2020-10-04

Oh no. I don’t believe it.

Number 4.

The husband of a friend suffered a stroke at home. An ambulance was called and the husband was put into it. He was lucid at the time. His wife was refused permission to travel to the hospital with him. She was also refused permission to visit him in hospital.

Whilst in hospital he suffered a bigger stroke. She was again refused permission to visit him.

After two weeks he was moved to another hospital. His wife was refused permission to visit. The hospital did offer to have a phone next to him so that she could talk to him even though he was, by this time, comatose.

After another two weeks the hospital relented and said she could visit him but she would only be allowed to by being two metres from the bed, wearing a mask, a visor, gloves and a disposable apron. She couldn’t touch him, comfort him or do anything to ease his condition. No one knew if he could hear anything so she would have to shout at him from two metres away and hope he could hear.

After four weeks he has died, alone, apart from a nurse with him right at the end.

NHS? Yeah, fuck you.

If a private hospital did that, they would know that at the very minimum they would lose one family as customers. They would also be aware that if the story gets out, they would lose a lot more customers. But the NHS doesn’t have to worry about that. Whether a patient lives or dies, whether they are treated like a human being or like a piece of furniture, none of it matters. The government will still force you to pay the NHS. There are no consequences for the NHS. There is no incentive to do better. That is why the NHS is flawed from the start.

The full story of what happened in the death camps is yet to emerge

death camps

Yes sadly that is what NHS turned into

It will make grim reading. The top management and some others in the NHS have behaved abominably and following government orders will of course be no excuse.

I think ultimately it is because the NHS staff see the public as supplicants rather than customers who are deserving in their own right.
The Bismarkian Social Insurance model which most countries bar US & UK have adopted a variation of allows for this:
GPs are not gatekeepers.
If you aren’t happy you can see another specialist or GP at your choice.
You can go straight to a specialist.
You only have to look at how the NHS has performed in comparison to realise how woeful it is as a system.

One system came up with: a)Liverpool Care Pathway.
b)Staffordshire Elderly Feeding Plan.
c) Cumbrian Neonatal Plan
d)Covid Care Home Transfer Plan.
Its not a bloody coincidence!!!

I think it’s because too many working in the NHS are thinking of themselves and not the patients. The patients are a threat to them so must be kept at a distance as much as possible.

Bullshit constantly disproven free-market wishing. It’s nothing to do with the essential nature of the NHS – it’s to do with the political control of it – which happens to be from the far at the moment.

I’ve been in a private hospital during this shit-show – and it’s exactly the same.And it’s been even worse in NY.

Why all the down votes?
I would suspect that the reason that private hospitals are no different to NHS ones is the insurance aspect, which means that private hospitals have absolutely no wriggle room and have to behave like the NHS even if they did not want to.

NY state accounts for 1/2 of US deaths after Cuomo ordered decanting of Covid positive patients from hospitals into care homes.
He is now trying to deny it, but too many people have a copy of his orders
All the Democrat run states have worse death rates than republican ones.
Funny that.

DoJ on the case since August, waiting on an update:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-requesting-data-governors-states-issued-covid-19-orders-may-have-resulted

The downvotes are for believing that the US health system has anything in common with a free market system.

The blame lies with those medics who have some power and authority but failed to insist that long-established safe medical protocols were allowed to continue, rather than this inhumane and counter-productive nonsense.

It’s not just the politicians in charge. It’s those working in the NHS, and as I’ve just said above, they’re more worried about themselves than patients. That’s not all staff, obviously, but I’ve worked alongside too many whose last concern was the treatment of patients, and greatest concern was their career or personal life.
Even before CV19, there were plenty of admin staff who were borderline hostile to patients. This slide has given them carte blanche to virtually close shop.
Are you familiar with the “Yes Minister” episode about a hospital that had won lots of awards for its efficiency, etc, but hadn’t opened to patients because they just get in the way?? What’s going on is nothing new.

If you think that the health system in the US has anything to do with a free market, you are incredibly deluded. There are huge levels of control placed on the US health system. Programs like Medicaid and Medicare remove any interest the patients would have to look for a better deal. The individual practices have no need for competition, because they get their bills paid regardless.
Just go look up why the price of insulin is so high in the US. Socialists would have you believe it’s because of the free market. In reality, the price of insulin is so high the US because the government not only awarded exclusive manufacturing rights to a few companies, but they blocked any and all imports of insulin, as well as blocking imports and manufacturing of insulin alternatives. In other words, through government policy (which is anathema to the free market), a couple of companies get exclusive rights to set whatever price they want on insulin, without any competition.
You are being lied to. The US is no longer a capitalist country. The US health system is anything but capitalist.

What puzzles me is, where is the empathy? Would they like members of their families treated the same?

Maybe the staff has become desensitized from losing so many patients. Maybe they never cared to begin with. But there are studies showing that when people are following orders from what they perceive to be an authoritative figure, they usually throw morals out the door, especially when they’re told that if anything goes wrong, it’s not their responsibility. See the Milgram experiment for more on this.

Sociopaths are everywhere. I’d like to know how many are in public office.

Murdering, vicious, sadistic bastards.

Yes indeed, this is about murder and treason against the British people by its own government. Those responsible have to be accountable and face trial for their horrendous crimes.

This is beyond evil, heartbroken for your friends. I just read your story to my husband who is quite religious and he said, effing c’s. And he doesn’t usually swear.

Another war crime

Heard a similar story from my parents yesterday – how many couples or parents or children every day are having to make that decision to get into ambulance say goodbye and never know if they will see each other again. The medical “profession” should hang its head in shame. Once the truth is really out there I don’t think they will ever recover their reputations. They know what’s happening and what we have 60 have finally decided to speak out. Pathetic

Very sorry to hear what happened to your friend. Social distancing is a crime against humanity and this illustrates why.

This incident should be circulated more widely as well as to wake people up and realise that what they were clapping for is essentially a No Help Service and has transmogrified into the National Covid Service.

Bastards the lot of them!

There is something I find utterly disgusting. One justification for lockdown was to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed. The country had to suffer a lockdown to help the NHS but the NHS shut down and people were denied access to medical care and relatives couldn’t see people in hospital. Imagine if a law was passed making it illegal to cook at home due to fire risk but the fire brigade stopped attending fires. We pay taxes for the NHS. What is the point of paying taxes if we don’t get anything in return. Could someone explain why we were expected to clap for an NHS which shut down. There should be legal action against the NHS.

We were asked to clap for people who were doing the job they wanted to, and were being paid for…

We were asked to clap for an organisation that was largely closed to anyone who didn’t have CV19. It smacked of communist-style propaganda even then.

But they weren’t doing it, and were getting paid…..

I didn’t clap once, but I have several friends who were working incredibly hard on busy wards for the NHS. One got coronavirus and was wiped out for weeks. I dislike the government’s rules and I think some senior NHS people have been spineless, but let’s not turn this against all workers “on the ground”.

What I find strange is whilst a percentage of the NHS staff did work hard during the lockdown – a very large percentage was either deliberately under occupied or put on temporary leave due to orders from above. But we are expected to praise the organisation as a whole and countless businesses are giving NHS staff discounts and freebies when in fact Nursing Home Staff and Carers are far more worthy of the handouts than those in departments which abandoned their patients for months.

If we are in the middle of a pandemic why were staff placed on leave and hospitals set up to deal with Covid patients have been empty.

I was not attacking workers on the ground. I was attacking the higher ups who decided that the entire NHS was shut down to treat only Covid patients.

I didn’t clap and think depriving people of the chance to comfort their loved ones is unforgivable. However, I was recently an outpatient at the local hospital and could not have been treated more kindly. They accepted my mask exemption without question and allowed my friend in the waiting room with me as I’m disabled and was anxious. The consultant herself took me back to my friend.

That’s just utterly heartbreaking. We don’t yet know the half of it, but when we do, when the majority public realise it was NOT about “saving the NHS” that they blindly clapped for every Thursday, when they realise the extent of the killing fields in care homes and hospitals of people unable to have any contact with family, of all the people who lost their lives during this “crisis” due to lack of medical care, it will tragically be too late. Will they then finally wake up?

When I became a nurse 14 years ago I was not signing up for this type of barbarism. The actions of the hospital are reprehensible, what harm could have resulted in the lady seeing her husband without the PPE and being able to hold him? He was dying, the clinical staff knew that, it wasn’t as if he was going to contract a viral infection. This was cruelty of the highest order. I do have to question myself as to whether I would have let her see and touch her husband, I hope that I would have the courage to say yes to her and tell the hospital where to jump.

P02099003: It’s the same logic where they won’t start chemotherapy for cancer after an operation until the surgical wound has healed in case they get an infection, because the immune system will be reduced, and the metastases continue to grow and kill the person because they didn’t get chemo in time….

Please send that story to Toby.

Really really sad. I remember, years ago, when my own father had a minor stroke followed by a major one, we were all allowed to be by his bedside. That was bad enough. I can’t imagine trying to grieve in these circumstances. The anger would get in the way too much.

I’m wondering if this is a local decision. My 96 year old mother suffered a heart attack back in July and we were allowed to visit at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford. Only 2 (not sure if this was per visit, or only 2 ever) visitors allowed, but that was humane. Also wondering if it is the same now.

Our friend’s wife was not allowed to visit him in hospital when he was treated for bronchitis back in early May. He died in hospital from CV19 (we assume, because he tested positive) without his wife having been allowed to visit him for two weeks.

I won’t be letting either of us go into hospital. We’ll die at home in our own beds. I want nothing to do with the NHS.

Sent this to my MP with the comment ‘thought you’d like to know what you are supporting’.

love the t shirt.. from where?

Anders Tegnell on Neil Ferguson: “…rubbish in…rubbish out”. Ferguson model under big pressure
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWwn6f-WLTI
youtube watch?v=xWwn6f-WLTI

The dictator panicked? Who knew?

Umm?

I don’t actually hold that against him per se. It was an unknown virus, he was taken in by Ferguson’s doomsday model and panicked.

Now though there is no excuse to continue with the course of action he embarked upon.

There is enough evidence out there to stop this train before it really smacks into the buffers. Instead he appears to still be in panic mode for reasons that elude me and countless others especially on here.

Maybe he has been ‘got at’. I doubt we’ll ever know.

If he or any if the cretinous mob had spent five minutes looking into Ferguson’s previous convictions, they’d have known where to stick his. ‘predictions’.

Boris is work shy and with little management experience or ability and so he was only to happy to pass this on to the scary megalomaniac team of Witty/Valance/Hancock. In his ‘Have I got news for you’ days we would probably have been the first to lampoon this horror movie trio but he just ducked out of doing any actual work and left it to them with dire consequences.
The weird thing about this hoo-haa is how I am now following, reading and listening to people like Peter Hitchens and Julia HB when previously I would have thought they were not on my wavelength.If anything this has shown some people in their true colours.

Agree regarding Mr H. I wouldn’t have gone near him last year. Now I think he is a hero!

I have found myself agreeing with many people that I would never have considered “bedfellows “ before.

War makes allies of previous enemies eh?

I had never listened to talk radio before in my life until this year,there isn’t a day goes by now when they don’t have a sceptical interview on .They have thousands of listeners and i can’t think of a better way to get our message across.

I’ve been liking Peter Hitchens since the Brexit referendum, but certainly the Corona virus situation has really exposed people for who they really are (media, MP’s, police, NHS etc etc), and some everyday heroes/leaders who are fighting against this narrative

There is such a thing as due diligence. And checking past performance is a minimum requirement

It would appear that he had the choice of going with Ferguson’s model or listening to Michael Levitt and he decided to go with the model. That situation happens at my work all the time, there are people who always make a mess of things and others who are usually right and management regularly listen to people in the first of these categories because they tell them what they want to hear with no basis in fact and result is always predictable. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for them for constantly repeating same mistake so I struggle to defend Boris for doing the same and deciding a serial incompetent was person to listen to.

There were more than those choices. If Johnson had two neurons to rub together he could have cobbled together some penetrating questions himself. For example, a SAGE document from 2 March shows quite clearly that they were well aware of the extreme age skew in the impact of the virus. This alone should have been enough to prompt questioning as to the wisdom of a policy of locking down the entire population including young and working age people at minimum risk.

People should stop making excuses for Boris and his cabinet. There was ample information available at the time to reject out of hand Ferguson’s ludicrous recommendations.

Exactly. And someone posted on here a day or so ago that Johnson has had a recent meeting with Prof Sunetra Gupta but is refusing to follow her advice. MW

Yes, I was just using one example but I’m sure there are lots of other examples that just make him look even more incompetent. Both Gupta & Heneghan were apparently invited to recent SAGE call and ignored as well for example.

It’s less excuses, and more ammunition and we-told-you-so.

I sympathise, but a Prime Minister will rely on the appointed government experts, namely, Whitty and Vallance. It is their job to analyse and filter the advice and make a recommendation. It seems they have been either negligent or incompetent, in either case they should be sacked.

Too kind. N egligent or incompetent or malicious or ‘something else’.

If we can’t analyse problems in full, we’re no better than them.

We don’t have all the information regarding “something else.” We’re mostly guessing on that.

For sure. Even more reason we should not limit our analysis to just two possibilities though.

Exactly. BTW, is Ann still the ‘pseudonym’ of Annie? MW

I believe so.

Thanks, confirmed by ‘Ann’s’ horrible experience in church today, reported below. MW

Yes, it’s me. No idea where my ie went!

Thanks, Annie. We’re probably all used to the New You by now but, if you want to, I think you can restore the ‘Old Normal’ by logging out, logging back in with your email address and re-setting your profile. Something similar happened to me on Off-Guardian where, instead of losing letters, I required a few extras and ended up as Miriamwxyz or similar. Eventually I worked it out! (AG says it’s an automatic guillotine imposed by SPI-B Only the elect are targeted for Handle-Corruption.) MW

What about it was unknown? It’s a coronavirus. There was information back in March that showed the age demographics, there were studies from other countries and the Diamond Princess cruise ship.

On the 19th of March the government downgraded coronavirus to a non dangerous disease which means the government must have known about the virus to make that statement. There are two critical areas I would like to address

* What knowledge did the government have about how coronavirus spreads as to justify lockdowns. A FOI request to NHS England couldn’t answer this question.

* Healthy asymptomatic people were placed under quarantine. What evidence was there to support asymptomatic transmission?

China had said there was no evidence to support the asymptomatic transmission hypothesis. Yet the entire UK strategy has been based on that false premiss.

To the best of my knowledge asymptomatic transmission has not been considered to exist in other respiratory diseases. What is striking about coronavirus is that no distinction is made between sick people with symptoms and healthy people with no symptoms. Both are regarded as equally infectious. On the comments I have raised this issue which I have received good responses. Regarding everyone as possibly infected has been at the root of the disaster we face. Lockdown laws apply to the whole population which has crippled our economy and society. For instance, under lockdown rules the entire population can’t do basic things like have visitors in their homes. Everyone has to wear masks. Businesses have to close or endure damaging regulations on the assumption any of their customers can be infected. Many of the public regard healthy symptom free people as infected.

In view of the above, assessing whether asymptomatic transmission exists is very important but s urprisingly lockdown opponents have not dealt with this issue to my knowledge. As far as I can recall Toby has not dealt with this issue. Simon Dolan never addressed this issue in his legal challenge. The legal challenge by Simon Dolan argued lockdowns were a disproportionate reaction. If it can be proved asymptomatic transmission doesn’t exit, the challenge could argue putting healthy symptom free people under lockdown laws was disproportionate.

If asymptomatic transmission exists there are numerous issues raised. Are asymptomatic carriers infectious but less infectious than symptomatic carriers, how would asymptomatic carriers transmit if they didn’t cough or sneeze, how long do asymptomatic carriers carry a viral load sufficient to infect others, where is the scientific research to support asymptomatic transmission.

Exactly. People who persist with the “so much was unknown” line were simply unaware themselves of the large quantity of data already available in February and early March. Government decision-makers most certainly were aware of this data.

Exactly. Sweden demonstrated within a couple of weeks that Ferguson’s modelling was up to his usual standard, utter horse shit. As soon as that was clear, every other country should have followed Sweden’s lead and opened up from lockdown as soon as possible to mitigate the appalling collateral damage. Sensible countries like Denmark, Germany, Austria and Switzerland did precisely that and have got closer to herd immunity, thereby mitigating any second wave.

I theorized that it’s possible that Boris could have suffered from mild brain damage as a result of the severe CV19 illness that he had. We know that in some people, what kills them is the blood clotting, i.e. tiny blood clots blocking blood supply to various organs. That would include the brain. It wouldn’t be enough to cause a stroke or similar, but could potentially cause a change in personality.

My brother-in-law had something similar, ie reduced blood supply and oxygen to his brain, and it caused a noticeable change in personality, which is what my sister noticed and kept telling the GP. The GP just treated him for depression, ignoring my sister, but the symptoms, including depression, had a physical cause. Luckily we know a consultant neurologist, and she managed to get my BIL treated privately.

The point being that it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that something like this has happened to Boris..

Balderdash! He’s “fitter than several butcher’s dogs.”
He is, however, a bone idle skiver, booze artist and well-practised liar.

Besides, what turned Whitless into a barefaced liar and Wankock into the ultimate wannabe Hitler?

Given Ferguson’s previous track record, there’s absolutely no excuse for hiring him, let alone being “taken in” by his predictive bollox.

Merkel, Macron, Sanchez …leaders worldwide panicked?

Apparantly neighbouring countries just copied each other, but there were certainly a number of guiding hands (WHO, WEF, UN, B&MGF etc).
When this is over we need an inquiry into both our governments actions and the role played by these NGO’s.

Things are progressing apace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr04gHbP5MQ

The problem is they don’t want it to be over.
The Germans have started their inquiry.
Simon Dolan wants a judicial review here.

As far as u know there is no offial inquiry? Only the Doctors fuer Aufklarung and their private inquiry..

Yes, I agree

Yep, all known to be nervy folk. It’s common among worldwide leaders – nervy panickers. Totally. Panic. Panic.

Bollocks. Bollocks.

Occam’s razor suggests they were (and are still) simply following the same script.

And Macron is documented as having threatened to shut the border if we didn’t lock down. Yet another person Johnson can chuck under the bus…

Should have let him follow through on that. It works both ways, and we might not have hundreds of illegal migrants turn up daily on our shores….

He did not panic. This narrative lets him off the hook.

He made a political decision, and in narrow tactical terms it was a jolly clever decision. Labour and the media were demanding lockdown, and salivating over deaths which could be used to push the ‘heartless Tories’ line. By doing as they told him, he trapped them all into permanent support for his regime. Starmer is Johnson’s gimp, able to whine only about the minutiae of implementation. The media is Johnson’s mouthpiece, because they dare not criticise the policy they demanded. They are all now desperately looking to the regime to get them off the hook.

No, Johnson did not panic. He made a political decision; Ferguson gave him a fig leaf. The idea that no one thought to question a highly contentious bullshit model at a time when there were known to be different scientific views is not credible. Ferguson was heard because what he said fitted the decision that had already been made. Note that Cummings was pushing lockdown inside SAGE meetings long before the rest fell into line.

Is Boris really that clever?

No, but Cummings is!

Caroline, we have a psychic link!

I don’t think Cummings is clever. He thinks he is; but that’s another matter. And people who think they’re clever but aren’t are dangerous if given responsibility.

And so is Starmer. Whatever Labour is up to, I do not believe Sir ‘Trilateral Commission’ Starmer is Johnson’s gimp. He is as signed up as anyone to the bigger picture. If Johnson and co get thrown to the wolves, expect Sir Keir to step up. MW

The position of Starmer is clear. Forget your personal views on Corbyn for a while (they’re not relevant to the argument), step back, and look at the history.

Corbyn was subjected to an unprecedented propaganda campaign, full of distortion and untruth. Many honest observers, whatever their personal predilections, have noted this pretty obvious fact.

Notably, the campaign involved two ex-heads of MI6 being used to channel smears (a clear indication of establishment propaganda at work). The Groan was particularly active in confecting stories.

Greasy finger-prints everywhere.

Inevitably, Corbyn goes after the election.

Who is there, falling over himself to align with the establishment agenda, with an extremely flattering and forgetful media?

Yes – your previously identified unradical shill, previously well-embedded in the establishment culture

It’s not difficult to join up the dots if you observed the process.

It’s not difficult to join up the dots if you observed the process. Yes, Rick, we agree with your succinct and excellent analysis 100%. MW and AG

The BBC / press have memory holed Starmers previous performance as DPP.
Remember the DPP who presided over the twitter joke trial where Paul Chambers was jailed for a tweet about delayed flights

Yes that f****** Starmer.

This is also Starmer at his finest, fast-tracking the extradition of Julian Assange:

As DPP, Sir Keir Starmer tempered his supposed love of liberty by fast-tracking the extradition of Julian Assange (a process now making its way through the courts). He flouted legal precedents by advising Swedish lawyers not to question Assange in Britain: a decision that prolonged the latter’s legal purgatory, denied closure to his accusers in Sweden, and sealed his fate before a US show trial. Leaked emails from August 2012 show that, when the Swedish legal team expressed hesitancy about keeping Assange’s case open, Sir Keir’s office replied: ‘Don’t you dare get cold feet’.

https://labourheartlands.com/exclusive-ken-loach-calls-out-sir-keir-starmer-what-was-his-dealings-in-the-julian-assange-case/ and otherwise widely reported.

He also let Dame Dick off for the police’s ‘mistaken’ killing of Jean-Charles de Menezez in 2008:

Keir Starmer QC, Director of Public Prosecutions, approved a decision not to prosecute any police over the shooting.

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/family-of-jean-charles-de-menezes-1009708 also widely reported at the time. MW

“Corbyn was subjected to an unprecedented propaganda campaign, full of distortion and untruth. ”

And plenty of truth. The Marxists in Labour made it unelectable. It was the younger generation who had no idea of Corbyn’s past history who needed to be told, and everyone else reminded.

If you want an unprecedented propaganda campaign, look no further than the Russia Collusion campaign carried out on the other side of the pond.

I very much agree.

The stupid part however is that nobody appeared to have worked out an exit plan. Such blatant political short termism.

Refuse to accept that going into lockdown was a sophisticated political move. The events post LD show that at no point did they have a credible end game/exit strategy. If it wasn’t panic because of the Ferguson model, it was nonetheless an ill thought out plan borne out of short termism.

If the aim was narrowly political, lockdown has worked and worked as a fairly long term strategy. Instead of a politically dangerous ‘heartless Tories’ line gaining traction, Labour and the media are in captivity to the regime, have been since March, and still have no wriggle room. Yes, the country is screwed, but in a context in which it was assumed all other governments were folding too, that makes no odds politically.

I love it that people expect an end game/exit strategy. Nice intelligent people, but not nearly cynical enough.

It was a coup, and the current situation is their desired outcome.

I agree. They’ve had plenty of opportunities to claim victory and unlock the economy.
Instead, they have “ramped up” testing to create an epidemic of fake infections to justify stalling until they can mandate the “health passport” which is their goal.

Trash the economy and kill thousand as collateral damage just to get at Labour and the media? That’s just as bad as panicking.

But the only ambition they have is preservation of political power. So it makes sense: easy way to neutralise any opposition.

But like I say, stupidly short termist, because unless they can engineer a mammoth economic rebound, they’ll be blamed for the fallout. And labour and the media are sure to capitalise on that.

Yes, I do agree with that, Sophie. It has to end on their terms, or they’re stuffed. Neither the vaccine nor the money shot look like Hollywood endings, so we are in for an interesting few months.

No, it’s worse than panicking. That’s why I take issue with the panic narrative. It lets them off.

Do you remember the hoo-haa before the last election over the boy who was pictured in hospital lying on the floor waiting for treatment? I think Boris and his chums thought that if the media can make that much fuss about a single patient, what will they do with an Italy style situation . . . ? The media have a lot to answer for but the blame lies squarely on Boris, Hancock and Ferguson.

Irony alert

The statue of George Orwell stands outside broadcasting house

Room 101 in The Ministry of Love was named after conference room 101 in the BBC building; where Orwell had to endure long tortuous meetings

Can the statue be relocated in Toby’s front garden?

Anders Tegnell on Neil Ferguson: “…rubbish in…rubbish out”. Ferguson model under big pressure
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWwn6f-WLTI
youtube watch?v=xWwn6f-WLTI

Watching that video, my view is the compounded errors result in more than a factor of 12 error. That number is based on Ferguson’s prediction versus the ‘real figure’ of 42,000. But we know that the 42,000 is probably at least double what it should be, and arguably worse. For a start, should we really be counting the demise of a 90-year-old with co-morbidities as a Covid death at all? In many cases, Covid may be present (but with PCR, who knows?) and not the main cause of death at all.

I think Ferguson’s main errors are going to be:

1. Extreme IFR value
2. Ridiculously simple core model that doesn’t reflect the immune system
3. Ignorance of pre-existing immunity/resistance

His calculation of herd immunity threshold is based on the R0 figure and the equal-susceptibility SIR model, and so his death count automatically scales with IFR. But as we know, ‘IFR’ is a tricky thing to define because ‘infection’ itself is not a binary state. Antibodies are not the only mechanism by which the body can deal with a virus, and PCR is unreliable, so I think IFR figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. I suspect that the reality is that a large proportion of the population has had some encounter with the virus and developed some sort of resistance to it, but there may be no way to measure this, so whether it can be called ‘infection’ is open to debate.

Sometimes, I think rational argument (which would be seen by some as hand waving) is the best we can do, backed up with smatterings of real world data. As soon as we introduce some arbitrary definition of infection as, say, a positive antibody test, and then define our IFR on that basis, and then extrapolate it to a deaths calculation for the population, and then calculate the herd immunity threshold in terms of ‘infection’ and therefore antibodies, we introduce factor-of-ten errors very easily and introduce logical conundrums. If, based on our IFR and ‘R0’, we calculate we need 60% of the population to show antibodies before we declare herd immunity, we may be waiting forever.

Good post. I agree with your three Ferguson errors, except that I’d add that I think he was deliberately making things look as bad as possible in order to place himself at the heart of policy-making – i.e. I think he’s dishonest, and criminally so.

It’s also that a rough estimate of “could we deal with 120,000 dying? i.e. double a bad flu season” and then working to build contingency around that, would demonstrate that the models were moot. As they are.

The trouble is that SAGE does not include any practical people with real-life experience on safety projects i.e. engineers of all kinds.

You would quickly see the stupidity of using models like this as well as trying shut down large sections of society.

“the 42,000 is probably at least double what it should be ”

Indeed.

Antibody tests are no good for HIT calculations.
Low viral load infections do not always lead to antibody production.
Antibody presence can be shortlived.
All denials of the HIT having been reached, will always be based on dubious community seroprevalance studies.

Ferguson model under big pressure – yet again!

Huge numbers from Imperial College
Huge vaccine orders
Huge bill for the taxpayers
Huge profits
Huge wedge to Imperial College

Anyone made the connection yet?

If we’d have said this 6 months ago the blunt weapon of “conspiracist” would have been used to silence.

Also a large proportion of their students are from China..

All this nonsense today derives from the mission creep of environmental science since the 1970s. Any independent national inquiry must look at the dodgy intellectual roots responsible for this debacle in order to cut them out, cauterize the gaping wound that will leave at the centre of the Whitehall and other state bureaucracies, including the state broadcaster.

‘ Instead, they’ve swallowed the government’s line that “the science” is clear and unquestioned, and that the prospects, should we fail to “follow” the science, are apocalyptic.

Both are highly disputable. Science is divided. The most apocalyptic, however, are getting the loudest shout.’

The Times (above)

What does that remind you of?

‘….the public climate science debate has been framed as “deniers” versus “alarmists”, or “honest saintly scientists” versus “corrupt perpetrators of a hoax”. The media pushes exaggerated claims of a crisis while some scientists misleadingly shield their hypotheses claiming the “science is settled”. But science is a process and never settled.’

Jim Steele, Pacifica Tribune September 30, 2020

‘When this program started, we used a precautionary principle…..’

Dr Harries England Deputy Chief Medical Officer June 22 2020

‘Precaution is a slippery but appealing term that emerged in the social democratic planning era of the 1970s in the former West Germany. At the core of the early conceptions was the belief that regulatory agencies and governments should move to minimise environmental risks by anticipating possible danger’

‘In the last decade the precautionary principle has entered into the lexicon of modern environmentalism with remarkable speed and stealth. Nowadays, it appears regularly in national legislation, in international statements of policy…..;

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-24237-5_5 1995

Put environmental science back in its box (it’s killing us) and ditch the precautionary principle……..it is lethal, particularly when incompetently applied without the necessary cost benefit analysis to moderate its draconian effect on policy, disastrous effect on the most vulnerable; a disgrace, quite probably a crime.

Excellent comment
As an environmental scientist I can say that this is exactly my experience. Funding by corporations and political bodies like the United Nations has been driving the teaching of dogma in environmental education. Open discussion of scientific theories is something from the past.

You may find interest in the Corbett Report’s two documentaries How Big Oil Conquered the World and Why Big Oil Conquered the World.

In them it is shown how from very early on oil derivatives, which became modern pharmaceutical corporations, loaded target university boards by the same mechanism of funding as you describe. The intention of which was to steer medical academia towards pharmaceuticals.

Thanks, I will take a look.

They are excellent – we’ve watched them both in the last couple of days. I would also recommend his World War 1 documentaries. Meticulous research, brilliantly filmed and the roots of what is going on now plain to see. MW

See also the second half of G.Edward Griffin’s book, World Without Cancer

I can also recommend The Corbett Report’s youtube channel.

Ferguson’s prediction was the so called ‘reasonable worse case scenario’ and when applying the precautionary principle the inevitable result is the shelving of risk assessment proceedures.

‘Stay safe’ at all costs!

RISKS of failure to apply to apply risk assessment are described in this document posted on this site.

Leaked Analysis of the Impact of the Lockdown by a Senior Official at the German Ministry of the Interior – Lockdown Sceptics

Ferguson’s scenario was an outlier, not a reasonable case. 120,000 would be reasonable worst-case, if you doubled the typical flu IFR.

That’s the same as 100% margin on flight tolerances or tank pressures used in space.

The point of a worst-case is not to predict the most extreme. It’s to prepare you for contingency. Because after all we’re not planning for an asteroid hit.

you missed the point

Well said. This crisis has also played into the greens’ hands especially when it comes to the aviation and travel/tourism industries – lockdown, quarantines, social distancing and mandatory muzzling has dealt a hammer blow to both sectors which will take years to recover. Of course the greens won’t care because it could set back the clock in the bad old days when only the rich and upper middle class could afford to travel around and the rest of us will have to make do with Bognor Regis or Scarborough.

That said I’m amazed at the deafening silence from the greens when it comes to the problems of masks and gloves littering our environment (far worse than single use plastic) and lockdowns acutally harming conservation projects in places such as Africa.

Our Green/Left acquaintances locally have entered a new state of denial. All well-heeled, they do not appear to have a problem with what’s going on and their earlier Covi-hysteria has been replaced with an enthusiastic embrace of the ‘New Normal’ – zoom meetings, masks, online exercise, home deliveries and all. When we pointed out to one of them the other day that we’d seen masks strewn on the pavement her response was, ‘Oh they probably didn’t mean to do it, maybe they dropped out of someone’s handbag.’ Previously she would have been horrified at the pollution and litter. Bless. MW

Funny thing is even before this shit show, every time I mentioned littering to the green inclined, its always greeted with tubleweed.

This obsessive’s linking of ‘green’ issues (amongst other hobby-horses) to the current shit-show is one of the things that undermines the force of the arguments against the shit-show.

Not seen Jenny Harries on TV or the internet for ages- wondering why?

Don’t think even Ferguson would have predicted 50000 people dying of foot and mouth disease. I know a lot of people are like sheep, but…

Zombies are devil-worshippers and the devil notoriously has cloven hooves.

Wancock will salivate when he reads this from the Yeadon article on compulsory vaccination:

“state mandates should not be structured as compulsory vaccination (absolute requirements); instead, noncompliance should incur a penalty. Nevertheless, because of the infectiousness and dangerousness of the virus, relatively substantive penalties could be justified, including employment suspension or stay-at-home orders for persons in designated high-priority groups who refuse vaccination.”

And they say we sceptics are alarmist!

He also recommends compensation for people who suffer adverse effects. Dilly dilly, dilly dilly, come and be killed, and maybe the government will pay a bit towards your coffin.

“ the infectiousness and dangerousness of the virus”

Proof?

Heh heh …

Yikes!

Dr. Reiner Fuellmich is a consumer protection trial lawyer in Germany and California. He is one of four members of the German Corona Investigative Committee.

https://youtu.be/kr04gHbP5MQ

50 minutes – an exceptionally important watch. Dr Fuellnich gives a complete, step by step, exposure of the whole, entire thing from the beginning up until today. The crimes, the fraud, who and how. Cannot over state how important this development is. Please share onwards – perhaps MPs would value seeing this.

Crimes Against Humanity

YES …MUST READ

I love this man.

Watched! Brilliant!

Thank you. Just watched it, and have shared, including Toby, though noted I had got it from his comment section. I am in the process of emailing my MP for the umpteenth time – never replies – and will attach this. Hopefully in his subconscious, the echo of ‘I was only following orders”, might galvanise a backbone to be grown, even if it is just for selfish arse covering.

Could I suggest you repost this after a couple of hours so it doesn’t get lost in the multitude of comments.

I’ve sent this video to UKcolumn—-I’ll be surprised if they don’t feature this.

Great! I was going to – but not sure I already sent it last night. At least they won’t miss it!

A question about vaccine trials. If 80% of the population had pre-existing resistance/immunity to a virus (as has been suggested with SARS-Cov-2) does that mean that provoking an antibody response from them would be difficult? Is the aim of a vaccine trial to provoke antibody responses from everyone ? – even the people who are already immune?

In the case of SARS-Cov-2, many people still assume that it is ‘novel’ and that we have no pre-existing immunity. Is this still the official view? If it isn’t the official view, that’s a tacit denial of Ferguson’s model; if it is the official view, it looks like a conundrum for vaccine development. A tangled web…

Everything about this hoo-haa seems to have been done in a hysterical panic driven febrile manner with little in depth lateral thinking and very poor management. This whole vaccine business seems to fall into the same category.
As far as I can gather SARS-Cov2 has a significant upper respiratory tract effect and in that way has some similarities to the common cold for which a vaccine has always proved elusive. Indeed, even if we do get a vaccine it is likely to be against the second stage effects of Covid 19 and it is possible that even immunised people will still get the upper respiratory tract infections and still test +ve with a swab test.

It increasingly seems to me that given the nature of this disease we would do better directing some of the vaccine resources to develop effective treatments for people who do unfortunately go on to develop serious COVID 19 symptoms.

That would be common sense but the real agenda precludes that.

I looked up the endpoints on the study (available here: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04516746?term=Azd1222&draw=2&rank=1 )

in theory the vaccine’s efficacy should be based on results for the primary endpoint, which is prevention of infection (symptoms plus positive PCR test). That makes sense.

However there are a whole bunch of secondary endpoints, including production of antibodies and whole load of other biomarkers. The issue for me will be whether the regulator decides to approve on the basis of secondary endpoints in the event that the primary endpoint is not achieved. That would be scandalous.

I don’t think 80pct pre-existing immunity is that likely, surely? How did the infection spread so rapidly in Mar/Apr if that were the case? Maybe more like 50pct says my gut feel. I will have to do some research on that. I suspect it’s a lot like flu. Lots of asymptomatic people due to prior exposures.

Nosocomial transmission would be my guess as to why (if) it spread in March and April. We (think we) know that there were a lot of PCR ‘cases’ then, but PCR testing has been refined since then and is still regarded as untrustworthy. We think there were some excess deaths (now ‘amortised’), but many of those could have been people dying of having their treatment stopped and the hospitals shut, plus heavily-infected oldsters (though not necessarily C19!) being sent out into the care homes. There is also the small matter of ‘dry tinder’ due to previous mild winter(s).

The 80% doesn’t necessarily refer to ‘immunity’. It could be partial immunity or, to use a different term, ‘resistance’. Neil Ferguson only works with binary states, but the reality is that there can be shades of grey that could transform the modelling.

all fair points.

The early PCR tests were on those with definite symptoms, not like the cattle market scenario we have now.

Maybe. But there will always be plenty of ‘flu-like symptoms’. I just don’t trust these people to get anything right. And I don’t trust them to tell the truth.

Ridiculous Oxford vaccine trials in Africa.

Oxford vaccine trials are being carried out on the poorest people in the world, in Africa. As this excellent video asks and then answers, why would a vaccine trial in Oxford travel halfway around the world to a place that has lower rates of Covid than elsewhere?

Any lockdown loving westerner needs to see and know the shame of what IS happening as humans are right now being used as lab rats by the Oxford trial in order to bring them a vaccine. Heart breaking and sickening.

Your government does not want people to know this.

Particularly fine coverage by scientist Obianuju Ekeocha
https://youtu.be/kJ0F3mgabBE

I have put this video on my Facebook preceded by 3 words only

Black Lives Matter

Please everyone, do the same.

We only need to say these three words before that video on a site like Facebook. Nothing else.

X x

They absolutely do. Great idea, country.

BLACK LIVES MATTER

I want to write that large so everyone reads mine and basics post.

This is an opportunity to open up the discussion simply

Use this phrase on your social media and the link on Basics post. That’s all. Please do it.

I think it has the opportunity to get people to question. Especially some that are woke, authority compliant virtue signallers.

Done!

Nice one fruitbat. Thank you too for reminding us that not all bats are bad…

Oddly enough I haven’t heard anything from BLM regarding this cynical exploitation.

Maybe the folk who pay for them wouldn’t like this angle.

Great post.

wrong sort of black lives.. clearly not woke enough

Even I can’t come up with a punch line for this one

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/whats-on/music-nightlife-news/strip-clubs-wales-cardiff-lockdown-19014791?utm_source=linkCopy&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar

Watching strippers wearing full PPE and face nappies may appeal to a certain kind of kinky zombie…

Full nudity is back in Thailand. The masks are the first thing that comes off. It’s quite artistic. Added bonus: no drunken tourists.

I thought of a punchline by the way. “I wanted a peep show, not a peepPE show!” I’ll get my coat.

It’s surely too early to produce such gems of wit – Masterful!

Heavy pun man!

do they have to sterilise the ping pong balls?

Oh well done that man!

Already been done https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_Strippers

The Covid hysteria is really helping people in less fortunate (!!?) countries. This from a pious and charitable friend:

“When I go down to church tomorrow they are threatening us with a mug of frozen soup made from all the produce we took to church the previous Sunday. This is in aid of Christian Aid which went very badly this year with no collections in the village so every church member was asked to donate £5 to help swell our offering.”

Never mind. Cancelling door-to-door collecting keeps our own zombies safe, and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

Send your friend this. With my compliments. https://youtu.be/kJ0F3mgabBE

It is the antidote to self-absorbed piousness in lockdown loving friends of a charitable nature.

Thank you, Basics, I will.

If it saves one overweight, elderly first world life…..

We had our usual collection from the congregation to help the local foodbank.

To be fair to Ofcom, I would think it likely that they panicked, knowing next to nothing about public health and having to suddenly assess news complaints about covid, and just picked a standard they could measure themselves against. Maybe I’m wrong. In any case, at this point in the pandemic as scepticism becomes more mainstream and it is clear that the science is far from settled, there should be some sort of review.

I think this illustrates the inherent problem with deciding censorship, even with the most benign intentions, is acceptable

Great to see Trump up and about .
Brazil is a large country with a big population which has just let corona rip , as our useless PM Might describe.
I look at Brazil graphs on World OMETER , iv said this before. death rates and infections have been falling for 2 months.
I’m not good at maths , but the way I see it it could well be over there by january.
Notice MSM doesent mention brazil much i wonder why.

As an aside – ‘Let rip’ is a new one that has sneaked into popular use, isn’t it? Suggests damage.

Yes it is and it does. Briefed by nudge unit is my assumption. Too many talking heads/experts/quacks came out with the phrase “letting it rip through” society for it to be coincidence – it’s launch complemented the bill and ben graph. The phrase was used by a good handful of them within hours of each other.

Behavioural Insights Team need to be part of the reckoning.

Funny, I was wondering about Brazil this morning and how they get on.

How I load a picture?

You need to be logged in, then you’ll get a little icon to the bottom right

Thanks!

Regardless of what you think of the man, the fact that Donald Trump is broadcasting from his hospital sitting at a desk wearing a suit, rather than lying in a bed and filled with tubes, is a MAJOR blow to the bedwetters. This doesn’t match their scenario. If he recovers fully it will also be a blow for Biden and his masks, but that’s another story.

Agree this is fantastic news let’s hope hes back on the campaign trail soon

Agree that a quick recovery is helpful in terms of showing that even the “most vulnerable” have low chance of serious suffering, but it will be said (is being said constantly) that he got it because of not wearing a mask.

That’s just their last line of reasoning. As the Guardian ironically showed yesterday, others in his group that caught it did wear masks.

A better key to this is needed.

It looks to me as only those highlighted in red tested positive- five altogether. Only one of whom was wearing a mask.

But I can only count six people altogether wearing a mask* – out of what? nigh on a hundred people?

So one out of six mask wearers were infected. (17%)

As opposed to four out 80+ non-mask wearers. (5% or less)

But, of course, not all those tested positive have probably been identified,

What an excellent opportunity to test the thesis that masks work!

*There’s two way at the back.

I’m sceptical he really caught it at that outdoor gathering as he and his entourage attended a lot of events such as dinners and he was a good distance from the people he was giving a speech to

You could argue, using the twisted logic around us, that this shows it takes about 6 months of non-mask wearing to get the virus. Since Trump hasn’t been wearing a mask for the majority of that time.

If? Of course he’s going to recover.
I don’t know about you. I’m not on here pretending to believe covid isn’t particularly dangerous. I really do believe it and don’t expect for one minute this will be much worse than a flu for him. Especially given the the platoon of medical staff dedicated to keeping him healthy.

Democrats are circulating on SM a *horrible* meme of Democrat leaders surrounding an open coffin in which Trump lies – showing their true colours?

Some of the testimonials I’ve seen on SM are insane. One lady wore a mask to the Presidential Debate and has now tested positive. She blames Trump. Maybe she could recognise theat she attended an event with a large number of people and it was her choice.

No self accountability anymore

New England Journal of Medicine wants mandatory vaccination

https://www.corona-stocks.com/medical-journal-calls-for-mandatory-covid-vaccine-non-compliance-should-incur-a-penalty/?fbclid=IwAR1sC4oAMrVZc833CR952BwCf9FJqvAk7KlWudBeBBZk0ZFO2AitFbLyWSg

The paper proclaims that “noncompliance should incur a penalty” and notes that it should be a “relatively substantial” one.
It suggests that “employment suspension or stay-at-home orders,” should be issued, but that fines should be discouraged because they can be legally challenged, and “may stoke distrust without improving uptake.”
The paper also suggests that government health authorities should avoid making public their close relationship with vaccine manufacturers, to quell public mistrust.

That relationship will be made public all right. Not by lying governments, but by others.

Who will be called conspiracy theorists and ignored.

To a far lesser degree nowadays. I wonder why … ?

Psychotic

“Why did Boris take the predictions of this serial doom-monger so seriously?”

Perhaps because it suited the globalist oligarchs who pull his strings.

And because he is a follower, not a leader.

“ Perhaps because it suited the globalist oligarchs who pull his strings .”

Not imo, though I suppose it’s possible depending what you mean by “pull his strings”. Much more likely imo that he’s a cowardly politician with no moral fibre and he panicked because he thought he might get blamed for lots of people dying.

“Much more likely imo that he’s a cowardly politician with no moral fibre…”

You could be right; that is always possible. But it is rather worrying when it is our “best case scenario”.

Another good article from Professor Carl Heneghan
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/will-covid-cause-a-winter-crisis-in-the-nhs-

Excellent. Puts the hospital numbers into sharp perspective.

Excellent artwork, above, by Galina Gardiner. So true!

Right, now can someone tell me the provenance of the above figure, posted yesterday by Tim Bidie?

Because without knowing its validity it’s not going to convince people. If we know it is real, however, then it ought to be very useful indeed (especially if you re-do it all in black and white, and ask which is 2020? How would they know?)

So where did it come from?

those are US codes, no? So CDC maybe?

It’s a start! Perhaps Tim will come on and tell us?

Actually no. Numbers too small. U.K. So ONS? You can download into excel from their website

summary-of-the-ons-report-on-deaths-registered-weekly-in-england-and-wales-29nd-september

The 2020 numbers bear little relation to all-cause mortality. The reason is the COVID19 mortality has a separate ICD code for death. The small blue bump indicates some additional deaths, but the ONS number will be much higher

Assume this includes ‘with Covid’ numbers for this year?

Also, this would appear to show that fewer social interactions reduce the spread of respiratory disease?

And masks have done f*ck all.

I assume this is for all respiratory diseases.

It was posted yesterday on this site and looks excellent. I just want to know where it comes from because it could be really useful. In one picture you can see that this is not a special virus.

Has anyone else had that burning feeling since the renewal of the Coronavirus Act, that the window of opportunity is closing? That we really only have a few months to turn this thing around before things get really awful? And potentially irreparable?

I feel mentally clearer now we have strong indications of govt strategy ie suppress virus until vax (which will probably be enforced vax).

I also feel we have been logical and rational evaluating the data (tests, numbers, trends) and people’s attitudes and behaviours.

But now I feel a strong urge to do something practical to help. Something that will make a tangible difference. Like some of the fantastic lawyers are doing and the brave doctors speaking out.

What is the mood here? Do you feel similar?

Hancock has already stated in the Commons that UKgov’s strategy is to suppress the virus until a vaccine is rolled out.

I’d love to do something tangible to help, but what? I have no platform and I don’t live in London so I can’t attend the protests. Other than informing everyone I know of the data, sceptical views etc., I feel like I’m pissing into the wind.

I believe this is the new bench mark. Perhaps there is something you can see in it that may inspire you to action.

Get it to political people – parties, politicians? You’ll know better than I.

https://youtu.be/kr04gHbP5MQ

Crimes against humanity.

If qr codes is the new fad why not create qr codes and post them up?

QR codes that point to sceptical sites or videos could be a good idea. Something like ‘For up to date Covid information, please scan’

Good idea – and people will of course be more likely to scan if the description looks as ‘neutral’ as possible..

that’s an amazing idea. I feel strongly we need a space above the line for actionable ideas now. I have drafted out a few, I’ll add that one in if that’s ok….I’m going to send my ideas below the line and then send them to Toby too.

I’ve had a few ideas I’ve been mulling over. I’ll write them up later and post them here.

I think it could be local and practical. For the reasons you say. I’m even thinking small scale. Loads and loads of small scale = large.

I think we need parallel activity to support ongoing talks about data, stats etc.

Will write up ideas and post here later on.

X

Interested to hear about your ideas

Join the crowd. Once again, I am reminded of a short sci-fi horror story that I read as a child – entitled, ‘I have no mouth and I must scream’.

It can be frustrating not knowing how we can move forward. As good as this site is with its excellent editorial content, the comments section can sometime feel like you are yelling into an echo chamber!
Best action, if you can’t attend demos, is to post truths on forums and social media, and try to educate friends and family without appearing to be a conspiracy theorist!
Slow and steady wins the race.

Local KBF group ? Leafleting/fly posting ? (There are also trains to London now I hear. ).

Things ARE already awful. Much of the worst has been hidden by lack of media coverage plus the temporarily positive, but long-term terrible destructive, furlough scheme.

Yes, I think I feel similarly. I’m not sure the Coronavirus Act makes too much difference in real-life terms because my understanding is that the 1984 Public Health Act gives Hancock the powers to do as he wishes on any case, but it felt significant symbolically. After 6 months it feels as if the dogma is so strong that nothing will break through.

While I know people in real life who are sceptically inclined, most of them have just switched off from any debate and don’t want to think about the reality because they are exhausted with it all. I feel exhausted too, but that makes me more determined not to be battered into submission. I just hope that enough people are waking up now to swell the sceptic ranks. I don’t accept that it will ever be too late but it is harder than ever to hang on to hope.

Very much hoping that there will be some success through the Simon Dolan case… other than that, not much more than local law-breaking of the nonsense groups of six.

Yes, it is obvious what the plan is. Keep the country on its knees with continual fear porn until the vaccine and “health passports” are ready.

Then it will be the vaccine to “liberate” you from the muzzles and other restrictions and the “health passport” to “unlock international travel” and help you “safely return to work and leisure”.

They will hope that no one notices that we could go back to normal tomorrow with negligible risk, no technocratic “solutions” required.

And you are right, the time to avoid this dystopian future is now short. Action is needed – both legal and local.

EU plan for ‘commission proposal for ‘common vaccine passport’ is 2022 : https://ec.europa.eu/health/sites/health/files/vaccination/docs/2019-2022_roadmap_en.pdf

Surely nobody can pretend there’s no conspiracy after seeing that?!

Taking every crackdown, ignorance of exemption, damage to businesses etc. to court is now vital.
Sueing givernments on the basis of the big picture is too: PCR tests (unsuitable, need to be standardised reg. swab, test, lab, cycles etc.), mandatory masks and vaccines contravening the Nuremberg code, locking up healthy people etc..

In Germany, a movement (Freiheitsboten) is gaining ground, where people organize in local groups to distribute leaflets that challenge government policies and narratives and provide links to the sceptical case, so that people are at least made aware that one exists and so that they can begin to research it.
This is necessary to circumvene the censorship and ignorance by the
MSM and a good, if not the only way, to achieve just that.
Maybe worth copying in the UK too!

Also I think people should be more proactive for instance parents and employees holding the schools and workplaces responsible should their children or they suffer from any health problems as a result of “safety” policies such as social distancing and mandatory muzzling.

Boycotting and challenging shops, restaurants, museums, leisure centres that zealously enforce guidance on masks, social distancing, T&Ts. Threaten to take them to court for discriminating against people with disabilities and long terms health issues.

We maybe powerless but there are other things we can do. As one supermarket advert says, every little helps.

The COMPULSORY VAX is the next stage of the Agenda.

I posted yesterday about one way to tackle this; use the public obsession with SAFETYISM in reverse.

Ask your brainwashed friends and relatives the following:

• Thorough SAFETY tests on a new Vax can take up to 10 years. This one will be rushed through in 6-12 months. Does that make you feel SAFE?
• The Vax will be unlicensed. Does that make you feel SAFE?
• Manufacturers are to be granted Govt exemption for any death, paralysis, brain damage or autoimmune disease caused by this rushed-through unlicensed Vax. Does that sound like a SAFE Vax to you?
• Kids have a 99.999% chance of recovery (CDC latest estimates) if they catch the virus. The SAFETY of this new Vax for kids is UNKNOWN. Remember Thalidomide? How SAFE do you feel about your kids being shot up with this stuff, considering they are almost at ZERO risk from the virus itself?
• Overall this Vax will be nothing less than “injectable Russian roulette”. How SAFE is that?

IOW the public’s obsession with SAFETY – deliberately engineered to encourage compliance with the narrative – can be used in reverse to challenge the narrative. Are people more frightened of the Vax than the virus? If not, they should be.

The only think I can realistically do is share info on my social media, write to my MP, sign up to various activist groups that are fighting this authoritarianism and attend rallies in London.

I’m not a s scientist, so maybe I’ve misunderstood but if breathing out is ridding the lungs of stuff my body doesn’t want, isn’t wearing a mask that keeps even a bit of the stuff next to my mouth and nose so I breathe it back in, the respiratory equivalent of drinking urine or eating poo? They are all waste products aren’t they?

Correct. But the masks don’t really work and let most stuff, including viruses escape.

Masks are associated with problems if used for extended periods. Against which they seem to have little positive purpose except to screen people nearby from coughing or sneezing, in which case one should be at home anyway.

From a SAGE document (in other words a government document):

“ Neither surgical masks nor face coverings are designed for use for extended periods … Masks will become highly contaminated with upper respiratory tract and skin micro-organisms. ”

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/923607/s0760-4a-duration-wearing-face-coverings-170920.pdf

In other words, yes, you’re right.

That quote needs to be spread widely on SM!

A new study published in France « boasts » that masks may be promoting immunity through « variolisation » – the primitive vaccination method that consisted in inserting pus from a smallpox pustule into a cut in the skin. (It worked, but 1 in 10 died). This is basically an admission that masks are a cesspit on the face that continually reinfects the wearer.

Correct.

If you’re slightly infected (having picked up an infection due to the many periods you’re not wearing a mask), then wearing a mask will mean you breathe in all the viral shedding that happens to be electrostatically attached to the mask rather than everybody else.

From mouth to nose for example.

You will therefore have more virus particles in your body than you otherwise would have. And that will continue exponentially while you wear the mask.

What effect that has given you are already infected to the level of producing viral shedding we don’t know.

But the underlying assumption of mask fans is that this makes no difference.

A German pediatrician has made a video where he explains that the ‘Totvolumen’ of a mask is a particular problem and danger when children are made to wear them.
A baby would die after 3 minutes of wearing a mask, because it would basucally just inhaled its exhaled air, as its lung’s power is still very weak too.
The problem and danger reduces with age and growth, but it never disappears.
Masks are medically harmful.
Masks for children are a crime, they are child abuse!

London Marathon

BBC currently showing the London Marathon (lockdown version).
Always a big event for BBC. I wonder how much money they are putting into it. No mass runners. Just the elite runners. 1.3 mile circuit. Nobody watching. And lousy weather

So a dismal and expensive BBC promotion of the elite running around in circles with no support.

What does that remind me off?

They’re desperate for world records to create interest. The weather should kill that idea.

Nice to hear Andrew Cotter getting some work again, the only commentator left with a sense of humour. Would like to think he’s a bit of a sceptic

I was amused by the commentary – broadcasting across an empty site to nobody except stewards and cardboard cutouts.
Love the analogy!

Hi Again i asked yesterday if anyone knew where the link was to the posters for shops which said NO MASK WE DON’T ASK .There was a link to print them off a few weeks back .Can anyone help i know people who wan’t to print them off and take round the shops .

They might be in Simon Dolans website. Absolutely great idea to do that.

Thank you i will have a look .

Corona graphs for the visually impaired. Have you ever heard what a graph sounds like? Now’s your chance!

Scroll down to the graphs and click the sound icon. Sit back and listen.

https://covid19.scottishtecharmy.org/

I can only feel that this must cause extreme alarm in anyone listening. But I am not an expert in listening to graphed data.

Scottish data. 8% case fatality rate seems questionable.

Typo I think.., Ferguson predicted BSE would kill 50,000 people not Foot & Mouth.
He was involved in bad predictions for F&M too but it kills cattle not humans.

I think it’s the bolt gun that kills the cattle, not the foot and mouth, even if they have actually got it.

I stand corrected!

No, he didn’t. He predicted that over the next 80 years, the number of deaths caused by vCJD (the human form of BSE) was likely to be between 100 and 1000, with a 95% confidence interval from 50 to 50,000. In fact, after 20 years it has been just under 200.

Of course the media reported only the highest figure. But as I said elsewhere, Prof. Ferguson is at least entitled to be criticised for what he said or did, rather than for what he didn’t do or say.

A prediction quite properly heavily caveated

‘Although the risk analysis presented here incorporates a wide
variety of available information into a single integrated framework,
its reliability depends on the quality and volume of data available for
parameter estimation. The limited data highlight the need for
further studies…..’

‘Given the uncertainty regarding the presence of BSE
in the British sheep flock, such large-scale testing is a priority.’

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11571329_Estimating_the_human_health_risk_from_possible_BSE_infection_of_the_British_sheep_flock

Did he add similar extensive caveats to his coronavirus modelling outcomes regarding available data?

Whether he did or not, and separately, the PCR test cycling controversy is not going away…….yet more junk data……..

FMD didn’t kill any people. From what I remember the only person who died unintentionally during FMD was a slaughterman who was shot with a captive bolt pistol; I can’t remember whether it was a deliberate killing or an accident.
FMD is an economic plague and the desired outcomes are totally different to those of a human epidemic. Herds and flocks were slaughtered to stop herd immunity; if FMD antibodies had developed in the National Beef Herd, British beef would have lost its value on the export market. For the same reason, although we had a vaccine, it wasn’t used.
FMD did, of course, cause a lockdown of rural areas, particularly in the North, which is similar to the current situation and, whilst farmers received compensation, other rural businesses, such as hotels and restaurants, did not. The effect on the mental health of rural people was devastating, particularly in Cumbria, and deaths undoubtedly happened as a result.
No one, however, died of zoonotic FMD.

I think they meant BSE…

Yep, I seem to remember similar figures relating to that, which probably caused even worse impacts to the farming economy.

After the F&M cull, a lot of small farms went under and were swallowed up by Big Ag.

It also vastly reduced the stocking levels on the hills, which have never been replaced.

A Point of View on Radio 4 just now ends with the woman (works in academia) “Wear a mask – it’s the least we can do”

“- it’s completely ineffective due to network effects, but it makes the gullible feel better, and since they respond better to marketing messages they’ll spend more in the shops and keep you employed”

Either genuine fear, or pure virtue signalling

Name is always useful, Jonathon.

Seems to be the latest mantra.

I’ve an idea for a demonstration format, but it would take a lot of organisation and I’m not sure if the impact would be as I imagine.

Instead of congregating in one area, each protestor would be assigned a specific street corner in London. They would stand alone with one of perhaps just two or three types of placards to ensure the message is simple, strong and oft repeated.

Just a few thousand people could cover a significant area, so instead of being pigeon holed away and out of sight, the rebellion is shown to be strong and broad.

I suspect it would be quite powerful on the ground, if one was walking for any distance through such an area. My concern is the ability of such a protest style to garner much in the way of media traction. We do need to think outside the box in these times though.

Thoughts?

I think it’s great. I could def work in rural villages too.

I totally agree we need to think outside the box.

Earlier post says I’ll send round some ideas. I’m going to put yours on the list.

Maybe Toby will create a section above called “ideas for action” (or something more editorially pleasing) and we can take from that list that which we feel we can do, within our own locations and abilities.

CM x

Unkettlable, but would take a lot of coordination. Coordination needs nameable ‘ring leaders.’ Who is going to be General Ludd?

Perhaps we can learn from Extinction Rebellion. They seem to have distributed and collective ways of organising that makes it hard to identify “leaders”

I think distributed sounds good. We need to lead ourselves so we don’t rely on others for decisions and responsibility. We can do it ourselves in our own way, locally.

That sounds like I’m a proper libertarian and I voted Jeremy Corbyn at the last election. How funny that none of that matters!

Don’t do it alone. An accomplice should be lurking to ensure the person is safe and should be able to call for help if needed.

Instead of just standing about perhaps a group could systematically patrol a town centre, for instance, while remaining within sight of the person in front.

A bit like a beacon system. Sounds good. Largely avoids the need for central coordination. No incriminating lists or annotated maps.

If you do it, those involved should maybe avoid using smartphones and use old ‘bricks’ instead? So they are a bit harder to trace…

Groups of 6.

Another point, how do we contact like-minded people in our local area? We have made several attempts to find people in our vicinity without success. Perhaps Toby might consider providing an area in LS where meeting points and times could be suggested for various towns so that initial contacts could be made.

There is a section in the forums part of this site for that purpose but unfortunately it isn’t widely used. Maybe Toby or other admins could give it a plug?

It feels like We are moving into a new phase. I’m not saying I’m not interested in the data or the chat, I am, but I also want to do something.

Don’t forget, no more than 6 of you can meet. How convenient!
Perhaps initial meetings might instead be virtual ones – on zoom, skype, etc

I think it best to be anonymous until bona fides have been established. Meeting outside a coffee shop with your exempt card in hand around 11am on a Saturday might be one possibility.

See above my “ideas” list. A survey may work for this.

Have you tried the KBF website ?

Querdenken in Germany have lots of local groups holding demos almost every week. Bodo and Samuel are travelling the country in a bus, stopping in smaller towns , trying to get people into one to one conversations, Freiheitsboten very important. My perception is that people do not believe local lockdowns have an impact, s we should start there, as they affect social and local economy. Provide a link to an e- mail text people can send to their local councillor, with the addresses provided, mp, paper etc. They do not want to do the work, but are fed up enough to press a few buttons on their beloved smartphone. I’m not technically savy.

And this on false positives;
https://www.redstate.com/michael_thau/2020/09/03/ny-times-up-to-90-of-people-who-tested-positive-for-c19-not-infected-truth-a-whole-lot-worse-pt-3/

Excellent interview on Andrew Marr with Fraser from the Spectator. Hopefully people will listen. Can’t get it from surfaces, numbers inaccurate..everything we’ve been saying.

How come (from what you say) Andrew Marr let Fraser talk, but did not challenge BJ regarding that ‘this is the only way’?
I can’t watch UK TV from here…

I shared Andrew Neil’s interview with Sunetra Gupta on Facebook and someone responded by saying that she’s discredited since she said that we may already have herd immunity in July. I think he’s just jumping on the headline without considering the nuance of what she actually said, but can anyone suggest a more thorough response?

How about since masks were introduced in July cases have shot through the roof. Therefore masks must be causing the case increase. If we hadn’t bothered then things would be so much better now.

That’s the line they use in reverse. It’s similarly non-falsifiable.

That’s the problem -deaths so far x (let’s not get into with/from here) but the MSM will tout that without lockdown it would have been y (y>x) and without muzzles z (z>x) .

Not me. However having a dashed bash, – T cells cover a proportion of the population by being cross reactive from previous viral ocurrances. The figure might be say 30% already have T Cell immunity and so only 15-25% of the population need to gain immunity to a new virus and herd immunity is achieved.

Note Devi Sridhar has put quite a body of work together in press and broadcast dismissing the concept of herd immunity *crucially* until a vaccine is found – only then herd immunity is okay by Devi. I mention this since her spoutings are likely to be the argument you encounter against herd immunity. Easy to research.

That woman should be permanently gagged!

Do the BLM reponse, “read an book and educate yourself!”.

Deaths in the UK peaked in April. Herd immunity doesn’t mean no cases.

It is an old trick to say someone is discredited – don’t fall for it

That’s not what she actually said. The model she proposed in March was explicitly intended to be an alternative plausible scenario to the Ferguson Imperial worst case scenario. Ferguson produced a model that worked on the basis that nobody had any degree of immunity; Gupta’s was a counterpoint that said it was also possible that many people had some degree of immunity. Gupta’s model has proved to be closer to reality than Ferguson’s.

It’s also an odd use of the word ‘discredited’. She’s far from discredited in academic circles – she is highly respected, in fact. The press have chosen to present her as controversial, but that’s not the same thing.

There are different levels of “herd immunity”. Usually when people talk about it they think of the theoretical level whereby the virus can no longer spread via natural or vaccine induced immunity.

However artificial “herd immunity” can be achieved using a combination of immunity and NPI, such as social distancing. If some sort of threshold is not reached then any disease would just carry on infecting people until everyone in the world is infected and this clearly does not happen.

I was shocked by the report listed in yesterday’s LS about the success criteria for the vaccines under development being very low, i.e. just mitigates symptoms.This seems like a crucial and huge story. I have no problem with well tested vaccines against significant diseases, but why should billions be spent on something not much more than a placebo? And how can something with such marginal benefits be made, de facto, compulsory?

In my opinion, the other big story that hasn’t had any significant reporting yet is the colossal squandering of public money that is occurring. The state has always found it easy to spend Other Peoples’ Money”, but what is happening now is criminal. There seems to be no regard now for looking after tax payers’ money.
A couple of examples:

• the billions being hosed at companies in bounce back loans without any regard for credit worthiness (or need). The opportunities for fraud are legion and much will never be paid back
• the £100bn for the lunatic “moonshot” mass testing idea. How is that this government of charlatans, who couldn’t make it as Apprentice candidates, have the ability to spend such money without any restraint?

So far they have been able to get away with it because of a compliant Bank of England’s money printing and a compliant bond market. It’s all fine until it isn’t. Financial disaster is inevitable.

and still the majority continue to obey and co-operate in their own total destruction.

I was shocked by the report listed in yesterday’s LS about the success criteria for the vaccines under development being very low, i.e. just mitigates symptoms.This seems like a crucial and huge story.

It’s a good rule of thumb that when a story like this seems shocking, it bears further investigation. This is what I posted here yesterday

“These vaccine trials are testing to prevent common cold symptoms.”

That seems to me a misleading way of putting it. As to the purpose of the trials. I suppose that we might agree that the ultimate goal of any intervention (behavioural, drugs or vaccines) is to reduce as far as possible (and balancing benefits with costs) illness and death caused by this virus. A good way of doing this is by reducing infections, and in particular bringing the rate of infection down to the point where it does not spread in the population, and this is what behavioural measures are intended to do. It is therefore reasonable to make a goal of a vaccine that it should prevent the subject from becoming ill if they encounter the disease. It is also reasonable to make it a goal that it should make the subject non-infectious. But these are different, and the first is more important.
So I looked at one of the trial documents . Under primary objective number 1 we find

To estimate the efficacy of 2 IM doses of AZD1222 compared to placebo for the prevention of COVID-19 in adults ≥ 18 years of age

and

The primary efficacy endpoint is a binary response, whereby a participant is defined as a COVID-19 case if their first case of SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR-positive symptomatic illness occurs ≥ 15 days post second dose of study

So the vaccination is deemed to have failed if the patient develops any symptom of Covid. In other words the criterion for success is that it should prevent any symptoms, even those as minor as those of the common cold. That sounds to me like we want from a vaccine: that it reduces the seriousness of the disease to less than that of the common cold.

In other words the criterion for success is that it should prevent any symptoms, even those as minor as those of the common cold. That sounds to me like we want from a vaccine: that it reduces the seriousness of the disease to less than that of the common cold.

Unless a vaccine can prevent the illness it is not worth taking it. Immune systems are there to fight viruses, bacteria and pathogens. Improve immune systems!

Every year after receiving the flu jab many people complain that they got the flu with very bad symptoms and some of them say never again.

Unless a vaccine can prevent the illness it is not worth taking it.

I’m not sure that’s the majority view. Reducing the severity of a potentially disease to less than that of a common cold seems a perfectly worthwhile thing to aim for.

An elderly aunt stayed with her son and his family one Christmas. They all caught flu , she only had cold symtoms, though, most likely as she was the only vaccinated member of the family. She was up and about while they were confined to bed and very glad she was not as ill as the rest of the family.

Not when 99/8% of the population only get symptoms equivalent to those of the common cold in the first place!

Er, some 50,000 people have died of this disease. If — and I say if — there had been a vaccine that reduced their symptoms from “death” to “less than the common cold”, are you saying that would not have been worth doing?

I´m not convinced that some 50,000 people have died of this disease. I´m also surprised that you never mention the collateral damage from the measures taken by the Government. No interest in the full picture then?

We’re discussing vaccines in this thread, not the effects of lockdown. As to the wider picture, I’ll discuss whatever aspects of the issue I’m interested in, have some knowledge of, and feel I can contribute constructively to, thank you for asking.

50,000 people have died of this disease?

No. 50,000 people have covid 19 mentioned on their death certificates, covid 19 not considered to be a high consequence infectious disease, but still considered to be a ‘notifiable disease’…….ahem……..

‘ Our definition of COVID-19 includes some cases where the certifying doctor suspected the death involved COVID-19 but was not certain, for example, because no test was done. Of the 46,736 deaths with an underlying cause of COVID-19, 3,763 (8.1%) were classified as “suspected” COVID-19.’

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsinvolvingcovid19englandandwales/latest

You may consider such data reliable. I doubt many here would share that view.

Yes, I have some respect for the ONS. Others may wish to question the figures, but I have little interest in debating with people who dispute figures on the sole grounds that they don’t like the answers.

The question is not whether it is worth doing but whether it is at all conceivably possible

Does anyone really believe that a vaccine can be created that will prevent a common cold from killing elderly and infirm, immunocompromised, patients, most over 80 years old with more than two other serious health conditions?

Clue: the word ‘immunocompromised’ may be important

‘ The mean number of pre-existing conditions for deaths involving COVID-19 between March and June 2020 was 2.1 for those aged 0 to 69 years and 2.3 for those aged 70 years and over.’

‘ The age group that made up the highest proportion of COVID-19 deaths in males was those aged 80 to 84 years, with this age group accounting for 21.3% of deaths in England and 20.3% of deaths in Wales.

For females, the age group that made up the highest proportion of deaths due to COVID-19 was those aged 90 years and over with 33.1% of COVID-19 deaths in England…’

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsinvolvingcovid19englandandwales/latest&nbsp ;

Does anyone really believe that a vaccine can be created that will prevent a common cold from killing elderly and infirm, immunocompromised, patients, most over 80 years old with more than two other serious health conditions?

Clue: the word ‘immunocompromised’ may be important

Actually there are several clues in that, mainly pointing to petitio principii . Let me mention a couple. “A common cold”. Covid is not a common cold. “Immuncompromised” You know that how? If you immune system is unable to fight off an infection, it doesn’t mean you were immunocompromised.

I don’t know whether this vaccine can or cannot be created, and neither do you. Some people believe it can, clearly.

Well I´ve got a company that was wiped out by the lockdowns. The government offered a “loan” to pay for the damage they did to our business!!!

In 2005, he told the Guardian that up to 200 million people could die from bird flu. The final death toll from avian flu strain A/H5N1 was 440. And in 2009, a Government estimate based on one of Ferguson’s models estimated the likely death toll from swine flu at 65,000. In fact, it was 457.

Neither of these is correct. Prof. Ferguson is at least entitled to be criticised for what he said or did, rather than for what he didn’t do or say.

In 2005, Ferguson told the Guardian that if avian flu mutated to become transmissible between humans (as opposed to only from birds to humans) then up to 200 million etc. But avian flu did not become transmissible between humans. Which is good.

And Ferguson’s swine flu estimate was explicitly intended to be a Reasonable Worst Case scenario, and as we all know, Reasonable Worst Cases are explicitly not predictions.

A reasonable worst case is one within the bounds of reality – hence the reasonable. Planning for an asteroid hit is what Ferguson’s model amounts to, which may be a remote possibility but will be moot due to implementation.

Anyone working on large-scale engineering projects has come across Reasonable Worst Case scenarios – there is a whole activity called FIT testing and FMECA dealing with how you mitigate and the impact of not catching errors.

The first thing you do is look at the inputs.

So I appreciate that you are trying to say it was a Reasonable Worst-Case but it’s not borne out by the facts.

It was an extreme prediction that doesn’t pass basic scrutiny. It’s the fact that the scutiny wasn’t done is the problem

It was explicitly adopted as a RWC by SAGE 11 on 26 February. They thought that the parameters involved: r0=2.8, infective period 5 days, IFR 1% and no pre-existing immunity were reasonable assumptions at the time.

That’s all you need to get to the RWC scenario, you don’t need an elaborate agent-based model, you can do it on the back of an envelope, and I’m sure there are plenty of people of SAGE who could have, and possibly even did, do it to confirm the decision.

Let me put to you the following thought experiment. You are seated at the table at SAGE 11. Your copy of the dossier containing what little is known about the virus is in front of you. The meeting opened with the chair telling you that the PM needs the committee’s advice that afternoon. The chair turns to you and says “Suppose we just did nothing and let people get on with it. We need to know what would happen. Could the NHS cope?” How would you answer that question? I don’t mean, by the way, what answer would you give, interesting though that might be. I mean, what processes would you go through to get from what you have — the data in front of you, the resources available to you on the day, and your accumulated knowledge and experience — to answering the PM’s question the same day?

In fact, let me pose an easier version. You can have any reasonable piece of data you want about the virus, and you can assume that it’s correct — a luxury not available in the real world. Let me ask again. What do you do? What analytical or practical processes do you carry out to get you from the question to the answer sought on the day?

“what little is known about the virus”

So he could have said, “I don’t know”.

He could indeed. Maybe he should have done. Maybe you would have done. Now what? A decision had to be made. How would you make the decision? What advise would you have asked for?

They are discussing locking down a whole country. Something never done before. I think they turned the precautionary principle on its head.

As did most of Europe. So what?

So what? So their panic response has caused catastrophic costs in both lives and jobs, and in the long run will, in almost any remotely plausible scenario, cause massively more harm than the disease itself would have caused.

The precautionary principle properly applied would have resulted in rejecting the radical experiments of societal lockdown and coerced mask wearing, for (broadly) the Swedish approach of moderate, mostly voluntary distancing and shielding, and we would now have been in an infinitely better place than we are, in economic, social and cultural terms.

Do you imagine for one moment that the UK economy would not have suffered a significant slump even if we’d have carried on as normal.

We don’t yet know what the fallout will be. However, We do know that LS readers are just as guilty as the pro-lockdowners when it comes to making predictions of armageddon.

Sweden has suffered much less, despite being massively exposed to the stupidities of lockdowns elsewhere because of their heavy dependence on exports.

Do you imagine for one moment that the lockdowns have not imposed massively greater economic costs than not locking down could possibly have inflicted?

It is, on the other hand, perfectly possible to believe that if we had treated this as just another winter flu, advised people to wash their hands and stay at home if they are symptomatic, and used the propaganda tools the government has used to promote fear to instead shame those showing fear and to push “keep calm and carry on” as the theme, then we would have suffered almost no economic losses beyond direct healthcare costs, brief disruption from a spike in absences, and whatever was imported from panic responses around the word.

Do you imagine for one moment that the lockdowns have not imposed massively greater economic costs than not locking down could possibly have inflicted?

Someone suggested recently that we could have given every vulnerable person their own Covid-secure mansion, two live-in assistants and had the RSC perform for them every evening in the grounds for less than this has cost us!

No need to predict; simply check the National Debt figures:

‘ Debt (public sector net debt excluding public sector banks, PSND ex) has exceeded £2 trillion for the first time; at the end of July 2020, debt was £2,004.0 billion, £227.6 billion more than at the same point last year.’

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicsectorfinance/bulletins/publicsectorfinances/july2020

Exactly.

Tag team now.2 of the 3 people still left in the country who think Ferguson’s 14 year old FLU model had any validity.
A false IFR based on 6 planes from China and pre supposition based on zero pre immunity which gives a different result every time it’s run because of faulty coding.

This is BS. Several sources were used to determine an initial estimate of IFR. Early WHO estimates suggested 3%.

Early in March Whitty had already made it clear that the upper bound for IFR was 1% – but could be lower,

Ferguson used 0.9% which was not unreasonable at the time. Oh, and by the way, under the UK lockdown scenario he predicted a death toll of ~40k. (R0 2.6).

Have you actually read the March 16th paper?

“ This is BS. Several sources were used to determine an initial estimate of IFR. Early WHO estimates suggested 3%. “

And plenty of experts in relevant fields, from Wittkowski to Giesecke and plenty of others, pointed out at the time that ifr estimates always fall significantly during the course of an epidemic, for various very understandable reasons. They were right, of course. It was those standing by those high initial numbers who were assuming a “worst case” of exceptional behaviour from this virus.

They fell for SARS (coronavirus) from about 17% to 10%.

Stop this nonsense about “things always do this it that”. We need clear scientific reasons why something may or may not happen.

CFR: 0.8-1%

‘ So my thinking is this is actually not as severe a disease as is being suggested. The fatality rate is probably only 0.8%-1%. There’s a vast underreporting of cases in China. Compared to Sars and Mers we are talking about a coronavirus that has a mortality rate of 8 to 10 times less deadly to Sars to Mers. So a correct comparison is not Sars or Mers but a severe cold. Basically this is a severe form of the cold.’

University of Hong Kong 06 Feb

IFR 0.1-0.41

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/
March 17

Have you actually read the March 16th paper?

Yes, and I had the overwhelming sense that it was essentially political rather than scientific.

I find it hard to believe that anyone used to reading scientific papers read it without feeling a high level of scepticism, and wanting to probe further to explore its limits.

Something that SAGE, the government et al. appear not to have done.

well, start with saying ‘And don’t bring me any more shock-horror gobbledegook from Ferguson – he’s got a rap sheet of Hammer Horror advice a mile long’ ?

And next … ?

Take precautions with NHS and add extra capacity, spot peak deaths on 8th April and start winding down.

That’s an answer to the question “What should we do”. I’m asking the question “What analytical or practical processes do you carry out to get you from the question to the answer sought on the day?”

In particular, if you choose not to use Ferguson’smodel, do you use some other model, or do you eschew modelling altogether, and if so, what do you use to answer the question as posed?

Real world data from China and Italy.

I can’t believe the naivete of this comment.

How would you know that the peak was a real nationwide peak and not just a local maximum. The virus did not spread uniformly across the country in March & April.

That’s why the North is seeing more cases than London. It’s why we are getting local outbreaks. There are still large parts of the country that have had relatively little exposure to the virus.

Cases have no bearing on what most people understand as infections.

How many of these ‘cases’ are resulting in hospitalisations and deaths?

The PCR test is arguably not fit for purpose in determining what is really covid19 and the resulting in ‘cases’ are more likely recordings of some type of corona residue, from what it is not clear.

This process is in no way equitable to the type of ‘infections’ seen at the height of this ‘pandemic’.

The advice of an acknowledged coronavirus expert based in China during the outbreak.

‘ There’s a vast underreporting of cases in China. Compared to Sars and Mers we are talking about a coronavirus that has a mortality rate of 8 to 10 times less deadly to Sars to Mers. So a correct comparison is not Sars or Mers but a severe cold. Basically this is a severe form of the cold.’
Prof John Nicholls Univ of HK 06 Feb

Plenty of evidence of how dangerous common cold viruses are to the elderly from a 2 minute trawl on google

‘ Unexpectedly Higher Morbidity and Mortality of Hospitalized Elderly Patients Associated with Rhinovirus Compared with Influenza Virus Respiratory Tract Infection’
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5343795/

Nevertheless those responsible could still regain their reputations if they simply woke up and put together an independent public inquiry.

Brilliant!

The Imperial model gave predictions for a range of scenarios. The most extreme being an unmitigated scenario in a population with 100% susceptibility.

Perhaps Professor Sunetra Gupta should have said she didn’t know when her team when they came up with the ridiculous scenario that over 50% of the country had already been infected in March.

I thought that 50% figure was just one of the examples they used to explore different scenarios? So your second para. also applies here?

I would look at the dossier and request the specifics of the dataset that were used in the model. I would then ask why the Chinese dataset provided by as yet unknown sources was used rather than the Diamond Princess dataset that was already being studied extensively by a team in Japan in conjunction with a team at Columbia Uni.

… and then what? How would you turn that information into an answer to the question “ Suppose we just did nothing and let people get on with it. We need to know what would happen. Could the NHS cope?”

The NHS didn’t cope,because they closed it to everything else anyway

That’s a fair point, but not quite relevant to this discssion.

How do you answer that question yourself now knowing what we know? Do you subscribe to the vee that without all these lockdowns on everything but name would we see hundreds of thousands dead? As Hancock does

Ah, that’s a different question completely. Do-nothing is not the only alternative to lockdown.

Looking at the experiences of places like Manaus and Guayaquil, I would say that for the do-nothing scenario , while the numbers would have been different, the answer would still have been correct, in that the question asked was “Could the NHS cope?”, and I think it likely that the answer would have been “No”. So, as a rough estimate, if the Government has done nothing at all we would have seen 200,000 dead, collapse of the NHS in London, another 100,000 deaths due to that collapse.

Nothing in that says anything about whether lockdown was the right “something” to do, merely that doing nothing would not have been the best option.

Richard, you keep bringing up Manaus as a “do-nothing” when taking the figures and applying it to the UK and Sweden, they do not make sense.

18,800 for Sweden, and 123,000 for the UK based on 3300 for a pop of 1.9 M (Manaus)

Sweded – less than 6000
UK – 42000

So both are roughly 2/3 thirds less with radically different measures.

Something is not up with the numbers.

But you keep pushing this as if it is correct as a “do-nothing”

You’re not thinking it through

The figures make sense, you just don’t like them. I’m not claiming to understand why different countries with apparently similar policies had different outcomes — UK and Norway, or example. Are you?

How do the figures make sense Richard? If you do nothing in Sweden you get 18,000 (or 100,000 in some of Ferguson’s) models.

If you do very little you get the same as doing a lot?

Tell me how does that make sense?

Well, I’m prepared to admit that your figures make no sense to me, because you haven’t explained what they are supposed to be figures for.

Manaus has 3300 dead in 1.9 million with the “do-nothing” scenario. If we take these numbers and apply them to the population of the UK and Sweden, assuming the same viral dynamics (ceteris parebus) we get 123,000 dead for the UK and 18,800 dead for Sweden.

So now you say – okay let’s “do something”. We look at Sweden that did little and the UK that did a lot. And the actual figures of deaths are roughly the same proportion. As in the measures between Sweden and the UK have no effect.

Only the measures between “do-nothing” and “do little” appear to reduce the effect by a whopping 2/3 thirds.

Hmm, an effect that saturates that quickly? There’s something fishy with the numbers. Which means the original numbers are off.

Manaus also had a collapse of its healthcare system, which was, let me remind, the issue under discussion.

I don’t know why different countries have such different outcomes. But let’s look at Norway, 5.4M population, so do-nothing, on your figures, would have led to 8000 deaths. They had 275. So measures as between Norway and Sweden had an apparently enormous effect.

Richard, the collapse of the health system in Manaus was for many reasons as it’s operating at most as a 2nd world city. The point as being demonstrated by your reference to Norway, is that when applying Manaus’ figures things don’t add up.

Plus what does Manaus’ health system do in high flu years? Does it similarly fall apart. Context is needed.

My point is that Manaus’ figures look exagerrated for a “do-nothing” scenario. If they are out by a factor of 2, which would be generous it puts the UK right smack in the middle of the Beast from the East in 2017/2018.

Meaning – do nothing.

Actually I’ve made a mistake with Manaus – the population is 2.6 million according to wiki.

So applying it to the UK is 85,000 people – well within the range of NHS capability.

The fact that anyone could expect that figures from shanty towns in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest would have any relevance to the developed world simply underlines how important it is to apply relevant experience to these matters.

Like for example the experience of an acknowledged leading coronavirus expert in China at the time of the outbreak, rather than simply using Chinese data based on case definitions that changed every week for seven weeks, or mortality rates in favellas.

‘The Chinese healthcare system is very overwhelmed with all the tests going through. So my thinking is this is actually not as severe a disease as is being suggested. The fatality rate is probably only 0.8%-1%. There’s a vast underreporting of cases in China. Compared to Sars and Mers we are talking about a coronavirus that has a mortality rate of 8 to 10 times less deadly to Sars to Mers. So a correct comparison is not Sars or Mers but a severe cold. Basically this is a severe form of the cold.’

Prof John Nicholls Hong Kong University 06 February

Whitty has admitted the peak had already passed before lockdown.So the measures were pointless.The NHS was never near collapse.
Also lockdowns don’t save lives they just postpone them,remember flatten the curve,and also cause other deaths.
It’s my opinion that doing nothing was a better option

Whitty has admitted the peak had already passed before lockdown

No he didn’t. He said that some people were saying it had.

BUT as I pointed out above. We didn’t really know if this was THE peak or a local maximum which applied to London.

Mayo is, I think, correct on that point (what Whitty “admitted”). I looked into it a while back and the references to Whitty’s “admission” seem to lead to a discussion before a Commons committee in which he said that “some people” were arguing that the peak had already passed. He didn’t dismiss the point, but he didn’t endorse it explicitly either.

Happy to be proved wrong on this, but that’s the only reference I’ve seen for a source for this assertion.

The peak occurred after social measures short of lockdown were underway. The point of postponing the peak was precisely to keep the caseload within the capacity of the NHS and save the concomitant deaths that would have been caused by a collapse of the NHS.

Oh, and I’m well aware of the current state of the NHS and its effect on numerous people. Preventing a collapse of the NHS by shutting down large chunks of it was not, I think, what was expected at SAGE 11.

But to do nothing now would lead to hundreds of thousands more deaths?

The point was, Diamond Princess answered pretty much all of that, but was ignored. The passengers were not just left to get on with it.

The Diamond Princess answered what exactly? That doing nothing would be fine?

That the IFR never gets to 1%

No, what it showed is that IFR didn’t get to 1% on one occasion. Other estimates of IFR were on the table too. The experience of Manaus and Guayaquil showed that it did subsequently.

No-one has any idea what the real IFR was in Manaus, let alone the CFR.

The IFR on the DP was almost 2%.

Okay, let’s call it Exposure or Population Fatality Rate. If a ship of over 3000 people in a sealed off environment has 30 people dead then it kills 1%.

How many actually died of Covid with no co-morbities? Less than 3 I believe. May even be 0.

Give up on this co-morbidiities crap. People live with “co-morbidities” for years. These were people on a cruise so were clearly able to lead a full & active life.

The co-morbitity crap? The point is that is creates noise in determining if the virus is the cause of death. And further creates issues with attributions.

But go ahead and miss the point that people have been talking about for months just to fit your view of the world

The background mortality rate include factors such as co-morbidity. Excess deaths in the UK for 2020 are around ~50k.

If these deaths were all due to non-Covid factors then the excess mortality figure would be declining rapidly.

‘The coronavirus (COVID-19) did not feature in the top ten leading causes of death in August 2020, in England or Wales. In England, COVID-19 was the 24th most common cause of death and in Wales it was the 19th most common cause of death, for deaths registered in August 2020.’

‘…. in both England and Wales, the COVID-19 mortality rate continued to decline for the fourth consecutive month.’

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/monthlymortalityanalysisenglandandwales/august2020

People live with “co-morbidities” for years

Explain, Mayo?

It is a fact that the great majority of those who die with the SARS-CoV-2 virus in their system (or at least test positive for it) have one or more other causes of death on their death certificates.

Are you saying that a death certificate that states a primary cause of death is “carcinoma of lung” or “myocardial infarction” as well as “covid-19” is wrong, or that their lung cancer and heart disease were not fatal?

Are you suggesting that these people would have survived their cancer and heart condition happily and in perpetuity had covid-19 not come along?

They are not all on their last legs. The Diamond Princess deaths are a case in point. Many of the victims may well have had health issues but that didn’t stop them taking a cruise.

All common cold viruses are lethal to the elderly and infirm, immunocompromised; more so than influenza:

‘Unexpectedly Higher Morbidity and Mortality of Hospitalized Elderly Patients Associated with Rhinovirus Compared with Influenza Virus Respiratory Tract Infection’
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5343795/

Diabetes,asthma, obesity and high blood pressure are also co morbidities . People can live many years of good quality life with conditions such as these. I don’t deny Covid can be very dangerous to the vulnerable(which I am). I do object strongly to having the freedom to make my own choices of how much risk I wish to take snatched from me.

No. Not everyone was tested. Of those that tested positive, not all had symptoms. Of those that died, not all died ‘of covid’, and several died more than 28 days after they tested positive.

Even Ferguson would struggle to build a model which would show 700 people infected within 10 days. Now you claim there was more. Really?

What was R0 on the Diamond Princess, then?

The DP was a big ship and passengers spent a lot of time on deck in the fresh air.

several died more than 28 days after they tested positive.

That’s because they were in intensive care at the time. Coincidentally, they were admitted to intensive care after displaying symptoms of Covid-19.

That only 20% were infected and 1% of the infected died despite the ‘cruise demographic’ and the ideal spreader environment.

No it didn’t. DP passengers were quarantined after 10 days. Over 700 passengers were infected from a single index patient in less than 2 weeks. That’s fast.

It’s a fair point to debate how effective the quarantine was, and thus how applicable the DP figures are to a wider field.

But I recall complaints at the time that the quarantine wasn’t being properly instigated. In the fog of data, the DP surely still has relevance – especially when compared to what happened in large cities, and the greater knowledge we have now concerning existing immunity.

How were the ‘infections’ detected? PCR test? How many cycles?

You’ve set up a number of strawmen there:

“You can have any reasonable piece of data you want about the virus, and you can assume that it’s correct — a luxury not available in the real world.”

Because we do have years of data about viruses especially coronaviruses and SARS viruses. Where do you think Michael Levitt and others pulled that from.

So you would first check this and do the following:

You would take the high number values of deaths from the flu in the last 5 or 10 years – 50,000 and double it:

So 100,000 – how do we cope?
Then triple it 150,000 how do we cope with that?

50,000 dead what did we do – nothing – that’s your baseline.

Then, in all of recent history what has been the worst deaths – Hong Kong Flu – over 100,000 – what did we do then – nothing?

Okay so it’s looking like if anything the worst-case precautionary action to take will be to increase contingency in the NHS – emergency ICU’s – okay we have mobile units for that.

And perhaps telling people to wash hands and respect hygiene. Also maybe have people take 5 days off with flu and we can compensate companies for that.

What else – do we take special care of the elderly? Yes let’s put that in place.

Here’s what we don’t do:

Interrupt the normal function of society – this will cause financial issues much larger than the virus.
Restrict movement – personal freedoms and the adaptibility of society occurs all the time in markets. Plus history has shown the folly of centralised governance and having the few control the many. Works for ants, not for humans.

You take onboard the mathematical modelling but it must sit with reality After all the previous predictions/projections or whatever you want to call it were overblown.

That’s how you plan it. The trouble is how do you SELL it? As the other factor in this whole debacle has been the media.

That requires leadership.

But then to add, what would you base it on? It appears you would take a theoretical model, unvalidated and unverified and say that this is what would happen?

Or take a simplified model with inputs that are an order of magnitude higher than seen before and say yes this is the worst-case? No checking against history or looking into the assumptions?

Theory over reality.

Precisely. Excellently put.

In summary, then your answer to the question “What analytical or practical processes do you carry out to get you from the question to the answer sought on the day?” is, to put it in a nutshell, think of a number and double it. You can imagine the reaction of others posting here if SAGE had done that …

But most of your answer is about what policies you would have adopted. That’s not what I’m discussing. To keep the focus, it’s about how to assess what would happen if we did nothing. Saying what we might do is not answering that question.

And what’s wrong with “Think of a number and double it”? You can make a reasonable case for it using historic numbers without a model

This is the fundamental problem here. Thinking that we can use models that haven’t worked on previous epidemics.

You focusing on what a “do-nothing scenario” would do is a semantic point?

We were already washing our hands and watching out if we sneezed on people. We were already considering not being in places that were too packed.

So a do-nothing situation is a fantasy as society was already adapting.

A worst case for do nothing is 100,000 based on Hong Kong Flu.

Great now what would you do? Any person would ask how do we get some insurance on that to deal with it.

You focusing on what a “do-nothing scenario” would do is a semantic point?

Since semantics is about understanding the meanings of words, I take that as a compliment.

And what’s wrong with “Think of a number and double it”?

If it helps, imagine Vallance, Whitty or Ferguson saying it and then tell us what’s wrong with it!

There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s used all the time in engineering for planes and spacecraft. As well as bridges. It comes from experience and looking at historic data and previous qualification programs

What it appears is that a “simplistic solution” is wrong? Even when it can be backed up with logic.

Barney is right: It’s the Empiricists versus the Rationalists

Frankly that’s silly.

That’s your opinion. I’ve worked for over 20 years in engineering projects and it’s built into the requirements (often over engineered requirements as well!) of 100% margins in key parts.

Then you should have known better than to say that “Think of a number and double it” is “used all the time in engineering for planes and spacecraft. As well as bridges.”

Where do you think Michael Levitt and others pulled that from.

Levitt used data from a location that was FULLY locked down and quarantined from the rest of China.

The myth concerning Levitt’s predictions continues to grow. He continues to be proved wrong as time passes.

The fact that Tengell and Co saw how ill informed the model. Was at the start speaks volumes.

If you are doing a worst case prediction 12 fold variation on the numbers that eventually arrived in reality seems utterly worthless.

Worst case you’d think might be double, triple but 12?

Maybe Ferguson is just the lead guy but who researched the validity of their assumptions in susceptibility in particular? Especially since Sweden clearly went with wildly different ones?

Needs a full nquiry, that’s for sure.

Yep. And apparently this common sense approach (one used in engineering a lot) is wrong because it doesn’t come with a complicated model.

If you are doing a worst case prediction 12 fold variation on the numbers that eventually arrived in reality seems utterly worthless.

This meme is based on a so-called “calculation” that because another group’s model for Sweden’s social measures was out by a factor of 12 (or whatever: it was certainly badly wrong) therefore Ferguson’s model for do-nothing was also out by a factor of 12. Which is nonsense.

I’ve already explained that the RWC didn’t depend on Ferguson’s model anyway.

To answer myself again based on:

“It was explicitly adopted as a RWC by SAGE 11 on 26 February. They thought that the parameters involved: r0=2.8, infective period 5 days, IFR 1% and no pre-existing immunity were reasonable assumptions at the time.”

As you rightly point out it looks like, what else could they have done?

Well they could have checked to see was an IRF of 1% even reasonable against reality. A cursory check would have shown there was something odd about that.

I think the deeper problem is the belief that when it comes to what looks like complicated matters you need a complicated solution. And that such a complication solution can only be modelled.

The trouble with this is that you can deal with the situation with simple logic and the belief that the system has contingency or that we can increase it.

Speaking as a technical person, a physicist, a rocket scientist too, this has been the biggest smack in the face to me. That simple solutions are often what are best for complicated situations.

Because what the modeller doesn’t see is the implementation cost nor the feedback of the system when you go dicking around in it.

The data on IFR was conflicting, and SAGE took a view on that. The experience of some cities suggests that 1% was not far out.

what the modeller doesn’t see is the implementation cost nor the feedback of the system

Unless explicitly asked to, no.

This illustrates why modelling is a valuable tool in the hands of people who know how to use it. A good servant but a bad master, if you like. But the question I posed for consideration “If we do nothing, could the NHS cope” is only part of the planning process. People discussing this point tend to assume that the only alternative to do-nothing was lockdown, which of course isn’t so. Once you have a range of options on the table you need to compare their costs and benefits. I do not claim to know how, when or even whether that was done. But modelling the costs of an RWC is only one step in that process.

Then your argument is just semantics as we are agreeing.

Do nothing is keep carrying on as before which at the time is washing hands and staying at home if you are sick (like we typically do)

The only difference is the public’s awareness level is heightened by the media and reports of Wuhan and Italy.

As for could the NHS cope? The NHS regularly expands and contracts capability with elective procedures. So yes the NHS could cope in general. There would be hot-spots.

History has shown we can deal with 100,000 deaths in a flu season. Probably more now.

I have to say that you have given the clearest answer so far to the challenge.

Your process is to take the worst flu outbreak we’ve had for fifty years and double it. That leads you to conclude that the NHS could have coped.

I don’t say that i think that is what would have happened — in fact I don’t think it is.

But more to the point, it’s hardly a Reasonable Worst Case estimate. In fact it isn’t even a worst case at all, since the Spanish Flu was much worse. What you’ve given is a central estimate: possibly a most likely scenario. But not a Reasonable Worst Case.

The Spanish flu was 100 years ago and a lot was going on that we still don’t understand. It isn’t a reasonable case. It is an outlier. SARS and MERS are the benchmark, Hong Kong Flu is one of the reasonable worst cases. A central estimate is the 2017/2018 flu season as that was a worst case within the usual mortality.

It is an outlier

Whereas Covid is not? You knew that how, exactly, on 26 February?

Well they could have checked to see was an IRF of 1% even reasonable against reality.

At the time it was reasonable. Even now, there is still uncertainty.

I rather think some are conflating IFR with heterogeneity. And that’s before we have the kerfuffle over False Positive tests. If we only consider symptomatic cases as TRUE cases which plenty of sceptics would prefer then IFR is much closer to 1% than 0.1%.

So in all the modern history of respiratory diseases has the IFR ever been 1%? Was in for SARS and MERS? Was it for ever for the flu?

The trouble is that the thinking was blinkered by panic and the need to pull some complicated model out to do a job that could be easily bounded by simply reading historical data and adding contingency.

Something a farmer or a builder would know how to do. Someone as “common” as that

Was in for SARS and MERS?

Err….. Yes

1/ SARS

With these methods, estimates of the case fatality ratio range from 11% to 17% in Hong Kong, from 13% to 15% in Singapore, from 15% to 19% in Canada, and from 5% to 13% in China.

A more accurate and unbiased estimation of case fatality for SARS can be obtained with a third method, survival analysis. This method relies on detailed individual data on the time from illness onset to death or full recovery, or time since illness onset for current cases. Using this method, WHO estimates that the case fatality ratio is 14% in Singapore and 15% in Hong Kong.

https://www.who.int/csr/sarsarchive/2003_05_07a/en/

More recent estimates suggest CFR ~10%.

2/ MERS

You really don’t want to know. Fortunately it’s pretty rare.

Frequency 2519 cases (as January 2020) [4] Deaths866 (35%)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndrome

Ah okay I see this about terminology. Okay what percentage of the population is going to die from SARS and MERS?

It’s not 1% is it.

Your point that a reasonable worst case scenario is intended as a tool to inform government decision making is a perfectly valid one, as is your point that the decisions themselves are for ministers to make, based on the information available and so the blame for bad decisions lies with ministers, not with advisors.

However, I also think that your defence of Ferguson on this basis is (inadvertently) disingenuous, for two reasons.

Firstly, Ferguson was well aware of the likely impact of the figures he presented. He must have been, because his millenarian “not actually predictions” had led to massive overreaction from governments before. Nonetheless, not only was he not a voice of caution in presenting the scenario, but he actively sought publicity for these numbers. Again, he was perfectly well aware of how the media would present this to the public, but he did it anyway. He and the Imperial team were also very vocal in dismissing alternative models that painted a more measured (and as it turns out, more accurate) picture. Now, it may be the case that he actually genuinely believed that unprecedented intervention and total lockdown was the only way to save countless lives, but nonetheless arguing for a specific policy and leveraging the media and public opinion to apply pressure on the government to implement that policy turns him from advisor to lobbyist and self publicist and makes it harder to argue that he doesn’t share some of the blame for the policy decisions.

Secondly, however sound his mathematics and however reasonable his choice of inputs, the real world data now available to us shows his scenario to have been very significantly wrong. He is (theoretically) no longer a government advisor, so it would be completely reasonable of him to decide to keep his nose out of the whole thing or – given his thirst for publicity – admirable of him to go on record as saying “that was what we thought we knew at the time, but it turns out not to have been nearly as bad as we thought, thank goodness.” But he hasn’t done that. Instead, he’s continued to seek opportunities to talk to the media and assert that his original modelling was correct (even though we now know that every one of his input variables were very wrong) and therefore that the policy he lobbied for is responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of lives and that if it is abandoned, those hundreds of thousands of lives will be lost anyway. At this point, this makes him either delusional, intellectually blinkered and too stubborn to look at anything that disagrees with him, or a narcissist.

Great post. IMO you are going to the heart of what is wrong with Ferguson.

I think that all along he had ulterior motives, and that this should have been spotted by those dealing with him.

They thought that the parameters involved: r0=2.8, infective period 5 days, IFR 1% and no pre-existing immunity were reasonable assumptions at the time.

The first two were clearly reasonable assumptions. But an IFR of 1 % (0.9%) and no pre-existing immunity? Well as worse-case scenarios maybe, but actually likely?

There was already a great deal of information available, particularly from China, both from Wuhan and areas that hadn’t locked down, which contradicted these assumptions. Even if you didn’t trust the specifics of the Chinese data, it was most unlikely to be out by orders of magnitude (by which I mean multiples of 10, rather than just multiples). It was clear that the Wuhan lockdowns hadn’t contained the virus, and thus that it was out there doing its work. But the bodies weren’t piled high, and by March the virus was fading – and in many areas of the SE Asia it didn’t seem to have got going at all. There was one obvious potential explanation for this – widespread pre-existing immunity. I have no medical background, but this occurred to me back then, and also suggested to me why Europe appeared to be suffering more than SE Asia.

I knocked up my own spreadsheet model (very easy) back in April and played with some figures. It quickly became apparent to me that the most critical parameter was degree of population susceptibility. Did SAGE do the same? I don’t recall anyone talking about that back then. (Indeed, the first time I saw it mentioned was in a comment by Will Jones on a Spectator thread). And the concept still doesn’t appear to have occurred to Hancock et al. – witness his ‘hundreds of thousands of deaths’ statement in the Commons a few days ago.

OK, back in March, if you’re on SAGE or in government you may wish to err on the side of caution – and allow for example’s sake an IFR of 0.9% and no immunity. But having made such serious assumptions, they should also have considered the other side of the coin – collateral damage owing to an appropriate reaction to those assumptions. Apparently they didn’t, and that in my book is negligence.

Besides, within a very short time it was/should have been clear that these assumptions couldn’t be justified. The data and models should have been revisited, and advice and policy adjusted accordingly. But they weren’t; we’re still in the same rut. And I find that deeply disturbing.

OK, back in March, if you’re on SAGE or in government you may wish to err on the side of caution – and allow for example’s sake an IFR of 0.9% and no immunity. But having made such serious assumptions, they should also have considered the other side of the coin – collateral damage owing to an appropriate reaction to those assumptions. Apparently they didn’t, and that in my book is negligence.

As I made it clear, asking what would happen in the do-nothing scenario — and in particular whether the NHS could cope, is only the first step in the planning process. (“Do nothing” is always the first option on the paper for the Minister.). Failure to take further steps, if there was such a failure, is culpable, but is not a criticism of the modelling process, but of the planning process. I would be surprised if there had not been some sort of cost-benefit analysis of the various options. Perhaps Bower’s book has an authoritative description of that, I don’t know.

I recall reading on one of Toby’s posts that in a Cabinet meeting only one person mentioned the potential economic effects of a lockdown, and that this was quickly passed over. Perhaps someone else on here will recall the details.

I don’t think there ever was a proper analysis and balance of the options. It’s as if certain forces wanted a lockdown, and nothing else. That’s the strong impression I get, although I concede that’s not science.

The decision making process and where it lies, the balance between SAGE and government, has gone seriously awry here. The government has said it’s acting on ‘The Science’. But the Science as in SAGE appears to have had a narrow view of things, so an awful lot has fallen through the gap – actually a gaping hole.

One of my problems with models is that they obscure responsibility. An individual didn’t come up with the scenario that needs acting on – the model did, as if it’s some living entity of truth or reality. Given the unknowns back in March, I don’t think the Ferguson model had any predictive capacity whatsoever, and SAGE should have known that. By adjusting parameters it may have enabled to think about outcomes and actions, but that is all, and I see no evidence that they did so. But we’ve disagreed on this point before on here.

The Gov and their mouthpiece, the MSM, only work off worst case scenarios. All the Brexit projections and reports were worst case scenarios. The most likely scenarios don’t sell papers or get the headlines, so worst case scenarios will always be used.

It’s certainly true that the media like to publish the most exciting figures they can, which tend to get repeated like memes. But what can a scientist do? Not publish their results because they might be taken out of context … then they’re accused of a cover-up.

Playing with words.

Statisticians may have appropriated the word ‘prediction’ to have a very specific meaning inside their profession.

That does not change its meaning for the rest of us: a forecast.

And, for the rest of us, a reasonable worst case scenario is a prediction, forecast, albeit heavily caveated, given certain data and assumptions.

If a reasonable worst case scenario were not such a prediction, forecast, it would be entirely useless for contingency planning purposes.

The fact that it was, in the case of this common cold coronavirus, entirely useless for contingency planning purposes was simply due to the selection of poor data and assumptions added to a dodgy old banger of a model…….

Nonsense. If you’re buying a new house then there’s all the difference in the world between my saying: “Your house might burn down: how would you cope if it did?”, which is a Reasonable Worst Case; and saying “Your house will burn down, how will you cope when it does”, which is a prediction.

If the range between best-case and worst-case is huge then what is the point of making any predictions at all?

The point of an RWC is to inform planning. In this case, the question was whether the NHS could cope if the government did nothing and let the disease take its course. The answer is no, so that means you might reasonably decide to do something. What that something might be is not determined by the RWC, and indeed this site is devoted to discussing whether the something that was chosen was the right something or not.

The answer is that if we did nothing we could cope with 100,000 deaths based on history. Above that we would need contingency

Semantics.

Your house might burn down actually means your house will burn down, given certain sets of circumstances…….a prediction, forecast, based on certain data and caveated with certain assumptions.

Semantics is about the meanings of words, which seems to me quite an important thing to get right.

Your house might burn down actually means your house will burn down, given certain sets of circumstances…….a prediction, forecast, based on certain data and caveated with certain assumptions.

That’s still a conditional. It is not a prediction.

That your house will burn down, given certain circumstances, is a prediction, a forecast…….albeit conditional on those circumstances, assumptions but still a prediction, caveated……

It look as if we’ve reached the “You say tomayto” stage of this particular discussion.

And thank fuck for that !

Must renew house insurance. . . .

‘ “Your house might burn down: how would you cope if it did?”

‘If your house were to burn down, how would you cope’

The conditional……….so a forecast based on certain conditions, for example data, assumptions.

If houses never burn down, then it is not a RWC scenario. I’m not saying that the proposition that they never burn down is correct or not, but if there is evidence that says that they never burn down, that mean by definition it is not an RWC scenario. It therefore hangs on ‘evidence’.

If there is evidence that houses cannot burn down, then it’s not an RWC. If there is simply no evidence that houses have ever burned down, then you need to make a judgement. For example, we have never had an Ebola outbreak in this country. Is there evidence that “we never have an Ebola outbreak”? No. Indeed, we came uncomfortably close to one in late 2014 and I think it would be wrong to say that the risk is so low we can disregard it. What’s the RWC for a case of Ebola arriving at Heathrow airport? You can’t say it cannot happen, because it has. So, what’s the plan?

Given certain assumptions, you predict, forecast, a scenario where Ebola could, realistically, break out here and (hopefully) create and resource a contingency plan….

And what process would you go through to derive those assumptions, to create and resource that contingency plan? Would a Reasonable Worst Case be part of that process?

The bottom line is that some modelling is useful but all models are wrong. So models can assist but hard data, relevant expertise, useful experience and leadership are required to make actual decisions

But only one person in the cabinet knew that and he wasn’t a cabinet minister.

The senior civil servant could and should have made all of this plain…….maybe he did………..

I am pleased that you are now appearing to concede that this rests on ‘evidence’. In several of your earlier comments you appear to have put the cart before the horse. If the evidence is flawed or of poor provenance, the model is dead on arrival, and so is any RWC derived from it.

As an aside, I was once asked to comment on a highly sophisticated econometric model presented by a world expert in a particular field. I dismissed it based on the evidence, without knowing anything about how the model worked. I had prior knowledge and experience of the dataset, and a comprehensive understanding of timelines and relationships that underpinned the dataset. The fact that the model’s RWC-equivalent conclusion established the author’s original hypothesis – that a particular merger did not lead to higher prices – merely reflected the dataset was from a period prior to the merger having taken place.

If the evidence is flawed or of poor provenance, the model is dead on arrival, and so is any RWC derived from it.

I’m not disputing that as such, but it’s not the whole story. The modelling process throws up the questions you need to ask, and gives some indication of the way in which the outputs depend on those inputs. For example, in the RWC we needed to know a few things: R0, infectious period, pre-existing immunity and IFR. The model depends on the IFR linearly, so you can immediately see that if you know everything else, a 10% uncertainty in IFR (eg 0.9-1.1%) leads to a 10% uncertainty in deaths. That might or might not be significant. The pre-existing immunity really only starts to make a difference above 30% or so. Do we know it to that level of precision. And so on.

But my point remains. The question has to be asked, and to whatever extent possible answered. How to do that? If you don’t use a model what do you use? Genuine question, by the way, not rhetorical.

Yes you need to know the relationships between the variables and the statistical significance of the outputs, as would be the case in any multivariate or regression model. The problem comes in what IFR you use. If you are out by a factor of 10, which seems to be a constant characteristic of every IFR that Ferguson has presented across a set of independent, but similar diseases since 2000, the RWC is no such thing.

What assumptions Ferguson may have made, or rather, been given, for other diseases in the past are not really relevant to whether the IFR assumed for this disease was correct either in hindsight or, more relevantly, on the data available at the time. The consensus view on the IFR was formed by SAGE, as you can see from the minutes online. It wasn’t selected by Ferguson. Reference: Influenza vs COVID planning assumptions: update, 26 February 2020

Case Fatality Rate (CFR) (symptomatic cases) (The proportion of deaths within a designated population due to an epidemiological outbreak). Uncertain but planning on the assumption 2-3%

Infection Fatality Rate (both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases) 1% (variable by age).

Okay then, what is difference in the action taken?

If someone says to me “Your house might burn down: how would you cope if it did?”, I’ld probably say, gosh, I’ld better take out house insurance, to cope with the impact if it did, and I’ll get some smoke detectors, to cope with the risk to the occupants. In fact, that’s more or less exactly what I did do.

On the other hand, if someone says to me “Your house will burn down, how will you cope when it does”, then depend on their tone of voice, I would consider telling the police that someone had threatened me with arson.

Semantics. Tone wise you may tell the police, but in general you’ll still get the insurance because it would make you think “Hmm what DO I do if my house burns down?”

Most people don’t see the difference between prediction and projection, as most people will get the insurance and fit the alarms.

So the point is technicality buried in the noise.

Since semantics is about the correct use of words, I take it as a compliment, though I suspect you did not mean it as one. Nonetheless, I take it that you understand my point.

I understand you are arguing about the position of the deck chairs on a Belfast-built ship while others are thinking about more pressing matters

I think you may have overlooked the fact that the lead item on today’s blog is precisely about those deck chairs.

Hi Tim, where did your 2010-2020 graphs come from?

Oops. Which ones were those? Probably ‘Roche The Healthy Skeptic’ website but I haven’t worked out how to post a graph and then add text, reference yet! Apologies

This one:

Because with a reliable source for the data it seems to me to show in one picture that the whole thing is nonsense. And therefore might persuade a few people!

Phew! Thanks1 Actually CEBM, where else!

If you right click on the image, it gives you the address….who knew? Certainly not me!

Many thanks. Do you have a link?

Quite a few charts but easy to find by scrolling down. Thanks for reminding me. It is a good one and CEBM are legends all and everyone of them!

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/summary-of-the-ons-report-on-deaths-registered-weekly-in-england-and-wales-29nd-september/

Thanks for the link, your chart caught my eye yesterday as well. How does it tally with the excess death chart that show a clear spike then return to pretty much average? Is it due to side effects of lockdown making up the balance I wonder?

You would have hoped that someone within government would have suggested that discharging tens of thousands of patients from hospital within 24 hours was unlikely to end well.

Apparently only one person, Jesse Norman, I believe, did so!

Yes. Good question from Adam. Good answer.

Excellent! Very many thanks.

Reasonable Worst Cases are explicitly not predictions.

I’m afraid that Reasonable Worst Cases have not only become predictions, but also the basis for public policy.

They are certainly reported all too often as “predictions”, and taken as such by many people, including a lot of people who comment here.

What is the point you are trying to make?

That media misreporting makes it harder to have a sensible discussion about policy when numbers are involved. That politicians are not always as well versed in science as they need to be to engage sensibly with their advice. That public trust in science is being damaged. I could go on …

Iohannidis said in March that he feared that science is going to be the big loser in this. But there is no excuse for wrecking livelihoods on an industrial scale, because of hypothetical scenarios. Your house may burn down, but you don´t stop working while you are worrying about it.

It is a very gallant rearguard action…but ‘that ship has already sailed’ and some time ago……

‘ Ferguson is one of the highest-profile faces in the effort to use mathematical models that predict the spread of the virus…’

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6

Your point is technically correct, but nevertheless wrong imo. Ferguson knows full well how his “reasonable worst case” predictions will be used and seeks to gain personally (in status and the resulting grants etc) from the higher profile response generated by the resulting fear. Just like the unprofessional medical propagandists speaking for the government the other night, he makes a “non-prediction” in the full knowledge that it will be treated as a prediction, while hoping that it will be deniable when it doesn’t come about in the way you seek to do here.

Well when a propagandist seeks to benefit from such behaviour it is meet that he should also be damned by it.

In other areas, I accept your and others’ arguments that we should try to be better than the other side in not relying on weak arguments, and therefore we must listen to unwelcome but accurate criticism.

In this case, no.

It cuts both ways. Government planning uses Reasonable Worst Case scenarios and they are capable of being valuable tools. Indeed, I think someone else has commented here on their use in engineering, for example. So someone is going to provide them, and indeed in this particular case, as I’ve said before, this particular RWC could be worked out on the back of an envelope.

Your point about Prof Ferguson being overly enthusiastic to have his name and work in the public eye is, I think, a valid one. As I say, I have no brief for him personally or any special knowledge of his work.

But the fact remains that if any scientist mentions any figures at all in public, the media are likely to seize on the most exciting number and misreport it — which is a serious deterrent to a lot of scientists.

Look at it this way, perhaps. We know we have a problem in epidemiology, that there is a huge pressure on experts to overstate risks, because the perception is that they will be pilloried for underestimating a danger but not much criticised for overstating it. So, as many have pointed out, they will structure models to avoid any risk of understating, while being relaxed about orders of magnitude errors on the upside. This, imo, is what Ferguson did in his modelling. That;’s what happens when you introduce ultimately unrealistic worst case assumptions with multiplicative effects.

The kind of “unfair” criticism of Ferguson you are attacking here is one way of introducing some cultural control on that problem.

If Ferguson wants to be one of the big boys whose work is used to set policies that destroy lives in the millions (debatably for the “greater good”), then he should face the consequences. Personal disgrace would be far less harm than his work has caused to millions around the world. Having failed to honestly represent and downplay the numbers he came up with, he should not be allowed to escape all consequences by just claiming “good intentions”, let alone weasel words about how seriously his numbers should be taken.

Let’s just remember that he was accusing people with different predictions of being “dangerous”, back when the crucial decisions were taken..

Since March 2020 I have not heard a single shred of self-criticism from Professor Ferguson. Not one single shred.

A telling point, that says something about the man.

Missing from this discussion is the point that to make a policy decision, we need to know the probabilities of the various scenarios and the cost of mitigation.
Without these we could make a long list of RWCs facing mankind that would cost more than the total global GDP to mitigate.
Another way of planning is to focus on building and maintaining organisational and physical structures that can deal with a wide range of emergencies. Something like the Civil Defence in the Cold War.

Without these we could make a long list of RWCs facing mankind that would cost more than the total global GDP to mitigate.

We could indeed. One outcome of a risk assessment is that you might decide to simply tolerate the risk. For example, extinction-level asteroid impact.

We never hear much about Coronal Mass Ejections (CME)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection
They are relatively frequent and could bring the global economy to a halt by disabling or destroying much of our electronic infrastructure.

Then you’ll be pleased to hear they were on the National Risk Register in 2015.

Has he ever been asked as to why he is happy to always answer the stupid question of “reasonable worst case scenario”. What’s the point of that. The question should be what is the “most likely outcome?”

I am getting up and going downstairs for breakfast.

Reasonable worst case scenario – I get out of bed, slip and break my back, I lay in a pool of my own liquids for days, I somehow use my tongue to crawl to the stairway and then slip head first down the stairs, crack my skull open against every step and finally slide with force into the front door at the bottom of the hall way. I am not killed and again lay in a pool of human fluids for days as my own cat decides to eat me alive. And it’s raining outside.

Most likely outcome.

I get up. Walk down stairs with ease. Eat my Special K. Read Lockdown Sceptics and want to hurt Matt Hancock. I then spend the rest of my day in disbelief at what’s happening.

See the difference?

Yes, I do. Shorn of its admittedly entertaining narrative, the RWC is that you have a fatal accident. Is it so absurd to plan for that eventuality? Do you have life insurance?

I think people here are trying to explain to you that planning for a RWC is inherently naive. You cannot live your life that way and neither can human society. So pragmatism makes such planning an irrelevance. We always opt for the most likely occurrence, which is the prudent way to plan for the future. RWC is just for kinky scientists. Has no value in real life. Reminds one of the Climate Alarmists. And of course the Second Coming and Apocalypse which certainly are within the category of RWC.

… and I’m pointing out that people actually do it all the time. Do you have house insurance with a rebuilding component? Why? After all, it’s not very likely that your house will burn down. Do you have travel insurance? Why? It;s not very likely you’ll need an air ambulance back home. Do you have life insurance to cover your mortgage? Why? It’s not very likely you’ll die before it’s paid off. And so on.

But government planning isn’t quite the same as personal risk. If you don’t take out travel insurance and get sick, the rest of us are hardly affected. But if the government fails to plan for, say, a nasty flu outbreak, we all suffer.

It is about the word reasonable. You don´t buy insurance that you cannot afford. That is what the science advocated for and what became gorvernment strategy.

I think what you’re saying is not so much that people don’t consider Reasonable Worst Case scenarios, explicitly or implicitly, when making important life decisions (since in fact they plainly do), but that this particular RWC is one you find unreasonable for some, er, reason.

Yes that is correct. I find this scenario unreasonble and implausable. But my main point is: to even briefly consider to wreck the economy of the country to prepare for one however plausible scenario is reckless. You could figure out on a napkin that by doing nothing and thereby 500 K would die (but probably not), you will certainly cause 2-300K deaths short term, destroy millions of livelihoods, create a serious depression, i.e. cause devastation to the country. So the question remains: why? Why go for the certain devastation to avert hypothetical problems? I did work in insurance and this is an absurd reaction to any situation.

But my main point is: to even briefly consider to wreck the economy of the country to prepare for one however plausible scenario is reckless.

That is a point you are entitled to make. But has nothing to do with the reasonableness or otherwise of the RWC under consideration.

Of course not. Reminds me though of the phrase: the irrelevance of your purity. Scientific advice in this case is not made in vitro. But as it is presented it lacks all pragmatism. If the only cure is to kill the patient, it is useless. You are now hanging on to the claim that this scenario could have come true, meaning that hypotheticals are of value. But this may be true in pure mathematics but maybe not in applied physics, i.e. real life situations.

I think this is an elaborate way of saying that the answer must be wrong because you don’t like it.

Are you maybe mixing a model projection up with science? I think there is a grave danger of a terrible mixup. People with academic credentials pose as proprietors of truth. This is the danger of our times. People are mixing up academic credentials with science. The next problem will be the so called AGW. Why should there be an answer to an RWC scenario? People think there is science behind it, when there is none.

Am I? A model projection is not a scientific experiment, although it may be the precursor to one.

Why should there be an answer to an RWC scenario?

The answer to that was given by the Commons Science and Technology Committee (NRA is National Risk Assessment)

Reasonable worst case scenario
75. The second stage of the NRA process is assessing risks and their impacts. Risks are assessed using available historical, statistical and scientific data. Where possible, the assessment should take account of probable developments over the next five years.[ 75 ] Impacts are assessed against five main criteria:

• the numbers of fatalities that are likely to be directly attributable to the emergency;
• the extent of human illnesses or injury over a period following the onset of an emergency;
• social disruption;
• economic damage; and
• the potential for significant outrage and anxiety to be caused to communities.[ 76 ]

76. The assessment leads to the development of a “reasonable worst case scenario” for every risk. The reasonable worst case scenario is “designed to exclude theoretically possible scenarios which have so little probability of occurring that planning for them would be likely to lead to disproportionate use of resources.”[ 77 ] The Government stated that:

They are not predictions of what will happen but of the worst that might realistically happen, and therefore we would expect most pandemics to be less severe and less widespread than the reasonable worst case. By planning for the reasonable worst case planners are assured that they have a high probability of meeting the demands posed by the hazard should it occur.

This seems to me to have been handled very badly, re. this set up. Only the first of five bullet points being addressed in the media. I haven´t read the famous Sage minutes in full, but from what I have seen cited, there seems to be little discussion of the other points until now. So if people want to be apologetic towards the Government, it sounds as it is getting more and more difficult.

Prof. Ferguson is at least entitled to be criticised for what he said or did, rather than for what he didn’t do or say.

RP is indisputably correct in making this statement, and I don’t understand the downvotes. But I believe that if Ferguson is judged on his actual statements and actions, rather than those unreliably attributed to him, the case against him will become even more damning.

In these way-out projections, he is always careful to include caveats he can point to when he turns out to be wrong – in the same way as Vallance and Whitty did with the ‘graph of doom’ a couple of weeks ago. But Ferguson knew that his apocalyptic figures would get the attention, which was what I believe he is after, so that he could set himself at the heart of policy-making.

I believe that he is a deeply manipulative, dishonest individual. In the aftermath of this current tragedy, as the inquiries unfold, it is sure that his actions and statements will be the subject of minute scrutiny – there are many scientists and academics out to nail him now. My feeling – largely subjective though that must currently be – is that his actions have been so dishonest as to merit criminal investigation. Whether or not his careful caveats are sufficient to get him off the hook is the central question.

As I’ve posted previously here today:

Whenever I see or listen to him [Ferguson], some inner sense tells me that there is something deeply, disturbingly wrong about him.
It’s as if there’s some inner warning system telling me I’m in the presence of evil.

But let him be judged on what he has actually done and said. To get a speculative calculation wrong by a multiple of 12 may be a mistake, incompetence, or lack of knowledge – and is likely deserving of ridicule rather than criminal sanction. But to set out to do what I believe he has done is another matter; and if this is indeed the case I for one want him to face the proper consequences, rather than mere ridicule. So let’s get to the truth.

Another arrest in youknowwhichstate in Australia. Their crime? Apparently they went to the beach which is 12km outside of the 5km ‘bubble’.

https://twitter.com/OzraeliAvi/status/1312492912727351296
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/coronavirus/police-abused-while-arresting-woman-at-altona-beach/news-story/de653f7469374eb1cfb2f95c79bfc781

Footage has shown police at a Melbourne beach facing a barrage of obscenities from a mob claiming they pushed a pregnant woman to the ground.
Victoria Police said the officers were patrolling Altona Beach on Saturday evening when they saw a group of people not wearing masks.
A police spokesman said the group became aggressive when approached and officers arrested a woman after she refused to give her name and address.
“She was subsequently arrested and, once her identity was established, found to be in breach of the Chief Health Officer directions by travelling more than 5km from her home,” the spokesman said.
Others confronted the police, saying the woman was pregnant and that they had pushed her to the ground.
The members were bombarded with filthy language during the encounter, which threatened to erupt into violence in front of other families.
“You’re f—ing p—ies,” one man shouts.
One officer tells a woman she is going to “get done (arrested) next”.
“F— you,” she shouts in reply.
The woman arrested was given several infringement notices and released, while several other people were also fined.
None of those hurling the abuse was arrested at the scene.
“Police will be conducting follow-up investigations in relation to the incident and other activity at the beach yesterday to ensure any further breaches of the Chief Health Officer are appropriately dealt with,” the force spokesman said.
“Victoria Police will continue to proactively patrol public spaces and will not hesitate to fine those who clearly and blatantly breach the directions of the Chief Health Officer.”

BBC funding £35m from various government/globalist sources 2018 including £2.2m from Bill & Melinda Gates

https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/about/funding

This isn’t about a virus anymore. It’s becoming the cultural zeitgeist – a sad indictment of what we have become as a people.

In a way, for me, one of the most devastating things about the ‘pandemic’ has not been the damaging effects of lockdown (even though they are utterly devastating) but how this crisis has harshly exposed how truly ugly humanity can be. Cruel, selfish, violent, ignorant, greedy, and cowardly. Is this all we’re capable of? There are some heroes who stand up to it but they are few and far between. The general consensus from the masses is a refusal to see the bigger picture, to see the far-reaching effects of a lockdown for a virus with a very low mortality rate (see CDC).

This isn’t about a virus anymore. When you take away the rights of young people, literally locking them in rooms and virtually starving them so they have to beg security for food; when the elderly are left to die alone in care homes and hospitals, terrified and separated from loved ones; when millions of jobs are lost and people are deprived of a living (it’s only been 8 months so the long-term effects of unemployment are yet to manifest); when a pregnant woman is beaten and arrested for not wearing a mask; when the media abdicates its duty to hold those who are inflicting this on us to account; when children are deprived of an education, innocence and childhood development for a disease that doesn’t affect them – how can anyone possibly say this is about a virus?

I can’t believe there’s talk of yet another lockdown. How can anyone say now, in light of the data and the economic/health/social effects of the first lockdown, that this is possibly a proportionate response. It isn’t.

Everyone just seems rather exhausted and broken now. Tired of restrictions, starting to wake up to the fact that something isn’t right but not having the time or inclination to put their finger on it. It’s really sad and I’m worried that most people will become just too tired to fight back; too used to merely existing and leading flat, colourless lives that consist of endless Groundhog days of always working from home, never going out or exploring anywhere, or meeting new people.

Things seem incredibly bleak, but I imagine things felt bleak in 1914 and 1941 – years which saw much worse events than this pathetic ‘pandemic’. This is why we must never lose hope, because hope is trust and faith that the future will get better without there necessarily being evidence for it in the present. Keep hope, and they can never win. I think it was No Lockdown on Twitter who said that if you’re not scared of the virus, you are already far more powerful than you think you are, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

Couldn’t agree more. We think that because now we have clever electronic tools we are a different set of people to the ones that have stood by enabling all the atrocities of the past. We aren’t. We are the exact same species. The only thing that stops us from descending into barbarism is our daily commitment to behave decently and constructively.

Which may not last too much longer.

And of course why should it! Behaving decently and constructively only allows demented Boris and his sick henchmen to pile on yet more life threatening and soul destroying restrictions. It should be clear to all by now, that that our warped government is waging a war against its own people. A war on behalf of the mega rich, who want a large scale reduction of the global population. The coming Covid-19 vaccines will be their main weapon of elimination.

We are still enabling atrocities, we have just outsourced slavery and worker exploitation to the Far East whole still buying all clothes and electronics at low prices.

One of the biggest causes of destruction in history is the misplaced belief in the idea of some “Fall” from the true, virtuous nature of humanity and the consequent need to get us back this perfect state at any cost. It’s been the cause of every evil doctrine from Communism to Christianity to Isis.

The reality is there has been no fall and there is no promised land of perfect society – we are a nasty, vicious and dangerous species and if we accept that we can deal with how to mitigate it instead of chasing a fantasy that we are somehow better.

Jakehadlee, I think I may (irrevocably!) downvoted you but I was trying to give you an up vote.

Great post

Poppy, it wasn’t ever about the virus, I saw that in March.

Maybe you beat me to it by a few days.

By mid March I was conscious that the news broadcasts were essentially emotional manipulation, having been unconsciously aware of it for some time before that.

After I saw Knut Wittkowski on Perspectives in early April I knew it was all bollocks, and strongly suspected something else was going on other than incompetence.

But the fundamental question remains: if not the virus, what is it all about?

The utter failure of our institutions, and the sheer craven manipulative selfishness and egotism, dressed up as virtue, of a great many of the senior people therein, is about the best answer I can come up with at the moment.

This doesn’t imply an organised conspiracy, by some Bond villain-like figure; simply cynical exploitation for selfish and egotistical ends of so many of those in positions of responsibility in our institutions.

Conspiracy is really all that’s left, once you rule out incompetence.

Yes, it’s was always about control and depopulation. Those carrying out this scam and the governments they have corrupted will not be stopped by reason or logic.

Well said Poppy and yeah, all this has become clear now – it was never about the virus. If it was, they would just have let us carry on while shielding the vulnerable and letting the virus naturally peter out.

Great post Poppy – thanks for taking the time to write it and express these thoughts, although I guess it’s a form of catharsis.

Your second paragraph is spot on: what an awful light is being shone on many of our fellow countrymen and women. Regarding your third paragraph: I hope and trust that in the fullness of time we will see criminal prosecutions against those responsible.

I would have added a further feature to your post: the potentially devastating effect this will have on the Third World. Anything we are suffering in the western World as a consequence of these measures will almost certainly pale into insignificance to what will likely unfold in the poorest parts of the world. I hope to God I’m wrong, as it absolutely isn’t their fault.

These lockdowns are stupidity, selfishness and sadism dressed up as virtue.

Regarding 1940-1: my grandparents lived through those days, and were bombed out of their house. They used to talk about the war a lot, but I never got any sense from them that they had panicked or been overly pessimistic about how things would work out. They just seem to have been quietly confident that all would be well in the end, and went about their daily lives accordingly. We’re a different breed now.

Big effect on the Third World also due to Gates using them as ‘lab rats’ to test the vaccines..

The vaccines are the perfect tool for depopulation and as you say, Gates has been experimenting on the third world for many years, leaving hundreds of thousands maimed and dead in the process.

The only comment I would make is your reference to the world wars – while I understand the reason for the reference, psychologically this could be considered more challenging as the enemy is not external, where you can gather as a united front as a country to fight. The enemy is within, our own government seeking destruction of the country and its people, whether by its own incompetence or more malign intentions. There is not a united front, so you are also ‘at war’ with your fellow citizens, family and friends ifyou are on opposing fronts of for or against these measures. Civil wars are always considered the most devastating of wars. Equally restrictions in the war made sense – curfew, well yes, with planes seeking to find lights as an indication of potential bombing sites, food shortages, understandable. But the current draconian restrictions taint every aspect of our lives, even intimate relationships if you are in a local lockdown, and with no exit strategy on the current farce, the psychological impact, I fear, is incredibly high.

Yes I agree, this is a war being waged on the masses of this country by a small number of others who swear allegiance to another ‘foreign power’. The people need to root out these foreign actors and deal with them accordingly. The problem is, many of them are ‘in drag’.

Very good point, I totally agree with you and thanks for adding. The psychological effects will surely be devastating but they will manifest very slowly and subtly I imagine so people won’t be immediately aware of how damaging this really is.

The psychological effects will probably lead to many people, hopefully a small minority, who are going to need their hands held for the rest of their lives.

Spot on. That’s why it’s much more difficult to win – and they know it. But I still think the sheer absurdity of what is going on will expose them, and from then on it’s just a matter of time.

Yes, but the masses will have to awaken soon and not bare their arms for the Gates depopulating vaccines. Once injected they are doomed and they will likely take the rest of us with them.

As usual a good thought provoking post Poppy! I’ve always held the belief that ‘civilisation is skin deep’. We are human and survival instinct takes over to protect ourselves when stressed by life events and scarcity of resources. This brings out the negative behaviour response e.g. selfishness, greed, mistrust etc as you say. You see this in every day life e.g. arguing over car parking spaces; people panic buying; selling goods at over inflated prices etc the list goes on – I think it’s self preservation.

Things will get better Poppy and everyone will pull through.The sooner everyone on this site puts all arguments and disagreements to one side about what the causes of this were or if its all planned and all the other shit and just puts all our efforts into ending the lockdown and getting rid of those foul masks the sooner we will be liberated .

I can sum that up. The Establishment comprises the wrong people.

“Everyone just seems rather exhausted and broken now. Tired of restrictions, starting to wake up to the fact that something isn’t right but not having the time or inclination to put their finger on it.”

Sums it up PERFECTLY.

They will need to make the time or they will be finished.

Far from undermining the sceptic cause, the infection of Trump and much of his entourage demonstrate how completely futile lockdowns and distancing measures ultimately are.

I would say that once they all shake their illnesses off, including the morbidly obese Christie, the case for just getting on with life will be stronger than ever.

So, let’s take the argument that world leaders ‘panicked’ in March.

Then, why did Dan Andrews the PM of Victoria, Australia wait until early August to ‘panic’ as much as he did and why has he ‘panicked’ so particularly hard.

After all, by that time he should have seen the mess that ‘panicking’ causes.

Maybe he just fancied the easy power you get from governing through fear

Southern hemisphere wasn’t hit until later, generally (it’s seasonal like other cold coronaviruses) and especially in relatively isolated locations such as NZ and Australia they could indulge the fantasy of isolating themselves from the world for longer.

And probably what Julian said, as far as why he panicked so hard when he did.

Quite simple March in the northern hemisphere is approximately August in the southern hemisphere in terms of season. No need to panic in the late summer as there’s been plenty of UV.

The point he was making is that the Australians had 6 months of data on Covid.They would know that it is not an existential threat;so why the overblown police state measures

Because their government and their media and social elites fully bought into the northern hemisphere elites’ delusion that covid was an end times plague that we had only prevented from killing everyone already by the skin of our teeth, and the stern daddying of Big Brother.

Seasonality.

Many organisations are now making race biased training compulsory – even some global banks with offices in the UK

CDC training course on critical race theory canceled after whistleblower steps forward

Instead of trying to figure out ways to help disadvantaged Americans how to survive the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic amid layoffs, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was pushing for a staff training course based on the quasi-Marxist critical race theory (CRT).

https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-10-03-cdc-training-course-canceled-after-whistleblower.html

Great update Toby. I’m one of those who hasn’t seen a dentist since June (it was supposed to be my regular check up). I’m just fortunate that I was able to complete my treatment before lockdown happened but given I have hereditary periodontitis, my twice a year check ups are very important.

About time that several GPs have woken up to the abomination of lockdowns and social distancing having a disastrous effect on medical care in this county, however it made me laugh that one of the signatories was Sarah Jarvis who appeared on telly advising how to get children to get used to muzzles then threw a wobbly on twitter when she was called out advocating what is tantamount of child abuse and harming their long term physical and mental health.

We call her Scary Jarvis. Always fussing about something.

First time I saw her in that abomination that is GMB, I did wonder if she was actually a doctor.

I have read the NEJM article on a mandatory vaccination strategy and whilst it is sinister and I disagree with that idea in principle, it is not as far reaching, yet, as portrayed.
It is advocating this for the most at risk groups and key workers in some areas only, after an initial voluntary uptake period for THEM only, and after a much more stringent safety review than currently pursued.
It also distinguishes this from the past or existing mandatory vaccinations for children, and it refers to the specific situation in the US, where the states are apparently in charge- which would make it very unlikely that a US wide mandate for these groups, let alone for all of the population, can be pursued or realized, and thereby, the elusive country-wide herd immunity through vaccination also seems to be completely unrealistic for the USA!
Which should make similar ideas in Europe et.al., and particular international (travel) discriminations on that basis, equally unrealistic and impossible to introduce.
Fingers xd.

It is advocating this for the most at risk groups and key workers in some areas only, after an initial voluntary uptake period for THEM only,

All vaccinations are tested on healthy and young volunteers. Vaccines do not work well on the elderly and chronically sick. Key workers also have rights. Why should they put their health at risk with vaccines that do not prevent disease. Many also gets badly affected by vaccines including the development of auto immune diseases, just look at adverse reactions to vaccines and current claims via the government as drug companies are protected. many of these claims are never settled

Do the vulnerable and elderly not also have rights?

While I agree with your comment, the fact that the NEJM believe this may be even remotely acceptable is worrying at best, and a sinister disregard of history at worst.

I am sure that many fellow sceptics of a certain age can remember an episode of the original Star trek series which if I can remember correctly involved a story where in a solar system there were two planets who had been at war for centuries.
When after a couple of hundred years,the leaders decided that it would be a good idea to stop damage to infrastructure and simply just kill people without damage to property.
This was carried out by a computer algorithm which worked out how many people would be killed in any nuclear attack from both sides and picked people at random to present themselves and to voluntarily enter the “elimination chambers”
Obviously this was science fiction but when compared to the measures being enacted by this “shower” of a government it makes the plot of the aforementioned episode almost logical and sensible.
PS:I hope this won’t give them ideas

Remember how unbelievable it was at the time that everyone would have their own mobile personal communicator?

Yes,absolutely.

Wasn’t that the thinking behind the idea of the Neutron bomb in the 1980s,remove people but leave buildings untouched ?.

Kill, kill, kill the poor!

“Well, well, well, erm, I completely understand what people are saying but this the only way.”

Boris response to every question posed to him by Andrew Marr this morning. Completely unchallenged throughout. Gutter journalism.

‘The only way’ because he is doing what Gates and co have told him to do…

Did you notice that Boris and Marr were not observing two metre distancing?

Yes. The same can be said of many programmes of late, Match of the day being another.

Boris looked a dishevelled figure. Did you notices the cursory glances to camera on the odd occasion when his thoughts were in sync with what he was saying.

As a side note, no-one ever seems to question the adverse effect that insomnia or forced lack of sleep has on decision-making.

I was thinking how dare Johnson,sat there like a great fat lump of Lard,be smiling and grinning with his big media pal when he has ruined and cost the lives of so many people through his actions.

Yes softball all the way. Marr if he wanted to or was allowed to could have blown the whole scam this morning.

He does not understand what any sane person is saying.
E pur’ si muove.

Dentists in Germany reopened after Easter. The do not do anything differently than before, no PPE other than the masks they wore before Corona already.
The UK policy in this regard is just completely crazy, and very harmful and dangerous for the population.

The UK Government is denying all but Corona virus patients access to health care and this includes dentistry. Absolutely shocking! Anyone still thinking the medical care from the NHS is great should hang their heads in shame.

And this criminal negligence is fully provable. Come the Coronaberg Trials, the doctors will have nowhere to hide.

Need to get someone like Desmond Swayne to ask Hancock about that in Parliament…

The advantage of doing it in Parliament is that Hansard will record all Hancock’s lies. Remember Hansard transcripts can be used by Simon Dolan in his case, because the case is all about proportionality in relation to the ‘threat’ of CV19.

Politico reckons that the main reason the Speaker did not allow the Brady amendment was that any discussion on rights and proportionality etc in Parliament would give ‘fuel’ to Dolan’s case, which would all be on record in Hansard.

But he’d just keep repeating, NHS open for business NHS open for business NHS……….

If Swayne could be furnished with lots of concrete examples (get people to email him) then that might help..

But yes, the way he treated that Indian MP the other day (not answering the question and just saying ‘I won’t have this divisive language’) does not fill me with much hope.
Anything Swayne or other MPs say will also be recorded though..

Lindsay Hoyle explicitly referred to legal challenge as his reason for not taking any amendments.

At least it shows Dolan’s rattled their cage. Hard.

The comments coming out of Tom Bower’s book are as informative from a chronological perspective as they are explosive in exposing the sheer scale of the incompetence at the heart of government. Boris, Cummings, Whitty and Vallance all need to be hung out to dry, each for specific reasons, but leaving that to one side for now.

We now have the airing of the early version of the ‘death model’ dated back to the 25 February 2020 SAGE meeting. I cannot recall, but was that evident in the ‘minutes of minutes’ of that meeting?

Working back, Ferguson was therefore primed to produce the model in the days running up to that meeting. The question still remains, when was the modelling solicited, and who requested it?

In my view, to determine whether this is purely cock-up or something more sinister, we need to have all behind-the-scenes documentation from around 23/24 January 2020 (the date when Richard Horton did his volte face on Twitter). All email and text traffic needs to be seized to include the communications of SAGE members, key Cabinet ministers and their advisers, and those in the wider scientific community associated with this.

Minutes of meetings? That’s a novel concept north of the border where Sturgeon just said everything was done verbally and no records kept.

The Tony Blair way!

This is surely correct. All the documentation must be put out there, and witness statements taken about what was said .

Also, whether or not Ferguson was primed to produce that garbage is a very pertinent question. One of the most striking things about the UK response is how policy makers are still stuck in the narrative as it existed last March. Is that because they want to be?

In my experience of historical research, the whole thing stinks to high heaven.

Here’s Kary Mullis Nobel winner and inventor of the PCR:

“If you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V__Zx0qS7uI

So true, this test should not be used for Corona virus. Cases = positive tests

We have a major problem in that all these good articles are behind paywall’s massively reducing the people that are going to read them.
The Grauniad and the BBC website are free to access. No broke students or low income people are paying for a news subscription. The right wing needs something similar (the daily fail doesn’t count).

In balance the left wing needs a high quality sceptical publisher but that’s not going to happen either.

Somehow needs to turn a profit, though.

Yeah but the Graun are constantly putting out the begging bowl due to their continuing abysmal circulation.

Yet another public statement completely contradicting his governments policy https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-54407656

What does any of it mean? Politicians just spout words and it’s like a different language. He’s got as much clue now as he did in January.

Whenever I see or listen to Ferguson, I’m staggered than anyone would put any trust in him. Especially when they know what a pig’s ear he made of those other so-called ”predictions”.

Whenever I see or listen to him, some inner sense tells me that there is something deeply, disturbingly wrong about him.

It’s as if there’s some inner warning system telling me I’m in the presence of evil.

Yes, it’s a kind of moral stench.

Just heard radio ad for Superdrug offering antibody testing. An interesting development. I wonder whether they will be swamped or whether those with the money to spend will realise that even if they test positive it will be of no practical use to them?

Can they get your DNA that way, out of interest?

Yes, that is one of the incentives of this testing for a cold.

I knew they could get it through the PCR test, but not that the antibody test also caught it..

My wife pointed this out to me last month, and I said there’s no point going for one as nowhere will accept it as a ‘Get out of jail free card’

It’s *only* useful to the government – DNA info, like other personal info, is worth a lot of money to Big pharma..

50 years ago there would have been no mass testing , and it would have been all b now

Wasn’t any mass testing in 68 when HK flu killed 80k in the UK. My parents don’t even remember it. No way we’re forgetting this.

Another one bites the dust:

https://twitter.com/timothy_stanley/status/1312531092738461696

And many people still think that lockdowns, antisocial distancing and wearing muzzles are A Good Thing?

Yes, as this farce of a lockdown continues it is dragging the economy into oblivion.

Many big businesses will be closing one by one and eventually very few will be left that could provide jobs/income. In addition pension funds will be severely affected as these organisations will ‘fall out’ of their investment portfolios.

Very bad times are on the way. We have seen nothing yet!

Good point. I also thought that Cineworld closing is bad news especially for the young as many of them have their first job experience at somewhere like a cinema.

And yep, their demise would also result into pensions becoming worthless.

Big new flagship Cineworld in our new town centre opened a couple of years ago. Another sign of the end of the high street.

I had been looking forward to seeing Tenet but didn’t go to see it as I was not prepared to visit any business that treats me like a leper with ridiculous rules instead of as a valued customer. As pointed out by lots of lawyers online government ‘rules’ were actually only guidance and could be overruled by normal risk assessment. Cineworld along with lots of other businesses had chance to make a stand and not insist on masks etc but didn’t so struggling to feel sympathetic for them.

Tenet is rubbish

It’s an egotistical mess. I could just about wear Matthew McConaughey hiding in a bookcase communicating with his daughter via gravity, but this is a step too far.

False.

Exactly. That’s why I’ve been boycotting cinemas and concerts – I’m not inclined to give my custom to a business that treats me like a leper.

Of course the companies will try to justify and say that they implemented the guidance due to insurance and liabilities but surely the fact that their venues are ghost towns should save sent them a message that the vast majority of people would have happily gone if there was no social distancing and masks.

Like with positive test translating to cases, guidance translates to rules. It is the new language.
Seriously, I wonder if some of these businesses really want customers back or just see it as an excuse to shut down.

I can’t remember the last time I was at a cinema but I wouldn’t go with all the restrictions even if you paid me (and I don’t mean the cost of the ticket).

Cinemas have took the right brunt of this, studios delaying and VODing their new releases, stupid bubble seating, ludicrous mask diktat.

I filled in a survey for Cineworld last month asking what precautions would bring me back to the cinema. Obviously I gave them both barrels.

Agree. I filled out a survey for Curzon cinemas and pretty much told them where to go with their Covid “safety” diktat.

I am not sure I am sad about cinema’s closing. All they do is pump out mind-bending propaganda. Almost every film that is made is there just to brainwash people,to nudge the sheeple a bit more along the road to building their own dystopian prison planet.

Hollywood is poison.

Time to do things the old way, get a large screen at home and have friends round, and choose more uplifting films to watch. No adverts involved either!

Can’t even do that at the moment in Scotland as no one is allowed in your home unless they live there!

The film industry is pretty corrupt and posion but yeah, Hollywood is the worst offender.

I very barely go to the cinema but am not going to start going now. If they go bust, they have only themselves to blame.

I’m at the ripping masks off people’s faces stage. Only because I’m certain a lot of them are wearing a smug smirk underneath. Especially when you see the eyes on the shelf above them slide over to my naked rebellion.

I remember seeing this kind of adoring uniformity before; then the crowds were on the Unter den Linden, and an open top Mercedes was driving slowly by.

In those days the party members were wearing swastikas instead of masks, and I would have been wearing a yellow patch.

Same mindless groupthink. The group came to regret it, eventually.

If their heads are down and their eyes are avoiding contact with other eyes, they’re not wearing a smug grin.

Some of the eyes sweep left and right like windscreen wipers, in a kind of mild panic. It’s like life itself worries them.

Masks have already been compared to and judged as being tbe equivalent of the Hitler salute by leading German lockdown sceptics.
They are Gessler’s hats, nothing else.
And on top of that, they are dangerous and posing a health risk for the wearer, in particular children.

Many of the people I see muzzled look dead behind the eyes and have demoralised body language.

They have no stomach in fighting this tyranny and are using the muzzle and their mobile phones to numb the horrors of their lives.

The Muslim burial without autopsy angle is very interesting. Should surely cut through to the mainstream media if we have a few more examples?

Good; how can we get such examples though?

I’m getting thoroughly p’d off with argy-bargy about the precise numnbers of ‘false positives from the PCR tests.

Don’t get me wrong – I think that illustrative numbers are vital in showing the degree to which false positives from this test can, even on best estimates, lead to barmy outcomes.

But, in the end, it misses the central point, which is that the PCR test, because of its disconnect with the key reality of an actual, infective virus – is simply not fit for purpose. Just as its inventor said .

The chain of assumptions between the material presented to the testing procedure, and its ‘result’ – from assumed relevant RNA to amplified DNA allows in so many sources of error in identifying actual illness, that using any aggregated results to indicate actual levels in the community is – frankly – barmy nonsense. Even if one gives a little latitude in accepting that variation might represent relative changes in incidence.

The ONS data, whilst seemingly more carefully gleaned is still subject to these error factors.

A Ct threshold is still a matter of debate – and varies – clearly vitiating any individual or aggregated results. And that’s just a start, before we get to the ‘gold standard’ of proper authentication.

So the numbers are just the angels’ footprints on the head of a pin.

The simple, clear, unambiguous and certain fact is that PCR testing is, in this context simply a junk heap of random debris, and we come back to Farr’s insight that such ‘evidence’ is just ‘assumption.

Which brings the whole ‘Track and Trace’ edifice, as presently conceived, tumbling down – a uselessness which sanely written previous strategies highlighted.

Judging by the no of deaths there is no pandemic.

In formal terms (this surprises people) there was a ‘pandemic’ – because the WHO’s definition is just of a disease that is globally widespread. It requires no definition of severity or a mortality level.

More importantly, there was no epidemic in the community – which requires (GP surveillance figures) an incidence of 40 per 10,000.

Doh!

Pandemic is big pharma’s magic word, it unlocks huge wealth. There’s that difficult moment down at the crossroads but the devil’s bedside manner is excellent.

Incidence meaning? Hospitalization?

Identified symptoms (Yes, I know, that raises issues in itself).

Are there any statistics kept on symptoms?

Exactly. All too often everyone is distracted by faulty presuppositions and we spend ages arguing them. False positives are essentially a straw man. Instead the focus should be on what the PCR test actually does .

I thought we were doing the curfew because we are ‘following Belgium’. Belgium has stopped using the PCR test because it’s useless.

As far as I can see we follow whichever country currently has the biggest increase in cases and deaths and the most draconian restrictions.

Following on from the links about PCR here and yesterday, it looks like to be used as a qualitative yes/no the amplication limit is 24 cycles. After that you get into increasing uncertainty and measuring noise.

I suspect that all of the tests used to denote Covid-19 in the UK are 35 cycles and above. Which means that:

a) we really have maybe 1000 people or less who could be claimed to have it
b) those suffering from the bad lung conditions may be experiencing a different condition or a combination of conditions, that have not been treated as best as they could (but that’s a small point as the conditions appeared new)
c) We are imprisoning people in homes based on a theoretical disease where a positive is simply a random number. – think Postcode Lottery in reverse.

Perhaps a positive PCR test ought be followed up with a blood test for either presence of disease or antibodies. Still not 100% accurate, but close enough.

I see your point, Nick – but the information on antibodies doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in it as a sure-fire indicator, either

I don’t think we have a sure-fire indicator, just hoping we can find something that doesn’t spook countermeasures in panic…

Antibodies will only be found in those who quite unwell, they’re only needed if the upper layers of the immune system cannot contain the infection. Think a castle, the moat is the first line, then the walls with the archers, the inner sanctum being the keep.
We are using 40-45 cycles here in the U.K..

I’ve been following this thing since I first became sceptical in April and whilst I’ve watched several vids and read several articles on the subject, I still cannot completely get my head around what the PCR test actually does.

I ask people “can the PCR test actually differentiate between different viruses? i.e. can it definitively identify Sars-Cov-2? and I get told “Yes”.

It leaves me confused.

The FPR thing, however, is far easier to grasp and I think it works for most people to just be able to say “The case numbers are massively inflated”.

Trouble is Rick, there’s not a lot of sanity left. On one hand we have governments and their apologists doubling down on everything, very likely with their eyes fixed on the litigious future; and another set of hysterics allegedly on our side who report wild speculation as truth, especially if the name “Bill Gates” or the word “mandatory” get a mention.

Do you not think there are questions to answer about Gates’role,in all this?

Frankly yes I do. And big pharma. And a whole host of others neither you or me have probably even thought of. But first things first, let’s get the government’s ears pinned to the door. First we need to find out precisely what has led to the decisions and keep digging from there. The full truth will out, eventually.

We have the sage minutes.I don’t remember lockdown or Ferguson’s paper even being mentioned.
The key driver was the government.
I think the secrets will be safely stored under the official secrets act for 50 years.
The economy won’t last beyond Christmas unless restrictions are eased and listening to Johnson they are intending to carry on with them

I agree, Nick.

That’s why I think that relentless focus on the clearest factual arguments is essential.

It’s why I get p’d off with riding other hobby horses – it diffuses (and defuses) the key argument.

Agree completely.

some good news to report. Visited two bars yesterday where bar service is still in place and no masks. Personal details could be given voluntarily.

Similarly I visited a local pub with Mrs leggy yesterday – paid cash and was not coerced into T&T, completely at odds with my recent attempts at buying a pint in London.

Can someone please tell me why this statement made on 30th January 2020 by the 4 CMOi s so frightening as this lead to all the coronavirus legislation being written:

“We have been working in close collaboration with international colleagues and the World Health Organization to monitor the situation in China and around the world.
In light of the increasing number of cases in China and using existing and widely tested models, the 4 UK Chief Medical Officers consider it prudent for our governments to escalate planning and preparation in case of a more widespread outbreak.
For that reason, we are advising an increase of the UK risk level from low to moderate. This does not mean we think the risk to individuals in the UK has changed at this stage, but that government should plan for all eventualities.
As we have previously said, it is likely there will be individual cases and we are confident in the ability of the NHS in England, Scotland and Wales and HSC in Northern Ireland to manage these in a way that protects the public and provides high quality care.
Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Chris Whitty
Chief Medical Officer for Wales, Dr Frank Atherton
Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, Dr Catherine Calderwood
Chief Medical Officer for Northern Ireland, Dr Michael McBride”

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/statement-from-the-four-uk-chief-medical-officers-on-novel-coronavirus

I know what is the most frightening bit – it was not actually required until the first piece of legislation with coronavirus in the title was written and came into power on the 10th of February 2020 – so it was very prophetic.

DHSC under FOI request says no other information was given by the CMOs other than this one statement so either “they” knew the legislation was coming before 30th January 2020 or DHSC covering up something or DHSC covering their arse by going “see we never said anything was dangerous, speak to the Minister”.

Factor in the much-ignored government announcement on 19th March that the 4 uk governments and the 4 UK public health bodies no longer considered CV19 to be a high consequence infectious disease, in part due to its low mortality.

Of course, lockdown apologists like to explain this away as the government covering its arse to allowing non-HCID hospitals to treat CV19 patients, but that doesn’t change the fact the UK’s 4 PHB stated that CV19 has a low mortality rate.

And then, 4 days later, Boris told us we’re locking down.

Did Gates come into the picture (ie talk to the UK government) during those 4 days?

Don’t know whether Gates had anything to do with it. But this article mentioned in Toby’s round-up a few days ago is well worth reading. It might have been China that was putting pressure on governments to lock up their citizens. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-covid-lockdown-propaganda

I’ve seen at least 2 ads on Facebook for a new Hyundai concept electric car. The marketing blurb explained that the car is more than a car, it’s your personal cinema and coffee shop.

Essentially the car is being marketed as a one-person bubble where you sit alone, drinking coffee and watching films.

Asides from this being a bizarre angle to market a car with, it’s also playing directly into the narrative that avoiding other people is now the norm, to the point where your fucking car helps you achieve this.

Global corporations don’t spend money on advertising and marketing without good reason. What do they know that us proles don’t?

“There will be transformations of gigantic, historical proportion. The whole way of doing business and living that we have become accustomed to will be abandoned in the next 30 years”

Angela Merkel, speaking at Davos (World Economic Forum) in January 2020

Can we make a video of little clips like this and circulate it? Maybe linked to the QR codes that people are suggesting we create?

If a leader says there is no choice or no other way then how can they claim to be leading?

Why did Boris take the predictions of this serial doom-monger so seriously?

Is it because Boris is unable to understand statistical information? Is this why Matt Hancock (and the rest) does not understand the implications of the False Positive Rate? Is the government innumerate when it comes to Statistics? Is it that no one can explain these things to them because they will not admit (to themselves) that they are ignorant?

Most politicians are ignorant outside their professional field, which is politics of course! They are far from alone in that.

Any policy-maker should be capable of understanding statistical information. How else are they going to be capable of making policy decisions that effect millions?

Quite.

Whitty and Vallance must shoulder a lot of the blame. They could have rubbished Ferguson’s Fantasy Figures. They should have. They did not.

Common sponsors probably made sure of that.

Whitty, Vallance, Ferguson and Hancock have been too busy burnishing each others egos.

It’s because “scientists” now take the rule of bishops in our society. No politician could survive electorally after ignoring a scientist.

Because boris does not do ‘detail’ anyone can see that in his bluffing baffoon behaviour!! He just relies on others to inform him, learns a couple of numbers to spout in interviews/PMQ. He’s too busy grandstanding and fantasising he’s flippin churchill, which is isn’t!

Boris told the House of Commons that there was evidence for the ten o’clock closing time. This morning Andrew Marr asked Boris what that evidence was. Boris asserted that the government had the evidence. He went on to say that the longer people socialised, the less they observed social distancing rules.

By the way, as Boris and Andrew discussed this, they were less than two metres apart.

My father also lives in a North Wales coastal town (is it the same one, I wonder?) and has been unable to see a doctor since March. He has pleurisy and an unidentified respiratory condition that might be related to asbestos exposure. Fobbed off for months by idiots on the phone with “it must be asthma” and “oh well I have no idea what it is then”.

He managed to book a hospital appointment a few weeks ago, but even with a reference from the nurse practitioner, he had to play that game where they say there are no appointments, but if you’re assertive enough, they make one available for you.

Don’t get seriously ill in North Wales. It’s not much better in normal times either.

One of the problems with Donald Trump is that he doesn’t stick to his guns. At one point he swore by hydroxychloroquine, but subsequently somebody must have turned him against it. Now it seems he’s being treated with Remdesivir, a very expensive drug developed by Gilead for ebola. According to the Tribune India – there is lots more information but that was the first article I found: “Remdesivir has to be used with extreme caution due to its potential for serious adverse effects including liver and kidney injury. Similarly, for Tocilizumab studies have not shown any benefits in mortality reduction. However, if used for patients with severe conditions, proper informed consent is required. Rampant use is to be discouraged since the effect of the drug is directed at the ‘cykotine storm’.” I don’t know if they’re also giving poor old Trump that second drug with the funny name, but they’ll probably try a bit of everything. I’m beginning to think he’ll be lucky to pull through.

He’s not ill. He isn’t taking any drug.

In fairness, it is well known that HCQ has side effects if you take it long term, it’s not good for your heart. It is one of the cheapest and best understood medicines in the world.

Heart arrythmia’s are extremely rare even in long-term HCQ use for Lupus (1.5m in the US) and RA.

Rare possibility of retinopathy in long-term use.

Don’t buy in to the ‘it’s dangerous for the heart’ without evidence.

How long term do you need to take it for Covid?

This article (from May of this year) should be of interest to those with a legal mind:

https://www.dlapiper.com/en/uk/insights/publications/2020/05/preparing-for-global-class-actions-arising-from-covid-19/

This is being pushed hard now, most class actions enrich lawyers and a few favoured ‘charities’.

The madness continues .. like Boris, Trump pretends to be ill.. the mainstream media doubles down, Trump’s case is now illness.. at what point will the likes of Hitchens and Young and Delingpole accept the conspiracies are true? When they are asked to take their vaccine to get their digital ID – wiithout which they cannot partake in society?

When Boris regresses brexit, which he will.. things will get even more interesting.

aw.. a low IQ sheepy thumbed me down.. boo hoo

It’s good to have a few doing good work ‘within the paradigm’.

Imagine if a pension advisor regularly used graphs showing how investments could grow exponentially claiming they weren’t predictions but merely possible futures.

How long would they be allowed to practice for?