The WhatsApp message leak

[Mycatsgoldtooth]

So, we’ve had the FBI saying it was a lab leak, the leaked messages showing many of the restrictions were for show, stats on the reality of masks being mostly useless unless N95s. Where are all the people that were so upset about anyone saying anything against the government now.

It’s almost as if no one care where the virus came from and how the government reacted. If I’d spent years being terrified and washing my shopping I’d be really pissed off.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/01/untruth-untruth-peddled-justify-great-lockdown-disaster/

@GoldenAye

I’m so sorry for your brother.

Threads like this just tend to descend into a anti everything type rant. Whilst I thought the government behaved very poorly and should be very much held accountable, I think many of the sentiments on this thread are even worse than anything the government was doing.

There's no way it would be the same.

For one thing, having a lockdown required a sweet spot of a virus that scared people enough to mostly observe at least some restrictions, but not enough that people were too scared to go out to work. That actually isn't a huge behavioural area. If people are too scared then you don't have a lockdown because services stop functioning and if they're not scared enough you don't have a lockdown because they keep mixing.

Levels of trust in government are so much lower after Partygate. The parliamentary arithmetic isn't there at present and neither is the willingness to pay for one. There are a number of ingredients required for a locldown to happen, a virus being only one, and they just aren't there.

I'm not saying it won't happen again in the longer term, and that's one of the reasons we need to ensure conversations about lockdown leaving to more DV continue to be had, but next month? Nah.

I remember that thread Calistan. There was some fair criticism of the government on it, but it was stuffed to the gills with conspiracy theories and theorists, links to really dodgy covid deniers and Laura Dodds worship. Then it started getting really OTT and was zapped.

Dodsworth, not Dodds

Doctors and scientists get things wrong. As seen by the modelling from imperial! I think if you blindly trust the experts without questioning things it’s a slippery slope. The drs in Nazi Germany got on board very quickly with the inferiority of some races and so did the scientists. They are not gods and science is not one agreed idea.

These people are not infallible. I think you should trust what you actually see and experience rather then what the tv tells you. I knew by April 2020 after seeing lots of people get covid and be fine this was a mild illness so treated it as such. Didn’t worry about catching it. Abided by lockdown for the sake of others but distrust of the government response as I could see the massive issues lock down was causing people.

To come out of these WhatsApp leaks and say “oh I trust the government and the scientists” is mad. The government were not listening to the scientists if they gave advice they did not like, Rishi went to banking sources for his information as he felt their risk calculations would be more accurate - and they were.

@IClaudine but so what! We are a free society. If someone wants to say 5g causes covid crack on. We now know the army were infiltrating chat boards and spying on people and companies were put under pressure to not allow discussion of covid in a critical way. That’s not how a free society works. We are allowed to speculate on issues, even if people say mad stuff.

At one point saying the vaccines caused issues with periods was a conspiracy. Now As were so many things about covid. You could be banned from social media for discussing the issues below.

Natual immunity - conspiracy - now accepted.
lab leak

vaccine passports
the risk being more to older people
discussion of Hospital capacity
Vaccine injuries
Yesterday I was deleted for citing a death were the inquest said lock down had been a contributing factor. I said nothing untrue.

I think there are a lot of older people without children who maybe don’t work and we’re targeted by the government to think they would die if they got it. It was them who got very frightened of the virus as they never saw the negative effects of lock downs and could cocoon themselves in their houses, getting their pensions and freaking out for two years while judging mums for taking their kids for a walk. Sadly they are the demographic most likely to vote Tory, so they were pandered too.

"I think you should trust what you actually see and experience rather then what the tv tells you."

This is so important and seems to be totally ignored. We're told that we're not scientists or virologists or biologists so we're to ignore what we see and hear and only to get our information from tv and news.
Deny the evidence before our eyes.
I know many of us did know people who died from(or with) covid but it was rare. I know more people who recovered after a couple of weeks of being ill before any vaccine rollout.
I also know people who died in car crashes but I still drive.

To come out of these WhatsApp leaks and say “oh I trust the government and the scientists” is mad. The government were not listening to the scientists if they gave advice they did not like, Rishi went to banking sources for his information as he felt their risk calculations would be more accurate - and they were.

I have long thought the problem was the expertise that wasn't at the tables when these decisions were being made.

It isn't that the scientists were the problem, although some individual instances like Ferguson's continued tendency to doomsday modelling were. It's that they couldn't ever have provided all the relevant expertise. So Rishi seeking outside statistical expertise is one example. We've been talking in this thread about the increase in abuse during lockdown. That wasn't news, it had been raised in previous pandemic planning, and there are plenty of DV experts who could've told them that much in March 2020... but they were not in the room. They knew enough to involve psychological expertise when it came to behavioural 'nudges' but there was nobody there to talk about the impact on people with pre-existing mental health conditions.

And when you don't have that balance, you can't properly undertake an assessment that balances the risks and benefits of a course of action.

oddly enough, yesterday I finally had an online chat with a retired family friend about this. I really don't want to believe in that stereotype but he summed it up. Faced with facts,he said "oh well, I was just observing as a retired person, I didn't have to leave the house, I didn't know any of the things that are coming out with the MH story, you never said anything before". No, because quite honestly mum and I were so disgusted with his "I'll stay in while others bring my food" attitude, we avoided talking to him.

he votes Labour but on this, what's the difference really.

I agree, OP, it takes some cognitive dissonance to have been a person who quarantined deliveries - and then to ignore these messages.

he berated mum for going for a walk at 11am. He said there were too many people around at that time and the Covid risk was too high. She pointed out that as a lone woman with a walking stick, she might not be happy going at a non busy time. Never occurred to him!

I'm not sure why you think I'm minimising it. I'm acknowledging that if a person has 100% chance of dying from something then they're extremely ill and are likely to die from any number of causes.

Bashir which experts do you think were missing from vital meetings?

Non-exhaustive and off the top of my head: they didn't have expertise in domestic violence and abuse, the impact of fear based messaging on mental health particularly those who had pre-existing MH conditions, in how the state enforces power, in criminology who could've explained the risks and benefits of treating a public health matter as a criminal one.

I've also read a lot of what Lucy Easthope, a well known disaster planning expert, has to say, and it makes me think she or people with her skillset would also have been good people to speak to. She's talked about lots of things, but one example is how not letting people in disasters have access to their dying and dead stores up lots of problems for later. We failed at that.

There will be things I haven't thought of here but that feeds into the point really. Epidemiologists are important because they can tell you about epidemics. They can't tell you about eg the longer term impact on public health and engagement if you make a policy choice to use scare tactics.

I also know people who died in car crashes but I still drive.

But presumably you follow the guidance/law set in place for safety.

No alcohol
Speed Limits
Seatbelts
Safety rules

🤷‍♀️

@Mycatsgoldtooth

To come out of these WhatsApp leaks and say “oh I trust the government and the scientists” is mad. The government were not listening to the scientists if they gave advice they did not like, Rishi went to banking sources for his information as he felt their risk calculations would be more accurate - and they were.

I'm basing my trust in doctors and scientists at a global, general level rather than a local, micro level like you describe. I use a range of sources when seeking out advice. As to the WhatsApp messages, they reflect people under immense, unprecedented pressure. Placing the messages under the scrutiny of a less than discerning population isn't a great decision on a the part of the RW media.

The evidence of your eyes is no good if you are not seeing everything.

And you do have to be quite naive to take these cherry picked messages at face value and not think you are being manipulated by the people releasing them on snippets. I suspect wider context will make some of them look very different to the way they are being portrayed. And epidemiologists and others were quite well aware of the fact that lockdowns cause harm it’s why they haven’t been recommended before but statistically those harms are less than doing nothing and not locking down. That risk benefit balance will absolutely have been weighed up when the decisions were taken. We just didn’t have many other options.

It seems to me that so many of the people who followed lockdown religiously are also those that have always hated the Tories. Why would anybody who hates the Government and has spent years complaining about Tory corruption/incompetence suddenly put total faith and trust in a Government/group of people who even before lockdown were shown to be one of the most venal, destructive, dangerous, dishonest and useless Government's the country has had? Surely most lockdown sceptics were/are just people who had never trusted the Government and continued to not trust what the Government was saying/doing?

This ^^

The telegraph has also been very cagey when questioned on whether they are releasing unedited segments (i.e., are the messages in the right order, have some messages been added in out of context)

As has been previously posted, if Oakeshott actually cared about integrity and transparency, and holding the government to account, she would have released the entire transcript publicly to be scrutinised.

Instead she's leaked it to the telegraph (with their own agenda) who are little leaking snippets every so often.

I find it madness that "MSM" is never to be trusted when they are pushing certain ideas, however in this case they are being lauded as a credible source.

That risk benefit balance will absolutely have been weighed up when the decisions were taken.

That's optimistic. There's no evidence it happened, and in any case, the timeframes would've mitigated against doing a proper job. Lockdown was never part of the UK pandemic planning and indeed had been ruled out. And the UK government clearly wanted to avoid it, well into March 2020.

I would agree that there was no other option politically, and indeed that's why lockdown eventually happened. The Tories understood that they couldn't practically do anything else, once it became clear how many other countries were locking down. But it doesn't remotely follow that a proper risk benefit exercise was undertaken, much less that it was done for every decision.

The Tories understood that they couldn't practically do anything else, once it became clear how many other countries were locking down.

This really isn't the case though - I just don't see how you can look at the evidence and think an initial lockdown was unncessary and it was only done for political reasons.

The government got most things wrong, but suppressing transmission whilst no-one was vaccinated has been proven (globally) to be the most effective tactic. Doens't mean it wasn't harmful, and no one is denying this, but all inteventions are about balancing risks and benefits.

They're actually two separate points.

It's perfectly possible to be extremely pro lockdown and to also identify that the Tories clearly didn't want to do it. It's not even a controversial statement, Johnson made comments about herd immunity very publicly. You can think that the right decision was taken but for the wrong reason.

This is also not the same issue as whether any particular restriction or even the restrictions based approach as a whole was the least worst option available to us. If it was, and we absolutely do not know that at this stage, again that doesn't tell us why any particular government chose to do it.

Johnson made comments about herd immunity very publicly.

And remember the howls of outrage? He said "some of you will lose loved ones" - he was right because that's what happens in epidemics and pandemics. It happens during flu epidemics too - no I'm not saying it was just the flu.

We had got so used to transmissible illnesses not killing people, generally.

If it was, and we absolutely do not know that at this stage, again that doesn't tell us why any particular government chose to do it.

I absolutely believe that if the virus had arisen in a country like, say France (for example), then the domino effect of lockdowns would not have happened. But no, China was dealing with it by imprisoning their populations, therefore that suddenly became the go-to method of dealing with an epidemic, then a pandemic. "Lockdown" became a thing very quickly, when it had not been used like this before.

Since when was China an example of a country to emulate?

Bashir I realised after I typed it, you'd say that. Apologies, I thought you meant medical experts were missing

I was thinking it was screamingly obvious to anyone in SPI-B that those things would happen, so they would never include experts in those areas.

Westward many people were worried about social credit etc before 2020.