Brian Monteith’s article in the Scotsman, highlighted here on Monday, makes a good point. None of our political parties care to talk about lockdowns. None remind us of how fervently they supported masks, social distancing or the Rule of Six. The Tories don’t wish to remember how stringently they enforced futile strictures. Labour and SNP don’t care to recall how they demanded greater restrictions. You could be fined £6,400 for persistently not wearing a mask on a train. Or £10,000 for a birthday party. Remember? They have taken a vow of silence. Including, in the SNP’s case, about the notion of lopping six inches off schoolroom doors to blow the virus away.
This is understandable. In civvy street, it’s becoming hard to find anyone who still thinks that lockdowns were wise. Everyone sees the wreckage – of educations, mental health, livelihoods, the work ethic and healthcare. The NHS stumbles on, less productively than pre-pandemic, whilst facing a backlog of sicker folks with delayed diagnoses. Inflation has impoverished us and driven interest rates higher. These, in turn, cause vast losses on Government bonds that the Bank of England bought during lockdown’s Quantitative Easing. We, as taxpayers, are on the hook for the tab. Raised taxes will cover debt interest, not better public services.
Pro-lockdown views are becoming confined to fanatics, unable to grasp any wider horizon. One such lodged a ‘formal complaint’ against me after I asked a lockdown-critical question following her lecture at ESCMID Global in Barcelona, alleging ‘harassment and distress’. How can I ‘harass’ anyone with a single question, articulated in a minute? Only if I prick a mental bubble, maybe?
What’s more interesting, and Mr. Monteith fails to mention, is the equal omertà on Covid vaccines. Unlike lockdowns, sold as a painful necessity, vaccines were touted as great achievements by Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock, Rishi Sunak, the BMJ, and the press at large. The FT – no friend of Boris – wrote in February 2021 that vaccines gave the then PM a second chance. Ahead of the May 2021 council elections Keir Starmer opined that the vaccine rollout gave Boris a “very significant boost”. Developers and deployers received public honours.
As late as February 2023 the PM began his response to a Parliamentary Question (apropos a vaccine-injured constituent) by saying:
It is important to start by recognising the importance of vaccines in protecting us all, not least the fantastic roll-out of the Covid vaccines across the U.K.
Now, come the election, no candidate hails the vaccines or the rollout. Nary a word. This is odd, to say the least. This Government hasn’t much to crow about. So, you’d think it’d highlight what, three years ago, was hailed as a world-beating success? Is it an admission it has all gone sour?
The vaccines’ mediocre efficacy was evident by the summer of 2021, as people found themselves infected despite recent vaccination. Nevertheless, most people dutifully queued for a third shot, bamboozled by propaganda that this would do the trick. It didn’t. Omicron struck and vast numbers, vaccinated or not, were infected.
Fewer punters have presented for each subsequent shot, and mistrust has multiplied. The comments below any newspaper article on Covid vaccines are now predominantly negative. Among frontline healthcare workers only 30.2% received a Covid vaccine in the six months between September 2023 and February 2024, compared with 42.8% who accepted the flu vaccine; corresponding figures for workers in GP practices were 44.9% versus 61.8%. These figures tell much about professional scepticism especially as the comparator flu vaccine is only modestly effective and widely declined.
Had the Government stuck to its original plan of vaccinating only the over-50s and the vulnerable it’d be able to claim success. The ratio of deaths to infections fell after the early stages of the rollout. I, doubtless now annoying some readers, continue to believe that some benefit was achieved, though the age bar should have been higher.
But, instead of proclaiming limited victory, our leaders flipped to vaccinating everyone, regardless of age and risk and the Opposition asked no questions. Some readers will see a global conspiracy. Other countries did the same and mandated more aggressively. I think it more likely that our ruling cabal – Johnson, Gove, Hancock and Sunak, plus SAGE – dreamt they could surreptitiously achieve zero-Covid and be lauded as saviours. The vaccines had around 90% efficacy, they believed. So, if they vaccinated enough of us, the R number would slip decisively below one. SARS-CoV-2 would then die out.
As with Lawson shadowing the ERM, it didn’t quite work out. More-transmissible variants – Alpha, Delta and finally Omicron – kept nudging the winning post further away. Or, perhaps more correctly, mass vaccination kept favouring more transmissible variants, pushing the winning post further away. In response, the Government doubled down, vaccinating adolescents, then children, re-vaccinating those already vaccinated. And the virus kept a jump ahead. Finally, late in 2021, SARS-CoV-2 became Omicron and hit full gallop. The race ended.
In retrospect the response looks ever more foolish. Pushing ahead after it was plain – in mid-2021– that the vaccines were failing to stop transmission was like raising your bet after you’ve noticed your nag only has three legs. Worse, those who drove the strategy – and the Opposition who asked no questions – missed a key point. With vaccines, unlike drugs to treat the sick, the people you save cannot be identified whilst those harmed become very visible. This indicates a need for greater caution when developing a vaccine. Surely the JCVI reminded them?
Yet, the most-used vaccines were hurriedly-developed mRNA and DNA-vector products with novel modes of action. Their tissue distribution and side-effects were incompletely examined. They are clearer now. As Robert Redfield, a virologist who headed the CDC from 2018 to 2021 puts it:
When I give you an mRNA vaccine… I don’t know how much spike protein you make because I give you mRNA and then your body goes and makes it… You may make it for a week… You may make it for a month.
He adds that the spike protein is inherently toxic (it binds to heart cells, among other targets). And it comes to be made, sometimes for long periods, in parts of your body that a natural SARS-CoV-2 infection would never reach, not just at the respiratory mucosa.
It is beyond dispute that mRNA and DNA-vector COVID vaccines injured sizeable numbers of individuals, causing death, blot clots, myocarditis and Bell’s Palsy among other harms. Many of those harmed were too young to be at any real risk from Covid infection. They were vaccinated ‘for the greater good’, under policies supported by every U.K. political party. John Watt, a Scot with a cardiac injury, confronted Rishi Sunak about this on GB News last February. The PM responded by talking of the Vaccine Damage Payments Scheme and how it might need tweaking. But he avoided the core issue of why a 35-year-old (as Mr. Watt was in 2021) was vaccinated at all.
Perhaps it is the fear of individual confrontations like this that keeps our candidates off their ‘Great Achievement’? They’d have to admit that many younger folk risked harms for no personal benefit in an ill-judged failure to stop viral circulation. And continued to do so once the inevitability of failure was clear.
Or perhaps a bigger, niggling, fear haunts the political class, despite walkouts when Andrew Bridgen MP rises to speak? The vaccines may (or may not) be a factor in the persistent excess deaths that have followed the pandemic. Many of these are cardiac or circulatory – common settings for Covid-vaccine side effects. Any honest scientist, or interested citizen, must ask if there is a connection. There is also the issue of turbo cancers, highlighted here by Professor Angus Dalgleish. In Japan – the world’s most-vaccinated country – long-falling cancer rates turned upwards after booster deployment. Perhaps this is coincidental. Perhaps not. Again, questions must be asked. If one accepts that cancers arise repeatedly during our lifetimes, but mostly are aborted by the immune system, it is eminently plausible that a hazard arises when products perturb this system. And, genetic vaccines, particularly the mRNA products, cause numerous complex perturbations far beyond the simple induction of antibodies and T-cell responses seen with conventional protein and killed-pathogen vaccines.
I do not wish to scare-monger. Much of the evidence for wider (as against individual) harms is circumstantial. I am not yet convinced that these vaccines triggered excess deaths or will bring a spate of cancers. These may largely be contingent on incipient illnesses that were missed or untreated during lockdown. But I am convinced that the novel-vaccines-for-all policy of 2021-2022 was reckless and unwarranted. Its consequences need rigorous examination, as does the lack of Parliamentary scrutiny in which it took place. That is why I deplore the U.K. Covid Inquiry kicking its vaccines module into the long grass of 2025 and wholeheartedly welcome the People’s Vaccine Inquiry along with the BMJ’s brave decision to publish a paper asking awkward questions.
And it’s why I’d like to hear our candidates say something about their great vaccine rollout. Do they still think it was a good idea. Or a madness? All the major parties of the time backed it. If Reform becomes the next Government it says that it’ll have an inquiry into excess deaths and vaccine harms. Good for them. Do the Tories, Labour, Liberal Democrats, SNP et al. agree that this is needed? And urgently, given that boosting continues for the elderly and healthcare workers. Or do they still believe in the Great Achievement?
Dr. David Livermore is a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.
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There is a strange increase in the reactions of people – the more their cherished beliefs or desires are shown to be at variance with facts – the more fanatical they become.
Applies to:
Trump
Brexit
Global Warming – or at least the idea that carbon dioxide is the sole driver of climate change despite ever more evidence that it has little, if any, effect on the planet’s climate.
–
The world is Topsy Turvy and I wish to be buried upside down, so that I will be the right way up when the world has sorted itself out.
Don’t forget Covid!
“People who make the rules made a rule which said nobody – not even they themselves – could break the rule so that means the rule was not broken because they said so, so there.”
If nothing makes sense, it’s usually money wot did it.
Eugyppius has some substantial reservations regarding Hersh’s article too.
Why is it so difficult to believe an underwater device could survive 3 months? Flight data recorders carry on transmiitting underwater for 90 days. An explosive device would need only enough power to pick up the detonation signal and to detonate the charge.
The legal argument is predicated on the assumption that those involved are honest and honourable, and as we know politicians and those in the security services are the epitomy of honour and honesty. It seems a bit like defending a criminal on the grounds that he knows crime is illegal so why would he commit one?
If the start assumption is that the people in power will violate the rules, anyway, the whole maneuvering to avoid doing so described in the Hersh-article could have been avoided by simply violating the rules.
Why did the US try to get a resolution passed in the UN to invade Iraq if they were going to do it anyway?
Why is it so difficult to believe an underwater device could survive 3 months?
Indeed. In fact such a device would be very simple to design and construct. There may even be off-the-shelf versions available.
“The legal argument is predicated on the assumption that those involved are honest and honourable”
The C1984 was authorised despite every law and rule in the damned world being broken.
“Rule of law?”
Give me a break – Jeez!
I seem to remember that the West has instituted a “rules based order” because the “international law based order” doesn’t get us what we want. But it’s still useful to wave the law flag bacause Joe Public has not been told about the new rules.
That sums it up.
Agreed. The Baltic at this site is not particularly cold or deep. 67m give or take a few metres. and bottom temperatures in June will be about +3degC. Thermoclines capable of accoustically masking a submarine are improbable in these shallow depths.
Presumably it would be a fairly straightforward technical matter, given US resources, to get an AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) to do the job, which could be launched from many miles away.
I spoke to a merchant navy guy who does underwater engineering/maintenance stuff, and he said yes they’d use an ROV. But I’m not sure. For one thing, Russia has sonar sensors on those pipes (but I suppose there could be stealthy ROVs). Another thing is that Sweden has said these were larger, non-precision bombs that were placed near the pipes, not on them, so they could have been dropped from a ship (or perhaps a sub). In fact, the pipes are so vulnerable that anyone with some explosives and a small boat (no transponder) could have done it and probably got away with it. There’s an NYT article with a few more details. Maybe we’ll never know for sure who did it.
I think an AUV would be more likely than an ROV (which would be tethered to the mother vessel and have very limited range, thus necessitating the mother vessel to loiter over the site while the explosives were being laid. I agree with RichardTechnik that a submarine, at least a full-size submarine, would be an unlikely platform to use for this task.
If the explosives were indeed large, non-precision bombs then perhaps (as alluded to in the NYT article) the best way to lay them would be off the back of a motor vessel, tracking along the top of the pipelines (which could be visible on a multibeam sonar). On a second run over the target the multibeam could be used to check the explosives were sufficiently close to the pipelines to do the deed. No doubt such an exercise would have be practised to perfection in some secret location.
Detonate some time later, perhaps months later, at a moment of choice. The technology would be similar to that of an acoustic mine, adapted to fire in response to a given acoustic transmission rather than a ship passing overhead.
The technology isn’t difficult, but given the extent to which most Western navies have been run down, their independent technology bases hollowed out by spending cuts over decades now, my guess for the culprit would be the one nation that has more or less kept up to speed – the US.
I agree almost anyone could have done it, via a small boat and divers for example, but if the explosives were large this rules out divers. And getting away with it – absolutely vital in the circumstances – would be another matter.
I do wonder how effective the protective sonar sensors would be, in that whether there were enough of them to detect if something untoward was going on – simple dumping of explosive packages from above for example.
An oft-stated reason Putin did not go for the Donbas in 2014 was to keep the gas flowing through Ukrainian pipelines which Nordstream would eventually replace. Thus the Trump administration under legislation proposed by Senator Ted Cruz applied sanctions to Nordstream 2 which – the very next day – halted the construction process. In an act of almost childish stupidity, Biden lifted those sanctions – with 100pc Democrat backing – simply because they were a Trump policy, and despite warnings, and the pleading of Zelensky that such a move would be a green light to Putin to move on Donbas. And so it proved. No wonder Biden blurted out that Nordstream could be taken out…You look a fool to deny otherwise.
The Russians doing it doesn’t add up either. It would be quite easy to dismantle the case that the Russians did it.
So where does that leave us?
The fog of war, people believing what they want to believe, chaos..
Cui bono?
A bit like the origins of covid, it may remain a mystery for a long time/forever. Also a bit like the origins of covid, it seems important to know so you’d expect those that govern us to be pulling out all the stops to find out the truth. Funny that doesn’t seem to be happening in either case. I’m sure it’s just a cock-up though. They did manage to fully investigate the Salisbury poisonings and established beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Russia wot dun it, same with US election interference, Hunter Biden laptop conspiracy theory. All completely believable.
and the excess deaths – due to eating too many eggs.
Cui bono?
The Yanks.
Therefore they did it.
Exactly. No need to overthink this.
So in addition to being a military specialist, Rons is also an expert in the interpretation of US law. Very impressive.
Further to Ian Rons’ well-researched points about the Hersh article,
A) Basing an entire journalistic investigation and its conclusions on revelations from ‘an unnamed source’ has exactly the same credibility as ‘it all came to me in a dream’.
It is perfectly possible that an individual did approach Seymour Hersh and present him with all the ‘information’ contained within this piece.
But without verifiable bona fides and corroborative evidence – of the sort that Mr Hersh would presumably have presented if available – the likelihood is that he was having a chat with a member of the FSB masquerading under the cunning guise of ‘Senior Agent Matt ‘The Rock’ Reacher, Deputy Sub-Director CIA Clandestine Section 14XJ, Undermine the Russian Federation With Extreme and If Necessary Illegal Prejudice’.
B) Even if it does turn out to have been a conglomeration of Western liberal democratic countries which were responsible for the destruction of this pipeline as Mr Hersh alleges, the intention was clearly to hamper the totalitarian Russian Federation’s neo-fascist project of mass destruction, murder and annexation / conquest in an independent and democratic member of the United Nations.
To put this moral and practical point in another way, how many genuinely life-preserving gas pipelines (to individual properties for central heating, hot water, cooking etc) have Russian Federation ‘liberation’ forces destroyed in Ukraine since the completely unprovoked invasion of February 2022;
And as a corollary of all this pipeline destruction (via aerial and artillery bombardment etc) –
How many lives?
Yes, there’s no indication Hersh ever tried to verify this source’s status in any way. And he clearly hasn’t asked experts (legal, military, engineering, etc.) about the key claims. There’s a reason he doesn’t write for the New York Times or the New Yorker any more, and it doesn’t look as though the NYT has even mentioned his claims this time, despite the fact that he was an excellent investigative reporter.
As to whodunnit, I’m very uncertain about all that (there are several possible culprits), but if it was the U.S. then I’d applaud them for having the audacity, and two fingers to Putin.
The ‘as to whodunnit’ cop-out implies you simply can’t be bothered to put together an argument that Russia destroyed their own pipeline because that would be ridiculous. And yet you refuse to jeopardise your own stated narrative by admitting all the evidence points to the Biden White House, not least of all its track record in disaster.
https://youtu.be/IAiZvKouZRw
P J Watson’s view.
Four minutes.
I’ve been reading this week about the Mỹ Lai massacre because I’m visiting the area this weekend. Hersh played such an important role in shedding light on that atrocity and subsequent events that I find it hard, not insulting to dismiss him as ‘gullible’.
It’s not a secret that the US has worked hard to make LNG from Qatar the primary source of Europe’s gas. So we have motive, something we don’t have in the case of Russia. For balance, maybe Rons should scrutinise the claims that it was Russia. Except he won’t, because he’s partisan.
Compared to what US strategic air warfare, ie undirected bombing of everything which could seen from the air, culminating in just unspecifically bombing the countryside after all of that had been eradicated, did to the people in SE Asia, the so-called Mỹ Lai massacre is a historical footnote. It’s also not really more gruesome than what invading Russian soldiers did to villagers in Eastern Prussia 1945. That’s just a lot less popular because they targetted The Right Kind of Victims[tm], ie, Germans.
Similar scenes have always occurred (and will likely keep reoccuring) whenever regular forces have to handle guerilla warriors, ie, enemies who dress up as non-combatants and prefer ambushes. When every supposed civilian could suddenly pull out a gun and start shooting at you, at lot of probably innocent civilians will end up being killed, either because they just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or in retaliatory actions.
Another outstanding article from Mr Rons.
There are, in fact, only two countries that stood to benefit from the Nordstream destruction:
Russia: a ‘false flag’ operation to sow discord within NATO.
Ukraine: to remove the leverage Nordstream afforded Putin.
These are also the only two ‘hot’ protagonists engaged in this European war.
Take your pick.
But in the event, only the US economy has benefited from increased sales as well as German de-industrialisation, NATO members have murmured about US involvement but daren’t say it out loud, Ukraine has been largely destroyed, and Russia’s massive investment in the pipeline is lost. Pretty duff planning on both fronts – US false flags never cost them that much.
Still, it’s a relief to know that there are no other participants in the war, and that the stated US intentions for regime change in Russia and the breakup of the federation are just whistling in the wind and trusting Zelensky to deliver. The weapons, advisers, trainers, technical input and intelligence, “deserters” serving on the front, visiting leaders etc, are just to keep us informed.
Did you see Zelensky entering Westminster Hall with pretty much all 650 of our sycophant pretend MP,s clapping cheering & whistling in support of the Hero in a green tracksuit . There’s nothing else to say , we are living in cartoon world !
Those barstewards in Westminster do NOT speak for me – Andrew Bridgen excepted. Bloody cowards.
one of the most shameful sights in the history of this nation.
Yes – the hero who is now conscripting 16 year olds for the meat grinder. When it happens in Uganda it’s a war-crime.
Yes, indeed. Startling prescience, strategic grasp and administrative grip from a President who can barely tie up his own shoelaces……
Controls are for those following the flowchart of decision making. Bearing in mind how the Biden administration has treated the US, I can see how they might bypass all the controls to make this happen. I can also see, on the technical issues of getting devices planted on the pipeline and detonated. The idea that they would need some super leading edge prototype device to achieve the detonations, and then discount that as a possibility because they didn’t have time to make them or to a quality that would permit them to work is absurd. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if you couldn’t just go to a storage room somewhere in the US Military, pick two, and heve them FedEx’ed to your mini-sub the following day.
I remain sceptical of everyone, but there is a strong smell of USA around this whole incident. It is really surprising to me how little has been made of it politically, diplomatically, and of course in the obedient media. I would be fuming if it was my pipeline and I’d want answers.
How can anyone doubt that lying Biden sabotaged NordStream 2?
When he officially promised that he would do it!
That it was a criminal act of sabotage, eco-terrorism and war is indisputable.
Few nations have the ability to pull off a stunt like this – so which ones profited from it?
Certainly not Russia, Europe or China – but America did, both financially and politically.
Why on earth would Putin sabotage a recent multi-million dollar investment that gave him huge political and financial sway over Europe? His “special op” practically depended on just that.
Why does Putin do anything? Why did his army not wear uniform when taking over Crimea? Why did he invade a country when he already occupied (uncontested, internationally accepted) a significant part of it?
Why did Russia do any of these things:
1921-6 Operation Trust, creating the pseudo-“Monarchist Union of Central Russia” (MUCR) in order to help the OGPU identify real monarchists and anti-Bolsheviks.
1939 False flag shelling Mainila before invading Finland
1968 Operation Progress, deployment of 20 KGB illegals to Czeckoslovakia
1999 Apartment buildings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk were bombed by FSB, killing hundreds of Russian civilians, blamed on Chechens.
2014 Little green men, in fact Russian soldiers pose as freedom fighters in Eastern Ukraine
2017, Russia used footage from video game as evidence of the United States colluding with the Islamic State.
2022 Two explosions destroyed two radio antennas in the disputed Moldovan region of Transnistria.
Sorry but you lost me at “The most glaring issue is a legal one.” The Biden administration (and others before him) don’t care about the rule of law and most of Congress doesn’t either. Even if they were caught breaking the law, there would be no consequences. It’s laughable to think that “breaking the law” would stop them from doing it. Also, enforcing the law in this case would mean proving that the US did it and Biden covered it up. No one responsible for enforcing the law is going to do that.
Like the other commentator who brought this up, you’re missing the point: The Hersh-article goes to great lengths handling this legal issue. Hence, pointing out that the text doesn’t really make sense is a valid criticism of the article. Whether or not US politicians break the laws supposed to regulate their actions is unrelated to that,.
As RW said, that’s not really the issue, Walrus. The issue is that Hersh’s source is lying (and obviously so), because there’s no such exception to the Covert Action Statute of the sort he claims, never mind whether Biden would be prepared to break that law or not — although Hersh’s source implies he wouldn’t have been prepared to break it, so perhaps he’s being naive?
Ian Rons the globalist apologist strikes again…..is this just to wind up the (awake) non woke on this site.
It’s odd that someone this naive works at the daily sceptic.