Decision to have secondary schools pupils wear masks was "totally political"

[-:Undertaker:-]

‘Nicola Sturgeon’s decision to force Scotland’s secondary school children to wear face masks was “totally political” and “not based on medical advice”, Sir Patrick Vallance wrote in his Covid diary.’ https://t.co/39NKUGenaM

— Christopher Snowdon 🇺🇦 (@cjsnowdon) March 13, 2024

How completely unsurprising to anyone with any critical thinking skills.

What was a shock was just how many normally rational people fell for the fear-mongering and paranoia over it all. It's now obvious to me just how easily in historical terms governments/regimes have gotten away with the most outright lies to outright crimes, with many cheering them on and turning on anyone who even questions it. That was the truly scary part.

[Hannah]

How completely unsurprising to anyone with any critical thinking skills.

What was a shock was just how many normally rational people fell for the fear-mongering and paranoia over it all.

Ignoring the whole mask wearing debate - are you saying that Covid wasn't something to be worried about or am I misinterpreting?

I lost my dad (no underlying conditions) and my aunt (underlying conditions worsened by Covid) and I know many people who lost close friends and relatives. The whole reaction to it was a dog's dinner, including the race to get a vaccine trophy which costed lives (including nearly causing my mum to die two months after my dad because of a pulmonary embolism suspectedly caused by the AstraZeneca).

Almost everything that happens has, or can be pushed to have political reasons behind it - but that doesn't mean it wasn't something to be concerned about, and cases definitely went up when children were back to school...

[-:Undertaker:-]

Ignoring the whole mask wearing debate - are you saying that Covid wasn't something to be worried about or am I misinterpreting?

I lost my dad (no underlying conditions) and my aunt (underlying conditions worsened by Covid) and I know many people who lost close friends and relatives. The whole reaction to it was a dog's dinner, including the race to get a vaccine trophy which costed lives (including nearly causing my mum to die two months after my dad because of a pulmonary embolism suspectedly caused by the AstraZeneca).

Almost everything that happens has, or can be pushed to have political reasons behind it - but that doesn't mean it wasn't something to be concerned about, and cases definitely went up when children were back to school...

I think that Covid-19 was much like the Spanish flu that struck around the time of World War I. A virus that was more deadly than the normal winter flu (due to lack of exposure by much of the population) to those with underlying conditions/advanced age such as the elderly in care homes, and which also had the ability (just as the flu has) to strike down seemingly healthy people without any known underlying conditions. I'm very sorry to hear that your father was in that particular and highly unusual statistical group.

My argument throughout the whole thing was that there was little we could realistically do to prevent it - which has been proven due to the fact that people still die daily from it just as they do from regular flu and pneumonia - and that those in statistically endangered groups should have been given the choice on an individual level as to what action they would take. Even then, I am reluctant to say that even the groups most vulnerable should have been shielded and i'll give my reasons for this below.

My Grandfather died just two months prior to the epidemic in February 2020. He was 89 and in a care home, had advanced dementia along with a history of strokes which has rendered him unable to walk unaided. It's quite evident to me that it would be absurd to shut the country down to only slow the progression of a disease in order to 'save him' when he was at the end of his life. In my view the "lets shield the elderly" argument is as equally as absurd as I don't see what good would be achieved on balance by depriving him of his family and 'normal' life only to add a few months maximum onto his already short lifespan that was left.

In other words yes it was worse than other variants of seasonal flu viruses, but there was nothing we could do but let it circulate and adapt.

[Hannah]

While I can see the link between the Spanish Flu and Covid, we're a bit more advance in a lot of aspects since WWI, just as we were then vs the Bubonic Plague centuries before.

The whole idea wasn't to prevent it - that wasn't possible and it was known. It was to lighten the load on the entire healthcare infrastructure (in the UK at least, anyway). Of course the more vulnerable will die, as they likely would with a normal flu, but it was the rate in which it was spreading to those vulnerable people that was the issue.

It was always transparent that children were less susceptible to serious side affects, if any at all, which made it even easier for them to spread it to the more vulnerable people in the community.

In actual fact, I'm a strong believer that the government would be quite happy to clear out some of the older generations as we're living longer as a whole and I don't believe the state pension and benefits can be entirely covered by that collected.

I'm also sorry to hear of your grandfather, but as above it wasn't to stop the deaths. The steps were to slow the hospital admissions that for a large percentage of cases ended in death anyway. We aren't allowed to just let people die because they're old, even if there isn't much but misery in what life they have left unfortunately.

We also still don't have enough evidence or data to suggest that there aren't other health deteriorations which are linked to Covid or indeed the vaccines, though it is suspected that hearts are definitely weaker as a result and that also increases the strain on our already failing healthcare system.

[-:Undertaker:-]

While I can see the link between the Spanish Flu and Covid, we're a bit more advance in a lot of aspects since WWI, just as we were then vs the Bubonic Plague centuries before.

The whole idea wasn't to prevent it - that wasn't possible and it was known. It was to lighten the load on the entire healthcare infrastructure (in the UK at least, anyway). Of course the more vulnerable will die, as they likely would with a normal flu, but it was the rate in which it was spreading to those vulnerable people that was the issue.

It was always transparent that children were less susceptible to serious side affects, if any at all, which made it even easier for them to spread it to the more vulnerable people in the community.

I'm also sorry to hear of your grandfather, but as above it wasn't to stop the deaths. The steps were to slow the hospital admissions that for a large percentage of cases ended in death anyway. We aren't allowed to just let people die because they're old, even if there isn't much but misery in what life they have left unfortunately.

We also still don't have enough evidence or data to suggest that there aren't other health deteriorations which are linked to Covid or indeed the vaccines, though it is suspected that hearts are definitely weaker as a result and that also increases the strain on our already failing healthcare system.

Essentially your argument here is that the purpose of lockdowns and restrictions was to ease pressure on the health service which is a logical argument to make. The problem however is that predictions of healthcare collapse were being made on the back of dodgy models which resembled nothing like we were seeing in reality. Public policy was being made on advice from these models, by which you can put any data you like in and get any data you like out. For more on this, see: https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/0...-covid-models/ It's much the same as the economic models we were treated to with predictions on the economic collapse if we voted to leave the EU, none of which were true at all.

Another point to make with the statistical evidence is this, of those who did 'die' of Covid-19 (much less than the dodgy models were predicting) you also have to account for the fact that people who were going into hospital with heart attacks and then testing positive during their stay who later died, their deaths were being added to the Covid-19 statistics. The death statistics also didn't take into account other factors - returning to the example of my Grandad for example, his death certificate is mainly down to pneumonia yet we do not blame pneumonia for the death of a 89 year old man who had dementia, had repeated strokes and who was essentially at the end of his life. Had he died during the pandemic, no doubt he would have gone down as a Covid-19 statistic yet the reality is it was his time to go. Flu does much the same in care homes around the country every year - it can often take out a handful of elderly residents at a time.

In actual fact, I'm a strong believer that the government would be quite happy to clear out some of the older generations as we're living longer as a whole and I don't believe the state pension and benefits can be entirely covered by that collected.

My belief is that a lot of the focus of medical science has been on extending our lifespans rather than focusing on the quality of our lives. One of the reasons Covid-19 picked off so many elderly people so easily is because we're extending lifespans to a point where people have zero quality of life, can barely function both mentally and physically, and then something like that comes along and quite frankly it is easy pickings.

My other Grandad - now 89 but in fine shape and health - said at the time it was simply nature's way (a pandemic) of coming along and sweeping through the weaker and sicker members of our species, as is often happens in animal kingdom. I think that's certainly true from a biological standpoint and you only have to look at the Black Plague as a key example of that where a disease sweeps through a population and leaves those who survived with an immunity which is then passed down.