I was interested to hear Sir Patrick Vallance’s excoriating criticisms of the Government’s performance during the early days of Covid on the news this week. No need for me to repeat them because you can read them in Will Jones’s piece here.
Working as a historian and a writer I’m always fascinated by the nature of what passes for historical evidence. One of the most unreliable of all is personal testimony which as we all know is responsible for more miscarriages of justice than any other evidence, and it’s just as unreliable in any other context.
Let’s look back at March 2020, and what do we find? Why, here we have a piece from March 13th 2020 in the Guardian in which Sir Patrick Vallance extolls the virtues of herd immunity, and specifically refutes the value of hard suppression (which of course means lockdown, though back then the word was only just coming into use):
“If you suppress something very, very hard, when you release those measures it bounces back and it bounces back at the wrong time,” he said. The Government is concerned that if not enough people catch the virus now, it will re-emerge in the winter, when the NHS is already overstretched.
Just a few lines earlier, there is the interestingly prescient observation that:
Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission, at the same time we protect those who are most vulnerable to it. Those are the key things we need to do. (emphasis added)
Doesn’t exactly sound like someone champing at the bit to lock everyone down, does it?
Notice that he said ‘our aim’. Our? Who is that. One must assume the Government’s scientific advisers.
Vallance took the trouble to spell this out on TV on the same day, preferring self-isolation as a mechanism to slow the virus down. You can watch a Sky News interview with him here. At four minutes in he points out that a hard lockdown once lifted results in the disease coming straight back, and that therefore it’s far better to go for herd immunity “which would protect everybody” to prevent a second peak.
I didn’t hear what Patrick Vallance had to say today but I did hear what he said at the time. pic.twitter.com/hHribLu6Sj
— Christopher Snowdon(@cjsnowdon) November 20, 2023
He may not have been quick to recommend a full lockdown in March 2020 but he was very quick to change his story within a few weeks. He was already denying he’d ever recommended herd immunity by May 2020, telling MPs, according to Politico, “that when he presented this concept at a press conference in mid-March, he did not mean that the U.K. should try to get immunity through this route. He reiterated that the strategy has always been trying to suppress the peak and keep it below the level at which the National Health Service can cope”.
Just by way of clarification, he added:
I should be clear about what I was trying to say, and if I didn’t say this clearly enough then I apologise. What I was trying to say was that, in the absence of a therapeutic, the way in which you can stop a community becoming susceptible to this is through immunity and immunity can be obtained by vaccination, or it can be obtained by people who have the infection.
Trying to say, but not actually using any of those words originally. Apparently. Interesting because if you want to say something it’s usually best to use the right words, especially at a moment of national crisis. If you try to say something using what you now claim were the wrong words, then people are bound to think you were saying something else. Wouldn’t they?
By September 2020 the BBC had this:
Sir Patrick and the Government have both insisted this [herd immunity] was never official policy. The Government also denies there was any delay in locking down the country, as some critics have suggested.
Emails obtained by the BBC reveal the alarm among the Government’s top scientific advisers at the reaction to Sir Patrick’s words.
In one email from March, Sir Patrick asks for help to “calm down” academics who have expressed anger at his repeated references to herd immunity and the delays in announcing a lockdown.
What do we conclude from this? That he was saying in public different things to what he wrote down in his diary? Do we know when he wrote down his diary? Or what? You tell me.
The truth of course, if there is any truth ever to be had out of all of this, is that back in March 2020 no-one in any position of political or scientific responsibility knew what the hell they were doing, and nor did they thereafter. It’s been a litany of changing narratives, contradictions and denials from day one.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Covid farce, it is that an expert’s expertise is only as good as his last piece of hindsight.
Stop Press: Chris Whitty today conceded to the Covid Inquiry that “with the benefit of hindsight, we went too late” with the first lockdown. Is this the same Chris Whitty who, with the benefit of hindsight in July 2020, told MPs (correctly) that Covid was already falling before the first lockdown? The ‘R number’ went “below one well before, or to some extent before March 23rd”, he said at the time. I’m sure Hugo Keith will be pressing him on this crucial point any minute now…
Stop Press 2: Fraser Nelson makes many of these points and more in the Spectator: “We also learned yesterday that the 4,000-deaths nonsense graph was shown by Vallance at the Halloween press conference because it had been used by Johnson’s advisers to scare him into action – and he felt the public should be shown what he had seen. The story here (which the Covid inquiry missed) was that Johnson was being spun by his advisers and shown misleading data.”
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The guy is just an imbecile totally out of his depth. You’d get more sensible advice from the drunk down yr local boozer than you’d get from our Paddy.
Totally disagree. He is a big fat liar. As Yeadon points out, these guys knew exactly what Yeadon knew, they just chose to take a different position, for reasons we may never be fully informed about, none of them honourable.
I dunno commies are pretty delusional. Most will believe it right until the system comes to kill their own fam.
Maybe so, though for senior commies communism works pretty well – until you are purged…
With you tof. The so-called advisers are lying. Dr Mike Yeadon knows the level of these people and when he says they knew what they were up to it’s because he’s right.
At some point the likes of Witless and Unbalanced were given their orders by a Davos Deviant minion and all of a sudden their stories changed. The facts haven’t changed though and they are still despicable liars as they are proving in the Hallett pantomime.
He is bought and paid for.
He’s not incompetent and neither is Witty they’ve known the truth all along as tof say’s they’re both disgusting liars. I think the change of direction is due to them being either weak or more likely got at and brought.
I’ve always wondered what the compromat is on Witty he always looked nervous about the nonsense he was spouting.
Remember that youth….Witty you are a liar!
I hope yr right but in the case of unbalanced I believe he’s a crack pot commie.
Something changed big time around mid March, globally.
Jeffrey Tucker has looked into this area quite deeply in case of Trump/USA
Most have come to the conclusion that the military&co must have taken charge then.
So much for cockups, that’s for sure.
Yep.
See the Snowden papers.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/edward-snowden-citizenfour-cola/?utm_source=luminate&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=defender&utm_id=20231120
Believe it or not, the Guardian actually was a paragon of investigative journalism – until this….
Spot on. I can also remember his earlier output via the BBC News channel back in early 2020 (I don’t watch it now). It may be that he changed his mind later on, but appears to have been “economical with the truth” at the Inquiry, perhaps just answering the questions that the barrister has asked; legal skills on display.
Anyway, the same barrister is interviewing his mate today, so we’ll see what the outcome is. An hour or so ago, GBN was reporting in it (split with the Korean visit to Buckingham Palace – so a bit disjointed).
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
In good King Charles’s golden days,
When loyalty no harm meant,
A zealous High-Churchman I was,
And so I got preferment;
Unto my flock I daily preached
Kings were by God appointed,
And damned was he that durst resist
Or touch the Lord’s anointed.
And this is law, I will maintain,
Until my dying day, Sir,
That whatsoever king shall reign,
I’ll be the Vicar of Bray, Sir.
When royal James obtained the crown,
And Popery came in fashion,
The penal laws I hooted down,
And read the declaration:
The Church of Rome I found would fit
Full well my constitution,
And had become a Jesuit,
But for the Revolution.
And this is law, I will maintain,
Until my dying day, Sir,
That whatsoever king shall reign,
I’ll be the Vicar of Bray, Sir.
Seems simple to me. In March 2020 it became (for whatever reason) good for one’s career and pocket to promote lockdowns.
Whatever is steering the inquiry that way, it is clear to the same people that preaching earlier and harder lockdowns is the key to preferment now.
The Vicar of Bray analogy is sound – outside of fiction, one can see the prelates doing such repeated back flips throughout the troubled times of the Tudor Reformation, as I often remembered during COVID itself.
One bonus from this nonsense. Millions of us now completely distrust the PTB in both government and “public health”. Next time this all comes round again, lockdown etc. , we will just say – “fuck that, no way”.
Wishful thinking. If my friends are representative of the population then tens of millions need only to be given the nod and they will all dig out their Karen uniforms and insignia and shut their churches, pubs and gatherings, while banging saucepans, flaunting their masked faces on social media and refusing to mingle with the unvaxxed.
Sadly and reluctantly I think you’re correct.
Snowdon was one of the covidiots!
We operate under the assumption that people with good jobs where their opinions have value – that they must have the cohones to hold to these views. If you’re surprised by the stupidity in our society then you will be more more surprised by the cowardice. Not to mention the venality and whorishness of such people, The fact is that we grew up convincing ourselves that the people in charge had at least some integrity. In a sense it was a compulsion because to admit otherwise would undermine the very framework of our own existence. As horrible as all of this is at least it shows things up in the cold light of day.
They wanted to segregate society. That is bad enough in itself. But the badge of being acceptable was to get yourself shot up full of poison. It is like a ‘think of the most evil plan in the world’ exercise. And that’s before you even mention infertility etc. This is no joke. This is the biggest assault that we will ever face even if we come face to face with a nuke in the future.This was cold and calculated and nasty and designed to injure or kill.
You had old men who had let flawlessly conscientious lives who had abstained from the drink all their lives being found in a pool of their own urine and vomit and dead from despair and dejection. The spririt which they pushed forth destroyed the mental health of countless millions from pensioners to small children. And it wasn’t even given a mention as it was happening. A remarkable acceleration in terms of the deterioration of dementia patients. That tells me a lot and all I need to know.
Watching Sir Patrick Valance this morning made me unhealthy angry. I don’t like to think I have it in me to hate anyone, but these people make me sick to the stomach even writing this is making my blood fucking boil.
They have to be hated because anything less is moral failure. You should never carry around hatred in your heart because it is bad for your health. But in termns of awarenss of the situation, you can’t really pretend that this hasn’t happened. And it is an ongong very nasty situation.I am still dealing with the attack of the bioweapon. I don’t think it has permanently reduced me. I don’t care it has done immense damage and I don’t forget.We shouldn’t allow any diminution.