On March 27th 1913, the population of Columbus, Ohio, started running. Afterwards, nobody was exactly sure why or when. James Thurber, the comic novelist, was a schoolboy in the town and recalled the incident in a famous article some years later. He said that perhaps it was simply someone suddenly remembering an appointment to meet his wife, and then a paperboy in high spirits joined in, and then perhaps a portly man of affairs broke into a trot, and before you knew it, the entire high street, from the union depot to the courthouse, was running. After the run had begun, people began to look for a justification, and the hubbub, the noise, eventually formed into one word: the dam had burst. Nobody stopped to point out that there was zero evidence of it having burst and that, anyway, even if it had, it could not have possibly reached Columbus, Ohio. People ran on for several more miles and then, eventually, sheepishly returned to the town. Here is the point: Thurber said that years passed before anyone dared mention it. Everyone carried on with their business as usual — and woe betide you if you made some jokey remark about the day the dam did not break.
It seems to me that we are in a very similar place with the lockdowns. Then, too, we saw herd instinct at its worst: people joining in one after another without stopping to think. It is an interesting counterfactual to ask what would have happened if the first sign of the pandemic had not been in autocratic China but in a country where lockdowns, the confinement of the entire population, would have been unthinkable — let us say if it had started in the Netherlands or Canada or somewhere. It started in China; then there was the attempt by the Italian Government to stop people moving from north to south; and then, suddenly, lockdowns, which had never been foreseen in any previous planning document, were considered a standard tool of public policy overnight. We were panicked into a response that no one had foreseen prior to those days — by shrieking broadcasters such as Piers Morgan, night after night, saying, “Why aren’t we copying these other countries?”, and all the signs up saying, “Covidiots go home” — and, rather like the people of Columbus, Ohio, we did not stop to think, and we still do not want to go back and ask whether it was justified or proportionate.
It is not true to say that there was no plan or that it was a plan for the wrong pandemic. We had a plan that we had worked out in cooler-headed times, at precisely the moment when you are supposed to think rationally about these things. We heard from my noble friend Lord Lansley about a number of the things in it. He said, well, maybe we were wrong about those things, but there has been no evidence at all that the original 2011 plan was wrong to say that face masks would be ineffective at containing a disease or that closing schools would have little impact or, indeed, to make the basic supposition that if you are dealing with something that will spread throughout the population, your best bet is to do that in a way that minimises fatalities rather than pretending that you can stop it altogether.
Actually, there was one country that kept to our plan. They did not have the resources to do their own, so they simply downloaded ours. That was Sweden, which I will come back to in a moment.
Like James Thurber’s citizens in Columbus, we are finding it difficult properly to relive the indignities and horrors that we went through, from the grievous ones, such as people unable to say farewell to dying loved ones, to the trivial ones, such as the debates about whether a Scotch egg counts as a meal. We have forgotten the taped-off playgrounds, the drones sent up to pursue solitary walkers, the police in Derbyshire pouring dye into a lake so it would be less of a beauty spot, and the ‘pingdemic’ — that bizarre period when people were self-diagnosing so that, if they could not take time off work they would self-diagnose as being all clear, and if they felt like a little time off they would claim to have been infected. We have crammed all of these into some remote corner of our memory. In fact, the very difficulty of those things became an argument for continuing. We got into the worst kind of sunk cost fallacy. In fact, the Secretary of State at the time explicitly used that argument: we have been through so much, so let us not let it all be for nothing.
By then, almost everything was pushed into a retrospective justification for the measures that we and other Governments — with one exception — had taken. If infections went up, everyone said, “Well, we can’t relax the restrictions. It would be extremely dangerous.” If they came down, everyone said, “Oh, it’s working. We just need to carry on with this.” People kept on saying, “Follow the science”, but the one thing that we were not doing was applying the normal scientific method. Karl Popper defines science as something that can be disproved, but woe betide you if you even asked the most basic questions at that time about whether there was proportionality. We already had the evidence by the end of April 2020 that Sweden had followed the same trajectory as everywhere else: that the infections had peaked and declined in a place where there were only the most minimal of measures, banning large meetings but otherwise relying on people to use their common sense.
That is what a scientific approach would have done. It would have said, “Consider the control in the experiment.” We had a laboratory-quality control there all along — we had a country that had stuck to the plan that we were panicked out of following.
What can we see about the results in Sweden? First, and most obviously, there is not a smoking crater where its economy used to be. In fact, Sweden suffered less of an economic hit in the pandemic than it did in the 2008 financial crisis. The Swedish budget was back in surplus by 2021 — imagine that. The last Government was done for by our selective amnesia about the cost of these lockdown measures and the current one will be too, because people still do not like to face the fact that for the better part of two years we paid people to stay at home, we borrowed from our future selves, and that money would eventually need to be paid back.
What if it was all for nothing? Let us ask the question: what price did Sweden pay for sparing its economy? At the time we were told that there would be an almost civilisational collapse there. I remember the Sun had the headline, ‘Heading for disaster’, while the Guardian’s was, ‘Leading us to catastrophe’. The argument was not that Sweden might end up with a slightly better or worse death rate than other countries, it was that this would be an outlier by any measure — that there would be bodies piled up in the streets.
The data are now more or less in. It was very difficult to track these things at the time because different countries have different methodologies. Different countries have different ways of measuring fatalities. Were people dying of Covid or with Covid? There were some territories which could not measure even that because they did not have a sufficiently advanced healthcare system. I think of my native Peru, which had about the toughest lockdown on the planet and about the worst fatality rate — again, showing how little correlation there was.
The one thing you can measure with a consistent methodology is excess mortality. You can apply the same calculation to any given population. You can say how many people died in the previous three years, how many you would then expect to die in this period, and compare that with what actually happened. You can be more sophisticated and factor in obesity and age profile and so on. However you do it, you find that Sweden ends up with one of, or on several measures, the lowest excess mortality rate in Europe. This should be the only thing the inquiry is looking at and we are debating, and yet it is somehow considered bad form even to mention it. We are still, like the citizens of Columbus, Ohio, unwilling to face the fact that it may have been disproportionate.
Among the institutions that put Sweden as the single lowest excess mortality rate in Europe are the BBC and the ONS. This is not some Barrington Declaration fringe thing, these are the data. Yet there is this extraordinary readiness to tiptoe around rather than face them.
Should this not be the sole focus of the inquiry whose provisional findings we are discussing? Should not the only question that really matters be: were non-pharmaceutical interventions effective? Given the cost of the ruined educations, the elderly people isolated and the debt, was it proportionate? We should not be asking that question in a vindictive spirit. I understand that people have to err on the side of caution, that there was a panicky atmosphere and that we were dealing with something we did not know. It is understandable that people have to go with the best models they can find. But we no longer have to rely on models. We now have actual hard data. Yet we seem extraordinarily reluctant to ask the central question: did lockdowns work? Did they work a little bit but not enough to justify the dislocation? Did they work a great deal? Or, as the Swedish case prima facie would suggest, did they not work at all? Did they in fact drive up the mortality rate because of unrelated healthcare problems — everything from unscreened diagnoses to the fact of confining people and denying them exercise?
How is it that we can have this lengthy and expensive inquiry — Sweden has completed both its inquiries and moved on while we were still getting around to phase 1 — and have had all those conversations, and not asked that one central question?
Looking at this interim report, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it is results-driven, or at the very least tendentious. In fact, you could infer almost everything you needed to know about this inquiry from the fact that, incredibly, witnesses were required to take a Covid test. It must be the last place in discovered space where this is still a thing, where Covid is not treated as an endemic disease.
You could tell from the tone of the questions what the conclusions would be — that the Government should have done more; that it was insufficient; why did we not lock down earlier or why did we not lock down harder? — all of it begging the question, all of it making assumptions that have, until now at any rate, not been interrogated, let alone proved.
This matters because, as the Minister said at the start, there is bound to be another pandemic and therefore knowing whether lockdowns work should be a critical question of public policy. Although, I have a horrible feeling that even if we were to rewrite, in a cool-headed way, a response plan without lockdowns, the evidence of 2020 is that such a plan, however reasonable and moderate, would be torn up in a panic under pressure from shrieking broadcasters and angry newspaper headlines.
This is a transcript of a speech given by Daniel Hannan (Lord Hannan of Kingsclere) in the House of Lords Debate on the Covid Inquiry that took place yesterday (September 3rd). Watch it here.
Stop Press: UsForThem has tweeted the contribution by Lord Frost to the same debate: “It is not even clear to me that we are going to get from the inquiry what we really need — a report on the costs and benefits of measures taken, factoring in the economic and social costs.”
— UsForThemUK
An important and admirably counter-narrative contribution from @DavidGHFrost in yesterday’s Lords debate on the Covid Inquiry’s first report. Extended clip here.
"I am not particularly impressed by what I have seen of the workings of the @covidinquiryuk so far…"
1/2 pic.twitter.com/BeBILhzbYQ(@UsforThemUK) September 4, 2024
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There is no shortage of dishonest, low quality education on the topic of meteorology, including apparently deliberate confusion between climate and weather, even environmental issues. All of that is tangled with the concept of our ability to influence it, or what can be done to manage our capacity to adapt to it.
Some of us have been around long enough to remember some of the significant variations, such as the 1962/63 winter weather, the 1976 heatwave & drought and a few others, like the winter floods in 2014, and 2020. It seems to me that every year varies quite a lot when you are involved in the detail effects, in particular with gardening or farming.
And those who’ve been around long enough to remember significant weather ‘events’ are those that they need rid of.. pronto.. they stain the narrative.. Put that man on a drip asap… of midazolam/morphine..
Extreme Weather is not Climate Change
************************************
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Dishonest seems charitable. Seems more like evil to me. Part of the war being waged on humanity.
You know something’s going on when now they’ve got to give every two-bit depression crossing the Atlantic a name.. Storm whatever.. anyone?
Indeed and it really pfizzes me off.
Chris – thank you. Keep at it – we’re with your every word.
Fwiw, there is defo a hunger for data and hard numbers – I posted a colloquial explanation and then some quite technical language below a bug eating piece in today’s Daily Telegraph, along with the link to the peer reviewed paper, to explain why chitin was toxic to humans, and it was astonishingly well received.
People are sick of being taken for idiots and realise that they have to buck up and study a bit if they are to triumph in intellectual debate against the morons in the predator class.
Ah.. the “predator class” so much more apt than the elite..
They’re more parasites than predators.
Hi AEC can you post a link to the article? It’s the devil to find anything in that rag…could be under business, sport, food …heaven only knows! Thanks.
If it’s getting warmer, when am I going to notice it?
I’ve been keeping a nature diary since 2011. There is no evidence of warming but some that it has got drier.
The cold spell last winter killed three beautiful shrubs in my garden that had thrived for at least 18 years.
Scorchio
People are protesting, gluing themselves to roads, stopping traffic, climbing onto bridges etc etc, all based on what they see on TV News. You can put your TV on day after day and see claims made by all manner of people that extreme weather is increasing or there are more floods and droughts all they say is caused by humans. Every bit of extreme weather that occurs anywhere in the world is beamed directly to our TV screens and this might give the impression that everything in the world is getting worse, but that is all it is ———-An Impression? But is it true? The answer is NO. ——–There is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event anywhere in the world. Virtually everything we hear on the issue of climate change is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency for which no observational evidence exists.—- No politician dares to question any of this dogma, as the flak they get would be career ending. How extraordinary that asking questions about something that is only occurring in speculative climate models but not in the real world gets you booted out of wherever you are and never to be seen again. We have recently amended the Climate Change Act (2008 Miliband) to now go even further and we are apparently to be NET ZERO by 2050. No one knows how it can possibly be done, how many trillions it will cost or even if the technology required can even be invented. This is preposterous. The United Nations have manufactured a CRISIS and are now dictating the SOLUTION to it all based not on reality but on virtual reality from un-validated models and speculations motivated entirely by the Politics of “Sustainable Development, which means a world run by unaccountable technocrats who will control all of the worlds wealth and resources and every aspect of people’s lives, and not only do many of us fall for this, we actually march with banners to DEMAND it.
The trouble with net zero projections by 2050 is as you say; vague. There isn’t enough money, natural resources, industrial processing capability, infrastructure for supply, engineering or technical advancement, and the necessary man power to facilitate each function, etc. to achieve this target, anywhere in this world. This simple fact is missing from the driven agenda. In 2016 the UK committed by law, to achieve net zero by 2050. (34 years) and after 7 years, (20% of agenda time) nothing has been done, started, or developed. It is still a talking shop, producing fear, with nothing that will facilitate the net zero targets, we here on this site, understand the 8ollox of it, but there is a lot more who believe. As you say, the governments have moved from being for the benefits par se of the nation to the servants of the few. The rest of us are being sent to where ever we can do least damage. Surplus to requirement.
‘,,,we actually march with banners to DEMAND it.’
You touch very correctly on the key point here. People want it to be true. I recall the old House-of-Commons Speaker George Thomas commenting on how he recovered his religious faith after episodes of doubt: ‘I want to believe,’ he declared. So many people persist with the belief in disastrous man-made climate change despite the fact that they know it is rubbish. They want it to be true. Something has to be wrong to explain how they feel about their lives. This is something to get behind en masse. Therefore this is what is wrong. I don’t think anything can be done to stop it.
Sadly, similar to the UK met office, weather manipulation is denied. Geoengineering going on right in front of our eyes,every single day. Look up, you will see dozens of chem trails, a constant. Who is funding this. What government/company is being used to spray chemicals into the atmosphere. The UK now in its 4th month of gloom, little sunshine, windy every day. Humans, plants and animals all need sunshine. Without it our planet and its creatures would not exist.
Even Chat GPT is on board with climageddon. I asked it why the theory of AGW was wrong and it basically told me it wasn’t. There’s no hope for the sheeple masses.
I suspect that we are going to see increasingly extreme weather and a hostile climate but it has nothing to do with humanity. The powers that be have known for decades, possibly centuries, that we are due a magnetic pole reversal which occurs every 12,000 years with the passage of the galactic current sheet. As part of this process the magnetic field deteriorates rapidly and has been accelerating since 1997 when the magnetic poles also began migrating and look set to cross around Indonesia sometime in the next 10-20 years. This will expose the earth to space weather and solar storms which will have disastrous consequences in terms of extreme weather, lightning strikes, volcanic activity and earthquakes. The UK’s mobile phone emergency alert system has got nothing to do with war! The present grand solar maximum lasting the last 100 years has been ridden on by the elite as evidence of global warming as it fits nicely with increasing CO2 emissions, despite humans only being responsible for about 3% of global CO2 emissions (The rest are natural) and the fact that CO2 levels rise and fall in response to global temperatures not the other way round. The big fiery ball in the sky controls global temperatures and in turn CO2 levels which at 420 ppm are at historic lows and for the majority of earth’s history have been around 5,000 ppm. However, Mr Global has indoctrinated people into the anthropogenic climate change ruse in order to take total control over the population as the carrying capacity of the earth plummets over the middle part of the century. The absolute Zero UK Fires report done for the government is not about net zero but in fact details what will happen out of necessity as a result of this catastrophe. There is also evidence that this cycle culminates with a solar micronova which unlocks the crust from the mantle causing the earth to flip 90 degrees as the ice caps settle out on the equator. Humanity always survives these events but civilisations will not. Call it The Great Reset if you will. See more at Suspicious Observers on YouTube.
It’s about sensationalism, ideology and click-bait, leading to more jobs and money in the climate-change industry.