Among the multinational COVID lockdown regime that gripped the Western world, the UK’s Sage stands out as uniquely draconian in the pain — economic, social, and spiritual — that it inflicted on the trusting people of Great Britain in the name of Public Health™.
Related: Top Branch COVIDian Doctor Leana Wen Does a 180 on Rhetoric: Amnesty?
Via The Telegraph (emphasis added):
The New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), a subgroup of Sage, was to provide advice on how to manage the virus based on projections of how it was spreading. One of the group, Prof John Edmunds…
had felt data on the numbers of cases was “woefully inadequate”. Britain was only testing people that had been to high risk places like China or were contacts of those people. “It didn’t really tell us about the epidemic here in the UK or how that was changing,” recalls Sir John, who was knighted in the 2024 New Year Honours list. “Surveillance was a real issue.”…
Sir John, 55, was an adviser to the advisers. He couldn’t directly impact policy; he and others passed their analyses to Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance who would present it to Boris Johnson and senior members of the Government, whom he realised, eventually, had a loose grasp of what Sage was reporting…
There were two possible strategies, he said at the time. “One: you can stamp out every single case in the world. Every single case in the world. And then, then you’re free. You can stop that epidemic without achieving herd immunity, but you must get every single case in the world. With a mild disease, that’s extremely difficult.
“The next phase when the genie is out of the bottle and the virus is all around the world, is spreading. The next phase, the only other way the virus is going to come to a stop, is achieving herd immunity."*
*”Herd immunity” was, from the start, a pseudoscientific pipe dream. There is no such thing as “herd immunity” for a virus that constantly mutates, as was known early on into the so-called pandemic, however inconvenient to the planned mass-vaxxing narrative.
Continuing:
When, later on, he lobbied for stricter lockdowns, he was deemed a flip flopping hypocrite. He was vehemently against Rishi Sunak’s “spectacularly stupid” Eat Out to Help Out scheme, and called for lockdown to be extended in the summer of 2020. Britain was “taking a risk” while cases were still high. Meanwhile the Government, he says, couldn’t settle on a sensible strategy to get us out of lockdown. “The big mistakes were made in the summer. That failure to come up with a proper strategy and understand it.”
In early 2021, he warned that easing the third lockdown would be a “disaster”. Perhaps hindsight** is a wonderful thing then – last May, he appeared to tell a medical conference of his worry that Britain had relied too heavily on “very scary” Sage findings. He wondered if the knock-on health effects and economic harm done by lockdowns could “in principle” have been taken into account when modelling…
Looking back, he regrets not putting more into modelling the potential impact of lockdowns. “I should have put more resources into modelling the macroeconomic effect. This was actually outside our official remit, though we did undertake some work in the area despite this and despite the enormous difficulties in linking epidemiological and macroeconomic models.
“With the benefit of hindsight**, we should have done more. I think that this could have helped inform what was quite a simplistic (and bitter) debate about trading off health and wealth that occurred in the autumn of 2020 and beyond.”
He’s keen to stress his own influence was minimal. People have, he says, “misunderstood the role of Sage”***. “It was much more limited than people think. We were just looking at and summarising the scientific evidence.” Scientists “didn’t have any contact with politicians”, he says. “That was all handled by Chris and Patrick.”
**This “benefit of hindsight” gibberish is routinely employed by the Public Health™ bureaucrats, implying they were making the best decisions at the time based on available evidence. This is contradicted by the fact that totalitarian lockdowns were never part of any pandemic responsible plan before 2020.
*** People did not “misunderstand the role of Sage.” They came to understand well that it was a handpicked team of domesticated scientists who could be counted on to justify lockdowns under a scientific veneer.
So, in summary, this guy actively facilitated the most brutal restrictions on human freedom in the West since the Dark Ages, consistently pushed for harsher lockdowns even in mid-2021, got knighted for it, and didn’t develop enough of a conscience to talk about the scam until years later only to dismiss his role as “minimal,” at a time when there are no longer any stakes and public sentiment has turned against the Public Health™ bureaucrats who were elevated overnight in 2020 to the status of demigods.
Profiles in courage.
