The scientific modellers who warned that Britain had little option but to impose severe restrictions or face tens of thousands of deaths from Omicron were last night in retreat – although they haven’t yet admitted they were wrong about every previous variant as well. MailOnline has more.
First, modellers who advise the Government said winter deaths from the highly transmissible variant would be “substantially” lower than they had originally believed, then Independent SAGE, a group of Left-leaning scientists who have pushed for lockdowns, distanced themselves from the need to impose further curbs.
Before Christmas, epidemiologists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine produced a series of dire scenarios in which they warned Omicron could lead to between 25,000 and 75,000 deaths by the end of April.
Dr. Nick Davies said that he and his team were working on revised scenarios that will soon be presented to scientific advisers and senior civil servants.
Tory MP William Wragg, a member of the party’s Covid Recovery Group, said the U-turn provided evidence that many in the scientific community had been too gloomy about the threat from coronavirus.
“Once again, it appears that certain scientists and experts so quick to spread gloom and panic at the arrival of Omicron are having to come to terms with a reality that is far from the catastrophe they were predicting,” he said.
“It all shows that Boris Johnson and his Cabinet were right to avoid condemning us to another lockdown with the dismal effects on people’s livelihoods and liberties.”
The School of Hygiene’s team built its original models – published on December 11th – on the assumption that Omicron was as naturally lethal as the Delta strain, meaning it would kill the same proportion of unvaccinated people who had not been exposed to Covid before.
Dr. Davies argued that while South African doctors were already finding Omicron appeared to be less severe, the reports were “anecdotal” so the School of Hygiene’s supposition was “a reasonable assumption to make at the time”.
Over the past month, however, considerable evidence has built up that Omicron is less dangerous. This includes statistical studies by Imperial College London, Edinburgh University and the U.K. Health Security Agency, as well as research from South Africa and Denmark. Laboratory studies have also found Omicron is less adept at infecting the lungs.
Dr. Davies said the December model had assumed that once a patient ended up in hospital with Omicron, their chance of needing intensive care and dying was the same as with Delta – which has proved to be incorrect.
“We now know that doesn’t seem to be at all the case, as people are ending up in hospital with Omicron, but they are not requiring critical care [to the same extent as with Delta],” he said. “The deaths number will come down very substantially [compared with original estimates].”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: According to Gordon Rayner in the Telegraph, questions are now being asked about why SAGE’s modellers – and England’s Chief Medical Officer – were so dismissive of the evidence from South Africa three weeks ago showing Omicron was “very, very mild” and wouldn’t result in a big uptick in hospital admissions.
Stop Press 2: Daily Covid cases across Britain have fallen for the fourth day in a row and are down 6.7% compared to last Sunday. MailOnline has more.
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Wow. 90% + links to Telegraph and Daily Mail.
Not sure how skeptical this is.
Plenty of meat for the neocon rightists to bite, not much on the power centres war against us.
You are free to send in your ideas if you see anything interesting
yep, and I often do.
Increasingly the Overton window of what skepticism is adhered to has been kept pretty tight. Off Guardian seems to be offering good thoughtful original material lately.
Like this:https://off-guardian.org/2024/01/18/understanding-power-dynamics-moving-beyond-divisions-covid19-ukraine-israel-palestine/
Understanding Power Dynamics & Moving Beyond Divisions: Covid19, Ukraine & Israel/PalestineDr Piers Robinson & Vanessa Beeley
Yes, I am a keen supporter of Off-G. There is always something interesting and with a different perspective.
For some contrast here is a link with regard to the effect of off-shore wind turbines on the marine ecology and commercial fishing;
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/01/28/offshore-wind-and-the-stress-on-commercial-fishermen/
I assume it’s part of the funding model.
There is so much Telegraph material every day, I’ll be really shocked if the DS doesn’t have some funding agreement with them.
I’m not sure the Telegraph would want to risk funding the DS.
I think it’s kept going by people working for nothing/not very much and the largesse of some wealthy backers.
A nice little informative 5min video, explaining how UNRWA are ensuring that Palestinians remain refugees ( and consequently become jihadis, in many cases ) forever;
”Instead of resettling its refugees, UNRWA forces them and all their descendants to be refugees forever. It indoctrinates kids to believe they must destroy Israel to ever have a home. This perpetual refugee status is unprecedented and different than how all other refugees are treated – including the 100 million aided by UNHCR, the UN’s main refugee agency.
In the past century, there were 1,000,000+ Jewish refugees from Arab countries. None are now seen as “refugees” or to have a “right to return”. They’ve all resettled in Israel or other countries. Israel grants all Jews a “Law of Return” to their indigenous homeland.
Most Arabs in Israeli territories came from Egypt or Jordan, which should offer them similar rights. Funding UNRWA destroys the lives of Arab children who become indoctrinated with hate and violence for life. It destroys the societies where it operates, and brings forever conflicts to the region.”
https://twitter.com/QuantumFlux36/status/1751797921035719129
Interesting to see the contrast between what constituted a ”refugee camp” in Gaza compared to refugee camps in Syria and Jordan;
”According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), as of 2023, the Gaza Strip includes eight refugee camps, the largest of which is Jabalia in the northern part of the Strip, where 116,000 Palestinians are registered as refugees.
Palestinian statistics show that prior to the current war, virtually nobody in any mukhayam – “refugee camp,” from kheyma, “tent” – in the Gaza Strip was actually living in a tent. Prior to October 7, the average housing density in Gaza was 1.7 persons per room; 21.2% of the population lived in a house or a villa while the rest (77.8%) lived in apartments. Most residents (78%) owned their homes or apartments.
In 2021, 100% of Gaza’s residents had access to electricity. Daily per capita consumption of water in Gaza was 86.6 liters per day – four liters more than average daily consumption in the West Bank, and in Jordan the average person has access to only 61 liters of water daily.”
https://www.memri.org/reports/palestinian-refugee-camps-gaza-strip-prior-october-7-%E2%80%93-part-i
“It destroys the societies where it operates, and brings forever conflicts to the region”
That explains why the US and Europe fund the UNRWA.
A bit misleading. She regrets using the word “elimination” but still thinks “maximum suppression” until the jab was available was the right approach. According to the article, anyway.
These people, btw, aren’t advisers. The idea that this sociology graduate was somehow shaping policy in Scotland is beyond comical.
Sturgeon like every national leader is a policy salesperson. She sells pre-determined policies to the public. And these little minions like Devi Sridhar who go out to the media as “advisers” are just part of the sales team.
The extent to which restrictions in Scotland were tighter than in England is simply that Sturgeon fancied she could flog the same policy being sold everywhere else that much harder to the obedient Scottish plebs. Double rations for the Scots because it seems they’ll take it. She used their national self identity against them. As did Drakeford in Wales.
Sturgeon must have screwed up on something else though because it doesn’t look like she’s getting her payoff, her nice position in the bureaucracy. At least not for now.
“Sturgeon must have screwed up on something else though because it doesn’t look like she’s getting her payoff”
She faltered on the question of whether a convicted rapist was a man or woman. Not able to follow-through on that agenda might not have helped.
So-called hate crime law ‘could be used to stop the display of the Union flag’ in Northern Ireland–
Northern Ireland must sometimes feel abandoned by the rest of the UK, so
“Well done” to founder Toby Young and his team for organising the meeting there, where they are threatened with the same outrageous “hate speech” laws as Scotland was under Justice Minister Humza.
“Hate speech” does not exist in the West. It is an entirely alien concept called “Lashon Hara”, being forced upon the West by a certain desert tribe, who originally used it to silence the parents of children abused by their “clergy”. It is similar to the codes of silence imposed by foreign criminal gangs upon their members, as well as within certain itinerant communities traditionally hostile to the sedentary inhabitants. We must reject the entire idea of “hate speech” and “hate crime” as an alien concept, and remove all references to it from our laws. We do not consent to it being forced upon our democratic societies.
Seconded
Substack by Prof Jo Phoenix on her court case with the OU
https://jophoenix.substack.com/p/what-a-week