News Round-Up
26 July 2024
Government Has Just Declared War on Free Speech
26 July 2024
by Toby Young
In my Spectator column I have tried to answer the question of why the global elite are such enthusiasts for the heavy-handed, statist approach to managing the coronavirus crisis and opponents of less draconian alternatives
The authors of The Great Barrington Declaration have teamed up with several other academics, including Carl Heneghan, to launch Collateral Global, which aims to document the far-reaching impacts of lockdowns.
Lockdown proponents are seeking scapegoats for the "biggest public health fiasco in history" when they should be examining the impacts of their own ideas, says two of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Glen Bishop has analysed a paper produced by one of the SAGE modelling teams and discovered an interesting fact: it tacitly endorsed the approach recommended in the Great Barrington Declaration.
Lockdown Sceptics has published a new piece by Dr Noah Carl arguing that the strategy recommended in the Great Barrington Declaration – Focused Protection – would have resulted in fewer deaths than locking everybody down.
In an original interview for Lockdown Sceptics, Professor Martin Kulldorff says that the censorship of sceptical views by the media, including social media, during a pandemic is a danger to public health.
In an original interview with Lockdown Sceptics, Prof Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Stanford, says vaccine passports are a terrible idea, variants are over-hyped and masks are pointless.
by Oliver May New variants are of no concern. There is no need to cancel summer holidays. Millions vaccinated, coupled with immunity from millions of prior infections means we can surf on the crest of the third wave, rather than being remotely concerned about it. In fact, the UK should open now. And vaccine passports, certificates, or whatever name they are being given, will do nothing to improve the health of the population – all headlines we have read and heard over the past week or so. Except, we haven’t. We have heard and read the opposite. And we are instilled with fear from TV and radio adverts, complete with ‘that scary voice’ all too eager to give listeners nightmares, be it your impressionable primary-school-aged daughter, or a frail older lady now terrified into wearing a mask outside while waiting for a bus with no one within a 50-metre radius. But the reality is that the above headlines could have been written – and all based on science. Jayanta Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, the report that called for the focused protection of the vulnerable and no lockdowns, signed by almost 14,000 medical and public health scientists, nearly 42,000 medical practitioners and close to 765,000 concerned ...
Lockdown Sceptics has published an excellent, very thorough demolition of the critique of the Great Barrington Declaration set out in Anti-Virus: COVID-19 FAQ, the oddly-named, now moribund site set up by @NeilDotObrien.
by George Dance Professor Martin Kulldorff, Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Jay Bhattacharya The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD),1 under which thousands of scientists and medical practitioners have called for a end to lockdown policies, was drawn up last October 1st-4th, was announced on October 5th, and was already being denounced on October 6th. Over the next month, the GBD and its message were virtually buried beneath an “avalanche of scathing criticism condemning it as ‘very dangerous, unscientific, unethical, total nonsense, dangerously flawed, conspiratorial and grotesque’. Among the critics were prominent role-players such as World Health Organization director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, British chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance, and US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci”.2 Defenders of the lockdown consensus released a counter-manifesto, the John Snow Memorandum,3 ironically named for epidemiology's most famous dissenter from a scientific consensus. At the time I read everything I could on the topic and made copious notes, hoping to write my own perspective on the GBD. Long before I was in a position to do that, though, the debate had moved on, and I never had an opportunity to revisit the subject. Fortunately, there is a new FAQ in town: Anti-Virus: The COVID-19 FAQ.4 This new FAQ may not be the best place to go for scientific advice about the disease; the ‘doctors’ behind it seem ...
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