I was first drawn into this mess when I met up by chance with a senior manager in NHS England. He’d noticed that, despite ITU beds emptying out late spring & into summer, elective surgery was at an historically low ebb. I’d asked why & he showed me slides from a recent internal.. https://twitter.com/photographerxa/status/1351293923633868801

...meeting. The #1 priority was not, as I’d expected, “Get the NHS back on its feet & start helping those who’d not been seen during the crisis”. No, it was “Run the NHS as lightly loaded as possible, so as to be prepared for the 2nd wave”. I told him viruses didn’t do waves &

...this led to my first, touchingly naive piece in Lockdown Sceptics.
It’s a macabre thought that this might not merely have been a misunderstanding of the (un)reliability of Ferguson’s forecasts. By the way, that group at Imperial still haven’t published their model on 2nd...

...wave, or revealed the literature upon which they’d built their predictions.
In case you think they were right, what we’ve had is predictable winter resurgence in areas which didn’t reach herd immunity in spring before warmer weather killed transmission, resurgences which...

...have been self-limiting, as were spring outbreaks. Recall how overwhelmed Liverpool hospitals were in October? Meanwhile, there wasn’t a resurgence of excess deaths at all in London, which reached herd immunity most rapidly in spring. Thousands of deaths attributed to...

...covid19, but no excess deaths. Some apologists have claimed lockdown reduced deaths from all other causes. Astonishingly, this claimed life saving impact of lockdowns have not been uncovered anywhere else in the world. It never ceases to amaze me the intellectual contortions..

...that otherwise clever people go to to explain really unlikely claims, when there is an explanation that’s wholly consistent with all the observations: that you’ve been lied to. I suppose it’s self-preservation. You cannot let that thought in, because the illusion that our...

...Govt & it’s scientific advisors haven’t been doing their best to help, but to damage us, is just too much to bear. I’m hoping that someone from SAGE will sue me, but they won’t, because then there’d be contested narratives & they’d lose.