Boris really has lost the plot here.
Mr Johnson acknowledged that people were ‘furious’ with him about the pandemic.
But he insisted his approach was ‘the only way to do it’, and it was not possible to do as some wish and let the disease ‘rip’ to protect the economy.
‘As Prime Minister I couldn’t take a course that could expose us to tens of thousands more deaths in very short order,’ he said.
‘And, you know, we’ve got to continue to bear down on this virus, whilst protecting the economy. That’s the balance we’ve got to strike.’
Told that Tories were condemning him for curtailing civil liberties without parliamentary scrutiny, Mr Johnson said ‘nobody in my position wants to do any of the things that we’ve had to do’.
‘I’m a freedom-loving Tory… I don’t want to have to impose measures like this, are you crazy?’ he said.
‘This is the last thing we want to do. But I also have to save life. And that’s our priority.
The sheer idiocy on display is staggering to say the least. There is no scientific evidence to support the concept of curfews. It is not within the government’s purview to save lives or prevent the spread of the virus. And what evidence we have suggests that this virus, like all those coronaviruses that preceded it is becoming less virulent and therefore letting it rip is precisely what we should be doing.
He said he believed the science would ‘change’ in the coming months which would allow the Government and the country to alter its approach to dealing with Covid-19.
Only someone with a complete lack of scientific understanding would come out with such a stupid statement.
What we currently have in government is a combination of incompetence, idiocy and hubris. It’s a pretty toxic mix.
This is disingenuous at best. By the time the UK went into this thing in March it was already understood that unlike the 1918 Spanish Flu, that those primarily affected were the elderly and those with comorbidities affecting cardiovascular function (hypertension, COPD, diabetes, extreme obesity, etc.)
The way to deal with this was much closer to the Swedish model than anything else, namely to provide direct financial and logistical support to those in at risk groups and provide the general public at large with genuine medical advice, not pandering to the opportunistic scaremongering of a few sexually frustrated academics wanting to get their face on the box. I’m looking at you Professor Lockdown!
If your “solution” to an epidemic is to effectively shutdown the entire economy and funnel funny money to the public to prevent rioting, then you need your head examining. That is neither appropriate, nor sustainable for any length of time and certainly “until a vaccine is produced” is simply wishful thinking.
If we’re having to close down the nation to “Protect the NHS”, then the NHS has essentially become a threat to the nation and should be restructured along the lines of Swiss-style public/private model so that it is more resilient than the bloated bureaucracy that we have at the present.
It is obvious to anyone with half-a-brain that effectively shuttering hospitals to all other admissions would lead to a dramatic rise in other diseases, especially cancer being undetected / untreated. When the final analysis is done I suspect the number of normally treatable cancer deaths alone will be higher than the actual COVID-19 death toll.
The problem is that the breed of professional politicians we have nowadays means that they are little more than lily-livered middle managers. I doubt there is an elected politician of note that would have done much differently.
“When the final analysis is done”
I really hope that at some point in the future there is a successful class action law suit brought against Wancock, Witless & Unbalanced, by families of cancer & heart patients who died as a result of their deliberate scaremongering, and disastrous handling of this situation. I will go to my grave (slightly) more contented if they all get life sentences for manslaughter…
Nah. It will be the usual “Lessons have been learned” wank fest and the guilty will get knighthoods and peerages.
Rear Admiral (Retd) has started a crowdfunded legal challenge against Hancock & NHS over abuse of elderly
ONLY JUST NOTICED?
Those of us in London already knew this.
BoZo has a long history of “Making stuff up” ( Sometimes lying, sometimes not ) – whatever seems plausible & will makle him look good.
NOW – he has arrived at the one job where you can’t get away with that – or not for long.
Unfotrunately, he has purged what is still called “The Conservative & Unionist Party” of people with sense & patriotism, so that people like Ken Clarke & Nicholas Soames are now “Independants”.
I was rubbish at science in school but even I picked up that however clever and plausible a theory is if it doesn’t fit in with real life then it is a rubbish theory.
johnson and his crew seem incapable of looking out of the window to see that Real Life has moved entirely away from fergusons precious model which was obvious by the end of April.
Meanwhile the local University continues its pathetic attempts to lockdown ‘infected’ students when all that will do is keep Covid lingering around so that a few late infectees take it home to kill granny at Xmas.
For a one-minute, superb summary of your first para, take a look at Nobel laureate Richard Feynman explaining the key to science… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b240PGCMwV0
Yup. That’s it in a nutshell.
Apparently, if the media is to be believed, there are three students in Italy who tested positive for covid (not worthy of a capital letter), have been isolated in separate rooms for something like three months, but can’t leave Italy as they keep showing positive tests. There had got to be something amiss here. If they are in isolation, then either the test results are wrong or, as they are still alive, the virus can’t be all that dangerous to the young.
There is one way to check this out. It is reported that several hundred students are in lockdown at Newcastle University after taking over the city centre for freshers week, and then testing positive. Let’s see how many die within the next two weeks. If none then, statistically (and how the government loves statistics), it can be ascertained if it is actually dangerous to the young, and priority measures can be concentrated on the most vulnerable. If they all die, it is no great loss as they are only students and probably supporters of Antifa, BLM, and LGBGT factions (*).
In either case, the government has learned something.
(*)A joke. Tasteless, I know, but still only a joke.
If “Readwald” were still with us – he would doubtless say that “localism” is the answer – & I would agree with him.
]BoZo the clown’s dimal attemopts at centralisation, so that he & his tame sub-clowns can be “in control” ( Not ) is certainly one of the roots of the problem