On Saturday I asked a friend of mine who lives in Walsall whether he had been vaccinated yet. He replied that he had not, because he is an illegal immigrant, which I had forgotten. He has been here for seven years now, and I know him from before that in Nigeria. After some online research, I called him back and asked him if he knew that the government had announced that illegal immigrants could receive the vaccine through registering with a G.P., with no details asked. He said he did not have a G.P. and certainly would not be providing the state with all the information needed to register.
That chimed with me, because eighteen months ago when we moved to a different part of Edinburgh we had to change G.P., and I was horrified by the process. We had to produce passports and proof of address. Why a G.P. practice needs to see your passport is something I completely fail to understand, unless it is indeed a form of immigration check. The doctor’s job is to make you well, not to check you are using your real name. It is of course also difficult to provide proof of address immediately after moving, for obvious reasons. We had a period where I could prove with a utility bill that I live here, but that was not acceptable as proof that my wife and daughter lived with me.
I cannot tell you how much I detest all this. There has been a fundamentally authoritarian swing in society and I detest the way that so many people simply accept it. The system used to run on trust and honesty. For most of my life, if you walked into a GP’s office to register yourself and your family, you would just fill in the forms and get registered. The assumption was that you were telling the truth, barring any indication otherwise. Society has changed so the default, the presumption, is that you are lying unless you can prove otherwise. This is an appalling and fundamental societal shift that people have simply accepted.
If I tell a doctor that I have moved into a certain house, I expect that doctor to believe me. If I tell them my wife and daughter live with me, I expect them to believe that too. Why on earth should I have to prove it to get medical treatment? If I tell them I am a giraffe, certainly they may doubt.
This presumption you are dishonest is most marked in the field of money. It is almost impossible to make any financial transaction of any size, without proving positively you are not a money launderer or drug trafficker. Again, the presumption is of guilt until you can prove otherwise. If you wish to withdraw any significant sum of your own money in cash, a bank will even require to know what you intend then to do – with your own money. You cannot put money into a business without proving the origins of that money. The degree of intrusiveness is simply enormous, the realms of the state have expanded exponentially, the integrity of the citizen is officially disbelieved at all times. All of which is deployed almost exclusively against the little people.
I believe that a system which assumes that everybody is a rogue and a liar, that nobody’s word is trustworthy, leads to a situation where the important societal norms of trust and honesty are so officially disrespected, that these good behaviours start indeed to disappear through discouragement.
I should make plain I am not against the policing of crime; quite the opposite. Laws should be well enforced against those who are not honest, that is important reinforcement. But that is very different from the assumption that nobody is honest, and regulatory control of simple, everyday social and economic transactions on the basis of zero trust.
All that brings in a truly authoritarian state.
So I am not surprised my friend does not want to register with the G.P. to get vaccinated. It brings a host of intrusive questions, and Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policies, which aim to turn everybody with whom an immigrant has dealings – landlords, employers, banks etc. – into a government informant, has destroyed any feeling of security in dealing with authority in the immigrant population.
Nobody knows how many illegal immigrants there are in the United Kingdom. An estimate of 1.3 million people was used at the time it was announced they could apply for Covid vaccines. I believe that may be a severe underestimate. 22 years ago when working in the FCO I paid an official visit to a Thames Water sewerage works (it’s a glamorous life in the diplomatic service) at a time when Thames Water were looking for a big contract in Accra. We were discussing the fact that nobody truly knows the population of Accra, and I was told the same is true of London. The volume of sewage in some parts of London (Newham, Tower Hamlets) showed that the actual population was approaching twice the official population.
London in particular would simply grind to a halt without the illegal immigrants who keep its services and infrastructure going. Boris Johnson recognised this as Mayor of London, and in a quickly buried moment of sanity called for an amnesty for illegal immigrants.
For what it is worth, I think Johnson is an intelligent man, capable of a wide and sensible understanding of real problems and solutions, but that he has no interest in pursuing these at all. He subordinates any ideas for the public good, to ideas that will bring him personal power and wealth. When you think about it, that is a special, higher grade of calculating evil.
In fact, an amnesty for illegal immigrants is precisely what is needed for the sake of society in general. Society deplores illegal immigrants while being highly dependent on their labour. Their position outside of formal institutions is fertile ground for crime and exploitation. an amnesty will bring millions of people within the formal economy and able to pay tax. The Covid crisis should be used to give the political cover required – the alternative is to have pools of Covid continuing to exist within highly concentrated communities living in dense populations, waiting to mutate and break out again.
Immigration amnesty as a response to the pandemic should be a no-brainer, bringing those living amongst us into a position of human dignity in the state and able to enjoy its protections. It would be great to see some good emerge from this crisis.
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Illegal immigration is bad for everyone , not least for the illegal immigrant who then lives in the shadows with limited rights, subject to blackmail and exploitation
And no chances of advancement. It is bad for the country of origins of these illegal immigrants because often they are those with the ability and means to leave and often form a brain drain. They usually do jobs below their skills and training. It is also bad for the host country where there is a class that does not officially exist and beyond planning and integration. The exploiters who facilitate the traffic, and the exploiters of their cheap Labour undercutting official resident workers are the only beneficiaries. It is an international problem and partly caused by foreign wars and interventions but also the gross inequalities. This is a serious matter.
As to identity checks and supposed anti money laundering measures, the latter has established channels for the rich, the offshore tax havens which are soon to be partly repatriated to post Brexit Britain. If you are rich enough you can legally launder your money.
SA
What’s an asylum seeker to do if their government’s policy is set by London? You run away from the tyranny of a managed ex-colony into the arms of the manager. In the asylum system, genuine victims of repression are accepted on either humanity or political grounds., or both. But not those who just disagree with their governments. Political refugees are only useful if they are politically active.
If all you want is a quiet life, far from Boko Haram and other Wezttern proxies, you are challenging the destiny allocated to you by your Imperial overlords. Better to just lie low and wait for a more benign regime to arrive in No 10. Britain is less pro-active in chasing illegal immigrants than other countries because it is short of manpower. It suits this country to maintain political ignorance amongst its own citizens, so intelligent refugees are always welcome, imho.
I do understand the blur between asylum seekers and immigrants (legal or otherwise) and the manipulation and misuse of such terms. The real problem is that globalisation has been privatised and owned by the 1% and the system of immigration and asylum seeking seamlessly blending with that of people trafficking with authorities observing with half an open eye.
According to a new study, in Europe, you qualify to be a 1%-er with an average net worth of about 2,5 million euro’s. That is a lot of money but not that kind of money that you can buy legislators to write laws which contribute to illegal migration. So you are aiming your guns at the wrong enemy. The oligarchs, the 0,01%, the masters of the digital universe. The big stock-owners of international banks and conglommerates, the central banks.
They are the enemy.
“… [and] the central banks. They are the enemy.” But CBs like the BoE never bounces a Treasury cheque and thus in effect despite any historical twists are now wholly owned and controlled by government? Is government too our enemy?
And do you think that the millionaires, as opposed to the billionaires, do not benefit inordinately from this ring fenced globalization. I think it is not an all or nothing, belonging to the magic circle, the more you are worth, the more you benefit.
Although you raise some true points, some points are questionable. E.g. many people have scant opportunities for “jobs proper for their skills and advancement” in the home countries. But mostly, you make a lament with only a trace of constructive points.
I think that the main constructive points is that big majority of jobs have an employer who is easy to trace, say a farmer who gets revenue from selling crops and does not spend anything for labour to collect them, some red lights can be raised from the tax statement –> audit of the bank account –> red light again –> inspection of the farm during the harvest time. This may be tad difficult, but random audits can catch it. Some stories are surprising – a slaughterhouse that belongs to a giant food processor with hundreds of illegal workers. They have to have paperwork for every person who is paid, documenting the check for the work permission. And yet they are active, report profits, and when immigration agents raid the slaughterhouse, nothing much happens to the company that according to the letter of the law could get huge penalty and perhaps even a bunch of criminal cases.
In the context of the topic we discuss, social calculus — in contrast to political calculus — would direct efforts to identify and deport illegal workers through inspection of tax records, bank accounts and work places rather than schools, people who are victims reporting to police, or the sick people visiting doctors. One should maximize positive effects, like lack of jobs for people who want to survive on the wages in the style customary for the country, e.g. not sharing a room in the dwelling with four or more strangers, and minimize the bad effect like crime praying of people who avoid police, diseases affecting people who avoid doctors etc.
But “being beastly” toward employers would deprive politicians of their financial contributors etc.
I am not quite sure I follow the points you are trying to make. My point through personal experience is that I have seen highly qualified professionals from third world countries doing jobs that they are grossly overqualified to do. In some cases someone employed through an ‘agency’ when offered a proper job disappeared because he did not realise that to get a proper job you had to show your passport. I know this is highly anecdotal but there are estimated to be over a million illegal immigrants in this country, the exact number is unknowable and they must be employed somewhere by some shadow economy.
Much as I admire Mr Murray’s thoughts on many topics, his understanding of economics is forehead-slappingly bad.
Illegal immigrants do many of the essential jobs because – being illegal – their employers aren’t obliged to meet minimum wage (and other) regulations, or pay tax. This means they are much cheaper to employ than nationals or legal immigrants.
Grant them amnesty and most of them will be rendered unemployed as they can no longer compete on price.
What’s more, granting amnesty would encourage even more illegal immigration.
And much official nosiness stems from the Left-wing policies (eg, socialised healthcare) that demand government reduce free-riding. A private health provider doesn’t care about your lifestyle or if you’re a legitimate tax payer. A public healthcare provider does.
Hence the need for proof of residency, and authoritarian policies like fat taxes or bans on advertising junk foods.
I recommend Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” if you want to understand why socialism must eventually lead to authoritarianism.
Sowell’s “Basic Economics” is a fantastic, maths-free economics primer that will give you the tools to understand how politicians’ (often well intentioned) interventions wreck havoc in economies, usually at the expense of the least wealthy.
Oh yes and presumably Hayek also thinks that capitalism is the great liberator for the waged masses.
London may grind to a halt without illegal immigrants, but I am not sure about much of the rest of the country, especially in rural areas. On the one hand you bewail the lack of trust and on the other imply there are millions of illegals, presumably being exploited by hundreds of thousands of dodgy employers who are supposed to check their ID before employing them.
I think I am right in my belief that much of this bureaucracy came in under New Labour as a response to piddling terrorism. Most years more people drown in a bath. The pandemic certainly has put our “security” spending into perspective. I wonder how long our cold war NBC suit stockpiles would have lasted? I suspect they were like our bunkers: tokenistic.
Dave,
“there are millions of illegals”
Not aiming this comment at you personally, or deriding the points you make in your post, it’s just that this was the first instance of the term “illegals” that came up when I searched the page.
I’m sure this term abounds throughout the comments section as it does in modern day parlance which prompted my own post.
I remember when this word transformed from an adjective into a noun, at least in the contemporary narrative and I think it’s something worth drawing attention too.
Concurrent with the ratcheting up of the abominable “hostile environment” policies, it seemed to be part and parcel of demonising and defining a new (or ‘rebirth’) of another underclass subset on whom to blame our woes and further divide the wider ‘underclass’, diverting our attention from those who truly contribute most to our misery.
The idea that you can ‘be’ illegal rather than simply ‘doing’ something illegal is a very insidious and unpleasant corruption of our language which casts many perfectly decent people as undesirable or enemies, & personally I find it offensive.
Again, I’m not having a dig at you, Dave. I think this trickery crept in much like “conspiracy theorist” or “anti vaxxer” in other conversations but the link between vocabulary, thought & perception is very powerful and worth considering.
I believe there have been many manipulations (perception management) of equal note over the past 20+ years:
When free English classes for migrants were defunded, the complaints of “they don’t even learn our language” abounded.
When the right to work whilst asylum cases were considered was revoked & migrants were forced onto benefits, people moaned that they were all “scroungers”.
When having false papers to travel (perfectly logical when fleeing) was criminalised, migrants often destroyed these documents and then that too became ‘illegal’, to have no papers. This all granted powers to criminalise, charge & incarcerate migrants in regular prisons and statistics could be rolled out to show numbers of “criminals”, who were undesirable and undeserving.
I do happen to think there is a big problem with migration, but I happen to think it is an emigration problem, not an immigration problem.
With resources & rhetoric aimed at putting men, women & children into cages, building walls, criminalizing the ages-old seafaring tradition of rescue & miltarising borders and inching towards a “show your papers” culture, where doctors, hotels, landlords & employers are all subordinated to the Immigration & Nationality Directorate (probably has new “fluffy” name now), these are all disingenuous and fraudulent efforts at problem solving.
Foreign policies such as enabling resource robbery, post colonial and neo imperial political & military meddling, economic warfare and dumping subsidised food stuffs and other goods on the majority world. These are all issues much more worthy on consideration in imagining and implementing solutions to this “problem”.
Migration should and could be a cause of celebration, diversity and economic boon, it ought to be a happy affair. The truth is too many people do not ‘want’ to leave their homes and communities. They are not lured by ‘carrots’, they are more often beaten across continents and oceans with heavy, barbed ‘sticks’ wielded by people & policies who profit from their misery.
They are not “illegals”, they are people and, if not for a fluke of birth or differing circumstances, “they” could be any one of “us”.
Amen Josh a comprehensive statement. Enjoyed the clarity.
It’s like that in Japan. The police lie to GPs, landlords, employers, etc., that they are legally required to check the passports of anyone who “isn’t Japanese” (i.e., not ethnically Yayoi), so trying to seek medical attention or rent a home is nigh-on impossible if you are not a member of the ethnic majority. People acquiesce because they aren’t lawyers and don’t know what the law actually says. (Not that it matters much, as judges regularly ignore the law to rule in favour of their own prejudices.)
Kimpatsu,
Welcome to the world as it actually is.
I live in a British colony – and believe me – the UK is an equal opportunity discrimination provider.
So – welcome to the world such as it is.
“If I tell a doctor that I have moved into a certain house, I expect that doctor to believe me. If I tell them my wife and daughter live with me, I expect them to believe that too. Why on earth should I have to prove it to get medical treatment? “
Doesn’t this have something to do with all the billions of illegal immigrants out there that Mr Murray wants to come to his Brave New Scotland?
No. But keep believing and repeating racist BS peddled by ultra-rich in order to turn your brain off and stop noticing how much they steal.
There is quite good comic with far right billionaire, immigrant, and native sitting around the table – then bankster grabs 49 cookies out of 50, then points at last one and screams to native “WATCH OUT, THE IMMIGRANT WANTS TO TAKE THE LAST COOKIE” – that’s about you, by the way…
what is far right to you?
and what is a far right billionaire?
Why the useless and counter-productive adjective?
meanwhile if you actually are a money launderer….
General Practice must register its user base with government via online surgery to get paid per person.
If no authentication GP could scam system, we have 10,000 patients … fraud, more money.
Dr. Shipman could hide murders if no accuracy!
So authoritarian, or good anti fraud, corruption and worse measure.
See 5 million people one GP so payment per person to correct GP.
Just good governance. Or do you want illegals to hide amongst us? Like in blade runner?
Is it big brother? Or big sister? Call amnesty and illegal no longer part of dark economy?
Some people mix up necessary authentication and identity checks with the misuse of such systems by the state or by scammers. The answer is to tighten the system not criticise the necessary checks.
Aside from deaths have you stopped to consider the cost of treating the sick? The ongoing cost to individuals and the taxpayer of ‘long-covid”?
How quaint. If vaccines really and genuinely helped reduce health costs for chronic problems… then pharma wouldn’t supply them. We are talking about billion dollar utterly criminal enterprises who profit from selling drugs and know where their bread is buttered. They are all felons in law who simply pay their fines as a cost of doing business. The opioid scandal is a great example, it nearly killed as many as covid has done in the USA, curiously the press has little to say about it.
They have been evaluated for profit making.
johnson and starmer were both metropolitan uber liberals, pro free movement, pro brussels.
to attract votes both performed overnight 180 transformations, representing themselves quite suddenly as flag humping, hard brexit nativists.
it is surely another major staging post in britain’s long decline and self-abasement that the country now has two transparent charlatans as its foremost politicians.
in this context it should surprise no one that covid deniers and anti-vaxxers also feel their views must be taken seriously.
“the presumption, is that you are lying unless you can prove otherwise. “
“The degree of intrusiveness is simply en
ormous, the realms of the state have expanded exponentially, the integrity of the citizen is officially disbelieved at all times.”
I believe its part of the ‘War on Terror’ if you recall. Of course none of this applies to money laundering banks or governments who run proxy armies of terrorists.
I recently discovered that one GP practice near me stated on its form to become a patient that they reserve the right to refuse registration for the following reasons:
1, Previous breakdown of therapeutic relationship; 2, Alleged fraud; 3, Violent behaviour or threat of it.
COVID-19 has enabled the state to change the Mental Health Act to remove ancient protections against being sectioned and here in Wales the local health board have told surgeries to not accept patients who want to move from one surgery to another within their catchment area, removing our rights. They appear to be able, still, to accept people moving into catchment areas from outside.
This clearly favours immigrants over natives and there will, at some point, be consequences.
Craig’s general view on this subject I find disturbingly hedonistic. He’s bang on the money when he talks about a transition to a state which assumes criminality and toxic contagiousness then seeks proof that we are neither (that’s the new normal) but then he uses illegal immigrants he cannot name to illustrate the point who are, presumably, living as fugitives and refusing to give their history, which could be both criminal and toxic.
Why are they here, Craig, and not in France?
Gary , I know Irish people – youngsters – one being an employee and has ‘medical cover’ under their employer, but can’t register easily with the local GP. Their partner who came along because he had the job here . Has no job, except bar work (or not for 12 months!) whilst looking for employment within their field, but has been able to register with the local GP!
One will get a vaccine the other won’t.
We are hardly talking illegal immigrants.
The point of Free Universal Health Care at the point of need is that it is Universal, godammit!
If you are going to deny it to a handful of the total users it is not then universal is it?
It increases risks of maybe , I don’t know, contagious diseases being spread for instance, doesn’t it?
It certainly causes cruelty for the person in need and makes the medics complicit in betraying their Hippocratic oath by turning it into a hypocritical oath.
And don’t get me started on the knee jerk, squirrel pointing bs about ‘tax payers money’ and ‘medical tourists’ and ‘illegal immigrants’ risking life and limb to travel illicitly because they can’t arrive in a fake passport or even a real one on holiday and than not returning ( which by the way is how almost all ‘migrants’ arrive.
That BrexShitHeads sold and bought to each other to achieve the great road to riches for the next century as the Traeasury opens the flood gates to wholesale profiteering from medical/pharmaceutical hagemony as they have perfected in their Mengele like laboratory that is the original born on slavery and genocide nation, USA.
Whilst the real aim of and beneficiary of that BrexShit smuggles in a whole new country and a million minions from HK to set up their pirate port Singapore on Thames.
That is a whole lot more important and thousands of times bigger issue than a handful of ‘illegals’, I’m sure you will agree.
Btw I also know many illegal Brits living in far flung countries from Europe to the Gar East to South America – it is not a one way street.
Dungroanin,
If you have an accident in say, Spain and need hospital treatment you get a bill because their system is more of a metered system.
They have a radically different approach which, in many ways, is preferable because you know the actual cost of treatment so get some insight into the real cost of things and you are required to insure yourself against things as a matter of course. You are able to complain if you don’t like it, too, and the rigidity of that meter – which exists everywhere but we just don’t realise it – focuses the mind and body.
There is always a bill for everything which someone has to pay. We have constructed a dangerous illusion that free is always good and always better.
You seem to be saying that there is a greater obscenity than that higher up among capitalist elites to try to deflect.
You also insult me and the UK majority you call “shitheads” who simply want a fairer playing field by trying to tell me that one unfair playing field is smaller than another.
Gary,
You “ simply want a fairer playing field “ ?
In medical treatment that is exactly what Britain had, invented even, the Post War Settlements greatest success- the NHS. Unarguably reflected in the various mortality statistics – for 40 years.
There was no less choice who could afford private treatment. Harley street never changed its preminence and many foreigners avail themselves to its medical tourism right upto today. Hell you could even have private medical insurance and BUPA!
So why the need to destroy such a public service? We could get into the whole reason for the various Trade treaties and WTO to address that.
Simply if the great Medical Pharma conglomerates want to feast on the worlds nations, they are forced into having ‘competition’ by their IMF/WB thugs. So that is why the minuscule population of the U.K. is forced to give up the working example of a social democracy that can provide the populace with the best public services without private ownership.
That is the only reason. That was Thatcherism / Monetarism / Titania Unhinged Cuckoos and yes BREXSHIT.
Suckers don’t know what they got till long after they have persuaded themselves to give it away. By such charlatans and confidence tricksters who cleverly instill the ideas until the punters believe it’s their ‘own’idea.
“ There is always a bill for everything which someone has to pay. We have constructed a dangerous illusion that free is always good and always better.”
These are loaded words which parrot the pseudo evolutionary claptrap of the Law of the Jungle.
It should be no surprise that all those who bracket any reasoned or rational dissent to the current oligarchy by smearing them with the latest catch-all social-media/MSM identity politics labels, such as ‘transphobe’, ‘anti-Semite’, ‘conspiracy theorist’, ‘covidiot’ or ‘anti-vaxxer’ are among those doing some the dirtiest work of power today. These thought stopping phrases perform an extremely useful purpose by obscuring the activities of all those who actually do wield power, from the Russian oligarchs across to the American oligarchs and everyone in between.
Back in the first decade of the new century, some of us were warning about the catastrophe about to be unleashed by the Blair/Bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, eventually causing successive waves of refugees across Europe and leading directly to the opportunistic far-right political responses throughout the EU. We pointed out there was no case for either war, that both were based on lies. We were of course derided by the same well adjusted professionals who call out ‘covidiot’ today.
Still in that same decade we warned of the creeping surveillance state, that governments would soon be prying into every area of our lives without warrant or cause. They called us conspiracy theorists.
Just for them, here’s the latest dystopian wisdom from the World Economic Forum, for the likes of whom, these educated managerial classes continue to toil, wittingly or not: https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1368894398705045508
Yes, agreed, “anti-vaxxer” is a stupid term and it is of a piece with “conspiracy theorist”, and another one we can add to the list is “climate change denier”. All of these terms are spread to cause confusion and to make people scared of criticising the ruling class. Those who do have the guts to criticise the ruling class tend to feel nauseous when they meet people whose “minds” are dominated by such idiotic terms.
Details:
“anti-vaxxer” – This basically says if you are anti one vaccine then you must be anti all of them. Very few people who are anti any particular vaccine actually ARE against all vaccines. For example I am opposed to the vaccines against SARSCoV2, polio, pertussis, measles, and flu, but I am not opposed to the tetanus vaccine.
“conspiracy theorist” – This is the moron’s term par excellence. Ask some idiot who uses it whether they think John F Kennedy was killed by one man acting alone, as the official story still asserts, and watch them squirm.
“climate change denier” – This obscures the difference between denying there is climate change and recognising there is climate change while denying that it is in large part caused by human activity. Those are two hugely different and basically diametrically opposed positions. Whether something exists or not is a completely different issue from the question of what its causes are, a question which of course presupposes that it does exist (in this case, rightly). This again is a term for morons and liars only.
That’s not stupid term. Anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, climate change deniers, and transphobes, etc, etc ARE all complete idiots ignoring science (95% plus scientific consensus in all these cases). Doubly so thanks to utterly hilarious accusation of ‘doing the bidding of ruling class’ – when it’s the ruling class who wants to sell expensive medicine forever, instead of fixing the problem with cheap vaccine, ruling class who wants to keep burning fossil fuels and pollute as usual, ruling class who hates tolerance and rights for everyone, etc, etc. These idiots are called idiots PRECISELY because they are doing the bidding of ruling class while being too dumb to realize they are just being puppets of 1% stopping change that would improve lives of everyone EXCEPT the ruling class.
“Very few people who are anti any particular vaccine actually ARE against all vaccines” – try reading one anti-vaxx site then you will see how hilariously wrong you are. And even if they’re only against vaccine X, in 99% of cases it’s because said people saw a clip on youtube or conspiracy post on facebook and are repeating lies sabotaging vaccination effort costing very real lives, all while actual scientist all say said vaccine is safe. Gee, I have no idea why people might dislike endangering others on completely spurious base. Ditto with masks, another measure that worked stopping pandemic cold in multiple asian states yet brainless imbeciles invent one lie after another why masks are bad/don’t work/harm you to spread deadly disease unimpeded.
“in large part caused by human activity” – yeah, it’s being done by aliens because that is the only rational explanation of temperatures skyrocketing while then sun is deeply in low activity part of the phase. People parroting this nonsense are being called idiots because they try to muddy the waters in “I am not racist but” style and if we wait till there is more CO2 in the atmosphere, sun enters active phase, ice melts and stops reflecting sunlight, and permafrost starts thawing releasing huge amounts of carbon and methane trapped under it till even said imbeciles are convinced, it will be too late. Do you wait with braking your car till you are 10 cm from said wall and call everyone screaming to do stupid because we need to consider if these painted bricks and concrete are manmade, or have some other cause, before braking?
“Anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, climate change deniers, and transphobes, etc, etc ARE all complete idiots ignoring science (95% plus scientific consensus in all these cases). ”
The compound stupidity of that statement can only be the product of a combination of ignorance and gullibility. You have not even attempted to address any of N’s points as to why these labels are moronic, but instead have come up with a moronic “rebuttal” of something he didn’t say. Anyone who bothers to study the actual physics – not “climate science”, but physics, you know, the science that’s been around for the last two hundred and forty years, not just the last forty years – can see that most of “climate science” is based on a denial of basic physical concepts, even including the laws of thermodynamics in some cases. As to that much-bandied-about figure of a 95% consensus, you are parroting it without even knowing where it comes from, which is this:
In a study of published papers on climate science, 95% of them were in favour of the theory that global warming (as it was called then) was man-made. This is equivalent to publishing a paper that says that after a study of theological papers published by the Catholic priesthood, it was found that 95% of them affirmed a belief in God. Scientists in fields other than “climate science”, to the extent that climate scientists are even scientists, given that they do not follow the Scientific Method, have better things to do than publish papers on subjects outside their own fields. I’m surprised the figure was as low as 95% actually.
“Just for them, here’s the latest dystopian wisdom from the World Economic Forum, for the likes of whom, these educated managerial classes continue to toil, wittingly or not: https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1368894398705045508“
A dystopian light bulb? Albeit a big light bulb.
Whilst the name is a bit daft with a lot of marketing fluff, UV light is and has been used for sterilization purposes for donkey’s years. Your local butchers (if you are lucky enough to still have one) uses a UV light to attract then zap flies and your local barber uses UV light to sterilise scissors and combs etc for instance and there are many more industrial uses. Whilst I don’t really see it being used well outdoors and if it is true that 222nm UV light is “safe” I can see it being useful (as long as it actually works) in some settings (mostly indoors) such as hospitals or shops. And not just for coronavirus.
I was going to link to their site but it seems to be down right now. It’s a lot of marketing guff about hope post covid etc etc but dystopian it isn’t.
That video looked like some bizarre ‘the future is coming’ viral video you’d see on Facebook that makes everyone comment what a mad world we’re living in then never comes to fruition. Reminds me of some artificial sun stunt I saw on TV where people were sunbathing on the beach at night for a laugh just to show it’s possible.
I’d been looking at UV sterilisation bulbs for tackling my mould problem at home a while ago, and as far as I’ve read, if you’re plugging one into your light fitting you have to switch it on and leave the room as it’ll damage your skin and eyes – and bleach all of your furniture… It’s only really practical for commercial / medical use.
I’d have thought that if you wanted to gather outside with safe levels of UV light you’d just go out when the sun has risen. I was just thinking about sun beds but even those make you wear eye protection, don’t they?
J
You imply that all of those who opposed the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq are also what you label as ‘covidiots’ without explaining the use of the term. There are many people whom one would call covid sceptics, who disbelieve some or all of what has been officially recognized as facts by the majority of the scientific community, about Covid-19 and the SARS cov2 virus. At one extreme some of these are on the far right and supporters of Trump, whom I would doubt have any problems about the imperial wars. So what you have done is lumped together two separate ideas and then assumed that you are sceptic about both, that all those who are sceptic about the first are also sceptical about covid-19. This is simply not the case. Moreover N_ in the comment to your comments then goes on to extend this according to his own perceptions.
“You imply that all of those who opposed the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq are also what you label as ‘covidiots’ without explaining the use of the term.”
I don’t label anyone as ‘covidiot’. Perhaps you could respond to what I did write, rather than what you would like me to have written..
“…who disbelieve some or all of what has been officially recognized as facts by the majority of the scientific community”
That the facts are in dispute by a wide array of scientific opinion is precisely my point, a fact you elide. Understandably so, these views have been actively suppressed, not just by media, also through reluctance and outright refusal to publish scientific papers with contradictory findings. That the scale of the disagreement is less visible because it has been actively suppressed proves my case, but I can see how it leads neatly to your generalisation that there is a unanimity of opinion. In short, garbage in, garbage out.
The rest of what you write isn’t even applicable.
Ah! The big conspiracy to suppress the truth means that you can’t sadly prove the truth, because all the non-sheeple that have seen the truth cannot prove the alternative ‘facts’ because of this conspiracy to suppress their true findings. That is exactly the implication of what you have said. Maybe the truth is much more mundane and there is exploitation of a real crisis because you know what, the alternative explanation is a huge conspiracy with no end to the number of conspirators.
Two repsonses to this post, which by itself is a strawman argument, have now been supressed by this blog. One of those was a link to a commentary by a Nobel Prize winning biologist. I rest my case.
J: “One of those was a link to a commentary by a Nobel Prize winning biologist. I rest my case.”
No prizes for guessing which biologist that is, then. Kary Mullis has been cited here by several people who aren’t particularly keen on listening to other scientists. Let’s not go over that silliness again. Read what was said about Mullis here: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/10/covid-19-and-the-political-utility-of-fear/comment-page-3/#comment-961886
Your case rests on a shoogly pile of nonsense.
Kary Mullis made great contributions to Science. However he also later in life said things about PCR test he invented that were not argued in the usual scientific way, through popular media, and which were taken out of context and misinterpreted.
Kary Mullis also argued against all evidence that AIDS is not related to HIV, something I am afraid makes his thinking a bit suspect. It is a very popular device used by those who wish to question the dangers from SARS cov2 to just link to this clip featuring Mullis without analysis and probably without understanding the meaning of what he said. You will probably find a better home for your posts with many upticks and self congratulatory remarks in echochambers that are currently thriving in propagating misinformation, but not here.
J
Consider an avatar labelling yourself a Marxist. It seems a failsafe protection on here against the obvious conclusion being drawn.
J,
“ Back in the first decade of the new century, some of us were warning about the catastrophe about to be unleashed by the Blair/Bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ”
Got any links to these?
We are in dire need to get such warnings on the street now. As Biden readies to rush into where Trump feared to tread.
The truth is that there is a huge level of racism in Britain, and huge hypocrisy about it. Look at the ongoing “prince Harry” story for example. Many are pretending they think it’s outrageous that somebody has wondered about what an unborn baby in their family will look like when they are born. In actual fact that is NOT necessarily a racist question at all! What is wrong with wondering what the skin colour of a baby will be? Will they look more like their mum or more like their dad? In itself, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. But HOW the question is asked can of course be EXTREMELY racist, as was the case with Ilie Nastase, who made disgusting comments about Serena Williams’s unborn child, for which he was rightly banned from the tennis circuit, and as also was surely the case with the “unnamed member of the royal family” who is almost certainly the deranged crown prince, “Prince Charles”.
“Prince Charles” praises Rudolf Steiner in his book “Harmony” and it is pretty much out in the open, for anyone who is interested, that his whole outlook is dominated by a loony belief in reincarnation. Steinerites are extreme racists who believe that the souls of babies choose their parents and that something has gone wrong with the “incarnation” of a child whose parents of two different ethnicities. That cult should be banned. But oh no, Michael Gove et al revel in giving it state money to run schools, cult schools which in practice are “inspected” by the cult itself.
Look at this vile racist comment piece by Carole Malone in the Daily Express, the newspaper that makes the Sun look centrist: “We adored Harry and welcomed Meghan – how dare they brand us racists“.
And who do we think Malone means by “us”? Well the British people of course, whom she believes to be some kind of pure white community! “SO it’s done – the knives have gone in deep and the treachery is complete. There’s no coming back from this. Prince Harry sat alongside his wife while she slated members of his family and, by association, the rest of Britain – as racists and bullies.”
The sad thing is that Harry is pulling his punches, just as his mother once did. He should come straight out, name people, say that his father’s family murdered his mother (as the whole of the ruling class are aware), and that the monarchy and everything associated with it are fit only for the dustbin.
I do find it funny (if you don’t laugh, as they say…) that there had to be a two hour programme discussing the fact that the royal family is just another bunch of elitist aristocrats who would at best be viciously passive-agressive towards an outsider who doesn’t mind their place and conform to the branding. I’m surprised Harry didn’t warn her straight away when she must have started talking about all of the nice things she wanted to do once they were married.
It’s amazing that their thin veneer of being a cuddly Disney pricess fantasy family still hasn’t worn away for the majority of the public. Whoever does their PR is a wizard.
It’s primarily a BBC production, funded by licence fee payers.
There’s money to be made from alleging racism, just as there’s money to be made from claiming antisemitism is an ever present danger. In fact there’s money to be made from all manner of what are largely turnip ghosts. Conversely there’s little money to be made from a more realistic assessment that many of the old prejudices are very much less pronounced than they used to be, and show every sign of continuing decline 🙂
“I detest the way that so many people simply accept it.” I don’t care how well educated they are. In fact, the educated are often the worst offenders… we live in a country (Western World) full of thicko sheeple. These sheeple are more preoccupied with their social media accounts, fast food orders, and the crap they plan to watch on Netflix. I can’t understand why there’s a demand for untested vaccines that don’t work. Partially tested on HEALTHY sheeple aged 55 and under? Craig questions this authoritarian swing towards a tyrannical police state, & yet, sheeple blithely take dangerous vaccines with complete and utter trust in a right-wing fascist regime that has never had a care for its sheeple, or the NHS which is being systematically destroyed.
Perhaps Carl you need to rethink who is the sheep.
People have their spare time and can do what they like with it. I don’t use social media but I did enjoy my pizza last night (from a local independent business) and am thoroughly enjoying watching “The Expanse” on Amazon prime. I have run out of things I want to see on Netflix and will unsubscribe for a while to allow them to perhaps make a few more shows I want to see.
“I can’t understand why there’s a demand for untested vaccines that don’t work.”
They were well tested for short term side effects and came up with not much dfference rom most other injectables. Granted, there isn’t long term data yet but the short term data shows that they do work and work well in the 300 million people so far vaccinated worldwide.
“Partially tested on HEALTHY sheeple aged 55 and under?”
It would be unethical to test them first on unhealthy people. Is that what you’d have done? It would also be pretty dumb to trial them on people who already had had coronavirus. Only one had limited data on over 55’s, the others had older groups in their trials.
“sheeple blithely take dangerous vaccines”
You have zero evidence for their being dangerous. Who is the sheep here?
ET, do you have an excess mortality graph from any country in the world which shows a decline associated with the introduction of covid vaccination? Genuine question.
If you believe some quotes from anti-vax circles, there are claims that deaths in care homes have been at a record high following the vaccines.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/19097077.coronavirus-deaths-falling-fastest-among-85s-care-home-residents-scotland/
https://www.carehome.co.uk/news/article.cfm/id/1643075/covid-19-care-home-deaths-are-showing-signs-of-falling
I am mostly looking at Ireland and UK and I cannot find all the articles relating to the general decline in death rates in care homes across both Ireland and UK but above are two. Use a search engine and you’ll find lots. Israel is also a good source of vaccine data because of their highly integrated health and IT system. It gives them almost real time data.
Excess mortality graphs in Europe show a sharp increase in deaths at around the time the vaccination programmes were first rolled out, lasting for a month or so, followed by a steep decline. But there is a steep decline in excess mortality pretty much every year that there is excess mortality at around this time of year as respiratory viruses are seasonal by nature. Any definitive proclamations about what exactly has caused the drop off in deaths are, at best, predicated upon faulty post hoc ergo propter hoc logic, and at worst deliberately misleading.
You could look at infection rates and then compare them with the death rates which followed a few weeks later in a now very predictable pattern. This occurs worldwide, regardless of whether a single vaccination took place or not.
I see what you’re doing, though. You’re trying to falsely imply that the rollout of vaccines _caused_ the increase in deaths. Unless you’re rather hard of thinking, you should question why the greatly increased rate of vaccine rollout is not continuing to make death rates climb.
I think you’re the one being deliberately misleading here, Bob.
I can give you very clear evidence that many vaccines are dangerous. Many contain aluminium, present as an adjuvant in killed-virus vaccines. It’s there in significant quantities, aluminium being a significant neurotoxin. There is enough aluminium in one dose to poison a child’s brain were it all to go there.
Now here’s the thing: they never tested it for safety.
There is no clinical evidence for its safety, nor is there epidemiological evidence for safety either. The claim that it is safe rests on discredited evidence.
How they get around this is a real hustle. When the vaccine is tested against a control group, the adjuvant is used both in the control group and the test group! This is arguably scientific fraud, but it is done as routine.
Scientists who have been exposing this malpractice are the excellent Professor Chris Exley from the UK. Also, Professor Gherardi from France who found mechanism by which aluminium can travel to the brain from a vaccination shot – macrophages, the ‘big eaters’ of the immune system (there’s much more to it than antibodies) can ‘consume’ the aluminium but if there is then inflammation in the brain, they can then transport the aluminium there, thereby setting off more brain inflammation, a chain reaction.
Professor Exley found sky high aluminium levels in the brains of ASD individuals. Really the cause of autism is a no-brainer.
The establishment can’t provide a shred of evidence against all this, so they react by cutting of funding of the researchers, and pretending that studies showing a lack of association with MMR or thimerosal (the mercury preservative) somehow cover everything.
Squirrel
Exley and aluminuim are old pseudoscience hat. Here is this for you to chew on.
https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/christopher-exley-vaccine-pseudoscientist/
you are attempting to countering peer-reviewed science with an entirely un-peer reviewed internet article written by a pseudonym!
If I was to do that from an anti-vax perspective, I’d be ridiculed.
This is an utterly vapid article with no merit or sound arguments whatsoever.
It seeks to compare ingestion with injection to suggest they are the same, but this is an absurd proposition because the whole point of injecting aluminium is to provoke an immune response, if you ate the aluminium, you would not get the immune response.
” The establishment can’t provide a shred of evidence against all this “
Ah yes the familiar cry of the lesser spotted conspiracy theorist. “You cannot disprove it therefore it must be true!” Actually there have been studies comparing mental development with blood aluminium levels in children which have found no link with vaccination.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28919482/
It used to be that blaming mercury for autism was the thing but the phasing out of the mercury based preservative thimerosal twenty years ago (which had no effect on autism rates) and the gradual acceptance that the vaccine most generally blamed, MMR, never contained any mercury anyway rather threw a spanner in the works. The ‘incontrovertible evidence’ that mercury was to blame has quietly been dropped and now aluminium is the bad boy.
Over 20 million people in the UK have had their first shot of one Covid vaccine or the other, 312 million worldwide with comparatively tiny numbers reporting serious side effects. I had my first jab on 1st February (AstraZeneca), I know half a dozen other people who have had theirs too and apart from a couple of sore arms none of us have suffered any side effects whatsoever. They gave me a pamphlet, three sheets of double-sided A4, including the ‘insert’ with the ingredients. No mention of aluminium; or mercury.
Blood levels are irrelevant kempe. The method by which the aluminium travels to the brain is via the lymph and macrophages.
This is why you cannot find, and will never find, a clinical trial to demonstrate the safety of aluminium injections.
How convenient that it’s impossible to prove the safety of aluminium in vaccines! By the same token though it’s impossible to prove that it isn’t safe.
Lymph is clear fluid that is made up of water, white blood cells, proteins, and fats that have filtered out of blood vessels into the spaces between cells. Some of the fluid is reabsorbed by the blood vessels so the two are interconnected.
Oh dear, just when I thought it was safe to use aluminium saucepans again as they wouldn’t give me Alzheimer’s, now they are going give my children autism. Back to gathering dust in the cupboard for them.
Kempe, either you are wilfully misinterpreting the point to be facetious, or you are not understanding it.
The reason that there is not, and will never be a clinical trial to demonstrate the safety of aluminium injections, is because it is extremely dangerous.
Were they safe, this could be demonstrated by a clinical trial.
Why do you think no such trial exists?
Are you really in favour of injecting children with neurotoxic metal in the absence of clinical trial evidence?
Bayard, you do not have nearly so much to worry about with ingesting aluminium as injecting it, but I’d avoid aluminium cookware for sure. Aluminium is found in the brains of alzheimer’s patients.
It is interesting that those who underestimate the seriousness of COVID-19 accuse those who do of fear mongering and shroud waving but then go on about how vaccines are so dangerous and there is such a coverup because THEY don’t want you to know the truth. If such childish arguments are not enough, the same people indulge in even sillier arguments about things they know nothing about because of some pseudoscientific hoaxster holistic website or organisation has said so.
Autism is a complex disorder and with genetic and environmental possible causes. It is possible that some environmental factors maybe including aluminium, may play a part in those who are susceptible. All of this does not by any means prove that vaccines, note plural and inclusive, cause autism.
The same people who resent being labelled covidiots or anti-vaxxers are quite happy to label those who have not seen the light, because they are not as clever as them, ‘sheeple’!
I find it quite ironic that anybody commenting in earnest on this blog uses pithy little epithets like “covidiot”, “conspiracy theorist” or indeed “sheeple”, when these are exactly the type of ad hominem attacks used to smear and denigrate Craig Murray by the corporate media.
I honestly switch off as soon as I see anyone using lazy labels that make broad assumptions about quite complicated opinions, whether they’re on my ‘side’ or not. If I wanted to read conversation on that level I’d go to Twitter.
Anonish
I am astonished then that you haven’t switched off quickly enough and responded. Better luck next time.
Yeah, it’s that kind of snark that turns comment threads into boring personal slap-fights.
You mean yours? Thanks for taking the time to continue to respond.
Bob and Anonish
I totally agree and tend not to use these terms but I used them here because Carl14 above used exactly these terms, and my comment was in answer to his post.
More generalisation without any factual basis. Unless you can provide some relevant examples.
I see you have produced a cogent argument buttressed with evidence, that what you have written is factual.
“All that brings in a truly authoritarian state.” Trust and honesty are laid bare when we examine the latest developments in ‘Technology Assisted Contact Tracing’ that uses Ai algorithms to interpret data from a number of sources such as your use of credit cards/loyalty cards, internet and mobile phone data.
The Covid virus is an opportunity for the intelligence community, authoritarians and powerful corporations to expand their power. One way they may try to do so is through the use of this technology and data to address the pandemic. These TACT systems will cause significant risks to privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties and will be managed on the back of ‘returning to normal’ to make them widely accepted
The schemes I have evaluated are privacy-unfriendly, and the societies that deploy them are already within the UK surveillance state with dangerous powers of social control vested in central authorities.
Mobile phones are carried by the majority of the British population.Each phone has a way to interact with neighboring phones —typically through Bluetooth Low Energy beacons. If you enroll in the proposed systems, your phone announces itself to its neighbors with a different large random number every few minutes. Your phone records the numbers it has announced, and the announcements it “hears” from neighboring phones, creating a history that goes back a few weeks and that information resides on central servers hosting a collection of databases and used in complex queries to analyse your daily activity and reinforce control.
I have never had a cellphone. (My experience in military signals intelligence made me aware of how the authorities could misuse them.) Shouldn’t this latest news give people reason not to possess the things, or at least not to carry them around?
Security researchers have highlighted a number of potential flaws in the coronavirus contact tracing app.
The issues have been flagged to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is involved in the app’s development, and it said it is in the process of fixing them.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/20/serco-accidentally-shares-contact-tracers-email-addresses-covid-19
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8343613/Serco-Private-contractor-leading-UKs-coronavirus-contact-tracing-programme-beset-controversy.html
https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/coronavirus/4031719-SERCO-have-sub-contracted-contact-tracing-to-CONCENTRIX-firm-who-were-involved-with-tax-credits
‘The doctor’s job is to make you well’ – the NHS is NOT the INTERNATIONAL Health Service. And I ask you again, Craig, how much of your OWN money are you donating EVERY month to help those ILlegals?
‘I should make plain I am not against the policing of crime; quite the opposite. Laws should be well enforced against those who are not honest, that is important reinforcement.’ LOL, do you even know what you wrote previously in the same article? You don’t do irony very well, do you?
‘to turn everybody with whom an ILLEGAL [corrected it for you] immigrant has dealings’ – and again, Craig, you have a surreal brain fog in refusing to accept the reality that those ILegal immigrants are mostly enabled to get into Britain by CRIMINALS, so by definition, you also support THEM.
Also, the more immigrants allowed in, the more the financial pressure is put on the lowest paid BRITISH workers, but of course, Craig, you don’t care about THEM. Amnesty actually ENCOURAGES more and more to come here! The sooner Scotland becomes independent the better, then you can invite ALL the ILlegal immigrants you want into Scotland, Craig.
You know what is the best way to stop illegals from taking money out of the system? Give them amnesty, legalize, give them work protection – boom, they suddenly start paying taxes and contribute far more to common pot than they ever took from it. But alas, there are too many idiots voting against this because ultra-rich convinced them peanuts taken by illegals are bigger issue than billions stolen by 1%. Craig is 100% right, too bad all you can do is parrot hate filled tabloid nonsense designed to blind you to the real issue (real thieves above you, not imaginary ones below you) instead of researching what actually worked to solve this problem in other countries…
‘peanuts taken by illegals are bigger issue than billions stolen by 1%’ – conflating the 2 points destroys whatever argument you thought you had.
Secondly, because those ILlegal immigrants are typically not well educated, the amount of remuneration they would receive from working would NOT be enough to cover their costs to the Government.
Thirdly, you do NOT factor in that we Brits have the RIGHT to determine who comes in to OUR country, much like YOU have the right to decide who comes into YOUR home, right???
..to turn everybody with whom an ILLEGAL [corrected it for you] immigrant has dealings’ – and again, Craig, you have a surreal brain fog in refusing to accept the reality that those ILegal immigrants… – Errrm do I detect an overload of egotism and arrogance in your response Ralph.
Can you clear up the ambiguity and confirm that you are, indeed, addressing Craig?
Slightly off topic, however ….
“The government has published the UK’s first national action plan aimed at protecting journalists from abuse and harassment.
Journalists have reported suffering abuse and attacks, such as being punched, threatened with knives, forcibly detained, and subjected to rape and death threats, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) said.
Commitments in the new action plan include training for police officers and journalists, while prosecution services across the UK have reaffirmed their commitment to taking a robust approach to crimes against reporters. Every police force is to be given access to a designated journalist safety liaison officer, and the National Police Chiefs’ Council has appointed a lead officer to take responsibility for crimes against journalists at a national level.”
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2021/03/09/government-publishes-action-plan-to-protect-journalists-from-abuse/
I wonder if this action plan to protect journalists could be used to protect Julian Assange or even Craig Murray ?
I had the same thoughts when I read the story, but I fear that this protection will be partial to those who doff their caps to those in power, write what they are told to write and toe the line, however thin.
Such as Luke H. and Carole C. but not those who really walk the talk to inform the public of the hard facts within an issue, such as Max Blumenthal or Caithlin Johnson, Craig or Greta Thunberg.
Interestingly, the european commission had a pop at Ireland today about it’s defamation laws.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/ireland-s-defamation-laws-are-being-used-to-pressure-journalists-eu-commissioner-1.4504781
The vaccines are not remarkably effective in any case. If an illegal desperately wants one, offer it along with a ticket home.
Offering amnesty to the illegal is an endorsement of the criminal people smuggler and an advertisement for their services. It leads to more and more, with increasing pressure on the poorest in this society, poor who have nowhere to run off to.
The newcomers will not be obeying the covid restrictions and ameliorations, so you are immediately back where you started.
“Not remarkably effective”? What do you base this on – reference, please, because it is completely untrue.
It is based on little accelerated fall off in case or mortality rates compared to countries with far lower vaccination. Little acceleration in the drop off in 80+ virtually fully vaccinated cohort against the 55-60 little vaccinated cohort. The evidence is weak, though I appreciate a spin has been presented to the media that it is effective. Look closely at the raw data yourself, it is available online.
Colin, there are remarkably few people who have got seriously ill – less still been hospitalised or died – after becoming vaccinated. A rate of 90%+ of people not becoming infected at all following vaccination places these vaccines in the category of being remarkably effective – the exact opposite of your claim.
As is typical, you talk about “spin” to the media and so on, eluding to some mighty conspiracy that only people as smart as you can see.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/leaky-vaccines-enhance-spread-of-deadlier-chicken-viruses
https://phys.org/news/2014-11-vaccines-imperfect-math-effects-disease.html
Despite Glenn’s protestations, the jury is still very much out regarding the effectiveness of the current offerings.
Two links to unrelated vaccines.
Any links that actually support C Smith’s claim because as far as I can see it isn’t supported by any evidence. Cases in Israel have fallen by 46% since their vaccination campaign began and cases and deaths in the UK are considerably less than in France or Italy, countries with similar populations but much lower rates of vaccine take up and who were previously seeming to manage this pandemic better than we were.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
It’s no good citing examples from other European countries becasue they are heading into spring like we are. In order to take that variable out of the equation, you need to be looking a t countries in the southern hemisphere.
The element of interest would be the potential for unforeseen results when ‘Leaky’ vaccines are introduced, as opposed to the disease the vaccine is intended to cure ?
You do see the distinction ?
Quite the opposite. For a valid comparison all other factors need to be as close as can be.
Quote:- This problem, where vaccination fosters the evolution of more virulent disease, does not apply to most human vaccines.
Any evidence that any of the Covid 19 vaccines are ‘leaky”?
As the article goes on to say this is not an argument against developing vaccines, just something the developers need to be aware of.
Casual Observer
I am afraid you have fallen victim of the copy-and-paste-titlesoflinks-withoutreadingthecontentsofthelink. This is a well known trick that MSM use, everyone reads the titles but no one reads what the articles say. So did you for example see this?
“This problem, where vaccination fosters the evolution of more virulent disease, does not apply to most human vaccines. Those against mumps, measles, rubella, and smallpox are “perfect:” They protect against disease and stop people from transmitting the respective viruses. “You don’t get onward evolution,” says Read. “These vaccines are very successful, highly effective, and very safe. They have been a tremendous success story and will continue to be so.”
And this later
“For the chicken industry, these results are actually an argument for getting the vaccine,” says Read. “Any chicken that doesn’t get it is at even greater risk than it would be in the 1950s.”
But elsewhere it discusses how these problems are greater in chickens which are selected and highly inbred, but also that this will mean more attention to designing and monitoring future human vaccines. In other words it was a positive report, not a scare story about the lurking dangers of vaccines.
To explain this, it is similar to bugs becoming resistant to antibiotics, it doesn’t mean we stop using antibiotics, it means we should be careful how to use them and be aware of the problems, and develop new ones.
All of this is of course a bit of a diversion because it has nothing to do with the safety or efficiency of the current SARS cov2 vaccines, another story.
I see the lying blue monkey army has regrouped for a new infestation. Got a new playbook? Or just the same old?
I just wonder what these denialists and anti-vaxxers are going to do for their next trick, once it becomes so obvious that the vaccinated are not falling ill and/or dying, and see governments worldwide falling over themselves to open up society again.
The conspiracy theorists/ denialists go through these stages – which is not exhaustive, just off the cuff :
– Covid-19 is a hoax!
– It’s cover to make us all controlled / fragment society / monitor us / keep us “locked down” forever!
– It’s the “Great Reset”!
– It’s a secret plot by Bill Gates to fit us up with microchips!
– Nobody is really dying, it’s a HUGE plot by every gov’t in the world, together with all medics etc. etc. etc. !
– The vaccine doesn’t work!
– Vaccines are just a plot to give our money to the pharma giants!
– The medics are trying to kill us! Governments want us all dead!
…. Not to mention all governments have secretly colluded to kill us with a disease they invented (but doesn’t exist) to reduce the population (which they cannot do through tax incentives), to pretend to cure it with vaccines which don’t work but will kill us, and …. err.. err… we’ll all starve to death last year (Mystic N_eg’s confident prediction! Whatever happened to that?)… and so on without end.
My guess is they’ll move right on – entirely unembarrassed – to the next Great Conspiracy Theory, and try to back-fit some re-writing of the Covid-19 pandemic into an even larger plot which “they” would have got away with, had it not been for a bunch of Youtube videos which reveal the Real Truth.
Beliefs are not responsible for those who believe in them: just because nutters believe in something does not necessarily make it untrue. There are plenty of certifiably insane people who believe the Earth is spherical, for instance.
There were plenty of people who believed that seat belts kill you, it’s far better to be “thrown clear” in an accident.
Do you think it’s OK to have mass protests against seat belts, to encourage the cutting of them with razor blades at every opportunity, so that thousands of people a year can be “thrown clear” safely?
Maybe that’s not quite as disastrous as positively encouraging the spread of a deadly virus in a global pandemic, simply because it’s tough to come up with an analogy for something that supremely irresponsible and stupid.
Insane or sane people can believe or not believe that vaccines save lives, or that Covid-19 exists and is deadly, and that seat belts save lives. But one would simply be wrong to deny it, sorry – personal belief doesn’t actually have any bearing on fact and science.
If you really cannot tell the difference between a non-invasive seat belt which is very clearly understood, and a mandation of an invasive medical procedure with all kinds of risks which would break the Nuremberg Code on medical ethics, you are an idiot.
I have been asking pro-vaxxers if they have ever seen an independent laboratory report to demonstrate the purity of any vaccine, and yet to receive a response… can you oblige?
Quality control procedures ensure “purity” of vaccines, do you think they just bang out the stuff without bothering to check it? Perhaps you can refer us to lab results showing that vaccines are routinely full of “impurities” that concern you so much. I wonder what you’re expecting – tiny little microprocessors with Bill Gates’ name stamped on each?
Anti-vaxxers would surely be able to take a batch to a lab, have a whip-round for the fee, and check it – rather than expecting a sane person to prove a negative. How about it – any anti-vaxxers actually bothered to do so?
glenn_uk
You are debating vaccines against someone who is far more experienced on the subject. You might want to be a bit less sure of yourself.
I would refer you to the Corvelva institute who have been doing exactly what you suggested. You can see their reports here https://www.corvelva.it/en/speciale-corvelva/vaccinegate.html
or an article here https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/health/the-vaccinegate-of-italy-63235
“Tests on the vaccine Priorix Tetra, also manufactured by GSK, and used for protection against measles, mumps, rubella and varicella, showed that it contained 1.7-3.7 microgram of foreign chicken embryo DNA and human foetal DNA. This is at least 100 times more than the World Health Organization (WHO) limit of 0.01 microgram.”
That is just one example, every vaccine they are finding contaminants and in some cases, the vaccine doesn’t even have the antigens it is meant to have.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘whip round’… you can’t buy vaccines off the shelf, for exactly the reason that their makers are terrified that you will do exactly this and take them to an independent laboratory. I’m not quite sure how Corvelva sourced their vaccines.
Of course, idiotic internet provaxxers are quick to say Corvelva are getting it wrong. So that is why I ask them if they know of any independent (or even non-independent) laboratory report to demonstrate purity on any vaccine. I have yet to receive a response.
Saying “Quality control procedures ensure “purity” of vaccines” is your assumption for which you have no evidence. It’s like saying, our intelligence services had quality control of the evidence that took us to the Gulf War and it would be unthinkable that they let garbage through because it suited them.
Are you really interested in ‘facts and proof’? I don’t think so.
If you’re quoting Corvelva as an authority on vaccines, you clearly aren’t as clued up as you think.
Corvelva is a notorious Italian anti-vaccination campaign group who have been caught publishing fake results to support their alarmist pseudoscience. Read a review of the methodological problems inherent in one of their “studies” here: https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/vaccine-pseudoscience-corvelva-anti-vaccine-researchers/
“Oh, here we go again with more vaccine pseudoscience that makes the anti-vaccine religion fall on their knees and genuflect as if real science was presented. This time it is garbage science from an Italian anti-vaccine group, Corvelva, that tries to claim that vaccines don’t contain anything but toxins. They laughably believe that vaccines don’t even contain antigens.
Yes, you read that right. This amateur group “published” (and by published, I don’t mean in a real peer-reviewed journal, I mean a pdf file on the internet). Obviously, this ranks near the bottom, if not the bottom, of the hierarchy of scientific research. But we’ll get to all of that – let’s take the time to dig through the nonsense presented by this fake “study.”
…
This is not an unbiased group – apparently, they will do whatever they can to dig up any evidence, whether valid or not, to “prove” that vaccines are not safe or effective. If they really had valid scientific evidence to back their claims, they would get it published in one of many respected peer-reviewed journals who would be overjoyed to publish their findings. However, given what I’m going to write below, it wouldn’t pass a peer-review of high school science fair students.
…
This junk science from Corvelva is being pushed all across the internet by our usual suspects in the anti-vaccine religion. They do this because they simply lack any scientific evidence that supports any of their invalid opinions about vaccines.”
We’ve considered their lack of credibility in the discussion form, specifically concerning the weakness of the claims propounded by one of their members, Dr Loretta Bolgan.
If you’re not aware of the faulty methods they used to derive their claims, then look for critical reviews via search engines. You’ll find the evidence you cite debunked in multiple places.
If that’s the best you can offer, then the conversation should end here.
This is looking at it from the wrong end of the telescope. The ‘nutters’ beliefs are not 100 untrue, what makes them ‘nutters’ is a limited range of ‘nutty’ beliefs.
Oh, don’t be such a spoil-sport, it’s so much easier to argue “this is believed by nutters, therefore if you believe it, you are a nutter, too” than actually have to disprove something using facts and logic.
Come on, Bayard. Denialists are not interested in facts and proof. They just keep coming up with “What about this? What about that? What about something else? How about this 2-hour youtube video I demand you respond to?”
When these points are answered, they don’t go away. They just get recycled in short order.
Denialists cannot be reasoned out of their position, because they didn’t reason themselves into that position in the first place. They make assumptions, start with a conclusion, then work backwards to find anything or anybody to support it. Contrary information is dismissed.
You do seem to be rather heavily and emotionally invested in being the Anti-vax Finder General 🙂
I just think it’s important to push back on lunatic notions that encourage people to spread disease and death, apparently you find it amusing.
the smiley emoji at the end of every post is as bold a giveaway these days as a swastika emoji.
I think you’ll find that putting up a coherent argument against such notions is far more effective than your method of “pushing back”.
No, I responded to this repeated point of yours just above. Denialists are not interested in facts or reason.
Glenn_uk, if denialists aren’t interested in reason, they sure as shit aren’t going to be interested in your brand of non-logic. What you are trying to do is cast doubt on beliefs that you personally don’t hold, by pointing out that nutters hold them. This is a complete non-sequitur: it may be the case that if you believe weird stuff, you are a nutter, but the converse, that, if you are a nutter, then everything you believe is weird stuff is not also true.
Bayard
You are again on the wrong track. Some of those, shall we call them covid deniers are long term sensible commenters here in other topics. But maybe you are not familiar with a particular disorder called fixed delusion. In this disorder individuals are lucid except where their pet delusion is concerned, then everything comes out. Many long term contributors to this site are now seeking refuge elsewhere where their rants are well received.
… madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from them; but idiots make very few or no propositions, and reason scarce at all.” John Locke
There are practically no denialists and relatively few theorists. I think all the administrations did what they thought they could best achieve in a democracy. I think it could and should and, if this happens again, will have to be done differently. That lockdown isn’t sustainable isn’t up for debate. It just isn’t sustainable. Now we get to tot up the real cost both now and over the next decade and more. Many lives have already been ruined and the absence of anyone questioning the wisdom of our reaction is worrying. This could have been done differently and those who don’t think so should think about what our options are if it happens again.
countries that enacted full lockdowns all but defeated the virus without the need of vaccines. the country that took the most laissez faire, eat out to help out approach earned itself the highest cv death rate in the world.
I wholeheartedly agree, it could and should have been done differently. But if we had this all over again I am afraid it will not be done properly. Why? Because there is an ideological block. The Chinese did it because of a strong state and a population that believe in communal good and the state provided the isolation and monitoring and infrastructural facilities. This is impossible here because the state is merely a facilitator of money flow for the rich and affluent, nothing else. I do not condone every aspect of what the Chinese did, there were probably many infringements of individual human rights, but they ended up with 4000 deaths and controlled the epidemic through harsh and decisive measures. The South Koreans and Vietnamese, with less authoritarianism, but with a cohesive populations also succeeded, and so did western style democracies with their unique geography, such as Australia and New Zealand, who also managed to suppress the virus.
In this country, PPE was a fiasco, test and trace was a fiasco and as to self-isolation and quarantine, that was only a token lockdown. There is no proper isolation of the source of infection, and there was no provision for support for those asked to self-isolate; they had to rely on local help, and in some cases this was organised but not through the state.
The current style of capitalism with a hands-off state is incompatible with containment of epidemics I am afraid and this will not change anytime soon.
Smiling ueber scientist Whitty already is warning of a fourth wave, before we even have exited the third wave lock down.
There was 1 covid death in Norfolk yesterday, remarkable and news worthy to the BBC, whilst any other dearh from the biggest killer, still, Coronary Artery Disease, or any other illness does not fit their news agenda.
Is there an order or requirement for our overblown and overstaffed national propaganda ministry to cover every covid victim of this blunder and mismanagement Government? and or nothing else, well maybe a few tear jerking personal stories, ringing bells with everyone who lost dear relatives?
And whilst everyone is on vaccines here, why are we not being told that getting a jab of both Astra Zeneca and Pfizer vaccine could provide a more allround protection?
Nevermind: We do indeed have promising results from the measures being taken. That is not an argument for removing the measures. We have seen what happens when measures are removed time and time again. We see what happens in entire countries where the approach is more lax, there are so many examples now.
Just in the UK, we slackened restrictions over Xmas and what happened? An explosion in infection rates, duly followed a few weeks later by a proportional increase in deaths. Same happened in the US. The same can be seen state by state in the US, according to how restrictions are imposed or lifted.
N: “ And whilst everyone is on vaccines here, why are we not being told that getting a jab of both Astra Zeneca and Pfizer vaccine could provide a more allround protection?“
That information is there for those who want it. But consider that getting even the first dose of any vaccine is proving uphill work right now, and also that there are plenty who think Covid-19 is a hoax and that vaccines are designed to kill them. Just getting the basics across to these nutters is difficult enough.
The notable one you missed is that a 14% increase in excess mortality especially when it affects the old and those with comorbidities, is really no more than that seen in a year of bad flu.
Exactly glenn couldn’t have put it better.
I see that you got a good haul of the pesky blue pests 🙂
“I see the lying blue monkey army has regrouped for a new infestation. Got a new playbook? Or just the same old?”
It’s nice to see that there’s a need for such an army.
The West wouldn’t get so many migrants if it did not make the places the migrants come from hard to live in.
One doesn’t expect the Royal Family to say that they feel like they are prisoners and that the family is scared of the press. It’s hardly stirring stuff. They ride because their function is above all else martial – “Colonel-in-Chief.”
Their basic role at the top of the tree is totemic – to fortify the national nerve. If they are independently minded they might gently indicate areas where they see failings. If can’t manage that or don’t like it then ……..
On the other hand…nah.
First, they came for the anti-vaxxers…
did they? when was this? are you in hiding as part of anti-vaxxer resistance? sounds very exciting!
Classic Tin Foil Hat.
Craig’s adaptation of Donald Tusk’s mockery of Boris Johnson and his clique of Brexiteers , ” a special, higher grade of calculating evil ” looks fair in the context of the chaos st the its and in Northen Ireland.
But the EU has no plan at all about what to do with the refugees from the countries they have helped to trash using Islamist proxies. Only President , dormant, Trump had a clear solution to the chaos caused by Western-backed jihadery in Mosul, and therefore European Crusading by all parties in the EU is just as plan-less as Brexit.
Just because the special evil of Crusading against Muslim countries is orchestrated and co-ordinated, doesn’t mean that it makes sense or isn’t evil.
Joking apart, there is actually a special.place in Hell for those who work together to flatten the existence of Muslim national viability. Boris hasn’t even started a war yet, unlike Blair Brown Cameron and May, Bush Obama and Biden. So Boris’s Venality is pretty tame criticism.
The powers that be assume we are all up to no-good, because THEY are up to no-good!
You also assume that WE is a monolith of righteous law abiding citizens and that THEY are all up to no good. But this is like one of those puzzles where you are presented with two people, one always tells the truth and one all lies and you have to ask the right question to achieve freedom:
“You are a prisoner in a room with 2 doors and 2 guards. One of the doors will guide you to freedom and behind the other is a hangman –you don’t know which is which. One of the guards always tells the truth and the other always lies. You don’t know which one is the truth-teller or the liar either. You have to choose and open one of these doors, but you can only ask a single question to one of the guards.
What do you ask so you can pick the door to freedom?”
https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/2188/two-doors-with-two-guards-one-lies-one-tells-the-truth
I have no objection to jumping through a few hoops in order to get medical entitlement. I sat in an A&E in London a couple of years ago….my seat was next to the receptionist….and the constant parade of would be patients from Africa and Asia, dozens of people, who, when asked by the receptionist for their address, the name of their surgery, etc…all replied laughingly that they couldn’t remember…it was a big joke…the receptionist was swamped….and eventually gave up and asked them to take a seat and wait to be seen. This scenario would be playing out at every hospital in UK.
I live in Spain. Before registering with a clinic….and before visiting a state owned clinic or hospital…I am required to show proof of my residence status and entitlement. Everyone in Spain does this (and elsewhere on the Continent) and it doesn’t seem to be problematic. Only in UK are there shrieks of angst. “The doctor’s job is to make you well, not to check you are using your real name”…absolutely correct and I have never heard of a doctor anywhere checking up on your name….the checks are carried out before you get to see the doctor….by the entity that is responsible for footing the bill. On the other hand, if you visit a private hospital presumably they couldn’t care less where you live as long as they can swipe your credit card first.
But this is the essence of the NHS, free at the point of delivery. Unfortunately what has happened is instead of tackling the problems of non-registration and other problems related to itinerant or immigrant populations through political decisions and frameworks, the politicians are trying to shift the burden of doing so to the medical facilities.
How many people are de-registering, I wonder. Cf. the million or so who left the electoral roll because of the poll tax.
Deregistering from the NHS may well soon become the sensible course of action for many anti-fascists.
You don’t have to be registered to get emergency treatment.
Much of NHS “health” provision is about keeping people waiting for ages, wearing them down for months or years giving them unnecessarily repeated tests, whereas in the private sector if they had enough money they’d get the necessary treatment or surgery that would fix their problem within a week, plus a bit of aftercare if necessary. That’s the f***ing truth about the NHS. What is actually the point of most of what “general practitioners” do, for example?
You enjoy slandering the NHS staff, don’t you? Bet you sing a different tune whenever you need treatment.
Thankfully, London is not the rest of Britain (and I say that simply because I don’t like the place, nothing to do with immigration or immigrants). It’s nothing like the situation that you described where I am in the North West of England, I can assure you.
How on earth is it possible “simply” not to like a place? There must be a reason.
“He subordinates any ideas for the public good, to ideas that will bring him personal power and wealth.” This reminds me of Lord Rothschild’s 1978 Richard Dimbleby lecture “Risk” in which he said, as I recall, that politicians are motivated by personal power, the party interest, and the national good, in that order (which brought a laugh).
Nothing new under the sun.
As well as measuring the sewage in Newham and Tower Hamlets, another way the Foreign Office could estimate the number of illegal immigrants in Britain would be to count the backhanders their officials and ministers get from all the visas they issue to gangster-run “language schools” and other immigration rackets.
The proportion of illegals who enter the country illegally, e.g. packed undeclared in the back of a lorry, is small. Most enter on visas and then overstay.
Correction: I meant of course visas are issued to prospective students at the “language schools”, not to the language schools themselves. The language schools are usually registered companies that return tax forms to her Britannic majesty’s revenue and customs, get fire-inspected, run British bank accounts rather than keeping all their money in big wodges of readies, etc. If they actually do run any residential facilities they will also have relations with the powerful medics in an area. (Remember that visas have an expiry date and until they actually expire the holder is not considered an “illegal”.) And of course gangsters need lawyers too. “Language schools” are a window on the corruption of various parts of the British state and Britain’s “professions” too.
No wonder not much light is ever shone on them. Ask too many questions and you can easily end up sleeping with the fishes.
Got to wonder whether many Sun readers know what an “overstay” is. The idea that illegal immigrants typically enter the country illegally rather than carrying visas issued in their real names and then overstaying has been deliberately encouraged. This has played to the ramping up of the “need” for a strong state (to protect white people) without any attention being paid to the corruption of the (white-run) state as it exists.
Things are now changing, as the wartime atmosphere in the country intensifies.
Looks like “special hotels” for “anti-vaxxers” in “our diverse communities” may be getting a lot of business later this year. Certainly investors in G4S seem to think the company’s going to win some big contracts. The whole locking up of people who enter this country from Black Africa plays to this. It is absolutely NOT possibly “justified” in terms of hygiene. That is complete bullsh*t. The USA has had a higher rate of reported deaths with Covid-19 per population than any country in Africa, mostly FAR higher. Terms such as “pockets” will be spread about, as the media whip up things like “hunts” for who has caused the latest “outbreak” – indeed this has already started.
“London in particular would simply grind to a halt without the illegal immigrants who keep its services and infrastructure going.”
Do you have a link to a peer reviewed study that backs up that stupendous assertion?
How did London function before the wave of illegal immigrants?
“How did London function before the wave of illegal immigrants?”
What, you mean before the Romans turned up?
You should report this illegal friend of yours he is not supposed to be here these people just disregard the law they are freeloaders PLAIN AND SIMPLE EVERY TVs show has people not reporting them feeling sorry for them I feel sorry for the people of this country who have to wait in hospital queues behind them schools over crowded house shortage etc., I would clear them all out showing the same respect they have shown to me none
“I cannot tell you how much I detest all this. There has been a fundamentally authoritarian swing in society and I detest the way that so many people simply accept it.”
Hear, hear. So long as it sold to them as a means to protect them from ‘bad and dangerous’ individuals and/or political or ethnic groups, a majority of people go along with whatever authoritarian schemes the state devises. This has been true throughout history. The same principle holds true when selling war – construct a frightening foreign scapegoat that “we have to kill over there before they kill us over here” and watch the citizenry quickly fall in line. Though there have been some exceptions to the latter, e.g. the 2003 Iraq invasion, in which case the government went ahead anyway.
After almost two decades of unrelenting propaganda about “imminent” threats – from Islamic terrorists to white supremacists – and constantly nattering on about “safety” and how dangerous the world is, people are cowed and afraid. Twitter posts challenging establishment orthodoxy are labelled as potentially “unsafe” ffs! Words are now considered a threat to our safety that social media companies, spook agencies and the Atlantic Council must protect us from.
This won’t end well I’m afraid.