As week eight of the lockdown comes to a close, there are some rumblings of dissent – although it’s coming from people unhappy from the Prime Minister’s easing of the lockdown rather than the fact that we’ve been confined to our homes for two months. Opinium polling for the Observer over the past week has seen a significant drop in public confidence in – and approval of – the Government. Approval ratings have been dropping steadily since a highpoint in late March – and those who disapprove now form the majority for the first time since the lockdown began:
Anti-Lockdown Protests
What little genuine dissent there is was confined to a handful of anti-lockdown protestors yesterday. One such demonstration was in Hyde Park where, according to the Mail, 19 people were arrested, including Jeremy Corbyn’s brother. My friend James Delingpole attended and was threatened with a £30 fine merely for trying to report on the demo for Breitbart. You can read his piece about that here (includes video footage of him being confronted by a police officer).
I’ve received several reports from readers who attended the Hyde Park rally, including this one:
I went to Speakers’ Corner today. Britain’s traditional fee speech locale in London. I counted 255 people, but there were more than that, perhaps as many as 300. No “far right” evident. People from all sides of the political divide, including pro- and anti-Brexit. What the people I spoke to had in common was getting their news and info and trying to make decisions based on information from ‘alternative’ sources. All were dubious about the number of deaths from COVID-19 being recored by doctors in the absence of testing evidence, although most were also dubious about the accuracy of the standard PCR tests. Huge mistrust of official “science” and officialdom in general.
It was therapeutic being with these people. Heart-warming after these weeks of terror and house arrest. Odd looks from passers-by, as if we were all mad. Like being a Brexit-voter while working at a university. Some humorous looks, but others aggressive and combative. One cyclist deliberately accelerated towards some protesters who managed to avoid a collision by the skin of their teeth.
I was asked to move on by a police officer after being told I was “breaking the law”, even though I was just sitting on the grass in the sunshine with a few others. When I asked the officer which law I was breaking he got a bit twitchy. Said assembling with others not from my household was against the rules enshrined in the 1984 Public Health Act. When I challenged the lawfulness of these rules and mentioned Simon Dolan’s lawsuit, he said “don’t start being clever” and threatened to arrest all of us.
Spoke with many afterwards. Was told that weekly protests are planned from now on. All the people I met have gone from respectable to deplorable in a matter of weeks.
If you want to see some footage from the Hyde Park demonstration, including the arrest of Piers Corbyn, click here. This was shot exclusively for Lockdown Sceptics by a professional filmmaker who attended the event.
I’ve also been contacted by someone from For Freedom’s Sake, the Manchester-based anti-lockdown group, who attended the demo in Platt Fields Park. Smaller turnout than in Hyde Park and no arrests:
There was a turnout of around 60 people, mixed gender and ages and a largely ordinary working people crowd. Police presence was pretty heavy, including officers mounted on bikes and horseback, but thankfully there were no arrests or fines doled out (as far as we witnessed.)
You can see some footage on Twitter of the Manchester protest here.
Lord Gumption
One person who would defend our right to protest, even in the midst of a pandemic, is Lord Sumption, the former UK Supreme Court judge. He has consistently been the most high-profile public figure to criticise the lockdown – a great advocate for the sceptics’ cause. His lead opinion piece in today’s Sunday Times is worth reading in full (and sharing on social media), but his point about “Protect the NHS” being the main reason for shutting us all in our homes is particularly good:
It was never much of a rationale. The NHS is there to protect us, not the other way round. How could its unpreparedness possibly justify depriving the entire UK population of its liberty, pushing us into the worst recession since the early 18th century, destroying millions of jobs and hundreds of thousands of businesses, piling up public and private debt on a crippling scale and undermining the education of our children?
Since the Prime Minister’s broadcast last Sunday, the lockdown has found a new rationale. The Government has dropped “Protect the NHS” from its slogan. The reason is plain from the paper it published the following day. The NHS is not at risk.
Sumption’s conclusion is withering:
The Prime Minister’s broadcast was supposed to be his Churchillian moment. Instead, we beheld a man imprisoned by his own rhetoric and the logic of his past mistakes.
The lockdown is now all about protecting politicians’ backs. They are not wicked men, just timid ones, terrified of being blamed for deaths on their watch. But it is a wicked thing that they are doing.
Failings of Irish High Court
It’s a pity the High Court judge in the John Waters and Gemma O’Doherty case – they’re the two applicants trying to get a judicial review of the lockdown in Ireland – isn’t more like Lord Sumption. I’ve published a piece today by an Irish social scientist (whom I’ve given the pseudonym “John William O’Sullivan”) explaining what the judge in that case got wrong when he refused their application last week. Here’s the key paragraph:
Justice Meenan’s argument against Waters’ and O’Doherty’s case is rather simple: he claims they must prove that the Irish Government’s actions have been “disproportionate” in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He claims, citing previous cases, that constitutional rights are not absolute and that if a government acts against them to deal with a threat “proportionately” then the government is allowed to trample on those constitutional rights.
The problem with this argument is that it implicitly sides with Government action as against the constitution. The Government is assumed to be in the right and the onus is on the citizen to prove not that the Government’s actions are unconstitutional, but that they are “disproportionate” given the threat of the pandemic relative to the constitutionally-protected rights they override.
Not So Rich List
Elsewhere in the Sunday Times is the news that the pandemic has wiped £54 billion from the wealth of Britain’s super rich in the past two months. “More than half of the country’s billionaires are nursing losses as high as £6 billion, with the combined wealth of the 1,000 wealthiest individuals and families plunging for the first time since 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis,” it says.
UK Government Petition Finally Approved
At last, the UK Government Petitions site has approved an anti-lockdown petition. Not as militant as some of us would like, but better than nothing. You can sign it here. If it gets 10,000 signatures the Government will have to respond; if it gets 100,000, it will be considered for debate in Parliament. Last time I checked it had just over 500.
Epidemiologist Condemns Lockdowns
There’s a great Q&A in Spiked with Knut Wittkowski, former head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at the Rockefeller University’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science. A more sceptical epidemiologist you’re unlikely to find, and that’s going some given how many we’ve already featured on this site. Here’s one of the highlights:
Spiked: Have our interventions made much of an impact?
Wittkowski: When the whole thing started, there was one reason given for the lockdown and that was to prevent hospitals from becoming overloaded. There is no indication that hospitals could ever have become overloaded, irrespective of what we did. So we could open up again, and forget the whole thing.
I hope the intervention did not have too much of an impact because it most likely made the situation worse. The intervention was to ‘flatten the curve’. That means that there would be the same number of cases but spread out over a longer period of time, because otherwise the hospitals would not have enough capacity.
Now, as we know, children and young adults do not end up in hospitals. It is only those who are both elderly and have comorbidities that do. Therefore you have to protect the elderly and the nursing homes. The ideal approach would be to simply shut the door of the nursing homes and keep the personnel and the elderly locked in for a certain amount of time, and pay the staff overtime to stay there for 24 hours per day.
How long can you do that for? For three weeks, that is possible. For 18 months, it is not. The flattening of the curve, the prolongation of the epidemic, makes it more difficult to protect the elderly, who are at risk. More of the elderly people become infected, and we have more deaths.
Spiked: What are the dangers of lockdown?
Wittkowski: Firstly, we have the direct consequences: suicides, domestic violence and other social consequences leading to death. And then we have people who are too scared to go to the hospitals for other problems like strokes or heart attacks. So people stay away from hospitals because of the Covid fear. And then they die.
COVID-19 and the Cult of Anxiety
I published a piece last week called “COVID-19 and the Infantilisation of Dissent” by a maverick academic whom I called “Wilfred Thomas”. That went down well, so today I’m publishing a follow-up: “The Hyper-Rationality of Crowds: COVID-19 and the Cult of Anxiety“. This academic, a social scientist, is trying to understand why governments around the world seemed to panic simultaneously in response to the viral outbreak, gripped by the same irrational fear. But this isn’t a dry, academic paper. On the contrary, it’s like a rant delivered at 100mph by your best mate in the pub after he’s taken a superdrug that temporarily boosts his IQ to 200. Here’s a particularly good paragraph:
So how did we get here, to a world in which children can be herded into their little playpark Guantanamo cells not as a punishment but – remarkably – as an indicator of a society’s love and care for those same children? One word that springs immediately to mind is “madness.” “We must be mad – literally mad – to be permitting all of this,” you may very well say to yourself (if, that is, you have a fondness for paraphrasing Enoch Powell). Madness. It’s a good word, isn’t it? Rolls off the tongue. Helps to burn off steam. After all, who doesn’t like to channel their inner cab driver every now and then? “The world’s gone mad, mate. Take that wot’s-’is-name. Bonking Boris. That’s ’im. I had ’im in the back of me cab once. Screw loose, if you ask me. It’s all that sex wot’s done it. And that Ferguson? Shag other people’s wives all you like mate, but take your mathematical modelling back to the funny farm wiv ya when you’re done!” And yet, sadly, individual madness can’t really explain our current predicament. It’s a bit like blaming the invasion of Iraq in 2003 solely on President Bush and his family’s supposed mania for oil. Nice and comforting and all that, but hardly convincing when considered in light of the messy complexities of 21st century geo-politics. The problem with any individualised idea of madness is that we have a large group of people in the West right now who have allowed – have willingly and happily enabled – our lockdown societies to emerge. You and I may not be directly culpable. We may not agree with what’s happening. We may turn the cold eye of reproof upon our fellow citizens. If society were a golf club, we might even go so far as to write a strongly-worded letter of complaint to the club secretary. But whether we like it or not, right now we’re individual members of a society that, precisely as a society, has decided that battery-farming kids, playing football without tackling and hiding under the bed in order to avoid social interaction are all genuinely, 100% bona fide great ideas.
Please do read the whole thing.
Welsh Government Angling For First Prize As Most Incompetent Regional Executive in UK
A reader in Wales has got in touch to vent his despair about the idiocy of the Welsh Government, which seems determined to ruin the economy. “The tourism industry, and especially the holiday accommodation and sporting sector (which I am involved with), is being decimated,” he says. He points to this story as evidence of how brain-dead the official response to the pandemic has been – it relates to how police stopped people fishing at Cledlyn Lake Fishery in Ceredigion on Friday, even though the initial advice from Angling Cymru is that fishing is a permitted form of exercise and people are allowed to drive short distances to do it. The revised guidelines now state only disabled people can drive to go fishing. (They may have changed again since going to press.)
US Government Was Advised Against Closing Schools During 1951-52 Polio Pandemic
A reader has drawn my attention to a paper published in the Journal of School Health in 1951 on the US polio epidemic entitled “Should Polio Close Schools?“. Then, as now, one of the biggest questions was about the efficacy of closing schools to prevent the disease being spread. Here’s an extract from the abstract:
Anderson and Arnstein in “Communicable Disease Control”, 1948, in discussing poliomyelitis, say: “School closure, as well as closure of moving picture theatres, Sunday schools, and other similar groups, is frequently attempted in response to popular demand that ‘something be done’. Although tried repeatedly, it is of no proved value, never altering the usual curve of the epidemic: nor has the disease been more prevalent or persistent in those communities with the courage to resist such demands.”
The author of this paper comes to the same conclusion about the 1951–52 epidemic. For context, the number of Americans diagnosed with polio in the epidemic of 1948–49 was 42,173, with 2,720 fatalities. The 1951–52 epidemic was the worst in America’s history. Of the 57,628 cases reported that year, 3,145 died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis. By contrast, the number of people aged 19 and under who have died in English hospitals after testing positive for COVID-19 in the UK is currently 12. For those aged 15 and under, it’s two, according to Channel 4 Fact Check. Professor David Spiegelhalter at the University of Cambridge estimates that the risk to children of catching and then dying from coronavirus is one in 5.3 million. In the light of this, might Anneliese Dodds, Labour’s shadow chancellor, reconsider her decision not to send her six year-old back to school?
Scottish Mum Starts a Petition Urging the Government to Reopen Schools… and is Cancelled
Last week, Kathrine Jebsen Moore, a journalist based in Scotland (and a friend of mine), started a Change.org petition urging the Government to re-open schools across the UK. In the hope of getting some signatures, she posted a message about it on a Facebook group she’s a member of called Edinburgh Gossip Girls. Perhaps naively, she was expecting this group of about 16,000 women in the Scottish capital – many of them mothers – to be sympathetic. I’ll let Kathrine take up the story:
Within a few minutes my post had 62 angry emojis, six stunned ones, three sad ones, and only 26 likes – and one heart. The comments reinforced the mood. As well as the simple “that’ll be a no” and “wouldn’t dream of signing this”, it quickly progressed to mud-slinging, strawmen and high tempers. Some comments were, worryingly, from teachers, who failed to show the professional pride that has been apparent among NHS workers and others who’ve continued to do their jobs during the pandemic. Although a few were supportive, I’ll include a selection which conveys the general spirit:
“Eh, not a chance. Most kids are fine without school.”
“Education matters but so does not dying.”
“Can everybody please report to admin and get this goady post taken down?”
Another accused me of having had “too many daytime G&Ts”.“Boo hoo, my kids miss their friends… they’ll miss them a lot more if they’re dead.”
That was the last comment before the admin switched off comments, with the words: “I’m not sure you’re going to get much support here, and this is a post that clearly stirs up a lot of angst and emotion which I’m trying to avoid. This is one for your personal FB, thanks.”
I’ve published the whole story on Lockdown Sceptics under “Is Shutting Schools Really Necessary?” on the right-hand side. You can read it here.
A Doctor Writes…
I received an email from a doctor today which notes that, among other things, the two-metre social distancing rule isn’t observed by doctors and nurses at her hospital. Nor do they wear masks when off the wards.
I’m a critical care consultant in a non-London District General Hospital and have been working throughout the pandemic.
There has been adequate PPE, which has been used in compliance with Government guidance, throughout this time by staff having patient contact. There has been a noticeable difference in how different areas apply this though, with some areas or specialties being extremely cautious, e.g. full PPE for procedures involving patients who’ve tested negative, making procedures slower, more difficult and more prone to complications.
As part of the escalation plan, more staff have been moved into critical care to assist with patient management. As our facilities have not increased, we have therefore had crowded coffee rooms and offices, with everybody sitting at a normal distance next to each other, without masks – it’s difficult to eat with a mask on) – sharing kitchen facilities and changing rooms. We then have the farce of going to the hospital dining room or coffee shop, and sitting spaced out two to a table, as we are visible to the non-clinical world. Several junior doctors at my hospital tested positive, and had a week off, returning once symptoms had resolved, although as they are not re-tested, and are allowed to return to work with a persistent cough, who knows whether they were still shedding the virus. My personal belief is that a significant proportion of the nursing and medical staff have had the virus, with either no or minor symptoms, and have some degree of immunity.
In my opinion, the hospital I work at did an admirable job of preparing and escalating, and managed well with a significant number of very ill patients. The de-escalation, now that we have far fewer patients, seems to be less logical, although this is probably due to the national guidance.
On a separate note, the news from NHS England earlier this week that showed that patients with diabetes have a higher chance of dying with covid was really unhelpful. Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes are completely different diseases, with Type 2 being associated with obesity, which we already know is one of the strongest risk factors for a poor outcome from covid. I’m not aware of any evidence showing an increased risk from having Type 1 diabetes. I haven’t seen any seriously unwell people with Type 1 diabetes, compared to Type 2. While it seemed logical before we had first hand experience to assume that people with Type 1 would be at increased risk, this hasn’t appeared the case, but statements like this from NHS England will continue to terrify those people with Type 1 who are otherwise fit and at low risk.
By the end of last week, we had no Covid patients left in critical care. As the pandemic dies down, paradoxically, the public’s paranoia and pointless mask-wearing is increasing. I have no wish to wear a face covering in public that will become saturated with the vapour I breathe out, including the many normal bacteria that colonise my nose. Face coverings are wrong for so many reasons – being a harbour for viruses and bacteria being one, but also for reducing facial recognition, contact and empathy with those we are interacting with, which I worry will cause increased friction between members of the community.
I was delighted to find your Lockdown Sceptics website, and know I’m not alone.
Latest on Slow-Mo Car Crash that is the NHS’s Contact-Tracing App
My correspondent who’s been covering the roll-out of the NHS contact-tracing app draws my attention to a leak over the weekend:
Can’t usually bring myself to read the Guardian but I may have to develop a tolerance as it seems to be the go-to paper for leaks from the Ethics Advisory Board overseeing the NHSx ‘public panic’ app. Not surprising, given that the majority of the board are legal and philosophy academics. Not a technologist amongst them as far as I can tell from the publicly available data.
The news is… the Board was not told about the development of a second version of the app (the Zulke developed one). According to the Guardian, which has spoken to some Board members on condition of anonymity: “Some members are particularly concerned that they were not informed about the development of a second, parallel NHS app that was being built in secret until its existence was disclosed by the Financial Times last week.”
If the Ethics Advisory Board cannot speak out publicly and is dependent on Matt Hancock reading the Guardian to get its message across then no wonder Parliament’s Human Rights Committee felt the Board was inadequate (as previously reported on Lockdown Sceptics).
The apparent lack of a tech member of the Board is astonishing. It means dropped balls – such as asking for all app code to be open sourced, but not asking for server-side, backend code to be included. Given the centralised data model, that’s a big deal.
As things stand, the Ethics Advisory Board appears to be a political fig leaf, whining about how powerless it is to the Guardian while Hancock charges ahead with his Big Brother apps.
Sue Denim Responds to Imperial College’s Statement to the Sunday Telegraph
The ex-Google engineer who reviewed Neil Ferguson’s code for this site under the name “Sue Denim” has sent me a response to today’s news story in the Sunday Telegraph – “Coding that led to lockdown was ‘totally unreliable’ and a ‘buggy mess’, say experts“. That story is based on a comment piece in the same paper by two senior software engineers. In response to their scathing assessment of Ferguson’s computer model, Imperial College has dug in. It gave the following statement to the Sunday Telegraph:
The UK Government has never relied on a single disease model to inform decision-making. As has been repeatedly stated, decision-making around lockdown was based on a consensus view of the scientific evidence, including several modelling studies by different academic groups.
Multiple groups using different models concluded that the pandemic would overwhelm the NHS and cause unacceptably high mortality in the absence of extreme social distancing measures. Within the Imperial research team we use several models of differing levels of complexity, all of which produce consistent results. We are working with a number of legitimate academic groups and technology companies to develop, test and further document the simulation code referred to. However, we reject the partisan reviews of a few clearly ideologically motivated commentators.
Epidemiology is not a branch of computer science and the conclusions around lockdown rely not on any mathematical model but on the scientific consensus that COVID-19 is a highly transmissible virus with an infection fatality ratio exceeding 0.5pc in the UK”
Sue Denim has responded as follows:
ICL is asserting here that once a few academics with the right kind of politics agree on something, that’s science. Replicability, accuracy versus observed outcomes and not being buggy are things that apparently only partisans care about. The claim about ideology is probably a reference to my comment about the insurance industry, but they then immediately prove the point by claiming “epidemiology is not a branch of computer science”. That’s exactly the sort of explanation for failure that companies can’t give to their customers, because nobody cares. Refusal to work cross-discipline is a mindset problem unique to academia, one that companies cannot and do not tolerate.
Finally, their claim about the Government never relying on a single disease model to make decisions doesn’t seem to match the official SAGE publication from March 9th, “Potential impact of behavioural and social interventions on an epidemic of Covid-19 in the UK“, which cites the ICL Report 9 paper and its assumptions as the only source of predictions for what would happen. The claim about consensus is equally dodgy: nearly as soon as the UK changed course in response to ICL’s model, a team at Oxford (Gupta et al) publicly contradicted them.
In my second post I asked if Imperial College’s administrators knew how out of control this department had become. Now we know the answer: yes, and they don’t care.
Worth noting that Imperial has just sealed a deal with with the Chinese company Huawei worth £5 million. The Mail on Sunday has the story.
A Banker Writes…
A banker has got in touch to express his astonishment that last weekend’s leak from Her Majesty’s Treasury (HMT), revealing how much the Government’s expenditure is likely to increase by this year, didn’t result in more comment:
I was a banker for 30 years and have worked with governments in the NL, France, Germany and the UK as well as major European corporates on privatisations and major capital raisings. Never have I seen a finance ministry send up what I can only describe as a distress flare to advertise the trouble its economy is in. Most finance ministries would avoid doing this like the plague (pardon the phrase). They all borrow internationally and the rule of the game is do nothing that damages your credit rating. If you damage it, not only does your cost of borrowing go up, but your very ability to borrow may be impacted. This matters when you’re going to have to rely massively on the kindness of strangers to finance your spending by massively increased debt issuance.
He can think of three possible explanations for the leak:
- There is serious alarm in HMT about the Government’s reaction to Covid and the economic cost of the lockdown, including Rishi Sunak’s expensive and over-generous bailouts. Maybe a worried official hoped the international capital markets could be used to put the frighteners on the PM.
- There’s tension between No 10 and No 11 and Sunak was trying to appeal to the international capital markets to put a brake on his boss’s recklessness by pointing out the financial and potentially political cost of an extended lockdown.
- HMT officials are scared shitless about the cost of Sunak’s crowd-pleasing and trying to put a shot across his bows.
He continues:
I’m astonished how little serious reflection this leak has occasioned. The FT barely noticed it. More tellingly, it didn’t spark a week-long comment war on Bloomberg, Twitter or the Wall St Journal. All it did was spark a straw fire about “no tax increases” with some sensible reactions from former Chancellors.
But it still puzzles me as to why it ever happened. And why it didn’t cause utter pandemonium. Because the economic cost of this madness will only be felt once we get out of lockdown’s phoney war and the “Blitz” proper gets underway later this year, by which I mean when all those who are unemployed and don’t know it yet have a bruising encounter with economic reality. I wonder what the Blitz spirit will feel like then? How many royals will have to be axed from the civil list so that Buck House can once again look the East End in the eye?
Or maybe the leak was just mistimed, premature. We’re still all too busy clapping Captain Tom and the nurses (God bless them) to cope with any likely reality 3-6 months down the road. Hence the damp squib?
Round-Up
And on to the round-up of all the stories I’ve noticed, or which have been been brought to my attention, in the last 24 hours:
- “Coronavirus offers another excuse for the New York Times to bash Britain” – Douglas Murray on the relentless Brit-bashing of the New York Times
- “Coronavirus in Switzerland: restaurants reopen but have diners lost their taste for eating out?” – Sunday Times reports that in spite of restaurants reopening in Switzerland, customers are staying away
- “Liberal Treated With Hydroxychloroquine Hopes He Still Dies Of COVID-19 To Prove Trump Is Stupid” – More laughs from the Babyloon Bee
- “Lemming Immunity” – Omar Khan says we need to stop worrying about herd immunity and figure out how to immunise ourselves against herd opinion
- “Lives vs lives – the global cost of lockdown” – Jayanta Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen, two professors, argue that when assessing the costs of lockdowns we should consider their devastating impact on the developing world
Small Businesses That Have Reopened
On Monday, Lockdown Sceptics launched a searchable directory of open businesses across the UK. The idea is to celebrate those retail and hospitality businesses that have reopened, as well as help people find out what has opened in their area. But we need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those businesses that have reopened near you. Please visit the page and let us know about those brave folk who are doing their bit to get our country back on its feet.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. A journalist called David Oldroyd-Bolt lent a hand today and I’d like to pay him something, so if you feel like donating please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in tomorrow’s update, email me here. Incidentally, hope you like the new format with sub-headings and more pictures.
And Finally…
I seem to have taken a leaf out of the News at Ten and begun to round off each daily bulletin with a funny bit beginning “And finally…” Today’s “and finally” is brought to you courtesy of our friends at Comedy Unleashed and features Meggie Foster, a performer who specialises in lip-synch comedy. Her Boris is particularly good. Until tomorrow…
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Perhaps you can take in a scotch egg and eat it in the witness stand. That should cover it.
However, surely an initial decision would be required on whether the Scotch Egg constituted a meal or a snack. And the response might dictate the conduct of the inquiry itself – standing up or sitting down. Given the pantomime is anticipated to be a taxpayer soakaway of ten years duration tired legs might be a problem.
No decision is needed. If the Scotch Egg self identifies as a substantial meal then obviously to try and claim otherwise makes you a despicable mealaphobe, or maybe eggaphobe.
That would be racist
What we are we to make of senior academics who are so committed to their political point of view they fail on simple logic?
No. All that follows is that some people attending the enquiry think this is true and the organisers don’t want to discourage them from attending for the trivial expense/effort of taking a test.
This is the partly the first assumption reworded – positive test equals greater infectivity -m plus the assumption of mode of transmission which doesn’t follow at all.
Again this only means some people attending the enquiry think this. As we don’t know what those measures are it is fairly meaningless statement anyway. If the measure is to insist on video interviews then I think we can reasonably assume they will prevent admission.
Doesn’t follow at all. Who knows what happens if you attend with respiratory symptoms.
You and a lot of rich-world people are in some parallel reality to me where covid was something special. I don’t think we can happily coexist – we need new countries for covidians and non-covidians.
tof just ignore MTF – always the same. Not worth the bother.
What we are we to make of senior academics who are so committed to their political point of view they fail on simple logic?
No. All that follows is that some people attending the enquiry think this is true and the organisers don’t want to discourage them from attending for the trivial expense/effort of taking a test.
As the people who wrote the policy didn’t give a rationale for it, any statements about what’s likely the rationale is necessarily speculative, ie, neither yours nor the one your complaining about are necessarily true. The one of the authors is the more simple one and the one based on a more charitable interpretation of the text, specifically, the people who made these demands made them because they believed them to be technically sensible.
I was planning to write more here but it’s really not worth the effort. This is all speculative BS from someone who’s known to tow the COVID establishment line and who – judging from comments prior to the £5 watershed – would love to see us all still force-masked and because he claims to believe this would benefit him.
Quite, there’s always been a powerful irony with these people claiming sceptics are “selfish”.
We heard that term banded around during the so called pandemic… But the irony is that it’s these people that are selfish as they actually own zero altruism.. Their pretence is astonishing
“Some people attending the enquiry think this is true”
Bedwetting cretins who should be mocked, not indulged, and whose presence can’t contribute anything to the search for truth.
But why do they want to discourage rational people from attending?
Couldn’t be that it’s a cover-up, could it?
No. All that follows is that some people attending the enquiry think this is true and the organisers don’t want to discourage them from attending…
Given the weight of genuine scientific evidence that neither LFTs nor masking played any major part in “managing the pandemic”, surely the organisers should be discouraging people who still cling to the irrational and outdated belief in their efficacy from attending ? It’s like inviting witch-doctors to an investigation into whether voodoo works better than neurosurgery when it comes to treating brain tumours.
For all your analysis of the author’s logic you still fail to counter the argument that he makes and is evidenced by the content of the policy document issued by the organisers of the enquiry: they BELIEVE that the measures they propose will prevent transmission of Covid 19, and those measures were part of the Government’s attempts to tackle the ‘pandemic’. As such the enquiry is clearly tainted with bias from the outset.
Your failure of what you claim to be simpler logic is clear to almost everybody but you. This requirement for a test is a signal to us all that this enquiry is biased. Why otherwise would it be the only place in the country where you need to take a test to attend. How are you so qualified that you can’t understand the signal of bias sent by this, that properly qualified people can and based on the approval rating of your comment piece, so can about 97% of the people who read it.
On reflection I wrote that comment too quickly and in a bad mood and it needs correcting. So here goes.
Heneghan and Jefferson seem to assume that the reason for asking for the test is because the decision makers in the enquiry are concerned about Covid infection; believe the test is sufficiently accurate to detect the virus; and the virus is highly infectious. Because of that H&J believe the committee is “biased”.
I would challenge both parts:
There are other reasons why the test may be required. It may have been a decision by someone who is not a decision maker in the enquiry. It might have been done because certain key people would not otherwise testify (it is a small price to ask). It might even be a bit of out-of-date bureaucracy.
In any case it is not clear what bias means in this case. An open mind doesn’t mean not having prior beliefs. Everyone who participates in the enquiry is bound to have prior beliefs. An open mind means listening carefully and fairly to all points of view including those that challenge your prior beliefs. You could demand that prior beliefs are in some sense equally distributed among the inquiry members but that is meaningless.
I’ve just popped back from the future to let you know the conclusions of the inquiry.
Apparently we need a bigger state, less freedom and autonomy, and more censorship.
Oh, and they said we really need to trust the experts and follow the science.
It defies belief they haven’t included measures to combat altitude dependent SARS or in layman’s terms Pub Covid. This highly unusual and aggressive strain identified towards the end of 2020 suspends itself around five feet above food and on the way to toilets. As the inquiry must know, this is a real and present threat to anyone standing up that still demands full 400% cotton facial protection across an entire beard.
I definitely think, had they bothered to fund such a study, that they’d find wheelchair users who went to the toilet were the safest of all, when compared to able-bodied people. Especially if they ate crisps the entire way. It’d be the equivalent of putting zombie innard gunge all over yourself then walking through a herd of zombies. The virus, like the walking dead, will not pounce because it doesn’t notice you, but stand and walk at your peril.
Bloody clever, but also discriminatory..Actually they should have a third group who walks and eats to the toilet, as the gold standard obviously.
Love it Mogs.
Absolutely. I actually wore a plastic tray that circled the entire circumference of my neck which I kept filled with calamari. This modern day life saving Shakespearian ruff enabled me to go anywhere. It’s the only reason I’m still here.
Class.
“altitude dependent SARS or in layman’s terms Pub Covid.”
Oh, that’s good.
No need for facial protection when you’re the one responsible for the policy and want an unhindered picture with a famous member of The Vulnerable. Touching permitted.
https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/scottish-news/20074393.lulu-nicola-sturgeon-spotted-book-launch-glasgow/
“We are asking staff and visitors to take a lateral flow test….”
In which case you decline to take up their offer, because if they are merely asking, you can say no. No-one, in the course of their duties, should be obliged to be nose-raped by a swab of uncertified composition to obtain a dubious result for a disease of little consequence.
I had a massive (polite) barney with the organisers of a national level event one of my teenagers was attending. I wasn’t prepared to lie and say a test had been performed. I cited bodily autonomy, inaccurate tests, no risk to young ‘uns, cribriform plate damage etc etc, the whole 9 yards. Given the nature of the event, the nasal probing could scupper a career, so doubly daft. Trustees were called, made to wait outside, isolated from group, whole psycho interrogation bolleaux. They caved. I guess they realised they had no legal leg to stand on, possible bad publicity. Eventually allowed in as long as we didn’t tell anyone.
If my 14 year old was brave enough to deal with that lot, then you grown blokes can too.
Good for you, but I’m intrigued now by what the event was. Peruvian nose flute ensemble?
Hear, hear and well done.
Everyone knows it’s a done deal, us and them, so why waste £100 million?
The bottom line is that too many powerful people have too much to lose by an honest assessment.
Hancock is its figurehead – corrupt, shameless, unaccountable, opportunist, marriage breaker.
Verdict: Every MP who supported covidism, every media outlets that took government advertising money, every corporation that pushed this wickedness are all guilty of murder, breaking the economy, ruining education and bullying old people to die alone.
“so why waste £100 million?”
Driving the country to bankruptcy is very much part of the reset. When the country’s debts are so great that they cannot be met we must go cap in hand to the IMF or BIS. Their “loans” to keep us solvent will in effect sell the country lock, stock and barrel. And then our dozy, useless compatriots will know what enslavement really means.
Politicians in our countries have driven us into debt…they have done this without our consent.
How do we get accountability?
Hear hear these people are less than human.
What is the false positive/false negative of the several different lateral flow tests, anyone?
And, always a mystery to me is what exactly is the absolutely definitely accurate test which the tests are measured against in order to assess said percentages (clue, there isn’t one)- because If it exists, shouldn’t we have used and be using that one?
Sadly a positive lateral flow test has entered the lexicon of infallibility – OMG you/I’ve got Covid – and all the sheep quiver with anxiety…again.
What a bloody world the last 3 years has made some of us.
We’re ALL GOING TO DIE!! Which actually is true but not necessarily at the same time or of the same causes.
Now be scared everyone and do as you’re told.
The Covid “Inquiry” is and will be a complete farce.
Take this article from the Telegraph today…..
“Ordinary Britons will have a role to play in the upcoming Covid inquiry hearings. Those who lost a loved one to the virus tell their story”
Ordinary Britons…. Apart from the tens of thousands who have died from the results of lockdown, the “vaccines”, and a crumbling NHS…
And the Telegraph still bang on about this oh so deadly virus..
There’s absolutely no hope.
On another note, I was intrigued to hear Frisby discuss the concept of Revolution (although as I do he feels it’s what is required)….. https://youtu.be/HwT7RtN44Fc
The Revolution will not be televised.
Well,not by the BBC. With any luck they’ll be the first to go down.
I’ll never forget the anti vax/lockdown marches which they simply ignored – in accordance with orders from their masters.
Logically, there’s absolutely no value in hearing the stories of those who lost relatives – everybody knows that death in the family is tragic. But this Inquiry should surely be about what everybody doesn’t know, and which needs to be investigated by… an inquiry.
A rhetorical question, no doubt. But it appears that we never could, given the built in assumptions. And who pays? Us; and it might be better value to rely on the work that’s been done elsewhere, or at least restrict it’s agenda so as to examine what our politicians did. Any sane individual would ask the question: who’s side are they on?
It could never be trusted – the outcomes have been decided, their problem is how to defend those outcomes.
Agreed. I’m a glass half full person but also a realist and I wouldn’t trust any of the buggers involved in this inquiry as far as I can spit. Alas, the outcome is a foregone conclusion, Kabuki theatre. I have zero hope anybody will be found guilty or held to account for their part in crimes against humanity. The article above is Exhibit no.1 as evidence on how this is going to go down. Yes let’s see how they spin the unfavourable outcome. They’ll have to really pull some spectacular crapola out of the bag.
I’m curious – a month after the WHO declared the pandemic over (or its “acute phase”, at least), I’m not aware of any public venues in the UK requiring COVID tests or masking, outside of isolated NHS departments bucking national NHS policy.
So what makes this Inquiry a greater risk than every pub, restaurant, sports venue and church in the country?
If the question is protecting the anxious, then there’s nothing to stop them wearing a mask which, if they’re still wearing them in the height of summer, they must be sure gives them 100% protection.
Something tells me ”the anxious” will be on their 7th jab and most likely test themselves as often as they floss. Much like the trans radical harpies the rest of us are expected to affirm and enable their mental health issues.
Slightly off topic but Dr Mike Yeadon has just posted that Mark Sexton’s application for a Judicial Review concerning the Scamdemic has now been accepted. Against the Hallett pantomime the manner in which the law gets broken yet again will be interesting and will certainly indicate the end point of her taxpayer funded bonanza.
The Inquiry is intended to:
The one thing it is not intended to do is challenge the premise that the lockdowns were necessary and justified.
It’s a massively expensive farce.
Surely we must realise that HEALTH, OUR HEALTH is the thing we should be most concerned about. Just like the lone masker I encountered in a large supermarket yesterday; so concerned about his health, that, while wearing his mouth/nose cover he bought half a dozen packets of pork scratchings. Me? I bought half a dozen packets of anti-histamines.
Yep the security guard in my local Waitrose still wears a mask with nose poking out over the top of course.
Note: staff and visitors. Those in. Herve need not apply (this rule)!!! Isn’t it the whole point of this enquiry? To find out if these stupid rules hinder the whole country and economy, and if those who made the rules are guilty of contempt of freedom plus? And that they broke them as they went along? What a farce!
Another thought – those in charge want to make sure the excess stock of LFT are sold….ad infinitum!
Shut this farce of an enquiry down now and save wasting time and our money. Just by deciding to implement a command to use these waste of time tests, it’s clear this whitewash has already decided what it is going to conclude. Let someone start a proper enquiry chaired by people who know what went wrong like Dr Carl Heneghan, Dr Tom Jefferson, Dr Jay Battachara Prof. Sunetra Gupta and Dr Martin Kullldorff all people who are qualified to advise on the hopelessly useless and disgracefully anti-democratic government’s controls using covid as an excuse. A report from this group of people would have many times more value and cost much less than this pro-government, pro-anti-freedom, rubbish enquiry set up by the government.