I acknowledge that there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know. So I’m interested to hear people’s theories about tradewinds, as I’m interested to hear people’s theories about viral dormancy, and change in temperature triggering epidemics… those are all things that you must entertain as a scientist—or a person that admires science at the very least. That’s how you learn new things, is by thinking about the novel, or the creative idea. And we’re simply not doing this; we have one cause, which is ‘kids give it to granny’, and we have one cure, which is lockdown. It’s the most stultifying approach you can possibly take to a complex system like an epidemic.

There is a confluence of incentives… you’ve got people who are making money, and they’re going to carry on trying to do that out of this lunatic testing asylum; you’ve got people that are too far gone—they’ve committed too much to the doctrine of lockdown, the voodoo of the mask, and it’s hard for them to stand down; and then you’ve got people with delusions of grandeur, who want to save the world from the deadly virus, and who believe that they’re going to do it with their vaccine, even though we’ve never had a really successful RNA vaccine, and a safe one, an efficacious one, that you can show is safe and efficacious, is years off; and then you’ve got… ineptitude as another part of the story, people who are not that bright—they haven’t really spent enough time studying the data and the information to form their views, they’re forming their views out of fear—and they go to lehman intuition, that you’ve gotta be better off if you put a bit of cloth in front of your face, and you’ve gotta be better off if you stop visiting people, they just go for that rudimentary, first thing that you can grab at, something that computes in a very simplistic kind of way, and then in the midst of all the fear they become adherents to this new religion. I think they’re sincere a lot of the time, but they’re just not very clever. And so you’ve got multiple commercial, political, accident-of-history, psychological fear-driven drivers of this thing that lead to the maintenance of, essentially a voodoo science

I’m most certainly not an anti-vaxx person, I think vaccines were fantastic inventions that saved millions of lives when it came to diseases like smallpox and polio, but I just look at this thing and say “what? really? what are we doing here?”.

I worry about these suggestions of these sinister coercive practices of requiring vaccine passports and the like. That to me is getting properly Orwellian.

There’s no relation between lockdown stringency and (COVID-19) mortality. As more of the longer-dated lockdown countries fill in… we are almost certainly going to end up showing that lockdowns cause higher coronavirus mortality. The reason is: your endpoint, whether you like it or not, is herd immunity. And what you want to be doing, what your strategy ought to be oriented around doing, is getting to herd immunity whilst infecting the smallest possible number of vulnerable people. And you do that by changing the relative mobility of vulnerable people. You bring down their mobility, without reducing the mobility of the non-vulnerable people. What general lockdowns do is exactly the opposite, because your vulnerable people are less mobile to start with, so when you start putting the brakes on the kids and the young adults, you massively reduce their mobility, and so the relative mobility of the older and more vulnerable people, the at-risk people, actually goes up. That is a very compelling explanation for why you get this very high mortality in countries like Peru, where you’ve had brutal and extended lockdowns, and this very high age-based mortality in countries like South Africa. It’s actually counter-productive.

This is a fight for the existence of civilization. I think we are heading down a very very dangerous road, and people need to see it that way, we really do. we can’t go on furlough and doing nothing and waiting every season for another lockdown… it will cripple economies and lead to starvation and the end of life as we know it. It really is important that people wake up to that reality.

Watch the excellent interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eJuj0rx-48&t=1709s