Lots of Graphs showing Florida (no masking, no lockdowns) doing so much much better than other US states, by all sorts of measures.
And as a late edit, especially for @PontiusPrimate . See if there is any scope here for intepretation!
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Hi Pat thanks for reminding us!
The example of Peru (strict lockdowns) vs Brazil (sambas only banned during presidential speeches 
) is compelling. with Peru having had the grimmer statistics. Sweden versus UK is another example, though maybe one should not extrapolate from the UK due to Borisâs border laxity; the fact remains that Sweden also did better than France, Spain, Italy and the US - and thatâs only in the myopic units of âCovid-deathsâ; the mysteriously uninteresting count of lockdown deaths is certain to favour Sweden, if only governments would start to acknowledge and study them.
Long report from Mercola today, including this:
"Herd Immunity Threshold Vastly Overestimated
âŚModelers were also incorrect when they predicted that 70% to 80% would get infected before herd immunity would naturally allow the spread of infection to taper off.
In reality, the herd immunity threshold has turned out to be far lower, which removes the justification for social distancing and lockdowns. More than a dozen scientists now claim the herd immunity threshold is likely below 50%,6 perhaps even as low as 10%.7,8 Data from Stockholm County, Sweden, show a herd immunity threshold of 17%.9 In an essay, Brown University professor Dr. Andrew Bostom noted:10
âLead investigator Dr. Gomes, from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and her colleagues concluded: ânaturally acquired immunity to SARS-CoV-2 may place populations over the herd immunity threshold once as few as 10-20% of its individuals are immune.â 11
Separate HIT [herd immunity threshold] calculations of 9%, 12 10-20%, 13 17%, 14 and 43% 15,16 â each substantially below the dogmatically asserted value of ~70% 17 â have been reported by investigators from Tel-Aviv University, Oxford University, University College of London, and Stockholm University, respectively.â
How could they get this so wrong? Herd immunity is calculated using reproductive number, or R-naught (R0), which is the estimated number of new infections that may occur from one infected person.18 R0 of below 1 (with R1 meaning that one person whoâs infected is expected to infect one other person) indicates that cases are declining while R0 above 1 suggests cases are on the rise.
Itâs far from an exact science, however, as a personâs susceptibility to infection varies depending on many factors, including their health, age and contacts within a community. The initial R0 calculations for COVID-19âs herd immunity threshold were based on assumptions that everyone has the same susceptibility and would be mixing randomly with others in the community.
That doesnât happen in real life though. According to professor Karl Friston, a statistician, âeffective susceptible population,â meaning those not already immune to COVID-19 and therefore at risk of infection, was never 100%. At most, it was 50% and most likely only around 20%.19
Despite the mounting of such data, and the clear knowledge that lockdowns were causing unimaginable harm to mental health, physical health, education and local economies, lockdowns were repeatedly implemented in various parts of the world.
The initial modeling report from the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team actually admitted it did ânot consider the ethical or economic implicationsâ of the pandemic measures proposed, noting only that âThe social and economic effects of the measures which are needed to achieve this policy goal will be profound.â Today, we have a much better grasp on just how profound the social and economic effects have in fact been, and theyâre devastating.
Public Health Officials Are Lying About Lockdowns "
Mercola also cites work by Ari Joffe, a serious attempt to analyze lockdown effects:
Mercola: "To that long list of evidences, we can add yet another report {below} from Canadian pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Ari Joffe, which shows lockdown harms are about 10 times greater than the benefits.2
In his 51-page paper,3 âCOVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink, Joffe reviews how and why initial modeling predictions failed to match reality, what the collateral damage of lockdown policies have been, and what cost-benefit analyses tell us about the efficacy of the lockdown strategy.
Canadian expert's research finds lockdown harms are 10 times greater than benefits | Toronto Sun "
Mercola continues: "The fact that lockdowns are still being implemented tells us theyâre still operating based on fictional assumptions. The answer is to push back with real-world data and refuse to acquiesce to fantasy doomsday scenarios.
We also need to insist on formal cost-benefit analyses. To this day, no government has presented such an analysis to the public, which is what prompted Joffe to investigate the matter. As noted by Joffe in an interview with Toronto Sun columnist Anthony Furey:20
âSince lockdowns are a public health intervention, aiming to improve the population wellbeing, we must consider both benefits of lockdowns, and costs of lockdowns on the population wellbeing.
Once I became more informed, I realized that lockdowns cause far more harm than they prevent ⌠Emerging data has shown a staggering amount of so-called âcollateral damageâ due to the lockdowns.â
Collateral damage cited by Joffe include:21
82 million to 132 million more people affected by food insecurity
70 million being pushed into severe poverty
1.7 million mothers and infants dying due to interrupted health care
Millions of deaths caused by other infectious diseases due to interrupted health care services (such as tuberculosis, malaria and HIV)
Millions of children losing future earning potential and life span due to school closures and educational shortfalls
Millions of women affected by worsened or pandemic-initiated domestic abuse
Unemployment, which is one of the strongest risk factors for early mortality, reduced life span and chronic disease
Increased loneliness and all the adverse health conditions associated with it
Increased homelessness
Mental health deterioration across society and an increase in âdeaths of despairâ
Increases in opioid related deaths
An 83% increase in excess deaths from dementia in England/Wales in April 2020, and an increase in Alzheimer disease and dementia deaths in the U.S., attributed to lack of social contact22
Public Health Officials Are Lying About Lockdowns? "
Sorry if the post is a bit of a jumble 
EDITED with some more quote marks
A jumble? Consider it high-grade samizdat citizen journalism, E: getting the word out as widely as possible, to thwart the censorship/propaganda. As essential work as anyone could devise, right now. Keep slugginâ bro!
Hi @Evvy_dense . I agree with the comments by @RhisiartGwilym above, âkeep slugging broâ. The only bit of your post I take exception to is this.
Boris is at the very best a bumbling idiot and we should not be making excuses for him. 
I just picked up something from James Lyons-Weiler on the issue of herd immunity. He said this (my paraphrase) in relation to all the supposed new variants of Corona virus.
The deaths from any new virus occur early on, and that variant rapidly dies out because a virus that kills its host does not survive. Hence, the variants become less and less virulent until its like any other virus. So the brazil/South African/Kent/etc variants may actually be more than Kill Gatesâ imagination, but they will be much less agressive than the original strain.
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Presume you were watching that extra âVaccines Revealed: Covidâ webinar, Pat? Iâd add to Jamesâ description something I learned from the same VR:C series: a rather revolutionary idea picked up from the equally remarkably insightful Dr. Zack Bush and Dr. Tom Cowan.
This is the idea coming from the rapidly developing new discipline of genomics that the virus âpathogensâ might perhaps be better seen as air- or water- or food-disseminated messengers sent by out by creatures dealing with a new environmental challenge - a new pollutant, for example - to other creatures likely to be afflicted by the same problem.
They suggest this because of the striking discovery that âvirusesâ under the electron microscope can be found to be physically identical with exosomes put out by bodies cleansing themselves of chelated toxins. The idea being that these toxin-containing packets can be received by other vulnerable creatures as a way of getting both a warning of a danger coming around, but also as a way of incorporating into the DNA of the recipient instructions from the sender on how it has dealt with the toxin.
Remarkably, one of these pioneers of this new way of looking at alleged pathogens such as viruses pointed out that a significant percentage of our inherited DNA is - whaddya know! - viral DNA which, long previously, has been incorporated into ours by this âinfectionâ process! The idea being that this permanent signalling function of the air-plankton is another long-evolved pathway by which survival-assisting adaptations are spread into populations of individual creatures by a much quicker mechanism than natural selectionâs multi-generational inheritance of survival advantages. The receiving individuals of the current generation get the survival advice, together with actual immunity-enabling samples, during their own lifetime!!
This way of seeing âviral pathogensâ strikes me as much more in tune with the ecologistsâ idea that biomes should be seen as cooperating wholes, rather than just random collections of self-serving individual lives striving in hyper-individualistic isolation in an indifferent or even hostile world.
It also seems to be in tune with that cherished scientific notion of theoretical âeleganceâ, which, along with Occamâs Razor, is posited as a fundamentally unprovable, but nevertheless highly probable, rule-of-thumb principle about which hypotheses to favour, and which to relegate. LOL! Beautiful!
Note too that, as a further bonus, this notion speaks elegantly and enlighteningly to the perennial question: When thereâs a âpathogenâ about, why do some recipients get ill from it, and even die, whilst others show no - or at most very minor - signs of physical distress, then get perfectly well again and now with an acquired immunity to the source of trouble about which the air-borne âpathogenâ is actually a helpful messenger? The whole process weeds out - and recycles - those individuals simply unready to meet the new danger, whilst strengthening even further those who are fittest to cope and to pass on their coping capability to their offspring via their - modified! - DNA. A process with a certain Gaian ruthlessness to it, sure, but elegant or what?! 
It certainly feels to me, at a deep level of persuasiveness, to be more inherently likely than the - as I would posit - highly-unconvincing idea of nature as a continuous and permanent battle-royal of each hyper-individual against all the others; a rather mad idea begot by our recent history of hyper-individualism dedicated to merciless competition of all against all; a philosophical aberration if ever there were one, but a handy one to the devotees of the psychopathic-capitalism stage of human developmentâŚ
In that âMemoirâ by Kerry OâGrady, which I posted here on a thread a bit further down the scroll, there is a vivid description of this airborne messaging system used by trees in a forest to warn each other of troubles incoming, such as leaf-eating insects, so that the message-recipients can prepare in timely fashion by filling their leaves with bitter flavours, to discourage the infestations. An atmospheric-pathway supplement to the mycorrhizal soil network which shares nutrients around the forest-floor community of life, whilst at the same time also functioning - with typical Gaian redundancy - as a species of message-carrying nervous system for it. Elegance in spades again! Love it! 
Hi PatB. Boris is Boris, thatâs damning enough
What I meant was that the people flying in and out of the UK while the virus was high boosted both âwavesâ, making Britain possibly an unreliable comparison with other countries.
My post was a bit jumbled as I was highlighting Mercolaâs stuff, may have given the impression of more originality. Iâll add some quotes to make it clear.
Hi Rhis. A completely mind blowing series. I have been telling friends suffering from TDS, that âyou canât catch a virusâ, but the propaganda has been just too strong. The whole concept put forward by Zack Bush and Thomas Cowan that we live in harmony with trillions of bacteria/viruses and we completely heal ourselves. Assuming of course we are not poisoned by the environment of poor food, dirty water and electro smog.
I knew about trees but talk to most people about that and they will want to have you commited! At least the people I know.
And Evvy. I wasnât have a pop at you but could not resist the opportunity to have a pop at Boris, or come to think of it, most other politicians. e.g. Tony Bliar, Teresa May, Keir tarmer. This could be a very long list!
PS: The messenger air-plankton hypothesis which I sketched above carries with it the shocking - to some - implication that - er - maybe Lysenko, universally trashed though he has been in our time, had a point!! Acquired characteristics ARE heritable, after all!! âAnd thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges!â 