rick said:
Where do you find these pictures Marigold?! The perfect meme!
On the radio this morning there was a scientist - Prof Gupta (didn't catch her first name) who was really questioning if we would have been worse off shielding the vulnerable (now with a vaccine in the tool box) and letting it go in the wider population to reach 'herd immunity' faster. That phrase is really unfortunate - was never going to be a politically savvy stance. She also seemed to think that there are other ways to interpret the data than the new variant being 3 times more transmissible - who knows? - unless we read the published papers on the subject and pick apart the finer nuances of what is in the current science.
I do think that there has been a fair bit of political cherry picking of whatever snippet of 'the science' fits the mood along the way.
Anyway, I liked Prof Gupta - whether she was right or wrong she was frankly giving her honest, and directly informed, opinion which is brave and rare of late.
Sunetra Gupta one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, https://gbdeclaration.org
She and the 13,000 other medical and public health scientists who have signed it have been portrayed as dangerous cranks, despite having much greater expertise in the fields of epidemiology and virology than SAGE and most of the other bodies advising Western governments. Of course this is to be expected. When you embark on a policy that is clearly ruinous on many levels, then the only hope you have of not being damned for your actions is to present it as "the only way to save lives". To do that you must prevent any other course of action from being undertaken in case it does in fact save lives and exposes your previous statement as a fallacy. So we will be having lockdowns and lockdowns only as a solution because the reputations of Chris Whitty, Patrick Valance, Imperial, SAGE and most importantly, the government depend on it. Personally I'm not a huge fan of the herd immunity argument, but I do believe that shielding should be given a go in place of lockdown, lets face it a huge amount of people have already been doing just that.
Throughout the data has indeed been cherry picked to justify the measures. Here is a PHE graph of excess mortality from the past five years.
The large spike occurs in March of this year and coincides with the criminal policy of discharging covid patients into care homes causing 20,000 excess deaths. Beyond that the curve follows the pattern of previous years, with excess deaths this December not discernibly different from 2016 and 2017. You will notice that by March of both years, that excess deaths had dropped and curve smoothed. That occurred without a lockdown. This year, in March, they will show the graph for THIS YEAR ONLY, point out the rise in December, the fall through February and March and will proudly proclaim that it is the result of lockdown.
This graph shows deaths in Sweden this year versus their 5 year average.
You will notice they also have a large spike in March. They also allowed Covid to enter their care home system as we did. Those care home deaths account for almost all of the excess Covid deaths they suffered compared to their Scandinavian neighbours, who did a much better job of sealing off care homes from the virus.
As we know, Sweden was the one country in Europe that did not institute a lockdown, and yet, lo and behold their excess deaths fall away in the same way that ours, and every other nation in Europe did. It might be reasonable to suppose then, that it was not an organised national lockdown that brought the disease under control in the spring. What the Swedes did in fact do, was unofficially shield.
However, you may as well bark at the moon, what chance does hard data stand against slogans such as "save granny". I think we would all like to "save granny" but I think some of us would like to do it without bankrupting the country and cancelling cancer screening/treatment. It would be good to "save granny" without causing god knows what damage to mental health, depriving kids of an education and putting their parents out of work.
I think the most depressing thing has been the inaction of the media on probing the government. Only Talk Radio, which was briefly subject to censorship yesterday before youtube realised their folly, has probed the figures and the policy put forward by the government. Now we hear Chris Whitty telling us there will be restrictions next winter too and there are news reports circulating that say the South African variant of Covid may become vaccine resistant. All of the eggs have gone into the vaccine basket, but if this virus morphs every year like flu, then what?.
Boring essay/rant concluded for anyone who even made it this far down the page.
