{"id":224464,"date":"2021-01-05T07:42:26","date_gmt":"2021-01-05T07:42:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=224464"},"modified":"2021-01-07T06:34:49","modified_gmt":"2021-01-07T06:34:49","slug":"guess-where-professor-lockdown-got-his-ideas-chinas-police-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=224464","title":{"rendered":"Guess where Professor Lockdown got his ideas … China\u2019s police state"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Hitchens \u2013 Daily Mail 2, 2021<\/strong><\/h1>\n

One of the strangest things about our recent national madness has been the role of Professor Neil Ferguson, the physicist who has somehow come to dominate Johnson\u2019s Covid policy.<\/p>\n

Physicist? Yes, that is his main academic discipline. He doesn\u2019t even have a Biology O-level, as he himself cheerfully admits. But that\u2019s no odder than his repeated record of wild predictions of vast numbers of deaths, for a variety of diseases from foot-and-mouth to mad cow, which can kindly be described as exaggerated.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s his complicated private life, which resulted in a pretty clear breach of the miserable restrictions he had helped to impose on the rest of us. As with all such cases, I don\u2019t blame him for breaking the stupid rules. I despise him as a hypocrite for supporting them and then thinking they didn\u2019t apply to him.<\/p>\n

Matt Hancock<\/strong><\/a>, the Health Secretary, said at the time that it was \u2018just not possible\u2019 for Ferguson to continue advising the Government. But this was not true. The professor was said to have resigned from the SAGE<\/strong><\/a> advisory committee. But did he? Not really. A current State website lists him as a member of the \u2018New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group\u2019 (NERVTAG). Minutes suggest he was only ever away from that for a few weeks. But this is small potatoes, set beside an amazing admission by Ferguson in a recent interview with the semi-official newspaper The Times. Here, Ferguson spoke of SAGE\u2019s growing admiration for China<\/strong><\/a>\u2019s tyrannical attempts to contain Covid.<\/p>\n

To begin with they thought \u2013 with good reason \u2013 that the dishonest and repressive Chinese state was covering up the truth about the Wuhan outbreak. I am sure they still are covering it up.<\/p>\n

Last week, after a \u2018trial\u2019 of a few hours, Zhang Zhan, 37, a Chinese former lawyer and citizen journalist, was sentenced to four years in prison. She was originally arrested in Wuhan in May for \u2018picking quarrels and provoking trouble\u2019 \u2013 a non-crime often alleged against dissidents in China. Then she was charged with \u2018disseminating false information\u2019 about Wuhan.<\/p>\n

She went on hunger strike against her treatment. But this was China, not a free country. Her lawyer says (and I don\u2019t doubt it) that she had a feeding tube forcibly inserted and her arms restrained to stop her pulling it out. Those who managed to see her in the courtroom before she was condemned and sent off to Peking\u2019s Gulag say she appeared there in a wheelchair, her hair cropped.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Professor Neil Ferguson. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

Modern China is a horrible place, cruel, ruthless and unembarrassed. But for some reason SAGE came to like Peking\u2019s Covid strategy. Ferguson told The Times that \u2018as the data accrued it became clear it was an effective policy\u2019.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d be interested to know how the SAGE geniuses evaluated data from this police state, which lacks a free press or independent universities. But there.<\/p>\n

Even so, they hesitated. As Ferguson says: \u2018It\u2019s a Communist one-party state, we said. We couldn\u2019t get away with it in Europe, we thought.\u2019<\/p>\n

Aren\u2019t those words \u2018we couldn\u2019t get away with it\u2019 interesting? Is this the way in which public servants in a free country think of the normal limits on what they can do? I can only hope not.<\/p>\n

But Ferguson and his friends then saw what happened in Italy, where a formerly free country reached for the weapons of repression and mass house arrest. And the rule of fear was so great that they got away with it. So we were next. Or, as Ferguson puts it: \u2018And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.\u2019<\/p>\n

They could. But they did not have to. They chose the Chinese way. And so they \u2018got away with\u2019 beginning a disaster which still continues. There is still no evidence that any of this Chinese-inspired repression has worked.<\/p>\n

Every country that has locked down has failed to control the disease and keeps doing the same thing over and over again in the hope of getting a different result.<\/p>\n

If lockdown is an effective policy, then the guillotine is a good cure for a headache (except that the guillotine probably does cure a headache).<\/p>\n

The shame of it is that the lockdown fanatics did \u2018get away with it\u2019, and continue to do so. That is, quite simply, because most of the responsible people in our society did not stand up for wisdom and freedom but allowed themselves to be swept away in a flood of State-sponsored fear, like so many pawns.<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The repressive Chinese police state served as an inspiration for the British government\u2019s chief scientific advisor on Covid-19 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":224466,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78,61,105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-china","category-Commentary","category-coronavirus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=224464"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":224468,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224464\/revisions\/224468"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/224466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=224464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=224464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=224464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}