Herd Immunity in the UK: Counting the Cost
We’ve been bamboozled by the Covid skeptics into thinking we’ve been “locked down” in the UK, which is untrue.
The chaos we’ve been experiencing, rather, is a function of a World beating performance in a lightly concealed Herd Immunity policy by the UK government.
If I was designing and implementing a policy of Herd Immunity then how things have been run over the past six months in the UK is how it would actually look.
We’ve seen the emails in which the government’s chief medical officer Whitty very diplomatically explains that when the minister quoted in the Times as saying Whitty had discussed herd immunity in January with them, he (Whitty) was simply replying to a question by that minister
The Times quoted multiple sources that witnessed government adviser Mr Cummings telling a “room” at a “private event” in late February that UK government policy was
“herd immunity. Protect the economy. If a few pensioners die. Too bad.”
On 27th February 2020 the UK Government’s official Covid scientific committee SAGE’s subcommittee of epidemiology modelers SPI-M (consensus view of the best modelers in the U.K.) advises govt that unless “stringent measures” are taken 250–600k people will die (80% of UK population gets virus and 1% of those die):
On 4th March 2020 Govt inexplicably (inexplicable, a. because govt had just been advised by SPI-M (after its March 2nd meeting) expect 250–600k deaths and b. if govt knew this, and it knew it wasn’t gonna take “stringent measures” why did it say: expect 100k deaths?) writes to local authorities all over the UK saying “expect 100k deaths”.
On 13th March, outside the SAGE framework, the so-called “Imperial Model” predicts, without stringent measures “250–650k” deaths. Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, a member of SPI-M and SAGE, with an astute and adroit media campaign, alerts the public to what the government has known since 27th February.
The government on March 13th publicly disowns the idea of herd immunity, yet takes none of the recommended “stringent measures” to halt the virus’s circulation. For TEN DAYS.
The first use of Herd Immunity in the media was by the head of the government’s behavioural insight team on 11th March 2020:
He said: “There’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows as it will do, where you want to cocoon, to protect those at-risk groups so they don’t catch the disease.
“By the time they come out of their cocooning, herd immunity has been achieved in the rest of the population.”
SAGE minutes note on March 13th that testing for Covid in the community ended in March 13th, “in order to prioritize testing for patients being admitted to Intensive Care Units”.
Over ten thousand hospital patients in acute care were sent to care homes without being tested for Covid.
Care homes for older people were financially induced to accept these entrants.
At least 15,000 older people in care homes died of Covid after this catastrophic decision that inexorably led to more than a few pensioners dying: care homes seeded further infection clusters all over the country, in every community.
Many care home workers without adequate PPE or pay worked in multiple care homes.
This was one of the single worst decisions in British political history (unless the government intended to herd immunity its population. In which case, it was a great decision that was aligned with the policy goal):
ZERO “stringent measures” are actually decided upon between 27th February and 23rd March 2020.
23 days after the Government’s own scientific advisory committee advises it that 600,000 people may die, while 80% of the UK population might get the virus, the government finally takes some action.
In the interim period, the PM’s fiancée’s baby shower reportedly took place, as did a Stereophonics concert in Wales and the Cheltenham horse racing festival, involving tens of thousands of people criss-crossing the UK and its borders.
The Prime minister’s adviser Mr Cummings visits Barnard Castle causing a huge furore thus proving there was NO lockdown, just a heap of culturally imposed “restrictions” fused with mixed messaging by the govt.
An Italian minister is quoted by Channel 4 as saying Johnson told the Italian Prime Minister on March 13th 2020 that the Uk’s policy was herd immunity.
“…Channel 4 heard from Italian health minister Pierpaolo Sileri who said Boris Johnson told the Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte in a call on March 13 that he wanted herd immunity in the UK…”
There is a non-enforced non-lockdown (that many people erroneously characterize as a lockdown).
Instead of bulking up localised existing systems for helping contain outbreaks of Hep A, B, C, HIV, et al in which everyone, as in Germany, is helped by personal contacts on a local level understand what having the disease means how to isolate etc a £10b contract given to private entity licensed to use NHS brand. It’s led by the wife of a Conservative Party MP who has NO experience in setting up, from scratch, a system to handle testing and advising millions of people with a novel and deadly virus.
Four months later the system which never got going properly has collapsed.
So the failure of this new system instead of using existing system to return more than 10% of tests within 24 hours — which is basically the foundation stone of a system to prevent a second wave we’re now going through- is the result of an ideological choice not to trust the NHS or a desire to reward political allies or the result of a conscious policy to let the virus rip through a trusting and unsuspecting population.
We’re either dying to enrich the private sector, at the cost of thousands of lives or we’re trying to fail.
Is it competence at a failed herd immunity strategy or incompetence at failing to develop herd immunity?
Your call.
Hardly any assistance is given to school children and teachers to create a system which is adequate for remote learning.
A level results fiasco.
Schools return rhetorically prioritized but nothing else is aligned to this goal: people bullied to return to office at the same time, restaurants which are proven hotbeds of cross infectivity, are incentivized and a population which trusts its government goes out to eat “to help out (the virus)”.
Rule of Six.
Health minister attempts to shame people who are asymptomatic or presymptomatic from seeking tests.
Whereas, everyone who wants a test should be being tested again and again. Schools given, like, five tests each and results take weeks to come back.
That’s what I mean by not aligning everything with the promoted prioritization of schools returning.
Now by late September actual empirical research has tested the blood of 130k people in a ten day period (the mind boggles at how Imperial did this -hats off to them):
6% have antibodies.
65,000 excess deaths:
“Direct COVID-19 deaths account for the majority of all excess deaths; approximately 65,000 excess deaths are estimated as a result of contracting COVID-19 between March 2020 and March 2021.”
56,000 people have actual Covid on their death certificates.
So if a government set out to have a herd immunity policy, what would it look like?
If it was shy about admitting to an unconvinced public that it was zen about tens of thousands of them dying, how would it conceal its true aim?
Well, it could do no worse than follow precisely the same choreography of missteps as outlined above.
Let’s call it: thinly veiled cack-handedly implemented Herd Immunity — -++ policy.
The immorality of such a policy in the first place is astonishing.
The incompetence/competence (you choose which) of setting out to implement such a policy in late January but doing nothing to protect older people, source ppe, prepare schools, or the economy is amazing.
The government and its spokespeople as well as its disinformation operations will encourage us to become confused about what exactly went wrong.
But remember the quote of Mr Cummings in the Times above that the policy was to
“… PROTECT the economy”?
How’s that working out for ye?
The cherry on the cake is that none of this brains trust that decided to let the disease rip through the population apparently even thought for one second about the economic consequences in January or February.
They appear to have thought herd immunity would happen in a vacuum and if a few pensioners died, so what?
Why would that matter to the economy?
It’s perhaps worth noting that the institute at University of Chicago in the name of Milton Freedman, the hero of laissez-faire capitalists, even calculated it was cheaper to keep people alive than to herd immunity them.
Imagine: the UK government could have behaved morally and saved money?! That would have been a win-win: 65,000 people get to stay alive. And the government finances stay in good health too:
Since embarking on its herd immunity policy, the UK has unexpectedly borrowed £174b and it is expected it will borrow a further £200b in previously non forecast sums:
And it has printed electronically £300b in cash:
£200b was printed on 19th March, while PM Johnson was still prevaricating about whether or not to temper the herd immunity policy his government was following, with a bit of window dressing:
That £200b was used to buy corporate bonds.
Then in June 2020, another £100b was printed, taking the total for the amount of so-called quantitative easing to £745b:
So let’s count the cost of the government’s off- and on- Schrödinger’s cat herd immunity policy:
65,000 dead.
I means it’s a world-beating performance.
That’s for sure.
Now, in September 2020, allowing 1.2m university students to criss-cross the country and do what those of us lucky enough to have gone to uni have always done in our present-Covid time when remote learning is technically feasible is another piece of evidence that either, even though the government’s herd inmunitying of us so far has yielded 6% with potential immunity for potentially a certain period of time at the cost of 65,000 people DEAD, it’s still persisting in what is substantively the worst of three worlds:
Failing herd immunity policy.
Worst economic performance since the fall of Rome.
And more people dead than practically anywhere in the Milky Way.
Now that’s what I call world beating.
The Story of the UK’s “100,000 Deaths Is Ok” Covid Strategy
