Documents obtained via an FOI request show that, in March/April of 2020, the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs did a cost-benefit analysis of lockdown. It concluded that the costs far outweighed the benefits.
In an interview last week, Neil Ferguson said that Britain's high infection rate had had the "upside of boosting population immunity". Whether he realised it or not, Ferguson was making the case for focused protection.
Until recently, many people openly identified as 'woke'. One suspects the reason that activists like AOC want to get rid of the term is that it’s much harder to fight something if you don’t have a name for it.
In a recent article, George Monbiot criticised growth, arguing that if the economy doubles in size then so do environmental impacts. But the UK's economy grew by 74% from 1990–2018, while CO2 emissions fell by 19%.
Last week, The New York Times ran a piece titled ‘Needless Suffering: Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid’. But infections are in steady decline. And even if they weren't, so what?
A recent viral tweet implies that if the UK had used contact tracing like Korea, we could have achieved the same outcomes. Yet we ploughed £37 billion into Test and Trace, and it still failed to halt the epidemic.
The FT reports that rich countries have given more *booster* doses than poor countries have given *total* doses. Why so few doses in poor countries? Rich countries wasted millions on young healthy people.
Chris Whitty said the Great Barrington Declaration is "probably" unethical, presumably because it would have led to more deaths. But the UK's pandemic plan forecast 315,000 deaths, and Whitty never tried to change it.
In January of this year, Japan introduced restrictions on businesses for the first time. Reo Takaku and colleagues analysed data on symptoms, and found no evidence that these measures reduced the spread of Covid.
Excessive focus on 'official' death numbers has led to a distorted picture of the pandemic’s impact on mortality – both total and over time. Tracking age-adjusted excess mortality provides a much-needed corrective.
© 2026 Skeptics Ltd.
