Covid Lockdowns Wreaked Carnage On UK –We Can’t Allow PM to Pass Buck, Says Nigel Farage; Former NIH Director: Ignoring ‘Collateral Damage’ Inflicted by COVID-19 Policies Was ‘Really Unfortunate’, and other C-Virus related stories

Covid lockdowns wreaked carnage on UK – we can’t allow PM to pass buck, says Nigel Farage:

Baroness Mone has been all over the pages of our national newspapers for past few weeks. And as we were in pantomime season, she seemed like the ideal villainess.

Her admission that she lied to the media about her links to a company that supplied £200 million of personal protective equipment to the government during the Covid pandemic has not gone down well.

As many people have pointed out, lying to the press is the same as lying to the country.But might this scandal be a useful diversion from an even uglier truth? When the facts are considered in the cold light of day, it becomes easier to see that in February 2020, when Covid-19 first hit, Britain was being led by a government which was woefully underprepared for it or, indeed, for any other pandemic.

And this prompted some of the most mind-boggling waste of public money in our history. At the start of the crisis, the NHS had only one day’s supply of surgical gowns. A panic began and by July 2020, five years’ worth of emergency PPE had been ordered and paid for by taxpayers.

Records show that the Department of Health spent £12.1bn on emergency PPE in the financial year 2020-21. Yet more than 70 per cent of this figure – at least £8.7 billion and possibly more – was ultimately written off because the equipment was unsuitable, had passed its expiry date, or because of a loss in market value.

Of course, in the interim, it had to be stored somewhere, and it was – at more than 70 locations around the country. Those warehouse fees alone cost more than £400 million.For this staggering misuse of your precious money you can thank our low grade politicians who were ably supported, presumably, by armies of faceless civil servants. —>READ MORE HERE

Former NIH Director: Ignoring ‘Collateral Damage’ Inflicted by COVID-19 Policies Was ‘Really Unfortunate’

As federal officials considered how the government should respond to an emerging pandemic in 2020, Francis Collins recalled last year, “we weren’t really considering the consequences” of extreme measures such as business shutdowns, school closures, and stay-at-home orders. It was a startling admission from Collins, who played a major role in those conversations as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Collins, whose July 2023 comments recently attracted online attention, confessed that “public health people” made a “really unfortunate” mistake by ignoring the devastating side effects of the interventions they believed were necessary to curtail COVID-19 transmission. That mistake carries important lessons not just for future responses to communicable diseases but also for a wide range of public policies that inflict harm in the name of saving lives.

Collins, who ran the NIH from 2009 to 2021, was speaking at a Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, conference sponsored by Braver Angels, an organization that aims to “bridge the political divide” by encouraging civil discussion between people with different ideologies and partisan allegiances. During a session with Wilk Wilkinson, a Minnesota trucking manager and podcast host who is sharply critical of the political reaction to COVID-19, Collins tried to explain the perspective of the scientists who shaped that response.

“If you’re a public health person,” he said, “you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. [It] doesn’t matter what else happens.”

That seemingly noble impulse, Collins noted, encouraged public health specialists to overlook the unintended but foreseeable costs of the policies they recommended. “You attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life,” he said. “You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from.” —>READ MORE HERE

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