Two years ago today, the U.K. climbed aboard the international lockdown bandwagon that had been gathering momentum in the preceding fortnight and ordered the whole population to stay at home. The aim was to try to ‘flatten the curve’ of coronavirus infections, and thus (it was said) ease peak pressure on the health service.
The policy, as it turned out, was completely unnecessary. As Professor Carl Heneghan pointed out as early as April 20th 2020, and Chris Whitty admitted to MPs that July, new daily infections were already falling ahead of the lockdown. The same thing happened on the next two occasions as well, as mathematician Professor Simon Wood has shown. All three times that the U.K. Government imposed a lockdown in England – March 2020, November 2020 and January 2021 – infections were falling before the restrictions came in.
The fact that infections and deaths in no-lockdown Sweden – where people were never ordered to stay at home, and schools and businesses were never closed – also went into decline around the same time as in the U.K. adds to the evidence that lockdowns are unnecessary.
Further evidence comes from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which, in February 2020, showed that a freely circulating virus in the confines of a cruise ship would peak and decline ahead of any intervention, eventually infecting a total of around 19% of those on board.
The evidence is clear: lockdowns are unnecessary to ‘control’ a coronavirus outbreak. Like flu outbreaks, coronavirus outbreaks peak and decline by themselves owing to factors such as pre-existing immunity and (possibly) voluntary behavioural changes in the population – though note there were no voluntary behavioural changes on the Diamond Princess, and nor are there typically exit waves as restrictions are lifted and people mix more, meaning the role of behaviour changes may be exaggerated. But either way, if infections decline ahead of lockdowns then lockdowns are unnecessary.
As well as being unnecessary, lockdowns are also ineffective. Where they are imposed before an outbreak is already declining they make little difference to the outcome. Many studies based on real-world data (as opposed to modelling) have shown this, and a recent paper from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) reviewing these studies concluded that “lockdowns have had little to no public health effects” and thus “are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument”.
The JHU study authors argue that prior voluntary behaviour change likely explains much of the ineffectiveness of imposing stay-at-home requirements on top of that. However, they also note that even with lockdowns and distancing in place, a considerable amount of contact continues, and some of the lowest mortality countries – Denmark, Finland, Norway – actually permitted the highest amount of contact in the first lockdown, allowing people to “go to work, use public transport, and meet privately at home”.
Even if lockdowns did have some effect, though, it would only be a matter of deferral, not prevention; everyone who was going to be infected would eventually be infected anyway. This might leave open the justification of flattening the curve, but since the NHS was never in danger of being overwhelmed, and given infections peaked and declined before lockdown, there was no need for such a costly ‘flattening’.
Lockdowns are not only unnecessary and ineffective, they are also devastatingly harmful.
Children were particularly badly affected, despite being at almost zero risk from the virus. Mental health problems in children increased 50%, rising from affecting one in nine before the pandemic to one in six during 2020 and 2021. Childhood obesity rates increased 20% or more above previous years. Around 100,000 ‘ghost children’ who were in school before the pandemic have never gone back.
Adult mental health has also been severely affected. The ONS estimates that the proportion of U.K. adults experiencing some form of depression is “more than double” what it was before the pandemic, increasing from 10% in 2019 to 21% in 2020.
Suicides in young women were up 25% and drug ‘poisonings’ in young men were up 12% in England in 2020. Alcohol deaths were up 20% across the U.K. in the same year.
The economic impact was considerable, affecting incomes and livelihoods. The U.K. economy shrank by almost 10% in 2020, the largest annual fall on record, while national debt jumped during the pandemic to £2.1 trillion.
The effect of lockdowns on poorer countries is terrible. The United Nations has estimated that an additional 207 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty over the next decade due to the long term impact of lockdowns.
Yet lockdowns were never part of the plan. The U.K. had a Pandemic Preparedness Strategy which, while primarily based on influenza, envisaged the possibility of a SARS-like pandemic and up to 315,000 additional deaths – well above the current U.K. total of around 133,000 excess deaths since March 2020. The strategy did not recommend lockdowns in any circumstances, implying they were ineffective and unethical.
During the pandemic the only opposition to Government policy has often come in the form of calls for restrictions to be imposed faster and harder. Now there is an official COVID-19 Inquiry and the worry is that the same will happen here, with the only criticism of the Government measures being that they weren’t severe enough or soon enough. Those running the inquiry and those presenting evidence need to ensure this doesn’t happen. The inquiry must be made to look at all the evidence, including the data which show that lockdowns were unnecessary, ineffective and harmful. Most of all, it needs to conclude that they must never happen again.
Postscript: It has been pointed out that this article does not mention that the Johns Hopkins paper was not peer-reviewed. The paper said that it examined 34 prior studies with data on the link between lockdowns and COVID-19 mortality, concluding that “lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality”. However, several critics have noted that the meta-study defined lockdowns as having “at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention”, meaning that even a mandate to wear face masks would be considered a “lockdown”.
Professor Neil Ferguson has been critical of this paper. He told the U.K. Science Media Centre: “This report on the effect of ‘lockdowns’ does not significantly advance our understanding of the relative effectiveness of the plethora of public health measures adopted by different countries to limit COVID-19 transmission.” In addition, Seth Flaxman, a University of Oxford computer science professor, has criticised the criteria used to determine which research was included in the paper’s analysis, telling the Science Media Centre that the paper “systematically excluded from consideration any study based on the science of disease transmission, meaning that the only studies looked at in the analysis are studies using the methods of economics. These do not include key facts about disease transmission…”
We are not persuaded by Neil Ferguson and Seth Flaxman’s scepticism about this paper. Its findings are in line with the conclusions of other researchers about the effect of lockdowns, such as this working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. It is not surprising that they are dismissive of attempts to assess the impact of lockdowns using real-world data rather than modelling data, given their own preference for modelling data. While it’s true that the Johns Hopkins paper has not been peer reviewed, it’s worth noting that Neil Ferguson’s highly influential Report 9, which used modelling data to make the case for lockdowns, was not peer reviewed either.
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Obviously we all agree that lockdowns are wrong.
The problem with the Sweden vs UK comparison, though, is that lockdown lovers will claim that Swedes reduced social contact voluntarily and so in effect did very similar things, albeit by choice rather than by mandate. And they probably have a bit of a point.
Lockdowns are wrong, not because they don’t work, but because it is an intolerable violation of our freedom to be forced into house arrest by our government without having committed any crime. It’s just plain wrong.
I know it’s a hard argument to make because people these days are so conditioned to favour safety over freedom, but that is precisely the notion that needs defeating.
We don’t belong to the state. The state exists for us.
That last sentence is fundamental.
Its also the defining issue in today’s world. It also needs ‘state’ defining, its no longer a geographical entity but something that I call a ‘civilisation’, a culture a way of living. There are I think 5 main ones in the world, and we live in the ‘west’ one, which is predominantly US-centric. Increasingly in our civilisation the majority of people appear to believe the state should determine lives of people, because that is virtuous and as you say ‘free of risk’ is more important than ‘free to risk’.
In one of the other of the 5 major civilisations this is enforced by social credits. In others religious association provides the cultural glue. In another there still exists a slightly old fashioned ‘national’ purpose.
What is common to almost all is the loss of individualism.
I guess that is a feature of belonging to anything. Even to a family.
With most groups, you have a choice whether you belong to it or not. With the state you have no choice. You have to belong to one or be a refugee, which is essentially a prison sentence.
So given that we have no choice of belonging, we are left with having to defend our individuality and and fight back the encroachment of the state in our lives.
Good point though about what the state is these days. I couldn’t agree more that the modern state does not end at national borders.
I withdrew my consent to be governed in two formal letters to my local M/MSPs
They still don’t have my consent.
you sent them by unicorn i can presume?
It’s like having a ringside seat at the collapse of Rome. Whitty et al knew what they were doing was wrong, and definitely not supported by the evidence, yet they still persist to this day. Deliberate manipulation of the public which know has caused the loss of public trust in all institutions. Perhaps that was their purpose
It is Bill Gates’s purpose. They are merely his paid lackeys.
It’s important to make all of the different arguments if we’re going to bring people in no matter where they are currently, but I agree that we shouldn’t stop at just the ‘lockdowns do more harm than good’ argument.
Some people aren’t ready to accept that lockdown would be wrong even if it saved 4 billion lives. We want to bring them across to the anti-lockdown side, and persuading them that lockdown does more harm than good can bring them across to our side, for now. But if they never move beyond the consequentialist arguments, all it takes for them to support future lockdowns is for the media to tell them that this time it’s different.
I think there’s a lot of value in persuading people of the consequentialist arguments though, because it can open them up to the deontological arguments. Once you accept that the people you previously thought were nutters have got the big questions right, it’s easier to accept that they might have something else to say that’s worth listening to.
I like the approach of saying “Here’s why lockdowns do more harm than good. Now I’m going to explain why I would oppose lockdowns even if they did more good than harm. If you’re not with me on that, I’ve still demonstrated why they do more harm than good, so you should oppose them anyway.”
Some people are numbskulls who won’t join the dots with inflation and what’s been happening these last few years, they’ll just blame the War in Ukraine.
it is impossible to convince a person to change its views by using reason if those views were not based in reason in the first place.
and until you accept that fact you will go nowhere with your efforts…
Yes, it’s highly misleading to brand every lockdown intervention as if it were the same thing. What matters is behaviour, not legislation. Some so-called lockdowns barely existed in reality.
Few countries had stricter rules than China and there, a lockdown policy was indeed highly effective in controlling the virus (albeit at high social cost).
But now the virus has changed. It’s more contagious, and the controls that worked 2 years ago don’t necessarily work so well now. China urgently needs to change its strategy because the risk-reward equation has shifted very markedly against lockdown as a long term policy.
Lockdown is complete anti-science, stop pretending otherwise.
Is this womens intuition?
in china lockdown policy was highly effective?
according to whom?
the chinese?
haven’t you learned a single thing out if this episode?
LOL
The funny thing is, if universal lockdowns worked, ie reduced the incidence of a terrible disease that was a danger to all, then you wouldn’t need them because people would change their behaviours voluntarily.
you judge the reaction of people to perceived danger completely wrong.
the first thing people will do in case of an unexplained disease that affects lots of people is to gather to pray…..
Lockdowns are wrong, not because they don’t work, but because it is an intolerable violation of our freedom to be forced into house arrest by our government without having committed any crime. It’s just plain wrong.
A thousand times, yes.
There have always been people who prefer to shelter in their homes when they are afraid of what is outside. Fair enough.
Nobody – no individual, state, or organisation of any description – has the right to order the confinement of those who have not been convicted of any crime by due (and open) legal process.
There are no excuses, no justifications.
Our freedoms are God-given and not under negotiation. Governments do not have authority to ride roughshod over natural, inalienable rights.
This last point is one that requires forceful application whenever they step up to that line again.
Which is why there must be criminal proceedings against the governmental figures who have indeed ridden roughshod over those rights. They must experience severe personal consequences and genuine disgrace.
i guess typhoid mary would agree with you.
but i do agree that you should be free to walk around while spreading a deadly infection.
as long as i am free to shoot you at first sight that is.
for there is no justification for taking away a man’s right to self defense…
Way back in March 2020 I expressed to a colleague that the idea of lockdown was absurd. Hindering the build up of immunity resilience in the community, destroying the economy and by definition making matters worse. My major concern was that any novel respiratory virus will present a high risk to the elderly and immunocompromised. The focus should be on treatment and protection of these groups. Yep – Barrington Declaration etc. This numpty could see this way back then.
But key is that lockdowns do not equal ‘safety’, but the reverse. A journey into the absurd and stuck in transit.
A journey into the absurd and stuck in transit.
Perfectly put. I have never been so bewildered; or so angry. How could people be so deceived? How could authorities be so stupid and/or immoral?
I have two cousins, in particular, to whom I owe my sanity (if I still have it). From different sides of my family, they have sustained me with their rage and their laughter.
Yes, lockdown is altruism put into practical politics, altruism is the morality of death.
Very true, but when large swathes are whipped into sufficient frenzy to acquiesce violations of our freedoms its incumbent on those who are keeping receipts to point out that Lockdowns are also wrong because they don’t work.
The evidence is clear, and its superfluous for us to labour these points. We know. We know they know. But the masses need to be regularly informed, despite their wholesale rejection.
If GBD had the same platform, airtime and advertising campaign as the official line (and the Intel Agnecy/Gov-Big Tech-Media complex permitted, which it wouldn’t) we may have had different outcomes?
On Sweden, we fortunately have other controls such as Danish Rutland, US states etc.
Who or what constitutes smoking gun evidence is up for interpretation. I’d seen enough in April 2020. But then my net worth hasn’t doubled in the last 2 years, so I would say that.
Formidable evalutaion by the way Will, bravo.
‘The WEF, the BMGF and Open Society are evil, malingering organisations and must never be allowed to operate again.’
Discuss.
They know all this. They didn’t – and don’t – give a damn.
Lockdown regulation, suppression of civil liberties, co-opting (bribery) of the press and the conditioning of people – most pertinently the young – was long planned.
You don’t think that they suddenly decided to abandon the pandemic preparedness strategy, and then draft the 359pp. Coronavirus Act in 6 days do you?
Yes, Jingles. Tis true. There is no possible way that such a coordinated response could have been achieved on the back of a fag packet at such short notice. It had been planned for a long time. I still get the horrible nagging feeling that we have all been part of a worldwide social experiment to judge how we would all respond to various restrictions on our lives in the name of safety over freedom. I don’t think it will happen again, but governments everywhere now know how easy it was. They will forever have it up their sleeves and can use it as a threat to subdue us.
Well Garry,
You are correct in your assumption this is long in the making.
About 30 or more years in fact. Right back to the Club of Rome and the invention of Global Warming.
If you have time take a gander at Iain Davis over at UK Column.
It’s a great 2 part article covering all this ScamDemic, NWO, Net Zero Big Bankers etc.
It’s quite long but well worth the read.
Sorry Garfy – this stupid machine cannot spell!
It’s already starting with the “no driving on Sunday to save fuel” ideas that are being nudged into MSM. With so many now conditioned to do what they’re told, the experiment in generating behaviours of acquiescence and unquestioning obedience continues.
in far less than six days.
just take the infectious diseases act draft and rename it into coronavirus act.
nothing wrong with that now is there?,
I doubt lockdowns of the type we had will happen again but the rest of the Covid theatre will certainly be repeated. It is a long way from disappearing now judging by all the measures still persisted with in many shops, museums and venues.
The relentless advance of safetyism, which long precedes the coronavirus crisis, certainly continues.
I agree that many of the ideas that were deployed during the crisis will be banked and built on.
It’s a bureaucratised world of policies and procedures, Any risk, however small, is set upon by zealous technocrats who thrive on ordering every aspect of our world, especially by telling others what to do.
This is not a world for anyone who isn’t willing to reduce themselves to behaving like an automaton.
We never thought it would happen at all. It’s that very stunned disbelief that enabled it. “Surely this is some sort of a mistake. Let’s just go along with it and it’ll be corrected by the weekend, no doubt.”
Never, ever forget the infamous quote by Neil Ferguson:
“It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe we thought…and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”
It tells you everything you need to know.
They got away with it for one reason: the MSM were complicit in spreading the lies and propaganda.
Absolutely. If you take all the other, generally stupid, measures imposed, together they add up to almost as great attack on ones liberties as a lockdown. I have just been to the hairdressers and they have a sign on the door demanding masks be worn (which I refuse to, and they say nothing). I have asked them why, and do they know masks are useless, they just shrug and say that’s what the boss wants (who is rarely there, incidentally). I bet, at this very minute, someone, somewhere in government, is thinking up petty rules (guidance ‘for your own good’) to cover things like ‘climate change’, terrorist attacks, civil unrest and the like.
Sadly, some people love being told what to do (and telling other people off if they don’t comply!)
Ah, yes. The ubiquitous Covid shrug.
Nobody ever mentions Florida for some reason, I would propose they are an even better model than Sweden which did start imposing some restrictions after the first wave, Florida recinded all mandates in Summer 2020 and never re-instated them.
It’ll telling that our Government sent representatives to Isreal to study their vaccine passports but as far as I can tell never once visited Florida on a fact-finding visit. They wanted the lockdowns, they wanted the vaccine passports and they wanted control not freedom!
The results of how the virus progressed on the Diamond Princess was ignored and that was what alerted me that nothing was what it seemed.
Same here
I expected our governments to be desperate for good news that would allow life to continue and in particular that the economy would not be trashed.
It was deeply disturbing to see the opposite was true.
It was becoming obvious before the insane lockup (as that is what it really was … an illegal detention), that there was no connection between the reduction in exponential growth leading to the peak and policy. Sweden simply proved that point.
So, why did it happen? For the same reason SAGE were predicting a peak in June, when the data showed April. They were using proven failed models and modellers who didn’t care about what was actually happening, only what their insane models were telling them “would” happen.
(For the technically minded, they took the R value, but totally ignored the much shorter mean time between infections which caused the predicted 2x per week to be in fact about 8-10x per week, which in turn meant they were predicting a June peak, whereas the data was showing all the UK had to be infected by end of April … so the peak had to be before then!)
The agenda’s changed. Bojo is now busy not fighting a war with Russia
Virtue Signaling About Ukraine!
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Back in Spring 2020 we just didn’t have the full information about the severity of the disease and how rapidly it would spread. At this point in time lockdowns were sensible (especially given the misinformation from China). Actually, even before that we should have restricted travel from China — but we didn’t do that because Trump was racist or something.
However, by May/June we had a much better understanding of the nature of the disease. At that point in time the science pointed towards targeted lockdowns for the vulnerable groups and self-isolation for those exhibiting symptoms.
What’s more, we did know that it was a coronavirus and that coronaviruses (in general) are seasonal, with lower infection rates and complications after infection during the sunnier months. This also supported relaxation of lockdowns for the non-vulnerable from May so that the non-vulnerable could develop some immunity. I also note that this would support supplementation with vitamin D in the population — it is only one of the proposed mechanisms for decreased respiratory infections during summer, but it would have essentially have been free and there would have been no downside. I still don’t understand why this wasn’t done and why the official advice was to not take vitamin D — it is completely bizarre.
Quite why we didn’t change strategies by May is weird. I suspect that it is due to a combination of two reasons:
Like the worthy suggestions that we should have protected the elderly more, I wonder what this might actually have achieved. Even if China had been entirely isolated from the world, their draconian policies have not worked, and the rest of the world would have caught it as soon as the restrictions were lifted or broke down (hello New Zealand).
The vaccines may have been universally rolled out, but we now know they would not have sterilized the virus. The virus would have spread as it did without travel restrictions, lockdowns or vaccinations, but would have done it more quickly, with less disruption, less loss of life, better herd immunity, and less vaccine-selection of harmful variants. That’s what happened with Hong Kong flu in 1968-9 and every other real viral pandemic.
There was never a possibility of zero-Covid, which is why the WHO 2019 pandemic plan advised:
So you can try it if you’re Iceland or Malta, but you may starve.
The suggestion is that the advantage would have been to pushed the first covid wave further into spring where the seasonality would have resulted in decreased mortality for a given level of immune protection.
That said, I don’t think that covid came in spring 2020 — there is now too much evidence that it came in autumn 2019 and that we didn’t notice until seasonality effects resulted in more people getting ill.
There was a small chance of zero covid right at the start, if China had admitted/dealt with the problem faster. But by the time they admitted it (Jan) it was already right round the world.
“Back in Spring 2020 we just didn’t have the full information about the severity of the disease and how rapidly it would spread.”
You can never have “full” information, but the information that was available did not point to the need for lunatic measures never before tried.
“At this point in time lockdowns were sensible (especially given the misinformation from China).”
Sorry I am not following. Lockdowns had been considered and rejected by planners, presumably while they had clearer heads than the loonies running the show in 2020. Following information from China doesn’t seem like a sensible thing to do.
“Actually, even before that we should have restricted travel from China”
Cut China off from the rest of the world? I’m sure that would have worked really well and been practical and sustainable.
“However, by May/June we had a much better understanding of the nature of the disease. At that point in time the science pointed towards targeted lockdowns for the vulnerable groups and self-isolation for those exhibiting symptoms.”
If you believe in “targeted lockdowns” for anyone I think you’re posting on the wrong site. Self-isolation for a disease that is mild for almost everyone – why?
And remember that there was a general election in Dec 2019. I know 3 months is a long time in politics, but when the lockdown arose, it looked to me as if it was like another election campaign at first – at least, the way it was promoted looked like that.
There’s a concert today to mark the second anniversary of the first lockdown. We are promised a permanent “covid memorial”. Even as we wring our hands about war in Ukraine we are creating a myth of the great covid epidemic as a time when we all came together and we fought shoulder to shoulder. And, of course, we are feting our national heroes – all, coincidentally, employees of the state.
Any notion that the state will accept culpability for the damage it has wrought is a fantasy. As Neil Oliver has said: it’s not about what they say it’s about!
That monument should be a suburban Mumsnetter banging pots for Our NHS.
While wearing a fashionable mask?
That same mumsnetter has changed horses and is now busy getting her house ready for Ukrainians.
I doubt that – that would be doing something proactive, and she’s all about virtue signalling rather than actually doing anything. More likely she’s just changed her social media profile picture to blue and yellow!
I must say I always enjoy your comments Rog.
We should all treat World War Covid with the respect it deserves.
Of course this is important but the most important article is nestling away in the Moira Stewart extra news section and taken from D.V. Williamson substack. Called something direct like Are Vaccines Killing People? It’s well worth a read. Seek it out.
And of course if the CDC NIAID NIH Fauci alphabet cartel are unwilling to release the granular data so it can be crunched what a great service to the people of the UK it would be if the MHRA would take a passing interest in it? Maybe they could stop spelling out SHELL OIL on their calculators, smirking because the caravan has moved on, and do some helpful work… Hey June, don’t be so sad, do some work! You know, like using the data to find stuff out that might save lives, like, you know, kids lives?
Well done to dailysceptic.org for pointing us to these rare gems. I’m sure the Online Harms Bill Gates will put pay to that very soon, and we’ll be hearing Ofcom Approved 2+2= 5Live forever. Orwell’s revised woke vision of a Rainbow Eco Sandal stamping lightly on an unvaxxed slab-faced Russian infantryman’s pet hamster forever.
Nurse, the meds! Not the one beginning with M though.
Or is it put paid?
5 3 1 8 0 0 8
I wouldn’t have said this two years ago as I put most things politicians do down to political posturing and Twitter led stupidity. But the longer this has gone on and the more we see of the lockstep relationship between national leaders, the WEF, unhinged international billionaires and global corporations all owned by either Black Rock and/or Vanguard with its roster of entirely secret investors, it’s become increasingly clear that this has been a grooming session.
These poor mentally hobbled brainwashed kids will now know the indefatigable overarching power of Big State to ‘protect’ them or punish them according to how they’ve behaved and they will be more inclined to accept everything else that’s in the long term goodie bag, including regular injections, centralised digital currency, a social credit system and eventually no doubt microchipping at birth.
And conscription to obliterate Russia, of course, with all the same democratic incentives to see it as a cause worth dying for or be punished if you become disillusioned.
I object to the word itself, as it has no meaning beyond “any arbitrary act of tyranny that we fancy imposing”. Look at the instances of police threatening to arrest people for standing in their own gardens, just for example.
Most enforcement turned out to be unlawful, but the tragic fact is that it still happened, and without consequences for the Day-Glo Derek despots, because “Oi, we’re in lockdown! Don’t you know there’s a war on?”
It’s a shibboleth to separate the believers from the heathen, a debate ender, the curtain behind which you may not look.
If I never hear that word again outside of a prison setting where it actually has a meaning, I’ll be delighted.
Well sharing this article lasted about 5 mins before it was removed by LinkedIn:
A good example of censorship and the denial of free speech that will not be addressed by the public inquiry.
The reason for ‘an inquiry’ is so that some ‘Baroness’ can make lots of extra income. That is all.
Just stop using these shitty platforms
Microserfs may not peddle unapproved narratives.
Reminder: LinkedIn is now owned by MicroSoft. Not that it would make much difference either way.
and just why are you feeding the troll MSM. Linkedin is one of the main instigators.
Uninstall and ignore any alphabet apps, Twatter, Farcebook, Netflix,. Disney, every single MSM news outlet, snapshit, Whatsarse.
You are the meat in their hamburger.
Since day one I have found it incredible that we in the UK and in fact the rest of western Europe – the philosophical home of the Enlightenment – were going to adopt the cruel, heavy-handed and oppressive methods of a tyrannical communist regime on the other side of the world – this I found astonishing..
Lockdowns, restrictions and in particular the deliberate targeting of those in society who did not comply was evil beyond belief and those responsible should be held accountable and stand trial for their crimes – they should not be given further positions in government or handed knighthoods – they should not be rewarded for their misconduct they should be punished.
A I see it the only European country to come out of this whole madness with any credibility at all was Sweden – a country who before the Covid debacle began I criticized severely for their open-door immigration policy but suddenly I found myself applauding and cheering-on their ‘Keep Calm and Carry On‘ attitude during covid – a phrase once attributed to the bulldog spirit of plucky Brits but judging on the performance of the past two years this can now best be attributed to the cool and spirited Swedes – while Swedes were carrying on regardless Brits fought amongst themselves for toilet roll, covered their faces in dirty rags, placed themselves under house arrest and willingly surrendered their freedoms in return for the promise of a little bit of security.
Hats off to Sweden – a country i thought I’d never find myself saluting but I do now – so Sweden I salute you…
“those responsible should be held accountable and stand trial for their crimes – they should not be given further positions in government or handed knighthoods – they should not be rewarded for their misconduct they should be punished.”
But this is all ‘should’ ‘should’ ‘should’.
Chris Whitty got a knighthood. He has not been punished.
Neil Ferguson has not been punished – what’s he doing right now?
How about all the Police who handed out ‘fines’? They haven’t even been named.
Covid marshalls? -another group of bullies who haven’t been named.
Who were the snithches who phoned to the Police to report their neighbours for ‘breaking lockdown rules’? – another bunch that has not been named.
Tony Blair isn’t going to prison – and neither is anyone who was responsible for the Covid fraud (which is still ongoing).
Boris got away with his partying. The ‘world leaders’ at their G7 meeting got away with not wearing face masks. Drakeford has got away with not wearing a face mask and being in close proximity to others at the Indian Diwali party.
We all know that any ‘inquiry’ is going to be a ‘whitewash’. And with the 4th and 5th jabs being dished out in 2022, and people still wearing face masks,and the Vaxx Passes still in use for travel, the ‘Covid scam’ is far from over.
It might have escaped your notice, but Britain is no longer fill of Brits they have been displaced by all manner of international mongrels
The reason lockdowns dont work is because fit and healthy people are not infectious. This was known. Any epidemiologist, virologist, pathologist etc worth their salt knew this. Even Fauci. The claimed levels of asymptomatic spread was one of, if not the main driver of restrictions. They claimed about 30% of spread was asymptomatic. Nonsense. Its low single figures and thats from presymptomatic not true asymptomatic. What they did was realise about a third of people were testing positive using a ludicrous high cycle pcr while asymptomatic and didnt go on to get symptoms, and then conflated that with a viable route of transmission. But then if only the symptomatic were isolating and the rest of the country were cracking on, the narrative of fear and the agenda of control wouldnt have fitted. Lockdowns were a vital part of the narrative.
All that were needed were greater efforts of infection control in hospitals and care homes, like actually cleaning surfaces properly. Increase hand hygiene awareness, as they did, plus ask people for a time to stay home with symptoms that otherwise they wouldnt have. Take extra precautions around elderly and vulnerable.
Measles is the most infectious respiratory virus and is spread by, surprise surprise, coughs sneezes runny nose (its particular adept at infecting cells in the trachea, perfect for cough based spread). These are cold like symptoms like omincron. You get a fever then a few days later you get the other symptoms. Guess when you are infectious? Not when you are symptom free lets put it that way. The clowns running this sh1tshow have tried to rewrite the rule book to fit their agenda. Unfortunately most of the population are too stupid to question anything and can only carry out orders and virtue signal.
Lockdowns were imposed to induce dread; masks to display conformity and submission – daunting the rebellious by a show of numbers.
Compulsory “vaccines” and vax-passes, with all that they imply and embody, were the goal.
‘Measles is the most infectious respiratory virus and is spread by, surprise surprise, coughs sneezes runny nose (its particular adept at infecting cells in the trachea, perfect for cough based spread).’
There is no credible evidence to support this statement, the original Enders experiments that claimed to identify measels as a virus were clearly flawed, even Enders acknowledged these flaws in his work but the myth was established and he got a Nobel prize to seal the orthodoxy.
Dr Mike Yeadon insists that there is no such thing as asymptomatic spread.
In early March calls for lockdown were increasing. The data from Italy had come in. I had a feeling lockdown would cause more damage than not.
So I spent a morning searching for data. I looked at costs of savings lives (NHS QALY), costs of a lockdown to the economy, plot of life expectancy against GDP/capita, the work of Prof Thomas at Bristol, the wealth of literature on the health effects of recessions, our pandemic plan etc.
After a morning’s work I came out utterly convinced of my initial suspicion. Something apparently beyond our 400,000+ civil servants.
And I’ll be proved right – but its obvious really.
It’s been common knowledge from the word go that the Covid restrictions were over the top and the barely tested “vaccines” introduced under emergency authorization were not only ineffective but positively dangerous. Given their performances throughout and the catastrophic effect of their measures, Johnson, Witty, Vallance et al should be made to beg for public forgivness before facing trial for misconduct in public office.
They should. But they obviously won’t.
“The inquiry must be made to look at all the evidence”
I doubt they’ll look into all the mendacity the way Reiner Fuellmich is in the Court of Public Opinion. We should focus all our efforts on that.
I have an important question for everyone.
The NHS appears to have shut down in many important ways. It is increasingly difficult to be seen by your GP and the GPs themselves do not appear to be resisting the barriers imposed between themselves and their patients.
I was speaking to a pharmacist recently and he implied that what was going on in the NHS was not imminent privatisation, but something worse, yet was afraid to say more.
I have noticed that the real difficulties people are having in accessing medical care IS NOT REPORTED ANYWHERE- total media blackout, which is the most telling part.
Does anyone have any inside information on what is planned? Because it is clear that whatever it is, we are not being told.
what could be worse to a public monstrosity like the Notional Health Service other than privatisation?
Regionalisation is already in place……
Public/private partnerships at a NHS DNA level?
Or an alignment to the “public” Obamacare model in the US. NHS becomes a health tax, being subsumed by the various UK private health providers……..
Theyd hate conversion to the 1st world social insurance model as practiced in nearly every 1st world country from Holland to Japan even more.
Unlike the US & UK that systems mitigates against cartel & big union control, allowing patients meaningful choices.
Its notable that most UK commentators think there are only 2 systems in the world, US & UK, deliberately ignoring the successful systems elsewhere.
Many areas had a serious shortage of GPs per capita before the pandemic. This was because of government cuts over a long period. The problem was hugely exacerbated by the pandemic, as the workload ballooned while staff were often sick.
The move to digital consultations/triage was a logical and reasonable response that increases efficiency without necessarily reducing quality, if done properly. However, it can’t compensate for a fundamental shortage of clinics and GPs.
I have something to do with this in my job. My local surgery, for example, is reaching crisis point. Staff turnover is increasing because the demands are unacceptable.
Meanwhile, the government simply lays more demands on the same service. This will vary hugely from area to area but I am seriously worried for areas like mine.
‘The problem was hugely exacerbated by the pandemic, as the workload ballooned’
Ballooned? They did sweet FA for months on end and then dropped everything in favour of jabbing people with the all new magic sauce because they got bonus pay for doing so.
Who are you? Sajid Javid? One of the things I criticise this government is ignorance of what’s going on at the ground level.
So if you seriously think that GP surgeries have been sitting around twiddling their thumbs for the last couple years, I can tell you have it utterly wrong.
Comments like this are a kick in the solar plexus for people who are burned out.
Lockdowns destroyed millions of lives..the end. There is no discussion, listening to other viewpoints, or fine line to consider. It’s that simple. I’m usually a fence sitter, but not on this.
But they will impose lockdowns again, they will force people to take more warp speed gene therapy vaccines with the vaccine passport used as the point of control (here it is called the NHS app) they will track and trace us everywhere rtc.
This system is the globalists wet dream of total control, if you don’t obey you die if you do obey they can kill you whenever they like, for them it is Nirvana.
Yes, exactly this. I have written a longer reply (waiting for approval) saying the same more or less.
But they will admit lockdowns and NPIs do not work, (save for Face Nappy symbols of compliance) so the solution then is the gene therapy for all, with participation in society (or not) controlled by digital surveillance and enforced by fines (eventually levied direct on the Central Bank Digi Accounts) for non compliers.
Johnson will blame the next ‘Lockdowns” on the orders from the Gates WHO to which will have signed away our Health and Vaccination policy – he will only be “follwing the science” and avoiding responsibility (as usual).
The anniversary of a day that will live in infamy. A day when the Government redefined the relationship between state and citizen in this country. Two years on, my anger remains unlimited.
To those who inflicted this on us and left us with a masked zombie nation. Johnson and his cabal. Ferguson, SAGE, the hysterical mainstream media and its celebrity fellow travellers like Piers Morgan and Robert Peston. The message is clear.
Never forgive
Never forget
Never again.
There aren’t the lamp-posts high enough.
I hate echo chambers – so here are some contrary points.(although I actually have my doubts about lockdowns)
It doesn’t follow that because cases were dropping before a lockdown was implemented that the lockdown made no difference. Cases can dip and then rise again – as is happening at the moment. For example, people may initially voluntarily confine themselves through fear of the virus, so numbers drop, but without confirming legislation this would soon run out of steam and numbers would rise again.
Lockdowns are not all the same. The Swedish version (there were some restrictions) was very different from the Chinese one. Also countries and states differ. So it is extremely hard draw conclusions about one form of lockdown in country A about another form in country B.
It seems blindingly obvious that the Chinese and New Zealand lockdowns worked for early versions of virus. They may not have been good long term strategies but they do show that you can’t simply draw a blanket conclusion that lockdowns don’t work. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t.
The Diamond Princess is poor example – far too few people in a very confined space. You cannot draw any conclusions about a country or a city.
Some people here think it is absolutely wrong to confine people to their houses whatever the consequences. In the end that is their decision about what it wrong but this kind of moral absolutism has some bizarre consequences. We sacrifice some freedoms for the common good all the time – you aren’t allowed to drive a car on a public road without passing a test. In wartime, and other periods of high public disorder, curfews are widely accepted as justified for consequential reasons. How do you decide which freedoms are sacred?
It doesn’t follow that because cases were dropping before a lockdown was implemented that the lockdown made no difference. Cases can dip and then rise again – as is happening at the moment. For example, people may initially voluntarily confine themselves through fear of the virus, so numbers drop, but without confirming legislation this would soon run out of steam and numbers would rise again.
Germany went from falling cases to rising cases during the so-called ‘hard’ lockdown which started in November 2020.
It seems blindingly obvious that the Chinese and New Zealand lockdowns worked for early versions of virus.
Post hoc non est proper hoc and cum hoc non est propter hoc are still basic tenets of logic, or, to use the well-known German joke: What’s that? It’s hanging on the wall and ticks and when it falls down, the garden door opens? Answer: Chance.
The Diamond Princess is poor example – far too few people in a very confined space. You cannot draw any conclusions about a country or a city.
This makes it a very good example: Many people (much more than those in a household) in a confined space with community transmission of Sars-CoV2 occuring should – according to the epidomological models Ferguson et al used – lead to an exponentially growing outbreak which would only end once the herd immunity threshold had been reached. But this outbreak stopped far before this had happened. If that’s what happens with many people in a confined space, there’s no reason to assume that things will become worse with many people in a much less confined space.
It’s also a nice text book example for the other staple of Corona lies, namely, the virus doesn’t discriminate and everyone’s equally at risk.
Some people here think it is absolutely wrong to confine people to their houses whatever the consequences.
Precisely so: Incarceration without trial because someone strongly believes it must be done is illegal in all so-called western democracies. That’s a punishment and not a public health measure even despite people like to label it as such.
Another valid feature of the Diamond Princess was the age group of it’s clientele. An unintended experiment, but a useful result, if was well understood.
The only reason lockdowns won’t occur again is if the people simply refuse to comply. What I have needed to understand over the past two years is that the State is not my friend nor my comforter.
The State is your slave master/rapist.
Indeed
Lockdowns were never about flattening the curve, saving lives or a pandemic.. Lockdowns were about public conditioning. We can see that from those who still wear a mask and those that support Ukraine and their western funded Nazi death squads
’Snake Oil’ by Michael Senger explains who is behind the global lockdown and much of the nonsense that followed.
Ep.43 ‘Too Stupid To Browse The Web’
Online Harms Bill
The End of SAGE (plus a great song!)
Ukraine Crisis and EU ‘Funding’
Mad Green policies
Ep.44 ‘Inside Ukraine w/Tanya Shelepko
We catch up with Tanya
And Chris Whitty gets a knighthood for creating £86 Billion worth of national debt. No wonder this government (sic) loves Putin invading Ukraine. They can bury their misguided Covid narrative.
All that harm, all those suicides and illnesses. Planned and very deliberately inflicted?
Yes.
Actually, I think we will see the inquiry (and others round the world) admitting that lockdowns and other so called “Non Pharma Interventions” do not work (except for Face Nappies as useful ongoing symbols of oppression and fear).
This position is slowly being adopted already.
Even Johns Hopkins (behind Event 201) and linked to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have said so.
Which I find rather disturbing.
Why would they do that now?
Well, think about it.
If there is an admission that NPIs don not work, the only solution to the next lab made “infection” (and I bet Fauci and co are working on one now) will be new quackcines only.
These will be backed by digital “health” (obedience) passports with segregation/health apartheid and all this enforced by all the usual tracing, testing and of course digital surveillance with access to buildings controlled by QR codes.
As before, fines (and maybe imprisonment) will be applied to those who say No.
Likely too, this will be backed by fines and payment restrictions imposed directly on central bank digital accounts. (I predict having one of these will be required for everyone in receipt of benefits) with wider roll out of CBDCs to a wider public in the event of a general banking collapse.
So, be afraid of what you wish for. The future could be very bleak indeed.