All remaining domestic Covid restrictions in England, including the requirement to isolate when testing positive for the virus, are to be removed on Thursday, February 24th, Boris Johnson has announced in the House of Commons. The Telegraph has more.
Boris Johnson says while coronavirus has not gone away, “we can now deal with it in a very different way, moving from Government restrictions to personal responsibility so we protect ourselves without losing our liberties and maintaining our contingent capabilities so we can respond rapidly to any new variant”.
Mr Johnson notes the U.K. was the first major European nation to boost half of its population, and the “extraordinary success of the vaccine programme” has enabled the early lifting of restrictions – both in July 2021 and avoiding another winter lockdown.
“While the pandemic is not over, we have now passed the peak of the Omicron wave with cases falling, hospitalisations now below 10,000 in England and still falling and the link between cases, hospitalisations and deaths substantially weakened.
“Together with the treatments and scientific understanding of the virus we’ve now built up, we now have sufficient levels of community to complete the transition from protecting people with Government interventions to relying on vaccines and treatments as our first line of defence.”
Boris Johnson confirms “all remaining domestic restrictions will be removed”.
From February 24th, the legal requirement to self-isolate after a positive test will come to an end, “and so we will also end self-isolation support payments, although Covid provisions for statutory sick pay can still be claimed for a further month”.
Contact tracing will come to an end, and fully vaccinated close contacts will no longer be asked to test daily for seven days.
“We will remove the legal requirement for close contacts who are not fully vaccinated to self-isolate.”
Until April 1st people will be advised to stay at home if they test positive, but after that, “we will encourage people with COVID-19 symptoms to exercise personal responsibility, just as we encourage people who may have flu to be considerate to others.”
Only because levels of immunity are so high and deaths are “below where you would expect for this time of year” can restrictions be lifted, says Boris Johnson.
This rationale raises the question of whether we will have to endure restrictions next time deaths go above average. The lockdown logic that dictates social restrictions must be imposed merely because deaths trend above ‘normal’ is still there, and threatens to reassert itself in future viral outbreaks, especially in winter.
It’s a pity that the guidance on self-isolation for Covid contacts appears to retain a discriminatory element against the unvaccinated, but at least it is only guidance. Though will employers turn it into something more coercive?
Travel restrictions also remain in place, especially for the ‘not fully vaccinated’, and there was no mention of when these might be brought to an end. Why not? COVID-19 is either a threat warranting restrictions or it isn’t. And the differential treatment of vaccinated and unvaccinated when the vaccinated spread the virus no less than the unvaccinated is plainly unjustified.
The Prime Minister also announced the immediate end of testing in schools and the withdrawal of free tests from April 1st.
From today, the guidance for staff and students in most education and childcare settings to test twice a week will be removed, and from April 1st – “when winter is over and the virus will spread less easily” – free symptomatic and asymptomatic testing for the general public will end.
The oldest age groups and those most vulnerable to Covid will still receive free tests, he confirms, while making sure “everyone who wants to can buy a test”.
A recommendation to use vaccine passports will also be dropped by April 1st.
The PM confirmed that the JCVI advice for a spring fourth dose for those aged 75 and over and those over 12 who are immunosuppressed would be accepted. He also said that the monitoring programmes, including the ONS Infection Survey (which it was rumoured may be scrapped) will continue, as will “pharmaceutical” public health interventions, presumably referring primarily to vaccines.
[SAGE] is certain there will be new variants and it is very possible they will be worse than Omicron. So we will maintain our resilience to manage and respond to these risks, including our world-leading ONS survey, which will allow us to continue tracking the virus in granular detail, with regional and age breakdowns helping us to spot surges as and where they happen… In all circumstances, our aim will be to manage and respond to future risks through more routine public health interventions, with pharmaceutical interventions as the first line of defence.
Mr. Johnson concluded:
Covid will not suddenly disappear. So those who would wait for a total end to this war before lifting these regulations would be restricting the liberties of the British people for a long time to come.
This Government does not believe that is right or necessary. Restrictions pose a heavy toll on our economy, our society, our mental wellbeing and on the life chances of our children. And we do not need to pay that cost any longer.
We have a population that is protected by the biggest vaccination programme in our history. We have the antivirals, the treatments and the scientific understanding of this virus. And we have the capabilities to respond rapidly to any resurgence or new variant. And it is time that we got our confidence back.
We don’t need laws to compel people to be considerate to others. We can rely on that sense of responsibility towards one another, providing practical advice in the knowledge that people will follow it to avoid infecting loved ones and others.
So let us learn to live with this virus and continue protecting ourselves and others without restricting our freedoms.
The promise, or rather threat, to “respond rapidly to any resurgence or new variant” is obviously ominous, as is the implication that above average deaths may trigger restrictions once more. Alongside this, the refusal to confirm that the pandemic is over is a missed opportunity, and there was no equivalent of the Danish reclassification of Covid as no longer a socially critical disease – if the Coronavirus Act is to be repealed it wasn’t mentioned. The continuance of travel restrictions is also unjustified. So there is still work to do.
Sir Graham Brady, Chairman of the 1922 Committee, asked Boris to review pandemic planning for the future to ensure “crucial lessons are learned” from lockdowns. Reaffirming his faith in the draconian interventions, Boris replied that he thought the “collective actions of the British public were indispensable in saving many, many thousands of lives”. However, he added that “all the evidence will be looked at in the course of the inquiry”. What the inquiry concludes, though, will be heavily dependent on (among other things) how much weight it puts on ‘evidence’ from models versus real-world outcomes, and thus on the biases of those conducting the inquiry. The fact that Boris retains his faith in lockdowns and remains committed to ‘rapid responses’ to new variants and surges to prevent deaths going above average suggests we have a long way to go to achieve the end goal of ‘never again’.
Nonetheless, the lifting of the remaining legal restrictions along with much of the guidance and the end of free testing is of course welcome, and it is good to see that sceptical voices have largely won out on this occasion.
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‘climate deniers’. I reject the premise of the pejorative.
Apart from the disgusting attempt to compare anyone who questions any aspect of this issue to holocaust deniers it seems to imply that as well as “climate deniers” there are also “climate confirmers”. —–But there are no experts or scientists or modellers or bureaucrats or activists or Attenborough’s or Thunberg’s who know what the climate is going to do 20 or 50 or 100 years from now. —–So there are no “confirmers”, and if there are no “confirmers”, then there is nothing for “deniers” to deny.
The evidence that the left is reverting to totalitarian type just keeps flowing in. “It’ll be different, this time,” they lisp, before trying to ban political parties (the AfD), blacking out “problematic” news stories and criminalising thought. Now they want to clap a chap in jug for holding an opinion. So where’s the difference, exactly? Well, they haven’t set up the gulag yet, but with prisoners of conscience they would take the first, fatal steps.
Farage is now talking openly of the need for a political revolution and he is right to do so – something along the lines of Prague, 1989. The political class, whether from cowardice, opportunism, true belief or sheer complacency (how typical of our establishment!) is overseeing the reintroduction of tyranny. The one gleam of hope amid this darkening mess is that the public is waking up and finding its voice, correctly identifying the enemy as hard left and willing to find ways and means of defeating them.
And Mr Young, here, can congratulate himself on making an indispensable contribution to that process.
“The one gleam of hope amid this darkening mess is that the public is waking up and finding its voice, correctly identifying the enemy as hard left and willing to find ways and means of defeating them”.
Not if the results of the last three by-elections are anything to go by!
Nobody, their facts are delvered, fully created, by organisations like the UN
Courtesy of Reuters and the Asscociated Press.. now.. I wonder who owns those two agencies ????
What hubris to think that we ever left the Medieval Ages with its suspicious, witch-obsessed, dogmatic mindset just because we have smartphones and the internet. Did the world get any smarter, any more self-aware after we invented all these things and more? NO, of course not. The same shysters get into power, the same hucksters want to stifle speech they don’t agree with, the same bitter, twisted souls who seek the light only to cast us into the darkness are all there, just dressed differently with smarter haircuts, reeking of peach-scented soap and wearing silk nooses around their necks. Religion is now called ‘The Science’ – I swear there’s a book of fiction somewhere about that. ‘Thou cannot and wilst not disagree with The Science, for to do so is blasphemy. Remember, there is no truth but OUR truth.’
This is very true. Flawed human nature with its contrary impulses and lurid fears does not change and needs profound tranquillity in order to reach the higher realms of logic and objectivity. This is what progressives forget: that the foundation of rationality is peace; and peace arises from a perfectly undisturbed status quo.
The whole idea of a “fact checker” is nonsense.
Exactly. It’s not fact-checking but pure censorship. In days of yore there used to be such a thing as scientific debate but it looks like that’s gone the way of the dodo.
The whole idea of a “fact checker” is….a bloody insult.
What worries me is that I think if you asked a lot of people about “fact checkers” they would think it was a good idea and put faith in them. Which is of course why we are where we are. I’m talking about “educated” and “intelligent” people, not just thickos.
What we on here have defined as the intelligent stupid. Ninety-nine per cent of those I live amongst qualify as intelligent stupid and it is extremely depressing as well as wearing.
Likewise
Fact Checking the Hockey Stick was good though right? So I think what you mean is that fact checking by people trying to protect dogma is a bloody insult. —-But unbiased fact checking isn’t. Everything needs to be fact checked. The whole idea of science is that the work of scientists be made available so others can check it. ——On the Hockey Stick Graph (as you will be well aware) data, code and methodology were not made available for others to check and only dogged determination by statistician Steve McIntyre exposed it as incorrect (and that is me being polite).
From the moment the US went for Assange with all its force and power, journalists for the most part have acquiesced to the establishment and know they are not to question authority. Not on any if the big stuff anyway.
So most of them probably welcome some fact checking authority to tell them where the red lines are.
Keeping themselves out of trouble is no doubt far more important to them than anything as mundane as the truth.
I think Paul Craig Roberts coined the term Presstitutes.. and how very apt that is..
“…there’s no infallible authority the courts could rely on to determine whether a particular claim about something climate-related is true or false.”
You are still living in the past.
Since Covid, the West’s judiciary has fully adopted the ‘only government&co data and conclusion is true and admissible in court’ approach.
I have to agree JayBee.
The demand for mere imprisonment of “deniers” is a walk-back for the alarmists. Back in 2012 Richard Parncutt (professor of systematic musicology at Karl Franzens University Graz in Austria) was calling for capital punishment for deniers (and some other targets).
Well, at least in the dock you could ask to boil a kettle to demonstrate the nature of boiling.
The judge and jury would swear they saw the water boiling at 30 centigrade
Undoubtedly.
As high as that ???
In previous times science was the big threat to authority. The likes of Copernicus and Galileo were thinking they were doing humanity a favour with their genuine search for truth but were seen as dangerous to the orthodoxy of the time. The authority of the church was being undermined. Galileo was given house arrest. —Wind forward to today and science is now king. There is a religious element to the science though, where those not subscribing to it or questioning it are seen as sinful heretics. The terminology is very religious—“climate apocalypse”, “Armageddon” etc and climate change supporters rely more on the will to believe and in faith and emotion rather than facts and reason. In many regards environmentalism, and in particular climate change has become a pseudo religious cult that tolerates no disbelievers. Or as Richard Lindzen puts it “Climate alarm belongs to a class of issues which makes claims for which there is no evidence and is characterised by profound immorality pretending to virtue”
Climate models can’t model regional climate behaviour beyond a couple of weeks let alone 100 years because the system they are modelling is mathematically chaotic. What reflects incoming solar energy? It’s clouds. They can’t model cloud behaviour so what makes them think they can model how solar insolation will evolve in 100 years time. Please find a fact checker who will contest that my statements are scientifically incorrect.
Additionally, I see on his Linkedin that Prof Cowern posits that reduction of SO2 is causing a faster rise in temperature and that 1.5 dec C may by reached by 2030. That would mean that CO2 has had a lesser impact than claimed as it’s usually all blamed on CO2.