UK lockdown was a ‘monumental mistake’ and must not happen again – Boris scientist says - "Mark Woolhouse said lockdown was a “panic measure” but admitted it was the only option at the time because “we couldn’t think of anything better to do”. But it is a crude measure that takes no accounts of the risk levels to different individuals, the University of Edinburgh professor said... The professor of infectious disease epidemiology said that the Government must now focus on increasing testing and striving to unlock society safely rather than restricting it further. Prof Woolhouse OBE, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours that advises the Government, said: “Lockdown was a panic measure and I believe history will say trying to control Covid-19 through lockdown was a monumental mistake on a global scale, the cure was worse than the disease. “I never want to see national lockdown again. It was always a temporary measure that simply delayed the stage of the epidemic we see now. It was never going to change anything fundamentally, however low we drove down the number of cases, and now we know more about the virus and how to track it we should not be in this position again. "We absolutely should never return to a position where children cannot play or go to school. “I believe the harm lockdown is doing to our education, health care access, and broader aspects of our economy and society will turn out to be at least as great as the harm done by Covid-19.” He said that Sage, the government’s advisory board on dealing with Covid, needed to have members from a wider range of fields. This would allow it a better understanding of how lockdown has had effects across the whole of society. He said: “I suspect right now more people are being harmed by the collateral effects of lockdown than by Covid-19... Prof Woolhouse said he had hoped the combined efforts of the world’s scientists would work out how to handle the virus during lockdown. But this hadn’t happened. He said: “At the time I agreed with lockdown as a short term emergency response because we couldn’t think of anything better to do, but it was always clear that the moment we started to relax enough measures we were likely to see infection rates rise again either nationally or locally. “My hope was that we would have learnt how to handle the virus better so lockdown would no longer be necessary."... “I would not dignify waiting for a vaccine with the term ‘strategy’. That’s a hope not a strategy. But we do need to get on with providing an alternative to lockdown.” He said a better understanding of who was actually at risk from the virus would allow better solutions to be presented. Any restrictions imposed should be “considered measures” and should protect those who needed it while letting everyone live more freely. As an example he explained: “Closing schools was not an epidemiologically sensible thing to do. “Evidence shows that children very rarely transmit to adults and there is not a single documented example of a child transmitting to a teacher in school. “But throughout this pandemic we have been very bad at communicating the actual risk of infection to individuals. “Instead of concentrating on schools we should have been concentrating on care homes. We were not really thinking about where the risk lies, just on suppressing the virus."
From August 2020. Sadly, political incentives led to 2 more - despite vaccines
The fatal mistakes which led to lockdown | The Spectator - "At a time when rational interpretation of the Covid data indicates that we should be getting back to normal, we instead see an elaboration of arbitrary responses. These are invariably explained as being ‘guided by science’. In fact, they are doing something rather different: being guided by models, bad data and subjective opinion. Some of those claiming to be ‘following the science’ seem not to understand the meaning of the word... To be classified as science, a prediction or theory needs to be able to be tested, and potentially falsified... The only way to get an idea of the real-world accuracy of models is by using them to predict what will happen — and then by testing those predictions. And this is the third problem with the current approach: a wilful determination to ignore the quality of the information being used to set Covid policy. In medical science there is a well-known classification of data quality known as ‘the hierarchy of evidence’. This seven-level system gives an idea of how much weight can be placed on any given study or recommendation. Near the top, at Level 2, we find randomised controlled trials (RCTs) where a new approach is tried on a group of patients and compared with (for example) a placebo. The results of such studies are pretty reliable, with little room for bias to creep in. A systematic review of several RCTs is the highest, most reliable form of medical evidence: Level 1. Further down (Levels 5 and 6) comes evidence from much less compelling, descriptive-only studies looking for a pattern, without using controls. This is where we find virtually all evidence pertaining to Covid-19 policy: lockdown, social distancing, face masks, quarantine, R-numbers, second waves, you name it. And — to speed things up — most Covid research was not peer- reviewed. Right at the bottom of the hierarchy — Level 7 — is the opinion of authorities or reports of expert committees. This is because, among other things, ‘authorities’ often fail to change their minds in the face of new evidence. Committees, containing diversity of opinion and inevitably being cautious, often issue compromise recommendations that are scientifically non-valid. Ministers talk about ‘following the science’. But the advice of Sage (or any committee of scientists) is the least reliable form of evidence there is. Such is the quality of decision-making in the process generating our lockdown narrative. An early maintained but exaggerated belief in the lethality of the virus reinforced by modelling that was almost data-free, then amplified by further modelling with no proven predictive value. All summed up by recommendations from a committee based on qualitative data that hasn’t even been peer-reviewed. Mistakes were inevitable at the start of this. But we can’t learn without recognising them."
From July 2020. Of course they didn't learn
Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison - "I explore the association between the severity of lockdown policies in the first half of 2020 and mortality rates. Using two indices from the Blavatnik Centre’s COVID-19 policy measures and comparing weekly mortality rates from 24 European countries in the first halves of 2017–2020, addressing policy endogeneity in two different ways, and taking timing into account, I find no clear association between lockdown policies and mortality development."
Four Stylized Facts about COVID-19 - "We document four facts about the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide relevant for those studying the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on COVID-19 transmission. First: across all countries and U.S. states that we study, the growth rates of daily deaths from COVID-19 fell from a wide range of initially high levels to levels close to zero within 20-30 days after each region experienced 25 cumulative deaths. Second: after this initial period, growth rates of daily deaths have hovered around zero or below everywhere in the world. Third: the cross section standard deviation of growth rates of daily deaths across locations fell very rapidly in the first 10 days of the epidemic and has remained at a relatively low level since then. Fourth: when interpreted through a range of epidemiological models, these first three facts about the growth rate of COVID deaths imply that both the effective reproduction numbers and transmission rates of COVID-19 fell from widely dispersed initial levels and the effective reproduction number has hovered around one after the first 30 days of the epidemic virtually everywhere in the world. We argue that failing to account for these four stylized facts may result in overstating the importance of policy mandated NPIs for shaping the progression of this deadly pandemic."
In other words, lockdowns don't work
Published Papers and Data on Lockdown Weak Efficacy - and Lockdown Huge Harms
BABER: Let's lift Ontario's lockdown -- the human toll is indisputable | Toronto Sun - "It was holding this public position that led to my removal from the Ontario PC caucus a year ago and cost me the chair of the Standing Committee on Justice Policy... There are now dozens of credible studies which conclude that the net effect of lockdowns was considerably worse than COVID, such as one by Alberta’s Dr. Ari Joffe... It is also important that history judges lockdowns fairly. This is not only because truth is a virtue or because of the need for political accountability, but to ensure that groupthink and cancel culture do not drive our response to the next pandemic, or any other issue dealt with by government. We should entertain discussion instead of censoring opinion or punishing well-meaning professionals who offer opinion — we owe it to the lives lost to COVID-19 and the lives lost because of the government’s response to COVID-19."
Lockdowns only reduced COVID deaths by 0.2 per cent, Johns Hopkins study finds - "A new study out of Johns Hopkins University is claiming that worldwide pandemic lockdowns only prevented 0.2 per cent of COVID-19 deaths and were “not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic.” “We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality,” reads the paper, which is based on a review of 34 pre-existing COVID-19 studies. Given the “devastating effects” that lockdowns have caused, the authors recommended they be “rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.”... For context, 0.2 per cent of total Canadian COVID-19 fatalities thus far is equal to about 70 people. The impact of border closures was found to be even less effective, with death rates only going down about 0.1 per cent... “It made little sense to prevent young people from living normally because they are at very low risk of getting very sick, but have been very, very heavily hit by the impacts of lockdown”... it’s not the first study to pour cold water on the notion that lockdowns were a significant factor in saving lives during the pandemic. An April study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for instance, determined that U.S. “shelter-in-place” orders “had no detectable health benefits.” However, that study concluded that the policy failed mostly because Americans had already begun to follow social distancing protocols on their own... It will be years until researchers have a complete picture of the harms caused by lockdown policies, including damage to mental health and corresponding spikes in cancer and overdose fatalities. What is known, however, is the cost: Government-imposed lockdowns spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic have proved to be one of the most expensive single events in human history. In Canada alone, the first year of the pandemic yielded a $343 billion federal deficit driven largely by payments to workers unemployed by government-mandated closures of gyms, restaurants and other public spaces."
Covid hystericists will pretend this systematic review and meta-analysis doesn't exist
‘The harm done by lockdown will last for decades’ - "Heneghan: In healthcare, people like quick fixes. There are some amazing examples of them, like antibiotics, which can be silver bullets. When you look at lockdowns, they seem like such a simple intervention that will sort everything out. It’s as if magically, all of the cases will disappear. In reality, lockdowns are a kind of intervention that has not been tried before. The debate about them has become a political argument as opposed to an evidence-based one. That has created all sorts of issues, because it has allowed opinions to reign over evidence. In situations like that, we should not intervene with lockdowns. All healthcare interventions should start with the premise of ‘first, do no harm’. But the conversation about the balance of benefits and harms is not being had, even now. Lockdowns don’t really help in care homes or with hospital-acquired infections. Care homes and hospitals make up a big chunk of the caseload. The thinking is that lockdowns reduce the risk among young people and that this will aid the wider population. But if you build up immunity among the young, you get a better barrier against the spread of the virus through the rest of society. ‘Flattening the curve’ just slows down the transmission rate of the virus. It does not affect the overall attack rate. That means we have just prolonged the pandemic...
The collateral damage will start to emerge over the next two to five years. Clinically speaking, that is what has happened in previous pandemics like the Ebola crisis – it caused an upsurge in measles two years later, because it disrupted vaccination programmes. It’s similar with economics. We are borrowing a lot of money and at some point, somebody will have to switch the tap off. The longer all this goes on, the more the harms will accentuate. The anxiety instilled in the population is already so ingrained that even as we are opening up, many people remain highly fearful. We are going to be talking about the damage of lockdowns for decades to come. Will we try to bury it all, or will we think critically about what we did and how well it went?...
We have had so many interventions against Covid. Lockdowns. Social distancing. Masks. Test and trace. At some point, somebody is going to have to ask the question of which ones work. The case data suggests that not many of them do. It could be that test and trace works in certain situations. There is evidence to suggest that many young people, for example, are only contagious for 24 to 48 hours. They could probably self-isolate for a short time, fairly effectively. But once we make people self-isolate for 10 days, and make them do so on multiple occasions, the chances of them adhering to the rules obviously fall. What we need to do is find out how infectious people are. Otherwise, we will continue forcing people to self-isolate unnecessarily...
The situation reminds me of HIV in the 1980s and 1990s. There used to be adverts on TV about the virus, depicting tombstones. It was really scary. One day, the government decided to change the narrative, because it realised it had done more harm than good. I think that’s what’s going to happen with Covid. But we are still some way away from that."
Naimisha Forest - The Mystery of the Lockdowns - "How did countries make the momentous decision to shut down such vast – so-called “non-essential” – swathes of their economies, in many cases with still no end in sight? Politicians, desperate to fend off a potential public health disaster, say they took guidance from epidemiologists and other public health experts. But “When and How Did the Experts Decide that the COVID-19 Pandemic Justified a Lockdown?” asks political scientist Larry Arnhart. There was, after all, no precedent in the world history of previous pandemics for any such policy. Nor can Arnhart find any evidence that experts in the U.S. ever conducted a cost-benefit analysis for lockdowns, setting their likely enormous economic and social costs against their public health benefits. Nor were the lockdowns based on the pandemic plans developed by earlier U.S. administrations. The CDC’s 2017 pandemic guidelines, for example, insist on the need to balance economic and social costs against the public health benefits of pandemic actions. They mostly advocate social-distancing measures and nowhere, not even for the highest risk “Category 5” pandemics, do they support government-mandated lockdowns of “non-essential” sectors. The Trump administration’s March 2020 pandemic recommendations mainly followed this earlier guidance, giving the lead role to state and local governments. Then, suddenly, mandatory lockdowns emerge as the one crucial way to fight the pandemic, championed by mostly Democratic state governments, “experts” in the federal health bureaucracy, and the mainstream media – all without a jot of evidence, analysis, or backing in earlier policy guidance... says Angelo Codevilla in “The COVID Coup,” they represent a counteroffensive by frightened “neoliberal” ruling elites – “Davos Man” – to knock away civil liberties and strengthen the power of the state over an increasingly restive citizenry. Nutty right-wing conspiracy theories, you say? Perhaps. But consider the recent cross-country study by Christian Bjørnskov and Stefan Voight: “This Time is Different? – On the Use of Emergency Measures During the Corona Pandemic.” By May 10 this year, 99 governments, almost half of all sovereign states, had declared a state of emergency due to COVID-19. States of emergency typically reduce civil liberties and increase the powers of the executive at the expense of other branches of government. Bjørnskov and Voight study the factors that caused governments to declare states of emergency. Were governments motivated by the desire to save lives? Or by the opportunity to expand their powers? The authors create an index for the additional discretionary authority a government could gain by declaring an emergency, for example, by dissolving parliament, derogating from basic rights, confiscating property, or censoring the media. Their conclusion: “We find that the discretionary power [governments] gain during emergencies is the main determinant of whether they declared a state of emergency, while the severity of the epidemic is irrelevant. We also observe that the same governments are likely to misuse these powers against journalists and the media. The danger, as under previous disasters, is that some of the measures now implemented are likely to outlast the current pandemic and weaken the rule of law and democracies for many years to come.”"
It is a journalist’s duty to question lockdown - "After the first lockdown lifted, the cost of locking down was clear. The Bank of England announced that the UK was in the worst economic recession in 300 years. So you would think, during the third lockdown, that every single statistic the government issues to justify it would be crunched by a trained reporter, and printed on the same page as the death-toll graphs which are scaring the crap out of us. Like the vast majority of people, I was not anti-lockdown in March. I was not even ‘lockdown sceptical’ until November, when I had a very serious wake-up call as regards my duties as a journalist. This was because the Mail Online fact-checked the claims of an NHS healthcare assistant who was standing outside Truro cathedral with a microphone having ‘publicly resigned after claiming she had “no work to do for three weeks” at the peak of the pandemic’: ‘The total deaths from these three hospitals in seven months is 76 people’, she said. ‘That’s about 10 people a month over the past seven months, and we have locked down.’ The Mail Online then looked into what she was saying as regards where she had been working, and NHS figures showed that ‘67 people died from Covid-19 at Treliske hospital between March and September… there were just four people with the virus receiving care at the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust on October 29.’ It should not be up to random members of the public to cause scenes that go viral to have a journalist investigate their truth and print it in a newspaper. Understandably, many think questioning lockdown is as reprehensible now as it was in March. But asking questions and printing the answers (so the public can draw their own conclusions) is the whole point of journalism... In 2001, Ferguson’s models proved instrumental in the slaughter of more than six million cattle, sheep and pigs during an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. By 2003, this was estimated to have cost the UK ‘£3.1 billion to agriculture, including losses in export value, with similar losses to tourism and business of £2.7-3.2 billion’. In 2016, a Vet Times investigation concluded the cull ‘was based on a model that was crude and wrong… Wendy Vere, a West Country veterinarian, commented in the Devon Independent Inquiry: “It was carnage by computer.” Retrospective analysis showed the Imperial model was flawed. It is noteworthy that the report of the Royal Society’s inquiry, published after the outbreak, stated: “It is not satisfactory to rely on the development of models during an outbreak, or even to make other than minor modifications to existing research tools.”’ In 2009, Ferguson’s models ‘forecasted that 65,000 people in the UK could die of swine flu, which prompted the WHO’s issuing of a pandemic’. The eventual death toll was 457. His prediction for deaths from mad cow disease was 50,000, and the actual death toll… 177. Ferguson isn’t the only one manufacturing the ‘scenarios’ the government is basing its decisions on, but it was his ‘computer-modelled research that said more than 500,000 Britons would die without the national lockdown’. The chancellor Rishi Sunak has since spent £280 billion supporting jobs and businesses. The government is now so invested in the lockdown strategy that it is behaving like a reckless speculator who lost a colossal amount of money backing a bad investment, but who continues to raise the stakes in the hopes of winning big in the end. How else to translate the headline from last weekend’s Spectator: ‘“We’re going to have a great summer”: an interview with Matt Hancock.’ (Does the man have any clue what paying off a national debt higher than the one we ran up fighting the Second World War is going to do to NHS funding for the next 50 years, never mind kids whose parents can’t afford school meals?)... Why is a woman arrested on a bench in Bournemouth dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ for suggesting the threat of coronavirus is being used to control us? She’s simply articulating a point of view which most people will never hear because they’re deaf from fear."
Coronavirus UK: Independent scientists blast SAGE lockdown approach - "One of main justifications for first national shutdown in March was to protect NHS from being overwhelmed
All signs point to this not happening again, which raises questions about why second shutdown considered...
Keith Neal, emeritus professor of the epidemiology of infectious diseases at University of Nottingham, questioned why 'learning to live with the virus' had been taken off the table, adding he was in favour of the tactic"
From Oct 2020
Is the cost of another lockdown too high? | The Spectator - "At times, the argument about lockdown has been described as a choice between saving lives or saving money. But this is a false equivalence. A weak economy leads to weakened citizens: it means less tax revenue, less money for the NHS, and poorer families — wealth and health are all too-closely linked. Just look at the difference in height between Koreans, depending on which side of the 38th parallel their grandparents happened to be caught on. It’s easy to measure money, but it’s far harder to measure the indirect results of a richer or poorer economy. It’s also hard to work out how much money you should spend to save a life. Ban cars, and you’ll end road deaths. But you’d also hit the economy. So a balance has to be struck somewhere. This balance has been researched extensively at the University of Bristol, where we have developed the ‘J-value’ (‘J’ stands for ‘judgement’). It’s intended as an objective answer to the safety questions that arise from nuclear plants, railways and the infrastructure that improves our material lives — including in the NHS... If 250,000 people die — who have a mean age of 79 and who have two or more existing serious medical conditions — then this would be equivalent to 45,000 average lives being lost. There is no doubt that this would be a very bad outcome. However, it is less than 10 per cent of the loss of life the nation will incur by subjecting itself to a prolonged lockdown of the sort currently envisaged by the government. There is, besides, no guarantee that a second lockdown for England will work... Imagine if, for a treatment such as chemotherapy to work, it had to be applied to the population as a whole. Perhaps it would prolong the lives of many suffering from a deadly disease. But chemotherapy would be an awful thing to administer to patients who did not need it and bring life limiting effects to the otherwise healthy. Doctors would rightly reject the treatment as unethical. Today, unfortunately, the government does not seem to understand the point. The societal and health costs, when tallied in years to come, will be far worse than anyone in Parliament seems to realise. It is not too late to change tack."
From Nov 2020. Sadly they had two more lockdowns
Ontario and Quebec’s movie theatre shutdown is shameful - The Globe and Mail - "At this point in the Groundhog Day that is Canada’s pandemic, it is useless to apply logic to most any government action when it comes to the cultural sector. This new shutdown will mark the fourth time that Ontario has closed movie theatres since March, 2020, each instance absent public-facing data proving that cinemas are helping to spur the public-health crisis."
Ginny Roth: Rome is burning and we fiddle with lockdowns - "A rational assessment of the evidence makes it clear that the virus is predominantly spreading in environments such as warehouses and food-processing plants that are essential to the functioning of society. This feels inconvenient because it is. People can certainly do without haircuts, gym workouts and pints on the patio but, unfortunately, that does not mean that banning those activities will stop the virus in its tracks. It may feel gratifying to target people appearing to derive some joy from their lives despite our current circumstances (I can think of no other reason why the park-shamers persist), but measures that fiddle at the margins, like Ontario’s move last week to shut down restaurant patios shortly after re-opening them, will not get us out of this mess."
Lockdowns are political theatre
Kathryn Marshall: Lockdowns leave us all uneasy, where are all the Charter champions? - "I don’t think that anyone imagined that a year later we would still be living with this many restrictions that in some cases are more severe than the ones introduced during the first wave. Inertia is a significant culprit here. There has been little questioning, backlash and opposition to the restrictions. Given the chance to expand or scale back powers, governments will always choose the former. But choosing the former has always been subject to a healthy sense of “we probably shouldn’t overstep our bounds.” Now, there seems to be no boundaries. And this is a problem, especially given the deep impact these prolonged restrictions are having on people’s livelihoods, mental health and basic liberties. Thankfully, activism groups and liberty-minded lawyers have begun challenging some of the laws. The Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) recently brought an injunction against the Federal Government’s quarantine-hotel policy... Lawyer Ryan O’Connor has filed a number of constitutional challenges against some of the Ontario policies such as the closure of gyms and suspension of kids sports. O’Connor has argued that these policies have had a detrimental impact on people’s mental health and wellbeing, with sports and physical activity being an important outlet for people with anxiety, ADHD and depression. He pointed out the arbitrariness of some of the policies, given that professional athletes’ gyms could remain open but disabled-oriented gyms could not. He received a partial victory on the gym challenge when the government changed the legislation to permit these gyms to re-open. These are important efforts, but where, oh where, are all the other Charter champions? You know, the ones who are normally so vocal, especially when Stephen Harper was Prime Minister."
Mary Harrington on Twitter - "Unsettling to think that it’s in the commercial interests of the richest man in history for lockdowns to continue indefinitely across the West"
Lockdowns are 'the single biggest public health mistake in history', says top scientist - " Lockdowns will be seen as the "single biggest public health mistake" in history, a Stanford University professor has warned. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine... The epidemiologist believes many scientists have clung onto the perceived effectiveness of lockdowns, and they "remain attached" to the idea despite the "failure of this strategy"."
Chris Selley: Pro-lockdown or anti-lockdown, Canadians need to guard their freedoms - "Responding to a challenge by three churches in March, B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson “said the churches were entitled to know how the orders would allow someone to go into a bar and watch a hockey game for an hour or two but … prevent someone from sitting in a church for the same amount of time,” the Vancouver Sun reported. “How do I know what Dr. Henry is doing and why?” Hinkson trenchantly asked, echoing what so many of us — pro-lockdown, anti-lockdown, everyone in between — have been asking for 12 months. Hinkson eventually ruled that “although the impacts of the … orders on the religious petitioners’ rights are significant, the benefits to the objectives of the orders are even more so.” There was no other plausible outcome. When Canadian governments decide that extraordinary events justify limiting our rights, the courts almost always back them up. Even if it’s successfully appealed, the process can take years — too long to remedy the loss of freedom itself, or to prevent governments from doing the same in future. It is not too soon for us all to worry about that. However necessary Canada’s various anti-pandemic measures have been, our governments will not have failed to notice how gratefully most of us accepted them. They sure as heck noticed after 9/11. No one should trust those governments to deploy these unprecedented restrictions on everyday life in future fairly, or only when necessary, or only when we happen to agree with them. Religious freedom is certainly imperilled in Canada nowadays, and I am bemused by arguments to the contrary. The Ontario and British Columbia law societies refused to accredit graduates of Trinity Western University’s prospective law school because it insisted upon a Biblically informed student code of conduct, just as several highly regarded American law schools do, and the Supreme Court of Canada said that was fine... Religious freedom isn’t uniquely imperilled nowadays, obviously. Freedom of mobility? Good luck going to Newfoundland right now. Freedom of assembly and association? You can get arrested for that. On Thursday, two weeks after allowing Toronto restaurants to reopen their patios — too soon to have any reliable data on the subject — Ontario shut them down again. Canada’s pandemic-era rules could have been far harsher, and plenty of ostensibly freedom-loving Canadians were demanding it: Arrest people trying to go their cottages! Lock people in their apartment buildings! It worked in Australia! Victory at any cost! The most distressing aspect of the pandemic, from my point of view, has been watching people turn against each other’s rights based on their own preferences: No one needs to go to a restaurant, so anyone who goes to a restaurant is an idiot and a menace, and should suffer. No one needs to travel, so anyone who travels is an idiot and a menace, and should suffer. God is a superstition, so anyone who goes to church is an idiot and a menace, and should suffer. This is precisely what informed the public health restrictions, and precisely why they’re so incoherent: The restrictions weren’t what were “necessary,” but rather what people would support. As an epidemiological exercise, that’s defensible: The goal is maximum limitation of human interactions, and the best way to achieve it is the way that works best. As a long-term societal proposition, however, it’s terrifying."
How the lockdown lobby rewrote history - "A bizarre Covid-19 conspiracy theory appears to have taken root among the epidemiologists and public-health officials who still support lockdowns. According to their claims, the UK government’s pandemic response was secretly captured at some point in the autumn of 2020 by lockdown critics – including Great Barrington Declaration co-author Sunetra Gupta, her Oxford colleague Carl Heneghan, and Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell."
It's only "disinformation" when it hurts the left
Is It Okay to Have a Party Yet? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: So here’s the thing: I wonder if we’re being idiots for having this party, because when you think about risk and reward — obviously there are vaccines, and everyone at this party will be vaccinated. But then I’m concerned that those people — many of them are younger people — will go home to parents and grandparents and I feel deeply conflicted about this, and I wonder if you have any advice for me.
JENA: Yeah, I understand and I’ll tell you we’re facing the same dilemma ourselves. Our daughter just turned seven this month. And we were deciding whether or not to have a tea party in the house, because she just got vaccinated."
The pandemic will never be over, since even if everyone at a party is vaccinated, you can't have one, and there will always be unvaccinated people
Anthony Fauci visited gay saunas and bars to help understand how AIDS was spreading - "Fauci said there is a “stark contrast” between COVID-deniers who have sent him death threats throughout the coronavirus pandemic and the AIDS activists who protested against him in the 80s. “The activists were justified in their concerns that the government, even though they weren’t doing it deliberately, were not actually giving them a seat at the table to be able to have their own input into things that would ultimately affect their lives,” Fauci said. “So even though they were very theatrical – they were very iconoclastic – they seemed like they were threatening, but never for a single moment did I ever feel myself threatened by the AIDS activists.” Anthony Fauci went on to say that AIDS activists were “right” in their belief that the federal government was not listening to their “valid concerns” about the epidemic. “Not only were they not threatening at all in a violent way, ultimately they were on the right side of history”"
Who knows what they'll be saying in 40 years? Judging "history" in the moment is the height of arrogance
Clown World Today 🤡🌎 on Twitter - "🤡🌎 Pfizer tells children taking the vaccine makes them “superheroes”"
Anti-vaxxers bribe doctors for fake vaccines in Greece, end up receiving real doses - "an anti-vaxxer from Melbourne was caught trying to sell a prosthetic arm online for people wanting to avoid the mandatory Covid-19 vaccination."
South Korea ‘Untact’ Plans for the Post-Pandemic Economy - Bloomberg - "South Korea is making a national push to reshape its economy around a concept called “untact.” Developed by a group of local consumer science gurus in 2017, untact envisions a future where people increasingly interact online and companies replace humans with machines to immunize themselves against the effects of rising wages and a rapidly aging workforce."
Researchers Warn Some Covid-19 Vaccines Could Increase Risk Of HIV Infection
