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/

That being said, your "policing" is probably like your "weaponising" and yet again designed to try and shut down a viewpoint you don't like. I'm not breaking any guidelines either by telling you that your constant referencing of your own offense adds nothing to the discussion.

@FrostyFifi

There are various fringe scientists around claiming all sorts of things. Perhaps anti consensus science is a better way to put it.

The GBD has been widely criticised - except by the likes of Nigel Farage.

zero covid I assume means getting covid infections to zero… or am I missing something. It’s such a bollocks concept I never looked into it. Zero flu, zero norivirus… all unworkable.

Crtain posters very happy to talk about abstract ideas, get upset and claim weaponisation but really bad it all unfurls we can see that the virus left unchecked would have been trouble for the old if they did not isolate, but would have been ok for the majority of young healthy people. And society would have carried on, we would be in less debt and there would have been less negative outcomes for children, the vulnerable and the poor.

Shopping washers wanted a trickle up pandemic. The working class to work for them keeping the show going, the kids to suffer, the mentally Ill and institutionalised to grin and bear it so they could freak out collecting their pensions/furlough in their houses with gardens and pretend they were hero’s. Confronted with the reality of the policies they advocated outcomes, which have been disastrous they get defensive and accuse people of ‘weaponising’ facts.

OMG ive heard it all now Unless they agree with you they are "fringe" Proves me right over what i said earlier though

@FrostyFifi

Great! And I’m not trying to stop you either. Unless I see anything offensive that breaks Mumsnet guidelines. They make the decision - not me or you.

@MinkyGreen so Sweden basically followed the GBD. We’re they wrong? Making out the. Authors of the gbd are right wing is the most midwit thing I’ve read on this thread and there has been stiff competition. Oh Nigel Farrage - well now I’ll change my whole stance 😂

The GBD occurred after March 2020, and thus no party's stance on it addresses my point that lockdown then was politically inevitable. Also, as pro lockdown posters often say, all very well to make claims in hindsight. I don't believe any politician who claims they wouldn't have locked down (as opposed to not agreeing with it) because not one of them could've pulled it off.

On a global level, there's no correlation between earlier and harder lockdowns and better outcomes, and lockdowns occurred across the political spectrum. As has the end of lockdowns too, come to that.

Yes, this. Honestly, the best argument so far against the use of suicide rates in this discussion hasn't been made by someone on the how very dare you train, it was the argument that they're not the best way to judge population mental health.

I’m sorry I brought up suicide, I worked with a lot of suicidal people during the 2020 part of the pandemic but more in 2021 and know three people who died that way. If I’d known it would cause a two day de- rail I wouldn’t have. But, if lock down hadn’t have happened I don’t think any of the men I know that died would have.

The GBD was fully embraced by very right wing politicians?

The Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial.

I think lots of people just care much less about the GBD than you do @MinkyGreen. In England, the relevant right wingers are the ones who led us into multiple lockdowns and chose to criminalise a public health crisis. The same ones who are now telling trafficking victims we won't protect them if they came here illegally and can't quite bring themselves to condemn fascist protests outside hotels where asylum seekers live. You know, that lot.

Ultimately my aim is starting this thread was to see if anyone felt from seeing the what’s apps and all the lies they told and the way they behaved would feel we’d been had.

And my answer is… no not at all. They loved it and would do it again in a heartbeat and they trust those lying liars with their affairs, parties, admitting they were ‘unleashing’ variants to scare people, quarantine times being wrong, laughing at people in quarantine hotels, pressuring the police to criminalise people for going for walks, keeping lock downs past when needed for optics, lying about Hospital capacity, lying about who was at risk… it goes on and on. Bit apparently what is more offensive then that, is people discussing these things.

@BashirWithTheGoodBeard

Believe me - I don’t support ‘that lot’ at all. I also don’t support a more extreme version of ‘that lot’.

Sorry - but there have just been a whole series of posts saying what’s wrong with GBD?

GBD was sponsored by AIER. Right wing, some would say very right wing, libertarianism group.

I didn't say you did. I said you cared more about the GBD than a lot of people, which is clearly true, and that in England it was a great deal less important than the fairly extreme right wingers who devised and implemented all this. Which again, isn't a controversial statement.

Sorry - but there have just been a whole series of posts saying what’s wrong with GBD?

That was just me, and I mentioned that I didn't think they'd got it wrong, and you extrapolated all sorts of things from that including apparently my political allegiences.
No other posters mentioned supporting it so you can can stop extrapolating my views onto them, just like you can stop extrapolating my opinion on one thing to my general voting choices.

There is actually a fair bit of lockdown sceptical and outright lockdown critical left wing thinking. Books, even. Not surprising that this would happen in England given that our experiences of lockdown were shaped by a right wing populist party who used the policy to come up with laws that disproportionately penalised the poorest and used the financial support to give a load of state cash to their dodgy mates. But because it's never really had any institutional backing or presence, you have to look out for it.

@FrostyFifi i think if you read it in hindsight it looks incredibly wise and measured.

@BashirWithTheGoodBeard

But I’ve just been called a ‘nitwit’ by @Mycatsgoldtooth

“Making out the. Authors of the gbd are right wing is the most midwit thing I’ve read on this thread and there has been stiff competition.”

The GBD were sponsored by the AIER - a right wing think tank.

Just wondering why I’m a nitwit…

I thought members of the GBD had met with our government early on? The herd immunity aspect was a route the government wanted to follow, which led to a lockdown anyway. I get the impression Hancock didn't want the herd immunity route - where are those WhatsApp messages? I'm not sure what would have been proposed in practice for those that needed to interface with those deemed vulnerable had GBD route been followed. The NHS appeared to be overwhelmed - people turned away as lips not blue enough etc, higher thresholds for admission for low oxygen, shitty choices about who to admit, staff put under immense pressure (but criticised for any reprieve they took - e.g. TikTok dances). Out of the thousands of WhatsApp messages, seems odd that so few have been published. Where are the ones showing convincing parents to send kids back to school/kids don't spread it, the ones about kids dying, the ones about views on levels of death or long term illness etc?

@BashirWithTheGoodBeard Its still happening Posted this on another thread last night.

JenniferBooth · Yesterday 21:06
oh and speaking of Covid it was bad enough the rules were used disproportionately against certain sections of society when they were actually in force but to still be doing it..... no excuse. We recieved this letter last month and no its NOT old rules being left on a template We had never recieved this prior to last month.
"it is advisable to wear a face covering. Where residents are not willing to do this we reserve the right not to enter the property and this will be treated as failure to provide access"
PHS Compliance
February 2023

I thought members of the GBD had met with our government early on?

The GBD is just a published paper, not an actual organisation, and was published in October 2020, so several months after the lockdowns and other measures commenced.

None of that addresses anything I wrote.

@BashirWithTheGoodBeard

Can you link me to any left wing lockdown critical literature?

That’s genuine. I’m interested.

www.kcl.ac.uk/news/new-book-critiquing-covid-response-launched

With the best will in the world, the 'protect the vulnerable' part of the GBD could never have worked. The 'vulnerable' includes people of all ages and lifestyles - working age people who are transplant recipients, have diabetes or cancer - it's not just frail 90 year olds in nursing homes, particularly pre-widespread vaccination. The 'vulnerable' have families and jobs and children. So that part of the GBD was never realistic. I don't think that for the people who wrote it that was a fatal flaw though, because the bit they wanted was the opening up and back to normal part. They needed to say the bit about 'protecting the vulnerable' but were a lot less concerned about its practicality.

I do think most people who read the GBD and thought it sounded like a nice idea, as opposed to the people who wrote it, would have cared about the 'protect the vulnerable' bit working. And it sounds appealing, the idea that someone, somewhere, would still be making sure that fellow citizens more likely to be severely ill from covid would be protected somehow, but the rest of us wouldn't need to think about it any more. But no one would have been making that protection happen, and vulnerable people would still have been forced to mix in society even with loads of covid everywhere, so it could never have worked.