For the next few months, there will be a daily blog posting "News of the Day", comprising links to things you may have missed. Mostly about Covid, Climate, Books, Academia but, since it's mine to do what I like with, absolutely anything that catches my eye during a daily dip into newspapers (British and French). blogs, substacks and assorted web scrapings. Today's offering is this link to one of the more important recent papers on "Covid". Norman Fenton, a professional statistician, who appears several times in my Covid Diary, is one of the authors. The paper explains the consequences of counting someone as "unvaccinated" for a number of days after the relevant injection (e.g. the apparently reasonable policy of waiting a few days "to let the vaccine have time to kick in"). Even if the "vaccine" does nothing at all (i.e. is a saline solution) adoption of this definition results in a wholly illusory high "vaccine efficacy" initially, fading until you apparently "need a booster". Worth reading in full, as the saying goes. The tranche of emails for the Period August - December 2021 has been posted. Navigate to A Covid Diary. The area is password protected in the usual way.
An Introduction is in preparation. These diary entries conclude the "Covid Diary" project. Some time later in 2024 they will disappear, to be replaced by advance notice of a Lasserrade Press publication currently bearing the unassuming working title "A Covid Diary". An illustrated talk given to The Arthur Ransome Society on 10 February 2024 is now available on the Lasserrade Press youtube channel or via this link.
The tranche of emails for the Period May - July 2021 has been posted. Navigate to A Covid Diary. The area is password protected in the usual way. Please note, the password has recently been updated. Check here for details. Here is the Introduction: In March 2023, Scott Atlas listed a few obvious epidemiological falsehoods about “Covid”. Things that have been known to be false for years or, in some cases, for generations. Here is his list (add to it if you wish): 1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude. 2. Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus. 3. No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new. 4. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread. 5. Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus. 6. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread. 7. The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory. 8. Teachers are at especially high risk. 9. COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection. 10. Immune protection only comes from a vaccine. Atlas argues that all these assertions, albeit manifestly false, have been promoted by “public health leaders, elected and unelected officials, and now-discredited academics.” These diary entries touch on the psychological consequences of this promotion. They cover the dog days of 2021. Do you remember what it was like? Something is wrong, we felt. Badly wrong. Wrong enough for a book entitled A State of Fear to find readers. Wrong enough for reports of suicide. Inevitably, we deployed what psychological defences we had, hoping to ward off the worst. We are still deploying them. We shall be deploying them for a very long time to come. The Diary entry for 10 July 2021 suggests why. I refer to an article by the medical journalist writing under the name “Elephant City”. It is worth reading because his experiences may echo yours; they certainly echo mine. Asked to face reality (dare I call it the truth of the matter?) his parents, siblings and friends reacted with incredulity and anger, rejecting him and refusing to discuss the matter. “No argument,” he says “however clever, and no data set, however telling, would change their minds.” If the price of facing the truth was “the theft of their most basic freedoms”, it was a price they were willing to pay. He laments the fact that only three of his closest friends resisted the Covid madness. “We’ve engaged in a running battle with our group about the latest abomination committed in the name of fighting Covid-19, but we’ve made no headway. We’ve finally come to the conclusion that they are beyond reach.” You can feel his anguish. How, in God’s name, he seems to ask, can intelligent people believe something they know to be demonstrably false? Well, I’m afraid the answer is all too easily, because minds are made that way and you are observing mechanisms of psychological defence deployed as never before. "Humankind cannot bear very much reality," said T S Eliot, who had read the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. It’s bad enough that the architects of all this insanity were so ill-educated in their own chosen domains that (by design or happenstance – it hardly matters) they got almost everything wrong - they will have to deal with that, and with their consciences, in God’s good time. Much worse is the fact that this bunch of biochemical idiots savants may inadvertently have saddled humanity with a psychological problem of unimaginable scale and gravity. Consider this. Many of us (perhaps a majority) know that COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection; we also know that they do no such thing. And if you think this is of no psychological consequence – just a “people thing” as one haughty medic said to me - then think again. And believe me, it won’t solve itself. To quote the same Mr Eliot: "Time is no healer: the patient is no longer here." The tranche of emails for the period February to April, 2021, has been posted (the password is unchanged). Here is the Introduction: These emails hark back to the spring of 2021. The dreadful days of 2020 were over and the full horror of The Global Plague had been revealed. Except that it hadn’t ! By then, even those most devoted to the Covid Cause must surely have realized that the response had been a grotesque over-reaction. And I’m afraid I’m bound to say I told you so (it’s alright, I won’t say it too often). We looked back in 2021 to the year of lockdowns and masks and concluded we had been living in cloud cuckoo land – a state described by the psychologist and psychotherapist Mattias Desmet as a kind of “mass hypnosis”. Desmet is certainly correct in pointing to the abuse of the discipline of psychology in seeking to control and manipulate behavior, but I am skeptical of his “hypnosis” idea for two reasons. First, I dispute the claim that loneliness and lack of social bonding led to our experiencing life as meaningless. In particular, I am suspicious of his appeal to social bonding as a necessary good. We too easily forget the near-forcible imposition of a shallow communitarianism on a manifestly unwilling population. We too easily forget all those appeals to the “common good” which somehow turned out to be much less common and much less good. Desmet sees the breakdown in social bonding as the root cause of all our ills: the sense that others control our actions; the near-universal anomie; the epidemic of anxiety; the palpable frustration; the overt displays of aggression. I am unpersuaded - you must surely be an extraordinarily sociable person to find the proposition even plausible. Either that, or committed to “socialism”, which is, I assume, sociability with its political hat on. My second objection to Desmet’s proposition is more psychological. I dispute the claim that human behavior is largely “thoughtless”: that what makes us ripe for “hypnotic control” in the first place is the fact that our behavior results from processes beyond the reach of our (rarely deployed) reflective rational mind. Freud was certainly not the first to endorse this proposition, which can trace its roots back to Plato. It is false, but it continues to resonate, even with some psychologists, for the rather unworthy reason that it recruits its adherents into a kind of priesthood. These are the people (you’ve surely met them by now) who can claim – with a perfectly straight face – that all this applies to you, but not to me, because I, alone, see behind the curtain. I refer in particular, of course, to the most recent re-brand of “social psychology” (that is, psychology without its mind) as Behavioural Science and its practitioners as Nudge Theorists. Now, nudging people to act against their own best interests is not particularly novel, neither is it particularly ethical. Tyrants seemed to know it in their cradles; prostitutes and second-hand car dealers grew into it. It’s not at all hard to frighten people, albeit you’re not supposed to do it. Some in France (where I live) find the whole Nudge business outrageous: Comment (writes the author of a rather grand piece in France Soir): c’est-à-dire, il est possible que la vie humaine se soit réduite à être enchaînée et asservie par un QR Code, avec la liberté accordée par les gouvernants à l’échéance des différentes piqûres vaccinales. Comment il a été possible d’échanger sa liberté contre un spritz au bar et de diviser la société entre si-vax et no-vax. Comment notre vie s’est réduite à être scannée par une application, comme si c’était un aliment acheté au comptoir du supermarché. Comment a-t-il été possible de justifier cette dérive au nom d’une urgence permanente, avec un État chantage qui, tout en se protégeant de toute responsabilité pénale et civile, nous dit quoi faire de notre corps au nom de prétendues exigences collectives et de la protection de la santé. Comment il a été possible d’ériger la science en religion et le totem vaccinal en panacée de tous les maux de l’humanité. Comment, tout cela a été possible, entre autres, dans une nation comme la France, au mépris de sa splendide Constitution, de son passé des Lumières et de ses saints principes de Liberté, d’Égalité, de Fraternité. [It would be fruitless to offer a translation, because this kind of splendid stuff can only be written in French.] Well I have news for the author: there is a (psychological) answer, and it is one that is unequivocal and surprisingly optimistic. It is equally surprising that it fell to a superannuated psychologist like myself to make the case, but there you are, I assume my brothers and sisters in academe were occupied with other things. You will find the reference in the email dated 12 March 2021. Here is the article. If you don't have time to read the lot, here's a summary of its message: "Can we put to bed once and for all the notion that there is a mysteriously effective battery of psychological techniques, uniquely available to a new breed of psychological rulers? The grisly truth is more mundane: public compliance was secured with that same mixture of terror and virtue that Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety would have found familiar. Lies, misinformation, intimidation and (in extremis) physical violence have served tyrants for as long as history – they have no more legitimate relationship with the discipline of psychology than physical torture has with the practice of surgery. No special justification for evil acts is purchased by defining them as ‘psychological’ with or without an appeal to elaborate ethical codes and the alleged mysteries of unconscious persuasion. " Entries for January 2021 have been posted. Introduction The Covid Diary has been updated to include emails sent during the month of January 2021. There is no particular introduction. If you do not have time to read them all, your attention is drawn in particular to the email sent to “p” on 28 Jan 2021. Important Notice: The Covid Diary is now a password protected part of this site. This website exists primarily to support Lasserrade Press publications and to publicise Alan Kennedy’s other non-fiction publications. Rather than transfer the Covid Diary contents as a whole to substack or some other pay-to-view platform it seems not unreasonable to restrict access to Lasserrade Press readers. Password protection employs the model familiar to readers of “Mixed Moss” essays. The password is a series of words from the print or kindle versions of a designated book. The chosen text will change from time to time. Go to Mixed Moss to discover the current password. Entries for December 2020 (the vaccine "roll-out") are now available. Navigate to A Covid Diary. The Introduction to "November 2020" has now been added, mostly about masks. Here is the Introduction to the December Diary, most about eye movements, a subject I know a bit about. If it sounds a little angry, tant pis, as they say around here: "There were psychologists on the SAGE Committee and I assume they were asked to provide informed advice on the psychological consequences of masking. I don’t mean jokes about bandits, but hard-headed advice. The first and most potent visual stimulus we all encounter is our mother’s face and there are well over 5000 papers published on the topic of mother-infant visual interaction. I assume their advice was that disruption to the visibility of the mother’s face was VERY likely to have significant adverse developmental consequences. Was that the advice given? If it was, it is alarming that it was apparently so easily ignored. Did the SAGE psychologists refer to work by David Lewkowicz and colleagues, first published ten years ago and hardly contentious? If not, why on earth not? For the first few months of life, infants look predominantly at their mother’s eyes – a bright glittering stimulus that moves independently of the face in which it is embedded. However, as they begin to babble their early efforts at language, visual attention shifts to the mother's mouth. Psychologists have known for many years that the infant brain makes use of this information to model the device (mouth, lips, tongue) the mother is using to produce sounds. The baby needs this information and there are almost certainly consequences of not getting it, and not getting it at the right time. Tell me, what would your advice have been if I had suggested covering the mother’s mouth? If you think I am hedging my bets with that "almost certainly" I can only respond by saying a proposal actually to carry out such an experiment would not, in my opinion, receive ethical consent." -- "Comments" are switched off for this Blog (Weebly is not really a blogging platform). If you would like to comment (particularly if you have provided advice on masking), please use the Contact form. There is more information on masks on the Smile Free website. An expanded version of the December 2020 Introduction was published on the TCW Defending Freedom Website under the title "The Sheep Behind the Masks."
Rewilding Europe Return of Ferocious Carnivores By way of an entr’acte, here is a brief response to a recent intemperate comment about the dog Caesar who features, perhaps more than he should, in those tormented covid diaries. Although he delights in chasing deer, rabbits, hare, pheasants, even lizards, to my certain knowledge Caesar has never caught one, not even come close. Apart from the lizards, that is, but they have their own ways of escape. Neither has Caesar ever shown the slightest inclination to capture a boar, thank God. So a very definite “no!” to the misplaced notion that he returns each evening with the bloody remains of his latest kill in tow. He prefers croquettes. He is, however, a dog, and certain scents are of ancestral significance to him. You may not like Virginia Woolf (I’m not all that keen myself), but her evocation of this in the dog Flush - “Span ! Span !” - cannot be bettered. If you have not read that yet, I envy you. I would even go so far as to recommend it to Mr Monbiot. However, Caesar did once encounter a deer at close quarters and it is a story worth telling. We were getting ready to go to an organ recital one Sunday evening long ago. A Mendelsohn sonata was on the menu – the one with a chromatic run in the pedals that always brings envious twitches to my own clumsy organist’s legs. And one of the Bach trios that only angels can play. This tasty prospect had rather allowed us to ignore a chorus of weird noises coming from the garden, until they eventually brought us to the window to look. There was a dog. Our dog, although that seemed hard to believe. It was engaged in an insane high velocity circular dance round and round an embryonic tree, still clad in its wire netting to protect it against the deer. Then we saw – there was indeed a deer. A very tiny one; in fact, not even Mr Disney could have invented a tinier. A fawn, with nothing to its credit but very fetching ears had got itself trapped inside the enclosure. And so it came to pass that our startled neighbours on their way to the concert averted their eyes (or not, as the case may be) at the sight of two elderly academics, both stark naked, one with a furled umbrella, apparently engaged in some kind of pagan maypole ritual with an attendant dog. And it wasn’t short lived either, that ritual – it took the best part of half an hour to extract the fawn, its mother silently standing all that time at the other end of the wood hoping to provoke the dog. And what of this fearsome predator? You may well ask. Once we had taken over, Caesar simply settled down to enjoy the show, a little apart in the upper circle seats. Finally released, instead of fleeing, the fawn lay down on its back, raised a feeble pair of legs, and waited until Caesar came to lick its ears. That done, mother and baby, reunited at last, finally fled to the far woods to live another day. We didn’t fancy making an entrance to the concert, albeit fully clad, convincing ourselves we would have been too late. Emails for the month of November 2020 have now been posted. Here is the Introduction. I call it The Masquerade The diary for my first year as a Covid innocent is drawing to a close. Overnight, we all became amateur virologists, epidemiologists, psychologists ... Informed (or even uninformed) outsiders took an unhealthy interest in the defining features of this game and those who had imagined they were going to run the show became uneasy. Inevitably, a lot of professional noses were put out of joint. The little people were asking questions they were never supposed to ask. More questions, I think, than our Masters ever anticipated. Perhaps they should have read that folk story about letting things out of bottles, but I won’t go there. Did you know that there existed in the UK a well-honed plan for what to do in a pandemic? The only question worth asking in 2020 was why wasn’t it used? Did anyone ask? If so, there has not been a convincing answer yet (and no, the fact that “Covid” and ‘flu” are different words won’t quite do). I have worked with the people who do such things in the UK - they are generally brilliant. The best, honestly, and I imagine their equivalents in France are equally good. The UK document is a model of its kind and you can easily find it on the web as “The UK Influenza Pandemic preparedness strategy, in its 2011 instantiation: (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/213717/dh_131040.pdf). You will have worked out by now that I have a particular interest in “masks”. For personal reasons, because I am profoundly deaf, but also for professional reasons, because I have spent my academic career trying to understand the cognitive process called reading. It is a subject I shall return to, but please be warned right now, our collective failure to follow the plan may well have made reading a lost art. Do you care about that? The Pandemic Plan had quite a bit to say about the use of facemasks and respirators, agreeing they “have a role in providing healthcare worker protection, as long as they are used correctly and in conjunction with other infection control practices.” Masks (by which they don’t mean bits of old pants run up on the sewing machine) provide a modest physical barrier to large droplets (sneezes and the like). You may recall the newspapers told us more than we really wanted to know about those “droplets” without really explaining. Perhaps they thought we already knew - "droplets" are the bits of high velocity flying snot and goo that hit you in the face if somebody sneezes on you. I suppose they meant "if you must sneeze, sneeze into your mask" - a proposal I find revolting, but perhaps I'm being precious. However, note well, masks – of any kind - won't filter aerosols. That’s “won’t” as in “don’t” as in "can't, as in “ever”. Please don’t start arguing about this. If you’re so inclined, rather take your inclination as evidence that you have fallen victim to a mild psychological disease. Go and look it up and treat yourself – there is a cure. The Pandemic Plan goes on to say, “although there is a perception that the wearing of facemasks by the public in the community and household setting may be beneficial, there is in fact very little evidence of widespread benefit from their use in this setting.” For a mask to “work” (and see above for what that means) they must be (and I quote again from The Plan) “worn correctly, changed frequently, removed properly, disposed of safely and used in combination with good respiratory, hand, and home hygiene behaviour.” Now tell the truth – did you keep a mask in the car just in case? Is it possibly still there, lurking like the corpse of some expired animal festering at the back of the glove box? Did you ever keep one in your pocket? Did you ever touch the bloody thing while you were wearing it? Did you ever actually wash one and wear it again? (I don’t believe you). There is, in fact, a vast amount of evidence on the Cochrane website assessing the use of face coverings during an outbreak of a ‘flu-like disease.” I quote: “Evidence from 14 trials on the use of masks vs. no masks was disappointing: it showed no effect in either healthcare workers or in community settings. We could also find no evidence of a difference between the N95 and other types of masks but the trials comparing the two had not been carried in aerosol-generating procedures.” Importantly, it goes on to say “a mask can become dirty with excessive moisture, and contaminated with airborne pathogens. And because your voice is muffled; individuals may have to get closer to people, particularly the elderly, to hear from you.” And you can say that again, say I. Notwithstanding all this, the mask became a focus of interest for social psychologists in 2020 because it was a potent symbol of compliance and, as the diaries here indicate, also a useful proxy for political allegiance. Hmm … Mask Theatre became embedded in our social and intellectual life. It never made sense that one should wear a mask only when standing in a restaurant and only when seated in the House of Commons. Looking back, why did you accept that? Would you accept it again? Injunctions to wear a mask when riding a bicycle outdoors but not when riding a horse (presumably outdoors) made no sense. Would you obey next time (or get a horse)? It made no sense that a President should remain bare-faced while his attendant lackeys wore masks. And next time? The mask has a long history as a means of engendering fear and this is a topic that will be more and more evident when we move into 2021. Meanwhile, (thanks to “What If There Had Been No Covid Coup?" by Debbie Lerman, Browstone Institute, August 15, 2023), here is what US medical and public health experts were saying in January, February and early March 2020: “Americans are too worried about the new coronavirus that’s spreading rapidly across China.” He added: “Everyone in America should take a very big breath, slow down and stop panicking and being hysterical.” And he explained: “I think we need to put it into context, the death rate is much lower than for SARS.” Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, President Obama’s White House health advisor. [I have] “a simple message for Americans: No, you shouldn’t be afraid.” Dr. Robert Redfield, CDC Director. “Most people who get coronavirus will have mild to moderate symptoms and will be able to stay home, treating it like the severe flu or cold.” … “ the CDC does not recommend Americans wear surgical masks in public. Surgical masks are effective against respiratory infections but not airborne infections.” Dr. Alex Azar, NIH Director. “The case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%” and “the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%).” … “either children are less likely to become infected, or their symptoms were so mild that their infection escaped detection.” Drs. Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield. “All the evidence available at the time suggests that COVID-19 is a relatively benign disease for most young people, and a potentially devastating one for the old and chronically ill, albeit not nearly as risky as reported.” … the mortality rate was “zero in children 10 or younger among hundreds of cases in China” … “it was important to divert our focus away from worrying about preventing systemic spread among healthy people—which is likely either inevitable, or out of our control.” Dr. Jeremy Samuel Faust, Harvard emergency physician. But, of course, all this was to suffer a terrible change. |
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