9th March 2022
The COVID19 pandemic has thrown an issue into sharp focus that I have been observing for many years now. What is an expert? The simple answer is someone who has expertise. Deep knowledge of a subject that has been gained by spending many years researching, reading, speaking to colleagues, and suchlike.
However, that is clearly not enough. I have spent years researching cardiovascular disease. I have written papers about it, written books, given lectures… but I have never been referred to, by any in mainstream medical research at least, as an ‘expert’. I am very much something else. A maverick, a denier, zealot a … [insert insult of choice here].
I used to joke that there must be a secret expert exam that you have to pass in order to be called an expert. Or perhaps it’s a bit like the Freemasons. Someone has a quiet word in your ear to sound you out. Then asks if you would like to join the international brotherhood of ‘experts.’ Dedicated to something, or other.
Very soon, after the COVID19 pandemic struck, Imperial College Business School had this to say on experts:
‘In 2016, when Michael Gove made his famous statement that “people in this country have had enough of experts”, it seemed experts and expert knowledge were on their way out. The opinion of populist politicians and online influencers were deemed much more relevant to decision making than the findings of scientists or the theories of economists. From the antivax movement to newly resurgent creationists, the spirit of the times was very much against the expert. Science and its evidence-based rationality were in retreat and the trend seemed unstoppable.
Fast-forward four years and the world is suddenly a very different place. Experts like Imperial College London’s Neil Ferguson, and Peter Piot from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine are now central advisors to government and the profiles of experts are the material of front-page stories. With the arrival of a global pandemic, experts are back – and with a vengeance!
So, what has changed? And what can we learn from the recent success of the experts who are shaping government policy on coronavirus? First, the experts who are currently leading the government’s policy response to the pandemic are not just experts, they are leaders. They know that simply understanding a topic deeply and having something to say on an issue is not enough.’ Etc. etc, glory glory Imperial College 1.
I found the final sentence interesting. ‘They know that simply understanding a topic deeply and having something to say on an issue is not enough.’
In short, to be an expert you must also be a leader? I think this is probably true …. You certainly have to be at the top of some organisation or other.
Anthony Fauci for example. He was held by the mainstream media to be the number one expert about COVID19. His position unassailable – or at least it was. He was, and remains, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He remains the Chief Medical Advisor to the President.
Did he know more than anyone else about Sars-Cov2? Was this even a requirement? Tricky, as this was a completely new virus. Was he the perfect man for the job? He most certainly ticked all the expert boxes – so he should have been the ideal man? Hire that man right now…
Of course, there are those who have been far more sceptical about the value added by experts – to anything. David Sackett, who was a driving force behind the Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) movement – and who was also a very good man – wrote an article in 2000 entitled ‘The sins of expertness and a proposal for redemption.’
Here are a couple of sections. I suggest you read the entire article; it is not very long:
‘Is redemption possible for the sins of expertness? The only one I know that works requires the systematic retirement of experts. To be sure, many of them are sucked into chairs, deanships, vice presidencies, and other black holes in which they are unlikely to influence the progress of science or anything else for that matter.’
‘But there are still far more experts around than is healthy for the advancement of science. Because their voluntary retirement does not seem to be any more frequent in 2000 than it was in 1980, I repeat my proposal that the retirement of experts be made compulsory at the point of their academic promotion and tenure.’ 2
In this paper he refers to an earlier piece, written in 1983, where he first called for the retirement of all experts. Having voluntarily ‘retired’ himself as an expert in the field of ‘compliance with therapeutic regimes’. As he added:
‘I received lots of fan mail about this paper from young investigators, but almost none from experts.’
Some twenty years later he ‘retired’ himself again. This time as an expert in the field of evidence-based medicine, some would say the expert. He believed he had attained too much power and status and was therefore distorting everything around him.
As with all other acknowledged experts, he found that junior researchers deferred to him, and simply would not question him. He came to the conclusion that the very presence of an expert impaired scientific progress. [Of course, of all the experts in the world, he was the one that should not have retired].
In his opinion, experts crystallised into barriers to the progress of new ideas, and most other forms of innovative thinking. Their primary role became an immovable pillar, supporting the existing status quo. Of course, this expert problem has been recognised by many others … For example, Max Plank, in his famous quote:
‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’
Or:
‘Science advances one funeral at a time.’
So, who you going to call? If, that is, you are a government, and there is a pandemic? You do what everybody does. You call on the established experts. Leaders who sit at the top of the pyramid.
Those professors garlanded with honours. Opinion leaders. Even the mighty key opinion leaders (KOLs). No need to look elsewhere. All the expertise can easily be found, right? And the experts all know each other, so they can also recommend their expert friends – the ones they know and get on with.
A few years ago, there used to be an expression in business, which went something like this: ‘you never get fired for hiring IBM?’ Why not? Because IBM was huge, and they had the reputation of being the major players in IT solutions.
No-one would ever ask you to explain why you hired them. You just did. IBM was also bloated, cumbersome and vastly expensive – containing about as much innovation as a squashed cabbage. Which eventually caught up with them… eventually. Now, you tend to hire another massive company … GE, or suchlike. IBM still exists, but it came very close to the edge.
Of course, everyone needs expertise. If you want to build a bridge, then hire an architect and engineers who are capable of designing and constructing one that does not fall down. This requires skills and knowledge that take years to attain. True, validated, expertise.
Equally, if you want someone to replace your hip, find an anaesthetist and an orthopaedic surgeon, and their team of experts. Don’t pop down the local Botox clinic and hope for the best.
However, if you find yourself in a situation never seen before, where no-one really knows what to do … Then you will find experts are always going to propose doing only what they have always done. What they already know. As used to be said of generals, that they always started off any new war, using the exact same tactics that were being used at the end of the last war. Which never worked. Things had moved on … they hadn’t.
I do find it ironic that when the pandemic started, the key advisor to Boris Johnson was Dominic Cummings? The great ‘disruptor,’ the man who wanted to break apart the ‘cosy establishment’ and replace it with new thinking, and innovation. Here from the article: ‘Dominic Cummings: A model of disruptive leadership?’ [Sub-header. “The best way to spot those at the vanguard of disruption is by their unpopularity”].
The underlying problem is widespread institutional inertia that serves to contain rather than facilitate change. Leaders soon realise that being truly disruptive carries risks that either they, their board-level superiors, or those they lead find hard to tolerate. Few therefore follow through on good intentions, the common default being safety first…
Rightly or wrongly, Cummings believes the UK is being held back by a cosy establishment that stands in the way of reform. He openly disdains convention, as when deliberately bypassing traditional campaigning methods to sell Vote Leave’s ‘Take Back Control’ message, even if this means sailing close to the ethical wind.
You can tell that Cummings hits raw nerves because criticism of his modus operandi is laced with attacks on everything from his personal manner to his dress sense. But you wouldn’t bet on him lasting much longer in the Whitehall machine. The quicksand of inertia has a habit of swallowing disrupters in organisations a lot less complex and cunning than that of government … [Good call]
Change rhetoric might tell us that we need more people prepared to break the mould but our recent political experience indicates that having the will to disrupt rarely guarantees success against stubborn guardians of the ‘same old, same old’. 3
Well, as everyone in the UK knows, Dominic Cummings is now history. Disruptor no more. However, in February/March 2020 he was still very much in place – and he had Boris Johnson’s ear, as his most trusted advisor. You might have thought, therefore, that the scientific advisory group for emergencies (SAGE) would have contained a disruptor or two.
But no, we got the exact same old, same old. The well-established experts. The Chief Medical Officer, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, the Chief Scientific Officer, the chief of this, the professor of that.
The great problem is that this ‘same old same old’ was going to have an in-built, and almost pathological resistance to risk – of any sort. In this case, by risk, I mean doing anything that is slightly different. Anything that may open you up to criticism. This is the main reason why the SAGE doomsday predictions have never matched reality.
Just as you never got fired for hiring IBM. If you are an epidemiologist, you never get fired for modelling a worst-case scenario. If you say there will be six thousand Omicron deaths a day – in the UK alone – yet the highest number reached was three hundred. Then are safe. This is the approved, standard direction of error.
On the other hand, if you said there would be three hundred deaths a day and it ended up at six thousand… all hell breaks loose. To quote Professor Graham Medley, who chaired the SAGE modelling group.
‘Professor Medley said one of the ‘worst things’ would be for the modellers to under-predict the approaching wave.
He told MPs: ‘The worst thing for me as chair of the committee is for the Government to say “why didn’t you tell us it would be that bad?”, so inevitably we are going to have a worst case that is worse than reality.’ 4
…inevitably we are going to have a worst case, that is worse than reality’… Roll that idea around for a moment or two. I did, and this was my interpretation. ‘Inevitably, our models will always be worse than the worst thing than can ever happen.’ Ergo, our models are designed to be utterly useless and inaccurate. A great way to plan your response?
Any decent disruptor would have questioned the assumptions underlying this ‘worst thing’. A disrupter would flip the question on its head. The worst thing, surely, would be to drive the Government into a massive over-reaction that could lead to such things as … thousands of deaths from undiagnosed cancers.
Or patients dying of heart attacks, terrified to attend hospital. Or care homes being flooded with COVID19 positive patients, because the hospital had to be cleared out. Or a tidal wave of mental health problems in children and adolescents. Or an increase in domestic abuse. Or … keep going, there are many damaging things that were caused by lockdown.
They would also have questioned the massive financial cost of extended lock-downs. The new hospitals that could not be built in the future. The much-needed healthcare staff not being hired – because we have run out of money. The inability to pay inflation matching pay rises, leading to staff resignations and loss of morale. The drugs that can’t be paid for, and on and on.
They would have remined those on the advisory board that this was not a zero-sum game. Every COVID19 death prevented, no matter how much it costs, is not necessarily a positive. There will be major, damaging, downsides to your actions, and these have to be taken into account.
However, if you stuff your advisory body with established experts you will get what you got. A group of people whose primary motivation is to ensure that they cannot be blamed for making a mistake. They will ‘hire IBM’. They will battle to maintain the status-quo. ‘Think of how terrible things would have been if we had not driven lock-downs on the entire country for weeks and months.’
Disruptor: ‘Look at how badly wrong your predictions have been, and the enormous and widespread damage you have caused. The cost of which may never even be known.’
Yes, as you can probably gather, I am not a great fan of experts. Of course, I do love expertise… and I love doing things as well as possible. At least those things that have been proven to work. I love innovation, and new thinking. Different ways of looking at the world.
What I hate, what we should all hate, is that any attempt to shift the status quo seems doomed to fail:
‘Change rhetoric might tell us that we need more people prepared to break the mould, but our recent political experience indicates that having the will to disrupt rarely guarantees success against stubborn guardians of the ‘same old, same old’.
When COVID19 arrived, we needed disruptors, new ways of thinking, and acting. We needed clear sighted innovators. What we got, predictably, inevitably, depressingly, were ‘experts’ to lay their cold, dead, hands on the situation. Experts desperate never to be ‘wrong.’ Having first decided what wrong meant. In this case it meant never, ever, underestimating the number of COVID19 deaths.
At this point I feel the need to quote David Sackett once more: I repeat my proposal that the retirement of experts be made compulsory at the point of their academic promotion and tenure.
Hear, hear. ‘Do I have a second for this proposal?’
Dr. Malcolm Kendrick 
Hmmm, these days I think experts are the pipers who can market the client’s tune, even if they don’t play it all that well.
“97% of all experts agree with the person who signs the cheques”.
Dear kitten, that’s an old adage that I’m afraid is not valid anymore, now is more like 99.6% (any reference to the “covid” recovery rate is absolutely not casual).
Unfortunately many monied persona (Gates/Soros) or famous (actors/singers) are also automatically associated as being “educated/informed and expert-like”.
Hear, hear, indeed!
If I could pry open the heads of my friends and family and install one idea it would be: expertise does not mean infallibility. Experts can be (and often are) wrong. This is why science involves disputation, argumentation, and criticism.
If you can convince a populace that your utterances are synonymous with Incontrovertible Truth, you are, for all intents and purposes, omnipotent. As a corollary, there is enormous potential harm to the wider populace if those unquestioned policies are false. Wouldn’t a rational populace, then, submit every “expert” knowledge claim to extra levels of scrutiny?
https://thefreethinker.substack.com/p/the-problem-with-trust-the-experts-6cf58d6c7657?s=w
Malcolm
Fair enough, but what should have been done in March 2020?
Cummings is not totally wrong, but he never to my knowledge put forward a cohesive strategy, and in the end he fell out because he criticised his boss’s girlfriend.
I have read many criticisms of government strategy but most have not proposed something more viable
Such is government
I had a strategy figured out in March and I’m not even medically trained. Protect the nursing home residents and let everyone else get exposed quickly and treat high risk patients early with antiviral cocktails.
It’s not that hard to come up with an effective strategy if you’re not pursuing income from covid vaccines.
covidpilot
my strategy was stuff my face with Vitamin D, keep away from crowded places, and read read and then some.
I am vaccinated, boosted whatever, I have been in close contact with people who two days later went down with Covid. We didn’t, so
we were lucky
or
we did something right
I’d love to know just how many people taking vitamins C and D caught the virus. I bought another box of 3000 iu vitamin D tablets from Tesco the other day, and it amused me that this purchase was stored in a little locked box that was removed at the till – a sure sign that this was a popular item.
I wonder how much safer we would have been if we had been vaccinated – if at all. I’d bet on the vitamins being more effective – not least because vitamin D runs low in the winter time, which is exactly the time that COVID was peaking. My rule of thumb is if the government is twisting your arm to do something for your own benefit, it is better not to! That goes for COVID vaccines, smart meters, electric cars, just about anything really!
David,
My wife (70 yo) and I (72 yo) both take Vit’s C & D (and others), and have been for a few years. I take more than she does – 4000IU D (plus K2), 3-5 grams C etc. each day, every day. So in Feb 2020 my wife was very sick (not sick enough to be hospitalized, though). We can’t be sure since there were no tests at the time, but we’ve talked to Dr’s and they agree that it probably was Covid. I have had no symptoms for the last 2 years, nor has she since Feb 2020.
We have also been 2x vaxxed, and boosted so that confounds the hypothesis that the Vit’s are keeping us healthy. I do believe that Vit D, especially, makes for a stronger immune system. I urge everyone in our family to load up of Vit’s D & C, even tho folks roll their eyes when I say it.
Tom
David Bailey
The reason we took our own course was being over 80 we seemed to belong to a group that might get thrown under a bus. I believe in people taking responsibility for their own health.
Generally good in my experience. All are unvaccinated unless stated. All received homeopathic arsenic.
1). Couple in mid seventies. Both on C, D (5,000iu) and K2. Wife got symptoms and tested positive, husband tested positive but only sniffles, because of age and her autoimmune comorbidities both had two doses of ivermectin and recovered quickly.
2). 17 y/o, 105kg, not on vitamins, caught it quite badly by the time I was told, two doses of ivermectin cleared most of it up rapidly. Still has some peripheral blurring. Parents both overweight/obese but on D and K2, didn’t catch it.
3). 24y/o, fit, got a moderate case, fever 39 for a day, no ivermectin but cleared up after 36 hours. Parents (D K2) and 22 y/o brother didn’t catch it.
4). Family of nine, plus a fiancée. Parents on vitamins. Mother and five kids caught it, none severely although the mother took maybe ten days to fully recover. The triple vaccinated fiancée was very sick for several days (no arsenic or ivermectin). Made a complete recovery eventually.
5). Couple, mid sixties. D, K2, C, mild symptoms only, took ivermectin after three days and a quick full recovery.
There are more in the same vein, but you get the idea. My protocol is if they are fat, old or have relevant comorbidities, two doses of ivermectin 24 hours apart, plus arsenic 30 the same.
I am not an expert. I’m a pragmatist. If it works, I’ll use it. Maybe I’m an expert pragmatist?
“If it works, I’ll use it”
Using reality to negate scientific theories is a crime, please follow the nice government employee with a black uniform to the nearest reeducation camp.
Back to seriousness, could you please elaborate more about homeopathic arsenic? I have to admit that for 40 years of my life I considered homeopathy just like snake oil, until official medicine almost succeded in seriously ruining my health.
It’s nothing like snake oil. Snake oil contains, well, snake oil I suppose. Unless they are total charlatans. But homeopathic arsenic contains nothing.
Homeopathy works on the principle that ‘like cures like’. That what can cause a set of symptoms in a healthy person, can cure the same set of symptoms in a sick person. So back in the 1790s its discoverer, a well respected, prominent physician and chemist, and a few mates started the job of testing substances on themselves and writing down all the symptoms, mental and emotional ones as well as physical ones. Of course, the problem with arsenic, and many other things, is that one of the symptoms is death. So to try to prevent that, and because arsenic does give lots of symptoms so should be curative in lots of situations, he started diluting it before testing. And found that the more it was diluted, the more curative it became. Even when it was diluted beyond Avogadro’s number, which happens after the twelfth dilution of one part per hundred. So arsenic at the thirtieth dilution (Ars 30) is diluted way beyond any chance of an atom of arsenic being in your pilule. Of course, once the apothecary’s guild found out that he wouldn’t be using vast quantities of bismuth, mercury, antimony and so on to treat his patients, and wouldn’t let them make his remedies for him because they were too sloppy in their techniques, he ceased to become respected and prominent (except among his patients) and was (literally) chased out of town.
The symptoms of covid are an excellent match for the symptoms of arsenic. Therefore we use arsenic when people catch covid. The remedy for the Spanish flu was gelsemium. For suicidal people first thoughts go to aurum metallicum, gold. For people with a slow pulse, digitalis is often indicated. Belladonna for high fevers, and so on. However, apart from specific diseases such as covid or Spanish flu, the remedy has to be selected on the basis of an individual’s symptoms: i.e. there isn’t a liver remedy, or a cancer or asthma remedy, there will be a remedy for an Australian Italian at the tropics.
Why it works, nobody knows. Theories involve vibrations, and energies. We don’t know why gravity works either. But we know how to make use of gravity.
My apologies, I wasn’t clear enough, I meant that I started to change my mind about 15 years ago and since then I’ve read a lot about the history of medicine, allopathy and homeopathy, how the American Medical Association was born and so on.
I’m also aware that the cancelling of Montagner started with his rethinking the whole HIV/AIDS theory, but started to be serious because his researches about states of water were dangerously close to homeopathy.
The question was, wby specifically arsenic, and your answer is satisfying.
E ‘n’ B, water really is a weird and wonderful substance.
I have this book – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Things-That-Dont-Make-Sense/dp/186197647X
There is a chapter (the final one, not surprisingly, right after The Placebo Effect) on homeopathy (“it’s patently absurd, so why won’t it go away?”).
The author, Michael Brooks, consults world expert on water, Martin Chaplin, who explains that water displays at least 64 anomalies. He figured out that water molecules, due to their bonding capabilities, are able to form geometric shapes, even an icosahedron (Buckminster Fuller’s favourite). Brooks adds the interesting note that Plato, assigning geometric shapes to various aspects of the world around us, as well as choosing the cube for the Earth, and the tetrahedron for fire, designated water as an icosahedron.
Chaplin’s research was validated three years later, when German scientists saw the shape in a drop of water a millionth of a millimetre across. Another researcher later showed that water can exist in chains and rings.
The argument for the success of homeopathy being based upon the structure of the original compound altering the structure of the water it was introduced into is explored.
Last year, on this site, I projected my enthusiasm for ‘structured water’, which probably engendered some raised eyebrows and sideways glances. However, I have been ‘structuring’ all of my drinking water since then. The tangible effects are that my frequent cups of tea taste so much better, and that the inside of the cup doesn’t become so stained and scummy.
However, I believe that structured water helps the body on a cellular level, since water has to be structured within the cells, for various processes to take place. It also seems to be required for blood cells to bend in order to negotiate constrictions, so could well be good for the CVS.
My attempts to construct a plumbed-in device failed. I had been using a funnel, with about 120 marbles, and passing the water through three times, which gave a good result, so I used a cartridge filter housing filled with marbles. The water tasted just the same, presumably because there weren’t enough vortex-forming interactions; so to save me the tedium of carrying on funnelling, I bought some 90mm pvc drainage pipe, installed a funnel in it, and added about 1000 marbles. One pass does the job.
Recently though, I had a bit of a lightbulb moment, when I realised that a pile of marbles in a container can be scaled; so you could use much smaller glass balls to achieve the same effect in a smaller space. The process is on a molecular level, after all. I have found a site (in Czechia, I think) that sells glass spheres with a diameter of from 0.6mm to 10mm. I wish I knew maths, because now I need to work out what size sphere, in a quantity of 1000 or so, will fill my cartridge filter housing. (However, I have still got to finish doing up my bathroom, and complete a cupboard and drawer unit in the hall . . .)
There is plenty to look at online about this subject, including Dr Gerald Pollack, who has done much research.
I think I may be performing some generalised self-homeopathy by consuming structured water, but should I need any treatment in the future, I will certainly consider looking at homeopathy.
Wasn’t that more or less exactly the strategy the UK government – and most others – had decided on years before?
What Covid revealed was that, in a crunch, “experts” and ministers will always choose the path that minimises their personal risk, totally ignoring risks to the nation and the people at large.
You could describe that as an absolute lack of public spirit.
“What Covid revealed was that, in a crunch, “experts” and ministers will always choose the path that minimises their personal risk, totally ignoring risks to the nation and the people at large.”
The plandemic was never about what was best for people.
I suggest that you take a careful look at the Event 201 website. The conspiracy was posted online for all to see. All measures followed the Event 201 plan.
Risk management was generally only involved in making sure one followed the approved narrative.
In fact, lots of deaths were necessary in order to promote fear and vaccines. Early antiviral treatment had to be discouraged and supplementation with vitamin D and zinc had to be ignored.
Cummings was frankly terrified by Covid, he had been as infected with fear as many others were all thanks to sage. He had no science based knowledge on which to base any strategy on.
Karen watcher
Cummings or any other person has the intellectual capacity to understand science. I sometimes feel that the notion that we should all bow down before scientists is not correct.
I worked at a large chemical company and someone outside the company invented a totally new chemical process.I was present in a meeting where doubt was cast on his capacity to do so since he did not have a Ph D! Knowledge and advancement is not limited to scientists.
As I often point out, almost everyone who invented or discovered anything really important was “unqualified” by modern standards. Euclid had no degree in geometry (mainly because no such thing existed in his time); Aristotle and Plato had no written qualifications in philosophy, biology, physics, or the many other subjects whose foundations they laid; Archimedes was more or less self-taught; Leonardo da Vinci never went to school, let alone university; Newton had no formal instruction in physics or cosmology; Darwin dropped out of university; Einstein did get the equivalent of a degree, but was already thinking his own thoughts; no one showed Babbage or Turing how to build a computer; and so on endlessly.
It is amazing how often a complete amateur who is passionately interested in a subject can quickly understand more about some aspects of it than the credentialled “experts”. Think, for example, of nutrition today!
There is a reason for that: you need an unadulterated mind to be able to work outside the box.
Once you start the pathway of formal education, you are actuallly indoctrinated and you need to follow the rules to be able to work.
Rules don’t go well with geniuses.
What should we have done? That which the Governmeny HAD been doing before they wobbled – isolate the vulnerable and allow nauturally acquired infections to build Herd Immunity ASAFP.
But they didn’t – they wobbled…… for exactly the reason that Malcolm Kendrick cites; they were afraid of repercussions IF they were wrong and things turned out worse than they’d predicted. There are no repercussions for being wrong the other way though – for grossly overestimating that worst-case scenario & killing people through other means; delayed cancer treatments, mental health problems, not seeking help for a minor ailment that then becomes much worse through lack of treatment. And of course helping to bankrupt the national economy. Oh no, those are OK, because “think how much worse it COULD have been ?!!!”.
These Bastards do it all the time. rather than tell you what they will do and how they will tackle a problem or issue, they revert to “think how much worse you would have been under !”.
If I had the power, they’d all be in jail. Yesterday. With no prospect of parole.
Sorry for the typos – can’t edit those!
‘GovernmenT’, ‘naturally’. and the website has knocked out my text between chevrons which should have been “think how bad it could have been under “(insert name of political party here)”.
That could be because WordPress uses chevrons to introduce emphasis. For example, to italicise something, you first type <, then i, then you type the opposite chevron (I won't put that here, as it might do what it did to you). After the word/s you want to italicise, you then type /i, enclosed by those chevrons.
‘I have read many criticisms of government strategy but most have not proposed something more viable’
The proper strategy would have been to implement the long establsihed respiratory pandemic plan that had been thought through years (probably decades) in advance.
The Great Barrington Declaration was a restatement of these core policies.
Instead they went for Chinese tyrant style lockdowns and it was a complete debacle not only because the policy was insane but because no one had ever given a moments thought to what implementing such a policy would actually involve.
This is why the morons stumbled from one balls up to the next, no one had ever even considered shutting the entire country down (never mind the globe) because doing such a thing was patently insane.
The Chinese had the infrastructure and political control to implement it and just like our half-arsed copy, merely delayed the inevitable; the spread of the virus. Isn’t it ironic therefore, that in the beginning of this squandering of human lives, that Bojo got it right! Herd Immunity and, just as the good Dr. Kendrick said, also right at the beginning, over 2 yrs ago, and I paraphrase, ‘protect the vulnerable’ and let’s get on with our lives’. We’ve had these things before,I remember a flu epidemic, I think in 1957? where businesses, factories, schools, all shut down without any kind of ‘Nudge’, it wasn’t needed, everybody was in bed with the flu!
What was done in the past, cure the sick and leave the healthy to live their life.
Thank you
Seconded
I am an expert, acknowledged within my own specialty of rheumatology and in parallel as an expert on facial surgery at the start of the 20th century. In both capacities I have been an international speaker and author. I have continued in both expert roles after retirement. But I am not an expert in statistics, public health, paediatrics, epidemiology or genetics. Covid-19 is a clinical condition with an immunological basis. So one might expect the experts would be clinicians with an immunological background. Like me. But they were not. They were statisticians, public health doctors, paediatricians, epidemiologists and geneticists.
Experts are invaluable as long as they are the right experts. Otherwise they are worthless – having said which, a bit of intelligence, common sense and native cunning can get one quite a long way…
“I am an expert, acknowledged within my own specialty of rheumatology….”
Isn’t it curious that rheumatologists, who prescribe more HCQ than any other specialty for chronic use, were not consulted about the alleged dangers of HCQ? I don’t recall the rheumatological societies having much to say on this issue–did those societies battle against the misinformation/disinformation?
Isn’t it curious that HCQ was approved only for hospital use to treat covid–and not for outpatient treatment?
If there’s any smoking gun that the focus was always going to be on vaccines, that had to be it. A rival treatment to vaccines had to be discredited.
“Qui bono” must be asked in any political situation–and public health will always be political.
So who are the experts? Depends on the questions being asked. If control of the questions being asked can be established, the conversation can be controlled and the desired experts defined. Statisticians and epidemiologists and pediatricians.
As regards mask dynamics, no one bothered to ask physicists whether droplets in masks might evaporate quickly and leave free virus aerosol. Because wicking, etc. The thinking was, “Doctors wear masks, so they must be experts about masks”. The CDC runs NIOSH, which handles masks–only droplet aerosols were a new thing which NIOSH had no experience with.
So, back to your question of true expertise.
Of course, one must put in the work when there is a new problem in order to gain knowledge that is needed for expertise about the new problem. So it’s not unexpected that a random person on the internet who has put in the work has a better grasp of the problem than someone with an MD who has not put in the work studying a new problem who instead merely relies on experts.
Now to your point about common sense. Common sense says that the covid vaccines were rushed and we know that they are experimental and we cannot properly evaluate risk. Rushed work contains a lot of mistakes.
Pharma’s protection from liability was another clue about covid vaccine dangers.
Yes, common sense should alert us to pitfalls. However, those who let their emotions control them (fear, confusion) lacked common sense.
Only those with hands planted over their eyes ignore the fact that pandemic response planning in Event 201 occurred in October 2019 and was attended by pharma, the CIA, marketing execs, FDA, CDC, etc. The event’s focus was on vaccines to end the pandemic and how to combat “misinformation” from vaccine skeptics.
What do you mean by “masks–only droplet aerosols “, please?
I think you are quite right to smell a rat. I think the governments around the world acted alike by plan, not chance. The experts in place were there as they were doing a job for whoever is pulling the strings (global cpaitalists I suppose). Just look at Fauci’s history with coronaviruses. They are not entirely new to him but he would want the vaccine to be the answer, not any other cure.
https://www.ieyenews.com/the-fauci-covid-19-dossier-investigation-into-possible-illegal-patent-claims-resulting-in-millions-of-in-commercial-benefits/
‘The National Institute of Health’s grant AI23946-08 issued to Dr. Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (officially classified as affiliated with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s NIAID by at least 2003) began the work on synthetically altering the Coronaviridae (the coronavirus family) for the express purpose of general research, pathogenic enhancement, detection, manipulation, and potential therapeutic interventions targeting the same. As early as May 21, 2000, Dr. Baric and UNC sought to patent critical sections of the coronavirus family for their commercial benefit.1 In one of the several papers derived from work sponsored by this grant, Dr. Baric published what he reported to be the full length cDNA of SARS CoV in which it was clearly stated that SAR CoV was based on a composite of DNA segments.’
As for Cummings, he has long said that “horrific” bureaucracy in Whitehall held back innovation and scientific advance. He pushed for Aria, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, a British version of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, formerly called Arpa. That would suit the global capitalists as the 4th industrial revolution (or whatever they call it), is rolled out.
“What do you mean by “masks–only droplet aerosols “”
Out of field numbskulls at the CDC were loudly proclaiming that masks caught disease-laden droplets, as if that were the end of the story. It is known in the physics of fluids that water droplets 5 microns diameter and below evaporate within microseconds. Should masks deform spherical droplets, their surface areas will necessarily increase, which increases the rate of their evaporation–likely to microseconds. If the ratio of mask-caught droplets’ surface area to mass increases to the ratio (surface area/mass) for droplets 5 microns diameter or greater, then evaporation will occur in microseconds.
Without water, virus is free. Without water, you don’t have droplet aerosols–you have free virus aerosols. Free virus aerosols will pass through masks more easily than droplets. The effectiveness of masks on free virus aerosols ( particles <= 0.1 micron diameter) has not been studied and I would not expect any benefit for the general public. There would be a time-effectiveness curve for N95 masks and others of the more effective masks. There would have to be training in handling, time to change them out, and how to maintain them (if they are costly).
There are physics reasons why N95 masks and some others would have some diminishing benefit over time against viruses (electrostatically charged fibers and Brownian Motion between layers) which have nothing to do with the size of viruses or mask pores.
"I think you are quite right to smell a rat."
Oh, I can tell you the age, sex, subspecies of the rat, and what it has eaten in the last 24 hours.
Fear! People in a state of fear can’t think straight, making them vulnerable, very vulnerable and thus open to whatever bullshit the government spinmeisters send our way. Mass formation.
Yep, now they are using Ukraine and Russia as the fear subject.
Why were some of us able to understand that fear was crippling us and others weren’t?
There is plenty of smoking gun evidence of disinformation by the public health authorities that should cause people to begin to distrust them.
The public that let itself be fooled for over a year needs shaming for its foolishness. It’s not just the con men who are to blame.
Remember the parable of the Emperor’s New Clothes? Yeah, there were con men, but some people wanted to be fooled for social reasons.
Now, let me see…where did I put the rotten eggs and fruit?
Why? You need to read the MINDSPACE document produced for the UK Cabinet Office by a bunch of experts in psychological warfare, the use of sophisticated mind-bending techniques developed for psychological warfare operations, that are being use on the British public. Basically it exploits peoples’ fears (eg the ‘500,000 dead’ meme) to get people to ‘give our permission’ to the state to, well eg, lock us down, wear a mask, don’t shake hands, keep your distance, get JABBED. At one point in the doc, these monsters from some kind of hell, actually state that the British public are frightened enough!!!!
“They were statisticians, public health doctors, paediatricians, epidemiologists and geneticists.”
They were also psychologists and behavioural scientists with little or no medical knowledge. I cannot understand why immunologists and virologists were excluded as well. There didn’t seem to be any of the “right experts”.
And you are 150 years old? I want some of what you’ve been taking!
You have a 2nd for that proposal.
I think that it’s irresponsible to discuss this topic without considering the panic-mongering and confusion-mongering from the Nudge unit. Otherwise we will fail to see how the public has been manipulated by fear and confusion into seeking a mental framework from “expert” con men who will spout the line which they have been given.
And where are all those experts (Chiefs of this, Professors of that, knighthoods galore, etc) now? Curiously inconspicuous while more and more awkward questions require answers.
On the other hand, why did those experts actually abandon any inclination to fight the last war? They are said to have binned an established existing pandemic strategy in favour of Chinese-style lockdowns — with all the deadly results we are beginning to see. What was wrong with the existing strategy? Will an Inquiry ask that question? And will the “experts” attempt to justify their ghastly lockdowns?
Another great post. However, if I might be bold, I suggest that what we got was even worse than you suggest. We would likely have done better to stick with the old Generals who fought the last war – in this case the accepted expertise that masks (even ‘proper’ masks) were useless for aerosols of viriods, that lockdowns would be mind bogglingly expensive anf ineffective, that vaccines (sepecially “novel” vaccines) should only be utilised after thorough testing, that mechanical aspirators were likely to kill rather than cure. Until early 2020 that was the advice even of the WHO. (Not the greatest inovators!)
What we actually got was a bunch of arts grad politicians (completely ignorant of science) who (as usual) appointed people as ‘experts’ whose only genuine expertise is in nodding their heads like parcel-shelf dogs (and enriching themselves). Policy based Evidence Making at its finest.
If we are forced to “leave it to the experts” our freedom to impart our own views are curtailed. If the M25 constantly is jammed up; if the supermarket bread is vile; and if I cannot now access treatment at my local surgery ..then I will speak out and the ‘experts’ can go rot.
Thank you Dr. Kendrick.
Hear, hear. I look forward to your emails/writings.
Investigative journalist, Johnny Vedmore, said that politicians trotted out some of the same (Roy Anderson, Neil Ferguson, Jeremy Farrar, Edward Holmes) “experts” responsible for the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic, which utilized the test and cull method responsible for decimating farmers in the UK.
Yes, remember Neil Ferguson’s ‘500,000 DEAD’ at the beginning of this piece of theatre, that frightened the living daylights out of everybody (including me, for about 2 weeks). It was that single thing that opened us up to the predations of the ‘NUDGE UNIT’. Mass formation.
Ah, it would have been 500,000 if “we” had not put anyone who couldn’t fight back, into solitary confinement, and other contentious practices.
How long did it take for you to escape the NUDGE spell?
Like I said, about 2 weeks, then I started reading stuff about Ferguson’s track record on Foot & Mouth and realised he’d NEVER gotten anything right! Well maybe not everything, I’m sure he knows his birthdate and then his connection to Imperial College that Bill & Melinda Gates fund, and of course, Big Pharma (now even Bigger Pharma). Why didn’t the psyops affect me? Probably because I’d never believed anything the state dumped on me in the first place! And I’m ‘naturally’ skeptical being a leftie. But again, for most of us, it seems, we trust the powers that be, especially if it comes to life and death, hence the Nudge Unit and people ‘not being frightened enough’! I have about 6 govt docs going back to 2011 that deal with this issue, so they can’t say they weren’t prepared.
For me, it took two things for me to abandon any trust in public health authorities.
First, I saw the panic-mongering back in Feb. 2020. They had to be part of that.
Second, I saw the smearing of HCQ in Feb-Mar. 2020 and that the FDA didn’t approve early treatment with HCQ. Without any evidence!!!
A veritable smoking gun.
The I found Dr. David Healy’s blog and his recounting of the SSRI research misdeeds by pharma–which is when I lost any confidence in pharma. (Although, truthfully, I had been gradually looking askance at pharma once I learned about the vaccines’ EUA requirement that no alternative treatment could exist.)
Good stuff.
Hear, hear! Thank you Dr. Kendrick. I look forward to your emails/writings.
Johnny Vedmore, an investigative journalist said that the politicians trotted out some of the same experts responsible for the foot-and-mouth epidemic in 2000 or 2001, with terrible computer modeling, test and cull methods of control, which decimated the UK farmers. (Jeremy Farrar, Roy Anderson, Neil Ferguson, Richard Sikes)
“an expert on facial surgery at the start of the 20th century” .
It is a real shame that some sentences can start so well but end so badly ;^) .
Why did the ‘experts’ abandon the UK Pandemic Preparedness Plans which were presumably prepared by ‘experts’?
Because all those ‘preparedness’ documents weren’t about protecting the health of the people but about protecting the state! I’ve published about half-a-dozen of them and the theme is constant; security, protecting the state. And our thoroughly emasculated civil service, that should have administered the ‘plan’ but they’d all been fired and the work outsourced to all the crony friends of the Tory governent and we know what happened, £50 BILLION down the drain!!! The rich don’t bloody care! We’re paying the price, the NHS has paid price. Mass formation!
Yes Dr Malcolm. I’m more than happy to second you. I watched in disbelief as one “prediction” after another was unrolled about this ” novel ” disease. Logic tells you that must be rubbish. Graph after graph swiftly shown in support of the expert advisors. Again, what exactly were they comparing? And how many people could see anything but squiggly coloured lines which we were told held doom if we weren’t all obedient little children. A performance. All logic, all objectivity gone. If there were any in the first place. Thank you for your sane and reasoned posts. A breath of fresh air.. Jean Dale. An 89 year old great grandma who can smell a rat. I’ve come across a lot of them down the years.
“A performance” … exactly! When asked for my opinion I would reply that I thought what was being presented as absolutely necessary to keep us ‘safe’ was a piece of political theatre and a very bad pantomime >:-(
I actually remember the saying “nobody gets fired for hiring IBM”. As leader of a scientific programming group in my company I wanted to buy a different brand of computer and invited the vendors to a meeting with the whole IT department. We agreed it was a good option but when I wrote the proposal it was turned down by the board – they had decided to go IBM. It turned out that IBM hadn’t bothered talking to us IT people, they just went straight to the board and warned them of the dire consequences of NOT going IBM. Perhaps there is a parallel here – any one other than the established, old guard experts is not given a chance to argue their case.
The saying was “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. IBM was a manufacturing company which sold computers (pig iron) and, within reason, provided the expertise to install it. They even considered the operating system to be part of the package. It came free – even the source code.
You weren’t ICI Pharma perchance?
You got it wrong I’m afraid. IBM made its money, initially from leasing computers. I did work for a millionaire in NYC who made his millions by buying computers from IBM and, of course, leasing them, which is how he became a millionaire!
Oh, and I forget the 2nd income stream IBM generated; fixing the damn things!
The “Maintenance Contract” Scam.
Most computers at the time came with an operating system as part of the deal. Not much use without it. The IBM “solution” to my requirements cost 3 times as much as the one I wanted to buy., It did of course come with a full support package from IBM.
I second the motion!
‘Why do we have experts?’
Isn’t it so that we have someone to blame when it all goes ‘tits up’?
I for one hope that we see them all on trial to answer for their failures.
But I expect that it won’t get that far unless politicians start getting it in the neck, and the confected Ukraine disaster is their current ‘dead cat’ to deflect from their culpability for believing their chosen experts.
Hopefully some of the worst consequences of the mRNA vaccines come to fruition and we can have a great clear out of those who got us here.
1 – As a KPMG IT/Management consultant many years ago my definition of “an expert” had two variants: “the guy on the next barstool”; and “someone 25 miles or more away from home”. The first because we could, and did, develop complex reports and presentations only to be over-ruled by clients responding to the expertise of nitwits, strangers, bar stoolees, and (most recently) internet comment writers, (on which see 2 below) – and the second because quite a few of our own and client staff attached credibility to nice suits, business cards, and the out-of-town-ness of the brought in expert. (Basically, someone from out of town gets judged on the sales hype/info available, not the local knowledge in his home office that that he’s just another poseur.)
2 – forcing churn in the ranks of the anointed always sounds great to the unblessed but may be a cure that’s worse than the problem. Where time permits, a process that’s slowed by elder caution can be smarter than just rushing in – and some old fools aren’t fools.
A better idea is to work toward reversing the general motto of government action: “if it doesn’t work, do more of it”. If we were able (magically!) to force people to reverse that so the response to a policy failure would be to stop enforcing it, young experts would be heard right along old ones since the basis of judgement would be external (success/failure) rather than institutional (I am the boss, so FOAD).
That this approach works has been demonstrated many times – not least in ground wars where the old generals in charge at the beginning refight the last war and always lose to an aggressor who then loses to battlefield promotees if whoever gets attacked lasts long enough to identify and promote people who prove their ideas by succeeding with them.
When I used to go around giving talks about software engineering (very long ago), one popular definition was: “An expert comes from at least 100 miles away, and brings slides”.
Maybe if we could exterminate PowerPoint, that might bring huge benefits to us all.
Thank you.
Yup. You actually know it well… as it is quite easy to spot Donkey’s. If not by sight, by the braying alone. They also like to be in herds. https://www.thedonkeysanctuary.org.uk/all-about-donkeys/understanding-herd-dynamics
Excellent….If you have not read “Intellectuals and Society” by Thomas Sowell you would certainly enjoy doing so – I had it as a talking book for a long journey and found myself pounding the steering wheel with pleasure at his pithy insights and takedowns …
Kind regards
Henry 01440 785341 House 01440 785562 Office 07768 271078 Mobile
Thank you for sharing the book “Intellectuals and Society.” Someone recently commented that intellectuals more often seek higher degrees as a form of social acceptance and are more prone to mass formation as a result. Then proceed to promote bad policies in the very face of poor outcomes.
I find your articles and books very interesting indeed.
Even your thinking about clotting seems to have adapted ever so slightly over the course of your books. As you seemed to observed and discovered even more with your mind wide open.
My thinking has always been was to let the doctors be at ease with C19 or anything they hadn’t seen before. There is always blood on the ground with the first through the door (on the beach) on a new journey of discover and understanding. Always. Ask any US Marine. Ask any person whose job it is to be first in a conflict. They already know this. However politically unsavory, people die every day. And are born every day. However the scale never made the headlines. No news channel was reporting the daily death count. None I know of. Not a news segment. Until it got popularized and politicized. So stop reporting a death toll. Which sane person wants to know the death count, unless telling us is being used to influence. If they do then why not give all the deaths. Like the football. Seems they only want to give the score for their new ManU of disease. There new poster boy for …. what exactly.
Learning and adapting. This is what we want to allow the MDs to do. Observe, record, understand and apply from their position of what they already know.
Seems most MDs have not been allowed to apply what they know, the use of some drugs and medicine techniques has been denied for political reasons. Denied by academic or political experts.
Bloodclots. Nasty wee beasties. Just doing the job they were triggered to do. In the lungs by the bucket load apparently as an after affect of over active respiratory infection – c19. I assume they just don’t randomly decide to clot in some such location. Like ‘Today is Tuesday, we clot in the lungs on the third Tuesday after Manchester wins a football game in April, and the ducks are flying south’. Or any other such obscure reasoning. Unless it is actually observed perhaps.
There are already existing meds for most of the conditions people experience with C19. Solving problems is always matching the patchwork of possible solutions to the problem at hand.
Skill is keep the mind open to keep seeing the problem.
Once the human mind deems it ‘knows’ the problem it stops allowing in any new information. Not allowed new information, as this quite likely would challenge the newly formed global truth. Not allowed. Defending the ‘knowing’ becomes the main activity.
The merry go round of going nowhere.
As the great poet Alexander Pope put it, “A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday”.
Prudence Kitten,
But he does have to be careful how he says it.
Another wise fellow, an American humorist, said, “Confession is good for the soul, but it’s bad for my reputation.”
Thank you for another highly enjoyable article Dr Kendrick. It does seem strange that a comiited ‘disruptor’ (Dominic Cummings) would be so quick to have his opinions in thrall to the established experts.
It seems that some of the experts failed to demonstrate expertise when preparing their ‘worst case scenarios’. A particularly good example is ‘Report 9’ from Prof Neil Ferguson et al.
As many will know the report predicted a potential peak in Great Britain of about 22 deaths per 100,000 people in late May 2020 with a total death toll of 510,000 people. For those who persist in saying it was not a ‘prediction’: the word ‘predict’ or similar was used three times in the opening paragraph of the Results section.
A peak of 22 per 100,000 people in Great Britain is about 14,340 deaths. By setting the height of the peak (at 13,340), the timing of the peak (late May) and the area under the curve (510,000 deaths) the prediction effectively constrains the start and duration of the epidemic. An epidemic curve might be low and wide or tall and thin and represent the same total number of deaths (think of it like a rectangle: if you fix the hight and the area then you have effectively set the width), but if you constrain the height and timing of the peak and the area under it then you’ve effectively fully defined it.
The ‘Figure 1’ graphs in the Results section seem to be pretty much symmetrical: they shouldn’t be. They should have a longer, shallower slope after the peak than before it (non-cumulative Gompertz curve) – that is what actually happened in reality. The best fit Gompertz curve for the constraints given in the prediction would have epidemic deaths starting in mid-April (if they started earlier but the peak remained the same height on the same date then the whole curve would have to be wider (greater duration) and the total death toll would be higher than 510,000).
According to ONS figures, by 16 Mar 2020 (the publication date of ‘Report 9’) there had already been 153 deaths where Covid was mentioned as a cause of death (though only 16 had been officially registered). The prediction was already unravelling before publication and before any government ‘action’ to attempt to avert the disaster.
The first wave peaked in Great Britain on 8 April (not late May) at 1,450 deaths in a day (not 14,340). By 1 Septempber there had been 56,948 deaths (not 510,000). So, the experts predicted the date of the peak too late by 6 weeks, height too high by a factor of ten and total too high by a factor of nine – some expertise.
By the time the government announced curfew on 23 Mar 2020 the majority of infections that led to the 1,450 deaths on the peak on 8 April had already occurred – the deaths were inevitable. The infection rate (as demonstrated by the later death rate) was already decelerating before 23 Mar 2020 – the curfew therefore had nothing to do with that.
It appears that the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team neglected to point out that their paper was already demonstrably wrong on the publication date. ‘Trust us, we’re the experts’. Still, better safe than sorry eh?
A very good post.
An ex is a has-been and a spurt is a species of drip.
And answering the question “Cui bono?” explains why the Covid response was so bad in every conceivable way.
A drip under pressure most likely. Though an expert has always just been someone out standing in a field…
Maybe a medical expert should not be a scientist, but a doctor with a glowing record of actually treating patients. If the expert is required to advise about a novel disease, perhaps he should have a record at treating people who have symptoms that are hard to diagnose.
Politicians do not really need advice from scientists but from effective clinicians.
A good specialist is a generalist too or she or he won’t be able to see the overlaps and wider picture.
To begin with, the experts who came up with covid are questionable.
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2022/03/09/cdc-fda-smoking-gun-of-smoking-guns-they-confess/
The mistake was in thinking that a few experts would be all knowing and in silencing any dissenting voices. I signed the Great Barrington Declaration very early. It is the recommendations in that that are being considered now as a means to move on and ‘live with the virus’. Some very brave people there.
An expert is someone with qualifications usually a PhD.
In order to get the PhD the candidate must show other people with a PhD that they share the same group think.
Once awarded the PhD they produce studies that can be published once peer reviewed, this means the study must be accepted as conforming to the prevailing group think of other experts from the discipline in question.
Experts are a circle jerk usually bought and paid for by vested interests like pharma.
“Piled higher and deeper”.
The PhD system also sustains a type of modern slavery, through which graduate students work unpaid and unacknowledged for their “advisors”. Naturally the latter support it energetically.
A society based on a pyramid structure will always run into the bottle neck of the expert, its the power structure model that is the problem.
Arthroscorsis continues as an interesting problem and with the recent death of Shane Warne the cricketer it poses the question why isn’t this problem number one on the hit parade?
The water hammer effect in arteries seems to me to play a role in the process, how many times have fit older people suddenly had a heart attack will running or exercising, also smokers would suffer the same condition as the heart suddenly snaps into action when a cigarette is consumed. The sudden shock wave could dislodge a clot at the wrong moment in the repair process?
Anyhow the search continues.
I’ll take Dr McKendrick for an absolute expert over many of those bafoons we have dictating absolute nonsense. Thank God for you Sir, and for the information you’ve bravely put out for us to learn from, and make decisions from. I send much good energy your way to you and the family and once again, thank you for the books, the blog and a general refreshing attitude.
Pfizer could have used some relevant expertise when they ran their vaccine trial: it wasn’t double-blinded! On the other hand maybe they used instead the expertise of someone skilled at running dodgy trials. Who knows?
https://jackanapes.substack.com/p/the-pfizer-vaccine-trial-was-not?s=r
Why double blind the trials? Fine if the symptoms are marginal but the affects of a deadly, virulent virus are not an issue for dispute.
Because double blinding the trials proved that it was neither deadly nor virulent.
How do we judge expertise? An airline pilot or train driver is obvious. Same with engineers. But where are the experts in pandemics? What the government should have done is gathered multiple experts, say in modelling and as time went on give more weight to the ones that got things right. How Ferguson still has his job is beyond me.
But this whole sorry mess was not because of any one factor, but it was driven by moral panic. And that is a spiritual malaise. My question is where was the spiritual leadership?
I would say it was immoral panic
The spiritual leadership?
Mostly locking churches.
You’ve reminded me of an experience I had maybe 10-15 yrs ago, in the early days of the Web and ‘citizen journalism’ and ‘Blogs’. In any case, one of the eminent ‘experts’ (no actuall bloggers were invited), a ‘journalist’ from Sky News told the assembled audience, “Would you let a blogger, perform brain surgery on you?’
Satanism doesn’t do spirituality.
Hmmm… Expertise? It’s not about expertise really, it’s about control and power masquerading as expertise. How else could they have destroyed so much without a single questioning permitted? Who challenges the experts? Who challenges the King’s ‘right’ to rule? Expertise is probably the closest thing we have to the ‘Divine Right to Rule’.
Thank you
Thank you Dr Malcolm Kendrick again for your thought provoking blog.
Credentialism – the last refuge of the ignorant.
Reminds me. Not long ago a MD asked for my credentials. I haven’t put in the work on patient care, but I’ve put in a LOT of work reading the literature. Which he obviously hadn’t.
My daughter to “expert”, a neurologist, “here is a paper linking the Pfizer vaccine to a case of POTS”, which is her problem, after he had flatly denied any chance of such a link.
“Oh, I don’t read that journal.”
End of relationship.
Unfortunately the funerals don’t come quickly enough for some ideas. The experts are still saying that a cure for MS is just around the corner (honest! just give me another huge research grant) dance at least the fifties, and all the experts from back then are dead. But the myth lives on.
I’ve always been interested in archaeology, probably prompted by Stonehenge being a convenient place to break the Bristol to Bognor run we did often as a family, and let us kids run off a bit of steam. In those days there was a rough gravelled car park on the other side of the road to the stones, and an information sign. That was it. So we could run around, play hide and seek, have a pee behind a stone, climb on the fallen ones ….. But, the information sign said authoritatively that the bluestones came by boat from south Wales, up the Hampshire Avon, and the biggies arrived by rolling them there on logs. The sea route sounded viable, but we also dinghy sailed in South Wales and Cornwall and whilst we don’t know what sort of boats they had 4,700 years ago, it would have been quite a journey round Land’s End with a five ton stone.
And rolling the sarsens on logs? You would really need a 20 mile chalk road from the quarry, as the logs would get easily bogged in the grass. And where did they get lots of nice straight, equally sized round logs? The natural trees of the area didn’t include pine at the time of Stonehenge.
Now it’s accepted that the stones were simply dragged on crude sleds, made from substantial tree branches, (WH&S would agree that that was safer too) once you break the static friction it’s easy to keep them moving over grass. And they may have floated the bluestones up the Bristol Avon after dragging them overland to an estuary crossing point near Newport.
So yes, be cautious with experts. Remember, experts built the Titanic, an amateur built the Ark.
If anyone thinks the past two years were caused by experts, I’ve got an acre or two in the Everglades to sell you. The people on Team Stupid knew exactly what they were saying were lies. It was intentional. Any means necessary to achieve your goals of power, money and control. Who the rulers deem ‘expert’ is trivial.
Yes! It’s quite clear what the purpose of the ‘pandemic’ was, simply, the state needed the draconian laws in order to protect the status quo. You’ll see these ‘Coronavirus laws’ used to repress us just as they’ve ‘anti-terror’ laws to deny us our right demonstrate,
And proof of the pudding? Suddenly, Covid19 disappears! How convenient. They’ve trashed the economy, ruined a generation of our youth but they have all the laws they need to control us. Mass Formation?
“Laws”? I think they may prove to be deemed unlawful if tested before a jury.
Juries, perhaps that’s why the govt is trying to abolish them?
Somehow, I am reminded of the definition of a consultant – someone who asks to borrow your watch, then tells you what time it is.
And keeps the watch.
Oh, a clever consultant, when asked what time it is, will tell you how to make a watch.
Maintenance of the status quo requires eminence over evidence, and intellectual class system. However many disruptors cannot see beyond the disruption and if the purpose of disruption is to innovate and develop better (however that looks), we need to be far more disciplined and detailed as to the vision.
Good article Malcolm
This is outstanding https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/what-physicians-say-covid-vaccines
Eddy: Thanx for posting the link…I agree, well worth a read thru.
Dr. K, thanks again, this helps reinforce your thoughts I think….
I’ve previously highlighted an article by Dr Alan Mordue which addresses, in conjunction with other public health ‘betrayals, the subject of ‘Experts’. He lists his ideas on who feeds MSM their fodder and his take on the difference between Public Health (PH) ‘Official’, ‘Expert’ and ‘Specialist’.
If you don’t want to link to the article below, in The Daily Sceptic, I quote from it:
A PH official:
* Someone involved with Central or Local government, that has some influence on population health.
* Diverse professional backgrounds
* Diverse training backgrounds
* Diverse working experience
A PH Expert:
* Someone referred to as such by a member of the media
A PH Specialist:
* Someone who has undergone specialist raining in public health
* Training is post-graduate, lasts 5 years and leads to membership of the faculty of Public Health in the UK (by examination)
* Training covers the underlying sciences, like epidemiology, and substantial work experience in NHS PH departments
So, in effect, when MSM quotes either a PH Official (who could be anyone) or a PH Expert (who could also be anyone) their opinion COULD (maybe, possibly) be worth nought.
These toads will often us words like COULD, maybe, might or possibly as a bottom-covering insurance.
‘Could see 500,000 deaths if the government took no action’ – remember that from the mathematical epidemiologist? Prof. F.
There’s only one things that the media picks up on here! Bang – panic.
Here’s the link: https://dailysceptic.org/the-betrayal-of-public-health-during-the-covid-pandemic/
“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no”.
– Betteridge’s Law
Expertise is success proven by results. An ‘expert’ is someone who knows a lot about very little.
I think that one of the VERY WORST things that was done over the last year…was the censorship of doctors that HAD found alternative strategies in dealing with covid using re-purposed drugs…all these doctors where actually treating patients daily and coming up with protocols that actually worked…ie doctors at the FLCCC….Pierre Kory, Dr. Paul Marik etc etc. All of these doctors…..because they were not pandering to the pharmacutical companies, had their reputations ruined although being some of the most highly qualified out there…DISGUSTING ! I would take their advice over that of sage or anyone else blindly just doing what they’re told……BY THE EXPERTS !!!!
There is (was?) an organisation called “Common Purpose” registered as a UK charity that ran (runs?) courses training all kinds of “selected” people to become “leaders” A website called Common Purpose Exposed has a list of hundreds who attended these courses. WikiLeaks also has a long expose of the purposes of this charity. Worth a look to see if any names look familiar by now – they are likely to be Remainers as well given the sponsorship.
So, we are demonising ‘remainers’ now. Such hypocrisy, Patricia.
birds of a feather….
The concept of mastering a skill or field of endeavour is quite different from touted or self acclaimed experts.
Ivan Illich remains relevant to illuminate the false turns that set up the tragic fall.
Clip from Part Moon Part Travelling Salesman: Conversations With Ivan Illich
(David Cayley)
This distinction between liberal and dominant professions was important to Illich. It identified the watershed between a time when professional services were essentially optional and a time when they became virtually mandatory. And this transition was abetted, he went on, by those who sought to professionalize the roles of consumer and client.
Ivan Illich:
Professionals could not have become dominant in society unless people were ready to experience as a lack what the expert imputes to them as a need. It is only during the last twenty years that Comfort and Spock and some Nader pupils teach people how to identify and describe to themselves with almost professional competence the needs which professionals have defined for them. To be ignorant or unconvinced of one’s own needs thus became the unforgivable anti-social act. The good citizen is he who imputes staple needs to himself with such conviction that he drowns out any desire for alternatives, including the renunciation to needs.
Ideas
(David Cayley)
Part of Illich’s concern with professionalism came from the way in which he saw it substituting for the participatory politics which he hoped to foster. When people begin to think of themselves as clients and consumers, he said, they often cease to think of themselves as citizens, and politics then becomes nothing more than the adjudication of competing claims for professional services.
You can listen to the series as podcast in 5 parts.
https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/2014/11/6/part-moon-part-travelling-salesman-conversations-with-ivan-illich
& or download the transcript (seek the title in the page)
https://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts
Unless we zoom out or expand your focus, we suffer the results of the outsourcing our life to a systemic replacement by what we are trained to mask in our own frame of thinking.
The emperor is naked.
But WHO told you you were lacking, susceptible, vulnerable, culpable & in need of a booster?
So many experts were used by the bullies running things to impress the public who don’t trust politicians. They could be bought to suppress other experts who discovered you could help people who caught Covid 19 without injecting them.
‘Who Changed the Scientific Conclusions of a Paper that Could Have Saved Millions? At Last, We May Have a Name.This is a scandal of immense proportions that warrants an immediate investigation’.
https://flccc.substack.com/p/who-changed-the-scientific-conclusions?s=r
I fervently hope that the day comes when this man (along with many others, and women) is brought to justice, and put away for a very, very long time.
I think this is relevant:
Scientific Integrity Is Dead. Here’s Proof.
Four examples show that scientific integrity is pretty much dead worldwide. There are only a few people left who support these principles and they’ve been marginalized by all mainstream leaders.
In this article, I am going to show two simple, but very important, examples that I believe prove, without any doubt, that scientific integrity is dead. I cannot explain the lack of outrage from the mainstream scientific community any other way.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/scientific-integrity-dead-here-proof/5773468
Time now to come out fighting, as it’s all falling apart. Even old Dr John Campbell is declaring it was all a fraud all along! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YOD9drZasM
Not impressed by Campbell. Earlier he was telling people to get jabbed.
Indeed. Many trusted him for his title of Doctor.
Most people here recognised from day one that all was not as we were being told. Lot of spineless types now coming out of the woodwork saying it was all wrong, where we’re they two years ago ? I suspect a lot of them are having their Damascus moment under the safe cover of the Ukraine situation – another tory clusterfuck.
Heads on spikes on London Bridge- you know it makes sense !
I detected embarrassment, barely covered by indignation and surprise, partially obfuscated by his urge to get at the facts.
Going back to pre-2010 (say) there seemed to be a series of fairly unpleasant bugs (Coronaviruses?) that laid people low for a week or more. One I remember seemed to produce cold-like symptoms that after several days suddenly intensified into something more like flu!
I remember that bug particularly because I flew to the US while the disease was a mere cold, but then while I was there, each day I had to return to my hotel room and collapse into bed at about 2 PM.
I seemed to get one of these every few years. Others did too.
My point is that I wonder if this background of ‘ordinary’ bugs is still around now, and accounts for those who say they probably got COVID and didn’t go to hospital but felt quite ill for a while.
barovsky: wow, very sad, but true. Thank you for sharing the link.
Hi Malcolm
Will your new book be available in audio any time soon?
Best
Zak
People actually make a living doing this?
‘A girl with unruly locks: molecular genetics makes a diagnosis of uncombable hair syndrome’
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00362-2/fulltext
Is it only girls who have ‘uncombable hair syndrome’? What a word, uncombable!
Is it only girls who have ‘uncombable hair syndrome’?
Oh, no –
See BoJo
He couldn’t comb his hair at speed, or slo-mo
He often swears a pox
Upon his flimsy locks
But reasons that it makes him look so po-mo
To me, you would be more of an expert because you go places where the mainstream medical idiots refuse to go. Most experts are self appointed agenda pushers and don’t know crap from crappola. The covid experts? No such animal in my estimation.
The guy who came and repaired the ice maker on the $2,000 fridge is an expert with 35 years in the business. The guy who wants to prescribe drugs and procedures may be an expert at doing them but not an expert in making you well so that you no longer need drugs or his services.
Most experts know a lot about specific things, but life and events are fluid and nothing is static. Many experts are overpaid and over trusted guesstimators and voodoo con artists. I always question expertise in most instances. The list of trusted people and sources is quickly dwindling.
Another horror seems to be about to hit us. Stay vigilant, resist …
https://worldcouncilforhealth.org/news/2022/03/pandemic-treaty/45591/
Astrid Stueckelberg, ex-WHO gave some interviews mostly in 2021 saying exactly what Gates was up to, including getting his various organisations like GAVI immunity from any legal liability and building an empire in Geneva.
Translated into normal prose, it seems to mean medical dictatorship and mandatory vaccination move one step closer. The UK government did ‘consult’ recently on abolishing, sorry ‘amending’ the Human Rights Act so that individual rights are watered down.
Added to which, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer has apparently approved a programmable central bank digital currency. This is another nightmare. If people move to such a system, the state can delete or block your funds if you don’t obey. I haven’t checked this report for myself, yet, apparently it was in the Telegraph.
Whatever happened to democracy? Aldous Huxley seems to have had amazing predictive powers.
Also watch Joe Rogan interview Maajid Nawaz. I think that was in February 2022 … one struggles to keep up with all the ‘conspiracy theories’ that are coming true.
They need us to be poor, grateful and beholden to them. As a world population we are already doing the equivalent of forelock tugging.
The definition I think is the most true and humble:
An expert is someone who has made all the mistakes one can make in a field.
I am reminded of the old definition of an expert. Ex – as in has been and spurt as in – drip under pressure.
Scott Adams reads Dr K ?
https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-03-13
I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.
My latest post asks this question…
“Who in the US is dying from heart disease, cancer, and stroke?” Those numbers are mostly level from 2020, although stroke has a 4.5% increase.
Deaths of the 85+ y,o. group are down 14% from 2020–and they are the group that normally dies from these things. Maybe it was the 75-84 y.o. group? No, their deaths are down about 3% from 2020. How about the 65-74 y.o. group? Their deaths are up 7%, which is 47,000 people. However that only accounts for a small percent of the 150,000 drop in 85+ y.o. deaths.
In other news, deaths of working age people are up 17% from 2020, which amounts to 137,500 people.
About a third of the excess deaths in the working age population is from covid. I suspect that about 15% are from delayed health care. What’s left?
Just remember…vaccines are the #1 cause of coincidences.
You have figures for the UK?
No, I don’t. NBS?
Reviewers face the unavoidable temptation to accept or reject new evidence and ideas, not on the basis of their scientific merit, but on the extent to which they agree or disagree with the public positions taken by experts on these matters … At other times, the expert bias against new ideas is unconscious. The result is the same: new ideas and new investigators are thwarted by experts, and progress toward the truth is slowed. — The sins of expertness and a proposal for redemption [Ref 2 above]
Henry Ford, who knew a thing or two about manufacturing cars, had a similar sentiment:
“None of our men are ‘experts.’ We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the ‘expert’ state of mind a great number of things become impossible.”
Henry Ford again:
“That is the way with wise people—they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work.”
Just trying to get my head around the expert / specialist thing.
We must respect people who offer their opinions in their own name. There’s no hiding place there, it’s commitment to their message and it’s putting themselves on the line. There are plenty of Messrs and Mmes risking their reputations and livelihoods in the name of honest debate.
Sometimes we’ve had to rely on a subtext or wheedle the truth out of their comments. Simply because if they’d come out and said what they really wanted to, either last week or last year, they would have been ‘shut down’ and that would have been the last we’d have heard of them on a widely-read platform. It’s been a delicate balance.
Some have had to compromise their beliefs to continue to work – which is basically criminal.
I believe, especially early on, some had covid injection(s) so they could continue do their job. A demand that is criminal, and a diktat bordering insane. Mandates – another word that entered everyday language as a result of covid, like lockdowns. Both suffocating.
Throughout, it has been easy for people to hide behind a pseudonym and comment or snipe from the side of the stage. Frankly there has been little chance of their ever being heard, and if they were they had little to lose.
Far tougher to be front centre, in the spotlight, in your own name, with your own message.
We’re here reading one such blog, so hats off to you Dr Kendrick.
There are of course others who warrant our respect. Hats off to them too.
Perhaps attitudes have softened a bit recently, those who were scorned as antis and conspiracists are now, grudgingly, tolerated. At least in some quarters.
MSM still has to catch up of course, they are still tethered to the big bucks.
So, track-record experts or highly qualified specialists, particularly those we can identify, we salute you.
There’s some more of those here: https://rumble.com/vwposh-the-curtain-close-on-covid-theater.html
Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, hosts a discussion with prominent opposition voices from medicine and science.
I forgot to mention that the video, bizzarely, starts at 16:00. Here is a version with the first 16 minutes edited off: https://rumble.com/vwrbm2-desantis-hosts-roundtable-discussion-on-ending-covid-theater-once-and-for-a.html
The US experts are doing a recount of covid mortality statistics.
“Clean-up Crew starting to amend the COVID Death Over-Counts at instruction of the CDC (Centers for Deliberate Criminality and Prevarication)”
https://merylnassmd.com/clean-up-crew-starting-to-amend-covid/
Truly shameful! Culpable homicide! Psychological Warfare! Many of us have been saying pretty much the same thing for the past two years. But there’s an Information War going on and it ain’t just about Ukraine and Russia! I read this morning that now ANY story, report, analysis that contravenes the ‘officlal line’, will now be banned and how long before it becomes a criminal offence?
Yesterday I had to pay a visit to the A&E at my ‘local’ hospital and on presenting myself to the Triage nurse, she said to me, ‘Have you had your jab?’ To which I replied, ‘Are you crazy?’ She responded, ‘I’m not allowed to discuss it’, to which I replied, ‘Well you asked me and I told you’. End of conversation.
” I am very much something else. A maverick, a denier, zealot a …”
Don’t forget: Cult leader.
The Cult of Data-Analyzing, Critical-Thinking Skeptics?
Is the “misinformation” topic related to the experts topic? Maybe.
I posted about how the anti-misinformation push started, on my blog.
I thought this article on Kennedy’s book on Fauci, worth reading:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/ad-the-real-anthony-fauci-the-new-york-times/
Misinformation:
Although we are fed the line that all restrictions have been or are being removed, ie. return to normality. The vaccinations continue. The NHS continues to push testing and vaccination. Masks are still pushed. People continue to WFH.
It’s a lie, normality has been redefined, the agenda rolls on.
Must Read Book!
http://edwardcurtin.com/states-of-emergency-keeping-the-global-populations-in-check/
Review by Ed Curtin
Kees van der Pijl, the author of The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class and the winner of the 2008 Deutscher Prize for ><emNomads, Empires, States: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, introduces his study with these words:
The psychological shock of the proclamation of a pandemic, like the purpose behind torture, is intended to induce acceptance of a ‘new normal’ and to turn off critical judgment. This state of mind is achieved by withholding information about what is really going on, through the extremely one-sided information by politicians and mainstream media. Divergent views by often highly qualified experts are not mentioned or are dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories.’ This can be compared to the sensory deprivation in psychological torture. . . .We are dealing with a biopolitical seizure of power, initiated at the level of global governance and reaching deep into the sovereignty of the individual, a seizure that involves a whole range of forms of violence.
Good luck in the High Court, I do hope that you get a fair hearing, but I am fearful.
>
Dr Kendrick – the term ‘expert’ is entirely situational. It is my personal professional experience that you can take a world expert in the field of, say, retinol-binding proteins (RBPs) and, if you think about putting them in an entrepreneurial start-up situation to develop novel drugs targeting RBPs, then suddenly they are like a duck out of water. The way that brought them success in academic research is not appropriate for a more commercial environment.
I’ve seen it the other way around too – someone not likely to become a Fellow of the Royal Society being absolutely brilliant in a young start-up. They had pragmatism, understood deadlines and financial targets and were good managing young staff to get turnkey work completed on time and on budget.
We now have the farcical situation of Patrick Vallance, professional drug development executive turned ‘Chief Scientific Officer’ during Covid, pontificating about ‘eating less meat, flying less and not driving to work’ due to his absolute non-expert status as a Climate Science guru.
Having worked both as an absolute specialist in a biomedical research niche, as well as having had roles requiring far greater breadth of expertise, albeit at non-world-leading level, the fact is that holistic expertise is not always correlated with specialist expertise.
There is of course the possibility of finding one set of skills in one field ‘transferable’ to another – I found it of interest that my experience in understanding how seedcorn venture capital funds work (lots of write offs, a few investments making shedloads) was relevant to football clubs developing 16-21 year old footballers. This linkage did not mean I could coach footballers, it meant I could understand the nature of what would be required concerning squad building to make a particular approach be successful both on the pitch and financially.
My cynical view about why we need ‘experts’ is that the decisionmakers patently aren’t experts and need someone to blame if they make the wrong call. I once did a strategic management consultancy review of an SME turning over around £5m a year 20 odd years ago, which was basically insolvent. At the end of the analysis phase (which was highly illuminating in how real businesses differed from case studies in business school), I presented the Board with three strategic options. I was amazed that this was not appreciated, since I thought that as executives, they needed to take the decision as to which option to pursue, they having been running the company for several years after all. I didn’t have the brass neck in those days to say: ‘If you can’t make the decision yourself, why don’t you offer me the CEO’s job?’ As it turned out, they pursued option 1 in year 1 to stabilise the cashflows, option 2 the next three years to move the company forward. I didn’t follow proceedings long enough to know if they ever exercised option 3.
Politicians are your exemplar ‘bumbling amateurs’ who need experts to tell them what to do. My view is that you shouldn’t be a politician if you aren’t capable of holding experts to account, but in a world where career politicians enter Parliament aged 30 with little experience outside of the media or the Westminster village, that’s never going to happen. It’s about time that 45-55 year olds entered politics with 20-30 years of experience of holding experts to account. It would transform Government, which would absolutely horrify Bill Gates et al.
What should be being asked is why Chris Whitty was considered an expert in economic implications of narrow medical decisions. His decisions were economically disgraceful. And they weren’t very medically superior either. A Chief Medical Officer needs to prove they know the first thing of the real world outside the rarified atmosphere of a research/teaching hospital. And the Secretary of State for Health shouldn’t be deferring to them, he should be holding them to account particularly before taking important decisions. All that happened in the UK is that Bill Gates dictated policy and Chris Whitty executed it. Matthew Hancock was just a fluffy PR executive and Boris Johnson couldn’t give a monkey’s until his poll ratings started dropping.
When you start bringing together ‘groups of experts’ is when it starts getting interesting. Who decides whether to defer to the epidemiologist, the behavioural psychologist, the molecular virologist, the expert in working deprived communities?
My view is that the problem with SAGE had nothing to do with its composition as such (which was pretty stupid), rather that every single member were upper-middle class entitled functionaries with gold plated salaries and pensions who didn’t suffer one iota during lockdowns. There needs to be a law stating that any committees with power like SAGE must be populated 66% by those on incomes of less than £60k a year and assets of less than £1m a year. You would never have had the outrageous nonsense we had if those intimately acquainted with the less prosperous uK communities had held the whip hand in decision-making. The Community of ‘I’m alright Jacquelines’ has much to answer for….
David Redman would agree with you. Putting medical experts in sole charge of a public medical problem is a mistake because they only look at narrow medical factors; they don’t see the “big picture” and determine a course of action that takes the many important influences on society into account.
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/furey-a-former-military-leader-breaks-down-what-ontario-must-do-now
“When retired Lt.-Col. David Redman wrote Alberta’s 2005 Alberta pandemic influenza response plan, he received input from 10 deputy ministers. Only one of them was the deputy minister of health. The rest represented other ministries, other sectors.
“That’s because a pandemic is a whole-of-society emergency. Health care shouldn’t be the only voice at the table.
“Redman, who was appointed by Ralph Klein as head of counterterrorism in Alberta the day after 9/11 and later became the head of the Alberta Emergency Management Agency, says the mistakes [in the Covid response plan] all started when Ontario Premier Doug Ford put the chief medical officer in charge and basically ignored the existence of Emergency Management Ontario.”
It’s much, much worse than that. Worser than a worst thing.
The experts in Australia, and as far as I can see certainly in the UK and USA, must have been aware of certain information, scientific research and studies, in the public sphere. I say that they must have been, because I knew about them and I’m not an expert. And if ol’ Eggsy found all these reports in PubMed, BMJ, NEJM, Lancet from the comfort of his armchair then the experts MUST have known about them from the discomfort of their clinical desks and fully adjustable office chairs plus the hordes of minions available to them as researchers. Here are some examples:
Between 50% and 80% of people have cross reactive T cell immunity to Covid. (From June 2020 onwards).
There were never enough deaths to justify calling it a pandemic. Or enough cases, that is, clinically verified cases.
Ivermectin was identified as a potential treatment in March 2020.
The major AZ trials didn’t use a placebo; and in the small trial that did, it was totally ineffective.
Pfizer had 25% excess mortality, and 70% excess hospitalisations, in the ‘vaccine’ cohort over the placebo group.
And so on. But in full knowledge of all the above the experts mandated lockdowns, masking, hand washing, isolation, quarantine, two jabs, booster jabs, banned HCQ and ivermectin without any remotely valid reasons and anything else they wanted to do.
Worser still, the politicians hid behind the experts. For eighteen months or so there was nothing more important anywhere in the world than Covid. Even climate change disappeared from the news. Yet not a single politician bothered to do any research themselves. All they wanted to do was to look good by throwing trillions of dollars at the problem. If you queried a pollie they would refer you to the experts ‘science’, which was not up for discussion.
Worst is that 95% of people went along with it and got jabbed, wore masks, killed off their skin biome with twenty suicidal hand washes a day and vilified anyone who disagreed with the ‘experts’.
And worser than the worst thing, experts have now started a war with Russia to distract from their incompetencies and cover up for the inevitable inflation resulting from their money printing. If you ignore the experts and the media, and look at history, you’ll find that the US and NATO in 1991 promised Russia that NATO wouldn’t expand “one inch” further east than Germany. A promise broken several times. That non-NATO membership served Finland and Sweden well in their relationships with Russia. That Ukraine announced that it was seeking NATO membership and would develop nuclear weapons. That since 2014 14,000 people of Russian descent in the Donbas have been murdered by neo-Nazi groups, the Azov battalion. That in 1961 the US made it quite clear that nuclear weapons would not be installed on Cuba. They would go to war with Russia to prevent it, nuclear war if necessary. But it would not happen. Putin is only doing the same thing, but unlike the USSR the West didn’t back down, so war it is. And the excuse for inflation; “Putin did it”. The excuse for shortages “Putin forced us to sanction Russian exports”.
The Putin gambit effectively killed Covid, the experts have decreed that he is evil and it’s all his fault, and the masses have sucked it up as usual.
For some understanding on why Finland is thinking of joining NATO, I recommend you read up on Soviet-Finnish war of 1930’s
The Finns call it the winter war. It morphed into a sort of civil war between white and red Finns, with atrocities on both sides. It established a border that has stood the test of time, through Stalin’s reorganisation of Eastern Europe, including creating Ukraine’s borders. I suggest Sanna Marin reads up on the winter war. I know someone who is old enough to be her great grandmother who went through that war, who is very angry at the concept of Finland joining NATO and would love to set her straight on the lunacy of poking the bear.
Here is a wiki link to winter war:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War
If you read it, you will see that it doesn’t support the things you say about that war. Soviet Union bombed civilian targets, its army didn’t fight well, it suffered heavy losses, and its military reputation suffered. Sounds familiar?
I think that if you knew the nature of this particular bear you would know that this one is more like a grizzly. You can drop down and pretend to be dead but it isn’t going to save you. The grizzly will just eat you alive.