Cassandra Voices

Tag: Sunetra Gupta

  • The Oxford Covid Debate

    On November 19 the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) hosted one of the first genuine debates on Covid policies. The nature of the debate, the issues discussed and the responses since, are all revealing as to where the last five years have brought public engagement on difficult topics – and how painful that time has been.

    CAF invited to the debate two speakers who had at the time been critical of Covid policies from a left-wing perspective: Sunetra Gupta (Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford, and co-signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration) and myself, Toby Green, a Professor of African history; along with two speakers who had been critical of the critics: UCL Clinical Professor of Intensive Care Medicine Hugh Montgomery (who at one time famously claimed people not amending their routines had ‘blood on their hands’) and Guardian journalist and medical historian Mark Honigsbaum. The chair, reproductive biologist and an advocate for public-facing science Güneş Taylor had a tough job on her hands, which she performed with aplomb.

    Several things are important to note about the discussion. First is that there were some clear areas of agreement. Britain certainly got the issue of school closures wrong, along with the rest of the world. The fraught nature of the Covid crisis was exacerbated by the failure to prepare adequately for medical emergencies in the West through building spare capacity in health services rather than using a ‘just-in-time’ model based on neoliberal economics. The shutting down of debate was widely agreed to have been a serious problem, and to have exacerbated mistrust in government and the crisis of misinformation (or information saturation); moreover the systematic failure in previous decades to have proper debates about social values related to death, and how society should in fact approach end of life in an ageing population, contributed to the discourse collapse.

    What was also encouraging in the debate was that there was some evidence of ability to listen and change opinion. Hugh Montgomery said that he had changed his mind on some topics over the evening. I too was also touched by his discussion and that of a nurse in the audience of the genuine fear and stress felt by medical staff at the outset of the crisis.

    All participants agreed on the social cost of the lockdown measures. Almost inevitably, however, this was where the differences were ignited. Did those catastrophic costs make them unjustifiable? Mark Honigsbaum thought they had become inevitable once China began to build its quarantine camps, citing the oft-quoted projection of Imperial College modeller Neil Ferguson that locking down a week earlier would have saved 20,000 lives in the U.K. alone – a quote repeated the very next day on the publication of Baroness Hallett’s Covid Inquiry report in the U.K.. In spite of strong disagreements on this, what was striking was also the breadth of the debate, even on lockdowns: where did lockdowns sit on the scale of values as compared to our debts to the young, the kind of society we wish to live in, and the immense rupture which Covid had brought to people’s digital habits and mental health – already acknowledged as a serious problem for the young prior to lockdowns and digital ‘learning’?

    If, as I pointed out, evidence suggested that over the long haul of an eighteen-month pandemic, fatality rates were very similar in lockdown and non-lockdown cases, what was the lockdown for? If it offered to buy a limited window of time to bring in PPE equipment and protect frontline medical staff, this could perhaps for a short time be justified (and here too there was some agreement). Nevertheless, it remains my view that had we invested sufficiently in primary healthcare pre-Covid there would not have been the same sense of panic, and such a dramatic suspension of basic civil liberties would have been unnecessary.

    What was encouraging about the debate itself was its breadth. Though at times the participants diverged into their 2020 camps, there were broader discussions about social change, the current systemic and social crisis, and the young – all the kinds of discussion that were systematically shut down in 2020. This itself was positive, and while in his Substack summary of the event Honigsbaum reverted to the lockdown for-and-against discussion, which had been just a part of what was debated that night, this breadth of debate and evidence of listening was something that, as one of the participants said later, restored their faith in humanity.

    What was also fascinating about the event was the audience, which was almost entirely anti-lockdown, as Honigsbaum noted in his ‘post-match report’. As indeed he also said, it was also difficult to find anyone to debate the pro-lockdown position. Therefore, he must be thanked for agreeing to participate. It is also hard, it seems, to get those who aggressively supported the measures to attend and engage in a post-mortem. Is this because people hate being proven wrong in such a massive way? Or is it because they still hunker down in an algorithmic silo contending that debating an issue will give succour to the ‘far right’ (by which, unless they are really disturbed, they cannot mean Sunetra Gupta and me)? Whether it is for both reasons is for the reader to decide.

    At this stage, sadly, it seems that one person’s far right is another person’s far left on so many issues – and this itself is symptomatic of the systemic social crisis we now face in the West. What is clear is that, as I said in my closing remarks, unless we are prepared to listen better to each other, and discuss the moral and political crisis we are living through openly and without judgement, all of us will pay the price.

    In conclusion, I provide the answers I prepared for Güneş Taylor’s questions for the Oxford debate – most of which, in some form or other, I tried to get across.

    Opening comments  in response to the title of ‘What did Britain get right and wrong during the Covid-19 pandemic?’

    One thing we got wrong: this is pretty hard to choose, to be honest, as I think so many things were got wrong. I would emphasise especially here the jettisoning of previous pandemic plans which led to many of the subsequent crises – and corruption in contracts, as responses were being made up on the back of an envelope. Many figures who worked extremely hard on those previous plans, such as Lucy Easthope and Robert Dingwall, have emphasised the extent to which they were ignored. I would also mention the inhumane cruelty of isolating care home residents in the last months of their lives and depriving them of contact with their families – where the life expectancy of someone entering a care home is about one year. This is as cruel as you can be.

    My focus will be on something broader here, as I will zoom in on more details later: the lack of debate. The shutting down of debate by public service broadcasters and social media platforms was nothing short of a catastrophe. It has contributed to many of the subsequent catastrophes. In particular, the lack of trust in government and media today – which links to the increasing appeal of Populism. So, I want to thank my fellow panellists this evening for being here and enabling this event to happen. We may have strong disagreements, but we are willing to air them in public, to try to understand each other’s perspectives, and thereby to understand what happened so much better. It’s quite shocking that this appears to be the first such event that has taken place in the U.K., and that it has taken five years to have it.

    It was also pretty hard to think of one thing that we got right in the U.K., but eventually I did remember one. It was the decision not to lock down in the December of 2021 during the Omicron wave. There was a huge amount of pressure, and The Guardian reported that we might have two million cases a day by New Year. In the end, the peak was at a little over 200,000, so this was an exaggeration of 1000% – not the first time this happened during the pandemic; with the misrepresentation of PCR testing as a diagnostic tool rather than a laboratory test giving the impression things were much worse than they were. And afterwards, many media “experts” such as Jeremy Vine intoned that they “had not realised” that “people adapted their behaviour automatically” at times of health crises – even though this was precisely what Sweden had said, under Anders Tegnell, in the spring of 2020, when deciding not to lock down.

    As it was things were already bad. On a call with a practising G.P. that winter, he told me that he was the only emergency G.P. in a city the size of Oxford, because everyone else had been called in for the booster rollout.

    A student put it to me like this: “If we lock down again, it’s going to mean more weeks doing my classes on the stairs.” The enormously regressive impacts – as a 2022 Sutton Trust study showed – of education lockdowns meant that advances in educational outcomes among the poorer sectors of the population had been reversed by ten years. We also cannot easily estimate the health costs of taking these measures, including pathological loneliness, and missed diagnoses.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    What measures were taken e.g. masks, vaccine passports etc? Did they ‘work’? How were Covid deaths measured? Could more lives have been saved through earlier and longer lockdowns? 

    There is no evidence that more lives would have been saved by earlier and longer lockdowns. A new book by Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo, In Covid’s Wake, shows no discernible difference in Covid mortality pre-vaccine between U.S. States which locked down and those which did not. Meanwhile, excess deaths in Sweden were among the lowest in the OECD between 2020 and 2022, comparable with its much-lauded neighbours. [Editor’s Note: according to this 2023 OECD report: Notably, Sweden, which was under the spotlight at the beginning of the pandemic, saw excess mortality among 65+ age group below the OECD average in 2020 and negative in 2021 and 2022, as well as overall.]

    And this is the key statistic, overall societal deaths, for the precise reason that measurement of who died ’from’ or ‘with’ Covid is so unreliable. In April 2020, the WHO changed the definition of death from Covid to someone who had a positive PCR within 28 days or just the suspicion of Covid. Peru changed its means of measuring Covid deaths after 18 months, for instance, which suddenly gave it far and away the world’s worst per capita mortality figure; in Italy it was the reverse, and in November 2021 the Italian ministry of health revised figures to show the numbers who had died without any comorbidities as dying “of Covid”, which was very small (under 4000). Indeed, at one point Priti Patel went on TV to try to argue that Covid mortality was lower than stated because of the comorbidities – and this was probably true, since Neil Ferguson himself had said quite early in the pandemic that a third of those who died of Covid would probably have died within the next year anyway.

    In effect, politicians became prisoners of statistics. This also led to the focus on vaccines and vaccine passports, even after the Associate Editor of the BMJ Peter Doshi  reported in the BMJ in October 2020 that the vaccines were not being studied to determine whether they would interrupt transmission, so could not guarantee a sterilising vaccine. Given the history of vaccination and its connection to colonial power in Africa and racialised experimentations in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, vaccine passports were nothing short of racist and discriminatory – and scientifically illegitimate, given the fact this was not a sterilising vaccine, and never could have been.

    This global perspective points to another issue, which is the absurdity of focussing on lockdowns when so many other variables are at stake: health spending per capita, socioeconomic wealth, obesity, age pyramids of populations, other health priorities, and so on. Given the huge range of health variables, and global socioeconomic conditions, it really is extraordinary that a medieval policy – developed when the humoural theory of medicine was still in vogue – was rolled out again, and assumed to be fit for the entire world for eighteen months to two years. Cui bono? The billionaire class!

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    What was the cost of the measures taken? What have been the global ramifications of the pandemic and pandemic response? Its effect on healthcare, economy, civil liberties?

    The cost was a catastrophe, which no one wants to talk about. I remember an email which Sunetra Gupta and I received in April 2021 during the Delta Wave in India from a Human Rights lawyer working for a trade union in India – saying that literally millions of informal sector workers were starving by the roadside in the state of Uttar Pradesh alone. In the Philippines, children were not allowed to leave their homes for eighteen months – enormous increases in child abuse were reported.

    We often hear that all this was “caused by Covid”. But it wasn’t: it was caused by Covid measures. In November 2023, the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) stated that ‘50 million more people in Africa fell into extreme poverty as a result of Covid’. This is nonsense: the African continent registered less than 260,000 Covid deaths, and over 100,000 were in South Africa alone. Mortality was very low compared to other endemic diseases – as some predicted right from the start on a continent where the median age is around nineteen.

    But now, Africa is entering Structural Adjustment 2.0 according to the New Internationalist. This has been caused by inflation, and collapse of the informal and service sectors during 2020-1. Well documented mass food price increases had already been reported by the World Food Programme and Reuters by October 2020, long before the war in Ukraine – although that certainly hasn’t helped. The result is, OXFAM reports, that over half of Low Income Countries are reducing health and education spending in the next five years. That isn’t going to offer any help in “preventing the next pandemic”.

    We saw two years of school closures in countries like Honduras, India, and Uganda. There were 4.5 million schoolchildren alone removed from schooling in Uganda, leading to catastrophic increases in teenage marriage and forced labour. We also have a whole lost generations in India, as documented in Collateral Global’s film The Children of Nowhere.

    We saw a massive spike in gender-based violence, a ‘shadow pandemic’ as the UN Women’s Commissioner described it – with twenty years of progress in sexual health wiped out by the closure of clinics; the abused incarcerated with abusers; huge increases in prostitution; and the shuttering of informal markets which are the main source of income for many women in the Global South.

    We also saw a version of this in the West. Enormously elevated time was spent by adolescents online, which has led to increased consumption of violent pornography with devastating consequences.

    So, closer to home we can see the haemorrhaging of trust in public institutions and government In the UK. There have been huge protests around, for instance, Keir Starmer’s policy of cutting winter fuel payments to many pensioners, saving around £1.5 billion. Yet we have had no debate around the £310-£410 billion spent on Covid policies, with bewildering figures such as £37 billion (the entire UK transport budget) allocated to track and trace – which the U.K. government’s own National Audit office estimates reduced cases by just 2-5%.

    Covid spending achieved very little, but it has meant that there is “No money left”. The worst of all – at least for those of us fortunate enough to be in this room – is the generalised collapse in hope and optimism for the future, as we can see all about us. It is this which is degenerating into polarisation, and social fragmentation.

    How should this experience shape our future responses to pandemics? E.g. Could the Great Barrington Declaration’s ‘focused protection’ strategy be applied to future pandemic preparedness? What lessons can history teach us about balancing public health, personal freedom and societal impact?

    In terms of how the experience should shape future policy, we held a conference funded by Collateral Global at King’s in 2023, which came up with some important recommendations signed by 25 scholars from across the Global South. I am going to share them here:

    :- The centrality of public investment in healthcare – especially primary healthcare and infrastructure – and in social welfare, to expand at times of need. The “just in time” model does not work for healthcare or social welfare, and is not “efficient” – this requires rethinking the privatisation of so many features of the state, as countries like Nicaragua and Sweden showed. In the end it was private pharmaceutical companies that profited. Astra Zeneca (branded as “the Oxford vaccine”) wasn’t supposed to be for profit but they altered that policy later on.

    :- Proportionality and the disaggregation of risk: people at Low risk of diseases in one country will not be the same in another – we need community-based healthcare, as the WHO’s 1978 Alma Ata declaration demanded, not top-down centralisation derived from a corporate management structure.

    :- The importance of an open and accurate flow of information: censorship quickly becomes misinformation and actively works against the public good.

    :- Attendance to socio-economic factors and the social determinants of disease: what works for residents of North Oxford does not work for residents of Peckham or Oldham – let alone for Lagos or Kinshasa.

    :- Awareness of the complexity of supply chains and the impacts that disruption can have in access to healthcare – transport restrictions can be catastrophic when they are required to get people to hospitals for regular medication, or to bring in medical equipment manufactured elsewhere.

    :- Awareness of how policies that aggravate inequality will exacerbate ill-health – as all previous research indicated, and as the Covid policies showed – with the biggest transfer of wealth in history from the poor to the rich, and subsequent prolonged increases in excess deaths in many countries long past the end of the pandemic.

    And this highlights the absurdity that those who opposed these measures such as Sunetra Gupta and myself were painted as “right-wing”, when the left has always favoured the opposite policy – the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor.

  • Ireland Urgently Requires a Covid Inquiry

    It should be a source of embarrassment that in Ireland we still have had no public inquiry into the State’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite talk of terms of reference, nothing has materialized, and nor does this situation seem likely to change during the lifetime of new Taoiseach Harris’s government.

    The mainstream media, which received millions in advertising revenue throughout the pandemic, would appear to have no interest in searching questions being asked. It may not be appetising to recall overwhelmingly uncritical coverage; placing the daily tally of new cases and deaths on their front pages news for almost two years; seemingly oblivious to everything else happening in the world.

    Nor does the main opposition party in Dáil Éireann, Sinn Féin seem gung ho for one either. During the pandemic, they failed to interrogate adequately the domineering, even dictatorial, role of Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan in particular, or the runaway budgets that developed in that period. Despite this spending, our health service appears to be no better equipped to deal with medical emergencies.

    In my view, Sinn Féin (and other opposition parties) should reconsider this stance as it hands a huge political opportunity to opponents on the far right as we enter a period of elections. The Irish people require accountability on this era-defining response.

    For all its faults, and failure to interrogate basic premises, the U.K. Covid inquiry is at least holding power to account. That inquiry implicitly acknowledges that extraordinary and unprecedented measures were taken, undermining basic civil liberties, and causing grave harms, including to children denied education and those caught in situations of domestic violence. The damage to our collective mental healths may be more difficult to quantify.

    A self-fulling prophecy

    Writing for the Irish Times on May 23 2020 clinical psychologist and author Maureen Gaffney reckoned that ‘Covid-19 has scored a direct hit on our most basic psychological drives.’ She seemed oblivious, however, to how statements such as her own that ‘the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic may have changed life more permanently’ might have been contributing to the anxiety of her readers.

    The direct health impact of what Peter Hitchens acutely described as ‘the Great Panic of 2020’ are fairly obvious. But the ripple of psychological effects is less easy to assess. Psychological injury, or so-called nervous shock, is difficult to quantify in law. A successful claim requires reasonable foreseeability, and the presence of a duty of care.

    Dr Gabor Maté, in particular, has pointed to the effect of stress and trauma on our health. Thus, if a national leader with a duty of care says that thousands of people are likely to die from a deadly disease and imposes a stay-at-home order for an indefinite time period, serious collateral damage in terms of stress and even trauma is reasonably foreseesable. Unless they are working from a firm evidence basis and/or a robust rational, political leaders should exercise great caution in making such pronouncements or laws.

    A 2017 study demonstrated that people who feel lonely report worse cold symptoms than individuals who are not. The exacerbating factor of loneliness on Covid symptoms may be just the tip of the iceberg.

    In 2020 Dr Marcus de Brun highlighted in this magazine how psychological stress would be a major determinant in one’s experience with Covid-19: ‘Psychological stress is (medically speaking),’ he said, ‘a self-fulling prophecy. People who are most anxious about becoming ill are most likely to become ill. If you ask yourself often enough whether or not you have a headache, you will eventually experience one.’

    The experience of photographer Barry Delaney also writing for Cassandra Voices is instructive:

    By early March a few cases were being recorded in Ireland, the media went into hysterical frenzy, almost shaming the inevitable innocent cases.

    Then I got an email to say that my next project was now cancelled. Devastated, I went for my usual swim, sometimes the magic water doesn’t work, it didn’t that day. I came home frozen, riddled with fear, no work, fear of how to pay my rent; suddenly I became unwell. A sore throat and mild fever, paralysed me, as I lay alone on my sofa.

    But no cough. Back then the only symptom mentioned was the hacking cough. I checked my phone and there was now talk of Ireland entering lockdown around St Patrick’s Day. Armageddon was arriving  Supermarkets running out of food, even fucking toilet paper. I was now in a delirious state of panic.

    The next day the fever went, but I still had the sore throat. On the Monday I tried phoning my Doctor; no answer; permanently engaged or just automated messages to contact some new HSE hub.

    I was now in a state of constant anxiety, with no food in the house, and yet I couldn’t leave home. and I live alone.

    I phoned my ex wife. She kindly said she’d shop for me. On St. Patrick’s Day Leo made his grim, great speech. I still felt he knew something that he wasn’t telling us. Maybe this virus was as deadly as the Spanish flu of 1918-20 that killed up to fifty million, including my grand-uncle aged just nineteen. Death figures of 85,000 were being predicted in Ireland by our Fear driven media.

    All that week I had an intermittent sore throat, but still could not get in contact with my Doctor.

    The thing to watch for was the breathlessness I had heard. This was what caused the dangerous pneumonia. On the Saturday night I went to bed early alone, and suddenly had problems breathing. It being Saturday I could not disturb my Doctor, nor did I want an ambulance arriving to take me to quarantine in hospital, where I’d be met by Hazmat-clad Doctors and become Patient No. 3. Laid low by fear and shortness of breath I could not sleep. By 5am I made a decision to complete my final book, Americans Anonymous and get my things in order in case this was it.

    Barry’s panic is likely to have been replicated across the population.

    Around for a lot longer than initially understood

    Yet Covid-19 had been around for a lot, lot longer than we imagined by the time in February 2020 it was presented to us as a SARS-like illness. Indeed, Spanish virologists found traces of the novel coronavirus in a sample of Barcelona waste water collected in March 2019, some nine months before it was identified in China, according to the University of Barcelona. Similarly, a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) of Italy found that it was circulating in Italy in September, 2019.

    Even the first Irish death attributed to Covid-19 demonstrates that the panic of March, 2020, when cases seemed to be spreading from Europe, was unfounded.

    That patient presented himself at Cork University Hospital on February 29th, 2020, days before the first confirmed case (via a PCR test) of COVID-19 in the Republic. Analysis later established the particular strain in his case showed ‘very little difference’ from the original strain from China’s Hubei province, and had none of the characteristic mutations found in strains then prevalent in Bavaria or Lombardy.

    The man, however, had no epidemiological link to any area where the virus was prevalent at the time or any link to a confirmed case.

    All this vindicates Oxford’s Professor Sunetra Gupta, assessment from the outset that Covid-19 had been circulating for months prior to the imposition of lockdowns, and was far less deadly than assumed by Imperial’s Professor Neil Ferguson in his famous paper. Tellingly, it was hardly registering in our hospitals in the winter of 2019-2020.

    Long Covid

    It may be that many of the symptoms associated with Long Covid or ‘long haulers’ as sufferers are known in the U.S., are the product of that collective panic; a combination of disease and trauma locked bodies over months of painful lockdowns.

    In March 2021 Adam Gaffney, an assistant professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, argued for a more critical appraisal of Long Covid. Having expressed scepticism around a condition characterised by symptoms such as ‘brain fog’, he recalls being contacted by a journalist who said: ‘I’m asking as much as a person as a journalist because I’m more terrified of this syndrome than I am of death.’

    Gaffney acknowledges ‘myriad long-term effects, including physical and cognitive impairments, reduced lung function, mental health problems, and poorer quality of life’ from severe bouts of COVID-19 – long recognised as post-viral syndrome – but cites a survey showing two-thirds of ‘long haulers’ had negative coronavirus antibody tests, and another, organised by self-identifying Long Covid patients indicating around two-thirds of those surveyed had undergone blood testing reported negative results.

    He asserted: ‘it’s highly probable that some or many long-haulers who were never diagnosed using PCR testing in the acute phase and who also have negative antibody tests are “true negatives.’ In other words, for many this may have been a disease with a psychological origin, which Gaffney attributes to ‘skyrocketing levels of social anguish and mental emotional distress,’ referencing a paper showing that about half of people with depression also had unexplained physical symptoms.

    Class Action?

    Investigating the consequences of that social anguish may, in fact, be one of the less contentious matters which any COVID-19 Inquiry in Ireland would consider, as members of the government could reasonably point to the global hysteria, in large part generated by social media.

    What is likely to have deterred the government from setting up an inquiry in the first place is a fear of a class action from relatives of care home residents, who seem to have died unnecessarily: Ireland experienced the second highest proportion of care home deaths in the world, during what is called, inaccurately the first wave, of spring 2020.

    Throughout, Irish people were effectively lied to, via a compliant media, regarding the nature of deaths from COVID-19. Thus, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) adopted WHO guidance listing COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death when:

    confirmed by laboratory testing irrespective of severity of clinical signs or symptoms.

    diagnosed clinically or epidemiologically but laboratory testing is inconclusive or not available.

    Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan even acknowledged a remarkably low threshold in April, 2020: ‘Clinically, the “index of suspicion” for the disease would be “a good deal higher” than would normally be the case for flu.’

    Our democracy demands an inquiry into what led our government to take many of their decisions. Was it simply a lack of expertise that led the State to adopt flawed policies, or did they know more than we have been told?

    How is it possible that decision-making was almost entirely devolved to the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dr Tony Holohan in 2020?

    We must also scrutinise the manner in which subsequent decisions were taken on masks, further lockdowns, and perhaps most insidiously, vaccine passports.

    If indeed we are to prevent the precedent of the COVID-19 response changing life more permanently, questions need to be answered. It is incumbent on the main opposition parties, Sinn Féin to demand this of the government, and promise one to the electorate if they come to power. If not, I suspect the far right will continue to make inroads into their support.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Lockdowns: “Thinking in One Dimension”. Podcast Interview with Professor Sunetra Gupta.

    Bonus Episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-episode-ii-100102849

    Or via apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep4-lockdowns-thinking-in-one-dimension-with-guest/id1728086643?i=1000648655188

    In early 2020, Sunetra Gupta was quietly working on a universal influenza vaccine as Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University, while finishing her sixth novel. By then, a new coronavirus had been discovered in Wuhan, China. In response, she and her group produced a paper suggesting, among other scenarios, as much as 50% of the U.K. population had already been infected.

    This was in stark contrast to the assessment of Professor Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London, whose modelling assumed Covid-19 had just arrived in the West and that we had no cross-immunity from other coronaviruses against it, meaning it would kill almost one in a hundred of those who contracted it. For reasons still inadequately explored, the U.K., Irish and most Western governments – along with many in the Global South – followed Ferguson’s (and others’) doomsday prediction and chose untested lockdowns in anticipation of a vaccine – a containment strategy to ‘flatten the curve’, as opposed to a (Chinese-style) elimination strategy.

    Sunetra Gupta has been vindicated in her assessment that Covid 19 had been circulating far longer than initially understood, and also that it had a much lower fatality rate than Ferguson and others assumed from limited data. Moreover, it was obvious that this social experiment would cause serious harms, while its inability to contain the virus was unknown.

    Sunetra Gupta did not take lockdown lying down. She and a number of academic colleagues authored the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, advocating for an end to lockdowns, and promoting the targeted protection of the elderly – who were by far the most susceptible to death from the virus.

    What followed was not, as she hoped, a civilised discussion weighing the costs and benefits of each strategy, but abuse and even an attempt to have her silenced.

    Sunetra Gupta argues that what we experienced with lockdowns represented a distortion of the precautionary principle, arguing:

    I think that people were incorrectly assuming that they were applying the precautionary principle to all of this. So they were thinking, okay, well, you know, the worst case scenario is what we should be going by. And that’s because they were thinking in one dimension, which is we’ve got to do whatever it takes to stop this pandemic from unfolding, because it is compatible with the idea that 1% of the population will die if it just unfurls. What they were missing was the fact that these very measures that they were seeking to employ to stop the spread were ones that came at a very huge cost – and that was known at the time – what we didn’t know is whether those measures would stop the spread. And even if they did, what effect that would actually have eventually on the final death toll. But what we absolutely knew for certain – because it was happening in front of our eyes – is that these lockdowns would cause people to die. People were already dying from not being able to sell toys in the pavement in Delhi and being told to go back home to their villages, so the costs of lockdown were known, the benefits of lockdown were completely unknown. And under those circumstances, what you should be doing if you’re adopting the precautionary principle is to not go with lockdowns, but think of other solutions.

    Image: Andrea Piacquadio

    Universal Influenza Vaccine

    Some years ago, Sunetra Gupta and colleagues theorized that parts of the influenza virus ‘targeted by the immune system are, in fact, limited in variability and acts as a constraint on its evolution.’

    The current, relatively ineffective, vaccines against it, have to be updated every year to catch up with changes in that virus. She reveals to Cassandra Voices that ‘we now have the ingredients to make this [universal] vaccine.’ This will mainly address endemic influenza which kills almost half a million people, including a high proportion of infant babies, every year.

    Interestingly, Sunetra Gupta argues here that the possibility of an influenza pandemic was ‘actually eliminated a long time.’ She bases this assessment on how until 1918: ‘we experienced influenza only in pandemic form, just because of the demographic characteristics of the time. But since 1918, we’ve had influenza as a seasonal, regular endemic occurrence.’

    Today, she says, we are ‘all regularly exposed to influenza,’ giving us protection against severe disease.’ She further argues:

    What happened in 1918 was that, in my opinion, there had been no flu around for thirty years. So when the virus arrived, people under the age of thirty were extremely vulnerable. And that’s why you saw such high death rates in young people. People over the age of thirty were more protected.

    She says it’s true, to an extent, that international travel predisposes us to pandemics, but, paradoxically, ‘we are regularly exposed to different viruses, which gives us a wall of immunity against these emerging threats.’ She assumes that without regular exposure to the other seasonal coronaviruses ‘we would have been more susceptible’ to COVID-19.

    Based on her evolutionary theory, she had predicted the Swine Flu pandemic (that generated unwarranted hysteria) of 2009 two years before it hit. She says she ‘wasn’t the least bit worried in 2009 because, first of all, I thought even if it weren’t basically identical to the 1918 flu, that most of us would have a considerable degree of immunity against severe disease.’

    Contrary to Bill Gates, who claims the world must create ‘a fire department for pandemics’ to avoid catastrophic outbreaks, Sunetra Gupta says ‘we don’t need to panic to the degree that we do about new pandemics; what we need to do is to be clear headed and rational and try and think about ways of protecting those who might die or might be severely ill and hospitalised from these pandemics or these events.’

    The Role of the Epidemiologist

    The medical historian Mark Honigsbaum wrote in Pandemic Century – One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris (2019) that ‘by alerting us to new sources of infection and framing particular behaviours as risky, it is medical science, and the science of epidemiology in particular, that is often the source of irrational and often prejudicial judgments’. Then in 2020, the Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt claimed that epidemiologists see their function ‘not as getting things correct, but as preventing an epidemic. So therefore, if they say it is one hundred times worse than it’s going to be, then it’s okay.’

    Sunetra Gupta argues:

    the role of epidemiology is to provide a conceptual framework within which you can understand what is happening and, rather than preventing pandemics or epidemics, which I’ve always been skeptical about, what you want to prevent is the death or the consequences of these events.

    She reckons: ‘it’s a hubris, really, as we saw to think that you can stop the spread of a virus like SARS-CoV-2.’ However, ‘where you can intervene is to try and prevent the consequences of that spread, in that you can protect the vulnerable, or at least try to. But the idea that you could stop the spread was, I think, extremely misguided.’

    She calls for greater resilience in the health system, pointing to the nefarious influence of neoliberal capitalism on public health.

    If you’re trying to maximize what they call efficiency, you end up with these big hospitals instead of sort of more local, smaller units. And that creates the conditions for vulnerable people to be exposed more easily to the virus.

    Professor Neil Ferguson.

    SIR Model

    Unlike Neil Ferguson, Sunetra Gupta’s team made no assumptions about the infection fatality rate in March 2020. She now says:

    The purpose of that paper was to show that you can take a simple model, an epidemic model, which applies to coronavirus or any virus that gives you some level of immunity for a certain period of time, at least in the case of coronavirus. Of course, that would be short. Measles would be long. But any such model, which is called an SIR model – simply because people go from being susceptible to being infected and then recovering – you can fit a model like that to the available data under a very wide range of infection fatality rates.

    She says Ferguson and his colleagues fitted the available data based an IFR of almost 1% because: ‘They were using data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship and a few other bits of data from Wuhan.’ In such a model as this the two variables, she says, ‘are the infection fatality rate and when the epidemic occurred … So what we showed is what we were seeing could easily be the result of an epidemic that had already occurred [that] had a very small infection fatality rate. Or as Neil proposed, there was an epidemic that was just taking off and had a high infection fatality rate.’

    Later she was asked a guess about what the infection fatality rate might be. What she said, she stands by, that it was definitely less than 1 in 1000 and probably close to 1 in 10,000. She adds, in hindsight, however:

    What I probably shouldn’t have done is given any answer at all, because the infection fatality rate is not really a number that you can think of in terms of the average across the population. So there will be parts of the world where, because there is [a high proportion of] elderly or people with comorbidities… [there is greater] vulnerability to death … So it is actually somewhat meaningless to think of the IFR as an average number, but it’s certainly not 1%.

    ‘What I was trying to do with that paper’ she says ‘is just to say, you can’t have that level of certainty in this situation.’ She agrees that ‘at the time you wouldn’t be able to discriminate between lockdown and the build-up of immunity and the contributions of seasonality. But now, because we have more data, you can and so it’s much more likely that we had built up what’s known as herd immunity in certain pockets or substantially it had accrued in certain areas.’

    She adds:

    We couldn’t tell then because we hadn’t done the experiment of lifting lockdown and seeing what would happen. But we did do that experiment a year later. And at that point you could discriminate between those two hypotheses. And I think what now I will say is that you can explain what happened almost anywhere in the world, using a simple model in which you accumulate immunity, but you also lose it quickly, which is known for all coronaviruses combined with the effects of seasonality. And that simple model … will explain qualitatively all patterns that we see.

    Gold Standard

    On March 17th, 2020, Mark Landler and Stephen Castle wrote in The New York Times. ‘It wasn’t so much the numbers themselves, frightening though they were as who reported them: Imperial College London.’ Due to the professor’s W.H.O. ties, the authors noted ‘Imperial was treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.’

    Not long afterwards on March 24th, a report appeared in the Financial Times, quoting Sunetra Gupta to the effect that perhaps as much as half the UK population had already contracted Covid-19. However, the author of that article added that her group’s modelling was ‘controversial; and ‘its assumptions were have been contested by other scientists.’

    Despite their differences, Sunetra Gupta speaks of a respectful relationship with Ferguson, with whom she had ‘friendly chats’ during the period. There was ‘no disagreement’ about ‘the basic ideas and assumptions.’ It’s just that he said ‘he thought that their worst case scenario was more likely than what I was saying, which is that we didn’t know, and perhaps veering more towards [that there had already been] substantial waves in areas like London … But we both acknowledged there were a spectrum of possibilities. And until we had the full data, we wouldn’t know where we were.’

    She acknowledges, nonetheless, that ‘it’s hard not to have emotion about these things. But you know, at the end of the day, you’ve got to think about whether an intervention is achieving its purpose and whether the collateral damage is too great or not.’

    ‘Oh, What a Lovely lockdown!’

    Interestingly, Sunetra Gupta says she had ‘a great time’ during lockdowns as she lives in ‘a nice house with a big garden, and my daughters, who were in their early twenties, came back home for six months.’ She now wonders whether ‘at some point someone should write a play called Oh, What a Lovely lockdown!’

    She says that’s the point: ‘the lockdowns … were put in place by those of us who are privileged; [what] Martin Kulldorff called them the laptop classes … while throwing the poor and the young under the bus.’

    Regarding an extraordinary article in The Guardian by George Monbiot calling for ‘a time delimited outright ban’ on lies that endanger people’s lives, referring to people such as Allison Pearson, Peter Hitchens and Sunetra Gupta ‘who have made such public headway with their misleading claims about the pandemic,’ she says she was ‘absolutely shocked that someone like Monbiot would claim to know more [than me] about how the pathogen spreads, about epidemic behavior and control measures.’

    She wonders, ‘why would someone with … no qualifications to speak of these things accuse me of spreading lies and misinformation … Why would he do that? I mean, it’s shocking.’

    She says she tried:

    to ask common friends to tell him. You know what? Pick up the phone to me. I’ll explain to you. I mean, that’s what he should have done. He should have said, oh, why is she saying this? Maybe I should just pick up the phone to ask for an interview and get her opinion. And then … he’s free to disagree with it. Although from a position of someone who is not precisely qualified to make those judgments. So I find that kind of behavior absolutely shocking.

    ‘They Should Apologise’

    Sunetra Gupta says she has repeatedly called for debates, for example, with Neil [Ferguson] with whom she has only ‘ever had a respectful engagement.’ She expresses surprise ‘that places like the Royal Society didn’t put on more debates and instead ‘just toed the line on this and just went with the consensus.’

    She says:

    I have not been approached with an apology from any of [her critics at the time]. An apology on account of how they behaved, but nor, indeed an apology on having got a lot of things wrong … So they criticised me for wrong reasons, and they should now come and say to me, we are sorry. We now see that lockdowns are indeed very harmful and that school closures didn’t prevent transmission, or that vaccines don’t block infection. They should apologize to me, but they haven’t.

    She also has some harsh criticism for the way in which academia now operates:

    I think the circumstances now under which academia is expected to operate are ones that are conducive to people … forming these sorts of groups, consensus groups, because that’s how they fund their research … by reviewing each other’s grants and just generally agreeing with each other. And of course … some of these funds are coming through some form of philanthro-capitalism. Those are all features of the system which lend themselves to this kind of aggravation of an idea of a risk. And … there’s also the … huge temptation of putting yourself in the middle of it being the saviour … “I had to get a burner phone because I’m so important.” And, you know, “I was the one who delivered the world of this scourge.” Those are the sort of rather more simple … reasons why we saw what we saw, rather than some huge conspiracy.

    Reflecting on the period where she earned such publicity she says:

    I’d always hoped [it would be] through my writing, through my novels, not necessarily through science. So I know it’s not something I particularly find to be that gratifying because this is just sort of my job and … it’s caused nothing but distress to me and to my family; for my daughters, it’s been a difficult period to have to deal with this fame, notoriety, that I achieved.

    However, she doesn’t buy into the idea that the role of a scientist is simply to deliver the science:

    because I think that one can always hide behind one’s profession. I mean, the best example … I often talk about [is from] the film Mephisto [1981, directed by István Szabó], where the central character, the actor … has kind of accepted the patronage of the Nazis at one point [and] when he’s accused of that, just says, “please leave me alone. I’m just an actor,” … nobody is just an actor or just a scientist. It’s not good enough to say, “I’m just a scientist. I just do mathematical modelling and you know, whether lockdowns work or don’t work or harm other people, it’s none of my business.” That’s not acceptable to me.

    Childhood Covid-19 Vaccination

    Regarding the vaccination of children against Covid-19 she says:

    from the outset that there should never have been given to people who were effectively at zero risk of dying from Covid, particularly because it was never likely to prevent transmission for any more than a few weeks … so there was no logic. Again, if we talk about logic rather than anything else, there is no logic to vaccinating people who are not at risk if the vaccine does not prevent transmission.

    She links this policy failure to recent measles outbreaks in the U.K., and Ireland:

    we warned against this early on by saying one of the reasons not to vaccinate young children, even if it is completely safe, is because it doesn’t prevent infection. So it will create vaccine hesitancy against vaccines that actually people do need … we have limited resources, so it has an opportunity cost. And what we’re seeing in this country and across the world is … the diversion of funds that are meant to tackle these serious endemic diseases … And it’s very, very sad because it’s causing deaths and particularly in places, not so much the UK and Ireland, but … in sub-Saharan Africa or India, I mean, the infection control programmes and vaccination programmes have collapsed in many places, and this is going to lead to many more deaths than Covid, particularly in children, not to mention starvation and other issues.

    She does not, however, believe that the excess deaths we have witnessed in recent times should be attributed to Covid-19 vaccines, pointing to the example of Sweden ‘which doesn’t have many excess deaths, but did vaccinate its population.’

  • George Monbiot’s Hall of Mirrors

    In 2010, having advocated for veganism in 2002, George Monbiot wrote: ‘I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly.’

    Having just read Simon Faerlie’s book Meat: A Benign Extravagance, Monbiot acknowledged serious environmental problems with the prevailing model of cattle production, but complained that pigs ‘have been forbidden in many parts of the rich world from doing what they do best: converting waste into meat.’

    Surprisingly perhaps, while rhapsodising on the efficiency of giving ‘sterilised scraps to pigs,’ he expressed no concern for animal welfare in feedlot production.

    ‘It’s time we got stuck in,’ he concluded, no doubt to the anger of genuine vegans who refrain from consuming animal products for ethical reasons, not simply because laboratory grown meat is more efficient to produce.

    By 2016, however, Monbiot had ‘[re-?]converted to veganism to reduce’ his ‘impact on the living world;’ while in 2017 he asked: ‘What madness of our times will revolt our descendants?’

    ‘There are plenty to choose from,’ he opined, but one he believed ‘will be the mass incarceration of animals, to enable us to eat their flesh or eggs or drink their milk.’

    Whatever one’s views – vegan or meat-enthusiast – on this issue, it is fair to say that Monbiot has been ethically vacant and that his knowledge of “the science” isn’t always up to speed, even by his own admission.

    Corbynista?

    Monbiot displayed a similar inconsistency and lack of staying power in his attitude to Jeremy Corbyn. In 2015 he hailed the Islington MP Labour leadership candidate as ‘the curator of the future. His rivals are chasing an impossible dream.’

    By the beginning of 2017, however, he was tweeting: ‘I was thrilled when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, but it has been one fiasco after another. I have now lost all faith.’

    That was just months before Corbyn’s high water mark: the 2017 General Election when the Conservatives under Theresa May were reduced to a minority administration reliant on the support of the DUP.

    At least the surprising result gave Monbiot pause for reflection. He mused later that year on a crushing defeat for the liberal media which had ‘created a hall of mirrors, in which like-minded people reflect and reproduce each other’s opinions.’

    He noted that ‘broadcasters echo what the papers say, the papers pick up what the broadcasters say.’ and how a ‘narrow group of favoured pundits appear on the news programmes again and again.’

    Covidiocy

    Having acknowledged “a hall of mirrors” in the media’s treatment of Jeremy Corbyn it seems surprising he wouldn’t consider that this phenomenon may have operated during the pandemic. Instead, we found full-blooded commitment to lockdowns and all that followed. The nadir arrived with an argument for what amounts to scientific censorship.

    On first glance, his proposal for a time delimited ‘outright ban on lies that endanger people’s lives’ might seem proportionate in an emergency period, but this proceeds a passage in which he refers to ‘people such as Allison Pearson, Peter Hitchens and Sunetra Gupta, who have made such public headway with their misleading claims about the pandemic.’

    “and Sunetra Gupta”!!!

    For anyone who has not heard of her, apart from being a published novelist, Sunetra Gupta is an infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford.

    In March 2020, Gupta and her colleagues posted a paper challenging the modelling of Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson which persuaded many Western governments to adopt lockdowns. Gupta’s paper argued that prior coronavirus infections would diminish the spread and posited a far lower infection fatality rate. Its predictions proved optimistic, but Ferguson projected a minimum U.S. death toll of a ‘best case scenario’ of 1.1 million, rising to 2.2 million in a worst case scenario that also proved inaccurate. It is fair to say that epidemiology is not an exact science.

    Monbiot’s disturbing article conflated Gupta’s more optimistic assessment – which brought vilification – with denial of human responsibility for climate change and the role of smoking in lung cancer.

    He also slipped in an attack on the Great Barrington Declaration that Gupta co-authored, misrepresenting proposals for targeted protection as championing ‘herd immunity through mass infection with the help of discredited claims.’ Presumably Monbiot would have consigned that document to the bonfire too.

    Covid Expertise

    A new paper in the British Medical Journal by John Ionnidas reflects on the echo chamber – generated by social media in particular – in which Monbiot operates. Ionnidas compared the social media following of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration to its rival John Snow Memorandum that advocated for the opposing view of continuing with lockdowns.

    He concluded that both included ‘many stellar scientists’, but that ‘JSM has far more powerful social media presence and this may have shaped the impression that it is the dominant narrative.’

    This paper is unlikely to inform Monbiot’s understanding of “the science” of COVID-19, which has been reduced to a political ideology. Thus, anyone questioning the wisdom of lockdowns and universal vaccination – with recourse to draconian laws if necessary – is essentially adopting “conspiratorial” “right-wing” ideas.

    Rather than dispassionately assess the merits of lockdowns or medications via cost benefit analyses – as a critical journalist or scientist ought to – Monbiot blithely argues that the ‘anti-vaccine movement is a highly effective channel for the penetration of far-right ideas into leftwing countercultures.’

    Notably absent is an acknowledgement that he, George Monbiot, could possibly err in his evaluation of scientific or political questions.

    Monbiot’s views on COVID-19 are consistent with opinions expressed across most of a liberal media (including the Guardian) which has received hundreds of millions of dollars in financial support from the Gates Foundation, arguably manufacturing consent for the status quo.

    Monbiot is hardly a gun for hire, but operating within the hall of mirrors he previously acknowledged has brought an intellectual meltdown.

    His diminished credibility as a commentator, and tendency towards divisive political tribalism, should be of concern to environmentalists; who also ought to be wary of the steady encroachment of philanthrocapitalism.

    Feature Image: Hall of Mirrors, Palace of Versailles

  • The “Strawman” Conspiracy Theorist

    In two hundred years doctors will rule the world. Science reigns already. It reigns in the shade maybe – but it reigns. And all science must culminate in the science of healing – not the weak, but the strong. Mankind wants to live… to live.
    Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907), p.263

    This article charts the origins and development of what often appears to be a strawman conspiracy theorist over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially through “fact checker” initiatives operating at the behest philanthrocapitalism. This appears to have insulated regulatory agencies long prone to capture from adequate journalistic scrutiny, leading to a groupthink amidst an effective censorship of alternative, and scientifically valid, assessments of the danger posed by COVID-19, and the optimal humanitarian response.

    Losing Our Grip?

    In May, 2020, veteran Guardian journalist John Naughton explored the origins of Plandemic a “documentary” video ‘featuring Dr Judy Mikovits, a former research scientist and inveterate conspiracy theorist who blames the coronavirus outbreak on big pharma, Bill Gates and the World Health Organization.’ Naughton relates how the video migrated from mainstream social media into the dark recesses of the Internet.

    As he put it: ‘The cognitive pathogen had escaped into the wild and was spreading virally.’ Ultimately, the New York Times ‘traced it back to a Facebook page dedicated to QAnon, a rightwing conspiracy theory, which has 25,000 members.’ All this Naughton said: ‘confirms something we’ve known since at least 2016, namely that conspiracy theory sites are the most powerful engines of disinformation around. And when they have a medical conspiracy theory to work with, then they are really in business.’

    In May, 2020 The Atlantic’s Jeff Goldburg announced that conspiracy theorists were winning, and that America was ‘losing its grip on Enlightenment values and reality itself.’ Thus a 2014 study estimated that half the American public ‘consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory,’ a proportion that had risen to 61% by 2019, suggesting the Internet was accelerating the trend. Another survey indicated that 60% of Britons were wedded to a ‘false’ narrative.

    Adjudicating on the falseness, or otherwise, of a narrative is not always, however, a straightforward exercise. Indeed, it will be argued that justifiable concerns around recent impugning of expertise have been weaponised to create another layer of disinformation over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The “wild-eyed” conspiracy theorist – often referred to as “members of the tin foil hat brigade” – has become a widely derided figure. This appears to be a belated response to so-called “post-truth” accounts, associated with supporters of Donald Trump in the U.S. and proponents of Brexit in the U.K., dismissive of expertise. This challenged a board consensus around such issues as the importance of mitigating climate change. But in confronting genuine disinformation it appears that many on the left, in particular, failed to interrogate vested interests during the pandemic.

    “Totalizing Discourse”

    Charles Eisenstein defines conspiracy myths as ‘a totalizing discourse that casts every event into its terms.’ He traces these overarching explanations – relying on observed phenomena only insofar as these fit with a preordained pattern – to the first century Gnostics, who believed that ‘an evil demiurge created the material world out of a pre-existingdivine essence.’

    The “totalizing” nature of such an approach has previously been dismissed by Karl Popper since ‘nothing ever comes off exactly as intended.’[i] Oliver and Wood (2014) identify three facets to an approach that has traditionally pointed to Freemasonry –an “illuminati” – Jews and Jesuits, and, in more recent times, intelligence agencies such as the CIA, KGB, MI5 or Mossad:

    First, they locate the source of unusual social and political phenomena in unseen, intentional, and malevolent forces. Second, they typically interpret political events in terms of a Manichean struggle between good and evil … Finally, most conspiracy theories suggest that mainstream accounts of political events are a ruse or an attempt to distract the public from a hidden source of power (Fenster 2008)

    In her seminal 1951 text The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt identifies such a tendency as a precursor to mob rule, describing how a conspiracy theorist ‘is inclined to seek the real forces of political life in those movements and influences which are hidden from view and work behind the scenes.’[ii]

    Yet certain conspiracy theories in our time, such as suggestions the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 in order to plunder oil resources rather than decommission weapons of mass destruction, or that the fossil fuel industry deliberately sowed confusion over climate change, remain plausible, even if we lack clear documentary proof.

    A problem lies in how individuals with minimal academic attainment treat conspiracies as objective truths rather than conjectures based on circumstantial evidence. The likelihood of a conspiracy is often portrayed as “beyond reasonable doubt”, as opposed to “on the balance of probabilities.” A formally educated observer may be repelled by an insistent approach that does not allow for reasonable doubt.

    The intuition relied on by confirmed conspiracy theorists thus generally fails to acknowledge uncertainty, and lacks scientific or historical rigour. Yet these accounts may still occasionally yield insights when empirical methods fall short. After all, suspicions raised by conspiracy theories are often vindicated. Rather than dismissing out of hand such ‘magical thinking’, it is useful to consider these as unproven hypotheses, and not necessarily untrue, simply because an individual is overstating a case.

    For example, over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic increasingly persuasive evidence has emerged of a laboratory leak – perhaps from so-called ‘gain of function’ research – giving rise to the pandemic. But in February, 2020 The Lancet published a letter from a number of prominent scientists who ‘strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.’ This had a chilling effect on the scientific debate during the early stages of the pandemic.

    Notably also, the ‘father of economics’ Adam Smith opined that ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’[iii] Smith’s portrayal of commercial calumnies is reflected in a question posed at a medical conference in 2018 by a Goldman Sachs executive: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’

    Previously, a succession of pharmaceutical scandals led Ben Goldacre MBE to take a sympathetic view of so-called “anti-vaxxers”, who are now consistently conflated with “conspiracy theorists”: ‘I think it’s fair to say that anti-vaccine conspiracy theories are a kind of poetic response to regulatory failure in medicine and in the pharmaceutical industry. People know that there is something a little bit wrong here.’

    Similarly, Tom Jefferson – editor of the Cochrane Collaboration’s acute respiratory infections – in an interview with Der Spiegel in 2009 in the wake of the Swine Flu pandemic-that-never-was pointed to shadowy pharmaceutical forces: ‘Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur.’

    UNESCO’s World Trends Report 2018.

    Journalism Under Threat

    An assumption of malevolent or self-serving – cui bono? – motivations (particularly concerning a Big Pharma industry with a shameful record of distortion and manipulation) is almost a prerequisite for being an investigative reporter. Stories don’t drop out of the air. Unless a journalist assumes wrongdoing – in essence a conspiracy theory – there would be no reason to begin digging.

    The key distinction between genuine journalism and conspiracy theorising is that proponents of the latter tend to blurt out their “findings” without marshalling supporting evidence, with the Internet providing anonymity as required. This, however, makes such accounts easy to ridicule to the detriment of journalism with an evidential basis.

    Journalists have long been deflected from investigating large corporations. In a recent memoir the great American journalist Seymour Hersh fumes at how in the late 1970s The New York Times shut down his attempt to investigate corporate America ’when confronted by a gaggle of corporate conmen.’[iv]

    This challenge has increased significantly in the wake of the Internet. After the “Original Sin” of free online publication, the number of American journalists fell from 60,000 in 1992 to 40,000 in 2009, a pattern seen across the world. As revenues diminished, workloads increased. Cardiff University researchers recently conducted an analysis of 2,000 U.K. news stories, discovering the average Fleet Street journalist was filing three times as much as in 1985. To put it another way, journalists now have only one-third of the time to do the same job.[v]”

    “Fact Checkers”

    Over the course of the pandemic a strawman conspiracy theorist appears to have been consciously developed to deter valid journalistic interrogation, in particular, through so-called “fact checking” initiatives. It has reached a point where, as Charles Eisenstein observes: ‘“Conspiracy theory” has become ‘a term of political invective, used to disparage any view that diverges from mainstream beliefs. Basically, any critique of dominant institutions can be smeared as conspiracy theory’

    In the absence of adequate journalistic scrutiny during the pandemic corruption has been rife. The executive director of The British Medical Journal Kamran Abbasi described ‘state corruption on a grand scale’ that is ‘harmful to public health’ Abbasi observes how the pandemic ‘has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.’

    This also occurred in the context of unregulated social media, where companies set their own rules. In March, 2020, having previously styled itself ‘the free speech-wing of the free-speech party’, Twitter moved to address concerns around conspiracy theories. In future it would be: ‘Broadening our definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information.’

    Nonetheless, free reign was given to “click-bait” alarmists such as Eric Feigle-Ding on Twitter, who saw his following mushroom from just two thousand to almost a quarter of a million. Angela Rasmussen, a Columbia University virologist, identified a pattern: ‘He tweets something sensational and out of context, buries any caveats further down-thread, and watches the clicks and [retweets] roll in.’

    Twitter did not act alone in upholding an apparent orthodoxy that often lapsed into an extremism that deterred legitimate questioning. Google took unprecedented steps to erase material violating ‘Community Guidelines’: ‘including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of global or local health authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.’

    Initially at least, Facebook adopted a more laissez faire approach, although users who had read, watched or shared ‘false’ coronavirus content received a pop-up alert urging them to go the World Health Organisation’s website. In November, 2021, however, the editors of the British Medical Journal sent an open letter to Facebook in response to “fact checkers” undermining their investigative report into ‘a host of poor clinical trial research practices’ at Pfizer’s original vaccine trial.

    Thus, the approach of the social media giants was bolstered by an unprecedented journalistic effort to “factually” repudiate conspiracy theories during the pandemic; notwithstanding how ‘uncontested facts—things that are ascertainable, reproducible, transferable and predictable—tend to be elusive.’

    Preparations for the “fact-checking” initiative began in January, 2020 when a global #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, comprising more than one hundred “factcheckers” around the world, described as ‘the largest collaborative factchecking project ever,’ was launched by the Poynter Institute, ‘when the spread of the virus was restricted to China but already causing rampant misinformation globally.’ It said that the WHO had classified the issue as ‘an infodemic — and the Alliance is on the front lines in the fight against it.’

    From March 2020, with the support of these “fact checkers”, outlets such as Reuters responded to an anticipated wave of conspiracy theories, taking particular care to address allegations against Bill Gates. He has been described as ‘the world’s most powerful doctor’ despite not having earned a medical degree due to the Gates Foundations being the second largest funder of the WHO, after China. This included allegations that he had apparently planned the pandemic, and wanted to commit genocide through vaccines.

    For example, on May 30, 2020 a BBC article purported to defuse claims the pandemic was ‘a cover for a plan to implant trackable microchips and that the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is behind it’; although it acknowledged Gates had said that ‘eventually “we will have some digital certificates” which would be used to show who’d recovered, been tested and ultimately who received a vaccine,’ and also referenced ‘a study, funded by the Gates Foundation, into a technology that could store someone’s vaccine records in a special ink administered at the same time as an injection.’

    Front building of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle.

    Gates Foundation

    When it came to outlandish conspiracy theories around COVID-19 all roads led to Bill Gates and his $47 billion philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – besides a personal fortune of $115 billion, and growing, as of October 2020.

    For many of world’s population under stay-at-home orders the pandemic was viewed through a digital prism – often at a remove from morbidity or mortality itself. At that stage, Gates’s 2014 Ted Talk ‘The Next Outbreak. We’re not ready’ seemed almost prophetic.

    He opined: ‘If anything kills over ten million people in the next few decades it is most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.’ The failure of Western governments to prepare for such an eventuality seemed to have been laid bare – in particular the Presidential administration of Donald Trump, who according to a Cornell University study ‘was likely th\\e largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation “infodemic.”’

    Gates’s Ted Talk, however, failed to discuss the false alarm of the Swine Flu Pandemic, when the WHO estimated that between 2.0 and 7.4 million could die, assuming the outbreak was relatively mild. This proved a wild exaggeration as less than 300,000 were estimated to have died globally, with Western governments stockpiling millions of dollars’ worth of GlaxoSmithKlein’s Pandemrix vaccine, which  brought an elevated risk of narcolepsy.

    Gates’s main reference point appears to have been the Spanish Influenza (H1N1) outbreak of 1918 – the Ur-pandemic of modern times  – that led to up to fifty million deaths, many of them young men in their prime, at a point when the global population was approximately two billion. In contrast, the infectivity and severity of SARS-CoV-2 ‘are well within the range described by respiratory viral pandemics of the last few centuries (where the 1918–20 influenza is the clear outlier).’

    Neil Ferguson

    “Scientific Groupthink”

    In March, 2020, Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson told the New York Times the ‘best case outcome’ for the U.S. was a death toll of 1.1 million, rising to 2.2 million in a worst case scenario, a projection that has proved wildly inaccurate. Yet, alternative, and scientifically valid, assessments of the danger posed by COVID-19, and the optimal humanitarian response to the challenge were virtually ignored in legacy media at the time. Thus, an Oxford University paper, which included Sunetra Gupta as an author, countered what the New York Times described as the ‘gold standard’ Imperial modelling underestimated immunity from prior coronavirus infections and posited a far lower infection fatality rate.

    But in March, 2020, the Financial Times warned that Gupta’s group’s modelling was ‘controversial and its assumptions have been contested by other scientists.’ Implicitly, the Financial Times was accepting the “gold standard” Imperial paper.

    Moreover, in November, 2020 an article in the Scientific American describes how Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health, wrote a letter about the potential harms of lockdowns which was rejected from more than ten scientific journals (and six newspapers) in April, 2020. Baral recalls, ‘it was the first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere.’

    The article also recalled that, ‘highly anticipated results of the only randomized controlled trial of mask wearing and COVID-19 infection went unpublished for months.’ The authors concluded that the ‘net effect of academic bullying and ad hominem attacks has been the creation and maintenance of “groupthink”—a problem that carries its own deadly consequences.’

    In the absence of access to authoritative, diverging scientific accounts, opposition to lockdowns could easily be dismissed as being the preserve of conspiracy theorist cranks associated with “anti-vaxxers” and even a “far-right” fringe.

    “Screen New Deal”

    Apart from offering pharmaceutical companies the huge financial incentive – grasped within open arms – of developing a vaccine for universal application, lockdowns and social distancing measures also brought soaring profits for major technology corporations. Moreover, restrictions provided a testing ground for the Gates Foundation’s long advocacy of technological approaches in education.

    In May, 2020 Naomi Klein identified collusion between state and Big Tech interests in what she described as ‘A Screen New Deal.’ She referred to New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s courting of Google and the Gates Foundation: ‘Calling Gates a “visionary,” Cuomo said the pandemic has created “a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas … all these buildings, all these physical classrooms — why with all the technology you have?” he asked, apparently rhetorically.’

    Remote learning technology permitted extended school closures around the world, despite the chance of death from COVID-19 being ‘incredibly rare’ among children. Research now suggests many students made little or no progress while learning from home, and that learning loss was most pronounced among disadvantaged students. As a consequence, up to 20,000 children in the U.K. went missing from school rolls during the pandemic. Nor is it apparent that teachers faced any greater risk compared to the wider population in fulfilling classroom teaching.

    Media Funding

    Popular consent on a global scale for lockdowns, particularly from those identifying on the left, seems to have been manufactured through vast ‘philanthropic’ funding of journalism, in particular of publications associated with progressive outlooks.

    By June 2020, the Gates Foundation contributed $250 million to journalism, which according to Tim Schwab in The Columbia Journalism Review, ‘appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world’s most visible charity.’

    A theme of ‘we are in this together’ inhibited criticism and enquiry. This quiescence has been criticized by the Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris who wrote: ‘What is missing here is something that used to be one of the main traits of the radical left, namely, an insistence that science and technology are not neutral.’

    Tim Schwab calculates that $250 million had been devoted to journalism by the Gates Foundation for the six months up to June, 2020,. Recipients included BBC, NBC, Al-Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as the BBC’s Media Action and The New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund.

    Schwab adds: ‘In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations—which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates’s funding into the fourth estate.’

    As a result, he says:

    During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively—both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation’s website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead and CureVac.

    ‘Undermining Scientific Creativity’

    The Gates Foundation’s pivotal role in funding global health has long raised concerns. In 2008, Dr. Arata Kochi, the former head of WHO’s malaria programme argued the Gates Foundation was undermining scientific creativity in a way that ‘could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policymaking process in world health.’ He worried that Gates-funded institutions – including Imperial College London (MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis) – were adopting ‘a uniform framework approved by the Foundation,’ leading to homogeneity of thinking: ‘Gates has created a ‘cartel,’ with research leaders linked so closely that each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of others. The result is that obtaining an independent review of scientific evidence (…) is becoming increasingly difficult.’

    GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, is the most obvious example of the Gates Foundation’s engagement. GAVI has successfully immunized large numbers of children, but been criticized by other NGOs for inadequate funding of health system strengthening.

    One of GAVI’s senior representatives reported that Bill Gates often told him in private conversations ‘that he is vehemently ‘against’ health systems (…) he basically said it is a complete waste of money, that there is no evidence that it works, so I will not see a dollar or cent of my money go to the strengthening of health systems.’

    As of 2017 only 10.6 percent (US$862.5 million) of GAVI’s total commitments between 2000 and 2013 had been dedicated to health system strengthening, whereas more than 78.6 percent (US$6,405.4 million) have been used for vaccine support. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) states that, while GAVI has helped to lower prices of new and underused vaccines for eligible countries, the cost to fully immunize a child was 68-times more expensive in 2014 than it was in 2001.

    According to long-time Gates critic James Love, Gates ‘uses his philanthropy to advance a pro-patent agenda on pharmaceutical drugs, even in countries that are really poor.’

    Safe Treatment?

    This article makes no bold claims regarding the efficacy of any treatments, but the overwhelmingly negative reaction of legacy media to research pointing to the efficacy of the off-patent drug Ivermectin suggests that vested pharmaceutical interests wished to undermine public confidence in any scientific arguments regarding its efficacy.

    In June, 2020, a laboratory study demonstrated it was ‘an inhibitor of the causative virus’ (Caly, 2020). Later, a Systematic Review, Meta-analysis that included twenty-four randomized controlled trials said: ‘Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin.’

    In a predictable example of “fact-checking” where an outlandish claim is used to discredit a compelling hypothesis, the Poynter Institute quoted a social media post ‘rating’ the claim that Ivermectin basically ‘basically obliterates’ as ‘false.’

    The Guardian’s dedication to discrediting the meta-analysis also suggested vested interests were at work, and contrasts with a failure to report on the British Medical Journal’s account of a whistle blower alleging serious data integrity issues during Pfizer’s vaccine trial.

    It should hardly be controversial – let alone dismissed as a conspiracy theory – to argue that the weight of evidence points to a ‘Gates-Approach’ lying behind ongoing adoption by most Western governments of unprecedented suppression measures in support of universal vaccination – notwithstanding potential treatment alternatives – leading to the introduction of vaccine passports, as Gates “predicted” in April, 2020. This also occurred alongside a familiar ‘rhetoric supportive of ‘holistic’ health systems.’

    It is now clear that consent for lockdowns, especially in the Anglophone world, was manufactured through wildly inaccurate epidemiological assessments of an infection fatality rate of 0.9% in the notorious Imperial College paper. This estimate has since been adjusted to 0.2% (available on the WHO website), a figure which Joffe argues is likely ‘a large over-estimate.’

    It is also clear that globally mortality statistics for COVID-19 have been systematically exaggerated. This manipulation can be traced to a WHO document from April, 2020 entitled ‘International Guidelines for Certification and Classification (Coding) of COVID-19 as Cause of Death’. It set out strict rules for the registration of COVID-19 deaths, which differ fundamentally from registration for other causes. The guidelines define a COVID-19 mortality as ‘a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID disease (e.g. trauma).’

    It is revealingly that in a country such as Ireland since the pandemic began the mean age of death from COVID-19 has been eighty years of age (eight-two being the median age), just two years younger than the average age of death, and that level of mortality through the years 2018-2020 (2018: 31,116; 2019: 31,134; 2020: 31,765) show little difference.[vi]

    For most people COVID-19 is a virus that poses little danger. Prior to the arrival of a vaccine, a U.K. study from October, 2020 found 76.5% of a random sample who tested positive reported no symptoms, and 86.1% reported none specific to COVID-19. Moreover, an article from Peter Doshi in the British Medical Journal in September, 2020, stated: ‘At least six studies have reported T cell reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 in 20% to 50% of people with no known exposure to the virus’; apparently vindicating Sunetra Gupta’s “controversial” paper, over which the Financial Times cast doubt.

    It should not be controversial to argue that morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 ought to have been weighed against the global impact of lockdowns. On that score, a new paper jointly by authored by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in the US, Lund University, in Sweden and the Centre for Political Studies, in Denmark concluded that lockdowns in Europe and the US decreased COVID-19 mortality by a measly 0.2% on average.

    Conclusions

    A “totalizing” discourse of a COVID-19 conspiracy theory identifies a preordained plan being set in motion by malicious actors, wherein the pandemic culminates in a dangerous vaccine being foisted on a brainwashed population. This might lead to an assumption that such vaccines invariably give rise to severe adverse reactions that are systematically covered up. Such an account does not demand evidence as events are simply unfolding “as planned.”

    In reality, however, events rarely follow a preordained pattern, and even in circumstances of regulatory capture state agencies are never entirely bereft of integrity. Moreover, such accounts divert attention from probing interrogation of the efficacy of vaccines and the desirability of universal uptake of a medication that does not block transmission, especially one rushed to the market, and which may cause unforeseen adverse reactions.

    It is also apparent that public perception of the efficacy of vaccines has been distorted by the media’s reporting of relative risk reduction, as opposed to absolute risk reduction, which is just 0·84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.

    Moreover, importantly, in January, 2021, Peter Doshi and Donald Light in the Scientific American objected to the undermining of ‘the scientific integrity of the double-blinded clinical trial the company—and other companies—have been conducting, before statistically valid information can be gathered on how effectively the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, intensive care admissions or deaths.’

    This came after Pfizer pleaded an “ethical responsibility” to unblind its trial and offer the vaccine to those who received a placebo. The authors argue that ‘there was another way to make an unapproved vaccine available to those who need it without undermining a trial. It’s called “expanded access.” Expanded access enables any clinician to apply on behalf of their patient to the FDA for a drug or vaccine not yet approved. The FDA almost always approves it quickly.’

    In terms of any actual conspiracy or contrivance to raise prices along the lines of tendencies that Adam Smith pointed to among gentlemen of commerce, the role played by Bill Gates has been, doubtless, more complex than many conspiracy theorists allow for. However, in circumstances where a billionaire with a history of monopolistic aspirations promotes an agenda aligning with his financial interests it should come as no surprise that colourful theories abound; especially with many journalists seemingly inhibited from enquiring into his Foundation’s activities.

    Indeed, ironically, the aforementioned Guardian journalist John Naughton recently described Gates while Microsoft CEO as having acted like ‘a mogul who is incredulous that the government would dare to obstruct his route to world domination.’ Does such a leopard ever change his spots?

    Sadly, the amplification of the outlandish claims of conspiracy theorists by so-called “fact checkers” could be causing reputational damage to genuine expertise, and allow demagogues reliant on angry mobs to say: “I told you so.” The propagandist role of “fact checkers” has undermined genuine investigative reporting, much of which already occurs on the margins.

    In the early stages of the pandemic especially, difficulties in reporting were compounded by deficits in scientific understanding among overworked journalists in precarious employment, who were encouraged to justify unprecedented lockdowns as a form of social solidarity. The assumption that by “following the science” a journalist is adequately performing his or her role is a dangerous fallacy, which does not take account of how diverging scientific arguments may be concealed.

    In the absence of sufficient independent journalism, and amidst censorship of alternative scientific opinion, troubling questions remain unanswered as the pandemic draws to a close. Perhaps we will never know the full story. Nonetheless, it is vital that adequate cost-benefit analyses (including with access to full trial data) are conducted on all pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions in future.

    Feature Image (c) Daniele Idini: The Burning of “the Witch of Winter” in Cardano al Campo, Lombardy, Italy.

    We are an independent media platform dependent on readers’ support. You can make a one-off contribution via Buy Me a Coffee or better still on an ongoing basis through Patreon. Any amount you can afford is really appreciated.

    [i][i] Karl Popper (1972). Conjectures and Refutations, 4th ed. London: Routledge Kegan Paul. pp. 123–125.

    [ii] Hannah Arendt (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, p.140

    [iii] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, book 1, chapter 10, par. 2).

    [iv] Seymour Hersh, Reporter, 2018, p.247.

    [v] Rusbridger, Alan, The Remaking of Journalism and Why it Matters, 2018, p.163-181

    [vi] Worldometre attributes 1,736 deaths to COVID-19 by December 31st, 2020.

  • Covid-19: Unanswered Questions

    Confusion and fear are to be expected in novel situations where experience is limited; this should fade as understanding grows. Such is the natural cycle. When governments employ behavioural psychologists to induce fears in order to control and coerce the population, however, we have to question their motives and methods.

    Initially we were advised that a zoonotic virus crossed species: horseshoe bat to pangolin and then to humans, via the food chain. Ghastly images were shown nightly of a range of exotic creatures that Chinese people – portrayed in somewhat xenophobic terms because of their, to us, foreign tastes – supposedly enjoy consuming. This outbreak witnessed sagacious, and wealthy, heads knowingly saying ‘I told you so.’

    And apparently we can expect much more, and worse, in the future because of the ways in which we live and eat. Last year any question of whether it could have come from any other source was shot down as absurd by dubious fact checkers, and freighted with conspiracy theory fairy dust.

    This despite Wuhan containing a level 4 BSL laboratory, and three members of its staff being hospitalised in November 2019 with coronavirus-like respiratory symptoms. Furthermore, this same laboratory was conducting gain of function research into coronaviruses, through a grant form EcoHealth Alliance, an organisation funded by U.S. National Institutes for Health. This type of research using viruses was banned by the Obama administration as being too risky.

    Weaponising

    This same research is not far removed from the process of weaponising a pathogenic organism. So why did NIH fund this laboratory to carry out this type of research, and who else knew of the potential risks, and incentives, for finding a novel infective agent and researching possible treatments and vaccines?

    The first we in the West learnt about any of this came from the videos on TV and social media of people dropping dead in the street – in hindsight clearly not coronavirus cases – and the Chinese locking down it citizens. Next there was Italy, with coffins being carted away by military trucks.

    These were all carefully orchestrated publicity stunts, but who was responsible? Who decided to broadcast uncritically these sensational images? The world took note, a pandemic was declared and governments around the world, almost uniformly, imposed harsh and unprecedented restrictive measures on their citizens.

    In Britain the initial plan was to protect the vulnerable, through cocooning, whilst awaiting herd immunity in the young. But there followed a swift turnaround in the face of public outcry. In Europe only Sweden resisted the clamour to lockdown and was pilloried in the international media. ‘Sweden has become the World’s Cautionary Tale’ declared The New York Times in July, 2020.

    The British government’s approach was strongly influenced by the epidemiological modelling of Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson, of previous forecasting fiascos. For example, he predicted three to four million deaths from Swine Flu in 2009, which ultimately resulted in less than 300,000 global fatalities.

    Ferguson’s Imperial paper predicted 500,000 deaths in the U.K. in an unmitigated scenario, and on March 20th, told the New York Times that the ‘best case outcome’ for the U.S. was a death toll of 1.1 million, rising to 2.2 million in a worst case scenario. As of June, the U.S. has seen just over 600,000 deaths, and the U.K. 127,945, in circumstances where the attribution of death to Covid-19 is often deceptive.

    Further doom and gloom laden scenarios was provided by Professor Christian Drosten, head of the institute of virology, Charite university hospital, Berlin, while alternate modelling provided by Professor Michael Levitt, Stanford University and Nobel laureate was ignored.

    PCR Testing

    Dorsten’s main contribution to this story is his paper ‘Detection of 2019 novel corona virus by real time RT-PCR’ outlining the basis for the widely used Drosten-PCR test that has been criticised for multiple errors, and the haste with which it was published. This test is now the most widely used diagnostic test for Sars-CoV2.

    This is despite its invenor Kary Mullis’s – Nobel laureate for chemistry for his work with PCR – stating unequivocally ‘it doesn’t tell you if you are sick’.

    https://twitter.com/zaidzamanhamid/status/1384873889591873536

    There are a number of criticisms of the Drosten method in that he reportedly developed it using partial genetic sequences provided by the Chinese, in conjunction with sequences from other corona viruses. Furthermore, the test which according to Kary Mullis is a quantitative test, is not reported to clinicians this way.

    Instead a qualitative result ‘detected’ or ’not detected’ is reported without giving the cycle threshold, even after the WHO suggested physicians should be given this figure. The significance of the cycle threshold harks back to Kary Mullis’s ‘it doesn’t tell you if you are sick.’ Even Dr Anthony Fauci of the NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) has stated that at ct values of greater than 35 it is unlikely that any live virus is present in the patient.

    https://twitter.com/jimgris/status/1326518250386063361?lang=en

    Why then did Irish laboratories use ct values as high as 45? And why did we go from testing inpatients with PCR, knowing the false positive rate, to the community setting and especially the asymptomatic, given asymptomatics are often ‘false positives’, leading to an inflated ‘case’ count.

    One has to wonder if the state’s spending of an estimated €400 million on PCR testing has been a case of noses in the trough not wanting to avoid the public smelling the coffee. Who were the people with vested or conflicted interests in this issue?

    Churchillian Speeches

    Most Western governments, including Australia and New Zealand, paraded their respective Prime Ministers before the cameras to make speeches of Churchillian gravity, implicitly likening the threat of Sars-CoV2 to World War II. Leo Varadkar even paraphrased Churchill in his first speech to the nation -’never will so many ask so much of so few,’ before imposing unprecedented draconian lockdown measures, based on fear.

    Along the way we have heard words of caution from notable academics including Stanford Professors John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya, as well as Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University. But these voices were hardly ever heard on Irish mainstream media.

    These authorities cautioned that measures would disproportionately hurt the poor and vulnerable; that severe illness was mainly confined to a recognisable cohort, and that there was no evidence for the efficacy of lockdown measures.

    Nobody listened. Instead the government closed schools, prevented people from earning a living, stopped all cultural and sporting activity, prohibited religious worship and confined travel to within five kilometres of home.

    For months elderly people languished alone in nursing homes and hospitals, some dying alone; women gave birth without their partners; funeral rites were severely curtailed, as basic civil rights were completely ignored in response to an illness with an estimated infection fatality rate of 0.05% for anyone under the age of seventy years.

    Every night the state broadcaster became the government’s harbinger of doom with the recitation of nightly death tolls. What purpose other than ratcheting up of fear did this serve?

    Through the diligent questioning of Michael McNamara TD, however, we know that the reported mortality figures included anyone testing positive in the previous twenty-eight days with a PCR test, no matter what their underlying condition. Deaths unassociated with Sars-CoV2 were obviously irrelevant.

    They turned out to be very relevant as the CSO annual death figures of 6.4 per 1000, which were little different to previous years, and even less than 2013. Why then, when death figures dropped, did reporting switch to the spurious concept of ‘cases’, defined by a positive PCR test? Why did the Irish government shamefully enlist the services of RTE in terrifying the nation, and why did the state broadcaster acquiesce? Answers on the back of a postcard…

    Disproportionately Affected

    The message ‘we are all in this together’ was a big lie. The disease disproportionately killed people over the age of eighty, especially those in nursing homes, many of whom were needlessly infected after being transferred to hospitals with testing withdrawn at the height of the pandemic in spring 2020. The obese, those with diabetes, chronic heart and lung diseases are also disproportionately affected.

    These pre-existing morbidities are more prevalent among lower socioeconomic groups in society. So we were clearly never all in this together.

    Civil servants, including politicians and the medical profession, those working in IT and for media corporations, could easily work from home, but nearly half a million people had to stop work for the duration, especially those in the tourism and hospitality sectors. These are mainly young people, and like children, most would only have been mildly effected by the virus. So why were they forced to suffer unnecessarily?

    Moreover, why did small retail outlets have to close for months on end, while off licenses and fast food chains were deemed essential services?!

    States of Fear

    The kind of Propaganda devised by Sigmund Freud’s grandson Edward Bernays who infamously made it fashionable for women to smoke, was evident in the government’s manipulation of the figures, and the media’s delivery. Bernays wrote in Propaganda (1928) ‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.’

    A host of celebrity scientists appeared, many with Conor McGregor levels of empathy, only better elocution, a gentler demeanour and less tattoos. Trite experiments were undertaken on popular TV shows, where we found dour funereal forecasts from infectious disease experts, who were invariably wrong in their predictions, and inane squeaking from a misplaced neuroscience.

    All of these ‘experts’ sang in unison. Dissenting voices were heard briefly and infrequently. Some lost their jobs merely for disagreeing with the bull-in-a-china shop approach taken by the HSE/NPHET/government.

    In her new book States of Fear Laura Dodsworth outlines how the UK government used behavioural psychologists, probably via their Nudge unit, to control the population through the deployment of carefully selected ‘experts’ and repetitive messaging on news broadcasting.

    This was substantiated in the recent testimonies by Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser to Boris Johnson. ISAG were also familiar with scaremongering techniques, as intercepted emails highlight their tactic of targeting and discrediting individuals, and keeping fear ramped up as a tool in their ZeroCovid campaign.

    To quote Bernays again ‘there are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realised to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scene.’

    Using this sinister playbook, between them NPHET, ISAG and the government managed to sow a level of fear, suspicion and division in society that may take years to unravel.

    Flatten the Curve?

    Despite all the hype around flattening the curve to save the health service at the beginning of the pandemic, and the use of draconian measures to do so, alas nothing was done to treat patients at home.

    Several readily available, cheap and relatively safe products, were hypothesised to have positive benefits in the early stages of a Sars-CoV2 infection, but there were systematic efforts to steer physicians away from these.

    The ICGP guidelines for GPs on the treatment of early Sars-CoV2 amounts to do nothing, and wait for patients to get better, or if they fall really ill send them into hospital. Some doctors in the USA lost their licenses for prescribing these medications, and others in Ireland faced censure by the Medical Council.

    According to physicians like Peter McCullough, Professor of Medicine at Baylor University, Texas in conjunction with AAPS (The association of American Physicians and Surgeons), and separately Dr Pierre Kory of FLCCCA (Front Line Covid Critical Care Alliance) Sars-CoV2 was empirically treatable, especially in that first week before the patient became very unwell.

    https://vimeo.com/560523610

    So, despite a concerted effort to vilify them, they treated their patients. Why did Irish GPs, save for a few, fail to do so?

    In doing nothing did many patients needlessly died? With our widespread application of lockdowns and our disregard for focused protection measures, as advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration (which has garnered 850,000 signatures, including 43,000 from medical practitioners) coupled with our refusal to at least try and treat patients, have we done a great disservice to our patients?

    Silencing of Dissent

    Sweden did not adopt anything like the same draconian measures, and their economy and society has not been disrupted to anything like the same extent as Ireland’s. Yet their mortality figures compare favourably, especially when adjusted for the relative age of each population.

    Perhaps one of the main reasons for the concerted campaign to ensure that no other treatments were deemed suitable for the early treatment or prevention of the disease was the FDA criterion for an EUA (emergency use exemption).  No such exemption would have been granted to a product in such an early stage of development, without animal or human study data, except in what are deemed to be extraordinary circumstances.

    €26 billion – the amount Pfizer expects to earn this year after producing the first Covid-19 vaccine – might buy a lot of scientific validation, and political influence.

    The undue haste with which these vaccines have been rolled out demands sceptical enquiry, especially in relation to two particular cohorts: pregnant women and children. As clinicians we generally exercise extreme caution in these groups.

    So why is it that for a condition with an overall IFR of 0.15% have we discarded this caution? Linking vaccination status to the right to work, travel, attend cultural and sporting events is divisive, coercing those who wish to exercise a degree of caution and/or exercise autonomy over their health.

    Without the questionable concept that is asymptomatic spread, there is no justification for vaccinating anyone in low risk groups, and certainly no justification for using bully tactics.

    Despite all these glaring questions, there has been a deafening silence from the medical profession in Ireland, and those that have spoken out have been quickly silenced. Is this how we are going to deal with complex issues in future? Adopting binary, categorical approaches without nuance leaves no room for debate.

    RTE have paid lip service to the notion of an informed debate, hosting Martin Feeley and then later pitching Professors John Lee and Sunetra Gupta into debate with hand-picked stalwarts.

    Moneybags

    In Ireland today scepticism is viewed as a contagion to be eradicated, with compliance seen as the perfect state of health. As a nation we must ask: why have so many been so quiet; why has fear replaced reason, and groupthink taken over once again?

    One must question the role of doctors ‘stuffing their mouths with gold’ as Aneurin Bevan put it in relation to British doctors at the inception of the NHS. A quick look at the 2019 PCRS payments to GPs shows a healthy €85 million in government expenditure. This, however, mushroomed to over €200 million for the same period in 2020.

    Some were clearly making a killing during the pandemic. And whose idea was it to advise doctors not to see patients face-to-face during the pandemic? If a doctor won’t see you who will?

    Further to this windfall will be vaccination payments at a cool €60 per patient. Is it any wonder GPs want everyone vaccinated?

    There may even be boosters for variants required for everyone on the planet! The media should be asking the question: who is benefitting from this Monty-Pythonesque situation?

    Certainly any government with the slightest authoritarian bent, which it transpires appears to be most Western ‘democracies’. It really is worrying how little opposition there has been to Chinese-inspired lockdowns, with opponents dismissed as a far right fringe – even by the apparently left-wing opposition – despite the obvious damage these policies have done to the poorest, who were also least protected by the measures.

    Why did so many European governments fall into line so quickly, when even a passing familiarity with EU politics would indicate that it can take years for Member States to agree on the number of legs that the average cow possesses?

    If you intuit that something is just not right, and baulk at jingoistic phrases like ‘the new normal’ and ‘build back better’ ask yourself cui bono or ‘who benefits’, and don’t let the fear of being labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’ dissuade you from asking reasonable questions.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Covid-19: A Simple Moral Calculus

    Introduction

    There are still many unresolved questions regarding the pathogenesis of this disease and especially the reasons underlying the extremely different clinical course, ranging from asymptomatic forms to severe manifestations, including the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). SARS-CoV-2 showed phylogenetic similarities to both SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV viruses, and some of the clinical features are shared between COVID-19 and previously identified beta-coronavirus infections. Available evidence indicate[s] that the so called “cytokine storm” an uncontrolled over-production of soluble markers of inflammation which, in turn, sustain an aberrant systemic inflammatory response, is a major [factor] responsible for the occurrence of ARDS.
    Francesca Coperchinia, Luca Chiovatoab, Laura Croceab, Flavia Magriab, Mario Rotondi, ‘The cytokine storm in COVID-19: ‘An overview of the involvement of the chemokine/chemokine-receptor system’ (2020)[i]

    For the first time in the post-war history of epidemics, there is a reversal of which countries are most heavily affected by a disease pandemic. By early May, 2020, more than 90% of all reported deaths from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been in the world’s richest countries; if China, Brazil, and Iran are included in this group, then that number rises to 96%.
    Richard Cash and Vikram Patel, ‘Has COVID-19 subverted global health?’ (2020)[ii]

    The evidence of Hitler’s as well as Stalin’s dictatorship points clearly to the fact that isolation of atomized individuals provides not only the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the top of the whole structure.
    Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

    All this hate and violence [in the world] is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.[iii]
    Sacha Baron Cohen, speech, (2019)

    Comment is free, but facts are sacred.[iv]
    John Scott, editor of The Guardian, (1921)

    In March, 2020 a simple moral calculus seized Western consciousness. Prompted by grim epidemiological assessments, and distressing accounts from emergency doctors in Northern Italy, a call to #flattenthecurve resounded across social media. The global force of hashtag activism led millions to renounce meeting friends and family in an extraordinary display of solidarity with vulnerable older people.

    Twitter, which had previously styled itself ‘the free speech-wing of the free-speech party’[v], allowing all manner of unmoderated content to appear on controversial subjects such as climate change – as well as hate speech from President Donald Trump – abruptly changed policy on March 16th saying it would be:

    Broadening our definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information. Rather than reports, we will enforce this in close coordination with trusted partners, including public health authorities and governments, and continue to use and consult with information from those sources when reviewing content.[vi]

    Problematically, however, there is no canonical response to the global pandemic and significant debate has occurred between authoritative sources, as different governments pursue varied policies, with mixed results. This has created potential for national authorities to impugn or disqualify reasonable criticism by grafting health warnings on accounts at variance with a particular government’s guidance, or wider political objectives.

    Twitter has not acted alone, Google has taken unprecedented steps to erase material that violates ‘Community Guidelines’: ‘including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of global or local health authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.’[vii]

    Typically, Facebook adopted a laissez faire approach, although users who had read, watched or shared ‘false’ coronavirus content received a pop-up alert urging them to go the World Health Organisation’s website.[viii]

    Whatever one’s view on the importance of social distancing, our readers may recall Ronald Dworkin’s pronouncement that ‘free speech is a condition of legitimate government.’ He argues that the universality of speech as a mode of rational discourse and scientific inquiry could act as truth-seeking counterweight to mass hysteria, negating unreason and prejudice.[ix]

    Moreover, Stephen Sedley, the great English judge, called freedom of expression ‘the lifeblood of democracy;[x] or as George Orwell put it in the introduction to Animal Farm (1945): ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’

    Accepting Covid-19 represents an extraordinary challenge requiring a concerted response, censorship by Big Data in such a blanket form, including of recognised academic authorities, surely only lends credence to conspiracy theories, fomented by the far-right in particular. Disregard for freedom of expression casts doubt over the integrity of scientific inquiry and inhibits rational debate.

    Reappraisal

    The English-speaking world was led to believe in early March that Covid-19 had a mortality rate of between 2% and 3% [xi], and that its spread would be exponential, with a reproductive (R) value of 3 (i.e. one person would infect another three), compared to an R value of 1.28 for seasonal influenza.[xii] Moreover, based on Lombardy’s experience, it seemed the death toll would include hundreds or even thousands of health service workers tending to the sick.

    As the weeks passed the assessment of the mortality rate was scaled back to 1.4%,[xiii] but by then the virus seemed to be moving through Europe like a forest fire at the height of summer. Soon the number of daily mortalities from the disease was dominating news headlines.

    Insofar as possible, most reasonable citizens abided by the popular injunction to #staythefuckathome, entrusting governments with emergency powers to guard against errant behaviour.

    As time passed, however, we learnt that early projections on the infection fatality rate seem to have been significantly wide of the mark. Lone Simonsen professor of population health sciences at Roskilde University in Denmark recently said she expected a infection fatality rate ‘possibly as low as 0.2% or 0.3%’, while Professor Emeritus at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm Professor Johan Giesecke has suggested an even lower figure of 0.1%.[xiv] The U.S. Centre for Disease Control’s best estimate implies a COVID-19 infection fatality rate below 0.3%.[xv]

    Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford has gone lower still estimating an infection fatality rate of between 0.1% and 0.01%.[xvi] She bases this on an assumption the virus has been in circulation far longer than initially assumed, an argument gaining traction, with satellite data suggesting the pandemic hit Wuhan in China a far back as October,[xvii] while France’s ‘first known case’ was in December.[xviii] In truth, however, the infection fatality rate appears to depend hugely on the nature of any society, and not simply its age profile, for reasons to be discussed.

    An aggravated perception of danger is also likely to have occurred through media reports juxtaposing confirmed cases, with mortalities. Thus The Guardian reported on May 16th that, ‘According to the Johns Hopkins University tracker there are 4,531,811 confirmed cases worldwide. The number of people who have lost their lives is 307,001 according to official tolls, but the true number is likely to be much higher.’[xix]

    On a cursory examination, one might assume a infection fatality rate of 6-7%, or “much higher”. Little wonder then that people have been jumping out of the way of one another on footpaths.

    This infection fatality rate may well prove to be considerably higher than a seasonal flu mortality rate of 0.04%, but it is instructive that during one such outbreak in 2017-2018 that there were 61,000 influenza-associated deaths in the United States alone.[xx] Yet these preventable deaths hardly registered on the national consciousness, unlike like the victims of Covid-19.

    As Simon Jenkins, one of the few Guardian commentators who has kept the pandemic in perspective put it: ‘When hysteria is rife, we might try some history.’[xxi]

    Epidemiological Modelling

    Based on a infection fatality rate of 0.9%, in late March an Imperial College team led by Professor Neil Ferguson predicted that unless stern measures were taken there would be half-a-million deaths in the U.K. and over two million in the U.S.:[xxii]

    But as early as March Nobel-prize winning bio-physicist Michael Levitt was identifying common sense flaws in prominent epidemiological modelling, saying:

    In exponential growth models, you assume that new people can be infected every day, because you keep meeting new people. But, if you consider your own social circle, you basically meet the same people every day …. You can meet new people on public transportation, for example; but even on the bus, after sometime most passengers will either be infected or immune.[xxiii]

    Levitt assumed the R rate would decline once reasonable steps were taken, such as social distancing and removing the possibility of close confinement in pubs, at sporting events and other so-called ‘super-spreader’ events. [xxiv] In March Levitt told Ferguson that he had over-estimated the potential death toll by ‘10 or 12 times.’[xxv]

    Moreover, given only one branch seems to have closed its doors over the course of the outbreak in the U.K.,[xxvi] it appears early panic about contagions occurring in supermarkets, which is still leading to people disinfecting their shopping, were largely unfounded.[xxvii]

    Mistaking Flu for Coronavirus

    Mortalities from novel flu viruses tend to be among individuals under the age of forty. This is because ‘emergent viruses resembled those that had circulated previously within the lifespan of then-living people.’[xxviii] This means older peoples’ immune systems are generally better equipped with antibodies to fight off such novel infections.

    As yet it is still unclear whether exposure to other coronaviruses, including the ‘common cold’, provide greater immunity to Covid-19, although one recent paper does suggest, ‘cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating “common cold” coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.’[xxix]

    It remains to be seen whether the death toll from Covid-19 will scale the heights of the ‘Asian’ Flu (H2S2) of 1957, (with a an estimated median R value of 1.65[xxx]) which led to 1 million deaths around the world, including 80,000 in the United States; or the ‘Hong Kong’ flu (H3N2) of 1968 (with an estimated median R value of 1.80) that was responsible for between 1 million and 4 million[xxxi]; let alone the Spanish Influenza (H1N1) outbreak of 1918 that carried off an astonishing fifty million people[xxxii], (with an estimated median R value of 3 [xxxiii]), most of whom were in the prime of their lives.

    Hugh Pennington emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen recently took an optimistic view on the prospect of avoiding a dreaded ‘second wave’ of infections:

    The idea of a second wave comes almost entirely from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. The first wave occurred in June and July and the second in October and November. The first was mild, the second was lethal. It is yet to be explained why the infections occurred in waves and why the virus faded away after the first and then returned.

    ‘Flu is very different from Covid-19’ Pennington says, ‘Although both are commonly spread by the respiratory route, and both have infected prime ministers, the more we learn about Covid-19, the less its biology and epidemiology resemble that of flu.’

    He further contends, ‘In the absence of controls, flu has an R rate of seven [presumably he means at the height of a pandemic]; Covid-19’s is between two and three [lower seemingly than the earlier assessment]. And far more than with flu, Covid-19 cases have very commonly occurred in clusters.’

    Conflation with flu modelling may also be discounting wider “imperviousness” than assumed. UCL Professor Karl Friston famously drew on astrophysics to explain Germany’s low infection rate relative to the U.K.:

    it looks as if the low German fatality rate is not due to their superior testing capacity, but rather to the fact that the average German is less likely to get infected and die than the average Brit. Why? There are various possible explanations, but one that looks increasingly likely is that Germany has more immunological “dark matter” – people who are impervious to infection, perhaps because they are geographically isolated or have some kind of natural resistance. This is like dark matter in the universe: we can’t see it, but we know it must be there to account for what we can see.[xxxiv]

    The curious case of Japan also indicates that certain societies – or nations – are considerably more impervious than others. As the country in the world with the oldest population in the world, and with heavy urban densities, one would have expected the virus to have had a devastating impact there, yet:

    No restrictions were placed on residents’ movements, and businesses from restaurants to hairdressers stayed open. No high-tech apps that tracked people’s movements were deployed. The country doesn’t have a center for disease control. And even as nations were exhorted to “test, test, test,” Japan has tested just 0.2% of its population — one of the lowest rates among developed countries.[xxxv]

    Japan’s population of over 125 million experienced less than 1,000 deaths from Covid-19.

    Nonetheless, apart from underlying exacerbating factors such as population density and an ageing population – relative to its Irish neighbour at least[xxxvi] – as well as a high obesity rate,[xxxvii] the U.K.’s high death toll can, at least in part, be attributed to Boris Johnson’s government’s ‘sleepwalking’ through the beginning of the crisis,[xxxviii] almost wlilfully ignoring the threat, and putting out highly inappropriate messages, including on shaking hands.

    Nevertheless, the suggestion aired on an episode of Channel 4’s Dispatches that 13,000 deaths would have been avoided if a lockdown or stay-at-home order had been introduced at the beginning of March came from a health analyst, George Batchelor, rather than a recognised academic authority, and should be treated with caution.

    Revealingly, in Hong Kong where 90% of cases were contact traced, ‘the number of individual secondary cases was significantly higher within social settings such as bars and restaurants compared to family or work exposures.’ In time it may be determined that Boris Johnson’s hesitation in closing pubs was his most costly mistake.[xxxix]

    QALY

    In Italy, where average life expectancy is approximately eighty-three-years-of-age, the average age of mortality from Covid-19 was approximately eighty years-of-age.[xl] This figure includes over one hundred health care workers.[xli] Many of these premature deaths occurred in the clusters that Hugh Pennington refers to – perhaps from heavy ‘viral load’[xlii] encountered in poorly ventilated hospitals and care home facilities.

    The overall loss of life years from the Covid-19 pandemic may prove minimal, however, compared to novel flu viruses, which have mainly afflicted the young over the past century.

    This is not to diminish the value of any life, but public health interventions are conventionally given a comparative value (QALY – Quality-adjusted Life Year), ‘which is routinely used as a summary measure of health outcome for economic evaluation, which incorporates the impact on both the quantity and quality of life.’ The financial cost of any intervention, including a lockdown or stay-at-home order, must be measured against its impact on both quantity and quality of life.

    There are now serious question marks around the efficacy of lockdowns. Using ‘Bayesian’ modelling a team led by Professor Simon Wood in Bristol University supports Michael Levin’s assessment that early epidemiological models were flawed, suggesting that ‘the number of new daily infections in the UK peaked some days before lock down was implemented, although it does not completely rule out a slightly later peak.’[xliii]

    Furthermore, a quasi-experimental study carried out by the University of East Anglia concluded that stay at home orders, or lockdowns were ‘not associated with any independent additional impact.’[xlvi] Another recent study in Nature, however, offers a different assessment, but includes data from China, which may be unreliable, and where the extremity of the measures are  incompatible with democratic norms. Lockdown advocates also generally assume a higher infection fatality rate than recent reappraisals.

    During lockdown, across Europe and beyond, cases and deaths occured in clusters: within enclosed spaces such as care homes,[xliv] hospitals and meat packing plants,[xlv] but also households. Hashtag activism informed the public in most Western countries about the pandemic, who were refraining from unnecessary social encounters, and travel, already.

    This may be why the Norwegian Institute for Public Health has recently called for the government to avoid such a far-reaching measure if the country is hit by a second wave.[xlvii] Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg also bravely admitted before a national television audience: ‘I probably took many of the decisions out of fear.’[xlviii]

    The adverse consequences of lockdowns – including a spike in domestic violence[xlix], its effect on children[l] and unprecedented economic impacts, especially on SMEs and casual workers, also cannot be discounted.

    Worst of all has been the effect of draconian lockdowns on developing countries, such as India. Vikram Patel and Richard Cash (both of Harvard University) wrote in The Lancet:

    we suggest that countries must let people get on with their lives—to work, earn money, and put food on the table. Let shop keepers open and sell their wares and provide services. Let construction workers return to building sites. Allow farmers to harvest their crops and to transport them to be sold on the open market. Allow health workers to do their daily work as before, with sensible precautions such as use of gloves and masks to minimise the risk of exposure to the virus. And allow the average citizen to travel freely with restrictions only applied to clusters where lockdowns are necessary. Livelihoods are an imperative for saving lives. Some will say such an approach, which runs the risk of spreading disease, implies that the lives of poor people are not as valuable as those in wealthy countries. Nothing could be further from the truth. The policies of widespread lockdowns and a focus on high-technology health care might unintentionally lead to even more sickness and death, disproportionately affecting the poor.

    These arguments also apply in wealthier societies, as many among the poor do not have the privilege of being able to work from home, and may participate in the black economy. Government supports are generally inadequate and do not last indefinitely.

    The preceding points are not a definitive argument in favour of Sweden’s policies during the pandemic, faults in which have been acknowledged by its chief architect Anders Tegnell. But it is important for policy makers to recognise the cost of lockdowns, especially for extended periods. Also, importantly, handing discretionary powers to police forces in such circumstances establishes a dangerous precedent.

    Fatalism

    In solitude we have been consumed by a story that feeds into pressing contemporary dilemmas, including on the role of scientific expertise. This can be situated within a long-standing division in Western culture between rationality and intuition, evident during World War II in the conflict between Communism and Fascism.

    As Martin Glover put it:

    Stalin, as a version of the Enlightenment idea of redesigning society on a rational basis, shared the catastrophic implications of carrying out such a project without moral or human restraints. Nazism was against the universalism of Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers. It was tribal: not rights of man, but the German right to lebensraum … Stalinism shows what can happen when Enlightenment ideas are applied wrongly, Nazism shows what can happen when unenlightened ideas are applied rightly.[liii]

    A form of this has spilled into the so-called Culture Wars, including identity politics, that have raged in particular since the 1990s, culminating in Brexit and President Trump, but it is also perhaps evident at a psychological level within most of our personalities. Importantly, excesses of rationality can be as destructive as Fascism, as we saw under the guise of Communism.

    Responses to the pandemic have also been conditioned by prior faith in, or suspicion of, the Western medical system – including from so-called anti-vaxxers – with Populist right-wing politicians dismissing concerns about a bad flu,[liv] and offering to take it on the chin.[lv] In contrast, some on the left seem to have viewed the crisis as an opportunity to enlarge the role of the State, leading to countervailing scientific authorities to be dismissed on ideological grounds.

    There may also have been a tendency, evident in The Guardian, The New York Times and elsewhere, to heighten outrage against the administrations of Donald Trump in the U.S. and Boris Johnson in the U.K. by front-loading mortality statistics.

    Another explanation for the extreme response of individuals who consented to prolonged periods of self-isolation – including those of an age profile suggesting they had little to worry about themselves – is an evident fatalism haunting a globally dominant capitalist system. As David Graeber put it:

    Capitalism is a system that enshrines the gambler as an essential part of its operation, in a way that no other has, yet at the same time, capitalism seems to be uniquely incapable of conceiving of its own eternity. Could these two facts be linked?[lvi]

    An understandable fatalism in the face of climate change and mass extinctions, perhaps spilled into reactions to this pandemic, with self-isolation a form of repentance.

    Moreover, the idea of plague as representing divine retribution may operate at an unconscious level. Apart from Biblical episodes such as that visited on Egypt, it is found in ancient epics such as Homer’s Iliad. Thus, when King Agamemnon makes a war prize of Chryseis the daughter of Chryses a priest of Apollo, the sun god takes revenge by unleashing poison-tipped arrows against the Greek army, many of whom succumb to plague.

    More recently, films, such as Outbreak (1995) starring and Dustin Hoffman, and novels such as Jose Saramago’s Blindness (1997), have played on these fears.

    What was Covid-19 but God or Gaia punishing us for our consumerist sins?

    Guardian Angle

    The so-called hashtag activism that prompted civil society to take preventive measures against Covid-19, and which led to many governments to adopt draconian suppression policies, including lockdowns, has been led in the U.K. and Ireland in particular by The Guardian newspaper

    The free digital site with an estimated 42 million monthly visitors[lvii] devoted unrelenting rolling coverage to Covid-19, emphasising the simple moral calculus with a banner across its home page. This has been to the almost complete exclusion of all other content for the months of March, April and May.

    The Guardian’s loss of proportion, and nuance, has been particularly damaging as it is the most trusted newspaper brand in the U.K., including, importantly, among readers aged 18 to 29.[lviii] This may be traced to its position as a global news provider of free content dependent on maintaining an enormous click rate to derive a profit.

    In a recent memoir the former editor Alan Rusbridger describes how: ‘Only by going for reach could you make up for … the ‘frightening disparity’ between the yields in traditional and online media.’[lix]

    He reveals that by mid-2018:

    The Guardian was reaching 150 million browsers each month and a billion page views per month. There was no talk of paywalls: even so, reader revenues had overtaken advertising. And digital revenues – at £109 million – had, for the first time, overtaken the £107.5 million of print revenues. The paper was confidently talking of hitting break-even in 2018/19.[lx]

    The difficulty is that once you have reached such a high threshold, and have taken on hundreds of staff, you have to keep that readership transfixed.

    The Guardian’s increasingly monopolistic position has come at the expense of journalistic diversity, as smaller publishers cannot compete with its reach. Moreover the perceived reliability of its reporting creates a difficulty for competitors wishing to mount a pay wall without significant marketing investment. In such a squeezed field alternatives are increasingly the preserve of billionaires, such as Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay Brothers, Mike Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos. This is having a corrosive effect on democracy, as many of these publications are ideologically tainted, and support vested interests.

    Underling all this, the number of American journalists fell from 60,000 in 1992 to 40,000 in 2009,[lxi] This pattern has been seen all around the world as revenues diminish and workloads increase. In the U.K. Cardiff University researchers recently conducted an analysis of 2,000 U.K. news stories. They discovered the average Fleet Street journalist was filing three times as much as in 1985. Or, to put it another way, journalists now have only one-third of the time they used to have to do their jobs.[lxii]

    This results in what Nick Davies has described as ‘churnalism’, whereby most journalists are passive processors of ‘unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve a political or commercial interest.’[lxiii]

    Hyperbolic Coverage

    An exhaustive assessment of Guardian coverage is beyond the scope of this article, but two examples of their unsatisfactory reporting throughout this crisis should hopefully suffice.

    On Friday, May 15th an article ran under the headline: ‘Dying to go out to eat? Here’s how viruses like Covid-19 spread in a restaurant’.[lxiv] It referred to a video experiment simulating ‘how quickly germs can be spread across a variety of surfaces in environments such as restaurant buffets and cruise ships.’

    To begin with, one guest of 10 at a restaurant buffet is shown with the substance on his hands meant as a stand-in for the coronavirus. Over the course of a typical dining period, the rest of the guests behave in predictable fashion, selecting utensils from serving stations, enjoying their food, checking their phones and so on.

    At the end of the experiment the black light is turned on and the substance is revealed to be smeared everywhere: plates, foodstuff, utensils and even all over some of the guests’ faces.

    A few paragraphs into the article, however, a second experiment demonstrates the positive effect of improved hygiene techniques, after ‘the “infected” person and the other diners take the simple precaution of washing their hands, and utensils and other implements are cleaned or replaced.

    The first difficulty with the study itself is that it is conducted in a canteen-style restaurant – a worst case scenario where cutlery and plates are exposed to many hands. But the most obvious problem is that the headline feeds into a narrative of fear and paranoia, to the detriment of anyone struggling to keep a restaurant afloat.

    Another headline from May 26th paints a lurid picture: ‘Global report: ‘disaster’ looms for millions of children as WHO warns of second peak’.[lxv] Yet it soon apparent that the “disastrous” consequences for children, who are more likely to die after being struck by lightening than from a dose of Covid-19 and barely register as mortalities from the virus,[lxvi] is from increased vulnerability to forced labour and underage marriage. The “second peak” warned of by the WHO in the headline is a non-sequitur that has nothing to do with any elevated danger to children,

    Choice of headline is crucial as many browsers simply scan news sites. A 2010 Pew analysis found that the average visitor spent only 3 minutes 4 seconds per session on the typical news site. That compared with a 2005 survey showing about half of U.S. newspaper readers spent more than thirty minutes reading a daily paper.[lxvii]

    What has gone wrong?

    Clay Shirky writes in Here Comes Everybody (2008):

    When we change the way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to a bee … The hive is a social device, a piece of bee information technology that provides a platform, literally, for the communication and co-ordination that keep the colony viable. Individual bees can’t be understood separately from the colony or from their shared, co-created environment. So it is with human networks.

    He asserts that the ‘Web didn’t introduce a new competitor into the old eco-system, as USA Today had done. The Web created a new ecosystem.’[lxviii]

    The Guardian embraced a form of ‘collaboration media’, which companies and politicians rapidly learned to respect, and fear. Former editor Alan Rusbridger recognised that ‘social media would disrupt conventional politics and transform the speed at which it happened.’ He acknowledges, however, that, ‘It was, obviously, not necessarily good at complexity – though it could link to the complexity. It could be frustratingly reductive. It didn’t patiently and painstakingly report, in the way a good new organisation still did. It was to some extent parasitical.’[lxix]

    Rusbridger also quotes former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans to the effect that ‘an investigation only really began to count once the readers and even the journalists were bored with it.’[lxx] But in an all-consuming demand for clicks, and in the frenzied political era of Trump and Brexit, balance has been lost. Lacking detached and independent journalism we have walked into a prolonged social experiment that will take considerable unravelling.

    A New Hashtag

    On May 25th, 2020, George Perry Floyd, a 46-year-old black man was killed when a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck during an arrest for passing a counterfeit $20 bill. His death brought a wave of demonstrations in major U.S. cities that have spread to other countries, with many protestors donning masks as protection against the virus.

    The hashtag generation has discovered another noble cause in #blacklivesmatter – to be clear #flattenthecurve was certainly well motivated – but let us hope balance and nuance is not lost, and that a deadening conformity does not ensue in debates over race, poverty and the ambit of the state.

    The extraordinary scenes witnessed around the world could also be interpreted as a proxy for societies throwing off the heavy knee of lockdowns, containing a basic human impulse to interact with one another, honouring the exuberant Dionysian element in our nature that had been contained by Apollonian rationality.

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s unnamed narrator from Notes from the Underground (1864) seems to envisage the poles of this division. First, he describes the archetypal rationalist that ‘scientifically’ predicts all outcomes in society:

    All human actions will then of course be calculated, mathematically, like logarithm tables up to 108,000, and recorded in a calendar; or even better, well-intentioned publications will then appear, like the present-day encyclopaedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so precisely calculated and recorded that there will no longer be deliberate acts or adventures in the world.

    But he suggests this would create a reaction:

    I, for example, wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in the midst of all this reasonableness that is to come, suddenly and quite unaccountably some gentleman with an ignoble, or rather a reactionary and mocking physiognomy were to appear and, arms akimbo, say to us all: “Now, gentlemen, what about giving all this reasonableness a good kick with the sole purpose of sending all those logarithms to hell for a while so we can live for a while in accordance with our own stupid will![lxxi]

    Thus an excess of rationality may create conditions for profound irrationality, or even absurdity in the case of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s felicitous calculus.

    What Next?

    We still have to address the public health crisis of a pandemic, requiring substantial reforms in healthcare, architecture and spatial design to contend with a disease that should not be treated as a flu pandemic.

    Once unsustainable lockdowns ease, Western societies with susceptible populations must adapt to life with the virus. A policy of elimination is unrealistic and even cruel, unless we essentially exclude entrants from the outside world, as in New Zealand, or become a police state like China.

    Like a thief in the night, Covid-19 discovered weaknesses in the wealthiest countries in the world that also happen to be among the most unequal. Most obviously it found its way to older individuals, many weakened by increasingly poor diets and sedentarism that is behind a pernicious obesity pandemic.

    It has already been argued that life expectancy is declining in the United States,[lxxii] after two centuries during which it climbed steadily. Our lives, and diets, are simply unsustainable, and perhaps Covid-19 is nature’s (God or Gaia’s?) way of telling us so. The question is whether we are prepared to adopt the environmental approaches to lower the risk of further zoonotic episodes that lead to viruses.

    On a more basic level we need to retrofit buildings – embracing the idea of a healthy home[lxxiii] or workplace that diminishes viral load – and redesign transport systems to prevent contagions. As a priority we require hospital design for better infection control as ‘Building ventilation, whether natural or mechanical serves to dilute droplets nuclei in the air and is the single most important engineering control in the prevention of transmission of airborne infections.’[lxxiv]

    Yet surely we cannot lose the joy of social interaction, or turn romance into an online transaction controlled by algorithms. Great gatherings of people are still the lifeblood of politics, the arts and sport. For these to become historical curiosities, outlawed indefinitely as “super-spreader” events, would be lamentable.

    We have to shake the trauma off somehow, or dance it off perhaps. Above all children cannot be confounded by the fear of their parents and other adults, and have natural inclinations to play frustrated indefinitely. Let us restore the friendly hug or kiss in time. We have to accept a measure of death in exchange for the expression of lives we all value. Society cannot be broken by social distancing.

    Another vital lessons from this pandemic is that we require greater freedom of expression and media diversity. It is unacceptable for unaccountable corporate bodies such as Twitter, Google and Facebook to control narratives indefinitely. In truth, people may have to get used to paying for journalism once again, or at least acknowledge that without payment you are (mostly) getting clickbait.

    In writing ‘the first draft of history’ on Covid-19, The Guardian may be excused for making errors, but nor should the publication be viewed as a neutral conduit of facts either, unmotivated by profit, and without a seat at the highest tables of power. As Rusbridger reveals in response to the Edward Snowden and Julian Assange accounts: ‘I once remarked to a senior intelligence figure that the British and American governments, instead of condemning our role, should go down on their knees in thanks that we were there as such a careful filter.’[lxxv]

    All Images © Daniele Idini

    [i] Francesca Coperchinia, Luca Chiovatoab, Laura Croceab, Flavia Magriab, Mario Rotondi, ‘The cytokine storm in COVID-19: An overview of the involvement of the chemokine/chemokine-receptor system’ (2020)https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359610120300927

    [ii] Richard Cash and Vikram Patel, ‘Has COVID-19 subverted global health?’ May 5th, 2020, The Lancet. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31089-8/fulltext

    [iii] Untitled, ‘’Greatest propaganda machine in history’: Sacha Baron Cohen slams Facebook, other social media companies’, NBC November 22nd, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/greatest-propaganda-machine-history-sacha-baron-cohen-slams-facebook-other-n1089471

    [iv] Simon Rogers, ‘Data journalism in action: what is Facts are Sacred about?’ April 4th, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/apr/04/data-journalism-facts-are-sacred

    [v] Josh Halliday, ‘Twitter’s Tony Wang: ‘We are the free speech wing of the free speech party’’ March 22nd, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wang-free-speech

    [vi] Vijaya Gadde and Matt Derella, ‘An update on our continuity strategy during COVID-19’,  https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/An-update-on-our-continuity-strategy-during-COVID-19.html

    [vii] Jon Levine, ‘YouTube censors epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski for opposing lockdown’, New York Post, May 16th, 2020,   https://nypost.com/2020/05/16/youtube-censors-epidemiologist-knut-wittkowski-for-opposing-lockdown/

    [viii] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: Facebook alters virus action after damning misinformation report’, BBC, April 3rd, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52309094

    [ix] Ronald Dworkin ‘The Right to Ridicule’, March 23rd, 2006, The New York Review of Books, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006/03/23/the-right-to-ridicule/, accessed 26/4/19.

    [x] Stephen Sedley, Law and the Whirligig of Time, London, Hart Publishing, 2018.

    [xi] Sharon Begey, ‘Lower death rate estimates for coronavirus, especially for non-elderly, provide glimmer of hope’, March 16th, Stat, https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/16/lower-coronavirus-death-rate-estimates/

    [xii] Matthew Biggerstaff, Simon Cauchemez, Carrie Reed, Manoj Gambhir & Lyn Finelli, ‘Estimates of the reproduction number for seasonal, pandemic, and zoonotic influenza: a systematic review of the literature’ BMC Infectious Diseases, September, 2014, https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2334-14-480

    [xiii] Ibid, Sharon Begley, Ihttps://www.statnews.com/2020/03/16/lower-coronavirus-death-rate-estimates/

    [xiv] Justin Fox, ‘The Coronavirus is worse than the flu, bro’ Bloomberg, April 24th, 2020 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-24/is-coronavirus-worse-than-the-flu-blood-studies-say-yes-by-far

    [xv] Jacob Sullum, ‘The CDC’s New ‘Best Estimate’ Implies a COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate Below 0.3%’, Reason, 24th of May, 2020, https://reason.com/2020/05/24/the-cdcs-new-best-estimate-implies-a-covid-19-infection-fatality-rate-below-0-3/

    [xvi] Freddie Sayers,  ‘ Sunetra Gupta: Covid-19 is on the way out’ Unherd, May 21st, 2020, https://unherd.com/2020/05/oxford-doubles-down-sunetra-gupta-interview/

    [xvii] Kaitlyn Folmer and Josh Margolin, ‘Satellite data suggests coronavirus may have hit China earlier: Researchers’, ABC News, June 8th, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/International/satellite-data-suggests-coronavirus-hit-china-earlier-researchers/story?id=71123270

    [xviii] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: France’s first known case ‘was in December’, BBC, May 5th, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52526554

    [xix] Guardian staff and agencies, ‘Global report: US House passes $3tn stimulus as experts track Covid-19-linked syndrome’, The Guardian, May 16th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/16/global-report-democrats-push-for-3tn-stimulus-as-experts-track-covid-linked-syndrome?fbclid=IwAR1tpHpfNr_3zdSY68Yw6BUpUfAM6S56Dke8VANSk21Fhx2OQZO9pRDzFug

    [xx] Center for Disease Control, ‘Estimated Influenza Illnesses, Medical visits, Hospitalizations, and Deaths in the United States — 2017–2018 influenza season’, https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm

    [xxi] Simon Jenkins, ‘Why I’m taking the coronavirus hype with a pinch of salt’, The Guardian, March 6th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/06/coronavirus-hype-crisis-predictions-sars-swine-flu-panics

    [xxii] David Adam, ‘Special report: The simulations driving the world’s response to COVID-19’, Nature, April 3rd, 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6

    [xxiii] Graig Graziosi, ‘Coronavirus: Nobel Prize winner predicts US will get through crisis sooner than expected’, The Independent, March 24th, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-michael-levitt-china-italy-a9422986.html

    [xxiv] Richard A. Stein, ‘Super-spreaders in infectious diseases’, International Journal of Infectious Diseases, April, 2011,  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971211000245

    [xxv] Tom Morgan, ‘ Lockdown saved no lives and may have cost them, Nobel Prize winner believes’, 23rd of May, 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/23/lockdown-saved-no-lives-may-have-cost-nobel-prize-winner-believes/

    [xxvi] Amelia Winn, ‘Lidl becomes first supermarket chain to CLOSE a UK store after staff catch coronavirus – but shoppers are told doors will reopen on Monday’, Daily Mail, May 3rd, 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8281995/Lidl-supermarket-chain-CLOSE-UK-store-staff-catch-coronavirus.html

    [xxvii] Emily Holden, ‘Do you need to wash your groceries? And other advice for shopping safely’, The Guardian, April 2nd, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/do-you-need-to-wash-your-groceries-and-other-advice-for-shopping-safely

    [xxviii] Tom Reichert, Gerardo Chowell & Jonathan A McCullers, ‘The age distribution of mortality due to influenza: pandemic and peri-pandemic’ BMC Medicine, December 12th, 2012, https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-10-162

    [xxix] Alba Grifoni, Daniela Weiskopf, Sydney I. Ramirez, Davey M. Smith, Shane Crotty, Alessandro Sette, Cell, ‘Targets of T Cell Responses to SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus in Humans with COVID-19 Disease and Unexposed Individuals’ May 14th, 2020, https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30610-3

    [xxx] Matthew Biggerstaff, Simon Cauchemez, Carrie Reed, Manoj Gambhir, and Lyn Finelli, ‘Estimates of the reproduction number for seasonal, pandemic, and zoonotic influenza: a systematic review of the literature’, BMC Infectious Diseases, September 4th, 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4169819/

    [xxxi] Mark Honigsbaum, ‘Revisiting the 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics‘,The Lancet, May 25th, 2020,  https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31201-0/fulltext

    [xxxii] Center for Disease Control, ‘1918 Pandemic (H1N1 virus)’ https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html

    [xxxiii] Emilia Vynnycky, Amy Trindall, Punam Mangtani, ‘Estimates of the reproduction numbers of Spanish influenza using morbidity data’, International Journal of Epidemiology, May 17th, 2007, https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/36/4/881/667165

    [xxxiv] Laura Spinney, ‘Covid-19 expert Karl Friston: ‘Germany may have more immunological “dark matter”’’ The Guardian, May 31st, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/31/covid-19-expert-karl-friston-germany-may-have-more-immunological-dark-matter

    [xxxv] Lisa Dua and Grace Huang, ‘Did Japan Just Beat the Virus Without Lockdowns or Mass Testing?’ Bloomberg, May 22nd, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-22/did-japan-just-beat-the-virus-without-lockdowns-or-mass-testing

    [xxxvi] Nicola Davis and Rory Carrol, ‘ Experts divided over comparison of UK and Ireland’s coronavirus records’, The Guardian, April 13th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/13/experts-divided-comparison-uk-ireland-coronavirus-record

    [xxxvii] Untitled, ‘ Obesity crisis: The UK’s weight problem in seven charts’, Sky News, August 20th, 2019, https://news.sky.com/story/seven-charts-on-the-uks-obesity-problem-11583981

    [xxxviii] Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott and Jonathan Leake, ‘Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster’, The Sunday Times, April 19th, 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-38-days-when-britain-sleepwalked-into-disaster-hq3b9tlgh

    [xxxix] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: Prime Minister Boris Johnson orders pubs, restaurants and gyms to close across the UK’ March 21st, 2020, Sky News, https://www.skysports.com/more-sports/other-sports/news/12040/11961096/coronavirus-prime-minister-boris-johnson-orders-pubs-restaurants-and-gyms-to-close-across-the-uk

    [xl] ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths in Italy as of June 3, 2020, by age group’, Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105061/coronavirus-deaths-by-region-in-italy/

    [xli] Untitled, ‘Italy says number of doctors killed by coronavirus passes 100’ France24, April 9th 2020, https://www.france24.com/en/20200409-italy-says-number-of-doctors-killed-by-coronavirus-passes-100

    [xlii] Marta Gaglia and Seema Lakdawala, ‘What we do and do not know about COVID-19’s infectious dose and viral load’, The Conversation, April 14th, 2020, https://theconversation.com/what-we-do-and-do-not-know-about-covid-19s-infectious-dose-and-viral-load-135991

    [xliii] Simon Wood et al, ‘UK Covid-19 infection peak may have fallen before lockdown, new analysis shows’, May 7th, Bristol University, May 7th, 2020, https://www.bristol.ac.uk/maths/news/2020/peak-lockdown.html?fbclid=IwAR2g2Mr0IudkXCnQo8leIdVBueq-fdkLNGk9lQjPYrrrO7GW2jfMT19Hg1Q

    [xliv] Observer Reporters, ‘Across the world, figures reveal horrific toll of care home deaths’, The Guardian, May 16th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/16/across-the-world-figures-reveal-horrific-covid-19-toll-of-care-home-deaths

    [xlv] Megan Molteni, ‘Why Meatpacking Plants Have Become Covid-19 Hot Spots’, Wired, May 7th, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/why-meatpacking-plants-have-become-covid-19-hot-spots/

    [xlvi] Press Release, ‘New study reveals blueprint for getting out of Covid-19 lockdown’, May 6th, 2020, University of East Anglia  https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/-/new-study-reveals-blueprint-for-getting-out-of-covid-19-lockdown

    [xlvii] Untitled, ‘Norway could have controlled infection without lockdown’, The Local, May 22nd, 2020, https://www.thelocal.no/20200522/norway-could-have-controlled-infection-without-lockdown-health-chief?fbclid=IwAR1jJTUpQLXLgONVqWmLJHQ2-rd-FG7794lONTsaquGaw0DJmhIUEOqWLwk

    [xlviii] Richard Orange, ‘Coronavirus: Norway wonders if it should have been more like Sweden’, The Telegraph, May 30th, 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/30/coronavirus-norway-wonders-should-have-like-sweden/

    [xlix] Emma Graham-Harrison, Angela Giuffrida in Rome, Helena Smith in Athens and Liz Ford, ‘Lockdowns around the world bring rise in domestic violence’, The Guardian, March 28th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/28/lockdowns-world-rise-domestic-violence

    [l] United Nations Sustainable Development Group, ‘Policy Brief: The Impact of COVID-19 on children’ April, 2020, https://unsdg.un.org/resources/policy-brief-impact-covid-19-children?fbclid=IwAR35l8582cnFgE_sWLurILYXeGWyg_PYSo8BApmmsarSwa_8_FQGzafxoI0

    [li] Johan Giesecke ‘The invisible pandemic’, The Lancet, May 5th, 2020, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31035-7/fulltext

    [lii] Jon Henley, ‘We should have done more, admits architect of Sweden’s Covid-19 strategy’, June 3rd, 2020, The Guardian,  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/architect-of-sweden-coronavirus-strategy-admits-too-many-died-anders-tegnell

    [liii] Jonathan Glover, A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Pimlico, London, 1999, p.394

    [liv] Oliver Milman, ‘Seven of Donald Trump’s most misleading coronavirus claims’, The Guardian, March 30th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-misleading-claims

    [lv] Michelle Cottle, ‘Boris Johnson Should Have Taken His Own Medicine’, New York Times, March 27th, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/boris-johnson-coronavirus.html

    [lvi] David Graeber, Debt – The First 5,000 Years, Melville, London, 2011, p.357

    [lvii] ‘Top 15 Most Popular News Websites | February 2020’, http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/news-websites

    [lviii] Jim Waterson, ‘Guardian named UK’s most trusted newspaper‘ The Guardian, October 31st, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/oct/31/guardian-rated-most-trusted-newspaper-brand-in-uk-study

    [lix] Alan Rusbridger, The Remaking of Journalism and Why it Matters Now, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2018, p.145

    [lx] Ibid, p.348

    [lxi] Ibid, p.163

    [lxii] Ibid, p.181

    [lxiii] Ibid p.181

    [lxiv] Luke O’Neill, ‘Dying to go out to eat? Here’s how viruses like Covid-19 spread in a restaurant’, The Guardian, May 15th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/15/how-coronavirus-spreads-in-restaurant-video

    [lxv] Guardian Staff and Agencies, ‘Global report: ‘disaster’ looms for millions of children as WHO warns of second peak’, The Guardian, May 26th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/26/global-report-disaster-looms-for-millions-of-children-as-who-warns-of-second-peak

    [lxvi] Statista, ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths in Italy as of June 3, 2020, by age group’  https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105061/coronavirus-deaths-by-region-in-italy/

    [lxvii] Rusbridger, Ibid, p.275

    [lxviii] Quoted in Rusbridger, Ibid, p.135

    [lxix] Ibidp.143

    [lxx] Ibid, p.161

    [lxxi] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground, Alma Books, London, p.23-24

    [lxxii] S. Jay Olshansky, Ph.D., Douglas J. Passaro, M.D., Ronald C. Hershow, M.D., Jennifer Layden, M.P.H., Bruce A. Carnes, Ph.D., Jacob Brody, M.D., Leonard Hayflick, Ph.D., Robert N. Butler, M.D., David B. Allison, Ph.D., and David S. Ludwig, M.D., Ph.D. ‘ A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States in the 21st Century’, The New England Journal of Medicine, March 17th, 2005,  https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr043743

    [lxxiii] Kate Hamblet, ‘How to Design a Healthy Home ~ An Architect’s Blueprint’, HealthyGreenSavvy, January 5th, 2019, https://www.healthygreensavvy.com/healthy-home/

    [lxxiv] Fatimah Lateef, ‘Hospital design for better infection control’, Journal of Emergencies, Shock and Trauma, 2009, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776365/

    [lxxv] Ibid, Rusbridger, p.250