THE Government is knowingly and willingly inflicting widespread unemployment, poverty, illness and death on its own population, by force.
Not a thought has been given to measuring the lockdown effect on the welfare of the 99.5 per cent of the nation’s population who were never likely to get seriously ill or die from Covid-19, and comparing that with the overall impact of the illness. Only the welfare of the NHS matters.
The Government knows that unemployment is now virtually certain to soar into the millions because its own Office for Budget Responsibility has said so, and many economists believe it is taking an optimistic line on an economic recovery.
The Government will know from its own Department of Work and Pensions that unemployment and poverty are intricately linked.
The UK’s pre-eminent cancer specialist Professor Karol Sikora has predicted that excess cancer deaths from the disruption caused by Covid-19 policies are likely to be 60,000. This is greater than the (recently lowered) estimate for total for deaths from Covid-19 itself of under 40,000, which has come from the US Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
If estimates for delays to medical treatment for common causes of death such as heart disease and stroke are added, the effect of ignoring these diseases in the NHS because of Covid-19 fears means we are looking at multiples of the Covid-19 death total. The Chief Scientist and Chief Medical Officer for England admit the problem. They knew all along.
The generous nature of the people of the UK meant that they heeded the shrill message not to overburden the NHS. They stayed away from hospitals and GP surgeries and in doing so delayed the presentation of serious symptoms of diseases that needed urgent treatment. Unnecessary illness and premature deaths will be the result.
There is a reported increase in serious mental health conditions as a result of the lockdown and from justifiable fears for the future in terms of jobs, housing and having sufficient money to live on.
The immorality extends to another moving of the goalposts for when the lockdown will end. As reported in TCW, Boris Johnson categorically stated that the lockdown would end when the NHS was not at risk of being overwhelmed. It isn’t, but the lockdown continues unchanged.
Instead we have the ‘five tests’ which include open-ended provisions. Now we have an added target of the value for R0, a measure of the disease’s spread, which is even more difficult to know as we have so few test results on the general population. All the testing was focused in the NHS on those who had the symptoms and presented at hospital. Belatedly this included health workers and some care homes.
The trend in cases and deaths is slowing or falling in every country in the world that has seen a major outbreak, including the UK, and yet the lockdown is retained under the newly invented criteria.
We know better than ever that healthy people in the general population are at exceptionally low risk from serious illness and death and that children are not transmitters or vulnerable to the disease itself.
From results elsewhere we know that upwards of 15 per cent of the population is likely to have had the virus and can calculate that the infection fatality rate (IFR) is likely to be extremely low and akin to seasonal flu at between 0.1 per cent and 0.36 per cent, according to Oxford’s Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM).
To put this UK epidemic into proportion, the number of Covid-19 deaths in the UK is now set only to exceed the number of seasonal flu deaths in England in 2014/15 of 28,330, an eventuality which caused barely a murmur in the mainstream media and no hint of a lockdown. The pattern of the elderly being most vulnerable was repeated. Covid-19 deaths remain a mercifully small number in relation to all causes of death in the UK.
Far from being caring and benign, the behaviour of the government resembles that of a socialist dictatorship obsessed with a fixed ideology that puts the interests of the people behind that of state institutions, in this case the NHS. The only people who are listened to are bound up in the same institution or are in awe of it.
There is no parallel committee to SAGE (the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) looking at all the other emergencies stemming from the policy of lockdown. That is proving both foolish and immoral because it is so unfair on the majority, especially young people who are looking for a positive future.
I never thought I could write this, but it is time for serious and widespread civil disobedience and a much bigger campaign for the lockdown to end immediately. There should be sensible short-term measures to prevent large crowds gathering, particularly indoors, which is where the virus most likely spreads, as well as ongoing protection for the most vulnerable to the disease.
Most importantly, the measures and their longevity must not be governed by the scientists. Hard as it seems to be, the Government should govern, with the welfare of the whole of society as its priority.
