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News

Britain drilled to accept lockdown in future pandemics, says ‘nudge unit’ chief – The Telegraph

Britain has been drilled to comply with lockdown under a future pandemic, the chief executive of the ‘nudge unit’ has said.

Professor David Halpern told The Telegraph that the country had “practised the drill” of wearing face masks and working from home and “could redo it” in a future crisis.

http://archive.today/2023.07.06-145552/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/06/britain-drilled-to-accept-lockdown-in-future-pandemics/

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Publications

Did lockdowns work? The verdict on Covid restrictions – Institute of Economic Affairs

The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to determine the effect of lockdowns, also referred to as ‘Covid restrictions’, ‘social distancing measures’ etc., on COVID-19 mortality based on available empirical evidence. We define lockdowns as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI). We employ a systematic search and screening procedure in which 19,646 studies are identified that could potentially address the purpose of our study. After three levels of screening, 32 studies qualified. Of those, estimates from 22 studies could be converted to standardised measures for inclusion in the metaanalysis.

https://iea.org.uk/publications/did-lockdowns-work-the-verdict-on-covid-restrictions/

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Alternative Media Videos

The Pandemic and the War on Humanity, with Dr. Naomi Wolf – Counterflow Podcast

Dr. Naomi Wolf joins me this week to go over the serious information that her team has uncovered in the Pfizer documents. At dailyclout.io, she has assembled a team of over 3500 medical experts to comb over the thousands and thousands of pages of Pfizer documents that the FDA tried to have sealed for 75 years. Luckily, a judge did not allow that. Also, Naomi and her team have discovered many of the reasons that Pfizer didn’t want that information to be public. There was not incompetence on their part, but rather outright maliciousness. They knew the harmful effects and the wide variety of them and hid them from the public. We go through many of them in this short episode, and the end result is population decline, which appears to be a feature, not a bug. We get into all of this, along with issues of repentance, punishment, forgiveness, spiritual warfare, good vs. evil, and more.

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News

Matt Hancock’s plan to ‘frighten the pants off everyone’ about Covid – The Telegraph

Throughout the course of the pandemic, officials and ministers wrestled with how to ensure the public complied with ever-changing lockdown restrictions. One weapon in their arsenal was fear. 

“We frighten the pants off everyone,” Matt Hancock suggested during one WhatsApp message with his media adviser. 

The then health secretary was not alone in his desire to scare the public into compliance. The WhatsApp messages seen by The Telegraph show how several members of Mr Hancock’s team engaged in a kind of “Project Fear”, in which they spoke of how to utilise “fear and guilt” to make people obey lockdown.

https://archive.today/2023.03.06-043724/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/04/project-fear-covid-lockdown-files-matt-hancock-whatsapp/

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News

‘Project Fear’ authors discussed when to ‘deploy’ new Covid variant – The Telegraph

Matt Hancock wanted to “deploy” a new Covid variant to “frighten the pants off” the public and ensure they complied with lockdown, leaked messages seen by The Telegraph have revealed.

The Lockdown Files – more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent between ministers, officials and others – show how the Government used scare tactics to force compliance and push through lockdowns.

https://archive.today/2023.03.06-095041/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/04/project-fear-covid-variant-lockdown-matt-hancock-whatsapp/

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News

10 myths told by Covid experts — now debunked – New York Post

  1. Misinformation #1: Natural immunity offers little protection compared to vaccinated immunity
  2. Misinformation #2: Masks prevent Covid transmission
  3. Misinformation #3: School closures reduce Covid transmission
  4. Misinformation #5: Young people benefit from a vaccine booster
  5. Misinformation #6: Vaccine mandates increased vaccination rates
  6. Misinformation #7: Covid originating from the Wuhan Lab is a conspiracy theory
  7. Misinformation #8: It was important to get the 2nd vaccine dose 3 or 4 weeks after the 1st dose
  8. Misinformation #8: It was important to get the 2nd vaccine dose 3 or 4 weeks after the 1st dose
  9. Misinformation #9: Data on the bivalent vaccine is “crystal clear”
  10. Misinformation #10: One in five people get long Covid

https://archive.today/2023.03.03-171938/https://nypost.com/2023/02/27/10-myths-told-by-covid-experts-now-debunked/

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News

The price Britain paid for lockdown was colossal. Was there an alternative? – The Guardian

Meanwhile, evidence is mounting of the long-term consequences of quarantining the country during lockdown. There were warnings at the time that keeping people under a form of house arrest would lead to rising loneliness, mental illness, domestic abuse and childhood obesity; a growing school attainment divide between pupils from rich and poor homes; an increase in hospital waiting lists and a rise in undiagnosed cases of cancer. All of which have come to pass. Only last month, for example, a report by the House of Commons Library expressed concern that the estimated rate of absence from school in the current academic year was 7.8% – compared with 4.8% in 2019-20.

https://archive.today/2023.02.12-113815/https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/12/price-britain-paid-lockdown-colossal-alternative-recession-austerity-stagnation

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News

We went too far with Covid restrictions says Germany’s pro-lockdown minister – The Telegraph

Some Covid restrictions were “idiocy” and lengthy school closures were an “unnecessary mistake”, Germany’s lockdown chief has admitted.

Karl Lauterbach, who became the face of the pro-lockdown movement, said some regulations went too far.

“Much of what we did was right but what was idiocy was the things like jogging with masks, or rules for outdoors. Those were excessive,” Mr Lauterbach said.

https://archive.today/2023.02.10-173712/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/02/10/went-far-covid-restrictions-says-germanys-pro-lockdown-minister/

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Opinion

It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives – Newsweek

I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.

I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.

https://archive.today/2023.01.30-172533/https://www.newsweek.com/its-time-scientific-community-admit-we-were-wrong-about-coivd-it-cost-lives-opinion-1776630

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News

Fatal heart attacks have surged in Australia. Here’s why – The Sydney Morning Herald

The pandemic has caused a surge of fatal cardiac arrests in Australia, as delayed care and COVID’s damaging effect on the heart drives a major uptick in serious heart issues.

More than 10,200 Australians died of ischemic heart disease in the first eight months of 2022 – that is about 17 per cent higher than would be expected in a normal year.

https://archive.today/2023.01.20-230252/https://www.smh.com.au/national/fatal-heart-attacks-have-surged-in-australia-here-s-why-20230117-p5cd22.html

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Opinion

The problem with the BBC’s reporting on excess deaths – The Spectator

I recall the newsroom conversations during the dark days of the pandemic only too well. They were upsetting at the time. Now, as we see a disturbing rise in excess deaths across the country, the thought of them fills me with horror and outrage.

‘You do realise these lockdowns and restrictions will end up killing people too, don’t you?’ I would say to senior editorial colleagues with something approaching desperation in my voice. ‘Sure, the virus is a serious threat to a small proportion of the population but the longer-term consequences of shutting the economy down and closing off the NHS will be deadly for huge numbers who were never at serious risk from the virus, people with years of life ahead of them. Shouldn’t we be reflecting that in our coverage? Shouldn’t we be considering the possibility that the government is going down the wrong path on this?’ 

The response of these colleagues would vary in tone, from patient but patronising good humour to open mockery. Many were influenced, I believe, by social media echo chambers (curated by pernicious algorithms). My colleagues had swallowed the myopic belief, adopted by people largely on the liberal left, that only lockdowns could ‘save lives’ and ‘protect the NHS’ from the devastation threatened by Covid-19. Anyone who demurred was, as far as they were concerned, clearly a right-wing lunatic.

Now we can all see how well that is working out. Provisional figures released this week reveal that more than 650,000 deaths were registered in the UK in 2022 – 9 per cent more than 2019. This is one of the largest excess death levels outside the pandemic in 50 years. But despite many of the causes of this being obvious, the BBC is pretending the development has come as something of a shock. 

https://web.archive.org/web/20230115091426/https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-problem-with-the-bbcs-reporting-on-excess-deaths/

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Opinion

Is this the true, devastating cost of lockdown? – The Telegraph

Up to 100 times more may have been spent on preventing each Covid death than on preventing each non-Covid death

http://archive.today/2023.01.12-192720/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/12/true-devastating-cost-lockdown/

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Opinion

How Stanford Failed the Academic Freedom Test – Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

Academic freedom at Stanford is clearly dying. It cannot survive if the administration fails to create an environment where good-faith discussions can occur outside of a framework of ideological rigidity and the false certainties that ideologues—and governments—wish to impose on us. Stanford missed the opportunity to sponsor COVID policy forums and it deplatformed dissenting voices. Several prominent faculty exploited this environment, engaging in actions that directly violated basic academic norms.

http://archive.today/2023.01.12-115607/https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/stanford-failed-academic-freedom-test

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Publications

In-Person Schooling and Youth Suicide: Evidence from School Calendars and Pandemic School Closures – National Bureau of Economic Research

This study explores the effect of in-person schooling on youth suicide. We document three key findings. First, using data from the National Vital Statistics System from 1990-2019, we document the historical association between teen suicides and the school calendar. We show that suicides among 12-to-18-year-olds are highest during months of the school year and lowest during summer months (June through August) and also establish that areas with schools starting in early August experience increases in teen suicides in August, while areas with schools starting in September don’t see youth suicides rise until September. Second, we show that this seasonal pattern dramatically changed in 2020. Teen suicides plummeted in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began in the U.S. and remained low throughout the summer before rising in Fall 2020 when many K-12 schools returned to in-person instruction. Third, using county-level variation in school reopenings in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021—proxied by anonymized SafeGraph smartphone data on elementary and secondary school foot traffic—we find that returning from online to in-person schooling was associated with a 12-to-18 percent increase teen suicides. This result is robust to controls for seasonal effects and general lockdown effects (proxied by restaurant and bar foot traffic), and survives falsification tests using suicides among young adults ages 19-to-25. Auxiliary analyses using Google Trends queries and the Youth Risk Behavior Survey suggests that bullying victimization may be an important mechanism.

Download the PDF: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30795/w30795.pdf

https://web.archive.org/web/20221229164454/https://www.nber.org/papers/w30795

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News

These Doctors Pushed Masking, Covid Lockdowns on Twitter. Turns Out, They Don’t Exist – The San Francisco Standard

Last month, Dr. Robert Honeyman lost their sister to Covid. They wrote about it on Twitter and received dozens of condolences, over 4,000 retweets and 43,000 likes.

Exactly one month later, on Dec. 12, Honeyman wrote that another tragedy had befallen their family.

…Again, the condolences and well-wishes rolled in. But there was a problem: Honeyman wasn’t real.

The transgender “Doctor of Sociology and Feminist studies” with a “keen interest in poetry” who used they/them pronouns was, in fact, a stock photo described on DepositPhotos, a royalty-free image site, as “Smiling happy, handsome latino man outside—headshot portrait.”

Their supposedly comatose husband, Dr. Patrick C. Honeyman, was also fake. His Twitter photo had been stolen from an insurance professional in Wayne, Indiana.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230105192234/https://sfstandard.com/technology/these-doctors-pushed-masking-covid-lockdowns-on-twitter-turns-out-they-dont-exist/

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News

Strep A surge linked to lockdown, health officials admit for first time – The Telegraph

The surge in Strep A cases killing schoolchildren is linked to lockdown, health officials have admitted for the first time. 

It comes as the tally of primary-school-aged children to die from the bacterial infection climbed to seven following the death of a child at Morelands Primary in Waterlooville, Hampshire. 

http://archive.today/2022.12.06-160826/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/05/strep-surge-linked-lockdown-health-officials-admit-first-time/

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News

NHS creates £1.3bn pot for Covid compensation claims – The Telegraph

The NHS has set aside £1.3 billion to cope with compensation claims arising from the pandemic this year with claims for treatment delays, cancellations and misdiagnosis expected.

An annual report from NHS Resolution, which deals with patient disputes, shows that the health service anticipates it will need to pay out more than a billion pounds this financial year to settle claims arising from poor service during Covid.

http://archive.today/2022.11.28-210431/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/28/nhs-creates-13bn-pot-covid-compensation-claims/

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News

Death of boy, 14, three weeks after Covid jab of ‘significant public concern’ – coroner – The Mirror

A 14-year-old boy died three weeks after receiving his Covid vaccine, an inquest heard.

Coroner Pat O’Connor, of County Mayo, Ireland, described the death as a “significant public concern”.

Joseph McGinty was vaccinated with the Pfizer Covid-19 jab on August 20, 2021.

http://archive.today/2022.11.22-151905/https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/death-boy-14-three-weeks-28552475

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Opinion

The lockdown cancer wave has only just begun – Professor Karol Sikora, UnHerd

Advocates for harsh Covid measures are finally waking up to what they have done.

The underreported story of the entire pandemic is excess deaths — not from Covid, but from other health conditions which were so brutally pushed to one side. There have been huge rises in the number of people dying from causes unrelated to the virus, accelerating throughout the year and showing no signs of slowing down.

http://archive.today/2022.11.21-081435/https://unherd.com/thepost/the-lockdown-cancer-wave-has-only-just-begun/

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Alternative Media

The journalist-run, intelligence-linked operation that warped British pandemic policy – The Grayzone

Presented as an independent voice for “unbiased” scientific advice, iSAGE provided a channel for media spinmeisters, spies and psy-op specialists to influence Britain’s pandemic policy without accountability. Leaked internal emails show members fretting over its unethical methods.

http://archive.today/2022.11.22-042832/https://thegrayzone.com/2022/11/21/journalist-intelligence-british-pandemic-policy/