GGPChat

IMO big macro economic events drive the gold price... It was always my view that Government solvency (and by extension Gold) were going to be affected for a very very long time by the magnitude of government debt created by arguably irrational, illogical covid lockdowns.... but to be honest I would struggle to articulate and argue what was wrong with them other than it felt way too 'heavy handed'...

Well here's the truth, detailed from a financial perspective in the Telegraph, today, which explains the shocking context of the debt left to society by Borris and his Sage Science...( Er nope, we didn't do any financial impacts assessment nor did we consider mental health in our covid modelling)

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/0 ... -lockdown/

Up to 100 times more may have been spent on preventing each Covid death than on preventing each non-Covid death
ALLISON PEARSON
12 January 2023 • 7:00pm
Allison Pearson

Here’s a challenge for the highly numerate among you. Last week, I confessed that I was bad at maths as a child and always felt a hot blend of alarm and shame whenever any calculation was called for. All that changed during the pandemic. Suddenly, I was hearing official statistics about Covid, and looking at graphs apparently charting hospital admissions and waves of infection, that I mistrusted. With the help of a brilliant trio – Liam Halligan, my Planet Normal co-host; Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford; and “George”, a senior source in NHS England – I gradually acquired the confidence to start delving into those fearful data.

Why were sums which the Government and its scientific advisers should have done as a matter of course never attempted? In an excellent recent column on the catastrophic legacy of lockdown, my colleague Fraser Nelson highlighted the dud Sage “scenarios” which prolonged restrictions into the spring of 2021 without any cost-benefit analysis. As he points out, the standard “way of judging public health questions is a ‘quality of life years lost’ study: factoring in age and health impacts of the problem and the solution”.

By happy coincidence, I had an email on that very subject from a Natural Sciences contemporary at Cambridge. Alison wrote to say she was infuriated by

“the official failure to address whether the horrible impacts of the UK’s reaction to Covid had all been ‘worth it’?” By what British yardstick, she wondered, “can we judge the improved health outcomes delivered by this unimaginably vast expenditure?”

I reckon you could call it the Three Hundred and Seventy Billion Pound Question. (That’s the amount of money the Government is estimated to have blown on Covid, creating a debt it will take generations to pay back.)

My arts brain did boggle a bit when I read Alison’s email, so I’m going to reproduce her analysis in full. That should give all you clever clogs some grist to your statistical mill. Here goes:

“There is a well-established definition of how much UK public money is allowed to be spent on achieving specific health outcomes. It is the preserve of Nice (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence), whose job it is to decide whether new treatments which extend lives are ‘value for money’ or not for the NHS. Nice can only approve treatments which cost the taxpayer less than a certain ‘threshold’ per QALY (Quality Adjusted Life Year) saved. The current Nice ‘threshold’ of cost per QALY is £20,000-£30,000.

“To justify spending £370 billion of public money, Nice would have to demonstrate it could save around 15 million QALYs! So how many QALYs are saved per Covid death? Because the average age of Covid death has always been above the average age of death from all causes, and the average Covid death is accompanied by between three and five co-morbidities, preventing one average Covid death won’t save many QALYs. Let’s guess that preventing a Covid death saves two QALYs. So, at £50,000 per prevented Covid death, Nice would have to prove it could save about seven million Covid deaths to justify spending £370 billion.

“Looked at another, simpler way, how many Covid deaths were prevented as a result of spending £370 billion and how much did each prevented death cost the taxpayer? If we guess that spending prevented 40,000-70,000 Covid deaths, then each prevented Covid death cost between £5 million and £10 million. Contrast that with the £50,000 that Nice would normally be allowed to spend per Covid death (again assuming two QALYs saved).”

Alison concludes with a question that Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary, Sir Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, and the brainboxes at the Treasury might usefully answer:

“How on earth can it be justifiable to spend over 100 times more per Covid death than the normal Nice spending threshold per QALY?”

It’s not very nice to talk about preserving human life in such a calculating manner. The brutal fact is that Nice does it the whole time. A thorny ethical dilemma has been created by such profligate spending on one disease, I think. In future, how could Nice possibly deny a 42-year-old mother of three a life-prolonging cancer drug that costs £8,000 a month if, only two years ago, the UK was prepared to spend £5  million keeping an 82-year-old with Covid alive?

Just think, a few of those billions thrown at Covid would have bought all the vital, state-of-the-art machines demanded by the Catch Up With Cancer campaign. Not to mention creating thousands more hospital beds and training doctors, nurses and midwives for a collapsing health service which endangers the British people. So, ladies and gentlemen, the Three Hundred and Seventy Billion Pound Question. Was it “worth it”? Is Alison’s maths correct? Could we ever justify lockdown again? Over to you.

I don't think it was ever about saving lives.

My 46 year old healthy brother who was also my best friend had the astra vax and became very ill afterwards. He was having trouble breathing and could not stop coughing. He managed to get a phone consultation with his doctor, who over the phone prescribed him an inhaler and antibiotics. He was found dead on his knees two days later. 12 days after taking the vax, he was dead.

Before he had the astra vax some EU countries had stopped administering it because it was causing thrombosis amongst other things. The UK kept on giving it until they eventually stopped.

He died from arrhythmia and thrombosis. He would still be alive if the UK had pulled it earlier.

He is just one of the many they don't want the general public to know about.

Very sorry for your loss.
The injuries and deaths from all the various vaccines have been kept quiet. Many have had it and so far remain ok. Many havent.

It's very easy becoming an expert in hindsight. It doesn't take much to realise that the government were reacting to an unknown, unknow from the start. What on earth would we be chatting about now, if the government said: hang on everyone, let's see where covid takes us before we dive in to save lives and livelyhoods!
We'd be slagging them off because of the millions of businesses lost, the suicides, the homeless, the victims of covid, the retracing of the british economy by 50 years.
Do you honestly think £370Bn was spent just on preventing deaths?
Did furlough prevent covid deaths?
The money was pumped into the system to sustain society as we know it. To maintain the economy as best we could under unknown events, one variant after another with no, repeat NO prior experience of what might be around the corner.

Exactly what do you think would have happened in this country if the government simply said - we're only paying for the vaccine.....the end?

Do some proper research and try to widen your horizons - then ask yourself.....why did nearly all other countries adopt the same model? NO-ONE, repeat NO-ONE knew what was about to happen from a global epidemic, previously unheard of and you sit there pumping out research carried out after the event as if to say, the government got it completely wrong.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing eh?
Z

I have huge sympathy for those that died of covid and those that died from a tragic reaction to the vaccine.

But I agree with your post Zoros which is very articulate and powerfully written

MFU

Zoros,
Your post is the best I've read in a very long time.
A global pandemic could end human life on earth, depending, of course, on the nature of the threat and the ability of science to fight against it. We got away with it this time.
All the best to you and all Greatlanders.

They spent billions locking us all down so we would not infect granny.

Pfizer did not test their vax for transmission. So they had no idea if we would infect granny.

Zoros,

The model you quoted / refer to the “what if they had done nothing” was tried in Sweden. (And many other countries too responded differently).

Death rates were often highest , in many modern EU countries like Hungary and Croatia, and the US and UK with strict lockdowns.

People assume lockdowns made a lot of difference… because that’s what we were told. but the final statistics are not as clear.

I personally think they didn’t make much difference in the Uk to transmission overall, other than slow it. they certainly slowed it in say Australian, where they closed all borders to all travel. But again, in the end, they all got it too, just much later. The argument being “ah but that meant we had time for a vaccine”.

Maybe they slowed the inevitable… probably true.

Incidentally, I had plenty of friends (not me personally) who refused to take new vaccines - who mostly very well educated, doctors or medical people actually, ironically, (which at the time I found a little surprising).

Anyhow, we all got covid (vax or not,) and the statistics on the highest death rates are not straightforward, with the relatively higher death rates in the US being testament to this…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/110 ... habitants/

I do plenty of research thanks. I just don’t always accept main stream narratives at first sight being from a scientific journalistic background.

Regardless… What’s coming next on vax front, from Pfizer, will IMO surprise us all … (and I’m pretty certain it’s not good news). If it was, it would have been all over the news wires last Friday.

Instead, there was absolute silence. Not a good sign.