Lockdown Britain Steps Closer towards Totalitarianism
James Delingpole 4 Nov 2020

Today Britain’s MPs failed the most important test of their political careers. They voted – by 516 to 38 – to turn the United Kingdom into a totalitarian police state.

From midnight Wednesday, the British population will be forced to spend a month (at least) under restrictions so severe that they make life behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Bloc Soviet Eastern Europe look almost carefree by comparison.

Nobody will be allowed to travel abroad (except on approved business). Nobody will be able to go to pubs or restaurants or gyms or swimming pools (all closed, by order of the government). Nobody will be allowed to practise any form of sport — not golf, not tennis, not riding, not shooting, and definitely not any team games. Everybody will be kept under house arrest, other than for certain state-mandated exemptions such as being a designated ‘key worker’ or shopping for supplies (but only those designated ‘essential’).

You might have thought that the biggest theft of civil liberties in British history would get some pushback from MPs, Conservative ones especially.

After all, lockdowns like this are not only enormously damaging to the economy — at a cost of at least £2 billion per day — as well as to the nation’s mental and physical health. Also, as senior lawyer Lord Sumption warned, it ‘marks a move to a more authoritarian model of politics’ which will transform ‘the relationship between the state and the citizen’ and lead to ‘distrust, resentment and mutual hostility.’

Anyone who doubts the corrosive effects this ‘authoritarian model’ is having on the British way of life should have a look at this video.

It purportedly shows a daughter — a qualified nurse — trying to take her 97-year old mother home from her care home only to be prevented from doing so by the police. It is claimed the mother is now back in the care home.

Here is another disturbing image, allegedly showing a five-year-old being refused entry to school because his parent is not wearing a face mask.

How can this possibly be a police matter? Surely, with Britain at a heightened state of terrorist alert, the forces of law and order ought to have better things to do than go round bothering people who are not wearing masks?

And surely when a once proudly-free country slides so rapidly towards tyranny, the first line of defence ought to be independent-minded MPs saying: “Enough is enough!”

But no. Only 38 MPs voted against this outrageous and dubious imposition.

It is as if Britain has been hijacked by a cabal of accidental fascists. No doubt the small group currently dictating Britain’s coronavirus policy — Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Health Secretary Matt Hancock, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Michael Gove, and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak — entered Conservative politics for the noblest of reasons. But their policies are the purest totalitarian evil. Absolute power has gone to their heads.

This open letter to Michael Gove, written by his friend, Conservative Woman co-editor Kathy Gyngell, captures well the horror and disbelief so many natural conservatives are currently feeling as they look at government policy and ask ‘Why are they doing this?’

How can you continue to treat every British citizen as though they face a very high risk of being hospitalised or even dying as a result of exposure to Covid, when this patently is not true? And why pretend the NHS is overwhelmed when the Nightingale hospitals lie empty? And how, this weekend, could you have bought into and sold the public such a dodgy Covid deaths dossier, your so-called ‘realistic worst case’ scenarios that lack any credibility an excuse for lockdown?

Lastly, how can you, an economic liberal, be part of a government which has needlessly wrecked Britain’s economy? You and colleagues may be shielded from the onslaught that the nation is about to experience thanks to your publicly-funded salary and pension, but most others – particularly the self-employed, the sole traders and those who run small businesses – face a very different future, one that is genuinely frightening. Irresponsible doesn’t begin to describe the national economic and political catastrophe your latest lockdown decision is leading us to.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/my-letter-to-michael-gove/

So many and varied and compelling are the arguments against a second lockdown that even the MSM — till recently the government’s bought-and-paid-for cheerleaders — is waking up to the scale of the impending disaster.

We know — because they’ve admitted it — that the computer-modelled projections by Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty of 4,000 Coronavirus deaths a day were an implausible exaggeration.

We know that Boris Johnson’s eye-wateringly expensive ‘moonshot’ track and trace mass testing system — the end goal of the lockdown — is risibly unfit for purpose.

It is truly extraordinary that on the basis of no cost-benefit analysis, no serious consideration of the scientific counter-arguments, Britain’s MPs voted almost unanimously for a lockdown which will damage their constituents’ freedoms, livelihoods and health while offering no obvious compensatory benefit.

Not one of the MPs who so blithely voted for this monstrous imposition deserves your vote ever again. They should live eternally in infamy.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/11/04/lockdown-britain-steps-closer-towards-totalitarianism/

Dr Mike Yeadon calls out the SAGE liars: Coronavirus pandemic is 'fundamentally over in the UK'
talkRADIO with Julia Hartley-Brewer

Former Chief Scientific Advisor with Pfizer Dr Mike Yeadon has claimed the Covid-19 pandemic is "fundamentally over" in the UK.

Watch the video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FQUmw5QljM

kyta,
As someone who cuts and pastes a lot, including observations by Mike Yeadon, do you know how he makes the following statement (from LS home page 4 Nov):
There is a small and potentially growing all-causes excess mortality signal. I am working with a pathologist and our evaluation so far shows that these excess deaths are inconsistent with being COVID-19. In short, they are not dying from respiratory illness, but from heart failure and from cerebrovascular accidents such as stroke and diabetes.

I have suspected this to be the case - indeed I foresaw it in March - but I would like to know how to demonstrate it. Maybe he has detailed this elsewhere.

I like Mike's approach and agree with most of what he says, but would not like to rely on mere statement as fact.

I have suspected this to be the case - indeed I foresaw it in March - but I would like to know how to demonstrate it. Maybe he has detailed this elsewhere.

A Plea to MPs From Mike Yeadon: “Don’t Vote For Lockdown”
Below is a guest post by Dr Mike Yeadon in which he urges MPs not to vote for a second lockdown.

Dear Sirs and Madams,

I am an independent scientist of over 30 years experience leading research into new medicines, operating up to Vice President and head of Respiratory Research at Pfizer, a US pharmaceutical company and founder and CEO of Ziarco Ltd a biotechnology company sold to Novartis in 2017.

As an independent I am less constrained than academics and commercial persons. However, I have applied the same rigour to analysing the pandemic since March as with any of my former projects.

In brief:

I am certain the pandemic is over and was over before the end of June.
There was a clear peak of excess deaths in spring. COVID-19 clearly caused many deaths, mostly of the elderly and already ill.
Turning to late summer and into the autumn – despite exaggerated claims that there is an ongoing full-blown pandemic, there are still FEWER respiratory deaths than at the same time periods in all five of the years since 2015. The below shows monthly deaths with any respiratory primary diagnoses including COVID-19.

There is a small and potentially growing all-causes excess mortality signal. I am working with a pathologist and our evaluation so far shows that these excess deaths are inconsistent with being COVID-19. In short, they are not dying from respiratory illness, but from heart failure and from cerebrovascular accidents such as stroke and diabetes. An awful realisation I have is that these excess deaths are just the sort you would expect if you take a mixed population, deprive them of easy access to the healthcare system for seven months and keep them stressed.

Looking at data obtained from contacts within the NHS, we do not have hospitals full of respiratory patients to any greater extent than usual for November. There are always hotspots and we know Liverpool is one such today. Again, the evidence is against this being due to COVID-19. And to repeat, we have not had excess respiratory deaths since the spring event itself. Liverpool and other cities and towns nearby have additional capacity and ‘surge capacity’, if required. The NHS as a whole is not in crisis and there is nothing to suggest it is about to be. I also checked with a colleague regarding intensive care beds. While an increasing number of their occupants have tested positive for COVID-19, intensive care beds are at exactly normal loadings for the time of year, i.e. 82%. I believe those COVID-19 diagnoses are mostly or all incorrect. We have tested well over 30,000,000 people. It wouldn’t be surprising if lots of people get a false diagnosis from a PCR test.

Antibody prevalence in the blood of those surveyed periodically is falling steadily and has been since its peak in the spring, when the virus was moving very fast through the population, infecting perhaps hundreds of thousands per day at its very peak. That antibodies are falling was last week wrongly touted as problematic and suggested immunity was fading. That’s the wrong interpretation. The human body does not maintain high levels of antibodies which are not needed. Consequently, steady falls in prevalence of antibodies is a clear signal that people are no longer encountering the virus. I believe that insofar as it is still present, it has become endemic at low levels and represents no threat to the health of the nation.

As someone experienced at reading into adjacent areas of science which I have done time without number since obtaining my PhD in respiratory pharmacology in 1988, I was always confident that the population would speedily attain ‘community immunity’. This is what I believe has happened as detailed in my article “What SAGE has got wrong”.

In my view – probably because SAGE lacked cellular and clinical immunologist expertise earlier this year and at no time during this event has it seconded a pathologist or an expert generalist such as myself – they’ve made a series of terrible errors which continue to infect policy to this very day. If such experts had been consulted, our advice would have made a huge difference, not least to the starting assumptions which are widely criticised as outlandish in the scientific community. In addition, we could have “sense checked” some of the more perplexingly unlikely predictions, such as 4,000 deaths per day.

The most fundamental error SAGE has made was to ignore all evidence of the very existence of prior immunity in the population on the spurious grounds that this was a novel virus. This virus is in fact related to four common-cold producing coronaviruses in general circulation and it has been shown unequivocally that a sizeable proportion of the peoples of at least Europe and North America possess T-cells that provide them with some protection against both endemic and novel viruses.

This virus is a serious threat to a low proportion of the elderly, especially if they are already ill. This description of the most vulnerable accounts for the vast majority of Covid deaths and the median age of those who’ve died of COVID-19 is slightly older than the median age of those who died of all other causes. However, the majority even of this elderly group survive infection. Overall, the lethality of the virus is now known to be very close to typical seasonal influenza. Notably, in relation to risks to the working population, the lethality of the virus in those aged 60 and younger is actually less than seasonal flu.

By using several sets of data I have been able to estimate the proportion of the UK population who have been infected. If you add them to the estimated proportion of the population that had prior immunity, and take account of the fact that young children do not often participate in transmission or become very ill, it is clear that there are far too few susceptible people remaining in UK to support an expanding infection as has been suggested. Instead, the evidence is strong from practical, theoretical and observational standpoints that the nation as a whole and probably most if not all regions in the UK are already protected by community immunity as described by many world leading academic epidemiologists in UK.

I heard with disbelief suggestions that surviving infection might not lead to immunity, or that immunity might only last a few months. Let me assure you, we have known for scores of years that surviving simple respiratory viruses which are neither immuno-toxic like HIV or change their appearance yearly like flu, leads as a rule, not an exception, to long-lived and robust T-cell mediated immunity. Antibodies may play a role but they are not central. That this ordinary virus has become a global media event is simply not justified by its profile.

I have been active on Twitter rather a lot in recent months. I would suggest that the people of UK are now highly suspicious of what is claimed to be happening. Many is the time people have in exasperation said: “This just doesn’t make any sense.” Indeed, what we are being told (that there is a full blown pandemic still underway) does not make sense and while I have no idea why it is being said, it is doubtless incorrect. Ordinary people know that each season’s flu takes perhaps three-to-four months to pass through the whole population. Knowing that SARS-CoV-2 is more infectious, they know that it would take the same or less time to pass through the UK population, not more. Indeed, we know it was in the UK by February. Adding a generous four months takes us to June, where all clinical signs of COVID-19 has disappeared (ignoring PCR test results, of which more in a moment). The rise and fall of Covid deaths in the UK follows exactly the same curve as that of other, highly seeded/infected countries such as Sweden. There is no doubt that we are in the same position as Sweden and it is only the monstrously error-prone and untrustworthy PCR test that suggests otherwise. What SAGE claims is happening is immunologically implausible in light of other data, specifically the shape of the death versus time curve, which shows beyond all reasonable doubt that the pandemic was self-extinguishing.

The PCR testing machinery is, at best, greatly in error and completely misleading. I have good knowledge of mass testing systems. I have always been deeply worried about polymerase chain reaction (PCR) because of its power, not only to find one molecule as small as a broken fragment of viral RNA and amplify it, sometimes by two to the power of 40, through repeated cycling, but also because it can find something that is not there – it can yield a ‘positive’ result even though the virus is not present. The greater the amplification and the higher the number of tests being done each day day – and the lower the expertise of the staff doing it – the higher the probability of error. I was the person who, with a radio journalist, finally pressed Mr Hancock to disclose the false positive rate of the Pillar 2 test, when it was still measuring far fewer tests per day than now. Having established that false positives exist, it is important to know that the rate of these can be small yet, when the prevalence of the virus is low, many or even all the positive results are false. That’s a practical debate for another time.

Yesterday, in response to a written question, the Government disclosed that while attempts had apparently been made to determine the operational false positive rate, it still doesn’t know it. As an experienced lab scientist, I know that when testing capacity is boosted substantially and the staff recruited have less and less lab experiences, there is only one outcome: errors of handling and of procedure. These in turn destroy the integrity of the testing system. The entire response of the UK depends upon the reliability of these tests. I have to tell you quite firmly: at present, it is practically, logically and legally impossible for anyone to be able to tell you what fraction of the positive tests recently obtained are real and which are not. For a range of reasons related to strong evidence that this virus cannot just hover around as it has been suggested and viruses certainly do not perform waves ever, the most secure conclusion is that these results are not to be trusted and are not reliable in any way.

So what I am saying is this. Despite warnings from all sides over months about this test it has continued to be used with increasing ferocity. It’s a medical diagnostic test. On no occasion would such a diagnostic be put into mass testing – in the NHS, for example – without knowing in advance how reliable it is. In terms of proper characterisation, it has NEVER been measured, despite the war-like impact of the test results on the nation and its people. At a minimum, the charge is reckless endangerment. Given all this information, it is literally impossible to guess whether the FPR is 1% or 10%. If even near the latter, there are no “cases” et seq. And there are other reasons to be very concerned about mass testing which I cannot go into today.

In my view, community mass testing is the pathology in the country now – not the virus. It must cease today. Without the ‘cover’ of mass testing, there is no evidence at all that the health of the nation is under any threat whatsoever. That event occurred in spring and our responses to it have been exaggerated and – what is worse – extraordinarily persistent, even when all the evidence says the pandemic has concluded.

I have a colleague who has a half a dozen sets of data all related to the pandemic. These show clear relationships between the data in the spring, all of which illustrated the impact of the virus. However, time after time, these relationships have broken down. The explanation for this is that at least one of the measurements are wrong, and the culprit is the PCR test. This has happened before. In New Hampshire in the USA there was a hospital that was convinced it had a huge outbreak of whooping cough. Physicians, patients and parents were all very worried about the expected deaths. Eventually, an older physician examined some of the patients and did not agree with the diagnosis. Asking the staff why they were so sure it was whooping cough, the answer was it had been diagnosed by the PCR test, the sole diagnostic tool. A review was ordered and this led to culture of the organism from the suspected patients. There was not a single person who actually had whopping cough. No infectious organism was found. What had happened was a now infamous case of a “PCR False Positive Pseudo-epidemic”. That is what I believe we have now in UK and in many other countries using similar technology.

MPs: If you vote for it now, you will condemn more people to suffering and some to death and the evidence does not support this extreme measure for which, even if the virus was circulating as SAGE claims, there is no evidence of benefit.

I urge you to vote against so we can all disclose our evidence that the pandemic is over and the epidemic of PCR testing can end.

https://lockdownsceptics.org/2020/11/04/#a-plea-to-mps-from-mike-yeadon-dont-vote-for-lockdown

I have suspected this to be the case - indeed I foresaw it in March - but I would like to know how to demonstrate it. Maybe he has detailed this elsewhere.

A Plea to MPs From Mike Yeadon: “Don’t Vote For Lockdown”
Below is a guest post by Dr Mike Yeadon in which he urges MPs not to vote for a second lockdown.

Sigh . That lockdownsceptics article is precisely where I read his statement - as you highlighted. He did not explain his evaluation. So I will ask again, do you know if he has detailed this anywhere? It may require a bit of consideration.