News Round-Up
- “Will we pass the Boris roadmap tests?” – It’s hard to tell, says Tom Chivers, as he estimates the probabilities of passing the tests at each of the four stages for UnHerd
- “NHS Test and Trace was doomed from the start” – Make all the tweaks you want, says Ross Clark in the Telegraph, the Test and Trace system is never going to work in a liberal society where the disease is already widespread
- “Medical chiefs call for ban on junk food advertising in sport after Covid death rates linked to UK obesity” – The Telegraph reports that the British Medical Association is settings its sights on sports advertising
- “Summer holidays abroad on cards as Grant Shapps ‘hopeful’ about talks with other countries” – Grant Shapps says holidays might be on this year, according to the Telegraph. Don’t get your hopes up
- “The closest thing to a COVID ‘cure’?” – The Daily Mail reports on a combination antibody drug, which according to a study, cuts the risk of COVID-19 hospitalisation and death by 87%
- “Covid will cause ‘tens of thousands of deaths’ every year, SAGE adviser says” – Pessimistic assessment from SAGE member Professor Andrew Hayward, as reported in MailOnline
- “Very special day’ as Darlington couple reunited at care home” – Tragic story about an old married couple who were prevented from seeing each other for a year thanks to the ban on visitors to care home
- “Covid in Scotland: Sturgeon objective ‘to eliminate’ virus” – Sturgeon has said that Scotland’s objective must be to “eliminate” coronavirus, the BBC reports. Might she be looking to divert attention away from something?
- “It’s time to take a step back and check our moral compass” – We need to pause, reflect and reset out moral compass if we are to regain our freedoms, say VoxPost
- “A year of COVID-19 lockdown is putting kids at risk of allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases” – A year raising children in isolated and sanitised environments has put them at great risk, Professor Byram W. Bridle writes in the Conversation
- “The ethics and metaphysics of money” – Rishi Sunak’s strategy will be to inflate the Covid debt away, writes Sean Walsh in the Article, and this has profound and long-lasting implications
- “UK summons EU officials over ‘false’ vaccine claims” – Now that the EU has admitted the UK didn’t in fact restrict exports of the vaccine, FCO officials have asked their EU counterparts to explain themselves, according to the Spectator’s Steerpike
- “Vaccines are testing Central Europe’s loyalties to the EU” – William Nattrass, again in the Spectator, reckons the debacle will cost the EU dearly
- “The EU’s ruthless vaccine protectionism” – The EU’s behaviour over vaccines shows it is not really very interested in international cooperations, says Xin Du in Spiked
- “Lockdown generation: Europe’s students in despair as pandemic lingers” – A Euronews report on the toll lockdown has taken on European students
- “Concern mounts over censorship of Canadian doctors” – After a video of doctors listing reasons not to be afraid of COVID-19 was censored by YouTube, iPolitics Canada reports on growing concern about the censorship of anyone who dissents from Covid orthodoxy. The video in question has been reposted here
- “Lockdowns wrecked democracy around the world” – A round-the-world tour of the damage lockdowns have done to democracy by James Bovard at AIER
- “Fauci and the communists” – Fauci has delivered a propaganda coup for the communist regime in Beijing by sharing a platform with a Chinese Communist Party ‘health expert’, writes Jordan Schachtel for AIER
- “Doctors, healthcare workers to be punished for anti-vaxx Covid claims” – Slightly misleading headline in this item from the Sydney Morning Herald. It reports that doctors “risk regulatory action if they spout false or deceptive misinformation to patients or on social media”
- “How you can tell they’re lying about Covid” – Watch Dr. William Briggs on the Patrick Coffin Show discussing how experts deal in “fallacy, half-truth and presupposition”, secure in the knowledge that MSM viewers are ill-equipped to detect their lies
- “The Charts That Tell the Covid Story” – The latest episode of the Tom Woods Show, in which he speaks to Ian Miller about his charts which tell the story of the failure of the lockdown policy
- Julie Hartley-Brewer defends Piers Morgan on her talkRADIO show
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When this is all over, deaths of covid will look like Asian or HK flu. Lockdown will cause tens of millions of deaths of African children over a decade or two. This is well known – see reports from World Food Program, UN, WHO. Development has gone back 20 years.
Lockdown supporters claims they didn’t know will be about as credible as the claims by leading Nazis they didn’t know about the death camps.
That lockdown causes far more deaths than it prevents has been so widely shown that it is beyond question.
We don’t even need to know that: using the lockdownists own logic shows it’s ethically abhorrant. The main issue with the skeptic case is that humans can’t process large numbers properly, we’re simply not designed to. Two examples using the governments/fergusons own figures put into manageable terms: 1) 10 people fall into a lake, it’s not anyone’s fault, unfortunately these things happen. They could get out if we just pushed one person in so that they could climb out on his shoulders. Unfortunately he would die. Is it OK to do this? It’s obviously not ok to kill someone to save other people’s lives; it’s morally abhorrant. Scale that up to UK population and it stays the same: 100k people killed by lockdown (govt’s own figures) to save 1 Million people (500k from virus, 500k from broken NHS, govts own assumptions.) Still morally abhorrant. 2) In a village of 200 people, they are told that unless everyone stays inside for 6 months (which will kill 1 person from loneliness/un-diagnosed cancer/ fear of using NHS) there will be 4 deaths in the village. 2 of those people will die anyway. Is that worth it? I don’t think any rational people would… Read more »
I agree
and in addition the Edinburgh modelling group took the Imperial modelling and shows that lockdown gives more deaths from Covid
“When this is all over, deaths of covid will look like Asian or HK flu.”
If that.
Back in May/June, I started looking at the pattern of population-adjusted all-cause mortality since 1993.
The first analysis was to look at infection seasons, from November to June over that period. This clearly showed that 2019/20 was far from the ‘unprecedented’ event claimed by the government. the season lay at the 75th centile, with seven seasons of higher mortality just in that period.
I’ve just done a quick analysis of the ‘worst case’ scenario, from January 2020 to February this year, which includes the two peaks of deaths – in April 2020 and January 2021.
The ranking against all similar periods since 1993 remains the same, even with both peaks included. There is no ‘unprecedented’ event. The big lie remains.
I don’t know whether HK or Asian flu affected overall mortality much – again it might just be old people
Problem is all cause mortality incudes lockdown deaths which I am sure are dominating – even the govt thought 1/2 of first season deaths were from the response – got to be more now
Re the new Eli Lilly miracle cure (DM article linked above) -best rated comment on the BTL DM comments is:
“Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were also found very early on to massively reduce symptoms and hospitalisation but doctors weren’t allowed to use it. Ask yourself why….”
Some very good points in that Telegraph article about NHS Test and Trace: the Western world’s discomfort with the kind of surveillance state available to South Korea (which was of course set up in response to the 2015 outbreak of MERS: a coronavirus far deadlier than Covid-19) is no doubt why test-and-trace failed in pretty much all Western countries. Test and Trace is failing not because it has shortcomings which could be eliminated by fine-tuning but because it was conceptually flawed from the beginning. Although ostensibly modelled on the South Korean test and trace system, which has been credited with keeping infection numbers low there, our system tries to do the same job without access to the data which fuels the Korean system: GPS phone tracking, surveillance cameras and credit card transactions. The UK Government knew it would be politically unacceptable to try to rush through powers to create a Korean-style surveillance state, so tried to create a system which ran on human memory. There was also Matt Hancock’s phone app, of course, but the first version didn’t work and the second version doesn’t have legal force.The result is that while the Korean system was identifying 100 contacts for every… Read more »
No, they haven’t. And why would they bother, given that overall all cause mortality in this country for 2020 was middling in a thirty year context. Things are going to get nasty, but in an entirely different manner. The free world is now confined to the 17 States of the U.S.A. that no longer have mask mandates. But there is a growing swell of opinion in support of legal action against State and Federal government for acting unconstitutionally: ‘…lockdown orders are not only in violation of the US Constitution, but also of state constitutions that typically allow for short-term emergency decrees by governors of between 14 days to 60 days. So, if these lockdown orders are unconstitutional, why were they imposed and how were they justified? As Mr. Barnes explained, government officials and courts across the United States have been using long discredited legal precedent as the basis for justifying lockdowns.’ ‘Mr. Wright focused more specifically on the current court challenges to various state emergency decrees, most notably those in Michigan imposed by Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Mr. Wright’s court updates will be covered in a subsequent article.’ https://www.aier.org/article/covid-19-lockdowns-violate-the-us-constitution/ Watch this space. It’s all a bit like ‘deja vu all… Read more »
It’s not surprising that the Japanese economic miracle ran out of steam, because state-directed investment of that kind tends to lead to spectacular results for a decade or two before running out of road as the opportunities for big productivity increases dry up before the political system can respond. Michael Pettis is pretty good on this.
The same was true of the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, Brazil under the military dictatorship and perhaps China today.
So the West would be crazy to look to Asia for any lessons, particularly in view of the shambles over SARS CoV 2 in China:
‘The documents reportedly cover an incomplete period between October 2019 and April 2020 and lay bare the reportedly inflexible health care system that is restricted by the top-down bureaucracy along with rigid procedures. It also indicates that local health facilities were not fully-equipped to handle emergencies. Even though the Chinese authorities showcased the nation handled the outbreak in a transparent and efficient manner, the leaked documents indicated flawed testing as well as reporting mechanisms.’
https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/china/chinas-initial-covid-19-response-was-chaotic-documents-reveal-inconsistencies-report.html
That sounds familiar, doesn’t it
Unfortunately, regarding healthcare, we still have not learned, and neither have the Chinese, that state apparatchik top down directed monolithic public healthcare systems are poor performers in comparison to social insurance funded private healthcare systems.
Although China eventually did a masterful job in eliminating the virus, their official case and death counts (dominated by the initial outbreak in Wuhan) are almost certainly an order of magnitude too low.
The most likely reason is that the CCP in Wuhan downplayed the outbreak out of fear of punishment by Beijing, and by the time Beijing discovered the fraud they felt compelled to go along with it in public, because by then SARS-Cov-2 had already become a global pandemic, and if Beijing had come clean at that point the rest of the world would realize that the CCP had lulled them into a false sense of security with bogus statistics, and would be hell bent on revenge.
Here is an example of the hoops that the meeja are jumping to avoid the truth:
The litter-picking ‘Wombles’ and others cleaning up West Midlands
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-56321769
A story about people going out and picking up litter, after noticing an increase. One word you won’t see in the article is “mask”. You also won’t see any masks in the photos of the people (sceptics?). I would put money on this being an initiative by people who are sick of dirty muzzles being littered. But the BBC feel they can’t mention the elephant in the room
I watched in astonishment when a bloke appeared yesterday with his very young daughter, litter picking the mess left behind by the well-paid council when they collect the recycled waste. Not having a TV licence, I’m not in the ‘loop’ on what the media want us to do, so seeing this was really odd.
At first I thought: “What a shame that has come to this” – after myself complaining to the local councillor about the mess left after collection each week.
The I started thinking: the guy and the little girl had proper litter-picking kit. This was weird.
Only now I see your message does it fall into place. Our population are desperate to please those ruling over us. The term ‘virtue signalling’ has escalated to a new level of meaning in the last year.
Not particularly pessimistic. Normal colds kill tens of thousands every year. Almost anything will kill someone in their last few months of life. Certainly lockdown will
Using tax payers’ money like a cash machine is spot on. We have and are being lied to at our own expense. As I talk to people it is clear that the vast majority still believe the early propaganda that natural immunity only lasts a few months at best, but the vaccines are much better. They also believe that a vaccine has already been shown to have such a high protective level that it is safer to get on a plane with a vaccinated person than one with a negative test result. They think the vaccines are almost completely safe, and that there is no real risk of bad effects in the years to come, though strangely they agree their long term effects are unknown. They believe that the Government and pharmaceutical companies would put the interests of the little people first. They have also completely accepted the line that anyone arguing against the Government is a conspiracy theorist, and they are desperate not to be one of those. They long to get back on a plane to see their families. They think taking a vaccine is a matter of public duty, to enable society to start again. These are… Read more »
I presume this was indeed propaganda intended to dissuade young healthy people from deliberately seeking out infection, as there was never any plausible scientific basis for it. SARS survivors were discovered to be immune to Covid-19, even though SARS and Covid-19 are more different than any two Covid-19 variants.
Coronaviruses generally aren’t as likely to be as adept at evading immunity as influenza A, because they don’t have those nifty interchangeable H and N proteins.
big mistake – should have put on parties for the young to get it. we found out back in march it doesn’t affect anyone under about 70
Aren’t most of the younger people who die of Covid or become seriously ill, either healthcare workers (exposed to far more virus than the regular population) or obese?
Chivers hides a lockdown fanaticism and automatic acceptance of the flawed logic behind it, behind supposed rationality. Stop giving him publicity.
Yes. I noticed early on that Chivers had little in the way of independent thought. His starting point is always the gullible swallowing of the official narrative.
How has the Morgexit shit found it’s way onto this site via Julia? How the fuck has this come to be?*
We’re now being pushed to consider this scum-bag as a martyr?
How about Julia spends less time winding up over a pantomime, ORCHESTRATED soap opera played out by the royals and more time looking at what they are really doing? If she has done a single discussion [rant] about Charles’ very public involvement in the Great Reset Initiative, I’d love to see it!
*(a rhetorical question)