Given that near the end of 2023 I hammered out a series of lengthy posts looking back at various aspects of the Great Chinese Lung Rot catastrophe (C-19 Issues – Index) I really had no intention of re-visiting this dreadful stain on our past even on the half-decade mark of the events here in early 2025.

But this article, Never forget that making Britain into a broke, repressive dystopia was a deliberate choice, by British Tory/Libertarian Daniel Hannan cannot be missed, especially this aspect that I was not aware of:

Five years ago this Tuesday, Jenny Harries, then the deputy chief medical officer, gave an illuminating, though now neglected, interview. It was not neglected at the time. On the contrary, it took place in No 10, and the interviewer was the prime minister himself, Boris Johnson.

Dr Harries – who has since become Dame Jenny, and been put in charge of the UK Health Security Agency – was impressively level-headed. She explained that, “for most people, it really is going to be quite a mild disease”.

She advised against wearing facemasks unless told otherwise by your doctor. She explained why Britain, unlike many countries in Europe, was not banning large meetings or sporting events. There was, she reminded us, a plan in place, and it provided for the gradual spread of the disease through the population in a way that would not overwhelm hospitals. Try to suppress the spread too vigorously, she said, and there would be a peak later on (which, indeed, is exactly what happened).

So Boris was about as well informed as he could be, and by a smart, educated, genuine expert. And of course all of this was backed up by the British Public Healthcare system’s plan for dealing with such a pandemic, which was effectively duplicated by those of New Zealand, Australia, many other nations, and even the World Health Organisation:

Dr Harries was absolutely right, but she was only repeating the global consensus. A little earlier, the WHO had looked at lockdowns and concluded that they were “not demonstrably effective in urban areas”. Its researchers had carried out a study of 120 US military camps during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, and found “no statistical difference” between the 99 camps that had confined men to quarters and the 21 that had not.

As recently as 2019, the WHO had declared that lockdowns as a response to respiratory diseases were “not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure, and there would be considerable difficulties in implementing it

That global consensus was built upon more than a century of analysis, including something as recent as the Swine Flu (N1H1) in 2010. Boris was obviously impressed:

“Politicians and governments around the world are under a lot of pressure to be seen to act, so they may do things that are not necessarily dictated by the science,” he said. Dr Harries responded that she was proud that Britain’s response had remained scientific.

It would not remain so.

Five days later, Boris took to the airwaves to tell people “to stop non-essential contact and travel”. A week after that, we were in lockdown (a term borrowed from prison, which I held out against using for as long as I could).

What changed in the meantime was the published report by Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College which forecast doom for both Britain and America if they didn’t lock down – fast. As I said back in April 2020 (A spherical cow of uniform density in a frictionless vacuum) and again in May 2020 (This man will NEVER be listened to again), this prick and his stupid computer model had been wrong through twenty years of such scares – but as that last post shows, he only got crushed when the public found out that his married mistress (2 kids) had been crossing London during lockdowns for bonking sessions.

In the face of all this, Boris Johnson, who’d admired Churchill his whole life and was finally in a position to emulate his hero by setting his jaw in his finest hour of “we will never surrender”…. turned his back, dropped his pants for Ferguson and company, and begged to be rogered, along with the rest of the British population.

But perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on him:

The grisly truth is that we wanted to believe Ferguson. Although we sometimes now imagine that Boris wrenched our freedoms from our unwilling hands, it was the other way around. We have forgotten the “Go Home Covidiots” banners, the terrified phone-ins, the YouGov poll showing that 93 per cent of voters wanted a lockdown…. We did this to ourselves.

Meantime, as recently as November 2023 when I wrote this, the embedded link to the NZ MOH Flu Pandemic Plan would take you to a PDF version, compiled from myriad other plans in 2010 and updated as recently as 2017. Nowhere in its 193 pages will you find the word “Lockdown” or a description of anything like it. In this the FPP was the same as those of other public health authorities around the world, including the WHO.

Well, in early 2025 I am entirely unsurprised to find that the same URL no longer links to that plan, instead showing a collection of C-19 studies. I suspect the fine hand of that autistic little fanatic, Michael Baker.

Fortunately, because this was entirely expected, I downloaded the PDF two years ago! 🙂