It says a lot that so many politicians and their friends saw the pandemic as a get rich quick scheme.
In this case a disgraced former MP working with an organic dog food company owner (!) to broker a deal with a Hong Kong company, which itself seems to be a middleman. 🙄
The company on the other end of the deal was Worldlink Resources in Hong Kong, who describe themselves as "experts in sourcing products from China and other Asian countries".
They boast of "unprecedented access to strategic supplies of PPE".
After Newmark contacted Matt Hancock (he says to "chivvy along" the process), Hancock's aide in turn emailed PPE tsar Lord Deighton, asking him to urgently "look into" the "excellent proposal", noting that it came from "former MP Brooks Newmark".
This is all part of a pattern of companies and individuals using personal contacts in government to sidestep procurement processes, using a VIP lane that fast tracked their proposals.
Some of these contacts were tenuous, to say the least...
Meanwhile in Canterbury, disgraced former scientist Michael Yeadon (who thinks proposed covid booster shots may be a plot to depopulate the Earth) is addressing people in a park with a PA system.
Having recently complained that he wasn't able to do this.
The problem is he's a racist crank with no expertise in viruses and a long history of writing nonsense.
His recent output on ResearchGate (which he was repeatedly warned about before the ban) includes articles claiming "vaccines are inherently dangerous" and that the surge in deaths last spring wasn't caused by covid but was "mass homicide by government response".
Before covid he was also a climate change denier.
A 2007 article claimed global warming was a "useful myth" that "deflects attention away from real world issues" such as "power-driven financiers, corporations and their cartels backed by military might".
We now have data from mass testing in schools for the first 4 weeks after they fully reopened on March 8th, up to the end of the spring term.
The results suggest that transmission of the virus *has* increased since schools went back .. but mostly amongst staff.
Starting with nurseries and primary schools, the data initially looks rather alarming, with a huge jump in positivity rates the week after schools reopened.
However...
The data is also broken down by role within the school, and we can see that the government started rolling out free lateral flow tests for support and household bubbles to use at home when schools fully reopened.
These are included in the main school test figures!
He says it's "hard to imagine, let alone measure, the side effects of lockdowns", and kind of proves that by listing lots of deaths that mostly have nothing to do with lockdown.
The latest graph and interview from @RealJoelSmalley starts by claiming that the response to covid killed more people than covid itself, and ends with a wild theory that vaccination drove the surge in deaths in January!
Needless to say, there's no real evidence to support this.
First he claims that there have been almost 40,000 deaths over the last year due to denial of healthcare.
Many of them over the summer, when there were no excess deaths!
As he says in his podcast interview, "any analysis is worthless if the data that goes in is not good".
And his data is not good.
Instead of using the five year average, he generates a baseline curve that he believes deaths would have followed in 2020 without covid and lockdown.
But this is based purely on deaths in late January / early February, extended out to the whole year!