Yesterday’s post introduced Neil Ferguson’s interview with The Times, which the paper published on the evening of Christmas Day.
This was the biggest statement he made:
How Ferguson, he of the hopelessly outlandish — and false — predictions, could enter the fray on a worldwide pandemic using CCP methods beggars belief:
The other chilling statement made in the article was that lockdowns will be employed in future pandemics. That’s because they worked so well, we had to have one long lockdown — under various guises — for the better part of nine months, not the promised two or three weeks:
Yet, Matt Hancock relies on what this man and SAGE members regurgitate every couple of weeks:
My prayer for 2021 is that divine providence shines a light on the evil that Ferguson, a NERVTAG member, SAGE and Matt Hancock have been perpetrating on the British people:
Thank heaven that Bosnia and Herzegovina ruled against an inhumane coronavirus programme. I hope that we do the same:
Someone also needs to have the guts to investigate Ferguson and the rest of them:
Let’s look at The Times‘s article, which Science Editor Tom Whipple wrote: ‘Professor Neil Ferguson: People don’t agree with lockdown and try to undermine the scientists’.
Tom Whipple was absolutely gushing in his reporting, overlooking Ferguson’s previous bogus predictions over the past 20 years of notional pandemics. Some of those predictions put a severe dent into British farming (emphases mine):
He moved from Oxford to Imperial as part of the country’s leading infectious disease modelling group. They modelled the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak, as well as the 2009 swine flu outbreak, in which at one point, before better data came in, they estimated a “reasonable worst case scenario” of 65,000 deaths.
When he returned to advise the government once again, this projection, two orders of magnitude above the real total, was cited by his critics. So too was foot and mouth, where the cull of millions of cattle and sheep, partly on the basis of predictions about the disease, still causes deep bitterness among farmers.
Whipple at least calls lockdown ‘a medieval intervention’. However, I would posit that, even in the Middle Ages, there were policies of sequestering the vulnerable and quarantining the sick, leaving the rest to work. People needed food and goods. Anyway, Ferguson describes how he embraced the CCP policy of overall lockdown:
In January, members of Sage, the government’s scientific advisory group, had watched as China enacted this innovative intervention in pandemic control that was also a medieval intervention. “They claimed to have flattened the curve. I was sceptical at first. I thought it was a massive cover-up by the Chinese. But as the data accrued it became clear it was an effective policy.”
Then, as infections seeded across the world, springing up like angry boils on the map, Sage debated whether, nevertheless, it would be effective here. “It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought.” In February one of those boils raged just below the Alps. “And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”
Whipple gushed:
That realisation was a fulcrum in British history, and in the life of Professor Ferguson.
That ‘fulcrum’ meant poor health and/or imminent penury for millions of the rest of us.
This was Ferguson’s outrageously erroneous prediction that prompted Britain’s continuing lockdowns:
a quarter of a million Britons would die. If we wanted to stop that, he also projected, it would require extreme social distancing measures until a vaccine arrived.
Whipple’s next sentence reads:
That was when he went from unknown epidemiologist to academic superstar.
That is incredibly disingenuous. Millions of Britons knew who he was from his previous predictions. Our celebrity astrologer Mystic Meg could have done better by staring into her crystal ball. She would not have advocated lockdown or masks, either.
Ferguson expressed his surprise that people would criticise him:
“It’s bizarre,” he says. “Particularly given that I’ve never been a public servant. We volunteer for scientific committees, we don’t get paid anything.” He says he has not read most of the coverage, but can’t help hearing some of the criticism.
“Where it’s been disappointing is if people start out from a viewpoint that they don’t agree with lockdown, then try to undermine the science and scientists behind it. That hasn’t been a pleasant experience.”
Those statements puzzle me greatly.
His own track record speaks for itself, yet, his and SAGE’s policies have been ruling all our lives for the better part of a year. He doesn’t think people should criticise him because they are losing their livelihoods? Pure bunkum.
Whipple then goes into the assignation that Ferguson and his married mistress had during the springtime lockdown. The rest of us were holed up in our homes and she travelled across London for an afternoon’s pleasure. My account of it is below. The title expressed my hope that this charlatan would be exposed and that we would be liberated. Alas, no:
Prof Neil Ferguson resigns: will coronavirus lockdown start ending in the UK now? (May 5)
Ferguson told Whipple that he had expected some sort of mercy, at least to be ignored. Why, oh why, did the media start digging into his private life? Oh, woe:
“I made some mistakes. I’ve been completely open in terms of saying they were mistakes. But, nevertheless, the fact that journalists were digging into my private life at that level of detail was not something I could ever imagine. That’s not something you want to be on the end of.
“My wife and son and my partner had journalists on the doorstep. I was actually in my flat in London, they didn’t know where I was. It was a very difficult time.” He and Sir Patrick Vallance, the present chief scientific adviser, agreed he should step back from Sage work.
Unfortunately, NERVTAG — New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group — allowed him to stay, hence, his continuing participation in these illiberal restrictions upon our lives.
Returning to lockdown, this is a curious statement:
These days, lockdown feels inevitable. It was, he reminds me, anything but. “If China had not done it,” he says, “the year would have been very different.”
Yes, it would have gone on as normal, with Rishi Sunak’s fantastic budget putting an end to austerity and giving us a better economy and hope for our post-Brexit transition future.
This month, the new variant — B.1.1.7, or B117, as it often appears — has caused more panic. Ferguson and his ilk have determined it is more infectious. However, it might also be less damaging to COVID-17 patients in hospital:
Nevertheless, Ferguson now wants even harsher measures:
he strongly implies that schools will have to shut in January, and even then the virus might evade lockdown.
Goodness knows what ‘the virus might evade lockdown’ might mean for Britons.
Whipple actually believes that Ferguson is some sort of scientific saviour. Good grief:
This is, I say, petrifying. It is also extremely interesting. Nowadays, it is orthodoxy that lockdown was right. In the next pandemic, we won’t hesitate to use it. But as this new variant shows, lockdown does not always work.
However, it also seems as if our first lockdown, sold to us as ‘flattening the sombrero’, to borrow Boris Johnson’s term, was done so on a false premise:
It was never guaranteed that lockdown would crush the curve. He is all too aware of this. “During late March, early April, we kept looking at the data as it came in. Was there any sign of hospital admissions and deaths hitting a peak? It was a very, very anxious time.” We now know that when we got it to its lowest, R, the reproduction rate of the virus, hit 0.6. Lockdown worked. If the professor’s modelling of the new variant is correct, it won’t be so easy to control. In the same circumstances it could have a rate just over 1 and the pandemic would not have retreated.
Ferguson says to his critics:
It’s clearly unfortunate that a minority of people almost don’t like the idea that you can just have random bad things happen in the world, and want to attribute it to some malign plan.
Ferguson and his family are largely unscathed from the policies he helped to develop.
Two other sites that reported on this interview had pertinent insights.
NewsWars noted:
In the Christmas interview, the epidemiologist admitted “there is an enormous cost associated with” lockdowns, specifically the erosion of civil liberties.
However, thanks to the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian measures, he said, “people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed.”
And how! A year ago, who could have imagined that the CCP would be indirectly controlling our health policy?
At UnHerd, Freddie Sayers wrote similarly (italics in the original):
He almost seems at pains to emphasise the Chinese derivation of the lockdown concept, returning to it later in the interview:
“These days, lockdown feels inevitable. It was, he reminds me, anything but. “If China had not done it,” he says, “the year would have been very different.””
To those people who, still now, object to lockdowns on civil liberties principles, this will be a chilling reminder of the centrality of the authoritarian Chinese model in influencing global policy in this historic year.
Let us look at what Laura Perrins, ex-barrister and co-editor of Conservative Woman, a haven of common sense, has to say about said policies. Let’s start with testing of schoolchildren, something likely to come in January, along with the current hue and cry to close schools again:
The Government, advised by SAGE, NERVTAG and other quangos — quasi-NGOs — have lied and lied and lied this year, culminating with Christmas:
In conclusion:
I could not agree more.
Pray that this scourge leaves us and other Western countries in 2021.
Freedom is never free.
Happy New Year.
6 comments
December 31, 2020 at 10:50 pm
H E
Hello Churchmouse
Thanks you for all you’ve done this year. I read your blog every day and I find it to be a source of true information concerning Covid, the government-mandated economic shutdowns, and the loss of our civil liberties. I join with you in praying that conditions improve in 2021.
I hope you and your family have a safe and prosperous New Year.
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January 1, 2021 at 4:20 am
churchmouse
Thank you very much, H E.
I greatly appreciate that you are a faithful reader.
It seems to me that 2021 will present even greater challenges with regard to our civil liberties.
I was surprised to find out recently from the Howie Carr Show that your governor and the governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, attended the same high school. Oh, dear, what exactly did they learn there?!?
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January 3, 2021 at 3:15 am
H E
I hope you don’t mind my making a second response.
Your posts from the Spring were prescient concerning a sinister motive behind the government actions in response to the Corona virus.
You wrote that something ominous was afoot in the government-imposed lockdowns and the termination of civil liberties. At the time, I thought these were just over-reactions to the new virus, and that governments were seeking to err on the side of caution. But, you made the point that the actions taken by government officials were out of proportion to the threat, and that once civil liberties are lost, they rarely are returned.
It has become clear to me that the actions taken by governments to terminate civil liberties and lockdown their citizens are part of a internationally coordinated plan. In the US, it appears that the democrat party has successfully stolen the presidential election from Donald Trump. President-elect Biden has spoken about a ‘dark winter’, which I understand is some sort of code-phrase for the imposition of a dictatorship to counter an attack by a biological weapon.
I read a book years ago about the events in Europe in the run up to the First World War. The ethos on the continent among with middle classes was optimism and faith in progress. In the Spring of 1914, the mobilization for war didn’t threaten the optimism of the age because people thought that any war would be short, and it would done by Christmas.
The author noted that in 1919, a mere 5 years later, the genteel life of pre-war Europe had disappeared, replaced by despair. 16 to 20 million civilians and soldiers died in the war, which included trench warfare, poison gas, and aerial attacks on cities. In Russia, the Czar was deposed and Lenin and the Bolsheviks were in power. In Germany, the Kaiser abdicated and was replaced by the Wiemar republic. The Austro-Hungarian empire dissolved into its constituent ethic nationalities. There were communist uprisings in Russia (successful), and in Germany, Hungary, and Italy (unsuccessful).
To someone in the dark days of 1919, the conditions on the continent in the Spring of 1914 must have seemed unreal, like an idyllic dream.
I wonder if we will someday look back to the time prior to March 2020 in a way similar to how the people in 1919 looked back to the Spring of 1914. How it was to walk into a shop and buy goods, speak with other customers and the proprietor, and pay with cash. How it was to walk to the corner tavern and meet and speak with our neighbors there. How it was to go church on Sunday and assemble with other people to pray and sing hymns. How it was to travel by simply purchasing a ticket for a bus, train, or airplane. How it was to assemble to address political grievances, and then vote to elect candidates to represent our interests, and see those candidates implement the policies they promised.
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January 3, 2021 at 3:34 am
churchmouse
Happy New Year, H E, even though we’re both in the same boat re coronavirus restrictions.
Thank you very much for remembering my posts from early on in this crisis so many months ago. I greatly appreciate it. You no doubt know that I didn’t enjoy being right about this.
I agree with everything you say in your brilliant essay. Your comparison of coronavirus with the First World War rings true, every bit of it.
Looking back over the past century, it does seem as if a certain group of people through the decades (the latest group seems to include Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab) want to do away with the middle class, whether by accident or design.
Hmm. The aftermath of the First World War gave way to the Roaring Twenties and, ten years later, the Great Depression, which also lasted a decade. Then came the Second World War. After that, the West had a great rebound in the 1950s and much of the 1960s. France’s rebound lasted until the early 1970s: Les Trentes Glorieuses (The Glorious Thirty Years), never repeated.
I don’t know what to say about the US. Many of the governors are acting like dictators, seriously harming their own people, treating them like Kulaks.
Here in the UK, I hope that the benefits of a post-EU future will give Boris reason to pull his head out of his fundament and return to his libertarian leanings with regard to coronavirus. What he, his health secretary and scientific advisers have done to this country is nothing short of abominable. It’s simply egregious.
Thank you very much for your comment. I would like to borrow your piece, giving you full credit, early this week. What you said is eminently true and offers a valuable historical perspective.
‘I hope you don’t mind my making a second response.’ You are always welcome to comment as often as you like. It’s always a pleasure to hear from you.
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January 4, 2021 at 12:50 pm
churchmouse
Guest post coming up on Monday, January 4, around 10 p.m. GMT.
Thanks again.
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January 4, 2021 at 10:04 pm
Guest post: H E looks at coronavirus through the lens of history | Churchmouse Campanologist
[…] reader H E, who is from the United States, commented on one of my Neil Ferguson posts and viewed the coronavirus crisis through the lens of history, […]
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