The police have cleared him of his isolation in durham with his family, it's just the day out to Barnard Castle that's a minor breach of the rules. The police wouldn't have even fined him so long as he returned to his parents farm when they'd had a chat about the rules.

Oh, puh-leeze.

He was always going to get a legal free pass on the Durham trip, the constabulary there have always regarded prosecution as a last resort and they would never waste valuable resource on checking his implausible claim that, with just one prent sick, there were no childcare options nearer than his ancestral estate in Durham.

I don't think those angry at the Johnson/Cummings (hereinafter JoCum) excuses are enraged by the severity of the offence, so much. After all the maximum penalty is just £60, a parking fine. It is more that they obeyed the guidelines while a member of the committee that drafted them was busily ignoring them. I cannot recall an example of an individual breaking rules they helped draft found to be flaunting them who was then was allowed to remain in post, hey, maybe I am just old fashioned.

JoCum have made much of the fact that the police are going to take no further action. As if that were some kind of exoneration. Well it might be if it were not for one inconvenient fact: they never do.

In line with Durham Constabulary’s general approach throughout the pandemic, there is no intention to take retrospective action in respect of the Barnard Castleincident since this would amount to treating Mr Cummings differently from other members of the public. Durham Constabulary has not taken retrospective action against any other person

The police examined the evidence and determined that Cummings broke the law. Two members of the SAGE Committee have now been shown to have breached the rules. Only one of them has resigned.

Again you've convinced me. Lock down was just to please Boris and Cummings. It was Cummings' contribution to SAGE. We should all go out and get the virus over and done with. Who cares if a few old or sick people die? Boris only wants to keep them alive because they voted for Brexit. And since the NHS already managed to kill my old and sick people, who cares what happens to the NHS? People certainly shouldn't do the right thing if other people aren't going to.

I'll be happy to call for Cummings resignation when the elected MPs who broke lock down are hounded out of their jobs too. After all, they're in the ultimate positions of responsibility to the public. They're the ones who actually make promises to the public. Corbyn can be top of the list since he's a serial offender.

Incidentally, how do you envision the childcare working? "Please can you send a live in nanny. Yes, the wife and I have probably got covid. The kid too. Oh, and there's a hoard of paps and agressive protestors outside. There's been a few death threats too but I don't take them seriously... I can do what? Sorry Mary, that's the third child care provider to tell me to fcuk off, so let's fcuk off to Durham."

"Two members of the SAGE Committee have now been shown to have breached the rules. Only one of them has resigned.

May 28, 2020 at 11:35 PM Phil Clarke"

Climate Science is betrayed by its own liars. They get rewarded with Awards.

Clarke, give us a list of those who broke the lockdown rules. Let us know what punishments should follow. Take the opportunity to tell us how virtuous you are.

Also, why we should postpone Brexit, why we should bail out the eurozone, and why it is right to give them access to our fisheries in perpetuity.

We could also increase the BBC licence fee to give bonuses to Barnier, Verhofstadt, von der Leyen. All those who righteously hose public money on useless schemes. Give thanks to France's Navy for ferrying "refugees" to our shores.

God help us.

It's on RT again, but seems very lucid, candid and balanced, and IMO is well worth a read:

"I’ve signed death certificates during Covid-19. Here’s why you can’t trust any of the statistics on the number of victims
By Malcolm Kendrick, doctor and author who works as a GP in the National Health Service in England. His blog can be read here and his book, 'Doctoring Data – How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense,' is available here."

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/490006-death-certificates-covid-19-do-not-trust/

"As an NHS doctor, I’ve seen people die and be listed as a victim of coronavirus without ever being tested for it. But unless we have accurate data, we won’t know which has killed more: the disease or the lockdown?..."

Mark, he's only looking at the covid deaths but missing the almost equally high number who haven't been recorded as covid deaths. So some might be mislabelled as covid but a lot aren't being counted to balance them out. I think the figure I heard the other day was 80,000 extra deaths.

Do people die outside hospitals because of lock down or the chaos caused by the disease? Would a frail person, not admitted to hospital, have much less chance than one admitted? Is every extra stroke victim caused by the chaos or were they caused by the side effects of having had (and survived) the disease. This disease causes blood clots. It causes organ damage.

Ok, some deaths like suicide and domestic murder may have risen but other deaths will have fallen (eg road accidents). I accept that some people will die because their treatment was delayed but where would they have been treated when operating theatres have been converted to ICU rooms?

All the estimates of cfr for the UK are coming in at about 1% with about 4-10% of us infected already. That is well in line with the original, do nothing total of half a million and herd immunity at 60-80%

I did post this at the end of March:

"Mar 26, 2020 at 6:15 PM | Phil Clarke
You are clearly hoping that the death toll will exceed that due to corrupted Climate Science.
Mar 27, 2020 at 12:12 AM golf charlie"

Inability to afford heating bills and consequent deaths in the UK ought to be credited to Climate Scientists

There's now an open letter on the Lancet's anti-hydroxychloroquine piece, following France's ban on HCQ.

If Trump is for it, we are against it. More will die? Small price to pay for a chance to diss the Orange Man.

10 main points:

1. There was inadequate adjustment for known and measured confounders (disease severity,
temporal effects, site effects, dose used).
2. The authors have not adhered to standard practices in the machine learning and statistics
community. They have not released their code or data. There is no data/code sharing and
availability statement in the paper. The Lancet was among the many signatories on the
Wellcome statement on data sharing for COVID-19 studies.
3. There was no ethics review.
4. There was no mention of the countries or hospitals that contributed to the data source and
no acknowledgments to their contributions. A request to the authors for information on the
contributing centres was denied.
5. Data from Australia are not compatible with government reports (too many cases for just
five hospitals, more in-hospital deaths than had occurred in the entire country during the
study period). Surgisphere (the data company) have since stated this was an error of
classification of one hospital from Asia. This indicates the need for further error checking
throughout the database.
6. Data from Africa indicate that nearly 25% of all COVID-19 cases and 40% of all deaths in the
continent occurred in Surgisphere-associated hospitals which had sophisticated electronic
patient data recording, and patient monitoring able to detect and record “nonsustained [at
least 6 secs] or sustained ventricular tachycardia or ventricular fibrillation”. Both the
numbers of cases and deaths, and the detailed data collection, seem unlikely.
7. Unusually small reported variances in baseline variables, interventions and outcomes
between continents (Table S3).
8. Mean daily doses of hydroxychloroquine that are 100 mg higher than FDA
recommendations, whereas 66% of the data are from North American hospitals.
9. Implausible ratios of chloroquine to hydroxychloroquine use in some continents
10. The tight 95% confidence intervals reported for the hazard ratios are unlikely. For instance,
for the Australian data this would need about double the numbers of recorded deaths as
were reported in the paper.

The .pdf is available here:

https://zenodo.org/record/3862789#.XtDxJcszbeT

Wonder if Dr Mann helped with the data shuffling?

tomo, I've been trying to post that since Friday.

Toby Young and J Delingpole have posted it.

It's all very climate science data handling and hiding. Who'd a thunk that politics would impinge upon drug trials?

Why does the "type the content of this box to prove you are not a bot" turn itself on, then off again? Can't see the box on my Linux PC or my android phone when it happens.

Very off-pissing.

Jun 3, 2020 at 6:49 PM tomo

Peer Review by Oona Lonstedt, JCU and Climate Scientists?
No wonder Phil Clarke loved it.

Mar 26, 2020 at 6:15 PM | Phil Clarke
You are clearly hoping that the death toll will exceed that due to corrupted Climate Science.
Mar 27, 2020 at 12:12 AM | golf charlie

Phil Clarke, why were you so quick to trash Hydroxychloroquine? Do you share sources of corrupted medical science too?

It's official, criticism of Hydroxychloroquine printed in The Lancet was based on fabricated evidence,.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/06/04/lancet-new-england-journal-retract-covid-19-studies-including-one-that-raised-safety-concerns-about-malaria-drugs/

Phil Clarke, why were you so quick to trash Hydroxychloroquine, was it from a political or climate science source?

"gc
Clarky's TDS is so intense it pervades everything .. >>>> Tangerine Man Terrible
Jun 5, 2020 at 2:24 PM tomo"

The campaign against Hydroxychloroquine had all the hallmarks of a well financed PR Attack and Destroy campaign.
How was Phil Clarke made aware so quickly?