Bjørn Lomborg is one of the world’s foremost contributors to policy debates on climate change. A Danish political scientist, author and the President of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Centre, he became internationally known for his best-selling book The Sceptical Environmentalist (2001). In 2004, he was listed as one of Time‘s 100 most influential people.
A prolific author, Dr Lomborg has published several well-received books. These include best-sellers False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (2020) and Cool It (2010). With these and other books, together with countless articles and op-eds translated into many languages, Lomborg’s central theses regarding the economic aspects of climate change and key policy recommendations are well formulated and easily understood.
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So which is it to be? Measured gambles based on circumstantial evidence and mathematical models or high-quality evidence?
It obviously depends on the circumstances. If you have limited time to make a decision you have to work with whatever evidence is available. If high quality evidence is available great, if not you use what you have.
It is not in this piece but Henegan and Jefferson more or less identify high quality evidence with RCTs. But some things are almost impossible to measure with RCTs.
“ If you have limited time to make a decision you have to work with whatever evidence is available.”
Like when faced with a societal threat like a variant of the common cold/bad flu season/plandemic/scamdemic?
“Limited time” ???!!!! There was a national ‘flu plan’ in place, written by so called ‘experts’ at least a decade before this pantomime started. The Civil Contingencies Act placed a duty on organizations to plan for and mitigate the effects of a pandemic such as the provision of PPE. They not only failed in their statutory duty, they failed miserably.
Indeed the plan went out of the window. The same plan that went out of the window everywhere else.
First off, you talk to a coronavirus expert on the ground; absolute No. 1 priority; talk to boots on the ground; basic crisis management stuff.
I would appreciate you naming a few of these
coronavirus‘flu variant “experts.”I have been quoting this guy since March 2020. He was on the ground in China at the time of the outbreak of the novel common cold coronavirus known as SARS CoV 2.
At the University of Hong Kong, Nicholls has spent the past 25 years studying coronavirus and he served as a key member of the team that characterized SARS. The Hong Kong University Faculty of Medicine’s Clinical Research Centre also created the world’s first lab-grown copy of novel coronavirus, giving researchers a major breakthrough in understanding the behavior of the virus.
In 1997, following the first outbreak of H5N1 influenza in humans, he commenced collaboration with the Department of Microbiology to study the pathological effects of avian influenza viruses in the respiratory tract. In 2003 he was a key member of the research team at the University of Hong Kong which isolated and characterized the novel SARS coronavirus which was associated with the global outbreak of 2003.
His work on SARS and avian influenza has been published in prestigious journals such as Lancet, PLOS Medicine and Nature Medicine as listed in part of his selected biography. His current investigative work is looking at the viral binding sites in the respiratory tract and determining susceptibility to avian influenza in humans and other animals.
https://www.patho.hku.hk/en/Our-Team/Academic/Professors/Professor-NICHOLLS-John-M-Item/Professor-NICHOLLS-John-M
Prof. Nicholls is the guy who told the world that covid was a severe cold, on 06 Feb 2020!
But the world had other ideas……
Largely because of Farrar, at Davos:
‘I know what it is like to deal with the science and politics of a new disease.’
‘I appeared at a press conference at Davos on 23 January 2020’
‘I was asked to speak first. I was in the spotlight. The truth could not be sugar-coated. ‘We are about six weeks into this outbreak and this virus can now clearly spread between humans,’ I told the audience, explaining it could be passed on like influenza, through coughing and sneezing. ‘It is not SARS. The virus is in a similar family as SARS but this looks different … and the difference is probably it is easier to pass between human beings. I think we can expect many more cases in China and many more cases in other parts of the world.’
https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/21180503/INQ000208834.pdf
That is the clue to the panic: ‘similar family as SARS…the difference is probably it is easier to pass between human beings….’
So Farrar effectively told the world’s press (looking for a story, unlikely to delve too far into the detail) that SARS CoV 2 was a bit like SARS (case fatality rate 11%) but with easier transmission……
Words fail…….
It obviously depends on the circumstances. If you have limited time to make a decision you have to work with whatever evidence is available. If high quality evidence is available great, if not you use what you have.
High-quality evidence is a nonsense term. Something is either evidence of something else or it isn’t. So, in absence of evidence that such-and-such a thing would be true (or not true) how does one arrive at a strategy for handling a given situation? Prejudice? Divine inspiration? Examining the intestines of sacrificed animals or the flight of birds?
“high quality” was Henegan and Jefferson’s phrase. You can substitute “strong evidence” if you prefer (obviously evidence can be stronger or weaker).
They were quoting the meaningless babble of the WHO.
They clearly thought high quality evidence meant something but it doesn’t matter. As I wrote – substitute strong evidence instead if you prefer.
No.
Following the precautionary principle you should not make any intervention unless you’re sure the outcome will be an improvement.
In the military this is often summed up as OODA (observe, orient, decide, act).
In medicine it is often summed up as Don’t just do something. Stand there.
In other walks of life it is offered as Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Lockdowns had foreseeable negative consequences – or our governments would not have hesitated to use them. Rushing the vaccine development had foreseeable negative consequences. Deploying a completely new vaccine technology to millions/billions of people had foreseeable negative consequences.
Overarching all the above, the question: Who the hell gave them authority to force this on us? springs to mind.
Excellent
“Who the hell gave them authority to force this on us?”
It was made easier for them because many of our fellow citizens fell for the “there’s a pandemic, something must be done” scam. Mentioning no names.
Well there are many interpretations of the precautionary principle. It is fine to favour doing nothing over acting but you can’t take it too far – many businesses have gone under because they did nothing despite mounting, but not conclusive, evidence their business model was going to stop working.
No.
You gather evidence until you have a basis for a decision.
Far too many people think that gathering evidence is doing nothing. It’s not. Assumptions are not evidence.
I don’t think anyone is challenging the need to actively gather evidence. The problem is that sometimes you simply can’t gather enough to be sure, or there isn’t time to gather enough to be sure. So you act with what you have. It happens all the time.
No.
If you don’t have evidence it will improve things then you don’t intervene. Flailing about without any evidence that you will improve things will be as bad as throwing dice to decide your strategy. It might work but it might as easily make things worse.
Evidence. Not computer models. History. Measurements of what happens in the real world. Experiments carried out in small-scale controlled conditions. Assumptions put to the test.
Am I going to wear a silly muzzle to stop me or other people getting flu? No – flu prevention is a million times less important than feeling the wind on my face. High quality evidence gathered, job done.
Are people who want to restrict my breathing for a trivial flu of the type we’ve lived with forever medico fascists to be opposed/ignored? Yes! High quality evidence gathered, job done.
To quote Kristi Noem – if you’re worried about Covid, stay at home, wear a mask, get vaccinated. We’re not going to mandate anything.
I’d really love to vote twice for this comment.
BINGO
That’s what I already wrote in an earlier comment: Assuming there’s no evidence to support a certain strategy, what is it supposed to be based on instead? In an emergency, wrong decisions will be catastrophical.
I’m going to supply a cynic answer myself: We (that is, the SAGEs and similar decision makers) know perfectly well that there’s no anemic panda emergency, that’s all just theatre we’ve intentionally staged to fool the unwashed masses. Hence, we can afford to experiment wildly and/ or do whatever damn well pleases us (like teetotallers shutting down all pubs) as wrong decisions cannot end in catastrophe. All we need to do is stage more theatre so that the still unwashed masses will suck it up.
Anemic panda emergency – lol
Long past the time when “Covid” and its fanatics should be treated with the laughing contempt they deserve
Perhaps we should explain this concept to the climate modellers. Implicit asumptions corrupt objective data analysis.
The job title ‘data scientist’ implies scientific process. Of those I’ve worked with on projects, I’m happy saying that the majority but not all DS would understand the distinction. Either that or the numerous caveats usually provided to management by properly contentious DS are being diluted or discarded.
I don’t think that the title “Statistical Fortune-teller”, “Data Shaman” or “Modern-Day Gizzard-Reader” would garner the same cudos. Either people need to understand the weaknesses of modelling or realise that deliberate misunderstanding is a feature not a bug.
Well-said
As I said in an earlier reply, the UK had in place a national flu plan that all government/local government agencies had to work together on to mitigate the effects of a pandemic. They failed
Like what exactly? re your 3rd para.
Any kind of so-called of society-wide public health intervention as repeatable experiments are impossible at that level. These are necessarily based on so-called public health experts coming up with theories what — according to their present understanding (or lack thereof) of the situation — really ought to work and then putting them into practice with absolutely no way of determining if they do actually work. Controlling movement of airbourne viruses is simply beyond our abilities. We aren’t even capable of knowing about them. But this obviously won’t do when public hysteria has reached fever pitch and Something must be done about it! Hence, modern-day shamans promising miracles appear and take over.
And that’s just the miserable situation when everybody’s being perfectly honest. Fanatical teetotallers like Devi Sridhar or Mark Drakeford would certainly never seek to close down the hospitality industry and eliminate human social life (which – in Europe – usually involves consumption of alcoholic drinks) for any other reason than to fight extremely dangerous respiratory viruses.
Like whether increasing interest rates reduces GDP growth (lots of evidence but how the tell do you do an RCT?)
Those in a position to provide leadership panicked, causing (just about) everyone else to panic:
Farrar:
‘Both SARS and H5Nl had a profound psychological impact on me, because of the fear that comes with unknown diseases. They took me back to being a young doctor in London at the start of the HIV epidemic: as medical students and junior doctors we rarely stopped to question the power of medicine, believing unerringly that we could treat people and cure them. But when HIV came along in the early 1980s we could do nothing. Young people would come in to die.’
‘(By the second week in January), I became exhausted and scared. I felt as if I was living a different person’s life. During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets. I would have surreal conversations with my wife, Christiane, who persuaded me we should let the people closest to us know what was going on. I phoned my brother and best friend to give them my temporary number. In hushed conversations, I sketched out the possibility of a looming global health crisis that had the potential to be read as bioterrorism. ‘If anything happens to me in the next few weeks,’ I told them nervously, ‘this is what you need to know.’
https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/21180503/INQ000208834.pdf
Oh dear!
In contrast, at about the same time, measured expert opinion actually in China, an acknowledged Coronavirus expert (which Farrar, Whitty et al were not), had the following to say:
‘People are saying a 2.2 to 2.4% fatality rate total. However recent information is very worthy – if you look at the cases outside of China the mortality rate is <1%. [Only 2 fatalities outside of mainland China]. 2 potential reasons 1) either china’s healthcare isn’t as good – that’s probably not the case 2) What is probably right is that just as with SARS there’s probably much stricter guidelines in mainland China for a case to be considered positive. So the 20,000 cases in China is probably only the severe cases; the folks that actually went to the hospital and got tested. The Chinese healthcare system is very overwhelmed with all the tests going through. So 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 06 Feb. 2020
So there we have it. People who really should have known better panicked and, no doubt, some enjoyed a bit of drama (Farrar?) and some saw the chance to make some money.
Those who really did know better were not listened to by world ‘leaders’.
Pathetic!
Well, do you think Farrar is still panicking now? If not, how do you account for his actions since his initial “panic”?
Here you go:
‘….everyone involved in the delicate conversations should raise our guard, security-wise. We should use different phones; avoid putting things in emails; and ditch our normal email addresses and phone contacts. Use different phones? These are not things that normal people do and I had no idea where to start. I contacted the communications tech manager at Wellcome….
He found me a blank phone in the Wellcome cupboard and left it charging on my desk while I was in a meeting. I didn’t know the term then but I now had a burner phone…….’
https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/21180503/INQ000208834.pdf
So no, he probably isn’t panicking………
Is Farrar a member of the SNP?
And yet he still maintains there was a pandemic.
The backside covering is monumental, in every national ‘establishment’ right across the globe.
That is, as we know, why culpability is proving so hard to pin on anyone…….
Farrar, Drosten, Whitty, Vallance and so many others will never ever admit that covid 19 was simply a novel common cold coronavirus, for which the best treatment for just about everyone except those with damaged immune systems was rest; treat the symptoms and let the immune system do its work. .
So thousands of top people all the over world in different organisations panicked in a very similar way, proposing very similar remedies, which required effort and planning, then fairly quickly realised they had panicked over nothing all the while pressing forward with the “remedies”, and are all now pretending it was a “pandemic” to cover up the fact that they “got it wrong”.
Well, read Farrar’s account (I can’t prove that it is Farrar’s account, but it purports to be an account of events by someone called Farrar, with a wife called Christiane, given to the covid inquiry) at the reference.
They all met up at Davos (why are we not surprised?)
‘I appeared at a press conference at Davos on 23 January 2020 with Richard Hatchett, the head of CEPI and a White House adviser during the HlNl outbreak of 2009; and Stephane Bancel, the now superstar head of biotech company Moderna. Stephane was already working with CEPI on other vaccines and only that week had inked an agreement with Richard to start work on a coronavirus vaccine.’
‘It is strange to watch the press conference now, to see how little attention anyone paid to Stephane. Nobody in the audience asked him a single question. His company had quietly picked up the genetic sequence more than a week earlier, on 13 January 2020, and had already begun prepping to produce a prototype messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine. This is completely new technology: it injects mRNA, a set of genetic instructions for building a bit of the target virus, so that the body’s own cells can make the viral protein in-house, to stimulate an immune response. This technology platform, as we have since learned, has the potential to go much faster than conventional vaccine production. Stephane urgently needed cash, he had told Richard a few days before Davos, to turn Moderna’s baby steps on this new coronavirus into phase 1 trials. In the end, there were just three days between Stephane’s pitch and Richard’s sign-off.’
‘Davos changed everything, Stephane told me later….’
https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/21180503/INQ000208834.pdf
As Commissario Montalbano would have put it “Mi sa che ci sta cuntando la mezza missa”.
Well, he’s absolutely correct there; far too many complete cuntandos!
tof, milado is taking the P.
Farrar has been up to his neck in the WEF agenda since his early 20’s. He has known since before the official Scamdemic was launched, and it was launched, exactly what was going to happen.
Farrar has less credibility than Bliar. At least with Bliar there is a degree of honesty – when he opens his gob we know he is lying.
As I have posted above, I would not take anything Farrar says at face value. Part of the problem is that whatever their initial motivation (which I suspect was foul) they have doubled down so far that they are never going to tell the truth now because they would be sending themselves to jail.
You really are taking the firkin mickey now.
I only report what these lunatics have written.
Make of it what you will.
“…circumstantial evidence…”
Like looking out of the window and seeing no pandemic?
Like standing in an enormous queue of customers at IKEA, all calmly waiting to pay, at the height of a “pandemic”?
Ah, but no pandemic would have meant no opportunities to coin it.
I agree with the assessment and with the conclusion that the lack of backbone is systemic and insitutional and perhaps has them by the balls. This is no excuse though. Perhaps we have become unaccustomed to the need for showing moral fibre.Look on the bright side – if we didn’t get to see what they are really all about then many people would’ve still had faith in the system. They were laid bare and this is only now beginning to arise in mass consciousness. Vaccine damage is becoming mainstream. The sense that we are ruled by the least among us. They might be the least in terms of character and humanity but they know very well how to kill people off or turn a blind eye and make a killing in the process. Many of us thought that this would never reach popular consciousness and the beauty is that they have facilitated their own demise and the demise of their paradigm.
They made dementia patients go from bad to worse. Young people already anxious having thei anxieties confirmed. Look at what you have done to the mental health of the nation. You ripped it apart forerver. I don’t forget and I hold you accountable.
Maybe you can’t leave the country but at least encourage your children to learn a couple of foreign languages and keep their options open. If you brought them up as fine young Englishmen then they will be welcome everywhere. You would be surprised.
https://off-guardian.org/2024/02/14/the-new-self-amplifying-rna-vaccines-promise-to-be-double-triple-quadruple-the-fun/
And here’s the new kid on the block for double the fun.
The death of the human being beckons.
Wouldn’t it be hilarious if all these “Vaccines” were being developed to protect us against things which er, actually don’t exist (ie virus deniers be correct).
This quote is from 18 years ago and is from a paper condemning Cochrane as a somewhat dodgy organisation then – nothing has changed – it is from the 2006 journal paper Questions on the Independence and Reliability of Cochrane Reviews, with a Focus on Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccine. The paper comments on a Cochrane review one of whose authors is Dr Tom Jefferson:
“Cochrane’s ability to appear above commercial conflicts of interest remains dependent on governmental funding and particularly from British governmental sources. By early 2004 significant changes had taken place. British governmental funding was reduced considerably. Faced with potential reductions in productivity and staff redundancies, Cochrane had to consider commercial sources. The changes were described thus by Cochrane author Professor Sir John Grimley Evans:
‘Over the next five years, the money to be provided to British Cochrane Groups by the Department of Health, ominously now called ‘core funding’, will not be enough for survival. We will all therefore be looking for additional money from people or agencies interested in what we do. To put it in terms familiar to the shopkeepers who, as Buonaparte observed, rule this unhappy country, we have to sell our product.’ “
[Cochrane Dementia and Cognitive Improvement Group (CDCIG) Newsletter 2004 (March); Issue 10.]
Will Tom Jefferson condemn that review and how Cochrane used it to claim the MMR vaccine is safe when it is not?
The safety claim was based on the claim 500 million doses had been administered in 70 countries – which ignored the fact that under-reporting of adverse reactions was 100% in 64 of those 70 countries and 200% under-reported in the only six countries which had any reports – 170 given to the manufacturers and those included deaths of 4 children recorded as “succumbed” and reported in a secret UK government report eventually released under freedom of information following legal proceedings.
Aside from the deaths the other 166 heavily under-reported cases of adverse reactions were serious and covered a wide range.
Happy to let Jefferson have a copy of the report for his comment.
Thanks for the link.
It certainly takes apart the mantra that MMR doesn’t cause “autism”.
In order to achieve the desired result – ie that MMR is safe – they never include a cohort of never vaccinated children in the studies.
You may be forgiven for thinking that such a cohort would have essential – but no, this is never done.
The book “Turtles All the Way Down” details the perpetual shenaganins practised by bigpharma.
The lie to the epidemiology is this – any vaccine can cause autism in a child. [And when you read the word ‘epidemiology’ substitute ‘junk science’.]
So the junk science studies cannot tell the difference between kids who got autism from the MMR vaccine from kids who got autism from other vaccines. And that is one reason why no association with the MMR vaccine was found because the comparison was to kids who had autism from other vaccines.
Anyone who claims vaccines do not cause autism have only to check the details of the Hannah Poling case. She got a US$1.5 million lump sum plus approximately US$750,000 per annum until she is 59 years old.
Nice work if you can get it, but then it comes at a price.
There have been many other cases too with payouts.
Autism is a medically ill-defined term as it’s not based on objectively measurable symptoms but on stories people tell about themselves to psycho-professionals or stories psycho-professionals read into them. Hence, introduction of the MMR-shot correlates unsurprisingly with a history of increasing number of autism diagnoses by psycho-professionals as introduction of term happened at about the same time. One could as well state that MMR-shots caused cars to have catalytic converters or brought the Berlin wall down.
People who can read German may want to have a look at Ludendorff’s Kriegserinnerungen. From the style of writing (and also from the way he treats other topics in different books), it’s plainly obvious that he was one of us (ie, an autist) as well. And at least, he gave you a really good hiding.
Whilst the ongoing debate about masks is obviously necessary, for me the biggest lie, the biggest dose of snake oil ever to be foisted on humanity was the PCR test, you know, that hugely scientific intervention that tested fit and healthy people to see if they were ill and the results of which were continuously reported on the ‘news’. A pandemic of cases, not deaths! Aren’t we stupid?