Was lockdown worth it? That’s the basic question the Covid Inquiry should be asking, says Lord Frost in the Telegraph. But it’s increasingly clear that it has predetermined the answer and is just going through the motions. Here’s an excerpt.
I felt vindicated this month when I heard Prof. Mark Woolhouse say – in one of the few revealing points to emerge so far from the sorry spectacle of the Covid Inquiry – that “in the build-up to that November lockdown in England, as far as I could see, SAGE was simply telling the Government it should lock down … There’s good evidence now that that lockdown was not strictly necessary … I think Government was not given, in the build-up to that lockdown, the full range of policy options it should have been given.”
Prof. Woolhouse makes this general point on two or three occasions. You might think it interesting enough to deserve discussion. But no. “Thank you Professor.” And counsel moves on.
I am afraid that it seems to many of those watching the hearings or reading the transcripts of the inquiry that its Chair, Lady Hallett, and the lead counsel, Hugo Keith, are basing their approach on a particular, preconceived, view of the story of the pandemic lockdowns. That is that Covid was obviously dangerous, that lockdowns were the correct solution to the problem, and that the only real question is the timeliness of the Government’s actions, not their merits.
That is certainly the consensus view. It is convenient for many because it allows attention to be focused on the failings of Boris Johnson personally, rather than on those of the Government machine and the people who ran it. That doesn’t make it correct. I have a view on the subject from my own experience – which is that we would have been better off following the Swedish approach – but I don’t claim a monopoly on wisdom. I am willing to be proved wrong. But sadly this inquiry seems unlikely to help me in this one way or the other.
That’s obvious from the direction of questioning of other main witnesses. So far there has been no serious examination of the modelling and why it turned out, repeatedly, to be so wrong. Prof. Neil Ferguson refers briefly to Sweden in passing in his written evidence, but only to dismiss it as a comparator – yet he was not asked about this at all.
Prof. Carl Heneghan tried to bring Sweden into the discussion, but unsuccessfully; the lead counsel seemingly more interested in sneering at his intellectual credentials. And we can’t be sure that Lady Hallett even understands the concept of trade-offs, since, on the issue of masking, she asked one witness: “I’m sorry, I’m not following, Sir Peter. If there’s a possible benefit, what’s the downside?”
And who knows when this inquiry will actually conclude? Let’s not forget that it took Lord Saville 12 years to investigate the events of 15 minutes in Londonderry in 1972, so perhaps we should be looking to the next century before the inquiry’s vast, meandering, and often irrelevant terms of reference have been properly considered.
All this time and effort would have been better spent on focusing on the only important question, the one thing I really want to know. It is whether lockdowns were the right response to a disease with a fatality rate of somewhere between 0.1% and 0.5%.
If we can be confident of the answer to this question, then if we are hit again, we will have a better idea of what to do. But all the efforts to allocate blame, all the email and WhatsApp archaeology, all the rush to point the finger, just make it less likely we will get that answer. Key witnesses will look to protect themselves. No one is going to admit willingly, “in retrospect, I think I got that wrong”. Yet without that we will never discover what was right.
Worth reading in full.
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‘Saoirse (pronounced “Sur-sha”)’
Saoirse is pronounced “Seer-sha”.
In case anyone meets her, Saoirse Ronan apparently pronounces her name SUR-sha. She says herself Seer-sha is also another, very common pronunciation.
It’s a bit of a minefield. I think this may be where the problems started:
‘The earliest written records of Gaelic are in Ogham, a script used in early medieval Ireland. Ogham is sometimes called the “Celtic tree alphabet” because each letter is associated with an Irish tree name’
I know a few women called Saoirse, I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it ‘Sur-sha’, not even people on TV or radio referring to Saoirse Ronan. It’s a bit odd, it’s like someone called Vera wanting it to be pronounced ‘Vura’.
There’s an MP from Northern Ireland called Sorcha Eastwood, but it’s spelt Sorcha, not Saoirse.
Are you sure it’s not pronounced “id-i-ot?”
Courts have to start handing out exemplary punishment for this offence.
In cases with rock solid DNA evidence for murder, I, personally, would have at least one perpetrator every year shot.
This would provide both useful live firing practice for our young soldiers, who would queue round the block to participate, and a stark deterrent to potential offenders.
Anybody who appoints themselves as a spokesperson for victims of rape and sexual assault, whilst simultaneously being of the “Refugees welcome”/”Women can have penises and enter female spaces and sports” is an idiotic, deluded, hypocritical traitor.
You cannot be both concerned about women’s personal safety and be a woketard, it’s not possible. These people are frauds and traitors to their own sex.
There would be altogether less sex crimes if there were less people in society who belonged to these two misogynist cults. Less stabbings and mutilation of kids/young people also.
This from Germany illustrates my point about who the actual perpetrators of the majority of sexual assaults and stabbings are, and ignoring this by potentially introducing female-only carriages on trains is hardly getting to the root cause of the problem. Especially considering you can now change your gender in Germany from the age of 14yrs, this idea seems even more pointless;
”Antje Kapek, the transport policy speaker for the Green Party in Berlin, has called for the introduction of train carriages for exclusive use by female passengers. This follows a shocking upsurge in serious sex crimes on trains and buses, with Berlin alone experiencing the equivalent of more than one such assault every day. Frankfurt is heading in a similar direction.
Transport hubs across Germany are becoming less safe. Federal Police recorded 13,543 violent crimes at train stations in the first half of 2024.
Critics point out that such changes to ticketing and rolling stock would leave the basic problem intact, that of sexual aggression from men. For the German Greens, this points to a separate issue they would rather not discuss: the actual men being arrested for these offences. When news outlet NiUS analysed a list of the names of suspected rapists from North Rhine-Westphalia, it concluded that 55.8 percent of the perpetrators were either not German or from a migrant background.
The Greens—who fully supported the opening of Germany’s borders in 2015—would sooner not address the fact that men from specific communities are disproportionately represented in the crime statistics compared to their numbers within the overall population. Women-only train carriages would respond to a symptom of the problem, in the deflection-oriented style preferred by the collapsed traffic light coalition government.
Other examples of this approach involve telling railway staff in Thuringia that ticket inspection is now discretionary and that conductors can opt out of checking the credentials of passengers who appear to be foreign, due to the threat of assault. Nationally, faced with a wave of stabbing, the authorities are considering a ban on knives in public with blades over 6 cm in length. This focus by the government on objects rather than perpetrators helps explain why German voters are growing bemused and angry with the official failure to grasp the nettle of violent crime.”
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/german-greens-advocate-women-only-train-carriages/
The 3 photos of men in blackface are definitely Welsh miners. This is why the Welsh Labour party needs to destroy white culture.
https://x.com/Basil_TGMD/status/1857100800054468634
It isn’t just rape and murder of white women though is it. Today’s papers report the murder of a 24 yr old woman found in the boot of a car in Ilford, East London. Her name was Harshita Brella (Harshita is an Indian name) and the police believe she was murdered by someone known to her. (In other words, they suspect it could be an “honour” killing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39nwjygjgro
We have imported millions of men from a cultural and religious background who believe women and girls are their property to be disposed of – literally – however they wish. If they have no care or respect for the individuality and rights of their own women/girls, why should they have any for white girls who they consider to be slags and “easy meat?”
Prophesied in the book of Revelation:
And he cried with a mighty voice, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great! She has become an abode of demons, and a prison of every unclean spirit, and a prison of every unclean and hated bird. For all the nations have drunk from the wine of her raging fornication, and the kings of the earth have fornicated with her.”
Babylon the Great stands for western civilisation, standing on the foundations of the first civilisation that rose up in Uruk Mesopotamia and now sexualised to the point of being depicted as a prostitute. The nations, symbolised as birds (Daniel 4:14), have introduced unclean religions into the city. Thus the largest mosque in the western world by land area is the Mosque of Rome, with Strasbourg’s not far behind. Demons have returned to the house that was swept clean of them and brought with them spirits more evil than themselves. The sense is not that they are captives, rather they hold the city captive.
More on this in When the Towers Fall: A Prophecy of What Must Happen Soon.
This was 5 years ago but is about pathological altruism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o40yZO2QPc
It happened again.
And an update 1 year ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzWVkHlAXhQ&t=183s
It happened again.
These are very much related.
Ah, the acting profession where they are at their best when somebody else tells them what to do and what to say. They should stick to that.
Never heard of this Ronan nonentity and I’m quite pleased about that. What a waste of space!