After the models upon which he based his policies proved to be “wildly incorrect,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Wednesday the lifting of COVID-19 vaccine passports, mask mandates and work-from-home guidance in England.
Regarding masks, the prime minister said the basic policy will be to “trust the judgment of the British people and no longer criminalize anyone who chooses not to wear one.”
“From tomorrow we will no longer require face masks in classrooms, and the Department for Education will shortly remove national guidance on their use in communal areas,” Johnson told the House of Commons.
Sajid Javid told a Downing Street press conference that “we cannot eradicate this virus and its future variants.”
“Instead we must learn to live with Covid in the same way we have to live with flu,” he said.
See Prime Minister Johnson’s remarks:
The Telegraph of London reported members of the British Parliament confronted Johnson with the model upon which the lockdown was based, which warned of 4,000 deaths a day.
The most recent complete data from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales – on Jan. 11 – showed a seven-day average of 232 deaths a day attributed to COVID-19.
In the U.S., with the more contagious yet much milder omicron variant now about 99% of new cases, nearly every state last week was recording a doubling of cases from week to week. But seven states, as of Wednesday morning, are recording declining cases. In New York state, new COVID cases dropped by 75% over the past two weeks.
Conservative MP Steve Baker, deputy chairman of the COVID recovery group, said the “reality is the Prime Minister was shown a terrifying model which was subsequently proven to be widely incorrect but he took away freedoms from tens of millions on that basis.”
“It is monstrous that millions of people were locked down, effectively under house arrest, their businesses destroyed, their children prevented from getting an education,” the Parliament member said.
“The situation is now perfectly plain that even our most basic liberties can be taken away by the stroke of a pen, if a minister has been shown sufficiently persuasive modeling that tells them there is trouble ahead.”
Baker said he told Johnson to challenge the modeling by Cambridge University and Public Health England. Prof. Tim Spector of King’s College London and Prof. Carl Heneghan of Oxford University were called into Downing Street to go over the data, the Telegraph reported.
“But by the time the models were shown to be inaccurate, it was too late to stop public calls for restrictions,” the British broadsheet said.
In a separate story, the Telegraph recalled that in the early stages of the pandemic, the British government’s coronavirus strategy was to “flatten the peak” of cases.
However, the government made an about face when Imperial College of London published its Report 9 in March 2020 projecting 500,000 deaths in the United Kingdom if politicians took no action.
The model by lead researcher Neil Ferguson also projected 2.2 million deaths in the United States, and after Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx confronted President Trump with the horrifying figures, the White House followed suit.
But the hard data and studies from around the world show the lockdowns and other severe mitigation measures didn’t stop the typical waxing and waning of a respiratory virus pandemic. And the Telegraph spoke with an expert on infectious disease modeling at Bristol University in England who made the point that even if “the government didn’t put in restrictions, people would have started behaving differently.”
“But we ended up with the baseline being ‘assuming nothing changes,’ because it’s difficult to know what the alternative baseline is,” said Dr. Ellen Brooks-Pollock.
The London paper cited a well-known aphorism among scientists, coined by the British statistician George Box in 1976.
“All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Last year, America’s doctors, nurses and paramedics were celebrated as frontline heroes battling a fearsome new pandemic. Today, under Joe Biden, tens of thousands of these same heroes are denounced as rebels, conspiracy theorists, extremists and potential terrorists. Along with massive numbers of police, firemen, Border Patrol agents, Navy SEALs, pilots, air-traffic controllers, and countless other truly essential Americans, they’re all considered so dangerous as to merit termination, their professional and personal lives turned upside down due to their decision not to be injected with the experimental COVID vaccines. Biden’s tyrannical mandate threatens to cripple American society – from law enforcement to airlines to commercial supply chains to hospitals. It’s already happening. But the good news is that huge numbers of “yesterday’s heroes” are now fighting back – bravely and boldly. The whole epic showdown is laid out as never before in the sensational October issue of WND’s monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled “THE GREAT AMERICAN REBELLION: ‘We will not comply!’ COVID-19 power grab ignites bold new era of national defiance.”
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