Oxford Population Health Event

 

I have attended an event in the famous and ancient Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford organized by Oxford Population Health, see: https://www.ndph.ox.ac.uk. It was entitled An Oxford Conversation- C****-19, the Impact of Misinformation and Uncertainty. I thought somebody should go along and show the tin foil flag, so to speak. The event was a lecture by four experts appointed by the government to handle the C****19 pandemic. Prof. Devi Sridhar is a young woman who obviously has Indian roots, but speaks with an accent that is half-Scottish half-American. During the pandemic, she advised Holyrood on lockdown and v**ination policy from her department at the University of Edinburgh. She was a Rhodes Scholar. Dr Richard Horton is the editor-in-chief of The Lancet, the country's top medical journal. He has written a book called The C****-19 Catastrophe- What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again, see: https://www.amazon.co.uk/COVID-19-Catastrophe-Whats-Wrong-Happening/dp/1509546464. Why is he so sure we're going to need to stop it happening again?... But I'll come back to that later. Prof. Sir Peter Horby has a grand title and a CV to match. He ran Oxford University's medical research centre in Vietnam and was behind the RECOVERY Trial, the government's attempt to find a suitable treatment for C****19... or that's what they said it was. The event was free and open to the public; I just had to register online. There were two chairpeople from Oxford Population Health, Prof. Sir Rory Collins and Prof. Patricia Kingori. With all the knighthoods in the room, the King's arm must ache from holding a sword.

The addresses that followed and the panel discussion were actually not very interesting. They consisted of different ideas about how the scientific and medical community could better communicate to the public, but the really key issues were left out, the ones I address in the background link at the bottom. It was obvious I was looking at some very compartmentalized individuals. They kept saying things like: "We did what we could with the evidence we had... Maybe we should have kept the public informed more... Before 2020 we knew nothing about the virus, so of course we had to close the schools!" The only lecturer I paid any real attention to was Dr Richard Horton. He was the loudest and angriest, possibly because of his journal's scandal over publishing Dr Andrew Wakefield's article on v**ination and autism. Dr Wakefield was unfairly punished for that in my view. Horton called doctors and medical researchers who didn't go along with the government's policy "dangerous!". He also warned against the "democratisation of authority" which means people being allowed to make up their own minds by listening to others who disagree with official C**** policy, even if they are equally qualified to comment. He didn't say it, but I suspect Dr Horton supported the social media censorship during the pandemic period. There were some other sinister elements to this hearing. Several times later on more than one of the participants made reference to "the next pandemic". They often spoke in the future tense instead of the conditional tense when this came up; uttering phrases like "how will things be better or worse?" instead of "how would things be better or worse?". It's as if it is a foregone conclusion that a new pandemic will happen. I've heard that elsewhere and it scares me. How do they know? Profs. Collins and Kingori closed the lecture by giving a quote, something important for the audience to take away with them. Guess what it was: "We were lucky this time" by none other than Bill Gates... I'll say no more. I think really it was not worth me attending this lecture. It held nothing of political importance or public interest in my view; but it was nice to see the Sheldonain Theatre. It is a beautiful building by Sir Christopher Wren. Like much of Oxford's classic architecture, it dates back to the 16th century. I'll leave some more photographs of it for you to enjoy. The fasces coming out of the lion's mouth is very meaningful.

See here for background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/02/coronavirus-portal.html.