As the stain of compulsory vaccination and its dystopian paperwork paraphernalia spreads across many European states, extinguishing the lights of individual freedom, and paving a way for a return to the dark days of totalitarianism, we in Britain, and particularly England, find ourselves standing alone in resisting the clamour for ever tighter controls. At his press conference earlier this week, Mr Johnson, the prime minister, may have had the appearance of new character in one of Mr Corbett’s glove puppets shows, but the content — no further restrictions — was pure gold. Had Johnson dipped into his Pocketbook of Memorable Churchillian Phrases, then he would not have gone far wrong with this from We Shall Fight on the Beaches: ‘I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone’. All it needs is but a single word substitution, covid in place of war.

The interesting question is this: why did Mr Johnson resist the clamour for tighter controls? The unprecedented meteoric rise in the number of PCR positive tests in recent days has surely been enough to turn the laxest of sphincters into a biological black hole of unimaginable tightness, and yet we got Mr Corbett’s new lightweight  glove puppet, tapping his flanking chrome domes with his invisible wand, along with a non-stop patter about getting boosted. We shall boost on the beaches, we shall boost in the shopping malls, we shall boost on the streets and in the hills, we shall never stop boosting, whatever the cost may be. Every ounce of booster rhetoric was an ounce less of restriction rhetoric, every boost a smokescreen for an absent restriction. The underlying reason for this lightweight message — essentially, nothing changed — is, Dr No  suspects, that some of those in government have become aware, some perhaps distinctly, some perhaps only subliminally, that the epic covid narrative is starting to collapse.

The evidence is all around us, and there is so much of it that this post could turn into a very long, and inevitably tedious, post. Instead, Dr No is going to focus on two key datasets, both from ONS, and data from the government’s coronavirus dashboard, that,  when put alongside each other, make no sense at all under the official covid narrative. This narrative, in its current iteration, is that covid is a nasty respiratory viral infection best controlled by regular vaccinations, along with some random NPI (non-pharmaceutical intervention) side orders, more for show than effect.

Now let us turn to the data, starting with immunity. ONS’s latest report, published on 23rd December 2021, estimates that at the beginning of December 2021, 95% of the adult population of England had antibodies, and so by implication immunity, to covid. This percentage is unlikely to have changed in the recent weeks to date. The antibodies may have come about because of vaccination, natural infection or both, but for our purposes how they came about does not matter. All that matters is that there are extremely high levels of covid immunity in the community. Under the official narrative, immunity, preferably by repeated vaccination, means less covid. That’s the whole point. Given 95% of the population are immune to covid, there should be precious little circulating covid.

And yet exactly the opposite has happened. At a time of remarkably high levels of immunity, we have seen even more remarkably high levels of covid. The last few days have seen exceptional daily totals of positive covid tests, and ONS’s latest estimates of infection for England have one in every 15 people testing positive for covid, briefly rising to one in 10 in London before falling a bit, for the week ending 31st December 2021. These are staggeringly high rates. And yet these rates are happening in a population that is 95% immune to covid. You do not need to be Spock from Star Trek to know this is not logical.

The reason it doesn’t compute is because the narrative is wrong. Covid isn’t a fire breathing viral dragon that needs a vaccine axe to chop off its head. It is a worm that tunnels through communities, raising it’s ugly head every now and then, with occasional — the last UK event was twelve month ago — dramatic flare ups. It is a typical seasonal respiratory virus that ebbs and flows. With omicron, covid has all but completed it’s transition into another common cold coronavirus, albeit with the potential to be more flu-like than other common cold viruses. It is no longer a SARS — a severe acute respiratory syndrome — virus. It is a common or garden virus, with both widespread (95%) population immunity and high levels (one in 15) of current infection, as measured by test positivity. At the same time, daily deaths within 28 days of a positive covid PCR test have been steady at around 100 per day for weeks, and many of those deaths will be deaths with, rather than from, covid; and of those who died from, many will be old and frail. Given something over 200 acute NHS trusts in England, that means that, on most days, most acute hospitals, will not have a single covid death. Covid is common or garden.      

This newer, more accurate narrative creates a problem for governments. As their cherished notion of covid as an epic disease that requires heroic counter-measures starts to collapse, governments have a stark choice: up the ante, or go with the flow. By promising an extra 100,000 pointless daily lateral flow tests for critical workers, and not much else, our Westminster government, to its credit — and notwithstanding its many other failings — has tried to avoid the former, but the same cannot be said for too many other countries. Across Europe, the thin veils that have briefly covered long-standing and deep-seated tyrannical tendencies have started to blow away, As the covid narrative starts to collapse, the tyrant’s reflex is to tighten his grip, until the pips start to squeak, and the eyes of the unfortunate start to bulge. This we might expect from our Continental colleagues of the jackboot tendency, but from our Commonwealth colleagues? Australia, it seems, is hell bent on making the pips squeak louder, and the eyes bulge more grotesquely, than any other nation.

Heaven forbid that Dr No be seen as a cheerleader for the Westminster government, but earlier this week, it did get the main call right. It is a welcome development. As our Continental and Commonwealth colleagues career dangerously towards ever-increasing controls and restrictions, our government has exercised restraint. There is still the futile booster-mania and hysterical testing to contend with, but let us be briefly generous, and tolerate these, as steps by a government that still desperately believes it needs to be seen to do something, anything, to save its face. But on the more important question of overall direction, it has chosen better: the road less travelled — and that has made all the difference.   

Comments

  1. dearieme Reply

    As an internet sage predicted on Hogmanay ‘Relax, everyone – we’re going to win.’

    He further predicted ‘no politician will want to be too obviously out of the new “mainstream”. (After all it’s that stupid mindset that got us into this pickle in the first place.)’

    That international resiling from the madness should start with Boris of the Bejellied Backbone is one of those ironies we learn to expect in life.

  2. Tom Welsh Reply

    In today’s “Daily Sceptic”, Mark Drakeford is quoted as saying (inter alia):

    “The outlier here is not Wales. Wales is taking action, as is Scotland, as is Northern Ireland, and as are countries right across Europe, and right across the globe.

    “The one country that stands out as not taking action to protect its population is England.”

    To my mind those words give the whole game away. Mr Drakeford is not much concerned with anyone’s health (except perhaps his own) or anything except NOT STANDING OUT.

    What he said, essentially, was that Boris Johnson is the tiny minority out-group, all alone in a corner and universally despised, while he – Drakeford – is cosily ensconced with the huge majority, at the heart of the in-group. A picture that takes me, for one, right back to the playground at the age of 9.

    Science, medicine, health, and even normal politics simply don’t come into the picture at all.

  3. John B Reply

    ‘The interesting question is this: why did Mr Johnson resist the clamour for tighter controls?’

    Answer… 100 backbenchers in revolt; a good kicking in the by-election threatened to invoke the termination clause in Johnson’s rental contract for No 10.

  4. H W Tsudnim Reply

    Looks as if Boris is dipping his toe in the water to see the reaction. Hopefully he will be encouraged, and speed up the reversal.
    Alternatively he plans to leave No. 10 soon and is repositioning himself to make Sir-hood an easier decision for Her Maj. He’s pressed the starter for his garter barter.

  5. dr-no Reply

    Dr No suspects history will look back on this period as a watershed, a point when at last the tide turned, at least in the main part of an island lying off the NW coast of Europe. The Hogmanay sphinx will turn out to be right after all.

    Dr No also saw those Drakeford quotes elsewhere, and thought what a feeble spineless man, but didn’t think to tie the quotes into the post. Almost all administration during the pandemic (government is too strong a word, and leadership is but a distant twinkle in the eye of history), with a few notable exceptions, has been about jockeying for a central position in the Council of Conformity. It has been group-think on a scale previously unimagined, and the adverse consequences have unfolded on a scale previously unimagined.

    ‘100 backbenchers in revolt’: absolutely. It’s rude brutal democracy at work. It may be far from ideal government, but it is, so far as we know, the best of all those that have so far been tried. If Johnson has one wit of leader in him, he won’t obstruct his backbenchers, he will rally them, and lead us to sunlit uplands. The language is of the 1940s and Empire, but this is a good starting point, all the more so for the so very relevant inclusion of an ‘abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science’:

    ‘What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.’

    ‘He’s pressed the starter for his garter barter.’ – brilliant! But first, let us hope he makes an approach to impartial epidemiology. ‘Give us the facts, and we will finish the job.’

  6. dr-no Reply

    Given Dr No’s recent tweet, and for the avoidance of doubt, Dr No is not absolutely against covid vaccines. They do appear to reduce admission, serious illness, and death, and there is absolutely no reason why a fully informed consenting adult, wishing to reduce their chances of a serious outcome, should be obstructed in their wish to have the vaccine (and as many boosters as they wish, until their ears go pop). It is an individual, personal choice.

    On the other hand, given the resent observations (not modelling) on vaccination and case (PCR +ve) numbers, it is very clear there is absolutely no case at all for compulsory mass vaccination, and so absolutely no case at all for covid vaccine passports. The only possible (sinister) rational for any such mandates is to exert political control, in much the same way masks are used, albeit in a marginally less heinous way (From the Milk Curdler July 2021: ‘masking of lay people is a collective cultural activity. It has social significance and moral worth. It conveys messages such as “our society is still at risk” and “I am doing my bit to protect others”.’)

    These measures, Dr No suggests, are exactly the sort of horrors Churchill had in mind when he warned against sinking into an ‘abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science’. We should take note. The history of totalitarianism tells us that, unlike viruses which tend to get less virulent over time, totalitarianism tends to get more virulent.

  7. dearieme Reply

    They do appear to reduce admission, serious illness, and death

    Aye, they appear to. But you know all about observational data, doc; they’re full of confounders, appearances can be deceptive, and so forth. People will declare “correlation is not causation” and then immediately ignore that aperçu the moment it suits their case.

    An example of an approach I admire is this (there are others around)
    https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/12/is-vaccine-effectiveness-against-death-mostly-a-statistical-illusion/

    An alternative crude, broad-brush approach would be simply to look at a mighty list of countries and correlate excess deaths per 100,000 with vaccine take-up. Such a plot shows no sign of vaccines saving lives. If anything it hints at the opposite. But I prefer the analytical approach, as in the link, because you’ve a better chance of finding data with some degree of internal consistency.

    Different tack: on a blog comment thread today I saw someone say that Tesco and the like suspect that Britain is far more populous than the Gov admits to: nearer 80 million than 70 million perhaps.

    Quite a difference: have you ever heard such a suggestion? Suppose it were “only” a five million discrepancy and they all lived in England: that would upset the calculation of unvaccinated souls I’d have thought?

  8. Annie Davenport Turner Reply

    All I can say is that the only people I’ve encountered with any kovi sc/variant since March 2020 are triple jibbed, so these experimental gene-messing interventions are clearly fantastically effective – not – but, of course, those who died following their jib (which now number in their five-figured-thousands worldwide – a long way from the previous 25-50 before any trial stopped in previous years) ‘would have died far worsely'(heard in a news flash) had they not been jibbed’.
    There is never anything good about something pushed with bribery, coercion (force), tricking into, shaming into, and propagandised to 110% – these ‘syringefuls’ are not good things, and whilst it’s true a person has every right to walk in front of a bus should they wish to, I would, and will, still attempt to dissuade them.
    On Blob, he’s being pushed and pulled by his string-pullers who are getting tired of his ‘There’ll always be an England’ bleats, so I can only see a brief moment’s hope, I’m afraid.

    • Tom Welsh Reply

      Maybe I lead a secluded life, but as far as I know I have never encountered anyone with any kovi sc/variant. We have had a few quite heavy colds since October 2019 though… As I have also never taken any form of kovi test, I have no idea whether any idiot or idiots would classify my colds as kovi – nor do I care. And if I eventually die of pneumonia, I shall not blame anyone for not wearing a mask or being poisoned.

      Although I have recently heard of a surprising number of people with suspiciously sudden heart trouble.

      • John Bowman Reply

        The only people I know who have had CoVid or tested positive are ‘fully’ vaccinated people and fully-plus vaccinated people. I have yet to meet anyone with CoVid.

        I have had two lab-conducted PCR Tests because I needed to travel in order to relocate. Done properly, they are invasive and unpleasant. I cannot understand why anyone would undergo such a test except out of necessity rather than curiosity.

  9. dr-no Reply

    “I say: do vaccines work, then, to reduce death?” – the sixty four million dollar question, and, despite all the wondrous power of modern computing, surprisingly difficult to answer. The problem is not so much the computers, as the boffins who operate the computers.

    For instance, when we say ‘reduce death’ do we mean reduce all deaths, reduce excess deaths or reduce covid deaths. Given we are talking about vaccines against covid, we might assume its reductions in covid deaths that matter. But there is a problem: we have no reliable way of knowing whether a death recorded as a covid death was a covid death. The opportunities for bias are limitless…

    When we say ‘reduce’, what is our reference point? Reduced compared to last year, or an average based on recent years? Reduced compared to what would have happened had we not vaccinated? That one is impossible to answer, because ‘we are where we are’ – no one knows what would have happened if we had done things differently, because that never happened. Don’t let the modellers tell you otherwise: they don’t know either.

    As regular readers of this blog will know, the least bad solution to these significant difficulties is to look at all cause mortality. What it lacks in detail, it more than makes up in robustness. Using a very simple second half of 2020 vs second half of 2021 comparison (second half only to (a) exclude visual distortion of early in year humps and (b) to compare covid present periods (i) without a vaccine (2020) and (ii) with a vaccine (2021)), what we get is this:

    Figure 1: Weekly all cause mortality summer/autumn 2020 (no vaccines) and 2021 (vaccines in widespread use). Source ONS weekly deaths

    On the above evidence (which has had no manipulation, it is just a plot of the weekly numbers) vaccines have either had no effect, or may have been slightly harmful (higher all cause mortality for most of the period). The problem is, where would the 2021 curve have been if we hadn’t had the vaccine? This chart assumes/implies it would have been close to the 2020 curve. Is that a fair assumption?

  10. John Bowman Reply

    Do CoVid vaccines work – hospitalisation and deaths?

    It would be interesting to have follow-up data on the V2 – Vaccinated Vulnerable – to see how long after being ‘fully’ (whatever the current meaning) vaccinated they live or whether they are hospitalised… I mean with respect to non-CoVid related.

    Vulnerable = mostly average age 80 with one or more comorbidity, people who are obese and or have compromised immune systems from other causes.

    My question is: does CoVid vaccination reduce hospital admissions and deaths or just delay them for a few days/weeks/months from other causes?

    I recall early last year deaths of a number of elderly patients in France and Belgium within a week of vaccination – deaths were not the result of adverse reaction… just what old people do – die, and what sick people do – die.

    There seems to be a perception that CoVid vaccines bring immortality.

    However: increased non-CoVid mortality in European Countries (except Sweden ?) suggest not.

    • Tom Welsh Reply

      This sticks in my mind, as I live in Basingstoke and have often walked past Pemberley House.

      The article leads off by quoting the usual official disclaimer – so as to get that claim firmly lodged in the reader’s mind before he sees the rest of the article. Twenty-two (at least) presumably elderly and fragile residents died within three weeks of everyone in the home being given the “vaccine”. But the deaths had absolutely nothing to do with that, oh no.

      “Pemberley House Care Home deaths ‘not related to vaccine'”

      “The vaccine is not related to a recent outbreak of coronavirus as a Basingstoke care home, a government agency has said.

      “As reported by The [Basingstoke] Gazette, at least 22 residents of Pemberley House Care Home have died in the last three weeks after contracting Covid.

      “The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHPRA) said their surveillance does not suggest that the Covid-19 vaccines have contributed to the deaths”.

      https://www.romseyadvertiser.co.uk/news/basingstoke/19045127.pemberley-house-care-home-deaths-not-related-vaccine/

  11. dearieme Reply

    “these results suggest that COVID-19 vaccine administration as a public policy over 80% of the time does not have a statistically significant causal impact of lowering total deaths or cases per million, but rather a statistically significant impact in increasing total deaths or cases per million associated with COVID-19 over and above what would have been expected if no vaccines were ever administered.”
    https://vector-news.github.io/editorials/CausalAnalysisReport_html.html

    According to Steve Kirsch this paper was written by Kyle A. Beattie.

  12. dearieme Reply

    This German piece seems pretty good to me (also found via Steve Kirsch).

    I’m particularly taken by a point that has occurred to me several times – where’s the ruddy research?

    For example, on boosters they remark “Multiple vaccination (more than two) is an ongoing experiment on the population on cumulative vaccination risks. Because:
    1.) So far, no data have been collected in the approval studies of the manufacturers.
    2.) Even in connection with the current booster campaigns, hardly any comprehensive analyses of the safety of the procedure have yet been published.”

    On the purported overloading of hospitals they remark “1.) Even after almost two years of pandemic, there is no reliable evidence as to what proportion of reported COVID19 patients are being treated in hospitals for COVID19 illness and what proportion is in hospital for other reasons.
    2.) Sufficient statistical information is not available on the vaccination status, age distribution and presence of pre-existing conditions of the actual COVID19 patients.”

    On alternatives to vaccination they complain of “the neglect of … the development and use of therapies and medicines.”

    • Tom Welsh Reply

      “I’m particularly taken by a point that has occurred to me several times – where’s the ruddy research?”

      In the waste bin, among the ashes at the back of the fire, or securely locked in a filing cabinet in a bolted room in the eighth sub-basement.

      If it didn’t “come out right”, that is. Corporate-funded research is a bit like baking a cake. If it doesn’t come out right, throw it away and try again until you get the desired result.

      A good example was Tony Blair seeking reasons to attack Iraq. He received many, many intelligence reports telling the truth: that Iraq had neither the capability nor the desire to harm the UK. Eventually John Scarlett – now Sir John Scarlett – obliged.

  13. dr-no Reply

    Thank you all, these are all very interesting and important observations and questions.

    It turns out that just before Christmas, ONS (discretely) released a third version of it’s deaths by vaccination status data – and for the third time it is infuriating! What ONS gives with one hand, it takes away with the other….

    The data now covers 1st Jan 2021 to 31st October 2021, and has a more detailed age breakdown (recall the problems caused by lumping 10 to 59 year old together), but the reporting interval has become a month rather than a week. There still appear to be significant under counts of total deaths (monthly totals do not equal totals from weekly deaths), but the data do break deaths down by vaccination status and attributed cause of death by month by age, so there may (or may not) be something to be gleaned from the data.

    It is possible that the vaccines have little effect on overall mortality, but appear (incorrectly) to reduce covid mortality, by way of mis-classification. At it’s simplest, because of hot stuff/hot vaccines bias, the unvaccinated are more likely to be given a covid cause of death, the vaccinated are less likely, not deliberately to cook the books, but simply because that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

  14. Tom Welsh Reply

    “…that’s the way the cookie crumbles”.

    Certainly when most people engage in continual goodthink, blackwhite, crimestop and duckspeak.

    Getting them to do so was the real achievement.

  15. Annie Davenport Turner Reply

    This is indeed 2 hours long, but I feel it needs to be shared everywhere, if for nothing else, for the clear information about just how far the ‘vax manufacturers’ – et al – are falling short of every rule in the book. (I didn’t watch, but listened on a long drive – find whichever way works for you.)

    When it comes to Mike’s take on asymptomatic spread, I have to say I realise now that comparing, say, a Christening party of 30 healthy people, half of which fall prey to a bug afterwards, and a Christening party of 30 people where no one falls prey, despite a clearly unwell person present, ‘asymptomatic’ is purely a belief system and extremely hard to prove. So, I’m with him enough for it to stand. But the second hour is the really interesting bit, and quite staggering.

    https://odysee.com/@Corona-Investigative-Committee:5/Mike-Session-86-en:0

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