I noted this tweet from Prof Christina Pagel this morning:
We just published a letter in the Lancet signed by over 100 scientists explaining why a policy that allows mass infection should not be an option.
Please read & sharehttps://t.co/OK7NfuozL2
Led by @dgurdasani1
Press conference on it tomorrow @10am https://t.co/Ot64Abmg4A
— Prof. Christina Pagel (@chrischirp) July 7, 2021
The following is from the letter in the Lancet. I am sharing it as Prof Pagel requested. It shows that there are alternatives to what is being done by the government. It shows what Opposition leaders and leaders in Wales and Scotland should be demanding. It makes clear that what is happening is not based on science. It is instead based on populist politics:
As the third wave of the pandemic takes hold across England, the UK Government plans to further re-open the nation. Implicit in this decision is the acceptance that infections will surge, but that this does not matter because vaccines have “broken the link between infection and mortality”.
On July 19, 2021–branded as Freedom Day–almost all restrictions are set to end. We believe this decision is dangerous and premature.
An end to the pandemic through population immunity requires enough of the population to be immune to prevent exponential growth of SARS-CoV-2. Population immunity is unlikely to be achieved without much higher levels of vaccination than can be reasonably expected by July 19, 2021. Proportionate mitigations will be needed to avoid hundreds of thousands of new infections, until many more are vaccinated. Nevertheless, the UK Government's intention to ease restrictions from July 19, 2021, means that immunity will be achieved by vaccination for some people but by natural infection for others (predominantly the young). The UK Health Secretary has stated that daily cases could reach 100 000 per day over the summer months of 2021.
The link between infection and death might have been weakened, but it has not been broken, and infection can still cause substantial morbidity in both acute and long-term illness. We have previously pointed to the dangers of relying on immunity by natural infection, and we have five main concerns with the UK Government's plan to lift all restrictions at this stage of the pandemic.
First, unmitigated transmission will disproportionately affect unvaccinated children and young people who have already suffered greatly. Official UK Government data show that as of July 4, 2021, 51% of the total UK population have been fully vaccinated and 68% have been partially vaccinated. Even assuming that approximately 20% of unvaccinated people are protected by previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, this still leaves more than 17 million people with no protection against COVID-19. Given this, and the high transmissibility of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant, exponential growth will probably continue until millions more people are infected, leaving hundreds of thousands of people with long-term illness and disability.
This strategy risks creating a generation left with chronic health problems and disability, the personal and economic impacts of which might be felt for decades to come.
Second, high rates of transmission in schools and in children will lead to significant educational disruption, a problem not addressed by abandoning isolation of exposed children (which is done on the basis of imperfect daily rapid tests).
The root cause of educational disruption is transmission, not isolation. Strict mitigations in schools alongside measures to keep community transmission low and eventual vaccination of children will ensure children can remain in schools safely.
This is all the more important for clinically and socially vulnerable children. Allowing transmission to continue over the summer will create a reservoir of infection, which will probably accelerate spread when schools and universities re-open in autumn.
Third, preliminary modelling data suggest the government's strategy provides fertile ground for the emergence of vaccine-resistant variants. This would place all at risk, including those already vaccinated, within the UK and globally. While vaccines can be updated, this requires time and resources, leaving many exposed in the interim. Spread of potentially more transmissible escape variants would disproportionately affect the most disadvantaged in our country and other countries with poor access to vaccines.
Fourth, this strategy will have a significant impact on health services and exhausted health-care staff who have not yet recovered from previous infection waves. The link between cases and hospital admissions has not been broken, and rising case numbers will inevitably lead to increased hospital admissions, applying further pressure at a time when millions of people are waiting for medical procedures and routine care.Fifth, as deprived communities are more exposed to and more at risk from COVID-19, these policies will continue to disproportionately affect the most vulnerable and marginalised, deepening inequalities.In light of these grave risks, and given that vaccination offers the prospect of quickly reaching the same goal of population immunity without incurring them, we consider any strategy that tolerates high levels of infection to be both unethical and illogical. The UK Government must reconsider its current strategy and take urgent steps to protect the public, including children. We believe the government is embarking on a dangerous and unethical experiment, and we call on it to pause plans to abandon mitigations on July 19, 2021.Instead, the government should delay complete re-opening until everyone, including adolescents, have been offered vaccination and uptake is high, and until mitigation measures, especially adequate ventilation (through investment in CO2 monitors and air filtration devices) and spacing (eg, by reducing class sizes), are in place in schools. Until then, public health measures must include those called for by WHO (universal mask wearing in indoor spaces, even for those vaccinated), the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (ventilation and air filtration), and Independent SAGE (effective border quarantine; test, trace isolate, and support). This will ensure that everyone is protected and make it much less likely that we will need further restrictions or lockdowns in the autumn.
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Looking through the media sources today, the clear scientific warnings are not receiving the prominence they deserve. Indeed, they are difficult to locate and the BBC is today one of the worse offenders. The records of New Zealand, Vietnam and China are the benchmarks for Covid performance and the comparative graphs make it crystal clear the U.K. performance is one of the worst. There is a virtual blackout on this information .
It is clear now that the government relaxation of Covid 19 regulations on 19 July 2021 and Richard’s arguments that this is counterproductive (to say the least) are totally vindicated by the most senior medical and scientific specialists in this field.
Yes Richard.
The BBC entirely complicit with the Government in not drawing attention to this authoritative and devastating critique of ‘Freedom Day’ on July 19th. It will be another ‘Black September’ (Sept 21 2020) – when Govt rejected their own advisors circuit breaker lockdown – resulting in maybe 50K unnecessary deaths.
There are also many other epidemiologists, statisticians etc, depending on Govt grants, looking for peerages etc etc who are pulling their punches and as such are regulars on BBC
It’s important to see the linkages between what has happened and been reported this week. First Boris Johnson announces that nearly all of the restrictions around Covid-19 will be lifted this month, thereby ushering in the second era of the letting-rip of the virus. Next, there’s the beginning of the winddown of what were always inadequate business support schemes. Thirdly, there’s Priti Patel’s Borders Bill which effectively criminalises the rescue of asylum seekers at sea. Finally, there are the effects of the long-term underfunding of the NHS, detailed by the OBR in the July Fiscal Risks Report.
None of these developments should be regarded as arising out of incompetence, nor out of madness; they are all deliberate policy, sometimes masked as incompetence, often seen as madness, but always done in pursuit of a ‘raw’, ‘primordial’ agenda, one that aims for ‘the purest level of entrepreneurialism untouched by law, regulation or tax’ in the words of Britannia Unchained, four of the authors of which are cabinet ministers. The attitude of the government towards the people of this country — unless they are these fabled entrepreneurs — can be summed up by these words from Howard Roark, the hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Sajid Javid’s favourite book: “The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption.”
Dependency has to be destroyed, helping others has to be destroyed, and if people can be labelled as ‘parasites’, or as a ‘herd’, then that destruction comes quite easily. This willingness to destroy ties all these developments together and this stance towards people is caught by a notion of sovereignty, not necessarily that of the nation-state, nor the fevered Brexit version that we have become used to, but a notion that the ultimate expression of sovereignty consists in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. This, in brief, is how the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe defines necropolitics and this is the form of politics now operative in England.
Take Johnson’s announcement of the bonfire of restrictions. This should not be viewed as being anything other than the continuation of a policy that has, from the start, been a eugenicist culling of the herd. At the very beginning of the pandemic, Patrick Vallance floated the idea of ‘herd immunity’ and the almost constant reiteration of the term has done a very good job of reducing the population to the level of a herd, mere animals who need to be disposed of when they are no longer of any value. It is, perhaps, appropriate that the very thing that is meant to save us — the vaccine — is derived from the Latin for ‘cow’. The talk now is of acceptable levels of infections and deaths, which always begs the question ‘acceptable to whom?’. We are meant to see certain sectors of the population as expendable, people whose lives are no longer worth living and therefore it doesn’t matter if they should die ‘before their time’. We have seen this dynamic play out, of course, over the last 18 months with certain groups having much higher mortality rates. These people were expendable: care home residents; the elderly in general; the disabled; those living in the most deprived areas; and black African and Bangladeshi men. If someone had wanted to design a virus that killed the expendables and that lingered longest in women, even though men were more likely to die, then he or she couldn’t have gone far wrong with Covid-19.
Johnson’s approach to the pandemic has always been one of self-willed ignorance, from his shaking of hands of the infected, to his boosterish demand that the UK don its Superman pants to promote free trade, from his failure to attend five COBRA meetings, to his gag about ‘Operation Last Gasp’. This buffoonery masked the serious intent to let the virus rip from the beginning, in the full recognition that many thousands would die. It was the price tag of 500,000 deaths that probably caused him to curtail his comic tendencies and adopt a semi-serious approach; even his gags couldn’t make us laugh at that figure. Nor could it be covered by the successful delivery of a vaccine which had not yet been created. That we are back in full black comedy mode is evidenced by the fact that the government is comfortable with infections rising to 100,000 cases per day in a few weeks’ time, while ditching all those restrictions which limit transmission. Johnson is again deciding who lives and who dies, who should be protected from the virus and who should be exposed to a viral disease that has shown itself to be readily adaptive, both in terms of the variants it has produced and the areas of the body it is able to attack. This willingness to expose millions to infection is necropolitics in all its raw primordiality.
This dynamic — who survives, who goes under — is operative in the withdrawal of business support. Any form of safety net is anathema to this government and the schemes put in place to help businesses to survive the pandemic must have really hurt the Britannia Unchained crew especially. Just as with people, businesses must be allowed to sink or swim; dependency is parasitical remember. Those that are lazy idlers will crash, while those who are willing to work will survive. All unnecessary businesses and jobs must be destroyed and those that are destroyed merely prove that they were unnecessary. Not only will this sort the winners from the losers, but it will also create a reserve army of unemployed, an essential disciplinary measure for the indolent and dependent British workforce.
The NHS has long been a target of the hard right and the OBR figures merely confirm that there has been a deliberate policy of underfunding that ensured that the NHS was unable to cope with a crisis such as a pandemic. It was far more important to push the NHS to a limit where it becomes acceptable to the public for it to be privatised than it was to ensure the health of the nation. We were, therefore, doubly exposed; an unhealthy public and a service unable to cope. Johnson’s rhetoric about ‘saving the NHS’, was merely that, as was confirmed by the pay rise offer and the bread and circuses diversion of the George Cross being awarded by the Queen.
As for Patel’s Borders Bill, what could be more sickeningly parasitical than an asylum seeker? Dependent on the kindness of strangers, how could such a corrupt figure be anything other than expendable? Allowing them to die in the English Channel would be to save them from themselves and to ensure that the rest of us remain untainted. Patel assumes she has the right to decide who lives and who dies. In this, she is a necropolitician from her head to her toes. She is, however, one of many like-minded denizens of the cabinet.
The Lancet Letter spells out the manifold risks in the UK Gov’s proposal of a bonfire of restrictions (aka as sensible precautions) with great clarity. It’s bad enough that UK Gov is clearly acting against scientific advice, but I wonder to what extent, if any, the UK Gov’s proposals were shared with the devolved governments in advance? There was certainly no mention of this in Nicola Sturgeon’s Covid update on BBC Radio Scotland today. Border Control is reserved to Westminster, so the devolved Govs and their devolved NHSs will be entirely at the mercy of UK Gov’s proposals as the holiday season brings large movements of people across Europe and within the UK. The more cautious approach of UK’s devolved governments to the gradual emergence from lockdown will be casually ignored by the UK Gov with potentially disastrous outcomes for the devolved nations. If this comes to pass it will, for sure, accelerate the demise of the UK.
Russell Davies at 11:48 wrote “take Johnson’s announcement of the bonfire of restrictions. This should not be viewed as being anything other than the continuation of a policy that has, from the start, been a eugenicist culling of the herd” and “we are meant to see certain sectors of the population as expendable, people whose lives are no longer worth living and therefore it doesn’t matter if they should die ‘before their time’. There are, of course, historic precedents for this kind of thinking, most notably the Nazis between 1933 and 1945, which chimes with Bill Kruse’s observation at 14:29 above “we’re going to need another Nuremberg to deal with this lot.” Indeed and this might be a suitable future function for the International Court at Den Haag.
I touch on this theme in my column for The National this week….
Not sure if it is up yet
For Johnson’s government – let’s not forget that he and Javid own this one, personally – to continue with their announced policy of ending nearly every lockdown rule on 19th July and 16th August, is now clearly an action amounting to criminal negligence. If they do this – let it be said in as many places as possible – they should, one day, face severe legal penalties for their actions, for if threatening millions of people with unnecessary long term debilitating disease and even – and admittedly from Johnson’s own lips – death is not criminal, then very little indeed can be.
I agree
Indeed, but this is hardly news. I’ve been saying for some time, and seen it suggested elsewhere by others, we’re going to need another Nuremberg to deal with this lot.
I believe in parts of the United States there is an offence of murder by depraved indifference. I think it might apply to this government’s current covid strategy.
The government has been explicit as they can be that they have made the deliberate policy choice to allow infections to increase without control. The inevitable consequence will be adverse health outcomes for many people, including more hospitalisations, long COVID, and deaths, and the risk of further variants emerging.
It is an enormous gamble, and probably self-defeating, but they think it is worth it. It smacks of desperation – they are willing to take this risk because they hope for an immediate positive response to more “freedom” and they hope there might eventually be a positive pay off. They are already so far in the hole that they don’t care if it blows up in their face yet again.
If not now, when? When infections, hospitalisations and deaths are under control, and not already increasing every week. It is plain that the current level of restrictions, including the current level of vaccinations, is insufficient. We need to wait until it is, and then we can start to relax the restrictions in a gradual and controlled way.
Your kast para is so obviously true
The numbers are awful. Deaths, hospitalisations, and infections all up markedly in the last week. Over 450 hospitalisations on Sunday 4 July (the last reported date) and steadily increasing week by week. Now (7 July) over 2,500 COVID cases in hospital. You just can’t keep increasing these things by 50% per week for very long.
The last month looks very similar to the period from September into early October 2020, when the government continued to pretend all was well while everyone with eyes to see could tell that something was going awry. And that was a month or two before Alpha became dominant, and before Delta emerged.
I share your sentiments
This is looking very grim
And Wembley and Wimbledon are full
I don’t know how difficult this is to understand. Cases are doubling about 14 to 16 days. We are currently recording about 30,000 cases per day. Doubling twice from here (i.e. about a month) gets to 120,000 cases a day. Vaccinations are not going to change the calculations much in that space of time, and unlocking in 11 days will make the current rate of growth even worse.
Something like 2% of cases seem to turn into hospitalisations. Currently about 450 a day. Double twice and it will be near 2,000 hospitalisations every day. Like mid to late December 2020. Within few weeks, we’ll have 10 or 20,000 or more people in hospital and the NHS will be under enormous pressure. In the middle of the summer. When it is warmer and sunnier, and people are spending more time outdoors. During school holidays.
There might “only” 100 or 200 deaths per day. So “only” adding an extra 10% or so additional deaths per day to the usual rate of about 600,000 per year.
Is this really the plan? Will the government be honest about what they expect to see in August?
Your forecasts are within all now quoted ranges
And it seems the government will say nothing
There’s plenty of evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has neurological effects, (often described as brain fog), and there’s some interesting research about that here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01693-6
The governement claim children need to catch up with missed learning, and propose making the school day longer to cope with that. But then they are following a public health policy that will deliberately infect them with a disease that is known to cause neurological affects that damage people’s cognitive ability. How does that make any sense at all?
Instead of waiting for widespread vacination to be available, they aim to infect as many children as possible. This callous indifference to young people is disgraceful and unethical. I only hope schools will show more sense than to follow the shallow and self-serving leadership of the government on this.
“Freedom” just before the 6 week school break will mean no negative media reports of the numbers of schools having to close due to the latest wave , and I’m sure Johnson will be hoping that “something will turn up” before September.
Interesting to read this take from outside the UK.
https://eand.co/how-britain-became-the-first-country-in-the-world-to-surrender-to-covid-e0d64c0a5d3f
I believe this is actually part of a coherent plan, that will ultimately result in the NHS being broken, poverty and immigrants being the scapegoats, a constant stream of criminalised individuals that they make useful cheap labour, resulting in a highly stratified unequal society with the riches being creamed off by the Oligarchs.
The desires and wishes of the ruling class in Russia and the UK are the same, just different faces on either side of the same coin!
‘Freedom day’ – when we free the virus to do its worst…
‘Living with the virus’ – so it can kill you (the ultimate in domestic abuse)…
I have seen the Lancet letter on a number of websites -but didn’t see it on the BBC. Perhaps I missed it.
[…] whole piece is worth reading. It concludes, referring to The Lancet letter I reproduced here […]