In an article last week I highlighted the Government’s missed opportunity in focusing on vaccines rather than weight loss and healthy living in the fight against Covid. A research paper published in the Lancet implied that a two-point BMI reduction (that’s about 6kgs, 14lb or 1 stone) delivers the same level of risk reduction against serious disease as is claimed for a Covid booster shot four months after vaccination. However, while the vaccine’s protection wanes to virtually zero after six months, losing weight and keeping it off delivers consistent equivalent Covid protection and, additionally, reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes, heart attack and some cancers and improves general well-being. Good news both for you and the NHS.
Information like this seems to me to be the kind of thing people are looking for, particularly now as they become increasingly hesitant about getting ever more shots of vaccine.
From my own interactions I sense a significant turning of the tide in people’s perception of the vaccines and the pandemic in general. A number of people have commented to me that last year in the first few months of the football season – and while the booster campaign was going strong – virtually no top-flight game was complete without a player collapsing on the field (Christian Eriksen and John Fleck come to mind), an ‘incident in the crowd’ or a pundit (Trevor Sinclair) potentially facing the sack for daring to muse ‘whether the vaccine had anything to do with it’. This year, and in the absence of a booster campaign targeting the age profile of the typical football spectator, I haven’t heard of any such incidents, have you? I’ve no specific evidence that vaccines caused the problems but, along with millions of others, it made we wonder.
It’s not only football fans who’ve had a double take. You won’t be surprised to know that sometimes I’ve been accused of ‘preaching to the choir’. There’s some truth in this. However, recently, a friend of mine, who is both metaphorically and literally in the choir asked me for some simple facts that were easily verifiable that she could use with her fellow choristers without them thinking she was a tin-foil hat wearer. She went on to explain that several of them had become increasingly sceptical about all aspects of the Covid hysteria and weren’t at all sure about having any more doses of vaccine. She wanted an easy-to-find and easy-to-verify argument from an irrefutable source that wouldn’t scare them. This is what I’ve come up with. I thought some of you may find these kinds of points useful in your own interactions with waverers.
The rationale for vaccines has always rested on three legs.
- Reduction in infection. Does anyone assert this anymore? I don’t think so. However, if you’d like to see an excellent explanation of how the data can be manipulated to make you think they’re effective, can I recommend this short Norman Fenton film.
- Reduction in deaths. I wrote an article published July 27th 2022 showing from official UKHSA data that deaths of the unvaccinated were proportionately no greater than the vaccinated.
- Reduction in hospital admissions. Let’s test this one out!
The UKHSA claims about 85% vaccine efficacy against hospitalisation in the first few months, falling to about 60% after six months (see figure 5 below). If this was really the case, wouldn’t you expect fewer Covid hospital admissions since the vaccines were rolled out? Well, that’s the odd thing, hospital admissions have increased.
Figure 1 tells us that to date in 2022 there have been 44% more Covid hospital admissions than in the same period in 2021. What’s more, already in 2022 we have had 12% more hospital admissions than in the entirety of 2021.
There have been 39% more Covid hospital admissions in the first 289 days of 2022 than there were in the 289 days from March 19th 2020 to the end of December 2020.
Whenever I mention Covid hospital admissions, I’m required to mention that not all the people admitted with Covid are in hospital because of Covid – for many it’s an incidental infection. But, of course this was always the case. The definition of a Covid hospital admission hasn’t changed, we’re comparing apples with apples.
Where does this unlikely sounding data come from? Well, I’m delighted to tell you it’s hidden in plain sight in the Government’s Coronavirus Dashboard. Figure 2 reproduces the familiar graph that you see if you visit the website and click on the Healthcare tab.
I know some readers like to verify the data themselves. To do so, go to the Coronavirus Dashboard, click on the Healthcare tab. Then click on the ‘Download’ button in the bottom left hand corner and extract the data as a csv file, which will open in an Excel spreadsheet. You can then reproduce any of the charts printed here. In figure 3 I’ve circled in red the ‘download’ button and I’ve highlighted the time periods I’ve shown separately back in Figure 1.
We can also simply present the data cumulatively (see Figure 4). If you draw a line from the bottom left-hand side to the top right hand corner you’ll notice that the trajectory of the line is a very close fit to the actual wavy line of hospital admissions. The straight line is indicative that hospital admissions are accumulating over time at a constant rate (albeit with waves on the way).
If vaccines really delivered 85% or even 60% efficacy against hospital admission you would expect to see the line kink down as the vaccines were rolled out, but you don’t. The peaks and troughs in the line have flattened but the trajectory has stayed amazingly consistent.
Figure 5 shows the claimed efficacy for the various vaccines following various doses taken from the UKHSA’s week 40 (the latest) vaccine surveillance report (page 14). I’ve put a red box around the hospital admission rates.
In the same report, though admittedly 35 pages further on, the actual number of hospital admissions by vaccine dosage is shown in table 12a. The figures are for about a five month period from March to August 2022. Only 6.2% of the people hospitalised were unvaccinated. As we know, there’s an ongoing dispute about the actual level of vaccination. For the over 40s the rate is probably somewhere between 80% and 90%, so whichever way you look at it the vaccinated are proportionately more likely to be hospitalised with a positive Covid test than the unvaccinated are. At most, 90% of the over-40s are vaccinated yet they account for 93% of those admitted to hospital (though admittedly there is a degree of age confounding here, as older people are more likely to be vaccinated and also more likely to be hospitalised).
Going back to my friend, the chorister, I think she can show this Government data to her choral friends with confidence. It’s from a reputable source. It doesn’t make any claims about vaccine dangers. It simply suggests that if you decide not to be vaccinated you’re at no more risk than if you were vaccinated.
Personally, I think frightening people with stories of vaccine harms isn’t terribly productive. Much better to focus on solutions than problems. If you have friends who are wavering in their enthusiasm for yet another vaccine, point them in the direction of the benefits of losing weight and general health. Point out that in not getting a further jab they’re inviting little or no greater risk, as can be seen from the hospital admission data. Maybe gently point out that the Scandinavians and Floridians have throttled back their vaccine campaigns and that in the U.K. we don’t appear to be offering a further booster to the under-50s.
Maybe by taking a gentle approach rather than blurting out “I told you so!” it will mean that some of your fractured friendships can be healed as people realise you weren’t a swivelled eyed loon after all. No one likes being told they were wrong.
As Charles Mackay said: “Men go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
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“Modellers are finding it increasingly difficult to know what will happen next…”
They’ve never known.
We need to show our resistance to the likes of Ferguson as much a possible
Friday 22nd October 11am
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Tesco Superstore
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Rebels at Roundabouts
Friday 22nd October, 5-6.30pm
Blackheath Gate, Greenwich Park
Beowulf is so right, but more so we need to show our greater relevance than our supine Parliament.
Perhaps they are getting it even more wrong?
It seems as ever when the models and reality diverge the reality needs changing. this is post-normal science.
Maybe he is getting scared of his reputation.
LOL what reputation? between buggy code, p*sspoor assumptions and sneaking out to bonk his mistress he shredded it months ago
Why the fuck is this charlatan still given airtime? Oh yes because he’s a useful idiot and fully in step with “The Narrative”
It’s simple, he is one of Gate’s mates.
Yes, he is director of the GatesGavi funded Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium which is paid huge bucks essentially to drum up business https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/hosted-initiatives-and-groups/vaccine-impact-modelling-consortium/
He’s also Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute at Imperial (sic) College.
On the subject of our global overlord Gates
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNAwUxZ5nfw
Gates, Schwab, Von de Leyen, and all the rest of the puppets and useful idiots.
Says it all in one handy graphic.
Simple, putting on the show a bumbling idiot hated by everybody brings more clicks/views/advertisement revenue. We have a similar clown down here in Germany, fond of warning about apocalypse (surname starts with L) without any pause – and he gets the exact same treatment by media (there’s been hardly a single day on which he did not give a doomsday interview to someone, and his greatest hope is to become the next health minister).
For crying out loud go away Ferguson.
I had to laugh at this one :
“Modellers are finding it increasingly difficult to know what will happen next,”
… given that the accuracy has always been around zero.
I guess that we need to know that the Imperial Clown is still getting airtime.
But ….. ???
If in doubt, create some really big, scary numbers.
Ah yes, the good old “we must introduce more measures because others have introduced more measures”, the brilliant policy which has worked so extremely well since the very beginning of this pandemic.
In politics this well-established doctrine is known as Race to the Bottom, and in academic circles it goes by Mutually Assured Dumbassity (MAD).
Yep, this why face nap mandates were brought in…”because other countries were doing it! ” And none of this worked last time, if you believe any of this crap was meant to work…but, like the dangerous lunatics they are they’ll keep doing it anyway, knowing damn well what the result will be!
Their policies have worked so extremely well! You must adjust your thinking and appreciate that they are hell bent on destruction.
Neil sum game
Saw this in the Telegraph and the comments were great…they were so good they closed down the comment section within a couple of hours! So I never got chance to add to it!! HaHaHa.
I nearly bought a copy of the Telegraph on Sunday but thought better of it. Closing down comments is hardly the way to endear itself to readers.
“Cases are growing, because boosters are stalling, if we don’t get boosters rolled, we will have to take measures, if we don’t take measures, we will have cases growing, blah, blah, blah” Yawn.
One of the many things you’ve got to watch out for with politicians, is them saying that they had the right policy all along and the reason it didn’t work is because it didn’t go far enough — hence needing more of the same to ‘solve the problem’.
This is exactly why we’re where we are — they’ve bet on vaccinations as the saviour and the more they fail to solve the problem the more they’ll demand are vaccinated / boosted.
You’d think that people would realise this sort of thing as a standard behaviour of politicians and call them out on it, but people never do seem to realise, and instead side with the politicians in demanding more of the same. Oh well, looks like we’re stuck with them.
Oh yes, vaccines, the Cavalry just around the corner to save us as Matt Wankok kept telling us before his timely departure.
The “vaccine” has not worked so let’s increase the dose; sounds like the theory that GPs etc use to dispense anti-depressants ” So Mr/Mrs X , I see you are still of a low mood with your current dose, let’s cycle up your medication to improve the outcome”.
And we all “know” that the UK as elsewhere is very heavily over medicated with SSRI…..all because of a community of medics driven by the “Herd Instinct”.
It is so comforting to have the mad modeller’s predictions, which we know will be out by a Fergu (the new epidemiological constant invented by him), and as long as we do the maths (just divide his doomsday forecasts by 10), we should be ready for what awaits us.
Love the “Fergu” as a measure of failure!
As you say, always divide his “forecasts” by at least 10 times.
Not listening, not interested, he’s never been right yet
“People need to be aware that we have currently higher levels of infection in the community than we’ve almost ever had during the pandemic “
Sane conclusion : Jabs and other bullshit do f. all. Ignore Public Health significance seekers.
Insane conclusion : Let’s do more pointlessness. Listen to Fergusson
Deleted
It’s not good news until it translates into a different perception.
Maybe it’s because I’m tired but is it just me who reads his statement and thinks that it’s not even grammatically correct? I presume to know what he is trying to say but I would have failed O level English language had I come out with such a disjointed combination of words. Presumably he had time in advance to think about it which makes it even more confounding.
I think living in a perpetual state of hysteria has an affect on the grammar part of a person’s brain.
It occurred to me that it is the sort of sentence someone with dyslexia might come up with. Apparently “many children have dyslexia and dyscalculia together”. Dyscalculia is the mathematical equivalent of dyslexia. In all seriousness, that could well explain a lot.
Count me, and millions of others, out.
#UnitedDisobedience
Ferguson is a laughing stock in his own profession. He’s now being openly mocked and frequently disparaged by his peers online. Numerous scientists in interviews have referred to “scientists doing questionable modelling”, or similar. Everyone knows who they’re talking about. How much longer can the likes of Imperial stand behind this guy?
ICL are the dam wall protecting this idiot – the weight of the scientific criticism – “water”- filling the lake behind that wall is evidently growing; we all now what happens when dams, holding back lakes when full, burst – they take out a lot of innocent people ( with apologies to Chastise/617 casualties)
That doesn’t say much for the vaccines, does it.
Italian news blackout is almost complete, they are still marching though!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx8Th581wJI
Watching the news nowadays is like watching Punch and Judy. Everyone has the internet, so it’s easy to see what’s going on. And easy to see the readers have a hand stuck up their arse.
In the old days the news told you what actually happened and you had to work out what to think of it.
Now the news tells you what you should think and you have to work out what actually happened.
“we have currently higher levels of infection in the community than we’ve almost ever had during the pandemic”, and we also have some of the highest levels of asymptomatic testing we have almost ever had.
Looking at the gov stats, I see that “cases” have dropped significantly in Scotland where the kids went back to school a couple of weeks before England. Thus I confidently predict that they will drop here too, especially given the impact of half term.
Axiom: ‘In order to advance a communist ideological belief system, the rulers must *pretend* not to know things’.
Individually, in groups, or in the systems they construct, that axiom has always been true.
Not sure if that’s confined to just communism, probably applies to any belief system based on lies. But it’s very true. They know what they are doing.
Indeed – what we are seeing is fascism rather than communism.
It’s anti-democratic totalitarianism – which is sui generis, and can emerge from behind a range of fronts, be they communist, fascist, nationalist or vaguely populist or paternalistic. In this case, and in this country it’s actually Toryism that is the operative front.
Oh God, you’re still spouting this crap.
The only opposition – feeble, I admit – to this tyranny in the HOC has come from Torys.
Did Mussolini support the replacement of the indigenous Italian population with Third Worlders?
Did he want to close down cafes, cinemas, local shops, theatres and restaurants?
This is ‘communism’ the same way that Ferguson’s models are accurate predictions.
Bring it on. Lockdowns and boosters forever. People need to have their noses rubbed in it to understand they’ve been conned. A general lockdown will help us. The nightmare scenario is vaccine passports everywhere. I think they are sadly too smart to close stuff again. The smart play is to demonise the unvaxxed.
‘Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don’t know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.’ –
Thomas Sowell
I doubt he’s ignorant. He’s getting away with talking shit and being listened to. Why would he stop?
Vaccine passport: a device used in early 21st century society to segregate unvaccinated people from the people who were given an ineffective vaccine that didn’t actually stop them catching or spreading covid. This device was also used to give the appearance of “doing something” while nudging the populous into carrying around digital identification, and into compliance with government commands. The devices were eventually abandoned after the Second Pandemic War.
Awesome!
Oh, do naff orf, Ferguson.
Ferguson is a cunt
Apologies, but there is no other way of saying that
Tempted to say
he is not as useful as thatbut I won’t for fear of being branded a sexistHow come people can become infected if they are vaccinated?
Impossible surely?
Can we dig up Jimmy Saville and ask him what to do about child sexual exploitation?
Didn’t the bbc just do that?
Good heavens. Imagining still listening to this crank. How on earth is this cretin (yes, philosophically speaking, he’s a cretin) still gaining airtime?
This inept specimen stands as a single indictment of our society.
So they’re trying the same “Don’t panic” move that they tried with car fuel.
Ferguson doesn’t panic about restrictions anyway – he just breaks them while telling everyone else to obey them.
Since 2020/03/31, 304,655,729 Sars-CoV2 test have been done in the UK, statistically this means every person living in this country has been tested 4.53 times. 27% of these tests have been done in the 92 days since freedom day. But these represent only 15.89% of the 579 days since testing started. Up to and including 2021/07/18, on average, 562,980.32 tests were done per day. From 2021/07/19, this increased by a factor of almost 1.6 (1.59) to an average of 894,331.55 per day. This exceeds the number of tests performed in every other major western European country (France, Germany, Italy, Spain) by a margin.
Could this perhaps be related to the higher case numbers in the UK and not enforced mask wearing and vaccination passes elsewhere?
Nearly 900k tests a day is a lot. Who exactly is getting tested? I think we should be provided with this information.
Also…. How many haven’t ever been tested? Apart from me
No, never. I once wore a face covering in summer 2020 but then read up on it and realised it was a con.
Me neither. Some people have to get tested at work or in school. And the remainder are probably a rather small (compared to the number of people) set of volunteer repeat offenders who absolutely want have a pandemic going on.
Well i’ve never submitted to one so some poor smuck has had more than 5!
In the absence of a functioning democracy, in the absence of any actual opposition to the Government, and in the absence of any members of Parliament to represent our views, and given all of the weapons (literal and metaphorical) which the State holds against us, our sole responsibility as citizens is to resist, not comply, not co-operate, not collaborate and in general cause as much friction for central and local government as we possibly can.
“we have currently higher levels of infection in the community than we’ve almost ever had during the pandemic”
Great ‘vaccines’ aren’t they?
Charlatan on the loose again. The BBC’s favourite fantasist.
Sheer lunacy to think our lives will probably be dictated by this nutter and his cronies under the pretense of protecting the NHS.
Imagine HAVING to pay for a service, but then when this service gets used as per what we’re paying for, we then get locked down to prevent us from using the service that we’re paying for.
Oh and when we’re at it, because you used that service you already pay for we’re going to have to charge you more now – because you used it.
Shame on us all eh
Is this man a doctor? No. He’s a maths geek. So why the hell is this goon shooting his gob off about health matters? Worse, why is anyone paying attention to his entrail reading prognostications, let alone the bloody Govt who frankly should know better but would rather outsource their decisions and claim immunity from blame? Get a grip, Johnson and stop acting the clown.
This guy isn’t a maths geek, either. He’s a self-taught C++-programmer with no background in computer science (not per se something bad — my official job designation is senior software engineer and I’m self taughy as well) whose main occupation is forever working on a single program claimed to model pandemic spread by simulating population behaviour in a way he pulled out of his ass.
This guy isn’t really an expert in anything except this particular piece of crap code.
That’s a little harsh, didn’t he get his data from that esteemed impartial font of knowledge, Wikipedia?
Can’t help thinking that masks, lockdowns, and this man’s finger in the air guesses are all about as useful as each other, i.e. not very.
This has seriously reached peak farce.
Zero evidence that restrictions “work” but lots of evidence of the harm they cause. But let’s do more of them.
God designed a perfectly effective breathing system so let’s cover it with a cloth mask to stop it working properly. With zero evidence that this impacts anything.
Vaccines are awesome and are so good that you need to keep taking them again and again.
I believe that this whole Covid theatre is sheer garbage. My own views increasingly align with Sam Bailey and “Virus Mania”.
Western “science” is fixated on viruses as the cause of illness and is programmed to find them and show them as the cause of everything. This suits big business interests that can then sell “remedies” and “vaccines”. But the evidence behind it is shaky, at best. A giant wrong turn.
In my opinion, we do not really know what causes the illness that has been identified as Covid. The “virus” may simply be a by product of it rather than a “cause”. The so called science is deep down based on a deck of cards where more assumption is piled on more assumptions.
History will equate what we are doing with bloodletting in the Middle Ages. Or the great moment in Star Trek IV (sorry this ages me…) where Dr McCoy encounters a patient in a 1980s hospital. On being told of the treatment he decries the barbarism of it and produces a simple gadget that he just waves at the patient, who is then cured.
I think that in reality illness is caused by toxins and many harmful substances in our environment. The true cause of Covid is actually not known. Heresy, of course.
Most have kept controls ….. except Sweden, Denmark and a range of American States all of which have far fewer deaths/infections than those who have kept controls.
But that’s irrelevant to Lockdown Ferguson.
They should try the radical practice of actually treating ill cov patients early as out patients with known, effective protocols such a as used by AAPS, FLCCC,etc instead of STILL doing nothing. If they did this from the start >85% of the deaths would have been avoided and we wouldn’t be in this mess. This is medical malpractice and the heads of NHS, Ferguson,sage and this government should be arrested and charged with mass murder.
More lockdowns says ‘Professor’ Fergusson?
Thats not like him to be so alarmist.
‘Authority’ can try imposing restrictions but whether or not they happen depends on whether or not we do them.
Rules only stand if majority comply with them and there’s nothing except personal choice that stops them being not complied with.
I and others learnt that that’s the way it is when we were children. ‘Grown-ups’ in our sphere never admitted it was so but most had the sense to not try to deny it in the face of the proof we kids provided
Er!
Who’s asking Ferguson?
Why are we asking Ferguson?
Why hasn’t Boris, SAGE, etc. twigged yet that Ferguson just has no clue, and *IS* the danger?
“Sajid Javid says winter poses the “greatest threat” to the recovery from Covid, with cases rising.
He adds that case numbers could go as high as 100,000 per day – but that the NHS is performing with “distinction”.” (news conference as reported by BBC)
I presume the numbers are a Ferguson factors.
I haven’t read this, but I just wanted to say that I don’t give a BUGGER what this dishonourable and dishonoured, discredited, disgusting piece of rancid offal has to say. Why on earth is he still being quoted?
Can’t think of anything profound or intelligent to say, other than “fuck off, Ferguson”.