coward:
1 Sept: 7 News Australia: Sam Newman backflips on COVID protest after police threaten jail
by Eamonn Tiernan and Hamish Goodall
Aussie Rules great Sam Newman has backflipped on urging 250,000 Victorians to protest the state government’s stage four coronavirus lockdown after being threatened by police...
But after police said they’d jail anyone involved, 74-year-old Newman claimed on Tuesday morning his words were “hyperbole” and cancelled his call to arms.
“It was hyperbole, it was an arbitrary figure,” Newman told Sunrise...
“I’m not asking people to come from all over Victoria to protest and I’m not trying to get the police involved.
“If they want to arrest me and put me in jail for this, that’s fine.
“But I’m not suggesting it and never did in the first place.”
Newman’s initial tweet sparked a strongly worded response from police, who told 7NEWS.com.au they are expecting to make arrests in coming days of individuals who they believe are “inciting illegal activity”...
https://7news.com.au/sunrise/on-the-show/sam-newman-backflips-on-covid-protest-after-police-threaten-jail-c-1281533
1 Sept: The Australian: Founded on risk and reward, now too scared to go out
by Nick Cater, executive director of Menzies Research Centre.
The chance of contracting COVID-19 in Victoria at the moment is less than 0.002 per cent. If Victoria were a country, it would be the 90th least dangerous place on the planet in which to shelter from the pandemic.
In the light of these reassuring facts, it seems surprising so few Victorians are protesting at their government’s gross over-reaction to the virus.
The severity of the spread in Victoria is roughly similar to Canada, which is also experiencing a second wave. Yet there are no reports of Canadians receiving six-month prison sentences for crossing a state border or being wrestled to the ground by police for exposing naked faces.
No Canadian, as far as we can tell, has been harassed by police on their front lawn for having the temerity to put their bins out after 8pm...
The post-pandemic world belongs to those with the strongest entrepreneurial spirit. Those looking to government to solve their problems will wither and die...
Chief among the doom-mongers is the public health brigade, the experts who in Victoria at least have more power than the government...
COVID-19 is the pestilence of their dreams; a virus so easily transmitted you could catch it from a lift button but whose long-term risks were largely unknown in February, giving the health bureaucrats their chance to step in.
The worst-case scenario was extracted from the only modelling then to hand; the threat was amplified in those parts of the media that never miss an opportunity to turn it up a notch.
Pretty soon the doom-mongers had convinced us that COVID was potentially the new ebola, or could be, if we didn’t take drastic steps to restrict its spread, which they would largely dictate.
The same advice was being given to almost every government in the world backed by the same spurious modelling. Some, like New Zealand, folded immediately, introducing draconian restrictions from the start. Others, like Sweden, resisted...
Were it not for the Victorian outbreak, we would be tied with New Zealand in bottom place among the 37 OECD members ranked by infection per capita. Even with the latest outbreak, we are seventh from bottom, with 20 times fewer deaths per capita than France, Italy, Britain and the US.
Yet the opportunity to return to near business as usual quicker than the rest of the world is fast disappearing, a casualty of our premiers’ risk aversion. Our closed state borders, almost certainly unconstitutional, have become roadblocks in our domestic economy...
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/founded-on-risk-and-reward-now-too-scared-to-go-out/news-story/0cf12b9b789ddc7fc5be8cfd8722e24f
23 Aug: UK Express: Britain DUPED on COVID-19: We’ve been completely misled on coronavirus figures – COMMENT
By Paul Baldwin
Try this more succinct version uttered last night by Professor Carl Heneghan, the director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford – he said: “.. we can’t understand what is going on.” That is almost certainly the only unreservedly true, accurate and indisputable comment made about coronavirus since a Chinese scientist dropped a petri dish in Wuhan last Christmas. And from a bloke who you’d think probably knows what he’s talking about.
And it leaves you wondering, have we all been duped?...
The official Government figures show that, at the peak of the pandemic in early April, nearly 20,000 people a week were being admitted to hospital with coronavirus, which sounds super scary.
In fact the true figure is not known and will never be known – but it is universally accepted that it is much lower (which, coincidentally, sounds oddly like the situation with GCSE results this year).
So how much lower? And how much faith can we now put in official figures?
Again, truth is we don’t know and we don’t know.
Basically, an investigation for the Government’s Science Advisory Group for Emergencies found that people were being counted as COVID-19 hospital admissions if they had ever had the virus, and were added to those being admitted directly due to it – so thousands of people who died of other causes were being included in coronavirus statistics.
So all the decisions taken at every level, from No10 closing down the economy to you wearing a facemask in Asda, have been taken using incorrect data...
https://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/1325790/Coronavirus-covid-19-economic-recovery-coronavirus-lies-how-many-deaths-statistics