On March 27th 1913, the population of Columbus, Ohio, started running. Afterwards, nobody was exactly sure why or when. James Thurber, the comic novelist, was a schoolboy in the town and recalled the incident in a famous article some years later. He said that perhaps it was simply someone suddenly remembering an appointment to meet his wife, and then a paperboy in high spirits joined in, and then perhaps a portly man of affairs broke into a trot, and before you knew it, the entire high street, from the union depot to the courthouse, was running. After the run had begun, people began to look for a justification, and the hubbub, the noise, eventually formed into one word: the dam had burst. Nobody stopped to point out that there was zero evidence of it having burst and that, anyway, even if it had, it could not have possibly reached Columbus, Ohio. People ran on for several more miles and then, eventually, sheepishly returned to the town. Here is the point: Thurber said that years passed before anyone dared mention it. Everyone carried on with their business as usual — and woe betide you if you made some jokey remark about the day the dam did not break.
It seems to me that we are in a very similar place with the lockdowns. Then, too, we saw herd instinct at its worst: people joining in one after another without stopping to think. It is an interesting counterfactual to ask what would have happened if the first sign of the pandemic had not been in autocratic China but in a country where lockdowns, the confinement of the entire population, would have been unthinkable — let us say if it had started in the Netherlands or Canada or somewhere. It started in China; then there was the attempt by the Italian Government to stop people moving from north to south; and then, suddenly, lockdowns, which had never been foreseen in any previous planning document, were considered a standard tool of public policy overnight. We were panicked into a response that no one had foreseen prior to those days — by shrieking broadcasters such as Piers Morgan, night after night, saying, “Why aren’t we copying these other countries?”, and all the signs up saying, “Covidiots go home” — and, rather like the people of Columbus, Ohio, we did not stop to think, and we still do not want to go back and ask whether it was justified or proportionate.
It is not true to say that there was no plan or that it was a plan for the wrong pandemic. We had a plan that we had worked out in cooler-headed times, at precisely the moment when you are supposed to think rationally about these things. We heard from my noble friend Lord Lansley about a number of the things in it. He said, well, maybe we were wrong about those things, but there has been no evidence at all that the original 2011 plan was wrong to say that face masks would be ineffective at containing a disease or that closing schools would have little impact or, indeed, to make the basic supposition that if you are dealing with something that will spread throughout the population, your best bet is to do that in a way that minimises fatalities rather than pretending that you can stop it altogether.
Actually, there was one country that kept to our plan. They did not have the resources to do their own, so they simply downloaded ours. That was Sweden, which I will come back to in a moment.
Like James Thurber’s citizens in Columbus, we are finding it difficult properly to relive the indignities and horrors that we went through, from the grievous ones, such as people unable to say farewell to dying loved ones, to the trivial ones, such as the debates about whether a Scotch egg counts as a meal. We have forgotten the taped-off playgrounds, the drones sent up to pursue solitary walkers, the police in Derbyshire pouring dye into a lake so it would be less of a beauty spot, and the ‘pingdemic’ — that bizarre period when people were self-diagnosing so that, if they could not take time off work they would self-diagnose as being all clear, and if they felt like a little time off they would claim to have been infected. We have crammed all of these into some remote corner of our memory. In fact, the very difficulty of those things became an argument for continuing. We got into the worst kind of sunk cost fallacy. In fact, the Secretary of State at the time explicitly used that argument: we have been through so much, so let us not let it all be for nothing.
By then, almost everything was pushed into a retrospective justification for the measures that we and other Governments — with one exception — had taken. If infections went up, everyone said, “Well, we can’t relax the restrictions. It would be extremely dangerous.” If they came down, everyone said, “Oh, it’s working. We just need to carry on with this.” People kept on saying, “Follow the science”, but the one thing that we were not doing was applying the normal scientific method. Karl Popper defines science as something that can be disproved, but woe betide you if you even asked the most basic questions at that time about whether there was proportionality. We already had the evidence by the end of April 2020 that Sweden had followed the same trajectory as everywhere else: that the infections had peaked and declined in a place where there were only the most minimal of measures, banning large meetings but otherwise relying on people to use their common sense.
That is what a scientific approach would have done. It would have said, “Consider the control in the experiment.” We had a laboratory-quality control there all along — we had a country that had stuck to the plan that we were panicked out of following.
What can we see about the results in Sweden? First, and most obviously, there is not a smoking crater where its economy used to be. In fact, Sweden suffered less of an economic hit in the pandemic than it did in the 2008 financial crisis. The Swedish budget was back in surplus by 2021 — imagine that. The last Government was done for by our selective amnesia about the cost of these lockdown measures and the current one will be too, because people still do not like to face the fact that for the better part of two years we paid people to stay at home, we borrowed from our future selves, and that money would eventually need to be paid back.
What if it was all for nothing? Let us ask the question: what price did Sweden pay for sparing its economy? At the time we were told that there would be an almost civilisational collapse there. I remember the Sun had the headline, ‘Heading for disaster’, while the Guardian’s was, ‘Leading us to catastrophe’. The argument was not that Sweden might end up with a slightly better or worse death rate than other countries, it was that this would be an outlier by any measure — that there would be bodies piled up in the streets.
The data are now more or less in. It was very difficult to track these things at the time because different countries have different methodologies. Different countries have different ways of measuring fatalities. Were people dying of Covid or with Covid? There were some territories which could not measure even that because they did not have a sufficiently advanced healthcare system. I think of my native Peru, which had about the toughest lockdown on the planet and about the worst fatality rate — again, showing how little correlation there was.
The one thing you can measure with a consistent methodology is excess mortality. You can apply the same calculation to any given population. You can say how many people died in the previous three years, how many you would then expect to die in this period, and compare that with what actually happened. You can be more sophisticated and factor in obesity and age profile and so on. However you do it, you find that Sweden ends up with one of, or on several measures, the lowest excess mortality rate in Europe. This should be the only thing the inquiry is looking at and we are debating, and yet it is somehow considered bad form even to mention it. We are still, like the citizens of Columbus, Ohio, unwilling to face the fact that it may have been disproportionate.
Among the institutions that put Sweden as the single lowest excess mortality rate in Europe are the BBC and the ONS. This is not some Barrington Declaration fringe thing, these are the data. Yet there is this extraordinary readiness to tiptoe around rather than face them.
Should this not be the sole focus of the inquiry whose provisional findings we are discussing? Should not the only question that really matters be: were non-pharmaceutical interventions effective? Given the cost of the ruined educations, the elderly people isolated and the debt, was it proportionate? We should not be asking that question in a vindictive spirit. I understand that people have to err on the side of caution, that there was a panicky atmosphere and that we were dealing with something we did not know. It is understandable that people have to go with the best models they can find. But we no longer have to rely on models. We now have actual hard data. Yet we seem extraordinarily reluctant to ask the central question: did lockdowns work? Did they work a little bit but not enough to justify the dislocation? Did they work a great deal? Or, as the Swedish case prima facie would suggest, did they not work at all? Did they in fact drive up the mortality rate because of unrelated healthcare problems — everything from unscreened diagnoses to the fact of confining people and denying them exercise?
How is it that we can have this lengthy and expensive inquiry — Sweden has completed both its inquiries and moved on while we were still getting around to phase 1 — and have had all those conversations, and not asked that one central question?
Looking at this interim report, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it is results-driven, or at the very least tendentious. In fact, you could infer almost everything you needed to know about this inquiry from the fact that, incredibly, witnesses were required to take a Covid test. It must be the last place in discovered space where this is still a thing, where Covid is not treated as an endemic disease.
You could tell from the tone of the questions what the conclusions would be — that the Government should have done more; that it was insufficient; why did we not lock down earlier or why did we not lock down harder? — all of it begging the question, all of it making assumptions that have, until now at any rate, not been interrogated, let alone proved.
This matters because, as the Minister said at the start, there is bound to be another pandemic and therefore knowing whether lockdowns work should be a critical question of public policy. Although, I have a horrible feeling that even if we were to rewrite, in a cool-headed way, a response plan without lockdowns, the evidence of 2020 is that such a plan, however reasonable and moderate, would be torn up in a panic under pressure from shrieking broadcasters and angry newspaper headlines.
This is a transcript of a speech given by Daniel Hannan (Lord Hannan of Kingsclere) in the House of Lords Debate on the Covid Inquiry that took place yesterday (September 3rd). Watch it here.
Stop Press: UsForThem has tweeted the contribution by Lord Frost to the same debate: “It is not even clear to me that we are going to get from the inquiry what we really need — a report on the costs and benefits of measures taken, factoring in the economic and social costs.”
— UsForThemUK
An important and admirably counter-narrative contribution from @DavidGHFrost in yesterday’s Lords debate on the Covid Inquiry’s first report. Extended clip here.
"I am not particularly impressed by what I have seen of the workings of the @covidinquiryuk so far…"
1/2 pic.twitter.com/BeBILhzbYQ(@UsforThemUK) September 4, 2024
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Simple fact that even a lay person such as myself knows.
NO RSV can be stopped until it has run its natural course. So all lockdown does is delay its end. As we saw in China and NZ, and other countries.
And we have the stats to show that such as Sweden and Florida, that did not lock down, fare better or certainly no worse than such as the UK. Plus none of the economic and social hell rained down on many, especially our kids and young people
Until those responsible for this, and the multiple breaches of the Nuremberg Code, are behind bars (the latter for life), we cannot rest easy. Starmer will lock down at the drop of a hat, given he is as much if not more of a WEF puppet as Sunak.
.
Hopefully Dan Hannan will remember this piece and be a little more robust about fighting against such things next time than he was in 2020.
Hear hear where was he?
“Until those responsible for this …”
I would put the appropriate government advisors at the top of the list, if only for taking tax payers money on the express promise of creating a plan and helping to implement it when the need arose.
What are they called? I think we know, but the official title is Public Health Officials:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_health
Problem is – any of us that ignore his lockdowns won’t get a fine – we’ll be in clink within 24 hours – having had our showtrial live-streamed to make examples of us.
I’d wager that if the outbreak had been plague or smallpox the public wouldnt need to be told to lock themselves down, pure fear would have sorted that, there would certainly not have been any parties or meetings in Westminster for the very same reason!
The pandemic was hyped to check on the populations compliance ,..and it worked
I’m sure you’re right. The collective intelligence of the people is always vastly superior to the moral and intellectual pygmies in government.
Not really. Most people are stupid – as proven by the Scamdemic of a fake flying bat virus (show me the virus in a bat and how it is transferred to a human).
80% loved lockdowns.
70% loved being stabbed with poisons.
95% wore diapers faithfully and religiously.
Collective Intelligence?
Please.
And the Climate Emergency, and NET Zero policies.
The Science is there, but the BBC ignore it because it goes against their agenda.
It involves understanding the basic laws of Physics which, while not difficult if learnt at school, is difficult to learn on the fly, with emotions running high and, apparently, no time to do it in.
The people of Columbus, Ohio may not have been able to speak about their moronic herd behaviour for some time but I’ll bet they didn’t do it again.
I live in hope that whatever people are willing to admit openly, privately they know it was all madness. And so will be very reluctant to do it again.
Btw,
Why?
There hasn’t been one since the Spanish flu. You need more than just an unusual number of old, frail and physically compromised people to die before you claim something is a pandemic.
But if the bar for defining a pandemic keeps dropping, then no doubt there will a claim to another one sooner than we all would hope.
There will be another “pandemic” because the WEF and WHO have decided there will be.
This wasn’t even an epidemic.
<10K died FROM Covid (not the fake “with Covid” count, created by the fraudulent PCR test from Feb 2020 to Dec 2021.
Avg c 15 per diem. I.E. Not even an epidemic
TWO under the age of 14 died from Covid. I’d bet my last dollar that far more were killed and harmed by the jabs
Under 100 under the age of 50. Just over one a week.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/covid19deathsandautopsiesfeb2020todec2021
One hopes that when they roll out Pandemic 2.0 enough have realised it is bullshit, and refuse to comply.
Well, the WHO changed the definition of a pandemic shortly before covid from lots of people dying to lots of people infected.
So, yeah, I’m sure they have plans. But, they mist also be wondering whether they may have pushed it too far with covid and might not be able to get away with more of these shenanigans any time soon.
“One hopes that when they roll out Pandemic 2.0 enough have realised it is bullshit, and refuse to comply.”
Indeed.
Although I incline to the view that Fuehrer Starmer has gone 2 Tier by way of frightening people in to compliance. I still expect Scamdemic ll by October / November.
Maybe, and will be told to fuck off in short order, that’s for damn sure.
Indeed. I will do the same and they can vaccinate my dead body because that is what it will come to. This is not China, we’re not supposed to be a compliant Nation, we are supposed to regard individual liberty highly. Well I still do regardless of how many have drank the collective kool Aid.
Dr Mike Yeadon maintains that pandemics are impossible. Check him out on Telegram.
What about the Black Death. That bumped off quite a few.
The Black Death took place in 14th century – we know very little about it actually, most chroniclers wrote about it decades later, much conjecture, very little evidence and fact that can be verified. I know we think it was rats and fleas but apparently that is not proven nor provable.
What is very interesting about that period is the volcanic activity which led to poor harvests and a mal nourished population in the preceding period which would have made people susceptible to disease. One chronicle mentions dead animals in fields: fields were not that secure back then, an abandoned and starving animal will escape through a hedge or fence, not simply wait and die so I suspect there might have been toxic clouds of volcanic dust which overlaid. Anyway it is all conjecture and we should be very careful about referring to it with any sort of authority.
” trivial ones, such as the debates about whether a Scotch egg counts as a meal”
Not sure I would say that’s trivial. The Scotch egg business was the perfect example of the government taking the piss out of us – we knew, they knew, we knew they knew and they knew we knew. If those that govern are openly taking the piss in the midst of a supposed crisis, and no-one apart from a few nutters calls it out, you know we’re lost.
Exactly! They didn’t quite push it to the level of ‘standing on one leg whilst in conversation with another person will confuse the virus and keep you from being infected.’ Almost.
Unfortunately we were the 20% that knew, the rest were compliant drones.
Then, too, we saw herd instinct at its worst: people joining in one after another without stopping to think.
The problem with this idea is that herd instinct was not the cause of the insanity, but a symptom of it – because the insanity was sponsored by our rulers as a deliberate instrument of social control. They were either testing the limits of obedience, or they had some other project in mind. The obvious other project is the imposition of the poisonous frankenjabs on an unsuspecting and trusting population. Given the world-wide persistence of excess deaths since since the end of the “pandemic”, our real problem, therefore, is not in the legacy of lockdowns, but in the legacy of the frankenjabs. And this catastrophe has only just begun.
The worst crime and scandal since WW2 and yet, and yet, not a word. Plenty of drama over other scandals like Post Office, Grenfell etc…..But in the other two, there was no violation of the Nuremberg Code regarding coercion of the young that were at no risk from whatever ‘Covid’ is supposed to be.
The costs of the Covid policies will run and run for decades. We will have tax payer funded employees not working [from the office], lost businesses will not be restarted and the medical consequences will emerge and cost the NHS billions in years to come.
Meanwhile, all the main culprits have either gine to the HoL or they will have retired before the proverbial hits the fan.
Just as with previous scandals, by the time there is any acknowledgement in Parliament the public will have been conditioned to worry about something else. the same will happen when Net Zero is eventually abolished and an urgent programme of thermal generators is undertaken.
The government spends £17,000 per person of our money every year.
For that amount of money, the service we have received and continue to receive from the government is absolutely pathetic.
A great deal of that money, in the past, was spent on the Common Cold Unit.
The Common Cold Unit coined the name ‘coronavirus’ for a newly discovered family of viruses in 1967. The CCU closed in 1991.
Why were its findings not referred to as part of a considered response to an acknowledged novel coronavirus epidemic?
‘These studies proved that typical colds could be produced by a wide range of viruses including some enteroviruses and paramyxoviruses, but certain viruses, namely rhinoviruses and coronaviruses were the main causes of colds’
‘In recent careful experimental work, manual transmission in a group playing poker was prevented by using splints or large plastic collars; yet rhinovirus infection was freely transmitted, so the airborne route must have been of major importance in those circumstances’
‘it was shown that colds could be transmitted from one end of a long room to the other when only air contact was possible’
‘It is therefore arguable that in the case of infections like coronavirus or rhinovirus colds, which are normally quickly self-limited, the best approach would be to relieve the patient’s discomfort and disability and leave their immune system to take care of the virus.’
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016635429290032Z
Had the findings of the Common Cold Unit been referred to, it would have been crystal clear that lockdowns were utterly pointless; vaccinations, except in the case of the elderly and infirm, unlikely to be able to accurately target a rapidly mutating common cold coronavirus.
Coronavirus experts were telling the world that Covid 19 was a common cold as early as 06 February 2020
‘my thinking is this is actually not as severe a disease as is being suggested. The fatality rate is probably only 0.8%-1%. There’s a vast underreporting of cases in China. Compared to Sars and Mers we are talking about a coronavirus that has a mortality rate of 8 to 10 times less deadly to Sars to Mers. So a correct comparison is not Sars or Mers but a severe cold. Basically this is a severe form of the cold.’
Prof. John Nicholls Univ. of Hong Kong 06 Feb 2020
The Department of Health has over 1500 employees. The country has countless medical professors, consultants, highly paid doctors.
Has the inquiry even bothered to ask what the feck they were all doing?
This has been rank incompetence, nincompoopery, on a biblical scale; frankly criminal.
The ineptitude, meanderings of the inquiry adds to the contempt in which central government, all government, politicians are held in this country
The warp and weft of British society is at stake here, Lady Hallett.
There must be consequences for the scandalous behaviour of our public servants or the drift towards anarchy will simply accelerate.
Nothing to do with science, all to do with mind control, these fascists have spent billions of our own money down the years studying this stuff and the covid shitshow was the result.
In 2020 our government spent hundreds of millions terrorising its own population into believing that lockdown was a correct policy to control an airborne virus. In addition it used its propagandists to suppress the use of anti-virals until the “vaccine” was rolled out enriching drug companies by many hundreds of billions.
I want a reckoning for these acts of economic and social vandalism.
“This matters because, as the Minister said at the start, there is bound to be another pandemic and therefore knowing whether lockdowns work should be a critical question of public policy.”
There was no pandemic and most importantly there will never be a pandemic. I suggest he checks out Dr Mike Yeadon for this.
Wrong again Mr Hannan.
Limited hangout type approach tiptoeing around the truth that has been apparent to many of us since feb/mar 2020.
Dan, Dan you’ve lost it pal you were sound on brexit but you cannot escape being part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Must do better .
Yes he might want to take a little more interest in the wonderful “Rollout”.
No. You borrowed from my grandchildren who will probably start paying income tax in the 2030s if they’re lucky enough to find employment. Your replacement in government is doing nothing to pay off the debt and continues to piss our money away like a crazed addict. Bastards – the lot of them.
Indeed….You can’t say there is a black hole, while at same time sending six billion to Ukraine and some Global climate fund. They must think the public are dumb, oh wait!
‘…….Barrington Declaration fringe thing…….’
Drs Bhattacharyra, Kulldorf, and Gupta could only be described as ‘fringe’ where the majority had gone mad; as indeed it had.
Excellent article. As a heating engineer I worked right through the ‘lockdown years’. I contracted a severe bout of covid and ended up in hospital for 8 days in November/December 2020. The strange thing is neither my wife (who I share a bed with) nor my kids had even the slightest of symptoms. At no point before, during or after my hospitalisation did I think lockdowns were a good idea. None of the measures made sense, and I could see the damage they would do to the economy, social cohesion and ironically, public health. And what really made my mind up was all the usual absolutely clueless suspects using Covid as a tool to grandstand their nonexistent moral superiority.
Say It Loud
Lockdowns Were Disasters
We also had the Diamond Princess. The whole reaction was so bizarre that Lord Hannan’s madness of crowds theory does not stand scrutiny. To be that mad for that long AT THE EXACT SAME TIME AS EVERY GOVERNMENT ALL OVER THE WORLD?? TPTB simply forgot to send Sweden the memo.
Sweden was outside NATO. So it didn’t get the memo which, I believe, originated from the American Industrial Military.
And that would make China a convenient tool considering their fake fear porn before Italy went into Lockdown.
Our cowardly political class and the corrupt, Big Pharma-funded, “medic/scientific experts” will never admit that the lockdowns – and everything they led to – were an absolute disaster.
Their egos, and their income sources, would not survive an admission that they effed up and created the biggest disaster since WW2.
I personally never swallowed any of the rubbish regarding Convid, but the lesson it does teach us, is that there are many gullible people out there, that simply want to be led, cater to their needs(ie pay to sit on their backsides) and as happy as sandboys/girls, but for every action, there is a consequence and as it was all about control, its no wonder we are losing it, as for the inquiry, does anyone seriously believe that the government will admit they were wrong??.
Andrew Bridgen is your answer. BTW I haven’t heard Hannan defend Bridgen so that makes him a Cos Play freedom fighter luke warm at best. Where have all the ‘men’ gone!
The impact of Gates funded Event 201 should be factored in here. It was here that the idea of lockdowns was seeded and posited as a replacement for extant pandemic plans. A cynic might suggest the concept of lockdown was all about creating desperation for injections. However, any claims to have made an “innocent mistake” can be dismissed given the hysterical and malevolent reaction to the Great Barrington Agreement that adhered to more sensible preparations. Pandemics are pretty rare, in nature. However, if you have gain of function research happening, you can engineer all manner of accidents dressed up as whatever foe you want to blame, such as climate change. Our mistake, if anything, was to follow billionaires with a lot to gain from this. For an excellent analysis, I recommend (amongst many others) Fazi and Green’s Covid Consensus. As Margaret Anna Alice said on Substack, mistakes were not made.
I disagree with the ‘forgetting’ part of the insanity of 2020-2022.
I cannot forget and will not.
There were in fact some who acknowledged the lack of catastrophe in Sweden, but don’t forget, they are only not all completely dead because of their low density population, or because Swedish people are better behaved than the British, or because (my favourite, as it usually comes from the people who were shrieking the loudest about what a mistake it was that they weren’t going into lockdown) they did in fact have a lockdown after all.
Long article but my answer to the headline would be another question: Why would they be?
I presume there are still some people who dined in a restaurant during the Covid Panpanic that still believe their lives were saved by donning a mask to enter and leave the restaurant, whilst taking it off when sitting down.