Peter Hitchens — Daily Mail Feb 13, 2021
Supporters of strangling the country always demand ‘What would you have done?’ if I dare to criticise the Government’s wild, unprecedented policy for dealing with Covid.
They assume, as backers of crazy policies always do, that there is no alternative to mass house arrest, enormous police powers, Maoist travel bans and the crippling of large parts of the economy.
Well, there is an alternative. Sitting in the Government archives is a 70-page document called UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011. Don’t be put off by that ‘influenza’. The plan could easily be adapted to deal with a coronavirus or any similar threat.
Agreed by all four governments of the UK, it was revised after the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. It is typical of careful, commonsense UK state planning before the hysteria outbreak of March 23, 2020.
But it was ditched in a moment of madness. As the noted Government adviser Neil Ferguson explained, the spectacle of a health crisis in Italy persuaded British authorities to follow the Chinese model instead.
He described how Sage, the Government’s scientific advisory group, had watched as China’s despots embarked on an unheard-of form of disease control by shutting down an entire province.
‘They claimed to have flattened the curve. I was sceptical at first. I thought it was a massive cover-up by the Chinese. But as the data accrued, it became clear it was an effective policy.’
Then, observing the crisis in Italy, Sage asked itself whether such ferocious methods could be applied here.
‘It’s a Communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’
What he meant by ‘get away with it’, I am not quite sure. But the document, which can be found on the internet, to which I provide a link on the Peter Hitchens Blog and on my Twitter feed @ClarkeMicah, has many interesting things to say.
It is very concerned with maintaining freedom and keeping society open, listing as objectives: ‘Minimise the potential impact of a pandemic on society and the economy by: Supporting the continuity of essential services, including the supply of medicines and protecting critical national infrastructure as far as possible. Supporting the continuation of everyday activities as far as practicable. Upholding the rule of law and the democratic process. Preparing to cope with the possibility of significant numbers of additional deaths. Promoting a return to normality and the restoration of disrupted services at the earliest opportunity.’ It stresses ‘Proportionality: the response to a pandemic should be no more and no less than that necessary in relation to the known risks.’
It relies on centuries of experience and good practice, planning to quarantine the sick rather than the healthy. It recommends simple hygiene. It supports school closures in some circumstances but this is because influenza seriously affects the young and is known to be spread through schools.
And it has interesting things to say about masks: ‘Although there is a perception that the wearing of facemasks by the public in the community and household setting may be beneficial, there is in fact very little evidence of widespread benefit from their use in this setting.’
On the closing of borders and restricting travel, it says: ‘Modelling suggests imposing a 90 per cent restriction on all air travel to the UK at the point a pandemic emerges would only delay the peak of a pandemic wave by one to two weeks. Even a 99.9 per cent travel restriction might delay a pandemic wave by only two months.
‘During 2009 it became clear the pandemic virus had already spread widely before international authorities were alerted, suggesting that in any case the point of pandemic emergence had been missed by several weeks. The economic, political and social consequences of border closures would also be very substantial.’
On the banning of public gatherings, it says: ‘There is very limited evidence that restrictions on mass gatherings will have any significant effect on influenza virus transmission. Large public gatherings or crowded events where people may be in close proximity are an important indicator of “normality” and may help maintain public morale during a pandemic.’
It adds: ‘There is also a lack of scientific evidence on the impact of internal travel restrictions on transmission, and attempts to impose such restrictions would have wide-reaching implications for business and welfare. For these reasons, the working presumption will be that Government will not impose any such restrictions. The emphasis will instead be on encouraging all those who have symptoms to follow the advice to stay at home and avoid spreading their illness.’
These thoughtful plans existed and were over-ridden. Instead we copied the Chinese police state which silences dissent, imprisons ethnic minorities in tyrannical labour camps and has recently insulted us by vaporising the freedoms we left behind in Hong Kong and which it promised to maintain at least until 2047.
There was an alternative. There still is. It can hardly be claimed that the repressive panic policy which we have followed has been a great success.
Thank you. I waited long for something sensible.
Yes of course plans were put in place….and ignored by despotic politicians and even more despotic MEDIA..
It’s the media and social networks that caused the hysterical response.
They MUST be brought to book…. ALL of them.
And the vaccination saga must be examined minutely… corruption and greed involved in this…. taxpayers money.
Here in South Africa the President is involved in a bribery scandal involving one of those companies supplying Europe and Britain with vaccines. They should be frozen and the vaccine put on hold pending the results of an independent inquiry…
Er… it should not include company representatives.
I read this Daily Fail headline the other day & just raised my eyebrows. I don’t know where Hitchens gets his ideas from… IF we take Hitchens title as red, the plan was: ‘We won’t close our borders because it won’t stop the virus, we won’t stop the planes from flying because it won’t stop the virus. There’s little evidence that masks stop the virus’. & so on, this was the regime’s plan. Irrespective of that plan changing by the day or week. The plan was to let Covid spread as far and wide as possible.
The thing is, this Covid bioweapon wouldn’t have worked if they had done the most obvious plan, so the plan & plan B, & plan C were all part of ‘the plan’. If they bring in their Covid passports, will they stop the sheeple traveling next Autumn? By then, MI6 might have released their next bioweapon…
@Carl Jones
a short clip from an NBC report on 2021 January 23 in which China’s Chief epidemiologist, Dr. Wu Zunyou, says: “They didn’t isolate the virus, and that is the problem.”
Sourcehttps://redpilluniversity.org/2021/02/14/chinas-chief-epidemiologist-admits-covid-19-was-never-proven-to-exist/
Recently the government announced the possible easing of lockdowns in March by allowing people to meet in parks, and yesterday it said grandparents may be allowed to meet grandchildren again (even though this contradicts their own guidelines, because if elders have had the jab and youngsters haven’t wouldn’t that mean the old endanger the young?) I think this may signal a pullback, because the elite know not enough people are buying their nonsense. But they can’t admit that, so instead have to say the threat is easing, or the science says we’ve nearly won etc.
The tide may be turning. They’ll have information denied to us as there are few places we can comment and measure the real situation like they can, but maybe to maintain power and not lose their heads in a revolt they’ll behave as though Covid is nearly beaten and we can try for some normality again.
The plan? The plan was to invent a hoax virus & then use it as a pretext to increase their Judeo-TechnoCommunist control over the white goyim..
“Sage” is all BS and propaganda, like the government advisory agencies everywhere these days. Once you realize that we are the enemy you have no alternative but to think of refuge in some nation not so oppressive, or some way to overthrow the evil establishment running things. Absolute nothing remains now in between. It is a joke that Sage modeled their measure on what the Chinese did. Any common sense advisor should have instantly twigged as early as January 2020 that the Chinese footage from December 2019 was hilariously and obviously fake. There was no correlation as to what was happening in South Korea in January. That is what very early in the day many of us ordinary people with no axe to grind were considering that massive scam was in the works. We distinctly recall from that earlier Chinese footage of even young men falling over allegedly dead, as they walked down the street. No one asked in the advisory group, how someone could be waiting with their phone filming a perfectly healthy man walking on the street and then suddenly keeling over just coincidentally right in front of the person filming. Then there was footage of police pushing a crowds of people into buildings and locking the doors from the outside, saying they were being “quarantined”. In January cell phone footage was leaked onto the internet from spectators watching the crowd and police performances, and in one of the videos you could hear in Mandarin people yelling from windows in the surrounding buildings, “Fake News.” Then of course was the close-up fake news footage which the conscientious advisory group no doubt blithely relied upon, where two men in hospital scrubs in a Wuhan hospital ER talking, and one of them says in a loud voice for the camera that he is tired of going outside and picking up dead bodies and that he is just not going to do it anymore.
People in Britain now seem to be more complacent and brainwashed believing all of the government fakery on the virus variations despite the inability of their government agencies to properly verify actual death and case numbers apart from all of their manipulations and fakeries. The British government as well as that of every other banking cartel-run nation have made and continue to make every effort to maintain the Covid scare, the public restrictions, and their overall PR escape hatch for the end of the day, if needed to say that in exercising an abundance of precaution they perhaps may have gone just a little bit too far, but that, nevertheless, they did their best. Of course, it is all deception and hypocrisy, because all the present unnecessary and crippling extraordinary measures, far exceeding the planned “reasonable” measures Hitchens alludes to, for a real pandemic, were never even considered, simply because the Covid pandemic was never a real one. To go back and deny the evidence of all of the experts from Dr. Wodarg in early March and on, showing that the seriousness of this particular Covid flu virus warranted absolutely no extraordinary measures other than some special efforts for the nearly dead, is not cricket, and why it is not is because none of the evidence of the independent experts has been rebutted, and also the restrictive measures of the government hacks everywhere are directly a result of their of a planned pandemic and have been totally sustained only by their own corrupted evidence and inflated numbers.
Before giving anything away, to the dishonest asses running things, like saying they could have exercised more reasonable measures to contain the alleged “pandemic’ (the definition of which they changed in around 2009 to mean anything they wanted it to mean), they have to prove and properly demonstrate the actual degree of the risk apart from the death and case numbers and panic without refence to the numbers they deliberately generated in the beginning. However, even in relying on their own numbers, clearly there was no need for any of the restrictions. They will never be able to do that, nor do they intend to do that because their intentions are that the control measures and restrictions are to be permanent.
If this present band of globalist thieves keep running things, the next thing they will do is shut down the internet, both for their financial and UN “Rests”, and to suppress all free speech and opposition. The faked death and case numbers induced by relatively large IMF and World bank payouts, will no longer be relevant for any anything, because no one will every hear about them.
I sometimes disagree with Nico X, but his comment (February 15, 2021 at 4:37 pm ) sums it up perfectly. I also agree with Mark Borah when he says “It’s the media and social networks that caused the hysterical response”.
The entire “germ theory” was fraudulent from it’s inception as an updated version of the “evil spirits” theory of disease, which was subsequently revived as “virus theory”, always maintaining the LIE that we are under attack by an INVISIBLE enemy.
Bozo the Downing Street monkey (Alexander Bey, also known as Boris Johnson) used those exact words in his fearmongering.
Bozo – another eugenicist like Gates – almost certainly knows as well as any of us on here that there never was, and never can be, a “virus” capable of infecting Humans.
One final point. Why are there so many foreign-born jews in what is supposed to be “our” government?