Pro-Lockdown Researcher Accuses Critic of “Libel”
A new pro-lockdown study has been doing the rounds on social media. In a Twitter thread, one of the authors claims that it “confirms the tragic consequences of delaying the UK’s first lockdown”. He argues that, if lockdown had started just one week earlier, there would have been up to “35k fewer deaths”.
Although the thread went viral (as many pro-lockdown threads do), the study was not without its critics. One of these was Philippe Lemoine, whose work I’ve discussed several times here on the Daily Sceptic.
In a Twitter thread of his own, Lemoine retorted that the study “doesn’t confirm jackshit” and merely exemplifies the “ridiculous methods that pass as counterfactual analysis in the field of epidemiology”. He went on to say that drawing strong conclusions about the “tragic consequences” of delaying lockdown is “intellectually dishonest”.
Profanity aside, the criticisms Lemoine proceeds to outline are well taken. As he points out, the latest pro-lockdown study is based – yet again – on the assumption that epidemics keep growing exponentially unless the government decides to do something. This assumption is not merely questionable, but false.
We know from examples like South Dakota – whose libertarian governor Kristi Noem did basically nothing – that infections start falling long before the herd immunity threshold is reached, even if there’s no lockdown. (There are at least eight other places where infections fell from a peak in the absence of both business closures and stay-at-home orders.)
Armed with the assumption that the only thing capable of arresting epidemic growth is lockdown, the authors conclude that Britain’s first lockdown had a large effect – one that would have been even larger if it had been imposed a week earlier.
Of course, there’s ample evidence to suggest this isn’t true: infections peaked around the same time in no-lockdown Sweden; reconstructions of Britain’s epidemic curve show cases peaking before the first lockdown; and Chris Whitty himself told MPs that “R went below one well before, or to some extent before, March 23”.
So, another pro-lockdown modelling study based on assumptions that we know are wrong. (Note: I’m not saying the lockdown had absolutely no effect; just that you can’t claim it had a large effect.) However, the story doesn’t end there.
The author of the original Twitter thread didn’t take kindly to Lemoine’s criticisms. After demanding to know “who specifically” Lemoine was accusing of intellectual dishonesty, he asked him to remove the “libellous” tweet and “desist from further public defamation”.
While Lemoine (a Frenchman) could have perhaps been politer, resorting to accusations of “libel” when faced with criticism isn’t a ‘good look’ for a scientist. It suggests you’re more concerned with social status than with finding out the truth. Why not just ignore the Twitter digs, and answer the man’s criticisms?
While this little dispute hardly matters, it doesn’t show ‘The Science’ of lockdown in a very favourable light.
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But we have never had a lockdown before and 100% of epidemics have been survived by the human race.
In the old days they had isolation hospitals where the sick were isolated and the healthy went about their normal business.
Has this even been an epidemic? I’m sure that there’s a neat definition somewhere that says ‘Yes, it WAS an epidemic and it still is’. But Worldometer indicates 6.22 million deaths from a global population of 7.9 billion. None of us are going Charlton Heston and moving into swanky apartments left vacant by their deceased owners.
Epidemic of stupidity in the population accompanied by an epidemic of malevolence in the political and credentialed classes. Epidemic is spread of disease from a locus of infection throughout a population. It has three phases, initial slow rate of infection; exponential rise to a peak; gradual decline back to low rate of infection, or in some cases extinction. It’s like a forest fire: smoulders; takes flame to become an inferno; gradually burns itself out. When the pathogen reappears periodically or is continuous at non-epidemic activity, it is endemic – like Cold & ‘flu and now CoVid. Pandemic = occurring over a wide geographic area affecting a significant proportion of populations. Arguably CoVid was not truly pandemic, no more than Cold & ‘flu is. It never affected significant proportions of the population, it was quite specific about whom it affected. Unreliable PCR Testing which can detect any bit of viral dandruff but not disease, was deliberately used to give a wholly misleading impression of the scale of the epidemic. If CoVid had truly been pandemic, we would not still be getting reports of (allegedly) millions of new (or repeat?) infections. It’s just not how epidemics/pandemics work. It’s like a continuously burning… Read more »
I suggest the repeat infections are due to the wonky jabs.
That’s so true
Yep – My BS-radar is always activated when I hear two people within the same dog-walking session tell me “Yeah well I’ve had it twice and my cousin’s had it four times”. Much like the community recycling centre operative with whom I had a fruitless argument back in July last year, who insisted that Covid “is killing millions of children” – a fact he knew was correct because his mate’s brother’s son-in-law’s 3 month-old baby had died. Of Covid. Honest.”
It’s all so depressingly predictable.
I think most of us here are unjabbed, so know of many other unjabbed people. Isn’t it obvious now that the reinfections are in the jabbed, and NOT the unjabbed? We catch the disease, become immune naturally and then don’t suffer reinfection. That’s how it looks to me, anyway.
And that 6.22m is for a period of over two years.
I know of not a single person who succumbed to covid. The more I talk to people, the more I hear the same from them. It’s been an accountancy trick as much as anything else.
Mortality rates wholly fabricated – death within 28 days of rubbish PCR.
A monumental fraud.
By “succombed” do you mean “died”? If so, then I quite agree. I had a significant dose – painful sore throat for a few days, and some dizziness; same for my old friend Tim, who is COPD Stage 4, has rheumatic fever and god knows what else – no sore throat but bad headache for several days, off his food, very tired… But near death? Hospitalised? Nah. Like you, in two years nobody of my wide acquaintance has become more than mildly to quite ill. None have feared for their lives. The disease clearly exists and may or may not fit the ‘pandemic’ definition (I’m not sure it does); but its seriousness and the number of people who have had a dose are unknowable, for many reasons. This is where a certain reliance on common sense observation becomes a perfectly valid way of gauging reality; I know no one who’s died – you know no one who’s died – he knows no one who’s died; so this number that Hugh Edwards intoned somberly every night for so long, for the gullible to take to their beds with them and quake in terror over – did it really mean anything at… Read more »
I would simply call the last two years The Scamdemic.
Stage 1 of their Reset.
In a way serious epidemics do have lockdowns. People get so sick they do not/cannot leave home, others concerned about catching it stay home often tending to their sick relatives.
And in January, February, March 2020 there was an absence of sick people among family, friends, neighbours, work colleagues. And hardly anybody noticed. What a bunch…
My great grandmother died in 1968 probably as a result of the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968/69 – she had flu-like symptoms that slowly progressed into pneumonia – she was taken to hospital where she passed away – she was in her late eighties.
In modelling, if you make the ‘right’ assumptions you get the ‘right’ answers. This is known as Ferguson’s Theory.
The skill is knowing how to work backwards from the right answer to get the right model.
I thought Ferguson’s theory was ‘it’s ok to to break your own rules unless you get caught (with your trousers down)’
The problem isn’t really the modelling. The problem is that the modellers, with an agenda, in effect snatched the media megaphone and started screaming “we are all going to die, we are all going to die, get into your homes and don’t come out.” And it took many months before anyone tried to take the megaphone back.
Two years on and they still insist in trying to scream their message of terror and panic into the megaphone.
A ‘study on Twitter’ and an unknown author ‘claims’.
“Gone viral”.
Someone says the author is wrong.
No real evidence anywhere.
Another ‘Twitter storm’ to keep the masses engaged for a few hours.
Is it ‘the masses’ on Twitter, or a small hardcore of lunatic asylum absconders?
Surely it can’t be worse under Musk? Drain the toxic Twitter Swamp!
Down here in the Land of Oz we are just six weeks from a national election and our PM, being a shallow politician, is offering up a shallow, smug soundbite claiming that “40,000 people are alive today because of the way we managed the pandemic” (i.e. Zero Covid, closed borders, lockdown, goofy masks and mass ‘vaccination’ as the exit ramp). This is insulting spin. The 40,000 figure is derived by comparing an island continent which has searingly virus-unfriendly summers to cooler northern hemisphere countries. Back in April 2020, Morrison had earlier boasted that “tens of thousands” of lives were being saved by his policies. This relied on comparing actual Covid deaths with modelled estimates by Melbourne’s Doherty Institute but the latter lacked integrity because it used the defective parameters and assumptions (such as a grossly inflated viral reproduction rate, a vastly overstated infection fatality rate and a belief that the virus was a threat to all rather than just the already very old and very sick, or the very obese) which Neil Ferguson of ICL first used in his infamous modelling that sent the world into a Covid policy tailspin in early 2020. If you get to set your own exam question to… Read more »
Still, ‘40,000 lives saved’ makes for an easily-remembered talking point on the campaign trail and sounds scientific. Approved by experts! With numbers!
I’d love to have heard how they came up with that one: “50,000 or 100,000 would sound suspiciously concocted; 40,000 sounds important, but not overstated or immodest, Prime Minister”.
If only we had an Opposition that could take it up and run with it: how many lives damaged, jobs lost, businesses and hopes ruined?
That, of course, is the question that Scotty From Upf**king dreads. How many suicides? Untreated cancers?
The virus discriminated for elderly in poor health, moribund, average age at death circa 82.
All cause mortality data being reviewed for a number of Countries, UK & Sweden being two, averaged for the two years show no increase above previous years averages.
Increase in all cause for first year is balanced off by decline in second year – so deaths displaced. Those who would have died in 2021, died in 2020.
CoVid did not cause any additional deaths.
So at best, those supposed 40 000 lives ‘saved’ by now probably will have died or will die soon anyway.
Thank you, JXB – I’m aware of this.
The PM’s figure of 40,000 was plucked out of thin air for electioneering purposes.
As of 13 April 2022, 6648 deaths have been recorded as Covid deaths in Australia. 2003 of those occurred in residential care facilities for the elderly. It is much more difficult to obtain data on whether or not these were deaths “from” or “with” Covid.
For those interested in the details, this is from the Australian Health Department website (one of a weekly series):
Coronavirus (COVID-19) at a glance – 13 April 2022 (health.gov.au)
I just saw a Channel 9 news clip from Queensland, talking about the ambulance backlog and people waiting hours to be dropped at the hospital, with a 30% rise in ‘code 1’ emergencies like heart attacks, but of course the hospital spokeswoman feigned ignorance as to what was the cause.
40,000? Unprovable.
It’s an election campaign: a hundred unprovable things will be said every day! As for the promises ….
Still, ‘40,000 lives saved’ makes for an easily-remembered talking point on the campaign trail and sounds scientific. Approved by experts! With numbers!
And that’s his best claim? Zero Covid, closed borders, lockdown, goofy masks and mass ‘vaccination’ as the exit ramp for 25.69 million people is claimed to have postponed the deaths of 0.16% of them by an unspecified amount of time? Or, put the other way round, each of the individuals whose lives were supposedly saved by this is about 642 times more valuable to society than ordinary Australians? What’s that? A caste system in extremis?
Don’t use Twitter.
Mind you, on a toilet wall near me someone scribbled…
The one thing that unites pro-lockdown zealots, pro-mask zealots and pro-vaccine zealots is industrial level stupidity. Oh, and a thin skin. Ok that’s two things And a ridiculous propensity to take offence and over-react by demanding legal action to shut down any criticism. Fine, three things, sue me.
And malevolence.
H.L. Mencken: “The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.”*
What unites them is unexamined insecurity. The confident rarely wish to control anyone; it is an enormous hassle they don’t need. It is the inadequates and those with low self-esteem who need this external validation for their lives.
Many pushing harder lockdowns, and praying for another global event with which to impose them, fear their time has passed. Their chance to shine and mentally align their mismatched fears and anxieties with constant external validation has come to an end.
The way forward is to establish a very hard red line; there will never be a situation in which any central authority will confine us to our homes under any circumstances whatsoever. If they want us to assist the vulnerable, including suggestions to avoid them, that is fine as long as they remain suggestions.
What unites them is unexamined insecurity. I think you’re right. I have offered reading material to those who are pro-lockdown, pro-mask and pro-vaccine – in the mildest of manners, so as not to alarm them. Even the simple suggestion that they might find an article interesting (and I went to great pains to use articles of the most respectable provenance, with nary a mention of Great Resets to panic them), produced something very like consternation on their faces. I should add that these were people with whom I was on good and friendly terms; people with whom I had never argued. I reluctantly came to the conclusion that they were afraid to read anything that might contradict the words of their masters, because the idea that their masters were seriously wrong or deceptive was too frightening. These were citizens living in what was a functioning democracy (Australia is no longer that – it’s a totalitarian society with residual democratic features). As my choice of tense indicates, I no longer work in this manner. It’s pointless. Should anyone ask, I have files of articles ready to hand them and links galore. The way forward is to establish a very hard red… Read more »
I’ve done this too. But there is too much angst around for it to work. The propaganda also found a receptive audience for it to work so well.
Free floating anxiety. It’s strange because I’m a naturally anxious person and walk around with a sense of existential dread about 95% of the time. And yet I didn’t succumb in any way to the propaganda. So I think it’s a combination of abject head in the sand ignorance and free floating anxiety. Don’t know about you, but I saw this scam coming a mile off!
Interesting. Have you experimented with diet? I too used to have that sense of constant background dread. I changed my diet significantly and it has changed my life.
Beer diet. After a few I don’t give a flying f**k about anything.
Perhaps it’s the desire for information that’s critical?
The people I know who have resisted the propaganda are intellectually curious – about lots of things. They believe that they can conduct independent research and form reasonable opinions of their own.
Yes I think some of the “resistance” was possibly just curiosity about the truth rather than a rejection of propaganda as such. I myself was curious about where Covid came from and how the government’s early statements from two years ago fit in with what we knew then, such as the Diamond Princess and the age of the Italian population who were dying (old).
Even by about April or May 2020 much of it didn’t add up at all. Then I remember scientist who used the Diamond Princess data as a microcosm of a worst case scenario (enclosed population, skewed to include many old and infirm etc.) and concluded the infection and death rates would likely be low. Then those people disappeared rapidly from view.
And on and on. Early on it was a wall of bullshit. I remember being astonished no one around me cared even when they locked down.
John Ionidas. Ironically, his paper is now on the WHO website.
‘… on the assumption that epidemics keep growing exponentially’
Gompertz curve.
‘… Chris Whitty himself told MPs that “R went below one well before, or to some extent before, March 23”.’
(Alleged) Deaths peaked in first week of March. Infection to death takes 21 to 28 days on average, so these deaths were infected about 4 weeks earlier. Add on reporting delays of a few days, shift the death curve back 4 weeks in time and peak infection was first week of February.
The epidemic started in early January, peaked early February and was well into decline in March. The ‘experts’ should have known this – it looks like Whitty did, which shows just how dishonest and dishonourable he is for not saying so publicly and for not opposing lockdown, which even if such restrictions are effective (not), they had no possibility of stopping an epidemic that had already run its course.
I remain convinced that the authorities, led by the WHO, were determined to use Covid-19 as a test-bed for the policies developed by Jeremy Farrar’s CEPI in 2017, i.e. use the first 100 days after the emergence of a new pandemic to develop diagnostic test methods, treatments and, most importantly, vaccines. (https://cepi.net/) During the first 100 days, they wanted to minimise transmission using their various Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions, including Lockdowns.
Having started down this road, the UK’s SAGE, with Farrar holding court as their primary “pandemic expert” were hardly likely to row back and admit that the situation wasn’t as serious as they first thought….
I see that CEPI’s website justifies itself by claiming that their $3.5 billion dollar plans are good value compared to the cost of future lockdowns!
Are these the same people who believed Ferguson’s ‘modelling’. There is no way death can be predicted, still can’t specify covid with or of deaths. No post mortems on the first wave of those removed from critical care in hospitals
Obsessing over the science of lockdowns is a red herring that runs the risk of legitimizing an illegal act. It doesn’t matter how much science they present as the state does not have the right to limit our movements under any circumstances.
When we delve into the minutiae of exactly how much evidence is on hand we tacitly endorse the idea that there is a threshold for lockdowns and perhaps they haven’t quite reached it. The measures are a little harsh as it isn’t quite that bad. This is nonsense; there is no threshold. The state does not have the right to lock us down under any circumstances.
We must keep this in mind at all times. Seemingly critical articles like the one above are in fact maintaining the narratives that lockdowns are justified. They are not and must become unthinkable.
Agree with every word.
The state does not have the right to lock us down under any circumstances.
If we do not establish this, we are reduced to the status of slaves. Those people energetically looking to topple statues of people who had any historical connection, however tenuous, to slavery, might like to pay attention to the complex issues of modern slavery. If they have the guts.
That needs to be the message. It doesn’t matter what the data says, the options on the table exclude lockdowns.
As for the statue topplers, we need them rebranded as intolerant cultural extremists, like the Islamic types who wrecked all the Mesopotamian art in Iraq. People you cannot live with.
The strange phenomenon of ‘Public Health’ which not public health at all, it’s the health of the individual.
Narrative, narrative, narrative.
Since on the ONS’s own terms it cannot be shown that more than just over 6,000 lives were lost due to COVID, one can only marvel at the authors’ claim that an earlier lockdown would have saved 35,000 more lives. This is the stuff of miracles. The cultists are now creating lives ex nihilo. They have now become little gods.
The hubris is a thing to behold.
https://jdee.substack.com/p/covid-19-as-the-sole-cause-of-death
“While this little dispute hardly matters, it doesn’t show ‘The Science’ of lockdown in a very favourable light.”
I disagree, if a libel case gets taken to court there will be presentation of both sides of the argument, which we need more of, no matter how it’s achieved.
Sadly, courts rely on “expert” testimony, and nobody is more expert in a fantasy model than the fantasist that modelled it.
35K fewer deaths if they hadn’t used two years worth of Midazolam in 2 months to murder the elderly. Nobody has the balls to raise this issue. And the rest weren’t Covid either.
Actually, I heard on the grapevine that the police in some counties are asking care homes for information related to deaths. In our county (small population) there were only a handful of covid cases over two years, but there was a huge death peak in April 2020 with double the usual number of deaths over 3 or 4 weeks.
And I do wonder what will be done with that ”information”. The words ”carpet” and ”brush” spring to mind.
“If we assume that our wild guess about the effectiveness of tyrannical home internment is correct, then we can prove absolutely that tyrannical home internment was effective.”
Serpentza video – showing some recent events in Canton. The utterly insane behaviour of Chinese authorities, locking tens of thousands of people inside a convention centre because one person had ‘red’ on their health pass app.
Because that makes perfect sense doesn’t it? In fear of an infectious disease you trap tens of thousands of people close together. It’s all theatre, and he’s wrong about Omicron too because we know it doesn’t exist.
Western governments are watching closely, learning how it is done. That is what we must keep an eye on. And that starts with rejecting apps and other tracking mechanisms.
Blows my mind how anyone believes the virus narrative after this much time. The same psychopaths doing the atrocious things in these videos are the same ones telling us there’s a virus to be scared of. You have to be mentally handicapped to believe them as far as I’m concerned.
I think many people derive a sense of relief from someone else assuming a position of authority. That relief overrides normal sensibilities. It matters more. That is to say, many more people than you imagine think like slaves. The laptop class, for example. They might drive BMWs but deep down they have no great yearning to be free with all the responsibility it implies.
And their idea of ”freedom” isn’t what you or I would wish for.
All these “see lockdowns didn’t work” and “see masks were ineffective” just continue to feed the myth of a virus. Again, the effects of panic and despair (and vaccines) can readily explain excess mortality.
But WAS there ”excess mortality”, in 2020 anyway? The borough councils’ figures of cremations and burials don’t bear it out.
The US suffered horrific excess mortality 2020-2021.
If it wasn’t for the PCR testing and the hysterical media overreaction, would anyone have even known there was a new virus circulating? In previous years 2020 would have gone down as a moderately sever flu season.
Without the midazolam murders I suspect the death rate would have been unremarkable.
If epidemics grew exponentially then the R number would be constant, there would be no herd immunity and cases would immediately crash to zero once it was over. Surprisingly enough no epidemiological model predicts exponential growth. It’s amazing the number of people who’ve appeared in the media stating that they failed Maths.
Just scan read the article and the authors complain that it is too hard to fit the SEIR model so they just assume exponential growth. How do these people have jobs?
One can only wonder what these guys are smoking. The diagram shows case numbers during the so-called first wave. The red line marks the lockdown date. The obvious conclusion would be that the first, English lockdown had no effect at all on case growth.
My model shows that if we’d locked down earlier an extra 100,000 deaths would have occurred. But then my model is also sh1t !
”Thirty five thousand few deaths…..” What utter tripe.
Why isn’t more said about the freedom of information results from borough councils with figures for cremations and burials through 2020 showing an average figure for the previous five years?
”fewer” of course….