David Craig, on August 10th, 2020(Monday/Tuesday blog)
Utterly useless government run by Bojo the Clown?
I agree that the UK government’s response to Xi Pingpong’s Covid-19 Chinese plague has been disastrous:
- the UK has the second highest rate of deaths per million of population in Europe
- Hancock, Williamson, Sharma and all the the other lightweight politicians have been worse than a joke inspiring about as much confidence as a chocolate teapot
- our bureaucrats such as Public Health England (PHE) and NHS procurement have been shown up to be (IMHO) lazy, incompetent, arse-covering, over-paid, over-pensioned fools
Oh, and here’s the magnificent Yvonne Doyle from the wonderful Public Health England:
At least this seems to be the standard narrative propagated by most of our 20/20-hindsight journalists and believed by most people.
But maybe this is because we all have rather short memories?
But did the ‘experts’ get it wrong?
I have been trawling back through what really happened at the start of Xi Pingpong’s Chinese plague and came across this from a blog I wrote on 19 March 2020:
The four nations public health group (including the now infamous and ludicrously-misnamed Public Health England) made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID (High Consequence Infectious Disease). On its government website on 19 March 2020, Public Health England (PHE) announced that COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) in the UK.
Here’s a link to the official government/PHE website from 19 March:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid#status-of-covid-19
In the UK, a HCID is defined according to the following criteria:
- acute infectious disease
- typically has a high case-fatality rate
- may not have effective prophylaxis or treatment
- often difficult to recognise and detect rapidly
- ability to spread in the community and within healthcare settings
- requires an enhanced individual, population and system response to ensure it is managed effectively, efficiently and safely
The government is constantly being lambasted for shutting down the economy too late. Yet just one week before the government did implement the lockdown on 26 March 2020, its advisors from the useless PHE downgraded the seriousness of Xi Pingpong’s Chinese Covid-19 plague.
As far as I’m aware, none of the mainstream media have thought to mention this. Why not? Because it doesn’t fit into their “the government is run by a floppy-haired clown and is to blame for everything” narrative? The last thing the media wants is some positive stories about the government’s Covid-19 response.
If the ‘experts’ were correct in downgrading Xi’s Chinese plague, this asks the question whether a better strategy would have been to isolate all those over 65 and all those who had comorbidities making them vulnerable to the Chinese plague, but to have let the rest of the economy continue as normal allowing infections to build herd immunity? However, with the media – particularly the UK-hating BBC, UK-loathing C4 News and (IMHO) shouty idiots like Beth Rigby from Sky News and Piers Moron from GMB – screaming for action, I can understand why the government felt pushed into drastic action – crashing the economy – which may lead to the cure being worse than the disease.
From this it’s clear that between 19 March and 26 March the government was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Some of its ‘experts’ (PHE) were claiming one thing – relax, things aren’t too serious – while Professor Penis from Imperial College and a hyperventilating media were demanding the opposite – shut the economy or we’re all going to die!
Here’s just part of the PHE recommendation from the PHE website on 19 March 2020:
As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK.
The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.
The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.
The need to have a national, coordinated response remains, but this is being met by the government’s COVID-19 response.
Cases of COVID-19 are no longer managed by HCID treatment centres only. All healthcare workers managing possible and confirmed cases should follow the updated national infection and prevention (IPC) guidance for COVID-19, which supersedes all previous IPC guidance for COVID-19. This guidance includes instructions about different personal protective equipment (PPE) ensembles that are appropriate for different clinical scenarios.
Oooops, we all seem to have forgotten that!
You’ll also see that, in addition to downgrading Xi Pingpong’s Chinese plague from being classified as a HCID, PHE also recommended that Covid-19 sufferers should be treated in general hospitals rather than in specialist HCID treatment centres. This led to the disastrous panicked policy of sending over 15,000 elderly patients into care homes without testing them for Covid-19 to free up hospital beds because the NHS didn’t want to see a situation like Italy or Spain where dying patients were left lying in hospital corridors.
I’m not defending the government’s response
I’m not trying to defend the government’s confused and contradictory response to the plague that Xi Pingpong unleashed on the world in order to increase China’s power. But I do worry that the reporting from our headline-seeking, intellectually-challenged, often woke media has been simplistic and has a remarkable tendency to ignore any facts it finds which don’t fit its “politicians are all idiots and we journalists are always much smarter” narrative.
My Wuhan song
And here, for anyone who hasn’t seen it is my little video – The Wuhan Song:
Category: 
That is because all the MSM are controlled by the left and this was an opportunity not to be missed.If our Government was remotely conservative they would have had the confidence to carry on regardless and ignore and refute the scaremongering.But as we know this Government is weak and tries to run with the hounds and totally lacks any conviction politically.This is why we are where we are,in a bigger mess than ever and one that will in all likelihood lead to financial ruin and civil strife.How people keep believing that the Conservative party is in any way conservative or right wing amazes me and they keep vot ing for more of the same.Their recent tough talking,yes they are good at talking tough,with regard to illegal immigration,is typical.We all know they have expressed the same promises for years and done nothing.They have treated the electorate like fools and yet still they vote for them.We are now talking about the complete destruction of the civilised country we knew so well,so relatively recently.I fear it too late,short of armed insurrection,which is highly unlikely in such a cowed and controlled population.We are one step away from a totalitarian state,if indeed we are not already there,
You have covered a huge amount of ground today.
I think it is wrong to say that the UK has had a higher number of deaths and imply that they are all due to Covid19 but I realise you are just quoting the claimed facts. Deaths are a matter of statitics and that is why it is wrong to compare totals for specific periods. For the sake of argument, suppose that Covid disappears then the deaths we have seen this year which are mainly people who did not have long to live anyway, will not happen next year and so this two year period will not be significantly different to any other two year period. Lies, damned lies and statistics.
The other implication in this comparision is that it is the governments response to the pandemic which is the cause of the higher deaths. It seems more likely to me that it is the poor health of the British compared to other countries and I put this down to the utterly useless socialist health care system which does not encourage people to live a healthy life. People have to be ill to keep the money rolling into socialist parasites.
You refer to the classification of the disease and I think I have seen this mentioned elsewhere. I don’t watch TV news and don’t read newspapers, but my impression is that whilst the media, unions and opposition parties are criticising the government, they seem to be supporting even more draconian measures, with even less evidence than the government has.
There is a parallel here with climate science and expert opinion. I do know the physics associated with the climate and it has been perverted by a large number of apparently qualified scientists. For years I spent my time reading published papers and I have thousands of them. I felt that perhaps I had missed something but of course I haven’t. I then started to ask the question why are scientist lying to us, and it can only be because politics and not science is driving the agenda, but what is the agenda and who is really behind it? The same questions apply to the virus.
In the UK we have Prof Brian Cox, a physicist who should, and I am sure does understand the physics of climate, but he is promoting human caused climate change. He appeared on Australian TV claiming that consensus and correlation were the justification. When it came to his own work on the identification of the Higgs-Boson particle using the large hardon collider, consensus did not apply. A group of scientists could have agreed that the particle existed and it would have saved billions in unnecessary research.
I don’t understand the science of viruses but it is clear that there are differences of opinion, and with totally opposing views. We do not have to understand the science to question why the government is accepting one view and not the others and apparently does not question the differing opinions. I have seen discussion of published reseach on masks and not one paper says they are effective at stopping the spread of viruses. However, the studies all seem to be in medical situations and not for our new normal existence. Two Oxford professors, Heneghan and Jefferson, from the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine say they do not work, and there is a video on the Unherd channel.
There is some sense is isolation but do we ever apply it? If people are really ill, then they are not going to go out, even if it is just temporary, like a cold. We have used common sense, until the government started giving rules for every aspect of our lives. The failure was the NHS discharge of patients to care homes and not protecting the care homes. People were out clapping the NHS for the death sentence effectively given to many elderly. It is now being claimed that for every 3 Covid related deaths there have been 2 other deaths because of the policies.
Isolation is never true isolation because most people live with somebody or need help if they cannot go out. I have not lived with anybody for the past 50 years so perhpas others could comment about transmission of disease in household. It seems obvious to me that colds and flu do not always get transmitted between members of a household. Many years ago my mother had a virus that left her very weak, but my father didn’t get it. It is obvious that some of us have immunity to some diseases but this is being completely ignored by the government. We should basically carry on and stay home if we are ill, as we have always done.
Better safe than sorry or the precautionary principle is being applied. It never works and there are always implications. In this case the destruction of our economy, which will have an impact on survivors (most of us) for decades to come. The big question is why has our government and almost every other damaged their economies for a virus that is not much worse than flu. Why have all government acted in the same way immdiately when normally it will take endless conferences over many years? Was it all secretly planned in advance? Why are the populations so willing to accept these draconian measures? Perhaps the answer is that many are being paid to accept them.
Harcastle could be right, we could be already living in a totalitarian state, along with most of the world, we will only know if normality does not return. It is interesting that videos of Yuri Bezmenov, a soviet defector, who discussed how communists use subversion and not force to spread the canker of communism are appearing on the internet. I think it was 1984 when he expressed these view and he thought, wrongly, that America was about to fall. The reason it didn’t was that most people in the west were too wealthy to fall for it. The virus policies are going to make a lot of people much worse off.
Boris, Hancock, Sunak, Whitty and Vallance have seized power and have become dictators whose strings are pulled by the loan sharks who have supplied the finance for lockdown and the vaccine lobby/manufacturers who are set to reap billions upon billions.
Boris and Sunak, I suspect, were captured (bribery and/or stupidity and/or fear?) by the IMF/Pharma cohort and other institutions into a lockdown whereby a vaccine effectively becomes a ransom. i.e. the only means or returning life back to normal is to eliminate the disease by vaccination.
Rebellion over the lockdown was bought-off by grossly excessive borrowing from (I suspect)international loan sharks whose terms (according to Alexandr Lukoshenko President of Belarus) included face masking and social distancing. All presumably to instill fear and build up desire or acceptance for the Gates’s and other vaccines.
In future we may be more interested in the Vaccine Damage Payment Act (1979) Most of us (over the age of 21) are not be covered and, in any case, it only pays out for vaccine damage with very serious life-changing side effects. In the US vaccine manufacturers are free from liability if their vaccines have any (mild or serious) adverse side effects. Therefore, in both jurisdictions there is very little incentive to make vaccines without side effects. Vaccines rushed into production and implementation are self evidently the most risky.
Chris, you are quite right to raise the vaccine issue and it is being driven by money poured into universities, pharma and charities for research, with no central coordination of the research. An issue I cannot resolve is what they are actually doing because there are many reports saying that the virus has not been isolated from all the others. Until that is done there will be no vaccine. It is back the the issue of who do we believe and why isn’t any government asking the relevant questions. The WHO said a few days ago that they don’t expect a vaccine any time soon.
We must also consider that there is not a vaccine for any of the known coronaviruses. Perhaps because some have vanished and so there hasn’t been the pressure to develop a vaccine. There isn’t a vaccine for HIV after all the years of research. It is not easy. We do not have a vaccine for flu that has allowed it to be eliminated and it does not give lifetime protection to those who receive it. It is said to be 40-60% effective but I have never seen an explanation of what that really means. In the case of smallpox, it has been eliminated, I believe because it does not mutate and it does not spread to animals and it was only finally eliminated because of a targeted vaccination programme.
It is not difficult to imagine a vaccine that has not been fully tested being forced on us and that we will have to carry a certificate around and will not be allowed to travel or enter countries if we do not have it.
This is exactly what I fear.Access to a whole range of activities only for those with a vaccination certificate.This would be full scale fascist totalitarianism as far as I am concerned,but I can see plenty of people going along with it.If I have heard the phrase,”better to be safe than sorry” ,once over the past months I must have heard it dozens of times.Blind acceptance is just unintelligent and intellectual laziness,especially when our basic freedoms are threatened and threatened they most definitely are.We will be unable to escape from this nightmare or indeed the country if these developments actually happen.
Hardcastle, you are right about the expression, I have seen it used more often recently. It is going to be the new mantra of oppression. It is the precautionary principle at work. It was used to kill supposed witches in medieval times to prevent “weather cooking” – better kill them than risk them bringing on a terrible storm. It is the same argument used about CO2 – what harm can it do to reduce CO2 emissions? People who adopt this approach never stop to think about the implications. In life there are no solutions, there are just trade offs and when one side is ignored we head blindly into problems. Climate policies are costing us billions world wide in higher energy cost and the supply system will become unreliable. Virus polices will result in unemployment, companies going out of business, deaths for other reasons, disruption of normal life and education, increased crime etc. Perhaps a taste of real poverty and austerity will bring people to their senses. I don’t think rational debate will change their minds.
”But I do worry that the reporting from our headline-seeking, intellectually-challenged, often woke media has been simplistic and has a remarkable tendency to ignore any facts it finds which don’t fit its “politicians are all idiots and we journalists are always much smarter” narrative.”
Ironic for both sides then, that before he moved into the business of running London, and then attempting to run the UK, Boris’s profession was, er, Journalist……
Alexandr Lukashenko recently refused an IMF/Pharma (protection racket) loan because the terms of the offer required him to mandate fear mongering masks and social distancing. All this was to prepare his country for Gates’s, et al, vaccine. True to form the media and its deep state owners are now (in Mafia style tactics) preparing the ground for regime change.
I also see the media doing its best to rubbish Russia’s first CV vaccine. I bet Facebook, You Tube, Twitter will be removing all but critical comments as they did with hydroxychloroquine. But, once again, Putin has stolen a march and I would bet many countries around the world will prefer to have a Russian vaccine. Especially India, which has suffered so much from the Gates’s Foundation’s dangerous polio vaccine.
Masks today, forced vaccinations tomorrow.