Dear Baroness Hallett,
You have invited submissions to your U.K. COVID-19 inquiry that contain information or insights that might otherwise be overlooked.
We’ve got one for you.
We submit that you should look into the payments that the U.K. Government handed over to domestic violence agencies during Covid lockdowns. In our view, those hand-outs are among the most unwarranted of that period. We urge you to bring a sceptical, impartial mind to bear on the reasons that were given for those payments. We invite you to bring the same forensic rigour to the uses to which that money was put as you will no doubt apply to other Government hand-outs supposed to mitigate the harmful impact of the Covid restrictions.
We can be sure, for example, that you will want to hear, in detail, about the £29 million plus which Michelle Mone is alleged to have made from contracts to supply PPE equipment. At the same time, your inquiry’s learned counsel will assuredly dig into the evidence that Bounce Back loans totalling more than £10 million were blithely handed out to Russian and Lithuanian businessmen. Similarly, discussion is bound to be aired about the £34.5 million purloined in a host of internet frauds.
Add all those amounts together, however, and the total comes nowhere near the £125 million plus which the U.K. Government handed over between April-June 2020 to domestic violence agencies on the grounds that they were facing unprecedented calls for their services.
Everybody, without question, regards that money as having been spent in a good and deserving cause. Nobody doubted it at the time and we would bet good money your Covid inquiry will not question it for a second unless (even if) we press the case.
However, the domestic violence agencies obtained that money on the strength of un-evidenced claims about an increase in domestic violence resulting from stay-at-home orders. We submit that those agencies ought to be asked to account for that money and, if they cannot, to give it back.
Here’s the background:
As soon as the Government announced its COVID-19 restrictions in March 2020, the domestic violence agencies began to say that demands for their services were turning into a ‘tsunami’ and that they were confronting ‘a perfect storm’.
In April 2020, Refuge reported a “120% increase in calls to its helplines since the crisis began”. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline reported a 49% increase in calls. The Counting Dead Women Project said 16 women had been killed in domestic incidents in merely three weeks – the highest number for 11 years.
The Victims’ Commissioner, Dame Vera Baird, relayed that murder figure to the House of Commons committee which was considering the effects of lockdown, telling it that the number represented a doubling of the normal rate. The Chair of that Committee, Yvette Cooper, solemnly thanked Dame Vera for her “grave and serious evidence”.
The former Prime Minister Theresa May assured the House of Commons that “clear evidence” proved that abuse was increasing because victims were locked up with their abusers 24/7 and had no chance of getting away.
Without exception, the mainstream media uncritically relayed the same picture. Panorama transmitted an entire edition devoted to the subject, tearfully fronted by Victoria Derbyshire, who drew upon her own experience of living with a father who hit his wife, her mother.
In emotional terms, the picture everybody was seeing seemed completely logical and it naturally tugged the heartstrings of society’s instinctive wish to protect defenceless women and children.
The response of the U.K. Government was prompt and unstinting. Before the end of May 2020 more than £125 million had been handed over to domestic abuse agencies in extra subsidies to deal with the coronavirus crisis. One of the first to shell out public money was Nicola Sturgeon, then First Minister of Scotland, who announced as early as March 30th that she would be giving more than £1.5 million to Scottish Women’s Aid and Rape Crisis Scotland. She explained, “There is a real risk that women and children already subject to domestic abuse will feel even more isolated and vulnerable during this crisis, so this funding will ensure they have access to support services.”
Not a single official or elected representative appears to have asked at any point whether independent verification existed to support the claims of the domestic violence agencies. Not one journalist asked to see the evidence. As is the established custom with these agencies, they shake the begging bowl and find it filled to the brim by the state and by well-meaning patrons and donors. The experience of more than half a century has taught them that nobody is going to check their claims, doubt their probity or scrutinise their expenditure.
In the case of the Covid lockdowns, however, it looks doubtful that a tsunami of domestic abuse occurred. No perfect storm was over the horizon.
I made FoI applications to every police force in the U.K., asking for their records for January-May 2019, 2020 and 2021, showing figures for numbers of reported incidents of domestic abuse, arrests, charges and homicides.
More than half of those forces did not reply or withheld the information but 21 police forces delivered their figures – a more than adequate sample.
The spreadsheet tabulating those figures is below. It makes amazing reading. In many areas, the number of recorded incidents of domestic abuse actually fell in the lockdown months of 2020, compared with 2019. Overall, the number of calls reporting incidents did rise by 9% in 2020 compared with 2019 and the number of charges rose by 3.25%. If the domestic violence agencies received a similar increase in calls, it would be understandable that they might have needed to augment their services. But a 9% rise does not a tsunami make; and did they really need to spend £125m to cope with that increase in calls?
With a sleight of hand that is never called out, the agencies habitually conflate calls to their helplines with actual incidents of violence, as if the first invariably connotes or leads to the second. However, that 9% increase in the number of calls to the police is not reflected in a commensurate rise in charges (3.25%). Police Scotland explained – on the record – that in 2020 the gradual rise in the number of reports they received throughout lockdown was largely attributable to disputes about custody and access to children – incidents which did not necessarily lead to criminal charges.
In fact, as the spreadsheet shows, charges were lower in 2021 than in 2019 (although marginally higher in 2020). More tellingly (and contrary to the claims of the Victims Commissioner and Counting Dead Women Project), the number of murders in the areas for which we have figures actually fell between January-May from 26 in 2019 to 23 in 2021, and the number fell from 35 in 2019 to 32 in 2020, at least in the 21 areas that responded to my FOIs.
Our partial survey is not the only source on this subject. The ONS reports on Homicide in England and Wales for the years ending March 2021 and 2022 show that there were 114 domestic homicides in the year ending March 2021 and 134 in the year ending March 2022 when, as the ONS observed:
Homicide returned to pre-coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic levels [compared with] the year ending March 2021 when Government restrictions meant there was less social contact.
Why the fall? The answer is contained in that ONS observation that “Government restrictions meant there was less social contact”. So far as domestic violence is concerned, this means that fewer people killed each other at home, mostly because they hadn’t first gone out and got mad.
Going out has always proved one of the flashpoints for domestic violence. Suspicions of infidelity – whether of flirting or going further – are dynamite between couples, especially when they are themselves lit up by drink and/or drugs and they burst into flame most frequently when people are at the pub, the club or at parties. Even if they were drinking while they were confined at home during lockdown, couples who were isolated from the temptations of company had one major thing less to fight about.
Murder, as recorded by the police, is the most reliable of all indices of domestic violence. Dead bodies don’t lie. If, therefore, the number of domestic murders fell during lockdown, it can be reliably assumed that the number of domestic violence incidents will also have fallen.
So, Baroness, if the domestic violence agencies were faced with only a small increase in calls to their helplines and, at the same time, incidents of domestic violence between 2020-21 were likely falling in locked-down homes, what did they do with all that money they received? We urge you to ask that question. We respectfully suggest you should press it very hard.
But, of course, we realise that’s never going to happen. You won’t be calling anybody to account over this scandal. The domestic violence agencies operate on holy ground which is sacrosanct. It would be an unthinkable heresy to question their probity.
We can be certain that the domestic violence gravy train will roll on unhindered. No awkward questions will be asked in your inquiry – even though it was appointed specifically to ask such questions.
They know they are immune.
Neil Lyndon is a British journalist and writer. He has written for the Sunday Times, the Times, the Independent, the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph.
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Israeli situation is discussed here.
https://www.rintrah.nl/suppression-of-the-innate-immune-system-the-main-cause-of-the-pandemic-of-the-fully-vaccinated/
We’re two months behind Israel.
Many thanks for posting that. It explains so much that is puzzling.
I thought of trying to summarize it, but no. It really does require reading in full. Just never get on the treadmill of these mRNA vaccines. (The Chinese may have got away with this, though the worry with their vaccines has always been ADE, so the jury is still out on that one.)
I think it’s rather telling – or rather, not telling – that we don’t distinguish between the experimental non-mRNA and the experimental mRNA pre-infection treatments when recording “vaccination” status along with critical care and deaths.
I’d love to see the breakdown in AZ versus Pfizer and Moderna.
This one I can corroborate – my sister-in-law, an ICU nurse, has reported empty, or nearly empty covid wards at the two hospitals she works at for several weeks. Given what most of us believe about the dangers of the ‘vaccines’ esp. OAS/ADE, wouldn’t we expect to see something more akin to Israel? How can we account for the difference? I’m baffled.
One difference would be that many-to-most UK citizens at high risk (i.e. the elderly) were dosed with Astra Zenica, the non-mRNA experimental treatment.
Apparently:
“Since more than half of ICU admissions have not been vaccinated, this suggests an intrinsically milder virus rather than just increased protection from vaccination.’”
According to the UKHSA there are around 5x more deaths in the vaccinated compared with the unvaccinated — now, that’s perhaps just because the vaccines are protecting them, but…
…Why aren’t these dying vaccinated people getting a bed in ICU? Are they dying before they get a chance to get admitted? Or maybe there’s a secret society of unvaccinated doctors turning the vaccinated away from ICU?
Or are these figures just really dodgy, as usual.
3 things spring to mind. Anecdotally, there seems to have been an upsurge in sudden deaths. These would appear to be predominantly among the vaccinated, so yes, dead before they get to ICU. Secondly, isn’t it possible that the treatment of patients may differ according to their vaccination status? If the unvaccinated are getting poorer treatment due to nhs staff bias, then maybe they’re more likely to deteriorate and need intensive care. Thirdly, I believe that ICNARC and UKHSA use different estimates for their unvaccinated population. ICNARC uses the ONS estimate, which likely underestimates how many people are unvaccinated, and therefore overestimates the proportion of unvaccinated that end up in ICU.
I have suspected for some time that treatment given in hospitals will differ according to jab status.
I’ve no proof, just a gut feeling as 20+ yrs experience of working with the medical profession means I am well aware of what some of them are capable of.
If everybody gets the same treatment why is one of the first questions about your jab status?
I agree. I can’t help but think there is something sinister, or at least very questionable, going on. A few weeks ago a relative (also a sceptic) told me he’d read an article in The Times which presented an anecdotal frontline report from an A&E doctor. In the report, reference was made (in passing) to having to identify the vaccine status of covid patients, as they were put in different areas “reflecting the need for different treatment”. What this meant in practice wasn’t explained.
The almost 5x was pure numbers, not proportion — in the last figures it was 5012 deaths with 2 or 3 doses, and 1177 unvaccinated.
I realised that. My comment about defining “unvaccinated “ denominators was just in response to your comment “or are these figures just really dodgy, as usual”. (If they can fudge something as basic as the uk population, what else will they fudge? Another one, clearly, is their definition of “unvaccinated”.) It wasn’t intended to explain the discrepancy per se. Perhaps I should have clarified at the time.
Yes these figures are definitely “dodgy”. I believe they don’t include admissions from care homes and have my suspicions that unvaccinated patients are rested much more regularly (and possibly at a higher cycle rate?) than the vaccinated. As you point out the vaccine shows completely different figures for deaths – around 80% jabbed. So the vaccine means that once hospitalised you are at a much higher risk of dying then? Or the figures are manipulated junk?
Spiegelhalter is a regime gatekeeper. Nothing he says can be taken at face value.
Israels problems may be related to the number who have been quadruple stabbed.
As the damage to the immune system is acknowledged to be cumulative, it may well be that the Israelis have many more over a threshold where their immune system can no longer cope?
This is just abuse of the term “vaccinated.”
Hospitalised but no injections – unvaccinated.
Hospitalised after one jab but exceeding the timeline for injection two = unvaccinated.
Hospitalised after two jabs, but not boosted to heaven, yet = unvaccinated.
I completely agree (see post). Add to this list “Unknown” which are also classed as “Unvaccinated”.
One can only suppose that this misinformation is being supported by doctors, just as they don’t report teenage heart attacks as adverse reactions (see Tommy Robinson’s Telegram posting yesterday – sorry, I can’t link to it) and continue to cash in on injecting while refusing to do their job of actually seeing patients.
The Australian tyranny is just a test run
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-australian-tyranny-is-just-a-test-run/
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Delingpole’s article is superb – and the film is well worth watching (especially if they’ve sorted out the original volume problems)!
I think it is important that any time the term “Unvaccinated” is used it really needs to be in quotation marks since an unknown number of them have been vaccinated.
We need to show scorn and contempt for the way the term is used, as we should also for the term “Cases” and “Asymptomatic Infection”.
The German health and panic minister stated yesterday that Israel’s problems stem from too few elderly being vaxxed and boosted in comps with Europe.
As far as I can tell, that statement is completely fact free/a lie, it contradicts the statements from doctors there that 3/4 of the ICU patients are vaxxed and the general booster overload and lead there.
But even if it was true, it would then confirm that vaccinating people not at risk and younger ones was and is a misguided strategy and that any vaxx mandate for them, which he is now planning to introduce, is medically ridiculous.
Omicron seems to be having a much more significant impact on the population in both Israel and the USA.
Both of these countries used almost exclusively mRNA vaccines. The majority of adults in the UK were vaccinated with the Oxford Astra Zenica vaccine (at least the first two doses) Could it be that AZ is more effective at protecting from serious illness in the longer term than the mRNA vaccines?
It could be, yes. I’d note that while all the vaccines induce a pretty poor cellular immune response (but lots and lots of antibodies), AZ produced the highest amount of t-cell response (still poor, but higher than the others). We’ve little idea how any of the vaccines are modulating the innate immune response (there’s some papers saying that the mRNA vaccines at least have an impact on the innate immune system, but really we need much more data).
Alternatively, it could be a vaccine dose separation issue — in the UK we started vaccinating at the same time as Israel, but delayed the second dose by two months. This has put us two months behind Israel ever since.
It is called immune erosion. This is from the head of healthcare in Israel.
The Israelis have had 4 jabs. Their natural immunity has been more effectively suppressed (wrecked) than our population with a sizeable number who haven’t been jabbed, or have only had one or two.
Why “excluding Scotland”. Surely with vaxpässen and muzzle mandates still in force here, we must have reached zero by now? That’s what The Science demands, and reality must defer to it.
”One mystery is why Israel’s Omicron wave is proving a rougher ride in terms of ICU admissions and deaths compared to ours.”
Really? A ”mystery” is it? Not to a lot of us who’ve read about what jabs do to the immune system – and Israel has certainly done a lot of jabbing.
The Propaganda Loyal BBC & the Highly Trust worthy health & Prime Minister, with their Cameras & Photographers would have been all over this if they had a few patients. Lest not forget how much we spent on Nightingale Hospitals either!
Why is Israel’s situation as regards ‘COVID’ ICU numbers and deaths recently than here in the UK? Probably becuase:
1) They’ve used the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines throughout, which appear (in my view from reports) to cause immunity fatugue, i.e. their effectiveness wears off quicker and quicker and once it doesm the more vulnerable people’s immune systems are worse off.
They may be ‘dependent on the jabs’ so much that it could induce many auto-immune diseases, as some scientists and clinicians have speculated. Unfortunately, some many not know until years down the line, whereby it’s too late to make much of a difference.
The Oxford/AZ one did not seem to be anywhere near as ‘bad’ on that front, whilst lower initial immunity, it appears to last longer and not induce this immunity deficit so much/soon. Noticeably most oldies here got the AZ jab (my elderly parents did).
Whether this now changes in the coming months, as most of the booster jabs appear to be of the Pfizer/Moderna ones.
2) The has been a lower take up of jabs in the UK, especially in younger people, and also young children have not had them at all – yet.
Combine this and, in England (which makes up the majority of the UK population) lesser lockdown restrictions and more ignoring of those rules, the virus (especially since it ‘got milder’) has been far more extensively circulating in the below 50s population here, giving many more the better, longer-lasting natural immunity.
3) Israel rolled out the boosters quicker than we did, they are now on No. 4, but they rolled them out at a time of the year when they were least needed, and thus, IMHO, wasted before the aforementioned immune system problems kicked in just as the worst of winter illness was approaching.
It also means that the immune system problems are worsened because many have 2, not 1 booster and in quick succession.
What appears to be now coming out is that the effects of mRNA vaccines are still relatively unknown over the medium to longer term. To expect entire populations, inculding under 50s who in theory have decades of life to live, to have these jabs which are not fully tested despite them predominantly not being those seriously ill is an utter disgrace.
As more have said, any vaccines should have gone to just the most vulnerable, with them and everyone else using a holistic approach to both treatment and boosting the immune system by way of better diet, exercise/fresh air/sun, including vitmain D, zinc and a couple of other supplements, especially in colder less sunny months.
All the less vulnerable/younger people should then have just got on with their lives as before, shielding the vulnerable at the lowest level required without destroying what life they have left.
To show the Covid daily death figures are nonsense if the current trend continues we’ll shortly have fewer people seriously ill with Covid in ICU’s than die every day with Covid. A clear contradiction.
What “mystery” re Israel? The “vaccines” make many more susceptible to illness, as their immune systems get attacked by the snake oil. As per Mike Yeadon. mRNA mayhem is in the pipeline now…
Medical clinics and hospitals in USA are denying life-saving Ivermectin medicine even with court orders. Big Pharma doing all that they can to push the vaxx and inoculate us while effective and cheap COVID cures exist. There turns out to be censorship that we have never seen before for those who are looking for these treatments. We say over and over again that indepenedent researchers found Ivermectin safe and very effective for these Flu-Corona symptoms. Getting Ivermectin is easy https://ivmpharmacy.com