The real Covid scandal is emerging right in front of the inquiry’s nose, writes Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph: Britain could have escaped the horrors of lockdown, but nobody pulled apart the doom models driving it. Here’s an excerpt.
Let’s go back to when much of the world had copied the Wuhan lockdown, with two major exceptions: Britain and Sweden. In both countries, public health officials were reluctant to implement a lockdown theory that had no basis in science. Ditto the case for mandatory masks. The public had responded: mobile-phone data showed millions were already staying home. Could you really put an entire nation under house arrest, then mandate masks, if you had no evidence that either policy would work?
Sweden held firm, but Britain buckled. It was all decided in 10 fateful days where, thanks to inquiries in both countries, we know a lot more about what happened.
The written evidence submitted by Dominic Cummings is one of the richest, most considered and illuminating documents in the whole Covid mystery. He was, in effect, the Head of Staff to a Prime Minister he viewed with despair, even contempt. He has since admitted that he was discussing the possibility of deposing his boss within “days” of his 2019 general election victory. So he was prone to taking matters into his own hands, trying to circumvent what he regarded as a dysfunctional system and an incompetent PM.
His frustration, at first, was directed at the public-health officials who resisted lockdown. SAGE advisers were, at the time, unanimously against it. Even Professor Neil Ferguson fretted that lockdown might be “worse than the disease”. Was this the cool, firm voice of science – or the blinkered inertia of sleepy Whitehall? Cummings suspected the latter and commissioned his own analysis from outsiders, whose models painted a far more alarming picture. He knew these voices would be dismissed as “tech bros”. But, he says, “I was inclined to take the ‘tech bros’ and some scientists dissenting from the public-health consensus more seriously.”
There was no SAGE modelling until quite late on but, soon, models and disaster-graphs were everywhere. Cummings’s evidence includes photos taken in No. 10 of hand-drawn charts with annotations like “100,000+ people dying in corridors”. He says he told Boris Johnson that failure to lock down would end in a “zombie apocalypse movie with unburied bodies”. The PM asked him, if this was all true, “why aren’t Hancock, Whitty, Vallance telling me this?”
It’s a very good question. Cummings told him the health team “haven’t listened and absorbed what the models really mean”. Soon, Neil Ferguson’s doom models were published – and making headway across the world. Britain’s scientists fell in behind the modellers.
It was a different story in Sweden where Johan Giesecke, a former state epidemiologist, had returned to the Public Health Agency and was reading Ferguson’s models in disbelief. Remember mad cow disease, when four million English livestock had been slaughtered to prevent the disease spreading? “They thought 50,000 people would die,” he told his staff. “How many did? 177.” He recalled Ferguson saying 200 million might die from bird flu when just 455 did. Modellers, he argued, had been calamitously wrong in the past. Should society really be closed now on their say so?
On March 18th, Cummings had asked Demis Hassabis, an AI guru, to attend Sage. His verdict? “Shut everything down ASAP.” On the same day, Giesecke’s team in Stockholm was pulling apart Ferguson’s models, finding flaw after flaw. When some Swedish academics started to call for lockdown based on Ferguson’s work, Giesecke agreed to go on Swedish television to debate them. As did Anders Tegnell, his protégé. They gave interviews non-stop, in the street and on train platforms, making the case for staying open. They showed it was possible to win the argument.
Nelson points out that while one internal U.K. report said Covid patients would need up to 600,000 hospital beds, the actual number peaked at 34,000. Johnson was told that 90,000 ventilators were needed, but the actual peak was 3,700 – while all the extra ventilators ordered cost an extraordinary £569 million and ended up in an MoD warehouse gathering dust.
Noting, correctly, that new Covid cases were falling before the first lockdown, Nelson insists that the reason lockdown was not needed was because the voluntary behaviour change was enough to “force” the virus “into reverse”. This, too, is wrong, and also dangerous (though not so dangerous as lockdown) as it implies that even if lockdown is not required, people still need (and need to be encouraged) to cower in their homes when a virus is spreading. But to what end, since the virus is not going to go away and everyone will be exposed sooner or later? The only realistic answer is some kind of healthcare rationing – stay home to protect the NHS and all that. But as Nelson notes, healthcare systems were nowhere near overload, and besides one of the main harms of lockdown – “eight million NHS appointments that never took place”, as Nelson puts it – is people staying away from getting the healthcare they need, so expecting them to do that voluntarily (and encouraging them to do so) hardly helps matters. Lockdown is bad because it keeps people away from healthcare, but we don’t need lockdown because people voluntarily stay away from healthcare is hardly a sound argument.
But the fundamental error in the ‘voluntary behaviour change was necessary’ position is that it fails to recognise that Covid waves, just like waves of other similar viruses, fall by themselves without any behaviour change. You need only look at charts showing winter flu waves and successive Covid waves to see that they all have the same shape – straight up and straight down. It’s the characteristic shape of a respiratory virus outbreak and there is no sign of it being affected by shifts in behaviour to any noticeable degree. Thus, there is no reason to think that behaviour change – everyone staying home – was necessary to bring the first wave down any more than it was for any later wave or the flu every winter. The cause of the drop is likely in all cases to be much more due to the susceptibility of the population to the circulating strain (typically no more than 10-20% of the country are infected in any given virus wave) than any hiding away behind closed doors.
This point aside, Nelson is being a hero in making a big thing out of the failures of lockdown and the inadequacies of the Covid Inquiry to address the evidence properly – even making Carl Heneghan’s overlooked inquiry report the cover piece for this week’s Spectator. Both Heneghan’s piece and Nelson’s Telegraph write-up are worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Heneghan and Tom Jefferson provide data from Lombardy which show behaviour change was not needed to bring down the first wave. Italy was locked down from March 8th (starting with the North), a date which coincided with when new daily Covid hospitalisations plateaued, as the following chart shows. Since new infections precede hospitalisations by at least a week, this indicates that the epidemic had stopped its explosive growth well before the lockdown.
Google mobility data from Lombardy also show that there was no change in behaviour during the pre-lockdown period. While there was a drop in movement following the initial quarantine zone being imposed around a few towns on February 21st, there was no subsequent change that could explain why the outbreak slowed down in the week coming up to lockdown.
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“Covid Inquiry Invites Input From 17 Members of Pro-Lockdown Left-wing Lobby Group ‘Independent SAGE’ Led by Communist Susan Michie”
Sounds fair!
Par for the course..
Protecting themselves, and not real people, perhaps. Anyway, as there was an “independent SAGE”. Perhaps there should be an independent inquiry – indeed, there is one. You don’t have to look too far for that, if it’s organised and ready to dispute the results of the other lot.
Next they will canvass Hancock, Doris, Ferguson, Whitty, Starmer, Sturgeon, Drakeford et al, who will say that they did not do enough, hard enough, fast enough, or deep enough. But there is always next time. Learn from our mistakes, upon reflection, insights etc etc.
“Baroness Heather Hallett, the Chair of the Inquiry, has written to 17 members of Independent Sage which criticised the country’s re-opening and later called for fresh lockdowns.”
in that case, why not just lock her down? She’ll be happy then and can have a whale of a time in solitary confinement!
What a splendid idea.. why didn’t I think of that.. ???
Answer : obviously not as bright as Dinger.. 😉
Well.. Michie’s one red I wouldn’t want under my bed.. and certainly not in it.. perish the thought..
🤣🤣 seriously mate you dont have to be bright to keep up with me, I’m no great shakes! But thankyou anyway 👍
“Independent SAGE” may have been “Independent” of the government, but they are “dependent” on the “pandemic” industry for their existence and importance. Ditto WHO, Big Pharma, “real” SAGE. Goodness knows why so many people took all their pronouncements at face value rather than as people “talking their book”.
MULTI-MILLIONAIRE communist Susan Michie.
Sounds like she’s a little more “equal” than the rest of her comrades!
It’s funny how Communism, whilst claiming to liberate the prolitariate, always seems to have some very rich backers. Could it be that it’s nothing more that a scam to monopolise markets and inflict one’s own hubristic fantasies about the world should be on everyone else?
Susan Michie is probably far right according Marianna Spring.
Everybody is far right according to that lefty tart!
As if the Covid inquiry was anything other than a gaslighting pantomime to mask the greatest looting spree and assault on our lives in modern history.
You know the government is just screwing with us by pretending they are concerned what happened during lockdown , they don’t give a damn.
The COVID inquiry is a political farce supposed to find out that evil Tories killed loads of people by not doing everything-corona earlier, harder, faster and for longer because they cared more about insignificant things like the economy and just don’t care about important things like people. When the select independent SAGE for input but omit HART (for instance) it’s absolutely clear who’s driving the car and where the journey’s supposed to go.
I read of these trips , one journey ended near Durham (or north of Islington) at a beer and curry party that was sanctioned by the police during lockdown.
Right. Instead of asking whether lockdown worked, they are assuming it did. Some inquiry!
Specifically, the Mitch-Thing wanted to keep mandatory public face masking forever as that was never really about COVID. She admitted as such in an interview in 2021, at the height of her pandemic career. She had seen many people with such masks during an earlier holiday in Japan and badly wanted to get Britons to wear them as well to combat unspecific dangerous germs.
“Germs”, such a scientific term
“Independent SAGE”
…
“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”
…
“German Democratic Republic”
You know when they have to say it, it’s because they aren’t.
‘Independent SAGE’, aka ‘Communist SAGE’!
Anyone expecting a proper Inquiry – listening to both sides of the debate – hasn’t been paying attention for the past 3 years.
If you didn’t agree/conform to the Government “line to take” you were silenced. And the Inquiry will do the same, since there must be only one outcome: “lockdowns were justified; the destruction was necessary; the Government did what the Government had to do.”
Move along ….. nothing to see or discuss.
But “lessons will be learned” so that’s OK then
“Take a lateral flow test before entering the building” WTF?
Nowhere does it say HOW LONG befiore – I’m sure that 2 years will suffice.
Governments are whitewashing all the unnecessary damages, destruction of livelihoods, injuries and deaths they caused with their covid policies. You can bet that any government initiated inquiry will do the same as was done during covid. In Canada a National Citizens Inquiry (NCI) was formed to record and has been holding townhall meetings across country inviting people to give testimony. You can find them at https://nationalcitizensinquiry.ca . Many Doctors have testified how they were threatened and coerced and also how they were prevented from giving treatment and reporting vaccine injuries.
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Sorry I really don’t care anymore and if it gets me banned it will be worth it and I’ll cancel my subscription to this site so f it!
ARSEHOLES!!! The lot of them.