When bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE) hit the U.K. in the 1980s, computer modelling predicted that without intervention new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) would kill tens of thousands of people. The U.K.’s response to BSE was to slaughter millions of cows as a way of halting the potential spread of the disease into the human population. In the end, about 3,000 people have died of CJD within the last 30 years and of these only 178 can be attributed to vCJD.
Was the modelling useful?
Surely yes! The modelling saved thousands of lives due to its timely prediction of the impact of BSE on the U.K.’s population if we didn’t do something. And luckily, we did do something, and because we did something there were only a couple of hundred deaths from vCJD… although the cows weren’t so lucky.
Welcome to the world of the counterfactual model and predicting what might happen if we ‘do nothing’.
Fast forward to COVID-19 and we found ourselves yet again in a situation where computer modelling was predicting thousands of deaths from a new disease unless we did something. And yet again, these predictions became part of the rationale for a series of major national interventions to curb the threat from this new disease, only this time the cows got off lightly and it was the humans who suffered.
Of course, it’s much more likely that the modelling predictions were wildly inaccurate, but it’s easy to see why they carried such sway in times of uncertainty. Their apparent sophistication, and general impenetrable-ness to all but a select few, together with the fact that their outputs were promoted by learned individuals with strings of letters after their names, created the illusion of providing powerful future knowledge… an objective crystal ball that should underpin difficult policy decisions. The problem is that, parking the fact that some models have major technical problems, they suffer from two much more basic fundamental problems that should limit their influence.
The first is the obvious fact that our knowledge of biology is incomplete, especially that of a novel disease, and so all models of such complex biology will also be incomplete. We may be aware of the gaps, and so make educated guesses in an effort to plug them, but it’s not the case that we know where all these gaps are or even that there are gaps at all. We may be completely ignorant of key relationships or important variables in the system. There may well be important ‘unknown unknowns’ in the biology of which we are blissfully ignorant and so, by definition, things we cannot model. It therefore falls to the modeller to fill the gaps (that they are aware of) and to be the arbiter of ‘truth’ in the disease biology. As such, these models are built upon the assumptions of the modeller and although many assumptions may be non-contentious and generally agreed on, this is not true for all assumptions, especially when it comes to modelling complex biological systems where knowledge and data maybe sparse, inconclusive, or even contradictory. It will be up to the judgement of the modeller to decide what to include in their model and this judgement will reflect the modeller’s own opinions and biases. This in turn will affect the predictions of the model itself.
So, far from being objective ‘crystal balls’, models reflect the prejudices, knowledge, ignorance, and preconceptions of the modeller. Meaning that regardless of who builds them, and regardless of how many wonderful graphs and pictures they spit out, unless their predictions are actually tested and found to have some element of truth, such computer models are effectively the codified opinions of the modeller. And opinion is the weakest form of clinical evidence.
The second important point is that counterfactual models don’t tell us what we should do only what might happen if we don’t.
Something that was striking about the use of models in the COVID-19 briefings was the fact that they were not used to make predictions of what would happen but to describe what wouldn’t. This was because, just like in vCJD, models were used to paint a picture of a future, caused by ‘doing nothing’, which we were going to avoid by ‘doing something’ and as such they were not predictions of the outcomes of our actions, but our inaction. And just like when we killed all the cows, we certainly did something to avoid the futures predicted by these pieces of computer code: lockdowns, masks, screens, school and business closures, social distancing… the whole COVID-19 dance. Having ‘done something’ we then saw that none of the modelling predictions came true and so, using the argument I used above for vCJD, concluded that by ‘doing something’ we successfully avoided the thousands of deaths that would have resulted from ‘doing nothing’. Time for drinks at Number 10!
Such fallacious circular reasoning seems to abound when it comes to the use of these kinds of models: first, we start by assuming that such counterfactual models have some level of truth in prediction, even though the models and their predictions are untested and unvalidated. Secondly, we then assume that in ‘doing something’ we are actually avoiding the outcome predicted in the ‘doing nothing’ scenarios, even if there is no relationship between the proposed ‘doing something’ and what is codified in the model. Finally, if the ‘doing something’ results in real world outcomes that are better than those predicted by the ‘doing nothing’ modelling we then take this as evidence to implicitly validate the modelling predictions we used to justify ‘doing something’. Counterfactual modelling would therefore appear to be unique amongst scientific disciplines because it creates unproven hypotheses that we do not want to explore, encourages the use of interventions that it does not explicitly predict will be effective, and makes predictions that are confirmed by not testing them. This is called ‘following The Science’ by policy makers.
The fact is that counterfactual models of COVID-19 are not a rationale for lockdown or any other intervention because they do not predict the impact of these interventions. They model NO intervention; it is policy makers and bureaucrats who decide what should be done. It is the very fact that such models make such dire predictions which provides the strong incentive to not test them by doing nothing. In fact, if one thinks about it, there is a perverse incentive for counterfactual models and modellers to paint the worst possible picture. After all, nothing substantial happening is no justification for action whereas the more dire the predicted outcomes, the more likely we are to do something to avoid them and the greater the claim we can make of lives ‘saved’ as a result. Indeed, it turns out that’s why SAGE didn’t bother modelling anything other than the reasonable worse case.
That said, counterfactual models and modellers are still making predictions and so all we need to do to test them is to do nothing and wait and see what happens; we turn the counterfactual into the factual. Which is essentially what happened after ‘Freedom Day’ and then during Christmas 2021 when the dire predictions of the modellers were ignored and in both cases the scenarios of thousands of deaths and hospitals overwhelmed failed to come to pass. The COVID-19 models were proven to be wrong, and if they were wrong then, then they were always wrong.
Predicting the Past
There is an old saw that says “prediction, especially about the future, is hazardous”, and it is certainly the case that the modelling predictions of COVID-19 futures have been truly hazardous for us all. But as we try to put COVID-19 behind us, a new form of counterfactual prediction is emerging which might be even more hazardous, and that is using models to predict what might have happened in the past.
When Professor Neil Ferguson stated last year that if the national lockdown had been instituted even a week earlier “we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half”, one assumes he was making this statement based on the output of a model. In a similar vein, modellers at Imperial have also argued that Sweden should have adopted lockdowns to save lives and that the COVID-19 vaccines have saved 20 million people from an untimely death. We have also seen modelling papers being published that support use of lockdowns over focused shielding efforts by predicting what would have happened if we had made these more modest interventions. We can expect more and more of the same.
Unlike the ‘do nothing’ models of counterfactual predictions, such re-imaginings of the past aim to produce new counterfactuals based on different assumptions about what could have been done. Obviously, such models also suffer from the problem of the incompleteness of biological knowledge, but they have an even more fundamental scientific issue and that is that the ‘predictions’ they make are intrinsically untestable. After all, we cannot go back in time and see if the modellers were right about what would have happened if we had done something differently. So, any claim that these models are uncovering a scientific truth or proving (or disproving) anything is false. Because what defines science as a practice is the very fact that hypotheses can be tested, and their validity or invalidity determined… beautiful theories can be slain by ugly facts. It doesn’t matter how much science goes into a model, if the predictions and simulations it produces are untestable then they are, and will always be, just an opinion, a point of philosophy, an article of faith. They don’t ‘prove’ anything.
There is also huge potential for circularity and confirmation bias in developing models of the past. Imagine that you wished to model the impact lockdown had on SARS-CoV-2 spread in the pandemic, how would you do this? One way one could be to assume (because of less social mixing) that there was less transmission in lockdown, and as a result we adjust the ‘R’ number so that it was lower in lockdown than without. Lo and behold, now when we model lockdown vs. no lockdown, lockdown produces a better result due to a more rapid decline in infections. But this is completely circular: we assumed lockdown reduced transmission and our model then shows less transmission. Likewise for any other intervention (pharmaceutical or not), the temptation is to assume its level of effectiveness… and then model its effectiveness. Similarly, for approaches that the modeller does not like (for example, focused protection), assumptions about lack of effectiveness are also made… neatly demonstrating that more modest interventions would not have been as effective. Such circular arguments in these modelling efforts may not be as obvious as my example here, but it’s easy to see how the assumptions and biases (whether explicit or implicit) of the modeller can be baked into the model well before they even think of hitting the ‘run’ button.
As academic exercises, the views of modellers about what could have happened – both about the future and the past – are perhaps interesting as intellectual endeavours, but the danger lies in the way they’re used by policy makers. Just as counterfactual predictions were used to justify ‘doing something’ during the pandemic, so these retrospective re-imaginings of the past are used to validate that the ‘something done’ was the right course of action. However, unlike modelling the future, which is hard enough to test, there is absolutely no way to demonstrate that such modelling output is either right or wrong because in the absence of a time machine we cannot go back and test their predictions. There are no ‘Freedom Days’ – which provide us with a crude way of testing the dire predictions of future modellers – just an endless series of imagined what-ifs. The reality is that such models are more akin to the computer renditions of historical places, or the fantastical simulations of distant planets found in films and games which exist as binary code but are not anywhere we can visit and explore… they look solid on the screen, but their foundations are not real and their walls are pixel thin.
The trouble is that when it comes to COVID-19 the outputs from such modelling efforts can be pounced upon and reported as ‘Scientific Truth’, especially if they support the perceived wisdom or accepted narrative. So, we intend to spend many hours, and lots of money, trying to understand our responses to the pandemic, but when interrogating the role of modelling and modellers we allow the predictions of the models themselves to become the ‘evidence’ of their validity. Evidence of alternative histories avoided, whether old predictions of a future that did not happen or new predictions of a different past. Evidence that we did the right thing or should have done it harder or faster or longer. Evidence that other approaches would have been much worse. Evidence that costly, unsafe, intrusive, and ineffective interventions worked for COVID-19 and so should be used again in the future.
Predicting the future is indeed hazardous, but it might turn out that when it comes to COVID-19 predicting the past is far, far more dangerous.
George Santayana is the pseudonym of an executive working in the pharmaceutical industry. Thanks to Mildred for critical reading and comments on this article.
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https://www.lockdowntruth.org/post/please-help-select-top-10-facts-to-promote-to-non-sceptics
Please give your thoughts! Thanks
The DELVE report being used to justify masks when it goes on about masked hamsters and no human RCTs performed.
The CMO Whitty quote on 21 July 2020 debunking the need for the lockdown.
The deliberate easing of standards for reporting deaths so that nearly any death could be used to boost covid-19 numbers.
It all becomes clear. When I read masked hamsters before I thought it some kind of joke. You do actually mean masked hamsters, hamsters in masks.
Long, very silent pause.
Do they put monkeys in masks because I’m betting the amount of mask touching I see would be better replicated with monkeys masks rather than hamsters in masks.
Hamsters in masks to prove mass human wearing is a point to pass on to all mask wearers.
I know, I had to read it a few times before it sunk in.
I even checked the links as I thought it was a piss take at first.
They’ve updated the report but it still contains the classic:
A series of controlled experiments in a hamster SARS-CoV2 transmission model
And I’m guessing hamsters don’t stuff their masks into their handbags or bottom drawer when they get home. Why isn’t there a public outcry against this nonsense. I’m so tired of it.
It’s no joke. Every hamster death is a tragedy and if hamster masks save just one hamster life then it will have been worth it.
I forgot masks on my list! Hamsters…FFS! Thanks
Maybe we should all wear hamster sized masks? Maybe size matters? Ahem.
Hamstering (“hamster wheeling”) is a term used to describe how someone makes up all sorts of excuses to avoid the obvious and have accountability for things. Like a hamster running on a wheel wondering why it isn’t going anywhere.
Fitting that these rodents were used in a mask trial
Are you sure they weren’t government ministers?
How would you tell the difference?
Interesting – in Swedish the verb which we would translate to mean ‘to hamster’ means to hoard!
‘att hamstra mat’ means ‘to (hamster) ie, hoard, food’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamster#Etymology
The world is a very strange place!
The stuff about T-cells Toby links to is definitely useful. Non-sceptics with often either bring up the relatively small number of people testing positive for antibodies or the stuff about how quickly they decay. Now we know that (nearly?) everyone develops T-cell immunity, even after a mild infection and, based on research on SARS, people can still have T-cell immunity seventeen years later.
Will often, I should have said. Can we have an edit facility please?
There is an edit option (for a few minutes after posting) – mouse over the lower right-hand corner of your post and click on the “Manage Comment” small gearwheel icon which appears.
Hamster over…
Thanks
Well some of them have T-cell immunity before they were infected.
Part of the problem is that Covid antibody tests are deliberately designed to be as specific as possible, to show if someone has had Covid, not just if they have immunity to it (which they might have without having had it).
The T-cell testing is more to see if people have any immunity to Covid (which at least half, probably more, do, without even being exposed). That immunity is both humoral and cell-mediated.
It’s not so easy to test whether somebody had Covid without making assumptions about what their immune response was. You’re looking for a 19mm spanner and find a 3/4 inch. That’s called a “false positive”. But the 3/4 inch spanner fits the nut and might have actually been what they used.
Indeed – and, in fact, stressing the cross-immunity is useful. People who don’t think they’ve had Covid might be more likely to be scared, but pointing out how they may have immunity due to (some) strains of common cold (important to point out that not all strains are coronaviruses) may help to reassure them.
Some people have a degree of cross-immunity from being exposed to SARS-COV-1 back in 2003 – which seems to debunk the “no long-term immunity” story.
Definitely agree that T-cell immunity is one of the most important points – probably the single most important point given its effect on the number of susceptible people and on the herd immunity threshold. Many of the pro-lockdown arguments are based around the idea that around 70-80% of the population would have to be infected in order to reach herd immunity.
A related topic is the many poor/Third World nations which didn’t implement a full lockdown and where the virus appears to have reached herd immunity and “burnt out” usually with quite low death tolls – most of these nations showing identical epidemic curves. https://twitter.com/Covid19Crusher is the best source I’ve found for wordwide graphs + data relating to this issue.
Another related subject is the % of asymptomatic cases and their probable low infectiousness. Many media stories depict asymptomatics as something that makes the virus more, rather than less, dangerous.
And many of them were using HCQ – often for protection against malaria.
Please not the Koch Postulate thing! That’s rubbish and makes us look like cranks. The virus has been isolated, cultured, electron-microscope photographed, sequenced tens of thousands of times, and it does cause COVID-19, which can be severe. And RT-PCR tests work (with some caveats about how they’re applied, as with anything).
Don’t compare vaccines to flu jabs. They’re different vaccines for very different viruses and have a different set of potential issues, which are certainly worth pointing out.
They have material they’re calling SARS-COV-2, but it can’t be SARS-COV-2 because the virus has not been isolated. Nevertheless, useful idiots come along and say, but they’ve got all these genomes…
And PCR tests go off like a fire alarm positioned over an old toaster.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7045880/
https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/novel-coronavirus-sarscov2-images
And to see what this virus does to monkeys and mice:
https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.13.093195
As for unique symptoms, what law or postulate says that any disease has to have unique symptoms?
BetaCoV/Korea/KCDC03/2020? That old chestnut?
http://www.frombehindenemylines.org.uk/2020/06/sars-cov-2-doesnt-exist-but-dont-take-anyone-elses-word-for-it/
The pictures are nice, but what do they really show? What’s the other material in them?
Check out the Flickr photos from the Rocky Mountain Labs guys. They have some scanning electron microscope photographs in which you can see apoptosing cells, coronaviruses, and nothing else.
“This appears to say that the virus was observed through the medium of the Vero cells that were infected with it. And indeed, images inserted in the paper are ones of Vero cells. The problem must be obvious: there is no proof that the Vero cells were inoculated with SARS-COV-2.”
So basically he’s calling them liars? This argument is a bit self-defeating because why should we believe P. W. Laurie?
I made the point about that. And it was not regarding postulates,but how you act. For Covid there’s a lockdown and panic. For other respiratory issues we do nothing of the sort. If we are to say that this is Covid then you have to eliminate other things otherwise you are now panicking and doing a lockdown for the common flu.
Basic logic and Karl Popper’s principles apply.
There is an asymetry in response and action hence the systematic risk of impacts due to misdiagnosis are high. The risks may be small medically but large societally, which then have secondry medical impacts.
The point that it’s not much different from other similar illnesses is a perfectly valid one.
But the Koch Postulate one is not needed for the skeptical argument, increases the attack surface, and also weakens the argument a lot.
If the virus doesn’t cause the disease and we can’t test for the virus then almost all of our knowledge about the epidemic and when it was over goes out of the window.
It’s just occurred to me that the obsession with purifying the virus and not having other cells in the picture may be because when Koch postulated his famous postulates, viruses had not been discovered yet. A virus can’t do anything on its own without a host cell so no virus will ever strictly satisfy the postulates.
the love of truth is lost to the marketing campaign.
The Scientific principles that Koch postulated are to establish a causal agent of a specific disease condition.
That these cannot be established led corporately invested science to shift to a probability fudge – under Rivers – and then to abandon empirical science for computer modelled constructs of reconstituted but ultimately unidentified genetic fragments that have neither been truly identified, classified or functionally understood, not proven to solely cause a specific disease. That fireman can be sampled from a fire scene is not establishing cause – though they can be truly identified and their function determined.
FEAR seeks an object of displacement – a scapegoat that can be driven out, eradicated, attacked, demonised and used as a foil to moral self-rightous virtue signalling, funding and authoritative controls.
To the controller class – fear of Disclosure or unmasking runs the ingenuity of maintaining and reinventing or restating the core thems of the deceit by which fear is protected, hidden and seemingly made ‘War’ on as every kind of funding crusade to save us from (insert terror symbol or hateful outcome here).
That we can each observe this pattern of split consciousness in our own mind – if we are simply willing to look at our mind rather than obey its dictates – is then hardly surprising to find as collective representation.
Self-will – as distinct from Sovereign will – runs masked as a covert operation – under masking cover story. Learning to discern which is which is aligning in the capacity to release the untrue to a more integrated appreciation of living truth – rather than asserted ‘truths’ to which the living must be sacrificed to act out.
Do you really think there wouldn’t be some cover story to satisfy those who WANT to believe ‘Authoritative’ Bollox?
Where you can make up a disease entity to account for a toxic cluster, state that you have isolated and show photos of extracellular debris, model fragments of debris into a the ‘whole virus’ – defined and patented and protected and controlled, without any demonstration of cause – apart from lots of hazmat theatre, then there IS NO DISEASE.
The novel can then be assigned ANY common symptoms to be seen to spread, and any capacity to mask, hide, mutate – or run DISEASE-LESS as a hidden vector of CONTROL. For the virus that is active is not the biological response to stress and toxicity, but the virus of ‘self-will’ operating fear-control-protection, and I use ‘self-will’ here for the denial or blocking of the symbiotic and cooperative alignment of communication – for the operation of a locked down private masked agenda – in all its socially isolated but lockstepped parts.
If there is no specific disease as a clinical condition – there is not ONE disease vector. Covid is thus a BRAND or catch all – like ‘Commie’ or ‘Terrorist’ that operates a blanket judgement and reaction to ANYTHING assigned to it by the authority to inflict penalty or extend favour.
Without establishing CAUSE – all of what comes after is a confusion of invested lies. The Lie and the Father of it – is a false flagged cause.
Invested BELIEF runs as identity with the momentum of its self-investment.
You have been phished.
If being fooled is not an education, then the fool persists in folly and is fed upon by those who likewise prey on lies to support their habit.
The defining of ‘diseases’ is a corrupted and protected operation of social control. These can be are are moveable parameters in which diseases can be manufactured or eradicated by shifting the goalposts of their definitions, testing and diagnosis.
It is a kind of sorcery – that to those downstream from the corrupted source have no or little sense of – because it manipulates the reality of their world-in-reaction.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.01800/full
“Complete viral genome sequences have been
made rapidly publicly available to the research community and
have recently surpassed the 48,000 units, thanks to the worldwide
effort of scientists and to the GISAID consortium”.
That’s rather a lot of useful idiots who are in on the conspiracy.
That’s great. But they don’t have any SARS-COV-2.
That’s rather a lot of useful idiots who are in on the conspiracy.
I thought that was the problem. We’re practically the only ones who aren’t falling for the hype, whether it’s an actual conspiracy or not. What you say above is almost word for word what Rod Liddle says.
I would still recommend avoiding potentially controversial issues like this (I know arguably all sceptical arguments are “controversial”!) when there are so many other, more straightforward points (like T-cell immunity); there are so many people, especially in the media, eager to dismiss sceptics as cranks and conspiracy theorists, that it’s probably better to avoid giving them ammunition!
I agree. Useful debate here but not for general consumption yet.
Underlying the ‘arguments’ are Trillion dollar interests.
The controversy of calling out ‘industrial interests’ that distort and capture the regulatory, political, media and educational sectors, is not a matter of ‘conspiracy’ but of extraordinarily disproportionate wealth and leverage.
Your argument is the definition of a ‘captured opposition’, for you self-censor anything that undermines your own support within a corrupted structure – and so can War on the (bad thing) while feeding and supporting and protecting the underlying mindset of which ‘bad things’ are the symptoms – but attacked or worshipped as ’causes’.
I don’t say this in blame. I understand the rock and hard place.
But the underlying theme I read in your post is of identity politicking replacing an willingness to address the issues.
It is perfectly possible to include reference to lack of established causality for the ‘defined’ viral ‘code packet’, with respect to the original Wuhan cases from which it was sampled – or any cases since – anywhere – or any other set of conditions or or no clinical conditions.
In fact the original ‘discoverers’ of the novel virus stated that they had not established causality.
If you neglect the small print, you jump the gun and run off like a headless chicken. Foxy Loxy knows how to identify a ‘cluster’, find a ‘virus’, construct a novel conceit of a media campaign, and activate drills that have been prepared and refined over decades to lockstep reality to a shaped charge of a narrative. That is ‘his’ role or function as the protector of what cannot be faced, felt, owned, or integrated.
We see a humanity split according to how currently willing we are to face and live through our fear – to its undoing – or when unwilling and unready – to it masking over and armouring against disclosure.
The desire for UN-consciousness becomes a death wish of those who elect to die to life rather than open to deep fear of conflict that is beneath our ‘reality-experience’ and masked over by a mind set in whatever enables NOT seeing and NOT knowing fear be-lived true. The Intuition of Life prompt a willingness to re-evaluate our predicates or presumptions – most of which are embedded and invisible habits of conditioned reaction or seemingly autonomous ‘identities’.
Don’t let what you are seeking to be free of – set the frame of your own thought and response – or you will lose the Felt Intuition of Life for a desire to ‘win’ by over-righting another as wrong.
A Soul-less or loveless existence is not a philosophical construct – but a kind of living hell – that locks in, isolates and separates, to a masking in hollow parody of life, given priority over truth recognised, extended and shared as one.
What are the unique symptoms of Covid-19? And how can you tell it from other ailments?
The only unique conditions I have seen as the very small subset of people who have lung (and other organ) damage and even that is not conclusive. But it actually doesn’t matter as the numbers are way less than the flu. Hence it can be handled.
As for RT-PCR it is a qualitative test – it absolutely can be used in support of other evidence but it is low resolution and low information.
You still need a gold standard.
Covid-19 is an illness that requires intensive care treatment. I had this confirmed again to me by a “health professional”:
A twitter encounter with a zealot from the cult at the forefront of tyrannising the country (an equivalent of the Nazi SS)
However, ICU admission numbers do not relate to a situation where there have been 50,000 supposed Covid-19 deaths.
Goes to show how little that health professional knows, they’ve totally bought into the scaremongering.
Interesting reading, isn’t it?
Was talking to my brother, who works in care homes, over the weekend and I happened to mention that under 65’s are more likely to die in a car accident than from covid. He was shocked – had no idea the risk was this low. It seems people outside this enlightened community are completely unaware of the age profile of the disease, so I would start with making the relative risk much clearer to people in a way they can understand.
That’s simply extraordinary!! This whole thing is about risk.
I know, it’s nuts how many people have no idea about the true risk. I suppose we can blame the MSM for that, but even so people ought to be able to compare their own personal experience (e.g. how many people do you know, or people you know know, who have got sick from covid – likely not many, if any at all) to what they are being told in the media.
Yes that’s a biggy alright!
“Rise in cases” (aka rise in number of positive tests) vs. rise in % of positive tests is a very important one, given all the local lockdowns as a result of the goverment (apparently) confusing the two!
Similarly the effect of false positives on testing results (another factor in the above)
Also, some reference to similarities with the 2009 swine flu epidemic (in terms of the way society and the media behaved, not in terms of the virus itself) in particular the aggressive push for a vaccine and the side effects (narcolepsy) caused by the latter; this is one of the clearest arguments that concern over a rushed, possibly unsafe vaccine does not make you an “anti-vaxxer”!
I would place as Number 1 on the list the average age of a Covid death exceeds the normal lifespans of citizens. That single fact stops people in their tracks.
I talk to various people numerous times throughout every single day and address any number of the various Covid lies or inconsistencies (I keep a notebook with me at all times that has lots of data for proof) and that one single item above has proven to be the best inroad to get them questioning this swindle.
The 2nd one that has been most effective (connected to the first) is the percentage of “covid deaths” that occurred in nursing homes/care centers. For that one I add that this was due to radical and deliberate policy changes not some unique viral event.
Hi Allen
Have you “converted” anyone?
If so, where were they already on the sceptic scale? 0 = Jacinda Ardern 10 = Peter Hitchens…!
Thanks
Here’s my penn’orth, hope it’s useful for you:
Stress negative impacts on the NHS and potential impacts on children’s education;
When discussing deaths, use official figures. I know they’re inflated, you know they’re inflated, many of those who’ve bought into this think they understated. Besides, the official stats don’t do the sceptics’ cause any harm;
Point out the age profile of deaths, underline the lack of risk of death for adults under 70 and, especially, for children. Compare with flu, which kills babies. Avoid anything which says or suggests that “these people were about to die anyway”. If anyone is in the room who happens to have lost one of “these people”, there may be violence;
Compare UK & Sweden death numbers using FERGUSON’S PROJECTIONS, especially expressed as a percentage of the population. I know it sounds like dancing with the devil, but Sweden still comes out well. It’s the best dismantling of Ferguson’s model I know that’s simple to put across;
Point out the relentless fear-mongering by the MSM, use examples of where they have only reported worst-case scenarios as fact, the fallacy of reinfections, etc;
Do explain how vaccines are developed and the various levels of testing they really need to go through before they can be used. Stress the time scales involved. Point out that there are several coronavirae, just as there are several versions of flu. And that 50k people died in 2017-18 because the “wrong” flu appeared that year and they’d vaccinated against the wrong variant.
Using Ferguson’s predictions for a sceptical argument.
Ferguson predicted 510k deaths in the UK, from a population of 66.65 million, assuming they did nothing. We got 41,433 which means we “saved” 468,567 souls, with a lockdown. Or 0.7% of the total population.
Ferguson predicted 96k deaths for Sweden, from a population of 10.28 million, assuming they did nothing. They got, with NO lockdown, 5,813, meaning they “saved” 90,187 souls. Or 0.88% of the total population.
Sweden saved a greater percentage, according to Ferguson’s model WITHOUT a lockdown, than the UK managed WITH a lockdown.
Oh new page, took me by surprise.
Found this while mooching the interweb, don’t know if it’s still valid but interesting reading:
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmcode/1885/188502.htm
I think most MPs are ignoring it.
Few good lines:
III. Duties of Members
6. Members have a general duty to act in the interests of the nation as a whole; and a special duty to their constituents.
Accountability
Holders of public office are accountable for their decisions and actions to the public and must submit themselves to whatever scrutiny is appropriate to their office.
HA HA HA – wonder if this can be used to get investigations going under this bit:
VI. Upholding the Code
18. The application of this Code shall be a matter for the House of Commons, and particularly for the Committee on Standards and Privileges and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards acting in accordance with Standing Orders Nos 149 and 150 respectively.
19. The Commissioner may investigate a specific matter relating to a Member’s adherence to the rules of conduct under the Code. Members shall cooperate, at all stages, with any such investigation by or under the authority of the House. No Member shall lobby a member of the Committee in a manner calculated or intended to influence its consideration of an alleged breach of this Code.
20. The Committee will consider any report from the Commissioner to it and report its conclusions and recommendations to the House. The House may impose a sanction on the Member where it considers it necessary.
Found this on the petitions page about MPS having to represent their constituent’s views:
https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/252142
Quite interesting the reasoning on why the petition was rejected:
“It’s about something that the UK Government or Parliament is not responsible for.
We can’t accept your petition because MPs are accountable to their constituents and how they choose to represent their constituency is their responsibility and not the responsibility of the UK Government or Parliament as a whole.”
This:
Episode 2 is here! https://open.spotify.com/show/4TvMounXNnJPuycMbn3kj7?si=l2lA5rbET-K3GpVVyb6B8A
Thanks for this! Great work. The 4291 figure was worldwide deaths at the time a pandemic was declared. It was in the WHO DG’s briefing on 11th March https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19—11-march-2020.
Love the logo
I felt it might be useful, save our LS readers time, and save them from intrusive pop up ads, to show a small snippet of the top comments on various news stories recently. Just helps to give a very general “feel” of what the UK population deem to be the most sensible comments at present!
Telegraph 24/8 – A second lockdown? Most English neighbourhoods haven’t had a Covid case for a month, says academic
“The pandemic is over. But no one is prepared to say so. Especially the ‘experts’ and those heavily invested in producing a vaccine. Don’t expect Whitty, Oxford, Imperial or any other financially interested parties to announce it. They will be praying every night for ‘just a few more months’ to keep the money rolling in.”
Daily Mail 24/8 – Huge Covid outbreak shuts Dundee school as seventeen staff and two pupils test positive:
“May as well just shut the country down forever then because this is going to happen everywhere if you test the hell out of everybody. If people aren’t getting sick from this is it really necessary to continue this hysteria?”
“Oh, for crying out loud! Are any of them actually ill? If not, get into school. This is ridiculous.”
“Since when is 17 HUUUGE Hilarious Covid nonsense”
Daily Mail 22/8 – Fears of a second wave as Italy records 1,000 Covid cases in 24 hours in the worst daily figure since lockdown restrictions were lifted in May
“My God!!! And there were 9 deaths reported yesterday and 3 today. This is getting really scary now, might have to do a special Facebook profile picture showing solidarity with the poor Italians currently having to deal with this absolutely shocking second wave. P.s give it up DM, we’re not buying it anymore, you’re making yourselves look very silly, and remember the print industry is going down the toilet, only being propped up by government adverts at this time. We shall see what becomes of you soon…..”
“Just stop with the scaremongering now DM, whether it’s here in Britain or in other countries like Italy. We the British public have had a guts full of this 0.01% chance of dying from the so-called dreaded coronavirus. Life moves on, the flu is worst than this and countries do not go into lockdown or enter a second lockdown because of the flu. I’m completely over with this coronavirus pandemic now.”
Daily Mail 24/8 – Fury as Education Secretary Gavin Williamson is nominated for MP OF THE YEAR
“What, by an algorithm?”
And finally, not really relevant to anything, but this top comment made me laugh….
Daily Mail 23/8 – Firms with more than 250 employees should carry out random drug tests on their employees to help identify middle class cocaine users
Top comment: “Try it out in the House of Commons first.”
I seem to recollect our ‘boys in blue’ were not too keen on this, when first mooted.
Thanks. Appreciate the snipped summary.
I wonder how many companies would suspiciously reduce to 249 employees.
Not suspicious, just sense. Stupid laws and regulations should be treated with the utter contempt that they deserve. Who of us has worn a mask today?
Oh! Exciting moment today – you just reminded me.
I went to the dog food shop today. When I walked in, that made 5 people in the shop – 2 staff and 3 customers. 100% mask noncompliance. (3 customers unmasked, when they were supposed to be masked and 2 shop assistants masked when they don’t need to be).
Then a bloke walked in behind me, wearing a mask and spoiled it a bit, but I’m taking it as a win.
Should have pointed at him and laughed…
I gave him a funny look and a raised eyebrow instead.
That sounds about right.
A heartwarming tale, we need many more of them.
I was thinking more because management were taking cocaine rather than simply trying to avoid red tape.
I was actually thinking much more generally. Compliance with these outlandish mandates will lead us ever closer to the full control police state, that the government clearly craves.
Good work!
Huge outbreak – tests not cases – anybody actually ill? two pupils … did it mention how many pupils the school had? And how many staff?
I really enjoy reading the comments on some of these articles – it gives me hope that common sense will eventually prevail.
“Dan Andrews, gov of Victoria, AUS”
Dan Andrews (Kim Jong Dan) is the Premier of Victoria, not the Governor. In Australia, Governors are just figureheads, and can’t do any harm. On the other hand, Dan has demonstrably done enormous harm to Victoria and all of the neighbouring states with his insane lockdowns and arbitrary border closures.
I think we’ve just dodged a bullet with this latest virus (Covid19).
Can I suggest that a biological warfare agent, ‘accidentally’ released from an American sponsored Level Four Biological Warfare facility in a place in China that nobody had heard of before this year may not have been accidental?
Can I also suggest that this virus has ‘evolved’ five thousand years since its discovery in 2004? Yes five thousand years is how long it’s estimated for the virus to have mutated naturally to the point where it would infect human beings. Hmm…
On paper this is one hell of a nasty virus. No cure either.
You have to be a bit clever with biological agents, after all you want to kill the enemy without killing yourself! In this case the remit was just to kill off the weakest 90% of the population. What could possibly go wrong?..
One of the problems was that this ‘cure’ for many of the world’s ills (climate change, over population, lack of resources, etc.) was that those who wanted it implemented are not in the top 10% of health in the population.
This meant that the virus had to be fast acting but have a very fast ‘burn out’ at the end. This would mean that the instigators of this virus having to lock themselves away for as short a time period as possible before being able to walk the earth again.
The problem that has occurred with this virus is that those damned masses of people have immune systems that work exceedingly well! Not only that but a Malaria drug is found to stop people dying. How frustrating!
So the virus to end all virus had a stellar start. It certainly killed lots of people in a shirt space of time. But shortly afterwards the problems started coming; it really wasn’t measuring up to its expectations. The numbers had to manipulated for starters…
The death rate had to be increased so some wag (sic) suggested that another way to get the body count up would be to increase secondary effect deaths. So health care has been withdraw from huge amounts of people.
Cancer deaths are increasing rapidly, suicides too, all good to the cause but it just isn’t enough.
In the meantime all the governments are carrying on as if the virus is doing its mass murder thing exactly as planned, but the reality is that it’s almost totally disappeared from the nations health. I wonder what the next move will be?
Could a rushed out ‘vaccine’ be the cure (ie. to kill 90% of the human race)? If it was forced on the masses at the same time could it do what the virus has failed to do? Or will there be a ‘second wave’? No not of Covid19 that won’t, can’t, happen, but from Covid20 or Covid21 perhaps?…
Yes, that sounds about right, and arrived on the scene in time to introduce the New World Order, the Big Reset! The timing is too perfect to be an accident.
I wish that was all nothing more than fancible nonsense. But it has too much of a ring of truth about it.
But the ‘government’ is plans to extend the lockdown for two years in September.
Politicians lack the guts to admit severe pressures being placed on kids: Alan Jones, Sky News Australia
Large numbers of children commiting suicide down under. The LOCKDOWN is now a crime against humanity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czXYjln2hSI
Scandalous!
On a positive front, it looks like it has doctors over there in Australia have just been given the green light to use a treatment protocol that Mercola (see mercola.com) has also been recommending. That could mean pressure on our government to also allow it…
I have heard that this Australian news reporter is very critical, watched it for the first time. WOW!
If every country had just ONE reporter who dared to say what he does, we would be better off.
Ignore the Infowars bit …
https://www.infowars.com/frontline-doctor-silenced-by-youtube-and-facebook-speaks-out-about-hydroxychloroquine/
I think one unintended consequence of the whole nonsense will be the emasculation of public sector unions, the teacher’s unions & the BMA (the doctor’s union). They’ve witheld their labour for months on end & we’ve survived, the threat of them striking has lost all power.
They’ve also lost the public’s goodwill and trust, they will never get it back.
I think it will go further as unions become enabling agents of top down change.
Very true. Bless ’em! In a twisted way I’m looking forward to the kids going back to school, not just us parents questioning everything our kids are doing it now too! If the worst comes to the worst we’ll take them out of school & home educate them like we have been all year.
Not sure it’s true to say the teacher’s unions have lost all power. Schools have not reopened yet, and if and when they do, teacher’s unions will probably have a lot of influence over what measures are put in place. Also didn’t they effectively scupper schools reopening towards the end of the summer term?
As for the doctors, the NHS seems to be firmly esconced as the new religion, so not sure how the doctors have been weakened.
In both cases I get the impression that they enjoy broad public support currently
Spot on. If anything they are now enjoying more power than they’ve ever had!
I was thinking about that with the railways. The perfect time for massive reform? Last time there was a strike our hourly train went down to 3 a day (run by management). That would be about right for current demand.
They’ve fired their bullets, if the government could find a spine & stand up to them they’d destroy them.
Maybe. No evidence of any spine, though, sadly.
“if the government could find a spine & stand up to them“
I think you’ve highlighted the flaw in your own argument there…
One interpretation of events is that the lockdown has essentially been the public sector talking to itself.
Mark Woolhouse said lockdown was a “panic measure” but admitted it was the only option at the time because “we couldn’t think of anything better to do”.
All he had to do was ask anyone on this site. We’d have supplied him with plenty of excellent options.
It like flying into the side of a mountain because there means seem to be a bit of a strange noise coming from one of the engines.
The pilot said it was a “panic measure” but admitted it was the only option at the time because “we couldn’t think of anything better to do”
Nothing would have been better. How hard is that to see.
Doing nothing would have also saved many thousands of lives in nursing and care homes Also patients requiring necessary and sometimes life saving attention would have been treated properly, instead of receiving utter contempt.
Ludicrously, much of the craven NHS is still sheltering in place even though Covid-19, whatever it actually was, had clearly packed up and left around the middle of May.
The sheer depth of this scandal is yet to be plumbed, but it will involve all of the following, UN Agenda 21, Bill Gates, genocidal vaccines, massive global depopulation, and the corruption of governments, not least our very own.
The cracks are appearing, and the blame game has started. This is gonna be fun
It’s great that he’s changed his mind, but he was all for it at the beginning. I remember some time around May or June he started to get antsy, saying that he’d only supported lockdown as a temporary measure lasting a few weeks, not the never-ending shambles it has become. Funny, because I could see right from Day 1 that it would be lasting a long, long time. It was obvious, surely?
Obvious indeed. Ferguson admitted as much. Giesecke pointed it out.
Ferguson has a face that I would never tire of punching. It is only that I don’t believe in violence as a method of persuasion that deters me.
Yes, it seems that Woolhouse has not been made privy to what’s really going on and he’s now getting rather nervous, as so he should. Woolhouse will have to do much better if he doesn’t want to end being branded and jailed as a coup collaborator.
Woolhouse is just another of the bloody fools, who ludicrously label themselves as being SAGEs. These “wise” people and the government are criminally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and should be charged accordingly. Let’s start with the arrest of Johnson and Hancock and an international warrant for the vaccine tsar himself, Bill Gates. Are you ready to do the decent thing Cressida Dick? It would be a long overdue but welcome change.
How I so want to see Ferguson, Hancock, Gates (and his wife) and the odious Whitty and Cressida all in the dock for manslaughter. If I was on the jury, the decision would take less than a minute.
At least he is honest and does not advocate these measures again. I hope this gets widely reported.
No doubt it will be headline news on the BBC.
1 Relatives are told they are no longer allowed to have contact with their loved ones in care homes
2 Gov/ PHE issue orders for hospital patients to be decanted into care homes whether they are infectious or not
3 NHS issue instructions that residents of care homes are not to be resuscitated (a highly illegal act)
4 GP’s and ambulances refuse to attend care homes
5 Care home managers allowed to sign death certificates as ‘covid’ even when there is no test
6 Bodies buried or cremated without post mortem examination
7 Doctors, Police, and Coroner involvement in the investigation/certification process abolished
As Tony Hancock once put it ‘Very clever innit”
As Herr Hancock will say at his trial:
“I vas only following Ze Science, ja!”
Although maybe their lining up the “we was spooked by China” defence.
Showing my age, I’m referring to the real Tony Hancock in Twelve Angry Men
More like ” Ve ver only following ze orders, clicks heels, Sieg Heil”!
When listed like that it’s an absolutely astonishing crime they’ve committed
It’s impossible for children to die of Covid-19.
A twitter encounter with a zealot from the cult at the forefront of tyrannising the country (an equivalent of the Nazi SS)
Last night of the Proms (from the Grauniad report):
“The final concert will be conducted by Dalia Stasevska, 35, from Finland, only the second female conductor to preside over the Last Night of the Proms.
“Dalia is a big supporter of Black Lives Matter and thinks a ceremony without an audience is the perfect moment to bring change,” a BBC source told the Sunday Times.”
A concert of classical music performed live by actual top-class musicians with no audience. Perfect.
AG
“a bbc source”
A bit of light relief: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sAYv2XQ8ZE
Brilliant! And every word is true.
very good
Yes, they’ve managed to work in a female conductor (almost certainly not appointed on merit), a “celebration” of BLM, and no audience with their outdated flags, to boot. You couldn’t make it up! It’s about time the BBC was disbanded. I refuse to watch this objectionable propaganda. Do you remember that nauseating woman last year, banging on about how she was queer, and then waving that rainbow flag at the end; virtue signalling at its worst – and virtue signalling is nasty by default.
Her predecessor was also Finnish, so certainly equally likely to have been ‘almost certainly not appointed on merit’ (in 2012).
I don’t see why Finnish women can’t be great conductors. Anyway as Strauss advised von Karajan, sometimes it’s best to just wave your stick around a bit.
Who cares what they do on the last night. The good news here is that they are going ahead with the whole season albeit without audiences. This will be a welcome change for the orchestras from picking strawberries to pay the bills.
Me neither! I took exception to the overt misogyny that regrettably infests some comments here by John Tench and others, and meant to imply you were just as likely or unlikely to have been appointed on merit if you were Finnish, as if you were female.
‘I don’t see why Finnish women can’t be great conductors’
Quite so. What is it about women conductors and Finnish nationality that has brought this stream of misogyny, xenophobia and homophobia out of the woodwork on this thread? Surely the nationality and sex of the conductor is beside the point!
We agree with what you say, Guy, that the content of the jingo-fest that is the Last Night of the Proms is not the big issue. Sadly, it was always going to a target for the ‘woke’ brigade and Cheezilla is right that they do not understand the content, surprise, surprise!
Some orchestral musicians are currently furloughed so not too badly off and many are teaching. The freelancers are undoubtedly struggling as they will only have what they can earn from teaching – often via Zoom or Skype which is not satisfactory (as MW knows!)
For musicians, the lack of an audience for what would normally be a crowded and exuberant event will make for a sterile and unrewarding experience, normally associated with recordings which aim for technical perfection and no ‘noises off’.
The Last Night of the Proms, like it or loathe it, is as much a community occasion as a concert and for it to take place in a vacuum, along with ridiculously ‘woke’, ‘virtue-signalling’ content makes it a travesty, like all the other audience-free Prom (or other) concerts. MW and AG
And no ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. What a surprise.
Not that there’s any hope or glory in today’s Coward Britain.
Mother of the face-nappied doesn’t have the same ring does it
The Mothers of the Face-Nappies have replaced The Mothers of Invention.
The BBC would never have got away with not having these classic songs included if there was going to be a paying audience- they’d not have been able to sell tickets. If they get away with it this this time, then whenever (if ever) there is a ‘Last night of the proms’ with an audience again, a precedent will have been set and the songs will not be reinstated…
Very Last Night of the Proms?
I saw a PBS doc about Mozart several years ago and one lesbian dyke went to Salzburg with her girlfriend. She claimed that she was the reincarnation of W. A. Mozart.
I found the comments about Rule Britannia from the BAME orchestra founder very puzzling.
She said:The lyrics are just so offensive, talking about the ‘haughty tyrants’ – people that we are invading on their land and calling them haughty tyrants – and Britons shall never be slaves, which implies that it’s OK for others to be slaves but not us
Checking out the lyrics for myself, I’m not sure she’d actually referred to them, as I interpret them completely differently:
The nations, not so blest as thee,
Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;
While thou shalt flourish great and free,
It’s about the defense of the realm and not its expansion. The same applies to Heart of Oak. Songs that were relevant at a time when we were frequently at war with France.
Not just woke but ignorant.
But let me guess – her only objection to any of the words of any revolutionary, punk, rap etc songs is if they feel a bit sexist to her….
Oh get fucked! Okay?! That’s what immediately popped into my head. Automatic writing. Surrealist.
Wait until someone tells her about Trafalgar Square, and Nelson’s column, and how they relate to a certain period of history…..
Bullshit! No audience, no fun.
Irony alert! AG
Just a quick comment re. mask-wearing in Italy. Regional governments have issued their own decrees on this. So in Northern regions like Alto Adige and Lombardy worst hit by the epidemic the regulations tend to be stricter than further south. It’s presented as a civic duty. But as of August 17 even nationwide there is a requirement to wear a facemask outdoors between 6pm and 6am.
Intelligent virus part 94 – not dangerous before 6pm outdoors
it’s a vampire virus – only creeps out after dark….:-)
May I draw your attention to this rather humorous webpage I came across recently. It’s brilliant!
https://www.suffolkgazette.com/category/news/
I liked ” Woman visiting the beach complains too many people are visiting the beach”
and ‘Norfolk – where Bob is not necessarily just your uncle.’
Bit random, but anyone know the origin of the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’?
Norfolk has a certain reputation in comedy circles for inbreeding. Whether there is (or was) any truth in it I don’t know, but it doesn’t surprise me that people in Suffolk would latch onto it for local rivalry.The origin of “Bob’s your uncle” apparently dates back to Robert Cecil’s nepotism in appointing Arthur Balfour to the role of chief secretary for Ireland.
An alarming number of locals in Lowestoft look the same… I’m speaking from experience.
Sounds fishy to me, Andrew.
Oh, don’t start on the fish puns. I get enough of that at work.
Good laughs!
Some laugh-out-loud ones. Thanks!
I’m thinking of putting a mask on the front of my car, like they do for Red Nose Day with something like “Stuff the NHS” or Get back to Work you lazy sods!
New height of stupidity today, have got members of parish council coming round to explain themselves about approving the latest bit of garden infilling next to us. They are prepared to meet to subject to outdoors only, masks and social distancing !! Have informed them that there is absolutely no chance of me wearing a mask – compete idiots …
We must fight this at every opportunity. Never give up, never give in!
bozos.
are you planning to attend?
maybe you should film it…
I mean if you turn up sans-muzzle what’ll they do?
turn away from you?
maybe slowly back up to a ‘safe’ distance?
run off?
lynch you?
perhaps they’ll spray you down until you’re ‘safe’..
Indeed ! Well it’s them attending us – the idea is to stand in our garden point and essentially say in a firm but fair way “what have you fu&@ers agreed to now?”. Am trying to decide whether or not to put in a one way system, lots of tape marking out 2m and every other chair at the table. Possibly also a hazmat suit and ww2 gas mask if I can locate quick enough !! I’ll think about the filming idea too … 10am on Wednesday !
ah I see
maybe you could get out an old weed killer pump / spray type thing and start pumping
”please let me spray you down before you enter my garden” you could holler as you look up to the traffic light you have installed into the one way system you mentioned you were thinking about also installing
good luck! haha
I like that idea with the spray – will see what can russle up – perhaps map out three boxes on the grass for them to stand in and then have the lawn sprinkler aimed Over them to suppress any emissions !!
What about making a video of the visitation.
Your garden hose is your friend …
Need some choreography for next Saturday’s demonstration in Trafalgar Square.
perhaps they’ll spray you down until you’re ‘safe’…
Like Sean Connery and Ursula Andress in Dr. No.
Excellent response. Official stupidity, at any level, is always the worst.
Ask them how many times in the last week they have gone into a supermarket [or other retail premises] & touched the chip & pin machine, or touch screen in a library, or self service checkout somewhere, which is not sanitized, in the overwhelming majority of places, between people smearing their hands on it. Saw this in Asda the other day – someone asked about people touching the card machines, reply was simply, “Oh well we can’t clean it that often really can we,” to which a few other lightbulbs appeared to go off in the queue from other shoppers, “Oh that’s a good point, I haven’t thought of that, been touching these things for weeks” heard a couple of people say.
Or re-run the Lemsip commercial “Stop snivelling and get back to work”.
Big thumbs up Bella!
Genius!
Excellent meme. I agree I would not want to revisit this year again, ever!
I went to church yesterday and was heartened matters had improved since a fortnight ago. The person who took me no longer asked me to cover my face in his car. I’m medically exempt from masks. No one bothered me about and many people took theirs off after the service when e chatted as normal, last time we had to go straight out after the service. We were allowed to sing quietly and children in the congregation allowed to play with the toy box. Apart from masks and lack of cups of tea, it felt like a normal service.
On the way home, I spotted a masked man in a totally deserted street. The person driving remarked,, “Some people are afraid of their own shadow.”
I’m grateful my church is still enjoyable . Another local church posted this yesterday.
“There are two services on offer on Sunday
1. In church . 10.45am. Remember that seating is limited, that you must wear a face mask and that social distancing will need to be maintained throughout. Please do not feel under any pressure to attend. We will be attempting to live stream it which you can find on our youtube channel.
2. A prerecorded service will be available from 10am online.
Could they be more off putting if they tried?
I’m another left leaning remainer who has opposed lockdown from the start.I’m in a vulnerable group but felt it was up to me to take my own precautions as I saw fit. Every common cold landed me in hospital as a child but I was always told to get plenty of fresh air. We had visitors, people were simply told not to come if they were ill. My parents wore masks if they caught colds to try to protect me but I caught it every time.
God is with your church, alleluia!
“Report author Prof Alison Leary MBE said the findings were ‘worrying’ and called for an inquiry.”
It’s more than worrying. It’s criminally irresponsible and negligent.
What has taken the authorities so long to realise all this was happening. Anecdotal evidence was available at least back in early April, but no one in authority was paying any attention.
At least the same scenario in NYC and elsewhere in the US was being highlighted by Tucker Carlson on his show. Who here in the UK was speaking out about it, and raising awareness?
All our supine media were doing was encouraging he weekly NHS worship. They should be ashamed of themselves, but I don’t suppose any of them were.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-andrew-cuomo-donald-trump-nursing-homes-a9535691.html
“New York State quietly deletes controversial Cuomo order that forced nursing homes to admit coronavirus patients
‘He didn’t reverse or rescind anything. The order is still in effect’ ”
https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2020/06/16/michigan-gov-whitmer-defends-placing-covid-19-patients-in-nursing-homes-with-healthy-residents/
Michigan Gov. Whitmer defends placing COVID-19 patients in nursing homes with healthy residents
Health officials say more than one-third of state’s COVID-19 deaths came in nursing homes
Anyone else notice a pattern here???
If Hancock didn’t know what was going on in the UK, he should have been aware of it and taken steps to stop it. If this was being deliberately hidden from him, those responsible should be sacked and prosecuted for manslaughter.
If he did know, then he should be sacked and prosecuted for manslaughter.
Ireland has the largest % of deaths in care homes I believe. Had to be following the same policy of culling the frail.
If ever an enquiry was needed. This is it. Who exactly was providing advice that said to issue DNR orders without consulting, releasing positives back into Care Homes etc. I want to know names and faces.
They need to be rooted out immediately
If this was intentional – and it was certainly deliberate policy, then surely it’s murder, not manslaughter.
en masse too
Like the Nazis with the Jews. N’est-ce pas?
Prosecute all of them for manslaughter.
Yep, same story in other states. California (to a lesser extent, I believe they at least attempted to roll back the policy after a while). Plenty of other states did the same thing WRT Nursing homes. inc. Pennsylvania, who played a blinder by having a Trans Woman as the Chief Health Secretary; people who didn’t necessarily like what she did to their relatives, after moving her own family out of a nursing home, in some instances now are subject to hate-crime investigation:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2020/05/15/state-official-requires-nursing-homes-to-admit-covidpositive-residents-then-moves-own-mother-out-of-similar-facility-n2568874
From your left winger: “I used to be a Guardian reader, too, but I knocked that on the head in early April when I cancelled my subscription because of the lamentably biased and narrow-minded nature of their coronavirus coverage).”
You beat me to it by a few weeks but I also cancelled my membership for the same reason.
I didn’t always agree with their take on things (especially Corbyn, but also blaming anything bad on Brexit), however overall I was willing to forgive them that.
But their refusal to report responsibly on Covid-19 and look at the situation practically baffled and infuriated me. One thing they do have is good investigative reporters, but either they furloughed them or silenced them.
I’m curious. Are you at all excited by the possibilities for, effectively, a socialist revolution on the back of Covid?
The thought terrifies me.
Without wanting to go too deeply into traditional political debate, this whole affair has pretty much thrown everything I thought I knew up in the air.
It’s quite disorientating.
Your situation exactly mirrors my own. It seems I’m actually quite right wing after all
Count me in too. I was always very socially liberal and slightly right of centre on economic issues, but I’ve realized that freedom is the only thing that matters to me now. My long-buried libertarian instincts have come to the fore and I’m keeping some strange company these days…well, strange for the old me!
Same. I follow a local politician who was a bit of a hero, always an outlier, sticking it to the corporations and politicos.
They are still doing good stuff, picketing a local factory who have laid off a third of their staff but they are all wearing masks in the open air, posting it on their FB page and calling for all school kids to be made to wear them. I won’t be voting for them any time soon.
On that point, pics of people on social media sending kids back to school and include a photo of them in a mask. Awfully depressing.
Exactly likewise but replace Guardian with Telegraph in my case.
A message to all the lord mayor chief people who scour LS to work out where it all went so badly wrong on your watch.
Realising it’s not about public health is your first step to success.
Then follow Aberdeen Council’s example. Tell the old boot cow moo or Boris or other fuhrer to fuck off and then open up your city as you please. Here we see evidence of weak Nippy having to back the council or look like the jumped up pencil topper fraggle she actually is.
https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/aberdeen/2431222/coronavirus-restrictions-relaxed-in-aberdeen-after-hours-of-talks/
Wondered if they read the letter I sent to them last week? Be nice to think so.
It was a damn good letter anyway.
Well done, Aberdeen!
But she’s made her point and other towns will take note:
Mike Wilson, whose Epic Group runs a number of venues, including Prohibiton, said: “The licensed trade is now in no doubt what is expected of them. We have had a tough lesson…..
“I think the main thing people will find is much stricter enforcing of bookings and the three-household-rule.”
Sent to the BMA part 1:
I have been reading your press release dated 04th June 2020 on the use of face coverings.
Some of the quotes from BMA council chair Dr Chaand Nagpaul:
There are no justifications quoted, no science quoted, no studies quoted, no facts or figures quoted and so on so I have a few questions to ask so that I can understand your stance that has been widely quoted in the mainstream media and on social media as an authorative voice of reason and science over the past few months.
My questions:
Sent to BMA part 2:
If they do not work in a controlled medical environment used by trained personnel how will their use by the general public work?
There are plenty more studies that can be read and recently the world’s leading epidemiologists issued a statement challenging Governments on this issue and said that masks were not effective for stopping the spread of viruses so what science does the BMA have but not released that proves mask and face coverings are an effective mitigation?
In addition to this I am struggling to understand why GP surgeries, dentists and hospitals are insisting on face coverings to be worn on their premises under your seeming authority or recommendation when the list of premises that remain excluded under the relevant legislation and where face coverings are not required are:
I look forward to your reply. I am positive it will be most enlightening.
Amazing AG, as usual. You are a star, sir.
Light relief after doing online training for days that I’ve put off for months due to lack of interest. Mojo coming back and getting ready to go back to work at some point soon and rebuild the business.
legend!
Re: the hamster, I think this episode of Tales from the Riverbank might need to be renamed…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NxlvfXmkzs
Nostalgia trip!
Awkward Git for Prime Minister! Elected by LS acclaim!
I love the last sentence!!!
Also: My sister once owned 2 hamsters. I am very curious as to how a scientist got a mask onto a hamster as they tend to wriggle all the time… Sedation?
Also hamsters don’t have big enough ears to hook any securing elastic over. What does a hamster face mask look like and how the heck did they attach it and get it to stay on???? The mind boggles!
I don’t think scientists are quite as gentle with their hamsters as little girls would be.
But I think when I looked at that study, the actually used “mask material” (what’s that? Whatever you want it to be!) slung between cages, rather than actual masked hamsters.
Which, by the way, is one (but only one) of the reasons the study was clearly stupid – the air and fluid dynamics are obviously different.
Kinky!
Thank you so much for a fantastic letter. Please can you provide the link to the 15 academic studies showing masks are ineffective in medical settings. I want to send a version of your letter to send to my golf club: If masks aren’t effective in a medical setting what use do you think they are in a golf club? … I am not a hamster so I should be allowed to use the changing room…
James Delingpole’s June 1, 2020 interview with Dr. John Lee is worth watching again. Dr. Lee just said, around minute 37:10, that there are a hundred thousand million times more viruses than the number of cells in our body.
Let us know if you get an answer!
If they tested all of us for other viruses and bacteria they would probably find hundreds of them. They are just fixated on one in particular and they won’t let go, like a dog on a bone.
It looks like the overseer in the school pictures mask is not being worn in a compliant manner. If this is seen again it will result in a loss of 100 social access credits. Stay safe.
What is truly scandalous is that Dr Jenny Harries et al. are only now admitting that children are at very low risk from Covid-19. The evidence was there months ago. Good to hear Prof Woolhouse speak up. The ICL modelling that led to the lockdown will eventually be regarded as the biggest scientific scandal in decades.
Not as far as the BBC are concerned!
China controls the public policies of country after country by using Twitter to express opinions.
This has got to be the most laughable nonsense of the century, and there is plenty of serious competition.
Well, if you substitute “attempts to influence” rather than “controls” is it so implausible? I am sure we attempt to influence what happens in other countries – say Belarus, or Ukraine.
I do not know who the “we” is in your comment, but I know I do not attempt to influence the public policies of other countries.
However to the substantive point: I was referring to the story which claims that China used twitter accounts promoting the lockdown response and these accounts persuaded political leaders across the global to introduce the lockdowns. The notion that the world’s political leaders introduced such obviously self destructive policies on the basis of some anonymous twitter posts is beyond absurd.
unfortunately governments are influenced by public opinion and they think that what they see on twitter and in the MSM is public opinion. We already know that governments have been influenced by the media – Remember the old Sun proclamation of “we won it ”
I am currently involved in an issue where the organisers request a twitter storm be generated at appropriate times to influence MPs. So do not be so dismissive of what effect tens of thousands of tweets – and not anonymous – the bots have “identities” will have.
The “we” was the UK. Whether any of this attempted influencing is effective I do not know, but I think there’s strong evidence it happens.
The government of the United Kingdom has for decades made it perfectly clear that it is opposed to any attempted foreign meddling in domestic politics. Surely you are not suggesting that they are lying hypocrites?
i think some of us take the view that if a politicians lips are moving , they are lying .
And maybe they are opposed to foreign meddling but can they actually do anything about it?. I am vehemently opposed to a meteor landing on the UK. But i don’t think i can do much about it..
Surely not!
There is much more in the Chinese Italian connection than these twitters.Large Chinese population in Northern Italy especially from Wuhan in leather industries to produce Made In Italy shoes.Lots of Chinese medical teams in the beginning being shocked not seeing face masks.I would not easily dismiss Chinese influence in the Italian handling.The other governments just imitated Italy.
I heard about that too. They all celebrated New Year in Wuhan and then hightailed back to Northern Italy. Happy New Year!
could be the country we’re not allowed to mention you might think to mean possibly once upon a time in a land far away or something
A continuation of my post earlier about my friends birthday bbq in his garden where he has told us all that masks are compulsory if we go (even when sat in the garden)
Somebody asked me if I tried to make them aware of what the law actually says. I did but I was told by the host and another friend that the government rules did not go far enough given the severity of the disease.
I tried to talk sense but no luck. These are healthy people in their 20s who are still petrified at the thought of catching this.
I am sorry to hear that
We’ve cut ties to certain friends who don’t share our sceptical views
Are they really scared, as opposed to just posturing?
They’re terrified they arent just doing it to look virtuous. Even if you dont die the first time, they still think you can get reinfected or you suffer from severe lung damage.
In the past we were able to avoid clashing by avoiding the topic but now we’ve hit a wall.
There is a certain section of the population that will remain frightened, until the wonderful day that BBC says it’s safe to come out. Of course, this will only happen once we’ve all been vaccinated with Gates’s Agenda 21 depopulating special brew. Hey ho.
in their 20s … gawd what on earth are they crapping themselves about. If they were in their 70s fair enough to be cautious. Those youngsters need a good dose of reality!
Can you imagine these twots being called up to fight a real war, not this sorry ” virus” thing?
Given that some freaked out at the mere presence of a Military recruiter in uniform within 500 metres of them on campus (Cambridge, was it?) I think I can pretty confidently guess what the outcome would be…
Send them to all the care homes.
Can I be nursey.
That was me. How do they know how severe it is? Who has told them? If the same people told them it was safe now, would they believe it? I fear not; you wonder just what these people want – what do they need to see, to change their minds?
Will a vaccine do it? Probably only if it brings the dead back to life in front of them.
The CMO is saying it’s safe for kids to go to school, but the great unwashed aren’t going to believe it…
Your friends are your friends, Ricky, but I think I would have to leave them behind, because they are so stupid. That would apply to anybody, in any situation, where the evidence against their argument is so abundant and so clear.
The only thing keeping me from totally cutting ties is the notion that such friends have always just skimmed issues such as these.
The tide is definitely turning. They’ll catch up soon enough
That cartoon is very very good. Worth leafletting, I would suggest.
sounds like a dull party
I’m my 20s we fucking rocked! masks? haha maybe we saw some i mean after dropping some lsd we saw all sorts
these guys sound boring as fuck.
Sort of related. One of my duties at my church is the preparation of our steward’s rota. I had just distributed the latest rota for the forthcoming three months and immediately got an email back saying one of our stewards and his wife won’t be able to do any duties until things get back to normal ‘as we are not keen to resume physical interaction in the church building under current circumstances’. 40-ish couple, of African descent so maybe think they are more vulnerable, but clearly still scared stiff of going out and meeting people. I imagine this is far from unusual and it is going to be a hurdle to get past this fear mania. In our town 1-2 ‘cases’ a week and no deaths in local hospitals for ages.
From the wording, I took it to possibly mean they didn’t want to come back if it is all face masks and social distancing? Maybe they’re sceptics?
From the rest of the email it was clearly fear of catching the virus. The friend’s party is the same mindset, as is one of my other friends and his wife. Totally scared of even going out, they go out walking late evening because there are few people around, but gosh he managed to go into a paper shop the other day.
Don’t go.
Have your own party in your own garden.
Maybe the other guests will swap to your garden!
Lost cause then I’m afraid.
The Doors. Strange Days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI76mRtSD9g
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7430289/
“Three months of loneliness during the COVID-19 lockdown”
Perhaps obvious things in this article by psychiatrists but a good quote speaking of the opening up after lockdown
“We speculate that this is because the “new normal” is not normal. Even in communities that have reopened, typical social interactions remain profoundly altered, as people maintain social distance, avoid congregating in groups, refrain from handshakes, hugs, and pats on the back, and wear masks that hide subtle facial expressions of emotion and muffle vocal intonations. Many of the social behaviors that have evolved for generations as ways to express closeness, friendship, and a sense of community have been radically altered in the wake of the pandemic.”
Indeed. Not understood that a legal challenge has not been made on discriminatory grounds for mask wearing for the 5% of population with heard of hearing relying on lip reading. And the discussion about mask wearing in children and teenagers in education and not discussing the devastating effect of masks for autistic children.
You would think such discrimination of vulnerable groups should be addressed by the left wing medical establishment type Trisha Greenhalgh etc the fanatics for facemasks. Not a word although they could attack Johnson for this thing and require face shields for all teachers and anyone in business etc serving their community. So Sunak would have to cough some more millions extra to stop this discrimination. (And afterwards we’d highlight for him that face shields do not protect against C-19 for the waitresses as shown in this Swizz study)
https://www.thelocal.ch/20200715/only-those-with-plastic-visors-were-infected-swiss-government-warns-against-face-shields
I was talking to a young man the other day who is mildly autistic, he works in a customer facing role. He told me that masks make it very difficult for him because he can’t pick up non-verbal signals & keeps misreading situations, he found it very upsetting because he feels he can’t do his job anymore.
Very sad.
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(20)30102-6
Another newly published report on this from California about T cells immunity
“Our results suggest that long-lived and robust T cell immunity is generated following natural SARS-CoV-2 infection, and support an important role for SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells in host control of COVID-19.”
This study contains some interesting new information. It was only 9 people, but they looked in much greater detail at exactly what kinds of T-cells they had.
They were looking for SARS2-specific T-cells. Lots of T-cells can fight SARS2. They were looking for ones that are specifically adapted to SARS2. To use my earlier analogy, they were looking for the 19mm spanners and excluding the 3/4 inch ones that also fit, do the job, but weren’t originally designed for SARS2.
They found these only in the nine convalescent COVID-19 patients and not in the uninfected ones, confirming that they were SARS2-specific.
Those SARS2 specific cells were all “Th1” which means their job is not to kick off B-cell proliferation and make new SARS2-specific antibodies.
But one of their jobs is to help with “affinity maturation”, which is the process of selecting and evolving B-cells to make effective antibodies. Interestingly they seemed to find adaptations that are believed to specifically wake up memory cells for similar pathogens.
In other words, the T-cells that had found 19mm bolts were looking to see if they had any 3/4 inch spanners lying around rather than rushing out to Halfords to buy a 19mm spanner.
“Whether this is also true in the context of COVID-19 is not clear, but given that 40-60% of unexposed individuals have T cells that react against SARS-CoV-2 peptides, likely due to cross-reactivity with endemic coronaviruses, it is possible that the SARS-CoV-2-specific CD4+ T cells we identified are acting on previously-generated cross-reactive memory B cells. We speculate that the convalescent individuals we analyzed had previously been exposed to endemic coronaviruses and that this prior exposure, along with conditions favoring a Th1 response in these individuals, provided the necessary conditions for eliciting a robust and effective response against SARS- CoV-2.”
But this is still quite speculative at this stage. This should be replicated with a larger sample and, as they also say, they should repeat the study on people who have been vaccinated to see how closely the immune response to the vaccine matches the natural one (which is known to be very effective). Perhaps the vaccine researchers are doing this.
Thanks for the clarification. The amount of articles now published about the T cells response is increasing rapidly as this might be the clue to the epidemiological features of the C-19.We need lot more to convince Fergusson et al that 60-80% herdimmunity might not be needed.
We may even have close to 60%. It’s just that the antibody tests are only looking for one specific thing that’s part of a much bigger picture. As Gupta and others have shown less than perfectly uniform mixing of the population also lowers the real world HIT quite a bit. Both things are probably true of other viruses as well.
The immune system is truly amazing
Better than most, if not all, vaccines. And less costly as well.
Yes the more I learn about it the more I am in awe. It has a lot of intelligence for something that isn’t a brain, all driven by cytokines turning genes on and off that result in more cytokines.
Didn’t notice this before on the DELVE report:
“This paper has drawn on evidence available up to 28 June 2020 and has not been subject to formal peer-review. Further evidence on this topic is constantly published and DELVE may return to this topic in the future. This independent overview of the science has been provided in good faith by subject experts. DELVE and the Royal Society accept no legal liability for decisions made based on this evidence.”
Oh well that’s OK then.
Zero credibility.
BBC R2 today, Jeremy Vine was asking listeners their views on the schools going back next week.
Woman caller ” it ain’t safe Jeremy, I got two kids and we’re shielding “.
JV ‘since lockdown, wow’
WC “I took ’em out of school 2 weeks before lockdown because nan’s got diabetes”.
(Was diabetes a known co-morbidity 2 weeks before lockdown? Jeremy didn’t ask).
JV ‘ so you’re still shielding now ?’
WC ” It’s not safe for the kids to go back coz nan this and nan that…”
JV ‘so how is nan ? Is she alright ?’
WC “no Jeremy she passed away in April”.
Even Jeremy lost interest at that point having established that nan died 4 months ago without the Covid.
And these people have bank accounts, hold down jobs, have mortgages, drive cars and EVEN more worryingly have reproduced!
I have searched my lexicon very hard, but can only offer “Fuck me.”
It’s subtle, yet erudite and captures my similar response too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anLDf3qdVFA
There are times when one is lost for words. How can these people be so “blue-pilled” that they can’t see the obvious in front of their noses? Perhaps these muzzles are having more effects than we think.
Not anymore they don’t
Yes, it’s sad. Mentally dead, morally dead, but still capable of copulation and conception.
Wonder how they manage to get even that one right.
They got it right at the second attempt.
Possibly teachers, six months paid holiday is not enough.
Yes, my wife and I both think that the stress of teaching “the difficult” children is greater than the stress of being locked up. They simply want to avoid going back to work for as long as they are paid 80 percent of their already-generous wage.
Public Sector = 100%
Very understandable, you should hold out from returning to school at all costs.
Yes; it’s quite a concern.
Comedy gold. This is a spoof. Right? … Right?!
No sadly, word for from memory, posted within an hour of the broadcast.
if this is real… caller is trolling right?
Probably not.
No, just thick as shit.
re comments about this being spoof or trolling.
we have seen how gullible the public are regarding the MSM output and the guidelines re distancing, masks etc . And this is among millions of people, so if this is this average, how stupid are the stupid ones. Never underestimate the stupidity of people who watch daytime tv.
Think how stupid the average person is. Then consider that half of all people are even more stupid than them.
That now includes teachers, of course.
But you can never be too careful and it’s still only four months, so safety first for the little ones.
I really do hope that you are being sarcastic.
None so dangerous as Nan-Covid.
I think we have discovered why eugenicists exist!
Got the below from Southern Rail today. I’m trying very hard not to electrically swear at the morons. ‘This’ is no longer new, and it’s definitely not normal. I shall probably not dignify the ‘children’s television’ tone of the email with even a vitriolic reply. Plus #AskAngie appears to be a Realtor’s handle in Orange County Calif.
Why do these clowns insist on referring to passengers as “customers”? It’s almost as bad as HMRC referring to tax payers as customers.
corporations no?
The best argument I’ve hear against masks:
“You can smell farts through underpaints and trousers”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6YLwruACzU
I’ve started a farting campaign at work to try to get through to these idiots who wear masks (I work in an office)
Here’s a variation of this quoted by Jim Corr, musician in the band The Corrs…
Covid’s over – Ivor Cummins it’s now a “Casedemic” – lots of positive tests in Europe but hardly any deaths
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU3OibcindQ
Not that many cases actually- per the latest official estimates of community transmission your chances of being infected tomorrow are roughly one in 15000. Your chances of being admitted to hospital just under one in a million.
In reply to why Prof Woolhouse seems to have changed tack from pro to anti lockdown, I note that the Express article is actually some quotes from a Channel 4 interview (July?) with Krishnan Gurumurthy (he of the Diana interview). At the end KG puts to Prof Woolhouse accusations of hypocrisy, in that he took his family away to a remote Scottish island at the start of lockdown. KG gets MW to admit that they’re all still there, been wonderfully kindly received and supported by local community, basically not fleeing, they went for a week’s holiday and then got caught short, etc etc. KG asks him why he hasn’t gone back to work in Edinburgh, to which MW replies that he’s actually found it remarkably easy to do his job from the island, thanks to the fantastic IT guys at his Uni, blah blah. Then it all gets a bit more animated, and MW finally says it’s all in the hands of his lawyers and if C4 want to become party to the legal proceedings, ‘be my guest’. Then he terminates the interview. So he might be a bit fed up with still being cooped up on the island, maybe the broadband’s been playing up?
kg as you call him is a nasty little shit
I bet most of what went on was pre-agreed
I can picture kg doing literally anything for his masters. horrible man
“I note that the Express article is actually some quotes from a Channel 4 interview (July?) with Krishnan Gurumurthy (he of the Diana interview).”
Which bits? I didn’t see any reference to this in the piece.
https://www.channel4.com/news/lockdown-was-always-a-temporary-measure-that-wasnt-sustainable-epidemiologist-prof-mark-woolhouse
No, I Googled Woolhouse as was curious about when and why he’d said it, and turns out it was on 31 July. So he’s been months on this island, apparently.
OK, thanks, that’s interesting.
KG didn’t do Diana, that was Bashir
My mistake! Must have been her funeral.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-reinfected-hong-kong-covid-19-study-a9685571.html cue delirious joy from the usual suspects
How is this a reinfection, if he wasn’t ill?
Yes, he seems more like a guinea pig than a private individual.
Hospitalisation when perfectly healthy. That’s brilliant. Would have made a good Monty Python sketch that! The world is bonkers. And these lunatics are so deranged they think this HELPS their case! I mean, seriously….
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x64m0ss
More lunacy from Scotland (The Telegraph coronavirus live feed):
Scottish secondary pupils to wear face coverings in school corridors but not classrooms
Secondary pupils in Scotland are to be ordered to wear face masks in school corridors and other communal areas but not classrooms, under plans outlined by Nicola Sturgeon.
The First Minister said different groups of pupils are more likely to mix and transmit the virus in these areas, with crowding and a lack of ventilation also more commonplace.
Speaking at her daily briefing, she said her government was in the final stages of consulting on the change and an announcement will be made within the next few days.
Although SNP ministers are not consulting on introducing masks into the classroom, she said they could be an option where there are outbreaks. Ministers are also considering whether masks must be worn on school buses.
Intelligent virus Part 94 – in Italy it’s only dangerous after 6pm if you’re outdoors, in Scotland it’s not dangerous in classrooms, just in corridors
And if you’re travelling back from France, it can tell if you’re a lorry driver or a tourist
In Chirk, Wales, it’s not at all dangerous inside the local Spar. No masks needed. Cross over the old ‘Pont a Blew’ bridge into Shropshire and walk an hour or so uphill to Saint Martins, the next village along, and it’s so dangerous that you have to mask up to shop in Stan’s supermarket.
Direct correlation between any semblance of social interaction and happiness being shared it seems and the danger!
and not on buses………yet (it is just learning that one).
This is Theatre of the Absurd to the nth degree.
Ordering children to mask up. Must make her so proud.
What kind of pervert even countenances this shit?
It’s that use of the word “Ordered”.
It makes me feel quite… strange.
Given that there is more evidence of harm caused by masks than there is of any protective effect, are the politicians and bureaucrats boosting this policy admitting liability for any harm caused by mask wearing.
Can a legal case for harm be launched by the first child to suffer acne, asthma or whatever, as after all there is no proof the masks didn’t exacerbate the problem.
She is obviously in the final stages…
Masks will be in the classrooms within a month.
Any time there’s talk of something being considered it ends up happening.
All that taking them on and off. Prepare for an epidemic of tonsillitis.
Not sure about the Back To The Future caption. The way things are looking, you don’t want to be around after 2020 either.
Barney, look on the bright side…. the momentum behind the resistance is building, so much so that many western governments will buckle to our will within a year. It won’t be a victory by any stretch as this is when we will face the greater challenge of implementing our vision of the great reset to right all the wrongs.
Stay positive, do your bit and it will happen.
What a pleasure to watch the link to the French news report above (French Professor Exposes the Casedemic Hysteria – Professor Jean-Francois Toussaint lets rip about Covid hysteria on French television) – very little interruption or talking over the expert, just polite listening and clarification of points. (Perhaps the BBC could take note).
He makes some interesting comments about UK and is very much on the same page as UK sceptic experts. I have just come back from France and mask wearing is becoming an obsession there, even in the outdoors with a stiff sea breeze.
https://youtu.be/0ulA8u05Z-Q
That is a very high profile programme in France as well. With big viewing numbers, so this will have an impact. I watch it sometimes when I am there and they always allow the guests to speak and in fact it is more like a discussion panel than the hectoring two way interviews on Newsnight (unless you are pro-lockdown, BLM, Remain etc in which case you will get a warm smile and gentle encouragement throughout of course!)
Good to hear – I was wondering what channel and programme it was..
He was excellent – fearless, assured, articulate, made every word count
Encouraging to see some real dissent being aired in Europe
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1297854438221197313/photo/1
This is from one of the Arch Fear Monger. Now he salivates. First case of reinfection described in HongKong. Patient infected again with another C-19 strain. This will feed Project Fear for some time. You can read about the case inside the twitter.
Of course the real news is that this is the first one found and that the sterilizing immunity lasted 4.5 months. Not particularly surprising. I don’t especially doubt this finding but it is only a small sample (1) so far.
It is possible that one reason for Covid being apparently milder now is that people are getting reinfected. We have suggested this before but the probability just increased a bit.
Staggering misfortune to get it twice. I haven’t even had it once yet!
Uh yes, you have had it. If you’ve felt perfectly fine the past 6 months then put your mask on and protect others from your infection
Posted under comment below. A positive test with no symptoms it seems..
False positive?
https://twitter.com/cwylilian/status/1297857727251673088/photo/2
A very sketchy part of original article.33 year old IT person coming back from Spain getting the second infection BUT asymptomatic.Seems to not hav e produced antibodies in the first symtomatic infection which was mild.Really can’t see anything dramatic here
It’s not dramatic. Unfortunately though, it’s exactly what the MSM have been waiting for to allow them to trot out the line that NOBODY CAN EVER BE SAFE. EVER!!!
According to Balloux no problems for the future vaccine
https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1297867222636007426
Yes. The vaccines like the Oxford one and the Russian one only include the spike anyway. They deleted the whole rest of the virus including the entirety of ORF8, with or without those 382 nucleotides.
“Can I have a coffee with no milk please?” Waiter: “We don’t have any milk sir, but you can have a coffee with no cream”.
I wish I could understand all this scientific stuff!
Asymptomatic, his immune system is working so his T cells are killing the virus and the PCR test is detecting fragments.
Ding ding ding most likely, although of course this will be overlooked, asymptomatic again just means that you become a mass murderer if allowed out of your gulag sorry quarantine facility.
In the light of Toby’s post, could this be some Chinese bot or fake account?
No this is not fake news.The 33 year IT worker had a mild infection in March in Hong Kong.Did not produce antibodies.Then went to Spain Aug and in the quarantaine in HongKong had PCR pos with supposedly different strain from the first time but was completely asymptomatic.The problem is Project Fear will spin this news.For all other it is not surprising you can have second infection with this virus and second time asymptomatic just proves how good your T cells are.Probably already happened millions of times for our all common old cornaviruses.Project fear will say it is a problem for the vaccine(which it seems not to be) and feed the paranoic mass testing even more.
Project Fear will say (inconsistently) that it is not a problem for the vaccine but is for natural immunity.
It is not a problem for either and not remotely unexpected.
Sounds like the IT worker has a normally functioning immune system.
Interesting replies from Prof. Akiko Iwasaki
https://twitter.com/VirusesImmunity/status/1297890418168860674
The only safe and effective way to achieve herd immunity is through vaccination
But they’ve already admitted the vaccine might only work for 6 months. That’s hardly herd immunity.
Why does she say: ‘Since reinfection can occur, herd immunity by natural infection is unlikely to eliminate #SARSCoV2. The only safe and effective way to achieve herd immunity is through vaccination’. ? Is this because the person infected a second time, though asymptomatic (but with antibodies), can still shed virus and infect others?
Her pictogram suggests social distancing reduces deaths, as well.
After several good tweets her ultimate expose her to be part of project fear and vaccine fixation.We have influenza vaccines with moderate effect and still
thousands of deaths yearly.Why should this vaccine be better? The safest way for all to reach this herdimmunity is to have the infetion now in younger persons and stop delaying the inevitable and that we can never stop this virus.The social distancing only delay. If she thinks vaccine will eliminate the virus with a vaccine,it has happened only in smallpox and never to respiratory virus. The only way forward is to treat this in all aspects as simiar to influenza virus.
I don’t think she was seriously suggesting elimination.
Herd immunity won’t eliminate it whether natural or from a vaccine is really all she’s saying. Yes it’s a little ambiguous and I think she’s being diplomatic and doesn’t want to get drawn into “strategies” (which have now descended into meaning nothing more than which particular kind of political sugar you coat the inevitable with).
Yes. We will have waves of SARS2 every few years just like the other coronaviruses with similar low mortality. It would be extremely unlikely that SARS2 would be eliminated completely even if there were no reinfections anyway as there are always new hosts being born.
Social distancing does reduce deaths if you keep it up indefinitely. I think having mentioned herd immunity she felt she had to say something about vaccines to put something in the swear jar and not get flamed by Nassim Taleb for the rest of time.
Ha ha! Thank you. I find it quite appalling that sober medical research is now the subject of flaming and bad behaviour on platforms like Twitter. Can’t imagine why serious scientists engage with it at all, ever.
Dr Eric DingDong.
I thought people might be interested in a confirmation email I received earlier from ONS (office of National Statistics). About 84% of all hospital admissions for covid are identified as covid cases when already in hospital. It strikes me that if you were showing symptoms you would be hard pressed to get into hospital without first getting tested, unless you were already in the care system.
Couple this with the fact that 40% of deaths were in care homes or at home. 15% of cases have been nosocomial, and 25% of hospital deaths have come from care home transferees. This would suggest that only 10% of all hospitalisations have come from people moving around the community.
I’m not surprised.
Good work – so that 84% are probably already ill enough to be in hospital, with something else
My query here would be that, at the peak of hospitalisations, it was only people ill enough to be hospitalised who were being tested. I sort of doubt we could get the answer, but the real question is, how many people tested positive in hospital after being hospitalised for something else.
This shows, by day, people diagnosed in hospital v people who were already inpatients at the time of the diagnosis.
That’s powerful stuff. However, to try to phrase myself more clearly, there will have been people who went to hospital (under a blue light or otherwise) in March, suffering from Covid symptoms, who hadn’t previously been diagnosed with anything, but were first tested when they arrived in hospital and _then_ were diagnosed.
If what you’re trying to establish is that more sick people caught the virus in hospital than not, then you have to be able to show where the transmission took place. The above graph doesn’t do that – it shows where the test took place and/or whether or not the individual had previously had a consultation with a GP about their symptoms before going to hospital.
I’m more interested in what’s happening now. The vast majority of covid patients are still only diagnosed when they’re already in hospital. I suspect we can’t get the data, but I simply don’t buy it that someone who’s fit enough to walk about wouldn’t interact with their local health service & so get tested before being admitted. It just doesn’t seem to work like that. The consequence being it’s virtually an entirely nosocomial event.
Oh. Yes. In that case, you’re spot on, I think. I thought we were talking about March/April.
Yes, if we assume 40,000 deaths, about 24,000 of those were definitely people already in the care system. Then on top of that nearly all the other 16,000 were only diagnosed once in hospital. I just can’t see how in recent months you’d have got to hospital without first being tested. Which makes me suspect these people were also nearly all in the health system. This would mean community infection & subsequent hospitalisation just hardly ever happens & the whole thing since May had been a delusion.
This was suggested in late March to be the case in Italy.
The Spanish doctor said something about ‘COVID-19’ hospitalisations coming from people who were in car accidents, so at least those are not being hospitalised for COVID but count towards the statistics anyway.
Chap in admin at our main hospital reported he was instructed to record as Covid dead any patient who came into contact with a ‘covid case’ and who subsequently died.
The fact that copper destroys viruses and bacteria has been known for decades. Yet hospitals and care homes do not use copper. The door handles, the beds, etc could all have long ago been replaced with copper alloys, which would have massively reduced infections in these environments. It wasn’t done. As far as I can tell, even with all the current germophobia, there are no plans to do it. I cannot help but wonder why?
Very expensive?
easier to destroy the economy, deprive kids of an education, erode civil society and take away the health service?
Hospitals and ships had brass handles, railings, bannisters etc years ago (within my lifetime) due to the known antibacterial properties but then it was all change out to stainless steel or chrome plated to save money and cut down on polishing.
So old ways were best then, modern going cheap has bitten all the penny pinchers in the buttocks.
Cut down on polishing most like. Takes time – can’t pay minimum wages cleaners for that!
Better to pay pharma companies for gallons of toxic handgel.
Mostly made in China.
I suspect it’s down to theft. Stealing stuff is progressive, didn’t you know?!
Going off on a tangent slightly, but earlier this year, Tescos were attacked for putting anti shoplifting signs in stores, after a spate of thefts of sanitary products and other women’s items; Women’s Equality Party said people were being attacked & singled out for being poor, and that people should have the right to take what they want. Theft is progressive. Tesco replied that they were so sorry for any offence. Within days, other places reported spates of thefts of all sorts of things, inc. many small community centres had wipes, toilet rolls, sanitizers, sprays, all among things reported stolen… the largely typical response on social media was that ‘people need these things’ it’s ok to take what you want, & by doing so you are the epitomy of progressivism.
Similarly in NYC, crime rate soaring through the roof, 40+ shootings being reported in under a week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blamed it on people who just want food on the table. Progressives. That must be some real quality bread they have in NY.
My comment on China in the Guardian from 27.3., when I still cared and thought it could make a difference there. Many others others by me on Cui bono? China. have been deleted, of course:
“China has planned for all that.
Trump scared them with his plans for tactical nukes, NATO with 2% etc..
Insofar, he can indeed be blamed.
They knew exactly how idiotic we would react and how their fake numbers would give us fake hope at just the right time.
Now, there won’t be anymore money for those nukes and much, much less for the military, for decades, and they get Italy, which they
love, for free on top, because the Europeans leave it hanging out to
dry alone.”
Why do most governments around the world think that slapping a nappy on your face is going to do the slightest bit of good?
Masks for teachers and students become mandatory in Greece
In Greece, teachers and students will be required to wear masks in class and indoor spaces when schools reopen in September, Reuters reports.
On Sunday, Greece reported 284 new cases, a new daily record since its first case surfaced in February. In total, the country has registered 8,664 infections and 242 deaths.
The world is being governed by imbeciles.
“Why do most governments around the world think that slapping a nappy on your face is going to do the slightest bit of good?”
What makes you think they are doing it for public health benefit? It’s political theatre, cover your arse, pretend you’re doing something useful, keep the panic going.
I don’t for a moment think they are doing it for public health. I guess the more astounding and worrying thing is the number of people that do.
Yes, when the government are actually printing posters saying a homemade mask will do, you know it is not about ‘the science’ – why can everyone not see this????
Even so called uni. trained clever dick.. heads
…imbeciles who are having their strings pulled
aka useful idiots
or blackmailed / threatened if they deviate from the narrative
order of the day
Don’t be so generous in your assessment. These people are evil.
Not in Sweden
Covering your face dehumanises you.
Covering your face cancels your identity
Covering your face makes it impossible for you to empathise.
Covering your face creates a permanent atmosphere of fear.
Covering your face obliterates your smile.
Face nappies are the tyrant’s best friend.
And all that gets you desperate enough to risk being vaccinated with Bill Gates’s Agenda 21 depopulating special brew. Now roll up up your sleeve!
Not in Quebec. Here it shows that you really care and believe everything that our Fascist Premier tells you.
“The world is being governed by imbeciles.”
That’s no way to talk about Bill Gates et al and psychopaths would be much more fitting.
Re the millions of tests per day article, the indomitable BTLer, Angela Marks commented thus:
Biotechnology business Avacta Group, which has sites in Wetherby and Cambridge, has appointed a new chairman.
Dr Eliot Forster brings more than 25 years of experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry.
He was most recently chief executive of Immunocore, helping it to raise more than £230m in equity and non-dilutive funding as well as securing partnerships with AstraZeneca and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
There’s Billy Boy yet again- he owns this whole deception
https://avacta.com/diagnostics/covid-19/
No conspiracy there. Look away. Just a coincidence.
This talk of left and right…
I’m still not sure why anyone from the left should not be very excited about the lockdown and its possibilities. I often see XR graffiti… sorry, decorative urban enhancement installations, that say “No going back”. It’s surely your best shot at a revolution..?
Don’t be daft.It’s not big, and it’s not clever.
Honestly, I’m genuinely curious. I’m neither left nor right as far as I know, so maybe I don’t get the motivation of either of them.
But my perception of the left is that they seek less freedom for the individual and more power for the state. Am I wrong?
Totally wrong, yes. We want freedom for individuals to roam our own countryside, travel abroad without papers, not be exploited at work, or by rapacious companies gouging us for phone roaming charges, or – one could go on. And are deeply suspicious of and opposed to the totalitarian tendencies of the state when it attempts to override the judiciary and subvert the judicial process, for example the recent attempts to illegally prorogue parliament, and the current threat to restrict or deny the process of judicial review.
Phone roaming charges. Really, is that one of the major problems in your life?
Do you ever wonder about the sequence of events that resulted in the £20 mobile phone from Tesco? Back in the 1970s, you’d wait three months to have the state install a clanky dial-phone at your house.
I’m not saying that I don’t actually miss those simpler times, mind you! But I think I weigh up the pros and cons, and I’m aware of the miracles that occur – such as the existence of the mobile phone.
What would a socialist mobile phone look like? Probably a stylish canvas rucksack containing the main battery, plus a portable, easily-stowed antenna tower. A buzzer would go off to tell you when it was about to overheat.
Surely abolishing roaming charges was simply a pro-EU idea to make going abroad seem less “foreign”. Simpler than making us drive on the right…
I’m not saying I like roaming charges, but then again few of us will be going abroad in future anyway!
But really, roaming charges is an example how the left starts from the position that society was always going to have mobile phones, but the ‘right’ have messed it up by introducing some unfairness. No. Only a particular type of society was going to develop mobile phones, and it was the ‘unfair’ one. I don’t like the unfairness, but I recognise that it generates the wealth.
I’m not sure that just ‘taking the edge off’ the unfairness e.g. abolishing roaming charges makes one a true person of the ‘left’.
In my earlier question I was talking about the real thing: a socialist revolution; a command economy; the Green New Deal; everything BLM wants; everything XR wants. It looks to me all possible on the back of Covid because democracy has been abolished, and the experiments in manipulating whole populations have been shown to be terrifyingly effective.
It’s just an example of how a small amount of state regulation can actually help the economy. If there were no regulations to protect consumers there’s a risk it would take so long to buy anything after checking all the small print to see if you were going to get screwed that you just wouldn’t bother. It’s a balance. It’s a bit like a garden– a little bit of weeding and pruning here and there works better than a total free-for-all (like my garden…). Communism is like flattening the whole thing and pouring concrete on it. Somewhere in the middle is the kind of agreeable centrist tolerant society we all want to live in.
Well it looks like it has been that way for some on the left. And I am totally disgusted with them as this is not a time to politic as people have and continue to suffer. People dying alone, unable to support family at funerals, 90 year olds barred from care homes where their spouses live, treatments stopped …. on and on and on the suffering and abuse goes. I have been a life long Guardian reader but I won’t be going back. I don’t even open their webpages. What turned me was their early campaign with photographs of doctors and nurses who had died. Then the ONS research came out which showed in fact NHS staff had died in lesser numbers than other working age adults. The Guardian disappeared this article, no apology, no acknowledgement. It left me feeling something political was going on in the midst of terrible suffering. I won’t forgive them and I won’t forgive the Labour Party for their part in this.
If Boris could admit the mistakes now there could still be a turning point. After all with Ferguson’s model, France threatening to close boarders and panic rising in March he was in a difficult place. Or am I being too charitable?
The time for forgiveness for admitting the mistake passed at least 2 months ago. If he did it now, it might improve my opinion of him as a human being, since being able to admit mistakes at all is to be admired, but not as a prime minister.
Agreed,they could have rowed back but instead doubled down and caused more deaths and economic destruction.
Yep.
There is no excuse for that doubling down, or any chance that they can still be deemed to act in good faith and the national interest, unless they know something which they can’t or won’t want to tell us about yet, as they still need to prepare for it.
Like building arches to save a few thousand people to ensure mankind’s survival from upcoming asteroid impacts, or so.
Yep. There is only one way to respond to an error of this magnitude, persisted in for so long, and it is resignation.
The question is, could they find anyone in the Parliamentary “Conservative” Party unsullied by this catastrophe to replace him?
Gosh. There’s a head scratcher.
Is the Downing Street cat in the running?
Is it wearing a mask?
Or has it joined the Foreign Secretary’s cat and is now chasing rodents alongside it in the countryside?
Or he will have to be removed by them. Would they take a chance on Gove? He certainly looks to be posturing.
I’m sure they will try with someone from the Cabinet that was responsible for lockdown. I suspect most will accept one of the Guilty Men as the new PM.
I won’t, obviously, but enough will to allow them to move way from the specific issue of the lockdown (enabled by the fact that the opposition were complicit, wholesale). They will be up against the economic disaster they have unleashed, and it remains to be seen whether they can rescue enough credibility to fight off a challenge from new parties on their right (the only really important issue, long term).
(Gove’s not only one of the Guilty Men, he’s also certifiably insane on foreign policy and would definitely drag us into every neocon war going, if he gets the opportunity.)
Do you really think people would accept anyone from the current cabinet as PM? They are all complicit!
I like Steve Baker, but since his speech the day the coronavirus act was passed, he has been far too silent for my liking..
I think most would, though it partly depends how the fallout plays, and where the media ends up. If they stick with “should have locked down earlier”, to protect the opposition, then it’s easy for another member of the Cabinet to get away with condemning Johnson’s leadership and hiding behind collective responsibility. If there.s a proper witch hunt of the perpetrators, with the whole panic properly condemned, then it would be difficult for any member of the Cabinet, but I’m not confident that’s what we will get.
If we don’t, then within a year people will basically be back to the usual party lines, with the “Conservatives” having lost a lot of support (much like any mid-term government) and hoping they can pull the economic chestnuts out of the fire in time to limit the damage at the next election.
While a lot of people here think “the old left/right politics are over”, that’s only really true for the tiny minority of people in our sceptic box. For the vast majority, it’s blue v red just like it always has been.
He was muzzled.
You’d have to be an idiot or a hero to take on the job in the middle of this mess.
And I don’t hold much hope for a Parliamentary hero.
Indeed. Potential challengers might well think it’s better to let Johnson take more of the blame for the coming reckoning, before they take over, hoping to get some credit for a recovery.
Yes he has shown himself as cowardly
He cannot be allowed anywhere near power ever again. The initial panic and failure to do a cost benefit analysis were resignation matters, IMO. Since then, it looks very much to me like he has been knowingly perpetuating this for political gain/survival. If he’s done nothing criminal, I would be surprised.
Far too chritable!
De Piffle has lied systematically throughout this whole charade, starting with the announcement that the lockdown would be for three weeks, while knowing full well that it was to be indefinite.
Yes, in hindsight, you are being too charitable.
https://twitter.com/philthatremains/status/1297713382469111809/photo/1
Philharmonic orchestra.In times of covid.Real or parody?
WTF?!
While I don’t buy into conspiracy theories, I always said look at the provenance of the pro-mask “studies” and the supply chain…
No conspiracy.Good old political pressure placed on the WHO to change their guidance.
Yes – you don’t need conspiracies as explanations.
It’s good old ‘Follow the money’ stuff.
Did you see that there is a cross party group of MPs lobbying for the release of the details of all PPE contracts the government awarded? If they succeed it will be very damaging as we already pretty much know that all those contracts went to mates of Tory MPs…
sounds promising ..
would you have a link or source?
It was on Simon Dolan’s Twitter the other day…
Good Law Society have been behind this. Great materials on their site showing their comms with the companies involved
con‧spi‧ra‧cy /kənˈspɪrəsi
– noun (plural conspiracies)
a secret plan made by two or more people to do something that is harmful or illegal
1980 interview with Peter Sellers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S6uGe7p280
Some interesting stuff in today’s edition.
Good to see the Deputy CMO speaking sense about the risk in schools – although I think she is being far to cautious in her downgrading of the risk from Covid, given that you would have to be in close contact with several thousand random *adults* to actually catch this generally mild bug. I had the 1957/8’flu as a primary school child – and it’s far more serious than Covid to that age group.
The evidence about DNRs and Care Homes is dynamite. It flies in the face of required procedures if families are not involved and, if true, those responsible in NHS England deserve to be hung out to dry. Names and pack-drill.
I have tended to think that the DNR issue partly arose from an opposite Scary Fairy story that sentimentally distorted the nature of DNRs for people at the end of life.They are a reasonable and necessary measure.used properly – as anyone who has been faced with the circumstances knows.
But – if true – the corruption of the procedure is inexcusable. No wonder the government and NHS England wants to exaggerate the panic if true – it’s the only cover.
Mark Woolhouse’s comments are a welcome inching towards sanity and reality – but (a) Sweden proves that there was an intelligent alternative and (b) Teat and trace is neither necessary nor desirable. Just get over the massive mistake.
Finally – observations on the eastern edge of the Peak. Lots of people out walking. Perhaps some tentativeness about not getting to close when paths cross, but NO masks outdoors. At all. Zilch. Small mercies.. But let’s be grateful.
Yesterday
Total recorded deaths in Europe: 189 of which 96 were in Russia, Ukraine and Romania.
Europe’s Population: 741.4 million
Devastating.
Europe loses about 20,000 a day so that is less than 1% of the daily total.
My comment in the Guardian from 24.3.:
“As in Italy and elsewhere, the virus cannot be contained or eradicated anymore by testing and any social distancing, if a substantial part if the population is still allowed to go to and be at work and all are still allowed to go shopping.
The only way to achieve that now is to lock us all in completely and strictly with our families, but for a fixed period of, say, 3 weeks max..
(With real key workers in utilities, care etc. to be quarantined at the work place, hotels and tested during that time.)
This is also the only way to save the economy and allow a recovery to happen eventually, bar the herd immunisation with separation of the vulnerable strategy so detested by everyone but the pragmatic and reasonable Swedes.”
My comment there on 10.4.:
“Every country always had 3 options:
1. complete, harsh, time limited, early lockdown to eliminate the virus, with subsequent border controls, testing etc.- most countries blew that chance, but most also just weren’t suited to it.
None of the latter has the guts now to still give it a try, but the public still harbors some false hopes because of its look at the success stories here, which in itself is now a further problem.
2. accept the virus spreading and protect the vulnerable, care homes etc. most resolutely, incl. splitting them from their families and prohibiting them from going to work or shopping.
Even sensible Sweden is probably too lax on the latter, but all the studies, IC etc., also completely ignored the reduction of the dead count hereby, and the fact that health systems would then not even see that additional traffic!
3. what we do now, with no idea how to get out of it and also resulting in certain tens of millions of deaths in the 3rd world rather soon, millions of deaths in the West alone due to violence and poverty here in due course, a multi-decade long depression with all its side-effects, including medical services and life expectancy deterioration for everyone, and likely social unrest/civil wars between the Have-no-mores and the financially sofar not negatively impacted.
If there is one choice we should NOT have considered, let alone made, it’s No. 3.
It is high time we change that strategy back to either 1. or 2.!
If we stick to 3.,the least we must do very, very, soon is to adopt the Saez/Zucman plan of the government being the payor of last resort for everyone, including ALL businesses (90% of all costs or foregone revenues), global, otherwise, see above for the coming, inevitable and irreparable collateral damage.”
(I would only add/change that 1. has not been tried that harshly anywhere and that it, like it’s softer NZ version, is ultimately dependent upon an effective vaccine and until then, as we now see, very vulnerable to setbacks. And on 2., the vulnerable and their families should still be given a choice- many would have preferred to take more Corona risk in exchange for more quality of life/death.
I added the medical collateral damage for 3. in other comments.)
My point of posting this here is:
Do not EVER accept the narrative, that the Woolhouse SAGEs&co couldn’t have known that their lockdowns were futile and most disastrous, and that there were no alternatives to them at the time!!!!
Sage never advocated lockdown the released minutes prove this.It was a political decision.
That’s right. The problem is that they never resigned in order to flag a fundamental disagreement.
And the media just ignored the revelation.Maybe in 5 months they will report on it.That seems to be the time lag
1 Doesn’t work unless you have an effective vaccine or can entirely cut off from the outside world.
3 Is insanity.
2 Is the only sensible option,especially as we are so far down the road to herd immunity – despite idiotic and destructive interference by ”public health” experts.
But my guess is we shall continue on with 3 regardless because…
Albert Einstein : “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Good thing Alfred was sane.
More proof that the tests are a waste of time – and money.
From the comments to Redwood’s article:
Fred H, When I had Covid19 it was not present at all in my ears, nose, or throat (unlike a flu or a cold). This was apparently quite common in hospitals according to a senior hospital pharmacist (about 30% at one hospital).
It gave rise to repeated negative results when the doctors were sure of the diagnosis. Consequently they had to test the phlegm for infection, which was quite difficult because the typical Covid19 cough is non-productive. Phlegm testing was not done at the drive-in testing stations, possibly giving rise to around a 30% under reporting of infection.
I’ve heard that called ‘clinical covid’, they are certain the patient has got Covid but is testing negative.
The problem with your first story is the picture. In spite of the fact that kids are more at risk from the flu – which we deal with literally every year – they will still be required to suffer through school under those conditions. Masks on kids are mandatory in my state, even at private schools (which is why my kids are being home-schooled this fall). Democratic governors wouldn’t let a thing like “the truth” get in the way of their plans… and the CDC, with its insane recommendations, is more than just a little complicit.
Sadly – child abusers rule (not OK) and the profession that should protect is complicit.
The three bullets below from today’s Spectator CCP Virus email stood out. When will this nonsense peak? Maybe we should have a sweepstake on it.
The dictator is a madman
Don’t know what the Spectator says, but 5 days ago Harlow council thought the HQ building might be scrapped – contracts had been awarded by PHE, so money must have been in budgets already:
‘Kier, Wates and VolkerFitzpatrick have been awarded major contracts for the job where main construction work is due to start next year.
Now local council leaders are calling for clarification on the scheme’s future after Health Secretary confirmed that PHE will be scrapped and replaced by the National Institute for Health Protection (NIHP)
Harlow Council leader Mark Ingall said: “We will be seeking urgent reassurances and an update from the government and Public Health England on what the changes to the organisation could mean for the public health science campus and headquarters in Harlow.”
https://www.constructionenquirer.com/2020/08/19/fears-over-400m-campus-plan-as-public-health-england-axed/
The even more worrying thing is the £10Bn for Track and Trace, I’m waiting with bated breath for a reply to Offlands’ FoI request !
Just shuffling the deck chairs.
You might have thought that the properties to be vacated by PHE, would have been suitable as NIHPs new HQ, especially as most of their new staff will familiar with their surroundings.
I like this new ‘bon ami’ between the ‘left’ and the ‘not so left’ in here.
Its interesting because we have our own interpretations of what these things are.
I suspect that most in here have similar outlooks and goals for themselves and their families – but may differ on how these are achieved, probably by far less than we think.
It’s not so much ‘bon amie’ : more just keeping to the knitting on this over-arching objective of resisting a totalitarian state. It’s too serious for playing games.
Other issues can be argued about when they assume greater relative importance. But not now.
Police break up ten year old’s birthday party
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-53887559
‘we were only following orders’
I feel so much safer knowing the police out there fighting crime
It’s clearly ridiculous, but it also clearly highlights one of the biggest problems. When the government set stupid rules that half the public ignore, the police are forced to make a choice between enforcing them and not enforcing them. As the Chief Constable is quoted as saying in the article “We can’t win. If we don’t deal with them, people are saying it isn’t fair and when we do deal with it people are saying it is heavy-handed.”
He’s right. This way, people end up losing respect for the police and they lose respect for the law in general. This is how civil society begins to break down – stupid laws that don’t make sense make the house of cards fall down.
yep, they’ve been forced into the ”damned if we do – damned if we don’t” situation
No they have not been forced to do anything. They each have a free will and they chose to do it
They could have displayed the moral courage to say this is not right, whatever the law says this is wrong and I will not do it
Either way, the problem is the same. If the police refuse to enforce the law, or if the police enforce a stupid law, or if they selectively enforce a stupid law, it still undermines the whole system.
As in damned if they do and …..
LOL – I got confused, I’m multi tasking, thought it was a rave for a moment – you’re absolutely right!
Right on!
desk sergeants kid didn’t get invited.
Yes, the real blame rests with idiot politicians who introduce stupid laws, lacking the wisdom to understand the depth of harm they cause by doing so.
But on the other hand, the police always have the option of saying they lack the resources to respond. Seems to work for minor thefts, vandalisms and burglaries, as far as my experience is concerned.
But the curtain twitchers and the moronic terrified don’t care about minor thefts, vandalism, burglaries, car thefts, drug dealing or muggings while Covid is around. The police have lost in the court of public opinion, whatever they do. We’ll all suffer for that in the end.
No one in the right mind is going to lambast the Police for breaking up a 10 years old party. And if they did who cares. Its a ridiculous to try to justify this.
Especially as they appear to be not getting involved in the various rave/house parties breaking out. A much more difficult nut to crack. It seems they prefer the low hanging fruit.
I’m not justifying. You completely miss my point.
No. You’re making a very sane point : the blame for this shitshow should be paced firmly with the perpetrators – not those who’ve been dragged into the resulting conflicts.
I’d get a bit animated if there was a party next door that had been going on for ten years. Might even phone the plod myself.
I read about a Nanny State story several years ago. A boy’s birthday. His parents hoisted a pirate flag on a pole in their backyard and a neighbor called up the council to have it taken down. Arrrrr!
That’s right – the police are also victims of the Big Scam.
One useful thing to emerge should be a recognition of what a delicate balance is required for a civilized society, and how easy it is for arseholes to destroy it if people succumb to their blandishments and lose their bearings.
Snake-oil can rule – if you let it.
Nasties. Nazi nasties.
Greater Manchester Police’s Chief Constable said it was not a “jelly and ice cream” event.
Apparently there were lashings of ginger beer as well.
young people being young people
just realised they were 10 years old….
maybe it was the parents that were the problem
WTF is ‘a jelly and ice cream event’ ?
On the upside at least they didn’t taser any of the little bastards
I had a jelly and ice cream event with a Russian hooker once. Never thought of bringing a taser to it though. A schoolboy error…
I used to make very alcoholic ginger beer ……
“No one has the RIGHT to follow orders.”
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
I knew the Police were done for ever since I traced
‘parkie is a wanker’
in the snow and got away with it.
No no no Mark Woolhouse may sound encouraging, but it’s anything of the sort! Alright, he is saying it was a monumental mistake, strong words and definitely needing to be said. However he advocates for MORE testing to end it. We know this isn’t going to work, all it will do is keep finding cases and enable more lockdowns and stupid antisocial distancing and muzzling and continued panic that the virus is still raging beneath the surface! It seems more to me that the government has realised the monumental mistake, and is trying to brush it under the carpet by saying “well yes, but actually no” and continuing the test test test mantra. Not exactly breaking ranks.
compared to what we normally get out of any of the various sages, its not perfect, but it is encouraging
Agree with the Major. I suspect he is probably naive to the government’s underhandedness as most people are.
I think it is more than encouraging, I think it’s pretty massive – a huge step down the road to an admission of how wrong it has all been.
Clearly the mania for testing needs to be got over – I think it’s like a comfort blanket. Once you’ve admitted that what has been done was a mistake, what do you do? What’s your next logical step? For us, it’s obvious- back to normal. I think for many, that is still a step too far at this stage, because it would mean that not only were the measures a mistake, and the wrong approach, but that there wasn’t a great deal to approach, and that aside from protecting the vulnerable, giving realistic risk advice and increasing NHS capacity within reason, the best option was to DO NOTHING and monitor the situation. That is a bigger leap, for now. Sooner or later, if he’s realised that what we have done so far was a mistake, he will realise that testing madly won’t help either.
Yes. I think the testing mania is partly a matter of “something must be done”, so do the only thing they can think of, and partly harking back to early obsession with test numbers, and the fantasy of track and trace as a solution.
Like masks, testing is a reaction to “somebody must doooo something!” And when that is said, your stupider breed of politician flails around trying to think of something to do.
I think the testing is all part of what Tony Blair was going on about the other day, with people being tested every 2 weeks and one’s latest test needing to be on a mobile and to be used for any travel..
I think we are being ‘softened up’ to accept compulsory testing every fortnight or so in the future..
I think in Woolhouse’ case it’s more a lack of courage to take the final step. For others, yes, probably there’s an agenda around testing. Don’t trust Blair an inch.
Don’t trust the current lot either! I agree with Carrie.
The problem for these characters who got sucked into the hysteria is that they can’t quite cross the bridge to sanity and say :
“Sorry – it’s all hyperbole and general bollocks. Nothing to see here – let’s move on.”
Indeed. Sunk cost fallacy.
Exactly. With SAGE members coming out, together with some of the sceptical-ish stories appearing in the MSM, I have a feeling a massive reverse ferret is on the way. With the increase in protesting as well, I suspect this flurry of testing may miraculously show far fewer cases than expected…
If you put a gun to my head and told me to give you a date, I’ll go with Monday 5th October.
I’m just popping into the garden to find the biggest piece of wood I own to hang on to.
I hope you’re right. But I fear that the Great British Public has, collectively, handed a bunch of tenth-raters a new (and dangerous) toy that they won’t easily give up.
Some of them look far too much like they are enjoying it. Others seem less comfortable with it. Let’s hope the latter prevail.
At some stage more people are going to finally get it: no uptick in deaths or hospital admissions. Only a matter of time hopefully. A colleague realised this today while we were chatting …
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Yes. I was suspicious of the article.
Every smile is a poke in the eye for our Fascist oppressors.
Tyrants hate smiles. That’s why they are so keen on masks.
So smile, smile, smile!
Reminder to sign petition (and to distribute the link) – already 91,968 signatures, need to get to 100,000
Prevent any restrictions on those who refuse a Covid-19 vaccinationhttps://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/323442
Signed! Thanks for link
Just got back from the travel clinic feeling like a pin cushion.
Interesting chat (maskless) with the nurse.
In my yellow fever vaccination book the date of the last polio jab has now to be included on it under orders from the WHO.
Reason?
Big polio outbreak in Africa due to nothing being done for 6 months and now more children are at risk of dying from polio than from covid-19.
Nurse thought it tragic and the whole coronavirus thing has turned into a farce.
The CDC page from August 19th 2020:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/alert/polio-africa
Oh well, polio is nothing compared to Covid, of course.
Covid kills more people than all other causes combined.
It’s so dangerous, it’s changed the very fabric of our society.
We must be grateful to still be alive.
I thought we were all dead!!!!
Well, a lot of people are, brain dead that is.
And we have no idea we have it, until tested.
Haha!
Exactly – that’s how devious this lethal plague is.
Sieg Heil!
Didn’t help that the CIA set up a phoney polio vaccine clinic* to help take down bin laden in Pakistan.
*or used a real one as cover.
I cant find any information on the outbreak in Africa. However these two articles might be of interest.
BOMBSHELL: United Nations admits latest outbreak of polio in Syria was caused by polio vaccines
https://www.naturalnews.com/2017-08-30-bombshell-united-nations-admits-latest-outbreak-of-polio-in-syria-was-caused-by-polio-vaccines.html
.
Bill Gates paralyzed half a million children with polio vaccines – do we really want him vaccinating the world for coronavirus?
https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-04-29-bill-gates-paralyzed-children-polio-vaccines-coronavirus.html
CDC reporting it
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/alert/polio-africa
Plus this from the WHO website
https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/23-06-2020-statement-of-the-25th-polio-ihr-emergency-committee
From that report:
The multiple circulating VDPV (cVDPV) outbreaks in four WHO regions (African, Eastern Mediterranean, South-east Asian and Western Pacific Regions) are very concerning,
In 2020, West Africa and Ethiopia are experiencing high levels of transmission of cVDPV2, and due to the pandemic, outbreak response has been significantly hampered, with many areas that have reported cases recently not having had an immunization response.
Why the down vote? This is absolutely true — the vaccine is what is causing polio and polio-like paralysis.
The down vote was from Bill Gates himself. Anyway, I’ve upped you cos you seemed so upset by it.
“United Nations admits latest outbreak of polio in Syria was caused by polio vaccines”
No doubt the Covid-19 vaccine will cause mass global incidents of Covid-19 infection, which will lead to a perpetual cycle of sheeple desperately taking the vaccine again to protect themselves against the new outbreak, which will cause a new outbreak, and ad infinitum – Total Lockdown for ever.
The data from the WHO show that there were 17 cases of vaccine-derived poliovirus cases recorded in India between 2000 and 2017.
The data shows that cases were recorded in India only in 2009 and 2010.
And the source of your data is?
Saw this in a WHO polio report:
Similarly, the significantly greater than expected number of circulating vaccine derived polio virus type-2 (cVDPV2) outbreaks are another major challenge.
Is it just me or does that read like the cVDPV2 polio outbreak is caused by the vaccine?
Bit further down the report:
He also remarked that the novel oral polio vaccine type-2, which will be made available under the Emergency Use Listing procedure (EUL), is expected to be an important new tool to stop the vicious cycle of using monovalent Sabin OPV2 to combat outbreaks, but in turn seeding new outbreaks of cVDPV2.
Sounds like the new vaccine is spreading a new type of polio to me our am I reading it wrong?
You have nailed it. Good work.
As someone who once collected vaccines like fucking passport stamps…. I cannot strongly advise enough that everyone needs to start thoroughly investigating these vaccines. It is shocking…. but no one can tell you, because we are all so consummately brain-washed. You have to discover it for yourself. And it just gets worse and worse and worse. Like Tobacco, DDT, Dupont and Thalidomide wrapped into one.
Please not to lump tobacco, a sacred herb to some cultures, with the rest of that shite.
It was – once Bill Gates polio vaccine programme was withdrawn in certain countries (think India was one) the rates of polio dramatically dropped!
Some people admire Bill Gates because he made so much money.
In 2018, there were 33 cases of wild polio and 104 cases of vaccine-derived polio worldwide. This is down from 350,000 wild cases in 1988. In 2018, the wild disease was spread between people only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2019 there were 175 cases of wild and 364 of vaccine derived polio.
There is a legacy of these small numbers of vaccine derived cases from the old type vaccines (which nevertheless have been so successful in protecting children from the wild virus, see figures above). In rare circumstances, like the Afghan man who was still shedding the virus 44 years after being vaccinated, that type of vaccine could spread infection. That’s why WHO is trying to get countries to use the new and better versions now.
WHO world and country figures for wild and vaccine derived polio cases this week:
http://polioeradication.org/polio-today/polio-now/this-week/
Since no-one wants to over dramatise the CV19 case figures, we should refrain from doing it with polio.
What produces Polio? Hygiene? Drinking water? What?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio
Some months ago it was reported that Indias biggest producer of all types of vaccines was turning all its resources over to finding a new one for the Covid.
Predictable result.
It’s all shown in the 2005 movie The Constant Gardner, Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz (+ geat support by Bill Nighy and Pete Postlethwaite).
DM Headline
‘If the NHS waves you off with paracetamol, get ready to meet our maker’: Morrissey slams health service following death of his mother from cancer claiming doctors missed three chances to diagnose disease
Simple is best…
Its interesting – the most credible scientists are able to put across their complex science in easy to understand layman’s terms, including; Michael Levitt, Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan, John Lee, Dolores Cahill…
Dolores Cahill could probably have made a fortune jumping in bed with the large drug companies – but chose instead to speak out, with the knowledge of all the attacks she was in for, and for no financial gain
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing…
Dolores Cahill knows her stuff- watched an interview with her and it took the interviewer about 9 minutes to go through all her qualifications and experience!
Late checking in today as travelling down to south coast. Do I get a late mark?
Some observations:
Local railway station is usually busy on a Monday morning-lots of businessmen going down to London. Today-20 people max. You could count on one hand the numbers of people on each passing train but all the trains appear to be running thanks to a massive government bung.
Seven passengers in total in the three first-class carriages, ( senior railcards and early booking make it a bargain) we four and three others. No one else in our particular carriage, which seats about 40. Only one member of staff needed to run the service. Last time there were about six.
Never seen Euston nor St Pancras so quiet and traffic and pedestrians were flowing freely along Euston Road-very abnormal.
Taxi to station-No mask on driver and OH sat maskless in the front with him.
Taxi between Euston and St Pancras ( yes, we usually walk but had three suitcases and grandchild this time). Driver, no mask-he had been waiting at the taxi rank for three hours for a fare.
Taxi to car hire-no car hire firms seem to be operating from Ashford International at present. Again, maskless driver who had been waiting two hours for a fare.
All three thought it was a load of you know what.
We use the car hire that used to promise to pick you up, (except it no longer does because of Covid, and you are not allowed into the office any more for all the paperwork.
We were challenged at our local station and at St Pancras about masks. Pointed out badge and lanyard ( OH and I decided on two different methods of exemption as we have different conditions). Lady very apologetic at local station and all over us like a rash when she realised.
OH was challenged by an official at the hotel in which we are staying “You need a mask sir”. When told about exemption, there was no apology, no “sorry, I did not notice your lanyard sir” As an ex head teacher, OH does not take kindly to being spoken to like a naughty boy. Suggested to reception staff that more training was needed in the managerial department, particularly as government website states specifically that us exempt folk do not need to carry or show a card anyway.
All in all, a better trip than I imagined.
You did ruin the cab drivers day though
Interesting piece Margaret,your experience of the West Coast Mainline reflects what I am seeing on the East Coast Mainline into Kings Cross,trains with perhaps less than 10% of the pre-lockdown passenger numbers.If and when the government turns off the money tap the railways are going to be in serious trouble but with the idiot apparently running this country saying for months that public transport is not safe it is no surprise that passenger numbers have barely risen.
I think passenger numbers are low because of the mask idiocy. I love rail travel but have not set foot on one and nor will I until this awful government makes muzzles optional and removes the fine threat.
They are putting off the fearful and the fearless at the same time. Another achievement.
Muzzles ARE optional Lili. I’m sure that you have a number of “ailments” that make you exempt from wearing masks-it is causing you great distress for a start.
I forgot to add in the post above about my experience on SE railways.
There are very brusque posters on their trains “Wear a face covering”. No please or thank you or remember there are exemptions.
On the priority seats however, it reminds passengers, who may be sitting in those seats by mistake, that people’s reasons for requiring the use of these seats may not always be obvious.
They only discriminate against non mask wearers then!
That’s because Nappy-Deniers are selfish, granny murdering traitors who believe the earth is flat.
They must be broken, because if they won’t wear their face nappies, what else might they not do when we tell them?
The real granny killers wear face nappies to hide their inner shame.
Quite so, face panties are easy, cheap and observable way of judging Compliance.
I never use trains but the car park at our main station is still less than 25% occupied when old normally it would be full by 7-7.30 on Monday.
On train to wales with my Teenage daughter. Unmasked. No one else In the whole carriage but was asked by The ticketmaster ‘ you do have your masks with you don’t you?’. Replied:’ no, we don’t . We’re exempt.’ I could tell she wanted to say more but couldn’t question it. She gave me a look then moved on. It’s not my usual nature to be anti social but that exactly how you’re made to feel. It is so wrong.
yet so right
Yes, stand up to them, and count it as a victory.
Excellent response. If some clown asks why you are not wearing a mask, just do as you did and tell them that you are exempt. If they don’t want to accept that, tell them that they are not entitled to know anything more and politely tell them to clear off.
It’s not you being anti social, they are, all of them.
I think I have just about seen it all now.A piece on our local ITV news with a reporter going around with an air ambulance crew.
One of the paramedics saying how he is very worried about taking ‘the virus’ home to infect his family,doctors and paramedics wearing muzzles whilst flying in the helicopter and in the open air dealing with accident victims and apparently getting suited up in full ppe, overalls,visors,masks etc before dealing with patients.
I don’t know if this was all done just for the cameras but it was a brilliant piece of project fear propaganda.
I have a huge amount of respect for the air ambulance crews but this is making me see them in a different light.
Saw that.
Thought what a lot of bollocks but it’s not worth contacting Central News, they never even acknowledge your e-mail.
Yes,they are in their own little self-righteous bubble.I reckon the propaganda they put out on there and on the local BBC news is even worse than on the main news programmes,in my experience a lot of older people take what is said as gospel.
that is my experience too.
The local news has always been bad.
We’d watch the weather forecast, then when it was time for the local bit, we’d take bets: Any advance on three muggings, two rapes, five burglaries and a garden shed that obscures someone’s view?
I can report from Sky news and live coverage of Trump speech at North Carolina GOP convention. To cheer up all lockdown sceptics – no social distancing in the large crowd, and possibly only 2 or 3 masks in camera shots. Uplifting.
I noticed Trunk gave a speak at The White House, Sunday night. Neither Trump or any of his aids wore face coverings, previous speeches face coverings had been worn by all bar Trump.
Lincolnshire & Nottinghamshire air ambulance has been very quiet these last few months, I have noticed recently they have been doing a few flights, but possibly to get air crew hours back up rather than attending emergencies., as they seem to go from Waddington to various locations but without landing, sometimes doing circuits.
After dark seems to a favourite time.
i took a drive around east Midlands weekend before last
there were loads of plod, more plod (vans) and ambulances with sirens going full blast
I swear my gut indicated to me that they were infact driving around with sirens for no reason other than to scare the locals (having been told they need to be scared to be forced into lockdown for their ‘safety’ – just following orders guvnor)
I’m in West Midlands, and ambulances with sirens is now a regular feature of late. Two explanations. Either it is to keep the scare going, as the link to the early ‘save the NHS’ adverts with the sirens (this was the view of the NHS whistleblower in Surrey a month or so ago). Or, because traffic was down and people have been walking on the roads to avoid each other, the emergency services have been told to put the sirens on when they approach built up areas in case they knock somebody over. I favour the first, but there still could be an element of the second in the thinking?
This is happening here in Southport. An earlier post had a consultant in a Surrey hospital maintaining the ambulances in his trust were doing the same This stuff beggars belief if true.
I’m in Southport too and have noticed the same thing. As an aside, Southport General Hospital has been practically empty since May when my mother was in there and caught the bug. They also imposed a DNR without my consent.
i definately hear more sirens here in bristol in last few months – outside i can hear a main road nearby and seems almost constant sirens…maybe my imagination working overtime!?
Nope, live on a main road. Definite increase
I have posted about the sirens blazing even at the start of lockdown when mine was the only other vehicle in sight. Those ambulances were not going to the hospital and neither were they parking outside private or care homes.
Pure fear mongering theatrically.
That’s similar to a BBC travel show I saw a couple of months back, where they were speaking to coast guards who were saying that they won’t save anyone out at sea because of the risk of the ‘rona. That’s right, your ~0.3% chance of dying from something that the victim has a ~0.03% chance of having, that you likely won’t catch anyway and may be immune to, outweighs saving a drowning person.
These people are supposed to be heroes but in fact they are selfish cnuts. Same goes for a helicopter pilot who thinks flying around over urban areas with hypoxia is a considerate thing to do. Should be grounded and license revoked.
Our Air Ambulance was grounded for two months before it was reconfigured to be safe from the Covid.
I live not far from the Champs Elysées, it’s a beautiful evening here in Paris tonight so I went for a walk along the Avenue. Many masked denizens in view. At one point I was stopped by a group of masked policemen for the offense of not being masked. One officer asked if I was planning to sit in an outdoor café (in which case I didn’t need a mask), otherwise he would escort me to a side street where mask wearing was not mandatory. I asked politely that if I sat on a public bench right next to the outdoor café, would that be alright. He shrugged and said “I’m sorry, sir, we’re just following the latest “indications””. After accompanying me for about ten yards further, he turned around and left me alone to continue my maskless and illegal stroll. The Western World in 2020.
DJC, have you been looking at the site covidinfos.net? Apparently there is to be a protest in Paris on the 29th. On one of the forums there was also horrific footage of a supermarket worker being dragged off by two policeman because his mask wasn’t covering his nose.
Hello. I haven’t really seen much anti-lockdown activity yet in France, although there are some stirrings. I’m Irish so the morale was boosted by the demo in Dublin over the weekend, I would definitely support anything similar in Paris, they are wrecking the city which was already suffering so badly after the Gilets Jaunes incidents and the pension reform troubles.
I saw that. Looked decent. I have noticed a very healthy dose of scepticism amongst the Irish in general. More than UK I reckon. . I mentioned it to my Dad who is Irish (and a sceptic). I mentioned Ivor Cummins and Dolores Cahill as beng two of the more prominent ones worth listening to as well.
Yikes!
Just back from France. Discovered a couple of legit ways to avoid a mask in mandatory areas – carry an open bottle of water and have the occasional sip, vape or smoke (or have a cigarette in your mouth). I don’t do the latter two, but the bottle of water kept me mask free for a good couple of hours in a popular French seaside resort yesterday, which is plastered with “masque obligitare” signs. Not a comment or glare. (I’m exempt in the UK, but couldn’t work out if there is an equivalent in France).
Yeah I know that ruse. I’ve been flying quite frequently since the madness took hold, I always have a coffee cup in hand at the airports!
But to be honest this behaviour is embarrassing. The whole mask and Covid carry-on is so self-evidently ridiculous that resorting to stratagems just depresses me more. I’ve never in my life been in any sense activist but this is so much in our faces and so degrading that it honestly makes one think that one hasn’t really realised what was actually going on in the world. I look at all these senseless sheep and I wonder should I be sorry for them or angry at them?
I vote angry. If they were wearing their muzzles and not forcing them on the rest of us, I’d feel sorry for them. But since they are mandating them for everyone I’m just angry.
I’ve seen someone on a train doing that water trick with a drink can.
How about a mini breakfast cereal box ? I’m pretty sure it would take a while to get through a box of Rice Crispies one at a time!
That’s always the excuse, we are just following orders. Look what havoc that has wreaked on humankind in the past hundred years. Just following orders.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Joseph Goebbels
With what we are facing today anybody would have thought that the Nazis had won the war!
Yep. Stalin, or any other tyrant for that matter, would be have been proud of our great leaders handywork.
Their ideals never went away. They just went into hiding. First in South America… Now they’re back and most of them don’t even speak German.
Actually it doesn’t take very long for them to believe it.
I don’t know why Harries is being so coy: ““In fact that risk, or the risk from seasonal flu, we think is probably higher than the current risk of Covid.”
In a bad flu season the risk from flu for children IS higher, and they’ve undergone a risk every year.
Statement from the BBC regarding the Last Night of the Proms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sAYv2XQ8ZE
he’s good this chap.
watched a vid posted earlier
There is something troubling me regarding face masks in Scottish schools. Surely, if pupils are putting on and taking off a reusable mask several times a day (and putting the mask in pocket / bag when not in use), this piece of fabric is gradually collecting all kinds of germs and bacteria. If the pupil doesn’t wash this mask and simply reuses the next day, it collects even more stuff. They then strap this bacteria-ridden fabric to their face, in very close proximity to the place (mouth and nose) where germs can enter the body. Am I misreading this or over-exaggerating the risks? Just seems this advice is contrary to all medical advice of the last half century. When I was in hospital with meningitis a couple of years ago, I was kept in an isolated room. All doctors and nurses would mask up before entering the room and then dispose of masks straight away after leaving. So unless everyone uses disposable masks and dispose of them fairly frequently, then wearing a reusable mask is pointless at best and possibly bad for your health at worst?
I was thinking the exact same thing. Where are the virologists speaking out against the ineffectiveness of Using masks in this fashion and – more importantly- the public health officials protesting against the very real risk of such practices being injurious to children’s health? Do any of these people actually care about human beings at all? And what sane parent thinks this is in the best interests of children. I think parents have been so worn down they’ll obey any silly rules provided the schools open.
Doesn’t the Hippocratic oath mean anything any more? It used to be central to medicine.
My kids will NOT be wearing masks to school. Full stop. Not up for discussion. Will continue home educating if necessary. School has been informed. Funnily enough they haven’t replied yet…
Boycott schools that mandate masks. That’ll teach ’em.
Nothing to do with virologists—it’s an epidemiological factor, but as the recent shit show demonstrates, the country’s public epidemiology bodies have been reduced to playing with Ferguson’s model…
Play or lose your payday.
Our lovely Carl Heneghan has an article on masks and their politics. He is on a YouTube video giving evidence to the Irish Parliament about masks too. He is very good.
You fail to understand that Covid is top trump.
No one has proven that wearing a mask makes you more likely to catch Covid, therefore, just in case, we should all wear masks permanently.
Covid sits above cancer, heart disease, COPD, suicides, even polio, malaria, all accidents, and starvation.
And especially above any bacterial infections caused by masks.
Do please get with the programme.
And do ensure you are only partaking in authorised activities and entertainment which further the cause.
Indeed, but the flaw in the argument is that, assuming you believe any of this nonsense, the masks will be FULL OF CORONAVIRUS which you’ll spread via the mask and your fingers handling the mask and poking your nose and face
Hell hath no fury like an absurd theory.
While that may seem logical, it mustn’t be the case or surely our dear government wouldn’t have mandated them.
Positive cases across Europe have increased since masks introduced, could they by any chance be related?
More likely increased testing with the totally unfit for purpose RT-PCR test, testing for a virus which has packed up and left for the summer.
Ten bob says two days after they open.
Two days before…
You are exactly right. Before care staff put on a face mask they wash their hands and change the mask after every patient, I think they are 40 minutes before they are less useful because they become damp. I read some research yesterday that even suggested face masks for surgery don’t protect the patient so are not needed so even in hospitals with better grades of surgical masks they seem of no use. Wearing a piece of cloth and taking it on and off all day, leaving it on desks and in pockets is very unhygienic for the wearer and others as the child is dirtying their hands. It’s like wearing a handkerchief. They are political and children will know it just as we do. It makes me livid. That photo of the little children behind those screens is sickening.
It’s like wearing a snotty handkerchief. FIFY.
Why are you not in SAGE?
That is 100% correct. We all have many viruses and bacteria in our bodies that lie dormant, and wearing a mask means we are potentially exhaling these and trapping them in high concentrations and then breathing them into our sinuses and lungs which can lead to infection. In fact, my daughter left our rural property and has been masking up in the city for the past week and a bit and now has strep throat. She’s prone to it and usually gets it once a year. I’m convinced that between the mask and our immune systems that have been on holiday, we will be seeing lots of infections. Yes, masks are supposed to be swapped out when they become damp, which is around the 15 minute mark, so of course kids and anyone wearing a mask for a longer period of time is being exposed to concentrated virus and bacteria so you are not overstating the risk. With respect to surgeons, we all know the mask was to prevent bacteria (not virus particles which are tiny) from entering open wounds — and the science on that has shown there is no difference between masks and no masks. What many don’t know is that ORs have extra oxygen pumped into them to compensate for the mask wearing and the temperature is regulated. I believe this is true of hospitals in general. The oxygen levels are higher than would be found in regular settings. Your points are well taken and spot on!
Teenagers and strep throats run concurrently.
I had my share when teaching teens too.
Indeed , I watched a video from experts in PPE in all settings . They said what surgeons didn’t realise was most of their work was in building the theatres with control over temperature, gas exchanges, ventilation, etc to enable them to wear a mask with the least problems possible.
And of course surgeons are not generally decrepit old wrecks, like many of those that I often see wearing masks.
Why is this idiotic idea about masks being to our benefit not been laughed out of court yet? All the scientists that supported this idiotic idea should have their diplomas made null & void and be given their walking papers.
Some of these people are making a mockery of the scientific method.
And to your point, when a surgeon sees a patient just for a regular office appointment (so, stating the obvious, not an open wound, extra oxygen being pumped in scenario) they are not wearing a mask then. A fact that the parrot-the-narrat commentors on Daily Fail, etc., conveniently ignore.
You’re talking sense.
Scotland us the land of Non Sense.
The points you make are exactly what the “experts” were saying back in March as reasons why mask wearing by the general public was not recommended. Then the pro-mask mania began to spread globally like a virus (!) and, I fear, still has some way to run.
It has to be strongly resisted by refusing to wear the offending article claim exemption on health grounds if challenged. There is no need to tell enquiring clowns anything more.
Yes of course. I learnt today that some of the schools in my city are making uniform optional…to encourage children to wear clean clothes every day. It’s really sad that that’s not a given but how’re they going to wear a clean mask multiple times per day if their parents don’t even send them in clean clothes?
I used the same old snot rag (1960s) for days on end, didn’t do me any harm; came in handy for wiping jam off the table, playing cops&robbers too.
they were always ok until they went crispy
https://www.instagram.com/p/CERoQOzH3Wk/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
‘A Columbia Journalism Review expose reveals that, to control global journalism, Bill Gates, has steered over $250 million to the BBC, NPR,NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, The New York Times, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, Center for Investigative Reporting, Pulitzer Center, National Press Foundation, International Center for Journalists, and a host of other groups. To conceal his influence, Gates also funneled unknown sums via subgrants for contracts to other press outlets.
His press bribes have paid off. During the pandemic, bought & braindead news outlets have treated Bill Gates as a public health expert—despite his lack of medical training or regulatory experience.’
Direct link: https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-funding.php
Indeed. I have been thinking about this for some time. If Bill Gates was a truly altruistic man, who had decided to donate some of his enormous fortune to the health welfare of the planet, why does he need to be such a figurehead?
Surely, it would have been more sensible to just donate the money and let the scientists get on with their work. If, on the other hand he was someone who had little use for money anymore (due to having such a huge surplus) what does he now desire?
The cynical amongst us may be tempted to assume he wants power and influence.
“His press bribes have paid off. During the pandemic, bought & braindead news outlets have treated Bill Gates as a public health expert—despite his lack of medical training or regulatory experience.”
Vanity is responsible for a lot of bad things
So is obsession in a psychopath.
The number of re-infections has soared to 1 – now this:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53892856
I wouldn’t dream of commenting on the picture.
By Marianna Spring
Specialist disinformation reporter, BBC News
How many thousands went into work or visited vulnerable relatives while infected with Covid because the Government and the BBC told them the identifying symptoms of Covid were a fever and a persistent dry cough. I recall guffawing at that disinformation put about by the BBC and MSM generally at the time. Anyone with any sense could see it was wrong and misleading and would result in unnecessary deaths.
I’m genuinely sorry for them, and of course I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.
Having said that, perhaps we should also have coverage of the millions starving due to the economic damage caused by lockdowns, stories of the cancer patients let down, the families at the food bank, the victims of domestic abuse, the people whose livelihoods have been destroyed, those left behind after the suicides.
Oh no, hang on – of course: one Covid death carries the same weight as 100,00 deaths through other causes.
Theses “examples” pop up every now and then as if to say we told you so.
What most of these stories fail to point out is that the vast majority of people who have died have been “believers”, taken it seriously or taken precautions.
Should we have stories written about how “doing the right thing” is more likely to get you killed? No because it’s absolute nonsense to suggest there’s any causal effect.
What an excellent point! Stories you will never see in any newspaper – ”Psyop Denier dies of Coronavirus’ or ‘Coronavirus Denier tests negative.’
Pure gutter press and typical of the BBC’s bent output. MW
It’s almost as if the BBC were listening in:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53892856
“ While social media companies have made attempts to tackle misinformation about coronavirus on their platforms, critics argue that more needs to be done in the coming months.”
Damn right. Anyone who questions, anyone who reasons, anyone who understands mathematics or science, must be silenced.
We will not tolerate anyone claiming Covid isn’t an existential threat to humanity.
The BBC’s DG however is set to open the Edinburgh festival tomorrow with a speech saying that its role is combating misinformation, ‘protecting integrity in news…in the fake news world, truth is a priceless commodity in our societies’:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/aug/23/bbc-a-bulwark-against-pandemic-of-fake-news-tony-hall-to-argue
Head of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth for sure.
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.bbc.co.uk
Shame their trust ratings are 1/5. Please add your voice
I would. Pair of obese diabetics!
If I tried to write a spoof article to illustrate BBC misrepresentation, I could do it better than this. Someone at the BBC should be cringing with embarrassment: “Do we really hire journalists who write this badly??”
Appalling journalism. .
Quotes from the article. “Erin ….. had existing health problems – she suffered from asthma and a sleeping disorder” “Erin … his 46-year-old wife became critically ill and died this month from heart problems linked to the virus” And from the photo – she is obese.
So more likely to be “died with covid” rather than from.
Regardless this is just a BBC concoction to blame anything on the internet that is not pro covid and pro regulations as being “fake news” and misinformation
Has anyone had a look at the APPG website. I’d like to add something but it looks very much to me to be aiming at taking evidence to say that the measures were not enough/too late to lockdown etc and asking for evidence to support their view. I am not sure how I could write something about how it has been too much and not in proportion to without it sounding like an opinion rather than how I have been affected and fit into one of their categories. Any thoughts?
My two and a half year old grandson’s small nursery is reopening after a 2 week closure due to only two nursery teachers with mild corona symptoms and a few toddlers asymptomatic all ok now. However the owner is opening with a new protocol that nursery staff have to wear face masks. My grandson tells his mummy’s “ no mask mummy” when she puts one on in the shop, as he naturally dislikes it. I am horrified that children under 4 are having their social emotional communication and mental well-being damaged. Does anyone know of an early years evidenced based article that my daughter can send the owner of the nursery to persuade her that this decision is sinister. …. ? and thank you all for being sane!!!!
I don’t know of any early years research but you could have a look at Carl Heneghan’s mask research on his CEBM website.
Thank you I will as at the moment his parents don’t want him to miss out on nursery!!but know he will be stressed about masks .
This has brought tears to my eyes. Cruel and inhuman. There are no other words for it. I’m sure the owner means well but I’ve been appalled by the lack of anyone ( other than the few brave ones we already know about) in the wider medical community speaking out against the inevitable developmental and mental health impacts. How can a young child feel emotionally secure without being able to see the reassuring expressions of his/her carer and how can young children possibly learn empathy. Are there any doctors/ psychologists/ psychiatrists/ paediatricians on this site? If so , please, please can you start speaking out about the long term damage. I’m sitting here with my teenage daughter reading a message from one of her friends who’s utterly dejected and depressed. He doesn’t see the point in anything. He’s about to start his second year at Oxford, Usually bright, funny , full of life. I just don’t know what to say to him or to my daughter. Please speak out.
Yes there are so many youngster being damaged by the impact of face coverings. You are so right to ask where are the educational psychologist? They seem cowardly rather than defending the rights of children and young people, when we know masks do not work in everyday non medical settings. WE need to start defending the next generations from this false, altruistic badge of honour which is making them physically shrink away from other human beings. It is a disgrace on those who are charging these significant destructive and unnecessary mandatory dictates.
You are no doubt on the money. This will be stopped by the mums and dads, not those who are paid to guard wellbeing for kids. Most of the items I’ve seen acknowledge the fact developmental issues are likely, but simply recommend strategies to get used to the masked rather than warn against them.
“play peek a boo with your little one, pulling the mask down and up, so that over time their initial fear of the mother being masked shall recede”
Thats one nugget I’ve seen. Its scary to see this mind shift in real time.
Hugs over masks. We will defeat this.
Could your daughter not contact the nursery, making them aware of possible mask exemptions for some of their employees and if they don’t comply, the trouble they could find themselves in?
Nigel Farage and Andrew Neil will be on a new discovery NEWS UK programme soon, some decent news for a change, other than the bought and paid for sort.
Amazed anyone still believes farage is on their side. He doesn’t do anything unless it’s to line his own pockets.
Whatever, you still get a different view other than ALL the other media
maybe, you STILL get the overton window though
Well there you go, got to believe in something, we all believe Covid is rubbish
overton window
sorry to say but those 2 are bought n paid for
farage runs a mile anytime he succeeds at anything vaguely anti-establishment. I mean for fucks sake. it’s every time he does this. almost like someone else is pulling his strings.
we’re never presented with the truth. not on the ‘news’.
I mentioned him in an email to my Tory MP and he said he prefers not to even think about Mr Farage, Why is he winding up the Tories about the migrants when they would rather he was somewhere else.
Maintain his public profile.He stops a genuine movement, that could sweep away our rotten establishment,from ever forming
Farage is in favour of lockdown and all the associated rubbish. Good to hear about a new News Channel with alternative viewpoints to the BBC/Sky/ITV dirge though. I said to a few people I know that I thought we would see libertarian slanted news channel started up very soon. Seems it has!!
I’m not aware of what Neil’s views are but Farage is pro-lockdown. I tend to think that anyone in politics at present who is pro-lockdown is the enemy. He’d be a good person to convert as he has energy and experience, though he’s also a potentially divisive figure.
‘Unfortunately COVID-1984 continues to escalate. We were initially told that we would need to have a temporary two week lockdown to ‘flatten the curve’
Six months later, we are still in lockdown and now mandatory vaccination policies are being rolled out in addition to severe penalties for violating mandates which include life in prison!
We have seen cases where people have been forcibly removed from there home by the police, in front of their families and have been forced into quarantine.
All of this in response to a virus with a 99+% survival rate which multiple world renowned experts believe this virus originated in a laboratory funded by the US government.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMpUpKmP6So
We have seen cases where people have been forcibly removed from there home by the police, in front of their families and have been forced into quarantine.
Reminds me of Iraq in 2003 and onwards.
Jesus, this in the Telegraph
“A second national lockdown could be imposed, senior Government advisers have warned, as the upper limit of the R rate pushed over one for the first time since restrictions lifted. The Prime Minister ruled such a lockdown out last month, telling The Telegraph that the option was akin to a “nuclear deterrent”. Yet, senior sources are discussing how “more nationwide measures are needed”. Here’s what we know.
Talking about mixed messages…
“Mark Woolhouse is a professor of infectious disease epidemiology and a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviors that advises the government.
And he’s now saying the lockdowns were a terrible mistake.
“At the time I agreed with lockdown as a short-term emergency response because we couldn’t think of anything better to do,” he confesses. It was a “panic measure.”
He now calls it a “monumental mistake”:
who are these senior gov advisors?
who are they?
yes, but the telgraph has some new funding
Has the Government doshed them up again or is this you-know-who? MW
Matt Hand Cock Up?
From Bill Gates?
This afternoon in the High Peak: The weather is glorious today (wall-to-wall rain and high winds forecast for tomorrow i.e. normal!) The Coop was quiet as usual and those in there were all masked but not the staff. As we left, 3 people were congregating in the entrance area where there’s a cash machine – none masked so the virus is up to its clever tricks again.
On to the garage to hand in my licence validation code as we’re hiring a car next week for our trip down to the SW. We had hardly got through the door when Karen appeared behind the screened reception desk and shouted ‘Mask!’ at us. I pointed to my badge (It’s a Euan one, so large and clear) and she said something like ‘Oh all right – oh you’ve got one too!’ to AG. She then ordered her underling, a youngster in a horrid black jockstrap, to deal with us. The lass was struggling with our booking, possibly oxygen-deprived, and I could barely hear her. The thing is, all the time this was going on, a male member of staff was conducting business with a male client, both unmasked each side of a small table, about a foot apart and in the showroom where masks are allegedly mandatory! Maybe he was buying a Beamer or something, who knows? Either way Karen & co tried to make us feel like 2nd class citizens and I’m going to complain about it.
Morrisons was Magic Virus Land as ever. The shop was full of zombies, the cafe was as good as ‘The Old Normal’. Nobody seems to notice this. At least the door goon greeted us like old friends today, we may have been the only people he could recognise!
On the way home we came across a walker who stood back several feet as we passed. (There was a lot of swerving today, its as if people are regressing.) Anyway, we realised we knew him. He’s a Quaker, who it turned out is the full CDS so we were shocked. When you think of Quaker history, you’d think it would be hard to brainwash one but, no, this guy reads the Guardian and watches/listens to the BBC. ‘Job done and there’s several hundred years of dissent and ‘speaking truth to power’ down the toilet. I hope he’s not typical but I can’t imagine his ilk cutting the fence and getting arrested at air bases like they (and we) did back in the early 80s. Anyway, I’ll find out if there’s any Quaker scepticism. I really hope there is.
We think that the psyop has put a kind of filter in people’s minds where they simply don’t hear what you’re saying if it deviates from the rubric. AG told the Quaker that he had leukaemia and yet was not afraid and it was quite obvious the man was incapable of understanding what he was saying. He is normally very intelligent and has written books. We realise that this filtering process is common among people with CDS and it seems to particularly afflict the educated, as many people have observed.
So not a very inspiring trip really although the walk in the sunshine was fabulous and we met some nice dogs with jolly owners. MW
Enjoyable as always Miriam, thanks again for a great report
Cheers! MW
Hope you enjoy your trip down here, don’t bring your rain as we have plenty of our own.
Overheard today “oh I like your mask”.
‘I got from lidls, only cost a quid’.
They should buy from me, I sell pre-loved masks at ten for a quid. I get them off the streets.
Used baby nappies, just as effective, even cheaper, twenty for a quid. I get them off babies.
Ha-ha, you should see the rain here today – plenty to spare! As for your mask anecdote, I despair
MW
Ive just watched a new fiim on netfix, the ozzys and kiwis in the vietnam war. What ever your opinions, the men/women who fought on all side were the bravest people.
The ozzys n kiwis in both world wars were the bravest toughfest fighters anyone could hope for.
today in oz and new zealand – what the fuck!!!!!
failed nations
I’m over tired, so sorry if I’m posting nonsense, but I can’t shake the feeling that parts of Australia and NZ are some sort of testing grounds… seeing how far people can be pushed
Agree…
Rory Sutherland has a good article in the Spectator. He debunks the idea of “following the science” . Science hankers after certainty and in terms of public policy that makes it a clumsy lumbering beast when governments need to act and react with nimble alacrity.
Sutherland notes that most immunologists support the hypothesis that virus load is an important factor in the risk of serious infection. The importance of virus load is something I’ve mentioned before – it has implications, not least that we should perhaps be encouraging exposure to relatively low load airborne infection (for healthy people) whilst stressing the importance of hand washing and avoiding face touching.
Sutherland notes it is difficult to prove the hypothesis – not least because of ethical concerns – and so it is not part of the “science” allegedly directing government policy.
Sutherland (who I usually have a lot of time for) also pissed at least one reader (me) off by clearly coming down on the side of masks, on the basis of potential but unproved and unprovable benefit. He essentially said “the science doesn’t know everything and just because they can’t show masks work, doesn’t mean masks don’t work.
Although, I had to read the article twice to work out that was what he was saying.
“Human 2.0”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywuCRVJVDqs&feature=youtu.be
Scary stuff! Fits with the chromosome 8 stuff too.
Has this been shared?
https://youtu.be/0ulA8u05Z-Q
Yes but worth bumping.
Nice walk in the park this afternoon, after being cooped up by the weather for the last few days. (Good job I don’t have a dog!)
Quite busy, not a mask in sight, no leaping into bushes.
The greatest danger was from small kids ferociously zooming around on scooters. Also being approached from behind by youngsters on bikes and not knowing which side to move. I suggested to one lad that they learn the starboard rule.
Or maybe I just need a rearview mirror?
We’ve had mandatory masks for a month now, so I assume we’ve seen a huge reduction in the number of cases given how fantastic we are told they are at disease prevention….I mean there has been a reduction in the number of cases hasn’t there? ….hello!? …
Oh, hate to break it to you, but it’s not about the cases, it’s about making people feel safe to shop. That’s all.
In England that is, in Wales they already feel safe to shop and in Scotland they need lots of extra enourgement to leave the house as they definitely don’t feel safe unless dear leader tells them what to do.
That’s because us Welshies are as hard as nails. Virus schmirus.
On the streets today in the capital of sturgeons domain its clear that masks are not being worn – maybe 10% of people on the busiest streets in the city centre. In the filthy virus festering shops of doom on those busy streets mask wearing is nearly universal. Not yet found any issue with going without nor declaring no mask then entering shops – they welcome me in.
Local shops are a different kettle which is more in line with normal life based of reason, sense and the need for oxygen.
Oh good so shops are busy and doing a roaring trade now everyone feels so “safe”
How much has footfall increased? 2,000,000 less a week in supermarkets! Double plus good!
Yes, as any fule kno, all retail relies on 18 – 30 yr old, and they just lurve a mask!
Ah virtue signalling, shame they haven’t got any money
Chiz chiz chiz.
Freedom is slavery. War is peace.
Well the shopping thing is not working.
“The welfare of people has always been the alibi of tyrants”
Camus
My fave – NOT to be read literally…
“Each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And i know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breath in someone’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest – health, integrity, purity (if you like) – is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter”.
Where does this come from?
All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.
The Plague
Hugh Masekela, around 1967:
Mace & Grenades
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MYgzF8uZvo
Nice one. Thank you Richard.
That album was from 1966.
I bought that Hugh Masekela LP in Ottawa, 1969, for 39 cents. It was in the discontinued bin. It should have been prominently displayed in the record shop window!
A few minutes I was thinking about a Red Dwarf episode where they used 3D Printing and accidentally made multiple copies of Rimmer. Imagine multiple copies of Cockup? Arrrghhh!
A little tale.
My stepdaughter returned from a 3 week stay at her Granny and Grandad’s yesterday. They’re old school proper lefties and very sceptical of what’s going on. They told their grand daughter that one day when she’s older she’ll remember that they were fighting for her freedoms. Legends.
A lovely little tale
Thanks Kath. It certainly cheered me up.
There was a Prisoner episode with a wannabe Napoleon. Done like a lovely little tale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX8szNPgrEs
If you tolerate this, then your children will be next
Played most days in this house.
How many million times was that magnified?
Don’t be naive, only the mug is real and it looks about life-size to me. AG
What happens when faces are cancelled?
“The ability to detect and to discriminate social beings from inanimate objects is of paramount importance to survive. Among other social cues in the environment, faces are probably the most important to us as humans, since they convey relevant social information, such as identity, age, gender, emotions. Humans are expert in processing faces, and evidence from behavioral, brain lesion, and neuroimaging studies suggests that, in adults, face processing involves specific face processing strategies (i.e., functional specialization, Farah et al., 2000) carried out by dedicated brain areas (i.e., structural or neural specialization, Allison et al., 2000; Kanwisher, 2000, 2010). Together, these findings support the hypothesis that the adult brain is equipped with a neural circuitry specialized for preferentially processing faces…”
And the development of this ability starts practically at birth.
If there are faces available, that is.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4496551/
I’m using your research on my FB posts Annie, hope that’s okay. Spread the word and all that
Please do, and let us know if you find out more.
The obliteration if the human face is a colossal crime against humanity, and the truly horrible thing is that it’s welcomed by most of the victims. Apparently they don’t want to be human any more.
Hi again all
Please let me know (here) any stories of how you “converted” non-sceptics, if any.
If so, what “facts” worked best?
Also, where were do you think they were on the sceptic scale?
0 = Jacinda Ardern
10 = Peter Hitchens
Thanks
Interestingly, I have just spoken to my mother. She listens to me (a former natural scientist) but will defer to my brother (not a scientist). He is surprisingly pro lockdown, social distancing and masks. Yet, she read yesterday’s Sunday Express, and specifically mentioned Carl Heneghan by name, and said she felt reassured that things probably weren’t as bad as she thought. She has mentioned Karol Sikora a few times too. Carl Heneghan – his experience, how he looks and how he talks – can reach the parts others cannot (to borrow from the Heineken advertising playbook).
Thanks!
My mother too is coming round to my way of thinking. But it’s just an overall thing for her as if “something isn’t right”.
Distressing that sexism still seems to rule in families: the man gets the casting vote. Very early 20th Century
I miself do not need to be converted like lots of people… I’m both a Catholic and a Mechanical Engineer…:
As a Cath I don’t belive we can invent a stone so heavy that we cannot lift…
As a Mech Eng… the numbers are all bullshit…
If anyone buys the muzzle scene; fk ’em…
(end rant. Not an English native)
Faces again:
“Faces are arguably the most important social stimulus for humans and likely the most effective tool for promoting and supporting infant learning. Newborns come to the world preferring to look at anything that looks like a face, and will look longer at images that have more parts on the top compared to the bottom.
Although the reason for this early preference is debated, an initial looking preference for face-like images, coupled with the fact that faces are all around, moving, expressing emotions, and talking or singing leads infants to spend a significant amount of time attending to faces. This increased attention results in a large portion of early learning occurring simply by watching the faces of others, especially caretakers like mom or dad. In other words, just like books are educational tools used to promote language development and reading, faces are also educational tools during the first year of life.”
https://bold.expert/the-importance-of-faces-for-infants-learning/
Faces are all around.
Were.
Thank you this link about cognition and faces. I will send to my daughter for her to evidence face masks are unethical in nursery.
Thanks Annie. We think this is serious and dangerous stuff, what is going on and will result in serious mental problems for children and adults alike. To do this to children is criminal, nothing less.
We notice that whenever we encounter a baby or young child in a supermarket they stare at us and smile. We give them huge smiles back. That’s unlike Mummy (and Daddy) who no longer have faces. We already speak out a lot but we may need to up the ante. MW
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/08/24/boris-johnson-facing-pressure-introduce-face-masks-schools/ (paywall) but the Association of School and College Lecturers want Bojo to follow Wee Jimmie.
This is a good comment, from a regular poster who usually gets many upticks:
‘This is now sheer moronic stupidity. There is NO scientific consensus in favour of masks. A study just this week has demonstrated some types of masks actually INCREASE droplet dispersion.
The government’s own health and safety advice to retailers stated that the evidence in favour of masks protecting other people was weak and the effect was likely to be small. That advice was quietly deleted when Hancocks maskerade decree was enacted.
I have just retired from teaching chemistry and biology in sixth form colleges. Ask any microbiology teacher what it is like trying to get a sixth form class to follow mask protocols, then ask them what are the chances with a Year 7 class. The people suggesting this utter garbage are either scientific illiterates or not teachers.’
Quite!
I’m beginning to wonder if the government is trying to deliberately hamper our immune systems through mask wearing so this winter they can claim vaccinations will become mandatory as infection rates are even higher than expected.
100% of the comments are firmly against this (apart from a few comments that are unintelligible!)
None in support.
100% against face masks, so by my reckoning that meant it will be enforced.
As they have admitted that flu is now more prevalent than Covid, they are going to have to admit that lockdown and masks don’t seem to have effected the transmission of viruses.
They won’t. They’ll just say it would be worse without these measures. It’s heads they win, tails we lose.
That’s my point. Flu deaths are at their normal rate. Not suppressed by lockdown or masks at all.
Yes, flu will become the new Covid. Why have we let people die of flu since the beginning of time??? How could it have taken tens of thousands of years for us to wake up to this menace and not cover our noses and mouths every winter? And why stop at winter — let’s just do it all the time. Soon we’ll have Covid and flu together. Quick, hide under the bed!
The absolutely extraordinary thing is that the NHS has no protocols for dealing with flu. No PPE, no quarantine, nada. They know it is normal and unbeatable.
So how come they are killing patients with flu, and killing other people by refusing to treat them, but petrified by Covid?
No they won’t. They will order a lock down for flu next. Cos it ain’t about the virus.
You are right, it can’t be. It seems to be an unthinking quest to control how society is ordered. Here is a wonderful opportunity for control, so the public guardians take it.
Supposedly reinfection is now proven.
Another less than appropriate tweet out from Devi Sridhar, 36 – Globalist public health official advisor to Scotland and on the steering comittee of DELVE a group that feeds into SAGE. This time devi hasn’t wandered in baldly political matters of the United Kingdom – she is a snp supporting American.
Here is the tweet:
Devi Sridhar
@devisridhar
Wouldn’t usually share such a big news item without verifying carefully. But @KarenGrepin
is a close colleague & top Prof in Hong Kong, and extremely reliable in her tweets.
Quote Tweet
Karen Grepin
@KarenGrepin
· 10h
Big news out of Hong Kong: Colleagues at @hkumed claim to have documented first case of COVID-19 re-infection. twitter.com/cwylilian/stat…
11:59 am · 24 Aug 2020
There is a press release about the discovery in Hong Kong here
https://twitter.com/KarenGrepin/status/1297841334900756480?s=20
It’s almost like they’re celebrating!?
Devi certainly beside herself to get the news out. I cannot express how unprofessional her conduct is. I am certain the people of Britain deserve higher standards of conduct than she offers.
As for the scientific findings – why trust the untrustables?
The untrustables are untouchable.
Of course they are. Grist to the terror mill.
I’m sure they are. I’m afraid I have to conclude she is a wicked person.
Does she not know the one about the swallow?
Which is?
The human immune system isn’t perfect. It isn’t unheard of for someone to become re-infected with something that they have previously become exposed to, whether through infection or immunisation. But these cases are very rare. See for example https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/measles/expert-answers/getting-measles-after-vaccination/faq-20125397
My son has had Chickenpox twice now which is very unusual. He first had chickenpox when he was three and again when 12. So, reinfection is definitely possible but very rare.
Same here – had Chickenpox age 4/5 and again age 13.
Aren’t there different strains of chicken pox?
What was the name of that tweeter again? Ah yes, just as I thought. AG
“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
― Joseph Goebbels.
Read Joe’s treatise on propaganda and learn some valuable techniques for our side.
EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE
The Government launches operation Dalek in a final act of desperation to keep the R Rate Just below 1. Some may find them intimidating but Daleks are going to be part of the new normal. They will be deployed in all indoor shopping areas and all indoor working environments. There will be a higher presence in high risk areas like abattoirs. In pubs they will be deployed to escort you to the table and toilet. To prevent local lock downs Daleks will be deployed in even greater numbers where the R Rate is edging above 1. The Government wants to make clear that Daleks are your friend in the fight against Covid19. In schools Daleks will be escorting children to various locations. Teachers will have there own individual Dalek assistant and they will ensure Covid safety is maintained. The Government states that you must treat the Daleks with total respect at all times. Critics say this is a dangerous gamble and they may be handing power over to the Daleks and inadvertently helping them in their mission to conquer the solar system. EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE
Sorry losing the plot!
More worried about what is going on in NZ: https://twitter.com/simondolan
‘New Zealand’s new dictator orders all positive tested people and possibly close relatives, to be placed in mandatory quarantine facilities..
If you refuse to get tested, you stay in there for as long as you refuse the testing..
-No elections..’
Concentration camps. Guarded by the army.
In fact the whole if NZ is one vast concentration camp, guarded by the coward spirit of its inmates.
Someone should take him out!
Handjob is a covert Dalek. I suspected it from the first.
“Sorry losing the plot!”
It happens
Hitchens Twitter feed is a hoot at the moment – he’s gone full on absurdist with his posts on the deadly danger of having a tortoise dropped on your head by en eagle, like Aeschylus
The turtle moves.
Yes. A joy to read.
https://www.itv.com/news/tyne-tees/2020-04-07/dalek-orders-all-humans-of-robin-hood-s-bay-to-stay-indoors
Some hits from previous days:
Government Admits it’s been Double Counting Tests
I would like to know why Boris and the other idiots in government continue with this lunacy. Individually there are some clever people, not least Boris himself, with his upper second in Classics. But collectively they are as astute as a lobotomised earthworm.
Sorry but I’m not impressed by Boris’s classics degree. He might be able to quote passages from the Iliad but that’s not too helpful in his present job.
And this for best comment to date, from Laura Suckling:
Laura Suckling
1 hour ago
Reply to Mr Dee
Maybe, if you are too frightened to go out without a mask, you should stay in. Do they really think a virus that escaped from a grade 4 containment lab is going to be stopped by a disposable mask?
My wife had a particularly upsetting experience in a B&Q branch in Northern Ireland. She went to go in without a mask because she is exempt and was refused entry initially by the guy on door duty. Even after she said she was exempt, he still refused her entry. She only got in when another, more senior member of staff, told him he had to let her in.
The next day she had to go back again so I went with her. I didn’t wear a mask either. It was girl on the door this time and she let us in but when my wife went back out again to get a trolley she refused her entry again and said she had to wear a mask. She told her she was exempt and she insisted she couldn’t enter My wife told her she would report her and entered anyway.
It would appear that the staff are deliberately targeting people that look the most vulnerable ie women on their own. My wife is also small so that probably made easier for them to pick on her.
I have complained to their CEO but I am sure it will do no good. Has anyone else experienced this from B&Q? Should we be compiling some sort of blacklist of shops that treat us like this?
Yes we should
… but it’s tricky because individual branches and individual employees are clearly behaving differently from one another.
Thats why we should always complain. Individual branches and all employees must adhere to the company policy or they are in the shit and the company policy will be you cannot discriminate against those with exemptions.
I’ve gone into a b&q a couple of times with no mask and haven’t had a word said. It was Sprucefield one.
Which one are you referring to Stephen?
Yes we should
Brewers decorators have an obligatory ‘masks instore’ policy. No exceptions. You are ‘encouraged to order online or telephone ahead’ and be served at the entrance door.
I’ve tackled their customer services department on this and they are adamant, they WILL shame the mask exempt and treat them like lepers in order to ‘protect their staff’ – who don’t have to wear masks themselves.
I’ve pointed out the law, the fallacies of masks wearing, the cognitive dissonance (makes for customers, but not for staff) plus some of the reasons why people might be mask exempt (including the harrowing tale of the lady who was abused as a child and whose abuser put a sheet over her face). They didn’t care.
They won’t even engage in sensible dialogue about it. That’s the policy, they’re sticking to it.
Boycott Brewers and please tell them WHY you’re doing so.
customer.service@brewers.co.uk
We ordered some wallpaper from an Internet website and it was delivered by Brewers, we thought that was strange.
Sorry to hear that Stephen. I would point out that B&Q’s idea of customer service was uniquely awful, even before they were given even more excuses.
Hi Stephen Everyone should complain .I had a problem with millets the other week and complained to the customer service department .It took a while of emails back and forth but in the end i received assurances that staff had been told that they must treat all customers the same and apologies for any offence and a £10 gift voucher. The only way to stop it happening to others is to stand up first when it happens to you. The good thing about this site is if anyone is not getting the service they desire they should put the details of said case and where to write and we can bombard the company in question.If we want to move things forward then the least we can do is stand by each other.
I cannot bear shopping in B&Q or Homebase fortunately Online shopping now provides for all our needs, even sacks of compost too.
I won’t shop at a place that treat me like that. Well done for your wife when she entered anyway
Carole Malone on Sky News – going off on one about the lack of science behind masks. Go Carole, Go!
Sounds like the paper review which will repeat every half hour throughout the night.
You must have to be really clever to be a Professor at Edinburgh University and member of SAGE like Mark Woolhouse O.B.E. (Toby’s 2nd article above) but there is not a thing he said that is not covered by what people, mostly elderly ladies, were saying/are now saying “they should/should have let “it” run it’s course like usual.”
Let’s hope Marks stunning and brave conclusion earns him his knighthood.
Edinburgh university proudly putting signage outside its own buildings – “reshaping the fabric of society”
Common sense outstrips their scheming everyday of the week and twice on Sundays.
At least they’re giving fair warning.
Have they added ‘Arbeit macht frei’?
I would stay with just ‘mostly elderly’, to be fair (having had a tetchy moment or two with male/female stereotyping just now! )
One thing I have seen no mention of with regards to the social distancing measures that have been put in place within buildings, is the effect in fire safety and means of escape. In shops or DIY sheds aisles are blocked off, in many pubs and restaurants you have bizarre one way system and God knows what schools will have to implement. As a building surveyor I wince at all the fire regulations that are being broken, which in many cases present a very real risk to life if anything were to happen. Have fire regulations been suspended due to the obviously far greater risk posed by people passing on a virus they don’t have to people who wouldn’t notice if they contracted it?
Precisely. Went to my company’s offices for the first time in weeks, and all the fire doors were permanently wedged open to prevent people from having to touch the handles. It keeps people “safe”.
I kid you not.
Everything about this is insane. I simply can’t fathom the depths of stupidity to which we have plumbed. Having spoke to otherwise intelligent and rational people who are now acting like they have been lobotomised, I fear that we are well and truly fcuked. The behaviour scientists have played a blinder
Odd question, but do we have anyone here – or does anyone know anyone who knows about TV technology? Specifically how you can work out if images are being inserted into programming in such a way that the brain registers them on a subconscious level, without people being aware that they have seen them?
I remember reading once, that this technique was used by many years ago, that a very quick ‘Drink coke’ image was ‘slotted in’ to TV programming and it increased sales of coca cola, even though no one could recall having seen it.
I’m just wondering if something like this might be being done on us now – but how could we find out?
i think it’s called ‘subliminal’ advertising where a shot is displayed very briefly. Don’t know if happening now – it seems rather explicit TV to me.
Yep, that’s the term I was looking for!
It would be really interesting to find out if say, some of the government slogans were being inserted into programmes or even other messages (eg encouraging people to report their neighbours)
I’m just finding it very hard to believe that people can change personality so rapidly..or be so easily led..
We would need someone with access to the right software to look for such subliminal images – there must surely exist software that can rapidly scan through broadcast TV and search for this type of random insert???
Subliminals have been around for quite a while (60s/70s ?).
I would suggest that things will have moved on a lot since then, re the black arts of influencing via tv/movies. Colour changes, volume changes, brightness/contrast changes, vibration rates of pixels, shifts between scenes, overlaid images, etc. etc.
Add in the NLP trained announcers, and nasty use of phobias, neuroses, and people’s psychological weaknesses, and it is a witch’s brew indeed.
As an example, there exist devices that can translate brain waves into normal language. What are the odds they were too ‘principled’ to work on the other direction ?
It can be done, it has been done, I’m pretty sure it used to be illegal, but if it is being done, why doesn’t it work on us sceptics?
Some people are more prone to ‘suggestions’ than others.
“Subliminal suggestion” was debunked, it’s pseudoscience. A chap named James Vicary did the original movie theatre study with Coca-cola and popcorn images inserted within a film. Other scientists couldn’t reproduce the results and he later was found to have falsified his findings.
That’s a relief!
Also the ‘backwards masking’ nonsense where several bands were accused of hiding ‘Satanic messages’ to influence people. There was actually a trial in the US where it was claimed a Judas Priest track had induced a fan to commit suicide. Sanity prevailed and the verdict was not guilty. Rob Halford, the lead singer, is a gay Christian, which may well be relevant to the decision to target the band.
They were found not to have been “Breaking the Law”….
It did make for a great episode of Columbo, though.
Go watch one of the Derren Brown episodes (find them on Channel 4’s website for free) and he delves into exactly this sort of thing, and shows how easy it is to manipulate people with subliminal messaging.
Advertisers were doing that decades ago so it’s bound to still be in use.
If there are subliminal messages being used then I haven’t seen them.
SPI-B members should be put on trial after this for their part in terrorising the British people
In our secondary hospital you have to walk straight past the In entrance and on twenty yards, sorry, metres to get to the Out entrance.
wheelchair users are exempted.
This was said somewhere earlier on this page – Covid trumps all.
Public health at its finest! Beggars belief.
Gosh, I’d never thought of it that way. Maybe you should write to your local fire brigade? Maybe we all should?
Presumably, for a zombie, being roasted alive is now preferable to a dose of bat flu.
At the pub this evening. Sitting outside. Tables inside “fully booked”.
Watching young people coming and going. Looking for people who might be slightly interesting – with a sense of perspective. No. Even the most bohemian-looking fishing out plastic bags containing face pads. One girl wore a pink glittery mask while her boyfriend got the drinks, even though they had their own table at least ten feet from the next one, outside. Then a whole bunch of youngish parents arrived, children in tow. Yay! They must be a bit interesting if they were prepared to risk bringing their kids to a pub in Covid Britain. Not on your life. Their version of interesting was wearing slightly hippy masks – a bit dirty – or bandana scarf things.
One old couple. Possibly academics the way they were talking. Surely they must have a sense of perspective. No chance. She put a scarf round her face when going to the bar. When I passed him inside the pub, he turned to the wall like that kid in that old house at the end of the Blair Witch Project.
It started raining, so we moved inside anyway, to a table that didn’t have a reserved sign on it but seemed to be devoted to sanitiser and paper towels. Maybe we weren’t supposed to sit there. Started observing the people queuing at six foot intervals in the pub. MASKS. But they don’t seem bothered. That’s what’s so worrying. They now think it’s normal and perfectly reasonable.
I live in very central London and I find it strange that it’s the utter opposite here. People are going to many bars and pubs almost completely normally – albeit in smaller numbers than before.
I was out at my local tonight and other than the staff wearing face nappies, everything was normal.
I honestly think the people of London have had enough of this s**t and will lead the rest of the country out of it.
Fingers crossed anyway.
Don’t use that pub. My pub doesn’t do any of that bollocks. Just come back and happy and three sheets…well you know
This is quite opposite to the pubs around my way, I don’t remember ever seeing a customer wearing a mask. Nobody seems to do social distancing either, and most parents seem perfectly happy to let the kid mix in the play areas.
Sounds as if Barney was in the Nappy Arms.
I hope things start to unravel this winter. At present, people are socialising outdoors. Not sustainable.
My fear is that they will bring in another national lockdown, or shut the pubs anyway as a bargaining ploy in getting the kids into school.
I’m actually hoping they try closing the pubs again. I don’t think there is any chance of getting out of this nonsense unless enough of the population wake up and demand an end to it. Maybe closing the pubs might hasten that process. We can but hope …
Used a beergarden at the weekend, Sad to see that test&trace information was laying out for everyone to see. We weren’t asked to fill it in, nor other people who arrived after us.
I refuse to give my details, especially when I see the lack of confidentiality. My company is very keen on that, so I am hyper aware of the regulations.
Yes, I think there was an article in The Sun about the potential for fraudsters to steal confidential information.
There was a report a few weeks ago of a pub selling on T&T information. Not sure of its provenance. MW
Does anyone here know if there are still people scared to go out of their houses? – still doing the “Stay home” bit of the propaganda? I’m not referring to people who because of disability or agoraphobia were largely confined to their homes anyway. Just curiosity on my part, and an interest in how psychological manipulation operates.
Yes – I know at least two. One will go out a bit, as long as it’s outdoors and she can keep away from other people. She’s scared to go into shops. The other one claims to still be self-isolating, although I suspect that she does go for walks. Both are horrified that I let my daughter play with other children and don’t bother with social distancing.
Both female, I notice. To expand slightly on my post, any propagandist knows that simple messages are the best. “Stay home” is simple, and we haven’t yet had (and may never get) “OK folks, it’s all over, you can go out now”.
I know of a male. When he returns home, strips off clothes immediately and puts them in the wash. Dips fingers in a bowl of dilute bleach. Bonkers. He is retirement age.
I know a priest in his nineties (my chaplain when I was a student) at the opposite extreme – disgusted by lockdown. He was a school boy in London during the Blitz. The idea of hiding from a bat cough turns his language most unpriestly.
Look, I don’t post ‘both male, I notice’ when a couple of guys witter on here about their gun totin’ tendencies.
Is it a female tendency to re-label a belief in the centuries old right to bear arms as “gun totin’ tendencies” ?
Ha ha, John, you must know it’s a female tendency to smile inwardly when the men start the mutual dick waving.
Again, you think one of the most important issues of all times is dick waving. Puts you on the same level as Edward.
As you appear to think that one of the most important issues of all time is ‘ the centuries old right to bear arms’. It isn’t .
Well it is so !
Remember feudal times, when the Lord of the Manor could sleep with brides on their wedding night ? Remember witch trials, trial by combat, mandatory tithes ? Remember when people could be shipped to Australia for combining with others to obtain higher wages ?
Nor do I, but I’ve read about them, and am quite keen they do not make a reappearance.
Marches, banner waving, and writing to the Times are, of course, alternative options. I can’t remember if they worked against Hitler, Stalin, or Mao ?
You’re in essence saying we cannot resist such people – that would be dick waving. Forsooth.
Our Declaration of Rights, and the upgraded version the Yanks created, include/emphasize the right to bear arms. One assumes the authors were not distracted by some weird sexual fantasy …
https://youtu.be/5TGaYOdWNZ4
Fair enough, Sylvie, but there are behavioural differences between the sexes, and it’s valid to note them.
I agree, actually. And perhaps you were right to note the sexes’ different attitudes to risk, as shown by some research, here. Both of which can be wrong in a given situation.
My excuse is that in public fora I don’t notice so many women criticising male risk taking / courage as I do men criticising female mimsiness/precautionary behaviour.
Born to be meek.
Have they noticed that you and your daughter, and quite a few other people, are still alive?
Yes, my friend who has Lupus. She was a sanitizer freak before Covid, so she’s gone off the deep end now. She will only do curbside pickup or delivery and will only socialize outside in her backyard with proper distance. To use her bathroom you must wear a mask, not touch anything, and use the basement bathroom that’s reserved for guests. I won’t visit again. She did rent a cottage but cleaned it top to bottom even though it had been cleaned. So she will go places, in a sense, but will sanitize them immediately. I asked her if she’d meet me for lunch on an outdoor patio but she said no — not enough distance between us. I’m not sure the friendship will survive Covid.
I know (slightly) someone with lupus, but she was largely unable to go out of the house anyway.
Like most Covid maniacs, she was a hypocrite before. She used to go on cruises even with her Lupus. So she wouldn’t eat at the buffet, but cruises are a cesspool even if you stay away from the buffet (sorry to cruise lovers, but I hate them). She’d go on an airplane but would only sit next to a family member…as if the person in front or behind couldn’t pass something on.
I spent a three hour flight once enduring s young man open mouthed coughing at an average 30 second interval. On a plane you will be exposed to a huge number of pathogens.
Christ that sounds awful. Not sure I’d be bothered with that friendship
It’s under a great deal of stress! 20+ years possibly gone. She doesn’t understand why her protocols are a problem for me. The only way I could explain it was to tell her that my anxiety about the “new normal” is just as severe as her anxiety about Covid. It’s not for anyone to judge what makes another person anxious, so we did commiserate about how both our lives have become extremely limited — hers because she chooses it and mine because others have mandated measures I can’t tolerate. Not sure that’s enough in common to keep the friendship going and not sure Covid will ever be over for her.
Update:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/24/axeing-rule-britannia-bbc-proms-would-erase-history-culture/
The BBC has defied the Government by announcing that Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory will not be sung at this year’s Last Night of the Proms…. [the pieces will be played as instrumentals]
The Last Night should be boycotted by all right-minded people. Is there maybe something on Twitter to promote such a boycott (I don’t do Twitter)?
i suggest those in london go to the Albert Hall with huge speakers and blast the darn tune out so flippin loud that they hear it inside and the whole of Kensington.
Better than boycotting and much more fun (wish i was in london!!)
Exactly. The suggestion is a mass rally outside Pravda House singing Land of Hope and Glory, and Rule Britannia!
i reckon if someone put out a rallying call on last night of the proms (think it’s 12 Sept) to go to the venue and sing loud and proud you’d get quite a crowd turning up, plus as a bonus would piss the BBC off big time!
Absolutely disgusting. The BBC have always hated the Last Night of the Proms. They tried to destroy it about 15 years ago but couldn’t so tried to tame it by turning it into a sort of Glastonbury experience. Now they will use Covid and the BLM bollox to try and finally finish it off. Time for the BBC to be finished off.
A horrible prediction (which I hope others can find reasons to dismiss):
The Tory strategy of hugging Labour and the media into lockdown and beyond will prove to have been clever politics, and will in effect be rewarded by the electorate. Taking the political decision to lock down when Labour demanded it prevented Labour from gaining traction by crowing about covid deaths caused by the heartless Tories. Now Labour and the media are united behind Boris as he keeps digging all the way to Australia, because he’s their only hope of avoiding accountability. Sceptics have no party to vote for, and by the time we get a vote Boris will have found some way to declare victory over covid, the grateful party will have replaced him in time for the election, and it will be politics as usual. A few tens of thousands of avoidable deaths, destroyed livelihoods and trashed basic liberties will be ‘lessons will be learnt,’ if that. Bojo’s decision to lock down will prove to have been politically risk-free, regardless of its destructive cost. I want to puke.
Don’t fucking call him Boris or BoJo. His name’s Johnson and he’s a shit
Bozo? Short for Boris Zombie – the thing he became after just about dying from the virus.
Dead right! My skin crawls when I see people writing ‘Boris’. I think, ‘Friend of yours, is he?’ Same with people who went on about ‘Hillary’. Ugh! MW
I think what it proves is that we are all hostage to the public guardians in the BBC. The politicians as much as the electorate. Time to defund and de-licence them all.
Horribly, I think ‘electorate’, ‘vote’, and ‘election’ are now extremely optimistic words to be using. Unless we can fix things, of course.
How do Londoners think about their time expired unlawfull mayor still being in office ?
Tories hugging Labour, or Labour hugging Tories? Or just one, big group hug? It’s all so confusing.
I’m not hugging any of them, unless I get the Covid.
I think the number of avoidable deaths will be way more than tens of thousands, when this is over (decades, not years).
“Sceptics have no party to vote for”. Currently true, may continue to be true. So don’t vote, or spoil your ballot paper, stand yourself, vote for independents. Maybe KBF will put up some candidates – Dolan looks like he is quite serious. I’ve stolen these ideas 100% from Hitchens, but it’s essential that those of us who would normally (often reluctantly) support the nominally “right wing” party just to keep out the nominally “left wing” parties must stop doing so. Sceptics on the left would need to do likewise. UKIP and the Brexit Party pushed the Tories into a referendum and into supporting Brexit, so it’s not complete fantasy to think that the Tories cannot be pushed into being more sceptical if they see their support eroding.
The presupposes there are enough sceptics to make a difference – something we are all working towards.
This is the most important article about C-19 transmission a very comprehensive meta analysis. Highest risk in households. Confirms the idiocy of quarantining healthy persons with household cases in the lockdown scenario. Almost guaranteeing a higher attack rate. It would have been better to have household members working normally, better for them as less infection and better for the economy. The whole idea of locking in healthy people with sick household members must be one of the most stupid ideas ever invented. All other social distancing measures have a certain meaning but this locking down healthy people was a catastrophic idea.
In the article other means of transmission to be investigated is the possibility of faecal oral transmission and also sexual transmission as in this new information SARS-Cov2 has been found in semen.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.29.20164590v1.full.pdf
“To prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2, people are being asked to stay at home worldwide. With suspected or confirmed infections referred to isolate at home, household transmission will continue to be a significant source of transmission”
“Modelling studies demonstrated that household transmission had a greater impact on R after social distancing (30%-55%) compared to before social distancing (5%-35%).”
“ The finding that households with only one contact had higher SARs than households with greater than two contacts may suggest that household crowding and residential area per person are more important for SARS-CoV-2 transmission than the total number of people per household. “
So… pretty much like influenza… what people with a clue in science were saying, but those who payed to the Gods of “The Science” disagreed…
And again for symptomatic vs. asymptomatic spread “The estimated mean household SAR from symptomatic index cases (19·9%; 95% CI: 14·0%– 25·7%) was significantly higher than from asymptomatic index cases (0·7%; 95% CI: 0%–3·8%) (P < 0·001), though there were only a few studies of asymptomatic index cases.”
I don’t know – sounds like cart before horse to me.
I think public mixing, most obviously in supermarkets (but also public venues ) is where transmission really takes place.
I know scientists would happily have us starve in order to eliminate the virus (ha-ha) but the politicians had to allow us to continue shopping for food in supermarkets, even at the height of the virus spread. I believe nearly everyone was exposed to the virus by airborne transmission in shops in Feb to April. The vast majority shrugged it off.
Households will share similar DNA and similar traits. An obese individual is often found living with obese family members – that’s probably enough to explain the research findings about household transmission.
And I think that close proximity on public transport, like the Tube, and in homes (care and other) is where transmission really takes place, not in supermarkets where you’re rarely shoulder to shoulder with anyone. But we neither of us have a shred of evidence, unlike the paper quoted.
There are plenty of scientific papers stressing the importance of airborne transmission (but also surface transmission) in public places. We can all pick and choose our science just like government does…
This paper doesn’t seem to take into account that people from the same households have a high degree of genetic and trait similarity. So they will tend to have similar vulnerabilites. This applies even where there is no familial relationship – eg people with good hygiene for instance don’t often live with people with poor hygiene.
To explain further…obese individuals, for instance, often share the trait of being obese with family members. They may have a genetic predisposition or may share a group trait of not being able to control their eating. Either way their obesity makes them vulnerable to Covid. If Covid is pretty much “everywhere”, they are being constantly exposed to it at roughly the same time.
Does this paper really have access to exact timings for exposure, infection and onset of symptoms? Of course not. They are simply conducting a mathematical correlation exercise.
Probably in offices too
Those who have marked me down need to appreciate the average infected person generates about 7 billion virus particles a day. People don’t need to be coughing to be spreading the virus. In a big supermarket with 200 shoppers and 100 staff there will be hundreds of thusands, maybe millions, of virus particles floating on the air or attached to items touched by those infected.
About a fist full as I like to tell people when the subject crops up.
Not so sure about the shops, in my small Tesco and large Co Op not a single new face has appeared to replace staff taken by the Covid.
An early headline shouted ‘shop closed by Covid outbreak’.
A member of staffs sister had become unwell, she reported this and self isolated.
The staff with whom she had worked were sent home to be replaced by others from different shifts.
The shop was closed for all of 4 hours while this was arranged and the store cleaned.
Wasn’t me btw OKUK
You were lucky.The only food shop in the large village of Linton, Cambridge, was closed for four days because an employee tested positive. Originally the closure was announced as ‘indefinite’. And the locals uncomplainingly prepared to starve.
They used to deliver, once upon a time. Billy Backler’s, on the corner of Coles Lane.
Most people, especially younger working age people, are either asymptomatic or have
mild symptoms, so lack of deaths tells you nothing – although, for what it’s worth, retail workers have had a higher death rate than the rest of the workforce.
Not so sure about the shops, in my small Tesco and large Co Op not a single new face has appeared to replace staff taken by the Covid.
I’m confused: are you saying people died in your local atores or went off sick and never came back? The rest of your post seems to be saying it was a fuss over nothing. Could you clarify? Cheers, MW
The large supermarkets are well ventilated it is almost like being outdoors – especially since the mask rule has halved the number of shoppers.
It was totally bloody obvious from the start. For anybody with a brain. None of those in government, obviously.
A care home manager told me that her husband had a stroke shortly into lockdown.
He was given 2 telephone consultations and prescribed painkillers. She had to give up work to look after her very ill husband, I don’t know the outcome, probably not good.
‘People were stopping to take pics and beeping their horns…’ https://www.spirefm.co.uk/news/local-news/3149103/face-mask-put-on-amesbury-ancestor-to-encourage-people-to-do-the-same/
Eff moi, there are some weirdos about.
OMG, what a nightmare
So now we can expect a wave of statue masking.
And a jolly good thing too, statues spread Covid like mad.
is that before or after they pull them down?
Have you a link to the CCP / NYT article? – I can’t find it now it is needed.
Thanks in advance.
County Council announces that School Buses will not require Social Distancing. Their explanation for why School Buses are immune from the Covid is entirely at variance to all the other old rubbish we are being told.
Really it’s because they don’t have a coronovirus’ chance in a chlorine bath of keeping a bus load of kids behaving ‘properly’ and the drivers certainly won’t want to take the blame.
“Now Johnny, I’ve had a complaint that you exposed yourself on the School Bus this morning”.
‘Not my fault miss me belt broke an me trahsers just fell down”.
“Oh is that all, I thought they meant you had removed your mask, run along now”.
https://thecritic.co.uk/dark-matters/
This is not directly related to calamitous Covid, but it is well worth reading: a renowned mathematician discusses the perils of academic group think and the current fashion for ‘cancelling’ dissidents.
Secondly, a number of locals have recently confided that they cannot stand the Dear Leader and her endless rules and restrictions.
So, even though the masks still predominate, frustration and legitimate concerns about future prospects are building.
Let’s hope that critical mass will be achieved before next year’s elections.
Yes. Have just been listening to a Glasgow pub owner on R5 money programme about how to manage their outdoor spaces in winter (I wouldn’t fancy going, particularly in Scotland, in winter) – and you get a sense of the anxiety and frustration building.
Something that is calamitous to Covid untested vaccines is hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and we should try to get this into the discussion as much as we can.
I tried to buy Hydroxychloroquine on the Internet, however you need a doctor’s prescription.
Breaking news this morning- one person in the world found to have been reinfected with the virus since contracting it in April- established by a new positive test. A false positive perhaps? Of course not..
Nope, it’s another strain of the virus. Couldn’t have predicted a mutation at some point? Bound to happen I would think, but no doubt to be used as more scaremongering and justification for more muzzling
And the person is completely asymptomatic. He was only discovered by routine testing returning to Hong Kong from Spain. So basically he came back from holiday with a cold.
What’s not clear is that, given that some strains of the common cold are coronaviruses, what makes this a mutation of Covid-19 rather than just another coronavirus? These are (relatively) simple organisms, so it seems likely that any genetic dissimilarity between Covid-19 and this “new” strain would be of the same order as that between Covid-19 and strains classed as a common cold.
The “So you’re telling me there’s a chance” brigade are already on it.
They’re desperate to keep the lie ongoing so expect to find many more catching it for the 2nd time.
Dr Simon Thornley of the NZ Plan B group will be having a weekly Zoom q/a through Facebook on Mondays (AEST) where live questions can be asked. The meetings will be posted on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7mXnWFHi_hdnOIhTIPxBtw
I didn’t realise there was open dissent from what seems like quite a heavyweight group of scientists in NZ. Are there also journalists writing critical pieces in major newspapers? Do we know if there is an NZ equivalent of LS?
Technically just Dr Thornley but he recently got some esteemed scientists together. Plan B promotes their work in Scoop which apparently isn’t that mainstream. They have gotten very few donations and need more press.
I’m from Aus and there is very little dissent.
Am i right in thinking that the current level of testing is unprecedented for any disease outbreak and that we have never tested for flu or chickenpox in this way? If that is the case then there is no precedent and whilst test results are useful indicators we have no idea if they are a cause for panic or are much like we would have seen for flu or chicken pox if we had continued to test for them months after the main disease outbreak had past?
The world has supposed to have moved on from a belief in magic and soothsaying and yet some of the public reaction to this virus indicates we are not so far away from the society that burned witches as we might like to think! Part of this is the way so much of society seems to have an almost religious belief in the infallibility of ‘TEST RESULTS’ that must never be questioned and about which we must all panic and run around like headless chickens.
Tests are useful diagnostic tools but need interpretation, understanding and viewing in some sort of context, after all nobody ever died of a test result. The current reality in the UK seems to be that there is little Covid 19 disease/death and every indication that like a bad outbreak of flu or chicken pox the thing has now passed by. And yet in an unprecedented move we have continued testing in a way we have never previously done for any disease and are now panicking over test results when we have no historical context of knowing what such test results mean nor if these test results are current infections or just asymptomatic RNA remnants?
How do we end this spiral into madness? how do we convince arrogant febrile politicians that they cannot achieve ‘zero covid’ without wrecking the world we live in? Reminds me of Vitalstastix in the Asterix cartoons who was concerned that the sky might fall on his head, people are now terrified that the ‘ju-ju’ magic virus might get them tomorrow even though there is little current sign of disease/death. How did we all loose our rational logical minds so quickly and how do we put it right?
I’ve tried to make this point about testing several times recently, without success. In a conversation yesterday with an acquaintance who was worried about a woman standing too close to him in the queue at Gregg’s, I pointed out that everyone we know is well-(he knew of one fatality, a very old man with dementia)- that bodies aren’t piling up in the streets and that society cannot maintain this panic driven hypervigilance indefinitely.
Children need to go to school in normal conditions, people need work and prospects, businesses need to survive and thrive and meanwhile the recession builds and tax revenues are shrinking rapidly.
Stupidly I hadn’t realised, before I watched those German lawyers interviewing a virologist, that there are hundreds of different PCR tests and that each laboratory can devise its own. I think she said that any post grad scientist could produce one and that using PCR tests for measuring all sorts of things was the “bread and butter” income for these laboratories.
They are not binary tests-a yes or no, like a pregnancy test and each lab will have its own cut off point for the number of cycles it uses until a positive test is achieved.
I won’t even go down the road of false positives and false negatives.
That’s good to know thanks.
Growing up in the 60s you either got the lurgey* or you didn’t, seemingly at random but with sibling and neighbourhood clusters.
All dealt with by the School Nurse and no big deal.
Goodness knows if kids were wandering around asymptomatic, if so they didn’t have it.
*lurgey, official collective noun for childhood diseases or if non-specific.
I remember a chicken pox epidemic in the 60s. Half the school was off sick. When the spots appeared you stayed at home for two weeks. When I noticed the spots I remember thinking, “Great! Two weeks off!”
Don’t forget the big lurgey of 1968, Hong Kong flu, which saw no lockdowns, no mass panic and no bans on parties and mass gatherings. The irony is that in 68, New York State hosted the best known large gathering at Woodstock. One of the Apollo 8 astronauts developed symptoms on their way to the moon.
A person was diagnosed with the lurgey when they developed symptoms not based on a random test. Tests are usually used to confirm diagnosis.
The 1968 epidemic went by unnoticed because no great fuss was made of it yet more people died then! What we are having to endure now is definitely manufactured chaos.
Back in the day if your neighbours kids caught any childhood ailments kids were purposely put in with them to get it over and done with. Chickenpox Measles Mumps etc were all treated like that.
Great post. Expresses in a way I couldn’t this testing mania.. The mania seems to spring from Tedros of WHO saying some months back that the key to controlling the virus was “testing, testing, testing”. Is China behind all this as we know that Tedros and WHO are but puppets of China.
Look how much money the WHO gets from China (very little) and then look how much it gets from Bill Gates. That will tell you whose puppet Tedros really is. MW
Similarly Ferguson and Whitty and goodness knows how many in the civil service and government are on Gates’s payroll.
The power of propaganda!
Fortunately, not everyone believes it.
Todays BBC surprise R2 news 06.30
“The government has said that one in eight hospital Covid cases caught the disease while in the hospital”.
Only one in eight?
No, the 7am news upped it 23%
It was admitted the hospitals and doctors surgeries were the epicentres for the pandemic bearing that in mind I’d say 23% is way below what it really was.
The figures are of those in hospital, they don’t mention GPs
It’s a massive fudge. Only one in eight when counting those confirmed at least 15 days after admission, and tested in hospital. They quantify some caveats that would increase it to near one in four, but then brush them off with “Those caveats do suggest the the risk of catching the virus in hospital remains still small.”. What, that’s double your headline figure! They also acknowledge that it doesn’t include those who acquired it and then left without being tested, for example those discharged and sentenced to DNR in care homes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53895891
So it is OK for the State to statistically miminise the risk when infection occurs indoors in hospitals but not OK for others to do so when infection occurs in cinemas, theatres, pubs, museums etc etc. Do as we say and not as we do
They clarified that on the longer 7am news so now 23% (+rising ?)
Definitely rising they don’t want to admit that so many caught it in hospitals. I think it’s the same as the “we made a mistake, we just need to test so much more” in that they are half admitting but shifting it and muddying the waters so no real blame can be put on them.
Ok, so now we’re starting to get somewhere…
This guy has been a very good investigative journalist from the outset. He smells blood clearly, but is a bit constrained by the BBC I suspect. He is only allowed on the website, never seen him on the TV but hopefully Debra Cohen will pick this up and run with it.
So, let’s do some counting..
21,000 Care Home residents died. This has now shifted from being 43% of the total to over 50% since the admittance of the fraudulent counting of car crash victims, and people who died of other illnesses after recovering from Covid as Covid deaths.
13% DEFINITELY caught it in hospital, and 23% of the total likely caught it in hospital so lets go with 18% and split the difference.
So basically, at least 70% of the total deaths caught it in care homes and hospitals. Already very sick, ill people that caught it in the very settings where the most precautions, lockdown style environments are on in the country. Nearly all of those will (by dint of where they are) have serious pre-existing conditions and severely weakened immune systems. Most very old.
That now leaves us with a total ‘community’ death toll of c12,000, or 0.0001791%
Now consider this. At the height of the ‘spread’ leading up to thousands of deaths a week, everybody was going to work, getting on the tube, going to football matches, drinking in pubs indoors. (it was Jan/Feb/March remember). Everybody was shopping. Cheltenham went ahead with 250,000 people descending on a town of 70,000. No social distancing, no mask wearing, no one way systems and all the rest of it. Schools open, no masks, no social distancing there. In winter when colds are rife. 0.0001791%
Now in summer time when barely anybody is being hospitalised and almost nobody is dying, we are going around behaving as if this is the Black Death and that unless we do all this stuff we are all going to die.
Now there are a few possible interpretations of this.
i) The disease was initially far more widespread than thought but just very benign in the vast majority of cases. The less ill/obese/old you were the less likely you were to even feel ill.
ii) Natural immunity is far higher than we first thought
iii) Social Distancing, Masking etc is hogwash and makes no difference amongst average healthy people
There are others of course. One that most definitely does not add up is locking down the healthy people, causing economic destruction, locking off the NHS so causing lots of early deaths from other causes, and all the other myriad of ills from this outrageous policy. It most definitely cannot justify extending the idiocy and continuing the pretence that this is a uniquely dangerous and deadly virus driven by ‘community spread’.
We knew all this anyway, but it is nice to see their whole bullshit narrative being gradually torn down, strip by strip…
The only cases in the local community that I am aware of were early on in sheltered accommodation, Mcarthy & Stone etc. ie already old, perhaps not particularly ill but meeting together in common rooms.
Great summary. It’s amazing how we can infer the big picture with a little bit of deduction but the people who are paid to do this can not understand what the numbers mean through their narrow fearful view.
Another anecdote from Sturgeon land: yesterday,while waiting to collect a prescription at our local pharmacy, I watched an elderly masked couple explain that they both required passport photos.(Passport and ID photos are one of the services provided.)
A member of staff came out from behind the perspex barrier ,asked a few questions and then followed the Removal of the Masks; great fun.
So here is another challenge to the mask dictatorship; bare faces still mandatory for official photographs.
The couple were very pleasant and told me that they were hoping to get away fairly soon,to a safe destination.
Apologies if this has been posted before but I would encourage everyone to go and have a play with the interactive Covid response model on the World Economic Forum website (an NGO). There is literally layers upon layers of information – it’s utterly mind-boggling.
You can call me a ‘conspiracy theorist’ as much as you like but I am genuinely struggling to believe that this was put together in just a few months:
https://intelligence.weforum.org/topics/a1G0X000006O6EHUA0?tab=publications
This has been planned, and as you say they couldn’t have cobbled this together in a matter of a couple of months. The only thing I cannot be certain of is whether the virus was deliberately manufactured for this purpose or it was accidentally released from a laboratory. The fact it kills only the elderly and vulnerable people across the globe is looking more like a planned cull of the elderly.
BD, um, the flu primarily kills the elderly and vulnerable, but I don’t think that counts as a “planned cull”. Now dumping infected people in care homes – *that” sounds like a planned cull.
They have similar tools for the “Future of Energy”, “Systemic Racism” and “The Great Reset”(!) and a host of other topics, although you have to be a registered user to access them. While the tool looks whizzbang, I think it’s just a link list displayed in a circle with a search engine attached.
Also, they are relying on a host of organisation for the information populating the tools (https://intelligence.weforum.org/about). There’s probably a small team in charge of updating the database driving the thing, but other than that, it just looks like something put together by a well-resourced organisation.
So while I think there’s more to all of this (the general situation) than random chance, I don’t think the existence of this site means much from a conspiracy perspective.
I hope you are right. It appears to me to be a blueprint for global governance.
Brewers decorators have an obligatory ‘masks instore’ policy. No exceptions. You are ‘encouraged to order online or telephone ahead’ and be served at the entrance door.
I’ve tackled their customer services department on this and they are adamant, they WILL shame the mask exempt and treat them like lepers in order to ‘protect their staff’ – who don’t have to wear masks themselves.
I’ve pointed out the law, the fallacies of masks wearing, the cognitive dissonance (makes for customers, but not for staff) plus some of the reasons why people might be mask exempt (including the harrowing tale of the lady who was abused as a child and whose abuser put a sheet over her face). They didn’t care.
They won’t even engage in sensible dialogue about it. That’s the policy, they’re sticking to it.
Boycott Brewers and please tell them WHY you’re doing so.
customer.service@brewers.co.uk
Sounds like case to sue for disability discrimination.
The Government has already sunk money into several vaccine projects, so from the point of view of those who profit from these things it’s already working. In my view, the Government are basically idiots taking advice from people who are making money from the scare. If enough people are subsequently encouraged to take the vaccine then more money will follow: you don’t need coercion, because unlike with the NWO conspiracy you don’t need everyone to take it, but obviously the longer you can keep the fear going, the more customers you will have and the more money you will make.
A tip to any one who does not want to wear a mask JUST SAY YOU ARE EXEMPT
I do it all the time now in shops public transport etc.
I have never been questioned or asked to prove it.
And my medical.records cannot be read by anyone including police.
Absolutely right but it seems as if most people either don’t know they can do this or they are so brainwashed that they believe that masks are saving them and others from the deadly virus.
The fake news that the fine for not wearing one is £3200 helps keep people in line. This plus the majority of people seem incapable of thinking now. MW
Oh look at her in her cheapo NHS surplus mask, I got mine at Waitrose, twenty five quid. Skinfint, all mine are from the Burberry Range , starts at £90.
(Waitrose bit made up).
I avoided shops successfully til last weekend, and at just my 2nd one was actually challenged and told I should have ‘a badge or something’… Was surprised at myself but managed to stay composed and told the shopkeeper that was not required and then turned it on them but asking if they routinely ask people who use disabled bays to divulge their disabilities to them
this did shut them up, but they still insisted I wait at the door (was a tiny tiny shop) whilst they collected the few items I wanted for me. I was mid ride and desperate for a drink otherwise would’ve taken money elsewhere.
Story is, some people are rude and ignorant enough to challenge and want to know why, so incase you encounter one, be prepared and turn the tables on them.
Just say “Did you know that any further question would be a criminal offence?” That’s enough to get them worried, and reverses the Warden Hodges “I’m in charge” they love.
Or “Don’t you realise how many exemptions there are..?” If pushed you could then reel off some long medical terms…
Even though doing you a favour they have still broken the law by offering a different level of service because of your Disability.
If treated like that I will not part with my money
If treated like that I will not part with my money..
Yes, good points. Tell your Dad the fine is £100 (reducible to £50) and only doubles for ‘further’ offences. The £3200 was fear tactics and, of course, it’s working!
Nobody needs to get a fine anyway, just make yourself exempt. No sane person could feel other than distressed at being forced into the degradation and humiliation of wearing a mask for no valid health reason. MW
Well done! Every bare face a little victory.
Just say “for health reasons”.
It’s not a lie. Masks are disgusting germ ridden rags. I refuse to wear one for health reasons.
Anyway, extreme distress is a valid reason.
Not been accosted yet but my response will be a slight variation
“I am exempt on account of being able to think for myself”
Brilliant, I’m going for that one if challenged.
“I’m here to buy something, not rob the place.”
I said exempt when booking my car in for work over the phone, when I arrived neither staff or customers were bothering.
Get tested ……… get locked up
So why would anyone who has no symptoms volunteer to get tested?…… Smell rat
Are NHS and care home staff in a continuous cycle of getting tested?
What happens if an NHS worker with no symptoms tests positive, then positive 14 days later, then positive 14 days later etc
Three positives? or one?
I wouldn’t put anything past this lot
A couple of months ago I heard of someone who this actually happened to. Just hearsay so I don’t know if he’s still testing positive! MW
Care home staff are now being tested weekly, don’t know about NHS
I think a grass roots campaign encouraging people to refuse testing needs to get going. I won’t be taking one and neither will any of my family.
Prof Robert Dingwall member of SAGE let the cat out of the bag when saying
“The problem is that the PCR tests are so sensitive that they can detect RNA when the virus itself is inactive and no longer infective. It is only being cleared from the body.”
“This can go on for several weeks so you would be keeping people in hospital unnecessarily, tying up beds and exposing them to risks of other infections like MRSA.”
If only that statement from Dingwall is picked up on and amplified in the media (with the wider implications made clear for the hard of thinking) this could be a turning point. Unfortunately I don’t think that would suit most agendas.
Finally our podcast ‘Bedwetters’ is live on iTunes! You can subscribe here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/bedwetters/id1528841200
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I hope you’re getting that printed on t shirts and face masks…
If he had no symptoms why did he get tested, Anyone asked him?
He does a good job lying in bed acting as if he is ill though! But that’s exactly what I thought too, why would you get a test unless you’re ill? I don’t know what the rules are where he is though, and maybe he was peer pressured or just felt guilty for having a party?
Our government remind me of a child who does something with good intentions but doesn’t understand the negative consequences due to naivety. Too embarrassed and fearful of a telling off to fess up they start embroidering the truth to avoid discovery until they are completely enmeshed in lies and they see no way back. The difference is that the child’s parents will still love and forgive them when it all comes out. The government know they have gone too far to be forgiven and most politicians put their political survival above all else. Just my take. I agree that they are unlikely to be capable of conceiving of, let alone implementing, a plan based on evil genius. Or any type of genius.
I tend to think this is the most plausible explanation but also that there are other bodies with their own agendas who are trying to cash in and influence our already weak and venal leaders
Yep. That is it.
Bomber Hague sounding off in the Telegraph this morning. He claims that Biden winning is in the British national interest. I don’t think it is in the British national interest to align ourselves with the whiny losers, the BLM rioters, and the covid-clusterfuck-perpetrators of American politics.
Tell Hague to take a trip to Portland Oregon to see the likely result of o Biden victory.
Well, Hague has to be one of our most consistent politicians – always wrong!
I imagine he and Ferguson get on like a house on fire!!!
If they come to mine, they will.
Just reinforces the reality that the British “Conservatives” are a party of the centre left, broadly similar and philosophically in tune with the US Democrats. In terms of its political parties, Britain is akin to a NE US Democrat fiefdom. There are conservatives in the UK as there are in the US NE, they just don’t have any political representation.
Hague is obviously a fool then.
Joe-I-wanna-shut-down-the-US-economy-Biden is in our national interest? Don’t think so.
You mean, if it can catch the fastest man on two legs.
Covid breaks the 200 metre world record!! Viral gold!
I challenged our gym as to why they took away the hair dryers. I can’t believe I am even writing this!
Given your name suggests that you’re a man, I believe that you can’t believe it.
Yes I find that a quick blast with the hair dryer gets great results! I didn’t know that I was infecting people. They also removed the spin dryer that wrings out your swimming costume. Madness.
Churches have banned the use of the organ, as well as singing!!
I can think of better ways of stopping people from singing with an organ but it’s unprintable.
Ha! Best I’ve felt all day.
I have read about a protest march for this Saturday (29th) in Trafalgar Square, and seen posters online – the posters include Keep Britain Free & Lockdown Sceptics but I can’t see any formal notification. Does anyone know about this? Is it genuine?
Best to keep it informal BLM style so the fuzz can’t arrest any ringleaders
Yes. There is a well planned rally with lots of speakers – Dr’s Andrew Kaufmann, Dolories Cahill among many eminent others. I dont have the flyer to hand but take a look at Off-Guardian – they have a pinned post with all the details. It should be a big event.
Link
https://off-guardian.org/2020/08/24/unite-for-freedom-protest-on-august-29th/
Many thanks. I’d not understood the reason it’s not promoted by the usual channels.
I agree with you Stedfarm. I genuinely don’t think there is any conspiracy and, even if there was, I just don’t believe the UK establishment, outside of the armed forces, would be remotely competent enough to affect one. This is the politics of survival in action.
The western world has been duped by the Chinese communist party and useful idiots like Ferguson and the WHO into destroying our economies and societies for no good reason. They backed the wrong horse but don’t think they dare admit it because the fallout from such an admission would be existential.
The penny is beginning to drop, however, in the general population that the threat from covid has been vastly exaggerated. I think fears of a seasonal recurrence of the disease have a degree of logic about them and would argue that Professor Geisecke has suggested as much for countries that didn’t allow the disease to spread before they locked down. That said, the disease is clearly much less dangerous, I suspect as a result of natural mutations and our ability to treat it.
There is a tipping point coming when the right wing press are going to make it clear they know the emperor hasn’t got any clothes on and, at that point, the Johnson will have two perfect candidates and the CCP to chuck under the bus, try and save face and admit he was duped by them/ panicked by his illness into a misguided and unnecessary strategy.
Whether he will be brave enough to seize the opportunity will determine whether he or Gove enjoy Christmas in number 10. Whatever, politically, he can’t get the long knife out until we see what happens in the autumn; we will get an inkling that he is changing tack if Handcock survives the reshuffle.
Genuine question here – what is or is not a ‘conspiracy’? When the government acts behind the scenes with powerful players, and directs the media, and some at least of those players have long term plans and agendas – there are elements of conspiracy.
Would ‘conspiracy’ have to mean that the various mega-players are acting as one? Clearly not, they are all jostling for power with one another, but to some extent together as that’s where the money flows from.
I hear you. At the end of the day, I am not sure it matters because people aren’t going to take a vaccine, if one ever turns up, and I don’t think the Johnson, as an arch populist is going to force them to.
The novelty will wear off and, eventually, someone will take charge, admit the CCP exaggerated everything, useful idiots like Ferguson endorsed them, governments fell for it but now the virus has disappeared. The problem they have is people aren’t going to take a vaccine and if people aren’t dying they won’t be persuaded to.
By a literal definition, if Johnson does realise at this point he’s been had and committed and committed an appalling blunder (it’s hard to see how he could not realise, but there’s the possibility that his advisors are junk and he hasn’t enough interest to work it out for himself) and he and the government are engaged in nothing more than a massive face-saving cover up exercise, then it _is_ a conspiracy. I don’t think that’s what is normally meant by the use of the word, though.
Ah, so the problem is making assumptions about what people mean by the word ‘conspiracy’. By ordinary definitions, then conspiracy is what we are looking at. ‘My’ topic is global warming and I’ve been hard pressed to write about it without being dismissed as a ‘Conspiracy Theorist’.
I settled for this in the end:
“Society is changing fast – something we can all agree on. Is this just random social evolution? Is this serious conspiracy going on behind the scenes? Or might it be more to do with the way bad ideas can grow when people in positions of power and influence either can’t or don’t like to challenge the latest groupthink?
We think it’s mostly the third option above but unfortunately there have been some extremely bad ideas around for a long time.
We’ve been doing some investigating because it’s not possible to stand against the destructive changes without some knowledge of where they come from.”
It’s here if you want to read more https://www.beautyandthebeastlytruth.com/what-is-going-on
links at the bottom of the page –
and here is the main text https://www.beautyandthebeastlytruth.com/
#1 Decarbonising the economy will cost us an arm and a leg – and achieve nothing.
#2 Planet Earth has her own natural cycles. We didn’t heat her up – and it’s not our job to cool her down.
#3 Planet Earth needs more carbon dioxide not less. Then plants would grow faster, the deserts shrink, and the earth will be greener.
Well, I think that more to the point, conspiracy has become an emotionally loaded word. Or rather, it’s always been an emotionally loaded word (nobody ever conspired to do something good) but in the past few decades it’s accrued the meaning of shadowy groups of mysterious, all-powerful people gathering in secret to plot something vast and monstrous. It brings to mind the Illuminati – or something like them – secretly pulling the strings behind the scenes for an unknowable purpose. I don’t think this is that, and many other people don’t either and actually, I think that speculating as to whether it might be doesn’t help us even if it turns out to be so. Our argument against lockdown and the rest of the nonsense that’s going on is plenty solid enough to be convincing without some eminences grises behind the curtain manipulating things to their own ends – that can only possibly put people off and allow people to pigeonhole us all as nut jobs.
Do I think that there is an agenda going on other than the one that’s being publicised? Yes, I do, because the evidence that this is a non-event is so strong to my mind that it seems to be impossible that our government or others in the world can possibly still believe that they really _must_ be hyper-vigilant in the way that they are being.
Do I think various non-governmental groups have their own agendas and are trying to influence policy to their own advantages? Yes, I do, because that’s the way the world has always worked and always win.
Do I think that this means there is a conspiracy afoot? Well, actually, in a literal sense, I’m quite certain that many people are conspiring with one another to try to achieve outcomes that are far from altruistic, but suit their own motives. I’m not sure they’re doing it very well, though.
But in the current sense of the word “conspiracy”, no, I don’t buy it. I do not think there is a single group of interests who have a plan and are successfully manipulating all of the moving parts to achieve it.
Whether it was planned or was released by accident,or came from bats is immaterial now.
It is undeniable that powerful interests are working behind the scenes to further their own intrests.
Bill gates and his vaccines,identity passports for one.
WEF are on record as saying we should use this crisis to reset the world economy.
WHO admitted that they changed the guidance on masks due to political pressure.
These are all facts that can’t be denied.
Then we have have our own government who have killed people in care homes and through the shutting down of the NHS.
They have manipulated the statistics to exaggerate the death toll of this disease and now exaggerate the number of cases and use this reason to lockdown whole cities.i could go on but my point is If it wasn’t a conspiracy at the beginning it definitely is now.
Yes ! Crucially, it’s not just our government, but all the bastards worldwide.
Why is the government block the use of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ)? Same in the US where doctors and surgeons are demanding its release to health professionals and even the public. HCQ is safe, effective (if used early in infection or as a prophylactic) and cheap.
The answer is because it would make all these untested vaccines unnecessary and a lot of rich people would lose a lot of money.
“Why is the government block the use of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ)”
Because it doesn’t work. As the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine regularly reports.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-guidelines-for-community-palliative-care-which-is-the-best-in-show/
The nudging is too effective. I think that most people will accept vaccination, just as they accept muzzles. Then the pressure will be on the rest of us. I don’t share your optimism in the least on this topic (wish I could). If you don’t know about nudging and behavioural manipulation, it’s here
https://www.beautyandthebeastlytruth.com/psychological-manipulation
People accept muzzles because they can’t be bothered to make a fuss about something they regard as trivial.
I believe masks are a terrible idea if you want to stop the spread of disease and, with a daughter undergoing chemotherapy, will not go anywhere where their use is mandated and there is a heavy footfall of people who might pass on colds, diarrhoea, chicken pox, measles( god forbid) etc, diseases that might actually harm her unlike the (no longer existent and, even in sick children, relatively harmless) covid.
If I didn’t have a sick child I would actually regard mask wearing twats as a source of wry amusement that they think they are being so virtuous when they are actually spreading what is left of covid about much more efficiently by pawing at their putrid face nappies.
My daughter was on hydroxychloroquine for over a year, due to an autoimmune condition, so I know very well it has some quite nasty side effects. It also seems to counter covid but, because it was backed by Trump, it cannot possibly be countenanced as a treatment. Vaccines have nothing to do with it, imho, it has been rejected because Trump can never, ever be seen to be right on anything.
By trying to cover their own asses, I think SAGE have finally let the cat out of the bag!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/24/exclusive-health-chiefs-defied-sage-advice-hospital-tests/#comment
It’s behind a Pay Wall but Prof Robert Dingwall who is a member of SAGE was trying to make excuses for not testing patients before releasing them from Hospital. He said…
“The problem is that the PCR tests are so sensitive that they can detect RNA when the virus itself is inactive and no longer infective. It is only being cleared from the body.”
“This can go on for several weeks so you would be keeping people in hospital unnecessarily, tying up beds and exposing them to risks of other infections like MRSA.”
So given that, why the hell are the Media and Govt so obsessed with “New Cases” ?
Surely we’re way past the point where this can just be sheer incompetence?
What’s the IFR of MRSA I wonder.
Mr ‘A’ says to Mr ‘B’ “don’t do that it could kill people”
Mr B does it anyway
People die as a result
(From the Janet and John book ‘How to spot manslaughter’)
Not very high I wouldn’t think. You can be colonised with MRSA without being infected, usually in the nose and throat. It causes problems if it gets deeper into the body. Interestingly if a person is swabbed for SARS-COV-2 and is colonised with MRSA could this result in a false positive SARS-COV-2 result?
I don’t see how MRSA could do that. I haven’t checked but it’s very unlikely that its genome would include the sequences the test is looking for.
I vaguely thought MRSA was an umbrella term for a number of antibiotic resistant bacteria, rather than a single one?
no it is methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus ….it lives normally harmlessly in the nose and can enter the body systemically through a cut.
You can catch it from “contact with contaminated linens”
Hmmmm…fabric masks, shaving cuts….only a matter of time. I hope Hancock’s first.
We are indeed.
Rule Britannia
The beeb have backtracked on the threat to remove Rule Britannia from the proms.
‘Of course it will be included it’s just that it can’t be sung because Covid means nobody can sing in public.
There is no threat to it being linked to slavery
(despite them doing just that 24 hours ago on yesterday’s Today Programme)
and it will again be sung in all its glory once the lockdown restrictions have been removed’.
But we are slaves.
I’m not.
Nor me.
I think we should all sing it on our phones and send in the videos to the BEEB and world!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dypyx5ae2PY Toby himself on the subject.
Back in mid July when the mandatory mask wearing came in force was it introduced to meet some reassessment of the threat posed? Does anyone recall.
I don’t think there was a reassessment. I think the measure was introduced to give people the confidence to go out shopping – which really hasn’t worked out that well.
It wasn’t thought through too well was it? The negative ramifications it might have, and what on earth the exit strategy was going to be.
Now, at least, we are being entertained by members of the government and their advisers attempting to explain why they are not needed in schools. They’ve got themselves in a bit of bind to say the least.
AFAICT and reading between the lines, the general idea is that those who are scared are essentially easily hypnotised and susceptible to marketing, PR and propaganda. The whole mask thing is there to ensure those sort of people go to the shops and not those of us who are completely unaffected by marketing and advertising.
Masks is schools is again pandering to the hysterical.
What we need is somebody to spell it out in plain terms. No masks. Those parents that ensure their children go to school are rational good parents and those that don’t are hysterical bad parents.
It’s way past time we stopped appeasing hysterics.
Thing is, the Royal Society have clarified they are useless in Schools. No evidence they say.
It was on the news headlines again today. The clip showing the Royal Society rep saying don’t bloody bother with them. But they move on and continue to discuss it. PHE then quoted to say no need. Still, not enough for the hysterical. They are still talking about this. The anchor has actually said the Science is settled, corridors are cess pits of infection.
It’s exhausting. Pandering to the scared. We opened a Pandoras box using fear as the method to deliver policy. The anchor just read out an email from a concerned parent freaking out about sending their kid into a death zone.
It really is on a scale I’ve never seen before.
Anchor to concerned parent:
“You have said you’ll only send your kid back once the scientists say it is safe. The 12 scientists on SAGE have said it is safe. Thoughts?”
Mum:
“That is a supposition from Chris Witty. Not science. Until there is a vaccine schools are not safe.”
Anger levels rising
Trouble is, sorting this mess out quickly requires even more draconian measures, such as fines or taking people’s children away (NOT a good idea, I hasten to add). The only way to end this nonsense is to end ALL coronavirus restrictions, REPEAL the Coronavirus Act, and let the situation sort itself out.
Then the hysterical can either get a grip, or starve at home. I tend to think that they’ll get a grip.
They will have to go in to full reverse I’m hoping. But when a person like Ms. Greening thinks getting children to wear masks in school should be ‘considered’ – it could yet be a long haul.
This is good – if they do want to end this nonsense. What signs have we seen of that since, I dunno, March ?
Until there is a consistent message across the board, we’ll continue to have hysteria amongst parents. Now they can just point at public transport and shops and cry, “But, but, but, it’s over there, isn’t it?” I mean the “smart virus” joke only works here.
We’ve been pandering to hysterical bullshit ever since the beginning. These people need to get a grip, or get help, or fuck off. I’m through with them.
The Lancet meta study of 130 papers was held up as the key to the new science. No RCTs, just mechanistic, observational studies of course.
And the actual review did not prove anything. It is this idea that if there is a chance they can work, we should use them.
Health of wearers and psychological aspects to masks was not part of it.
That the Science is now settled has been embedded in the national psyche now. The SAGE members all moved into line. The reason? For any effect to be made from masks, and I remain open to the idea that they do but that the hard evidence suggests otherwise, everyone needs to wear them all the time. So the messaging has to be ridiculous enough to make it seem they will save us and dissenters are baby killers. Nudge nudge. Sickening.
Thats the reason Norway did not mandate them. You have to get 100% compliance to even register a measurable impact if at all. So it’s effectively pointless.
They are now pushing for 5 year olds to wear them. It’s making me feel extremely low as my eldest starts Primary 1 tomorrow.
So there was some sort of ‘science’ that could be held up as propelling the decision. Well, I suppose they had to find something. But I suspect what really drove it was the needs of commerce as they saw it.
The online petition against their compulsory use drew a government response, which I don’t have to hand, which spoke a lot about the commercial benefits it was conceived that mask wearing would bring.
In the Irish Republic, where I now be, it was linked to a modest rise in cases – which have increased ten fold since – mainly due I’m sure to the increase in testing.
Home school, and demand your taxes back.
If my boss (if I had one) told me that I couldn’t come into work because the most deadly disease ever known to man was killing people, I’d say ok I’m not coming back until it’s gone.
If he then told me it’s ok to come back I’d simply ask, is it gone yet?
This is the situation the government has created.
Just been for my twice weekly shop at Tesco, large superstore. Almost deserted – OK, pouring down with rain might be something to do with it. They seem to have gone overboard with the perspex screens at the checkout, hard for the lady to reach me to give me my change.
Noticed this in our local paper regarding the losses from the town car parks – A report indicates that despite car park charges being reintroduced in July, the number of cars returning to council-owned car parks was down 45 per cent on budgeted figures. Huge town centre, totally rebuilt couple of years ago, but obviously footfall has plummeted.
Mandating on public transport, didn’t encourage more people into the office, or the shops.
With the cities/town centres effectively abandoned, I think the only places that have seen an increase are small towns/tourist areas, judging from what I’ve seen at least.
They said it was to give people confidence to shop. Didn’t believe it for a second, myself.
The whole narrative is now about ‘asymptomatic’, and treating people that are as if they’ve just been admitted to an ICU. I thought they were supposed to be the good guys. The ones that carry immunity around the community. If Hancock goes about randomly testing hundreds of thousands to find these people and stop them, then the meddling will probably cause untold damage to the natural immunity system that has got humans all the way to here via real, proper, epidemics. He/they haven’t a clue what they’re messing with.
Every single policy that’s been brought in wears down the immune system. This is commonplace knowledge – sunshine, fresh air, exercise, hobbies, happy social interactions. There comes a point where one has to question the assumption that they don’t know what they are messing with.
Face masks make us much more susceptible to disease, imho, which is actually no bad thing after months of us avoiding each other…
It really is Alice in Wonderland. They are testing in order to establish who isn’t ill
Correct me if I’m wrong, but pre the sham pandemic (remember that) if I felt unwell an option was to contact a doctor (or not)
In Matts new la la land they come looking for you in order to tell you that you are not ill, which was something you knew already
I’m living in a madhouse
Brilliant.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/testing-overview.html
These are the brand new testing guidelines from CDC.Many has been very surprised by these as they indicate a great change and does not seem to encourage mass testing and a more relaxed attitude.
If you have a close contact with a C-19 patient you don’t need (except risk groups) to do anything if you have no symptoms. You don’t need then to be tested. How does fit with the narrative that asymptomatic can spread? So, when a child/teenager has C-19 and the other pupils are OK no need to do any testing at all?
If you have symptoms and have positive test they clearly say there is no need for a repeat test. After isolation you are fine.
If you don’t have symptoms you do not need a test.
If you are in high C-19 transmission area and attended a gathering more than 10 without social distancing and mask(heaven forbid!) you don’t necessarily need to be tested unless you develop symptoms.
There are some strange things. If you develop C-19 like symptoms you should isolate 10 days. How on earth are you to distinguish C-19 symptoms for common cold symptoms? That would be costly for the society if everybody followed that and not much education for kids.
People with these symptoms may have COVID-19:
Then in the final paragraph the caveat
It is important to realize that you can be infected and spread the virus but feel well and have no symptoms.
Trying to find UK guidelines for testing, not the easiest task considering the chaotic UK response. I am trying to find similar to US CDC guidelines for the UK but I can’t find them easily. Clicking on the UK gov PHE sites mostly come up how to get a test. But whom should be tested? Under which circumstance? Exposed? Probably too ignorant to find them most likely some gem hidden in their pages.
So, basically, we don’t even know why we are testing
We do. It’s cos media demanded bigger numbers, Boris the useless idiot and Hancock willingly obliged, then they volunteered bigger and bigger numbers all the time, and now they have a target of 4,000,000 tests by next year or something.
They are testing because they said they could test sooo many people, and so now they must meet that stated aim.
Testing for Covid is rapidly becoming the human equivalent of TB testing in cattle. A damaging and pointless search for a phantom disease and all so we can continue to export/ go on holiday. Load of b’llocks.
It reads like the CDC are going for Bojo’s arse covering policy, just like all the media and govs. So giving reasons why they might not test “enough”, but also why they might test too much.
It’s like “Go down the pub, but don’t go down the pub” or ” Go to the blonde American birds flat for a shag, but don’t shag”
People aren’t willing now, but what about after another 18, or even 6 months of restrictions of liberties, unemployment and lack of access to healthcare? Different decisions are made under desperate conditions.
In less time than this people will be more concerned with where their next meal will be coming from. There will not be a vaccine until late next year at the earliest. The economy, as is, cannot last till then. October, in my view, is the turning point.
Yes, when Rishi turns the money-tap off we’e liable to see some serious unrest. The govt know all about this; it will be their big opportunity to bring in martial law to protect the grateful normies who, let’s face it, comprise the majority of the population.
Fascism comes to Australia. With a death rate of 0.006.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8659955/Furious-British-man-lashes-police-hes-handcuffs-not-wearing-mask-Melbourne.html
Good on him. At last some display of Bulldog spirit.
What a surprise.
Reported to have occurred on Barky Street, more like Barking Street if you ask me
So this is what DoesDymSyniad is up to? Thought I hadn’t seen him for a few days…
A rare Daily Mail article that doesn’t allow comments. Rather like life in Australia these days.
More madness.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53901236
In days of yore, it was a common pastime after Church on a Sunday to visit lunatic asylums. You’d pay 1d to the warden, and spending a merrie afternoon pointing and laughing at the antics of the inmates.
I feel like this is now the case for me every time I check in on the mainstream media.
Laughed aloud at this. Cheered me up on a wet, dismal morning.
The bit that makes me laugh loudest is when you scroll down the page until you run out of the “Most Read” items to the right. There’s a little “i” sign with the funniest sentence I’ve ever read: “Why you can trust BBC News”.
Pull the other one!
Never again will I use the phrase ‘it couldn’t get any worse’! It’s official, covid19 only physically kills 0.1% of people but for most of the other 99.99% it seems to kill common sense and the ability to think!
Wonderful – Mrs BTL and I were ROTFL as the young would say
I do hope this isn’t a hoax!
I must be out of touch. I thought they changed the slogan to “So good” a while back. Maybe I didn’t notice them changing it back.
Or even visit a supermarket in Merrie Olde Englande.
The French media piece, found by Ivor Cummins and referenced by Toby:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ulA8u05Z-Q&feature=youtu.be
is tremendous.
The interviewer lets him speak, but the body language of the other guest is a treat; I suspect Prof. Toussaint’s next post will be Junior Ass’t Prof in far-flung Reunion or Martinique!
I’ve asked my brother (lives in France) whether this has gained much traction over there.
Apart from the vaccine (?) they can buy it off the shelf from China where it is all up and working.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/aug/25/van-morrison-blasts-covid-gig-limits-pseudoscience Good to see Van the Man encouraging artists to stand up against socially distanced gigs.
Yes. Not suprised he’s a sceptic . He’s a grumpy oul shite, but his shows are top notch.
A few years ago a mate of mine, who worked as cabin crew for BA, and lived in Belfast, carried Van a few times back and forth. Mentioned he was getting married and Van turned up at the reception, on a bike, with a guitar over his shoulder to do the music. Good bloke.
What if, and it is a big what if, Oxford do actually have a working vaccine? I know someone on the project and they said that they have been working on a CV vaccine for years. The world would want our vaccine and would place us in a very strong bargaining position come Brexit. I don’t think it will be mandatory and perhaps they are just getting all ducks in a row before ending this madness?
Trying to find some silver lining to all this but probably clutching at straws.
Difficult to analyse responses to this situation because it is so fundamentally irrational. I mean that in the sense that the supposed need for a vaccine is not based on any objective assessment of the real risks of the disease it targets, but rather based on its use to counter irrationally inflated fears of the disease. So the “need” that has been puffed up presumably out of panic or for political purposes could almost as easily be manipulated downwards if a vaccine is inconveniently costly to get hold of.
In the end, hysteria and political goals aside, we are talking about an untried vaccine for a type of cold – useful to have but hardly a priority.
Please can somebody/everybody tap ‘hamster in masks’ and report what results look like.
I have just done so and got a google graphic of a hamsters with words overlaid telling me Covid is not passed from hamster to hamster in masks. Not a joke. This is the key reserach as to why people across tge globe are force-wearing masks.
Yeah I get a handy info box on Google results with a stupid picture of a hamster and text about the hamster study.
Cheers. I am amazed. But there’s another string in our sceptic bow. Asking people who are starting to see the light to do that search may give rhem a sense of foolishness.
Incidentally, thoughts about human lung power, facial hair and face/mask shape occured to me. Like for like or apples and oranges.
I thought the original paper claimed the hamsters were simply separated in cages and there was a mask material between the cages?
But yeah that little info box makes it sound like they actually made teeny tiny hamster masks… surely not?!
There a group called DELVE that feeds into SAGE they have a paper which talks masked hamsters.
See todays first comment thread for more.
It appears hamsters in masks is the resesrch.
War of sceptic vs ‘bedwetters’ or any other pejorative term is part of a contagious psyop.
As if being right has anything to do with truth.
Is it possibly a misprint for Hampstead in masks?
Hipsters
Find reliable research proving transmission without masks?
Belief in contagion is a fear – not a fact – but fear is contagion.
Once you enter the psyop – you are framed in lies.
As if it’s not absurd enough, hamsters are well known solitary mammals.
It’s official!
It’s more likely that you would die from being hit by an asteroid that dying from Covid 19…….
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/asteroid-impact-chance-nasa-center-for-near-earth-object-studies-a9683786.html?amp
I posted about this last week. To be fair, I think the risk is calculated over a lifetime, but still a nice pub worthy factoid.
Well the article doesn’t talk about the risks of being killed by asteroid strike, but it’s worth bearing this in mind from Astronomy:
“However, researchers still have not found a single confirmed case of death by space rock. “
Maybe not, but many have been rendered comatose by Hawkwind…
Space is deep…
We Will Mock You
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=121&v=Sk-qqmlXlzQ&feature=emb_logo
Excellent, but the link above did not work for me. Try this: https://youtu.be/Sk-qqmlXlzQ
Love the fact that the first comment is “This is offensive”, and the makers have pinned it to the top…..
CDC report on methanol in handgunk…
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932e1.htm?s_cid=mm6932e1_w#contribAff
Did these people really drink it??
Extreme alcoholics will use anything – it’s always been a problem in Native American communities in particular, probably of their isolation on reservations. The clue is on the states mentioned – Arizona and New Mexico.
Good point, though the report does also infer intake via the skin as a danger
Interesting…some people might be more vulnerable to skin intake. I guess. I knew someone who worked with Native Americans in Canada – some of the alcoholics would eat shoe polish for its alcohol content.
Yes – once you can destroy a cultural identity – the fragments that remain can seek connection in insane and self-destructive ways.
I can’t use the stuff at all and if I inhale it, I have an asthma attack. I wish people would stop using it on the bus where I’m stuck breathing it.
Methanol – used in many industrial processes – and even products sold as food – converts to formaldehyde in the body. I have read plausible arguments for this neurotoxicity as underlying many ‘diseases’ that operate our medical system while covering for or masking over corporate industrial profits set above the conditions for life.
Instead of person of the year I think Time magazine should have word of the year.
My nomination is “arbitrary”
What about “bollocks”
I had imagined a scrotal sac mask. But I resist playing within a temptation to make an identity from deceit that then engages in polarised reaction.
And in the new category of most promising letter of the year, the winner is…R.
There should be a prize for “most misleading statement purporting to be based on science”. Professor Ferguson should surely win that for the Brits…
When you look carefully you will see that legal advices operate such as to backtrack the official claims after the leverage has been enacted – or the regulations signed in.
With the internet comes the ability to remake the past to suit the present, daily.
Fergusson wins acceptance and protection within the Gated Community.
Which is one thread of a many threaded network of deceit of ‘masked’ or hidden agenda.
“Time magazine should have word of the year“
FEAR!
Panic!
HYSTERIA
Or as the globalist alliance might put it: the only thing we have to fear is the end of fear.
Sturgeon wants children forced into masks. We need to have some tests done on these masks after use, from what I’ve heard they are actually a breeding ground for germs, warm breath, confined space, they are actually going to harm children
That would be agreeing with their framing.
Masks do work – in environments like hospitals where disease particles are in high concentration.
In a country where less than 19,000 people have the disease they can’t possibly have any effect at all. Except on the bottom line of the mask suppliers.
The amount of litter the things are causing should be enough to have them stopped.
You believe that they work in hospitals – as does almost everyone else.
But here at least is a basis to review the belief:
https://www.realfoodhouston.com/wp-files/dr-arthur-firstenbergs-research-on-medical-face-masks/
I know masks work to protect the wearer in dusty environments – such as insulating my loft.
The whole subject of ‘contagion’ cannot be separated from superstition. And superstition operates a sort of mind-capture to those who believe it protects them or the World from Catastrophe.
To the controller class, contagion is where too much light leaks into the system and discloses a lack of true foundation in its core such as to present a threat to the system as a whole and thus ‘too big to fail’. And so the suppression of the ‘virus’ of a growing awareness of a protection racket of organised crime demands staying in front of the curve and of course flattening it.
There is a belief that organised crime is better than a disorganised crime – and that the consolidation of control as a systemic network of fronting appearances or subverted institutions is the lesser evil, the necessary evil or the moral necessity.
Fear of pain of loss is a common denominator. But living is an alignment in the Movement of Life – not aligning in fear of death. These two ‘guides or voices’ are in our mind and each can seem to be the other – especially as a result of seeking to co-fuse both within one narrative identity.
Slightly off-topic: AlBeeba running an article on polio in Africa:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-53887947
Talks about eliminating “wild polio” and “only the vaccine-derived polio remains….”
What may I ask is the “vaccine-derived polio” when it’s at home?
You made me curious. The BBC article carries on with This is a rare form of the virus that mutates from the oral polio vaccine and can then spread to under-immunised communities.” Searching further, I found an answer on the CDC website: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-derived-poliovirus-faq.html. Sounds nasty but not a concern in parts of the world where people have been immunised against polio. I’m certainly not up to speed on the current state of the polio vaccine since I was given the sugar cube version in the 60s when I was a girl.
If you had the free awareness to research beneath the official narrative on polio you would have a lot more understanding of how covid hijacks our selves.
The ability to lump a number of conditions that have plausible toxicological causes under one ‘brand name’ – run lots of distressing PR – and launch a restatement of pharmaceutical dominance into the public mind through the changing of the parameters for defining, diagnosing, testing and treating – is genie that wont go back in its bottle.
You could look at HIV too.
The first level of Immunity at the body level is the barriers or membranes of skin as well as internal membranes such as gut lining and lung lining.
The trojan horse that promises to boost what it actually undermines also undermines the vitality of the ability to respond to toxic events and this can suppress the symptoms of immune response without addressing the even that activates the response.
The recognition of being ‘delivered unto evil’ by false promises is a very old wisdom – but wisdom cannot be taught or trained into people. But it can be lived, demonstrated and held in cultural narratives.
Once people invest in the ‘protection’ they become dependent and effectively captured or even addicted, such as to lose their own ability to perceive or respond within life – but only as the ‘standard of care’ defines, diagnoses and treats or manages the pharmaceutically repackaged problem to serve as a pharmaceutical asset.
It might be obvious that fear of an evil or negative outcome is the condition that attarcts and can succumb to ‘magical answers’ or placebos that firstly offer a re-flagged condition to an ‘authority’ in the world, and secondly derive such authority as the overriding of fears and doubts – to the extent that further disease from the treatments is almost invariably assigned to the ‘disease’ that develops, jumps, mutates or otherwise masks itself in all kinds of complexities that are themselves a call for further diagnosis and medication.
The underlying causality for any disease condition is generally displaced or false-flagged by default of a mind operating as conflict evasion under narrative justifications, but fear as a glossed over or suppressed feedback or symptom, is not the basis for a true resolution.
Hence a mind and world in which ‘truth’ is relativised to perceptions, feeling and worldviews by the ability to direct or control the narrative of which they are derived.
BBC ramping up the masks in schools propaganda campaign, it’s dominating their news broadcasts , VD asking parents to phone in with their concerns so irrational fears will be reflected back at an ill informed population rather than the bbc doing the job we pay them for and educating people with facts.
By tonight it will be ‘pressure is mounting on the government’ and ‘there are growing calls’ and by tomorrow kids will be muzzled in school.
The media are driving this.
But the government will follow what media say if the public are seemingly scared.
This fear mongering is dreadful.
Just as Sturgeon planned it.
Why would she plan it?
That doesn’t make sense.
Many of her announcements have forced Boris to climb down from his previously stated position. This is another one in my opinion. Her popularity seems to rely quite heavily on continued success in undermining Westminster.
Masks are a great way to perpetuate the idea that there is a public health emergency, giving the government an opportunity for almost unfettered, unscrutinised power and glory. What’s not to like about them, if you’re a politician?
Lampposts … pitchforks …
Sturgeon doesn’t know what she is doing. She’s just another bought and paid for shill for the new world order. Your life is what she is buying her mansion with. Fuck her.
Without a doubt, her tactics from the beginning, but it needs a weak government to be effective, ditto with the media driving the agenda, they most certainly are, but the government has let them without a fight.
Yeah, I head that on the BBC radio this morning. Same old fear-mongering. Useful idiots claiming the government’s guidance on face coverings is “unclear”. What’s unclear about “you don’t need them”? They won’t stop until everybody is masked up forever. Why?
Perhaps we ought to be asking why the BBC appears so determined to destroy children’s education?
Because it’s a story and the invent of 24/7 media, the internet and social media have just made this situation so tragic.
The BBC will keep looking for fear stories until the Government tell them to stop.
The line of masks= child abuse needs to be pushed at every opportunity.
Terrible secrets rise from turning a blind eye that at the time was merely part of a largely tacit consensus.
If you life, career and social inclusion depends on fitting the narrative then is it your part to be crucified? and for what?
After the fact moral outrage struts its stuff.
Saville had very many friends in very high places.
Because the BBC could educate children via various platforms and replace physical schools.
To remake the world it the controller’s image. So what is new?
Why people continue to listen to propaganda channels without a condom is perhaps the spell of a fascination that cannot be broken while reacting to anything it says as ‘true’.
This virus has given all the irrational people in the world more of a voice than they should ever be allowed.
I suggest that manipulators are extremely rational minds operating without a feeling awareness. They prey or feed on those who invest in emotionally driven identity, that runs wishfully or as an augmented bubble overlay to an otherwise intolerably harsh or loveless sense of life and world. Or rather they feed each other.
If fear threatens to overwhelm the sense of order that still holds some sense of control, then anything that serves the purpose of suppressing and mitigating the fear is assigned power and allegiance.
If Reason is Sanity – then the fear has to be felt and faced and the temptation to recoil passed by or left unchosen. For the fear defined mind is conflicted and cannot answer its own problem at the level of its presentation.
You could say that the fear assigned to ‘virus’ has exposed an irrational recoil to a masking reality that demands facts comply with its model or be smeared or ignored.
Fear can be assigned to ‘carbon’ (dioxide) or to any other leveraged and weaponised sense of guilt, shame or invalidity or lack of worth – EXPOSED or at a cost, protected.
The ideal of rationality is predicated upon circular reasoning – but Reason is a wholeness of thought and feeling and awareness or sensing as a unified expression. The capacity to Feel in its original or native sense is denied or blocked by emotional reactivity – which is thinking that runs as conditioned response or rather reaction.
It’s possible the government always wanted masks in schools and are using the BBC and others as cover. I think it’s also plausible that the government don’t want masks in schools (it’s not a good look, and may alienate a lot of parents) and the BBC are pursuing their own agenda.
It may look like the BBC is doing the government’s bidding here, but my gut feel is that if the government starts to go down the sceptic path, the BBC will start to attack them.
No it only very approx but both deaths and infections have levelled off and are starting to fall on worldometer there will.be no 2nd wave it will b over by the autumn
Heretic!
We didn’t have a first wave
If it’s seasonal we might get another season of it in winter. I don’t know if it is or not, or what the latest thinking is on this.
If it’s seasonal then it’s likely the case numbers will rise at some point. However, it’s unlikely to be anywhere near as bad as it got the first time round.
The problem now is that we’re stuck in a self made trap. There may never be a “second wave” but we will never know because they won’t let it happen regardless.
The world is now set up to prevent something that may never happen. That is the trap we’re all stuck in.
Please let me know (here) any stories of how you “converted” non-sceptics, if any.
If so, what “facts” worked best?
Also, where were do you think they were on the sceptic scale?
0 = Jacinda Ardern
10 = Peter Hitchens
Thanks
Ask them to guess how many weeks it’s been that fewer people are dying in UK than 5 year average. Makes them think so it sinks in.
Know the current answer and the simple reason behind it
Stress that it is not from twatter or Facebook but from Govt ONS.
If they take the point they generally ask
“Why are we not being told” and away you ho
Tell them seasonal flu is taking five times as many people as covid now. Also seasonal flu levels are bang on average so face-nappies (always angers them) and social distancing have had zero effect.
My 14 y/o was concerned (understandably, from the MSM) but he is good at maths, so I pointed him to the worldometer dashboard and just divided the total deaths (~800,000) by the world population and came to the logical conclusion that we’re not all going to die.
So a “look at the real numbers” approach should work for someone usually rational who can do some basic maths. For other types, probably a different approach may be better.
The real numbers are a great help
The most fearful though will just say there will be a second wave. Less hope for them.
Others will resist because of the sunk cost fallacy tendency. They need working on, gently. Time and patience and data and good news.
Some people come at it from the other direction. They see 1 death as terrible and as the numbers increase it gets worse from their perspective.
What I would say to these people is this:
Yes 800k dead does seem awful doesn’t it. What if those deaths were spread out over 10 years. Would that be as bad, after all it’s the same number? What about over 50 or 100 years?
This should open their mind to the idea that numbers need context.
The other approach is get them to look at the number of e.g. cancer deaths to put it in context (about 12x the number of Covid deaths worldwide – every year) and explain how shutting down the health service is letting people die unnecessarily. The lives vs. lives argument, hard to argue with that for anyone concerned about deaths overall.
In fact a broader question is, by what logic is it sane to shutdown health services during an epidemic, or any other time? What is it we are supposed to be “saving” the NHS for, that we are paying a fortune for? How is it acceptable to turn away sick people when hospitals are at anything less than 100% capacity? Why are people not angry about this?
someone usually rational who can do some basic maths
Asking an awful lot there, Zacaway.
Well, yes – perhaps that the root of the problem
Usually rational? Can do basic maths?
That cuts out 99% of Britain’s population.
Numbers work for us, but unfortunately the masses simply cannot understand either very big or very small numbers. You have to unfortunately put it into terms they do understand. So compare the chance of their little brat dying to the the chances of winning the jackpot on the lottery (which is actually pretty close). Don’t use percentages smaller than 1%, they don’t understand, use one-in-x. Compare the chance of themselves dying to the chance of them being killed in a car accident. Real life examples of probability are the only way to get it into their monkey brains.
I am afraid I have not managed to convert anyone. Most people I know well enough to talk to about this are either already sceptical or the complete opposite and the pro-lockdown people after a few attempts I have given up and stopped speaking to them completely as they were not interested in discussing it.
I was maybe a 3 or 4 on your scale, but in the space of a week or two went to a 10 on the basis of having looked into the actual risks, and realising there had been no cost benefit analysis
Responded to your request at the very beginning of today’s comments, LDT! Hope it’s a helpful contribution.
I think most people fall on the 3-4 on the scale. If we can get them thinking 6-7 then that in itself is a result. I’ve spoken to people, not sure if I’ve converted any. Hopefully made them think.
Had to edit that, scale wrong way wround. Duh! I was about 11 on the scale from the very start. When the press start giving out lurid details, I know they’re lying and immediately default to the opposite position and a bit.
It was the personal ‘tragedies’ stories that did it for me early on. The beginning of the irresponsible MSM scaremongering. Set off warning bells that all was not right.
I find that whilst most people I know think the current situation is crazy they’re willing to go along with it, in public anyway rather than protest in any way. That’s the hard thing to overcome.
That pissed me off too, “my dad died of Covid is more sad than your dad got run over by a truck.”.
Government policy as advised by SPI-B.
SAGE felt that some people (rightly) didn’t feel afraid so the press was used for some hard hitting emotional messaging.cant link but Peter Hitchens has the document as his header piece on Twitter.
You cannot reason with a fanatic.
Any individual loses his ability to think critically, when he becomes first and foremost part of a crowd.
Lockdown, masks etc. proponents will only change sides when they have become impacted negatively themselves.
First only individually, when they start losing their jobs/income, when they are denied treatment, when they are quarantined without symptoms, when they are denied access or sanctioned due to insufficient social credit or a refusal to get vaccinated.
Then as group/crowd of such people.
Lastly and in droves only when they, their children and their newborns start to get ill, handicapped and die in droves due to the vaccinations.
Which will happen.
I think it’s the neutrals we should focus on first – lots of people I know are not especially fearful or signed up to the narrative, they are just a bit lazy and apathetic and assume all this nonsense must sort of be for a good reason, and is temporary. Once they get over the hurdle of realising they’ve been had, they will come over to our side.
It aill happen. And I shall not lament.
I’ve converted a half dozen. It was a long, relentless process.
It’s not quick, and most that I have experienced are already around the 5 mark – compliant rather than believing.
All I do is to try (not always successfully) not to sound obsessed, but simply drop in well-established factual stuff about, for instance, the unexceptional mortality, the dodgy nature of PCR defined ‘cases’ and the low rate of infection, ICU occupancy and hospital deaths.
I point people towards the CEBM data and couple it with the question -“Well how many people do you know that had a serious illness?’ – which is always a pause for thought.
I stay off any wider ‘Why?’ theories – beyond pointing out the old ‘Follow the money’ rule.
One of the barriers is that people, by their very nature, do not want to believe that the framework of society in which they live can be so corrupted by sheer lies and misinformation.
Keeping people out of the FEARZONE is the first goal, and most important. At home we have to help one another at times. The argument that your are more likely to die in a car crash works well. I say that I don’t believe a word I hear on TV.
Also talk about convalescence, and the things we used to all know such as fresh air an exercise
I’ve not converted any one particular person, but keep at it whenever I can, and definitely boost the confidence of anyone who hasn’t fallen in.
Listen and respond to the other person. Some can take a more robust approach and others you have to drip doubt.
Have an answer ready for when somebody bleats “Better to be safe than sorry”.
I haven’t found facts to be all that useful to start with. Emotion is a more powerful tool. Play the MSM and the nudge “scientists” at their own game. It seems Toby has increasingly gone this route, pointing out the tragedies caused by lockdown. These are impossible to ignore. Once people start to come around a little, slip in a few facts here and there.
I agree 100%, I’ve found talking about the dreadful way old people have been treated in care homes, lack of treatment for cancer patients etc way more effective because most people like to see themselves as caring and unselfish. Whilst I think people should be way more concerned that they are about civil liberties and the economy, most don’t think that way or even understand the implication of assaults on their civil liberties and many seem remarkably callous about businesses suffering as if ‘business’ was a dirty word – I also think Toby is on to something here.
The average age of covid death versus the average age of death. Friend was a 5 or a 6.
Honesty and respect – not ‘conversion’
I’d put healing first … but those who are capable should be converted where possible.
Justine Greening advocating masks in schools on the Today programme earlier. Reported in Telegraph Asked why it was necessary given the relatively low risk to children, she said: “If you can make that even lower then it is something that should be considered.”
Give me strength! I am not an angry person but I am increasingly feeling positively violent. Do these people have concrete between their ears?
So no discussion of the costs to children of wearing them? I don’t even need to check.
This too, from DT live:
Staff and pupils at 52 schools run by the Oasis Academy chain will be wearing masks when they reopen, the founder has said.
Steve Chalke, told the BBC it was “all about common sense and taking responsibility”, adding: “There is no such thing as being Covid-safe, just Covid-safer.
“Based on our values and our sense of morality – these are the moves that we are choosing to make.”
He told the BBC News channel face coverings will be considered part of the uniform.
He added: “We will consult with everyone but this is the way we are going… we believe this makes our schools safer than they would otherwise be”, not just for students and staff but also their families.
How do you get lower than nothing. They’ve never thought about making RTA’s lower in any real sense.
Didn’t you know? Children wearing masks in schools will resurrect grannies killed by Covid. © The Science™
No but she has NO children herself and that does matter in this instance.
I see your point, but I have no children either, yet consider them with the same compassion, if not more, than I feel for all human beings.
Me too, I fail to see how childlessness affects this issue.
When I see the way some parents treat their offspring, it’s obvious to me that ones fertility does not necessarily have much bearing on ones compassion or love.
Difference is, she’s a psychopath. You’re not.
An entire political class and societal elite with a almost complete, infantile ignorance of cost/benefit and diminishing returns.
Or they simply don’t give a flying f.
… which is just as belivable – and well documented in the case of Mr Toad’s constant pursuit of his own infantile and incontinent desires at everybody else’s expense.
She always thick,
But not on their way to school, our county council have announced social distancing not necessary on school buses.
Hahaha! That’s cos they’re short of buses!
Look at the comments below the article in the DT – all very strongly against Greening’s viewpoint. So far not a single one in favour.
The DT are doing a poll about this.
65% back the government to stick with its no school masks policy.
So why is so much MSM space being given to promoting this form of child abuse?!
ICYMI. A brilliant, uplifting article in the DM.
“No lockdown, no masks, no hysteria… NO PROBLEM: Sweden didn’t go into a corona coma – and it’s living in glorious normality. Now DOMINIC SANDBROOK asks: Is this proof we got it all terribly wrong?”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8652523/No-lockdown-no-hysteria-DOMINIC-SANDBROOK-asks-Sweden-proof-got-terribly-wrong.html
As previously noted, since the globalists took over the Mail it’s been in a state of total confusion.
5,000+ replies!
Masks are PPE and as such are disposed of in a specific way as they are a breeding ground for germs, not to be kept in pockets, bags, lying on desks or anywhere else. The real reason is control,seeing people muzzled gives politicians like Sturgeon a feeling of power.
Like nasty children torturing dumb animals.
Good analogy, Annie. They know masks are harmful, yet push them anyway.
Good analogy.
My cat brought in a sparrow this morning – got thrown straight outside to eat it in the rain!
There’s an analogy there too.
I think the bigger picture is probably quite simple.
Lots of people died, the world was seemingly unprepared. It was lucky this virus wasn’t particularly deadly but next time we better be prepared.
Any measures put in place now will be with us forever in preparation for a future threat.
This will be how they’ll spin it anyway.
A cotton panty masks are unlikely to save us from anthrax or bubonic plague when they get ‘accidentally’ released.
… again.
The anthrax sent to various people in the US was traced back to a government lab.
It’s the 9/11 approach all over again. Things that weren’t acceptable before 9/11 are just considered “normal” now. Remember that next time you see armed police in an airport (should it ever be possible or desirable to go to an airport again).
People have family in other countries.
And, fwiw, the ‘armed’ plod at Gatwick were initially not provided with live ammo. I don’t know the current situation.
Mandatory mask wearing is nothing to do with public health.
The country is divided into Skeptics and Bedwetters. The Bedwetters are permanently scared, believe all the MSM and government propaganda and unfailingly wear masks. They will, no doubt, accept mandatory vaccinations too.
The Skeptics question all this and believe it to be bullshit. But, to me, it seems that the bedwetters are winning.
To get our lives back, there has to be a mass pushback. I’m not a young man anymore, but I will take part in any concerted mass disobedience and/or protests.
They’re not winning here in North Wales. Masks are not mandatory in shops and mask-wearers are very much in a minority, among locals and with tourists from elsewhere (mostly England).
Take away the threat of fines and social shaming, and you’ll probably see the same thing in England and Scotland, I reckon.
Is it possible to use what is happening in Wales (no masks) as an anti-mask argument to those who are blind to the facts? If masks are a good thing, why is life more normal in Wales and how come they dont have a rise in cases? That sort of thing.
Certainly people should be comparing masked regions vs. no-masked regions and drawing conclusions from some measured effects (ideally, counting hospitalisations for covid). MSM not interested in asking these obvious questions.
Yes – we could be the Sweden of the UK.
In fact, (I can’t find the link) I read recently that cases (for what they’re worth) are rising much slower here than in the rest of the UK.
However, bear in mind that Wales is a very rural area (especially mid-Wales and much of the North away from the coastal region), though the pattern seems to be the same in more urban south-east region.
Yes, if you’ve access to the bbc 9 o’clock news. Otherwise no.
Mr. Dee (can I call you Afon?), grateful for your insight, love North Wales/Anglesey. Was considering a return visit later this year, staying a half hour walk from Benllech. Last time we were there, pubs were shut, so I was just looking round yesterday to see what’s happening. Found this, so ill-informed, it’s depressing:
We are still operating a one way system, limiting people at the bar and generally making sure everyone is safe. in line with welsh government advice with regards to wearing face coverings, we are recommending that customers do so inside whilst moving around the pub, and only take them off whilst they are seated. As the increase in covid -19 cases in Manchester has now resulted in the situation being declared a major incident, we feel it makes sense that everyone does as much as they can, to keep Anglesey safe. So if you do fancy coming and have a meal or drink inside we will run through how everything works when you arrive
Might still visit Ynys Mon, but not ‘The Benllech’.
I’ve not been up to Anglesey for ages, so can’t say what’s happening there. Benllech is lovely.
I’m based, surprise surprise, near the Dee Valley (hence my moniker). People are back on their barge holidays along the Llangollen canal, and Llangollen seems back to normal (was packed during the heatwave a few weeks ago). You have to pre-book for some of the restaurants though, due to social distancing regulations resulting in less space inside.
I think, in few weeks, when I have time, I’ll take a trip to Anglesey and check it out.
My only experience so far of life outside Wales is Chester – which again seems normal (though I avoid the shops). Riverside was bustling last time I went.
I’m off to Manchester in 3 weeks (stepson starting at Uni there) so it will be interesting to compare life there with what I’ve been used to so far.
Standing on the bridge on Castle St. is one of my favourite places. I’m in Greater Manchester, we are thoroughly wicked people, as you may have read. Helicopter was up last night, with search light on, probably looking for ‘Jelly and cream’ incidents. We also have something called ‘cases’, so you will need a full hazmat suit when visiting.
Sorry mate just back from two days in Llangollen and found the experience depressing. True no masks in shops but then limited numbers allowed in so you have to queue outside. Masks on public transport. Can’t just go to the pub you have to pre book a slot and the atmosphere was dead due to limited numbers and table service. Same with cafes. Had my temperature taken before being allowed into one. Track and trace everywhere. Staff all masked/visored up. One way systems etc etc. Thought we might get away from the madness in England but apart from no masks in shops it was the same.
Yuk. Thanks for the heads up. It’s usually a day trip for us, so driving, but last time we stayed there, I got the bus up to Wrexham and went to the two Wethy’s. They seem to be handling the shitshow fairly well, at least round here.
On a break in Wales this week – just went to the local Asda – what a treat – you lucky people! Hope it stays this way for you.
Probably doesn’t help calling them Bedwetters! How about Believers. They are more credulous rather than more easily frightened.
A reasonable point – even if the sane section of society are totally frustrated by the incontinent terror that some people seem to have that bears no relation to the actual threat.
It seems to me that the whole edifice of restrictions is a pack of cards, and the government are terrified of is tumbling down.They recognise that the damage to the economy is unsustainable – but the new toy of social control is sooo attractive that they are reluctant to let go. They’re also so far up the gum tree that they need to keep the narrative in play – thus the stupidity (in rational terms) of what is being imposed.
Once people openly realize that it is a pack of cards, the whole thing will tumble – and that’s what needs to be pushed – although none of us will be strangers to the expectation of such fictions as ‘second waves’, ‘R’ numbers and ‘Test and Trace’ being pushed.
The one bright spot is, that the restrictions in the UK are relatively easy to circumvent and lift.
I am absolutely certain that Johnson&co were always and are still primarily focussed upon making the coming no deal Brexit appear as successful as possible, so all restrictions will likely be lifted at year end, in contrast to the other countries.
I think we’ve just had a useful lesson in how important a general social contempt for excessive fearfulness can be in controlling panics, by seeing how quickly panic spreads when society’s elite refuses to do it, and instead turns its social pressure guns on those resisting the panic.
There’s a thread further down on protests this coming weekend. Simon Dolan has an organisation called Keep Britain Free. They have a website and are active on Twitter. There are other organisations that are joining the protests.
Posting on social media, writing to MPs and local politicians and other bodies, persuading people in person, all help, a bit
I think the tide is turning in favour of the sceptics.
What the new guidance for care homes recommends (among other things):
Genius!
It’s one of those situations where it’s so incredibly stupid and sad you want to laugh. How our elderly in care homes are being treated is utterly shameful.
Anything about shaving off beards? And as for hair, mine styles itself in an unusual and different way every morning
You gotta laugh.Or go and strangle the lot of them.
Preferably both.
It’s strange isn’t it? Yes the whole mad hysterical overreaction, we know that, but if it was as bad as governments across the world would have us believe, why no global approach? In any previous ‘world emergency’ the UN, G7 even EU meet regularly to work through a coordinated response. The Labour Party call for a unified response. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Just each country doing its own thing, ‘following the science’ from the WHO. Strange.
That’s what has surprised me as well.
Each country being an individual experiment in seeing how gullible a population can be; how far it can be pushed..?
They’re all working from home!
Gordon Brown (!) highlighted this at the beginning then started calling for a ‘world government’ to sort the mess out. Jesus, it’s everywhere
They meet. They coordinate. They instruct.
They just don’t tell us about it.
Good piece by Tucker Carlson on Fox News,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeTliWwDPOg
Load of unelected wankers who get the power and control because of their vast wealth
I don’t think our elected wankers have exactly covered themselves in glory recently.
Deaths above 5 year average this week – https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending14august2020
Covid deaths continue to decline. 139 mention Covid, a decrease of 8.6%. They are trying o insinuate that the hot weather is to blame for the above average rate.
Telling graph off the back of that covering up to beginning of May. Would be very interested to see figures since then:
Interesting alcohol drop. Lack of accessibility?
They are quite right very hot weather will finish off the very old and sick.
Cold weather is much more deadly but we have central heating and that protects us from the cold.
I suspect heatwaves across the world have contributed to the Covid toll.
https://www.perthnow.com.au/news/coronavirus/wa-woman-asher-vander-sanden-jailed-for-six-months-over-quarantine-breach-ng-b881648347z six months -you don’t get that for battering a granny in Preston.
Option 4 – Keep Buggering On and discipline yourself not to go mad, because that means they’ve won.
I’m wavering between that and emigration at present. I will give it a few months and if things have not got much better, fatigue may have set in and I’ll be looking for somewhere else.
South Dakota and Wyoming have plenty of space. Governor of South Dakota seems like a sceptic.
KBO – we owe it to ourselves, to our heroes and to our children.
It’s good to find a limited number of things to focus on. We do one cultural activity (music making at home) and I mostly work on ‘Climate Change’ and I just KBO on that. We need additional time to exercise, walk, work the garden, do quizzes, make home food, make friendly contact with people – and give ourselves a big pat on the back when each day comes to an end.
Beautiful places and lovely people, but damn cold in the winter Julian.
Yes. Sweden’s cold in the winter too. Maybe best to go somewhere hot where the country is too poor to worry about covid.
Going to Portugal. Can´t speak the language, so I can´t follow the local news, and will order food online.
Tanzania
Agree! Morocco?
Costa Rica is top of our list.
Can we emigrate to the US of A ?
Plandemic 2
Mystery Thriller Starring Bill Gates, Fauci and the WHO
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/08/25/plandemic-indoctornation.aspx
Well none of those options suit me. I’m just going to carry on laughing at the absurdity of it all, and ignoring all absurd rules.
“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
Well said, Mr Dee.
All cause deaths are above the five year average for the first time in nine weeks. When added to the huge 1 cases of ‘reinfection’ this presents clear evidence of a second wave.
Either that, or as we are talking averages, as long as it’s ‘at or about’, everything is fine.
It’s so confusing, isn’t it?
Well, the waters were muddied by lockdown and the ongoing backlog in health care. At least some of the “excess” deaths this year will be attributable to lockdown and not to covid.
But the all cause deaths are not due to the virus, as the ONS state that deaths from the virus continue to decline. I suspect that all cause deaths are going to rise above average soon due to the missed hospital check ups for cancer, etc.
Increase in overall deaths is being widely attributed to the heatwave. Will see next week if it was a blip. Deaths with Covid on the death certificate still down on the prior week.
Interesting thoughts, SOP and other guys. Of course, there are loads of contributory factors, but we know which way it will be spun, don’t we?
The all-cause mortality remains well within normal range – particularly when you consider that we have gone through ten years of notably low mortality. This is non-significant.
Then we have the issue of what comprises that mortality – which will more and more contain the impact of lock-up.
Updated CDC guidance on isolation and masks
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/public-health-recommendations.html
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cdc-guidelines-say-wearing-a-mask-during-prolonged-exposure-to-coronavirus-wont-prevent-possible-infection
Pretty much backtracking to May. No evidence to say general public wearing them has any real tangible effect
Masks are visible and keep the fear alive.
And it let’s the police enjoy themselves enforcing it.
Never see any police round here. Not many masks either
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2674&v=w6koHkBCoNQ&feature=emb_logo
Look for yourself Dr Fauci 44 10 about asymptomatic transmission.
Fauci: “in all of the history of respiratory viruses, there has never been one in which asymptomatic carriers drove an outbreak.”
It is strange how old Fauci comments are often hard to find and are forgotten it is like the internet is being scrubbed of any information that doesn’t fit the current narrative. Funnily enough Serco the governments favourite company are one of the leading specialists in erasing information on the internet.
I’m feeling unusually angry, having just read this: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/24/have-make-work-nightmare-challenges-headteachers-trying-reopen/
….. a recent survey of parents at the Premier Academy’s Eaton Mill primary school in Milton Keynes, over which Mr Harrison presides: asked if they planned to send their children back in September, almost a third said they were not. It’s an “incredibly high” proportion, Mr Harrison admits.“If I can take any measures whatsoever to increase confidence and put another barrier of security in, it’s worth doing,” he says.
To this end, his school is believed to be the first to make face masks mandatory. All staff, children and parents must wear one when on site or they will be denied access. Once in their bubbles, children and members of staff in close contact with them will change from a mask to a visor supplied by the school. Only reception-aged children will be exempt from the new requirements.
….. At the Premier Academy, where 27 per cent of staff are deemed clinically vulnerable according to Government criteria, they have also invested in two airport-style thermal scanners, hand-held temperature scanners for every classroom and two isolation rooms, each equipped with a full set of personal protective equipment lest any child falls ill.
“We’ve spent about £30,000 from the school’s budget on safety measures,” says Mr Harrison. But he has been sent dozens of messages containing abuse and threats by members of the public for introducing masks at his school. “We’ve thrown quite a lot of money at it, so I hope it works.”
Well mine would have been among the abusive ones. Shame on those pathetic parents who have caused this for those children!
And having been frozen while teaching in a prefab, I pity anyone who has to spend a couple of hours here in winter:
Kay Mountfield, head teacher at Sir William Borlases’s Grammar School, in Bucks, says marquees will be erected in the grounds to provide more teaching space and enable students to be kept apart during break time....
Imagine throwing £30k of already stretched school budgets at fucking PPE equipment that all evidence tells you is not an issue within schools – the guy is a complete twat. I wonder if some of those 30% of parents who wont send kids back, was actually because of the horrible environment they feared, and this will make it worse.
A generation of children with PTSD.
Well done politicians, teachers and parents.
The sole ‘consolation’ is that they will most likely not replicate, or as they are soon also being poisoned with mRNA and vector vaccines, their few children will likely only have a very short lifespan too.
… and OCD.
We could assume it’s being done by mistake.
Or we could assume it’s being done deliberately.
This piece was posted several months ago, regarding schools in Quebec:
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/schools-after-covid-prison-camps/
“by Daisy Luther
If you’ve been wondering what it will look like when the kids go back to school, one school in Quebec has released their new guidelines and they’re shocking.
Apparently, schools are going to look a lot like prison camps.
This is another example of how things will not just “go back to normal.” Everything is changing, including life for our children.”
“Once assigned to a class, students will spend their entire day (including lunchtime) in their assigned seats;
Students must expect to be regrouped based on the number of students returning;
Students must not expect to return to their regular class with their classmates;
Your child may not be with the same teachers as before as several members of our staff will not be returning to school;
Teachers not returning to school will continue working and keeping close contact with students remotely from home as recommended by the government;
Activities completed while in school will not be evaluated or graded;
No physical materials will be transported back and forth between home & school;
Students must include a mini garbage and recycling bag with their lunch in order to collect their personal garbage and dispose of it at home;
All students must bring in their personal, labeled, and filled water bottle as water fountains won’t be available;
Sharing of ALL items (pencils, pens, sharpeners, wax crayons, rulers, toys) is not permitted;
When weather permits, recess breaks will be held outdoors and will entail of walking outside safely distanced from one another in a prearranged pattern;
Gatherings (groups of students together) will not be permitted;
Limited travel throughout the school by all during the day;
Bathroom visits will be monitored/escorted so that proper disinfection by our caretakers can follow before another student uses the facilities;
As per government recommendations, masks and gloves will not be provided;
Students are certainly welcomed to bring these items from home. They are also invited to carry their own personal disinfecting wipes with them if they wish;
Lockers will no longer be used. Students will place their spring/summer jackets behind the chair they will be using & their school bags under their assigned desks;
There will be no cafeteria service or Home & School pizza & frozen yogurt days.
There will be no physical activity taking place in the gym, no art classes (although art and craft projects can be promoted as home suggestions), no library periods, and no drama classes;
No fundraisers or after school activities will take place;
Parent volunteers will not be permitted in school;
We recommend your child brings a book or two of interest from home to read;
Students with fever or flu-like symptoms will be returned home.”
https://computingforever.com/2020/05/07/the-people-we-are-becoming/
Dave Cullen: the people we are becoming
Nail on head:
And did you notice there are quite a few inconsistencies? Kids can’t take anything back and forth from school. You know, except for their lunches, their garbage, their water, their PPE, and some books to read. That stuff doesn’t count as gong back and forth and clearly, is germ-free.
“If I can take any measures whatsoever to increase confidence”
Of course, the most effective way to increase confidence and reduce fearful hiding away of the kind described would be a robust dismissal of fears as nonsense together with social shaming of those exhibiting excessive fearfulness.
It’s the abandonment of that approach,.which was pretty widespread in British culture at one time, that has created the conditions for the disaster we are currently going through.
Exactly!
These supposedly intelligent people genuinely seem to be too stupid to grasp that demonstrative covid theatre measures don’t “reduce fear”, they increase it, by making people believe there really must be something to be afraid of, after all.
They are trying to increase fear. But they can’t say that.
But why would a petty figure like a primary school headmaster particularly want to increase fear?
Common Purpose.
Please keep up, Mark it’s pretty prevalent in all spheres.
Because he us a stupid fucking zombie. I am SO. glad I don’t have children or grandchildren.
I doubt he does. He’s just left his brain somewhere and is panicking between a rock and a hard place.
Maybe he believes covid is a terrible threat. Maybe he knows it isn’t.
Either way, he’ll not please all the people all the time but HMG is leaning on him to open his school next week.
There’s a serious absence of cajones in our public servants, that’s for sure.
It’s about this, nothing to do with protecting the children
I think it’s important to remember when talking to people that even if schools do reopen, and stay open, the experience will be massively diminished for pupils, from a social, sporting and extra curricular point of view. The government should get NO credit for reopening schools on this basis. Schools as they will be are part of the ongoing, indefinite lockdown.
Is it masks or visors? Mirror seem to think the latter:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/headmaster-defends-decision-insist-children-22569797
From the Mirror:
Mr Harrison instructed them that all children will be required to wear surgical masks when being dropped off and picked up from school.
The letter stated that all staff, children, parents, carers and visitors must don a mask when on site, or they will not be allowed access.
Children will then be allowed to take off the masks and switch them for a named face visor – provided by the school – once in their classrooms.
Maybe some parents won’t send their children back because they don’t want them brainwashed, or terrorised by all these “safety” measures. They are going to damage the physical and mental wellbeing of these children for years to come. It’s nothing short of abuse. As has been said elsewhere, there’s nothing worse than someone abusing you for your own good.
I wouldn’t want to send mine. Not just the because of the conditions, but what does it say about the teachers? Pathetic!
My message to Mr Harrison did contain abuse. As part of the phrase ‘child abuse’.
Good for you – because that’s exactly what it is!
If his salary was directly related to how many kids he had in school and the success of their education (i.e. skin in the game) and he saw that salary plummet because of these idiotic measures, he would soon change tune. But as he’s a public servant and paid by tax payers money…
“Show me the incentive and I’ll show the outcome”
They are complete loons:
https://principia-scientific.com/u-k-study-very-little-evidence-of-virus-spread-in-schools/
Whats the point of scientific research if the loonies go ahead and ignore all the evidence.
https://twitter.com/kylamb8/status/1298063747374886912
“You may hear about the ‘2nd wave’ of Covid in Spain, right? What they don’t tell you is that it’s mostly occurring in the southern portion of the country that didn’t get hit, among a younger crowd. Cases since July 1: 124,458. Deaths since July 1: 517. 0.4% CASE fatality.”
Correction: Some part also in the North,Catalonia and Aragon and the Islands
I’m afraid that is just not true. The south of Spain remains pretty unaffected.
https://www.andalucia.com/health/coronavirus
Most areas with an increase in cases remain pretty unaffected.
You may well both be correct.
Remember this is a disease so virulent you need a test to see if you’ve got it.
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.bbc.co.uk
Don’t forget to add your review to this of the BBC. Currently 93% 1 star (you can’t give no stars)
93% plus mine now, wish it could have been minus ten stars.
Interesting:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8661609/Boris-Johnson-planning-quit-Covid-aftereffects-claims-Dominic-Cummings-father-law.html
Wonder whether Mrs Gove has got the dress and hat ready to meet Her Majesty?
I think that’s wishful thinking. Though maybe not – it could get worse. We could get Hancock.
You just ruined my day!
I want the whole lot of them out of the way, and preferably yesterday. I’ve been saying for a while now that Boris is mentally unwell. That, in itself, is dangerous and he should be removed now, not in 6 months time. We need a caretaker government with lots of grey hairs, spine and intellectual rigour. Perhaps a few people from on here?
Interesting! No 10 has denied it – of course.
However, it nicely promotes the Long Covid narrative that’s the latest tool in the scaremongering bag ……
It also gives Boris an excuse for not being prosecuted!
Exactly, pull the pin, throw the grenade and calmly walk away as the country explodes. What a tosser!
Cameron 2.0
The long covid is going to be difficult to sustain as a scare tactic with over 3.5 million in England with antibodies. Perhaps every time we hear it we can make this comment if comments are allowed on any item. The BBC are a disgrace. But we have to hold to that we are right, we have Carl Heneghan to show we are right, and that means a lot of people will have egg one their faces soon enough.
Interesting indeed. So there are rumours he is still unwell and rumours he is spitting from Carrie Symmonds. Is this preparing for him to step down before he is removed.
Do you think that Carrie Symonds will find a fat, balding ex-Prime Minister someone she would spend the rest of her life with? Not sure Johnson is much of a catch without the power thing, so I don’t see him giving it up.
She’s done the job she was put in to do!
They do look very mismatched and he can’t stay PM forever no matter how or when that happens.
Hope Carrie has found a really chic mask to put in their baby.
I’ve just said a prayer to St Anthony in the hope that he brings it about
Infomercial for Long COVID.
For anyone who is in a choir and missing the joy of singing together:-
https://twitter.com/MartinDaubney/status/1298134947325239297
https://twitter.com/Adrian_Hilton/status/1298149862752636930
Great comments:
a) BBC would report on a ‘far-right’ hate rally and the police would arrest dozens.
b)They wouldn’t report it at all if the choir was wearing “Defund the BBC” t-shirts.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CeTliWwDPOg
Tucker: When do we get America back?
Answer: according to the latest announcement from Tedros at the WHO, it will be never.
It’s not about flattening the curve, not overwhelming hospitals, getting a vaccine….It’s about climate change and control of the populace.
“WHO is committed to working with all countries to move into a new stage of opening their economies, societies, schools and businesses safely.
To do that, every single person must be involved. Every single person can make a difference. Every person, family, community and nation must make their own decisions, based on the level of risk where they live.
That means every person and family has a responsibility to know the level of transmission locally, and to understand what they can do to protect themselves and others.
At the same time, we will not – we cannot – go back to the way things were.
Throughout history, outbreaks and pandemics have changed economies and societies. This one will be no different.
In particular, the pandemic has given new impetus to the need to accelerate efforts to respond to climate change.
The pandemic has given us a glimpse of our world as it could be: cleaner skies and rivers.
Building back better means building back greener.”
The WHO have been disgraceful.
The WHO have been criminally irresponsible, as was its leader when he was the Ethiopian (bad) Health Minister.
He is a revolutionary Marxist, who cosies up to Communist China
By clogging the environment with disposable, single use PPE. He’s a moron.
Reminiscent of:
“a Saudi hanging out in Afghanistan causing terrorist acts in the US?
Let’s bomb the shit out of Iraq.”
We will get our countries back because most people want them back how they were and the WHO can go F… their selves
So we’re all governed by a corrupt Ethiopian politician now?
Jeremy Vine will be spreading the ‘reinfection’ fear from 12pm. What do you mean you are too busy….?
I’m listening to Radio 2 and he’s just spoken and I could have smashed the radio up I’m that angry at his comments!
Vine is some one not to listen to EVER!!!!!
I will listen as I am curious to see what the callers say about today’s Scottish mask announcement. For some reason I have hope that they will speak to a sensible, non-hysterical caller, though Jeremy would prbably just talk over them anyway…
First caller, member of the public who wants face masks imposed on children and said that she already makes her 7 year old wear one. Even though it isn’t madatory for under 12’s. Stupid *bleep*.
There are a lot of callers for the use of face masks for children. No one yet ringing up to counter argue.
Yep, I am waiting for the counter argument. All very one sided at the moment.
They choose their callers ‘very well’ – unless you fit their narrative you will not get on air
I am scared for the future of my two children. I’m worried what kind of life they are heading into. One is in secondary and the other still at primary school. They’ve had all social activities taken away from them and some are not starting yet due to it not being safe yet?! They were both active children, I only had one night free but I didn’t mind ferrying them everywhere.
And now there’s talk of masking them up at school. I’m deeply upset and if it happens I’m not sure what to do. Keep them off? They won’t get a good education from me. I tried to school them in March and it just doesn’t work.
One question id like the answer to is why does the MSM push for masks in school? Why do people think it’s alright to mask our kids?? I haven’t wore a mask yet and have encouraged my kids to stand strong and not be bullied into wearing one from their masked friends.
It is horrible Lydia. I think it is people pandering to those who are panicking and fearful and in doing so it makes other people like us more angry as if feels to us we are having irrational things imposed on us and this feels and is abusive.
I have been looking at Michael Levitt and worldometer and and it is really looking like the pandemic is over. Deaths going down. I am very angry about what is being done to children but I think as the hospital admissions and deaths continue to stay low people will not be able to keep on deny the risk has gone soon. Masks on children are particularly abusive but children are resilient and won’t be as affected by them as us.
A lot of people will have a lot to answer for and their credibility will be gone.
Even with all the evidence around that suggests the pandemic is over, people are still fearful over the virus and the threat of a second wave still being pushed by the MSM and these so called scientists. I don’t think it’ll ever go away. And that’s what I’m afraid off for my two kids.
Your two kids have you.
Tell them the truth.
Live the truth.
I’m very open and honest with my two kids. I believe if we’re open with them then they’ll be the same with us.
I don’t know how long they could keep up masks in practice. Having been a child at school among other children (though not a parent) I foresee 25% of the pupils losing their mask by 1st break, 90% dropping the mask by lunchtime so the corridors are awash with them and someone from 5B accidentally starting a blaze because they want to see what happens if they set fire to the bloody thing.
Ha Ha! I think you could possibly be right there.
You don’t even have to look at Worldometer.
Much closer to home, the evidence is clear : there has been no epidemic for a couple of months, and all-cause mortality has been at unexceptional levels since the middle of June.
Even by the dodgy ruler that is the PCR test, you’d have to come into close contact with over 2000 random individuals to even cross the path of a Corina virus – let alone catch an infection.
And the true figure, given that the test simply picks up a loosely connected RNA strand, is probably near 1 in 10,000 for actual infection.
I know. So the only explanation for the BBC to not be shouting this out loud must be political and that is criminal as people are suffering. But lack of admissions and deaths it can’t be ignored forever can it?
Wendy, it can’t be ignored forever but if coronavirus is with us forever and cases are still being picked up then they can ignore hospital admissions and deaths and continue to scare us with cases.
I think a lot of people in the MSM are heavily invested in the coronapanic – some because they pushed it and, like the government, don’t want to admit they were wrong, some because bad news sells, and some because it suits their political agenda and view of the world.
I don’t know what I would do in your shoes, as a parent. Mine are grown up now. They need an education and will be missing out at home. Is moving to a different school or area an option? If not, maybe the best you can do is educate them that this is all nonsense, and continue to put pressure on the school to provide them with the full educational experience they deserve and that you’ve paid for, and also try to persuade parents of like mind to do the same.
I have spoke truthfully to my kids about this virus and gave them the evidence and stats to educate them on what is happening and with continue to do so.
I see young children/adults wearing masks but they’re wearing them as a fashion accessory and think they’re pretty cool. If my eldest child doesn’t wear one will he be bullied for it? Then pressured into wearing one. They’re trying to reprogramme our children that they’re only safe when wearing a mask! And its not going to go away for a very long time.
The problem is that leaves schools in the same position. We need to get normality back for the sake of all children.
I am using this as an opportunity to teach my kids about questioning authority and engaging in civil disobedience. They seem to be learning quite quickly and enjoying it.
As the saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
I think the questioning of authority mantra is very important. I was taught this by my father, in particular, from a very early age. I was always in trouble at school, from about age 7 – first memory being ‘TT will you never accept that you are wrong?’ Continued all the way through secondary school, where I was routinely described as ‘aggressive’. My father used to phone the school, and merely say ‘she has nothing to apologise for’. Thanks Dad, I wish you were still here with us.
Yes, thank you, Mr. TT Senior. People like you are the reason people like us are here. Nowt to apologise for, not going away.
Good. I’ve never questioned authority or engaged in any disobedience until now and I’m loving it.
Lydia, masks have nothing to do with this faux pandemic. It is being pushed nationally and internationally by lobby groups that want us to stay indoors and only go out if absolutely necessary (for our own ‘safety’ of course) ..Our elected governments have abdicated all responsibility for this outrage.Our lives are now being manipulated by the MSM, billionaires and activists
masks4all.org.uk
masks4all.org
Just read that pupils in Scottish secondary schools are obliged to wear ‘face coverings’ from next Monday (except in classrooms). Education Secretary John Swinney is reported as stating that the new rules are ‘not mandatory’, but should be ‘considered obligatory’.
So, in theory you don’t have to wear a mask, but in reality you do, because we say so?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53900825
“Scottish government adopts child abuse as policy”
I’ve always thought of mandatory and obligatory as synonyms. Find it a bit odd that an Education Secretary seems to think they mean different things…
If you followed any of the recent exams fiasco, you would not be suprised by anything from the Education Secretary.
The ability to think does not go with this job.
Yeah but no, but yeah, but no
mandatory
[ˈmandət(ə)ri]
ADJECTIVE
It would appear that those teaching English in Scottish Schools know sweet FA about the language
BBC now pushing for same in England.
Reasons given,Scotland are doing it.might give parents reassurance no mention that they have any benefit or any scientific basis.Puff pieces about schools doing it anyway.
Disgusting
FFS what do the BBC know about anything. They are trying their best to bring the government down and contributing to the suffering and abuse of many people. I don’t understand why they think they are so powerful when it is licence payers who own them!
“They are trying their best to bring the government down”
Wake up! – the problem with the BBC has been it’s continual reinforcement of government nonsense.
That’s it – they’re trumpeting govt.nonsense so that the govt’s proposed examination of how the BBC is funded doesn’t take place.
Not sure about that. My suspicion is that, if the government were to go down the sceptic, back to normal route, the BBC would start to attack it very heavily indeed. For a while, their agendas align.
My hypothesis (aka a conspiracy theory) is that the Gov told the BBC that if they towed the line then they’re funding model wouldn’t be reformed.
‘the new rules are ‘not mandatory’, but should be ‘considered obligatory’
= Double speak
Mandatory – means the Gov is telling you to wear them.
Obligatory – no need to wear them, but you will be forced into wearing them by being shamed, bullied and peer pressure.
Obligatory is worse than Mandatory.
You are a 15 year old with a natural disposition to ‘act out’ or in other words clumsily learn about life in your own way. You are what tge 1950s called a rebel. How can this possibly end well – with weasel words from weasel in chief obligitory, mandatory, law not law.
It will only take one vicious teacher to badly rule with authoritarian ziel for months of learning to be upset. For all their suppose sophitucation teenagers learn by trrial and error. This is setting them up for a draconian fall.
Out of words to describe my opposition to this creep and all the others ruling over us. They are in position to facillitate our lives not this.
Its the same game but using words instead of numbers. Another definition of obligatory is If you describe something as obligatory, you mean that it is done from habit or custom and not because the person involved has thought carefully about it or really means it.
Not only do they clearly not have a grasp of the English language, the maths skills of all those making these decisions are inadequate too.
In a country of 5,454,000 after 6 months of panic and fear and endless testing and encouragement to get tested, this supposedly highly contagious and deadly virus has still only found its way to less than 20,000 individuals (positive tests – obviously we’re aware its found its way to more but they were so symptom free they werent picked up despite the campaign).
At present the prevalence is lower than 1 in 4000 (as I recall?) in Scotland, children aren’t known to pass it on or at least not in any meaningful amount, have no to mild symptoms and there’s no concrete evidence of regular asymptomatic spread… and yet they have somehow calculated that amongst that absolutely minuscule risk there is justification for yet another costly (in numerous ways) and disgusting policy. If I was a maths teacher and they were my pupils I’d be requesting to see their workings, as the answer they’ve given is clearly not right.
Uniforms are to please parents.
Latin I’ve found useful for etymology but not for much else.
However, I’ve found Greek etymologically useful too – and I never studied that!
Somewhat pessimistic, Concrete. There is also opposition, and/or revolution,
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12481469/sweden-coronavirus-herd-immunity-pandemic/
Sweden, which controversially never went into lockdown and has rejected the use of masks, currently has a 14-day case rate of 36.6 per 100,000, according to data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
In France, that rate is 59.8 per 100,000 – despite implementing a strict lockdown and stringent mask measures.
Spain’s 14-day case rate is 152.7 and the UK is 22.3.
Arne Elofsson, a professor in biometrics at Stockholm University, said: “Sweden is doing fine. Strict rules do not work as people seem to break them.”
Anders Tegnell, the top epidemiologist leading the response to Sweden’s pandemic, claimed the infection rates of Spain, Belgium and France have increased after mask mandates in public spaces came in.
He said last week: “The belief that masks can solve our problem is very dangerous.”
Lovely Sweden!!!!!
During lockdown, my sons (18 and 20), who both speak Spanish and Italian, have taken it upon themselves to learn Swedish. They are lockdown sceptics, but, I cannot discount it has something to do with something else!
They didn’t consider the unintended consequences of lockdowns in advance and they certainly haven’t considered those of masks either.
They will discover the harm masks do in due course and then claim there was no way of knowing. Who could have thought that not breathing in fresh air and having a dirty mask covering your mouth and nose for hours would be harmful, right?
I definitely like that Tegnell is off his back foot now and starting to troll other countries.
We need to find a way of making the politicians, advisers and panic merchants boosting masks personally liable for all harm caused by masks.
Evidence that they cause harm is well known so when pols & others ignore that evidence they need to be held accountable:
https://principia-scientific.org/neurosurgeon-face-masks-pose-serious-risks-to-healthy-individuals/
Heads! Spikes! Walls!
It’s the only way out of this.
Or the right to a pension far above waht ordinary workers can expect and paid for by those wormers is forfeit when harmful action os deliberately taken by those with power over us.
It should be a standard control measure over those who wish to boss their fellow citizens about.
The government knows that children not attending school is harmful. The government knows that the coronavirus presents less risk to children than their risk of being hit by lightning. The same government closes schools and engages in a deliberate campaign to create fear and hysteria. Then, the same government threatens the people it has frightened with fines for being fearful.This is precisely how to send people mad.
They have known this since March!
Just one para from the new ONS bulletin:
Of the deaths registered in Week 33, 139 mentioned “novel coronavirus (COVID-19)”, the lowest number of deaths involving COVID-19 in the last 21 weeks and an 8.6% decrease compared with Week 32 (152 deaths), accounting for 1.5% of all deaths in England and Wales.
So, what’s the problem?
It’s gone too quickly for our lords and masters before they have had the chance to manufacture a second wave. The emperor has no clothes.
But, but… ‘Reinfections’ have soared to… 1.
https://twitter.com/AlistairHaimes/status/1298207748887371777/photo/1
“If masks work, can anyone explain why there has been no reduction in respiratory deaths since their introduction? Covid-related deaths continue the decline they were on anyway.”
Excellent evidence.
In the comments someone links to tweet from Labour MP in Oldham saying even without evidence, we should do this on precautionary principle (re: children being forced to wear masks in school) — beggars belief, it really does. It’s like these virtuous heroes dont actually know what precautionary principle means – you should be certain that the precaution you are taking does not cause greater (or any, really) harm than the measure being taken first – which is obviously not the case with masks.
Its like a virtue signalling arms race!
They are saying “precautionary principle” when they mean “just to be sure”. A bit like the way most of the plebs think ‘exponentially’ means ‘very’.
The same people wouldn’t switch their choice in the Monty Hall problem. Sometimes you have to look at the impact of the negative. The Precautionary Principle is often akin to Pascal’s Wager.
I’d like to know if there has been an increase in respiratory, cardiac and blood pressure admissions to hospitals and calls to GP since the introduction of face masks.
I’ve heard a few times 2nd hand from people who have spoken to GPS and I have had it happen once to me direct from a GP that bacterial lung infections are rising.
Exactly. We’ve had a month of this mask malarkey and all that’s happened – if you believe the Government – is that the number of cases has risen sharply,
Also further evidence here:
https://principia-scientific.org/neurosurgeon-face-masks-pose-serious-risks-to-healthy-individuals/
I have a comment waiting for approval is this normal?
It is if it contained multiple links
OK Thanks – Probably hit the link twice or something like that
yes, you might have more than 3 links
Rundown of countries with mask mandates and their infection transmissions:
https://twitter.com/CovidSenseBloke/status/1297865055036411905
Very useful guide of this massive failure
A shopkeeper friend greeted us with, ‘Have you noticed how as the ‘cases’ go up, the deaths go down, nearly to zero and the hospitals are empty?’. He had an elderly woman in yesterday who started talking about ‘Covid’ and burst into tears, she was so scared and demoralised. He thinks ‘they’ are are trying to break us all down mentally and we agree. We will not be broken down though, will we? We will resist.
Some zombies outside the stores; I fear they are becoming habituated to wearing them. Some muzzles in the street including a woman carrying a child of about 1. Horrible!
A merry couple in the bus shelter, sharing a picnic during a short break in the sideways rain. She said it was her birthday and at least we could all smile at each other and wish her well. We were the only people on the bus. Again. MW
German doctors (impressively qualified) challenging the MSM covid 19 narrative at The Corona Extra-Parliamentary Investigation Committee: https://acu2020.org/
Reports from a recent conference in Hungary and Doctors for Education site: https://www.xn--rzte-fr-aufklrung-pqbn68b.de/
Also on YT with English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X21UboS93qc&feature=emb_title
She needs treatment, as all dictators eventually do, they all go mad in the end
Nicola Sturgeon has just announced that jumping off a cliff is to become obligatory in Scotland as it reduces COVID-19 infections and deaths.
The MSM are pushing Boris Johnson to implement this in England to save lives.
No scientific evidence has yet been found to prove this, but all decisions made by other governments must be followed blindly!
I think by the end of today Bozo Boris will have done a dramatic U turn and will announce that secondary school pupils will have to wear face masks. Two days ago Education Minister said the evidence of pupils wearing masks is weak. But because Boris is a weak, spineless & incompetent bell end who cannot stand up to anyone will follow Sturgeon and inflict abuse on our poor children.
We’ll all be required to wear them outside soon….
Prof Devi Sridhar is advising her, worse luck.
They’ll get what they deserve if they continue to keep her in power…..