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UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers gives a blistering reaction to the UK’s £200 million COVID inquiry, tearing apart the official narrative. After 800 pages, the report reaches the conclusion that Britain’s only mistake was not locking down sooner—but at what cost? From the missing chapter on Sweden’s success to the ignored collateral damage inflicted on a generation of children, was the lockdown experiment actually a civilisational error that the state is now too afraid to admit? And is the inquiry an establishment whitewash that sets the stage for future authoritarianism?
Thanks Freddy for not pulling your punches and for continuing to be the voice of sanity that you were in the early days of the ‘pandemic’.
Thank you, Freddie, for an excellent and highly convincing report of what was expected by many to be an exercise in whitewashing.
Another lawyer fest with a narrow remit that misses major points and staffed by quite obviously Remainers to ensure Boris is truly sunk. (I think his worst decision related to Ukraine). Boris of course never wanted lockdowns to start with but he realised that unless he acted as per Europe he would be blamed for every Covid death personally by the media who hated him for winning Brexit.
I hated him for being an incompetent and lazy liar.
And obese to boot!!
Part 2 (Dr Sunetra Gupta) AWOL
Oh Freddy it makes you weep. I am married to a Swede and live in Sweden and just couldn’t believe what was going on in the UK. We both managed on three occasions to travel to Britain and back during this period and it was like going into a gulag and back. There were only two media outlets in Britain that attempted to fight back – UNHERD and Planet Normal. Otherwise it seemed the government had a Putinesque control over the rest. What made me especially scared was that many of my friends and relations both in the UK and in the US all highly intelligent and university educated (though realise that doesn’t count for much these days) rebuffed my attampts to persuade them that Sweden was correct in its handing of Covid and their countries were wrong. It seemed they had all been brrainwashed. Terrifying.
Nigel Bradshaw, Karlshamn, Sweden
It makes me even more scared that virtually all the “highly intelligent and university educated” people follow the same groupthink on just about every major issue of the day, from Ukraine to Net Zero. Covid was just the harbinger of a complete collapse in critical thinking among the UK’s ‘elites’.
I could NOT agree more and very well said.
In short it was a national disgrace of gigantic proportions! The degenerate behaviour of the British Establishment, coupled with the supine behaviour of the lumpen masses was truly appalling!
Consummatum est.
Don’t forget about Reiner Fuellmich. He’s now in jail for his efforts to bring these bastards to justice….. effectively kidnapped from Mexico by the German Govt, arrested and held in Solitary Confinement for almost 18 months (with severe impositions on his dignity and suffering extreme physical abuse) and then jailed for 2 years and 8 months on a false embezzlement charge, and not all of his pre-trial detention was deducted from his original 3 years and 9 months.
This absolutely wasn’t anything to do with him ’embezzling’ anything – it was retribution for him trying to hold the Establishment to account over their Corona Crimes. He is a Political Prisoner.
https://pinchofsoot.nl/sentence-reiner-fuellmich-as-harsh-and-disproportionate-as-his-pre-trial-detention/
You should have been in NZ or Melbourne – you guys dont know what lock down is!!
What is the most worrying is the legacy media will enjoy the conclusion of the report and the public will lap it up. Thank you Freddy and Unherd for being one of the few news outlets that can think critically. I’ll give Talk TV a shout out too, especially Julia Hartley-Brewer.
The report should be subtitled” “We Learned Absolutely Nothing.”
At least the UK establishment’s control over internet communication, in particular youtube, has loosened enough since covid to permit Freddie to deliver such a pungent critique.
A few years ago, any well-reasoned, compelling criticism of covid policy would likely have been censored by youtube.
Yes.
Allegedly, I could have been banned from Twitter for saying that Covid was airborne, as opposed to the erroneous WHO idea that it was only transmitted by touch (remember all the hand sanitisers?), as flu was also believed to be for years.
I put that down to a shortage of good masks, which they were trying to keep for medics, and I correctly predicted that as soon as the mask shortage was solved, they would miraculously discover that infected people masking up would cut down infection rates.
Most people would have had no idea that they were infected – unless they were testing every single day (keeping up the nice bonanza for all the pharma companies churning out their unreliable tests). So they’d have been walking around unmasked at their most contagious. Which is why masks, if they are effective at all (which is debatable) are better worn to protect oneself. If at all. Especially considering the ridiculous homemade rags that so many people used.
Youtube is owned by Google, is owned by Alphabet Group/XXVI, whose principal corporate investors are Blackrock and Vanguard.
Just sayin’….
Thanks Freddy for your thoughtful analysis. I cannot believe the propaganda of the report. As a Canadian couple who are seniors, my spouse is currently 89, we avoided lockdowns and Covid rules. Due to the draconian measures put in place in Canada we stayed out of Canada for 6 months in 2020 and 7 months in 2021. We continued this pattern until this past winter leaving Canada for only two months. We never had a Covid vaccine. We tried not to wash our hands and avoided masks much of the time. Due to travel policy we each were tested for Covid 13 times and all tests were negative. We were never ill. We spent every Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Valentine Day, Easter, anniversary and birthdays dining out. We made the sensible decision to not follow the herd mentality.
Keep up the excellent work!
Royce and Nelson
First time I see Freddie in a rage
Competitive virtue-signalling (as usual) was the engine. And Horse-Face in NZ won. She will be UK SecGen next, be very afraid.
Is that an oblique reference to Jacinda ‘the Hun’?
This was an experiment
An important point of not asking the right questions.
But just as nuclear power uses Uranium so it can give us nuclear weapons, there are many hidden agendas here.
Pandemics kill even more people than wars. They can arise rapidly and without warning. The next one could have 10x the death rate – and if a deliberately released bioweapon, could be even worse.
So this experiment informs on how well lax policies (as at the beginning) and lockdowns (as in later) actually work.
What was obvious was that voluntary lockdowns, while they made a big dent on R, would have still led to almost everyone being infected pre-vaccine, leading to a multiple of the deaths, as well as even more suffering from the organ damage Covid causes.
I have heard many stories about physical mixing with strangers in Sweden, but the big piece you are missing is that no one knew the short term – or the long term – damage from Covid. It is a mistake to think that real deaths may have been -100% the estimated deaths to +100% of the estimated deaths. The real fear was that the deaths may have been 1% or 100x the estimates. This is why lockdown was adopted – as an insurance policy against the end of civilisation.
You make the point well about a 10,000x death variation from age, which dwarfs almost every other aspect, with only inoculation coming close, saving many years equivalent.
It is indeed odd that the scope of the report doesn’t cover unconventional ideas and why they would have been worse than what was tried.
Given everything that we know is going disastrously wrong in this country, is anyone genuinely surprised the establishment has just poured £200m of our money down the drain to cover its own ar$e.
Can’t thank you enough for your work here and over the last 5 years. I only hope it will still be possible to get some challenge to this poor report – even for £20m it would have been a terrible waste of money
Congratulations to Freddie Sayers for applying clear logical thinking to a confused, self justifying, self-serving piece of bureaucratees: an appalling waste of time and money. The political class and nearly all members of public life, including (perhaps especially) the “great and the good” just have no idea how to think. They are strangers to logic and rationality. This suits them because they can look as though they are searching, in an “impartial enquiry”, for the truth – whereas in fact they will do everything (including disobey the rules of logical thinking) to avoid the truth if it does not correspond to their preconceived ideas.
i agree – lockdowns were a terrible idea and the fall-out from them will cotinue for decades. Utterly shocking and the so-called enquiry was a massive waste of money. Truly shocking.
Thanks Freddy for a clear overview of the corruption at the heart of the Inquiry all printed in black and white. I look forward to Part 2.
NZ will publish its results of their Commission of Inquiry at the beginning of 2026. The NZ Commission refused to interview the top 5 politicians who caused an equal amount of destruction in this country. We are expecting a similar white wash with avoidance of the facts.
Never forget Jacinda Ardern’s chilling words “We will continue to be your SINGLE source of Truth”.
She should be in jail.
Thanks for the focus on what’s missing – the cost/benefits analysis from the perspective of “we don’t want to do this again, do we?” The report’s bias obviously is cemented by groupthink, but what was the motivating need? … stability, by avoiding a chaotic upset? or was there also ‘steering’ by some clique of a controlling establishment?
I agree with Freddie’s conclusions. I suspect that one factor is that the inquiry was conducted by scientifically illiterate lawyers who – like Boris and other key decision makers during the crisis – simply could not get their heads round the issues. They appear to have defaulted to assuming that the Vallance et al line was correct – which with hindsight it was not. Next time inquiries of this nature should be conducted by those able to ask the right questions and understand the answers.
The entire farce was a £200m whitewash.
I’m not sure I can be bothered to wade through 800 pages of lies to find out whether these two things are mentioned it it (and I’ll bet my last penny that they aren’t), but readers may or may not be aware of these :-
1) On the Govt website in the section on ‘guidance’ regarding High Consequence Infectious Diseases, about halfway down this page in the greyed box https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid it states that as of 19th March 2020 Covid-19 is NO LONGER considered to be a HCID”.
That was the day before Johnson shut the pubs, and 4 days before we went into full lockdown…. let that sink-in folks!
So Hallett reckons we should have gone into lockdown a week earlier on the 16th….. and then 3 days later teh Govt would have …er…. declared Covid-19 to no longer be an HCID….. and then they would have rescinded lockdown? Like I said, the repoert – the whole ‘Enquiry’ was a whitewash.
2) On the Parliamentary Assets website, there is a document which shows that the Govt had sought legal advice as to how they might circumvent both the Mental Health Act and the Human Rights Act in order to declare the Vaccine-Hesitant, and indeed ‘anti-vaxxers’ as mentally ill, and to MANDATE Covid Vaccinations. The document is here https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/9253/html/
The legal advice is dated 22nd July 2020. Now, I may be making a slight hop to a conclusion here (I don’t think it is a leap or even a jump) but there is a coding in brackets after the title of the document – (COV0220). That looks like a date to me – i.e. February 2020. If I am correct, then that is likely the date that the Johnson Govt made the request for legal advice. Legal wheels turn slowly and it took 5 months for that legal advice to be produced.
There is a further implication here; if the UK Govt made that request in Feb 2020, then it would have had to have been discussed prior to that time (in a COBRA meeting perhaps?) say in Jan 2020, or even Dec 2019. If it was any earlier than that – say Nov 2019, when news of a novel Coronavirus was leaking out of China, when nobody else had even heard of SARS-CoV-2, or Covid-19, or the level-4 BioSecurity Lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or the Wet Market just down t’road…. and a full year before any potential ‘vaccines’ were available…. that means that the UK Govt was looking to mandate those yet-to-be-synthesised ‘vaccines’, that had had ZERO Clinical Trials and hence had provided NO data on efficacy, or indeed associated risks. Furthermore it was anticipating resistance from the public to those yet-to-exist ‘vaccines’ such that it needed to FORCE them onto people. Clearly they knew that simply providing genuine information as to both necessity and efficacy would not be enough to convince people that the ‘vaccines’ were in peoples best interests, and that they would voluntarily comply.
There is only one conclusion to made there, and that is that the UK Govt (along with other national Govt’s acting in lockstep) KNEW that the ‘vaccines’ were intended to cause harm and that they would need to employ an increasing series of penalties for refusal to comply ; coercion, then bribery (free Uber rides for students, free French Fries in the USA, free Pizza in Italy, free ice-cream in Israel, etc etc), then sanctions (you can’t fly, sail, travel by road; can’t go to the shops / restaurants / park / out for a run or a walk unless you had a dog (FFS); then financial penalty for being caught, then the threat of custodial Jail sentences for repeat ‘offenders’.
This is not yet over folks – be warned. The conclusions of this sham enquiry, and Halletts word yesterday, are preparing the ground for more of the same in the future. The W.H.O. are even giving us clues here = Public Health Emergency of International Concern, abbreviated to P.H.E.I.C. – and pronounced ‘Fake’.
Bob Moran’s cartoon “Orwell’s Surprise” sums it up perfectly. https://www.bobmoran.co.uk/cartoons2021-24/orwell-surprise-original-artwork
This is Oxford’s fault!
So many of our so called Establishment are PPE graduates, and a more worthless ‘bluffers’ degree would be hard to imagine.
Off course the Boris Beast did read ‘ Greats’ by to no avail as he turned out to be just as useless, spineless and spastic as the rest of them.
And now to add insult to injury we have a five year late COVID Report at a cost of £250,000 a page!!
I discovered Freddie S and Unherd during COVID. Both saved me from going insane.
I met an old acquaintance who said she loved COVID! I’m of Freddie’s view. It was a horrific time – truly. We were treated like prisoners in our own countries. Unforgivable.
The graph show non excess deaths can be seen in a similar form in this article in the Lancet https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(24)00163-7/fulltext
“There is no attempt to quantify the destructive effects of shutting down society”.
Except UK society wasn’t shut down. It was offered a half-hearted, badly enforced, cynical, cosmetic, too late gesture by Boris Johnson’s government to tell the British electorate and their children – what the hell if hundreds of thousands of you die or are permanently disabled, as happened in every country whose governments decided what became known as Covid, was little more than a bad dose of influenza. Until it was too late.
I can only assume you haven’t listened to Freddie’s excoriating analysis. Listen to it and tell us where he’s wrong.
I have listened to it and as I say about Boris Johnson’s Lockdown, it was – “a half-hearted, badly enforced, cynical, cosmetic, too late gesture by Boris Johnson’s government to tell the British electorate and their children – what the hell if hundreds of thousands of you die or are permanently disabled, as happened in every country whose governments decided what became known as Covid, was little more than a bad dose of influenza. Until it was too late.
So here’s my own experience, not in the UK but in China, after arriving here on the 28 January 2020 and spending the next three years here. I do this in order to correct some of the understandable mistakes in the video.
On 31 January 2020, with Covid cases already detected, the city government where I live imposed the strictest of lockdowns with only hospitals, open air food markets and a few banks open. Mask wearing was compulsory. But people were allowed out to exercise and shop. There was no public transport other than private taxis. By 6 February online shopping meant being able to order a normal supermarket shop online and collect it at the gates of the complex. As usual Chinese entrepreneurship came to the fore with fleets of electric motor scooters appearing, whose riders would collect the shopping you’d ordered on line from your chosen supermarket and deliver it to your door. On 22 February 2020 buses were back on the road, the metro opened, shops and places of work were open and people who were away for the Chinese new year holiday, were allowed back in the city, after the Expressways were reopened. All places of work and education were re-opened. Other than compulsory mask wearing and later having a tracking device on my phone, things were largely back to normal. The most extensive and efficient online shopping service continues to this day and the last time I went in a supermarket in China was the 25th December 2019. For the 23 days of lockdown the internet was very slow presumably because so many people and students were working at home and studying online. On 24th February the provincial government reduced the crisis level from 1 to 3 and the 23 day lockdown was over.
Currently statista reports that in the province of over 46 million, since January 2020, total Covid cases are 2,154 with only 2 deaths.
Finally from SKY News Friday 5 June 2020:
“The UK currently has the second highest coronavirus infection rate of any major European country, according to Sky News analysis”.
“Only Sweden, which decided not to impose a lockdown, has a higher rate of infection”.
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-uk-infection-rate-is-second-highest-of-any-major-european-country-12000623
You are Matt Hancock and I claim my £10 finder’s fee.
From a review of Hancock’s and Isabel Oakeshott’s book- “Pandemic Diaries”:
“In fairness, Hancock has a tech geek’s love for scientifically engineered solutions to problems, (meaning…the need for a vaccine, might actually be true.) But still he can’t get his Brexit-focused colleagues to wake up, or let him call a Cobra meeting. Even when the penny finally drops, and despite what Hancock grandly calls his economist’s ability to “see the behaviour of individuals at the scale of whole societies”, for some inexplicable reason Cummings keeps arranging big meetings behind his back. Stepping back for a moment, you don’t have to pick a side in the Cummings-Hancock war to see the practical difficulties of trying to run a Covid strategy with these two, plus a prime minister who in the middle of the second deadly wave apparently inquired about testing his dog to see if it had had Covid”.
Hancock didn’t keep a diary during the pandemic, but I did and on 29 October 2020 recorded the end of month new confirmed UK Covid cases. There were starting in January 2020: 2 / 23 / 25,521 / 171,253 / 274,762 / 312,564 / 303,181 / 335,873 / 453264 / October 894,690
After scientists projected ‘that there could be several thousand COVID deaths a day’, Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds a Downing Street press conference at which he announces a second lockdown for England, for four weeks from Thursday 5 November to Wednesday 2 December, in order to prevent what he describes as a “medical and moral disaster” for the NHS.
You have a predilection for prolix statements of credulity. Your knowledge of what happened in Britain is virtually non-existent: explicable, as you were not in the UK, but in China.
I wasn’t in Britain but my laptop, VPN software and internet connection gave me exactly the same access to the media coverage of the pandemic, in the same way as I can leave this reply this afternoon. Those such as the BBC checking to find my location via my IP Address found I was located in a town or city in the UK. I’ve just checked and currently my IP Address locates me in Coventry.
It’s strange there was no mention of UKHSA (UK Health Security Agency) report on non pharma interventions (NPIs) such as social distancing and mask wearing and I quote from their report:
“Conclusion: The validity and reliability of evidence on the effectiveness of NPIs as implemented in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic is weak.”
Well done Feddie for ploughing through 800p for us in one night! A very helpful summery of the five years of trauma we have been submitted to and which will continue as we deal with the pharmacological attempt to chase the man made virus!
Indeed thanks Freddy for being a cool voice of sanity. the news bite that “Had a mandatory lockdown been imposed on or immediately after 16 March 2020, modelling has established that the number of deaths in England in the first wave up until 1 July 2020 would have been reduced by 48% – equating to approximately 23,000 fewer deaths” is so full of holes it should be added to Darrell Huff’s book “How to lie with statistics” Models might be correct but with respect to Covid-19, none came even close to predicting the actual number of cases accurately. A good number were just PCR positive without any evidence of disease. Moreover no post-mortem examinations were undertaken not even a swab from the upper respiratory tract, hence the weird definition of death due to COVID-19. If only a portion of the £200 million had been devoted to proper studies perhaps we would now be much the wiser.
That was all designed to boost the ‘fear-factor’ ; HUGE numbers of ‘cases’ meant that the population at large would more readily accept the narrative and comply. Testing at PCR ct40 produces over a TRILLION (I’ll write that out in full to make that number appear as significant as it is) – 1,099,511,627,776) copies from ONE single starting fragment of viral RNA. The inventor and developer of the PCR technique – Kary Banks Mullis – stated that it was not, and should not be used as a test to diagnose ‘illness’ in somebody. It was and is a technique for producing extremely large quantities of ‘stuff’ from minute quantities of ‘stuff’. He also stressed that at higher ct amplifications, any results became unreliable and recommended that the technique NOT be taken beyond ct34 cycles (and iirc, there is no instance of any disease having been grown in the lab from samples that were taken past 28 cycles). Mullis also stated that if you do it (the technique) right [meaning that if you abuse it and do it ‘wrong’] then you can find anything in anybody’s samples. And he should know because he got the Nobel Prze for Chemistry for it in 1993.
It was a pandemic of ‘testing’ and not of a disease. Oddly – or not – Mullis died on 7th August 2019 from pneumonia, in California; just before Covid kicked-off. Some might say that ‘they’ knew what they were going to use his technique for (specifically the discredited Modified Corman-Drosten PCR Test, which did not sample UNIQUE parts of a viral genome, and so the results would confirm ‘Covid’ from the Common Cold you had 6 months ago….) ; they turned it into a ‘test’ – and it was (cough) necessary for him to not be around to rail against its misuse. Pneumonia at the age of 74, in California, at the height of the Summer? Yeah right.
I have two friends who are paramedics. They’ve both told me that they experienced a much higher incidence of cancelled blue-light shouts (compared to pre-‘Covid’), whilst en-route…. which would seem to reinforce the notion that many blue light emergencies were fabricated to get the population used to seeing those ambulances speeding along the streets? Of course, that would just be an unsubstantiated, crackpot, tin-foil hat, nutjob conspiracy theory…. wouldn’t it?
As a specialist in acute internal medicine with an MSc in epidemiology and having worked in both Sweden and UK, I couldn’t agree more that lock downs were pointless. There is however one ultimate predictor in the rate of excess deaths rarely spoken about: namely the health of the population before Covid as a result of that countries health care system. UK vs Sweden in outcome can be explained to a large degree based on this one factor, and not due to lock down or no lock down. The Nordic countries have an overall healthier population and well functioning health care systems. Finland and Norway did lock downs, with similar outcomes to Sweden without them. The elephant in the room in all this is that the NHS is inefficient in all meanings of the word: time management, economically, work descriptions, hierarchy etc. Politicians in the UK know this but would be political suicidal to admit it.
Are there not 3 more ‘modules’ of this rubbish to go? So another £600 million?
I gather the current cost is circa £160,000 a day! Who do these muppets think were are?
Thanks Freddie for this brilliant piece. The way you eviscerated some of the more fantastical and absurd passages made me cheer; before of course holding my head as you did… it looks as if the authors of the report are suffering from cognitive dissonance to such a degree that they have actually gone a bit insane…
Looking forward to hearing some of the counter-witnesses to come in Part 2.
Thanks Freddy for continuing to be the voice of sanity that you were in the early days of the ‘pandemic’. As an independent GP in Harley Street, you and UnHerd helped me enormously not to lose my mind and to remain confident that sane thinkers still existed. However, this report is not only a disgrace but also proof that those in charge: politicians, bureaucrats, NHS leaders, and most worryingly the experts in medical and social care, have failed to use the opportunity to understand what went wrong and why. As Freddy stated, Covid has been a self-inflicted societal destruction, and the responsible are still in place.
I remember UnHerd at that time and meeting Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, professors at Stamford and Harvard respectively, in a top room of a pub that was then used for Unherd’s events in London. I asked them both the same question – ‘ are we living through the very enactment (lockdowns), of the 1952 ‘Solomon Asch Experiment’ concerning the individual and group dynamics, the result which showed a majority would agree with group opinion, at least once, knowing it to be wrong. They both immediately said ‘yes’!
And this, it needs saying, is why the name ‘UnHerd’ is relevant. Inedpendent thinking based on self education is what no one saw during this period, anywhere in the world to the extent of making a difference, either in society, the press, media or governance. Is it ever ? it is the human default.
As a retired public health doctor I was astonished that lockdown was applied , and that modelling forecasts ( which are an important contribution to pandemic management) worst cases were taken as fact to justify them. No only has the inquiry not critically examined this key issue , but has used these assumtions to provide the reports headline.
Sweden carried out a prompt scientific assessment of the response reporting within the year after the pandemic with practical recoomendations. The UK after the H1N1 ‘mild ‘ Pandemic did likewise with a straighforward report from Dame Deidre Hine that included the wise recommendation regarding the use and misuse of modelling.
One recommendation for the future is to keep lawyers away from the scientific matters which need to be summarised from the bulging literature by those competent in science. As I considered this point I note that most research on Covid was done probono or through repurposing existing funding.
Reflecting on this point the inquiry seems to invert the principle of premier leagure football, where the players on the field,,scientists, health workers, are paid nothing whereas the ‘specatators’ lawyers at the inquiry are aid a fortune to criticise, inexpertly, the run of play.
paid a fortune, ( sorry misbehaving keyboard!)
Excellent summary Freddy. The moral o this whole episode is that pnaic and hysteria always kills. And the response generated by panic is always exactly opposite of what the response should be. A simple example is how to handle a skid on snow or ice: the appropriate response is turn the steering wheel into the skid but the panicked response (which almost invariably occurs even if one knows what to do but has not trained extensively to do it) is to turn the steering wheel in the direction opposite the skid).
The real question is why exactly did the UK and US and all the other European countries with the exception of Sweden, panic to such a degree. I recently read that the number of deaths in Scotland during the 1st wave of the 1988/1989 flu epidemic was larger than in the first covid wave, yet to my recollection nobody made any fuss or song and dance during the 1988/1989 epidemic. In fact most people probably didn’t even realize there was a major epidemic during 1988/1989 because it wasn’t broadcast from the rooftops with daily death counts (which in the cas of covid were exaggerated by orders of magnitude, thereby feeding the panic and mass hysteria).
I cannot help but think that Drs. Farrar (a total disgrace to our mutual alma mater, UCL med school), Fauci et al. knew that SARS-CoV2 was a result gain-of-function research coupled with a lab leak in Wuhan, and that SRAS-CoV2 or the main elements thereof (the furin cleavage site and adjacent regions) was produced in Ralf Baric’s lab at Chapell Hill NC. Worth noting that Moderna patented the DNA sequence for the furin cleavage site and adjacent regions that happens to be identical to that in the actual SARS-CoV2 virus. Given that each amino acid can be coded by 3 different base triplets, the possibility of that occurring by chance is as close to zero as it gets.
Finally, it might be worth considering what the response should have been. Clearly there was no need to close schools since children were basically not at risk. Focussed protection of the elderly and infirm in nursing homes would have been wise. And another simple thing that could have been done quite easily with minimal economic consequences was to allow people largely working in the paper pushing industry (e.g. lawyers, accountants, stock brokers, etc….) to partially work from home, thereby reducing crowding on London public transport.
Finally, I also suspect that had Covid not been hyped up by the press to the extent that it was, but simply ignored, nobody would have known the difference between 2000-2001 and two successive bad flu seasons.
Sweden features large in both of Freddie Sayers episodes so it’s worth looking at this in some depth.
Sweden had 2,754,129 cases of Covid-19 infections and 27,407 deaths in a population of about 10 million. (Figures at 21 March 2025)
Also according to Statistics Sweden, the average useful floor space per person in Sweden was 42 square meters at the end of 2022. That’s an incredible advantage if one member of a family needs to go into isolation.
More than half of all Swedish homes are made up of one resident, the highest proportion in Europe, according to Eurostat figures.
It’s very difficult to be infected if you live on your own.
“As for social distancing, Swedes already have that down to a tee and naturally and culturally gave each other vast amounts of physical space way before the coronavirus pandemic hit.”
Much originally posted on UnHerd 21/3/25
Largely published in my comment on UnHerd – 27/12/23 and updated today.
Before I recount my own experience I recall reading another Swedish journalist who wrote that self-isolation comes quite naturally to Swedes and doubtless helped in combatting Covid-19 without a lockdown. Furthermore according to Statistics Sweden, the average useful floor space per person in Sweden was 42 square meters at the end of 2022. That’s an incredible advantage if one member of a family needs to go into isolation.
Cutting short a visit to the UK, I returned to China from London on 28th January 2020 mainly after reading the following article by Jing Xuan Teng & Yan Zhao, on 10th January 2020.
“That Mystery Disease Outbreak in China Could Be Caused by a Newly Discovered Virus”, in Science Alert 09 January 2020.
https://www.sciencealert.com/china-thinks-mystery-pneumonia-outbreak-caused-by-new-coronavirus?perpetual=yes&limitstart=1
[“ScienceAlert publishes timely, trusted science news to enlighten and entertain millions of readers each month. We are an independently run online news source, and our experienced journalists cover the important scientific issues of our time, as well as new discoveries, mysteries, and wonders from around the globe”].
On landing at Xi’an airport in central China, the plane was held at the gate for 5 hours until two medics in full hazmat suits and helmets entered the plane, took everyone’s temperature twice, collected a 40 question form and took those with a raised temperature into quarantine.
When in China I live in a city with an Urban Permanent Population of nearly 7 million, (end of 2022), almost 800 miles from Wuhan. I have spent over 11 years living and travelling in the country since 2002. [I am currently in the country]
In 2020, the national lunar Spring Festival holiday was 24 January to 2 February when it’s said, “half of China travels to visit the other half”. The timing was an unfortunate coincidence in spreading the virus. [Public transport, as happens during every national holiday, would have been full with tickets booked months in advance]
The city government where I live ‘locked down’ on 31 January 2020, when 97 Covid cases had been detected. (It was also the day of the first two cases in the UK). Those infected here were all visitors, some from Wuhan and they were all quarantined in their hotels. All roads in and out of the city were closed. All places of work and education, other than hospitals and emergency services were closed. Only open air food markets were allowed to open. On 4 February the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office advised all Britons to leave China “if they can”. I stayed as by then it was obvious from the lack of seriousness in the UK media, that a catastrophe was on its way.
On 13 February I wrote the following to my MP and the Guardian newspaper whose cartoonists and opinion writers seemed to think what was to become a pandemic was all a big joke.
“1. Two days ago people received a text message from the city authorities telling them to refrain from spitting in the street.
2. Yesterday there was a message from central government saying stay away from wild animals. (sic)
3. Today after visiting the market for food, on arriving back at the gated complex, the security guards required residents to scan tracking software onto their phones so they could tell who was leaving and who was arriving. They had no idea what would happen to the data collected. In the market people were still behaving normally, trying to push in and making no attempt to avoid contact with others.
4. People’s behaviour has changed in some respects, with one example being how they now stand back from the lift doors in the 33 floor block where I live to see if anyone is coming out, whereas before the virus struck they would frequently barge through those trying to get out. There are three lifts in each of the four blocks so with far fewer people venturing out it’s possible to wait until an empty one arrives. Almost everyone is wearing a mask.
5. I am able to get out every day to walk and every other day to run along the river wearing a mask and gloves and avoiding the few other people I come across, who fortunately also do their best to avoid me. It’s clear that whatever is killing people in Wuhan is coming here.
6. The gym I go to is closed until further notice, there are still no buses and the metro is either closed or not stopping in the city centre. [It was also closed] Today it’s the busiest it’s been for two weeks but both the amount of traffic and pedestrians is greatly reduced.
On 15 February 2020 Chinese media reported an increase of 2,641 cases to 66,492.
The 17th February was the official first day back at work following the end of the extended national holiday, although many places remained closed. On 22 February buses were back on the road and the city metro was working again. Road blocks were removed and those who’d left at the start of Spring Festival were allowed back into the city. Other than wearing masks and where possible, observing “distancing” things were more or less back to normal. The 22 day lockdown had worked although internal and external travel continued to be a minor problem, especially for foreigners, until March 2023. Several times at long distance bus stations my translator had to assist staff who had never seen a British passport, what to record on their forms.
Statista’s most recent report for 27 July 2022 records just 2 Covid deaths in a province of over 48 million people.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1090007/china-confirmed-and-suspected-wuhan-coronavirus-cases-region/
In December 2022 after an increase in cases, 48 hour negative test results on mobile phones were required on public transport, taxis, internal and external flights. That requirement was rescinded in March 2023.
Perhaps if Boris Johnson had locked down hard on 9 March, when UK cases were 148, (or even better at the end of February 2020, as happened in some UK nursing homes, whose management had seen what was happening in Italy), things would have been markedly different.
The 22 day lockdown I experienced was infinitely preferable to Boris Johnson’s dithering that resulted in three lockdowns lasting almost 16 months.
On the 3rd of June 2021, courtesy of a client who made the arrangements, I went to the Quanwei Community Health Clinic to get a Sinovac anti-Covid jab.
The first mainstream documentary on Covid policies, Covid Collateral, (covidcollateraldotcom) featuring Jay Bhattacharya and other key scientists in 2024, was persistently censored by Google. No mainstream critic would review it and no mainstream broadcaster would touch it, despite the filmmaker’s stellar credits and endorsements by Jay and Robert Redfield, formerly head of the CDC. The climate for truth has still not arrived.
Thank heavens someone is talking sense. I was appalled when I heard the various News reports on the results of the Covid Enquiry. The ridiculous statistic of 23,000 deaths and the suggestion that it was Boris Johnson and the government who were to blame was pathetic, or as you say ‘sophomoric’: conceited, overconfident of knowledge and poorly informed . A perfect word for it. What happened to ‘follow the science’? How about acknowledging what I understand to have been the average age of those who died of Covid as 82?! It is a sad reflection on the intellectual health of this country if the best that can be produced at the cost of £200 million comes up with what we should have done rather than what should be done better next time. I hope Baroness Heather Hallett takes as much care to listen to what Freddie Sayers has to say here as he did when reading her 800 pages.
Very good, but the main thing that went wrong was that at no stage did anyone ask the fundamental question – why did people who caught SARS-CoV-2 die? Why meaning what was the mechanism of severe illness leading to death. And thereafter why, despite being told what the correct treatment was, did no-one authorise its immediate introduction? On the basis that had they done so the death rate would almost certainly have diminished substantially, and it was already a very small fraction of those who acquired the virus and got a bit ill, one then has to ask whether there was any need for ANY of the public health measures; lockdowns, masks, vaccination (and on that latter point the evidence is mounting rapidly that the vaccines are as dangerous as Covid itself, because the generator of severe illness is an immune disturbance from introduction of the spike protein.
For a fuller exposition of my critique see The Covid Inquiry Has Failed to Ask the Most Basic Question: Why Were People Dying? – The Daily Sceptic.
Happy to discuss on camera!