I have a friend who holds very strong opinions about Covid. I sent him a link to one of dan's posts here and followed it up with this clarification. What I'm interested in, dan, is your reaction to my friend's response.
This is from me to my friend:
I think dan gets riled when certain figures in the media (and on the Lifeboat board) make light of covid and hint that it was a hoax of some kind, and as a nurse he’s on the front line dealing with deaths and the bereaved. I don’t know enough to say it was a”rebranding” of flu but I certainly agree that billions were wasted. The question is why would a tory government spend all that money (apart from to cronies of course) if they didn’t think it necessary? Were they just plain incompetent? Badly advised? Frightened into acting by the media?
I mean, they don’t usually give a flying fukc about the common populace, so why now?
My friend replied:
In a bid to appear compassionate, and copying other governments around the world in a virtue race, lockdown was introduced despite the govt knowing from the beginning that the average age of death from covid was 82 and the chances of an otherwise healthy person dying from it were minuscule.
Lockdowns and other associated covid measures cost the UK nearly £800 billion which, of course, has wrecked the economy. We now have a cost of lockdown crisis, not a cost of living. This is because MPs did not think about the consequences of lockdown on finance, mental health, wider health issues, culture, business etc. In fevered short-termism, everything that the pandemic planning committee (formed 25 years ago) had recommended was torn up overnight.
A panacea had to be found and the vaccines became it. They had to be seen to work and stave off complete economic collapse. This is why the govt's psych ops teams used coercion to such a degree and spent millions on pro-vaccine propaganda which was so powerful that a fundamental human right (the sanctity of body autonomy/free choice) was eroded.
The 'liberals' loved the vaccine more than anyone else because virtue-signalling is their first love (after themselves) and they were doing it, of course, for their aged relatives, the rest of society etc. So, these self-proclaimed mavericks, dutifully rolled up their sleeves for a govt-backed, trial drug from which pharmaceutical companies (probably the most corrupt industry on earth) made billions. And, for good measure, because they had rushed it a little and possibly not got the cocktail just right, the pharmas were granted indemnity from any future litigation. Think about that.
In short, it's been the biggest global fukc up of all time. I knew the world was corrupt and horrible (and fair and beautiful and brilliant, too) but I always assumed someone was driving. Not any more.
It will cost the UK taxpayer £132bn to decommission all the UK’s civil nuclear sites and the work will not be completed for another 120 years, according to latest estimates. Report -- May 2022:
Re: For dan
Posted by Gerard on June 2, 2023, 11:53 am, in reply to "For dan"
My problem here guys is that I have always been convinced that someone has been "driving"..should be prosecuted immediately for all vehicular and road traffic crimes in the book but nevertheless, technically, still driving..
Your friend is right. All he's said is uncontroversial at this stage. NM
Posted by Fionn on June 2, 2023, 10:54 pm, in reply to "For dan"
Nm
Well Scrabb
Posted by dan on June 2, 2023, 11:16 pm, in reply to "For dan"
Not much point in arguing with those that already know what they know. I might have listened to the contrarian opinion if I hadnt got the evidence of my own eyes.
Covid wasn't rebranded flu and anyone who thinks that is massively credulous, chooses their sources to confirm what they already know and, isn't going to accept anything I have to say.
I've worked in ICU through 20 flu seasons and have never had to open a new icu on an empty ward to preserve capacity. The worst I could remember as a reference was 2009 - which was an outlier, and even then a non event - maybe 3 or 4 young people at the same time on the ward had influenza pneumonitis.
At the peak of 2021 there were so many people with lung failure due to sars-cov-2 we opened a new 15 bedded icu every 2-3 days over a 3 week period until there were 10 empty wards converted into new ICUs. Surgical and cardiology consultants were being used as nursing healthcare assistants to turn patients because we slipped from one nurse for every patient to one nurse to 4 patients. No elective and most emergency surgery was impossible because all staff were drafted into the new ICUs
Very few people who were admitted to icu were elderly - the outcomes for those patients were uniformly terrible and beds were full of younger patients - especially patients from ethnic minority communities and the most deprived in society for whom deaths were 2-3 times higher.
Because the infection fatality ratio rose exponentially with age it is very possible to have an average age of death of 82 and yet also to have very high mortality in younger people. The chances were not miniscule in 50 and 60 year olds. A 1% infection related mortality in 60 year olds for a virus with such a high transmissability means that 1 in 100 60 year olds (and 1 in 20 70 year olds) in a population in the same year will die and about 10 times that need hospital, overwhelming hospital services. The figures 1.5-2 times higher in men. A disease that kills 1 in 50 60 Yr old men is not a rebranding.
At peak we were using 7 times as much oxygen as we normally do in peak winter months and that's with all operating theatres closed, all elective care stopped and all wards full of patients with covid respiratory failure.
I work in East London which has a large proportion of patients from poor and non white backgrounds so no doubt we had the worst of it but still there's not been anything like it for decades and anyone wheeling out stats that say otherwise is just a victim of selection bias.
I said very early that there was no such thing as herd immunity for covid - we know that corona viruses circulate round schools for instance and by the time it's gone from year 1 to year 6 and back again everybody in year 1 will get the virus again. That meant that until there was a vaccine any covid infection was a trial by ordeal. You got the infection, you lived or died according to your demographic, and co morbid health risk and if you survived, the next time it came around you would probably be OK. The vaccine meant you could take that first hit without the high risk of death and even 0.1% in 40 year olds seems like an unacceptably high risk for me. 1 or 2 parents per school for every average sized school.
Vaccine side effects probably arrive through the same mechanism as the virus which cause the same thing - but a vaccination leads to very many fewer mrna replicates than the infection. Myocarditis for instance much lower incidence in vaccinated last time I looked. The only way we'll know is eventually looking at differences in outcome between vaccinated and unvaccinated in large populations, in US for instance.
Covid is over now for us. Everybody has had it the first time or been vaccinated and then had the infection and we don't see covid pneumonitis currently.
Cost of lockdown crisis - getting out of one comfort zone and into another? Weird it's so much worse in uk than all the other places that also locked down. In the UK there is a cost of greed crisis. We live in a totally corrupt kleptocracy. There's no need to invent some vast fake virus conspiracy.
Who benefits from blaming poverty on the virus response, other than the thieves who are even as I type robbing us, and robbing us, and robbing us? The post office is being wound up by venture capitalists who want to put posties on zero hours contracts. F÷#×#*g c#@t5 and not a virus in sight. This theft is everywhere, in plain sight.
I've come to firmly believe covid denial is an overblown diversion which is being promoted by grifters and also I think a psyop. If you are tying people up in knots in arguments about faked statistics you sure ain't pointing the finger at capitalists and saying that's where all the money is going.
It's capitalists who are the enemy. Of course pharma are part of that but they didn't invent covid. They just made an obscene amount of money out of it.
Smashing the system doesn't require proving that viruses don't cause disease, or that pcr can't be used to make diagnoses, or that vaccines don't prevent infection. Any efforts along those lines are a waste of time.
Happy to respond here and now Scrabb, I esteem your contribution on this board and the previous one over many years. I'm not going to get into a debate by proxy though, for the reasons above.
on June 2, 2023, 12:10 am