Here are common sense reactions from non-medical professionals. Each person uses reason and logic to build their case. Each person should be listened to as all of them have an amazing message to share:
Peter Hitchens https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
PETER HITCHENS: The deep velvet quiet of our cities is as terrifying as a fire bell in the night
This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column.
The sound of silence now spreads across the country as the economy dies. As I walk through my home town, I see even the few brave small shops closing earlier and earlier as the customers vanish.
I ask them how business is – carefully keeping the prescribed distance – and they give me strained smiles as they confess that it has all but disappeared. I genuinely do not know how much longer they will bother. And once those familiar doors close, will they ever open again?
People are so used to a world in which the lifeblood of commerce flows smoothly and reliably, that they seem unable to grasp what happens when it just stops. In the late 1970s and early 1980s I was an industrial reporter.
I spent my life writing about the strikes which then convulsed many of our major industries. I had some sympathy with the strikers, who were, after all, only trying to protect their pay and conditions against inflation and attempts to wring more work out of them for the same pay.
But they were badly and often quite stupidly led. In the end they killed their own jobs.
Ultimately, it was obvious that their actions were self-destructive. Newspapers and Government Ministers used to warn dramatically about the millions of irreplaceable working days lost through strikes.
They said that our economy would be crippled, and that foreign competition would sweep in and take their place. And they were right. When did you last see a British car?
The April wind now blows over the graveyards of dozens of great industries whose workers ignored this warning. Not much more than a mile from where I am writing this, you may see the place where the huge Morris Motors car factories and the Pressed Steel plant that fed them used to stand, enormous, busy and seemingly indestructible, with dozens of smaller businesses clustered round. Now they have quite vanished, as if they had never been.
But the damage done by those strikes is a pinprick compared to the damage now being done by our own Government.
Much of this lost industrial work was replaced by the busy service industries. But now they are being strangled by a Great Lockout, whose end we cannot foretell, but which destroys a job every few seconds, and a long-nurtured business every few minutes. On this occasion, it is the Government which has caused millions and millions of working days to be lost.
In this disastrous standstill, in defiance of humanity’s innate desire to work, produce and trade, and provide for children and the old, we must stand and stare, apparently powerless.
To me, the oddest sight is when huge buses trundle by, every few minutes, often wholly empty but sometimes conveying two or three passengers in unaccustomed state along the deserted roads. It would be cheaper if the Government provided the passengers with personal chauffeur-driven cars. How long can this go on? How is it to be paid for?
Oh, everyone says, the Government will pay. But when will it sink in that when we say ‘the Government’ we mean us? We will pay in heavier taxes, higher prices, lower wages, longer hours, ravaged savings, shrivelled pensions, less freedom of all kinds – for if you think our former liberty will ever fully return, you are mistaken. We will become a lot more like China, once this is finished. Because we have to. In my many visits to that thrilling, terrifying country, I used to fear this as a distant prospect. Now I see it as a more immediate one.
Oh yes, there are some small compensating pleasures in this. But they are sad ones. There is the glorious clean air in the heartbreaking spring sunlight of this lovely, magic season. But it ought to be a time of hope and rebirth. Instead it is a time of foreboding.
The deep velvet quiet at the dead of night takes me back to my childhood in the soft, safe Devon countryside. But I am not there. I am in a busy city. And so the silence is as alarming to me as a fire bell in the night. It is the wrong kind of peace.
How can the world we have known up till now survive if this goes on much longer?
I have explained here before why I believe the shutdown of Britain is a pointless folly.
I am not as alone in this as I used to be. Several other voices, including the conservative novelist Frederick Forsyth and the liberal former editor of The Times, Simon Jenkins, have this week joined in the expression of doubt. But perhaps the greatest break in the national groupthink was an interview given to Radio 4’s excellent World At One programme by Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court judge and Reith lecturer.Until I mentioned his opposition to the shutdown here last week, the Establishment had buried or ignored his dissent, much as the USSR might have done.
But his radio interview, in which he rightly attacked police officiousness, became a sensation, and in my view caused the police to behave much better. Sadly the rest of his message was lost (it can be read on my blog).
The core of what this very considerable heavyweight said was much what I have been saying. ‘Is this serious enough to warrant putting most of our population into house imprisonment, wrecking our economy for an indefinite period, destroying businesses that honest and hard-working people have taken years to build up, saddling future generations with debt, depression, stress, heart attacks, suicides and unbelievable distress inflicted on millions of people who are not especially vulnerable and will suffer only mild symptoms or none at all, like the Health Secretary and the Prime Minister?’
The eminent German professor of microbiological medicine, Dr Sucharit Bhakdi, has also followed up his severe criticisms of the shutdown by writing to Chancellor Angela Merkel, saying: ‘It is expressly not my intention to play down the dangers of the virus or to spread a political message.
‘However, I feel it is my duty to make a scientific contribution to putting the current data and facts into perspective… The reason for my concern lies above all in the truly unforeseeable socio-economic consequences of the drastic containment measures which are currently being applied in large parts of Europe and which are also already being practised on a large scale in Germany.’
With minds of this candlepower criticising the policy, can it continue undiscussed, as it was when it was first implemented? I am honestly not sure that this shutdown and mass house arrest can be made to hold, as the warmer weather comes and as more and more people lose jobs and livelihoods.
Do any Ministers have a clue as to what it is like raising a young family in a small house in such circumstances? I think the terrible possibility of social unrest cannot be dismissed.
For that reason I think that all responsible people in our society should now be asking for an urgent recall of Parliament, so that Ministers can be questioned properly, for the first time, about the wisdom of their policy. Experts can be reinterrogated. Other experts, previously ignored, can be allowed to speak. Lord Sumption should be heard.
Grave damage has already been done. But maybe we can save something. I pray that it is so.
Dr Jordan Peterson – What he has to say “It is almost impossible to provide people with enough protection so that they feel safe to speak. It is not safe to speak. And it is even less safe not to speak. You will be a miserable worm at the end of 20 years of hiding from your fear to speak who you are. No self respect. No power. No ability to voice your opinions, nothing left but resentment. Because everyone is against you, because you never stood up for yourself.”
Tom sends us a face to face message from his backyard. So many words of truth in this discussion. People are afraid to speak the truth. I feel for this man. I don’t know about his comments about chem trails And it is interesting to here his religious points. It does appear that the truth will be crucified again, let’s hope that Tom can help and this website can help. “Pray for the courage to do it.” These are religious words that are useful.
Greg Mannarino – An explanation as to why this is happening.
Noam Chomsky – 92 years of experience.
I was wrong. Or I think I was. I heard Boris Johnson on 3 March leap into war mode and publish 28 pages of emergency plans, should coronavirus take hold in Britain. There were reports that “half a million could die”. I was sceptical.
I noted that in 1999 it had been said that BSE “could kill” half a million. Sars in 2003 had a “25% chance of killing tens of millions”. In 2009, the British government said 65,000 “could die” of swine flu.
What was different this time? The experience of China through January was enough to put other countries on guard. A widely publicised study of the virus in the January Lancet by the University of Hong Kong professor Joseph Wu and his team warned the world that a global outbreak “could become inevitable because of substantial exportation of presymptomatic cases”. It called on all health authorities to prepare.
We now know that governments round the world reacted very differently. Korea and Taiwan threw resources at testing, tracing and quarantining. In Europe, so did Germany and Sweden. Italy imposed increasingly severe lockdowns, followed by France, Denmark and Norway. The US did almost nothing; Russia and many African nations likewise. Everywhere people were told to “listen to the science”.
At first, the British government clearly did not take the virus seriously – despite Johnson’s 3 March clarion call. While the Koreans were installing drive-through testing booths and Poles were taking temperatures in airports, Johnson was joking about handwashing.
The policy was apparently to assume that, like previous scares, Covid-19 would pass. The first intimation that Britain was getting serious came with Johnson’s daily press conferences from 16 March, flanked for protection by his chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and chief medical officer, Chris Whitty. The policy was containment and mitigation. The sick would be treated. Crowds should be avoided. “Herd immunity” should rise to 60 or 70% and time would do the rest. The Swedish government made roughly the same announcements. At the time I found this approach plausible.
Across Europe that week, pandemonium broke out. Deaths were rising in Italy and Spain. Lockdown was instituted on all sides. Ministers were clearly panicked by a report from Imperial College London under Prof Neil Ferguson, the most alarming document I have read outside the realm of nuclear war planning. In a welter of graphs and statistics, it rubbished the government’s mitigation strategy and advised full-scale “suppression”. Even if the virus was suppressed, the report warned it could return and would be as bad or even worse. The report estimated that deaths could range from 20,000 in the best-case scenario to the familiar half-million in the worst.
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On 23 March a clearly traumatised Johnson appeared alone on television, unattended by scientists and with a union jack behind him. He and his in-house scientists fell into line with Imperial’s projections. Schools should close, everyone should stay at home and he would bring in emergency powers with fines. In ham-Churchillian, he told Britons to show a “national spirit as they have done before” and come together – or rather stay apart.
But “the science” appeared to lead us to differing conclusions. The same weekend Johnson did his volte face, an Oxford University team led by Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology, pointed out that figures on the morbidity of Covid-19 were virtually meaningless in the absence of testing. They suggested that half the population could have had already it mildly, which, if true, would imply the death rate was far lower than thought. Were that the case, it might seem more sensible to throw resources at the NHS and merely encourage people to avoid crowds rather than shut down the economy.
Connoisseurs of academic backbiting can enjoy the eight scientists contacted by the Science Media Centre, who rubbished the Oxford study, though some carefully hedged their bets.
But Gupta was not alone. The maverick – but frequently accurate – pandemic forecaster at Stanford University John Ioannidis called the data collected so far on the pandemic “utterly unreliable”. It would one day, he claimed, be regarded as “an evidence fiasco”. He pointed out that the Covid-19 hothouse of the Diamond Princess cruise ship yielded a mortality rate of 1% in a population largely composed of high-risk older people. He suggested the US would end up with an annual rate possibly as low as 0.05% (seasonal flu is around 0.1%). The Swedish government took a similar view.
The Cambridge University statistician David Spiegelhalter was almost as sanguine on the BBC’s More or Less programme. He did not challenge the disease’s virulence but suggested it might compress the annual flu death rate into a few weeks – putting intense pressure on hospitals – with the only “extras” coming from non-vulnerable groups. Yet more scepticism was expressed by a former NHS pathologist, John Lee, who suggested deaths of elderly people were being very differently recorded in different countries. How many were really dying “of” Covid-19 rather than of something else “with” it?
Science was plainly suffering herd disagreement – leaving politicians floundering. There is clearly more than one side to this argument. Will Sweden prove better or worse than adjacent Denmark? One day the mother of all inquiries will tell us. For the present, all we know is that the world is conducting a massive real-time experiment in state authority.
The world is not divided between “the science”’ and other mortals. Scientists are like the rest of us. They form assumptions and grasp at evidence to validate them. They are optimists or pessimists, by nature risk-taking or cautious. My wife and I share inputs, hear the same news and read the same papers. But I am an optimist and she is a pessimist. I think we could have stuck to the Swedish model. I think the crisis will be over in three weeks. She believes it will last months. It is not much comfort that we both have scientists on our side.
Kevin Drum – While this person seems to be supportive of the lock-downs, he does present many useful charts that show that the virus situation is “not that bad” and “getting better all the time”. He attributes to “the lock-downs are working”, I feel it is because the virus was never as bad as media made it to be, and probably millions already had it months ago with mild symptoms.