I am emulating the Guardian headline:
“Too little, too late”: damning report condemns UK’s Covid response.
In my third word of my first sentence, I am also alluding to what Erasmus said in one of his books. You can follow, you can imitate, and you can emulate, said Erasmus. Follow = do the same as, imitate = do as well as, and emulate = do better than. Well, I shall emulate the Guardian, i.e., do better than it. Not difficult.
In fact, it is not just one column that condemns the Inquiry.
In these pages, we have had Heneghan and Jefferson, Toby Young, David Livermore, Guy de la Bédoyère and Andrew Bamji telling us that the inquiry has ignored the evidence that countered government policy and the economic and social and educational and funereal consequences that followed it. The inquiry, in sum, talks up the consequences of supposed government inactivity and ignores the consequences of actual government activity.
What are we condemning?
Well, we have known that the OFFICIAL VIEWTM of Covid for some years has been ‘too little, too late’. I am sitting in an armchair where I am able to reach my copy of the 2022 edition of that wretched book, Failures of State, by George Arbuthnot and Jonathan Calvert – boosted, I see, at the time by James O’Brien, Jonathan Freedland, Piers Morgan, Christina Patterson, Owen Jones, Rachel Clarke, Armando Iannucci, Kazuo Ishiguro, Andrew Marr, Marina Hyde, Devi Sridhar, John Crace, John Lanchester, Boaty McBoatface, Nurse Ratchett and Dogberry –
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I think you are being very unfair, clearly this woman is a genius . We can use her key insight to prevent harm from every future natural disaster by moving the population well away from danger before it actually happens.
I burnt my house down. Success! It got rid of the wasps nest! Must do it sooner next time.
There is now sufficient world evidence and research into the covid-19 pandemic that demonstrates that lockdowns were completely ineffective. Probably the most succinct explanation is offered by an Anglican priest in this video: https://youtu.be/jm5eLuVjUhA?si=XltfCgN7phsBZdqQ
This farce of an inquiry should have been completed within a week and illustrates a lot of what is wrong in the UK.
Actually a week is not long enough. My own report has taken three weeks so far and I have hardly started. Other things keep getting in the way. Three months? Let’s see. You will read it here first.
Excellent summary of a perverse episode. Preparing the ground for next time, while letting their mates off the hook. Astounding.
For me, the fundamental problem is the one that James is concerned with here; the instinct of those in charge to do something, whereas doing nothing would have been the better option, as discussed in one of the Sceptic’s early essays – and still one of the best:
https://dailysceptic.org/2020/05/27/from-stoicism-to-hysteria-uk-pandemic-responses-a-historical-context/
One aspect of Hallett’s blinkered thinking that particularly angers me is her ability to entirely ignore evidence from other countries, in particular the USA. Just one example amongst many:
“The British Covid inquiry found that earlier implementation of social distancing measures could have potentially avoided the need for a lockdown and reduced the number of deaths during the pandemic.” [AI generated summation]
Compare and contrast the US Congressional Select Subcommittee findings:
“SOCIAL DISTANCING: The ‘6 feet apart’ social distancing recommendation — which shut down schools and small business across the country — was arbitrary and not based on science. During closed door testimony, Dr. Fauci testified that the guidance, ‘sort of just appeared.’”
The Inquiry “portrayed [the Great Barrington Declaration] as an ‘eccentric sideshow'”. [Grok] One of its authors, Jay Bhattacharya, is now Director of the NIH, making him one of the most important public health officials on the planet. We are so far behind the Americans in coming to a reckoning with just WTF went wrong in 2020.
Totally agree regarding the “minority report”. I’ve said many times here and elsewhere that the inquiry needed to be adversarial, with at least one “sceptical” team able to call witnesses, introduce evidence and set its own broad terms of reference. In the US they have congressional hearings and we’ve seen Republican members of Congress hauling various players of the US shitshow over the coals. Sadly here you’d be hard pressed to find enough MPs who actually opposed covid bollocks at the time. Therein lies the problem. 90plus % of everyone and everything was on board with it to start with and not many openly changed their minds. Nobody wants to hear it was all bollocks, except us nutters.
We cannot even get our Prime Minister to actually answer questions at PMQs but then he is protected by a Labour speaker – how long since we had a good impartial speaker? – in Long Haul Hoyle.
It needs a truthful,brutal,satirical tome in response. We need Jonathan Swift on the case. Then we need to enact a Modest Proposal encompassing lawyers,public health experts,politicians and journalists.
Brilliant piece, possibly the author’s best.
Fuckofcom – priceless!
But, an incredibly good idea. The minority report it’s genuine genius.
Fuckofcom? I thought his use of TM even better.
In the world of “yes minister” politicians manipulate the questions to get the answers they want/need. It’s astonishing to see how compliant the legal experts are. This inquiry will surely come to be recognised as a case study of “how not to do an inquiry”!!
For “too litttle, too late”, read “too much, too soon”. Or as Dr Malcolm Kendrick puts it: “Don’t just do something, stand there.”
it means, “We weren’t Medical Nazi enough” The Rona Reich. Medical Nazism, yet asshats today call Trump a dictator….how is your IQ level.
for the next plandemic against the non-existing bat-ass virus, they will go door to door and shoot you, if you don’t consent to the poisons. if you believe this is insane, remember 19th c history, where starting in 1848, they went door to door with the smallpox quackcine and if you refused, you were fined, imprisoned or both.
Good day to you, Lady Hallett,
I wonder if you would be so very kind as to look into your ‘vanity mirror’ this morning and ask yourself this one simple question:
How could a common cold coronavirus with, using Office for National Statistics figures, average age of mortality equal to or greater than life expectancy in this country, for both men and women,…how could such a virus/Influenza Like Illness possibly justify any of the measures that you have considered or, indeed, your £200 million inquiry itself?
Yours sincerely,
What The Actual Dickens?
She cannot hear you because she doesn’t want to.
Blind, deaf and very, VERY dumb.
“… a poor state of preparation for the pandemic … an extraordinary dereliction of his duty as Prime Minister … delay in making the decision … many people died unnecessarily …”
Modern medicine began with the likes of Nightingale, Jenner, Snow, Flemming, Ivanovsky etc. Not one of these individuals were Prime Ministers. There have been no medical advances made by ANY politician or ANY government. How did we switch instantly to government run medicine and also a global governance via the WHO? We already had hard won protocols in place for such a pandemic, unless we consider this particular virus as human engineered so similar to a bio weapon? However, it all looks exactly like a power grab.
The following excerpts are from Klaus Schwab’s book “Covid-19: The Great Reset” which was miraculously published just 3 months after the pandemic was declared as if it was already prepared. I draw your attention to the quote on page 156.
On the first page of the book ‘Covid-19: The Great Reset’ it begins:
“Since it made its entry on the world stage, COVID-19 has dramatically torn up the existing script of how to govern countries, live with others and take part in… Read more »
I feel a chill in my bones. Is it freezing outside, or is it the Klaus Schwab effect?
Agenda 2030 is on track. Look how much effort is being put into digitizing and controlling people through computer software. This is Klaus Schwab’s 4th Industrial Revolution.
A sort of handbook for global fascism…
When all these books began to appear in 2020 even I said in my blog that it was much too early to start drawing conclusions. Five years on I have been proved right. SARS-CoV-2 was nothing like as fatal as believed. Vaccines were not the answer and indeed are now implicated in more deaths than the virus – entirely predictable once you have realised you are stimulating the body to produce the very thing that causes the complications. In the US the FDA’s re-evaluation of child deaths has proved that the vaccines were implicated and this was covered up, or at best not properly investigated in case the “wrong” answer emerged.
The BMJ has this week published a couple of articles that broadly support Hallett’s conclusions, so it appears even the medical press cannot see clearly (I am waiting to see if my riposte appears, but it has censored my contrarian views before).
All outbreaks of respiratory viruses are likely to be pandemics. We have pandemics every winter when colds and flus blow around the World.