The Observer leads with a new poll by Opinium that reveals fewer than one in five of the British public believe the lockdown should be lifted. 67% of people think schools should remain closed, against only 17% who think they should reopen. Just 11% think it’s time to reconsider reopening restaurants, with 78% against, while only 9% think pubs should reopen, with 81% against. When it comes to sporting events, 84% are against allowing mass gatherings to take place, with just 7% in favour.
Unfortunately, that poll isn’t an outlier. A YouGov poll for the Sunday Times found that just 25% of adults would feel safe returning to work and the public opposes reopening schools by 48% to 28%. And 59% of people polled by the Sunday Express said they would not feel comfortable going out and don’t plan to resume a normal life any time soon.
It’s official. We’re a nation of bedwetters. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
And it isn’t just us. In America, the lockdown zealots are on the march, having got the hashtag #extendthelockdown trending on Twitter. New York Times journalist Taylor Lorenz has been banging the drum for this cause, tweeting: “The ‘open up the economy’ people are truly the dumbest ppl on here. How do they think the economy will look when millions are dead and our hospitals are overwhelmed? If u want to ‘save the economy’ then u need to keep everyone *alive.*”
Among the “dumbest ppl” expressing scepticism about the effectiveness of the lockdown policy is Michael Levitt, Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2013. Levitt has given a great interview to Freddie Sayers at UnHerd pouring scorn on lockdown advocates and their scientific handmaidens. Among the points he makes is that the total number of deaths we are seeing in places as different as New York City, parts of England, parts of France and Northern Italy all seem to level out at a very similar fraction of the total population. “Are they all practising equally good social distancing?” he asks. “I don’t think so.” He points out that the lifecycle of the virus, wherever it has broken out, is remarkably similar, regardless of local differences and irrespective of whether lockdowns have been imposed or not. In particular, after a two week period of exponential growth infections and deaths tail off, meaning the projections of Neil Ferguson and other modellers, which assume constant exponential growth absent a lockdown, are vast overestimates. And worth bearing in mind that so far Levitt’s death toll estimates have been much more accurate than Professor Ferguson’s.
Here’s one of the interview highlights:
I think the policy of herd immunity is the right policy. I think Britain was on exactly the right track before they were fed wrong numbers. And they made a huge mistake. I see the standout winners as Germany and Sweden. They didn’t practise too much lockdown and they got enough people sick to get some herd immunity. I see the standout losers as countries like Austria, Australia and Israel that had very strict lockdown but didn’t have many cases. They have damaged their economies, caused massive social damage, damaged the educational year of their children, but not obtained any herd immunity. There is no doubt in my mind that when we come to look back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor.
One of the most interesting sections of the interview is when Levitt explains why epidemiologists’ predictions tend to be so apocalyptic. The reason, he says, is because if they underestimate the death toll likely to result from a viral outbreak they face catastrophic reputational damage – if people die, they get the blame – but if they overestimate it they face zero consequences. “In my work, if I say a number is too small and I’m wrong, or a number is too high and I’m wrong, both of those errors are the same,” he says. “It seems that being a factor of 1,000 too high is perfectly okay in epidemiology, but being a factor of three too low is too low.”
Worth reminding ourselves that Neil Ferguson’s estimates of the impact of previous viral outbreaks – which have been almost comically inaccurate – haven’t damaged his scientific reputation in the slightest. In 2001, he predicted that foot and mouth disease could kill up to 50,000 people. It ended up killing less than 200. In 2005, he told the Guardian that up to 200 million people could die from bird flu. The final death toll from avian flu strain A/H5N1 was 440. And in 2009, a Government estimate based on one of Ferguson’s models estimated the likely death toll from swine flu at 65,000. In fact, it was 457.
Just in case the Government’s anointed scientific experts haven’t done quite enough to scare the bejesus out of people, another group of experts is intending to shadow the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies and publish what looks to be even more cautious advise. According to the Sunday Times, the former Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government, Sir David King, will chair the group, which is meeting for the first time tomorrow. “It is expected to focus on seven key areas,” says the report. “These include the criteria being used to lift the lockdown, how testing and tracing can be achieved, whether the policies on quarantine and the shielding of vulnerable groups are sufficient and how untapped resources can be better deployed.”
Whether the existing lockdown is sufficient?!? God give me strength.
Incidentally, it’s probably a good idea to watch Professor Levitt’s interview ASAP because there’s a risk YouTube will take it down. Yesterday, the video platform deleted David Icke’s channel, telling the BBC it had “clear policies prohibiting any content that disputes the existence and transmission of COVID-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS”.
The censorious attitude of the tech giants – and the gatekeepers of the mainstream media – to anyone who challenges official Covid orthodoxy is reminiscent of the suppression of dissent in totalitarian societies. A reader pointed me towards this quote by Friedrich Hayek:
The situation in a totalitarian state is permanently and in all fields the same as it is elsewhere in some fields in wartime. Everything which might cause doubt about the wisdom of the government or create discontent will be kept from the people. The basis of unfavourable comparisons with conditions elsewhere, the knowledge of possible alternatives to the course actually taken, information which might suggest failure on the part of the government to live up to its promises or to take advantage of opportunities to improve conditions, will be suppressed.
Friedrich Hayek, The road to Serfdom
Yesterday I flagged up the fact that America had endured a bad bout of seasonal flu in 1967 that killed 100,000 people – more Americans than COVID-19 has killed so far – and managed to cope without placing its citizens under virtual house arrest. A reader has drawn my attention to this piece in the National Review about how America responded to what was referred to in 1968 as “Hong Kong flu”, which, needless to say, didn’t involve closing schools or shutting down businesses or imposing stay-at-home orders. As an article in the American Institute for Economic Research pointed out, Woodstock took place during that flu outbreak. And the Telegraph ran a similar piece yesterday, pointing out that the British authorities responded to the same pandemic without over-reacting, recommending hand-washing and social distancing at work but nothing more. Both pieces drew on an article in the British Medical Journal by a retired professor of medicine called Philip Philip Snashall, whose two-year-old daughter was the first known case of Hong Kong flu to hit Europe. “How things change,” he noted. “The stock market did not plummet, we were not besieged by the press, men in breathing apparatus did not invade my daughter’s play group.”
It’s not all bad news in today’s papers. The Mail on Sunday reports that the Royal College of GPs and the British Medical Association have warned the Government against quarantining healthy people aged 70 and over when the lockdown is eased – and a furious row has broken out between Matt Hancock and the Sunday Times, which has the same story, in which the Health Secretary disputes that quarantining the elderly for 12 weeks is official Government policy. “The clinically vulnerable, who are advised to stay in lockdown for 12 weeks, emphatically DO NOT include all over 70s,” he tweeted above a screen grab of the Sunday Times‘s front page.
Here’s a quick round up of stories that have stood out for me, and been flagged up by readers, in the past 24 hours:
- ‘The science is becoming clear: lockdowns are no longer the right medicine‘ – Op Ed in the Sunday Times by John Ioannidis and Rohan Silva
- ‘Wuhan virus lab “cover-up”‘ – Story in the Mail on Sunday about lax security at the Wuhan Virology Institute
- ‘Is evidence rising that Britain’s lockdown could be a deadly mistake?‘ – Great column in the Telegraph by Sherelle Jacobs
- ‘I’ve worked the coronavirus front line – and I say it’s time to start opening up‘ – Op Ed by a New York City ER doctor in the New York Post
- ‘We’re destroying the nation’s wealth – and the health of millions‘ – Peter Hitchens, an early sceptic, in the Mail on Sunday
- ‘Protesters in London take part in group hug in defiance of coronavirus lockdown outside Met Police headquarters‘ – Story about a small protest in the Evening Standard
- ‘GCHQ granted extended powers to demand data from the NHS during the COVID-19 crisis‘ – Story in Computing about the intelligence-gathering hub being given extended powers by Matt Hancock
- ‘Why do we clap the NHS, yet take the success of the private sector for granted?‘ – Good column in the Telegraph by Dan Hannan
- ‘Capitalism 1, Big Government 0‘ – Entertaining column in the Critic by the always amusing David Starkey pointing out that privately-run supermarkets addressed critical shortages much better than the publicly-run NHS
In what may be becoming a series, here’s another letter in the Telegraph about the wrongful diagnosis of COVID-19 as the cause of death in a care home:
Sir – My mother died last week in a care home at the age of 98. When my brother registered her death, as expected the cause given was “frailty due to old age”, but he was surprised to see that the doctor certifying the death had added “presumed COVID-19”, an inclusion that also shocked the home’s manager.
The day before our mother died, my brother was allowed to sit with her for an hour. His temperature was checked before he was admitted, but there was no form of isolation and none of the home’s staff were wearing personal protective equipment.
If doctors are attributing all deaths in care homes to COVID-19, it makes a nonsense of any statistics and does great reputational damage to both individual care homes and to the care industry as a whole.
Tony Parkinson, Christchurch, Dorset
And for a bit of light relief, there’s a story in the Sunday Times about how the lockdown has given an unexpected boon to amateur pornographers (‘Debbie does lockdown: coronavirus home porn goes viral‘.) “Data from Pornhub, the world’s most popular video-sharing website, suggests COVID-19 is far from a turn-off for libidos inflamed by the sight of a mask or the thought of a police officer hiding in the bushes,” says the paper. “It has reported more than 8.2 million searches for videos about ‘quarantine’, with overall viewership up by about 25% since lockdowns were introduced.’ Wannabe porn stars have to apply to be verified by the website, but after they’ve received Pornhub’s imprimatur they can then upload their videos and are paid when the clips are viewed. The site now boasts more than 165,000 amateur performers, up 41% in the past year. According to the Sunday Times: “Popular themes in the coronavirus genre include ‘doctors and nurses’ inspecting ‘patients’; women performing sexual acts in return for loo paper or dried pasta; and police officers turning up at opportune moments.”
Another candidate for Hero of the Week has been nominated by a reader: Plants Galore, a company that has garden centres in Plymouth, Exeter and Newton Abbott. Not only has this company defied the lockdown order, arguing that their garden centres are also hardware stores and therefore should be exempt, it has also started a petition to try and stop the local council shutting down its outlets. The petition has already attracted over 3,500 signatures, including mine. Thanks to CBird for flagging this up in the comment thread below yesterday’s Latest News.
Readers have suggested more theme tunes for the site: ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now‘ by the Smiths, ‘No Restrictions‘ by Men at Work, Thomas Tallis’s ‘Spem Alium‘ by Stile Antico and ‘I’m a Lazy Sod‘ by the Sex Pistols.
Thanks to those who donated to this site yesterday. If you feel like donating, you can do so by clicking here. (Every little helps!) And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in tomorrow’s update, you can email me here. See you tomorrow.
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Why would anyone give a toss what that muppet thinks?
Because the Fascist morons do.
He is one of their principal operatives.
I suppose I should have asked why it is presented here in a way which, in the eyes of some, may lend it credence which nothing he has said or done in the past has had.
Your use of the word muppet in your original comment was far too generous and polite.
Because ALL the MSM do and thats all that counts. Sheeple will hang on every word he says without a shred of critical thought. If people did their research, they’d know that Ferguson isn’t an Epidemiologist, he’s a Physicist. he has no medical training whatsoever.
All of Neil Ferguson’s modelling prior to lockdown being announced showed the most benefit to come from isolation of the vulnerable coupled with quarantine of those infected.
It really isn’t at all clear why they went for universal lockdown instead.
It must be because of an effect they wanted. What effects have there actually been?
Perhaps bozo thought that treating pensioners differently would eventually lose him their vote which is why he went for
‘All in this together’.
KV you know better than that. This business has nothing to do with C1984.
Because they thought they could get away with it. And they did!
Thus far.
All of this has been planned.
Objective is control of every human on the planet via digital ID.
Even most sheep wouldn’t swallow that one so, viola, create a climate of fear – and the rest simply follows – dodgy gene therapy being the only way to stop everyone dying = compulsory “vaccination” = digital ID.
Focussed protection never stood a chance.
I think you have it!
Whatever happened to the “right to be anonymous”?
Group think and stupidity.
Oh yes it is – if you believe this all has nothing whatever to do with a virus!
I suspect its because every other country in Europe was doing it, other than Sweden. With the situation very unclear as to the severity/deaths etc, the UK followed everyone else. Its easy to look back now and say that it may not have been the right choice, but at the time, it was a crisis situation, and you go safe option, tried and trusted, at least ‘what everyone else is doing’. No-one wants to be the one to choose another route and get it wrong…
This is nonsense. All Sweden did is follow standard approved WHO protocol for pandemics. The lockdowns are completely experimental and never formed part of already wargamed solution to pandemics. This is a crime scence, a war zone, not a rational response to a genuine health crisis. Its a completely irrational response to what is at worst a low mortality rate virus. Dont believe me – allow HMG to explain. HMG downgraded C19 from a high consequence infectious disease 19th March 2020, before the first lockdown.
High consequence infectious diseases (HCID)Status of COVID-19
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid#status-of-covid-19
Worlds number one epidemiologist Professor Ioannidis confirmed C19 low mortality virus April 2020
BREAKING NEWS ! Prof Dr John Ioannidis Stanford University On Real Data On Coronavirus Pandemic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btvDL6kIDsA
China used as scamdemic launchpad, Evidence:
The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Lockdown FraudRequest for expedited federal investigation into scientific fraud in COVID‑19 public health policies
https://ccpgloballockdownfraud.medium.com/the-chinese-communist-partys-global-lockdown-fraud-88e1a7286c2b
Yes, everybody needs to be continually reminded of this fact. Right before the 2020 lockdown too.. The political class at its finest..
High consequence infectious diseases (HCID)Status of COVID-19
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid#status-of-covid-19
If Big Pharma, medics, and the state were going to go for “focused protection”, i.e. mostly protecting people aged over 80 who tend to be the ones most at risk from pneumonia, then
1) they would have done it nearly 2 years ago, and
2) hospitals throughout my lifetime have always been places where old people catch pneumonia, and seriously I don’t know how on earth the authorities are going to change that – the country hasn’t got the effing resources.
“Given that the vaccines don’t provide lasting protection against infection, they’re best seen as a way to protect the most vulnerable.”
Huh?
In other news: click here to watch from 0:28 in Tesco’s Christmas advert and tell me that that couple aren’t under house arrest.
(Note to those who haven’t yet begun to wrap their heads around how propaganda works: yes, I know that superficially the point is that Tesco delivers even to those who live in high-up flats. The actual message is that even if you’re under house arrest
He’s just belatedly trying to attach his name to an idea many people thought screamingly obvious in the first place.
Re your link to the Tesco ad.
Downvoted have gone from 13k to 14k in about three hours.
Their Social Media staff should be arriving at work just about now.
Now 15k down votes!
14.00 hrs 17k
and rising, upticks risen by just 100 in four hours to 1.6k so that’s all their friends and relatives roped in by now.
Hands up who thinks Tesco will be bankrupt before February, because of so many people boycotting their stores due to their Christmas advert in which Santa shows he’s ‘fully vaccinated’?
Not a chance, unfortunately.
If only this were true – Black Rock are big players in Tesco, they are in it up to their necks.
I think it’s just poorly expressed. I took it to mean “focused protections” (agree the plural doesn’t work very well) are the best way to protect the vulnerable
They are not in the least bothered about “protecting the vulnerable” or indeed anyone else.
Quite the opposite.
Further to your observation about tower block inmates being under house arrest.
The only people who ever thought tower blocks were a good idea were social experimenters like that twat le Corbusier(sp?) who condemned mostly working class people to live their lives in those shit-holes just to test his theories.
Aided and abetted by corrupt local councillors who implemented them to line their own pockets, notably “Champion of The People” T. Dan Smith in Tyneside, late 1970s but he wasn’t the only one
Also used to Gerrymander, build the Tories out of London (with subsidised migration)
I used to live in Hornsey, N. London which they tacked onto Tottenham and Wood Green to Gerrymander a built in Labour majority while benefiting from Crouch End rates/Council Tax.
Mind you from what I see of Crouche Ende on t’internet they probably vote Labour as well now.
To create the People’s Republic of Harringay
Don’t forget the ghastly ‘sculptures’ in the grounds of those giant multi-storied hovels to augment the pleasure of living there, which inevitably attracted grafitti artists just to complete the ugliness.
Check out David Martin – he finally names the guilty!
It may be time to lockdown football, the rate of heart attacks amongst young people is scary, I’d say it’s more dangerous than Covid for this age group!
Noah says
“a month ago I asked if we should encourage people to get the virus so as to build up more immunity . . .”
Over a year ago I was making the same point here at lockdownsceptics when telling of students largely disregarding instructions not to socialise or mingle both in halls of Residences and in student houses of multiple occupation.
I argued that they should be left to get on with it and thus be post-covid safe to go home and share Xmas with Granma.
When the Autumn term ended and the student body were asked to take part in mass testing before leaving precisely 6 tested positive.
The age breakdown for positive test in England show clearly that the 20 to 24 age group has had far fewer positives than the younger and older groups, suggesting that they did acquire natural immunity earlier.
As was also proven in S.Korea before lockdown 1 in the UK.
There appears to be a plan afoot to scale down all covid measures next year: I can only assume they’ve got some other dastardly control plan in mind;
https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticle-10198985%2FOperation-Rampdown-Codename-revealed-Government-papers-dismantle-key-Covid-measures-year.html%3AuKZJxJMTCTxD3qGHODeaHFwZK7o&cuid=5316213
What about the 10 days of lockup in detention “hotels” for vaccine resisters resident in Scotland who return from holidays abroad?
Haven’t heard much about that, have we? Is it ongoing? Are there any hotels available that haven’t been filled to the rafters with illegal immigrants and Afghan refugees?
‘Operation Rampdown’, not exactly discrete.
End of March 2022 is when they would have to extend Covid legislation once again.
Up to something nefarious that’s for sure.
Yes, it’s possible this was just a dummy run to test how much we’d believe and obey. It seems that the more absurd a ruling is the more most people will fall for it.
The BBC interviewing Neil Ferguson.
I’d rather slide down a razor blade with my balls out.
I hope nobody takes you up on that one.
“have him”, and “his”, BBRS, “his”…..
Latvia has banned unvaccinated MPs from voting and even from taking part in debates, and it will also dock their salaries. There are nine of them, out of 100 MPs altogether. (Source.) The Latvian authorities have today begun a crackdown on the unvaccinated outside of parliament too, including by banning them from supermarkets. That’s even if they have a “medical reason” for being unvaccinated. For some reason Latvia isn’t been reported much, if at all, in the British MSM.
They are preferring to report on Austria, perhaps because more of their journalists know where the country is, and they know it’s in some foreign place called “Europe”. The publicly-remunerated turd Katya Adler at the BBC is saying it will be “interesting” to see how restrictions are enforced.
Sad given that Latvia so keenly adopted the new democracy following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
A report yesterday suggested that all who voted in favour of banning unvaxxed MPs came from the ruling ‘far right’ coalition. It would be interesting to know if the banned MPs all come from a particular part of the political spectrum or do they perhaps represent the substantial ethnic Russian minority?
Presumably Latvia has a Constitutional Court? Can’t see such a ban getting past that if properly run.
I’ve wondered whether they will try to pull that here. Health min. De Jonge, of the CDA, formerly the single biggest party in NL, over the past 10 years or so has been decimated and is now a shadow of its former glory, has lost a lot of voters over the years to Wilder’s PVV and presumably in the last year or 2 to FvD (Forum for Democracy), not that far removed from the PVV.
Wilder’s has taken the approach of being against any mandates, but does not oppose any and all measures as such (some yes, like the night curfew). FvD is against all measures and is very outspoken against the vaxx itself. If De Jonge gets his way and allows a caretaker government to push through unconstitutional legislation that can bar people from attending their workplace unless vaxxed/recovered, he will be able to keep FvD MPs from entering parliament. Considering they are clear opponents to the current government, that smacks far more of doing away with political opposition than anything to do with public health concerns.
I don’t know if he will try to keep political opponents out of parliament and I am even less convinced he would succeed in doing so if he tried, but I am keeping my eyes open for the attempt, which in itself would be disgraceful enough.
If they did that and banned MPs were physically prevented from entering Parliament it would be very reminiscent of the Reichstag c.1933
We used to see a lot of Wim Wilders here on UK media but not so now. I seem to remember our Home Secretary banning him from entering the UK.
Latvia, and the other Baltic states, enthusiastic complicity in the Holocaust was obviously not an aberration. Thank God people, from this disgusting country, no longer have the right to freedom of movement to the UK.
Wasn’t this what the Barrington declaration was trying to achieve? But instead got branded as “covidiots” and “science deniers”
I remember my BIL (aged late 70s) disagreeing with the GBD because he thought focused protection meant that at his age, he would be forced to stay indoors except for necessary outings and exercise. I pointed out that for the GBD creators, it was advice but not mandatory. I fear focused protection if it was instigated in the future might be aimed only at the non-jabbed, especially the older ones of which I know quite a few, and be mandatory.
So rather than him being shielded he wanted all children’s lives ruined as well? A very selfish attitude that.
‘Forced focused protection’, nice.
“It’s for your own good…..it hurts me more than it hurts you….don’t you want to be safe…..then do as you are bloody well told!
OR ELSE!”
Yes, I am extremely worried that the unvaccinated will be (and already are) fair game for hateful discrimination.
“Divide, create conflict chaos and conquer ” – all very obvioulsy part of the plan
Focussed Protection in the mind of an utter prat like this will be Vax passports and further restrictions on the unvaxxed (which the majority of double/treble vaxxed will lap up).
Ferguson sees which way the wind is blowing and wants to get ahead of the narrative.
Good news I think, but we need to ensure they abandon the vax passports. Swapping mass testing for digital health ID is not a win.
“As Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya note, many scientists who should know better have downplayed or even denied the existence of natural immunity to Covid.)”
And this is very very very simple to explain. They’re all taking money from the pharmaceutical giants and their investors.
So Sweden was right all along then?
I think all on here know this.
This is like the abusive partner admitting they have made mistakes and telling their battered victim they have changed their ways now … but one thing is missing in their admission … an apology – a sincere heartfelt sorry for all the harm they have caused and damage they have inflicted.
Wrongdoers who display no sense of remorse should never be taken at their word … there is always usually an ulterior self-serving motive behind their attempts at reconciliation.
“Anyway, back to Neil Ferguson”
Why the f., Noah, are you giving more air-time to this numptey fraud as a means of hanging your hat?
All you do is rehearse various Narrative threads :
(1) There’s the true ‘vaccine hesitancy’ – the sort that pauses to think that the 1% ARR does something practically useful.
(2) ‘Focused protection’ is a novel idea. It isn’t – it’s what we all practise when there’s a virus about.
(3) That the virus is exceptionally dangerous to the older population. It isn’t – the somewhat raised mortality follows the natural curve.
(4) More burbling about ‘infections’ and ‘cases’ are given credibility, ffs.
(5) Above all – that this straw man has any insight, given his disatrous modelling record.
Give it a rest.
Neil Ferguson is not suggesting focused protection at all, or the benefits of natural herd immunity. He is simply saying that protection against COVID should be focused and that the less vulnerable population will likely, naturally, acquire immunity to COVID. Please don’t twist his words.
That is basically what the GBD said
I remember at, about the mid-point of this debacle, reading some analysis on costs vs benefits of lockdowns/restrictions on this site.
We are now over 18 months in and some of the data, including things like NHS waiting lists is shocking.
I wrote to my pro-lockdown Labour MP over a year ago now, warning that the cure is probably going to be worse than the disease, I included a number of pieces of data at the time – but they were largely predictive.
Surely, as I notice the Telegraph is reporting, we have a mounting tsunami of real world evidence that this is the case?
I wonder if readers or contributors have an up to date lists of harms vs benefit, so I can write to my MP once more?
Any help would be great – and, I would encourage DS to work on getting this together so we can all do the same.
At some point they are going to have to admit that lockdown was a policy choice, not a necessity and we have to start making the shit stick on them – and not their scapegoats.
I can’t help thinking that a coordinated focus on this would begin to help shift the argument.
In April 2020, about 5 or 6 weeks after this all kicked-off, by accident while channel hopping, I came across a late night talk fest (they’re usually quite serious, socially-engaged nonsense here, hence I avoid like the plague). A woman was talking, either a doctor or hospital administrator, about all the measures they had taken, how tough it had been. Everyone around the able was looking at her as she were Jesus giving the sermon on the mount.
Then a chap there got his turn to speak. He was a professor of Public Administration and Risk Assessment. He said that yes, NL had done well to deal with such an unexpected and overwhelming event, but that no one had ever bothered to speak of cost/benefit and that it was time to start doing so. He had emails from oncologists and other doctors saying they were prevented from continuing their work and that this would lead to missed/late diagnoses which would result in deaths further down the line. He presented a variety of costs/negatives that could arise from focusing solely on corona and that there was great need to do a cost/benefit analysis going forward. The rest of the people at the table looked at him as if he were insane or had just murdered their cat. They hardly responded to what he said and moved on to someone who continued to fawn over the lady who was singlehandly saving the country from corona.
I expect to hear the cost/benefit analysis about 10 years from now, with a lot of “sorries, we got it wrong, we’ll do better”.
“Lessons have been learned” – isn’t that what is always said after some massive cock-up?
Are we sure that he meant, or understood, what he was saying?
He’s never knowingly right about anything.
Neil Ferguson does not get to walk this back. By the time all deaths are counted, from lockdowns to delayed hospital appointments, his formal advice to government has killed hundreds of thousands of people totally unnecessarily. He has committed crimes against humanity and must stand trial. Or this happens again and again. This cannot be a “no consequences” situation.
But there’s no-one brave enough to drag him out of his lair.
The chart appears to be the Our World in Data 7 day moving average of confirmed daily new cases with the UK omitted. I attach the same chart including the UK and also recent daily new cases without moving average. They give rather a different idea of the relative fortunes of the UK compared to the Netherlands and Germany.
Picture above was too small to read. Better image attached.
Cases of what? What are we to do with this information?*
*What governments do with it is us it to implement insane, evil, expensive fascism based on a Big Lie.
Ferguson knows how the Covidofants produce these numbers and what they actually correspond to: Healthy people repeatedly being caught in the mass-testing net, eg, pupils, people who have to undergo workplace testing etc and – obviously – Corona-mad volunteers who keep testing themselves, many presumably also repeatedly testing positive all the time.
Most COVID data is bogus given the ease with which the numbers can be adjusted by the authorities to support the desired narrative at any moment in time – this is particularly true of “cases” which can be made to rise by simple virtue of doing more tests or ramping up the number of PCR cycles used.
The share of positive tests is a slightly better measure as it removes the influence of the number of tests done from the comparison*
And if we look at that measure in the UK, Netherlands and Germany we can clearly see the UK’s positive cases are on a downward trend while the Netherlands and Germany are rising steeply. Perhaps the UK got more of its pandemic over with in 2020 and so has greater immunity now? All of those Guardian commenters in 2020 saying “look how much better our European friends are doing with COVID compared to the little Englanders” may look a little foolish if so (not for the first time).
* Of course there are still plenty of confounding variables when comparing the positive test rates in different countries: PCR cycle numbers and also what populations are subject to testing – if testing is focused on people with symptoms, for example, rather than mass testing of asymptomatic people, the positive rate will be higher. In the end all cause mortality is the only measure worth looking at.
Downward trend is no longer the case for the UK, at least not for now: Mass testing, presumably again mostly of healthy pupils, has again stopped an attempt at stealing the experts their beloved pandemic (simulation) dead in its tracks!
When they captured Osama bin Laden, someone suggested he should be sentenced to having to go through airport security for the remainder of its life. Similarly, I hope all of SAGE and all these professors of public gobbledegook and international dideldidum who are behind this will end up being force-tested for COVID twice per day for the remainder of their lives.
I have always said, right from the beginning of this debacle, that covid parties was the way to go.
Just like the measles parties of old.
It’s not to late. As a bonus, its likely the virus has become less virulent (probably why its not killing so many, nothing to do with “vaccine” effectiveness) & more infectious (showing up the “vaccines” for what they are, useless). Evolving, as most viruses do, becoming less harmful, because killing your host is an evolutionary dead end.
Neil Ferguson will forever be known as the bloke who told everybody else to stay at home to protect their grannies whilst he had his mistress, the wife of another man, flit across London to his lair for a bit of rumpy pumpy. What a hypocrite.
I was going to quote Luke 15:7 (“There will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent”) but, because Ferguson is a mendacious, philandering, self-regarding, serially inaccurate cuck, I think I’ll stick instead with John 11:35 (“Jesus wept”).
I think the only focused protection we’re likely to see is vaccine passports & locking up the healthiest in society, i’e. The unvaccinated.
YES the big pharma propaganda & liberal religion of scientism is taking us, to chemical apartheid, the likes of Austria, Australia, Germany are discriminating against the healthiest people in society & calling them unclean for not polluting their bodies with synthetic alien substances, and to think I used to ridicule conspiracy theorists who would rant about transhumanism & Malthusianism!
Time Ferguson and Gates/China financed Imperial College were exposed as among the principal engineers of the Global Covid Scam and the Mass Gene Therapy Injection ‘project’. He has obviously been primed once again to join in on the latest Lockdown hype .
It is now all so obviously all a pack of total lies.
This isn’t the first time, and it’s unlikely to be the last, that I’ve said, “fuck off, Ferguson”.
You have to hand it to Ferguson, he is consistent. He’s been consistently 100% wrong, about everything he decides to open his mouth and talk about.
Focused Protection ?
isn’t that where they protect the “vulnerable” by locking down the un-vaxxed ?
ferguson’s been trotted out to give the next predictive programming heads-up.
Hospitals in USA and in first world countries are refusing life-saving Ivermectin treatment even with court orders. Big Pharma doing everything they can to jab us no matter what, while alternative COVID cures EXIST! There happens to be heavy censorship who are looking for these treatments. The Research Is Clear: Ivermectin Is a Safe, Effective Treatment for COVID. Get your Ivermectin today while you still can! https://ivmpharmacy.com
So he’s admiring the Great Barrington Declaration was correct.
Ferguson coming around to agreeing with the Great Barrington Declaration? Unbelievable. This snake is a piece of work! He is now slithering to escape from his part of the blame for this hellish fiasco. He should be at the front of the line of accused when Nuremburg 2 takes place!
To use an old pejorative term, he’s ‘covering up his a—e’ to defend himself. I agree with you that there is nothing paradoxical about normal human behaviour and it’s outcome. The concept of “lockdown” and related political behaviour is the real problem, is it not?
If I had just made a very public pronouncement recommending new restrictions of any sort, I would not break those rules as it would undermine their credibility. Unless, of course, I didn’t believe what I’d just espoused.
But, this is exactly what Ferguson and too many other ‘experts’ to name were discovered to have done. For me, this proves beyond doubt that we’re being conned.
Imagine Churchill not carrying his gas mask.
The snake Ferguson is ‘nudging’ towards what’s being hinted at in France.. confining people over 65 in their homes.. for their protection of course. But it wouldn’t stay there as the hint then talked of over 50s.
Do you see where this is going ?
They know that isolating people damages them, makes them vulnerable, so they are weasel wording their way into the next stage of this farce..
Same old same old.. divide and rule..
I’m a bit confused about the paragraph refering To Martin & Jay it looks like a bit of it has gone missing. If any one is in any doubt they were clear that we would build up immunity over time and we should have concentrated on protecting the most vulnerable. If we had followed their advice as set out in the Great Barrington declaration we would have had less deaths and suffered less cost to our country’s finances. Feguson and Hancock and many other scientists rubbished the declaration and we have paid and are paying in increased taxes the cost of that. The most wrong thing is that those scientists who gave very flawed advice to our government are still being listened to by them.
That would be locking down DAGE then would it, so the rest of us can carry on living normally?