Professor Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M-O) that modelled Covid outcomes for SAGE and the Government, has told the Covid Inquiry his team was never asked to model the harms of lockdown or how to avoid it. Madeline Grant has more in the Telegraph.
Professor Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M-O), was a rare voice of reason throughout the hysteria. It was he who rubbished the notion that elimination was ever possible, and the SNP’s Anglophobic claim that Covid was “reseeded” into Scotland from the Typhoid Marys of England when the first lockdown ended. He repeatedly warned that using worst-case predictions (those ‘graphs of doom’) to shock people into compliance could trigger a general loss of scientific credibility. All this proved prescient.
This week, while giving evidence to the Covid Inquiry, Prof Woolhouse made a particularly damning declaration. Though lockdown was often framed as a last resort which no one wanted to impose, he begs to differ. “The harms of the social distancing measures – particularly lockdown, the economic harms, the educational harms, the harms to access to healthcare … societal wellbeing … mental health – were not included in any of the work that SPI-M-O did and, as far as I could tell, no one else was doing it either,” he told the inquiry.
So his team was never even asked to model the harm lockdown might inflict. Nor were they asked to consider alternative ways of mitigating health risks. “The question of how to avoid lockdown was never asked of us,” he added, “and I find that extraordinary.” Too right. This ought to be a national scandal. Saying “hindsight is always 20/20” doesn’t cut it; not only were many people warning about collateral harms at the time, expert authorities weren’t even being asked to consider such warnings.
Myopic decision-making was accompanied by an equally damaging tendency to view the public as a faceless bloc, ignoring the risk levels different individuals faced. So back in March 2020, the nation was, in Woolhouse’s words, “concentrating on schools when we should have been concentrating on care homes”.
This led to two of the pandemic’s most colossal mistakes – the neglect of vulnerable elderly patients and lengthy school closures, even though children were 10,000 times less likely to die from Covid than the elderly and the evidence for school transmission was patchy at best. We are still counting the cost, especially to less privileged pupils.
Worth reading in full.
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Just because he wasn’t asked didn’t mean he couldn’t have modelled the harms.
Had they modelled the harms there would have been none, just as they modelled without lockdowns zillions would have died.
Modelling supports any policy they like.
As with everything else to do with the scamdemic, they did not ask what they did not want to know. This seems to underscore the idea that lockdowns were coordinated across the world – lockstep, as it were. Decision makers were not asking how best to handle the situation, they were asking for models and arguments to support a decision they had already made (or rather, that had already been made for them).
Next time, perhaps scientists can stand together and speak a little louder. Had one major scientific/public health face publicy resigned, that alone would have spoke volumes. It is clear that quite a few had their doubts.
Next time the WHO and the IHR will decide everything so these poor hard up MP don’t have to, just like the good old days of the EU.
I can only dream of Ursula von der Leyen deciding everything for us.
She is going to take over NATO – can you believe it – with President Sleepy Joe’s approval.
After what she did to Germany’s Bundeswehr as Defence Minister [nearly destroy it as members of her own party acknowledge] I hear she is going to outsource NATO to a Putin’s favourite company – The Wagner Group.
And it is not corruption. She actually thinks it is a good idea.
Only joking – [but only half – I think she would do it if no one was checking up on her].
It’s hard to get somebody to disagree with something their job depends on.
I think for a lot of people this went beyond keeping their jobs. The head of the ICUs here, the head of the public health authority, they wouldn’t have lost their jobs (they’re both top doctors in a country with a chronic shortage). PM Rutte forever uses the “we’ve agreed”, “we can disagree, but we must show a united front” crap, it takes backbone to stand up to that and be the odd man out. That is the real reason no one spoke up here, no one had the guts to take the flack that Tegnell did.
That’s right…lockdowns were coordinated.
In Australia we were put into lockdown based on modelling out of the Doherty Institute, which was influenced by the notorious Ferguson modelling.
It is absolutely stunning to think about how the world was turned upside down by the likes of Ferguson and others who colonise the universities, the power these people exercised over our lives…without our informed consent.
It’s time for accountability for this diabolical shambles…
“without our informed consent”
Without any shred of democracy.
Our elected representative are cowards almost to a man, transman, woman and transwoman.
Don’t vote. The government always wins.
Don’t vote. It only encourages them.
There were enough organisations, charities and support groups screaming about the risks of lockdown before they were implemented for even the most obtuse ‘scientist’ – and I use that word very loosely – not to miss the signals. It was deliberately implemented and all this ‘not me guv’ schtick is utterly sickening.
The Human Rights groups must’ve been self isolating because they did sweet FA over the fascist Lockdown.
The ‘I was just following orders.” defense.
I’m sure there were not asked. But then neither were any of us. That didn’t stop lockdown sceptics from speaking up to whoever would listen, repeatedly, while being told we were Literally Hitler etc. Weak. Like Sunak and Truss piping up after the event. All big grown up boys and girls quite capable of speaking up for themselves.
It appears that he followed the tactic of only answering the barrister’s questions, and avoided adding any titbits, as it were. He has made a profit from it though – I actually bought a copy of his book, “The Year the World Went Mad” published in 2022, via A.
Was giving people eight times the recommended dose of HQC in the Oxford study, where vulnerable patents were killed, just a mistake? or how about the Morphine & Medazolam ‘Pathways’ that were supposed to be stopped — They were called the Liverpool Pathways before, but they just changed the name and carried on as usual.
Naturally Lady Hallett will be calling for the death penalty when her inquiry ends [in 2155].
Only joking.
It was in the Government’s Pandemic Plan – don’t lockdown as it will have no benefit but will have harmful social, economic and health ill-effects.
Why didn’t they just read the damned plan and follow its recommendations?
Are these folk so brain-dead they need to ‘model’ what happens when you shut a society and economy down for months on end?
I think these people are mentally ill.
So specialised that they have a kind of academic tunnel vision. No clue of the big wide world.
They read the plan, they were told not to follow it.
Sweden followed the original plan, the Netherlands did to a great extent – until November 2020, when it changed course (imo on instruction from Brussels). The head of the public health authority always maintained that masks were pointless – they were forced on us by the tw*t who was minister of health – a former primary school teacher with zero scientific background. Even then the advice of the RIVM was that masks did nothing.
In November 2020 the same head of the RIVM tried to get parliament to agree to a night curfew, even though Spain’s disastrous incarceration had proven not to work – even that of next door Belgium, far more strict than NL, could show no better infection, hospital or death rates. When Wilders pushed the head of the RIVM as to what good a night curfew was supposed to be, he just muttered something about getting people to take things more seriously. In other words, he had absolutely nothing to support the human rights violation in terms of public health. He is one of the people I am certain knew full well a lot of this was nonsense – had he publicly, loudly stepped down it would have sent a signal. I doubt it would have changed anything, but he could have held his head high and maintained scientific standards instead of joining in with a public health response more suited to the Middle Ages. This was not the time to be a team player.
You’re being kind. They were and are and continue to be evil.
Evil is a much underused and much needed word these days.
In my job, if I see a problem highlighted by the data, or a problem with the data itself, or a problem with the way the data is collected, and I don’t draw attention to it, I have FAILED.
I go out of my way to disprove my assumptions and those of others.
It’s called…. SCIENCE!
Professor Mark, you should have done more. You did a lot, but you had the means, the motive and the opportunity to do more. A lot more.
The simplest thing you could have done was point out that it wasn’t a goddamn pandemic in the first place. Instead, you blithered about it not being feasible to eliminate SARS-CoV-2. You’re a loser, I’m afraid, a loser.
I can’t argue with that. If he clearly saw what a disaster the policies were, he should have fallen on his sword and resigned. That way he could genuinely hold his head high now.
I don’t think we should be surprised by this, the last few hyears have taught us that many people will carry about their job despite misgivings because it suits them to do so.In a lot of cases the misgivings would’ve been drowned out instantly by the ‘protect my own ass’ instinct.. How many people refused the death jab when threatened with loss of employment. Less than half I would wager. We shouldn’t insult such people. We don’t have some ideal or normative level of courage. The essence of our culture likes to keep this away from us. This propaganda model has existed since the Boer War and was powerful for seventy years before that. What would an average Englishman living in 1700 have made of this centralisation? It was more about your town and your county and the people close to you. We should be grateful that there is any dissent left at all given the onslaught. Most of these people aren’t nasty they are just utterly overwhelmed.
We cannot even rely on good old-fashioned corruption where people did it for suitcases full of cash.
These days they just do it.
So dishonest IMHO.
Just joking.
You either see a path of circumventon or you don’t. We all know tha these types run our world and we don’t really know what to do about that but we know that it is an urgent situation. Many arch atheists have changed a lot in recent years, people such as Susan Blakemore and others have embraced the idea of pan-psychism. This is halfway to the realm of the spirit and these were the most arch atheists. I can say with confidence that despite a rocky road we are moving to something much higher.
Very interesting viewpoint. I thought I was atheist but although not religious I am not atheist I think there is malevolence, and like all forces, is capable of coalescing and becoming organised. Looking at the Nazi party, or the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Stalin, they behave like a group of Fred Bundies, only with nice uniforms.
There is a scientific basis [modern physics] for pan-psychism but not a lot of people know that.
And it has its origins ~400 years ago incredibly.
Professor Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M-O).
Considering how this has all turned out, how much money did the learned professor spend on his education? This question applies to all who are pushing net zero, ESG, Gender ID, The Great Reset, or any UN global policy. I get the strong impression that many treat education as a means to get qualifications, which is not the same as knowledge and does not replace experience, but those qualifications confer status and a kind of ‘access all areas’ pass, which on the face of it seems logical, but how is that turning out?. Klaus Schwab has a long list of qualifications, such as a Doctorate in Engineering, a Doctorate in Economics, a Master of Public Administration, and he also has 17 honorary Doctorates, 16 National Distinction Awards from various countries and 14 selected awards. Not bad for someone who spent 4 years on the shop floor of several German factories and 3 years as assistant to the Director-General of the German Machine-building Association (VDMA). He hasn’t made anything, managed his own business or made a fortune, and yet he is revered.
You can trace a post-war boomer psychopathy starting with the dubious parenting practiced of Dr Spock and then the instant fulfilment of consumerism and the idea that it was perfectly acceptable to dodge the draft. Not conscienscious objection but using certain techniques to dodge the draft that only affluent draftees knew how to navigate. You can get away with this for a while, during the supremacy of the Anglo-Americans. Not any more. I try to alert people of the situation.
The stuff that is being purveyed to use really is destined to fail. How many have any understanding or anticipation of this? Frankly I speak to very few these days. There is nothing for me to say to dulled minds These were fine minds not that long ago.
They weren’t focusing on school
closures because they thought children were at risk. What’s the average age of teachers? What % had to shield themselves? In a country where only 8% live with someone vulnerable did the teaching profession live with shielders in disproportionate numbers? Charlatans and self-serving cowards; some professions have a higher purpose than self-preservation. I do know a small number of teachers and doctors who thought the whole thing was bollocks; they’d have been targeted in the staff room. Most people are not brave or principled enough.