November 24, 2023 - 6:00pm
This week the Covid Inquiry touched upon one of the most publicly contentious and yet fundamental concepts of the pandemic: herd immunity. Yet during questioning the Chief Medical Officer for England, Prof. Chris Whitty, perpetuated several unfortunate misconceptions about this basic epidemiological concept.
Whitty’s position this week was that herd immunity is a concept too difficult for the public to grasp and too amenable to misinterpretation. As he told the Government in March 2020, “this is very complicated — please don’t talk about it”. Singling out the Great Barrington Declaration, he branded herd immunity a “dangerous” and “clearly ridiculous” policy approach that should not even be subject to a respectful scientific debate. It is worth, then, looking at several common misconceptions which Prof. Whitty and others continue to spread.
Firstly, Whitty, together with prominent global public health authorities such as the WHO and Anthony Fauci, continues to frame herd immunity as something that can be sustainably “achieved” and held constant rather than a dynamic relationship between susceptible and recovered populations. This new redefinition of the concept is based on diseases like measles, polio and smallpox, where durable vaccines can effectively eliminate a disease. Yet this vaccine-centric perspective isn’t valid for diseases like Covid. Rather, as a mathematical principle, the herd immunity threshold is achieved whenever the rate of infections declines due to a large fraction of the population being immune. Arguing against herd immunity is like arguing against gravity or fluid dynamics.
Secondly, the mainstream position oddly accuses others of “deliberately spreading Covid” whilst ignoring the fact that most people on earth, including in Antarctica, have already been infected. The virus did “spread through the population”, despite two years of unprecedented Government infection control mandates in the UK. Aggregating data at national level also obscures how the virus spreads through local contact networks, with different population densities, living conditions and social interactions. The rate of transmission is not a universal constant, whatever is alluded to in the media.
Thirdly, those who railed against herd immunity claimed that it could never be achieved because there was no lasting immunological protection from infection. This is mathematically incorrect. Herd immunity is established separately from the rate of loss of infection-blocking immunity. Coronaviruses are known to reinfect individuals at regular intervals of a few years, but the first infection confers durable protection against severe disease. Protection from severe disease was also provided from cross-immunity from previous exposure to other coronaviruses, such as the common cold. Interestingly, this implies global travel protects the human herd from a more devastating pandemic.
In the case of respiratory viruses, epidemics are strongly influenced by seasonality (which isn’t well-defined in non-temperate countries). In fact, epidemic trajectories can be explained largely by looking at the arrival time of Covid, which explains the “waves” in winter and the fact that lifting lockdowns did not significantly increase infections in the summer of 2020.
Finally, the ecological framework of herd immunity challenges the command-and-control infrastructure and anthropocentric hubris of government Covid mandates. This is perhaps the most threatening dimension: that two years of heavy-handed restrictions on basic social life and community caused immense social harm but were not altogether effective at controlling the pandemic, despite the models which generated an illusion of certainty. Rather, there are natural laws at work governing the human-microbial-environment interaction beyond our control. Here, human illness and death are an intrinsic yet unfortunate reality that, although minimisable by protecting the most vulnerable as with the Swedish approach, cannot be avoided altogether. Lockdowns were always a porous intervention.
So there is still much to learn about herd immunity and respiratory pandemics. However, we must move beyond the emotive polarisation of basic epidemiological science. Government scientists such as Prof. Whitty continue to misrepresent herd immunity, and their statements have become part of the mental scaffolding which justified the UK’s emergency state. Paradoxically, these same scientists advocated for “herd immunity” and focused protection right before flipping to Plan B on 23 March, 2020.
It is time we rehabilitate the reputation of herd immunity as a foundational reality of epidemiology. Future respiratory pandemic response depends on it.
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SubscribeThanks goodness to read something that’s written or spoken by someone with sufficient intellect to distinguish between science and emotive self-justification.
During the previous worldwide pandemic – the Spanish flu which raged in the aftermath of WW1 – precautionary measures were taken but nothing draconian such as lockdowns, and herd immunity took its course to bring the pandemic to an end. The world moved on, still far more concerned about the aftershocks of the Great War than anything else.
That is the Great Lesson. Only fools and incompetent over-promoted science pretenders would fail to take heed of it.
Plenty of lockdowns during Spanish flu, also vaccines.
You’re incorrect. Some public places such as theatres were closed, but pubs stayed open, sports events continued with spectators and there were absolutely no general lockdowns. Why bother commenting when you’re so misinformed?
The authoritative history of the Spanish flu, ‘Pale rider’ gives a detailed account of what happened. Responses varied from country to country, but there were general lockdowns. You should read it, then you’ll be informed.
So, just tell us, which countries imposed general lockdowns?
Closing some public spaces does not amount to a lockdown, which is commonly understood to mean confinement to one’s home or severe restrictions on venturing outside. You’re trying to make an entirely spurious point.
If you read the book [ie take the trouble to look at the evidence] then you’ll see that very many cities, areas, provinces around the world imposed severe restrictions on venturing outside during the Spanish flu epidemic. You’ll also see evidence that these lockdowns suppressed infection levels.
Christmas is coming, so here’s a taster. A Chinese province locked down in 1919 in pretty much the same way that Wuhan locked down in 2020. Now read the book, it would make an ideal Christmas gift.
You don’t need to read the book: This is the BBC:
In 1918, there were no treatments for influenza and no antibiotics to treat complications such as pneumonia. Hospitals were quickly overwhelmed.
There was no centrally imposed lockdown to curb the spread of infection, although many theatres, dance halls, cinemas and churches were closed, in some cases for months.
Pubs, which were already subject to wartime restrictions on opening hours, mostly stayed open. The Football League and the FA Cup had been cancelled for the war, but there was no effort to cancel other matches or limit crowds, with men’s teams playing in regional competitions, and women’s football, which attracted large crowds, continuing throughout the pandemic.
Streets in some towns and cities were sprayed with disinfectant and some people wore anti-germ masks, as they went about their daily lives.
So….no general lockdown. Keep arguing minor points and avoiding the main one….”
And the Spanish Flu was far more deadly and affected younger people. The average age of those dying with covid was greater than the average life span.
Lockdowns were ineffective anyway, but totally ignoring – almost incredible that, but true, all the other vast economic, social educational and indeed medical costs verged on the criminal.
By the way, many western countries had excess deaths just as great many months after the the pandemic. These were not related to covid deaths.
Were there? I wasn’t around then to be honest.
However, if there weren’t (or were..) what difference does it make? What are you trying to prove or infer? What objective evidence would that give us?
Maybe we could have done a rain dance and it would all have gone away? At present that’s just as probable as lockdowns being beneficial (certainly from a cost/benefit analysis point of view) in terms of of evidence based medicine (of which assumption based computer modelling has no part).
As Prof Bhattacharya (Professor of Epidemiology at Stanford) noted, theAge of Enlightenment may well have ended in 2020.
I’d pay good money to see you do a rain dance
The Spanish flu second wave in the autumn of 1918 was more deadly than the spring wave. One explanation is that the attempts to limit the spread of the flu amongst those well enough to socialise gave an advantage to the variants severe enough put people in hospital (which became the main vector).
In other words, an examination of the counterproductive policies of 1918 would have ruled out using them in 2020.
Epidemics usually develop in waves of differing severity. We don’t need a theory to explain an element of randomness. Imagine if the waves of infection were all the same severity, then we’d need a theory.
If we compare the two big covid waves in the UK the second wave wasn’t as bad as the first.
What was the average age of a UK death for Spanish Flu do we know?
And for our recent UK COVID outbreak?
According to the NIH, in the U.S. the average age of death from the Spanish flu was 28, and 75 from COVID.
Many thanks.
From what I can gather the UK was 26 and 82..
Spanish Flu did kill rather a lot of people though. Some estimates put it at 50 million, which, given that the population of the world then was a quarter of what it is now, would equate to about 200 million in today’s terms.
Thank you Kevin. One of the clearest and most helpful explanations I have yet read.
We have been treated very badly. And it continues.
Kidding me. It’s actually a sad reflection on society when some biased hack with an agenda thinks he has the credibility to call out the Chief Medical Officer. Crazy times.
I feel a little sorry for these scientists who were catapulted into the political sphere after March 2020.
While I’m sure the article correctly describes Chris Whitty’s failings, it is obvious at this stage that the entire government, Civil Service and public sector is going to defend lockdown no matter what. They cannot afford to admit it was a mistake, and a significant authoritarian streak in government clearly also has no intention of reliquishing the power to impose it again.
Climate policy lockdowns are coming, and their real target, of course, isn’t saving the planet but ruling the planet.
They won’t admit it was a mistake, because it wasn’t a mistake. Obviously.
I’ve seen the rest of your posts on this subject – including the one earlier that seems to have been deleted – and you are really just delusional where this is concerned.
Oh, and stop using words like “obviously”. You aren’t intellectually equipped to decide whether something is obvious or not.
It wasn’t deleted, it was suppressed, as appears to be the policy on anything criticising the Unherd narrative.
Unherd doesn’t have a “narrative”.
????
It is not just herd immunity that Whitty. Vallance and his fellow “scientists” at SAGE and IndieSage misrepresented. The justification for lockdowns had already been demolished in an April 2020 paper which said ” the postintervention resurgent peak could exceed the size of the unconstrained pandemic , both in terms of peak prevalence and in terms of total number infected. Strong social distancing maintains a high proportion of susceptible individuals in the population, leading to an intense resurgence when R0 rises in the late autumn and winter.” A pretty accurate prediction of what actually happened.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abb5793
You are cherry-picking from that Science article. I would recommend that everyone read the last paragraph: it actually states the need for “stringent social distancing” until interventions [vaccines, antiviral drugs] become available.
Our scientific establishment chose to ignore greater Vitamin D intake despite papers and trials showing it worked and it was cheap. The large Spanish trial showed that people who had over 75 nano mols/ml had a 2% chance of dying of covid whereas those under 35 nano mols had a 77% chance of dying. Today the level just about covers for rickets. Whitty when told of Vitamin D said there was not enough evidence as his boss in America keeps telling him to say.
Great article.
Reality is that no major player in covid decision making is going to admit that we wasted over 400 billions, destroyed businesses and children’s education for no reason.
Or at least reasons stated by government and MSM.
The government and Witty used a graph they knew to be wrong to justify the second lockdown in 2020. This was known then and it is still known now but it has never been discussed at the inquiry. Dr Ben Warner who warned cabinet of the mistake before the announcement, but was ignored, was questioned at the enquiry, but despite mentioning it in his written report, was not asked about it. One can only conclude that the only mistake this enquiry is intetested in is ‘not locking down soon enough and hard enough’. And of course spicy detailing of the bad language and behaviour of the politicians behind the scenes.
It’s beginning to look like the costs of lockdown hugely outweighed the benefits. I just wish the “enquiry” could focus on establishing whether this is in fact the case. If it is the case, then that would amount to a massive failure on the part of the global establishment – governments, the media, the scientific community, all of us. And if so, then I’d argue that the failure was an example of our lack of understanding that central, top-down attempts to control really big, complex, adaptive systems usually don’t work. A sort of generalisation of Hayek’s arguments in “The Road to Serfdom”. Better to do nothing, or nothing too dramatic – in this case adopt a policy based on something like herd immunity and allowing bottom-up control by allowing individuals to make their own decisions based primarily on their own self interests. A sort of generalisation of Adam Smith’s arguments in “The Wealth of Nations”. And if that analysis is broadly correct then I think we’re probably making the same mistake with respect to the “climate emergency” and “Net Zero”.
I am reminded (as I often am in discussions like this) of “Yes, Prime Minister”: We must do something! This is something, therefore we must do it!
A clear and succinct explanation of herd immunity which, contra Prof Whitty, I managed to understand.
Having watched the development of the nanny state for the last seventy years, the reaction to COVID-19’s appearance was not a surprise to me.
At least in the United States, we’ve seen again and again authorities urging citizens to take steps “out of an abundance of caution”. Schools close with anticipated snowfalls of a few inches, indoor events are cancelled when it rains, and predictions of the intensity of hurricanes are sometimes exaggerated to ensure local residents evacuate as directed.
All of this points to a foundational change in our society that declares everyone should always be safe, regardless of our society’s inability to ensure that safety in every instance.
In the United States, government leaders’ reactions to potential disasters are as much about avoiding public opprobrium as they are about not being sued by someone, somewhere, who wants to assign blame for a failure of imagination or to understand risk.
The Powers That Be reacted to COVID-19 as they had previously reacted to other threats to the general population. The policy of shutting down facilities, hiding in homes and hoping things get better include the Anthrax post office scares post-911, the Lee Malvo serial killings in the Washington Metro area later on in 2001, and sundry other crises du jour of the same ilk. The short version is always one, two, three or fifteen people out of several million perish, so we all must restrict our activities until the danger passes.
This is not to say that I disagree with anyone’s condemnation of those in authority for their COVID-19 lies, misdirection, censoring of dissent or other acts furthering their efforts at control to the detriment of the people they were supposed to be serving. But, something like COVID will come again, and our resistance to things such as lockdowns has to be accompanied by we, as a society, collectively becoming more accepting of risk without always having to find a scapegoat when things go sideways. We can’t blame bureaucrats who fear consequences for pursuing less risky approaches when they see all around them the punishments meted out to those whose decisions were wrong.
Personal responsibility is a fading obligation for adults in many Western nations in the 21st Century. If we are to prevent future shutdowns and coercions of that sort, we must reverse that trend starting with ourselves.
My personal view is that the drivers of most government decisions are cowardice and incompetence. Both were on display during COVID.
Chris Whitty should have been ‘SHOT’. along with quite a few ‘others’.
I wouldn’t go so far as suggesting that Whitty should have been shot, but I would say that it was a disgrace that he was knighted and elected to the Royal Society based on his performance as the Chief Medical Officer during the Covid pandemic, when every decision he made was ultimately wrong and harmful. But, unfortunately, all of those who have screwed up, both in the UK and US, have been amply rewarded with honours and prizes. Well clearly we live in an upside down world where right is wrong and wrong is right. Alice in Wonderland anybody?
Metaphorically speaking.
Just want to say that I am no fan of Boris but Vallance demonstrated breath taking arrogance in his sniffy little comment that Boris gave up Science at 15 !
Whitty was no better and if they were not directly on the payroll of Big Pharma , they were certainly their useful idiots.
The Covid enquiry is a total stitch up.
Yes, Whitty made the claim that you had to vaccinate Children to protect their Parents and Grand Parents. This from a supposed Professor
Here in Australia, I do remember people saying that if you got vaccinated, you wouldn’t catch COVID, and you wouldn’t spread COVID. Both of those things are clearly untrue, but I wonder if the powers the be believed them at the time.
It’s always seemed obvious to me that the fact that infection doesn’t confer lifetime immunity has nothing to do with whether herd immunity is a good way to suppress infection. If the experts are arguing the contrary I doubt their good faith.
One of our big problems in medicine is that we still prefer to use a mechanistic approach-logic based on classical physics and chemistry of the 19th and beginning 20th century. It is worth reading ‘The mater with things’ by McGilchrist in which he explains how the physicists of the 20th century have repeatedly warned about how we in the western world are to easily convinced about knowing the truth…
We are living systems, who live in living systems (local town, country, region, world…). The complexity of interactions between these living systems, the complexity of the feed back loops at work to try and keep some balance (to presence health, preserve life) in the individual and also in the wider group is multiple and complex. We can therefore easily argue that that discussion on herd immunity (however important we think that this is) which is a linear thought process in systems that only respond to non linear principles and patterns with strange attractors, seems to belong to those who do not realise we are living entities and prefer nice simple stories rather than accepting the real complexity of reality. As some say: the definition of a specialist in medicine is somebody who knows more and more about less and less….
That is the definition of a “specialist” in anything.
Don’t disagree with the general theme of the Article, but the question that faced the UK, and others, in Mar 20 was the pace of transmission and illness not the rights or wrongs of wanting herd immunity.
Herd immunity was always the goal. The problem was the pace of infection and the numbers made v ill by it was overwhelming services. It was the old ‘flattening the Sombrero’ argument and whilst that analogy, conveyed by the Chaos Chief himself, somewhat cartoonist, it does essentially outline what had to be done. Herd immunity had to happen but slower.
As regards the GBD – we’ve heard lots about this principle in the subsequent 3yrs. Almost always it’s exponents keep it at v high level and duck explaining the realities of how they would have applied within practical guidance. I hope the Inquiry gets it’s exponents to be interviewed and give evidence. If they have really good practical suggestions on how it could have been applied at different stages we need to hear them.
“Herd immunity was always the goal. The problem was the pace of infection and the numbers made v ill by it was overwhelming services. It was the old ‘flattening the Sombrero’ argument…”
I recall the data around this coming out during the first lockdown in summer 2020. By that time Covid was far better understood in terms of the transmission rate and the way the disease affected different kinds of people. In particular, the length of the incubation phase was now known for the purposes of modelling the transmission rate, and with the benefit of hindsight by May 2020 we could accurately model the real infection rate by reference to the later rate at which hospitalisations occurred.
The upshot of this is that a spiking hospitalisation rate in March 2020 panicked the government into imposing lockdown, and almost immediately thereafter the hospitalisation rate started to level off. However, working back the infection rate from the hospitalisation numbers showed that the infection rate must already have been falling prior to the declaration of lockdown: the existing non-lockdown NPIs had already produced the desired result without lockdown. As Sweden’s example then went on to prove.
JR I worked in an ITU at that time. Our hosp has c800 beds. I still have the daily data. 5th March 22 Covid+ in-patients; 21st March -117 Covid+; 5th Apr – 365; 20th April 402; 1st May 519. It was July before it was below 150 again.
That gives some indication of the pace and how long it took to settle back to a manageable number. Everything by way of planned care stopped – Cancer ops, etc the lot. Not just because of cross infection risk but insufficient staff as loads had it or were shielding. We were only able to staff c650 beds through that period, and not 800. And we have to remember still got ill with other things and needed emergency care.
Now the numbers never climbed as rapidly or as high in LD2 & 3, but they were heading up fast both times. The fact they were held at a lower number allowed Cancer ops and some other urgent planned care to continue. Nonetheless I think more of a case to answer for LD 2 & 3. My own view is LD1 unavoidable and became essential. It worked, but was v crude and took time. We can’t get ourselves into such a position again hence critical we reflect on what happened and how to be better next time.
So I hope this gives a further perspective on what was going on.
What a wonderful indictment of the NHS.
Thank you.
From March and throughout 2020 and into 2021, medical staff not working in ICU and on COVID wards were literally twiddling their thumbs as wards were closed and operations cancelled and people stayed away from A&E. Reported to me by a nurse in one of Britain’s largest hospitals.
“by May 2020 we could accurately model the real infection rate by reference to the later rate at which hospitalisations occurred.”
Not sure about that. According to Wood’s paper, modelling from death data :
Inferring UK COVID-19 fatal infection trajectories from daily mortality data: were infections already in decline before the UK lockdowns? Wood June 2021
“In our view, determining definitively what caused R to drop below one is not possible. ”
Despite this comment Wood is very positive that restrictions were way over the top.
Adam Kucharski in his X thread on epidemic delays expands on the problems of modelling and reverse engineering infection dates and delays until hospitalisation especially in a situation with little or no surveillance data (which was the case in March 2020) :
https://twitter.com/adamjkucharski/status/1569235844682194944
and another comment on AK’s twitter feed by Silver Orbit dated 03.11.2023 :
“But (and I can’t believe I’m still needing to say this) it’s not enough to get R just below 1 when you are up at around 1,200 deaths a day. As it was, we were still running at over 500/day a month later by getting R down to about 0.7 with full lockdown”
which simply reinforces JW’s comments about her/his experiences in ICU.
Modeling! Really! Haven’t you learnt by now how completely off all the modeling was. It’s really very simple: GIGO.
The GBD was all practicality. That was its point. The arguement was that there was enough behavioural wisdom within the population and amongst public health officials to respond to the virus in a way that could avoid harm to children and the economy.
Sweden serves as a valid control group in the global experiment of lockdown. It proves that draconian lockdowns were not necessary.
UK has a population density completely different to Sweden. I think Sweden is c25th lowest and we are 150th. No doubt we can still learn bits from them but I think we need to be a little more sophisticated in quoting such a crude comparison.
As regards GBD – give us a few practical policies arising from this principle you’d have implemented to provide focused protection? Remember the GBD is not just voluntary.
I think something in the GBD by LD2 & 3 but not for LD1. Couldn’t be implemented and administered quickly enough and would have confused too many. But even then come LD2 the purveyors were largely devoid of precision in how they’d apply it. They’ve now had 3 years to ponder it more, so important we hear the ideas on how one would so we can potentially use next time.
Swedes live in cities as we do. It is a myth that Sweden is somehow very different.
You may have been short staffed but that was because of incompetence. I volunteered to work in ITU in March 2020. As an ophthalmologist I felt I could at least do nursing work while anaesthetists and specialist nurses got on with what they could do.
Multiple emails about appraisal,Revalidation and diversity awareness ended in May with me being told I was not needed.
The harms caused by policies have far outweighed the whole pandemic madness.
We weren’t ever short in ITU DJ. With no theatres working we had plenty of airway trained staff well qualified and experienced. We lacked ventilators, other kit and PPE of course but the ‘esprit de corps’ was the best I experienced since leaving the RAMC. No disrespect but to get you up the ITU standard, medic or nurse, would take too long. Now you could have gone and filled a junior doc shift on a general emergency ward perhaps as they were struggling with cover, but even that would be quite a stretch for an Ophthalm as you’ll well know. So the offers had to be triaged quickly and brutely. Had the numbers run away even more then who knows, but fortunately the actions taken in LD1 just abated complete meltdown.
Fortunately you were probably tucked up somewhere safe whilst we got on with it, but it does mean you didn’t see what it was actually like. However there is no doubt there were other harms, especially with LD2 & 3, and the balance does need to be assessed by the Inquiry.
As any epidemiologist will tell you, direct comparisons between countries re : Covid and how it was managed are almost a complete waste of time because of the number of confounders both known and unknown.
Some Swedish social demographics for you which you may find illuminating.
In Sweden, over 50% of households are single person households (according to eurostat in 2017). In 2019 according to ONS UK average was 30% range 35% (Scotland) – 24% (London)
Sweden has the smallest average household size in the OECD (1.99) compared with 2.4 in the UK (in 2021)
The largest age group in Sweden is the 25 – 34 years cohort (in 2019)
A 2017 study by Statistics Sweden found that more than 55% of 16 to 24 year-olds don’t socialise with any close relatives.
As for volunteering for ITU duty it takes 2 – 5 years to become a useful critical care nurse in the UK. If you applied in March 2020 then there would have been no spare bodies to train you on the job even supposing there had been no preliminary paperwork.
Greater London has a population density 4 times that of all of Sweden’s urban population. Greater London has 9,787,426 people on 1738 km2, for a density of 5631 persons/km2. Sweden has 9,135,000 people on 6711 urban km2, for a density of 1361 persons/km2. For epidemiological purposes the two are not comparable at all.
Ya know, there is something very wrong with people who downvote simple obvious facts.
The only practical suggestion Gupta came up with at the time the GBD was published was “putting vulnerable people in hotels”
So who are the vulnerable ?
Lets look at some numbers for the UK :
A. 1.49 million people in the UK are in receipt of adult social care (private and NHS and Local authority and direct payment recipients). According to Statista about 490,000 of these are in care homes.
There are 1.52 million social care workers (potential transmitters to this vulnerable population in 2020). This doesn’t include those that are being cared for by immediate family members about 13.6 million informal carers according to this paper :
COVID-19 and UK family carers: policy implications
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2215036621002066#!
B. The population at risk of severe COVID-19 in 2020 (aged ≥70 years, or with an underlying health condition with a fully adjusted hazard ratio (HR) of getting severe covid of 1.13 or greater) comprises 18.5 million individuals in the UK, including a considerable proportion of school-aged and working-aged individuals.
C. 34% of households in the UK are multigenerational – 9 million homes.
D. According to the Actuaries Friday report # 51 : Priority Groups 1 to 9 i.e. over 50s, Health & Care Staff, Extremely Clinically Vulnerable and “At Risk” amounts to around 31m people.
E. There were about 900,000 hotel rooms in the UK in 2020. I don’t know about you but I have never been in a hotel bathroom that has a bath hoist for infirm crinklies.
And you’re point is? The truth is really very simple. A lot of people, probably including yourself (and for that matter, and I fully admit this, myself at the beginning), aided and abetted by the onslaught of the MSM, panicked, and viewed COVID as they would, for example, Ebola – i.e. a death sentence with something like a 50% survival rate. Yet, the fat was that COVID, even with the original strain, was nothing more than a bad flu-like illness that had minimal risk for anybody under the age of 70-75 with no co-morbidities.
The unfortunate truth is that one can run but one can’t hide. Eventually, no matter how many precautions one might take, one will catch COVID. And that’s exactly what happened.
Well said
I still maintain (admittedly from my vantage point in distant Australia) that the UK wouldn’t have had the heavy lockdowns they did had Boris not been hospitalised with COVID. As far as I can seem that rather spooked him.
The fundamental problem is that both scientific advisors and politicians panicked as a result of the pictures from China and the Lombardy region of Italy, all hyped to the nth degree by the press. This put pour politicians in the unenviable position of having to do anything so as to seem to be taking action. All that really needed to be done was advise people not to go to work or use mass transport when sick. Hardly something difficult to do. The end result would have been the same both in the initial and then subsequent waves.
I have just watched Chris Whitty’s Gresham College lecture on Covid 19 delivered on 30 April 2020 – about two months’ in. I recommend it to anyone who still thinks (as I did until seeing it) that the first lockdown was necessary because we didn’t know what we were dealing with. In his lecture all the features of the disease – that it had a <1% mortality rate; that serious illness and death were heavily skewed towards the elderly and those with co-morbidities; that children were in effect not affected by the disease at all – were already known. It is impossible to listen to the lecture and understand how, faced with this pandemic, it was thought correct to lock down the whole country for weeks, or make children wear masks at school. I like Whitty (still) but I have found his position in the Inquiry baffling.
Dear moderator, I am trying to join the discussion, but my [I believe] careful and evidenced contribution is still ‘awaiting approval.’ This happens to me quite a lot, and I do feel rather unherd. I note a chap on the thread has suggested executing certain people he disagrees with, which on an unlucky day would land him in trouble with the law, but you print it anyway. Four benighted people seemingly agree with him. Some food for thought here, I believe.
Where were you educated Mccaully? The Christian Brothers perhaps?
I only ask because you are obviously completely unaware of what the expression “metaphorically speaking “ means.
I find that simply staggering even in this day and age. Perhaps you should sue the CBs or whoever it was? Good luck.
‘Officer, when I was chanting ”from the river to the sea,” I was only chanting metaphorically.’ You only added the ‘metaphorical’ caveat after I mentioned your behaviour to the moderator. You’re a fool if you think this is ok or that people [or the law] will always overlook your offensive behaviour. Grow up.
CBs it is then bad luck!
Incidentally I didn’t add the caveat initially because I thought it was self evident.
However Mr Johann Strauss (directly below’) seemed to take it at face value, hence my correction.
Perhaps it is you who should “grow up” and stop behaving like a male hysteric?
Don’t hide behind Mr Strauss
Look at the timings!?
Let us not forget that the reason we are all talking about this is that Demagogue Fauci funded the Gain of Function work in China after Obama had banned it in the US. For what purpose did he give the Eco health alliance $Millions to make a man made virus more virulent to humans? And then the fool? published a document to say it came from Nature. Too much power in the hands of a Politician and not a Scientist. And that is where we are today in the grip of anti science unable to debate anything.
It was our top scientist Prof Angus Dalgleish who labelled Fauci a good politician but not that scientifically bright. He regarded Chris Whitty as next to useless and should have been sacked and that he would listen to advice from Battersea Dogs Home than advice from Sage who were all incompetent. He doesn’t mince his words. But then he made the anti science cabal blush when he and a top Norwegian scientist basically showed how it was impossible for the virus to come from Nature. But of course you are dealing with a man well above their pay grade. He has developed his own HI virus vaccine and has a cancer vaccine that acts as a covid and flu inhibitor too. Perfectly safe and constantly boosts the immune response, great for people like me instead of vaccines that perturb the immune system. Sorry for the rant.
Is there any hard evidence for that “Fauci funded Gain of Function research in China” comment? I can’t recall seeing any. Maybe you can point me in the right direction.
I have actually looked into the above point myself. It seems the answer depends on who you ask.
Herd immunity is not a tactic, strategy or policy. It is, quite simply, the metric by which the spread of an epidemic through a population is measured.
The herd immunity threshold is the minimum percentage of the population that are immune to infection when, if the population had zero infections and a small number of infections were introduced, zero infections is a stable equilibrium. The herd immunity threshold is a function of the frequency of infection-producing contacts within the host population, the mean infectious period of time and the season, so varies through time. Countries with a high vaccination rate lack natural immunity (which is broad and robust), so are unable to achieve herd immunity, and instead achieved herd-level original antigenic sin, and so COVID-19 waves continue to ripple.
Whitty didn’t claim that herd immunity was too difficult a concept for the public to grasp, he said that politicians, who had the difficult concept of herd immunity explained to them and who agreed that it was not a feasible policy were asked not to talk of herd immunity in such a way that might cause people to believe it was feasible, or was policy, and that they ignored this advice, causing confusion. The Great Barrington declaration was an outlier in the scientific consensus, largely because no one could work out how we could cocoon the vulnerable, their families, their carers and their families etc, while letting the virus rip through the rest of the population. No country on the planet managed to do this, which would seem to be powerful evidence that we were right to ignore the Great Barrington declaration.
Whitty never said herd immunity for covid could be sustainably achieved, he said that if we simply went for herd immunity the death rate would be so appallingly high, and the process might take so long as to make it ethically unthinkable, and destroy the NHS. In the UK something akin to herd immunity was achieved via mass vaccination, which was then built upon by naturally occurring infections in a population with a pre-existing level of vaccine immunity. This facilitated herd immunity which in previous centuries could only have been achieved by the attrition of many waves of the disease.
The idea that living with the common cold confers immunity to covid flies in the face of the evidence, and so far, covid hasn’t become a seasonal illness though it may become one in the future.
The suggestion that Sweden effectively protected the most vulnerable is an extraordinary claim. If you read the Swedish report into its handling of covid, Sweden regards its failure to protect its vulnerable as a national scandal, both the King and the Prime Minister went on TV to apologise to the Swedish people for this failure. There is so much that is wrong about this article, it can’t be taken seriously.
“The Great Barrington declaration was an outlier in the scientific consensus, largely because no one could work out how we could cocoon the vulnerable, their families, their carers and their families etc, while letting the virus rip through the rest of the population.”
The point you are missing here is that lockdown, being a generalised blanket policy applied to the whole of society and policed as such, meant that the implementation and policing of the measures necessary to protect the vulnerable to the extent required was not done and could not be done. The consequence was that the vulnerable, such as elderly care home residents, were not in any case protected by the generalised lockdown measures, and that’s why they had such a high casualty rate.
It’s essential to remember that the GBD was presented as an alternative to lockdowns, not as a general system for dealing with respiratory disease epidemics that would have perfect outcomes. It is entirely wrong to criticise the problems that would accompany the GBD strategy as if the alternative of a generalised lockdown would somehow not also possess equal or greater challenges. To do so is to advance a partisan political argument that misrepresents both policy choices in terms that necessarily would lead – and in fact have led – to serious public policy mistakes carrying colossal societal costs.
I don’t agree with your logic. Given the impossibility of adequately cocooning the vulnerable, the only practical way of mitigating their vulnerability was to keep the general infection rate as low as reasonably possible.
What measures to protect the vulnerable could have been put in place, no one is saying, certainly not the signatories of the GBD, who said nothing at all about how this could be done, and to repeat myself, no country on the planet managed to do this, hence the widespread scepticism over the GBD. Lockdowns didn’t prevent cocooning, the interconnectedness of modern society plus the urgency of the situation prevented cocooning. Interestingly, and I’m putting this forward as evidence, Greece had a much better pandemic than ours, by recognising that the only achievable way of giving some protection to the vulnerable was to keep general infection rates low.
You seem to be suggesting that most of the suffering was caused by the lockdowns and not by the virus, this can’t be the case, and don’t forget the need to prevent the NHS from collapsing.
I’ve replied to your questions but my answer appears to have been held up in the post again
Ha ha, hilarious. Chief Medical Officer for England ‘wrong’, some bloke writing on the internet ‘right’.
Seems to be a case of a ‘little knowledge’ is a dangerous thing.
You’re absolutely right! Only, i think you may have applied it to the wrong target.
Would you care to tell us why Prof. Bardosh is wrong?
Would you care to tell us why we should think that prof Bardosh is right? He has no consensus behind him, he has no particular authority (‘a bloke on the internet’, in fact), and he is giving no arguments, beyond his own overwhelming certainty that he is right.
The evidence for the efficacy of lockdowns tends to nil. That consensus you mention changed his mind overnight on masking and can’t even say where the virus appeared first.
The evidence for alternative measures (‘Barrington’, ‘let ir rip!’) is exactly nil. They were not tried so we know nothing. It is a tricky question, not one where you can assume you are right until the other side proves its case.
What we do know for sure is that 165 million people have been pushed into $2 a day poverty since 2020 because of lockdowns.
Sweden?
Booming!
Just far too many feral immigrants, intoxicated by the sight of nubile white women. Not a good combination.
Certainly not Sweden
Perhaps you should think a little, rather than always go with the consensus blindly. First many studies have shown that lockdown was ineffective and harmful. Second, it should be obvious that in the case of a respiratory virus to which one is potentially exposed 24/7, mitigation efforts are only ging to flatten the curve somewhat, thereby prolonging the agony while leaving the number of people hospitalized or who died from (as opposed to with) COVID unaltered.
When you have a complicated scientific question with a lack of good evidence and a huge controversy, anyone who claims ‘it should be obvious’ is simply proving that he is not serious.
But we do have good evidence and the only controversial position at this stage belongs to people foolish enough still to defend the lockdown-based policy under discussion.
Argument by authority
Your faith in government experts is touching…
The ‘Party Leader’ is ALWAYS right.
Critical thinking is not a dangerous thing.
What is a dangerous thing is unquestioningly believing everything that you are told by your government and the Establishment!
100% spot on Adam. Unfortunately so many supposedly intelligent people have forgotten how to think critically. That is a damning indictment of current elite education.
There was NO critical thinking in Europe and the Middle East from the Emperor Theodosius (c400) until John Wycliffe (c1350) at the earliest.
So it should come as no surprise that we have have degenerated. Subservience to authority/religion is in the blood.It will take AI to fix it!
What is even more dangerous is unquestioningly believing everything that you are told by everyone who is against the establishment. Taking Bardosh at his word has nothing to do with critical thinking.
“Ha ha, hilarious. Chief Medical Officer for England ‘wrong’, some bloke writing on the internet ‘right’.”
The author’s position represents the medical and public health consensus prior to March 2020 in most countries. Oh, and Sweden’s position after that point – you know, the country that proved everyone else’s lockdowns were an expensive mistake. Oh, and it’s a position that the data collected in all nations since March 2020 now supports.
“Seems to be a case of a ‘little knowledge’ is a dangerous thing.”
In your case, certainly.
For your next trick, why not shoot yourself in the other foot?
An additional hilarious concept is how some people are now utterly convinced that Sweden’s approach was correct, despite how they suffered far greater covid losses than their neighbours.
In the longer term,up till 2023, Sweden has now done better than their neighbours
Not as funny as operating on the principle that saving someone dying from Covid is a success even if it kills more people as a consequence. Honestly, the claptrap you do talk.
You’re right Robbie. If we just simply welded doors shut, like they did in China, fewer people would have died from Covid. I’ll keep beating this drum because no one in the west seems to care – 165 million people have been pushed into $2 a day poverty since 2020 because of the lockdowns. Where does this fit into the equation? What this inquiry has shown me is that fat, rich, white people don’t care a fig about poor people living in third world conditions.
“fat, rich, white people don’t care a fig about poor people living in third world conditions”.
Agreed but it was NOT always thus.
In the heyday of the British Empire ‘we’ took a much more benign approach. We called it “the White man’s burden”, and ‘we’ really meant it.
Funny how so many conveniently forget.
Their “neighbours” as you very well know had killed off their ‘old & useless’ the previous year with Flu.
Sweden hadn’t, and therefore had, to use a biblical expression, “lambs to the slaughter”, or “dry tinder” as the Swedes called them.
That’s right. We should all just blindly follow an edict decreed by our beaurocratic “experts”. There were many equally or better credentialed recommending different policy, but they didn’t work with the government so they were discounted. The same is happening with the climate control debate.
What different policies? The one’s where twice as many people died?
I suggest you look up Profs Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson from Trust the Evidence <trusttheevidence@substack.com> You should find the definitive takedown of the fools in SAGE and the Hallett Enquiry.