Happy Christmas
For the past three days we’ve publishing a pared down version of Lockdown Sceptics so we can have a bit of time off over Christmas. Cartoonist Bob Moran has very kindly given us three original cartoons which we’re running on consecutive days.
Happy Christmas to all our readers. Thanks for all your links, stories and suggestions, as well as your comments below the line and in the forums. Lockdown Sceptics is a collaboration between our small team, the writers who contribute original material, and the readers who post comments or send emails to us at lockdownsceptics@gmail.com. To date, we’ve had over 21,000 emails and we do our best to read them all.
Back in April, when I set up this blog, I imagined I’d be signing off about now. Turns out, that was naive. God knows when this madness will end, but at least there are some comforts in this digital camaraderie. Readers often get in touch to say Lockdown Sceptics has kept them sane. The feeling’s mutual.
Neil Ferguson: I was inspired by Communist China
Professor Lockdown gave an interview to yesterday’s Times in which he revealed that China’s lockdowns in January inspired him to push for more draconian measures in the UK than he had initially thought possible. Freddie Sayers in UnHerd has more.
Professor Neil Ferguson has given an extraordinary interview to Tom Whipple at The Times, in which he confirms the degree to which he believes that imitating China’s lockdown policies at the start of 2020 changed the parameters of what Western societies consider acceptable.
“I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March,” Professor Ferguson says. When SAGE observed the “innovative intervention” out of China, of locking entire communities down and not permitting them to leave their homes, they initially presumed it would not be an available option in a liberal Western democracy: “It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”
He almost seems at pains to emphasise the Chinese derivation of the lockdown concept, returning to it later in the interview:
“These days, lockdown feels inevitable. It was, he reminds me, anything but. ‘If China had not done it,’ he says, ‘the year would have been very different.’”
To those people who, still now, object to lockdowns on civil liberties principles, this will be a chilling reminder of the centrality of the authoritarian Chinese model in influencing global policy in this historic year.
When lockdown critics like Dan Hannan claimed that the lockdown policies of Western governments were inspired by China’s illiberal response he was accused of political point-scoring. So it’s good to have it from the horse’s mouth.
Stop Press: A joint investigation by the New York Times and Politico has revealed the extent of China’s efforts to censor social media at the beginning of the pandemic, hoping to conceal its role in triggering the global crisis. Were the architects of the West’s lockdowns inspired by that policy too?
Stop Press 2: We’re publishing an original piece today entitled “When Did Scientists Turn Into Lobbyists?” about the ‘open letter’ that circulated in mid-March, supposedly by scientists (but mainly signed by mathematicians), urging the Government to go for a full lockdown. The author is an academic scientist who doesn’t want his name to be published.
Another Dodgy PCR Test Result
We get a lot of these stories at Lockdown Sceptics. As this reader says, whether you get a positive or a negative result from a PCR test is a bit of a coin toss.
Over Christmas, a family friend told me that he had recently been offered two tests – one for himself and one for his severely disabled son.
The son will not brush his own teeth without a fight, let alone accept a nasal swab, so our friend decided to take both tests himself. He took one test immediately after the other, and sent the tests off under the separate names.
Can you guess the results? One test was negative and the other test was positive! A 50:50 split from the same sample. Go figure.
Neither party had shown any symptoms of course. The son required a negative result to be allowed back into his special care facility after the holidays. Worryingly, it was ‘his’ test that was positive.
Our friend cannot work full time and/or look after his son 24/7 without specialist support, which has now been totally withdrawn for two weeks.
Not only is this PCR test completely arbitrary (it’s essentially a coin toss), it is actively putting vulnerable lives at risk.
We Fought the Law and the Law… Didn’t Win
A heart-warming Christmas story from a reader about how he and his family managed to celebrate in spite of all the restrictions.
Despite the insanity we managed to have a fairly normal Christmas with our family, who live 180 miles away, simply by ignoring all of it. We loaded up the car on Wednesday with dogs, presents and luggage and set out from our Welsh detention camp to my brother-in-law’s house in Suffolk. Once there we had dinner with them and their friends, spent Christmas Eve at our niece’s house and spent Christmas Day with the entire extended family. Meanwhile Suffolk was placed into Tier 4 but we returned home on Boxing Day with no sign of the police trying to enforce non-existent borders. I wonder if we are actually winning?
Stop Press: This reader’s behaviour was quite unusual. According to a Daily Mail poll, 85% of Britons complied with the rules.
Round-up
- “Doctor allergic to shellfish suffers severe reaction to Moderna vaccine & gives himself EpiPen shot to lower heart rate” – The Sun has a report about the first doctor to have an allergic reaction to the Moderna vaccine
- “Irish Catholics protest Government shut-down of public Masses” – Irish Catholics were banned from worshipping in churches this Christmas so they held services outside them
- “Our year of bowing down to ‘The Science’” – Great piece by Bruce Pardy, a Law Professor at Queen’s University in Canada
- “South Africa says ‘no evidence’ its virus variant more dangerous than UK strain” – Matt Hancock may have to come up with a new excuse when he moves the entire country into Tier 5
- “Free us from this futile cycle of Covid control” – Dr John Lee in the Daily Mail reminds us how pointless lockdowns are
- “Keep schools open by getting Army medics to train teachers how to give pupils Covid tests” – Former Defence Secretary Tobias Elwood MP has come up with a novel way to keep schools open
- “One in five train services could be AXED next year” – 20% of train services could be cut, according to Treasury officials
- “French Government delays bill branded as ‘vaccine blackmail’” – The French Government has delayed plans to make it legal to discriminate against people who haven’t had the vaccine
- “Vaccines and our own antibodies hold fast against mutant Covid army” – According to the Sunday Times, if you’ve got the antibodies you should be immune to the new variants
- “Beds aren’t the problem. It’s the shortage of doctors and nurses” – Andrew Gregory, the Sunday Times‘s Health Editor, confirms the analysis of the senior doctor who writes regularly about the NHS for Lockdown Sceptic
- “Back to Normal, Save Lives” – If you want to get involved in a grass roots campaign, contact this group and ask them to send you some of their leaflets to deliver
- “Scientists Eye Potential Culprit Behind COVID-19 Vaccine Allergic Reactions” – According to the Wall St Journal, the allergic reaction to the vaccines could be caused by an ingredient they all have in common: polyethylene glycol, or PEG
- “‘Hypocrite’ Deborah Birx says she broke her own Thanksgiving travel warning after her parents ‘stopped eating’ and became depressed during the lockdown she helped create” – One of the architect’s of America’s shut downs broke the rules herself
- “With Covid mutating, it’s clearer than ever that we must eliminate this virus” – Social anthropologist Devi Sridhar doubles down on her ‘zero Covid’ strategy
- Blue Labour trade unionist Paul Embery pointed out in a tweet that to date only 377 people under 60 with no underlying health conditions had died of Covid. The responses by lockdown zealots aren’t pretty
naufrage/sauvetage 