Saturday, March 28, 2020

Evidence of COVID-19 Overreaction

Here is a list of links (which I will keep updating) that show why our reaction to COVID-19 is worrying, to put it very mildly, and also to demonstrate, for when this is all over, that the fact of our dangerous overreaction, with its likely immiserating and authoritarian consequences, was already known. If we don't acknowledge this, and instead choose to believe that our overreaction is what made COVID-19 a relatively mild pandemic, then we will have learnt nothing, and will readily surrender our liberties in the face of other fears and manipulations the government presents to us. We cannot and should not be persuaded by the post hoc fallacy that the government will have saved our lives by stripping us of our liberties. I will forever hold Boris Jong-son and his People's Government in utter and total contempt for what he and they have done.

Links (in no particular order):

Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, on the flawed science that governments have been using to justify their radical COVID-19 measures:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsExPrHCHbw&t=361s

And here is the text of the open letter he wrote to Chancellor Merkel:
https://swprs.org/open-letter-from-professor-sucharit-bhakdi-to-german-chancellor-dr-angela-merkel/

Lord Sumption on the legal perils of a 'lockdown' and the possible dangers to liberty: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/there-is-a-difference-between-the-law-and-official-instructions-j9tthqnrf

University of Oxford research suggesting that large minority of the country may already have been infected with COVID-19: https://www.ft.com/content/5ff6469a-6dd8-11ea-89df-41bea055720b

'John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine and professor of epidemiology and population health, as well as professor by courtesy of biomedical data science at Stanford University School of Medicine, professor by courtesy of statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) at Stanford University.' He warns us that we are 'making decisions without reliable data':
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/

Virologist and infectious disease specialist Dr Pablo Goldschmidt:
https://www.clarin.com/buena-vida/coronavirus-panico-injustificado-dice-virologo-argentino-francia_0_yVcmJ4RM.html

Neil Ferguson, of Imperial study infamy (the study which seemed to frighten the government into taking these emergeny measures), criticised for flawed research:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/28/neil-ferguson-scientist-convinced-boris-johnson-uk-coronavirus-lockdown-criticised/

Retired professor of pathology and a former NHS consultant pathologist John Lee: 'How deadly is the coronavirus? It's still far from clear':
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think/amp

Government setting up an anti-'misinformation' 'specialist unit':

R.R. Reno is First Things questioning the shutdown:
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/03/questioning-the-shutdown

Evidence that Italy has recurring problems managing influenza outbreaks (particularly among elderly):
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971219303285

Professor Sucharit Bhakdi on the actual nature of the threat from COVID-19 and our hysterical and damaging response:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBB9bA-gXL4&list=PLO8heR1nSoznRyBQSVD3LZ82iztFBismZ&index=9&t=8s

Simon Jenkins: 'Why I’m taking the coronavirus hype with a pinch of salt':
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/06/coronavirus-hype-crisis-predictions-sars-swine-flu-panics


Sweden taking a different and more sensible path:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-elderly-in-lockdown-and-children-in-school-help-sweden-pursue-herd-immunity-r705m76dd

Lord Sumption on our hysterical reaction to COVID-19:
https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/03/lord-sumption-speaks-against-hysteria-driven-government-policy-.html

Brendan O'Neill: 'Dissent in a time of COVID':
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/03/23/dissent-in-a-time-of-covid/

Only 12% of corona-deaths in Italy were directly caused by COVID-19:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200324214448/https:/www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/have-many-coronavirus-patients-died-italy/

NYT: 'For Autocrats, and Others, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power':
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/world/europe/coronavirus-governments-power.html

Novelist Frederick Forsyth: Is the virus really as bad as we're being told?

Dr John Ioannidis interview:

Theodore Dalyrimple on the uselessness and indeed perils of modelling:

Coronovirus and the Cult of Expertise:
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/03/coronavirus-and-the-cult-of-expertise

Britain has “painted itself into a corner” with no clear exit strategy from the coronavirus epidemic and needs to reconsider herd immunity, according to a senior government adviser:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/boris-johnsons-coronavirus-adviser-calls-for-a-way-out-of-lockdown-rd58g6tc9

Simon Jenkins: Was I wrong about Coronavirus? Even the world's best scentists can't tell me:

COVID lockdown may cost the lives of cancer patients:

Lord Sumption: the cure is worse than the disease:

Government contemplates banning exercise (and Opposition Leader supports it):

Has Sweden found the right solution to coronavirus?

Nearly 3,000 influenza patients are admitted to ICUs in 2018/2019:

Past severe influenza outbreak:

One in five dental practises risk collapse, patients with serious problems not getting treated:
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Monday, March 23, 2020

A Nation Under House Arrest

Rome was not built in a day, but apparently a police state can be built in a week. We no longer can travel freely, are subject to an 'emergency powers' act which gives police unprecedented enforcement power, suspends trial by injury for death inquests, weakens protections for the vulnerable (now only one doctor's signature is required to detain someone under mental health laws, or to sign off on a death), we cannot open businesses, we cannot attend mass, we cannot attend any social events or ceremonies, we cannot gather at all in public grounds. We cannot protest; we may no longer be able express dissent publicly without being considered a danger to public safety. No one is safe, and we must keep two French Revolutionary metres away from each other at all times. We are now even ordered to stay in our homes, with very few exceptions. 

An entire nation under house arrest. We may not face the same punishments (yet), but our liberties are no longer much greater than those of a resident in Pyongyang.

I have written a letter to my MP (Julie Marson) and received no response. I have searched the internet for evidence of her opinions on the emergency powers act and have found only uncritical, unthinking support. There are some brave dissenters in parliament, who have at least placed some checks on the government, and who have managed to remove at least one egregious aspect of the bill (the possible enforced cremation of the dead), but it is not much, and Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson must be feeling mightily powerful right now.

Other countries have not found it necessary to respond with such self-destructive madness. Japan, which is in some ways as England was, did not initiate a lockdown. They took sensible measures and precautions, but have kept most work and travel and public events operating. Despite having COVID-19 in the country for months, their incidence rate remains less than a thousand. Are they simply a more decent people, not as selfish, filthy and uncivilised as we have become, more likely to take sensible precautions, to be considerate of others? Does that explain it, or is it that the disease may not be the Big One it has been presented to us as. Both are probably true.

I hear you say, but what about the experts? I do not necessarily think we should 'follow the experts', a fairly empty phrase. For one thing, experts are not a homogeneous group. And for another, just as in the mass of mankind, the minority of experts may be more right than the majority. We have had spectacular errors in medical science before: lobotomies, pathologising of homosexuality, eugenics, thalidomide. Economic experts are usually more wrong than they are right, and produce forecasts which are about as unreliable as a trabant. The recent UK Supreme Court decision showed that judges, for all their learning, may show little understanding of, or cannot be counted on to uphold, the constitution of this country. And social science expertise is often useless. There is no psychological opinion that was not better and more truthfully expressed by Samuel Johnson, no sociological study as insightful as the great novels. And does anyone who studied women's studies or media studies actually have a deeper understanding of the female sex or the role of the media? In both cases, their education has probably misguided them as to the truth. And let us not get started on military experts, responsible for so many blunders and idiotic ventures.

To be ruled by experts is a mad system -- no successful country has ever tried it. Rule by an aristocracy, rule by a monarch -- even rule by the demos is preferable to rule by experts.

Now, we should pay much closer attention to the advice of medical experts, and consider it much more seriously, than that of most of the experts listed above, but they are not infallible, and their expertise is not beyond the reach of a curious and sceptical mind. Even those of us essentially ignorant in matters of medicine can at least look at the COVID-19 statistics in various countries and ask sensible questions. Why does Germany have such a low death rate from the virus? Why Italy such a high rate? Why is South Korea so low? From where should we draw our conclusions? Are these people dying of COVID-19, or did they have the virus but die of something else? How many healthy people have died from the disease? When you start to look into it one starts to suspect it is bad, but not let-us-shut-down-everything-and-hope-for-the-best bad. A 3% death rate seems too high as an estimate. Germany's death rate is only 0.3%. South Korea has done extensive testing and records a death rate of 0.7%. Italy's death rate (9%) does not like the rule. Maybe they are only testing the most severe cases, as I've seen suggested, and their culture of living with elderly relatives, though otherwise noble, will doubtless have made them more vulnerable than others to this virus.

Let us not, then, let experts think for us. Be informed by them, but not ruled by them. And do not be so quick to follow expert 'consensus', or to identify apparent homogeneity among experts (which is usually only apparent). Do not let opinions become commandments. An expert is not an expert is most things, and sometimes not even in those things peripheral to his studies. Especially when he enters the realm of social and governmental policy, we all have a duty to be informed by his advice, but also to question it. This is not like trutherism -- a comparison I have heard made -- which is a denial of something that happened and is clearly and accessibly documented. Rather, this is a questioning of something that has not and may not yet happen, of forecasts and measurements which are abstract -- and which are not one mere incident but a collection of thousands of incidents from which only partial and uncertain conclusions can be made.

As a result of our actions, we face grave societal damage. We see the fragilitities of our economy and moreover the fragilitities of a global system. To cope, we have loaded ourselves with an economic burden which we will have to pay for at some point in the future. How on earth are we going to it? Thousands of mortgage payments postponed, potentially millions of workers not producing anything yet getting paid 80% of their salaries, while the pound falls in value and the economy almost comes to a halt. We could be sacrificing our economic future. Ruin could await us. We don't have the strong social, communal and religious institutions to cope with such an outcome.

What's worse, the traditions of this country no longer have any hold. Who, except for a few eccentrics, even know what habeas corpus is anymore? Who knows of the 1689 Bill of Rights? Who knows anything about Peel's police? I am now finally resigned to the fact that I do not live in a free country. A country that does not know its past cannot be free, even one whose past was so glorious that the long deformed shadows can still be seen in its sunset years. But the sun is finally setting. Those of us aware of what has been lost will have to try to carve a small corner of this island for ourselves. We will never have much wealth, though we will have another kind of wealth, for we will know the value of things that do not come with price tags. We may face many dangers and many attempts against out liberty, but we may still be able to hold onto a tiny portion of this world and live a life in the sun; free, meaningful, dutiful, beautiful, contented, not vulnerable to the madnesses of this society. And what madness we see before us! The entire country, having lost all sense of proportion, and preferring the draconian extremes of China to the more effective moderation of Japan, shut itself down over a virus which does not kill the young (and seldom the healthy it would seem), and whose fatality rate is likely well below 1% -- and even then, so many deaths are 'with COVID-19' but we do not in fact know whether the virus was the cause.

It really is quite extraordinary. We have now seen men of action, authoritarian government, militarised police, enforced morality, government-provided social security on the most astonishing scale (greater than even I, not unsympathetic to socialist economics, support), and I worry that we may like it. As society around us collapses thanks to our reaction to this crisis, will we finally forget liberty and cling to the protecting bosom of the modern state? We have not quite established tyranny, but we have set a precedent which it could easily use to establish itself.
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Thursday, March 12, 2020

Boredom

Sir Walter Scott in his Journal wrote, "Few men, leading a quiet life, and without any strong or highly varied change of circumstances, have seen more variety of society than I—few have enjoyed it more, or been bored, as it is called, less by the company of tiresome people." Could it be this is why Scott can spend so much time writing about details which often bore other people? Even I, a fairly devoted Scott reader, can find him a bore at times -- though an entertaining bore.

 It is this word "bore" which interests me most. The emphasis on "bored" is Scott's. Scott probably italicised it because it was still a novel word, and therefore still retained its old definition of making a hole through something. I suspect the new definition -- as in something which is tiresome -- corresponds to the tedium of the industrial age, a tedium not caused by an absence of something but rather something boring, i.e drilling into you so severely as to create a hole into which is filled tedium. Is boredom then a modern phenomenon, particularly to an urban age, and perhaps even an agricultural age? Am I a terrible Rousseauian optimist for wondering whether boredom is in fact possible in a state of nature?

 Certainly it seems more possible in a highly developed society with bureaucracies, earpiece-wearing businessmen, impersonal large-scale retail, background music, smartphones and social media -- contrary to conventional wisdom, I think smartphones, instead to eliminating boredom, in fact create more boredom: it is the bored person who idly sits there on his phone; he would be a lot less bored were he to do something like go for a walk; instead he scrolls and scrolls and scrolls, his boredom only occasionally alleviated by the sight of something novel, and then he scrolls some more trying to find another relief.

For my own part, I can only recall experiencing boredom when it has been imposed on me. I think of retail work, or when I would be stuck in a seminar with dull unthinking peers, or the dreadful slowness of a school detention. I'm never bored at home. There is always a book on the shelf, and if I've run out of new books, good: I enjoy re-reading even more. There is always an instrument to play, paper (or, admittedly, a computer) to write on, thoughts to entertain. There are always places to walk -- a woods nearby, with my favourite rodent, the squirrel. Like Scott, "I cannot remember the time when I had not some ideal part to play for my own solitary amusement."
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