Yesterday, Professor Neil Ferguson told the Science and Technology Select Committee in the House of Commons that if the Government had locked down a week earlier, the death toll would be less than half what it is now.
The epidemic was doubling every three to four days before lockdown interventions were introduced.
So, had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half.
But where’s the evidence that the number of people becoming infected was “doubling every three to four days” in the week running up to lockdown?
Numerous analyses – the latest by Simon Wood, a Professor at Bristol University, entitled “Did COVID-19 infections decline before UK lockdown?” – suggest the R number was <1 before the lockdown was imposed. Here’s one of Professor Wood’s graphs, showing the daily infection rate in the lead up to and immediately after lockdown (the red line).
You can read more about Professor Wood’s paper in this blog post by Fraser Nelson.
The same conclusion was reached by Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford, who has long maintained that infections peaked shortly after the Government introduced a raft of social distancing measures on March 16th and were declining by the time the lockdown was imposed on March 23rd. He told the Mail:
The peak of deaths occurred on April 8th, and if you understand that then you work backwards to find the peak of infections.
That would be 21 days before then, right before the point of lockdown.
Far from imposing the lockdown a week earlier, these data suggest it wasn’t necessary to impose it at all. Infections were falling before it was introduced and would have continued to fall, just as they did after peaking in those countries that didn’t impose a lockdown – like Sweden and Belarus – as well as those US states that avoided locking down. As numerous analysts have pointed out, the trajectory of the pandemic has followed almost exactly the same pattern in every country it’s afflicted, regardless of whether or not that country locked down, when it locked down or the severity of the lockdown it imposed.
The reason the media has seized on Neil Ferguson’s statement is because it fits the narrative that the UK’s high Covid death toll is due to Boris Johnson’s “dither and delay” at the beginning of the crisis. This was the narrative set in stone by a Sunday Times article on May 23rd entitled: “22 days of dither and delay on coronavirus that cost thousands of British lives.” A key plank of that case is that the scientists advising the Government were urging the Prime Minister to impose a lockdown long before he did and if only he’d listened to them – to epidemiologists like Professor Ferguson – many unnecessary deaths could have been prevented.
But if you go through the minutes of the SAGE meetings immediately preceding the lockdown decision, there isn’t any evidence that the scientific attendees were urging the Government to impose more severe social distancing measures.
As I’ve blogged about before, the former barrister Paul Chaplin has gone through the SAGE minutes in a lengthy blog post and concluded that placing the entire country under virtual house arrest was not something the Government did at the behest of its scientific advisors. His analysis is compelling.
Chaplin finds plenty of evidence in the minutes that various different containment measures were discussed by SAGE, but at no point before March 23rd did the group recommend the quarantining of the whole population. The measures SAGE considered were home isolation of symptomatic individuals, the isolation of everyone in a symptomatic individual’s household for 14 days and the cocooning of those over 70 and those with underlying health conditions – the three measures introduced by the Government on March 16th.
At no point did SAGE discuss anything resembling a full lockdown. Indeed, SAGE noted at a meeting on March 10th that banning public gatherings would have little effect since most viral transmission occurred in confined spaces, such as within households.
The last SAGE meeting before the lockdown was on March 18th where it was noted that the impact of the social distancing measures introduced thus far would not be known for two or three weeks. The attendees did not at that stage know whether those measures would be sufficient to prevent the NHS’s critical care capacity being overwhelmed and in the absence of more data could not offer any advice on whether additional measures – such as closing bars, restaurants and entertainment centres, and limiting use of indoor workplaces – would be necessary. The only further measure SAGE recommended at that meeting was closing schools.
SAGE advises that the measures already announced should have a significant effect, provided compliance rates are good and in line with the assumptions. Additional measures will be needed if compliance rates are low.
Minutes of the 17th SAGE meeting on COVID-19, March 18th 2020
The attendees discussed locking down London but no conclusion was reached. However, they did say that if additional measures were going to be necessary, it would be better to bring them in sooner rather than later. According to the minutes: “If the interventions are required, it would be better to act early.”
In other words, Boris Johnson and his advisors were not following “the science” when they took the decision to lock down the country on March 23rd – they weren’t acting on any specific recommendations by SAGE. Nor can the Government claim this is one of the options that was discussed at SAGE meetings and it was basing its decision, in part, on SAGE’s analysis of the impact of a full lockdown. That option was not discussed at any of the meetings before March 23rd.
This dovetails with Christopher Snowdon’s analysis of the decision-making in the period leading up to March 23rd published in The Critic on May 28th, although Snowdon only had access to the broad summaries of the SAGE meetings that the Government has released at that point, not the more detailed minutes that were released on May 28th as a result of Simon Dolan’s lawsuit.
Snowdon concluded that the Government’s scientific advisors never explicitly recommended a lockdown; on the contrary, at various stages they recommended against it.
Snowdon says that even Neil Ferguson’s March 16th paper, predicting 510,000 Covid deaths if the Government took no measures to stop the spread of the virus and 250,000 if it stuck with its “mitigation” strategy, stopped short of recommending a full lockdown:
Contrary to popular belief, the infamous study did not call for a full lockdown, nor did it model the effects of a full lockdown. It looked at school closures, social distancing and household quarantine for suspected cases and those living with them. It concluded that the greatest benefit would come from a combination of social distancing and household quarantine, with further benefits likely to come from closing schools, although it conceded that school closures would prevent many people from working.
There is no doubt that Ferguson’s model was impactful. It suggested that hundreds of thousands of people would die from COVID-19 if the Government continued to pursue a policy of mitigation. This put containment back on the table and gave legitimacy to more coercive action from Government, but the measures it recommended did not amount to a full lockdown. Its social distancing recommendations were far from trivial and yet they seem modest after nine weeks of genuine lockdown (the authors anticipated most people still going to work, for example). The only time Ferguson and colleagues use the word “lockdown” in the text is when they are making a distinction between their proposals and an actual lockdown. They implicitly dismiss a lockdown as being too extreme for the UK, saying that their favoured policies are “predicted to have the largest impact, short of a complete lockdown which additionally prevents people going to work”.
Snowdon’s conclusion is remarkably similar to Chaplin’s:
The founding myth of the lockdown is almost the opposite of the truth. Science did not triumph over politics on March 23rd. It would be more accurate to say that the strategy which preceded the lockdown, unpopular though it now is, was based on science whereas the decision to go into lockdown was political.
I emailed Christopher Snowdon when I blogged about this before to see if he’d had a chance to look at the SAGE minutes and he got back to me to say he had and they did indeed corroborate his analysis:
The minutes fully support what I wrote in The Critic. The social distancing measures discussed by SAGE – and modelled separately by Neil Ferguson et al. and John Edmunds et al. – are not well described in the documents, but it is clear that they are more moderate than the lockdown that was introduced on March 23rd. Even at the late stage of mid-March, SAGE was never seriously entertaining a full lockdown, nor did the attendees expect their more modest measures to be in place for more than 12 weeks. To claim otherwise is to rewrite history.
A reader challenged this analysis, claiming that if you look at the minutes from SAGE 18, the meeting which took place on March 23rd, the same day the full lockdown was imposed, it’s clear that the Government was “following the science”.
I took a look and don’t agree. As with the meeting of March 18th, there’s more stuff about not yet being able to assess the impact of the social distancing measures announced on March 16th, not much about them being insufficient: “SAGE noted that social distancing behaviours have been adopted by many but there is uncertainty whether they are being observed at the level required to bring the epidemic within NHS capacity.” However, there is some talk of the effectiveness of those measures: “Footfall in London transport hubs reduced by 80-90% over the weekend, but in retail and food outlets has decreased by a smaller margin.”
There is some other interesting stuff in there, however. For one thing, the attendees seem quite worried about the negative impact on public health of the measures already introduced. “Actuarial analysis is required to estimate deaths caused indirectly by COVID-19, including those caused by the social interventions,” says one of the minutes. (Is this the ONS data that was released on June 5th analysing excess deaths not involving coronavirus?) Another says: “Given the clear links between poverty and long-term ill health, health impacts associated with the economic consequences of interventions also need to be investigated.” And: “In due course, analysis of the effects of the interventions on other causes of death should be undertaken.”
There’s also some evidence that it was beginning to dawn on SAGE that COVID-19 is a predominantly nosocomial disease. There’s a reference to “nosocomial hospital clusters” and one of the action points is “NERVTAG and DSTL to investigate spread of COVID-19 in hospitals”.
Interestingly, the minutes also say that any restrictions on travel into the country “would have a negligible effect on spread”.
And that last minute points to one of the major shortcomings of the scientific advice the Government has received during this crisis. That is, at no point during the beginning of the pandemic did any of the members of the official scientific committees recommend that Britain introduce port-of-entry screening, when it could have actually been effective (unlike now).
Readers of this site will recall my post on May 9th pointing out that the Newly Emerging Respiratory Virus Advisory Group (NERVTAG) considered screening passengers arriving from Wuhan at a meeting on January 13th chaired by Peter Horby, an Oxford professor with links to the World Health Organisation. This is the same Peter Horby who has criticised the Government for easing the lockdown too soon. At this point, seven other countries had introduced temperature screening at airports for visitors from Wuhan. However, the NERVTAG recommendation was that there would be no point in doing this if exit screening at Wuhan airports was already taking place, although they had no evidence it was.
At the next NERVTAG meeting on January 21st, this one attended by Chris Witty and his deputy Jonathan Van-Tam, as well as Professor Neil Ferguson, the boffins were asked to reconsider the question. But again they passed the buck to the Chinese authorities. By now, human-to-human transmission had been confirmed. Nonetheless, NERVTAG’s response was the same.
Neil Ferguson noted that from the modelling perspective, with exit screening in place in China, effectiveness of port-of-entry screening in the UK would be low and potentially only detect those who were not sick before boarding but became sick during the flight. NERVTAG felt there was a lack of clarity on the exit screening process in Wuhan, although it was thought that this process would be robust, and statements had been released by Chinese authorities about stopping febrile passengers from travelling. However, as noted, there were no data on the implementation of this programme.
Minutes of the NERVTAG Wuhan Novel Coronavirus Second Meeting: January 21st 2020
So rather than recommend port-of-entry screening, the assembled brains at NERVTAG decided to trust to the Chinese authorities to screen people leaving the country.
That may count as one of the biggest blunders the British Government and its scientific advisers – notably Professor Ferguson – made. It’s a shame that none of the MPs questioning the Imperial Professor yesterday appeared to be aware of any of this. If they were, they could have pointed out that he was present at the meetings in January when a measure was discussed that really might have saved lives and he recommended against it. Those countries that started screening airline passengers arriving from Wuhan in early January have some of the lowest Covid death tolls of anywhere in the world – Hong Kong (four deaths), Taiwan (7), Singapore (25), Malaysia (118), Thailand (58) and Vietnam (0).
Yesterday, Channel 4 News added its 10 cents to the case against Boris, bringing us what its Health and Social Care Correspondent Victoria Macdonald called an “exclusive”. This was the revelation that a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M), Professor Steve Riley, produced a paper on March 9th saying that unless the Government imposed a full lockdown 1.7 million Britons would die over the next 18 months.
Macdonald acknowledged that she didn’t know if this paper had been circulated to SAGE, let alone shown to anyone in the Government, so it’s hardly a smoking gun.
But if it was circulated, the Government would have been right to dismiss it.
I haven’t seen Professor Riley’s paper, but assuming he was estimating that 80% of the country would be infected over an 18-month period, that means 53,600,000 would become infected. For that to result in 1.7 million deaths – the headline figure in the Channel 4 News report – the virus would have to have an infection fatality rate of >3.2% – higher, even, than the WHO’s initial estimate. If we assume the IFR Professor Riley was working with was 3.25%, that’s nearly 13 times the CDC’s current best estimate of the IFR, which is ~0.26%.
I’m amazed Professor Riley is sharing this forecast with Channel 4 News – if, indeed, that’s how Macdonald got her hands on it. If I was the author of that paper, I’d bury it in a nuclear waste facility at the bottom of the North Sea.
So to summarise:
- Had Boris imposed the lockdown a week earlier it wouldn’t have made any difference to the subsequent Covid death toll since the R number was already falling by the time the lockdown was imposed. Neil Ferguson’s claim that infections were doubling every three or four days in the week leading up to the lockdown is evidence-free political point-scoring.
- Nearly every robust comparative analysis of the rise and fall of the disease in different countries across the world has come to the same conclusion: the pattern is unaffected by whether or not a country imposed a full lockdown, when it imposed it, or how severe it was.
- There is no evidence that the Government’s scientific advisors, acting in their official capacity as members of SAGE and its subgroups, advised the Government to impose a full lockdown before March 23rd.
- The one intervention the Government could have made that really might have saved lives would have been to introduce port-of-entry screening in January. That’s something Neil Ferguson explicitly warned against, preferring to rely on a Communist dictatorship to ensure the safety of the British people.
Round-Up
And on to the round-up of all the stories I’ve noticed, or which have been been brought to my attention, in the last 24 hours:
- ‘Black Lives Matter is now a political party‘ – Tucker Carlson persuasively argues that Black Lives Matter is a political party, perhaps the most powerful one in America at the moment
- ‘UK orchestras may not survive coronavirus pandemic, conductors warn‘ – Sir Simon Rattle and Sir Mark Elder write open letter to the Guardian about challenges musicians face
- ‘Bitcoin Doesn’t Take Sides: Why Apolitical Solutions Are the Internet’s Future‘ – Interesting take by Preston Byrne
- ‘Lockdown was unnecessary, claims German virologist‘ – Professor Hendrik Streeck predicts there will be no second wave
- ‘UK economy is world’s biggest Covid-19 casualty, OECD warns‘ – The Telegraph has an alarming report about just how great the damage done by the lockdown is likely to be
- ‘Why aren’t broadcasters scrutinising Neil Ferguson’s claims?‘ – Ross Clark in the Spectator poses an excellent question
- ‘Towards herd immunity? New data suggests millions of Russians may have Covid-19 antibodies‘ – Interesting report in Russia Today – but it is RT, so treat with caution
Small Businesses That Have Reopened
A few weeks ago, Lockdown Sceptics launched a searchable directory of open businesses across the UK. The idea is to celebrate those retail and hospitality businesses that have reopened, as well as help people find out what has opened in their area. But we need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those businesses that have opened near you. Please visit the page and let us know about those brave folk who are doing their bit to get our country back on its feet.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. It takes me many hours every day, which doesn’t leave much time for other work. If you feel like donating, however small the amount, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in future updates, email me here.
And Finally…
Slightly off topic and not funny, but this letter by an anonymous history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, taking issue with some of the claims made by the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the uncritical way in which they’re accepted and regurgitated by American universities, is a must-read. No doubt as soon as his identity is discovered he will be subject to a mobbing and may very well lose his job.
If you want to see a growing list of all those who’ve suffered catastrophic career damage for challenging the orthodoxies of the BLM movement, or because they haven’t genuflected before it with sufficient piety, or because they’re married to someone who’s criticised it (not making that up), click here. It’s up to 21 so far, but to borrow a phrase from Neil Ferguson, it’s growing exponentially. And if you want to donate to the Free Speech Union, which has already gone to bat for one of these people (Stuart Peters, the Manx Radio presenter suspended for questioning the concept of “white privilege”), click here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
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Repeat after me:
Data are racist.
Facts are lies.
Breath is death.
Strokes are normal.
And as Monkey Pox shows, anal Schwabs are bad for your health.
this could also be to do with the massive backlog of people who have not been treated and left to suffer for the last two yrs, if you can’t get a doctors appointment or are left with a video call and left un or mis diagnosed, more people are becoming sicker as a result. These jabs are also a contributing factor as well as doctors etc dismiss that the jabs may be causing an effect which leads to a overlook of conditions etc.
Stress, depression, unemployment, overeating and drinking during lockdowns, mass vaccination.
All predicted as dangerous here by us two years ago.
Indeed. All of this was predicted by so many people, which makes one wonder why no real ‘risk-benefit” analysis occurred before these “health” and “safety” protocols were mandated. They all produced extra and unnecessary deaths. “Public health” has never been worse in my lifetime.
“jabs may be causing an effect” – we need to get real!
Time is getting short.
Coronavirus lockdown could cause ‘200,000 extra deaths’ | Metro News
is 200 greater than 6?
The cult becomes a cull
Every cloud
If this continues then by my calculation by the time winter fuel payments etc come due in October they will have saved themselves £30,588.800
They’ll call it a good start
Hmm, let’s see what could have caused this to happen?
Blame it on Liverpool fans
I didn’t know Trump supported Liverpool?
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/monkey-pox-update?s=r
Malone posted this an hour ago. Suggests that the monkeybollox has been genetically manipulated.
In conclusion, the preponderance of current evidence is pointing towards a hypothesis for the origin of this outbreak which is increasingly consistent with prior “war game” scenario planning, remarkably akin to that which occurred during Event 201, which posits emergence of an engineered Monkeypox virus into the human population during mid-May of 2022.
When asked why so many people in their twenties and thirties were dying prematurely of heart attacks and strokes, a spokeswomxn for the regime said “new regime science shows that coffee, bananas, atmospheric conditions, listening to the wrong kind of music, muffins, not sleeping enough, dogs, curtains, jelly beans, freedom, free speech, the right to protest, voting and cold air have all started causing heart attacks in 2022, and the novel cell therapy known to cause clots has nothing do to with it, bigots.”
These hypothesised current excess deaths of 10% or so associated with prior lockdown and or vaccines could have been running for the last twelve months.
Up until now masked in the weekly death data by the ‘premature [by a year or so] deaths’ of the very old and frail of 2020 being subtracted, or having been ‘brought forward’, from 2021-2022?
Those 120,000 excess deaths covering circa 2020 to early 2021 have to be deducted from later death data at some point.
‘According to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Covid deaths have been dropping as the Omicron waves have subsided…’
Lying toads!
Omicron was so mild it was indistinguishable from a slight Cold, so how could it be causing any more than a few chance deaths?
What they mean is Omicron has done what coronavirus do, start disappearing due to seasonal change, and they can’t pin deaths on it.
So add more than 1 000 because of tricksy ‘underlying’ double-talk.
Increase in all-cause mortality: mRNA ju-ju brew deaths which unlike CoVid are being vastly under-reported, deaths from other diseases due to weakened mRNA spike immune systems, and lack of medical care because the permanently overwhelmed NHS is overwhelmed.
But the real cause = Government. When will the arrests and trial start?
If we look at the occurrence data for all cause deaths for England and Wales (which aren’t affected by when bank holidays fall and distorts reported deaths) we can see there has been a move in all cause deaths above the 5 year (2015-2019) average since around the end of March. This increase associates with the latest booster experimental vaccine doses. Association isn’t proof of causation of course.
Ignore the very last point on that chart (20th May) as estimates of deaths that have occurred but not been reported will be subject to major uncertainty.
And essentially the same chart but this time showing the percentage that all cause deaths exceed the 2015-2019 average (i.e the percentage above the blue line the green line is in the previous chart)
There is this very good analytical substack, FC, it may interest you.
Causes of death in Massachusetts
https://coquindechien.substack.com/p/neoplasm-to-ectoplasm-in-months?s=r
Thanks. I’ll have a look later.
Needs to be broken down by age cohorts. I’d wager the 20-50 groups show a sharp increase compared to baseline.
Nothing to see here.
Your Govt loves you xxx
If they’re jabbed it serves them right, frankly.
Whisteblower’s Lawyer: Pfizer Got Away With Vaccine Fraud Because Government Was Co-Conspirator
https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/30/whisteblowers-lawyer-pfizer-got-away-with-vaccine-fraud-because-government-was-co-conspirator/
The gene therapies are working, slowly but steadily and surely.
Just another faint and fall and another cancer comeback after 25 years of remission in my circle of acquaintances came to my attention last week.
“Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce a Genocide”
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/dear-friends-sorry-to-announce-a?s=r
Worth reposting here.
Noone can still believe in a cockup after having read just this.
“In the internal trials, there were over 42,000 adverse events and more than 1200 people died. Four of the people who died, died on the day they were injected.”
“The side effects about which Pfizer and the FDA knew but you did not, include blistering problems, rashes, shingles, and herpetic conditions (indeed, a range of blistering conditions oddly foreshadowing the symptoms of monkeypox).”
“The internal documents show that Pfizer (and thus the FDA) knew that angry red welts or hives were a common reaction to the PEG, a petroleum-derived allergen in the vaccine ingredients — one that you are certainly not supposed to ingest. Indeed, PEG is an allergen so severe that many people can go into anaphylactic shock if they are exposed to it. But people with a PEG allergy were not warned away from the vaccines or even carefully watched by their doctors, EpiPen in hand. They were left to their shock.”
Confirms for me for sure if I had had even one of those jabs I wouldn’t have suffered a jab injury. I’d be dead.
There was a very interesting article from a German pathologist which I saw this morning, basically saying that whenever he carries out an examination he finds tissue which has been damaged by the “vax” jab and which caused or contributed to the death by strokes, aneurysms etc.. The immune system tries to destroy the vax induced spike – with consequences which were predictable i.e. death.
I intended to provide a link – but guess what, it appears to have disappeared.
If anyone can find it please let me know.
It was, I think, from the Hart group.
Not the link you were on about, but covers the same information.
https://doctors4covidethics.org/vaccine-induced-damage-to-our-vascular-system/
Thanks for that, much obliged.
It is the same one, but I kept getting the dreaded P. 104
Non- Covid but what about Covid Vaccine deaths then?
I read Comment Sections for important anecdotes. This morning at a Substack site I read a post from someone who said a close friend works at a florist shop. This person said that her shop has never had so many orders for flowers for funerals.
I prefer to compare weekly deaths with those from years completely outside the hoax pandemic. I use ONS data for 2010-2019, adjusted by population totals to 2020.
What this shows is that this week is 10.6% above the ten-year maximum.
Even averaged over the last 3 weeks, it is 4.0% above maximum and 13.7% above average.
I update regularly on Telegram here.
Yes we all know the covid vaxx is driving excess death in every country that pushed the dangerous and lethal covid vaccines. Read Steve Kirsch, Joel Smalley, Jeff Childers, el gato on their substack. The information is all there. Also read Expose. Demand your gp and mp face reality and have access to this data. Legacy media will not print it. Until we are given back truth, honesty and integrity, this will continue. Demand your rights back.
See infant mortality rates in Scotland – shock increase reported!