The following is a guest post by Tony Brown. Tony was a Political Advisor to the former Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy and its predecessor, Europe of Freedom and Democracy.
I have been a trenchant critic of Government about Covid in recent weeks, provoking a number of my friends to ask 'ok, what would you do?' This 8 point plan is my answer to that important, valid question:
1. Publicly sack discredited advisors who have exaggerated the threat and provided massively inaccurate forecasts of deaths and serious illness; for example, forecasters at Imperial College. Instead start listening only to those whose more optimistic forecasts are borne out by the data;
2. State unequivocally that it is deaths and serious illness which matter and not incidence when so many cases are asymptomatic and cause no problems to those catching Covid;
3. Be clear about what the data is telling us - that the young are very little at risk and most of those who are dying are the (very) elderly or those with pre-existing conditions.
Therefore…
4. Switch resources back to non-covid medicine where we are now seeing serious reports of massive non-Covid excess deaths: ITN News on 26 August suggested there would be 35,000 non-covid excess deaths from, to give an example, undiagnosed and untreated cancer;
5. Use our understanding that Covid is less of a threat than originally claimed to speed up the re-opening of the economy, including;
6. No more lockdowns and restrictions simply based on incidence when this is not reflected in deaths or serious illness;
7. Explain all this to get teachers back to classrooms, civil servants back to offices and to encourage the private sector back to work;
8. End quarantine restrictions based on a figure of 20 per 100,000 which is clearly plucked from the air, without any scientific base and based on case numbers and not related to what really matters which is serious illness and death.
The Government has been badly advised, listened to the wrong experts and, as a direct result, pursued 'emotion-based' policies. As a result, we are coming dangerously close to that old aphorism, 'the cure is worse than the disease'. But with my 8-point plan, it need not be!
All views expressed in contributions by named authors are their own and may not reflect the views of The Freedom Association.