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Opinion

Ten reasons to end the lockdown now – Dr. John Lee, The Spectator

Even if one could understand why lockdown was imposed, it very rapidly became apparent that it had not been thought through. Not in terms of the wider effects on society (which have yet to be counted) and not even in terms of the ways that the virus itself might behave. But at the start, there was hardly any evidence. Everyone was guessing. Now we have a world of evidence, from around the globe, and the case for starting to reverse lockdown is compelling.

  1. You cannot understand the significance of this virus simply by looking at the raw death figures
  2. The policy response to the virus has been driven by modelling of Covid – not other factors
  3. We don’t know if lockdown is working
  4. We should ease the lockdown to save lives
  5. Lockdown is not sustainable
  6. Lockdown directly harms those most likely to be affected by coronavirus
  7. Lockdown directly harms those who will be largely unaffected by coronavirus
  8. The health service has not been overwhelmed nor likely to be 
  9. The virus is almost certainly not a constant threat
  10. People can be trusted to behave sensibly

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ten-reasons-to-end-the-lockdown-now

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Opinion

We need to stop the spread of Big Tech censorship – Spiked

It is time to draw a line. In the fight against Covid-19, people across the world have been required to suspend many hard-won freedoms – to give up travel, loved ones, places of worship, the pub. They have gone along with it because they understand that some temporary restrictions on liberty are sometimes needed in times of crisis (even though we must ensure they do not become permanent). But one thing we cannot give an inch on is freedom of speech, our right to speak and our right to hear others, which is under serious threat right now.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/08/we-need-to-stop-the-spread-of-big-tech-censorship/

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News Opinion

The Grand Delusion: Bail-out billions shield us from the reality – our economy is in tatters – Dr. John Lee, Daily Mail

  • Just 11 people under the age of 20 have succumbed to Covid-19.
  • Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College has a dismal record as a forecaster.
  • There’s the possibility that the lockdown has actually made the virus more deadly.
  • Bank of England warned that if the lockdown is extended until June the economy could shrink by 14 per cent this year.
  • More than one-in-five adults now furloughed on 80per cent of their wages.
  • A fifth of the working-age population could be jobless and the quality of people’s mental and physical health would plummet.
  • Every day, about 1,700 people die in Britain. Only five years ago, in the winter of 2014/15, more than 28,000 people died from seasonal flu, not far off the current coronavirus death toll of just over 30,000.
  • Direct evidence to support the two-metre rule is weak, and based almost entirely on modelling rather than real life.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8302055/Bail-billions-anaesthetise-reality-economy-tatters.html

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Opinion

The lockdowns still aren’t working – Spiked

It is also worth noting another unsayable fact at this point: approximately the same number of people have always been projected to contract Covid-19 in most ‘curve flattening’ scenarios. Lockdowns simply spread the deaths out across a longer period of time.

The original argument for locking down to ‘flatten the curve’ was very specifically about stopping patients from entering hospital in a single stream that would overwhelm healthcare resources and cause millions of incidental deaths. Now, however, we know that hospitals have not been swamped on a large scale in any of the non-lockdown US states, nor in nations such as Sweden which never locked down. In fact, more than 200 hospitals in lightly hit areas of both lockdown and social-distancing states have begun to furlough their employees, after cancelling elective procedures in preparation for a Covid wave that simply never arrived.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/08/the-lockdowns-still-arent-working/

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Opinion

Lockdown fanatics scare me far more than Covid-19 – Spiked

The Covid threat is not the apocalypse we were warned about. Its death rate is low. Its impact on younger people is negligent. Just 0.75 per cent of deaths in the UK have been among under-40s, and the majority of those were people with underlying health conditions. And yet most under-40s – fit, healthy workers – remain locked at home, denied the right to work and play and keep society going.

The horror stories that were spread about Covid-19 by government officials and media fearmongers have been exposed as inaccurate, and in some cases hysterical. As the government adviser Professor Robert Dingwall says, the government has ‘effectively terrorised’ us into ‘believing that this is a disease that is going to kill you’. When in the vast majority of cases that simply isn’t true. As Professor Dingwall points out, 80 per cent of people who get the virus never have to go to a hospital, and of those who do, ‘most of them will come out alive – even those who go into intensive care’.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/08/lockdown-fanatics-scare-me-far-more-than-covid-19/

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Opinion

Code Review of Ferguson’s Model

All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial’s modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn’t under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one. 

On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves.

https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/
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Opinion

‘Professor Lockdown’ Modeler Resigns in Disgrace – National Review

Indeed, Ferguson’s Imperial College model has been proven wildly inaccurate. To cite just one example, it saw Sweden paying a huge price for no lockdown, with 40,000 COVID deaths by May 1, and 100,000 by June. Sweden now has 2,854 deaths and peaked two weeks ago. As Fraser Nelson, editor of Britain’s Spectator, notes: “Imperial College’s model is wrong by an order of magnitude.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/professor-lockdown-modeler-resigns-in-disgrace/

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News Opinion

Matt Ridley We know everything – and nothing – about Covid – The Spectator

The horrible truth is that it now looks like in many of the early cases, the disease was probably caught in hospitals and doctors’ surgeries. That is where the virus kept returning, in the lungs of sick people, and that is where the next person often caught it, including plenty of healthcare workers. Many of these may not have realised they had it, or thought they had a mild cold. They then gave it to yet more elderly patients who were in hospital for other reasons, some of whom were sent back to care homes when the National Health Service made space on the wards for the expected wave of coronavirus patients.

Once the epidemic is under control in hospitals and care homes, the disease might die out anyway, even without lockdown. In sharp contrast to the pattern among the elderly, children do not transmit the virus much if at all. A recent review by paediatricians could not find a single case of a child passing the disease on and said the evidence ‘consistently demonstrates reduced infection and infectivity of children in the transmission chain’. One boy who caught it while skiing failed to give it to 170 contacts, but he also had both flu and a cold, which he donated to two siblings. Children appear to have ACE2 receptors, the cellular lock that the coronavirus picks, in their noses but not their lungs.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-know-everything-and-nothing-about-covid

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News Opinion

On lockdown, Boris Johnson faces a new opponent: his own party – The Guardian

The prime minister’s former business adviser Andrew Griffith – elected as an MP in December – has warned that every day the UK economy is in lockdown, and its competitors aren’t, means lost business.

“It’s easy to like lockdown if you are being paid close to the same to stay at home as you would to go to work,” says one MP. Another adds: “People like lockdown? Wait until the furlough scheme ends.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/08/lockdown-boris-johnson

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Opinion

Coronavirus: surprisingly big problems caused by small errors in testing – The Conversation

In short, far more people will receive false-positive results than true-positive results. Up to 60% of those released back into the workforce could be at risk of infection themselves and unknowingly spreading the disease to others, sparking a second wave of the epidemic. If the true prevalence of the disease in the population is as low as 1% then this figure could rise to 80%.

Understanding the startling rates of false positives and false negatives for tests that seem, on the surface, to be quite accurate could have profound consequences for health policy as we travel deeper into this pandemic. Failing to do our mathematical due diligence has the potential to take us past the tipping point beyond which the epidemic starts to grow again, leading to even more avoidable deaths.

https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-surprisingly-big-problems-caused-by-small-errors-in-testing-136700

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News Opinion

Why it’ll still be a long time before we get a coronavirus vaccine – New Scientist

Trials of experimental coronavirus vaccines are already under way, but it’s still likely to be years before one is ready and vaccination may not even be possible

It is far from guaranteed that the vaccine will be safe and effective. 2013 study calculated that, before entering clinical trials, the average experimental vaccine has a 6 per cent chance of ultimately reaching the market. Of those that make it into trials, a 2019 analysis suggests the probability of success is 33.4 per cent.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24632804-000-why-itll-still-be-a-long-time-before-we-get-a-coronavirus-vaccine/

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Opinion

‘This is international hysteria’ – Spiked

Lionel Shriver and Brendan O’Neill discuss the irrational response to Covid-19 and the cruel regime of social distancing.

https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast-episode/this-is-international-hysteria/

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Opinion

Bruce Schneier on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps

“My problem with contact tracing apps is that they have absolutely no value…I’m not even talking about the privacy concerns, I mean the efficacy. Does anybody think this will do something useful? … This is just something governments want to do for the hell of it. To me, it’s just techies doing techie things because they don’t know what else to do.”

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/05/me_on_covad-19_.html

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News Opinion

Boris Johnson must end the absurd, dystopian and tyrannical lockdown – Steve Baker, The Telegraph

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/03/boris-johnson-must-end-absurd-dystopian-tyrannical-lockdown2/

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News Opinion

Locking up the elderly until coronavirus is defeated is a cruel mockery of basic human values:- Lord Sumpton, The Mail On Sunday

Viruses don’t just go away. This one will never disappear unless and until there is enough exposure to it to produce collective immunity or an effective vaccine appears.

Talk of compulsorily ‘shielding’ (in plain English locking up) the old and vulnerable until one of those things happens is a cruel mockery of basic human values.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8281007/Former-Supreme-Court-judge-LORD-SUMPTION-gives-withering-critique-Governments-lockdown.html

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News Opinion

We’re destroying the nation’s wealth – and the health of millions – Peter Hitchens, The Mail on Sunday

Nobody will be able to say, when the much-needed inquiry eventually sits in judgment on these times and on those responsible, that criticism is just hindsight and that nobody pointed out at the time that a grave mistake was being made.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8281063/PETER-HITCHENS-destroying-nations-wealth-health-millions.html

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News Opinion

The science is becoming clear: lockdowns are no longer the right medicine – The Sunday Times

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News Opinion

If our New Normal is the state telling me who I can and can’t see, count me out – Daily Mail

But it’s clear that in their increasingly desperate search for a route out of the lockdown labyrinth, Ministers are giving serious consideration to some radical – and dangerous – schemes. One is the idea of some sort of continuing restriction on private social gatherings, along the lines of the ‘ten friends’ proposal.

My normal will not involve State-approved lists of people I can meet. Or State monitoring of when and where I meet them. Or a quiet acceptance of the division of my country into the pure and the plague-carrier.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8280777/DAN-HODGES-New-Normal-state-telling-count-out.html

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Opinion Videos

Nobel prize winning scientist Prof Michael Levitt: lockdown a “huge mistake” – UnHerd

With a purely statistical perspective, [Prof Michael Levitt] has been playing close attention to the Covid-19 pandemic since January, when most of us were not even aware of it. He first spoke out in early February, when through analysing the numbers of cases and deaths in Hubei province he predicted with remarkable accuracy that the epidemic in that province would top out at around 3,250 deaths.

Nobel prize-winning scientist: the Covid-19 epidemic was never exponential”

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Opinion

Coronavirus: Second wave of deadly virus described as ‘very unlikely’ by Professor Hugh Pennington

The renowned microbiologist suggested to Holyrood’s health committee on Tuesday that fears a fresh wave of deaths could hit Britain in the autumn or winter were based on the mistaken assumption that the coronavirus acts in the same way as influenza.

Coronavirus: Second wave of deadly virus described as ‘very unlikely’ by Professor Hugh Pennington