Tag Archives: science

Rishi Sunak IGNORED ‘the science’ with his Covid-spreading ‘Eat Out to Die Out’

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So much for “we’re listening to the science”.

Remember that – the Tory government slogan that they repeated like a mantra throughout the Covid-19 crisis?

Evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry suggests – strongly – that this was a lie; and one with mass-fatal consequences.

Remember Rishi Sunak’s ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme?

Announced on July 8, 2020, it involved the government subsidising half the cost of food and non-alcoholic drinks ordered at participating cafes, pubs, and restaurants, where the food and drinks were consumed on the premises, up to £10 per person (per order).

The offer was available from August 3 – 31, from Monday to Wednesday each week. There were no limits on how many times an individual could use the discount.

It led to a significant increase in restaurant visits during August – and what else do you think happened?

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Research available in December of that year showed – well, here‘s what This Site said at the time:

Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak made certain that thousands more people caught Covid-19 than would otherwise have done so, with his Eat Out to Help Out scheme.

Research by the University of Warwick has shown that the initiative is likely to blame for 17 per cent of infections – one in six outbreaks – between August and early September (when it was overtaken by outbreaks linked to schools that had reopened at Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab’s insistence, we may conclude).

People will have died from catching the virus after taking part in Sunak’s crackpot plan.

He didn’t even help hospitality businesses very much, either.

In March this year, we discovered that then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock knew about this:

Matt Hancock – Health Secretary at the time – knew about it and conspired with then-Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, and Sunak (who is now prime minister, remember) to hide it from us.

Look at his WhatsApp messages from the summer of 2020:

News outlets like The Independent are reporting that Hancock ridiculed the scheme, calling it “Eat Out to Help The Virus Get About”.

Clearly the scheme should have been halted as soon as the concerns became apparent to Hancock. Instead he made a bad joke about it.

Who knows how many people died because they weren’t told about the danger? And shouldn’t Hancock, Case and Sunak be punished for allowing those deaths to happen?

And now, finally, we know that the government’s scientific advisers had opposed the scheme all along but Sunak refused to listen.

The current Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Dame Angela McLean, actually called him “Dr Death” in a WhatsApp exchange with Prof John Edmunds, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in September 2020.

Here it is:

Prof Edmunds was recorded discussing the exchange at the Covid-19 Inquiry today (October 19, 2023):

According to the BBC,

Prof Edmunds told the inquiry he was unable recall if that had been a specific reference to the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which had subsidised food in pubs, restaurants and other hospitality venues over the summer, while Covid cases had been low.

But in earlier testimony to the inquiry, he said he was “still angry” about the policy.

“It was one thing to take your foot off the brake – but to put your foot on the accelerator,” he told the inquiry.

Prof Edmunds told the inquiry 45,000 people had just died – and while the pub and restaurant sector needed support, the government could have just given them money.

“This was a scheme to encourage people to take an epidemiological risk,” he added.

To explain: he was saying Sunak was asking us to gamble on whether we would catch Covid-19 or not. And we now know that the scheme led to 17 per cent more of us being infected than would otherwise have contracted the disease.

This Writer is unaware of any statistics showing the number of people who died – but there would have been fatalities.

This means Rishi Sunak is directly responsible for the deaths of many people who might otherwise have been alive and contributing to UK society today, if not for him and his homicidally reckless fiasco.

As some have already commented: no wonder he is refusing to release his own WhatsApp messages from the time of the scheme.

The question now is: how can he be brought to justice?


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Covid inquiry spotlight turns to Rishi Sunak – and he’s trying to squirm out of it

Rishi Sunak: this little howler pushed up Covid infections massively. If Rishi Sunak didn’t consult scientists before making it happen, he could be in serious trouble with the Covid inquiry. Is that why he’s trying to hide information from that investigation?

Allegations that the government ignored scientific advice during the Covid-19 pandemic have shifted the focus of the inquiry into its actions at that time onto Rishi Sunak and his ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ fiasco.

Here’s the gist:

The article says the inquiry will focus partly on Sunak – particularly over the way the Treasury failed to involve scientists in decisions and the formulation of policy.

Inquiry chair Baroness Hallett has sent questions to then-prime minister Boris Johnson, asking if scientific evidence and opinion was sought before ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ was launched…

which appears not to have been the case.

The Observer article states:

Prof John Edmunds of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who was a member of the Sage committee of advisers to ministers and who has submitted written evidence to the inquiry, said the controversial Eat Out to Help Out scheme – which gave people discounts for eating in restaurants and pubs – was never discussed with scientists.

Eat Out to Help Out was launched in August 2020. It allowed diners to claim 50% off more than 160m meals at a cost to the Treasury of about £850m. In the process, it also drove new Covid-19 infections up by between 8 and 17%, according to a study carried out by Thiemo Fetzer, an economist at the University of Warwick, a few weeks later.

“If we had [been consulted], I would have been clear what I thought about it,” said Edmunds. “As far as I am concerned, it was a spectacularly stupid idea and an obscene way to spend public money.”

That’s interesting, because Sunak himself is on video record as having insisted that he spoke to scientists about ‘Eat Out to Help Out’:

Another critical decision set to be investigated by Hallett was made in September 2020, when the government was urged by Sage to impose a mini-lockdown to dampen rising case numbers, with both Johnson and Sunak opposing the move.

“I said then that the question was either do it now and get on top of the epidemic and keep it under control, or be forced into doing it in a few weeks’ time, by which time the epidemic will be much worse,” Edmunds said.

“There will be many more hospitalisations and deaths, and you will have to take more stringent action. Unfortunately that is exactly what happened.”

Considering the accusations against him, it may be no surprise that Rishi Sunak’s government – through the Cabinet Office, is trying to deny the Covid inquiry access to WhatsApp messages between government ministers.

The claim is that it would be an invasion of privacy to let the inquiry have (for example) all of the WhatsApp messages Boris Johnson sent via his personal phone because they would include “unambiguously irrelevant” material.

But Sunak and the government want to be the arbiters of which material is relevant and which isn’t –

-and that creates a serious credibility problem: why should the organisation under investigation dictate what evidence is permissible or not?

The Cabinet Office – on behalf of Sunak’s government – has launched a judicial review to keep some of the WhatsApps (and other material) away from the inquiry. Apparently this is going to cost you, me and the rest of the UK public a fortune:

(Again: it won’t cost taxpayers’ money – it will cost public money. We then pay tax according to what the Treasury reckons is needed to keep inflation from going through the roof. You can probably tell that the current mob aren’t very good at making that prediction.)

(Oh – and we’re also funding the Covid inquiry, meaning we’re footing the bill for both sides in the dispute.)

But here’s a twist:

… Or is it?

It seems to me that it is actually reasonable to withhold the information on ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ from the Good Law Project – for the time being. The Cabinet Office has said it is handing “all relevant material to the Covid Inquiry – and ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ is definitely relevant to the Covid inquiry.

The claim – by the Cabinet Office – is that it has given all relevant information to the inquiry, so we would be justified in expecting the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ stuff to have gone there already.

Refusing to hand other information to the inquiry on grounds that it is not relevant does not contradict this claim.

But it makes the result of the judicial inquiry all the more important.

Because if the government wins in court, but doesn’t hand over information about ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ over to the inquiry, it will have no excuse not to hand it over to the Good Law Project.

Right?


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Hancock’s excuse for care home deaths changes with the wind – but doesn’t change the fact that HE LIED TO US

Smug little liar: when Matt Hancock opens his mouth to make a claim, it will probably be wrong – or irrelevant.

It should have been easy to demonstrate that Matt Hancock has been lying to Parliament.

This Site provided a handy guide for members of the Commons Science and Health committees, who questioned the Death Health Secretary for four and a half hours on Thursday (June 10).

But instead of catching him out over his old lies, committee members managed to let him tell some new ones.

And they don’t even excuse him from the accusation he faces: causing the deaths of more than 40,000 care home residents by failing to provide adequate protection against Covid-19 – and lying about it.

We know he told us on May 15 last year, “Right from the start we’ve tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes. We set out our first advice in February… we’ve made sure care homes have the resources they need”.

Would this be the advice from Public Health England that “There is currently no transmission of Covid-19 in the community. It is therefore very unlikely that anyone receiving care in a care home … will become infected”?

If so, then it is clearly that his “protective ring” claim was false. Clearly, one of the resources necessary to ensure that care homes are protected from Covid-19 is the testing of people going into those homes, to ensure they don’t have it. This testing was not carried out.

Nor were homes provided with equipment to protect care home residents, in case their neighbours returning from hospital might have the virus – or with advice on how to achieve such protection.

We know that government policy was to provide no protection at all.

This policy did not change, even though Covid-19 deaths were registered at care homes from March 2. So the Tories allowed those deaths – and the infections causing them – to go uncontrolled for 10 days (March 12 is when we understand the advice was changed) before taking any action at all.

Covid-19 testing did not begin in those homes until July last year, by which time more than 29,000 people had died there. At least a further 11,000 people died after testing began, bringing the total to more than 40,000.

Hancock told the BBC’s Andrew Marr that [bolding mine] “we brought in the policy of wanting to test everybody who went into a care home as soon as we had those tests available”.

That is not what he told us last May. He lied.

At the Science/Health committee hearing, he said the government had not changed its advice on routinely testing hospital patients before they were discharged into care homes did not change until April – because it was following scientific advice that the virus was unlikely to spread asymptomatically.

That does not make his “protective ring” claim any less of a lie. It doesn’t matter what the scientific advice was – he had claimed the government had been protecting care home residents since February when it hadn’t.

None of his witterings about the scientific advice changes this fact.

Here’s another howler:

Defending the government’s initial advice that all hospital patients did not need to be repeatedly tested before being sent to care homes, he said ministers had “followed the clinical advice” at all times.

Again, this does not excuse him from lying. He said the government had put a “protective ring” around care homes when in fact it had left them completely unprotected.

Why did the MPs grilling (if that’s the word) Hancock not point out that nothing he had said changed the fact that he had lied?

Were they protecting him, for reasons unknown to us? If so, that’s dereliction of duty.

Were they dazzled by the new set of excuses he put up to replace the debunked previous batch?

Or are they simply as stupid as Hancock himself?

He clearly thinks they are, otherwise he would have at least come up with lies that were more convincing.

If any other MP is reading this (I know many of you do), can you please point out that Hancock’s lie is obvious and proven – and that we, the people, want him to face serious and lasting consequences?

Source: Covid: Matt Hancock defends timing of first lockdown – BBC News

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‘Optimistic’ PM plots ‘cautious’ lockdown easing. Some fools never learn

After admitting that he ignored scientific advice many times over the past year, making the Covid-19 pandemic much more harmful to the UK’s people and economy than it needed to be, Boris Johnson is planning to do it again.

What a bumbling dimwit.

According to the BBC,

as scientists warned against easing lockdown measures too quickly

Boneheaded Johnson was again planning to ignore them, saying

he is “optimistic” he will be able to set out plans later this month for a “cautious” easing of England’s lockdown.

It seems he really is determined that Covid-19 will kill more of the UK’s population than Spanish Flu. That epidemic killed 228,000 people, so there’s around 100,000 deaths to beat.

Causing another increase in deaths is the only reason any intelligent person could possibly want to open schools before Covid-19 is well and truly under control.

Johnson’s congenital imbecility might excuse him – but not his government, whose ministers should recognise that he is unfit to make such a decision and remove him to ensure he does no further harm.

But they’re not going to do that, are they?

So Johnson will set out his “road map” for easing his excuse for a lockdown (we were never really locked down – that would have meant everybody apart from vital service providers staying inside their houses, all the time, until the danger was past) on February 22.

Whatever timetable he sets then, he’ll follow. That’s what he did in summer 2020, and that’s why an extra 55,000 people died over the winter.

And he can’t stop lying!

“Our children’s education is our number one priority,”

he said – but we all know that the only reason he wants children back in schools is to deprive their parents of any excuse not to go back to work, making money for his Tory donors.

Once again, it’s all about greed.

How many people have to die for the sake of Boris Johnson’s friends’ balance sheets?

Source: Covid: ‘Optimistic’ PM plots ‘cautious’ lockdown easing – BBC News

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Johnson has admitted he was lying about ‘following the science’ – and doesn’t regret causing thousands of deaths

Two-fingered salute: Boris Johnson sends a candid message to everybody who died of Covid-19 – and their surviving families and friends.

That’s a hell of a confession.

Remember all those times Boris Johnson and cronies like Matt Hancock said they were “following the science”?

They weren’t.

They were ignoring the science – and lying to you.

You want some examples?

Scientists warned reopening schools and universities would spread the virus through communities and around the country – which it did.

The PM was urged to keep Brits working from home in a bid to avoid a winter spike a month before the Government launched a campaign to encourage the public to return to the workplace.

Mr Johnson, who has claimed his response to the pandemic has been “guided by the science”, only rowed back on plans to allow as many as three households to mix over the [Christmas] holiday when his hand was forced by the emergence of the Kent variant.

Asked if Johnson regrets these decisions, that have led to tens of thousands of deaths, Boris Johnson’s spokesperson avoided a direct answer – which indicates that he doesn’t.

That’s right.

The UK electorate gave a huge, 80-seat Parliamentary majority to a prime minister who proactively chose to ensure that tens of thousands of people died of Covid-19 – and doesn’t regret it.

He won’t face criminal charges, of course.

He’s above the law. The voters put him there.

Source: Boris Johnson ‘doesn’t regret’ ignoring advice which could have avoided ‘worst case’ Covid-19 – Mirror Online

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Johnson’s ‘herd immunity’ is a nonsense: Covid-19 antibodies fade within months

Boris Johnson’s entire strategy for coping with Covid-19 has been proved to be useless  – according to the science.

Oh yes, yes – Johnson appeared to give up on ‘herd immunity’ when he put the UK into lockdown in March.

But for lockdown to succeed, we all had to stay away from possible infection until the virus had no way of reproducing and passing from person to person.

Johnson’s strategy ensured that there were always people circulating who could be exposed to it. Think about the NHS staff with their inadequate PPE (personal protection equipment), or care staff who carried the disease between homes after the Tories ordered infected residents to be sent there.

And Johnson has kept infection rates up by easing the lockdown for sectors of the community – schools, for example. Pub-goers. Commuters…

All of it was for nothing if he thought he was immunising the nation incrementally because it turns out that Covid-19 antibodies don’t last.

Like the common cold, it seems it will be possible for the virus to infect us all on a regular basis.

That’s the finding of research by Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS foundation trust – and also by the Spanish Ministry of Health.

So the easing of lockdown before Covid-19 was eradicated has done nothing but prolong the crisis in the UK; Johnson would have been better-advised to make the lockdown much harder (and he probably was). It would have been for a much shorter period.

But it seems unlikely this bull-in-a-China-shop prime minister will acknowledge his own stupidity and change course.

All in all, it suggests that the conspiracy theorists are right and he’s simply using the pandemic as a way of culling the population.

Given the evidence, why else would anyone follow a plan as ridiculous as Johnson’s?

Source: Immunity to Covid-19 could be lost in months, UK study suggests | World news | The Guardian

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Another Johnson Covid claim bites the dust: scientists say opening all schools is not ‘safe’

Boris Johnson: he seems to think we’ll accept any old nonsense that comes out of his mouth.

Isn’t it a good thing Tories like Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock don’t have any reputation of honesty to ruin?

If they had, the Covid-19 crisis would have scuttled them double-quick.

As it is, it should be no surprise to anybody that Johnson’s claim, last week, that “it is safe” for pupils to return to school is bunkum.

On Friday Mr Johnson, speaking at a primary school in Hemel Hempstead, said he wanted all year groups in all schools to return in September.

Minutes from the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) on May 21 reveal that extending the easing of restrictions through social bubbles or opening schools for all age groups would reopen transmission networks.

That means it would almost certainly ensure that more people started catching the disease again.

The minutes argue that although parents and teachers had a “relatively young age profile” which meant a lower level of risk of suffering from Covid-19, it urged “very careful monitoring and evaluation of infection in schools after any reopening”.

Reopening schools or non-essential retail “would require a significant effort to ensure that environments are appropriate to minimise transmission” such as distancing and hygiene measures.

Opening non-essential retail would lead to a “modest increase” in contacts of between 10 percentage points.

The minutes say: “Sage advised that overall public adherence with social distancing measures will likely be diminished by HMG signalling its intent to release even some of the measures.”

Source: Coronavirus latest: Scientists warn opening all schools will have a ‘large effect on the epidemic’

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Here’s why schools should stay closed and why anyone saying otherwise may have a political agenda

School: even in exam conditions, teachers will struggle to keep pupils two metres apart.

Perhaps you think it’s not a big deal.

Ever since Boris Johnson announced that he wants schools to reopen at the beginning of June, the idea has become a raging controversy.

He didn’t say that scientists support this notion – for a very good reason, it seems:

Let’s have a look at the article, from Schoolsweek:

The Department for Education’s chief scientific adviser admitted he has not assessed whether guidance on reopening schools is effective, adding the current advice is “draft” and “will be developed”.

Appearing in front of the Parliamentary science and technology committee today, Osama Rahman also admitted the DfE had done no modelling on the impact on transmission rates of starting to reopen schools after the May half term break.

During a hearing that left some MPs visibly bemused, Rahman also suggested the government guidance issued yesterday on safety is a “draft”, and will be reissued after further consultation with Public Health England.

He also said the decision to reopen schools was made by cabinet, not the DfE.

Asked about the transmission rate among children during the hearing, Rahman said the evidence is mixed, and there’s a “low degree of confidence in evidence they might transmit it less”.

SNP education spokesperson Carol Monaghan then asked for clarification. Was it true that “we’re putting together hundreds of potential vectors that can then go and transmit. Is that correct?”

Mr Rahman’s response – “Possibly, depending on school sizes” – may have contributed to Ms Monaghan’s conclusion that, as a former teacher, she “did not think the profession will be satisfied or put at ease with what they are hearing”.

Asked what scientific evidence base underpinned the decision to reopen schools to pupils in reception, year 1 and year 6, and what modelling had been done, Mr Rahman said the Department for Education had not done any modelling at all.

He was unable to provide any proof that any scientific evidence had contributed to the decision to seek the reopening of schools at the beginning of June. He believed the Cabinet had made that decision, following advice from SAGE – albeit filtered through Education Secretary Gavin Williamson.

Rahman also admitted he had made no assessment on how effectively actions proposed by the government for schools to reopen safely can be implemented.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, given this background, that education unions united to declare that they would only support the reopening of schools “when it is safe to do so”:

The statement says:

“We all want schools to re-open, but that should only happen when it is safe to do so. The government is showing a lack of understanding about the dangers of the spread of coronavirus within schools, and outwards from schools to parents, sibling and relatives, and to the wider community.

“Uniquely, it appears, school staff will not be protected by social distancing rules. 15 children in a class, combined with their very young age, means that classrooms of 4 and 5-year olds could become sources of Covid-19 transmission and spread.  While we know that children generally have mild symptoms, we do not know enough about whether they can transmit the disease to adults. We do not think that the government should be posing this level of risk to our society.

“We call on the government to step back from the 1st June and work with us to create the conditions for a safe return to schools based on the principles and tests we have set out.”

The principles and tests include:

  • Safety and welfare of pupils and staff as the paramount principle
  • No increase in pupil numbers until full rollout of a national test and trace scheme
  • A national Covid-19 education taskforce with government, unions and education stakeholders to agree statutory guidance for safe reopening of schools
  • Consideration of the specific needs of vulnerable students and families facing economic disadvantage
  • Additional resources for enhanced school cleaning, PPE and risk assessments
  • Local autonomy to close schools where testing indicates clusters of new covid-19 cases

Doesn’t that seem reasonable? Not to Gavin Williamson!

He said: “Sometimes scaremongering and making people fear is really unfair, and not a welcome pressure that is to be placed on families, children and teachers alike.”

Amazingly, he has had support from a Labour MP – Barry Sheerman:

Fortunately, this chap faced an instant backlash:

So it seems we are being asked to believe the unions are scaremongering, despite the evidence from Mr Rahman that shows they aren’t.

What do you think?

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Is this the reason Lancet editor said government advisors were lying on Covid-19?

Dominic Cummings: he can’t give advice on science, so why has he been attending Sage meetings on handling coronavirus?

Dominic Cummings and a data scientist from his Brexit campaign, Vote Leave, have been influencing the scientific group advising the government on coronavirus, it has been revealed.

Is this the reason Lancet editor Richard Horton reckons “supposedly independent medical advisors” have been telling “manifest untruths” – lying – to support a “political regime whose credibility is rapidly collapsing”?

We have already heard that Cummings was involved in a meeting in late January, when Covid-19 was played down as “just a bit of flu”.

He apparently said the UK would be better able to resist a second wave of the disease next winter if 60-80 per cent of the population became infected and the survivors developed “herd immunity”.

Cummings was paraphrased after speaking at a private engagement at the end of February, in which he said the government’s strategy was “herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”.

Now The Guardian has claimed that both Cummings and Warner have been taking part in meetings of the group, raising questions about the independence of its scientific advice.

The government’s former chief scientific adviser Sir David King is quoted in the article, saying Cummings may have been reporting his own “interpretation” of Sage advice to Boris Johnson.

Mr Horton wrote in the Lancet criticising Dr Jenny Harries, England’s deputy chief medical officer, at the end of March. She had stated that England had a “perfectly adequate” supply of Personal Protective Equipment.

We all now know that this was not true.

Mr Horton wrote: “I am sure Dr Harries believed what she said. But she was wrong and she should apologise to the thousands of health workers who still have no access to WHO-standard PPE.”

On Sunday, Dr Harries seems to have made matters worse by saying: “The UK, regardless of the position that we may be in now, has been an international exemplar in preparedness.”

It sounds like propaganda.

And what about when government ministers say they have been “following scientific advice”?

If they’ve been getting this advice from Dominic Cummings, then it cannot be considered to have any value at all.

Source: Revealed: Dominic Cummings on secret scientific advisory group for Covid-19 | World news | The Guardian

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So much for the party of law and order! Forensic science cuts pose risk to justice, regulator warns

A forensic scientist specialising in DNA sequencing points to bands representing nucleotide bases (A,C,T,G) in an X-ray image [Image: Alamy].

It’s as though the Conservatives wanted to hinder police investigations, isn’t it?

So much for the party of law and order!

The government will damage British justice if it inflicts further cuts on forensic science, the official regulator has said.

Dr Gillian Tully warned in her annual report that financial pressures were compromising quality, including potentially in serious criminal cases involving murder and sexual assault.

Techniques such as DNA analysis and hi-tech examination of samples underpin the criminal justice system and are vital to proving guilt and innocence in the courts.

The government abolished the Forensic Science Service in 2012, which was the main provider to the police, and the system has been beset by problems.

Source: Forensic science cuts pose risk to justice, regulator warns | Science | The Guardian

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