Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire
One of the things which makes the holiday season so enchanting are the tales Santa and his reindeer, making that impossible trip on Christmas Eve to deliver presents and cheer to wide-eyed younglings around the world. In 2020, Government has sought to muscle-in on the marketplace of myths with a competing set of fables of its own, suitable for adults and children alike.
Ever since March, the Government, in conjunction with its media partners, has erected a god-inspiring pandemic PR machine which is now in full-spin mode over the holiday season, with politicians continuing to ply the public with new weekly plot twists. and harrowing stories of ‘new strains’ of the no longer novel coronavirus – prompting bombastic calls to ‘Cancel Christmas‘ and throw the nation into a third lockdown. This, supposedly to save lives and to ‘protect the NHS.’
But how many of these claims by persons in positions of authority are true, and how many are contrived?
Just as when mum and dad have to break it to the kids that Santa is just a children’s fable, it’s high time we finally level with the public and reveal that underpinning this Christmas folly are nothing more than a fanciful woven basket of assumptions and myths. They are:
- ‘The ICUs are overrun, we’re running out of hospitals beds!’
- ‘A new mutant strain is on the loose, and it’s 70 percent more contagious!’
- The ‘R number’ is above one!
- ‘The real danger are asymptomatic spreaders!’
As it turns out, each of these widely-held assumptions are about as real as Santa, but in the absence of any noticeable adults in the room, this Christmas pantomime looks set to continue.
There is No Hospital Crisis
For months, the mainstream media have allowed government ministers like Matt Hancock and Jonathan Van-Tam to promulgate the idea that there’s a deadly pandemic which is still raging through the country, and that the number of COVID patients is approaching equal levels to the peak last April. We must lockdown now in order to Save the NHS™, or so the narrative goes. However, upon examination of the government’s own data sets, such hysterical claims favoured by tabloid headline writers and BBC anchors do not even remotely resemble reality. According to a recent report, the UK’s NHS data clearly shows that the country’s hospitals are in fact quieter than this time last year. Therefore, any suggestions by UK government ministers and officials that hospitals are ‘overrun by COVID patients’ is simply false. Some key data points from that report:
- Average intensive care ward occupancy down to 75 per cent from 84 per cent from the same time last year
- 15,465 people in hospital with Covid in England on Wednesday compared to 18,974 on worst day in spring
- But statistics suggest the health service is, overall, coping better with its workload than it did last winter
The Mail Online report goes on to state that, “statistics suggest the health service is, overall, coping better with its workload than it did last winter. A greater proportion of ward beds are free, intensive care units have more room and A&E departments aren’t yet turning ambulances away more often than usual – with the exception of a bad day at one NHS trust in the Midlands. And the occupancy figure does not take into account bolstered capacity at the mothballed Nightingale hospitals, which went unused after being built during the first wave in case wards were overrun with Covid, or the thousands of additional beds commandeered from the private sector for the same purpose.”
In other words, there is no ICU or hospital crisis in Britain – to suggest there ever was one is patently false. Yet, that very lie has been incessantly pushed by government officials and repeated by their loyal allied media machine. This bucket of cold water won’t stop the mainstream media and 77th Brigade trolls online from presenting an endless stream of emotive and anecdotal stories from supposed “frontline healthcare” combatants, all claiming the NHS is a war zone and we must all be good patriots and get behind the war effort, and honour the dead by doing our part; social distancing, masks, stay off the streets, and whenever possible try not to needlessly burden the NHS unless you are on death’s door, and so on. It all sounds eerily familiar.
The hospital bed myth is one of the main creaky pillars of Project Fear. That’s not to say it isn’t possible should a real pandemic might arrive on day and ‘rage’ through the population, but to date this simply hasn’t been the case. Anyone who has honestly and soberly reviewed the official data sets has known this since last spring.
The 70% Claim: More Dodgy Modeling
The next contrived claim which is driving government efforts to cancel Christmas is the latest sensational claim that there’s a new mutant strain of the Rona on the loose which is supposedly “70% more contagious,” and which is ripping through the unsuspecting villages and hamlets in south of England as we speak. Common sense would dictate that officials could not have possibly been able to verify such a claim in the span of only a few week, an obvious point which media mavens haven’t managed to challenge the government’s science star chamber on yet. Yet, on the back of this widely reported ‘scientific’ assumption, multiple European countries panicked and closed their borders to UK travelers. The insanity has also made it across the Atlantic, with lockdown-loving New York Governor Andrew Cuomo decreeing over the weekend that it was “reprehensible” and “grossly negligent” to allow any travelers from Britain to fly into his private fiefdom at New York’s JFK Airport without being tested for coronavirus. Cuomo, well-accustomed to grandstanding over COVID, stated, “Right now, this variant in the UK is getting on a plane and flying to JFK.”
Cooler heads have already urged Prime Minister Boris Johnson to please publish the actual evidence in the government’s data which justifies canceling Christmas and New Years festivities. Thus far he hasn’t done so. And its little surprise why: the government has no such data. Renowned epidemiologist Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford University, has raised serious doubts over the government’s “70%” claim.
“I’ve been doing this job for 25 years and I can tell you can’t establish a quantifiable number in such a short time frame,” said Heneghan. “They are fitting the data to the evidence. They see cases rising and they are looking for evidence to explain it.”
“It has massive implications, it’s causing fear and panic, but we should not be in this situation when the Government is putting out data that is unquantifiable,” he added.
Of course, Heneghan is right this time, and the Government-Media Complex are wrong. That’s been the story throughout.
As it turns out, the source of government’s latest wild “70%” claims may have come from some of the usual suspects already implicated as bad actors in this entire pandemic debacle. Incredibly, one of those characters is none other than Professor Neil Ferguson, author of the original science fiction modelling which helped to drive both the UK and US governments into lockdown back in March. Even after that epic failure, the Government has kept Ferguson on the payroll, allowing him to pollute their NERVTAG (New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group) committee with his malign influence. The latest exotic guesswork behind the “70% more transmissible” claim seems to be the result of more dodgy computer-modelling claims. More viral WMDs. Naturally, this low hanging fruit was seized upon by Chris Whitty, the government’s in-house corporate pharmaceutical sales rep who moonlights as Chief Medical Officer, who brought it straight to the attention of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Columnist Peter Hitchens pointed to this very phenomenon in a recent interview, describing this pseudo-scientific folly as that of a “government is obsessed with a crisis more or less invented out of statistics.”
The Illusive “R number”
Since the crisis began, Government science advisors at SAGE have invented a number of arbitrary mechanisms which politicians have been cherry-picking from in order to justify their own ‘raging pandemic’ narratives. One of those is the ever-illusive “R number” – something which did not actually exist in real science until Government fashioned it together in March 2020, but which is meant to resemble the concept R-0 (R naught) which is meant to represent a theoretical ‘reproduction’ or transmission rate at large among the populace. The reason the government has reinvented this metric is so that it can be applied theoretically and arbitrarily at will in order to generate the result which its technocrats want. Note the loose sliding scale being applied as stated in the Daily Mail this week:
“In more confirmation that No10 is struggling to keep a lid on the epidemic, SAGE today claimed Britain’s Covid-19 reproduction ‘R’ rate is now definitely above one again. The R is the average number of people each Covid patient infects and when it’s above one it means cases are growing exponentially.”
In reality, there is no way the government can actually measure their “R number” accurately and in real time, but the media seem disinterested in taking them to task on this bit of scientism. When government claims that, “when it’s above one it means cases are growing exponentially” – know that they are flat-out lying. This in no way predicts exponential growth. Any epidemiologist who is not on the government’s payroll will tell you that this notion is pure pseudo-science. Firstly, these tall tales of eternal geometric growth of the virus ignore the prevalence-suppressing realities of herd immunity and T-cell immunity, not to mention the fact that when the virus mutates it tends to get weaker, not stronger.
What they also aren’t telling you is the real cornerstone holding up this entire facade, namely that the majority of the data government is relying on to generate their theoretic “R number” is coming from the highly problematic PCR Test – which means their “R number” is not worth the paper its written on. Writer Jeffrey Peel explains the nub of the issue in his recent piece, explaining that, “the PCR test is a duff test. I’m not going to re-hash a huge volume of work and back catalogue of research. There are a lot of resources on www.pcrclaims.co.uk that justify the view that the testing is creating a false narrative of “cases” – when they are, in fact, simply false positives. The PCR test produces large volumes of false positives simply because it is not fit for purpose for testing large populations of asymptomatic people.”
The Myth of Asymptomatic Spreader
Similarly, claims of a “new more infectious mutant strain of coronavirus” are being used to advance the myth of the ‘asymptomatic spreader.’ This is no trivial item either – the myth of the invisible “asymptomatic super-spreader” phantom menace is the cornerstone of every single reactionary pandemic policy of 2020; mass testing, contact-tracing, lockdowns, social distancing, masks, school closures, and vaccines – are all predicated on the widely held false claim of the ‘asymptomatic spreader.’ The data clearly demonstrates that this was a monumental lie from the very beginning of the COVID crisis.
To date, the most state-of-the-art science on asymptomatic spreading actually comes from Wuhan in China, where 300 subjects were followed and monitored over the entirety of their incubation period only to find almost zero cases of asymptomatic spreading. In fact, globally authorities can only only point to six cases of possible asymptomatic spreading, as reported by Lockdown Skeptics:
“The existence of transmission of SCoV2 from asymptomatic individuals has become an accepted truth but…examination of the underlying data from the most frequently-cited reveals that the conclusions are based on a surprisingly small number of cases (six in total globally).”
Just to reiterate, that means all of these supposed mitigation policies being pursued by hypochondria-inspired governments should be null and void.
Now after all that, you’re probably thinking – if it’s not a raging pandemic, then what is it? The answer is pretty unremarkable, and might disappoint some folks: it’s just another winter, like the last one, and the one before that. It should be anyway, but the Government and Media have another parallel reality they are forever constructing.
This entire pandemic drama has been a case of one lie piled on top of another, and another, and another. Rather than admit they got it completely wrong, Government operatives have instead doubled-down. But these craven efforts still won’t save them from the reality that their entire contrived COVID crisis is one giant house of cards which has already collapsed, only the majority of the mainstream media gatekeepers haven’t realised it yet.
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Author Patrick Henningsen is an American writer and global affairs analyst and founder of independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire, and is host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR). He has written for a number of international publications and has done extensive on-the-ground reporting in the Middle East including work in Syria and Iraq. See his archive here.
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