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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Within the Telegraph article we find:
It didn’t need to swing. Not the first time nor the second nor the third. As Albert Einstein almost certainly didn’t point out: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
So let me get this straight. The PM initally didn’t believe in lockdowns. Neither did the Hancock, Witty and Valance trio? Dominic Cummings – who looks abit odd and almost certainly is – contacted his mates to come up with terrifying models of apocalypse if we didn’t close the country down and impoverish and destroy great swathes of our lives and businesses and economy.
And I’m the unmasked, unvaccinated baddie? Really?
The real scandal is that the general public trusted them too much, and in effect showed a batch of group thinkers that they could get away with murder. Back in 2020, as the panic developed, I thought that it demonstrated how the German government got away with what happened in the 1930s.
A lot of people dislike or mock The Spectator but you cannot fault their willingness to give platforms to unpopular/alternative views
One of the reasons I am a subscriber. I do not mind having my assumptions/prejudices challenged – provided the arguments are well made and not woke nonsense. I think that The Spectator broadly gets this right.
The comments section to Fraser Nelson’s column (geddit?) is quite illuminating too.
The petri-dish for infection monitoring, the Diamond Princess, had all elderly passengers aboard, some 3,000 plus if memory serves. The ‘rampant,’ contained infection onboard killed 14 souls, a fatality rate of .0037. Compare and contrast the real world numbers with the woefully inaccurate tripe arrived at by Ferguson.
It had passengers and crew across the age range. It showed that many youngsters were not infected, those that were had negligible or very mild symptoms.
Those most affected and among whom the fatalities occurred were 70+.
In other words – it was a Common Cold – not even ‘flu – epidemic, milder than most.
Thanks for the steer. It prompted me to google the precise numbers. Suffice it to say, Ferguson was no nearer the real world. 3,711 pob.(Persons on board), comprising 1,045 crew, median age 36. Zero deaths, 145 infections.
Passengers, 2,666. Median age 69. 567 infections, 14 deaths, all 70s and 80s.
You’d have thought somebody somewhere would have used those numbers to temper the wildly inaccurate modelling. Obviously not.
And remember what the MSM reporting about the Diamond Princess was like. Selective with the truth comes to mind for the usual suspects, esp BBC News.
The problem with Sage/modellers is that they appear to know the square root of f. all about how virus behave, transmit and the immune system.
But there again nobody knows, or ever will know, precisely how and why some people get ill and others don’t.
For example, there is the Seattle trawler case, and the Argentinian trawler case. How did so many trawlermen, completely isolated from the outside world for weeks, “catch covid”? And also it was discovered that some actually had antibody protection to this “completely new virus”.
Then there’s the experiment in Belgium or (Holland?) nursery schools. Over three winter months one was thoroughly deep cleaned every day ie to eliminate all pathogens on toys, work surfaces etc and the other just normal cleaning. Rigorous testing proved that the deep cleaned one was virtually virus/bacteria free – the other wasn’t.
The result – virtually identical levels of sicknesss/absences (the dirty one being slightly better). I can’t find the link, but I believe it is one of Tom Jefferson’s favourites.
I’m no virus denier but surely the above blows a pretty big hole in Germ Theory – which, funnily enough is bigpharma’s God.
Much proper research is desperately needed re immunology/vaccinology, sorry, gene therapies and virus.
Won’t happen – no money in it and besides mRNA will be able to cure us all of everything.
“But there again nobody knows, or ever will know, precisely how and why some people get ill and others don’t.”
Well largely we do. It depends on the state of the immune system in each individual which depends on general state of health, age, but also every individuals physiology – genetic influence – is different to the next.
This is why real CoVid deaths were among those with weakened immune systems, 95% of whom were over 80 with one or more serious medical conditions and who were near death.
It also depends on previous exposure to pathogens. Measles was mostly not fatal to Europeans, but European colonists infected the South American natives with it in whom it was nearly always fatal, because it was a pathogen never before present in their environment.
It also depends on the level of exposure to a pathogen. (A bit like poison is a matter of dose. )
And North American natives were affected in the same way, not necessarily Measles, but at least by locally unknown bugs imported by colonists.
I accept what you say entirely, and am aware we know a lot about these matters and that’s why I used the term “precisely”.
Of the many books and articles I’ve read, mainly immunological, one particular phrase resonates often, and that is “the mechanism behind thiis is not fully understood”. Then there’s the synergy and cascades of immune responses to consider.
Thus in those many cases one simply doesn’t know how much more there is to know – you could be nearly there or miles off (study the man hours/years to discover, for example, inerferon/s). It’s what you don’t know you don’t know that’s the problem.
“The beautiful cure” by Daniel M. Davis. 2018, if anyone’s interested. ( I am not he by the way), details history of immunological discoveries and latest research.
I would be interested to hear your, or anyone’s views om the trawler cases?
So Cummins executed a Coup d’État.
He should be put in the Tower awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock, from a cheap and chippy-chopper on a big black block.
It certainly seems that his hero worship for voodoo mathematical medical modellers swung the day.
I wonder how many entirely preventable deaths, injuries (mental) he and his ilk caused.
FWIW, the only thing he got right was his opinion of Hankok.
I believe the Spectator/Heneghan piece is now outside the paywall, it’s brilliant We needed a Covid inquiry – but this isn’t it | The Spectator
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/savoy-declares-independence-from
Got this from Dr Mike Yeadon’s Telegram channel. Can any of our European members verify?
“What is the point of the Covid Inquiry? It should be to establish which parts of the government’s pandemic response worked, which parts didn’t, and what to do next time. Instead, it is a farce – a spectacle of hysteria, name-calling and trivialities.”
Professor Heneghan’s opening para in his Spectator article which is superb – how on earth does this man keep up this work rate – but I have a big issue with “what to do next time” which amounts to conceding that the pandemic was real and almost invites Billy and the boys to get on with their next release.
As tof would point out – there was no pandemic.
Top class work by Professor Heneghan and at least when the pantomime whitewash is over and we have “lessons will be learned ” nobody can deny Professor Heneghan’s outright debunking.
The standard SIR model of 1927 goes up and down and has no dependencies on change of behaviour – and fits the data from India at the time, flu in an English boarding school and presumably numerous other datasets. When Covid struck the settled science was ignored.
‘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.’
Great! But, meanwhile, in Socialist Fascist Britain:
‘Broadcast content relating to the Coronavirus
Published on 23 March 2020
……..we remind all broadcasters of the significant potential harm that can be caused by material relating to the Coronavirus.
This could include:
• Health claims related to the virus which may be harmful.
• Medical advice which may be harmful.
• Accuracy or material misleadingness in programmes in relation to the virus or public policy regarding it.
We will be prioritising our enforcement of broadcast standards in relation to the above issues.
In these cases, it may be necessary for Ofcom to act quickly to determine the outcome in a proportionate and transparent manner, and broadcasters should be prepared to engage with Ofcom on short timescales.
Ofcom will consider any breach arising from harmful Coronavirus-related programming to be potentially serious and will consider taking appropriate regulatory action, which could include the imposition of a statutory sanction.’
‘Sanctions may include:
Another matter that the inquiry should be looking at: Socialist fascist state censorship.
At the beginning of the epidemic, the “case” numbers followed Farr’s Law. They were clearly not going to reach Ferguson’s estimates, if it was assumed that the mechanism of development of the epidemic was not significantly different to others. In particular, the infection had peaked before the first lockdown, especially if measured by “back working” to time of infection rather than time of case. Figures from Public Health England, published daily at the time. [NB: the sudden drop off in the last two days is an artefact of the daily reporting system and does not represent the final data for those days.]
”case’ numbers’
Yet another matter for the enquiry.
‘Until now (4 February 2022) COVID-19 cases have been reported at the individual level: every positive test taken and reported by one person has been considered part of a single case record, initiated by their first positive test.’
UK HSA
‘The Trust did run the assay for 40 cycles and cited this is standard for many PCR assays.’
PCR Testing in the UK During the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic – Evidence from FOI Requests, April 2022
‘Infectious virus was associated with mean Ct values of 18.8 ± 3.4 (median 18.7)
Not obtaining infectious virus was associated with mean Ct values 27.1 ± 5.7 (median 27.5) (see the figure)
Samples with a Ct value below 23 yielded 91.5% of virus isolates.’
CEBM Aug. 2020
In view of the above, can we have any confidence in NHS case numbers?
Why don’t we have an inquiry into that…..oh……hang on……..
Shame the Speccie did not speak up loudly at the time.
All it seemed to want was to get rid of Boris and then get rid of Truss because she was not their preferred candidate for PM, so they attacked her until Sunak was appointed without a vote. So much for their democratic credentials.