“I Make Absolutely No Apology” – Boris Johnson Defends Lockdown Decision Based on Outdated and Potentially Inflated Data

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has defended the decision to put in place a 2nd national lockdown even as medical experts suggest the data he is referencing for the decision is outdated and potentially inflated.

As we reported earlier today, multiple medical experts have pointed out that the data presented at Johnson’s Saturday press conference, where the newest lockdown measures were announced, is outdated and represents a scenario that is four times more deadly than that of more recent data.

The Cambridge University data presented during the Saturday conference was 3 weeks old and had since been updated more than once, according to Dr Dan Howdon, a medical researcher at the University of Leeds.

The updates to the data had been made prior to the Saturday presser, says Howdon, who expressed his concerns in a report published in the Telegraph on Monday.

“I’m deeply concerned about how the data is being presented so that politicians can make decisions,” the doctor said.

Clinical epidemiologist and director of the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, Carl Heneghan, expressed a level of confusion as to why the UK Government would run with old data to justify the lockdown.

“I cannot understand why they have used this data, when there are far more up-to-date forecasts from Cambridge that they could have accessed, which show something very different,” he said.

PM Johnson and SAGE had presented models showing England could have up to 4,000 death per day by early December while the more recent data from Cambridge reportedly forecasts 240 daily deaths for next week, and around 500 in the second half of November. Although this latest data doesn’t account for December it is broadly far lower than the the numbers presented at the lockdown conference.

The 3 week old data also paints a scenario where the death toll per-day as of November 1st is 1,000 deaths, when in reality the average COVID-19 death toll per-day in England over the last week was 260 – roughly four times lower. In fact, there were only 162 COVID-19 deaths in the UK on November 1.

Even with the medical communities concerns about the data driven reasoning behind Johnson’s decision to declare a fresh round of locking down, the Prime Minister is defending the decision as he reiterated his belief of there being “no alternative” in front of Parliament on Monday.

“The modeling presented by our scientists suggests that without action we could see up to twice as many deaths over the winter as we saw in the first wave,” Johnson said. “Faced with these latest figures, there is no alternative but to take further action at a national level.”

His statement suggests that he is barreling forward with the models presented by SAGE at the Saturday presser and there has been no consideration that the expected outcome of those models could be 4-5 times higher than the more recent Cambridge data, as argued by Dr Heneghan and Dr Howdon.

“I make absolutely no apology whatever for doing my level best — our level best as a government — to avoid going back into a national lockdown,” the Prime Minister would go on.

The House of Commons will vote Wednesday on the fresh lockdown measures, with senior Tories vowing opposition and Labour planning to vote in favor of the plan.

It would be no surprise if discussion of the outdated data comes up during the vote considering this assessment on going into lockdown from MP David Davis:

“This is a bigger decision than going to war from the point of view of many people in the country.”

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Joseph Jankowski is an Editor-at-Large for Planet Free Will. His works have been published by major news publications such as ZeroHedge.com and Infowars.com.

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