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.
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If they still want masks in the summer when all adults have been vaccinated *and* disease prevalence is near 0 (just as last year) then realistically there exists no scenario where they’ll EVER go away. You cant ever get conditions more suited to having no NPIs.
The SAGE report was ridiculous, lacking any useful RCTs measuring infections, ignores ALL the ILI infection RCTs hosted by the WHO prior to 2020 that show no difference.
Add to that a “face covering” is not a mask – its even less effective again by a huge margin.
Suspect they’ll now have SPI-B working on a propaganda campaign to normalise these idiotic things.
“A small price to pay for freedom” and other such nonsense.
One of the very WORST things of the entire lockdown was the dehumanising, unscientific masking up of the entire population and it seems they want to keep it forever.
Mask wearing will only stop happening if we can change the view of them.
What they actually signal is that you believe you are infectious and should be at home in bed.
And that means repeating that simple mantra everywhere you can: “Only those who believe they are infectious would wear a mask now. It’s irrational to do so otherwise”.
Good point, will make it every chance I get
Trisha Greenhalgh (mask fanatic “expert”) has been wearing a face covering for months and months. I asked her on Twitter whether she considered she had had a case of infectious Covid-19 for this whole time and was promptly blocked.
Here in New Zealand with strict border controls and no community “cases” we have legislation requiring mask wearing on public transport, from one end of the country to the other, including isolated towns and islands. If there ever was a case for there never being signal for the cessation of this requirement this is it. The “just in case” scenario is beyond ridiculous.
Masks have nothing to do with health, only with control, obedience, identifying and ideally punishing dissenters.
They are Gessler hats, nothing else.
As such, all kinds of manipulations of science and information is justified with them.
In Germany, they have now gone full Orwell: Maske macht frei. Impfen macht frei. Civil rights are only for the vaxxed. An unvaxxed and untested aka healthy person is now dangerous and sick. The reason for Germany falling in the freedom of press League table is attacks on journalists by anti Corona restriction and pro civil rights demonstrators, not the the attacks, censoring and diffamation on and of them. And so on.
Not sure about “Maske macht frei. Impfen macht frei”, certainly such words would not be used in Germany. But it is the case that Germans, along now it seems with most other nationalities, are susceptible to intensive propaganda and will accuse those who question the new norm of being anti-social (at best).
Anyway, words on the LS sight don’t really do much to persuade people that they are actually being repressed, so in the spirit of fighting back in whatever way you can this piece of reverse proganda might be of interest to any Germans reading lockdownsceptics. As any translation program shows it is written for children but with the message clearly aimed at parents and adults. And don’t forget: VERTEILEN MACHT FREI!
KINDER! WEHRT EUCH!
DIE WOLLEN EUER SPIEL VERDERBEN!
Weißt Du, dass Deine Körper aus winzigen Zellen bestehen und dass einige davon T-Zellen genannt werden? Weist Du, dass Deine Thymusdrüse Deine T-Zellen trainiert, um Dich vor Krankheit zu schützen? Nein? Dann lass es mich erklären.
Genau wie Deine Arme oder Beine, ist Deine Thymusdrüse, wir nennen sie TD, ein Teil Deines Körpers und die Aufgabe von TD ist es, Deine T-Zellen zu trainieren, sodas sie verhindern, dass Du krank wirst. TD muss wirklich schlau sein, denn jede T-Zelle hat eine andere Aufgabe, wenn sie Dich schützt.
Genau wie in der Schule, wo einige besser Deutsch, andere besser Sport und andere besser Mathematik können, werden Deine individuellen T-Zellen so trainiert, dass sie Dir helfen, wo sie am effektivsten sind. Einige Deiner T-Zellen bekämpfen jede Krankheit, andere erinnern sich daran wie der Kampf gewonnen wurde, damit es beim nächsten Mal leichter ist die Krankheit zu besiegen und einige sind da, um Dir zu helfen, Dich nach dem Kampf sanft zu erholen.
Also, Du kannst sehen, dass die TD sehr wichtig ist, um sicherzustellen, dass Du ein gesundes Leben führen kannst. Damit die TD gute T-Zellen trainieren kann, muss es auch trainiert werden, und dies geschieht durch viele kleine Kämpfe mit den Dingen, die für Dich schlecht sein können, Dich aber nicht wirklich krank machen würden.
Und das ist jetzt der beste Teil, denn nur Du kannst helfen die TD zu trainieren, indem Du zum Spielen augehst! Denn je mehr Du mit Freunden spielst, auf Bäume kletterst, Dich schmutzig machst, Würmer isst, oder was auch immer, desto besser wird TG Dich beschützen! Und wenn TD stark ist, brauchst Du weniger unangnehme Medizin und Spritzen!
Aber wenn Du alleine spielst und eine Maske trägst, lernt TD nicht, wie man gute T-Zellen herstellt und kann Dich nicht so gut schützen.
Wie Du weißt, spielen wirklich nur Kinder. Und tatsächlich muss TD das meiste lernen bevor Du erwachsen wirst, sonst wird es Dich nie so richtig schützen können. Also tue etwas für TD, wirf Deine Maske weg und
SPIEL MIT DEINEN FREUNDEN!
These words have actually been used by German politicians, first and foremost Markus Soeder.
If anyone doesn’t speak German it is saying that the thymus gland is important in children because it teaches the T cells to fight disease. And to fight disease children need to play together and if you wear a mask your thymus won’t learn to fight disease. I’m not sure I quite agree with that as the mask doesn’t really do much to protect children, I even have a sneaking suspicion they help spread the germs about. But it is an important lesson nevertheless. If we grow up in a sterile environment our immune systems will never develop properly.
I must admit I’d draw the line at eating worms. Raw milk maybe…
well it serves them right…. any nation that cant come together against tyranny deserves to suffer the consequences. you reap what you sew dont you? Those that blame politicians and the media are just looking for an easier alternative than blaming society as a whole… it is society that allows or wont allow.
No you don’t! You reap what you sow.
On the bright side, no one wears a mask anymore when outside at the private school in Sussex I pass through daily.
There clearly is reverse herd instinct and peer pressure now, especially since the return post Easter.
And I witnessed the same for the very first time with a sports event on TV yesterday: there was hardly a spectator wearing a mask to be seen at the last round of the Valspar Championship in Florida yesterday, in contrast to the three prior days there!
(I am convinced the TV guys have and followed instructions to try to show as few unmasked people as possible at these golf and other events sofar.)
Agreed, I’m seeing far fewer pedestrians wearing masks between shops than there have been in the recent past. It’s probably 1-2% now, down from maybe ten times that. People are still fully compliant in the shops but they are now doing the minimum to comply with the rules.
That is exactly what I have found too.
Please don’t use the word compliant. There are several better words, surrender, stupid, virtue signalling (forgive the mix of tenses).
For some reason I can’t edit my other post. Please don’t forgot non mask wearers are also ‘complying’. Exemptions are very broad.
There is a ten minute window for editing and you cannot edit at all once your comment has recieved a reply.
I went to local garden centre yesterday, early to avoid the large queues. Who wants to spend all day waiting in them? Anyway, everyone in the small queue ahead of me were wearing masks, I joined maskless and noticed a guy ahead taking his mask off now that he had ‘reinforcements’. I’m glad I gave him confidence not to wear it, I only hope that when I’m not there the next time he has to queue he feels brave enough to do what he wants to do. He did however put it back on when he entered the garden centre. Small steps I suppose.
This is why I wish more of our fellow sceptics would avoid going all out online shopping*, we need to give each other as much support as possible in situations like that, not to mention local businesses that are struggling but compelled to obey bozos dictats.
*Not that I blame those that do in order to avoid conflict but in my experience and that of others here, such confrontations are vanishingly rare even if the press did try to promote them for a while last year.
my take on it is that considering what me be coming down the line of Mike Yeadon’s doomsday scenario is to be believed we should all take every opportunity to get out and about – shopping – eating out etc while we can before the vaccine passports come in and mean we are excluded.
Milo, well yes, but I’d recommend we do a great deal more than go shopping!
It’s a matter of fact that, at present, there’s no database containing a digital ID in common format with an editable field which is part of an interoperable system.
When everyone is coerced onto such a platform, and they will be if the system starts up with a bare majority of adults on it, we will have no freedom to refuse instructions or right to do what’s prohibited.
That’s totalitarian tyranny, with no exit.
As to the purposes that power will be put, who knows?
Totally agree. And to keep physical cash in the economy too.
It’s not against the law to pay in cash but they want us all to pay through these apps!
Whichever study (ICLs??) they quoted at the last press briefing when they stated they work was a heavily reduced version of the executive summary. This stated that they had to be of the right material worn in the correct way etc. The conclusions of the same paper were at complete odds with the summary, little evidence to show reduction in transmission, scant evidence to indicate any protection.
It’s not science its just nonsense from the ‘experts’ in charge who are enjoying the power far too much.
On the plus side when a 15 year old calls you a liar you can override the body language and use a bit of cloth to hide the hole the lies come out of.
This is so normal it is unremarkable.
Some years ago I did this same exercise with Climate Change papers. They often came to conclusions which were the precise opposite of what was claimed for them.
Scientific papers are now routinely commissioned to provide justifications for activist policy decisions. Essentially, the massive provision of government grants to support scientific research since WW2 means that science has become completely politicised…
climate change is big techs move to make the world greener… in other words to make themselves richer and more powerful because effectively green means more people stuck at home consuming social media and buying online. especially since now everyone has more cash left over since they cant travel go to bars etc
Ad on TV last night. Carlsberg is planting sea grass on floor of ocean because it neutralises environmental impact more effectively than a rainforest. They think it probably makes their beer taste better.
Nutrition is another bias-prone field where you have to check references carefully because their conclusions can be the opposite of the claims in the referencing paper.
There’s no doubt that the Fascists want face knickers for ever. This from the news round-up:
Professor James Naismith of Oxford University … argued that face-mask wearing could become a useful measure for countering diseases other than Covid-19. “I think we’ll re-impose masking in the winter on crowded indoor spaces. It has the benefit of reducing flu.”
So we’ve managed to live with flu since mankind was invented, and all of a sudden it requires universal knickering.
Sod off, Nay-smith, back to your nasty, snivelling, totalitarian hole.
It has the benefit of reducing flu ? Despite all the actual research conducted over many many years that they don’t stop flu transmission?
Face coverings were tried in the 1918 flu pandemic and did absolutely nothing.
He credits the Mask for eliminating the flu, reasonable people credit the Covid statisticians.
Like in January/February when PHE detected not a single case of flu as the Covid ‘Second Wave’ slaughtered the innocent.
Can’t have it both ways Naismith.
In my 48 years, a lot of time working in a customer facing environment, I have never had flu and seldom a cold.
Why should I start wearing a mask to avoid getting flu, which I am unlikely to get?
But the few weeks wearing a surgical mask at work made me anxious, stomach upsets and lack of concentration.
So some unelected, unknown Adviser just has to say
“I THINK” and that’s enough for
“We will re-impose mask wearing . . .”
Who the fuck is ‘WE’ ?
A large, multi centre study of transmission of influenza-like illnesses was made in Vietnam. No effect of masks.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971/
The government is weak and a mess……..
I will be voting against this socialist fascism, against all three main parties and particularly against any daffy ‘green’ party, and for any independent candidate with no links whatsoever to government/NHS socialist fascism.
That doesn’t leave a lot of choice…
It is the only choice.
We have some excellent local independent candidates.
And a big celebration in order after so voting!
This complete weird out orchestrated by the biggest bunch of complete nincompoops ever to take power in this country has to be voted down again and again and…….
Good luck with that – the average person who watches the BBC likely thinks Boris has done a good job handling ‘pandemic’, or that Starmer would do a better one and will vote Tory or Labour accordingly. Much though we really need a change in this country and a surge in those prepared to vote for the independents I don’t see them making much of a dent in the mainstream party votes.
There isn’t a single alternative candidate standing in any ward in my constituency.
Might have to write “NONE” on the ballot paper.
Ron DeSantis is a Conservative worth that name.
Notice his recent ban on vaxx passports and any discrimination of the people by corporate fascists.
I contrast, Boris Johnson is a narcissistic, spineless, fascist, corrupt and woke puppet and a true enemy of the people.
Ron is a Trump ally – would imagine that there is a hotline from the gubbernatorial mansion to Mar a Lago. If only Ron’s approach could cross the Atlantic.
I hope he has good close protection.
Dr Stephen Karanja was just murdered in Kenya. Allegedly dying of covid19, this is extraordinarily unlikely as one of the leading exponents if Pharmacological treatment.
He uncovered the earlier sterilisation attempts via vaccination & helped boot Gates out of the country.
Another great article from Will, and worth bookmarking.
A little while ago, before covid, I found the same thing in a medical paper – all seems plausible and even persuasive, and then you follow up a couple of references and you find those references do not actually say what is being claimed, or really have anything much to do with what is being claimed. But they do of course make the paper look authoritative.
The level of dishonesty in science is something to behold.
And the level of cowardice and stupidity in the population in following the mask mandates is also something to behold.
Good job I’m exempt.
I agree with this 100%, but come on, how many people can be bothered to make the effort? Even politicians just read the ‘ABC for toddlers’ summaries. Where I live people routinely wear masks outside and even two primary school kids I saw at the weekend were playing outside with the damn things covering all but their eyes. Their parents must be so proud…
Agreed, Wills excellent article confirming what we already know about masks is way way too long to be of any use in trying to convert a zealot.
Even previously sensible people refuse to look at the evidence and instead send that stupid cartoon of people pissing on each other.
Time to restart the triple underwear meme, to prevent rectal exhalation of the Covid, complete with Compliance Marshals.
A lot of investments into mask companies, we are cash cows and need to think of that every time we buy a mask. They stopped making plastic drinking straws and now make masks from polypropylene.
Buying masks? Why? I started by using an old jam strainer, then a bit of old lace, or a cotton rag with “masks don’t work” written on it, and I saw an excellent photo of a guy wearing a pair of underpants.
The greatest transmission risk has been the scientific nonsense spouted by politicians and their tame. non sagacious SAGE – the only individuals who should be forced to wear masks are the Politicians and media scientists and the masks should be soundproof!
I am genuinely astonished that most people still wear masks. I don’t wear one and I don’t get any hassle at all, not even a funny look from anyone.
I got escorted out of Meadowhall yesterday for not wearing one. My view is everyone is equal under the law including those politicians doing photo-ops the week before last. e.g. Johnson (twice in England), Gove (Israel), Starmer (Wales).
What happened to you your statement
‘I’m exempt, thank you?’
Unfortunately that does not necessarily make much difference if a shop or shopping centre choose not to accomodate people without masks. I do not wear one but if a shop manager refuses to serve me unless I have a mask there is little I can do about it other than boycott that particular outlet or establishment. However, this has never happened to me as most shops would rather have the custom as opposed to being anal about face coverings. I see the manager on the shop floor of my Tesco Extra every week and he sees me but he just looks the other way. As many others have mentioned, I have never been challenged either by staff or members of the public for not wearing a mask. Quzzical looks is about the limit. I appreciate there could always be a first time but so far, so good.
If they refuse to serve you then you have the option to sue them for discrimination.
I agree and most (certainly the big chains) will know that which is why nothing is said. A poorly paid and informed security guard in a shopping centre probably does not know that.
Large retailers and Security companies were fully informed of the law and with few exceptions abide by it (the Police were worse to begin with).
The individual security guard is wrong in law and his employing security company and their client could be liable for damages.
On the first day of compulsory mask wearing I went to my local convenience store early and when the owner pointed at his new sign I very politely informed him of the law relating to exemption and that if he challenged it he himself would be guilty of Disability Discrimination.
I then forwarded him the PDF from the lawnotfiction website outlining this in detail.
Good for you, retailers might as well say they won’t accommodate blind or black people.
Why are we still going on about the effectiveness of masks? It has been proven that they are useless in preventing transmission, the data tell us that. They are however very effective in proving compliance.
Because they’re still being required, even after the June lifting of restrictions.
There’s James Max on Talk Radio still promoting restrictions and masks because of VARIANTS!! and what if this, what if that.
He was also talking spherical objects about electric cars, eulogising about them to Quentin Wilson as they both admitted to being I-pace owners (starting price £65K).
I read somewhere reputable online this morning that Musks Tesla eclectic car company has a stock market valuation worth more than the rest of the auto industry combined.
Might be his investors know something we don’t but then again it could be Tulip Mania revisited.
Because they will represent the last bastion of “control” that will be left after the restrictions which the data no longer justify have been lifted – they will be the last remaining link to the fact that we are under government control and a vital psychological tool. Always important to keep that tiny little bit of fear bubbling away in the background so that it can be manipulated again when the time/need suits.
I turned him off. Idiotic wanker.
That has always been the case as was repeatedly pointed out here at LS when they were introduced last summer at a time when any efficacy they might have was rendered pointless as Covid had gone on its summer seasonal holidays.
Another great article Will. The lovely Dr Sam Bailey on YouTube rips a lot of these so called scientific papers to shreds especially on the useless Wikipedia. All the so called science this government has based its mandates on is utter bollocks. I read yesterday all the covid in the world could fit into a coke tin and you think your poncey black mask is stopping that? Like hiding from a high powered rifle behind a chain link fence. It’s just virtue signalling of the absolute fear this government has spread. Especially the young. Wanna know why masks are useless. Go back to last March, remember, death is knocking at your door. Meanwhile in supermarkets the staff are all working unprotected with hundreds of thousands of disease carrying people sneezing and coughing all over the goods. How many supermarket workers died. Surely all of them right. The body bags must have been piling up. They had NO mask, NO perspex screen. It will take a long while to get people out of wearing masks, what a bunch of uneducated sheep, they get all the sickness from wearing a mask and still come back for more.
Thanks for the Sam Bailey reference. That’s a real Kiwi accent!
Agree with what you say apart from the Coke can bit. I read that yesterday. It’s a graphic concept but how do we know how many ‘Covid’ particles there are in the world. There are many verifiable arguments against masks without leaving ourselves open to Covidiots picking on the one unverifiable claim.
Back last Autumn the weekly 15 minute BBC R4 numbers programme (weekday 09.45 ‘the sum of it (?)’ reliably informed us that all the Covid in the world would fit into a large wine glass.
My Bank Holiday W/E NHS adventure
(Gets on topic in the end).
On Saturday my pharmacist told me that a crucial repeat prescription was not on their system; knowing that my supply would run out because of May Day I called 111 who advised that ‘County Doctors On Call’ would be able to issue an emergency one that day.
County Doctors rang me and arranged an appointment for that afternoon at their location on a trading estate nowhere near the hospitals, or indeed a Saturday bus route.
I had to wait outside in the taxi until telephoned to enter, sat on a little chair in the middle of a portacabin for a coursery examination by a doctor in full Covid Safety gear.
Never mind, I got the scrip I wanted which was all I cared about, plus two others which I knew I didn’t need.
To my surprise that same doctor telephoned me while in the taxi back to town to tell me she was concerned about something else and that I should present myself at the main hospital (Medical Triage part of ITU) asap. Having collected the scrip I actually wanted, my taxi driver eventually dropped me off at the main entrance.
Following an examination the consultant ‘politely’ dismissed the County Doctors fears but wanted me to stay overnight relating to a pre-existing condition.
(I had no phone charger so kept internet access to a minimum).
Every four hours they took temp, blood pressure and pulse tests for the 6 people in my bay plus one Covid test.
Shortly before being discharged on Sunday afternoon a nurse knelt beside me to tell me the ‘bad news, sadly you’ve been exposed to Covid 19 here in this bay, so unfortunately when you go home later you will have to self isolate for ten days’.
I didn’t bother arguing about false positives or the almost total lack of Covid in the County for many weeks.
She asked how I planned to get home and when I replied ‘by taxi’ she said
“Ok that’s fine, just make sure you’re wearing your mask for the journey”
and the same to a fellow patient who was going home 10 miles away by bus !
Does that mean they really do believe in the abracadrabra power of masks to prevent a potentially contagious passenger infecting his driver, or fellow passengers, or is it because they know it all complete bollocks but just have to go through the motions.
Yours truly is thus now self isolating after an uncalled for overnight in the hospital having spent 12 months out and about as a ‘key worker’ up close and personal (mask exempt) with approx 6,000 random people ever since day one of Lockdown.
(sorry for the length of post, I left much out which might be of interest but entirely of topic).
Any symptoms?
What a nightmare for you. From just trying to get a prescription, to an overnight hospital stay, to isolation for 10 days! Wow. I have some health issues which I have to be routinely monitored for and it all feels like such a pantomime performance now, that they want you to go through, to keep up this illusion of an on-going pandemic.
If the population was an aircraft and mask-wearing was needed for flight, then the evidence presented so far would not get you an airworthiness certificate from the CAA, FAA or EASA.
I’m professionally qualified engineer, working in product safety and if I presented this level of non-evidence to my sector regulator to support my product’s safety argument, I’d be laughed out of a job.
Aha, but you deal in realities.
the article makes the important mistake of assuming you actually need evidence to get people to believe you
The high priests have declared the mask to be the holy relic. All praise our great leaders.
Firstly, masks must stay, because they are The Badge. Then, in order to turn the vaccinated against the unvaccinated, a visual symbol will be needed; how can you tell whether to bully someone based on a digital ID that’s in their pocket? No, in Project Yellowstar, The Badge will be used to separate the Virtuous from the Verminous – got your vaxport, no mask needed. No vaxport, compulsory mask wearing, 24/7, no exemptions. Cue lynchings etc.
That might work now but when cv21 turns up and everyone has to wait 1-2 years for their next jab it might prove a little difficult to start lynching the unvaccinated.
I think the idea is that they don’t have to wait 1-2 years, they just add the new sequence to their mRNA vaccine and it’s ready for distribution in 1-2 months.
maybe but the queue is still around a year long unless they increase and maintain capacity for the actual jabbing.
Sorry 20 somethings, your summer holidays are cancelled because your new vax won’t be ready until Christmas.
and of course the above queuing is what all the smug zombies calling for a vaccination passport haven’t stopped to think about.
Indeed. And it doesn’t even need to be a vaccine.
There will he no clinical safety studies.
Once VaxPass is up & running, you’ll be instructed to turn up for such a top up.
There’s absolutely no reason for any top up vaccines.
Immunology is among my strengths, do I’m absolutely certain about this.
The repeated variants narrative is what showed to me the mode whereby depopulation will probably be accomplished.
Someone asked me what it felt like travelling on buses and trains, the only one unmuzzled. ‘Miserable’ probably sums it up best, despite a sense of superiority.
I see the government now intents to keep the stupid things going after 21/6. It won’t make any difference to me as I refuse to wear them. If businesses won’t serve me without one then they’ll have to do without my custom.
Do you ask to see the owner and tell them? Makes no real difference to an employee, but it may make the owner think twice.
I told the manager (who I knew by sight by virtue of long term custom) of a local Toby Carvery why I would not be back for a while after being confronted at the Meet & Greet point by a staff member who declared “No QR Code No Service!”.
He was wearing a mauve waistcoat with matching mauve mask which I imagine he crafted from the worn seat of his trousers which made his tone worse.
This article bends over backwards to be ‘fair’.
O.K, I can see why. The rational side in this argument shouldn’t be aping the unscientific distortions of the government – and should show clear rationality.
However, starting from the WHO strategy document of 2019, reviews of available research have shown no convincing case for the wearing of face masks when put into a scientific/medical context.
Consider :
(1) Scientifically, you have to show in probability terms that there is consistent evidence that masks have a beneficial effect. Not ‘maybe’ or ‘perhaps’, but convincingly. Otherwise the null hypothesis stands as the current conclusion. No ‘ifs’, no ‘buts’.
(2) In terms of medicine, this theoretical principle turns into a very practical one. Any treatment has to show that benefits outweigh the harms.
Mask wearing doesn’t pass these criteria by any stretch of the imagination, and the idea should have been binned before it started breathing (!) again.
Yes indeed, regarding 1) if the medical establishment and Wikipedia were to follow their normal policy on reporting medical interventions they would be saying “There is no evidence that masks help”
I’ve noticed the same in many Climate Science presentations. They will cite a paper as backup for a proposition, but when you go to that paper it will just mention the idea in an aside, as a piece of speculation, without any supporting evidence. They just rely on no one following up. The IPCC summaries are, through the same process, unmoored from actual scientific research.
“It’s just a piece of cloth”
If you agree to mandating triviality then you are probably incapable of making decisions for yourself.
Excellent article Will. I appreciate the time, thought and effort you put into LS and your articles are one of the main reasons I keep visiting this site, ATL in any case. These articles about the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of masks are still highly relevant, particularly for people like me where the rules around wearing masks at work (a non-medical nhs setting) have just got stricter despite “case” numbers being on the floor, and people are being threatened with disciplinary action if they repeatedly “break the rules”. Twice weekly LFTs have just been introduced (voluntary so far), so I felt compelled to email managers’ attention to the fact that the government’s own literature says that when caseness is so low as it is presently, a positive result is likely to be a false positive. This gov document was attached to the email inviting us to participate in LFT testing, FFS! No surprise there’s been a deafening silence in response to my email. Time to give them a nudge!
I guess my point is that it’s good to have as much evidence up your sleeve as possible to highlight the idiocy of these mandates and directives – it might come in useful some time!
Thanks for that. I too work in a non-medical nhs setting. I have refused LFTs when offered to me before. If a similar email comes my way I will look out for the document and do the same.
Everything this disastrous government has done from the start has been weak and a mess.
With the exception of its fear mongering propaganda of doom and gloom which succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
I went to an open air market today – lovely sunny day, lots of people there looking for bargains – still quite a few wearing masks though – overheard a few of the sellers and buyers discussing their vaccinations and the subsequent side effects – some thought the first jab had the worst side-effects and others thought the second with one complaining that his arm has ‘not been right‘ since he had the jab over a week ago. One mask-wearing seller claimed that he has not allowed anyone to touch him for a year (how true this is I don’t know?) – but when someone bought an item from him he held out this long wooden stick with a plastic tuppawear container stuck to the end for customers to put their cash into afterwhich he then proceeeded to wash his hands in sanitizer.
Just a snapshot of the kind of insanity I am witnessing from my part of the world – if this is anything like the rest of the country then we could in this insane situation for the long-term.
I’ve not seen that since during lockdown 1. when I went to a newsagent that I rarely use. They had a trestle table on the pavement barring entry to the shop and various felt tip signs giving instructions.
I paid by credit card through the door glass rather than leave cash in the little tub labelled “put cash here”.
He then opened the door just enough to squeeze his gloved hand out and tossed my cigarettes onto said trestle table.
Needless to say I have not been back since.
Hi all . . . I’ve started a collection of mask-related papers (probably bitten off more than I can chew, as i’ve a-many other things to do), but an early point of interest – backed up by the papers quoted in this article – is somewhat revealing:
All – as in ALL – the papers that have come out in favour of mask mandates are from 2020 or 2021 (mostly after mandates were imposed). Papers from before 2020 lean heavily towards NOT recommending masks/face coverings. ‘Emerging science’? Hmmmm . . . .
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t papers from 2020/21 that do not recommend them (eg the Danish study), or which highlight the potential & actual harms, but they are ignored (of course).
Yet another big red flag. . . .
Galileo recanted his heresy about the earth revolving around the sun to avoid being burned at the stake.
Same principle really.
His final words were said to be
‘Yet still it turns’.
“The best quality evidence (which isn’t saying much here) is five RCTs where all members of households (ill and well) wear masks, which indicate masks may reduce risk of infection by 19%”.
It also doesn’t allow for the known fact that the entire household is unlikely to catch or develop Covid-19, masked or not, so any apparent results would indeed be pretty useless. (as are masks!)
… given that in-house transmission is estimated at only 17% anyway.
Thanks, Rick, I couldn’t remember the figure but knew it was very low.
And that only if the source was symptomatic,
If the potential source was asymptomatic, the secondary attack rate was 0.7%.
By attack, is meant the contact became PCR positive, yet on NO occasion did that contact become symptomatic.
As 0.7% would be a good lower bound for operational false positive rate, I think even to become PCR positive is a ZERO risk if you share inside space with a person lacking symptom.
That on not a single occasion did a contact become positive & symptomatic ie ill, yet again confirms a zero risk of transmission inside, sharing space closely with others, provided no one is symptomatic.
This is what we’ve known for centuries & is why we’re very good at detecting symptoms of respiratory illness in others.
The answer is to make them non compulsory. Those who believe they do any good are free to continue in their belief.
they tried that and naturally only the insane were wearing them. Then they invented the “it’s to protect others” crap because masks are magic and only work in one direction so now the insane have a reason to try and shame you into wearing one.
‘I’m wearing a mask to protect you’
was indeed a masterstroke worthy of Dr Goebbels no less.
‘I’m wearing a mask to protect you’
A shop assistant used that line on me. Said I was sorry to hear it, best go home for some rest etc.
No reaction, as usual.
I was asked in a general chatty email from a friend, ‘by the way, have you had your jab yet, just had my 2nd one’ as if its normal to give your medical history away in an everyday conversation, the country has lost the plot and its doing my head in.
I don’t think the ‘medical history’ issue is the main one – it’s the way brainwashing has generated this blithe assumption that a snake oil injection is quite normal – just like so many Germans in the 1930s just knew that Jews were a bit dodgy.
Thank you Dr.G for your insights into informing the public of what is necessary and in its best interests.
I’m so sick of that – one of these days I will lose it and challenge them for nosing into my medical history.
These psychotic politicians cannot believe that they’re still getting away with this b.s. Raab’s probably got a nice little bet on that the public will still wear their masks in the height of the Summer…
What an utter disgrace. It would be better if they all just went home and stayed there. These people need to be fired immediately. The so called ‘experts’ are nothing of the sort.
I’ve just completed a report on the health effects of wearing masks for the public and specifically for children. It knocks anything the SAGE clowns come up with into a cocked hat.
The list of ill effects from mask wearing are so long you will need around 40 to 60 minutes to read my report. You can download it from free and there’s a plethora of supporting documentation (PDFs) available in zip format.
https://www.grahamfrench247.com/useful-documents
I hope you find it of use.
Thanks Graham