As for the intoxication of power: Boris, Matt Hancock and their cronies – and similar teams in many other countries – seem to me to be taking far too much pleasure in having us dance almost daily to changes in the Covid lockdown tune. Cancelling Christmas, and maybe Easter, rarely acknowledging uncertainties in the science, sending in thought police to discipline doctors who challenge vaccine orthodoxy, making 100-year-olds spend their last months and hours in Room 101… these are just a few of countless examples.
Here’s Ethan Yang on unfreezing the economy after the lockdowns.
David McGrogan asks “Where did our human rights go?”
David Redman and Ramesh Thakur reflect on a year of living with Covid-19. A slice:
After a year’s experience of COVID-19 worldwide, the continuing hold of discredited mathematical models regarding lockdowns remain. As well, it is increasingly evident that medical specialists put in charge of public policy ignored existing pandemic preparedness plans, for better or worse.
Hugh Willbourn reflects on recent correspondence between Neil Ferguson and some who question the efficacy of lockdowns. Here’s Willbourn’s wise conclusion:
It is time to mourn our losses, to learn how to make better decisions in the future, to let go of fear and to acknowledge that we cannot eliminate risk, nor death, from life. When we remember we are going to die it may make us all a little braver while we live.
“A series of unfortunate experiments.”
Omar S. Khan rightly labels the narrative of the past year as “diseased.” Two slices:
When the Wuhan death videos, almost certainly “doctored” in retrospect, having seen no equivalent situation anywhere in the world, looking almost absurdly surreal today, relating to this alleged scourge, went viral, and well before there was any factual basis for existential panic (nor has any been forthcoming since), the world geared up to shut down. It was well before any surges, and it was exacerbated by the manic, fevered modeling fervor of SAGE and its persistently, consistently, inaccurate prognosticator, Neil Ferguson, who almost never fails to demonstrate that “accuracy” is clearly not a criterion for legitimacy in UK government circles.
Models can be terrifying, and indeed some “milestones” or “markers” could have been established with Plan A, B, and C, ready to go. Instead “blow up the planet” was opted for, on the basis of conjecture. And competing models or analyses coming out of Stanford, or indeed approaches like Total Harm Minimization coming out Yale, were all sidelined if not swatted away. Why? What was the motivation for being so mindlessly alarmist?
…..
Again, we are left wondering why? Never in medical history was there a precedent for repeatedly testing the healthy. Never was a “case” defined as being symptom-free. But to create global panic, this was necessary, in addition to unremitting flashing of COVID stats from a media base that capitulated, kowtowed, and became advocates for the panic porn, underwriters of the orthodoxy.
