In the third part of its ongoing investigation into the U.K. Government’s management of the coronavirus crisis, the Mail on Sunday looks at whether lockdowns actually saved lives. Its conclusion won’t surprise anyone’s who’s been visiting this website for the past two years. Here is an extract:
For the past few weeks, in a series of reports probing the science that has underpinned key pandemic decisions, the Mail on Sunday has investigated the accuracy of PCR tests and the chaotic way Covid-related deaths were recorded.
Today, in the final part, we talk to the growing number of experts who say that lockdowns had little benefit – a cure that was worse than the disease.
One of them is Professor Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, who has recently published a book, The Year The World Went Mad, about the UK’s pandemic policy failures.
Speaking this week on the Mail on Sunday’s Medical Minefield podcast, Prof Woolhouse said: “I think that lockdown will be viewed by history as a monumental mistake on a global scale, for a number of reasons.
“The obvious one is the immense harm the lockdown, more than any other measure, did in terms of the economy, mental health and on the wellbeing of society.
“Clearly things needed to be done to bring waves of infection under control.
“But many analyses suggest that lockdown itself didn’t have a huge impact on reducing the health burden. That was achieved in other ways.”
Analysing the effect of any single Covid measure is difficult, and researchers have managed it with varying degrees of success.
In the UK, ‘lockdown’ refers specifically to the stay-at-home order. But some studies also include school and border closures, business closures and curfews in their definition of lockdown. …
One paper that did attempt to tease out the benefits of individual measures, published last month, found stay-at-home orders reduced global Covid deaths by just 2.9%.
You can listen to the Mail on Sunday‘s Medical Minefield podcast on Spotify here.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Be careful about sharing this article on Twitter. Professor Carl Heneghan shared the Mail on Sunday‘s article about an Oxford University study that showed Britain’s coronavirus death toll may be lower than the official data suggests on Twitter and the social media platform responded by slapping a ‘fake news’ warning on the post and then locking Prof Heneghan’s account. The Mail on Sunday has more:
Last weekend’s article – by Deputy Health Editor Eve Simmons – reported the findings of a new analysis suggesting Britain’s 164,000 Covid-19 death toll may have been overestimated.
Researchers reached the conclusions after combing through 800 responses to Freedom of Information requests to care homes and hospitals to find flaws in the way fatalities were recorded.
The row comes as tech giants may find themselves being handed sweeping powers in the new Online Safety Bill, which campaigners fear may have the effect of curbing freedom of speech by allowing social-media networks to remove legitimate material because they disagree with it.
Twitter sent an email to Professor Heneghan, an award-winning epidemiologist, saying his account – which has 110,000 followers – had been “locked” because it was “violating the policy on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19”.
It added: “We require the removal of content that may pose a risk to people’s health, including content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information. Please note that repeated violations may lead to a permanent suspension of your account.”
Further down in the same article, I’m quoted, pointing out that his kind of censorship is bound to get worse after the Online Safety Bill is passed.
Toby Young, director of the Free Speech Union, said: “Twitter once stood for free speech but those days are long gone. It is now an enforcer of a progressive orthodoxy, whether about transwomen in sport or the pandemic.
“Anyone who challenges that orthodoxy is punished, even if they know more about the subject than Twitter’s ‘fact-checkers’, which Professor Heneghan plainly does.
‘The suppression of dissenting voices will only get worse once the Online Safety Bill becomes law. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube will treat it as a green light to increase their censorship of anyone who doesn’t fall in with the woke agenda.”
Worth reading in full.
Discussion
Comments
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”A mistake”? Oh, for crying out loud………
Just re-posted this using the twitter and also facebook icons above
I seldom use Facebook and am not on Twitter, and I’m sure my life is less stressful for it.
Professor Mark Woolhouse and other “experts”/experts are mistaken. Lockdowns weren’t “a mistake”: all part of the plan.
Of course Prof Woolhouse is right about the ineffective nature of the lockdowns. But even he misses the point. This debate should not just be about whether lockdowns work or not.
Lockdowns would be a gross violation of basic democratic rights, even if they did work. It is simply not acceptable in a democracy to put millions of healthy people under house arrest in the name of public health.
They are a radical Communist measure, even if they were promoted by highly paid civil servants like “Sir” Chris Whitty.
Carl Heneghan silenced: the ONS admitted their estimate of COVID deaths was at least 23% over the real figure! How “fact ” checkers are able to rule the roost sickens me. This really IS how nazi Germany started…
Need an anti-woke, populist revolution and fast….no more virtue signalling nonsense, no more cancelling debate, free speech re-established by law meaning the right to offend anyone including minorities with social media allowed to let rip as required. (Outlaw fact checking) Get to the truth and then chase down these Government criminals first by getting them out, then by prosecution of them and their cronies. I want my money back for their lockdown fiasco.
Absolutely furious about this! We conspiracy theorists said this from the beginning and we were all vilified. These scumbags ruined many lives, destroyed businesses and caused poverty because of their decision to lockdown. Now they’re basically saying it was a mistake… oh well… suck it up. It didn’t bother us because hey… we are rich and got even richer.
I suspect that the fact checkers themselves are not particularly bright. Mostly trainees. They are clearly incapable of distinguishing between legitimate evidence based scientific research and “conspiracy theories”. Safety from harmful content? They might as well subcontract the work to the Chinese. Censorship services are likely to be a lot cheaper.
“mostly trainees”
Trainee what?
Woke warriors. I have an alternative term but I don’t think it is allowed by the community guidelines.
More and More Experts Say Lockdowns Didn’t Save Lives and Call it a “Monumental Mistake on a Massive Scale”
It’s taken the cowardly barstewards two years to reach this conclusion.
Pathetic. Reverse ferret virtue signalling.
(No criticism of Professor Heneghan intended).
I can’t really congratulate myself for resisting the propaganda because I haven’t seen or heard it: I haven’t had a TV licence since 2011, haven’t read a newspaper for around 5 years, never really listened to the radio and live in a village so haven’t seen any billboards or posters. I don’t have children of school or university age and haven’t been ill.
I have received lots of texts, emails and phone calls but I’ve never responded well to being nagged and as soon as I hear a Third World accent I know it’s a scam.
Spare a thought for the pressure Anders Tegnell must have been under in March and April of 2020.
How easy it would have been to yield, when everybody else was locking down.
In particular Swedish primary school kids have reason to be grateful for having had uninterrupted mask-free education.
Not only that. He provided a very good control.
He could be forgiven for feeling smug now-
Perfect track for the BBC and MSM:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoAwsrkLWZE
For the past few weeks, in a series of reports probing the science that has underpinned key pandemic decisions, the Mail on Sunday has investigated the accuracy of PCR tests and the chaotic way Covid-related deaths were recorded.
yes,
amazing how the minority said this for two yrs and was called a conspiracy theorist, does that now mean the daily mail should be banned for being a “conspiracy theorist”?
There needs to be far greater urgency in combating big tech censorship. It is bad enough these giants avoid tax and constantly lobby governments to grow their power base…shame on our elected representatives for facilitating them instead of opposing them.
Find alternatives. They can censor whomever they like. Fine a platform you like instead.
The response to Twitter is more and more people shutting down their accounts.
Twitter’s not your wife you know, it’s where you have some bantz with horny unattached women.
IF the unattached women start pissing you off, you dump them and find some more congenial ones.
Closing down a Twitter account will take less than 1 hr of your time even if the process takes longer than a week start to finish.
Do the same to Facebook, stop watching the BBC, stop buying newspapers and watch their revenues drop towards the floor.
It’s called ‘customer feedback’.
Couldn’t agree more 🙂 Throw out the TV too and you’ll deprive them of 95% of their mechanism for propaganda.
Shut down my Facebook account before COVID. Not had a TV for years. Never done Twitter.
I never had a TV in my life (apart from a few student houseshares in London back in the day). Not having a TV or having got rid of it is a common characteristic amongst us sceptical folks, I find.
I’m in the same boat. Drifted away from TV in my twenties and never made it back. My instinct for privacy meant social media was never an option.
Likewise, never done twitter. Shut down my FB account years ago and ditched the tv licence.
As far as I can see, the lockdown slowed the spread of the virus somewhat.
This was intended to give some time for the vaccine to be developed and distributed. IF the vaccine had worked as planned, THEN the lockdown would have only been needed for a while, and would have been a success.
The problem was that the vaccine DID NOT WORK. And so we kept locking down, and slowly released once we saw that it was pointless, while the vaccine supporters kept arguing for ‘just one more booster’….
As far as you imagine, you mean.
If that’s the conclusion you’ve reached after two years, I’d suggest going back to the drawing board.
Do both of you think that the vaccines DID work?
I rather suspect their point was that lockdowns didn’t work (and wouldn’t have worked even if the clotshot hadn’t been useless).
Look at all the stats from around the world and it’s absolutely clear that that lockdowns, muzzles and all the other NPIs do not correlate with a slower spread or lower infection rates.
And let’s not forget that they straight out lied about three weeks to flatten the ‘curve’.
That was as clear as day. The minute Johnson triggered the original lockdown my family knew immediately we’d be in for years of turmoil and chaos and so it has proved. Johnson knew perfectly well right from the off that the two or three weeks to flatten the sombrero was a load of old crock.
Hi DAEW
completely off topic I know but last week you were asking about why the sudden change in the mask wearing.
As I understand it WHO were looking at the lowest rates for ‘rona in Southern Asia and noted that mask wearing there was commonplace. Therefore they assumed(wrongly) it was due to the mask wearing.
BUT
When people meet in this area it is a very demure hello and Thailand in particular you bow your head when you greet some one. No touchy feely kissy kiss here.
The air pollution in this part of the world is pretty horrendous – from burning field to clear the remainder of the crops, extremely poor mechanical maintainence of cars lorries busses motorbikes and the burning of the forests in Malaysia for the palm oil plantations. N95 masks are the best choice for these conditions.
I hope this sheds some light for you. Sadly I do not have the references for this but I did read it somewhere.
ALL NPI’s were intended to undermine public health.
It was already slowing…
Sorry
What the F. are you smoking?
That is not quite correct. The lockdown was intended to slow the spread to avoid the health service being overwhelmed. (“Flatten the curve” as they put it.)
At the time of the first lockdown, it was thought that vaccines might be years away if ever.
In other words, the lockdown was “necessary” because “our NHS” (sic) had no capacity to handle a sudden increase in demand.
Having read the article it is not really as challenging as the headline suggests (nothing new there as far as The Mail is concerned) and there still seems to be the implication that the first lockdown in particular was necessary and successful. It is not quite the backtrack the headline implies.
Chuffing ‘eck, DS, are you on commission for Woollyhouse’s book sales?
This is the third article that I can recall promoting the’ turncoat’s’ attempt to profit from the collective failings of SAGE.
“the growing number of experts who say that lockdowns had little benefit “
If it’s only now they speak up they are either not experts or deep-dyed cowards. Or both, of course.
To the great British public: “We don’t want to say that we told you so,but!!!!!”
WE
TOLD
YOU
SO
signed: ‘conspiracy theorists’
These experts speak as if there were no other “experts” who were saying, before lockdown began, purely through foresight, not with hindsight, that lockdown was going to be a terrible mistake.
Of course that is not true – there were many in the scientific community saying this at the time, the Great Barrington people being primary examples.
So the central issues which need to be addressed in whatever inquiries take place are these:
And also the other elephant in the room – why did the likes of Whitty U-turn from his initial recommendations that were not too dissimilar to the Great Barrington?
He would struggle to even lie about a justification given that they downgraded the seriousness of the virus to flu level a week before the first lockdown.
Someone had a quiet word. Cushy directorship further down the line and a knighthood to seal the deal 😉
I think it’s more likely to have been them revealing they had video of him.
These experts speak as if there were no other “experts” who were saying, before lockdown began, purely through foresight, not with hindsight, that lockdown was going to be a terrible mistake.
A very good point. Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford, a scholar of outstanding reputation in the fields of epidemiology and evidence-based research, warned against lockdowns on 17 March 2020. His article was called “A Fiasco in the Making?”
He raised issues and questions that were brushed aside or ignored.
Remind me why all these proud to be quoted, now outraged at censorship, STILL want to use Twitter?
Nothing short of a mass exodus will work, stop being outraged and DO SOMETTHING about it. There are alternative, free speech focused, platforms.
Y’all are like domestic abuse victims staying with the abusers.
The HYPOCRACY is palpable.
It’s better to be slung out from the platforms rather than just packing up. I don’t bother with Twitter, I already got suspended accounts on there consigned to Hotel California.
Twatter kicked me out in late 2020. I haven’t bothered to go back with a new profile (I refused to cave in to their demands). Facebonk, meh, left that toxic place in 2015.
There is a war on truth, and the bad guys are going to win. It’s hard to fathom the world of lies and corruption we are living in. Before Covid I was vaguely aware that the medical industry might not be acting in our best interests. It’s now crystal clear that their sole interest is making us sick and keeping us sick in order to harvest as much profit as possible. It’s also clear that virtually all of government and the legacy media are equally corrupt, or just too stupid to understand the problem. There are probably a few decent doctors around but their hands are tied. They have to follow protocols that are controlled by the corrupt cartel. I very much doubt there will be any resolution in this iteration of civilisation. Health-wise, we are on our own. It’s an awful truth to confront but perhaps better to know than not. All we can do now is try to stay healthy despite the system doing everything in its power to make us sick.
An ounce or prevention is worth a pound of cure. That’s been my takeaway from covidmania. Like you I had my suspicions. But now the craven cowardice of doctors, as well as the endorsement of indefensible positions like injecting kids, has tipped me over the edge.
I’ve been religious in taking appropriate supplements plus I appreciate more than ever the benefits of remaining fit and healthy. I’d also throw in a complete rejection of the government approved diet which will slowly kill you.
😉
People should stop using Fakebook and Twatter and seek alternative Internet providers They are out there!
‘The row comes as tech giants may find themselves being handed sweeping powers in the new Online Safety Bill’
You can just imagine our glorious leaders banning informtion exposing their corruption and incompetence as such information would ‘harm’ our magnificent democracy.
Every attempt to further restrict information just hastens their demise. This site didn’t exist a few years ago, and there are many others.
They are panicking. Which is great 😉
There’s the possibility that this site may be wound up with the ‘Restricted To What You May Say’ Bill coming into force.
We are already limited as to what we can type on-line, and in future, anything you write that is deemed ‘unseemly’ may have Plod knocking on your door and for you to be ‘disappeared’. Or, if you’re lucky, just charged and threatened.
These may be the last days of ‘freedom’.
Oh yes, they’ll let you travel to London now & then to wave your placard in Parliament Square and allow you to let off steam. They have already filmed you and taken photos, they know who you are, they read your text messages, know who you’ve phoned to, and can see the location of your phone. They know you are no danger.
“We know what you did during lockdown”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WTpO9y2Dh4
Then others will pop up. That approach only works when it can be conveyed as clamping down on extremism. It is more difficult when it is fairly beign stuff.
I too am concerned. But these attempts to define hate speech and the like are a sign of fear and desperation. It is ultimately them who will disappear.
Another Independent article on Russel Brand, he must be striking a nerve. Or striking things they’re too scared to cover for any number of reasons.
Yes, must be off the reservation. Bad celebrity.
God, how smug do I feel. 4th booster bedwetters?
I’ll admit to smugness. And a mixture of empowerment and fear now I know that 9/10 people are dangerous aliens.
More like 3/10, with about 4/10 compliant with today’s narrative. 3/10 not buying it.
Clare Fox thinks we’re all paranoid conspiracy theorists regarding the WEF, speaking on GB News last night.
Sounds like the thing a WEF young leader might say 😉
But But But! She is one of then
Lockdown wasn’t a mistake, lockdown was necessary in order to justify the looting of the taxpayern without any of the normal oversight and to push the jabs which they intend to be perpetual jabs along with vax passports.
So yes lockdown was terribly damaging but it was not a mistake, if was perfectly deliberate.
Modern day Robber Barons.
It’s Sunday, so here’s a Christian perspective.
This video, which explains specifically how to be a watchman over MSM bias, deals with how the MSM, Big Tech and large corporations suppress the facts.
YouTube took it down for breaching their rules, so now its up on Rumble https://rumble.com/vybi3r-omega-programme-mod-3.1-part-22-the-role-of-the-watchman.html0
Why do people still keep calling Lockdowns a “mistake” when they were
obviously such an important part of the plan from the very start?
Will people never wake up?
It is only a “mistake” of the consequences of the actions were unintentional when it is now blatantly obvious they were not.
(Ukraine distraction from their next phase working well).