Were we plunged into a devastating national lockdown because of Boris Johnson and his boffins’ dodgy data?
DID we get plunged into a devastating livelihood-destroying national lockdown based on falsehoods?
That seems a worrying possibility after the release today of dramatic official figures by the Office for National Statistics downgrading the incidence rate of coronavirus per 10,000 people that Boris Johnson and his boffins used to tell us Lockdown 2 was unavoidable.
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When the Prime Minister announced the month-long shut down on Halloween, the ONS said coronavirus in England had doubled from 4.3 per 10,000 on October 3 to 9.52 on October 17.
But the latest modelled ONS data from December 4 has seen the figure for October 17 nearly chopped in half to only 4.89 per 10,000 people.
Their modelling shows that during lockdown the incidence rate did not go higher than 6.62 per 10,000 on November 12, nothing close to the nightmare figure.
Crucially, ITV’s Political Editor Robert Peston said the ONS coronavirus survey “underpinned Boris Johnson's controversial announcement at the end of October to put England back into national lockdown”.
The ONS responded to Peston today, insisting: “All our evidence, including positivity rates which are still over 0.9 per cent, show the pandemic was at a peak at the time of the Prime Minister’s announcement on October 31 on restrictions.”
DOOMSDAY DOSSIER
But we know the downgraded incidence rate was not the only example of dodgy data used to justify the national lockdown.
Already discredited is the terrifying headline figure in Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance’s doomsday dossier that the UK was on course to experience over 4,000 deaths a day in December.
Professor Carl Heneghan, of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, almost immediately pointed out that modelling was based on the incorrect assumption that we were already experiencing 1,000 deaths a day in October.
As the Former Brexit Secretary David Davis said at the time: "This is not the first time that we've had misleading forecasts.
"Back in March we had the Imperial College model, which was some ten times greater than any potential outcome.”
Trust is at stake here.
That couldn’t be any more significant for the Government on this historic Vaccination Day, as they encourage vast swathes of the population to be jabbed for the greater good.
I have said for months that lockdowns don’t work. Increasingly, scientific evidence is backing that up.
Despite constant claims from Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer that a two-week circuit breaker lockdown would have made all the difference, the outcome of just that in Wales doesn’t back that theory up, with Welsh rates spiking once the nation reopened.
As Professor Tim Spector – the scientist behind the ZOE Covid app – puts it: “UK cases still slowly dropping today – but Wales now has three to four times the rate of new cases of the rest of the country.
“Looks like the experiment of short lockdowns and releases are a disaster to be avoided.
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“We now need steady policies and advice over the next three months – stay ahead.”
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He is right: Lockdowns are a blunt instrument that don’t actually work.
I only hope our leaders start to get the message before they think about Lockdown 3 in January.
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