Now in it fourth month of Lockdown, the UK government seems to be caught between a rock and hard place. They are so deeply invested in their initial Coronavirus narrative and reactionary policy measures, that to pull back now would mean admitting that they were wrong to begin with. For today’s new breed of self-inflated, social media-obsessed narcissistic political operatives, admitting that you were partly responsibly for cratering your country’s economy and ruining tens of millions of lives (all based on a wild guess), if a fate worse than mortality itself.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson says that the Government is satisfied that Britain has passed the “five tests” required to safely lift the draconian lockdown measures, but despite this, the government can’t join the rest of the world and be done with the disintegrating lockdown logic, because he “cannot, and will not, throw away all the gains we have made together,” ostensibly by opening up society and the economy too quickly.
Boris still stands by his latest decree, ‘allowing’ people to meet up in groups of up to six, but only if it’s happening outdoors, and only then if social distancing is being observed, with people staying two metres apart. But if you venture out into the real world, you’ll quickly discover that very few people are talking any notice of the government’s Orwellian social engineering rules. That’s because with each passing day, fewer and fewer people are buying the ‘pandemic’ narrative.
Recently, the Oxford-based Centre for Evidence Based Medicine revealed that there is an scientific basis for scared “two metre rule” of social distancing. Professors Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson found that there’s little if any evidence to support such arbitrary “formalised rules.” Again, the governments simply invented these measures and then tried to pass them of a part of “The Science.”
Just this week, the UK government had to abandon its much-celebrated Contact Tracing App, a surveillance tool designed to track and trace the movements of anyone who downloaded the government issued App. As it turned out, very few people obliged the government’s pleas, and those that did have complained about the technical limitations, particularly with Apple iPhones. Back to the drawing board.
And despite that fact that the general public were never actually at any serious risk of falling ill with COVID-19, the government and its compliant institutions are still operating on the false belief that this respiratory virus poses some universal threat to the public. It doesn’t. By now, it is already very well-known based on the real data and the experience of European countries, that the virus is seasonal and has already ‘left the building.’ On top of this, it’s also well known that the only demographic at any real serious risk has been the elderly persons with multiple chronic comorbidities, and more specifically, those who are residing in nursing/care homes.
It’s really an extraordinary state of affairs, but hardly surprising. This is what politics has largely become in the 21st century – a corrupt technocracy, effectively couched in a single party autocracy.
Daily Telegraph Columnist columnist Sherelle Jacobs explains the dilemma very well…
We have arrived at one of the most dangerous points in the pandemic. With the economy on fire and second wave paranoia seared into the nation’s psyche, our leaders need to get a grip. Although there is some evidence to suggest the virus is running itself out in the Northern hemisphere, it may well be here to stay. The risk of another lockdown some time in the future, therefore, looms large. Not least because mass hysteria, incubated by a leadership vacuum and overheating modelling, can spread faster than the virus, as we have learned.
To prevent a disastrous rerun, good basic science needs to be put in place, and the public must be engaged in an adult debate trade-offs and the reality that we may never “beat” Covid-19.
Instead, Britain’s politicians and scientists find themselves locked in a lie: that No 10’s strategy is to dutifully follow that plodding, mysterious monolith, The Science.
This nonsensical concept has proved useful for responsibility-shirking politicians. But the myth of officially-approved scientific truth is not only cynical but dangerous.
It is the main reason why No 10 can’t ditch its most disastrous policy, the two-metre rule. As the Government has spent months pretending to prostrate to the wisdom of Sir Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, who have both championed two metres, No 10 has found it impossible to quietly drop the moronic regulation: while it dithers over a time-wasting review of the decision, false rumours have even swirled that its two chief scientific advisers could resign in protest.
The Science is also a blockage to frank national conversation about controversial scientific matters. With scientists probing whether Norway and Germany have experienced fewer deaths because of innate “black matter” natural resistance, we should be exploring the situation in Britain as openly as possible. Instead, since the initial herd immunity controversy, politicians have dropped the subject like a hot potato.
Alarmingly, the myth of politicians deferring to The Science has put lead experts on the defensive at a time we need them to be adaptive and proactive. Sage is embroiled in an ugly defensive war against politicians. In some cases, its experts have been right to pipe up.
Writing in the Telegraph, Vallance recently stressed that the role of Sage is to give advice, not decide policy. He has sought to make it clear when policy dissents from the advice – for example, he has refused to fully back the Home Office’s quarantine policy.
Still, one wonders whether the experts are more interested in rewriting history than dissecting reality. Perhaps because doing the latter would amount to admitting one of the most astronomic scientific errors ever, Sage has refused to tap the small handful of world-class modellers who actually know what they are doing.
These thinkers seem to be successfully forecasting the pandemic’s course from Brazil to Britain using good statistical techniques supported by data rather than assumptions. Some even seek to extrapolate from the data whether the virus has a mathematical form, which could make its future path predictable. Given that Britain is supposed to have led the world on modelling for this pandemic, Sage’s attitude is a scandal.
And far from leading a frank national conversation about how better to protect the vulnerable, the scientists seem all too eager to shift the blame for cockups onto bureaucratic leviathans like Public Health England. This is particularly galling. Although Sage discussed signs the virus was nosociomal (ie occurring in hospitals) before lockdown, it seemingly failed to follow the evidence to its natural conclusion: that locking down made no sense, based on the limited data about where the virus was actually spreading.
The response of other countries is putting Britain to shame. Norway has conceded its lockdown was probably pointless. France’s chief scientific adviser has said the country must never lock down again. After its experts failed to push vigorously enough for a mass testing strategy at the start of the pandemic, Macron has set up a second scientific advice committee focused on operational issues.
Despite becoming a national hero over Greece’s swift lockdown, physiologist in chief, Sotiris Tsiodras, is furiously wrangling with Greece’s track and trace deficiencies. Spain’s hoarse-voiced chief scientist Fernando Simon has gone from foghorning draconian stay-at-home orders to rasping about personal responsibility. Meanwhile, Germany has sought official advice from philosophers and theologians to tackle the ethical dilemmas of lifting its stay-at-home order while protecting the vulnerable.
Disturbingly, Britain has more in common with China, which is also trapped in a lockdown lie; to distract from the country’s catastrophic role in the pandemic, it has been eager to spin the narrative that, while Europe sputters, China has strangled the virus. Now the CCP is stuck in a vicious cycle, risking huge economic disruption as it overreacts to “stamp out” a small uptick in cases in Beijing.
Which brings us to a devastating truth: what is happening in this country is not some bumbling British shambles. It is a devious meeting of science and political misinformation, and it puts us on a deeply worrying path.
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