A year since the technocrats lost control, who besides the media is thinking about Covid 19? Few.
from thorns
How SAGE Almost Stole Christmas
Seeing someone wearing a mask today is like seeing someone wearing a monocle. However, it has only been 12 months since a group of scientists, activists and journalists attempted to bring Britain into a fourth lockdown.
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It’s easy to forget how much pressure is on Boris Johnson to impose ‘non-pharmaceutical’ interventions on populations brimming with immunity
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At its heart are the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and epidemic management groups at various universities. Any pretense that they were dry academics giving impartial advice died last Christmas. They were active participants in a campaign, releasing documents to the press and criticizing the government when speaking to the media ‘in private’. The model, which has been too pessimistic for at least a year (most famously when Neil Ferguson predicted 100,000 cases per day after ‘Freedom Day’ in the summer of 2021), has become ridiculously doomsday. One million cases per day were predicted before Christmas. Thirty thousand hospital admissions per day are thought to be probable. Six thousand deaths per day is considered a reasonable worst-case scenario. Even the best-case scenario predicts a peak of 600 deaths per day.
As it turned out, the death toll peaked at just 200 people, one-sixth of the number of deaths in the previous two waves. The number of short-term hospitalizations has exceeded 2,000 a day, and many of these are ‘accidental’ – that is, among people who happen to have Covid but are hospitalized for other reasons. How did scientists get it so wrong?
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The evidence that Omicron is more contagious (yes) comes from South Africa and is immediately considered science solved. But when evidence from South Africa showed that Omicron resulted in relatively few hospitalizations and deaths (which is also true), the SAGE experts tried to refute that. South Africans are younger, they say. They say they have built up immunity from previous waves, as if the UK didn’t have its own waves of infections and a much more extensive vaccination programme.
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Almost from the start, doctors in South Africa have told us that Omicron is ‘much less serious’ and the UK is ‘unnecessarily panicking’. Anyone tracking the data from South Africa can see what they’re talking about. Episodes of infection increased and then declined with far fewer hospitalizations and deaths than in previous waves. On social media this was dismissed as ‘hopium’ and a range of reasons were given, such as it is summer in the Southern Hemisphere and South Africa has lower obesity rates (actually). practically none). The head of the South African Medical Association, Dr Angelique Coetzee, later said that she had been asked by European scientists to keep quiet about Omicron being lighter.
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On December 16, Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London stated that there is “no evidence” that Omicron is less severe than Delta, based on a study involving only 24 hospital patients. in London.
At this point, SAGE has been more or less lobbying publicly to put in place ‘stricter restrictions’ as soon as possible (‘if done late, it is less likely that these will prevent significant pressure’. including care and health facilities’). One of its members, psychologist Stephen Reicher, told the press that ‘all science holds that [mandatory masks and vaccine passports] won’t be enough… anyway, everything is closed because of the spread of the disease. So I think we need to act now.’ The group of self-appointed experts and hypocrites at ‘Independent SAGE’ have called for an immediate ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown.
Much of the media got involved. Already obsessed with ‘Partygate’ and can’t get out of their thoughts about 2020, they seem intent on reviving last Christmas’s drama. On December 19, the Guardian’s science editor wrote that “the scientific case for more limitations is overwhelming”. LBC’s James O’Brien tweeted: ‘Scientists warn of what could happen next if Johnson doesn’t act now. Johnson refuses to act until it actually happens. We’ve seen this movie before.’ The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr tweeted: ‘It’s March 2020 again.’
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So here’s to a merry Christmas without the risk of a lockdown for the first time since 2019. Attempts to cancel last year’s Christmas celebrations have largely been forgotten. But for those of us who remember, those responsible will never be forgiven.
https://www.spike-online.com/2022/12/23/how-sage-almost-stole-christmas/
And many bad actors are still in place.
A Merry Christmas to all.
