And welcome to Mastermind. Our first contestant is Mr. Lauchie Downe, special subject: Covid policy interventions
Your questions start now, Mr. Downe.
Q: What policy intervention prevented over half a million Covid deaths in the UK and over two million deaths in the USA?
A: Lockdown!
Presenter: Correct!
Q: What policy intervention is preventing further human carnage from a second/third/n+1 wave?
A: Two, three, many lockdowns!
Presenter: Correct!
Q: What policy intervention is necessary to contain local Covid hotspots?
A: Local lockdowns! Graded by Lockdown tiers!
Presenter: Correct!
Q: What are the three main failings of the government’s lockdown policy?
A: It was not early enough, hard enough or long enough.
Presenter: Correct!
Q: What policy intervention is responsible for actual deaths being less than predicted, for the ongoing, rapid decline in the number of deaths and number of hospital admissions?
A: Lockdown ….
Presenter: Further information required ….
A: Nothing to do with herd immunity!
Presenter: Correct!
Q: What is responsible for the rising number of cases?
Contestant: Define a ‘case’, please.
Presenter: A positive PCR test result, including false positives, asymptomatic infections and long-dead traces of the virus.
A: Wilfully inadequate observance of lockdown!
Presenter: Correct!
Q: What policy intervention is required to prevent, almost uniquely in the history of immunology, deadly and repeated re-infections?
A: Continuing lockdown!
Presenter: Correct!
Q: What policy intervention is needed to protect us from seasonal influenza and other respiratory diseases (including the common cold, a coronavirus which has as much as a 6% death rate amongst vulnerable groups of people)?
A: More lockdowns, for each and every communicable disease, including the common cold!
Presenter: Correct!
Q: What policy intervention is necessary until a vaccine is developed?
A: Lockdown!
Presenter: Correct!
Q: What policy intervention is necessary once a vaccine is developed and rolled-out?
A: Lockdown, forever and a day!
Presenter: Correct!
Q: What policy intervention is necessary until the virus has been totally suppressed, the last bug loaded into a rocket named Zero-Covid and shot into the heart of the sun?
A: Lockdown!
Presenter: Correct!
Q: What policy intervention provides ongoing proof of the necessity of lockdown by drastically and ostentatiously reinforcing a continual sense of crisis, nurturing a culture of fear and aggressively legitimising the moral-shaming of those sceptics and miscreants who have not got with the virtue-signalling, see-how-much-we-really-really-care-about-granny program of lockdown?
A: Lockdown! No, wait, face-masks! No, no … lockdown, it is!!
Presenter: Correct!
Q: What, apart from ‘love’ (pace the 1970 film, Love Story), means ‘never having to say you’re sorry’ when it comes to a Covid policy intervention that has proved to be disastrously wrong, destroying world economies, people’s livelihoods and which will cost more lives than it has saved, if any?
A: Lockdown means never having to say you’re sorry, never having to say that, oops, we got it disastrously wrong and we submit ourselves to your electoral judgement.
Presenter: Correct! Congratulations, Mr. Downe. You are tonight’s winner. Your prize is a government Ministry of Health portfolio. You have all the lexicon, knowledge and policy nous that is needed for managing Covid.