One of the claims put forward by the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration is that lockdowns unfairly shifted the burden of COVID-19 onto the working class. As Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta argued in a piece for the Toronto Sun last November:
Low-risk college students and young professionals are protected; such as lawyers, government employees, journalists, and scientists who can work from home; while older high-risk working-class people must work, risking their lives generating the population immunity that will eventually help protect everyone.
The same idea was captured in a viral tweet by the art critic J.J. Charlesworth:
To evaluate this claim, let’s begin by looking at some of the data from Britain. Last July, the ONS attempted to quantify the extent to which different jobs can be done from home. Unsurprisingly, they found that higher-paying jobs in the professional and managerial classes are much easier to do from home, whereas lower-paying jobs in the skilled and unskilled working class are much harder to do from home. (‘Front-line doctor’ is an exception.)
While “key workers” are drawn from all income deciles, a relatively large percentage are drawn from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th deciles – particularly in the food and necessary goods sector. And according to the ONS, 15% of such workers were at an increased risk of COVID-19 because of a pre-existing health condition.
In January of 2021, the ONS computed age-standardised mortality rates for COVID-19 in different occupations. They found that men in professional and managerial occupations were substantially less likely to die of COVID-19 than those in service and elementary occupations:
The pattern among women was similar, although somewhat less pronounced. (The highest age-standardised mortality rate was for women working as plant or machine operators.)
In a study published in Nature, Elizabeth Williamson and colleagues analysed data on a large sample of British adults, and found that individuals from the bottom quintile for area deprivation were significantly more likely to die of COVID-19, even after controlling for age, sex, ethnicity and a number of pre-existing health conditions. This may be because such individuals had greater exposure to the virus, although there are other possible explanations.
It’s important to note that men in elementary occupations and skilled trades are more likely to die for any reason than men in professional and managerial occupations. In other words, there is a mortality gradient across occupations for all-cause mortality, as well as for COVID-19. This means that the two gradients may be partly caused by the same factors – such as more men in working class occupations having pre-existing health conditions.
Furthermore, the fact that people in working class occupations were more likely to die of COVID-19 does not, by itself, prove that lockdown shifted the burden of COVID-19 onto the working class. Such people might have been more likely to die of COVID-19 even in the absence of lockdown – say, because they were less able to engage in voluntary social-distancing.
In order to evaluate the claim that lockdown shifted the burden of COVID-19 onto the working class, we need to compare countries or states that did lock down with those that did not. Of course, the only major country in Western Europe that did not lockdown is Sweden.
In an unpublished paper, Sunnee Billingsley and colleagues analysed Swedish data, and found that workers in frontline occupations were not more likely to die of COVID-19 when adjusting for individual characteristics. Their findings indicate “no strong inequalities according to these occupational differences in Sweden and potentially other contexts that use a similar approach to managing COVID-19”. This supports the Great Barrington Declaration authors’ claim.
Another way of testing the claim that lockdown shifted the burden of COVID-19 onto the working class is by comparing infection rates across social classes before and after lockdown.
In a study published in BMC Public Health, Nathalie Bajos and colleagues analysed French data, and found that individuals in the highest social class saw a substantial decline in the risk of infection after the country went into lockdown, whereas individuals in the lowest social class saw a much smaller decline. Though it’s possible these differences emerged due to voluntary changes in behaviour that happened to coincide with the start of the lockdown.
Overall, there is tentative evidence that lockdown did shift the burden of COVID-19 onto the working class. However, comparative studies will be needed to investigate this claim more systematically.
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“Monkeypox lasts after scabs…” (Telegraph) Comments now closed, but some good robust views. The virus would be detectable after infection – that is immunity!
Also noted in the same article there were ‘surging case numbers’ LOL…I think there’s around 100 worldwide. They just can’t help themselves!
wonder when it is going to become “exponential”.
I haven’t heard it for ages now. I kind of miss “exponential”
Roll up those sleeves, dronebeings!
A Commonwealth-funded $200 million quarantine facility in Perth’s north looms as an expensive white elephant with Premier Mark McGowan admitting he is unsure what to do with the compound once construction is complete in the middle of the year.
Fill it with the evil politicians and ‘health officials’ and big pharma bootlickers. And use up that stockpile of vaccines – three shots a day, before meals.
They bought it. They own it!
They will keep it mothballed ready for the new WHO pandemic treaty.
Then any future vax refusers can be imprisoned in these 21st Century gulags.
Monkeypox deniers down under beware
Things have changed since they greenlit this. A lot more vax resisters and vax-remorseful now.
That’s one reason why the next shock that the rulers impose won’t be a rerun of the last one.
“Vaccination” only started about 9 months after the first lockdown. There has been far more resistance to “vaccination” than to lockdown.
They should be treated humanely (but locked down, of course), and allowed visitors: anyone who wants to speak to them about what they did to our lives.
And a televised draw every day for the honour of giving them their shame-to-waste-it shot. Something like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5EzLJzimZ0
The way prime minister Mark McGowan talks about this! That guy is seriously taking the p*ss.
Only in the state sector!
It’s basically a large number of portakabins with lots of extractor fans and barbed wire.
Is that a railway line running to it?
https://www.multiplex.global/projects/centre-for-national-resilience-perth/
Good question. There is a rail line through Bullsbrook, unfortunately there aren’t specific enough details as to where this facility is located. Google Maps doesn’t give much away.
LOVE the solar panels on the roofs, though. Internees will be happier just knowing their carbon footprint has been reduced.
‘Stonewall accused him of “making fun of trans people” in his new SuperNature special, reports MailOnline.’
He’s a comedian you demented perverts, making fun of people is what he does.
If he refused to make fun of trannies you would probably accuse him of excluding trannies and condemn him for that.
No they wouldn’t It is called touching a nerve. We seem to have forgotten in our new politically correct era that the anguished are often triggered by observations that get too close to the truth.
Most of us view transgenderism as mental illness. Six-foot men in frocks aren’t women. The literature (rarely quoted now) is quite clear; most suffer from a paraphilia, a fetish. They become sexually excited at the thought of themselves as women. Talk of them being women trapped in mens bodies is exactly that, talk. Some people are convinced they are Napoleon but it doesn’t make it so. The sexual link has always been clearly understood as unhealthy.
Instead of classifying this as a sexual fetish as they used to do, and working on reducing its hold over the individual, we have allowed the fetishists themselves to dictate terms. We must treat those masculine creatures as women. This is absurd and we all know it.
The exceptional sensitivity to all this is a clear sign all is not as the narrative would have us believe. Perhaps the way out is more awareness of the fate of those who transition. As we all know they tinker with some superficial aspects of the body; oestrogen injections do have some effect, and breast augmentation adds more. Wearing women’s clothes, a wig and makeup all add something. Except the most important thing, they don’t solve the actual problem. They aren’t women. They are men with mental health issues.
All this is known by psychiatrists. Surely at some point we must all get fed up assisting mentally ill people in a delusion that is destroying their lives?
Gervais probably gets too close the ridiculousness of this topic. A mortal sin for the thin skinned.
I don’t care a jot if their delusions destroy their lives. It’s allowing them to destroy other people’s lives that I object to.
A good synopsis
I watched it last night. Absolutely hilarious, but only because it approaches comedy from kind of a 1970’s perspective. Not quite though.
While the initial reaction to a comedian even mentioning trans is a bit of hand rubbing and “this could be good” what he actually articulates isn’t transphobic. But it’s funny and whilst trans is the subject matter, trans people are not the butt of the joke, so called TERFS are.
I was never a Gervaise fan until I watched his Oscar’s spot. What he does with his Netflix show is highlight the absurdity of every ‘phobic’ subject, even hurty words.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceS_jkKjIgo
I did think his series After Life was very funny though. All characters were fab but I think my fave was the skanky guy with glasses who’s wife left him for a gypsy. Cringey but funny with an undercurrent of pathos.
Good to see conservatives ( in name only) preparing for another cash handout into the highest inflationary environment for 40+ years.
“More money off energy bills for every household under Rishi Sunak rescue plan” – rubbish, he’s taxing business for making a profit and leaving green taxes in place, the Communist troll.
Yes, why not suspend the ‘Green Levy’ for a few years, keeping that and robbing tax payers again is not on
they aren’t giving up on any taxation rates
and to even have tax on home heating fuel is disgusting
By a few, you mean about five million and by suspend, you mean shove up the arse of Kim Jong Johnson….
Bet my household is excluded yet again
Left-wing parties will oust the tories and wreck Britain?
They’re too.late. The tories have spent the last two years wrecking Britain and have more or less finished the job.
I think we all sense there is some remnant within the Tories that does prevent the full spectrum destruction the modern Labour Party would unleash.
That would be a swift descent. Look at Scotland. The SNP are a hard left party now in bed with the Greens, who are outright communists. They openly talk about “New Scots” whom they want to invite to the UK. Many Scottish Government job adverts state explicitly “We welcome applications from individuals who require a visa to work in the UK.”
Their absolute hatred of us – their own people and the culture we created – is very obvious. At least some of the conservatives are against that. It isn’t much but it is something.
Agree there is a small remnant. If only they’d leave the Tory party and form something that represents the values that many of us have. It will be a great shame that they almost certainly won’t as the few decent ones are pretty much bound to lose their seats in the next election as the Tories are destroyed and who will we get instead?
I am not so sure. Labour don’t seem at all credible. So it is difficult to say.
Now would be the time for them to do it. To form a genuine conservative party given the disappointment of the last few years. A zero immigration policy alone would probably trigger a landslide in my view.
That hundred of them who rebelled against the vaccine passports would be a good start of a party – they could form a kind of alliance voting or bloc with perhaps the DUP who were fairly opposed to most of covid lockdown BS and maybe others. Would make it damned difficult for Johnson to ramrod anything else destructive through without his big 80 seat majority if nothing else. And if they went now they have the interim period between now and next gen election to try to grow.
There will be no salvation via the ballot box. That pseudo politics is gone for good.
Yes, there is still a remnant of non-leftism left in some parts of the Conservative party but Kim Jong Johnson has essentially destroyed the party.
They aren’t even Tories, they are Blairites, continuing the dismantling of the UK
Compulsory vaccination of children in the Netherlands failed.It was said that this proposal was aiming to make childcare centres safer for children’s health.
This was not just about any Covid vaxx.
So if a child is vaxxed against common diseases, why are the childcare industry scared of an unvaxxed one?
https://nltimes.nl/2022/05/25/childcare-sector-upset-cant-mandate-vaccine-use-senate-vote
“Compulsory vaccination of children in the Netherlands failed.”
But when they get to a certain age they will need to be ‘vaccinated for Covid’ to receive their EU Vaxx Pass if they want to travel anywhere, and be able to re-enter the Netherlands.
Down voted you for your defeatist attitude in your reply without even acknowledging the small win that Encierro informed us about.
Thank you.
“and be able to re-enter the Netherlands” Please cite examples of EU countries refusing entry to their own citizens/residents.
How about the UK? Entry was forbidden unless you could provide a Passenger Locator Form, and proof of being ‘vaccinated for Covid’, or a ‘negative result from a test’. Plus you needed to show you had paid for two PCR tests (sold by some shady character with a foreign name)… and also spend 10 days in ‘self-isolation’.
Many countries in the EU had similar demands of their own citizens.
How quickly we have forgotten!
Your memory fails you. The UK is not in the EU:
You are posting false information.
Dr. Naomi Wolf Proven Right On ‘Global Vaccine Passports’
https://rumble.com/v164s83-dr.-naomi-wolf-proven-right-on-global-vaccine-passports.html
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““ESG’s power grows as banker is canceled for talking sense on climate change” – Rupert Darwall says in the New York Post that Stuart Kirk should not have been cancelled for talking sense about big banks’ ludicrous obsession with climate change.”
Best thing that could have happened. Kirk has had great publicity from this and had plenty of support from other bank bosses. The BoE also being slammed for their obsession.
Rumpelstiltskin syndrome. People yawning and rubbing their eyes as they emerge from a generation of slumber.
I think the COMMservative scumbags have done a pretty good job of “devastating the UK”. There is no coming back from this. They have committed treason on a grand scale and are guilty of carrying out the most serious crimes it is possible to commit on an industrial scale. They have got this far without being asked a single difficult question. That is a measure of how dishonest our society is, it literally cannot bring itself to even contemplate the truth, let alone handle it.
We now need to form a NEW POLITICAL MOVEMENT, with good people at the centre of it, not the lying criminal selfish greedy corporatised terrorist scum we have currently got. The UK is ripe for big change, we now have a golden opportunity to finally rid our democracy of these vile people and their twisted ideas about what is ok and not ok.
Theres six hundred and fifty of them and sixty eight million of us. We can do this.
Thanks for that CTR. I was beginning to think I was a loner.
On DS!
““DAN WOOTTON: Sue Gray delivered a damp squib Partygate investigation” – The GB News presenter and MailOnline columnist says it will take more than Sue Gray’s report to topple BoJo.”
Dan Wooton is wrong. Partygate was never about parties, we could all have dealt with work/social events, albeit grudgingly.
It was the barefaced lying by our PM and his habit of hanging others out to dry as a sacrifice to the public that’s objectionable.
It was the barefaced locking down, repeatedly and with accompanying propaganda from Pyongyang.
Dan is completely wrong on this. I cannot for the life of me understand why he goes as far as he does to DEFEND Johnson.
The other evening I was in the very very odd position where I found myself, possibly for the only time ever, actively agreeing with Benjamin Butterworth.
Have said elsewhere on this site that Dan Wootton needs to scan some of these posts on this site to see what his viewers really think before he continues with his “move on draw a line under this” patter.
The irony of this comment is that Partygate is a big distraction from the actual crimes the government has committed over the last two years, and their ongoing destruction of British democracy and sovereignty.
“Analysis from NHS doctors …”: are these the same doctors who lied their way through the last couple of years, or different NHS doctors? How are laymen meant to be able to distinguish one mob from the other?
From British government radio a few minutes ago I learnt that Mary Magdalene has been “slut shamed” for all these years.
Every gob in the studio agreed. “Slut shamed”, “slut shamed”, they all echoed. The term “sex work” was also heard.
So it will be no Easter eggs for them!
But I doubt even a single one of the idiots on the radio programme, or its producer, would understand that joke. They’d have to know more than a tiny amount about Mary Magdalene to begin to.
Clearly we live in uber-sensible times, when fashionable lingo thought up by independent thinker geniuses during the past five minutes, standing so impressively on the shoulders of giants, finally explains thousands of years of history and culture and religion.
Either that…or well maybe another take on what’s happening can be made to stand up better?
PS Did nobody tell these idiots the difference between a “whore” and a “slut”?
Boris Johnson may be a pathological liar in the true sense of that term, lying even when he isn’t close to being obliged to lie to maintain his position.
We’ve enjoyed the photos. Next can we have some audio please? And then perhaps a “What happened to the missing tapes?” inquiry if you must.
Surely surely he’s got it coming to him? The senior civil service must detest him. The Commons Speaker’s office probably aren’t too keen on him either. His friends include the London Metropolitan Police, officials of one or two foreign powers in London, and … ?? … Has he got one or two mates left at the Spectator? He doesn’t seem like the kind of person many people would bend over backwards to be loyal to.