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June 20, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:17:05
Alistair Haimes
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With me, James Bennington.
And before I tell you about this exciting special guest, I'd just like to gently nudge you.
Although I hate the concept of nudging.
Support my Patreon.
It's bloody great.
And I will get even better for you and do more exciting things for you if you support me.
And also it frees me from the evil world where people like me are closed down by the left.
Anyway, this week's special guest, or this day's special guest, because I'm being so prolific with my podcast these days, I don't know, you know, I'm like the Ferrero Rocher ambassador, is Alistair Haymes.
Welcome to the podcast, Alistair.
Hi, James.
Very nice to meet you.
Very nice to be on the pod.
And Alistair, I've been following Alistair's stuff for quite a while.
Alistair is, you work in finance mainly, you're not a journalist, right?
I'm not a journalist at all.
No, I've been working in finance since 1997 and I have not been on Twitter until about two months ago and I wrote my first few bits of journalism about a month ago and the moment lockdown's lifted I'm off Twitter, off journalism and back to the day job.
So you're almost like a normie who's been red-pilled.
I am like a I always thought the blue pill sounded more fun from what I hear, but I've been working in numbers non-stop since 1997, like I say, and as soon as this story broke, so many things didn't make sense.
I thought I'd just have to try and get my views out there a little bit, but the moment this has lifted, I'm off.
Well, welcome briefly to my world.
Yeah, I don't blame you for wanting to flee back to Normie world when it's all over.
We're talking, of course, about the...
I still don't know what the phrase is.
The plandemic.
The shamdemic.
The shamdemic.
By the way, now we are putting off people.
Somebody the other day I saw on Twitter, Helena Morrissey had tweeted out the interview that we did and somebody had grumbled in the comments below, I didn't get past like a dose of, no worse than a dose of bad flu.
So I think, you know, if you are what I would call a COVID bedwetter, this is probably not the podcast for you if you want your terror panic confirmed.
But it is for you if you want to learn about the truth.
And Alastair, you've been...
Even though you're a sort of civilian in this, you've been writing some really good articles explaining why what seemed at first like a really scary thing, like maybe even the new Spanish flu, when the first story started coming out from Wuhan, the rumours.
But that's not how it's transpired.
So give us a sort of tour d'horizon of what's been happening.
Okay, so I completely agree with you, actually, there, James.
I think up until about mid-March, I was seriously worried, and I thought, is this the next Spanish flu?
Is it the disease X? As soon as you turned the news on, it was the pictures from Wuhan of people being welded into apartments and fumigators in the streets.
And then, of course, when it hit Italy, you know, the overflowing wards, the stories of the intubations, and it was all very, very harrowing.
All these words we learned were not in our vocabulary, and suddenly intubation became...
Absolutely.
I mean, I put lots of graphs on Twitter, as you know, and I get told off for not doing log y axes from people I know very well, didn't know the word logarithmic or exponential.
You know, we're all experts in different types of antibodies and T cell CD4 plus killer cells and we've all become armchair epidemiologists and I think we're all looking forward to forgetting it all.
And what's the one about when you catch it in hospital?
Nosocomial.
Nosocomial.
Or iatrogenic.
I knew about iatrogenic, but nosocomial.
Fantastic.
Not worth much in Scrabble with so many low-scoring letters, unfortunately.
So up to about mid-March, I thought, this is actually properly scary.
And then when they started doing the number 10 press briefings and actually started giving us some numbers, I think it became pretty clear pretty quickly that it actually wasn't what we were being told.
And just to rewind to what you were saying five minutes ago, is I think people get outraged if you compare it to a flu.
And that's because people say it's just flu.
But actually, there's no just about it.
Flu kills on average about 20,000 people a year in this country.
20,000?
I think it's about 17,000 in England.
So it's not far off 20,000 in the UK, just to put COVID in a bit of context.
Every death's a tragedy for sure, but you have to put the numbers in some kind of context at some point.
And, you know, 1968 flu killed 80,000 in the UK. There was no disruption whatsoever to people's normal life.
And in fact, my parents don't even remember the 1968 flu.
Woodstock went ahead.
And in fact, if you adjust for population, at the moment, COVID is a lesser killer than 2000 flu.
And from what I remember, nobody talked about flu back in 2000.
The millennium wasn't cancelled and Boris Johnson was singing along with everyone else in the Millennium Dome, which is the ultimate super spreader event.
So I just, although every number is...
Sorry, let me just get rid of that.
Should I stop?
No, that's okay.
Somebody's answered it.
Somebody's answered it.
Great.
Yeah.
Carry on?
Yeah, carry on, yeah.
So we just think people need to put some kind of context on the numbers, and the problem is that I don't think we're very well, as a species, we're not very well set up to put a lot of these numbers in context because they're just so enormous.
And so because I work with numbers all day, every day, and my day job is seeing patterns in numbers, I just felt it would be kind of useful for people to kind of explain in articles why this particular number doesn't make sense or should be put in context of that number why, you know, the pattern would imply that things were going to get better even when the politicians in the press conference were telling us they weren't going to get better.
So let me help you to spell it out because I think it's probably quite shocking.
So we're up to what of deaths, excess deaths?
So I think we're up to about 60,000, just in round numbers, because you have to talk about what the excess is over.
But when the ONS says excess, they mean over a five-year average.
So we're up to something like, in round terms, 60,000 in England and Wales.
And of those, about 45,000 are people dying with COVID. Not necessarily of COVID, but with COVID. And I think most of them probably are dying of COVID, if you believe the ONS. And what Chris Whitty called the indirect deaths, which you or I might call the lockdown deaths, is up to about 14,000.
So in other words, that's people over and above the average numbers dying, but who don't have COVID at the point they die.
Right.
And so compare that with, well, you said 2,000 was a bad number.
2000 was a very comparable year in terms of the number of people who died over winter.
So normally with a flu, this is what's so unusual about this, James, is every year, as far back as I can get the ONS statistics, these respiratory viral diseases, they come like clockwork from beginning of December, roughly, and they peak in about the second week of January-ish.
But every year is exactly the same pattern.
So what's really unusual about COVID is that it came in at the end of March and into May.
So if you look at things versus the average, this looks absolutely horrendous because normally spring is a very low death point of the year.
You know, I've done a graph I put on Twitter every week where you literally just delete the COVID deaths from March and April and tack them back on to December and January.
And this would be a bad but not a remarkable flu year.
This is why it looks so bad, is because of the timing.
I think I read that first at Hector Drummond's site, didn't I? Did you write it there?
I did, yeah.
I think it was called the virus that missed the train or something like that.
But yeah, it stands out like a sore thumb, actually.
And in particular, just like Knut Witkowski pointed out on YouTube before they took his videos down, these respiratory viral diseases, they come along, they last two or three months, and they leave.
And the pattern of COVID is exactly the same as the flus we have every year.
Yes, what's the, there was a name for it, isn't there, the bell curve that they, what's it called?
Gompertz, the Gompertz distribution.
Oh no, I was thinking of something else, that somebody, particularly relating to viruses.
Well, there's an epidemic curve, yeah.
No, but it's named after somebody, and I'm going to kick myself afterwards, because I'm going to look at your article.
Okay.
Yeah, because it...
Because we love these labels, don't we?
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
There's a sigmoid curve, there's a Gompertz curve, there's a Gaussian, maybe.
Gaussian, that's a normal bell curve.
Yeah, I've heard about this Gaussian distribution.
Yeah, that's the normal bell curve, which is symmetrical, whereas for various reasons, this one, the right-hand shoulder slopes about twice as slowly as the left-hand shoulder.
Yes, why does it do that?
That is a very, very good question, and Twitter is absolutely alive with debate about why that is.
This is an absolute personal theory, but my guess is that initially when it strikes this virus, and most of us haven't been exposed to it before, a lot of the old and the frail who it's particularly knocking over will tend to die quite quickly.
And you get to the peak quite quickly, but a lot of people can be kept ventilated and in sort of suspended animation for a long, long time before they eventually succumb.
So you would expect it to be asymmetric.
That's my pet theory, and there might be a much cleverer reason which immunologists will be able to explain to you.
We're going to get so many complaints if you're wrong.
People are just going to say, I don't know why this...
Why do you have this stupid, ignorant bastard on the...
He didn't understand at all about the slope of the shoulder, they're going to say, because that's the kind of listener we attract.
Absolutely, yeah.
Well, one thing I've never done is try to predict.
I've put no forecasts or predictions anywhere.
The height of my analysis normally is putting a line through existing data.
So, in that sense, I'm not doing Neil Ferguson's job of trying to predict things.
One of the The points in one of the excellent pieces you wrote for the critic you made was that...
Or maybe it was for the spectator, actually.
You showed this completely fake graph that I think the BBC had used to indicate that once the lockdown had been brought in, the numbers of...
The infection rate had collapsed.
And this...
I think it was an entirely artificial artifact.
I don't think there was any relationship with reality.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But actually, am I right in thinking that we'd already reached the peak before the lockdown?
Well, yes.
So there's two things you've raised there.
One is, that's the graph of the R number, which when Imperial published, I can't remember which number report, but it's the impact of their non-pharmaceutical interventions.
Their model, which I've run on my home computer and I've checked all the output, It does actually produce a sloping curve, but when they publish their paper, they put these very sharp divisions between each intervention to make it look as though it could only be the interventions that have made the difference.
And it's a sham.
And if you actually go to the death state at which it runs off, it actually makes a very, very smooth curve.
Not only a smooth curve, but the identical curve to Sweden, which hasn't had a lockdown.
Are you saying they've been actually torturing the data to make it look?
Their model calculates the data correctly, but it's the graph which they generate from the data, I think is plain misleading.
And in fact, they came out with a new, based on the same model, they came out with a new paper a few days ago.
And it really shows the sham for what it is, because the point at which there's a cliff edge collapse in that R number that we're all going to worship these days.
For Sweden, of course, Sweden hasn't locked down, so they couldn't put the lockdown label.
So they say, oh, that's when they banned mass gatherings.
For every other country, the mass gatherings makes no difference.
So the emperor's clothes are on plain display there.
So on the R number, that is just...
I think it's completely misleading how they've represented what their own model has as an output.
So I forgot, there was a second question which I've already forgotten.
Well, yes, you said there were two things raised and I don't know what they were.
So you can come back to it.
You've 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 COVID-19 has a natural trajectory and it forms the same shape regardless.
Is that true?
That's true, and it reminds me of 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'd 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 recognized 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 um 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
um but in the same way when for example we had uh 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 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.
And it's just the same with COVID. You say, lockdown, stop it.
So then when we look at the data, we must be able to see that lockdown, stop it.
Whereas if you just start with the data itself, That isn't the story that the data tells.
Yes.
You know, if you try and ignore the assumption.
So, for example, if you just looked at the data and you did kind of a pin the tail on the donkey and said, you know, show me where you think lockdown came in.
You know, I've done this on Twitter.
I've covered up the dates and said, where do you think it was?
And no one gets it right.
Or I've put up graphs of Sweden versus UK. I said, one of these countries has a lockdown, one hasn't.
You know, and the polls, in fact, 55% of people got it wrong, I think.
Yes.
So if you start from the data, you get a totally different result than if you start from the theory.
So, in terms of worst policy disasters in history, I mean, inside or outside wartime, is there anything comparable to what's happened in the world today?
It's quite extreme.
Well, I mean, you need to ask a historian that I think we're well past sewers, aren't we?
We're probably kind of appeasement levels of awfulness.
With the slight difference that we were then rescued by Churchill and this time we've got Johnson.
Oh, but yeah, but you're talking about the UK, the British experience.
But this has been repeated across the world.
I mean, we've got exceptions.
We've got, okay, so we've got...
Bolsonaro in Brazil, who continues to maintain heroically, I think, given the grief he gets from the international media, that this is a shamdemic.
And whenever I read...
In papers like The Telegraph, I read sort of stories about bodies piling up on the streets or implying that.
There's a piece about Bolsonaro's economic policy and how people were really raising doubts about...
Brazil's economic future.
And I read the piece.
And actually, it was just an attack on his scepticism about COVID-19, which had nothing to do with economics at all.
What else?
We've got those heroes at Belarus.
We've got a few countries.
And Sweden.
Sweden.
But generally, this is a...
A global disaster.
Yeah.
Okay, so you're in finance.
You must have an inkling about the world of pain coming our way as a result of this policy.
It's not looking good.
In fact, we're recording this on the 12th of June, and it was this morning that they showed the GDP number down 20% in a month.
I don't think we ever had a point in the 2008 crash where it went below 6%.
If we keep this up for another month, it looks like we're going to be worse than anything since the 1700s, and completely self-inflicted.
I come back to the British decision slightly, in that I do think it's when Ferguson came up with his number in SAGE. I do feel that's also what triggered the collapse of Trump's confidence in America.
The bad news spread across the Atlantic, and it was such a wall of bad news that he went from Democrat hoax to maximum fear porn, like a kind of a taxi turning on a dime.
There was that and there was the famous trip to Mar-a-Lago by Tucker Carlson.
And Tucker Carlson was...
I mean, Tucker's great.
He's had a good war.
He's had a good war.
Although they're losing advertisers pretty quick, I think.
Well, they are.
But where are we going to go for our Tucker fix if he gets driven out of fog?
Patreon.
Oh my God, he's going to be so...
What a Patreon that would be.
I mean, it would actually eclipse mine.
And I say that, I think my patrons are bloody good.
Get more people onto Patreon, though.
Yeah, well, it's true.
But he went on his famous trip to Mar-a-Lago to tell President Trump...
You know, the optics aren't necessarily looking good if this turns out to be really bad.
Yeah.
And you're talking about it being a kind of Democrat invention.
Although, in a way, one wonders whether, with hindsight, perhaps Tucker's visit was a mistake and actually America would be doing probably really well if...
It's difficult in the early stages, though.
I mean, sort of in mid-March, that would have been a huge call for Johnson.
Ballsy in a brilliant way.
But it would have been humongously ballsy for Johnson or Trump to say, no, I'm pretty confident.
It's a sham.
We're not going to do anything.
I mean, if I were tyrant, which, you know, I'm probably not going to be, but if I were tyrant...
Back in mid-March, I actually think I probably would have called that first lockdown, just the first one, just while you build a bit of capacity and just wait to see how the story turns out.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so you'd have hedged.
I'd have hedged, but I wouldn't have renewed it.
Yeah.
So we'd have had, what, three weeks?
Three weeks, yeah.
Three weeks of lovely sunshine.
Kids were breaking up anyway.
And, you know, it's like someone's written the tragedy, you know.
Johnson got ill.
Rab probably didn't have the authority to lift it.
And then you're into another three weeks.
And then by then people are so petrified that the opinion polls show that people love the lockdown and the whole thing is gathered up.
It's sort of fed on itself to become the story it's become.
Where has Gove been in all this?
What has Gove been doing?
Do you think he's been on manoeuvres, biding his time?
I always thought he was kind of a voice of sanity inside the quad.
And then he's basically been silent until this morning, apparently, saying that we're going to allow EU traffic in without the same checks that the EU will be doing on our checks, on our goods going over there.
So I think that's the first thing I've heard from Gove for weeks and weeks.
He's an operator.
You know Gove listens to this pod when he goes running.
I'm a huge fan of Michael Gove, I have to say.
You see, the thing is, even when he does things that I fearfully disapprove of, for example, his stuff on climate change, he's bought into the green blob and he's completely wrong and he should bloody well know this.
But I love him.
He's my friend and he will stay my friend and that's how it goes.
People say, how can you be friends with that vile, whatever they want to call him?
But sometimes you stay loyal to friends because you love them.
And also, he's so articulate and intelligent, you want him inside the tent.
And funny.
Yeah, and funny, yeah.
He's very funny.
He does the best off-the-cuff speech that anyone...
Boris is praised for his kind of speeches and oratory and his bluff, kind of amusing, bumbling persona, but Gove is...
Gove wipes the floor with him as a speaker.
But I want to reiterate, I do not approve of Gove's sucking up to the green blob.
It's poor.
It is poor.
So, we've talked briefly about the economic impact, which I think you characterised as, what, 10 to 15%?
Brexit bills.
The Treasury was saying a few weeks ago that they were fearing it was going to be somewhere north of £300 billion of deficit over and above what they'd expected before the panic.
I think round numbers.
I think the Brexit bill is something around £35 billion and they had a worse case of up to £500 billion of excess deficit.
So that's about 10 to 15 Brexit bills.
And as well as the costs of furlough and all the support, we're actually losing something like £4 billion of lost output a day, I believe.
So it works out roughly a Brexit bill a week, that this lockdown is costing us while we dribble on, you know.
Talking about a three or four week review cycle, I mean, it should be, I think every day there should be some, there should be like a sort of a dead man's handle on this legislation, that every day it needs to be, it needs to be kind of reauthorised or, you know, I've got children at home who haven't missed the entire term of school while they're kind of,
you know, while they're just fiddling around and waiting to, I think we, you know, we said before we started recording that the scientists and the ministers stand in front of a graph at these 10 Downing Street press briefings and And you can see behind them there's a picture of a bell curve.
And we've gone up the hill and we're right down at base camp.
And they say, we think we're past the peak.
And the guy doing the sign language can't believe it.
You look at his facial expressions and it says it all.
He's appalled.
Yes, we're virtually below sea level now.
We're that much past the peak.
Well, actually, it's funny enough, the...
The government also publishes a report on excess mortality, and the one that came out yesterday, we're right back to normal levels again.
We're back to the seasonal adjusted averages.
It's basically the end of the affair, done and dusted, but still, my kids are not at school and I'm pretty angry about it.
Tell me about this, the second, what's it called?
The second wave.
The second wave, yes.
Oh God.
Will there be one, you mean?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I guess by definition, if you squash a sombrero and then you stop sitting when you stand up, I guess you'd expect the sombrero to regain its shape to some extent.
So we've done a pretty enormous intervention keeping people in their homes.
So if there is some mild bounce back while the first wave completes itself, I wouldn't be enormously surprised.
But I also wouldn't be surprised at all.
I'm not the guy to ask in that it's really a question for an immunologist or a virologist, but These respiratory viral diseases, they tend to go away in summer when we're all getting lots of vitamin D and we're spending much more time outside, and then they come back in winter.
I mean, that is kind of what they do until there's enough immunity we've all built.
I don't want to say herd immunity because it's kind of a trigger word for some people and a safe word for others.
But until we've all had enough of it going around our system, it seems that you get the summer off and then...
One criticism I think we can make is that if we were going to allow the virus to go through our community while the vulnerable are shielded, it would have been a damn good time to do it when the weather's nice.
Because if we have this overlapping with flu season...
It could be nasty.
But actually, looking at the reports that came out earlier this week, it sounds like the virus has been among us for months longer, or at least weeks if not months longer.
And thanks to all the public-spirited people going skiing over half-term, we've had it seeded so much in this country.
It's likely completed its cycle, I would imagine.
You know, it's a damn shame that I don't have enough money yet, obviously this will change when my Patreon takes off, to go and do my bit for the country by having skiing holidays in Italy.
Take one for the team.
God, the nobility of those people.
It's altruism.
Yeah, yeah.
Damn, damn.
I could have won a George Cross.
I mean, did you see that proposal?
There's a...
Oh no.
It's a mad world.
My latest column is It's a Mad World, My Masters.
But the insanity that we've been experiencing, I think we've had more insanity condensed into the last three months than in the entirety of my life put together.
The proposal, for example, the National Health Service, the failing, sclerotic, Stalinist system that is not an embarrassment to the world.
I mean, respect to the doctors and nurses, but not to the kind of administrative staff.
This should get the George Cross.
Well, it's bananas.
I mean, some of them got their little care badge from Hancock, didn't they?
Do you remember that?
It was a little kind of thing you pin on your lapel.
They didn't.
What did they say?
Care?
It says care.
Yeah, I'll send you the image.
It's quite something.
I think that story sank without trace.
I think it was mocked quite.
But at the moment, I'm not sure.
I think we kneel on one day, we have to clap on another.
I think we'll be doing hands, shoulders, knees and toes before very long.
We probably will.
And that's the kind of intellectual level, I think, head, shoulders, knees and toes, and wheels on the bus going round, round, round.
I noticed something the other day, you probably haven't written about this, but the thought occurred to me.
I was driving to the petrol station and I was looking at the looking at these signs saying we salute our glorious heroic tractor producing NHS workers with rainbows and stuff.
All this stuff has been pre-printed professionally, and it's obviously not the individual garage owner that's done it.
Presumably, this was part of the plan, because you see it everywhere.
You see on shops and outside towns and stuff, you see NHS flags.
Presumably the government's propaganda department started producing this stuff, this material, to sow this idea in the...
It's a bit like kind of female yak pilots in the Soviet Union in the war, you know, that we're being fed a propaganda line everywhere we go.
Do you know where this came from?
I've got no idea.
In fact...
You didn't even notice, you didn't even have any thought about it?
On the drive on the way here, a friend phoned me to say that there's bunting saying thank you NHS all the way up Oxford Street today.
I don't know, if we rewind, you have to kind of look at the past through the eyes of the past.
And back in March, I've got lots of friends who are doctors and I thought, God, it looked like there was a tsunami approaching.
I mean, they were really fearful.
Yeah.
And, you know, they didn't know what we now know.
And they were looking at the pictures from Bergamo and from Wuhan.
Yeah.
They were absolutely petrified.
And I thought, God, these guys are really brave.
I was out there clapping the first couple of times.
I thought, fantastic.
I know.
You COVID bedwetter.
I'm the miserable guy who doesn't now.
But what's bizarre is this sort of performative, you know, cultist love of the NHS now, which means you can't look at it objectively.
Whereas actually, I mean, I think the carers, the doctors, the nurses, fantastic, you know.
But the actual institution of the NHS does not seem to have had a brilliant war, kind of overseen by PHE, whereas the German system has had an absolutely brilliant war, where they've got structural overcapacity because it's insurance funded, they've got ventilators coming out their ears.
And they've also, you know, they focus early on on when there's testing.
It's testing to make sure that, you know, the infected aren't seeding care homes.
And they've actually got a system where the insurers are actually paid for each night that someone's kept in their hospital bed.
So the last thing they want is to discharge them.
But rather than looking clear-eyed at another health system and thinking, what did they get right?
What did we get wrong?
We've got such kind of group love for the NHS. I don't think people will look at it in a clear-eyed way now.
It's counterproductive, I'd say.
There is, of course, another reason why the Germans have had a good war.
It's their national sport.
Sorry.
I couldn't resist that one.
We've lost some Germans.
No, no, no.
Germans bloody love this.
Yeah, I know.
I've got loads of Germans.
Germans love me.
Seriously.
And they're probably a bit sore today having lost their faulty towers.
Do you know what I'm doing at the moment?
Just for my German listeners, I'm actually learning Erlkönig.
Wer leitet zu spät durch Nacht und Wind?
But I've got to get one of my German friends to take me through the pronunciation because my German is shit.
I sort of pronounce it like a kind of, like somebody impersonating a Nazi might do.
And actually it's a much more beautiful language than that.
It is lovely.
But yeah, yeah.
So I've done, by way of digression, I've done La Batrosse by Baudelaire.
So I've got French covered.
Is this commercially available?
No, no, no, no, no.
Actually, do you know what I'm going to do?
When I'm sort of freer, I'm going to make a series...
Actually, Mark Stein does this already on his kind of...
the Mark Stein website.
You get him talking about poetry.
And I want to do the same.
I want to maybe make short films of me maybe reciting the poetry, or maybe that would be an awful thing.
But talking about poems, for example, an obvious one would be to go to Stoke Poge's graveyard.
Where Grey's Elegy is set and just talk about why the poem, why that poem is probably the greatest in the English language, why it matters so much, why it's so quoted and why, you know, it speaks to people.
And do a series, you know, so you might go to Adelstrop to see where Edward Thomas was inspired to write his poem and, you know, I think that might be nice.
And it also, although part of me doesn't give a shit anymore about what the other nasty people think about me, at the same time, it's always quite a good thing to show that you've got hinterland.
Because I think the left would love to caricature people like me as being just pure evil and purely obsessed with politics, which I'm so not.
Yeah.
You know, I sort of fell into politics just because the times have, the lunacy of the times has demanded it, but it's not a kind of, I don't, well actually that's a lie, I probably do wake up and eat, breathe and sleep politics, but I don't, I don't just, you know, I do have other interests.
But you're no redneck, are you?
No, God no.
In fact, Vox Day said this to me.
Have you come across Vox Day?
I haven't, no.
Do you know of him at all?
Never.
Okay, so Vox Day is a rum cove.
I mean, he's very far down the rabbit hole.
He's beyond red-pilled into sort of black-pilled status.
And he calls himself Voice of God.
No, Vox Dei.
Not Vox Dei.
Vox Dei.
I think he's got Red Indian blood in him.
Maybe he's completely Red Indian.
He lives in Switzerland.
And he has a website thing that I've just joined called Uncensored, I think.
And he's very good at fighting the culture wars.
And I was saying, look, Vox, do you...
I think I'm really quite reasonable.
I don't think I'm a kind of rabid rightist by any stretch.
I mean, I kind of love the Jews, very pro-Israel.
You know, what else?
I mean, I believe in limited government, low taxes, freedom.
Where's my nasty bit in me?
Where's the evil bit in me?
And he said, no.
He said, actually, I would say that you're really quite safe on the scheme of things.
I think he sort of meant it half as an insult, but it's absolutely true.
But he then went on to make the point that it doesn't matter.
As far as the left is concerned, they will turn even your mildness into something that is evil and to be destroyed.
No one is safe anymore.
And I think it's probably true.
They love their narrative.
So what's bizarre on this is, I mean, I don't regard myself as right of centre even, really, to be honest.
Well, no, didn't you vote Remain?
I voted Remain, yeah.
And, you know, I think I've voted for four different parties so far in my time.
You haven't voted Green?
I've never voted Green, no.
I haven't sunk that low.
I was 52-48 myself on Remain.
I could see the arguments both ways.
I think of myself as very, very centrist.
But what's bizarre is any scepticism or any scrutiny of the official party line on this current epidemic...
Any scrutiny of the numbers which is actually published by the government every day, you know, I've had lots of people on Twitter saying, oh, you would say that, you're some right-winger, and I think, you don't know anything about me.
Why would you automatically assume someone's right-wing because they're applying some kind of scrutiny and just not bleakly accepting, meekly accepting whatever you're told.
It's bizarre, really.
How do you think it breaks down the political make-up of people who are What would you call people like us?
We're COVID sceptics, lockdown sceptics.
Yeah, I guess.
Libertarian is maybe putting it a bit strong.
I just want to be allowed out of my damn house and get my kids back to school.
I think I've set the bar pretty low.
Yes.
But what I mean is, do you think there's a correlation between people's politics on other issues and their scepticism about this, would you say?
Well, there seems to be, doesn't there?
I mean, everybody, at least on the social media, everybody who's applying any scrutiny, everyone who's kind of jumping up and down, saying, you know, for God's sake, we're being spun a line here.
The economy can't survive.
You know, you're killing far more people than you're saving with lockdown.
Anyone who's saying those things seems to be entrepreneurs feature pretty well.
You know, Hugh Osmond and Luke Johnson are banging the drum all the time.
And, you know, to the extent that any of the press are, you know, trying to say, you know, we need to get our kids back to school.
It's people like Alison Pearson from The Telegraph.
I can't see anyone in the left of centre who's doing anything apart from just kind of nodding meekly while we stay locked in our houses.
And, I mean, have we ever needed more scrutiny?
You know, the cabinet seems to have no ability to influence what the Quad's doing.
And Keir Starmer is, as far as I can see, he's basically twiddling his thumb and making loyally points, trying to save up political capital for later and waiting for the opinion polls to change underneath him.
But he's not banging the table and saying, hang on, you're saying X, but the data says Y.
He's absolutely useless.
You raise a good point there.
Isn't one of the most...
One of the many disappointing aspects of this pandemic, whatever, that we've got these daily meetings, the daily briefings, where these spokesmen for the government are supposed to be held to account by our fearless media.
And every time our media has been asking completely the wrong questions.
Totally.
Unbelievable.
And they've actually got the chief science officer, the chief medical officer there.
They can actually ask them the things that, you know, once you peel the top of the story back, the really interesting questions are things like, you know, why are you checking for antibodies?
You know, what's the other parts that may be a much more useful part of the story?
You know, how can contact tracing possibly work if the ONS says that 80% of people don't have any symptoms?
Yeah.
How can you possibly expect to control this?
No one's asking the most basic questions.
I mean, you and I can teach young children why contact tracing couldn't work, just using marbles in bowls.
You can see that was an absolute turkey.
And day after day, they're saying this is our great hope to let us out of lockdown.
Explain briefly why contact tracing can't work.
If this was something where everybody who gets ill has symptoms and you can get to them all during the period while they're infectious, contact tracing as a concept can work and does work and works all the time for epidemic.
But the absolute devil on this particular disease is that it sounds like about 80% of people have no symptoms but they are still infectious.
So even if you just work through numbers very, very simply, even by the time you've collared one symptomatic guy to contact trace, at least another and maybe three or four others have already slipped through the net.
And meanwhile, with whatever our number is...
You know, they've already multiplied up to 10 people five days later while you're fiddling around, trying to get this one person you've collared, and then you've got about a 30% chance of the test coming up negative, even though they are actually positive.
And then once they've done that, he's got to try and recall which contacts.
You've got to try and get hold of those contacts, it sounds like, about...
20% of those slip through the net.
Then those people have got to actually comply.
And it sounds like about 8 out of 10 say they will, but will they really?
You know, if it means missing another fortnight of school each time.
If you're self-employed, missing another fortnight of work.
Was this ever actually worked through?
I mean, I think...
In a few sentences, you can see why it just won't work if this many people are asymptomatic.
I mean, it's not like SARS where it's really symptomatic if you have it.
It's really obvious.
So you put the ill away, you find the other people who are ill.
You don't have anyone slipping through the net, really, the way SARS worked.
Or, you know, in Ebola or something, you make kind of just a ring around the village.
And you make sure, yeah, you do the contact tracing properly there.
But by the time we've got tens of thousands of cases in the UK, we're chasing our tail.
It should never have made it off the whiteboard.
So here's something that puzzles me.
We're civilians, okay?
We're informed civilians.
But we've formed a pretty educated and very supportable view that...
The virus has done its worst, that the lockdown was a waste of time, that this is no worse than bad seasonal flu, that the economic damage that's being done is enormous, that lots of people are dying and will die unnecessarily because of the lockdown, and that we're storing up a whole heap of trouble.
This is a given.
I don't think any intelligent, informed person would think otherwise.
So why is the government still acting as if none of this is true?
Oh gosh, that's a really good question and it's probably a better question for a political analyst.
I just feel as though they've got themselves in so deep now.
This story has sort of fed on itself.
They've got everyone absolutely petrified.
So the opinion polls, people love the lockdown now.
You've got the furloughed at home who are pretty much fully paid to do absolutely no work and they've saved all the money they spend commuting.
And people are in the middle of a box set horror movie and they've got themselves petrified now.
And I think the problem is we've basically elected a government who's governing by opinion poll.
Even though the election is four and a half years away.
I mean, if the election was six months away, then yeah, do what the opinion polls tell you.
to look at opinion polls and then just enact it.
Because then you're not actually a government.
You're an administration.
And we actually elect these guys to sit around a table with a scientist and say, look, you said X.
It actually looks much more like Y.
We can't afford this damage.
And in fact, we're going to have more of a problem in four and a half years' time if we carry on with this now than if we just rip the plaster off and have a short-term pain and lift the furlough, to reinstitute truancy and get the kids back to school, basically.
If you were really brave, that's what Johnson would do.
He'd realise that we're back at base camp and it's time to get the country moving again.
But it's not just a question of bravery, although I do agree with you there, that they've dug themselves in this hole and they're having trouble getting out of it.
But also it's about honesty, isn't it?
I mean, if you've made a huge, huge mistake, you have two options.
Either you fess up and start remedying the damage you've done.
Or you go through this charade where you continue with the lie and go through this elaborate pretense that it's still a problem.
And you go through this charade and you force the country to participate with you in this charade, this business where the two-meter rule and stuff.
Oh, God.
Do you think they know?
How?
The WHO, no.
I mean, I've got absolutely no idea why we've got a world where the WHO says a metre.
You know, we have people who've been back in pubs in Copenhagen for six weeks.
No one's keeling over dead.
And we've still got two metres.
It's absolutely bananas.
Oh, but yeah, but I think you're even, you're conceding too much ground to the enemy even with that one metre thing.
My question was actually, do you think the government know that it's all a complete sham?
I would imagine, well, I think from what I hear, a lot of people on the back benches are really saying, hang on a second, you know, if we rewind, was hand-washing enough?
You know, was just people being, just, you've got a scary story out there, so people will automatically adjust their behaviour a bit.
You know, and it just looks like we're on the same curve as Sweden.
And when you look over to other countries, they must be thinking, hang on, never mind how the electorate's going to judge us, how the history book's going to judge us.
Because there will be history books to fill a shelf written about this.
Do they want a chapter to themselves?
But I don't think they care about the history books.
I think they just care about the short term.
But I think they care about the Inquiry as well.
That's for sure.
Yeah, but they're going to choose somebody who's...
They're not going to choose Jonathan Sumption.
That is for sure.
They're not going to choose him.
They're not going to choose you.
No.
They're going to choose Lord Biddable of Wank.
And Lord Biddable of Wank is going to find that, yes, well, mistakes were made, but it was in the context of the blah, blah, blah.
It was understandable and they...
I mean, it amazes me that the main thing that...
What's that cranky woman in Scotland called?
Sturgeon?
Sturgeon.
And the kind of the leftist media, you know, people like The Mirror and so on.
The main thing they're trying to pin on the government is you should have started the lockdown early.
I mean, if that's...
There are so many more...
Stronger criticisms you can make about the government's policy.
Oh yeah.
So many more on-point criticisms you can make than they should have started earlier.
Who cares about that?
It's where we are now.
The lockdown coming in earlier would have made no difference.
I mean, with the benefit of total hindsight...
You know, what we could have done is actually close the airports in sort of mid-January, because it sounds like most of our cases were ceded from Spain and Italy and France in that half term.
But, you know, who could have possibly known that?
I don't think the government would be hung on that.
But what the inquiry, I think, will focus on is the care homes.
Because, you know, unlike other countries, we were actually discharging knowingly positive cases into a care home.
So you want a petri dish, we were dropping germs onto that petri dish, and that isn't It's a scandal and, you know, the numbers are petrifying, well not petrifying, they're scandalous in that in England and Wales, 37% of the deaths are care home residents.
That's 0.6% of our population.
Now they are older and frailer anyway, so you would expect them to be very, very disproportionate.
But not that disproportion.
I mean, we've actively, I think, pushed the infection levels in care homes well above what they should have been.
And I think a couple of weeks ago in Scotland, I think over 60% of people dying were actually dying in care homes.
So the care home scandal will be a massive chapter in the Royal Commission that must be coming down the tracks.
But you're right, by the time that, it'll be some biddable lord.
It'll be ten years later.
And they can say, oh, we did the same as France, the same as Spain, the same as Italy.
And because we did the same as the people who haven't done very well, you know, you get the groupthink and you can't be shouted at.
It's just the same as in investments.
You know, if you do the same as the next guy and you end up with the same track record as the next guy, you don't get shouted at.
If you're the maverick who thinks he's seen the opportunity, if you get it wrong, then you're absolutely screwed.
Yes, absolutely.
You look a hero if it works, but you're absolutely screwed if it doesn't.
Yes.
Who wants to be that ballsy?
It's like the Big Short, isn't it?
It's like the Big Short, yeah.
It really is like the Big Short in that they had the data.
The guys who really profited off it, they didn't think they were taking a judgment.
They said, this is a one-way bet.
They had all the information.
They did the data better than everyone else, and it was a one-way bet, and it came off.
Yeah, but even then, the investors in their short funds were saying, I'm pulling out, you know… Oh, yeah.
Yeah, they lost the nerve.
Actually, the situation it really reminds me of is back in 98, there was another hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management.
And I'd been working in the city for about a year.
So I had a front row seat.
I was working Canary Wharf and everything when this… This hedge fund blew up and it really nearly took down the world financial system because something had happened that everyone thought was impossible, which was a country defaulting on debt in its own currency.
What was that?
Argentina?
No, Russia.
Russia?
Oh, that's right, yes.
And it blew up all the other emerging markets.
It's such a similar situation that it was too clever an idea to fail.
It was run by two Nobel Prize winners.
It had the best models and everyone said, God, these guys are so good at modelling.
And then it turns out, well, they got the most simple thing wrong.
They thought that one thing would always move against another and it turns out both things went downwards.
It's what it is, is expert failure.
And in fact, I saw Steve Baker, who's an MP who's had, I think, a fantastic war.
He's about the only one that has.
One of the very, very few.
Him and Lizzie Allen and David Davis, to a degree.
He's come and gone a bit, hasn't he?
Yeah, he has a bit.
A lot of them are kind of hedging their bets.
Yeah, David Davis was very good putting his head above the parapet when it became clear that Neil Ferguson's model was just not worth the paper it was printed on.
I think he got involved in that story.
But he's gone quite masky recently, I think.
He's quite pro-mask.
I'm not a huge mask guy.
Well, you see, again, what's completely put me, I used to be a fan of Dominic Cummings.
I thought he was going to keep Boris honest, but we've seen him, his championing of this quarantine thing.
Yeah.
It sounds like he was an observer in a meeting where, you know, the sage minutes are quite amazing.
And, you know, hats off to Simon Dolan for making sure we can actually read them.
Yes.
But it's quite clear the change in tone in the Sage Minutes before and after Ferguson presented that scary number of, I think it was half a million UK deaths, which, I mean, that's a bit of a stretch.
That's twice what Spanish flu killed in the UK, and that's before we had antibiotics.
So that's a stretch number.
But it really sounds like maybe he was in the room and, you know, Oxbridge, Duffer, arts background, heard a huge number, got scared.
Yeah.
But what's bizarre is you read Cummings' blog and you think, this is fantastic.
He's going to make sure there's scrutiny, there's red teams to attack the groupthink.
He's going to have super, super forecasters as well as the experts.
I read all that and I thought, this is fantastic.
And all of that stuff would have actually saved us.
But then you read the minutes of the SAGE meetings, there was no red team, there was no scrutiny, there was no challenge.
It's very clear that just the gravity of a really bad story presented by someone who's very articulate ended up swaying them.
They didn't have any kind of out-of-domain experts who were just good with numbers, good with analysis, saying, hang on, does that make sense?
Can that be right?
All the things that we look forward to when Cummings got involved, they just seemed to go out of the window at the most important time.
What amazes me, although it shouldn't, because you've read Watermelons and it's all about the same thing, is given the track record of Neil Ferguson, given his record going right back to the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic where he got it completely wrong, and his bad, bad advice resulted in the slaughter of, what, six million-plus healthy animals, whatever, his ring-fencing policy or something.
It was just disastrous.
Mass slaughter.
If he'd been in the private sector, he'd have been sacked long ago as a kind of useless git.
But this was their go-to guy.
Why did nobody look at his record and think, well, are we sure this guy's kosher?
It's totally bizarre, James, because, you know, I think what it is, is if you're an epidemiologist on SAGE, you've got no skin in the game, really, unless you underguess.
So you've got a completely asymmetric incentive in that if you, you know, I read a paper of Neil Ferguson's about BSE. Do you remember the human variant?
Yes, it was going to kill us all.
I read the paper where he revised his estimate down from half a million to I think 136,000.
You know, I think I didn't eat burgers for a few years because of that burger.
And I'd never forgiven him for that.
I think it still hasn't killed a thousand people in the UK, BSE. Avian flu, like you say, swine flu, foot and mouth.
Time after time, he has guessed super high.
And then, how can you be wrong if you do that?
If you guess super low and more people die, you know, it was because of you that so many died, you lose your job.
If you guess super high and it comes in low, oh, you know, the data wasn't clear, the parameters weren't clear.
Or, what's going to happen this time?
We can already see the story forming.
Because of our prompt action, we stopped, you know, half a million people dying.
Exactly, they have.
They've actually said this.
They are that brazen.
It's incredible.
It's as if Sweden doesn't exist.
It's as if you couldn't see what is happening in Tokyo or Japan or Belarus.
But to be fair...
It's not actually an unreasonable assumption that most people won't, they're not going to get found out.
Because look at the way it's been covered in the media.
This is one of the most puzzling things about this whole weirdness.
We touched on this earlier when we talked about the questions not being asked by the press in these meetings, the government ministers and scientists not being held to account.
If you look at the reporting on this shandemic, everywhere from the Daily Mirror to the conservative papers like the Telegraph and the Mail, what you find is that they've been really pushing the government's propaganda narrative.
This is a very serious business.
We don't want to jeopardize our NHS. This is a serious disease.
Look at these numbers.
How do you explain that?
There's been no critical thinking at all?
Well, I think for some of them, they don't want to lose access.
So if you make things too awkward for the government, you'd probably lose access.
But frankly, if it bleeds, it leads.
The fear is such a fantastic story.
There's a human element for people who have actually lost relatives.
And it's just sort of so fun to be petrified, isn't it?
We all watch horror movies, and this is the ultimate horror movie we're all in, and I think it's basically what their readers want.
It's also, there's so many different bits that they can have a snipe at the government and see the ministers squirming at the press conferences where the different critiques are put to them.
But they don't seem to want to engage with the guts of it, which is that, is this actually just a completely different story than we were originally told?
I haven't managed to see much agenda behind it personally, apart from, I'm just not sure that some of them are numerate enough, basically, to have seen through the story.
Yes.
Let me ask you, because you're reading Watermelons at the moment.
It's a while since I looked at the book.
What parallels have you noticed?
Were you a climate sceptic before you read the book, by the way?
I'm a sceptic about everything in life.
I mean, it's become as a tick after a while that if you say a number, after a while you can't help thinking, hang on, what's that number in the context of this?
Or, you know, like the recent story with white police brutality against blacks in America.
My absolute instinct is immediately to say, okay, well, hang on, how many white people are killed by white policemen in America?
Is it different if they're armed?
You know, just always wanting to put context.
On watermelons, I guess one thing that's really clear is the way that the academy closes in on itself.
So the moment there's any scrutiny from outside the system, you're rounded on, you know, how can this guy say this?
Why should I take him seriously?
It's not in a peer-reviewed journal.
And I think that's a huge parallel.
And like we said maybe half an hour ago, it's starting with a prior assumption.
And that prior assumption creates so much gravity that the scientists just cannot get past its event horizon.
You know, they're constantly dragged back to this idea lockdowns must work because it's common sense.
But actually, these viruses don't make sense.
I mean, you can fit 100 billion viruses on a full stop.
You know, these things are unimaginably tiny.
And we've got loads living in us, apparently.
Yeah, we've got bacteria.
The bacteria in your tummy have viruses that attack them.
Your gut has viruses on the lining so that bacteria can't get through your gut.
The whole thing is absolutely fascinating, but I think the human brain is just not really built to work the common sense and the reality of a virus and the and the maths of an epidemic.
It's not something that's intuitive at all.
But I think I think what it is, is they started with this prior assumption and they've never got around the idea of being able to just look at the data and say, let's imagine we didn't have that prior assumption.
Would the data make sense?
I don't think they've really done that.
No.
We were talking earlier on our walk about a friend of my wife's who lives in your fair city.
And she believes all this shit.
She's invested in COVID-19 being a serious problem.
And I think she'd be horrified to think that it was no worse than bad flu.
Because...
She's experienced, you know, several friends have had it and it's really, really bad and they've been really, really ill.
But you made the point so well that there's no such thing as just flu.
Flu is a serious, bad shit thing to happen to you and you feel it and it knocks you sideways.
But when somebody has Flu, but dose of flu, they don't go and tell all their friends and it doesn't get round to, you know, oh, so-and-so's had flu.
But this one, because we've given it a name and because it's in the news all the time, suddenly, if you get this thing, isn't it something to do with our culture of victimhood?
Victimhood confers power and importance on you.
Yeah, but also it's got such a great brand name, COVID-19.
I mean, if it was sort of called H5N3 or something, you wouldn't...
I had swine flu in 2009.
That bloody nearly killed me.
That was horrendous.
But swine flu, you don't sound very alpha male going around.
You make it sound like you've had some kind of pig virus.
But I think a huge failing is allowing just flu to become a thing, because there's no just about it.
It really doesn't seem to be affecting children or young people or people with healthy immune systems or people without serious pre-existing conditions, which when they die we call comorbidities.
But if you're under 40, effectively the risk of getting COVID is completely ignorable.
You've got more chance of being hit by lightning than you have of dying with COVID. If you're under 60, you've got way more chance of drowning.
And regardless of your age, unless you're already very ill, you've got way more chance of dying on the roads.
About a 50% greater chance of dying on the roads.
The thing I would be keen to know, although I think I know the answer already, is how it relates to your chances of being killed by a shark.
Well I haven't got that number off the top of my head.
I think the chance of being killed by a shark is roughly nil isn't it?
I think the international shark research files say that there are roughly five deaths by shark per year.
So, within a rounding era, that's nothing, isn't it, basically?
It does remind me of the fact that when they brought Jaws out, you know, that saved huge numbers of lives, the Jaws movie, because people didn't go swimming, so they didn't drown.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So, it's one of those counterintuitive things, like, you know, after 9-11, people didn't fly because they were so scared.
So loads more died on the roads.
Loads more died on the roads, yeah.
And this is of a piece with, you know, you have Matt Hancock in front of a lectern with hazard signs all around it saying stay safe, you know, protect the NHS, stay home.
What happens is that people ignore the tight chest, the funny numb arm, the dizzy spell and they die at home.
So, you know, we've basically shut down the NHS and everyone's died at home to protect it.
Yeah, yeah.
I think you were the first person to say that weren't you about the chances of being struck by lightning versus the I was definitely one of them.
I think Luke Johnson made the point about drowning as well on Question Time.
He kind of baited Fiona Bruce a bit with him.
I bet he got shit time from the audience, did he?
I don't watch Question Time.
I don't either.
I saw the clip and it looked a little...
He looked like a kind of a lion in a den of Daniels.
Yeah.
He was pretty brave to go on there.
But, you know, good for him for putting his head above the parapet.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
But this is all of a piece.
People see a number.
It's scary if you don't put it in context.
The moment you put it in context, then you think, oh, hang on, well, every winter we go about life completely normally with influenza that kills 20,000 people a year.
You never read about it.
But as soon as you say, COVID's killed 50,000 people, you think, Jesus Christ, 50,000 people?
It sounds horrendous.
That's a decent-sized town.
That's like the number that were killed in the Blitz.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's terrible.
You mentioned in your critic piece how important comorbidities are in most fatal COVID-19 cases.
So I think you mentioned that a quarter of them, a quarter, have dementia, is that right?
Yeah, so the NHS England stats, so this is people dying in hospitals in England, over a quarter have dementia, I think it's about a fifth have dementia, about a quarter have diabetes, about a sixth each have kidney or serious lung disease.
So 95% of people who are dying have got comorbidities.
And that doesn't mean just a background illness.
That means something that will be a cause of death.
They're well on their way out already.
They're very poorly people.
And in fact, they haven't just got one of these things.
So the ONS came out with some statistics a few weeks ago, and the average person who dies has got two and a half comorbidities.
You can't have half a comorbidity, but on average, someone's got two and a half comorbidities and is aged over 80.
And that tallies with the Italian data as well, where the average age of death is 81, and people had three serious illnesses that would be a cause of death.
So, I mean, every life is precious, but you have to, at some point, acknowledge this is predominantly knocking over people who are very old and very ill.
It seems to me that this is a point that is not often discussed honestly, because we are squeamish about death.
I mean, you look at...
You look at how the Victorians treated death.
Death was so common.
They lost so many children, which is why they had to breed so many.
But it was very much that they understood that death was an intimate part of their lives and the ceremony and the mourning and so on.
And now we're so remote from death that any death seems to destroy us as a kind of an anomaly.
Some terrible thing that really shouldn't have happened and it should have been prevented.
But I've reached that stage in life where you start having your parents' generation start popping off and you have...
I've had two relatives recently in the last year die and one of them had dementia.
And I have to say, in all honesty, that anyone who has got a dementia suffering, somebody with severe dementia, when they die, it's an absolute blessing for all parties.
This idea that somehow it's a nice thing.
Say you're the spouse.
Of a dementia sufferer.
And your dementia sufferer is in a care home.
Completely lost as marbles.
Doesn't know who you are.
Is incontinent.
Is essentially a kind of living vegetable.
Eating up, God knows how many thousands of pounds a week of your money.
Maybe you're the wife and you're healthy and your life savings are being just eaten up by this vegetable.
You're not thinking, oh, if only he could live forever.
If COVID-19 has helped save the living from the living dead, I think that's a damn good thing, and I think we are dishonest if we pretend otherwise.
The people who do put it in context are generally the old.
They will say, God, if anyone's going to get it, I hope it's me, not my grandson.
I mean, it's predominantly the elderly people who aren't scared of it, who I've met anyway.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I think of the people who are dying in care homes, I think over 40% of them are dementia sufferers.
So it is largely, you know, taking the lives of people who would probably be close to death anyway, because you do tend to go down fairly quickly.
And in fact, I mean, we're not grown up enough in this country to accept that, on average, a care home is kind of a slightly drawn-out hospice.
It's death's waiting room, isn't it?
Yeah, I think people on average, when they go to a care home, I think on average live two and a half years.
So we shouldn't kid ourselves that, you know, it's taken 20 years of life off someone.
This isn't the same tragedy as, for example, if you go back to swine flu again, I think 80% of people who died in swine flu were aged under 60.
So there's been a lot of active...
Including almost you.
Nearly took me, yeah.
That was pretty horrific.
But, you know, a disease that takes the young must be much more scary than a disease that takes the old.
And you can't just let go, this killed 20,000 people, this killed 21,000.
You do also have to put it in the context of who is it taking.
So, before we go, how far down the rabbit hole do you want to go, Alistair?
I mean, do you have any...
You presumably listen to my Dolores Cahill podcast.
I mean, there's some dodgy shit going on, isn't there?
Even if you're not...
I'm not David Icke, but I'm going to get on the podcast.
I'm becoming more and more in tune with David Icke as time goes by.
The WHO, Dr.
Fauci, China.
Yeah, there's some interesting stones to look under, that is for sure.
I mean, the WHO's had a pretty appalling war, really, in that their first instinct was to immediately say, hasn't China done an incredible job?
As opposed to, gosh, you gave us that DNA or RNA profile very quickly.
You got that much quicker than we did, I guess.
I mean, one thing is, it's a hell of a coincidence that it starts in the same city that has an institute of virology, where they were looking into, not that it was created as a weapon, but they were actually looking into effectively splicing SARS viruses onto something else with a spike protein.
As you do.
As you do.
And I think the University of North Carolina that was working with them.
But it is a hell of a coincidence that it happens to be in Wuhan.
And it's particularly given that, you know, there's been a couple of SARS escapes from, you know, from labs.
So, you know, if I was the WHO, I think my first instinct would have been, hang on, is there something else you're not telling us here?
Yeah.
Because as soon as the WHO speaks, it has gravity, the media will swing behind it, YouTube will start censoring videos that don't cleave to the party line, and it creates a tide you can't swim against.
This is the worrying thing, isn't it?
The mainstream media has been pushing the official narrative, borrowing a few licensed jesters in the form of their right-wing columnists like Sherelle Jacobs or whatever.
Who've been fairly robust.
The newspapers have not been robust.
The newspapers have just been regurgitating propaganda.
And yet, if you want to find the counter-arguments, you have to A, go into the sort of darker, weirder recesses of the internet.
You know, sort of obscure places like good old Hector Drummond's site or my patron or whatever.
But worse, you get Facebook and YouTube increasingly censoring you.
I mean, mentioning hydroxychloroquine, for example.
It's actually scary because you have someone like Knut Witkowski.
He's a biostatistician.
He's part of the academy, you'd imagine.
He puts a very well-reasoned argument that this looks like a normal viral respiratory disease, in which case not only should we expect it to do X, but also what we should really do is exactly what Sir Patrick Vallance was saying back in March.
Protect the vulnerable, create a cocoon around them and let it fly through the rest of everyone else.
But you ignore that view, you can actually create thousands or tens of thousands of deaths.
But how do you find these alternative views?
It really takes a lot of finding of the stone that you want to look under.
I think it's really quite sinister.
The social media that you'd think would be an alternative to the mainstream media, they're centering on just the same basis.
It's becoming harder and harder to find the rabbit hole you want to go down.
Before we go, given your job, I know you're not allowed to give financial advice, but nevertheless, you must have noticed that the way the world's changing, there are going to be some opportunities, aren't there?
What do you think is going to be, what's going to be looking up for if you're an investor?
Oh, crikey.
I can't give financial advice, but I mean, one thing I would say is we've just had an enforced three-month experiment that you would never normally run, which is, you know, if you'd said, right, what we're going to do, all companies, we're going to put all of your back office at home for three months, no one would run that experiment, but we've just run it.
And, you know, I've got friends who run pretty decent-sized companies, and they've all suddenly realised that, hey, you know, not only does it work absolutely fine, them doing it remotely, but actually...
They've realised how much they're saving not having to commute into London.
So maybe moving particularly back office function out of London.
I'd be probably a bit nervous if I was a London office investor.
Maybe education as well.
The public schools in particular have really got their act together on remote learning.
And although I think it's a poor substitute for school, it's probably a fantastic supplement to education.
So Zoom has done pretty amazingly.
I think, what else?
I can't give advice.
No, no, no.
We've all bought exercise equipment.
That's done very well.
But that ship's probably sailed, I'd imagine.
That probably has sailed.
My God, if you'd gone long waits.
Imagine.
You know, funny enough, I said to a friend of mine, you know, we should all buy some Peloton shares as a joke before lockdown.
And I didn't.
And nor did he.
What have they done?
Well, I haven't followed them recently, but they absolutely rocketed because everyone thought, oh my God, this is my chance to...
Well, first of all, I'm not having my gym, so people bought the exercise bikes from home.
So if I put my money where my mouth is, that would have been a good idea.
But just looking at investment largely is kind of just common sense and looking at the world as it is rather than the way you thought it should be and just looking at the impact of this enforced three-month experiment and thinking what will that mean for the different areas of life and who are the companies who provide those services?
No, I think that's really good advice.
I'm trying to persuade my kids of this, that there's actually nothing mysterious about investment.
It's actually using your common sense.
In fact, sometimes when you read the financial press, you get misinformation.
For example, I remember thinking a while back that premium tonic was just going to do really well.
And I thought, well, shall I buy some shares in what's it called?
Fevertree.
Fevertree.
Shall I buy some shares in Fevertree?
And I read the experts and they told me that the PE ratio was already just ridiculous.
And from that point, when I didn't invest, I think probably their share price doubled.
Oh, well, yeah.
But you were buying Bitcoin when it was cheap as chips.
I was buying Bitcoin when it was about 300 quid.
And you know the terrible thing was, I thought, oh, it's a bit steep, you know, 300 quid.
I haven't got much money.
We're talking not very long ago when it was that much, but I'd lost all my money and I hadn't got much of the spare.
It was more of a kind of gamble.
Yeah, but you're right.
I mean, all my good investments, I have to do an investment special one day.
I think investment is a fascinating subject.
Oh, what's particularly interesting about it actually is that although there are quants who make algorithms, fundamentally most investors are humans and so behaviour is such a humongous impact.
It's difficult to model, but it's very easy to kind of just feel in your waters when tides are turning.
And, you know, when fear was at the absolute maximum back in April, that would have been a fantastic time to buy the cinema shares and the restaurant shares that everyone else has done.
It would have been.
Well, they say, you know, when there's blood on the floor, don't they?
Yeah, exactly.
One great bit of investment advice that I can give, because it's not mine, is Sir John Templeton said the most...
Expensive words in investing are, this time it's different.
You know, if only somebody in SAGE had put their hand up and said, hang on, is this just another of those?
Is it different this time?
We wouldn't be in the picker we're in.
Yeah, I think that's a very good way to end it.
Thank you very much, Alistair Haynes.
Thank you.
And thank you for coming briefly into our world before you retreat back to your world of privacy when all this is all over.
It's been fantastic to catch up and be in your bubble.
Oh, great.
Thanks.
Right.
Oh, yes.
And one more thing.
I think I don't mention this enough at the end of my podcast, and I should.
Don't forget to support me on Patreon.
You know I'm worth it.
You love me, and I love you.
Thank you.
Bye.
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