Not ‘essential’ …

 

Over the weekend an important government document came to light – details below – but there were also ‘interventions’ from the usual suspects. Together with this morning’s CoronaVirus articles there’s one diagnosis we can make already: this whole, unprecedented Lockdown mess has been and is driven by the MSM and Whitehall Mandarins. 

But firstly, readers of RemainCentral were presented with a beautiful reminder that Remain is alive and kicking, CV-19 Lockdown or not. The headline now reads “Public wants Boris Johnson to delay trade talks as coronavirus halts work on Brexit” (link, paywalled) – yesterday morning it was “The People” want a delay. I think I better start taking screenshots, given the rash of post-publication editing now taking place in the MSM! This ‘demand’ was based on a poll:

“A Focaldata poll, commissioned by the campaign groups Best for Britain and Hope Not Hate, found that 64% of voters want Johnson to “request an extension to the transition period in order to focus properly on the coronavirus”. A majority of voters in every age group backed a delay, with 18 to 24-year-olds the most supportive (78%) and the over-65s the least supportive (52%). Some 44% of those who voted Conservative at the last election want the government to delay.” (link, paywalled)

‘Hope not hate’ speak for ‘The People’? Really? The usual “Whitehall Source” and ‘a senior EU Official’ were also quoted, saying that an extension was a must. As it’s Monday morning, I think we ought to start the week with a laugh, so watch this video on how to conduct polls …

Next, there was the edifying spectacle of a certain Tony Blair telling the PM what to do. He says testing ‘must be massively ramped up’ (link). By ‘massively ramping up’ Blair apparently means every Brit must be tested, and given the number of tests so far, that could take 50 years (link). I didn’t watch that Marr Show, forgive me, so I don’t know if Blair was asked about Foot-and-Mouth. 

Other articles today in the MSM are again into the now well-worn exercise of demanding ‘tests-tests-tests’ because the WHO said this was vital. At the same time we’re served with yet another lot of ‘compare and contrast’ reports about death rates. While some, even Michael Gove, are cautiously criticising the Chinese data (link), our MSM are still comparing bananas with carrots.

Interestingly though, while praising S.Korea, Singapore and Sweden for their ‘success’ without any thought that their societies are rather different from ours they never mention Taiwan – one wonders why … There’s even a Labour MP who demands Johnson remain in 14-day according to ‘WHO Rulz’. She’s a doctor, dontcha know, and obeying rules coming from a ‘higher authority’ is in Labour’s DNA.

Another ‘higher authority’ is Jenny Harries, the deputy chief medical officer for England. She told the Nation at yesterday’s government press conference that the current measures, especially on social distancing, could be in place for six months and could go further (link, also link paywalled).

Meanwhile, Germany – and we surely must believe them when they say they’ve been testing massively! – is planning to introduce that antibody test, combined with giving people ‘certificates’ when they’ve been proven to be immune (link).

There’s not one sentence in that whole article that our government is planning to do just that, with these tests being made available on a mass basis ‘soon’. That however would not fit the ‘narrative’ – the narrative that we must be very afraid, that the government isn’t doing enough, and that we’re all gonna die.

The Times found another scientist who was involved in that model-making on which Johnson based his Lockdown, who now says that the previous predictions were being overtaken by ‘events’ and it’s ‘worse than we thought’:

“Tom Pike, from Imperial College, had calculated the likely total death rate by assuming that the outbreak in Britain would follow a similar trajectory to that seen in Wuhan, China. His paper predicted that at its highest, Britain would have 260 deaths a day. That number was reached over the weekend. He said that this changed the results entirely. […] Professor Pike said “[…] If we don’t regain the Wuhan trajectory, each day we are building up more deaths. It’s a very dangerous state to be in.” Deaths seen in wards today represent infections that were caught several weeks ago, before the imposition of a lockdown. Because of this, the most recent measures only show success after a lag.” (link, paywalled)

What extraordinary language: ‘building up more deaths’! As if ‘we’ do this on purpose! Apparently, this lag wasn’t factored into their model … More importantly – are all deaths being tested, and are they recording ‘deaths because of CV-19’, or ‘deaths with CV19’, which is a different kettle of fish?

Let me briefly recommend two critical reports on ‘numbers’. One is by facts4eu, here, looking at CV-19 deaths v ‘expected deaths’ for this time period, producing a stunning graph. The other report is from the Brookings Institute – here – where CV-19 deaths are also compared to ‘normal’ deaths. It’s as if for the MSM there are only CV-19 deaths now.

You might have noticed that the scientist quoted by The Times is not the one (Neil Ferguson) who was so often ot telly. Well, he is self-isolating, but two journalists at the DT have taken a closer look at his career and found some remarkable things which put a giant question mark on that Lockdown Model:

“It has now emerged that Ferguson has been criticised in the past for making predictions based on allegedly faulty assumptions which nevertheless shaped government strategies and impacted the UK economy. He was behind disputed research that sparked the mass culling of farm animals during the 2001 epidemic of foot and mouth disease, a crisis which cost the country billions of pounds. And separately he also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die from bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or ‘mad cow disease’) and its equivalent in sheep if it made the leap to humans. To date there have been fewer than 200 deaths from the human form of BSE and none resulting from sheep to human transmission.” (link)

Read the whole thing! I cannot believe that nobody in Whitehall was aware of the critical reports! I also find it astounding that government advisers still follow that ‘kill them all’, now ‘lock them all up’ advice, unquestioning. I well remember the foot-and-mouth outbreak, that silent spring. Now we’re being forced to observe this year’s spring in silence as well.

There’s more. The DT has unearthed a government document. It’s about a ‘war game’, an exercise on preparedness in the face of a pandemic:

“Code-named Exercise Cygnus, it took place in October 2016 and involved all major government departments, the NHS and local authorities across Britain. […] The findings of Exercise Cygnus remain classified with officials citing “biosecurity concerns” and a desire not to frighten the public as a reason for keeping the documents secret. “There has been a reluctance to put Cygnus out in the public domain because frankly it would terrify people,” one senior official added. More than a thousand separate organisations took part in the cross-government exercise in October 2016 including NHS trusts, the military and the British Medical Association.” (link)

So let’s cast our minds back: what was happening in 2016? Who was the PM? Correct: there was Brexit, it was MS May who had just become PM, relinquishing her job at the Home Office – and there was this other ‘Project Fear’ which we all remember so well. Apparently, Whitehall thought that burdening us poor peasants with more ‘fear’ would be too much. Here’s another interesting quote:

“These gaps, which included a shortage of ICU beds and PPE, were revealed at a time of austerity. […] A spokeswoman for Jeremy Hunt, the then health secretary, insisted : “Jeremy was acutely aware the NHS needed more capacity which is why he fought for and secured an £8 bn and then a £20bn increase in the NHS annual budget during that period, […]” (link)

So money was given – but where did it go? Was there no accounting, no oversight by the Treasury? I’m sure Labour and the MSM would have been onto this result like hawks, right? Why weren’t they? Did they think the money was better spent on ‘gender reassignment’? What about this:

“Throwing money at the problem was not necessarily the solution. “The NHS eats up money.  It’s a bottomless pit,” said a senior former government source. “We were in a time of austerity and it wasn’t easy.” (link)

So what was ‘the solution’ and why didn’t it happen? Is it because nobody must criticise ‘Our NHS’? My cynical view is that Mandarins using the term  ‘austerity’ do so to cover their own inadequacies while politicians use it to score political points. Here’s a final quote which is remarkable because it shows that not all Mandarins were ‘fond’ of the models, provided by the same people who provided the Lockdown model:

“There was also cynicism across Whitehall about the epidemiological modeling. The previous chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, ended his term under something of a cloud when the 2009 H1N1 (Swine Flu) pandemic proved a damp squib relative to the initial modelling. The same view was taken of forecasting of the 2013–2016 west african Ebola outbreak.“ (link)

But now we must believe ‘Teh Science’ and those modellers and trash our economy and way of life? I leave you with this report on our lives under police surveillance where the zeal of police and council officials knows no bounds:

“In several parts of the country, reports have emerged of police and environmental health officers trying to stop shopkeepers from selling certain products they deem non-essential, such as Easter eggs.” (link, paywalled)

Words fail me! This is Lockdown Britain: everybody is a suspect, everybody must cower indoors while food rationing has been outsourced to grocery stores. People are expected to trudge daily to local shops instead. Will the police and council officials now also check our bags, to see that it is ‘essential’? No Easter Eggs …

Use the time you have to look for critical reports, write about your finds, keep safe, avoid the police, wash yer hands and as always

 

KBO!

 

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