Total Surveillance: Contact-tracing app will be ‘key part’ of UK government’s Covid-19 ‘surveillance programme’

Picture (c) Olivier Douliery, AFP

The hugely unpopular NHS contact-tracing app proposal, which as libertarians point out will giver the government the power to track all our movements, will be a “key part” of the U.K. government’s Covid-19 containment policy for the foreseeable future, a spokesman for the Prime Minister's office has confirmed.

The app, designed ostensibly to notify smartphone users if they came into close contact with someone who had tested positive for the coronavirus, could be available within a few weeks, but privacy campaigners warn that the app, which will give the government and its agencies, including the police who have shown their willingness to abuse their new powers, the ability to record and store the complete movements of individuals and details of those with whom they were in contact.

If the plan goes through unchallenged, and Boris Jognson's recent conversion to the kind of authoritarian approach wannabe Galactic Emperor Bill Gates has lobbied for suggests it will, the public will be “coerced” into sharing personal data about their movements, personal liberty activists fear.

This blog has warned from the outset that the whole COVID - 19 coronavirus scare was being used by globalists to effect a huge power grab and the abolition of the rights and liberties we in the democratic nations have come to take for granted.

Johnson’s spokesman added that the priority while waiting for the app to be ready is ensuring continued social distancing in order to fullfil the “five tests” to be met before lockdown measures can be eased. Those tests include falling deaths and falling infection rates. This is ridiculous and confirms our suspicions as empirical evidence shows distancing does not work and lockdown, apart from trashing the economy, has failed to curtail the spread of the disease. Nations like Sweden and South Korea which avoided a lockdown, arguing rationally that the economic damage would cause more deaths in the long term than the virus is ever likely to, have experienced no higher infection rate or deathg rate than normal.

Today's statement from Downing Street follows a heated exchange in the House of Commons on Tuesday 28 April over proposed legislation setting out the legal basis for processing personal data by the app. Shadow deputy leader of the House, Afzal Khan, said that while the app has an “important role to play,” legislation should ensure that it stores data in a decentralized manner. This is nonsense as data stored in a decentralised way, i.e. a distributed database, can still be pulled together almost instantly on entry of certain keywords.

Responding to Khan, Solicitor General Michael Ellis QC said the app will be “voluntary participation only” and there will be “no private identifiable information on it.” Furthermore, the whole process will be “data protection compliant and there will be an ethical advisory board monitoring it,” he said.

If you believe that look out of the window quickly, you might see several pigs flying over your home.

Internet law professor Lilian Edwards took a more cautionary line, telling MPs, that there was a “precedent of other pandemics leading to a mass land grab in extensive state surveillance.” She is probably referring to the pandemics of damp squibs over the past three decades, including SARS, MERS, Swine Flu, Bird Flu and Ebola. The first four of those were so ludicrously hyped they caused the World Health Organisation to change the edfinition of 'pandemic' from hundreds of millions of people all around the world will be infected and millions will die, to 'a few people here and there will feel a bit poorly.' Ebola was different, it killed thousands in west Africa in 2014 / 15 but despite a massive campaign to spread fear and panic in the rest of the world the diseasedid not significantly break out of Africa.


Historically, virus epidemics to tend to burn out after a few months. Why this is so has never been understood.

COVID - 19 has turned into a real pandemic, but there are several aspects of how it is thought to have originated, the way it predominantly attacks the old and those with underlying health problems and the fact that all the world's leading economies were in deficit because of rising welfare bills, that have led conspiracy theorists to speculate that the timing is suspiciously convenient. And the authoritarian measures adopted by governments, vesting far more powers in the state, tend to fuel those suspicions.

Several EU countries have been developing contact-tracing apps in parallel with the UK, a statement from the EU Commission in Brussels earlier this month stated that it wanted EU members to take a “common approach” to the use of digital technologies and data.

The 'common approach' recommendation from Brussels has triggered a debate that is still raging in Europe over whether to use centralized or decentralized solutions for the apps. While a decentralized approach would see data stored on the user’s own phone, a centralized infrastructure would see data sent to a central database run by public authorities, which civil liberties groups say risks evolving into state surveillance.

The German government plans to adopt a decentralized approach it was announced last week. This is a U-turn on the previous plan which involved full support of the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (Pepp-PT) protocol developed by European Union agencies. Berlin will now support decentralized solutions proposed by Apple and Google instead, which leaves the gathered data on devices controlled by US tech corporations. This approach presents even greater problems for personal liberty activists as on user privacy and data protection the track record of both these predatory corporations is on a par with that of a fox in a chicken coop.

Meanwhile the UK leans toward a centralized model and it’s been reported that experts from GCHQs National Cyber Security Centre, an agency which has been spying on us through our web use, emails, molbile phone calls and texts for over two decades, are advising on the project. So the unalienable human right to privacy is right out the window then.

In France the government of beleagured president Emmanuel Macron has also been pushing a centralized app solution, prompting hundreds of the country's computer security experts to sign an open letter asking the government to reconsider due to concerns around privacy and individual freedoms.

Johnson's spokesman said the government would set out more details regarding the British app as soon as it could. Our advice, Just Say No, Do you really need an app that allows a government no sane person would trust, to track their every movement and who they came into contact with.

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Scientist who convinced Boris lockdown was the only way to beat coronavirus criticised many times for flawed research

The scientist whose mathematical models of how the coronavirus would spread in the UK and the wildly exaggerated estimates of how many deaths might result from the epidemic reportedly led to the decision to implement a countrywide lockdown and trash the economy has been criticised in the past for flawed research.

Lockdown-Backlash Begins: Angry Crowd Surrounds Capitol, Demands Michigan Governor Reopen Economy

THEM (poetry noir)
A poem about surveillance

Lockdown-Backlash Begins: Angry Crowd Surrounds Capitol, Demands Michigan Governor Reopen Economy

As we have noted, the evolution of the virus pandemic is not just a public health crisis nor a financial meltdown but could transform into a social unraveling. And, oh boy, it appears we could be right.
But before we cover today's events. Several weeks ago, what piqued our interest was a warning from the Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies of how "a social bomb" was ready to explode over major Western cities "in a few weeks." And it appears, those few weeks have just expired, as protests begin:
On Wednesday afternoon, massive crowds, organized by a conservative group, have surrounded Michigan's state Capitol building. Protestors are angry at Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's (D) stay-at-home public health order during the pandemic.
Supporters of the Michigan Conservative Coalition have requested Whitmer to reopen the economy on May 1 and ease restrictions to return life to normal.

WWJ Newsradio 950's Charlie Langton said organizers are calling the movement "Operation Gridlock." Langton tweeted a video of a traffic jam of protestors that "extends for miles outside Lansing," waiting to get to the Capitol.

The line for the anti- @GovWhitmer “Operation Gridlock” rally extends for miles outside of Lansing. @WWJ950 @FOX2News #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/18KJlxUKsC

— Charlie Langton (@charlielangton) April 15, 2020

WOOD-TV's Heather Walker provides coverage from within Operation Gridlock as people use their cars to lockdown streets around the Capitol building. Walker interviewed several Michiganders, who are fed up with the public health order and want the economy to reopen. Many said they could make their own health decisions and don't need the government to tell them what to do.


MORE ON CORONAVIRUS FEAR AND PANIC

Why you can’t trust the UK’s “daily” Covid19 updates & more blacklisted news

Total Surveillance: Contact-tracing app will be ‘key part’ of UK government’s Covid-19 ‘surveillance programme’
The hugely unpopular NHS contact-tracing app proposal, which as libertarians point out will giver the government the power to track all our movements, will be a “key part” of the U.K. government’s Covid-19 containment policy for the foreseeable future, [ ... ] The app, designed ostensibly to notify smartphone users if they came into close contact with someone who had tested positive for the coronavirus, will give government agencies new powers, to record and store the complete movements of individuals and details of those with whom they were in contact.

EU bullies: Italy forced to surrender in secret meeting over coronavirus economy crisis

We wouldn't normally feature a story from the Express in this daily blog because they're mainstream, but Yannis Varoufakis is always worthy of attention.

from Daily Express

Yannis Varoufakis, a veteran of the 2015 Greek debt crisis, accused Eurozone finance ministers of “failing Europeans” after a 15-hour row over a post-coronavirus rescue package ended in stalemate. The rebel economist said he was the victim of similar bullying at the height of Greece’s financial crisis when his defiant strategy against debt negotiations with European leaders led to banks being closed and queues at cash machines. “The Eurogroup, again, failed Europeans,” he wrote on social media, after their overnight meeting eventually broke up.

“The Italian finance minister, during the night, was bullied to surrender – as I was in 2015. It was all done behind closed doors and with no minutes kept.”

Mario Centeno, the Eurogroup’s president, called time on the marathon talks this morning after it emerged warring ministers would not sign up to a compromise deal.

Italy and the Netherlands are urged to drop their red lines to allow the bloc to eventually forge a common response coronavirus crisis.
One Brussels source said the atmosphere between member states had become "very toxic" because of the difference in positions between richer northern member states and their poorer southern neighbours.

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Coronavirus deaths: Are The Authorities Deceiving Us?

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Picture: Buzzfeed
Yes we know we’ve used it before but we like it

Yesterday we reported that a Canadian outfit, CitizensLab had carried out a forensic data analysis of China’s response to the Coronavirus outbreak and concluded that while politicians (anvious perhaps of the way authoritarian governments like China’s can trample on human rights and civil liberties and silence critics by simply shooting them,) and academics (aka “scientists” or “experts”) are heaping praise on the way the communist regime in Beijing has contained and controlled its Coronavirus epidemic, the Chinese have actually being lying, the epidemc is still raging and real numbers of infections by, and deaths from COVID – 19 to use its technical name are far higher than are being reported,

SHOCK! HORROR! A socialist government lying to cover up its failures, incompetence and illegal activities in developing biological weapons. How could any reasonable person have suspected such a thing?

Well it seems the governments of the liberal democracies are not avese to playing the same game. The extreme measures introduced in the UK to tackle coronavirus by virtually putting the entire nation in lockdown have been justified because of the need to save lives, but if we look a little way below the surface, these measures are based on some very dubious evidence.

Mathematical Modelling (yes that old demon again) carried out by Imperial College London has been used by “scientists” and “experts” to inform government that unless new powers were enacted and used to curtail freedom of movement, social interaction and necessary activities like food shopping as many as 500,000 could die in our epidemic. That is a worst case scenario of course, but the best case scenario, that for the majority of people who are healthy, well nourished and living in a reasonably good environment, Coronavirus will be a relatively minor infection, in fact many of us will be unaware we have been infected with the virus.

The 500,000 dead being quoted as if it is the most likely outcome, although it is a worst case scenario, has the sticky fingerprints of the deep state (i.e. the civil, military and security services all over it, these agencies have a long track record of using fear and panic to reassert their authority when they feel control is slipping away from them. Even the government’s previous, more gentle strategy to slow the spread was likely to lead to 250,000 deaths, the research suggested. But where did these figures come from?

The warnings based on output from mathematical models remember,  prompted ministers to announce on Monday the biggest assault on personal freedom in the UK since World War 2, with the public being told to stay in their homes as much as possible, not reduce shopping trips to a minimum, not to go to pubs, clubs or theatres, and to work from home if possible. Sporting events had been shut down the previous wee

The move has hit the economy, putting jobs at risk and prompting schools to be closed and exams cancelled. In other words chaos rules, but then as author Terry Pratchett said, “In any conflict between order and chaos, chaos will win because it’s better organised.”

But is there any substance in those figures or are they plucked out of the air as previous estimates of the threat of pandemic diseases were. It was predicted millions would die, in reality a few people here ad there felt a bit poorly. Professor Neil Ferguson,  a senior academic involved in modelling the course of the epidemic told the BBC’s Today Programme earlier this week there was “no alternative” to the curtailment of personal liberty if 250,000 lives were not to be risked. Not the weasel words there, if lives were not to be put at risk. Everything we do carries some degree of risk, whether we drive to work, take a bus or walk there is always the risk of us being involved in an accident. If we eat at a restaurant there is a risk of food poisoning and if we cok at home there could be a house fire or an electrical fault could kill us. Lives being put at risk is a universe away from lives being put in danger.

Another expert, Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, told BBC Radio 4’s Today program he had advised The House Of Commons Health Select Committee, the parliamentary overseer of health issues, that the hope was to keep the death toll below 20,000 by suppressing the virus.

That would still be worse than those killed by flu, he said, giving a number of 8,000 per year. But again there is no evidence to suggest this figure is in any way accurate. In fact there is strong evidence, when we analyse the modelling techniques, that the figures they produce are not only unreliable but are simply made up to grab headlines. The question the “scientits” and “experts” don’t want us to ask is

Would these people be dying anyway?

The quoted figures for likely deaths from coronavirus are astounding but what is not clear  because to put it bluntly, the modellers deliberately avoided factoring into the alogrithms is, to what extent the deaths predicted would occur without coronavirus?

The answer to that question can never truly be known or predicted with any degree of accuracy until the pandemic is over, which is why modelling is pointless unless qualified by numerous caveats. Given that the old and chronically ill are most vulnerable, would these people be dying anyway, of seasonal ‘flu, common colds, breathing problems brought on by extremes of cold or hot weather? My wife’s final illness was triggered by a very cold spell in the winter of 2019 although she survived some months. There was no infection; scoliosis – a lifelong condition – put pressure on her lungs, the cold spell exacerbated that and … well several months later we are still waiting for the hospital to tell us exactly what happened. But whatever it was, it was neither the cold itself nor a cold weather infection, our home is well heated and Teri did not have to go outside.

Every year over 500,000 people die in England and Wales: inclide Scotland and Northern Ireland, and that goes up to over 600,000. The models being used to predict coronavirus deaths are not on top of this but included in the figure. Many of those deaths assigned to “The Corona Virus pandemic would be within this “normal” number of expected deaths. In short, they would have died anyway.
It was a point conceded by Sir Patrick at a press conference on Thursday when he said there would be “some overlap” between coronavirus deaths and expected deaths – he just did not know how much of an overlap. To put it another way the numbers of deaths likely to occur because of Coronavirus infection are expected quite small, but in a time of pandemic almost every death can be described as coronavirus related as most of us will have been in contact with someone carrying the virus, or in a public building that infected people of people who have been in contact with others carrying the virus have passed through.

As the 19th century British Prime Minister George Canning said: “I can make statistics tell me anything except the truth.

MORE ON THE CORONAVIRUS EPIDEMIC

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Scientist who convinced Boris lockdown was the only way to beat coronavirus criticised many times for flawed research

The scientist whose mathematical models of how the coronavirus would spread in the UK and the wildly exaggerated estimates of how many deaths might result from the epidemic reportedly led to the decision to implement a countrywide lockdown and trash the economy has been criticised in the past for flawed research.

In fact Professor Neil Ferguson, of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College in London, who authored and published a research paper predicting that The UK was likely to see 250,000 premature deaths during a coronavirus epidemic unless measures to effectively shut down the country were taken. It is this research which convinced Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his cabinet and advisors to introduce the lockdown.

Neil Ferguson: would you buy a used mathematical model from this man (Picture: Press association

It is, however, always unsafe to accept the word of one scientist or one research project, and it seems Prof. Ferguson is such an incorrigible publicity junkie he has a track record for making exaggerated and sensationalised claims about the probable outcomes of various crises which is longer than the Tour de France course. It is now being discussed publicly that Ferguson has a long established reputation for making predictions based on allegedly faulty assumptions and the results of mathematical models which have nonetheless shaped government strategies and impacted the UK economy. 

It is perhaps no coincidence that the medical research faculty at Imperial College London receives a large chunk of its revenue in the form of donations from the Bill and Medlinda Gates Foundation, which is also the largest donor to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

We have to cease this deification of scientists now. They are not impartial and objective seekers after truth, but are every bit as self interested as the rest of us. And when we look at Ferguson’s career and the disastrous policy decisions his mathematical models have lead to, the best we can say is “He’s not The Messiah, he’s a a very naughty boy,” (h/t Monty Python’s Flying Circus.)
The 2001 model used by Professor Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London concluded that the culling of animals include not only those found to be infected with the virus but also those on adjacent farms even if there was no physical evidence of infection.

“Extensive culling is sadly the only option for controlling the current British epidemic, and it is essential that the control measures now in place be maintained as case numbers decline to ensure eradication,” said their report which as presented to government, but published after the cull began

This mass slaughter – technically known as contiguous culling – triggered disgust in the British public as news video night after night showed the corpses of healthy animals being stacked, soaked with fuel oil and burned, and also prompted analyses of the methodology which led to such an appalling and, as it turned out, unjustified conclusion.

An analysis of Ferguson’s research published in the 2011 paper, Destructive Tension: mathematics versus experience – the progress and control of the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic in Great Britain, found that the government had ordered the destruction of millions of animals on evidence from “severely flawed” modelling.

According to one of its authors – the former head of the Pirbright Laboratory at the Institute for Animal Health, Dr Alex Donaldson – Ferguson’s models made a “serious error” by “ignoring the species composition of farms,” (a fairly basic piece of information, it must require a special kind of stupidity to be unable to distinguish betwen cattle, sheep and pics,) and the fact that the disease spread more easily between some species than others.

The report stated: “The mathematical models were, at best, crude estimations that could not differentiate risk between farms and, at worst, inaccurate representations of the epidemiology of FMD.”

It also described a febrile atmosphere – reminiscent of the fear and panic whipped up by attention seeking “experts,” celebrities and the mainstream media in recent week – and suggested that this hysteria allowed mathematical modellers to shape government policy.

“The general impatience that met the wait for the full extent of infections to become apparent, accompanied by an ever increasing number of outbreaks and piles of carcasses awaiting disposal, was perceived as a lack of success of the traditional control measures and provided the opportunity for self-styled ‘experts’, including some veterinarians, biologists and mathematicians, to publicise unproven novel options,” the researchers said.

As the lead scientist behind that disputed advice that led to Tony Blair’s government ordering the mass culling of farm livestock during the 2001 epidemic of foot and mouth disease, a crisis which cost the country billions of pounds was none other than Ferguson who based his conclusion on the output from – you guessed it – mathematical models of a cow and a bacterium, it is absolutely unacceptable that this man’s advice is being allowed to influence government.

And before that it was he who predicted that up to 150,000 people could die from bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or ‘mad cow disease’) and its equivalent in sheep if it made the leap to humans. The BSE panic is long forgotten but BSE is still around and still no cure has been developed, yet to date there have been fewer than 200 deaths caused by the human form of BSE and none resulting from sheep to human transmission.

Ferguson’s foot and mouth disease research has attracted strong criticism in scientific journals and therefore cannot be said to have passed the acid test of scientific research, peer review. It has also been the subject of critical academic papers which identified allegedly unsupportable assumptions being made by Ferguson in creating the algorithms and defining the data for his mathematical
modelling.

When challenged, he robustly defended his work, saying that he had worked with limited data and limited time so the models weren’t 100 per cent right – but that the conclusions it reached were valid. but as every old computer pro like myself knows, conclusions based on incomplete data may be valid in the circumstances but are meaninless. Mathematical models can only be relied on if they are fed all the relevant data, if guesses are made to fill in the gaps then the law of GIGO kicks in, “Garbage In, Garbage Out”.

Professor Michael Thrusfield, of the veterinary epidemiology faculty at Edinburgh University, who co-authored both of the critical reports, said the papers were intended to serve asas a “cautionary tale” about the dangers of using mathematical models to predict the spread of disease when there are unknown factors that can probably never be known.

He spoke of experiencing a sense of “déjà vu” when he read Mr Ferguson’s Imperial College paper on coronavirus, which was published earlier this month.

That paper – Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand – warned that if no action were taken to control the coronavirus, around 510,000 people in Britain would lose their lives.

Naive belief in the infallibility of mathematics has not only led to disastrous responses to outbreaks of disease of course, which is why many people of a naturally sceptical mindset have questioned the way modern academics conflate science and mathematics. Science and mathematics are not the same thing, in fact mathematics is not even a science, although we were all taught at school that is is. Mathematics is, in the truest sense of the word, an art: that is a contraction of artifice, which is a statement guaranteed to have some maths and science fanboys screaming in outrage. The true meaning of artifice however is not something false or dodgy, but something created by humans, something not of nature. And no matter what fanboys (and girls,) might try to tell you, nature does not do equations.

As I have said many time, computes are not infallible, they are only as good as the person who programs them. And there is no such thing as Artificial Intellegence, as Professor Ferguson’s wild adventures in mathematical modelling seem to show very clearly.

The Black-Scholes equation was the mathematical justification for the irresponsible trading in financial markets that plunged the world’s banks into meltdown a few years ago. The brainchild of economists Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, the equation provided a rational way (they believed,) to price a financial contract when it still had time to run. It was like buying or selling a bet on a horse, halfway through the race. It opened up a new world of ever more complex investments, blossoming into a gigantic global industry. But when the sub-prime mortgage market turned sour, the darling of the financial markets became the Black Hole equation, sucking money out of the universe in an unending stream. It was the Black-Scholes equation that opened up the world of derivatives.

The equation itself wasn’t the real problem. It was useful, it was precise, and its limitations were clearly stated. Derivatives could be traded before they matured. The formula was fine if you used it sensibly and abandoned it when market conditions weren’t appropriate. The trouble was its potential for abuse. Unfortunately a fatal flaw was that it allowed derivatives to become commodities that could be traded in their own right. The financial sector called it the Midas Formula and saw it as a recipe for making everything turn to gold. But the markets forgot how the story of King Midas ended.
The world’s banks lost hundreds of billions when the sub-prime mortgage bubble burst leaving thouse who had bought consolidated debt obligations in the belief that property prices would keep goping up forever. In the ensuing panic, taxpayers were forced to pick up the bill, but that was politics, not mathematical economics.

Likewise with Neil Ferguson’s mathematical models of diseases, in order to prevent a disaster which the professors mathematical models say is inevitable, politicians are being persuaded to courses of action that really will destroy national economies on the basis of a largely fictional (if not fantastic,) course of events. We must return to sanity now. Far more people are likely to die in a global recession than are ever going to be killed by coronavirus.

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Just To Put Things In Perspective

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People’s Skepticism About Covid-19 Is The Fault Of The Lying Mass Media – Caitlin Johnson at Medium
(Our comment on Caity’s article)

COVID – 19: Do The Figures Justify The Actions
US John Hopkins University Prof Says Don’t Believe Corona Virus Numbers

Is This The Smoking Gun That Proves China Has Lied About Coronvirus?

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Is This The Smoking Gun That Proves China Lied About The Coronavirus Outbreak?

With the number of confirmed cases of, and deaths from coronavirus in Italy, a nation of 63 million people having now surpassed the number of infections officially admitted by the government of China, a nation of 1.4 billion and the nation where the news strain of coronavirus, COVID – 19 was first observed, it was obvious to the realists among us that the Chinese government’s claims to have contained the virus were deeply suspect and further claims that the outbreak were under control were as reliable as reported sightings of The Tooth Fairy. To call the official narrative into question by suggesting China may have covered up the true extent of the coronavirus outbreak, despite being denied by government officials and mainstream media talking heads, was being put on a par with questioning the climate change narrative, saying there is no evidence that Donald Trump is a Russian collaborator or predicting that post Brexit, Britain will boom once free of the suffocating blanket of EU bureaucracy.

That may all be about to change because a report published today reveals an app supported by the government of China has been censoring keywords since January 1 this year. An investigation carried out by Toronto-based cybersecurity research company Citizen Lab found the WeChat app blocked combinations of keywords on the virus and any material critical of President Xi Jinping’s response. WeChat is the most popular messaging app in the China was created by entrepreneur Allen Zhang. The Chinese government government is known to have supported its development and uses it as a data source for mass surveillance programs in China. Such is the reality of life in socialist dictatorships, although the way governments use technology to control information is not so different in the liberal democracies.

The Chinese government has censored what its people read and say online for years, aided and abetted in some cases by Silicon Valley giants such as Google and Facebook but the CitizenLab report suggests they began blocking discussions on the mystery disease epidemic weeks before officials acknowledged the scale severity of the outbreak.

As I commented under and article by Cailtlin Johnson a few days ago, “Firstly, the unofficial reports I’m hearing through my network of business contacts is that the Chinese government is lying through its teeth, the infection is still rampant in China, there have been upwards of 100,000 fatalities and many millions of infections, the stories of hospitals built from scratch being fully operational 30 seconds after work on the foundations is begun are typical of the bullshit that always comes out of socialist governments to mask the fact that is a crisis bureaucrats never have a clue how to deal with the problems…” (Read full comment.) Looking back on China’s track record for dealing with humanitarian crises, it is on a par with the communist government’s track record on human rights, so it’s rather disconcerting to see liberal and progressive commentators in the free world jumping on the fear-and-panic bandwagon by heaping praise on a brutal, opp[ressive and incompetent tyranny.

For governments of course, to profess belief in China’s incredible claims about its success in containing COVID – 19 provides justification for the kind of executive power grabs we are seeing around the world in response to a relatively minor illness with a very high recovery rate. Because in spite of all the scaremongering, so far this strain of coronavirus is killing far less people that seasonal flu.

The damning report on China’s misinformation campaign also found that WeChat’s algorithm was updated to block progressively more significant words as the outbreak grew. Thus the Chinese government tried to keep it secret even when they knew the disease was out of control and pose a serious threat to certain demographic groups.

On December 31, China first alerted the World Health Organisation (WHO) to the outbreak, but information was initially withheld over the number of people infected, the risks downplayed, and timely information overseen, leading some to claim at that time the government was lying about the true extent of the virus.

Then, almost a month later, on January 20, President Xi publicly addressed the issue of the virus, saying it had to be “resolutely contained”.
It is not clear if WeChat’s keyword-blocking in this period was based on government directives, or if it was done of its own accord, as the report suggests it could be the result of companies “over-censoring in order to avoid being sanctioned by the authorities”.

WeChat was found to have censored 132 keyword combinations between January 1 and 31. Among words identified were the terms “Unknown Wuhan pneumonia” and “SARS outbreak in Wuhan” An additional 384 keywords were added between February 1 and 15.

China and some other non – democratic nations have a toxic attitude to freedom of speech and information, instead of being open about it when problems occur these authoritarian regimes try to hide what is happening and pretend to the outside world that everything is, if not quite normal, then at least under control. The governments in liberal democracies are not much better, but find it harder to get away with such blatant malfeasance as, at the time of writing, we still have a few ways available to us of calling those who rule us to account.

The CitizensLab report illustrates perfectly why governments and global corporations should be kept away from control of the internet, it is the last bastion of free speech and unfortunately the bastion is crumbling under constant bombardment.

We have all seen how alternative news sites and social media platforms have fallen into a biased propaganda left wing echo chamber, how censorship and Orwellian controls on information would be imposed on entire internet should it completely ever fall into the hands of the government or corporate globalists.

Yet in spite of warnings and concerns being raised by free speech activists, Boris Johnson in the UK appears determined to involve Huawei, the main corporate collaborator in China’s mass surveillance and information control policy, in building the UK’s 5G network, while in the USA the Trump administration continue to use Google and Facebook as collaborators in spite of the record of those companies in abusing their market position and manipulating information to their own advantage.

For most of us there is little to fear from COVID – 19 coronavirus if we take sensible precautions, the fear and panic being promoted by governments and mass media is a bigger threat. But as F. D. Roosvelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” If we give in to the artificially generated mass panic we are likely to find we have been stripped of most of our civil liberties. And for what? Fear of an infection far less dangerous that the seasonal influenza outbreaks that occur each year. Why has Italy been badly affected? Because the regions of Italy the virus has hit hardest have a very high proportion of old people. Why has China been hit? Because despite official reports of China’s rapid progress from third world poverty, much of the country is still poor and backward and vulnerability is increased by poor nutrition, sub standard civic sanitation and some bizarre dietary choices.

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Coronavirus deaths: Are The Authorities Deceiving Us?

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Picture: Buzzfeed
Yes we know we’ve used it before but we like it

Yesterday we reported that a Canadian outfit, CitizensLab had carried out a forensic data analysis of China’s response to the Coronavirus outbreak and concluded that while politicians (anvious perhaps of the way authoritarian governments like China’s can trample on human rights and civil liberties and silence critics by simply shooting them,) and academics (aka “scientists” or “experts”) are heaping praise on the way the communist regime in Beijing has contained and controlled its Coronavirus epidemic, the Chinese have actually being lying, the epidemc is still raging and real numbers of infections by, and deaths from COVID – 19 to use its technical name are far higher than are being reported,

SHOCK! HORROR! A socialist government lying to cover up its failures, incompetence and illegal activities in developing biological weapons. How could any reasonable person have suspected such a thing?

Well it seems the governments of the liberal democracies are not avese to playing the same game. The extreme measures introduced in the UK to tackle coronavirus by virtually putting the entire nation in lockdown have been justified because of the need to save lives, but if we look a little way below the surface, these measures are based on some very dubious evidence.

Mathematical Modelling (yes that old demon again) carried out by Imperial College London has been used by “scientists” and “experts” to inform government that unless new powers were enacted and used to curtail freedom of movement, social interaction and necessary activities like food shopping as many as 500,000 could die in our epidemic. That is a worst case scenario of course, but the best case scenario, that for the majority of people who are healthy, well nourished and living in a reasonably good environment, Coronavirus will be a relatively minor infection, in fact many of us will be unaware we have been infected with the virus.

The 500,000 dead being quoted as if it is the most likely outcome, although it is a worst case scenario, has the sticky fingerprints of the deep state (i.e. the civil, military and security services all over it, these agencies have a long track record of using fear and panic to reassert their authority when they feel control is slipping away from them. Even the government’s previous, more gentle strategy to slow the spread was likely to lead to 250,000 deaths, the research suggested. But where did these figures come from?

The warnings based on output from mathematical models remember,  prompted ministers to announce on Monday the biggest assault on personal freedom in the UK since World War 2, with the public being told to stay in their homes as much as possible, not reduce shopping trips to a minimum, not to go to pubs, clubs or theatres, and to work from home if possible. Sporting events had been shut down the previous wee

The move has hit the economy, putting jobs at risk and prompting schools to be closed and exams cancelled. In other words chaos rules, but then as author Terry Pratchett said, “In any conflict between order and chaos, chaos will win because it’s better organised.”

But is there any substance in those figures or are they plucked out of the air as previous estimates of the threat of pandemic diseases were. It was predicted millions would die, in reality a few people here ad there felt a bit poorly. Professor Neil Ferguson,  a senior academic involved in modelling the course of the epidemic told the BBC’s Today Programme earlier this week there was “no alternative” to the curtailment of personal liberty if 250,000 lives were not to be risked. Not the weasel words there, if lives were not to be put at risk. Everything we do carries some degree of risk, whether we drive to work, take a bus or walk there is always the risk of us being involved in an accident. If we eat at a restaurant there is a risk of food poisoning and if we cok at home there could be a house fire or an electrical fault could kill us. Lives being put at risk is a universe away from lives being put in danger.

Another expert, Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, told BBC Radio 4’s Today program he had advised The House Of Commons Health Select Committee, the parliamentary overseer of health issues, that the hope was to keep the death toll below 20,000 by suppressing the virus.

That would still be worse than those killed by flu, he said, giving a number of 8,000 per year. But again there is no evidence to suggest this figure is in any way accurate. In fact there is strong evidence, when we analyse the modelling techniques, that the figures they produce are not only unreliable but are simply made up to grab headlines. The question the “scientits” and “experts” don’t want us to ask is

Would these people be dying anyway?

The quoted figures for likely deaths from coronavirus are astounding but what is not clear  because to put it bluntly, the modellers deliberately avoided factoring into the alogrithms is, to what extent the deaths predicted would occur without coronavirus?

The answer to that question can never truly be known or predicted with any degree of accuracy until the pandemic is over, which is why modelling is pointless unless qualified by numerous caveats. Given that the old and chronically ill are most vulnerable, would these people be dying anyway, of seasonal ‘flu, common colds, breathing problems brought on by extremes of cold or hot weather? My wife’s final illness was triggered by a very cold spell in the winter of 2019 although she survived some months. There was no infection; scoliosis – a lifelong condition – put pressure on her lungs, the cold spell exacerbated that and … well several months later we are still waiting for the hospital to tell us exactly what happened. But whatever it was, it was neither the cold itself nor a cold weather infection, our home is well heated and Teri did not have to go outside.

Every year over 500,000 people die in England and Wales: inclide Scotland and Northern Ireland, and that goes up to over 600,000. The models being used to predict coronavirus deaths are not on top of this but included in the figure. Many of those deaths assigned to “The Corona Virus pandemic would be within this “normal” number of expected deaths. In short, they would have died anyway.
It was a point conceded by Sir Patrick at a press conference on Thursday when he said there would be “some overlap” between coronavirus deaths and expected deaths – he just did not know how much of an overlap. To put it another way the numbers of deaths likely to occur because of Coronavirus infection are expected quite small, but in a time of pandemic almost every death can be described as coronavirus related as most of us will have been in contact with someone carrying the virus, or in a public building that infected people of people who have been in contact with others carrying the virus have passed through.

As the 19th century British Prime Minister George Canning said: “I can make statistics tell me anything except the truth.

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Boggart Abroad: US John Hopkins University Prof Says Don’t Believe...

Boggart Abroad: US John Hopkins University Prof Says Don’t Believe...: Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog, The COVID-19 pandemic continues to explode all over the globe, and auth...

US John Hopkins University Prof Says Don’t Believe Corona Virus Numbers

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to explode all over the globe, and authorities are warning that it is going to continue to get worse.

The number of confirmed cases outside of China roughly tripled once again this week, and if this outbreak continues to escalate at this pace there will be more than a million confirmed cases in less than a month.  But as bad as the official numbers are, the truth is that there are a whole lot more people walking around out there that have caught the virus but have not been tested.  In fact, a medical professor at Johns Hopkins University named Marty Makary believes that there are “probably 25 to 50 people who have the virus for every one person who is confirmed”…

“Don’t believe the numbers when you see, even on our Johns Hopkins website, that 1,600 Americans have the virus,” he said.
“No, that means 1,600 got the test, tested positive. There are probably 25 to 50 people who have the virus for every one person who is confirmed.”

He added:

“I think we have between 50,000 and half a million cases right now walking around in the United States.”

If he is correct, and considering how easily this virus spreads from person to person, it isn’t going to be too long before this virus is everywhere, as Makary concluded:

"...we’re about to experience the worst public health epidemic since polio"

Other health experts are also warning that the number of Americans that have become infected is already extremely high.  As I pointed out yesterday, Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton is convinced that the number of victims in her state is now above 100,000…

Ohio health officials announced Thursday that the state has five known cases of the coronavirus, but one expert said that the number is likely much higher and estimated 100,000 undiagnosed cases.
Dr. Amy Acton, the director of the state’s health department, told reporters that the virus is “among us, but we can’t see it yet,” WBRB reported.

But of course what we have seen so far could just be the tip of the iceberg.
According to the New York Times, the CDC is projecting that up to 214 million Americans could eventually become infected…

Between 160 million and 214 million people in the United States could be infected over the course of the epidemic, according to one projection. That could last months or even over a year, with infections concentrated in shorter periods, staggered across time in different communities, experts said. As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.

Can you imagine how overwhelmed our healthcare system will be if that actually happens?

*******************************

And supposing this is repeated her in the UK (and there is no reason to believe it isn't,) can you imagine the strain on the NHS, already struggling to cope with the demands placed on it due largely to the stupidity of virtue signalling left wing and neo - liberal politicians who think we should offer 'free' healthcare to the world.
We still have no idea how long the pandemic will last. Some experts say it will burn itself out in a matter of months but that is pure speculation.  What if the virus mutates as quickly as 'flu, for which we have to have a new vaccine each year, or lasts for three full like the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1919 to 1921 did?
As things standeu, European, the entire western world seems to be in the process of shutting up shop as fear of the coronavirus spreads like wildfire, but can the economies of developed nations withstand such a shock to the system.  Many people are going to be deathly afraid to go out in public for the foreseeable future because this virus is so easy to catch yet the global economy depends on us rushing round like gadflies, sending shipments of good flying round the world, hoppong on and off passenger jets and ignoring the natural barries that have slowed previous pandemics .
This virus could be on the next surface that you touch, it could be on the next hand that you shake, and there is even the possibility that you could breathe it in during the next breath that you take.
In spite of this Emmanuel Macron, the idiot who serves as President of France and Ursula Van Leyen, the wannabe tyrant who is president of the EU have called for national borders to stay open and no restrictions placed on the free movement of people. In typical EU style their thinking is driven by globalist ideology rather than pragmatism.
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