The U.K.’s new Chief Scientific Adviser pushed hard for lockdown during Covid, describing Rishi Sunak as “Dr. Death” for seeking to get the country back to normal with his Eat Out to Help Out scheme, it emerged Thursday at the Covid Inquiry. The Mail has more.
Dame Angela McLean, who this year succeeded Sir Patrick Vallance as No. 10’s Chief Scientific Adviser, sent the WhatsApp message to a fellow Government adviser in a crunch meeting with former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and then-Chancellor Mr. Sunak.
At the time of the September 2020 meeting, the Rule of Six was in place following Mr. Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme and Mr. Johnson had confirmed that the U.K. was “now seeing a second wave coming in”.
Government advisers were urging Mr Johnson to impose a circuit-breaker lockdown but Mr. Sunak was concerned about the impact on the economy.
During the same meeting, Dame Angela, who was then Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Defence, also called one of the scientists arguing against a shutdown a “f***wit”.
Professor John Edmunds, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the inquiry today that he attended the meeting on Sunday September 20th, along with officials including Mr. Johnson, Mr. Sunak and Sir Patrick.
Email exchanges between Sir Patrick and Professor Edmunds state that the meeting was so Mr. Johnson could hear a “range of views on the forward look” from the “let it rip brigade”.
Professor Edmunds told the inquiry that this referred to “vocal people who took the view that we shouldn’t have locked down in the first place and that we shouldn’t be considering that again”.
This included Oxford University professors Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan, and Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s leading epidemiologist, whose advice shaped the nation’s controversial decision to avoid a blanket lockdown.
The scientists were each given 15 minutes to argue a lockdown was unnecessary at that point, Professor Gupta later revealed.
In an email to Professor Edmunds, shown to the inquiry today, Sir Patrick said “we have tried to put together a balanced group across views and so I think what he needs is your view on future direction of the epidemic”.
The inquiry was shown WhatsApp exchanges between Professor Edmunds and Dame Angela during the meeting, in which she referred to “Dr. Death the Chancellor”.
Lead Counsel Hugo Keith KC asked Professor Edmunds: “Did you understand those were references to the eat out to help out campaign of which you’d spoken about?”
Professor Edmunds said: “Honestly, it’s so long ago I don’t know but it could well be.”
The brief WhatsApp exchange was introduced after Professor Edmunds criticised the Eat Out scheme, which was introduced in August 2020. It provided a 50% discount on food and non-alcoholic drinks to customers who ate inside at participating restaurants.
Professor Edmunds, who sat on nearly 100 SAGE meetings during the pandemic, told the inquiry: “To be honest, it (the scheme) made me angry and I’m still angry about it.
“It was one thing taking your foot off the brake which is what we’ve been doing by easing the restrictions, but to put the foot on the accelerator, it seemed to me perverse.
“To spend public money to do that, when 45,000 people had just died… the optics of it were terrible. This was a scheme to encourage people to take an epidemiological risk.”
Worth reading in full.
So, the Government’s new Chief Scientific Adviser was a lockdown fanatic, formerly at the Ministry of Defence, who pushed hard behind the scenes to promote restrictions and discredit opposition to lockdown. And we’re supposed to believe lockdown won’t happen again? The same people are still in charge.
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If all else fails, repeat the failure
Exactly. Pigs will fly before we ever hear the words, “We have to learn to live with Covid” coming out of China. And so the human rights abuses continue on an epic scale..
What do you call it when you do the same thing over and over and expect different results? “Five Year Plan, comrade!” Or is that “Great Leap Forward” (read: great step backward)?
No doubt authoritarians and despots around the world are looking at the social experiment that is today’s China to learn just how far a population can be enslaved and abused, how much 21st century man, with all his modern day luxuries and technological comforts, can take before he cracks.
And the authoritarians and despots, of which there is no shortage in our own country, must be very encouraged by what they see.
As I’m sure we all learned in the film ‘A Bugs Life’, there’s a lot more of us than there are of them. All you need is the courage to stand up to them, or something like that.
Courage unlike apathy, is in very limited supply…
“It’s hard not to be a menace to society, when half the population is happy on their knees”, as Five Finger Death Punch would say. Though I would argue that it is a LOT more than half the population!
Indeed, it is the ultimate gilded cage. And no matter how gilded, it is ultimately still a cage.
Absolutely agree.
Do not forget that, from the start, the WuFlu killed preferentially men that were no longer economically active.
Which country has the most unbalanced population, after following a one baby family policy?
Politicians of all countries would be happy to see older plebs thinned out.
Happy coincidence?
Successful design by Chinese scientists and their Western chums like Fauci and Farrar?
You choose!
I would be really interested to hear Michael P Senger’s take on the latest waves of lockdowns in China. According to his book (Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down The World), the first lockdowns were all part of a plot to prompt the West to follow suit with the aim of undermining our economies and values (free speech, independent judiciary etc.). I found his argument compelling but it is difficult to see how the latest developments fit in to his theory. Are they an attempt to re-boot lockdowns around the world? Have factions in the CCP started to believe their own lies? I wonder if anyone has seen him comment on this?
I agree that this is a very interesting and somewhat confusing development.
My understanding is that in the earlier phases of the outbreak the CCP was incredibly limited in its use of actual lockdowns – for example they instituted travel bans between urban centres within Hubei province plus a ban on public transport, but only inflicted the full house-arrest type of lockdown in one city; and it was the latter exception to the rule that they deceptively used as a template for the rest of the world, including via its sympathetic WHO mouthpiece. The Chinese regime also, of course, allowed travel in and out of the country long after they were aware of the emergence of COVID-19.
All of these factors lend full credence to Michael Senger’s hypothesis that the massive exaggeration of the threat posed by this flu-like illness, its deliberate international propagation plus the promotion of unprecedented mass home confinement were designed by the CCP to weaken the West and relatively strengthen its own economic and strategic position.
With that in mind my best guess about the recent apparent conversion to a genuine ‘Zero-Covid’ strategy would be that the CCP is extremely worried about external scrutiny of its original duplicity and criminally reckless behaviour over the disease and is desperately trying to deflect attention / engaging in a sort of cover-up – with its much brutalised population yet again being used as the fall guys.
Presumably it was not a coincidence that most of the studies promoting the asymptomatic transmission myth originated from the PRC?
Wasn’t aware of that, but not surprised at all. The whole thing has CCP-style pseudo-scientific and deceptive fingerprints all over it.
What we are hopefully witnessing now is a mass awakening in the still (relatively) free West from a decades long undermining and anti-democratic campaign based on faked crises such as ‘Climate Change’, Coronavirus (in reality a variation of flu or even just a common cold) etc.
Spot on
I’d go with that hypothesis. Let’s not forget, those in China with their great firewall are ignorant of the outside world, granted there will be some with unlocked phones but a small proportion in the whole and never enough to create a critical mass of awakening to the reality of their lives compared to the west’s – ignorance is bliss. Of course we do have similar problems over here even without firewalls (well at least not in admitted service and to the extent they do – only in our captured press and social media companies trying to censor certain narratives but ultimately failing in the long run). Point being the CCP don’t really care about their populations’ rights or standard of living given their positions in government aren’t ever under threat – there could very well be a swathe of opinion that the west is still battling with covid just like they are and are having to suffer similar policy. How would they know any different.
Even though I’ve said that it does make one wonder what we’re all still naïve to, and are we, at least to some extent also living in a CCP style society under the guise of our supposed enlightened democracies. Food for thought.
There is a long list of policies that Bunter and his annointed “experts” were hot for that a bright 12 year old might have questioned.
Closing down kiddies’ playgrounds?
Decanting elderly hospital patients, untested, into care homes?
Appointing an Executive Member of the British Communist Party to head up the agit-prop?
Appointing Neil Pantsdown Ferguson to provide doom laden computer models?
Intubation?
Everyone on here could add another dozen.
And remember that the “opposition” were hot for sooner harder longer.
On your last point, for at least 3 decades now democratic rights and freedoms in the UK have been eroded via a ‘boiling frog’ process, with the Coronavirus lockdowns and mask / vaccine mandates representing their near complete breakdown and assimilation into a CCP-style centralised command and control structure.
I say near because even at the lowest points of this slide into quasi-tyranny we have still maintained basic rights to freedom of speech and political opposition (and in anticipation of a possible challenge to this being ‘cancelled’ on YouTube or Twitter really is not the same as being interned in a concentration camp, or worse, in China).
As I stated earlier I am also confident that now that the catastrophic economic costs of the coronavirus fiasco and the similarly pseudo-scientific and wasteful ‘Climate Change’ / Net Zero agenda are being felt the population in the West is beginning to wake from this prolonged period of ideological hypnosis (a stupor encouraged, of course, by hostile anti-democratic regimes such as the CCP itself), and a quite dramatic change of direction might come about remarkably quickly.
Just the conclusion that I came to.
21 million locked down for 157 cases? I don’t know, words fail me really.
Looking at the illustrating photo, and other very similar pics of Chinese city centres, it would appear that the urban population is a sitting duck, living the way they do – so easy for the authorities just to seal up the front door of the block, and guard hundreds of people with just four guards, one for each side of the building. I have no doubt that the rural population is not controlled in this way – too darned difficult. Of course, one could also point out that cramming so many humans into close proximity is an ideal siruation for spreading disease.
James C. Scott has entered the conversation. His book “Seeing Like a State” is entirely about how modernist “improvement” schemes carry a hidden payload of making what they “improve” more legible to, accessible to, and thus controllable by the state.
Indeed this is sadly true. In my view at least, many improvements related to technology have benefits as well as downsides in terms of convenience to the user and overall efficient use of resources, but they are more open to abuse – and it seems the willingness to abuse is there, and unfortunately the majority are too trusting.
There is an old Chinese saying, ‘The Emperor is far away’. I think that it probably a very different world out in the sticks, but it is stupefying that the authorities are carrying on a failed solution.
I think it’s much easier to make sense of this if we avoid the trap of seeing lockdowns as disease control measures. The Chinese authorities understand very well that ‘Covid-19’ is a confected threat. Lockdowns, in my opinion, are economic measures. We are living through the Third World War, which is an economic war for control of the next century. As Denis Rancourt says, the Covid-19 exercise was a war measure which enabled national governments to enact draconian laws suitable for wartime, not limited to but including:
Chinese economic hari-kari is a means of attacking the West, with its over-reliance on Chinese exports. We should stop thinking about this in terms of a Chinese mistake. China has been on a trajectory towards world domination (with the backing of Western supranational financial elites) for at least thirty years. They understand, I’m sure, the nature of psychological operations, and they don’t make mistakes.
Here would be a pertinent place to share the latest excellent vid from Ivor Cummins, all about the origins of lockdowns. Well I learnt something new because it turns out it didn’t start with China, but the concept was inspired by the school project of a 14yr old kid years earlier.
Yes I wonder what that fraudulent git from the WHO, Bruce Aylward, is getting up to nowadays and what he would now like to say about just how “effective” China’s lockdown, that he fully advocated, was back in 2020. Somebody definitely needs to interview this scumbag and pin him down on what he said to hold him accountable, because personally I’ve not heard from him in 2.5 years! These Mother Hubbards must answer for their part in the universal shitfest. Anyway, the usual great quality run down of the data from our Mr Cummins. Worth a watch;
https://odysee.com/@IvorCummins:f/amazing-true-story-the-actual-origins-of:9
China is really on the wrong side of the moon, so to speak. In more ways than one.
The People’s Republic (lol) of China is on the verge of collapse. Evergrande is the tip of the iceberg of their cascading financial crisis. Ironically, they MIGHT have been able to pull through had they refrained from their perpetual quasi- (and often full and draconian) lockdowns and Zero Covid insanity. But the combination of the two will be their ultimate downfall.
So they won’t last longer than the Soviet Union after all! Question is, what next? I suspect that war and chaos is all too likely.
CCP: locks down 21 million, sparks panic buying.
BMJ/ Independent Sage: be more like the CCP.
You know, perhaps “the enemy within” is about right for BMJ/iSAGE
The Chinese have learned nothing since the days of the cultural revolution. They still think big gestures like this or killing all the sparrows or getting rid of all the academics or locking up pretty much the whole male population of Uighurs will work for whatever reason they’re designed to bring about. They never do. They’ve got some sort of sense bypass or maybe it’s panic because the country is just so darned huge. Imagine governing such a hugely populated country and trying to keep it all functioning – it would do you head in especially if you, as President, were prone to paranoia. Absolutely effin’ bonkers. Nothing more to say.
‘157 new infections’? the deadly fraud continues
so-called ‘covid’ cannot be diagnosed … (1) so-called ‘covid’ has no pathognomonic clinical features, it cannot be clinically distinguished from other respiratory infections (2) the fraudulent PCR test, used for ‘covid diagnosis’, is being deliberately and maliciously upcycled so most ‘positives’ are false (3) ‘detection’ by the PCR test of nucleotide sequences allegedly from SARS-CoV2, and therefore giving a ‘positive’ PCR result, tells us nothing about the presence of genuine infectious respiratory viral illness
there’s no evidence that there has ever been a ‘covid’ pandemic, it’s an in silico fraud
but there’s abundant forensic evidence for an ongoing and fraudulent pandemic of fake ‘covid’ testing
tests other than the PCR used to diagnose ‘covid’ must be assumed to be equally fraudulent, in accordance Lord Denning’s famous 1956 legal dictum that fraud vitiates everything it touches