Is Obesity to Blame For the High Covid Death Toll?
A number of news outlets carried the story yesterday of the report by the World Obesity Federation which concludes that obesity is responsible for worsening Covid death rates around the world. The Times has more.
Britain’s dire COVID-19 death rate is partly the result of obesity, according to a report that the World Health Organisation says is a “wake-up call” to the overweight West.
Boris Johnson is considering giving out shopping vouchers for losing weight as he accepts the link between obesity and Covid and will promise today £100 million more for slimming schemes. The prime minister’s near-death experience with Covid caused him to reverse his opposition to anti-obesity policies and accept the need to act. This case is underlined in a report by the World Obesity Federation which concludes that thousands of deaths in Britain could have been avoided if “negligent” governments had a grip on the national weight problem.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO, said that the link between obesity and Covid deaths was “compelling” as he urged countries to improve public health.
Analysis shows a “dramatic” increase in death rates once more than half a country’s population is overweight, which it says cannot be explained by age, wealth or health systems. In countries where less than half the population is overweight, the risk of death from Covid is a tenth of that in countries above this level, with almost nine in ten Covid deaths in countries with overweight rates above 50%.
No country where less than 40% of the population is overweight has Covid death rates above 10 per 100,000, while no country with death rates above 100 per 100,000 has overweight rates of less than 50%.
The last statement is certainly true – and is another way of saying that the top left of the chart above is empty (i.e., there are no high Covid mortality countries with low obesity). But is this the whole story? For reasons best known to themselves, the Times did not reproduce the full chart from the report, which is shown below.
With the bottom right now filled in with all the countries with high obesity but low Covid mortality, the result looks distinctly less impressive.
Notice in particular that among the countries above 50% obesity (right-hand side) there is no sign of a correlation at all, with more points at the bottom (low Covid mortality) than at the top and no upward slope to speak of. There is no indication of Covid mortality getting worse as a country gets fatter.
Neither is there much correlation in evidence in the bottom left of the chart, among the low obesity countries. As the obesity prevalence increases it remains basically flat. The countries with 20% obesity fare basically the same as those with 40%.
Then suddenly, wham! A tower of Covid appears at just over 50% obesity.
Thus it is a chart of two halves: a flat half below 50% and a strange tall blob above 50%, and no neat slopes upwards in either half or between them.
What explains this curious shape? It may be helpful to realise that the countries in the bottom left consist almost entirely of the African and South East Asian countries, which are already known (for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious) to have had a very different pandemic to the rest of the world.
Obesity is likely to be part of the story. But how big a part? On the evidence of this graph and report, it’s very hard to say.
The Emerging Totalitarian Dystopia: An Interview With Professor Mattias Desmet
We’re publishing today an interview with Mattias Desmet, Psychotherapist and Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium, who is concerned about the emergence of totalitarian tendencies in the West. The interview was conducted by political philosopher and author Patrick Dewals and first published in Flemish here. It has been translated by a group of Lockdown Sceptics readers and appears here for the first time in English.
Here’s a taster.
Do you recognise totalitarian traits in the current crisis and the government response to it?
Definitely. When one steps away from the virus story, one discovers a totalitarian process par excellence. For example, according to Arendt, a pre-totalitarian state cuts through all social ties of the population. Simple dictatorships do that at the political level – they ensure that the opposition cannot unite – but totalitarian states also do this among the population, in the private sphere. Think of the children who – often unintentionally – reported their parents to the government in the totalitarian states of the twentieth century. Totalitarianism is so focused on total control that it automatically creates suspicion among the population, causing people to spy on and denounce each other. People no longer dare to speak out against the majority and are less able to organise themselves due to the restrictions. It is not difficult to recognise such phenomena in today’s situation, in addition to many other features of emerging totalitarianism.
What is it that this totalitarian state ultimately wants to achieve?
At first, it doesn‘t want anything. Its emergence is an automatic process coupled on the one hand with great anxiety on the part of the population and, on the other hand, a naive scientific thinking that considers total knowledge possible. Today there are those who believe that society should no longer be based on political narratives but on scientific facts and figures, thus rolling out the red carpet for rule by technocracy. Their ideal image is what the Dutch philosopher Ad Verbrugge calls “intensive human husbandry”. Within a biological-reductionist, virological ideology, continuous biometric monitoring is indicated and people are subjected to continuous preventive medical interventions, such as vaccination campaigns. All this to supposedly optimise public health. And a whole range of medical hygiene measures must be implemented; avoiding touch, wearing face masks, continuously disinfecting hands, vaccination, etc. For the supporters of this ideology, one can never do enough to achieve the ideal of the greatest possible ‘health’. A newspaper article appeared in which one could read that the population ought to be made even more afraid. Only then would they stick to the measures recommended by the virologists. In their view, stirring up fear will work to produce good. But when drawing up all these draconian measures, the policymakers forget that people cannot be healthy, either physically or mentally, without sufficient freedom, privacy and the right to self-determination, values that this technocratic totalitarian view totally ignores. Although the Government aspires to enormous health improvement for its society, its actions will ruin the health of society. By the way, this is a basic characteristic of totalitarian thinking according to Hannah Arendt: it ends in the exact opposite of what it originally pursued.
Worth reading in full.
COVID-19 Testing and the Workplace
There follows a post from our legal eagle Dr John Fanning, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool, responding to a question posed by a Lockdown Sceptics reader about whether employers can require their employees to be tested for Covid.
For those fed up with working from home or the tedium of life on furlough, the UK Government’s “roadmap” for the easing of lockdown raises the prospect of a welcome (though gradual) return to the workplace over the coming months. Of course, many people – including NHS staff; the police; fire brigade; workers in essential retail, construction and manufacturing; and so on – never left it in the first place. Nevertheless, employers will most likely have to continue to ensure that workplaces are “COVID-secure” for the foreseeable future – with an expanded programme of asymptomatic testing playing a key part in this endeavour. With that comes another interesting question: can your boss demand that you take a test?
This is a tricky one to answer because so much depends on what is “reasonable” in the circumstances. The manager of a nursing home might reasonably require her/his employees to undergo mandatory testing in order to protect its residents from coronavirus disease. In those circumstances, an employee’s failure to comply with such a reasonable instruction might be grounds for disciplinary action. By contrast, it would seem much less reasonable to order an employee who ordinarily works alone in a single-occupancy office, or a warehouse yards away from anyone else, to take a test which she/he has declined. Between these two examples is a broad spectrum of circumstances in which employers’ instructions may, or may not, be reasonable. The context is key.
One thing about which we can be sure is that an employer cannot force an employee to undergo a COVID-19 test without consent. To do so would constitute battery – i.e., “the infliction of unlawful force on another person” (Lord Justice Goff in Collins v Wilcock [1984] 1 WLR 1172) – and a criminal offence. I have written elsewhere that the Coronavirus Act 2020 does contain powers which authorise compulsory testing of potentially infectious persons, but they have remained in reserve up to now and, in any case, they are not for employers to deploy. In its recent guidance on this subject, the Department of Health described the expansion of workplace testing as “crucial” in “breaking chains of COVID-19 transmission”. Yet in the very next paragraph, the guidance states that it is “a voluntary decision for employers to run testing programmes for their staff”. As is often the case where COVID-19 testing is concerned, the sabre-rattling rhetoric is an imperfect reflection of legal reality.
As with many of the measures taken to “stop the spread” of COVID-19 (e.g. face masks, plastic screens, one-way systems, 2-metre (6ft 6ins) social distancing, and so on), asymptomatic workplace testing may have more value as a performative ritual – a reassuring sign for returning staff that something is being done – rather than as a necessary condition of the restoration of normality. What remains to be seen is whether any court will find that an employer’s failure to offer workplace COVID-19 testing is negligent. If an employer fails to offer Covid testing and one of its employees contracts the disease and suffers serious complications or dies, could that employee (or her/his estate) claim compensation from her/his bosses?
This is another tricky one. It is true that employers owe a non-delegable duty to provide their employees with a safe place of work (Wilson and Clyde Coal Co v English [1938] AC 57). But whether a failure to offer COVID-19 testing would breach that duty would, again, depend on what was reasonable. My hunch is that an employer’s failure to comply with Government guidelines by not running an inexpensive workplace testing scheme to tackle a foreseeable risk probably would breach her/his duty to her/his staff in some circumstances. This does not mean that employers everywhere are now on the hook for big compensation pay-outs – there is still an obvious causation problem; i.e., can it even be said that an employer’s negligent failure to offer testing caused an employee to fall ill? That employee could just as easily have been exposed to the virus on the bus, in a supermarket, or by another member of her/his household. However, even the potential for liability might prompt many employers to offer testing out of an abundance of caution; indeed, their insurers may insist upon it. Whether an employee would actually have to take a test would depend on that vexed question of reasonableness.
Zero Covid Cultists Target Scotland
A Lockdown Sceptics reader forwarded to us the email he received from the Zero Covid campaign inviting him to the “Launch conference for Zero Covid Scotland”.
Join us on Saturday March 13th for the Zero Covid Scotland launch conference.
There’s a door ajar in Scotland, a door to Zero Covid.
The Scottish Government has been handed a report, by their own Scottish Parliament’s COVID-19 Committee, telling them to pursue a virus elimination strategy. With the Scottish elections coming up on May 6th, let’s push that door wide open.
Speakers include:
Science
Dr Philippa Whitford MP, member of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus that recommended a Zero Covid strategy.
Dr Jeremy Rossman, expert on the international elimination of Covid, University of Kent.
Professor Andrew Watterson, public health expert, Stirling University.
Dr Deepti Gurdasani, epidemiologist and medical statistician, Queen Mary University of London.Activism
Yvonne Blake, Migrants Organising for Rights and Empowerment (MORE)
Tracy Edwards, Public and Commercial Services (PCS) trade union.
Allan Crosbie, Educational Institute of Scotland (personal capacity)
Kathy Jenkins, Scottish Hazards – aiming to reduce injury, ill health and death caused by work/workplaces in Scotland.Others to be confirmed
The campaign to eliminate the virus – Informed by science – Led by activists
The frightening thing is, they know the Scottish government is open to their barmy ideas.
Why is the Government Ignoring the Evidence on Harms to Schoolchildren of Wearing Masks?
As schools prepare to return for all children on Monday for the first time since December, Government guidance is that masks should be worn by all children in class, though confusion has been created by the Government also stressing they are optional.
Molly Kinglsey from UsForThem has an excellent piece in the Telegraph outlining the dangers for schoolchildren of wearing masks all day and asking why the Government is not, as per WHO guidance, monitoring and evaluating the impact on their health and education.
There are clear and negative implications for teaching; only a few short months ago DfE advice was that “face coverings can have a negative impact on learning and teaching so their use in the classroom should be avoided”; it’s yet again another intervention forced on children to protect adults; and worst of all it appears to be entirely unevaluated for its potential to cause harm and yet capable of causing great harm in a great many cases.
The Covid legislation makes no secret of this fact that harms have not been assessed – each of the Government’s regulations concerning coronavirus restrictions states “No impact assessment has been prepared for these Regulations”. Perhaps this is okay for adults. Is it for children?
The WHO certainly don’t think so: they say that when authorities recommend masks for children those authorities should monitor and evaluate the impact on their health and education from the outset. Under a FOI seen in October, both DfE and the Department of Health confirmed they were not collecting this information.
We are apparently flying blind; and we are doing so in the face of what looks to be potentially serious harm to our children. In Germany a study of over 25,000 children wearing masks throughout the school day reports headaches (53%), difficulty concentrating (50%), malaise (42%), impaired learning (38%) and drowsiness or fatigue (37%); in France social media is awash with reports of parents measuring children’s oxygen levels at the end of the school day and finding them to be dangerously low.
There are lists of studies, many now peer reviewed, identifying other proven harms which are extensive and serious – communication issues, eye issues and difficulty breathing. If these aren’t clear red flags, what are?
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Judith Woods, also in the Telegraph, evidently does not agree – and felt no restraint in expressing that disagreement, calling parents opposed to their child wearing a mask “brainwashed”, “cretinous Covid-deniers”, “selfish nutters”, “criminally loopy” and implying their child will kill their teacher. Of course, no self-respecting newspaper would publish a sceptic writing in this rude and inflammatory way about lockdowners or mask-lovers. But as so often, it’s the double standards that show you who’s currently in charge.
Masks are horrible, unnatural and reduce communication, which is crucial in any classroom. I hate them. Everybody hates them.
But that doesn’t alter the fact that we must wear the wretched things now in order to eventually never wear them ever again in the future.
If a school asks students to wear masks in class, then so be it. Unless there is a bona fide medical reason not to cover their face, there’s no valid reason to refuse, other than truculence or terror instilled in them by bloody-minded parents who should be ashamed of themselves for putting my child and other children at risk.
The brainwashed anti-vax brigade and the cretinous Covid-deniers can do one, as far as I’m concerned. No jab, no job? Fine by me. Even the Queen thinks you’re selfish nutters (I paraphrase, Ma’am).
Classroom apartheid, with masks refuseniks made to sit at the back, and kids segregated at lunchtime? If that’s what it takes, Mr Chips. Knock yourself out, Miss Jean Brodie.
I gather some parents have been bleating on about the outrage of this “coercion” and cavilling at the stigma their child will suffer. It will be a far bigger stigma if Milo kills Miss.
Maybe you can tell, but I’m bone-weary of exceptionalism. Yes, every child is a special poppet (particularly mine), but learning to conform is a life skill too. In this case, a life-or-death skill.
Kids have more than enough on their plates come Monday without being inculcated with criminally loopy theories about protective facemasks being a vector of disease.
Really not worth reading in full, unless you like to enrage yourself by being exposed to the intemperate rantings of people who think the findings of infectious disease specialists are “criminally loopy”.
Now Granny is Safe, Are We Killing Our Children?
Today we’re publishing an original piece by Emma Hine, who asks whether we have considered the enormity of what we have imposed on our children in the name of preventing a disease that barely affects them.
By keeping our teens out of school for almost a whole year, we have already deprived them of one of their fundamental, instinctive needs and now, when they can finally feel hope at restoring these connections, we are asking them not only to continue not to physically connect with their peers but also to hide half of their face, in effect removing every tool they have in their communicative toolbox. A Gallup Youth Survey in 2001 found that, unlike Maslow’s hierarchy of basic human needs that places food and water at the base of its triangle and self-fulfilment at the pinnacle, 13-17 year olds responded with their most important needs being “need to be trusted” (78%), “need to be understood and loved” (77%) and “need to feel safe and secure where I live and go to school” (77%). I don’t believe there is a single psychologist who would agree that a sea of masked faces, devoid of expression gives the feeling of either safety or security.
When you consider that 46% of suicides occur in people with mental health conditions, these increases in mental health disorders in adolescents are alarming. If we do not start giving young people back their lives, then we have lost our fundamental instinct as parents. We are no longer prepared to die for our children. We are literally asking our children to die for us.
Worth reading in full.
What is Happening With Mortality in Israel?
A story has been doing the rounds in the past few weeks that the mainstream media are understandably nervous to touch. At Lockdown Sceptics we have been keeping an eye on it to see how it develops. It began with an article published on February 11th (with an update on March 2nd) that asks why mortality in Israel appears, on official data, to be so much higher among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated in the first few weeks after the first vaccine dose.
Israel National News explains further.
A front-page article appeared in the FranceSoir newspaper about findings on the Nakim website regarding what some experts are calling “the high mortality caused by the vaccine.”
The paper interviews Aix-Marseille University Faculty of Medicine Emerging Infectious and Tropical Diseases Unit’s Dr. Hervé Seligmann and engineer Haim Yativ about their research and data analysis. They claim that Pfizer’s shot causes “mortality hundreds of times greater in young people compared to mortality from coronavirus without the vaccine, and dozens of times more in the elderly, when the documented mortality from coronavirus is in the vicinity of the vaccine dose, thus adding greater mortality from heart attack, stroke, etc.”
Dr Hervé Seligmann works at the Emerging Infectious and Tropical Diseases Research Unit, Faculty of Medicine, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France. He is of Israeli-Luxembourg nationality. He has a B.Sc. In Biology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has written over 100 scientific publications.
Dr Niall McCrae has written about the story in Unity News Network.
More evidence of iatrogenic harm came from Israel, which started vaccinating on December 19th. As reported by former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson, while COVID-19 mortality escalated among Israelis throughout January, in Palestine it declined steeply after a surge in December. Yet the Palestinians had no vaccine.
This correlation is more than coincidental. Analysis of Israeli health ministry data by Hervé Seligmann at Aix-Marseilles University indicates that about 40 times more elderly people died of COVID-19 in the three weeks between their first and second doses than among those who were not vaccinated. … Deaths in Israel are now falling, which politicians and media attribute to the vaccine, although there is a global trend of the virus becoming less deadly.
There has not yet been any official response to this analysis from the Israeli Government or Health Ministry, though they were contacted by FranceSoir.
Why is SAGE Still Advising Government?
There follows a guest post by Lockdown Sceptics contributor and former parliamentary researcher Dr James Moreton Wakeley, questioning why SAGE, contrary to its original design, seems to have become a permanent fixture in political life.
SAGE is designed to be an ad hoc, temporary body summoned when emergency circumstances persuade government that they need particular expertise. It has been called eight times since 2009, for events like Swine Flu, floods and the 2010 Icelandic volcano eruption. Its formation and role guiding government policy for almost a year is entirely unprecedented, and entirely contrary to how it has been used in the past.
SAGE’s mandate is interesting. It emphasises timeliness and consensus: even though the Enhanced SAGE Guidance does note that SAGE representatives should tell ministers the degrees of consensus around the issues they consider, other guidance explicitly states that SAGE’s key sub-committees, like NERVTAG, “provide (their) consensus conclusions to SAGE”, strongly implying that the system risks supplying ministers with too small a degree of perspective. This risk of course increases when those looking at the evidence do not change, and become professionally invested in maintaining a certain set of conclusions or more interested in certain types of data.
The need for government to receive clear, unified scientific advice is perhaps understandable in a short-term, emergency situation when information is slight and uncertain. Almost a year into the Covid pandemic, however, when so much more is known, and when it is clear that equally qualified experts have entirely different perspectives on the issue, why is a temporary, emergency committee – comprised of the same 20 leading figures who now have public reputations to defend – still advising government? SAGE was not designed to monopolise or replace normal governmental decision-making, but to be one source of advice among others in exceptional circumstances. Yet it seems to have morphed into some kind of dominant Committee of Public Safety, with ironic and deleterious consequences recalling its namesake in the darkest days of the French Revolution.
“Every Crisis Becomes a Religion If it Lasts Long Enough”
Journalist John Hayward has a Twitter thread on the cultic enchantment of the Covid crisis that we thought was so good we would reproduce it here in full.
Every crisis becomes a religion if it lasts long enough.
One factor in that transformation is the Beautiful Theory phenomenon: the power elite insists its remedies are logical and politically correct so they MUST work, even if the actual evidence shows they obviously don’t.
When Beautiful Theories crash into hard, cold reality and shatter, faith is the glue used by the elites to put their precious ideas back together. They need MILITANT faith to get the job done: true believers eager to crush doubt and compel obedience by making war on the infidels.
Some are swept into the faith because they desperately crave a sense of control over the crisis. They need to believe Something Can Be Done, and they’d rather invest their faith in debunked Beautiful Theories than have no faith at all. Faith is a coin that demands to be spent.
Some crave social approval, and the purveyors of Beautiful Theories have immense political, economic, and cultural power to make their faith seem fashionable. Virtue signalling is such a plague in modern society because the signals are pre-packaged and made very easy to send.
Some aren’t even hoping they can assert control over a crisis by converting to its religion. They’ll settle for just having some MEANING, some simplicity, a sense that the righteous will fare better than the unbelievers, that virtue will be rewarded while sin is punished.
That’s a very common impulse with the Church of Covid, since the Beautiful Theories were so very obviously wrong. There isn’t much left of the faith except the visceral communal satisfaction of hoping unbelievers will be punished for their blasphemies with sickness and death.
That sort of thing happens with all of the crisis religions, although not usually as quickly and obviously as with the Church of Covid. Look at the endless stream of movies about how the world became an apocalyptic hellscape because people didn’t believe in global warming.
The last resort of every crisis religion, the last thing that puts asses in the pews, is that addiction to misery porn, the collective hope that unbelievers will suffer someday, and everyone will admit the True Faith was right all along as Judgement Day crashes down upon them.
The elite will never have the humility to admit they were wrong, and they’ll never give up on politically or financially profitable “solutions” even when they obviously don’t solve the problem. Founding a crisis religion means they never have to say they’re sorry.
That applies to some very longstanding crises, like the War on Poverty, whose nostrums long ago transformed into fantastically expensive articles of religious faith even as mountains of data accumulated that proved they were utter failures, and often made the problems WORSE.
You can look for some telltale signs of a crisis transforming into a religion. The most obvious one is when the high priests tell you the “war” you’ve been drafted into will never end. They become very angry when asked to define success or failure, or lay out exit strategies.
Watch for the moment when you’re told “science” means not asking questions, defying dogma, or challenging “consensus.” That is the literal definition of faith, not science.
Always keep an eye out for Moving Goalposts, which are the signature miracle of crisis religions, their version of parting the waters or loaves and fishes. Crisis religions work very hard to make their faith unfalsifiable by constantly changing the standards of evidence.
Check to see if certain people are accumulating huge amounts of money and power from a crisis. That’s a pretty good sign it’s turning into a religion. A crisis should be solved as quickly and efficiently as possible. Don’t let it fester long enough to become a special interest.
Above all, look for the whiff of ARROGANCE to develop around a crisis. Wise religions and effective crisis managers have something in common: a sense of humility. Crisis religions are militant faiths that quickly become arrogant, smug, and totalitarian.
Dedicated people who truly want to solve a problem will look for evidence their analysis is wrong, or their policies aren’t working, and make adjustments as quickly as possible, no matter the cost or embarrassment to themselves. This is humility.
Crisis religions are arrogant. They reject criticism, insist their Beautiful Theories MUST be right because they’re ideologically pure – they fit snugly into a worldview that must not be challenged. Their plans only fail because their commands were disobeyed or sabotaged.
The high priests of a crisis religion see devils everywhere, leering at them from the rubble of every failure. Only sin can explain why their Beautiful Theories are tarnished. Failure never THEIR fault, so it must be YOURS. They find your lack of faith disturbing.
And you know what? A LOT of people want to see the world that way, including a great many self-described atheists. They hunger for the comfort of faith and the vibrant energy of militancy. They want to be right, and they want the wrong to suffer for their folly.
Conservatives think religious faith in the State is terrifying and wonder why so many embrace it. It’s because uncertainty is much more frightening. A simple false story is better than a complex true one, and with enough faith, maybe we can force the simple story to be true.
Poetry Corner
Diary of a (Vaccine) Church Mouse
by Kate Williams
Imagine being a church mouse hauled in for vaccine trials whilst you’re busy munching through the Book of Revelation…
The Antichrist and Armageddon
formed my fulsome bite,
When upon me swiftly whished a swoop
And knocked me into flight.
He towered over, giving chase,
A small cage in his grab,
“Come ‘ere you wretched long tailed squeak!”
“You’re wanted in the lab!”
I skidded through curled edges,
Of Apocalypse Horsemen Four,
He hurled the cage in front to catch
Me heading for the door.
Three squeaks abound, I lay there flat
Wedged underneath the pew,
Then came a pencil, lead end first
At Matthew Twenty Two.
A hobnail boot, a sighing captor
Shuffling to and fro,
It’s death by jab or hunger lest
I took my chance he’d go.
A chink of light through vestry door
Showed fair chance to a dash
I scrambled over Ephesus
And just escaped his lash.
The cage came down, a crash! A clink!
But narrowly I fled,
“Test your vaccine on your kind!
And leave me be!” I said.
“Damn your eyes ya pesky brute!
I’ll ‘ave ya next time, look!”
And off he went, with empty cage,
And I back to my book.
Rising From the Ashes
Lockdown Sceptics reader Scott Fennell has written to tell us about his new business venture after lockdown cost him his job.
I normally work on a cruise ship, but this industry has been really hard hit as you can imagine. With no help from the Government, I decided to set up my own supplement company without the nasty ingredients you see in nearly all other companies.
It’s only small at the moment with just one product, Vitamin C 1000mg, but I’m hoping to add some more soon. LS readers can get a 15% discount using code LSVITC15.
I don’t have a website at the moment, but you can order from Amazon UK here.
If you have a similar story to share then email us here and we’ll try to give your new venture a boost.
COVID-1984
Three more Party slogans today:
BANALITY IS REALITY
PANIC IS PEACE
OUR MODEL IS YOUR MASTER, YOUR FREEDOM OUR DISASTER
Round-up
- “Why we shouldn’t worry about Covid super strains” – Dr Julian Tang, Clinical Virologist at the University of Leicester, writes in the Spectator that virus variants are unlikely to reignite the pandemic as “over a lifetime, your body will build up an immunological library of SARS-CoV-2 variants and immune responses”
- “ANOTHER Covid variant is found in the UK: Public Health England say they’ve picked up 16 cases of new strain which shares a mutation with the Brazil and South African versions” – The Mail reports on the inevitable
- “China makes COVID-19 anal swabs mandatory for foreigners” – Another reason not to travel to the communist country in the New York Post
- “What We’ve Learned from Israel’s Covid Vaccine Program” – Dr Gilbert Berdine on Mises Wire discusses the recent New England Journal of Medicine paper on Israel’s trial of the Pfizer vaccine and concludes that the benefit of vaccination is small and unlikely to be cost-effective
- “Safety and Ethical Concerns of using Covid-19 Vaccines in Healthy Children” – Read the latest open letter from the UK Medical Freedom Alliance
- “The moral debate over Covid jabs for children” – Katy Balls in the Spectator on the alarming direction of travel in Government thinking
- “Lord Sumption: civil disobedience has begun” – Some great quotes here from the sceptical former Supreme Court judge speaking to Freddie Sayers in UnHerd, though he disappointed some listeners by resigning himself to vaccine passports
- “Daily Mail Journalist David Rose, Dr Tess Lawrie and Dr Pierre Kory” – Watch the latest interview from former BBC journalist Anna Brees
- “Rishi Sunak is turning into a Gordon Brown tribute act” – Ross Clark in the Spectator draws an unfavourable comparison
- “Masks in Schools” – Watch Episode 2 of the Pulse podcast from HART with Dr Elizabeth Evans, Dr Ros Jones and Dr Zenobia Storah
- “Amazon is censoring my book about Covid!” – Dr Sebastian Rushworth is dismayed to find the dead hand of the censor alive and well as he attempts to bring out the English language version of his new book
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Eight today: “You Are Killing Me” by The Dandy Warhols, “No More Lies” by Cardboard Foxes, “No Justice” by Jimmy Cliff, “Strange Times Are Coming” by the Meteors, “I Can’t Be With You” by the Cranberries, “Lonely Day” by System Of A Down, “Life Worth Living” by The Spitfires and “My Resistance Is Low” by Robin Sarstedt.
Love in the Time of Covid
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums, including a dating forum called “Love in a Covid Climate” that has attracted a bit of attention. We have a team of moderators in place to remove spam and deal with the trolls, but sometimes it takes a little while so please bear with us. You have to register to use the Forums as well as post comments below the line, but that should just be a one-time thing. Any problems, email Lockdown Sceptics here.
Sharing Stories
Some of you have asked how to link to particular stories on Lockdown Sceptics so you can share it. To do that, click on the headline of a particular story and a link symbol will appear on the right-hand side of the headline. Click on the link and the URL of your page will switch to the URL of that particular story. You can then copy that URL and either email it to your friends or post it on social media. Please do share the stories.
Social Media Accounts
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Woke Gobbledegook
We’ve decided to create a permanent slot down here for woke gobbledegook. Today, Joshua T. Katz, Professor of Humanities at Princeton University, writes in the New Criterion on the sheer madness of cancelling Dr Seuss.
Just last week, a wonderful cabinetmaker spent two days at my house installing shelves in a room where I have long intended to display my collection of alphabet books. Once he’d left, I put them up one by one—alphabetically, of course—stopping now and again to leaf through some I particularly like. One of these was Dr. Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra!, first published in 1955, in which Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell draws letters
he never had dreamed of before!
And I said, “You can stop, if you want, with the Z
“Because most people stop with the Z
“But not me!”I did not imagine then that on the 117th birthday of Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss Enterprises would announce that six of his books, including On Beyond Zebra!, would no longer be published or licensed because “they portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” Or that President Biden in his proclamation for Read Across America Day (which takes place on March 2 specifically in honour of Dr. Seuss) would, unlike his predecessors Presidents Obama and Trump, fail to mention one of the country’s best-loved children’s authors.
This is madness.
When the morning news broke, I took On Beyond Zebra! back off its new shelf and tried to discern the problem. It is true that there is mention of a man Americans (still) celebrate with a federal holiday:
So, on beyond Zebra!
Explore!
Like Columbus!
Discover new letters!A friend more attuned to the zeitgeist than I am suggests, however, that at issue are the orientalizing depictions of one Nazzim of Bazzim, who rides a camel-like beast called a Spazzim (spelled with the Seussian letter spazz), and possibly also of Flunnel (spelled with flunn), a “softish nice fellow who hides in a tunnel.”
Let me repeat: this is madness.
That Dr Seuss, a man of the Left, can be cancelled shows that no one is safe from the woke revolutionaries, Katz writes.
It is true that Theodor Geisel was an imperfect man. For example, he supported the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. That said, he was a liberal Democrat who despised Richard Nixon and whose widow gave money from his estate to Planned Parenthood. If Seuss is canceled, anyone can be canceled—as, indeed, we are seeing day after day in this year of mayhem.
Worth reading in full.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a one-stop shop down here for people who want to obtain a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card – because wearing a mask causes them “severe distress”, for instance. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and the Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. And if you feel obliged to wear a mask but want to signal your disapproval of having to do so, you can get a “sexy world” mask with the Swedish flag on it here.
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption. Another reader has created an Android app which displays “I am exempt from wearing a face mask” on your phone. Only 99p.
If you’re a shop owner and you want to let your customers know you will not be insisting on face masks or asking them what their reasons for exemption are, you can download a friendly sign to stick in your window here.
And here’s an excellent piece about the ineffectiveness of masks by a Roger W. Koops, who has a doctorate in organic chemistry. See also the Swiss Doctor’s thorough review of the scientific evidence here and Prof Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson’s Spectator article about the Danish mask study here.
Stop Press: Paul E. Alexander and colleagues have written a detailed debunking of the CDC’s “Mask Mandate Study” for AIER. Read it here.
The Great Barrington Declaration
The Great Barrington Declaration, a petition started by Professor Martin Kulldorff, Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Jay Bhattacharya calling for a strategy of “Focused Protection” (protect the elderly and the vulnerable and let everyone else get on with life), was launched in October and the lockdown zealots have been doing their best to discredit it ever since. If you googled it a week after launch, the top hits were three smear pieces from the Guardian, including: “Herd immunity letter signed by fake experts including ‘Dr Johnny Bananas’.” (Freddie Sayers at UnHerd warned us about this the day before it appeared.) On the bright side, Google UK has stopped shadow banning it, so the actual Declaration now tops the search results – and Toby’s Spectator piece about the attempt to suppress it is among the top hits – although discussion of it has been censored by Reddit. In February, Facebook deleted the GBD’s page because it “goes against our community standards”. The reason the zealots hate it, of course, is that it gives the lie to their claim that “the science” only supports their strategy. These three scientists are every bit as eminent – more eminent – than the pro-lockdown fanatics so expect no let up in the attacks. (Wikipedia has also done a smear job.)
You can find it here. Please sign it. Now over three quarters of a million signatures.
Update: The authors of the GBD have expanded the FAQs to deal with some of the arguments and smears that have been made against their proposal. Worth reading in full.
Update 2: Many of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration are involved with new UK anti-lockdown campaign Recovery. Find out more and join here.
Update 3: You can watch Sunetra Gupta set out the case for “Focused Protection” here and Jay Bhattacharya make it here.
Update 4: The three GBD authors plus Prof Carl Heneghan of CEBM have launched a new website collateralglobal.org, “a global repository for research into the collateral effects of the COVID-19 lockdown measures”. Follow Collateral Global on Twitter here. Sign up to the newsletter here.
Judicial Reviews Against the Government
There are now so many legal cases being brought against the Government and its ministers we thought we’d include them all in one place down here.
The Simon Dolan case has now reached the end of the road. The current lead case is the Robin Tilbrook case which challenges whether the Lockdown Regulations are constitutional, although that case, too, has been refused permission to proceed. There’s still one more thing that can be tried. You can read about that and contribute here.
The GoodLawProject and three MPs – Debbie Abrahams, Caroline Lucas and Layla Moran – brought a Judicial Review against Matt Hancock for failing to publish details of lucrative contracts awarded by his department and it was upheld. The Court ruled Hancock had acted unlawfully.
Then there’s John’s Campaign which is focused specifically on care homes. Find out more about that here.
There’s the GoodLawProject and Runnymede Trust’s Judicial Review of the Government’s award of lucrative PPE contracts to various private companies. You can find out more about that here and contribute to the crowdfunder here.
Scottish Church leaders from a range of Christian denominations have launched legal action, supported by the Christian Legal Centre against the Scottish Government’s attempt to close churches in Scotland for the first time since the the Stuart kings in the 17th century. The church leaders emphasised it is a disproportionate step, and one which has serious implications for freedom of religion.” Further information available here.
There’s the class action lawsuit being brought by Dr Reiner Fuellmich and his team in various countries against “the manufacturers and sellers of the defective product, PCR tests”. Dr Fuellmich explains the lawsuit in this video. Dr Fuellmich has also served cease and desist papers on Professor Christian Drosten, co-author of the Corman-Drosten paper which was the first and WHO-recommended PCR protocol for detection of SARS-CoV-2. That paper, which was pivotal to the roll out of mass PCR testing, was submitted to the journal Eurosurveillance on January 21st and accepted following peer review on January 22nd. The paper has been critically reviewed here by Pieter Borger and colleagues, who also submitted a retraction request, which was rejected in February.
And last but not least there was the Free Speech Union‘s challenge to Ofcom over its ‘coronavirus guidance’. A High Court judge refused permission for the FSU’s judicial review on December 9th and the FSU has decided not to appeal the decision because Ofcom has conceded most of the points it was making. Check here for details.
Samaritans
If you are struggling to cope, please call Samaritans for free on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email jo@samaritans.org or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch. Samaritans is available round the clock, every single day of the year, providing a safe place for anyone struggling to cope, whoever they are, however they feel, whatever life has done to them.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the past 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. Doing these daily updates is hard work (although we have help from lots of people, mainly in the form of readers sending us stories and links). If you feel like donating, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links we should include in future updates, email us here. (Don’t assume we’ll pick them up in the comments.)
And Finally…
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Superb analysis, as always.
You are easily misled. Go and look at the actual facts.
And who are you.. rayc.. with knobs on. ???
No; rayc with no brain
Just made for you, rayc…
“Go and look at the actual facts”
Give every one a clue as to where to look.
They don’t because they can’t.
It’s a bloody disgrace. If it’s shoddy work by incompetent people, then they need a kick to the place where they normally apply loo paper, followed by a warning to shape up, and if they don’t, a P45 and directions to the Exit door.
If it’s done on purpose, then it’s criminal deceit, and it’s high time the people supposedly in charge of this packed up the spin and terrorism games, and dealt with those responsible for this fear-mongering and lying in the manner described above. If they don’t, then it’s plain they can’t run a whelk stall, let alone a country with 60-odd million inhabitants and billions of pounds spent on “services” and “the pandemic”.
The trouble with the politicians is that most aren’t very intelligent, and their minds, such as they are, run in tram lines. The medics and paper-pushing administrators are no better. The miasma of total dishonesty and scheming for their own ends envelops them all, like a poison gas cloud.
“If it’s shoddy work by incompetent people, then they need a kick to the place where they normally apply loo paper, followed by a warning to shape up, and if they don’t, a P45 and directions to the Exit door.”
Of course they do, but this is the public sector!
Which means they’ll be promoted to another job somewhere else in the taxpayers’ money wasting public sector
“It’s a bloody disgrace. “
yes it is another very misleading article.
How about you put up some solid facts to counteract it, or shut up?
A full explanation would help your view no end….
Have you ever heard of the phrase “Better to keep quiet and let people think you’re an idiot than to open your mouth and prove the point”?
I think the “Incompetent People” have had the boot of public opinion applied to their arses enough times for that to be a sufficient warning. Sign of the times that the Doctor from the BMJ can deliberately be disingenuous – OK, lie – and not fear for her professional status. For me, this is as dangerous as any pathogenic risk of “the virus”; so called professional people with a “higher calling” abandoning their Hippocratic oath and overall ethical imperative; how can “they” ever be trusted ….again?
The GloboCap plan has always been to destroy legacy welfare and healthcare safety nets:
https://twitter.com/SubjectAccesss/status/1484907250821046273?s=20
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/red-pill-or-blue-pill-variants-inflation-and-the-controlled-demolition-of-society/
Be seeing you…
Having worked within the NHS such low numbers in ICU at this time of year are probably causing consternation.
Senior figures at hospitals and health boards have got no need to worry – the backhanders will still flow in from the equipment suppliers.
They are low at the trust I work at. As are covid cases. That is the reality. Yet still we are on high alert and routine admissions cancelled again.
You mean they are 75% full….
The actual number of empty CC care beds is 645 for England. The lowest number since October.
Irrelevant. The article is about occupancy in a January month.
Pay no heed.. its a 77th starter without stabilisers fitted..
An apprentice Tobias Elwood with no parliamentary seat?
Spoiler alert – “its winter Jim, but not as we know it”
If you were anywhere close to being “even handed”, you might point out the twin follies of a mass testing regime directly leading to a very significant reduction in staffing levels through isolation – involving staff from a setting which is dually responsible for the majority of acquired coral infections and therefore some of these people are likely to be CV19 recovered as per the Consultant saying just that to Javed – and the threat to further reduce staffing numbers by sacking those who wish to determine what goes into their bodies…
But you aren’t capable of seeing that, are you?
BTW, in case you splutter “prove it, how do you know that”, TOH is career NHS and she has told me this for ….2 years…..and she no lie.
Yes, they won’t have expected the extra time available for their Tik Tok rehearsals
As possible causes for the reduction in ICU numbers:
The latter may be the biggie.
Government “health” policy is now closely bound up with public relations propaganda, and those in the critical community need to get a grasp of the sheer extent of its schizoid character. While the authorities (political, “medical”, “shientiffick” and otherwise) are saying on the open level
“We love you so much, we care about your health, all we want is for you plebs to be healthy, healthy, healthy – and telling you to stay cooped up and to wear masks hurts us more than it hurts you, but we have your best interests at heart“,
what they are saying on a deeper level is
“When you’re sick, you can f*** right off. We’re f***ed if we’re going to let scum like you swan around thinking you’ve got any rights, whether you’re gasping for air, have got pain in your bodies, are about to croak, would like to spend time at your dying progenitors’ bedsides, or what the f*** ever.”
There are millions of people in the country who know damned well this is true – they know it from their own experiences over the past two years.
My God this is bad.
Now covid makes you invisible.
Quick lock it all down.
But hospital ICU beds are overflowing with selfish intubated unvaxxed and keeping decent people unable to get into ICU or hospital – must be true because that’s what the sheep continue to believe and say.
At least you know what you are.
I rather think you overlooked the sarc in Alkanet’s message.
No… I just look for small fragments of hope in the insane ramblings of fools.
Better get back to your mates in the barracks then.. maybe you’ll find something there..
Not far to look then, rat.
Have you been missing your psychiatry outpatient appointments?
Not much point in you re-reading your own posts …..
Unlike you, who seems to think you are “rational”.
Well duh! Of course he did; he’s a first-rate buffoon, but a politician no less. Will the appeased thank him for it? You bet they will.
Is there an honest break down of vaxxed v unvaxxed in hospital, ICU and dying for England at this time?
By honest I mean not using the two week post booster injection window as a time where any negative covid outcome is chalked up in the unvaxxed column?
Excellent shredding of UK Goverment agency ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ lies by Norman Fenton, Joel Smalley et al https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357778435_Official_mortality_data_for_England_suggest_systematic_miscategorisation_of_vaccine_status_and_uncertain_effectiveness_of_Covid-19_vaccination
Thanks, I’ll have a look.
A propos of politicians being made aware of these data, so that they at least know what’s going on beyond the lying, hyperbole etc. is there any tested way of getting it to them? I doubt any are DS readers.
Go and have a look at the actual data. It is published by the NHS.
You will find actual numbers and be able to see the trend.
If you do that you will learn that the number of empty critical care beds was 645 on 18 January, for England. You will also see that this is the lowest number since the beginning of October 2021.
Every time you see one of the Will Jones misleading articles (all of them), you can do this.
If you just swallow what is written, you are being his victim.
Go on look at the data, you will find I am correct.
You are completely missing the point. Deliberately, I think.
The point being made is the low occupancy for a January.
The fact that there might be more beds occupied than since October is irrelevant to that point.
We also had empty hospitals right in the middle of the supposed ‘worse pandemic in 100 years’.
Covid is certainly setting records. Its proving to be one of the biggest acts of mass deception in 100 years.
No you didn’t.
You know it isn’t true.
He’s using ’empty’ as a relative term, not an absolute one.
So, you are being silly.
And being anything but rational.
Reading reports like this makes my blood boil. It has been said before but bears repeating, the pathogen is the government with their toxic, dysfunctional machinery, and they are destroying the well-being of the nation and the people in it.
Instead of believing the garbage written, go and look at the actual data.
It’s available. You call yourselves sceptics, but never ask questions.
Don’t just believe… check it out yourself.
I thought you might be along, and here you are. A more patient poster than me has already debunked your nonsense below, so it just remains for me to add, you are an idiot, go and troll somewhere else.
Don’t feed the troll. It satisfies their narcissism.
Might have helped if ‘other opinions’ were seriously considered instead of sticking with those with Funding agendas. Still can’t believe Ferguson’s modelling was given 100% credibility.
Just because he’d been a bit OTT every time before was no reason not to go tonto again. There’s tradition to be upheld, you know.
Emotion should reign.
Try thinking instead.
How come so many ICU beds are empty and not filled with elective surgeries? Because no staff. Either they left the profession or have been told to go home to isolate themselves?
What is the current policy? One cannot keep up, and every trust will have a different approach.
I would say as in Germany at least half of the hospitals are now owned by shareholding companies, this would not happen, as these beds need to make money!
Be careful what you wish for.
Pharma has lots of products that ‘need to make money’ and it is critical for them for there to be lots of sick people to achieve that end.
“Covid vaccines are helpful in reducing severe disease and death”.
Perhaps the “in-house doctor” who wrote this article (an excellent article apart from the above statement) can point to a study that confirms his statement so we can check on it’s veracity?
Do you have some rational reason for disagreeing with
“Covid vaccines are helpful in reducing severe disease and death”.
Yes, its untrue.
Simple irrational. How can it be possible for there to be more covid related deaths in the uk post vaccine then before if they are so wonderfully effective at preventing severe disease and death? And that with more knowledge and better therapeutics and a less severe strains. How can it be the same in the US and many other countries?
How can there be proffesional statisticians that have analysed the ons data and found there to be no clear indication of all cause mortality reduction from the vaccines if they are so wonderfully effective and have saved hundreds of thousands of lives according to the clowns in the gov and msm? The data would be irrefutable if that were true.
And on a side note, how can it be the case that we are told the booster reduces transmission, for a period of time at least, and yet every age group over 30 is showing higher ‘case’ rates then unvaccinated? far worse in 2 doses. How can that be possible?
How is it possible for there to be peaks in all cause mortality for each older age group in 2021 coinciding with the vaccine rollouts rather then historically being at the same point in winter?
How is it possible for 80% of all covid related deaths since august being double/triple vaxxed if they are so wonderfully effective? Surely it should be 80% unvaxxed.
I could go on and on.
Don’t use logic to try to convince someone who thinks they are rational but clearly is the polar opposite. It won’t work.
Don’t feed the troll. The thread ends up being filled crap about it.
Thanks for that!
Yes.
I’ve asked you before to provide a paper or study that shows Covid “vaccines” reduce hospitalizations or death and I’m still waiting so I can show that it is flawed.
People keep saying the jabs are working against Covid hospitalisation and death but are they really and at what cost to the future health of the jabbed?
Viruses have a natural trajectory of their own with little deviation from interventions.
Perceived success of a “vaccination” program may instead be due to natural herd immunity (without any adverse side effects).
The jabs briefly increase anti-bodies to the spike protein but NOT to other parts of the virus.
Soon after being jabbed people’s immune systems are compromised and they are more susceptible to viruses for a couple of weeks.
Every country that started a jab program had a sharp increase in infections, hospitalisation and deaths that coincided with the program.
Studies have shown negative effectiveness of those jabbed compared to the unjabbed.
Long term, due to Original Antigenic Sin, Antibody Dependent Enhancement, Vaccine Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome etc. plus all the other possible side effects from the experimental jab including myocarditis people will be potentially more ill from the jab than they would be from Covid.
There are rogue batches of the jabs which are causing the most harm. People are playing Russian roulette with their lives depending on which batch they are jabbed with of which they have no choice.
Around the world the number of reports of injuries and death from the jabs has been horrendous.
Many studies show natural immunity is better than jab induced immunity.
Pathologists have done autopsies where 90% of the people died directly from internal injuries caused by the jabs.
We really need to challenge the notion that these experimental jabs are helping to curb hospitalisations and death from Covid even in the vulnerable.
“The jabs briefly increase anti-bodies to the spike protein but NOT to other parts of the virus” – I think that is too tough a concept for any vaccine zealot, especially when the spike protein induced may not be the version that attacks with infection by the “whole” variant. I think you might have to explain the spectrum of antigens with a virus…..unless, of course, I have got hold of the wrong end of the RNA strand, quite possibly.
I am jabbed due to being immune compromised – a very very tough decision and only made after intense personal self doubt. I now know that Pfizer jab 1, was from a batch with the highest deaths, adverse effects and hospitilisations as detailed on the ‘net. I think I may have dodged a FMJ bullet here, for the 3rd time, 6 to go.
Conversation with GP about D-Dimer tests was very fraught ; she totally refused to sanction such a test, stating that there would have to be cast iron evidence of a health issue before they would do it; when I pointed out that at that point it might be a tad late (and I reminded her about the lack of early CV19 treatments had led to many deaths, NHS ICU/Staff crushing pressure – did not like that one iota) and now the RCOGP is calling for a halt to the NHS vaccine mandate…..I wonder why..
I now take the widest spectrum of vits and minerals to boost my immune system. Somehow, I doubt the “Rational Zealot” has had to go through that process….again I might be wrong.
The said waxines also destroy millions of people’s jobs, mental health, education, society, marriages, cancer survival chances, democracy, rights and freedoms, etc.
In other words, the cure is worse than the disease.
Wake up, if you’re rational!
Do you have some rational reason for disagreeing with, say, “unapproved, minimally trialled, experimental use only authorised gene therapies have caused thousands of post post jab deaths, tens of thousands of adverse events principally but not wholly due to induced clotting with unknown long term consequences, significant increases in deaths in male under 20’s” ?
Have you read how the CDC admitted they fraudulently massaged the enforced trials into how pregnant women have been affected – discovered by two NZ doctors; still reckon these vaccines are “helpful” – or the fact that the post jab deaths from these vaccines, in the US, have far exceeded the total deaths drug trials in the last 30 years (as per Drs Cole, McCullough and others have, for you, very inconveniently pointed out)?
Or are you the most recently recruited Nudge Unit “useful idiot” zealot ? May I suggest if you are so brainwashed, a relocation to Israel may suit your “helpful vaccine” persona; there you can have jabs 5, 6, 7 and more and still help medical research by becoming another number in their ICU wards – or maybe that data has passed you by – difficult to see with blinkers on.
Will there ever be a reckoning?
No, there will be a fudging, there may even be an enquiry, a whitewash of course, and some politician will come out with a sound bite or two, and we’ll all move on. And an approximation of some of the truth will trickle out over 2 or 3 decades. And former establishment figures accused of crimes like Tony Blair for example will continue to walk the streets and rake in money. That’s what usually happens.
In June 2020 I had the misfortune of being admitted to hospital for a serious asthma attack. I spent three days in ICU, followed by four days on a respiratory ward. The ward was one of about 12 on an entire floor. When I left ICU it was literally empty. Not a soul there at all. On the respiratory floor, there was just two of us. Not in the ward, but on the whole floor. Obviously there was a full compliment of staff – including six physiotherapists!
We both left on the same day, leaving the place completely empty.
How can it have been empty, if there were 2 people in it?
Why don’t you look at the data before writing twaddle?
There were zero in ICU and 2 in the respiratory floor.
Zero in ICU = empty ICU.
Two people on the respiratory floor left on the same day.
2 – 2 = 0, i.e. empty.
Rational,
I would suggest you re-read the post from fractaltrader. He clearly states that it was empty when he and his fellow patient left the ward.
Please read and understand before replying. You will not rally anybody to your cause if you continue to misinterpret / misunderstand other posters. It just annoys everybody.
Doesn’t annoy me……..I just laugh at the chunt
“We both left on the same day, leaving the place completely empty”
If you find that tough to assimilate, I suggest you seek urgent medical intervention; it concerns me that you may require treatment.
And I am not joking or being sarcastic.
Halfway through reading this, I had a sudden urge to check out how things looked over at the Grauniad, where I feared the bedwetting would be unabated.
The sheets were soaked.
Fearless investigative journalism indeed!
So the statement of “One quarter of ICU beds are empty” is easy to understand, even for the idiots who read this blog.
It actually also means that only one quarter are available.
Now let’s find out what that means.. the data is published, so you don’t need to believe the “in house doctor” as an author on this site cannot be considered neutral.
on 18 January, there were 645 unoccupied critical care beds in England. The lowest number since October 2021.
If you want to know if an article is misleading look for the words “Will Jones”
Your tripe continues to be really easy to rebut: Your statement is only one quarter [of ICU beds] is available. The only suggests that this an unusually low number. But such occupancy numbers are meaningless unless one also knows how many of these would usually be occupied during this time of the year. According to the article, the usual occupancy towards end of January ought to be 90% and not 75%. Hence, you’re misleadingly framing an unsually low number as unusually high number.
Nobody knows what your second statement is supposed to refer to. I meant, you can’t really try to compare ICU occupancy during a spell of cold in the middle of winter with occupancy numbers in the middle of an unusually mild, almost summery fall, can you?
NB: I’m writing this mostly because I consider the off-hand intellectual exercise amusing. Any attempts to draw me into a flaming conquest by hurtling insults at me will be futile.
I think ‘rational’ is being deliberately dense.
Troll activity.
It is probably one of those pretend soldiers from the 77th brigade.
Go easy on ‘it’.. it’s first time swimming without arm bands..
It’s spluttering a lot, and bloviating, out of its depth probably.
Clearly you have zero understanding of how hospitals are run. If approx 23% of ICU beds are AVAILABLE, this in itself is highly unusual for this time of the year. I concur with other commentators on this forum who state that the normal available ratio for ICU beds is about 5%.
I would suggest you check the MSM headlines which were published for the last 20 years stating that the NHS was in danger of collapsing. Well I hate to disappoint you but it is still here, notwithstanding it urgently needs whole scale reform from the top down.
surely if there was ever a case crying wolf…. This is it.
“Absence of influenza for the second year in a row”
This, of course, raises the question of how much severe respiratory disease is actually ‘Covid’
No I beg to differ, the real question is, when they actively prevent hospital treatments less people die, why’s that?
Or perhaps ‘Covid’ is a cure for the flu?!!
It’s not down to any lack of demand for ICU. My stepmother (otherwise very healthy and still walking up hills) could do with a heart operation pretty quick so she doesn’t drop dead. Likely she’ll take up a bit of ICU after that.
Guess what – the operation had been delayed due to NHS self isolation rules taking staff off work which has screwed their planning. The reason there aren’t people in ICU because they aren’t treating people who might need ICU for a little while.
It’s just more madness. Heart operations just aren’t important any more. None of the top 10 causes of death are even worth a thought. What’s covid on the list now – still top 20?
I don’t want to look after my dad because my work is 400 miles away. My stepmother does the job really well and could still outlive him if she is allowed the operation.
A modern Communism does not require a Marxist ideology, politics, or economy.
A State Health Service is all that is required, because the modern currency is choice and consumption – which can be delegated to the citizens, especially with technology.
A State Health Service replaces priesthood, justice, law, and ideology. It asserts and propagandises that it alone can PREVENT DEATH: the final frontier, the only fear, once conscience and faith is destroyed.
This is a lie, the Big Lie, the total lie, within Covidianism. The NHS can ‘stop you dying’.
We have a society of degenerates bound together by self-interest and Salvation at the point of a needle, delivered by the priests in white coats.
They might offer cures and delay some deaths, but they can never give the meaning, faith, hope, and love that CONQUERS DEATH. Only God can do that. Only God can raise a person up to die for another – and die well, as opposed to clinging to a morbid half-life of the Covidian zombie, terrified of ‘death’ and judgement.
This is the malaise at the heart of it all. With sawbones and SS Dentists now the arbiters of Salvation. And it doesn’t even work, does it? Neither medically, socially, politically, nor spiritually.
When ‘mere life’ is what you want at all costs, you will sacrifice your whole civilisation to keep that mummies’ eternity on earth.
Excellent!
Sadly the Government can deny,manipulate the ICU occupancy and the sheep will gurgle it like a $20 Hooker.
A thought has occurred to me, what is the history of ICU, when was the idea conceived (intensive care) how has it evolved, specifically time frame & technology. I’m guessing it’s relatively new in terms of technology 15-20 years.
What i’m getting at is what did the human race do for the other 230,000 years! I’m thinking we didn’t put off a mammoth hunt in case there were no ICU beds available, just in case.
I know who I blame, fffing socialist liberals, man up, end this health & safety culture take responsibility for yourself .
No messing around, Croatian MEP Mislav Kolakušić addressing French president Emmanuel Macron in the EU Parliament macron the mass murderer.
Brilliant!!
For context:
10 years of Gaurdian Headlines showing winter NHS crisis
https://ibb.co/ws0NctQ
Annual flu/respiratory figures
https://ibb.co/Vt67yWz
What pandemic?
Jon Gaunt on the attack now and backtrack
He disgraced himself
I don’t follow this guy but he did himself zero favours on Neil Oliver’s show last night.
Perhaps the excess mortality of the past two years means there aren’t enough “customers” for ICU beds.
Would it also be useful to see the absolute numbers of ICU bed capacity, regardless of occupancy, from year to year, especially with the isolating induced staff shortages of the last two years?
Do NHS Trusts reduce ICU bed numbers if there is no staff to “man” them? Even to a non statistician like me, I can see all manner of number tricks to distort the “data” here…
Medical clinics and hospitals in USA are denying life-saving Ivermectin medicine even with court orders. Big Pharma doing all that they can to push the vaxx and inoculate us while effective and cheap COVID cures exist. There turns out to be censorship that we have never seen before for those who are looking for these treatments. We say over and over again that indepenedent researchers found Ivermectin safe and very effective for these Flu-Corona symptoms. Getting Ivermectin is easy https://ivmpharmacy.com
Please watch Planet Lockdown The Documentary a thorough explanation of the plandemic. The BBC continues to be dishonest in their reporting. Turn them off. They serve no purpose other than to stoke fear. They refuse to report with integrity, clarity and honesty. I guess you could say the same about this gov’t.
The best one can say of the predictions of doom is that they were made by false prophets. I have said from almost the beginning that the experts are the wrong experts. Dealing with a disease requires doctors with sharp end experience, not statisticians, mathematical modellers or even dare one say epidemiologists.
False profits surely.
One cannot now consider reporting by the BBC to be objective; it is simply the propaganda arm of government.
The UK MSM received money from the government to pimp the fear porn as proposed by the SPI-B Nudge Unit. Bill Gates threw even more money around.
An interesting point to note about malaria risks in children due to lack of immunity is the importance of breastfeeding which has been undermined over many years by corrupt pharmaceutical companies promoting formula milk. Breast milk provides essential and lasting immunity which protects children while their own immune systems are developing. Supporting and promoting breastfeeding is the elephant in the room when it comes to health promotion.