Reply To: SAGE : Conflicts Of Interest


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Nothinguptop
I have promised to look at your links, and I have. I am afraid that none of them tell me anything new. The first link is by a young Journalist, Laura Dodsworth and is just an opinion piece, so I am afraid no new insights whatsoever. I give you an example:

“I spoke to a coroner (who does not wish to be named) who confirmed that the UK quickly increased mortuary capacity. They think the lockdown and changes to death registrations were necessary when knowledge was scant and threatened by having to house and process 500,000 bodies. As it turned out, “the epidemic was essentially the sort of pressure we get over a normal winter. It was way less than what we had planned for.”

So what this says is that this was similar to normal winter pressures that the NHS is subjected to and almost causes a standstill in the NHS in winter on a yearly basis. Except it happened in April and May, and as we know now we are also facing a new wave of pressure on the NHS, the usual winter pressure plus a Covid pressure. Can we not see that this potentially a triple whammy? Is this not something worth discussing and thinking about, or just sweep it under the carpet and say, oh yes we coped! Well done. But also is there no analysis whatsoever or concession that the lockdown, which I think was very poorly managed, did after all have an effect? But of course the whole tone here is to say that it didn’t so there you are, circular arguments leading nowhere.
Then may be, just maybe, the author, instead of talking to a nameless coroner who only wishes to convey anecdotal data, would have spoken on the record to an ITU consultant?. Another theme that is very well developed by those who wish to deny the dangers of SARS-Cov2, is to concentrate on CFRs or IFRs. This is not the whole story. Between 5-10% of all ‘cases’ whatever way you count them, need hospital admissions. When you have an exponential rate of infections then you will soon saturate capacity for healthcare which is limited. The only way to reduce the number of cases in a highly contagious disease iS by various measures collectively called lockdown. But of course we need to ignore morbidity, absenteeism due to illness and all the other non-lethal effects of SARS-cov2.

Your ONS link is useful to read, but I will pass on to the next by Whitney Webb, who writes well in many fields. The focus of her essay is mainly on how the pandemic has been used to increase state control. I have no disagreement with this, in fact I think the pandemic has been misused in this way, and so has the opportunity to enrich friends and acolytes, and stuff money into various friends’ pockets by the governing neoliberal capitalists. This disaster capitalism is well knowN and disasters are used in this way. But this is not to say that there was a disaster in the first place. To say that the disaster was real and that it is misused, is different from saying that the disaster was created in order to achieve a hidden agenda. The second is merely a conspiracy theory that has implications of collusion of almost all countries all politicians and all scientists and doctors (apart from about 200-300 often quoted by certain websites).

The last link I am afraid is just sheer scientific nonsense with little evidence. The arguments presented have been discussed in the other forum under similar claims made by Mike Yeadon, if you wish to look at that.

In summary I think denying the severity and the consequences of this pandemic is something that is easy to disprove. But that does not mean that I would not criticize the way it has been misused, the way it has been mishandled or the way it has been used to counteract dissent. But the vociferousness of those who try to belittle the effects of the virus merely gives more weight to the authorities to clamour for more censorship.