Because Trump is such a spring chicken !???? :skull::whistle:

Sure Trump is also at Risk.


He could be taking meds already

A growing backlash from a certain section. The times has always been the paper with the closest ties to the conservative party, and suddenly, the party who spaffed £100m on no deal preparation propaganda are suddenly all out in force to knock down an article they didn't like, and their pushback is somehow seen as more truthful?

The same cabal that acted illegally during the referendum? The same folks with the big red bus? The people funded by Russia? Yeah, it's no surprise that the tory party is putting out an extensive rebuttal, when they can't even be arsed to record the number of care home deaths.

The rebuttal has some inconsistencies too, look at the response relating to the editor of the Lancet on 23rd Jan...
He rejects the findings of one study on the global impact without evidence, it was basically his opinion.
One week later as further evidence emerged he called for a global public health emergency, essentially this vilified the original article as entirely correct.

Can I also point out that this is the same editor of the Lancet that refused to retract an article that suggested vaccines cause autism for 12yrs.

https://twitter.com/richardhorton1/s...449072128?s=19

The responses to this tweet are very interesting.

The COBRA meetings the PM Missed were not due to his presence not being required, he was on holiday.

There was a COBRA meeting on 29th Jan the global health emergency was declared on the 30th and in a speech to the nation on the 31st boris mentioned nothing in relation to covid 19.

I've seen quite a few journalists starting to unpick the story now and question its accuracy. It's not about who's telling the truth as such, it's about the quality of the journalism and giving it appropriate scrutiny. Like can we really infer that Hancock wasn't bothered about the virus because he was said to have 'bounced out of Whitehall' after a meeting about it and been 'breezy' with journalists? And like this article points out, how much credence can we give to some of the sources:

And more problems with the articles sources

Then there was the big focus put on us sending PPE to China. It was true that we sent a small supply when they were at the height of the crisis but then it doesn't point out how we have received more than forty times what we donated from China

Keeps being said on here how healthy it is to question things so surely the same applies to this article.

In the middle of January, a WHO delegation declared that there was ‘no clear evidence of human to human transmission’. Yet by then it was already quite obvious that Chinese authorities had sought to engage in a cover-up. The police had actually threatening a Wuhan doctor, Li Wenliang, with arrest for daring to warn colleagues of a new illness which had reminded him of Sars. In the end, Dr Li died of Covid-19 himself.

(Spectator)

Did the ST do anything about this article wise ,?

Or does in not suit the owners agenda?

Seeing as the owner is the most pro government person in the media who knows. Maybe he's had enough of the bull? Haven't we all? ...

Oh dear...Oh dear oh dear...

Every scientist of integrity on SAGE should resign immediately'

Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet medical journal, has accused the government of having 'Utterly corrupted independent scientific advice."

He tweeted:*"If true that Dominic Cummings attended meetings of SAGE, then every scientist of integrity on SAGE should resign immediately. You have forfeited any claim you might have had to providing independent scientific advice to government.

"If it is true that Dominic Cummings attended meetings of SAGE, then the government led by Boris Johnson has utterly corrupted independent scientific advice; but I’m afraid to say that the scientists who sit on SAGE have allowed themselves to be corrupted, including the CSA/CMO."

The chuckle bros of politics boris and Cummings in bovver again.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/h...-a9481346.html

Making SAGE scientists resign at this time would be about as sensible as injecting disinfectant.

Very True
James.

But Mr Horton is the person relied upon in the government rebuttal of the times article remember, are his services no longer required as the voice of reason against fake noos?

This is yet another example of why the public lose faith in the govt, they keep being found out in areas like this where independent advisors are anything but. As the saying goes, don't shoot the messenger!

Can I just leave this here? It's to counter the boring It's new they didn't know'! Trope.... They very much DID know.

How funny is it that people who hate the Tories come up with all the "they knew all along..." bunkum? Politicising a national emergency is dumb.

Meh. Obviously I'm no Tory but :shrug: I don't see the dishonesty on this one. They didn't lockdown earlier because, no matter how hard we wish, hope and pray otherwise, no matter how many times Arista insists we'll be on lockdown until 2029, the simple fact is that lockdown is functionally voluntary and extremely finite.

They didn't lock down earlier because the earlier they locked down, the earlier in the curve people would have started to give up on it.

Did they mistime it? Who knows, maybe, but the logic was sound. The lockdown is starting to disintegrate already, if we had locked down two weeks earlier, it would have been collapsing two weeks ago - at peak deaths.

Now... would earlier lockdown have meant earlier and lower peak? Maybe, that's possible, but it's also possible that it wouldn't have and we would have had increasing numbers breaking it before it had any effect at all.

In short; the idea that we could and should have locked down earlier hinges on the idea that we can lock down indefinitely when in terms of social psychology it was always obvious, and now becoming increasingly evident, that that just isn't the case.

That's fair enough, TS. The fact for some people is that the Tories would be damned if they did and damned if they didn't. I'd just like to see the criticism saved for the post match analysis.

I agree with that, there's a lot of overly-confident talk about what was and wasn't done right, which country had the right idea, who-dun-it-best... when to continue your metaphor, we're just finishing up the second game of the first set, in a 5-set Wimbledon final that's going to stretch on into the evening.

There are so many variables that are going to play into what was right, we won't know until someone properly crunches the numbers - the initial Covid deaths, the effect of lockdown, the knock-on non-covid health effects, the longer term effect of the economic damage... and that's data we're not going to have for several years.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion of course, to say "Hmm I'm not so sure about this?" but the concrete "THIS was right, THIS was wrong, they should have done THIS" is all very premature and like I said over-confident.

There's no evidence base for this. It doesn't exist, this has never happened before. On the plus side... ? ... there will be one next time :umm2:.

Some people that are moaning about the lockdown being delayed will be the same ones now moaning for it to be lifted.

:clap1: and most of them don't appear to even bother with the daily briefings just get their news from the Sun/Mail etc

So let me get this straight, during a national emergency, where we saw what was happening to other countries around the world due to the virus, our governments early strategy was to let as many people catch the virus as possible before they chose to do anything, just to see if an unproven theory would be correct, tens of thousands of people have now died, many more possibly than what they’re actually telling us, but the government shouldn’t be criticised or be held to account? Not quite sure that’s how this democracy thing works tbh

They’re only now just discussing closing the airports from the worst hit countries, like come on, how is that in anyway not negligent and downright idiotic?

The mainstream press right now :joker:. They're managing to do both at the same time, which is quite impressive really.

Like I said you can share an opinion that you think they've taken the wrong path etc. but you can't fully hold them to account before there's an outcome to hold them to account for... we still have no idea what this all looks like long-term. You're making concrete assertions based on no data (there is no data!) which is pointless.

Surely the amount of people that have died is a good place to start holding them to account?
Or are we going down the ‘well, they don’t really count cause the majority of them would have died anyway so :shrug:’ routine that seems to come with every ‘leave the government alone!’ defence everywhere lately

Longest sentence of the week award.

Labour would have done much the same as the Tories if they'd got in at the last election. Except we'd have Diane Abbott, as Home Secretary, handling the logistics. Now that would be something to see...

So rather than try and defend a point, you divert to attack grammar and pose hypotheticals nobody knows the answers to, good job