I first started researching vaccines for coronaviruses in spring and summer 2020 when it became obvious that lockdowns were not going to be “three weeks to flatten the curve”. It became clear that it was intended that we should remain in lockdown until a vaccine was developed. I cannot convey how much that alarmed me. Everything that was happening at that time was in conflict with my core values and my response was visceral.
My first post on COVID-19, on March 20th 2020, reported that coronaviruses were first identified in the mid-1960s. We had thus known about coronaviruses for over 50 years. My research quickly revealed that we had developed no vaccines during that time. This appeared to be because of something called antibody dependent enhancement, which showed up in animal testing. In brief, this meant that the animals developed antibodies following vaccination (which was good), but they then had a worse response than unvaccinated controls when exposed to the virus (which was bad).
Lockdown was announced in the U.K. on Monday March 23rd 2020. The U.K. Astra Zeneca COVID-19 vaccine trial was registered three days earlier on March 20th 2020. I didn’t know that at the time; it would have shocked me. The trial registration submitted full plans for 19 different arms or interventions. These included the product to be injected (ChAdOx1 nCoV-19), the doses, the placebo (a meningitis vaccine), the timetable, the locations, the number of participants, inclusion and exclusion criteria etc. The speed at which products were moving from laboratories to arms was impressive to many and concerning to some (one could be both impressed and concerned). I was aware that the Astra Zeneca (AZ) trial was already underway as early as spring 2020, as I knew one participant. When the first trial papers were published (December 2020), it was confirmed that recruitment for the AZ trial had started from April 23rd 2020 (Ref 3).
In October 2020, Dr. Peter Doshi’s important paper was published in the BMJ. This paper analysed seven vaccines in development and what they were designed to test. Doshi reported that none of the vaccine trials were designed to test for either transmission or severity of outcome. The two things that we most wanted to know – will vaccines stop spread and will they provide protection against bad outcomes – were not even being tested. The only outcome of interest was: did the trial participant test positive on a PCR test, which was a highly unreliable measure for, by itself, confirming active infection.
In December 2020, the outcome papers for the AZ and Pfizer trials were published in the Lancet and the NEJM respectively. I examined both here. Both vaccines were approved for use in the U.K. that month. Pfizer approval followed in more countries quickly. The AZ product was less readily adopted. On December 8th 2020 the first member of the public (as opposed to a trial volunteer) was given the Pfizer vaccine.
The trial protocols were disregarded from the outset. The December 2020 outcome paper for the AZ trial was a summary of four sub trials – two in the U.K. (COV001 and COV002), one in Brazil (COV003) and one in South Africa (COV005). In COV001 alone there were four intervention groups and protocols (all versus the meningitis vaccine placebo): Group 1 single dose; Group 2 booster at eight weeks; Group 3 two doses 10 weeks apart; Group 4 single dose but with paracetamol. The Pfizer protocol that was trialled was one jab followed by a second three weeks (21 days) later. The U.K. roll out started with a 12 week gap between the two injections. This was rationalised as ‘let’s give more people some protection’, but the 12 week protocol had never been tested before mass global rollout.
I didn’t give much thought to the injections over the winter of 2020-2021 as they weren’t intended for me. The message was 15 million jabs to freedom. The promise was that once the over-65s and younger people with comorbidities had been jabbed, we would all be released from house arrest. When that didn’t happen, my visceral fear reached a different level. The new message became “no one is safe until everyone is safe”. But I knew that the injections didn’t stop someone getting Covid, they didn’t stop transmission of Covid and they didn’t reduce severity of outcome (the latter two not even having been tested). As 2021 progressed, the narrative became more and more sinister. Soon pro-vaccine people who had had every vaccine throughout their lives were being called anti-vaxxer for having some doubts about this one. Soon after that, people were being refused entry to countries and venues and fired from jobs if they didn’t want this novel product.
Voluntary and informed consent
The U.K. National Health Service (NHS) principle of informed consent states:
For consent to be valid, it must be voluntary and informed, and the person consenting must have the capacity to make the decision. The meaning of these terms are:
- voluntary – the decision to either consent or not to consent to treatment must be made by the person, and must not be influenced by pressure from medical staff, friends or family;
- informed – the person must be given all of the information about what the treatment involves, including the benefits and risks, whether there are reasonable alternative treatments, and what will happen if treatment does not go ahead;
- capacity – the person must be capable of giving consent, which means they understand the information given to them and can use it to make an informed decision.”
Informed consent was abandoned during this period of medical history. Read those definitions of both “voluntary” and “informed” carefully. Regarding “voluntary”, pressure was exerted from the Queen of England, the Prime Minister of New Zealand and the President of the U.S. and every world leader in between. Medical staff, friends and family all exerted pressure, as did celebrities, neighbours, employers and social media ‘influencers’. The denial of rights to travel, to enter venues and even to remain in employment were in stunning contravention of the voluntary aspect of informed consent.
Regarding “informed”, the following is what happened when I tried to obtain information about the benefits and risks of the treatment.
My invitation
By spring 2021, Wales was rattling through the administration of injections. On March 11th, 2021, I received an invite from Aneurin Bevan University Health Board (ABUHB) to attend Cwmbran sports stadium to receive a Covid vaccine. I was given a date and time (March 24th 14.45pm). This was clever. A number of people I spoke to attended because they didn’t want to miss an appointment and “let the NHS down” when the NHS was so busy.
I chose instead to write to the Chief Executive (Judith Paget CBE ) and Chair (Ann Lloyd CBE) of Aneurin Bevan University Health Board as follows:
Dear Ms Lloyd, Ms Paget (sent separately to each),
Thank you for your kind invitation for me to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
Both the Pfizer BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine are novel drugs. Both drugs have only been approved for emergency use. The trials are ongoing, with the Pfizer trial not due for completion until January 31st 2023 and the Oxford/AstraZeneca trial not due for completion until February 14th 2023.
The NHS policy is “for consent to be valid, it must be voluntary and informed”. Given the novelty, rapid development and incomplete trial history of these interventions, consent is vital. For my consent to be first informed, and second voluntary, please can you answer the following:
1) I have had COVID-19. Please can you explain why I need a vaccine for something to which I have immunity? In anticipation of an answer saying we don’t know how long natural immunity will last a) how long does vaccine immunity last? and b) surely immunity to a virus is preferable to a message to try to replicate a spike protein?
2) The December 2020 publications reported 95% efficacy for BNT162b2 and 70% efficacy for ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. Please can you explain what efficacy means and the number of cases (positive PCR test and at least one symptom) that the 95% and 70% numbers were based on?
3) Please can you tell me (with sources) the Number Needed to Treat (NNT) and the Number Needed to Harm (NNH) for each vaccine?
4) Please can you tell me the safety profile for both vaccines after one, three and five years?
5) I understand that Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) is a (or the) reason that we have had human coronaviruses for 55 years and no vaccine in that time. Please can you guarantee that ADE cannot happen with either of the vaccines you are offering me?
6) The vaccines try to introduce the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein into our body. Recent peer-reviewed literature reports that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein “may affect the cells of systemic and coronary vasculatures, eliciting other cardiovascular diseases such as coronary artery disease, systemic hypertension and stroke”. Please can you guarantee that this cannot and will not happen?
7) Given that the vaccine manufacturers have indemnity from providing compensation if something goes wrong, please can you confirm that I can sue the board and individual members directly, with unlimited liability, if I am harmed in any way?
I am one of the rare 1% of people who follow all five healthy behaviours associated with reduced mortality. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink alcohol. I exercise daily. I have maintained a BMI of 20 for many years. I eat an optimally nutritious diet. My health is of utmost importance to me. I will not risk the huge effort I dedicate to my health without fully understanding what risk I am taking. Especially when I can discern no benefit whatsoever in me taking that unknown risk.
Thank you
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Zoë Harcombe
The questions were a mix of ones to which I knew the answer, but I wanted to know if the Health Board did, and ones to which there was no answer and I wanted to know if the Health Board would admit this. Please note that I was questioning the cardiovascular impact of the Covid products as early as March 2021. Cardiac issues are now acknowledged but dismissed as rare or mild (there is no such thing as mild myocarditis). Many people claim that we know more now than we did then. We do; but we knew enough then. The concerns about mRNA technology were there from the outset.
My follow-up
On April 6th 2021, I needed to chase for a reply. I re-sent the two letters with a handwritten note at the top saying “Dear Ms Lloyd, Ms Paget (sent separately), I am being chased for my vaccine, so I need to chase you for my reply please. Thank you. Zoë.” I also submitted a Freedom of Information request (FOI) to the health board in parallel.
The first Health Board reply
On April 7th 2021, I received an email from ABUHB corporate services acknowledging receipt of the FOI request. I have no concerns about sharing this exchange, since FOI requests, by definition, are supposed to be freely available:
Dear Dr. Harcombe
Thank you for your request for information under the Freedom of Information Act received on April 6th 2021. We have allocated it the following reference number FOI 21-161 and will be in contact again shortly. We aim to respond to all Freedom of Information requests within 20 working days from the date of receipt.
The full Health Board reply
On 14th April 2021 I received an email with the response to the FOI request:
Dear Dr. Harcombe
Thank you for your request for information under the Freedom of Information Act, received on 6th April 2021.
Please find attached the Health Board’s response to this request.
The attachment was as follows:
As you can see, the reply did not attempt to answer any of my questions. It said that ABUHB was delivering the Welsh Government strategy and following guidance from other public bodies. In essence, the ABUHB position was “Nothing to do with us”. The reply invited me to ask Public Health Wales if I had further questions. Further questions? I didn’t have answers to my opening questions.
Involving Public Health Wales
On April 19th 2021 I emailed Public Health Wales. The title of the email was “A request for a review of JP/lab/FOI 21-161.”
The email said:
Dear Richard Howells, Board Secretary
I would like to request a review of a recent FOI that I submitted.
I was pleased with the speed of response, but not with the answers.
On March 16th, when I received an invitation for a COVID-19 vaccination, I sent the same letter to Judith Paget CBE, Chief Executive, and Ann Lloyd CBE, Chair. The letter asked seven questions, which I needed answering before I could accept the invitation. A copy is attached (the word file).
When I was chased for a jab, on April 6th I chased for replies. I submitted an FOI on April 6th in parallel. The FOI was the one responded to – although it wasn’t. The FOI reply is also attached (PDF). None of my seven questions was answered. The only response given was that, in essence, “Aneurin Bevan University Health Board is following Welsh government and Public Health Wales orders“. That may be the case, but these questions need answering please. The clinical trials for these injections do not complete until 2023. The Pfizer trial completion date has slipped since my first (March 16th) letter. It is now April 6th 2023.
These are entirely reasonable questions to ask before taking part in a clinical trial with a novel drug with novel technology and known issues. Arguably you should not be vaccinating tens of thousands of people in ABUHB alone (two-three million across Wales) without knowing the answers to these questions.
If anything does go wrong (see Swine Flu), “following orders” would not be a defence.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Thank you.
Yours sincerely – Zoë
The attached letter said:
Dear Public Health Wales,
Following an invitation for a COVID-19 vaccination, I asked the following questions of my Health Board – Aneurin Bevan University Health Board. They have not answered them, but instead replied that “The Health Board follows all national guidance provided by the Welsh Government, JCVI and other relevant regulatory bodies and specialist advice regarding the vaccines is provide by Public Health Wales… Should you have any further questions regarding the JCVI advice or vaccinations please contact Public Health Wales directly.”
And so I am. Please can you answer the following questions.
(The rest of the letter reiterated the seven questions).Thank you.
Yours faithfully
Dr. Zoë Harcombe, PhD
The reply from Public Health Wales
I had to chase this too. The first response from Public Health Wales was an auto reply saying (paraphrased) “Is your request really necessary? We’re dealing with a pandemic.”
On April 25th 2021 I replied (verbatim) “I would like my FOI to be answered please. It is core to current issues and so cannot wait until the current issues are over.”
On May 11th 2021 I received an email reply from Public Health Wales with an attached letter. The letter is copied below.
Again, none of my questions were answered. Again authority was deferred to. I had reached the end of the road to try to obtain the informed bit of informed consent, so I left it there.
I had asked reasonable and important questions and they had not been answered. I could not therefore give voluntary and informed consent to a novel intervention. What happened thereafter will forever horrify me.
Postscript
I happened to come across Judith Paget again in October 2023. Former Office for National Statistics (ONS) statistician James Freeman tweeted a letter that had been sent to him. The letter was from Paget, and it was to all Chief Executives of all NHS Wales organisations. You can see the letter in the tweet. It was demanding to know what interventions would be made to overcome NHS staff “reluctance” to have more COVID-19 vaccines. This would be at least the fifth jab, if staff had accepted all invitations until then. I suspect, at the time of this demand, Paget still did not know the answers to my questions.
Dr Zoë Harcombe is a researcher, author, blogger and public speaker in the field of diet and health.
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“Of course, all of these arguments disappear if one is happy with the prospect of not living in a liberal democracy in the first place.”
Regrettably I suspect that is where we are going, and I suspect the additional funding source of the majority of our universities over the last 25 years may be to blame.
That’s the problem with market based solutions. Those who pay the piper call the tune. And now we have a population remarkably well attuned to social credit.
So you’re saying we need to cut university funding from government?
If so I agree. Students need to pay for their education, not people who don’t have degrees.
Lucan, those of us who voted for Boris Johnson thought we were getting the liberal Conservative libertarian he purported to be when, in fact, we finished up with exactly the opposite. The true conservatives in the Tory party represent less than 25%, and I shall never vote for them again. I hope by the time the general election comes around, there is a new party with the principles of personal freedoms, honesty and fairness, otherwise I will only be able to vote for “none of the above”.
It’s a good argument were we not now living in evil clown world where behavioural scientists assist politicians who are run by corporate and pharmaceutical interests that worship at the technocratic church of Davos.
In this world Liberal Democracy was part of the old normal.
I think Toby has an incredible ability to avoid the red pill.
What virus reemoved the concept of free will from the population .So we have to go along with any kind of plan do we becaus there are only 60 million of us Oh i see
I believe it was Mandelson who, a decade or so ago, said that the age of Democracy was over. It starts with Blair – who is so enthusiastic about a Global Health Surveillance system – and the ability to introduce a social credit system.
You need to also add alternatives. So, not only do you need evidence that lockdowns would work, but you also need to compare the efficacy of lockdowns honestly with the available alternatives such as “focused protection” and then demonstrate that the lockdowns would work significantly better than the more liberty-preserving alternatives.
One thing that I’ve found quite distressing about this whole affair is how the fears and predilections of one (large) group of society totally overrode the freedoms of the other group.
Why did we not see freedom-preserving measures in place. How about supermarkets have mask policies on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday whilst going mask-free on the other days? That way we could all exercise our judgement.
If we are worried about the hospitals being overwhelmed, how about letting those who sign papers saying that they’ll refuse COVID-19 treatment if the hospitals are full, go free and party? Why not?
Why did we as a society not search for solutions that respect everyone, but rather just exercise a tyranny of the majority and bulldoze over everyone who disagreed?
There was scope for compromise on many of these issues, but no quarter was given by the media or the elites as they condemned us to be incarcerated in our own houses.
Excellent points.
A few conclusions to be drawn :
“I have to recognise that insisting on ideological purity on this point will get us nowhere.”
Au contraire mon ami, NOT insisting on ideological purity on this point will get us into big trouble, which is where we are.
Given that it is clear that governments cannot be trusted with these powers, and cannot be trusted not to manufacture or prolong emergencies and use the state’s power to lie to people, they should never ever be used under any circumstances.
Inalienable rights are inalienable rights after all
They and that concept reining supreme, over utilitarian goals and concepts, were introduced in response to their abuse due to and in the name of utilitarian goals.
The Nazi Germans, Stalin, Mao&co were all convinced that they acted utilitarian and for the greater good of their people.
Not insisting on ideological purity GOT us into this big trouble already.
Masks and invasive testing mandates were infringements upon our right of bodily autonomy, accepting them opened that box of the Pandora.
The acceptance of some professions deemed not being ‘essential’ was another such infringement and box.
I’ve been disappointed how few people have presented the argument as ideological. The anti-lockdown movement has often been on the back foot, conceding too much.
The biggest error is agreeing with lockdown proponents that restrictions are cautious, they are not, they are disastrous.
A cautious exit from lockdown is like a cautious reduction in the number of times Frank Bruno punches you.
The necessity of adherence to fundamental principles is indeed what all this revolves round.
“If the ‘brain-eating amoeba’, which has an IFR above 95%, were to somehow become airborne and communicable, for example, then there are few who would suggest that the government should not act to attempt to restrict its spread.”
I would. Whatever the government does will make it worse. Presumably the government would panic and clear the hospitals of brain-bug infected patients and send them somewhere full of susceptible people.
I would argue that that particular amobea has already successfully spread to 95% of the people anyway.
Them being easily identifiable by their vaxx passports and/or masks.
We very much didn’t “beat Covid” in the UK, so your title image should be showing not Boris Johnson but Jacinda Ardern or Xi Jinping…
I think it is a projection into the future…
Beating your own people using “COVID” as pretext is not the same as “beating COVID”. Not to mention that it’s physically imposible to “beat” viruses.
However, rather like the clown Johnson we can be assured that the lovely Jacinda will be doing her erstwhile best to make life intolerable for the vaccine aware, i.e. those who do not want the Pfizer poison running through their veins and clogging up their arteries.
“Third, it suggests that ‘hard’ lockdowns, not including schools, might be permitted where there is a strong case to be made that hospitals will not cope otherwise and all that can be done to remedy that problem (for instance, the use of Nightingale hospitals) has been done.
in the situation you describe, something has to ‘give’. That something would be the ability of hospitals to cope rather than my liberties.
Not my government
A dictatorship
There is evidence but it is ignored. e.g. there is over 90 years of epidemiological modelling and yet we are bombarded with squawking about exponential growth.
Furthermore there has been a problem with people not seeking the evidence. e.g. for months we were told the Kent variant was more deadly until someone pulled their finger and did the actual work.
What is needed is more post-hoc epidemiological analysis and massively less inaccurate predictive ‘modelling’ (computer guess-work)
Every few decades we send hundreds of thousands of young men off to battle to defend our liberties (as perceived at the time). They give their lives for our freedom.
How odd then to throw away all our rights to attempt to prolong the TV watching of some care-home geriatrics.
Would we now make a peace with the Nazis because in defending our freedom someone might get shot?
Odious the way the govt have used war imagery regarding the coronamadness when we have surrendered rather than fought
If the point of lockdown was to save the NHS then it failed miserably
Try getting a doctors appointment or a knee replacement
The NHS is fucked, it seems it’s only purpose now is to pay it’s employees
No the NHS is there to protect us against the Chinese army as it is our only organisation that is big enough
Good luck with that.
Most of the nursing staff are too fat to do any fighting.
Pretty good at dance routines though.
I’m still a Nurse and former soldier I’m ready for the initial engagement with our own Government.Death to all those cunts
makes sense, really, more work for their nationalised industry…
not to mention it’s opened a massive can of worms. BBC this morning were pushing the “we need salt + sugar taxes” line to … “save the nhs”. if we save the nhs from everything then what is the fucking point of it?
This is a point I’ve made a lot. How many illnesses or accidents can genuinely be said to be no fault of the person affected? Genetic diseases perhaps, dementia, some cancers, perhaps some respiratory ailments but only if the patient has never smoked, taken regular exercise etc. We could rule out most heart disease/strokes, lots of cancers, anything smoking-related/COPD etc, ditto anything related to alcohol such as liver failure and so on, bad knees and hips if the person didn’t keep fit (which would need to be proved), pretty much all accidents and trauma since you could always have been more careful, couldn’t you? And with the new precedent set by covid, anything infectious was probably your fault for not social distancing or washing your hands enough. I guess people could be allowed to have babies, but only the minimum required to continue society, so more than two would be a no-n0. Where does it end?
The NHS is a service for humans, so surely it has to accept that human folly is part of that?
There is no such thing as “an avoidable accident” except in (3rd party) hindsight. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have happened. And same goes for diseases claimed to be caused by lifestyle choices someone happens to disgree with.
Ie, it’s not so much human folly which has to be accepted but human limits in correctly perceiving and correctly reacting to externel events. Even the most dilligent person will make mistakes.
If the studies on the Hunzas before their way of life was altered by contact with the outside world are to be believed (and there have been other “disease free” peoples), precious few of the ailments we see affecting Western populations on a large scale need to happen. Unfortunately, I suspect most of our politicians (and some of our doctors) can’t even spell the word “orthomolecular”..
Ah, you noticed that too! I said yesterday that banning pizza ads was the answer to heart deaths. Perhaps I shouldn’t give them ideas…
Ever wonder if the framing of lockdowns as being to “protect the NHS” is fundamentally about discrediting the NHS?
The article seems to be summarised as
“lockdowns are ok if they work”
which I don’t agree with
Indeed. As I’ve posted below, if you concede they can be OK in some set of circumstances, you’re lost.
It’s clear that the default position now has to be limit government power as much as possible. Of course you’ll never limit it completely and governments need power to function, but the aim should be to have as many barriers as possible to prevent the state overreaching. It was the starting point of the people who framed the US Constitution (not just the bill of rights but their structure of government, states’ rights etc).
Coronamadness was not some one-off aberration, it was the culmination of long term trends. Governments globally have overreached in synch in an unprecedented way. If there is no “great reset” that on principle leaves people believing in inalienable rights then they will overreach again and again, forever.
very few people seem to believe in the importance of rights. been too long since the WW2 I suppose
‘Lockdown’ is a term invented in the american prison system
Lockdown meant locking all inmates in their cells in order to quell disorder
I don’t recall any disorder when they did it to us
Or perhaps in terms of a lockdown of a city after a terrorist attack?
You’re definitely over the target Toby and thank God for men like yourself.
Stay strong.
My sense is a much greater proportion of Brits agree with you than we currently appreciate. Polls are cycnically and routinely manipulated to say the opposite, the Media is wholly bankrupt, and Boris and chums have their sights on a the Reset.
Meanwhile, in the streets and thoroughfares of Britain ordinary folk are losing patience.
Please, please keep banging on.
I think this argument in favour of “lockdowns” doesn’t really make sense. NHS capacity is a direct function of the amount of money the government is will to spend on building and maintaining such capacity even despite it migtht not be needed most of the time. Eg, in Germany, the talk for the people is “hospitals in danger of being overwhelmed” and the talk for the spending beancounters is “hospital excess capacity to be reduced to save costs”.
Consequently, the government failed to provide the facilities for excercising one’s right to medical treatment. Punishing the people for that make no sense.
Governments around the world made exactly the same arguments for lockdowns, two weeks, three weeks to flatten the curve, and are still under restrictions well over a year later.
The state of the NHS is immaterial. They’d have said the same thing if we’d had the best health service in the world.
This was a reply to an argument put forth in the text: As there’s a right to medical treatment, lockdowns are justified if the health service would otherwise be overwhelmed. I don’t think so because “health service would be overwhelmed” means “government failed to provide enough capacity”. Conveniently, the government also claims that “expanding capacity” wouldn’t make any sense due to “exponentiell growth”.
Considering this, punishing the people for failures of the government makes no sense, especially if the government is also unwilling to rectify these failures. Politicians are supposedly responsible for the outcome of their policies. Hence, if people die because “the health system got overwhelmed”, this should result in some “Mr Austerity” going to the dock (or block :-)) and not in shutting down all of everything and putting everyone under house arrest.
“In What Circumstances are Lockdowns Justified?”
Never.
The only other alternative is ‘sometimes, we’ll tell you when we get there’
Steve
Do you have access to the latest Covid Symptom data? It looks as though the unvaccinated/vaccinated ratio has narrowed again since that summary earlier to-day.
only what I posted earlier
https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/new-cases-plateau-aead-of-freedom-day
would have been nice if he included a graph like before but I expect they don’t because it doesn’t look so good
Clare Craig has tweeted the following graph
https://twitter.com/ClareCraigPath/status/1415677813919678486/photo/1
Vaccinated : 16093 UP from 15537
Unvaccinated 16827 DOWN from 17581
I’m not sure where she gets this from. Perhaps it’s a feature for app users.
Purely observational data – but the last two instances I know of actual SARS infection and illness were both vaccinated.
An enjoyable read. A well argued case but seriously undermined by failing to take into account the current wider situation.
Bozo’s handlers have decided we will no longer enjoy a Liberal democracy and by use of the 1984 Public Health Act (1984, can’t believe this was not done on purpose) and the ensuing emasculation / buying off of the judiciary and Parliament have ensured that our normal forms of redress have been taken from us.
Professor McGowan is therefore extremely naiive in the case he makes.
I would be more interested in the arguments he could put forward in terms of dealing with our current Orwellian situation than I am in his genteel suggestions about a world we shall never enjoy again.
When the prison is rioting
All lockdowns are standing in fundamental opposition to the correct answer to the trolley problem:
Their collateral damage will always be unknowable in advance, therefore, they can never be justified.
That our lockdowns were for a pathetically undangerous disease in the big scheme of things, that the scientific basis for anything was minimal to absent, that scientific dissent was censored instead of engaged with to arrive at better sutions, that treatments were badmouthed and withheld instead of professionally trialled, promoted and made available etc. are just sideshows here and in truth crimes comitted in conjunction with all Covid ones.
It is a scandal that no cost/benefit analysis or collateral damage assessment was and is undertaken.
Much has been said about the domestic collateral damage already, but our Western lockdowns also put 120 million people in the 3rd world into poverty and into being hungry again, most of them will die soon and much sooner than otherwise, and Britons alone now have the blood of 5 million of them on their hands.
That and most of the other collateral damage was evident from the start, but some unknowable in advance one is also occurring, for example in
New Zealand, which now sees children falling ill and hospitalised due to immunity debt due to its Sentinelese approach.
Which brings me back to and confirms my first two paragraphs:
the trolley problem and the only correct answer to it.
“Now they got the whole country sectioned off, you can’t make a move without a form”
Harry Tuttle (played by Robert De Niro)
Brazil (1985)
I was just rewatching Gilliam’s masterpiece now, hadn’t seen it in thirty years. The film’s Ministry of Information ain’t got nothing on the world’s health ministries and their Big Pharma bosses. Truth really is even stranger and more terrifying than Gilliam’s dystopian vision.
Oh for a beautiful woman in a big truck to come and save us
Never.
If the airborne “brain eating amoeba” were to make an appearance, we would all require our own oxygen supplies and our own suspension tanks to live in for a few months. The government would be powerless to stop its spread, just as it’s been powerless throughout this experience to do anything about the spread of any airborne pathogen.
That’s the whole “lesson” to learn from lockdown. The lesson that the government implied it already knew when it said “three weeks to flatten the curve” or “slow the spread”. Lockdowns cannot hope to stop transmission. They only slow the inevitable under the flimsy pretext of helping the health services to cope. There isn’t even any evidence they can do that. By the time you get to “20 months to control the virus and reshape society”, you should stop asking whether these measures could ever be justified and pick up your pitchfork.
The thing is, people are pretty good at saving their own skin. So if there was an ACTUAL pandemic we wouldn’t need all these new regulations, restrictions and rituals. People would do these things voluntarily because on the whole they don’t want themselves or their families to die! We’re like genetically programmed to instinctively do what’s best to survive.
We may have needed some emergency laws to cope with loo roll looting, distribution of N95 masks, ivermectin black market etc. Medics would’ve been allowed to just turn up and volunteer at the Nightingales. Even the sheep would’ve realised that scotch eggs and 10pm curfews wouldn’t work.
A good argument about the fundamental issues that have been undermined over the last eighteen months.
The only positive in this quagmire is that, to the rational mind, the notion of the adequacy of our legal-constitutional framework has been comprehensively blown out of the water.
… but the exposure comes too late.
In response to the statement :
“They [the government] have to get their powers from somewhere.”
… that relates to the same issue : the total inadequacy of current parliamentary arrangements in protecting fundamental rights.
Dr David McGrogan, the author, is an absolute asset to this site with his analyses. He wrote something of similar quality back in the winter.
“First, let’s begin by granting that governments should have emergency powers“
The argument falls down at this point, imo, at least insofar as peacetime is concerned.
Once you concede that the government should have access to emergency powers, experience suggests that “emergencies” will arise.
Better to have clear lines beyond which the government is barred from stepping under any peacetime circumstances, ruat caelum. One of them, imo, should be a complete ban on opinion management by propaganda or by behavioural manipulation. Such a thing is counter to the most fundamental idea of democracy, and while it seems harmless and useful on its face, we have just had a harsh demonstration of just how costly it can be.
Ahmm, no, overwhelmed hospitals is not an excuse for anything. Let’s say you know 100% for sure that hospitals will be overwhelmed a lot if you don’t do some kind of restriction – it still does not justify it.
Having a right to be protected from illness is a stupid way to consider things. Unless someone on purpose stops a hospital car with a patient from going to hospital or disperses a capsule full of viruses among crowds, they are in no fault of jeopardizing anyone’s health. We live in a world of pathogens and interact with them and transmit them all the time and it’s no ones fault if that pathogens leaves their body and enters someone else.
Maybe epidemiologists (real ones like Sunetra G, Martin K, John I, etc. not those pop-star “scientists” from Imperial-CL) can average R numbers over whole population, apply some math and try to guess how quickly the virus will spread and what will it do. But when it comes to law and personal responsibility and morality, no one needs to do anything to slow the spread (even if you knew 100% what could slow the spread).
The state should prepare the healthcare system, good idea to increase the wages of healthcare workers during pandemic, employ police and army to carry medical equipment around so nurses and doctors don’t have to, carry food to those who chose to self isolate for their own health (much better use for cops/army than harassing people for being outside “for no good reason”), but at no point does the state or any authority have the right to limit freedoms.
Also consider that the state of hospital care without pandemic is a relative one. It is not some kind of absolute level at which comparisons are to be made. You could always make a better public health by diverting resources from other public areas to public health and “saving lives”. Even during non-pandemic times, someone can argue that you are “killing people” by not increasing health care budget 2x or 3x times. So what then, the state could force people into force labor camps and steal their salary to fund public health? Or it can forcibly take a kidney from person who has 2 of them and give it to someone who needs one in order to survive?
Since on this topic, official c19 deaths are the same age (or a bit higher) as all-cause mortality for each country. In UK about 600k die every year. A lot of these deaths are preventable. If you increased the health care budget 2x or 3x times (at the expense of everything else), a lot of very old people could live a few years more (and then would die in large numbers in the next few years), some old people could live 5-10 years more, some middle age few decades more and some young people maybe 50 years more.
Even if you take the >100k c19 deaths figure at face value for UK, there is no reason why these people deserve special attention than all 600k that die every year.
It would be a start if they would provide scientific evidence to support emergency measures, after say a few months.
This wouldn’t be so hard for them to sort out if they knew that they needed to obtain it.
As it stands we’ve got ‘elephant trumpet’ science — they’re telling us the elephants will come back if they stop blowing their trumpets, but no-one has seen any evidence that trumpet playing scares elephants.
Not a start, sorry. They would just lie and subvert the scientists. It has not been that hard.
Mr Young, if we were dealing with reasonable people who practiced real dialogue and could negotiate rational solutions based on logic, law, and the scientific principles, your arguments would be sound. Unfortunately the last 18 months has increasingly demonstrated that we are not.
We therefore have to fall back on to some fundamental principles of rights on which we cannot give way.
This whole episode has been based on nations taking rights from their citizens to support supposedly ailing health provision. For a disease with an IFR of 0.15%. And with plentiful evidence that cheap generic drugs can relieve most symptoms.
Now we face even further restrictions as evidence grows that all ’emergency use’ vaccines that we are being coerced to take are useless in stopping transmission and infection.
There are two interlinked aspects to this; lockdowns and coerced vaccines.
Your piece is worthless without inclusion of the second of these which is being used as the vehicle for introducing biotech IDs worldwide.
There is an element here of debating detail in the long grass while the focus on the ball has been lost.
The simple answer to the question is “None!”
Bullying other people can never be justified. Not even if you give yourself moral permission to do it.
Very interesting. You lose me, however, at the suggestion that a “right” would be implicated by the overwhelming of a medical system and consequent rationing based on maximum capacity. To observe that, at some point under extraordinary circumstances, demand for health care may outstrip the capacity of a medical system is simply to observe that scarcity exists in the medical field as elsewhere.
If we are terrified even by such simple economic facts as the fact of scarcity, we are much too fearful.
If there is a famine, I am hungry, and I face the reality that food though often seemingly plentiful in our supermarkets is, in fact, scarce. Likewise with illness and health care. In either case, we should act together to mitigate such problems of scarcity.
But only mitigate. We cannot pretend to eliminate the fact of scarcity altogether, and we cannot eliminate the possibility of extraordinary circumstances overwhelming our best-erected defenses against pains of scarcity and need. If we think we can do that, then we really are fantasists, and we are in for some real disappointment.
We would not be the first generation to think we had cracked it, only to find out the hard way we have not. But we might be the most comfortable, so have the farthest to fall.
We must integrate meaningfully and acceptingly the fact of scarcity (and indeed of death, in which scarcity achieves its fullest and most sorrowful expression) into our understanding of the world. We must be wise, and do our best, without imagining we can will away these things altogether.
Then we will recognise the importance difference between those things that are truly “rights” and those things that are merely great achievements from which we should be glad to benefit and to which we should be glad to contribute.
Demonstrating that lockdown is communist, simultaneously immoral and impractical, is the key
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Y792MBqICVPz/
Former WHO whistleblower interviewed about the people really behind what’s going on.
Unfortunately there are far too many authoritarians in SAGE, Parliament and the mainstream media who enjoy, benefit from and/or are simply desperate to use their power to restrict other people’s Rights.
Protection of a State Bureaucracy and their totemic symbol of Socialism in the UK, the NHS, will trump any argument for Civil Rights, however well it is made.
The best thing Libertarians (who can’t move to Florida) can do is insulate themselves as much as possible from the lunacy and try to live life as normally as possible.
Q: “In What Circumstances are Lockdowns Justified?“A: NONE
Let’s face it, our NHS has become the CHS Covid health service, and a very poor service at that. As earlier in this update, it has refused to authorise the use of inexpensive drugs in common safe use which have a proven beneficial use against Covid-19. Its use against all other illnesses has been severely curtailed, and people are dying or will die as a result of its poor service. Why does no media give the daily death figures from all purposes to demonstrate what a small proportion Covid-19 represents and the resulting correct focus that it should be given, and the corresponding lack of justification for the restrictions that persist?
There is so much evidence for the uselessness of face masks to prevent virus transmission, but the naive who believe they should continue never see it because they don’t bother to research it, and it is certainly not any part of the information publicised by the media.