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The Hume statue on Edinburgh's Royal Mile. Credit: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
For much of human history, doubt was considered a personal vice. Status and advancement was generally conferred on believers and cheerleaders for the prevailing orthodoxy. Questioning the status quo was regarded as sedition and, as a result, discussions of “doubt” were confined to pedantic philosophers determined to discover whether anything in the world could really be known.
It was not really until David Hume, writing during the Scottish Enlightenment, that an attempt was made to reconcile Scepticism with the real world. Frustrated at the “insipid raillery” of those who claimed mankind could know nothing, he dismissed their obscure thought experiments as “mere Philosophical Amusement”, and instead chose to reclaim Scepticism as a critical mindset. To put it simply, for Hume it was important to be “a philosopher; but, amidst all of your philosophy, be still a man”.
At the end of last year, Edinburgh University renamed its David Hume Tower because the philosopher — at least according to those who demanded the change — “wrote racist epithets”. Whether or not that is true is an argument for another day. But this erasure of Hume – the Enlightenment philosopher who reclaimed the meaning of scepticism more than 200 years ago – is symbolic of something far more significant. For it seems to me that the term “sceptic,” and the attitude it represents, is once again in urgent need of rehabilitation.
On paper, that shouldn’t be too difficult. As Hume put in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, to be sceptical is “to begin with clear and self-evident principles, to advance by timorous and sure steps, to review frequently our conclusions, and examine accurately all their consequences”. At the time, this was radical. It encompassed everything progressive about the Enlightenment and the emergence of the scientific method. But it also seems eminently sensible. Who wouldn’t want to be a sceptic today?
Apparently, quite a lot of people. Scepticism is suddenly perilously out of fashion. More than that, it is now deemed dangerous. The reason? The rise of the “lockdown sceptics”, who in recent weeks have taken a battering for having made claims about the virus that turned out not to be true.
In a sense, this is what should happen in the scientific method — commentators and experts being held to account for predictions they make. But the ferocity of the attacks has left us at a place where all questioning groups are subjected to the same moral condemnation. Whether they are pundits peddling conspiracies, credentialed scientists recommending alternative approaches, or intellectuals worried about the political implications — “Lockdown sceptics” is used interchangeably for them all. Any dissent will mark you out as part of the global “anti-science” movement. So sceptic has become a dirty word.
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SubscribeEarly in lockdown 1, I argued in the comments section of a Scottish newspaper that it was the duty of every citizen to respond ‘why?’; ‘for how long?’; ‘based on what evidence?’ and ‘are the trade offs with other health matters and our liberties worth it?’ to each of Ms. Sturgeon’s decrees before considering consenting to them.
In the land of David Hume, I was met with such an onslaught of shrill hysteria that I simply gave up posting. Such was and still is the conflation of the Scottish covid response with the increased fortunes of the SNP, I was even accused of being – shock, horror – a unionist (I’m not and have campaigned actively for Scotland’s independence). We’re not in a good place, intellectually or democratically.
We’re not in a good place here in the U.S either. I had the same experience as you when posting anything even remotely skeptical of the lockdown narrative, masks, etc….Vicious and savage attacks always followed.
MSM & Government favoured Trolls…
I didn’t argue in either way – I simply spoke out for considering all options calmly and objectively since – at the start of the pandemic – no one knew how long the vaccine would take and what the exit would look like. I was shouted down for even suggesting taking herd immunity into consideration. It was crazy.
Come to think of it, the worst offender in that bout of “burn-the-heretics” hysteria within my group of acquaintances was a Scot…
Please don’t do this guys, even if humour (maybe). I think we have the same feelings about this but if you’re going to try and divide us on these lines, as well as pro-anti Europe lines, you undermine all of us who are challenging the Covid madness.
Don’t forget: the land of Hume was once the land of Knox – the hysterical, statue smashing bigot who erased most of his country’s medieval culture. The Scots are reverting to the earlier type, alas.
Yes indeed, Knox, the original ‘poisoned dwarf’.
You might have thought two years as French galley slave would have taught him a few manners, but not a bit of it.
As you say Scotland’s meagre medieval culture and buildings were nearly eradicated. Just look at the paucity of their Medieval Cathedrals as but one example.
.
Yes. Good job there were plenty of non-Protestants around to kill them for their opinions, like Bloody Mary, eh?
Not in Scotland. She was Queen of England long before the union of the two kingdoms. And persecution went both ways.
I had a very similar experience posting on the comments page of the Financial Times. I argued that lockdowns were not well thought through, were likely to cause more harm than good, and that more targeted restrictions were likely to be a better response.* I got accused of being a murderer, of having blood on my hands, of hating old people. Very few commentors were even willing to engage in debate. The situation is somewhat better now but we lockdown sceptics are still the target of censorship and hate speech.
*As just one example, retail supports 3 million jobs, and with social distancing and mask-wearing is a low-risk environment for transmission. So why close so-called nonessential retail? I find it hard to believe that the small reduction in transmission is worth the unemployment and mental health impacts to a very large group of workers, most of whom are low-paid and with limited alternatives.
‘Why close nonessential retail’ ? Probably because they think it makes them look tough and decisive. Most of the political class and civil service don’t really give a toss about the general population. Have they all had pay cuts ?? I’m not able to go about my lawful business by Government decree, so I have hardly earned a bean all this tax year. In my village some of my neighbours work in the public sector, so have been on full pay usually doing damn all. Life has been good for them, but not the majority of us. And what will be left at the end of this ? Well, an even more bloated public sector of that you can be sure, but probably loads of people will just decide, like some people I work with, ‘what’s the point?’ and pack up throwing millions out of work. And for what ? To control a virus which is perhaps a little bit more deadly than a normal winter flu virus.
Yes! If the MPs and their advisers were suffering the consequences of their actions, they might think twice. But their jobs are secure, they’re not worried about the bills, they mostly have nice houses with gardens to isolate in, and if they still feel like the rules are too onerous they can always go and take a trip to Barnard Castle. One rule for them, another rule for the rest of us.
Where we live, many of those people, who can comfortably work from home, are actually enjoying this pandemic. It gives them a sense of purpose; they’re doing everything they possibly can to contribute to the fight. And more importantly, every day provides another opportunity to prove what good people they are. Dissenting voices are treated with shock and disdain. I know this, because we’re surrounded by them. Meanwhile, my husband has not been allowed to work in his chosen profession since March. The financially secure don’t care. They’re too busy saving lives.
Indeed, but what would happen if their Waitrose deliveries were cut off ? Lockdown seems to be the virtuous middle classes ‘contributing to the fight’ by working from home, and everyone else having to deliver stuff to them. Meanwhile people like your husband (and myself) don’t matter. Our lives and businesses can be ruined just so they can polish their halos.
My thoughts exactly
The issue here Andy is that those on full salary, the public sector etc are actually in the majority, and lockdown is therefore damn fine. All paid for by the most extraordinary increase in our public debt.
The FT used to be good with interesting articles and an educational comment section (I learnt a lot from it). Now it has loads of Europhile articles and the comment sections are filled with UK haters. I’m still trying to figure out where they all came from.
Universities.
Now you’re one of the people demonising the other side. Remainers don’t hate the UK, although we think Brexit is stupid, and we may hate this government.
Well, I’ve read more anti-UK bile from Scottish Nationalists (who all mysteriously have southern Irish names, and support Remain to boot) this past year than in a whole lifetime. What’s also interesting is that they go on about ‘the Scots’ and ‘Scotland’ in exactly the same terms as Hitler did about Germans and Germany (the SNP supported Fascism when they were founded, so ‘Godwin’s law’ can be overlooked in this particular case). And who is ‘we’? I have my own opinions. I don’t have to wait for the local ‘gang’ leader to tell me what I should think.
Frankfurt school, Or Teachers ‘Training college”
I have been re-reading my books on the Third Reich in Germany and the tactics, promoting fear, widespread thuggery, hysterical attacks on anyone who disagrees, are being used again today. The so-called “storming” of the Senate in Washington reminded me of when the Reichstag was set on fire (by the Nazis themselves) and the Communists were immediately blamed – thousands were imprisoned without trial and the Communist leader executed. We live in perilous times.
Financial Times is A Globalist Joke, totally buys ‘Climate Change’ ‘Green New deal” ”Biden being saviour of the West!” er no…
The shrill hysteria has come my way too. (I’m Canadian.) I don’t fully understand what’s driving the frenzy of moral outrage. All I know is that I feel less connected to (most of) my fellow humans than ever before.
Much of my family live in Canada (we’re all dual U.K./Canadian citizens), Gabrielle, all sceptical to a greater or lesser degree and report what you do. Sadly, most of them live in BC and are subject to the regular pronouncements of Dr Bonnie ‘Gloryhole’ Henry. My brother and I have begun playing one upsmanship games about the latest cockamamy rules imposed by the U.K. and Canada. Right now you guys are ahead on points because of the Quebec curfew. 😉
I know the feeling.
On Facebook, a friend of my Mum’s decided I was a unionist because I didn’t vastly overrate the virus
There are those who are so ontologically terrified in this ‘pandemic’, that they try to retain some shred of the old certainties by putting their hands over their ears to silence dissent.
In their view Nanny knows best and anyone who causes an upset in the Nursery must be silenced.
It’s congenital. No amount of argument or reasoning will change their view of ‘reality’.
Get used to it.
The hysteria which is evident is bewildering and unprecedented. Even if you point out that their risk factor is less than death through an RTA you are met with an incredulous stare and what my father used to call an ‘ah but’ and yet another ‘reason’ for the ridiculous precautions being imposed given which if analysed represents a similar very low risk factor. People seem to have forgotten that a) we die, b) when we are old and weak we succumb to whatever is going around at the time and c) we cannot prevent death when the time comes and that to try is frequently cruel to do so
Show me a country that consistently penalises critical thinkers and you show me a society where democracy is weak and which will never decide its own fate. Critical thinkers make leadership and management tough and can be frustrating but they are an essential part of creating the best solutions and achieving progress. They should be thanked, not vilified.
It may not be penalised by government policy but have you seen the response to anyone who steps out of line on climate change, covid, racism, trans etc. That IS being penalised.
Yes I certainly have. A lack of civilised debate among individuals also weakens democracy. We all bear a responsibility to keep debate civil and respectful, no matter how sporty the discussion becomes. It’s so tempting to step right back into the shadows and keep your thoughts to yourself when your opponent thinks that shouting or insults are a legitimate tactic. But to do this is to make yourself complicit in the deterioration of democracy. By all means choose your battles, but then stick your head above the parapet! Getting a (metaphorical) bloody nose from a debate doesn’t kill you.
China
And the US. And Great Britain.
Freddy, you seem to be becoming one of the true believers yourself, from the above. OK, the virus has comeback wile some really glib experts said it would not, but that seems to be only a part of the story. The big story should be the cost/benefit which I have never run into here.
I actually consider China to be where Japan was in 1930 with the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’, only with Africa very much too, and South America, quickly joining in this amazing nu-Imperialism. Same thing, need for raw materials so basically using dirty economic tricks to take over nations and whole regions.
If my analogy holds then we could expect a Pearl Harbor, and one wonders if we had one.
Your article says the dogma: fast and hard lockdown explains the 3 Chinese deaths per million to Western 1300 deaths per million. That and they lack the co-morbidity (I assume ‘Dark Matter Immunity’) seems to also be the explanation – but this all is utterly beside the point. They knew we had the co-morbidity, they knew we were susceptible, and that we are not machine like in fallowing rules. Basically they should have known they would have 3 deaths per million, and we the 1300. Thus they would know we would destroy ourselves economically and civilly wile they would not. They have growth, we have bankruptcy.
I do not say this was intentional, but then there is no reason to think it was not. Then the next part, we took our eyes off the ball and China is using that to expand internationally more, they use the economy destruction to capture Germany, Poland, the EU, and every where else, with China Biden they are in the last lap of the race wile we are just on the first.
That is why I will NOT ever wear the mask, I am anti-locckdown, because I think a state of diplomatic war exists between the West and China, and by wrecking the economy, the education, the focus, the society (creating so many expensive health problems by Lockdown to be paid for later) we are setting the world up to Chinese rule.
Disguised as saving the over 80s we destroy our civilization. Where are the cost benefit discussions? OK X lives saved and bla bla bla… But at what cost? That is the real issue, the cure worse than the disease, possibly even fatal.
Not just scepticism but common sense and logic
Aha..common sense is rare..
I am not aware of anyone who has said that the virus would not come back. What has been said clearly from numerous parties on the sceptics continuum is that it would be endemic and not pandemic. You cannot release something or have a new virus emerge which will then suddenly disappear. It could well do in time when it has run itself out of hosts but given that this is no deadly killer virus, that could be a long time indeed. Certainly what is known and what is clear from the data if analysed is that lockdowns do not work for airborne viruses, viruses cannot be controlled as we are endeavouring to do so and that given how we are recording covid deaths and how the CCP is hardly known for their honesty when communicating with the outside world; that analogies between the UK and China and drawing conclusions based on China’s performance and messages cannot be made
Who are ‘they’? Our response to the infection was entirely our own. You are peddling rubbish about China. Societies like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc., entirely unlike China, all adopted similarly effective strategies. Our own ineffectiveness was shared by all developed societies which had not had the experience of SARS. We must do better next time. But that requires learning from our mistakes.
I am not so sure Japan fits the pattern of extremely competent Asian responses… It’s ‘success’ is not so easily explained.. But East Asian societies are not in any case ‘entirely unlike China’ in terms of their social mores.
It is also very obvious to me that while many Brits are very self righteous about the sins of others, most people are in some way or form breaking the rules (just look at the 2 metre spacing….).
The Asian strain of the virus is also different from the one circulating in Western Europe and North America, which may partly explain the difference.
The numbers of cases in India, of all places, is now declining – on its own and without any competent government response.
I listened to an economist last spring who had hopes that the virus would dissipate as he was in Thailand and he had a very low infection rate despite an enormous number of Chinese tourists in late winter. Right then I thought, they either have a different strain or had already been exposed to something similar and have immunity. (I’ve read that blood work of Europeans show that some have immunity to HIV based on ancient exposure in their DNA.) Blood work in the US shows that the virus was here in November – well before any lockdowns. We need excellent scientific detective work not glib conclusions.
It’s a matter of balance. Critical thinkers are wrong most of the time, but when they are right the implications can be substantial.
It’s also a mistake to draw a dividing line between people who are critical and people who are not. We are all mix, to varying degrees, of acceptance and criticism.
As above, I would argue there is so much critical activity that our social and political structures are beginning to collapse.
What is destroying our social structure is not critical activity but the failure to distinguish critique from cancellation. Critique equates to moderate scepticism (identified by Merton as a characteristic of science). Cancellation is the very opposite of critique. The root of the problem lies in Postmodernism which allows both lazy educators and overweening educational bureaucrats to undermine academic and intellectual standards
There is little moderate scepticism. It usually takes the form of moral hysteria. The Left accuse those on the right of being evil, racist and stupid. Those on the Right accuse those on the left of being traitors, cowards and sheep.
Both sides are full of outrage and a type of dogmatic hysteria. Refusing to engage with each other, refusing to trust each other and casting aspersions on each others intent.
The Left is admittedly worse. Although the Right are now giving them a good run for their money.
Like I wrote above:
“Critical thinking” is not the same as skepticism.
In contrast skeptical thinkers are never wrong – because skeptics always defer to the facts, and, indeed, base their arguments on the facts. Or have done for the past 400 years since Enlightenment thinkers revised skepticism. This can witness a real skeptic changing a viewpoint halfway through a discussion when some, as yet, unearthed fact comes to light.
Facts are sacred to skeptics but not for self-styled “critical thinkers”; who generally just want to win a debate.
Try the US(?)
Critical thinking? = is not really skepticism. Real skeptics must follow rules. Skepticism assumes the “critical thinker” can by lying, as they sometimes are. Skeptics are never allowed to lie.
In fact, this article is touching on a massive elephant in that room which is known as “western civilization”. The Long March through the Institutions is now complete and the entire philosophical bases of those institutions have been overthrown. Every arm of society, be it courts, media, academy, police, social services (particularly social services), health and even now, the military is infused with leftist assumption. And, indeed, presumption.
Thus, in America, the left can spend the entire summer systematically burning their cities to the ground while Democrat prosecutors flatly refuse to prosecute, Democrat judges dismiss cases or give OR releases and Democrat “celebrities” raise money for bail for those who catch the judge on an off day. Meanwhile, when a Trump supporting mob crash the Capitol, it’s an “insurrection” requiring that the president with “the most votes in history” import more troops into Washington to protect him on his inauguration than were present there during the Civil War.
The UK is not much better, with, as an example, lawyers, twisting the definition of provocation to its breaking point in pursuit of leftist assumptions and in the process destroying the legal system as an engine of truth and fact and turning it into some kind of socialist rain-making machine designed to bring about the final earthly paradise. The unthinking arrogance of these people is emblematic of what the author of this piece is attempting to illustrate. “We don’t need to find the facts of this particular case because whatever they are, it’s all the fault of the patriarchy/white supremacists/racists/transphobes or whatever”.
I’m reminded of the creation of the Soviet Union under Lenin. We’ve all heard the wailing of the left about how it would all have been wonderful if only Lenin had lived and that degenerate Stalin had not come to power. Besides the fact that the “only for that” attitude is so typical of leftist excuses of why it never works, it was Lenin not Stalin, who created the gulags, and when he did, he put actual criminals in charge of them, then filled the camps with so-called “bourgeoisie” who suffered terribly under the regimes of these people. And he did that because the ideology of the left is absolute on this point. Criminals are never responsible for anything (except those on the right, of course). Whatever they’ve done, it’s due to the oppression of … whoever. But once the Earthly paradise is born — and birth in blood is an unfortunate necessity; can’t make an omelette and all that — it’ll all be fine for ever. Just one more push needed and we’re there.
That’s where we are today, folks. That’s why “scepticism” of any sort isn’t allowed, not even in the sciences where, you might think, it’s an absolute necessity. From the point of view of he left, it’s a bad habit to allow to take root. You’re down to your last pound coin of freedom, people. Find a good vending machine and spend it wisely.
Quite so, Joe. The West is wracked with this cancer – welcome to the Chinese century. As otheres have remarked, when the barbarians are at the gate, we’ll be wondering what their pronouns are.
Cicero’s, Traitors Within the Gate are the real problem, they make the full conquest by the barbarians possible.
But they won’t!
This is how Freedom and Liberty die. As I said above I have come to the conculsion that our leaders have gone Mad. And damn all of us for following them like sheep.
We must follow…a new mantra
Brilliant…
One small point – the incoming Vice-President was also pushing the bail fund to benefit the mob. A sitting US Senator at the time and failed presidential candidate, but that’s since been shoved into the memory hole.
Indeed. We sit by while history, whether ancient or last-week, is quietly rewritten. My brother and sister and I used to talk about purchasing copies of Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day by the gross and handing them out on street corners. The novel, even as it entertains, illustrates a world where the people handed over body and soul, bit by bit, to a vague government represented by Uni, a computer that takes care of all their daily needs and decisions, creating, of course, a submissive, peaceful world, bereft of pain, joy, or meaning. When I read the book, in the eighties, I could see disturbing hints in our society of how such a world could come to be: giving drugs to subdue boys who dared to be boys; pressure to assign new words to conditions or behaviors deemed to be unpleasant; attempting to eliminate competition from children’s games.
Why didn’t we hand out that book on the street corners? Because society would have laughed at us. Maybe it was already too late.
We had “Brave New World” and we had “1984”. People who actually read them were horrified but helpless.
I read them, along with Fahrenheit 451, and other dystopian novels. They all have a lot to say about extremses – but the extreams they portray (particularly “Brave New World” and “1984”) are polar oposites of each other, we seem to have so far walked a shakey line that has found some sort of middel ground.
As for book burning and rewriting history – I’m also not convinced thats a complelly bad thing. I’ve come to realise that a lot of 20th centuary history at least was political spin at the very least – it would be logical that other history suffers from the same problem.
Fanatical responses by people who find that things in the past are more complicated than their primary school teacher taught them are a great worry though.
I’m by no-means a leftist or for that matter a particualrly ardent libralist. However your speal above seems a little to close to paranoia to me – I’m sorry to say that you come across as angry and delusional.
We currently live in a world where Donald Trump has managed to convince appoximatally half of the voting population of America that the main stream has been brain washing them for years
Over this side of the pond we have recently had a massive break from the status quo in the form of a referendum and termination of our membership of the EU.
Both of these have come about because people are more sceptical of the things they are told than ever before, and disenting voices are more able to find a platform and reach people who will listen.
Yes some people are scared about Covid, and as far as i can tell the media are pushing quite biased opinions. However as time goes on peolple are starting to take less and less notice, rather than becoming indoctrinated.
I’m also troubled by the idea of us living in a non-liberal world – which ever side of the left/right political spectrum that were to fall on it essentially amounts to the same thing – do what I say because I know whats best for you.
Excellent. How do we get our civilization back?
Only two ways. One is a long march BACK through the institutions. The other doesn’t bear thinking about, but I suspect certain gents in places like Montana and Idaho are presently examining their options.
Where we are now in relation to covid is not where we were 10 months ago and where we will be in 10 months time.
I’m personally of the opinion that there will have to be the mother of all public inquiries into how this has been (mis)handled by our politicians when the dust finally settles on this debacle.
We’re still not truly there yet, but as more and more news trickles out in time in terms of jobs and business losses, the rising suicides, the unheard court cases that threaten to seriously undermine our already creaking criminal justice systems, the predicted exponential rise in child and domestic abuse and mental illness cases, particularly amongst the young robbed at crucial stages of their educations, the many tens of thousands of undiagnosed cancer cases and those effectively denied treatment for other serious conditions due to Covid, the severe restrictions on funding for future healthcare thanks to a knackered economy, the list will just go on and on.
This litany of shame and disaster will build and build as the profound long-term social and economic effects of these monstrous measures finally begin to dawn on and impact more of those who naively believed that this was always all but a simple, binary choice between ‘compassionately’ saving lives or ‘cruelly’ and ‘cynically’ not saving them.
It will provide mighty cold comfort for all of us I fear, but perhaps then it’ll be far obvious as to who the real ‘covidiots’ were.
Well a ‘scapegoat’ will be required of that you can rest assured. But I suspect any public inquiry will be a window dressing exercise. The reality is the political class as a whole were bounced into their actions by a combination of hysteria, stoked by the media, and farcical predictions from so called ‘academia’.
What is most worrying is the fact that our Government has decided to take away ALL our freedoms and liberty on the strength of fighting a virus they really don’t know how to fight, using measure that haven’t worked and wont work, but measures that must be repeated over and over again. When this nonsense is over, as one day it will be, I doubt they will return our freedoms and liberty as it was. And having done it once, and we all meekly going along with it like daft sheep, they wont have much compunction about doing it again. It wont do, wont do at all.
I fear you might be right, but sincerely hope you are wrong.
If nothing else this government, along with a good many others across the world incidentally, seem intent on proving Einstein’s definition of madness and testing it to the point of destruction.
Most ably egged on by political oppositions that seem to have used covid as little more than cynical self-serving opportunities to further their own agendas, invariably by suggesting that encumbent governments haven’t gone far enough, soon enough or often enough.
Grim, quite frankly.
So very true….its likely vaccinations will now be rolled out every year along with flu…..& whatever next…
I do hope you are right but my fear is that any attempt to hold a realistic objective and independent inquiry will be undermined by those wanting to protect themselves for the decisions that could be shown to have been catastrophically wrong.
That’s very ‘sceptical’ Alex…chuckle..
I certainly hope there is a public inquiry, as I think there are a lot of lessons to learn. But I do think a lot of the criticism of the government is rather simplistic and assumes an alternative scenario that has a lot more benefits and no additional costs. I just don’t believe this alternative is or was available. The GBR model of sheltering the most vulnerable, whilst everyone else ‘carries on as normal’ does not sound credible to me. Many people would change their behaviours anyway, even without formal lockdown rules. And it’s hard to see how the millions of older and more vulnerable people could really be isolated fully from the rest.
I think the ‘sceptics’ should acknowledge that their approach would give a higher priority to younger people and those with other health problems, such as cancer, who are the big losers at present. Under their model, if the NHS could no longer cope, which frankly would only be a matter of time, patients who reached a defined state where recovery looked unlikely, especially if they were over X age, would be put to sleep. I would not agree with this approach at present, but I definitely think that it should be considered – for example, if the vaccines turn out to be ineffective against a future variant of the virus. But I don’t recall anyone actually putting forward this argument – apologies if I have missed someone posting to this effect. It’s all an alternative with lots of benefits and no costs.
I thought that was the whole idea of not allowing elderly patients to be tested before shoving them forcibly into care homes to infect others. Care homes ill-equipped with PPE, thanks to Scummings and our lovely government. It worked quite well, didn’t it?
Prepare With Buckets of Whitewash..
Even as a self-confessed sceptic I genuinely don’t blame the government for not being ready for this, and nor do I blame them for the first lockdown. Back in March 2020 covid was a novel illness.
Hasty preparations had to be made, fear was heavy in the air and nobody really knew what to expect.
In fairness then no government anywhere could have properly prepared for covid and its effects on their health systems not least because, by design, they have very little slack built into them for the simple reason of cost.
Sure, one might argue, why didn’t we have 10 times the numbers of ICU beds and 10 times the number of trained staff to man them and why didn’t we have a gazillion pieces of PPE in anticipation for this random once in a hundred years event, but if you argue for that then that’s probably a good indicator as to why you should never, ever be let anywhere near the levers of power.
That all said, ideally an elected government’s job is to recognise, react and act in the greater, long-term interests for the country and its people when facts become clearer and even when there are those who, arguably in good faith, might constantly seek to pressurise them into doing otherwise and in that task one can only conclude our politicians, pretty much of every hue, have been found to be seriously wanting.
The covid debacle has been an abject lesson in the political expediency we’ve come to expect from our politicians writ hideously large where no politician was up to facing down the cynical, but inevitable emotive charges of having blood on his hands and deaths laid at his door secure in the knowledge that what he was actually doing was ultimately seeking to achieve far less suffering overall not more of it.
Good post. In fairness though, put yourself in their shoes. They have no alternative but to appease the mob. That’s democracy.
Good reply also, and I fully accept your point, but it implies that politicians are simply tools of the tyrannous majority, like they themselves have no powers whatsoever of rational persuasion over them.
Pale and weak reflections, never sculptors. Eternally passive, never pro-active.
A notion which I don’t buy into not least because to accept it is an outright admission of the failure of the power of reason and that is unconscionable to me.
You’ve just made an argument for aristocratic government.
Given how common that type of government is, it shouldn’t surprise us that it has some positive things to recommend it.
Yes, “fear was heavy in the air” but that fear was stoked quite deliberately by the Government itself and the media, particularly the BBC. I am quite amazed that sane and sensible people I know seem to be terrified to set foot out of their front doors, content to hide under the kitchen table – always allowing for a delivery from Waitrose of course.
Governments are there, ideally, to make rational, on balance decisions without fear or favour for the greater good, and this inevitably involves uncomfortable compromises sometimes.
To fly in the face of the prevailing climate at the time, the overreaction to Covid was near global remember and would have informed the decision making, would have been the correct and courageous thing to do in retrospect, but that’s an easy thing to say and hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Even politicians are human…well mostly.
Kudos for not treating hindsight as something else and recognizing that govt is run by people, with all the flaws and strengths of people in any other walk of life. I’d suggest a big part of the issue is way too many citizens blindly going along with one govt edict after another as they’ve been conditions to expect a govt solution to every problem.
Ironically, the US had moved toward a pandemic prep plan n the Bush years but that lost steam after a time, and that time was long before covid. Being ready for the unpredictable is quite the expectation. What’s worse is how govt officials refuse to back down from their original orders given what is known now. This is not the new black death; it simply isn’t, and causing widespread economic harm and also injuring mental health is a lousy prescription.
The biggest flaw of politicians is perhaps being concerned more about their political career than anything else, no matter what c**k-ups they make.
Politicians biggest concern is getting power and keeping it.
Perfectly said.
I’m honestly coming to the view that the western world would be in a far better place right now if only Ron Swanson were in charge of our covid response.
Eloquently put, GH!
Yes, we have to remember governments are made of people, with their flaws and fears as well (not to mention populism). Also, how you put perfectly, nobody wants blood on their hands.
However, I think one of the main goals of the article is not to necessarily condemn gov. actions, but of the people constantly attacking any skepticism – even the smallest questioning is being labeled by many as misinformation or stupidity.
Merely asking if lockdowns are really effective, necessary or what are it’s consequences (and if they pay off) will usually follow accusations of being anti-science or pro-murder.
Also the media didn’t promote open debate, didn’t discuss different points of view on the measures or helped develop more analysis on the data. Usually you only see number of cases and deaths, promotion of fear and tragedy – which brings more audience, especially with everyone staying at home and serve as distraction for who knows how many new temporary rules that are probably here to stay, since no government wants to give out power once it has the taste. The media should be on top of the opportunistic politicians, not only covid 24/7.
Mauricio / G Harris
Well done, bringing the discussion back to the main theme of Freddie’s article. At one time freedom of speech and academic freedom were prized in the UK and in most western societies. Alas the “long march through the institutions” of Postmodernism and woke culture has almost destroyed that tradition. The most dismaying aspect of the whole debacle is the way that bureaucracy has exploited this culture war to undermine the authority of academics and investigative journalists.
The pressure was on from the very start, not just from the media but even more, I would argue, from social media.
The govt could have been better prepared. A pandemic was considered to be a top national security threat and it’s inevitable at some point. A sensible approach would have been to have good numbers of ventilators, stockpiles of PPE, a NHS with a much higher number of beds per capita (the UK is well down the international comparison list even though we have a GDP in the top 10), and follow advice that until last year was not to use lockdowns.
Without Isolation Hospitals, no amount of preparation would help..or made a difference, This is the cleverst Virus EVER. It will enter Sport Grounds,Libraries,Museums, but not supermarkets, chemists, Garages, etc..but i mustn’t be cynical>>?
They could also have taken a good hard look at the “data work” or lack of it surrounding the practices of death certification, which might have ensured that statistics were not actively misleading.
I think they have all gone Mad. If ‘Lockdown’ was such a rip roaring success how come we are on the fourth version of same ? And what on earth is everyone thinking when blindly agreeing to be imprisoned in their own home indefinitely ? Agreeing that the Government has the right to decide how many people you can have to dinner etc. Does no one love and respect Liberty anymore ?? And just how deadly is this Chinese Virus ? Does it kill 70% of all those it infects ? Less than 70% ? More perhaps ? Is it worse than the black death in the middle ages perhaps ? And just exactly what is the exit strategy for all these ‘temporary restrictions’ ? This has already gone on for 10 months so does everyone envisage it lasting another 2 months, or 4 months, 10 months or 10 years, or is everybody willing to ‘live’ like this for ever ? And just exactly how much of the economy does everyone expect to be left at the end of all this ? Or does no one actually care. I’m starting to suspect no one does.
A lot of valid and important questions but those who care or have the b**ls to stand up and be counted do not include those in power and with influence, witness the BoJo consultation with experts and GBD-proposers. It’s disappointing that the qualified epidemiologists are not more forthright in their judgement of the widespread and misdirected pandemic measures which governments have imposed blindly. Even Tegnell and Giesecke are reluctant to give straight answers to some questions, and issues such as effect of measures on spreading due to international travel are a no go area. According to WHO’s earlier recommendations these are ineffective and meaningless where travel between areas with similar infection spreading levels represents no increased risk.
Career wise i can see why genuine epidemiologists and public health acedmics have kept schtum. There is also another issue. As a scientist and engineer i have constantly had to put up with accusations of being what BJ calls a “girly swot”. Doesn’t bother me, i’ve been partying for most of my 60 years . If however your life is pretty drab and you are stuck in a poorly rewarded academic job i can see why you may not be so keen to help your fellow citizens. Especially when their own stupidity makes a bad situation worse, as is the case with SARS-CoV2.
Why genuine epidemiologists kept shtum?
A recent Telegraph piece by Sherelle Jacobs described Epidemiology as “a failed and bullying discipline”. No chapter and verse for that, but it put me in mind of a Mail article in early-ish 2020 about how Neil Ferguson’s mentor had had to leave Oxford 20 years ago because he made scurrilous accusations against Sunetra Gupta, of which she was cleared. Which is how Ferguson came to be at Imperial. Interesting if true.
As i said in an earlier post i know something of the back story from gossips at Uni of Ox and that’s pretty much what i heard.
And what on earth is everyone thinking when blindly agreeing to be imprisoned in their own home indefinitely ?
This question is beginning to attract a measure of civil disobedience, from Italy to the US. In the states, we were told of the need to shelter in place for roughly two weeks in order to flatten the curve so hospitals would not be overrun. That was last March and here we still are. Seems the public has noticed the emperor’s wardrobe.
More than a question of a liberty is an adoption of the precautionary principle which puts safety so far ahead of anything else that a sort of paralysis sets in. Combine that with much of the public willing outsourcing risk to unaccountable third parties, and this is what you get. Not only that, but a fair portion of the population remains insistent that lockdowns are necessary and if you disagree, it’s because you’re unfeeling and want grandma to die.
Some of us “grandmas” would prefer to break rules, build their immune systems, (Vit D in particular) and then get out, visit their relations and have some social life in their last years. However, when I called on my daughter to collect a vital piece of equipment I had left in her house (my handbag), I was not allowed inside and she was too frightened to hug me! How have the younger generations been so easily brainwashed? I think it’s education since the ’80s. I thought I had brought mine up to be more independent.
it Kills 3-4% Mostly 97% people have diagnosed or Undiagnosed Cancer,Heart,Lung,Blood,Obesity Conditions
The importance of scepticism to a healthy debate that has any chance of arriving at a sensible outcome can’t be overstated; I have been shocked at the near religious fervour with which lockdowns and untried NPIs have been embraced by the public. More than embraced, any questioning of them is met with either hostility or a refusal to engage. It is like the defensiveness you encounter when questioning the existence of God around a certain (though certainly not all) kind of religious advocate.
I sometimes wonder though if the mistake lockdown sceptics have made is to adopt the mantle of ‘scepticism’ and give the impression that we are the ones arguing against popular wisdom. As we have now learned, it is not the lockdown sceptics that are proposing something out of the ordinary – it is not actually us who are engaging in the costly and dangerous social experiment that has never been tried before or reliably proven; and was noticeably absent from the recommendations of its current proponents until 2020.
Lockdown sceptics actually argue for tried and tested pandemic management that takes a holistic approach to the crisis and accounts for all human well being. After all, pandemic management is not merely an epidemiological issue – though this is were the study of it resides, it’s management is too multifaceted to be the preserve of any one group/discipline. We basically have pandemic management by computer.
Maybe lockdown sceptics should be reclassified as pandemic traditionalists or conventionalist, the lockdown advocates meanwhile are – maybe mechanists, given the mechanistic way they assume we can all be just sacrificial variables on the way to their quasi religious quest against Covid.
I expect, in a few decades, the ‘Covid delusion’ will be available in all good (assuming they still exist) book shops.
I believe in God but i don’t believe in lockdown.
It seems that Sweden has had no more deaths than in a normal year, and fewer deaths per head of population than in 1993, the last time they had a serious flu outbreak. And that was without really taking steps to protect the vulnerable last March/April. That is why are both sceptical and dismissive of the insane and tyrannical lockdowns imposed upon us.
They have had about 8-9000 excess deaths since March so not really a normal year and with obvious failures around care homes but their approach of trying to keep measures consistent and sustainable is the very opposite of U.K. and looks like yielding far better overall results in terms of public health and economy.
OK, so Sweden has had some excess deaths but this was caused largely by:
– Care home failures
– Covid messaging not reaching unhealthy non-Swedish speakers
– Low death rates in the two previous years, leaving quite a lot of ‘low hanging fruit’
Allowing for all that, Covid probably led to about 4,000 unavoidable deaths in Sweden, almost all of them among the very old and infirm. This is a pretty good outcome given the fact of a new virus that will inevitably kill quite a few people. Moreover, Sweden has not applied anything like the lunatic and tyrannical restrictions imposed on much of the rest of Europe, most of which probably do more harm than good.
So you went from “…had no more deaths than in a normal year…” to “OK, so Sweden has had some excess deaths…”
When countries measure excess death rates they compare the current year with the average for the last 5 years.
As of today Sweden, according to its own government, has c.10,200 C19 deaths…unless of course the SWED GOV is (unique in the history of the world) trying to “cook up” the numbers in such way as to make its performance look utterly miserable.
I don’t know if you are a liar or just a nutter that believes in conspiracy theories…
As a former evangelical Christian, I found the article
The Psychology of Apologetics: Biblical Inerrancy (as usual, no links on UnHinged, but Google finds it) a good description of the contortions I’d go through to maintain the belief that the Bible is without errors. The author refers to the philosopher W.V.O. Quine:
If “Sweden done good” is a central belief to be maintained at all costs (much like my former Biblical inerrancy), whenever new evidence arrives, it can be rationalised or re-interpreted. Sweden had no excess deaths! Oh, it did? Why then, those were people who would die soon anyway, and anyway, it was worth it not to have a lockdown. and so on.
I suggest Imre Lakatos and degenerative research programmes as a closer philosophical parallel. “A Lakatosian research programme is based on a hard core of theoretical assumptions that cannot be abandoned or altered without abandoning the programme altogether. More modest and specific theories that are formulated in order to explain evidence that threatens the “hard core” are termed auxiliary hypotheses. Auxiliary hypotheses are considered expendable by the adherents of the research programme”they may be altered or abandoned as empirical discoveries require in order to “protect” the “hard core”.
More humility required here though. IIRC Lakato identified scenarios in which apparently far fetched auxiliary hypotheses ended up winning out.
I agree. Being a Christian and surrounded by believers of all stripes, I am quite used to this kind of thinking, and may even indulge in it myself. I am sure I can see it at the edges of the lockdown debate and other contentious debates. What I find equally interesting, however, is how when some subsidiary belief (i.e in a noetic system of X > Y > Z, Z is a subsidiary belief, e.g. “I believe in God” > “God wrote the Bible” >”therefore the Bible is perfectly inerrant”) becomes unstuck, the believer tends to switch to the opposite extreme. For example a lockdown sceptic, having noticed the second Swedish wave and having presumed that Sweden should have had herd immunity, could then flip to becoming a lockdown zealot.
When it comes to Covid many people talk about excess deaths as if they’re somehow all attributable to it.
We simply don’t know this, and likely never will, but it seems to be taken as gospel in some quarters by implication.
The effects, both in the practical sense in terms of accessing medical treatment and its effect on people’s overall mental well-being, lockdowns in themselves are likely in the frame for seriously adding to the non-covid related death toll, but apparently that’s either judged ok for some as a price worth paying for saving the lives of people who might otherwise die of covid or a complete falsehood.
It’s a question of equivalence, I guess, but which category would you say you fall into there?
Actually we do.
Perhaps you would like to enlighten me with some figures then if it’s so clear after you’ve answered my question about which category you fall into?
By way of a related aside, as a rather loftily named key worker in the UK I’ve had around 60k interactions with people now, pre and post facemask imposition, and one of the interesting themes is people telling me about people they know who’ve fallen victim to Covid.
One such yesterday involved a gentleman whom I’ve known personally for years telling me how his sister in law had succumbed to the virus.
As is frequently the case upon further inquiry it turns out she was 82, had had leukemia off and on for years and was due to go into a hospice for end of life care but apparently ‘covid’ took her from us before her time.
Now, I can’t say for sure what that death will officially go down as but I know what it will be reported as and I have a pretty strong suspicion what will appear as the cause of death on that death certificate.
Given that you eerily seem to unequivocally know so much about these things what do you think that death should be reported and then recorded as?
It should be covid, same as that prisoner just executed that had had covid prior. (if it was within 28 days that is)
Nope. Because Covid did not contribute directly or indirectly to the technique of execution.
The cause(s) of death will be reported by the doctor who was taking care of her. If there are any queries/uncertainties s/he would order an autopsy.
Covid could appear in box 1a (cause directly leading to death) or 1b and 1c (cause leading to 1a) or 2 (cause contributing to death but not directly related).
For example she might have died from a complication of Covid-19 ““ for instance a pulmonary embolism (blood clot) or a bacterial pneumonia in which case that will be 1a with Covid as 1b or c.
Or her doctor may have decided that Covid just contributed to her being weaker or more susceptible or starting a chain of events that led to her death in which case it would appear in box 2.
Covid being the sort of disease that it is, it’s unlikely that it had no influence at all on the timing of her demise.
What do you believe doctors gain by lying about the direct and contributory causes of death ? or do you believe that the medical profession is full of Harold Shipmans ?
Thanks for taking the trouble to reply so fully.
In terms of your last point, no I don’t think that the medical profession is full of Shipmans, but I’m also acutely aware that the profession is under considerable, albeit unavoidable, strain at the moment and that in such circumstances expediency is far more likely to play its part in what a death is attributed to, not least amongst the elderly.
Under normal circumstances such similar ’causes’ like the prolific ‘pneumonia’ which kills tens of thousands of UK citizens each year would be a moot point and go unchallenged, but the specific cause of the covid virus and its transmissibility carries with it a particular political weight and charge that is inescapable at the moment and brings with it a distinction I’m sure you can appreciate.
Elaine: In the UK doctors were ordered to record Covid as the cause of death even if the patient had another pre-existing fatal illness Given that as many as 25 % of Covid infections occur in hospital, this can be seriously distorting. It is not a matter of individual Shipman’s, it is the effect of bureaucracy replacing professional judgement.
Who ordered them ?
Evidence ?
I quote David Oliver Consultant in Geriatric and Acute general medicine in Manchester :
“Certificates can only be completed by doctors who looked after the patient in the lead up to death and knew the full facts of the case.
We have a clear statutory professional duty to complete certificates to the best of our knowledge and beliefs.
Falsifying certificates would be a serious offence with serious sanctions.
Certificates are checked by an independent medical examiner of deaths.
Even if we list Covid as cause 1b or 1 c or II we do not mention it if it did not play a part in the final illness and cause of death.
There is no pressure of any kind from government agencies or acts of parliament for doctors to falsify death certificates or inflate death numbers.
No incentive for us to do this (financial or otherwise).
No evidence that it is happening.
and you are talking to doctor with 31 years in the job, 10 months of solid Covid medicine experience and the RCP London elected officer who used to oversee the “learning from deaths” programme”
Ordered by whom ?
Certificates can only be completed by doctors who looked after the patient in the lead up to death and knew the full facts of the case.
Doctors have a clear statutory professional duty to complete certificates to the best of their knowledge and beliefs.
Falsifying certificates would be a serious offence with serious sanctions.
Certificates are checked by an independent medical examiner of deaths.
Even if Covid is listed as cause 1b or 1 c or II it is not mentioned if it did not play a part in the final illness and cause of death.
There is no pressure of any kind from government agencies or acts of parliament for doctors to falsify death certificates or inflate death numbers.
No incentive for doctors to do this (financial or otherwise).
No evidence that it is happening.
All this information from a consultant in geriatrics and acute medicine in Manchester who writes for the BMJ and who used to oversee the “Learning from deaths” programme at the RCP
Unless J smith has done Autopsies himself he is whistling in vacuous echo chamber
Actually we don’t. Since the number of excess deaths is much smaller than corona deaths, and since the COVID largely kills people on their way out anyway, we won’t know until the histories are written. If then.
First of all they did a lot better than us. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peop…
Secondly, they’re bound to affected by their neighbours doing badly because of their badly focussed lockdowns.
Yeah. Our politicians are actively going, “ehhhh, we’ve maybe not done so great.” These would be the same politicians who are strongly incentivised to never admit fault for anything, ever, because admitting that you were wrong costs you votes.
I feel like I live in Bizarro World. It wasn’t that long ago when foreign conservatives screeched about how we were a Muslim-ruled hellscape of non-stop rapes and beheadings. Now all of a sudden they won’t believe us when we try to freely admit that we’re not perfect.
I’m not sure politicians are incentivised that way, to be honest. I mean, yes, if Sweden was alone in the universe then I’m sure they’d be incentivised to praise their own response. As is, they’re not.
They’re surrounded by countries and leaders that have convinced themselves they are making a highly moral sacrifice for the greater good. Sweden, sitting out there and just disproving all the “science” and subsequent actions, is making all the other countries look very bad indeed. The Swedish leadership will need to go to conferences and other social events with other leaders at some point and defend their decisions, of which the only reasonable defence is “we were right and therefore, you were all devastatingly wrong”. That’d be sort of a tough call socially, even for argumentative loose cannons like some of us.
If you look at Switzerland, they had very few restrictions up until a few weeks ago. In particular their second wave epidemic peaked and went into decline in November, at a time when no new restrictions were introduced. Now in January all the shops are closing, despite hospitals being ~25% empty. As far as I can tell the only real reason for this is a desire not to stand out, after a bit of a bruising argument over Christmas about keeping ski resorts open.
Groupthink and fear of being shamed is in my view one of the primary drivers of lockdowns and government responses around the world. I have no doubt that Löfven and others would LOVE to get rid of Tegnall but the man just doesn’t seem to make mistakes, so they’re stuck with him, and have been desperately trying to find ways to join the rest of the world and stop being exceptional ever since.
It’s endlessly frustrating that hard questions about excess mortality, how to calculate it, and how it relates to the Covid death toll (whatever *that* is; a few problems there too) have had such a low profile. Criticize him for his failed predictions, but Michael Levitt has surely been right to push these questions from the start. And yes, there continues to be ample room for skeptical inquiry here. Let me give you an example from Canada (but in principle the same thing can be done anywhere if you have access to cause of death statistics). Without getting into the details (but please check this out from Statistics Canada yourself if you want), the big picture is that in 2020 there was a sharp decline in deaths from all the leading causes of death (cancer, heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, etc). It’s true that any previous-years baseline average is just a reasonable guess, and that any given year can see some fluctuations, but these are categories of death that change very little from year to year. The signal in the data is really obvious. And the obvious conclusion is that a significant percentage of ‘Covid deaths’ in Canada would have happened anyway and been labelled as something else. By my rough estimates, this could easily account for anywhere between a quarter to half of Covid deaths. A further step would be to take full account of excess deaths that can be reasonably attributed to lockdown policies, which also now has some clear signals in the data (deaths by overdose are *way* up, for example). How this could have failed to have been part of the decision-making process form the start is beyond me. I put this forward as a hypothesis about the Canadian data, and invite criticism. But the approach, as I said, can and *should* be replicated everywhere. It would be the skeptical/scientific thing to do. And, in an ideal world (sigh!) it would help to moderate the official messaging we’re all swamped with. None of this is intended to call into question the fact that a real challenge to public health exists. But the devil is in the details, and we desperately need to get back to realistic assessments of the risks and impacts we’re dealing with, both from the virus itself and from our responses.
Excess deaths are more like 3,000 vs recent years.
https://www.statista.com/st…
You are completly wrong about Sweden and excess death rate – that is why Swedish GOV changed policy.
You can look at the excess death data on EUROMOMO – https://www.euromomo.eu/gra…
Sweden is up, like pretty much everywhere (with the exception of Norway, to which Sweden is continually compared, although Norway would appear to be an outlier in the data).
So surely the comparison to Sweden isn’t that they fared better, which they clearly haven’t, it’s that without strict lockdown, they don’t appear to have fared dramatically worse?
But that means they may have escaped some of the unintended consequences of Lockdown that will kill people over time.
No one wants to talk about those consequences. In fact, a mention of them draws everything from blank stares to insults. Various studies have estimated up to a half-million deaths in the US from the recession last decade. No virus, just the health fallout that comes with economic harm. And here we are, repeating the process, ignoring spikes in domestic and substance abuse, suicide, the impact on children, and what will follow when business owners are forced into bankruptcy.
It’s easier to see on the yearly data. Look at the last 10 years of mortality in Sweden by year. Virtually no difference in 2020. Weekly figures look like it should be higher because there’s a wave in April, but, many years have virus seasons and mortality can be lower than average the rest of the time without it being easy to notice that.
A quick way to check this is to compare the sum of 2017+2018 deaths vs 2019+2020 deaths. If you do this you get 184,157 deaths for 2017/2018 and 183,788 for 2019/2020! I think this puts it in perspective that actually Sweden hasn’t had abnormal mortality at all, even though it is easy to construct comparisons that make it look like it did, e.g. Norway has had extremely low mortality and is a general outlier so that’s what people love to compare Sweden to. When you compare them to Denmark or Finland the apparent “Swedish disaster” disappears.
Edit: a few hours after I posted this comment Statista refreshed their dataset so these numbesr are now a bit out of date. See elsewhere in the thread for updated numbers.
Is anyone surprised? We have seen it all before. We have seen calls for people who express sceptical opinions on Anthropogenic Global Warming to be prosecuted. Pretty soon you are going to be “lockdown deniers” if not worse.
While I agree that prosecution is wrong and unjust, it’s fair to say that there is a mountain of scientific evidence supporting the claim that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide are warming the planet and there has been for decades.
By contrast, covid is a brand new virus, the science is still very uncertain, and the use of prolonged society-wide lockdowns to control an infectious disease is brand new. There are still a huge number of unknowns.
Put another way, the lockdown sceptics (like me) have very little pro-lockdown evidence to be sceptical of, while climate sceptics have a mountain to climb.
Infrared is absorberend and scattered by water vapor into the atmosphere. This cannot happend twice, by both carbon dioxide and water vapor. That is why there is little greenhouse effect by CO2, because it reflects the same wavelength of infrared (except for a very small part).
Oh, and 35 % of the atmosphere consists of water vapor, vs 0.04 % is CO2.
Volcanoes affect Climate ,Meoteorites ,Solar Flares,Solar Minimum all affect Earh’s climate..CO2 is Vital for foodcrops,Forests to Grow…
I am not a scientist but I have always understood that the destruction of the rain forests has the most devastating effect on the atmosphere. Why is no-one talking about this? It seems to me that “somebody” is aiming to make civilised countries cowed and under control.
Absolute rubbish!
There is no scientific evidence supporting the lie that carbon dioxide warms the planet, more than trivially. There is just fake science, bad statistics and models written by astrologers claiming to be “scientists”.
I discovered Unherd as a result of the pandemic. It heads the short list of publications that have kept me sane throughout this ordeal. Keep celebrating skepticism!
Hi, please share your list. Thanks.
The pro lockdown side has made a lot of false predictions and U turned repeatedly but they are never crucified over it.
Crucified? For expressing a different view! I suspect that the jury is still out on what has been effective and what is not . A bit early to call for execution of those who dare to disagree.
Nb I was to quick to comment I initially read it that you wanted to crucify the sceptics not the advocates – so thats alright then..
How about simply being called out for having been wrong and for advocating a stance that carries a great deal of collateral damage. Thus far, the call for execution, deprogramming, or other measures seems reserved for people on the right.
Pelosi &her Corrupt Cohorts,Called for Anyone who didnt believe in Paris -Accord Or Love big government to be ”deprogrammed” last week ..her poisonous botox infused roza Klebb impersonations,will turn people away from Mainstream politics
The jury will be out for a long time. The trouble is that the advocates have gone so far down this route will never admit they were wrong – too much at stake. I said this towards the end of the first lockdown and it’s even more the case now.
I think crucifiction is too good for them.
Skepticism is portrayed as virtuous only when it is applied in the “correct” situations, meaning that it is aligned with the dominant narrative. We should be skeptical of “conspiracy theories”, but not about the Covid vaccine or the necessity of lockdowns. When we are skeptical of the “wrong” things, we are punished in some way, often by reputational and financial destruction. And, the power to inflict this damage is generally held in common with “official” or mainstream views.
The message in all this is very clear – that unless you are prepared to martyr yourself, or are protected against financial ruin, you must either accept the dominant narrative or keep you mouth shut. Why more people aren’t worried about this escalation of authoritarianism is unclear to me, although I suspect a good percentage of people are worried about this, but don’t feel safe enough to talk about it.
Well some of us wont keep our mouths shut. If we are going to be ruined we might as well fight.
As to the ‘escalation of authoritarianism’ I reckon most people do not understand the importance of ‘Liberty’ and how it has evolved mainly because people don’t understand history. Under the cover of ‘Save the NHS’ and other such bullish*t the Government and Establishment have managed to enslave us all. Once these rights and liberties are lost you can guarantee that they will not be restored in their entirety when this damn Chinese Virus disappears, as all viruses eventually do. And having done this once, and we all went along with it like a load of brain dead sheep, they will have no compunction at doing it again on slender reasons.
I think most of us are sceptical of everything that British governments, the authorities and the experts say or mandate because they have such a disastrous track record. Certainly, in my lifetime, one struggles to think of anything they have got right beyond a few social issues (equality for women etc) and a few economic reforms during the Thatcher era. Beyond that, it has been nothing but disaster after disaster.
Fraser – I wonder if you are really sceptical at all, in the real sense of the word? Your posts all come from the perspective of a confirmed opponent of ‘authority’, whether that’s the current government, more or less any western politician, the ‘MSM’ or anything that might have the word ‘consensus’ attached to it. My problem with that point of view is that it is just as unthinking as its opposite, an automatic acceptance of everything those in power and authority do and say. Isn’t the point about scepticism that one should always be questioning, even of one’s own assumptions and prejudices, and only accept as true, or likely to be true, that which good evidence supports? And I just do not believe that there is no good evidence for anything the government, ‘the authorities’, etc do or say.
Believe me, I constantly question my views and assumptions etc. For instance, from 1973 to around 2005 I was very pro-EEC/EU, but came to be very much in favour of Breixt. (I didn’t vote for or against Brexit, because personally I have benefited considerably from the EU).
It’s fair to say that I was once something of a neo-liberal globalist, but am now much more in favour of localism/nationalism. I once believed in immigration to the UK but now understand it have been, in too many cases, a disaster, certainly over the last 25 years.
Yes, I am profoundly anti-authoritarian and could not bear the thought of having any authority over another human being. Added to which, my experience is that all the structures of authority are self-serving, incompetent, unpleasant and endlessly wasteful.
I always enjoy your posts Frasier, I think of you as some hot-shot finance guy with over achieving children in exclusive schools and a trophy wife, and so I am glad to hear you often have similar views to me, who am rather the opposite of that.
From 1973 to now I have believed authority to almost always get it wrong, the reasons being political. Politicians first act in ways which protect their vote streams, and voters are not that wise, then politicos are almost never worldly wise, usually being so focused on the other swamp members, local and national reality, they misunderstand foreigners every time so make a mess of everything they do outside their countries.
While I can sympathise with your point of view, sometimes – and certainly don’t agree with all your posts – what would you put in the place of authority? In a less populated world, we might revert to a form of tribalism which in itself means we would spend our time grabbing territory from other tribes. Or the other alternative seems to be total anarchy.
Try explaining to a German, Spaniard or a US citizen that the guy who runs the prisons was never a warder or governer, the guy who runs schools was never a head teacher etc and they take some convincing you are telling the truth. I think your wise skepticism is a logical response to a poltical system that does not try to manage, check and balance the technocrats. Instead it seeks to replace them entirely with time serving, buggin’s turn idiots.
One of the saddest things of this this crisis is how I’ve fallen out with many colleagues because I am a natural skeptic. I value liberty and education very highly. This pandemic shows just how much the whole world is governed by the priorities of the old and well heeled, at the expense of the young and impoverished. While we rush to immunise against a disease that 90% don’t notice (but kills and debilitates the powerful), we ignore the needs of the poorest in the world to receive basic care and support, including vital measles vaccines, and the development of vaccines against the diseases that kill millions, like malaria and dengue.
The fall out from our reaction to Covid will kill so many people. Time will only tell if it’s more or fewer than Covid itself.
We’ve always ignored the poor. Regardless of viruses etc. Nothing new there.
We’ve always ignored the poor.
Except when they can be exploited for raising lots of money, and little of which actually goes towards helping them.
True!
Exactly right Freddie, and this is one reason why Unherd is a good platform, because it allows critical thinking and accepts alternative views too. The bigger concern for me, outside of the covid debate, is how criticism in many countries is now considered to be an attack on the state and there are an increasing number of countries that outlaw it with the threat of prison. Healthy debate of strategy and principle help progression to the correct view. Stifling debate is a classic characteristic of a despotic and insecure Government afraid of its’ own people.
I think a lot of the problem lies with a basic misunderstanding about the nature of the scientific method and the notion of uncertainty. People have difficulty with uncertainty, particularly when faced with existential crises. The press did not do a good job with communicating that any statement about the pandemic (particularly in its early stages) had to be taken with a huge grain of salt because of the high degree of uncertainty regarding its lethality, method of spread, etc. And often the “experts” seemed to let their newfound relevance get the better of them, framing their guesses as gospel. The problem was exacerbated by the requirement that politicians do something, so they framed their guesses in the mantle of certainty in order to project competence, while arguing they were “following the science” as if the science at that point was certain.
I am extremely sceptical of this article. Claiming its pro scepticism and then dismissing people as wrong who are far more right than the official narrative. Your “sceptism” is similar to the critical theory variety. i.e. its ok to question as long as you question in the “right” way and find the “correct” answers.
or you need to be prepared to take fair criticism when you get it so wrong as some in the article ie Dr Gupta got it.
In what way did Dr Gupta get it so wrong?
IIRC She said 60% of the population had immunity in March
She wrote a paper saying that it was consistent with what we saw back in March. Basically you need more evidence to differentiate between a very rapidly spreading but less deadly virus and what SARS-nCOV-2 actually does. See @jameshay218’s twitter thread back in Mar 25, 2020: “They showed you can estimate the same number of deaths with either a high % of the population at risk of severe disease and a recent epidemic start, or a low % and an earlier start. Some media outlets have reported this as suggesting “majority of the UK has already been infected””
The paper said that serology (antibody testing) would provide the evidence. The real problems with her approach are:
– she now appears to say that antibody testing (which showed what SARS-nCOV-2 actually does) wasn’t evidence (classic modification of auxillliary beliefs to preserve a central one, see my comments elsewhere)
– she should have known better than to put such a low number on the IFR in her interview with Freddy when it was already apparent at that point that it couldn’t be right. And as far as I know, she has not issued any corrections about this.
SARS-nCOV-2 isn’t particularly deadly. It’s the same as flu. The problem is, that hardly anyone dies of flu anymore due to vaccination. All those ‘vaccinees’ were just waiting for an unvaccinatable type of flu’ to kill them. There’s 500,000 of them accummulated since 2003. prior to that , the normal death rate from flu’ was higher than the death rate from this virus.
Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Nice graph at github shows IFR of Covid 19 versus seasonal influenza, by age. Covid-19 is definitely significantly more fatal than influenza at all ages above 30 years. 14 studies for the Covid figures and flu stats for the USA back to 2014.
and the big VA study looking at what happens to people if they are unlucky enough to end up in hospital with Covid comapred with flu :
“The risk for respiratory complications was high, consistent with current knowledge of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza pathogenesis (1,6).
Notably, compared with patients with influenza, patients with COVID-19 had two times the risk for pneumonia, 1.7 times the risk for respiratory failure, 19 times the risk for ARDS, and 3.5 times the risk for pneumothorax, underscoring the severity of COVID-19 respiratory illness relative to that of influenza.”
and
“The percentage of COVID-19 patients admitted to an ICU (36.5%) was more than twice that of influenza patients (17.6%); the percentage of COVID-19 patients who died while hospitalized (21.0%) was more than five times that of influenza patients (3.8%); and the duration of hospitalization was almost three times longer for COVID-19 patients (median 8.6 days; IQR = 3.9″“18.6 days) than that for influenza patients (3.0 days; 1.8″“6.5 days) (p<0.001 for all).”
This is an endothelial, thrombotic, multi organ disease.
Oh really well as I understand it we have roughly 30% of the population who were immune due to previous coronavirus infection, 30% after May who had caught the virus and were immune basically giving us herd immunity already and then we have false positive PCR tests and people who lockdowns have caused not to be treated fast enough to show why we supposedly have lots of infections and excess deaths although the excess deaths are relatively no greater than 2008
I thought it was up to 60. But then they did not really know the asymptomatic were not just immune.
Can we have Neil Ferguson back on to give a mea culpa for the entire field of epidemiology, which has been consistently and massively wrong about everything, as well as in some cases extremely deceptive? Hmm no, I thought not.
And yes, it’s been wrong. Beyond the fact that their models don’t predict seasonality for COVID either, Sweden was supposed to have 100,000+ excess deaths this year, actual number around 2000 but even that is inflated because 2019 had the lowest numbers for a decade so there was some reversion to the mean going on. When that’s controlled for they basically had a normal year. No lockdowns, no masks, no disaster.
This whole narrative that’s taken hold in the media set in recent days about how lockdown sceptics were wrong is itself the start of yet another deceptive narrative. No they weren’t. Their core argument – that COVID is nowhere near serious enough to justify the response- has been borne out with hard data in lots of places and ways. Meanwhile the people who claimed otherwise are busy ignoring all the data that contradicts them and attacking their opponents. (Not knocking Freddie here, because he isn’t taking sides)
It’s probably the case that the most shrill lockdown demanders are now realising the magnitude of their error, that they’ve boxed themselves in with no way out intellectually or morally, and figure maybe if they just go on the attack enough people won’t notice that they destroyed society over something that calmer countries have taken completely in their stride.
When countries (including Sweden) compare the excess death rate they compare it the the avg. of the last 5 years.
The Excess death rate in Sweden – according to the government and the independent commission that published the first part of the investigation – is over 10,200 not 2,000 as you say.
And is Swedish policy was a success why has the government changed its policy ?
Do you happen to know what the average age of those 10,200 slaughtered were?
I would guess they were, to use Fraser Bailey’s wonderful metaphor “low hanging fruit”, and thus ready to drop anyway.
Probably the same as the UK. The average death from COVID is older than the average age of death in the general population.
I am astonished that this figure is not more widely reported.
I just googled it on statista. It’s 5000 excess deaths v the last 10 years. It’s 3000 deaths v the worst year in the last 10 years. that’s 3%., You, are just as bad a cherrypicker as anyone on here
I was just about to write down the table from Statista, and noticed they just updated the dataset again this afternoon. So now the number in my above post is slightly out of date. It’s increased by about 2000-3000 from where it was this morning (I don’t have a screenshot of the prior graph).
The differences depend on what baseline you measure against. The delta between 2019 and 2020 was (as of Tuesday afternoon at least) 97941 – 88766 = 9175. But 2019 was an abnormal year – the lowest number of deaths for Sweden in at least a decade. Some of the 2020 deaths were just reversion to the mean and would have happened anyway. This is easy to see when summing 2017+2018=184157, summing 2019+2020=186707 or a difference of 2550.
The 5 year average is another way to do it, but captures the abnormal 2019 which pulls down the average, leading to a misleadingly low baseline and consequently (slightly) exaggerated figures.
But fundamentally the point about the Swedish excess deaths is not about the difference of a few thousand between different sources or different baselines. Sweden has 10 million people in it. On the scale of a country these numbers are all tiny. The point is, we were told crystal clear that if we didn’t take the most extreme actions in history to control the virus there would be mass deaths. See my comment above: academics predicted 100,000 extra deaths for Sweden if they engaged in “moderate” suppression. What matters here is not the absolute level of change in Sweden but the levels relative to what was used to justify global action. And for that it doesn’t really matter which exact years you compare against. The conclusion is the same: the predictions were catastrophically incorrect.
well said. Both positions must be accountable, why just one Freddie?
Before making stuff up, I advise reading Report 9: Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand (the Imperial paper published in March 2020).
Wrong, see Figure 3.
There is no mention of Sweden in the paper. Where are you getting this figure from?
If they admitted actual case numbers/deaths and still said the response was too severe, I’d have some respect for them, but instead they have their foregone conclusion (too severe) and carefully pick their evidence to justify it, so we get the PCR truthers and all the rest.
Figure 3 has dates on the X axis but if you read the text of the paper or source code of their model (which you did do, right?) then you’ll find that’s just a mapping of “days since start of simulation” onto the point when they ran it. The reason Report 9 shows second/third/etc waves is nothing to do with seasonality but rather a prediction about what happens if lockdowns are released. Note how the curve is perfectly symmetrical around the blue shaded region “in which restrictions are assumed to remain in place”.
See this sentence:
Relaxing restrictions in September was just an example and it’s what drives their model. If they’d told it restrictions would be held in place until the start of the summer, then their model would have predicted a summer second wave. If you look at the model in depth then this is clear – there’s nothing in it about seasons.
Gardner et al, who re-parameterised the Ferguson ICL model for Swedish demographics. See the paper “Intervention strategies against COVID-19 and their estimated impact on Swedish healthcare capacity”.
They’re talking about total all-cause mortality at the moment, which is literally deaths and the simplest possible measure. Indeed it’s much more robust than the “COVID deaths” that relabels large numbers of people dying of old age. As for carefully picking evidence to justify it, what evidence are they overlooking? The people you call “PCR truthers” have been pointing out that nobody seems to be measuring false positive rates on these tests, because as far as they’re concerned, COVID is defined as having a positive test. That seems pretty important.
By the way, do you really want to be the sort of person who attacks people who care about the truth (“truthers”)?
current lockdown is Really number 4,So I expect a 4th Wave Around Easter April 4,2021
Not sure I would describe Sweden’s year as “normal”
Restrictions started in Sweden in March.
16 March 2020, Public Health Agency recommended that people over 70 should limit close contact with other people, avoid crowded areas such as stores, public transport and public spaces. At the end of March, 93% of those older than 70 said that they were following the recommendations.
They also recommended that employers should recommend their employees work from home. One month later, roughly half the Swedish workforce was working from home.
18 March, the PHA recommended that everyone should avoid travelling within the country … They also called for the public to reconsider any planned holidays during the upcoming Easter weekend. Confirmed by mobility data.
All schools 16 + and universities swapped to online teaching
Restaurants were closed down if they didn’t follow reduced occupancy rules
27 March the government announced that the ban on public gatherings would be lowered to include all gatherings of more than 50 people. Anecdotally, (from a pal in Sweden) most of the entertainment industry closed down until October.
1 April No visitors to retirement homes. Reopened to visitors on Oct. 1 without masks recommended for visitors or staff but all had to have a negative PCR test
Just because the restrictions were voluntary and lots of people didn’t wear masks doesn’t mean that life was “normal”.
They knew from the get go that they were short of ICU beds (5.3 / 100,000) and were concerned that Stockholm, in particular, was going to be another Bergamo so they triaged elderly patients up front – they were never taken to the hospitals – only 13% of the people who died in hospital in the first wave were > 70
From 24th of December:
Only 4 persons can gather at a restaurant; No alcohol sale from 20.00; Limited number of people at shopping centers, shops & gyms; Use of face mask during certain hours on public transport; High schools closed until 24th of January; Non essential business to close until 24th of January; All non essential workers must work from home until 24th of January; Everyone who can work at home must work from home; Vaccine is a new & sought after tool against #COVID19
and now today from Marc Bevand on Twitter :
Sweden mortality from 1900 to 2020.
This week’s data update from SCB puts Sweden past a sad milestone: year 2020 recorded both the most excess deaths as well as the highest excess mortality (population adjusted) since the 1918 flu pandemic.
All sounds a bit familiar to me and they took an 8.6% hit to their economy in Q 2 and are still down 3.5% on 2019 in Q 3 although forecasting a big rebound in 2021.
If there is an absence of trust the government are much to blame. For instance, many sceptics question whether the virus actually exists and some of the scepticism quite rightly surrounds the anomalies of PCR testing. In November I wrote to Public Health England asking how many cases of COVID the government had diagnosed by DNA sequencing and received an FOI answer stating that they only diagnosed by PCR. Five days later we were into the era of ultra transmissible mutations and I read in the the BMJ (Jacqui Wise) that the government had DNA sequenced 140,000 cases: it had suddenly become politically expedient to mention it! The government will apparently only use data in a manipulative way, and for those not happy with the treacle coming from the mainstream media this is deeply troubling. From the scientific point of view it is obviously essential that we have bona fide information and open debate, otherwise the government will just blunder from one position to another. The conflicts are also very serious: Ferguson, for instance, was has always been a prospector for the vaccine industry, heavily funded by GAVI and Bill and Melinda Gates (Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium). This is even more serious than his lockdown bed-hopping (though that might be something to swallow).
You tube censored the guy who designed the PCR test explaining it can’t test for a specific virus. It test the amount of viral load/ T&B cell reaction in the patient at the time of test. So SARS- CoV2, H5N1, H-CoV229E etc will all give the same “positive” result. The guy who designed the test died before SARS-CoV2 was discovered which was unfortunate timing.
Yes, they are completely infantile.
Depends what set of primers you use for the PCR test. These are derived from whatever current virus you are looking for, so the test is specifically designed to spot a specific virus.
The Lighthouse labs use a PCR test that has 3 primers derived from 3 different bits of the Sars Cov 2 genome – Orf1a/1b (open reading frame), N (nucleocapsid) and S (spike). All 3 have to be picked up by a test at a certain cycle threshold for the test to be deemed “positive”.
This is how they spotted the new variant – they were seeing tests from certain areas that were showing positive for Orf 1a/1b and N but negative for S (the spike protein for those tests had mutated enough in those people for the primer to no longer be able to recognise it).
Lauritsen was talking specifically about HIV, not any other virus. What he actually said was :
“PCR is intended to identify substances qualitatively, but by its very nature is unsuited for estimating numbers.”
Hope you are right as its not nice to think of health professionals doing organised dishonesty – though perfecetly understandable if politicians do it. However its not what the late Kary Mullis says here https://www.bitchute.com/vi…
Excellent piece. I very much like Freddie’s calm, reasoning demeanor. Not afraid to discuss difficult and controversial topics, but always respectful. Bravo!.
There is nothing wrong with skepticism which should be ENCOURAGED and not “punished” but authorities or the media.
But I do have a problem with people that refuse to say ” I was wrong”…Sweden and its policy is the perfect example. If the policy was a success the SWED GOV would have not changed track over and over again.
Johan Giesecke is another great example. Last year he kept predicting (including the Unherd Interview) in the Swedish Media that by early summer large segments of the population would have developed herd immunity – but he kept changing his range numbers. When the tests were done it was revealed that a tiny tiny minority of people have developed immunity.
When asked by Expressen (a Swedish Tabloid) how did he come up with his numbers Giesecke responded “let’s drop this”.
Why should the sceptics admit they’re wrong when faced with an establishment that responds to it’s own errors by ‘doubling down”?
Not clear what the criterion of having immunity is. It seems that more patients fight off Covid-19 with T cells than actually form Antibodies. If this is true (cautious step here!) then it would be possible to have the herd immunity without having the evidence of it. But that would still leave Giesecke in rather an awkward position. I suspect that his hunch is right but his evidence is lacking, and he knows how much trouble sceptics get into when they advance positive assertions. As for proportioning beliefs to the evidence, I am not sure how that squares with Hume’s critique of induction …
I think its one thing to be a sceptic in the literal and scientific definition of the word, constantly testing and retesting theories. but the concern are those non Scientifics who use the word sceptic, at best, without understanding its meaning , or at worst using others understanding to spread distrust and push a particular agenda.
So I don’t have an issue with the Sunetra gupta’s of this world as long as they are open to being held accountable at a later stage and are open to testing and retesting and adjusting their thoeries according to the facts as they unfold. But I do have a problem with the Toby Youngs and lawrence Fox’s of this world who use this scientific and objective Scepticism to amplify and give credibility to their own unscientific agenda.
Thats concerning to me and why its important, particularly in this age where all sorts of ‘information’ is available at the touch of a phone, where the wider public are taught the importance of critical thinking, starting with the fundamentals of What a persons credentials are and why they are positing a theory before even taking a look and spreading on that theory.
Too many people search for things that fit their own gut and give voice to dangerous actors.
Toby Young is an idiot – why would anyone listen to him about epidemics is beyond me…
..Agreed. but they do .. and we need to understand why they do, to be able to stop them doing it.
You can not.
People have always believed and always will believe in conspiracies. Technology has made it much easier for the nutters to share their idiotic ideas.
Well respectfully I disagree. yes its easier than ever to be a conspiracy theorist and to get your warped view out into the wider world. but to reduce the amount of people who subscribe to this approach, just like all the bad ‘isms’ out there in the world, we have to understand and be open about their attraction to then beat them.
Calling someone an idiot or tin foil hat wearer (while satisfying in the moment I agree) just drives a wedge even deeper. whats more effective is engaging people in discussions and persisting to ask them why ….
He is, but no more or less than any of the hundreds of other idiot media pundits: James Obrien, Owen Jones, Melanie Philips, Will Hutton, Richard Littlejohn
And yet there is a constant campaign to silence only one subset of the idiots. I wonder why that is?
Could it be that we’re in the middle of a pandemic which one set of idiots are telling us not to take seriously?
Absolutely no one is telling you not to take it seriously, no one ever has told you that – no one ever will.
They have pointed out that it is neither reasonable nor useful to completely rearrange human existence around the avoidance of one particular threat without doing a proper cost/benefits analysis.
….which here in the U.K. we are still waiting to see. If indeed it exists or was ever properly commissioned.
That is not true. They are taking it very seriously indeed – the economic harm, the attack by government on our civil liberties as well as the virus.
What is Toby Young and Lawrence Fox’s unscientific agenda? I am still unclear on this, the accusations that they have one sound themselves like conspiracy theories. I’m unfamiliar with their history but I understand that a certain political class find them automatically unpalatable; meaning the knee jerk way they are dismissed has to be at least considered equally illegitimate.
I have to say, in my experience, the forums on which lockdown sceptics discuss things tend to demonstrate more openness with the use of data, a greater openness to exploring other points of view and higher general understanding of science amongst the users, which is validated to a greater or lesser extent by the expert opinion they reference.
What you seem to argue for is an acceptance of propositions based on the credentials of those making the argument, without questioning the consistency (why did they never recommend these actions before), the wisdom (have they considered the impact of their recommendations on the greater good – something for which credentials and expertise is too narrow to be the final arbiter of) or entertaining the possibility that they themselves are subject to group think and compromise.
This is surely antithetical to the process of critical thinking – this is unquestioning acceptance and submission.
Google’s algorithms are the ultimate arbitrators of truth. Twitter the ultimate disseminators of it. Dorsey says so.
A good philosopher, let alone a great one like Hume, would spot what we refer to as equivocation over the use of the term “sceptic” here. Hume’s definition is caution. As he writes in Of Miracles in the Enquiry, “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence”.
The people who have gained fame (and sometimes Patreon contributions) from being known as “Lockdown sceptics” are not wise by Hume’s standard. Whether it is the diet guru who predicted herd immunity in July, the journalist who can’t do division, or the retired pharma exec who speculated that there might be no more elections, the so-called “sceptics” have gone far beyond the evidence.
In the case of the actual career scientists who have got things wildly wrong, like Gupta, it was obvious when she gave the interview that she was wrong, as many people here commented beneath the interview at the time. Has she published any admission of this? If not, why believe that she is wise, by Hume’s standard? The evidence for that belief would seem to be lacking, no matter how kind and caring she is.
Nobody has the monopoly on wisdom of course, but if you apply Hume’s cited standard universally, which you pointedly seem to be reluctant to do there, then you seem to be suggesting that anything and everything that emanates from ‘the other side’ and that ‘funnily enough’ apparently backs up your position is, by implication, unequivocal and purely evidenced based. Ergo your belief is sound.
You might be under the illusion that you’re proportioning your beliefs to the evidence, but what you’re doing is what so many others do, cherry picking your evidence and using it to confirm your own established position which is, I suspect, not exactly what Hume had in mind to be honest.
A bit too general to respond to. Since I don’t mention what my established position is, I’m not sure how you’d know all this about me. What’s your evidence?
That you do not give the same treatment to the lockdownphillics as you give to the deniers. But wait and see, I think all wile be wrong, but the deniers less so, once the post covid accounting is drawn up.
The deaths from despair and neglect across the world because of lockdown are plain for all to see and the lack of evidence or precedent for the measure that caused them is also clear (the former can be disputed – but a case for lockdowns as being effective in the virus trajectory has yet to be made).
Dr Gupta had the ethics and wisdom to point this out and suggest that a virus lethal to people with easily identifiable characteristics could be mitigated against in a less deadly way – and, indeed, in previous times would have been.
Making some condescending point about her numbers being slightly off misses the point in a way which has been a truly tragic aspect of the lockdown advocates mentality.
Lockdowns are terrible. Unfortunately, failure to use the time afforded by them to organise means you doom the country to repeated cycles of them until an effective treatment arrives. In this, I agree with Devi Sridhar.
She is an epidemiologist. Getting the numbers right matters. Do you regard criticism of Ferguson “some condescending point about [his] numbers being slightly off”? (Assuming you think they’re off, in which case, I’d ask to see your evidence).
I would welcome a look at Ferguson’s base data and to see if i can replicate his models. As i commented elsewhere on this thread all mathematical models are wrong but some are more useful than others. Ferguson would probably be happy to admit to another scientist the assumptions he had to use created his results, but he can’t very well say that in public. That is the problem with scientist as shaman. You are only as good as your last weather forecast. If your prayers to the Rain God are ignored you are toast.
The Imperial model is on Github (mrc-ide/covid-sim). I’ve read blog posts of people modellers from other fields who’ve built and played with it, which I found interesting. As usual, no links on here, but Google for Clive Best’s Imperial College simulation code for COVID-19 and “”¦and Then There’s Physics” blog’s article The Imperial College code.
Clive Best describes what the model’s doing and points out that the model’s predictions for the first lockdown were reasonably accurate.
The original Imperial paper often credited with causing the first lockdown contains references to the team’s earlier work (the model was originally written to model other epidemics, flu I think) which may also document what it’s doing.
Thanks for that – i had a quick look at th model code and will dig in later. I confirm it runs on our blade server at work, i hope it does on my i7 56gb ram at home! I am still unsettled by the overall issue of source data in terms of R:0 ratio and CFRs as they have to be got from somewhere, so the model is still highly at risk from the garbage in garbage out problem even if the maths are correct in the model itself, which it appears they are.
Seems like ancient history now, but when the WHO cried ‘pandemic’ last March, the new virus was explicitly compared with the flu in its official announcement. One point of comparison was lethality. The 3.4% figure given for SARS2 was not labelled as an IFR, but it *was* directly compared to the standard flu IFR endorsed by the WHO, the oft-cited 0.1%. There can be little doubt that the 3.4% figure was *interpreted* at the time by the public as an IFR, and who (WHO) knows? this may even have been the intention. At any rate, would it not be true to say that Gupta, interviewed later in March and suggesting a 0.1% IFR, was a *lot* more accurate than the WHO? And this may be even more the case if we distinguish between the cumulative IFR (which includes the ‘first hit’ of the virus on populations) and the endemic IFR (we’re obviously heading there with SARS2).
I bet Dr Gupta & colleagues are not phased by keyboard warriors. I know some of the back story to hers and Ferguson’s careers in the poisonous playpen of academe and lets just say she’s outplayed him so far.
I would still trust Dr Gupta’s judgment than yours as to what is right.
What has become apparent with all this is that some people care more about being right, and shouting at everyone else that they are right, than any number of deaths, or amount of economic damage. And they are so physchologically invested in being right they can discount all the evidence in the world that they are actually dead wrong.
No – an appeal to authority is the enemy of all knowledge, science, ethics, logic etc. Judgement is not reserved for the few. I am 98% behind the GBD and Gupta & co, not because of their status but because of their work. Note not 100% because like you and i no one can be right all the time.
and Dr Karol Sikora,professor carl Heneghan..
maybe skeptics have gone beyond the evidence but all those does is put them on equal footing with the oh-so-self-assured experts.
I suppose you’re only really making a point about a handful of famous sceptics rather than everyone, but the point about a few people predicting no second wave in June is rather blunted by three problems:
1. There are huge numbers of “sceptics” by now. Vast majority of them didn’t make any such prediction, or even said the opposite, e.g. Ivor Cummins pointed out in one of his recent videos that he projected Spain would have a winter increase in mortality.
2. The second wave has some curious characteristics like not really causing a second wave of excess deaths, at least not in the UK. The Telegraph has a good article on this today looking at the data. If you define “second wave” as a second wave of cases then it certainly exists but must be exaggerated by the large increase in testing. If it’s defined as a second wave of overall deaths then it gets a lot murkier because, well, mortality undulates normally, so can we really say it’s a second wave of a pandemic if mortality always comes in waves and currently looks pretty normal for a British winter?
3. None of the models being used by epidemiologists for COVID predict seasonal second waves either. They either all predict a single wave, or second/third waves caused by suppressing the first via lockdowns, but none predict summer disappearance and winter re-appearance. They can’t because they measure time as “days since start of simulation”, rather than an absolute date in the year.
In fairness to your post, you don’t claim lockdown-loving people are Hume-style wise either. But the vast majority of people pointing out errors in the strategy have engaged in Hume-style scepticism, and that includes people like Gupta, Toby Young etc. That’s why of the thousands of things they’ve collectively said, it requires dropping nearly all of them to focus on a single thing to try and discredit them. What of all the other things they’ve said that turned out to be correct? Like the overall thrust of the argument – that lockdowns are wildly disproportionate and damaging relative to both the strength of the evidence (at the start) and the now known impact of the disease?
Spain mortality – like he predicted in June that cases and deaths would collapse in the USA ?
Cases exaggerated by testing. How can that be ? We know what the operational false positive ratio is from the testing done in the summer when there was very little Covid around (0.08% according to the ONS random survey, 0.9% from Test and Trace ) and we know what the case positivity ratio is from the regulalrly updated ONS infection survey + they have now published a paper on Ct values over time – down in the spring and autumn and up in the summer, as you would expect if there was more disease around during the two waves. Nothing to do with an increase in testing.
Deaths. Well we won’t know how many died with Covid as stated in boxes 1a,b or c on their death certificates as compared with other causes until ONS finish crunching their mortality stats – delayed somewhat because of the delays in coroners courts at the moment. There is apparently less Covid mortality (maybe) this time around because :
1. The NHS has got better at managing this disease
2. They are putting fewer old people onto ventilators – that is they are triaging the type of care offered to crinklies – more palliative, less interventionist.
3. Older people are shielding better this time around
This could all change of course, in the twinkling of an eye given the time lag infection >> hospitalisation >> death.
Models don’t predict. They produce a series of scenarios from a set of stated assumptions, with confidence intervals. You pick the one you feel most comfortable with, or makes most sense to you at the time. How can they possibly predict 6,9,12 months in advance ? There is no good model of the vagaries of human behaviour.
“Seasonality” – is all about what the hosts of the virus do. The virus can’t survive without a warm wet nose, trachea, lung, kidney, gut, brain, heart, liver, muscle, etc. It transmits from one warm, wet host to another. If these hosts spend extended periods of time close enough to one another in an enclosed environment, the virus transmits. This tends to happen routinely in cold climates September – March’ish but it can happen at any time. It’s all down to what the hosts are up to and where and maybe a propensity for droplets and aerosols to hang around longer in cold damp weather.
Scepticism is suddenly perilously out of fashion. More than that, it is now deemed dangerous.
Suddenly if one forgets the great climate wars where any one not all-in on the concept of a wholesale stoppage of fossil fuels and govt-mandated emissions goals was branded a “denier.” Because, god forbid, that anyone point out that ‘consensus’ is not part of the scientific method or of research. God forbid anyone even accept the premise of man-made climate change but question the perceived wisdom of handing over control to elected officials and bureaucrats.
This is part of a broader absence of critical thinking, which has sadly gone out of style. Ironically, much of this is driven by a generation that came of age about a half-century ago pushing the mantra of ‘question everything.’ Apparently, their progeny was taught the exact opposite.
There is now a scientific paper,peer reviewed,published on 5th January in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation.It was written by Dr.Eran Bendavid,Professor John Ioannidis Christopher Oh and Jay Bhattacharya.It compares 10 countries’ policies to combat the case growth of Covid,including Sweden and South Korea who did not have mandatory lockdown.Their conclusion is ‘While small benefits cannot be excluded,we do not find significant benefits on growth case of more more restrictive NPIs(Non pharmaceutical interventions)>similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less restrictive interventions.I think this is the only scientific paper which addresses this subject but has been completely ignored (or perhaps ‘cancelled’ by the UK media .Govt. suppression maybe ?
As far as I can tell, the UK government resorted to lockdowns once the situation was spiralling out of control. In each instance, earlier smaller interventions would probably have done the trick (pace South Korea). By late March 2020 the virus was well established in the UK and doubling rate was 3 days – the government having missed its chance to shut borders and mandate social distancing in February. By the time HMG realised what was going on they only had a few days in hand to shut down the chain reaction.
Since late March I’ve followed a range of opinion, Lockdown TV providing many. In a recent conversation between Dr. Bhattacharya – prof.of medicine at Stanford – and John Anderson – ex. deputy Prime Minister of Australia – a discussion centred around the ‘cost’ (opportunity cost) of lockdowns, a seeming lack or necessity/time for any impact studies, a ‘trading of lives’ where one sector pays for another. It is an unarguable reality that now, it is the poorest and young who are paying a price for lockdown, indeed, with their lives. People who do not own property, renters who have lost jobs because of lockdown and face eviction, the many societal ills – depression/suicide, that ensue (the latter highlighted by both as now being worringly high in Australia and the US – (Japan’s up by 16%). Should there not be some balance in main stream news between infection rates, deaths, hospitalisation and others lives? Is that affordable ? and if not why not?
Critical thinking is essential and this post by Freddie Sayer long due. To always ask questions and the action in so doing, is more important than seeking an answer. What we have, everywhere, is the result of political institutional design – party politics in the main leading to parliamentary argument, not deliberation. In my opinion this has been ‘carted’ over, en bloc, into the covid narrative. It is this which has to change above all other.
Apparently suicide attempts were up by 1000% in part of California last year. This was according to a medic. I have also heard it said that suicides are up by 200% in the UK, but I haven’t seen any evidence and it sounds a little unlikely.
Mr Sayers, your libertarian instincts are plainly evident in your interviews (including most recently with Adam Wagner), which is absolutely fine.
My problem with your interviews is that you have failed to make clear that reasonable people can disagree on the merits of Covid policy without having to deny the best available epidemiological evidence.
Rather than debating Covid policy from a philosophical perspective, your interviews last year created false balance on the science by suggesting (implicitly or otherwise) there were two equal sides to the epidemiological debate. You should have made clear that the vast majority of experts thought that Giesecke, Tegnell, Gupta, Levitt etc were very wrong on basic facts such as the IFR range, seroprevalence, herd immunity threshold, whether there would be a second wave etc. (I also think it would have been responsible of you to fact check more and to periodically update your historical interviews with a note on the latest data.)
Indeed, it was rather telling that Giesecke and Levitt in their interviews with you were far more interested in discussing philosophical arguments against government restrictions than technical or factual issues.
And I’m sure you read the comments to your articles and on your Twitter posts, and therefore you know very well at how Covid cranks interpret your interviews and the headlines you choose. (In this regard, I struggle to see the relevance of your David Hume Tower reference, other than scoring a culture wars point with some of your readers.)
I cannot help but conclude that many of your readers would have been better prepared for the reality of what occurred last year, and is continuing now, had they not given much weight to your interviews with Giesecke, Tegnell, Gupta, and Levitt.
So, anyone who thinks that we should not cause the maximum amount of collateral damage in order to suppress (possibly) Covid is a ‘crank’ now? This is a serious misrepresentation, especially as we fall in to shrill denunciations of lockdown sceptics and witch hunts in the press based on wilful misunderstanding (witness what happened to Lord Sumption). You can not justify the suspension of enlightened values to embrace a hysteria around a disease – a hysteria that hasn’t existed since before the enlightenment – on the basis of ‘whose epidemiology is more accurate’.
As annoying as I am sure you find it, there are other considerations than just the virus – there are other things that kill people (starvation and extreme poverty – 270m people worldwide will now be subject to the later – being the most persistent through history).
There is more to managing pandemics than the study of epidemiology – we are not input in a computer model and the kind of epidemiologist who has recommended lockdowns have proven themselves incapable of contemplating the harms caused to humanity by their hubris.
That is why – regardless of the numbers or the virus ‘waving’ like the queen on acid – Gupta, Giesecke and Levitt will still be right in the fullest sense of the word.
You entirely miss my point. I said reasonable people can disagree on the merits of Covid policy. But such policy debates must be based on the best available evidence, from epidemiologists, risk statisticians, child psychologists, economists etc (i.e. those knowledgeable in whatever metric one thinks relevant to assessing the merits of policy).
My point therefore is simply that one cannot assess the merits of a policy on the basis of incorrect information/assumptions. And my specific criticism of Mr Sayers in my comment is the incorrect epidemiological information he was propagating through his interviews and/or his failure to make clear that these were outlier views (and then his failure to publish follow ups when the hard data started to suggest/confirm that these views were likely very wrong).
I would not have this complaint if Sayers interviewed Sumption, who opines on philosophy/politics and not technical scientific matters. But I think I’m justified in wanting my epidemiology experts to be able to give me an accurate steer on the epidemiology. And I think you and all other UnHerd readers should want that too.
Point taken, that makes more sense. I think you can find plenty of follow up interviews with the scientists you cite (Dr Gupta was interviewed on BBC 4 on 5 January), but that depends on them being allowed a platform to speak – sadly that doesn’t seem to be the direction we are going in.
Thanks for the clarification.
Thanks David. I understand your concerns too. I think our disagreement is probably more over the extent to which Gupta et al’s scientific assertions (as opposed to her philosophical arguments) have been helpful to public knowledge and expectations.
Most of us here on Unherd want our Liberty back. However, if you want to cower under the kitchen table then you get on with it. We want our lives back, virus or no virus. We cannot live like this any longer.
Whoever said I am cowering, or indeed personally in favour of UK government policy? I am in fact a critic of it. But I do understand the importance of basing decisions on the best available evidence, not trying to make facts conform to my worldview. I am perfectly capable of making arguments against “lockdowns” (or any other such Covid policy) without having to deny the epidemiological facts.
I don’t give a flying f*** about ‘epidemiological facts’. I do care about LIBERTY. As I said above we cannot go on living like this and I would also point out that we have been living this farce since March last year. We are now on the fourth lockdown, so the previous three didn’t work did they. No, let us have done with this nonsense.
I’m afraid that you would have to engage with the epidemiological facts in order to address your point about whether or not lockdowns “work”. But you say you don’t care about the facts. Which makes having a rational debate with you over policy rather difficult.
It is of course perfectly reasonable for you to want there to be no restrictions on your liberty. The government has the unenviable task of balancing your desires and interests against everyone else’s. I think reasonable minds would agree that the government should undertake that exercise using the best available evidence.
With respect I think you are missing the basic point. The Government should never, ever, have contemplated ‘Lockdown’ in the first place – it is draconian, illiberal and totalitarian. In a Western Liberal Democracy you cannot just lock up the entire population, placing everyone under what is basically house arrest, taking away all their freedom and liberty. What did Ferguson mean when he said ‘we didn’t think we could get away with it’ ??
You talk of ‘epidemiological facts’ but as I ask earlier what are the ‘facts’ regarding this virus ? How many people under 20 have died from it ? – and on death figures lets have honest figures not the twaddle being pumped out. How many deaths of the under 45s ? I believe only a few hundred under 45s have died and only 6 children under 14. So we shut every school, shut the entire economy for what exactly ? Where is the ‘cost benefit analysis’ for this madness ? What are the comparable figures for a very bad flu season ?
Like many I have come to the conclusion that we have had our Liberty removed and our lives destroyed by a load of power mad unaccountable maniacs colluding with a bunch of spineless, lily livered politicians. The dunces of Sage and the gutless political class have created such a sense of hysteria that as I remark it has got normally sensible people cowering under their kitchen tables. And none of the policies they have foisted on us have worked: if lockdown was such a rip roaring success we wouldn’t be on the fourth bloody one would we. Indeed in many ways it has done exactly the opposite.
As far as I’m aware there is no debate over the fact that not many young die from Covid, so that’s a straw man argument.
And there are comparable figures on the seasonal flu. One of the worst flu seasons in 40 years was in 2017/18 with around 6 people per million per week admitted into ICU, whereas now with Covid we have 17 people per million per week in ICU and that number is still going up. We had 59,000 excess deaths in the spring and are around 20,000 excess deaths this winter (currently still increasing). If you don’t believe me, check the numbers published by that well known pro-lockdown, China-loving, anti-libertarian publication, The Spectator.
It also undermines your case to employ ad hominem attacks against Sage experts, who can hardly be described as dunces.
Moreover, the term “lockdown” is used to describe lots of different policies. Compare for example the “lockdown” in Australia with the “lockdown” in the U.K.. Very different in nature/duration and epidemiological outcomes.
I think the lack of scepticism is because people are unwilling or unable to analyse numbers. Coupled with the media need for alarmist headlines and it seems the majority view is that everything is utterly terrible and bound to get worse.
Tonight’s covid death figures are a good example. A new record number of deaths apparently. 1610. But hang on, this is REPORTED deaths and I’m pretty sure they are catching up from the weekend, as can be seen on the UK.gov dashboard which shows the reported numbers drop every weekend and rise every Tuesday. The BBC points this out in their nerdy “More or Less” radio 4. But their reporting is still alarmist. You’d be mistaken for not thinking that cases, hospital admissions are dropping and certainly not accelerating suggesting we are over the worst for this spike at least.
it worries me that the government will use this wilful ignorance to continue lockdown. I suppose I’m just a covidiot denying there’s a problem.
The toughest line to draw is between skeptical critical thinking and rank conspiracy theories. We need more acceptance of the former and more condemnation of the latter.
if the former were more accepted, then the latter would have far less oxygen.
For what it’s worth, this government, any government, should always seek to preserve ‘normal and ordinary life’ in all situations and circumstances. Our government, and many other governments, appeared to give little or no thought to this. They reacted; and with a high degree of hysteria.
Had they held in mind the simple idea that living in so far as possible in normal and ordinary ways, is more important than the base, utilitarian, preservation of every life and avoidance of all death; that protecting means more than just the abnegation of all risk, each decision would have needed to be very carefully thought out and implemented, and I suggest, could have resulted in far more creative, enduring and courageous policy-making -indeed it may have even provided something more heroic for all our future generations. We could have said there was a terrible virus; we came together and thought about what was truly important, and acted, we did something about it. Instead the best we will be able to say is we hid away for a number of years, destroyed most of what people had spent years building, and then tried to forget it.
Many govts cling to the mantra of “if it saves one life” so tightly that they cannot see the five others lives ruined or ended by their decisions.
“At the end of last year, Edinburgh University renamed its David Hume Tower”
… which is exactly what prompted me to adopt Hume’s portrait as my Disqus avatar.
Yes the man who never called it Scotland, but correctly North Britain.
We should not penalise critical thinking?
No shit?
The fact that someone has to put that sentence on the front line of an article, says a lot more about the climate than anything what’s in the article itself.
We should not penalise critical thinking?
Which means: our socities are penalising critical thinking already and the left wing hegemony is in full effect cracking down on critical thinking.
It is a shame, that this article has even to be written.
This is disingenuous Freddie, and I think you must know it.
Look at the vitriol that the ‘consensus’ scientists have attracted on this forum alone. Any mention of Neil Ferguson, for example, results in people frothing at the mouth and calling for him to be jailed.
But how credible is Ferguson and his work ? How accurate were his predications regarding Foot & Mouth for example ? Or any other predications he has made ?
And how rigorously has the model he used been tested ? What of the data used ?
It is ok holding him up as a great ‘Sage’ but we are entitled to call his predications and track record into question, examine and test it. And quite frankly I was rather surprised by the composition of the ‘Sage’ committee. No wonder the government weren’t that keen for the membership list to be released.
Ferguson and the Mertonian norms are strangers to each other. If a character like Ferguson makes someone froth at the mouth they’re probably as messed up as he is. It’s vitally important when considering people like him to employ the Mertonian norm “skeptical disinterest”. Only then can you see the banality of the man and the system he represents. Put more simply my advice to anyone considering Ferguson or anyone else misusing a position of scietific authority; Don’t get mad, get even.
There is yet very little data on the (I suggest dire) effects of lockdowns beyond they don’t seem to correlate with Covid deaths when the curve of the virus is assessed across many global/local jurisdictions and their different strategies – and there seems a lot of misinformation about Sweden – a great new source on Sweden with incredible detail and official data analysis is https://softwaredevelopment…
The conclusions are most telling – you can cherry pick to suit your view – the author though concludes (about Sweden):
* Yes, Covid 2020 was real (and continues to be real at least until spring 2021, as all seasonal viruses). The number of deaths 2020 was higher than it should have been, which ever way we define “Excess”. Not exceptionally higher, and far from all the disaster scenarios painted by media, politicians and failed scientists.
*Was Covid 2020 our generation’s “Spanish Flu” ? No. Far from it, as can be seen in the graph showing 1918 above, and by comparing mortality rates, where non-age-adjusted mortality 2020 is on par with that of 2012, and age adjusted mortality 2020 on par with 2013.
Maybe we should confine ourselves to DATA and EVIDENCE and forget the philosophical chatter. After all, people are dying from all causes unnecessarily, I believe.
Thanks for this, Ruth. That’s a great resource.
No problems – I am always looking for the deep and broad data – it is the only true picture.
p.s. I encourage everyone to have a look at a subreddit I help moderate, r/LockdownSkepticism. It’s a global, nonpartisan, scientifically grounded community of over 30,000 people. We post and discuss credible news pieces and analyses, and share our opinions and experiences of lockdown.
The basic conditions for sound philosophy and critical thought are time and intellectual privacy: allowing space to ponder, to think things through, to play with ideas freely and test hypothesis in intimate conversation or against immediate experience.
In an environment where the broken reflex, the unchecked habit, is for every possible person to express any possible thought instantly and unfiltered, without them even being fully aware why they think that way or how they have come to think that way, there is little chance for anything of substance to emerge. Especially since value is measured in critical mass among the uncritical masses and not quality.
Promoting ideas then turns into a cognitive cockfight where you have to hit the other hardest with whatever goes through your head and knock them out before they can come at you. That’s where this gang-like mentality in the public discourse comes from, in my view, where the social mob will put a hit on anyone who crosses into the territory and tries to curb the businesss of their questionably acquired thoughts.
Can you imagine what life would be like if nature developed in the same way and by the same processes people grow intellectually by means of a twitter mindset?
There is a reason many philosophers loved to do their thinking while walking and pondering the landscapes.
Not really. Great times of danger gave great results. People do best under pressure, it focuses them and the system. The problem with this covid is several, one is how risk adverse government is because losing votes is the all. The second is the theory that saving lives was worth any cost, as no cost/benefit was allowed because modern people are so liberal and stupid that ‘If it saves one life’ is the only criteria.
So you had government terrified of voters saying they were killing granny, and thus could not look deeper into the problem than saving granny, even if it loses the world.
No cost/benefit could be done as it would inevitably allow more deaths now to ultimately save more lives and business later, and they knew they could not sell that – and once in all the way they could not back down or the voters would leave them either way.
It has seemed to me for some time that most of the predictions come from virologists and their ilk who naturally predict based on their own areas of expertises. Few people have tried to sort out strategies based on how to handle the pandemic based on not only viral science but also how us Western, individualistically-minded humans might react and behave under the pandemic circumstances. Our early reactions were based on more restrictive and controlled regimes who in previous years were subject to quite a differently behaving pathogen: SARS. We have stuck to these measures and not thought beyond them.
Always look on the bright side of life. When the world does get the next and inevitable pandemic , when it gets a more deadly virus, we will know what to do and what not to do. Those countries that haven’t learned from the current pandemic will suffer. Let’s hope that the West does learn from its dismal experience to date.
The writer overlooks one important fact. Most of these ‘skeptics’ have not just turned out to be wrong, but they were actually highly dismissive about those who disagreed with them. Indeed, they showed the ‘moral disdain’ for their opponents that the writer claims was shown against them.
The issue is not really COVID at all. It’s social media and the internet. It takes a nano second for any issue to go from a reasonable disagreement to ‘you are part of a global conspiracy that is trying to destroy my people and everything you say is a lie. I therefore refuse to have any dialogue with you, other than to insult or mock you’
We need to find new rules to govern debate on the internet. Free speech absolutism sounds great, until you put a large number of anonymous people together and let them say whatever they like with no accountability and no boundaries. It’s never productive.
We have ground rules in real life (mostly unwritten cultural and social mores) that civilise our debate. We need to do the same for the internet. And no, I don’t know how to do that. Perhaps anonymity should not be allowed?
‘Most of these ‘skeptics’ have not just turned out to be wrong, ‘
I don’t disagree with most of what you’ve written above, but I think it’s a shame that you use covid to frame it and started it with that highly debatable, sweeping, provocative statement if you’re attempting to make a wider, I think valid, point.
Most of these ‘skeptics’ have not just turned out to be wrong, but they were actually highly dismissive about those who disagreed with them. Indeed, they showed the ‘moral disdain’ for their opponents that the writer claims was shown against them.
I could equally say the exact same about those who support lockdowns and mask-wearing. It is not the sceptics who are in charge of the narrative, either inside or outside government and media.
Sceptics have been described as “deniers,” a loaded and deeply cynical attempt to associate those who question locking down an entire country (and much of the world) with those who deny the Holocaust ever happened.
They’ve been accused of having “blood on their hands,” etc, and are on the receiving end of rants by the likes of Piers Morgan, or a police truncheon if they dare protest.
Those critical of lockdown call those who support them ‘sheep’ and ‘cowards’. And those on the extremes even start talking about being part of a global conspiracy of globalists intent on destroying the world economy (for reasons that are never fully explained or make absolutely no sense)
So my point is, there is enough blame to go around.
The guy running the WEF Klaus Schwab wrote a book about it. Just read the book dummy. They aren’t hiding it
I have read the book and deal frequently with the WEF. Unlike you and most of the people who believe in these conspiracies.
I’m sorry, anyone who knows anything about the WEF knows the idea they are trying to undertake a ‘global takeover of the world’ is bloody hilarious. They have no idea how the WEF works, it’s mainly a think tank. It has no huge resources nor does it have any direct power over anything. The Great Reset book follows a strategy of improving air quality, reducing poverty and reducing inequality by increasing the distribution of wealth from rich to poor among other things.
As a Conservative I do not agree with some of these policies, but the idea it’s a secret plan to take over the world is bizarre.
I’ve read the book. I’ve visited the website. I’ve listened to the piece of human garbage. You are a conservative? l***o. Ok. “conservative”. Just go eat your meal worms so you can save the planet. Schwab doesn’t need the money. Gates and Soros have the money. https://www.weforum.org/age…
https://www.weforum.org/age…
https://www.theguardian.com…
The Future of Pensions and Healthcare in a Rapidly Ageing World: Scenarios to 2030″ don’t bother trying to download the pdf as it was removed from their servers by the end of February of 2020 [ I’m sure just a coincidence with no sinister inference.]
Download PDF
“One of the most eminent challenges facing the world today is the ageing of our societies. The United Nations (2007) predicts that by 2050 the number of people aged 60 and older in developed countries will have increased from 21% today to 32%, and in the less-developed countries from 8% today to 20%.
“This will have profound implications for labour markets, aggregate demand, politics and societal structures. In addition, ageing societies will significantly challenge the affordability of traditional pension and healthcare systems. New approaches and new solutions from both governments and the private sector are require”
All by way of saying those running the show identified what they consider to be the existential threat to their priveledged positions”in 2008 no less when they were oblivious to the economic avalanche barreling down the slopes”and a decade later a solution appeared.
Good grief, is that it? Two paragraphs that could be taken from any report ever written on future demographics?
That’s your evidence of a global conspiracy to commit mass genocide?
Get a grip
Where do you see conspiracy?
I see a 115 page report, chapter and verse, on the threat to the economic viability of developed western nations in the face of an increasing population of elders claiming their rightful pension benefits and right to access the healthcare systems they paid to create and in some instances built with their own hands, intellect and good will.
That woud be a 115 page report I downloaded three years ago as pensions and healthcare are areas of my intererst and expertise and today it will take you an hour or more”if possible at all”to find an organization that actually has the report stored on their servers rather than just a link to the WEF’s servers which removed the pdf from their servers at some point at the end of Februaary or beginning of March.
I’ll leave it to you to explain why it was removed from their servers and nearly a year later is still gone.
oh yeah…before I forget, the evidence of mass genocide is the WHO’s reporting of 2,098,879 deaths as of a minute ago and the statistics that establish fully 80 to 90 percent of those deaths are those over the age of 65…or perhaps you have an understanding of these coincidences that you care to share.
good news…you can read the full report, for now anyway, but I wouldn’t wait…
[https://www.scribd.com/docu…]
good news…you can read the full report, for now anyway, but I wouldn’t wait…and you’ll have to close the space I created after https: so this comment would post
https: //http://www.scribd.com/document/500...]
good news…you can read the full report, for now anyway, but I wouldn’t wait…and you’ll have to close the space I created after
https so this comment would post
https://www.scribd.com
/document/50012535
/Pensions-and-Health-2030-Scenarios-Report
good news…you can read the full report, for now anyway, but I wouldn’t wait…and you’ll have to close the spaces I created after
https so this comment would post
at http://www.scribd.com
/document/50012535
/Pensions-and-Health-2030-Scenarios-Report
good news…you can read the full report, for now anyway, but I wouldn’t wait, at SCRIBD’s web site
and this from the Heritage Foundation’s “Reform Medicare’s Demographic Challenge”and the Urgent Need for Reform
March 21, 2013 8 min read Download Report
Authors:Robert Moffit and Alyene Senger
..The sheer number of beneficiaries is projected to grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 81 million in 2030.[2] This will create an unprecedented demand for technologically advancing medical services in the 21st century. Current taxpayers already pay almost nine out of every 10 dollars in total Medicare costs in any given year, and general revenues will account for an increasingly larger share of Medicare spending [3] In other words, current and future taxpayers are being saddled with enormous obligations.
Wow, this is amazing. I had no idea there was so much evidence available. My life will never be the same. I am going to quit my job and dedicate the rest of my life spreading the word on social media.
Thank you for showing me the light. Now it all makes sense, at last.
I have adopted the sensible attitude that I now live in an occupied country. That until we are relieved by a liberator I must assume the worst of any state actor or law maker. There is no point in making waves . Maybe just little ones but try to avoid trouble and find ways to assert your basic freedom and live the best you can.
The government is ruling by decree . That is enough for me to get it. This is not going to end for some long time.
The real satisfaction is knowing that you no longer believe them and reject their authority. In the end all they want is to be loved.
It is not as daft as it sounds., If millions slowly but surely withhold their cooperation and allegiance then slowly but surely the state as it now is will have to do one of two things, Either go all out for repression or just give up and pretend that it is still in control .
Thank you Freddie. A very sober and reflective analysis which brings into sharp focus our current dilemma.
In a year in which the lode star of Science (or at least ‘Scientism’) has been in the ascendent, critical thinking and ‘Falsifiability’ – the very essence of the scientific method according to Karl Popper – has not only been suppressed but worryingly, denigrated.
Science is now the captive of politics and will find itself used to justify every act (“we will follow the Science…..” – Boris Johnson) as long as it suits the narrative.
I can only stand back and admire those scientists who have the balls to stand up and risk their stipend by questioning the orthodoxy. You have more courage than me. I have nothing left to lose.
Great article Freddie!
Also, remember that with all the “horrible” current situation mortalities in most western countries are about 0.1% – 0.2% of the population which is a far cry from the 2% claimed at the beginning and used to justify the lockdowns.
Also, the ambiguity between deaths with covid and deaths because of covid is for sure inflating that 0.2% although it might be hard to say by how much.
Regarding pandemics and other sudden disasters, the Go In Hard policy definitely works, as OP says. In the case of the UK, it would have saved many months of pain.
No, there are quite a lot of papers studying the data rigourously by now (all of it) which show no correlation between lockdown severity or length and outcomes. People claiming otherwise are cherry picking data. This is easy to do. For example, if they say New Zealand I can say Sweden, if they say Australia I can say … wait a minute, they did impose some pretty nasty lockdowns but let’s ignore that …. I can say Japan, which delayed actions for a long time, perhaps to try and save the Olympics. Or we can compare Florida and New York. Etc. As far as anyone can tell there are no correlations at all, so in a noisy dataset obviously anyone can pick their preferred data points and “prove” anything they like. It’s only when examining all the data that the lack of signal becomes apparent.
Concluding the UK needs to have self harmed even more than it already has to “beat” the virus is very dangerous. It wouldn’t have helped and the UK is already using more totalitarian techniques than some other places. Lockdowns don’t work, that is clear. The question we should be asking now is, why not? What’s missing from germ theory that results in such a large predictive miss?
What’s missing? Even King Cnut recognised you can’t legislate an alternative reality. A virus does not recognise legislative authority..
Well said. And on the wider point, the fact that scepticism today elicits such outrage and hatred is a sure sign that we are confronted with an essentially cultic approach to argument, in which “belief” is mandatory – and not just “belief” in a number of base assumptions, but in all dogmas – as defined by a self-selecting elite. True, there are elements on “both sides” now coalescing into intolerant neo-medieval cults, but it is clear that the version on the left is the more powerful, more active and more immediately dangerous of the two.
Pretty much like any article of faith people all too easily become entrenched in their views usually choosing to surround themselves only with the like-minded and willingly subjecting themselves to the regular sensory onslaughts only ever designed to reinforce ‘the message’.
They live with the tenets on a daily basis, they dutifully perform the requisite ceremonial rituals and wear the robes, they invest in them emotionally, they might make small, personal, ideally conspicuous sacrifices as proof to others of their undying devotion, some quietly imagine to themselves that this conscious choice never, ever to question makes them a better person even.
Challenging that mindset, never mind undoing it, is the Devil’s own job and the charge of ‘heresy’ is naturally never far from its most vociferous devotees’ lips.
We are all trapped in the paradigm of consciousness i guess but some are more enmeshed than others. The shaman like status of for example medical doctors pretty much prevents them from learning from either theirs or others successes and failures. They are quite literally “married to the game”. I hear there was an outbreak of shanking amongst plastic surgeons the other day. Queens Med Crew versus City Hospital Man Dem? If the robe fits, as they say!
Scepticism should indeed be welcomed when it is part of and/or embraces critical thinking. But some of these so-called “sceptics” have long since ceased to be doing this. They continue to preach an agenda inconsistent with observed reality. Michael Yeadon is a good example of this, as is the “fat charlatan”. Both may have appeared at the outset as sceptics; they are now clearly both cranks. Michael Levitt continues to promote his inexplicable model, despite its predictive failure. If he had not won a Nobel prize, years ago, in a vaguely related field, no-one would be taking any notice of him at all.
Similarly, Sunetra Gupta has been repeatedly wrong and not once appeared to admit it. Even at the time she put at her theories (firstly that more than half of us had already had Covid and secondly that by last summer the virus was on the way out as most of us were immune), they were inconsistent with phylogenetic analysis and multiple examples of >60% observable attack rate in/on ships, prisons, Manaos. Yet instead of confronting these conflicts between her theorising and empirical data, she segued into the inexecrable Great Barrington Defecation. I don’t care how nice a person she is, “sceptic” is not an accurate term and no amount of exposition of the philosophy of David Hume can deflect from the enormous damage some of these people have done – in some cases, continue to do.
I’m sceptical about almost all the 194 comments I’ve read so far. Anyone want to shout me down?
You are skeptical about skepticism? It’s almost as if this subject is actually more complex than we’ve been led to believe.
Perhaps it’s not just a case that ‘skepticism equals good’ and ‘order equals bad’?
But who do I blame? I want someone to blame! I want to be outraged! Fuc*king liberal elite, capitalist, communist, globalist basatar*s
Only if you say please…..then we will – with pleasure.
By and large, I agree – with the proviso that both scepticism and belief have to be acocmpanied by a willingness tochange one’s mind in the face of new events, new evidence, new points of view. Some professional sceptics and believers simply keep looking for evidence for their own original view, disregarding conflicting evidence.
I do find this an incredibly alarmist yet also blind article which rounds several things together.
Alarmist thinking about dictatorships and powers never abandoned by Government. In fact, Government has only used the powers and authority it has , so far as I know it hasn’t passed any new laws giving it unlimited powers for permanent use. If it ever showed any signs of doing so then yes – scream from the roof tops but so far ………..? Is there not a good argument that says, if the UK had adopted and managed a strong set of measures from the start – with thorough and firm implementation of e.g travel, group and social activities , and strict checking of self isolation then we could have been enjoying a near normal life for the last 6 months or so. As it is we listened too much to the dissenting voices – the short sighted voices that called for freedoms, the short sighted voices that have given us ongoing long term restrictions and a pretty dismal life – boring at best, tragic for many . Why did we listen to those short sighted dissenting voices?
As for silencing dissenting voices! When do dissenting voices cross the line into conspiracy theorists, peddling basically bizarre but attention grabbing conspiracies that lack any real evidence or basis and which, even a little common sense would reveal as damaging nonsense.
How can you call the opinions of others on this Pandemic short sighted when it is not clear to anyone how it will end? What you consider as ‘a little common sense’ will to another show as gullible! What would your conclusion be- shut down all opinions that don’t agree with your opinion of common sense?
Please don’t take my comment as being silly! What you do is take evidence and science – without political bias and a mad desire to ignore what clearly works in other countries. And you certainly don’t ever go on uninformed , unfounded opinion from people who know nothing about the medicine and science of viral infections and pandemics
Yes! It gets harder and harder to step out of line and challenge the prevailing opinion – that’s why I’m so glad of Unherd. Do people realize that in the 1917-18 Spanish flu the number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide, with about 675,000 occurring in the United States. Yet the population was much smaller and the President never mentioned it in his speeches or gave anyone federal aid. We’ve got a long way to go before matching those numbers, and the way we have politicized our Pandemic shows how much the world has changed.
Yes, because the theory that smoking causes lung cancer is just one opinion and critical thinkers are entitled to another
We do indeed need scepticism more than ever. However, we need it for many other things than the Covid pandemic, which is a Black Swan. Every one (scientist, politician, journalist etc) in every country was lost for what to do. The most important area in need of healthy scepticism at the moment is climate change and the absurd policies being put into place with no debate. Any questionning of this subject is closed down and all we get is catastrophist propaganda from all political parties, the media (especially the BBC), celebrities (including Attenborough), the UN, Universities (££ research grants) etc etc. XR and other activist groups have their job done for them! Nobody understands what Net Zero means in practice. I hope UnHerd will focus on some proper sceptical debate on this issue rather than the pandemic.
Recognising, as you do, that “Countries which…swiftly imposed border controls and restrictions have generally had the best Covid-19 outcomes” is a major step forward. Learn from the best performers. And in this case it is not the usual peer group.
We are all aware of the echo chamber the Internet Creates what is terribly difficult is to take those walls down and allow people to mingle and as my mother used to say you have two ears and one mouth use them in that proportion. So everyone needs to listen more. I have read many of the excellent comments made here and they fight to be rational and balanced which is not how a lot of us perceive journalism on this issue.
My concern all along is the matter has been exaggerated and it kicked off with the most hellish statistical outcomes which have proved to be wrong. That did a great deal of damage to credibility.
I happen to believe we had two crisis which have intersected with the Protein a huge and growing elderly population many of whom merely exist and a terribly worrying level of obesity in the West.
I remain of the view that the mental health, development and lively hoods of millions of people are being sacrificed for these two groups.
The debate should simply be where is the balance. From my perspective and I am willing to be wrong I do not see a balance I see the whole argument reduced to capacity constraints to deal with in the main these two groups. The politics that flow from that. I suspect long after this particular virus has diluted and passed on like all the others we will still be arguing which would be sad because the prosecution of end of life and poor health choices really do need to be addressed they will be with us for ever unless we deal with them unlike the Protein.
All the arguments about testing, masks, lockdowns can be an outlet for frustration and a removal of compensation that we need but its not an original thought to say the real test is in the execution. If you wear the right equipment properly it does make difference but there is the rub can the elderly actually perform these requests diligently and with success. The answers suggest no. The very people we are protecting continue to get infected in greater numbers in Lockdown than those where its a passing problem. You Lockdown the healthy get infected less the old carry on getting infected and that disparity will increase as so many healthy people now gain Herd Immunity. It will be interesting to see if the Vaccines will deal with this lets hope so.
The most focused example which I followed daily with the transparent and clear data provided by the authority is Victoria. They brought the community transmission down to zero but the aged still died on a ratio of 3 (809) 1 (250) to influenza from previous years. Meanwhile 11,000 people died during Lockdown. It worked but still everyone died, Maybe thats important. Since the Pandemic Phase started in the UK 800/1000 excess deaths occur at home every week the vast majority (98%) to non Covid causes. (ONS stats) Maybe thats important. Whose discussing that does that make me a sceptic?
are you suggeting we simply require those in extremis as result of the SARS-CoV-2 virus be required to die at home or in the streets to avoid clogging our hospitals with the soon to be dead?
you might also consider that in 2008 the World Economic Forum’s featured research paper was titled”The Future of Pensions and Healthcare in a Rapidly Ageing World: Scenarios to 2030″ don’t bother trying to download the pdf as it was removed from their servers by the end of February of 2020 [ I’m sure just a coincidence with no sinister inference. ]
Download PDF
“One of the most eminent challenges facing the world today is the ageing of our societies. The United Nations (2007) predicts that by 2050 the number of people aged 60 and older in developed countries will have increased from 21% today to 32%, and in the less-developed countries from 8% today to 20%.
“This will have profound implications for labour markets, aggregate demand, politics and societal structures. In addition, ageing societies will significantly challenge the affordability of traditional pension and healthcare systems. New approaches and new solutions from both governments and the private sector are require”
All by way of saying those running the show identified what they consider to be the existential threat to their priveledged positions”in 2008 no less when they were oblivious to the economic avalanche barreling down the slopes”and a decade later a solution appeared.
Many thanks for your response.
If you look at the issue of the elderly on any metric it is arguably as important a challenge that mankind faces as any. Your quotes remind us that others have been looking at this for sometime.
There are several groups of people involved in this transaction.
1) Everybody else who are sacrificing their lives both now and in the future, due to additional taxation to control the debt created.
2) The health care services who are actually already making the decisions you imply I am leading the argument to. Rationing of resources is with us. My Mother who nearly died a couple of weeks ago in a hospital is caught in the argument. More recently I read a fascinating account of a journalist who has passed through ICU will have a long recovery period and alluded to rationing. We know in order to keep the healthcare system functioning in Sweden in the Pandemic Phase palliative care was offered and rightly so. If you have an intimate knowledge of the ravages of ICU mentally and physically its not for the fainted hearted ..literally.
3) Those whose lives we are talking about the confused, the demented, the waiting for the next hospital visit. That group are more frightened of death than the long story of reduction they go through. I sense my generation, I am 65, are entirely different that is why many of us have living wills and directions on the manner of our ending. The older generation wish to live on their knees, whereas we seem to want to die on our feet. But there are many particularly the almost alzheimers group who do not want to live who sit in homes and say let the damn thing in I want to die. With a life expectancy of 2/3 years many will never see a soul again before they die.
So our current but interfered with quite rightly by health care professionals policies benefits no one except pharma and aged care profits.
The one phrase I regret in your post is about dying in the streets. This is not Leningrad in 1941. 172,192 people died at home in 2020 (ONS stats). To die at home for many is preferable to being in hospital. With a package of care designed to alleviate pain and drilled knowing relatives in their eye line if they have a contagious virus that might be considered more humane than being behind a screen in a hospital alone bereft.
You see the thing that fascinates me the most with the current people please policies of the west is that everyone suffers but those that suffer the most are those who die alone wrapped up in protocol. They will be dead for a very long time . There maybe recovery for everyone else who survives but dying at home painlessly with someone familiar not to far away is that such a bad thing?
All we need in this extraordinary circumstances is emergency time dependent protocols which allow health professionals to consider the chances of survival of a Co Morbid and 75+ with a threshold that takes away their agony in making those judgements ones that were made in Italy with success (lower overall death rates) last spring.
“Everybody else who are sacrificing their lives both now and in the future, due to additional taxation to control the debt created.”
are you ignoring the many sacrifices of those 65 and older…many of whom not only survived the Great Depression and WW II but contributed to their successful outcomes and recoveries from the destitution we can only imagine?
Can’t you be a bit more succinct, five consecutive posts?
And please do try to cheer up, there’s a good chap.
Not at all sacrifice was burned into their psyche. Most Grandparents who have had a full an active life would always put their grandchildren first.
But lets cut to the chase with all your clipped replies. I am simply saying that the threshold for taking a comorbid 75 + person into hospital should be based on a time limited protocol which looks for a high level chance of recovery and by doing that you take aware the agony of the health care professional. 75% of deaths to Sars Cov 2 continue to be this age group. This is an 80/20 problem 80% of all deaths come from comorbid 75+. Deal with them differenty and the conversation is entirely changed.
Oh I agree absolutely but your responses can come across as very generalised which is why I queried the living on their knees statement. It came across as a general statement about the older generation because you did make a comparison with people of your generation. Your above statement is, however, an excellent starting point for debating end of life care.
“This is not Leningrad in 1941.”
nor is is it Berlin 1945.
I am not quibling about the location of an individual’s death or whether it meets an arbitrary standard of care or dignity”it is the death the could otherwise have been prevented.
Are you volunteering to sign a protocol for your own demise that allows for your being excluded from interventions that have shown to successfully allow for recovery from illnesses associated with a SARS-CoV-2 infection?
Yes if I am not fit and healthy afterwards.
“…benefits no one except pharma and aged care profits.”
I’m farily certain those enjoying a quality of life through the miracles of phamacology and quality care facilities would dispute your facile argument.
You may be right but I know of no one living in a home who has their mental capacity enjoys the experience. I freely admit living in an institutional with a lot of elderly people is something my mother would rather die than do. We discussed when she survived two weeks ago.
“There maybe recovery for everyone else who survives but dying at home painlessly with someone familiar not to far away is that such a bad thing?”
you assume death at home is painless and the presence of “someone familiar not to far away.”
Morphine administered in a hospice, hospital or home has the same medical outcome but significant numbers of people wish to die in familiar surroundings with loved ones.
the thing that fascinates me the most is the ease with which willfully ignorant intelligent people fabricated fantasies they shameleslly promote as reasonable and rational argument.
The older generation wish to live on their knees.
What a sweeping generalisation and one which in my experience is completely wrong. I agree on the palliative care issue for those deemed unlikely to recover (but I suspect that happens anyway with caring physicians). I agree with assisted dying so I am not a life at any cost person, but you worryingly lump everyone over 80 into the same category and suggest they get sent on their way – that is a very slippery slope. But I agree end of life care is a huge issue that is rarely addressed but to assume everyone over 80 is undeserving of treatment is a dangerous route to follow.
Take as read that everyone over 80 who is fit and healthy and lives an active life is excluded from this debate. I am talking about the Tsunami of elderly people merely exist waiting for the next medication or visit to hospital. Why would any one bring into the conversation fit and healthy people of any age. They are much less at risk across all age groups.
To me, skepticism is a virtue. There was a time when the consensus said the Earth was flat. What would life be like if a skeptic had not asked, “Where does the water go when it falls off the edge?” COVID has frightened many out of their common senses. The government and media keep stoking the “end is near” narrative for power and readers. In the US, we are fortunate that we are more decentralized (at least so far). California and Florida can pursue different tactics and we can compare the results. When we do, we see Florida’s more hands off approach actually works better. Now we just need the media to actually report on it honestly so people can make their own decisions.
Organised, disinterested skepticism is a Mertonian norm. I suggest readers look up the 4 norms* and consider if any can be applied to say Neil Ferguson. He is by no means the only person misusing their position by leveraging SARS CoV2 but is a handy whipping boy since his foot – in mouth modelling has long form. So in genuine science skepticism remains alive and well. In pseudo science skepticism is not allowed, because pseudo-science is a religion not an epistemic system and it cannot tolerate heresy. A very good physics professor told me in 1st year Uni – all mathematical models are wrong, but some are more useful than others. I have heard Ferguson has a physics degree? if so that makes his actions more of a moral issue than a matter of competence and he should be made accountable. If however he has a degree in history or classics etc then whoever hired him needs to face the music too. *Not to be confused with the Norns, seers in Norse myth who know the predetermined fate of living things, be they god, man or beast. I am sure that as well as English, Turkish, US (Sioux?) and Russian heritage Boris must have claimed Norse blood? He may as well be guided by the Norns as he sure as eggs is not guided by science!
Just occurred to me when editing my typos – he probably does have some Norse in him from way back – probably on the Jonsson side. He’s spot on with the tradition of boastful tales in the drinking hall, but the only sword he’s had in his hand isn’t made of metal.
Johnson is guide by Bill Gates and the vaccine industry, and by Neil Ferguson who works for Gates and the vaccine industry.
He is not his own man is he?
I am not sure why anybody should be holding their heads for having a view that supports the Great Barrington proposal or the approach taken by Sweden as you imply. The U.K. has the highest deaths per capita in the developed world and has managed to damage the economy most severely. The saving of the current situation is the arrival of vaccines not the work of the DHSC, SAGE, PHE, NHS quangos etc who have persistently been behind the events and often wrong.
Scepticism is still with many if not all.
Opinion: Do we need scepticism, and in my reflection, it is born from real and perceived failure, and so, through this loss of belief and values, it is an enabler towards a new beginning of truth? As it is our only base through our life experience to remove doubt, so the answer, “Yes”, we do?
Thank you for an excellent article. Both the sensible and the crazy have been lumped under the single monicker “lockdown sceptic” which is unfortunate and has inhibited discussion.
So now that phase one is complete-when is Kamala Harris going to take over the Presidential office?
If Biden drinks a coffee she hands him he is a fool.
Terrific article.
Perhaps Boris should authorise the off-label use of Ivermectin( as the NIH has just done).
This is just the tip of the looming disaster after disaster we will see , not because of Covid but because of lockdowns. I fear that FEAR is our guide in the future. Inadvertently , our children are being taught to avoid risk. Risk is irresponsible The adults too will get used to being told what to do because they too want to shun personal responsibility.
If we disrespect our bodies & become obese, it will not be our fault , it’s the government’s responsibility to give us diet or diabetes pills or staple our stomachs .
We should be able to extremely live long lives no matter it’s quality. Just keep us alive .
If we disrespect the environment, it’s not our fault, the government should find ways so that we can be ever consuming without any side effects .
If we disrespect our minds, the government should give us depression pills & give us mental health treatments.
If we feel disrespected, we should be able to march and protest and shout and riot .
If some one disagrees with us , oh boy …. they should be persecuted to oblivion.
Since we have all the rights & no responsibilities, as long is we are on this gravy train , to hell will any one who could not/ would not get on it . So why would anyone have a different opinion ? Why risk your neck ever? Always stay with the majority. Mob rules .
It was my understanding that in more ancient times the ethic was to honour authority and by that authority honours you by inferring or bestowing their identity as yours.
To be sceptical of authority is to bring into question their honour, and your identity, the truth however was recognised as something standing by itself.
The difference today is that truth is denied apart from that established by the collective truth is relative and malleable and the individual seeks to be part of the identity of the collective or risk rebuke and exclusion.
Therefore in the old system one could be rejected, dishonoured but not be a liar and not vilified by the citizens.
In the new system sceptics are subversive liars and liars are detrimental and abhorrent to the collective as they threaten its identity and purpose.
Therefore sceptics are vilified and excluded
Well written Freddie. The liberals are so scared that whenever someone argues against them they want to shut them down just in case they influence some free-thinking person!
Moving from science, here a bevvy of them, to policy is always fraught.
Unfortunately in the minds of many, the kind of scepticism described here which is a tool for examining what we are thinking and doing, has become something else. Rather like the idea of secularism, it has moved from being a framework to indicating a particular set of beliefs.
The “Skeptic community” as represented by various online groups and a few public personalities has as many orthodoxies of belief as any other, despite claims that they simply follow reason and avoid fallacies. Anything that “science” says is true, is orthodox, what it doesn’t say, is “anti-science”. What counts as science is generally mediated by large bodies like medical associations. They don’t handle emerging or controversial questions, or even nuanced questions, well.
Largely this seems due to epistemological naïveté, appealing to a set of people who are inclined to back and white thinking, many of whom are educated technically rather than liberally.
But whatever the cause, when people hear a call to scepticism, they interpret it as doing just what the author of this article claims is negative and unhelpful.
Scepticism isn’t perilously out of fashion. You make the common mistake of failing to distinguish between scepticism and pseudoskepticism. The latter certainly is dangerous – and always in fashion.
No you didn’t. In so far as any scientific inference at all can emerge from an interview series yours gave undue prominence to the fringe. Wittingly or unwittingly you used the pseudoskeptics’ “magnified minority” technique.
There is much that is right with this article, but there is also a fundamental muddling of concepts.
It is not a matter of sceptics versus believers. Rather it is a matter of what one is or isn’t sceptical/credulous about.
In the cesspit that is modern academia (more specifically on its public face), there is extreme credulousness towards “established” “consensus”, but extreme “scepticism” towards just about anything new, regardless of how well based.
In academia there is a false notion that “scepticism” about a newly-presented notion equates with intellectual superiority, while credulousness towards the new is proof of being soft in the head.
In reality, intellectual superiority consists in having a proper judgement of what to be sceptical of and also what to be credulous of.
Academia and journalism are highly authoritarian fields. The vast majority therein just assume that if it comes from an “expert” it is true, and conversely if not then it must be sneered at.
“mere Philosophical Amusement”…a common element in these threads
Freddie, you refer to the wrong predictions made by some scientists. But why is it that recorded infection rates and deaths do in fact appear to be so high?
Some “sceptics” will point to inconsistencies in the ways figures are compiled, (e.g. should someone who dies in a road traffic accident be classed as a COVID death because they had a positive PCR test four months previously?).
Another question that needs to be asked is whether the lockdown measures themselves ““ the social isolation, the mask wearing, the inability for people to plan ahead and be in charge of their lives, financial uncertainty, psychological and domestic problems ““ are weakening people and making them more vulnerable to illness ““ thus increasing death rates beyond what would normally be predictable.
Finally I would like to propose that the very lack of scepticism itself, the growing herd mentality, has a weakening effect that ultimately destroys not only psychological but even physical resilience. Creative thinking is not an inessential embellishment in life, it is the very substance that makes us human and not animals. Without it we cannot thrive.
Although Freddie Sayers comes perilously close to not trusting his own instincts”the very thing the oligarchs want (“just trust us”)”he does us a great service by reminding us of the value of doubt. More accurately perhaps, I would have cast it not as doubt but as the power to question, an essential intellectual tool first laid down by Socrates, hence what we know today as the Socratic method. Essentially, when seeking to cut through error or deliberate obfuscation in order to discern the truth, one must answer an answer with another question until the fallacy is exposed. Socrates thus became a “gadfly,” something one finds intensely annoying, in his case by constantly asking questions in the marketplace in Athens. In the Memoirs of Socrates recorded by Xenophon we have the following exchange between Pericles and Alcibiades as an example:
“Everything that the powers that be in the State enact, after deliberating what should be done, is called a law.”
“Then supposing a despot, being in power in the State, enacts what the citizens are to do, is that a law too?”
“Yes, even the enactments of a despot in power are called laws.”
“And what is violence and lawlessness, Pericles? Isn’t it when the stronger party compels the weaker to do what he wants by using force instead of persuasion?”
… “And if the minority enacts something not by persuading the majority but by dominating it, should we call this violence or not?”
“It seems to me,” said Pericles, “that if one party, instead of persuading another, compels him to do something, whether by enactment or not, this is always violence rather than law.”
“Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates, Penguin Books, translated by Hugh Tredennick and Robin Waterfield
Of course, Athenian society passed the death sentence on Socrates for his persistence in exposing the political fallacies of his day. Showing how little has changed in 2,500 years, we’ve practically done the same to Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and other truth-tellers.
Much like ‘New Atheism’ seems to have been an attempt by the left to take over atheism – we’ve seen the arrival of a ‘new skepticism’ in recent years, presumably designed by lefties to take over skepticism! These new skeptics delight in using logical fallacies such as character assassination, appeal to authority, and projection (for example: imagining their debate opponents are ‘deniers’, of COVID, climate, …, or in my recent case: imagining I was ‘QAnon’). I urge people before you call yourself a ‘skeptic’ to consider taking out basic training. You’ll need to consider debate skills, avoiding logical fallacies, getting savvy with basic philosophy, politics and economics, how to progress a debate to elucidate the truth – not to ‘win’. In fact, winning a debate should be the last thing on a true skeptic’s mind. The moral of my rant is: just because they call themselves ‘skeptic’ doesn’t make it so. There should no self-styled ‘skeptics’; there should more of us doing ‘skepticism’. It’s a pain when we also need to be skeptical of self-styled skeptics; but life is struggle.
Speculation is perfectly OK, but context matters. Speculations such as the nefarious “Great Barrington Declaration” may be seen as valid & interesting as the author proposes – but certainly not when they ultimately serve to support devastating stupidity such as anti-mask “sentiments” that costed way too many lives already.
And the notion that the sceptics whose ideas ultimately proved incorrect will ever be held accountable for the consequences of their exercise of “freedom of expression” is downright ludicrous.
Unaccountability is the root of just about 100% of the garbage that we see parroted in the Internet – and I doubt the author would support any sort of witch-hunt for the sceptics he listed in his text.
People keep desiring freedom with zero responsibility. We all pay for such folly.
There’s no correlation between mask mandates and infection rates.
These days everyone with a smart phone is a fuc*king skeptic. Full of outrage and contempt for anyone who disagrees with them.
We need less skepticism and a greater appreciation for the value of deference to hierarchy, competence and expertise. We should encompass more views and inputs into these hierarchies, but we should not bring them crashing down around our heads. As they provide stability, structure and allow incremental progress to occur in an orderly fashion. Revolutions don’t work.
And the most competent hierarchies are the ones that work in the private sector, where free trade and the profit motive automatically regulates the utility of the decisions made.
We need less skepticism and more unity.
That has greatly contributed to the mess we’re in. People have not just abandoned skepticism, they have outsourced much of their critical thinking to unaccountable third parties ranging from govt to news media to some blog they read on the Interwebz.
An appreciation for the value of deference to hierarchy competence and expertise.
And when the result is incompetence and a lack of expertise? A deferential society is not one you will enjoy, unless you are content with perpetual appeals to authority and letting someone else decide all things for you. When a hierarchy fails – and this does not mean just getting something wrong because that happens; I’m talking about getting something wrong and stubbornly clinging to the same belief or idea – it becomes subject to scrutiny.
Full of outrage and contempt….well, you either live up/down to your own description in spades or you have no sense of irony.
The deferential and unquestioning approach you appear to advocate and your evident indignation at anyone daring to think for themselves is a form of intolerance if not dogmatic condescension.
Noone is advocating a revolution, so no need for such extremes. If being open to alternative views or questioning what has often been selective or distorted data is beyond you, then UnHerd clearly isn’t the right forum for you.
Is intolerance of intolerance, intolerance? Is outrage against outrage, outrage? They are qualitatively different concepts, I would argue. To suggest otherwise means embracing a convoluted form of postmodern semantic nonsense.
I specifically said we need to take into account a greater diversity of information and views. So I am not suggesting an unquestioning approach. Don’t straw man my argument.
“No one is advocating a revolution” You really are not following events.
As for being open to alternative views, it would appear you are not, or at least not my view. Are you only open to views which agree with yours?
You were the one that brought up revolution.
I am perfectly open to alternative views from all sides. You come across as less so.
“where free trade and the profit motive automatically regulates the utility of the decisions made.”
This is the world famously populated by the non-existent homo economicus. If the profit motive and free trade accounted for what is called “externalities”, then perhaps your formulation might be sustainable. In fact, environmental accounting as a concept has been a longtime topic of discussion and, I suspect, part of business’ resistance to it is, rather than seizing the opportunity offered, they focus on their anticipated short term reduction in profit.
But, if you think about it, why should a business privatize its profit while socializing the effects of the pollution or other negative, wasteful effects its production causes? It’s certainly a discussion to be had – given the article’s general topic.
I am linking to a document, created nearly 30 years ago under the auspices of the US Environmental Protection Agency (though not with its endorsement) that lays out one form of environmental accounting that seems to me a reasonable entry to the overall problem.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/p…
imo, Covid-1984 is merely a Trojan horse to institute martial law and call it something else, to take away all rights and institute authoritarian control over the global population. Why do I say that? Because that’s what actually happened.
It’s not really much of a virus. It’s much bigger of an excuse for people to beg for a totalitarian state.
Many self-described sceptics you mention are simply rattled (many will appear in this comment section soon), and are trying to line up their world view with the reality that their way of life was precarious, and completely contingent.
Consider a genuine sceptic, a person who does not trust any information aside from what they see. If they found themselves in Italy in March/April 2020, saw how quickly something was spreading, and how quickly hospitals were incapacitated, they would have to conclude that something had to happen.
I can imagine a conversation with my daughter (now 5months) in 20 years in which she asks me, with utter bafflement, ‘Hang on a second Dad, you’re telling me, when you were 28, you could just get in a cab, go to the airport, fly from London, to the USA, then China, then back home, with no protective gear, and nobody checked you for viruses??????. And she will be as shocked as I was to hear of a time when they could smoke on planes, didn’t require seatbelts, and nobody checked your luggage let alone with an x-ray machine. Technology and knowledge will keep on patching the various problems caused by technology and knowledge, as it always has.
It has been known, and pointed out, that in a highly connected, global world of creatures with mouths and bodies, the inevitable pandemics will cause disasters, and the UK wouldn’t be prepared. No government will respond optimally to this one, or those to come. But it should be a surprise to absolutely nobody that in a fundamentally uncertain world, risk averse individuals and governments fare better in the long run, not the ones prattering on about ‘evidence’.
Your proposal that sceptics being silenced is dangerous would be true, if they were actual sceptics, but in most cases they simply aren’t. And the ‘orthodoxy’ you describe isn’t an orthodoxy so much as billions of unrelated people and countless governments coming to similar conclusions about tradeoffs.
I’ve enjoyed much of Unherd’s journalism up until covid set loose but I have to say, during it I’ve been astounded at the level of denial, despair and delusion from many of its writers over the last year, (aside from your wisest contributer John Gray who is as lucid as ever).
It seems strange that someone who points out that ‘a genuine sceptic [is] a person who does not trust any information aside from what they saw’ is such a confident predictor of the future.
Which prediction?
The prediction that, decades from now, people will still be living in terror of a cold virus with a 99 percent survival rate because they no longer trust their immune systems.
He said ‘I can imagine…’. It was speculative not predictive.
I made no prediction
luggage is still checked as a precaution, largely because of 9/11. Do you describe that as terror?
Anyone here still comparing this to a cold virus is completely in denial
A 99% survival rate until hospitals are overwhelmed. That death rate is not fixed
Oh so theyused to? But now no longer do? When did this nebulous collective agent start to doubt itself?
Plenty of people trust their immune systems (many of whom are dead now) what’s your point? Human bodies can’t just pull themselves out of any problem. Life expectency wouldn’t have shot up in the last century if humans didn’t rely so heavily on tech and knowledge.
What Kathy Prendergast said.
The world isn’t fundamentally uncertain and this particular problem is as much caused by technology as solved by it. Doctors are trained not to do mass testing on healthy people for a reason, but that has been forgotten along with many other bits of basic medical wisdom. Now mass testing exists it must be used apparently, and questions of accuracy are blown off or given ridiculous answers. Even worse we get a constant stream of pseudo-science from academia and even though it’s easy to spot basic errors and even fraud in these papers, the population is told not to read them in case we accidentally draw a conclusion or two.
The countries that closed their borders early on were attacked on the grounds of not only racism (see when trump tried to do that) but also that the WHO explicitly did not recommend quarantines or border closures as ways to fight a pandemic! And the ones that did placed a massive gamble on vaccine development which is hardly low risk. “Emergency” mass injections of a brand new technology and taking on more debt than in the second would war to pay for it is the exact opposite of risk averse.
Doctors do mass screening of healthy people for cancers, mass testing of cholesterol levels, blood pressure, diabetes etc etc. Are you saying they do all this in opposition to their training?
“prattering on about ‘evidence’…” – guilty as charged. Happy to own that label. And won’t stop prattering until the indiscriminate use of PCR is stopped, excess mortality becomes relevant as a metric again, hospitalization info is communicated transparently and contextually, and a real cost-benefit analysis of lockdown policies happens, to name just a few concerns.
Out of interest are you someone in favour of wearing masks in public spaces?