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Some Covid Links

Sarah Knapton, Science Editor for the Telegraph, reports that “Britain’s Covid experts ‘abandoned their objectivity and misled with alarming models’.” Two slices:

Scientists abandoned their objectivity, “misled” with alarming models and failed to appreciate the damage lockdown would cause, a government adviser has claimed in a damning indictment of Britain’s pandemic response.

Prof Mark Woolhouse, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M), said that the Government’s advisory system was dominated by clinicians and public health specialists who “weren’t looking at the bigger picture”.

In his memoir, The Year The World Went Mad, Prof Woolhouse claimed that lockdowns “had surprisingly little effect” and just “deferred the problem to another day, at great cost”.

He argued that Spi-M was set up to tackle the wrong disease, influenza, and that early models were based on flu dynamics, and so mistakenly thought schools were a major driver while underrepresenting the impact of shielding.

Prof Woolhouse says he was “extremely sceptical” about the Imperial College report from March 16 2020 that claimed more than 500,000 people could die without intervention, but The Telegraph revealed last week that, at the time, modellers were still “uncertain” of case numbers “due to data limitations”.

The figures, published a week before lockdown was announced, led to an about-turn from the Government.

…..

Prof Woolhouse also said it was an “awkward” truth that the people who benefited most from suppression of the virus, such as the elderly and vulnerable, were not the group that suffered most from the impact of lockdown: young people and low-income workers.

Hong Kong’s deranged pursuit of “zero Covid” isn’t working out so well (and so the straw man might pay a citywide visit).

Thank goodness for this: “Justin Trudeau’s approval ratings slump over Covid trucker protests crackdown.”

Laura Dodsworth decries the “moral cruelty of the pandemic response.” Four slices:

When we angrily refused the idea of herd immunity, we offered ourselves up on the altar of behavioural science to herd psychology. Unable to face one fact of nature, we made ourselves blind to the exploitation of our own nature.

The [British] government was nervous that the population would not follow the draconian lockdown rules and posed a question to the SPI-B advisors: “What are the options for increasing adherence to the social distancing measures?” And this is when SPI-B famously recommended that

“the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”

…..

When the pandemic is done, some will brush off the harms inflicted during the response to Covid with an embarrassed laugh. They might pretend that they were never part of it. New high ground will be sought in hindsight. The danger that follows is in conveniently relapsing into a woolly-headed collective amnesia. But evil deeds do not belong in the past, they are our present and our future, and this is why it is essential to consider why it is in our nature to perpetuate cycles of foolishness and cruelty.

…..

Fortunately during Covid we have not endured the depth and scale of the horrors inflicted by Stalin, Mao Zedong or Hitler. Countries battled through a virus as best they could, but there were penalties, cruelties and mistakes. Remarkably, we traded liberty for a sense of security (the transactional value was never guaranteed) and criminalised activities which should be far beyond the interest of the law or government. Children were deprived of education. Women birthed alone. People died alone. Jobs and businesses were lost. Much of this was not necessary, and was not included in previous pandemic plans for good reason. Bodily autonomy and freedom of medical choice were nearly forsaken. In the developing world the consequences were devastating and even more out of scale with the threat.

…..

The question of human relationships and the cohesion of society is an urgent one. Not everyone will agree we have experienced mass hysteria on an almost global scale, but most will accept we are acutely divided on political and social fault lines. Human isolation renders us vulnerable to mass hysteria but also to the mass State which feeds upon atomised social units. To counter the danger we need to give thought to the human relationship from a psychological perspective. Not the cold, calculated view of the behavioural psychologist that predicts, anticipates and shapes behaviour, but the bonds of affection and genuine meaning that arise in a free society. Where love stops, power, violence and terror begin.

Do you still doubt that Covid hysteria has unleashed both tyranny and a dystopian battering of science? If so, read this:

Six U.S. doctors have had their licenses suspended and 18 more threatened as they are accused of spreading misinformation about COVID-19. The action comes amidst concern that their claims are generating mistrust in officially sanctioned health measures used to combat the pandemic.

By the end of 2021, TrialSite reported that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advised the Federation of State Medical Boards to monitor doctors behavior more closely regarding their prescriptions of early off-label treatments for COVID.

Before the December FDA to Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) communication, by August 2021, the FSMB issued a statement indicating that they would suspend or revoke the licenses of physicians who spread misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.

Theo Jordan tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

A tolerance for “noble lies” from the same people censoring “misinformation” is a truly dangerous cocktail.

In response to an apparent criticism of Ron DeSantis by one of the students to whom the governor gave permission to remove his mask, el gato malo observes:

there is nothing sadder than seeing a free dog begging for the leash.

breaks your heart.

Here’s more brilliance from the Babylon Bee: “Americans Who Cowered Under Government Oppression For 2 Years Urge Ukrainians To Die For Freedom.”