As part of our drive to keep our comment section the best in New Zealand we showcase each week an example of a top-notch comment that adds value to The BFD.
Today’s comment was written by David Theobald. Thank you David for taking the time to craft such an interesting comment.
What a depressing start to a new week. Partaking of my Vogels and coffee with TV3 AM Show as Muzak (I tolerate this mainly to watch Mark Richardson’s face whenever Ms Gillies is talking – also the alternative is the Pravda 1 offering; enough said).
At about 06.20 they interviewed Sean Hendy on the anniversary (good grief) of NZ being introduced to Lockdown. It was as if this was a celebration much like we now have anniversaries of the earthquake, White Island and, of course, the mosque shooting. Society is not quite right is it?
Anyhoo, the time with Hendy was very depressing. I think I am right believing that his background is in physics and none of the medical sciences and I am fairly sure I am right in saying that he is pretty much running government policy re the virus. Him and the very odd Michael Baker – NZ’s poor man’s Neil Ferguson and SAGE in the UK.
So with this as a backdrop it was so depressing to hear him say that he still believes his 80,000 deaths was not a number picked from the sky and was realistic. It was disheartening to hear him smugly (and smugness was a hallmark of the whole segment) and confidently say ‘Well, we now know that lockdowns work’.
They don’t. The evidence that they don’t is everywhere (Sweden vs the rest of Europe, lockdown vs non-lockdown states in the USA, the UK’s death figures in the midst of still in-place lockdowns despite the ‘success’ of their vaccine rollout for starters).
His absolute conviction that the vaccine is the silver bullet to get us out of our global isolation was also front and centre – I really think he believes this; 60 million UK residents could put him right on that one. When the government is cajoled into announcing a ‘travel bubble’ with the West Island, using it will be at your own risk; i.e. if it doesn’t work it will be your fault and not the government’s.
I had to leave the room at this point, I don’t need this sort of nonsense with my breakfast to wreck what can be a perfectly acceptable day. As an aside this abrogation of blame for anything that goes wrong has been a hallmark of the past year, has it not? And while we are on hallmarks of the year, why not look at the ‘we are following the science’.
‘The science’ has the same relationship with real science as the popular ‘my truth’ has to the real truth. We are following the government’s ‘my science’. Science is not settled – not in anything. Copernicus questioned the settled science that the sun orbited the earth. The Royal Society’s motto is ‘nullius in verba‘ – take nobody’s word for it. Science is about testing hypotheses. Do we have that with our following the science with Mr RNA? Do we heck?
Not only do we not even look at alternative views as to what might be going on (backed up by inconvenient stuff like data from a year of interfacing with the virus), one is labelled a COVID denier (emotive language right there) to even suggest an alternative view might exist.
The depressing part about all this is, that although Hendy is not going to be the talking head at the pulpit of truth, whoever that talking head is, the words are those of the model making physicist.
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