Welcome to episode 43 of the Weekly Sceptic, and it’s a special extended episode! This week:
- Prigozhin mounts a coup against Putin – but is it all misdirection?
- Culture warriors waste no time in exploiting the Titanic submersible tragedy to score cheap political points
- News leaks out that Taylor Swift declined an invitation to appear on Meghan’s Spotify podcast and super-agent Jeremy Zimmer brands her ‘talentless’
- Theresa May attended a ‘socially distanced party’ during lockdown
- Conservative mayoral election candidate Daniel Korski is MeToo’d
- Lewis Schaffer triggers the censors on Headliners by denying Covid exists
- Byline Times gaslights conservatives over cat-girl incident at Rye College
- In Birdwatch, the boys discuss Davina McCall and Judy Murray outing themselves as Terfs and imagine a Disney ride called ‘Terf Island’
- In Peak Woke, Nick puzzles over why ‘knacker’ is a racial slur and Toby rails against the Irish Hate Crime Bill
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““If we had done literally nothing, the economic impact from loss of life alone would have been catastrophic.”
I’m sick of hearing bullshit like this. Nobody can possibly know this with so many variables at play. There was a graph recently which indicated that shopping was by some distance the biggest spread of Covid, which seems quite obvious really given it is food and it’s tactile nature. The supermarkets stayed open in lockdowns for rather obvious reasons, which makes a complete mockery of claims like the above.
During the outbreak of this insanity I was curious about supermarket footfall so did a bit of investigating. Looking at figures from Morrisons a couple of years previously, their 500 odd stores had an average of around 24,000 visits per week, giving around 12 million across the country. And they’re only Britain’s fourth-largest chain. Lockdown was, and is, a nonsense from start to finish.
The example of Sweden also demonstrates that the loss of life would not have been catastrophic! In fact, looking at Sweden’s stats, they’d have been virtually no excess deaths at all, had the UK followed its example!
As it is, lockdowns have almost certainly resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, as people were unable to access essential NHS scans. The economy has taken a huge battering, too. Children’s education has suffered, as well – goodness knows how much damage has been done in connection with that!
Just this week, we’re hearing from leaders that lockdowns make no difference – which is what was concluded decades ago when responses to future pandemics were being considered. For some odd reason, the protocols that had been established then were thrown out of the window at the start of this.
Our One Party socialist state agreed to kill 200,000 UK citizens to, supposedly, prevent an unknown number of people from possibly getting a respiratory disease with a mortality rate equivalent to a bad flu season.
For that is the number of people that the governments own report says will die from implementing the first lockdown. One expert assessed that 560,000 Britons would die.
If the premise is poop, the argument is poop.
There is, of course, a hidden premise at work: do and believe whatever authority figures tell you, and not only that, but INTERNALISE it.
But what can we expect when the vast majority have had their minds turned to mashed potato by the school system and the mass media?
Yes, it is virually impossible to state which saved what, because it was and will always be an experiment without a control and with so many things being done at once, no stats person could ever tease apart the individual effects of any of it. Worst experiment ever.
This isn’t about a desease
CANADA
UNREAL https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/svg/1f633.svg Father can’t see son over “Anti-vaxx” Facebook posts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD0bZ33Xgts
Carl Vernon
Please come and join our friendly peaceful events.
Saturday 15th January 5pm
Silent lighted walk behind one simple sign
“No More Lockdown”
Bring torches, candles and other lights
Meet Corner of Castle Hill & High St,
Windsor SL4 1PQ
Stand in the Park Sundays 10am make friends, ignore the madness & keep sane
Wokingham Howard Palmer Gardens Cockpit Path car park Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Henley Mills Meadows (at the bandstand) Henley-on-Thames RG9 1DS
Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
There’s a great deal of wriggle room between Lockdown and “literally doing nothing.”
The best policy was the one in the Government’s Pandemic Preparedness Plan: inform the public without unnecessarily alarming them; provide advice; shield the vulnerable and let people get on with their own lives.
But that wouldn’t have advanced the Globalists/WEF plans.
With a 99% survival rate there would be no apocalypse!
Main stream media lies. News at 11.
The pro lockdown defenders always reduce themselves to the same argument because there is no evidence to support their cult. Be it masks, curfews, sitting only in pubs, no dancing at weddings, triple masking, closing schools, disinfecting streets, rubbing down shopping trollies, elbow bumping, masking kids, masking while running, masking while in bed.
“it would have been so much worse without…”
“X is better because not-X is worse – and don’t you dare question that premise, you lunatic gullible conspiracy theorist who doesn’t Follow The Science!”
It is hard not to feel pity sometimes.
And I’d reference lemmings at this point if I didn’t know that the story about lemmings and cliffs was made up.
It is remarkable that the belief in those interventions remains despite there being no evidence of them actually working at all.
I actually felt a longer list was required.
masks, curfews, sitting only in pubs, no dancing at weddings, triple masking, closing schools, disinfecting streets, rubbing down shopping trollies, elbow bumping, masking kids, masking while running, masking while in bed, one way systems, firebreaks, tiers, quarantine camps, mandates, banning park benches, closing play parks, closing schools, bubbles, N95 masks, time slots for going to the dump, work from home, lanyards, face away from each other in lifts, no hugging, mass testing, lock up grandma, no travel, 5km zoning, essential goods only, mass vaccination, sacking doctors and nurses, furlough, masks on babies, hazmat suits, no visitors in hospitals, DNRs, quarantine your shopping, quarantine yourself, zoom medical care, ventilation, ban Christmas, ban football, close gyms, suppress Ivermectin, 3rd dose, 4th dose, boosters, masks when walking to the toilet at the restaurant, no singing at Church, no protesting (except for BLM).
“it would have been so much worse without…”
I want to laugh, but given that this is actually what happened, I’m more likely to cry.
Quite a lot of the administrators of society at various levels – guys and gals who (in their ignorance) think they know how the native-prole mind works – were surprised at the sheer willingness of the population to obey, and the length of time for which they did obey, when told they had to stay at home, couldn’t visit family members, had to stay 2 metres away from everyone, etc. In March 2020 many didn’t think the obedience would last for more than a month.
Next time it will be much worse.
Furlough played a huge part in that. Many were only too pleased to be paid to languish at home on full pay, for months on end. The least they could do in gratitude was play along and engage in the obedience training that was required of them. But the that training took effect too quickly and efficiently…
Furlough is the forerunner to UBI. Get everyone addicted to ‘free’ money, then start applying conditions.
Like most of the MSM, Times journalists dont actually believe what they write. They are paid well to lie.
It is remarkable that some people still believe that the last two years has been about dealing with a “virus.”
The great mistake for the first 18 months or so of this pandemic was the belief that the lockdowns had a massive effect. Evidence for this was the observation that every time cases rose lockdowns were introduced, and then cases dropped a little later. The trouble is, there was even back in summer 2020 evidence that each covid wave lasted about 8 weeks in total; the dropping in cases after each lockdown was imposed was just the natural cycle of things.
We would probably have saved more lives with a highly targeted but aggressive lockdown for the most vulnerable — but while that might have worked for the very elderly, it probably wouldn’t have been accepted by the ‘older-healthy’ or the obese.
Indeed, the only argument against ‘Great Barrington’ that hasn’t been proven incorrect by time is that a targeted lockdown would have result in legal challenge.
So, we probably ended up destroying the economy (and livelihoods, healthcare, freedoms, childhood development, education, etc etc) just because the lawyers would have caused too much trouble.
Still, if you want to see the trouble lawyers can cause just wait for the vaccine related injury court cases.
Yep. Bugger all happened in the summer of 2020 in terms of total all cause deaths at the time when we were de facto open again. The pubs were open in early July and they – and restaurants – were heaving all through August. There was no rise in all cause deaths against the norm until December.
Does anyone know who will actually end up paying for vaccine-related injury compensation? If the drug cos have no liability, is it the wretched taxpayer – again??
I would think so,. TPTB have to find the money from somewhere so it will be us, the tax-payers that will foot the bill.
Lockdowns were sold as a temporary measure until vaccines would come along and save us.
Meanwhile, we would have ‘saved’ more lives if the NHS hadn’t outlawed all early treatment (the combination of medicines proven by the likes of Peter McCullough to be effective) and gone along with the plan to addict the population to Big Pharma’s ‘vaccines’. Readers will know why in inverted commas, but the idea that even true vaccines can improve on natural immunity and save lives needs to be challenged. See the highly revealing review of how harmful vaccines by Ray Obomsawin
https://pennybutler.com/vaccine-lies-forever/
I believe there is a growing realization that pro-lockdown papers, such as The Times (and its sister, The Sunday Times) got it wrong. It strikes me that this article is a rather desperate attempt by The Times to justify its editorial policy. What a pity that it simply can’t offer an apology instead. The article is, of course, rubbish from beginning to end, and these journalists are fooling no one but themselves.
To me, the biggest problem is that Ferguson’s model results are interpreted by the pro-lockdown set as “what would have happened” rather than what they actually are – a possible outcome based on a model based on disputed coding, that has been widely debunked and produced by a team that has a long past history of vastly overestimating the effect of many of the things they model. All we can say truthfully was that we ended up with a death toll that was a lot lower than that.
I’m so bored of the ‘what if’ Nostradamus type predictions. They are not scientifically robust and utterly facile.
Bootstrapping the result seen to claim it was achieved by the measures put in place is nonsense. Claiming that a catastrophic loss of life was averted because we locked down is ludicrous because we have no idea what would have happened if we hadn’t locked down!
But now we do…..Xmas 2021. If we don’t lock down 5000 a day will die. We didn’t lockdown (much) and how many died? So calculate the error ratio – let’s say it’s a 10th of the prediction and then use the same ratio for previous lockdown death predictions which will show you roughly what would have actually happened had we not locked down.
If the lockdown death numbers and the corrected not locked down death numbers are the same then lockdowns achieved nothing!
Agreed. It’s the same counterfactual logic evinced by the proponents of jabs once they get Covid. “Praise the heavens I was double/triple/quadruple vaccinated – otherwise it would have been far worse!” What? Rather than just the same or even (gasp) better? No evidence either way. I see this all the time with my friends and family on F***book – the f-wittery and delusion is fully baked in, I see little hope for the human race.
O/T (maybe not)
Breaking on the Beeb: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59979504
Jonathan Van-Tam to leave role as deputy chief medical officer
I wonder which drug company he’s off to.
Will we get somebody in who’ll actually tell the truth next?
Or rather who is going to pay for his research carried out at Nottingham University where he is apparently going.
The 90k deaths Imperial projected for Sweden were if it did nothing, as was the 500k deaths estimate for the UK. If Sweden followed a mitigation strategy (case isolation, quarantine, 70+ social distancing) Imperial predicted 32-40k (250k for the UK but ICU capacity exceeded 8x. The latter was the key argument for many people who feared they would not get critical care unless there was a lockdown).
Sweden’actually has 15k deaths so Imperial overestimated by a factor of 2. However it’s worse thsn that becsuse their total excess deaths for the whole Covid period is only about 8k so Imperial’s overestimate was even greater.
Here’s a breakdown of how catastrophically, wildly wrong Imperial’s modelling was, about every country in the world. And how they flat out lied and said they’d never done such modelling.
Did you mean to attach a link to that?
Bugger. Yes, sorry.
https://www.aier.org/article/the-failure-of-imperial-college-modeling-is-far-worse-than-we-knew/
So using those numbers and an over estimate of a factor of 4 imperial predicted 60k deaths with adjusted behaviour but no lockdown.
How many died with full lockdown? About the same wasn’t it? So the extra measures did nothing.
Just the lying liars of the Times lying to justify their own past hysterical lying, in the hope of evading recognition of the catastrophic harm they contributed to.
Contrast it with the reported approach of a Danish newspaper, linked here by Anti-socialist earlier:
“We Failed”: Danish Newspaper Apologizes For Publishing Official COVID Narratives Without Questioning Them
“If we had done literally nothing, the economic impact from loss of life alone would have been catastrophic,” and, “There would probably not be enough workers left to run the NHS, let alone deal with the backlog of cancelled operations or the tidal wave of long Covid.”
only old people were dying – that was clear from the Italian data in early March
“tidal wave of long Covid”
this is bullshit too. I have long covid as does my wife by their ludicrously broad definition
“Still feeling a little bit off after a month” is now a debilitating lifelong condition.
my wife’s sense of smell comes and goes after 6 months – long covid etc
allbullshit
Extra zinc helped mine return, also ‘smell training’ – Fifth Sense (uk charity) shows how on their website.
Apparently, if it’s due to a virus there is a good chance of recovering, especially if it already comes and goes.
thanks! I’ll pass on the info
In the early 1990s I had a really bad cold (Covid93 ?) that left me with no sense of taste or smell for months. Then one day I brushed past a lemon verbena plant and like a miracle my sense of smell (and taste) had returned.
I shall purchase one!
I read some time ago that the most complaints of long covid come from NHS staff – all of them, not just front of house. I know post viral syndrome exists because I suffered it many years ago after a really bad dose of flu. Everything tasted metallic for ages, then just a bit off for another age. I would also feel feverish and weak intermittently. The only thing that seemed to cure it eventually was the summer – warmth, sunlight, dry air. However, it was never so debilitating that I took time off work (I needed the money anyway!). I think there are an awful lot of snowflakes out there who only need to mention covid in hushed and reverential tones and they are given carte blanche to ‘take as much time as they need’.
If we had “done nothing”, in the sense of coercive state action, and just responded rationally and reasonably, there would have been very little economic loss, because this disease does not affect working age people much. Doubtless the medical professions would have been very busy for a while, the poor dears (and we might have spent a small amount of government money – a fraction of what was wasted on “track and trace” and such, supporting them).
Natural immunity would have spread quickly, and without the active suppression of treatment, doctors would quickly have learned to treat the disease properly, as the early response group has in the US.
Ideally, we’d have gone back culturally to our former robust attitude to whining nonsense, which would have dealt with most of the “long covid” hysteria, and to harmful scaremongering, which would have silenced the media and science panickers. Mask-wearing and other hysterics would have been properly ridiculed.
Basically, it would have been an experience akin to the flu pandemics in the mid-C20th.
But that was never going to happen, because there was far too much money to be made and career enhancement to be got by pushing hysterical panic, and making the world shit was a price worth paying. And for some, undoubtedly, it was the whole point.
For example, he writes things like, “If we had done literally nothing, the economic impact from loss of life alone would have been catastrophic,” and, “There would probably not be enough workers left to run the NHS, let alone deal with the backlog of cancelled operations or the tidal wave of long Covid.”
shouting fire in a crowded theatre. this sort of catastrophic panic mongering shouldn’t be consequence free.
Propaganda from China spooked Italy. Propaganda from Italy spooked Europe. Couple with spineless, risk averse ministers, civil serpents, nhs bosses and a baying mob media, and you have the perfect storm of irrational thinking. Sad thing is that the arse covering politicians will continue to justify their use and keep them on the table for the future because they are incapable of admitting they got things so wrong. They will do everything to brush the collateral damage under the carpet.
Then we can ask whether the whole thing was a plan and being controlled from above, which is looking more and more likely to me, or whether it was pure opportunism by the the dark forces. But then either way they were just waiting for something like this to happen.
We all know, even Fauci, that symptomatic people drive epidemics. Simply asking those who have the relevant symptoms to stay at home and isolate, concentrating on hand hygiene and focusing on and boosting well known nosocomial infection control measures, would have ended in a similar, if not better, overall outcome in terms of pure covid deaths (which is obviously a fraction of the nonsense figure of 150k). Natural herd immunity was, and still is and only way to make this truly endemic.
Don’t forget the role of pharma and big tech in all this. They expected to do extremely well out of it, and did so. If this had happened ten years ago – probably even five years ago – it couldn’t have happened in the way it did as Teams, Zoom and all the other toxic technoshit wasn’t at a sufficiently developed level.
Nothing to do with Big Pharma and global finance. All a communist/socialist plot from some hidden political source.
That response requires of necessity a belief in the official story.
The official story is however complete Bollox.
This whole debacle has taught me a few very important things:
1) The vast majority of people who have attained positions of influence (ministers & journalists mainly) have zero common sense and zero foresight. Anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together could see that the long-term damage of lockdowns would far outweigh any benefit.
2) Most people really are like cattle – they’ll run off the edge of a cliff if their peers are all doing the same.
3) There’s lots and lots of really evil f*ckers about. Nazi Germany can be recreated easily anywhere and at anytime.
There’s obviously a caveat to 1), in that many in positions of power know exactly what they’re doing.
‘The vast majority of people who have attained positions of influence (ministers & journalists mainly) have zero common sense and zero foresight.’
Indeed. The climate change malarkey is evidence of this, too. If just one of the ‘green’ aims (replacing petrol-powered cars with electric vehicles) is analysed for just 5 minutes, it should be apparent to anyone capable of rational thought that it is based on wishful thinking.
Of course, the same applies to what is expected of ‘renewable’ sources of energy.
However, the Covid response has taken this type of idiocy to levels hitherto unseen!
If we hadn’t locked down, then Doris wouldn’t be having problems now, except for Broken Brexit and Net Zero . Unfortunately, Cummings was a lockdown fanatic!
“Who controls the past (now), controls the future.
Who controls the present (now), controls the past.”
Given that covid-19 deaths are overwhelmingly concentrated among the very aged and the very sick, this assertion can be judged, a priori, as complete bollocks.
To begin with, the very aged and the very sick generally don’t make much economic contribution to society. In fact they tend to consume vastly disproportionate amounts of health and social care resources. Old and sick people don’t pay much income tax (because they are too old and sick to work.)
If covid-19 was a disease that killed newly-minted graduates of engineering and medical schools, then one could make an argument based on the negative economic impact. But that simply isn’t the case.
Go back to school Times journalists before you waste any more time trying to edify those who know better.
“Given that covid-19 deaths are overwhelmingly concentrated among the very aged and the very sick, this assertion can be judged, a priori, as complete bollocks.
To begin with, the very aged and the very sick generally don’t make much economic contribution to society. In fact they tend to consume vastly disproportionate amounts of health and social care resources. Old and sick people don’t pay much income tax (because they are too old and sick to work.)”
The especially hilarious aspect of that bit of nonsense from the Times is that one of the hysterical demonisation arguments used – especially by the panicker left aimed at conservatives and the “Conservative” regime – to bully the country out of a sensible herd immunity strategy, was precisely that anything else was supposedly motivated by greed or economic convenience, in killing off dependent elderly and seriously ill people while not affecting productive sectors much.
“If we had done literally nothing…” I ‘literally’ stopped reading after the misuse of this word by the author of The Times piece. Utter joke that it’s a news sheet of reference. Murdering the English language while promoting murderous lockdowns and jabs.
This demonstrates the problems with journalists. They have opinions based on their biases and uninformed ideas. These articles need to be backed up by accurate data and if refering to interventions and their effect should relate the data to accurate timings. Many people will see the Times article and be misinformed as a result of it. Its diifficult not to see it as being biased towards justifying the government’s actions which the data does not support.
The demographic that was most likely to die of, rather than with, Covid was overwhelmingly not economically active; the very old, the chronically ill and the morbidly obese. Many of them caught it in hospitals and care homes. Closing down schools and businesses almost certainly made very little difference and the small number of lives ‘saved’ is likely to be outweighed by the murdered women and children and the suicides caused by lockdowns and resultant poverty.
Please stop reading, listening to msm until they agree to report with integrity, honesty and clarity. I have stopped all msm entering our house. What a breath of fresh air. There is more than enough honest data from researchers, scientists, doctors and data analysts. That is who I prefer getting my covid info from, like so many.
The lockdown sceptic cause was undermined early on by Boris’s remark that “I am not one of those who just say let it rip”. That was never our position. Sweden’s response was largely correct except that it failed in the early stages of the pandemic to shield the care homes. The Swedes unlike many other countries who made the same error have admitted this. We have since learned that hospitals and care homes were at the epicentre of Covid infection and spread. Lockdowns contribution to controlling the pandemic remains an article of faith without any credible scientific evidence to back it up. 2 years on we know enough about what needs to be done if we are faced with a similar crisis eg a better organised and joined up health system (not entirely dependant on the NHS), sensible Swedish style precautions, focussed protection, promotion of a healthy lifestyle and placing trust in the population rather than kneejerk reactions and panic. When all is said and done, the politicians of this country and much of the rest of the world have demonstrated how not to react in a crisis. What we can do without next time is the contribution of behavioural scientists, mathematical modellers and careerist politicians who jump on any bandwagon if they think it will lead to their personal advancenent and let us not forget all of those hysterics in the media. How far the journalistic standards have fallen with certain notable exceptions of course.
Times muppets. All they need to do is do a thorough investigation of what has been happening in Belarus, among other places. And maybe put Oliver Wright on another big pharma corruption story.