The Telegraph leads on Chris Whitty’s depressing announcement at yesterday the Downing Street press conference that social distancing measures will have to remain in place until a vaccine or “highly effective drugs” are available to avoid a second wave of infections, which could mean well into next year. This bombshell came just moments after Dominic Raab had said there was now a “glimmer of hope”. He didn’t spell out what he was referring to – and he used the same phrase almost two weeks ago, so the glimmer hasn’t got any brighter. But in his speech he referred to “the peak of this virus” three times and implied we’re in the midst of that right now. The Government’s position is that no social distancing restrictions can be lifted until we’re past the peak and there is no risk of a second wave that will necessitate reimposing those restrictions.
I have good news for Mr Raab in that case. There’s growing evidence that the daily death toll peaked on April 8th, as can be seen on the NHS England graph below:
That’s the view of Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford. Two days ago he said: “From an epidemiological perspective we can say that the numbers are consistent with the peak happening on April 8th.” As Prof Heneghan has pointed out, if the peak was indeed on April 8th and deaths have begun to decline since, that suggests the more modest social distancing measures the Government introduced on March 16th flattened the infection peak, without the lockdown being necessary. After all, there’s a three-week lag time between infection and death and April 8th is three weeks after March 18th, two days after the mitigation measures were introduced but five days before the lockdown.
More evidence that extreme social distancing measures aren’t necessary to flatten the peak is the analysis done by numerous researchers – including three I flagged up in yesterday’s update – showing that the rate of infections and deaths rise and fall according to the same pattern in every country the virus has struck, regardless of varying population densities, testing rates, case levels, mortality rates, etc. and in spite of the severity of the lockdowns they’ve imposed and when they imposed them in the lifecycle of the outbreak. This is nicely illustrated in the graph below, created by a sceptic on Twitter, which maps the rise and fall of daily deaths in England and Sweden, having adjusted for the fact that Sweden’s are about 10 times lower than England’s. As you can see, the pattern is almost identical, even though Sweden hasn’t imposed a lockdown:
So what are you waiting for, Mr Raab? The doves in the Cabinet will argue that these analyses are all very well but we still don’t know enough about the virus yet to be sufficiently confident that if we start to relax social distancing measures we won’t be overwhelmed by a second peak. But even though that may be true (depending on how you define “sufficiently confident”) it’s not a good argument for delaying announcing a phased exit, as the leaders of Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, the United States, etc. have already done. No Government can eliminate the risks posed by the virus completely, but keeping lockdowns in place is hardly the risk-free option, given how much economic damage they’re doing. It’s a question of balancing the risks against each other, and in order to do that in a properly informed way our Government needs to listen to sceptical epidemiologists and virologists, not just the most alarmist, as well as economists and business experts. (And educationalists. Only five per cent of Britain’s most vulnerable children are taking up the offer to attend school, according to the BBC, and only 8% of children in the most disadvantaged schools are turning up for online lessons.)
The editor of the Washington Examiner, Hugo Gordon, makes this point eloquently in an op ed published yesterday. Talking about the reluctance of some state governors to end lockdowns, he writes:
It is time to resume commercial activity, at first gradually, and then as quickly as reasonably possible. If we allow ourselves to be frightened into an innumerate expectation of complete safety before life is allowed to return nearer to normal, we will bring on an economic, social, and national catastrophe involving the destruction of America’s wealth, happiness, and place in the world. We must take sensible precautions so the public knows the balance of risk has switched toward activity away from inertia. But a balance still means risk on each side.
Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that the lockdown itself may be causing more deaths than it’s preventing – and that’s just in terms of its immediate impact on public health, not the long-term consequences of the economic harm. Consultant oncologist Karol Sikora has a piece in the Mail today warning of the catastrophic impact the lockdown is having on non-COVID-19 patients. “Some stroke and heart attack patients are routinely waiting more than two hours for an ambulance, while 2,300 cancer diagnoses are being missed each week because patients are not going to see their GP or because they are not being referred for urgent tests and scans at hospital,” he writes. “Another 400 cancers a week are, it is estimated, being missed because breast, cervical and bowel cancer screening has been suspended. For any of these patients, delay can be a death sentence.” Since the virus struck, the number of patients who are being referred for cancer treatment has dropped by 75%. By Sikora’s estimation, the combined effect of all these delays will be 50,000 excess cancer deaths. (TalkRadio’s Dan Wootton makes a similar argument in today’s Sun.)
The odd thing about the neglect of non-COVID-19 patients is that the hospitals are hardly full of COVID-19 patients. Health Service Journal reports that a new Nightingale hospital in Harrogate isn’t going to be needed after all, so low is the demand, and the flagship Nightingale hospital in London, which has the capacity to treat 4,000 patients, is still largely empty. As if to underline just how underwhelmed the NHS is by the current crisis, doctors and nurses have been posting videos of themselves on YouTube dancing on their wards.
Some people were outraged by the opening paragraph of Monday’s daily update, in which I tried to assess whether NHS workers are more likely to die from COVID-19 by crunching some numbers with the help of Guy de la Bédoyère, a reader who’s well-versed in statistics. On the face of it, NHS workers don’t seem to be dying from the virus in greater numbers than other people of working age. The NHS employs roughly 1.5 million people across the UK, which is about 1/43 of the UK population and about 1/25 of the working population (people aged 20-65). But the number of NHS workers succumbing to the virus is a bit lower than 1/25 of the number of people of working age who’ve died of COVID-19. Of course, if you adjust for the fact that a majority of NHS workers are less likely to be suffering from underlying health conditions than the general working population, it may well be that they are dying in greater numbers. But when Guy and I looked at the data that calculation hadn’t been done. Was that a callous and unfeeling point to make, given that NHS workers are placing themselves in harm’s way every day? The producers of Radio 4’s More or Less don’t think so because yesterday the programme posed exactly the same question and came to a similar conclusion. It calculated that if NHS workers are dying from COVID-19 at the same rate as the rest of the working population, you’d expect between 70 and 85 of them to have died so far. In fact, according to More or Less, 77 have died (or had when they last looked), which is in line with expectations rather than higher. Like us, however, the presenter Tim Harford and his producer added the caveat that NHS workers are likely to be healthier than the average 20-65 year-old, which means you’d expect fewer to be dying if their risk isn’t elevated. You can listen to the item here. It starts at 17m and 23s.
The South African authorities have banned the sale of alcohol and tobacco in the hope of persuading people to remain in their homes, prompting looting to break out in the Western Cape. That’s a particularly brain-dead bit of state over-reach because according to a study carried out in a French hospital nicotine may be both a prophylactic against coronavirus and an effective treatment. It found that of those admitted to hospital with COVID-19, whose median age was 65, only 4.4% were regular smokers, compared with 11% of 65-75 year-olds in the general population. The Guardian has the story.
Bad news for those lockdown sceptic who upload content to YouTube. Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s CEO, told CNN’s Reliable Sources yesterday that during the pandemic the social media platform will be “removing information that is problematic”, such as advising people to “take Vitamin C” or “anything that would go against World Health Organisation recommendations”. Not sure when YouTube put this policy in place, but if it was at the beginning of the year then presumably any content suggesting COVID-19 was a transmissible disease before the end of January would have been removed because up until that point the WHO was maintaining that there was no “clear evidence of human to human transmission of the novel coronavirus”.
Thanks to all those people who donated to Lockdown Sceptics yesterday – it’s those donations that enable me to devote so much time to this site. If you’d like to donate, you can do so here. I’ll leave you with this table. It was originally produced by the Babylon Bee in a different form, but I’ve adapted it slightly (with help from Ian Rons).
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“Berlin expresses solidarity with Israel in the face of Hamas attacks, as pro-Palestinian riots erupt in the migrant neighbourhoods of the German capital” – In Berlin, the Brandenburger Tor was illuminated with the Israeli flag in solidarity, while nearby in the migrant-saturated Neukölln neighbourhood, Palestinians celebrated, writes Eugyppius on Substack.
And there’s the problem right there: migrant neighbourhoods of the German capital
There’s celebrations all over the world, no surprises there because there’s Muslims all over the world, although I’d like to think that the majority of Muslims are peaceful and would condemn the atrocities committed by the Hamas jihadis. Anybody supporting Hamas is outing themselves as a terrorist apologist. No difference between them and ISIS. I saw a video doing the rounds of a family with 3 kids held hostage and they allegedly killed one of them. I didn’t watch the video because it’s too upsetting and I’m not even sure of it’s authenticity. I thought the whole point in taking hostages was because they’re a valuable bargaining tool. Why kill them outright? And how on earth are the IDF meant to safely rescue these hostages? This is the challenge. Hamas aren’t just going to get bored and let them go, they’re also not going to conveniently keep them all in one place.
So anyone supporting Hamas is actively supporting the deliberate murder of children, which is beyond sick. Supporters may as well hold a sign up declaring ”I’m an evil monster”. That’s what they’re admitting to. It is possible to support Palestine but condemn Hamas, in my view, and it’s important not to conflate the two. I’m sure there are civilians in Palestine that just want to live peacefully and hate the atrocities but they’re governed by terrorists.
You clearly refuse to understand this conflict and are simply repeating the biased msm narrative which not only surprises me Mogwai but sickens me also…
Zelensky good, Putin bad…. Its the same ridiculous notion..
Zero consideration for the complexity of these geo political situations..
You should get a job in the msm spouting such nonsense
Seriously suggest you listen to Galloway here Mogs, and learn something about this conflict because frankly , you’re clueless
https://youtu.be/uLAID0dEuRA?si=FTpDDzMPlri8A-8l
“The lives of Palestinians is worth less than the lives of Israelis”..
Isn’t that right Mogwai….
Just to put some context on that –
Recent statements on an Israeli talk show by Itamar Ben-Gvir, current minister of national security in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, shed light on the Zionist segregationist ideology. The minister, who lives in the Kiryat Arba colony surrounding Al-Khalil, admitted, “My right, the right of my wife and children to move around in Judea and Samaria [the biblical term for the West Bank], is more important than the right to movement of the Arabs.”
https://jacobin.com/2023/10/west-bank-apartheid-israel-idf-oslo-accords
My thoughts with those suffering on all sides of this desperate conflict.
Absolutely.
“Angela Merkal’s astounding open border policy granting close to a million Muslim immigrants entry into Germany could be seen as self-flagellation for Germany’s historical transgressions. Laced with typical progressive lunacy. What better way to make up for the Holocaust than by admitting “refugees” who frequently exhibit genocidal hatred of Jews.”
Gad Saad – From his book ‘The Parasitic Mind’
Islam, the ideology of hate and death.
Usefully exploited by western governments to fracture our society’s ! Just look at how cocksure Khant has become !
Fox News have this live update page. Death toll estimate increased dramatically since yesterday.
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/hamas-attack-israel-war
More live updates;
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/378017
I’d recommend visiting this website for news and all updates on the war. So much crap to navigate around on Twitter with phony, out of context footage, it’s difficult to establish authenticity. Plus all the trolls and bot farms are out en masse. I just try and stick with reliable, trustworthy sources.
”Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The sources claimed that officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions.
Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah, they said.”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/378135
And to provide some balance Mogs I’d recommend visiting this one…
https://www.aljazeera.com/
Get my point?.. No I’m sure you don’t
Jon – you need to stop your personal attacks, IMO. Feel free to disagree respectfully…
Cheers Michael. Not many people on here seem to call out this sort of behaviour from posters so props to you. He’s just one of several on here that I refuse to engage with now due to behaving disrespectfully, trolling me or just being downright abusive. Seems there’s a fair amount of fragile egos around this place that can’t seem to contend with somebody having a different perspective to them or engage in debate while keeping it civil, so the dummies get well and truly spat out. Pathetic.
”When you resort to name-calling you’ve lost the argument.” Anthony Watts.
“I just try and stick with reliable, trustworthy sources.”
And you think the Israel national news is one… Unbelievable
Deluded beyond all measure.
Latest leaflet – Stop the Global Medical Coup
“unless you hear from us it is not the truth”. You should see the coments below. Apart from one person going on about the lack of context, the rest are negative towards horse face.
…I remember her clearly saying that with a straight face at the time….
I also remember this speech she gave about a year ago at the UN…if you can stand to listen to the tortured way she talks, which grates on my nerves (LOL) the whole thing is worth a listen….but if not @14.00…..after talking about how important free speech is..gives all the reasons she would never be trusted with it….a proper little fascist in a frock…..!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_4Cjki3SOM
It’s her vs Trudeau for the most fascistically evil of the western leaders over the last few years.
In
Hugo Keith KC states:
By that definition ‘Report 9’ was neither a forecast nor a model. It did not match the reality of what was happening up to its own publication date. Perhaps it needs a new term to describe it? I’d go for ‘Apocalyptic Science Fiction’.
Everyone needs to calm down about AI – spiked (spiked-online.com) The author talks about “catastropism and climate alarmism being very attractive to policy makers:
“The takeover of government policy by effective altruists is astonishing, not least for the ease with which it has been achieved. There is a striking parallel between AI catastrophism and apocalyptic climate alarmism, which allows policymakers to pose as saviours of the planet in the long-term, while ignoring our immediate concerns. Our rivers and beaches get filthier from lack of investment in water infrastructure, while MPs, their eyes fixed heroically on the long-term, congratulate themselves on being ‘world leaders’ in Net Zero. Similarly, the putative threat of AI allows Sunak to pose as the saviour of humanity, while the internet drowns in spam.
It seems our policymakers are in danger of losing themselves in an apocalyptic fantasy world. The sooner they free themselves from the grip of the EA doomsayers, the sooner they might get round to tackling some of the actual problems with AI.”
This is written by Andrew Orlowski and seems to me to be a good summation of where we find ourselves and what our governments are up to.
This article is from June. Predictable and turns out Israel’s worst fears have come true. Thanks Biden!
”A high-ranking Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commander has told Newsweek that Israel is concerned over the risks of weapons provided by the United States and other Western nations to Ukraine ending up in the hands of Israel’s foes in the Middle East, including Iran.
With experts too backing these worries, the situation could mark yet another chapter in a long legacy of U.S. arms shipments being diverted, empowering adversaries of both Israel and the U.S. in another restive region, while the focus of Western governments is on the volatile conflict playing out in Eastern Europe.
The Israeli commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic, said the diversion of weapons, such as the Javelin shoulder-fired anti-tank missile system, was being monitored from paramilitary forces operating on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war.
The Israeli commander said pro-Russian formations were motivated to transfer captured U.S.-supplied weapons due to the close defense relationship between Moscow and Tehran, while pro-Ukrainian elements were largely motivated by money to smuggle arms. The commander said the primary route was via the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, and argued that the situation was “very dangerous” due to two primary concerns for Israel.”
https://www.newsweek.com/israel-worries-us-weapons-ukraine-are-ending-irans-hands-1806131
…does anyone know what the Taliban did, or who they might have armed with these weapons?
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/27/politics/afghan-weapons-left-behind/index.html#
Approximately $7 billion of military equipment the US transferred to the Afghan government over the course of 16 years was left behind in Afghanistan after the US completed it’s withdrawal from the country in August, according to a congressionally mandated report from the US Department of Defense…..
….A total of 9,524 air-to-ground munitions, valued at $6.54 million….
Over 40,000 of the total 96,000 military vehicles the US gave to Afghan forces including 12,000 military Humvees…
More than 300,000 of the total 427,300 weapons the US gave to Afghan forces….
Less than 1,537,000 of the “specialty munitions” and “common small arms ammunition,” valued at a total of $48 million….
“Nearly all” of the communications equipment that the US gave to Afghan forces, including base-station, mobile, man-portable and hand-held commercial and military radio systems, and associated transmitters and encryption devices also remained..
“Nearly all” night vision, surveillance, “biometric and positioning equipment” totalling nearly 42,000 pieces of equipment…..
And “nearly all,” of the explosive ordinance disposal and de-mining equipment, including 17,500 “pieces of explosive detection, electronic countermeasure, disposal and personal protective equipment” also remained in Afghanistan, according to the report.
Welcome to the Soviet State of New Zealand.
My wife, a Kiwi, is clear. She will not return
That clip of Jacinda Ardern is taken out of context and is from March 2020.
Why “out of context”? What she said then is being rolled out all over the Western world and Anglosphere.
What difference does it make when it’s from?
What “context” should we add to help us not to misunderstand her?
The narrative on Israel/Palestine is to divide us. Whichever side one supports politically, the only winner in war is the banker. The ordinary Israeli & Palestinian are the ones who will suffer & die. Remember that the plan is to destabilise the whole world & trigger a world war. This is the plan of the parasite class.
The text below is from Lawyers of Light.
“Please remember that Israel did not care about it’s citizens and effectively used them as lab rat’s during the convid crisis, which was heartbreaking. Awake Israelis have a lot of issues with their Government. Please remember the allegations about who funded and effectively created Hamas to be what it is. Please remember what has happened to the Palestinians over the years and the horrendous deaths of innocents, and how they were usurped of their homes and land. Please remember this region has been used geopolitically for years without thought about the innocents that have suffered as a result.
But above all else please remember this.:-
Condemn those who betray humanity for the cabal. Condemn those that harm anyone in service of the agenda of the global parasites. Condemn those that choose Evil over Good in service of the regime.
If we stop blaming each other and start blaming those at the top who are actually responsible, we might stand a chance. Otherwise we could see a quick escalation over the next few weeks perhaps heading into full scale kinetic war in the region, with ramifications for a wider hot world war 3. And that is just what the parasites want.”
https://youtu.be/uLAID0dEuRA?si=FTpDDzMPlri8A-8l
Galloway making sense as always…
Gaze. The story of a Jailbreak.
What is happening in Israel is absolutely horrific..and my thoughts are with all the civilians caught up in this…
The Isreal – Palestine problem is a huge subject, which no one yet seems to be able to solve…and I wouldn’t even think of trying….like Ukraine/Russia.. it is a decades old conflict with a huge amount of history…and is certainly more complex than the MSM portray….
I have been a bit wary of saying anything at all because it’s easy to point the finger (as we have seen with Ukraine)…when you say anything that doesn’t follow the allowed agenda…..and quite frankly I have no intention of falling out, or offending anyone on a subject that I can do absolutely nothing about.
So these are just a couple of observations and nothing more…
…it’s worth remembering that decades ago Hamas was backed and funded by the West, including Israel, as a counterpoint to Yasser Arafat and the Fatah Party….in the same way that the CIA funded ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
….this article is from 2015…and is worth a read, just as a reminder that
the ‘good/bad’ ‘terrorist/freedom fighter’ narrative is whatever suits their purpose…and whatever they want it to be at the time…..
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq
I think this is a more honest and insightful editorial from the Israeli Haaretz newspaper yesterday……..a clear indictment that actions have consequences?
“The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians….
….Netanyahu also shaped the policy embraced by the short-lived “government of change” led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid: a multidimensional effort to crush the Palestinian national movement in both its wings, in Gaza and the West Bank, at a price that would seem acceptable to the Israeli public.….
……In the past, Netanyahu marketed himself as a cautious leader who eschewed wars and multiple casualties on Israel’s side. After his victory in the last election, he replaced this caution with the policy of a “fully-right government,” with overt steps taken to annex the West Bank, to carry out ethnic cleansing in parts of the Oslo-defined Area C, including the Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.
This also included a massive expansion of settlements and bolstering of the Jewish presence on Temple Mount, near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as boasts of an impending peace deal with the Saudis in which the Palestinians would get nothing, with open talk of a “second Nakba” in his governing coalition. As expected, signs of an outbreak of hostilities began in the West Bank, where Palestinians started feeling the heavier hand of the Israeli occupier. Hamas exploited the opportunity in order to launch its surprise attack on Saturday…..”
If people are interested I would suggest looking up the Nakba ….. and also the West Bank Areas Oslo II Accords even if it’s just on Wikipedia…..it will at least give some context to the article….
I wasn’t aware that Ukraine / Russia was a decades-old conflict. Were they not relatively friendly neighbours until the American-sponsored coup against the Russia-friendly government in 2014?
LOL!
Maybe they are only happy when they can beat actual women?
https://news.sky.com/story/transgender-world-cup-swimming-races-scrapped-because-no-one-entered-12976203
World Cup swimming races designed to accommodate transgender competitors have been abandoned because no one entered.
Open category events – made up of 50 and 100-metre races across all strokes – were due to be part of the competition starting in Berlin on Friday.
But no entries were received for the events, World Aquatics (WA) said.
Women winning by taking action!
So Kneeler is going ´channel´ T. B´liar – with permanent lockdowns and jabs.
And he´s going to start “dating” Ursula von der Lying´s EU.
And he´ll make gender-bending easier.
Of course, it´s all “for our own good”.
Is Kneeler Brandon in disguise?
https://fb.watch/nzNPcTta-s/
Galloway back in 2017 with essential facts some may not like to hear…
Dr Clare Craig
@ClareCraigPath
Sept’ 22…..MHRA claims that the number of lipid nanoparticles in a dose is part of their“acceptance criteria.”
Later: MHRA does not know the number of LNPs in each dose “because this information is not deemed crucial to the safety of the Moderna vaccine.”
“Unfortunately, the initial response to your FOI request included an error; the number of lipid nano-particles (LNP) is not an acceptance criterion included in the specifications. We would like to clarify that the MHRA does not hold data on the number of LNP per dose because this
information is not deemed crucial to the safety of the Moderna vaccine”
FOI
https://ico.org.uk/media/action-weve-taken/decision-notices/2022/4021499/ic-147776-f3p1.pdf
Robert F Kennedy Jr is going to run for President of the US as an independent.