Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson is an embarrassment to journalism

[Bahnhof Strasse]

Isn’t the Telegraph the rag Johnson writes for? Just a bunch of paper filled with bullshit.

 

[William of Walworth]

Here's the Press Gazette's account of the Yorkshire Post's repudiation of the "fake picture" myths.

Looks pretty convincing to me.

 

[cantsin]

This doesn't constitute a death threat but I would be really happy if she got fatally run over by a large goth on the school run

just a good" lost everything due to massive libel f*ck up, Katie Hopkins style" wld do for now ( until the gulags are up and running, obvs)

 

[UrbaneFox]

I don’t know how she does it*

*title of a bloody awful book she rote

And straight-to-DVD film of it.

I liked her when she was on Late Review, with Tom Paulin and Tony Parsons.

Sorry to see that she has come to this.

 

[frogwoman]

 

[frogwoman]

How the fuck can someone be pleased their child has it?

 

[PTK]

And straight-to-DVD film of it.

I liked her when she was on Late Review, with Tom Paulin and Tony Parsons.

Sorry to see that she has come to this.

Ah, the good ol' days when she was on the "A Team", as Mark Lawson called them.

 

[PTK]

I nominate this woman for Parent of the Year 2020.

 

[quiet guy]

Modern take on the Measles Parties of yore.

 

[NoXion]

It's a good thing that your son and his student mates could potentially kill a vulnerable person? Who the fuck is this psychopath and when can we tar and feather the cunt?

 

[Spymaster]

How the fuck can someone be pleased their child has it?

I can’t read the article but I guess she subscribes to the herd immunity theory and given the fact that the likelihood of serious consequences for kids that age is vanishingly small, it’s not so shocking is it?

Click bait headline though.

 

[Pickman's model]

I can’t read the article but I guess she subscribes to the herd immunity theory and given the fact that the likelihood of serious consequences for kids that age is vanishingly small, it’s not so shocking is it?

Click bait headline though.

I hope she gets a nasty dose of the virus

 

[Pickman's model]

I don’t know how she does it

I don't know why she bothers

 

[ska invita]

I can’t read the article but I guess she subscribes to the herd immunity theory and given the fact that the likelihood of serious consequences for kids that age is vanishingly small, it’s not so shocking is it? Click bait headline though.

here you go

My son has Covid-19. Good. Everyone in his student house has it as well. Even better. Typically, the infected ones have had a rough four or five days featuring at least one forlorn phone call home to Mum (Experience teaches us that only self-pity or the need for sudden cash injections will cause the young adult male to ring his mother). Already everyone is much improved although the virus’s trademark loss of taste and smell (the one symptom those geniuses on SAGE forgot to put on the list) has lingered.

There is no cause for alarm. On the contrary, I am glad that my boy will now form a tiny tile on the vast human shield which will protect his grandparents and other endangered citizens as our country acquires community immunity. Apart from a vaccine (unlikely to show up any time soon), allowing Covid to run through the healthy population is the only way out of this loathsome epidemic which kills our old and murders the futures of our youth.


While unveiling a package of new restrictions which may delay the epidemic, but will never defeat it, the Prime Minister told the Commons that “the fight against this virus will continue ... we will not listen to those who say let it rip”. I feel more disappointed in him by the hour. We thought we voted for Winston Churchill and we got King Canute.

Boris really needs to start listening to Sunetra Gupta, professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford university and a world authority on infectious diseases. “As many young people as possible need to get the virus before winter,” says Professor Gupta. Not that chaps like Sir Patrick Vallance and Professor Chris Whitty are listening to her. Their Scientific Advisory Group is an echo chamber.

Consider that grim press conference given by the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser and the Chief Medical Officer. Talk about an odd couple: imagine how Bill and Ben would have ended up if neither had got off with Little Weed. What was made all too clear by Whitty and Vallance is that SAGE is still giving credence to the madcap guesses (Oops, sober mathematical models) of Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson, he of the “500,000 Covid dead” forecast.

Sir Patrick put up a now-infamous slide which showed almost 50,000 cases a day by mid-October if cases kept doubling every seven or eight days. “This is not a prediction,” insisted Sir Patrick disingenuously. Make no mistake, Bill and Ben were fully aware that this implausible viral trajectory (witnessed nowhere else in the world, certainly not in France and Spain as they claimed) would be the main headline on every news outlet. Sure enough. Our boffins and their worst-case-scenario-on- steroids guaranteed that the British public was both primed for another lockdown and scared Whittyless. I saw the proof for myself. By 3pm, the loo-roll locusts had cleared the Andrex aisle in Waitrose.

As a mother, I detest Professor Ferguson and his recklessly inaccurate model for laying waste to my children’s prospects. I despise those senior civil servants who have secure pensions and nothing to fear from the economic danger their myopic safetyism has wrought. And I am coming to hate the men in Downing Street who are so busy eliminating risk (mainly to their own reputations) that they condemn the elderly to wither in loneliness and treat students like cattle with foot and mouth.

University term starts this week. It’s the ideal time for freshers to socialise, swap mobile details and microbes. Far from relations who may be vulnerable to Covid, they live in promisingly fetid halls of residence where they can easily get the virus during Match of the Day and be rid of it in a week.
Alas, far from seeing uni as the perfect Petri dish in which the virus can be cultured – and ultimately curbed – the authorities have imposed restrictions so draconian you wonder why any young person would want to be there at all.

Glum reports reach me from Exeter and Edinburgh where freshers have to stand two metres apart in a queue for the dining halls and then – get this – sit on their own at an exam-type desk far away from their nearest neighbour, a cordon sanitaire marked out by hazard warning tape. “My daughter hasn’t done this yet,” emails Diana, “as the thought of standing on your own followed by eating on your own is far too anxious-making. Our other daughter, who is in the second year, tells us the dining hall was the chief place to make friends. How is this going to work for our youngsters?”
“All Edinburgh courses are online,” says one dad who is worried that his shy son is isolated in distant lodgings – after the A-levels fiasco, university halls of residence were hugely oversubscribed. “So, he’s on a computer in his room all day followed by solitary dining and can’t go to the pub because he just missed out on being invited to join a group of six. And seven is breaking the rules. WHAT kind of experience is that?”
Rank, as my own son would say. Totally rank. St Andrews has taken the higher-education leper colony to its logical conclusion and invited students to “voluntarily isolate”. Amazing value for their £9,250 a year, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Do Bill and Ben the Pol Pot Men care about the effect their exorbitant graphs and terrorising models are having on actual people, both young and old? I’d like to see Professor Whitty, a monkish bachelor, try and reassure a tearful eighteen-year-old for whom Freshers’ Week, never the easiest experience, has turned into a socially-distanced ordeal.
“I am feeling so upset and cross about the whole thing and am not alone amongst my friends,” says Diana, who describes herself angrily as an ex-Tory voter. “We are on the verge of marching or chaining ourselves to some railings!"

Believe me, Diana, I feel like chaining myself to some railings with you. How dare our PM say that “nothing is more important than the education of our young people” when our offspring are having their studies wrecked by wholly disproportionate measures. Covid cannot harm students but adult paranoia about Covid certainly can.

How dare the Government’s chief scientific adviser show people who are just starting to rebuild their confidence a graph indicating a possible massive spike in Covid cases which has no credible basis in fact. It’s garbage. Insulting, manipulative, cruel garbage.
Whitty and Vallance have shafted science by turning it into spin. They should be replaced immediately on SAGE by Professors Gupta and Carl Heneghan, two superb scientists who have dared to challenge the conspiracy of dunces and this week signed a letter to the Prime Minister requesting a new, evidence-based approach to the epidemic.

I predict that Professor Gupta will turn out to be as right as Professor Ferguson was wrong. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the virus is now passing rapidly through 20- to 29-year-olds like my son, but there is much less incidence in the vulnerable 70-plus age group. Grandparents are using common sense to assess their own risk while their beloved grandchildren take one for the team.

Forget panicky politicians. Do our senior citizens really want youngsters to be confined and made miserable on their behalf when Covid makes up just one per cent of all UK deaths and they are 10 times more likely to perish from flu? I know from your defiant letters and emails that you want no such thing. Nor do you want a Conservative government which punishes the next generation in your name.

Instead of forcing students into sterile silos, we should rejoice when they do what comes naturally. The virus poses least threat to their age group and many are in the perfect position to protect rather than kill their Gran. Let Freshers have their fun and to the virus we say, Go forth and multiply! Community immunity can’t come a moment too soon.

 

[Spymaster]

I hope she gets a nasty dose of the virus

I rather hope she doesn’t. We want fewer people to get it, not more.

In fairness I’d be equally unconcerned if my son caught it.

 

[NoXion]

I can’t read the article but I guess she subscribes to the herd immunity theory and given the fact that the likelihood of serious consequences for kids that age is vanishingly small, it’s not so shocking is it?

Click bait headline though.

It's not just about you and your family though, is it? Viruses spread from person to person, especially when the persons involved have few if any symptoms and are thus are more likely to jolly about, spreading the virus as they go.

Why do people keep forgetting how infectious diseases work?

 

[Pickman's model]

here you go

My son has Covid-19. Good. Everyone in his student house has it as well. Even better. Typically, the infected ones have had a rough four or five days featuring at least one forlorn phone call home to Mum (Experience teaches us that only self-pity or the need for sudden cash injections will cause the young adult male to ring his mother). Already everyone is much improved although the virus’s trademark loss of taste and smell (the one symptom those geniuses on SAGE forgot to put on the list) has lingered.

There is no cause for alarm. On the contrary, I am glad that my boy will now form a tiny tile on the vast human shield which will protect his grandparents and other endangered citizens as our country acquires community immunity. Apart from a vaccine (unlikely to show up any time soon), allowing Covid to run through the healthy population is the only way out of this loathsome epidemic which kills our old and murders the futures of our youth.


While unveiling a package of new restrictions which may delay the epidemic, but will never defeat it, the Prime Minister told the Commons that “the fight against this virus will continue ... we will not listen to those who say let it rip”. I feel more disappointed in him by the hour. We thought we voted for Winston Churchill and we got King Canute.

Boris really needs to start listening to Sunetra Gupta, professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford university and a world authority on infectious diseases. “As many young people as possible need to get the virus before winter,” says Professor Gupta. Not that chaps like Sir Patrick Vallance and Professor Chris Whitty are listening to her. Their Scientific Advisory Group is an echo chamber.

Consider that grim press conference given by the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser and the Chief Medical Officer. Talk about an odd couple: imagine how Bill and Ben would have ended up if neither had got off with Little Weed. What was made all too clear by Whitty and Vallance is that SAGE is still giving credence to the madcap guesses (Oops, sober mathematical models) of Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson, he of the “500,000 Covid dead” forecast.

Sir Patrick put up a now-infamous slide which showed almost 50,000 cases a day by mid-October if cases kept doubling every seven or eight days. “This is not a prediction,” insisted Sir Patrick disingenuously. Make no mistake, Bill and Ben were fully aware that this implausible viral trajectory (witnessed nowhere else in the world, certainly not in France and Spain as they claimed) would be the main headline on every news outlet. Sure enough. Our boffins and their worst-case-scenario-on- steroids guaranteed that the British public was both primed for another lockdown and scared Whittyless. I saw the proof for myself. By 3pm, the loo-roll locusts had cleared the Andrex aisle in Waitrose.

As a mother, I detest Professor Ferguson and his recklessly inaccurate model for laying waste to my children’s prospects. I despise those senior civil servants who have secure pensions and nothing to fear from the economic danger their myopic safetyism has wrought. And I am coming to hate the men in Downing Street who are so busy eliminating risk (mainly to their own reputations) that they condemn the elderly to wither in loneliness and treat students like cattle with foot and mouth.

University term starts this week. It’s the ideal time for freshers to socialise, swap mobile details and microbes. Far from relations who may be vulnerable to Covid, they live in promisingly fetid halls of residence where they can easily get the virus during Match of the Day and be rid of it in a week.
Alas, far from seeing uni as the perfect Petri dish in which the virus can be cultured – and ultimately curbed – the authorities have imposed restrictions so draconian you wonder why any young person would want to be there at all.

Glum reports reach me from Exeter and Edinburgh where freshers have to stand two metres apart in a queue for the dining halls and then – get this – sit on their own at an exam-type desk far away from their nearest neighbour, a cordon sanitaire marked out by hazard warning tape. “My daughter hasn’t done this yet,” emails Diana, “as the thought of standing on your own followed by eating on your own is far too anxious-making. Our other daughter, who is in the second year, tells us the dining hall was the chief place to make friends. How is this going to work for our youngsters?”
“All Edinburgh courses are online,” says one dad who is worried that his shy son is isolated in distant lodgings – after the A-levels fiasco, university halls of residence were hugely oversubscribed. “So, he’s on a computer in his room all day followed by solitary dining and can’t go to the pub because he just missed out on being invited to join a group of six. And seven is breaking the rules. WHAT kind of experience is that?”
Rank, as my own son would say. Totally rank. St Andrews has taken the higher-education leper colony to its logical conclusion and invited students to “voluntarily isolate”. Amazing value for their £9,250 a year, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Do Bill and Ben the Pol Pot Men care about the effect their exorbitant graphs and terrorising models are having on actual people, both young and old? I’d like to see Professor Whitty, a monkish bachelor, try and reassure a tearful eighteen-year-old for whom Freshers’ Week, never the easiest experience, has turned into a socially-distanced ordeal.
“I am feeling so upset and cross about the whole thing and am not alone amongst my friends,” says Diana, who describes herself angrily as an ex-Tory voter. “We are on the verge of marching or chaining ourselves to some railings!"

Believe me, Diana, I feel like chaining myself to some railings with you. How dare our PM say that “nothing is more important than the education of our young people” when our offspring are having their studies wrecked by wholly disproportionate measures. Covid cannot harm students but adult paranoia about Covid certainly can.

How dare the Government’s chief scientific adviser show people who are just starting to rebuild their confidence a graph indicating a possible massive spike in Covid cases which has no credible basis in fact. It’s garbage. Insulting, manipulative, cruel garbage.
Whitty and Vallance have shafted science by turning it into spin. They should be replaced immediately on SAGE by Professors Gupta and Carl Heneghan, two superb scientists who have dared to challenge the conspiracy of dunces and this week signed a letter to the Prime Minister requesting a new, evidence-based approach to the epidemic.

I predict that Professor Gupta will turn out to be as right as Professor Ferguson was wrong. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the virus is now passing rapidly through 20- to 29-year-olds like my son, but there is much less incidence in the vulnerable 70-plus age group. Grandparents are using common sense to assess their own risk while their beloved grandchildren take one for the team.

Forget panicky politicians. Do our senior citizens really want youngsters to be confined and made miserable on their behalf when Covid makes up just one per cent of all UK deaths and they are 10 times more likely to perish from flu? I know from your defiant letters and emails that you want no such thing. Nor do you want a Conservative government which punishes the next generation in your name.

Instead of forcing students into sterile silos, we should rejoice when they do what comes naturally. The virus poses least threat to their age group and many are in the perfect position to protect rather than kill their Gran. Let Freshers have their fun and to the virus we say, Go forth and multiply! Community immunity can’t come a moment too soon.

I appreciate her concern for those who work in higher education. From reading that there are no academics who teach, no ancillary staff, no librarians in universities, only students

 

[Spymaster]

It's not just about you and your family though, is it? Viruses spread from person to person, especially when the persons involved have few if any symptoms and are thus are more likely to jolly about, spreading the virus as they go.

Which is a reason for those infected to quarantine from vulnerable people, not for everyone to throw their hands up and scream “woe is me”.

See the article that Ska just posted. There is a sizeable portion of top epidemiologists who are saying exactly what she is; that the virus needs to run through the young and healthy population as quickly as possible.

 

[Pickman's model]

Which is a reason for those infected to quarantine, not for everyone to throw their hands up and scream “woe is me”.

See the article that Ska just posted. There is a sizeable portion of top epidemiologists who are saying exactly what she is; that the virus needs to run through the young and healthy population as quickly as possible.

And then it can scamper through other age groups

 

[chilango]

There are no old or vulnerable people on campus, just virile, strong young men who need their mummies?

Vile, loathsome and dangerous writing.

 

[Steel Icarus]

Telegraph columnist writes something afactual and controversial for money

Plus ca change

 

[Steel Icarus]

Telling though that her experience of her son is that he only calls to whine or demand money

 

[NoXion]

Which is a reason for those infected to quarantine from vulnerable people, not for everyone to throw their hands up and scream “woe is me”.

See the article that Ska just posted. There is a sizeable portion of top epidemiologists who are saying exactly what she is; that the virus needs to run through the young and healthy population as quickly as possible.

We already tried that "herd immunity" bullshit, and the care homes got fucked. Viruses don't give a shit whether they infect the young and healthy or not.

 

[Chilli.s]

She writes a load of self centered wank that shows clearly how out of touch the telegraph is.

 

[TopCat]

Telling though that her experience of her son is that he only calls to whine or demand money

I doubt she dishes out the cuddles.

 

[Spymaster]

We already tried that "herd immunity" bullshit, and the care homes got fucked. Viruses don't give a shit whether they infect the young and healthy or not.

Well I guess we're going to see if the "Swedish" strategy has worked over the next months. If everyone else get spikes and a huge death toll in the second or tertiary waves and they don't, we'll know.

 

[ska invita]

Well I guess we're going to see if the "Swedish" strategy has worked over the next months. If everyone else get spikes and a huge death toll in the second or tertiary waves and they don't, we'll know.

As has been pointed out, its not possible to compare Sweden with the UK say, and draw definite conclusions - so many differing factors involved, from environmental to behavioral, including Swedens own precautionary guidance

 

[two sheds]

Which is a reason for those infected to quarantine from vulnerable people, not for everyone to throw their hands up and scream “woe is me”.

But if they're asymptomatic they won't know that they're infected and so won't quarantine themselves. And a lot of those who don't get bad symptoms will likely think the whole thing is overrated and not quarantine themselves either.

The real herd immunity comes from a vaccine.

 

[flypanam]

Four or five days? Nevermind the immediate term, the long term issues that may arise for her son should concern her. No doubt she won't be answering the phone when he calls to tell her that the bout of covid he caught in halls has affected his health.

 

[Plumdaff]

I genuinely hope that neither her son nor any of his friends get long covid or any other complication, let alone infecting and killing many of the other people who are on university campuses.

Not that she appears to give a shit.