While the US fights for freedom, we hear barely a peep as our country is turned into a land of ID cards and endless mask mandates
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/14/britain-sleepwalking-state-perpetual-covid-tyranny/
Policy
Browse the articles related to this topic below.
Join our community on Guilded.
But over the past 20 years, local authorities have started to take a more police-like role. They issue an increasing number of penalties, carry out patrols, and issue new legal orders. This trend has been furthered under Covid, with new powers and funding to issue legal orders and penalties, and a new patrolling role for ‘Covid marshals’, who ensure businesses and individuals are following social-distancing rules. Over time, local authorities have also been increasingly released from legal and governmental checks on how powers are used, meaning that they now hold remarkable power over the lives of citizens.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/07/05/how-councils-became-parallel-police-forces/
Children are being vaccinated against Covid before an official decision on whether youngsters should be given the jab, The Telegraph can disclose.
Councils and GPs in virus hotspots are defying current government rules by giving the vaccine to 16- and 17-year-olds without underlying health conditions.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/02/children-vaccinated-councils-go-rogue/
In truth, it’s very difficult to ‘hold governments, companies and international bodies’ to account on climate change. The public have been given no vote on climate-change policies, and no political party has offered criticism of climate-change alarmism. Certainly don’t expect any real criticism to come from CCAG.
But then perhaps that is the point of Indie SAGE or CCAG – not to hold power to account, but to prevent the technocratic apparatus from being properly held to account. For there is nothing fear-mongering technocrats like King fear more than democracy – because it threatens to take away the power granted to them by endless emergencies, be they Covid or climate change.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/29/the-lockdown-fanatics-are-moving-on-to-climate-change/
Conclusions: This lack of clear benefit should cause governments to rethink their vaccination policy.
The present assessment raises the question whether it would be necessary to rethink policies and use COVID-19 vaccines more sparingly and with some discretion only in those that are willing to accept the risk because they feel more at risk from the true infection than the mock infection. Perhaps it might be necessary to dampen the enthusiasm by sober facts? In our view, the EMA and national authorities should instigate a safety review into the safety database of COVID-19 vaccines and governments should carefully consider their policies in light of these data. Ideally, independent scientists should carry out thorough case reviews of the very severe cases, so that there can be evidence-based recommendations on who is likely to benefit from a SARS-CoV2 vaccination and who is in danger of suffering from side effects. Currently, our estimates show that we have to accept four fatal and 16 serious side effects per 100,000 vaccinations in order to save the lives of 2–11 individuals per 100,000 vaccinations, placing risks and benefits on the same order of magnitude.
As Sarah Knapton has revealed in these pages, the brutal postponement of Freedom Day coincided with the release of a bunch of alarmist models predicting a huge new wave of deaths. The most pessimistic, inevitably from Imperial College, forecast 203,824 deaths over the next year. It did so by assuming just a 77-87 per cent reduction in hospitalisations following two vaccinations, despite the fact that real world data shows two vaccinations to be between 92 per cent (AstraZeneca) and 96 per cent (Pfizer) effective in preventing hospitalisation. That would cut the Imperial forecast of deaths by a gob-smacking 90 per cent to 26,854.
This keeps happening. In April the modellers assumed a 30 per cent effectiveness for the vaccine at preventing the spread of the virus. This was described as “a pessimistic view – but it is plausible, it’s not extreme”, by Professor Graham Medley, chairman of the SPI-M sub-group of Sage. It turns out it was far from plausible. At the end of March the BBC’s favourite modeller, Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, was forecasting that by June 21, even with “optimistic” assumptions, less than half of Britain would be protected against severe disease by vaccination. The true figure is over 80 per cent.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/21/flawed-modelling-condemning-britain-lockdown/
The Health Secretary claims he “tried” to throw a protective ring around care homes but, from my experience in the early days of the pandemic, he couldn’t have come up with a more disastrous and deadly policy.
As a GP working mainly with elderly patients in care homes and intermediate care I witnessed, at first hand, the absolute disaster that was the government policy at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak. Elderly patients who were Covid-19 positive, or not tested, or perhaps even negative, were simply shovelled out of hospitals and into care homes. ‘The hospitals must be cleared out… nothing else matters.’
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/526539-catastrophic-care-homes-matt-hancock/
The introduction a Covid-status certification system would have a serious impact on businesses and individuals and has the possibility of infringing rights and being discriminatory in nature. In light of that, we believe that it would be inappropriate for a system with such a potentially wide adverse impact to be introduced by secondary legislation.
https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/6264/documents/69158/default/
How many more patients were left to die as a result of this hidden prejudice? Office for National Statistics figures from last year show nearly six in 10 who died with coronavirus in England were disabled. These vulnerable people’s families have a right to know whether their beloved relatives were sacrificed on the altar of NHS capacity and so do we.
For if they were effectively regarded as “collateral damage” during a national emergency, what does it say about the treatment of patients with learning disabilities or mental illness, in general?
The pressure of the pandemic has clearly been used as an excuse to explain away some of these decisions – but there can surely be no justification for refusing to resuscitate otherwise physically healthy patients, regardless of the state of their mental faculties. And in a world when everyone seems to be banging on about discrimination of one kind or another, where is the clarion call for equality for disabled people seemingly being treated like second class citizens in a health service that is supposed to care unequivocally for all?
Patients with mental illness and learning disabilities were given “do not resuscitate” orders during the pandemic, The Telegraph can disclose.
Families, carers and doctors have said that medics decided that patients with these conditions should not be resuscitated if their heart stopped – a decision which in one case appears to have led to the patient’s death.
This is the first instalment of my three-part investigative report on the Chinese-made Innova lateral flow test. Vast sums of UK taxpayers’ money have been paid to a California start-up for tests that have failed to stand up to scrutiny.
…Innova Medical Group, the company benefiting from the UK Government’s huge testing contract, is owned by the private equity group Pasaca Capital which was founded by a Chinese investment banker, the enigmatic Dr Charles Huang, in 2017. It has been revealed to be the single largest recipient of the Department of Health’s Covid contracts after signing a £496million deal to supply LFTs last year. An earlier contract with Innova cost the taxpayer £107million.
It’s a touchy, complex question. People may not want to learn that millions of us covered our faces for 15 months for no good reason, after all. But asking the questions is exactly what we must do.
Last week, a trove of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s e-mails were released to the public. In a Feb. 5, 2020, e-mail to a Team Obama health official, the virus guru wrote that masks were for infected people, and that “the typical mask you buy in a drug store is not really effective in keeping out the virus, which is small enough to pass through the material.”
https://nypost.com/2021/06/06/was-mask-wearing-pointless-after-all-fauci-must-answer/
I had no choice but to speak out against lockdowns. As a public-health scientist with decades of experience working on infectious-disease outbreaks, I couldn’t stay silent. Not when basic principles of public health are thrown out of the window. Not when the working class is thrown under the bus. Not when lockdown opponents were thrown to the wolves. There was never a scientific consensus for lockdowns. That balloon had to be popped.
…Ultimately, lockdowns protected young low-risk professionals working from home – journalists, lawyers, scientists, and bankers – on the backs of children, the working class and the poor.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/04/why-i-spoke-out-against-lockdowns/
Lockdowns are ‘awful’ and Britain must learn to live with Covid without restrictions, one of the country’s most senior scientists has warned.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said the measures had had ‘very profound consequences’ on the nation’s mental health, education and jobs.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9649967/Sage-expert-warns-awful-curbs-ever.html
Federal data seen by DailyMail.com reveals The Pentagon gave $39 million to EcoHealth Alliance, which funded a lab in Wuhan, China, between 2013 and 2020
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is accused of being the source of Covid-19
The majority of the DoD funding came from the DTRA, a military branch with a mission to ‘counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks’
Federal grant data assembled by independent researchers shows that the charity has received more than $123 million from the government in total
Grants from the Pentagon included $6,491,025 from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2017 to 2020
EHA also received $64.7 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID)
It received $13 million from Health and Human Services, which includes the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control
It is not known how much of the money actually went to the Wuhan lab
EHA has also funded deeply controversial ‘gain of function’ experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells
HART continues to be deeply concerned to hear various MPs and SAGE representatives calling for children to be vaccinated against COVID-19 despite the lack of long-term safety data. Disturbing language has been used by teaching unions implying that the use of ‘peer pressure’ could be harnessed to boost take up among school children, even though such coercion would be unethical, not to mention contrary to UK and International Laws and Declarations.
The ‘Speak Out’ service is available to witnesses with information about ALL aspects of the pandemic response, not just Covid death reporting. Professional legal advice will be given free-of-charge* to eligible applicants at the start of their process and everything will be fully confidential. Those with information on any Covid related practices of concern are encouraged to come forward as a matter of urgency by completing the form on the “Speak Out” page of the website below.
Go to the Covid19 Assembly Speak Out Service
Fresh from their smash reunion tour this weekend, James and Toby recap the weekend’s anti-lockdown march that wound from Parliament Square to Toby’s doorstep.
We then parse the testimony of the PM’s former “top man,” Dominic Cummings, before the House’s Health and Science select committees last week and who came out of it better. Do you want a Prime Minister or a Monarch (and by “monarch” we’re not talking about the one we’ve already got.)
https://ricochet.com/podcast/london-calling/release-us-from-this-servitude/
Plans for the use of Covid-19 passports as a legal requirement for entry to large events this summer are set to be dropped, according to a report.
Officials working on the ongoing Covid-19 status certification review do not believe that the law will be changed to mandate their use in the UK, with one government source claiming that the plans were “dead”, The Telegraph reported.
“It’s not a case of ‘it’s finely balanced’. It’s not going to happen,” the source told the newspaper.
The ‘Unite for Freedom’ anti-lockdown protest in London yesterday was as good-natured and peaceful as the previous anti-lockdown protests I have reported on for spiked. Seeing the sculpture and words was a gladdening moment on a day blessed by sunshine.
…The coverage from major news agencies and outlets told the story of ‘hundreds’ of ‘anti-vaxxers’. ‘Hundreds’ is the downplaying part. It worries me. I was there, and I know it is not true. Do I need to see the news unfold with my own eyes every time in order to fact-check the front pages?
I can’t estimate the numbers because the scale of the crowd was too vast, and moved steadily for many hours through the streets of London. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Presumably the Met Police could estimate if they wanted to. The Guardian at least reported ‘vast numbers of people’. The Press Association declared, ‘Hundreds join anti-vaccination protest in central London’. The comments put that misconception straight.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/05/30/the-smearing-of-anti-lockdown-protests/