Love in the Time of Covid
Well, that set the cat among the pigeons. Yesterday, I launched a dating section in the Forums called “Love in a Covid Climate” and within hours it had been invaded by trolls posting satirical comments. Some of them were quite funny, although they took it for granted that lockdown sceptics are all Brexit-backing Tories. (Evidently haven’t read “The Left-Wing Case Against Lockdown“.) The National – the SNP-supporting online newspaper that never misses a chance to have a pop at me – published a selection of them within hours of the forum going live. Here are a couple of my favourites.
After a demoralising divorce I was, like many, reinvigorated by the Brexit movement only to be let down by Boris in this mask debacle. Looking for Albion-loving lady 35-50 who would be open to dressing up as Winston Churchill and spanking me with a cricket bat while I sing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. No snowflakes need apply.
Hi my name is Miles.
I live in North London and I’m looking for a patriotic lady for lasting friendship and to settle down with.
I am financially stable with my own house, car and am mortgage free.
I am 47 years old and my interests are politics, Brexit, cars, holidays in the English countryside. My musical and film tastes are very wide so there should be something we have in common.
I am totally against all the masks/muzzle nonsense and feel that it is unnecessary scaremongering.
I also like watching animals make love (mainly dogs, foxes and wolves) but other animals as well. If that is not a thing you can get into it is a deal breaker I’m afraid.
There were plenty more in that vein – and wags on Twitter came up with some amusing alternative names for the site, including “Two Meeters”, “Spreadr” and “Hydroxychloroquindr”.
After I was contacted by the Evening Standard asking me to comment on the “adverse reaction online”, I had a chat with the Forum moderators. Should we abandon the whole idea? Would it be too much work to constantly weed out the pranksters, particularly if “Love in a Covid Climate” attracts a bit of publicity? They heroically concluded it would not and set to work tidying it up. I can’t promise that no hoaxers will get through from now on, but we should be able to spot them fairly quickly.
Since we cleaned it up “Love in a Covid Climate” appears to have taken off, with plenty of legitimate users now posting messages. And I’m happy to weather the Twitter storm if readers think it’s a useful service. The most common barbs revolve around the fact that lockdown sceptics are more likely to have the virus than other people, making them extremely unappealing as potential romantic partners. I even got an email from a reporter at the Guardian asking me to respond to the charge that the forum could spread coronavirus and harm the individuals involved. In fact, almost no one has the virus any more, including those who refuse to wear face nappies. (0.05% of the population, according the latest ONS infection survey and many of them may be false positives.) If the idea of going out on a date with a sceptic scares the living daylights out of you because you’re incapable of assessing risk, fine, don’t use the service. Indeed, the rationale for setting it up is so sceptical singles can avoid inadvertently going out with a bedwetter. As I said in my reply to the Guardian reporter:
Most people wildly exaggerate the risk posed by the virus. For instance, a poll published a couple of weeks ago found that British women think that 10% of the UK population has already died of COVID-19. That’s about 6.7 million people. In fact, the real figure is less than 1% of that – about 45,000. According to John Ioannidis, the Stanford Professor of Medicine, you’re more likely to die in a road traffic accident if you’re under-65. I’ve created “Love in a Covid Climate” for people who are properly informed about the risk, realise how small it is and want to meet other scientifically literate people who haven’t succumbed to what Bernard Henri-Levy calls “psychotic delirium”.
No doubt the forum will evolve, as most things do on this site. For the time being, the experiment continues.
Cases Increasing, Hospitalisations Falling
Yesterday, 1,062 people tested positive for COVID-19, up from 758 cases in the previous 24 hours. Anything to worry about? No. According to yesterday’s Sunday Times, the number of people in hospital with Covid-19 has fallen by 94% since the peak of the pandemic. Hospital staff are treating about 1,067 coronavirus patients a day in England, compared with about 17,000 a day in the middle of April, says NHS England. The Times has more.
Ron Daniels, an intensive care consultant in Birmingham, one of the worst-hit areas, told the Sunday Times there had been a big fall in admissions.
Last Thursday, across three hospitals that serve more than 50 per cent of Birmingham’s population, there were three critically ill COVID-19 patients.
“Compare that to where we were a couple of months ago, when we had almost 200 patients ventilated at any one given time, and this is a huge downturn,” Dr Daniels said.
He said the figures showed there was cause to be optimistic, even with the recent rise in cases in some areas such as Aberdeen and Preston.
He added that he didn’t expect an increase in hospital admissions. “I think that’s highly unlikely, because the pubs have been open for over a month [and] people have been socially interacting heavily during that time and the natural history of this disease is that if you contract the virus and you’re going to end up in hospital, you’re pretty much in hospital within 15 days,” he said.
Gobal Lockdowns Will Plunge 100 Million into Extreme Poverty
Today sees the publication of a disturbing report by the Associated Press’s Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. It purports to be an investigation into the devastating impact of “the virus” on the developing world, but, of course, what it’s really talking about is “the lockdowns”. Here’s an extract:
With the virus and its restrictions, up to 100 million more people globally could fall into the bitter existence of living on just $1.90 a day, according to the World Bank. That’s “well below any reasonable conception of a life with dignity,” the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty wrote this year. And it comes on top of the 736 million people already there, half of them in just five countries: Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Congo and Bangladesh.
India is struggling with one of the world’s largest virus caseloads and the effects of a lockdown so abrupt and punishing that Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked the poor to forgive him. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, has surpassed India with the most people in extreme poverty — roughly half its citizens. And Congo remains one of the world’s most crisis-ridden countries, with outbreaks of Ebola and measles smoldering.
Even China, Indonesia and South Africa are expected to have more than 1 million people each fall into extreme poverty, the World Bank says.
“It’s a huge, huge setback for the entire world,” Gayle Smith, president of the ONE Campaign to end extreme poverty, told The Associated Press. Smith, a former administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development, called the global response to the crisis “stunningly meager.”
Most of the millions newly at risk are in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that against countless odds had some of the world’s fastest growing economies in recent years.
It’s a timely reminder that the the main cost of the lockdowns favoured by liberal policy-makers across the world will not be people in the West, but those hovering just above the poverty line in the developing world. Thanks to the misguided enthusiasm of Western governments for imprisoning entire populations in their homes, thereby triggering a global recession, tens of millions of people will die of starvation in low-income countries. Worth reading in full.
Postcard Request
Are there any readers in the West Yorkshire village of Menston Park? If so, could we have a “Postcard From Menston Park” please? According to the Telegraph, the village is split between the Bradford half, with villagers occupying an area governed by Bradford City Council, and the Leeds half, which falls within Leeds City Council. The Telegraph has more.
Historically, it is not a division that causes serious problems, but since the Government’s partial lockdown of the Bradford council area, however, Menston has effectively been cut in two.
The Leeds half has the same liberties most of the country enjoys, while the Bradford half is living under tight restrictions.
“It’s crazy, Menston’s been split down the middle,” villager Michael Rhodes, 66, told the Telegraph.
“My house is right on the border. I can literally walk out, go 20 metres across the road into the park, and that apparently gives me different freedoms. So which do we abide by?”
Philip Davies, the local MP, is not happy about this state of affairs.
Mr Davies has had a “very robust conversation” with both the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, and the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, about the matter. The Prime Minister, he says, “listened, and said I made a very strong case”.
Matt Hancock told him the line had to be drawn somewhere.
If you’re a Menston Park resident and fancy writing something for Lockdown Sceptics, whether a full postcard or just a paragraph or two, please email me here.
Recommended Holiday Destination: Vallon Pont D’Arc, Southern France
A reader has been in touch to say he’s very happy with his choice of holiday destination: Vallon Pont D’Arc.
After ‘surviving’ the flight to Nice on a well known low-cost carrier, our first full day in the Ardeche has been wonderful. The French (please note we are the only Brits in the entire campsite or indeed possibly in the whole town) here on holiday are clearly up for a good time and whilst mask wearing was observed in the local supermarket it’s pretty much ignored or paid lip service to elsewhere. There’s zero social distancing in the streets, bars, restaurants, Ice-cream parlours – there’s even a funfair where the kids don’t have to wear masks on rides. It’s obvious to us that the French leave their snowflakes where they belong, on the ski slopes. Vive la France
We’re super glad we made the effort and are happily keeping the French economy going.
Recommended Holiday Destination 2: The Brecon Beacons
I’m just back from a lovely three-day family holiday in the Brecon Beacons. We went hiking in the Black Mountains, did the four waterfalls walk and visited Carreg Cennen Castle. No one seemed bothered about social distancing, we didn’t encounter a single leaper and – best of all – the Welsh Government hasn’t made face nappies mandatory in shops. Almost normal, save for the fact that there were very few tourists around.
Best bit about it was the wonderful bed and breakfast we stayed in – Ty Newydd in Llangadog, Carmarthenshire. Run by a lovely couple called Lesley and Derick, it’s just one mile outside the Brecon Beacons National Park and about two miles off the A40. Dogs welcome. In addition to bed and breakfast, it also has a caravan site and ample parking space. Worked out at £36 per person per night, which included a full English every morning. For couples who’ve just met on “Love in a Covid Climate”, this is perfect for a weekend getaway. Booking website is here.
Postcard From Latvia
I’ve published a new Postcard today, this one from Latvia. Our correspondent’s trip did not start well.
My trip got off to an inauspicious start when the person next to me on the plane was a young female who sat down and immediately requested I made sure my mask was covering my nose. I readjusted it and uttered words along the lines of, “Of course. I’ll make myself feel unwell just to please you.” (I have lung scarring from an illness 19 years ago). Perhaps I should have been nicer. But she was a mask militant. After the flight I saw her in the airport’s outside car park, still fully masked up, getting picked up by her (what I presumed to be) dad, who was also fully masked up. Neuroticism must run in the family.
Happily, it got better after that. Worth reading in full.
Round-Up
- ‘Deathly Lockdowns Compound Australia’s Covid Fiasco‘ – Dr Guy Campbell argues the Australian lockdowns are causing more harm than good
- ‘Almost half of teachers say it’s still unsafe to reopen schools‘ – Scottish teachers are still skittish about re-opening schools
- ‘Lockdown supporters cannot bear the thought that Sweden has got it right‘ – Excellent piece by Ross Clark in the Telegraph
- ‘The Myth That Lockdowns Stop Pandemics‘ – Good article by Stacey Rudin in RealClear Politics
- ‘We need a principled anti-lockdown movement‘ – Jeffrey A. Tucker, Editorial Director of the American Institute for Economic Research, sets out what an effective anti-lockdown movement would look like
- ‘Quarter of a million over-50s “will never work again” after coronavirus‘ – According to the Telegraph, one in four workers aged 50 or over has been furloughed and 377,000 of them could lose their jobs
- ‘UK poised to suffer the biggest Covid blow of any major economy‘ – The Telegraph reports that the UK economy has shrunk by 23% over the first half of 2020 due to drop in consumer spending during lockdown
- ‘“Politicized” Hydroxychloroquine Being “Discarded Prematurely” Warns Oxford Professor‘ – Hydroxychloroquine is being “discarded prematurely” and could still be effective against COVID-19, according to researchers from University of Oxford. They’re about to undertake a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study of the antiviral medication
- ‘UK heading into full lockdown next month if Boris Johnson doesn’t fix “disastrous” test and trace, says ex-government scientist‘ – The ex-scientist in question is Sir David King, head of “shadow SAGE” and longtime Labour supporter
- ‘How to choose between the virus camps‘ – Nice piece for Conservative Woman by Rowina Seidler, a regular Lockdown Sceptics reader
- ‘What we can learn from the Swedish paradox‘ – UnHerd editor Freddie Sayers writes about the lessons we can learn from his home country
- ‘My fellow teachers need to get a grip‘ – Outstanding piece in the Spectator by a teacher arguing all schools need to re-open in full next month
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Just one today: “The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils” by Morrissey.
Small Businesses That Have Re-Opened
A couple of months 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 re-opened, 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.
Now that non-essential shops have re-opened – or most of them, anyway – we’re now focusing on pubs, bars, clubs and restaurants, as well as other social venues. As of July 4th, many of them have re-opened too, but not all (and some of them are at risk of having to close again). 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 – particularly if they’re not insisting on face masks! Don’t worry if your entries don’t show up immediately – we need to approve them once you’ve entered the data.
Forums Up and Running
I enjoy reading all your comments and I’m glad I’ve created a “safe space” for lockdown sceptics to share their frustrations and keep each other’s spirits up. But please don’t copy and paste whole articles from papers that are behind paywalls in the comments. I work for some of those papers and if they don’t charge for premium content they won’t survive.
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums that are now open. Initially, they became a spam magnet so we temporarily closed them. However, we’ve found a team of people wiling to serve as moderators so the Forums are back up and running. And we’ve added a new dating section – “Love in a Covid Climate” (see above). Any problems, email the Lockdown Sceptics webmaster Ian Rons here.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
I thought I’d create a new permanent slot down here for people who want to buy (or make) a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and it has the advantage of not explicitly claiming you have a disability. But if you have no qualms about that (or you are disabled), you can buy a lanyard from Amazon saying you do have a disability/medical exemption here (now showing it will arrive between Sept 24th to Oct 3rd). The Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. You can get a “Hidden Disability” tag from eBay here and an “exempt” card that looks like as if it’s been issued by the NHS for just £2.79 from Etsy here.
Don’t forget to sign the petition on the UK Government’s petitions website calling for an end to mandatory face nappies in shops here (now over 27,500).
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption.
But what if you’re travelling on public transport without a lanyard and you’re stopped by the British Transport Police? According to today’s Times, 28,964 people without a face covering were questioned by the Transport Police between July 13th and 25th. However, just 1,605 were told to leave the network and only 33 penalty notices were issued.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the past 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. If you feel like donating, however small the sum, 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…
A Cambridge professor sent me this advertisement for a new book called Is Free Speech Racist? by Gavan Titley. We’ve been puzzling over it, but have decided it’s not a parody. We could be wrong, of course, but it’s on sale on Amazon here and Titley has written at least one other book – although, that, too, could be a parody. According to the Guardian, where Titley was a contributor until 2014, he is a lecturer in media studies at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
IS FREE SPEECH RACIST?
by Gavan TitleyFollowing the killing of George Floyd, thousands have taken to the streets across the world under the banner of a simple message: Black Lives Matter.
Almost instantaneously came calls to declare that ‘All Lives Matter’ – an undeniably important message, but not the one that needs airspace following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks, to name too few. When those who ‘cannot breathe’, literally or figuratively, finally raise their voices to be heard, they are immediately challenged, their speech closely regulated and their demands measured against the pre-existing values of the status quo. Witness Boris Johnson underlining law, order and democratic process as he condemned those who toppled Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol.
At the same time, out come the right-wing ‘counter-protestors’ touting either overt racism or else the sacred cow of ‘free speech’, increasingly used as a cover for the former. But we must not let the free speech defence immediately close down anti-racist activism. We must look more closely at the hypocritical use to which it is being put and ask: is free speech just another tool of racism today?
“This is an excellent and urgently needed book that offers a key contribution to both academic and public debate on free speech. In a clear, succinct style, Gavan Titley persuasively argues that free speech is often defended in a superficial way, which focuses on speech as a mere channel of ideas and neglects structural inequalities between different speakers.”
MATTEO BONOTTI, MONASH UNIVERSITY
Stop Press: There’s an amusing story in the Babylon Bee headlined “Riotous BLM Protesters Suddenly Realize They’re All White People”.
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Common Sense: ‘Act like you’ve got it,’ – Updated useful information and links: https://www.LCAHub.org/
Dr Sam Bailey has ALL the facts
Covid-19: Dr Sam FAQs 2
https://odysee.com/@drsambailey:c/Covid-Faqs-2:d
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday from 10am meet fellow anti lockdown freedom lovers, keep yourself sane, make new friends and have a laugh.
Join our Stand in the Park – Bracknell – Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
Love Dr Sam, she is an absolute star in this crap show.
Just listened to Dr Sam. Have I understood correctly that the early samples of the Coronavirus consisted of just a few strands of it? These genes were then fed into a computer which came up with the whole genome so, depending on which computer was used, different variants could be produced? Is there any proof anywhere that the Coronavirus actually produces a certain range of symptoms which we call Covid-19?
This seems to fit in with reports that Christian Drosten sent the RT-PCR test to the WHO days after the reports of this strange pneumonia found in Wuhan and before the whole genome had been sequenced, then the WHO just accepted it as the gold standard test.
Sorry, I’m not a scientist but I would like to understand if this is what she is saying. Thanks.
You are correct. All based on a lot of assumptions.
Christian Drosten is a liar. A stupid ‘expert’. He did experiments with rabbits and a type of coronavirus that affects rabbits.
The German Neil Ferguson. From various reading it appears there’s one of these cucks in every country; Fauci in the States, and others across the world.
The US are lucky that their “expert”(read idiot) has a name which can be used for puns about fascism, there’s not so much one can do for names like Ferguson or Drosten(maybe puns in German though?).
The virus is very similar to other bat coronaviruses. Full secuences for many of these would have been published in openly available professional databases – by Wuhan researchers amongst others.
Early patients would have had samples taken and sent for sequencing to most of the world’s major labs. A great many of these are in the UK. Researchers in many institutions would have identified the specific features of this virus, interchanged info with other researchers, published sequences and started developing detection kits. Others would have predicted likely clinical paths and hence symptoms to look for..
It is unlikely that any government organisation could have interfered sufficiently with this process to render it suspect. So I think you can depend on the generally-agreed output from this exercise. In other words, there is a specific recognisable covid virus, and it does cause an illness as described.
Thanks for that. Does that mean that each of the labs would have been given different gene sequences and these were fed into their computers rather like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle for which the computer then provided any missing pieces?
I’m struggling to understand it when some people say that this virus has never been isolated in a lab, but others say that it has been.
Are we talking about “isolated” in reality or computer generated?
Thanks again.
Biology was my worst subject at O Level!
No. Labs would obtain complete virus specimens from patients, then replicate and purify them so they had a good sample. They would then use an automatic gene sequence machine, which, simply,
1 – breaks up the genome into small fragments
2 – uses a chemical process to sequence each one
3 – uses a pattern matching computer to re-assemble the fragments into the original order.
because you break the genome into fragments and handle each one in a parallel fashion at the same time, it’s fast. You just need a lot of test tubes – these are associated with the multiple rows of pipettes that you see sometimes in pictures
The spike protein alone produces the symptoms of Covid-19, no virus required.
Pathologist Dr Ryan Cole lays it out clearly in this video
Human cells and Bacteria also contain RNA. So it may be possible to manufacture a viral genome using that.
https://odysee.com/@drsambailey:c/Odysee-Hunting-Viruses-With-Andy-Kaufmann-1-comp:7
This explains quite a lot of the stuff Sam talks about. And yes basically they seem to be able to make thing up to fit with what they want to ‘prove’.
my own question would be if SARS coV-2 is clearly isolated and easily recognisable, why can no one give definitive symptoms for it? why does the PCR struggle to find it? Why does it get it so wrong? How can it find false positives?
https://blog.waikato.ac.nz/bioblog/2021/04/sam-bailey-on-isolating-viruses-and-why-she-is-wrong/
Wish the links could focus more on practical rebellion, I’m worried that with the courts’ rejection of Simon Dolan’s case we may have gone beyond the point where legal action works in Johnson’s embryonic* dictatorship.
*he’s committed forms of most dictatorial atrocities already, but still emrbyonic as the main consolidation of power isn’t apparent yet
Trouble is that high school or less also ranks highly…just playing devil’s advocate. Master’s degree also ranks at the bottom
People with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees have generally demonstrated predisposition to conform to the requirements of society while PhDs are more likely to be genuinely intellectually curious?
It is as though you need to achieve a level of Socratic wisdom:
All that I know is that they know nothing.
This is a gem worth knowing !
https://covid19.onedaymd.com/2021/03/quercetin-and-zinc-zelenko-treatment.html
The more educated will also have come to realise that the injection is not a vaccine. Their research will have led them to understand that it is a gene altering substance with no long-term analysis and the makers are free from liability.
LS continuously calling this poison a ‘vaccine’ supports the MSM who demonise us as “anti-vaxxers”.
Plenty of us are NOT at war wih the vaccine, only against the lockdowns, the other tyrannies and the vaccine passport ID card plots. Well done to LS for standing against tyranny without using overly flowery language that would let the label anti-vaxxer be applied to us.
LS continuously calling this a vaccine supports the idea that they can read a dictionary.
A pre- or post-2020 dictionary?
we’re all clearly geniuses!
And that Lord Snooty is a dumbarse:)
Dr Sam Bailey has ALL the facts
Covid-19: Dr Sam FAQs 2
https://odysee.com/@drsambailey:c/Covid-Faqs-2:d
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday from 10am meet fellow anti lockdown freedom lovers, keep yourself sane, make new friends and have a laugh.
Join our Stand in the Park – Bracknell – Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
Weaponised ignorance.
Of course, the total number of PhDs – even in a 5m survey – is going to be comparatively low. So we may have less confidence in this finding.
It can be explained simply through social psychology.
1 – The vast mass who are outside the establishment are naturally suspicious of it.
2 – Those who are striving to better themselves inside the establishment are compliant with its every wish
3 – Those who have succeeded and have achieved their position in life have the freedom to make up their own minds…
I’d add, enlarging on your points 2 and 3, that the comfortable establishment position is very tempting to “midwits”, who want to associate themselves with elite positions, and also often lack the intelligence to either see past the establishment case or to defend positions outside the Overton Window when challenged.
If you read the full report:
“Those with professional degrees (e.g., JD, MBA) and PhDs were the only education groups without a decrease in hesitancy, and by May, those with PhDs had the highest hesitancy. To our knowledge, no other study has evaluated education with this level of granularity, which was possible due to our unusually large sample size (>10,000 participants with PhDs).”
>10k PhDs is not such a small number.
But but . . . the BBC said they’re all ant-vaxxers, outliers and trouble makers – though I’m sure there’s a chunk of people at the BBC that aren’t falling for this crap but are having to tow the line.
Can I just add as well – it’s not vaccine hesitant. That’s media speak to make to make people believe they’re umming and arr’ing and maybe could do in the future. Some of us are simply saying NO and never will – there’s no hesitation about it.
Too right, the word hesitancy applies to those who “probably won’t” or “won’t for now” or “won’t until X happens”. For those who definitely won’t refusal, as is their right for any medical procedure, applies and should be used to reflect the fact that coercion is worthless as it WILL NOT WORK for such people who have made a strong decision.
For another explanation see my long post, PhD and professional quals are very different to the taught quals in “learning” style. In a PhD or professional qual one often isn’t so much studying as simplying doing, and picking up necessary knowledge and skills as and when needed. Whereas up until masters the higher you rise the more accustomed you get to taking al info on trust and wrote memorising it for exams. The good news is that as everyone with a PhD, and many with professional quals, took a masters first, it seems that a few years of learning for yourself undoes the psychological damage which exam cramming causes up until and through masters level.
Be honest and tell everything!!! Results from cited survey: “COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy decreased by one-third from January to May, with relatively large decreases among participants with Black, Pacific Islander or Hispanic race/ethnicity and ≤high school education. In May, independent hesitancy risk factors included younger age, non-Asian race, having a PhD or ≤high school education, living in a rural county, living in a county with higher 2020 Trump support, lack of worry about COVID-19, working outside the home, never intentionally avoiding contact with others, and no past-year flu vaccine”
It would be interesting to see how these figures have changed since the end of May, since much more information about adverse vaccine effects has come out since then, as well as increasing information about the lack of effectiveness of the vaccines in preventing infection and transmission.
Totally unscientific in my case, but I have made the same observation about wokeism and Brexit among my fairly diverse circle of friends and acquaintances.
Those who are pro-woke and remainers tend to be well educated but not obviously high IQ. The sort of people who know a lot about their area of expertise but are limited in more general understanding and poor at questioning and debate.
Those I know who are anti-woke and pro Brexit are either in low-paid jobs and have no further education, or are the exceptional minds – those who debate and reason well, have very high level jobs in areas that require more holistic thinking.
Seems almost a perfect divide among the groups. Interestingly, I find most of those with the lower education levels tend to have a more inquiring mind even if they don’t have the same level of exposure to education. There are a few gullible, unquestioning, people among them, but generally speaking they ask more questions.
My assumption has always been that those who have some intelligence but don’t have an enquiring mind tend to go with whatever they are told by people in authority as they are served well by the status quo and don’t have the curiosity, capacity or need to question.
Those who have brilliant minds ask questions of everything, and those more excluded from society question everything.
Good post. That is my experience also.
I think if you are low paid and in a manual job you are more likely to have found the lockdowns difficult to deal with but also been in a position to observe how little risk the virus posed in reality. Making you much more cynical about the politicians and media and their motives. You are probably also having more daily face to face contact with people than if you are a middle income “worker from home” and have a better connection with the real world.
I think the other factor is the level of consumption of mainstream media and involvement in social media. I am almost alone in my (middle class professional) social circle in that I don’t have a TV licence and therefore have to actively go out and find news and information rather than have it constantly on in the background. Similarly I am not on social media like facebook and twitter and all of my relationships are real world ones. Pretty much everyone else I know has rolling news constantly on in the background and is constantly on facebook and Twitter and therefore exposed to the relentless narrative and propaganda.
Hmmm? Does it really take a genius to read scientific facts and apply them to your decisions? Well if they say so, from now on I’d like to be addressed as Ebygum, Doctor, Master, Bachelor, PhD, BH (Calcutta) Failed. Thank you!
(that last for the oldies who remember the Perishers.)
Careful! You might accidentally uncover support for Trump among the educated.
Makes sense. People with some college or degrees are likely to have just swallowed the Kool Aid they’re fed and were probably only doing it in order to get a nice cushy job which involves doing as you’re told and not questioning anything (and maybe getting a vaccine as well) in order to keep it and get ahead.
Master’s and, even more so, PhDs are going to think more critically and independently about things, question and critique what they’re told and weigh up opposing evidence and viewpoints.
Therein lies the crux of the problem: the bulk of the “educated” classes are taught what to think, not how to think. These are the people that run the country, the media and the institutions.
God help us all.
“Vaccine hesitancy” is a poor term. Hesitancy implies a pause before something you will actually do.
I am not pausing before doing something, I am saying “fuck off, no”.
Can’t we just call it “not vaccinated”? So the above would become, for example, “…such as that counties with higher levels of support for Donald Trump in the 2020 election had higher levels of people not vaccinated.”
This is far more accurate, we don’t know whether they are “hesitant” or saying “no, fuck off”, so it’s misleading to use the term “hesitant”.
It’s a good term if your objective is to nudge people into getting vaccinated, because it implies you probably will eventually. One alternative phrase I’ve heard is “vaccine cautious” but there’s got to be a better one. I think we need a phrase that more generally encompasses a rational assessment of risks vs benefits of ALL medical procedures.
What about “gene therapy refuseniks” because they sure as hell ain’t injecting a vaccine?
What is your preferred definition of “vaccine”? How is “gene therapy” defined?
There are two terms, the hesitant do exist, they exist aplenty, but there are also outright refusers. Trying to mark refusers as hesistant does seem to be an attempt to pretend coercion would work.
Informed non consenter.
As opposed to (the vast millions) uniformed CONcented. (to the clot shot)
PS. You are right in the context of this article though, it should say not vaccinated there, part of the problem here is that because the MSM are bombarding us with particular phrases all day long it’s hard not to fall into the trap of using those phrases ourselves.
Indeed. I’m not vaccine hesitant for two reasons: 1: It’s not a vaccine 2: I’m not hesitating I’m refusing
Quite happy with all my actual vaccines – yellow fever, tetanus etc. Never more certain about anything than that I’m not going to take an experimental mRNA gene therapy that: does very little to protect me against a disease I’ve already got natural immunity to; that even if I hadn’t would be approximately half as risky to me in any given year as crossing the road is; and that has the worst record of adverse effects of any medical intervention since trepanning.
No “hesitancy” even comes into it. I’d have to be fucking insane to take it.
40K people died on british roads in 2020, despite reduced traffic caused by the government’s attack on our economy. Given we know covid deaths have been badly over-counted it would appear that road deaths in 2020 could potentially outnumber true covid deaths.
Careful now, they’ll be using that to ban cars. Oh wait . . .
I knew there was a reason why I got my engineering degree and C.Eng.
I don’t like the term ‘vaccine hesitant’ because a) it’s not a vacccine, it’s an experimental gene therapy, and b) it’s not ‘hesitant’, it’s ‘enlightened’.
It is my experience that those with a curious and genuinely intelligent mind, free of groupthink, will not touch this poison with a bargepole…
A degree in the US is not (or used not to be) the same as a degree in Europe. The first year of a US degree is basically A Levels. Their masters courses take 2 years.
Sick of the term Vaccine hesitancy, I much prefer the ‘Look before you leap’ principle, the most basic of all risk assessments.
Wow. Those most-educated folks are just as smart as yours truly, who left school at sixteen.
Not sure that it applies in the UK. I work in an organisation where a high proportion of the staff would be described as well educated (majority with degrees, and a fair few with Master’s / PhDs. Nearly all of them are very pro-vax.
Don’t know any anti-vaxxers in my workplace, and I’m not an anti-vaxxer (I’m a lockdown sceptic and an “I will have this vaccine when this government stop coercing and treat the vaccine as a way straight to true normality, not as the entry price to a new abnormal”), but I know more lockdown sceptics with PhDs or hard science undergrad degrees than I do sceptics with less qualifications. Not that sceptics seem a majority in either group, but still more common with rising education.
Kinda makes sense.
I listened to the Delingpod pod cast with a blogger called Morgoth. He reckoned the biggest sceptics were IQ at the lower end (could just tell by intuition that the narrative didn’t stack up, didn’t bother thinking about it too hard) or those with an IQ over 140, who can assimilate the information logically and know exactly why the narrative doesn’t make sense. The “man in the middle” all buys into the madness. Well maybe not all, but a lot of them.
IQ over 140 is pretty extreme. 99.6% of people are lower than that.
Most of the people in control today…in business, academia, politics, science, wherever….they’ll be in that middle category. I work with plenty of people with science based PhDs who are struggling with it. Met one for a drink yesterday… Cambridge nat scis degree, and PhD…”but the vaccines produce an antibody response better than natural infection”.
No thought as to what “better” might mean or how whoever pumped out that shite might be using the word “better” in order to manipulate.
They produce an antibody response which should be almost exactly equal to natural infection what the vaccines don’t do is train the T cells or the other first line immune defences.
That’s not exactly true. They produce fewer IgA antibodies and they are v short lived, and practically no IgM ones. Masses of IgG – more than natural infection – but very specifically targeted at S1 subunit. Not sure about T cell. May be too soon to tell for sure
So more of a very narrow type of antibody. More is not better.
I’ve seen it argued that it is “better” because the dose given is sufficient to generate 4 times the number of antibodies, but the reason the dose was set that high is that most of the vax antibodies are non-neutralising, the kind that doesn’t actually work against the virus and potentially causes ADE as the vaccine wears off https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.07.21253098v2
Yes, as I say, more is not better. More is to cover up crap, I reckon.
Pretty much every bit of this scamdemic doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny. I’m not convinced the antibody argument does either.
https://theinfectiousmyth.com/coronavirus/AntibodyTestingForCOVID.pdf
An interesting correlation, that U curve with education. Wonder if it might be that for folks with very little education they’ve never grown accustomed to trusting everything told, and folks with a PhD have grown accustomed to working things out themselves (I’m about a month away from membership in that latter camp), but heading up towards masters degrees people get ever more used to cramming for exams and start just taking anything heard on trust.
Actually lots of other interesting correlations too in the medrxiv paper:
..oddly a lot of people saying they’d probably get the vaccine mention they think others need it more,
..really odd discontinuity in data for elderly hispanics (wonder whether it links to a specific historic cultural event they were old enough to have lived through),
..”don’t like vaccines” is only highly common in the definite refusal group rather than the “probably nots”,
..trust in government is surprisingly high in the “probably nots” (25% distrust),
..side effect concerns same for definitely nots, probably nots and probably yeses,
..regular and part-time social distancers less hesitant than full-time isolationists or undistancers,
..no effect of an elderly person in the home affecting hesitancy (folk have the sense to know that if you ger the vaccine it doesn’t do anything for those around you, hence no need ever for vax passports),
..apparently no question on “have you ever suspected you’ve had covid-19”, only a question of if positively tested, would be interesting to compare results from the two,
..hesitancy scarcely different among areas with different covid death rates, except a bit different for the lowest quartile of counties,
..not that much difference between democrat and republican areas, but big difference between trumpist and anti-trumpist areas, would have been good if they’d asked the folk their political views too as well as just looekd at where they lived,
..higher hesitancy rates for those not “working” from home, so folks who’ve had more chance of exposure have clearly got a better feel for the real risks of covid,
P.S. if the researchers ever do read this post: PLEASE DO NOT USE YELLOW LINES ON GRAPHS WITH WHITE BACKGROUNDS!!! Swap them to black, grey or dashed, I would advise orange but you’ve already used that colour for another line. Chartreuse green often works well too, stands out nicely, none of your existing colours are close enough to it to confuse with it.
I live and work in a very working class area. The paradox i’m witnessing is that the working class seem to have an instinctive knowing that something isn’t right, they don’t trust the gov and know they’re being at least partly lied to about the pandemic……but the majority of them are going out and getting jabbed anyway and too many for silly reasons like going on holiday etc.
I have conversations with vaccinated people at work about how the entire thing is a fraud and they agree! Insanity.
Well, forgive me for venting: I am relieved, if a little surprise to read this.
My BSc was Genetics, with genetics and immunogenetics, microbiology and virology; and my PhD in low template PCR analysis of trace DNA of the Human Leucocyte Antigen system. I worked professionally in IT between my undergarduate and graduate degrees. So I would like to think I have a good grasp of the basics and understood the initial plan as ‘conventional wisdom’. This is essentially the one still pursued in Sweden and advocated by the brilliant Sunetra Gupta, Martin Kulldorff, Jay Battachayra, et al.
Since mid-March 2020, its been absolute daily torture from which it is impossible to escape, cognitively – and physically:
The abandonment of Plan A (the pandemic preparedness guidelines) for untried and untested Plan B, the pointless masks and deadly lockdowns, abandonment of the major pillars of immunity, using a PCR based test entirely wrongly and inappropriately, being mesmerised by the modellers (who seem to be mathematicians and economists, not life scientists) and reading the scathing reviews by professional programmers of Imperial’s rubbish code (why am I not surprised?), and investing everything in vaccines – knowing the limited efficacy of ‘flu vaccines.
Far worse though has been the unethical – I would say wicked – manipulation of public opinion to which much of the scientific / University community has acquiesced or actively colluded: the Royal Society / Oxford ‘masks work’ advocacy research, the 1200 concerned scientists’ letter – some pf whom are former colleagues, the accusations that questioning the narrative is ‘dangerous’, the appalling bullying of SG, MK and JB, and the confirmation that using fear and whipping up hatred is actually ethical behaviour in science and psychology..
F*ck me. You’re never too old to learn.
Apologies
Anyone who trusts any government on any issue at any time is an idiot.
vaccine hesitancy NO………clot shot never ist
All this study shows is that having a Ph.d doesn’t make you smart or a good decision-maker. Look at all the bloviator scientists discussed here ever day with their models and their questionable notoriety.
I am sure they have Ph.Ds but their ‘advice’ is not up to any standard. Dr. Fauci has a Ph.d. Having a Ph.d, in neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for being a good decision-maker.
As to the anti-vax movement I ask; what do you think is a viable alternative to non-sterilizing immunity vaccines for the over 65 crowd ?
I also challenge anyone here to provide an accurate database of deaths ’caused’ by the vaccines. Not VAERS and not just correlation.
Send it to me at Ltristano2008@gmail.com.
Just the data please, not the Ad Hominem.
“As to the anti-vax movement I ask; what do you think is a viable alternative to non-sterilizing immunity vaccines for the over 65 crowd ?“
Most of the resistance are not “anti-vax”, of course, just anti-this particular novel experimental treatment being rolled out before full testing on the basis of a spurious claim that we face an emergency, or even just against coercion in its implementation.
Personally I don’t have a problem with the treatment being given to those especially vulnerable, provided it’s with genuinely fully informed consent and provided it’s properly costed on the usual basis used for medical treatments. But I’ll answer on behalf of any genuine anti-vaxers there might be: the viable alternative to giving the new treatment is not to give it. It’s not as though covid is some kind of unprecedented plague, nor is it as though any of us are going to live forever.
The simple truth is that if we had not been bombarded with scare propaganda and railroaded into ridiculous panic measures, we wouldn’t even be noticing that there was anything particularly unusual about the situation now. Perhaps a few hospitals would have an unusual patient profile and some doctors would be writing papers about an unusual uptick in respiratory illnesses in the very old. That’s about it.
“I also challenge anyone here to provide an accurate database of deaths ’caused’ by the vaccines. Not VAERS and not just correlation.”
Nobody can, of course, because there is no system in place to properly monitor vaccine consequences.
But you cannot conclude from that, that there are no such deaths, of course. What you should be asking yourself is: how is it that such an obviously wise and necessary precaution has never been implemented? Who gains from having merely a ramshackle system of self-reporting that rarely generates any usable information?
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Most EducatedLeast Stupid Are the Least Likely to Get Vaccinated Against Covid, According to New U.S. StudyFixed.