There was not and could not be in the 1 to 3 years span of the pandemic any safe and effective vaccine for SARs CoV 2.

Are you suggesting that the Pfizer vaccine, the Moderna and the Oxford AZ Vaccine are not safe or effective? Or neither? And that all other vaccines are unlikely to be any good?
So the SARs CoV 2 pandemic of 2020 (which was over by June) will turn out to be the greatest single peace-time public health disaster since 1918.

That contradicts the " 1 to 3 years span of the pandemic" you mentioned. If it were over by June, how come the ZOE symptom checker app presently records 672,959 live cases, and rising? Is it all in their heads?
most of the excess deaths will be due to incompetent government polices in response to the initial outbreak rather than the actual primary pandemic. Totally unlike 1918. Or any other pandemic in the last 100 years for that matter.

What would have been the correct policy? Why do you say "incompetent government" when the policies were suggested by chief scientists?

If you read the various phase testing papers for the other HCOV vaccines (SARs1 / MERS) the pattern for the current SARs CoV 2 vaccine will be very familiar. Hyped initial numbers, very weak final numbers. The eventual effectiveness rate on the epidemic mortality number will be statistically insignificant. When you look at the damping effect of various vaccines scenarios all plausible SARs CoV 2 vaccine candidates fall into the basically zero damping effect. Ineffective physical barrier to diffusion.

The main wave of deaths was over by June. But by the technical definition of an epidemic it will probably be 720/1080 days before the infection rate settles to its normal background infection rate. As it becomes part of the normal flu season infection cycle like the other four HCOV's. The number of infections you quote is a heterogeneous low quality polluted data set, mostly false positives or if true positives they are mostly HAI's. Hospital Acquired Infections. Hospitals are the primary physical infection vector with SARS2, just like with SAR1.

The correct policy was the one used in all previous flu pandemics. 2009, 1968, 1957. etc. Beef up the health service resources and do absolutely nothing else. Zero lockdowns. Remember if it was not for the very vicious and very personal political battle between Conti in Rome and the Lega leader in Milan (which had been going on for years) there would have been no lockdown fiasco in Lombardy. It was that Italian fiasco that started the lockdown avalanche in March in the rest of Europe. Those provincial lockdowns, like the ones in China, were done for purely local political reasons. The local Italian press was full of medical and public health people saying lockdowns were the completely wrong way of dealing with the problem. The problem was other provinces failed to provide health resources mutual aid as the disaster response plans required. For totally political reasons. That was it.

It is political incompetence from top to bottom. People who get to the top of any professional organization are politicians first and last, professional competence is always very secondary. Often non-existent. Its often decades since they were actual practitioners, not career bureaucrats. If you had actually dealt with any of these very senior people you would know they are the last people to get any reliable professional domain advice from. It's about 3 or 4 levels down in the organization the real professional competence starts. Some great people there. But they are never heard. For political reasons.

So your "chief scientist" is just as much a political hack as any MP or senior civil servant.

If the pattern for the current SARs CoV 2 vaccine will be very familiar.

It is very different, there was no full vaccine campaign for sars1 or mers.

The number of infections you quote is mostly false positives

How could false positives cause symptoms in symptom checker app? Do you think people lie about their symptoms in the app?

mostly HAI's. Hospital Acquired Infections.
Hospitals are the primary physical infection vector

I would not know.
The main wave of deaths was over by June.

They are are on-going and growing. Hence the current flap. Current total asymptomatic infected today in ZOE app 672,949 , assume 20 % more (asymptomatic) and at ifr = 0.25%, will give death rate of~ 2,000 per day by mid january, hence the ongoing giant government panic.
Present death rate reputed to be 5 to 6 hundred a day.; but I think they are over egging that!

😀 👍
Well.said jmc..

Hello from a long-time lurker, but first-time poster on this site. Thanks for the excellent summary, jmc. I so glad to see confirmation of my view that Whitty, Vallance, Van Tam and so on are in their posts mainly because they are successful career bureaucrats with a scientific background. I keep seeing statements from lockdown zealots saying that we should defer to these people because they are 'the top scientists in the country'. I even saw someone a while back claiming that Sunetra Gupta was 'jealous' that she hadn't got one of these 'top jobs'. As if she'd want to be in one of them! Your point about the origin of lockdown mania in Italian politics was fascinating; hope we will be hearing more about this.

If the pattern for the current SARs CoV 2 vaccine will be very familiar.

It is very different, there was no full vaccine campaign for sars1 or mers.

The number of infections you quote is mostly false positives

How could false positives cause symptoms in symptom checker app? Do you think people lie about their symptoms in the app?

mostly HAI's. Hospital Acquired Infections.
Hospitals are the primary physical infection vector

I would not know.
The main wave of deaths was over by June.

They are are on-going and growing. Hence the current flap. Current total asymptomatic infected today in ZOE app 672,949 , assume 20 % more (asymptomatic) and at ifr = 0.25%, will give death rate of~ 2,000 per day by mid january, hence the ongoing giant government panic.
Present death rate reputed to be 5 to 6 hundred a day.; but I think they are over egging that!

Screenshot 2021-01-03 at 11.27.53.png

It is very obvious you have not read any of the very extensive published literature on the SARs CoV 1 / MERS vaccines published over the last almost 20 years. If you had you would not have written such twaddle. It look remarkably the same. And the same kind of trajectory.

The ZOE app? You must be joking. Break open any clinical differential diagnostic manual (the Massachusetts General Hospital one is quite good) and you will see that symptomatic SARs CoV 2 infections share non-specific symptoms with at least two dozen other respiratory infections. Not to add a subset of the same symptoms are shared with several hundred other viral infectious diseases. Its only when the active infection starts developing strong pneumonia like symptoms , all clinical, that the list of potential causes gets below maybe a dozen. Which is why after they get the chest x-ray and see clouding, thats when they order the PCR test etc. To find out whether it is viral or bacterial infectious pneumonia. With bacterial there actually are therapeutic treatments, with viral there are none.

Unless those using the app had access to blood assay data the self-assessment is based completely non specif symptoms and basically worthless. A classic example of very low quality data.