A reader sent Derek Winton’s article in Lockdown Sceptics criticising Imperial College's modelling to Professor Neil Ferguson. His remarkable response in turn prompted a lot of responses from our readers. One, a regular contributor to the site, produced a line-by-line analysis which we're publishing below. I was interested to see Professor Neil Ferguson’s reply to one of your readers. I was surprised he had replied, but no less surprised that anyone had bothered to write to him. Now, I think it’s a bit unfair to write to someone and then publish that person’s reply, especially if it hadn’t been made clear the reply would be published. However, it has been, and I suppose anyone in public life would have to be naïve to believe that anything they say is immune to being disseminated more widely. I thought it would be interesting therefore to analyse the reply. I presume you sent me this because you feel upset, angry, that no-one is listening, want to hurt me or change my mind. Or all of the above. Here we have an assumption of motive. The writer, who is a woman, is depicted as having become emotional ("angry, upset"), seeing herself as a frustrated victim ("no-one is listening"), aggressive ("want to hurt me") and manipulative ("want… to change my mind"). Therefore, the original email is...

A man owned a chicken farm. One day he became concerned that it hadn’t rained for a while and that his crops, which he used to feed his chickens, might fail resulting in lots of chickens dying. So, the man went to the nearby temple to consult the Sage. After performing a complex ritual, the Sage had the answer: “You must sacrifice one of your chickens every week or it will never rain.” The man was upset – he liked his chickens and was always reluctant to kill them. But the Sage was wise and the ritual complex, so he obeyed the command and that evening he killed a chicken. The next day it rained. We may well laugh at the man’s stupidity. How could he believe that sacrificing a chicken will have any relationship to the weather? But how do we prove that it doesn’t? Clearly, the first time the man sacrificed a chicken it rained the next day, but this isn’t really evidence of cause and effect. So, rather than just this one case, what if we observed the man for a whole year? If we did this, we’d note that he sacrifices a chicken every week on a Tuesday night and that it rains in the subsequent week 10 times. From these observations we might conclude that...

by a Former Nurse Back in November 2020, I read with interest on Lockdown Sceptics that St. John Ambulance were recruiting for volunteer vaccinators. The only qualifications required were to be educated to A-level standard, and perhaps have some sort of healthcare experience. Being suitably qualified, and having spent time as a nurse in the 1980s, I decided to apply for three reasons: 1) To help speed up the end of lockdown and aid our (purported) swift return to normal life: “The distant bugle of the scientific cavalry coming over the brow of the hill.” 2) To help the NHS, so their staff could focus on clinical care and catching up on backlogs, rather than being diverted to mass-vaccination centres, thus "relieving pressure on the NHS" and the "threat of being overwhelmed". 3) To get an inside view of proceedings and the vaccination roll-out. I therefore applied on December 1st. Initially things moved quite fast and I was interviewed, approved (with enhanced DBS) within a fortnight. However at that point the wheels came off the bus and applicants – including me – were being lost in the system. (I know this was widespread having spoken to fellow volunteers.) The order of events should have been: a) Submit online application.b) Have an online interview.c) Complete enhanced DBS.d) Complete nine St. John...

I teach at a private college (four-year, Bachelor’s degree granting), in Greenville, South Carolina. I am a University Professor of Classics at my institution (a fancy title that means that my salary does not come out of the Operating Budget), and also an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science. So I am supposed to think about language, and I am assumed to be able to count. In January and February of 2020, we heard rumors of a pernicious virus in China. Some of my colleagues, as early as February, were pessimistic about our chances of running study-abroad programs later that Spring or in the summer. I was insouciant. My wife, my daughter, and I flew to Germany on March 7th, 2020, to visit our son who was studying at the Freie Universität in Berlin. While we were in Germany, all hell broke loose. Trump announced the ban on travel, and… (your readers know how that all went). When we returned, it was like the chapter “The Scouring of the Shire” in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. All of the sudden, there were all these rules. But… skipping forward a bit, the Governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, has been vigorously opposed to lockdown and other restrictions. In March, when the insanity was at its peak, he did place restrictions on...

I had a light bulb moment last year when I realised the appalling Government strategy of lockdown is all about the NHS. Somehow the public got conned into the ‘Save our NHS’ slogan, clapping on the street. One of the few journalists courageous enough to point out that surely the NHS was meant to save us was Julia Hartley-Brewer on talkRADIO – another life saver for my mental health alongside Lockdown Sceptics. There appears to be a massive cover up going on for the dismal failings of successive governments to properly resource and structure the NHS in which I have worked as a nurse and midwife for four decades. It was shocking to hear a spokesman for the NHS say in a radio interview last December that there are 11,000 fewer beds this Winter. After months to prepare and after years when the NHS has been on its knees every Winter, was this the time to slash capacity and provision under the auspices of COVID-19 infection control measures? Clearly not. The Nightingale Hospitals were built in a great hurry and at considerable cost last year with Matt Hancock heralding them. Yet when they became really necessary to provide extra capacity to maintain all routine healthcare in the midst of a pandemic, the Government woke up to the fact that there...

I write this at the beginning of the third week of Rwanda’s second lockdown, some eight months after the first ended. The lockdown only encompasses the capital, Kigali, as the epicentre of the rise in cases, and domestic and international tourism is still open for those wishing to see the rest of this beautiful country. We have to get police permission to leave the house even for food shopping, masks have been mandatory outdoors – and in cars – since the WHO changed their advice, and outdoor exercise is only allowed between 5am and 9am; even then we are only supposed to stay in our Umudugu, a small village within a village (ours is tiny). The biggest cheerleaders for this latest lockdown were, predictably, the privileged expat community, those least likely to be severely affected by the closure of the Rwanda’s economic centre. Rich (especially so in a context where the average salary for Rwandans is around $50 per month), mainly European and North American people have been a constant source of panic, hysteria and judgement since the very first case of COVID-19 arrived in Rwanda in early March 2020. This is expressed in the groupthink posts on Expats in Rwanda Facebook group. In their comfortable compounds, with their gardens, their nannies, and ‘house boys’ and their home deliveries of...

Asuncion, Paraguay Paraguay is not a well-known country. Frankly, this is justified: it has nothing much to offer tourists that can’t also be found in one or both of its giant neighbours, Argentina and Brazil. Nevertheless, the Paraguayan people are polite and kind, the food is excellent, the climate is warm (of which more later), and right now it is a far pleasanter place to be than Britain. That latter statement is a fairly recent state of affairs. In March, Paraguay won some rare international praise for locking down hard as soon as it had registered its first two cases of COVID-19. This lockdown began to be loosened in May in the almost complete absence of both cases and deaths up until then, and was not reimposed when numbers did begin to pick up in July; although there was some typical fiddling around with local restrictions, curfews and other ineffective nonsense. As it stands according to the data, Paraguay has plateaued at about 15 deaths ‘with’ Covid per day since August (in a country of 7.3 million people). No classical epidemic curve, just a delayed rise to what may well be the endemic state. I have not come up with a fully plausible explanation for this pattern, but I am reminded of the observation that more equatorial countries tend not...

With Brexit now in the rearview mirror, the Government is trying to figure out what to do with their newfound freedom. But since their plans are emerging against the backdrop of the lockdown, they tend to tip toward the absurd. We currently live in an upside-down world where the Treasury focuses on economic minutiae while ignoring the massive collapse that they have engineered with the lockdown strategy they have borrowed from communist China. The Government is looking at ways to deregulate the economy, something they think will boost productivity and competitiveness. But what they are finding is that much of the economy is already lightly regulated. Take finance, for example. Anyone with a smartphone can download an app in minutes and trade everything from stock market ETFs to foreign currencies. This is not a tightly regulated market. When they turn to the labour market, the Government focuses on the 48-hour workweek and rules around taking work breaks. This is hardly the sort of root-and-branch reform envisaged by the Thatcher government when faced with chronic inflation and strikes in the early-1980s. Yet, at the same time, we live under partial house arrest, risking a £200 fine for carrying the wrong beverage in a park and the high street has completely collapsed. The lockdown regulations we face daily are arguably worse than...

A piece by David McGrogan on January 3rd implies surprise at the alacrity with which the British public has acquiesced to lockdown and suggests that sceptics embrace some of the more emotive strategies of lockdown proponents. Dr McGrogan is not alone if he was unprepared for this complicity: even one of lockdown's principal architects, Prof. Neil Ferguson was surprised that Western Governments could “get away with” national lockdowns. Yet the roots of blind societal compliance in the UK surely have several components, some of which have been hidden in plain sight. The impact of disinformation has been compounded by a woeful lack of scientific literacy among Parliamentarians. This may in part explain the paucity of due process and failure of legislative oversight, for example in appointing members of SAGE, or not having it publicly audited. The ex cathedra pronouncements of SAGE may have produced unchallenged fear that has prevented un-whipped Parliamentary votes at key points in this unfolding saga. Without full and disinterest deliberation, a balanced policy approach seems unlikely, and that has turned out to be the case. The general population may be forgiven for feeling secure, a mood fostered by the comfort of recent decades and Government borrowing to cushion the economic down-side of lockdown. It has been egged on by a lamentably unquestioning and complicit main stream...

Most of those sceptical of the Government response to COVID-19 have concluded that the recent uptick in cases is seasonal. COVID-19 appears to recur in winter and seems to have partly replaced the flu this year. We will call this the ‘flu hypothesis’. If this is correct, then we may be able to make some predictions about what is about to happen in the United Kingdom with respect to Government policy and the public response. Now that the new lockdown is upon us we can use the ‘flu hypothesis’ to imagine two possible outcomes and assess their relative likelihood. First let us try to get into what passes for the minds of those dealing with the response. The Financial Times, which seems well plugged in to the mindset of the political class, published the following helpful graphic: What this tries to show is that the lockdown worked. If you glance at the chart and don’t really think about it – you know, like a public official would be inclined to do – it looks like a lockdown was imposed at the beginning of November and cases in the North and the Midlands fell. Now, lockdown sceptics will say that this was just a coincidence. After all, robust cross-sectional studies – the sort of studies honest scientists use to evaluate these...