Thorntons is the latest major high street victim of the Government’s lockdowns, announcing the closure of its 61 stores. 600 jobs are likely to be lost as a result. The Guardian has the story.
The Thorntons brand will remain on offer in supermarkets and other retailers, while its factory in Alfreton, Derbyshire, will make more chocolate for international markets.
The 600 staff whose jobs are at risk will receive relocation support if they apply successfully for vacancies at Thorntons’ sites in Alfreton or Greenford in west London, the company said.
Coronavirus pandemic lockdowns have hit Thorntons particularly hard because they have occurred during its peak times, including Christmas and two consecutive Easters.
The closures will represent the latest departure of a longstanding high-street name. Thorntons blamed the changing dynamics of the high street and the shift to online retail, as well as the pandemic, for its decision.
Thorntons was already struggling before the pandemic. In the year to the end of August 2019 it reported a loss of £36 million, only a slight improvement from the £38 million loss the year before.
Joseph Thornton founded the company in Sheffield, using the slogan “Chocolate heaven since 1911”. It floated on the stock market in 1987, but has since struggled with competition from international rivals.
Thorntons was bought in 2015 by Ferrero, the Italian chocolate manufacturer, in a £112 million deal. At the time of the buyout Thorntons ran 242 stores in Britain and Ireland.
The chocolate retailer was clearly already struggling before 2020, but lockdown struck the final blow.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Yes, very suspicious. Because they made it. In China.
God knows why.
It’s not to any extent clear the US did. Electronic surveillance is extremely powerful and pervasive and knowing what I know about it, the hole in the argument this article puts forward I s that it is not just feasible, but for me, expected, the US and U.K. administrations would have known about this from communication pattern detection from a very early point. Not to mention there was a lot of researcher to researcher joint project communication. Further given the way surveillance systems work versus work/power hierarchies it also, to my mind feasible (less likely but still nevertheless perfectly feasible) the US and U.K. would have known first before the CCP because within an authoritarian hierarchy there is more defensive shielding before reporting to the upper layers and that is because there is fear about presenting a wrong picture (witness the carefully worded emails around the order for a new air filtration system for the lab in late 2019 and, for a more extreme case the denial of reality in the USSR regime relating to Chernobyl) The same reluctance can even include state security apparatus. this second point though is just for context because of course, there is a difference between the CCP knowing and the CCP publicly acknowledging they know, so the point isn’t essential to the argument anyway.
Of course none of this rules out what could be taken to be implied by this article, but sorry, IMO the information we have carries no such implication (nor contradicts it).
BTW in saying “knowing what I know” I’m not in any way claiming or hinting inside knowledge or any kind of secret squirrel status – I don’t like it when commenters big up their credentials with hinted expertise they don’t really have. I’m just speaking as someone who has dealt with technology throughout his life.
Hmm. All valid points. But we know (and knew from the beginning, those with common sense anyway) that SARS-CoV-2 was no worse than a bad winter flu. So exactly what led US “Intelligence” to act as if something dangerous was happening in China cannot have been a real life signal.
“…wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images…” Rubbish, in other words.
The real reason they came to believe it was dangerous was because of what enough of them thought they already knew about what was happening in Wuhan (GoF research) and the involvement therein of Daszak, Fauci et al.
That has always been the most convincing theory. I don’t buy the cockup story, but neither do I believe it was part of the Great Reset (though I have no doubt lots of those bastards were chuffed when it happened and have seized the moment).
Yes, I am sure that once the outbreak was underway, US intelligence would have had known about it through the kind of surveillance that you mentioned.
The problem, though, is that the US intelligence reports were of an outbreak in mid November, which is not only weeks before anyone in China seems to have known, but weeks before the outbreak actually happened.
The estimated date of the first infection in Wuhan is November 18th. The date of the first known patient (patient zero) is December 1st.
Thus, the author is asking how US intelligence seemingly had prior knowledge of the outbreak.
The only thing missing is how Bill Gates fits in to this.
I’ve been round this a thousand times in my head. There is a case to be made for a deliberate release and if so, then the Yanks would be at the top of my list of suspects. In this scenario the Chinese are the patsies, which would work well for the US biosecurity state for a number of reasons.
The biggest problem with this scenario in my mind is one of calibration. To create a Goldilocks virus (not too deadly to put the lives of the creators at risk but deadly enough to cause a panic) would require a lot of testing in humans. It is hard to imagine how this might have taken place, even covertly. Having said that, these people are maniacs so perhaps they just trusted their models and went for it.
The biggest thing that for me that doesn’t fit is why release a virus no more deadly than seasonal flu (as John Ioannidis’s latest IFR analysis on latest data indicate)? But maybe that’s just because, thanks to being a lockdown sceptic, I must be a rabid right winger who doesn’t care if anyone dies and so would have no sense of jeopardy or that such a mild virus could prove useful to a globalist agenda..
Is it possible that they underestimated the average human immune system?
I heard about it from a Wall streeter in early November. How did he know? I asked what the hell was a Corona? He said some flu from China that will shut down the economy. I laughed. I wasn’t laughing in March 2020. How does Wall Street know about this in early Nov and yet it is not official until Jan 2020?
All planned is why. CIA-Pharma op. With a purpose. Just a pilot project for the Climate Thingy and Scamdemic 2.
We must have had the same contact/s. I heard about it Nov 2019 and dismissed it. Then I became increasingly worried as authorities began their increasingly ridiculous reactions and the politicians found an excuse to run around “saving” everyone. And here we are!
So you guys heard about it from some Wall St guy in November, but no one in China seemed to mention it anywhere. There were no social media posts. No rumours. No gossip. No leaks. Nothing. Seems incredible.
When I read this sort of thing I ask myself the question, how many “threats” does US Intelligence track on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and how many does it issue warnings about?
I genuinely don’t know, but my guess is many. And in a “cover your arse” world like the one we live in, I fully expect that anything that could escalate to a bigger threat would be reported to someone at some stage, just so nobody can say – how come this wasn’t brought up sooner?
I have clear memories during the years after 9/11 of potential terrorist threats being announced regularly most of which came to nothing.
I mean, the job of these people is to scan the globe looking for threats. Any kind. Maybe on this one occasion one of the many things they flagged actually turned into the mother of all shit storms.
Just a thought.
Yes agree. They do see A LOT. When they “miss” something like this it is usually not that they “missed” it at all but because they have so much data they failed understand it would turn into something big and prioritise it. There is very limited time and few items the higher ups can handle at once, so extreme filtering and selection is required. That is where it’s easy to get things wrong. But yes, the authorities would have had this information and it could very easily be something they got right.
All horribly plausible, but for me I think a step too far down the rabbit hole. And would they not have wanted to have a “safe and effective” vaccine ready before they released the engineered virus?
Yep. Original “conspiracy theory” is adequate. They were messing around with viruses like kids play with lego, because they were fascinated with how they work and coming up with excuses for getting paid to do this kind of stuff. They were rationalising excuses for why, despite the fact that due to the number of prior leaks it is a self evidently bad idea. Of course there are some legitimate excuses for doing gain of function work on coronaviruses, it’s just that they are not worth the risk. One (that wasn’t particularly deadly), escaped. Wether there are bio warfare aspects to the lab is in this case bye-the-bye. C19 is not nearly deadly enough for either a military application (other than the fact the military will be interested to be sure Chinese researchers are up on how to synthesise viruses) or supporting a WEF depopulation agenda kind of move. If you want authoritarian control, why not do the job properly and make real excuse for locking people down?
I thought the virus couldn’t / hasn’t been isolated ??
A US-initiated leak of the virus seems entirely plausible to me. There’s a huge amount to gain for the US by seeding a virus within China, not least to falter the juggernaut of Chinese technological & economical advancement; to provide, at the very least, a little breathing space while plans are redrawn. If those plans include sweeping socio-economic reforms for the West, then those initiatives can be triggered under the guise of a pandemic and a reset be triggered. All done while pointing the finger at the communists in the East.
Out of every single country in the world, it’s the US I trust the least. The ‘pandemic’ has always had, in my mind at least, their sticky fingers all over it.
Then why were the US trying to hide that it was synthesised, and why release it in the vicinity of a lab where there is a paper trail and public knowledge that you have involvement? Makes no sense. It was a lab accident.
That ratio. Ouch.
‘… deemed a dangerous novel virus in China…’
And a second question, how did they ‘deem’ a mostly harmless virus to be ‘dangerous’? With what were they comparing it?
If CoV 2 is ‘dangerous’ what describes the 1917/18 influenza virus or the Ebola virus?
(perhaps they’d tried before with a less infectious virus and it hadn’t worked so well)
Bill Gates: “We’ll have to prepare for the next one…”
So the virus was reportedly spreading just days after EVENT201 ‘exercise’ concluded ‘its proceedings’, so to speak. How conspiratorial.
Great article thanks – lots of questions without much in the way of answers.
As I was reading it I too was coming to think that it pointed to a deliberate release by the US, before I got to the paragraphs discussing this possibility.
But …
What about the Wuhan Lab deleting that file on coronaviruses in September (correct me on date if necessary)? That to me has always been a massive smoking gun. It needs to be accounted for. It seems a most unlikely coincidence.
An alternative hypothesis, which I think fits the facts.
Wuhan Lab is working for the US (via Fauci et al grants). In fact, it’s reporting directly to the US and not to Chinese authorities. The Wuhan scientists become aware of an accidental lab release circa August 2019. They inform their paymasters in the US, but not their ostensible employers in China. US authorities now know what they’re looking for, daren’t tell China, and the rest is history as they say.
I’d welcome comments on this, especially critical ones.
FWIW, I agree with this hypothesis. See my comment above.
It seems to fit with all the known facts.
Although as you point out in your post, I thought it was understood that activities in the Wuhan area were indicative of dealing with an outbreak in. the fall of 2019 – in which case the Chinese authorities must have been aware of there being a new virus around, although not necessarily that it came the lab, with all the concomitant sinister implications.
I continue to have a problem with the deliberate release hypothesis. To release deliberately a man-made pathogen, engineered to be highly infective to humans, would require an unfathomable level of cynicism and evil. And to what end? What purpose could realistically be achieved by it?
I know some would answer ‘total world-wide control’, Bond villain style. But there was never any prospect of that, and I can’t think that anyone (lots of people in fact) in their right mind tempted to release the virus would think this a tenable end-point.
There’s another problem: it would require a lot of people to be in on the scam, at least some of whom would have baulked at the idea and squealed. I don’t find it plausible, or at least find it very hard to believe, that deliberate release could be kept quiet.
Nope, an accidental release that the Americans knew about before anyone else seems the most likely scenario to me, on what I know. That the Wuhan Lab scientists should have dealt directly with their US paymasters concerning the escape seems plausible, and even attractive, to me – as does the thought that they daren’t let the Chinese authorities know about it.
I see your argument and agree up to a point. Where I disagree is that there would not need to be a lot of people in on the scam. A single lab technician could easily release a pathogen if so inclined or induced. That is the big risk of gain-of-function research.
If you consider Bill Gates’ funding of bat corona-virus research at the Wuhan lab, and his large investment in BioNTech in 2019 , and his hosting of Event 201 in Oct 2019, there is an unavoidable smell to it.
I guess the interest in coronavirus research may be explained by the likelihood that if/when a new respiratory virus ‘epidemic” did emerge naturally then there was a good chance it would be a coronavirus. Plus I think these people have God complexes, and thus just love playing around with genetic sequences which hitherto have been the realm of the Gods, or whatever you want to call it.
The BioNTech investments and Event 201: I actually see these as being supportive of, or at least consistent with, my hypothesis.
The US authorities learn in August 2019 that their lab-created and funded coronavirus has escaped. Collectively they cry ‘SHIT, what are we going to do?’ Two obvious reactions would be: 1. invest immediately and heavily in developing a vaccine; 2. run a wargaming session simulating a new emergent coronavirus epidemic. Gates would be an obvious conduit through which to push these reactions. (It would be interesting to know when the technical specifics of Event 201 were decided upon – a worthwhile line of research I’d have thought.)
Yes, I guess a determined rogue lab-tech could release a pathogen if they were so inclined. But that would be a very different thing from from a high-level orchestrated deliberate release, with the agenda of world domination or world depopulation, as some are claiming. A rouge lab-tech release would in my book be more akin to an accidental release – the mechanism of the accident being that the lab-tech had gone mad.
I’m not saying you are wrong. That might be exactly what happened. Just if you follow the money Bill Gates made half a billion on his BioNTech investment from a virus probably created with the help of his own money. It is suspicious.
Yes, nice work if you can get it. The Gates BioNTech investment needs probing, and my guess is that sooner or later it will be under oath.
Accidental leak or intentional, they are culpable either way.
This would answer another niggle – why would you locate a lab doing cutting edge gain-of-function research in the middle of a big, bustling, city?
Also, maybe the lab reported problems to both their masters, but the scientists in the US were more conscious of the risks than their political masters in the CCP.
Right so you’re saying the CCP wasn’t aware of the risks that a SARS-like virus may pose. Mm, cool.
You have left out a couple of indications that Covid was circulating even earlier in China.
I once read a report that the region of Wuhan increased their purchases of viral testing supplies radically in the third quarter of 2019. I also saw US satellite photos of the area around the Wuhan lab which showed pretty clearly the imposition of a 4 km no-go zone centered on the Wuhan lab for a period of roughly two weeks in October 2019.
Both of these reports surfaced in the second quarter of 2020.
It is worth noting that neither of these points is indicative of whether or not the Chinese were aware of the virus as Covid or that it originated in that Wuhan lab. But they could explain the US intelligence reports. I am guessing that the US intelligence community is pretty sensitive about the fact that they are conducting routine surveillance of every square foot of the globe.
It is also worth noting that even if the Chinese were aware of unusual virus activity, it is quite possible that the implications were not understood, at least by the CCP. If Chinese scientists are anything like US scientists and if the virus was a research product that accidentally escaped from the lab, it seems very likely that their first instinct would be to protect their lab and deny anything unusual had happened. So it would not be surprising if the first real indications of coming disaster were the first sequencing of the virus by private labs.
Considering all of the comments, it came to mind this could have been a demonstration to powerful countries of a bioweapon that has been developed. Many countries are hard at work developing bioweapons.
The fact they have developed the skill to enhance any non human virus to make it human transmissable is frightening and they justify gain of function research with reasons they are helping mankind, although it has been banned in US for some reason.
During the Cold War they were quite willing to perform nuclear bomb tests that had fallout and other health risks that threatened the whole planet while demonstrating their weapons and power.