The Hump of the Camel

Yesterday I got a phone call from someone from the NHS, relating to my not having received a third dose of COVID vaccine. One is not prepared for such calls, but I said that I had already explained to my GP, when the surgery staff enquired, that I did not wish to have it. (I confess I got two doses of AstraZeneca from my doctor’s surgery last spring, and have never had dealings with any other “vaccination centre”).

It’s good to hear about the roll-back of the UK’s useless Plan B restrictions, including the infamous vaccine passports, albeit it is apparently largely an attempt to save Boris Johnson’s political career. But as I’ve already discussed here, it’s part of the general unraveling of the lockdown narrative that’s happening around the world. The worrying indicator is that the unraveling is happening in lockstep everywhere, leading many to wonder “what’s behind it.”

The official UK figure for COVID deaths over the last two years is around 150,000. But with a definition, initially, of “death after a positive PCR test” and latterly of “death within 28 days of a positive COVID test” that figure is highly suspect.

Zoe (for those not in the UK) is a voluntary app that has been tracking a decent sample of the population for COVID symptoms, test results and so on, throughout the pandemic. It has usually given a more accurate picture of the current state of play than the ONS data, plagued as that is by poor definitions and worse. Here is an interesting graph from their data:

UK mainstream news is showing all the signs of the beginning of the end of the COVID madness, amidst signs of the unraveling of Boris Johnson’s government through scandal over its cavalier approach to its own undemocratic restrictions. Various scientists and doctors are coming out against the continuation of “Lockdown” policies for the first time, or are gaining a mainstream hearing if they’ve been banging that drum for a long time. One particularly scathing piece, by leading Israeli immunologist Ehud Qimron, is well worth reading, and rather cathartic to boot.

The lockstep official agreement on COVID policies across the world, cutting across one hundred years of epidemiological wisdom, is one of the oddest features of the pandemic. Even on its own it is a good reason to suspect something rotten in the State of Denmark. The other odd thing is how many formerly dispassionate scientists, doctors and others have gradually come to embrace a belief in such rottenness. Conspiracy theorists have hitherto been an eccentric minority: that they now include so many credentialled critical thinkers and relevant experts is a sociological shift that ought to give everyone pause for thought.

Well, so far it looks as though the concerns about the “Omicron wave” I reflected from Sarah Knapton beforte Christmas are not coming to fruition, for a number of reasons.

The message from our Betters was to save granny, stop the spread, and gain Christmas reassurance by testing before you visited her for Christmas. So naturally enough yesterday evening’s Mail headline was about all the people who’d tested positive at family gatherings, how it would cause a post-Christmas surge, and of course how that would necessitate all kinds of further restrictions.