Plans for Covid passports have been significantly scaled back as government ministers privately question whether they should be adopted at all, The Telegraph understands.
Not a single person has been successfully prosecuted under the Coronavirus Act despite almost 300 people being charged, it has emerged.
Figures released by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) following a 12 month review, revealed that all 270 cases had been dropped before making it to court.
The vast majority of prosecutions were withdrawn because the police – confused by the constantly changing laws – had charged people with the wrong offence.
Hard to justify right now for most children in most countries
Following widespread vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 of older adults and other highly vulnerable groups, some high income countries are now considering vaccinating children; just days ago, the US Food and Drug Administration authorized the use of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in children 12-15 years of age. Young people have been largely spared from severe covid-19 so far, and the value of childhood vaccination against respiratory viruses in general remains an open question for three reasons: the limited benefits of protection in age groups that experience only mild disease; the limited effects on transmission because of the range of antigenic types and waning vaccine induced immunity; and the possibility of unintended consequences related to differences in vaccine induced and infection induced immunity. We discuss each in turn.
Epidemiologist Prof Sunetra Gupta welcomes news that an independent inquiry will examine the government’s handling of the pandemic. “There was a religious belief that lockdowns and facemasks work. Let’s look at the costs of these strategies.”
Mirrors:
A pilot universal basic income (UBI) scheme is to be launched in Wales, the first minister, Mark Drakeford, has revealed.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/14/wales-to-launch-universal-basic-income-pilot-scheme
The case for the prosecution of Johnson is likely to be heard in a parliamentary inquiry (with Dominic Cummings as the star witness) which should bring scrutiny of the Imperial College cliff-edge hypothesis. This suggests that Covid cases surged every day until lockdown, so Prime Ministerial dither cost thousands of lives. Only when he eventually agreed to lock down on March 23, says Imperial, did cases collapse. This theory is one of the most influential ever deployed in government – and now looks as if it could be bunkum.
We don’t have to guess anymore, given how much Covid data exists. The ONS, Zoe/King’s College, the React-2 study run by a different team at Imperial: none support Neil Ferguson’s cliff-edge theory. All show Covid cases falling before lockdowns. So what forced the virus into retreat, if not stay-at-home orders? We can look at another form of contagion: news, spread digitally. People saw how things were getting dangerous and stayed home of their own accord. This is more than theory. Mobile phone data offers rich detail of this worldwide trend.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/13/really-need-inquiry-sage-forced-britain-lockdown/
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine”.
More recently, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, wrote that “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness”.
Health and social care workers who felt under greater pressure from their employers to receive COVID-19 vaccination were more likely to decline it, according to preliminary new research highlighting factors influencing uptake.
GPs have been told to refuse patients face-to-face appointments, in order to force the use of virtual consultations, under new NHS guidance.
…The updated NHS guidance now instructs practices to make this the default permanently.
…It continues: “Discourage patients from attending the practice to book appointments. If they do attend in person, demonstrate the process using a smartphone or kiosk”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/12/exclusive-gps-told-stop-seeing-patients-face-to-face/
Still, however, the battle for common sense over hysteria is far from won. Do we really think testing healthy children at an estimated cost of £144,564 per positive test is either “sensible” or “proportionate”? Do we really think that asking children who’ve already missed so much this year to miss further days isolating for a virus against which all vulnerable adults have been vaccinated is a drawback appropriately balanced against a benefit? And what do we think of this in the context of the looming discussion over offering the vaccine to children – at negligible risk from Covid – given the harm we should assume will ensue to a small minority of them?
So, the third wave is officially no more. New modelling by SPI-M, the government’s committee on modelling for pandemics, has, at a stroke, eradicated the predicted surge in new infections, hospital admissions and deaths which it had pencilled in for the autumn or winter as a result of lockdown being eased.
…As Philip Thomas explained here on Sunday, Imperial College has also assumed strangely low estimates for the number of people in Britain carrying antibodies. If you are going to use assumptions that are far more pessimistic than real world data suggests, it is small wonder that SPI-M keeps predicting waves and surges that turn out to be wide of the mark. The question is: why are these modelling teams using such negative assumptions?
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-likely-is-a-third-wave-
IFFIm’s financial base consists of grants from 10 sovereign sponsors. By signing the grant agreements, countries agree to pay these obligations in a specified schedule of payments.
| Country | US$ equivalent | Currency of pledge |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | US$ 3,652 million over 23 years | GBP 2,130 million |
 France | US$ 1,884 million over 20 years | EUR 1,390 million |
| Italy | US$ 821 million over 25 years | EUR 654 million* *Includes a pledge to support the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) through Gavi for the development of COVID-19 vaccine candidates. |
 Norway | US$ 647 million over 25 years | US$ 27 million & NOK 5,100 million* *Includes additional pledges to support the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) through Gavi for the development of COVID-19 vaccine candidates |
 The Netherlands | US$ 487 million over 20 years | EUR 330 million & US$ 67 million |
| Australia | US$ 284 million over 20 years | AUD 288 million |
 Spain | US$ 240 million over 20 years | EUR 190 million |
 Sweden | US$ 38 million over 15 years | SEK 276 million |
| South Africa | US$ 20 million over 20 years | US$ 20 million |
 Brazil | US$ 20 million over 20 years | US$ 20 million |
| TOTAL | US$ 8 billion (approximately) |
http://archive.today/2021.05.28-164114/https://iffim.org/donors
So in recent weeks I’ve made a clear decision no longer merely to point out what it is that governments and their advisers and spokespersons around the world are doing is wrong, scientifically unjustified and harmful, but to join the dots in an attempt to provide potential explanations of why they’re doing these things.
…Why do I say this? Simply because there is no benign interpretation of the acts of commission and omission consistently imposed upon us and no explanation of the statements which are flatly wrong other than an intention to deceive the population.
…It is my deduction and conclusion that the only motivation that fits all the observations is the intention to ‘herd’ every citizen into a VaxPass system. This is a completely novel system. Never before have all individuals been represented in a single, interoperable database as a unique digital ID, accompanied by an editable health-related field. Whoever controls that database, and the algorithms which govern what it permits and denies, has literally totalitarian control of the entire population. There is no personal threshold crossing or transaction which doesn’t fall to those operating that system.
As Sherlock Holmes might almost have said: “When two people use the same rubbish catchphrase, that’s a coincidence. But when Tony Blair, Green MP Caroline Lucas, Andrew Cuomo, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, President Bieber of Canada, Boris Johnson, Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Kamala Harris, the Prince of Wales, Prince Harry, Sadiq Khan, and Jacinda Ardern all use the exact same rubbish catchphrase as the megalomaniacal globalist Klaus Schwab, that’s starting to look very much like a conspiracy in plain sight.”
Covid-19 lockdowns shaved 3.5% off U.S. GDP in 2020 even as the federal government spent more than $2.6 trillion in relief measures. Millions of children fell behind in learning and nearly 100,000 businesses closed for good.
Conventional wisdom holds this was worth it because lives were saved by shutting workplaces and schools and telling people to stay home. But a new study by University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan shows the opposite. After the first month of the pandemic, organizations that adopted prevention protocols became safer places than the wider community. Officials who didn’t see that coming forgot that organizations are rational and look for cooperative solutions that improve the welfare of the group, such as reducing the risks of communicable disease.
…Meanwhile, Mr. Mulligan found that there is no evidence that homes became “places of solitary confinement and zero transmission.” That’s putting it mildly. Humans are social animals. Lockdowns were leaky at best with stir-crazy family members venturing out to see friends and relatives.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/lockdowns-didnt-stop-covid-11620596906
Professor Neil Ferguson struck an unusually optimistic tone this week. With just one Covid death reported on Monday, and infection levels at an eight-month low in the UK, the architect of the original lockdown said: ‘The data is very encouraging and very much in line with what we expected.’ The first half of that statement is certainly true; the second half much less so.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/How-did-Sage-get-it-so-wrong
This latest evidence that Beijing considered the military potential of SARS coronaviruses from as early as 2015 has also raised fresh fears over the cause of Covid-19, with some officials still believing the virus could have escaped from a Chinese lab
- Beijing has considered the military potential of SARS coronaviruses since 2015
- The bombshell document was accessed by US State Department investigators
- Scientists examined manipulation of diseases ‘in a way never seen before’
- Foreign affairs committee’s Tom Tugendhat says evidence is a ‘major concern’
All under-40s are to be offered an alternative to the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine as a precaution.
Categories
Did Covid-19 come from a lab? – UnHerd
[T]he theory that the virus was cooked-up in a lab and accidentally released isn’t just a possibility, it’s the most likely explanation.
….What’s so compelling about Wade’s deep-dive is that he shows how the key details are easier to explain within the context of a lab leak origin. He doesn’t claim that they definitively rule out a natural origin — just that it’s more of a stretch to get all the pieces to fit together.
Social bonds are an attractive investment for worldwide institutional and individual investors looking for a socially responsible investment with a clear, unambiguous purpose and a portfolio diversification opportunity with attractive risk-adjusted returns. Although the social bond market has been growing fast, it has so far remained a niche sector.
…Over the last few weeks, several social Covid-19 bonds have already been issued by a number of multilateral institutions and public agencies and are already generating significant investor interest, paving the way for more issuances. The stage is now set for social bonds to move from a niche solution to a mainstream one.