THIS IS the speech I made as a representative of the Inform Scotland group to the May Day Gathering at Holyrood on 1st May 2021. The web address for the group is www.informscotland.uk. I hope it helps you understand what has happened to us over the last year.
“Hello Friends! It is wonderful to see so many faces in real life – thank you for uniting here!
What unites all of us in Scotland is the experience of fear in the last year. I assure you, you have support here.
In September I started writing a daily covid statistics blog for Us For Them Scotland. I could never have imagined where it would lead me, the conversations I would have, the friends I would make.
It has led me here and I am grateful. A fire has been lit in me.
I will continue to tell people what some hate me for saying: Covid restrictions did not work.
That is the truth.
I will not minimise the Covid death toll. I will not minimise the pain and suffering of Covid. Hospitals did get busy. Healthcare workers were traumatised. Many did get sick and took time to recover. People died.
But I will continue to demand we acknowledge the pain and suffering of lockdown. I demand that the ineffectiveness and cruelty of lockdown are also acknowledged.
We must never allow ourselves to believe the efforts of restricting our lives were good and noble, because it is a lie. If that lie wins, we will live restricted forever.
I watched the news in March and April 2020 and I will not forget that fear. I thought I was going to lose people to this Coronavirus. I was determined to protect the NHS. Three Weeks To Flatten The Curve was a grim effort to slow the spread: deaths from Covid would not be prevented. This is what we were told and that was the truth.
We were locking down because we needed our hospitals to treat others as well.
How ironic!
I was happy to be obedient and compliant through spring 2020.
But then I began to find my usual news sources a wee bit shrill and tiresome. As I looked around me I wondered how scared it was rational to be.
I went to the Government’s own naked statistics and was filled with horror at the mistakes we were making.
In my Physics and Medical Physics training I had learned a wee bit about how to describe the growth and decline of natural phenomena – like epidemics.
But I didn’t spend time in early 2020 thinking about the mathematical functions that might describe this epidemic. What former physicist does? We should be able to trust we have highly knowledgeable and competent people doing that for us. Who was I, a housewife, to form an opinion?
I trusted the exponential spread theory of Professor Neil Ferguson. Why would I not? He is a physicist at the top of his field. He must know how to apply the laws of Physics to model epidemic spread.
But a very little reading revealed to me that his model was entirely inappropriate for an epidemic. His model isn’t a Gompertz curve and yet that is what epidemics follow.
You can look Gompertz curves up for yourselves if you are interested and it will be well within your capabilities to understand it. Exponential rise is ever-accelerating. But an epidemic becomes ever more suppressed with every new infection. Looking at the Scottish infections curve you can see this epidemic had been significantly suppressed very quickly. The curve had turned down after surprisingly few infections.
What suppresses a virus? Immunity!
I thought I knew that everyone was susceptible to this new virus? That was what we were told. If that were the case, suppression had developed too early.
I wondered if lockdown explained it, but that meant many people remained to be infected. That frightened me so I went and looked for more information.
I found Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt interviewed on Lockdown TV by Unherd and it is not an exaggeration to say that interview changed my life. He spoke of the Diamond Princess cruise ship outbreak of February 2020. I went and looked it up.
In the petri dish that was this cruise ship, only one fifth of the passengers were infected, some of them with no symptoms. In some analyses conclusions were made that the other four fifths who were not sick were ‘asymptomatic’ and major drivers of infection. Eh, what?
I think in some people’s minds, this early idea stuck.
I have a different interpretation: four fifths of the passengers were never at any risk. The proportion of passengers who died was 0.4 per cent. This should not have inspired any panic because a cruise ship is an exceptional environment. There was good news from the outbreak too if people had wanted to engage in some optimism.
It should be crystal clear from this outbreak that prior immunity to SARS-CoV-2 did exist from other coronaviruses. So we could safely conclude we would develop lasting immunity to this coronavirus as well. In May 2020 in Scotland, immunity had been acquired to a sufficient extent sufficient to suppress the outbreak to below epidemic levels. This was partly a seasonal effect too.
That was all good news.
But good news was banned in 2020. Reassurance might make people relax. And then they would obviously die.
But the corporate media could report to us from the statistics from the first wave that fewer than half of people sharing a house with an infected person got infected. This will not surprise you from your own experiences I think. It was good news! And I have more. A recent Public Health England paper has shown that fraction is now down to one tenth! Even better news! Immunity is spreading. Of course it is.
But testing has been preventing us celebrating anything!
By summer 2020, we had a profound belief in the myth of widespread asymptomatic infection and thus created an environment ripe for the development of a totally inept mass testing strategy. We have been doing mass screening of the healthy population without an essential and normal confirmatory testing strategy. All we have now is a bad dataset for the second wave. I am not saying people didn’t get sick. But I am saying we can never now know the extent to which SARS-CoV-2 infections were wrongly attributed to people because of this inept testing strategy. In my opinion, this is unforgivable and will inhibit scientific progress in the study of coronaviruses.
When we got positives back in a person with no covid symptoms we should have questioned if the positive result was false and confirmed the test. This is basic stuff.
In the summer, I waited and waited for hundreds of scientists to say what I know they knew: that this was a woefully poor strategy in mass testing. It remains an absolutely catastrophically bad policy.
People who were perfectly healthy could now test positive, get put under house arrest for two weeks and shut down their community. How can we ever calculate the total cost of this to the taxpayers of the next countless generations?
False positives are not a reflection of how good a test is. They are just a fact and they need to be corrected for. But very few seem to know or remember or want to be reminded of this.
As a society we have found it easier to believe in asymptoms than to do some basic arithmetic and heed our prior knowledge. When have you ever considered your healthy self a risk before?
This all brings me to why lockdowns do not work. To claim they have worked is to deny the Laws of Mathematics. Asymptomatic spread is a negligible part of the problem! It accounts for 0.7 per cent of all transmission in the home. Not in the supermarket.
Imagine destroying our whole way of life and all quality of life and killing people in other ways to prevent less than 0.7 per cent of SARS-CoV-2 infections! [See Ref 4] If healthy people don’t spread this virus, so the lock down of healthy people will not reduce spread in any significant way.
I encourage you to go and look at worldwide infection curves. It will slap you in the face: lockdowns make no difference to covid outcomes. Look at Florida, Sweden, South Dakota and Texas. Look at Brazil and compare it to Peru. Look at Mexico and compare it to Chile. Look at the UK and compare it to Norway, Finland, Netherlands, Lithuania, any country you can think of. Lockdown policy and stringency are NOT the determinants of outcomes.
And, yes, I know about New Zealand! But it doesn’t matter how intuitive anyone thinks lockdown is if the fact is it doesn’t work.
Why are we still behaving as if we believe that lockdowns work?
The answer to that is: censorship.
You should remember you may disagree with me. I’ll be fine. You should remember you may disagree with all the lockdown sceptic scientists I have the privilege of now working with. They will also be fine. But the ability to say things which some may disagree with is essential to debate. Debate is essential to science. Ideas have to be tested.
Lockdown and Covid matters have become a dogmatic Godless religion. If you disagree with government policy there are many waiting to line up to make you out to be nutter or immoral or both. That is religion. But this is a politics/religion hybrid and it’s devouring medicine now too.
There is no discussion. Lockdown-approving scientists say incorrect things all the time and go unchallenged. That is why we live with all these absurd nonsensical rules. We have lost reason.
Do you miss reason? I do.
Because we are living in an age of unreason, our children have not known normal life for a year. They have not done the sports they used to do, they have ceased to learn to swim, they have missed much school, they have had an abnormal Christmas, they have missed time with friends, they have lost irreplaceable time with dear and elderly relatives, they see masked faces in public everywhere they go and they have learned that many people see them as a viral vector and nothing more. And there are children with much more to worry about than all that.
The shutdown of discussion is why your children have to sit masked in school all day as they try to learn and socialise, while adults sit in the pub all day unmasked.
And why are we allowed lawfully to meet here in such numbers but only 20 people are allowed to attend a funeral?
The loss of discussion means that people have died alone! Been locked in isolation in care homes. Missed their relatives for more than a year at the end of their lives. The economy has been irrevocably damaged, businesses lost, patients have missed countless treatments, friendships have crumbled, hypochondria is rife, spirituality has been lost… the list goes on and on. It was all for nothing. And I am sorry for the pain it causes people when I say this.
We have been broken by a year of living alone and looking in on our fearful selves. We seem to me to be sedated by grief for what we have allowed to be stolen from us.
A little discussion would have saved us all from all of this.
I want to talk with you, we all at Inform Scotland do. If you come to us, we will listen. It doesn’t matter if you think you agree with us or not. Please visit our website informscotland.uk. Please listen to the podcast CoronaStories and get in touch with us, anonymously if you prefer.
Join us and share your knowledge. At Inform Scotland we are a group you can stand up with. We will support and protect you. We are your forum.
Censorship is the biggest danger we face.
Have faith in what you know and are capable of learning. Do not wait to be managed. Reject fear.
You are not alone.
Stay sane. Stay strong.
For what we have suffered in the last year, I say, ENOUGH!”
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References for my speech:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340594164_The_Math_of_Epidemic_Outbreaks_and_Spread_Part_3_Least_Squares_Fitting_of_Gompertz_Growth_Models
- YouTube channel Unherd Lockdown TV episode date 2 May 2020
- https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2774102“Household transmission of SARS-CoV-2”
- PHE Paper April 2021 “Impact of vaccination on household transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in England”
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