Question Everything - The True Cost of Lockdowns...

At the Question Everything summit on the 17th of July 2021 in London, Dan Astin-Gregory, host of the Pandemic Podcast assembled a panel of distinguished medical, scientific, and business professionals to discuss the negative impacts of lockdowns and COVID policies and suggest a more effective way forward.

Eighteen experts from various fields discussed testing, contagion, mental health, human rights, law, economic impacts, and the nation's long-term health. Collectively, they presented a grim but preventable picture of life during covid, while also conveying hope that we can all contribute to positive change.

Astin-Gregory began by highlighting the prolonged collateral damage done by lockdowns: -

4.7 MILLION PEOPLE added to NHS WAITING LISTS

150 MILLION plunged into POVERTY worldwide

£2 TRILLION mountain of NATIONAL DEBT*

(*that we will repay for generations to come while being poorer than ever)

Experienced businessman and columnist Luke Johnson believes digital media enabled the pandemic; that online news and social media fed a morbid appetite for grim daily updates, and that the public meekly complied with lockdowns due to terrorising fear campaigns by the media, the NHS, and the government, and are now too scared to get on with their lives.

“We have developed an obsessive-compulsive focus on a single illness, which has accounted for about 15% of all deaths: what about the other 85% of deaths, and what about the other aspects of living? Work and being productive is good for health and if you prevent people from working, as well as destroying relationships by isolating people, then it can’t be right”.

Sociologist Professor Frank Furedi suggests cultural forces created the conditions that enabled the trade-off between freedom and security, saying, “The values attached to freedom have sharply declined and it is being used as a threat to our safety and security”.

Furedi mentions 'Western risk-aversion and safety-obsession' and asks whether anybody actually feels safer by locking-down. He believes we feel safer—and do better—by coming together.

“In the last decade or so, people have been primed to be frightened and to look to the state for remedy,” says psychologist Zenobia Storah, who believes that by isolating the population the government has totally disregarded everything we know about human beings.

“We are social animals and need interaction and social contact for our health and survival”.

Storah details the adverse effects on children, who are neither susceptible to, nor likely to transmit the illness, but who have unduly suffered the brunt of lockdown measures due to school closures, abusive PPE policies, and needless social restrictions.

"The government have amplified the fear element and those who have suffered the most are those who were already vulnerable. 2.2 million people sought mental health support last year and urgent care for children who have self-harmed has risen by 19-22% since January. There has also been increased cognitive decline and a rise in mobility issues among the elderly due to being housebound, lonely, and terrified for eighteen months."

Economics Professor David Paton says that while we purportedly locked-down to avoid overwhelming health services, infections were actually decreasing before all UK lockdowns. He believes voluntary behavioural changes have been more effective than legal restrictions, which had no significant impact, other than to negatively affect people’s behaviour.

In a panel discussion, mathematician Norman Fenton demonstrates how covid statistics are flawed because the data metrics aren’t presented properly: “We should be asking how many positive cases are actually people who are ill; of those, how many are hospitalised or die; and of those who die, how many die ‘with’ covid and ‘from’ it?”

Fenton has analysed the statistics and reveals that there is only a 9.1% chance of actually having the virus if you test positive.

Diagnostic pathologist Clare Craig points out that virus particles are about the same size as smoke particles and claims you'd need 5,000 of them to transmit the virus, adding that PCR tests detect just four particles, are super-sensitive, difficult to do properly, and are prone to cross-contamination (the CDC reported a 33% false positive rate due to cross-contamination). Craig further explains that transmission of covid (and other respiratory viruses) is not yet fully understood and believes it has been over-diagnosed because the 'testing system has been set up to maximise positive results'.

Craig describes the misuse and fallibility of tests, explaining how a sample of air could test positive for covid: "A positive result alone is not a reliable indicator of disease, nor is vaccination proof of immunity. It’s complex. We have virus particles in our bodies all the time but what’s crucial is whether the virus enters our cells and makes us ill. Some people are more susceptible than others and it largely depends on age, weight, ethnicity and comorbidities."

Craig believes the real problem with transmission lies in hospitals and with people who are already ill.  She says that money would be well spent upgrading hospital air filtration systems and increasing and improving intensive care facilities. Hospital transmission in England was 40% in spring 2020 but many cases were incidental (people already hospitalised for something else, not for covid).

US Physician Peter McCullough has seen excellent results with early home drug treatment and insists it makes all the difference but believes successful protocols have been suppressed to 'keep people in fear and suffering and promote hospitalisation and death to get the public to accept the goal of vaccination', which he added is showing, 'strong signs of mortality'.

PANDA (Pandemic Analytics & Data) co-founder and actuary Nick Hudson reminds us that pandemic theory is not fact and should be questioned. He says that while there is a notion of universal susceptibility, the fatality rate for infected under-seventies is only 0.01%. Hudson calls out ‘Orwellian truth ministries’ and says there has been an institutional takeover of science by vaccine makers.

Expert in constitutional law, Barrister Francis Hoar believes this is a crisis of culture and politics far more than a crisis of health, saying, “The government have put public health officials in charge and that in itself is a crisis of democracy. The Public Health Act (1984) has been abused; it was never designed to allow the government the kind of extraordinary powers whereby it could lock down the entire country and quarantine healthy people."

The conclusions and solutions seem to be clear and straightforward: -

~ The government has overstepped the mark and its powers need restricting.

~ The public need to know their rights and start asserting them to recapture the narrative.

~ Fear programming and anti-social measures need to go and never return because they are ineffective and widely harmful.

~ The habitual wearing of masks has no measurable effect on the spread of covid (but might make the situation worse).

~ There is no evidence of asymptomatic transmission.

~ Quarantining and testing healthy people, especially children, is pointless and contributes to a false positive ‘casedemic’.

Professor David Livermore says that covid is here to stay and will eventually weaken and become like all other coronaviruses; that unvaccinated children and the young will develop natural immunity, which is stronger and longer lasting; that we should continue to protect the most vulnerable in society but that it is essential we get back to living our lives before they disappear completely.

To watch the Question Everything summit in full, go to: https://www.questioneverything.io/replay/

Louize Small, July 2021.

All Rights Reserved.

A previous version of this article appeared in issue 13 of The Light paper.

thelightpaper.co.uk