When he appeared at the Covid Inquiry this week, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson had a golden opportunity to get to the heart of the issue and denounce lockdown as unnecessary and harmful. But he blew it, says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in UnHerd. Here’s an excerpt.
As a vocal Covid dissident and lockdown opponent throughout the pandemic, watching the U.K. Covid Inquiry these past few weeks has been a depressing experience. One gets the sense that both the people leading the inquiry and the vast majority of those questioned — the architects of the U.K.’s disastrously failed Covid policy — have learnt nothing.
At one point on Wednesday, Boris Johnson had a golden opportunity to get to the heart of the problem. The lead inquiry lawyer, Hugo Keith KC, asked the former Prime Minister whether the late March 2020 order to lock down the country was “absolutely necessary”. This was Johnson’s golden opportunity to confess the cardinal error of the U.K.’s pandemic strategy: that it imposed lockdown in the first place.
Instead, he averred that the U.K. had “no other tool” than lockdown available. Under questioning about his involvement in pandemic decision-making in January and February 2020, the ex-PM’s mea culpa centred on his regret that he had not “twigged” the seriousness of the Covid threat earlier.
One major problem with this reasoning is that by the time February 2020 rolled around, Covid was almost certainly more widespread than anyone realised because it had arrived earlier than anyone realised. In 2019, Chinese authorities delayed reporting the existence of the virus to the world. Studies of antibodies in stored blood and stored wastewater from across the globe — including Italy, the U.S., Brazil and elsewhere — found traces of Covid’s presence in autumn 2019, long before the world knew about it. Even a January 2020 lockdown would have been too late: our fate was sealed once the virus was abroad in the world.
“The inquiry has been marked by a studied lack of curiosity about the great control group of the pandemic: Sweden,” Dr. Bhattacharya continues. “But Sweden did better than nearly every other country on earth in protecting human life. It has among the world’s lowest cumulative age-adjusted all-cause excess deaths since the start of the pandemic. And it accomplished this feat without lockdown.”
Worth reading in full.
For the full story on early Covid spread, see here and here.
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Interesting inside look at the asylum system from this doctor;
”I am the clinical lead in an asylum hotel in the north of England. We’re right in the centre of town. Though we try to keep a low profile, that’s not always easy with 24-hour security guards in hi-vis patrolling the entrance. The building is modern, but it was never intended to house hundreds of people long-term. It’s starting to degrade quickly. My role is to provide a GP service within the hotel.
I have to be inexact about certain aspects – but let me tell you this: the Home Office is not focused on the details in any meaningful way. At the hotel where I work, the physical building is owned by a group of investors. The security is contracted to the lowest bidder for this kind of work. Day-to-day operations are run by a large housing management firm.
You have to comb their websites for any information about their activities in the area. The asylum-industrial complex is largely run by for-profit contractors, each leveraging their slice of the cake for further enrichment.
The space I work in is extremely secretive. Part of that comes from the housing companies making phenomenal profits from commodifying people. This is a business led by algorithms and obsessed with process. Several of these providers also run prisons, probation services and custody suites; there’s a hardness to their culture – it can be unkind and arbitrary.
In many ways, it’s like a prison: nobody has anything, so the only thing you have of value is your word. I’ve learnt never to promise anything I can’t deliver.
People are not always who they say they are. Most arrivals are undocumented, having disposed of their papers along the way. The Home Office assigns them a name and date of birth based on whatever they declare. People do this to reinvent themselves – they may have tried and failed previously under their original name, or they may be wanted overseas. There is no way to verify it. They are given a new identity and that becomes who they are in the UK. Some have already been granted the right to remain in other European countries and then left to try their luck here, where they have stronger family networks. I have met families who have been on the road for years.”
https://article.wn.com/view/2025/04/10/I_work_at_a_migrant_hotel_Even_when_residents_are_granted_as/
“What’s the difference between cigarettes and illegal immigrants?
You’re only allowed 200 cigarettes into the UK before the authorities start asking questions.” A Meme.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHV8-kSoG0h/?igsh=N3R1bmE0N3o5MTR4
Nigel’s got it sorted.
You can come here in vast numbers and within a few short years the towns you live in will start to remind you of home. It amuses me how potentates in far fling countries love the British immigration policy because it means that they can off-load their criminal classes here which cost a lot of money to contain at home. The British love of cheap labour and scraping the barrel and the race to the bottom is something to behold.
Is it a surprise that with every mention of a trade deal with India the first thing that comes up is allowing more of them to come here to the imperial nation they are supposed to hate? Maybe it is revenge….
How low do you want to go? Please stop. Is it the lure of that final sound in the bathtube when the last of the water goes gurgling down? Is it self-punishment for empire? Surely you can see the futility of money worship and how everything valuable lies outside of the realm of money. Cheap taxi drivers and delivery drivers. Cheap nannies and restaurant staff. Is it really worth it?