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Sunday, June 6, 2021, was the 77th anniversary of D-Day, the Longest Day:
This map shows the landings in Normandy:
While preparing Sunday dinner, I listened to C-SPAN’s Sunday morning show, broadcast on BBC Parliament. Sarah Rose, the author of D-Day Girls, was the guest. Her book is a novel, but she did a lot of historical research showing the intelligence work that women did behind the scenes as part of a carefully-managed international network.
The phone-in included many sons and daughters of Second World War veterans. Nearly all said that those veterans were, understandably, highly reluctant to talk about their war experiences. However, some said that their fathers or grandfathers opened up in their later years. One caller said that she has several hours of memories that she has recorded for posterity, particularly for younger family members.
With more and more of those veterans passing from this mortal coil, now is the time for children and grandchildren to record and catalogue those memories, if they can. One person who has done so is the author of Pacific Paratrooper, remembering Everett A Smith, their father. It’s an excellent website, which also documents much history about the battles and conditions in the Pacific theatre. I am delighted to have the author as one of my regular readers.
We will always remember those heroic men and women:
Incidentally, the Houses of Parliament were bombed in 1941 and had to be reconstructed authentically in the 19th century manner. Both were faithfully restored. The next tweet shows the House of Commons:
Seventy-seven years later, we are still in the grip of the coronavirus crisis and a loss of freedom the troops involved in D-Day would have found unthinkable.
In Britain, former Prime Minister Tony Blair (Labour) appeared on The Andrew Marr Show to say that Britons who have had two vaccinations should be allowed greater freedoms, thereby creating a two-tier society:
If a Conservative had said that, Marr would have heaped criticism all over him or her.
It is mystifying that Tony Blair even gets airtime on this topic. He isn’t in government, nor is his party.
It appears I am not alone, judging from the replies to this tweet:
On the topic of vaccines, Tony Blair has never said if his son Leo, born when he was in No. 10, had the MMR vaccine, which was highly controversial at the time. So, it was okay for him to refuse to give his son a vaccine that every other child born in Britain had/has to have. It is very difficult to get separate children’s vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella. One imagines that Blair managed to get them for his son.
Tony Blair also wanted national ID cards. The debate raged for a few years in Parliament. Fortunately, nothing happened.
On Monday, Guido Fawkes’s cartoonist Rich, recalling the ID card debate from the Blair years, posted this:
On the topic of vaccines, the Government is talking about giving them to children. Highly dangerous, one would have thought. The Telegraph‘s Bob Moran was moved to create this cartoon a week ago:
ITV’s Good Morning Britain stoked the flames by asking whether the vaccinated should refuse to associate with the unvaccinated:
Fortunately, most Britons disagree with Good Morning Britain:
June 21 is supposed to be Freedom Day, according to the Government, with the caveat that full reopening of Britain will be based on data rather than dates.
It should come as no surprise that the Government could now backtrack on that date:
On June 1, we had no coronavirus deaths, but that did not make the news:
TalkRADIO host Julia Hartley-Brewer is fed up with the delays. In fact, as the chart below from Peston shows, the UK’s actual coronavirus stats are much better than SAGE’s models:
On June 3, Portugal, the only European country on the UK’s green list for travel, was moved to the amber list, yet these charts tell a different story:
One suspects that it was only ever on the green list for the Champions League final in Porto:
Oddly, we had more freedom a year ago — with no masks and no vaccines — than we do now:
In Wales, First Minister Mark Drakeford (Labour) says that social distancing will not be disappearing any time soon:
Data for the UK should be available on June 14, at which point the Government will announce their decision regarding June 21:
The Government have paid for coronavirus advertising and COVID marshals, extending to 2022. Former London Assembly member David Kurten tweeted a reminder:
I, too, want my country back.
In Germany, scientists from Munich University say that lockdown had no effect on the virus spread:
Something is very wrong when, in a five-minute speech on television, a prime minister or a president can remove everyone’s civil liberties at a stroke.
Monday, March 23, 2020, will be etched on my memory forever. That was the date of the UK’s first lockdown.
D-Day. Freedom Day. What has happened to us — and for a ‘pandemic’ with fatality rates no worse than influenza? We are in a very bad way, not only in the UK, but also elsewhere in the West.
Following on from my post of last week, below is a continued timeline about herd immunity and the coronavirus crisis in Britain.
Old news, perhaps, but it will be interesting to see how much of this, if any, is mentioned at the Government’s hearing, scheduled for 2022.
May 2020
On May 17, 2020, journalist Robert Peston tweeted about a conference in Edinburgh that could have been a super-spreader event:
One of Peston’s readers said that he was partly to blame, because, in March, he wrote an article for The Spectator, ‘”Herd immunity” will be vital to stopping coronavirus’.
It begins with this (emphases mine):
The key phrase we all need to understand is ‘herd immunity’ – which is what happens to a group of people or animals when they develop sufficient antibodies to be resistant to a disease.
The strategy of the British government in minimising the impact of Covid-19 is to allow the virus to pass through the entire population so that we acquire herd immunity, but at a much delayed speed so that those who suffer the most acute symptoms are able to receive the medical support they need, and such that the health service is not overwhelmed and crushed by the sheer number of cases it has to treat at any one time.
Infection figures were starting to recede in May. This could partly be explained by a month of glorious weather, apart from two days. It was one of the warmest and sunniest on record. I fantasised that I was in Cannes.
On May 18, Freddie Sayers of UnHerd interviewed Prof Karl Sikora, the Founding Dean and Professor of Medicine at the University of Buckingham Medical School and an ex-director of the WHO Cancer Programme:
The serology results around the world (and forthcoming in Britain) don’t necessarily reveal the percentage of people who have had the disease.
He estimates 25-30% of the UK population has had Covid-19, and higher in the group that is most susceptible.
Pockets of herd immunity help *already* explain the downturn.
Sweden’s end result will not be different to ours – lockdown versus no lockdown.
On May 10, Nic Lewis wrote a post about the UK and Sweden for Climate Etc.: ‘Why herd immunity to COVID-19 is reached much earlier than thought’.
It says, in part:
A study published in March by the COVID-19 Response Team from Imperial College (Ferguson20[1]) appears to have been largely responsible for driving government actions in the UK and, to a fair extent, in the US and some other countries. Until that report came out, the strategy of the UK government, at least, seems to have been to rely on the build up of ‘herd immunity’ to slow the growth of the epidemic and eventually cause it to peter out.
The ‘herd immunity threshold’ (HIT) can be estimated from the basic reproduction rate of the epidemic, R0 – a measure of how many people, on average, each infected individual infects. Standard simple compartmental models of epidemic growth imply that the HIT equals {1 – 1/R0}. Once the HIT is passed, the rate of new infections starts to decline, which should ensure that health systems will not thereafter be overwhelmed and makes it more practicable to take steps to eliminate the disease.
However, the Ferguson20 report estimated that relying on herd immunity would result in 81% of the UK and US populations becoming infected during the epidemic, mainly over a two-month period, based on an R0 estimate of 2.4. These figures imply that the HIT is between 50% and 60%.[2] Their report implied that health systems would be overwhelmed, resulting in far more deaths. It claimed that only draconian government interventions could prevent this occurring. Such interventions were rapidly implemented in the UK, in most states of the US, and in various other countries, via highly disruptive and restrictive enforced ‘lockdowns’.
A notable exception was Sweden, which has continued to pursue a herd immunity-based strategy, relying on relatively modest social distancing policies. The Imperial College team estimated that, after those policies were introduced in mid-March, R0 in Sweden was 2.5, with only a 2.5% probability that it was under 1.5.[3] The rapid spread of COVID-19 in the country in the second half of March suggests that R0 is unlikely to have been significantly under 2.0.[4]
Very sensibly, the Swedish public health authority has surveyed the prevalence of infections by the SARS-COV-2 virus in Stockholm County, the earliest in Sweden hit by COVID-19. They thereby estimated that 17% of the population would have been infected by 11 April, rising to 25% by 1 May 2020.[5] Yet recorded new cases had stopped increasing by 11 April (Figure 1), as had net hospital admissions,[6] and both measures have fallen significantly since. That pattern indicates that the HIT had been reached by 11 April, at which point only 17% of the population appear to have been infected.
How can it be true that the HIT has been reached in Stockholm County with only about 17% of the population having been infected, while an R0 of 2.0 is normally taken to imply a HIT of 50%?
A recent paper (Gomes et al.[7]) provides the answer. It shows that variation between individuals in their susceptibility to infection and their propensity to infect others can cause the HIT to be much lower than it is in a homogeneous population. Standard simple compartmental epidemic models take no account of such variability. And the model used in the Ferguson20 study, while much more complex, appears only to take into account inhomogeneity arising from a very limited set of factors – notably geographic separation from other individuals and household size – with only a modest resulting impact on the growth of the epidemic.[8] Using a compartmental model modified to take such variability into account, with co-variability between susceptibility and infectivity arguably handled in a more realistic way than by Gomes et al., I confirm their finding that the HIT is indeed reached at a much lower level than when the population is homogeneous. That would explain why the HIT appears to have been passed in Stockholm by mid April. The same seems likely to be the case in other major cities and regions that have been badly affected by COVID-19.
On that topic, Prof Sunetra Gupta, one of the signatories to The Barrington Declaration which came out that summer, entered the picture. Prof Gupta is the Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford. Freddie Sayers of UnHerd interviewed her on May 21:
The accompanying article says:
Her group at Oxford produced a rival model to Ferguson’s back in March which speculated that as much as 50% of the population may already have been infected and the true Infection Fatality Rate may be as low as 0.1%.
Since then, we have seen various antibody studies around the world indicating a disappointingly small percentage of seroprevalence — the percentage of the population has the anti-Covid-19 antibody. It was starting to seem like Ferguson’s view was the one closer to the truth.
But, in her first major interview since the Oxford study was published in March, Professor Gupta is only more convinced that her original opinion was correct.
As she sees it, the antibody studies, although useful, do not indicate the true level of exposure or level of immunity. First, many of the antibody tests are “extremely unreliable” and rely on hard-to-achieve representative groups. But more important, many people who have been exposed to the virus will have other kinds of immunity that don’t show up on antibody tests — either for genetic reasons or the result of pre-existing immunities to related coronaviruses such as the common cold.
The implications of this are profound – it means that when we hear results from antibody tests (such as a forthcoming official UK Government study) the percentage who test positive for antibodies is not necessarily equal to the percentage who have immunity or resistance to the virus. The true number could be much higher.
Observing the very similar patterns of the epidemic across countries around the world has convinced Professor Gupta that it is this hidden immunity, more than lockdowns or government interventions, that offers the best explanation of the Covid-19 progression:
“In almost every context we’ve seen the epidemic grow, turn around and die away — almost like clockwork. Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet what we’ve observed is almost a uniform pattern of behaviour which is highly consistent with the SIR model. To me that suggests that much of the driving force here was due to the build-up of immunity. I think that’s a more parsimonious explanation than one which requires in every country for lockdown (or various degrees of lockdown, including no lockdown) to have had the same effect.”
June 2020
On June 4, Freddie Sayers interviewed Prof Karl Friston, a computer modelling expert, world-renowned for his contributions to neuroscience. He had been applying his ‘dynamic causal modelling’ approach to the Covid-19 pandemic:
The accompanying article says that his Bayesian models were showing that up to 80% of the population might be naturally immune to coronavirus:
His models suggest that the stark difference between outcomes in the UK and Germany, for example, is not primarily an effect of different government actions (such as better testing and earlier lockdowns) but is better explained by intrinsic differences between the populations that make the “susceptible population” in Germany — the group that is vulnerable to Covid-19 — much smaller than in the UK.
As he told me in our interview, even within the UK, the numbers point to the same thing: that the “effective susceptible population” was never 100%, and was at most 50% and probably more like only 20% of the population. He emphasises that the analysis is not yet complete, but “I suspect, once this has been done, it will look like the effective non-susceptible portion of the population will be about 80%. I think that’s what’s going to happen.”
Theories abound as to which factors best explain the huge disparities between countries in the portion of the population that seems resistant or immune — everything from levels of vitamin D to ethnic-genetic and social and geographical differences may come into play — but Professor Friston makes clear that it does not primarily seem to be a function of government coronavirus policy. “Solving that — understanding that source of variation in terms of this non-susceptibility — is going to be the key to understanding the enormous variation between countries,” he said …
His explanation for the remarkably similar mortality outcomes in Sweden (no lockdown) and the UK (lockdown) is that “they weren’t actually any different. Because at the end of the day the actual processes that get into the epidemiological dynamics — the actual behaviours, the distancing, was evolutionarily specified by the way we behave when we have an infection.”
Most significantly, it would mean that the principal underlying assumption behind the global shutdowns, typified by the famous Imperial College forecasts — namely, that left unchecked this disease would rapidly pass through the entire population of every country and kill around 1% of those infected, leading to untold millions of deaths worldwide without draconian action — was wrong, out by a large factor. The largest co-ordinated government action in history, forcibly closing down most of the world’s societies with consequences that may last for generations, would have been based on faulty science.
When I put this to Professor Friston, he was the model of collegiate discretion. He said that the presumptions of Neil Ferguson’s models were all correct, “under the qualification that the population they were talking about is much smaller than you might imagine”. In other words, Ferguson was right that around 80% of susceptible people would rapidly become infected, and was right that of those between 0.5% and 1% would die — he just missed the fact that the relevant “susceptible population” was only ever a small portion of people in the UK, and an even smaller portion in countries like Germany and elsewhere. Which rather changes everything.
With such elegant formulations are scientific reputations saved. Practically, it makes not much difference whether, as per Sunetra Gupta, the 40,000 officially-counted coronavirus deaths in the UK are 0.1% of 40 million people infected, or, as per Karl Friston’s theory implies, they are more like 0.5% of 8 million people infected with the remaining 32 million shielded from infection by mysterious “immunological dark material”. If you are exposed to the virus and it is destroyed in your body by mucosal antibodies or T-cells or clever genes so that you never become fully infected and don’t even notice it, should that count as an infection? The effect is the same: 40,000 deaths, not 400,000.
However, on Sunday, June 7, SAGE member Prof John Edmunds was still backtracking on his earlier claims about herd immunity from March. He was all about lockdown and told the BBC’s Andrew Marr that the UK should have locked down sooner to prevent deaths:
Speaking of lockdown, Britons were increasingly angry about being told not to leave the house, especially when people were protesting with no social distancing:
June in the UK — Part 1: the angry, yet law abiding, silent majority (June 3)
June in the UK — Part 2: angry silent majority questions lockdown (June 5; masks; no arrests for destructive protestors, two for eccentric Piers Corbyn)
June in the UK — Part 3: the angry silent majority on lockdown (June 5)
June in the UK — Part 4: coronavirus and the public’s anger about health during lockdown (June 5)
June in the UK — Part 5: the hypocrisy surrounding coronavirus and social distancing (June 6, protests)
—————————————————————-
Writing a year later, I do wonder whether getting vaccinated is really worth it for most of us.
Unfortunately, we have to do it to have any semblance of normality.
I’m a big believer in natural herd immunity, less so the artificially engineered type.
More to follow on herd immunity next week.
Prince Philip’s funeral took place at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, on Saturday afternoon, April 17, 2021.
Exactly two months earlier, he had been admitted to the King Edward VII Hospital in London, a private health care establishment where he went for minor ailments:
He then was transferred to St Bartholomew’s, a specialist NHS hospital in London, for heart surgery. Afterwards, he was sent back to the King Edward VII to recuperate. He spent a month in hospital before being discharged:
Because of coronavirus restrictions, the Queen did not visit her husband. However, Prince Charles visited once. On March 18, The Express reported:
Prince Philip’s 28-day hospital stay is the longest ever, and he was only visited by Prince Charles, likely due to ongoing COVID-19 restrictions.
The Prince of Wales visited his father during his first week in hospital, having made the 200-mile round trip to London from his Gloucestershire home, Highgrove.
Prince Philip has been treated for heart problems in the past, and this time, his stay isn’t understood to be Covid related at all.
On April 11, after the Prince died, The Sun reported on the significance of that visit. Royal insider Andrew Morton wrote (emphases mine):
It was a meeting of vital importance, especially as visitors to the private King Edward VII’s hospital were permitted to see patients only under “exceptional circumstances”.
This private exchange clearly came under that heading as the future king emerged from their 30-minute conversation clearly upset and preoccupied.
It had been an emotional encounter — one where, it could be assumed, Philip outlined his final wishes to his eldest son.
The Duke, who had been the head of the family for as long as anyone could remember, was finally stepping down and bowing out.
Now it was Charles’s time to step up to the plate and finally take over control of the first family.
Doubtless his father, who had the reputation for writing thoughtful letters to family members, set down his thoughts on paper beforehand …
Though Philip is remembered with enormous affection by the family — William and Harry call him The Stud in reference to a picture of their grandfather with his hair slicked back and wearing sunglasses — his relationship with his eldest son was never easy.
Princess Diana told me it was “very tricky, very tricky”.
She recalled: “Prince Charles longs to be patted on his head by his father.”
Once at home, the Prince appeared to be recovering, until he took a turn for the worse. On his better days, he took advantage of the occasional mild weather we enjoyed in southern England. On April 10, The Sun reported on his final weeks:
The Queen was by Prince Philip’s bedside when her husband of 73 years passed away, with the Duke having spent his final days in “good form” reading in the sun, it was reported today.
The Duke of Edinburgh is believed to have spent his last few days reading and writing letters and sleeping in the sun weeks before his 100th birthday.
Despite officials at the Palace declined to “go into any specifics” about the Duke’s passing, it is understood that his condition worsened overnight on Thursday with insiders warning that he had become “gravely ill”.
However, any talk of whisking Prince Philip back to the hospital was reportedly dismissed by the Queen.
One well-placed source told the Telegraph: “He spent most of the four weeks he was in hospital trying to get home.
“They operated on his heart in a bid to give him a little longer, maybe with the 100th birthday in mind.
“But he didn’t really care about that.
“He just wanted to be back in his own bed. There is no way he would have wanted to die in hospital.”
According to reports, there had been no dramatic decline in Philip’s health but it was gradual.
Staff said that the Duke was “on good form”, still writing and reading letters earlier this week.
On warm days over the last few weeks, Philip would reportedly ask to sit in the sunshine with a rug over his legs and nod off.
The Prince wanted to be self sufficient to the end. He was livid when he first saw a wheelchair in his room:
One aide told the Daily Mail he insisted on bending to the floor and picking up his dropped reading glasses, saying “I’ll do it” when a footman sprung forward.
And the Queen was said to be overheard saying he wouldn’t use his hearing aid, which “means we have to shout”, she noted.
Prince Philip was still reportedly dressing himself until recently and heading out of his room in a smart shirt and jumper on good days.
He would use a stick to walk around his rooms, and rarely allowed himself to be pushed in a wheelchair.
A royal source revealed when it was first put in his rooms he shouted: “Get that bl***y thing out of my sight”.
In his last few weeks, the prince was well enough to still speak to family and close friends on the telephone but unlike the Queen, the Duke was not a fan of Zoom calls.
Days before the funeral, the Queen made a decision about attire for her sons and grandsons:
Meanwhile, hours of military rehearsal took place:
On Saturday, I watched the funeral coverage on Sky News. Alastair Bruce OBE, a senior British Army reservist, did an excellent job of commentary from start to finish. That video is now private, although a podcast exists, but the Royal Family channel has the funeral in full:
Sky News posted three minutes of highlights:
The Prince had been closely involved in ‘every detail of planning’ the ceremony, including the music and the readings.
Within the grounds of Windsor Castle, a procession took place with the Prince’s casket placed on a Land Rover Defender he helped to design. The casket was draped in his own standard, or colours. In the video shot above, you can see the flag of Greece in one quadrant.
On the casket were a few items personal to him, such as his Royal Navy covering, and a naval sword that his father-in-law George VI gave him.
A carriage was also part of the procession, as the Prince enjoyed carriage racing. On the seat were his riding gloves and, it was said, sugar cubes for the horses.
Sky News reported:
A naval sword, gi[ven] to Philip by King George VI when he married Princess Elizabeth in 1947, was placed on top of the duke’s coffin as it was carried into the chapel.
The coffin was also covered with a wreath, naval cap and the duke’s personal standard.
It was one of several details which reflected the royal’s naval career and lifelong association with the armed forces.
Philip designed his own custom-built Land Rover to carry the coffin at his funeral.
The modified Land Rover Defender TD5 130 chassis cab vehicle was unveiled two days before the service.
The duke first began the long-lasting venture to create the bespoke hearse in collaboration with Land Rover in 2003, the year he turned 82.
He made the final adjustments to the vehicle in 2019, the year he turned 98.
The Defender was made at Land Rover’s factory in Solihull in 2003 and Philip oversaw the modifications, in collaboration with the company, throughout the intervening years.
The duke requested that the original Belize Green bodywork be switched to Dark Bronze Green, a colour used for many military Land Rovers.
Along the route, the men of the Royal Family and Princess Anne walked behind the Land Rover. The women, except for the Queen who was in the ceremonial Bentley, stood along the route, awaiting the procession.
The Queen rode with her lady-in-waiting Lady Susan Hussey, who did not attend the funeral, in order to keep the numbers to the state-required 30 persons during coronavirus restrictions:
Once at St George’s Chapel, eight Royal Marines carried the Prince’s casket up the steps. On the second landing, they stopped for the one-minute national silence at 3 p.m. Featured in this video is a clip of students from his alma mater Gordonstoun in Elgin, Moray (Scotland):
Although a lot of this video is about Prince Harry, Alan Jones of Sky News Australia said that Prince Philip’s coffin was designed to be biodegradable:
Inside the chapel, various medals had been placed on velvet cushions on the altar. Sky’s article says:
Military medals handpicked by the duke featured inside the chapel at his funeral.
Philip’s chosen insignia, the medals and decorations conferred on him by the UK and Commonwealth countries – together with his Royal Air Force wings and Field Marshal’s baton, were pre-positioned on nine cushions on the altar.
The duke also included insignia from Denmark and Greece – Order of the Elephant and Order of the Redeemer respectively – in a nod to his birth heritage as a prince of Greece and Denmark.
Insignia on display from across the Commonwealth included the Zanzibar Brilliant Star of Zanzibar, the Brunei Esteemed Family Order and the Singapore Order of Darjah Utama Temasek.
Insignia, orders, decorations and medals are a way of a country saying thank you and recognising someone’s achievements.
The insignia were sewn in place at St James’s Palace by two seamstresses using transparent fishing wire.
The Queen was met by the Dean of Windsor before the minute’s silence. This is a photo of her before the rest of the Royal Family took their places. The Queen placed her handbag on the seat next to her, where her beloved husband sat on so many other occasions. Her brooch was a gift from the Prince:
Our hearts went out to the monarch, especially during this time of coronavirus restrictions:
Barrister Francis Hoar was livid:
The Duchess of Cambridge attracted much attention at the weekend for this filmic, yet unsettling, photograph. Note that a ‘Karen’ posted it! You could not make this up:
Members of the Royal Family were spaced apart in the chapel, sitting in their respective familial bubbles. Princes Harry and Andrew sat alone.
Three members of Prince Philip’s family were also in attendance. They flew in from Germany and stayed with a mutual friend in Ascot, near Windsor. They left immediately after the funeral.
The Sun reported (photos at the link):
THREE of Prince Philip’s German relatives will attend his funeral and are in isolation ahead of the service, it is claimed.
Two great-nephews and a cousin are said to be staying with a mutual friend in Ascot, Berkshire, so they can safely be there on Saturday.
Bernhard, Hereditary Prince of Baden, Prince Donatus, Landgrave of Hesse, and Prince Philipp of Hohenlohe-Langenburg are locked in a Covid-compliant bubble, the Daily Mail reports.
The Duke of Edinburgh allegedly made it clear he wanted his “blood” family to be included in his funeral arrangements.
Prince Philipp, 51, said in a statement from the house where he and his relatives remain isolated until the weekend: “It really is an incredible honour and we are all extremely touched and privileged to be included on behalf of the wider family.”
Contrast the social distancing and self-isolation with the scene in London that afternoon. It doesn’t make sense:
The ceremony had a lot of music, which the Prince himself chose:
You can read the Order of Service in its entirety here. The liturgy was in traditional language.
A choir of four, socially distanced in another part of the chapel, sang the hymns.
The service began with ‘sentences’, Bible verses:
I AM the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
John 11. 25-26
I KNOW that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.
Job 19. 25-27
WE brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
1 Timothy 6. 7, Job 1. 21
Among others, the Prince chose the hymn I refer to as ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’:
ETERNAL Father, strong to save,
Whose arm doth bind the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.
O Saviour, whose almighty word
The winds and waves submissive heard,
Who walkedst on the foaming deep,
And calm amid its rage didst sleep:
O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.
The first reading was one that only Prince Philip would have chosen:
Ecclesiasticus 43. 11-26 read by the Dean of Windsor
LOOK at the rainbow and praise its Maker; it shines with a supreme beauty, rounding the sky with its gleaming arc, a bow bent by the hands of the Most High.
His command speeds the snow storm and sends the swift lightning to execute his sentence. To that end the storehouses are opened, and the clouds fly out like birds.
By his mighty power the clouds are piled up and the hailstones broken small. The crash of his thunder makes the earth writhe, and, when he appears, an earthquake shakes the hills.
At his will the south wind blows, the squall from the north and the hurricane. He scatters the snow-flakes like birds alighting; they settle like a swarm of locusts. The eye is dazzled by their beautiful whiteness, and as they fall the mind is entranced.
He spreads frost on the earth like salt, and icicles form like pointed stakes. A cold blast from the north, and ice grows hard on the water, settling on every pool, as though the water were putting on a breastplate.
He consumes the hills, scorches the wilderness, and withers the grass like fire. Cloudy weather quickly puts all to rights, and dew brings welcome relief after heat.
By the power of his thought he tamed the deep and planted it with islands.
Those who sail the sea tell stories of its dangers, which astonish all who hear them; in it are strange and wonderful creatures, all kinds of living things and huge sea-monsters.
By his own action he achieves his end, and by his word all things are held together.
The second lesson was the story of Jesus and Martha discussing her brother Lazarus. This exchange took place before Jesus raised him from the dead:
John 11. 21-27 read by the Archbishop of Canterbury
MARTHA said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world.”
The choir sang the Lord’s Prayer, a beautiful rendition.
A series of prayers read by the Dean of Windsor and the Archbishop of Canterbury followed, beginning with these:
The Archbishop of Canterbury shall say
O ETERNAL God, before whose face the generations rise and pass away, thyself unchanged, abiding, we bless thy holy name for all who have completed their earthly course in thy faith and following, and are now at rest; we remember before thee this day Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, rendering thanks unto thee-for his resolute faith and loyalty, for his high sense of duty and integrity, for his life of service to the Nation and Commonwealth, and for the courage and inspiration of his leadership. To him, with all the faithful departed, grant thy peace; Let light perpetual shine upon them; and in thy loving wisdom and almighty power work in them the good purpose of thy perfect will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Dean of Windsor, Register of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, shall say
O LORD, who didst give to thy servant Saint George grace to lay aside the fear of man, and to be faithful even unto death: Grant that we, unmindful of worldly honour, may fight the wrong, uphold thy rule, and serve thee to our lives’ end; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
GOD save our gracious Sovereign and all the Companions, living and departed, of the Most Honourable and Noble Order of The Garter. Amen.
O GOD of the spirits of all flesh, we praise thy holy name for thy servant Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who has left us a fair pattern of valiant and true knighthood; grant unto him the assurance of thine ancient promise that thou wilt ever be with those who go down to the sea in ships and occupy their business in great waters. And we beseech thee that, following his good example and strengthened by his fellowship, we may at the last, together with him, be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Then came the military music, which included Pipe Major of The Royal Regiment of Scotland playing A Lament, followed by the Buglers of the Royal Marines, who sounded The Last Post, Reveille and, perhaps the most meaningful of all as a final message from the Prince to his family: Action Stations.
At the end, the choir sang the National Anthem:
Afterwards, the Queen returned to her private apartments in the Bentley.
Cars awaited the other royals, but Prince Charles gestured for them to drive on. The Mirror reported that this was perhaps a move to give younger members of the family time to spend chatting with Prince Harry.
The Queen’s 95th birthday is Wednesday, April 21. The Mirror reported:
The widowed Queen went for a solo drive and stopped at one of her favourite spots for a moment of quiet reflection the day after Prince Philip’s funeral, it is claimed …
She will celebrate the first birthday of her reign without her husband when she turns 95 on Wednesday, just four days after the funeral and 12 days after the Duke of Edinburgh’s death.
Events will be shelved or toned down, as the Royal Family remains in mourning, and the Queen is likely to do the same things she did 24 hours after Philip’s funeral at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle.
On Sunday, the 94-year-old drove herself alone from the castle, where she has been shielding during the coronavirus pandemic, to her nearby Frogmore estate for some quiet reflection, the Daily Mail reported.
There, the monarch, who isn’t required to have a driving licence, took in the cherry trees that are still in bloom and the spring flowers lining the banks of the ornamental lakes.
Sources told the newspaper that she is likely to spend her birthday in similar fashion – making the short drive alone to Frogmore to walk her new puppies, a dorgi named Fergus and a corgi named Muick.
Fergus is named after her uncle Fergus Bowes-Lyon, who was killed as he led an attack on the Germans during the First World War, while Muick (pronounced “Mick)” is named after Loch Muick on the Queen’s Balmoral estate in Scotland.
My prayers go to the Queen for many more years of sentient life and for the Lord’s peace and comfort upon her at this most difficult time.
Robert F Kennedy Jr went to Berlin late last week to speak at a rally for personal freedom in the city on Saturday, August 29, 2020:
The rally continued into the night with music:
For several years, Robert F Kennedy Jr has been concerned about the effect of modern vaccines on children and, as a result, founded Children’s Health Defense.
The day before the Berlin rally, he launched Children’s Health Defense Europe:
A press conference was held:
The press release says, in part:
On Friday August 28, 2020, Mr. Kennedy, chair of Children’s Health Defense, held a press conference and met with the leaders of the newly-formed Children’s Health Defense Europe Chapter. In attendance were Senta Depuydt and Tina Choy (board members of CHD Europe), RA Markus Haintz (Querdenken-731 Ulm), and Heiko Schöning (MD, Ärzte für Aufkärung). While in Berlin he will also meet with colleagues from all over Europe to discuss global challenges to health and human rights …
In photo [above], RFK, Jr. is with organizers Dr Heiko Schoening, M.D. and Attorneys Markus Haintz & Rolf Karpenstein in front of Brandenburg Gate where his uncle, President John F Kennedy, gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963.
Kennedy gave an 18-minute speech at the launch:
He spends the first seven minutes discussing vaccines, then moves on to the current coronavirus situation in Western nations.
In those seven minutes, he says that Big Pharma is much larger and much more powerful than Big Oil. Big Pharma is also working with governments all over the world.
After that, he warns us about our compliance with government guidelines on coronavirus.
At 7:54, he says that when Herman Goering was interviewed at the Nuremberg Hearings, he said that the German government created a climate of fear to get people to obey. When pressed further on the nature of the German people, he replied, ‘It wasn’t just Germany’, explaining that any government can successfully create a climate of fear causing people to do all sorts of things they would not normally do.
Kennedy noted that, by contrast, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the American people in that era:
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
He says that present-day Western governments have created a climate of coronavirus fear, using ‘science’ as a weapon. He wants to see the details on ‘Bill Gates’s and Dr Fauci’s “science”‘.
He discusses 5G and Alexa. Those who own an Alexa are allowing spying on them and their households. He says that 5G isn’t there for the benefit of gamers, allowing seconds-long downloads of video games. Rather, it is there to enable phone networks, governments and the private sector to gather vast amounts of information on citizens.
With 5G, Western governments would be able to target individuals who are not obeying the system. They could freeze people’s bank accounts for making notionally unauthorised purchases. (This is already being done in China, with deleterious effects on private citizens. It’s called a ‘social credit score’. Some Chinese have lost not only access to their money but also their jobs and, in some cases, their university places. Their next of kin can be similarly affected: guilt by association.)
He says he does not know whether coronavirus is a ‘plandemic’, as many have said, but understands how one could draw that conclusion.
Therefore, with all of this in mind, we need to be careful about complying with government directives en masse. Kennedy says that it would be very easy for governments to take away our precious civil liberties. He said that his father, the late Attorney General Robert F Kennedy who was assassinated during his run for president, told him as a child:
People in authority will lie to you.
Interestingly, on the day of the rally in Berlin, news emerged that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) did an about-face on America’s coronavirus deaths, revising them downwards. They are not the sky-high totals we’ve been shown over the past several months:
The Gateway Pundit reported (emphasis mine):
The CDC silently updated their numbers this week to show that only 6% of all coronavirus deaths were related to the coronavirus alone. The rest of the deaths pinned to the China coronavirus are attributed to individuals who had other serious issues going on. Also, most of the deaths are related to very old Americans.
The article also said (emphasis in the original):
So get this straight – based on the recommendation of doctors Fauci and Birx the US shut down the entire economy based on 9,000 American deaths to the China coronavirus …
Earlier this year, after the WHO seeded panic:
Doctors Fauci and Birx were next to push ridiculous and highly exaggerated mortality rates related to the coronavirus:
** Dr. Tony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx used the Imperial College Model to persuade President Trump to lock down the ENTIRE US ECONOMY.
** The fraudulent model predicted 2.2 million American deaths from the coronavirus pandemic
** The authors of the Imperial College Model shared their findings with the White House Coronavirus task force in early March
** Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx then met with President Trump privately and urged him to shut down the US economy and destroy the record Trump economy based on this model
But the Imperial College model Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx pushed was garbage and they recommended the destruction of the US economy using this model.
Today we now have empirical evidence that the WHO, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx were all wrong. They were charlatans. They lied.
Robert F Kennedy was right: authorities DO lie.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was also correct. His maxim about fear still holds true today.
Be careful out there with statistics. Question today’s ‘science’. Today’s technology is not there primarily for our benefit, either.
Today, Friday, July 24, 2020, face coverings became mandatory in shops in England.
Early in the pandemic, Dr Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England, told Prime Minister Boris Johnson that masks were not necessary for the general population and could make people more vulnerable to COVID-19, because they would be adjusting them, thereby touching their faces, potentially spreading the virus. This video first appeared in March, if I remember rightly:
On Thursday, March 12, The Independent reported on what Dr Harries told BBC News (emphases mine):
Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer, said the masks could “actually trap the virus” and cause the person wearing it to breathe it in.
“For the average member of the public walking down a street, it is not a good idea” to wear a face mask in the hope of preventing infection, she added …
Asked about their effectiveness, Dr Harries told BBC News: “What tends to happen is people will have one mask. They won’t wear it all the time, they will take it off when they get home, they will put it down on a surface they haven’t cleaned.
“Or they will be out and they haven’t washed their hands, they will have a cup of coffee somewhere, they half hook it off, they wipe something over it.
“In fact, you can actually trap the virus in the mask and start breathing it in.”
Asked if people are putting themselves more at risk by wearing masks, Dr Harries added: “Because of these behavioural issues, people can adversely put themselves at more risk than less.”
However, she said those who are advised to wear one by healthcare workers should follow their guidance.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government of the United Kingdom, gave testimony on COVID-19 last week. When asked about the apparent change on face covering advice, he said that, early on, it made no sense for people to wear masks during lockdown because no one was on the streets. He said that the advice had never changed: masks provided some benefit. Now that lockdown has been lifting, he explained, it makes sense for people to wear them.
Of course, earlier this year, there was also a worldwide mask shortage, so it could also be that officials discouraged the general public from buying them because medical staff needed them badly.
This happened not only in England, but also in other countries.
In the United States, Surgeon General Dr Jerome Adams did an about-face on masks early in April. Since then, they have been mandatory in some states:
President Trump said the advice from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) was only an advisory, yet the public wondered how such a change could have come about in so little time, only a matter of weeks:
The same change in advice occurred in Germany:
Yet, at that time, Good Morning Britain‘s long-time, trusted Dr Hilary Jones stated that masks were a no-no for the public, citing the same reasons as Dr Jenny Harries did. On April 28, Metro reported:
If there is one thing Hilary has been consistent on, it is that the general public do not need to wear a mask.
He has previously explained how the particles of coronavirus are so small, they can easily pass through the fibres of a mask or scarf, making them completely useless to the average person.
‘For healthy people who are doing their essential journey who are socially distancing, the use of masks is not effective,’ he recently told Piers Morgan.
‘Most masks have gaps in them to which the virus can drive a bus through. When you are inhaling in a mask the virus can come in.’
The GP added: ‘It can do harm if you do wear a mask, you adjust it, it gets itchy and moist – which means you are putting your hand to your face more often.
‘If the mask gets moist it traps the virus.’
A week later, Guido Fawkes reported that PPE items, including masks, were plentiful in Britain and available to medical as well as care home staff:
By the end of May, Good Morning Britain‘s Piers Morgan criticised London mayor Sadiq Khan for not mandating face coverings on the capital’s public transport. The policy at the time left the option open to passengers, putting more emphasis on social distancing.
In England, masks became mandatory on all public transport on June 15.
On June 6, some in the NHS criticised Health Secretary Matt Hancock for giving them only a week to get all hospital staff to wear masks. The Daily Mail reported that NHS England had been apprised of the new rules before Hancock made a public announcement:
The Department of Health and Social Care said NHS England had known Mr Hancock was going to make the announcement, adding that hospitals still had more than a week to prepare.
On Monday, July 20, in France, masks became mandatory in all indoor spaces as well as some outdoor venues. Fines start at €135. The original date was August 1, but that was brought forward.
This is what one French shopping mall looks like since the requirement came into force:
Some people have been wearing them in the street and inside commercial premises.
This is what one observer has noted, proving what Dr Harries said earlier this year:
Dr Rashid Buttar has posted several videos to YouTube on the dangers of healthy people wearing masks. This is a short but instructive clip from one of them:
On April 7, the BMJ featured an article which said that, while masks might make members of the public more comfortable psychologically, face coverings can also help to spread the virus.
Excerpts from statistician Karla Hemmings’s ‘Covid-19: What is the evidence for cloth masks?’ follow:
… the question of whether facemasks work is a question about whether they work in the real world, worn by real people, in real situations …
There is little doubt that masks works in controlled settings – they stop particulates penetrating the air [Leung 2020]. Facemasks also seem to prevent infection spreading when worn by people who are infected [Brainard 2020]. Yet, this doesn’t tell us if they will work in the real world …
Systematic review of facemasks vs no mask [Brainard 2020]
There are three RCTs identified in this review where people wore masks to try to prevent other people becoming infected (primary prevention). The authors of the review interpret the evidence from these three RCTs as a small non-significant effect on influenza like illness. But, this is an incorrect interpretation of the result (RR=0.95, 95% CI: 0.75 to 1.19) as this result is compatible with both benefit and harm. The evidence from these three trials should therefore be interpreted as uninformative (or consistent with either benefit or harm). There are observational studies in this review, but these do not allow us to answer the question of whether the masks provide protection as they will be subject to confounding. The largest of the three RCTs was a pragmatic cluster trial in pilgrims [Alfelali 2020]. This is a well conducted pragmatic cluster randomized trial with low risk of bias, but suffered from low compliance. This found OR 1.35, 95% CI 0.88-2.07 which although non-significant, is more suggestive of harm than benefit.
Conclusion: The largest and most pragmatic trial (which informs on how facemasks will perform in the real world) assessing the benefit of facemasks vs no mask is suggestive of more harm than benefit.
Evidence from trials comparing different sorts of facemasks
(This is not based on a systematic review, so there may be other evidence that I am unaware of) …
Conclusion: The evidence from pragmatic trials (people wearing masks in everyday settings) suggests wearing of facemasks both induces risk compensation behavior and increased virus spreading from poor mask quality.
England’s new rules on face coverings do not mandate actual masks. We can wear what we want, within reason.
I still believe all the advice from March and early April stated above.
Here — and no doubt elsewhere — this has been a political decision taken to get more people shopping and putting money into the economy and businesses.
On Tuesday, July 14, Matt Hancock made a statement in Parliament about mandatory face coverings, which included the following:
Local action is one way in which we can control the spread of the virus while minimising the economic and social costs. Another is to minimise the risk as we return more to normality. In recent weeks we have reopened retail and footfall is rising. We want to give people more confidence to shop safely and enhance protections for those who work in shops. Both of those can be done by the use of face coverings. Sadly, sales assistants, cashiers and security guards have suffered disproportionately in this crisis. The death rate of sales and retail assistants is 75% higher among men and 60% higher among women than in the general population. As we restore shopping, so we must keep our shopkeepers safe.
There is also evidence that face coverings increase confidence in people to shop. The British Retail Consortium has said that, together with other social distancing measures, face coverings can
“make shoppers feel even more confident about returning to the High Street.”
The chair of the Federation of Small Businesses has said:
“As mandatory face coverings are introduced, small firms know that they have a part to play in the nation’s recovery both physically and financially, and I’m sure this will welcomed by them.”
We have therefore come to the decision that face coverings should be mandatory in shops and supermarkets. Last month, we made face coverings mandatory on public transport and in NHS settings, and that has been successful in giving people more confidence to go on public transport and to a hospital setting when they need to, providing people with additional protection when they are not able to keep 2 metres from others, particularly people they do not normally come into contact with. Under the new rules, people who do not wear face coverings will face a fine of up to £100 in line with the sanction on public transport and, just as with public transport, children under 11 and those with certain disabilities will be exempt.
The liability for wearing a face covering lies with the individual. Should an individual without an exemption refuse to wear a face covering, a shop can refuse them entry and can call the police if people refuse to comply. The police have formal enforcement powers and can issue a fine. That is in line with how shops would normally manage their customers and enforcement is, of course, a last resort. We fully expect the public to comply with these rules, as they have done throughout the pandemic.
I want to give this message to everyone who has been making vital changes to their daily lives for the greater good. Wearing a face covering does not mean that we can ignore the other measures that have been so important in slowing the spread of this virus— washing our hands and following the rules on social distancing. Just as the British people have acted so selflessly throughout this pandemic, I have no doubt they will rise to this once more. As a nation, we have made huge strides in getting this virus, which has brought grief to so many, under control. We are not out of the woods yet, so let us all do our utmost to keep this virus cornered and enjoy our summer safely. I commend this statement to the House.
I agree that we need to stimulate the economy by shopping. I disagree that face coverings are the answer.
I also wonder about shop staff dying. I see the same smiling faces week after week in my local shops. I never heard anything on the BBC News about shopkeepers dying: it was front line medical staff and bus drivers.
This is purely a political decision. Purely political.
I had looked forward to visiting a garden centre. I now think I’ll shop online for the plant pots I’d planned to buy.
We have been told that our coronavirus lockdowns will not end until a vaccine has been successfully developed.
Meanwhile, in France, Professor Didier Raoult has been successfully using chloroquine, where suitable, on his COVID-19 patients at the IHU Méditerranée Infection facility, where he is the Director.
Professor Raoult is also a physician. A number of his fellow doctors oppose his use of an anti-malarial drug, which is cheap as chips, to treat this novel (new) coronavirus, said to have no known remedy, much less cure, at this time.
Raoult describes himself as a ‘renegade’ physician. Other doctors in France certainly agree. They doubt his claims. Now they want to suspend him from France’s national medical association, l’Ordre des Médecins (The Order of Physicians).
On Saturday, April 25, Geopolintel (French language, translated below) reported that the ANSM (French National Agency for Medicines and Health Products Safety), INSERM (French National Institute of Health and Medical Research) and the biopharmaceutical drug company Gilead are out to get Raoult.
The article is an open letter to Raoult’s critics:
The Covid-19 crisis shows the destructive ideology of your policies as well as that of the health institutions of our country.
Given the sums of money involved, it takes any and all costs to transfer the professor from Marseille for the generalized vaccination agreement between Macron and Bill Gates to be realized.
Censors, you have lost public opinion and you cannot regain it by threatening Professor Raoult with suspension by the Order of Physicians.
He makes fun of your stories of cash and corruption, unlike you, he treats and does not bear responsibility for death by organized shortage.
What displeases you in him is his indifference to lobbies and sirens of glory and as a professor, researcher and doctor; he cares while you polish your the seats of your trousers on the leather armchairs of the circles of initiates who have done nothing in their lives other than lying and earning dirty money.
There have been major pharmaceutical scandals in France in recent years, yet the establishment is going after Raoult, who has provided patient relief in an inexpensive prescription anti-malarial drug available at pharmacies. The medical establishment has accused the professor of employing ‘illegal medical research protocols’:
Regarding the “illegal clinical research protocols” which are attributed to Didier Raoult, what about the scandals of the Pick (Médiator), Depakin and other drugs approved in the so-called respect for randomized trial protocols?
As for his possible suspension by the Order of Physicians:
The Council of the Order of Physicians threatens Professor Raoult with immediate suspension of activity, because his clinical trials “do not comply with official procedures”, and he risks up to a year in prison and 15,000 euros in fines.
Yet, President Macron visited Raoult in Marseille recently to find out more about the doctor’s success with his COVID-19 patients. About this, the article says:
As a reminder, Professor Raoult presented Emmanuel Macron with the results of his work on 1,061 patients.
Almost 92% of patients cured in ten days,
Nearly 5% of patients cured “late”
Less than 5% of “patients with complications”.
Or 31 patients hospitalized for more than ten days,
10 transferred to intensive care,
and 5 deaths. On 1061: do your accounts and compare to the rest of France…
The abstract and summary table of the data in our article on the treatment of 1061 patients are online!
The abstract and the summary table of our paper on the treatment of 1061 patients are online! https: //t.co/mTWj6aGpTk https: //t.co … pic.twitter.com/PLdygNolxG
– Didier Raoult (@raoult_didier) April 10, 2020
These are the full results of Raoult’s study:
The article concludes:
The first reaction of the simple man that I am, in the delusional French context that I observe from afar, is this: Raoult heals while the profession flounders. It has no response, no treatment, adding the humiliation of the mandarins to the resentment of the rascals. In short, Raoult must be suspended. It is urgent: he risks treating even more people.
Now, it must be said that chloroquine doesn’t work on everyone. Nor does a similar drug, hydroxychloroquine, often combined with azithromycin (which contains zinc), in COVID-19 treatment. The latter is the treatment that President Trump has been championing for weeks.
Both should be used with caution and under medical supervision. They can harm patients with certain types of heart ailments. Never self-medicate!
As is true in France, the American medical establishment is eager to pour cold water on Trump’s claims.
On April 16, 2020, MedRxiv published an abstract of one such study: ‘Outcomes of hydroxychloroquine usage in United States veterans hospitalized with Covid-19’, which ends as follows:
CONCLUSIONS: In this study, we found no evidence that use of hydroxychloroquine, either with or without azithromycin, reduced the risk of mechanical ventilation in patients hospitalized with Covid-19. An association of increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone. These findings highlight the importance of awaiting the results of ongoing prospective, randomized, controlled studies before widespread adoption of these drugs.
Yet, nearly half of America’s 50 states are stockpiling the drug, as Axios reported on April 25 (emphases in the original):
At least 22 states and Washington, D.C., are building up stores of the anti-malarial drug President Trump previously touted as a possible solution for the novel coronavirus, AP reports.
Why it matters: The Food and Drug Administration advised doctors Friday against prescribing hydroxychloroquine or the related drug chloroquine to coronavirus patients as it appears to be causing some serious and potentially life-threatening side effects.
-
- ‘The warning comes as doctors at a New York hospital published a report that heart rhythm abnormalities developed in most of 84 coronavirus patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin, a combo Trump has promoted,” AP notes.
What they’re saying: “While clinical trials are ongoing to determine the safety and effectiveness of these drugs for COVID-19, there are known side effects of these medications that should be considered,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said.
The state of play: Some health experts worry the public could misuse the drug if it is made more widely available.
The FDA has authorised use of hydroxychloroquine under the following conditions, summarised on page 4 of their guidelines:
The hydroxychloroquine sulfate may only be used to treat adult and adolescent patients who weigh 50 kg or more hospitalized with COVID-19 for whom a clinical trial is not available, or participation is not feasible.9
South Dakota is the first state to participate in a trial of the drug:
Kudos to their governor, Kristi Noem, who ignored calls for lockdown. South Dakotans rewarded her with a parade:
But I digress.
Health Feedback is a site that debunks current coronavirus remedies or possible cures. Another is Poynter. Both must be busy.
There has been much talk of using ventilators on ICU patients with COVID-19. However, in some cases, ventilators do not always work and, in some instances, have worsened patients’ outcomes.
On March 20, Cleveland Clinic published an explanation of the damage that COVID-19 can do to the lungs, leading to the need for intensive care and, likely, a ventilator. Excerpts follow (emphases mine):
Although many people with COVID-19 have no symptoms or only mild symptoms, a subset of patients develop severe respiratory illness and may need to be admitted for intensive care.
In a new video, lung pathologist Sanjay Mukhopadhyay, MD, lays out in detail how the lungs are affected in these severe cases. The 15-minute video walks through how COVID-19 causes a “dangerous and potentially fatal” condition known as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) while providing stark images that underscore the severity of the damage that condition can cause to your lungs.
As Dr. Mukhopadhyay explains, Chinese researchers have linked COVID-19 to ARDS. Their study examined risk factors for 191 confirmed coronavirus patients who died while being treated in two hospitals in Wuhan, China.
The researchers found 50 of the 54 patients who died had developed ARDS while only nine of the 137 survivors had ARDS …
If you have ARDS, you’ll have symptoms like sudden breathlessness, rapid breathing, dizziness, rapid heart rate and excessive sweating.
But the four main things doctors will look for are:
-
- If you have an acute condition, symptoms that started within one week of what they call a “known clinical insult,” or new or worsening symptoms.
- If your shortness of breath isn’t explained by heart failure or fluid overload.
- Having low oxygen levels in your blood (severe hypoxia).
- Both lungs appearing white and opaque (versus black) on chest X-rays (called bilateral lung opacities on chest imaging) …
There might have been other articles like this circulating recently, ones that mention hypoxia.
Hypoxia has been mentioned often in online discourse and in some online articles, such as one from April 5, posted on Medium, ‘Covid-19 had us all fooled, but now we might have finally found its secret’, written by a non-medic whose Medium account has since been deleted.
That article has appeared all over various fora over the past few weeks.
It does sound really plausible, even though Poynter and Health Feedback have both debunked it, which I’ll get to below.
Not being a medic or have anyone in the family who is, I’m just going to throw these excerpts out there.
As such, I wonder if this is accurate, i.e. something that front line physicians will mention a year from now. Anyone with a medical background reading this should feel free to leave a comment below.
The author explains why ventilators don’t always work on COVID-19 patients. This is what caught my eye:
There is no ‘pneumonia’ nor ARDS. At least not the ARDS with established treatment protocols and procedures we’re familiar with. Ventilators are not only the wrong solution, but high pressure intubation can actually wind up causing more damage than without, not to mention complications from tracheal scarring and ulcers given the duration of intubation often required… They may still have a use in the immediate future for patients too far to bring back with this newfound knowledge, but moving forward a new treatment protocol needs to be established so we stop treating patients for the wrong disease.
Then the author quotes someone in the medical profession who published a paper that seems to have gone nowhere (see below). Unfortunately, there is no reference to what or whom he quotes, which is this:
The past 48 hours or so have seen a huge revelation: COVID-19 causes prolonged and progressive hypoxia (starving your body of oxygen) by binding to the heme groups in hemoglobin in your red blood cells. People are simply desaturating (losing o2 in their blood), and that’s what eventually leads to organ failures that kill them, not any form of ARDS or pneumonia. All the damage to the lungs you see in CT scans are from the release of oxidative iron from the hemes, this overwhelms the natural defenses against pulmonary oxidative stress and causes that nice, always-bilateral ground glass opacity in the lungs. Patients returning for re-hospitalization days or weeks after recovery suffering from apparent delayed post-hypoxic leukoencephalopathy strengthen the notion COVID-19 patients are suffering from hypoxia despite no signs of respiratory ‘tire out’ or fatigue.
I only found the Medium article last week, but I have many COVID-19 links bookmarked, including this one from April 10:
The article is behind a paywall, but you can read it here in its entirety. The doctors the Telegraph interviewed seem to be saying the same as the Medium author does: no ARDS, no pneumonia, therefore, no ventilator, which can do more harm than good:
British and American intensive care doctors at the front line of the coronavirus crisis are starting to question the aggressive use of ventilators for the treatment of patients.
In many cases they say the machines, which are highly invasive and require the patient to be rendered unconscious, are being used too early and may cause more harm than good. Instead they are finding that less invasive forms of oxygen treatment through face masks or nasal cannulas work better for patients, even those with very low blood oxygen readings.
Dr Ron Daniels, a consultant in critical care at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, on Thursday confirmed reports from US medics that he and other NHS doctors were revising their view of when ventilators should be used.
At the heart of the issue was the “bizarre” and “frankly baffling” phenomenon of Covid-19 patients presenting with catastrophically low blood oxygen levels but few other ill effects.
The Telegraph says that this new protocol goes against prior received wisdom on the unknown COVID-19. Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been in intensive care that week, released back to a general ward on the evening of Maundy Thursday, April 9:
The initial recommendations from doctors in China and Italy were to ventilate Covid patients early and aggressively, with the so-called “PEEP” pressure on the machines turned up high so their lungs did not contract when they exhaled.
“The initial message was treat as if you were treating for acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) with a high PEEP,” said Daniels. “But now we are becoming braver. We are tolerating much lower blood oxygen levels and using lower pressures. We are learning as we go along”.
The alternative to mechanical ventilation is oxygen treatment delivered via a mask or a nasal cannula or via a non-invasive high flow device. This is the sort of treatment the Prime Minister Boris Johnson is said to be receiving in an intensive care unit at St Thomas’s hospital London. His blood oxygen levels are not known.
Increasingly doctors in the UK, America and Europe are using these less invasive measures and holding back on the use of mechanical ventilation for as long as possible …
Doctors in Italy and Germany wrote to the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine last week making a similar point. They urged other doctors to be “patient” with Covid patients, arguing for “gentle ventilation” wherever possible …
It is not known why Covid-19 allows some patients to tolerate such low blood oxygen readings without air hunger or obvious confusion. One clue may be that patients are still able to exhale carbon dioxide – a toxin – through their lungs even if they are having difficulty absorbing oxygen.
“The patients in front of me are unlike any I’ve ever seen,” one American doctor working in a Brooklyn hospital told the specialist health publication STAT this week. “They looked a lot more like they had altitude sickness than pneumonia.”
Dr Daniels agreed that there were similarities with altitude sickness, itself a potentially fatal condition. “We’ve seen a lot of headache and dizziness”, he noted …
You might have heard of Drs Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, whose two-part press briefing in California was removed last week from YouTube. The two went against the received wisdom of the WHO. I watched both videos when they came out at the beginning of April. In the second video, they warned against the aggressive use of ventilators when treating COVID-19.
Therefore, the Medium article might not be either wrong or fake news with regard to ventilators.
It has an explanation of what might be happening whereby blood gets starved of oxygen through COVID-19, and it is this which has proven to be controversial with physicians:
Your red blood cells carry oxygen from your lungs to all your organs and the rest of your body. Red blood cells can do this thanks to hemoglobin, which is a protein consisting of four “hemes”. Hemes have a special kind of iron ion, which is normally quite toxic in its free form, locked away in its center with a porphyrin acting as it’s ‘container’. In this way, the iron ion can be ‘caged’ and carried around safely by the hemoglobin, but used to bind to oxygen when it gets to your lungs.
When the red blood cell gets to the alveoli, or the little sacs in your lungs where all the gas exchange happens, that special little iron ion can flip between FE2+ and FE3+ states with electron exchange and bond to some oxygen, then it goes off on its little merry way to deliver o2 elsewhere.
Here’s where COVID-19 comes in. Its glycoproteins bond to the heme, and in doing so that special and toxic oxidative iron ion is “disassociated” (released). It’s basically let out of the cage and now freely roaming around on its own. This is bad for two reasons:
1) Without the iron ion, hemoglobin can no longer bind to oxygen. Once all the hemoglobin is impaired, the red blood cell is essentially turned into a Freightliner truck cab with no trailer and no ability to store its cargo. It is useless and just running around with COVID-19 virus attached to its porphyrin. All these useless trucks running around not delivering oxygen is what starts to lead to desaturation, or watching the patient’s spo2 levels drop. It is INCORRECT to assume traditional ARDS and in doing so, you’re treating the WRONG DISEASE. Think of it a lot like carbon monoxide poisoning, in which CO is bound to the hemoglobin, making it unable to carry oxygen. In those cases, ventilators aren’t treating the root cause; the patient’s lungs aren’t ‘tiring out’, they’re pumping just fine. The red blood cells just can’t carry o2, end of story. Only in this case, unlike CO poisoning in which eventually the CO can break off, the affected hemoglobin is permanently stripped of its ability to carry o2 because it has lost its iron ion. The body compensates for this lack of o2 carrying capacity and deliveries by having your kidneys release hormones like erythropoietin, which tell your bone marrow factories to ramp up production on new red blood cells with freshly made and fully functioning hemoglobin. This is the reason you find elevated hemoglobin and decreased blood oxygen saturation as one of the 3 primary indicators of whether the shit is about to hit the fan for a particular patient or not.
2) That little iron ion, along with millions of its friends released from other hemes, are now floating through your blood freely. As I mentioned before, this type of iron ion is highly reactive and causes oxidative damage. It turns out that this happens to a limited extent naturally in our bodies and we have cleanup & defense mechanisms to keep the balance. The lungs, in particular, have 3 primary defenses to maintain “iron homeostasis”, 2 of which are in the alveoli, those little sacs in your lungs we talked about earlier. The first of the two are little macrophages that roam around and scavenge up any free radicals like this oxidative iron. The second is a lining on the walls (called the epithelial surface) which has a thin layer of fluid packed with high levels of antioxidant molecules… things like ascorbic acid (AKA Vitamin C) among others. Well, this is usually good enough for naturally occurring rogue iron ions but with COVID-19 running rampant your body is now basically like a progressive state letting out all the prisoners out of the prisons… it’s just too much iron and it begins to overwhelm your lungs’ countermeasures, and thus begins the process of pulmonary oxidative stress. This leads to damage and inflammation, which leads to all that nasty stuff and damage you see in CT scans of COVID-19 patient lungs. Ever noticed how it’s always bilateral? (both lungs at the same time) Pneumonia rarely ever does that, but COVID-19 does… EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
Poynter says this is clearly wrong:
The claim that COVID-19 causes hypoxia because the causative virus binds to hemoglobin in red blood cells is unsupported. For starters, no scientific evidence demonstrates that SARS-CoV-2 can enter red blood cells. The claim that the virus binds to hemoglobin is founded on the conclusions of a single pre-print, which solely involves computational analysis, without experimental verification or peer-review. The mechanism proposed is also inconsistent with clinical evidence from COVID-19 patients.
Health Feedback posted their refutation on Wednesday, April 15. It is lengthy and thorough. Excerpts follow:
Scientists told Health Feedback that the claim was not supported by experimental and clinical evidence. “There is no direct biological evidence that SARS-CoV-2 proteins interact with hemoglobin. The claim is based on a single study performed purely in silico without proper wet lab validation,” explained Victor Tseng, pulmonologist and assistant professor of medicine at Emory University. Eva Nozik-Grayck, clinician-scientist and critical care specialist at the Children’s Hospital Colorado, stated that “without any experimental evidence, it is dangerous and misleading to make these claims.”
David Irwin, associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, who studies hemoglobin and hypoxia, questioned the conclusions of the ChemRxiv pre-print that served as the basis for the claim. “The authors show no convincing data to suggest that the [viral] proteins of interest, such as Orf8, etc., actually bind heme other than in modeling theories. Most troubling is that there is no way that we know of to suggest that the virus accesses hemoglobin in red blood cells to attack the heme as described in the manuscript,” he said.
A Medium article authored by Matthew Amdahl, a clinician-scientist and hemoglobin researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, details the numerous problems with [Medium author] Gaiziunas’ hypothesis. Notably, he pointed out that SARS-CoV-2 is larger than the entire hemoglobin protein, but according to Gaiziunas’ hypothesis, would somehow manage to fit into “a space barely large enough for two-atom molecules like oxygen (O2)” in order to eject iron from hemoglobin and bind to porphyrin:
“To put it charitably, this would be an entirely novel and seemingly impossible sort of chemistry, and there is absolutely no scientific evidence that supports such a possibility. It’s this seemingly impossible interaction that forms the foundation of the blog post’s entire argument, and so the remainder of the conclusions drawn by the blogger simply don’t carry any weight.”
Furthermore, clinical evidence from COVID-19 patients contradict Gaiziunas’ hypothesis. Firstly, supposing that the virus did bind to hemoglobin and ejected iron from red blood cells, this would have produced a modified form of hemoglobin that has an altered ability to bind to oxygen, which can be detected by measuring the oxyhemoglobin dissociation constant …
In summary, while scientists have not ruled out a potential link between changes in red blood cell physiology and hypoxia observed in COVID-19 patients, the mechanisms proposed by Gaiziunas are founded on little to no scientific evidence, are highly implausible given what we already know of hemoglobin and the virus, and are contradicted by clinical evidence in COVID-19 patients.
We might find out more about hypoxia in COVID-19 patients in a year’s time.
For now, I can’t help but wonder if this type of hypoxia explains why hospitals have been refusing more ventilators for COVID-19 patients.
In the meantime, returning to Prof Didier Raoult, it seems that renegades are never in vogue with the establishment.
More power to him for successfully trialling on his coronavirus patients an inexpensive, prescription anti-malarial that has been on the market for decades. Well done. Millions of us support him in his work.
Yesterday’s post was about the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a historic and happy occasion, to put it mildly.
However, while reunification has not been easy, the relationship between the western and eastern regions of Germany has been a historically uneasy one in some ways.
James Hawes, the author of The Shortest History of Germany, on sale in 20 different countries, wrote a short but information-packed article for UnHerd: ‘It wasn’t the Berlin Wall that divided Germany’. It is well worth reading. Even though I took World History in school, there is much here about Germany that I did not know.
A summary with excerpts follows. Emphases mine.
In the Middle Ages, as the Church was gaining adherents in the western half of what we know as Germany, the eastern half was comprised of pagan tribes. The river Elbe was the demarcation line between these two groups of people:
While early medieval western Europe was developing its unique signature, the power-sharing of international Church and national-state, the lands beyond the river Elbe were still populated by pagan, illiterate tribes. No real attempt was made to exert German control and settlement beyond that point until 1147; Cologne had already been a flourishing western European city for 1,200 years when the first German conqueror-farmers reached Berlin.
… East of the Elbe, the Germans never entirely supplanted the Slavs (some, the Sorbs, remain even in the truncated eastern Germany of today, just north of Dresden).
Hence the importance of subsequent Prussian rule and influence over the East:
The Germans of the east came to accept rule by a caste of warlords — the famous Prussian Junkers — and, later, the new Lutheran paradigm of a state which controlled its very own Church and against which there was hence no appeal.
Not for nothing did Friedrich Hayek see Prussia as the template for all modern totalitarian states, whether of the Left or of the Right. Max Weber constantly referred to a place he called Ostelbien, East Elbia, palpably different, for all its local variation, to ciselbian, western Germany.
Once suffrage was granted, voting patterns were very different between these two regions:
Of course, psychologists, philosophers and sociologists can all be wrong and often are. Electoral maps, however, do not lie. They show that ever since Germans have had votes, eastern Germans have voted very differently from western Germans.
Under the German Empire (1871-1918), the Prussian Conservatives — conservative in this context meaning supporters of royal and militarist rule under an agrarian Junker elite — depended almost completely on votes from the East, having scarcely any traction at all in the West.
The First World War changed nothing. In the first normal elections of the Weimar Republic, the extreme Prussian conservatives of the DNVP (officially anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic, violently antidemocratic, their members implicated in several high-profile political murders) were the second largest party nationally but — exactly as with the AfD today — that position was entirely dependent on votes from the East.
And when the deluge finally came in 1933 it was, again, only thanks to heavy votes in the East that Hitler got 43.9% nationally, enabling him (with support from the rump DNVP) to seize power by semi-constitutional means. If the whole country had voted like the Rhineland or Munich, he could only have attempted an armed coup, which the Army would have crushed.
Such patterns have continued to the present day, with nationalist and populist parties more popular in the east than the west.
Further disparity has resulted economically, from the western regions propping those up on the east:
… well over €2 trillion has been pumped from Western taxpayers to the East. The so-called Reunification has dragged West Germany back into the role which Bismarck assigned it: to subsidise the economically moribund East because it is their patriotic duty.
Western German voters, rather sick of this, are more and more wary of keeping up this settlement, on top of their traditional role as paymasters of the stable Europe from which German industry benefits so greatly. Yet the Prussian myth of “reunification” has trumped economic reality, which goes to show something we in Britain should know all too well: that there is nothing worse for a country than to misunderstand its own history …
The founder of West Germany, Conrad Adenauer, knew his history. After the First World War he begged the French and British to help him split Prussia off from Germany. When he had to visit Berlin, he would always draw the curtains of his train compartment as he crossed the fatal River Elbe, muttering “Here we go, Asia again!” (“Schon wieder Asien!”) After the second war, though obliged in public to support re-unification, he told the British most secretly that he was determined it should never happen.
To top it all off, both sides of Germany also have a different opinion on the EU, a further source of friction, according to German journalist Sabine Beppler-Spahl in ‘After the Berlin Wall: whither democracy’:
Sabine Beppler-Spahl explains that the calls for reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall were as surprising as the fall of the Wall itself in 1989. The GDR was the German Democratic Republic — East Germany:
It is true that the first banners demanding reunification only appeared after the wall fell, and the GDR had all but collapsed. But that was because of the great dangers involved in demanding reunification in the GDR while it still existed. Hence the original protest slogan was ‘Wir sind das Volk’ (‘We are the people), which was directed at the GDR’s Stalinist government. But from mid-November onwards, it changed to ‘Wir sind ein Volk’ (‘We are one people’), which was directed at the establishment in the West. Soon calls for reunification became so powerful that they could no longer be ignored.
In calling for reunification, people were demanding rights that had been withheld for decades. These included an end to the command economy, with all its hardships, and above all, democracy. When the first free elections were held in March 1990, an impressive 93.4 per cent of the population in the old East took part – which remains the highest ever turnout in any free election in Germany. East Germans didn’t need to be convinced of the virtues of civil liberty and democracy. That’s because, as political scientist Robert Rohrschneider put it in 1999, they knew what it meant to live in an authoritarian system (1).
One of the most amazing aspects of 1989 was that, across Europe, few in power expected it. ‘Of course we said that we believed in reunification, because we knew that it would never happen’, said former UK prime minister Edward Heath in 1989. When reunification did appear on the popular agenda, it became apparent how large and diverse the opposition to it was. It included the most unlikely of allies, from prominent former East German civil-rights activists (2) and the West German SPD and Green Party, to many Western European heads of state.
The Greens were against reunification and wanted reform of the GDR instead:
Several former East German dissidents, like Bärbel Bohley, campaigned for reform of the GDR system. She and others identified with the environmentalist and anti-consumerist rhetoric of the West German Green Party, which was very successful during the 1980s. The Greens, like large sections of the West German Social Democrats and others, identified with Stalinism more than they liked to admit. They were turned off by the sight of so many people demanding democracy and an end to the command economy. So they became supporters of the status quo. ‘We were anti-nationalists’, explained former Green Party leader Ralf Fücks in 2015.
That should tell you something about why opponents to the Greens call them the ‘watermelon party’ — green on the outside, red on the inside.
That said, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister at the time, also opposed reunification. So did France’s Socialist president, François Mitterand:
Outside of Germany, the speed and turn of events also prompted apprehension. On 28 November, [Chancellor Helmut] Kohl presented his ’10-point programme for the formation of a contractual community’ (effectively, a plan for German reunification). The then British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who had made no secret of her hostility to reunification, quickly demanded that any talk of a united Germany should be postponed for at least five to 10 years (3). French president François Mitterrand informed a group of journalists that he considered German reunification a ‘legal and political impossibility’. A reunited Germany ‘as an independent, uncontrolled power was unbearable for Europe’, he concluded.
The then-US president George HW Bush — Bush I — was Chancellor Kohl’s greatest ally:
With Western Europe’s most powerful states opposed to reunification, Kohl’s most reliable ally became US president George HW Bush. As journalist Elizabeth Pond wrote, the US played a decisive role in reversing the resistance of the British and French. There was, however, one condition placed on German reunification – it was to take place within the European Community.
Although reunification took place on October 3, 1990, it did not happen overnight. The terms of the controversial Maastricht Treaty, signed in 1992, were the only way France would agree to a formally reunified Germany:
The most far-reaching part of Maastricht – and the most contested within Germany itself – was the decision to create a monetary union, with a common currency, namely, the Euro. According to historians Andreas Rödder and Heinrich August Winkler, Kohl accepted that a reunified Germany would have to enter a monetary union in order to win support for reunification from France. It was a concession that came at a price for the French, too. It meant the French state was also to be bound to the fiscal rules and regulations of the EU. As French political scientist Anne-Marie Le Goannec explains in L’Allemagne Après la Guerre Froide, it was France’s admiration for the ‘German Model’ that helped Kohl push through the fiscal rules of the EU. Maastricht, however, was unpopular from the start. And in a referendum held in France in September 1992, only 50.8 per cent voted in favour of it.
Whereas the French public were consulted over Maastricht, the Germans had no say:
Maastricht was also unpopular in Germany. Unlike the French electorate, however, the German electorate was never consulted. The absence of any public vote was compounded by the weakness of the opposition SPD, which had never recovered from its position on reunification. It meant that Kohl’s government was given a free hand to reunify Germany as a part of the European Union.
Although most Germans approved of Maastricht when Kohl’s government ratified it, by the mid-1990s, sentiment had changed dramatically:
Admittedly, support for a united Europe had been high in the early 1990s, especially in the former GDR, where over 85 per cent were in favour, compared with 70 per cent in the former West. By 1996, however, support had dropped to 35 per cent in the east and 40 per cent in the west (4). Christopher J Andersen, a professor of political science at New York State University, attributes the sharp drop-off in enthusiasm for the EU to the job losses and economic problems that plagued the former East German economy (5).
In brief, reunification under EU rules brought about years of change that no one had expected:
It wasn’t just the abolition of the well-loved Deutsche Mark, pushed through by Kohl, which annoyed so many Germans. Other deeply unpopular policy measures, which would probably have been rejected by the electorate, if they’d ever been asked, included: the expansion of the EU; the free movement of cheap labour from impoverished eastern Europe (leading to wage depression); the German military intervention in the Yugoslav war; the handling of the Greek debt crisis; and the temporary loss of control over borders. Again and again the structures of the EU have allowed different German governments to ignore the opinions of the electorate and pursue unpopular policies.
This year, the East has shown that it sees reunification differently to the West and is reacting against the EU:
The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has led three successful election campaigns in the former East German states of Brandenburg and Saxony (in September 2019) and Thuringia (October 2019), using the slogan, ‘Vollende die Wende’ (‘complete reunification’). The slogan was widely criticised in the media. ‘People are told to go back on to the streets, like they did in 1989, and bring the system down’, said one journalist on a programme entitled How the AfD has appropriated reunification. Elsewhere, an open letter, written by a group of former GDR civil-rights activists, accused the AfD of ‘historical lies’. But the AfD can also point to several former dissidents who sympathise with it. And so the battle over the meaning of 1989, which is simultaneously about today’s politics, is set to continue.
No doubt some Germans living in the East would agree with another article from UnHerd, ’10 things I hate about Germany’, which discusses various economic and political policies from Angela Merkel. EU-loving Britons point to Germany as the be-all and end-all, the role model to which we must look up. Ultimately:
the Germans may be no worse than we are, but they’re certainly no better.
I could not agree more.
Germany is a great place to visit. The German people I’ve met have been courteous and friendly. The architecture is fabulous. Shopping is excellent.
However, no EU nation is a be-all and end-all — not under Brussels and the Maastricht system.
Were you around when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989?
I remember it. What an exciting time it was, too, even for those of us watching events unfold on television news.
This short video from Germany’s Federal Foreign Office explains its history from 1961 to 1989:
Professional photographer Tom Stoddart was fortunate to track down a brother and sister whose photo he took on November 9, 1989. Amazing:
Here is another Tom Stoddart image of the fall of the Wall:
The following video from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office features two British diplomats serving in Berlin at the time. One explains that they had diplomatic passports to allow them into the East, but, even then, the Stasi had their eyes on them the entire time. Families could not travel together from West Berlin to see other family members in East Berlin. Only one family member could go from West to East for visits. Of course, there was no traffic by East Berliners to the West, which explains the mix of anger and joy that people from East Berlin felt once the barrier came down:
I was unaware that people dug tunnels under the Wall in order to escape from East to West:
East-West passport control was risky, especially for those who had escaped:
This is an excellent ‘before and after’ photo, followed by one of Checkpoint Charlie:
Here is a photo of one of the many men who chipped away at the Wall:
Once it came down, yes, we thought the hankering for left-wing politics would end. Unfortunately, we were wrong:
This has implications for the UK’s upcoming general election on December 12:
And, if we look at Venezuela, Marxist politicians and their rich friends are thriving when everyone else is attempting to survive:
But I digress.
Now to conclude on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, which took place on October 3, 1990. It hasn’t been easy for either side to reunite economically. What was East Germany still suffers as the western half continues to attract new business investment. This brief report from a German business channel with English subtitles explains the situation:
However, at least personal freedom continues to flourish in a reunited Germany.
To mark that freedom, one upon which President Ronald Reagan insisted at the time, the American Embassy in Germany unveiled a statue in his honour last week. It is sad that people in Berlin did not want it accessible to the general public. Reagan was a huge influence in the fall of the Wall:
On a seasonal note, Germany’s Christmas markets are open, including those in Leipzig and Dresden, once again flourishing cities after decades of communist rule:
We should be grateful for the fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago.
May such a division and an oppressive political regime never be repeated. Pray that North Korea will be reunified with its southern neighbour.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson will be visiting our European neighbours this week before the G7 conference in Biarritz:
Reuters reports (emphases mine):
Prime Minister Boris Johnson will tell French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the Westminster parliament cannot stop Brexit and a new deal must be agreed if Britain is to avoid leaving the EU without one.
In his first trip abroad as leader, Johnson is due to meet his European counterparts ahead of a G7 summit on Aug. 24-26 in Biarritz, France.
He will say that Britain is leaving the European Union on Oct. 31, with or without a deal, and that the British parliament cannot block that, according to a Downing Street source.
Despite Parliament’s summer recess, Remain MPs have been in various discussions as to how to stop our leaving, deal or no deal, on October 31:
It is, however, unclear if lawmakers have the unity or power to use the British parliament to prevent a no-deal Brexit on Oct. 31 – likely to be the United Kingdom’s most significant move since World War Two.
Sky News reports that No. 10 says Brexit will be but a small part of Boris’s discussions with France and Germany:
… Number 10 said it expects there to be “very little discussion” of Brexit during the visit to Berlin on Wednesday and Paris on Thursday, with other topics to be the focus.
Discussions are expected to centre around the next G7 summit in Biarritz, France, next weekend, with trade, foreign policy, security and the environment set to be on the table.
Number 10 said Mr Johnson would discuss issues such as climate change with his fellow leaders, adding: “The EU are our closest neighbours and whatever happens we want a strong relationship after we leave.”
Thanks to Boris’s leadership thus far, the Conservative Party once again leads in the polls:
British voters believe that Boris would make the best PM:
Nevertheless, Labour MPs think they can overturn triggering of Article 50. Whether this can be done is of some debate:
The Speaker of the House, John Bercow, is supposed to be impartial, yet, he, too, is said to be plotting against No Deal:
Boris’s government tied up one loose end at the weekend:
This was something Theresa May was supposed to instruct Stephen Barclay (pictured) to do — but didn’t:
There were two significant leaks in the past few days.
One was Boris’s Brexit ‘script’, left behind in a London pub, allegedly by a civil servant. Tell me this was not deliberate:
The other was a copy of Operation Yellowhammer, which contains all the worst case scenarios in case of No Deal:
The Sunday Times made this look like news, but Yellowhammer first surfaced on Wednesday, March 20 in preparation for our original March 29 exit date.
That day, the Express reported:
Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay told Cabinet ministers in a letter the plan will be implemented on March 25 unless a new exit date is agreed. Operation Yellowhammer is the UK Treasury’s contingency plan for no deal exit from the bloc. The plan drafts what would happen for factors such as money, citizens, trade and customs.
According to the Daily Telegraph, if no date is set by Monday Operation Yellowhammer will be implemented.
In a letter to Cabinet ministers, Mr Barclay wrote: “Operation Yellowhammer command and control structures will be enacted fully on 25 March unless a new exit date has been agreed between the UK and the EU.”
The Guardian‘s story, also published that day, had more information:
With the country placed on a knife-edge by Theresa May’s latest Brexit crisis, the government is preparing for “any outcome” with a decision on Monday on whether to roll out the national Operation Yellowhammer contingencies for food, medicine and banking.
Some measures have already swung into place, including Operation Fennel’s traffic management in Kent.
The Europe minister, Alan Duncan, has also said the Foreign Office staff deployed to its Brexit “nerve centre” are working to help UK citizens in the EU in the event they get caught up in a Brexit mess.
The Department of Health was due to activate emergency supply chain operations, with instructions to medicines suppliers to book space on ferries to ensure they are not caught up in queues from next weekend in the event of no-deal.
They are just two of the 12 Operation Yellowhammer areas of risk the government has planned for in the event of a crash-out, according to a National Audit Office report [pdf]. It will decide next Monday if they should all become operational, enacting no-deal plans in 30 central government departments and 42 local councils, two devolved governments and in Northern Ireland.
Yellowhammer also had measures in place for Gibraltar. Fortunately, the government there was quick to point out that Yellowhammer as published is now out of date:
Interestingly, the week before, the island’s government reminded residents to prepare for a No Deal Brexit:
But I digress.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, Michael Gove, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, tweeted:
Sky News had more about Gove’s explanation:
Sebastian Payne of the Financial Times tweeted:
Boris is also displeased with Theresa May’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, who has been predicting all manner of Project Fear disasters if No Deal comes about on October 31:
However, Germany had an important leak of its own at the same time as Yellowhammer resurfaced in the UK:
Good. I was also heartened to see the view of Boris from Berlin:
Absolutely correct.
I wish Boris Johnson all the best in his meetings this week with our European partners.
