In a last-ditch effort to persuade the Government not to lift all Covid restrictions in the coming weeks, SAGE has raised the alarm about the prospect of a new mutant strain emerging. MailOnline has more.
Documents released today from the panel’s last meeting, just a day after the PM revealed he intended to scrap all the leftover curbs in England, warned that any sudden change to the rules carries the potential to accelerate the pandemic and trigger a “rapid” rise in cases.
One paper discussed by SAGE, which delved into potential scenarios that could emerge over the next few years, dismissed the milder nature of Omicron as being a “chance” event and argued that it’s a “common misconception” that viruses evolve to become weaker.
It warned of a “realistic possibility” that a variant could spawn that is just as lethal as other coronaviruses known to strike humans, such as MERS, which has a 35 per cent case fatality rate. Mutations are more likely while circulation of the virus is high, the panel said.
Referencing the document in its minutes, SAGE warned that the scenario – which they’ve already floated before – remained a “valid” possibility. But the report also admitted that it was equally realistic that the virus will mutate to become less lethal over time.
Experts told MailOnline the estimate is an attempt to maintain the “project fear campaign” despite SAGE having “no way of estimating the likelihood of a deadly new strain appearing that is vaccine resistant”.
It comes as Britain’s Omicron wave continues to fizzle out, with official figures showing the outbreak shrunk on all three fronts again today. The U.K. logged another 47,685 cases, 158 deaths and 1,280 admissions linked to the virus.
Three new papers from the influential group’s last meeting on February 10th were put into the public domain today while three others were published last Friday, including one warning dropping the remaining restrictions would “increase anxiety”.
The PM’s announcement last week was widely seen as a desperate ploy to appease hardline anti-lockdown Tory backbenchers and fend off a flurry of no-confidence letters following a spate of allegations about illegal lockdown parties in Downing Street.
Mr Johnson’s blueprint will be checked over by ministers this weekend before being announced on Monday when Parliament returns from recess.
He has already faced vocal opposition to his plans, with senior NHS leaders calling on No10 to park plans to ditch free testing and the legal requirement for the infected to self-isolate.
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of NHS Confederation – which represents health boards, said “now is not the time to take risks”, saying the Government should not “wave a magic wand” and pretend the virus has disappeared.
Let’s hope Boris holds his nerve. You’d hope so, given how many times his scientific advisors have cried wolf in the last 12 months.
The contrast with Denmark is telling. There, restrictions were lifted at the start of the month based on modelling from its Government scientific advisers and with the support of all political parties. Who your Government scientists are and what they say can make all the difference. The fact that we’ve been lumbered with the lockdown fanatics and incorrigible (and perennially wrong) doom-mongers on SAGE goes a long way to explain why extricating ourselves from the over-the-top pandemic measures has been such an uphill struggle.
Worth reading in full.
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My three year-old would do well under this regime. After lengthy preambles, we got to ‘What does C A T say?’ (sounding the letters). There was a thoughtful but confident pause, and she proudly returned with ‘Zebra!’. It’s a question of priorities, with imagination being the strongest. Sadly, she will lose this genius in the coming months.
I recall when my sister was three and she had trouble pronouncing the word “warm”. My dad said she could have a glass of cola if she could say it. So she thought for a second and blurted out the word “HOT”. —–She deserved the cola for that genius
🤣
My sister once asked dad for a drink of ‘nilk’. He tried to get her to say it correctly, and after a few failed attempts she gave up and asked for ‘zorange’ instead.
Wasn’t this a Calvin and Hobbes strip many years ago? Calvin wrote ‘I refuse to answer this question as it is against my religious principles’ or something, in a Maths test. I hope Watterson was cited.
No surprise. Cultural Relativity. No right answers including Maths, invented in the modern format by White men including Christians. Abominable isn’t it. But comports with a penis is a vagina and an x chromosome is the same as a y ‘science’.
I would say that in a world of Fake Science, Fake Maths is mandatory. What’s that? Can’t get Newton’s or Einstein’s equations for Big Banging theology to balance? Lorenz’s invariate not working? Galilean trickery failing? No big deal – just add the demi-urges of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ as ‘constants’. There you go. Everything balances. Consensus. All hail. Don’t be an -ist.
Or the cat that can be dead or alive at the same time. But what about all the cats that existed before humans never looked at them because we were not a species yet?
I tried to get the views of our Lab-Pei (Labrador X Shar Pei) on this topic, but he was too busy doing the Times crossword puzzle and told me to foxtrot-oscar.
OMG
😀😀😀😀😀😀😀🙂😀🙂🙂😀😀😀😀😀
Class.
Not really hux’. He’s a rescue dog. Having said that, he had a splendid first two years of his life as a stud dog, then castrated and sent to the pound from whence we got him. Re “class,” in 1978 in my RAF days, I drove a fire-engine red Morgan +8. and was out front of the Mess checking the rad’ one morning, prior to an ‘assignation’ involving bubbly and the future Mrs 10navigator. Seeing the rad’ needed a top up, I used a champagne bucket to decant water into it.. A passing fellow officer looked, nodded and muttered, “class”.
“So, kids of different races may naturally ‘perform’ maths in different ways – the boring old traditional method of performing calculations in a logical, rational and systematic fashion is really just the way white, straight, males have long performed the subject.”
The pyramids were obviously designed to be traditional rectangular-shaped structures, but due to their race, their mathematical calculations ended up with pyramids.
Makes perfect sense to me /sarc.
Nah, they ran out of stone so had fewer to use for the upper layers.
An interesting article – from a ‘know your enemy’ perspective.
So essentially the suggestion is to allow certain students to fail and to make them feel less bad to drag others down too.
I don’t fancy using a bridge designed by these Mathematxcal (or should that be mathematiqal – to emphasise gender diversity?) geniuses.
By the way, my beans tell me I’m too late – I should have asked them for their fruit earlier. I must have lost count of days somehow.
Why do these people think adding an ‘x’ to the end of every word makes them edgy and cool?
Fux if I knowx !
😀😀😀👍
Good one.
In biblical times, wasn’t this known as the Tower of Babel?
Thanks Steven. It must have been harder than trying to solve Fermat’s last theorem using a decimated abacus deciphering this twaddle. Ever since the American Physicist Alan Sokal parodied this progressive drivel, its proponents have just turned up the ridiculous level. A serious point is that STEM skills will now become even more calcified in the white elite. In case this painfully stupid woman doesn’t know it the Chinese and Asians (who are often browner than her Latin compadres), and have just as many foundation myths, favour materialism. That’s why they come top of international league tables. Meanwhile the kids taught this mince will be further disadvantaged in a world where numbers as an abstract form of knowledge with really concrete applications rule. You could call it regression to the meaningless.
“Ma..? Fetch the net. No. the big one…”
So let’s see what happens when NAxA builds a space shuttle devised by Physxists and Mathematixns
After you… No, I insist.
5 out of 3 globalists can’t do fractions.
Did the author of this drivel pass it by her psychiatrist before publishing? I guess not.
Absolutely bonkers!
If a person can change gender just by believing it then 2+2 = 5 just by believing it.
Check her out in Google Images: I think that unhinged rictus probably never leaves her face. The Blair Stare – into fantasy world.
Extreme example of merging feelings with facts, so that there is no non-subjective reality.
The devouring mother indeed.