No surge as schools open in the UK, no surge as Texas throws off restrictions, free states like Florida and Georgia doing no worse than lockdown states – is anyone in Government watching the real world or are they too busy gawping at the curves of Neil Ferguson’s latest model?
Jeffrey A. Tucker at AIER has gathered together some of the alarmist predictions made about Texas that have, so far, not come to pass:
- California Governor Gavin Newsom said that opening Texas was “absolutely reckless.”
- Vanity Fair went over the top with this headline: “Republican Governors Celebrate COVID Anniversary With Bold Plan to Kill Another 500,000 Americans.”
- There was the inevitable Dr. Fauci: “It just is inexplicable why you would want to pull back now.”
- Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke of Texas revealed himself to be a full-blown lockdowner: It’s a “big mistake,” he said. “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s also a cult of death.” He accused the Governor of “sacrificing the lives of our fellow Texans… for political gain.”
- James Hamblin, a doctor and writer for the Atlantic, said in a Tweet liked by 20K people: “Ending precautions now is like entering the last miles of a marathon and taking off your shoes and eating several hot dogs.”
- Bestselling author Kurt Eichenwald flipped out: “Goddamn. Texas already has FIVE variants that have turned up: Britain, South Africa, Brazil, New York & CA. The NY and CA variants could weaken vaccine effectiveness. And now idiot @GregAbbott_TX throws open the state.” He further called the Government “murderous.”
- Epidemiologist Whitney Robinson wrote: “I feel genuinely sad. There are people who are going to get sick and die bc of avoidable infections they get in the next few weeks. It’s demoralising.”
- Virus guru Michael Osterholm told CNN: “We’re walking into the mouth of the monster. We simply are.”
- Joe Biden famously said that the Texas decision to open reflected “Neanderthal thinking”.
- The chairman of the state’s Democratic Party said: “What Abbott is doing is extraordinarily dangerous. This will kill Texans. Our country’s infectious-disease specialists have warned that we should not put our guard down, even as we make progress towards vaccinations. Abbott doesn’t care.”
- The CDC’s Rochelle Walensky didn’t mince words: “Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained. I am really worried about reports that more states are rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from COVID-19.”
Are any of these experts and commentators now reconsidering their fundamental assumptions and examining the data? What do you think?
The coronavirus has certainly surprised many of us in the past year, defying expectations by being more deadly in Europe and North and South America than it was in South East Asia, while in Africa and India it surprised by its mildness.
The lazy mainstream assumption that the differences between countries are explained primarily by their restrictions or interventions has not been borne out by any of the studies that have examined the real world data rather than relying on models that bake-in assumptions of lockdown efficacy.
One of those studies, by eminent Stanford scientists Jay Bhattacharya (co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration), John Ioannidis and colleagues, published in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, has come under criticism since it was published at the start of January. The authors have now responded to that criticism, defending their paper in the journal.
It includes some great quotations from these two pillars of the sceptic movement.
Some suggest that New Zealand’s effective control can be ascribed to its highly restrictive lockdowns. That opinion, unfortunately, has no evidence to support it beyond the anecdotal. As of March 2021, the highest death rates globally have occurred in countries that used prolonged and very restrictive measures, while the lowest death rates occurred in countries with more diverse responses. This is of course no proof of the futility of lockdowns, but it does call into question any claims of a much-worse counterfactual with less restrictive measures.
Experience from past pandemics has shown vast differences in disease spread across different locations, irrespective of measures taken, and we are seeing the same variability with COVID-19. Ignoring these plain-to-see epidemiologic patterns is a disservice to public health and society.
They did admit to one mistake – which actually made their case stronger.
We note that, by mistake, we cumulated the case counts for the Netherlands twice. Correcting this, the trend for the Netherlands points more strongly to enhanced case spread with more restrictive measures (0.08 (0.00-0.17) versus Sweden and 0.13 (-0.11-0.37) versus South Korea.
They do not think much of the models popular among lockdowners, which typically beg the question by assuming what they are trying to prove.
An underlying theme in the letters is that COVID-19’s epidemic trajectories have been difficult to characterise, and have traced trajectories that often seem disconnected from the policies aimed at modifying these trajectories. … The past year has revealed puzzling patterns of epidemic dynamics that have defied models that attribute much epidemic control to policies. At the time of this writing, cases and deaths are declining across most locations, despite models’ predictions to the contrary.
This points to a more generalised and pernicious challenge: how should NPI [non-pharmaceutical intervention] effects be studied? Simulation models are clearly problematic because their results are a direct function of input assumptions. Observational studies, especially using causal inference methods, have advantages. However, when the underlying dynamics are non-linear and the policies are deeply endogenous, as in this case, attribution is precarious. This limitation is shared by all observational assessments of NPI effects.
They conclude that the scientific literature does not support the use of lockdowns, the harms of which are known and large whereas the benefits are unproven and, on current evidence, weak-to-non-existent.
In all, we maintain that the science plausibly supports beneficial, null, or harmful impacts on epidemic outcomes of highly restrictive measures, such as mandatory stay-at-home and business closures. Given their many uncontestable harms to health and society, we believe that the extant literature does not provide strong support for their effectiveness at reducing case spread, and should be subjected to careful, critical, and rigorous evaluation. If the benefits of such measures are negligible (or worse), their perpetuation may be, on balance, detrimental to the health of the public.
Worth reading in full, as is Jeffrey Tucker’s piece in AIER on Texas and the open states.
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This was clearly a very poor attempt to justify a policy which has been an abject failure, even before we consider all of the damage caused by vaccine adverse reactions, and to “roll the pitch” for future vaccine programmes.
It’s interesting that another model, created by the government in April 2020, which estimated that 200,000 people may die in the short to medium term from the effects of lockdowns, has received no attention at all and in fact only saw the light of day three months later thanks to dogged work by a handful of Parliamentarians.
https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/20/coronavirus-lockdown-cause-200000-extra-deaths-13014848/
Some “models” are more equal than others, evidently.
The other point to make that given the tendency ot the virus to be most deadly for the elderly with comorbidities, any lives “saved” by the vaccines are likely to have been deaths delayed by a relatively short period.
Whereas many deaths caused by lockdowns and delays in medical treatment would have been of people with potentially many more years to live.
Exactly. The death count is somewhat meaningless; it’s Life Years Lost that is the only metric of significance. If we compare LYL from people already close to death, but spared a couple of years by being jabbed, against LYL from lockdown, other inane policies, plus adverse reactions to the shot, then the net cost will be extraordinary. I don’t doubt for a second that they already knew that.
Four letters, apparently forgotten by experts, politicians, medics, the lot:
QALY.
Yes, indeed. Let’s spell it out in full:
QALY =
Quality
Adjusted
Life
Year
It’s what the NHS, before it became the National COVID Service, would use to assess whether a new drug or therapy was good value. What is the cost of giving someone one extra year of full quality life, one someone two years of half quality life etc.?
One QALY was worth around £25-30k but when we’re talking COVID one QALY is worth £millions, more than that, there is no measure at all of the cost of lockdowns, “vaccines” and collateral damage.
We also have the problem – probably now intractable – of defining the nature of those excess deaths, given the criteria for a Covid death was so absurdly loose.
Public Health England were caught in 2018 and exposed by the BMJ and The Guardian (no less) for fabricating flu deaths (up to 50,000, and at the very least a few thousand) from thin air.
That they did this is beyond doubt. That the same people would do the same thing again two years later with far greater motivation and easier conditions is hardly farfetched.
Then you have the now universally accepted fact that lockdowns themselves were responsible for at least a proportion of those deaths – from the effect of anxiety on people with serious health problems to the shutting down of large chunks of the NHS – from consultation to treatment for serious and urgent diseases. During a pandemic when the infection rate was likely far higher than officially recognised, a proportion of these people would have tested positive for Covid, regardless of its role in their decline.
Then further down the rabbit hole you have potential deaths from inappropriate use of ventilators. Though ventilation might have saved lives, it is unknown how many it might have cost, especially when done in an atmosphere of panic.
The same with the use of Midazolam, which was in effect a reinstatement of the ‘Liverpool Care Pathway’ – advocated by some corners of the medical profession and banned after being recognised as too open to incompetence and abuse. Covid raised it up again like a zombie, as can been seen in end of life care guidelines for the use of Midazolam by various NHS trusts in England and Scotland.
These guidelines often recommend administration of a dosage of Midazolam (sometimes in combination with opiates) often likely to be fatal in elderly patients suffering from anxiety and breathing difficulties. The key here is that the decision to administer this drug could be made without clinical diagnosis, on the basis of an opinion of an unqualified health practitioner, outside a clinical setting. This was a recipe for catastrophe. While it’s obviously unlikely that medics would have knowingly committed involuntary euthanasia, it’s quite reasonable to speculate that under a cloud of uncertainty, fear, vast pressure and possibly panic, many might have administered fatal doses to patients who otherwise could have survived. This is especially likely as (as the above link shows), a consequence of midazolam is respiratory depression. A practitioner gives the drug to an anxious, elderly patient with breathing difficulties to help calm them. The drug causes severe breathing difficulties that without proper diagnosis are impossible to distinguish from advanced pneumonia, and the patient then enters ‘end of life care’, leading to another Covid death.
It’s likely we will never know how many of the last two years’ excess deaths could be attributed to these factors. We might get some idea by looking at the excess death statistics for the coming years – if they show an sudden significant drop, then it could be evidence that Covid was only ever dangerous for those who were already in a vulnerable position, and that for most other people, RNA vaccines, rather than saving 500,000 lives, might have been a needless risk.
If you believe vaccines are 90% effective you have to believe that in their absence deaths of the vaccinated would have been about 10x higher, this is an article of faith & can’t really be tested. However, we can look at the unvaccinated & see that their rate of death is not 10x greater than that of the vaccinated, in fact it’s about the same, as shown by ukhsa data up to the point when they stopped publishing it, see week 13 HSA weekly vaccine surveillance report.
Imperial didn’t need to model anything, the data is readily available.
Good point
You say they didn’t need to model anything but that sort of assumes they were looking for the truth rather than looking for data to justify previous models and the policies that they were used to justify
Evidence-based Decision Making
became
Decision-based Evidence Making.
“Did the vaccines save 500,000 lives in the UK?”
Nope.
Did the jabs cut short many peoples lives?
Yep.
“The vaccines did save lives in Britain.”
I doubt that. But I am pretty sure that they (the GTs, there/they are no vaccines) cost more already and dead certain that they will cost many more than they might have saved over time.
It is also very obvious, that they killed Western liberal democracies, and that surely is a price we should not have paid for them.
I’m not convinced that the vaccines have saved more lives that they have claimed. And that is without also counting the life changing injuries.
Well indeed. How can they say the 500,000 would have died if they hadn’t been injected?
It’s a total, utter absence of any logic…
Where did the researchers go wrong? They went wrong when they decided to put their bank balance over science – real science, that is questioned and debated and is never settled, not Pfauci’s pfake science.
Yesterday I heard 2 more stories of people in their 60s who had recently had boosters (4 or 5, not sure which) – one was sick in bed, the other had gone to the doctor with symptoms of severe itching and pain in the legs. Two others in their 60s had said they were so sick after the 3rd shot in the spring that that was the last one they were getting. In other words, for some people the side effects get worse with each shot and it is not just younger people who suffer this problem. How in the world did we get to a situation where people are willing to keep on taking a chemical product that a) has only questionable, temporary effect, b) causes worse side effects with each poke, c) makes you feel so bad you take to your bed for several days or have to visit a doctor, all in a vain attempt to avoid catching a virus that for most people will at worst cause them to take to their bed for several days or visit their GP.
By the way, it is not just that the models exaggerated the effectiveness of the vaxx – they also wildly exaggerated the risk of the virus.
I find that the more jabs someone’s taken the more fearful they seem to be about the disease.
The jabs don’t take away the fear but rather seem to enhance it.
That’s why they keep taking more boosters. They are captured by their fear.
For some that is undoubtedly the case – rather than see the failure of the vaxx as the scam that it is, they see the virus as outwitting us mere humans and our fabulous science at every step, like a monster/killer who keeps coming back to life in a horror movie.
For others I think it is a case of trying to put off having to admit they were conned. I think a lot of people were very hesitant to take the vaxx but did so anyways, many because they either genuinely believed it would protect others, that it would protect themselves, that it would lead to zero covid and an end to outrageous lawbreaking and economic destruction of governments.
Convincing yourself to take a risk for a potential meaningful reward is one thing. To then find out that the risk was worse than you initially feared while the reward was close to non-existent, certainly if you do not keep taking the vaxx – we really are in that territory of people who get scammed by internet ‘love interests’. They know deep down they were conned, but admitting that hurts – not only do you have to face up to having been fooled, you have to give up something that gave you comfort and made you happy. I’ve spoken to several people who claim to be okay about having been vaxxed, but don’t intend to take any more – even though they say they’re okay, you can see some underlying doubt and concern.
It literally doesn’t matter what these studies or models say anymore. We are at the point where corrupt parasites like Imperial know that if they brought out a study showing the vaccines prevented ageing, cured all known cancers and made the recipient capable of self-propelled flight, the bought and paid for media would report every detail as fact.
Yesterday, the Germans saw their parliamentary enquiry ‘independent’ ‘expert’ commission present its findings, aka official whitewashing attempt, on all the restrictions etc..
Their conclusion: we had and still don’t have any proper data or clue of what works.
MSM reporting (Tagesschau 8pm, equivalent of BBC News):
“So, we have no data and no clue, but wearing masks indoors surely is just great and must be super important.”
All one needs to say and know, really.
“vaccines did save lives in Britain”
Hmmm
The lives of those who were tasked to push the toxic bioweapon into every man, woman & child which if they failed to do would end in a sudden & unexplained end….
The “leaders” have sold their souls to the devil & if they fail to do the devil’s bidding, it will have consequences…
But btw not plausible to attribute excess mortality in 2020 to Covid given barbaric treatment of the elderly.
Yes, where are Professor Ferguson and his disreputable cronies – AKA SAGE?
Ferguson was shifted when “sacked” from SAGE. Some group called NERVEDEATH or summat.
It seems to me that we had a balance with nature where previously respiratory viruses would mostly come in the winter.
Then we messed around with nature, locked ourselves away for nigh on 2 years and now the viruses are happening all year round.
And there are people crying out for us to do more of the things that created this imbalance in the first place.
Totally agree.
We also used to accept that immunity came from bugs getting around enough. Now we’re determined not to let them get around, which if in any way successful puts off the acquiring of immunity.
We are safest when bugs get around and the collective immunity of the whole population deals with it.
Mo respiratory virus has ever been stopped by any medicine. Nature determines that they must run their course. The hubris of the 21st century mankind suggests we can even stop nature in its tracks.
Good luck with that.
All propaganda bullshit for the sheep.
The real question is how many people will have their immune systems affected to such an extent that they sustain debilitating injuries/premature death :-
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027869152200206X
And don’t tell me the bastards are unaware of this and similar.
TRPTB and their pushers are beyond evil.
Please check my maths
80% of adult population vaccinated: 66M – 11M = 55M * .8= 44M vaccinated
If 500k more of this 44M would be dead were it not for vaccination, that’s 1 in 88
So, 1 in 88 unvaccinated adults should be dead from Covid since approx March 2021, or 125,000?
Also, wouldn’t this require that we add 1/88 or 1.13% onto the agreed ifr of covid, so wouldn’t this essentially triple it?
2/3rds – 2 doses
1/3rd – 3 doses
Utter nonsense. How on earth can they make such a claim?
As noted below, the government themselves believe 200K+ died as a result of lockdown.
MHRA count 2k+ – and they state publicly that they believe at most 10% of fatalities are reported.
So 20k+
And how many did Hancock euthanise when sent them untested from their hospital beds (where most caught Covid in the first place) off to care homes to get rid of all of them, with the help of Midozalom?
30k? (and why is Hancock a free man – this was the governmental equivalent of corporate manslaughter).
So that 250k or so who didn’t need to die in the first place.
Worth noting that from Feb 2020 to Dec 2021 less than 10k died FROM Covid (“with” Covid being meaningless. How much Covid? How much did it speed their death from whatever they were dying of anyway? And why did suddenly only those dying from/with Covid become so much more important than any other poor sod dying of whatever).
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/covid19deathsandautopsiesfeb2020todec2021
And quite what we saved the NHS for, I have no idea. It’s collapsing in front of our eyes. My mum-in-law, 87, with many problems, and very poor breathing, got in tough with her GP as her blood oxygen levels keep dropping dangerously low.
A phone call in two weeks was what they offered.
An GPs want a 30% pay rise. For what?
Lancet is lost.
At least the BMJ is fighting the good fight.
My hunch is that they just don’t know. No shortage of those who are making it up as they go along, though. No shortage of vested interests, either; some declared, others not declared, perhaps.
If it were only a matter that they don’t know and could simply say that – after all, they had no problem saying almost every single day for well over a year that it was a novel virus, that it kept throwing up surprises and they were learning something new every day, hence all their nonsense measures “out of an abundance of caution”. How anyone could then believe that, even when they claimed they were still learning, they had found *the* answer in a novel vaxx trialled for 2 months just shows the power of advertising/brainwashing. ‘Safe and effective’ – these magic words managed to get more recruits than the Hare Krishna chant.
But seriously, how are there still people willing to trust the health authorities after one of the top dogs in the US, Dr Birx, said that their reason for sticking a needle (using bribery, emotional blackmail and outright coercion) in the arm of every man, woman, child, dog and cat was based on “we hoped”?
The number of lives saved would be a known non-controversial figure had they retained the integrity of the trial data
But they didn’t ans we have to instead rely upon circular imperial models.
oddly this is not making me any less a
vaccine sceptic
Well worth reading – Doctor’s testimony on the death jabs – few ages down on this substack
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/bmj-investigation-are-drug-regulators
Deleted. Wrong thread
I think you will find the above academic is in fact Professor Denzil Dexter of the University of South California.
Climate change and Covid have demonstrated that basing policy on utterly flawed models is beyond stupid. There is a place for modelling – engineering relies on being able to model structures and test them to destruction. Here we have the substitution of wild projections being treated as reality and real world data.
Doesn’t work, does it?
That Imperial figure can be shown to be wildly wrong much easier than that.
If 80% of the British people had caught Covid between those dates, that would have been around 50 million people. For 500,000 to die, the infection fatality rate would have had to be 1%.
So these researchers are effectively claiming the virus has an infection fatality rate in excess of 1%, which is very clearly utter nonsense.
When I was studying for an Acupuncture degree several years ago I was told that you should always look at who is funding a study. Studies often get funded because the funder wants a specific outcome/result. If the study doesn’t produce this then it gets shelved. Look at who is funding this study:-
Schmidt Science Fellowship in partnership with the Rhodes Trust; WHO; UK Medical Research Council; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; National Institute for Health Research; and Community Jameel.
“The vaccines did save lives in Britain.”
WWII bomber found on moon with Elvis Presley and Shergar inside.
Yeah right.
The beauty of articles like these is that they demonstrates how simple it can be to prove how some so-called ‘experts’ (Imperial College here) can come up with such nonsense. All you need is some basic maths and logic to demonstrate that Imperial College of London have sullied what could have been described as a good reputation some years ago.
They are now becoming a laughing stock. You don’t have to be a comedian to put them down. Just give this article to your average 10 year old and they should see things don’t add up. Kids might look at what Imperial have been up to and wonder whether ‘modelling’ is synonymous with the word ‘abracadabra’ or whether ‘modelling’ is a form of Harry Potter sorcery.
Imperial College of London disgrace the (once good) name of their institution and, to a certain degree, that of ‘science’ in general. They should be utterly ashamed of themselves and either leading academics at Imperial or at other UK scientific establishments must make a stand and call them out. All the team involved in this latest study should face immediate disciplinary proceedings for their own sake, that of the College and, most importantly, to protect the public from being grossly misled.
Always useful to do a quick “back of the envelope” reality check, which, clearly, these pseudoscientists have not done, otherwise they would have dialled it down a bit.
Maybe it’s a good thing. The more ridiculous the claims, the more people will question this tsunami of complete and total b*ll*cks.