In his analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on the U.K., financial analyst James Ferguson questions the likely overstatement of Covid and investigates the factors behind unexplained excess deaths.
In a special Christmas fairy tale for the Daily Sceptic, David Stacey imagines how different the last two-and-a-half years would have been if Anders Tegnell had been in charge of Britain’s response to the pandemic.
Second Wave of Hysteria Arrives Here we go – brace positions. The UK's "Rule of Six" ban on social gatherings over six people comes into force today, and the Government confirmed yesterday that it includes children in England (unlike in Wales and Scotland). Denmark – the country once lauded for its coronavirus response – has been placed on England's quarantine watch list due to rising cases (even though on most days since June it's had no Covid deaths at all). Countries around Europe tighten restrictions. Israel locks down again. SAGE scientist Professor Sir Mark Walport warns that the UK is "on the edge of losing control" while Professor Peter Openshaw (of, you've guessed it, Imperial College) intones that the public must "act fast" and fall into line or face a second lockdown. Panic is back. "You've only got to look across the Channel to see what is happening in France and what's happening in Spain," says Professor Walport. "The only way to stop the spread of this infection is to reduce the number of people we all come into contact with." And what is happening in France and Spain? Let's see. A huge rise in cases positive tests, and little else. Hospitals in some areas such as Madrid have seen a gentle rise in COVID-19 admissions, but nothing they can't ...
A Defence of Lockdown Sceptics Into the valley of death rode the 600 What follows is a guest post by Toby. I was disappointed to read the Spectator article by Lockdown Sceptics contributor Alistair Haimes about his departure from our ranks. The brilliant data analyst has been a valuable ally and I hope he will return to the fold in due course. His argument boils down to this: "When the facts change, I change my mind." But what facts have changed? He cites three. First, the health service is under severe stress and unless we can reduce virus transmission over the next few weeks it’s at serious risk of being overwhelmed. That wasn’t true when the second national lockdown was imposed in November, he says, but it is today. Second, we now have two approved Covid vaccines, with more to follow, so any new restrictions will be short-lived. Third, there is a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 which is around 50% more transmissible than the pre-existing variants. I’ll take each of these in turn – although I may digress a bit. First, I’m sceptical of the claim that we have X number of days to save the NHS – a familiar trope that I thought the Labour Party had flogged to death. Let’s not forget that a winter bed crisis in ...
Free Speech Union Asks Ofcom to Withdraw Censorious Coronavirus Guidance or Face Judicial Review Breakfast television presenter and dangerous thought criminal Eamonn Holmes In my capacity as the General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, I wrote to the Chief Executive of Ofcom Dame Melanie Dawes on April 24th to complain about its reprimand of Eamonn Holmes. According to the regulator, the breakfast television presenter had said something that "could have undermined people's trust in the views being expressed by the authorities on the Coronavirus and the advice of mainstream sources of public health information". Holmes’s sin, in Ofcom's eyes, was to say on ITV’s This Morning on April 13th that any theory running counter to the official Government line – such as the one linking 5G masts to COVID-19 – deserved to be discussed in the mainstream media. This was in spite of him saying the 5G conspiracy was “not true and incredibly stupid”. Ofcom said this view – the view that such theories deserved a public hearing, not that they were in any way right or plausible – was “ill-judged and risked undermining viewers’ trust in advice from public authorities and scientific evidence”. In my letter to Dame Melanie, I pointed out that if Ofcom is going to prohibit views being discussed on television that might risk undermining ...
15,841 Cases Added to Sunday's Daily Total Due to Technical Glitch "Is that you Dido? Hancock here. Don't talk to any journalists in the next 24 hours." Even hard core sceptics might have experienced a tremor of doubt yesterday on seeing the daily total of new cases: 22,961. Is Witless and Unbalanced's graph of doom going to turn out to be accurate? Er, no. The reason Sunday's figure were so high is because 15,841 additional cases were added to the "daily" total, which, without them, would have been 7,120, which is almost exactly what they were seven days ago on September 29th (7,143). So where did these extra 15,841 cases come from? Apparently, they are positives spread out over a seven-day period between September 25th and October 2nd but which were omitted from the daily totals due to a technical glitch. The Guardian has more. Boris Johnson said earlier on Sunday that there was “a failure in the counting system which has now been rectified”. He told BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show it was a “computing issue” and all those who had a positive test had been notified.While PHE said the technical issue did not affect people getting their test results, Test and Trace and PHE joint medical advisor Susan Hopkins, has said it resulted in a delay in cases ...
Professor Ferguson unveils his latest model I've decided to post an update every day, but the updates proper will be on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, with shorter ones on the other days. This is in response to numerous requests in the comment from people who find it difficult to keep track of the threads if there are over 1,000 comments, something that happens if more than 24 hours pass since the previous update. Friday's update, for instance, attracted 1,714 comments. Today, I've decided to devote the entirety of the update to Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College, including a guest post by "Sue Denim", the software engineer who wrote "Code Review of Ferguson's Model" for Lockdown Sceptics on May 6th. That article was the most talked-about post that's appeared on this site, as well as the most viewed. This seems like a good time to publish Sue's latest thoughts about Professor Ferguson's model because yesterday the Imperial College modelling team, including Neil Ferguson, published a paper in Nature, based on a new model, arguing that the lockdowns have saved the lives of approximately 3.1 million people in 11 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK). In the UK alone, the authors think the lockdown has saved 470,000 lives. That ...
Bournemouth beach earlier today. Looks like the British public have decided lockdown is over Lockdown is over as far as the British public is concerned. At least, it is when it's the hottest day of the year with temperatures peaking at 33.3C, as they did today. Half a million people descended on the Dorset coastline, according to the Times, creating a "major incident". The council said it had issued 558 parking fines in 24 hours and dealt with congested roads into the early hours this morning. With campsites still closed, large numbers of people pitched camp illegally.In the area between Bournemouth’s piers eight tonnes of waste were collected yesterday on the second collection run of the day. This morning, a further 33 tonnes of waste were removed along the full stretch of coastline. The Daily Mail has more. A major incident was declared in Bournemouth today after thousands of people flocked to Britain's beaches, leaving the emergency services "stretched to the absolute hilt" on the second hottest day of the year in a row.Furious council bosses said they were "appalled" at the scenes on the Dorset coast, blasting the "irresponsible behaviour and actions of so many people" as temperatures hit 91.9F (33.3C) in southern England this afternoon.Police desperately urged people to "stay away" and "think twice before heading to the ...
A Ferguson Worth Listening To Matt Hancock and his closest advisors receive the latest modelling update from Prof Neil Ferguson James Ferguson, who runs a financial research company called the Macrostrategy Partnership, has produced a research paper on the FPR (False Positive Rate) of the PCR test in which he explains why the PCR test is a poor diagnostic tool when the prevalence of COVID-19 in the general population is so low. (The lower the prevalence, the more likely it is that a positive result is a false positive). Here's the opening section: The UK has big problem with the false positive rate (FPR) of its COVID-19 tests. The authorities acknowledge no FPR, so positive test results are not corrected for false positives and that is a big problem.The standard COVID-19 RT-PCR test results have a consistent positive rate of ≤ 2% which also appears to be the likely false positive rate (FPR), rendering the number of official ‘cases’ virtually meaningless. The likely low virus prevalence (~0.02%) is consistent with as few as 1% of the 6,100+ Brits now testing positive each week in the wider community (pillar 2) tests actually have the disease.We are now asked to believe that a random, probably asymptomatic member of the public is 5x more likely to test ‘positive’ than someone tested in hospital, ...
Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes a tetchy response by Neil Ferguson to yesterday's critique of Imperial's modelling, a lament about NI's health service and a cost-benefit analysis of mass vaccinations.
