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An important new paper documenting that the pre-vaccination case fatality rate was extremely low in the non-elderly population. That means more evidence the Ferguson’s models were wrong (again) and what do we hear from the state-sponsored media? Crickets.

The real Covid scandal is emerging right in front of the inquiry’s nose, writes Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph: Britain could have escaped the horrors of lockdown, but nobody pulled apart the doom models driving it. Here’s an excerpt.

In one of the more bizarre moments at the Covid Inquiry so far, Professor Neil Ferguson, the architect of Britain’s lockdown, today denied ever calling for the first national stay-at-home order – in the latest instance of lockdown backpedalling.

By way of one Health Minister Roberto Speranza, on whose order 50,000 Lombardy residents were placed under lockdown on February 21, 2020, the first lockdown in the modern western world. Within weeks, lockdown had spread to cities across Italy, until the entire nation was placed on lockdown on March 9. By April 2020, more than half the world’s population—some 3.9 billion people—had been placed under lockdown.

We need something more than rational scepticism. We need a new ideology – something like a religious movement of our own – one that’s more optimistic about the future of humanity, that places a little more faith in the ability of people to do their own risk assessments and voluntarily adjust their behaviour if necessary.

We have held the belief that no politician who has not experienced the bestiality of war should ever be elected Prime Minister of any state. Ours is a belief and an aspiration, as those who have been in action are nowadays thin on the ground. Enforcing such a belief would entail restricting democracy: only veterans, front-line media and humanitarian agencies could be elected.

This is a pretty feeble report that seems to have been written with an eye on getting Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark – the chairs of the two select committees involved – on the BBC news rather than making a serious contribution to understanding what the Government got right and what it got wrong over the past 18 months.

It's hard to overstate the novelty and folly of what happened worldwide in March of 2020. What descended upon us was not just a novel virus but a novel mode of social organization and control—the beginnings of a new biomedical security state that I describe in my book, The New Abnormal.

The increasing rule of efficiency over truth is a sign of sliding into totalitarianism. And a sign of the decline of one of the key tenets of human dignity: the inner sense of truth.

These weren’t prophets warning us about the future. They were profiteering charlatans who knew what they were paid to predict. Their training taught them that this was utter statistical malpractice but not one of them objected as to how their work was being used. It was produced to be propaganda and they were happy to please their benefactors.

The destruction wrought by the lockdowns has many fathers—computer-modelers who terrified federal policymakers with guesses dressed up as certainties; health officials who were given the levers of government without any sense of or care for unintended consequences; governors who ruled by executive fiat.

The pandemic opened the curtain to expose the folly of expert worship. Experts are just as fallible and prone to biases, toxic groupthink and political influence as anyone else. This recognition might make people uneasy. However, it should also force a sense of responsibility to search for the truth despite what the experts might say, and that’s a good thing.

Bad modeling, bad data, and bad science had once again conspired against freedom and peace, the ideals that Trump had come to office to protect. Thus did he flip and go the other way fast: no more attacks on life.

Governments were able to mobilise members of the public to exert peer pressure and societal coercion to enforce compliance, backed by often brutal police coercion against pockets of resistance and protest. In retrospect, it’s doubtful if the degree of state and social coercion deployed to increase vaccine uptake would have been possible without the ground having first been prepared with lockdowns and masks.