Tag: Ferguson

Neil Ferguson, China and a Fanatical Socialist Health Minister: The Untold Story of How Lockdowns Came to Italy and the West

An infection, even one as lethal as cancer, often begins with a single wound. Through this wound the pathogen enters the body by way of a single cell, where it pathologically replicates and corrupts those around it until eventually it consumes the entire host.

As goes infection, so goes totalitarianism.

And in 2020, totalitarianism found its wound in the free world by way of Lombardy, Italy. More specifically, by way of one Health Minister, Roberto Speranza, on whose order 50,000 Lombardy residents were placed under lockdown on February 21st 2020, the first lockdown in the modern Western world. Within weeks, lockdown had spread to cities across Italy, until the entire nation was placed on lockdown on March 9th.

By April 2020, more than half the world’s population – some 3.9 billion people – had been placed under lockdown.

These lockdowns were unprecedented in the Western world and weren’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan, China.

They failed to meaningfully slow the spread of the coronavirus and killed an estimated tens of thousands of young people in countries across the world, including Italy.

Worse yet, officials who led the response to Covid in several major countries have testified that Italy’s adoption of China’s lockdown policy was one of the most important events leading to their own imposition of lockdowns.

As White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx wrote in her bizarrely self-incriminating book:

[W]e worked simultaneously to develop the flatten-the-curve guidance I hoped to present to the Vice President at week’s end. Getting buy-in on the simple mitigation measures every American could take was just the first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions. We had to make these palatable to the administration by avoiding the obvious appearance of a full Italian lockdown. At the same time, we needed the measures to be effective at slowing the spread, which meant matching as closely as possible what Italy had done – a tall order.

Likewise, in the words of Imperial College Professor Neil Ferguson, architect of the wildly-inaccurate Covid models that instigated lockdowns across the free world:

It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.

Ferguson’s assessment is doubly ironic, because it was a study led in part by Ferguson and his team at Imperial College that purported to show Speranza’s lockdown of the town of Vo’, Italy, on February 22nd 2020 had been effective that led to the lockdown of all of Italy on March 9th. His study’s conclusion was, of course, bunk – we now have proof that the rate of Covid infection growth was in decline well before lockdowns began in many countries, including those in Lombardy and Vo’, Italy. Ferguson justified the lockdown of the United Kingdom based on the lockdown of Italy, which had in turn been justified with a false study led in part by Ferguson himself.

Thus, it’s of paramount importance that we understand what led to Speranza’s decision to order those initial lockdowns in Lombardy and Vo’, Italy.

In October 2020, Speranza published a book titled Why We Will Heal: From the Hardest Days to a New Idea of Health. Shortly after being published, the book was hastily pulled from stores. The stated reason was that Italy was experiencing a second wave of Covid, but upon reading the book it’s abundantly clear that Speranza, who’d signed the first lockdown orders in the Western world, betrays an embarrassing lack of concern about Covid itself and a much greater concern for how the response could be used to implement far-Left political reforms across Italy. As he states in one telling passage:

I am convinced that we have a unique opportunity to entrench a new idea of ​​the Left… I believe that, after so many years going against the wind, there is a possibility of reconstructing a cultural hegemony on a new basis.

Likewise, Speranza says that a primary lesson of Covid is that the WHO must be strengthened, and he requested that the United States be prevented from leaving the WHO.

In mid-July I wrote a letter to Jens Spahn, the German Health Minister and President of the Council of Health Ministers, and to Stella Kyriakides, asking for an initiative at European level to prevent the United States from leaving WHO, currently scheduled for July 2nd 2021. WHO is fundamental: it must be defended, improved, strengthened, reformed starting from the principles of transparency and autonomy.

By contrast, throughout the 229-page book, Speranza never once expresses any criticism of China, going only so far as to acknowledge China has “a very different cultural, political and institutional model”, while advocating closer ties with China.

China is a great protagonist of the time we live in and I am convinced that an important political space is opening up for Europe, as a hinge between the new Asian power and the United States.

Speranza is a leader in Italy’s newly-formed political party Article One, founded by former Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, the first known former member of a Communist Party to become Prime Minister of a NATO country. D’Alema now serves as honorary president of the Silk Road Cities Alliance, a Chinese state organisation.

Speranza makes clear that he was well aware, at the time he ordered the free world’s first lockdown in Lombardy, Italy, that he was copying a policy only China had done, and that it would be a restriction of citizens’ fundamental constitutional rights.

The progression of infections in the Lodi area and also in Veneto requires us to ‘close’ areas that are not small, necessarily preventing over 50,000 people from entering and leaving the confines of their area of residence. This is a measure with worrying implications for the economic and social fabric, but also with a terrible symbolic impact. Restricting citizens’ freedom of movement, sending the army to check that closures are respected. Could the protection of the right to health, recognised by Article 32 of the Constitution, lead us to restrict other fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution? And then, will this type of intervention really work, to stop the contagion? No other Western country has yet experienced this virus and the management strategies it requires. The only precedent we can look to is China, with a very different cultural, political and institutional model from ours. In Italy, everyone has been saying for weeks, it would be impossible to do what China has done. But what if it were necessary?

Prior to ordering the Western world’s first lockdowns, Speranza played a role in Italy as an early Covid alarmist similar to that played in the United States by Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger – the Mandarin-fluent intelligence operative who, beginning in January 2020, unilaterally ratcheted up alarm in the White House, advocated sweeping mandates based on his own sources in China, and appointed Deborah Birx to orchestrate lockdowns across the United States.

Like Pottinger, who organised the first White House meetings on the coronavirus in mid-January 2020, Speranza organised Italy’s first coronavirus task force meetings around that same time – prior to there being any confirmed cases in the Western world. Like Pottinger’s meetings, Speranza’s coronavirus meetings were held on a daily basis. And, like Pottinger, Speranza says that he’d been inspired to do so by the response he saw in China.

Giovanna Botteri keeps the Italian public informed. His updates from Beijing are frequent and punctual. Tens of seconds of news coverage, which however convey a surreal situation. Hospitals stormed, new temporary health facilities organised in a few weeks, temperature checks in every corner of the country. And then the lockdown and quarantine: huge cities, with millions of inhabitants, closed with a total block of activities and a ban on leaving the house. I look at those images and I think that in the West it would not be possible to manage a crisis in this way. But we can’t just hope it won’t be necessary…

And it is with this idea that on January 12th I set up for the first time the task force for the Coronavirus. I immediately consult the main Italian scientists, aware of the privilege of being able to do so. Research, mathematics, for me, are a fundamental part of the strength of humanity. As a staunch rationalist, I have a true faith in science… The task force will meet, in my presence, every day at 9am, sometimes earlier, without exception, until the Technical Scientific Committee (CTS) becomes operational.

Like Pottinger, at the end of January 2020, Speranza began ratcheting up alarm about the coronavirus in Italy’s highest halls of political power.

On January 29th, for the first time, I tell the Parliament that the country must be united in this game. There is no longer a majority or opposition. There are the Italians, there is a huge problem that threatens them and there are the institutions that have to defend their citizens. At the end of my report to Parliament, I take the phone and personally call the three leaders of the opposition: Silvio Berlusconi, Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini.

Around that same time, Speranza also began ratcheting up alarm within the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

Even if the ECDC considers the risk of the spread of the virus in Europe to be low, after some informal and personal solicitations to European Commissioner Stella Kyriakides and the Minister of Health of Croatia – who holds the rotating presidency of the EU – I decide to formally request, in the name of the Italian Government, the convening of the European Council of all health ministers…

But my feeling is that our cohesion is defective, that the level of alert on the virus is too low and the functioning mechanisms of common institutions are too weak to be activated effectively in an emergency. In these hours an urgent meeting of the ministers of health is needed.

The next day, January 30th 2020, Prime Minister Conte announced Italy’s first two confirmed Covid cases and immediately declared a state of emergency, “allowing the Government to cut through red tape quickly if needed”.

When Speranza ordered the lockdown of Lombardy, he conveyed in a press conference that he knew he was taking an action of consequence not only for Italy, but for the entire world.

It seems to me a fairly clear fact, the measures implemented by Italy are at the highest level in Europe, but probably also globally.

This aligns with an anonymous stock tip posted on January 30th 2020, the same day Italy’s first cases were confirmed, from someone who said they had friends and family at the CDC and WHO and that the WHO was planning to begin recreating China’s response across the Western world, first by locking down Italian cities.

[T]he WHO is already talking about how ‘problematic’ modeling the Chinese response in Western countries is going to be, and the first country they want to try it out in is Italy. If it begins a large outbreak in a major Italian city they want to work through the Italian authorities and world health organisations to begin locking down Italian cities in a vain attempt to slow down the spread at least until they can develop and distribute vaccines, which btw is where you need to start investing.

Despite the fact that lockdowns had no precedent in the Western world, this tip proved to be a near-perfect foretelling of subsequent events.

Indeed, Speranza’s coronavirus task force had already commissioned a study on possible scenarios for the progression of Covid. This study, using China’s data, was provided to Italy’s Technical-Scientific Committee on the coronavirus on February 12th 2020, having been led by Stefano Merler at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK).

The FBK and Merler were cited positively by Bill Gates, second-largest funder of the WHO, at the World Economic Forum in 2017 after Merler and FBK worked with Gates on the response to Ebola. The fact that Merler’s study even existed was kept confidential and not publicly disclosed until months later. For this reason, it was dubbed the ‘secret study’ by Italy’s opposition parties.

Merler’s ‘secret study’ has never been publicly released, but Merler published two additional journal articles in 2020 with several Chinese co-authors and funding from the Chinese Government, each purporting to show the effectiveness of lockdowns and non-pharmaceutical interventions against the coronavirus in China. The first of Merler’s journal articles with Chinese co-authors, funded in part by the Chinese Government, appeared in April 2020 and claimed to show that “social distancing alone, as implemented in China during the outbreak, is sufficient to control COVID-19”, based on data provided by China from Wuhan. The second of Merler’s journal articles with Chinese co-authors, funded in part by the Chinese Government, appeared in July 2020 and claimed to show that NPIs had been effective in controlling the spread of the coronavirus in Chinese cities outside Wuhan, again based on data provided by China.

A reasonable person would likely recognise that the inputs from China on which Merler based the conclusions in his journal articles, coming from a totalitarian regime with a well-known history of fabrication, were lies.

Whether motivated by directed reasoning, funding, or something worse, Stefano Merler, the lead author of the unreleased ‘secret study’ based on China’s data which led to the free world’s first lockdown in Lombardy, Italy, was effectively running a propaganda laundering operation on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party throughout 2020.

Though Merler’s secret study has never been publicly released, it was later shared privately with la Repubblica, Italy’s center-Left newspaper of record. La Repubblica wrote one article about the study, but in my life I’ve never seen a mainstream article so thoroughly memory holed. Not only does the original link to the article not work, but the web archives don’t work either, and the article doesn’t appear on Google. Fortunately, one website copied the article’s text.

Covid must really be some virus, seeing as it prevented Italy’s newspaper of record from upholding basic standards of online record retention for the one article it wrote on a key Government study shared with it privately. Of course, this is in keeping with a pattern of secrecy and outright dishonesty that we’ve seen from governments across the Western world since the coronavirus appeared.

In fact, in parallel with Merler’s secret study, there was also a more detailed ‘secret plan’, specifically titled the “Operational Plan of Preparation and Response to Different Scenarios of Possible Development of a 2019-nCov Epidemic”, no details of which have ever been released. In December 2020, the opposition party went to court to compel release of the secret Operational Plan, but Speranza still refused to release it on the grounds that it was not a “formally approved pandemic plan”.

Speranza’s refusal to release the secret Operational Plan is interesting, because in early 2020 the Government of Germany likewise commissioned a confidential operational plan, later obtained through a series of whistleblower leaks and FOIA requests, “based on the scientific findings of expert teams from the University of Bonn/University of Nottingham Ningbo China”, at least one of whom had no background in infectious disease or epidemiology, containing a “catalogue of measures” to be implemented by Germany’s CDC. It outlined, in line-item detail, the steps to implement lockdowns, mass testing and quarantine facilities, among other draconian measures. The paper specifically suggested “appeals to the public spirit” including the slogan “together apart”. Of the 210 pages of FOIAed emails leading up to the publication of the German operational plan, 118 were blacked out entirely. The emails contain frequent discussion of China, but nearly all these references are redacted. The stated reason: “May have adverse effects on international relations.”

Of course, because Mr. Speranza has decided that it is not in the interest of the Italian people to know the contents of Italy’s secret Operational Plan, we have no way of knowing whether it resembles Germany’s secret operational plan based on the findings of China lobbyists containing specific line-item instructions on implementing lockdowns, mass testing, quarantine facilities and appeals to the public spirit.

Key findings:

1. Neil Ferguson justified the lockdown of the United Kingdom based on the lockdown of Italy, which had in turn been justified with a false study led in part by Ferguson himself claiming to show that the lockdown of the town of Vo’, Italy was successful.
2. Prior to ordering the free world’s first lockdown in Lombardy, and prior to any Covid cases being confirmed, Roberto Speranza played a role in Italy as an early Covid alarmist similar to that played in the White House by Matt Pottinger, calling Italy’s first daily meetings on the coronavirus and ratcheting up alarm in Parliament and the ECDC.
3. Speranza was well aware, at the time he ordered the free world’s first lockdown in Lombardy, that he was copying a policy only China had ever done and that it would restrict his citizens’ fundamental rights.
4. Throughout his book, which was hastily pulled from stores, Speranza never once criticises China, while he expresses a strong desire for the response to Covid to bring about far-Left reforms across Italy and a strengthening of the WHO.
5. Speranza’s committee commissioned a secret study on possible Covid scenarios which was produced by Stefano Merler at FBK, an organisation with ties to the Gates Foundation, the WHO’s second-largest funder. This secret study led to the lockdown of Lombardy.
6. Stefano Merler, lead author of the secret study commissioned by Speranza’a committee, was effectively running a propaganda laundering operation for the CCP throughout 2020, publishing multiple articles with several Chinese co-authors and funding from the Chinese Government purporting to show lockdowns and NPIs in China succeeded in controlling the virus, using inputs that a reasonable person would likely recognise as lies.
7. In parallel with the secret study produced by Merler, there was also a more detailed secret Operational Plan which Speranza refused to produce even when formally requested in court.

Speranza comes across as a far more charismatic person in his book than the eerily totalitarian Deborah Birx in her weird confession of a memoir. He often crosses party lines, fondly recalling his first meeting with former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi:

After exchanging some pleasantries, the former Prime Minister concluded with a smile: “You have such a clean face, like a good boy, but what are you doing with these Communists? Come with us!”

Speranza expresses an earnest desire for far-Left policy reforms, and in multiple places he expresses fond memories working as a young International Socialist:

My first real political commitment, in the Youth Left, was largely dedicated to European and international politics. It makes me smile that today Enzo Amendola is sitting with me in the Council of Ministers as Minister for European Affairs. He is a few years older than me and we have worked together for years on international issues, he as head of the International Young Socialists, I in Italy in the youth Left, up to becoming national president, but always with a mind to what was happening in the world…

I was part of the Socialist International and in that trip I really breathed, in the most popular and human way, the concept of international solidarity. The one from below, that of the boys of my generation, with little budget and a lot of faith in the world. From this point of view I believe I belong to one privileged generation, which was already a European community: boys with enormous backpacks on their shoulders who met, anywhere on the continent, and recognised each other.

It’s possible that Speranza gradually got tangled up in a network of Chinese-style totalitarianism out of an overabundance of zeal and affinity for the traditional, egalitarian propaganda of socialism. This was more common in the Soviet era when the dystopian realities of communism were less well known, but all you have to do is talk to a young person in a liberal city bar to know that the original propaganda of communism still goes a long way on the far Left.

Speranza concludes his book with an epilogue that Karl Marx himself would be proud of, and which I’ve reproduced in full below. As a reminder, this is supposed to be a book about a response to a pandemic. I’ll let it speak for itself.

In the course of these pages I have repeatedly used two terms that are essential to me such as “equality” and “rights.” And they served to chart the course in the storm, like the stars for sailors. Hard times are not those in which values and principles have to be left aside. They are the ones you need.

We have seen how politics is daily management, daily choices, daily effort. But it is also an exciting personal and collective story and a leap towards the future. For this reason I believe that another duty we have towards ourselves and towards the country, another way not to waste the hard lessons of these months and to better face the challenges that await us, is to embrace a political wind that has been needed for a long time.

I am convinced that we have a unique opportunity to entrench a new idea of the Left, based on a commitment that today everyone recognises is needed: to defend and relaunch fundamental public goods, starting from the protection of health, the value of education and the defence of the environment. We have experienced unbridled individualism, we have undergone its economic and social translation: neoliberalism as well so unbridled. We believed in the propaganda that a world organised according to these principles would produce wealth and well-being for all. For over thirty years this ideology has been hegemonic in the conscience of the Western world: it has not only oriented the right, but has also significantly influenced the left, changing it little by little.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ‘end of history’, all over the world the big parties of the Left have had to accelerate the path they were taking, to update their vision of society. It was a just and necessary development: the world is changing and politics must include the new times. In the post-Cold War period, the goal was to definitively free the progressive and democratic camp from the anti-democratic and illiberal impulses that had characterized real socialism. In truth, the social democracies in Europe, and then the Italian Communist Party itself, had already for years made a pragmatic path of breaking with the Soviet experience.

The ideological revision was legitimate. Leaving the field open to a model of civil and political coexistence determined by the market without rules, on the other hand, was a mistake. Individualism has weakened social networks and fragmented representation. It was thought that the state was no longer needed, that it should be reduced to a minimum. That all his interference was a nuisance because ­society and the economy were able to regulate themselves. They just had to be left ‘free’.

And so the season of extracting resources began at the expense of social equity. The season of cuts in public spending, of the deconstruction of the two great pillars of welfare: health and education. With very rare exceptions, not only in Italy, the national health services have become weaker and less capable there to respond to people’s needs. And within the downsizing of the welfare state, inequalities have exploded. The rich always get more healthy and poor always get more sick.

We have seen the risks taken when a health, economic and social system weakened by decades of wrong choices found itself facing a real emergency.

The months of Covid, however, have accelerated a rethinking process of which some first signs were already visible. We have rediscovered how important fundamental public goods are, starting with the protection of health. For the first time, after many years, the Left is not going against the wind. We have been in the long phase in which history seemed to go in the direction of neoliberal individualism, and in our going against the wind, looking for the route, fighting against solutions that were a bit messy and that had little to do with values of the left, in ­Italy we have experienced a painful split in the main centre-Left party. Today things are changing and an idea of the Left can be reaffirmed starting from fundamental public goods and a new role of the state.

During the crisis, people have realised that there is a need for someone to protect and defend their life, their personal safety. Who can guarantee these rights to every citizen? Who can offer the certainty that the protection of the right to health does not depend on the economic and social conditions of each person at a given moment of his or her existence?

The market cannot do it alone. In the face of a ­life that is put at risk, its rules are not enough, nor is individual initiative enough. Insurance is not enough against a virus that kills, nor is a credit card. It is illusory, we have seen it, to think of saving oneself. There is need for a superordinate protection of fundamental rights, which only public institutions can guarantee. We need a great National Health Service, rooted and organised, capable of taking care of everyone and leaving no one behind. To stop the virus, and to re-establish conditions in which nothing that has happened to us can be repeated, it is essential to cure everyone. And doing it isn’t just convenient: it’s right.

People have understood this. And this awareness has cleared up a very fertile political ground for the Left. As long as it puts the defence of fundamental public goods and work at the center of its agenda. As long as it stops imitating the right and its policies and archives, the season of subordination to neoliberalism.

I believe that, after so many years against the wind, there is a new possibility of reconstructing a cultural hegemony on a new basis. Many trends that we see affirming are going in the same direction, from the beautiful environmentalist events inspired by the young Greta to the spontaneous Italian squares of the ‘Sardinians’. They are shouting the same thing at us: there are fundamental public goods that must be defended and protected. And one can no longer stand by and watch. It is time for a new great collective effort.

Covid has changed everything, it has deeply affected individual lives and social coexistence. It is not possible that everything changes and the political forces remain as they are. We need to question ourselves. With courage.

I and the women and men who shared the Article One experience with me are available to do so immediately. The Right is very strong. It cannot be underestimated. It has an extraordinary ability to interpret a feeling of anxiety and insecurity widespread in our society, especially in the weaker segments, where there are fewer certainties and more fears. The response from the Right speaks easy and direct language. It identifies in the different, in the other (perhaps with a darker skin colour), a responsible enemy and raises the flag of national identity as a wall, a fence, with the illusion of leaving danger out.

We must cultivate a new great field that starts from the defence of the values of our Constitution, of work and of fundamental public goods. This political area, beyond the acronyms existing today, which all seem quite obsolete to me, must try to hold together the forces that support our Government today. Now it may seem like a utopia, but I believe that the road is already marked and it is the right one. A new dichotomy will ensue. It is necessary, on this basis, to reestablish the democratic and progressive field. This too is a demanding and fascinating challenge.

Workers of the world, unite.

Source: Michael P. Senger – Daily Sceptic

Don’t believe the media’s fake post-mortem, the ‘PANDEMIC’ was NOT a mistake

As the mainstream media power down the pandemic narrative and engage war mode, there’s still time for one last autopsy – the media’s post mortem of the pandemic itself.

And, in a beautifully fitting piece of poetic irony, COVID’s autopsy will be inaccurate and fitted to a foregone conclusion.

This week has seen the UK’s SAGE group discontinuing their regular monthly meetings, whilst admitting their predictions were “at variance with reality”.

The media are discussing the “bad data” which was used to build the Imperial College models that called for a lockdown.

An Imperial College report shows Covid modelling that took the UK into the first lockdown in March 2020 was based on inaccurate data.

Evidence Based Medicine Professor Carl Heneghan: “Fundamentally something has to change because this is inexcusable.”@JuliaHB1 | @carlheneghan pic.twitter.com/1RFCDPl8Np

— talkRADIO (@talkRADIO) February 28, 2022

A Telegraph article quotes Prof Mark Woolhouse, who claims in his recent book that “lockdowns had surprisingly little effect”,

and that

“Anyone who supported lockdown on the basis of the half-million figure was misled” but still lays the blame at the feet of incompetence, never malice.

This is all still part of the story. The post-event navel-gazing. We’ve seen it before.

They said 9/11 was the result of a “failure of imagination”.

The Iraq War was supposedly the result of “bad intelligence”.

Both outright, provable lies. A protective rear-guard for the establishment narrative.

The agonising over “mistakes” and promising to “do better next time” are all still part of the theatre, buttressing the fake story against a more brutal reality – “COVID”, as it was sold to us, never really existed.

The pandemic was not organic. Lockdowns were not the result of panic.

We have all read the facts.

The data was fudged, the tests were useless, the statistics artificially inflated, and many deaths were intentionally caused through institutionalized medical negligence. Hospitals received funding bonuses as payoffs.

None of that had anything to do with bad data, or pessimistic models. They did it all on purpose, all of it.

Every life lost, every business destroyed, every penny wasted, every child traumatised. Every moment of anxiety and fear – every single one – entirely intentional.

They ruined lives and countries and the global economy as a deliberate policy on the back of a vast web of lies, and last act of the deception will be to claim it was a “mistake”.

Meanwhile, the same agenda that masked itself behind this “mistake” – mass poverty, food and energy shortages, censorship and social control – is creeping ever closer in a new guise: War.

It’s all the same, no matter what they’re saying, no matter what they’re pretending to care about, what they actually want never changes.

“COVID” cost every single one of us something – safety, money, trust, health, friends, family – but it gave us something too – A peek behind the curtain.

In their ambition, the establishment exposed their true face.

They think if they stop talking about the “great reset”, the “new normal” or “building back better” for a few months we’ll forget. But we won’t.

They told us, clearly, who they were and what they intended, and now they’re going to pretend they didn’t mean it.

Don’t believe it. Not for a second.

Source: Kit Knightly – Off-Guardian

Two Strategic Errors in Facing COVID-19

Western countries succumbed to panic in the face of the COVID-19 epidemic.

Turning irrational, they committed two strategic errors: confining their healthy population at the risk of destroying their economy, and betting everything on MRA vaccines to the detriment of health care, or even at the risk of causing particular disorders due to this new vaccine technique.

Communication: COVID-19 and war

COVID-19 is a viral disease causing the death, in the worst case, of 0.001% of the population. The average age of death from COVID-19 in developed states is about 80 years, with a median age of about 83 years.

In comparison, countries at war experience an additional mortality, due to war, that is 5 to 8 times higher, but mainly affects males aged 18 to 30. To this must be added emigration of up to 50.00% of the population.

The Covid epidemic and war are therefore two situations that are out of all proportion, despite the apocalyptic rhetoric that confuses them [1]. Moreover, the response of those who have ventured to make this dramatic comparison has not borrowed anything, in terms of mobilisation, from those of war situations. At most, a mobile military hospital was required to take a few photos of uniforms in action. Its only real effect was to panic the population and thus deprive it of its critical spirit.

Origin of the communication error

This comparison was made on the basis of erroneous information.

A British statistician, whose mathematical models had been used to justify the European hospital reduction policy, Neil Ferguson, had indeed predicted more than half a million deaths in his own country and as many in France.

This scientist was unaware that a virus is a living being that does not seek to kill its hosts, but to inhabit them like a parasite.

If it kills the man it has infected, it dies with him. This is why all viral epidemics are at first very deadly, and then less and less so as the virus varies and adapts to humans. It is therefore completely ridiculous to extrapolate its lethality from the devastation it causes in the first weeks of the epidemic.

Political leaders are not connoisseurs of everything. They must have a general culture that enables them to distinguish the quality of their experts in different fields.

Neil Ferguson is one of those scientists who demonstrate what is asked of them, not those who seek to understand unexplained phenomena.

His curriculum vitae is just a long succession of errors commissioned by politicians and denied by the facts [2].

He was eventually dismissed from the British Cobra Council (Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms), but one of his disciples, Simon Cauchemez of the Pasteur Institute, still sits on the French Scientific Council.

First strategic error: lockdown, a variable for adjusting health policies

Faced with the scourge of Covid, developed States have reacted by enacting border closures, curfews, administrative closures of companies, and even generalized lockdown of the population.

This was a first in history: never before had generalised lockdown – i.e. confinement of healthy populations – been used to combat an epidemic.

This political measure is very costly from an educational, psychological, medical, social and economic point of view. Its effectiveness is limited to interrupting the spread of the disease in healthy families during containment at the cost of its dissemination in families where a person is already infected.

When the confinement is lifted, the spread of the virus immediately resumes in healthy families.

As all developed States have progressively reduced their hospital capacities since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, most governments have adopted containment measures, not to control disease – which they cannot – but to prevent overcrowding in their hospitals.

In other words, in order to continue their system of managing public health services, governments consider containment as the only possible adjustment variable. Yet the price of these confinements is much higher than more expensive hospital management.

Above all, the ageing of the population in developed States makes it foreseeable that the same crisis of hospital congestion will occur every three to four years, the usual cycle of epidemics of all kinds.

In practice, the use of containment condemns the countries concerned to resort to it more and more often, during epidemics of Covid, influenza or many other deadly diseases.

A comparative study by Stanford University, published on January 12, 2021, shows that countries that have practised widespread plant closures, curfews and containment have not ultimately influenced the spread of the disease, which they have only delayed, compared to countries that have respected the freedom of their citizens [3].

Contrary to popular belief, the choice was not between hospital overcrowding or containment, but between mobilizing or even requisitioning private clinics and containment.

All developed countries have a private health care system that is largely capable of dealing with the overflow of patients.

Origin of the strategic error

The source behind the lockdown is CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations).

This association was created in Davos on the occasion of the 2015 World Economic Forum. It is headed by Dr Richard J. Hatchett. You will not find his biography on Wikipedia or even on the CEPI website. He had it removed.

This man was the designer of the Healthy Person Containment for the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld [4]. In 2005, this member of President George W. Bush’s National Security Council was tasked with adapting US military procedures to the civilian population as part of a plan to militarise US society. Since IMs stationed abroad were instructed to confine themselves to their bases in the event of a biological terrorist attack against them, he advocated confining the entire civilian population to their homes in the event of a biological attack on US soil. This military plan was unanimously rejected by US doctors, led by Professor Donald Henderson of Johns Hopkins University. They stressed that doctors had never confined healthy populations before.

Professor Richard J. Hatchett was the first to draw a comparison between the COVID-19 epidemic and a war, in an interview on Channel 4 a few days before President Macron.

His first CEPI donation, of course, was to Imperial College London. The director of this venerable institution is not British, but American, Alice Gast. In addition to being a director of the transnational oil company Chevron, she worked with Dr Richard J. Hatchett in the United States to mobilise scientists against terrorism. She supported propaganda work to discredit what I had written about the September 11th attacks.

In addition, one of the most famous professors at Imperial College is Neil Ferguson, the author of the fairy-tale curves projecting the spread of the epidemic.

Second strategic mistake: the exclusive focus of research on vaccines

Faced with this new epidemic, doctors found themselves without treatment. Western governments immediately directed medical research towards the discovery of appropriate vaccines.

In view of the sums involved, they directed all budgets towards genetic vaccines and closed research into pathology and care.

The use of the RNA-based vaccine technique, chosen by Moderna/NIAID, Pfizer/BioNTech/FosunPharma and CureVac, is not expected to involve classical side effects, but it is not without danger.

Until now, this technique has been considered with great caution because it affects the genetic make-up of patients. This is why, in the absence of sufficient studies, these companies have demanded that their state clients relieve them of any legal liability.

Doctors who try to practise their art by treating their patients according to the Hippocratic oath have been prosecuted by their disciplinary bodies. The treatments they have implemented have been ridiculed, even banned, instead of being evaluated.

This is the second strategic error.

Western doctors, who, with rare exceptions, have never been confronted with the demands of war and disaster medicine, sometimes panicked.

At the beginning of the epidemic, some did nothing at the first symptoms, waiting for the appearance of a cytokinic storm, of a brutal inflammation, to plunge their patients into an artificial coma.

As a result, it was more often inappropriate care than the disease that killed the first patients. The disastrous results of some hospitals compared to others in the same region bear witness to this, despite the fraternal ban on criticism of incompetent doctors.

The gigantic budgets allocated to vaccines make it necessary not to discover a treatment without risking the bankruptcy of multinational pharmaceutical companies.

This is why all research in this field has been subjected to strict censorship. Yet a cocktail of blood-liquefying, immune-stimulating, antiviral and anti-inflammatory drugs is being tested in Asia, which treats almost all patients if administered at the first sign of symptoms.

Similarly, in Venezuela, the medical and pharmacological authority has approved a drug, Carvativir, which, according to the authority, treats almost all patients if administered at the first sign of symptoms [5].

As I am not competent in this area, I will not comment on these treatments, but it is frightening that Western doctors are not informed about them and have not had the opportunity to evaluate them.

The Pasteur Institute of Lille and the company APTEEUS, for their part, in September 2020, identified a drug that had fallen into disuse as preventing the replication of the virus. They were careful not to advertise it so as not to have to face the rivalry of the vaccine industry. Their experiments are now coming to an end. The manufacture of this drug, originally a suppository for children, has resumed in France so that it could be advertised soon [6].

Moreover, censorship of non-Western medicines is not only unacceptable because it is detrimental to human health, but also because it is carried out by unelected powers (Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.).

The problem here is not whether these treatments are effective or not, but to free up research so that it can study these molecules in order to reject, approve or improve them.

Origin of the second strategic mistake

Incidentally, let us observe that there is a strategic contradiction between slowing down contamination through the practice of confining healthy people and accelerating it through the generalisation of live or inactivated vaccines.

However, this remark is not valid in the case of RNA vaccines, which are destined to become predominant in the West.

The second strategic error is the result of group thinking.

Politicians imagine that only technical progress will provide solutions to problems that cannot be solved. Thus, if vaccines can be discovered using a new technique based not on viruses but on “messenger RNA”, the epidemic should be defeated. It no longer occurs to anyone that we can treat the Covid and do without heavy investment.

This is the ideology of the World Economic Forum in Davos and the CEPI. It is therefore in the order of things that governments do not react when transnationals censor the work of Asian or Venezuelan doctors, blocking the freedom of scientific research.

Sources:

[1] « Seconde allocution d’Emmanuel Macron sur l’épidémie », par Emmanuel Macron, Réseau Voltaire, 16 mars 2020.

[2] “Covid-19: Neil Ferguson, the Liberal Lyssenko”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 20 April 2020.

[3] «Empirical assessment of mandatory stay-at-home and business closure effects on the spread of Covid-19», Eran Bendavid, Christopher Oh, Jay Bhattacharya, John P.A. Ioannidis, University of Stanford, January 12, 2021.

[4] “Covid-19 and The Red Dawn Emails”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 28 April 2020.

[5] “Venezuela reportedly found drug against Covid-19”, “Google, Facebook and Twitter black out information on Carvativir”, Voltaire Network, 26 and 28 January 2021.

[6] «La recherche sur la COVID-19 : l’Institut Pasteur de Lille mobilisé face à la pandémie», Institut Pasteur de Lille, mise à jour du 26 janvier 2021.

Source: Thierry Meyssan – Voltairenet [FR]

Header: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Triumph of Death (detail), c. 1562, Museo del Prado, Madrid

Note:

We are not in the Middle Ages anymore but The Triumph of Death by Flemish Renaissance master Pieter Bruegel the Elder with a very deadly swing shows how the Black Death could look like in an average European town.

OK, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but an army of skeletons wreaking havoc across a blackened, desolate landscape makes a huge impression to this day.

Everything is dead, even the trees and the fish in a pond. This painting depicts people of all social backgrounds, from peasants and soldiers to nobles as well as a king and a cardinal. Death takes them all indiscriminately.

COVID-19 Scamdemic – Part 2

In Part-1 we defined the UK State and looked at the driving forces behind its lockdown response to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO’s) declared COVID 19 “global” pandemic.

Please read Part-1 first to appreciate the context of this article.

It appears that COVID-19 has been exploited to bring about a new global economic, social, cultural and political paradigm.

Encapsulated as The Great Reset, this affords a technocratic parasite class, often wrongly referred to as the elite, centralised global control of all resources, including all human resources.

Though influential, the UK State is just one national component of this global agenda. In order to prepare us for global technocracy, which will be a dictatorship, we need to become more accustomed to obeying orders without question.

Consequently the Lockdown response has been characterised by conflicting, ever shifting advice, both to condition people to arbitrary diktat and psychologically unbalance the public to better facilitate behaviour change.

We will cover a lot of ground in this article and I should warn you, it does not make comfortable reading. But please, if you have the time, grab yourself a coffee and we’ll discuss these important issues.

THE UK STATE & COVID 19 BEHAVIOUR CHANGE

Population wide behaviour change techniques were promoted in the UK Cabinet Office’s 2010 document Mindspace: Influencing Behaviour Through Public Policy. Behaviour change (modification) has been widely adopted by the UK State as a means of controlling the populace.

So successful was the subsequent “nudge unit” that the UK State later privatized it, forming the Behavioural Insights Team.

This enabled them to make a profit by selling their behaviour change expertise to other States, similarly seeking to control their own people.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lead authors of the seminal MINDSPACE document included representatives from Imperial College, whose wildly inaccurate COVID 19 computer models underpinned lockdown policies, on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Rand corporation, a US military industrialist complex think tank who former UK Chancellor Denis Healey described as “the leading think-tank for Pentagon.”

The MINDSPACE authors state:

Approaches based on ‘changing contexts’ – the environment within which we make decisions and respond to cues – have the potential to bring about significant changes in behaviour […] Our behaviour is greatly influenced by what our attention is drawn to…..People are more likely to register stimuli that are novel (messages in flashing lights), accessible (items on sale next to checkouts) and simple (a snappy slogan) […] We find losses more salient than gains, we react differently when identical information is framed in terms of one or the other (as a 20% chance of survival or an 80% chance of death) […] This shifts the focus of attention away from facts and information, and towards altering the context within which people act […] Behavioural approaches embody a line of thinking that moves from the idea of an autonomous individual, making rational decisions, to a ‘situated’ decision-maker, much of whose behaviour is automatic and influenced by their ‘choice environment’. This raises the question: who decides on this choice environment?

In response to the novel coronavirus, the UK State has defined our choice environment. It is the environment that best suits its policy objectives. One created by exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic in order to prepare all of us for The Great Reset.

This behavioural change approach avoids the need to make convincing arguments with facts and information. This could risk potential challenge. Evidence-based debate is not welcome, and not part of behaviour change.

Better to target the population with fear inducing propaganda, censor any dissent, and frame public opinion within an altered context. Thus moving the people away from being autonomous individuals, who make rational decisions, towards situated decision makers controlled by their choice environment.

With the real risks of COVID-19 well known, on March 19th 2020, just over a week after the WHO’s declaration of a global pandemic, both Public Health England (PHE) and the UK government Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) agreed that COVID-19 was not a High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID.) They downgraded it due to low overall mortality rates.

The UK State knew that COVID 19 was unlikely to kill sufficient numbers to justify the massive re-engineering of society and economic destruction required to bring about The Great Reset.

Therefore, it resorted to coercion, statistical manipulation and propaganda to convince the people be terrified of the relatively low level COVID-19 risks.

With the support of the ever obedient mainstream media (MSM,) who have been directly funded by the UK government throughout the crisis, the UK State turned to its behavioural change experts. They included the Scientific Pandemic Influenza group on Behaviour (SPI-B for short.)

Spi-B’s role, during the crisis, has been to advise the State how to use behavioural change techniques to convince the people to obey its orders without question.

Three days after COVID 19 was downgraded from an HCID, Spi-B recommended the following (Bracketed information added):

1. Use the media (MSM) to increase sense of personal threat.

2. Use the media (MSM) to increase sense of responsibility to others.

3. Consider use of social disapproval (via the MSM) for failure to comply.

A free and independent media could not be “used” in this fashion to scare people without cause. Only a controlled MSM propaganda machine can possibly achieve this. The convincing myth that the western MSM is a free and independent media is one of the greatest propaganda coups in history.

Spi-B don’t believe that anyone who disagrees, and subsequently refuses to comply, with the UK State’s tranche of Lockdown policies, has any legitimate concerns. Rather they call them complacent.

To ensure that resulting non compliance doesn’t take hold, those who do stand against the tyranny of the common interest, are to be marginalised by subjecting them to the social disapproval of the terrified majority. Spi-B recommended:

Guidance now needs to be reformulated to be behaviourally specific […] The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging […] Messaging needs to emphasise and explain the duty to protect others […] Consideration should be given to use of social disapproval.

LED BY NOTHING

Thanks to the behaviour change efforts of the UK State and its MSM, if you scrutinise the official COVID-19 statistics, social disapproval, alleging that you don’t care about people dying, is heaped upon you. This is nonsense, but effective. Not because it stops criticism, but because it frames the objections as the acts of callous monsters.

Hence, the MSM’s reliance upon hard-hitting emotional messaging.

Early in the crisis, an example of the hard hitting emotional message came in the form of MSM stories about NHS staff who had all supposedly died from COVID-19. In any rational society it would go without saying that, of course, these people’s deaths were a tragedy.

Analysis from the Health Service Journal showed that, with millions of employees, NHS staff were statistically less likely to die from COVID-19 than the general public.

While the MSM didn’t report these findings, it was left, as usual, to the so called alternative media to question power, and reveal the deceptive use of the statistics to as many people as they could.

Using snappy slogans, the UK State encouraged the nation to “clap for the NHS.” In combination with the hard-hitting emotional messages, this was part of the process of creating the controlled choice environment.

For a wider public of situated decision makers, this further strengthened social disapproval of anyone who questioned Lockdown health policies. To point out that the health impacts of the Lockdown would be significantly worse than COVID-19 was to question the NHS. An act of heresy.

This strategy was essential for the UK State because the COVID-19 statistics do not support its own fearful narrative.

Even if you accept the official accounts, should you contract COVID-19 in the UK, the chances of it leading to death are between 0.3 – 0.4%. If you are infected, you have at least a 99.6% chance of survival.

This almost certainly explains why the UK State decided not to report recovery rates. The rationale given for this was that the “modelling used to calculate it was complex.”

However, to date, despite promising to publish this statistic, the UK State still doesn’t report recovery rates. It seems counting people diagnosed with COVID-19, who don’t die, is too complex. While it is incapable of simple subtraction, most people are willing to accept all the other UK State COVID-19 statistics that the MSM report to them ad nauseam.

Claimed UK deaths from COVID-19 are nominally 41,486 (at the time of writing). This means, according to UK State statistics, the global pandemic has allegedly led to the deaths of 0.06% of the UK population with the median age of death being 82 in England and Wales.

Like nearly every other mortality risk, the chances of dying from COVID-19 increase significantly with age. Mortality distribution is practically indistinguishable from standard population risk. Bluntly, the belief that COVID-19 presents some sort of dire, plague like threat is irrational and based upon nothing but persistent fear porn.

Initially, the UK MSM widely reported that COVID-19 could kill more than half a million British people. On the 12th March the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave a press conference in which he warned of significant loss of life. Preceded by the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, who repeated the preposterous suggestion that more than half a million people could die, Boris Johnson told the British public:

”It is going to spread further and I must level with you, I must level with the British public: many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.”

This terrifying statement was not based upon the WHO’s declaration of a pandemic. The WHO has nothing to say about mortality, only the worldwide spread of a disease. Johnson’s statement was not based upon the available data either.

It was founded entirely upon computer modelled predictions of Imperial College’s COVID-19 Response Team.

So far in 2020, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMFG) have given Imperial College more than $86 million.

As is the norm with the Imperial College’s modelled pandemic predictions, they were hopelessly inaccurate.

On every occasion they have grossly overestimated mortality and have never erred by way of underestimation. Always for the financial gain of pharmaceutical corporations.

Imperial College’s lunatic COVID-19 predictions were questioned by the wider scientific community at the time. Nobel laureate biophysicist Michael Levitt immediately highlighted the problems with their models; Professor of global public health Devi Sridhar pointed out that Imperial had presented nothing more than a hypothesis and microbiologist Dr Sucharit Bhakdi, questioning the predictions, called the global state Lockdown response “grotesque” and warned that it would be far more dangerous than COVID-19.

Scientists from around the world raised their concerns. They repeatedly warned that the science underpinning the alarm was weak.

However, their voices were largely censored as the UK MSM advanced the UK State narrative without question.

Perhaps, in part, because they were paid to do so by the UK State.

Imperial College’s pandemic predictions have consistently delivered nothing but statistical dross. To imagine that no one within the UK State knew this, prior to cherry picking their report as claimed justification for their subsequent lockdown, is ridiculous.

Whether written for the purpose, or seized upon to fit the purpose, it seems Imperial College’s fantasy predictions were selected solely to promote Lockdown policies. With tight control of the MSM narrative, the UK State simply ignored the real science and trotted out its meaningless “led by the science” propaganda soundbite.

A simple, snappy slogan maintaining the public’s altered context within their choice environment.

It is not credible for Professor Mark Woolhouse, a member of Spi-B, to now state that the Lockdown was a monumental mistake.

Practically the only body of scientific opinion which believed Imperial College was the one firmly attached to the UK State, including Spi-B, who were equally committed to nonsensical Lockdown policies.

The UK State had to disregard the weight of global scientific opinion, deliberately choose the fictitious computer models and actively deceive the public, falsely claiming their policy was “led by the science.”

It was no mistake.

FIXING THE NUMBERS

Due to the lack of an unprecedented threat, it appears the UK State has instead fixed the statistics, maximised case numbers and mortality figures, fed its statistical rubbish into its MSM propaganda machine and then exploited the resultant fear, of a fake unprecedented threat, to achieve its desired behaviour change.

This necessitated a continually shifting narrative, both to compensate for encroaching reality and to keep the population constantly confused and psychologically open to suggestion as a result.

One of the UK State’s first responses to the pandemic was to create a new, entirely unnecessary, death registration process. One so opaque and prone to manipulation and error, it practically guaranteed the meaningless statistics we have been given.

In late March, before the recorded peak in mortality during the second week of April, the UK State instructed the Office of National Statistics (ONS) to record all “mentions” of COVID-19 on death certificates as proof of death from COVID-19. The new death registration system meant a COVID-19 death could be recorded without the decedent either testing positive or receiving any examination by a qualified doctor, either prior to death or postmortem.

• The UK State split its testing regime into “pillars.” Pillar 1 focused upon swab testing (RT-PCR) the most vulnerable, the seriously ill and front line key-workers in state healthcare settings.
• Pillar 2 expanded the testing to include essential workers in the social care and other sectors. However, RT-PCR, used in Pillars 1 and 2, is incapable of identifying a virus and was not designed as a diagnostic test.
• The UK State’s Pillar 3 relies upon antibody testing. So far, this has been a complete disaster, characterised mainly by expensive outlay on tests that don’t work which, if they did, wouldn’t reveal anything useful anyway.

The Royal College of Pathologists (RCP) petitioned the UK government, raising numerous concerns. Firstly they highlighted that current antibody tests were clinically incapable of indicating either the level of infection (asymptomatic rates) or any possible acquired immunity.

There were no benchmark tests, nor any data, to assure the quality of these non-evidence based tests which consequently provided no value to health professionals trying to treat patients. The RCP concluded that their only perceivable use was for very broad research purposes. These findings were backed up by the prestigious Cochrane Review, who stated:

We are therefore uncertain about the utility of these tests for seroprevalence surveys for public health management purposes. Concerns about high risk of bias and applicability make it likely that the accuracy of tests when used in clinical care will be lower than reported in the included studies […] It is unclear whether the tests are able to detect lower antibody levels likely seen with milder and asymptomatic COVID-19 disease. The design, execution and reporting of studies of the accuracy of COVID-19 tests requires considerable improvement.”

• Pillar 4 (surveillance testing) takes tests from Pillars 1 – 3, whether saliva swabs of antibody blood tests, which the UK State then claims it uses to learn more about the prevalence and spread of the virus. Though the chances of the flawed RT-PCR and antibody tests producing anything cogent appears negligible.

What is more certain is that there are multinational corporations with a firm grasp of the UK State’s testing procedures and subsequent data analysis.

Even if someone tests positive, anywhere up to 80% of these people are asymptomatic.

Meaning they do not have COVID-19, the syndrome that may, in as little as 20% of cases, result from an infection with SARS-CoV-2.

Reporting a so called spike in “cases” is a vacuous claim.

A large number of the positive RT-PCR tests will be wrong, up to 80% of those who test positive won’t develop COVID-19 and, of those that do, 99.6% will survive, of which more than 80% will experience COVID-19 as little more than a cold.

The actual threat from a claimed “spike in cases” is diminutive. The eternal MSM alarmism, reporting terrifying case numbers and highly speculative causes of death, is pure propaganda.

It was Pillar 2 that established community testing, providing pharmaceutical corporations further, significant influence over policy and the physical response. The collected swabs are analysed at the UK Lighthouse Labs. The data and resources are provided by the vaccine producing, pharmaceutical giants Astrazeneca and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Creating an enormous conflict of financial interest within the Pillar testing program.

From the outset Pillar 2 data collection was plagued with problems. For example, multiple tests from one individual were counted as separate positive cases and tests were prematurely counted as complete, before the results were even available.

Pillar 2 testing was so poor, the UK State simply wiped off 30,302 reported cases due to methodological errors and were forced to suspend all reporting of Pillar 2 test results in late May.

Throughout the crisis, Public Health England, an agency of the UK government Department of Health, received notification of every death. They then cross-referenced the test data, much of it from Lighthouse Labs, to check if the deceased had ever tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.

Up to 80% of whom could have been completely free of COVID-19.

No matter what the decedent died from, whether it was cancer or a road accident, and irrespective of when the positive test was taken, possibly many months prior to death, PHE recorded it as a COVID-19 death.

Only after this practice was discovered did PHE change their methodology, removing 5,377 deaths from the official mortality figures overnight.

The Great Reset aims to centralise all power and authority.

Therefore, in response to the supposedly deplorable performance of its own government department (PHE), the UK State pounced upon this opportunity to further centralise its power and authority.

It created the new Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) which will initially be led by Dr Clare Gardiner, a former GCHQ operative and former director of the National Cyber Security Centre.

The JBC will issue the biosecurity alerts that will control our daily lives. By amalgamating PHE with NHS Test and Trace and the JBC, the UK State has removed the notion of public health and replaced it with biosecurity.

In the future biosecurity UK State it is difficult to see how anyone won’t have COVID-19. The JBC definition ranges from “confirmed”, to include asymptomatic cases, “linked cases”, people who may or may not have the COVID-19 but may have once met someone who tested positive, “probable”, someone in a Lockdown area with possible symptoms and “possible”, someone who may have symptoms.

Only the “discarded,” people who haven’t been tracked and traced, who don’t live in Lockdown areas and haven’t got any symptoms at all (ie. they don’t have a cold,) will be free from the clutches of the JBC. But only after they have passed their surveillance checks to be discarded.

As the reported mortality rate declined sharply, in late April, the UK State instructed the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to report “suspected” COVID-19 care home deaths to the ONS. Adding thousands to the COVID-19 mortality figures in an instant.

From this point forward, COVID-19 didn’t even need to be mentioned on a care home resident’s death certificate for them to be added to the ONS’ mortality count.

The MSM then reported the COVID-19 horror to a terrified public, without any scrutiny or hesitation.

There are no sound reasons to believe any of the UK State’s official COVID 19 statistics. From the registration of deaths, through testing to data collection, analysis and reporting, the whole system is either a complete shambles, irretrievably corrupt or a combination of the two. No one, especially the MSM, know what the real COVID-19 mortality statistics or case numbers are.

Sadly, all we can do is count the dead. Which raises a gut churning possibility.

From all cause mortality, we can estimate something approaching of the true COVID-19 mortality figure.

Research by the Italian Ministry of Health found that around 12% of recorded COVID-19 deaths in Italy could be accurately described as such.

Similarly, researchers at the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) found that around 6% of COVID-19 reported deaths were unequivocally attributable to the disease.

All globalist States, such as Italy, the U.S. and the UK, have slightly different death registration and statistical processes. In addition, for a number of decedents, while their primary cause of death was their pre-existing comorbidity, COVID-19 probably did hasten their deaths.

Giving the benefit of the doubt to the UK State, an estimate of 30%, for genuine COVID-19 deaths, can reasonably be applied to the reported mortality statistics. Suggesting that the true figure is closer to 12,500 rather than 41,500.

This places the real public health risk of COVID-19 well below recent seasonal influenza.

In England, in 2014-2015, PHE estimates attributed more than 34,000 deaths to influenza in the first 15 weeks of the year, and in 2015-2017 more than 17,000.

COVID-19 is not, and never was, at any stage, more dangerous than the flu.

People only believe it is, and that belief is based upon little more than statistical drivel and MSM scaremongering.

Nonetheless, there has been a significant spike in all cause mortality this year which does not conform to the usual, seasonal patterns. One that corresponds precisely with the UK State’s Lockdown policies to bring about the conditions for The Great Reset. The disquieting reality appears to be that these are Lockdown deaths, not COVID-19 deaths.

It seems at least 29,000 of the most vulnerable people in our society have died before their time. I have very recently lost my father and, while most of the lives lost, falsely attributed to COVID-19, may only have been shortened by a few months, I speak from acute sorrow in the certainty that every moment with a loved one is precious beyond measure.

FIXING THE NARRATIVE

Initially the State said the purpose of it’s Lockdowm measures were to flatten the curve.

The claim being this would stop the NHS being overrun from the projected surge of cases.

However, this story was only deployed before the statistical shenanigans began in earnest. As the reported number of deaths hit the headlines “flatten the curve” was discarded.

The anticipated surge never happened because the predictive models it was supposedly based upon were junk. There were some notable COVID-19 hotspots, but nationally the NHS was effectively closed to virtually every condition but COVID-19.

The much publicised Nightingale hospitals were nothing but expensive white elephants and, at the height of the global pandemic, the NHS was practically deserted in the UK. However, the “flatten the curve” fable was sufficient for the UK State to shutdown the productive economy and propel the country into a totally needless state of panic.

After “flatten the curve”, public attention was firmly drawn towards deaths, rather than the unreported survival rates.

These were delivered with the flashing lights of alarming mainstream media (MSM) headlines, as the meaningless figures were made accessible through daily COVID-19 “emergency” updates.

A steady supply of simple snappy slogans (stay home, protect the NHS, save lives etc.) ensured the situated decision makers remained firmly entrenched within the altered context of their choice environment.

There was never any public health rationale for the UK State’s Lockdown policies. Rather than exposing the virus to rapid extinction in the summer sun, the UK State instead ordered people to stay in their own homes where community infections were at their worse. In 2019, this was well known to the WHO.

The WHO reported that, for viral respiratory infections,

• quarantining exposed individuals (quarantining the healthy – by placing families under house arrest), was “not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure;”
• the isolation of sick individuals should only be done for limited periods and was not recommended for “individuals who need to seek medical attention;”
• workplace closures should only be considered in, “extraordinarily severe pandemics;”
• there is “no obvious rationale” for contact tracing and
• wearing face masks was not recommended because “there is no evidence that this is effective in reducing transmission.”

The UK State’s Lockdown policy was the complete antithesis of the WHO’s own, previously recommended, procedure for managing a viral respiratory pandemic. Quarantining the healthy and then re-orientating health care services maximised the risk to the most vulnerable, something which never made any sense. At least, not if saving lives was the priority.

A recent study by the Queen’s Nursing Institute found the following practices, commonly operating in Care Homes, at the height of the Lockdown pandemic:

Having to accept patients from hospitals with unknown Covid-19 status, being told about plans not to resuscitate residents without consulting families, residents or care home staff…..21% of respondents said that their home accepted people discharged from hospital who had tested positive for Covid-19…..a substantial number found it difficult to access District Nursing and GP services….25% in total reporting it somewhat difficult or very difficult during March-May 2020.”

These life-threatening practices were a direct result of official guidance, issued by registration bodies and health services, in response to the UK State’s Lockdown policies.

The NHS issued guidance stating care home residents should not be conveyed to hospital; they operated an apparent policy of discharging COVID019 positive patients into care homes; GP’s were advised not to visit care settings, with consultation conducted without examination via video calls; ambulance response times increased dramatically, practically removing vital emergency care the most vulnerable; essential PPE for care home staff wasn’t supplied, further reducing their capacity to care for those most at risk; testing for COVID-19 wasn’t extended to care settings, leaving care staff confused and uncertain of the risk, with furlough further reducing staffing levels; there were widespread reports of residents having “do not attempt resuscitation” (DNAR) notices attached to their care plans, without their knowledge or consent, and this practice seemingly extended to other vulnerable adults, such as those with learning difficulties.

There is little to no evidence that children are either at risk from COVID-19 or spread SARS-CoV-2 to adults.

However there is evidence that children are dying as a result of UK State Lockdown policies.

Yet still the MSM persist with their dangerous fake news the COVID-19 is a childhood risk.

Children’s lives mean nothing in the pursuit of The Great Reset.

By mid June the UK COVID-19 mortality risk was negligible and the so called pandemic was effectively over. There has been no significant excess mortality in England & Wales for more than 13 weeks. Since mid June deaths in care settings have been at or below normal levels and COVID-19 has accounted for less illness and death than combined influenza and pneumonia.

Therefore, the MSM propaganda has shifted towards cases and the distraction of face masks.

The MSM propagandists tell us that wearing masks will protect us from the SARS-CoV-2 respiratory virus. However, they clearly have no effect against influenza.

For months, the UK State consistently told the public that face masks were entirely unnecessary. After years of gold standard science, demonstrating no viral benefit to wearing face masks, suddenly they became mandatory.

This was a purely political decision and certainly wasn’t led by any science.

The WHO did not recommend face masks but were then pressurised by national governments to change their advice. Because there was no science to inform this decision, the WHO hastily cobbled together some meta-analysis, which somehow missed every single randomised control trial showing how ineffective masks are, in order to falsely claim the science had recently changed.

Like virtually every other aspect of the supposed COVID-19 pandemic, the only scientific basis for this policy is behavioural science.

The face mask ruse is being used to distract the public from the fact that there is now no justification for any restrictions. No matter what the UK State claims the alert level is.

The objective is to move people away from making rational decisions to become ‘situated’ decision-makers. This enables the choice environment to be shifted towards the dreaded altered context of the “second wave.”

THE HARD WIRED SECOND WAVE

The UK State is not unique. It is just one of a number of globalist States that have colluded to foist the COVID-19 scamdemic upon the world. The Great Reset is a centrally devised and controlled global objective for all partners States.

To say that COVID-19 is a scamdemic is not to allege that it isn’t a deadly disease. It has caused terrible, but far from unprecedented, loss of life and every death leaves a gaping hole that can never be repaired. Our only hope is that we learn to live with pain.

In the effort to create the social, economic and political conditions for The Great Reset the UK State is among those who have condemned people to die alone, torn from their loved ones. The sickening truth of the scamdemic is that these heartbreaking losses have been exploited to control the living.

This has been done for the sole benefit of a despicable, uncaring parasite class. They have global control only because we allow it and the vast majority passively give consent without even knowing it. Constantly directed as situated decision makers, fed nothing but propaganda to ensure their automatic behaviour.

We won’t rid ourselves of the malevolent rule of the parasite class by using a party political system built to protect them, and advance their interests.

Other peaceful solutions exist and we must pursue them or suffer this malignancy forever.

It is not enough for the them that people die isolated and afraid, nor that entire populations live in gratuitous fear. The Great Reset offers them the promise of the New World Order technocracy and the vaccine controlled, global biosecurity State. They simply don’t care who becomes collateral damage along the way.

It seems that we have all been set up for the second wave, hard wired into the scamdemic from the start. The final push to permanently frame the choice environment.

Analysis shows that the phrase “second wave” was trending from the day that PHE downgraded COVID-19, due to low mortality rates.

The trend spiked significantly as mortality declined below all cause averages and again when it approached statistical zero.

The UK State’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) recently leaked a report to the MSM claiming that 85,000 people could die from COVID 19 in the UK this winter.

This followed the claims of former GlaxoSmithKline R&D President and current Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK State, Sir Patrick Vallance, who claimed 120,000 would die.

The Scientific evidence shows that COVID-19 reaches the Herd Immunity Threshold (HIT) at around 20% of the population, or even less.

At this stage, it appears the virus has burned out and is incapable of infecting or making more people sick, save for the tiny minority with severely compromised immune systems. The UK has long passed this threshold.

Further evidence shows that a sizeable proportion of human beings, possibly up to 60%, already carry T-Cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 from previous coronavirus and SARS infections. This part of the population was never at any significant risk.

There is no apparent need for a vaccine and, despite the clear suppression of treatments that could have potentially saved thousands, the fact that cases continue to rise, while hospital admission and deaths are virtually nothing, demonstrates that the COVID-19 pandemic is finished.

The only thing the UK State’s testing programs are allegedly finding are residual infections that present virtually no risk to anybody. The increase in “cases” is directly proportional to the increasing number of tests.

Yet none of that matters to the State planners and propagandist pedlars of the scamdemic. Their hard-hitting emotional messaging is divorced from informing the public. A significant proportion of the MSM has been co-opted to serve nothing and no one but the parasite class.

Despite the fact that it is now certain that Lockdowns are the worst possible response to COVID-19, still SAGE “experts” argue for further, various Lockdown measures that absolutely don’t work. The only fathomable reason for this is to continue preparations for The Great Reset. Either that, or SAGE are collectively, scientifically illiterate.

A recent study by health-tech contractors Medefer estimated that the Lockdown response, to the low level threat of COVID-19, has left more than 15 million people waiting for vital health care. While this report should be treated with some caution, as Medefer are one of many private companies hoping to swoop in and profit from the Lockdown accelerated destruction of the NHS, it is beyond doubt that millions of people will suffer irreparable health damage from the Lockdown. Mental health charities are among many who have warned of the Lockdown’s devastating impact.

The political response to this has been to argue about the definition of waiting lists. This is because the political class are the otiose puppets of the parasite class and, as such, they don’t provide any public benefit at all.

In every sense, they are just the expensive illusion of democracy.

Homelessness has reached 320,000 in the UK and freedom of information requests reveal that, in England alone, nearly 20,000 household have been made technically homeless during the Lockdown. As we discussed in Part 1 the economic destruction delivered by the lockdown is unprecedented. The link between poverty and a wide range of health inequalities is beyond dispute.

With its Lockdown, the UK State has created a health crisis that will make current Lockdown and COVID-19 deaths seem like a minor, public health hiccup.

Given what appears to be the appalling statistical deception and rancid propaganda that the UK State has relied upon thus far, it is easy to see how the second wave deception could emerge.

This autumn, with it’s disorienting death registration process in place, and a population of immune suppressed, mask wearing, recently released detainees facing the usual seasonal flu and pneumonia risks, the UK State, and its supplicant MSM, have everything ready to create a psychological operation beyond imagination. The likely objective will be to consolidate on the work already done, and permanently transform the people from a population of autonomous individuals, capable of rational thought into a herd of situated decision makers whose behaviour is automatic and influenced by their ‘choice environment’.

The Lockdown’s existing impact upon treatments for cancer, heart disease, and a range of serious, life threatening conditions, combined with huge waiting lists, struggling health services and the normal excess winter pressures upon the NHS, will be more than enough to create an appalling health crisis. All slickly blamed upon the second wave of COVID-19.

I truly hope I am wrong. However, it is by no means beyond the UK State to do this.

If it again claims people need to be placed under house arrest; should it insist we can’t be with our loved ones, that we must avoid each other, literally like the plague; if it labels anyone who disagrees a “COVID denier” and starts “quarantining” people who don’t comply, then you will have a choice to make.

You can be a situated decision makers, or you can be an an autonomous individual, making rational decisions. It’s not hard. Just stop believing everything you are told, especially from the likes of me, do some independent research, take a long hard look at the evidence, and decide for yourself if you can give any credence to the claims of the UK State and its global partners.

Original: Iain Davis – OFF GUARDIAN

The 1% blunder: How a simple but fatal math mistake by US COVID-19 experts caused the world to panic and order lockdowns

When you strip everything else out, the reason for lockdown comes from a single figure: one percent. This was the prediction that COVID-19, if left unchecked, would kill around one percent of us.

You may not think that percentage is enormous, but one percent of the population of the world is 70 million people – and that’s a lot. It would mean 3.2 million Americans dead, and 670,000 Britons.

But where did this one percent figure come from? You may find this hard to believe, but this figure emerged by mistake. A pretty major thing to make a mistake about, but that’s what happened.

Such things occur. On September 23, 1998, NASA permanently lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter. It was supposed to go round and round the planet looking at the weather, but instead it hit Mars at around 5,000 mph, exploding into tiny fragments. It didn’t measure the weather; it became the weather – for a few seconds anyway.

An investigation later found that the disaster happened because engineers had used the wrong units. They didn’t convert pound seconds into Newton seconds when doing their calculations. Imperial, not metric. This, remember, was NASA. An organisation not completely full of numbskulls.

Now you and I probably have no idea of the difference between a pound second and a Newton second (it’s 0.67 – I looked it up). But you would kind-of hope NASA would. In fact, I am sure they do, but they didn’t notice, so the figures came out wrong. The initial mistake was made, and was baked into the figures.

Kaboom!

With COVID-19, a similar mistake happened. One type of fatality rate was substituted for another. The wrong rate was then used to predict the likely death rate – and, as with NASA, no-one picked up the error.

In order to understand what happened, you have to understand the difference between two medical terms that sound the same – but are completely different. Rather like a pound second or a Newton second.

Which fatality rate, did you say?

1. First, there’s the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR). This is the total number of people who are infected by a disease and the number of them who die. This figure includes those who have no symptoms at all, or only very mild symptoms – those who stayed at home, coughed a bit and watched Outbreak.
2. Then there’s the Case Fatality Rate (CFR). This is the number of people suffering serious symptoms, who are probably ill enough to be in hospital. Clearly, people who are seriously ill – the “cases” – are going to have a higher mortality rate than those who are infected, many of whom don’t have symptoms. Put simply – all cases are infections, but not all infections are cases.

Which means that the CFR will always be far higher than the IFR. With influenza, the CFR is around ten times as high as the IFR. COVID-19 seems to have a similar proportion.

Now, clearly, you do not want to get these figures mixed up. By doing so you would either wildly overestimate, or wildly underestimate, the impact of COVID-19. But mix these figures up, they did.

The error started in America, but didn’t end there. In healthcare, the US is very much the dog that wags the tail. The figures they come up with are used globally.

On February 28, 2020, an editorial was released by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the editorial stated: “… the overall clinical consequences of COVID-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza.”

They added that influenza has a CFR of approximately 0.1 percent. One person in a thousand who gets it badly, dies.

But that quoted CFR for influenza was ten times too low – they meant to say the IFR, the Infection Fatality Rate, for influenza was 0.1 percent. This was their fatal – quite literally – mistake.

The mistake was compounded. On March 11, the same experts testified to Congress, stating that Covid’s CFR was likely to be about one percent, so one person dying from a hundred who fell seriously ill. Which, as time has passed, has proved to be pretty accurate.

At this meeting, they compared the likely impact of COVID-19 to flu. But they used the wrong CFR for influenza, the one stated in the previous NEJM editorial. 0.1 percent, or one in a thousand. The one that was ten times too low.

Flu toll 1,000 – COVID-19 toll 10,000

So, they matched up the one percent CFR of COVID-19 with the incorrect 0.1 percent CFR of flu. Suddenly, Covid was going to be ten times as deadly.

If influenza killed 50, COVID-19 was going to kill 500. If influenza killed a million, COVID-19 was going to get 10 million. No wonder Congress, then the world, panicked. Because they were told COVID-19 was going to be ten times worse than influenza. They could see three million deaths in the US alone, and 70 million around the world.

I don’t expect you or I to get this sort of thing right. But I bloody well expect the experts to do so. They didn’t. They got their IFR and CFR mixed up and multiplied the likely impact of COVID-19 by a factor of ten.

Here’s what the paper, “Public health lessons learned from biases in coronavirus mortality overestimation”,says: “On March 11, 2020,… based on the data available at the time, Congress was informed that the estimated mortality rate for the coronavirus was ten-times higher than for seasonal influenza, which helped launch a campaign of social distancing, organizational and business lockdowns, and shelter-in-place orders.”

On February 28 it was estimated that COVID-19 was going to have about the same impact as a bad influenza season – almost certainly correct.

Eleven days later, the same group of experts predicted that the mortality rate was going to be ten times as high. This was horribly, catastrophically, running-into-Mars-at-5,000-miles-an-hour wrong.

Enter the Mad Modellers of Lockdown

In the UK, the group I call the Mad Modellers of lockdown, the Imperial College experts, created the same panic. On March 16, they used an estimated IFR of 0.9 percent to predict that, without lockdown, COVID-19 would kill around 500,000 in the UK.

Is this prediction anywhere close?

So far, the UK has had around 40,000 COVID-19 deaths. Significantly less than 0.1 percent, but not that far off. Of course, people will say… “We had lockdown… without it so many more would have died. Most people have not been infected…” etc.

To answer this, we need to know the true IFR. Is it a 0.1 percent, or one percent? If it is one percent, we have more than 400,000 deaths to go. If it is 0.1 percent, this epidemic has run its course. For this year, at least.

With swine flu, remember that the IFR started at around two percent. In the end, it was 0.02 percent, which was five times lower than the lowest estimate during the outbreak. The more you test, the lower the IFR will fall.

So where can we look to get the current figures on the IFR? The best place to look is at the country that has tested more people than anywhere else as a proportion of their population: Iceland.

As of last week, Iceland’s IFR stood at 0.16 per cent. It cannot go up from here. It can only fall. People can’t start dying of a disease they haven’t got.

This means that we’ll probably end up with an IFR of about 0.1 percent, maybe less. Not the 0.02 percent of Swine Flu – somewhere between the two, perhaps. In short, the 0.1 percent prophecy has proved to be pretty much bang on.

Which means that we’ve had all the deaths we were ever going to get. And which also means that lockdown achieved, almost precisely nothing with regard to COVID-19. No deaths were prevented.

Mangled beyond recognition

Yes, we are testing and testing, and finding more so-called cases. As you will. But the hospitals and ICUs are virtually empty. Almost no-one is dying of COVID-19 anymore, and most of those who do were otherwise very ill.

Instead of celebrating that, we’ve artificially created a whole new thing to scare ourselves with. We now call a positive test a COVID-19 “case.” This is not medicine. A “case” is someone who has symptoms. A case is not someone carrying tiny amounts of virus in their nose.

Now, however, you test positive, and you’re a “case.” Never in history has medical terminology been so badly mangled. Never have statistics been so badly mangled.

When researchers look back at this pandemic, they’ll have absolutely no idea who died because of COVID-19, or who died –coincidentally– with it. Everything’s been mashed together in a determined effort to make the virus look as deadly as possible.

Lockdown happened because we were told that COVID-19 could kill one percent. But COVID-19 was never going to kill more than about 0.1 percent – max.

That’s the figure estimated back in February, by the major players in viral epidemiology. A figure that has turned out to be remarkably accurate. Bright guys… bad mistake.

We’ve killed tens of thousands – for nothing

But because we panicked, we’ve added hugely to the toll. Excess mortality between March and May was around 70,000, not the 40,000 who died of/with COVID-19. Which means 30,000 may have died directly as a result of the actions we took.

We protected the young, the children, who are at zero risk of COVID-19. But we threw our elderly and vulnerable under a bus. The very group who should have been shielded. Instead, we caused 20,000 excess deaths in care homes.

It was government policy to clear out hospitals, and stuff care homes with patients carrying COVID-19, or discharge them back to their own homes, to infect their nearest and dearest. Or any community care staff who visited them.

We threw – to use health secretary Matt Hancock’s ridiculous phrase – a ring of steel around care homes. As it turned out, this was not to protect them, but to trap the residents, as we turned their buildings into COVID-19 incubators.

Anyone working in care homes, as I do, knows why we got 20,000 excess deaths. Government policy did this.

That is far from all the damage. On top of care homes, the ONS estimates that 16,000 excess deaths were caused by lockdown. The heart attacks and strokes that were not treated. The empty, echoing hospitals and A&E units. The cancer treatments stopped entirely.

Which means that at least as many people have died as a result of the draconian actions taken to combat COVID-19, as have been killed by the virus itself. This has been a slow-motion stampede, where the elderly – in particular – were trampled to death.

We locked down in fear. We killed tens of thousands unnecessarily, in fear. We crippled the economy, and left millions in fear of their livelihoods. We have trapped abused women and children at home with their abusers. We have wiped out scores of companies, and crushed entire industries.

We stripped out the NHS, and left millions in prolonged pain and suffering, on ever lengthening waiting lists, which have doubled. There have also been tens of thousands of delayed cancer diagnoses – the effects of which are yet to be seen, but the Lancet has estimated at least sixty thousand years of life will be lost.

Lockdown can be seen as a complete and utter disaster. And it was all based on a nonsense, a claim that COVID-19 was going to kill one percent. A claim that can now be seen to be utterly and completely wrong. Sweden, which did not lock down, has had a death rate of 0.0058 percent.

It takes a very big person to admit they have made a horrible, terrible mistake. But a horrible, terrible mistake has been made. Let’s end this ridiculous nonsense now. And vow never to let such monumental stupidity happen ever again.

Original: RT – Malcolm Kendrick, doctor and author who works as a GP in the National Health Service in England.

How the Modelers Went Wrong – Ferguson’s ICL study [PDF & Original code-GitHub]

Sweden’s shortfall from this expected death toll is good news for supporters of its comparatively mild and voluntary social distancing approach to the pandemic.

But it also represents a complete failure of the predictive model that jarred much of the world including the United States and the United Kingdom into imposing draconian shelter-in-place policies that have now persisted for over two months.

Back in early April, a team of epidemiologists at Uppsala University adapted the Imperial College model designed by crystal physicist Neil Ferguson to Sweden in an attempt to dissuade the country’s government from its hands-off approach.

Their results, like the more famous US and UK iterations of the ICL model, predicted disaster if the country did not change course immediately.

Ferguson’s ICL study is the most famous and influential example of a relatively recent type of epidemiology model known as an agent-based simulation.

Briefly summarized, the ICL approach purports to take known or approximated data about a virus’s infection and fatality rates and subjects them to a simulation of expected transmission within a country or region, calibrated to its population characteristics and related demographic inputs.

The model then runs a succession of computer simulations that allegedly calculate how quickly the virus spreads given what they assume about the frequency of human social interactions. Since the models are probabilistic, they’re usually carried out in repetition so the final result reflects multiple runs of the simulation.

To render the simulations useful for policymakers, modelers such as the ICL team then adjust their runs to account for a variety of proposed scenarios. While the first set of predictions might reflect a “do nothing” course of no interventions and an uncontrolled pandemic, a second scenario might include what they predict to happen if schools and large sporting events are closed. A third might predict adding voluntary social distancing to the mix. And a fourth might predict a full mandatory lockdown.

Under perfect knowledge of both a virus and human behavior in response to the virus and full understanding of how each affects transmission, a computer simulation of this type could at least – in theory – approximate an actual pandemic. Indeed, modelers such as Ferguson and the ICL team seem to believe they possess such knowledge and can accurately control for such complex scenarios to the point that it yields accurate predictive information about viruses.

In a sense it’s an epidemiological approach that treats the world as a real-life version of the old SimCity computer game, and reports what happens if you play that game in repetition under the conditions of a pandemic.

The simulation approach has a severe deficiency though in that the assumptions and inputs it takes for granted are both unknown and sufficiently complex to render them unknowable. Modelers have to fill in substantial gaps in their knowledge by imposing assumptions into their code – assumptions about the transmissibility of the virus, assumption about its duration and fatality rate, assumptions about the effectiveness of policy responses, and even assumptions about the rate that people will comply with or abide by those policies.

If we look to a key table from the ICL COVID model, we quickly find that these assumptions are little more than guesswork – particularly when it comes to the effectiveness of the proposed policy interventions. The table shows four modeled policy responses that purport to contain COVID-19. Note that all four adopt nice, even, round numbers as their parameters for modeling the proposed intervention: a 70% compliance rate with X, a 50% compliance rate with Y, and a 25% reduction in behavior Z, all allowing precise predictions of how the pandemic will supposedly play out.

Curiously, there appears to be little effort in these models to test and verify whether the underlying assumptions are correct. They also do very little to account for behavioral changes during the course of the pandemic that will almost certainly alter factors such as compliance rates with policy directives, or even voluntary behaviors that people undertake on their own to mitigate the risks of the disease (think about increased hand-washing). Instead, we have parameters that essentially amount to guesswork, all of it hard-coded into the model. And if any one of those underlying assumptions ends up being wrong, it potentially throws off the entire predictive ability of the model itself.

As the Swedish application of the ICL model reveals, one or more of its underlying assumptions about the coronavirus and the effectiveness of proposed policy interventions were clearly in error.

Its predictions were therefore wholly implausible, and have already been invalidated by reality as the June 1st numbers demonstrate.

In fact, we may see evidence that the ICL model was wholly unsuited to the coronavirus by looking into its history.

Ferguson and the other ICL authors first developed this model in the mid-2000s as one of the two major contributions to the computer simulation approach for pandemics.

The second came from a team led by Robert J. Glass, a modeler at the Los Alamos laboratory who adopted a similar approach.

Ferguson and Glass were both major figures in the epidemiology community’s shift away from traditional disease-mitigation strategies and toward wide-scale lockdowns, as first proposed in 2006 following a succession of government research inquiries into influenza pandemics and the threat of bioterrorism.

The introduction of their modeling approach precipitated a debate among epidemiologists over the effectiveness of unproven strategies such as society-wide lockdowns, as well as lesser interventions such as school closures and event cancellations.

Several figures in the medical wing of the discipline expressed doubts about top-down society-wide approaches such as lockdowns at the time, noting the lack of empirical evidence behind the modeling assumptions as well as the complete absence of a causal identification strategy for the claimed effectiveness of its policy prescriptions. The modeling approach of Ferguson and Glass caught the ears of public health officials at the time though, and has since come to dominate the COVID-19 response.

Yet if we look back to Ferguson’s original paper from 2006 in which he laid out the model that he later adapted to the current pandemic, we find another stunning revelation in its penultimate paragraph:

“Lack of data prevent us from reliably modelling transmission in the important contexts of residential institutions (for example, care homes, prisons) and health care settings; detailed planning for use of antivirals, vaccines and infection control measures in such settings are needed, however. We do not present projections of the likely impact of personal protective measures (for example, face masks) on transmission, again due to a lack of data on effectiveness.”

Among its many shortcomings, the original ICL model lacked a means of accounting for the transmission of viruses in residential institutions such as nursing homes and similar long-term care facilities.

As the last several months have shown however, nursing homes are acutely susceptible to the coronavirus and may be the single largest factor in explaining its high fatality rate. In many countries and US states, nursing homes even account for more than half of all total coronavirus fatalities. In virus hotspots such as New York, the nursing home problem was compounded even further by likely undercounting of deaths and an emerging scandal over Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s order forcing nursing homes to admit known coronavirus carriers as a way of mitigating hospital capacity strains that were never actually realized.

Returning to the question of epidemiology modeling, the nursing home issue may reveal a fatal flaw in the ICL model’s underlying assumptions.

If indeed it had no means of accounting for viral transmissions in residential institutions as Ferguson’s 2006 paper indicates, the ICL model completely missed what now turns out to be the single greatest vulnerability point for the coronavirus pandemic (the ICL team has thus far resisted calls to release its original code from the COVID simulation, and public versions of the same code are riddled with bugs and errors. The released version of its COVID paper does not give any indicator though that they modified the 2006 study to account for nursing homes).

Such an oversight would further imply that the predictive scenarios of the ICL model’s policy interventions are not only misdirected away from the primary vulnerability points and onto society at large, but also that the forecasted mortality ranges of its milder scenarios under the lockdown have little basis in reality.

If nursing homes account for the lion’s share of COVID mortality as the statistics now show, the realized death rates in countries that went under lockdown may only be said to follow the ICL model’s milder scenarios as a result of coincidence. Even when the total numbers in some countries appear to match up with the ICL’s midler scenarios, the deaths predicted by the model are not the same types of deaths we are seeing in reality.

When it comes to predicting the actual mechanisms of the pandemic, including the danger it poses to nursing homes, the modeling approach appears to be functionally useless and catastrophically off the mark.

Source: Phillip W. Magness – AIER

Note: This article was first published on 1 June, 2020

For download,

COVID-19 CovidSim Model – GitHub (zip – master – 90.1 MB)

Please also check this page to meet those who developed this “masterpiece”

Basically there are 4 people behind it:

Neil Ferguson, Matthew Matthon Dann, Ian Lynagh, “dlaydon”

For original zip – master please check here

“This is the COVID-19 CovidSim microsimulation model developed by the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis hosted at Imperial College, London.

CovidSim models the transmission dynamics and severity of COVID-19 infections throughout a spatially and socially structured population over time. It enables modelling of how intervention policies and healthcare provision affect the spread of COVID-19. It is used to inform health policy by making quantitative forecasts of (for example) cases, deaths and hospitalisations, and how these will vary depending on which specific interventions, such as social distancing, are enacted.

With parameter changes, it can be used to model other respiratory viruses, such as influenza.

The model is written in C++.

The primary platforms it has been developed and tested on are Windows and Ubuntu Linux.

It should build and run on any other POSIX compliant Unix-like platform (for example macOS, other Linux distributions). However, no active development occurs on them.

Running the model for the whole of the UK requires approximately 20GB of RAM. Other regions will require different amounts of memory (some up to 256GB).

It is strongly recommended to build the model with OpenMP support enabled to improve performance on multi-core processors. 24 to 32 core Xeon systems give optimal performance for large (e.g. UK, US) populations.

See build.md for detailed build instructions.”

This masterpiece was developed from March 25 by Ian Lynagh (igfoo), followed on April 1 by Neil Ferguson and from April 2, 2020 by Matthew Matthon Dann and “dlaydon”

Also, but not the least, meet MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis team

John Lees *johnlees – Research Fellow at Imperial MRC GIDA. Works on statistical genetics/bacteria

Rich FitzJohn *richfitz – Member of MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis

Swapnil Mishra *s-mishra – Post-doc at School of Public Health, Imperial College London

It would be nice if this teams would answer some questions in front of a commission of inquiry.

Two Pandemics: One Serious, One Mild

Epidemiological modeling has played a central role in the global response to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak of early 2020. The response to the emerging pandemic prompted multiple teams of researchers to rapidly adapt existing models, predominantly from previous influenza outbreaks, to forecast the spread of COVID-19 as well as its anticipated fatality rates.

Using the familiar SIR/SEIR epidemiology models, these studies attempt to employ modern statistical techniques to predict the spread and expected mortality of the COVID-19 pandemic. Common approaches include mechanistic adaptations of agent-based simulation to the SIR/SEIR framework that probabilistically estimate the spread of the virus through general social interactions, as well as autoregressive forecasting techniques that update to reflect emerging data for the disease’s spread in a specific country or locale.

In both cases, the associated models have been used to strongly advise the adoption of non-pharmaceutical policy interventions as a primary tool of COVID-19 mitigation.

These interventions, consisting of the now-familiar suite of public event cancellations, school and business closures, and wide scale lockdowns or shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs), were implemented in all but a handful of countries across the globe – often with direct dependence on the advice of epidemiology modeling.

In a well-documented example, the influential simulation model for the United Kingdom and the United States by researchers at Imperial College London (ICL) spurred both governments to shift their response strategies to embrace wide scale lockdowns in mid-March 2020.

American President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson directly credited this model for their respective decisions to impose lockdowns, and Trump continues to cite the ICL projections of up to 2.2 million deaths to justify his actions. These fantastical claims increasingly diverge from the realities of the coronavirus outbreak.

In the time since its release back in March, the ICL model has repeatedly failed to accurately anticipate the course of the pandemic in both countries, and in its adaptation to other locales such as Sweden.

While most of the policy discussion has thus far focused on society-wide interventions aimed at reducing the spread of COVID-19 in the general population, the problem of acute outbreaks within long-term care facilities (LTCs) such as nursing homes is now difficult to deny.

Although LTC outbreak data vary widely in scope and quality by state and country, a high concentration of COVID-related deaths in such facilities is readily apparent.

Depending on jurisdiction, it is not uncommon to find between 30 and 70 percent of recorded COVID-19 fatalities have occurred in nursing homes, including more than half of all recorded deaths in Europe. Similar patterns appear in most US states.

The concentration of outbreaks in LTCs has only recently called attention to a shortcoming of the epidemiological modeling approach that guided the world’s COVID-19 response strategies.

While these models aim to project the disease’s spread through social interactions within the general population, they do not appear to be suitable for capturing acute outbreaks among susceptible populations in LTCs and similar closed-residential facilities.

Indeed, we may find this shortcoming directly acknowledged in the 2006 influenza pandemic study that the Imperial College team used as the basis of their COVID-19 simulation. As its authors conceded at the time, “Lack of data prevent us from reliably modelling transmission in the important contexts of residential institutions (for example, care homes, prisons) and health care settings.”

The conundrum presented by LTC outbreaks vis-à-vis epidemiological modeling need not be speculative though, as emerging statistical patterns are beginning to reveal a sharp divergence in the pandemic’s course when trends in such facilities are compared to the general population.

Although LTC outbreaks have accounted for significant shares of COVID-19 mortality in all 50 states, obtaining accurate and daily LTC data remains a challenge.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts presents an exception to this data deficit. Ranking among the hardest-hit of US states outside of the New York City region, Massachusetts began tracking detailed daily COVID-19 case and mortality statistics for LTC facilities on April 10, 2020. At this relatively early stage in the pandemic, LTC and non-LTC fatalities in Massachusetts sat at near-parity. They then began to rapidly diverge. As of June 29, LTC deaths account for 5,111 out of 7,895 confirmed deaths in the commonwealth, or 64.7 percent of all fatalities

The clear patterns in these data suggest that the coronavirus would be better understood if we began to treat it as two simultaneous pandemics: one severe but acute outbreak that ravages nursing homes and LTCs with extremely high fatalities concentrated among the elderly and infirm, and a second significantly milder wave in the general population.

As nearly all mitigation strategies have focused on containing the spread in the general population through lockdowns and similar mandates, the policy response has almost entirely missed the mark despite unleashing unprecedented devastation to our economy and social fabric.

Daily data from Massachusetts illustrate the divergence of the two simultaneous pandemics. As may be seen in the chart below, they show steady growth in the share of COVID-19 deaths arising from LTC facility outbreaks since the beginning of record keeping. Furthermore, these two trends continue to split apart. For the month of June, Massachusetts averaged only 9 COVID-19 deaths per day in the general population. By contrast, the state’s LTC facilities averaged 27 deaths per day despite comprising a tiny share of the population.

When smoothed using a 7-day moving average, daily deaths in the non-LTC general population peaked in late April and began to sharply decline in late May 2020. While Massachusetts LTC deaths have leveled from their early peak around the same time, they still remain at approximately three times the general population’s daily toll.

The severity of the LTC outbreak may be seen in the cumulative death toll from this subset of the population. As of this writing, COVID-19 mortalities appear to encompass almost 10 percent of the commonwealth’s pre-pandemic LTC population of an estimated 53,000 residents. By comparison, the state’s approximately 2,784 non-LTC general population deaths as of June 30 come from an estimated 6.9 million people.

The clear difference between observed patterns in LTCs and the general population points to a need to further assess the suitability of current COVID-19 epidemiological modeling strategies in accurately capturing the dynamics of the ongoing pandemic.

Indeed, the modeling approach appears to project an entirely different mortality pattern than what we are observing in realized data – even when cumulative death totals approximate some of the milder modeled scenarios from the ICL model and similar projections.

Since most policy interventions aimed at mitigating COVID-19 were premised upon models depicting its general population spread, the emerging evidence of a very different pattern concentrated in LTC facilities is of high consequence in evaluating the political interventions adopted back in March.

Simply put, we adopted the wrong measures and used them to ineffectually target the milder of the two pandemics, all the while neglecting or even exacerbating the much more severe outbreak that continues to run its course through our vulnerable nursing home population.

Original: Phillip W. Magness – AIER

Important: Please read the following article – How the Modelers Went Wrong – Ferguson’s ICL study [PDF & Original code-GitHub]

‘Professor Lockdown’ Ferguson, UK’s Covid-19 czar, admits crippling restrictions MADE NO DIFFERENCE – where’s the outrage?

Professor Neil Ferguson probably woke up this morning breathing a massive sigh of relief because he hadn’t been ripped to shreds again in the British newspapers for this second time in just under a month – this time over his startling admission that there has been no significant difference in the levels of Covid-19 suppression when comparing the UK and Sweden.

During his evidence to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on Tuesday, he said: “They [Swedish scientists] came to a different policy conclusion based really on quite similar science. I don’t agree with it but scientifically they’re not far from scientists in any part of the world.”

He then acknowledged that the Swedish authorities had “got a long way to the same effect” without a full lockdown.

In other words, in the type of roundabout waffling way you’d expect from a bumbling boffin, the scientist – dubbed ‘Professor Lockdown’ after he cajoled Boris Johnson into bringing the British economy to a screeching halt – reckons Sweden has essentially coped very well without being forced into any draconian lockdown, thank you very much.

So where was the indignation about how his recommendations f**ked up the economy and made people prisoners in their own homes? It certainly wasn’t to be seen splashed across any British front pages. Indeed, it was hard enough to find much, if any, coverage of this very significant news story on Wednesday.

It was buried inside the Daily Telegraph on page seven, running across a third of a page or less, with a very accurate subheading stating in clear black and white: “Professor admits radical Scandinavian policy worked as well as British policy of shutting down.”

The evidence from the two countries’ differing approaches has left the professor with little escape route. UK (full lockdown/businesses shut down): 579 Covid-19 deaths per million of population. Sweden (softer restrictions/businesses kept open): 442 deaths per million.

But why make such a startling confession now, when he could have wriggled away by saying it’s too early to assess the data as the disease is still running its course? The cynic in me wonders if Dr Ferguson’s matter-of-fact admission that a full lockdown probably didn’t make a blind bit of difference was fueled by ulterior motives. Seeing as his own reputation is already in tatters, was it a warped act of revenge against Boris Johnson for being forced to fall on his sword after being caught breaking lockdown with his married lover?

Or here’s one for conspiracy theorists: instead of wanting to throw BoJo under the bus, could it have been a case of wanting to hide something else that’s about to come down the track? With America now burning in the wake of the atrocious murder of George Floyd, the confession at this juncture reminds me somewhat of how a British government spin doctor sent out a memo only 30 minutes after the second plane hit the Twin Towers on 9/11 with the cynical recommendation that “it’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.”

At the moment, the biggest accusation they could face is needlessly making a hames (for those of you who aren’t Irish, this means a ‘big mess’) of the economy.

Even Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell has since said that, while he regrets not implanting stricter measures to stop the spread of Covid-19, he “still would not have gone as far as other European countries did.”

But the Swede being plagued with self-doubt sounds much more like someone racked with guilt about “what ifs?” like an Oskar Schindler type of character who was pictured crying at the end of the Spielberg film because he was convinced he could’ve done better.

According to Aric Dromi, CEO of the Sweden-based Tempus Motu Think Tank, both the UK and Sweden’s response to Covid-19 is “ego driven and lacking in strategy.”

He told me: “Differences in the social structure between the UK and Sweden should have made a bigger impact between the numbers infected. The Swedish economy, for example, far from being protected by remaining open, has still been badly damaged as it relies heavily on exports, despite the lack of a lockdown. For both countries, it represents a human sacrifice on the altar of economics, and it is wholly unacceptable.”

It all reminds me of when John Cleese in the ‘Gourmet Night’ episode of ‘Fawlty Towers’ told guests that there were only three different types of duck on the menu that night – with orange, with cherries or “surprise,” which turned out to be “duck without oranges or cherries.” And if you don’t like duck? As Basil Fawlty quipped, “Ah, well, if you don’t like duck, uhhh, you’re rather stuck.”

At the end of the day, it might still be too early to fully know which was the right way to go, which begs the question: Why did Prof. Ferguson jump the gun and heap such fulsome praise – no pun intended here – on the Swedish model? Whatever way you spin it here, he has, once again, “undermined” the lockdown just like he did “after violating quarantine he designed to meet married lover.”

He might’ve been dubbed “Dr Strangelove” after that embarrassing slip up – but now he just comes across as a nutty professor after his latest confession. These strong words might just come back to haunt BoJo when he next goes before the electorate.

With a crippled economy thanks to the draconian measures, he’s going to find the next election will be all about his mishandling of Covid-19, and specifically, “the economy, stupid.”

Original: RT – Jason O’Toole

PUBLISHED: 3 June, 2020