Toby Young - Lockdown Pants On Fire

Today, as with most weekdays, the loathsome Toby Young is posting updates for his eager fellow Covid-19 denialists on Lockdown Sceptics, which, like Climate Sceptics and Eurosceptics, is not sceptical at all. Its sole purpose is to tell the easily persuaded that the Government is wrong, it’s not really happening, and it’s all a big con.

And, d’you know, I don’t give a rat’s arse what Tobes has put up for us to read today, or indeed any other day. Because it consists mostly of falsehood and misinformation, and easily disprovable falsehood and misinformation at that. For someone so keen on education, Tobes seems terribly shy of bothering himself to check his claims.

Take, for instance, the old chestnut about children not transmitting Covid-19. As James Willby has noted, “I know he won't respond because he's a coward but this showing half the recent COVID outbreaks in the Netherlands were from schools again shows up that [Toby Young] and his covid-denialists were wrong about children not being vectors for the disease”. Then we come to the “hospital admissions aren’t rising” excuse.

Tobes RTd Alastair Haimes’ claim “England: covid hospital admissions steady at 200/day for 5 days. Not growth, let alone exponential growth”. See? It’s not really happening! But this is disingenuous bullshit: as any fule kno, there is a lag between infections increasing and admissions doing likewise. And the information on the former is not good.

As can be seen from the numbers for Scotland - updated earlier today - infection numbers are set to go higher than they were at any point in the March-June first phase of tackling the pandemic. Three or four weeks down the line, those hospital admission numbers are going to be rather higher. And so we arrive at the 2200 hours pub curfew.

Again, Tobes has RTd what he wants to hear, and this time it’s James Melville (“Communications and social media consultant”) exclaiming “This is appalling. It appears that the 10pm pub and restaurant curfew was decided on the hoof without any evidence. Source: The Times”. Except it wasn’t: the policy was being floated two weeks ago.

Even the Mail noticed, telling readers “Belgium was able to curtail a second wave of coronavirus by limiting the number of people who can socialise together and imposing a nationwide curfew, data shows, as the UK looks to follow in its footsteps … The European country experienced a resurgence of the virus in mid-July that was comparable to the UK's current trajectory, the Chief Medical Officer said”. And the kinds of restrictions enforced?

“On July 29, officials there brought in new rules reduced the number of people who could socialise together from 15 to five and introduced a 10pm curfew on the entire population”. Here, it’s six, not five, and the curfew is on bars and restaurants. On the same day the Mail ran its piece, YouGov released details of a poll showing support for a curfew.

And Dominic Raab mentioned this during an interview on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme … this morning. None of this gets promoted by Toby Young’s Twitter feed. Because it’s not about giving a full picture of what is actually going on. It’s about peddling whatever bullshit fires up the anti-lockdown brigade. And that’s not good enough.

This is literally about life and death. But to Tobes, it’s just a game. What a louse.

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