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April 15, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:05:51
Hector Drummond vs Covid-19 Hysteria
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Welcome to the Deling Pod with me James Deling Pod and my very special guest about whom naturally I'm enormously excited.
His name is Hector Drummond.
And Hector, not his real name by the way, Hector has been at the forefront of, what do we call it Hector?
Covid scepticism?
I think we probably call it lockdown scepticism.
Lockdown sceptics, that's what we are.
That's Toby Young's new name for it anyway.
That's a very good point.
Toby's another person, actually, besides yourself, who's covered himself with glory, who is having a good war.
I really do hope, when this is all over, Hector, that there's going to be a ledger.
And in the ledger, which actually is going to be written by a friend of ours, isn't it?
Yes, Dan.
And you, I would say, Hector, my friend, would definitely appear in the calm, measured authority category.
Because you've been writing on your website with graphs.
I mean, actual scientific stuff that I couldn't do.
You've been shown by graphs that...
What?
That this COVID pandemic isn't quite what we're being told by the hysterical tabloids?
Is that fair?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, we don't really know quite what the situation is as yet, but it's not looking as bad as it's been made out to be.
And certainly when it comes to the lockdown, I think that the lockdown, that hasn't been shown to be justified at this point.
Right.
Can you explain that?
Because, look, the story I'm getting from the other side on Twitter is...
Is that this lockdown was necessary to save our NHS or something and that we had to impose the lockdown because otherwise the NHS wards would have been overrun and that there weren't enough ICU beds available.
There wasn't enough equipment and it would have been an abject disaster if we hadn't imposed this lockdown.
Do you think that is not strictly accurate?
Well, I think we should have waited a bit longer to actually see whether there was any actual evidence that the NHS was going to be overwhelmed because the evidence, I say evidence, but all we really had was some dubious computer models playing that this was the case.
Where have I heard the phrase dubious computer models before?
That's a fairly familiar scenario.
But yeah, carry on.
So the computer models, Well, they claimed that the NHS was going to be overrun, and that's the only reason for the lockdown, really.
The whole point of lockdown wasn't that it needed to be done to save lives in general.
It was that the NHS would be overwhelmed if we didn't do it, and we needed to buy time to increase capacity in the NHS. And develop a vaccine and so on.
Although I think that developing a vaccine was a bit of a forlorn hope because that doesn't look like it's going to happen for a year or so, if ever.
If ever.
It was really about the NHS. And the NHS is not even full at the moment.
The new Nightingale Hospital in London.
Do you know how many patients it currently has?
Oh, go on, tell me.
Nineteen.
And how many beds has it got?
I think it's got hundreds, possibly even a thousand beds.
Right.
See, the NHS has not been overrun, so it's looking to me like we didn't really need to do that.
We could have at least waited to see whether there really was a likelihood of the NHS being overrun before we locked down the whole of society.
Yeah, I think I'd be with you on that one, Hector.
And I think there are quite a few people, a growing number, I hope, of our party.
I mean, I was checking out my Twitter today, and I saw some NHS nurses doing a TikTok-style dance routine, which is what the kids are into, apparently.
Now, I know how long these videos take to make.
You know, you can't just put aside five minutes and just bash it out.
You've got to put a bit of effort into it.
Now, if these angels, these NHS angels, have time on their hands to make TikTok-type videos, allegedly to cheer us all up, I wonder whether perhaps the crisis isn't quite as extreme as we're being told by the tabloids.
Yeah, it certainly suggests that.
We're certainly getting mixed messages.
On the one hand, we're told we're in the midst of a terrible war, we're in the trenches, we're on the battlefield, things are looking really grim.
On the other hand, we're getting these endless videos.
I've seen loads of these videos on the web of doctors and nurses and ambulance staff doing all these funny choreographed dances.
Oh, and let's not forget the police as well.
The police have been doing these videos.
So, I mean, that sort of suggests to me a wholly different scenario.
The analogy I've been thinking of recently is, it's like we're in the middle of a bit of a war, but it's more to do with some border skirmishes, and we're the officers sitting in our mess, doing quite nicely, having a few drinks, sending out some troops to quash the trouble on the border, but that's about it.
So we seem to be flipping back and forward between these two extremes.
Yes.
So I'm wondering, which one is it?
Are we in the trenches or are we in the officers' mess?
Well, hang on.
So in your scenario, in your analogy rather, the officers are what?
The government, basically.
Yes.
Well, the government, the NHS, people who are sick, all of us really, we're all supposed to be in the middle of a battlefield where we're terribly worried about this extreme disease which is supposedly going to kill huge numbers of us.
Let me ask you, actually let's have a bit of background first so that people know who this mystery Hector Drummond character is.
I can understand why you want to remain anonymous, because you probably want a career sometime in the future.
Well, it's not a total secret.
It's more that Hector Drummond is my pen name for writing novels.
So I'm sort of wanting to keep that life away from my normal life as much as I can.
Mate, I totally don't blame you.
It is given to very few of us to have the kind of rhino hide and sheer stupidity to want to put their own name to any view slightly to the right of Jeremy Corbyn because the penalties are so great.
So I don't blame you.
But you come from an academic background, don't you?
Yeah, I suppose the relevant background I have for this is that I spent a few years, or quite a few years, sort of looking at things like the philosophy of science, the logical justification of inductive reasoning, statistical reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, that sort of thing.
Also looking at risk-benefit analysis-type reasoning, looking at the philosophical underpinnings of that.
So I don't claim to be someone with expertise in epidemiology or virology or medical stats.
I know my way around basic stats and graphs and things like that.
Actually, let me just pick you up on that one.
I mean, there's so much irritation going around at the moment.
Every day I wake up and I find myself assaulted on any number of fronts by irritations, and it's starting to make my head explode.
But one of the things that's making my head explode, definitely, is there's people who begin a sentence, I'm not an epidemiologist, or I'm not a virologist, as though somehow we should defer entirely.
To anyone who's got a degree in or a qualification in epidemiology or virology, as though everything begins and ends with the virus, which it doesn't.
I mean, it's about bigger things than that.
It's about, well, that thing that you mentioned just now, a cost-benefit analysis.
It's about, for example...
Considering the number of people who are going to die as a result of a crashing economy and comparing those with the number of people who are going to die of coronavirus.
All sorts of considerations which are not being taken into account because, hey, we're leaving it all up to these narrowly specialised scientists.
Is that right?
It seems to be.
I mean, you would expect the government to have some sort of bigger picture people working on this sort of stuff, but there's no sign that they're in operation, are there?
Dominic Cummings, for example.
Sorry, what was that?
Dominic Cummings.
I mean, where is Dominic Cummings in all this?
He was supposed to be the interface, wasn't he, between kind of scientific wankery.
He's really into really obscure papers and turning us into some kind of...
World, global science hub or something.
So he's interested in science and technology.
And yet also he seems to have a basic grasp of economics.
So why isn't he translating all those interests and that expertise into policy that actually works?
Yeah, I don't know.
Do you think he's been sidelined a bit on this topic?
I think it's...
Do you know what?
I think it's even worse than sidelining.
I think that the entire government's lost its head and I think that the bloated...
Technocratic, unaccountable, inefficient, useless civil service is just running around taking charge of things because ministers don't feel they have the intellectual or moral authority to make a positive decision.
That's my fear.
I mean, are you getting the impression from anyone in government that they know what they're doing?
Because I'm not.
No, not at all really.
It's really embarrassing.
We might just as well have Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn and who are the other nutcases that we've just sidelined pretty much.
The opposition that could almost have beaten Boris, if you believe the BBC... Had they been the government now, I'm not sure they would be significantly more incompetent than the lot we've got.
I don't think they would have been any more competent, obviously.
Things might have been a bit worse because they might have encouraged the civil service even more to go out and engage in this behaviour.
But, yeah, I agree.
Probably you'd see the same kind of thing happening where basically the civil service is going around doing what it wants and the government hasn't got a clue, really.
Yeah.
I'm always interested in how it is that people choose to take a side on a particular argument.
I mean, I know that you...
I think you came upon my stuff, didn't you, via watermelons and via climate scepticism, is that right?
Well, I came upon your stuff years ago when you used to write your blogs for The Telegraph.
Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was a big fan back then.
Right.
So I sort of followed you since then.
But yeah, I have read Watermelons and all your climate stuff.
Because there does seem to be quite an interesting correlation between climate sceptics and lockdown sceptics.
I mean, I know that in my case, this is because having studied the world of, or at least an area of science up close for over a decade now...
I realised that these keepers of the flame of scientific truth in their lab coats and with their Bunsen burners and their international conferences and so on and their PhDs are not nearly these lofty figures that we're told they are by the BBC and by Radio 4 all the time.
That in fact, they've got to eat, they've got to pay the rent and...
Particularly in climate science, they're actually pretty low grade and far too dependent on these models which depend on algorithms which seem to be written for political reasons rather than scientific ones.
I hope that that was confined to the world of climate science, but it seems to extend to the world of virological, epidemiological predictions as well, because, lo, look what's happening.
We've got the guy from Imperial College...
Who's written the paper on which the government's lockdown has been based.
What's his name?
Neil Ferguson.
Yeah.
And as you've written about, he doesn't exactly have the most successful track record, does he?
That's right.
He's made a lot of extreme claims in the past about foot-to-mouth and BSE and bird flu and things like that.
He's made some very extreme predictions which have...
Turned out not to be true.
So I'm unsure why we should be minded to take his predictions that seriously on this issue.
I'm not saying we should dismiss them completely, but we should evince a degree of scepticism towards them and assign them a low probability.
I think probability talk is missing in a lot of this.
It's one thing to say, well, here's a model which says there's going to be 550,000 deaths if we do nothing, or actually he said 250,000 if we just have some mitigation procedures in place but not full lockdown.
Yeah.
So there's a lot of deaths he's predicting.
And on the other hand, we're looking at the economic effects and so on.
I'm trying to weigh those up.
One of the points I've been making is that Well, we can't just compare the two just like that.
We've got to look at the probabilities involved.
The probability of the economic damage is very high.
It's almost certain we're going to have economic damage.
The probability of Ferguson's models being true has got to be pretty low.
I mean, we can argue about how low, but there's no way it's going to be 100%.
I mean, the very most, 50%.
I mean, I'd be more minded to say 10% to 20%, but at the very least 50%.
So we're talking about something that's very uncertain compared with economic damage and societal damage, which is certain.
So it's not just a matter of sort of weighing up the two sides.
You've got to take the probability into account.
You've got to say, how likely are these things?
And you can't just compare them straight out.
It's like on the one hand we've got a dice toss, on the other hand we don't.
We've got something which is definitely going to happen.
That's a very good point, actually.
And again, there are parallels, aren't there, with climate science, inasmuch as we are told that if the scarier models are correct, although we know they're not correct, we know that, what is it, RCP 8.5, the doomsday model that has been...
Climate model which has been used to justify all manner of extravagant government policy.
We now know that there's no chance of that coming true.
But nevertheless, what we've been told is that if the worst case scenario is at all, if it comes true, then the disaster will be so great that Any amount of money spent now is better than enduring the disaster later.
But you're right.
It's all about probability.
That's the missing element, isn't it?
Yeah, that's right.
And a lot of those climate models are very improbable, some more probable than others, but you've got a whole range of them.
Well, they can't all have 100% probability.
You've got to assign probability between them, and you've also got to put in there the chances of nothing happening.
So you can't assign a very high probability to any of them.
So we've then got to say, well, do we really want to be making all these huge changes on the basis of something which is very improbable?
Yeah.
Then, of course, you get into your precautionary principles and better safe than sorry type rhetoric, which you've covered very well in Watermelons, where people say, well, it might be a low probability event, but if the chance of damage is so enormous, we have to not worry about the probabilities and just do what we can to stop this happening.
Well, we know that this is an irrational way of thinking.
You can't be thinking that way, because that justifies acting on a huge range of possible disasters that could happen in the future, and there's no way they can all be true, and there's no way you can take action to avert them all.
No.
So you end up going back to more rational, standard risk-benefit analysis, where you do take into account probabilities, and you say, okay, just because something has potential for massive damage...
That's one thing, but we've got to weight that by the probability.
And when you see most people talk about the precautionary principle, they very rarely have the basic naive thing of just better safe than sorry.
They've usually got their own little versions of it with some caveats thrown in and some extra principles.
But when they get taken up on the problems that still exist with it, they'll qualify it and qualify it, and they'll get pushed and pushed more towards standard risk-benefit analysis.
So I think pretty much anyone who starts out with a precautionary principle, if they engage in proper analysis, just ends up with your standard decision theory stuff.
Well, let's look at the possible damages, but take into account the probability.
And when you take into account the probability, Most of the climate models aren't really worth worrying about because most of them don't have very high probability.
Yes.
Well, it's fairly obvious to me, and I haven't studied risk-benefit analysis at university, but it's fairly obvious to me that...
Well, the analogy I used in watermelons is it's...
It's theoretically possible that somewhere out there are an alien race which wants to colonise our planet and eat our children and kill us all and turn us into slaves or whatever.
And obviously, if that were to happen, it would be so ghastly that almost any amount of expenditure would be worthwhile to stop it happening.
So maybe we should divert 50% of the global economy to building these giant lasers on every hilltop in order to zap the spaceships as they come in.
But, okay, then you'd have sacrificed half the world economy, and what if they didn't turn up?
Which is quite likely.
So I can see that.
I can see why there are flaws with this precautionary principle.
And the other version we get given is...
It's Pascal's wager, isn't it?
I suppose because they think that if you invoke the name of a French philosopher, when was Pascal around?
18th century?
17th century?
17th century.
17th century.
So if you quote Blaise Pascal, that somehow this reifies your theory, it makes it more plausible.
Yeah, well, Pascal basically invented this kind of decision theory when he came up.
With the wager, but right from the start, this problem was always there with it.
People have been pointing out for centuries that if you don't take into account probabilities, you're going to end up having to take all sorts of things seriously.
Pascal thought this wasn't an issue for his wager because he thought infinity was involved.
But clearly, even if you think that's a good defence in the case of God, that's not going to work for things like climate change and COVID-19 and so on.
Yeah.
We don't have any infinities involved, so that's not going to work anyway.
What do you mean by infinities?
You mean because of heaven and damnation being eternal and all that?
Yeah, that sort of thing, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
During your time in academe, how long were you an academic?
I was in academia for about 25 years.
Right.
So you probably were there, you probably witnessed some of its decline.
I mean, was it good when it started, when you started out?
Well, I'm not sure I'd say it was good.
It was certainly better when I started.
Right.
I mean, it had its faults.
It had faults in the old days.
It's got different faults now, which are possibly worse than the old faults.
In the old days, one of the faults you had first.
And then we'll move to the worst new faults.
Yeah, I mean, I think the worst fault in the old days was you had a lot of lazy old bastards who didn't do much and didn't really keep up with things.
Right, right, okay.
But we've got much worse faults now, particularly a politicised workforce and the intolerance of any different opinions.
Yeah, I mean, do you think people are...
Is it objectively more stupid nowadays in academe?
I suspect they, yeah, probably.
Certainly, I think there's much more of a groupthink going on.
I mean, you might have a lot of people who are very good at maths and science and so on, but they seem to lack quite as much capacity for independent thinking and go against the herd, unless they're going against the herd in a left-wing way.
They seem to be okay at that.
So you mean you can get away with it if you out-radical left your colleagues?
That's cool.
Yeah, that's alright.
If you can be like, I don't know, Aaron Bastani or that fit bird.
What's the fit bird called?
What's the what, sorry?
That fit bird.
Oh, Ash Sarka.
No, no, no.
Well, she's fit also.
The other one, Grace Blakely.
Oh, Grace Blakely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I love pointing out she's a fit bird because I think it's all she's really got going for her.
I don't fancy her political theories very much, but she looks good on TV, which presumably is one of the reasons she gets on.
And isn't that another problem?
That people are...
Rewarded for promoting the fashionable groupthink by appearances on the BBC, on the state broadcaster.
And on ITV as well, which is extraordinary.
I can't understand why all these people are basically communists.
As Ash Sarko said, I'm basically a communist.
They get invited on national TV all the time, on mainstream programmes.
I wouldn't mind that so much if people from the other side got invited on as well, but they very rarely do.
No, no, indeed not.
I mean, our job as right-wingers is there to be doughnutted, isn't it, by a sort of a Marxist, a Trotskyite and a hard-left feminist.
And you're the pantomime villain.
That's a balanced panel.
Yeah.
And that's how it is.
But I just, I mean, I keep sort of Debating whether to write this book called something like The Perfect Storm of Stupid.
It seems to me that the climate change scare was a dry run for this scare.
And what really frightens me is that at the moment, because the weather's nice...
And because people are temporarily being bankrolled by the government and they think that the government, they now genuinely seem to think the government has a magic money tree and that on their furlough it's kind of great because they still get their wages and yet they're at home and they're spending quality time with their fam and it's really alright.
And I don't think that people have the, a lot of people have the critical abilities to realise that this is a fool's paradise.
Does that worry you?
Yeah, I think they are living in a fool's paradise, and I'm thinking it's going to be a month or so before it hits them that this is what it is, if the lockdown lasts that long, which I'm hoping it won't, but it's looking like it probably will last for at least three more weeks.
I think when people start losing their jobs, I've seen people on Twitter recently saying, I've lost my job now, I thought this was a good idea, but now I'm starting to wonder, I've got no money, how am I going to pay the rent?
Things like this.
Academics also, a lot of academics drove this lockdown and they've probably been thinking they're all right, that things are going to survive for them.
They'll still get their paychecks.
But I've heard stories now of a lot of universities, even big established ones, being in serious trouble because a lot of them have huge debts and they're losing money hand over fist, not having conferences and things like that.
And the students not being there.
Yes.
So I'm hoping that this will turn some academics' heads around and I'll start saying, also academic pensions aren't taxpayer guaranteed.
So they could lose their pension.
So I'm hoping that will turn them around to make them say, hang on, maybe this is not such a great idea.
I've seen a few doing that.
Have you?
Yeah.
Tell me, tell me, show me these examples.
Well, Devi Shridhar in particular, who was quite influential in pushing the lockdown.
Sorry, who's this person?
Devi Shridhar.
Where from, who, what?
I can't remember exactly where she's from.
It's up north, I think.
Okay, right.
She was pushing the lockdown and now she's starting to change her view.
Yeah, now she's starting to say, well, we can't have this go on for too long, can we?
We've got to think about how to get out of this.
Right.
So that's one.
The other thing that I've noticed is that...
Well, I've heard that the tabloids...
I mean, the media generally is in serious trouble.
Yeah.
I've been looking...
You know, I used to kind of like The Sun and I used to...
Well, I mean, I sort of...
The Mail, I think, is a...
Or has been a good newspaper.
But they've been pushing very much the official narrative that this is the pandemic to end all pandemics and we must all observe the lockdown and we must save the NHS.
And they've been bigging up every person who dies of COVID, even though it might be just dying with COVID and so on.
And now they're in trouble because the advertising is dried up and people aren't buying newspapers and the media apparently has never been less trusted and so on.
And I find it quite hard to be that sympathetic to these people.
I mean, any institution which pushes the views of Piers Morgan, who I think is the abomination of desolation in all this, I think he's ground zero of awfulness.
Would you agree with me on that one?
He seems to be, yeah.
I can't think of anyone who's even worse than him.
No.
No.
I mean, he's like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot rolled into one, isn't he?
But the sad thing is that, I mean, sometimes we sort of cling to Piers Morgan as like the only sane voice on TV occasionally.
Well...
It turns out he's not that sane after all.
No.
He did have that even-a-stop-clock-tells-the-right-time-twice-a-day quality, didn't he?
Where, just occasionally, Piers Morgan would shock you by being right about something, and you'd go, well, hang on a second, you know, I... Whatever I may have thought about Piers, he's an arse.
He's a cock.
He's really, really annoying.
He fancies himself.
But here he is writing on this issue or that issue.
And then, of course, the next day he disappoints you by being spectacularly wrong on something else.
But this time I think he's jumped the shark.
He's...
In a way, he's pushing national policy at the moment, I think.
He's generating...
He's a one-man hysteria generation machine.
Yeah, he seems to be the Prime Minister at the moment, really.
Yeah, he does.
Yeah, I haven't been reading the tabloids much.
I stopped reading the Daily Mail when that Gordy Gregg guy took it over and turned it into a Brexit supporting paper.
Yeah.
And I haven't read The Sun much.
I mean, Trevor Kavanagh seems pretty sound on this.
But you've got people like Tom Newton-Dunn on there who I'm not really keen on.
I don't know what his view on COVID is.
It's going to be wrong.
He's a Remainer.
I think that there is a...
Again, it's a loose correlation, but it is definitely a correlation.
I mean, anyone who had FBPE on their Twitter account, or anyone who had a black spider on their Twitter account, or anyone who supported Remain seems to be taking the wrong line on this coronavirus.
Yeah, because they're all pretty much flaky loons.
Not Remainers in general, but the FBPE crowd definitely are.
They're prisoners of groupthink, aren't they?
In fact, do you not worry?
I'm sure you do.
That really, this is the ultimate, this is the dream crisis that the left wants and is exploiting as an opportunity.
It is, and I think they're bringing a lot of Brexiteers to their side because I'm finding quite a lot of working-class Brexiteers on my timeline are getting really hysterical about the COVID situation, even more hysterical than the FBPE types.
Yes, I've had to do a bit of blocking.
Yeah, the hyacinth bouquet types.
Yeah.
Now, how do you explain that?
I think they're scared.
Partly, they're scared of this thing being a terrible killer.
Yeah.
And also, you know, some of them, they might not like Europe, but they are authoritarians in their way.
They just prefer their authoritarianism to be based on national principles rather than European principles.
Yes.
I think that that always has been a strand within the Brexit movement, which those of us on the libertarian side of the argument have been slightly nervous of.
And I think Farage understood this.
Which is why he was careful not to float too many kind of flat tax free market ideas because he recognised that at least part of his base really wanted bigger government, just our bigger government rather than someone else's.
Yeah, more the old-fashioned, old-labor nationalist types.
Definitely a lot of those voted for Brexit.
Which is a shame, isn't it?
Because I was rather enjoying the camaraderie of the working classes.
But I think that at the moment, quite a lot of them have been frit.
And it just makes me wonder, if this is our Second World War, We're going to lose this time, aren't we?
Because that bulldog spirit, that pluck, that devil may care in a crisis approach...
It seems to have vanished.
I look around and I see my countrymen just losing their shit.
I'm hoping it will come back.
I think there's a lot of vocal people at the moment who are creating a false impression of us, at least I'm hoping this.
Yeah.
And as time goes on, we'll hear more of that sort of plucky spirit of the salt of the earth, British working class types who are not taken in by it.
Of course, you get some of them...
Some of them do go the other way, and they're very sceptical of all this, but they sort of tend towards conspiracy theories.
Like what?
That's the other problem.
I quite like...
Steady, Hector.
I quite like the conspiracy theories.
I'm with Eamon Holmes.
There probably is some connection with 5G. I don't know what, because I haven't read about it, but it sounds plausible.
But more seriously, I do...
Oh, God!
The Telegraph.
The Telegraph is so rubbish.
I get the Telegraph because we have to have at least one newspaper to keep the wife happy at breakfast.
You know, she's a traditional sort.
But...
William Hague, the ghastly William Hague, has a column today and it's about how we must close the wet markets in China.
And he's got Ricky Gervais on his side on that one.
But actually, I don't believe that the wet market...
I don't think it came out of bats or the wet markets or pangolins or whatever.
I think this is Chinese disinformation.
I think it probably was granular lab.
I don't think it was deliberately leaked.
I think it came out by accident.
But I think the Chinese were working on some kind of...
Yeah, I don't consider that a conspiracy theory.
I think that's a distinct possibility.
Yeah.
In fact, I think there's probably three possibilities.
Okay, tell me.
Well, the wet markets in Wuhan, the lab...
Or it might have come from somewhere else in China a while ago.
Right.
I'm not saying this is definitely right, but it's a possibility because most diseases, it turns out, do come from somewhere else earlier on than from somewhere else than we originally thought.
Right.
It may not be the case with this one.
I mean, we do have a couple of obvious possibilities in this case, the lab and the wet markets.
It may have come from somewhere else, say in rural China, a year ago, and it's just taken this long to travel to Wuhan.
Right.
We don't forget AIDS. AIDS was traced back...
It didn't start in the 80s.
That was traced back to the 50s and possibly even back to the 20s in Africa.
Really?
So it's possible that this has been around for quite a while in China and has gradually made its way to Wuhan, where it really spread.
Then again, it might have been the wet markets in Wuhan or it might have been the lab.
We don't really know.
Well, it's quite...
Coincidence, isn't it?
Not that the Chinese biowarfare lab is in Wuhan where this outbreak took place.
I mean, and have you seen that documentary on the internet?
I found that pretty persuasive.
No, I haven't seen that yet.
No, you should watch it.
You should watch it, Hector.
It's good.
I think you'll come away fairly convinced that it is a bioweapon.
There are certain...
Facets of this particular virus, which I think lead very strongly to the inference that this is lab-created.
I forget the details.
You have to watch the video.
It could well be.
It wouldn't surprise me.
I'm sort of holding fire at the moment because I'm trying to be very careful.
With all my analyses and things.
Yeah, you and your bloody academic caution.
That's the thing.
I certainly don't rule that out.
I mean, it is a pretty obvious culprit.
And we do know that there are lots of leaks in these labs.
I mean, even in America you get leaks from these bio labs where it's very hard to stop germs getting out.
Because they're quite tiny, aren't they?
Yes, they are.
A bit on the small side, yes.
Yeah.
And quite hard to see.
Yeah.
So you can have all the security precautions you want, but it's pretty hard to stop them getting out, all of them.
Yes.
Yes, I have actually noticed that about you.
You're much less gung-ho than I am.
I mean, on your blog, you're quite robust, but in conversation, you don't want to push anything too far.
Is that fair?
I've been pretty cautious on the blog at the moment, I would have thought.
I mean, probably a year ago, if you read my old post, I was probably...
Much less cautious, because I wasn't worrying about academics reading my stuff as I am now.
There are some figures out today.
Of course, it...
We're going to date this podcast if we're too specific, but tell me what the state of play is.
What have you discovered recently?
Well, the state of play today on, was it Tuesday the 14th?
We did have the Office for National Statistics did find a big increase in deaths for week 14, which is up to April the 3rd, I think.
Previously, we hadn't seen any sign of COVID-19 in the stats at all.
And I'm talking about the Office for National Statistics stats, because the stats that get released by other departments like Public Health England are not very reliable.
We can't really trust them.
The Office for National Statistics stats are much more reliable.
So it does look now like we've got COVID-19 actually doing something.
It is a problem.
It's possibly going to be worse than flu.
There's no sign yet that it's going to be a massive killer along the lines of the Spanish flu, which killed hundreds of millions of people.
We shouldn't forget that we had the Hong Kong flu in 1968, killed tens of millions worldwide.
Did it really?
Tens of millions?
I was just looking at this before we started talking.
Here it is.
It was...
Of course, between 20 and 50 million deaths.
Which is a proportion of the world's population would probably be...
This was in the 50s, you say?
This was 68.
So it's probably...
And most people don't really remember this.
Or if they do, it was just sort of background news.
I mean, nobody freaked out and panicked over this.
I think it was a different world back then.
People, I think, accepted that there were risks to life, and life had to go on.
I'm not saying life has to go on in all cases.
Obviously, if you do get a genuine alien invasion, things have to be done.
But I think in general, if it's just a disease that's killing a small percentage of the population, it's not really worth shutting down society over.
Right.
Well, I'd be inclined to agree with you there.
And when I was talking earlier about the perfect storm of stupid, I was thinking of all the different factors that led up to this.
So, for example, the bigging up of and simultaneously dumbing down of scientists generally.
They get treated with far too much reverence, out of all proportion to their actual understanding or skill.
But...
Another factor is our kind of cultural softness, the fact that we cannot accept That we'll do anything to avoid death.
I mean, it's perfectly rational not to want to die.
But we seem to have reached the point where there's a sort of societal expectation that you should be able to stuff your face, end up with...
Type 2, go drinking, end up with type 2 diabetes and all these various underlying health conditions, hypertension and so on, which we know are contributing to some of these COVID deaths.
And we somehow expect that our government and our health system should drop everything, deploy every resource available in order to stop these walking time bombs from dying.
Am I being harsh there?
No, I think that's true.
We think there's a magic pill to solve all problems, and you can just do what you want with your life and turn your body into a complete wreck, and the health system will fix you.
I mean, there is some truth in that.
Our health systems, or not the systems, but medicine, modern medicine's got pretty good at fixing a lot of ills these days.
But you can't push it forever, and there's always a chance that things like this will happen.
A disease will come up and modern medicine can't save you.
So I think you're right, we have got pretty soft and complacent in thinking that we'll always be fine, there'll always be a pill for the doctor to fix us.
I think we have got fixated on death as well.
I think you're mentioning that at the start of what you said, that we've become fixated on death as a thing to be avoided at all costs, which I can sort of understand.
I mean, who wants to die?
But it seems that these days when governments and safety bodies sort of look at anything, they end up thinking that avoiding death is the most important thing.
So something I'm always going on about, and nobody else seems to agree with me on this, possibly you will, look at the seatbelt laws.
The seatbelt laws have been designed so that everyone has to wear a seatbelt at all times.
Same with cycle helmets and so on.
In order to save a few deaths, what doesn't seem to be taken into account is the enjoyment you can get from, you know, in the 70s when you used to get kids piled into the back of the estate.
That was a lot of fun.
You can't do that sort of thing anymore.
Of course it makes sense.
Of course...
And 99.9% of parents will say, it's right that we shouldn't do that sort of thing anymore.
We should all wear seatbelts and so on because we don't want our kids to die.
And as a parent, I can understand that.
But you have this in so many cases where death always takes precedent over anything else that you end up with a society where avoiding death becomes the all-important thing.
So when you get a situation like this, the all-important thing is to avoid having too many deaths.
And we don't look at the other side of the ledger, which is all this terrible damage to the economy and people losing their jobs and careers being destroyed and businesses going bust and so on.
Yes.
Well, there seems to have been a certain amount of mission creep going on.
I think Dan Hannan pointed this out in an article over the weekend, that originally the rationale for the lockdown was to enable the NHS to make preparations for all the kind of extreme cases and to get more ventilators and so on.
But now it seems to be just about stopping everyone dying, as though stopping everyone dying is a possibility at any time, let alone during a pandemic.
It's all about the numbers now.
It's just look at these big numbers, see how big these numbers are.
And also...
Another element I've noticed is that you've started getting the media going into grisly detail about just what unpleasant things the coronavirus does to you, what it does to your lungs and how much scarring it does.
And I was thinking about that.
I was thinking...
When I had my pulmonary embolism, I probably did damage to my lungs.
I probably had scarring.
I mean, this is what happens when, you know, bad shit happens to you when you're ill.
And when you get a fatal disease, it's, guess what?
It's fatal.
Sometimes bugs and nasty things do kill you, and dying anything that can kill you is obviously going to do serious damage to your body, and it's not going to be nice.
But this morbid fixation with just how horrible a disease is seems to be a way of masking the, well, of stopping the debate.
The much more important debate is, well, hang on a second, is saving a few lives more important than keeping Western civilisation going?
And I'm not sure that it is.
Yeah, I would agree.
I think Dan Hannon's article was very good because, after all, the whole rationale for the lockdown was supposed to be making sure the NHS didn't get overwhelmed.
But now it seems to have shifted to just, well, let's just try and save as many lives as we possibly can, no matter what damage it's done to the economy.
Yeah.
But that's crazy.
I mean, doing big damage to the economy, when we're looking at Great Depression levels of damage even more, I mean, things like the Great Depression have a massive effect on the world and a massive effect on future generations.
I mean, if you asked a year ago, which looms larger in the historical mind, the Spanish flu of 1918 or the Great Depression, there's no question it was the Great Depression.
The Great Depression is a much bigger event and it had a much bigger effect on most of the...
I mean, obviously a lot of people died in the Spanish flu and it was very sad and so on.
But the Great Depression was a major...
A major disaster.
Yes.
And we don't want to go through that again.
That would be much worse for our kids, having possibly a worse depression than the Great Depression.
That would be much worse for our kids than some deaths from COVID-19, especially seeing as kids seem pretty much unaffected.
That's the other thing from the ONS release today, the Office of National Statistics.
It's looking pretty much certain now that anyone under 40 has no risk at all Or very tiny risks from COVID-19.
It affects pretty much people, elderly people, people who are vulnerable, who have underlying conditions and so on.
Mostly, actually, it's the very old.
Probably people who would have died anyway soon.
I mean, the thing is we've had two winters where there were very low winter deaths.
Normally you have these excess death years in winter where you have a lot of deaths in winter.
Then often the next year you don't have so many deaths because a lot of the more vulnerable people were killed off that first winter.
Then the next winter you've got hardier stock left.
So you tend to get this zigzag effect.
We've had two winters now where there's been pretty low deaths, historically speaking.
Is that because they've been warmer or what?
It seems to be partly this winter was pretty warm.
It didn't get cold at all.
So we've probably got a very vulnerable population of older people who managed to escape dying this winter.
Good on them.
But they're now at risk of being hit by this late arriving disease.
So we're probably going to see quite a few of them dying over April.
When the summer comes, things will be alright.
But once winter hits again next year, especially if it's cold, we could be seeing quite a lot of those people dying.
As we'd expect anyway with the two winters with not many deaths.
We expect to see a big rise next winter anyway.
And with COVID-19 around, it may well be bigger than usual.
It's very hard to avoid that sort of thing.
Every couple of years, every two or three years, we have this massive amount of excess deaths in winter, often 30,000, 40,000, 50,000.
Yes, and am I right in thinking that people, deaths that would previously have been attributed to respiratory disease, to a generic respiratory disease, are now being specified as due to COVID-19?
It's quite complicated.
So the ONS has developed this new category called COVID-19.
What they're doing is it's kind of an overlapping category.
So you could end up in both the COVID-19 category and another category because they're classifying anyone who died with COVID-19, which includes even just suspected COVID-19, As a COVID-19 death, and they go into this category.
But obviously, if you also died of a heart attack as well, you're put into the category of heart attack deaths.
Which doesn't mean they're over-counting deaths overall.
I'm glad to hear that.
They're allowing for that.
But it does mean the COVID-19 category, it's probably exaggerated.
There's probably a lot of people in there who are dying with COVID-19, but not of it.
Because COVID-19 is what they call...
A notifiable disease, which means it's like anthrax, it's a disease that the government wants to know about if it's there.
So anyone who dies with COVID-19, even if it's something else, or even just suspected COVID-19, the doctor or the coroner has to write on the death certificate that they had COVID-19.
So they then go in the COVID-19 category, and possibly another category as well.
That's why those COVID-19 statistics are not very useful.
They give us kind of a rough guide, but we have to be careful of taking them too literally.
Having said that, we do have a lot of excess deaths that came out today.
Although there's a bit of a puzzle there as well, because we had 6,000 excess deaths, but only, I think it was 3,500 people who died with or of COVID-19.
So we've got two and a half thousand deaths unaccounted for there and we only had 500 excess respiratory deaths as well and that's counting COVID-19 respiratory deaths.
So there's another two and a half thousand deaths which so either we're under counting COVID-19 deaths or there's people dying for other reasons possibly because of the lockdown.
We don't really know we need to get to the bottom of that.
That would be interesting, wouldn't it, if that proves to be the case, that already people were getting excess mortality from people not of coronavirus, but people who are dying as a result of, what, inability to reach hospitals and get proper treatment?
Yeah, choosing not to go into hospitals or leaving things too late.
We don't really know.
There's other things that could be, but...
It's too early to be sort of saying what's going on, but it's also possibly that there's been a lag in reporting deaths because so many deaths have been sort of looked into to see whether they're COVID-19.
So it might be that some of this 6,000, really some of it belongs to the previous week.
So rather than seeing a big spike this week, we're actually seeing a more gentle spike over two weeks.
That's not showing up in the figures because those deaths weren't registered until week 14.
Hmm.
How do you think it's going to play out?
How are we going to get out of this mess?
Well, it's going to need someone in the government to stand up, but there isn't really anyone who can do that, except maybe for Boris Johnson.
I mean, we do know that Boris wasn't that keen on the lockdown to start with.
He was sort of pushed into it.
I mean, he said that his hero was the mayor in Jaws.
He did say that, didn't he?
He didn't want the beaches closed, even though there were reports of a shark about.
So I think he's on the side of lifting a lockdown.
But it's going to be very hard to do now that they've actually brought it in, and now that there's all these reports of massive deaths around, it's going to be very difficult to lift it.
So I'm not entirely sure of how that's going to happen.
I got very cross with the cuckmeister Toby Young in one of his cuckish moments on our London Calling podcast where he sort of, he does talk like a politician at times and it makes me puke.
Just the one, the recent one, yeah.
Yeah, where he said, you know, that now Boris has had the disease, that it's going to be harder for him to remove the lockdown because it might be perceived that he's thinking, well, I've had it, I'm all right, Jack, I've had the antibodies and so forth.
By the way, have you heard the rumour that Boris definitely was treated with hydroxychloroquine?
I've heard rumours of rumours.
Yeah, no, I've had it from various sources.
The problem is I couldn't write a piece about it for Breitbart because they'd say, well, where are your sources?
And I can't betray my sources, but...
I do have it on pretty good authority that Boris did have chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine or whatever.
Who can blame them?
He was in a bad way and hydroxychloroquine has proved effective.
But it seems to me that we've got this...
Sclerotic, public health England stroke, National Health Service bureaucracy, which for historic reasons and reasons of obduracy and hidebound tradition, etc., Doesn't want to use hydroxychloroquine except until it's had randomised clinical trials, which could be some time, couldn't it, before people are dying?
I think this goes back to my question of are we in the trenches or are we in the officers' mess?
The other thing about that, I think the whole open borders issue makes you worry about that as well.
We're having all these lockdowns for the native population, yet the borders are still completely open.
That makes me think, sometimes we're said to be on the battlefield, but when it comes to things that the establishment are very keen on, like open borders...
It makes me think, well, things aren't that serious.
They don't want to get rid of open borders.
They don't want to close the borders and the airplanes.
It makes me think, maybe we're in the officer's mess.
And the hydroxychloroquine thing also makes me think of that.
We're told, we're on the battlefield.
Things are really serious.
We've got to do whatever we can.
But then we have a possible new drug which might help.
It's like...
Oh, well, you know, we're not really sure about this.
It hasn't been through the randomised double-blind trials and all that.
Well, that just sounds like you're back in the officer's mess and there's no great, nothing really to worry about.
I think you can't be having both these messages coming out.
Either it's really serious, and we have to try anything we can, or it's actually not that serious, in which case we can end the lockdown.
Yes.
I think so.
You're right.
We're in this...
We're betwitzed in between these two positions.
And...
Yeah.
It's the same inconsistency, of course, we saw in the whole climate change scare narrative.
that if the situation was as bad as these party-pre-politicised activist scientists claimed and the media reported, then the politicians would have done something.
But they didn't, because clearly there was no sufficiently strong evidence to support massive diverting the world economy to dealing with this illusory problem.
And I think we've got the same problem now.
If it were as bad as they say, then definitely they would be not relying on bureaucratic routines They would actually be saying, well, hang on, this is a kind of wartime emergency situation.
We'll try everything.
And they're not.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, I guess it's a bit like climate change when we're told the world's in a terrible state, yet you still see a lot of these people buying beachside properties.
Yes, that's a good example, yeah.
Hang on, is this really as serious as you're saying?
Tim Flannery, yeah.
I know, it's amazing, isn't it?
Oh, I know what we must do before we go.
You must tell the special friend about your book.
You've written a book set in academe.
Novel.
Yes, it's a comedy, comic satire of university life.
It's called The Biscuit Factory.
It's volume one.
This particular volume is called Days of Wine and Cheese.
It's hopefully a good laugh and it'd be very nice if people actually bought it to have something to read during the lockdown.
Well, we have got time, haven't we?
Yeah.
If you go to my blog, HectorDrummond.com, you can find links to it or just search for it on Amazon under Hector Drummond.
I don't think there's any other Hector Drummond's on Amazon selling stuff, so you'll find it.
You know, I've spent the last two months stuck, in a good way, reading Andrew Roberts' doorstopper of a biography of Churchill.
And I mention it because we're talking about literature partly, but also because there are parallels with our end times in as much as...
We imagine, those of us who haven't studied our history that closely, that somehow, in the past, politicians were not the pygmies of today, that they were somehow these principled, intelligent, agile, clever figures who govern the country responsibly and intelligently and so forth.
They were just as crap as they are today.
I mean, Parliament, in Churchill's wilderness years, was riddled with people who didn't want to rearm, who didn't want to confront Hitler, who wanted to ignore the growing threat posed by Japan and who wanted to ignore the growing threat posed by Japan and so They were an absolute shower.
And even after the war had broken out, that was the extraordinary thing, even...
Even when Britain was at war with Germany, there were still people who said, well, of course we've got to treat with Herr Hitler.
We can never win this one.
And you think, well, plus ça change.
Yeah, and I think the same sort of accusations can be levelled against the intellectuals at the time as well.
Oh, God, yeah.
The intellectuals were such appeasers, particularly people like Virginia Woolf, who was constantly writing articles saying, oh, Germany's nowhere near, Germany's just as bad as us.
Do you think Virginia Woolf was the, apart from being cleverer, was the Piers Morgan of her time?
She's probably too clever for that, but she'd probably be more like the Jollyon Maugham type.
No, she'd be...
What's that?
Grayling.
A.C. Grayling.
Yeah, actually, that's probably a good...
She's the A.C. Grayling.
Oh, no!
Oh, my God, no!
You know who she is?
Except, no, again, the problem is I think Virginia Woolf probably was quite clever.
Who's that really, really awful Irish woman don at Oxford who's just obviously quite...
Oh, the one who keeps taking her clothes off all the time.
No, no, not that one.
No, she's just absolutely achingly thick.
Like a lot of these Oxbridge dons are these days, that Cambridge one with the Indian name, who's again spouts leftist tripe on Twitter.
Yeah.
Sorry, we're getting sidetracked onto one of my other particular hobby horses, the decline of Oxford and Cambridge, and I'm sure that you can...
Yeah, perhaps we'd better talk about that another time.
Yeah, exactly.
But you're certainly right about the politicians.
I mean, I've been reading a lot of Russian communist history recently.
Oh, yeah.
And it's just astonishing how many Western politicians just willfully closed their eyes to what was going on in Russia.
Yeah.
Western politicians back in those days, you're right, they weren't any better than they are these days.
Well, nobody wants to rock the boat.
Everyone wants to preserve their lifestyle or even pull up the drawbridge and enrich themselves and enhance their security while the peasants can go hang.
I mean, we're seeing that now, I think, to a degree with Bill Gates.
I think Bill Gates is using this as a...
I don't know how cynically and deliberately, but it's basically a power grab, isn't it?
That there is a massive establishment which doesn't want hydroxychloroquine to be an effective short-term or even medium-term solution because...
They want Big Pharma to profit by a non-generic product, a vaccine, which makes them a fortune.
Yeah, it's hard to know what's going on with Bill Gates.
I mean, I think that's probably right about Big Pharma.
Bill Gates, you think he'd be rich enough?
Yeah, that's what puzzles me.
Bill Gates, I thought, is rich enough, and yet here he is meddling on a kind of, on a Soros scale, frankly.
I used to think George Soros was the most evil and dangerous man in the world, but I think Bill Gates is now giving him a run for his money.
Yeah, I'd still go with Soros for that.
Not quite sure what Bill Gates is up to.
I think if it's not the money, it's got to be the power or the desire to think that my ideas are great ideas and we should change the world to fit so that it runs the way I want.
I mean, that's always been a big problem with people with money and influence.
It's not so much that they are after money, but they want to run the world the way that they think it should be run.
I'm particularly worried, aren't you, about the people who, and there's lots of them, who've bought into this line that we really can't relax the lockdown until the vaccine comes out.
Yeah, that's crazy.
I mean, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a distinguished professor of molecular biology the other day.
He says there might never be a vaccine.
It just might not happen.
It's quite hard to do it with things like coronaviruses.
There's some woman at Oxford who's claiming that she's 80% towards the way to doing one, which is good news if it's true, but you can't rely on things like that because sometimes that last 20% can be hard.
And also a lot of these things just end up not working anyway.
You think you've got a vaccine, but you tested it.
It doesn't work.
You can't rely on a vaccine happening.
You can't lock down the world for 18 months.
That would be just economic Armageddon.
That would just be the worst economic disaster in the history of the world, and it would be self-inflicted.
Even three months looks like being a total economic disaster.
Historical disaster.
Epic proportions.
This will vastly swamp the 2008 crash.
It'll swamp the Great Depression.
The longer it goes on, the worse it's going to get.
The other thing about the lockdown is, what I'm worried about is, we'll come out of a lockdown, but we'll be told there might be another one over winter.
I think that would be really bad.
Because if we come out and we're told there won't be any more lockdowns, period, Yes.
November, December, January.
Who's going to start investing in restaurants again and hotels and theatres and things like that?
That would be terrible if that happened.
Yeah.
It's got to be a, let's get out of it and let's not have it again.
I mean, I heard someone the other day saying, this is like, the lockdown's like a silver bullet.
It's like, I mean, this is assuming it works.
I'm not sure it even does anything.
But it's like a silver bullet that you can use once to fight a disease.
We've probably picked the wrong disease, because although coronavirus seems pretty nasty, it's probably not the mass-killing Mars attack disease.
A pandemic we should have used it on.
If something really bad comes in 10 years' time, it's not clear that we can use a lockdown again because we've already used that and it's probably going to mess up the world's economy.
We probably won't be rich enough to do it again.
Yes, good point.
We should have saved this possibility.
We should have saved this, assuming it works, which I don't think it does, but if it works, we should have saved it for a really serious pandemic.
This has got to be the biggest outbreak of mass hysteria in history, wouldn't you say?
It's probably going to be the most damaging outbreak because of the fact that our leaders took it seriously and they had the power to shut everything down.
No one saw through it.
It's amazing.
Hector, I need a pee, so I think we'll use this moment to bring our conversation to an end.
It's been great talking to you.
Just tell us where we can find your blog.
It's HectorDrummond.com.
And I've also got a Twitter page, Hector underscore Drummond.
Well, keep fighting the fight, Hector.
You're doing very well.
In the ledger, you're going to be marked as having had a good war.
Thank you.
Many congrats.
I obviously will have a good war too.
I'm probably going to get...
I reckon I'm going to get a DSO and bar and maybe an MC as well.
You might even get the VC. I don't know.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Well, thanks for having me on.
Absolute pleasure.
Absolute pleasure.
And I'm looking forward to seeing you at Libertarian Drinks, at Dick's Libertarian Drinks.
Yes, that'd be great.
Yeah, we'll catch up then.
Well, cheers, mate.
Okay.
Bye.
All right.
See you then.
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