In a tiresomely predictable piece of policy-based evidence-making, the UK authorities have continued to use their self appropriated powers to put almost all of the UK into their new Tier 4, which is lockdown by any other name, although importantly an actual lockdown would require parliamentary approval, an irritating inconvenience for the Public Health Taliban that they have sought to avoid as much as possible. The latest restrictions, which seem likely to finally bankrupt much of the private sector hospitality industry, were justified by the tired old references to the NHS being overwhelmed – even as the multi million pound Nightingale Hospitals remained either unused or -even more bizarrely – decommissioned having never been used.

The timing is no coincidence, having moved the New Forest (where I am currently trying to work from) from Tier 2 to Tier 3 on Boxing day, we now find it moved to the highest level (for now) of Tier 4 within 4 days, when obviously there is no way in which there could be any ‘new’ data to justify this (not that there was for Tier 3 in any event). It is clear that this was a pre-planned policy position to put London into Lockdown for Christmas and then the rest of the country for New Year and the SPI-B propaganda unit have just been managing ‘the narrative’ to pretend that it is evidence leading policy, rather than the other way around.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Albert Einstein

In effect, the UK has “gone the Full Melchett” (worth revisiting this post for a clip of General Melchett at his most amusingly insane) and are persisting with their ‘policy’ of lockdown. Thus despite all evidence to the contrary, they are seeking to ‘control the virus’ by suspending all social contact until, apparently, we can all be injected with a vaccine that is only claiming to limit the effect of the virus rather than control its spread. This is the equivalent of the insanity of World War 1 Generals and their obsession with trench warfare. One has to hope that this doesn’t last the two and a half years it took them to learn the lessons of the battle of the Somme.

On the basis of what the drug company claim the virus can do, we should be using the vaccine to protect the vulnerable by reducing the fatality rate, but instead we appear to be giving it to ‘key workers’ who have so far either had the virus and recovered or show no signs of being susceptible to it. Perhaps this is an example of Hanlon’s Razor – that we should not attribute to malice what is better attributed to stupidity – but one has to be suspicious of the claims that the whole population now need to be vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity, since with deep irony, herd immunity is a concept from the world of vaccines that has so far been comprehensively ‘rubbished’ by the propagandists. Indeed, the whole thrust of the lockdown of the healthy to somehow protect the vulnerable has been to claim that herd immunity doesn’t work!

So just to be clear, the healthy being infected by the virus itself and thus developing herd immunity so as ultimately to protect the vulnerable is apparently a bad idea, even though the overwhelming majority of those infected are either asymptomatic or suffer only a mild illness. Hence they must be locked up, forced to wear masks and socially distance so as not to kill granny. Equally, injecting only the vulnerable with a vaccine so as to reduce the infection fatality rate (which is in any event now similar to seasonal flu) is not in fact the purpose of the vaccine, even though that is what it is designed to do. Apparently, the vaccine is actually going to be used in a way that it claims no efficacy for, which is to inject the healthy as some sort of protection against transmission, something it clearly says it doesn’t do. So we are spending billions of pounds to inject otherwise healthy people with an untried vaccine that doesn’t achieve what we claim we are trying to achieve, while not giving priority to those whom it does actually help. In the meantime, the pointless trench warfare against shops and the hospitality industry as well as the gig economy goes on.

General Melchett would be proud.

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