Well, it now looks as if the grandees are turning against each other. Rishi Sunak, as we reminded our readers, stated to the Spectator that not even Cabinet Ministers were aware of the rationale for the toxic cocktail of evidence-free restrictions imposed on the nation.
Now, Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser during Covid, is accusing politicians of cherry-picking the science. Apparently, the diary he kept will be produced at the Hallett Enquiry. So, whom do you believe? Sir Patrick used some pretty strong words to describe the former Prime Minister, and incidentally, a registered medical practitioner should not use words such as ‘bipolar’ as an insult. Mental illness is no joke, especially for those whose conditions were caused or triggered by the three Ronnies’s restrictions. So why was Sir Patrick always standing up like a stalwart at the three Ronnies’ show every night? Why did he not resign if the Government was running amok with the advice? Two metres, rule of six, night curfews, see granny in the garden and Christmas parties on balconies and all.
We think the restrictions narrative is now fast unfolding. Unlike the decks of the Titanic, it’s everyone for themselves – I got my damehood/knighthood, my pension, time to move on with my trusted Kevlar armour around me.
One of the reasons why the narrative is unfolding is that SARS-CoV-2 is going up and down regardless of whatever idiocy the Government, the media and the so-called experts dreamed of, which brings us to our thread on the outputs of the UKHSA. On Tuesday we pointed out that the UKHSA has produced a map of what it calls available evidence on the use of what it classifies as non-pharmaceutical interventions – NPIs (the ‘Evidence Gap Map’). Here’s the main screen again:
As we explained, you can click the arrows in the top row and inspect the list of different interventions.
So the map tells us there is a massive dump of models of all kinds, a few other bits and pieces, but nothing strong enough to justify granny in the garden having a conversation through the window or ‘closing the Welsh borders’.
But we are curious, you know us: we ask questions the whole time. So, we have downloaded references numbers 24 to 123, which are the 100 models which form the backbone of the UKHSA dataset (100 out of 151; 66% to be precise).
We have downloaded them, and now we are reading them and asking four straightforward questions about each published or quasi-published model included in the map:
- What is the NPI being assessed (e.g. is it an NPI, and is it defined and described?) and in what setting? (e.g. community, hospital, homes etc.)
- What is the source for the effect estimate? (to model its effects, you need a source of data, i.e., what does it do?).
- What is the size of the effect? (such as risk reduction of SARS-CoV-2 infection)
- What is the case definition? (how did they define a case of COVID-19?)
Once we have answered these questions, we will grade the model using the ROBINS I tool. Remember the UKHSA did not assess the risk of bias, it just mapped.
We will then synthesise our findings and reflect on the advisability of relying on the mapped models for introducing restrictions.
To remind readers, we have done a similar exercise with a previous review produced by the UKHSA:
The UK Health Security Agency Review – our Trust the Evidence Critical Appraisal
- U.K. Government Evidence for Mask Mandates – an introduction
- Mystery studies
- Studies with non-representative populations
- Studies with obscure methods
- Studies with no blinding and no protocol
- Office for National Statistics – Part 1
- Office for National Statistics – Part 2
- Studies which shouldn’t have been in the UKHSA review
- Predatory Journals to Inform Mask Policy
- U.K. Government Evidence for Mask Mandates – Main Points
Bear with us as we do this work and present the results. TTE resources are finite: it’s just Tom and Carl.
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.
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The trans zealot brown shirts are bullying us again!
I have never read a word of Harry Potter or anything else that JK Rowling has ever written, but I have huge admiration for her..
The time may be coming when those of us who understand biological reality may need be to stand with HER!
It is time everyone realised that if it is to be a crime to misgender anyone then it would be a crime to deny the genders of 99.9% of the population.
What does this mean?
It means not calling a boy a “boy” or not calling a girl a “girl” could become a criminal offence like this:
So what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Time to wake up and smell the coffee.
Lock ’em all up and throw away the key.
And if one calls a trans woman a ‘woman’ as that is misgendering all women should indirect misgendering be a crime too?
Just as the law recognised direct and indirect discrimination then it surely will have to recognise direct and indirect misgendering for not just trans people but also for everyone else.
I can’t see a billionaire going to prison. Those less well known or wealthy – not so lucky.
Her “Solve et coagula” tattoo is quite fitting for the times we live in. Society is being broken down before it can come together in a new imagining.
Denying biological reality is going to become a hate crime, but telling people to punch a TERF in the face is OK! Could this country be any more f***ed up?
“Hate Crime”——It doesn’t get much more sinister and totalitarian than that.
“Could this country be any more f***ed up?“
I’m sure someone will think of something.
They have not let us down so far.
We’ve had 13 years of it under this government. Sur Kurr Stammer’s lot don’t look like giving up any time soon even after they win the next election.
I will defend her free speech BUT….What was her position on jabs, Lockdown. What was her position on free speech before the Trans attack on her? would she defend people like us with such rigor. From what I remember (this was Twitter around 2015) she was a bit of a feminazi!
Hi Ron – it doesn’t matter. When she’s right she’s right, when we think she’s wrong, we call her out. No one is perfect and I have certainly got things wrong in the past.
Every divorced man knows women are always right.
Its one more reason for men wanting to be trans.
[Only joking].
She will have lots of company in jail then, with those of us who do not do personal pronouns; like me an adult female.
But wait jails are full we are told, so could we have our own barge for biological reality prisoners, with waiter food service, like illegal migrants have.
I think Labour will need more than one prison as we are many.
Hasn’t Starmer finally confirmed he knows what a woman is though? Or is the slippery parasite going to insist there are different types of women. Some of them being indistinguishable from men. Maybe there is no need to do any distinguishing though since as Occams Razor (the most likely thing is usually the real thing) would tell you——-Maybe they are really just men after all.
“Hasn’t Starmer finally confirmed he knows what a woman is though?”
No. That’s what he wants you to think. He is a politician. He hasn’t got a clue. Just ask his wife. He still doesn’t know where children come from and that is after having two.
Just because he does not know something does not mean he can’t pretend he knows when necessary to get votes.
So that’s the truth.
Only joking.
If you read my whole comment instead of just replying to the first sentence you would have seen that I am perfectly aware that him saying he knows what a woman is doesn’t fool me at all.
Try reading my comment again.
And then read the one immediately after it which says “Only joking“.
yawn———you were joking …ok then
Thanks for the comment.
That is way better than some of the people here who mindlessly downvote.
Are you sure he fathered them?
Presumption of legitimacy – legal term for – “I know they have the milkman’s nose but you have to give Dad the benefit of the doubt“.
Can be rebutted though.
Sometimes I admit there can be grudge pregnancies – where someone had it in for him.
Yes maybe they are really just men after all.
Transgender people? Surely they mean transvestites?
Actually no.
I used to shop at a supermarket frequented by a six foot four man who dressed as a woman and who had some surgery including implants in the derrière.
The surgery had been done very very badly and the implants were lumpy and all over the place.
It was at that moment I realised how sad and hard it must be for someone to want so much to be physically the other sex to their birth sex that they would go to such lengths to achieve that.
I cannot think of an analogy which might put this into a context which has resonance to those of us who do not have such desires.
Truly terrible.
And I am not sure misgendering such a man to be a woman [because it is misgendering in the biological sense] is going to help someone with such a strong desire.
All of this woke trans crap is not in fact helping anyone like that. It is making it us vs them when it should be us vs the people pushing all this wokism.
What we all need is a true understanding of the nature of the problem for trans people and to find ways of helping them live as normally as it possible in all the circumstances.
It is clearly tough.
And of course there are complications like sexual predators who pretend to be trans.
That does not help us one little bit to help true trans people.
It’s time for a “I’m Spartacus” moment !!..
…”an.”
A brave stand, but then she knows the Authoritarians wouldn’t dare “take her on” in Court.
Instead, they’ll pick on some poor sap who has no money for defence; no public profile and “make an example” of them.
It’s what bullies do.
If someone has decided to identify as a hippo and I identify them as a person is there something wrong with me or is it the alleged hippo that is in need of help? It really is a crude as that. Ordinary people cannot be expected to be told a pillar box is now an aeroplane because the pillar box says so and be prosecuted for insisting the aeroplane is actually a pillar box and identifying it as such.
Am I in an episode of Postman Pat? Talking pillar boxes?
Someone in my street put a knitted wooly hat on the pillar box but I can’t tell if it is a trans pillar box or not.
What do I call it? He or she or it?
Will calling it ‘it’ be misgendering under Sur Kurr Stammers Labour government next year?
Blimey. The French have a serious problem. All their nouns are either male or female.
What is a noun decides it is going to be trans?
They won’t be able to speak French in the UK next year without facing hard time in chokey.
I read somewhere that someone has invented a trans pronoun for the French but I don’t have the full details.
Will they have a defence if they use it?
The Germans do similar stuff as Mark Twain pointed out in his “The Awful German Language”
Deleted. Posted in the wrong place.
I (and a couple of friends of mine) have experience of wanting to call a trans man ‘he’ and wanting to call a trans woman ‘she’ – two people we knew in two different situations – and it is actually extremely difficult. When talking among ourselves about either of them when they weren’t there, we would constantly unintentionally ‘misgender’ them. We’d try to get it right but about four times out of five we get it wrong, and then laugh about how difficult it was to get it right.
It’s difficult because informally talking is something we generally do without thinking too much, it’s spontaneous, and if in your mind you perceive that a trans woman is actually a man, and a trans man is actually a woman, then it’s very difficult to remember in normal spontaneous conversation to refer to them in a different way from how you think about them.
So although nobody is suggesting it should be a ‘hate crime’ to unintentionally ‘misgender’ someone, it could be extremely difficult to determine if the misgendering was deliberate or not.
How things get blown out of proportion. This whole thing derives from this sentence in Anneliese Dodds’ speech at the Labour Party conference:
Under Labour, everyone who falls victim to hate crime will be treated equally under the law, and the perpetrators of anti-LGBT+ and disability hatred will no longer dodge longer sentences.
Note
It is about enforcing sentences for existing crimes.
It is not specific to transgender – it refers to LGBT and disability hatred
There is no implication that it means simply using the wrong pronoun
This is the Daily Mail twisting things to create a false scare about what Labour might do.
I would watch those cornflakes your munching on this morning if I were you. I think they might be a bit tainted. But then again it is all down to personal taste isn’t it? Wokery would run riot if left to it’s own devices so stop being an apologist for it.
It is striking how many people on this site respond to my comments with stuff about me as opposed to the issues being debated – perhaps I should be flattered?
“Flattened”?
Spelling?
Your cornflakes are more important than you though and it was them I was commenting on.
It’s not specific to transgender, nobody said it was, but if a Labour government enforces its policy of stricter sentences ‘for abuse targeted at transgender people’, it could include the ‘hate crime’ of deliberately misgendering, as “Deliberately misgendering someone is already a hate crime if it is motivated by hostility to the victim’s transgender identity, the Government said last year”.
Although they are wrong in cases where it is motivated by not believing a man is a woman and vice versa.
Just another way of looking at it.
“This is the Daily Mail twisting things to create a false scare about what Labour might do.”
How can you be confident it is a false scare? They might be bang on the money.
Vote independent – it’s the only thing we can do. This has just popped up and may be worth a look https://theindependentalliance.org/