2020 must be the last year of lockdown.

Lockdown: a deadly, failed experiment: It has been a global catastrophe. We must never go down this road again. ...

In the developing world, where Covid itself has had a much lesser impact than in the West, lockdowns have disrupted an estimated 80 per cent of programmes aimed at treating tuberculosis. In 2019, TB killed 1.4million people worldwide. But this year, thanks to a 25 per cent reduction in case detections, 1.7million deaths have been projected.

One of the greatest costs – which cannot be quantified in lives lost or dollar signs – has been to freedom. And this goes deeper than the (hopefully) temporary curbs on everyday life. Our entire culture of freedom has collapsed. We now need and expect the state’s explicit permission for whatever limited activities we can do. Even Christmas can now be cancelled by the state.

 

 

 

 

Political polarisation impedes the public policy response to COVID-19

Political polarisation impedes the public policy response to COVID-19: As the use of face masks has been shown to effectively diminish the spread of COVID-19 without hampering economic activity, it should be among the least controversial public policy responses to the pandemic. This column shows, however, that mask usage is strongly associated with political partisanship in the US. Using various research designs, it finds that localities which voted for Trump in 2016 are significantly less likely to wear masks, even if mask wearing is mandated. Leadership is shown to matter as well – tweets with positive sentiment towards masks surged after Trump wore a mask in public the first time.

Questions for the UK government in consideration of the empirical data

COVID-19 - Questions for the UK Government in consideration of the empirical data

Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence

Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence: The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The costs are legion. 

The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control. 

Perhaps this is a shocking revelation, given that universal social and economic controls are becoming the new orthodoxy. In a saner world, the burden of proof really should belong to the lockdowners, since it is they who overthrew 100 years of public-health wisdom and replaced it with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights. They never accepted that burden. They took it as axiomatic that a virus could be intimidated and frightened by credentials, edicts, speeches, and masked gendarmes. 

The pro-lockdown evidence is shockingly thin, and based largely on comparing real-world outcomes against dire computer-generated forecasts derived from empirically untested models, and then merely positing that stringencies and “nonpharmaceutical interventions” account for the difference between the fictionalized vs. the real outcome. The anti-lockdown studies, on the other hand, are evidence-based, robust, and thorough, grappling with the data we have (with all its flaws) and looking at the results in light of controls on the population. 

Much of the following list has been put together by data engineer Ivor Cummins, who has waged a year-long educational effort to upend intellectual support for lockdowns. AIER has added its own and the summaries. The upshot is that the virus is going to do as viruses do, same as always in the history of infectious disease. We have extremely limited control over them, and that which we do have is bound up with time and place. Fear, panic, and coercion are not ideal strategies for managing viruses. Intelligence and medical therapeutics fare much better.

End the COVID-19 Lockdowns? Two Epidemiologists Debate

End the COVID-19 Lockdowns? Should the COVID-19 lockdowns be replaced with a more targeted strategy?

On October 4, 2020, epidemiologists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocates for ending the COVID-19 lockdowns and turning to a strategy of protecting elderly and vulnerable populations, while allowing everyone else to resume their normal lives.

Critics of the Declaration issued a counter-petition, called the "John Snow Memorandum," stating, "Any pandemic management strategy relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed. Uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity and mortality across the whole population."

Sweden’s king says country’s coronavirus strategy has failed

Sweden’s king says country’s coronavirus strategy has failed: Asked by the Financial Times if he should have done more to reduce the spread of the virus in Sweden, [state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell] said that many countries with strict lockdowns had had high infection rates, and that the situation was “very complicated”. 

He added: “In Sweden we do the same as all other countries: we do our best to keep the spread as low as possible. We can see countries using a lot of different measures, and we cannot see any clear correlation between measures and the stop of the spread.”

WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyseus is accused of aiding genocide in Ethiopia by nobel peace prize nominee

WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyseus is accused of aiding genocide in Ethiopia by nobel peace prize nominee:

• American economist David Steinman accused WHO chief of being one of three officials who directed Ethopia's security forces from 2013 to 2015
• Tedros, who denies the allegations, was Ethiopia's foreign minister until 2016
• The complaint was lodged at the International Criminal Court in the Hague

WHO accused of conspiring with Italy to remove damning Covid report

WHO accused of conspiring with Italy to remove damning Covid report: The World Health Organization has been accused of conspiring with the Italian health ministry to remove a report revealing the country’s mismanagement at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic – the publication of which was intended to prevent future deaths.

Italy was the first European country to become engulfed by the pandemic. The report, produced by the WHO scientist Francesco Zambon and 10 colleagues across Europe, was funded by Kuwait’s government with the objective of providing information to countries yet to be hit.

Evidence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in an Oropharyngeal Swab Specimen, Milan, Italy, Early December 2019: We identified severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 RNA in an oropharyngeal swab specimen collected from a child with suspected measles in early December 2019, ≈3 months before the first identified coronavirus disease case in Italy. This finding expands our knowledge on timing and mapping of novel coronavirus transmission pathways.

It’s Time to Scare People About COVID

It’s Time to Scare People About COVID: Mister Rogers-type nice isn’t working in many parts of the country. It’s time to make people scared and uncomfortable. It’s time for some sharp, focused, terrifying realism.

Facts – Not Fear – Will Stop the Pandemic: The media relish negative news. “If it bleeds it leads” still holds, and perhaps it’s never been truer than in the COVID-19 era. Every day the news highlights the spread of the virus and tells the sad stories of some of its victims.

And yet, much of the media does not pay sufficient attention to the good news regarding improved treatments and survival of patients with the coronavirus. In contrast with the international media, the American press has been unrelentingly negative in its COVID coverage, even when there is good news to tell. That negativity is part of what fuels a culture of fear that affects local, state and federal politicians and the decisions they make.

 

Explaining Operation Warp Speed

Fact Sheet: Explaining Operation Warp Speed: Operation Warp Speed's goal is to produce and deliver 300 million doses of safe and effective vaccines with the initial doses available by January 2021, as part of a broader strategy to accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics (collectively known as countermeasures).

Political, Not Medical, Science Drives the Lockdown Lemmings

Political, Not Medical, Science Drives the Lockdown Lemmings: History ignobly records and rightly condemns those despots who tried to excuse their trampling of people’s rights by arguing: “I kept you safe.” Astoundingly, such despots are often enabled and, indeed, applauded by those they oppress.

In vaccine race, Russia and China seek global influence as U.S. looks inward

In vaccine race, Russia and China seek global influence as U.S. looks inward: In the new frontier of vaccine diplomacy, there are two paths: stockpile or share.

The first way is unfolding in the United States — with two promising coronavirus vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna on the cusp of approval — as the Trump administration focuses on domestic distribution from private labs.

The European Union and other wealthy democracies have bought up much of what’s left of the initial doses, but they also will lend support to a World Health Organization-linked effort to eventually expand supplies to countries in need.

The other approach comes from China and Russia, which have rushed to share their own state-backed vaccines with nations scrambling for supply, positioning themselves to possibly expand their political and economic interests in the process.

The contrast goes well beyond the crisis of the pandemic, reflecting how the post-World War II world order is challenged by the rise of authoritarian powers and the retreat of the United States during the outgoing Trump administration.

“Global health and pharmaceutical interventions are getting sucked into balance-of-power politics,” said David Fidler, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. “For the U.S., this creates geopolitical nightmares, because we are not in the game.”

It's morally wrong for government control freaks to tell us what to do at Christmas

It's morally wrong for government control freaks to tell us what to do at Christmas: The question is not which group is right. It is whether we should be allowed to make the choice for ourselves, instead of having it imposed on us by law.

Let’s open up debate about lockdowns

Let’s open up debate about lockdowns: Less than a year ago, a national lockdown would have been unthinkable in a democratic country like the UK

SAGE used WIKIPEDIA data to model Covid crisis, says documentary

SAGE used WIKIPEDIA data to model Covid crisis, says documentary:

• SAGE admitted early virus modelling based on figures from online encyclopedia
• Committee of scientists advising PM also had no expert on human coronavirus 
• Dubious data formed the basis for the group's calls for first national lockdown
• Experts predicted that the peak would be in June - but it actually came in April  
• Impact of care home staff spreading Covid by working in multiple sites not considered
  

'Chumocracy': how Covid revealed the new shape of the Tory establishment

'Chumocracy': how Covid revealed the new shape of the Tory establishment: The anti-establishment claims of a government led by Johnson and Dominic Cummings were always audacious, and in the appointments and contracts awarded during the pandemic, the shape of a Tory establishment has come into focus. Critics are calling it a “chumocracy”.

UK government contracts during the pandemic

A visualization of the connections between Tory politicians and companies being awarded government contracts during the pandemic

The Enraging Deja Vu of a Third Coronavirus Wave

The Enraging Deja Vu of a Third Coronavirus Wave: Health care workers don’t need patronizing praise. They need resources, federal support, and for us to stay healthy and out of their hospitals. In many cases, none of that is happening.

The Controlled Demolition of Society

Dustin Broadbery: The Controlled Demolition of Society: The Trojan Horse of COVID

Admittedly, this is not your standard issue-industrialised, globalised takeover of society. Why would it be? Fascism has come a long way since Hitler. Nowadays the general population is too smart, would recognise the face of tyranny and not this garden variety imposter. Or so we think. Besides, ‘without the Allies landing on the beaches of Normandy, how could we be under siege?’ We reassure ourselves before crawling back into captivity in a comforting lockstep with less fortunate nations. Adaptation is a wonderful thing, but maybe not for us. In keeping with the opaque nature of this political confidence trick, this is not your typical dictatorship either. Instead it’s Middle England’s answer to a veritable military junta, carrying the letters of marque from Her Majesty’s Government to legitimize its piracy, courted by the ivory towers of science and medicine, and extolled as a force for good by a population sleepwalking towards the edge of disaster. Meanwhile society burns ritualistically to the ground. But that’s ok, we can build back better from the ashes. Or so we are told.

This journey towards the wrong side of history is made possible by subtle nuances of control, confusion and fear that most fail to comprehend. Triggering the wholesale abandon of logic and reason to a seemingly benevolent cult who offer protections against our day of reckoning. The threat of death strikes an uncomfortable chord and our ability to adapt makes us low-hanging fruit. But who could have predicted fascism would look so ordinary from inside the Panopticon? Once we’re plugged into a shared digital common, a state of emergency can rapidly contaminate consensus, until collectivism flourishes like wildfire. Meanwhile, measured perspective becomes an act of war. Who wants to be on the wrong side of the cult, when those failing to bend a knee to COVID, are, by disassociation, guilty, with blood on their hands? This entire process works because the fertile ground for any dictatorship to prosper is fear. A state of emergency unites us with common purpose. And what could be more compelling than a pandemic? Death, like communism, levels the playing field of all distinctions. Regardless of class, age, gender, or race, death is indiscriminate. Reaffirming the normalcy of our departure from one place of relative safety to another is straightforward enough. Safety is, after all, relative to the setting of the emergency. The higher the alert level, the safer we feel in the herd, regardless of small matters such as the number of prison bars holding us captive. In a strong-enough current people are like driftwood trying to dock in the reeds. Remember the motto of this thing from the outset: ‘The New Normal?’

Europe confronts the second wave [What Think Tanks are thinking]

Europe confronts the second wave [What Think Tanks are thinking]: This note offers links to recent commentaries, studies and reports from major international think tanks on pandemic related issues.