Mad World

Even people who have broadly supported the government’s lockdown policies - and, incredibly, there appear to be many, if opinion polls are to be believed - are surely not blind to the various kinks in those policies that have been at best misguided and at worst, truly scandalous. Here I list some of Boris Johnson’s most catastrophic missteps in a year full of them. Care homes In a perverse attempt to ‘protect the NHS’, thousands of Covid patients were shunted out of hospitals into care homes , without tests, where they infected others which led to a huge proportion of Covid deaths. (Interestingly, many countries and US states, including Sweden and New York, made the same mistake.) Nightingale hospitals ‘Fever hospitals’ would have been one of many infinitely preferable ideas to lockdowns, which bowdlerise the economy and atomise society  in dangerous ways, and the quick construction of discrete health centres gave rise to the hope that this would happen. But the eight of t...

In my previous post on this blog on 31 December I expressed hope that it would be the last of my 42 articles on the ruination caused by lockdowns as a response to coronavirus. I hoped that the vaccine roll-out would shortly lead to the resumption of some sort of normal life, and that the government would gradually begin to pull back from its draconian, stifling measures. Not for the first time in the past year I was to be disappointed. This repugnant administration has used vaccines to double down on its position, to become ever crueller, ever more thoughtless, ever more totalitarian than before. This godforsaken prime minister has presided over the most fascistic, inhuman policies ever enacted by a British government. Were these to happen in wartime would be bad enough; that they are happening in peace time is unforgivable . For what? A virus. A nasty virus, to be sure. But whereas smallpox has a mortality rate of 30% and ebola has a mortality rate of 50%, this virus has a mortality...

The last day of this awful, ridiculous year seems like a good time to write what will probably be my last blog post on the subject of Covid and lockdowns.  This was the year when the world went mad. Throwing out decades of scientific guidance on how to deal with a viral pandemic, most countries embraced the methods of a totalitarian communist state, with predictably catastrophic consequences. Not only was the pandemic agonisingly stretched out, life as we knew it was upended in the most tragic and harmful way, with our economy trashed, our schools emptied, our liberties stamped upon, our health service unforgivably mangled, our faces muzzled for no good scientific reason, our mental health pulverised and our future conduct in health crises put on a highly worrying footing. The lockdown fanatics got it wrong time after time . Wise medical practitioners were not listened to , governments preferring instead to adopt The Precautionary Principle on steroids. The USA allowed its greatest...

*but were afraid to ask Why did the government put us into lockdown in March? One of the main reasons the government did so is because of the computing models of Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College Oxford. His model forecast a worst case scenario of 500,000 deaths.  This figure provoked a panicked response, to put it mildly. One problem was that Ferguson had in the past made similarly apocalyptic forecasts, many of which had been astonishingly wide of the mark . In 2001, he predicted that foot and mouth disease could kill up to 50,000 people. It ended up killing less than 200 .  In 2005, he told the Guardian that up to 200 million people could die from bird flu. The final death toll from avian flu strain A/H5N1 was 440 .  And in 2009, a Government estimate based on one of Ferguson’s models estimated the likely death toll from swine flu at 65,000 . In fact, it was 457 . Ferguson’s predictions haven’t been out by a mile or two, they’ve been out by t...