The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Narrative in Retreat BY   RAMESH THAKUR   The  Lockdown Files  have dished up a curious exchange among Britain’s top policy advisers in early 2020. On February 29th, responding to a WhatsApp message from Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Chief Adviser Dominic Cummings that Israeli scientists were just weeks away from developing a Covid vaccine and if this was credible, Chief Scientist Sir Patrick Vallance replied “Short answer is no”. Chief Medical Officer  Chris Whitty  explained: “For a disease with a low (for the sake of argument 1%) mortality a vaccine has to be very safe so the safety studies can’t be shortcut. So important for the long run.” England’s highest  mortality rate  was in April 2020 at 0.6%, falling to 0.55% in January 2021 and 0.04% by January 2023. Based on the original Phase 3 trial data,  Bart Classen  showed as early as August 2021: “Results prove that none of the vaccines provide a health benefit and all pivotal trials show a statically significant increase in

  A (Possibly Unpopular) Null Hypothesis Revisiting flawed assumptions H 0 : SARS-CoV-2 was nasty, but not unusually so, and certainly not particularly novel. The cure was worse than the disease. It is difficult to bottle up truths forever, and it will be instructive to see whether this hypothesis is still in the running when it comes to writing the definitive history of the Covid epoch.   For context, it is helpful to consider recent history, specifically the turn of the millennium: a time of great joy and celebration (and concerns about an altogether different bug that turned out to be a flop: the Y2K bug).  While we were nervously eyeing harmless computer glitches, a virulent respiratory disease epidemic brutally killed tens of thousands of people over and above the expected winter ‘baseline’: over 81,000 souls were wiped out in England & Wales over a five-week period from just before Christmas and through January 2000. This mortality spike can be clearly seen in the ONS  graphi