This week saw the publication of a suite of systematic reviews by the Royal Society (RS) on the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions in the pandemic.
Politico headlined with ‘Top review says Covid lockdowns and masks worked, period’. The Guardian led with ‘Lockdowns and face masks “unequivocally” cut the spread of Covid, report finds’, and the i newspaper stated: ‘Masks and social distancing did reduce Covid infections, new report shows, proving lockdown sceptics wrong.’
So there you have it, a slam dunk, sceptics, you were all wrong. You should have masked up and stayed in lockdown.
Even more so when you listen to the Chair of the report’s group, Mark Walport, who said: “There is sufficient evidence to conclude that early, stringent implementation of packages of complementary NPIs was unequivocally effective in limiting SARS-CoV-2 infections.”
Four systematic reviews informed the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions in the Covid pandemic. However, here is some of what these reviews report.
A systematic review on environmental control measures:
Many of these studies were assessed to have critical risk of bias in at least one domain, largely due to confounding factors that could have affected the measured outcomes. As a result, there is low confidence in the findings.
One study, an RCT, showed that daily testing of contacts could be a viable strategy to replace lengthy quarantine of contacts. Based on the scarcity of robust empirical evidence, we were not able to draw any firm quantitative conclusions about the quantitative impact of TTI interventions in different epidemic contexts.
Effectiveness of face masks for reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2:
We analysed 35 studies in community settings (three RCTs and 32 observational) and 40 in healthcare settings (one RCT and 39 observational). Ninety-one percent of observational studies were at ‘critical’ risk of bias (ROB) in at least one domain, often failing to separate the effects of masks from concurrent interventions.
Effectiveness of international border control measures during the COVID-19 pandemic:
There is little evidence that most travel restrictions, including border closure and those implemented to stop the introduction of new variants of concern, were particularly effective.
The report makes the same errors that the UKHSA and Public Health England did. They ignored the critical biases and the confounders when drawing conclusions. Some of the comments misunderstand the evidence required for making healthcare decisions.
Chris Dye, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, who led the review on masks for the Royal Society, said if they had only looked at randomised controlled trials, they would have come to the same conclusion as the Cochrane review. However, the researchers behind the paper released Thursday chose to analyse a larger body of studies and found strong evidence that masks work.
So, if we ignore high-quality evidence, we arrive at the conclusion we want – they fully understand the politics. Low-quality evidence means the estimated effect will differ substantially from the actual effect – we’ve known this for quite some time, and it is fundamental to the delivery of evidence-based interventions. An approach that uses low-quality evidence shouldn’t inform healthcare, and it doesn’t. That’s why we have NICE, which uses the best available evidence to develop recommendations that guide health, public health and social care decisions.
Did the reviewers, for instance, ask if there was a protocol for any of these studies – something we have previously pointed out. There were none, despite protocols being essential for robust research.
There is something we do agree with in the report, that the “future assessments should also consider the costs as well as the benefits of NPIs, in terms of their impacts on livelihoods, economies, education, social cohesion, physical and mental wellbeing, and potentially other aspects”. However this report looked at none of that. The single focus on one outcome, ignoring harms, further hinders informed decision-making.
The RS report wants us to believe that RCTs are impossible during a pandemic: “While RCTs should not be discounted, it is highly likely that most information in a future pandemic will continue to be observational.”
Yet the pandemic has re-emphasised the importance of high-quality randomised clinical trials and highlighted the need for preparation, coordination and collaboration.
The Royal Society review shows that some academics are losing their ability to think critically. Instead of retrofitting evidence to preconceived conclusions, it would be much better to report the uncertainties and set out those questions that need addressing. Refusal to acknowledge uncertainties does a disservice to society and undermines public trust in research.
Staying at home decreases your risk of all sorts of hazards – in the short term, you won’t get run over and you’ll reduce the risk of an infection or an accident. But what matters is the costs of what happens when you reemerge.
Dr. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Dr. Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist based in Rome who works with Professor Heneghan on the Cochrane Collaboration. This article was first published on their Substack, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I’m persuaded by the chap on the left I’m afraid… If The Great Reset is just a crackpot conspiracy theory, it’s certainly fooled the WEF, who brag about it on their website, publish books about it and state very clearly that vaccination status will be the foundation of a new global economic system. Should someone tell them they’ve been had?
What sort of evil geniuses would just tell you their plans, right out in the open, then gaslight you for talking about them? Surely that’s James Bond stuff.
We are indeed living in the sum of every badly-written and implausible spy film.
that just happen to be propaganda for those nice people at the CIA (at least the Bond films anyway), who also popularised the term “conspiracy theorist”.
(For those not getting my point, decrying the obvious gaslighting as fiction is just cranking up the gas.)
From what I have seen these WEF people are third-raters. What certainly can be happening, however, is that many convergent interests make it appear that it is being run by a cabal. Money for Big Pharma, power for Karens (in and out of the bureaucracy), and relevance for politicians. It has it all.
Third raters, maybe. But browsing their own list of the “world leaders” they’ve trained they are some of the richest and most powerful third raters in the world, including those heads of nations pushing the lockdown agenda hardest, like Macron and Ardern.
Just to clarify, I don’t believe the WEF are directing the entire fraud supervillain style in a command centre under a Swiss mountain!. I think (like others have suggested) that they are just one component of a group of generally converging interests attempting to capitalise on an inevitable economic reset caused by spiralling US debt. That’s the interpretation that makes the most sense to me – if we accept that the whole thing is a gigantic fraud, we need to be able to explain how leaders across the world have been convinced of the need to play along, the only way I can get there is if the alternative has been presented to them as an economic apocalypse..
It could be even simpler than that. A bit like terrorism, covid is a useful bogeyman that allows politicians to grab more power and be criticised less.
True but it goes a bit beyond that doesn’t it? The fake terrorism crisis created a fake industry sure, but it didn’t involve destroying whole swathes of the economy and millions of peoples’ lives and livelihoods.
‘but it didn’t involve destroying whole swathes of the economy and millions of peoples’ lives and livelihoods.’
Well, not in the West, but elsewhere it did.
You’re right; I suppose the economic terrorism has just come home to roost.
Yes when they boast about their actions and write them down it stops being a “conspiracy theory” it just becomes a conspiracy.
Anti-vaxxer is a badge of honour now in the UK.
It describes people who can and do still practice the principles of the enlightenment and who understand and defend those principles in our constitutions or equivalents.
Most often medically, they are indeed fully properly vaxxed, in favour of or agnostic about Covid gene therapies for those at risk or desiring to have one, as long as that’s voluntary and concerns adults, but very much opposed against any coercion and discrimination on the basis of the Covid gene therapy status and as such equally opposed against those ‘passports’.
The equivalent term and insult in Germany is now Nazi.
But that is also in truth now a badge of honour, if, as and when thrown around only by the real and currently fascism practicing modern day Nazis online, in in the MSM and in the major political parties there.
Indeed, the convergence of Big Business (Big Pharma, Big Science and Big Media) with the Government is literally the Fascist end game.
Which would mean that your evident desire for aggressive confrontation and military deterrence of China (which I do understand the temptations of and arguments for, don’t get me wrong) points us not in the direction of a free world resisting an Evil Empire, but rather of two huge totalitarian blocs squaring up to each other.
Less Reagan versus the Soviets, more Oceania versus Eastasia.
Seems to me our internal problems should take precedence over military confrontation and containment, atm.
You could argue that building a military confrontation of China might help us to turn our cultures against Chinese-style totalitarianism, but I’m not convinced that will work – the totalitarians are far too deeply embedded here for that. And the risks of aggressive confrontation are immense.
My instincts are very much that we should focus on our own internal problems, leave other countries to their own business, and use our military to protect our borders and deter any possible attack on us. Where that approach might fall down is in a world where an evil superpower (e.g. China) is allowed to expand its military power to the extent that they can exert a good deal of control over what’s going on globally. As it stands, what might be stopping that happening is the United States, simply by being a military superpower. If we feel we’re benefitting from the US occupying that space, you could argue we should give them some help. It will (and has) lead you down some very wrong paths, but you could argue that’s still better than a world where China is able to throw its weight about more or less unhindered. Happy to be dissuaded of this, though!
“My instincts are very much that we should focus on our own internal problems, leave other countries to their own business, and use our military to protect our borders and deter any possible attack on us. “
Those are good instincts.
There are times when they fall down, but imo now is not one of them. Currently (and for the past few decades) problems have been mostly due to the consequences of the US throwing its weight around.
China is not (yet) any military threat to the world and certainly not to us. It’s just about getting strong enough to be able to deter the US from throwing its weight around in China’s own backyard. It has little or no global force projection capability.
Obviously the US and US sphere militarists want to paint it as a huge imminent military threat, but that’s just the usual interventionist and militarist bullshit.
It might become that, but it isn’t anywhere close yet.
There might come a day when a full defensive military cooperation against China is necessary, but this is not that day. This day we have more than enough problems of our own at home.
Of course, if you want to let the bullshitters lead you to risk war over Taiwan or Hong Kong – issues well within China’s legitimate sphere (certainly if you accept US dominance in Central America, as the world has for decades), then you can look forward to a world of hurt.
As history has shown time and again, weakness is an enticement to a potential aggressor.
Weakness does indeed sometimes attract aggression, as the relative weakness of Iraq, Syria and Libya attracted US aggression, for instance. But that’s a superpower imposing its will on uncooperative third world states.
When you are looking at wars between rival dominant powers, or a dominant power and a rising replacement, it’s more often misjudgement, or fear of real or potential strength that causes wars. As for instance if the US regime follows your evidently preferred course and tries to interfere in what are very obviously matters well within China’s reasonable sphere, in Taiwan or China.
Ad if they do follow that course, and there is a miscalculation that leads to open war, and that war is not contained, you can be pretty certain you will regret your country having done it bitterly, win or lose, if you are still alive to do so.
But hey, with the kind of superlatively skilled strategic leadership your country has been blessed with over the past few decades, what can possibly go wrong?
But also, firmly promote the free and open discussion of flaws and bad consequences from these very novel medical technologies, so that informed consent would be possible. It is not possible currently, given the censorship, politics and propaganda for informed consent to be arrived at for the normal person.
I think many of us started with Toby’s position, jabs fine with no coercion for risk categories. Looking now at the Vaers etc reports, especially the heart attack issues, it is no longer as simple as that.
“James Delingpole and I discuss Macron’s toys-out-of-the-pram reaction to the AUKUS deal“
Macron’s response was indeed hilarious, but Toby Young’s was almost as funny.
The idea that we are supposed to get all excited about a bit of potential future military expenditure and cooperation on the other side of the world, that even on its face only manages to promise us the enticing prospect of a potential war with a nuclear armed superpower, while at home we face the ongoing transformation of our own society into a totalitarian replica of the Chinese tyranny we are supposedly resisting over there, really is rather comical.
If fear propaganda and nanny state collectivist healthcare have been the most effective manipulative tools of big pharma/big government in pushing covid medico-fascism, jingoist glorification of interventionism has been the equivalent, for decades, for the military-industrial-political complex in pushing confrontation and war.
Which is worse? Well I suppose it depends whether you are looking from the perspective of victims at home or abroad.
No, the AUKUS alliance (along with the Qaud – India, Japan, Australia and the US) will, if anything, reduce the potential for war. That’s the whole point of deep water nuclear submarines.
“No, the AUKUS alliance (along with the Qaud – India, Japan, Australia and the US) will, if anything, reduce the potential for war.”
One’s opinion on that will depend upon a lot of judgement calls and opinions about the strategic situation, and the appropriate lines to draw.
If you view the most likely cause of war as some kind of outright Chinese military aggression, Nazi/Soviet/Pearl Harbor-style, then you could try to make a case that conventional deterrence has a role to play. But that’s a bad mis-judgement of the Chinese regime and strategic situation, imo.
If you view the problems as being more one of US aggressive forward positioning in trying to contain a rising China (along the lines of what the US did to rising Japan in the 1930s that led to Pearl Harbor), then you are unlikely to take that view, especially as war between the US and China today would likely be immeasurably more costly than even WW2 (we do not live in the shade of the nuclear peace for nothing).
We would better spend our time addressing the problems of our own elites transforming our societies into pale shadows of Chinese totalitarianism, than provoking confrontation with that power imo.
“That’s the whole point of deep water nuclear submarines.”
The issue here is not a mostly irrelevant few additional subs nominally in Australian hands, should they eventually materialise. That will neither add much to the military balance nor in practice serve as much of a deterrent to war between China and Australia. The Chinese threat to Australia is unlikely to be military anyway.
The issue is the political drawing of the US and its satellites into a forward posture to interfere in Chinese affairs in Taiwan, which is the most likely flashpoint for a war between the rising Chinese power and the formerly dominant US power.
China will regard outside interference in Taiwan much as the US viewed it in Central America during the Monroe Doctrine era, and any honest person would accept and understand that – if anything there’s more justification for the Chinese version than there was for the US one. The place to draw a line is not the Taiwan Strait, and nor is it Hong Kong, unless you believe war is inevitable. But in that case, you should be advocating for an aggressive triggering of war with China now (actually a decade or more ago), because every year that passes increases China’s relative strength, as its military power catches up with its huge growth in economic power.
And you need to face up to what global war between superpowers with nuclear weapons actually means.
The former Naval Intelligence officer (RAN) and now military historian, Tom Lewis, says that the real reason the French were left out of the AUKUS arrangement (apart from the unfortunate acronym that it would produce) is that the bureaucratic French style would not fit well with the flexible and nimble arrangement that the Anglo nations have in mind.
The froggies refused to contribute to NATO’s armed forces, if I remember rightly. They had a toy atom bomb all of their own, of which they were immensely proud, like a mentally deficient toddler with its very own teddy bear. Who’d want them in an alliance now?
And what’s the point of protecting Aus and NZ against China when to all intents and purposes they are part of China?
France withdrew from the NATO military alliance in the mid 60’s I think. They remained in the other parts of NATO. IIRC this was under de Gaulle. France rejoined the full alliance in 2009
When this site was setup I was on team Toby thinking that the governments’ reaction to a virus was just groupthink and incompetence.
Gradually that thought became a hope, and then disbelief, as step by step, lie by lie, every response fell into place exactly as those nutty conspiracy theorists had predicted, until eventually I had to become one.
Welcome. You didn’t intend to become a conspiracy theorist but when you looked at the facts it was either that or live a lie.
Delingpole is a bit of an odd one, but Young is now either lying to himself or pretending he is not seeing what is now crystal clear in an attempt to keep in with those setting the narrative.
Nothing odd about Delly, he tells it as it is.
He’s right, your wrong.
“[James’] crackpot conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and the Great Reset”. Oh dear, Toby! Much as I appreciate this forum, there’s none so blind as those who will not see. I’m firmly in the Delingpole camp. If you still need persuading, try this excellent and concise expose of the Great Reset by Ernst Wolff. https://odysee.com/@LongXXvids:c/Ernst-Wolf-speech—summary:3
In early 1930s Germany, lots of Jews saw what was happening and left for America. Those that remained eventually ended up at the Auschwitz rail-head, where they were seperated from their family and sent to the showers. At this point they finally realised what was happening. I call this the “Auschwitz Rail-Head Moment.”
Some of us are either en-route to, or have already arrived at, our metaphorical American haven. Others refuse to believe it. Toby seems to cleave toward the Auschwitz Rail-Head Moment group. Wake up Tobe’s FFS!
Where is our latter day American haven though?
Well, there are bits of it. Florida and Texas.
Incredible indeed – how come TY is SO slow on the uptake? (Ker-ching?)
the glorious prospect that lockdown zealot Justin Trudeau will end up with fewer seats in the Canadian federal election than he did in 2019
Looks like he will end up with one more seat – disappointment for everyone really.
And, of course, should anyone mention vote stuffing, they will be called conspiracy theorists. Odd really since the MSM are all bleating on about ‘vote stuffing’ in Russia!
Only the bad guys engage in “ballot stuffing” and “interfering in other countries’ elections”.
The good guys “increase voter participation” and “promote democracy”.
How anyone can watch the footage from UN ‘Strong City’ Melbourne yesterday and think this is all a perfectly normal response is completely beyond me. We are rapidly being enslaved and virtually no one is speaking up about it, as long as the media gatekeepers get their paycheques they will happily lead us into a pen to be dealt with later.
Anyone who believes all the UN / WEF Great Reset stuff is nonsense should look at the work of Sandi Adams. She has copies of the source material, all you have to do is visit the UN / WEF websites and read their public documents to see their dystopian smart city transhumanism vision. It’s not a conspiracy if it is all out in the open and publicly discussed.
Absolutely amazes me that low level agents of the state sell out humanity and their families for so little money. Wasn’t previously religious but now really hope there is a heaven and hell.
And more evidence of corruption:
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/my-front-row-view-of-the-covid-drug-corruption-scandal/
More from Melbourne: https://youtu.be/pCIWfRmZ-Ww
How can one be an anti-vaxxer over the jabbings? You do realise, Toby, that they are NOT vaccines, they are therapeutics (and rather dangerous ones at that)!????