The Covidocracy doesn’t care what people suffer from as long as that suffering isn’t caused directly by Covid-19. This attitude, my friends, is Covid Derangement Syndrome.
Starting at around the 18-minute, 40-second mark, David Brody talks with Jay Bhattacharya, including about the Delta variant. (By the way, this interview, sadly, is no longer available on YouTube.)
Omar Khan speaks with Sunetra Gupta.
Nine months after the Great Barrington Declaration was ridiculed for attacking a straw man, the straw man continues his calamitous global romping…. including, still, in the once-free country of Great Britain.
No one should have any sympathy for hypocritical covidocrats who so cruelly obstructed our humanity. A slice:
Mr [Matt] Hancock has always been one of the most emphatic for the rules. In internal government debates, he has invariably pushed for the toughest restrictions and wanted 10-year jail sentences as a penalty for trying to dodge draconian quarantine rules. “I make no apologies for the strength of these measures,” he said: they’d target a “minority who don’t want to follow the rules.” Who, presumably, he thinks, deserve everything coming their way. When two women were fined by police for walking together, Mr Hancock was unforgiving. “Every time you try to flex the rules,’ he said, “that could be fatal”.
Like Neil Ferguson’s tryst with his lover last year and Dominic Cummings’ notorious road trip to Barnard Castle, the Hancock imbroglio will be a bookmark in the Covid-19 story. The first two scandals were broadly forgiven after the vaccine success: a great many mistakes made last year, by every country in the world. But the vaccination programmes were supposed to pave the way back to normality. Things are safe, which is why ministers are acting normally. But the public is not (yet) allowed to carry on as before. Politically, it’s a sensitive mix.
At the start of the pandemic, ministers were astonished how closely people followed the rules. The first lockdown was delayed, in part, because it was argued that Britons would tire of restrictions after a few weeks. It might not have taken long for “lockdown fatigue” to overcome those making the rules, but the public went through months of sacrifice – even if studies suggested that stay-at-home diktats were far more than was needed to force back the virus. The bans on intimacy, even guidance on hugging: very little of that was based on science.
Stuart Ritchie is beginning to doubt the seriousness of Long Covid. A slice:
Still, as the medical scientist Adam Gaffney has argued, it’s likely that some substantial proportion of people reporting Long Covid are actually people who’ve never had the virus. Which might help us understand why the numbers on Long Covid are so weird. Some sources argue that “10-30%” of people who have had a Covid infection go on to experience it — which is itself already quite a range. But look at a UK study released this week (which hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed and is in preprint form). The researchers — some of whom are colleagues of mine — were able to dig into electronic health records from the NHS, and produced a startling figure. Of the 1,199,812 people they found who’d had a positive test for Covid, been hospitalised for Covid or been otherwise diagnosed with Covid, just 3,327 had also reported Long Covid — that’s 0.27%, a different universe from the other numbers.
Amelia Janaskie and Ryan Yonk survey some studies on excess deaths and Covid lockdowns.
Tell me again why Australia deserves applause for its response to Covid.
