In the hundreds of pages of statements submitted to the U.K. Covid Inquiry, important questions are being raised which Baroness Hallett shows little interest in answering, says Michael Simmons in the Spectator. Such as: was lockdown based on a false premise, conjured up by poorly drafted models? And why did the Government put out a ‘graph of doom’ to justify the second lockdown that it knew to be wrong?
On October 31st 2020, some 14 million British TV viewers sat down to watch an emergency press conference in which Boris Johnson, flanked by Sir Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, announced a second lockdown. Sir Patrick presented a slideshow giving the data that justified the restrictions.
It was terrifying. The argument was summed up by a graph saying that if there were “no changes in policy or behaviour”, there could be up to 4,000 deaths a day, three times the number from the first wave in the spring. …
But the graph was wrong. It was out of date and based on flawed information, as was later pointed out by academics including Cambridge’s David Spiegelhalter and by the U.K. Statistics Authority itself. Might this have been a genuine mistake? In the rush and the panic – news of the lockdown had already leaked to the press – surely officials would have published a wrong graph only if they believed it to be right?
In his testimony, Warner remembers seeing a graph being circulated among scientists two days before lockdown that was “screen-shotted out of a SPI-M [the modelling group] working paper”. …
Angela McLean, now Chief Scientific Adviser but then at the Ministry of Defence, sounded the alarm. The graph had been based on a rate of virus growth – the R number – that was by then known to be incorrect. …
Warner testified that he went into the cabinet room to raise the alarm to the Prime Minister and his officials. The Covid peak might be half of that forecast, he said. Having flagged corrupt data, he thought the graph would be taken out of circulation. …
Only later did Warner find out that this graph had been shown on national television.
Worth reading in full.
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The youth of today seem more troubled than those of the past despite all the safeguards put in place for them.
Our should that read “because of all the safeguards”?
Moronphobia!!
Nice to see some new names popping up in the comments.
Tell your friends!
Cracking name
Try telling them to read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Less trigger, more atom bomb.
Get rid of these people and their patronising ways, pandering to the worst sides of human nature.
BE TOUGH – BECAUSE LIFE IS!
The only things that need trigger warnings are the bloody trigger warnings.
I suggest to discontinue the use of terms like snowflakes for the victims of all these intellecutal safety procedures, namely, the students, who have no way of opting out of them and keep being told/ taught that this would be necessary by people who are at least as clever as the majority of students and have much more real-world experience. This is obviously outrageous nonsense but it’s really just university administration health and safety teams on autopilot. Their job is to attach trigger warnings to stuff and given enough time (and money for salaries) they’ll eventually have all of the world covered with them.
Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and Orwell’s ‘1984’ must have left the syllabus long ago.
More bombardment of inconsequential woke rubbish to distract us.
Meanwhile, the ruling elites work in the background on the stuff that really matters.
I just wonder how many of these snowflakes play/ed violent games on line or watched violent movies?
Trigger warnings will be attached to these in due course. That’s just a matter of busy people finally getting around to that.