Is the NHS in Danger of Being Overwhelmed?
Just how great a risk is there of the NHS being overwhelmed? We’re constantly being told by Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and others that unless we observe the traffic light restrictions in our area, we will witness the kind of scenes we saw in Lombardy back in March, with Covid patients dying in hospital corridors. But is that true? Not according to my friend who’s worked as an NHS doctor for the past 30 years. Here is his guest post for today’s Lockdown Sceptics.
The last three weeks have seen much speculation about the numbers of COVID patients in intensive care units, particularly in the North West and London. Further local lockdowns have been enforced by the Government in the North West, London and yesterday in the Midlands on the grounds that the NHS risks being overwhelmed. But how close is the system to being swamped, and what can we reasonably conclude from publicly available information?
NHS data released to the public to date is incomplete and usually a week in arrears. Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson point out in their recent Spectator article that this crisis has been characterised by sequential data inadequacy from the Government’s scientific advisors, Public Health England and the NHS. As they say “a look back at the figures issued shows that the track record, eventually validated against the facts, is abysmal. This is important because major decisions continue to be taken on the strength of such data”.
Some of these mistakes relate to crass errors of basic management, others more disturbing over-exaggeration or over-extrapolation of the size of the threats to public health. It is known that more granular data exist – for instance around the cause of death statistics and in-hospital Covid infection rates. But these figures are not being released to the public by the NHS despite requests for more transparency – seemingly at odds with Freedom of Information obligations.
The data we do have throw up some interesting patterns.
Firstly, the rate of change of numbers of patients in ICU appears to be levelling off in all regions other than the North West up to October 20th (Graph 1). What happened after that we are not permitted to know.
In comparison with the spring surge of Covid, the curves seem very different, especially in London (Graphs 2 and 3). It is clear that the rate of increase in the autumn is nowhere near as steep as in the spring. Further, the number of patients in London ICU beds is not out of proportion to what one would generally expect from respiratory infections at this time of year.
The data curves from the North West look different to London (Graphs 4 and 5). Again, the ICU patients track the ward inpatients, but the slope of the graphs is steeper in the autumn. Why the difference? Broadly, there are two schools of thought. The first maintains that the London population has a higher immunity or resistance to COVID-19 after having been hit harder in the spring. The North West had a surge in the spring too, but national lockdown occurred before the Northern surge was fully mature, hence there may currently be more susceptible people in the North West for the virus to infect than there are in London. Serology data on antibody levels suggests that London has a significantly higher proportion of people with antibodies than the rest of the UK (approx. 15 – 20%). It is reasonable to assume that London also has a higher level of people with T-cell immunity on the basis of greater previous viral exposure.
The other school of thought holds that there is no difference in the resistance profiles between the London and North Western populations, and that the difference in hospitalisation rates is due to poor social distancing habits in the North West and more working from home in the London population. This view inclines to the belief that eventually the ‘second wave’ will travel from the North to London with a lag time of about two weeks.
A deeper analysis of the data suggests this is unlikely to be the case. There is a clear inflection point in the North West where ICU cases of Covid start to rise on or around September 22nd (Graph 6). ICU data by individual hospital can be difficult to interpret as intensive care units usually operate as a network involving several hospitals. In a surge crisis, the larger inner-city hospitals usually receive patients from smaller peripheral units, increasing their apparent numbers accordingly. In the North West, almost all the hospitals saw a sudden increase in ICU cases after September 22nd.
The inflection point in the London figures is different and the distribution of cases between trusts is also very different (Graph 7). Overall numbers are substantially lower than in the North West – a region of roughly comparable population. In London, ICU cases started to rise on September 20th – so, rather than being two weeks behind the North West, London may be seeing a ‘second wave’ at roughly the same time. Unlike the North West, where cases were spread equally between hospitals, cases in London were concentrated in the East of the City, with Barking and St Barts seeing the majority of cases. Hospitals which had been seriously stretched in April, such as Lewisham, Guys and St Thomas’s, the Whittington, St Georges and Northwick Park, have so far not seen many Covid patients, lending support to the enhanced resistance theory.
So what does all this mean? The fact that respiratory infections increase in autumn is not a surprise – the annual winter beds crisis has been a constant feature of my three decades in medicine and cancellation of routine surgical work due to winter pressures is commonplace. Certainly, it is very difficult at the moment for hospital staff in the North West – having been in the eye of the storm last time round, I have the utmost sympathy for them. However, the Mayor of Manchester and the head of the regional ICU network in the North West have both stated on the record that the healthcare system can cope with the surge. Meanwhile in London, Covid patients occupy 10% of ICU beds – completely in line with normal winter pressures at this time of year.
An objective reading of the available data does not currently support the hypothesis that the NHS is in imminent danger of being over-run. The argument from ‘circuit breaker’ advocates is that winter pressures may increase in the coming weeks and create further stress on the system – and that may come to pass, but should Covid admissions or influenza cases increase, there are several measures hospitals can take to manage the problem, such as cancellation of elective work, and use of overspill facilities constructed in haste and at substantial expense in the spring, before resorting to mass incarceration of the public and destruction of viable businesses.
So why the Tier 3 lockdowns in the North and now the Midlands?
Governmental restrictions of civil liberties must be a last resort in a democratic society. To justify such radical measures, both the Government, their scientific advisors and the NHS must be more honest and transparent with the public in respect of the data driving lockdown decisions. Simply asking the population to trust the experts is insufficient, particularly when the experts have clearly been so seriously in error in recent months.
Failure to provide sufficient evidence to justify unprecedented curbs on citizens’ rights suggests arbitrary deprivations of civil liberty are being enforced for political reasons rather than medical necessity.
Trust and confidence are essential for the operation of a modern liberal democracy. Our current leadership is rapidly running out of both.
50 Northern Tory MPs Demand Roadmap Out of Lockdown
Fifty Northern MPs have demanded a roadmap out of lockdown as a further million people have been told they’ll be placed under the most severe restrictions from Thursday, with the addition of Nottingham, Broxtowe and Warrington to Tier 3. The Mail has more.
A letter to Boris Johnson from the Northern Research Group – a newly-launched alliance of Tory MPs led by ex-Northern Powerhouse minister Jake Berry – outlines the group’s demands, which include a tailored economic recovery plan for the north.
Mr Berry says that the virus could widen the North-South divide and “send the North into reverse”. His group is now calling for Mr Johnson to “level-up the North”, something the PM claimed he would do following sweeping Conservative gains in the region in the General Election.
It comes as around eight million people in England face living under the toughest COVID-19 restrictions by the end of the week after officials confirmed four separate parts of Nottinghamshire will be thrust into a Tier 3 lockdown from midnight on Wednesday, following three days of crunch talks with the Government.
Officials have agreed to adopt the draconian measures in Nottingham City, Gedling, Broxtowe and Rushcliffe in an attempt to drive down transmission. It will mean all pubs and bars have to close unless they serve meals, while people are banned from mixing with anyone they don’t live with indoors or in private gardens and beer gardens.
MPs from the Northern Research Group describe how the region has been hit with harsh local restrictions and local economies will continue to suffer, with many losing their jobs and facing the prospect of closing down their businesses.
MP for Rossendale and Darwen, Mr Berry, said: “The virus has exposed in sharp relief the deep structural and systemic disadvantage faced by our communities and it threatens to continue to increase the disparity between the North and South still further.
“Our constituents have been some of the hardest hit by this virus with many losing jobs, businesses, and livelihoods. Never has there been a more pertinent and urgent political and economic case to support people living in the North.
“However, instead of moving forwards on our shared ambitions, the cost of Covid and the virus itself threatens to send the North into reverse.”
Ironically, Nottingham has been placed in Tier 3 in spite of the fact that daily new cases are falling. Department of Health statistics show that the number of COVID-19 cases diagnosed in Nottingham each day has been dropping since the start of the month.
Over the weekend, South Yorkshire became the latest region to fall under the highest tier of controls, following Liverpool City Region, Greater Manchester and Lancashire. If you add the areas announced yesterday, a total of eight million people will be living in a Tier 3 area, which means no household mixing – indoors or out – pubs closing unless they serve food, and locals advised only to leave their areas for essential travel such as work, education or health, and they must return before the end of the day.
Stop Press: ITV reports that drive-by testing facilities across the UK’s hotspot areas are well below capacity, with very few people showing up for tests.
Generation Covid
Panorama on the BBC last night documented the damage the lockdown and ongoing restrictions are doing to young people. An accompanying article on BBC News summarised the main points.
Young people, particularly those from deprived backgrounds, have had their earnings and job prospects hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic, adding to fears for the long-term impact on their futures.
BBC Panorama found people aged 16-25 were more than twice as likely as older workers to have lost their job, while six in 10 saw their earnings fall, according to new research.
It also highlighted the impact of school closures on young people and added to growing evidence that students from poorer backgrounds have fallen behind their more privileged peers.
A quarter of pupils – some 2.5 million children – had no schooling or tutoring during lockdown, the survey by the London School of Economics (LSE) suggests.
But, the study adds, nearly three quarters of private school pupils had full days of teaching (74%) – almost twice the proportion of state school pupils (38%).The study’s authors warn it could lead to poorer pupils suffering “permanent ‘educational scarring'” when it comes to key academic milestones such as exams and securing a university place.
One of the most moving stories featured on the programme was that of Rasheed Graham, a 23 year-old from north-west London who’d secured a place on a fully-funded pilot’s training course before the coronavirus outbreak brought it to a halt.
Rasheed was told the flying school was closing and the airline could not afford to fund the training anymore.
In order to continue, he needs to find £60,000 to cover the costs.
“This is why the cadetship is worth its weight in gold, because if you don’t come from wealth or money, it gives you the opportunity to pursue a career as a pilot if you didn’t have the means before,” he told Panorama.
Rasheed is trying to crowd fund the money to pay for his course and has raised almost £22,000 so far.
“This could work out or it couldn’t. I’ve actually accepted both eventualities,” he says. “But I’d rather look back and realise that I’d tried to do something to return to flight training than sit back, and let the opportunity go by.”
You can contribute to Rasheed’s GoFundMe here – although it looks like he’s already raised the £60,000 he needs.
You can watch the programme here.
Lionel Shriver Speaks Truth to Power
I interviewed arch-sceptic Lionel Shriver for the Quillette podcast on Friday. She was predictably marvellous. As she said in the course of the interview, this crisis has sorted out the men from the boys when it comes to distinguished scientists, celebrated intellectuals and literary celebrities – with the vast majority proving bitterly disappointing. But a handful of independent-minded giants have emerged and Shriver is among the most impressive. Definitely worth listening to.
Stop Press: Stacey Rudin has written another terrific post for the American Institute For Economic Research, this time arguing that where you stand on the lockdowns is a test of character. She says the sceptics deserve the public’s trust because they have the least to gain from their position.
If COVID-19 is Not a High Consequence Infectious Disease, Why Lockdown?
Martin Neil, Professor of Computer Science and Statistics, School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Queen Mary University of London, has done a twitter thread posing an interesting question. Reprinted below.
- On 19th March the UK 4 nations public health HCID group made a decision that COVID-19 is NOT a high consequence infectious disease (HCID):
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid - Note this important statement: “The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.”
- In the UK an HCID is defined as an acute infectious disease, with high case-fatality rate requires an enhanced individual, population and system response.
- Professor Neil Ferguson is a member of The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP).
https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/advisory-committee-on-dangerous-pathogens - I understand the committee reached the UNANIMOUS view, that COVID-19 is NOT a HCID, at a meeting on 13th March 2020.
- Despite this the UK SAGE group published a document on 14th March recommending enhanced individual, population and system responses to COVID-19:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/update-from-sage-delay-phase-modelling - The SAGE group, Whitty and Vallance made this decision on 14th March – the day after the ACDP committee decision and five days before the HCID group’s decision.
- They therefore made this decision despite, and in contradiction to, official scientific advice.
- What happened between 13th and 14th March? Why did Ferguson, Vallance and Whitty change direction before the 4 nations HCID group made their decision on 19th March?
- Professor Neil Ferguson is a member of SAGE and a member of the ACDP. How can he make a decision one day and then contradict it the next?
Prof Neil has written for Lockdown Sceptics before about how most ‘positive’ cases are either asymptomatic carriers or false positives.
C.S. Lewis Could See Into the Future
The Price of Panic
Great new website collating the collateral damage of the lockdown under five different headings: Hunger and Poverty, Deaths from Other Diseases, Harm to Children, Anxiety, Depression and Suicides, and Oppression. Here’s an extract from the preamble:
The negative effects of lockdown are too often dismissed as small sacrifices, necessary to keep a highly deadly disease from spreading. These sacrifices are, in fact, neither necessary nor small, and the disease is only a threat to a minority of the population that can be protected without lockdowns. Sometimes, where major harms become hard to ignore, they are lamented as further damage caused by Covid, even though your panic-driven measures are to blame. This is an effort to bring focus to the magnitude of suffering taking place around us because of lockdowns.
Worth bookmarking.
Poetry Corner
A reader – Dylan Lovelock – has sent us a poem. I know how he feels.
No New Normal
I do not accept the new normal, I do not want a new normal thank you very much,
I’m quite happy with the old normal, I’m not a rabbit in a rabbit hutch
There is not a fox lurking around the corner, I’m not hiding in a chicken pen
I’m not masking my smile through fear or phobia, I will shake the hand of my good friend
I will walk freely wherever I choose to, that is why I bought these shoes new
I’m not residing in a prison cell, nor have I committed any crime
So do not expect that any time soon I’ll be doing any time
Please turn off the loathly TV and do not read the news
Unless of course you want to be misinformed and served up sour mistruths
Do not give up on your freedom, do not hand it to the machine
Do not let them take away your cash, this insidious agenda is entirely obscene
Liberty is a precious right for each and everyone
We must protect our way of life for our daughters and our sons
I am a human being, born free to live and breathe
This is not my new normal, I simply will not believe.
Spooky Parallels With Mad Cow Disease
We’re publishing an original piece today by Dr Janie Axelrad, a retired academic who wrote a book about Mad Cow Disease (BSE: A Disaster of Biblical Proportions Or a Disaster of British Science?). She sees uncanny similarities between that crisis and this. During that panic, the equivalent of SAGE was SEAC – the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee. And, predictably, it massively over-reacted, got drunk on its own power and caused an enormous amount of needless economic damage. Here is an extract.
Once a course of action is established, original predictions become untestable, and mitigating actions can always explain the discrepancies between predicted and actual figures. The BSE crisis continued for years, and although it became increasingly clear that the dire predictions would not materialise, SEAC maintained enormous power over the narrative, the funding and the media. However, all good things must come to an end: case numbers refused to rise and the funding started drying up. In the midst of the BSE crisis I was asked to write a book for the Institute of Economic Affairs, in which I predicted that fewer than 200 CJD cases would be recorded. Later, in 2002, Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College team proclaimed that the 50,000 predicted deaths could be an underestimate. To date, the number of CJD cases is 178.
The course of that crisis has obvious parallels with the current COVID-19 pandemic response. The impression is that we are following the same handbook, albeit with a copy that is a little dog-eared. So when Ferguson predicts 500,000 deaths from COVID-19 if we ignore his advice, I suggest we should be a little sceptical. So far the UK mortality is around 45,000. Despite a total lockdown and numerous local restrictions, our death rate per million is still higher than that of Sweden, that has no such restrictions. Ten or 20 years in the future, the scientists and politicians responsible will be retired in the comfort of knowing that most people have forgotten their roles, just as happened with the BSE crisis.
We’ve added this piece to the right-hand menu in the section “How Have We Responded to Previous Pandemics?”, one of the strongest group of articles on Lockdown Sceptics.
Worth reading in full.
Our Finest Hour
A reader has adapted Churchill’s famous ‘finest hour’ speech so it applies to our current predicament. It required surprisingly few changes.
My fellow sceptics and I know that the Battle for Britain has now begun. Upon this battle depends the survival of civilisation and democracy. Upon it depends our own British way of life, and the long continuity of our culture, our institutions and our freedom. The whole fury and might of the enemy will soon be turned on us. He knows that he will have to break us and our spirit or lose his agenda. If we can stand up to him, we will be free, and all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole free world, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, remove this tinpot despot and his puppet master, and so bear ourselves that for the next thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”
Et Tu, New Scientist?
A reader points out that it isn’t just Nature that has abandoned scientific rigour for woke dogma. New Scientist has also been captured.
The most recent issue highlights on the front cover – “The Herd Immunity Myth – why let it rip arguments are fatally flawed” . This article is totally unconvincing and describes herd immunity as “unscientific and irresponsible”. In addition, the leader calls herd immunity “bad science”. This approach is typical of many items published of late.
It is disappointing that a once interesting topical magazine is now so superficial and lacks balance.
A Retired Police Sergeant Writes…
I’ve had a lot of emails in response to my query about whether the Territorial Support Group has been recruiting EU nationals to duff up anti-lockdown protestors. Most have been a bit too speculative or conspiratorial to publish, but this one struck me as reliable.
I am a retired police sergeant and can confirm that the police have been recruiting EU nationals for quite a while. I was a Cheshire officer and, towards my retirement, came across a number of Polish officers which, to be fair, made a lot of sense given the significant Polish population in the county and, in my experience, their spoken English was perfectly acceptable although I can imagine quite a lot would have been lost in translation with our usual customers. The main problem was their written English which was, to be frank, incomprehensible. My last role in the police was to assess evidential files before they were sent to the CPS for authority to bring prosecutions and I found myself trying to decode witness statements and frequently having to request that that they were retaken by officers who could actually write in English. This was further complicated by the fact that a significant number of the British nationals were incapable of stringing a sentence together due to the lack of standards in recruitment.
So it’s perfectly possible that some members of the TSG are non-British passport holders if the police routinely recruit EU nationals to fill their ranks. Could that be why our correspondent who wrote about last Saturday’s demo found that many of the TSG officers spoke only very halting English?
Postcard From Argentina
We’ve been sent an excellent postcard form a social science professor in Argentina. He describes his country’s lockdown as the longest and most irrational quarantine on the planet. It sounds like a complete shitshow – even more bizarre and inexplicable than our own festival of incompetence. Here is an extract.
At one point, the city Government of Buenos Aires attempted to require elderly folks to call a hotline to get permission to leave their own house for any non-essential task, the idea being that some poor Government call centre employee would patronisingly explain to them all the risks (as if they had been living in some bubble or under a rock) and attempt to persuade them to stay at home. The most ridiculous thing? The elderly were expected to call and request permission to leave their home every time they needed to go out! And if they left their home without permission, they were threatened with – community service! (Presumably outside the home? One can only guess). The resulting outrage, not least from the elderly themselves, forced the city Government to backtrack rather quickly, not least because was no practical way to enforce this policy anyway.
Since I qualify as an “exempted worker” (which means I did not have to lock down, but I am not allowed to use public transport), I have been able to travel through the interior of the country for work-related reasons. In the countryside the picture looks different to the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area. Local mayors have often reacted to the pandemic like medieval peasants, blocking most access roads to their towns with earth or concrete barriers, and instituting nonsensical additional measures to try to keep the virus out of their communities.
The only consistent criterion for policy adoption and implementation seems to be “monkey see, monkey do”, with local leaders copying each others dumbest ideas without regard to any actual science or cost-benefit analysis. In most places I have been to, whenever you want to enter a town, you have to drive through a disinfection area that will spray the outside of your vehicle as you come in. I have repeatedly argued how ridiculous this is – after all, if someone were sick, the virus would be inside the car, and not stuck on the outside surfaces. Makes as much sense (none) as disinfecting shoe soles, or spraying disinfectant on outdoor sidewalks.
Worth reading in full.
Round-Up
- “Schoolchildren Seem Unlikely to Fuel Coronavirus Surges, Scientists Say” – Even the New York Times concedes children aren’t infectious
- “This Harvard Epidemiologist Is Very Popular on Twitter. But Does He Know What He’s Talking About?” – Entertaining take-down of a know-nothing Covid hysteric who styles himself a “Harvard epidemiologist”
- “The Impersonator: Eric Feigl-Ding, COVID-19, and an implicit far-left agenda” – And here’s Jordan Schachtel on the same fraudster, but more hard-hitting
- “The land where books are banned” – The Mail‘s Guy Adams pays a visit to locked down Wales and discovers that magazines are ‘essential’, while clothes aren’t
- “Why are alternative Covid strategies being dismissed without adequate debate?” – Good piece by David Yorath in Reaction
- “Journalist Darren Grimes files formal complaint over Scotland Yard’s handling of ‘race hate’ probe” – Darren, along with David Starkey and the Free Speech Union, has filed a complaint against the Metropolitan Police
- “Delta adds 460 people to no-fly list for refusing to wear masks” – Delta Airlines has added 460 people to its banned list because they won’t wear masks
- “Parents back head over ‘offensive word’ at black history assembly” – Parents of pupils at Benenden have questioned whether the headmistress needed to apologise “unreservedly” for using the word “negro” in a school assembly
- “No let-up in Covid restrictions, Nicola Sturgeon insists” – The shutdown of pubs and restaurants will persist indefinitely across much of Scotland as Nic Sturge-On said that there would be “no immediate change” when a new five-level system is introduced next week.
- “Millions of coronavirus tests are just costly overkill, says Chinese expert” – China’s top epidemiologist thinks mass testing is overrated, reports the Times
- “Second lockdown spells an unprecedented non-Covid health crisis” – State scientists tragically overlook the collateral deaths that will result from a tunnel-vision strategy, says Charles Levinson
- “Matt Hancock has one of the most crucial roles in Government… Boris Johnson’s whipping boy” – Michael Deacon, the Telegraph‘s Parliamentary sketch writer, skewers Hancock
- “We cannot sacrifice the future of the young to keep my generation safe” – Norman Tebbit says the forever lockdown is madness
- Chris Whitty Confession – A clip of Chris Whitty at the Downing St briefing on May 11th being remarkably sanguine about the danger posed by the virus
- “Nine in ten police forces haven’t fined anyone for breaking Covid face mask laws” – Good news in the Sun – just four police forces out of 40 have issued fines for not wearing masks
- “‘Remdesivir for COVID-19’ Study accidentally proved effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine” – A study designed to test the effectiveness of Remdesivir has actually shown that Hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment
- “All fun is tracked, traced and cancelled in our misconceived efforts to beat Covid” – Sean Walsh takes aim at the puritans in CapX
- “COVID-19 is destroying global freedom, and it may not rebound” – Dan Hannan in the Washington Examiner on the precious inheritance we’re squandering
- “Student, 22, fined £6k for breaking covid quarantine rules after she was caught eating at restaurant in Insta snap” – That’s one expensive meal
- “Escape from Lockdown” – Alex McCarron talks to Telegraph cartoonist and arch-sceptic Bob Moran for his podcast
- “On balance, a circuit-breaker lockdown doesn’t make sense” – Good piece in the Times by Professor Barry McCormick arguing that the number of QALYs saved by a ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown would be outweighed by the number of QALYs lost
- “School could face legal action after pupil is excluded for failing to wear face mask” – Camilla Turner reports on a miscarriage of justice at Brockhill Arts Performing Arts College in Kent
- Must-Read Twitter Thread by Alina Chan – This Twitter thread by a post-doc at MIT exposes some of the discrepancies and elisions in the early papers on the virus coming out of China. Draw your own conclusions
Love in the Time of Covid
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums, including a dating forum called “Love in a Covid Climate” that has attracted a bit of attention. We have a team of moderators in place to remove spam and deal with the trolls, but sometimes it takes a little while so please bear with us. You have to register to use the Forums, but that should just be a one-time thing. Any problems, email the Lockdown Sceptics webmaster Ian Rons here.
Sharing stories: Some of you have asked how to link to particular stories on Lockdown Sceptics. The answer used to be to first click on “Latest News”, then click on the links that came up beside the headline of each story. But we’ve changed that so the link now comes up beside the headline whether you’ve clicked on “Latest News” or you’re just on the Lockdown Sceptics home page. Please do share the stories with your friends and on social media.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a one-stop shop down here for people who want to buy (or make) a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and it has the advantage of not explicitly claiming you have a disability. But if you have no qualms about that (or you are disabled), you can buy a lanyard from Amazon saying you do have a disability/medical exemption here (takes a while to arrive). The Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. You can get a “Hidden Disability” tag from ebay here and an “exempt” card with lanyard for just £1.99 from Etsy here. And, finally, if you feel obliged to wear a mask but want to signal your disapproval of having to do so, you can get a “sexy world” mask with the Swedish flag on it here.
Don’t forget to sign the petition on the UK Government’s petitions website calling for an end to mandatory face masks in shops here.
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption.
And here’s an excellent piece about the ineffectiveness of masks by a Roger W. Koops, who has a doctorate in organic chemistry.
Stop Press: The Swiss Doctor has translated the article in a Danish newspaper about the suppressed Danish mask study. Largest RCT on the effectiveness of masks ever carried out. Rejected by three top scientific journals so far.
The Great Barrington Declaration
The Great Barrington Declaration, a petition started by Professor Martin Kulldorff, Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Jay Bhattacharya calling for a strategy of “Focused Protection” (protect the elderly and the vulnerable and let everyone else get on with life), was launched last week and the lockdown zealots have been doing their best to discredit it. If you Googled it on Tuesday, the top hits were three smear pieces from the Guardian, including: “Herd immunity letter signed by fake experts including ‘Dr Johnny Bananas’.” (Freddie Sayers at UnHerd warned us about this hit job the day before it appeared.) On the bright side, Google UK has stopped shadow banning it, so the actual Declaration now tops the search results – and my Spectator piece about the attempt to suppress it is among the top hits – although discussion of it has been censored by Reddit. The reason the zealots hate it, of course, is that it gives the lie to their claim that “the science” only supports their strategy. These three scientists are every bit as eminent – more eminent – than the pro-lockdown fanatics so expect no let up in the attacks. (Wikipedia has also done a smear job.)
You can find it here. Please sign it. Now over 600,000 signatures.
Stop Press: The authors of the GDB have expanded the FAQs to deal with some of the arguments and smears that have been made against their proposal. Worth reading in full.
Judicial Reviews Against the Government
There are now so many JRs being brought against the Government and its ministers, we thought we’d include them all in one place down here.
First, there’s the Simon Dolan case. You can see all the latest updates and contribute to that cause here.
Then there’s the Robin Tilbrook case. You can read about that and contribute here.
Then there’s John’s Campaign which is focused specifically on care homes. Find out more about that here.
There’s the GoodLawProject’s Judicial Review of the Government’s award of lucrative PPE contracts to various private companies. You can find out more about that here and contribute to the crowdfunder here.
The Night Time Industries Association has instructed lawyers to JR any further restrictions on restaurants, pubs and bars.
And last but not least there’s the Free Speech Union‘s challenge to Ofcom over its ‘coronavirus guidance’. You can read about that and make a donation here.
Samaritans
If you are struggling to cope, please call Samaritans for free on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email jo@samaritans.org or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch. Samaritans is available round the clock, every single day of the year, providing a safe place for anyone struggling to cope, whoever they are, however they feel, whatever life has done to them.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the past 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. Doing these daily updates is hard work (although we have help from lots of people, mainly in the form of readers sending us stories and links). If you feel like donating, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links we should include in future updates, email us here. (Don’t assume we’ll pick them up in the comments.)
Special thanks to graphic designer and Lockdown Sceptics reader Claire Whitten for designing our new logo. We think it’s ace. Find her work here.
And Finally…
In the latest episode of London Calling, James Delingpole and I talk about James’s confrontation with a pro-masking fanatic on a train (which he wrote about yesterday for Lockdown Sceptics), the fiasco that is NHS Test and Trace and my new favourite TV show – Barbarians. Worth listening to on your daily walk and don’t forget to subscribe.
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WOW! Just WOW! Its taken two years but thank goodness the dam is finally bursting and this manufactured crisis can now be shown for what it is and hopefully the people responsible can be rounded up and dealt with.
Hold on a minute. Jeremy Hunt did his review of the handling of this, if only we’d locked down harder and earlier, this would never have happened.
Hancock in jail within 5 years was always my hopeful expectation. I think that the odds are shortening
He went on his London Run and people couldn’t even be bothered to throw bricks at him.
Doesn’t that sum it all up?
We’re better than that at least.
No, people like him need to be chased relentlessly and it takes years. Bricks will be the least of his worries.
I think that’s exactly why we’re in this mess. This game should have been stopped the minute it started.
No lobbied bricks are appropriate opening salvos for war criminals living free.
I would have loved to have held a massive sign up for him at the Marathon as he ran by:
“You can run, but you can’t hide”
Hunt was a the wheel back in 2013 when the NHS said it could not deal with a pandemic crisis . He did nothing.
Hunt was a principal advocate in the Commons of vaccinating children – he is a through and through Globalist.
Let us hope Hancock takes a few others with him.
When this is all finally over, we are going to be hunting down those responsible for the rest of our lives. It will take decades to bring them all to justice, just as it did with the Nuremberg trials.
For sure Chris… This whole globalist driven vaxx shit-show will eventually be proven maleficent via a Nuremberg 2.0 trial… As to the venerable Fauci, who’s deeply linked to Wuhan, EcoHealth and Gates… at last I smell blood.
https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1480943104496652297?s=20
Too many medics and Govt ministers for over two years now have gone along and promoted this scamdemic farce… Post-mortem hard lessons regarding biochemistry, human physiology and emergent cellular systems will be better understood – albeit at great personal cost to those folk and families coerced and lied to becoming Pharma lab rats…
Talking of which it’s time to put TV mindfuck garbage breakfast shows like this permanently out of their misery… where’s the kill switch?
https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1481222310489112580?s=20
And for any back-benchers still fence sitting time for a bitch-slap reality check…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8uPbCZnp2U
Well, Tony Blair the ‘war criminal’ has been openly swanning around all these years… oh, look! – he’s just gotten himself a knighthood!
“Hunting down”. How about hunting down Test & Trace headquarters? Anyone know where that is?
No-one is going to be “brought to trial”. There are no ‘lawyers’ coming to drag Boris and pals off to ‘Nuremburg 2’. This is just conspiracy fantasy nonsense, on a par with the nanobots-in-the-vaccines fairy tale stuff.
As I said, there’s Matt Hancock, allegedly a mass murderer, trotting along the streets of London, and nobody does anything to even arrest him.
Yet green foxie one… seems so many conspiracy’s turn into facts…
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-11/repeat-booster-shots-risk-overloading-immune-system-ema-says
I’ve started reading conspiracy theories more than the mainstream news, as the end up being far more reliable over time.
“What they REALLY mean by “living with Covid”” –
https://off-guardian.org/2022/01/10/what-they-really-mean-by-living-with-covid/
Kit Knightly in OffGuardian on the threat of permanent interventions.
Please come and join our friendly peaceful events.
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Good article on off-guardian. It’s what I thought when things started to loosen. The loosening is too fast, opinions have been changed too quickly. Well, apart from in Scotland where I live. Nicola mustn’t have got the memo…
Beware the false dawn – the Welcome Trust and Gates Foundation are in league funding vaccines and “Global Health Technology” ( eg mRNA) and every element of the pandemic including $400 million from Welcome for Imperial College and Ferguson by the end of 2018. They are prime movers behind the Globalist Covid strategy.
Anything coming from them should be treated with care – the are one of the biggest players in the Globalist vaccination strategy .
Should our concern be what comes next in their plans for us?
I realise there is an uphill war that remains to be fought, but I feel *slightly* optimistic for the first time in probably a year.
I do believe that people are slowly, slowly, slowly waking.
I feel the same. Given the previous false hopes I think ‘slightly’ covers it at the moment.
I will become optimistic the day that unvaccinated people are allowed to enter (or return to) Britain without having to self-isolate for 10 days.
This crosses over with the insane Nut Nuts Zero Carbon Agenda and the madness of trying to close down travel for plebs -we are in fact at war on two fronts.
Also as the weather continues to get colder, how many will freeze for want of heating they cannot now afford?
If the Vax doesn’t get you, the cold will!
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/ Paul Homewood has been exposing all this for years . His site is a first class resource.
Instead of freezing in their own homes, these people can go round to their local MPs home to Stay Warm. Just barge in and say “I’m cold and it’s your fault!” and occupy their homes, and see how they like it.
Yes, exactly this. A dose of reality, instead of “I didn’t wear my face mask in Lidl, and it’s all over”.
And if “people are waking up” they will wake up to find themselves in a prison, with Boris and pals fully in control.
Where is the list of people who snitched on their neighbours during the ‘lockdowns’?
I think there’s a lot of buyer’s remorse to wade through first, and people are going to prove reluctant, I think.
I would point you to those who say they’ll buy a ticket to the Australian Open so they can boo Djokovic for being unjabbed, even though he’ll have antibodies from his previous bouts of covid.
‘How dare he be unjabbed…!’
Only catching SARS2 vaccinates you.
The jabs are not vaccines they are failed prophylactics.
Don’t relax – they will have a New Wave of something nasty on the way! This has been twenty years in the planning!
It will become a matter of stamina and endurance as the truth fight its way out of the swamp they have created to drown it.
Our biggest problem is still the craven sold -out Media .
You mean, like this:
https://www.thegatewaypunditDOTcom/2022/01/dr-robert-malone-fires-off-warning-shot-war-room-latest-disease-spreading-across-china-ebola-like-hemorrhagic-fever-virus-video/
Dr. Robert Malone Fires Off Warning Shot on The War Room: Latest Disease Spreading Across China an “Ebola-Like Hemorrhagic Fever Virus” (VIDEO)
I feel they want this, so that when they slap everyone down harder, the opposition will feel doubly defeated. I feel hopeful too, but a warning here to curb your enthusiasm. Make yourself emotionally ready for a new shit storm worse than February /March 2020. If it doesn’t come to pass, you’ll be that much stronger. Unfortunately, I feel that likelihood is just as likely as a successful fightback this year.
Make that man head of the WHO.
I hope you mean the Israeli epidimelogist and not Farrar?
No chance. He’s not alarmist enough.
Gates would veto the appointment – he now funds the WHO.
Exponential rise in cases of common sense in latest UK figures
The total number of cases detected has risen by 100%
The 7 day average is now 2
The R rate is 1
The number of hospitalisations is still 0, but Imperial College predict that it will rise to 2 as soon as the asylum are told to send out more people into the care of the community
Prof Qimron is 100% right.
What a disaster this is.
This disaster is yet to fully reveal itself as the immune systems of the Fully Jabbed (plus endless boosters) begin to collapse under the unequal struggle with the vax-generated millions/ billions of spike proteins – no doubt Big Pharma will be marketing products to keep people alive – the $$$$$$ just keep flowing!
Make people sick and then sell them products to keep them alive “Its nothing personal, just business”!
If the tide is turning – and that’s a big if – we will be told it is because lockdowns, jabs, distancing, masks and so on have all worked. There will be no contrition.
“It’s all thanks to the Vax, get your fourth booster (we have 200m doses to shift and Pfizer don’t offer returns)”.
Roll up roll up, don’t delay, get eight weeks free protection now, all stock must go.
See exposure of Pfizer’s failure to follow safety trial protocols and its dubious past history in Canadian video circulated by RFK Junior – a real shocker!
What they know full well is that spring/summer is coming and that it will be hard to push their vile policies down people’s throats during that seasons. So they are doing a retreat while planning to regroup and strike with double force next autumn/winter. Everything must be done now to prevent that from happening.
I thought the contract for Serco’s Test & Trace was already signed up to 2025? That takes us well beyond next winter!
And the Covid marshalls contracts, and more ‘vaccines’ have already been ordered, plus more LFTs and thousands more boxes of face masks Made in China.
I don’t think the seasons have anything to do with this. You have to pre-purchase your PCR/LFT tests for international travel the year round.
The point is they will go mostly quiet about these measures during spring/summer, and will then increase efforts to mandate them again toward end of year. Their plan is to train humanity into a repeated yearly acceptance of all this bs, to make these sales campaigns and freedom restrictions appear as normal and “obviously necessary” further down the road.
But they’re aware that they cannot just keep on feeding the bs during times when it appears completely incredible, as that would turn victims away from their ideology. Therefore they must deploy it in waves roughly correlated with the natural (and mostly harmless) waves of respiratory infections.
New “deadly virus” already in the labs? “Marburg” has been mentioned.
Exactly the entirety of the establishment will never admit they were wrong .
They cannot admit anything because an avalanche of legal proceedings would follow.
They were not wrong – what has happened was exactly what they planned. See Fauci’s suggestion in debate that a new ‘virus’ needed to be the means by which a mass vaccination experiment could take hold on the frightened population with the help of a media offensive. ( “The Real Anthony Fauci ” RFK Junior)
Okay correction , never admit it was a plandemic. Haven’t read Bobby’s book yet , still working my way through Pseudo Pandemic by Iain Davis .
Absolutely, although The Sunday Times had an article asking if we had done nothing about Covid, what would have happened? They asked loads of experts from all fields and the conclusion was…nothing much. All the deaths would have been compressed into a shorter time scale but basically we would have got through it quicker.
…and, of course, the deaths would not have been exceptional, and additional harms would not have accrued.
If we had stopped the fake Drosten PCR testing, Covid would have disappeared into the usual severe deadly seasonal Flu we have lived with for years.( see stats of Flu deaths from 2000 onwards to confirm)
Yes Lockdown etc also had the benefit of persuading the space giraffes not to invade!
I feel a great disturbance in the force, as if a million scientific voices cried out in anguish and where silenced… as their gravy train came off the tracks.
Apologies to George Lucas.
Lysenkoist, what they were doing was in no way scientific.
This is very encouraging but I would caution that it should be taken for what it is.
For 2 years it has been almost all one way traffic – lockdowns, measures, tests, jabs – and no dissent except for a few lone voices in the desert, like the DS.
It is clear now that there are voices calling for an end, but as far as I can see this just means the battle is finally on.
The people who have been promoting our current dystopia aren’t going to go away quietly. They are going to fight back, like that are doing with Boris Johnson’s 18 month old allegations, like the stooge from the WHO, and plenty more.
But I feel good, because the fight is finally on.
“The people who have been promoting our current dystopia aren’t going to go away quietly.”
‘Covid’ is very much a ‘protection racket’ – those running it aren’t going to loosen their grip. They have the money and the power to keep the scam going.
‘Covid’ is over only when we get back to a pre-March 2020 way of life, with no travel restrictions, no face masks, no ‘Covid vaccines’, no ‘Vaccine Passports’.
Personally, I can’t see all these governments giving all that up now. They have seen ‘The Resistance’ ie. the ‘Alpha Men Assembly’ punching empty cardboard boxes in a field, and know all they have to do is send in the Police to round them up if they want to. I bet they even had their mobile phones with them – so dead easy to track them and know who they are and where they live! Duh!
Pessimistic or realistic? The Scots haven’t toppled Sturgeon and Devi, the Welsh haven’t got rid of Drakeford, Boris has a garden party and continues to get away with it. Of course, if these people were to go, there could be someone worse to fill their shoes…! So… best to keep them right where they are…?
Yes, battle is on:
“It is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning”. ( Apologies to WSC)
( Apologies to WSC) . ..Oddly our current Prime Minister’s hero,except this incumbent strangely picked tyranny over freedom.
He’s Petain without the military experience.
Will be out there this Saturday protesting helping gather momentum to turn the tide
Now the Beeb will get that Springs harpy to fact-check the Wellcome Trust.
If so…they will not report what they find.
I wonder how much this sudden new-found pragmatism has to do with news of pending litigation seeping through?
I certainly bloody hope so, and looking forward to the deafening sound of multiple squeaky bums.
Dare I hope that some common sense is looming on the horizon
‘Common Sense’ has little to do with this diabolical Globalist plot, at least twenty years in the making brought to a head by the coming Banking Crisis and the demand for digital currencies controlled by the Central Banks to save their skins from a financial crisis they created!
Covid has always been just a means to an end – the end of western democracy and democratic freedoms!
I read an article defending unvaccinated in Berliner Zeitung. Probably the first such article in German MSM I’ve seen in 2 years – I was shocked it was allowed through censorship (although of course there was an annotation that it “does not reflect the editors’ opinion”). And they are retreating on the mandatory vaccination front as well (calling it a “delay”). Times are a-changing, but it is too early to claim victory.
I really do hope so.
I think Fauci emails and the DARPA paper released by Project Veritas is another huge news items from yesterday.
The worry is that there is continued scheming and that they are simply rearranging the chess pieces. Digital IDs and centrally state managed cryptocurrency is the real goal.
Yes, Fauci is at last feeling the heat – let us hope the fire takes!
Did no german in their government think “hey this all sounds a bit 1930s again?”
Hard to keep up an ’emergency’ for over 2 years, once that is declared over, the pharma groups are Liable
Covid: Seth Burke, 13, returns home after weeks in hospital – BBC News
Pro ‘vaccination’ piece from the BBC
Yep, I’m going to take vaccination advice from an obese teen with a life-long progressive condition.
I’m amazed they showed his photo, Sky’s latest trick has been to tell us “40 somethings” are seriously ill in hospital but “this one doesn’t want to be on camera”
….cos he’s the size of a house end I’ll bet.
Or the BBC
What else ? The BBC – also now known as “the Enemy”.
Pro ‘vaccination’ piece from the BBC…… I’m ashamed to say, I haven’t yet got around to cancelling my subscription.
All hail the Chief Investment Officer of the Wellcome Trust! He’s got the public good at heart. Of course he has. ROFL
The Wellcome Trust are the outfit that owns Britain’s largest marinas (Brighton, Chichester, and Port Solent). Presumably they want income from those sources this summer.
See Gates and Ferguson connections.
Yes.. the very name ‘Wellcome’ gives me a warm fuzzy glow inside..
When the fact that governments, at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, suppressed and are still suppressing the early treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infected vulnerable patients ensuring that very many of them died, is widely broadcast in the media, then I will raise a glass to the end of this criminal madness.
Until then nothing will really change because, despite the best efforts of actual doctors and actual scientists, the media is still controlled by those who G.H.W. Bush could have included when he reputedly told Gore Vidal “if the people knew half the things we have done ‘in their name’, they would chase us down the street and hang us”.
Ivermectin banned by the Government – people who could have been treated with it have probably died as a result.
Does anyone care? The Japanese do -they allow its very effective use.
And we also need to hear the MSM say that mortality in the placebo group was lower than in the jabbed and thus all cause risk of being jabbed is higher.
They could add that this was covered up by the trial runners!
I’m sure there will be many here who have been following Alex Berenson in exile. It’s interesting because he seems to have also arrived at the conclusion that we’re reaching some kind of tipping point.
I will repeat my post of yesterday.
Kit Knightly has produced a very timely article in off-Guardian. Beware the ides of January ( sorry Billy Wagglestick)
https://off-guardian.org/2022/01/10/what-they-really-mean-by-living-with-covid/
An excellent analysis, thanks for the link!
Yes, I’ve read that. Excellent piece indeed. The message is most definitely.. be on your guard and do not trust those who were responsible for creating the mess we are in to get us out of it. They have an agenda..
A French citizen throws Emmanuel Macron’s words back at him:
Meanwhile, Macron himself makes the staggeringly offensive remark that we, the unvaccinated, are curtailing other people’s freedom! This guy has got it coming to him.
!940s Macron would’ve said the jews are cluttering up the train carriages
Nothing gets leaked and nothing appears in the MSM unless it is sanctioned by the dictatorship. It has always been the case
The party story is a clever tactic to distract attention away from the mass killings and give the dictatorship about a year in which to create a we won the covid war narrative
The Pig Dictators line is ‘we must await the result of the independent inquiry’ knowing full well he will be exonerated
In the meantime under the covering fire of the party story the tanks are being slipped into reverse gear and leaving the battlefield
Testing will be stopped, cycles reduced, deaths re calibrated, restrictions dropped. We will read stories about our brave NHS Tommies and their daring do fight against the killer virus.
We will get figures of how many children’s lives were saved, and we will be shown cute pictures of these children celebrating at the birthday parties they might never have had
Eastenders will portray the affable cockneys declare at the bar of the Queen Vic that The Pig Dictator is truly the new Churchill cor blimey. OBE’s and Knighthoods will be thrown about like confetti
The Mall will fill with flag waving jabbed Daily Mail readers as the they cheer the Pig Dictator and King Andrew on the balcony at Buck House
Victory Gin will flow
The Welcome trust? Sir Jeremy Farrar?….Up to their neck’s in the insidious GOF virus facilitated “Great Reset”.
Anything these filthy neo-fascist Eugenicist’s have to say comes with an agenda!
Too many “experts” to shake a stick at. Lots of worms turning, rats fighting in sacks and all the rest.
It would be good to think that these are Damascene moments, and not just flashes in the pan; and that they will penetrate to the dim recesses of the perverted politicians, unethical medical people and halfwit “modellers”. I have my doubts.
As long as there are vast sums of moolah on tap to “the right people”, together with all sorts of other goodies like knighthoods, consultancies, seats on boards, share options and overpaid sinecures, prising anything out of these people will be like getting a firearm out of Charlton Heston’s cold dead hand-difficult.
so many epidemiologists
turns out no-one can model epidemics
not one model has come close to modeling the different waves in different countries
sack them all
turns out we should
1 – have a decent plan (we had one)
2 – look at data, not models
3 – have some spare capacity that can be turned on (train up some of the army?)
4 – go about our normal lives – maybe modifying our own behaviour if we feel we need to
5 – don’t send infected people into care homes
Indeed.
And the spare capacity could be provided by volunteers from recently retired health professionals (say, people who retired within the last 3 years). Of course, they shouldn’t be made to jump through pointless training hoops (eg, equality and diversity training) or have to pay for their temporary re-registration!
Doesn’t matter, they are still forcing the vaxpass on us. That is what this is all about and that is why Boris is being removed. The Globalists need the mark of the beast on everyone, ready for Phase 2.
It does seem like a swift, efficient, clinical removal of a prime minister. Soon we shall find out.
As for Sue Gray’s “investigation”, according to the Independent
That is absolutely taking the mickey, given that we know that “personal phones” are used. This hardly qualifies as an “investigation”. She might as well write her conclusions before she starts.
Personal communication can be forced using a court mandated production order.
Does she have no legal training?
And using personal phones for work purposes? It’s illegal in the City so why not for civil servants and MPs?
once again the public sector held to much lower standards than the private sector!
Unfortunately Frank I think you’re right.. covid was always about vax passes morphing into digital ID..
Next step in plans to govern use of digital identities revealed – GOV.UK
UK digital identity & attributes trust framework: updated version – GOV.UK
Of course WHO doesn’t agree, they haven’t got all their ducks in a row yet to move on to the next phase. I reckon we’re at least 6 weeks ahead of their schedule and the case for continuing with health passports is falling apart at the seams, without them their whole plan is going to be so much harder to implement.
I am beginning to sleep better at night dreaming of how they are all panicking and of which rats may eventually emerge from the sack unscathed, in my dreams not many and we are waiting for them when they do.
Pleased to hear this, but sceptical it will end this year in UK.
Brazen pivotting contradicting all previous propaganda will be needed.
They will never admit lying, being wrong, or causing massive harm.
Ferguson’s modelling was outrageous, they are going to claim that the deaths were way below these predictions because of the precautions, same illogical reasoning that you would have been really ill if you hadn’t been jabbed
There is clearly a concerted effort to scale back the death message of COVID….for whatever reason.
All I can say is that if we manage to get through all of this, without much (any) testing, masking, jabbing etc. then we should be extremely proud of ourselves.
This site, from it’s Lockdown Sceptics beginnings, supported by the many commenters, has made me, ironically, even prouder to be British (and human!)
Well done everyone to date and I’ll see you all on the other side….I expect, if this does end, there will be a rather large DS gathering to celebrate. I reckon we could fill Wembley stadium ten times over.
Great work people!
WOW! Just WOW! There’s an amazing amount of naivety being shown in these comments.
Do people actually think this is all over? Good grief, they haven’t even got started yet. This so called change of heart is being put out by the very people controlling this covid 19 event. Do people think they are actually going to stop vaccines, and common-sense will prevail.. ???
As a couple have mentioned, the Vax Pass has not been dropped, far from it, its being prepared as we speak. Digital ID waiting in the wings. Across the Channel in France, unless a miracle happens the vax pass will be made law on Saturday 15th January.. Also in Europe they are gearing up for a massive cyber attack drill. Just by chance of course, nothing to worry about !!!
And of course the global economy is just fine. Booming in fact, it must be all the energy price hikes, and breaking supply chains that are giving it a boost, let alone a little local difficulty with the Ruskies.
I think people need to reel the hopium back in pretty quick. We’re in a war and the so called elite are playing a blinder with their multi-faceted tactics.
It does make me laugh after all that’s happened, people still believe in the lackeys that facilitated & manufactured this power grab, will put it right & give back what wasn’t theirs to take. & it’s astounding to me people think bozos is the lesser evil.
You’re right, the elite & their shills & stooges declared war on us on march 2020.
I think you are correct. The “pandemic” is now clearly over and even the most ardent COVIDian is going to struggle to revive it, but the same Establishment remains in charge.
But I think the plans for vaccine passports have taken a knock. I’m pretty sure that the intent was for the pandemic to last long enough to justify vaccine passport rollout everywhere for everything, and then once the pandemic ended people might continue with the passports having forgotten, goldfish-like, the reason they were brought in in the first place.
But omicron has rather scuppered that plan… too many people are going to be saying “hang on a minute, the virus has gone so why do we still need the passports (and vaccine boosters to infinity)”
So while I think you are correct, the celebrations are premature and we can’t relax until the likes of Gates and Fauci and Schwab and their organisations are broken apart, I do think they are currently losing.
Omicron has scuppered the plan, and none of their plans were fool and waterproof. The virus was not as potent as they hoped for right from the beginning, nor the people as compliant. Many of the main players had long been identified, and their attempts to shut down churches and hence prayer were only partially successful, and if anything aroused suspicion. Also some of their diktats were so obviously dumb that even dim people were suspicious.
Also human biology is massively complex, and has many self-righting mechanisms within that they never understood. Many billionaires think being rich makes them incredibly good and right and above the common herd; another error of judgement. I will not go into further detail since they may be taking notes for next time. I doubt whether humility and the hard discipline of structured learning will be accessible to them anyway. As for God and unfallen angels, they haven’t got a prayer… They will be outwitted in fairly short order each time.
Cyber attacks and Russia will be blamed for a shut down of the financial system and inability of people to access their bank accounts, savings etc. That will be a further push for the vax pass – now a green pass – a personal social credit conduit that the govt will generously top up with food credits… just to get you through the crisis of course. But in order to prevent black marketeering it will naturally need to be tied to your biological genetic identity. Just a little prick, you’ll hardly feel it. And if the refusniks don’t want food, that’s their tough luck.
If that were to happen, plenty of refuseniks will be taking the food, anyway! It won’t be theft if the alternative is starvation!
I think there’s a place between “it’s all over and the good guys won” and “they are Thanos-like supervillains who we can never possibly hope to defeat”, and that possibly the truth lives in that space.
Do not sound hopeless, and welcome any relaxation while pushing for more. Too many people wearing the de Bono “it’ll never work” hat on this forum. The major effect of that is to dispirit people when unless there is hope they will just become tired, depressed, and mope, and post complaining posts to the already convinced, which is far from the most useful thing they could be doing.
This will never happen because to admit failure is to admit guilt.
Whilst I hope this is going to result in a retreat, a crawling back under stones, I’m a bit
. The wondrous Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given funds to all these companies, and is of course the largest funder of the WHO. Not to mention money given to the BBC Media Action, NHS, and the Government for the clean energy technologies deal, which isn’t going away any day soon. I fear this is all part of the plan to keep working us from behind.
I’m just smelling a ‘huge’ great rat! A very coordinated rat at that..
So that’s where sausages come from
https://twitter.com/Coldwar_Steve/status/1481017021441662979?s=20
That’s horrible, I’m hoping my lunch doesn’t make a reappearance.
Calm rational discourse is not going to help at this point. That horse bolted long ago. This is now an infinite fear loop, recursively locked. All we can do is stand back. This thing is programmed to self-implode and nothing can avert what has been set in motion. Someone should make meme of Cortes setting fire to his ships, with the ships labelled 2019 and The Old Normal.
Most people will stack overflow.
A perceptible change in the gaslighting narrative….So they take their foot of the bullshit gas for a while, but the restrictions and the march towards financial collapse and programmable CBDC continues apace. All the while they are hoping the indoctrination of the brain dead will avert attention from the inevitable cytotixin induced mountain of death and disease that will inevitably arrive in the coming months and year’s!
Exactly right..
The evidence is growing that we have all been taken for several rides around the mulberry bush. I predict that other erstwhile allies of lockdown will start to jump ship soon.. It is a bit like those people who supported the Iraq war without hestitation and happily sign the Blair knighthood petition today, despite it having been clear at the time that the War had nothing to do with defeating Isis.
Blair won an election even after his Iraq lies were well known. You are correct, many of the same people ranting about him today happily voted for the monster, even when they knew he was a monster. All the doorstep NHS clappers will similarly claim they always complied reluctantly.
I never trusted him, and the death of Dr. David Kelly marked a watershed moment for me, which I think it did for many. Other things became clear at that time, and things I had thought were coincidence seemed not so much so. I doubted Robin Cook’s demise was completely proper, also, and, eventually, one or two others…
Not long after I came across ‘Bohemian Grove’ ritual, and spent hours over the next several weeks, on and off, trying to find ways in which it might be untrue or exaggerated, and went down each avenue, only to find none led out of it being true.. That shocked me to the core, and still does.
This will never be over for me until there’s complete acceptance of guilt by those who have wrecked 2 years of global life, as many hand wringing apologies that are necessary to satisfy me and punishments for those who are shown to have acted in self interest, through malice, for personal gain or through incompetence and stupidity especially when in public office.
There is no forgive and forget or an ah well that’s all over let’s move on now with a clean slate!
If the Israelis can still be hunting Nazi war criminals 70 years after the end of WW II then those to blame for this should never be allowed a normal life without looking over their shoulders.
I Hope for a Nuremburg 2.
However, TPTB won’t let go off their achievements without a fight.
It is crystal clear to me that the “elite” have declared war on us, it’s just a shame that humanity has bred so many sheep, but fear has always been their weapon of choice.
As long as they can dream of their next foreign holiday whilst polishing their shiny new SUV’s (bought on tick) they basically don’t give a shit about things like this that were perfectly obvious to me over 18 months ago.
Seemingly incapable of a shred of critical thought, – I mean why would they, we all trust the BBC don’t we?
Qimron’s statement is a really heartening indictment.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/article-692169
A lockdown would not help to curb the Omicron wave, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Tuesday, as Israel registered a record 41,154 new daily cases.
“A lockdown would not help, it has not helped anywhere in the world,” Bennett said during a press conference.
road to Damascus is getting pretty crowded!
Not only have lockdowns failed, but also the ‘vaccines’!
and masks
and vax passes
and track and trace
and that stupid phone app (x 2)
Have just received yet another message from gp surgery saying they are short-staffed due to people having to isolate, for the firat time I’ve replied… Thanking them for letting me know and suggesting they stop testing so often.
Marvellous, Catee
Why not suggest that instead of isolating they work and only treat other people who’ve been properly vaccinated by catching SARS2?
No bloody way is the Wellcome Trust an ‘independent funder of medical research’.
Abso-bloody-lutely..
Zoe R is now 0.9
coming down linearly
in 6 months time everyone “will have been” a lockdown sceptic!
I’m feeling more optimistic (I’m generally optimistic anyway) – even though my daughter is off school for 10 days with clovid
This is fascinating, we’re seeing the grand psyops narrative shift in real-time. This is the tide going out before the tsunami. I predict that tsunami is cyber war and a “Western Spring” coming this spring/summer 2022.
My current thinking, which no doubt needs refining, I’d be interested to see if anyone agrees.
Firstly: the Trusted News Initiative is abandoning the covid narrative: there’s several MSM news reports already this week and more every hour:
1. Fauci concealed the lab leak https://twitter.com/GOPoversight/status/1480909671082901504
2. Project Veritas releases military docs noting that Ivermectin works: https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1480790099994431489
3. CDC admits 75% of covid deaths had 4+ comorbidities https://twitter.com/MichaelPSenger/status/1480584475356512256
4. Wellcome Trust says it’s endemic: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/01/11/time-live-covid-treat-virus-like-common-cold-says-wellcome/
5. Too many other to list, I’m sure there will be many more this week and next
Secondly let’s think about where we currently stand:
1. The masses are tired of lockdowns and the virus panic has stopped working
2. Omicron occurred pre-winter when it was the final possible squeeze of the lemon to persuade the sheep to volunteer for another dose. Interestingly it had a genesis so far back in the SarsCoV2 evolution that given its extreme transmissibility it must have come from a lab. There’s nowhere on Earth so isolated that something this transmissible could possibly hide out for over a month let alone for years. So it was released deliberately to coincide with the growing awakening against this covid narrative
3. The vax mandates look set to fail in the Supreme Court (and that’s really the only place that matters). The EU and Australia/NZ etc will flail onwards but there will be no mandatory vaccinations. Who has been shot, is all who will be shot
4. It’s doubtful the masses will volunteer for another shot, summer’s coming in the Northern hemisphere and viruses naturally die down when UV is present and people get outside to exercise and make vitamin D.
5. A majority of people currently hold a valid vax pass: their usage has been adequately indoctrinated amongst the masses, and the machinery is in-place to use these to discriminate people in daily life
6. The vax passes remain valid for 9 months to cover the summer holiday season in the West, so the sheep aren’t rushing for a 4th shot yet and will worry about that after their holidays
… So now is the *critical* time to move the narrative to the next stage of diabolical control.
Let’s look around and see what’s happening… actually I’ve already found it for you:
+ Bloomberg yesterday: “EU to Stage Large-Scale Cyberattack Exercise on Supply Chains” “Simulation starting this week to explore supply chain attacks. Stress test comes amid concerns about Russian plans in Ukraine” (archived here to evade the paywall https://archive.fo/dVyxr)
+ Reuters Dec 9 2021 “EXCLUSIVE IMF, 10 countries simulate cyberattack on global financial system” (https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/exclusive-imf-10-countries-simulate-cyber-attack-global-financial-system-2021-12-09/)
+ The mainstay Cyber Polygon https://www.weforum.org/projects/cyber-polygon
+ The US-Russia diplomatic talks over Ukraine (https://news.yahoo.com/u-russia-engage-diplomatic-talks-234107398.html) are about to start. Incidentally, the the rather coincidentally timed civil unrest in Kazakhstan could have distracted Russian forces but that appears not to be the case (https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1480809870878470145).
The next stage involves **supply chain disruption, cyber warfare, and Russia**. Recall that we have vax passes and the widespread ability throughout the West to enact discrimination against people based on their vax-pass status. We’re headed for civil unrest, possibly civil war.
How could anyone be so evil as to want widespread civil unrest? Follow the money. All wars are bonkers wars, and war has the remarkably helpful effect of increasing inflation (which solves the otherwise impossible fiat debt problem) and reducing the population (importantly those already drawing or about to draw underfunded pensions). Hot war continues to be impossible, cold war is also impossible thanks to globalisation, so it has to be cyber war and civil unrest. I hope I’m wrong.
Good post.. you’ve said everything I wanted to say in my earlier post but was restricted by time. This war on us is only just beginning.
You told me a couple of days ago that I was being too pessimistic. Oh well, only another 10 years of this… we’ll just have to learn how to cope in isolation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai0MVYzGC4w
Has BJ quit yet?…Asking for a friend….
The WHO is a creature of Gates and GAVi – we must all remember that.
when the dust settles
1 – anyone that pushed for a lockdown – should be locked down
2 – anyone that demanded unvaxxed become second class citizens – should become second class citizens
karma innit
Oh look.. just in time.. swine flu’s breaking out in Italy and heading Westward..
Time to call in our ‘swine flu’ Imperial College’s Mr Fixit.. enter Neil Ferguson. We’re going to need someone of his calibre, with a good track record dealing with swine flu..
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/pig-ebola-outbreak-imminent-europe
Not to mention his exemplary record regarding Foot & Mouth. Speaking of which, I’d love to stick my boot into his gob.
Will this change the Agenda? No.
Let’s be honest, for the vast majority it has only ever been a cold.
if that!
The vast majority were asymptomatic and didn’t even get a sniffle. They did get a jab that will quite likely ruin their health though in the next decade.
There is an emphasis shift ongoing, without doubt. However, the bloodless psychopaths behind this are not done with us yet, by a long way.
Remember, beasts do not repent.
This all rather depends on what the purpose of the pandemic was. If the end goal was technocratic control of our lives (I’ve been arguing for some time that it wasn’t), then it’s going to fail. You can’t roll out a campaign based on lies and deception and expect it to stick; might work in the short term but can’t last. That’s what we’re seeing now as the narrative we’ve been decrying for two years finally unravels before our eyes. People are not (quite) that stupid, although the psychological damage inflicted on the more credulous members of society will take years to undo.
on you Mr Globalist.
If the end goal was a controlled demolition of the economy, then it might have already served this purpose. As inflation continues to climb the PTB now have the perfect cover story for economic/monetary collapse. Perhaps that’s all they needed, and in doing so, they may have created a vacuum for the sinister creeping technocratic authoritarianism we’ve been subjected to to slither its way into.
Although we have come to regard Big Pharma as our enemy, I believe it’s actually being thrown under the bus; once the true scale of this biological catastrophe comes to light, trust in allopathic medicine will be lost and the tsunami of lawsuits will break these seemingly invincible entities, whether they believe themselves above the law or not.
We should be wary of this period I think (we’ve got to; we’re sceptics). And look very carefully at the proposed solutions; Greeks bearing gifts and all that. We’ve got our
It’s hard to know the “purpose” through the “fog of war” as it were. All I can see is that, in under 2 years, large numbers of people have been successfully coerced into / convinced to show QR codes to enter buildings, coffee shops, stores etc. In some cases (like Italy) you need it to work.
For now, QR codes are given if you comply with a vaccine schedule, but this has the potential to be extended or changed.
Furthermore, the idea of the system “failing” depends on whether people will have a choice or not. In a sane world, people would vote these things out. We don’t live in a sane world.
My own personal view is, this is part of a prophetic play that has been going on since 9/11 and will start to culminate in the second half of this decade. We can’t change the overall flow of events, but I suspect we can shape / lessen their impact… so fighting back is worthwhile (from a spiritual point of view, certainly, but also from a material point of view).
Just a thought, but as a good percentage of globes countries now have “vax passports”, will England introduce said passports so that we can “align” ourselves with the practices of other nations, to allow great freedom of movement of course.
I don’t know how the UK can avoid ‘Vaxx Passes’ if there really is a ‘globalist elite’ pulling the strings. Every country in Europe seems to have Vaxx Passes. Britain is quite a small country compared to the rest of Europe, Russia, Canada, Australia, etc.
Brits are already using Vaxx Passes for travel abroad and back to the UK.
They’re a daft idea, especially if they are being used for a different reason. For decades, I have actually carried a record document alongside my British passport – for external use only. It’s a multi page A5 form marketed by one of the drugs firms, with a list of potential products etc. Started using it in 1996, on a trip to China via HK. I can’t remember when it was last used for any reason – maybe when I was temporarily in hosp in Karachi when I went down with a bug I caught there; not sure.
6 of the most vaccinated places on earth. Each currently enjoying all time high rates of infection. Ask your vaxxed zealot friends if the vaccine testing missed this what else might they have missed?
I hate to say this, but I’m not convinced Omicron should be treated like the common cold. My OH has been confirmed to have been infected with this latest variant, and is currently on a covid ward in hospital, on oxygen, dexamethasone, etc, and is seriously ill.
I, on the hand, caught it at the same time from my brother-in-law on Xmas day during a very, very brief visit (we literally stayed long enough to use the loo and leave again), and was never particularly ill.
MOH had been in bed for over a week/10 days, with a raised temperature, before falling whilst going to the bathroom and then being too weak to get up again, which was when I called the paramedics. MOH has been in hospital since Monday night.
My sister and brother-in-law have obviously both also had it, and the symptoms vary, e.g. my sister’s worse symptom was a very, very sore and swollen throat, as well as a raised temperature. My BiL has been bedridden for about ten days, temperature up to 102F, V&D, nausea, loss of appetite, exhaustion, etc.
We’re all in our sixties, so maybe it’s hit us harder, I don’t know. But a cold, it wasn’t, and MOH isn’t out of the woods yet. It’s been even bit as bad as Delta sounded.
For me, the flu was worse, but for the others it’s been on a par with flu, not a bad cold.
And it’s very infectious, bearing in mind that we’ve been in plenty of contact with other people for the last two years without picking up so much as a sniffle. Five minutes on Xmas day was enough to catch this latest version.
So be aware and warned.
I hope YOH is recuperating.
https://www.birpublications.org/doi/10.1259/bjrcr.20210139
Bilateral adrenal haemorrhage with renal infarction after ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 AstraZeneca vaccinationTun Tha, Iana Martini, Elena Stefan and Sridhar Redla
published 10th January 2022
This is a paper that’s just been published describing a woman who’d received the AZ vaccine and then suffered from blood clots in various organs. She’s a friend of mine, who worked at the same hospital that I did, and we still keep in touch.
She’s one of the reasons we declined to get vaccinated.
The authors are at pains to say the blood clotting is incredibly rare. I don’t believe that, from everything I’ve heard over the last year, but unless someone does a proper audit, we’ll probably never know.
I recommend everyone to read Real Anthony Fauci by Bobby Kennedy Jr. On chapther 3 he explains how Ivermectin could have saved 80 percent of deaths Worldwide. This book have opened my eyes. I now know that, 90% of all medicine is not for anything else than profit for them. Low profit and effective medicines are bashed and marketed as ineffective because they go against their narrative and profit plans. One of them is wonder drug Ivermectin. I see that everyday people search for it but can’t find a place to obtain. You can get yours by visiting https://ivmpharmacy.com
So we have the Wellcome trust, “biggest independent funder of medical research”, LSHTM, Chatham House , the WHO all in the same article and we’re supposed to believe this really isn’t just the vested interests and associated nwo activists engaging in synchronised narrative changing .
gimme a break
Golly.
As if poor Boris wasn’t having enough little problems!
Mind you, I feel confident that he’ll get the BBC and Grauniad’s “chat fekkers” to demonstrate that Wellcome Trust, GlaxoSmithKlein, Qimron and the others mentioned in Will’s piece (the Dirty Stinking Backstabbers!) are all talking “Mumbo Jumbo”, to Boris’s entire satisfaction.
But I’m a little concerned about poor “Sir” Patrick Vallance.” After all he only had £600,000 worth of GlaxoSmithKlein shares at the start of this Ebola style Pingdemic. I do hope he doesn’t loose too much money, after all those intelligent and accurate graphs he waved about, these many months!
Looks like the Establishment is starting to run scared and is starting to backtrack on their Global Reset plans. I still believe they should all be tried in Nuremburg II type trials and severely punished to warn future elites that we will not endure their power grabs in the future.
Professor Qimron’s letter to the Israeli Health Minister should be copied and forwarded to the Health Ministers in all European countries, the USA, Canada and all other countries who mass vaxxed.
Not yet, but we will be doing for the flu and the common cold if you give the covid committee the chance.
At last!! A voice of common sense is being heard. I had this so-called virus in December 2019 and it was no worse that a severe case of flu. That was what my GP thought at the time and three months later told me it had to have been this new ‘covid’ thing. From that moment on, my suspicions were aroused and I started searching the web for all the information I could find. Within weeks, I was being called a conspiracist and told by all and sundry I was a scaremonger. I have never stopped my crusade against big pharma, big tech and corrupt governments, and never will, not until the sheeple realise what is going on beneath their very noses. Fauci is a reincarnation of Dr Mengele from the Nazi party. He helped develop the virus and deliberately masterminded the distribution around the world with the help of the CCP. The man is a mass murderer and will receive his punishment in due course
Are you sure it was caused by SARS-Cov-2? I had a respiratory infection around that time, which no one was interested in what the cause was. Much later on – quite recently – I shelled out for a T-spot test to see if there was any evidence that I had an infection by it back then. The result of that was that there is no record of it, so was probably something else. On the other hand, it’s almost certain that I’ve never had Covid-19 over the last two years – at least not to the extent that I can ‘remember’ it. Might have chucked it out with no real problem, perhaps (via innate immunity).