Loving Lockdown? You shouldn't be

Imagine you walked into a supermarket and saw it was strewn with dead bodies. Horrified, you then discover the store was still full of shoppers, going about their business, selecting groceries from the shelves – and picking their way neatly over the bodies, averting their gaze.

This is how the community of business people as seen through the lens of LinkedIn has behaved for the last year.

People! Business owners and employees like yourselves have lost their livelihoods, businesses and jobs while you bantered about Zoom calls, ordered takeaways to be delivered to your sofa and counted the cash you didn’t have to spend on commuting. And what did you do to show some support? Or challenge the madness? Judging by the level of criticism of the absurd restrictions that have caused this carnage – nothing.

Hardly anyone in LinkedIn mentions the C-word. Or more to the point – the L-word. Heads down, uncritical of the largest act of self-harm ever committed by their governments across the world, a business community silently stepping over the corpses of the businesses harshly, and effectively randomly selected by self-interested governments to die on the altar of the new cult of Covid.

The data is in – lockdown-type mandates that have imprisoned most of the developed world don’t work. It’s about time we the business community started talking about this and stood up against the harms being caused. This is a heart-felt plea to change to my fellow LinkedIn users.

Exactly a year ago I wrote a dissenting blog early into the first UK lockdown. As a small business, we were horrified to see our revenue had collapsed by one third in the first full month of lockdown and I thought that we might not survive. We did, largely due to the good fortune of being firmly embedded in the digital economy. Had we been in the travel or hospitality industry - through no fault of our own - and due entirely to unnecessary government action we very likely would be bust by now.

And who on LinkedIn would have mourned our parting? Obviously no-one.

In my original post on May 7th 2020 I made 3 key points and 10 predictions. A year on is probably a good time to re-visit those and see what has happened.

My key points:

1.    Lockdowns will prove not to have worked.

2.   The government had already moved the goalposts and has lost the ‘unlock’ key.

3.   The government is manipulating public perceptions with deliberate and dishonest campaigns of fear-mongering.

My predictions:

• The 8,000 bed capacity emergency ‘Nightingale’ hospitals in the UK will have treated 54 patients.
• Governments completely over-estimated the threat of the virus and under-estimated the scale of economic collapse lockdowns would cause.
• Neil Ferguson (yes, the ‘Pantsdown Professor’ who broke his own lockdown) the key UK government scientific adviser will finally be fully discredited not only (as he was before the Coronavirus) by his own peers, but by an enquiry that includes all his other loopy predictions for swine fever, foot & mouth disease etc.
• We will discover that most infections happened in hospitals and care homes. The otherwise sick were right to avoid hospitals – they stood a very high chance of contracting the virus there.
• In the UK hundreds of thousands of smaller businesses will have been bankrupted and others burdened with unsustainable debt, with millions of job losses. Slowly these businesses and jobs will be replaced, but the associated burden of misery will be massive and last a decade.
• GDP will see the sharpest ever recorded decline, taxes will have risen sharply, and cost-push will drive inflation to a level unseen for decades.
• Half the pubs in the country won’t re-open, or will re-open until shut through by then absurd ‘stay safe’ ‘social distancing’ rules.
• Pointless politically-motivated international quarantines will provoke further tit-for-tat quarantines and finish off vast swathes of the travel and hospitality industry not already destroyed by the lockdown.
• The lockdowns that took place will be shown to have had no effect on the lifecycle of the virus.
•  Lockdown will have caused more non-Covid-19 ‘excess deaths’ than the Covid ones.

Let’s see how those points and predictions have fared.

1.   Lockdowns won’t work

Nope they didn’t. The data is in. Exactly as I predicted – they have had no meaningful effect on the trajectory of infections (or total infection mortality) anywhere – but they have caused catastrophic harms. While our government bare-face lies about this – without ever alluding to any evidence (and no, infections didn’t fall after lockdowns as they claim – in all three cases, infections were falling before lockdowns were imposed), over the last year 35 and counting scientific and often peer-reviewed studies (all invisible it seems to governments, big tech and the mainstream media), show time after time that if there is any correlation between the severity of lockdowns and their impacts on mortality, it is that the more severe the lockdown restrictions, the higher the mortality https://www.aier.org/article/lockdowns-do-not-control-the-coronavirus-the-evidence/.

Never mind the modelling – feel the data. Sweden and S. Dakota had no lockdowns and infections followed the same trajectory they did in the UK (and at lower levels). The predicted catastrophe in the absence of a lockdown failed to materialise. Florida removed all restrictions on September 26th 2020. They have faired substantially better than California (you can eat outdoors at a restaurant, but only if you mask-up between mouthfuls) with its draconian restrictions. Likewise Texas opened up 100% on March 2nd 2021, dumping the mask mandate and allowing all business to operate at 100%. Did this spark the disaster that Boris keeps threatening us with if we do the same thing here? No. Nothing happened at all.

2.  The government is moving the goalposts and has lost the ‘unlock’ key

While I have no doubt that there will be some reading this who dissent with the above, ‘After all – the government and the BBC can’t really be lying to us – can they?’ (Please check the data it’s there plainly for all to see.), all Brits will have experienced the mission creep with their own eyes. We are in the eighteenth week of the 3rd UK lockdown (and the 8th week of ‘negative excess deaths’ (fewer people dying than the norm) and still you cannot:

·       Go shopping without that ubiquitous sign of submission – whatever useless piece of paper or fabric you muzzle your face with.

·       Go to a pub or restaurant without freezing at an outdoor table.

·       Hug someone you don’t live with.

·       Invite a friend over for a drink in your house.

·       Go and stay in a hotel or B&B for the weekend.

·       Jump on a plane and go on holiday..

·       Go to a (normal) sporting event.

·       Go to a music festival.

- and these are the simple ones. There are countless rules and regulations that seem utterly random (like the ones for weddings and funerals) and which even the police despair of keeping up with.

Doing these things are not your rights. We do not have a rights-based legal system in Britain. The common law states that you are allowed to do what you like so long as it does not break a specific law normally based on avoiding harm to others. This principal has been abandoned now. The suspension of the freedoms above are indefinite. You may get some back soon - based on dates not data. They will be restored (or not) by ministerial diktat with no debate in parliament.

So is all this still for the defined purpose of ‘saving the NHS’ or rather saving the face of our politicians? No-one really seems to know. Government spokespeople and their craven supporters – i.e. most of the mainstream media – cite ‘The need to be cautious’ as some abstract objective with no evidence, or ‘The risk of new variants’ (which merely show the normal pattern of viral mutation – being each somewhat more contagious and less deadly – so they can survive.), or ‘The danger of importing new infections’ – some sort of exercise in irrational xenophobia about ‘foreign germs’.

None of these insipid explanations answer the question – why don’t we just do what Florida and Texas did? Their citizens are living and breathing and enjoying the good things life offers again. In fact it is almost beyond credulity that more than one year on, the government has offered neither any evidence that their restrictions have worked, or a cost-benefit analysis to show they do less harm than good. But there again, neither their political ‘opposition’ nor the media have asked them either.

3.  The government is manipulating public perceptions with deliberate and dishonest campaigns of fear-mongering

I pointed out one shameless lie propagated through a massive advertising campaign a year ago: that Covid is a deadly virus that “is life-threatening to people of all ages”. (2 children under 10 have died testing positive for Covid in Britain, both had severely compromised health). It turns out from leaked minutes from SAGE that behavioural psychologists were deployed to concoct a campaign of fear when it was felt that elements of the population were not sufficiently frightened by the virus.

More than a year later the fear-mongering propaganda continues unabated with more unchallenged lies: “One in three people with Coronavirus are asymptomatic and spreading the virus”. The real numbers are far lower, and Covid still follows the basic viral rule that healthy people who have resisted the virus are not meaningful sources of infection.

The UK government became the UK’s largest advertiser in 2020, spending over ￡120m frightening and misinforming the public. The campaigns can only be described as propaganda. I’m sure you will be relieved (and especially those happy Adland recipients of the government's largesse) that this will treble to ￡320m this year https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/notice/6043d1fd-1f8c-4232-a32a-a658e19abcb1?origin=SearchResults&p=2 . Now if all restrictions are to be ended on 21st June (ominously the day that the days start getting shorter) and this lockdown ‘absolutely has to be the last’ (? BoJo), why is the government planning to treble its Covid propaganda budget? (perhaps they anticipate it will take 3x the budget to un-frighten people than it did to frighten them – perfectly plausible).

I would have really liked to be proven wrong on all three of these – after all they were early calls. However the outcomes on these three things exceeded my worst expectations by a long way.

So what about those predictions? Let’s look at those.

• Prediction: The 8,000 bed capacity emergency ‘Nightingale’ hospitals in the UK will have treated 54 patients.

The 54 patients supposedly treated when I wrote that a year ago were not followed by any others. Birmingham and Sunderland hospitals never saw a single patient. The total cost of building the Nightingales was ￡532m or around ￡10m per patient, and this doesn’t take account of the multi-million pound contracts awarded for their dismantlement. Nightingales were a PR stunt within the government’s propaganda campaigns.

• Prediction: Governments completely over-estimated the threat of the virus and under-estimated the scale of economic collapse lockdowns would cause.

Governments across the world were influenced by the modelling-based estimates of Neil Ferguson of Imperial college. Sweden is probably a good example of the failure of his forecasts. His model forecast over 30,000 deaths in Sweden with a lockdown and over 66,000 without one. In the last year – without a lockdown – Sweden recorded 16,000 ('with Covid') Covid deaths.

“Just over one year ago, the epidemiology modelling of Neil Ferguson and Imperial College played a preeminent role in shutting down most of the world. The exaggerated forecasts of this modelling team are now impossible to downplay or deny, and extend to almost every country on earth. Indeed, they may well constitute one of the greatest scientific failures in modern human history.” https://www.aier.org/article/the-failure-of-imperial-college-modeling-is-far-worse-than-we-knew/

In terms of economic impact, leaving aside the unprecedented direct costs like Furlough, the useless and eye-wateringly expensive test and trace and NHS app debacles, the economic decline caused by lockdowns in the UK was 10%, double the impact of the banking crisis in 2009.

• Prediction: Neil Ferguson (yes, the ‘Pantsdown Professor’ who broke his own lockdown) the key UK government scientific adviser will finally be fully discredited not only (as he was before the Coronavirus) by his own peers, but by an enquiry that includes all his other loopy predictions for swine fever, foot & mouth disease etc.

Sadly probably my only prediction fail. Despite his track record not only with Covid but:

-     Predicting in 2001 that 150,00 people would die in the UK Foot-and-mouth crisis. Fewer than 200 humans died.

-     Predicting in 2002 that 50,000 would die from BSE (mad cow disease). There were 177 deaths.

-     Predicting in 2005, that 150 million could die from bird flu worldwide. 282 people died.

-     Predicting in 2009 that in a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ 65,000 people in the UK would die of swine flu. 457 people died.

So despite a catastrophic track-record, implausible, bungled modelling based on ridiculous assumptions (total 100% population susceptibility to Covid-19 for instance, when the Diamond Princess cruise ship case already showed that 80% of even a captive population would naturally resist infection), being caught in flagrante with his married mistress flouting the very lockdown rules he had largely instigated, Ferguson remains a go-to favourite for friendly interviews by mainstream media outlets like the BBC and The Times (where he notoriously talked about the moment SAGE in the UK realised that they could ‘get away’ with imposing a lockdown https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/people-don-t-agree-with-lockdown-and-try-to-undermine-the-scientists-gnms7mp98) .

I am however, relieved my dismay at Ferguson's still intact reputation is shared elsewhere. "Why is Ferguson, who has a long history of absurdly exaggerated modeling predictions, still viewed as a leading authority on pandemic forecasting? And why is the ICL team still advising governments around the world on how to deal with COVID-19 through its flawed modeling approach? In March 2020 ICL sold its credibility for future delivery. That future has arrived, and the results are not pretty." https://www.aier.org/article/imperial-college-predicted-catastrophe-in-every-country-on-earth-then-the-models-failed/ .

• Prediction: We will discover that most infections happened in hospitals and care homes. The otherwise sick were right to avoid hospitals – they stood a very high chance of contracting the virus there.

Looks like a good call for May 2020. Despite all the suggestions of government propaganda campaigns, and the closure of gyms, hospitality, entertainment and sport, a paper presented to SAGE in October 2020 (obviously ignored by the mainstream media) showed that over 40% of Covid infections were caught in hospital. And while there is no data available on the percentage of total infections that occurred in care homes, there is data from across Europe showing that half of all coronavirus deaths in the EU occurred in them, leading some commentators to estimate that this would account for another 40% of all infections. Thus it has exactly been the old and the vulnerable who have been allowed to become the victims of Covid, while the healthy have needlessly been incarcerated (unsurprisingly, homes during lockdown are the third most common place of infection after hospitals and care homes).

• Prediction: In the UK hundreds of thousands of smaller businesses will have been bankrupted and others burdened with unsustainable debt, with millions of job losses. Slowly these businesses and jobs will be replaced, but the associated burden of misery will be massive and last a decade.

An estimated 234,000 SME’s permanently ceased trading due to the first lockdown. https://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/downloads/simply-business-report-covid-19-impact-on-small-business.pdf

813,000 payroll jobs have been lost over the last year including 355,000 in hotels, restaurants and pubs and 171,000 in shops. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52660591 With over 3m jobs currently furloughed in the UK, it seems difficult to imagine the final score won’t still be millions when furlough finally comes to an end in September.

• Prediction: GDP will see the sharpest ever recorded decline, taxes will have risen sharply, and cost-push will drive inflation to a level unseen for decades.

In 2020 UK GDP declined by 10% - the sharpest decline ever recorded. In the March 2021 budget, the UK’s chancellor announced a freeze in the income tax threshold and higher tax threshold until 2026 to pay for lockdowns. This will mean millions more people who previously didn’t pay tax will start paying it, and more and more people will move into higher rate tax bands. This will obviously be exaggerated with the likely increase in inflation.

Fuel prices rose through March-May of 2021 in the UK, inflation is forecast to rise to 2.5% by October, and there is a 50% chance of interest rates rising in 2021.

The latest estimate of government expenditure in relation to Covid is ￡372 billion - ￡5,400 for every man, woman and child in the UK. It is widely expected that substantial new tax hikes will be necessary in the future to pay for this.

• Prediction: Half the pubs in the country won’t re-open, or will re-open until shut through by then absurd ‘stay safe’ ‘social distancing’ rules.

Too early to tell. As of early May 2021, fewer than half of all pubs in the UK are open due to regulations that demand you can only eat and drink outside. 10,000 licensed premises closed permanently last year and there are (were) 47,000 pubs in the UK. With likely continued ‘social distancing’ enforced on pubs I don’t think half of pubs closing by the end of 2021 looks unrealistic.

• Prediction: Pointless politically-motivated international quarantines will provoke further tit-for-tat quarantines and finish off vast swathes of the travel and hospitality industry not already destroyed by the lockdown.

 In perhaps the most bizarre display of Covid gesture theatrics, the manufactured fear of ‘new variants’ will I’m sure fuel knee-jerk bans and quarantines for years to come. The phrase: ‘import new variants’ is widely used by politicians in the UK and elsewhere. This despite the reality that viruses are pre-programmed to mutate in a similar fashion even in isolation, meaning that a copy of for instance the latest ‘Indian variant’ (which prompted ‘red-listing' of India and UK quarantines for travellers from India) can occur simultaneously in the UK, and the variant is already confirmed as present here. These travel restrictions are pointless, but serve the process of maintaining the levels of fear for governments and are popular with an irrationally frightened public.

• Prediction: Lockdown will have caused more non-Covid-19 ‘excess deaths’ than the Covid ones.

In the last year the ONS reports 43,000 non-Covid excess deaths. Examination of the causes of these excess deaths suggests that they are caused by lockdown – primarily through denial of healthcare. If you also consider that only a third of the 2020 ‘100,000 Covid deaths’ are ‘of Covid’ rather than ‘with Covid’ then it is likely that lockdown-caused deaths have already exceeded Covid-caused ones. When you also consider that future years are unlikely to see the level of mortality we have recently experienced with the first two seasons of Covid, but will reap a whirlwind of excess deaths from undiagnosed cancers and other diseases, and the deaths that are linked to the misery of unemployment and poor mental and physical health caused by lockdowns, that will surely bring the long-term lockdown-related death toll well above that of Covid.

Conclusion

At this point in my analysis of how my already dissenting predictions have fared, you will have likely to come to one of two conclusions. Either – ‘He’s obviously a covid-denier/anti-vaxxer/conspiracy theorist whom I should loudly denounce on social media and hopefully he will be banned.’

Or – you may think that there is cause for concern here. That like other good citizens, business people should not just tread over the bodies of the fallen. Those who through no mistake of their own have had to bear a massive price for the folly and hubris of their governments.

You may even like me, think that having committed to a certain course, governments are now throwing enormous resources at a fake narrative to justify their actions, and you want it to stop.

So please – stop stepping over the bodies, stop turning a blind eye to the businesses and their employees who have suffered. Resist the petty bureaucratic idiocies, push-back on the evidence-free claims, investigate them. Look widely for different sources of information. And let people – and me – know what you think. Let me know if you agree with my analysis – or if you don’t – and why you don’t. We need more debate, and at the moment debate on the state of democracy, freedom and state control post-Covid are stifled and censored. Be free!