Britain could suffer more than 60,000 coronavirus death by July, warns the Daily Mail. But there’s a massive tell in the first sentence of the report: “…leading scientists say.” And there’s an even bigger warning in the second paragraph:
“Modelling by researchers at the University of Washington predicted 151,680 people would succumb to the virus across the continent.”
Well maybe they will, maybe they won’t. No offence to the University of Washington but when I read the phrase “modelling by researchers” I know we are operating in the realms of purest fantasy.
That’s because I’m a climate sceptic and I’ve seen it all before.
The fact that computer models are unreliable — often based on the junkiest of junk data inputs; programmed with the shonkiest and most politically motivated algorithms, put together by people you wouldn’t trust to run a bath let alone dictate government policy — is the single most important thing you need to know about the entire global warming/climate change scam. This was the basis of the 2009 Climategate scandal: that the scientists were pushing a radical, disruptive, economically damaging agenda without any solid supporting evidence.
Everyone on the climate sceptical side of the argument knows this: the models are deeply suspect; the people behind them third rate; the scientific establishment pushing them arrogant, intellectually and morally corrupt, driven by politics, money and power not by honest science.
That’s why climate sceptics like myself have often been much quicker to understand what the rest of the world is only slowly starting to grasp: that our governments’ response to coronavirus has been a wild overreaction; that the cure is in danger of causing much, much more damage than the disease itself.
Typical of this problem is Dr Anthony Fauci, the medic largely informing President Trump’s lockdown policy.
Fauci often likes to say in the frequent interviews he gives that he wants to ‘overreact’ to the crisis.
For example, he told ‘Meet the Press’ last month:
“I think we should really be overly aggressive and get criticized for overreacting.”
This may sound forthright, proactive but hints at a toxic abuse of power and a misguided approach to policy.
If you’re ‘overly’ aggressive, that means you are being unnecessarily aggressive.
If you’re ‘overreacting’ then, by definition, you are making the wrong reaction.
The correct reaction — again, by definition — is one that is neither under, nor over, but just right.
So what is the correct policy response to the global coronavirus pandemic? The answer depends, of course, on which experts you ask. And therein lies the problem. If so many serious, respected, credentialed figures are coming up with such wildly different judgements and policy prescriptions we should all be very worried.
What if the experts our governments are relying on to give them policy advice are the wrong experts?
If what I’ve seen in my years observing the climate science establishment is anything to go by, I’d say the experts currently dictating your life and my life probably are the wrong experts.
Take Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London — arguably the single most influential person in the world right now: it was on the basis of his doomsday report that both Prime Minister Boris Johnson and President Trump were frightened, against their liberty-leaning instincts, into instituting the lockdowns which are killing jobs, businesses and the economy.
Ferguson’s predictions of mass deaths — 500,000 in Britain alone — would be huge if they came true.
But it has since emerged that Ferguson has a track record of getting things spectacularly wrong. For example, his recommended response to the UK’s 2001 Foot and Mouth epidemic is now widely recognised as having led to the needless slaughter of millions of animals. (What’s the word for such an unnecessarily zealous response? Oh yes. ‘Overreaction’)
His modelling has been described by critics as ‘not fit for purpose.’ Worse — a breach of the most basic scientific etiquette — he has been reluctant to share the code which he used to model his doomsday conclusions.
According to Benny Peiser and Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, writing in the Wall Street Journal:
Several researchers have apparently asked to see Imperial’s calculations, but Prof. Neil Ferguson, the man leading the team, has said that the computer code is 13 years old and thousands of lines of it “undocumented,” making it hard for anyone to work with, let alone take it apart to identify potential errors. He has promised that it will be published in a week or so, but in the meantime reasonable people might wonder whether something made with 13-year-old, undocumented computer code should be used to justify shutting down the economy. Meanwhile, the authors of the Oxford model have promised that their code will be published “as soon as possible.”
Are we really sure that this is the ‘expert’ on whose advice we ought to be basing the future of the U.S. and the UK economies?
And even supposing for a moment that Ferguson’s modelling isn’t bunk, we still have another major problem: Ferguson is a scientist with a very particular set of priorities and areas of understanding which may have only passing relevance to broader public policy.
One of the stupid things you often hear people say these days is: “We should trust the epidemiologists. We should trust the virologists.”
Oh, sure. But which epidemiologists and which virologists?
What about Professor Dr Sucharit Bhakdi — an infectious medicine specialist and one of the most highly cited medical research scientists in German, formerly head of the Institute for Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. Should we trust him?
If so then we are currently moving in the completely wrong direction with our lockdown policies which he has described as “grotesque, absurd, and very dangerous.”
In the unlikely event we can make up our minds which epidemiologists and virologists and other science experts to back, another problem arises: single objective function bias.
I recently discussed this with Professor Don Siegel, of the public policy department at Arizona State University. (You can listen to the podcast here, here or here).
Prof Siegel describes the coronavirus lockdown policy as ‘the grandest social experiment in history’ which has been ‘designed by public health officials’ in which we are all ‘unwilling subjects.’ This social experiment has been conducted without consent or proper ethical oversight — and all on the say-so of public health officials like Dr Fauci whose judgements are skewed by his ‘single objective function’ bias.
That is, he thinks like a scientist whose sole concern is to reduce coronavirus deaths to the barest minimum. What he does not consider, because it’s not his job, are the broader effects on the economy.
The history of science is littered with examples of vested interests, intransigent or dishonest Establishment shills (such as Stalin’s pet liar Trofim Lysenko), false assumptions, Appeals to Authority, and whopping errors. This is in the nature of science: an ongoing process of trial and error, conducted by flawed human beings who have got to eat and pay the rent.
That’s why, usually, few governments have ever been so stupid as to entrust vital policy decisions to such people. That way madness lies.
Yet madness, currently, seems to have been the course most of the world’s great economies have adopted.
Trust the experts, the politicians tell us.
But we don’t know these experts. We have no idea whether or not we can trust them or their models. And we certainly never voted for any of them — nor, unfortunately, do we have the ability to boot them out of office when they fail us.
That’s why we should all be concerned, very concerned about what’s being done to our countries in the name of dispassionate ‘expert’ advice.
President Trump’s first instincts — as they so often are — were right. ‘We can’t have the cure be worse than the problem,’ he said.
Amen, Mr President. So, sooner rather than later, please can we have our countries back?
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Andy Rowlands
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Excellent article, and the same is happening here in the UK. As of a few mins ago, we had recorded 60,000 cases in total, of which 53,000 are active. Of the active cases, 1500 are critical, the rest being classed as ‘mild’. Of the 1,057,000 active cases in the world, just 48,000 are listed as serious / critical. That is 96% mild and 4% serious / critical, yet we have effectively shut down the planet because of it.
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Alan
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I’m more worried about what the UK government is doing to us than I am about the virus. I will either survive or die from the virus. The government has created never ending misery for all of us and we have no idea how bad it will get or how many of us will die as a result of their policies
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Alan Stewart
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Hi Andy,
Another Alan here. Start doing the percentages. No matter what stats I put in Canada, U.S., world – I get a decimal followed by 2 zeros before the numeral. Having been taught a bit of actuarial science assessing the RISK factor is the initial logical premise to base decision on.
Cheers
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Finn McCool
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Hi Alan.
Percentages can be misleading.
So 8 out of 10 cats prefer Whiskas.
If you ask 10,000 cats, will 80% still prefer Whiskas?
What were the poor Moggies being asked to choose between?
Did they choose it every day for a month? You know what cats are like.
They say in Scotland that 495 people, in total, have died ‘from coronavirus’.
I prefer to say that ~4,999,505 have not died.
So what’s my probability of being infected and dying from this horrible virus?
I could use Bayes Theorem to work out some numbers but it’s a worthless exercise.
If a large number of people have been infected already there is a higher probability that I have as well and never noticed it.
If there is a small number my probability of catching it is small.
Who knows?
As for my cat. He won’t even look at Whiskas.
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richard
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update overview-
Overview
According to data from the best-studied countries such as South Korea and Iceland and the cruise ship Diamond Princess, the overall lethality rate of Covid19 is in the per mille range and thus in the range of a severe influenza (flu).
A French study came to the conclusion that the lethality of Covid19 does not differ significantly from known corona viruses (i.e. common cold viruses). More recent studies have come to a similar conclusion even for the Chinese city of Wuhan.
50% to 80% of test-positive persons remain completely symptom-free, over 90% of test-positive persons develop at most mild or moderate symptoms. It is therefore not resonable to speak of a fundamental „lack of immunity“ in the population.
The median age of the deceased in most countries (including Italy) is over 80 years and only about 1% of the deceased had no serious previous illnesses. The death profile thus corresponds essentially to normal mortality.
Media reports that young and healthy people also die from Covid19 have proven to be false in almost all cases. These people either did not die from Covid19 or they in fact had serious preconditions (such as undiagnosed leukaemia).
In the US and most European countries, overall mortality remains in the normal range or even below. In the US, about 5000 people normally die per day, in Germany it is about 2600 people per day, and in Italy it is about 1800 people per day.
Increased death rates, as in northern Italy, can result from additional risk factors such as very high air pollution and legionella contamination, as well as a collapse in the care of the elderly and sick due to mass panic and lockdown.
In countries such as Italy and Spain, and to some extent Great Britain and the US, waves of influenza have often led to an overload of the health care system. In addition, up to 15% of doctors and nurses – even those without symptoms – are currently themselves in quarantine.
An important distinction concerns the question of whether people die only with or indeed from corona viruses. Autopsies show that in many cases the previous illnesses were a more important factor, but the official figures usually do not reflect this.
Thus in order to assess the danger of the disease, the key indicator is not the often mentioned number of test-positive persons and deceased, but the number of persons who actually and unexpectedly fell ill with or died of pneumonia.
The often shown exponential curves of „corona cases“ are misleading, since the number of tests also increases exponentially. The ratio of positive tests to total tests (the so-called rate of positives) remains roughly constant at 5% to 15% in most countries.
Countries without lockdowns and contact bans, such as Japan, South Korea, Sweden and Belarus, have not yet experienced a more negative course of events than other countries. This speaks against the effectiveness of such extreme measures.
According to leading lung specialists, invasive ventilation of Covid19 patients is often counterproductive and causes additional damage to the lungs. The invasive ventilation of Covid19 is mainly done out of fear of spreading the virus through aerosols.
Contrary to original assumptions, the WHO determined at the end of March that there is no evidence of aerosol dispersal of the virus. A leading German virologist also found no aerosol and no smear infections in a pilot study.
Many clinics in the Europe and the US have been lacking patients and some have already had to announce short-time work or even insolvency. Numerous operations and therapies were cancelled. Even emergency patients sometimes stay at home out of fear.
Several media have been caught trying to dramatize the situation in clinics, sometimes even with manipulative pictures and videos. In general, many media outlets do not question even doubtful official statements and figures.
The virus test kits used internationally are prone to errors: earlier studies have shown that even normal corona viruses can give a false positive result. Moreover, the virus test currently in use has not been clinically validated due to time pressure.
Numerous internationally renowned experts from the fields of virology, immunology and epidemiology consider the measures taken to be questionable or even counterproductive and recommend a rapid natural immunisation of the population.
The number of people suffering from unemployment, psychological problems and domestic violence as a result of the measures taken has exploded in the US and worldwide. Several experts believe that the measures will claim more lives than the virus itself.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden warned that the corona crisis is used for the massive and permanent expansion of global surveillance. The renowned virologist Pablo Goldschmidt spoke of a „global media terror“ and „totalitarian measures“. Leading British virologist Professor John Oxford spoke of a „media epidemic“.
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Finn McCool
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Great comment, Richard.
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richard
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Not mine-
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
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Brian James
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Apr 9, 2020 Fauci’s Coronavirus Numbers Collapse – Why Still Listen To Him?
Anthony Fauci has dominated the headlines for weeks with his doom and gloom predictions of two million Americans dead from Covid-19. If we lock the country down, maybe only 240,000 will die he claimed.
https://youtu.be/sVKBvDqPuBw
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Tom O
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The saddest part o f this to me is the problem of “the boy cried wolf.” Every time one of these falsely puffed up events happen, when it is done, people say why did that happen? Wasn’t it really obvious from the start? And the time will come when we really do have pandemic that we need to rigorously react to, and people will say, “Sure. Here go again with the cry of wolf,” and humanity will suffer even worse than it had to. And this undoubtedly will find that “some people made a lot of money out of this,” while others suffered a lot of misery.
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JaKo
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“Trust the experts, the politicians tell us.” I think NOT!
True, as in competent, leader would not ‘trust the experts,’ they (s/he) should have been an expert on their own — an expert in leadership: i.e. listen to all sides = doctors, economists, local governments, military, police, psychologists etc., ask clarifying questions and then make a decision as justified — e.g. a best compromise with the least harm to overall well-being of the citizenry. This used to be, if not the norm, then at least the aspiration of leaders in the past; too bad the current state of affairs is as it is…
(You see, ‘my’ leader isn’t a kind of ‘stock from the spiritual remains of his father’ but, just of his father’s socks; eh?)
OTOH: “Every nation gets the government it deserves.” (A pearl quote by JdM)
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Michael Clarke
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The Medical ‘Experts’ cannot agree as to the ’cause of death’, the ‘best treatment’, or even the infectious period!
The data about the numbers of infected, tested, recovered or dead are totally meaningless as they are skewed this way and that, dependent upon who/where the reports are generated.
Any ‘Expert’ can find and use the data he needs to support his agenda!
The real useful information about how to avoid this virus and more importantly how to minimize its effect on YOU, is buried behind all the junk theories and data.
Here is my recommended approach to surviving this virus, and I think that it is almost certain that we will all eventually get exposed to it!
Get your Vitamin D level checked and take appropriate action.
Make sure you get a daily intake of Vitamin C, tests for this will vary significantly from day to day so are not really useful.
Consider taking the anti-malaria drug just as if you were going on a holiday to a location where that mosquito lives.
Consider taking anti-worming medication once or twice a year.
Use social distancing, do not shake hands with or kiss someone you never met before!
If you get a persistent dry cough take simple precautions to promote a productive cough!
Age old medications like ‘Friars Balsam’ are excellent at producing this response.
This virus can be deadly, especially if you have co-morbidity conditions and WE ALL have them to lesser or greater extent, or knowledge.
Take care not to get this virus when your immune system is not at its peak condition.
Michael Logician
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Michael Clarke
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Statistics, useful tool or?????
Let me look at some recent statistics and you can judge for your self.
Consider the COVID-19 outbreak in Northern Italy, namely Lombardy and Veneto, neighboring regions, Autonomous Medical Regions!
The reporting procedure was mandated by the Italian Government so should be considered to have delivered the same relevant data, people tested, people infected, death rates, etc.
The recorded data had the same column headings, yet the numbers therein are Vastly different!
Why is this and how did those statistics provide the Italian Government with meaningful advice to cause severe damage to their economy and claim the lives of so many citizens and medical staff in Lombardy?
Let us consider the factors behind those disparate numbers.
In Lombardy if you had symptoms and consulted a Doctor, it was policy to put you in hospital. In Veneto you were told to go home and self isolate and behave like you had a bad case of the flu’. These two diametric directives drove the reported hospital levels into a seriously skewed distribution!
The same can then be reasoned out about confirmed cause of death. In Lombardy if you died in hospital having been admitted because you had symptoms the cause of death was recorded as COVID-19, thus the large numbers in Lombardy and the lower numbers in Veneto. Skewed data delivering advice to the Italian government.
Even worse is the hidden effect of hospitalization!
In Lombardy if hospitalized you were in an environment with other sick people as were the health workers, cross infection was the result which again skews the infection rate and all the other numbers.
To use infection and death data from closed environments like the hospitals in Lombardy or the Diamond Princess cruise liner will AUTOMATICALLY skew the data.
COVID-19 is a serious infectious disease, real data regarding the infection/death rates are very porous to skewed input from countries, regions, Cruise Liners, yet decisions effecting the entire world are being made based upon these statistics.
Ask any Officially appointed Medical spokesperson about re-infection rates, or permanent health problems after contracting COVID-19 and please post their reply here!
Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.
Michael Logician
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