- “Biden Administration suggests it could keep controversial Covid vaccination entry requirement for travelers beyond May 11th” – The Biden Administration has praised the Covid vaccine entry requirement for travelers to the U.S., raising fears the controversial curb could stay beyond May 11th, reports the Mail.
- “Lockdown ‘added to work crisis by making people scared to leave homes’” – A recruitment executive says health problems including anxiety linked to Covid restrictions are the “biggest driver” of rising joblessness, according to the Telegraph.
- “Dr. Anthony Fauci now admits the mRNA Covid vaccines hardly work and might not be approvable” – “In fact,” says Alex Berenson, “a bombshell paper he co-authored last month suggests all vaccines for common respiratory viruses may face intractable hurdles. And that’s not even the worst news.”
- “Dr Jay Bhattacharya: questioning lockdowns, the Twitter files and how censorship kills” – Winston Marshall on his Spectator podcast speaks with Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya about the history of the Great Barrington Declaration and its censorship by Big Tech and at Stanford. Watch here on YouTube.
- “Pastor facing 10 years in prison for preaching at Canada trucker blockade protesting vaccine mandates” – Canadian pastor Artur Pawlowski told Fox News‘s Laura Ingraham he could see up to 10 years in jailtime for preaching a sermon at last year’s Canadian trucker convoy.
- “Why observational studies shouldn’t be used to assess respiratory virus interventions” – Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan defend excluding poor quality observational evidence that has proven biases from reviews.
- “Hypocrisy from MPs regarding regulators” – The MHRA was regarded as a troubled regulator in need of improvement – until the Covid vaccines came along, notes HART.
- “Round and round the logic merry-go-round we go” – HART examines the confusion in the media over Japan through the lens of the BBC’s coverage.
- “What the Medicare data from Connecticut tells us” – Steve Kirsch has obtained death and vaccination records for people who died in Connecticut and the results surprised him.
- “WHO, AZ safe and effective” – Dr. John Campbell wonders why the WHO is still claiming the AstraZeneca vaccine is “safe and effective”.
- “Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it” – Laura Dodsworth has a new book out June 8th.
- “Data Sleuths – Date for the Diary” – Joel Smalley notes that the ONS has announced it will release the updated “Deaths by vaccination status in England” bulletin on February 21st – the first one since July.
- “The psychology of totalitarianism – A book for burning?” – Dr. Mattias Desmet writes that on January 25th 2023, Ghent University banned him from using his own book in the course he teaches.
- “Big Brother Exposed!” – Toby gets a mention in Trish Wood’s latest Substack.
- “Sea Level Is Stable Around the World… The Good News the Media Don’t Want Us to Hear” – There has been no dramatic sea level rise in the past century, and projections show no dramatic rise is likely to occur in the coming century, writes Paul Homewood in WUWT.
- “Slash energy use by 15%, new Net Zero department to urge households” – Households and businesses will be pushed to slash their energy use by 15% by the newly-created Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, according to the Telegraph.
- “Moon dust fired into space could help stop global warming” – Astrophysicists say the radical solution may reduce solar radiation by 1-2%, reports the Telegraph. Sheer lunacy…
- “Lords kill off Government’s attempt to stop protesters using slow marches to block roads” – A group of Labour, Lib Dem and crossbench peers has defeated the plans with some saying it would be an excessive extension of police powers, the Telegraph reports.
- “Jewish group and MPs urge GB News to stop indulging conspiracy theories” – Neil Oliver is the crosshairs of the witchfinders for discussing fears about ‘one-world Government’, which apparently is anti-Semitic, according to the Guardian.
- “Safe spaces are ‘mad’, says Oxford University chief” – Baron Patten of Barnes said that freedom of speech was one of the “most important values” in an open society, reports the Telegraph.
- “Wales has learnt nothing from Sturgeon’s self-ID debacle” – Now it’s Mark Drakeford’s turn to try to tear up women’s rights, says Joanna Williams in Spiked.
- “‘Political correctness’ meant Islamist extremism was downplayed by Prevent” – A review finds the scheme operated a ‘double standard’, downplaying religion and talking up Right-wing dangers, with even mainstream conservatives like Douglas Murray and Melanie Phillips falling under its definition of extremism.
- “The Ukraine War in 2023” – Swiss Policy Research with its latest no-nonsense Ukraine update.
- “The Church of England is considering alternatives to referring to God as ‘He’ after priests asked to use gender-neutral terms” – Watch Christian Concern’s Tim Dieppe tell Talk TV‘s Julia Hartley-Brewer that “the Church has become so captured by woke ideology they don’t realise where they’ve got to”.
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Good article thank you. 100% agree.
First ‘Science’ in a pure form does not exist. A ‘method’ does not exist. ‘Science’ is now about profits and power. Has been since the days of that quack Jenner. ‘Science’ long ago left physical proofs for the easier ground to defend called maths and models, which in the main have little to do with physicality (Relativity and the Big Bang are examples of such frauds).
Second, ‘Scientism’ is a religion, and has nothing to do with evidence. It mergers philosophies, worldviews, processes and fraud and declares itself omnipotent. Rona was a Scientism.
Third, Stats can be used to derive any answer. This is true of any maths based activity including much of ‘the science’ which is mathematical, model based, not physically based. Common sense is thrown away replaced by arcane models which mean nothing. Long Convid is an example or claims that if I took poisons I would not die from a fake virus.
Lastly, Pharma and other domains claiming ‘science’ buy their power. This has been a fact since the 1960s. No ‘science’ whatsoever.
AGW has become a secular religion, that is why I identify myself as a heretic rather than a sceptic
Fair enough – up to a point. Backed up by a much-cited article, albeit from one of the scientific establishment…
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124&type=printable
“…Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
Less-so for experimental physical sciences? Arguably all began with Boyle’s Law of Gases in 1662 – founder of Royal Society, motto Nullius in Verba (“take nobody’s word for it”).
Unarguably “The Science” (P1V1 = P2V2) – otherwise we wouldn’t have gas cylinders, internal combustion engines and bulk manufacture of ammonia for fertilisers.
Let’s not throw all the babies out with the paddling-pool water.
Babies and the bath – sure I agree. Boyle et al are mechanical, physical experiments. They are not maths. Any ‘science’ based on ‘maths’ ie Relativity etc or not based on physical evidence, ‘virology’, ‘Evolution’, Banging etc is simply false.
Understood – no physical evidence means unproven (and hitherto unprovable), hence a theory or belief, and not established science.
Quibble over relativity – didn’t Eddington lead an expedition to Africa that observed a tiny deviation of light brought about by the mass of the sun? Cited as physical proof of relativity?
And don’t satellites have to take into account relativity, in order to be precisely located and function in operation of GPS?
This confuses sciences with engineering.
The vast majority of theories in the inexact sciences [which includes medical and biological] are false because inexact sciences are just that – inexact.
This of course also means that because most sciences are inexact, that most scientific theories are false.
Theories in inexact sciences are false because whilst some experimental outcomes might conform to the theory others do not and so falsify the theory.
And that is for those sciences which have theories which are potentially testable by experiments.
In engineering we take theories warts and all and find applications which can be used to develop a product. It is in the process of testing products that the ‘wrinkles’, the undesirable outcomes are eliminated. With pharmaceutical drugs we cannot eliminate undesirable outcomes – these are drugs which do not work in some people and are also harmful outcomes [adverse reactions].
The foregoing picture is complicated by complexity and we have a science called complexity science.
One of the consequences of inexact sciences and complexity is that prediction of future outcomes using theories is impossible.
The best anyone can do is forecast but once the “prediction horizon” is close or passed, forecasts become less and less reliable and eventually become useless past the horizon.
This is also one of the reason why dart-throwing chimpanzees are more reliable at forecasting the future than experts.
Science Proves “Expert forecasts .. no better than dart-throwing monkeys.”
The foregoing is why former physicist turned crystal-ball gazer Professor Niall Ferguson of Imperial College makes predictions which are a pile of crap. As far as I know he has never made a single reliable prediction.
And he turned the world upsides-down over Covid.
God save us from people like him – but sadly God did not that time and he does not seem particularly interested in doing so ever.
I believe it was Jordan Peterson that expanded the line to “lies, damned lies, statistics and computer models”. How right he is!
Some computer models are great. Like the ones that work out if buildings will withstand earthquakes, ships will float, and space rockets will go past planets. Etc. So it’s just as silly as saying ” all equations are rubbish” it’s just ignorant. Same with stats, they are extremely useful tools, but clearly can be used improperly, misunderstood, or purposely abused. To say they are all lies is just stupid. These people have no understanding or appreciation of science and yet feel very happy to make sweeping ill-informed statements. It would be like me saying all English literature is soppy and meaningless.
I think the issue is to spot the leaps from ‘This is what has been happening‘ to ‘This means that...’ to ‘ This is what will happen…‘. These leaps are not science or measurement – they’re the bits that need very careful scrutiny.
Agreed – all tools can be misused and abused – stats and models are just another
Even worse were the computer models, the bastard child of statistics.
Computer modelling beloved by “experts” used to prove whatever they wanted and made by people who understand precisely nothing about the riddle of disease transmission (but then again who does).
We ought to be looking at precisely how and why some people get sick and others do not.
Immunology and virology need to go back to basics.
Germ theory needs serious modification.
One of the basics is poisoning: in our water, air, food. We need to be more aware of it.
Indeed, Miasma theory becomes more relevant.
Imagine if they had used so called Artificial Intelligence (another oxymoron), I hate to think where we would be now. As someone said recently, can’t remember who, “AI is the Mad Cow Disease of computing, you take a computer output and then use it as a computer input” I paraphrase I think. This is another scandal brewing, ready for politicians and dodgy scientists to say “ that’s what the AI says”, rather than that’s what the programmers programmed it to do.
Generally when people say ‘this is what the AI says’, actually what they are saying is ‘this is what everyone has said’, given AI/ML is based/trained on what has gone previously in some form or another. Happy to be corrected by anyone close to the generative tech side who is better informed
“No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts.
If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.
They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of common sense.”
Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, British Prime Minister 1885-6, 1886–92, 1895–1902
Great quote.
‘Following the science’
‘They have been responsible in large measure for the miseries and suffering that have fallen on millions of men, women and children.
‘They have been a disgrace…… Although they were not a group falling within the words of the Charter, they were certainly a ruthless…..caste. The contemporary…….National Socialism…..made a mockery of the….oath of obedience to…..orders. When it suits their defence they say they had to obey; when confronted with…….crimes, which are shown to have been within their general knowledge, they say they disobeyed.
The truth is they actively participated in all these crimes, or sat silent and acquiescent, witnessing the commission of crimes on a scale larger and more shocking than the world has ever had the misfortune to know.’
https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/45f18e/pdf/
‘Between 2 March and 12 June 2020, 18,562 residents of care homes in England died with COVID-19, including 18,168 people aged 65 and over, representing almost 40% of all deaths involving COVID-19 in England during this period.
Of these deaths, 13,844 (76%) happened in care homes themselves; nearly all of the remainder occurred in a hospital.
During the same period, 28,186 “excess deaths” were recorded in care homes in England, representing a 46% increase compared with the same period in previous years.
These excess deaths likely include undiagnosed COVID-19 deaths, and underscore the broader impact of the pandemic on older people in care homes.
The UK government, national agencies, and local-level bodies have taken decisions and adopted policies during the COVID-19 pandemic that have directly violated the human rights of older residents of care homes in England—notably their right to life, their right to health, and their right to non-discrimination.
These decisions and policies have also impacted the rights of care home residents to private and family life
The UK government has known from the outset that COVID-19 presents a disproportionate risk of serious illness and death to older people, especially those with underlying health conditions.
Risk of death estimates made in early March showed infection fatality rates ranging from 0.01% for people under 20 to 8% for people over 80.
The UK government was clearly aware that the 400,000 residents of care homes in the UK, many of whom live with multiple health conditions, physical dependency, dementia and frailty, were at exceptional risk to coronavirus.
Yet at the height of the pandemic, despite this knowledge, it failed to take measures to promptly and adequately protect care homes.
Contrary to the claim by the secretary of state for Health and Social Care that a “protective ring” was put around care homes “right from the start,” a number of decisions and policies adopted by authorities at the national and local level in England increased care home residents’ risk of exposure to the virus—violating their rights to life, to health, and to non-discrimination.’
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur45/3152/2020/en/
Contrary to the claim by the secretary of state for Health and Social Care that a “protective ring” was put around care homes “right from the start,” a number of decisions and policies adopted by authorities at the national and local level in England increased care home residents’ risk of exposure to the virus—violating their rights to life, to health, and to non-discrimination.’
I’m sorry to be so blunt but this is a load of horsedung. Exposure to the virus was always unavoidable for everyone and naturally occuring events, like coming on contact with pathogens whose movements nobody can predict, control or even just observe can never “violate” any supposed to rights humans have granted to other humans. One could as well claim that somebody who fell down a staircase was “exposed to a staircase” which “violated his right to life and health.”
Right to life means that it’s usually illegal to kill someone. The people who think COVID violated anybody’s right to life ought to work out a way to lecture viruses about this and punish them if they transgress. Once they’re done with that, they can come back. In the meantime, they’re not entitled to act in vain vanity on humans as if these were pathogens. And what’s a right to health, anyway? Since when can we grant health to people? Have they stopped becoming sick and dying recently and I didn’t notice?
The fatality rates are way over the top. According to people setting vaccination priorities in 2021, fatality rate for people in care homes was 5%, for people over 80, it was 0.625%, for people over 60 0.1% and for working age people in general 0.002%.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/30/older-groups-must-remain-top-priority-for-vaccines-warn-government-advisers
The real care home scandal was people forced into social isolation because of “tests”, people dying of neglect in social isolation, people suddenly cut off from all of their relatives without even understanding what was going on in case they had dementia and generally, the whole COVID circus insofar it was applied to care homes, not “exposure to some virus”. This explicitly includes abolishing usual human face-to-face contacts in favour of turning everybody into a masked alien. I wonder how older people with dementia will have felt about that. Must have been a horrible experience of the world being completely transformed from one day to the other without the slightest bit of a discernible reason for that.
Amnesty International is one of the guilty organizations here.
There seems to be a great deal of horse dung about.
‘…the relative success of the Norwegian response to the Covid-19 crisis can at least partly be ascribed to the skilful crisis management performed by experienced nursing home managers – in close collaboration with their staff at nursing homes.
We found that nursing home managers, in collaboration with staff, swiftly implemented creative new solutions, much in line with the findings in a study of Norwegian healthcare managers’ use of innovative solutions during the Covid-19 pandemic (Lyng et al., 2021).
The previously mentioned fact that nursing homes had a low rate of transfer of infected residents to hospitals (Jacobsen et al., 2021), thereby countering capacity overload in hospitals, was one factor contributing to the resilience of the Norwegian healthcare sector during the pandemic.
Several aspects of the nursing home managers’ actions can explain the low infection rates; in the empirical material we have seen many examples of crisis responses in line with pragmatic and performativity-sensitive approaches to crisis management, including flexibility, agility and incrementality, and performativity in communication’
https://www.scup.com/doi/10.18261/tfo.9.2.3
Excellence in design and operation of care homes could very effectively reduce the number of infections, as demonstratedin Norway. Anderson Tegnell acknowledged this in admitting that more could have been done to protect care homes in Sweden. That was also a basic premise of the Great Barrington Declaration.
The NHS hospital clearances of 2020 introduced the common cold coronavirus into care homes. That is the indictment, and one to which ‘following the science’ is no defence.
Extremely condensed version of this “study”: Corona measures worked! They were saving lives in Norwegian care homes!
Nobody knows what would have happened had these managers done nothing at all or something completely different instead of the run-of-mill Coronavirus dance routines, mass testing, imprison people who tested positve, employ all kinds of supposed infection control voodoo, cut off social contacts to relatives etc. and hence, nobody can even claim that any of this had an effect at all besides the obvious direct effects of making people afraid, lonely and miserable.
This bullshit with supplanting low infection rates, that is, low rates of positive PCR tests, with actual sickness is enough to discard all of this out of hand. And why do we hear about Norway instead of, say, Peru? Because accidentally, something took place in Norway the Captain Coronas who still want to claim that they saved the planet, if not the universe, from an existential crisis, want to crow about.
It was a f***ing cold and nothing else. Bad colds happen. And they do kill some people, as they did in the 2019 years until 2019 and will be doing again in 2025.
Of course it was an ILI with similar lethality to a severe cold, pointed out on 06 Feb by Prof John Nicholls and confirmed in March 2020 by Jay Bhattacharya’s serial prevalence studies. Nevertheless:
‘The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside.
A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.’
As Norway so clearly demonstrated.
Who to listen to….the signatories of the GBD or some random punter on the interweb…..hmm…..tricky….or not really……
Who to listen to….the signatories of the GBD or some random punter on the interweb…..hmm…..tricky….or not really……
That’s a so-called appeal to authority, a logical fallacy.
The rejection of evidence: bigotry.
“Become abusive”, the standard strategy of people who have an axe to grind but whose blade has no edge. Always combined with ignoring any counterarguments that were raised, like me pointing at the vaccine priority article of 2021 to back up the claim that Amnesty International was vastly exaggerating death rates.
Shall that be ignored because of a random punter from the interweb labelling itself Monro?
Is he, according to his own definition, a bigot because he ignored this bit of evidence?
“The line had to be drawn somewhere.”
Yes. With Civil Liberties and Freedom of Speech preserved.
The creature Gove, and the rest of the Tyrants who destroyed both, should never be listened to, or allowed anywhere near government ever again.
If in doubt, do nothing – politicians of all flavours really struggle with that concept… especially in the competitive social media based world
If Gove believed that he was just following the science, why was the Great Barrington declaration ignored and the scientists behind that vilified? Answer it was the wrong science, it did not allow Politicians and advisors to play God, they enjoyed the tyranny, the power, they did not want to let it go, that is the reality.
Let us examine a few of the Mr Gove Sciences.
I can list many more facts, that even the most basic school science level child should know, but lets face it with the focus on decolonisation, diversity and stupidity in the curriculum they probably don’t these days.
Gove is lying to himself as he and his many colleagues, associates, advisors and of course paymasters including in Pharma, but hey look they got away with it, they all ended up in nice jobs, earning lots of money, retaining, indeed improving status, for them the deaths and the destruction they caused has all been worth it.
Excellent article. All they had to do was nothing. They could have wound back on the fearmongering and basically pushed “Keep Calm and Carry On”.
They could have even gently mocked the other countries who were losing their minds and panicking. That would have shown that we Brits ‘don’t blanch at the first smell of cordite’ etc.
But no, Johnson, Sunak, Gove and Hancock were drunk on power and didn’t want it to stop. Everyone they knew were doing very well, out of it thank you. Life imprisonment for them and others should be the minimum tariff.
Absolutely. Mr De Pfeffel caught the wrong bus, soon after the 2019 election. It would have been a useful occasion to go the other way compared with the rest of the EU at that time – perhaps lining up with the Swedish approach, or that of some US states, like Florida.
It was deep state all over – as in the state funded by corporations – Pharma in this instance.
Anyone who saw the clip of political maggot Andrew Mitchel crawling around the commons on all fours, tapping MPs on the ankle to leave whilst Andrew Bridgen was speaking on vaccine injury, should be in no doubt.
Even deadbeat Gordon Brown got a position in the WHO after shilling for lockdowns and vax.
Gove was just another cheap opportunist, and lo… he got the gig at the headbangingly pro-Ukraine Spectator. Hip! hip! Bildeberg!
I have always preferred this “principled” argument against lockdowns, rather than the practical one, though both work.
Hmmm…
The real problem is our political masters almost always have no grounding in science, maths, or statistics. I think I’m right in saying that there’s no-one with even a basic science degree in the current Parliament.
This means that politicians are easily bamboozled but what they think are good “scientific” or statistical arguments, but totally lack the ability to spot flaws in these arguments or ask the right questions which would expose those flaws.
This was abundantly apparent during the whole Covid episode, when the public was regaled with a whole series of bogus and nonsensical statistics, bad data, and implausible modelling.
Even if those in control had spread the net wider and had solicited the opinions of more sceptical data scientists and statisticians, they would have been unable to improve their decision making because they simply lack the ability to cut through the fog of argument.
When you add in the effects of agenda-pushing interest groups, nudge units, and the practice of politics generally, it’s absolutely no surprise the whole thing turned into an absolute sh*tshow.
Statistics is not the problem though. Statistics (and probability) is an extremely subtle discipline which requires rigour far beyond the capabilities of the average politician or civil servant, and even beyond most in academia who think of themselves as scientists. Read Nassim Taleb’s Incerto for further enlightenment.
Yet the only ‘experts’ not on SAGE were actuaries and your local bookie who would have accessed the risks in no time.
Closer to the truth there – a point Nassim Taleb makes.
However, your local bookie isn’t tasked with making decisions on behalf of the entire population.
I have O level maths and I worked out this was all bollocks. It’s an honesty and character problem we have with politicians, not a knowledge/intelligence problem.
Well, yes, but that’s easy to say from sidelines (I did too).
Harder in the spotlight when everyone’s expecting you to “do something”, as the article says.
But there is definitely a knowledge deficit with politicians – look how many have swallowed the “climate crisis” nonsense.
I don’t believe that they have all swallowed the climate crisis nonsense. I think it suits them.
Same thing, for all practical purposes.
The result is the same but the solution is not. Whitty and Vallance knew covid wasn’t dangerous. The solution is not more scientifically literate politicians, it’s more honest ones (and the electorate paying more attention).
If politicians are posed a difficult question beyond the scope of their knowledge, the only honest answer they can give is “I don’t know”.
Which leads inevitably to: we need to consult the experts.
Which inescapably means the likes of Whitty and Vallance can pull the wool over the politicians’ eyes, with them being none the wiser.
Honesty is obviously a desirable quality in a politician, but I don’t see how it helps here.
Unless I have misunderstood, you imply that they truly believed there was a deadly pandemic. I think the evidence points in the other direction, but all either of us can do is speculate.
All the senior leadership in any case are easily smart enough to ask intelligent questions. Anyway, Ed Miliband has a Masters in Economics, but he omits the capital cost when talking about schools saving money with solar panels. That’s dishonest.
Not quite. Maybe some believed there was a deadly pandemic, but I think it’s more a case of taking a course which they thought would result in the least harm. In other words, the precautionary principle writ large. After all, who would want to be held responsible if it turned out the extreme fatality projections turned out to be right?
I really don’t believe senior politicians are smart enough to address complex scientific issues with any sort of rigour. They just don’t have the right basic education or training. Most are graduates in some narrative-based subject where basically all you’re doing is juggling opinions. Economics being one of the worst of these. In the case of Miliband, he’s clearly a zealot working to an external agenda.
I don’t think Covid was a complex scientific issue. I’m not sure it’s the proper business of government in general to have to understand complex scientific issues – they should mainly stick to the basics and stay out of the way. Energy grid planning is perhaps an exception.
In any case, leaders of any large organisation are going to have to be able to interrogate experts and detect bullshit. If they can’t do that they are not fit to lead. They have to WANT to do that too.
I don’t believe that the actions taken during “Covid” for the most part were at all well motivated. I think the evidence for at least misfeasance is overwhelming.
Richard Feynman had much to say of the topic of science. The first one applies to master Fergusson and the Imperial College, or anything to do with Climate ‘Science’.
“If there is something very slightly wrong in our definition of the theories, then the full mathematical rigor may convert these errors into ridiculous conclusions.”
“If you thought that science was certain – well, that is just an error on your part”
“We live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television-words, books, and so on-are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.” (1966)
“Don’t pay attention to ‘authorities,’ think for yourself.”
“…if we did not have a doubt or recognize ignorance, we would not get any new ideas. There would be nothing worth checking, because we would know what is true. So, what we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty. Some of them are most unsure; some of them are nearly sure; but none is absolutely certain. Scientists are used to this.”
“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”
Cue the Man Himself back in 1964:
https://youtu.be/EYPapE-3FRw?t=36
“If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is…
…If It disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
Very good article. We need wiser heads on broader shoulders, not weaselly intellectuals pandering to bogus science and the consensus opinions of data driven statisticians who take no responsibility for the outcomes of their computer models.
We know that careful preparation of plans for emergencies had ruled out the very actions the government took.
If decisions were to be made purely on what a contrived majority of a selected group of advisers said was needed we could dispense with the services of Gove etc and avoif their gurning faces on Daily Sceptic articles.
Management and governments have to take decisions to achieve a set of values advertised to the electorate and approved by them and they have to make judgements with incomplete data.
The Boris government was subject to bureaucrats and politicians and some scientific types who wanted to carry out an experiment in the way of a 14 year old who discovered the keys to the arms development laboratories.
Gove and Co failed and there is no excuse they should leave public affairs and quietly keep out of our way. Every time their faces nor names appear we remember why we hate them (strong expression but I think it is widespread).
“, if not by Neil Ferguson, then certainly by Thomas Pueyo, SAGE, NERVTAG, the NIH and Fauci, and probably also by the nudgers of the Behavioural Insights Team. Cummings ”
Don’t forget the DOD & NATO (countermeasures).
” The Normans at Hastings feinted, pretending to retreat: and the English who were mostly drunk ”
they had also travelled from York to see off the Vikings for the last time. No mean feat!
Rough summary:
Doing nothing was the “rational” option
Choosing between lockdown or nothing was a “political” choice.
Which begs the obvious question: why was lockdown the chosen political option? What would have happened had “nothing” been done instead?
Had Johnson stood his ground and not agreed to lockdowns, teachers, prompted by the media and politician induced hysteria of the time and encouraged by their unions, would have stayed at home. Without teachers, schools would have closed. With schools closed, children at home, parents would have had to stay home to take care of them. With employees off work, businesses would have shut down.
Other unions (medical, transport, public sector etc) encouraged by media would have joined teachers’ unions in urging staff to stay home; staff would have eagerly complied. The result would have been very similar to lockdowns. Johnson could have done little or nothing about it and had he protested or ineffectually tried to prevent it, his feebleness would have been obvious to all.
As this was very likely to happen anyway, Johnson chose to “lead” by pretending that he was taking the decision to lockdown. Had he nonetheless continued to resist, his Cabinet, led by Gove and Hunt, would almost certainly have removed him, with the backing of media and most of the public. And then they would have locked down anyway.
Lockdown was a forced political “choice” which Johnson went along with at least in part to save his job. In his defence he could argue that the public would have stayed home en masse anyway and it was important that he at least pretended to be in charge rather than make it dangerously obvious that he’d lost control.
A stronger, smarter, more resourceful leader, seeing the way things were otherwise headed and taking early firm charge might have captured the spirit of the times and moved events in a different direction. But, as the saying goes, if my grandmother had balls, she’d be my grandfather.
I understand that Boris wasn’t ‘the government’, but his government had a majority at the time and handed the BBC millions in propaganda money. And we know the BBC were cheerleaders for Lockdowns, Masks & Jabs.
I understand your line of thinking here, but I’d say there would always have been enough teachers / staff to run the schools, even if it wasn’t official lessons etc – the kids could be kept busy doing something. Key thing as you say is to stick to usual day and allow parents to do what they needed to do
” Our great NHS, eh? And when it looked as if it was going to be tested, they locked everyone down in preference to letting the doctors get on with whatever was actually happening. And that is before we get to the consequences for churches, schools and so on.”….And TIK TOK!
Simple statistics are very valuable. It is easy to access extremely reliable mortality data in most countries around the world (see https://denisrancourt.ca) and then compare the number of recent deaths with historical values and values from neighbouring countries: these will clearly show whether an unusual event is taking place or whether a fatal disease is spreading from one country or one part of a country to another.
Probably the only sensible thing Angela Merkel did in reaction to the ‘pandemic’ was to force all German hospitals to enter every day into a public database how many intensive care beds were occupied. There was little reporting of the result because it clearly showed (a) the number of occupied beds remained constant and (b) the number of intensive care patients identified as being Covid-positive fluctuated over time but did not affect the total number of beds occupied. In other words, there was no pandemic.
As far as medical science is concerned, I had forgotten this video (unfortunately in German) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ7Qm61b6W8 – dated 18th September 2020, from an interview with Dr. Claus Köhnlein, a GP in Kiel, Germany, and co-author of the book “Virus Mania – How the Medical Industry Continually Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-Dollar Profits at Our Expense”.
Having been notified of the ‘pandemic’ and being aware of a complete absence of a surge in patients coming to his surgery, he made the simple decision (which any politician could have made) to phone a friend of his, who is an undertaker, to ask if he was experiencing a surge in business. The undertaker’s answer was, no, on the contrary, it had never been so quiet.
In the interview, Köhnlein explains to the interviewer that:
“the WHO had set up three or four large studies that started in April [2020]: the DISCOVERY, RECOVERY, SOLIDARITY and REMAP studies.
“Extremely high doses of hydroxychloroquine were used in these studies. Hydroxychloroquine is a medication against malaria, a medication which is really non-toxic in low doses – I once took it myself as a malaria prophylaxis many years ago. We use it a lot in rheumatology: in a dose of 200mg to 400mg it is no problem at all for the patient, who can tolerate it for many years, even decades. But this drug has a very narrow therapeutic range, which means it is easy to overdose. And that’s exactly what happened. The WHO specified the initial dose to be 2.4g, followed by 800mg each day for ten days. That means that after ten days the patients had about 10g of hydroxychloroquine in their blood. 10g is in the middle of the toxic range of this drug: you can read that in every package leaflet, or see it in every book on toxicology.
“400mg per day, that would be the usual dose and the man who led these studies, a certain Professor Landray from the WHO, was asked by other colleagues how he came up with this high dose? And he simply said, well, COVID-19 is a new disease and we have to start with something. But he was then pressed, that answer is OK, but why such a high dose? And he answered he had based it a bit on how we used to treat amoebic dysentery (which causes severe diarrhoea). Then the other professor who had asked him said yes, but we never treated amoebic dysentery with hydroxychloroquine, we treated it with hydroxyquinoline, which is a different drug. “I think he confused it. This man is dangerous! It’s a scandal”, he said.
“The WHO studies were started all over the world. In Brazil, too, they stopped a high-dose hydroxychloroquine study because they realized that after ten days the patients developed a serious arrhythmia and they all started to die. That’s also in the studies, some of which you can read about. But of course it’s not publicized, they tend to keep it quiet. Once it was noticed, the study was stopped immediately.”
Köhnlein and his interviewer then reviewed mortality graphs from different countries where you see excess deaths decreasing as winter draws to a close but then spikes in some countries in April (including UK) where the WHO studies enforced overdoses of hydroxychloroquine.
As Köhnlein said, “I’m publicizing this for the simple fact that the mortality everyone is afraid of is therapy induced, it has nothing to do with the virus”.
This was all confirmed by a second German Dr. Spitzbart on his Facebook post https://www.facebook.com/Dr.Spitzbart/posts/pfbid0XBa4KdVxFYEmS2wivYcF47hMHscU8igSQS2FsiK3HfYSdD9DzLBi9oYoNiG3hhVal:
During the C. era, Dr Martin Landray, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Oxford University, was the designer of a study to investigate the extent to which the long-proven drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) could help against C. infections. He made a serious mistake in the process. Landray confused the dosage of hydroxyCHLOROquine with the dosage of the drug hydroxyCHINOlin, which is used, for example, to treat amoebic dysentery. Both drugs have been tried and tested for a long time and are safe in the correct dosage. Unfortunately, the patients, thousands of whom took part in the so-called RECOVERY study, received the HCQ in the wrong dose. HCQ accumulates in the body and in this incorrect dose was certainly fatal after 10 days.
We remember the pictures of bulldozers digging mass graves in Brazil, for example, to bury all the ‘C-dead’. It was striking that the countries that did not take part in the RECOVERY study did not experience this peak in mortality. After 10 days, the RECOVERY study was cancelled because it brought ‘no benefits’. A very polite way of putting it.
I knew about the Oxford study, but didn’t know about the confusion between the two drugs. Whatever nefarious reason I figured, Big Pharma got the prise.
I disagree. The statistics and models were all extrapolation from previous observations. Prediction from them is not science. They were not scientific statements until they were used to form a falsifiable hypothesis. Then this hypothesis could have been tested. That’s what constitutes the scientific process. So, if they were wrong, what were we expected to observe?
For instance; if the Diamond Princess had ended up with 90% of the passengers dead from COVID. Then the hypothesis that this was all a psyop could have been falsified, and the hypothesis that this was really really bad would been supported etc. All other actual evidence that accrued clearly showed that ir was not a very bad problem and that it could be well treated by existing medication.
The problem was that this started as a deception and was eagerly maintained and pushed as a deception in order to vax as many as possible. “The science” was shhite all along.
The underlying problem is that people don’t understand what science actually is. “At any time there’s a consensus..” FFS! If you can’t see the problem at that step.
I sort of agree but answer me this. Let’s say that the Imperial prediction on “covid deaths” was accurate, and we had some kind of certainty at the time that it was, and some reasonable level of certainty that “lockdowns” would “save lives”. Do you believe that what then happened would have been justified? I don’t.
I believe Safetyism played a part, that’s why they was the Woodstock in the 1968 Influenza Pandemic. I had tickets for a Rammstein gig in Cardiff that got cancelled. I wasn’t that disappointed because Hotels were fully boked and I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy getting tanked up. Reminds me of my clubbing days, the smart ones never took their driving test till later, therefore enjoyed getting chauffeured around by a few of us mugs who started driving early, I digress!
When our Legacy Media, especially the BBC, prohibits discussion on a topic that is of national importance, problems will occur.
The idea that Windmills could provide a credible nationwide Power Supply (even more difficult than the Electricity Supply), can be demolished by explaining a fraction of the A’ level Physics course.
Just think of all those with an A’ level Physics, or even all the Physics Teachers in England, and yet none had the opportunity to explain on TV how idiotic all those MPs, with firsts in History or PPE, appear to the informed.
It’s hilarious! I was shocked, but after twenty years of seeing such twaddle, I’ve come to the conclusion that the public deserve it, and they will only wake from their slumbers when it’s the only alternative.
I don’t think the author has any idea what he is talking about.
“And we trust science”
Can people be that that stupid?
Yes.
But Science is a mode of enquiry, a means to understand.
And Trust means giving up thinking, the antithesis of Scientific endeavour.
And was being tattooed on the forehead with “Climate Denier”, so the children and grandchildren would know just how evil you were?
Was that part of trusting the Science?
I remember it well.
Politics Keeps Twisting Science
Something must be down.
Lockdown is something.
So it must be done.
I have lost count of the overturns of “Settled Science” that I have encountered in my medical career (beginning as a medical student in 1967). So I have always held that there is no such thing as Settled Science. However there is one thing missing from James’ excellent analysis. To get the right research, and the right answers, you have to interrogate the right people. If an infection makes you seriously ill then you should ask the clinicians, not statisticians or epidemiologists. Covid-19 was the serious illness resulting from SARS-CoV-2 infection. You only needed to manage the seriously ill; for 99.8% you needed do nothing. The reason why people were sent away from A&E and told to return when they were fighting for breath was because those in power knew no other management, because they had closed their ears to those who told them. Discharging the elderly ill to their care homes to die was another example of the “there is nothing we can do” attitude. There was something though.
God knows I tried. I like analogies; you don’t stop pedestrian deaths by forbidding the whole population to cross roads, you ask safety experts to invent zebra crossings and traffic lights.
Or in the case of your last analogy, tell people to keep their bloody eyes open and look both ways before crossing… in the absence of a crossing or traffic lights. Natural selection really.
The alarm bell for me on all examples is when the alternative point of view is censored – if the argument / facts were solid, why would you ever need to do this?
Not sure about this article.
I agree that counter arguments using numbers did not hit home.
The underlying issue, as with many current dogmas, is that the emotional argument trumps the rational one.
The first lockdown was irrational, based on emotion, the following lockdowns were the same with a doubling down by the political class, not wanting to admit they took a wrong turn.
Politicians generally are not scientists, so they take advice from those who claim to be. The problem is Vallance and Whitty are not competent scientists and it’s crazy that they were awarded for being useless and responsible for the financial disaster and pedalling of drugs causing more harm than good. There were competent scientists proposing effective policies and the main problem was the politicians were too stupid to recognise them.
We have the same problem with net-zero and there is probably no politician more stupid than Ed Miliband and no scientists more incompetent than those promoting net-zero and claiming CO2 is a pollutant when it’s essential for life on earth and has never been proven to be a main driver of climate change.