Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that the reduction in cases, hospitalisations and deaths “has not been achieved by the vaccination programme”. Rather, he claimed, “it’s the lockdown that has been overwhelmingly important in delivering this improvement in the pandemic and in the figures that we’re seeing”. While the lockdown may have had some impact on the epidemic’s trajectory, we should be very sceptical of the Prime Minister’s claim.
First, as Will Jones pointed out yesterday in Lockdown Sceptics, there are several US states where numbers fell dramatically in the absence of any lockdown: Florida, Texas, Georgia, South Dakota, South Carolina and Mississippi. And to this list, one could add Sweden. As shown below, the trajectory of deaths per million in Sweden is strikingly similar to that in the UK, even though the country has never gone into lockdown. (It should be noted, of course, that measures not based on age-adjusted excess mortality can be misleading.)
These examples do not show that lockdowns have no impact on the epidemic’s trajectory. But they do show that lockdowns are not necessary for case and death numbers to decline. Hence it is wrong to assume that, if numbers decline after a lockdown is introduced, it must have been the lockdown that caused the decline. (It might have been, but this cannot simply be assumed.)
Second, the most convincing study of the UK’s lockdowns of which I am aware (now published in Biometrics) concludes that each one was introduced only after the corresponding peak of fatal infections.
In particular, the statistician Simon Wood sought to reconstruct the actual time course of infections in England, based on available data. He notes that reported case numbers are subject to various forms of bias (e.g. non-representative samples, changes in the amount and type of testing) and that “under normal circumstances” statisticians would not “recommend attempting to estimate the effective reproduction number of the pathogen from such data”.
As an alternative, Wood used hospital death numbers (which, though imperfect, are less comprised than case numbers). In order to reconstruct the time course of infections, he combined these with the distribution of fatal disease durations (i.e., the number of days between infection and death), which he derived from the published literature.
His results are shown in the chart below. The grey dots are hospital deaths; the black line is inferred fatal infections; and the red lines are the lockdowns. As you can see, the peak of fatal infections occurs before the corresponding lockdown in each of the three cases. This finding casts serious doubt on the Prime Minister’s claim that the third lockdown has been “overwhelmingly important”.
Wood’s findings are consistent with those of economist David Paton, who notes that seven separate indicators all appear to show infections declining before the start of January’s lockdown. (Though it should be noted that parts of England were already under quite heavy restrictions when the lockdown began, and these may have contributed to the epidemic’s retreat.)
There is a large amount of evidence that lockdowns are neither necessary nor, in every case, sufficient to bring case and death numbers under control. This does not mean they have no impact on the epidemic’s trajectory, but it does mean that claims of “overwhelming” efficacy should be met with skepticism. And the best available evidence for England suggests that the infections were already declining when the third national lockdown was imposed.
Stop Press: Simon Wood, the author of the Biometrics study mentioned above, has written a piece for the Spectator responding to the Prime Minister’s comments, as well as the claim made by Imperial College that infections were surging right up until the first lockdown was imposed in March 2020.
This post has been updated.
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In short, long live tha AFD ,meloni, Penn etc
Give these lefty twats a bloody nose!
Sorry.. Dinger but Meloni’s a globalist posing as a populist and le Penn.. well le Penn just talks the talk and that’s about all. It was her father who was the real deal.. labelled a fascist of course
You’re dead right about Meloni.
Yeah.. Penn I know a bit about Mogs.. as France is my home at this moment in time. Its a shame because I supported her when she ran against Macron for the first round.. but she’s proved herself too be weak on so many points since..
This is what I’m finding, especially in the above two examples. They look promising initially, people dare to start believing what they say due to still having a glimmer of optimism and hope for change and that these people can deliver, and then further down the line you see where their loyalties lie and that they’re quite willing to shaft the people who voted for them. I just think it best to not trust any politicians ever, but that’s just me. Selective trust is a fool’s game. I mean, WTAF is Meloni responsible for letting into her country and unleashing on the citizens? Too many of these types of videos around to count;
https://twitter.com/RadioGenova/status/1690408539552919553
Here you go.. Meloni in action. Talks the talk but not the walk..
Italian PM Meloni Under Fire As Illegal Immigration Soars To New Highs
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/italian-pm-meloni-under-fire-illegal-immigration-soars-new-highs
Democracy in action.. coming to a place near you if this is allowed to continue in (democratic) Germany.. the Bolsheviks are running scared but brutal..
AFD’s Andreas Jurca below..
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/afd-bavaria-chief-beaten-up-in-organised-migrant-attack/
Sick, sick, sick. Nothing else to be said.
It’s important to realize that this was almost certainly done by hired thugs. That’s how the ‘democratic’ German government really deals with political opposition when it becomes too tiresome.
Maybe this is going off on a tangent, but it all seems linked to me….
I have never understood, from the moment they started what Germany, particularly, thought would happen when they followed the sanctions on Russia….how could Germany’s leaders who seemed to be at the forefront in Europe….invoke and engineer the draconian sanctions and not see that these same sanctions would boomerang and hit Europe on the head? ……and having seen it’s own economic instability in the process, still double-down on more?
Is it a case of extreme incompetence, or blind submission to external (US) dictates, or deliberate self-immolation????? Or a mix of all three?
Or like the ‘unpopular and destructive climate policies’..has the German Government outsourced its legitimacy in relation to its economy and military status to ‘outside sources?’….(again the US)….and like the rest of Europe …it’s health and well-being (WHO/UN)….in which case what is its function?
(Who’s in charge?….a question I would ask to all Western Governments?)
Because ebygum.. it was planned that way by the Club of Rome decades ago. The de-industrialisation/toppling of the West, and Germany being the powerhouse of Europe had to be brought to its knees.
All those in power now are infiltrators, or should I have spelt that infil-traitors. Merkel really got the ball rolling. The WEF’s Klaus Schwab has openly boasted about infiltrating cabinets/governments.
Read Gramsci’s ‘Long March through the Institutions’ its being adhered to like a manual by the scum that are taking our countries apart right now. In the UK they are represented by the likes of ‘Common Purpose’.
Who’s in charge.. maybe start your search with the City of London and Vatican.. the US is just the useful bully boy with the muscle..
I am going to ask a genuine question George. I have covered this ground in conversation with my son who is incredibly intelligent, well read and has a similar view to the one you expressed just now.
What is their end game in your opinion and why?
I personally do not understand why any human being would like to inflict misery on millions of people and cannot (for want of a better explanation) get my head around it
The end game Casual Observer is total control of the world and its people. To attain that they must desecrate the western world first, as people in the west have had a degree of wealth, individuality, and freedom not commonplace in the rest of the world, and won’t be to happy under communist rule. Communism being the perfect control system favoured by the elite capitalist oligarchy.
Once that’s achieved I believe the culling in earnest will begin. Why.. because they are psychopaths, its been their aim for millennia, passed on through the generations. They have wealth that’s unimaginable to the ordinary person which gives them immense power, and they are profoundly evil. We are no more than cattle in their eyes, we pose a threat because there are many of us, and now they have the technology and weapon systems available.. its time to get rid.
Of course you can’t get your head around it.. your not a psychopath..
I thought the most insightful comment in this useful analysis was the reference to the political class being the wrong one if a progressively authoritarian approach was to be followed. That thought might be what saves all the west as the left adopt ever more authoritarian policies to enforce their world view and energy illiteracy.
unfortunately it might take decades of increasing poverty and insecurity, at a time of great international threat, for the system to fall over. The hope is it might be sooner rather than later.
I don’t think there is much in the form of politics anymore. I see it all as the advance and final triumph of bureaucracy. There is no debate about what to do. The only discussion seems to be about how to get there and how quickly. All questions about what to do are shut down. Prohibited, essentially.
And that is pretty much the nature of bureaucracy. You don’t get a choice of whether to follow bureaucratic requirements. In every aspect of bureaucratic life you are obliged to do as you are told. At most you can moan about how inefficient it is. But never do you question whether you actually need it.
It seems to me like every aspect of our lives has been bureaucratised or is rapidly in the process of becoming so. They would have it so there is nothing left to debate. And if someone dares ask questions, like the AfD, well then they must be shut down. They must be mad or evil.
Good post Stewart..
…I don’t disagree, but honestly, where do ‘they’ think they will be in all of this? Are they going ‘off-world’ onto a spaceship?
Do they think we will all leave them in their comfy homes, having a great life? How will that happen?..where do they get their food if there isn’t any..is Bill going to grow it all on the land he’s bought? Does he thinks the unwashed millions will let him?
Too many questions!!!? LOL!
I see the bureaucracy as a cancer. It just expands because that’s its nature, unless it is held back or actively cut back.
Of course it is destined to kill itself off by killing off the host. Whether it’s slow and drawn out or fast depends on how aggressive the cancer/bureaucracy is.
I really can’t wait for the last neoliberal to scream a last Shrink the stateeeeee! while being smoked out of his house by hordes of foreign-born criminals with no policeman anywhere in sight. That would be poetically fitting: People who are incapable of learning that their mad (and originally radical) ideology which runs counter to everything mankind did for thousands of years is the cause of the problems and not their solution finally finding this out the hard way.
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
What is laugable is that you think that neoliberals are getting their way.
The state isn’t shrinking. It’s expanding in every way. In power, In authority, in budget, in personnel.
If you find your country is being overrun by immigrants be assured its not happening because the state is being shrunk, because it isn’t.
What is laugable is that you think that neoliberals are getting their way.
I’ve been living through the sell-out of pretty much every natural monopoly service the state used to provide to private profiteers and hence, I’m immune to your delusion. To use a particularly poignant example, in former times, military guards used to guard government buildings. Nowadays, military barracks are guarded by by private security companies. Actually, everything is guarded by private security companies and these people are entitled to enforce a private reign of terror explicitly including use of unlimited violence for absolutey no reason against everyone the fancy targetting. Like come running after people peacefully walking on a public pavement and slamming them into bus stations.
Try fooling someone else.
Just because stuff is privatised or outsourced doesn’t mean the state is not interfering in it through laws and regulations.
I fail to see the point of that. Beyond the truism that laws affect private entities, that is. That’s what they’re meant to.
We have too many of the wrong sort of laws and regulations. Banks are private but are encouraged, facilitated or bullied into debanking people on flimsy criteria by the state, its laws and regulators. That’s not to say the private sector is beyond reproach and doesn’t need regulating. Large social media platforms should IMO be forced not to censor by law, instead they are encouraged to censor.
Recently, the state decided that it would arrest me if I left the house while I had a cold.
Recently, the state decided that it would arrest me if I left the house while I had a cold.
How much of that was We must keep this plandemic rolling until the (vaccine) product is ready? On a related note, are these industry-funded regulatory enablers really a sign of state overreach? Or rather of our health being monetized by private corporations which gained accces to what used to be sovereign functions of the state due to the drive to privatize everything which can conceivable make someone money?
I certainly agree there appears to be an overly cosy relationship between senior government officials, civil servants and large private firms
Government isn’t really “meant” to do anything more than have some basic laws, keep the peace and protect us from invasion (because they’ve forced us to live within a state, so presumably they have to protect the integrity of that state, at the very least).
And yet governments and their bureaucracies collect more money than ever, borrow more money than ever and spend more money than ever.
Just because they privatised industries doesn’t mean they’ve shrunk. They’ve obviously haven’t if they’re spending more than ever.
Tell me we don’t have more laws and regulations than we’ve had in generations.
They are banning the use of certain types of energy. They are telling you what form of money you have to use. For a while they’ve required a pharmaceutical intervention as a condition to engage in society, and they plan to do it again, no doubt.
If your measure of state activity is how many industries the state has public ownership of, then you’re missing a massive part of the picture.
Just the finances alone tell you the scale of it.
Also in Germany; I used to enjoy visiting Berlin years ago but not so much now by the looks of it. Who on earth would target Jews and women with such hatred and contempt…..?
”Gang rapes in parks, violence in outdoor swimming pools – reports from the German capital Berlin are shocking almost daily. Everything is not so bad, according to the official visitor website Visit Berlin. The city is “basically safe” – women and Jews are excluded.
Even the leader of the Green Party, Ricarda Lang, had to admit that she would not stroll alone through Görlitzer Park in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. Due to a gang rape, the green space was recently in the focus of news coverage again.
Is visiting Berlin dangerous?, many tourists ask themselves. The city’s official visitor website emphasises that the city is “basically safe”, but crime cannot be ruled out and some safety aspects should be taken into account. This includes “avoiding dark parks and corners at night”.
Women report that harassment, insults, sexual assaults and attacks are by no means confined to the crowded inner city. “You actually only walk fast to your destination with blinders on,” two young women are quoted as saying in a report by the station RBB. “It’s not a problem of parks, it’s a problem everywhere: at every stop I get off at, in every street I walk through.”
Indeed, n-tv also reports: police are currently counting more assaults against women in public. From 2019 to 2022, the numbers of female victims of assaults, threats, sexual offences and robberies at night on streets and in parks rose from around 3000 to 4210.
But it is not only women that Berlin is not safe everywhere. Travel websites have long advised gay and lesbian couples or Jews to rather not walk through certain parts of the city at night clearly recognisable by behaviour or signs such as the Star of David, because there are always insults or attacks.”
https://medforth.biz/official-visitor-portal-alerts-berlin-is-safe-except-for-women-and-jews/
You made your bed, now lie in it.
These gullible idiots, with their rose-tinted glasses firmly in situ and wearing their denialism like a barrier to reality, make me so mad. If more of the harrowing sh*t that I read from these various websites, more often than not written by ex-Muslims or people born in the West to Muslim migrants who are vocal critics of Islam ( therefore being a damnsite more knowledgeable than these foolish MSM-following dingbats ), was shared or even covered by regular news outlets then these people most definitely would take a different view. To me it’s just another example of naive sheep supporting the current narrative. Nobody bothers to question the official line or scratch the surface and find easily-accessible contradictory information though, that’s the problem. Go look at any number of atrocities happening in Africa or India, for instance, and then ask yourself; what is stopping any of those perpetrators and those who share their vile attitude rocking up on our shores in a boat? Basically, nothing. Are people really so ignorant that they think this crap won’t arrive here and that these horrific acts only happen in far away continents? Jeez..
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19805/persecution-of-christians-june
The concept of the left to ban any parties which pose any kind of threat to their control of the country is extremely serious. It is straight out of the totalitarian conversion playbook, and must be resisted at all costs. Hitler did it, Mussolini did it, and Putin still does it. It does not bode well.