The Eat Out to Help Out scheme is a recurring theme in the Covid Inquiry. A witness statement from Rishi Sunak was shown to the inquiry on Monday.
I don’t recall any concerns about the scheme being expressed during ministerial discussions, including those attended by Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty and then-Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance.
Patrick Vallance responded: “We didn’t see it before it was announced, and I think others in the Cabinet Office also said they didn’t see it before it was formulated as policy. So we weren’t involved in the run-up to it.”
He added: “I think it would have been very obvious to anyone that this inevitably would cause an increase in transmission risk, and I think that would have been known by ministers.”
It’s not evident to us, so we thought we’d look at the evidence – something the inquiry isn’t too keen on.
Several approaches can be taken to look at the issue. First, we examine the Government’s Eat Out to Help Out statistics and geographic breakdown commentary.
It follows that the areas with the most participating outlets would have the most infections. One example is the South West, which claimed 11 million meals, nearly as many as the total for the South East or the North West. Yet cases kept falling until mid-Sep in the South West.
Cornwall (see the dark blue at the bottom left of the U.K. map) became the centre of the U.K.’s holiday destination as so many couldn’t leave the country. However, Vallance would have us believe that Cornwall, the Scottish Highlands and other scattered areas were the highest risk.
As it doesn’t fit the narrative, let’s also look instead at cases in Northern Europe – the answer might be that while U.K. cases were going through the roof in 2020, European cases may have flatlined or disappeared due to the lack of an eat-out scheme. As the data show, it’s not that straightforward.
If, as Vallance says, the scheme increased transmission risk, we would see a rise in cases within a week of the scheme starting in England. The modelling told us that some 80% of the population was susceptible and had no seasonal effect. Yet, it’s a little hard to spot.
You’d expect a dramatic rise in cases in August 2020 once the scheme came into force. So, we’ve focused on the surrounding months to show it had little effect until schools returned.
Writing in the Spectator, Michael Simmons asks whether the Eat Out to Help Out was behind the second wave? He says: “For the vast majority of August (when the scheme ran)… Covid cases were shrinking. Serious growth then only restarts in September and October.” Simmons also points out that in the “ONS’s infection survey there’s no sign of a great increase in Covid cases until the months after the scheme finished”.
Vallance’s assessment of the transmission risk also makes the same mistake the modellers make – it assumes we would have stayed home instead of going out. Yet what else would we have done in the absence of the scheme? Some of us would have still gone out to eat, some to the pub, and we would have inferred the same transmission risk.
We are at odds with the cost of the Eat Out to Help Out scheme – £849 million – and the level of fraud: the Public Accounts Committee estimated the scheme fraud losses at £71 million, almost 8.5% – suggesting one in every 12 meals claimed never existed and were never eaten.
It is concerning that the inquiry allows this evidence-free narrative to go unchallenged. It isn’t asking the critical questions about whether certain assumptions are grounded in evidence or just an adviser’s hunch. The inquiry’s continuing interest in political assassinations means it does not know what the evidence and the data show about the Eat Out to Help Out Scheme and, notably, how much it impacted the risk of infection.
Dr. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Dr. Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist based in Rome who works with Professor Heneghan on the Cochrane Collaboration. This article was first published on their Substack, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.
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Not unrelated; some truth in that!
Here’s seven signs that show Western civilization could soon end
Excellent- nutjob conspiracy theories about the decline and fall of our civilisation are now in the Daily Mail.
A similar thing that happened to the Yeoman farmers happened to WW1 Landowners who died in battle:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmwsb9j4tWU&t=2s
How long in weeks was the life expectancy of a lieutenant on the Western Front?
From what I heard shorter than the regular soldier. How is that relevant to the Royals hovering up their land?
But, did they?
https://x.com/CilComLFC/status/1878137821443072396
And here is a perfect example of wokeism being put out by the Welsh government.
I think most here would consider this enticement. Doubtless for the ROPers this is aimed at it is surely just a permission notice for when the RNLI drops them off. So it really, really, really is NOT their fault.
Absolutely sickening.
And more fool us for not hanging the sons of birches
They’re taking the mickey.
Talking of wokeism, Arsenal are playing in all white today to show red a red card – or some shit like that. I don’t know what moron designed the shirts – Stevie Wonder perhaps – given that the shirt numbers are also white with the thinnest of black outlines. and the reason is to virtue signal about knife crime in London. Obviously missed the knighthood given to a man who has seen a huge growth in knife crime on his watch.
I think Casey is basically right. The parallels are undeniable.
It cn be bloody hard to see the way back from the destruction we have allowed to be wrought upon our magnificent civilization.
The rape gangs scandal may well come to be seen as a watershed moment – in one way or the other.
As a science student at the time, viewing Dr Jacob Bronowski’s landmark 1973 BBC series “The Ascent of Man” was a formative scientific experience.
The series began with primitive man’s first migration from Africa’s Rift Valley, and in a 13-episode tour de force went on to explain how science and technology had been so fundamental to Western civilisation.
In the final episode, Dr Bronowski concluded by stating that the ascendancy of Western civilisation could not be taken for granted. Prophetic words begin at around 36 minutes in:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0g1kpd9/the-ascent-of-man-13-the-long-childhood
The good Doctor’s last testimony to the future, he died the following year.
I’m amazed it has not been more widely denounced as racist. Probably helps that some of his family were apparently killed in Auschwitz.
I’m inclined to think you can’t judge the past by the mores of the present, verities tend to outlast the temporal and -isms can be in the eye of the beholder.
I’d always assumed the death of his family at Auschwitz to be as told in an earlier episode of the series.
I am certainly not judging him, just suggesting that it’s likely sooner or later that his probable neglect of the “achievements” of various races and focus on the achievements of White people will make him a Bad Person in the eyes of the madleft as one of our fellow posters calls them.
I have no idea whether the Auschwitz story is true or not, just saying it might have bought him some brownie points (I did find one commentator who posited that JB might be a racist but dismissed it because his family were victims of the holocaust – illogical bollocks but there you go).
Bollox is as bollox says and does.
Wokeism is dead as dead as the green agenda. It might not look that way yet but all it takes is a certain tightening of material well-being and all of this fancy thought disappears very rapidly. You quickly understand that the people that you need to value are the people who offer the best chance of survival.
I think the worm is turning but the war is not yet won.
We are at Alemein, not D Day.
“Before Alamein we never had a victory, after Alamein we never had a defeat.”
There was Operation Market Garden though.
It has gone. Spengler talked about this stage, home economicus. The bankers say inflate or die. That means lots of war because it is the greatest inflationary pressure. The West is now severely overstretched militarily. Sadly a school of thought has grown up in the last 25 years among the Anglo-Americans that a nuclear war is essentially winnable. They really believe it and they talk about it openly now. If this permanent bureaucracy isn’t somehow dislodged very quickly then only blind and mindless destruction can follow.
There was a British study in 1985 if I recall. which looked at the effect of a single nuclear weapon hitting the UK. It concluded that even if all the hospital beds were empty the health system would still be completely overwhelmed by such an event. And that was at a time when the NHS was healthier than it is now. I strongly disagree with this doctrine of escalation to nuclear as if it is just another step.
I do believe there were parts of East England that had radiation contamination from the Chernobyl accident.
There is a good documentary, I forget the name about a huge undergoround site in Finland where they try to bury all the nuclear waste products. You can put it in the ground or under the sea but you can’t undo the dark magic. Can any civilisation survive when it has developed tools that can blow itself to pieces. The idea the nukes will be left on the shelf forever. I would say no destruction is assured. Maybe then we rise up again, as Plato said of the post-Atlantean period, like children with no recollection of what went before.
We’re all doomed.
To underline what is happening, the corrupt legal system we have (refer to Paul Barret’s YouTube posts about Tommy Robinson for example) there are other examples, is another step towards the failure of our civilisation unless we can have legal proceedings accurately monitored and corrected when they go wrong.