June 17, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
04:05
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| Welcome to The Dellingpod with me, James Dellingpod. | |
| As always, I'm incredibly excited about my latest podcast with Alistair Haymes. | |
| His name may be familiar to you from The Spectator, The Critic and the Hector Drummond site. | |
| Alistair is an investment fund manager who has recently been radicalised in the culture wars by the government's mishandling of the coronavirus crisis. | |
| Alistair is a lockdown sceptic and he tells me why. | |
| He's crunched the numbers, he's looked at the charts and that he's written about it a lot. | |
| He is your perfect guide for all of those of you who are looking for ammunition to explain to your bed-wetting friends that this isn't a disaster, that this isn't going to kill us all, it's not the Black Death, it's not even the Spanish Flu, it's all overblown. | |
| Alistair Hames, my next podcast guest, is your guide. | |
| So please, if you want to hear it now, go to my Patreon, sign up to my Patreon, and you will hear the podcast straight away. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Bye. | |
| Presumably read and probably written about. | |
| This theory which various people have advanced, which is that actually, whether you have a lockdown, or you don't do anything, it actually makes very little difference that these difference that COVID-19 has a natural trajectory, and it forms the same shape regardless. | |
| Is that true? | |
| That's true, and it reminds me what your second question was, was that did it peak before lockdown? | |
| Yes. | |
| And I think you have to absolutely torture the data before you can see infections peaking after lockdown. | |
| And in fact, there's a really good paper came out from a professor of maths at Bristol University, Simon Wood, a few weeks ago, which makes this point, and he's a proper chops modeler, I mean, a professor of mathematics. | |
| And you have to really torture the data to see it coming after lockdown. | |
| And not only that, I mean, if lockdown was the game changer, then countries that haven't locked down to any substantial extent, like Sweden and like Japan, they would be necropolises by now. | |
| And they're not. | |
| In fact, Sweden is on the same curve as us, but with fewer deaths per capita. | |
| And Japan has barely been touched by coronavirus. | |
| So... | |
| You know, all this fuss about modelling. | |
| I mean, I spend all day modelling for my day job, so it's not like I'm an anti-modeller. | |
| But there's more to science than just models. | |
| I mean, there's controls. | |
| We've got two controls there in Sweden and Japan. | |
| And if the lockdown hypothesis was correct... | |
| You know, we'd see it there in that they should have multiples of the deaths that we have, and we haven't, and they haven't. | |
| So that is enough to prove, to my mind, that it's not lockdown. | |
| Although it's quite interesting, isn't it? | |
| And you've just been, we'll talk about this later, but you've been reading my book, Watermelons, and you've recognised a lot of similarities between what's going on now and what was happening, what is happening with the whole climate change thing. | |
| And what you will find is that these people, rather than fessing up to their mistake, for example, in this case, looking at Sweden and Japan and saying, we see that our predictions of what our modeling of lockdowns and so on were based on a false assumption. | |
| But in the same way, when, for example, we had the pause or when we had periods of global cooling, What you find is that they're very good at explaining why the models are right, and that reality is behaving in a particular way because of another factor that they hadn't mentioned before. | |
| For example, particles, which are having an effect on the climate, but actually their theory is still right, even though the real world observations seem to prove them wrong. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| If you start off with a prior assumption, you can torture the data just about and make it fit a theory. | |
| So, I mean, the prior assumption for warming, I guess, would be humans create lots of carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide creates warming, and then you have to look at the data to make the prior assumption look right. |
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