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/
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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/
Admissions have failed to sky-rocket – and it’s time ministers took their own advice about learning to live with the virus
The number of people dying with flu and pneumonia on their death certificate in England and Wales is now 10 times higher than those with Covid, figures show.
The latest weekly data on deaths from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that there were 84 deaths mentioning Covid in the week ending June 11. There were 1,163 involving flu and pneumonia.
Registered Covid deaths fell by 14 per cent since the last update, in the week ending June 4, when 98 deaths were recorded.
Covid deaths now make up just 0.8 per cent of all deaths – down from 1.3 per cent in the previous week, despite the fact that week included the late May bank holiday, meaning there were fewer death registrations.
…The figures are much lower than would usually be expected for respiratory disease at this time of year. The five-year average for deaths involving flu and pneumonia in the same week is 1,704.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/22/flu-pneumonia-deaths-now-ten-times-higher-covid/
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/
Covid testing in schools is hugely disruptive and should be suspended, experts have said, as it emerged that up to 60 per cent of “positive” tests a week are coming back negative when checked.
Under plans to keep schools open, more than 50 million lateral flow tests have been carried out on youngsters, leading to thousands of pupils and their social bubbles being forced to self-isolate for 10 days.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/17/scrap-covid-tests-schools-says-oxford-vaccine-pioneer/
The by now all-too-familiar vertiginous lines were intended to leave the public in no doubt about the consequences of not delaying freedom until July 19.
But take a closer look and the choice of graphs is arguably disingenuous: the slides are most revealing for what they failed to include.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/15/fear-freedom-doom-laded-government-graphs-dont-show-us/
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?
Lockdowns will be seen as the “single biggest public health mistake” in history, a Stanford professor has warned.
…”Almost from the very beginning, lockdown was going to have enormous collateral consequences, things that are sometimes are hard to see but are nevertheless real.”
A new study by German scientists claims to have found evidence that lockdowns may have had little effect on controlling the coronavirus pandemic.
Statisticians at Munich University found “no direct connection” between the German lockdown and falling infection rates in the country.
Instead, the study found infection rates had already clearly begun to fall before a national lockdown was imposed last November.
It also found clear evidence the rate was already falling on the two occasions the lockdown was tightened, in December and April.
Nearly 40 per cent of recently registered Covid deaths in England and Wales were people who died primarily from another condition, latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show.
Out of 107 Covid deaths registered in the week ending May 21, just 66 had coronavirus recorded as the underlying cause of death, 61.7 per cent.
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.
SARS-Cov-2 is a more stable virus than influenza. Trillions of replications have thrown up a handful of variants of concern, clustering around a small set of mutations. These variants are worth monitoring but the vaccines effectively prevent them causing serious illness. There is a theoretical risk of a more dangerous variant but it does not seem more likely than a shift in the influenza virus. If it were to occur, we could now manage it with short-term measures and rapid vaccine modification.
…Vaccination protects the vaccinated. It helps protect others but it means that we take no greater risk in the autumn of 2020 than in the autumn of 2019. Interventions should be proportionate to that – which means that most cannot be justified.
Some are worth retaining, like improved hygiene in public places or greater readiness to stay at home with respiratory symptoms. It is probably a good idea to invest further in the search for effective antiviral therapies. Promoting better population health through diet and exercise is always a good thing. But it is time for a bonfire of face masks and the despatch of lateral flow tests to landfill.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/29/no-reason-new-variants-should-prevent-us-reopening/
While two men with receding hairlines quibble over just how many care home residents the Government managed to kill last year, let me paint you a picture of how shambolic the situation actually was. Regardless of what Health Secretary Matt Hancock might have you believe, testing in care homes was a fiasco right from the beginning of the pandemic.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/28/reckless-hancock-left-care-homes-fend/
A woman in her 30s has died from a stroke after the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccination caused a blood clot to form in an artery in her brain.
The patient, a 35-year-old Asian woman, went to hospital six days after her vaccine appointment, and died two weeks after being admitted following “extensive hemorrhaging”.
Pilot schemes for nine of the worst-hit areas will see councils offer to house the contacts of positive virus cases in order to stop transmission in overcrowded households.
Just 851.2 people per 100,000 died last month – the lowest figure since the ONS started recording mortality rates in 2001. At the height of the first wave of the Covid pandemic last April, death rates were 1,859 per 100,000.
The latest figures show that 38,899 people died in April – 6.1 per cent fewer than the five-year average.
Just 2.4 per cent of all deaths mentioned Covid on the death certificate, a 77.6 per cent decrease from March and the largest month-on-month decline since the pandemic began.
The new data provide more evidence that the NHS is in little danger of being overwhelmed in the near future, with deaths from most causes lower than normal. Covid is now the ninth most common cause of death in England and Wales, behind conditions including heart disease, dementia, several cancers and influenza.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/20/death-rate-england-lowest-since-records-began/
The Government is facing a backlash over plans to extend the vaccine rollout to children, with some experts questioning the benefits of the proposed move.
Dozens of medics, doctors and scientists have written to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to express their “grave concern” over the proposals.
In a joint letter, they warned it is “irresponsible, unethical and unnecessary” to jab children and urged the medicines watchdog not to “repeat mistakes from history”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/18/vaccine-roll-children-faces-backlash/
I hate to be a Debbie Downer on (yet another) celebratory ‘freedom’ day in the UK, but I’m here to tell you: we are not free. We are, as so many people continue to wilfully ignore, still living under a totalitarian regime that no-one voted for, which has for 14 long months seen our most basic freedoms given and taken away at a whim, all because of a virus that did indeed kill people, but on average at the same age as what the national life expectancy is anyway. That is not hyperbole. It is a fact. The average age of someone who dies from coronavirus is 82.4. Britons have an average life expectancy of 81.1.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/comment/dont-fooled-freedom-day-totalitarian-nightmare-far/
Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the Covid pandemic have admitted its work was “unethical” and “totalitarian”.
…SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” from Covid-19 because “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened”.
See also: How SAGE and the UK media created fear in the British public