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News Round Up

by Jonathan Barr
15 April 2021 1:36 AM

  • “Lockdown easing ‘may need to be reversed if variant spreads rapidly’” – Professor Peter Openshaw, one of the scientists advising the Government, is warning that a rapid spread of the South African variant, or any other, may necessitate an about turn on the “cautious but irreversible roadmap” out of lockdown, the Evening Standard reports
  • “Science has proved Boris Johnson wrong – vaccines are reducing deaths and cases” – The Telegraph reports on newly published research by the University of Manchester that shows a stark difference in cases, hospital admissions and deaths for vaccinated and unvaccinated elderly people, suggesting that vaccines not lockdown are bringing the numbers down, contrary to Boris’s claim
  • “Government will try to make Covid vaccines compulsory for care home staff, Matt Hancock confirms” – The Health Secretary is going ahead with this draconian measure, MailOnline reports
  • “Early treatment of COVID-19” – A real-time database and meta analysis of 565 studies into early treatments for Covid, including Ivermectin and hydroxycholroquine
  • “Care home residents ‘barred’ from voting in local elections because of Covid rules” – Residents of Britain’s care homes will be “effectively barred” from voting in May’s elections by guidance that would require them to isolate for 14 days upon their return, the Telegraph reports
  • “Covid-status certificate scheme could be unlawful discrimination, says EHRC” – The Government’s equalities watchdog has warned that plans for vaccine passports risk discriminating against groups with low vaccine take-up, the Guardian reports
  • “Pontypool mum ‘robbed of life’ by ‘late’ cancer diagnosis” – Justine Jianikos has cancer, which if it had been spotted earlier might have been treatable, but is now terminal, the BBC reports
  • “We are being enslaved by the smartphones that once liberated us” – “Big tech is ruthlessly exploiting the Covid crisis to make us even more dependent on their products,” writes Ross Clark in the Telegraph
  • “Making illness a crime: Beware the Health Fascism Agency” – “We need to stop framing illness as a security threat,” writes Dominey Jenner, of the UK’s new Health Security Agency for the Conservative Woman, “and return to a more measured approach – one that befits a liberal democracy”
  • “Speak out! Doctors can no longer stay silent on vaccine peril” – Dr. Sinead Murphy lays out four reasons for the Conservative Woman why we should be sceptical of the Government’s vaccine narrative
  • “End the lockdown now” – There is no justification for the glacial pace of the reopening, says Professor David Paton in Spiked
  • “Will Welby’s outburst of honesty be infectious?” – Roger Watson wonders if a trend is being set by Archbishop Welby, who recently admitted being too risk-adverse during the first lockdown, and whether it might spread to Ferguson, Whitty or even the Prime Minister
  • “SAGE’s Roadmap model: Where is it leading us?” – Dan Astin Gregory scrutinises the ‘evidence’ behind SAGE’s fears of a third wave in late summer or early Autumn for the the Pandemic Podcast
  • “Most of Europe should be open for summer holidays from May 17th, says EasyJet boss” – Johan Lundgren, the CEO of EasyJet, reckons that most countries in Europe will be on the Government’s travel green list by May 17th, the Telegraph reports
  • “Denmark becomes world’s first country to stop using AstraZeneca vaccine” – Denmark has stopped using the AstraZeneca jab altogether, the Telegraph reports, and has also suspended the Johnson & Johnson vaccine
  • “Lithuania to introduce ‘COVID-19 passports’ for certain groups” – Reuters reports that Lithuania is rolling out a vaccine passport scheme to allow some people to bypass restrictions on certain activities including dining indoors, attending sporting events and holding large parties.
  • “The high cost of the slow Covid vaccine rollout” – Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Michael Blanding heralds new research indicating that investment in the vaccine earlier on could have saved lives and prevented the global economy losing $700 billion
  • “Vaccine Passports vs. Freedom Itself” – The very idea of vaccine passports is an “anathema to our democratic principles and rights that are enshrined in the US Constitution as well as the Canadian Charter of Rights”, write Paul E. Alexander, Howard C. Tenenbaum and Dr. Parvez Dara at AIER
  • “Ludwig von Mises on intellectual obligation in times of crisis” – The Austrian economist had a message for our times, says Jeffrey A. Tucker at AIER: “None of us are really safe from state-imposed violence in the name of disease control until all of us are”
  • “U.S. intelligence chief: spy agencies do not know exactly when COVID-19 first transmitted” – The Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a senate hearing yesterday that U.S. intelligence agencies do not know exactly when or how COVID-19 was initially transmitted.
  • “Two pastors detained in Finland during worship Apr 11th, 2021” – A video showing Finnish police interrupting an outdoors service of Espoo Home Church and detaining two pastors for not making the members of the congregation, including children, sit two metres apart
  • “Two Covid vaccine questions that no one will answer” – Tucker Carlson of Fox News wants to know if the vaccines are safe and effective, but straight answers are hard to come by
  • “Vaccine Facts: Watch this while you can” – Steven Crowder’s latest show includes a piece on vaccines (at 44m 30s) but he suspects you might not have too long to watch it because it’s on YouTube
  • “Boris Johnson has ‘muddled the whole thing up’” – Professor Hugh Pennington thinks Boris Johnson got things “a bit muddled” over lockdowns and vaccines

Hugh Pennington, professor of bacteriology, says Boris Johnson has "muddled the whole thing up" after the Prime Minister said lockdown was the main reason for a drop in Covid cases, not the vaccine rollout.

Watch talkRADIO live ► https://t.co/38QrdgGEXV@JuliaHB1 pic.twitter.com/5IWnzXzuhg

— TalkTV (@TalkTV) April 14, 2021

Tags: News Round-Up

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94 Comments
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Major Panic in the jabby jabbys
Major Panic in the jabby jabbys
3 years ago

so are SAGE models not The Science then?

16
0
RW
RW
3 years ago

According to a recent Facebook-ad PHE is now “preparing for a worst-case winter scenario”. This implies that they must be pretty certain that the “worst-case summer scenario” Neil “No lockdown will keep my cock down!” Ferguson referred to as “inevitable” last week won’t happen.

14
0
yohodi
yohodi
3 years ago

SAGE…Soothsayers Against Genuine Evidence.

30
0
William Gruff
William Gruff
3 years ago
Reply to  yohodi

Subjecting Analysis to Gross Exaggeration?

2
0
MikeAustin
MikeAustin
3 years ago

Can we just stop using these bogus so-called ‘cases’. They are meaningless figures and bear little relation to actual illness and death.

30
0
TheyLiveAndWeLockdown
TheyLiveAndWeLockdown
3 years ago

The models are always wrong, but these models are not even useful as they are the opposite of what happens and have negative predictive usefulness.

25
0
RW
RW
3 years ago
Reply to  TheyLiveAndWeLockdown

Attempts to predict the future are always wrong. Even (even more so) when they’re based on complicated and messy computer programs not even the people working on them understand.

That’s just the techie equivalent of trying to read it out of the layout of guts in animals.

14
0
miketa1957
miketa1957
3 years ago
Reply to  RW

Its not quite as bad as that, for example predicting the flight of a canon ball is pretty well spot-on.

But you are right. Software engineer here. Predicting something like this is more akin to predicting the weather or the financial markets. There is no way you can have any confidence in the predictions without being able to compare predictions with real outcomes, but in this case the real outcomes to compare against are few and far between (and clearly not ameneable to experiment).

There is no way anyone should attribute any significance to the models’ predictions.

Last edited 3 years ago by miketa1957
13
-1
RW
RW
3 years ago
Reply to  miketa1957

To quote one of my physics lecturers of old “The usual assumptions are implied. The austronaut has neither mass nor extent”. Or, even nicer, a former navy superior “This was a so-called five mile shot. The rocket flew for five miles and then fell into the water and we don’t know why”.

🙂

Can’t even remotely get this to work using multiple threads and won’t fork it instead because we’re either ideologically blinded VMS fans and/ or nobody ever even got this to compile outside of Ferguson’s Windows laptop is entirely damning.

The mere fact that this program is a chaotic system whose parts interact in unpredictable ways doesn’t make it a suitlable “model” of some other chaotic system.

6
0
TheyLiveAndWeLockdown
TheyLiveAndWeLockdown
3 years ago
Reply to  RW

I dont think Fergusson even knows how little he knows about programming when you get those sort of comments in the code.

It’s not a model it’s an expensive simulated dice.

13
0
JohnK
JohnK
3 years ago
Reply to  TheyLiveAndWeLockdown

If he had tried to be a bookmaker, he’d be bankrupt by now!

1
0
prod_squadron
prod_squadron
3 years ago

Cartoons like this Bob one are brilliant not least because humourous ridicule is an excellent device for swinging things our way. See also the photo circulating today of Macron so heavily festooned in Polynesian garlands that he looks like a floating tourist boat and it utterly punctures his image. This approach secretly appeals to the majority, regardless of stance. It has to be the right side of bitchy. Snide is too much.

17
0
Julian
Julian
3 years ago

We had a very strong idea they were wrong from the start, and it was proved shortly afterwards beyond a reasonable doubt.

11
0
NonCompliant
NonCompliant
3 years ago

To my memory not one single modelled prediction SAGE has made has come true.

In a private business these jokers would’ve been fired by June 2020.

Fake it til you make it?

24
0
RickH
RickH
3 years ago
Reply to  NonCompliant

I can’t think of anything coming out of SAGE that was worthwhile.

I do know that when I experimented with a prediction – against a ludicrous one pushed by SAGE – it came out over 100 times closer to the actuality. And that never pretended to be more than intelligent guess work, using a spreadsheet and a graph!

13
0
NeilofWatford
NeilofWatford
3 years ago

‘It begs the question as to why the Government and media have again so enthusiastically engaged with consistently disappointing predictions …’
To answer the question – within the Media because their paymasters (Gates, Soros, BigTech, Big Corps) tell them to. With UK Government, the Reset doctrine requires the destruction of family, small businesses and freedom to travel, and most importantly, our Judeo-Christian culture.

20
0
Dodgy Geezer
Dodgy Geezer
3 years ago
Reply to  NeilofWatford

Actually, I think it’s simpler. It’s that they had no idea what to do, and then an activist scientist poked his head around the door and said “Hang on a minute lads, I’ve got a great idea….” .

6
-1
tom171uk
tom171uk
3 years ago
Reply to  Dodgy Geezer

…you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off…

7
0
Moist Von Lipwig
Moist Von Lipwig
3 years ago

Can we say, definitively, that ZZ Top and Brian Blessed have beards?

2
0
annicx
annicx
3 years ago
Reply to  Moist Von Lipwig

Well, no- a certain Mr Beard doesn’t have a beard so that model is only 75% accurate…

2
0
Dodgy Geezer
Dodgy Geezer
3 years ago

ALL models are ‘wrong’, in the sense that they do not mirror real life completely, and so have some degree of inaccuracy.

The question is whether this is small enough to be ignored, or sufficiently large to make the modelling useless for the task you want it to do.

Climate models are a good example of the latter – they are not accurate because they are based on incorrect premises, and they are now failing badly. The usual trick, and I am sure that the Covid modellers will follow suit, is to add fudged estimations which are intended to bring the final answer a bit closer to reality, and then claim that things are near enough. The Climate people have now gone beyond that and are into ‘Look, there’s a squirrel!’ territory…..

5
-1
annicx
annicx
3 years ago
Reply to  Dodgy Geezer

The incorrect premises thing is a real problem when trying to talk to anyone- particularly the young- about climate change. They don’t start from 0, they start from something like, ‘CO2 is evil and poisonous – we’re producing CO2- we are evil. With that sort of thinking, you can’t get anywhere. Ask someone why they think CO2 is poisonous, why they think there is a ‘climate emergency’, or why climate change in itself is bad and they just throw insults at you- they simply will not think or question the premise. Sadly it’s the same with Covid; almost everyone I speak to about it thinks it’s the no.1 killer and to catch it is almost certain death. I have come to prefer the company of my dogs more and more over the past few years.

5
0
Philipleigh
Philipleigh
3 years ago

There is obviously a plan being followed here.It doesn’t matter whether the modelling is right or wrong or the data rigged. These articles and Daily Sceptic itself are doing the equivalent of studying the train track while a high speed express bears down on them.

5
0
annicx
annicx
3 years ago
Reply to  Philipleigh

I am aware of this and am doing all I can to ensure that myself and my family are not in its path. I have given up trying to convince others as they clearly do not wish to save themselves and would prefer to be part of the bleating majority. In Sheffield today they were shuffling about, masked and fearful, presumably vaccinated, without any idea what it is that they fear. I find it hard to believe that any rational person would behave like this- walking around in the open air with a piece of cloth across their face as if it will save them from something that clearly isn’t causing unmasked people to keel over and die. What hope is there for such people?

1
0
William Gruff
William Gruff
3 years ago
Reply to  annicx

Hopefully none.

1
0
William Gruff
William Gruff
3 years ago

That cartoon may well be the finest I have seen in my sixty five and not quite a half years on this planet. Brilliant, especially the placing of Johnson’s left arm.

2
0

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