UK scientists: bring in curbs now or face up to 2m daily Covid infections as Omicron spreads
Deaths could hit 6,000 a day and delaying restrictions until New Year will cut effectiveness, say Sage experts
Not that I am actually recommending we just let rip. But if we did it would bring and end to it all.
There’re 65 million of us, 2 m a day gets through everyone in a month, having had one variant does not wholly protect but makes later ones less of a problem.
And at some point that is what will happen. Maybe not this variant, but at some point down he road there will be one that we just all do get and that’ll be that. So, the Q becomes when and which, not whether.
So?
Journalists have been bleating that no one told them that all these Sage models were worst case possibilitiez.
Bloody hell, how dense do tou have to be not to have known that ?
That’s why they are always so wrong, you idiots. Also as I am getting a bit fed up with saying all computing and thus all modelling is GIGO. Sometimes the garbage is of better quality, but usually thanks to MarksandSparks ready meals. One believes this at one’s peril, unfortunately it seems that the media believe all of this bull and are happy to imperil all of us.
PS Yes, the time for action has long since gone. The virus is becoming milder but more virulent and is mutating into another common cold variant.
Letting it rip is precisely what needs to happen.
Ottokring,
The Twitter exchange between Fraser Nelson and the head of Sage modelling was really interesting because he’s one of the because Fraser is one of the better informed journalists and even he hadn’t taken in what was happening, and he’s go a page on the Spectator website dedicated to Sage’s failed models.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/my-twitter-conversation-with-the-chairman-of-the-sage-covid-modelling-committee
https://data.spectator.co.uk/category/sage-scenarios
Ottokring,
(I see the sdpam trap is still very active and won’t accept links)
The Twitter exchange between Fraser Nelson and the head of Sage modelling was really interesting because he’s one of the because Fraser is one of the better informed journalists and even he hadn’t taken in what was happening, and he’s go a page on the Spectator website dedicated to Sage’s failed models.
Google: spectator my-twitter-conversation
That Nelson Twitter convo was amazing, for the reasons BiND states. Surely everyone knows they’ve been deliberately modelling the worst case? I was flabbergasted.
I think what’s happening is that SAGE are amping up the “lockdown now or we all die!” because they are desperate to be able to point out that a lockdown is the “cause” of the inevitable crash of Omicron after Xmas.
I believe that the strategy remains to allow covid to spread at a rate consistent with continuing the normal operation of the NHS. Vaccination allows this to be a very high rate. The big problem with the NHS is the cost of treating those who are not vaccinated. Not only do we have to pay the treatment cost of these free riders but they block beds for vaccinatated people who need surgery myself included. The full cost of treatment should be recovered from unvacinated patients. Incentives matter.
Good god: “We generally model what we are asked to model”.
“Give us a model that allows us to destroy the entire country”
“OK”.
“The full cost of treatment should be recovered from unvaccinated patients. Incentives matter.”
So, James, the full cost of treating all those footballers collapsing with heart problems should be recovered from those who were sensible enough to refuse the vaccine?
@James, you are flat out wrong. The majority of all hospital admissions are fully vaccinated, which is hardly surprising given that the elderly are mostly vaccinated. Try perusing these:-
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccine-weekly-surveillance-reports
Since this is the case, spending on unvaccinated COVID patients is clearly not a major budget issue, nor should it be given the endless billions thrown at the NHS over the last two years.
It’s interesting that you think that incentives matter and that the NHS should recover costs from unvaccinated. I thought “our wonderful NHS” existed to make healthcare a human right and to remove monetary incentives from the provision of healthcare?
This is still a powergrab and the morons in the UK deserve the beating Bogus Johnson is trying to hand them.
Hope your Op is nothing trivial James–removing your head to install a brain before throwing it away as a bad job perhaps. James= Unit 77 scum most likely. 25 million seems to be the figure of those too smart to take the mystery middle class marxist gene re-write so you be sure to send us the bill so we can make you eat it like the whining cowardly scumbag you are.
I wonder if James has been taking Captain Potato’s correspondence course on how to make unconnected sweeping statements supported by a perfect ignorance of the facts. Impressive!
James, I don’t know what colour the sky is on the planet you live on, but here on planet Earth it isn’t those who have refused the jab that are filling up the beds, it’s the obese, those with liver disease, heart problems, cancer, etc.
In case you hadn’t noticed, it wasn’t the unvaxxed who:
1. Stopped elective / non emergency NHS treatment, thereby causing millions of people (perhaps including you) to be worse than they would have been and in pain for longer or, as in the case of my daughters friend, die of cancer as her treatment was suspended.
2. Advised ill people not to go to the doctors in case they spread / contracted covid.
3. Discharged sick, elderly patients out of hospital into nursing homes.
All of these were the actions of HMG, so if you want to blame someone, start with them.
Also, I trust you are not one of those who’s lifestyle has contributed towards the reason for your required surgery?
“I think what’s happening is that SAGE are amping up the “lockdown now or we all die!” because they are desperate to be able to point out that a lockdown is the “cause” of the inevitable crash of Omicron after Xmas.”
Here in the second most restrictive jurisdiction in the world (Fiji currently tops the list), the latest drastic policies announced by the government were so effective that they started working before they were implemented, and even worked in neighbouring countries.
Now that’s what I call good government!
All elective surgery is fit in around emergencies. When there are more emergencies, as is typical in winter, less elective gets done. If there are more emergencies than expected, some of it gets cancelled. Not to deny that capacity in the NHS is inadequate at the best of times, the alternative is to have a health service constantly on standby for (what we are told is) a once-per-century event. The costs of that are obviously unacceptable.
If covid were a capacity problem (it’s not, it was around 2% of emergency admissions in week 43-47) the nightingales would have been kept open and a functional plan for infection control and the deployment of additional staff – bringing back retirees with minimal bureaucracy, moving healthcare staff up one notch of responsibility, and bringing in medical and nursing students, lab techs, paramedics etc all of whom could be trained to provide functional if not optimal care quite quickly. In fact, all of this was done, and the relevant hospitals and staff had almost nothing to do, at the absolute height of the first wave when it was going around killing noticeable numbers of people. So we know it is not a capacity problem.
Leaving aside whether the various restrictions work as well in practice as they do in theory, their stated purpose is to reduce the flow of patients arriving at hospitals to a level that the hospitals can cope with. What was described as flattening the curve could equally be described as prolonging the agony. Ultimately this goes away when herd immunity is reached, whether by vaccination or naturally.
There is no sign of hospital overload at present, unless it is caused by causing too many staff to self isolate.
I’d vote for getting this over and done with, especially since reports from South Africa make it clear that Omicron produces a much milder disease than previous variants.
I note that so far things are going better than LSHTP best case scenario.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a lot of desire to create the impression that lockdowns work and have worked!
@Interested – December 19, 2021 at 8:37 am
That Nelson Twitter convo was amazing, for the reasons BiND states. Surely everyone knows they’ve been deliberately modelling the worst case? I was flabbergasted.
“flabbergasted”..? I was fucking furious! Doesn’t the cunt have even the slightest shred of scientific integrity?
We know the Omicron variant isn’t as bad as other variants and isn’t as transmissible as some would have us believe for the simple reason that the MSM has stopped reporting from South Africa. If it had been as bad as claimed we’d still be getting Project Fear report from Johannesburg.
BiNKGP
A pal tells me of punch ups in Cottbus in Brandenburg after an AfD anti Lockdown demo, when a second involving neo Nazis appeared.
Nazis for Freedom !
But really this seems to be the level of debate in Germany. As far as the media and politicians are concerebed, only the Far Right are against their repressive measures.
Ottokring,
All demonstrations against coronavirus measures in Germany have long been officially anti-vaxer conspiracy theorist, far right antisemitic nazis.
Indeed, when they are big enough and in a big enough place, it is de rigeur for 2 skinheads in doc martens and bomber jackets with borderline criminal statements written on the back to turn up and wave an old imperial flag prominently in front of TV cameras. Some have suggested that these are as much paid actors as many of the people having breathing difficulties in hospital beds in TV spots. Ein schelm wer…
What this all means is, when actual nazis do have an actual nazi demo, it’s no longer possible to tell unless you were there and watching yourself. Which is not generally advisable. But Cottbus is a plausible location for an actual nazi fistfight.
Omicron seems to be exceptionally mild (not that it matters anymore), but this isn’t encouraging for anyone who doesn’t have shares in Pfizer and/or doesn’t want 4 injections a year for the rest of their existence:
“Our research demonstrates that the use of leaky vaccines can promote the evolution of nastier ‘hot’ viral strains that put unvaccinated individuals at greater risk,” Nair said.
Marek’s disease used to be a minor ailment that did little harm to chickens in the 1950s, but the virus has grown stronger and today is capable of killing all the unvaccinated birds in poultry flocks, sometimes within 10 days.
From the Before Times of 2019: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/leaky-vaccines-can-produce-stronger-versions-of-viruses-072715#What-We-Learned-from-Chickens
‘James, I don’t know what colour the sky is on the planet you live on, but here on planet Earth it isn’t those who have refused the jab that are filling up the beds, it’s the obese , those with liver disease, heart problems, cancer, etc.’
This has been shown to be false. There are lots if people I’ll with Covid who are obese because there are lots if obese people; the proportion is similar to that in the population at large.
Obviously, by obese I mean not obese in the actual sense at all, as the whole “obese epidemic” bullshit has been manufactured by the neo-puritan killjoys.
“The full cost of treatment should be recovered from unvacinated patients”
As well as smokers, drinkers, drivers, motorcyclists, people using privately owned “E” bikes on public highways, horse riders, skiers, etc. Oh, and why not include anyone who takes experimental drugs currently operating under an Emergency Use Authorisation? That’s what your so called “Vaccines” really are…
Worth remembering that this issue has little to do with facts & is mostly about people. And people prioritise what they perceive as their own best interests. So you have people. Politicians. Bureaucrats. The so-called experts. Scientists. Statisticians. Medical experts. Everybody involved in this has personal interests. Most of the people with the most influence will be coming to the end of their career paths. In 5 years time the majority will have retired on their comfortable, untouchable pensions.
So it’s entirely possible that the decision makers want the worst possible scenario predictions.
Let’s just imagine that the decision makers decided that the bast response to omicron was to do absolutely nothing. Relax all restriction, Go back to the normal for two years ago & just let it happen. And nothing bad happened. That would put into question all the decisions & the guidance of the past two years. While all of these people were actively in post & liable for the consequences.
It’s been the same all through this. The immediate health costs are now. The long term health, economic & social costs are in the future. Few of the people making the decisions now will be around to be responsible when the consequences of their decisions become reality.
OhmyGad variant: put not thy faith in Pfizer.
“The Omicron variant presents a serious threat to many existing COVID-19 vaccines and therapies, compelling the development of new interventions that anticipate the evolutionary trajectory of SARS-CoV-2.”
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472719v1.full.pdf
The Omicron doubles every two days, they say. When I plugged this in my calculator said that 100% of the population would be infected by 2nd January. Oh well, we’re all going to die so we might as well get on with it.
As it happens, I think I’ve got it. But there are no LFT kits to be had round my way. It was of course impossible to predict that demand might rise in a period when people socialise more, think about visiting elderly or vulnerable relatives or merely catch a seasonal infection like a cold. No, the surge in demand came out of a clear blue sky and was totally unforeseeable.
My symptoms are milder than my reaction to the injection, so at any other time of year I’d be rather chuffed to get natural immunity.
BiS:
While all of these people were actively in post & liable for the consequences.[…] Few of the people making the decisions now will be around to be responsible when the consequences of their decisions become reality.
You dear sweet old-fashioned chap!
There are career consequences, TMB. But it’s timescale. Career consequences are now. Decision makers who make risky decisions & get it wrong with bad results in the short term risk abbreviated careers.
“Relax all restriction, Go back to the normal for two years ago & just let it happen. And nothing bad happened. That would put into question all the decisions & the guidance of the past two years. While all of these people were actively in post & liable for the consequences.”
Since when has anyone working in the public sector ever been held to account for their screw ups?
The big problem with the NHS is the cost of treating those who are not vaccinated.
Around 5% of patients are designated as Covid (see Spectator data page for NHS). We also know that, on average, 25% of those are not being treated for Covid, they tested positive when admitted for something else.
So that leaves around 4% of beds occupied by patients being treated for Covid. Around 40% of those are unvaccinated, call it 2% of all beds.
That cost is nothing but a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
That Spectator article is revealing. Not particularly surprising as we’ve seen policy based evidence creation before. But people should be outraged by this. What is outrageous is that they aren’t. No one seems to care.
The best government policy would be to do nothing. At the beginning of all this, they could have adopted the Swedish model, ignored the headline writers and merely given out advice to those most at risk. Then, by all means coordinate vaccine rollouts. That’s it. Otherwise get on with the business of government. Preventing people from dying is not something government either can or should do.
Something that seems to have come as a shock to many is that we are mortal beings and elderly people die – frequently from respiratory disease. Well, I never, whodathunkit.
The big problem with the NHS is the cost of treating those who are not vaccinated. Not only do we have to pay the treatment cost of these free riders but they block beds for vaccinatated people who need surgery myself included. The full cost of treatment should be recovered from unvacinated patients. Incentives matter.
What ill-informed bollocks.
We all take risks with our lives and having paid handsomely for our health treatment up front, we are entitled to te service when we need it, regardless of whether we have abided by your assessment of an acceptable risk. See also, extreme sports, obesity, alcoholism, smoking and so on. This stupid argument is a powerful argument against socialised healthcare and I’m heartily sick of the sanctimonious moralising that it generates. My body, my choice. That’s it. If I get sick, I expect my money to be used to treat me.
A few years ago, my GP tried to get me to take statins. I declined because I understood the long term risks and side effects. I have declined the vaccine because those long term risks and side effects are not clear so I cannot make an informed decision. That is a personal choice. It is none of your concern and has no effect on you whatsoever. The vast majority of people who were ill with this before vaccines were available did not end up in hospital taking up your bed.
See also BiND’s destruction of your risible argument.
If the covid baloon were to go up today, I doubt if anybody’s career would suffer: a thousand fingers would point to ten thousand ill-defined abstractions which exonerated everyone directly involved.
Lord Carrington was the last man in public life to fall on his sword for a bungle under his command. It is easier today to nail a blancmange to the wall than to get a politician or public servant to admit responsibility for failure.
I will take COVID seriously when our Democrat lords and masters do. They are allowing hundreds of thousands unvaxed and untested illegal aliens through our border. Then compounding that by distributing them around the country with midnight flights.
If they were serious, they would have their masks welded to their faces’ any time they were outside their own homes. All the time, not just when the cameras are rolling.
If they were serious, they would shut down travel to stop the spread. I know it is possible, because on 9/11 travel was shut down in a couple of hours.
Anecdata: My 15 year old came down with COVID this week. There were three days he was sick at about the same level as the flu. Three days after that he is completely back to normal. Don’t know what variant, he only tested positive on the instant test, we didn’t bother to get any other tests done.
He is thoroughly enjoying his isolation period online gaming with his friends. None of the rest of the family is showing any symptoms. I am the only one vaccinated, about 7 months ago.
The news is biased to reporting deaths, while the overwhelming number of cases are like this, and hence not News.
@Mohave Greenie
Quite so. They are news precisely because they aren’t the norm. If they were, they wouldn’t be news.
I really don’t understand why our Gubmint doesn’t let it rip and scythe down our population.
It would make their climate change targets a piece of piss.
Cvnts
Has there been an actually documented death caused by Omicron? Last time I checked, WHO was saying “no”.
This is all pure bullshit, and Boris Johnson should be hung by his testicles in Trafalgar Square.
“If the covid baloon were to go up today, I doubt if anybody’s career would suffer: a thousand fingers would point to ten thousand ill-defined abstractions which exonerated everyone directly involved.”
And that, TMB, has entirely been the point of the exercise. You are looking at the success of a strategy. Not what might have been. The decision makers & influencer’s butts have been covered. Of course, in a few years time people might start looking back & decide they got it all wrong. By which time Ex-PM Boris Johnson will be penning amusing articles for the Torygraph criticising whoever’s attempting to clear up the economic mess he’s left the country in & Chris Witty enjoying a comfortable retirement.
I was hospitalised with Covid yet have been attacked on a number of occasions for not taking it seriously when objecting to the government actions. As other commentators have noted
Covid patients in hospital are low (locally 2% of beds) so why aren’t the politicians being asked why the system can’t cope with 2% especially with virtually no flu around?
Interestingly as people have become fatigued with staying home I’ve met up in person with a few work colleagues just for a coffee or lunch and what they are prepared to say in person vs online is very different. The work from home and social isolation is working in the governments favour in silencing dissent. Amongst other points I found most were deeply unhappy with the companies vaccine mandate whereas in online meetings I was the only one to question the policy, my feeling is once things settle down there are going to a lot of low morale unhappy people and that’s going to cause problems.
Longrider,
That Spectator article is revealing. Not particularly surprising as we’ve seen policy based evidence creation before. But people should be outraged by this. What is outrageous is that they aren’t. No one seems to care.
If that article got your blood pressure up you’ll be off the scale with this one:
https://spectator.com.au/2021/12/how-the-bbc-lost-its-way-on-covid/
The best government policy would be to do nothing. At the beginning of all this, they could have adopted the Swedish model, ignored the headline writers and merely given out advice to those most at risk.
It wasn’t the “Swedish” model, it was the standard response to a respiratory virus pandemic and the one that Sage had been recommending Boris followed, which to his early credit he did. It wasn’t until Ferguson worked is spreadsheet magic with goalseek and wound up the bedwetters like Gove that he caved, and has been caving since.
I note in passing that with the exception of the other Scandies and, for now, Germany, Sweden’s death tool per pop is amongst the lowest in the EU.
My use of the term “Swedish model” was merely shorthand.
Well, considering that the measures being taken are inadequate to contain it, it may take more than 30 days due to measures having some effect, but we’ll find out fairly soon. Hopefully, Omicron will turn out to be milder as initial reports suggest – obviously we cannot be certain until many people have had it for long enough that we can be sure they won’t need hospitalisation. Regardless, it’ll spread so widely that nearly everyone will be vaccinated, boosted, and caught it, so there’ll be nothing more to do. If it then is like a cold (or even flu, which does kill people) we can go back to normal, while if it is worse we can give up as we can’t stay in lockdowns for ever.
“All elective surgery is fit in around emergencies. When there are more emergencies, as is typical in winter, less elective gets done. If there are more emergencies than expected, some of it gets cancelled. Not to deny that capacity in the NHS is inadequate at the best of times, the alternative is to have a health service constantly on standby for (what we are told is) a once-per-century event. The costs of that are obviously unacceptable.”
But the NHS could think better about contingency planning, could have been more adaptive. I know that the Nightingales were Potemkin hospital wards, but why did they have to be? How hard would it be for someone to strip down the job of “nurse” into just the bits that someone needed for routine care of an infectious patient? Have them supervised by a nurse they can yell to if something goes outside of the normal parameters.
We had armies of civil servants loafing around at home doing fuck all who could have been pulled in, trained for a month. That’s as long as US WW2 nurses got, so should be plenty for Covid.
We should deal with uncertain things according to the precautionary principle.
Don’t fucking change anything until there is reason to do so.
“The big problem with the NHS is the cost of treating those who are not vaccinated.” But if the unvaccinated are equivalent to the placebo group in the Pfizer trial they are less likely to be a burden to the NHS.
See p11,12: https://www.skirsch.com/covid/MoreHarm.
The jab reduced people diagnosed with Covid i.e. reduced the sniffles by 91% Hurray! But they are not a burden on the NHS.
On the other hand the people who’d been jabbed (about 20,000) compared to the placebo people (also about 20,000) were more prone to side-effects i.e. “adverse events” by 300%, to severe AEs by 75%, to serious AEs (a visit to the hospital or hospitalisation) by 10%. They – the jabbed – also showed up as more deaths, 20 vs 14.
So why do people invent all this hysterical bollocks about the burden of the unvaxxed?
The decision makers & influencer’s butts have been covered.
It seems we’ve been at cross-purposes in our exchanges: my contention was (and remains) that nobody’s career will suffer as a result of the stupendous bungling, lying, profiteering and lying about bungling and clumsy profiteering that we have witnessed for nigh on two years.
Even at the simplest level, Simon Case, as Cabinet Secretary is allowed to stand aside from investigating Christmas parties because he is himself implicated in condoning such parties. We now use words like “recuse” to denote contrition where in a previous age we should have looked for resignations and a loss of pension rights.
I believe that the strategy remains to allow covid to spread at a rate consistent with continuing the normal operation of the NHS. Vaccination allows this to be a very high rate. The big problem with the NHS is the cost of treating those who are
not vaccinatedJews/Blacks/Homosexuals. Not only do we have to pay the treatment cost of thesefree ridersJews/Blacks/Homosexuals but they block beds forvaccinatated people who need surgery myself includedGentiles/White people/straight people. The full cost of treatment should be recovered fromunvacinated patientsJews/Blacks/Homosexuals. Incentives matter.I see you, James. I see you.
@longrider
The best government policy would be to do nothing
Applies to pretty much every problem in existence.
It’s not 65m because:
If you’ve had a jab or covid in the last few months you are well protected
If you’ve had a jab or covid ever you are quite protected
If you are a kid you are quite well protected
Run that through and there are about max 20m potential covid infectees
Herd immunity kicks in at 90% or less.
So we might get to 15m omni infections, high end.
To get to 1m cases a day that’s 7m infected. 2m a day is 11m.
Neither is realistic due to lack of infection targets.
Which also means hospital beds will max out below 30k, and daily deaths below 500.
Naah.
If you’ve had covid you’re gonna get it again and again and it will be worse every time, just like every other virus.
The jab won’t protect you and will probably make it worse which is why you must get jabbed. The models say so and The Science is settled.
The booster won’t proect you either which is why you must get it at ever decreasing intervals. Get your bloody vax.
The most terrifying thing about omigod is that many infections are completely asymptomatic, meaning you can have the infection and not even know it. This is really bad
The latest modelling shows that herd immunity will only happen when Piers Morgan shuts his face.
Kids can get omigod asymptomatically which is the worst way to get infected as you don’t even know you have it. Asymptomatic infections are thought to be the most deadly ones.
Exponential growth means that by 12 February everyone will be getting covid 4636 times a day. Almost all of them will be asymptomatic, which is as bad as it can possibly get.
The latest modelling show that we must lock down now and wear masks forever otherwise further symptomatic outbreaks will happen all the time even if we reach herd immunity which isn’t possible.
People here quite rightly lambast the brain-washed ignorance of James’ comment above. And yet it’s the same sort of rank stupidity that people like Jeremy Vine, Nick Ferrari and many others with media profiles are similarly coming out with (and being paid handsomely to do so). How the hell did we get here?
Prompted by today’s Samizdata quote of the day (https://www.samizdata.net/2021/12/samizdata-quote-of-the-day-1534/) the thought occurred that we’re rapidly heading towards being a post-Enlightenment society.
While I don’t agree with James that people who have declined vaccination should be charged for subsequent treatment for COVID, neither am I convinced by most of the arguments put forward against it above, the severity of many of which seems to suggest that the posters feel, as a matter of principle, that there are no circumstances in which such charges could be justified.
IF there is an outbreak of a disease that poses a sufficiently great threat to public health (and this is a big if; crucially, I am pretty certain that COVID doesn’t pose this note, and I was never totally convinced that it ever did), then I think it’s legitimate to use these sorts of incentives.
The government has made available the means of dramatically reducing one’s susceptibility to the disease, which the individuals have specifically chosen not to avail of. This is not the same as someone who chooses to go skiing – if anything it’s more analogous to someone who gets injured off-piste skiing with an on-piste insurance policy.
This is also why @TMB’s argument, while a great example of Godwin’s Law in action, isn’t relevant, as there’s really no parallels between Jews/Blacks/Homosexuals and individuals who have made a choice that is so directly relevant to the subsequent need for treatment.
OK, so then there’s @Longrider’s statin argument. Does it follow that he(?) should be charged for treatment for heart disease having declined them? I’d agree that this would seem harsh. However, the differentiator would seem to be that vaccination also decreases others’ chance of contacting the disease. There’s no freerider problem with stations, AFAIK.
To reiterate, I’d still not favour it because COVID just doesn’t seem to be a big enough issue to warrant such a step, but if the problem were big enough I’d have few issues with it in principle.
Are you absolutely certain that covid vaccination reduces transmission?
The reports I’ve seen suggest that any reduction is marginal at best, and could in fact be negative due to the emerging indications that the vaccinated are getting on for twice as likely to be infected.
That sounds reasonable at first glance, but there is a huge problem you’re not seeing: the mandatory injections would be required by the government. The same government that is pumping out psychological warfare fear campaigns; commissioning only worst-case modelling; and demonising any dissent.
Would you trust them to tell you that your hypothetical problem is so big that everyone must be injected with an experimental drug?