The results here,
are in.
I think the last column is all that one need focus on. The numbers seem to demonstrate that there is no pandemic.
(That conclusion would be even stronger if one subtracted the deaths caused by lockdown.)
1 Like
Hi Rippon
I’ve chatted about this a bit already. You might find it interesting
thanks
(I don’t watch this site very closely; that’s why I missed that)
1 Like
Hi @rippon You might also be reminded of two things.
First, Covid was downgraded in seriousness, way back last year. Second, the WHO (that’s the World Hoax Organisation for the uninitiated) changed the definition of “pandemic” a little while before the scam began!
As you rightly say, remove all the lockdown created deaths 2020 was no different to any previous year, and in fact better than some! So, pandemic no, scamdemic, yes.
Get yer buckets of salt here, before you plunge into examining ANY stats about the covid swindle. You’ll need the condiment. There are literally NO sources of statistical information on which you could trust your life, in this huge scam. Patience, the passing of time, and the value of hindsight, are the only reliable responses to this huge pig’s breakfast.
At least the covid swindle has been a useful object lesson in studying the vexed question: ‘Do things like this happen because of some widespread formal global conspiracy, or are they just instances of multiple axe-grinders spontaneously doublethinking themselves into ‘believing’ the propaganda, so that they can leap aboard the band-waggon - to their considerable personal profit, both career-wise and financially?’
The best guess I can come up with at present it that it all seems to be a ghastly blend of both elements. But that is just a guess.
Isn’t it interesting that the doctors, nurses, morgues and care homes were so overwhelmed with dying and dead people, given that there was no pandemic and everybody died at home because of “lockdown” (tripped on the stairs, maybe? Drowned in the bath?)
Isn’t it interesting that this pattern was repeated in so many countries around the world? So many stair trips… So many bath drownings.
Fingers in ears and eyes closed everyone. It’s the only way to get the truth…
But how do you KNOW all this, P? I acknowledge that there may be some - or even a lot of - truth in all this. But how can any of us be confident? The stories you detail here may be true, but equally, it’s exactly the sort of thing which the lie machine churns out so easily.
Yesterday, I was once again at the local hosp for an injection into my eye (such fun!! 
), and very much as the previous times, it was business as usual, and clearly no big panic going on. All the staff whom I asked confirmed this. Where are these overflowing ICUs and morgues. Have you actually seen them personally?
I get the impression that you’ve had some - undetailed - personal anguish coming from the covid thing; someone dear who died of it, or who at least has been thrashed by it. Is that what’s upsetting you about our apparent indifference? Please understand good bro, that if that is the case, I wouldn’t dream of belittling the pain of it. But is it colouring you view of the whole global story?
Peace and solidarity, in any case; and a still resolutely open mind. There’s no doubt that a huge scam is going on, but as yet I think we have no clear of the - undoubtably-real as well - toll of death and misery. 
I’d turn the question around my friend - how do you still not know this? How many doctors need to tell you? Why do you dismiss what Dan, for example, - a senior doctor in a large city - had been saying for a year? Do you want his phone number to call him up and ask him? I could give you the number of a young nurse friend of mine working in a hospital in Massachusetts too, or Addenbrokes. It’s happening, and it’s real.
How do you know that anyone died in the Iraq war? How do you know anything?
Let’s not have double standards here. If stats were good enough to count the war dead and show that the IBC were full of shit, then the same stats are good enough to count our own dead.
I’ve never heard of anyone who died of “lockdown”. Why do you accept that so easily? I know about half a dozen people who died of covid.
EDIT: I note, with wry amusement once again, that the ONS stats are considered absolutely, definitive as long as they seem to prove there was no pandemic. That’s fine and then the ONS are gospel. When I take the time to explain that they show a terrible death toll and the worst rise in excess deaths for more than half a century, it’s bucket of salt time. Yep - I think we can safely call that a double standard…
You’re very much making the same points as me. You say:
“doctors, nurses, morgues and care homes were so overwhelmed with dying and dead people”
“this pattern was repeated in so many countries around the world”
The only difference is that, for me, that raises questions, but, apparently for you, that is pretty slam-dunk that the media narrative is basically true.
The questions it raises include:
-
Everyone, including/especially politicians and hacks, knows that politicians and hacks are not trusted. So, in trying to persuade us of the veracity of their narrative, why don’t they simply run weekly stories from the frontline, e.g. doctors, nurses, care-workers, morgues? Instead we get regular tedious ‘briefings’ from the stooges in Downing Street.
-
How can something be repeated, with such a large degree of commonality, across the world?
One possibility is that there is a global pandemic and, since covid is the same virus in India as in America, then that’s why the pattern is repeated. Another possibility is that there is a level of world governance sitting above national governments that is shaping events - hence the repetition of the pattern.
The first possibility is a respectable opinion; the second is disreputable (‘conspiracism’).
It is damaging to your argument to dismiss (practically ridicule) lockdown deaths as Laurel&Hardy or MarxBrothers incidents - stair trips and bath drownings.
Did mental health not occur to you? Suicide, domestic abuse, exacerbation of existing conditions due to poor diet (e.g. take-aways), no sunlight, no fresh air, muscle wasting (sedentary lifestyles); and everyone knows that the physical (e.g. immune response) and mental are intertwined, so the depression from physical isolation has perhaps killed many elderly care-home residents. My lay understanding of medicine is that hugs actually have an effect on physical, not just mental, health.
Stats are not trustworthy because they can be twisted to fit almost any conclusion one desires. But my point, again, is the layman perspective. The lay perspective is the most important one because it’s a miniscule proportion of people who are scientists. The population comprises overwhelmingly laypeople.
It’s a reasonable layperson expectation that, being told there is a pandemic, there should be an unusually high amount of death in 2020.
But you are saying that it’s not that simple, that a deeper analysis than simply looking at a body count is required. Okay, then the government and media machine have a big problem, because that means that the population requires a good dose of 'Stats101 ’ to enable their persuasion that the pandemic is real.
Since stats can be meaningless and abused, my preference is to frame the debate thus:
Even if there is indeed a new deadly virus sweeping the planet, how should we respond?
I contend that turning ourselves into a zombie society (masks, lockdowns and jabs with toxic experimental biological agents) is the worst possible response. The Barrington people basically have it right - implement a strategy of ‘focused care’.
Also: one good thing that we have learned is how easy it is to transform society with extreme rapidity. Therefore, instead of stamping on everyone, e.g. small businesses (the biggest employment sector of the economy), we could have simply stamped on those sectors that are damaging people’s resilience to infection - those who are degrading the quality of our food, air and water. I say resilience to infection, not merely covid, because targeting covid is a mug’s game because there are mutations and there will be completely new virus threats, so targeting any particular infection amounts to an endless game of whack-a-mole and cat-and-mouse.
And I reiterate, this is what follows if you buy into the logic of ‘covid culture’:
-
We must do masks-lockdowns-jabs forevermore, because all the arguments that are ‘valid’ now will be ‘valid’ forevermore - because covid and, worse, its mutations are here to stay.
-
We have been deeply irresponsible for the last decades/centuries because all the arguments that are ‘valid’ now have always been ‘valid’ - with respect to flu, for example, another mass-killing deadly virus.
So we can ditch debates about stats and their correct interpretation and make the debate entirely political and zero statistical. The authoritarians love to embrace covid culture. The libertarians and anarchists hate it. (Incidentally, Chomsky’s silence about the chilling nature of covid culture is why I concur with Darren Allen’s verdict that Chomsky merely calls himself an anarchist, but he’s really just a socialist.)
1 Like
Hi @rippon - thanks for the great post, and also for calling out my childish comments on lockdown deaths. Fair play.
You’re right - there are two competing narratives that potentially explain what’s going on. Let me say right upfront, that I don’t think these two narratives are mutually exclusive, and both could be happening to a greater or lesser degree.
Let me try and deal with your points in turn.
Good question. I don’t know why they don’t do that in this country, but in other countries (particularly the USA, and Italy for example) these stories are common in their media. There are many stories of doctors, nurses and patients discussing the human cost of what’s going on. In the UK not so much. Don’t know why. I heard a really good podcast of stories from doctors on the frontline last year. Personal stories of struggle and pain whilst dealing with the chaos of the pandemic in full flow - but it was American. One of the things that came out of that podcast was the need that so many doctors and nurses had for psychiatric counselling for dealing with so much death. That is true of doctors and nurses in China, and the UK too, incidentally.
I think you already answered this pretty well. There are 2 competing theories - an actual global pandemic, or an actual global conspiracy (or a bit of both).
Yes - and you’re right to call me on it. I shouldn’t trivialise people’s suffering and death. There is good evidence that mental health has suffered, as you say, and domestic abuse cases are through the roof. What there is no evidence for (as far as I’m aware) is that there has been a large and sustained increase in deaths related to that. I’d be open to evidence if you have it.
I looked at evidence a few months back comparing Sweden to Norway, for example. Norway had a series of lockdowns, and Sweden didn’t. As far as I could tell from the research I did, there was no significant difference in mental health between Norway and Sweden over 2020.
There was. All graphs and stats show it. Check out the graphs at euromomo (the favourite source of Ivor Cummins) for details. Not only that, 2020 bucked an extremely long trend of falling mortality, was the largest rise in mortality since the creation of the NHS. These are not controversial findings - they are repeated across all the countries that got hit hard with Covid.
Whether I can do a good job of explaining that to a lay-person has no real effect on the reality of our situation. 2020 was extraordinary.
This gets to the heart of the question, and I suspect I might agree with a lot of your thinking here.
Yes - you could well be right here.
I disagree. I think that the Independent SAGE team are way ahead of the Barrington bods for actual, real-world, workable solutions. But we could argue that back and forth. I 100% agree with your suggestions about stamping down on industries that are damaging our collective health. Anything that increases our natural health and resilience to infection should be strongly promoted, as indeed should any drugs that show promise in treating the illness - ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, for example.
We can’t ditch the stats as there is a strong tendency among the covid sceptics to try and prove that there was no excess mortality in 2020, and that the whole thing is a “scamdemic”. I prefer to live in a world that acknowledges reality. As to your other points, I agree that there are a lof of important political discussions to be had around what is an appropriate response to our situation. I favour Indy SAGE, you favour Great Barrington. That is an important discussion.
Whatever the reality of how the virus came about (or whether there even is one), how dangerous it is and how many have actually died, it is undeniable that the response to the situation gets selected because it furthers some demographic’s agenda. Which demographic and which agenda is being furthered by the response are questions of the utmost importance. That is what I would prefer to focus on… But I don’t get to set the agenda for conversation anywhere (thank God) so I will chip in where I can.
Incidentally, did you see my thoughts on why some on the left (perhaps Chommers) are not wading into the covid debates?
Thanks for the reply, and for your thoughts.
Cheers
PP
I presume you’re referring to the thread on this topic that you previously referred me to (that I said that I hadn’t seen because in past weeks I haven’t been watching this site much).
There was much material there and I didn’t feel the energy to go through it.
So I would be very appreciative if you could do the effort for me: that is, repeat yourself in a nutshell here - regarding the silence of Chomsky and others - to save me having to work through stuff from a previous thread(s). But not just nutshell that (lefties’ silence), but also nutshell here any other factors you might care to.
Hiya
actually I was referring to this
I’ll happily try and summarise my points from the other thread. I’ll have a go next time I have a few mins.
Cheers bwana
PP
Whoops, oh yes, I did indeed see that.
Yes, you make a good point.
But it’s also puzzling because, What does it mean to support “the science”?
Why, for example, does MediaLens support SAGE science and not Barrington science?
Just one small correction: I don’t cherry-pick ‘facts’ which seem to support a preferred narrative. I treat all of them with steadfast scepticism, until they can be demonstrated to be true - which virtually none can in this time of the great global propaganda tsunami. That’s why I rarely cite any stats or ‘established facts’. Only time and the settling of dust will tell about that. At the moment, I’m flying only on my intuitive instruments, and on the testimony of my lying eyes.
I take dan’s testimony as a lonely bit of certified-sound stuff because I have long-established reasons for believing him to be honest, and telling a straight tale. And clearly he had a dreadful - and entirely real - experience. Otoh, his interpretations about what’s happening, either in his own hospital or more widely, are more open to quizzing. It’s been clear to me for years that dan too is susceptible to cultivating his own pet ideas. Who isn’t? And amongst the growing number of testimonies from frontline medical staff, there have been plenty who question the current dominant narrative quite comprehensively, death stats and all. That questioning frequently mentions a bemused and appalled sense that so many of their colleagues appear to have been swept away by the tsunami - and by an enhanced personal susceptibility to terror; an experience which many of us hiding out here at 5F can duplicate ruefully, regarding some former ship-mates of ours…
I’m entirely open to the idea that there’s a hectic superfluity of people dying in certain places; indeed it may be so (though clearly not in the area served by my local hospital; lying eyes/ears testimony at work there, trumps media reports). The questions are: why are excess numbers of people dying in some places, as some frontliners report, and of what? Interpretations of those questions may vary. Extreme caution is needed…
1 Like
Fair points bwana, and it’s true - you have been consistent from day 1, warning that it’s very difficult to separate out known facts from media narrative. I salute your integrity and consistency on those facts.
I guess the primary difference between you and I is that I, by pure chance, have access to several folk like Dan in different cities and even countries who are all telling me the same story. And, again by pure chance, I know folks in south london and leicester - both hard hit areas - who can tell me of their direct experience in those places, and the people directly connected to them who have died.
Perhaps that opens me up to being too gullible or trusting of the mainstream narrative.
So far what my own conversations with frontline staff, and my own experience of covid deaths in my close circle, have led me to is that it has been very bad in certain areas, and not so bad in other areas. This patchiness confirms my own attempts at mathematical modeling (which I have spared this board - I’m not totally heartless) that indicate the virus doesn’t spread just like the 'flu, but in a different way. That indicates to me that had the government taken it more seriously to begin with, and followed Indy SAGE for example, we would have had a much lighter ride of the whole thing.
Anyway. We are where we are. For whatever it’s worth I think there is likely to be one more big wave and then Covid will recede into the disease background of this country as you have been saying all along.
Cheers bwana. Keep up your sterling work on maintaining both your physical and intellectual immune systems. We have lots of other discussions to have before either one of us succumbs!
PP
Hi @rippon
so I can’t speak for ML, but I can tell you why I support Indy Sage vs Great Barrington science. The Indy Sage team are focused on finding new cases of illness, and quarantining them. With all the support they and their families need. They propose that these are community led efforts, using the local NHS (properly funded) and other community support groups to manage the financial, health, emotional and psychological costs of quarantining. Their aim is to aggressively control the spread of the virus through the population with minimal affect on those who are not infected.
The Great Barrington folk aim to try and protect a particular group of people (currently very ill-defined) and let the virus spread through the rest of the population unchecked. Every individual for themselves.
IS is a community driven effort to control the virus and protect the families of everyone who gets hit. GB is a laissez faire effort to let the virus spread, whilst hoping they can protect at least some of the vulnerable.
There are many reasons I support IS over GB, but the primary ones are that:
- I don’t think the GB one will work. It is too hard to try and protect an entire group of people like this, especially as we don’t have a good definition of who should even be in that group.
- Most of the cases that swamped the ICU in this country come from people who are not automatically in the “protected” category of the GB proposal. That means implementing GB fully would still have killed our NHS ICU capability and swamped our hospitals. In fact it would have been much worse than we saw, as the aim is to encourage people to get the virus and then get immunity. This would have been a complete disaster
- Even outside the ICU, if we had just let everyone not in the protected group go out and get sick at one time, the NHS would have completely collapsed to the point that the death toll in this country would have been ridiculous.
- Even now, it’s unclear if there are long term effects of surviving covid. It’s hugely irresponsible to actively encourage people to go out and get infected with a new disease when we don’t know what the long term effects are.
By contrast, the IS proposal:
- would have been run in each community, directed by local NHS experts and carried out by community volunteers.
- targets people who are likely to be infected with virus and isolates them, reducing the spread of the virus in the population
- would have made good use of local hotels, restaurants and other facilities to support people who need to isolate away from family or shared accommodation.
- had a strong emphasis on supporting those who were hit financially by quarantine, or who were suffering in other ways - psychologically and emotionally
- had an emphasis on keeping the NHS hospitals open for other business and avoiding the possibility that they got swamped with covid cases.
The difference between the two feels stark to me.
Cheers
PP
One last point here:
To summarise the ONS data that you have posted above, taken from my other post.
1 - 2020 showed an excess mortality much greater than anything in the last few years
2 - 2020 reversed a 50 year trend in which almost every year had a lower excess mortality than the year before (lower child mortality, longer life expectancy, etc etc.)
3 - The rise in mortality (i.e. how much it reversed the trend by) was the biggest since we created the NHS
4 - Unlike most years, the deaths that occurred were not evenly spread through the year. They happened in 2 or 3 peaks of a few weeks each time. This means that the impact on the NHS was such that it came close to overwhelm each time.
2020 was a horrendous year for the NHS and for mortality in the UK.