Delingpole: BoJo’s Dodgy Science Advisors Have Staged a ‘Covert Coup’

Looking forward to your summer holiday? Well, it may not happen if Neil Ferguson (aka Professor Pantsdown) gets his way. The disgraced computer modeller from Imperial College has been warning on BBC radio about yet another deadly COVID-19 variant.

According to the Daily Mail:

Professor Ferguson told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Perhaps of more concern for the UK though is that some countries are notably seeing a significant fraction, five to 10 per cent of cases, of the South African variant.

“When infection levels go up in France, to 30,000 cases a day, that implies there’s at least 1,500 to 2,000 cases a day of the South African variant. That is the variant we really do want to keep out of the UK.”

He added that “important decisions” were coming up, including whether or not No 10 can relax international travel restrictions to Europe.

Neil Ferguson was on the Today programme this morning to raise the alarm about the new South African variant. He's like Freddy Krueger: every time you think you've seen the back of him, he pops back up. https://t.co/1QHwgvWsZT

— Toby Young (@toadmeister) March 19, 2021

Yet again, it’s starting to look like Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s airy promises about re-opening Britain for summer are going to be undermined by scientific advisors and his SAGE committee. Which shouldn’t surprise anybody who has been paying attention: it’s the unelected, democratically unaccountable members of SAGE (and the related committee NERVTAG) who are really running the country right now.

Indeed, as reporter Sonia Elijah has written in an investigative series for Conservative Woman, SAGE has effectively conducted a “covert coup”.

She writes:

On March 25, 2020, the Coronavirus Act received Royal Assent having been fast-tracked through Parliament in four working days. The Act contained emergency powers to enable public bodies to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, or SAGE, and its sub-committees became the de facto leader of the operation. This was the point at which the UK ceased to be governed by elected representatives.

To this day, SAGE do not answer to the public – they don’t even answer to the government. They ‘advise’ the government on all things Covid, and the government is then led by the ‘data’ to implement the most draconian restrictions on freedom in our nation’s history. SAGE are accountable to no-one. In my opinion, SAGE have staged a covert coup and hardly anybody has taken notice, let alone the mainstream media.

Elijah goes on to list alleged vested interests of the SAGE committee’s membership.

If you take a closer look at the key ‘experts’, they have all had connections in some way with either Big Pharma, Big Tech or the Big NGOs, such as GAVI-The Vaccine Alliance, World Health Organisation, World Economic Forum, World Bank, Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Many have had their research funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. In fact, the UK is the biggest beneficiary of university grants given by the Gates Foundation with $744million disbursed to 38 universities, the top beneficiaries being Imperial College London, University College London, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LHSTM), King’s College London and Oxford University.

Of course, it’s not in itself surprising that government advisors in the fields of epidemiology and virology should have links to Big Pharma. What hasn’t, perhaps, received sufficient scrutiny is just how cosy these relationships seem to be.

Take Professor Jonathan Van Tam — or ‘JVT’, as Boris Johnson likes to refer to him at press briefings, as if this science bureaucrat with terrifying freedom-sapping, economy-destroying powers at his disposal is actually just our lovely mate whom we can trust totally to look after our interests.

Elijah then states in her report:

Van-Tam chaired the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) expert advisory group on H5N1 vaccines and advised the WHO during the H5N1 influenza (bird flu) outbreak in 2009- 2010. The WHO in turn triggered countries around the world, including the UK, to buy enormous quantities of the drug oseltamivir (brand name: Tamiflu) produced by the pharmaceutical companies Roche and GSK, former employers of Van-Tam.

Yet Tamiflu was a stupendous waste of money:

The BBC ran an article stating that ‘hundreds of millions of pounds may have been wasted on a drug for flu that works no better than paracetamol, a landmark analysis has said’. This was based on The Cochrane Collaboration (a global non-profit organisation of 14,000 academics) review on Tamiflu. Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine, University of Oxford, stated that the side effects of Tamiflu ‘included serious psychiatric adverse events, renal and metabolic adverse events’.

You could be forgiven for imagining that the main criteria for being on the SAGE committee were a) possible vested interests and b) a track record of failure. On this score, mind you, Van Tam must be counted an amateur when compared with the absolute master of the art — the aforementioned Neil Ferguson who so spectacularly failed to uphold his own rules and public duty in the interest of meeting his mistress.

As we have often had cause to remark — here, here, here, and here — few “experts” can be worse suited to dictating Britain’s healthcare and lockdown policy than a computer modeller (not an epidemiologist or a virologist but a physicist who doesn’t even have Biology at O-level) with a track record of getting all his predictions outrageously wrong, dating back at least to the Foot and Mouth epidemic of 2001.

If people like Van Tam and Ferguson were wreaking havoc in science academe, they would be dangerous enough. But it’s worse, much worse than that: they are the de facto government of the United Kingdom. Yet, unlike real government ministers, they cannot be voted out of office by the public — nor, it seems, are they getting anything but the most cursory scrutiny by the mainstream media, which invariably greets their edicts with unquestioning acceptance and fawning gratitude.

Elijah quotes a letter to the British Medical Journal by a GP Anne Mc Closkey:

Governments were advised in this course of action by scientists and medics whose identity, qualifications and aptitude for this work was largely hidden from public scrutiny. Even now, the conflicts of interest of these people on whose advice our futures depend are not publicly available.

Indeed. And who could not agree with Elijah’s conclusion?

It’s high time for an independent public inquiry to investigate Sage’s modelling data and the conflicts of interest of the scientists and indeed our politicians.