- “Joe Biden may be forced to declassify intelligence into COVID-19 origins” – Joe Biden is under pressure to declassify all U.S. intelligence about the origins of COVID-19 after the House and Senate voted unanimously for the information to be released, the Telegraph reports.
- “Scientists dismissed Covid lab leak theory ‘as they feared ban on high-risk experiments’” – Scientists dismissed the COVID-19 lab leak theory because they wanted to continue doing dangerous ‘gain-of-function’ experiments to make viruses more deadly, Anton van der Merwe, a Professor of Molecular Immunology at the University of Oxford has claimed, according to the Telegraph.
- “Simon Case warned Boris Johnson of the ‘terrible’ consequences of lockdown” – WhatsApp messages obtained by the Telegraph show how Simon Case, the country’s most senior civil servant, insisted “we have to be brutally honest with people” over the consequences of lockdown – including the effects on “non-Covid health”, mental health, education and jobs. He wasn’t arguing against doing it though.
- “Was Sweden right about Covid all along?” – The land of common sense seems to be thriving while Britain is counting the cost of harsh lockdown restrictions, says Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph.
- “Sweden, Covid and ‘excess deaths’: a look at the data” – Michael Simmons in the Speccie with a deep dive into the mortality data that show, whichever way you cut it, Sweden wins.
- “First do no harm” – Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson suggest that the option to do nothing is underrated.
- “Ukrainian healthcare is better than the NHS” – Despite the war, you can still see a doctor when you need to – no wonder refugees go back for treatment, writes Maria Chaplia in the Telegraph.
- “Iatrogenic deaths: was it mishandling society or mishandling Covid?” – El Gato Malo looks at U.S. excess deaths in 2020 by climate zone and concludes that the death spikes are connected with the virus, but a large proportion of such deaths are likely due to faulty treatment protocols.
- “Three Dots: Well, that was weird…” – Michael Shellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse report on the evidence that the former and Matt Taibbi gave before the House Committee on the Weaponisation of Government this week.
- “Anatomy of the sinister Covid Project, Part 5” – Paula Jardine in TCW tracks the development of military virus and vaccine research in the years leading up to the pandemic and its connection with SARS-CoV-2 and the mRNA inoculations.
- “Lockdown-loving bishops, where is your remorse?” – The egregious failure of the Church of England’s bishops to question, let alone resist, the Covid dictatorship must not be overlooked, writes Julian Mann in TCW.
- “BBC is caught in fresh impartiality row over new David Attenborough show that will not be aired on regular TV amid claims that Beeb bosses ‘fear rightwing backlash’” – A Wild Isles episode that focuses on themes of the destruction of nature across the U.K. reportedly won’t be broadcast to fend off criticism from the Right, according to the Mail.
- “The Green Economy’s Heart of Darkness” – There is no such thing as clean cobalt, writes Noel Yaxley in Compact Magazine.
- “Bit of an eco-hypocrite, Leo! Jet loving DiCaprio heads to green fashion awards in LA – after travelling 12,000 miles in two weeks to chase models in Europe” – The actor has proven to be something of an eco-hypocrite once again for heading to a green fashion event in LA after clocking up 12,000 airmiles in two weeks, the Mail reports.
- “‘Misgendering’ is not a crime” – Still less is it terrorism, writes Tim Dieppe in the Critic, marking the acquittal on appeal of Christian street preacher Dave McConnell after he was previously convicted of the spurious crime of ‘misgendering’.
- “Ofsted chief’s warning over explicit sex education lessons” – Amanda Spielman, Chief Inspector of Ofsted, tells the Telegraph she has warned the Government that the current relationships and sex education (RSE) guidance places no limit on what can be taught.
- “The Thing That Swallowed Britain” – Dan Hitchens writes in Compact Magazine about ‘the Thing’: “That combination of postmodern identity theory, religious fervour, pseudo-therapeutic ’empathy’, dogmatic moralism, private bullying and ritualised public humiliation which has swept through Western societies over the last decade.”
- “Colonialism and the culture wars with Nigel Biggar” – In the CapX podcast, Professor Nigel Biggar addresses the question, How bad was the British Empire?
- “ChatCCP? – The ‘Know-It-All With Flair’– Chatbot’s Hidden Agenda” – Randall Bock suspects an ulterior motive to the AI technology.
- “The rise of hyper-tokenism” – Why do TV shows insist on presenting Britain as far more ‘diverse’ than it actually is, asks Patrick West in Spiked.
- “J.K. Rowling-backed petition for Government to make clear that ‘sex means biological sex, not sex as modified by gender recognition certificate’ in Equality Act will be debated in Parliament” – The Harry Potter author was among those to support the proposal which seeks to “make it clear” that “sex” and “gender reassignment” are separate protected characteristics, the Mail reports.
- “BBC faces revolt after Gary Lineker told to step down over migrant Nazi jibe” – Ian Wright and Alan Shearer have refused to appear on Saturday’s flagship football show after the corporation said the presenter breached its guidelines on the use of social media, the Telegraph reports.
- “The Lineker row isn’t about free speech – it’s a moral coup” – The BBC knows that “if it allows big names to wax lyrical on politics, in defiance of the rules, then it would have no way of stopping other Beeb people from using this licence payer-funded entity as a personal soapbox,” writes Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator.
- “If Gary Lineker says things like this in future, will it cause financial loss for the BBC? I think maybe” – Watch Toby on GB News discuss the free speech nuances of Lineker’s provocative social media output.
‘If Gary Lineker says things like this in future, will it cause financial loss for the BBC? I think maybe.’
— GB News (@GBNEWS) March 10, 2023
Toby Young addresses the ‘difficult nuances’ of Gary Lineker being asked to ‘step back’ from his Match of the Day role.GB News YouTube: https://t.co/Wa58gYGZwF pic.twitter.com/75kz1ZcFfa
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Within the Telegraph article we find:
It didn’t need to swing. Not the first time nor the second nor the third. As Albert Einstein almost certainly didn’t point out: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
So let me get this straight. The PM initally didn’t believe in lockdowns. Neither did the Hancock, Witty and Valance trio? Dominic Cummings – who looks abit odd and almost certainly is – contacted his mates to come up with terrifying models of apocalypse if we didn’t close the country down and impoverish and destroy great swathes of our lives and businesses and economy.
And I’m the unmasked, unvaccinated baddie? Really?
The real scandal is that the general public trusted them too much, and in effect showed a batch of group thinkers that they could get away with murder. Back in 2020, as the panic developed, I thought that it demonstrated how the German government got away with what happened in the 1930s.
A lot of people dislike or mock The Spectator but you cannot fault their willingness to give platforms to unpopular/alternative views
One of the reasons I am a subscriber. I do not mind having my assumptions/prejudices challenged – provided the arguments are well made and not woke nonsense. I think that The Spectator broadly gets this right.
The comments section to Fraser Nelson’s column (geddit?) is quite illuminating too.
The petri-dish for infection monitoring, the Diamond Princess, had all elderly passengers aboard, some 3,000 plus if memory serves. The ‘rampant,’ contained infection onboard killed 14 souls, a fatality rate of .0037. Compare and contrast the real world numbers with the woefully inaccurate tripe arrived at by Ferguson.
It had passengers and crew across the age range. It showed that many youngsters were not infected, those that were had negligible or very mild symptoms.
Those most affected and among whom the fatalities occurred were 70+.
In other words – it was a Common Cold – not even ‘flu – epidemic, milder than most.
Thanks for the steer. It prompted me to google the precise numbers. Suffice it to say, Ferguson was no nearer the real world. 3,711 pob.(Persons on board), comprising 1,045 crew, median age 36. Zero deaths, 145 infections.
Passengers, 2,666. Median age 69. 567 infections, 14 deaths, all 70s and 80s.
You’d have thought somebody somewhere would have used those numbers to temper the wildly inaccurate modelling. Obviously not.
And remember what the MSM reporting about the Diamond Princess was like. Selective with the truth comes to mind for the usual suspects, esp BBC News.
The problem with Sage/modellers is that they appear to know the square root of f. all about how virus behave, transmit and the immune system.
But there again nobody knows, or ever will know, precisely how and why some people get ill and others don’t.
For example, there is the Seattle trawler case, and the Argentinian trawler case. How did so many trawlermen, completely isolated from the outside world for weeks, “catch covid”? And also it was discovered that some actually had antibody protection to this “completely new virus”.
Then there’s the experiment in Belgium or (Holland?) nursery schools. Over three winter months one was thoroughly deep cleaned every day ie to eliminate all pathogens on toys, work surfaces etc and the other just normal cleaning. Rigorous testing proved that the deep cleaned one was virtually virus/bacteria free – the other wasn’t.
The result – virtually identical levels of sicknesss/absences (the dirty one being slightly better). I can’t find the link, but I believe it is one of Tom Jefferson’s favourites.
I’m no virus denier but surely the above blows a pretty big hole in Germ Theory – which, funnily enough is bigpharma’s God.
Much proper research is desperately needed re immunology/vaccinology, sorry, gene therapies and virus.
Won’t happen – no money in it and besides mRNA will be able to cure us all of everything.
“But there again nobody knows, or ever will know, precisely how and why some people get ill and others don’t.”
Well largely we do. It depends on the state of the immune system in each individual which depends on general state of health, age, but also every individuals physiology – genetic influence – is different to the next.
This is why real CoVid deaths were among those with weakened immune systems, 95% of whom were over 80 with one or more serious medical conditions and who were near death.
It also depends on previous exposure to pathogens. Measles was mostly not fatal to Europeans, but European colonists infected the South American natives with it in whom it was nearly always fatal, because it was a pathogen never before present in their environment.
It also depends on the level of exposure to a pathogen. (A bit like poison is a matter of dose. )
And North American natives were affected in the same way, not necessarily Measles, but at least by locally unknown bugs imported by colonists.
I accept what you say entirely, and am aware we know a lot about these matters and that’s why I used the term “precisely”.
Of the many books and articles I’ve read, mainly immunological, one particular phrase resonates often, and that is “the mechanism behind thiis is not fully understood”. Then there’s the synergy and cascades of immune responses to consider.
Thus in those many cases one simply doesn’t know how much more there is to know – you could be nearly there or miles off (study the man hours/years to discover, for example, inerferon/s). It’s what you don’t know you don’t know that’s the problem.
“The beautiful cure” by Daniel M. Davis. 2018, if anyone’s interested. ( I am not he by the way), details history of immunological discoveries and latest research.
I would be interested to hear your, or anyone’s views om the trawler cases?
So Cummins executed a Coup d’État.
He should be put in the Tower awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock, from a cheap and chippy-chopper on a big black block.
It certainly seems that his hero worship for voodoo mathematical medical modellers swung the day.
I wonder how many entirely preventable deaths, injuries (mental) he and his ilk caused.
FWIW, the only thing he got right was his opinion of Hankok.
I believe the Spectator/Heneghan piece is now outside the paywall, it’s brilliant We needed a Covid inquiry – but this isn’t it | The Spectator
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/savoy-declares-independence-from
Got this from Dr Mike Yeadon’s Telegram channel. Can any of our European members verify?
“What is the point of the Covid Inquiry? It should be to establish which parts of the government’s pandemic response worked, which parts didn’t, and what to do next time. Instead, it is a farce – a spectacle of hysteria, name-calling and trivialities.”
Professor Heneghan’s opening para in his Spectator article which is superb – how on earth does this man keep up this work rate – but I have a big issue with “what to do next time” which amounts to conceding that the pandemic was real and almost invites Billy and the boys to get on with their next release.
As tof would point out – there was no pandemic.
Top class work by Professor Heneghan and at least when the pantomime whitewash is over and we have “lessons will be learned ” nobody can deny Professor Heneghan’s outright debunking.
The standard SIR model of 1927 goes up and down and has no dependencies on change of behaviour – and fits the data from India at the time, flu in an English boarding school and presumably numerous other datasets. When Covid struck the settled science was ignored.
‘When some Swedish academics started to call for lockdown based on Ferguson’s work, Giesecke agreed to go on Swedish television to debate them. As did Anders Tegnell, his protégé. They gave interviews non-stop, in the street and on train platforms, making the case for staying open. They showed it was possible to win the argument.’
Great! But, meanwhile, in Socialist Fascist Britain:
‘Broadcast content relating to the Coronavirus
Published on 23 March 2020
……..we remind all broadcasters of the significant potential harm that can be caused by material relating to the Coronavirus.
This could include:
• Health claims related to the virus which may be harmful.
• Medical advice which may be harmful.
• Accuracy or material misleadingness in programmes in relation to the virus or public policy regarding it.
We will be prioritising our enforcement of broadcast standards in relation to the above issues.
In these cases, it may be necessary for Ofcom to act quickly to determine the outcome in a proportionate and transparent manner, and broadcasters should be prepared to engage with Ofcom on short timescales.
Ofcom will consider any breach arising from harmful Coronavirus-related programming to be potentially serious and will consider taking appropriate regulatory action, which could include the imposition of a statutory sanction.’
‘Sanctions may include:
Another matter that the inquiry should be looking at: Socialist fascist state censorship.
At the beginning of the epidemic, the “case” numbers followed Farr’s Law. They were clearly not going to reach Ferguson’s estimates, if it was assumed that the mechanism of development of the epidemic was not significantly different to others. In particular, the infection had peaked before the first lockdown, especially if measured by “back working” to time of infection rather than time of case. Figures from Public Health England, published daily at the time. [NB: the sudden drop off in the last two days is an artefact of the daily reporting system and does not represent the final data for those days.]
”case’ numbers’
Yet another matter for the enquiry.
‘Until now (4 February 2022) COVID-19 cases have been reported at the individual level: every positive test taken and reported by one person has been considered part of a single case record, initiated by their first positive test.’
UK HSA
‘The Trust did run the assay for 40 cycles and cited this is standard for many PCR assays.’
PCR Testing in the UK During the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic – Evidence from FOI Requests, April 2022
‘Infectious virus was associated with mean Ct values of 18.8 ± 3.4 (median 18.7)
Not obtaining infectious virus was associated with mean Ct values 27.1 ± 5.7 (median 27.5) (see the figure)
Samples with a Ct value below 23 yielded 91.5% of virus isolates.’
CEBM Aug. 2020
In view of the above, can we have any confidence in NHS case numbers?
Why don’t we have an inquiry into that…..oh……hang on……..
Shame the Speccie did not speak up loudly at the time.
All it seemed to want was to get rid of Boris and then get rid of Truss because she was not their preferred candidate for PM, so they attacked her until Sunak was appointed without a vote. So much for their democratic credentials.