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/

I’m surprised to see the guardian reporting that.

Cognitive dissonance

The Guardian was appalling through the whole thing.

I'm surprised too.

The November 2020 lockdown to "save" Christmas then come 19th December tier 4 which was lockdown in all but name so then people who were originally going to go to their relatives had to go out and buy their usual food and Christmas food. Which ensured maximum spend Piers Morgan announcing how people and families will have to make sacrifices and give up their Christmas then pissing off to Antigua for his own Christmas. The media behaved as badly as the politicians did. Hypocrisy and psychological abuse.

“It does not take an investigative journalist to work out why Isabel Oakeshott sold former Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages to the Telegraph.

Claiming to have published them “in the public interest”, neither Oakeshott nor the Telegraph has ever made any secret of their anti-lockdown views. The newspaper regularly referred to Covid restrictions as “state diktat”, while Oakeshott called life-saving lockdown measures a “brutal regime [that made the UK] just like East Germany”.

According to his former chief advisor, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson called the Telegraph “my real boss” and the newspaper played a pivotal role in encouraging the then Prime Minister “not to act” in defiance of medical advice in the run-up to the disastrous second wave of COVID-19 in the winter of 2020.

The willingness of both the Telegraph and Oakeshott to ignore expert advice on the basis of contentious “research” is equally apparent, as demonstrated by their unwavering support for the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD).”

“Claiming that herd immunity was more effective than lockdowns, the GBD has been the subject of numerous positive Telegraph articles, including one from Reform Party leader Richard Tice,
who used it as the basis for promoting the Brexit Party (as it was then known). It has been soundly debunked by several publications, including Byline Times which first revealed its funders to be an outlet linked to right-wing libertarian think tank The Koch Brothers.

Likewise, tech publication Wired highlighted that the only qualification required of the 2,780 ‘Medical and Public Health Scientists’ who signed the GBD, was their ability to tick a box saying they were scientists.”

By allowing these groups to present such misinformation as the concerns of ‘ordinary people’, the Telegraph’s anti-lockdown cartel is playing an age-old political game; capitalising on Westminster’s failings by posing as the vox populi (at least as far as it suits their own interests).

This is a game at which Tice and the Reform Party excel, filling the gap left by the Tories’ pandemic mismanagement with glittering promises of a Libertarian utopia. Desperate to move away from the idea of the Right Wing as populated by wealthy men who neither know nor care for their constituents, Tice regularly complains about the “Westminster Elite”. Setting up himself and his party as the solution, he appears to be hoping no one will notice that (just like most of the current cabinet) he was a long-term Conservative party member and went to private school.

Not unlike the various anti-vax conspiracy groups which have emerged in the last three years, the continued success of both Reform and the Telegraph relies on convincing their audience that they’re the only ones listening to their concerns. The fact that they generated many of those concerns through rampant misinformation campaigns is apparently not in the public interest.“

From Byline Times.

I can't imagine anyone really believes Oakeshott leaked the messages out of pure altruism. That's a given.

I have no problem with scepticism, asking questions, discussions about political corruption, people's health being seen and used as a political game for advantage rather than caring but hindsight is a great thing and this

covid19.who.int

is the reality - Globally, as of 11:31am CET, 16 March 2023, there have been 760,360,956 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 6,873,477 deaths, reported to WHO. As of 14 March 2023, a total of 13,233,862,804 vaccine doses have been administered.

Science based public health research since the 19th century has dramatically reduced the incidence of disease and made life safer and cleaner. Whatever the source of covid, the early experience of it by the medical profession and what knowledge there was of past pandemics, Spanish flu going back to the plague and strange sicknesses like sweating sickness that killed millions in the Middle Ages, made it necessary to take firm action while the scientists figured out in record time, a way of staving off the worst.

Sheesh, I look forward to you anti lockdown guys ranting in the next pandemic and going bravely shopping with your buboes oozing pus while you step over the dead bodies and complain about the lack of doctors and stuff in the shops.

Ah another one hoping for a worse pandemic to teach us a lesson.Totally sane behaviour.

I always wonder whether people are actually naive enough to believe that lockdown would work in the nightmare pandemic scenarios they come up with. Whether you're pro, anti or on the fence, it should be abundantly obvious that lockdown is only an achievable policy with a disease not bad enough to threaten the existing social order.

Yes if people were literally dying on the streets like it was the 1600’s I doubt people would be staying home and watching Netflix. It would be utter collapse of everything. And once people had no electricity and water and food then we know panic looting etc would the societal reaction. I lived in Croydon during the riots in 2011 and I thought covid may cause that kind of mayhem.

Has no one been watching The Last Of Us? I think that's what would happen if a pandemic with a death rate of 50% or more hit the world. We'd be out on the streets rioting, looting and grabbing whatever food we could, not sitting on our arses waiting for the next Amazon or Waitrose delivery… And there are already diseases out there with that kind of death rate (let alone any new ones that might come along), they've just been relatively short-lived and/or contained. So far.

I do recall the Telegraph explaining that anti lockdowners have another fear - this isn't the pandemic that's overdue, and many of us are worried that there'll be no financial resources to deal with the big one we're expecting.

I'm lockdown questioning rather than anti lockdown, as I think it's possible it was the least worst option, but I worry about that too. If we have another pandemic in say 5 years, which would be very unlucky but not out of the question, the resources to cope with it just aren't there. In more ways than one. As some of the recent and more gleeful contributors have so happily reminded us, pandemics can come much worse than covid 19.

https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/when-this-is-over

Sheesh, I look forward to you anti lockdown guys ranting in the next pandemic and going bravely shopping with your buboes oozing pus while you step over the dead bodies and complain about the lack of doctors and stuff in the shops

U ok hun?

And we're not 'guys,' thanks. This is an site read overwhelmingly by women. Frankly if we have a resurgence of the Black Death then shortages in shops are likely to be the least of our problems.

Sheesh, I look forward to you anti lockdown guys ranting in the next pandemic and going bravely shopping with your buboes oozing pus while you step over the dead bodies and complain about the lack of doctors and stuff in the shops.

People with this view always sound a bit disappointed that 99.8% of people survived Covid. They really wanted something more deadly.

Even the most pro-lockdown, covid panicker, Piers Morgan, admits he got it totally wrong, I wonder when the rest of the crowd will

I said this almost from the start. That a lot of the government's action - certainly after May 2020 was basically a face saving exercise and them not wanting to admit they were wrong about Covid being the big one. It makes it far more serious a matter when you consider that they have lost so much trust and faith that when the big one DOES come along, people will be much more cynical and non compliant, to everyone's detriment.

I do feel nervous about bird flu when I think about it, but am putting it firmly in the mental box marked "things I can do nothing about".

It's also why the lab leak theory is really important to get to the bottom of.

If this was a lab leak, then the 'big pandemic' was literally man-made by messing around with natural viruses - and that is what we need to get a handle on.

I didn't know until 2020 that these gain of function experiments were happening - I am pretty sure most people didn't. And I don't think they should be continuing, personally. The risk is too high and the list of incidents of lab leaks is long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents . Lab leaks caused the foot and mouth outbreak, for example, if you remember us burning millions of cows?

Viruses like bird flu do not transmit to humans at the moment - however us messing around with them might make them, just like the 'bat virus' has - it really needs to be in the public conversation about this sort of science - are we all happy that these labs are messing around with viruses like this when clearly they cannot guarantee safe containment?

I don't think we'll ever find out exactly what the origins are. There's no way the Chinese regime are going to provide that level of cooperation.

I've never been terribly interested in whether it was a lab leak or not, but if it was, when did it happen? There are signs that it was about pre-2020.
If that's the case, how much of the population had it worked through undetected by March when we were counting cases in single digits?

I agree, the timeframe is the more interesting part.

Wuhan is a massive city, an international hub. The first known case there may have been mid November 2019, and the definite ones in early December, obvious caveats about the Chinese regime being full of shit notwithstanding. There will have been people from all over the world travelling in and out of the city during that period.

Recent opinion piece in The Guardian:

What worked globally? Looking around the world, there are lessons from many countries. From Japan, that masks work at limiting spread, especially on public transport and in workplaces. From South Korea, that testing and tracing and supported isolation could suppress the virus without lockdowns. From Denmark, that schools could reopen quickly if mitigations were put in place to use large, ventilated spaces such as parks and stadiums. From New Zealand, that messaging to the public is vital. From Norway, to move early and prepare to contain and thus avoid harsher lockdowns later. From Britain, to roll out the vaccine quickly through a trusted institution such as the NHS and cover priority groups first.

What didn’t work? Superficial and morally questionable debates pitting the young against the old. Pitting the healthy against the sick. Undermining the severity of Covid-19 by likening it to a bad cold or calling it a hoax. Telling those with cancer that their lives matter less. Saying the same to parents of children with asthma or diabetes by somehow implying child severe illness or death to Covid-19 is acceptable if there’s an underlying health condition. We wasted time fighting each other instead of finding collective solutions to a common threat.
We are better than that as a society: any talk of herd immunity with Covid-19 in 2020 should have been about how the herd takes care of the weak. “Targeted protection” or “segmentation” – asking vulnerable people to shield while the rest of society got Covid – was a fantasy because the truth is, at the start, we didn’t know who was most at risk of death. We know now that it’s a mix of risk factors such as underlying health conditions, weight, age, sex and a genetic lottery. Even if you could identify who was at risk of severe illness, there was no simple way to separate the vulnerable from the healthy. We live together and work together.

Yes I expected to see more out the box thinking when it came to schools. More forest school type setups and marquees, tipis etc appearing on school fields. At least at primary level.

Ditto with outdoor dining and so on. Sadly with the tiers any investment in my neck of the woods would have been too risky and ultimately, pointless.

The most interesting bit there is the final paragraph where she says we should place more trust in the people who've made this their life's work than we should in Boris and co. That could, of course, just as easily mean paying attention to the UKs pandemic planners rather than the Tory government who chose and sustained restrictions for political reasons...

This is written by Devi Sridhar, and while she makes some decent points in this piece, she was constantly calling for more restrictions all the way through the pandemic.