It seems such a long time ago when an awkward, contrarian group of people known as ‘lockdown sceptics’ were reviled in the mainstream media. How misguided and immoral they were! As the COVID-19 pandemic continued to make waves, columnist Dan Hodges wondered whether anyone had ever been so proved so wrong. Somewhat incoherently, Hodges used the phrase ‘lockdown denier’, not as in denying the existence of this regime, but for its criticism.
COVID-19 saw the emergence of an industry of fact-checking websites and censorship of alleged misinformation, portrayed as a danger to public health and safety. Official sources were almost as focused on refuting competing ideas as on providing supposedly useful and accurate information. A good example of this was a guide against ‘coronavirus fake news’ issued by Castle Point MP Rebecca Harris in autumn 2020, probably following the publication of the Great Barrington Declaration by three eminent scientists challenging lockdown orthodoxy. It is well worth retrospective review: was officialdom right?
The MP’s guide comprised 14 claims, each dismissed as ‘fake news’. In what follows, the ‘myth’ is stated in bold, the ‘refutation’ from Harris is quoted below it, and our assessment comes next.
1. 5G has caused the virus
The COVID-19 pandemic is caused by a novel form of a coronavirus and there is no evidence that 5G technology has any effect on people’s health at all. Scientists have made it clear that there is no link between 5G and coronavirus. A connection with the virus is “both a physical and biological impossibility”. This is a conspiracy theory that has come about as a result of false information online. Damaging telecoms infrastructure is particularly dangerous and anyone responsible for these criminal acts will face the full force of the law. 5G is an information technology that allows for faster mobile internet communication and will allow for new innovative services. After extensive trials OFCOM, measured 5G sites in various towns and cities across the U.K., focusing on areas where mobile use is likely to be highest. At every site, emissions were a small fraction of the levels included in international guidelines, as set by the International Commission on Non-Ionising Radiation Protection. And the maximum measured at any site was 1.5% of those levels. Therefore, 5G is scientifically proven to be safe.
This is the tactic of using an unrepresentative and extreme idea to discredit opponents. Politicians are good at asking themselves questions rather than responding to more important or legitimate concerns. Whatever the possible harms of 5G, the spate of mast installations during the first lockdown was unlikely to affect viral communication.
FACT CHECK: False
2. If you have Covid and aren’t showing symptoms you won’t transmit the disease
Not everyone who has COVID-19 has symptoms and it can take up to 14 days to show symptoms in some cases. In reality, we don’t yet know exactly how many people might be completely asymptomatic (meaning that you don’t show symptoms) while carrying the virus, but studies show it could be a high number. That’s why it’s so important to self-isolate for at least 14 days if you either live with someone who might have the virus or you’ve been instructed to by a contact-tracer, and why keeping a safe distance from others is essential.
Asymptomatic transmission of respiratory diseases is claimed and was before COVID-19, but by admission of the ‘fact-checkers’, we do not know how many people are asymptomatic (in theory, everyone in the population). The MP’s guide states a 14-day period as necessary for isolation, but this lacks evidence. Taken to its illogical conclusion, this principle would mean that everyone should be endlessly self-isolating and social-distancing, because contraction of the virus is not limited to the symptomatic. Note that the guidance does not mention testing positive: if there was such faith in the tests, as discussed below, surely that would be definitive.
FACT CHECK: Unquantifiable
3. Face masks don’t work
Science in this area has evolved during the outbreak, the body of scientific evidence that has built up shows that the risk of transmission is made lower by wearing a face covering. The more we learn about COVID-19 the clearer it is that face coverings are an absolute vital tool in our fight against the virus. They effectively capture droplets, which is the main way the virus travels from person to person. According to the British Medical Association, if you don’t wear one and have COVID-19, the risk of spreading it to others can be as high as 70%. If you do wear one, the risk drops to 5%. Make sure you wear one in all public indoor spaces and whenever you can’t keep a two-metre distance from others. It is simple and easy way we can all stop the spread of the virus. Because face coverings are mainly intended to protect others, not the wearer, from coronavirus, they are not a replacement for social distancing and regular hand washing.
There is no high quality evidence for the effectiveness of face masks, as shown by the DANMASK-19 study (the only rigorous RCT of face masks to date) and the most recent Cochrane systematic review. But this was known as far back as the Spanish influenza outbreak of a hundred years ago, and medical experts such as Anthony Fauci initially advised against mask use.
FACT CHECK: True
4. Masks are harmful to your health and can kill you
Only an airtight mask could possibly cause any breathing difficulty. That eliminates cloth masks, the preferred personal protective equipment in public. It actually eliminates N95 respirators, too, usually reserved for healthcare professionals. They fit tighter than a cloth mask but still not tight enough on the face to kill. Surgeons wear even more substantial face coverings all day without endangering their health. The average facemask user without pre-existing respiratory illness has nothing to worry about. Those who have an age, health or disability reason for not wearing a face covering should not be routinely asked to give any written evidence of this, this includes exemption cards.
There is credible evidence to suggest that wearing masks can kill, and reports of adverse effects were published in the BMJ. Ironically, amidst the shrill climate alarmism about carbon dioxide, this gas of life was trapped in masks, reaching levels that were genuinely harmful in children.
FACT CHECK: Partly true
5. We don’t need to worry about a second wave of COVID-19. It’s just the same as the normal winter cold and flu season
COVID-19 is not the same as winter cold or flu illness – in many ways it’s much worse. Seasonal flu has been around for a long time, so scientists and doctors know a lot about it and how to treat people who have the illness. There’s also a yearly vaccine available for seasonal flu. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is completely new. Scientists and medical professionals are still learning about the virus – what we do understand is that COVID-19 looks to have a higher reproductive number (the number of people infected by one person) than flu and has a higher death rate. A vaccine is most likely to be some months away. That’s why we must do all we can to follow the Government’s guidance to stay as safe as possible over the coming months.
Official data show that there was indeed a second wave in the U.K., attributed to a new but less dangerous variant of COVID-19 (the Kent or Alpha variant). Toby Young was roasted by Covidians for apparently being proved wrong on this. But just as COVID-19 data in the initial outbreak probably included many people with influenza, it is likely that the second wave included other coronaviruses including the common cold. Although official sources suggested distinct symptoms of COVID-19, the trumpeted loss of taste and smell is not unique, also featuring in influenza. The populace was on ‘high alert’ for COVID-19, inevitably influencing self-diagnosis, and mass testing of dubious accuracy undoubtedly led to overestimated incidence. Moreover, the ‘Lockdown Files’ leaked by Isabel Oakeshott revealed Health Secretary Matt Hancock asking colleagues when the new strain would be deployed.
FACT CHECK: The second wave was hyperbolic
6. It only affects older people, so young people don’t have to worry about it
Most people who aren’t elderly and do not have underlying health conditions will not become critically ill from COVID-19. But the illness still has a higher chance of leading to serious respiratory symptoms than seasonal flu, and we are still learning about some of the other long term effects.
Based on official mortality data, the threat of COVID-19 to healthy younger people was negligible. Everyone gets colds and an occasional flu, but it is predominantly frail older people who perish (pneumonia, a bacterial sequel to influenza, is sometimes known as ‘the old man’s friend‘). The narrative around ‘Long Covid’, obliquely mentioned in Harris’s guide, has been crumbling with scientists unable to agree a definition, middle-aged women possibly confusing it with the onset of menopause, some reports mixing it up with the side-effects of Covid vaccines, and the extraordinary finding that half of the people who report Long Covid symptoms have never had COVID-19.
FACT CHECK: True: there was no need for healthy young people to worry
7. COVID-19 death rate is 0.1% of people that catch it
This is incorrect, and the death rate is likely to be five or 10 times higher than this. However, it should be noted that the relative fatality of coronavirus is greatly affected by exogenous factors such as previous health conditions, age and other factors such as smoking or obesity.
Was COVID-19 more lethal than flu? Worldometers shows an infection mortality rate of 0.99%, but this is faulty in both numerator and denominator. The latter depends on testing, which we’ll consider below. Some people who died within 28 days of a positive test were deemed COVID-19 victims if the physician issuing the death certificate included COVID-19 on the death certificate, including people dying from cancer, heart attacks or accidents, which undoubtedly added to the toll. The lockdown regime, by reducing access to healthcare, possibly contributed to the surge. Arguably, no disease has ever had such inflated mortality, although this eventually became a casualty of mass testing, diluting the death rate. A WHO bulletin by John Ioannidis in 2021 estimated the median infection fatality rate of Covid-19 at 0.23% and in younger people at 0.05%.
FACT CHECK: Partly true: slightly higher in older people and very low to negligible in younger people
8. Testing is inaccurate, and testing for COVID-19 has false positives of 80%
Tests for active coronavirus are not always correct: at present they are understood to produce false negatives in between 2% to 20% of cases. If you are exhibiting symptoms but receive a negative test result, you must continue to self-isolate. Antibody tests are understood to be accurate in all cases where a person has not suffered with coronavirus, presenting a false negative in approximately 16% of cases where someone has had COVID-19. Developers of these tests have been working to maximise accuracy.
Leaving aside the controversy about isolation of the virus, the PCR method is not designed for screening of infectious diseases. The U.K. Government’s report on Covid testing indicated a false positive rate of 25%. This report, based on observational data, explained: “If the operational false positive rate was 0.4%, 400 of the 1,570 positive tests would be false positives. That would represent 400 people being isolated when they are well, and much wasted effort in contact tracing. It is possible that a proportion of infections that we currently view as asymptomatic may in fact be due to these false positives.”
FACT CHECK: Partly true: testing is inaccurate and the problem of false positive tests exists and is far from negligible
9. We should let everyone catch the virus so we become immune, even if it causes some deaths in the short-term
If everyone caught the virus without any strategies in place to suppress it, this could lead to an enormous number of deaths, a devastated healthcare system and a breakdown of our economy and society. It would also prevent people from accessing healthcare, emergency services and even prescriptions for normal medical reasons, and minor conditions could prove to be more fatal. The people most likely to suffer would be some of the most vulnerable in our society. We all have a duty to look out for each other and every person’s life is worth protecting. We all have a part to play to protect the most vulnerable people in society. Everyone’s actions have a direct impact on how fast the virus spreads. Young people can spread it to older and vulnerable members of society without knowing they are infected. Whatever you do, please remember to follow the Government’s guidance.
This was the central argument about lockdown: should the Government save lives from the contagion or ‘let it rip’. A massive PR exercise ensured that the country was shut down, with Boris Johnson — who initially favoured ‘letting it rip’ — threatening citizens with arrest if they left home unnecessarily. In fact, as proposed in the much-maligned at the time but now vindicated Great Barrington Declaration (painted at the time as tantamount to ‘letting it rip’), a strategy of focused protection of those vulnerable to COVID-19 was put forward, and ignored. As this website (then named Lockdown Sceptics) warned at the time, lockdown was an unmitigated disaster, wreaking severe social, economic, educational and psychological damage, for no significant health benefit.
FACT CHECK: Partly true: elderly and vulnerable people should be protected if they want it, but few suggested otherwise
10. Obesity kills more people than coronavirus
This is a misleading statistic and coronavirus remains the greatest threat to public health. The post circulating takes Covid deaths at one of their lowest points and compares it to an average of obesity caused deaths over a full year. However, as noted by fullfact.org, if you work out an average in a similar manner for the months in which we have had COVID-19, the death rate is significantly higher than that of obesity.
We were told that COVID-19 was the biggest threat to humanity since the Second World War or the Great Plague, varying by politicians’ bluster. Ironically, after two years of pronounced daily death reports on the news in 2020-21, now politicians and mainstream media are mute on the persistent excess mortality that began after the pandemic declined.
FACT CHECK: True in the longer term at least
11. The Government is using Behavioural Scientists in SAGE to brainwash and manipulate the public to achieve compliance with dangerous policies and laws
The purpose of SAGE is to provide scientific advice to the Government. I cannot emphasise strongly enough that this has been used to help save lives, and has been nothing to do with behavioural control, nor would it ever be so. I believe that it [is] particularly important during the coronavirus outbreak that the public are provided with truthful information and guidance. The spread of rumours, lies and falsehoods can put lives in danger. Cross-Government work is helping to identify false narratives and provide rebuttals to those claims.
The Government has since admitted use of covert and coercive means to manipulate society, as documented by State of Fear, a detailed exposé by Laura Dodsworth. Whether or not it was the behavioural scientists on SAGE (a body including unabashed Communist Susan Michie) who was doing this is not the important point. The Government, though various actors and agencies, subjected people to terrifying propaganda to increase fear and boost control.
FACT CHECK: True
12. COVID-19 is man-made
Scientists from across the world have disproved this theory. Research firmly determines that coronavirus is a result of a naturally occurring process and not a product of laboratory engineering. New diseases have emerged throughout human history, and we have seen two other major coronavirus outbreaks in the last two decades: SARS and MERS. The COVID-19 pandemic is not a hoax, it is a global outbreak caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2.
The presence of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the city of the first major COVID-19 outbreak inevitably aroused suspicion, particularly as its laboratories were engaged in gain-of-function research on SARS-like, bat-vectored coronaviruses. Harris parrots the official narrative without satisfactory rebuttal of the lab leak thesis.
FACT CHECK: Possibly true
13. The Government will force everyone to take a harmful and potentially lethal vaccine which it is already buying millions of doses of with our money.
The powers granted to the Government under the Coronavirus Act 2020 are made under and subject to the restrictions of the Control of Disease Act 1984. Under the 1984 Act, Ministers have the power to make regulations which prevent danger to public health and prevent the spread of infection, but these regulations do not include mandatory treatment or vaccination. Across the globe, there are 140 vaccines not yet in human trials, 19 in small-scale safety trials, 11 in expanded safety trials, and three in large-scale efficacy trials, including the Oxford vaccine trial. Scientists worldwide are hoping to develop a coronavirus vaccine within 12 to 18 months. While severe side-effects from vaccinations are rare, as a result of the rigorous testing and review process prior to usage, in the event that these effects occur, the Government has established the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme. This means that, if an individual is severely disabled as a result of a vaccination against certain diseases, he or she can receive a one-off-tax-free payment of £120,000. While the VDPS is primarily designed to cover adverse reactions for vaccination in the child immunisation programme, the scheme is kept under review at all times with further vaccination programmes included if appropriate. However, safety, effectiveness and the ability to tolerate the vaccine are top priorities for manufacturers and regulators, and I fully support the system of clinical trials currently in place to minimise the risk of side-effects.
The Government most certainly tried – and failed – to force everyone to take a course of experimental injections, which proved to be neither safe nor effective. COVID-19 vaccines are demonstrably harmful (as shown by the Yellow Card system) and sometimes lethal (as confirmed by coroner reports).
FACT CHECK: Partly true
14. Bill Gates has a vaccine to the coronavirus
This is untrue and deliberately misleading. A patent application was made for a different coronavirus filed by the Pirbright Institute, which receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but this has no connection to COVID-19. Coronavirus is a large category of viruses that includes the common cold, SARS and the new virus that causes COVID-19.
Why is the Government so keen to protect Bill Gates? He provided funding for COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution. Whether he personally had a vaccine ready is a spurious claim that is used to associate sceptics with wacky conspiracy theorists.
FACT CHECK: Red herring
Thankfully, there is now the investigative team at BBC Verify to rescue the truth from future pandemic propagandists!
Roger Watson was previously the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Advanced Nursing, published by Wiley, and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice, published by Elsevier. He is also an editorial board member of the WIkiJournal of Medicine. Niall McCrae was an editorial board member of Journal of Advanced Nursing.
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“..elderly and vulnerable people should be protected if they want it,..”
How? If masks don’t work, tests deliver wrong results, SD is just voodoo made up on the fly and staying inside and stopping socialising kills them too?
It was and will always be: let it rip and
stop trying to play God (with OPM, of course).
Indeed. One could also speculate that frightening the life out of the elderly (almost literally) did them a great deal of harm, keeping them separated from their loved ones (whether voluntarily while at home or by force by not allowing care home visits) caused great loneliness and despair, leading to physical decline. Leaving care homes shortstaffed by allowing those testing ‘positive’ to stay home for weeks on end and then losing staff when they refused to be part of the dangerous vaxx experiment must have led to deaths, as did jabbing people in poor healthy anyways, with the knowledge that people over 80 do not produce significant numbers of antibodies, meaning the whole vaxx campaign was pointless for the very elderly and probably only worsened their health (which may well have been the point, of course).
A friend in Spain was telling me how in the beginning he and his family had been terrified of infecting his gran, who was 90 when this started. How they had spent Christmas dinner with the younger people sitting by the open window of the kitchen, waving to granny across the room. As time went by and granny had reached 92 she told him to pack in the nonsense. She said, quite rightly, that she was 92, if her time had come, it had come and that she didn’t care to live longer if it meant she could not hug and kiss her loved ones (the Spanish are big on physical contact).
Frightening the old was despicable.
It really was. They had pretty much convinced people over 70 that if they got infected, they were almost definitely going to die. This despite the fact that early data from China showed that, even though the elderly were far and away those at greatest risk, the vast majority survived.
They also never made a distinction between elderly living at home and elderly living in care homes, where people are in essence sent to die and the average length of stay is between 6 to 18 months. That alone would have made an enormous difference to people’s state of mind.
Both my parents died in care homes, already suffering from advanced dementia with low quality of life. They both died of pneumonia I think, and possibly the triggering infection might have come from me or my kids or the staff – it seems to me the alternative, which would have been to stop visiting them, stop them mixing, and for them to be attended by staff wearing hazmat suits, would have been far far worse than their eventual fate.
I will never, ever forgive the government for the way my 94 year old father in law died. Deaf, and suffering from Altzheimers, he was imprisoned in a care home after a stay in hospital. He was kept in solitary confinement (he never had covid) and they lost his hearing aids, so he could not even lip read because all mouths were masked. We were not allowed to visit him. However, they allowed us to watch him crying via Zoom. He must have thought he was in hell, death was a release from such cruel conditions.
I will remain angry about it for the rest of my life, and I find it hard to be civil to anyone employed by the NHS as I still regard them as keen players in this theatre of horrors.
Totally agree
I would feel exactly the same in your position. It’s the 3 Cs for all of the medical/healthcare sector that has seriously boiled my p*ss throughout; Cowardice, complicity and cruelty. Nasty, nasty organization, the NHS. Unrecognisable from when I was employed with them, and the atrocities they committed ( whilst happily being hailed as heroes and martyrs ) against the vulnerable in their care is entirely unforgivable.
A truly gruesome story. They basically tortured him to death by systematic passive aggression. All in the name of compassion.
— words can’t really express what I’d like to be saying here —
“ However, they allowed us to watch him crying via Zoom.”
That is desperate poetry, with a real emotional punch, as indeed are many of your other words.
Possibly the only way that the majority of people will ever feel the outrage against the lockdowns, vaccine mandates etc. is to have their heartstrings pulled. Emotion beats reason hands down when it comes to changing peoples’ minds.
Can you imagine a music video using lines like that? And think of the visuals of some of the perpetrators…
How horrible my heart goes out to you. Makes you weep it really does. These people are just disgusting. As you say unforgivable absolutely unforgivable.
To borrow from JK Rowling, they missed Point Zero – There was no pandemic. FACT CHECK – TRUE.
And lest we forget, the corrupt WHO deliberately changed the definition of what a pandemic was just before the swine flu was declared as one, and muppet Mogwai even took a flipping vaccine for it, because I was very green and pro-vax back then, what with working in health care and all. But the swine flu did not result in massive numbers of deaths nor was it novel because some people evidently did have existing cross-immunity to it. The parallels with Covid are uncanny. But in that regard I think swine flu was a sort of ‘dummy run’ for the WHO and Big Pharma ( and all associates ) because what they learnt was that they needed a fraudulent test and one hell of a PsyOp to really make it impactful and work to their advantage, and boy did they succeed on a global scale! Pure chuffing manipulation and underhand shananigans from start to finish and look where we are now.
”Since 2003, the top of the WHO Pandemic Preparedness homepage has contained the following statement: “An influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in several simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.”6 However, on 4 May 2009, scarcely one month before the H1N1 pandemic was declared, the web page was altered in response to a query from a CNN reporter.7 The phrase “enormous numbers of deaths and illness” had been removed and the revised web page simply read as follows: “An influenza pandemic may occur when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity.” Months later, the Council of Europe would cite this alteration as evidence that WHO changed its definition of pandemic influenza to enable it to declare a pandemic without having to demonstrate the intensity of the disease caused by the H1N1 virus.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3127275/
Indeed. What I find so depressing is that as much as people are starting to wake up to the folly and evil, very few seem to me to have grasped what I believe to be the case – there was no pandemic, just a bad flu season that we should have just blustered through like every other bad flu season. The idea that covid was different or special is cemented in now, and I won’t live to see it let go of.
I saw a tweet the other day by that quack Hotez, pharma shill and vaxx pimp supreme. He was whining that the opening weeked of Barbie/Oppenheimer would result in moviegeddon, being huge (huge I tell you, huge, enormous) superspeader events – and we would never know, because no one was testing anymore.
Do these f-wits even read and understand their own words? A huge superspreader event we would never know about suggests there is nothing to know. If thousands of people start dropping dead in the next few weeks (bar having another round of boosters), we would definitely know. If no one is dropping dead and the hospitals aren’t filling up, then there is nothing to know. And that passes for a medical expert?
COVID was always the disease that’s extremely dangerous to everyone except those who actually got it. Nobody ever really questioned this patent insanity.
They still don’t. Most people I know are triple vaxxed, and they know I’m not. They ask me if I’ve had covid. I answer that I have no idea (never tested) but that I’ve had a few bouts of a flu like illness in the last couple of years and given that, if covid exists, most people must have had it at least once by now, so I expect I have had it once or twice. Not once has any of them expressed astonishment that I am still alive and in better health than they are, or asked me whether I was/is worried about covid. Some friends recently asked “oh, so how did you travel?”.
Well can you imagine if we’d had a PCR test for flu for the last 10 years, and mass testing for it was just routine and encouraged, the WHO would be declaring ”pandemics” as an annual event! We’d be dab hands at this lockdown and mask business by now, and our countries would have gone to sh*t economically, as well as health and social-wise, a long time ago as a result of these draconian and abusive measures. The success of the PsyOp ( and subsequent death jab uptake ) was always heavily dependent on the tests, the latter being the key to the governments’ totalitarian abuses of human rights, civil liberties and their crimes against humanity.
Indeed. Respiratory viruses of the type we’ve lived with since time immemorial will not go away, and we just need to accept that and keep on living with them – with the emphasis on living, as opposed to a living death. Even if all the lockdown lunacy “worked” to some degree, the suspension of normal life for billions for anything longer than 1 day per millenium is far too high a price to pay for any “lives saved”.
Yes, agreed. If anything there was a ‘pandemic’ of mass hysteria whereby everybody took leave of their senses and forgot what a flipping immune system was! I’m going to stick my neck out and say that there will never be any truly *novel* virus that could prove dangerous to people globally because everybody, depending on where you live, will always have immunity to something, and all you need is a functional immune system to not die from whatever lurgy you’re exposed to anyway. Oh and there’s the small point of governments/health authorities not depriving people of antibiotics and other known early treatment options that undoubtedly would have saved countless lives. It was all deaths resulting from iatrogenesis and democide.
This is evidenced by the fact that there are now more excess deaths in any country from 2021> than when we were exposed to their super-deadly, novel virus and had no miracle vaccine in 2020, and that those deaths ( and disabilities, inc heart damage ) are, worryingly, mostly taking place in people not even making it to the end of their natural life spans ( unlike the average age of death for somebody dying *from* Covid ), so people of working age and kids. You just cannot make this stuff up. A virus so deadly that people aren’t dying until they’re elderly and a vaccine so effective and safe you can still get Covid repeatedly and you won’t live long enough to draw your pension! Only in Clown World would such an absurdity make any sense.
It’s possible that a new plague might emerge that is dangerous enough to warrant drastic action, but unlikely we’d need to force people to take precautions, and equally unlikely any of them would do any good.
But that would likely only happen locally and never spread to be a global threat, just due to the fact a pathogen cannot usually be highly virulent and highly transmissible. Same goes for anything from a gain of function lab. It could cause havoc locally but a worldwide deadly pandemic is just the stuff of Hollywood movies in my opinion. The thing wouldn’t get very far if it killed its hosts so I anticipate in the future nothing worse than any flu we have already experienced. The WHO are trying their best to conjure things up though aren’t they? And they’ve had a few damp squibs, such as monkey pox and marburg recently, to name just two, though I did read about ‘shrew flu’ in China the other day. Molehills and mountains… And somebody might have to wake me up when this super-deadly haemorhagic fever thingy hits, with an IFR of 40, because I’ve got big expectations for that one. They’re really hyping it up! lol
Yes none of it seems very realistic.
Dr Mike Yeadon is firmly of the same opinion Mogs.
But that would likely only happen locally and never spread to be a global threat, just due to the fact a pathogen cannot usually be highly virulent and highly transmissible.
It absolutely can, at least in the right conditions. When the so-called black death wandered through Europe for the first time at the speed of the means of transportation back then, it would kill up to 80% of the people living in each settlement it reached within days.
I should have thought it obvious I’m referring to modern times, as in *the future*, where ‘The Black Death; Part 2’ is hardly likely to occur, what with medicines and sanitation being actual realities now.
The “Black Death” is one of those events that, when looked at more closely, is much more complicated than we have been taught. It also went on for decades (supposedly) in waves. It was pre-dated by strange weather patterns, rain and poor harvests meaning that the population would be weak and vulnerable to sickness. One person I spoke to about this thought that yellow (cadmium?) dyes from the East were responsible for poisoning people.
Finally it was such a long time ago that any evidence must be patchy. I think it is still unproven that the fleas were to blame.
Indeed – one theory I heard was that it was at least two different illnesses as historical records evidence completely different symptoms, one with Ebola-like haemorhagic symptoms, the other with more respiratory/pneumonic symptoms. Reflecting, as you say, preceding chronic health debilities.
I think you are referring to Dengue fever which is spread by mosquitos not person to person.
The first time someone gets dengue they feel pretty rotten stay at home and recover in a few days. The second time again can feel pretty awful and may need to be in hospital for repeated tests to make sure there platelet count doesn’t drop to low.
The third time quite often people are admitted to an icu for ntensive monitoring but can recover.
There isn’t a fourth time.
It really pisses me off the crap that is spoken in the west and the fearmongering about dengue. Yes it can be serious the third time but nowhere near the hype that is put out.
Indeed. I can remember some very bad ‘flu seasons. I think one was in the late 60s where so many people were sick everywhere became very quiet(empty shops, empty trains, etc), and my father (who never caught it) was, for some time, the only person in his office. Can’t remember any fuss being made.
Hong Kong flu, 1968, killed between 1 and 4 million, also flu in 1958 killed about the same. World population was much smaller then too.
And the NHS and the country at large weren’t shut down for Hong Kong Flu. Funnily enough there were no social media and 24hr rolling news back then either. Coincidence??
Indeed this was a key factor
I think a really important part – after two abortive attempts, 2004 and 2009 – was Don’t call it influenza. That’s too familiar to too many people for widespread panicking. It must be something verbally associated with a reportedly really bad illness many people still remember but something new and entirely different at the same time, to utilize mankind’s natural xenophobia. Eh voilà — Sars 2.0 aka Sars-CoV2 was born.
I think that is why Monkey Pox failed to make much impact. With such a silly name, it was not taken seriously.
…and the fact that it readily morphed into monepox, thus truly reflecting its origins!!!
15.Covid only exists in the mind.
Rebecca Harris: Shut up, you idiot.
Daily Skeptic: Yer, Shut up you idiot.
The testing point is missing a major argument. I remember at the beginning that some people were pointing out that a pcr test is so specific, it would pick up fragments of the virus, meaning not only that someone might not be infected, but also that it could be picking up fragments of an infection from months before. This was ignored or set aside as conspiracy (of course).
Little attention was paid to the announcement by CDC bimbo Walensky at the end of December 2021 that there was no need to test negative on a pcr test after being in isolation, as a person could test positive for up to 3 months after infection. In other words, they knew all along that a positive test for someone who was ‘asymptomatic’ (what we used to call ‘not sick’) was meaningless, yet countries threw billions of dollars, euros, pounds away on those garbage tests and forced people to be incarcerated on the basis of utter nonsense. This goes beyond whether or not the tests were accurate or not – outside of someone actually presenting as ill, they were utterly pointless.
People who are ill, by and large, tend to take to bed. Testing without symptoms = pointless. Testing while ill = equally pointless, they will have already infected people prior to symptoms and if already ill, how about going old-school and – gosh – treating them for their illness?
Testing, and getting a positive result without feeling ill = skivers charter!
And don’t forget the financial opportunity created for some organisations. They won’t be publishing the balance sheets for that lot. That said, it might have had a negative cash flow for some. E.g. the dentists surgery I go to had (earlier this year) an online symptom questionnaire specifically for Covid-19, with a list of about 10 items and a yes/no tick box for each one. It had a timeframe of about 4 weeks before. As it happened, I did have a fairly benign respiratory attack just before then; I think they would have cancelled my appointment if I’d selected “yes” for that lot – but it was outside the time limit so I said “no” to all of them. Nothing was mentioned on arrival. It all appeared normal there in early Spring.
One of the horrors of our time is that things don’t have to age well. They don’t even have to make sense from one moment to the next as long as the narrative has a hypnotic quality. Look at the mysterious disappearance of the Skripals and how completely that left the public consciousness. This is no consciousness at all it is a population captured by the images on the wall. Not surprising given that we are dealing with a hundred year old scientifically-crafted propaganda model that has had immense resources at its disposal, not just in terms of money but also darker insights gained in evil circumstances.All of the nastiness that went on in the post war era needs to be laid bare.
“Thankfully, there is now the investigative team at BBC Verify to rescue the truth from future pandemic propagandists!”
Yeah right!