As civil resistance (or, at the very least, social media grumbling) to COVID–19 lockdowns grows louder, the bootlicking types are scrambling to defend the Soviet-lite technocracy we’ve suddenly found ourselves living under. “Listen to the experts!” they bleat. “Trust the science!”
“Science” is the great fetish of modern progressivism. I use scare quotes deliberately: because, almost invariably, what we’re talking about is not actual science at all, but leftist dogma in a labcoat.
As for the “experts”…why on earth should we believe such a sorry rabble of credentialled buffoons?
[Neil] Ferguson and co-author Martin C.J. Bootsma compared data from 16 cities during the 1918 influenza outbreak and cautiously argued there is correlative evidence that the mortality rate can be reduced by up to 25 per cent through non-pharmaceutical interventions. One might imagine that such a study could recommend what specific public health measures might play a “key role”, such as closing schools or banning public gatherings, except that the authors openly admit their research offers no insight into any specific measures but only “overall reductions in transmission caused by the whole range of control measures used.”
In other words, they have no idea what worked in 1918, and they can’t recommend any specific measures, but, well, something might have worked in 1918. Maybe. Ferguson’s 2007 paper on the Spanish Flu is rife with this sort of waffling obfuscation, which Theodore Dalrymple characterised as, “as if every sentence concealed a guilty secret”.
Bear in mind that Ferguson is the “expert advisor” on whose say-so Britain has been locked down to an often “cruel” degree, with people forbidden from even visiting dying relatives. Ferguson also directly advised the U.S. government on its lockdown measures.
Ferguson’s paper even acknowledges the serious limitations to its research.
Extrapolating from 1918 to the present day requires great caution; the U.S. of 1918 was a very different place from today” and that, “we cannot exclude the possibility that there may have been some other factor that varied among cities, and that might have been partly responsible for the observed variation in overall mortality.
In other words, there is no real evidence for lockdowns. What must be added to Ferguson’s yeah-but-no-but-yeah-but-maybe equivocation is the glaring fact that he has been so consistently wrong before.
So, on what evidence does Ferguson base his “mitigation strategy”? Certainly he is not relying upon his own pandemic research. He openly admits that his study didn’t even attempt to measure the effectiveness of any particular intervention. And his guidance on more recent outbreaks is shaky, to say the least. He estimated that 2-7 million people would die from the bird flu. The final tally was 455. He compared the 2009 swine flu to the 1957 flu outbreak that killed more than a million people worldwide, but only a little over 18,000 died of the former. To his credit, he did accurately predict that the 2002 Mad Cow Disease outbreak would claim between 50 and 50,000 lives. The total fell right within his range at 178.
When it comes to the Chinese virus, Ferguson predicted not just 500,000 deaths in Britain, but two million in America. Even his drastically-revised estimate of one million deaths in America has still proved grossly exaggerated, predicting more than ten times as many deaths as have eventuated (and that with known exaggeration of the death toll).
Ferguson’s American sidekick, White House adviser Anthony Fauci isn’t much better.
In 1986, [Fauci] predicted that upwards of a million people in the US would die from AIDS by the mid 1990s. But even granting Fauci the extra 25 years to reach that estimate, the actual number still falls short — 700,000 deaths to date.
When it comes to COVID-19, Fauci has ignored even his own research regarding the Spanish Flu. In a widely-cited paper, Fauci attributed the vast majority of 1918 deaths to secondary bacterial infections rather than the flu itself. It now appears that up to 50% of COVID-19 deaths are also from secondary bacterial infections.
Yet Fauci has said almost nothing about stockpiling antibiotics.
Worse still, America’s “most trusted public official” has been less than candid about his own opinion on the fatality rate of COVID-19. In a study published on March 26th, Fauci wrote that the fatality rate was “considerably less than 1 per cent” due to the high number of asymptomatic and minimally symptomatic cases. He noted that the outcome of this virus would probably be more akin to a severe seasonal influenza (0.1% fatality), or the flu outbreaks of 1957 and 1968.
Yet, the very next day, Fauci repeated to the media that the death rate for the virus was “at least 1 per cent”
Modellers like Fauci and Ferguson also predicted that 10,000 hospital beds would be needed in South Dakota. South Dakota has had no lockdown orders – and is now predicted to need at most 127 beds.
This, believe it or not, is the “hard science” by which our own experts have mandated devastating nationwide lockdown measures[…]
Let me recap Ferguson’s own words. He says it is is “not at all certain” this global lockdown will “succeed”! Worse, it is “unclear” how such measures will affect society!
Translation: Ferguson has no idea how any of this is going to play out.
Finally, and most damningly, Ferguson has flagrantly violated his own draconian lockdown rules.
Uncertain, contradictory, consistently wrong and not even following their own advice: tell me again why we should take the least notice of these “experts”?
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