Following the evidence (to make sure it’s dead)

Have you experienced an odd feeling over the last year? You get involved in some ordinary activity – family events, a work project or whatever – and life seems to be getting back to some kind of normality, until you suddenly realize with a start that what with COVID, the Social Justice Revolution, and international politics, the whole world is a lunatic asylum, and it’s the normality that is the illusion.

In my case the need to manage the estate (clearing brambles and excess trees in this instance), a successful series of live services merging into the re-opening of the church’s main services, and even getting myself a new guitar as a reward for staying sane, have coincided with the promised easing of lockdown. It’s easy to lapse into the narrative that, at last, the crisis is coming to an end.

Though it’s not that easy, since although on any rational understanding the COVID crisis is ending, the government, their advisers and the media here (and clearly everywhere else) won’t let the disaster-movie script alone, even for a day. In Britain, people taking advantage of an unusually warm and sunny weekend and the long-awaited permission to meet outdoors crowded the beaches and parks, and the response was doomy headlines about irresponsible mixing risking everything, and policemen closing parks to increase the holiday fun.

In France, Mr Macron has imposed a new lockdown based on a “third wave” of “the Bristish variant” which has been building, in terms of positive tests, for well over a month amongst the non-vulnerable young, but which the EuroMOMO excess death data appears not to be able to see. On the basis of the known science, this “wave” would be a mere seasonal shadow of the spring epidemic last year, and therefore nothing to worry about. But although we have “learned so much” about COVID over the last year, governments appear still to be applying what we didn’t know last year as policy for their nations.

In America, for example, Dr Fauci was heard talking about the advisability of masks for children playing outside (having already flipped from opposition to enthusiastic support for double-masking on the basis that it is “common sense”, thus proving he is more politician than scientist). Yet this increase in support for masks, although it follows the election propaganda of Joe Biden, also follows the double-blind Danish study that proved their ineffectiveness even in the home, as well as the multitude of studies showing that no benefit can be found in mask-mandated states over mask-free ones, and that no change in disease rates followed from their introduction. And, of course, we have known from the very beginning, and confirmed in multiple studies, that children are not at risk from, nor likely to spread, COVID. And multiple evidence has come in that COVID does not spread in the open air to any significant extent. And research has not confirmed earlier suggestions that asymptomatic spread is significant. So the science has on four counts negated Fauci’s suggestion: the safety of children, of the outdoors, of the asymptomatic, and the uselessness of masks – and America’s chief scientific oracle wants to impose them de novo at the end of the pandemic after vaccinating millions.

Macron, together with most of the world, has conveniently forgotten the WHO pronouncement a good while ago that lockdowns should be avoided as policy because they are so harmful and not very effective. That’s apart from another plethora of studies showing the same thing, and in some cases suggesting they increase COVID harms as well as everything else. But even the corrupt WHO’s advice only seems to be followed when it is sufficiently draconian. Macron evidently prefers what the WHO said for those few months between the time they abandoned their pandemic policies at China’s behest, and when they half-heartedly returned to them in their “don’t do it” advice on lockdowns.

In Britain, my church sent out an invitation to its Easter service which, being outdoors, allows singing and masklessness – but to meet regulations it still requires we remain 2 metres apart – an imposition that applies indoors too and will severely limit our numbers in future weeks. Yet only last week, the authoritative Dr Fauci announced research that shows a 1 metre gap to be just as effective as 2 meters. So, given that so much commercial and personal damage has been done by 2 metre social-distancing, why did governments not announce with great rejoicing that the desks could be safely pushed closer, and that pub gardens can prepare for more customers? You can ignore the WHO, and you can ignore Dr Fauci, provided they’re not advising harsher constraints, in which case they are the Scientific Consensus and must be quickly obeyed.

Also in Britain, our exemplary vaccination programme and our world-beating high infection rate have achieved over 50% antibody presence in the population. Many studies over the year have also confirmed that cell-based immunity is even commoner than this, even in the absence of antibodies. On all measures, then, we have herd immunity. Yet the government is still banning travel on the basis of keeping out the third wave (which Macron says was from Britain in the first place!). They are working towards imposing formerly unthinkable health passports for events and places even in Britain, and generating more fear by the self-evidently nonsensical slogan, “None are safe unless all are safe.” Plenty of authoritative science now shows that Coronavirus variants have no effect of bypassing either natural or vaccine immunity, but they are talking not only of vaccinating infants, but calling for regular boosters for all. It’s as if they or their advisers have a financial interest in vaccine companies.

Across the world, despite all these reassuring population stats, the authorities are working to vaccinate groups that do not need vaccination, and on whom adequate ethical studies do not exist. The lack of trial studies on the elderly – the main group needing protection – was troubling enough. But children and pregnant mothers are also being mass-vaccinated, even though it is these groups for whom serious long-term harms have been feared on theoretical grounds. What possible basis do they have for risking birth defects or spontaneous abortions in those at no significant risk from COVID? How can they justify risking auto-immunity in children with no possibility of harm from the virus?

In short, none of the new science we read about – even when it is announced by the WHO or leading spokespersons like Fauci – appears to make a shred of difference to policy, which is made apparently on the basis of the erroneous modelling and panic measures that have now been shown by a whole year of experience to be wrong.

Think about this phenomenon: this is the first time in my lifetime, or in yours, when the management of a health issue has led a sizeable portion of the relevant professions not only to be skeptical of policy, but to “smell a rat.” How often now have you heard skeptical scientists and doctors, not to mention lawyers, journalists and a few politicians, say that at some point in this pandemic, they began to feel that there was something fishy going on?

Previously, indeed, you would find a few dissident voices disputing government dietary guidelines, or doubting the safety of certain products of Big Pharma. But never before have we heard large numbers of accredited scientists and medics discussing whether there really is a globalist plot to overturn the west, or whether it’s “merely” a corrupt financial scam by politicians and corporations. Never in history has that been expressed in anything like the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by 42,000 doctors and nearly 14,000 medical and public health scientists. Never before have so many doctors and scientist feared publishing or even speaking their opinions on a health matter, nor had articles withdrawn or “disappeared” from journals, not been cancelled by social media. If you do not appreciate that that phenomenon alone is fishy, then you are a fool.

A recent example of this is Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying, evolutionary biologists almost embarrassingly rationalist in their approach, discussing the “lab leak” hypothesis. The former CDC director Robert Redfield has stated that a leak from gain-of-function studies at Wuhan virology laboratory is the most likely source of SARS-CoV-2, directly contradicting the recent blatantly politically censored WHO report. Even Dr Tedros of the WHO (a corrupt Chinese appointee) has left the door open to the lab-leak hypothesis, for reasons probably byzantine in motive.

Weinstein and Heying, citing Dr Fauci’s claim that most scientists agree the wet-market hypothesis is far more probable, point out how scientifically specious his statement is. They also rightly question whether Fauci’s own role in promoting gain-of-function studies in Wuhan does not constitute a severe conflict of interest: if his advocacy as CDC director was a factor in causing this pandemic, he’s scarcely a dispassionate witness.

Weinstein, though, is less hesitant than Heying in suspecting deeper political motives from Fauci, the WHO and other players. China simply has too much to gain from weakening the west, and has been shown to wield great leverage over international organs like the UN and WHO, over commercial corporations, and over large swathes of western politicians. No other scientific question has caused so many scientists to become political conspiracy theorists. And that ought to suggest to us that the conspiracy may be a fact.

For this reason, the news that a consortium of influential nations and the WHO have formed to provide a more unified response to future outbreaks of COVID and other pandemics fills me not with warm and fluffy feelings about a new era of international co-operation, but with a deep dread of a totalitarian world on our very doorstep. As I’ve said before, I wondered back in 2018 how the biblical end-times deception of “all the nations” could possibly occur in real life (plug for my e-book here).

Now I ask myself how it could by any stretch of the imagination not happen.

Time to walk the dog and cut back some gorse, I suppose.