This text is part of a longer article I’m currently writing about
the expansion of the UK biosecurity state through the winter of 2020-21,
and which I hope to publish before Christmas. However, some of what
this section exposes is happening right now. We think it best,
therefore, to publish this information as a separate article, in the
hope it will provide some support to those who, like us, are resisting
what is being implemented under the cloak of the latest
Government-imposed lockdown of the UK and with the collaboration of our
scientists, doctors, academics, teachers, writers and other state
clerks.
My title, for those who do not recognise the reference, is taken from
the book published in 1927 by the French writer and cultural critic,
Julien Benda, titled La trahison des clercs. In this extended
essay, Benda accused European intellectuals of the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries of having lost the ability to think rationally about
politics, having instead becoming apologists for, among other things,
the struggle for power. Benda used the French word ‘clerc’ in
the Medieval sense to mean a scribe, or what we would now call a member
of the middle-class intelligentsia; but the Modern meaning of ‘clerk’
retains Benda’s intended puncturing of the intellectual posturings of
that class and their betrayal of their intellectual independence from
the institutions of power it is their social role and moral duty to hold
to account. In this section I want to look at the roles of such clerks
today in giving scientific legitimacy, practical implementation and
intellectual credibility to the Government’s lies about the coronavirus
crisis from within the institutional frameworks of medicine, education
and letters.
1. Medicine
It cannot be too strongly emphasised that SAGE, the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies
on whose recommendation the second lockdown of the UK has been imposed,
is not a group of independent scientists, doctors, academics and other
medical specialists dressed in leather-patched tweed jackets and
politely advising the Cabinet Office with reports that are then ignored,
set aside or belatedly listened to. This is very much how the UK press
depicts SAGE, which is fronted at press conferences by the suitably
academic-looking Professor Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance.
However, in reality SAGE is merely an extension of the Government. Its
leading figures are not independent experts giving their objective
opinions about what they think the Government should so, but scientific
advisors and employees from Government ministries, departments and
executive agencies, representatives from the Scottish Government, Welsh
Assembly and Northern Ireland Executive, or directors of organisations
and quangos dependent on Government funding for their existence. These
include the following members:
- Sir Patrick Vallance, Government Chief Scientific Advisor
- Professor Chris Whitty Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Adviser, Department of Health and Social Care
- Professor John Aston, Chief Scientific Adviser, Home Office
- Fliss Bennee, Welsh Government
- Mr Allan Bennett, Public Health England
- Professor Phil Blythe, Chief Scientific Adviser, Department for Transport
- Professor Andrew Curran, Chief Scientific Adviser, Health and Safety Executive
- Professor Paul Cosford, Public Health England
- Dr Gavin Dabrera, Public Health England
- Professor Sir Ian Diamond, Office for National Statistics
- Professor Yvonne Doyle, Medical Director, Public Health England
- Professor Sir Jeremy Farrar, Director, Wellcome Trust
- Professor Kevin Fenton, Public Health England
- Dr Aidan Fowler, National Health Service England
- Professor Robin Grimes, Chief Scientific Adviser, Ministry of Defence
- Dr David Halpern, Behavioural Insights Team, Cabinet Office
- Baronness Harding of Winscombe, National Health Service Improvement
- Dr Jenny Harries OBE, Deputy Chief Medical Officer
- Professor Gideon Henderson, Chief Scientific Adviser, Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
- Dr Indra Joshi, NHSX
- Professor Dame Angela McLean, Chief Scientific Adviser, Ministry of Defence
- Dr Jim McMenamin, Health Protection Scotland
- Professor Carole Mundell, Chief Scientific Adviser, Foreign and Commonwealth Office
- Dr Rob Orford, Welsh Government
- Professor Sharon Peacock, Public Health England
- Professor Alan Penn, Chief Scientific Adviser, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
- Professor Guy Poppy, Chief Scientific Adviser, Food Standards Agency
- Professor Steve Powis, National Health Service England
- Dr Mike Prentice, National Health Service England
- Mr Osama Rahman, Chief Scientific Adviser, Department for Education
- Professor Tom Rodden, Chief Scientific Adviser, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport
- Dr Cathy Roth, Department for International Development
- Professor Sheila Rowan MBE FRS FRSE
- Chief Scientific Adviser, Scotland
- Alaster Smith, Department for Education
- Dr Nicola Steedman, Scottish Government
- Dr Mike Short CBE, Chief Scientific Adviser, Department for International Trade
- Dr Gregor Smith, Scottish Government Chief Medical Officer
- Professor Jonathan Van Tam, Deputy Chief Medical Officer
- Professor Charlotte Watts, Chief Scientific Adviser, Department for International Development
- Professor Sir Mark Walport, UK Research and Innovation
- Professor Ian Young, Professor Ian Young
- Professor Maria Zambon, Public Health England
These 43 make up exactly half of the 86 members of SAGE, and are by
far the more powerful and influential members. There is a similar
proportion of Government officials to academics in the SAGE subgroups,
which include the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours
(SPI-B), which includes at least 3 members of the Cabinet Office’s
Behavioural Insight Team or ‘Nudge Unit’, and the Scientific Pandemic
Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M), which includes 7 employees of
Public Health England, the executive agency of the Department of Health
and Social Care. And, of course, this list doesn’t include the
unofficial presence of the Prime Minister’s Chief Advisor, Dominic
Cummings, and Ben Warner, a data scientist and another Downing Street
Advisor, both of whose names are redacted from the published minutes of
SAGE meetings. Nor does it take account of the role of seemingly
independent academics such as Professor Neil Ferguson, who with 4 other
colleagues from Imperial College London was responsible for the
now-infamous 16 March report
containing the wildly inaccurate and repeatedly refuted estimates of
deaths and ‘cases’, and who all sit on the SPI-Modelling subgroup. This
year alone, Imperial College London received $88.86 million in grants
from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), which has bankrolled it for well over a decade.
The influence of private investment on so-called ‘independent’
experts such as these, who make supposedly objective decisions used by
the Government to curtail the freedoms of the UK public, is endemic to
the medical and pharmaceutical industry. It was recently revealed that
Sir Patrick Vallance, who Chairs SAGE and decides who attends its
meetings, still has £600,000
in shares in his former employer, the pharmaceutical giant
GlaxoSmithKline, where he was President of Research and Development from
2012-2018, and which has in turn been awarded an untendered contract by
the UK Government to help develop 60 million doses of a vaccine to
COVID-19. Sir Patrick is in good company, as the Deputy Chief Medical
Officer, Professor Jonathan Van Tam, who Chairs the SPI-M subgroup and
the COVID-19 Clinical Information Network, is a former employee of the
Swiss multinational healthcare company Roche, on whose behalf he lobbied
the World Health Organisation for human vaccines that made both Roche
and GlaxoSmithKline billions. According to an article by Tom Jefferson
published in the British Medical Journal in December 2017, Van Tam is a regular attendee at conferences organised by the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI), a well known industry-funded lobbying group; and
as head of the Pandemic Influenza Office at the UK Health Protection
Agency in 2004-2007, he bears responsibility for decisions that were
heavily criticised in 2013 by the Public Accounts Committee regarding the production, trial and use of the influenza antiviral drug Oseltamivir (Tamiflu),
which was one of the highest revenue earners for Roche. From 2006, the
UK Government spent millions stockpiling Tamiflu in response to estimates
that bird flu would kill 200 million people worldwide, and up 710,000
people in the UK. In reality, around 600 people have died worldwide, and
not a single person in the UK even contracted bird flu. The
‘independent’ modeller who made these predictions in 2005 was Professor
Neil Ferguson, who 15 years later estimated half a million deaths from
COVID-19 in the UK, and whose discredited predictions are being used to
justify inflicting an equally unnecessary COVID-19 vaccine on the
British people today.
But the influence of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on UK
health policy and vaccine development goes beyond the consistently
alarmist reports produced by Imperial College London, whose Real-Time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT) programme, with its estimate of 100,000 ‘cases’
per day doubling every 9 days, has been used to justify the latest
lockdown of the UK. Besides being the second largest contributor after
the US Government to the WHO’s $2.4 billion annual budget (with $219.7 million in grants in 2020 alone), the BMGF is also a main donor to the Wellcome Trust ($613,000
in grants over the past decade), whose Director, Professor Sir Jeremy
Farrar, is also a member of SAGE, and sits on the PHE Serology Working
Group along with 1 other employee of the Wellcome Trust, 2 employees of
Imperial College London and 5 employees of Public Health England.
Another beneficiary of Bill Gates’ Microsoft billions is the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine,
which this year alone received $5.8 million in grants from the BMGF, of
which $1.5 million is for vaccine development, but like Imperial
College has accepted tens of millions in grants over the past decade and
longer. In 2008, the School received $46.4 million
from the BMGF for research into malaria, the bulk of which went to the
ACT Consortium conducting the research, whose Principal Investigator was
Chris Whitty, at the time Professor of Public and International Health
at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It’s not
surprising, therefore, that the LSHTM has 5 professors in the main
membership of SAGE, another in the Behavioural sub-group, and no less
than 9 professors and doctors on the Modelling sub-group that has
produced the estimates on which both lockdowns have been justified. If
that isn’t enough influence, the Medical & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) currently guaranteeing the safety standard of COVID-19 vaccines has received $7.15 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
over the past decade, $1.37 million of it this year. In December 2017,
the MHRA announced a partnership with the BMGF and the WHO worth £980,000.
Incomprehensibly, for anyone who doesn’t know how Big Pharma exerts its
influence over governments, the UK’s regulatory and executive agency of
the Department for Health and Social Care responsible for overseeing
the safety of medicines distributed in this country is being funded by a
US billionaire who in January of this year invested $10 billion as part
of his call for a ‘Decade of Vaccines’.
The perception, therefore, created and disseminated by the UK media,
that there is tension and disagreement between SAGE and the Government —
which is depicted as a struggle between the responsible, communitarian,
pro-lockdown scientists and the irresponsible, libertarian,
anti-lockdown Government — is a pure fiction. This has been carefully
constructed to make the public believe that if this group of
intellectually independent academics think we should obey Government
lockdown restrictions on our freedoms and rights, then we’d better
listen to them. Wikipedia’s
claim that members ‘are not generally employed by government’ is an
easily-proved lie; and calls by the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition
for the Government to ‘listen to SAGE’ is like telling the Treasury to
listen to the Department of Health and Social Care. In practice, SAGE is
and always has been an arm of the UK Government whose members are paid
and instructed to say precisely what they are saying. The delayed
publication of its meetings and reports is a public relations stunt
intended to present a facade of transparency to a gullible public all
too easily impressed by professorships and honours and post-nominal
letters, with little understanding of what they mean and how they are
earned, and the misguided perception that they guarantee honesty and
intellectual integrity. They don’t.
Nor are the academic members of SAGE exempt from the same criticism.
If they are not, as many are, employed or funded by Government bodies or
the social investment arms of pharmaceutical companies or international
vaccine lobbyists, there are numerous instances of Government contracts
being awarded to universities and colleges with members sitting on the
board of SAGE. On the one hand, this isn’t surprising, given the
research capabilities of their departments; but, on the other hand, it
would be naïve to dismiss this as an incentive to compliance for
universities starved of funds by cuts to education by a Government now
dangling those contracts in front of their faces. But these pale beside
the vast sums the academic institutions they work for receive in funding
from Big Pharma. In her article on ‘SAGE conflicts of interest’,
Dr. Zoë Harcombe has identified 12 out of what she calls the 20 ‘key
influencers’ in SAGE — those members attending at least half its
meetings — who work for or have received funding from organisations
financially connected with the development of a vaccine for COVID-19.
This doesn’t include Vallance and Whitty, but does include 3 academics
(Maria Zambon, Wendy Barclay and the since departed Neil Ferguson) who
are all professors at Imperial College London, and 2 (Dame Angela McLean
and Peter Horby) who are professors at the University of Oxford. These
are the two academic institutions at the forefront of the race for a
COVID-19 vaccine in the UK, with Imperial College, which has 4 professors in SAGE, receiving nearly $190 million in grants from the BMGT over the past decade; and Oxford University,
which has 6 professors in SAGE, receiving $208 million in grants over
the past decade, including $11.64 million for vaccine development over
the past 3 years. 3 more key influencers (Charlotte Watts, Graham Medley
OBE and John Edmunds) are professors at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine,
which has its own vaccine centre, is also in the race for a vaccine for
COVID-19, has received $158.37 million from the BMGF in this past
decade, and has 5 employees in SAGE and 9 in the SPI-Modelling subgroup.
1 (Steven Powis) is a professor at University College London,
which has received over $40.7 million from the BMGF in the past decade,
has 6 employees in SAGE and 5 on the SPI-Behavioural subgroup. 2 (Sir
Jeremy Farrar and Sharon Peacock, OBE) are professors at the Wellcome
Trust/Sanger Institute. And 1 (Andrew Rambaut), is a professor at the University of Edinburgh,
which has received $28 million from the BMGF in the past decade, has 2
employees in SAGE and 3 in the COVID-19 Clinical Information Network
headed by Professor Van Tam. Dr. Harcombe has uncovered more information
about the financial connections, professional roles and secondments to
Government departments of the key personnel in this supposedly objective
‘scientific advisory group’, and I recommend you read her article.
Perhaps the clearest indication of this exchange of contracts for
compliance is the absence from SAGE of a figure like Sunetra Gupta,
Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, who
in a study published back in March on the ‘Fundamental principles of epidemic spread’
questioned the assumptions behind the since-discredited predictions
made by Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London, and who
proposed very different solutions to the lockdown they were used to
justify. Only this departure from Government orthodoxy can explain why
such a senior figure in her field in one of the world’s leading
universities has not been invited to join SAGE, which is short on
epidemiologists to challenge the Chief Medical Officer and,
extraordinarily, doesn’t have a single immunologist. Indeed, it is this
very clear bias that led David King, Emeritus Professor in Physical
Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and the UK’s former Chief
Scientific Adviser, to form Independent SAGE,
whose name alone casts doubt on the independence of the official
version. For her persistent assertion, most publicly outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration,
that protecting those vulnerable to COVID-19 and developing herd
immunity in those who are not, Professor Gupta has been the object of widespread and vicious attacks on her intellectual integrity, not only in the media but from other academics, and the declaration suppressed
on the BBC, Twitter, Google and other media and online platforms and
search engines. Such is the hegemony among the UK’s clerks.
Even without such inducements to maintain a united front — or ‘consensus statement’
as it is called in SAGE’s published documents — in the face of
increasing dissent from within their disciplines, the actual scientists
comprising the membership of SAGE have been carefully chosen for their
task, and are not equipped with the knowledge and expertise such an
advisory group should have. The most public criticism of its membership
and their decisions has come from Dr. Mike Yeadon, an expert in allergy
and respiratory therapy with a degree in biochemistry and toxicology and
a research-based PhD in respiratory pharmacology who has spent over 30
years leading research into new medicines in some of the world’s largest
pharmaceutical companies. In 2011, Yeadon left Pfizer Global as Vice
President and Chief Scientist for Allergy and Respiratory, after which
he founded his own biotech company, Ziarco Pharma Ltd, which in 2017 was
sold to the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company, Novartis; so he
huge amount of practical experience in the industry. In his article ‘What SAGE Has Got Wrong’, published on 16 October, Yeadon had this to say about the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies:
‘It is my contention that SAGE made — and tragically, continues
to make to this very day — two absolutely central and incorrect
assumptions about the behaviour of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and how it
interacts with the human immune system, at an individual as well as a
population level.’
The first of these assumptions is that 100 per cent of the population
of the UK was susceptible to the virus and that no pre-existing
immunity existed. The second is the belief that the percentage of the
population that has been infected can be determined by surveying what
fraction of the population has antibodies. In contrast, Yeadon’s
contention is that because the proportion of the population remaining
susceptible to the virus is now too low to sustain a growing outbreak at
national scale, the pandemic is effectively over and can easily be
handled by a properly functioning NHS. The country, accordingly, should
immediately be permitted to get back to normal life. This, however,
raises the question of why, if these mistaken assumptions are so
obvious, they have been made by the members of SAGE? And the answer,
according to Dr. Yeadon, lies partly in the disciplines and specialisms
of its members.
‘In spring, membership of SAGE was initially treated like a state
secret. Eventually, membership was revealed. I will say that, for
myself, I was disappointed. I looked up the credentials of all the
members. There were no clinical immunologists. No one who had a biology
degree and a post-doctoral qualification in immunology. A few medics,
sure. Several people from the humanities including sociologists,
economists, psychologists and political theorists. No clinical
immunologists. What there were in profusion — seven in total — were
mathematicians. This comprised the modelling group. It is their output
that has been responsible for torturing the population for the last
seven months or so.’
As it isn’t the subject of this section, I won’t go into great detail
about why Yeadon thinks they are so incorrect in the assumptions that
are the basis to the current lockdown of the UK, and you can follow his
argument in detail in this and the longer study on which it is based, ‘How Likely is a Second Wave?’,
which was co-authored with Dr. Paul Kirkham, Professor of Cell Biology
and Head of Respiratory Disease Research Group at Wolverhampton
University, and Barry Thomas, an epidemiologist at the NHS. But in
summary, Yeadon says that although SARS-CoV-2 is a novel coronavirus, at
least four other coronaviruses circulate freely in UK on a seasonal
basis. This means not only that the PCR (polymerase chain reaction)
tests can pick up and detect as SARS-CoV-2 anyone with a coronavirus
common cold, but that this has given 30-50 per cent of the population
pre-existing immunity to SARS-CoV-2. In addition, SAGE’s assumption that
only 10 per cent of the UK population has been infected with SARS-CoV-2
is based on the proportion of the surveyed individuals in which
antibodies to the virus have been detected. However, not only is it well
known that not everybody infected with a virus produces antibodies, and
especially those with mild symptoms, but that all those surveyed had
T-cells circulating in their blood, giving them prior immunity to this
new but related virus. Indeed, of the 750 million people estimated by
the World Health Organisation to have been infected by SARS-CoV-2 so
far, only a handful appear to have been re-infected. This, Yeadon
states, is how the immune system works, without which humans as a
species wouldn’t be here.
‘What we can conclude from this is that SAGE is wrong to rely on
percentage seroconversion (antibodies) as a reliable guide to the
proportion of the population who’ve been infected. This is a truly
dreadful error, one that could not have been made but for the inadequate
skillsets of the members of SAGE. I’m sorry, but I have to say it. They
had too many mathematicians and no one with the right experience to
interpret the data coming in from fieldwork.
‘SAGE’s estimate of the proportion of the population who’ve so
far been infected by SARS-C0V-2 is a gross and amateur underestimate.
SAGE says everyone was susceptible and only 7% have been infected. I
think this is literally unbelievable. They have ignored all precedent in
the field of immunological memory against respiratory viruses. They
have either not seen or disregarded excellent quality work from
numerous, world-leading clinical immunologists which show that around
30% of the population had prior immunity.’
This has led SAGE to declare that the ‘pandemic’ has only just
become. Yeadon calls this ‘palpable nonsense’. It’s a respiratory virus,
with a lethality no greater than seasonal influenza in its worst years.
Indeed, out of the past 27 years, mortality in the UK in 2020, adjusted
for population growth, lies in 8th place — hardly testimony to an
unprecedented disease crisis requiring a lockdown. Yeadon’s final
judgement on this catalogue of errors and the measures they are
justifying is damning.
‘SAGE has nothing useful to tell us. As currently constituted,
they have an inappropriate over-weighting in modellers and are fatally
deficient in pragmatic, empirical, evidence-led experienced scientists,
especially the medical, immunological and expert generalist variety. It
is my opinion that they should be disbanded immediately and
reconstituted. I say this because, as I have shown, they haven’t a grasp
of even the basics required to build a model and because their models
are often frighteningly useless, a fact of which they seem unaware.
Their role is too important for them to get a second chance. They are
unlikely to revise their thinking even if they claim they have now fixed
their model. The level of incompetence shown by the errors I have
uncovered, errors which indirectly through inappropriate “measures”,
have cost the lives of thousands of people, from avoidable, non-COVID-19
causes, is utterly unforgivable.
‘As a private individual, I am incandescent with rage at the
damage they have inflicted on this country. We should demand more
honesty, as well as competence from those elected or appointed to look
after aspects of life we cannot manage alone. SAGE has either been
irredeemably incompetent or it has been dishonest. I personally know a
few SAGE members and with the sole exception of a nameless individual,
it is an understatement that they have greatly disappointed me. They
have rebuffed well-intentioned and, as it turned out, accurate advice
from at least three Nobel laureate scientists, all informing them that
their modelling was seriously and indeed lethally in error. Though this
may not have made the papers, everyone in the science community knows
about this and that SAGE’s inadequate replies are scandalous. I have no
confidence in any of them and neither should you.’
Dr. Yeadon is not a human-rights activist, a left-wing campaigner
against the pharmaceutical industry, an ‘anti-vaxer’, a ‘COVID-denier’,
or any of the other labels with which anyone questioning Government
advisors are dismissed in the media. He is an industry insider, a former
colleague of Patrick Vallance in the Wellcome Research Laboratories,
and a senior researcher into respiratory diseases for private companies
making vast profits from medicines for the public. He has nothing to
gain professionally or financially from making these accusations, and a
lot to lose reputationally. Once again, like Lord Sumption QC, the
former Justice of the Supreme Court who has accused the Government of
making coronavirus-justified Regulations unlawfully; like Dr. Sunetra Gupta,
the Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford who continues to
defend building up herd immunity against the Government’s imposition of
lockdown; like Professor Michael Levitt,
a biophysicist in the Department of Structural Biology at Stanford
University and one of the Nobel Laureates ignored by the modellers at
Imperial College London; like the tens of thousands of doctors,
scientists, academics and industry specialists across the globe, what he
says cannot be dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theory’.
There are only two possible explanations for this: 1) thousands of
eminent specialists in their field across the world have all entered
into a global conspiracy to lie about the most important event of our
time; or 2) scientists working for their governments are lying to the
public. The recent exposure of the blatant lies shown first on national
television and then to the House of Commons by the Government’s Chief
Scientific Advisor and Chief Medical Office to justify the current
lockdown — and only retracted when their predictions of 4,000 deaths per day from COVID-19 were shown to be mathematically incorrect by Carl Heneghan,
Professor of Evidence-based Medicine at Oxford University — should make
it clear which of these explanations is most likely to be true. Indeed,
on the day the lockdown came into effect, the Office for Statistics
Regulations issued a ‘Statement regarding transparency of data related to COVID-19’ in Government briefings and interviews, saying that:
‘The use of data has not consistently been supported by
transparent information being provided in a timely manner. As a result,
there is potential to confuse the public and undermine confidence in the
statistics.’
This is a polite way of saying that SAGE has lied to us. However, so
unaccountable has our Government become, so widespread is the
expectation and acceptance of corruption in public life, that instead of
being compelled to apologise for misleading Parliament and fired from
their positions in ignominy, both Vallance and Whitty continue to hold
their positions at the head of SAGE.
2. Education
The next group of clerks I want to look at has far less influence on
giving direct legitimacy to the Government’s lies about the threat of
coronavirus, but plays a far greater role in implementing it. This is
the education industry, one the UK’s top three sources of employment,
and which presides over 8.89 million school students and 2.38 million
students in higher education. These are, perhaps, the most vulnerable
members of our society and the most susceptible to propaganda, bullying
and fearmongering. They are also our future. And with the overwhelming
allegiance of young adults to the Labour party following the dreams and
illusions of the past five years, the current orthodoxy of the so-called
Left in this country — led by Sir Keir Starmer, the former Director of
Public Prosecutions and current Leader of the Labour Party — in
supporting the Conservative Government in every coronavirus-justified
Statute — no matter how financially catastrophic for the working class,
no matter how in violation of our rights and freedoms — makes the
education industry one of the most powerful propaganda arms available to
the UK biosecurity state.
On Monday, 19 October, Internal Communications at De Montfort
University in Leicester sent an e-mail to all their staff titled ‘DMU to
pilot new national testing programme in fight against COVID-19’. It
read as follows:
‘Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the health and wellbeing of
our students and staff has always been our top priority. We’ve worked
hard to make sure all the necessary measures are in place for you to be
able to enjoy everything our campus has to offer in the safest way
possible. You can find out more about this by taking a look at Your DMU
Safety.’
In reality, without consulting either its staff or its students, DMU
has unilaterally decided to implement the programmes and regulations of
the UK biosecurity state. This includes enforcing mandatory
mask-wearing, implementing an on-site Test and Trace programme, and
making almost all teaching virtual, without any consideration of the
effects this will have on students and lecturers. In particular, our
repeated attempts to raise the question of how students without access
to adequate laptops and suitable internet connection — which is often
the case among DMU students — are meant to participate in virtual
platforms has been repeatedly brushed aside as an inconvenient fact that
everyone is willing to acknowledge but no-one has done anything to
address. The e-mail continued:
‘Today, we would like to let you know about a pilot initiative
for a new national project taking place at DMU over the next few months
which we hope will positively impact the fight against COVID-19 for our
staff, students and society as a whole.
‘Supporting the Government’s Department for Health and Social
Care (DHSC) the university will host an NHS Test and Trace facility on
campus, giving staff and students an opportunity to engage and explore
how effectively Lateral Flow antigen tests can be used at scale.
‘If successful, it would allow for the rapid deployment of new
testing technology, enabling regular testing in targeted locations, a
clear step forward in the fight against COVID-19.’
In fact, as pretty much everyone besides DMU knows by now, the
so-called ‘NHS’ Test and Trace programme is a £12 billion public-private
enterprise of 35 contractors and subcontractors, 22 of which are
private companies with an appalling record of incompetence, malpractice,
fraud, price-fixing, financial mismanagement, conflicts of interest,
misconduct, bribery, breaches of contract, breaches of security,
breaches of confidentiality, abuse of human rights and questionable
ethical practices. The contract for outsourcing the programme was
awarded to Serco, the UK provider of public services in prisons, border
security, military defence and information technology. Among numerous
other failings of propriety, Serco was fined £22.9 million
by the Serious Fraud Office in 2019 for charging the UK Government for
electronically tagging people who were dead, in jail or outside the UK;
in the same year Serco was accused of covering up sexual abuse in the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Centre;
and in 2013 Serco was found by the Prison Inspectorate to be locking 60
per cent of prisoners in their cells up to 23 hours per day in HMP Thameside.
The Test and Trace contract, which is worth up to £432 million, and was
awarded directly by the Department of Health and Social Care without
competitive tender, has a clause allowing Serco to rewrite undeclared key terms
on service provision. The actual testing sites and processing of
samples are all run by subcontracted private companies. This
privatisation has been universally acknowledged outside Government as a
failure of incompetence and corruption. Far from being a ‘clear step
forward’ in the fight against COVID-19, the Test and Trace programme in
which staff and students are being asked to participate by DMU is an
example of the shady dealings that are outsourcing public services in
the UK to private contractors awarded billions of pounds of public funds
without scrutiny or accountability. DMU should have nothing to do with
this pilot, let alone unilaterally volunteering its students and staff
to be its guinea pigs.
‘Lateral Flow antigen tests are a new kind of technology that
could be used to test a higher proportion of asymptomatic people. This
would better enable the Government to identify asymptomatic cases who
are at high likelihood of spreading the virus, and break the chain of
transmission. The first Lateral Flow antigen tests have completed
initial validation and the Government is identifying how to best use
this new technology at scale through a series of different field tests
and pilots. The first such major pilot will be at DMU.
‘Lateral Flow antigen tests detect the presence or absence of
coronavirus by applying a swab or saliva sample to the device’s
absorbent pad. The sample runs along the surface of the pad, showing a
visual positive or negative result dependant on the presence of the
virus. The tests have been validated by Public Health England. They are
safe and offer reliable results.’
Lateral Flow tests detect a target substance in a liquid sample such
as salvia, and are used for point of care or home testing, for example
in pregnancy tests. In the case of Lateral Flow antigen tests, they
detect any substance that causes our immune system to produce
antibodies, including a virus. However, far from offering ‘reliable
results’, their sensitivity is two orders of magnitude lower
than that of the PCR tests already in use, and they produce an even
higher percentage of false positives in low-prevalence settings, to the
extent that they require backing up with PCR tests when producing
positive results on asymptomatic subjects. In an interim guidance
document from the World Health Organisation published on 11 September
titled ‘Antigen-detection in the diagnoses of SARS-CoV-2 infection using rapid immunoassays’,
it specifically states that antigen-detecting rapid diagnostic tests
(Ag-RDT) should only be used where there have been suspected outbreaks
of COVID-19 and there is a high prevalence of infection, and should not
be used on ‘individuals without symptoms’ or where there are zero or
only sporadic cases. It explains (Table 1): ‘Ag-RDTs are not recommended
for routine surveillance purposes or case management in this setting.
Positive test results would likely be false positives.’ Yet on the DMU webpage
advertising ‘free regular tests on campus’ this week it states that the
‘aim is for all students and staff to be tested regularly (at least
twice a week’).
There’s a saying among those who work in the tech and social media
industries that if something is free it’s because you are the product
being sold; and this test is being offered to DMU staff and students
‘free at the point of use’. This October, Dr. Jon Deeks, Professor of
Biostatistics at the University of Birmingham, commented in the British Medical Journal
on the commercial incentive for rolling out these rapid-response tests:
‘There is a massive opportunity for companies to get very rich selling
poor tests, particularly if they get a Government contract’. At the end
of September, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
entered into purchase agreements for £120 million of such Lateral Flow
antigen tests, and is part of an international coalition supporting this
approach, which will most probably be used to justify the mandatory
vaccination programme on which they and other social investment arms of
global corporations will make trillions.
As for being ‘validated’ by Public Health England, on 18 August the
executive arm of the Department of Health and Social Care was superseded
by and incorporated into the National Institute for Health Protection
(NIHP). Designed by the management consulting firm McKinsey and with
senior management comprised of former executives from Travelex, Jaguar
Land Rover, Waitrose and Talk Talk, the NIHP is a private-public
partnership with the Test and Trace Programme and the Joint Biosecurity
Centre (JBC), a monitoring system designed to require businesses to
collect a wide range of data, including biometric samples, from their
employees, customers and visitors. The JBC is being run by Clare
Gardiner, the Director of National Resilience and Strategy at the National Cyber Security Centre. This is a branch of General Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ), the UK’s intelligence, cyber and security agency, which in 2013
was exposed by Edward Snowdon to have been routinely collecting,
processing and storing vast quantities of global digital communications,
including e-mail messages, posts and private messages on social
networks, internet histories, and phone calls. This week, GCHQ launched a
new cyber offensive
targeting websites and social media accounts that publish content
categorised as ‘propaganda’ for raising concerns about state-sponsored
Covid-19 vaccine development and the pharmaceutical corporations
involved. And if anyone doubted that the implementation of the
biosecurity state is a cross-party programme, this week the Labour Party called on the Conservative Government to introduce
further emergency legislation that would impose criminal and financial
sanctions against social media platforms that do not censor content that
questions the need or motivations for mass vaccination, which the
Shadow Health Minister, Jonathan Ashworth, described as ‘conspiracy
theories’.
‘The pilot will be crucial in understanding the effectiveness of
these tests. The new lateral flow test will be run alongside existing
testing methods (PCR) and anyone who tests positive will still need to
self-isolate in accordance with current guidance and to undertake a
confirmatory test through the NHS. Staff and students must also continue
to book a test with the NHS if they have symptoms.’
In fact, according to a recent article published in The Lancet in September and titled ‘False-positive COVID-19 results: hidden problems and costs’,
PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests — which do not test whether
someone is infected or infectious but were designed for forensic RNA
trace analysis under laboratory conditions — have a false positive rate
(FPR) of between 0.8 and 4 per cent even under ideal testing
circumstances and on patients with a high viral load, let alone in the
makeshift tents in which the Government is rolling out its Pillar 2
swab-testing programme of the wider community. According to a study
carried out in August by doctors from the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine at Oxford University,
samples amplified more than 30-34 times pick up the smallest traces of
virus left over from an infection up to 3 months earlier in individuals
who are no longer either infected or infectious. If the sample is
amplified 60 times, 100 per cent of the tests will come back positive.
PCR tests in England amplify the sample an extraordinary 45 times, far
beyond the upper limit of 24 cycles
for detecting infectious samples. In effect, how many cycles of
amplification swab samples are put through, multiplied by the number of
tests conducted, will determine the severity of the ‘epidemic’ you’re
after.
According to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics,
in the week ending 31 October, 1.2 per cent of people in the East
Midlands tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. This means that, were PCR tests
conducted on DMU’s 20,000 students, on average 240 would test positive,
but between 160 (0.8%) and 800 (4%) of the results would be false
positives. Given the prevalence of asymptomatic infections and the poor
conditions for testing, the far end of this spectrum is far more likely;
but the PCR test would only have to reach an FPR of 1.2 per cent for
100 per cent of the test positives to be false. This isn’t surprising,
since the RT-PCR test was not designed either to prove infection or to
diagnose an infectious disease.
In a radio interview
conducted on 17 September, Dr. Yeadon pointed out that were the results
from PCR tests conducted under current Pillar-2 testing conditions
submitted in a forensic case, they would be thrown out of court. The DMU
pilot-programme is being conducted in the university’s sports venue,
which is appropriately called The Watershed, where cardboard boxes laid on the floor, temporary partitions hastily erected and trestle-tables are serving as a makeshift laboratory.
Yet this test would consign the 240 students who tested positive and at
least their households to 2 weeks’ enforced quarantine, with anyone
additionally identified through the Serco Test and Trace programme as
having come into contact with them while designated ‘infectious’ also
placed under quarantine, resulting in potentially tens of thousands of
people being placed under house arrest without medical cause. The
Lateral Flow antigen test, which produces an even higher percentage of
false positives in low-prevalence settings like DMU, will consign even
greater numbers to a medically meaningless quarantine. Despite this, it
emerged in October that UK police forces will be given the data
of those forced to quarantine as a result of these wildly inaccurate
tests, with fixed-penalty notices for non-compliance raised by The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Self-Isolation) (England) Regulations 2020 to a maximum of £10,000 as of 28 September.
‘The DMU pilot will begin in the coming weeks with a small group
of students who will be contacted separately and given the opportunity
to volunteer and help shape the future of this technology. Over the
following weeks, the testing will then be rolled out to include a wider
population of DMU staff and students. Further details on testing will be
available in due course via email and an area on the Your DMU Safety
microsite so please look out for more information.
‘The results of the DMU trial will be analysed carefully
alongside other university and school trials to assess how Lateral Flow
devices might be used to test large numbers of people who do not have
symptoms, and how this might help to get the country back to normal.
‘Using Lateral Flow tests may enable us to identify infectious
people who are asymptomatic, ensuring that they are aware and can
prevent onwards infection. This could then minimise ongoing disruption
for those who test negative, in turn supporting the economy and wider
society to return to a more normal way of life.’
Testing asymptomatic transmission of a virus is difficult, because
people without symptoms have no reason to go to a medical facility and
get tested, meaning accurate estimates of how many individuals they have
been in contact with since they contracted SARS-CoV-2 and whether they
have been infected by them are extremely rare. Historically, however,
asymptomatic transmission has never been the main source of infection in
viral epidemics, and the same is likely to be true of SARS-CoV-2. What case studies
there have been, conducted under laboratory conditions rather than
converted sports halls, have shown low levels of transmission. Far from
helping to return society to a ‘more normal way of life’, testing DMU
students and staff with a quick, cheap and inaccurate binary test, whose
production rate of false positives is even higher than the slow and
inaccurate PCR tests on which the current lockdown has been imposed,
will significantly contribute to the Government’s ability to make
compliance with programmes and technologies of health surveillance,
monitoring and control a condition of access to public life under the UK
biosecurity state pilots like this are helping to implement.
‘Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, DMU has worked to support its
staff, students and the community around it. Our volunteers have helped
people across the city and our academic research has increased knowledge
of the pandemic and informed at a national level about the long-term
effects it could have.
‘This pilot is an extension of this work and offers us an
important opportunity to be at the forefront of the national effort
against COVID-19.’
De Montfort University is an interesting choice to pilot this scheme.
What everybody knows about Leicester is that it is at the geographical
centre of England; but DMU isn’t Oxford or Cambridge, Manchester or
Liverpool, University College London or Imperial College London, whose
modelling team is responsible for both lockdowns. DMU is ranked 81 among
the 130 UK institutions listed in the University League Tables 2021.
The students aren’t wealthy. Their parents aren’t drawn exclusively
from the middle classes. There is a high proportion of students from
working-class, Black and Asian families. They might be thought by the
Government to have a lower likelihood of being exposed at home to
information about the coronavirus crisis other than what they hear on
mainstream media and from De Montfort University. It appears that they
have been chosen precisely because of the likelihood of their compliance
with this new test. But just to make sure, on 6 November the Prime
Minister paid a personal visit to meet the staff and students who are
participating in this scheme, where he posed for the cameras and took
the Lateral Flow antigen test under the makeshift arrangements. It wasn’t revealed whether it came back positive.
We know about this e-mail and the pilot scheme because ASH’s
co-founder, Geraldine Dening, is a part-time senior lecturer in the
School of Architecture at De Montfort University. She has declared her
opposition to the university’s plans in writing, and has refused to
enforce its measures on her students. Instead, in the single class in
which she has been in physical proximity to her students since the first
lockdown, she invited them to make the decision of whether to wear a
mask or to maintain social distancing. All but one of her students made
the decision to take off their masks and interact with each other and
with her. The following day, she received a letter from her
‘line-manager’ (UK academia no longer having Heads of Departments)
informing her that it had been observed and reported by fellow members
of staff that she was not enforcing Government guidance. From her own
attempts to address De Montfort University’s enforcement of Government
guidance, often well beyond the statutory Regulations, all of which have
universally fallen on deaf ears, it’s our impression that staff will be
as compliant as the students in this pilot testing scheme, which has
been presented to both, as I have shown here, on false assumptions,
inaccurate information, undisclosed conditions and half-truths
incompatible with the pedagogical and scholarly values of an institution
of higher education.
On 7 November, four medical practitioners, including a paediatrician,
an immunologist, a surgeon and a medical physicist, published an open
letter to the Prime Minister and his senior Ministers complaining that
the Government’s reaction to the actual threat of COVID-19 is
‘disproportionate’, that it is causing ‘more harm than good’, that
through ‘exaggerating’ the risk to health based on ‘false positives’ the
Government is ‘misleading’ the public about a second wave of
infections, and that it is deliberately using a ‘strategy’ of fear —
fear of contagion, fear of prosecution, fear of being informed on by
neighbours — to induce compliance. Significantly, the authors share Dr.
Yeadon’s argument that a large proportion of the UK public has
pre-existing immunity to SARS-CoV-2, but estimates it to be even higher,
at 40-60 per cent. They say it is ‘vital’ we build on this immunity,
rather than once again locking down the population. This letter, titled First Do No Harm
and co-signed by 469 other health professionals and scientists
including 12 named Professors, is particularly concerned with the
severe, widespread and long-lasting negative effects lockdown measures
are having on the mental and physical health of children and their
parents; and I recommend it to everyone in the education industry, both
staff and students. Citing the delay in referrals for children with
health conditions like diabetes or for those exposed to child abuse at
home, reduced social and family interaction, reduced access to education
and extra-curricular activities, the imposition of social distancing
and mask wearing beyond Government guidance and on the interpretation of
individual education institutions, the sending home of children with
minor coughs or colds who are refused re-entry without a ‘negative’ PCR
test, and even the quarantining of entire year groups for a single
‘positive’ test, they write: ‘Widespread and excessive testing in
educational settings is having an additional impact, exacerbating these
issues.’
It isn’t only in the classroom, however, that the Government is using
the education industry to implement the programmes and technologies of
the biosecurity state. Since the Government-imposed lockdown of the UK,
Architects for Social Housing has been asked to participate in several
online conferences, academic and otherwise. While this may have been a
justified precaution eight months ago when we knew relatively little
about the threat of COVID-19, we now know that there is no medical
justification for doing so, and numerous social, economic and political
reasons for refusing such measures. As scholars and teachers, academics
should question orthodoxies of knowledge and behaviour, whether
Government-imposed or media-fabricated, not unquestioningly perpetuate
them. Unfortunately, we have seen the latter position adopted by UK
academia, with universities and other institutions of higher education
uncritically prepared to obey Government guidance on face coverings,
social distancing and now testing and tracing.
By acting as if the country were under what over 290 coronavirus-justified Statutory Instruments
call a ‘serious and imminent threat to public health’ without
presenting anything more than contested, inaccurate and discredited
evidence to that effect, academia is helping to create the professional
and pedagogical conditions under which the regulations, programmes and
technologies of the UK biosecurity state are being normalised. This is
being done without legislative scrutiny, parliamentary approval, medical
justification or consideration of their long-term social, political,
economic and health consequences, not least for the young people placed
under our care.
By holding and participating in online classes and conferences,
academics are acting on the dictates of a quite evidently corrupt
Government cynically using this crisis to expand its power, further
outsource the State, and fill the pockets of its financial backers.
Under the cloak of a manufactured crisis, this Government is
transforming the UK from a parliamentary democracy founded on the
division of powers between executive, legislature and judiciary into a
biosecurity state governed by Ministerial decree under an ‘emergency
period’ it is in the Government’s power to perpetuate indefinitely.
The job of a teacher, whether at a nursery, a school, a college or a
university, is to educate their students, to install in them the will
and confidence to question what they are told, and to teach them the
skills with which they can find out the truth about the world. It is not
to terrorise them with falsehoods. It is not to bully and threaten them
into compliance with measures without medical basis and which are
profoundly injurious to their mental and physical development. It is not
to indoctrinate them into the propaganda of a Government and media that
has been exposed, time and again, to be liars in the pockets of those
who seek, among other things, to turn education into an instrument of
that propaganda. It is not to enact the role of policeman, spy and
informer in the corridors of education. Nor do teachers have the powers
under law to enforce such measures on students. If the Government
requires a policeman in every classroom to enforce its Regulations, then
it is not governing by consensus but by force, and deserves the
accusations of authoritarianism and worse levelled at it.
Architects for Social Housing formally denounces the collaboration of
UK academia in this unconstitutional erasure of our human rights, civil
liberties and democratic procedures. We call on all academics to refuse
to participate in the normalisation of virtual conferences, online
teaching and anti-social classrooms of masked students terrified into
compliance by Government propaganda and lies and subjected to a testing
programme of questionable validity and unclear purpose being promoted on
false premises. We demand that UK academia returns higher education to a
properly social space governed by a spirit of questioning and
knowledge, not of fear, ignorance and unthinking obedience, which as
Lord Sumption has warned us, ‘are the authentic ingredients of a
totalitarian society.’
3. Letters
And finally, I want to turn to the world of letters, as the nexus of
journalism, literary reviews, cultural commentary and periodical
publishing is rather foppishly referred to in the UK. Again, its
influence in either justifying Government regulations or implementing
them is far less than either the medical or education industries. But it
plays a key role in the hegemony of the middle-classes, whose members
continue to oil the cogs of ideology that will bring us through this
revolution and out the other side without even being aware it happened.
The almost universal conformity and collusion of the UK’s middle classes
in implementing the regulations, programmes and technologies of the UK
biosecurity state is a testimony to the role the world of letters plays,
not in informing, analysing and debating these changes, but in
articulating — through that strange rule-book of behaviours called
‘class’ — what its membership should and shouldn’t say and do.
It took the London Review of Books over a year to publish
something about the Grenfell Tower fire, and finally came up with an
issue-long revisionist apologia for Kensington and Chelsea council by
its editor-at-large, Andrew O’Hagan; and besides O’Hagan’s equally vituperative smears against him back in 2014, the LRB still hasn’t published anything more than polite observations by Patrick Cockburn
on the incarceration, torture and show trial of Julian Assange this
year — until now the greatest travesty of justice in modern British
history. So we shouldn’t be surprised that its commentaries on the
coronavirus crisis have escalated from quiet reportage to hysterical
fearmongering to outright propaganda. A politely liberal organ of
vaguely distressed middle-class values, the LRB is perhaps a better barometer of class allegiances than it is a broker of their terms. Leave that to the Guardian, the Financial Times and the BBC. The titles convey something of the periodical’s commitment to the menial duties of a dutiful clerk.
5 March
Wand Xiuying, ‘The Word from Wuhan’, was the LRB’s
first report on the coronavirus, written by someone under quarantine
less than two months before the final official death from COVID-19 in
China, which has a final death toll of 4,632 in a nation of 1.4 billion.
19 March
Rupert Beale, ‘Wash your Hands’,
written by a clinician scientist at the Francis Crick Institute, which
is partnered with Imperial College London and the Wellcome Trust and
counts among its board members key SAGE member Sir Jeremy Farrar, set
the benchmark for every subsequent contribution. It provided a brief
overview of coronaviruses, from those like OC43 and HKU1, which cause
the ‘common cold’, to SARS and MERS, both of which had far higher
infection fatality rates than SARS-CoV-2 but were far less infectious.
Conversely, SARS-CoV-2 is asymptomatic or causes only mild symptoms in
80 per cent of infections, with 15 per cent requiring hospital treatment
and 5 per cent requiring intensive care. This was written the week
before the Government imposed the lockdown of the UK, and 8 months later
those figures are still generally agreed on. But his next figures,
which he appears to have taken from the World Health Organisation, is
that the case fatality rate is 3 per cent, which equates to 70 and 165
million deaths worldwide, reduced to 1 per cent if Governments impose
lockdown restrictions. Now we know the IFR is around 0.2 per cent, and
according to the almost meaningless criteria for attributing deaths to
COVID-19, 1.263 million people have died with it, or with symptoms
similar to it, or had it listed on their death certificate as an
underlying cause in accordance with the WHO’s instructions to medical
practitioners. This is less than the 1.45 million deaths caused so far
this year by HIV/AIDS, the 2.16 million deaths caused by alcohol, the
4.33 million deaths caused by smoking, and the more than 7 million
deaths caused by cancer. We can’t expect Dr. Beale to speak with the
benefit of hindsight, but none of this appears to have registered with
the author, who appeared happy to use his status as a clinician to
terrorise his readers with these wildly inaccurate estimates. He didn’t
hesitate to write that, without lockdown measures, this would be ‘the
worst disaster in human history in terms of total lives lost’; and
quoted a colleague writing that ‘This will be different from what anyone
living has ever experienced. The closest comparator is 1918 influenza’,
which killed 50 million people. He concluded:
‘What’s very clear is that we must comply immediately with
whatever measures competent public health authorities urge us to take,
even if they seem disproportionate. It’s time to increase “social
distance” in all sorts of ways.’
No subsequent retraction of this irresponsible fearmongering in the
service of the biosecurity state has since been issued either by Dr.
Beale or by the LRB.
2 April
David Runciman, ‘Too Early or Too Late?’, written by a contributing editor of the LRB, set the periodical’s equivalent political position by opposing Johnson’s initially laissez-faire
attitude (this was published a week into lockdown but was most likely
written beforehand) against Government intervention. The coronavirus
crisis, in this reading, was about political positions and values:
right-wing libertarians versus left-wing communitarians. 7 months later,
this completely false opposition still holds sway in the perception of
the middle-classes, and not only in those who read the LRB.
Thomas Jones, ‘Quaresima’,
in the same issue. A report from Orvieto written in mid-March, when the
world’s attention had turned to Italy, ticked off the by-now familiar
numbers of ‘positives, new cases, recovered, dead’. While I was writing Language is a Virus: SARs-CoV-2 and the Science of Political Control, in which I began my research into how these figures were compiled and to what their numbers referred, the LRB,
which accepted all these figures at face value, published this diary of
mounting hysteria ending with a biblical reference, warning us all of
the retribution to come. The Catholic Church couldn’t have done a better
job of terrifying its followers into obedience and submission.
16 April
James Butler, ‘Follow the Science’, written by the co-founder of the pro-Corbyn Novara Media, was
about the Government’s response to the coronavirus, which began with
the strategy of shielding the vulnerable and developing so-called ‘herd
immunity’ in the rest of the population. This was only reversed when the
Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, presented to SAGE the now infamous
study published by Imperial College London on 16 March, with its wild
estimates of over half a million deaths in the UK. In a typically LRB example
of how to turn an unsubstantiated claim of extraordinary political
naïvety into unquestionable fact on the basis of nothing more than
dinner-party conversations, Butler made the now immortal statement that:
‘Few believe Johnson is an Anglo-Orbán, eager to use the crisis to
institute rule through decree.’ Few, that is, except Lord Sumption — and
a few million other citizens of the UK.
Wang Xiuying, ‘#coronasomnia’,
published in the same issue, was the author’s second contribution.
Published on the day before the last deaths were attributed to COVID-19
in China and infections were down to 1,081, it reported, among other
things, the debate on whether to open schools in China while those in
the UK had been closed down for a month.
7 May
Paul Taylor, ‘Modelling the Epidemic: Susceptible, Infectious, Recovered’,
written by a Professor of Health Information at University College
London and published 6 weeks into the lockdown of the UK, finally
examined the Imperial College London report on whose prediction of half a
million deaths it was justified. And what it found was damning. The
estimates in the 16 March report had been revised upwards from one
published by the same team just a week before. Sections has a ‘back of
the envelope’ quality, with data based on guesses and assumptions from
personal communications. The article even mentioned that 91 per cent of
so-called ‘COVID deaths’ have a pre-existing medical condition. By then
I’d published Manufacturing Consensus: The Registering of COVID-19 Deaths in the UK,
exposing the criteria that made any estimate of deaths from COVID-19
meaningless. None of this, however, had any influence on the author’s
conclusion. ‘The only option is suppression, and its consequences,
economic and social, are unknown’.
4 June
Eliot Weinberger, ‘The American Virus’, was a sort of US version of Runciman’s earlier article. By now I had published Lockdown: Collateral Damage in the War on COVID-19,
and not only the economic and social consequences of lockdown but the
costs in lives lost were available for anyone to read who wished to.
That didn’t stop the LRB publishing this report, again written
in the diary format, that firmly equated Donald Trump with
‘COVID-deniers’, and contained such unsubstantiated assertions as: ‘It
is obvious that the actual number of COVID-19 deaths is far greater than
the confirmed death toll’, and ‘Although the actual numbers are
undoubtedly much higher’. This was straight off the trending streams of
Twitter. Indeed, its staccato entries were tailor-made to be quoted on
social media, damning by association with the US President anyone who
dared to ask why it is ‘obvious’, why we shouldn’t ‘doubt’ these
exaggerated figures.
Nicolas Spice, ‘In the Isolation Room’,
published at the end of the same issue by the publisher of the LRB, and
written, as the article from China had been 4 months before, from
quarantine, its measured tale, told in the first person, of a
67-year-old man with a chronic respiratory allergy being treated for
COVID-19 on an NHS ward was elevated to what the author himself claimed
is a ‘synecdoche for the pandemic as a whole’. It ended with this
warning: ‘If the capitalist system is to survive, we shall need to go
back to our dream of safety first, and fast.’ A month had passed since
I’d published The State of Emergency as Paradigm of Government: Coronavirus Legislation, Implementation and Enforcement, recording the vast number of regulations and programmes that were making his wish come true.
2 July
James Meek, ‘The Health Transformation Army’, was written by another contributing editor of the LRB.
A history of the World Health Organisation written primarily from its
relationship to the US Government and the latter’s battle for ascendancy
with China, this was far more interesting for what it didn’t say about
this organisation that has played such a role in all our lives this
year. It didn’t say, for instance, that the WHO declared coronavirus to be a pandemic on 11 March, the same day it entered into partnership with the World Economic Forum to launch the COVID-19 Action Platform. It didn’t say that on 5 June the WHO changed its advice on wearing facemasks
— and even then only to their ‘potential’ benefits — following lobbying
from European governments including that of the UK. This is
intellectual dishonesty by omission, censorship by the white noise of
fear. And despite the ongoing lack of evidence for their effectiveness
and the overwhelming evidence for their negative impacts on lives, jobs,
education, businesses, mental health, civil liberties and political
freedoms, some of which I had collected the previous month in The Science and Law of Refusing to Wear Masks: Texts and Arguments in Support of Civil Disobedience,
Meek didn’t hesitate to identify the UK’s failure to impose lockdown,
self-isolation, enforced quarantine and mandatory mask-wearing as the
reason for the high number of deaths officially attributed to COVID-19.
Instead, in a convincing impersonation of our Health Minister, he
concluded: ‘Lockdown requires each individual to accept personal
constraints for the sake of the community, even when they are not
themselves ill.’
13 August
Rupert Beale, ‘In the Lab’, his second article for the LRB,
took this latest opportunity to advocate for vaccination. He referred
to what at the time was the recently revealed observation that the
number of people in the UK infected with SARS-CoV-2 was so low that
there were not enough people to test the efficacy of vaccine prototypes,
but dismissed these as ‘mutterings’. But while he was sceptical about
finding an effective vaccine by 2021, he never questioned why we should
want one when so little of the population has the virus, let alone the
disease. ‘A bigger problem’, he concluded his article, ‘is to get enough
people to take it up.’ This sounds very much like advocacy for changing
legislation to make taking a vaccine for COVID-19 mandatory.
22 October
James Meek, ‘Red Pill, Blue Pill’, published after 2 months of silence during which 90 Statutory Instruments were made into law, 35 of them ultra vires
of the Public Health Act. This was the second article on the
coronavirus by the LRB editor, and once again it sought to damn through
association, not with Donald Trump this time but with the likes of David
Icke, equating the thousands of doctors, scientists, researchers and
other critics of the actual threat of the coronavirus crisis with
conspiracy theorists. Presented as an insight into ‘the conspiracist
mind’, this is little more than trolling, designed to slander, silence
and suppress, while comforting its readers that anything they hear to
the contrary can safely and comfortably be dismissed as ‘conspiracy
theory’.
5 November
Peter Geoghegan’s ‘Cronyism and Clientelism’,
a review of the corruption, privatisation and outsourcing being pursued
by the Government under the cloak of the crisis. The author didn’t let
the fact that in the 5 months to September the Department of Health and
Social Care awarded private contracts worth £11 billion — around £3
billion of which has not been accounted for — deter for a minute his
belief in everything the Secretary of State has told us about the
‘pandemic’ to justify this outsourcing of the State to his business
contacts, and the need to transfer these vast sums of public money into
private hands.
In 8 months of publication, 18 issues and 13 articles devoted to some
aspect of the coronavirus crisis, not a single one has addressed the
case of Sweden, where there has been no lockdown but only light and
consensual measures, where the fatality rate is below that in the UK,
where the economy has suffered but millions of businesses are not on the
edge of bankruptcy, where state services have not been outsourced to
private companies awarded billions of pounds of public money, and where,
as we once again sit at home under house arrest, Swedes have returned
to something like the life they led before the coronavirus crisis. Not
only fearmongering and propaganda, therefore, but censorship too have
been the LRB’s role in ushering its middle-class readership
into acceptance of this revolution. Not that I think for a minute that
the editors and contributors have the least awareness of what that
revolution is taking us into, or even that a revolution is taking place;
but their willingness to accept, apparently without question, the
Government’s claim that this immense upheaval is in response to a virus
confirms their place among the subservient clerks of the state.
The other periodical I want to look at briefly is the New Left Review,
the bi-monthly Left-wing equivalent of the LRB (the contents of the
latest issue are advertised in the pages of the latter), whose academic
Trotskyism differs from the former largely in its footnotes. And here,
too, the Government line on the coronavirus — while denounced for the
usual crimes of not locking down sooner or for longer or with greater
severity — is dutifully toed, like a drunk lecturer along a smirking
copper’s ‘straight line’. This gives a better insight, perhaps, into one
of the more remarkable phenomena of this crisis, which is that the
political Left — whether that’s the Neoliberals in the Labour Party or
the professional Marxists in academia — is united as never before in
calling on the Conservative Government of Boris Johnson to impose,
enforce and maintain the ‘lockdown’ of the British people.
March/April
In this, the first issue to refer to the coronavirus crisis, the NLR published a medley of global reports from the USA,China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Iran and Japan
— but not the UK — collected under the title ‘Pandemic’. No medical
criteria for this term was given or examined, and no-one investigated
what and who influenced the decision of the World Health Organisation to
declare it in March. It was simply taken as a trans-discursive fact.
But the article included under the category of ‘theory’, Marco d’Eramo’s
‘The Philosopher’s Epidemic’ was devoted to dismissing the controversial commentaries on the coronavirus crisis by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben,
whom d’Eramo accused of ‘paranoid conspiricism’ for daring to subject
the crisis to the analytic framework of the biosecurity state he had
developed for just this moment. ‘If coronavirus denialism was faintly
possible in February’, he wrote, ‘it is no longer reasonable in late
March’. No reason why this should be the case was given, besides the
bullish assertion that ‘the basic facts contradict him’.
May/June
Robert Brenner, ‘Escalating Plunder’,
found nothing in his own account of the Federal Reserve System’s
financial bailout of US financial institutions to the tune of $7.7
trillion — with the result that, between March and June this year, the
wealth of US billionaires increased by $565 billion — to question
whether the coronavirus crisis justifying such a vast redistribution of
wealth upwards should be questioned about the veracity and degree of its
threat to the health of the public funding this largesse, or whether
and to what extent it justifies such plundering. The equivalent of the
LRB article by Peter Geoghegan, and just as politically naïve.
July/August
In the months I published my two-part report on The New Normal: What is the Biosecurity State? (Part 1. Programmes and Regulations) and (Part 2. Normalising Fear), the NLR carried
no trace or echo of the huge number of regulations being made into law
in the UK, the surveillance programmes brought online, the public
services being outsourced to private companies, or the new powers being
handed to police and security services. Instead, the NLR led
with an elegiac remembrance of the work of the cultural critic and film
theorist, Peter Wollen. Comforting, but hardly the most pressing matter
to a Left-wing journal when the world is undergoing a revolution.
September/October
Susan Watkins, ‘Politics in the Pandemic’,
sought to argue for the affectivity of local lockdowns, widespread
testing and contact tracing on the grounds that the tiny number of
deaths attributed to COVID-19 in Japan (1,841), South Korea (487) and
Taiwan (7) is because these countries were ‘pre-armed by the devastating
SARS epidemic of 2003’. In fact, as I have shown in detail in Lockdown: Collateral Damage in the War on COVID-19,
these countries not only have among the lowest deaths per capita but
also the lowest level of restrictions. As for the ‘devastation’ of SARS,
this amounted to 73 deaths in Taiwan, none in South Korea, and not a
single infection in Japan, which SARS never reached. Not only is the NLR
giving its backing to the erasure of civil liberties and human rights
by the Government of Boris Johnson, but it is doing so on the same
absence of facts and unsubstantiated assertions.
There are exceptions, and our numbers are growing; but in this
usually disunited kingdom of nearly 68 million people, the vast majority
have agreed to remain silent. Silent the human rights lawyers, the
civil servants, the economists in the Bank of England. Silent the
journalists, editors, newsreaders, talk-show hosts, satirists and
comedians. Silent the left-wing academics, civil rights activists,
protesters and students. Silent the writers, poets, artists,
film-makers, actors, musicians. Confronted with the most far-reaching
changes to the social contract and its political forms not only in the
history of this nation but across the world since at least the Second
World War and perhaps far longer, our leaders, intellectuals, public
figures, social commentators, expert pundits, national treasures and
professional rebels have all put on their masks — not only over their
mouths, it would appear, but also over their eyes and ears; too
terrified of losing their audiences in the ‘post-COVID’ markets of the
Fourth Industrial Revolution to speak out or listen to anything that may
compel them to do so; obedient, like everybody else, to the handful of
crooks and liars in Government, whose authority they have for ever given
up the right to criticise or question or mock. Silent, most
unconscionably of all, are our Members of Parliament, except when
calling for longer lockdowns, more severe restrictions, stronger
enforcement, and harsher penalties for non-compliance.
On 30 September, at its first review by Parliament six months after
they had so obediently and rapidly nodded it through both Houses in just
three days before voting themselves into recess precisely when their
scrutiny of Government actions was most required, the powers conferred
by the Coronavirus Act 2020 were extended for a further 6 months. These
included the powers in Schedule 21, which can be exercised on the mere suspicion of a Public Health Officer
— which is to say, anyone designated by the Secretary of State for the
purpose — that we are a ‘potentially infectious person’. This means that
anyone so designated can:
- Use whatever force is necessary, including police constables,
immigration officers or security personnel, to cover our face with a
mask and remove us to a place of detention for 48 hours;
- Take a biological sample (blood, nasal swab or respiratory
secretion) from us without our permission, against our will and without a
lawyer being present;
- Compel us to answer questions about our movements and personal
contacts, gain access to our health records, contacts details and
whatever else they deem necessary for their assessment;
- Impose upon us, following their assessment, whatever restrictions
and requirement upon our movements, actions and contacts they decide is
necessary for an additional 14 days;
- And do so under the threat of our further detention, without time
limit, together with the charge of a criminal offence and being taken
into custody if we refuse or attempt to leave.
By voting for these and other violations of our human rights
empowered by the Coronavirus Act 2020, which will remain in force
through the winter and into the spring before it comes up for further
review at the end of March 2021, the legitimacy of this Parliament to
represent us under UK constitutional law must now be regarded as null
and void; and, somehow, we need to go about reconstituting a new Commons
that defends and enforces the rights and freedoms of the citizens they
represent. At the conclusion of his Cambridge Freshfield Annual Law Lecture last month, Lord Sumption warned:
‘The British public has not even begun to understand the
seriousness of what is happening to our country. Many, perhaps most of
them, don’t care, and won’t care until it is too late. They
instinctively feel that the end justifies the means — the motto of every
totalitarian government which has ever been. It is difficult to respect
the way in which this Government’s decisions have been made. It marks a
move to a more authoritarian model of politics which will outlast the
present crisis. There is little doubt that for some ministers and their
advisers this is a desirable outcome. The next few years is likely to
see a radical and lasting transformation of the relationship between the
state and the citizen.’
Simon Elmer
Architects for Social Housing
https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2020/11/12/the-betrayal-of-the-clerks-uk-intellectuals-in-the-service-of-the-biosecurity-state/
