From the very start the UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance Reports delighted in telling us all how many millions of people had been vaccinated. Clearly, it was considered an important aspect of the message that Government wanted to send to the population. Week by week, the numbers vaccinated climbed ever higher, indicating that increasing numbers were now protected from infection by the tried, tested, safe and effective vaccines… And the nation waited with baited breath for the moment that we would achieve the much heralded herd immunity that would mean that our nation would be free from the scourge of Covid.
This aspect of the report was discontinued in April of this year, a month that saw a Covid wave peaking at around 7% of the population of the U.K. concurrently infected with Covid.
The UKHSA’s final graph of vaccine coverage in that April 2022 report showed that uptake had flatlined for most age groups.
Did the UKHSA finally stop publishing the vaccine update graphs in their Vaccine Surveillance Report because they had ceased to serve their purpose? The lack of any significant increase in vaccination uptake would surely be interpreted by the ‘vaccine hesitant’ that there were significant numbers who like them were also resolute in their determination to avoid the Covid vaccines. Nevertheless, the vaccine coverage data live on in the national flu and COVID-19 surveillance reports. I find this shift to a new venue rather odd, because while I could accept that a report on vaccine surveillance might include vaccine coverage, there’s less reason for it to be included in a report on disease incidence. Even odder is that while the UKHSA devotes 13 pages out of 84 (15%) on coverage of the Covid vaccines, there’s only 1½ pages devoted to coverage of the influenza vaccines. I’d have thought that the influenza vaccine uptake data would be equally as important as the Covid vaccine uptake data in a ‘flu and COVID-19 surveillance’ report. We’re currently hearing ever more frantic noises about the importance of getting both the bivalent boosters and the influenza vaccine. Indeed, there are already desperate warnings being made about the severity of the incoming flu season (indeed, they’re hyping it as a ‘tripledemic’ of Covid, influenza and RSV). I’m sure that if this turns out to be as brutal as they claim then it will be blamed on poor take-up of the influenza vaccine.
I’ve already touched on the fact that the initial cries for all to be vaccinated were based on achieving herd immunity. This was based on ‘science’, given that effective vaccines that reduce the risk of infection to near zero do offer the means to dramatically reduce the prevalence of a disease to near zero once the herd immunity threshold has been reached. In late 2020 this aspect of the Covid vaccination strategy was discussed in a paper by world expert (and former Chief Scientific Officer of the U.K. Ministry of Defence) Professor Roy Anderson. In this paper he discussed how herd immunity might be gained, the impact of a short duration of immunity (as short as 18 months of near complete protection!) and how the vaccines might be targeted to different parts of the population. Of particular note in this paper are the recommendation for an extended period of rigorous vaccine surveillance:
Phase 3 trials will tell us about efficacy and safety, but well designed phase 4 trials [robust trials and monitoring of data when vaccines/medicines are given approval and given to the general public] are essential based on representative and large numbers of those vaccinated and follow up over time. These studies will record any serious adverse events and identify whether repeatedly exposed individuals acquire coronavirus infections, particularly SARS-CoV-2, and if they do, what is the severity of disease. These cohort-based longitudinal studies will need careful planning and sustained funding, probably from governments with industry contributing. These studies should be targeted at those vaccinated in high-risk groups, such as the individuals older than 70 years and those with co-morbidities that predispose to severe disease.
Of course, these rigorous studies are conspicuous by their absence, with mainly lower quality ‘observational’ studies having been undertaken. It is surprising that so many senior scientists in the U.K. and worldwide have remained quiet about the lack of rigour of Government sponsored studies into the impact of the vaccines. These individuals have also remained quiet about the value in striving to achieve very high vaccination rates if the vaccines don’t offer protection from infection (no herd immunity possible) and at best only offer protection from hospitalisation or death (both very low risks for the non-vulnerable population).
Alas, it turned out that the vaccines haven’t offered meaningful protection from infection, and thus onward transmission, and ‘herd immunity’ is a phrase that appears to have entered the memory-hole. The appeals to ‘get vaccinated’ slowly changed from ‘protect yourself’ to ‘protect granny’ and then to ‘protect the NHS’, without any real explanation to the public as to why these messages had to change. I have given up thinking that it is odd that our authorities haven’t apologised to all those who took the experimental vaccines only ‘to protect others’ – indeed, the situation is actually that the vaccines were rolled out to achieve herd immunity and it is only by a fluke that they’ve turned out to offer some protection against hospitalisation and death (if indeed this is the case; there’s even evidence that the vaccines are making hospitalisation and death from Covid more likely). Our authorities are, of course, very keen to tell everyone that the vaccines were always intended to achieve this end result, even with very little evidence from the original vaccine trials that this was occurring.
I sometimes wonder why anyone under the age of 60 or so is getting vaccinated at the moment. I believe that it might be a vaccination inertia effect, where people are simply doing what they did before without bothering to ask themselves why they’re doing it. Perhaps this vaccination inertia effect will cease soon. Then again, there’s also the ‘would have been worse if I’d been unvaccinated’ effect, in which healthy, non-vulnerable individuals get to spend several days feeling truly rotten every time they get infected with Covid, but are thankful that they’re not in hospital. I’m sure that the ‘would have been worse’ individuals are surprised that any unvaccinated individuals have survived this Covid pandemic at all. That reminds me of the survey undertaken in 2020 where the surveyed population believed that 7% of the U.K. population had died of (or with) Covid, whereas the reality was less than 0.1% of the population had died, and this was heavily biased towards the most elderly and other vulnerable, which is relevant because it highlights that most of the population weren’t at high risk from Covid in the first place. Again, it has been forgotten that so many people were misled, and that official sources of information didn’t try to rectify this misunderstanding at the time.
My final point on the the vaccination uptake data is perhaps the most important aspect that should be discussed, although it isn’t actually about the numbers vaccinated, but about how many people in the U.K. remain unvaccinated? The data that we have on the numbers vaccinated are probably fairly robust (albeit there are questions surrounding those that paid to get their vaccine passport without getting vaccinated, or whether there were those that had contacts in the NHS who could ‘pretend’ to inject them with ‘their free dose’). However, the question of the number that are unvaccinated at any point in time is much more complex to answer. On the face of it, this appears simple – those in the population who aren’t vaccinated are the unvaccinated ones. The problem is that we don’t seem to have a good understanding of how many people there are in the U.K. Most official estimates use the population estimate provided by the Office for National Statistics, based on returns from the 2020 census plus a modelled estimate of how the population might have changed since that point. However, this estimate appears to be lower than other estimates of the population’s size – for example, the number of people in England aged over 18 is estimated by the ONS to be approximately 44,450,000 (estimate from July 2022), while the number registered with the NHS aged over 18 and who are eligible to receive a vaccine dose is approximately 50,850,000 (also from July 2022). What’s more, some independent parties estimate an even higher population – from supermarket estimates based on the quantity of food sold to estimates from water-companies based on how much faeces that food turns into, estimates of the population size stubbornly keep on exceeding the ONS’s estimate. Quite how we have such a poor estimate of the population of the U.K. is beyond me – you’d think it would be highly important when it comes to many aspects of managing the U.K., from the provision of social services to planning how many roads we need to have. Nevertheless, this is the situation we find ourselves in – perhaps our Government finds it convenient to have unreliable data on the population size?
While this difference in population estimate might appear to only have a small impact on the estimates of the numbers remaining unvaccinated in the U.K., it becomes important given the very high proportion of the population that have received a dose of Covid vaccine. For example, the NHS reported that it had given 3,290,155 first doses of Covid vaccine (of all types) to those in England aged between 60 and 64 by the end of June 2022:
- The NHS NIMS estimated that there were 3,626,033 individuals in this age category at that time, leaving 335,878 unvaccinated (or about 10% of the population in this age group).
- The ONS estimated that there were 3,196,813 individuals in this age category. This resulted in the embarrassing situation where there were 93,342 more individuals vaccinated than were in the population. The NHS got around this problem by simply stating that 100% of the population in this age group were vaccinated and kept quiet about the details.
This uncertainty in the number of unvaccinated in the population has impact far beyond simply making the population believe that most people were vaccinated, and thus possibly encouraging the undecided to join the majority in being vaccinated. Many of the official measures of how well the vaccines were doing used the lower estimate (based on ONS data) of the population size, and thus estimated a very low number of unvaccinated. This had the effect of making Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths appear to be occurring at much higher rates in the unvaccinated than was probably the case – results that have been enthusiastically promulgated in reports of vaccine effectiveness by our various authorities. This impact of uncertainty in the number of unvaccinated has been covered in many blog posts, but possibly the most rigorous assessment of the problem has been covered by Professor Norman Fenton in his various scientific papers and blog posts – they’re well worth a read.
In my next post I’ll discuss an aspect of the vaccine that appears to be a direct consequence of high vaccination levels – the rise of the Covid variants.
Amanuensis is an ex-academic and senior Government scientist. He blogs at Bartram’s Folly – subscribe here.
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What about the crock served up by the pair of Sage groups, Whitty and Vallance ? The Cabinet Office is key and there is no visibility as to what was going on there.
The administrative state is completely out of control. Any institution that receives sizeable quantities of public money should have people panels overseeing drawn in the same manner as jury service.
What you’re describing in your last sentence is what I refer to as Mr Biguglybloke and his baseball bat.
See my comment below which i just posted.
As the article says ‘it’s the politicians themselves’ that are the problem. My solution would be to create a jury type selection process for responsible adults over 50 years who are committed to doing their duty to governing/administering their local council or national government for a specific term of office, 3-5 years max.
Part of the current problem is the career opportunities that politics present to careerist, motivated individuals. It’s too tempting for ambitious, ego driven maniacs like Hancock and Johnson to take advantage of all the perks of high office. I would also get rid of the party system. Each member of parliament should represent their constituents not end up being controlled by party apparatniks. They should all be independent of party loyalties.
I would also reform the House of Lords. This should be a house of representatives or a council of elders whose responsibility should be to safeguard the sovereignty of the people by scrutinizing the legislature of the House of Commons. Again the members of this House could be selected through a jury selection process rather than individuals rewarded for political services.
Electoral reform is needed and there needs to be a national debate about it.
Rather than any of that, let’s just dismantle whole swathes of government. Life would go on. I think that is the author’s argument
“Matt Hancock, the Lockdowner-in-Chief.”
Seriously? He’s just a small cog in a huge global machine, and he probably doesn’t even realise it.
A welcome article, on a subject which I hope will be discussed much more on the DS: there is clearly something very wrong with the quality of people who comprise our governing class.
But why and how did they get to positions of responsibility? Why did we vote for them?
What can be done to limit their power and thus the degree of damage they can do?
How do we get a better class of human being into positions of responsibility? And – the flip side – how do we prevent sociopathic narcissists like Hancock, and so many others like him, gaining positions of responsibility?
The questions go on and on.
But one answer, or rather problem, keeps hitting me as I think along these lines: if the public at large is so intellectually bone-idle, so utterly lacking in self respect, so utterly devoid of any sense of justice or the value of liberty as 2020-22 demonstrated, then we really are all fucked.
I say public at large: in fact by my guess, as I have posted on here many times, if only 20% of people had stood out against this shitshow then it would have been stopped in its tracks. But they didn’t. Only maybe 1-3% did so.
Our society is in deep, deep shit.
It also makes one question the reason people choose to go into politics.
It clearly is not to make the country a better place in Hancock’s case.
Are there any decent politicians and how can we use them?
There should be a mechanism in place to remove a MP if clearly incompetent.
And why was there silence from all but a few MPs during this sorry saga.
As you said it would only have taken a few more to expose it all. Instead they remained silent….
Andrew Bridgen (MP for Ashby-de-la-Zouch). He had the courage to speak out and the integrity to ignore any threats or bribes not to do so
Homepage | Andrew Bridgen MP – Member of Parliament for NW Leicestershire
I noticed the change when we lost our statesmen, whose sole concern was the country and who took resonsibity for their department’s failings (Carrington at the time of the Falklands war was the last? ). In exchange we got politicians whose sole concern was themselves, who absolutely avoided any responsibility. Add to that the Bliar changes that gave bureaucrats more money for doing zero risk jobs where resonsibity was just a word, not an engrained behaviour, with effective tenure until they received their taxpayer funded, gold plated pensions.
Andrew Bridgen is an honourable man
Goodness, is there any reason why society shouldn’t be like this? You think about the structure of society: family – community – nation. There has to my mind been a war against all three going back to at least the 1960s. “Old fashioned” principles have been jettisoned and not replaced with anything of substance. Thus, to borrow a phrase, we find ourselves with this inverted pyramid of piffle. To borrow another phrase, why don’t they teach logic in these schools?
Of course things are a right mess, and to change this would take a cultural battle lasting probably decades (though unfortunately if we get “world war three” sooner, things could be knackered up even more).
They got their because they aped the views and attitudes of their party leader and the rest of the political class. Few others get past the screening process.
Many people voted for such people because they believed the trope that not to do so would let the other lot in, and they would be worse. The truth was and is the others would be almost indistinguishable, just like competing soap powerd (fluids now).
Part of that 1-3% would comprise of members of the Heritage Party led by David Kurten who openly admits to declining the “jab”. Have a browse through its manifesto.
I am surprised at your surprise. Ordinary people have far too much else going on in their lives to have time to spend on the detail of politics. They are NOT “bone idle”, This just feels remote and not a priority, when you have a job and a family to care for. And hindsight is 20/20 vision. At the time a huge chunk of the public was baying for more restriction. We lived in a world of fear. The messages in the Lockdown Files do make me angry at how those in charge sneered at laughed at us. But at the same time, the drive was always to stay popular and to do what they thought the public wanted. Rule by opinion poll. Our politicians don’t lead. They follow. Society as a whole wanted what was done to us. And those who didn’t were sneered and laughed at by friends and family. The pressure was appalling. Let’s condemn them by all means but let’s not let ourselves off the hook.
Goebbels was right, propaganda does work
But as I understand it a century or so ago – even a few decades ago – people took far more interest in politics and current affairs. How can how you are governed feel remote and not a priority?
And we’re not talking here about some arcana of government policy which doesn’t affect day-to-day life that much. We’re talking about people having practically all their vestiges of freedom and liberty taken from them. And most people didn’t even question it, let alone push back.
That I do not understand, and believe that it augers very ill for the future.
As you conclude in your post, ‘let’s not let ourselves [i.e. the public at large] off the hook’.
Absolutely- any system of government, however well designed, will inevitably be taken over by those who are willing to do what others aren’t in pursuit of power: the criminals and the sociopaths.
There is no political system that can overcome this, so the only solution is the ensure that the power that can be claimed is absolutely as minimal as is necessary to do a limited number of essential jobs. Government must be small, constrained and directly accountable to the public at all times, not just during elections.
Indeed. The USA has got closest – separation of powers at Federal level, limited Federal government power over the States, but even there we’ve seen massive overreach.
Ultimately the defence against the state has to come from the individual in every choice they make – believe very little, question everything, push back early and hard. We need the general public to stop trusting politicians and their “experts”.
I wonder if there would be any value in having regular referenda (say yearly) on how much MPs get paid? I understand a town in the “United States” did something similar with local police – the electorate always vote for good wages for the police who in return make sure they deal with what people are worried about.
Recall rights would help moderate the worst and kick them out. A few examples might be enough to dissuade many others.
Indeed – I also think a system should be in place whereby election pledges are guaranteed and failing on a certain number of them automatically triggers a recall. Plus the end of party systems replaced by plebiscites on cabinet roles so the you get on as an MP if you do what your voters like not what your party masters like, and the complete outlawing of large donations to and share ownership by MPs and their wider families.
And that’s just the start.
I completely agree with James D in his latest piece here. This claptrap involving Hancockwomble is nothing more than a limited hangout that is designed/timed to distract. Particularly when it comes to his worst crimes. Totally transparent.
”There is nothing our corrupt, mendacious and hopeless compromised political class would like more than for you to think that Covid was all about cock up not conspiracy. That’s why the clownish Matt Hancock makes such a convenient fall guy. No one takes him seriously – especially not after his appearance on a TV game show, which was no doubt pre-planned as part of the strategy. The quid quo pro for Hancock’s agreeing to play the sacrificial lamb, I would guess, is that the story be focused on his bumbling incompetence rather than on his role as Midazolam Matt, serial killer of the elderly.
Not in my most cynical imaginings could I have predicted that at this late stage in the day, with the vaccine-dying and injured all around us, the legacy media would STILL be trotting out the line that it was all just cock up and that next time all we need to do is be a bit more authoritarian and ‘trust the experts.’ But then, unlike the Telegraph, Bill Gates didn’t pay me $6 million, so what would I know?”
https://delingpole.substack.com/p/the-telegraphs-lockdown-files-leak
“‘passionate embrace’” ? He was kneading her behind like a master baker kneads two handfuls of dough. As for the media, who remembers Robert Peston demanding lockdowns sooner?
Good article. The poverty of politics and the broken system around Parliament, replete with vote fraud, Hancocks, corruption (how much money did Hancock make from the Rona fascism?), graft, greed, and small people with enormous egos and shoe sized brains and depots of morality.
GK Chesterton said it best – that the House of Commons was actually the House of Lords and the Aristocracy, and had since the time of Richard II sought to crush the Commons. So we were ineffably crushed and slaughtered for 3 years by Pharma/Parle ment.
As Churchill observed, politicians are but glittering scum – but scum most of them are including Hancock.
Statism ends in something like a Rona Fascism, or the Dystopian Health-Bio surveillance state the same scum are so busily erecting. Another Hancock will rear his stupid smirking brainless cranium soon enough as Minister of something or other.
On the plus side – there was talk of getting rid of domestic cats – but that’s just me – I can’t stand them. I wonder how many “thumbs down” I’ll get for that?
Thumbs up from me
Happy to oblige, but that’s the first thumbs-down I’ve ever done.
The trouble with Hancock he is not under arrest awaiting trial.
I can only hope many people read this and start asking the same question.
Hancock is a product of a parliamentary system fuelled by neoliberal ideology. More neoliberalism will brings as more Hancocks, not no more Hancocks. It’s about time that the adherents of this failed 1980s ideology which has been driven politics everywhere since then accept that circumstances which manifested itself during its supreme rule (and which keep getting worse) are caused by it and that the solution to this problem is not more of the same. The solution is something else.
At the height of the corona madness an item posted by a videoblogger said that Hancock was a member of the House of Commons All Parliamentary Committee on the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. It wasn’t clear if he had set this group up or was just a member but the item went on to say that at one of their meetings in 2018 Klaus Schwab was invited to attend.
Hancock having this association with Schwab and obviously enthusiastic about Schwabs ideas – technology solves everything – might explain how the UK Gummint got pushed into spending colossal sums of Tax Payers money on the Track & Trace app for your smart phone.
“The trouble with Matt Hancock”
He’s a complete twat!
“What is wrong with our governing classes?”
I was asking myself this with the USA elections: out of the world’s fourth largest population, how were Trump the Clinton the finalists? As for why people go into politics: I think many do go in with good intentions, but only those who know how to play the system become powerful enough to make a real difference; and by then, they are corrupted by it. Then there are those who start evil, and know exactly how to become rich and powerful, such as Bliar. To borrow another phrase, “There is no good and evil: there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.”
As I said on the news round-up, this “revelation” has “conveniently timed distraction” written all over it, all part of the plan. The number 100,000 seems familiar: didn’t Saint Boris do a staged grovel to mark 100,000 deaths? They are gaslighting us by telling us what might have happened, how they might have killed our cats, but didn’t, so that we kneel down and worship Satan for sparing us this. The “Partygate” revelations had a similar vibe: get the public angry at a suitable moment. Liz Truss was probably deliberately installed a short tenure as PM, so that the economic woes can be blamed on her, instead of the far more obvious cause: lockdowns. Greta Thunberg was silenced during lockdowns, and now they are dusting off her puppet strings again.
Nothing is as it seems.
Is it possible to retire this photo of Hancock? And, for that matter, any and all photos of Hancock? I find them triggering.
I have a horrid suspicion that Handcock is just the chosen fall guy since he’s political dead meat and the release of these WattsApp messages will be used to justify the UK signing the new WHO Treaty …. on the basis that politicians can’t be trusted to genuinely follow the science and keep politics out of their decision-making …… unlike the oh-so-wise “experts” of the WHO.
I hope I’m wrong ….. but I smell a very large rat.
100%
Indeed. Our politicians made terrible decisions, but those decisions were theirs to make. You listen to “experts” – hopefully a good variety – you educate yourself as much as possible on the subject, question those experts to see if you detect bullshit or flaws in their arguments or conflicts of interest, then you consider the tradeoffs and make a political decision. In this case they made the wrong decision, for various reasons which don’t completely understand but suspect are to do with following a hidden agenda.
Oh it’s 100% contrived. Nothing about this or anything else we hear involving government is by chance. The key is to know when you’re being manipulated. Same goes for the legacy media of course. Anyone else notice how they, in particular the Telegraph, have been attempting to ingratiate themselves with us, pretending that they’re now on our side and that we have a common enemy? It’s all PsyOp and totally obvious as such. The traitorous, deceitful scumbags wouldn’t know quality, investigative journalism if it bit them on the arse. They’re just captured presstitutes that can tell which way the wind’s blowing and run their storylines accordingly. The PsyOp wouldn’t be possible without the MSM. “The media is the virus.”
Oohh, that last paragraph absolutely nails it. Unfortunately, there are still way too many people, probably even the majority on here tbh, that can’t wrap their heads around that. The system is broken beyond repair and must be razed to the ground before it can be rebuilt.
Says it all really.
These lunatics should be the last people to be exercising power but this is what we get when individuals with appropriate expertise have been forced out of ever considering going into politics by the destructive influence of mainstream and social media. Like never before we’re at the mercy of those politicians who are best at manipulating the ignorance and emotional hysteria of the masses.
But never give up hope. Perhaps something better will emerge before the next General Election!
The hypocrisy of the man to accuse someone of breaching trust when he has treated his wife in the manner he did.
I suggest an alternative explanation, that ministers have too little power, not too much. Politicians like Hancock are content to be, effectively, barristers arguing cases which have been constructed for them by their advisers. In the days when home secretaries had power of life or death and chancellors could set interest rates and fix exchange rates, those offices attracted people who cared about policy and you had them where you could see them. Policy makers now work unseen in think tanks and the “independent” advisory bodies which have multiplied over the years and there is nothing you can do about them. You could sack Edwina Currie but you can’t sack Neil Ferguson.
As the article says ‘it’s the politicians themselves’ that are the problem. My solution would be to create a jury type selection process for responsible adults over 50 years who are committed to doing their duty to governing/administering their local council or national government for a specific term of office, 3-5 years max.
Part of the current problem is the career opportunities that politics present to careerist, motivated individuals. It’s too tempting for ambitious, ego driven maniacs like Hancock and Johnson to take advantage of all the perks of high office. I would also get rid of the party system. Each member of parliament should represent their constituents not end up being controlled by party apparatniks. They should all be independent of party loyalties.
I would also reform the House of Lords. This should be a house of representatives or a council of elders whose responsibility should be to safeguard the sovereignty of the people by scrutinizing the legislature of the House of Commons. Again the members of this House could be selected through a jury selection process rather than individuals rewarded for political services.
Electoral reform is needed and there needs to be a national debate about it.
Calling fellow Scots/Scotland-based folk following Daily Sceptic! A friend and I are trying to set up Libertarian Drinks a la Dick Delingpole’s Third Wednesdays. Probably central belt. Is there anybody out there? Let me know if you are interested.
Only the original form of democracy, sortition, aka a lottery among all non-idiots (meaning the not politically interested), for a year or 2 at most can and will solve all these problems.
Alternatively, abolishing all political parties and allowing only independents to run, possibly with far smaller constituencies, might be worth giving a try.
Whatever radical solution is pursued, one thing is for certain: the outcome cannot be worse than what we have at the moment, everywhere.
So, bring it on.
Fat chance, I know: the people now in charge will never voluntarily abolish the current system.
The trouble with Midazolam Matt and his cohorts is that they are still not in prison and are still using valuable oxygen.