For those of us on the side of sanity, reason and data-driven evidence, the refusal of Covid extremist ‘experts’ to admit mistakes has been a constant, oppressive source of frustration.
The names of those involved in creating a false consensus based on inaccurate information have become an infamous reminder of the dangers of excessive reliance on a few politically motivated individuals: Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Jerome Adams, Deborah Birx, and later entries like Ashish Jha and Vivek Murthy.
There were a host of others who had a significant impact on the rampant spread of indefensible, immediately disproven ideas, mandates and policies.
Many continue into 2024 to advocate failed policies, ‘interventions’ that still don’t work and unnecessary panic. And all with the willing participation of major media outlets dedicated to continuing their preferred narratives. For example, those who support the endless Covid vaccination series over natural immunity.
This week we saw two wildly opposite storylines on Covid narratives that indicate yet again the disastrous incompetence of the ‘expert’ class.
New Variants Mean Same Old Masks
Perhaps the two most popular excuses for the failure of pandemic interventions were lack of compliance and new variants.
The United States was unable to control Covid because not enough people wore masks, even though Sweden had better outcomes with virtually no masking. And South Korea with its masking culture wound up near the top of case rate charts. Not to mention that the flu was eliminated in countries with wildly different mitigation strategies and mask compliance.
Then as new variants predictably emerged throughout 2021 and 2022, the failure of Covid vaccines to control infections and the disintegration of the response in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and elsewhere was blamed on the Delta and Omicron variant.
Never mind the absurdity of believing that Covid could be eliminated or controlled permanently if marginally more transmissible variants would lead to essentially unchecked spread.
But the variant panic didn’t stop in 2022. Or 2023. And based on the start to 2024, it’s not stopping this year either.
The Sun newspaper reported on the rise of the JN.1 variant in an article from January 9th, covering what the U.K. ‘experts’ had expected to happen as a result of a new, more distinct variant emerging around the holidays.
With temperatures plummeting and socialising inside with loved ones over Christmas, experts predict cases could continue to rise throughout January.
Professor Peter Openshaw, a virus expert at Imperial College London, told the Sun Health: “We’re going to see quite a major surge in infections over the coming weeks – the wave could be bigger than anything we’ve seen before.”
He said in a bid to help stop the spread, Brits who haven’t received a Covid booster this winter should consider wearing masks in public again.
“To help stop the spread, those who haven’t had the Covid booster should consider wearing face masks in public places, like on trains, when shopping and at large events,” he said.
A “virus expert” from Imperial College, the same Imperial College where the notorious Neil Ferguson model originated, made the prediction that “we’re going to see quite a major surge in infections” with a wave that “could be bigger than anything we’ve seen before.”
How would we ever stop this insurmountable wave? That would be by wearing masks and getting booster doses, of course!
Another ‘expert’, Professor Christina Pagel of University College London, predicted that the JN.1 wave would be similar or larger than Omicron: “I am sure this wave will rival the first two Omicron waves in 2022 and might even exceed them,” she said.
While another Professor of Virology, Jonathan Bell, from the University of Nottingham and Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, did say he wasn’t that concerned about the impacts on JN.1, he did also tell the Sun that the rise in JN.1 cases is a “sign of things to come”.
“New variants will continue to evolve, replace pre-existing variants causing major outbreaks of infection,” he said.
So now that we’re officially past January, how did these predictions age?
Not well!
On January 9th, the rolling 7-day average of newly reported Covid ‘cases’ in the United Kingdom was 938. By January 17th, just over a week afterwards, it had dropped to 750. Eminently qualified ‘experts’ from some of the most prestigious universities in the world predicted a surge from JN.1 that would equal or exceed Omicron, with the promise of the ensuing weeks after January 9th to be an unmitigated disaster of unchecked infections, particularly because of the Christmas/Boxing Day/New Year’s holidays and the traditional gatherings.
Instead, the cases dropped 20% in just one week after their doomsday predictions were made.
Every. Single. Time.
Obviously the U.K., and all countries, are in a very different testing environment than when Omicron hit in late 2021. But to compare the JN.1 “surge” to Omicron is laughable by any measure.
In early 2022, the U.K., despite mask mandates and vaccine passports in many locations, was reporting nearly 160,000 new ‘cases’ each day.
While, again, testing has been widely diminished, the current seven-day average is around 750. This is likely lower now given that the dashboard hasn’t been updated in several weeks.
It’s a similar story with hospitalisations too. Even in January 2023, a year after the Omicron peak, there were nearly 10,000 people in the hospital with a positive Covid test.
This January it’s around 3,900, and remaining flat to trending downwards, despite the JN.1 “surge”.
It’d be easy to say that it’s difficult to imagine a series of predictions aging worse than the ones made by virology and infectious disease experts about the upcoming, inevitable, overwhelming “surge” in the U.K. in January – if we hadn’t already seen the ‘experts’ make similarly hyperbolic and inaccurate predictions periodically since 2020.
Speaking of…
Zero Covid Goes Down The Drain
Professor Devi Sridhar, one of the top advisers to the Scottish Government on Covid during the early part of the pandemic, made her fame in 2020 by being a fanatical ‘zero-Covid’ advocate.
An absurd, nonsensical idea that had no chance of long-term success considering the virus had been spreading globally long before anyone realised it, Sridhar nonetheless had outsized influence on policy making in Scotland, and unfortunately with global impact from a massive social media presence and media promotion.
And now she claims that she regrets saying ‘zero-Covid’ at all.
The Daily Mail reported on Sridhar’s comments at the U.K.’s Covid inquiry, a set of hearings on the country’s pandemic response. She told the inquiry at her recent appearance that her many references to “eliminating” the virus were actually all a big mistake.
“This was a mistake I made using the word ‘elimination’,” she said, according to the Mail, while claiming that “maximum suppression” would have been more accurate.
However Sridhar frequently used the term “elimination” in public communications, as catalogued on Twitter by Anthony LaMesa.
In another post the next week, Sridhar said “The best and safest way to get schools back full-time is to stop community transmission. The fastest way to get restaurants and city centres full again is to stop community transmission. A zero-Covid approach is the ‘least worst’ path forward. And it is feasible.”
It was not feasible.
By summer 2020, we knew that masks didn’t stop respiratory viruses, especially Covid. We knew that schools didn’t need to close, because of Sweden’s example. We knew that transmission was airborne, meaning that eradication and elimination was impossible. We also knew that there had already been and would most assuredly continue to be massive harms from the closures and mandates enacted in a futile, feeble attempt to control the uncontrollable. Sridhar forcefully advocated for ‘zero-Covid’ anyway, and was quite clear in her definition of such efforts as meant to eliminate the virus from local communities.
She of course had no plan to continue that “elimination” permanently.
Yet now it was apparently all a poor choice of words. How convenient!
While it’s nice to see some level of awareness and acknowledgement that these absurdist ideas were wrong, Sridhar simply won’t tell the whole truth: none of her preferred policies had any chance of working. Instead, she dances around her own failures with semantics.
But both of these stories, Sridhar and the JN.1 panic, indicate what we’re likely to experience as the future of Covid. Those who were responsible for incalculable damage will continue to skate scot-free, while the cycle of unnecessary panic, inaccurate predictions and the call for more masking rears its ugly head every few months as new variants emerge.
Although it’s frustratingly predictable and infuriatingly obvious, best to prepare for a whole lot more of it.
Ian Miller is the author of Unmasked: The Global Failure of Covid Mask Mandates. He writes a Substack newsletter, where this article first appeared. It was also published by the Brownstone Institute.
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“For those of us on the side of sanity, reason and data-driven evidence, the refusal of Covid extremist ‘experts’ to admit mistakes has been a constant, oppressive source of frustration.”
Mistakes, or lies?
They are members of the “something must be done” club, in an attempt to preserve their reputation. Quite likely to backfire, you’d have thought – but they can behave like ferrets in a sack, when under investigation.
Some of them maybe
I would be much less charitable towards people like Fauci, Farrar
Admitting they were wrong, all along, would (or should) completely destroy their reputations, and their reputations deserve to be destroyed, utterly.
If we had anything resembling justice in this country they would be languishing in prison cells, on charges of mass murder, genocide and crimes against humanity, in something akin to the Nuremberg trials.
As soon as I see Imperial College, London I conclude that I am about to read a pack of lies.
Dr Mike Yeadon points out that newer variants are always weaker variations of the original strain as a means of preservation.
Clearly the depressing harlots working at Imperial have no shame. What a way to go through life.
Once is a mistake, twice maybe coincidence, serial mistakes is deliberate.
Not sure about quoting statistics referring to “covid tests”, “covid cases”, “covid hospitalisations” etc. I think they are all somewhat meaningless terms. Even if the numbers are accurate (i.e. covid exists and the tests are accurate) I am not sure what they mean taken in isolation – you would need to compare them to data gathered with the same level of accuracy regarding “flu cases”, “common cold cases” etc etc.
I was under the impression that then only possible way for masks to have any effect on virus transmission was for infected people to wear them.
The masks would stop some of the larger virus-bearing droplets of exhaled breath; most of the virus will pass straight through the mask, and consequently the masks worn by others will be equally impotent in stopping the passge of the virus.
Of course, the droplets stopped by a mask will soak into it and reach a suturation level where breathing out will force more of the infection through the saturated mask. I have seen a number of articles suggesting that masks lose even this marginal effectivebness in a matter of minutes,
I still remember the videos of people weaaring masks on really cold days, when clouds of condensed breath could be seen coming from the masked wearer, clearly demonstrating the inability of the mask to stop water vapour, and hence infected exhalants.
“… The masks would stop some of the larger virus-bearing droplets of exhaled breath;”
Respiratory viruses have evolved to spread by aerosol formation, not droplets. Aerosols enter right into the respiratory tract, unlike droplets.
Droplets are large, short range, and stay airborne for only seconds due to affect of gravity, so people have to be, literally, within spitting distance to infect others, or be infected.
Aerosols (solid or liquid dispersed in gas) contain very tiny particles, they spread over wide areas, stay airborne for long periods, accumulate in closed spaces, and the infectious person doesn’t even still have to be in the room, and therefore are better adapted to reproduce more successfully.
That’s why masks have no effect. If you are in a room with virus circulating as an aerosol in the air, you WILL breath in that air so whether an infected person’s mask is stopping droplets that might also carry virus, makes no difference – particularly if that person is no longer there.
Similarly, if an infected person is wearing a mask, whilst some droplet containing virus may be stopped, they WILL still exhale air containing virus aerosol, round the mask and through it. Mask wearing makes no difference.
All very laudable but we knew this already.
How about some analysis of what is happening in Gaza, particularly Rafah?
This is supposedly a site for sceptics – No?
Or maybe the Israeli propaganda machine has succeeded even here.
As if. Lol.
Regarding Israeli propaganda, here’s an article on editorial guidelines at Agence France-Presse instructing journalists to accommodate Israeli sensitivities.
https://www.declassifieduk.org/leaked-documents-show-pro-israel-bias-at-major-newswire/
It’s obvious to anyone with half a brain and any shred of decency or moral judgement what’s happening in Rafah.
Israel’s continuing it’s fully justified war against a barbaric enemy that want’s to wipe it off the map.
Those cowardly genocidal barbarians are holed up in urban areas so some civilian casualties are inevitable.
Hamas continue to spew out propaganda about civilian deaths as a recruiting tool and their useful idiots/active supporters in the West continue to lap it up.
It’s therefore obvious that anyone who keeps showing support for Hamas or making anti-Israeli comments is an utterly sick depraved bastard who must support a despicable Islamist death cult rather than the forces of light and democracy.
Sceptic? Why not be at least slightly sceptical about claims made by Hamas and the craven Islam supporters in the MSM.
Hear hear, Matt. Lots of terrorist-supporting, Jew-hating traitors on here that I wouldn’t pass the time of day with in real life, knowing they held these opinions. Even on here that applies because who’d want to associate with such, as you say, sick, depraved people, either remotely and anonymously online or in real life? I’ve quite the extensive list now of posters I just blank, that’s grown somewhat since Oct 7th, as so many have now shown their true, nasty colours. This isn’t just people having a difference of opinion, it’s people literally supporting and condoning terrorism, and I’ll have nowt more to do with said sickos. They’re an absolute disgrace in their hateful attitude towards Jews/Israelis.
As an experiment, I’ve semantically inverted you text:
It’s obvious to anyone with half a brain and any shred of decency or moral judgement what’s happening in Rafah.
Palestine’s continuing it’s fully justified war against a barbaric enemy that want’s to wipe it off the map.
Those cowardly genocidal barbarians are holed up in urban areas so some civilian casualties are inevitable.
Israel continues to spew out propaganda about civilian deaths as a recruiting tool and their useful idiots/active supporters in the West continue to lap it up.
It’s therefore obvious that anyone who keeps showing support for Israel or making anti-Hamas comments is an utterly sick depraved bastard who must support a despicable Jewish death cult rather than the forces of light and democracy.
Sceptic? Why not be at least slightly sceptical about claims made by Israel and the craven Jew supporters in the MSM.
and I’m pretty convinced that this is very close to actual Hamas press release. Do they both employ the same PR agency?
The Muslim Jihad lover.
Why don’t we talk about the millions of whites killed and enslaved by Muslims in North Africa, Spain and the Balkans?
Jihad boy.
Look at the vitriol you’re receiving for suggesting the situation in Gaza be analysed. Some of it is outrageous enough to make me think it’s paid-for influencing. Otherwise we have to consider that they support the very things they claim to oppose when it fits their worldview.
It’s ironic that this unquestioning support is for a regime that had a such an enthusiastic COVID vaccination program their country was nicknamed Pfizrael.
Analysis: the Israelis are creaming the Palestinians, those innocent people who dug a complex network of tunnels over the last 15 years under their homes, streets, hospitals, schools, etc funded by millions of Pound/Dollars/€uro in aid, who raised their children from the cradle to hate Jews, and so debauched them they were able casually and joyously inflict such atrocities on others with no qualms, film themselves doing it, boast about it.
Then they innocently hid Israeli hostages in their homes.
They are celebrated by a large contingent of mindless blobs around the World.
It’s so exciting, wearing a mask! Makes you feel like a superhero!
A man wearing a mask hassled me at the cash point yesterday and tried to take my money…lovely. Mask wearing bastard.
How else are they going to get that senile old cretin Biden in the Oval orifice ? Mail-in ballots is all the Democrats have. 81 million votes folks, 81 million votes
Sighted in Kent – one nitwit wearing a mask walking along the street in the rain. Only sighting so far this year, perhaps an endangered species soon to be extinct.
There are a few more in Reading but certainly less than 1% overall. But they all surely like like I keep wearing a mask to show that Corona vaccines are safe and effective!
I visited my GP surgery today for the first time in nearly 5 years. They had texted me to say that they had had no blood pressure reading from me for 5 yrs (obvs) and would I phone the surgery or pop in to use their self-service pod. Didn’t fancy the pod because it even got my height wrong last time I used it, so for the hell of it and because I fancied a walk, I made an appointment – just to see the inside of the building.
Only half a dozen souls in the waiting area; not a mask in sight; summoned to see the HCA who was lovely (but plus-size, as is traditional) and offered me a pneumonia vaccine. She appeared to concur with my surprise (I politely declined) and merely chatted as she took the BP reading. No mention of flu, COVID or any other jab. Not even a statin.
It felt as though the whole place had sobered up and patted itself down after an orgy and felt a bit embarrassed about it. *Panicky overreaction? Wot – here? No! It’s all fine now..you must be mistaken…we’re professionals and here to care for you.*