Senior epidemiologist and Government coronavirus adviser Professor Mark Woolhouse claims he was told to “correct” his views after he criticised what he thought was an “implausible” graph shown at an official briefing – Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty’s notorious Graph of Doom from September 21st 2020. Sky News has the story.
The Edinburgh University academic is deeply critical of the use of lockdown measures and says “plain common sense” was a “casualty of the crisis”.
Speaking to Sky News, Prof Woolhouse seemed concerned about a possible “big-brother” approach to the control of information about Covid.
He says he was told to watch what he was saying following a briefing given by Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA) Sir Patrick Vallance on September 21st 2020.
Sir Patrick said at the time: “At the moment, we think that the epidemic is doubling roughly every seven days.”
Fifty thousand cases a day were being predicted by mid-October.
“There was a lot wrong with the projection,” Prof Woolhouse says. He calculated the doubling period as every 10 or 11 days, rather than seven, and, in his opinion, there was “no reason to expect the epidemic to accelerate suddenly”.
He observes: “If this projection had been extended for another week we would be talking about one hundred thousand cases per day. Another month would have given us close to half a million. Per day. An exponential projection will give you any number you like if you run it for long enough.”
Prof Woolhouse felt the predictions were “so implausible” that he was concerned about a loss of scientific “credibility”.
After seeing the graph, he says he “quickly posted what was intended to be a reassuring comment through the Science Media Centre saying it was highly unlikely that the U.K. would see so many reported cases per day by mid-October”.
“As it turned out, we barely reached half that,” he says in his new book on the pandemic called The Year the World Went Mad.
However, his “objections did not go down well”.
“After a flurry of emails I was invited to ‘correct’ my comments,” he says.
“The invitation was passed on to me by a messenger so I cannot be sure precisely where in the system it originated.”
Nor did not end there, he says. “A couple of weeks later I was asked to give evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee. This generated another flurry of emails over an October weekend from two senior Government scientists concerned that I might criticise the CSA’s graph before the MPs.”
When asked where the message telling him to “correct his views” came from, he says he simply doesn’t know the source, but it was “not from a random person”.
Clearly angry, he insists it “wasn’t my views that needed correcting, it was the projections”.
Then almost the exact same thing happened at the end of October, he says, ahead of the November lockdown.
The article includes a number of other fascinating and revealing anecdotes from Prof Woolhouse’s book and is worth reading in full.
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He’s trying to save his own skin. Not me Guv! However, more joy in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth and all that.
He was on record before this as opposing lockdown.
I may have misjudged him, if I have done so then I will hold my hands up.
Fair enough. We all make mistakes. If you do or I do, best to admit them rather than cling to the same old rubbish in defiance of reality, as the Branch Covidians do.
Why didn’t he resign and go public with his criticisms?
He went public with his criticisms at the time.
Why do you assume that he’s only speaking out now?
Does history begin at the point where the corporate media finally chooses to report it?
Either way, he’s seems to know where the money is. Before he got paid for being on SAGE (I assume they got paid for it) and now he’s cashing in with his book criticising SAGE.
Sounds like he’s doing very well out of the whole experience.
Would you prefer that he’d never been on SAGE and offering a dissenting voice, or that he didn’t write an expose on it now?
Apparently, he would
We always knew this kind of thing must have been happening. Undoubtedly there were other incidents like this within SAGE (probably involving Dingwall) and I expect this was repeated within the Cabinet, MPs more widely, journalists, “Public health” figures, academics.
Jennie Harries & masks, in 2020
Yes good point. Andrew Hill and Ivermectin.
plus every CO2-climate sceptic that spoke out.
Further evidence that the lockdowns were coordinated by a very select group, two or three people at most, irrespective of the chosen scientific advice.
Which one? Every graph shown was implausible!
Whilst its nice that hes standing up now (and stood up a little during) he needed to be screaming from the rooftops at the time rather than muttering under his breath.
If he genuinely thought at the time that lockdown were wrong/he was being censored or threatened etc he needed to make sure that his and everyone else’s who thought the same were being heard.
Its not difficult to trace a message back to the original sender by the way. He needs to name names.
And given all he has ‘revealed’ recently he needs to address the question of WHY.
Why was he told to correct his views? Why wasnt he listened to? Who did he raise all these things with? Why did they ignore him? For what reasons? Who was running the ‘big brother’ approach etc
We need names and reasons, and ideally payback and sanctions.
I thought the same. But, perhaps whoever issued the threat is dangerous enough not to name?
Michael Gove is the most obvious answer, together with Dommunist Dictator and Carrie Antoinette though the latter two were at loggerheads for reasons of personality, not ideology.
Add Kim Jong Johnson to this too for not having any convictions of value and doing whatever seems or seemed expedient at any given millisecond.
What makes you think he wasn’t screaming from the rooftops?
Reality and history are not defined by what the corporate media chooses to report from one day to the next.
Indeed we on this site know plenty of things – none of them good BTW – all of which MSM espec BBC chooses not to report and probably also goes some way to make sure they are buried [fact checking, trusted news initiative etc etc etc]
Enough alternative media outlets would have given him a platform.
Did this get missed from Prof Fenton?
https://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/2022/03/official-mortality-data-for-england.html
Official mortality data for England reveal systematic undercounting of deaths occurring within first two weeks of Covid-19 vaccination
Our new research (full paper with first author Clare Craig available on ResearchGate) has discovered over 26,000 covid and non-covid deaths expected to have occurred within two weeks of first dose vaccination have been omitted from the latest UK ONS deaths by vaccination status report:
The ONS data also fails to include millions of people categorised in the UK NIMS database as ‘within 21 days vaccination’ status:
Our analysis compares expected deaths in the ONS dataset to those that have occurred in the whole population. We only use data from UK government sources including data from NIMS and UKHSA. We found implausibly low number of non-covid deaths in the ‘within 21 days of first dose’ category:
The ONS dataset only includes the number of non-covid deaths equivalent to the number expected to have occurred in the third week after vaccination only. So the expected deaths for the first two weeks post first dose vaccination are missing. This is the case for all age groups 60+. For example, here is the 70-79 age group:
For covid deaths the same patterns are evident, across all age groups 60plus. This is a significant and rather troubling anomaly warranting an explanation. Covid deaths are also implausibly lower than expectations
Yes I think their line of enquiry is very important. If it can be properly shown that there’s no or minimal evidence that the vaccines protect against severe outcomes, then we may finally get Nuremberg 2.0 started.
I was uplifted by the suggestion the ONS are co-operating with their enquires. Time should tell if that is the case.
Perhaps to understand how much we know about “their” little scam
Reminds me of the old phrase ‘helping the police with their enquiries’!!!
I’ll eat my hat if there is ever any Nuremburg 2.0 type trials or tribunals. What government would ever sponsor or call for such a tribunal? After all, the tribunal – if legitimate – would PROVE that the leaders of every government in the world (except maybe Sweden) were guilty of crimes against humanity.
No government-created entity ever investigates itself. This might have happened in the past – regarding relatively small matters – but not now – and not with a “crime” this massive.
I read that in full earlier today, and would heartily recommend it.
And, please, before we start frothing “Well, he would say that now, but why didn’t he say something earlier?”, the point is that he did, and was shushed and told to praise the Emperor’s New Modelling.
It’s only being reported now because the dirty, dirty smear merchants are selling whatever bit of controversy they can dredge up. Let’s not shoot the messenger for being held in the oubliette for years.
Some people just like yelling incoherently at others. It’s the virtue signalling circus moving on.
The way I see it, in a lot of cases, when people *did* say stuff at the time, they were rubbished, cancelled, and so forth, and then were in no position to observe let alone affect anything. So to some extent, people coming out now, when the total failure of policy is becoming more and more apparent, is better. Difficult call, I know.
Scientist who questioned ‘risk-benefit ratio’ of vaccinating 12 to 15-year-olds leaves JCVI role | Daily Mail Online
Yep. This point is key. The media blackout and institutional forces meant truly speaking out would relegate you to the outcasts. And those outcasts already included a number of prestigious scientists and it made no bloody difference whatsoever.
That Upton Sinclair quote is apt for this page:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
One wonders how many SAGE members would agree with that sentiment.
If he won’t name names, there is little point in him complaining about it.
I think “two senior government scientists” narrows it down to, well, the two senior government scientists.
Knighthoods anyone? Just bend over.
who is controlling those 2? They don’t believe their own BS, we know that much. So why are they spewing it?
Ive heard rumours one has a dark secret. Something to do with St James’ park. So maybe being blackmailed. But the other?
Fauci and Gates are mixed up in it some where especially where Vallance and Witty are concerned.
The eco health Spook front group?
Yep all roads lead back there. With luck, a Republican Senate majority in the midterms and the inquests can really get rolling.
They may tank the financial system by then to keep the masses occupied.
Vallance appears in the FOIA released emails from Fauci January 2020, involving the virus origin Wuhan lab cover up. He knew what was going on.
So basically, a bunch of pompous Government bureaucrats were doing anything they could to stifle dissent and have shamelessly covered up all their uselessness ever since?
And the useless ones got knighted?
“Prof Woolhouse felt the predictions were “so implausible” that he was concerned about a loss of scientific “credibility”.”
Well he wasn’t wrong, not just scientific credibility, medical, legal, govermental or educational, in fact I’ll never trust anything anyone in any public service, quango, charity etc ever again.
Yes, I agree with the first comment, I think Woodhouse is to some extent trying to escape culpability. However, if it is true that he was leant on, then certainly there should be an investigation into who was responsible. In the meantime, not one member of SAGE has been held to account for the wildly inaccurate modelling that has led to colossal economic damage. It is a disgrace that Whitty and Vallance remain in post.
What leads you to the conclusion that this is about escaping culpability?
I believe the flawed modelling that led to the restrictions, together with the decision to proceed with the mass vaccination of those at low risk from Covid, will in time be seen as the biggest scientific scandal in decades. Prof Woodhouse was part of the scientific establishment when these measures were imposed. But full credit to him for speaking out now.
Don’t forget the suppression of early treatment options, and the implementation of lockdown itself (even if the modelling was accurate it should never have been more than a few weeks at most by any science or logic).
I can only hope it leads to massive reform of policy making, drug regulation and the entire democratic process. But i guess I shouldn’t hold my breath.
The crux of my point is that “speaking out now” implies that he wasn’t before.
All we can tell is that corporate media have chosen to publish him now.
If we take the article at face value, it seems that he was speaking up all the way through this debacle, but not being listened to by anyone in a position to promote his views.
I’m not sure that we can blame him for that, given that learning how to manipulate the meedja to promote your narrative is a skill that’s more likely to be picked up by Faucis and Fergusons than actual scientists.
If we get out of this, and the Davos Deviants haven’t finished yet, this last two plus years will be revealed to have been THE greatest crime against humanity in the history of the world.
There were avenues available to speak out. Not BBC or Sky obviously, but I don’t recall him being on Talk Radio or Planet Normal, for example. Easy to have had doubts after the event, not so easy to shout them out throughout, but he certainly should have done. Those of us who wrote to our MPs over and over only to be told that the Science was settled and they had no choice have been badly let down. I will never forgive my MP; voting for “Covid certification” was the last straw.
You don’t recall him being on any of the particular fringe outfits that you personally prefer?
Then I’m certain that he said nothing to anybody, because as All True Scientists know, absence of evidence is hard evidence of absence.
“Fringe”? Hardly. What outlets do you recall him appearing on?
None. As I say, we must hang him first as an example to others, and then consider the evidence.
Well if you want to but you won’t find me attending the lynching. Just because I think it’s a travesty not to have spoken out doesn’t mean I want to string him up.
The Prof should name all those who emailed him and publish those emails – giving them a taste of their own medicine.
They’ll be on a server somewhere. As Hillary Clinton can confirm.
Ich bin innocent, i didn’t do it, i voz only following ze orders…..Fek off ya Neo National Socialist acolyte!
You know, if we shoot every messenger when the corporate media finally chooses to report what they’ve been saying for years, we make a strong argument for them not bothering to speak out at all.
That’s strange … because in the spring they were telling Johnson that the epidemic was just doubling each week, whereas the reality if anyone had bothered to check the data (as any school kid could have done on a log-time graph) was that it was increasing 8-10 fold per week.
That’s why they made such a calamitous prediction saying the peak would be in June (Ref: Cummings in evidence to parliamentary committee & as stated by Johnson in press conference)… whereas at the rate it was actually increasing, by end of April, the entire UK would have had covid, so there was no way on earth the epidemic was going to peak in June.
Which … is why we got the chicken headed panic response when they finally did tell government that it was going to peak in April … probably days from the actual infection peak (which precedes the peak as shown by testing).
Nazi claims not to be a Nazi, then adopts the Eichmann defense: I was only obeying orders
Yes, but more germane to any future reassessment will be this statement: “The science was evolving. We did what we did at the time using the best or accepted science of the time.”
Forgotten will be the millions of times we all heard “the science is settled.”
I wrote an article in July 2020 arguing that sports should not be cancelled and that COVID posed no health risk to healthy young athletes. I was right of course, but my detractors would say all of those sports leagues that DID cancel sports – and concocted all of those silly protocols – were just going by the known science at the time. This is a lie too. The reason I wrote my piece with such confidence is that the real science on COVID already showed that no healthy young athlete had any real risk of dying from COVID. This was probably known by March 2020, certainly by April or May 2020.
Steve Kirsch has highlighted one of the more frightening examples of intimidation and retribution against a medical practitioner and professor who was willing to question the narrative. Here’s an excerpt from one of his recent Substack articles:
“There are many examples of the corruption of science during the COVID pandemic.
The most stunning one to me is the silencing of (German) Professor Peter Schirmacher.
Dr. Schirmacher is one of the top 100 pathologist in the world (he’s #67 on this list).
Dr. Schirmacher did a study of 40 people who died within 2 weeks after COVID vaccination and determined that at least 30% to 40% of those deaths were caused by the vaccine (see also Chief pathologist insists on more autopsies of vaccinated people). That’s a minimum. It could be far more than that, but he wasn’t able to conclusively prove that.
Other German researchers have independently replicated his findings (they found an even higher percentage of deaths that were highly likely caused by the vaccine):
When I tried to reach out to Dr. Schirmacher for more details, I was met with silence. Indeed, nothing has been heard from him since the news broken on his study.
How could that possibly be that to this day Schirmacher remains silent about his remarkable findings?
The answer to that question should be obvious. It is because he was silenced; they threatened his family if he spoke out about what he found. So he shut up like he was told.
This is not how science is supposed to work, is it? Fear and intimidation techniques should never be used to muzzle scientists, especially those scientists with information that could save hundreds of thousands of lives by revealing that the vaccines are unsafe and should be immediately stopped.
Link:
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-mit-president-l?s=w
If he was giving his book away for free he himself would have more of this “credibility” to which he refers.
Time to name names.
This guy is not what he tries to appears as, an opponent of government corona policies since 2020. He just believes said policies had been much righter if he had had greater influence over them. A telling example quote (from the end of the article):
He also says that lateral flow testing should have been ramped up much more quickly
[…]
He thinks it was a major factor in keeping us out of lockdown during the recent Omicron wave, with more than 80% of people testing at least once a week.
This implies that the recent Omicron wave was an inherently very dangerous event and the only reason why another lockdowns didn’t become necessary was mass testing of healthy people and house arrest for those who tested positive. Which – in turn – implies that he’s perfectly fine with using lockdowns and all the other public harm interventions we’ve come to know so well to mock-fight the spread of harmless diseases.
Verdict: Guilty.
You’re reading an implication into the corporate meedja synopsis and spin on whatever it was that he actually said (or didn’t say).
When did you first start trusting Sky to deliver accurate, informed, unfiltered and unbiased reporting?
If you want to argue against my understanding of this quote, please feel free to do so. If you have a better source for Woolhouse’s statements or some other proof that the article is misquoting him, please present it. I don’t expect Sky to deliver that, which is why I pointed out the Corona politics broadly ok, says SAGE expert message hidden in this quote.
If you just enjoy being abusive and/or are attacking me because you have no arguments, you can kiss a lower body part of me.
A bit late to be a hero, matey. Why not speak out at the time?
Anyway, he’s the sort of ass who believes that masks are useful. Bah humbug.
“An exponential projection will give you any number you like if you run it for long enough.”
Reductio ad absurdum? He could make a stronger statement that no epidemiological model demonstrates exponential growth so why listen to some data scientist who managed to fit the curve,
I see he is too spineless to say who told him to alter his views. Obviously does not want to give up a prestige position but wants to buy a little protection. Quite frankly as much use as a chocolate tea pot.
“After a flurry of emails I was invited to ‘correct’ my comments,” he says.
“The invitation was passed on to me by a messenger so I cannot be sure precisely where in the system it originated.”
Nor did not end there, he says. “A couple of weeks later I was asked to give evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee. This generated another flurry of emails over an October weekend from two senior Government scientists concerned that I might criticise the CSA’s graph before the MPs.”
When asked where the message telling him to “correct his views” came from, he says he simply doesn’t know the source, but it was “not from a random person”.
Who invited him to correct his comments? he doesn’t say.
Who was ‘the messenger’? He doesn’t say.
Who were those two senior Government scientists? He doesn’t say.
Where are these e-mails? Publish them, Woolhouse!
I call this all bogus. Let’s have some facts.
“Buy my book!”
Professor Mark Woolhouse, who sits on Nicola Sturgeon’s Covid-19 taskforce, has angered residents on a tiny Hebridean island.
A Scottish Government coronavirus adviser ignored Nicola Sturgeon’s advice and stayed at his island holiday home hours before lockdown restrictions were put in place.
Professor Mark Woolhouse, 60, has angered residents on Lismore by temporarily moving to the tiny Hebridean island with his family from Edinburgh.
The Edinburgh University epidemiologist sits on the First
Minister’s Covid-19 taskforce.
It comes just a week after Scotland’s chief medical officer, Dr Catherine Calderwood, was forced out of her job after being spotted at her second home in Fife while telling the rest of the
country to stay in the house.
One islander, who didn’t want to be named, said: “It’s just another example of hypocricy.
“Locals in Lismore are far from happy because coronavirus refugees put the community in danger.
“There’s not even a doctor or nurse on the island.
“Just as Professor Woolhouse came here, various politicians were telling people to stay away from the Highlands and Islands.”
Scotland’s Rural Economy and Tourism Secretary, Fergus Ewing, said: “I am furious at the reckless and irresponsible behavior of some people travelling to the Highlands and Islands.
“This has to stop now. Let me be crystal clear, people should not be travelling to rural and island communities full stop.
“They are endangering lives. Do not travel.”
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/scottish-government-coronavirus-advisor-slammed-21853063
‘Freedom Day’: Edinburgh University Professor calls England’s route out of lockdown ‘dangerous’ and ‘unethical’England’s unlocking on July 19 is a “dangerous, unethical experiment” and should be scrapped in favour of the model followed by the Scottish Government, according to an epidemiologist at Edinburgh University.
Professor Mark Woolhouse told Times Radio: “The concern at the moment is that the trajectory of hospitalisations and deaths in the UK is upwards, fairly slowly… and we want to see what that trend does.
“It’s widely accepted the number of cases would increase, we’ve known this would happen when we unlocked for many months now, we’d expect it…. so ‘dangerous, unethical experiment’ seems to be a very inaccurate description of what’s going on.
“This is unprecedented, it’s not an experiment but it’s an unprecedented situation because we’ve got a new pandemic here and the UK is in a particularly interesting position because we have such a successful vaccine programme.”
https://www.scotsman.com/health/coronavirus/freedom-day-edinburgh-university-professor-calls-englands-route-out-of-lockdown-dangerous-and-unethical-3311732
Beyond redemption.
So, why didn’t he immediately resign and go public? I don’t recall reading that he was a sceptic over the last two years. Maybe I missed it. But people like him who don’t speak out at the time are almost as bad as the Fergusons of this world.
Feel free to write and ask him why he won’t name names!
Email: mark.woolhouse@ed.ac.uk
Finally these people are starting to speak out. It infuriates me that they’ve waited this long when it’s really too late to dislodge the gaslighting from the minds of the millions that believed all these lies. But maybe if even a few read this and realise how they were had it will be worth it. Better late than never I suppose.