Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~Feeling sick as a dog today. Not as sick as Kristi Noem's dog, obviously, but close. However, last Monday was The Mark Steyn Club's seventh birthday, and I thank profoundly all those First Week Founding Members who opted to sign on for an eighth year. We hope, as this se'nnight proceeds, that our First Fortnight Founding Members will want to do the same.
~As many of you know, four weeks from today, in the King's Bench Division of the High Court of England, shall be heard:
The King on the application of Mark Steyn
vs
The Office of Communications
I'll be there. Not sure if the King will - he's got a lot on his plate. The "Office of Communications" (Ofcom to its friends) is the deceptively bland name for the UK state censor headed by "Lord" Grade and Dame Melanie Dawes. Many readers have kindly asked how they can help out on this case. (We may have to go all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, which, notwithstanding Brexit, remains the final court of appeal for the UK proper - if you're in a mere colony, such as Montserrat, or even a fully-fledged independent nation, such as Jamaica, at least you get to go to the Privy Council. But not in metropolitan England.) Support-wise, we've included a few suggestions below.
However, the substance of the censor's ruling against me is over my coverage of the Covid vaccines, specifically in my monologue of April 21st 2022. You can see that show in full here - and only here, as it has been thoroughly vapourised by GB News, YouTube, etc. Here's the basic point I was making:
The third booster shot so zealously promoted by the British state and its groupthink media has failed, and in fact exposed you to significantly greater risk of infection, hospitalisation and death.
That the third jabba-jabba (the "booster") actually increased your risk of getting the Covid has since been confirmed by no less than the Cleveland Clinic. But Ofcom's conviction of me for "materially misleading" the audience still stands - even though the only really material misleading going on here is by Grade, Dame Melanie et al.
However, Stephen McIntyre has now gone further, and carefully analysed what I said and showed on air at the time. Mr McIntyre needs no introduction here. With Ross McKitrick, he dismantled Michael E Mann's "hockey stick"; he testified against Mann in the DC Superior Court earlier this year; and, of course, he's a cousin of Barack Obama, so it's totally racist to criticise him. He is a peerless reader of data - of what it actually says and of how it's being presented:
At the time, I observed that the UK data showed that the case rate for triple vax was //higher// than among unvax. Three months later, Steyn (as discussed below) made a similar claim, for which he was censured.
Although the UK authorities conspicuously refrained from including this result in their summary or conclusions, they were obviously aware of the conundrum, since their publication included a curious disclaimer by UK authorities that actual case data "should not be used" to estimate vaccine effectiveness. I pointed this odd disclaimer out in this earlier thread, also noting that health authorities in Ontario and elsewhere had previously used such data to promote vaccine uptake and that the reasoning behind this disclaimer needed to be closely examined and parsed.
in this thread, I'll re-examine Steyn's analysis. I've transcribed all the numbers in the tables and done further calculations to check his claims.
First, case rates. Steyn first showed an important table showing the population by 5-year age group and vax status, observing... pic.twitter.com/ERsMz1TMpB
— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) May 12, 2024
Steve McIntyre addresses Ofcom's ruling - that I had "failed to take into account" various factors - and very methodically proceeds to take them into account. He finds that they support my conclusion:
For all groups between 18 and 80, the infection rates for fully boosted were more than //three// times the infection rates for unvax. For the 60-69 agegroup, the infection rate for fully boosted was //five// times higher than unvax. [EMPHASIS ADDED]
In all cases, the sample sizes are very large so that the phenomenon is not some sort of statistical artifact. It is a phenomenon that deserves explanation and to which the public is entitled to have an explanation.
Indeed. But Grade and Dame Melanie see their job as protecting the official narrative, just as the MHRA (Britain's Medical and Health Regulatory Agency) see their job as protecting Big Pharma and Baroness Whatnot's laughable Covid "inquiry" sees its job as protecting the establishment and its disastrous policy decisions. So that striking phenomenon may "deserve explanation", but in the UK, as in Canada and Europe and America, it's highly unlikely ever to get an honest one.
However, as to Ofcom's conviction of me, Mr McIntyre continues:
Ofcom's complaint that he hadn't allowed for age groups turns out to have been irrelevant.
In my present decrepitude, I don't find Twitter threads the easiest to follow and miss the old days of the McIntyre "Climate Audit" blog posts. But this one is worth making the effort for, because, as noted above, the UK's public-health and statistical bodies knew something was off in the data in late 2021 and attempted to obscure it by changing the basis on which they published the numbers. That's a government-integrity scandal - as Ofcom well understands.
We'll excerpt other findings from Stephen McIntyre's thread as the days proceed.
~Because of Ofcom's "materially misleading" conviction of me, I will never be on UK telly again. However, kissing up to the censor hasn't exactly worked out for GB News either. Their ratings have tanked and their already under-staffed production teams are being cut further. They've still got Farage, but you can't (as Angelos Floppadopoulos said to me three years ago) build a TV channel around one man - especially when the guy in question is under increasing pressure to get back into electoral politics:
GB News insiders hope Farage rules out Reform MP bid amid ratings fears
The insider added: "Morale at GB News is low. They are cutting costs and jobs. There's no sign of Boris Johnson [who previously announced he was joining the channel). If Nigel left that would be a real hammer blow."
As he demonstrated with the Brexit Party and the European elections, Farage's sense of timing can be pretty lethal. But the will-he-won't-he? folderol is beginning to remind me of Harold Macmillan quoting Otto Harbach:
Perhaps some of the older ones among you may remember that popular song, I think recently revived:
'She Didn't Say Yes
She didn't say no
She didn't say stay
She didn't say go
She wanted to climb
But she dreaded to fall
So she bided her time
And clung to the wall.'
On the other hand, if you're a Reform Party supporter desperate for him to take you in his manly arms and lead you into the sunlit uplands, you may be reminded of Jim Callaghan channeling Vesta Victoria (not, as he misattributed, Marie Lloyd):
There was I Waiting At The Church
Waiting At The Church
Waiting At The Church
When I found he'd left me in the lurch
Lor', how it did upset me...
But Nigel seems to figure he can milk it a while yet:
Regardless of what I decide to do next, the Conservatives are toast anyway. pic.twitter.com/Zfz470R0Fx
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) May 13, 2024
~We mourn the passing of Rex Murphy, one of the very greatest of Canadian public intellectuals. I did not know Rex personally, which people seem to find odd, because they assume everyone in Canada knows everybody else. I was in the same room as him every so often, but we never interacted. No particular reason, it just never happened - until he turned up on my show during the Canadian trucker convoy that inspired the world:
You can see Rex's full interview with me here. I had assumed that would be the first of many appearances, but the next time we tried to book him there was a health issue and eventually it became known sotto voce through the Canadian media that this most clear-sighted and forceful of thinkers was going to be leaving us at a time when we most needed him.
I was a fan for many years. With hindsight, it seems to me astonishing that he was a fixture on the CBC and in The Globe and Mail for so many decades. It could not happen now. But Rex had a panache and style that was truly unique. Born in what was then the Dominion of Newfoundland, he was happy to join Canada but not to embrace the prevailing torpor of Canadian media. We forget how, before Conrad Black launched The National Post, bigshot Toronto media was not just reflexively big-L Liberal but monumentally boring: prominent columnists were important (and self-important) because ministers of the Crown were willing to lunch with them, not because they were in the least bit readable. Murphy's eminent Globe colleague, Jeffrey Simpson, was supposedly a media colossus, but his prose was almost parodically turgid and sludge-like.
Rex was always a glorious exception to that rule: I would have read him even if I'd never agreed with a word he said. And there's no one I can say that about these days. He wrote with the tremendous brio of Fleet Street at its best, but with the important bonus of being principled and ruthlessly forensic. Even more impressively, he was exactly the same on air, too: if you were tuning the dial in the car and came in midway through something or other, you could tell it was Rex after three words - not just because of those memorable Newfoundland vowels but because of the command of language. Cross Country Checkup, a show he hosted for over two decades, is a pale imitation of its former glory.
Our mutual friend Conrad Black has a fine eulogy here. Elsewhere, it's all a bit muted - and, needless to say, it's Jeffrey Simpson, not Rex, who's in the Order of Canada. Pathetic.
~As mentioned above, many readers have inquired about how to support Mark's lawsuit against Ofcom over its throttling of honest discussion of the Covid vaccines. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
b) buying a near-and-dear one a SteynOnline gift certificate; or
c) ordering a copy of Steyn's latest book, The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it - ask Kathy Gyngell).
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds goes to a grand cause - and, in the last, a significant chunk thereof. And, in all cases, you or your loved one gets something, too.
