Monthly Archives: December 2021

The Empire of Covid Passport Tsar

Let us be clear from the start: the case, the whole case, and nothing but the case for the introduction of covid vaccine passports rests on a single premise: that covid vaccination reduces the risk of onward transmission of covid–19 by vaccinated individuals. That is the alpha and the omega in the Empire of the Covid Passport Tsar. If folk, be they vaccinated or unvaccinated, are as likely the catch covid from a vaccinated individual as they to catch it from an unvaccinated individual, then there is no case for covid vaccine passport. The Covid Passport Tsar has no clothes, and more importantly, he has no evidence, and stands revealed as the model tyrant from Albert Camus’ 1950s observation: … 

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A Sage Moment

It’s not often that Dr No’s flabber gets well and truly ghasted. An extraordinary exchange on twitter (scroll down a page or so to get to the start of the substance, and click here to see the above tweet) has revealed what many have long suspected: SAGE purposely cook the books in its modelling reports. Graham Medley, professor of infectious disease modelling … 

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New Ways of Legislating

Covid — the perfect public health emergency that just keeps on giving. Each new scariant is only ever one step away from the next new scariant — an endless flow of new worries, Fergie forecasts and government responses, forever clogging up the mainstream media, like logs in a log jam. Behind the puppetry, for an authoritarian government hell bent on passing draconian laws and regulations with the minimum of scrutiny, covid is the perfect enabling epidemic, because it allows the government to get into the swing of passing law by diktat, or secondary legislation, which is almost never subject to meaningful parliamentary scrutiny. The backstops against bad secondary legislation, the arcane the negative … 

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Bonfire of the Straw Masks

There have been some crackles in recent days on twitter, as the Bangladeshi mask trial caught light again. The crackling started with the publication of a ‘short note‘ that provided a ‘simple analysis’ of the recently released raw data from the Bangladeshi trial that claimed that, given the new ‘simple analysis’, the trial failed to show any covid protection benefit from mask wearing. Not content with blowing holes in masks, the authors of the ‘simple note’ also report that they did nonetheless find some other highly significant differences between … 

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All Cause Mortality, Again

***Correction 0848 02/12/21: The 45-64 age band chart lost the 2020 line – Dr No apologises. Now corrected, and with marginally better colours. This styling will also be applied to other charts in due course. One phrase, ‘unlike the all ages and older ages charts’, removed from chart commentary*** ONS’s weekly mortality reports have rather gone off the rails for the last two weeks. A week ago, the familiar high profile double humped weekly deaths chart got disappeared, perhaps because the 2021 line was misbehaving. Earlier … 

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