The Lockdowners Have Their Own Conspiracy Theories
By Phillip W. Magness | AIER | April 2, 2021
A bizarre Covid-19 conspiracy theory appears to have taken root among the epidemiologists and public health officials who still support lockdowns. According to their claims, the UK government’s pandemic response was secretly captured at some point in the fall of 2020 by lockdown critics including Great Barrington Declaration co-author Sunetra Gupta, her Oxford colleague Carl Heneghan, and Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell.
Seizing on an article in the Times of London, supporters of this theory allege that Gupta and her colleagues convinced UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak to abandon a so-called “circuit breaker” lockdown during an audience in late September. Had the UK gone back into lockdown around the beginning of October instead of a month later – proponents of this theory maintain – it would have avoided its disastrous second wave over the fall and winter months.
Even the basic narrative flies in the face of empirical reality. In November 2020 and again in January 2021, the UK went through two successive rounds of draconian lockdowns of the exact type that Gupta and her colleagues advised against. Championed by Johnson as a way to avert the second wave, these policies utterly failed at their stated purpose. On November 5th, the date the second lockdown took effect, the UK’s death toll stood at 48,000. Over the next four months, three of them spent under recurring lockdowns, the UK’s fatality numbers exploded to over 120,000.
Equally telling, the timing of the UK’s fall/winter wave almost perfectly matched that of Sweden, which remained open throughout the same period – except the UK’s results under lockdowns were visibly worse. As a growing body of scientific literature attests, lockdowns did practically nothing to contain the pandemic. Instead, the performance of this policy shows no discernible advantage over states and countries that opted against suspending the basic operations of daily life, and in many cases lockdown countries actually did worse than those that remained open.
Still, proponents of the newest UK conspiracy theory hold that something very different would have happened if only Johnson had enacted an earlier lockdown around the beginning of October instead of November 5th. Its underlying narrative has gained an unusually intense following among public health activists and pundits in the UK.
Deepti Gurdasani, an epidemiologist at Queen Mary University in London and a principal organizer of the pro-lockdown John Snow Memorandum, has aggressively promoted the alleged wresting of pandemic policy away from the lockdowners as an explanation for why the UK’s second and third lockdowns failed. As early as December, Gurdasani blasted Downing Street for supposedly listening to the “dangerous ideology” of Gupta, Heneghan, and Tegnell, which “has cost thousands of lives” and sought to replicate the “dangerous” Swedish strategy. Never mind that Sweden, without lockdowns, has a much lower deaths-per-million residents total (1,303 as of April 1st) than the UK (1,890) under three harsh lockdowns.
The same narrative has become a favorite of Devi Sridhar, an anthropologist and Snow Memorandum co-signer who frequently appears in the UK media to advocate the fringe “Zero Covid” strategy (the same one that claims we need more lockdowns to prevent future lockdowns, apparently unaware of the contradiction that entails). Attempting to explain why her own lockdown approach did not work, Sridhar wrote on January 5th that “Chancellor Sunak invited Heneghan, Gupta & Tegnell to advise on strategy. That says it all.”
Other variants of the same conspiracy theory permeate the UK’s pundit ranks. Far-left Guardian columnist Owen Jones repeated it in a December column targeting Sunak and the scientists for allegedly delaying the lockdowns until it was “too late to bring coronavirus rates down to anywhere near the level needed to suppress the virus.”
A little over a month later, Sam Bowman, a right-leaning self-described “neoliberal,” penned an almost identical argument to Jones in the same newspaper, writing “Sunak was reported as having been the decisive voice in government against an autumn lockdown that might have brought cases low enough to make things like test-and-trace viable,” all because of “Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan and Anders Tegnell being invited to speak via Zoom at Downing Street.”
Note that none of these commentators are even willing to consider the possibility that lockdowns do not deliver on their promises, or that Britain’s dismal performance under the policies they advocated is a direct testament to their failure as public health measures. The validity of lockdowns has become an axiom to them, and the only conceivable reason they do not work must be some form of malfeasance preventing them from working the way the epidemiology models claim they should. Sunak and the three dissenting scientists accordingly became a natural scapegoat for Britain’s dismal public health performance over the winter months.
Is there even a kernel of truth behind the lockdowner’s UK conspiracy theory? Gupta, Heneghan, and Tegnell did meet with Downing Street via Zoom on September 20th to voice their opposition to lockdowns in general – a position they have consistently held throughout the pandemic. Unfortunately, as Gupta has explained and as the next four months repeatedly demonstrated, the Prime Minister largely ignored their advice.
The conspiracists’ alleged “smoking gun” is a series of minutes from the UK government’s SAGE advisory committee on September 21st, which included a “circuit-breaker lockdown” among a “short-list” of policies “that should be considered” in response to rising Covid-19 cases. Apparently in their minds, being “considered” equates to adoption, and the fact that Johnson did not lock down the very next day is proof that the dissenting scientists had wrested the reins of the UK’s pandemic policy from those who advocated lockdowns, delaying the necessary response until November 5th after which it was too late.
There are multiple immediate problems with this narrative. First off, Wales tried a “circuit breaker” lockdown that almost exactly followed the proposal being considered by the SAGE committee, announcing it on October 19 and implementing it a few days later. Although it had a lead of almost two weeks before the rest of Britain went into lockdown in November, Wales’s per capita case numbers followed the same trajectory as the rest of the country, including the sharp spike in late December and early January. Far from working as intended, Wales’s “circuit breaker” lockdown only slightly shifted the timing of this pattern. Its maximum daily peak of 87 cases per 100,000 residents nearly matched England’s peak of 96, and its curve for Covid-19 fatalities followed the same pattern as the rest of Britain.
Equally telling, a number of the conspiracy theory adherents themselves were singing a very different tune when these events were unfolding. Gurdasani, Sridhar, and other lockdown advocates of the John Snow Memorandum crowd want you to believe that they were patiently counseling the government to adopt an early lockdown between the end of September and mid-October, only to see their advice deflected by Downing Street due to the interference of Gupta and the other dissenting scientists. The record reveals a very different story.
On September 24, only three days after the SAGE meeting minutes, an interesting editorial appeared in the leading British medical journal. Written by Karl Friston, a frequent collaborator with Gurdasani and fellow John Snow Memorandum organizer, the editorial advocated a “third way beyond lockdown or herd immunity” premised on implementing a contact tracing regime over the next few weeks. Far from raising alarms about the immediate need for another lockdown, Friston attempted to assure calm.
“We have already developed a substantial population immunity (around 8% in the UK) and our physical distancing policies remain adaptive and effective,” he explained, arguing that a contact tracing regime could synergistically harness and augment their effectiveness. As far as the fall case surge went, he predicted a comparatively mild trajectory: “When one models what is likely to happen…in terms of viral spread and our responses to it—a plausible worst-case scenario is a peak in daily deaths in the tens (e.g., 50 to 60) not hundreds, in November.” As it happens, the UK topped 400 deaths per day during the November lockdown, and surged to 1,200 deaths per day at the peak of the January lockdown.
Just over two months later, Friston joined Gurdasani and several other Snow Memorandum signers in an letter to the Lancet that blamed the UK’s second wave on failing to heed pro-lockdown advice that they now claimed as their own, even as it conflicted with their public messaging from September that downplayed the very same recommendation. Writing in hindsight and with a liberal amount of revisionism, they recast themselves as proponents of an earlier lockdown all along: “On Sept 21, 2020, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) advised the UK Government to institute a circuit breaker in England to suppress the epidemic. Instead, the government opted for several weeks of ineffective local tiered restrictions, and cases continued to rise exponentially.”
A similar messaging came from the “Independent SAGE” group – a private organization of scientists who now generally support the lockdown approach, but also spent the early fall advocating less-restrictive measures that would supposedly avoid another lockdown. On September 20th, the same day that Gupta and the other scientists met with Downing Street, the Independent SAGE group (not to be confused with the official SAGE group despite their shared name) released a 10-point plan “to avoid a national lockdown.”
The scheme warned of a point “when the situation is so far out of control that the only possible response will be a second national lockdown,” but advised “we can only avoid it if we take urgent action” as recommended by the group. They sought a variety of restaurant restrictions limited to outdoor dining, plus the same testing and contact tracing programs espoused by Friston. Six months later, Independent SAGE member Kit Yates is now faulting the anti-lockdown scientists for Johnson’s failure to implement a policy last September that his own group purported to oppose and sought to forestall.
Indeed, what we see when we look to the words of these lockdowner scientists and pundits is nothing short of a conscious attempt to rewrite their own positions from the time period when the conspiracy theory that they’ve now adopted was allegedly playing out. As I documented last fall, the overwhelming media narrative from late September and early October explicitly deflected attention away from the prospect of a second lockdown. Scientists such as Gupta, Heneghan, and the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) signers, they vigorously maintained, were arguing with a “strawman” of renewed lockdowns that nobody was seriously proposing or considering anymore.
A typical version of this narrative appeared inWired UKon October 7th as part of a media attack on the GBD. “The kind of lockdown that the Great Barrington Declaration seems to be railing against hasn’t been in place in the UK since mid-June,” argued the magazine’s science editor Matt Reynolds. Even in UK cities that were under local restrictions, “pubs, restaurants and schools are still open and it’s hard to find people who are advocating for a return to the lockdown we saw in March.” Reynolds continued: “When the Great Barrington Declaration authors declare their opposition to lockdowns, they are quite literally arguing with the past.”
Similar messages appeared throughout the UK media at the time, each insisting that lockdowns were no longer on the table. On October 11th, Guardian columnist Sonia Sodha wrote “The [Great Barrington] declaration sets itself up against a straw proposal that nobody is arguing for – a full-scale national lockdown until a vaccine is made available.” By October 30th, Sodha was already contradicting herself and revising her own history, tweeting “Wish we’d had a circuit breaker lockdown when SAGE first recommended it.” By mid-December, she was touting the conspiracy theory about Gupta, Heneghan, and Tegnell’s Zoom meeting with Downing Street. More recently, she’s become an advocate of de-platforming the same scientists from British media channels for their anti-lockdown heresies.
Sridhar’s own navigation of the lockdown question followed a similar course. Although she now chastises opponents of the “circuit breaker” lockdown proposal from the events of September 20-21 and faults them for Britain’s second wave, Sridhar wrote a bizarre op-ed in the Guardian on October 10th purporting to oppose “continual lockdowns.” Much like the Zero Covid messaging she would later adopt, its argument is confused and self-contradictory, meandering from touting the model of Taiwan, which never locked down, to New Zealand, which continues to use aggressive lockdowns to suppress even the slightest outbreak. But it also sought to signal her opposition to the specter of renewed lockdowns, which could be avoided – she insisted – by adopting less-stringent localized restrictions and an extensive contact tracing regime.
Sridhar would doubtless insist that her own re-adoption of lockdown advocacy about a month later arose from a failure to heed her earlier advice, as opposed to a more fundamental error with the lockdown approach. Even then, it’s difficult to square her mid-October position with her newfound claim to have recognized the wisdom of a national lockdown some 2 to 3 weeks earlier than the October 10th op-ed, only to see it derailed by the scientists who spoke to Downing Street. Like the Independent SAGE group’s September 20th manifesto, Sridhar was either far less attached to a second lockdown at that point in time than she now insists, or she was engaging in deception about her intentions.
The most astounding attempt at revisionism, however, came from Gurdasani – the Snow Memorandum organizer who has since tried to scapegoat the UK’s Covid failures on Gupta, Heneghan, and Tegnell over the September Zoom conference. She now depicts herself as an early lockdown advocate whose advice from September was shoved aside and ignored. Yet as late as October 26, Gurdasani was still pushing the same “lockdowns are a strawman” line that had dominated the previous month of UK media coverage.
Writing for the Byline Times, a London-based blog that has pushed multiple unhinged conspiracy theories of its own about the Great Barrington Declaration, Gurdasani described lockdowns as “a strawman that the science is not only not advocating for, but very keen to avoid.”
Gurdasani was in the middle of a publicity campaign for the John Snow Memorandum at the time, its own language having been carefully crafted to present its recommendations as a strategy “to prevent future lockdowns” by relying on nondescript localized “restrictions” and a contact tracing regime. As Gurdasani and another Snow Memorandum signer told the Byline Times’ readership, “Unfortunately, the proponents of herd immunity have had a huge impact on responses to the pandemic, effectively creating the lockdown strawman,” insisting that this presented a “dangerous false dichotomy.”
With Gurdasani stressing that she was keen to avoid future lockdowns – a “strawman” in her own words – as late as October 26th, one begins to wonder how she could have supported the very same “strawman” over a month earlier on September 20th, the date on which the dissenting scientists allegedly wrested control of the UK’s pandemic response. Perhaps the lockdowners’ latest conspiracy theory has another as of yet undisclosed twist to it, this one involving a time machine.
Irish FOI Data-Release Proves Hospitals Were Never Under Strain In 2020
BY MICHAEL J SULLIVAN | FREEPRESS | MARCH 9, 2021
Update: Gript ran a piece on March 11 criticising the inferences of our article below, and here’s our recently published rebuttal. After reading the below ask yourself, why are Gript not going after St James’s hospital for what they did?
Freepress.ie can exclusively reveal that Irish hospitals were never under strain throughout 2020, based on newly released official health system hospital data arising from our freedom of information request. If you’re in a hurry, scroll to the section on St. James’s hospital.
The contradiction between the official data and representations that the health service has been under dangerous strain is obviously extremely important. The charts below will show you just how how busy Irish hospitals have been.
The new data directly contradicts the reporting and statements of Irish politicians, RTE and other Irish mainstream media, and the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE) covid-body NPHET. These Irish establishment bodies have consistently told the public that the hospital system was at breaking point since the Covid issue surfaced. Their own HSE data completely contradicts that contention.
We requested a specific dataset from the HSE on the 2nd of February. We asked for:
‘the full occupancy rates for all Irish hospitals under the direction of the HSE for the past four years broken down by month. Specifically, only people who were admitted to hospitals should be included and not outpatients who were on a waiting list: only people who were in the hospital for treatment should be included.’ – Our February 2nd FOI Request to HSE
It took five weeks, but we now have that data. It shows conclusively that hospitals were never at breaking point and they were operating far below capacity all year.
The idea of an extremely stressed health service is still one of the key pillars used to justify the Irish Government’s unscientific lockdowns and mask mandates, both of which have no basis in science and have been argued to be examples of crimes against humanity.
The HSE Hospital Bed Data – Available For You To Download
We have included both the FOI request letter from the HSE and the actual data release here for download to verify everything for yourself with the HSE if you need to.
We encourage everyone to examine and use it for your own content to spread awareness – a link back to this site at the top of your material is all we ask. Make a chart for your local hospital and share it in your area! If you can’t use excel hit the comments below and I will make one for you. Feel free to use anything in this report in your own material for free, including all chart images below. The spreadsheet data we received from the HSE breaks down hospital bed occupancy for the past four years, with tabs for each year from 2017 to 2020.
The figures are given for the entire country at the top of the list, and then each of the seven hospital groups are given, along with each individual hospital within each of those groups. In all, there are fifty-six lines of data per year, broken down by month. Each of the charts below have the corresponding data shown used to generate each chart.
For each chart we took the four consecutive years for that specific group or hospital and charted it to show the comparison between the year of the ‘pandemic’, and the three previous years.
The National Picture Is One Of Half Empty Hospitals
Let’s first take a look at the national picture. For the year of Covid-19 2020 in blue, the graph shows that National Hospital occupancy levels were starkly below those of the previous years. Click each image to enlarge and to see the yearly figures.
All Irish hospital bed occupancy by month, from 2017 (Yellow) to 2020 (Blue). Click each image to enlarge
It seems they flattened the curve alright – but maybe not the one we thought they meant. This data incorporates all hospital beds in the country (the first line of data on the excel sheet). As you can see, the system was never under strain.
To check if the National picture is reproduced in a subset of that data, the Ireland East Hospital Group (IEHG), is the largest and most complex of Ireland’s hospital groups. Comprising 11 hospitals (6 voluntary and 5 statutory), IEHG spans eight eastern counties and works with four Community Healthcare Organisation (CHO) partners. The Mater hospital and National Maternity Hospital are members of this group.
Ireland East Hospital group, 11 hospital on most populous East Coast of Ireland
Still the same picture. Remember: according to official government figures, between March 1 and May 6, a total of 534 sick elderly patients who had tested positive for Covid were discharged from hospitals in Ireland and moved to nursing homes, under instructions from the Irish Government and senior HSE & NPHET officials. This was ordered under the auspices of ‘protecting hospitals under strain’. We included this period in the graph above.
We have written extensively about the Nursing home actions of the the government and NPHET in Freepress.ie. These new hospital figures show conclusively that the hospitals were half empty. Those covid-positive elderly people should have been kept in hospital where sick people are normally treated, not sent back into vulnerable mortally ill nursing home populations to cause havoc. The HSE and Irish Government knew this at the time, and they knew the hospitals were the best place to treat these people.
We wrote about how certain US Governors are now being investigated for similar nursing home decrees by the FBI earlier this month. It has been argued that these actions were taken deliberately to boost Covid-death numbers, to help the pandemic program. Many new readers will find that notion hard to believe, but many of our readers believe this is exactly what happened. If someone can explain why this action was justified feel free to comment below, no registration is required.
Here’s Ireland’s largest hospital, St James’s hospital – which is not part of the previous Ireland East hospital group.
St James’s hospital, Ireland’s largest, and four years of bed occupancy levels. Never under strain in 2020.
Same picture. Indeed, you will see the same picture across all Irish hospitals if you chart them yourself in excel or give the numbers a brief examination across all four years. Fifty-four elderly sick Covid patients were transferred from St James’s hospital to understaffed nursing homes by decree.
Why were they discharged if St James’s was almost empty as their own figures show us (at 58%), when they could have received the best acute care in hospital for what the HSE & Government said at the time was a deadly life-threatening disease? This is proof positive of medical negligence resulting in death by St James’s hospital.
Let’s now take a look at a Cancer hospital, St Luke’s Oncology and radiation network. Remember, cancer diagnosis, treatment & detection services were shut down across the country on the basis that Covid was a bigger threat to life (despite the Irish Government and HSE having access to data from Italy in March 2020, whichshowed conclusively that Covid was not a major pandemic threat – we reported on that here.
St Lukes Cancer network, Ireland’s largest. Cancer rates did not half because of Covid.
I think we can all agree that Cancer in Ireland has probably not reduced because of covid, and you can see the steady levels of treatment in this cancer hospital for the previous three years. This shows that people with cancer (a real killer in Ireland, with real mortality figures) was not being treated in the usual numbers. This also means that those cancers will be much worse when eventually treated or detected.
The Irish government and HSE know that screenings for cancer and other killer diseases have been stopped, yet continue into 2021 to advocate for unscientific and devastating lockdowns, despite Covid having killed a relatively small number of people who were not already dying of underlying conditions like Cancer. This is not an insensitive declaration – we are advocating here for hospitals to fully open up so that people can get screened for diseases that are guaranteed to kill more people than Covid. All data shows that Covid has been massively overblown, is not the threat as presented, and the mitigation and protection measures like masks and isolation are total overkill.
Skeptics may say that this data is proof that lockdowns work, but given that global locations without lockdowns have had less mortality than those with lockdowns, their contention will not hold up to any kind of scientific scrutiny. Take Sweden, Florida & North Dakota – there were no lockdowns or mask mandates there and they had less Covid death than all other lockdown states. Like everything about Covid, the actual science proves the Irish Government got everything wrong. The only question is how deliberate it was.
The Covid hysteria pushed by Irish politicians and Government meant that regular hospital admissions were drastically reduced due to appointments being cancelled, and people being afraid to visit the hospitals they pay for via taxation. The Irish government and HSE deliberately withdrew healthcare from the population. What more do the quiet people need to see in order to voice their opposition to what the Irish Government are doing?
The Lasting Health Impact Of Closed Hospitals
No rocket science degree required to figure this one out – even the brainwashed know that stopping hospital treatment on such a wide scale is disastrous. Many people unfortunately still believe the government messaging on Covid, through the spell of Irish mainstream media repetition and paralysis by fear. They are still having trouble understanding the scale of what they have done.
We are facing the biggest existential crisis our people have ever faced due to lockdowns and the suspension of healthcare & democracy in Ireland.
As Per Dr Scott Atlas late last year, “The harms to children of suspending in-person schooling are dramatic, including poor learning, school dropouts, social isolation, and suicidal ideation, most of which are far worse for lower income groups. A recent study confirms that up to 78 percent of cancers were never detected due to missed screening over a three-month period. If one extrapolates to the entire country, 750,000 to over a million new cancer cases over a nine-month period will have gone undetected… Beyond hospital care, the CDC reported four-fold increases in depression, three-fold increases in anxiety symptoms, and a doubling of suicidal ideation, particularly among young adults after the first few months of lockdowns, echoing American Medical Association reports of drug overdoses and suicides… Finally, the unemployment shock from lockdowns, according to a recent National Bureau of Economic Research study, will generate a three percent increase in the mortality rate and a 0.5 percent drop in life expectancy over the next 15 years, disproportionately affecting African Americans and women. That translates into what the study refers to as a “staggering” 890,000 additional U.S. deaths.”
Ireland has roughly the same cancer & disease rates per capita as the United States, which has sixty-seven times the population of Ireland (328 million versus 4.9 million). Dividing Atlas’s 890,000 additional US excess deaths caused by lockdowns by 67 gives you 13,263 additional Irish deaths due to disastrous unscientific lockdowns and shuttering of our health service in Ireland. This doesn’t even take into account suicides because the Irish Government are hiding those figures from the public, or the bigger unemployment rate we face.
Compare these projected death numbers with the 369 people who died with Covid and no underlying conditions for the past 12 months according to HSE, numbers which came via an FOI request C150/71 in February 2020, linked here. You can immediately see that crimes against humanity are occurring, perpetrated by Irish politicians, the HSE, and a complicit media who are legally mandated to investigate these matters in Ireland yet refuse to do so.
The Irish Government have the statistics and are not acting on them by opening up society immediately. At this stage, things have gone well beyond political arse-covering. People are dying unnecessarily and politicians know it. And they’re not dying not from Covid.
There Never Was A Pandemic
Based on this official data there never was a pandemic. Our hospitals were never under strain – not once. Even by the now changed WHO definition of a Pandemic, as reported by the British Medical Journal, there never was one. We see now with certainty how so many doctors and nurses had so much time to make dance videos, while the elderly of the country were wrongly made to fear for their lives.
We see now how they could make those comedy sketches and movie parody videos in full PPE on hospital trolleys, while the lives of our children were so devastatingly impacted by masks that continue to cause fear, erode their sense of self, and cause incredible feelings of guilt and helplessness along with suicidal-ideation.
We showed you that the Government & RTE knew that Covid was not the killer they said it was as early as March of 2020, yet still embarked on this ruinous path deliberately. They really must pay for the death and suffering they have caused, or this wound will fester for decades. We must continue to push for accountability. It will not be easy: so many institutions are so heavily invested in the idea of a pandemic that they cannot let go because of status repercussions, loss of trust issues (for that segment of the population that still believes their lies), and real legal liabilities. Politicians & NPHET operatives know that if the public at large fully understood the scale of what they have done, many would be dangling from lamp posts.
Get out of your echo chambers and put material like this in front of people who are still under the spell of media and political repetition. Each one of you reading this is important. Create your own content, use the excel data we received to make your own comparisons and inferences. Share it.
Lockdowns, and the quarantining of healthy populations, and the deliberate withdrawal of healthcare for a fraudulent pandemic, are crimes against humanity.
These are crimes that the Irish Government, politicians, and various civil servants are clearly guilty of. The evidence is clear now for the currently complicit police to redeem themselves and prosecute this psychopathic Irish establishment.
Michael Martin, Leo Varadkar, Tony Holohan and Stephen Donnelly are the murderous ringleaders: we await their arrest and trial by jury.
© Freepress.ie 2021
Risk of Asymptomatic Spread Minimal. Variants Over-Hyped. Masks Pointless. An Interview With Professor Jay Bhattacharya
By Oliver May | Lockdown Sceptics | March 25, 2021
New variants are of no concern. There is no need to cancel summer holidays. Millions vaccinated, coupled with immunity from millions of prior infections means we can surf on the crest of the third wave, rather than being remotely concerned about it. In fact, the UK should open now. And vaccine passports, certificates, or whatever name they are being given, will do nothing to improve the health of the population – all headlines we have read and heard over the past week or so.
Except, we haven’t. We have heard and read the opposite. And we are instilled with fear from TV and radio adverts, complete with ‘that scary voice’ all too eager to give listeners nightmares, be it your impressionable primary-school-aged daughter, or a frail older lady now terrified into wearing a mask outside while waiting for a bus with no one within a 50-metre radius. But the reality is that the above headlines could have been written – and all based on science. Jayanta Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, the report that called for the focused protection of the vulnerable and no lockdowns, signed by almost 14,000 medical and public health scientists, nearly 42,000 medical practitioners and close to 765,000 concerned citizens.
I interviewed him by email and he remains a staunch lockdown sceptic.
Why have the media, politicians and many scientists sought to panic the populace about SARS-CoV-2 far beyond what the evidence would warrant? The incentives include financial motives, political goals, the desire to protect professional reputations and many other factors.
The virus is seasonal and late fall/winter is its season. It is very unlikely, given that this is the case, that the virus will spread very widely during the summer months. It is also the case that a large fraction of the UK population has already been infected or vaccinated and is immune, which will greatly reduce hospitalisation and mortality from the virus in coming months.
There are tens of thousands of mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They mutate because the replication mechanisms they induce involve very little error checking. Most of the mutations either do not change the virulence of the virus, or weaken it. There are a few mutations that provide the virus with a selective advantage in infectivity and may increase its lethality very slightly, though the evidence on this latter point is not solid.
We should not be particularly concerned about the variants that have arisen to date. First, prior infection with the wild type virus and vaccination provide protection against severe outcomes arising from reinfection with the mutated virus. Second, though the mutants have taken over the few remaining cases, their rise has coincided with a sharp drop in cases and deaths, even in countries where they have come to dominate. Their selective infectivity advantage has not been enough to cause a resurgence in cases. Third, the age gradient in mortality is the same for the mutant and wild-type virus. Thus a focused protection policy is still warranted. If lockdowns could not stop the less infectious wild type virus, why would we expect them to stop the more infectious mutant virus?
According to the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration which, other than Dr Bhattacharya, include Dr Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Dr Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, the UK Government is creating unfounded hysteria around SARS-CoV-2. Dr Bhattacharya said:
According to a meta-analysis by Dr John Ioannidis [Professor of Medicine at Stanford University] of every seroprevalence study conducted to date of publication with a supporting scientific paper (74 estimates from 61 studies and 51 different localities around the world), the median infection survival rate from COVID-19 infection is 99.77 per cent. For COVID-19 patients under 70, the meta-analysis finds an infection survival rate of 99.95 per cent.
The CDC’s [Centres for Disease Control] and Prevention] best estimate of infection fatality rate for people ages 70 plus years is 5.4 per cent, meaning seniors have a 94.6 per cent survivability rate. For children and people in their 20s/30s, it poses less risk of mortality than the flu. For people in their 60s and above, it is much more dangerous than the flu.
Even so, this hardly warrants a new Government drive urging families to carry out tests on their children twice a week in the hope of unearthing asymptomatic cases. Especially, as the vulnerable have already been vaccinated.
The scientific evidence now strongly suggests that COVID-19 infected individuals who are asymptomatic are more than an order of magnitude less likely to spread the disease to even close contacts than symptomatic COVID-19 patients. A meta-analysis of 54 studies from around the world found that within households – where none of the safeguards that restaurants are required to apply are typically applied – symptomatic patients passed on the disease to household members in 18 per cent of instances, while asymptomatic patients passed on the disease to household members in 0.7 per cent of instances. A separate, smaller meta-analysis similarly found that asymptomatic patients are much less likely to infect others than symptomatic patients.
Asymptomatic individuals are an order of magnitude less likely to infect others than symptomatic individuals, even in intimate settings such as people living in the same household where people are much less likely to follow social distancing and masking practices that they follow outside the household. Spread of the disease in less intimate settings by asymptomatic individuals – including religious services, in-person restaurant visits, gyms, and other public settings – are likely to be even less likely than in the household.
What about mask mandates?
The evidence that mask mandates work to slow the spread of the disease is very weak. The only randomised evaluation of mask efficacy in preventing Covid infection found very small, statistically insignificant effects [Danish mask study]. And masks are deleterious to the social and educational development of children, especially young children. They are not needed to address the epidemic. In Sweden, for instance, children have been in school maskless almost the whole of the epidemic, with no child Covid deaths and teachers contracting Covid at rates that are lower than the average of other workers.
In light of this, what conclusion can we draw from the fact that the UK Government wants the entire adult population to be injected against the virus, instead of just the vulnerable? And the possibility that we’ll need to produce vaccine certificates to access hospitality and sports venues or travel overseas?
Vaccine passports are a terrible idea that will diminish trust in public health and do nothing to improve the health of the population. Vaccine certificates are not needed as a public health measure. The Government had it right previously. The country should open up now that the older, vulnerable population has been vaccinated. The rest of the population is at much greater health risk from the lockdown than they are from the virus.
The author is a staff journalist at a national newspaper group. Oliver May is a pseudonym.
GAVI Vaccine Alliance Is The Source Of Terror Behind Global Lockdowns And Vaccine Coercion
By Lance D Johnson | Humans Are Free | March 23, 2021
The World Health Organization (WHO) is facilitating a global health dictatorship, commanding all member states to enforce totalitarian lock downs and far-reaching medical edicts that empower government authorities and the vaccine industry – not human health.
WHO’s authoritarian recommendations were adopted in rapid fashion by almost every government on Earth.
The behavioral controls and livelihood restrictions imposed by WHO have no basis in immune system health, mental health, or general well being.
WHO operates like a global oligarchy, forcing all member states to carry out their orders. In 2020 and beyond, WHO has ordered populations into isolation, avoidance, and unlawful quarantines.
WHO has forced perpetual oxygen restrictions, coercive DNA harvesting, and mRNA vaccines experiments, while instructing governments around the world to quash civil liberties and promote medical martial law.
This dictatorship is giving rise to a medical apartheid – a system of segregation that punishes healthy people for not complying.
Bill Gates Vaccine Alliance Is The Source Of Terror Behind WHO’s Lock Downs And Coercive Vaccine Passports
Where is WHO coming up with these restrictive medical edicts and coercive vaccine policies?
According to WHO insider Astrid Stuckelberger, Ph.D., WHO serves the financial interests of GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance run by Bill Gates.
GAVI was formed in 2000 and set up as an international institution in Switzerland. GAVI operates tax free and enjoys blanket immunity against criminal sanctions.
Bill Gates leveraged GAVI and bought his influence into the WHO. He even asked to become a member state in 2017, with the privilege of being on WHO’s executive board.
Bill Gates now controls Swissmedic, the FDA of Switzerland, due to a three-way vaccine distribution contract agreement reached by Gates, WHO, and the Swiss regulatory agency.
By controlling WHO, Gates funnels tens of billions of dollars through his GAVI Vaccine Alliance, with the ultimate power of controlling member states.
As the controller of information and the arbiter of science, Gates and the vaccine industry has the power to suppress prophylactics, treatments, phytonutrients, adaptogens, and antivirals.
Bill Gates and GAVI is the source of terror behind WHO, the lock downs, restrictions, and authoritarian medical edicts that are compelling vaccination experiments.
Stuckelberger is an international expert who evaluates scientific research and advises policymakers.
She has written more than 180 scientific articles, policy papers and governmental reports. She admits that this research is conducted to support political agendas and to justify government policy.
Since 2009, she managed WHO’s international health regulations, which were primarily used to prepare member states to act in unison during a future pandemic. At the center of this world government plandemic is Bill Gates and the GAVI Vaccine Alliance.
GAVI And WHO Control Governments Around The World Now, Threaten Populations
Bill Gates has more power and influence over WHO than entire nations. The United Nations originally established WHO, but has repeatedly refused to rein in their dictatorial powers, illegal quarantine procedures, coercive vaccine passports, and undemocratic power grabs.
Justus Hoffmann, Ph.D., one of the German Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee members, pointed out that GAVI has no political power but enjoys “qualified diplomatic immunity.”
GAVI is immune from all criminal business dealing, as well, whether their potential criminal actions are intentional or inadvertent.
“They can do whatever they want,” Stuckelberger confirmed, and they answer to no authority. No law enforcement is allowed to investigate GAVI, even if the Vaccine Alliance was implicated in a criminal conspiracy to defraud or coerce people.
“Stuckelberger, who worked four years on the ethics committee for the WHO, said its “disturbing” that GAVI enjoys blanket immunity especially when GAVI is “directing, as a corporate entity, the WHO.”
The director general of WHO forces all member states to follow GAVI’s orders, from the type of diagnostic tests, to the type of treatments allowed, to top-down population controls, pandemic messaging, and most importantly, vaccine experimentation.
The WHO has been set up over the years to assume dictatorial power over world governments and GAVI is the source of their authoritarianism, terror, and coercive vaccination push.
After months of using high cycle PCR tests to diagnose covid-19, the WHO finally alerted the world in January of 2021 that these tests were producing mostly false positives all along.
As laboratories dial back the cycle threshold on the PCR tests, the official number of covid cases and deaths will slowly dissipate.
This medical fraud will not stop the wave of hospital dependence, ventilator-associated pneumonia, lung infections, stress induced heart disease, drug overdoses, severe mental illness, and vaccine injury that is now taking hold of the world.
References: LifeSiteNews.com; GAVI.org; HumansAreFree.com
Featured Video
HE SAVED LIVES. NOW HE FACES PRISON.
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
NATO Sanctions and the Coming Global Diesel Fuel Disaster
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 11.04.2022
Amid the ongoing global inflation crisis, NATO heads of state and mainstream media repeat a mantra that high energy prices are a direct result of Putin’s actions in Ukraine since end of February. The reality is that it is the western sanctions that are responsible. Those sanctions including cutting SWIFT interbank access for key Russian banks and some of the most severe sanctions ever imposed, are hardly having an impact on the military actions in Ukraine. What many overlook is the fact that they are increasingly impacting the economies of the West, especially the EU and USA. A closer look at the state of the global supply of diesel fuel is alarming. But Western sanctions planners at the US Treasury and the EU know fully well what they are doing. And it bodes ill for the world economy.
While most of us rarely think about diesel fuel as anything other than a pollutant, in fact it is essential to the entire world economy in a way few energy sources are. The director general of Fuels Europe, part of the European Petroleum Refiners Association, stated recently, “… there is a clear link between diesel and GDP, because almost everything that goes into and out of a factory goes using diesel.” … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Trita Parsi: Middle East Unraveling — Are We on the Path to World War?
- Iran FM meets with US envoy on UN meeting’s sidelines at American side’s insistence: Report
- Qatar PM calls for Gulf security framework with Iran, says war must be ‘wake-up call’
- China condemns US extortion of Iranian airlines, rejects Washington’s ‘illegal’ sanctions threats
- Italy to move military personnel from Taif base after missile strike
- Finland’s Stubb tells European leaders to calm down
- Defeating Russia on battlefield impossible – Fico
- Finland’s Gender Clinic Reversal
- Massachusetts Wants Mental Health Visits, Why Does Government Use ‘Health’ to Enter Our Homes & Families?
- US lawmaker admits American people footing bill for Trump’s failed aggression against Iran
- If Americans Knew
- Sanctions are collective punishment: immoral and self-defeating
- Phosphorus Munitions Fired by Israel Burn Groves, Orchards in Southern Lebanon
- Israel Carries Out New Ceasefire Violations Across Gaza
- AI – Emphasis on the ‘I’: Israel Is Funding AI Chatbot Propaganda
- Israel Blocking Hundreds of Wheelchairs for Injured Children From Entering Gaza
- Israel Is Expanding and Upgrading Compounds for Palestinian Militias in Gaza
- The Palestinian-American Residents of This West Bank Town Are Wondering: Where Is Trump?
- Gaza desperately needs tents, wheelchairs, fuel… and everything else (Israel blocks it all) – Daily Update
- Israeli Attacks in Gaza Kill at Least Seven Palestinians Over Three Days, including Woman and Child
- Trump’s militarization of Washington DC as he pursues Israel’s war against Iran
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
