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On March 28, 2021 an hour-long interview with General Thomas McInerney appeared online.
I do not know of the interviewer Nino, but the two seemed to get on well. Both support President Trump and both are sceptical of coronavirus vaccines.
General McInerney, 84, began his career in the Army then joined the Air Force. He completed his initial pilot training in 1960. In 1962, he flew escort missions in the West Berlin Air Corridor during the Berlin Crisis and escort reconnaissance missions over Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In April 1963, he was one of the first forward air controllers assigned to South Vietnam with a Vietnamese army division. He was sent to South East Asia on three additional deployments.
After the Vietnam War, he completed studies at the Armed Forces Staff College and graduated from the National War College.
In 1974, he was stationed in London as the air attaché to the U.S. Embassy. Between November 1976 and October 1977, he was assigned to the Royal Air Force Station in Upper Heyford, England, where he was vice commander of the 20th Tactical Fighter Wing.
In 1979, he was stationed in Asia, first in the Philippines, where he commanded the 3rd Tactical Fighter Wing at Clark Air Base, then in 1981, in Japan, where he commanded the 313th Air Division at Kadena Air Base.
In 1983, he was transferred to Hawaii, where he served as deputy chief of staff for operations and intelligence, Headquarters Pacific Air Forces at Hickam Air Force Base.
In 1985, he returned to Europe. He became commander of 3rd Air Force, Royal Air Force Station in Mildenhall, England. The following year, he became vice commander in chief, Headquarters US Air Forces in Europe, Ramstein Air Base, West Germany.
In 1988, he was reassigned to the United States, serving as commander of Alaskan Air Command, Alaskan NORAD Region, and Joint Task Force Alaska. In July 1989, when Alaskan Command was activated, he became its commander. In 1990, he commanded the 11th Air Force, the redesignation of Alaskan Air Command.
His last active duty assignment was as assistant vice chief of staff, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Washington, DC. He retired from the Air Force in 1994, with the rank of Lieutenant General. Afterwards, he served on the boards of directors for several military contractors.
General McInerney endorsed Donald Trump both in 2016 and 2020. After the 2020 election, he supported the use of the Insurrection Act and all additional powers available. He was quoted as saying that he wanted President Trump:
to declare a national emergency, use the Insurrection Act, declare martial law, suspend habeas corpus, set up military tribunals, and suspend the electoral college [vote for president and vice-president] on December 14 and the presidential inauguration on January 20.
A summary of the General’s interview with Nino follows. As one would expect in a conversation, the subjects ran together, so I have separated them below.
2020 election
At the 13-minute point, he said that Trump had 79 million votes to Biden’s 68 million. At the 15-minute mark, he mentioned the recount in Maricopa County and two more recounts in two other states. He believes that the Supreme Court did not want to hear any cases about the election because Chief Justice John Roberts is ‘compromised’ in some way.
He also thinks that coronavirus was engineered to steal the election and that someone cut a deal with the C C P.
The General said that President Trump should have appointed Sidney Powell as special legal counsel in December.
He said that, as nothing has been done:
Americans have got to take control over their country.
As to why Cyber Command did not report election irregularities on the night to the President, he said
I believe we have a Deep State.
He would like to know the reasons why Trump did not contest the election and made this assertion:
Trump had a lot of the Deep State around him.
He repeated later in the interview that Trump was surrounded by:
Deep Staters.
When asked about his former Vice President, Mike Pence, he said:
I think he is Deep State. He is part of the problem.
He was disappointed that the military did not do anything with regard to the election. He believes that Germany intercepted Dominion votes but took no action:
I think the military’s asleep at the switch.
He said that the United States needs:
a transparent audit that we’re all comfortable with.
He asserted:
Biden did not win.
He explained that votes exceeded voter rolls in all suspect states, a situation that, on a national level, was previously:
unheard of … a stolen election.
He said that Biden did not win through properly cast votes and that one would have to throw out mail-in votes as well as:
get the right people to look at them.
He thinks the focus needs to be on clean elections for 2022:
We’ve got to just keep banging away at it …
and if done fairly, Trump gets in for 2024.
As for the Q movement, he said:
I don’t know anything about the Q movement.
Coronavirus
With regard to coronavirus, at the 17:30 mark, the General said:
Do not take the vaccine.
He revealed that has already had one shot.
He explained that the vaccine is a prophylactic mRNA and that there will be no built-in immunity to COVID-20 and COVID-21.
Whether all the military have had it is still unconfirmed, he said.
He was and is clearly against lockdown. He added that a proper hydroxychloroquine protocol would have been sufficient and also suggested ivermectin. He believes that the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) lied to President Trump.
He mentioned a Dr Northrop, whom he described as a well renowned physician, who says that Americans should stop taking the vaccine.
The General has strong feelings on this subject:
This is our Normandy, this is our Iwo Jima.
He believes that Dr Fauci:
has been part of this cabal.
He mentioned New York’s Governor Cuomo and deplored the nursing home deaths in that state.
On the other hand, he added, COVID-19 has a 99.2% survival rate and said of the American response:
We over-reacted.
Potentially, he said, Americans could go to ‘camps’ for refusing vaccines.
Conclusion
General McInerney said that Americans need to be realistic and resolute:
Hope is not a strategy.
He also foresees difficulties later in 2021, with serious problems starting:
this winter.
My readers wonder why President Trump is not doing more to oppose the Biden administration’s agenda. I am not sure that he can do much, if anything, at this point.
I will have more on the concluding days of the Trump administration next week which might help explain his current circumstances. I haven’t written about those final weeks. They have been too painful to consider.
Retired Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption has been a doughty opponent of lockdown since last year.
He has given many interviews during that time.
His most recent one was to Freddie Sayers of UnHerd, an excellent site which explores the world of ideas, history and current affairs.
I found out about Lord Sumption’s interview via Guido Fawkes. On Friday, March 5, Guido posted an article about it as well as an ONS (Office for National Statistics) survey about over-80s breaking lockdown rules:
Guido’s post says (emphases in the original):
Buried in the latest ONS data dump of Covid research is a remarkable – if logical – statistic. Just 33% of over 80s have not met with anyone indoors since having their jab, with 43% admitting to meeting with people other than their carers or support bubble after receiving the first dose. After two jabs, this explicit rule-breaking rises to 48%. Despite the widespread rulebreaking, hospitalisation and death rates amongst the age group are tumbling…
Cheeky octogenarians are not alone – spritely 72-year-old Lord Sumption yesterday made a splash by telling UnHerd that “sometimes the most public-spirited thing that you can do with despotic laws like these is to ignore them” – even claiming that a quiet campaign of “civil disobedience” has already begun …
With regard to the vaccine, most in this age group support it enthusiastically, despite the fact that 41% of the survey’s participants experienced side effects after the first dose. Here are more ONS findings on that subject (emphases mine):
-
- Of those who had experienced side effects and were still awaiting their second dose of a vaccine, 63% said the side effects would not affect their decision to get the second dose, and 35% were more likely to get the second dose.
- Around 19 out of 20 over 80s (96%) would be very or somewhat likely to encourage others to get a COVID-19 vaccination.
Also:
Of over 80s who had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, 49% reported that they had met someone who they do not live with, outdoors, since receiving their vaccination; 54% had left home to go shopping, and 45% had left home to participate in outdoor leisure activities.
In contrast, one in five (20%) people who had received at least one dose of a vaccine reported that they had not left home for any reason since receiving their vaccination.
The survey findings add background to what Lord Sumption, 72, told Freddie Sayers of UnHerd.
The video is 51 minutes long and requires concentration:
Note his tie, which has a motif of American flags from the Colonial era with ‘We the People’ printed on it. He also sits with his arms crossed much of the time to hide a physical ailment.
It looks as if they met in his office. Sayers must have been thrilled to resume in-person interviews, as he has had to do them remotely over most of the past year.
Many of the comments beneath the video are from Britons disappointed that Lord Sumption implied that the vaccine will be the only way forward at this point in returning to a normal life. To be fair to him, he did describe it as ‘a regrettable step’ and that ‘people should be prepared to trust each other’, instead (31:00-31:14). Also:
I recognise that most of my fellow citizens want coercive measures.
Unfortunately, I agree with him. There is no way out right now. It is doubtful that the vaccine will be made mandatory by law, but most adults won’t be able to resume much of their prior lives without it. Many employers and businesses will require proof of vaccination. This is likely to also be true for package holidays and international travel.
Lord Sumption talked about how we arrived at this point. He said that the public were afraid of this pandemic and wanted protection from the government. The government protected the public and helped to reinforce the fear factor in their coronavirus briefings and other public statements. Hence, civil liberties went out the window. He said that once those are gone, it is very difficult to regain them, particularly as government ministers enjoy their new roles in controlling the population.
UnHerd has an article with notable quotes from the interview.
On the dangers of public fear, Lord Sumption said:
John Stuart Mill regarded public sentiment and public fear as the principal threat to a liberal democracy. The tendency would be for it to influence policies in a way that whittles away the island within which we are entitled to control our lives to next to nothing. That’s what he regarded as the big danger. It didn’t happen in his own lifetime; it has happened in many countries in the 20th century, and it’s happening in Britain now.
He pointed out that the civil liberties we have taken for granted as being well established are, in fact, highly fragile. They can vanish at any time. To this end, he explained that democratic forms of government are but recent developments in the time line of history:
Democracy is inherently fragile. We have an idea that it’s a very robust system. But democracies have existed for about 150 years. In this country, I think you could say that they existed from the second half of the of the 19th century — they are not the norm. Democracies were regarded in ancient times as inherently self-destructive ways of government. Because, said Aristotle, democracies naturally turn themselves into tyranny. Because the populace will always be a sucker for a demagogue who will turn himself into an absolute ruler…
Now, it is quite remarkable that Aristotle’s gloomy predictions about the fate of democracies have been falsified by the experience of the West ever since the beginning of democracy. And I think one needs to ask why that is. In my view, the reason is this: Aristotle was basically right about the tendencies, but we have managed to avoid it by a shared political culture of restraint. And this culture of restraint, which because it depends on the collective mentality of our societies, is extremely fragile, quite easy to destroy and extremely difficult to recreate.
Allow me to add that this is why America’s Founding Fathers established a republic, not a democracy. They feared eventual despotism. The establishment of the Electoral College was also intended to be a safeguard against demagoguery.
Freddie Sayers asked Lord Sumption how we got to the point where we consented to the government taking away our civil liberties when they had been held sacrosanct for so long.
Lord Sumption said that our stability as a society and as a nation relies on the support most citizens have towards national institutions. Once a large enough percentage of people begin to question those, everything is gradually thrown into doubt. Socio-political fissures develop and something or someone comes in to replace what citizens as a whole once respected and valued.
Sayers asked him how he became so outspoken on the government’s coronavirus policies. He replied that no one else was stepping up to do so, therefore, he decided to speak up:
I would very much have preferred the kind of points that I have been consistently making for the last year to have been made by just about anybody else. Those colleagues or former colleagues who disapprove of what I’ve been doing have got a perfectly good point. But there are some issues which are so central to the dilemmas of our time, which are so important, where I think that you have to be prepared to stand up and be counted.
He reiterated his awareness that he is in a minority, however, that small minority from last year is now becoming a ‘significant’ minority.
He thinks the Coronavirus Act 2020 is an example of bad law. As such, he does not feel any moral obligation to obey it and advises each of us to do as we think best as individuals:
I feel sad that we have the kind of laws which public-spirited people may need to break. I have always taken a line on this, which is probably different from that of most of my former colleagues. I do not believe that there is a moral obligation to obey the law… You have to have a high degree of respect, both for the object that the law is trying to achieve, and for the way that it’s been achieved. Some laws invite breach. I think this is one of them.
Politically, Lord Sumption describes himself as a ‘small-l Liberal’, which is classical liberalism — free market economy and small government — rather than what Americans define as ‘liberal’, meaning left-wing. He served as a Justice of the Supreme Court under David Cameron’s and Theresa May’s Conservative governments.
He had this advice for Boris Johnson’s government:
My first proposal is that governments should not treat information as a tool for manipulating public behaviour. They should be calmer than the majority of their citizens; they should be completely objective. My second lesson would be that governments dealing with scientific issues should not allow themselves to be influenced by a single caucus of scientists. They should always test what they are being told in a way that, for instance, judges test expert opinion by producing a counter expert, and working out which set of views stacks up best.
In other words, the government should stop ginning up fear and listen to scientists other than those on SAGE.
In closing, while watching the video and based on nothing at all, I had a recurring thought that Lord Sumption is an opera lover.
Afterwards, I looked up his Wikipedia entry. Amazingly, I found this:
An opera lover, he serves as a director of the English National Opera and as a governor of the Royal Academy of Music.[46]
I do wish Boris and Co. would meet with Lord Sumption, listen carefully to what he has to say, then act on his advice.
In closing, curtailment of civil liberties can extend to protests. There are the correct kind of protests, such as those in June 2020. Then there are the wrong type of protests.
This one was obviously in the latter category, because the organiser received a £10,000 fine:
Currently, the only places in the UK where a group of people can gather to discuss anything outside the home are the two Houses of Parliament.
An MP pointed that out last week.
As he said, that is wrong on so many levels.
As March blew in like a lion and with coronavirus vaccines being distributed, the UK and the US began looking towards a post-pandemic future.
UK
On Monday, March 2, Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave a statement and held a press conference later in the day to announce that schools would reopen on Monday, March 8.
He laid out what he calls a ‘roadmap’ for the next few months, with businesses reopening in stages from April through the summer.
It’s not worth detailing here, because this, as with everything else, is likely to be hijacked by SAGE scientists and psychologists.
Boris maintains that the Government, advised by SAGE, is relying on data not dates, yet, there are tentative dates associated with each stage, the next one being in early April.
Outside of school reopenings at this point, the rest is subject to change.
On the subject of schools, who could forget that schools in England opened the first Monday in January only to be closed by the end of that day? What a palaver!
Katherine Fletcher, one of the new Conservative MPs from 2019, representing the northern constituency of South Ribble, studied biology, qualified as a safari ranger in Africa, worked in banking and ran her own business before entering politics.
She opined on Budget Day, March 3, that her constituents were unhappy with the financial cost of lockdown. She also said they ‘get’ that they had to be locked down:
just because some bat in China got a nasty cough a couple of years ago.
This is Northern plain speaking at its best:
Also note the fairy lights at the top left of the video. Indoor fairy lights seem to be a post-Christmas lockdown trend. Bob Seely MP (Isle of Wight) has them, too.
She added (emphases mine):
… this Government have done eye-wateringly massive things quickly to protect people, their families and their work from the consequences of bats and biology.
It is also honest to say that this help has cost us a fortune. This Conservative Government have been fair in protecting people when the awful things happened, but the sums of money required are—wow—massive. It is our money. When I say that it is costing us a fortune, I do mean “us”. It is not Government money or some nebulous concept; it is our money raised by our taxes on our hard work and our business innovation. At some point, we will have to pay this massive support back— not all in one go and not at any price. I commend the Chancellor’s honesty today in setting out two broad themes on how to keep us on an even keel with our money and the nation’s finances.
As individuals, we will have to push back some potential gains to future years, such as freezing salaries, paying a bit more tax, and asking the bigger businesses to contribute a bit more without making us as a country too different from our international peers in the G7. As the Government, we will have to continue to be careful about how we spend our money, but when we do spend money, we should spend it to invest. This statement shows that we will focus on areas that will help us grow our businesses and our communities. We are putting in place the foundations for a future economy to boing back, never mind bounce.
Today’s announcements of investments, super deductions and capital investment plans will boost business investment by enormous sums with world-leading measures. This Government are supporting people to invest to grow their business, creating good jobs across the country. Measures today such as the UK infrastructure bank in Leeds—it is the wrong side of the Pennines, but still amazing—and the levelling up fund will make the UK and Lancashire the best place in the world for innovative businesses to set up and grow. Freeports will help us get our goods to the world, and Help to Grow is brilliant. It will give everyone access to new skills and technologies and boost their businesses, no matter how small they are. I would have run with open arms to these measures when I was running my business.
On a personal note, the people of Leyland want me to thank the Chancellor hugely for the announcement today of the £25 million investment in our town …
That’s all for the UK this week.
United States
Two states — Texas and Mississippi — lifted their states’ mask mandates.
Alabama
It was thought that Alabama would join them, but on Thursday, March 4, Governor Kay Ivey said she would be extending it through April 9, then lift the order.
NBC reported:
Gov. Kay Ivey said the extension would give businesses time to implement their own policies and make any necessary adjustments before to the deadline.
The current order requires people to wear masks in public whenever they are within 6 feet of someone else from a different household. Face coverings are also required in schools and colleges for both employees and students in the second grade and above.
Once the order ends next month, masks will no longer be mandated.
“There’s no question that wearing masks has been one of my greatest tools in combatting the spread of the virus,” Ivey said at a news conference Thursday.
“And even when we lift the mask order, I will continue to wear my mask while I’m around others and strongly urge my fellow citizens to use common sense and do the same thing. But at that time, it will become a matter of personal responsibility and not a government mandate,” she added.
Ivey said the state had kept the mask order in place for a “generous amount of time.”
Texas
On Monday, March 2, Governor Greg Abbott announced that Texas was opening up, mask-free, effective Wednesday, March 10:
Here is his announcement:
The Texan has a more nuanced view of what the lifting of the state’s mandate means. It will be left to individual counties, businesses and health-oriented places to mandate mask wearing:
Abbott said that his executive order will allow county judges to impose other restrictions if COVID-19 hospitalizations rise above 15 percent in the state trauma service area that covers their county — though not with a penalty of jail time or fines with any mask mandates …
… businesses may still require employees and customers to wear face coverings and request law enforcement to remove violators for trespassing.
“Removing statewide mandates does not end personal responsibility or the importance of caring for your family members,” said Abbott. “Personal vigilance to follow the safe standards is still needed to contain [COVID-19]. It’s just that now state mandates are no longer needed.”
… According to the New York Times, Texas follows 12 other states that currently do not have mask mandates.
Mississippi
The lifting of Mississippi’s mask mandate and reopening of all businesses went into effect on Wednesday, March 3.
Governor Tate Reeves announced his reasons:
Absolutely!
Joe Biden: ‘Neanderthal thinking’
Readers will not be surprised that the three aforementioned governors are Republican.
Before Texas and Mississippi lifted their mandates, the CDC warned that restrictions should remain in place (more here):
On Wednesday, mask-happy Joe Biden accused the governors of ‘neanderthal thinking’:
Thankfully, Daily Wire reported what Biden said, as it is somewhat difficult to hear his words:
“I think it’s a big mistake. Look, I hope everybody has realized by now these masks make a difference,” Biden said. “We are on the cusp of being able to fundamentally change the nature of this disease because of the way … we are able to get vaccines in people’s arms. We’ve been able to move that all the way up to the end of May to have enough for every adult American to get a shot.”
“The last thing, the last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime everything is fine, take off your mask, forget it. It still matters,” he continued. “As of yesterday, we have lost 511,874 Americans. We’re going to lose thousands more.”
“We will not have everybody vaccinated until sometime in the summer. We have the vaccine to do it; getting a shot in someone’s arm and [giving] them a second shot,” he concluded. “It’s critical – critical, critical, critical – that they follow the science. Wash your hands, hot water, do it frequently. Wear a mask and stay socially distanced. And I know you all know that. I wish the heck, some of our elected officials knew it.”
The Gateway Pundit offered this take:
Biden criticized the governors for allowing people to work and feed their families as “Neanderthal thinking.”
Dementia Joe knows that Florida, Texas and Mississippi will expose the big lie that lockdowns and masks slow the spread of Covid.
True. We’ve already seen proof of that in South Dakota and Florida.
Tate Reeves wasted no time in responding.
Shortly after Biden made his announcement, Reeves tweeted:
Reeves credited President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed for his decision. He said that over 700,000 people in Mississippi, with a population of 2.97 million, have now had the vaccine. He told Neil Cavuto that the number of positive cases in the state has dropped dramatically over the past two months. He also asked, ‘If not now, then when?’
On Thursday, March 4, he told Fox News that Joe Biden should get out of Washington DC once in a while to travel to middle America. He said that Biden’s message of ‘Neanderthal thinking’ reminded him of Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’:
Glad to see that these governors are sticking to their guns, especially Tate Reeves.
We have to learn to live with coronavirus, something I’ve maintained for nearly a year.
President Trump spoke at CPAC on Sunday, February 28, 2021, in Orlando.
Anyone missing his rallies will enjoy his closing address, which lasted about an hour. I watched RSBN’s coverage, which was excellent. The video covers the whole day, so go to the 8-hour mark to see the speech:
UPDATE ON THE VIDEO — March 4:
For now, it is available from the American Conservative Union and a well respected news site:
Liberty Nation has a good version of the transcript. I’ve made a few edits in the excerpts below. Emphases are mine.
President Trump began by thanking CPAC organisers Matt and Mercedes Schlapp. Mercedes Schlapp worked on Trump’s communications team during his presidency and also on his 2020 campaign. He also acknowledged Rush Limbaugh’s widow, Kathryn:
Thank you very much and hello, CPAC. Do you miss me yet? A lot of things going on. To so many wonderful friends, conservatives, and fellow citizens in this room, and all across our country. I stand before you today to declare that the incredible journey we began together – we went through a journey like nobody else. There’s never been a journey like it, there’s never been a journey so successful. We began it together four years ago, and it is far from being over.
Our movement of proud, hard-working – and you know what this is? The hardest working people, hardworking American patriots – is just getting started. And in the end, we will win. We will win. We’ve been doing a lot of winning. As we gather this week, we’re in the middle of a historic struggle for America’s future, America’s culture, and America’s institutions, borders, and most cherished principles.
Our security, our prosperity, and our very identity as Americans is at stake – like, perhaps, at no other time. So, no matter how much the Washington establishment and the powerful special interests may want to silence us, let there be no doubt, we will be victorious, and America will be stronger and greater than ever before.
I want to thank my great friends, Matt and Mercedes Schlapp. Matt, thank you. Thank you, Mercedes. Thank you very much. And the American Conservative Union for hosting this extraordinary event. They’re talking about it all over the world. Matt, I know you don’t like that but that’s okay. All over the world. I also want to pay my love and respect to the great Rush Limbaugh, who is watching closely and smiling down on us. He’s watching and he’s loving it and he loves Kathryn. Kathryn, thank you for being here. So great. Thank you, Kathryn. He loved you, Kathryn, I will tell you that. Fantastic. Thank you, Kathryn, very much.
He put paid to rumours about a new political party. There will not be a new party. Trump aims to take over the Republican Party:
To each and every one of you here at CPAC, I am more grateful to you than you will ever know. We are gathered this afternoon to talk about the future of our movement, the future of our party, and the future of our beloved country for the next four years. The brave Republicans in this room will be at the heart of the effort to oppose the radical Democrats, the fake news media, and their toxic cancel culture – something new to our ears, cancel culture. And I want you to know that I’m going to continue to fight right by your side. We will do what we’ve done right from the beginning, which is to win.
We’re not starting new parties. They kept saying, he’s going to start a brand-new party. We have the Republican Party. It’s going to unite and be stronger than ever before. I am not starting a new party. That was fake news, fake news. Wouldn’t that be brilliant? Let’s start a new party and let’s divide our vote so that you can never win – no, we’re not interested in that.
Mr. McLaughlin just gave me numbers that nobody’s ever heard of before, more popular than anybody – that’s all of us. Those are great numbers and I want to thank you very much. Those are incredible numbers. I came here and he was giving me 95%, 97%, 92%. I said they’re great, and I want to thank everybody in this room and everybody all throughout the country – throughout the world, if you want to really know the truth. Thank you.
We will be united and strong like never before. We will save and strengthen America and we will fight the onslaught of radicalism, socialism, and indeed it all leads to communism, once and for all. That’s what it leads to. You’ll be hearing more and more about that as we go along, but that’s what it leads to – you know that.
Not surprisingly, he spoke a lot about the disastrous Biden administration:
We all knew that the Biden administration was going to be bad, but none of us even imagined just how bad they would be and how far left they would go. He never talked about this. We would have those wonderful debates – he would never talk about this. We didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, actually.
His campaign was all lies. Talked about energy – I said, you know, this guy, actually he’s okay with energy. He wasn’t okay with energy. Wants to put you all out of business. He’s not okay with energy. He wants windmills – the windmills that don’t work when you need them.
Joe Biden has had the most disastrous first month of any president in modern history. Already, the Biden administration has proven that they are anti-jobs, anti-family, anti-borders, anti-energy, anti-women, and anti-science. In just one short month, we have gone from America First to America Last – you think about it, right? America last.
He spoke about the wall along the southern border, which requires closing the gaps in places:
… We did such a good job; it all worked. Nobody’s ever seen anything like we did, and now he wants it all to go to hell. When I left office just six weeks ago, we had created the most secure border in U.S. history. We had built almost 500 miles of great border wall that helped us with these numbers, because once it’s up – you know they used to say a wall doesn’t it work well. You know what I’ve always said: walls and wheels, those are two things that will never change.
The wall has been amazing, it’s been incredible, and little sections of it to complete, they don’t want to complete it. They don’t want to complete little sections and certain little areas, they don’t want to complete, but it’s had an impact that nobody would have even believed. It’s amazing, considering that the Democrats’ number one priority was to make sure that the wall would never, ever get built – would never, ever happen. We’d never get financed – we got financed. We ended catch and release, ended asylum fraud, and brought illegal crossings to historic lows. When illegal aliens trespassed across our borders, they were promptly caught, detained, and sent back home. And these were some rough customers, I want to tell you – some rough customers were entering our country.
I had hoped he would have said ‘bad hombres’, as he did in 2016, but, perhaps wisely, he did not.
He continued:
It took the new administration only a few weeks to turn this unprecedented accomplishment into a self-inflicted humanitarian and national security disaster. By recklessly eliminating our border security measures, controls, all of the things that we put into place, Joe Biden has triggered a massive flood of illegal immigration into our country, the likes of which we have never seen before. They’re coming up by the tens of thousands. They’re all coming to take advantage of the things that he said, That’s luring everybody to come to America. And we’re one country, we can’t afford the problems of the world, as much as we’d love to – we’d love to help, but we can’t do that.
So they’re all coming because of promises and foolish words. Perhaps worst of all Joe Biden’s decision to cancel border security has single-handedly launched a youth migrant crisis that is enriching child smugglers, vicious criminal cartels, and some of the most evil people on the planet, you see it every day just turn on the news, you’ll see it every day.
Under my administration, we stopped the child smugglers. We dismantled the criminal cartels. We greatly limited drug and human trafficking to a level that nobody actually thought was possible and the wall helped us a lot. And we protected vulnerable people from the ravages of dangerous predators and that’s what they are dangerous, dangerous predators. But the Biden administration has put the vile coyotes back in business and is done so in a very, very big way.
Under the new administration, catch and release has been restored. Can you imagine? We worked so hard. Catch – you know what that is – you catch them, you take their name. They may be killers, they may be rapists, they may be drug smugglers. You take their name and you release them into our country. We did the opposite. We not only didn’t release them, we had them brought back to their country, illegal immigrants are now being apprehended and released along the entire southern border – just the opposite of what it was two months ago. They weren’t coming because they couldn’t get in. Once they think they can get in they’re coming, and they are coming at levels that you haven’t even seen yet – by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions, they’ll be coming.
The Biden administration is now actively expediting the admission of illegal migrants, enabling them to lodge frivolous asylum claims and admitting them by the thousands, and thousands and thousands a day; crowded together in unsanitary conditions despite the ongoing economic and public health crisis, COVID-19 – or, as I call it, the China virus.
He made a short announcement:
This alone should be reason enough for Democrats to suffer withering losses in the midterms and to lose the White House decisively four years from now. Actually, as you know, they just lost the White House, but it’s one of those things. But who knows, who knows? I may even decide to beat them for a third time, okay?
Trump said that his administration has already paid for the completion of the gaps in the wall. All that needs doing is the work itself:
Joe Biden defunded the border wall and stopped all future construction, even on small open sections that just needed to be finished up – routine little work. It’s already been bought. Wait ’til the contractors get to him and they say no, it costs us much more money not to finish this small section than if we finished it – that’s going to be nice. Wait ’til you see those bills start pouring in.
He talked about another amnesty, which is probable:
To top it all off, the Biden people are pushing a bill that would grant mass amnesty for millions of illegal aliens, while massively expanding chain migration – that’s where you come in and everybody comes in; your grandmother, your father, your mother, your brother, your cousins. They come in so easily. So crazy. It even requires that the U.S. government provide illegal border crossers with taxable funded lawyers. Anybody need a good lawyer? You can’t have one. They get the lawyers. They’re probably very good, too.
He then discussed coronavirus, beginning with schools that are still closed:
The Biden administration is actually bragging about the classroom education they are providing to migrant children on the border, while at the same time millions of American children are having their futures destroyed by Joe Biden’s anti-science, school closures. Think of it, we’re educating students on the border, but our own people, children of our citizens – citizens themselves – are not getting the education that they deserve.
There’s no reason whatsoever why the vast majority of young Americans should not be back in school, immediately. The only reason that most parents do not have that choice is because Joe Biden sold out America’s children to the teachers’ unions. His position is morally inexcusable – you know that. Joe Biden has shamefully betrayed America’s youth, and he is cruelly keeping our children locked in their homes. No reason for it whatsoever. They want to get out.
They’re cheating the next generation of Americans out of the future that they deserve – and they do deserve this future. They’re going to grow up, and they’re going to have a scar. It’s a scandal of the highest order and one of the most craven acts by any president in our lifetimes. It’s the teachers’ union – it’s the votes. And it shouldn’t happen and nobody has more respect for teachers than I do. And I’ll bet you a lot of the people within that union, they agree with everything I’m saying. Even The New York Times is calling out the Democrats.
The mental and physical health of these young people is reaching a breaking point. Tragically, suicide attempts have skyrocketed, and student depression is now commonplace and at levels that we’ve never seen before. The Democrats now say we have to pass their $1.9 trillion boondoggle to open schools, but a very small part of it has to do with that. You know where it’s going – it’s going to bail out badly run Democrat cities, so much of it. But billions of dollars for schools remain unspent from the COVID relief bills that were passed last year.
So on behalf of the moms, dads, and children of America, I call on Joe Biden to get the schools open and get them open now.
He talked about Operation Warp Speed’s success in obtaining coronavirus vaccines and treatment for the American people:
When I left office – and we’re very proud of this because this was something that they said could not be done; the FDA said it, everybody said it, and the article you read said it couldn’t be done, it would be years and years – I handed the new administration what everyone is now calling a modern-day medical miracle. Some say it’s the greatest thing to happen in hundreds of years. Two vaccines produced in record time with numerous others on the way, including the Johnson and Johnson vaccine that was approved just yesterday – and therapeutic relief also if you’re sick.
If you’re sick, we have things now that are incredible – what has taken place over the last year under our administration would have taken any other president at least five years and we got it done in nine months. Everyone says five years …
I pushed the FDA like they have never been pushed before. They told me that loud and clear. They have never been pushed like I push them. I didn’t like them at all, but once we got it done I said, I now love you very much.
What the Trump administration has done with vaccines has, in many respects, perhaps saved large portions of the world – not only our country but large portions of the world. Not only did we push the FDA far beyond what the bureaucrats wanted to do, we also put up billions and billions of dollars – ten billion – to produce the vaccines before we knew they were going to work. It was called a calculated bet or a calculated risk. We took a risk. Because if we didn’t do that, you still wouldn’t have the vaccines, you wouldn’t have them for a long time so think of that; we took this bet. We made a bet, because we thought we were on a certain track, but you’d be starting to make them right now. It’d be a long time before you ever saw. It takes 60 to 100 days to manufacture and inspect new doses. And that means that 100% of the increased availability that we have now was initiated by our administration …
Joe Biden is only implementing the plan that we put in place. And if we had an honest media, which we don’t, they would say it loud and clear. By the time I left that magnificent house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, almost 20 million Americans had already been vaccinated – 1.5 million doses were administered on my final day alone. Yet Biden said, just a few days ago, that when he got here – meaning the White House – there was no vaccine. He said there’s no vaccine. Oh, good, say it again, Joe. Now, I don’t think he said that, frankly, in a malicious way – I really don’t. I actually believe he said that because he didn’t really know what the hell was happening.
Never let them forget this was us, we did this, and the distribution is moving along according to our plan – and it’s moving along really well. We had the military, what they’ve done – our generals, and all of the people – what they’ve done is incredible. But remember, you know, we took care of a lot of people, including, I guess, on December 21 we took care of Joe Biden, because he got his shot, he got his vaccine – he forgot. It shows you how unpainful that vaccine shot is, so everybody go get your shot.
He spoke about his policies of peace:
When I left office, we had virtually ended the endless wars, these endless wars they go on forever. They go on forever. I would go to Dover and I would see caskets, coffins coming in, I’d see the parents and wives and husbands I would see the kids, endless wars 19 years in Afghanistan, we have it down to almost nothing left and I hear they might want to go back in Iraq, remember I used to say don’t go in, but if you’re going to go and keep the oil well we went in and we didn’t keep the oil.
We had made historic peace deals in the Middle East, like nobody thought were even possible … not a drop of blood. By the way that one American soldier has been killed in Afghanistan in over a year, think of that, not one those troops have largely come home at the same time, the new administration unilaterally withdrew our crippling sanctions on Iran foolishly giving away all of America’s leverage before negotiations have even begun. Leave the sanctions, negotiate.
Then he addressed the Biden administration’s fawning attitude towards the WHO and China:
And another horrendous surrender: he agreed to get back into the World Health Organization for approximately $500 million a year which is what we were paying. When I withdrew from the WHO and you know the whole story with that they called it badly. They really are puppets for China. They called and they wanted us to stay in. I said, ‘How much are we paying, approximately $500 million? How much is China paying … in terms of population country?’ ‘Sir, they’re paying $39 million.’ I said, ‘Why are we paying 500 million and they’re paying 39?’ I can tell you why. Because the people that made the deal is stupid. That’s why.
So, so, and I had no idea how popular was we I didn’t even know if I would be able to politically because people were so happy when I did get out. But I said so we went in, we could get it for 39 million, which is what China not 500 million, which is what we were stupidly paying and they said, We can make a deal we want you to go in, we can make a deal. Okay, and I did, I decided not to do it. We could have had it for 39, we could have had it for the same as China, and they decide now to go back into the World Health Organization and pay 500 million. What the hell is wrong with them? …
He talked about the Paris Climate Accord:
Just like Iran and the World Health Organization Joe Biden put the United States back into the very unfair and very costly Paris Climate Accord without negotiating a better deal. They wanted us so badly back in. I’ll tell you they wanted us. I was getting called from all of the countries: ‘You must come back into the Paris Accord’. I said, ‘Tell me why. Give me one good reason.’ First of all, China doesn’t kick in for 10 years, Russia goes by an old standard which was not a clean standard and other countries, but we get hit right from the beginning when it cost us. Hundreds of 1000s and millions of jobs; it was a disaster.
But they go back in. I could have made an unbelievable deal and got back in but I didn’t want to do that, surrendering millions of jobs and trillions of dollars to all of these other countries, almost all of them that were in the deal, so they have favorable treatment. We don’t have favorable treatment and we just had we’re going back in to go back in, they wanted to so badly. You couldn’t negotiate if you wanted to go back in, which, frankly we have … the cleanest water and everything else that we’ve ever had.
He discussed Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, the folly of wind power and the price of petrol over the past few weeks:
One of his first official acts, which was incredible, because, again, he talked about energy. He never said he was going to do this. He cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline, destroying not the 8000 or the 9000 or the 11,000 jobs that you hear, but 42,000 great paying jobs on just about day one, right? He never talked about that during a debate, because he wouldn’t have gotten away with it …
We cannot let this stuff continue to go on, but one of my proudest accomplishments as president was to make America energy independent. The United States became the number one energy superpower, number one. Number one, bigger than Saudi Arabia, bigger than Russia by a lot. We left them all in the dust …
How bad is wind power? So, I talked about it all the time …
The wind isn’t blowing. I don’t believe we’ll have any electricity … It’s such an important such an expensive form of energy. It’s so bad for the environment, it kills the birds, it destroys the landscapes. And remember, these are structural columns with fans on them, they wear out, and when they were out all over the country you see them, nobody takes them down, they’re rotting, they’re rusting. How this is environmentally good for our country?
And it costs, many, many times more than natural gas … [Natural gas] can fuel our great factories. Wind can’t do that and, and solar, I love solar but it doesn’t have the capacity to do what we have to do to make America great again. Sorry, it just doesn’t happen under the radical Democrat policies.
The price of gasoline has already surged 30% since the election, and we’ll go to $5 $6 $7 and even higher. So enjoy that when you go to the pump, because it’ll be about $200 to fill up your van … It’s a shame what’s happening, energy prices are going to go through the roof, and that includes your electric bills. That includes any bill having to do with energy our biggest costs.
We will now be relying on Russia and the Middle East for oil and they talk about Russia, Russia, Russia. What’s better than what this guy’s done for Russia? …
He deplored what is happening to women’s sports:
Joe Biden and the Democrats are even pushing policies that would destroy women’s sports … Hate to say that, ladies, but a lot of new records are being shattered. … Now, young girls and women are … being forced to compete against those who are biological males …
Now I think it’s crazy. I think it’s just crazy what’s happening. We must protect the integrity of women’s sports, so important. Controversial. Somebody said, ‘Well, that’s gonna be very controversial’. I said, ‘That’s okay’.
He defined Trumpism, a word he says he did not coin. However, he defended this new movement and pointed to his administration’s record:
Many people have asked what is Trumpism, a new term being used more and more. I’m hearing that term more and more, I didn’t come up with it. But what it means is great deals, great trade deals, great ones …
Did you see grain prices and grain sales are at an all time high? We are at an all time high … We did a lot of work with the tariffs and all these things that we had to do to get it and now the farmers are doing great … they’re setting records.
It means low taxes and eliminating job killing regulations. Trumpism, it means strong borders, but people coming into our country based on a system of merit … It means no riots in the streets, it means law enforcement. It means very strong protection for the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms. It means support for the forgotten men and women who have been taken advantage of for so many years, and they were doing great.
They were doing great before that horrible thing from China came in and hit us, and now they’re starting to do really well again … No country comes even close to competing with our comeback … A strong military and taking care of our vets but a strong military, which we have totally rebuilt. We have rebuilt it. And our military has never been stronger than it is today. It was tired, it was depleted, it was obsolete and now we have the best brand new equipment ever made. And it was all produced right here in the USA.
And we take care of our vets. You know, we had a poll recently just before leaving office, the vets had a 91% approval rating for the way we took care of them, that’s the highest number in the history of the polls. But on top of all of that. We have even created the Space Force the first new branch of the United States military in nearly 75 years …
The mission of our movement and of the Republican Party must be to create a future of good jobs, strong families, safe communities a vibrant culture, and a great nation, for all Americans, and that’s what we’re creating … The culture of our country, our party is based on love for America, and the belief that this is an exceptional nation, blessed by God.
We take great pride in our country. We teach the truth about history. We celebrate our rich heritage and national traditions we honor, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln Thomas Jefferson and national heroes. And of course, we respect our great American flag.
He received a lot of applause with that and thanked the audience several times.
He continued:
We are committed to defending innocent life and to upholding the Judeo Christian values of our founders and of our founding. Free thought. We stand up to political correctness, and we reject the left wing lunacy, and, in particular, we reject cancel culture. We know that the rule of law is the ultimate safeguard. And we affirm that the Constitution means exactly what it says. As written, as read …
That is the essence of Trumpism.
I’ve covered only half of President Trump’s speech. The other half can be found here.
Afterwards, he received a standing ovation from nearly everyone in the crowd.
President Trump’s speech closed the CPAC conference. It’s hard to imagine a better ending to it and a better beginning to 2021 for Republicans.
My series on minority MPs in the Conservative Party continues.
In case you’ve missed the earlier posts in this series, here they are: parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Today’s post covers the two minority MPs who were elected during Theresa May’s snap general election of June 2017.
Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden)
Bim Afolami represents the leafy Hertfordshire constituency of Hitchin and Harpenden, far enough from London to be in the countryside yet a close enough for a daily commute to and from the capital.
I always enjoy hearing what Afolami has to say in Parliament. He speeches are eloquent, considered and, above all, sensible.
Afolami was born in the Home County of Berkshire to a Nigerian father, employed as a consultant physician for the NHS. His mother works as a pharmacist.
Afolami attended Eton College and University College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. While at Oxford, he worked as a librarian for the Oxford Union Society and played football for the university team.
He worked as a lawyer prior to entering politics. His employers included the prestigious law firm Freshfields and the banking corporation HSBC.
In 2017, Hitchin and Harpenden’s MP Peter Lilley stood down. Afolami was selected as the Conservative candidate.
Afolami was a Remainer, however, during his time in Parliament, he voted the Brexit line most of the time.
He has been a member of several parliamentary committees.
He has also had positions as Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Department of Transport, International Development, International Trade and the Department for Work and Pensions.
Currently, he chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Credit Unions and is a Commissioner for the Financial Inclusion Commission.
Afolami is married with three children.
He describes Winston Churchill as his ‘biggest hero’.
Kemi Badenoch (Saffron Walden)
Kemi Badenoch also reveres Winston Churchill, along with Margaret Thatcher.
She, too, has Nigerian roots and spent her formative years there before returning to England.
She represents the constituency of Saffron Walden in Essex, which, not surprisingly, includes the ancient town of the same name. The town of Saffron Walden was known not only for its wool production but also for its cultivation of saffron in the 16th and 17th centuries. That happy combination of industry enabled the town to develop dyes as well as provide the condiment for use in food.
Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke was born in Wimbledon, London. Her father is a GP and her mother a professor of physiology. As her mother obtained teaching positions overseas, Kemi lived in both the United States and Nigeria. She returned to England at the age of 16 to complete her A levels and attend university.
She has worked in computing for most of her career. She obtained a law degree in 2009 and went on to work as an associate director of private bank and wealth manager Coutts and was a director for The Spectator.
Kemi joined the Conservative Party in 2005.
In 2012, she married Hamish Badenoch and took his surname.
In 2015, she served on the London Assembly after Suella Fernandes Braverman had to give up her seat, since she had just been elected to Parliament.
In 2017, Kemi Badenoch succeeded Sir Alan Haslehurst as MP for Saffron Walden with a healthy majority.
In her maiden speech, she explained how she became a conservative: failing nationalised electricity and water provision during her years in Nigeria. Wow.
She also said that Brexit was the ‘greatest vote ever’.
If you want to feel uplifted about Britain and conservatism, this video is definitely worth five-and-a-half minutes of your time:
She currently holds two positions, to which Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed her in 2020: Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Minister for Equalities) in the Department for International Trade.
The latter position has seen her come up against stiff opposition from the Opposition benches last year when it emerged that minorities were more affected by coronavirus. The protests in June exacerbated the issue.
On June 4, an SNP MP, Alison Thewliss, had the gall to intimate that Badenoch had little understanding of the black community.
Badenoch politely responded that she objected to Thewliss’s ‘confected outrage’.
As former Labour MP — now Baroness Hoey in the House of Lords — put it:
Guido Fawkes posted a video of the exchange and commented (emphasis in the original):
Today’s BAME Urgent Question was never going to be one Parliament’s more tranquil sessions given the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. Kemi Badenoch gave a feisty performance, scolding left-wing white MPs for telling her how to feel as a black person. Her slap down of SNP MP Alison Thewliss, who conflated all black Britons with recent immigrants, is worth a watch…
The BBC also attacked her response.
On June 6, Badenoch wrote an article for the Daily Mail, which said, in part (emphases mine):
The disproportionate impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on black and minority ethnic people has been one of the most troubling aspects of the pandemic – and the Government was right to seek the expert guidance of Professor Kevin Fenton, an eminent black physician at Public Health England, to examine the issue.
So when, as Equalities Minister, I stood up in the Commons to discuss his review and its conclusions, I expected tough questions.
This, after all, has been a week of heightened emotion about racial divisions. Unfortunately, clumsy attempts at scrutiny by some MPs and commentators unintentionally risk inflaming racial tensions.
Updating Parliament on the review, Labour MPs repeated racially charged claims such as: ‘Being black is a death sentence.’
One SNP MP conflated all black people with recent immigrants. This language does nothing to calm tensions at a time when politicians need to set an example.
Far more irresponsible though, was the BBC’s coverage of the debate – with the headline: ‘Minister rejects systemic racism claims’. I did no such thing.
In fact, the phrase ‘systemic racism’ was not used once in the debate. The BBC report was shared on social media thousands of times and believed because it was from a trusted source. This is incredibly harmful.
By implying that a black Minister has, out of hand, rejected racism as a factor, the hard work done by many ethnic minorities in Government, the NHS and Public Health England is discredited, trust is lost and race relations become worse.
Yes, there are gaps in PHE’s review. By its nature, it highlights what we don’t know and must investigate further.
We will build on this work, engaging with individuals and organisations within communities, to protect lives in this pandemic …
We need to be more circumspect; we need real journalism, not campaigning.
We must address prejudice but this is impossible if our national broadcaster, politicians and commentators play a social media game to achieve outrage rather than enlightenment.
We must combat the real inequities in society, but we do everyone a disservice if we give in to culture warriors whose relevance depends on inflaming tensions.
By hijacking the Government’s work to improve the lives of BAME people, those spoiling for a fight are sacrificing the hope of so many young people for little more than clicks, likes and retweets.
In October, Badenoch volunteered to take part in a vaccine trial:
Moving to the present day — February 2021 — issues have arisen with minorities reluctant to get vaccinated when the time comes. Personally, I do not blame them. There is a lot we do not know about their long-term effects, particularly the mRNA vaccines. So that minorities would feel more reassured, the Government appointed Nadhim Zahawi MP to oversee vaccine rollout in the UK. His brief includes visiting minority communities to encourage uptake:
In January, minority MPs from both sides of the aisle took part in a video to promote the vaccine programme.
Badenoch was criticised for not having taken part. She said it was because she was participating in the aforementioned vaccine trial:
Let’s return to last year.
In October 2020, Badenoch spoke in Parliament about Black History Month in the UK. She said that she was taken aback by something her daughter said:
That month, she participated in a Spectator discussion debunking various socio-political left-wing theories and promoting conservatism.
This triggered a severe reaction from the Left in November.
Several radical left-wing academics took issue with what she said:
Guido Fawkes provided the exhaustive list along with the radical positions of each academic, explaining the background (red emphases in the original, those in purple mine):
Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch sent Twitter’s wokesters and academia’s race baiters into meltdown a fortnight ago when her savaging of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) went viral, with 2.4 million views. Guido’s since picked up on an open letter doing the rounds in nutty left-wing academic circles, who – unable to take on the substance of what Badenoch argues – have chosen instead to misrepresent her words. Aside from their attacks on the substance of Kemi’s words – incorrectly claiming she wants “the banning of certain ideas or schools of thought” and that she misunderstands history and CRT – the mostly former-polytechnic-based academics now claim CRT has “scientific principles” behind their ideology. Eugenicists, phrenologists and Marxists have argued the same for decades...
Looks like Kemi’s on pretty sound ideological ground…
I wish Kemi Badenoch all the very best in holding her ground so consistently.
Tomorrow’s post concludes this series.
So far, Israel, the UK and the United States (President Trump) have had the greatest success in procuring and distributing coronavirus vaccines.
This must have been painful for a German newspaper to publish:
Guido Fawkes has more from the article that appeared in Bild and additional commentary about Germany (emphases in the original):
The loss of German confidence was not helped when the first German vaccinated was vaccinated in England. This humiliation is reconfirmed in the breathless copy of Peter Wilke, Bild’s UK reporter, exclaiming that whilst he had not received a vaccination appointment in his home town of Mühlheim, he was shocked to get an SMS text from the NHS, “Suddenly I got a vaccination appointment in England!”
Guido has not seen any British media reporting of the Kremlin’s statement that on a call this week between Putin and Merkel “Cooperation in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic was discussed , with particular attention to the possible prospects for joint vaccine production”. Desperate times make allies of necessity…
Here’s the message that the Bild‘s journalist received for a vaccination (and a response):
Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.
Kelsall, by the way, is in Cheshire, in the north-West of England.
United States
President Trump’s business acumen and America First policies made vaccine procurement and distribution to individual states a given.
Unfortunately, not all states are rolling out their vaccines as quickly as they should be. Massachusetts, despite its Republican governor Charlie Baker, is among them. Baker, incidentally, is an anti-Trump RINO, which explains a myriad of things, including his lockdown and mask policies.
Never let it be said that President Trump did not do the right thing. From the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, he made sure states had funding and equipment as soon as it was available. Every nation suffered from a PPE shortage until after the first wave. After that, it was — rightly — up to the governors to make sure their states used the distributions responsibly and promptly.
Israel
Israel also puts its own people first, and rightly so.
Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shared his vaccine strategy with those attending Davos virtually:
Netanyahu adopted practical policies, including telling his ‘bureaucrats’ (his word) to ‘cut the c—‘ (which he was at pains to leave unspoken) and get on with it. Pricing, supply, efficacy and payment were all part of what has turned out to be a truly world-beating strategy:
As Guido Fawkes commented:
Essentially, pay up, move fast. Whereas the EU haggled about the price, moved slow and did not sign contracts. Political vanity which will cost European lives…
Guido is referring to the EU, which is now trying to interfere with the UK’s long-agreed upon supplies from Belgium, although a Belgian lawyer disputes that move:
Fernand Keuleneer, Brussels attorney, tweets…
“From the published contract between the EU Commission and AstraZeneca I cannot conclude that the Commission has the contract and therefore the right on its side. Rather the opposite.”
More here, from Guido.
United Kingdom
Being halfway out the door of the EU in 2020 made a huge difference to the United Kingdom’s ability to procure and distribute vaccines.
Although I am deeply dismayed with Boris Johnson’s and Matt Hancock’s handling of coronavirus restrictions, one cannot fault the Conservatives for seizing the opportunity to be independent of EU policies and become self-sufficient.
James Forsyth, political editor of The Spectator, wrote an excellent article for The Times, dated January 28: ‘Covid has taught the UK the importance of self sufficiency’.
An excerpt about the British strategy towards coronavirus follows (emphases mine):
The last year has shown that even in this globalised age the nation state trumps the market. You could see this in the scramble for personal protective equipment (PPE) last spring when countries stopped firms from honouring contracts until they were sure their domestic needs had been met. The same dynamic is beginning to assert itself on vaccines.
Just look at how the German government is pushing for EU export controls on vaccines. Today the EU will set out how companies must provide notification before exporting vaccine out of the bloc. It is expected that these rules will allow exports to be blocked in certain, supposedly rare circumstances. The British government remains confident there will still be vaccine deliveries from the Pfizer factory in Belgium.
These new headwinds pose a particular risk for Brexit Britain, a country stuck between two large economies with protectionist tendencies, the United States and the European Union.
When Oxford came to the government last year to make sure it was happy with arrangements for production of its vaccine, Whitehall said it wanted the NHS to have first access. But when ministers saw Oxford’s proposed contract with a non-UK pharmaceutical firm they saw it went little further than promising best efforts. Alok Sharma, the business secretary, and Matt Hancock, the health secretary, insisted on a legally binding promise to serve Britain first. They eventually received such a pledge from the UK-headquartered AstraZeneca.
Hancock’s worry was over waiting for imports, which raised the prospect of delay, even expropriation. There was particular concern about Trump invoking the Defence Production Act to secure all the vaccine supply for the US. This was why billions were spent helping various British-based companies to buy the facilities needed to mass-produce vaccines.
There are only a few dozen large-scale bioreactors in the world. Six are now based here, which is what is allowing vaccines to be made at such pace.
At the time it was a bet: huge sums were being spent on a vaccine that had not been approved. Even more was being spent to protect Britain against the theoretical risk of vaccine nationalism. But both bets paid off.
Too often in modern British history industrial strategy has meant trying to keep a dying industry or company going for a few more years. Even in this crisis the government’s attempt to develop a contact tracing app that didn’t use Google or Apple technology failed spectacularly.
Nor has the £22 billion test and trace scheme been a resounding success. But the vaccine was an example of the government successfully bringing together academia and business and using taxpayers’ money to help seed a new industry in Britain.
In the same way that the Second World War left politicians with a desire for food security, the Covid crisis has prompted a desire for self-sufficiency in medical supplies. Already around two thirds of PPE is being manufactured domestically; a dramatic change from the situation pre-pandemic when only 1 per cent was produced here.
And another UK vaccine is on its way, albeit somewhat delayed. Nonetheless, there is every reason to be happy:
Guido Fawkes has more:
A clearly delighted Kate Bingham, chair of the UK’s vaccine task force, appeared on the Today programme this morning following last night’s brilliant news of a new vaccine from Novavax showing 90% efficacy against the new Kent variant; the UK having ordered 60 million doses, all of which will be made in Teesside.
While there’s lots to be excited about, government sources emphasised to Guido last night that the jab will not roll out until the latter half of the year, with MHRA approval set to take weeks. Bingham explained to Today listeners that scale-up is already underway in Teesside and going well “but it just takes time, we are growing up mammalian cells from low volumes up to the high thousand-litre volumes and it’s very complicated”.
Novavax, a single-dose vaccine, is made by America’s Johnson & Johnson in the US, but Janssen handles European production in Belgium. The UK has already purchased doses:
Furthermore, Livingston, Scotland, has opened a new vaccine production facility for the international pharmaceutical company Valneva that Boris visited on January 29 (start at 1:08):
Conclusion
Self sufficiency is the way forward.
No nation — including an EU nation — can fully rely on another to supply its needs in a time of crisis.
Well done to the three countries who put their own people first. Long may it continue.
After a slow news period post-‘inauguration’, everything accelerated again to the point where there is too much to cover in one week.
At the end of January 2021, the EU tried to block the UK’s coronavirus vaccine supply, specifically to the AstraZeneca vaccine developed in Oxford!
The EU poked at the softest, most vulnerable part of the UK-EU agreement post-Brexit: not to create division between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, covered by Article 16.
However, the EU, being short of coronavirus vaccines, briefly invoked the sacrosanct Article 16 on Friday, January 29, 2021, despite Jean-Claude Juncker’s old commitment to Ireland that there would be no hard border with a post-Brexit EU-UK trade agreement. This debate in the Irish parliament took place long before coronavirus. What a sloppy dress code:
Then, just less than a month after the UK made a full Brexit with a trade agreement, the EU did this:
On Friday, January 29, Guido Fawkes reported (emphases in the original):
As part of its plot to block vaccine exports to the UK, the EU has invoked Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol. This has effectively removed Northern Ireland from the EU’s customs. In plain English, Article 16, the so-called safeguard clause, allows both the EU and the UK to unilaterally suspend part of the Northern Ireland Protocol (which keeps Northern Ireland in the EU’s customs territory) in specific circumstances.
Most discussion around this particular article had been how or whether the UK would use it. The fact that the EU has implemented it less than a month after coming into effect could set a big precedent.
Practically this new EU-imposed hard border won’t make a huge difference as Northern Ireland will receive their jabs via Great Britain, but this political move is extraordinary, after a week of terrible news for the Union. After years of arguing to keep Northern Ireland in its customs territory, the EU has just merrily kicked it out.
However, such an action threatened the long-standing peace agreement between North and South.
EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s action managed to unite Britain’s — and Ireland’s — Right and Left for the first time in years:
Guido’s article says of the centre-right Democratic Unionist Party:
UPDATE: The DUP have, not unsurprisingly, slammed the EU’s decision as “an incredible act of hostility”. Arlene Foster says:
“This is an incredible act of hostility. By triggering Article 16 in this manner, the European Union has once again shown it is prepared to use Northern Ireland when it suits their interests but in the most despicable manner — over the provision of a vaccine which is designed to save lives.
At the first opportunity the EU has placed a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland over the supply chain of the Coronavirus vaccine.
With the European Union using Article 16 in such an aggressive and most shameful way, it is now time for our Government to step up. I will be urging the Prime Minister to act and use robust measures including Article 16 to advance the interests of Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom.”
As for Labour:
UPDATE II: Labour join in with the EU condemnation: Louise Haigh MP, Labour’s Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, commenting on the European Union’s decision to invoke Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol:
“This move is deeply destabilising and undermines the huge efforts being made to make the Protocol work.
Unilateral actions like this do nothing to aid the stability in Northern Ireland which the Protocol was designed to preserve.
The European Union must remember the Protocol depends on joint working and they share a responsibility to uphold that. They must think again, and revoke this action.”
Later that day, Guido recapped the previous five days of hassle for AstraZeneca and vaccine supply. CEO Pascal Soriot insisted that the company never made a hard and fast commitment to the EU. AstraZeneca made what are contractually known as best reasonable efforts to supply to the EU. Guido’s article has a copy of the contract, which you can read at the link:
AstraZeneca has committed to use its Best Reasonable Efforts (as defined below) to build capacity to manufacture 300 million Doses of the Vaccine, at no profit and no loss to AstraZeneca, at the total cost currently estimated to be [REDACTED] Euros for distribution within the EU [REDACTED] (the “Initial Europe Doses”), with an option for the Commission, acting on behalf of the Participating Member States, to order an additional 100 million Doses (the “Optional Doses”).
The ball was then in von der Leyen’s court:
Guido reported von der Leyen’s response:
No. There are binding orders and the contract is crystal-clear. AstraZeneca has expressly assured us in this contract that no other obligations will stand in the way of fulfilling the contract.
However, Guido explained:
The key obligation in the agreement is in Section 5.1, which “silos” production for the doses to go to the EU, making clear that the AZ obligation is only to use best reasonable efforts to manufacture the initial doses within the EU. If they are manufacturing doses outside the EU that’s irrelevant to that obligation. Has the EU just shot itself in the foot?
Guido’s founder Paul Staines is based in Waterford, Ireland. He thinks that, for the good of relations between North and South, the UK should share their AstraZeneca doses with the Republic:
He was not alone. The Scotland editor for The Spectator agreed:
Fine. Let’s make sure that Britons get their share first. That’s why the deal was set up in the first place.
By the end of last Friday, right, left, centre and the Church of England opposed the EU action:
The Archbishop’s intervention seemed to have a huge impact in Britain, which is surprising for such an atheistic nation:
The strange thing about Article 16 is that the British EU-lovers assumed that the UK Government would implement it first against the EU. That was the big stink around the Internal Market Bill, which gives the UK leeway to back out of parts of the trade agreement if the EU becomes threatening.
In the end:
Late that evening, the EU president conceded:
Boris made no mention of it on his Twitter feed.
More on the UK’s coronavirus vaccine success will follow on Monday.
For now, here’s the next EU-UK drama, which also started on Friday, January 29 — international travel:
Macron’s probably upset because the Institut Pasteur vaccine failed this week. Because of that failure, he rubbished the AstraZeneca vaccine:
As Guido said:
The French haven’t been able to produce a vaccine, and the Germans couldn’t do it without American corporate help. No wonder voices in the EU were so keen to hit out, falsely, at the success of Brexit Britain’s Oxford vaccine. Poor Little EU.
Oh, boy. Politics, politics.
2021 will be a doozy of a year.
Yesterday’s post introduced Neil Ferguson’s interview with The Times, which the paper published on the evening of Christmas Day.
This was the biggest statement he made:
How Ferguson, he of the hopelessly outlandish — and false — predictions, could enter the fray on a worldwide pandemic using CCP methods beggars belief:
The other chilling statement made in the article was that lockdowns will be employed in future pandemics. That’s because they worked so well, we had to have one long lockdown — under various guises — for the better part of nine months, not the promised two or three weeks:
Yet, Matt Hancock relies on what this man and SAGE members regurgitate every couple of weeks:
My prayer for 2021 is that divine providence shines a light on the evil that Ferguson, a NERVTAG member, SAGE and Matt Hancock have been perpetrating on the British people:
Thank heaven that Bosnia and Herzegovina ruled against an inhumane coronavirus programme. I hope that we do the same:
Someone also needs to have the guts to investigate Ferguson and the rest of them:
Let’s look at The Times‘s article, which Science Editor Tom Whipple wrote: ‘Professor Neil Ferguson: People don’t agree with lockdown and try to undermine the scientists’.
Tom Whipple was absolutely gushing in his reporting, overlooking Ferguson’s previous bogus predictions over the past 20 years of notional pandemics. Some of those predictions put a severe dent into British farming (emphases mine):
He moved from Oxford to Imperial as part of the country’s leading infectious disease modelling group. They modelled the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak, as well as the 2009 swine flu outbreak, in which at one point, before better data came in, they estimated a “reasonable worst case scenario” of 65,000 deaths.
When he returned to advise the government once again, this projection, two orders of magnitude above the real total, was cited by his critics. So too was foot and mouth, where the cull of millions of cattle and sheep, partly on the basis of predictions about the disease, still causes deep bitterness among farmers.
Whipple at least calls lockdown ‘a medieval intervention’. However, I would posit that, even in the Middle Ages, there were policies of sequestering the vulnerable and quarantining the sick, leaving the rest to work. People needed food and goods. Anyway, Ferguson describes how he embraced the CCP policy of overall lockdown:
In January, members of Sage, the government’s scientific advisory group, had watched as China enacted this innovative intervention in pandemic control that was also a medieval intervention. “They claimed to have flattened the curve. I was sceptical at first. I thought it was a massive cover-up by the Chinese. But as the data accrued it became clear it was an effective policy.”
Then, as infections seeded across the world, springing up like angry boils on the map, Sage debated whether, nevertheless, it would be effective here. “It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought.” In February one of those boils raged just below the Alps. “And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”
Whipple gushed:
That realisation was a fulcrum in British history, and in the life of Professor Ferguson.
That ‘fulcrum’ meant poor health and/or imminent penury for millions of the rest of us.
This was Ferguson’s outrageously erroneous prediction that prompted Britain’s continuing lockdowns:
a quarter of a million Britons would die. If we wanted to stop that, he also projected, it would require extreme social distancing measures until a vaccine arrived.
Whipple’s next sentence reads:
That was when he went from unknown epidemiologist to academic superstar.
That is incredibly disingenuous. Millions of Britons knew who he was from his previous predictions. Our celebrity astrologer Mystic Meg could have done better by staring into her crystal ball. She would not have advocated lockdown or masks, either.
Ferguson expressed his surprise that people would criticise him:
“It’s bizarre,” he says. “Particularly given that I’ve never been a public servant. We volunteer for scientific committees, we don’t get paid anything.” He says he has not read most of the coverage, but can’t help hearing some of the criticism.
“Where it’s been disappointing is if people start out from a viewpoint that they don’t agree with lockdown, then try to undermine the science and scientists behind it. That hasn’t been a pleasant experience.”
Those statements puzzle me greatly.
His own track record speaks for itself, yet, his and SAGE’s policies have been ruling all our lives for the better part of a year. He doesn’t think people should criticise him because they are losing their livelihoods? Pure bunkum.
Whipple then goes into the assignation that Ferguson and his married mistress had during the springtime lockdown. The rest of us were holed up in our homes and she travelled across London for an afternoon’s pleasure. My account of it is below. The title expressed my hope that this charlatan would be exposed and that we would be liberated. Alas, no:
Prof Neil Ferguson resigns: will coronavirus lockdown start ending in the UK now? (May 5)
Ferguson told Whipple that he had expected some sort of mercy, at least to be ignored. Why, oh why, did the media start digging into his private life? Oh, woe:
“I made some mistakes. I’ve been completely open in terms of saying they were mistakes. But, nevertheless, the fact that journalists were digging into my private life at that level of detail was not something I could ever imagine. That’s not something you want to be on the end of.
“My wife and son and my partner had journalists on the doorstep. I was actually in my flat in London, they didn’t know where I was. It was a very difficult time.” He and Sir Patrick Vallance, the present chief scientific adviser, agreed he should step back from Sage work.
Unfortunately, NERVTAG — New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group — allowed him to stay, hence, his continuing participation in these illiberal restrictions upon our lives.
Returning to lockdown, this is a curious statement:
These days, lockdown feels inevitable. It was, he reminds me, anything but. “If China had not done it,” he says, “the year would have been very different.”
Yes, it would have gone on as normal, with Rishi Sunak’s fantastic budget putting an end to austerity and giving us a better economy and hope for our post-Brexit transition future.
This month, the new variant — B.1.1.7, or B117, as it often appears — has caused more panic. Ferguson and his ilk have determined it is more infectious. However, it might also be less damaging to COVID-17 patients in hospital:
Nevertheless, Ferguson now wants even harsher measures:
he strongly implies that schools will have to shut in January, and even then the virus might evade lockdown.
Goodness knows what ‘the virus might evade lockdown’ might mean for Britons.
Whipple actually believes that Ferguson is some sort of scientific saviour. Good grief:
This is, I say, petrifying. It is also extremely interesting. Nowadays, it is orthodoxy that lockdown was right. In the next pandemic, we won’t hesitate to use it. But as this new variant shows, lockdown does not always work.
However, it also seems as if our first lockdown, sold to us as ‘flattening the sombrero’, to borrow Boris Johnson’s term, was done so on a false premise:
It was never guaranteed that lockdown would crush the curve. He is all too aware of this. “During late March, early April, we kept looking at the data as it came in. Was there any sign of hospital admissions and deaths hitting a peak? It was a very, very anxious time.” We now know that when we got it to its lowest, R, the reproduction rate of the virus, hit 0.6. Lockdown worked. If the professor’s modelling of the new variant is correct, it won’t be so easy to control. In the same circumstances it could have a rate just over 1 and the pandemic would not have retreated.
Ferguson says to his critics:
It’s clearly unfortunate that a minority of people almost don’t like the idea that you can just have random bad things happen in the world, and want to attribute it to some malign plan.
Ferguson and his family are largely unscathed from the policies he helped to develop.
Two other sites that reported on this interview had pertinent insights.
NewsWars noted:
In the Christmas interview, the epidemiologist admitted “there is an enormous cost associated with” lockdowns, specifically the erosion of civil liberties.
However, thanks to the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian measures, he said, “people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed.”
And how! A year ago, who could have imagined that the CCP would be indirectly controlling our health policy?
At UnHerd, Freddie Sayers wrote similarly (italics in the original):
He almost seems at pains to emphasise the Chinese derivation of the lockdown concept, returning to it later in the interview:
“These days, lockdown feels inevitable. It was, he reminds me, anything but. “If China had not done it,” he says, “the year would have been very different.””
To those people who, still now, object to lockdowns on civil liberties principles, this will be a chilling reminder of the centrality of the authoritarian Chinese model in influencing global policy in this historic year.
Let us look at what Laura Perrins, ex-barrister and co-editor of Conservative Woman, a haven of common sense, has to say about said policies. Let’s start with testing of schoolchildren, something likely to come in January, along with the current hue and cry to close schools again:
The Government, advised by SAGE, NERVTAG and other quangos — quasi-NGOs — have lied and lied and lied this year, culminating with Christmas:
In conclusion:
I could not agree more.
Pray that this scourge leaves us and other Western countries in 2021.
Freedom is never free.
Happy New Year.
As we approach 2021, a growing number of Europeans are sceptical about our governments’ respective responses to coronavirus.
My guess is that people are becoming suspicious about the loss of their civil liberties, which was only supposed to last for two to three weeks, yet continues to this day — nine months on.
There is no end in sight as we face the possibility of another sharp, nationwide lockdown early in the New Year.
France
This was a major topic of discussion on RMC’s Les Grandes Gueules today.
Vaccinations have reached saturation point in France, even though the programme has barely started. Perhaps the government was too slow in obtaining more doses at the outset:
Regardless, in France, as well as everywhere else, even the vaccinated will need to continue to wear masks — possibly even after their second BioNtech/Pfizer jab:
Of course, mass vaccination is the only way that a nation’s economy can once again flourish. Recall that for most age groups — up to the 70+ cohort — the average death rate is around 0.05%:
In the meantime, the question arose over whether future lockdowns should be national or regional. (We’ve tried both recently in England and Wales. It doesn’t seem to make much difference.) This educator says that we can’t stay locked down for the next ten years — ‘I’m horrified. We’re in a world of madness”:
The lawyer on the panel disagreed, saying that we need lockdowns until we get the all clear. Someone responded to the tweet casting doubt on government statistics, saying that lies are a way of dramatising the situation — Project Fear:
Listeners rang in to say that they were sceptical about lockdowns and mandatory vaccines. The lockdowns don’t seem to work and there aren’t enough data yet to show that the vaccines are reliable and safe, especially if they operate like the flu vaccine, meaning that one is still susceptible to getting coronavirus, albeit a milder form of it.
Spain
The Spanish government is considering whether to develop a list of residents who do not take the vaccine then circulate those names to other countries to restrict their movements.
British talk show host Maajid Nawaz of LBC warned that this is a very dangerous step for a nation to take. He said that, years ago, he was a prisoner of conscience in Egypt and found out how far the state can go in controlling one’s life. The response to his video is quite telling:
Someone else replying said that Spain would not be able to circulate the list because of personal privacy laws under the Europe-wide GDPR regulations. Hmm, I wonder:
England
Maajid Nawaz had another excellent commentary on the futility of lockdowns. He said that only one person in the UK has put together a cost benefit analysis for public consumption and that only the Times has published it. Apparently, 500,000 lives are adversely affected among the general population and they are not COVID-19 ‘cases’ or inpatients. He added that Government ministers have a lot of data they refuse to reveal to the public. I would go further and say they are not even revealing it to MPs. Matt Hancock lets nothing out in Parliament, only more fear-mongering messages, then expects MPs to approve more restrictions:
Simon Dolan, a businessman who has sued the Government over lockdown, points out that lockdown relies on asymptomatic transmission being true. However, yet another study shows that there is no truth behind asymptomatic transmission:
The latest study, which the JAMA published, focusses on household transmission:
On lockdown, Simon Dolan posits:
Yes, most probably.
But what about the lorry drivers stranded at Dover because Emmanuel Macron didn’t want them coming into Calais unless they were tested? Only a tiny number tested positive:
It’s no wonder people are sceptical.
In closing, I have been waiting for an ecological impact assessment on masks. Here it is:
Does anyone else find it odd that, given the alarm over coronavirus, no country has any HAZMAT bins for used masks? Shouldn’t worn masks be considered hazardous waste?
It makes one wonder …
More to come.
