I came upon this interesting article from Robin Tilbrook, Chairman of the English Democrats, in which it appears to me that he suggests the measures taken by Government to tackle Coronavirus may well be overdone and the social and economic consequences unjustified. He quotes, among others, Peter Hitchens, Sir Simon Jenkins and Professor John Ioannides.
The draconian measures taken by our Conservative Government may in part be due to fear of being accused of allowing the NHS to be overwhelmed, and the consequent reaction of the electorate at the ballot box. Even now Labour is polling at 30 per cent so it would not take many of the “red wall” voters returning to Labour to devastate the Conservatives’ future electoral prospects, and eventually see the installation of an extreme far-left government.
I imagine just standing by watching scenes similar to those in Italian hospitals as the NHS is overwhelmed is not an outcome the government wants to risk, even if it means crashing the economy and introducing policies Corbyn and McDonnell might have dreamed of.
Below is Robin Tilbrook’s article.
THE RISKS OF RELYING TOO MUCH ON MEDICAL EXPERT'S ADVICE
“As I write our
ancient English freedoms have now been ended by Parliament as a result of the
“Coronavirus Act” (aka the “Enabling Act”).
This is very alarming but how did we get to this?
It is an old wisdom that if you ask any expert
specialist, particularly a medical expert specialist, for their advice on how
to keep safe, you will wind up with advice that focuses too much on the
immediate problem and too little on your general welfare.
Let me give you an example.
My own late father, when he was in his late 70’s
developed cancer and was therefore given the standard recommendation of six
doses of chemotherapy.
Anyone who has had cancer will know that with each
dose of chemotherapy your general health is impacted more and more
seriously.
By the fourth dose I said to my father that I
thought he should not take any more. After all the prognosis on this
cancer was one where, even if it came back it was sufficiently slow developing
that he would probably have died of something else before it could get
him.
My father, having been a good soldier was
determined to carry on with the cancer specialist’s instructions and so he did
complete the course of six chemotherapies. The impact on his health
however, was so bad that the last one had leached the calcium out of his bones
and as a result he had a collapsed vertebra, which left him in agony for the
rest of his life.
Boris and the Government in their panic over the
Chinese Virus (aka Corona Virus) has asked its medical experts and specialists
for medical advice on what is best to do to keep the vulnerable
safe. The all too predictable result has been that the medical experts
have advised such a thorough Safety First policy, that the Government probably
already crashed our economy by following it.
This is of course a drastic failure of political
leadership. In this type of situation it is the job of politicians to balance
the expert, specialist, medical advice with the need to keep the economy and
society going.
It is worth remembering that so far as we can tell,
all those who are under 65, unless they have underlying serious health
conditions, are unlikely to be seriously affected by the Chinese Virus.
The more elderly, the more at risk people
are. That is of course partly because the older you are the more
underlying health issues you naturally acquire and the more fragile your health
becomes.
People who are at risk should of course, on any
sensible basis, consider taking precautions, however the rest of society which
is not at much risk really should be carrying on as much as they can without
unnecessarily putting those at risk at yet greater risk. That would
have been the sensible approach.
What we have seen instead are wild panic measures
for a disease which may well be far less dangerous than would have called for
such measures.
Our political system, as it currently stands, seems
to select far too many people for high office who prove to be incompetent once
appointed. This inherent political incompetence, combined with
wildly irresponsible, hysterical scare-mongering by our wholly unprofessional
mainstream media, seems, yet again, to be creating a policy disaster.
The excessive “Safety First” type of thinking on a
much more minor scale has become all too prevalent in the Health and Safety
“Precautionary Principle” based thinking of officialdom.
There is of course no true “safety” for any of us.
As Archbishop Cranmer’s Funeral Service in the Book of Common Prayer, rather
gloomily, puts it:-
“Man, that is born of woman, hath but a short time
to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower;
he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.
In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?”
The commentator Peter Hitchins has written as
follows in his article: “Is shutting down Britain – with unprecedented curbs on
ancient liberties – REALLY the best answer?
“In a pungent letter to The Times last week, a
leading vet, Dick Sibley, cast doubt on the brilliance of the Imperial College
scientists, saying that his heart sank when he learned they were advising the
Government. Calling them a ‘team of doom-mongers’, he said their advice on the
2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak ‘led to what I believe to be the unnecessary
slaughter of millions of healthy cattle and sheep’ until they were overruled by
the then Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King.
He added: ‘I hope that Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty
and Sir Patrick Vallance show similar wisdom. They must ensure that measures
are proportionate, balanced and practical.’
Avoidable deaths are tragic, but each year there
are already many deaths, especially among the old, from complications of flu
leading to pneumonia.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC)
tells me that the number of flu cases and deaths due to flu-related complications
in England alone averages 17,000 a year. This varies greatly each winter,
ranging from 1,692 deaths last season (2018/19) to 28,330 deaths in 2014/15.
The DHSC notes that many of those who die from
these diseases have underlying health conditions, as do almost all the victims
of coronavirus so far, here and elsewhere. As the experienced and knowledgeable
doctor who writes under the pseudonym ‘MD’ in the Left-wing magazine Private
Eye wrote at the start of the panic: ‘In the winter of 2017-18, more than
50,000 excess deaths occurred in England and Wales, largely unnoticed.’
Nor is it just respiratory diseases that carry
people off too soon. In the Government’s table of ‘deaths considered
avoidable’, it lists 31,307 deaths from cardiovascular diseases in England and
Wales for 2013, the last year for which they could give me figures.
This, largely the toll of unhealthy lifestyles, was
out of a total of 114,740 ‘avoidable’ deaths in that year. To put all these
figures in perspective, please note that every human being in the United
Kingdom suffers from a fatal condition – being alive.
About 1,600 people die every day in the UK for one
reason or another. A similar figure applies in Italy and a much larger one in
China. The coronavirus deaths, while distressing and shocking, are not so
numerous as to require the civilised world to shut down transport and commerce,
nor to surrender centuries-old liberties in an afternoon.
We are warned of supposedly devastating death
rates. But at least one expert, John Ioannidis, is not so sure. He is Professor
of Medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science,
and of statistics at Stanford University in California. He says the data are
utterly unreliable because so many cases are going unrecorded.
He warns: ‘This evidence fiasco creates tremendous
uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality
rates, like the official 3.4 per cent rate from the World Health Organisation,
cause horror and are meaningless.’ In only one place – aboard the cruise ship
Diamond Princess – has an entire closed community been available for study. And
the death rate there – just one per cent – is distorted because so many of
those aboard were elderly. The real rate, adjusted for a wide age range, could
be as low as 0.05 per cent and as high as one per cent.
As Prof Ioannidis says: ‘That huge range markedly
affects how severe the pandemic is and what should be done. A population-wide
case fatality rate of 0.05 per cent is lower than seasonal influenza. If that
is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and
financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being
attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant
accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.’
Epidemic disasters have been predicted many times
before and have not been anything like as bad as feared.
The former editor of The Times, Sir Simon Jenkins,
recently listed these unfulfilled scares: bird flu did not kill the predicted
millions in 1997. In 1999 it was Mad Cow Disease and its human variant, vCJD,
which was predicted to kill half a million. Fewer than 200 in fact died from it
in the UK.
The first Sars outbreak of 2003 was reported as
having ‘a 25 per cent chance of killing tens of millions’ and being ‘worse than
Aids’. In 2006, another bout of bird flu was declared ‘the first pandemic of
the 21st Century’.
There were similar warnings in 2009, that swine flu
could kill 65,000. It did not. The Council of Europe described the hyping of
the 2009 pandemic as ‘one of the great medical scandals of the century’. Well,
we shall no doubt see.”
We shall indeed see and then there will be
reckoning!
