Christ has risen!

I wish all my Catholic and Protestant readers Happy Easter!

The Orthodox have a full month to wait this year.

The Jesus Seminar, a group of liberal, publicity hungry New Testament scholars who were very fashionable in the USA around the turn of the century, disbelieved most of the Gospels, thought Jesus never claimed to be the Son of God and his corpse was probably thrown into a shallow dirt grave, where it rotted away or was eaten by wild dogs.

In fact few non-Christian historians doubt the crucifixion happened (the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus records it) and that something happened very shortly afterwards to create a movement which swept the civilised world.

The non-Christian New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann said ‘It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.’

These experiences were also enough to lead Peter and Paul to suffer death rather than renounce their faith that Jesus had risen from the tomb and was the Son of God. Their martyrdom under Nero is not questioned by any historian, as far as I ever heard. Peter is said to have been crucified upside down at his request because he did not believe himself worthy of the same death as Jesus, but there is no evidence for this.

All of Western and much non-Western history begins with the resurrection, whether or not you believe it happened.

Talleyrand met a young man at a party who asked him for his advice about how to start a new religion. The renegade bishop turned pagan replied, 'First die and on the third day come again'.

“When the ‘Spanish Flu’ took over 50 million people in just two years, it didn’t scare people half as much as Covid-19"

“After more than 70 years of peace, at least in Europe and with growing prosperity, this crisis could not have hit us any more unprepared. When the ‘Spanish Flu’ took over 50 million people in just two years from 1918 to 1920, it didn’t scare people half as much as the COVID-19 pandemic does today, as far as I can see — without all the lockdowns and masks and vaccination debates.”

“...Was it perhaps because the peoples at that time were by and large more at home in religion, and its consolations and resilience? I don’t know. From my family history, I only know that in the generation of my grandparents, death was still perceived and accepted, in a certain way, simply as a ‘part of life.’”

Pope Benedict XVI's private secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, in a lecture online at the Sigmund Freud University in Vienna.

Douglas Murray, talking in The Strange Death of Europe, says 'Western Europeans have lost what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno famously called the “tragic sense of life.”' He was talking about the effects of mass immigration but also about the death of religious belief and the attempt to find substitutes for it. 

One of them is to put man firmly at the centre of the universe, as indeed he is if God does not exist. This carries the grave responsibility to do godlike things like control the climate and control viruses. 

It is odd, if you think about it, what things governments are expected to do, such as control viruses, take responsibility for human rights in Afghanistan and Burma, allow boys to become girls and vice versa, and things they are understood not to be able to do, such as close borders to illegal immigrants.

Had Charles married Marie Astrid he'd have spared himself and us a world of pain - and answered the Irish Question

I posted a very uncharitable attack on the egregious Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and intended to link to a very uncharitable and very just attack on her by the thrice blessed Douglas Murray, but I failed to do so. Here is the link to the article which appeared under the headline

Meghan Markle is a US culture-war missile aimed at the heart of Britain and Europe

In my post I said she is evil but so was the Duke's mother and almost all men marry their mothers.

I originally welcomed the match despite her being divorced, American and left-wing but my female Facebook friends all saw that she was a wrong 'un immediately and I saw it too in a while. She began at nine by writing a letter to a TV company complaining about an advert that showed a wife washing dishes and continued in her twenties complaining about being ogled.

The world must be peopled, ma'am.

I liked the fact that the duchess is mixed race, which seemed to strengthen the monarchy, but I should have kept to my opinion that princes should marry other princes. 

If only Charles had married Princess Marie-Astrid of Luxembourg, necessitating a change to the Act of Succession. I said this to Richard Overy at my admission interview for Cambridge when he asked me what is the answer to the Irish question. I said this would have led Paisley to take Northern Ireland out of the union. This was not something I desired to happen but he rewarded with with an open scholarship

Alas he had gone when I went up and I was left in the hands of an authority on mediaeval Burgundian numismatics.

What a world of pain the pretty blonde Marie-Astrid would have saved the Prince of Wales and England from. She would have conducted herself as she should, however the Prince behaved. And how nice to have Catholics on the throne again after so long.

Instead he married a godless Whig noblewoman with borderline personality disorder.

Belgium

Lord Curzon said that without India England would be a greater Belgium. A greater Belgium sounds to me very like modern Europe.

Julie Burchill said that in the 1970s Britain tried being Belgium and didn't like it.

Meghan and malignant narcissism

Douglas Murray beautifully expresses in this essay his very justified loathing and contempt for Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.

I foolishly was first hopeful about the Duke's marriage despite the Duchess being an American and a divorcee and left-wing. My female Facebook friends saw she was a bad'un from the off.

The Duchess of Sussex may be evil, a word I almost never use of anyone, but so was the Duke's mother. 

Men generally marry their mothers, unless they do not marry at all.

I recently had some unpleasant interaction with a malignant narcissist which made me read up on a subject I once knew lots

32 studies find no evidence that lockdowns reduce the numbers of deaths from Covid-19

The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) is an American free-market think tank with its office in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which has issued publications which portray the risks of climate change as minor and manageable. In October it issued the "Great Barrington Declaration" which argued against lockdowns and for a strategy of achieving herd immunity to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Despite being written by eminent epidemiologists it was scarcely reported.

The AIER has listed 31 scientific studies into the efficacy of lockdowns published last year and this which conclude that there is no evidence, surprisingly enough, that lockdowns reduce the numbers of deaths. 

What our rulers really think

I have tried for years to understand why Brexit makes many people so very angry. 

I know why it makes many Eastern Europeans angry. They want the European Union, a deus ex machina, to rescue them from history and from domination by Russia or Germany. Their natural elites were destroyed by the Bolsheviks. They want anything rather than rule by their own politicians.

Germans think: tie me down before I kill again. Meanwhile the EU enables them to rule Europe (in tandem with France) despite themselves.

France has been enabled by the EEC and then the EU to rule Europe for 64 years, a much longer time than Louis XIV or Napoleon managed. Without England speaking up for the small state and for the small states, France is even more powerful.

But why do so many English people and, even more oddly, Americans feel this way?

It's not about pragmatic reasons, obviously. 

Knut Wittkowski today

"That lockdowns cause more harm then good was well known since end of March (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.28.20036715v1). In the meantime, we have learned about two more side effects: (1) universal mitigation causes more COVID deaths, because it deprives the vulnerable of the advantage from self-isolation while the virus spreads among the young and healthy until HI is reached. (2) Epidemics that last more than 3 months (from "flattening the curve") incubate the resistant strains that cause the next epidemics, which started in Oct/Nov 2020."

Technology and the decline of the nation state

Most people nowadays no longer live in villages, towns or cities but on the internet. 

On the internet nations are an abstract idea.

Some states restrict internet use (China, Vietnam, Russia, countries in the Middle East and in the future the European Union) but only three that I know of (Turkmenistan, Cuba and North Korea) more or less ban it altogether. 

In the democratic countries so far the internet is not linked to territory. 

I could be writing these lines from Bucharest, Bukhara or Timbuktoo. In fact, I am writing this in Bodrum in Turkey. 

Distance has been abolished. Have nations?

Abolishing distance creates many problems. Only the naive imagined that this might not be so. 

People are happy now to work at home, not realising that if they can do their jobs remotely so can people in poorer countries for less money.

An Englishman in Bucharest can live there for decades, speak English at work, with his friends, in shops and restaurants, inform himself through English language sites on the internet and through English language television and never learn Romanian.

I know hundreds of such people.

Americans do the same in Paris.

So do many Arabs in London, perhaps attending a local Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosque, though not speaking English is much more limiting than only speaking English.

This state of affairs predates the internet, by the way. Major-General Richard Clutterbuck, the only sociologist I ever came across who was not left-wing, pointed out in the 1980s that because of satellite television and many other things there was no longer a culture in England to which immigrants could be hoped to assimilate.

It was also back in the 1980s that Steve Cohen, a leading English immigration lawyer and author of several books about racism "from a Marxist perspective", said that countries do not belong to the people living in them.

Yet not long ago the world was not globalised. From the first to the nineteenth century the Catholic Church was the only institution in the world that was universal. 

English writers talking about the Koran

Instead of a perpetual and perfect measure of the divine will, the fragments of the Koran were produced at the discretion of Mahomet; each revelation is suited to the emergencies of his policy or passion; and all contradiction is removed by the saving maxim, that any text of Scripture is abrogated or modified by any subsequent passage. The word of God, and of the apostle, was diligently recorded by his disciples on palm-leaves and the shoulder-bones of mutton; and the pages without order or connexion, were cast into a domestic chest in the custody of one of his wives.
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 50

Instead of inspiring the blessed inhabitants with a liberal taste for harmony and science, conversation and friendship, he [Mahomet] idly celebrates the pearls and diamonds, the robes of silk, palaces of marble, dishes of gold, rich wines, artificial dainties, numerous attendants, and the whole train of sensual and costly luxury, which becomes insipid to the owner, even in the short period of this mortal life. Seventy-two Houris, or black-eyed girls, of resplendent beauty, blooming youth, virgin purity, and exquisite sensibility, will be created for the use of the meanest believer; a moment of pleasure will be prolonged to a thousand years, and his faculties will be increased a hundred fold, to render him worthy of his felicity. Notwithstanding a vulgar prejudice, the gates of heaven will be open to both sexes, but Mahomet has not specified the male companions of the female elect, lest he should either alarm the jealousy of their former husbands, or disturb their felicity, by the suspicion of an everlasting marriage. 

Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 50

Quotations

Laura Kipnes

Sure, there have always been offended people, but those people used to be conservatives. Who cared if they were offended, that was the point. At some point offendability moved its offices to the hip side of town.

Laura Kipnis

By the time #MeToo hit, transgression’s sheen was already feeling pretty tarnished. #MeToo was about a lot of things and among them was a cultural referendum on the myth of male genius, which as thousands of first-person accounts have elaborated over the decades, is pretty frequently accompanied by sexual grabbiness and bad breath. Sexual transgressiveness has always been the perquisite of gross men in power, but there is also an added perk, which is that treating the boundaries of less powerful people as minor annoyances makes insecure men feel like creative geniuses, like artists and rock stars. Post #MeToo, the emblematic transgressor was starting to look less like Vito Acconci at Sonnabend and more like Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the Sofitel.

Margaret Thatcher on Today BBC Radio 4 6 June 1987.

‘The fundamental reason of being put on earth is so to improve your character that you are fit for the next world.'

Enoch Powell, Speech to the Royal Society of St George, on St George's Day, April 23rd 1961.

.
There was a saying, not heard today so often as formerly,


"What do they know of England who only England know?"

It is a saying which dates. It has a period aroma, like Kipling's "Recessional" or the state rooms at Osborne. That phase is ended, so plainly ended, that even the generation born at its zenith, for whom the realisation is the hardest, no longer deceive themselves as to the fact. That power and that glory have vanished, as surely, if not as tracelessly, as the imperial fleet from the waters of Spithead.

Ursula von der Leyen has “disgraced Europe”

'Die Zeit newspaper's Alan Posener said that “if the British were still EU citizens, they would be like us: instead of having vaccinations, simply waiting for Godot”. Der Spiegel said that the EU had attempted to secure the vaccines in a “hare-brained manner, as if it were a summer sale, a bargain hunt on a whim.” Peter Tiede of the daily Bild newspaper claimed that von der Leyen had “disgraced Europe”.

'Not everyone, however, shares these views. Ellen 't Hoen, is a lawyer and public health advocate at research group Medicines, Laws and Policy, and is former policy director for Médecins sans Frontières’ Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines. Speaking to The Lancet, she said people should be cautious before envying the UK's approach. “What is the UK going to gain if other countries in Europe don’t have the vaccine?"'

From an article in The Lancet on Saturday. The answer to Ellen t'Hoen's question is obvious. A schoolboy or girl of six could answer it. A much more interesting question is what does her question mean and what makes her ask it.

Rereading novels

Nabokov said as soon as you have finished a novel you should immediately reread it. I am sure he is right. But I find it almost impossible to read a book at all.

One night in the summer of 2015 I left my telephone in the office and my WiFi wasn’t working at home. I couldn’t get on the internet on desktop or tablets and so I managed 2 chapters of War and Peace.

War and Peace IS ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL, very readable indeed, undoubtedly the best novel I ever read, but I had started it in February to get ready for visiting Russia in May and didn't finish it for almost two years.

The only other book I read in 2015 was a 150 page book with big type by Lucian Boia, "Cum s-a romanizat Romania", which I picked up in a tent selling books while hanging around Vama Veche. I read it while waiting for a friend who was two or three hours late because my telephone was almost out of battery.

Of making many books there is no end and much study wearies the body (Ecclesiastes 12.12), but at least when you read a book you do come to an end. The problem with the internet is that you never reach an end to it. There’s always something else to click on.

Even the pandemic has not led me to read many books, though I read very many articles about Donald Trump.

Does anyone have any tips as to how to read these days? 

I have one. I have given up social media and reading the news and anything political for Lent. 

It sort of works but do I have the willpower to continue it after Lent?

Holidays help. I picked up, packed and read The End of the Affair by Graham Greene for the third time when I went away last summer. 

I was in tears as always, though I almost never cry. 

This reminds me of a Romanian femme fatale, who once asked me if Englishmen ever felt emotion. 

I replied yes, certainly, when we think about the Queen.

I find reading books exceptionally difficult

It’s incredibly important to reread. Nabokov said as soon as you have finished a novel you should reread it. But I find it almost impossible to read a book at all.

One night in the summer of 2015 I left my telephone in the office and my WiFi wasn’t working at home so I couldn’t get on the internet on desktop or tablets and so I managed 2 chapters of War and Peace.

War and Peace IS ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL, very readable indeed, but I had started it in February to get ready for visiting Russia on 1st May and didn't finish it for almost two years.

The only other book I read in 2015 was a 150 page book by Lucian Boia, "Cum s-a romanizat Romania", which I picked up in a tent selling books while hanging around Vama Veche waiting for a friend who was two hours late.

The problem with the internet is that unlike books you never reach an end to it. There’s always something else to click on.

Does anyone have any tips as to how to read these days? I have given up social media and reading the news for Lent.

Governments did nothing about the Hong Kong Flu of 1968 which was much worse than Covid-19

Asian Flu emerged in China early in 1957 and spread by September to the UK, where doctors were “amazed at the extraordinary infectivity of the disease”. 

Some GPs called for the British government to issue a warning about the virus and coordinate measures to deal with it. 

One doctor writing to the BMJ in June 1957 said,

“The public seems under the impression that nothing can be done to prevent the calamity that is threatened by the advance of influenza in the Far East. On the contrary there is a great deal that the Government can do; by acting at once they may save hundreds of thousands of lives.”

These calls were ignored and the press did not make a big thing of the pandemic.

The flu burnt itself out by April 1958, after the deaths of about 20,000 people in the UK and more than 1 million deaths worldwide.

Between 1 and 4 million people died of the Hong Kong Flu of 1968, with half the deaths among individuals aged up to 65 — very much in contrast to Covid-19, 90% of whose victims are 65 or over.  

Life in 1968, as in 1958, continued as normal. 

Daddy and I spent two or three days in bed with the Hong Kong Flu, doing puzzles in my Rupert Bear annual.  

Romania leads the rest of the EU

The Romanian government chose not to impose another lockdown after the one that ended in May and the economy outperformed the rest of the European Union last quarter.

Output not only grew from the previous three months, but surged by more than 10 times what analysts had expected. The expansion of 5.3% puts it ahead of all other EU members to have reported data so far.

Boris is Hillary in drag

I keep saying that Boris Johnson is not Donald Trump but Hillary Clinton in drag, if you can imagine her with eloquence, a sense of humour and a quick mind, which obviously you can't. 

The things he has in common with the Donald are charisma (dread word, Wallace Arnold would say) and the ability to make good jokes, but not ideas or political philosophy.

After he bottled out of his initial, short-lived inclination to try the Swedish policy of going for herd immunity Boris has instituted three lockdowns.

In 2008 when he was Mayor of London he called for an amnesty for hundreds of thousands of (or maybe well over a million) illegal immigrants in London, saying that deporting them from the UK is "just not going to happen". He is right about that last bit. 

He repeated his call for an amnesty in 2013 and in 2015.

Now he has announced that he is in favour of three million Chinese in Hong Kong having the right to settle in the UK. 

Hillary Clinton, eight days before she lost the 2016 election, said that regime change in Syria was her 'top priority'. It was also Boris Johnson's policy as British Foreign Secretary back then and he would happily have helped her achieve it. He rowed back from it after Donald Trump became president and said President Assad could stay for a while. 

Lockdowns seem not to work

The best thing I read recently about the pandemic is this article about Sweden from Spiked. It seems to me pretty much to prove that Sweden did not lose by not having a lockdown.

When Sweden decided not to lockdown in March, we were told it would lead to nearly 100,000 deaths by 1 July. The actual total ended up being 5,490. Infections and deaths were falling from mid-April, pretty much at the same time as in most other European countries with strict lockdowns.

If you click on the link above, you see the estimate of nearly 100,000 Swedish Covid deaths comes from Yale University. Modelling by Professor Neil Ferguson's team at Imperial College, London predicted 85,000 Covid deaths.

Then in the winter Covid came back in Sweden and now is ebbing away again, again without a lockdown.

We have to assume that this illness is to some extent seasonal, which Professor Ferguson assumes it isn't.

By now, eleven months after lockdowns started, there should be proof that they work. There isn't.

"We should have hanged George Washington. He was the worst sort of populist."

I left Facebook and will leave Twitter tomorrow for Lent and perhaps for good. Today I got my first suspension from social media, for twelve hours, for commenting on a post by the  American political opportunist Nikki Haley, praising George Washington as the president in office when the US Constitution was written. 

I commented, as I always repeat, that it was a shame we didn't hang him. I showed some originality by adding that he was the worst sort of populist. In a split second I was suspended for twelve hours. Oh well. 

Magna est veritas et prævalet. Great is the truth, and it prevails.

Everyone else pointed out that Washington wasn't president when the constitution was written. How could the presidency be older than the constitution? She is another inhumanly stupid politician, more stupid than Old Man Biden, Ursula von der Leyen or possibly even Theresa May. 

Most people in Stockholm who died of or with Covid last spring would have died in a few months anyway

More than 70% of people who died with Covid-19 in Sweden, up to the middle of May 2020, were people in elderly care institutions. This is a much higher proportion than in other countries. More people died in Sweden than Norway and Denmark because Sweden had no lockdown, but a very big reason was the failure to look after people in nursing homes. 

As Anders Tegnell, the Swedish chief epidemiologist, pointed out, it is hard to see how a lockdown would have prevented the disease from entering the elderly care homes.

Those who died of Covid-19 in Stockholm’s nursing homes had a 'life-remaining median' somewhere in the range of 5 to 9 months. Median life expectancy means the age which half of people will die without reaching and half of people will live past.

Most people worldwide who died with Covid-19 were over 80. Many of those, perhaps most, would have died within months anyway. 

Most might not have died of Covid at all, but simply with Covid.

A report on deaths with Covid-19 mentioned on the death certificate in old people's facilities in another Swedish province showed that 75% of the deaths were not caused by Covid-19.

Dr Horatiu Moldovan, the Romanian secretary of state at the Ministry of Health, said back in May that he had examined in detail all Covid related deaths in Romania and 80% of Covid related deaths in Romania were not deaths from Covid. 

Old people, he explained, die because they are old and frail. Once their immune system breaks down they catch every infection going. If Covid-19 is going they catch that.

YouGov poll in Great Britain

 Britons think facing up to ten years in jail for lying on a passenger locator form in order to avoid quarantine is...

Too harsh - 30% About right - 51% Not harsh enough - 13%

Swedish cases of Covid-19 have fallen away, again without a lockdown

A lot more people died in Sweden of Covid-19 than I had hoped and expected last spring. Much of the much higher death toll than in Norway was because of the negligent way in which the Swedes treated old people's homes. 

By the summer the epidemic was over there but they didn’t avoid a second wave, as I had expected them to do. 

I expected it because no respiratory infection has come back since the Spanish Flu of 1918-20. I assumed the other countries would have second waves because lockdowns had pushed deaths into the future. 

I wonder why Sweden had a second wave. Perhaps because without a lockdown people took lots of measures not to mix. So herd immunity is not achieved. 

In December as a result of the second wave restrictions were imposed in Sweden, which was taken by the foreign press as an admission that the arguments for lockdown were compelling. These restrictions were mild stuff:  limits on opening hours of bars and restaurants, closing schools for pupils aged 16 and above and recommending masks on public transport.


Still, from the end of December, Sweden has experienced the same steady decline in cases as elsewhere: a 60% decrease in positive tests from 7,136 on 20 December (taking a seven-day average) to 2,875. That’s almost exactly the same as in the locked down UK, where the Deputy Chief Medical Officer is warning people about making holiday plans for the summer and there is even talk of wearing masks to continue into next year or even beyond.

QAnon and Black Lives Matter are cults born in the social media

QAnon is the clearest example of a cult born on social media: there is no way it would have reached the size it did without social media.' 

So says Stanford University's Renée DiResta, who is is researching online conspiracies. 

Black Lives Matter is another clear example, but does not worry most researchers at famous American universities. 

They probably approve of the BLM movement as a spontaneous movement protesting against injustice, though there was nothing spontaneous about it and the injustices in question were spurious and based on misinformation on social media. 

The expert class is very frightened of the public and the power the social media give the public, but it is not the possibility of a left-wing revolution that worries them. The spectre that haunts them is not the spectre of Communism, although the Black Lives Matter movement is explicitly Marxist, but fascism. 

But even more what frightens them is conservatism.

To feel comfortable you need your own approval

A land that lacks your sacred rites cannot supply guards for its borders. But it can if you are willing. Who would dare to be matched with this god?

quae tuis careat sacris,
non queat dare praesides
terra finibus: at queat
te volente. quis huic deo
compararier ausit?

Catullus 61.71-75 (translated by Michael Gilleland). The god is Hymen, the god of marriage.

“Writing makes a critical mass of one's true self.”  

Ira Lightman

"To feel comfortable you need your own approval."

Mark Twain

"Propaganda is often not used for indoctrination, but rather to signal the government’s strength in being able to afford significant resources and impose on its citizens...not meant to 'brainwash', but rather to forewarn the society about how strong it is."

Haifeng Huang, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California

“What should our policy be towards non-Marxist ideas? As far as unmistakable counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs of the socialist cause are concerned, the matter is easy, we simply deprive them of their freedom of speech.”

Chairman Mao

Pe

The King is dead

Yesterday was the 69th anniversary of King George VI's death and Queen Elizabeth II's accession to the throne.

'The King is dead' are very powerful words. 

'The King' is much much more powerful than 'the Queen'.

Frederic Harrison said his first memory was of his father paying a very rare visit to the nursery and saying,

'Frederic, I am going to tell you something now that you will remember for the rest of your life. The King is dead.'

'I said, "Oh, papa, who will be King now?" and my father said, "We are not going to have a king. We are going to have a queen."

' I said, "So, it has come to that." '

German business guru: "By failing to procure vaccines, the EU has validated Brexit"

“It is dawning on the German and European population that the political class has failed across the board in meeting the enormous economic and social challenges of the Corona crisis. It marks the accelerating decline of the EU.

"...Everybody in the economic sphere now knows that whenever there is a problem at a production site in the EU, there is a risk of being hit with an export ban: vaccines today, biotech tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow what?

“This destruction of trust in the EU as a place of business (Standort EU) is all of a piece with its tendency towards over-regulation and planned-economy control. The gap between wish and reality in the EU is greater than ever. By failing to procure vaccines, the EU has validated Brexit and given all EU citizens an objective reason for euroscepticism.

Daniel Stelter, a widely respected German business writer, in Manager Magazin, quoted by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph’s Economic Intelligence newsletter.

An anonymous highly placed source in Brussels told a British journalist, Simon Kuper, in 2018 that Europe’s ruling political class no longer identified with Britain’s Conservatives because they had embraced a nineteenth-century nationalism unparalleled among Western European governments. The British conservative politicians are not nationalists but they and the British have rediscovered belief in the nation. I think everyone in Europe has, thanks to the pandemic and especially thanks to Ursula von der Leyen.

British Secretary of Health Matt Hancock says he overruled advice and ordered 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine rather than 30 million because the film Contagion had taught him there would be a global scramble for vaccine. He says every Brit needed to be jabbed “and I wasn’t going to settle for less”.

I can't see any reason why healthy people under 50 need a vaccine but the important point is that he on his tod made the decision and had he got it badly wrong it would have probably cost him his job.

How differently things work in the European Commission where Mrs von der Leyen accepts no responsibility whatsoever for the AstraZeneca mess, even though she handled procurement of vaccines personally, says the European Union should be proud of its vaccination strategy. 

She asks with astonishing brass neck that she should be judged when her term of office ends in 2024.

Simon Kuper said back in 2018 that wanting to punish Britain isn't personal with most Eurocrats, just business.

"Europe’s ruling classes do want Brexit to hurt Britain – but chiefly so as to shut up the continent’s anti-European populists."

That is still their strategy. With Ursula von der Leyen reportedly it is Brexit that motivated her to try to stop AZ sending vaccines to the UK. 

That strategy is in big trouble now. 

We shall see what the rest of the year brings but January 2021 feels like an historical turning point.

Great Britain never ceased to be great until 2016 when she almost became a failed state

Neville Chamberlain is very unfairly treated. He was a great man in the wrong place at the wrong time. In his day Great Britain was considered the most powerful country in the world.

The war changed that.

Eden was not a great man, though his contemporaries thought he was. By invading Egypt and then withdrawing at Eisenhower's behest, he showed the world how weak we had become. After him all British governments have been satellites of the USA.

In the 1970s Britain was regularly called the sick man of Europe and this sense of decline was what led Macmillan and Heath to take us into the EEC - Labour leader Harold Wilson who opposed entry would also have taken us in. The one man who could have prevented it was his predecessor Hugh Gaitskell, who opposed entry but who died suddenly in 1962.

After we joined the sense of decline got much worse during the Labour governments of 1974-79.

Still, even in all those years from Suez to Brexit, even if the British did not know it (and they didn't), Great Britain remained a great country in every way that can be measured.

She has always one of very powerful and respected countries except for two historical periods: during the reign of King Charles II, who was subsidised secretly by Louis XIV, and in the three years when Theresa May was humiliated by Brussels and almost led us to perdition, by becoming vassals of an EU over whose policies we had no influence.

This is what Boris has saved the country from. This is why his trade deal is comparable with the Glorious Revolution (so called, I am a sentimental Jacobite) of 1689.

1689 was the English Revolution and Brexit is the British Revolution.

I give Boris the credit for getting the UK out of the Houdini-like box Michel Barnier and the witless Theresa May had constructed.

I should add that successful revolutions have many authors and the man who deserves most credit for Brexit is the oft maligned Nigel Farage.

Quotations

Karel van Oosterom@KvanOosterom·
Internationally, we the Dutch are seen to be direct and blunt. Our checklist for travel to the Netherlands lives up to that reputation.

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.” Jean Monnet, architect of what is now the EU, wrote this privately in 1952. 

"[I] had no other feeling for the working classes than an intense desire to abolish them and replace them by sensible people". George Bernard Shaw

“To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.” James Joyce, Ulysses

"Good wood, bad wood - the same ashes, but not the same flames." Nicolae Iorga

"Did one ever establish contact with anyone? We are all parallel straight lines. Jenny was only a little more parallel than most." Aldous Huxley in his lovely first novel Crome Yellow (Brave New World is a far-sighted political polemic that is more accurate than 1984, but rubbish as a novel). Facebook conversations remind me of these lines.

If there weren't a statue to Charles de Gaulle in London already we should have built one now

The reason?

He vetoed the UK joining the EEC twice.

At the time it was considered typically ungrateful and bloody-minded of him, but he was right.

His words in 1970 are the epigraph to Robert Tombs' new book, This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe.

'Our neighbours across the Channel, being made for free trade by the maritime character of their economic life, cannot possibly agree sincerely to shut themselves up behind a continental tariff wall.' 

Jacques Chirac was a very much less admirable man, in fact a devious, adulterous crook, but he too deserves a statue for begging the US and UK not to invade Iraq in 2003.

Mrs von der Leyen's vaccine fiasco: we miss Jean-Claude Juncker already

"We mustn't gloat. This is no time to gloat. But I can tell you, I am gloating like hell." (William Whitelaw)

The British government is the midwife of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. Oxford University was planning to collaborate with Merck, a US firm, but London did not want Donald Trump to be able to seize all the vaccines for US use. The British invested the very large sums of money to enable the Oxford or AZ vaccine to be developed and has earnt a debt of gratitude from the whole world.

The EU, who still haven't paid a large part of their bill for the AZ vaccine, should have praised the British effusively and said, 'Thank you very much, Boris - we owe you one. We are happy to wait patiently in the queue until you vaccinate your vulnerable and old people before we obtain the vaccine.'

Instead...

I remember a journalist on Twitter saying "You'll miss him when he's gone" when a film clip emerged of Jean-Claude Juncker unsteadily circling other dignitaries at an outdoor ceremony in Africa with a blazing flambeau.

That prediction didn't take long to come true.

Herr Juncker said in a speech in Stuttgart on Sunday that he was "very much opposed" to his successor Frau von der Leyen's export restriction measures. 

He and everyone else.

“Isn’t European management of the vaccines the best advertisement for Brexit?” the French minister of state for European affairs of France was asked yesterday. 

He replied: “I don’t think so. This has nothing to do with Brexit. The British are in an extremely difficult sanitary situation. They are taking a lot of risks with their vaccination programme. I can understand that. They have spaced out massively the delay between the two injections, up to 42 days. Our scientists tell us you mustn't do that."

"They are relying primarily on one single vaccine, which is AstraZeneca, and the German authority has already said there are doubts about its efficacy for the over 65s. In the UK they're using it for that group."

Actually Oxford scientists are sure the AstraZeneca vaccine is effective for people over 65. 

The Pfizer vaccine has also already been rolled out across Britain and the Moderna coronavirus vaccine has been approved for use. Not to mention the Novavax and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. And more coming along.

The UK has now vaccinated 9.2 million people, out of a population of 67 million. 

The idea that without a hard border people in the Republic of Ireland, who don't have vaccines, would sell vaccines to Northern Ireland, where they have lots, is the proof of how completely useless Ursula v d Leyen is.

Matt Hancock, British Secretary of State for Health last night:


“I want to say this to our international partners. Of course I’m delighted about how well this is going at home. But I believe fundamentally that the vaccine roll-out is a global effort… So we will protect UK supply, and play our part to ensure the whole world can get the jab…”

The EU has almost unbelievably lost the opinion writers in the Financial Times and it has lost even more than that - it has lost the German press. 

What a difference this debacle makes, not just for a week but for many years to come, to British opinion (Macron wants to kill British people aged over 65) but also to European and world opinion. 

The AstraZeneca story is a parable.

2020 did not see an unprecedentedly high number of deaths in England and Wales

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) reported that the number of deaths in 2020 in England and Wales was 77,161 higher than the number registered in 2019. This was the biggest year-on-year increase since 1940.


You can only die once. The flu season in 2019 was very mild, which meant more people than normal survived to die in 2020.


The ONS reported that the total number of deaths in England and Wales was 506,790 in 2013, 501,424 in 2014, 529,655 in 2015, 525,048 in 2016, 533,253 in 2017, 541,589 in 2018, 530,841 in 2019 and 608,00 in 2020.


Much more important than these numbers is the fact that the 'age-standardised mortality rate' (adjusted for changes in both the size and structure of the population) in 2020 was the highest since 2008.


It was no higher than any of the years before 2008. The death rate in England and Wales in 2020 was lower than in the early 2000s.

Without lockdown another 97,000 would have died from Covid-19 this winter alone, according to a government estimate, but that is of course a guess. It can't be known what would have happened has looser restrictions been tried.

Estimates and modelling are one thing but there should be evidence by now after ten months of the pandemic - there should be an obvious reduction in deaths in places with lockdowns compared to places without a lockdown, but there isn't.


Peru has had the harshest, longest lockdown and has the highest death rate per capita in Latin America.


Romania had no lockdown after May and Covid deaths have been falling to the extent that they have reopened restaurants.


Belarus lied about the number of deaths and the real numbers were three times what the government said. Still, despite no restrictions of any sort, the number of deaths per capita in Belarus is no worse than with a bad flu season.


The report also says that more than 100,000 people are likely to die from non-coronavirus causes because of the pandemic. 40,000 may die over the coming years because of the economic consequences of the lockdowns. Again it's a guess.


I know don't know the figures for all of Europe but Swedish deaths in 2020 were about the same as in 2000-2003 and about 2.5% higher than 2018, despite not having a lockdown.


Two thirds of Covid-related deaths in Sweden three or four months ago had occurred in old people's homes and the average age of death was 84. Three quarters of Covid-related deaths, where Covid was mentioned on the death certificate, in old people's homes in one Swedish province were not in fact deaths from Covid.

Landor, amaranth and daffodils

It’s Walter Savage Landor’s 246th birthday. 

I came across him first quoted in the enchanting play and book 84 Charing Cross Road. My favourite sentence in English literature is still this. 

"There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, O Rhodope ! that are not soon mute, however tuneful : there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last."

It made me read the Imaginary Conversations or some of them. 

I was sorry when I went up to Cambridge to find nobody had heard of Landor, he who threw his cook out of a first floor window into the garden below and then said,

"Oh God I forgot the daffodils."

The strange case of Ursula von der Leyen and the AstraZeneca vaccines

Deaths from other illnesses are just sad facts but for every death from Covid-19 a politician is held to blame.

I suppose it's what the 1970s hard left feminists meant by 'The personal is political'.

On Wednesday Boris Johnson was blamed for 100,000 deaths, but today he is praised for the UK having five vaccines available or close to being available. And what looks like a watertight contract to get AstraZeneca vaccines ahead of Europe.


The UK paid money down months before the EU finished haggling over the price of a drug being sold at no profit by the manufacturer. When cabinet ministers saw a "best endeavours" clause in the AstraZeneca contract like the one in the EU contract with AZ, Alok Sharma and "Matt" Hancock "insisted on a legally binding promise to serve Britain first". Mr. Hancock is not the complete ass I had thought.


Had Brexit not happened, the UK like any other member state in the EU could have opted to buy the vaccine on her own. The UK was invited to join in the EU purchasing arrangements despite Brexit. The British chose not to, knowing how slow and bad the EU would be at making decisions. 

However, in an interview in the Daily Telegraph Miss Bingham, chairwoman of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, said she "voted Remain but recognises that Brexit allowed the UK to go it alone in purchasing, well in advance, the vaccines most likely to succeed."

Countless people on Facebook and Twitter have asked for years what concrete benefit Brexit would provide. 

Even a week ago my friend Tony did so. He was emotional because French customs officers had confiscated an English lorry driver's ham sandwich.

Quotations

When nobody wakes you up in the morning, 

When nobody waits for you at night,
When you can do whatever you want.
What do you call it,
Freedom or Loneliness?

Charles Bukowski

“We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.” 

Trotsky

Christianity, which has been ludicrously accused of being gloomy and the enemy of life, has distinguished itself among the creeds of the world by its quite peculiar insistence on the fact that life is sacred, even when it is sad; that a man is sacred, even when he is oneself.

G. K. Chesterton

Good Housekeeping

Did you guess that (at least the US edition of ) Good Housekeeping magazine now believes in Critical Theory?

I did.

From this week's edition. 

"Diet culture has long been institutionalized and is part of an oppressive system that’s intrinsically tied in with racism and patriarchy. “Whenever we create standards about how we all should live, these norms always benefit those individuals who are already in power,” says Sabrina Strings, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine and the author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia."

Good Housekeeping was never just about housekeeping but always kept au courant with up-to-date political ideas. In 1921 Vice-President Calvin Coolidge spoke to the magazine about restricting immigration to white people and said:

“There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.”

In a century, if it survives which I suppose is not very likely (who reads it now?) I wonder what political ideas the magazine will express.

Please repeat after me: we do not start life as blank sheets of paper

I find it very mysterious that one cannot say middle class children are on the whole more intelligent than working class ones for genetic reasons.

If this mystery were solved so many fallacies could be exploded.

Well-known British political blogger Guido Fawkes, who sometimes links to my articles, quoted an anonymous well known Tory educationalist who told him, “You can’t say it, that’s a third rail it’s inadvisable to touch in this debate”.

America's leader is senile

Watch this, if you doubt me.

And here he struggles to put his pen in his inside breast pocket.

Churchill from 1953 and Brezhnev for years were senile, I know. Reagan in his later years was losing it but not like this - at any rate he was coherent in public.

Biden is absolutely terrible. Everything he has done in his first days as the 46th President of the United States has been disastrous, except maybe wanting to go back to Obama's Iran deal. 

I favoured that when it was signed, partly because I don't see any threat to America or the West from Iran. 

Since then things have changed. Iran remained as hostile as ever to America. Trump was much better than Obama at containing Iran and made a useful peace between Israel and the Sunnis.


But people are unfair who say Biden is already the worst US president of this century. George W Bush was much worse.


Going further back Lincoln was even worse than Bush the Younger. Lincoln waged an unnecessary and arguably unjust war in which 600,000 died. 


President Obama, persuaded by Hillary, Cameron and Sarkozy, destroyed Libya - from an original idea by Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL). Biden has not yet done anything remotely so bad, but it is very early days.

One day after Joe Biden was sworn in, 200 US troops and 40 trucks of ammunition and equipment entered Syria from Iraq.

The next few years threaten to be awful. Boris's views on quite a few things, including climate change, the Middle East and Covid, are not very different from Joe Biden's. The same is true of President Macron and Frau Merkel. 

I shall try to follow politics much less closely. 

At least Brexit happened.

Alexandre Kojève and the End of History

It might even be said that, from a certain point of view, the United States has already reached the final stage of Marxism ‘communism,’ since all the members of a ‘classless society’ can, for all practical purposes, acquire whatever they please, whenever they please, without having to work for it any more than they are inclined to do so.

These are the words of Alexandre Kojeve, a Russian philosopher who became French and a believer in the European Economic Community. He believed that the United States represented right-Hegelianism and the Soviet Union represented left-Hegelianism. Victory by either side in the Cold War, he argued, would result in a classless, bureaucratic society.

I had not heard of him until today when I read this essay about him.

...the logical exhaustion of homo economicus as the homogenous understanding of humanity is what is at the heart of “multiculturalism.” Multiculturalism is not really about the celebration of the diversity of cultures but, rather, the eradication of the past socio-cultural distinctions which prevent, for all practical purposes, the non-European peoples of the world from the easy and equitable life they seek: the free-going, comfortable, and easy life already acquired by Europeans and their diaspora descendants. The elimination of the supposedly artificial barriers and distinctions erected by culture must occur for the end-state to be reached and human desire to be recognized and actualized.

Why people love or hate Trump - it's abortion, stupid

'...25 per cent of American voters say that abortion is the most important issue for them; that equates to tens of millions of people who will have put an X by Trump’s name because on that one issue he was aligned with them.

 

'This is the key to understanding the Trump phenomenon and also the hostility of the media; because the US media elite, like our own media class, overwhelmingly supports the pro-choice position, itself a central tenet of intersectional feminism. Trump’s other attributes – his uncouthness, his flagrant narcissism, his erratic outbursts – were certainly irritants but it was Trump as an obstacle to the final triumph of progressive thinking which made him such a hate-figure for American journalists.

 

'This will have long-term consequences, for while many Americans will be yearning today for normal politics to resume, many others will be harbouring a dark resentment against a media which stacked the deck against their man. Trump’s charge that the election was ‘stolen’ has not been substantiated in any legal sense but in another way the charge has force. When a media campaign is so one-sided, when the media coverage is so very partisan, those on the losing side are bound to feel it was unfair. And that bodes ill for the future because, for America to recover its equilibrium, it will need a media that is trusted to be fair; and we’re a million miles from that point right now.'

Robin Aitken in today's Daily Telegraph

Mrs Cleveland was 21 and 27 years younger than Grover Cleveland when they married

With a few hours to go before the most unusual U.S. President since Abraham Lincoln leaves office, I stumbled by chance on the story of Frank or Francis Folsom, who became Mrs Grover Cleveland.

She was 21 when she became the youngest ever First Lady of the United States in 1886 and is the only woman to have become First Lady a second time, when in 1893 her husband returned to the White House for his second term six and a half years later. She was christened Frank after her uncle, but chose to be called Francis because it was more feminine. 

She met her future husband when she was a baby and he was 27. He became her guardian when her father died when she had just turned 11 and paid for her education. 

Grover Cleveland, with Woodrow Wilson, was one of the only two Democrat presidents to serve between 1861 and 1933. Along with the previous Democrat president, James Buchanan, he was one of the only two bachelors to be elected US President. He was then aged 47 and when he married in the Blue Room of the White House he was 49. 

The couple had five children. The age gap did not matter to the public.

Although a bachelor when he became President, Cleveland was a father, giving rise to the famous chant in the 1884 election campaign of “Ma, ma, where's my Pa?" After he won, Democrats replied, "In the White House, ha ha ha!”

The last heir to the Ottoman throne died last night

"Dündar Abdülkerim Osmanoğlu, the last heir to the throne of the now-defunct Ottoman Empire, passed away late Monday at the age of 90, the family said in a statement." (The Daily Sabah this morning.)

His great uncle was the last Sultan and Caliph. Had Turkey been on England's rather than Germany's side in the Great War she would still rule the Middle East and the world would be more peaceful.

America is the biggest threat to the West but also the last redoubt of freedom of speech

For more than thirty years America has been the biggest threat to the West by exporting political correctness but also the one country in the world that has freedom of speech.

By contrast free speech in England is a memory. It is the same on the Continent, though Eastern Europe is much freer than the West. Who would have imagined it in 1989?

Amber Rudd, the Conservative Home Secretary in England, wanted to make it an offence punishable by up to 15 years in the clink to visit an extremist site on the Internet. Just think about that.

Footnotes to history

After John F Kennedy was murdered, Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as US President on the plane. When they landed a lieutenant said, “Over there - that’s your helicopter, Mr President.” LBJ: “Son, they’re all my helicopters.”

                                        *

In 1862 a Persian prince marvelled at how 'England is the determined enemy of the slave trade and has gone to an enormous expense to liberate the African races, to whom she is in no way bound save by the tie of a common humanity.'


Until around 1970, slaves in the Arabian Gulf who had escaped their owners could go to a British consulate and, after touching the flagpole holding the Union Jack, would immediately be given their freedom. Freed slaves received this certificate.


                                        *

Pope Pius XI, speaking about Kristallnacht, said, ‘It is not possible for Christians to take part in anti-Semitism.’ 

Years before, he made a priest who in 1925 published a translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into French a protonotary apostolic, in recognition of his efforts against "our mortal enemy". The Protocols, describing a Jewish plot to rule the world, were a Tsarist forgery, as proven by the Times in 1921.

How Covid spreads - it's very rarely from contaminated surfaces

There have been only two known possible cases in the world of outbreaks of infection with Covid-19 via contaminated surfaces. Hand washing is therefore not so important as you think, though useful. Droplets sprayed by someone, usually but not always indoors, are the main way the virus is transmitted. It's not known how far particles travel through the air. Airborne transmission (aerosol) might be possible, in which case they could travel a distance well beyond two metres or it might not. Keeping windows open is strongly advisable where two people meet indoors. Source: Stuart Ritchie, a psychologist and a Lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London, writing in Unherd.

Mortality rate in England in 2020 highest since 2008

I always prefer anecdotal evidence to statistics and both show that Covid cases have risen dramatically in England. Hospitals are under enormous stress. 

Anyone who thinks Covid-19 a hoax is deluded. 

Still, that does not mean that the numbers of Covid-related hospitalisations and deaths are not exaggerated. They must be, because when a dying person's immune system breaks down he catches every infection going around and since Covid-19 is going around he catches that. Covid is mentioned on the death certificate. His is recorded as a Covid death, although he has really died of old age.

Sarah Caul, head of mortality analysis at the British Office of National Statistics, said yesterday that the "age-standardised mortality rate" last year, which takes into account total deaths, population size and age distribution, was the highest in England and Wales since 2008. 

This is important, more informative than the startling news that deaths last year were 15% higher than in 2018 and the accurate headline in The Times:

Coronavirus: Largest yearly increase in deaths since 1940

The English language media are largely suppressing "lockdown sceptics'', like climate change sceptics and mass immigration sceptics, but the exception are sceptical Members of the British Parliament. Their words are reported. Sometimes. 

I suspect people pay less attention to speeches in Parliament since the place was televised, but they get attention. It's what makes hard left ex-BBC journalist Paul Mason demand Boris Johnson show 'real leadership' by getting his backbenchers to keep quiet on the subject.


These words are from the website of David Warburton, Conservative Member of Parliament for the delightful Somerset seat of Somerton and Frome (Frome rhymes with hmmm).

"Every death, for whatever reason, is tragic and shocking. Even to write about it — and especially to do so in terms of data and numbers — belittles and minimises the personal loss which we all feel. It is important to see, I think though, that excess deaths over the past year have not been statistically higher than the average for previous years. And the ONS reveals that, in terms of deaths per 100,000 of population, since 1993 ten previous years have had higher rates than 2020. But I also understand that, given the infection rates and the new strains, it is the predictions of future mortality which concerns the Government. They do not know what may come.

 

"I will not dwell on the historic predictions of SAGE, but I must draw attention to the missing component in this thought process. At the end of the regulations before us yesterday was the bald admission that “No impact assessment has been prepared for these Regulations.”

 

"That means that we were asked to vote, again, on restrictions which will have unknown effects, both positive and negative. We are not provided with evidence for the efficacy of the lockdown, other than our experience of the mixed results of previous lockdowns, and — crucially — we do not know what is the nature or the extent of the detrimental effects.

 

"As I’ve said before, the ONS have estimated that the restrictions across 2020 will have resulted in 200,000 non-Covid excess deaths. Bristol University put the figure far higher. Whether or not these predictions have any more accuracy than SAGE’s own Covid predictions, these numbers are many times higher than those who tragically will have been lost to the virus."

Some quotations from Richard Nixon

“Never forget, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”

“The worst thing a politician can be is dull. At least I'm interesting.”

“Yet we can maintain a free society only if we recognize that in a free society no one can win all the time. No one can have his own way all the time, and no one is right all the time.”

“Television is to news as bumper stickers are to philosophy.”

''I don't think a woman should be in any government job whatever. I mean, I really don't. The reason why I do is mainly because they are erratic. And emotional. Men are erratic and emotional, too, but the point is a woman is more likely to be.''

(I stole the first four from the Politically Incorrect Australian.)

After his resignation in disgrace, former President Nixon used to sit in the park and give out valuable advice about life to people who shared his bench. 

For now we see Covid through a glass, darkly

"Politicians must know that lockdowns are incubating new epidemics and are causing more deaths each time" - Knut Wittkowski.

Swedish deaths in 2020 were about the same as 2000-2003, about 2.5% higher than 2018 when there was an unusually mild flu season. Nevertheless you have read lots of articles telling you that the Swedish response to Covid-19 has been a failure. 

Now we read that Swedish hospitals are in danger of being overwhelmed.

English hospitals are in danger of being overwhelmed but, as one journalist said, they are every year. 

Three winters ago flu patients were lying on mattresses on the floors of hospitals in Lombardy.

We don't yet have the total number of deaths in the UK for 2020 but it looks like it might be the highest since 1985. But the population then was 56 million and now it is 68 million.

The Great Barrington Declaration was signed by some of the most distinguished epidemiologists in the world, who thought lockdowns do not work and that governments should make herd immunity their goal. It is hard to find information about it on Google and what there is is mostly very condemnatory. The Daily Telegraph almost alone reported it in a balanced way but you have to type 'Telegraph' into the Google browser to find their reports.

Meanwhile in the USA and in much of the world this winter there are almost no cases of influenza. How can this be?

Knut Witkowski, Senior Research Associate of the Rockefeller University, New York, says flu has been renamed Covid. That seems the obvious explanation.

"Influenza has been renamed COVID in large part. There may be quite a number of influenza cases included in the 'presumed COVID' category of people who have COVID symptoms (which Influenza symptoms can be mistaken for), but are not tested for SARS RNA."

"They may also may have some SARS RNA sitting in their nose while being infected with Influenza, in which case the influenza would be 'confirmed' to be COVID."