In America, Prof Jay Bhattacharya, the lockdown sceptic once derided by NIH chief Francis Collins as a “fringe epidemiologist”, is about to take over as NIH head in truly sweet karma. But five years on the UK is still mired in denial, say Molly Kingsley and Allison Pearson in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
This week, in a committee room in Washington, DC, witnesses observed what may turn out to be one of the greatest vindications in the history of medical science. Jay Bhattacharya, a Professor of Medicine, Economics and Health Policy at Stanford University, appeared before a Senate nomination hearing en route to confirmation as Director of America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH). Hollywood would struggle to come up with a more stunning story arc for this mild-mannered hero.
During the Covid pandemic, the man who is about to become the most senior health official in the United States was a pariah. In October 2020, along with two distinguished colleagues, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Sunetra Gupta, a Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya published the Great Barrington Declaration.
The trio argued that lockdown would cause “irreparable damage” and made the case for “focused protection”; the elderly and the infirm would be sheltered while younger, healthier people got on with their lives (no social distancing, no masks, no quarantine) and built up immunity in the population. The manifesto proposed the lifting of restrictions which were plain silly (shutting children’s playgrounds, limiting exercise outdoors) and others which were deeply damaging (closing schools, cancelling hospital appointments) or merely economically disastrous (paying healthy people to stay at home, suspending hospitality and transport).
In an interview with the Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, in 2021, Bhattacharya warned of an “unseen” mental health crisis. Lockdown, he said, would come to be viewed as “the single biggest public health mistake of all history in terms of the scope of the harms that it’s caused”.
For daring to challenge the global groupthink, Bhattacharya endured vile personal attacks and censorship. Twitter suppressed the visibility of his posts while Google and Facebook, acting on requests from the Biden administration, no less, buried any mention of Great Barrington.
Four days after the declaration was published, Francis Collins, then the head of NIH, wrote an email to Anthony Fauci, who led America’s Covid response, warning that Great Barrington seemed “to be getting a lot of attention” and that “there needs to be a quick and devastating published take-down of its premises”. Bhattacharya, Gupta and Kulldorf, he sneered, were “fringe epidemiologists”.
Collins seemed to be casting himself as the infallible pope of science and Jay Bhattacharya was the heretic who must be burnt at the stake. Well, from next week, that heretic takes the pope’s job. Karma rarely gets much sweeter.
Five years on, Americans are getting to grips with the fact that Great Barrington was pretty much spot on, and the lawsuits are flying. Lockdown has indeed had horrific and indelible consequences. We can all see that, can’t we? Developmental delay in infants, a mental health epidemic, poorer exam results, lethal waiting lists for hospitals which closed their doors to non-Covid cases, a spike in avoidable cancer deaths, difficulty coaxing people back to work, not to mention economic catastrophe (a deafening £450 billion was printed to pay for furlough, PPE and other measures. On this the British political class are silent).
In the US the reckoning is huge. The guilty men are being named and the former heretic Bhattacharya is elevated to the highest office. But here in the UK we are still mired in delusion and denial.
Take Sunday, which is the official Covid Day of Reflection. It’s billed as “an opportunity to come together to remember those who lost their lives since the pandemic began and to honour the tireless work and acts of kindness shown during this unprecedented time”. The heart sinks. While those who lost loved ones to Covid deserve our sympathy, many who died were already in God’s waiting room and could just as easily have been carried off by flu. The day sounds like another opportunity to wallow in soft-focus sadness when what is called for is a tough, hard-headed appraisal of how our pandemic response led to tragic consequences for the living, and what we must avoid – like the plague, funnily enough – in future. We do not need a day of quiet reflection: Britons should look back in anger.
In stark contrast to the US’s determined uncovering of pandemic mistakes and lies, the UK’s Covid Inquiry, led by Baroness Heather Hallett, seems glacial, myopic, evasive and absurdly expensive (it’s on track to cost more than £200 million, although some say half a billion is more realistic, with a stupefying £55 million set to be squandered on up to 150 lawyers).
Where other countries got their Covid reports done and dusted years ago (Lady Hallett’s Swedish counterpart, Mats Melin, had completed his final report four months before the terms of reference for the UK hearings had even been agreed), our inquiry has taken on an Alice Through the Looking Glass pointless perversity. How painstakingly it confirms its own prejudgments and prejudices while studiously avoiding anything contentious.
The core question the British public may have hoped to have answered was whether the staggering costs of the Government’s population-wide interventions outweighed the benefits. With some nine million people now economically inactive in the UK, upwards of 7.5 million languishing on hospital waiting lists, and marked rises in obesity, mental health issues, alcohol-related deaths, substance abuse and disability all traceable back to 2020 – don’t we have to ask: seriously, was it worth it?
With Sweden standing by her decision to avoid draconian mandatory lockdowns and restrictions on personal liberty, a view which the Swedish inquiry called “fundamentally correct” (albeit indicating that certain venues should have been closed earlier), an influential (bipartisan) Congressional report on the pandemic emphatically concluded: “The prescription cannot be worse than the disease, such as strict and overly broad lockdowns that led to predictable anguish and avoidable consequences.”
Academic papers suggest only a negligible benefit of lockdown in terms of saving lives. So why is the UK inquiry dodging those critical issues altogether?
From the outset, Lady Hallett’s inquiry has largely accepted the necessity of unprecedented, authoritarian interventions in a country we were told was facing an existential threat to its entire population. (The fact we knew quite early on that Covid was a remarkably age-stratified virus, with the risk of death to the elderly a thousandfold what it is to the young, is never mentioned. The average age of death in Italy, where the European chapter of the pandemic began as garment workers returned from China after the holidays, was 82.4 years. Not much different from the average life expectancy for a British man.)
“There was no real argument as to whether, for good and obvious public health reasons, these measures had to be contemplated,” said Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, to Michael Gove on the topic of lockdowns. “They were matters of life and death. So there wasn’t really a thesis and an antithesis position here, Mr Gove. All the public health advice on a public health crisis was pointing in one direction.”
Unfortunately, that is a typically smug, complacent contribution to this inquiry. It also happens to be untrue. The UK’s pre-existing pandemic plan never featured lockdowns because everyone knew how ruinous they would be. (Granted, the plan was based on an H2N2 influenza pandemic, but both viruses spread rapidly and kill by causing acute respiratory illness.) Also, in science, there should always be a thesis and an antithesis.
When he gave his evidence, the then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak (who became alarmed as Chancellor at the vertiginous and mounting bills), was shot down in flames when he had the temerity to reference a study that suggested more quality-adjusted life years would be taken by the first lockdown than the virus itself. “I don’t want to get into Quality Life Assurance models [sic],” sniffed Hugo Keith, betraying a surprising lack of familiarity with a standard public health assessment metric which is used to weigh costs for every single medical treatment. But not Covid.
Worth reading in full.
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It is noteworthy than in the recent election campaigns in The UK and in America that there was tacit agreement between the parties that this matter would not be discussed or even mentioned. Given the seriousness of this situation and its consequences that will linger for decades perhaps forever, it might be expected that any self-respecting person would reflect upon this atttude. But it seems to have gone largely unnoticed.
Just shows the power that The RPTB have, courtesy largely in the UK due to the BBC.
How bad does it have to get before 80% ie the useless sheep we sadly have, actually wake up.
I think that we can justifiably conclude that it isn’t going to happen. The only way we could even pretend it happened is to frighten the sheep even more than our overlords and that would be no victory at all. Perhaps it is a big mistake to aspire to this global all-encompassing awakening as if humanity suddenly ascended to a higher plane. As Auden said, man’s lot has always been miserable. In the information age you are faced with this truth written large. I think if we read the situation correctly it can best be understood as a parting of the ways. That was an Australian aborigine prophecy for years. That a run on toilet paper would herald a parting of the ways. March 2020 and here we are now. Still alive but hardly thriving.
Exactly the same with Ukraine/Trump I might add.
Oh, and net zero.
I sat next to a Beeboid denying it was raining, as the water poured down the windows, because the BBC had forecast dry weather! So even if people further ahead in the Covid jab queue collapsed and died then others would walk over their bodies to get their jabs and I would estimate at least 20% are that propagandised.
The UK refuses to learn the lessons of the covid catastrophe, or the UK establishment?
Because I think a large proportion of the population have learned a let from it.
I certainly have, and I know others have. Maybe not enough of us. Maybe some know it was BS but don’t want to admit it to themselves/others/talk about it because it’s not a pleasant thought.
The difference between here and the US is that there was substantial political opposition to the BS, mainly from the “Republican right”. There was no opposition to it here from any mainstream force, so there’s no incentive from any part of the establishment to dig this up.
I think the establishment did learn some lessons – it’s not that hard to control people when they are scared of dying, but you can only push it so far before people start to realise they’ve been had.
It is ridiculuous to say that they didn’t learn lessons when the whole point was to shift things in a certain direction and part of that shift is the imposition of amnesia. If you are going to talk in these terms then you are of the devil’s camp without knowing it.
If you were being careful with taxpayers’ money you could set up a Covid Inquiry to assemble those already done in other countries to establish the facts and have the UK inquiry establish the UK guilty.
Of course that would undermine the purpose of the UK inquiry to spread the blame as far and shallowly as possible…
There is no blame to spread. Ask Mr (nothing to see here) Keith KC.
Interested to see for the first time in DT article acknowledgement that problem started in Italy with return of Chinese garment workers. There are many in Northern Italy often hidden from sight. We were then skiing in the Dolomites. At first local TV said problem was with the Chinese workers but within days that explanation disappeared.
Before that it was the return of several thousand athletes from the military games in Wuhan in late 2019, but again it seems that too has disappeared from history.
The more I read, the more I believe that there was no serious viral disease at all, all that was needed was the withdrawal of normal treatment for pneumonia and the application of a lot of doses of morphine and midazolam often after dangerous mechanical ventilation had been used on inflamed lungs that were further damaged by that practise. Follow that up with toxic gene therapies which were manufactured without even bothering to take the care that the initial trial treatments were given and we have a lot of deaths, a lot, and they are still continuing together with those damaged by these very ill-advised treatments en-masse.
Pandemic? No, not on your nelly.
From analysis of excess mortality data, Prof Denis Rancourt agrees with you…
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-denis-rancourt-there-was-no-pandemic-it-was-the-state-that-killed-granny/5876206:
…As a scientist, what I decided to do was to look at all-cause mortality data. Our nations collect very good data about the number of deaths. That is something you cannot be biased about.
My research group, we were the first to say, back in an article that was published in June 2020, that when we look at all-cause mortality data, there is no pandemic.
There was a peak of deaths at the beginning in certain hotspots that was directly due to how people were treated in hospitals and care homes.
I did the same , no excess deaths in 2020 so why the inquiry
? It’s a cover up ! Let’s hope Fauci gets his comeuppance then Old Bag Hallet & the surrounding chunts in the uk get theirs
While Prof Bhattacharya managed to retain his academic position at Stanford in the face of much unsavoury internal criticism, fellow founding signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration, Prof Martin Kulldorff, was hounded out of Harvard…
https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-tramples-the-truth
“…I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired.”
Despicable institution. As for the UK’s public inquiry, sponsored by gov.uk, for gov.uk, to exonerate gov.uk.
Not an inquiry and not in the interest of the British people.
Despicable sham.
Thanks for drawing attention to the curious fact that Prof. Martin Kulldorff, one of the three founders of the Great Barrington Declaration, was driven out of his university job, while the other two founders are still thriving in their university jobs, and Bhattachara now given a top position in the US government.
What was the difference, I wondered? So I looked for more information, and discovered that while Professor Kulldorff is a tall Scandinavian blond from Sweden, a country whose Ethnic European people helped build America into a great nation, the other two founders are from India, which has no historical connection to the USA at all: Jay Bhattachara and Sunetra Gupta, who also signed on with Blue Water vaccines to develop a new flu vaccine. She claims to be “more Left than Labour”, like many Communists from the Indian Subcontinent.
This is a good example of “Two Tier” discrimination against white people, especially blonds.
The opening of the first seal was about the bow and arrow. A terrible blight on humanity the attack of pharmakeia. And then the reign of knives in Europe. If you are going to stay in an English city for a few years then you will have a very good chance of being stabbed. And when they get more confident there will be a feeling of finishing off the natives. You ought to take this seriously unless you don’t care about being usurped and stabbed and buggered. You can fight them but they will outnumber you tenfold.
The peaceful religion has just mascaraed a lot of Christians in Syria. This should be taken as a very serious warning.
Public health knowledge has taken a huge knock since COVID, beyond simply the vaccine, testing etc. How often now do you hear people saying that they’ve had a cough for for weeks now (from COVID or otherwise) so they won’t mix with people to save spreading it.
Once everybody knew that you couldn’t spread a virus after the first few days. I blame the nonsensical concept of asymptomatic spread, that turned common sense about infections into magical hocus-pocus or clever tests.
Needless to say, no health authority has stepped forward to put public perception back on a rational footing.
Just look at this awful news from Ireland featured in The Expose:
GSK report: Ireland needs a national adult vaccination strategy to address an ageing population – The Expose
“Last week, The Irish Times published an article about a report commissioned by the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (“GSK”). Unsurprisingly, the report says that an ageing population in Ireland means the need for vaccination is growing and called for a “stand-alone national adult immunisation strategy.””
“GSK’s report does not focus on specific vaccines. Instead, it looks at the system of adult vaccination, making reference to a number of injections including shingles, flu, pneumococcal and RSV. GSK’s vaccine portfolio consists of more than 20 marketed vaccines, one of the industry’s broadest.”
The Expose’s Rhoda Wilson points out that this ties in with:
Immunisation Agenda 2030: Bill Gates’ latest plan to vaccinate every man, woman and child on Earth – The Expose
While it is nice to see this kind of article in The Telegraph now, it should be remembered that they were only slightly less gung-ho for lockdowns and vaccines than the rest of the media. Perhaps I’ve missed it but I have yet to see an apology.
The Telegraph publishes a range of opinions.
Not in 2020 it didn’t…
I am reflecting…..
and upon reflection I say…
Never forget
Never forgive
and
Never again.
Fun fact:
During Bhattacharya’s hearing he mentioned a ‘shrimp on a treadmill’ study as an example of maybe not the best use of public research grants.
I found the study:
https://doi.org/10.1086/733347
They apparently built little underwater treadmills for shrimps and studied their respiration under environmental stresses, such as different oxygen levels in order to look at the effects of black gill disease.
What wonderful karma, amazing & uplifting. The USA now has a world-leading epidemiologist. Good luck to Jay.
As for Mr Keith he is a vacuous, pompous pr@tt and demonstrates all that is wrong with so-called leadership in the UK.
Perhaps including Lawyers in general? Just look at Stalin. Truth is an anathema it seems. The same at Harvard, famous for lawyers!
“Britons should look back in anger.”
This one does. I will never forget and never forgive.
A journalist by the name of Stefan Aust wrote an article for the German online newspaper welt.de on 6th September 2020 with the title “Denn sie wissen nicht, was sie tun” or “Because they do not know what they’re doing”.
In the article, he very sensibly asked the simple question: after 6 months of a pandemic in Germany, how many people have actually died? The answer would then prove how dangerous the virus was and how effective the various government reactions had been.
The newspaper actually compiled a list of associated questions and sent them to the Robert Koch Institute and the Federal Ministries of Health and the Interior, all of whom had been recounting the horrors of the pandemic on a daily basis in the news.
The questions included how many deaths had there been each month from January to June 2020 in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, France, Italy, Spain, USA and Brazil, how many of those deaths were caused by a corona infection, how many of those deaths were confirmed in Germany by autopsy, what was the average ages of those who died with or without corona, what were the numbers of monthly deaths in the first half years of 2016 to 2019 and, finally, how many of the latter deaths were caused by influenza? So, in fact, quite a comprehensive and sensible list of questions.
The Ministry of the Interior never replied. The Ministry of Health replied they had no such data. The Robert Koch Institute replied the newspaper should ask the Federal Statistical Office.
The latter office did indeed provide exact numbers of weekly and monthly deaths (in Germany) grouped by sex and age, but without data referring to the cause of death. Nonetheless, their data showed that there were less deaths in Germany in the first half of 2020 than in two of the four preceding years.
The newspaper compiled corresponding data from most of the other countries listed above and came to the same conclusion: nothing special was happening!
In the meantime, Denis Rancourt and his colleagues (see https://denisrancourt.ca) have analysed mortality data from 125 countries and also concluded there was no spreading deadly virus, there were only deadly government reactions leading to 31 million excess deaths in the 3-year period 2020 to 2022, including 17 million deaths from the so-called vaccines.
So, for the Daily Telegraph to cite the restrictions of the time as being “plain silly” is possibly the understatement of the year, especially coming from the same newspaper that, at the time, was presumably as alarmist and government supporting as all mainstream media are up to this day on the subject of this dreadful, globally dictated catastrophe.
The thing of greater interest is the 10% or so of excess deaths in Britain after the jabbing started, and still rising slightly. The Government has now changed the way these are presented to a 5 year moving average, which will cover up the increase for good! How to lie with statistics again!