Today’s Telegraph leads with the story that Boris is due to wind down lockdown restrictions on Sunday, although by the time you read this it will have officially been extended. Is this finally happening? Or will the announcement be postponed again? As Guido Fawkes points out, the Telegraph has predicted lockdown is about to be eased three times before on its front page, only for nothing to happen. But this is probably a case of fourth time lucky, according to Guido, because the story is “exclusive to all news outlets everywhere”, i.e. all the other papers have it too. The Telegraph‘s Camilla Tominey has more details.
One fly in the ointment – or, rather, two – is that the plan hasn’t been signed off yet by Nicola Sturgeon or Keir Starmer, who both think it’s too soon to start easing restrictions. According to the Mail, Sturgeon thinks any dialling back of stay-at-home measures would be “catastrophic”. “Our assessment of the evidence leads me to the conclusion that the lockdown must be extended at this stage,” she said at a briefing in Edinburgh this morning. (She must be looking at very different evidence to me.) Starmer, meanwhile, says the restrictions cannot be eased until testing has been ramped up further, highlighting the fact that the Government’s daily figure has dropped below the magic 100,000 number. And the Mail has a poll showing that Sturgeon and Starmer’s more cautious approach is supported by a majority of the public. The survey found that 62% of Britons are worried about the curbs being lifted too early, while only a minority – 38% – say their main concern is the havoc the lockdown is wreaking on the economy.
A couple of different readers have sent me a “leaked” document that purports to be a five-step exit plan that English local authorities have been sent in advance of Sunday’s announcement, starting with garden centres and ironmongers reopening on May 18th, along with outdoor workers returning to work, some outdoor sporting activities being permitted (limited to four participants), some tourist attractions reopening, and some mixing between households. The most alarming revelation is that schools won’t reopen until the beginning of the next academic year. However, a bit of cursory research on my part has revealed that this isn’t Boris’s plan, but the Irish Government’s. RTE has the details.
Several of the papers reveal that the NHS is having second thoughts about its contact-tracing app. The FT says NHSx, the health service’s digital innovation arm, has asked a team of software developers to “investigate” whether the app can be redesigned so it aligns with the Apple-Google solution being used in Germany and elsewhere. The firm tasked with redeveloping the app – and providing support once it’s been rolled out – is Zuhlke Engineering, a Swiss IT company. According to the FT, it’s been awarded a contract worth £3.8m.
One of my readers – the same cyber security expert who wrote the review of NHSX’s app that I published yesterday – thinks something fishy is going on.
£3.8m for six months work? Money no object here, clearly. That’s £30k per day. What the heck are they doing? Day rates per programmer for a London team are circa £450 per day. That implies a team of over 70 people on this. That’s a problem in itself. Big teams don’t write good software. By comparison Amazon use a “two pizza” model – you should be able to feed your team with two pizzas. Over 70 is madness and smacks of desperation. So even plan B is doomed to fail. I wish I could say I was surprised.
According to the FT, which is quoting from the invitation to tender, the contract includes a requirement to “investigate the complexity, performance and feasibility of implementing native Apple and Google contact tracing APIs [application programming interfaces] within the existing proximity mobile application and platform”.
One word jumps out there: “within”. It means the strategy is to gut the existing app and replace the internals with the Apple-Google version. Like Trigger’s broom in Only Fools and Horses – same brush, just an entirely new head and handle. So it will be the “same” app, just with a new code inside it. Most users won’t notice the app update on their phone, so it means NHSx and Matt Hancock can save face. Nothing to see here…
There’s a lot more detail on Neil Ferguson and his mistress in today’s papers. If you Google Antonia Staats it brings up her LinkedIn account, which describes her as a “senior activist/campaigner” with Avaaz, although her LinkedIn profile is no longer available. According to Wikipedia, Avaaz is a US-based charity that was launched in January 2007 and promotes global activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, animal rights, corruption, poverty and conflict. During the 2008 Canadian election campaign, the then environment minister John Baird called Avaaz a “shadowy foreign organisation” and said it was funded by George Soros.
This will be grist to the mill of those conspiracy theorists who believe that many of the scientific experts advising governments during this crisis – not just here, but around the world – are linked to activists and campaigning groups with a green agenda and are deliberately exaggerating the risks posed by the virus to persuade politicians to inflect needless acts of economic self-harm. Their object, according to this theory, is to destroy capitalism. And in case you’re wondering exactly what they’d like to see in its place, over 200 “artists and scientists”, including Madonna, Robert De Niro and several Nobel Prize winners, signed a letter to Le Monde this morning demanding that the world not “return to normal” and urging us all to stop “the pursuit of consumerism” and instead try and bring about “social equity”. Sounds a lot like socialism to me – and we all know how that ends.
My own view is that the public health experts advising governments around the world are acting in good faith. Yes, many of them have misgivings about free market capitalism, and it’s entirely possible that some of them are fully signed up to the Extinction Rebellion agenda. But I don’t think they’re deliberately trying to sabotage the global economy in order to further that agenda. As I explained yesterday, the advise being given to politicians during this crisis by left-leaning policy panjandrums is indeed catastrophically wrong and will undoubtedly do enormous damage to the economies of those countries that have listened to them, not least the UK. But that’s not because advisors like Neil Ferguson have a secret agenda. It’s because they’re wildly over-estimating the good that governments can do and not giving nearly enough thought to the unintended consequences of large-scale state interventions. We’ve been here before – many, many times, particularly in the area I know most about, which is public education. Nearly every ambitious, state-led attempt to raise educational achievement has been, at best, completely ineffective. More often than not, these ruinously expensive national programmes do more harm than good. The policy wonks who’ve designed them don’t deliberately set out to make schools worse. That’s just the inevitable result of their hubristic over-reach, which is often linked to their denial of human nature and the limits it imposes on what governments can achieve. They’re innocent saboteurs, as it were, hamstrung by their own idealism, and I suspect the same is true here. I distilled my argument in a piece for the Critic entitled ‘The fatal hubris of Professor Lockdown‘.
Some people will think that’s naive. Maybe so. Time will tell.
Not all my fellow hacks think Neil Ferguson is a villain – Paul Nuki, the Global Health Security Editor of the Telegraph, thinks his sagacious advice “saved thousands of lives“. However, lockdown scepticism continues to grow. The Mail has a story headlined ‘Was Britain’s lockdown a waste of time?‘ that’s based on some research by a group of academics at the University of East Anglia showing that draconian stay-at-home orders and shutting down all non-essential businesses has had little effect on suppressing infections. A couple of days ago, the Telegraph ran a piece by its Economics Editor Paul Lynch arguing that the economic price we’re paying for saving lives (which he thinks the lockdown is doing) is too high. And this morning, the BBC’s Nick Triggle, usually a pretty cautious customer, wrote a piece asking whether the public health costs of the lockdown are greater than the public health benefits. He links to this paper, produced by some academics in Edinburgh and London, arguing for a “segmenting and shielding” exit strategy – basically, we gradually come out of lockdown and ramp up protection of the most vulnerable groups as we go, eventually building up herd immunity. For the non-vulnerable population, i.e. the vast majority, coronavirus carries no more risk than a “nasty flu”, according to Professor Mark Woolhouse, an expert in infectious disease who led the research.
Yesterday, I published a review of the computer code used by Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial – or, rather, a derivative version of that code – by someone I identified as “Sue Denim”. It’s hardly the only criticism the code has received from within the programming community – see this thread on Reddit, for instance – but it got more attention that I’d anticipated and at several points in the past 24 hours our server was overwhelmed. So today my webmaster has transferred the site to a new server.
Sue Denim is not the author’s real name, incidentally. It’s a byline derived from the word “pseudonym”, an old Private Eye gag. But plenty of people didn’t get the joke, with some sleuths on Twitter claiming they couldn’t find any evidence of a “Sue Denim” ever having worked at Google. I’m satisfied that the person in question did, in fact, work at Google. He/she has added a note at the bottom of the review explaining why they wish to remain anonymous:
Sue Denim isn’t a real person (read it out). I’ve chosen to remain anonymous partly because of the intense fighting that surrounds lockdown, but there’s also a deeper reason. This situation has come about due to rampant credentialism and I’m tired of it. As the widespread dismay by programmers demonstrates, if anyone in SAGE or the Government had shown the code to a working software engineer they happened to know, alarm bells would have been rung immediately. Instead, the Government is dominated by academics who apparently felt unable to question anything done by a fellow professor. Meanwhile, average citizens like myself are told we should never question “expertise”. Although I’ve proven my Google employment to Toby, this mentality is damaging and needs to end: please, evaluate the claims I’ve made for yourself, or ask a programmer you know and trust to evaluate them for you.
Some of the comments that have appeared beneath the review are excellent. I thought this one, posted today, was particularly good. The author, also anonymous, tells me he’s spent 20 years as a high-level consultant to various national and international institutions, overseeing advice and policy decisions based on economic, environmental and epidemiological modelling.
Unlike most of those who comment on the code for the Imperial College model, I can say that I have been there, done that and got the t-shirt, i.e. I have created models for academic work that have become the subject of intense political controversy. The comments by Sue Denim are based on a substantial amount of hindsight and expectations that are unrealistic for academic teams who do not have access to the resources necessary to meet the best coding standards and are often under extreme pressure to generate results quickly. I have little doubt that every model that I have produced could have been coded better, but that is really not the point with 99% of models. We should remember the aphorism that “all models are wrong, but some of them are useful”.
Nonetheless, there are strange features of the Imperial College model. No-one that I know would have coded a model of this kind in C++ at any point in the last three decades. Most academics would use Matlab, Python or a large variety of high level packages/languages – according to taste and age. Using C++ (or, for the older of us, Fortran) is an open invitation to bugs, memory leaks, buffer overwriting, etc. which lead to the “random” results highlighted by Sue Denim. Of course, the model may also have been deliberately stochastic – i.e. it may rely on random number generators to derive a distribution of outcomes – but there has been little attention paid to the stochastic features of the results and in any case there are much better ways of doing this than writing C++ code.
What this review highlights is the complete failure of bureaucrats and politicians to go through a reasonable system to test the results of such models when and if they rely on them. There are many other epidemiological models around and the big failure seems to have been to rely heavily on one set of results without trying, even in a short period of time, to develop a consensus about broad conclusions rather than detailed numbers. Errors are not especially important if there is broad agreement across modelling groups.
The real problem is that no such consensus exists; this decision was made on political grounds and in a panic. Personally, I think Neil Ferguson was foolish to allow himself to become the focus of the supposed “scientific” advice underlying a political decision. Intense media attention is both seductive and fickle. The lesson to learn now is that future policies must be based on a broader discussion of both epidemiology and policy options. There is, now, a huge amount of evidence from around the world that is largely being ignored by those who seem more concerned to defend what was done and rather less to work out reasonable trade-offs between health and economic outcomes.
And while we’re on the shortcoming of Professor Ferguson’s model, a reader flagged up this passage from the 2011 paper by Mansley et al about the UK Government’s heavily-criticised response to Food and Mouth Disease (FMD) in 2001 which, needless to say, was influenced by one of Ferguson’s computer simulations:
The mathematical models were, at best, crude estimations that could not differentiate risk between farms and, at worst, inaccurate representations of the epidemiology of FMD. Ultimately, the models neither correctly predicted the course and duration of the epidemic nor the effectiveness of the traditional control measures put in place nor the novel ones proposed. Thus, they failed the acid tests of refutedness, testedness and usefulness. The rush to embrace non-validated mathematical models in policy-making, presented without balancing their apparent numerical certainty against the degree of improbable biological assumptions they contained, resulted in traditional methods proven by generations of veterinarians being neglected. As Kitching et al put it [in the summary of their 2006 paper]: “The UK experience provides a salutary warning of how models can be abused in the interest of scientific opportunism.”
You can read that paper in full here, and the paper by Kitching et al that’s referenced in the last line here.
A couple of weeks ago I urged readers to sign a petition on the Government’s website calling for the lockdown to end, but it disappeared into the bureaucratic ether. However, Mary Waugh, granddaughter of Auberon Waugh, has started another one and this one has got past the gatekeepers. You can sign Mary’s petition here. 10,000 signatures and the Government will have to respond – 100,000 and it could be debated in Parliament. I’ve signed it, naturally. (Doh! The petition has already disappeared.)
A reader has asked whether Simon Dolan, the man threatening the Government with a judicial review of the lockdown unless restrictions imposed by the Coronavirus Regulations Act are lifted, will be pressing ahead with his lawsuit because the Government didn’t comply with his demand by 4pm today, the deadline mentioned in the original crowdfunder. However, the Government’s lawyers have asked for an extension until 4pm on May 14th and Dolan’s lawyers have responded, giving Boris until 4pm on May 12th to lift the restrictions. You can read the letter from the Government’s solicitors here and the response from Dolan’s solicitors here.
Last week, I asked some rogue epidemiologists I’m in touch with if they’d compile an Excel spreadsheet of all the testing surveys that have been done so far – both PRC and serological – showing what percentage of the populations-in-question have been infected and what the estimated infection fatality rate (IFR) is. I suggested they add to it whenever a new set of survey results is published and stick a median IFR figure at the bottom. They didn’t bite – too much work – but as luck would have it someone has posted precisely such a spreadsheet in the comments below one of the pages on this site. It’s here. I haven’t had a chance to check it yet, but it looks solid and all the surveys are linked to in the spreadsheet so it’s easy to check. The median IFR is 0.23%, a quarter of the estimate in Professor Ferguson’s infamous model.
Here is a round-up of all those interesting articles and papers I’ve spotted, or readers have flagged up, in the past 24 hours:
- ‘Delaying herd immunity is costing lives‘ – The case for herd immunity, as set out in Spiked by Martin Kulldorff, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School
- ‘Segmentation and shielding of the most vulnerable members of the population as elements of an exit strategy from COVID-19 lockdown‘ – An exit plan devised by a group of infectious diseases academics at Edinburgh University and University College London that’s a lot more attractive than the one likely to be unveiled by Boris on Sunday
- ‘Majority of new COVID-19 hospitalizations in New York are people who stayed at home‘ – Turns out, 66% of those currently being admitted to hospital in New York City followed the Governor’s ‘shelter-in-place’ order. 96% have underlying health issues
- ‘Charities on the brink after donors ignore appeals and back NHS‘ – Story in the Times about the financial collapse of the third sector
- ‘Churchill in reverse‘ – Good column by James Allan in the Australian Spectator, although, surprisingly, it’s about Scott Morrison’s handling of the crisis, not Boris’s
- ‘We know everything – and nothing – about Covid‘ – Matt Ridley summarises the state of our knowledge about the virus in the latest issue of the Spectator
- ‘The invisible pandemic‘ – In a letter in the Lancet, Sweden’s former epidemiologist-in-chief Johan Giesecke explains why Sweden’s deaths-per-million remain below those in the UK, Spain, Belgium and Italy, in spite of the fact the country hasn’t locked down
- ‘I told you so! 1,000 tests was a foolish targets‘ – Tom Chivers at his scathing best in UnHerd. A pic of Matt Hancock looking foolish accompanies the piece
- ‘Despite the Ferguson fiasco, No 10 is about to make its second major blunder‘ – The always-good Sherelle Jacobs sticks the boot in
More suggestions for theme tunes: ‘I Am the Virus‘ by Killing Joke, ‘F.E.A.R.‘ by Ian Brown and – in a nod to the weird hold Neil Ferguson has exercised over successive British Prime Ministers – ‘You Put a Spell on Me‘ by Nina Simone.
Thanks as always to those who made a donation yesterday to pay for the upkeep of the site. If you feel like donating, you can do so by clicking here. (Every little helps!) And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in tomorrow’s update, you can email me here. With the bump we got from the review of Ferguson’s computer code yesterday, we’re on track to pass half a million page views later today.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
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As an aside, I spoke to a hospital anaesthetist who is currently covering for ICU, she said it’s started getting unexpectedly busy. Not with Covid patients, but all the people who’ve not managed to see a doctor for one reason or the other.
The Telegraph estimates an extra 2,000 extra non covid deaths a week, week 17 was 3,300, I suspect that will continue to rise.
When will ‘extra’ non covid deaths overtake the covid deaths?!
https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/oestrogen-covid
Interesting new research by King’s College and NHS England on possible protective effects of oestrogen.
I’ve just done my daily report and answered the extra questions
Until I found this website I had no idea so many people felt the same way about this seemingly endless lockdown. I had some hope that restrictions would be eased from Monday onwards, particularly now that Ferguson has publicly disgraced himself, but alas it seems there is no end in sight.
I am in disbelief at the latest polls which suggest that the British would be happy to see this insanity continue until July, it’s sad testament to the fear mongering that has been ramped up by government and media alike.
Thank you for speaking on behalf of those of us who are increasingly worried about the impact this undemocratic lockdown will have for years to come.
Has everyone seen the Oxford Study? Same dept but looks like different team to CEBM? “Risk factors for COVID-19 death revealed in world’s largest analysis of patient records to date”
Largest study to date, analysing NHS health data from 17.4 million UK adults between 01 February 2020 and 25 April 2020, has given the strongest evidence to date on risk factors associated with COVID-19 death.
Among the 17.4 million adults in the sample, there were 5,707 deaths in hospitals attributed to COVID-19.
I’m rubbish at Maths, but even I can see just shy of 6k deaths out of 17.4 MILLION people is quite worthy of mention.
https://opensafely.org/press-releases/2020/05/covid-risk-factors/
0.034482759% mortality rate. Somewhat less than benign
It looks like an interesting study. The 17m were just 17m people, they weren’t necessarily infected with SARS-COV2. So the proportion of them who died doesn’t tell us anything, except perhaps as a bad estimate of the population fatality rate, but we already know that from other sources (about 0.05% in the UK currently).
This means they’re sampling the risk of dying of Covid-19 for different age and ethnic groups etc. and they’re including in that the risk of catching it in the first place.
It is clear that Covid-19 affects people differently. Some will not even notice a period of infection, and some will die. The range of outcomes could not be further apart, so why is it that the virus is so deadly for some?
To understand that, one has to understand what’s going on during such an infection. The condition that leads to death is severe respiratory distress. This isn’t caused by the virus, but by an excessive immune system response called a Cytokine Storm. The Alveoli, which are the little lung sacks that transfer oxygen from the air we breathe into the blood, fill with fluid which hampers the oxygen transfer and forced ventilation doesn’t improve this, in fact it can cause more damage to these sacks, which is why so many people die once this stage is reached. It’s simple physics. Limited space, fluid enters, pressure increases, pump air in and it increases even more. At some point the alveoli often suffers permanent damage, followed by death. By often I mean considerably more than half the people on forced ventilation die.
Dr Shiva Ayyadurai, an expert in the immune system, makes this point forcefully. He recommends high dosage vitamin C… Read more »
Here is Dominic Raab’s email address:
[email protected]
Let him know what you think of this lockdown. If EVERYONE on this site sends this to him, it WILL have an impact. Here is my MP template letter below (with a few tweaks):
I am writing this joint letter to express my deep concerns regarding the continuation of the restrictions on our freedom of movement and forced closure of businesses, otherwise known as “lockdown”. These actions were based on nothing less than science fiction, which originated from Imperial College’s false modelling and the predictions led by Professor Neil Ferguson’s non peer-reviewed unpublished paper, produced on 16th March 2020. His model was based on false assumptions, and relied on assuming a virus mortality rate which we now know was 10 times higher than has found to be the actual IFR.
Prof. Ferguson’s history of pandemic modelling, has been nothing less than disastrous, overblown nonsense. To remind you of Neil Ferguson’s estimates on the impact of previous viral outbreaks – which have been embarrassingly inaccurate: He was previously instrumental in modelling that led to the cull of more than 6 million animals during the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, which left rural Britain… Read more »
My email sent.
Also Matt Hancock – [email protected]
Consider it done. Great letter and the facts are shocking but true.
Is it possible to get this in a newspaper and/or Magazine such as the Spectator?
My concern is that they clearly know all of this, but are choosing to ignore it. But why?
Political expediency.
Sent to Raab and Hancock. Doesn’t matter if they already know this. Flood their inboxes so that they know we know it too. Thanks for the template RDawg
Sent just now. I hereby appoint RDawg as the Lockdown Sceptics writer in chief.
Likewise. Thank you RDawg
Done
Greetings, friends!
My husband has been graphing COVID stats from U.S. states for several weeks, sucking down the daily data from the states to see the trends. And he has discovered the most remarkable thing.
Case fatality rates are higher in blue states (Democratic governors) than they are in red states (Republican governors). This holds true even running the graph without blue New York, which has the lion’s share of COVID deaths.
Even comparing states that are basically twins, the pattern is present. Blue Vermont has a much higher cfr than red New Hampshire, and New Hampshire has twice the population of Vermont.
I tried to copy and paste a graph but it doesn’t seem to appear.
He adds that cases per capita are 2x higher and deaths per capita are 3x higher in blue states, not counting New York.
Be interesting to add in the demographics there, as well, because I’d have thought the age spread would be tilted towards older (and therefore much more vulnerable) in the Republican states. Don’t know if that’s factually true or not, just my feeling.
Put the graph in a Google Doc / Sheet and share the link
He promises links to the notebook itself later in the day, and then everyone can run their own custom graphs. Microsoft is cleaning up the code….
Mimi, this says much the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmIF0vZTZaA
Maybe the population density is higher in blue states. These tend to be the nerdier more metropolitan places on the coasts.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN …… ATTENTION PLEASE!
I have noticed despair creeping in to many of these comments. I have experienced it myself. But one thing you need to know about is:
THE 3.5% RULE!
That is, research has shown that it only needs 3.5% of the population to non-violently challenge a government or its policies, for that government to fall or for its policies to change.
Watch this TED talk on the subject – you can find more online about this.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w
IOW keep on keeping on! What happens in this country does NOT depend on the 95% of the population who are incapable of independent thought – it depends on the 5% of thinkers; and in fact not even that – 3.5%!
Once the narrative begins to change, the 95% will AUTOMATICALLY fall in line with whatever “newthink” they are told to think by the Govt. and mainstream media.
We may be nearing a tipping point so it important to press on!
Gracie Knoll, couldn’t agree more. That’s what I ‘feel’, not what I ‘know’.
You can add this to the antibody testing – it’s hidden away in this NYT article. They tested people who thought they had had it, but were never tested. Results was 38% tested positive!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/health/coronavirus-antibody-prevalence.html?campaign_id=51&emc=edit_MBE_p_20200508&instance_id=18312&nl=morning-briefing®i_id=124209132§ion=topNews&segment_id=26884&te=1&user_id=062bd030210b474408ff48cca3345fba
Silly Thought for the Day: when ,in the future, a well meaning astronomer publishes a study of the sun’s corona will there be an outbreak of mass panic? Stock piling of sun hats,sun screen and shades? Plus mega doses of Vitamin D to counteract the terror of the outdoors and sunlight?
The virus comes form outer space! Cue online persecution of astronomers.
Daft I know, but still attempting to find some humour and whimsy in all this.
Allegedly, Americans have been avoiding Corona beer.
Nice one!
And of course, every human skull has a coronal suture, which separates the parietal bones from the frontal bone…….o dear!
There’s a very good fake CNN headline that reads:
“Man Eaten By Shark Dies From Corona virus.
Pelosi Blames Trump.”
Jaws! Carcharodon coronavirus: Trump accused of neglecting virus threat posed by great whites in coastal waters.
Democrats call for investigation into funding cuts
75 years since people gave their lives to defend our democratic freedom. How they would turn in their graves to see us now living under illegal rule of Government.
https://twitter.com/wewillbefree82/status/1258720789794357249?s=21
Heart-sinking article on YouGov – most Britons think they could cope with the current lockdown restrictions until JULY.
Lord give me strength.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/health/articles-reports/2020/05/07/most-britons-think-they-could-cope-current-lockdow
Well, dear people, it is NOT the lockdown that will really hurt, it is the aftermath!
That’s YouGov though who are in the government’s pockets. Their sampling is biased towards those who agree with the establishment point of view
Quotes of the day, from a government adviser, no less, excellent for highlighting in discussions with the fearful majority:
“the public authorities face a real challenge in managing the British people out of the levels of fear and anxiety that the authorities themselves have induced”
“we’ve had this very strong message about which has effectively terrorised the British population into believing that this is a disease that’s going to kill you, and mostly it isn’t”
“Prof Dingwall said he had been told by a senior public health specialist that “we knew it was one metre but we doubled it to two because we did not think the British population would understand what one metre was and we could not trust them to observe it so we doubled it to be on the safe side”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/07/government-has-terrorised-britons-believing-coronavirus-will/
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/fear-freedom-and-fishing/id1213415786?i=1000473899714
I can only imagine Toby will be making highly effective and entertaining use of these particularly devastating quotes in his next piece. Can’t wait…
Interesting that he says “Eighty per cent of the people who get this infection will never need to go near a hospital. The ones who do go to hospital because they are quite seriously ill most of them will come out alive – even those who go into intensive care.”
Far fewer than 20% of those infected will need to go to hospital, at least ten times fewer than that. In fact 80% may not even know they had it all. But if you do go into intensive care, assuming you aren’t a prime minister, your chances of coming out of it in a box are about 50/50.
Still far more significant than whether he gets his factoids wrong is seeing a bit of gentle deprogramming in the Telegraph which is a good sign.
I suspected he was just talking a little loosely (as one does when speaking rather than writing), and meant 80% of those who suffer symptoms, which is the kind of figure I’ve seen suggested for those who don’t get badly ill.
Remember (from the words of our state broadcaster) lockdown continues to be a so called ‘holiday’ for many! Liberty and the biggest economic crash of my lifetime versus a few weeks off work as ‘the science’ (big brother) knows all – yes please, the latter!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-52539794
Oh dear…
Article: Vitamin D level is directly correlated to COVID-19 outcome. https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/05/08/vitamin-d-level-correlated-to-covid19-outcomes.aspx
“Vitamin D deficiency has been found to contribute to acute respiratory distress syndrome; and … case-fatality rates increase with age and with chronic disease comorbidity, both of which are associated with lower 25(OH)D concentration.
To reduce the risk of infection, it is recommended that people at risk of influenza and/or COVID-19 consider taking 10,000 IU/d of vitamin D3 for a few weeks to rapidly raise 25(OH)D concentrations, followed by 5000 IU/d. The goal should be to raise 25(OH)D concentrations above 40–60 ng/mL (100–150 nmol/L). For treatment of people who become infected with COVID-19, higher vitamin D3 doses might be useful.”
IE. Get yourselves out from under your duvet and get outside. The exact opposite of a fucking lockdown. It’s been obvious from the start, just have normal functioning immune system and the risk is miniscule.
Protect and shield the vulnerable
Here’s another.
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/04/28/covid-update-focus-on-vitamin-d/
It looks like Mary’s petition is at the same stage as mine – its waiting for a parliamentary committee to approve it. I think Toby you may have just supported it to get to that stage (they need 5 supporters to get to the committee). Mine was at that stage over a week ago and I guess is ahead of Mary’s in the queue. Its interesting that petitions should normally be approved within a week but mine is already taking longer than that – I wonder why?
Being kind, it could be that all petitions are going slow as the 100% fully-paid public ‘servants’ may be all off having a hoiday/self-isolating/unable to work because of limited PPE!
No – I’m not that kind either!
Ms Waaugh’s petition appears to have disappeared into the ether also. Should we be reading anything into this? I cannot believe it hasn’t received 10,000 signatures. I would have signed yesterday had I had time to read today’s LS post.
The most possible scenario is that it was removed by special order of the Government using the Coronavirus Bill. The previous petition ‘reverse the Dangerous Coronavirus Bill: rushed through parliament’ (think that is the one that Toby mentioned) had more than 180,000 signatures and just disappeared one night. Change.org’s T&Cs stated that they will notify signatories once it reached 200,000 signatures, but in this instance disappearance and sadly NO notification from them.
Two young people whom I’ve spoken to in the past few days are content with matters as they are: one is worried about possible resurgence of the dreaded covid in the event of the lockdown being lifted:(she is a dental nurse but also runs a local shop with her parents); the other hates her part time job and is enjoying the leisure which furlough affords her.
She has a second job which she loves and which she hope will eventually offer more hours.
The staff in the local pharmacy are all swathed in masks,despite having glass barriers in place and distancing signs on the floor.
Others are bored and frustrated,but there doesn’t seem to be any widespread discontent at present.
We’ve unfurloughed one staff member this week (until then, just MD and two sceptical stalwarts helping us to limp along on 10% turnover). He’s our data boffin, does all the web back end, but he’s been with us a long time so knows how to pick and pack, answer the phone, deal with returns etc so if he wants to stay employed, he’s on man friday duties for the forseeable. The problem is, he’s hysterically terrified of dying. He’s also probably the brightest member of our team. So we’re now doubly inefficient, as he won’t touch doorhandles, the phone, the computer or the toilet until it’s been disinfected, and keeps shouting about distance. Over half of our staff are going to have to go once furlough is over, as there simply isn’t enough work to justify keeping the jobs, however we are now fretting our major issue is going to be getting anyone to do any actual work if they do come back.
I should also point out he’s about 32, and fit as a flea.
So basically zero death risk from this disease.
If he’s intelligent, can he not be persuaded of that by the clear evidence available to that effect, or is there some psychological impediment to hos taking the info on board?
Psychological impediment: frequenting the bbc
As Professor Dingwall was said to the Telegraph:
“the public authorities face a real challenge in managing the British people out of the levels of fear and anxiety that the authorities themselves have induced”
“we’ve had this very strong message about which has effectively terrorised the British population into believing that this is a disease that’s going to kill you, and mostly it isn’t”
This is big news… I have noticed a subtle change in MSM since that article about Brits being the most fearful in the world… Now you are seeing ‘numbers recovered no symptoms’ on some articles. Do the maths… Basically
Still doesn’t explain rest of the world though.. I mean wtf? But it will change when this fucking thing dies down everywhere
And I don’t believe people will accept mass vaccinations or bill gates micro chip shit either. I do cling to some faith that once revealed that the fear emperor has no clothes, even the bedwetters won’t be fooled again
I don’t envy you BecJT; seems that he might need CBT or similar. I don’t know how such a deep seated neurosis could be overcome.
Intelligence and irrational fear is a heavy combination.
What a headache.
My pal the retired teacher has just told me that her other daughter has reported from Canada that law suits are now multiplying as folk who missed out on cancer treatment are now in some cases, terminally ill.
Lawyers will profit as usual, while businesses like yours pay the price.
What a crazy messed up world .
Crackers isn’t it? We’re calling it the ‘mind virus’. Or as the saying goes, fear is like a mushroom, it grows in the dark fed on bullsh*t. If he can’t get it, and he crunches numbers all day, we’re doomed.
Is he addicted to Dr Google?
Is he using Dr Strangelove’s coronacode?
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/leading-german-virologist-covid-19-less-deadly-we-thought
Important article as the IFR(Infection fatality rate) is 0,24 %. Ferguson lockdown model had IFR 1%.For many this could seem a small difference but the article explains the enormous difference. Others like Giesecke/Ionnadis guess is IFR more likely in the region 0,1%.
The brilliant mathematician Professor Levitt from Israel/Stanford Univ has also made prediction of mortality for the over 65(not the total population IFR above) and calculate for that agegroup IFR 0,41% which is 4 times more deadly than the flu in US 2017/18. (The IFR for the total population would be substantially lower than this)
https://twitter.com/MLevitt_NP2013/status/1258331626062446598/photo/1
Prof Levitt says that “Diamond Princess” was an unintended test case for the pandemic with a distinct subgroup over 65 with cases and deaths and a younger crew with fewer cases and no fatalities.
https://twitter.com/MLevitt_NP2013/status/1258472413244915714
Finally this study in the above twitter
“New study estimating that nearly 75% of SARS-CoV-2 infections on the Diamond Princess were asymptomatic, half were never detected and asymptomatic infections may have contributed substantially to transmission.”
Prof Levitt says that if we had done all these calculations already in Feb with the data from the “Diamond Princess” we would have much safer figures to base how we could… Read more »
We would like to have our grandchildren over for a sleepover. Partly because we are missing them, but mostly because they are driving my daughter and her husband round the bend. Being cooped up with a 9 and 7 year old for six weeks can’t be good for the sanity.
BTW … my previous message has disappeared. Is there some censorship going on?
I’ve been a committed sceptic since the start, but am starting to realise that there is nothing practical or tangible that I, or fellow sceptics, can do against the situation except sit it out and wait.
This site was initially a great release, to realise I was not alone in my thinking and to provide hope that there could be a way to influence change. But it now provides me little comfort as depite all our protestations to each other, and our endless lists of supporting reporting, analysis, literary quotations and supporting data we are having zero impact.
The UK situation remains firmly in the hands of a government few, who it seems do not even discuss with the wider government let alone parliament – according to The Telegraph today anyway.
The hope offered by the efforts of Simon Dolan were dashed yesterday as the government will not respond now until 12th/14th May – and who knows what they will say then. Most likely that by the time they do respond they have begun to release the lockdown.
MPs are writing back to those (who elected them) who complain effectively giving the ” your story touched my heart but… Read more »
FFS! Get a grip man! 😉
Steve Austin, not a helpful comment mate for someone who has just poured their heart out.
Brian can decide the context in which it was intended, not you.
OK. Fair enough.
Brian, we are at a critical point and now is not the time to give up. I work from home (always have, self-employed) but I’ve diverted myself from my proper work to engage more fully with this (these) issue(s). I went walkabout yesterday and ran into a barman from my local drinking hole (a rather pleasant hotel) and we got chatting. (Sat on the same bench, don’t think it was six foot long). He lives in the hotel and because he’s idle has been doing a lot of research. I’d never take him for a conspiracy advocate but he’s now saying there is something deeply, deeply wrong about all this. He’s determined not to have the tracing app on his phone and won’t succumb to any hurried vaccine and he’s not the rebellious type. He’s saying all the other staff locked in the hotel are feeling much the same. I think the damn is about to if not burst then start to leak. Every day more and more evidence appears that this isn’t what it seems. You have to become a beacon to shine light into darkness. To use a cliche, it’s always darkest before the dawn. You can’t beat… Read more »
China has been criticised for trying intially to cover up the outbreak of coronavirus as it was then called. Yet the South China Morning Post, based in Hong Kong but generally favourable to the PRC, put out a three minute video on January 4th, five days before the first confirmed death from this new virus on January 9th, highlighting “A mystery illness in China” and an “unknown virus in Wuhan.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LtA0-qoHOg Li Wenliang, the whistleblowing doctor (actually ophthalmologist) had been arrested for “rumour-mongering” just one day earlier, on January 3rd, after looking at a report on December 30th about a patient who seemed to be affected with a SARS-type virus. The report came from Ai Fen, the head of the emergency department at the Central Hospital of Wuhan, who at that point had seen only two infected people, but had apparently heard about the admission of multiple patients by the owner of a clinic near the seafood market. (What was actually wrong with these patients? Wikipedia doesn’t say whether it was the same “mystery illness” or not.) Far from trying to cover up the “mystery,” it seems to me that the Chinese authorities were on the contrary very keen to… Read more »
I would suggest because some higher up somewhere already knew that this was an existing disease that they had actually encountered before (and were already researching…… ).
The tricky balancing act in being a dissident is when it’s still very much a small minority thing. It’s dangerous – if you push too hard you will face real costs, lost friends, lost business, aggression and even violence. So you need to be tactful and careful, and only push when you’ve given it careful thought and are prepared to accept consequences. And it does often feel hopeless.
But it isn’t really hopeless. Every little helps and if truth is on our side (as I’m confident it is on this issue), it’s likely recognition will slowly grow, until it reaches a critical mass and a kind of dam breaks.
You can’t always win, and we all have to be able to accept that, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
― Margaret Mead
Great sentiment but VERY rarely effected. At the very least, one needs a charismatic leader who can talk to and engage a good proportion of the masses (e.g. Farage – who, sadly, appears to go along with the Lockdown).
Does he? That’s disappointing. It also makes him another bloody hypocrite since he’s been caught going out for political reasons himself.
As a die-hard anti-EUer, I’d have hoped for better from Farage (as in, I’d like to think he would have seen through the fearmongering bullshit about this disease).
Oh well, feet of clay and all that.
I feel the same way. The attitude of Scottish independence bloggers in particular sends my heart rate into a danger zone. I’m going into the garden now to see if the contemplation of greenery will calm me down.
You’re not alone in feeling that way, at the very least, I feel similarly. Acceptance of the situation will no doubt help with moving on from the frustration and desperation (which is what I’ve felt at times), but swallowing that will surely be a day-by-day process.
Personally, I’ve struggled with mental health issues for years and as a result of them, crippling loneliness, even though I still live with my parents. I happily found myself in a relationship 3 years ago, and there’ve been some tricky times given my situation, but we were able to spend more and more time together last year and this year – it was really helping my health. Now, my girlfriend is in Austria, her home country, where she went for a visit at the beginning of March and where she’ll be until who-knows-when. Sure, there’s video calling, but it’s never the same. I feel pretty rubbish most of the time.
Do help yourself however you can, so that you and your family can stay connected as much as possible. Hopefully things will improve; and it would be a cruel irony if they did, but you or I or anyone found themselves in a place… Read more »
I understand how you feel Sam – I’ve been struggling with mental health issues now for almost a decade, and I have a very poor relationship with my mother who made my life very difficult for me throughout my adolescence. I grabbed the new-found independence that came with going to university and getting my first job and I met a wonderful boyfriend who, like with your girlfriend, really made my life a lot brighter. I felt as if I was finally in a position to forge my own path in the world and I was ready to soar.
However, coronavirus (or rather the lockdown) struck and I lost my job and had to return home to isolate with my parents and sadly, my mother. My boyfriend and I are still very young (barely in our twenties) and he is in the middle of his university education (now curtailed due to nationwide university closures, I feel desperately sorry that he will not be able to enjoy any post-exam celebrations) so we don’t live together and have found ourselves torn asunder by this calamitous lockdown, having not seen each other for 8 weeks now. Like you, we video call every night… Read more »
Given your phrasing it doesn’t sound like things have improved with your mother, so not least for that, I wish all the best to you with your situation.
Yourself, your boyfriend and my girlfriend are around a similar age, I’m mid-twenties. My health has been such that I’ve been unable to work: a phobia of sickness that’s kept me so often inside, cleaning things, staying away from people. For so long, few people seemed to understand what that must be like. Oh, the bittersweet irony!
I hope you and your boyfriend may be reunited soon, even though soon seems intolerably distant amidst the cloud of forlorn love. Even if that graduate job disappears, you’ve gotten through a lot before and you can get through this. I believe in you!
Your comment resonated with me for a number of reasons. It’s hard to counter the conclusions you have drawn, particularly about the state machine and the politicians and civil servants in charge of its operation. Cheered on by their supporters in the British press. This period merely reinforces my view, building for years and sealed in the aftermath of the vote to leave the EU, that we can’t trust our elected representatives as much as we can’t trust those unelected but who are allowed to bring considerable influence to bear on how the country is run.
Many of us struggle to comprehend how the UK (and many other countries around the World) took these lockdown steps with serous repercussions to the economy and many other unintended outcomes. Total Madness!!
However it is good to know that there are many people that fundamentally disagree with the lockdown and many of them provide great information. Keep reading, keep contributing and do not give up.
I agree to the most part in that it does appear futile. However, I don’t think it is in the long-term and to ensure we do not allow this to be a regular occurrence by becoming part of the silent majority.
Sure, an overwhelming number of people either won’t listen, or don’t want to listen. I think the majority of people are still doing this in the belief that it is ‘saving lives’ rather than to cheat the system, but the allure of a paid holiday will wear off shortly as summer approaches and beer gardens call out.
I have been trying my best to take emotion out of it completely and reply with fact. There’s always the ‘what about’ argument, I don’t think that can dealt with but apply critical thinking with and reason based on evidence, not hearsay and estimates and slowly, more and more people will realise that this is something we need to learn to live with, not hide away from. It’s probably too late for this one, but maybe not the next time.
The trouble is, of course, that in the long term we are all dead – the direction in which the economy (here and in most countries) is heading precipitously.
Yes – we are the modern day Cassandras and noone in power gives a toss.
Never ever ever ever ever give up. Did the Brits give up fighting the Nazis? No. It took six years of suffering and immense loss but eventually they won us our freedom. I say that with great irony on the 75th anniversary of VE day.
The moment you stop fighting, stop caring, stop challenging, stop believing, stop questioning, you just become another one of the sheeple. What are your instincts telling you? Mine are telling me this lockdown is absolutely wrong. I will not give up fighting until our hard fought freedom is 100% returned and we can legally ensure something like this never ever happens again.
We owe it to our ourselves and future generations to keep going. To keep fighting until the message gets through. Boris Jong Un might believe he is right, but we ALL know this lockdown is unequivocally, morally and catastrophically wrong.
Never ever ever ever give up.
#WeWillBeFree
Is it true New Zealand are going to ask overseas travellers to quarantine for 14 days, how are they going to sell that to the tourists.
“Come visit New Zealand, where you won’t see any of it for 14 days”
Sounds tempting…..
Their loon of a PM has still got them in lockdown despite something like 15 !! Deaths, most from prexisting conditions, and no cases. How in holy hell are the Maoris not rioting on the streets right now???
It’s simple : Fear.
The whole world has been infected by it
All true – sanctimonious New Zealand, now headed by a sanctimonious, slightly more attractive version of Wee Krankie!
Good morning!
For years I’ve wondered why this country hasn’t had a public holiday for VE day and for VJ day and I was really looking forward to celebrating and commemorating this day today. However, now I have mixed emotions: pride at what our forebears did for the sake of our freedom, sadness and shame to see that freedom so easily compromised and abandoned through an exaggerated threat and excessive fear mongering. Yet, I’m thankful that this government, which doesn’t appear able to fight its way out of a wet brown paper bag, wasn’t in power back then. I will struggle with the rhetoric that will no doubt come from Downing Street today about it all.
On another note, I’ve compiled a letter to the leader of the opposition. It contains questions that I wish they’d ask, e.g. why did the government follow the advice of Neil Ferguson?, etc. Anyway, even though I don’t know any of you, I’m gonna go ahead and ask whether you think it’s worth sending? It’s just that it seems to me that the opposition really is no opposition at all.
Thanks.
Kevin
I think it would be a good idea to send the letter.
Absolutely…do send!
Please do send it
Unfortunately the opposition (as of this crisis I am a lapsed leftie) have more authoritarian instincts than the government. The voices that are banging on about civil liberties are coming almost exclusively from the right which I find disappointing. (No that the right are speaking up for liberty but that the left aren’t.) But Kevin send the letter anyway. I remember campaigning massively against the illiberal Blair government in the noughties. We lost on Iraq but we won on i.d. cards. Every little bit helps. My sentiments on VE day match yours. .I was born after the war but I had relatives die for that freedom you mention and would have been horrified to see this capitulation.
Send it of course and thanks for writing it. 😊
The VE day stuff is making me feel ill. I have no grandparents left but I know for certain what their reaction to all this would have been. What did we fight for?
Interestingly yesterday the BBC in its VE segment interviewed some veterans who seemed to say this explicitly. “We fought for freedom” one of them said. I got the distinct feeling his full interview was pretty damning of the current situation but they only included the most tame soundbite of course. They shoehorned the veterans in right at the beginning, skimming over the actual people, but they had to have them there as tokens of virtue of course. They appeared for all of two minutes before the beeb was back onto its Coronysteria – with a distinct patriotic flavour of course.
Ok, I’ve sent it off!
There’s a very funny poem from Crawford Howard called “The Diagonal Steam Trap” in which a cleaner at Harland & Wolff in Belfast manages to con everyone into adding a device to make a ship engine work. When in fact it was an oily rag stuck in the exhaust.
I’ve been reading up on the PCR test and testing and what strikes me is the inversion of the Null Hypothesis, something that happens a lot in climate science. So say you have 80% of people who test positive but are “asymptomatic” and yet can “pass it on”.
Okay so if you test positive for something and you never get ill, then the issue is with the test not you. Saying you can pass it on is also ludicrous. It’s like saying you test positive for “Hydrogenated Tissue Syndrome” – my God, quick. Lock down!!!!
The PCR test looks for piece of RNA supposedly from the “virus” yet common to many viruses that we walk around with in our systems everyday. There is no gold standard test, no way to isolate and hence anyone and anything (pets included) test positive. In Tanzania, the president got his people to place… Read more »
It’s time for us to act rather than keep debating. There are enough of us on here to change public opinion, and I’d imagine all in influential positions in our communities. Simple message below to text preferably (tweet if really necessary) to all. It’s time to start the revolution.
“Friends, we’ve been brainwashed by the government and media. There were 50,100 excess deaths in the UK in 2018 caused by a bad flu (Source: ONS). This is no worse than a bad flu but more targeted to the old and vulnerable, who we must protect. The young are suffering. The world is opening up. The UK is not. The lockdown failed. The lockdown and devastating effects on lives and the economy must end. Send to all.”
I would make the message a bit less trenchant so that more people can agree with it. Even if is worse than a bad flu it’s not nearly as bad as a lockdown. Concentrate on how harmful the lockdown is first not on how relatively non-harmful the virus is. Leave that to the end and gotta be tactful because many people will have a friend of a friend or two who had a severe illness or even died.
Okay, recommendation. Don’t do it. The people don’t want to know. Sorry.
Get people to go out. Mingle (okay, keep your distance if you feel that way.) Make the streets busier. If people are not working then go out. Make yourselves visible, the weather’s on our side. .
This is the best tactic. Just live as freely as you can, as close to how you did before. And be visible doing it.
Today my VE celebration is going to involve going out and sitting in a local park in a deckchair for several hours. Let’s see what the police do with me. — My guess is nothing, unless Stasi neighbours report me to them.
Sadly, so many people just won’t hear the truth: you can try but noone I have spoken has changed their view one iota.
I’ve managed to chip away at a few friends and my parents I think. But only to the point of “well we’ll see won’t we”.
Trouble is they won’t see as they are retired and already own their houses, or are un very comfortable well paid public sector jobs which….. Well yeah, but we’ll see how long they last.
Everyone who’s worried seems to rely on actually working for a living. Funny that.
“Can I go shopping?”
“Can I go and feed a stray cat?”
“Can I still move house?”
“Can I go out in my car at night?”
“Can I wash my horse?”
“Can I go out in my garden?”
“Can I go and buy ink cartridges to print my daughter’s school work?”
Read More
Coronavirus latest
Calls received by Gwent police : the great British IQ is alive and well….
I looked through COVID-SIM code, and it’s a giant SIM City with people, households, places all interlinked to create a virtual world. Seed the infection, give an R0 value. Let rip. That’s the unmitigated scenario. Then you can instigate lockdowns of various households, places, etc. and see the effect.
There doesn’t seem any human behavior modeled into it. Individually, we’re pretty keen to survive and protect our family. At what point will people voluntarily narrow their network of places/households, and to what extent?
The only case I could see for modeling behavior was what percentage of people wouldn’t obey a household quarantine!
I think it’s the mindset you referred to in you’re the Critic article that produces such a model!
A couple of points……
Petitions to MPs. Good to do, but I’m not sure if they will have much effect. They assume that our politicians are actually in charge of this fiasco; I’m increasingly convinced that they are not.
As the late comedian/philosopher George Carlin said, “forget politicians – they’re only put there to make you think you have a choice. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE! You have OWNERS. You are OWNED!”
IOW governments today are, to all intents and purposes, wholly-owned subsidiaries of a global corporatocracy – banksters, Big Agra, Big Pharma, Big Oil etc. The REAL power-players of this world. They buy and sell politicians who have to dance to their tune first, before they can give any consideration to the people they are supposed to be serving – i.e. us. And I think all this dragging out of lockdown, fiddling the death toll etc. is a sign that our Govt are serving their Owners, who want a huge extension of their powers and profits. And compulsory vaccines are the key to this.
Again and again we hear the mantra “without a vaccine we cannot return to normal” which is risible BS and should be shot down in flames… Read more »
I wonder in my more cynical moments,whether we’ll all be issued with Home Office ankle monitors. Luddites like me, whose elderly mobile won’t accommodate the wondrous all singing all dancing tracking app,will be undetectable unless they come up with a new means of herding us.
So this is possible, but it requires the existence of a somewhat organised conspiracy to be true.
Isn’t it more likely that what we’re seeing is less rational, more instinctive behaviour like the way a herd of sheep all run like crazy when one of them says he thought he saw a dog?
People still behave like that and although we sort of do believe in science you can always find a rational justification for what you want to believe.
There is enough uncertainty about the IFR, infection rates and the effects of lockdowns to convince yourself that the deaths we’ve seen are only the tip of the iceberg. I don’t agree with it (in fact I’m increasingly thinking we’re only looking at the very tail end of the epidemic and wouldn’t have noticed it at all if it had all been in the winter and not in the news). But plenty of smart people on Twitter who can do math and stuff do think that and they surely aren’t all part of a conspiracy. I even have friends who think this way and we often discuss the data.
If you really believe that story then lockdown followed by vaccine… Read more »
Throughout this crisis, I have questioned my own “dot-joining” process (one such thread of course being Ferguson>Imperial>Gates>Pharma>Compulsory vaccination) and I have held in mind Hanlon’s Razor: “never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.”
So I sincerely hope I am wrong; that this is NOT a colossal power-and-control grab by globalists who are exploiting the pandemic for their own ends, but is simply a series of governmental gaffes, bungles and miscalculations on an epic scale.
That is a totally plausible explanation and for me, would be the best possible outcome: it was nothing more than a colossal cock-up (sorry, Professor Ferguson!)
Your comment about “opportunities” at the end of this, is something I resonate with strongly. The old Chinese word for disease – “dangerous opportunity” – is never more appropriate than now, facing down the outcome of this disease from China!
There is indeed much we can learn from what has happened. Once again, I recommend readers to the truly wonderful essay “The Coronation” by Charles Eisenstein, available from his website or narrated by the author on YouTube. A powerful and moving exploration of the life-enhancing opportunities that await us in the aftermath of this crisis, if… Read more »
The place where that row of dots breaks I think is the idea that Fergie ever had any influence over the government. Maybe he (and his dodgy girlfriend) even thought they did, but I think it’s highly unlikely, especially given how this particular government is run, which is very centrally and by people like Cummings who look at numbers and data for themselves. They have plenty of experts telling them both sides of the story and always did. In any case, estimating how many people will die in a pandemic is just basic math, it’s not really “science”.
Science would be working out what social distancing measures might actually work based on understanding how the virus spreads. We could have done with some of that during that epidemic we just had actually.
I think Gates is well-intentioned and vaccines are generally a good thing. In this situation however it will be harder because you’re weighing the risks of a somewhat rushed-through and novel vaccine against those of a low-criticality disease. If the vaccine causes issues in just 1 out of 10000 people it could already be worse than the disease. I am expecting it to be added to the set… Read more »
‘The Coronation’ is terrific. And I know a few people who have been thinking similarly. This is a huge opportunity if we can but see it, but it needs people of vision to take it on. There’s a load of humbug being thrown around about the ‘new normal’ like permanent social distancing and all that bs. But what if this is heralding massive change? What if it is the gift that humanity needs to step up collective consciousness? I’m hesitant to quote metaphysical sources on a website designated to more practical day-to-day sceptical affairs, but they are out there.
Well, Nigel, I absolutely agree about the metaphysics.
When I had recovered from cancer back in 2004, I was offered a counselling session funded by the NHS. I agreed because I was confused as to what direction to take in my post-cancer life, and thought the sessions would help. (They did; the counsellor was wonderful.)
The very first question the counsellor asked me was “what do you think about having had cancer?”
And the very first words out of my mouth were, “I think it’s a gift from God.”
The counsellor looked as surprised as I was!
And indeed my life thereafter changed for the better in countless ways.
Today, struggling through this lockdown and its potential effects on everyone’s lives, I have turned yet again to my favourite spiritual text, the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas.
(At this point I must apologise to both atheists and “orthodox” believers; I am neither.)
In this “sayings Gospel”, the words of Yeshua ben Yosef (‘Jesus’) – that great “Teacher of the Transformation of Consciousness” (in the memorable description by theologian Cynthia Bourgeault) are recorded in enigmatic, koan-like aphorisms.
At this time, my favourite of these sayings has assumed new significance.
I would… Read more »
Gracie, [email protected] if you want to discuss the metaphysical side of this. (It’s nige, not nigel)
I think you’ve covered a lot of the mechanisms there pretty well, tbh.
You could add the tendency of blame-fearing politicians to prefer to be seen to act rather than to not act. This was explicitly a motive in the original “Swine Flu SNAFU” in the US in 1967 (and is often on display with political action):
https://www.irememberjfk.com/swine-flu-scare-the-1976-version/
And another important mechanism to consider is the built in tendency to paternalism in our mainstream media (and in authority figures including medical experts), especially the BBC but on this kind of issue probably most mainstream media managers and news editors. Once fear of the disease is established, the paternalists feel they have a duty to suppress news that might make people less afraid and play up news that might make them more afraid, so as to encourage “responsible” behaviour. See for instance this disgraceful piece of deceptive fear-mongering by the BBC a few days ago:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52473524
We’re being told that the R0 is creeping up and apparently that’s why the lockdown conditions cannot be eased on Sunday. Were also told that this R0 increase is due to the woeful situation in care homes and to a lesser extent hospitals. I’m confused though. Can anyone shed light as to why that is s danger to the other 60 odd million of us? Are the elderly and vulnerable leaving their care homes like rabid zombies to infect us during the night? I would have thought those in care homes are sadly trapped and incapable of moving more than a few feet. Therefore, how the hell does a high R0 in care homes become relevant to society as a whole, I’m struggling to see how it does.
Unless care home workers themselves are somehow super spreaders (they should be tested regularly anyway) and are emitting disease to the rest of us by some magical transmission route how the do care homes dictate lockdown policy? They should be a separate entity entirely.
I know those in care homes have to go to hospital, but can this risk of transit time transmission be relevant? Government have even stated the R0 for… Read more »
Sounds a lot like ‘today’s justification (excuse) not to relax the lockdown’ doesn’t it? I live on the Dorset coast, the natives are more than restless here, particularly in the sunshine, we have pretty much unlocked ourselves – good!
They do not have the guts to lift the lockdown and are using flimsy excuses. The care home industry has been a disgrace for years.
Who was telling you that then, that those in care homes have to go to hospital? The opposite seems to be true. According to Dr Malcolm Kendrick, a GP in Cheshire, hospitals “discharge the elderly unwell patients with COVID directly back into the community, and care homes. Where they can spread the virus widely amongst the most vulnerable.
“This, believe it or not, is NHS policy. Still.
“Yes, you did just read that. COVID-19 patients, even those with symptoms, are still to be discharged back home, or into care homes – unless unwell enough to require hospital care e.g. oxygen, fluids and suchlike. If this is not national policy, then the managers are telling me lies.”
So much for crocodile tears about protecting the vulnerable.
The reason they go is for other ailments, they probably get the infection in hospital and take it back to the care home, and repeat the cycle as well as the policy to get them out of hospital anyway. Its a form of mass man slaughter, or worse depending on whether its intentional or not
PROTECT THE NHS FROM OLD PEOPLE!!
According to today’s FT the NHS has been told to start developing a contact tracing app based on the Google and Apple system. Yet another NHS IT failure it would seem. I wonder if they should be included in the mindless weekly clap?
Based on past history of IT and the NHS, this was obviously going to be a roaring success….
The Thursday night clap – when are the seals Finally going to spot that no fish are being thrown to them?
In TheMailOnline this morning, I see an image of the Prime Minister, clasping a lit candle, his head reverentially bowed.
Sickening cant.
We need a leader, not a bloody vicar.
Yes – it has truly become a right Carrie On.