Matthew Syed’s latest article in the Sunday Times is titled “Now we know our ministers did OK against Covid, but I hear no apologies”. And while Syed may not have chosen the title (that was probably his editor), he did write this: “The truth is that on the whole, and with only a few exceptions, ministers did their best in unenviable circumstances.”
Syed’s basic argument is as follows. The recent WHO report reveals that, in terms of excess deaths, Britain “is roughly in the middle of the bunch when compared with similar nations”. Therefore, those who slammed the Government for its handling of the pandemic were wrong, and really ought to apologise.
The article isn’t all bad. For example, Syed skewers those unhinged left-wing commentators who accused the Government of pursuing ‘eugenics’ for not locking down sooner, and chides his fellow journalists for asking ‘gotcha’ questions, rather than trying to get useful information out of politicians.
Yet for every swipe he takes at those who say the Government didn’t do enough, he also takes a swipe at those who say the Government did too much. And his basic argument – the one I outlined above – doesn’t work.
Syed writes: “Websites such as Lockdown Sceptics rose up like cancers, metastasising across the internet, sucking rationality from the debate like intergalactic debris into a black hole.” This rather lurid comparison is ironic coming from Syed, who spends much of his article lamenting the “shocking decline” in standards of public discourse.
Hint: if you’re concerned about declining standards of public discourse, you may wish to avoid comparing your opponents to metastasising cancers.
Anyway, why doesn’t Syed’s argument work? To begin with, his premise that the WHO report tells us something we didn’t already know – that it provides “new evidence” – is false. Decent estimates of excess deaths in various rich countries have been available for months.
Ariel Karlinsky and Dmitry Kobak’s estimates were published as far back as January of 2021, and they’ve been continually updated ever since. Likewise, the ONS published estimates for most of the countries in Europe in November of last year; and the rank order of countries hasn’t changed drastically in the interim.
Okay, that’s a minor point. And it’s true that Britain winds up somewhere in the middle when you compare rich countries on excess mortality. But this doesn’t mean our ministers “did their best in unenviable circumstances” – not by a long shot.
Excess mortality is only one metric you can use to evaluate government performance. And on other metrics, Britain did much worse than average.
According to the latest figures published by the ONS, Britain saw the second largest increase in government debt out of all European countries. From Q4 of 2019 to Q4 of 2021, the U.K.’s general government gross debt (as a percentage of GDP) ballooned by 19 percentage points.
Likewise, when the Economist ranked 23 rich countries for overall economic performance during the pandemic, Britain finished second from bottom.
From the very beginning, lockdown sceptics have argued that we can’t just look at Covid outcomes; we have to consider things like the economy, education and civil liberties as well. And this still applies today.
Saying that Britain “did OK” in the pandemic, while ignoring everything other than Covid deaths, would be like saying the U.S. “did OK” in the Iraq war, while ignoring everything other than U.S. military deaths. (Although America lost fewer than 5,000 troops, the war ended up costing almost $2 trillion, and sparked a decades-long insurgency.)
It’s also worth pointing out that our ministers threw the Government’s own pandemic preparedness plan out the window. As you’ll recall, the plan states that attempting to “halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus” would be a “waste of public health resources”.
A genuinely praiseworthy pandemic strategy is the one followed by Sweden – which boasts lower excess mortality than Britain, and far better economic outcomes (not to mention greater respect for civil liberties).
If our ministers did “their best”, I’d hate to see what their worst looks like.
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“We are not Canada, New Zealand or China – places where Governments think they can exterminate Covid by depriving their population of the most basic civil liberties.”
Well, for a while we were. Thankfully not any more – for now.
They also aren’t Sweden – which respected people’s Civil and Human Rights.
A long way still to do, but we’ve come a long way since the darkest days.
Vaccinazis, none of the idiots can name or spell 3 ingredients nor describe what mRNA is or how it works….talk about a cult of ignorance and stupid, not to mention corruption and fraud.
The summing up by the woman in pink at the end (a health minister?) had me aghast and not a little worried about medical and political capture.
Any old carp issuing from the lips of a doctor counts as medical advice, it seems, and should be taken as gospel: especially by ministers.
And they accuse US of imparting misinformation!
While her summing up was depressing as a whole, I thought there was one chink of light when she said the JCVI would be reviewing at their next meeting whether the recommendation to ‘vaccinate’ children would continue.
The fact that an initial recommendation to give these poisons to children condemns them all in my opinion.
No ifs. No buts. No exceptions. All guilty.
Absolutely. You really don’t have to have any particular expertise to see that giving an ineffective ‘vaccine’ to a person at vanishingly low risk from a disease is medially and ethically wrong.
It’s quite a spectacle watching politicians and bureaucrats of the state struggling to catch up to where the population already are. We know the jabs don’t work and that they’re dangerous.
It does nothing for their credibility to resist those facts, which of course is fine by me. The less credibility they have the better. If there is one thing sorely needed these days is a healthy lack of respect for authority.
Yes, it’s amazing how far behind most politicians are in their understanding. The opening speech by Elliot Colburn was quite nauseating in its ignorance and arrogance.
Even the MPs questioning the stabs are way off the mark in how bad things are, and are about to become.
It is difficult getting people to understand something when they consider their political careers depend on not understanding.
Convenient that the MSM had other matters to concentrate on when the debate took place (sarc).
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/my-dispatch-from-the-vaccine-safety-debate-a-day-of-heroes-and-halfwits/
Kathy Gyngell over at TCW provides an initial write-up. As she makes clear, she was the only member of the press in attendance. What does that say about MSM?
Furthermore, the only MP’s in attendance were ‘Conservatives,’ no MP from any other party. That alone confirms how ‘safe and effective’ our grifting parliamentarians are and what we can expect in the future.
I’m no fan of the Tories as I am apparently “far right”, but you have to recognise that the resistance to covid madness has come from Tory right. The same is largely true in the US.
Important point regarding only political resistance as coming from the Conservative Party – similarly, to a very large extent, in the vote to mandate the stabs for NHS staff.
Actually, there. were a couple of Labour MPs and an SNP MP who spoke on Monday, but frustrating boilerplate stuff regurgitating vaccine propaganda.
Some from the DUP too I should say. Almost zero from the left, apart from towards the end. It started with Swayne and a tiny number of others from the libertarian wing.
There is no Tory Right. It doesn’t exist. They are faux Right playing a vital role in keeping the credulous Centre Right vote onside for electoral purposes. The so called Tory Right have achieved little in holding back the agenda of the continuity Labour Party Tories over the last 12 years. The Party is rotten to its very core.
I would in general agree. I suppose you could call it right in relation to the mainstream of the parliamentary party.
Kathy Gyngell’s take on the debate.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/my-dispatch-from-the-vaccine-safety-debate-a-day-of-heroes-and-halfwits/
I haven’t seen a vaccine complication for over an hour.
Double pulmonary embolism within days of second vaccination.
Even the hospital told her it was the likely cause.
I don’t think they’re in denial at all. They know perfectly well what is going on ( how can they not? ) and after almost 2 years since the beginning of the mass jabathon they can absolutely not plead ignorance. Because they know the score full well and are choosing to look the other way they are all complicit sociopaths who have blood on their hands and their decision just backs up what we here have known for some time now, that this is an agenda whereby one of the aims is to intentionally harm as many people as possible, even the unborn. This no longer sounds far-fetched because, if it wasn’t so, then just one look at the adverse reporting systems, which have steadily been reporting more and more deaths and injuries for these products alone since the outset, would ensure that these injectables were stopped many months ago. Previous legit vaccines ( by the true definition of the word ) and other medications would have been taken off the market with but a fraction of the deaths/adverse events, but these ones? These are clearly deemed worthy of *special* treatment. So to say that they won’t even bother to investigate, what does that tell the public? It screams that they will not investigate because to do so would unearth evidence of their guilt of malfeasance and show them up to be the criminals that they are. Well I can see the up-take of further jabs plummeting even further off the back of this decision to be honest.
In the big Vioxx scandal Merck finally took it off the market 5 years after it was launched, but 88,000 people had to have heart attacks first and 38,000 of them died, and that’s just an estimate. What are we up to now with these clot shots in a fraction of the time? And bear in mind that Vioxx didn’t have half the myriad of other adverse effects ( such as the significant increase in miscarriages and stillbirths ) that these novel products do. If anybody can’t believe that this isn’t willful harm and our governments are out to cause us damage then they need their heads read.
https://www.openvaers.com/covid-data
And if you watch this 5min video of Dr James Thorp presenting slides which show, among other things, a 40+ sigma increase in stillbirths ( even worse in Canada ), nobody can possibly disagree that our governments are out to intentionally harm us. No such thing as ignorance at this late stage in the game.
https://rumble.com/v1piboi–i-want-it-stopped-now-obgyn-dr.-james-a.-thorp-presents-alarming-stillbirt.html
I will have to be careful of my wording.
If these poisonous injections were stopped now on the basis of the deaths and harms they are causing and have caused, those responsible for pushing them beyond an easily determined cut-off date could, if plaintiffs came forward with a case, be facing court and minimum charges of mass murder. Most, if not all those responsible for the continuing carnage are still on the payroll of taxpayers. I do not need to insult the intelligence of DS readers by identifying specific areas of employment.
Refusing to halt the injection campaign amply reinforces the guilt of all those involved.
It’s the equivalent of walking past somebody being assaulted and not doing a thing about it. If you don’t, at a bare minimum, attempt to sound the alarm and help the victim then you are basically as guilty as the perpetrator. And this is what we are seeing here. You can’t look the other way when you are aware of people ( masses of people in this case! ) being harmed and killed then tell yourself you’re innocent, just a cog in some big-ass machinery. These MPs all have clout, but they’d have even more clout if they stood up and spoke out as a collective. As long as they are closing ranks and allowing more and more people, including unborn babies, to be killed and injured by the very products they’ve spent best part of 2 years bullying and terrifying people into getting injected with then they may as well have killed/hurt those people with their very own hands. They are complicit therefore they’re guilty as sin. They are allowing the abuse to continue and as a result more people will die and become seriously injured. They are sick AF!
Great post Mogs.
“Of course there are lunatics out there who make absurd and outrageous claims, but there are many reasonable and respectable people who have anxieties about the vaccine programme”
Hell, we are not trying to prove the existence of aliens here. The hard evidence for the ineffectiveness and danger of the jabs is out there in abundance for all to see. The problem isn’t lack of good evidence it’s wilful blindness by politicians who simply refuse to look at it. I suspect that as the the evidence increasingly gets into the public domain the deeper the politicians will have to shove their own heads into the sand.
“Hell, we are not trying to prove the existence of aliens here...”
Love it.
And you ain’t seen nothing yet….
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-msms-cancer-cure-stories-are-bio-firm-hype-not-hope/
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/cancer-rates-are-increasing-and-mayCancer “Rates are Increasing — and May Get Much Worse
Wiped Out Immune Systems Take Time to Manifest”
Interesting article looking at the deaths and injuries caused by these Covid shots compared with all other vaccines.
“This is a vaccine cult and has nothing to do with science or facts”. Given the refusal to even investigate the deaths and harms, let alone acknowledge any damage the products might be doing, these MPs are behaving exactly like a cult. But I’m sure they’ll expect us to believe that it’s all in our own best interests though, so that’s alright then! More deaths by these injections in less than 2 years than all other vaccines in the last 3 decades…but nothing to see here clearly. Keep repeating “safe and effective”, I mean, every cult needs a mantra.
https://healthimpactnews.com/2022/covid-19-vaccines-have-caused-84-of-all-deaths-recorded-in-vaers-for-the-past-32-years-pfizer-1-in-vaccine-deaths-even-before-covid/
There’s no denial.
They’re simply in thrall to the MSM/bigpharma and their own ambitions
Never forget.
How many of the bastards even bothered to attend.
Massive thanks to the paltry few who did.
They will be remembered.
At least it’s a start, maybe.
The way vaccine supporters have thwarted any “vaccine hesitancy” movement is to recruit influential partnerships with key organizations which vouch for the vaccines. In America, Pfizer has just “partnered” with the Southeastern Conference sports league to advance this objective.
The SEC is the premiere college sports league in the States. It is an association of 14 extremely popular universities (like the Universities of Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas A&M, Vanderbilt and Auburn.)
Still, it doesn’t seem the SEC is eager to publicize the fact it is now partners with this drug company. My prediction is this partnership could end badly for the 14 schools that make up the SEC.
https://billricejr.substack.com/p/the-southeastern-conference-is-now
‘The Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy but where are they’ – Plutarch
I and millions like me have given up on mandates from under-qualified MP”s. As for our our laughable police force. Just cry rascist like our commonwealth friends and they tend to shuffle away.
There seems to have been mention of the debate on Sky news (the link was in News Roundup in yesterday’s DS email):
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-inquiry-focusing-solely-on-safety-of-vaccines-will-not-be-opened-govt-says-12729605
They’re in denial not because they don’t understand. They now understand that their original, hysterical reactions led them to effectively ignore the usual pre-launch safety studies and provide immunity to the manufacturers.
So politicians are in the firing line for poisoning and killing people and they don’t like that, not one little bit.
“This is really important, and if we do not get it right, no one will believe us, and trust in politicians, in medicine and in our medical system will be lost.” Said Andrew Bridgen.
Too late, Mr Bridgen. That happened some time ago.
Correct. I will never believe a word the Public Health Bureaucrats/Government Ministers or an employee of the NHS says on the subject of vaccines ever again.
I am so pissed off the MSM continue not to report on this, we have had months of high non Covid excess deaths, and now we have silence around this debate. I am cancelling my Telegraph subscription because how can they be trusted when they completely ignore such a big story as this and therefore fail to bring this to the attention of the masses.
The DT is just another propaganda outlet for the government. We cancelled our subscription some time ago.
And in reply: “Move along, nothing to see here. Get your jab; safe and effective; don’t you dare question the official “$cience.”
“A lot of people are asking what the vaccine does to children and young people, and Professor Whitty is right that the benefit to healthy children seems to be essentially nil.”Danny Kruger.
Of course the answer is Big Pharma gets indemnity for any vaccine adverse effects if they are approved for use on Children.
This is an example of how corrupt our medical fraternity has become.
The fact Pfizer tried to bury the results of their tests for 70 years should alert anyone with a brain cell that they were hiding something!