Here’s an odd one.
INnthe USA the Democratic Party are demanding that, with an apparent lead of 3.3% over the incumbent president, Mr Trump should do the decent thing and give up the fight.
I do hope that they will be similarly minded in pushing for the result in the UK EU referendum, which was won by a margin of 3.8%, to be respected by their presidential candidate, Mr Biden. And the EU.
My wider family have recently been seeking to purchase a new home. Buying a new home is one of life’s great joys. But it is also one of its great stress points, new job, marriage, and death being the other ones.
However, when the finish line is in sight, there is a warm feeling. Almost there. 99.9% certain we will get it over the line. And emotionally that is a big high. But as our common sense keeps reminding us, it is not a deal till the papers are signed. And so it was for us. Going through the fine print, there it was a problem. A big problem that was big enough to have to walk away from. But even though emotionally we want to be over the line, rationally we know we must not simply trust someone’s word, or our emotions, that it will be all right. We know that there is only thing that matters. A legal document. A document that may end up one day in a court.
Which brings me to ask you an odd question. If I were to offer you a gun and tell you that I was only 99.9% certain that it was not loaded, then invited you to point the said gun at yourself and pull the trigger, would you? If like me you would decline the trigger pulling opportunity, you may be also amazed by the number of highly intelligent, otherwise independent, and level headed people who have decided that 99.9% is 100%.
I am of course alluding to the presidential election in the USA. Has Biden won? I suspect he has. And all the best to him if he has. The numbers are certainly going that way.
Has the result been 100% proved? No, it hasn’t. Some polls are being contested.
Now of course those doing the contesting may being nothing more than mischievous. Seeking to undermine the democratic vote. But the reality is, main stream media has, almost without exception, decided that 99.9% is good enough for them.
99.9% equals 100%. It is a Biden victory. Say it often enough and people will start to believe it. And at the extremes, that can have terrible consequences.
We have all
have read about, or even participated in, the experiment where everyone in a
room says one thing about an incident they witnessed. But you know you saw it with our own eyes totally differently. But as the experiment shows, when up against it,
most people accept the narrative of everyone else in the room, even though they
know it is wrong. You go with the flow, the path of least resistance. And the MSM (the people in the room) narative says 99.9% equals 100%. Say it often enough and people accept it.
Surely, rather than saying Trump is a bad loser and he should concede, the press in a democratic nation should be encouraging Trump to put any evidence before a court. There he will be humiliated beyond measure. Or it be found to be the 0.1% who was right.
What’s happening? And why? Who's figures are right? And who's are wrong? Is it that simple?
Let’s start with the data from the Cambridge statistical unit that the Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir Patrick Vallance, relied on.
- The data was three weeks out of date. More recent data from the same unit is less apocalyptic. So why didn’t he use that?
- The PHE/Cambridge model predicted 1,000 people a day would die by November 1st. They’re not. Therefore the model is invalid.
- Prof Tim Spector’s KCL data is showing infections are “flatlining across the board”.
- The Government has focused too much on worst case scenarios.
- Government policy isn’t guided by the evidence; rather, it is massaging the evidence to justify the policy.
- The Government is ignoring the costs of lockdowns, both economically and in terms of non-Covid deaths.
- The PCR test identifies people as “positive” if they’ve had the virus three or four weeks ago and are no longer infectious.
- If we go into a second lockdown, what’s the exit strategy? In Cornwall, for instance, there are only about 40 cases/day (out of a population of ~566,000), yet Cornwall is being forced to go into lockdown. So how low do case numbers have to be before we can come out of the lockdown?
- Yes, the NHS is running at about 90-95% capacity, but that’s normal for this time of year. Why the panic?
Not my words but those of Prof Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidenced Based Medicine at University of Oxford.
“Next slide please”. There were a number of very scary graphs painted in angry colours with illegible axis scales put up by Sir PatrickVallance FRS FMedSci FRCP is Government Chief Scientific Adviser and Head of the Government Science and Engineering, on Saturday night. (Actually, you can read them on the web site, just. The words show these are not forecasts or projections. Just scenarios!.)
At face value they show that things are getting worse in a very scary way. Extrapolating the curve we can see that everyone will have died at least twice by end of the tax year. So, at last, we really can spend a year dead for tax reasons!!!
What I find quite remarkable is that the official Opposition are suggesting they will back the government. If they do, they will be equally culpable for the disaster ahead. They should join the Conservative MPs that are threatening to vote against the legislation unless the Government comes up with something that is a whole lot better than what they have so far fed us in what can, not unreasonably, be described as a dodgy dossier.
It certainly doesn’t pass the smell test. On Saturday, Public Health England reported 278 new Covid deaths in England. The average number of deaths for the past seven days is 214, up 50 per cent on the week before.
If deaths kept on rising at that rate then, yes, you would get to 4,000 deaths a day in December.
However, a better guide to future deaths is the figures for new infections, which, of course, tend to lead the death figures. Over the past seven days PHE has recorded an average of 22,521 new cases a day – which was a six per cent increase on the week before. If deaths follow the trajectory of new infections – as surely they must, unless Covid-19 suddenly mutates into a vastly more deadly form – they will be nowhere near 1,000 a day by Christmas, let alone 4,000.
The figures stink.
I just hope there is not another David Kelly “suicide” when someone blows the whistle.
