What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

At last, some serious clout being lent to the operation to shift the tightly wedged Evergreen tanker that is bringing the world's trade to a standstill. At eleven 'o' clock today (UK time) professional spoon-bender Uri Geller has requested us all to bend our mind's toward unblocking the constipated canal with the power of our collective will. If I could add just a small suggestion, perhaps a few million tonnes of greasy liquid paraffin sluicing down the waterway in the hour before we turn to the task might sufficiently lubricate the canal innards such as to augment the effect of our efforts? I have some experience in the matter of expulsion of tightly impacted boluses (boli?) from the grasping embraces of recalcitrant tracts (no details necessary) and can speak from personal knowledge as to the efficacy of the 'treatment' I recommend

[peter]

The Star newspaper, who yesterday brought us the request from Uri Geller to join forces with him in a telepathic attempt to free the grounded tanker in the Suez, today reports that the ship was indeed seen to move in response to the collective mental powers of all their readers minds, but concedes that the shift was only a small one.

Meanwhile the other papers are throwing their collective hats up into the air and blowing hard about freedom and the glorious summer ahead of us. Can I just get this - I can't sit down with my collective family, I can't go where I choose on holiday, abroad or even at home,I can't enjoy watching my kids go off to Glastonbury or go to a pub without having to prove I'm one of the acceptables. I can't go within six feet of any other person while I'm outside my house, I have to wear a sodden piece of cloth over half my face, I can't go and visit any friend or neighbor in a care facility. I can't communicate with anyone in a shop unless through a glass plexiglass screen, in all likelihood I would not be able to continue in my job unless I submit myself for an invasive procedure that I might not trust on what looks to be three or four times a year going forward, if a business owner I live with the distinct possibility that my efforts may at any time be brought to naught by my Government deciding to slap us with renewed or even increased lockdown measures........

And this is freedom?

[peter]

Well there's a thing! The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities set up by Boris Johnson in the wake of the Back Lives Matter protests has found that ethnic disparities and inequalities in Britain are the lowest in the world and we shine out as a beacon of success in terms of diversity and ethnic integration. There is no inherent racism, the report concludes, and children from ethnic minorities outperform their white counterparts the length and breadth of the country from Lands End to John'O'Groats. (Oh - and we're a totally free country as well; barely have any Government a all in fact.)

Well that's alright then. Sorry - where was this country? I think I might like to move there.



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And in other news, an investigation into the behaviour of police at the Sarah Everard Clapham Common vigil (during which attendees were wrestled to the ground and arrested for gathering in numbers and with no social distancing) found that the officers involved broke no laws in the heavy handed treatment they dished out. Well of course they didn't you fuckwits. They were simply applying the law as was laid down in the Coronavirus Act of last year - an infringement of our civil liberties that a few people like me have been shouting about since day one but no one seemed to find important at the time, or at least until it effected something they cared about.

Sorry guys. Too late. Too..... fucking.......late!

[peter]

Today every paper and his mother is running the headline "Two tests a week to set us free" (or words to this effect). A few weeks/ months ago it was Covid vaccinations that were going to set us free.

What the fuck is going on here?

I defy anyone - anyone - to explain the rationale behind the introduction of a vaccination passport when all of the vulnerable groups have been vaccinated and those yet to receive the vaccination are in little to no danger from the virus were they to contract it. If people who are vulnerable have chosen not to have the vaccination and by choice go out into situations where they contract the disease then so be it. The key word here is chosen. Choice. Remember that? If they exercise this choice and become ill then so be it. The hospital's won't be overwhelmed: they weren't at the height of the 'crisis' and they won't be now. This risk/cost to the NHS is no more than that posed by those who 'choose' to be fat, to live unhealthy life-styles, to drive their cars too fast and smack them into walls. All of these other people provide the daily fodder for the NHS and Covid patients would be no different. And why would the NHS staff be expected to be exposed to these individuals: because they get paid to, and they're not vulnerable and they're vaccinated (unless they have chosen - chosen..... there's that word again - not to be) and because they (yes) choose to be.

Jesus, this thing has gone so far off track it hurts! The ex-director of leading vaccine manufacturer Pfizer said two days ago that if you're healthy and under sixty you don't need a vaccination at all and with the exception of the very few people who tragically do get caught in the coils of these viruses - and that applies to all flu viruses, not just the Covid-19 causative one - he is on the button. Granted you can't know if you'll be one of the miniscule number in the latter group, but the same applies to ordinary viruses and we don't loose any sleep over it.

I've had my first vaccination, I'll have my second. My choice. When a vaccination passport or certificate becomes available I will hold one for the purposes of international travel. What I will never do is ever - ever - patronise any establishment that practices voluntarily any form of vaccination apartheid (for this is what we will create no less) and if the use becomes mandatory then I will fight it in whatever small way I can until the day I draw my last breath.

[I'm Murrin]

Young, healthy people still die from covid. People who get it still get hospitalised, taking up beds, even if it's not fatal. We've been over this before peter.

[peter]

I'm getting used to the idea that I'll never go abroad again. The quarantine requirements, the testing requirements, the uncertainty of the evolving situation in terms of the gap between booking and going on holiday make it simply untenable for people at my level of income and time availability. It doesn't worry me too much because I've had a good run. I've been to not far short of fifty countries, seen some really wild stuff and don't regret a single moment of it. But what is really getting to me is the on/off messaging coming out of Government - the ever more complicated and rapidly changing information about how people's holidays might (or might not) proceed....... what amounts to a death by a thousand cuts for the travel industry as they try desperately to keep people's hopes (and bookings) up.

And I feel so much for the people, mostly younger than me, who will never get the chance to do what has been readily available to my generation. Travel as I have enjoyed it is dead. The ongoing situation, year to year, variant to variant, n'th wave to n'th wave has done for it. People haven't realised it yet and the Government hasn't got either the courage or the honesty to admit it, but anyone with a grain of insight who takes the trouble to think it out can see it. Instead as I say, they are playing a game of shifting sands and moving goalposts to avoid having to tell the truth; hoping that realisation will slowly evolve over a period long enough so that there isn't a kickback.

Typical cowards behaviour and running true to form.

[wayfriend]

Believe it or not, peter, the situation is very fluid at the moment. On the one hand, vaccinations are pushing us towards lifting restrictions. On the other hand, more deadly variants (such as B.1.1.7, which is both more contagious and more fatal) are pushing us towards retaining them.

For example, prior to B.1.1.7, it was considered relatively safe to send kids to school, as infection rates among children were very low. Enter B.1.1.7, and the infection rate among kids is far, far greater now. So it needs a re-think.

The messaging from the UK government would be more consistent if it could decide between serving business interests at the expense of humanity, or humanity at the expense of business interests. It can't'; it won't; it shan't.

Now there is an actual, literal race between vaccination-based herd immunity and lethal mutant strains. On the one hand, we have a potential to put this to bed and get back to things. On the other hand, the odds increase daily that new strains will either be resistant to the vaccine, become impossible to contain without draconian quarantine, or will simply kill us all.

Given that business will generally suffer far worse if we are all dead, I don't see the conundrum. But then again, I am not a politician trying to make myself and my friends wealthy.

[peter]

Well a clever guy recently made the observation that no country ever saved lives by making itself poorer, but this aside I think you pretty much nail my point Wayfriend.

The situation is so fluid, so constantly shifting, that there is no longer a pathway back to the place we started from. That's okay - things evolve and if one of the collective existential threats we faced didn't get us another was always going to. We are so far down the climate change route that the seriously devastating effects of this await us just around the corner even if we did manage to claw our way back to 'normal' from the pandemic.

But sticking with the pandemic, the simple number of different considerations - variants, waves, modes of transmission, testing/vaccine efficacy questions etc - means that we have chosen an opponent that simply cannot be eradicated/defeated in any meaningful manner that is consistent with our old lives. Either the way we live now is the way we live for the foreseeable future, in which case we retain some kind of nominal control at the huge ongoing collateral cost we are seeing - or we bite the bullet and take the thing at it's worst (however bad that as yet unestablished level of badness might be) by returning to our normal lives and letting the chips fall where they will.

I'm for gambling on the latter, others will think that the way we live now is sustainable and the preferable option. My belief is that with the vaccine development progress we have made, the treatment improvements we have made and placement of a little more faith in our own immune systems (which have served us pretty well to date), the time is now to get our lives and economies back on track to generate the money without which there is no healthcare anyway. I don't believe our health services would be overwhelmed. Others will find this anathema; to them it is to invite disaster, a tsunami of death and destruction that would mirror the great plagues of earlier European history.

We can argue the right or wrong of each approach until the cows come home, but the essential point remains. That from where we are, with the knowledge we have and the tools we have at our disposal, control of this adversary at a level consistent with a return to our old type of living is simply not possible (if eradication or significant reduction of its presence remains the goal). It may be possible in the future, yes - but not in any of our lifetimes.

(Edit: but for all I have said, realpolitik demands that I concede that my side of this argument is lost. All that remains is to see where the final landing ground will place us. Behind the scenes the movers and shakers will be steps ahead of us in this - when are they not - and plans will have been made, decisions come to, as to how maximum benefit may be extracted from even this unprecedented state of affairs. Whether we will be beneficiaries of these decisions remains to be seen, or whether we will just be the fodder used in order to realise this benefit. Solzhenitsyn's wise words of my tag line below will remain true either way.)

[peter]

Now we are getting down to the nitty-gritty of this. We have all been effectively coerced into taking this jab, like it or not, and the reports of potential risks in respect of the Astra Zenica vaccine (in which the UK vaccination rollout is heavily invested) keep on coming. (Interesting to note that the one product that seems to be attracting all of the negative coverage just happens to be the only one that is being supplied by the producer on a not-for-profit basis but hey, let that go.)

I personally don't think that the particular risks being referred to - that of the so called 'unusual blood-clots' post vaccination - are in the slightest bit significant. So few cases have been reported (around 30 occurrences with 7 deaths in 18 million people vaccinated) that as a risk factor it seems insignificant. Other non-reported risks I think could be far more significant. Anecdotally, Astra Zenica seems to be causing more problems in terms of general un-wellness post inoculation, but again this seems to a degree to be expected and is certainly evidence that the vaccination is stimulating a response in the sufferer. But what is not being spoken of here - and what is significant in terms of where I'm going with this post, is that it is the long term effects of the vaccine administration that are the unknown quantity here. This is why standard pre-pandemic protocols took years to conduct on slowly increasing test cohorts over time.

Now today's reports in a couple of papers relate that the ongoing trialing in the UK, of the vaccine (Astra Zenica) in a group of 200 6-16 y.o. children is being 'paused' due to the clotting concerns. As I say, I don't think this is the significant point here; what is significant to me is that the trials are taking place at all.

What does this tell us other than that it is in the planning, or at least being thought about, that our children should be given these vaccines alongside the adult population.

What do we think of this?

Let us be clear on what we are suggesting here; that our children should be given these vaccinations, not because they need them to reduce the risk of them dying of Covid-19 - they aren't at risk of dying of Covid-19 - but in order that they may not act as an infection reservoir that endangers the older and at risk cohorts of the UK population.

I ask again - how do we feel about this? Are we comfortable with the idea of our children being injected with a vaccine or vaccines that have not been trialed according to the strictest pre-covid standards simply so that they might not be a risk to the rest us? And if we don't accept this, then how do we deal with this ever present reservoir of infection in our midst, but still return to a semblance of normal life? Is this (the vaccination of our children), like the acceptance of vaccination passports, just another of the "small sacrifices that we must make" in order that normal service be resumed?

To any who would try to slubber up some kind of answer to these irreconcilable paradoxes that the current policy is throwing (and will keep throwing) up, I would say this. Keep digging guys - I can still see your heads!

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Further evidence today that the reality of the situation is beginning to dawn on those who should have seen it coming from the start; Phillip Johnson on the front page of the Telegraph, "The Chilling Truth; We may never return to normality."

No comment needed.

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Here's an odd little anomaly that I was musing on yesterday. From the start of the pandemic Boris Johnson has insisted that he was "following the science!" This has been his mantra - that it is science that dictates where we go, what we do in respect of our response to the crisis. But is this not to mistake the purpose of science? Science should be an adjunct, a tool used to give you insight as to how you proceed, not the arbiter of how you do so, and here's why.

Science, at it's very core, operates on the basis of falsifiability. It progresses by being wrong. It winnows out its mistakes, tests hypotheses and rejects those found to be wanting. If a statement cannot be proven to be true or false then it is rejected as a scientific pronouncement. So if you only ever "follow the science" in any situation, you will inevitably finish up following paths that lead to dead ends, paths that take you to places you don't want to be, and it will by necessity be a long time before it brings you to the right place, the right course of action, for the situation you are in. This is what science does. It explores multiple scenarios, many clearly unpalatable and unprofitable, before it moves forward. In dealing with a pandemic such an approach might be very costly.

Time perhaps, to start following our hearts a bit more and our heads a bit less perhaps?

(Probably bullcrap, but hey.)

[peter]

Here's a quote from today's Telegraph;

At a press conference yesterday afternoon Professor Johnathan Van Tam, the deputy Chief Medical Officer, said that a "course correction" was needed for the vaccine rollout, and presented slides showing that the risk of harm for the under-30's now slightly outweighed the benefits when the prevalence of Covid in the community was so low.

The Sun newspaper puts a figure on the risk of such vaccine induced harm as being 0.000095 percent - a figure it describes as "vanishingly small."

Now the obvious question that arises from the combination of the Van Tam quote and the Sun figure is, if the risk to this age group of suffering such an adverse reaction is so "vanishingly small", yet (by Van Tam's words) it outweighs the risk to them from the virus..........then why are they being vaccinated at all?

In anticipation of the answer that might be forthcoming, ie that it reduces the risk of them infecting other more vulnerable individuals, I would simply offer the rejoinder that, well - those at risk groups and individuals are already protected by the vaccine. Their chances of dying with Covid were pretty small, vulnerable as they might be, anyway and have been further greatly reduced by having had the vaccination. Is it really worth vaccinating the whole cohort of the country below the age of thirty on the basis of prevention of a small number of potentially avoidable early deaths in individuals with most probably co-morbidities that would render their life prospects limited in any case?

Excuse me if I begin to get the idea that all of this is beginning to look as if it is sitting on pretty shaky ground...... sorry - did I say the word "beginning" there?

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Just watched an interview between Julia Hartley Brewer and Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch (I think the name is self-explanatory) who explained that the forthcoming vaccination passport currently in development by the government (despite their continuing pretence that "no decision has been made") is in essence no difference from the citizens credit rating system which operates in China and on which people are rated in terms of their value as contributors to society. It would be naive to assume that once such a system was developed (she said) that it would not be extended to cover other areas of health and lifestyle factors. There exists no centralised database from which Covid passport data can be harvested other than your entire medical records, so the only way such a passport can function is if it operates not just as a Covid passport, but as an ID document as well. The fight that has already been mounted against the introduction of such a document was directed at the identification end of the scale (ie with no suggestions that it would be attached to your entire medical history as well). Now the Government are in one great bound, leaping over three hurdles simultaneously to tie in information on your full life history into the certification. It is inconceivable, Carlo said, that such a huge development of IT capacity would not be extended to cover other areas than simply Covid. It would be like building a transatlantic liner and then using it to cruise up the Thames, a rocket-ship which you then only used to go to the corner shop. Once in place, the application of such a data system in the way we are individually recognized and viewed by the state (and others who will have access to the data therein) is chilling to think about. Combine this with the facial recognition technology that the Chinese state already uses and that our own Government is also heavily invested in investigating and the implications become ominous at an entirely different level.

How incredible she said, that those people of the liberal commentariat who rail so loudly against the use of such a social ranking system in China, seem either quite prepared to see the same thing introduced in this country or simply so naive that they do not understand what is being done.

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And on an even more surreal note I end on the already commonly understood theme, that you can't always trust what you read on the internet, by recounting that this morning, while casually flicking through the news feeds, I landed on one posted by an investigator for the My London site. Entitled 'I tried these tinned meat pies and I think they may have shortened my life'. The piece purported to be an tasting exercise in which the reporter went to a supermarket and selected tinned pies one of which was a brand that I have myself eaten many times as a kid. His report lost some of its credibility however, when he made the following statement. ".......pie made by Fray Bentos - not named after the ex Cuban leader, but apparently a town in Uruguay.......".

Ah well - that's life.

[peter]

The Vaccination Passport/Certificate (call it what you will) will morph into no less than the Chinese 'Citizen Credit' rating system........ mission creep will absolutely ensure this. Oh sure, we'll dress it up in fancy words and softer imagery but it will ultimately do the same job. When the CCTV system that now watches virtually every move we make outside our homes was introduced, it was for the purposes of helping in the fight against Islamic terrorism that we were told threatened us all. Now you can barely switch on a news report without seeing the ubiquitous images of this camera shot or that street footage on screen. It is used to track people as they move through the town's, crowds of revellers coming out of pubs and clubs, protesters and 'illegal gatherings' - all manner of things. From the luxury of their seats in front of banks of screens, we are monitored, assessed, graded and judged - and very shortly to be individually recognized.

Do you really think that the opportunities offered by the Vaccination Passport database will not be utilized in the same way? Are you nuts? Blind? Or perhaps actually in favour of such state involvement in the minutiae of our lives?

Why are the liberal commentariat, so vocal in their condemnation of the same system operating in China, prepared to welcome it with open arms in this country. Are you mad? What is this strange place I have woken up in? I do not recognise it - it isn't my home???



But there is hope. Go over to YouTube and watch the beautiful images of thousands of people protesting against lockdown in London on March 20. You won't have seen it on the main news broadcasts, but it happened. It gives me hope that we are not all prepared to roll over and offer up our freedoms without complaint. Our right to pursue our lives as we see fit, without having to explain our presence, provide proof of our acceptability to be abroad, is hard-wired into who we are (well, some of us anyway). We will not surrender these rights without a struggle.

[peter]

I've been watching the series Rise of the Nazis today - a three part documentary on the political history of Germany between the years of 1930 and 1934. Just four years was all it took. Four years in which democracy was crushed, the people enslaved and the scene set for the most disgracefully murderous period n the history of mankind to date.

The parallels with our own situation are chilling; the taking of emergency powers, how an event was the catalyst for a change that led to places that no-one could ever have predicted (the Reichstag fire which bought the Nazis the public approval that they needed in order to bring in the swingeing changes they needed to begin to dismantle democracy - in our case how Covid has softened up public opinion such that erosions of our liberties unthinkable but eighteen months ago have been sucked up with approval), the crushing of parliamentary oversight and the independence of the media, the usurpation of the independence of the judiciary and drawing in of legislative power to the central authority.....the list goes on.

But I think the most telling commentary was that of a German historian who said that at the time, democracy was really in its infancy as a political system (and in 1930 the democratic system in place was almost an exact mirror of our own today) and the people simply did not realize, did not understand, that it required continual protection. That it was a fragile thing that if not continually maintained, protected by ongoing opposition to the forces that would seek to undermine and destroy it, that it could not survive. That it is vulnerable to attacks from within.

There is a lesson here for us and I beg for you to go over to the BBC i-player and watch the series for yourselves.

(For those who would respond to this post with a raising of the eyebrows, a feeling of self-satisfied superiority that this was entirely different, this could not happen here, this is not what our leaders want or what it is all about, then I say the following. Of course our leaders are not Nazis in the making, are not undercover black-shirts waiting for their opportunity to slap us in chains; but not all forms of oppression will come with the convenient motifs of a skull and crossbones on their lapel. There will be newer more subtle manifestations of which, before their advent, we can have no comprehension. They will not necessarily even be deliberate in the early steps that historians of the future may look back on, saying wisely to their audiences, "the signs were there." We need now more than ever to look back at our collective history, to be fully and absolutely cognisant of what it is that we do - and what it is that we allow those who should serve our best interests to do in our stead.)

[Avatar]

Ah, but we are far more vigilant these days against those sort of things. Of course, dressing them up as something else may get them a bit further, but the push-back against fascism is far easier now, and able to be more unified.

I'm not too worried, at least, not about countries like yours and the US, for the most part.

As for the vaccine passport, meh. Not only was this completely predictable, but I can't really argue against its practicality.

I see your lot are expecting all restrictions to be removed by June or July or something? Would have thought you'd be chuffed...

--A

[peter]

The June/July lifting of restrictions only takes us back to a halfway point from our starting place before all of this Av. They are pretending in the media that the restrictions are being lifted, but with facemasks and social distancing being enforced with punishment for those who fail to comply, vaccination passports limiting access to whole swathes of people to various events and venues, no free international travel and restricted meeting of people in their homes and elsewhere, it is a pale shadow of anything I recognise as freedom. And the state has retained the Draconian powers it took in the form of the Coronavirus Act for a further six months (which effectively allow it to make new laws by fiat) with no promise that they will be released even then.

They are simply not getting, or choosing not to get, the central fact that makes all of this unnecessary. I'll spell it out for them. (Watch my mouth.) The....... Vaccination........ Works. Get it; The vaccination works. Those who are vulnerable are covered. Covid-19 deaths are now lower than flu deaths in any ordinary flu season (in which up to 24,000 people die of flu). The risk to the remaining unvaccinated portion of the population is negligible. The case for masks, for social distancing, for extraordinary powers is gone. The time now is for people to begin to be treated like adults again and to be left to their own devices in respect of deciding how and what precautions they take to protect themselves and their loved ones from this now minimal threat. There is no more case for the introduction of a socially divisive identity document cum Covid passport than is provided by the standard yearly flu epidemic. If you don't trust the vaccination sufficiently to feel comfortable going to a football match (and recent data showing that the vaccines are efficacious in preventing transmission as well as preventing serious illness should set your mind at rest here, if nothing else does)......then the answer is simple. Don't go to a football match!. But let the rest of us proceed with our lives as we choose, in the manner that life is meant to be lived.

It's like all of a sudden Sage have become vaccine deniers, so pessimistic are the predictions they keep coming up with (and all based on the totally discredited Imperial College modelling that has done so much damage already and been shown to be plain and straight wrong in it's predictive validity). No wonder that the population are in a dither as to what they can and can't do, with mixed messaging like this coming out. Time to put Sage back in their box and start getting right side of all of this.

(Edit; In respect of your first point Av, agreed, but it matters not how much we are wrong in respect of our fears in this regard - what matters is that we are not right, and in consideration of this it is right that we remain ever vigilant in protection of our liberties and democracies. If you can get it, the recent BBC Hard Talk episode where Stephen Sackur talks to Yale Professor Timothy Snyder on whether the Trump era exhibited the initial signs of fascism makes interesting viewing. Sackur argued just your point, but Snyder was able to adopt a much more cautionary position with some degree of conviction. Totalitarianism always waits in the wings, even in the most long-standing and apparently unshakable democracies.)

[peter]

I notice that today's Telegraph is bemoaning the fact that a quarter of all registered Covid deaths now do not have the virus as the primary cause of death on the death certificate, yet there is no speeding up of the roadmap out of lockdown. In other words these people died with the Covid causing virus in their system rather than off the disease itself. Lord Sumption spoke recently in interview on a Spiked podcast how he had received countless emails from doctors within the NHS telling him how Covid death figures were being massaged upwards by the inaccurate recording of the causes of death of countless individuals. The daily Covid death figures released by the ONS have consistently since the beginning of this pandemic been that of people who have died within 28 days of a positive PCR test rather than people who have died of Covid-19. The truth is that with this level of mendacity and deliberate muddying of the waters in respect of the actual number of deaths that this virus causes, we may never be able to answer the question as to what degree we have destroyed our economy, the life chances of our children, our own lives to great degree, by our fleeing in terror from a phantom that never existed.

That we jettisoned the careful pandemic planning of ten years over the course of one weekend's deliberation by the Whitehall entity to whom the Government has outsourced our futures, namely the SAGE Committee, speaks not of our"following the science" but instead of our 'following the herd' of other countries panicked into taking the path of Italy in it's mirroring of what it had seen done in China. The science of our pandemic response was thrown into the bin along with the courage of our Government to take responsibility for dealing with the situation alongside the ten years of careful planning that was discarded. This has had catastrophic effect in that a course of action was taken - that of halting the economy in it's tracks - on the advice of people who had no experience in what the consequences of this would be, had done no study in respect of this, and thus had no place to be issuing such advice (where rather their comments should have been confined to their own particular sphere's of knowledge).

Asked in the podcast refered to above, whether he saw any hope for the correction of the consequences of the policy followed, the loss of liberties and freedoms, and the increase in authoritarianism and centralisation that the policy had spawned Lord Sumption was pessimistic. There was, he felt, little anyone in position of influence could do to turn the tide of what was happening, because the Government could never, never, admit to or allow itself to be shown to have acted wrongly in its response to Covid-19. Short of a public inquiry that absolutely calls out the Johnson administration on what it has done, demonstrates that it has been both catastrophic and unnecessary, then nothing exists that is going to shift them from the path they are set to follow.

[I'm Murrin]

"It's impossible to know whether they would have died without Covid, or if they would have lived if they hadn't got it, so we should assume the first one and let the virus run wild." Thanks, peter.

[peter]

Nonsense. If someone dies of Covid-19, say they died of Covid-19. If someone dies of something else, say that. Be honest. That way people can make a fair assessment of the risks that the illness presents to them in their particular circumstances and base their decisions on it. The perceived necessity on the Government's part that unless they ramped up the apparent threat posed by the virus people would not tolerate or follow the lockdown or other restrictive measures they were introducing was seld-defeating and undermining of any (already flimsy) justification they had for what they were doing.

You have consistently since day one of this affair cast aside your long held beliefs in freedom and minimal state intervention in our lives that have been the bedrock upon which your party, the Conservative Party, has rested since time immemorial. As the case for what it has done has weakened and weakened with every successive revelation and the unrolling of time, you have reverted to hyperbole and comments of the nature of the one above, "let it rip", in your inability to frame anything that amounts to a proper considered argument against the points I have raised. This has been the cheap tactic of all who have blindly followed the Government narrative from the beginning; undermine any dissenting opinion to the one you hold by scorn, sarcasm and false exaggeration. The adoption of the policy of dealing with a pandemic, ten years in the planning and updated last in 2017, based upon protection of the vulnerable and quarantining of the infectious would not have been "letting it rip" - and you know it. Don't worry Murrin; by use of these tactics and the silencing and marginalisation of any dissenting opinion your side has won the day and will have plenty of time in which to savour the fruits of this pyrrhic victory.

[I'm Murrin]

The fuck are you talking about? I'm a fucking socialist. I just don't like this weird, reactionary, conspiracy-minded hole you've been falling down for months now.

If someone dies of Covid-19, say they died of Covid-19. If someone dies of something else, say that. Be honest.

This would be just as misleading, and probably more dangerous than the alternative. Covid has comorbidities with other conditions. Getting a severe respiratory illness (that also seem to attack the nervous system on some level) can, will, and has weakened people enough to allow other illnesses to kill them that they might otherwise survive. Your suggestion is just a way to suppress the effects and make it look safer than it is. Making it clear "person died of x while they had covid" is the sensible thing, and those deaths absolutely should be taken into account when assessing the impact of covid.

[sgt.null]

The fuck are you talking about? I'm a fucking socialist.

For real?

I'm a conservative independent with some liberal leanings.

[I'm Murrin]

A bit of an oversimplification I guess. I have strong socialist sympathies and have a bit of an "in an ideal world" attitude toward it. I lean more democratic socialist in practical terms, but I also acknowledge I haven't read enough socalist thought to really make a strong judgement of it.