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Samizdata quote of the day Despite ‘a pretty much unlimited budget to run trials’ they didn’t run one for masks ‘because they knew that they don’t work’. In effect, ‘the trial was Scotland versus England. And we found they don’t work.’
For this government insider the implications are now too serious to remain silent because ‘we are lying when we say masks work. They are a signal, a psyop. And we’ve criminalised not wearing them. Masks also transfer the blame onto individuals for the epidemic spreading. We have people counting the unmasked on public transport, policing each other. It is deeply unethical that we have set people against each other in this way. It allows the creation of an “out group” to blame.’ He points out that it is the government we should be blame for not increasing healthcare capacity.
– Laura Dodsworth
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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A comment I saw on a roundup of views from business owners following Prime Minister Wiff-Waff’s decision to impose “plan B” – more mask mandates, vaccine passports, encouragement to work from home, etc, to deal with the new variant:
“Keir Starmer might be Captain Hindsight, but Boris Johnson is Commander Cover-up, and after the shambles of today, we’re done listening to him. When you’re once again asking businesses up and down the country to re-evaluate their strategies and upheave their staff, you’ve got to be holding all the cards. Boris has no cards left to hold. He’s done.” (For those who don’t know, Starmer is leader of the Official Opposition, the Labour Party, and he has been even more in favour of lockdowns than BloJob has been.)
The key issue appears to be this trade-off: if omicron is more infectious but less lethal then it is good news to the extent that it even acts a bit like a natural vaccine in prompting a response from our immune systems; if it is more infectious but about as nasty as the existing bugs, then that is not good news and could overwhelm “our NHS”. Then that would suggest the problem is a healthcare system that appears to be rapidly overwhelmed. In turn, we have to ask why our economy – and so much else – is being trashed to “save” a NHS that is, according to its heroic socialist founders, supposed to “save” us.
Another thought: by March next year, the UK government will have ruled using emergency powers over health and much else for two full years, covering the entire country. Even during the height of the IRA violence during the 70s and 80s, emergency powers did not run to this extent. This is akin to war. Boris thinks he is Winston Churchill; the poor fucker is delusional.
I hope Wiff-Waff is gone by the spring. The problem, however, is that some of his colleagues appear to be even worse.
An aunt died, alone, with her husband threatened with arrest if he tried to force his way into her care home so he could sit with her and hold her hand while she passed away. While this was going on, the taxpayer funded parasites were using their expenses to breach the guidelines they set down. To me, this is inexcusable and, despite who is thrown under a bus, Johnson has handed the next General Election to the Labour Party, and God help us all when that happens.
The difficulty is that both parties are singing from versions of the same hymn sheet of lockdowns and tax/debt fuelled largess to tackle something that previously we would have dealt with via individual risk management and a transition to herd immunity.
The futility of fighting a mutating RNA virus has been known since forever due to attempts at fighting common-or-garden flu. COVID-19 and it’s multitudinous variants is no different in that regard, we just have better data, techniques and technology to track the evolution of the mutations close to real-time.
The “vaccines” don’t really work as “vaccines” because they provide no guarantee of immunity against subsequent mutations, just like the annual flu shots seldom provide anything more than about 40% coverage because they are based upon fighting flu variants that were active during the previous 12 months or so rather than the (completely unknown) variants that will affect us in the year following the flu shot.
As for “following the science”, the UK had a reasonable plan to deal with this sort of flu outbreak prior to COVID-19, based upon lessons learned over preceding outbreaks and more recent events dealing with bird flu. Then COVID comes along, BoJo gets sick and they threw the plan out of the window for no good reason.
What really needs to happen is for the Tories to do what they have always done best, a bit of self-interested Regicide enabled by the 1922 committee.
Get someone elected PM on the basis of “enough is enough” no more masks, lockdowns, COVID passports or any of this nonsense and kick BoJo to the curb. As long as it’s not Treason May (who seems to have found a spine that she never demonstrated in office), many contenders, even the repulsive Gove would be better than BoJo’s ongoing clown show.
Then a formal inquiry into this whole shit show with the aim being to prevent this expensive draconian nonsense from ever being inflicted upon the UK public again.
Well, compulsory vaccines will be tried in various provinces of toytown austria-hungary in the next few months. It will be interesting to see what the results will be.
There are some masks that DO work – but not the masks the government are demanding.
The masks the government are mandating are nothing to do with health – they are ritual humiliation, a sign of compliance (submission) to the international establishment. If that was still debatable before the announcements of yet more restrictions today, it is not now.
Think about it – on a whim (with no medical justification at all) just one of the many edicts announced today will destroy cinema and the theatre – most people are not going to sit for hours in a masks. One would have to be PAID to that – and cinemas and theatres expect you to pay them (not the other way round).
As Sir Graham Brady and others said in the House of Commons today – what started as “three weeks” in March 2020 has turned into perpetual “Emergency Rule”. This is not acceptable.
The more important virus killing us today is the fact that a majority of people think that all of these measures are called-for and appropriate. Government would hold no power if these people didn’t carry its water.
Medically vulnerable people will die from Covid. The rest of society will wither away if we cannot re-introduce independent thinking. It is indeed a crisis – just not the one being sold.
@bobby b
Yes. I would just add that available evidence suggests that more (small numbers but still more) young people will die from the Covid vaccines than would have died from Covid iself.
Doh!
The medical standards body for England, is bought and paid for by Bill Gates – I suppose it goes without saying that much of this hiving off of functions of the State to semi autonomous orginisations was a Blairite idea.
But the Tories, with their ‘bonfire of the Quangoes’. Have they ever encountered an NGO ( the modern incarnation of the Quango ) they didn’t shower with public funds?
I think they did for the Blairite Standards board for England. But mostly, they merge these QUANGOS/NGOs into something worse.
What I wanted to say, there is no ethics any more. Our English/British ethics were based on Christian theology. We’ve now two generations that don’t know anything about Christian doctrine.
And the Church of England? Well, no wonder people are flocking to leave. The synod, what a bunch of drips.
To be more accurate, there are *some* masks that work *if you fit them properly and follow the proper protocols*
People touch/adjust their masks way too frequently for them to be effective, even if they were quality masks.
It’s a three part psyop: the mask, to constantly remind you that you are at risk from a deadly disease, the lockdown, to isolate you from your friends and comparing notes, and the constant barrage of terror stats in the media.
If I cared to, I could hunt down the response to one of my comments claiming we have been and, are being terrorized by our own government and media (esp the BBC). Apparently, I was being too extreme, too tin hat, sounding like a ‘nutter’. Well, ..
I’m glad to see that position is gaining ground to the extent that others are adopting it. Or of course, they have been saying it all along but I didn’t notice.
We are now at the stage where nothing, absolutely nothing the government says can be accepted on facevalue as truthful.
On another Blog there is a guy who among other things, documented the death rate/case rate back in 2019/2020 and concluded that the lockdowns and mask mandates were always brought in just after the peak of the cases/deaths. Thus the evidence for such measures being effective in the stated goal of reducing deaths/cases was at best, up for debate. Well, he recently reviewed the ONS figures for the period, and they’ve shifted the peak, to make it look like the lockdowns and maks mandates might have had an effect. If you haven’t been watching this guys work throughout the period, that government lie would have gone unnoticed, and the evidence of government duplicity gone unremarked.
I don’t really know what Boris Johnsons latest error is, but the British government can at this stage be described as a SNAFU.
There is a high chance that it’s largely the civil service, who should have been redically pruned after BREXIT. There can be no doubt that there are folk in the Civil service who are still loyal to the EU, and probably being lifelong CS, know exactly where to throw a little grit into the gears.
Boris Johnson being (1) a cretin, and two surronded by cretins* is a sucker for every bear trap. We’ve had a political class(*) who for the last 43 years have just been ciphers for effective government. Now they are expected to do something for the money, frankly, they haven’t a clue.
As Paul Marks is wont to say, the anonymous administrative state is running the show, now.
‘Keir Starmer might be Captain Hindsight, but Boris Johnson is Commander Cover-up.’
Wrong. Captain Pugwash (without a cabin boy) is the correct image for both. Brave, decisive, etc. (not).
Can someone explain to me then if masks don’t work why there have been tests done that say that they do work? They apparently restrict moisture carrying drops spreading as far and it is those that carry the virus. The virus can’t exist outside of droplets.
No. We have known since last year that covid-19 is not a droplet vectored disease (coughs and sneezes) or fomite (spread via surfaces), it has an aerosol vector (breathing).
Only to a certain threshold. Once the mask material is saturated, the first three or four times you exhale ( ambient humidity etc etc, bla bla.. ), the mask cannot absorb any more moisture so everything passes through.
But the commonly used mask, the mask everyone has seen used in Scrubs, or Greys anatomy, Green wing, Casualty, they do not have a seal around the mask between the mask edge and the skin, so they simply divert the exhaled air in all directions – up ( if you’ve ever worn spectacles at the same time as wearing a mask, you’ll know how that works ) side ways, but less likely down, because many people tend to wear the bottom edge of the mask below their chin.
So if you are a nose breather, you exhale through your nostrils and the airflow is largly directed down ward, relatively harmlessly toward the floor. However, if you’re wearing a mask your exhaust is sprayed upward, to the left and to the right.
So Perry’s comment notwithstanding, there is a case that wearing the wrong mask, and the majority of people do wear the wrong mask, actully contributes to transmission, because it has the effect of distributing the exhalant more widely that otherwise would be the case.
The virus can’t exist outside of droplets.
Ahem (cough)..
For want of an analogy, coughs & sneezes droplets are the size of footballs, while the aerosol vector (breathing) particles are the size of tennis balls.
A football net (mask) is good for stopping football-sized items, it does almost-zero (bugger all) to stop tennis-ball-sized items.
No surprise that so few people realise that, as most of the general public is woefully ignorant of basic science, let along basic virology.
Not much excuse for Samizdata people either, as a higher standard of awareness is expected of self-determining folk 😉
Isn’t telling people to wear masks, and then observing how many of them do so, a really good way of deciding how much other shit they will be prepared to put up with? My observations, supermarket 90% compliance, railway station, 50% compliance, doctor’s surgery and dentist 100%. Various people walking alone or alone in cars wearing masks. If the vast majority were refusing to comply the clear message would be that mass resistance to further restrictions could be expected. Alas the people have voted with their masks it would seem.
Conservative Members of the House of Commons must now remove Mr Johnson.
Everyone except the manufacturers of the masks. It seems to me to be the biggest reading comprehension test in history.
Everyone who wasn’t gagged, that is. Dr Sam is finally free to speak.
(From ‘The Conservative Woman’, h/t Guido.)
In the archives of Samizdata, I cited a study into the efficacy of masks in the surgical environment. The trial was to abandon masks for a period of six or so months. The findings?
Post operative infections decreased.
The result? They resumed mask wearing 🙂 probably because the medical suppliers didn’t want to lose guarenteed revenue.
Yes Sam Duncan and APL – it is weird.
When I talk to colleagues and to officials they all know the masks do NOT work – yet most of them wear them.
It used to be that they only wore them when standing up (and then took them off again when they started to speak) – but I just sat through a three hour meeting (never-you-mind what it was about) and most people there were wearing masks all through it – apart from when they spoke (then they took them off).
I was not in the mood to humour anyone – so I took my “Living with COPD” booklet with me, basically a visual aid saying “I do not have to wear a mask – so BACK OFF”.
But as far as I could see only a couple of colleagues not wearing a mask. One person in particular caught my eye – he was not old and was not playing the “I am ill – leave me alone” card that I play. That person is clearly someone with a backbone.
Most colleagues and officials know it is all nonsense – yet most people obey. I do not understand.
Some people were clearly in great distress, they were sitting for three hours in a mask (I would pass out if I tried that) – yet they obeyed something that is not even “the law” yet.
Mr Johnson says “the Elves insist everyone must hop around on their left leg – it is SCIENCE” most people know that this is total nonsense (there are no Elves – and even if they were Elves, they would not be demanding that everyone hop around on their left leg) yet most people OBEY, even BEFORE there is any punishment for not obeying.
Well here is another ‘weird’ thing. I only heard it by listening to Rees-Mogg speaking in Parliament.
So if I understand this correctly, Allegra Stratton worked for irredemebly left wing operations; The Guardian, BBC, and in cahoots with a irredemable lefty Robert Peston, yet she slots straight in as Boris Johnsons press secretary.
Incongruent, a bit?
APL (December 10, 2021 at 1:58 pm), during the Brexit referendum, there were some favourable papers but TV was fanatically pro-Remain. However, Dominic Cummings, after noting that fact, did add that:
To be conspicuous for an ‘unusual’ degree of professionalism (e.g. having any) within UK TV circles is not worth much, but it means that, if the Tories decided they needed an existing industry professional, they were not spoilt for choice.