Cambridge University Goes Full Fascist on COVID Rules!

Written by Will Jones on September 17, 2020. Posted in Current News

Students at a Cambridge college have received a coronavirus “Community Statement” that they must sign and adhere to or risk being ejected from college accommodation. Lockdown Sceptics has seen the draconian rules issued by Trinity College to its students and it’s a shocker.

It states:

You are required to sign this statement and adhere to it if you would like to return to, or remain resident in, College accommodation. No accommodation for the new academic year will be allocated until you return a signed copy of this statement. The Senior Tutor and Junior Bursar can withdraw your accommodation if you breach your commitment to follow the Community Statement.

The rules, sorry, I mean “community guidelines”, include being prepared to move rooms or leave at “very short notice”, rigorous cleaning duties, no visitors, being limited to the bare minimum of possessions for “basic living standards”, and a requirement to store in your room “three days’ supply of non-perishable food for use in the event of a lockdown”. Parties are “likely to be deemed a grave breach”. The rules can change at any point. (The Guardian also has the story.)

It is left entirely up to academic supervisors whether they will teach their students in person, leaving many at risk of a substandard education. As one university lecturer told us:

“I have been at the receiving end of online teaching, and it is absolutely not as good as the real thing. Even in a small group you lose the immediacy, your attention drifts, and your tutor loses the body language necessary to get a feel of how you are responding to the instruction.”

New students were told before term began that they cannot defer their place if this is not to their liking. It’s our way or the highway at Trinity College, Cambridge. The college which, over the course of its history, has won more Nobel Prizes than France and Belgium combined has turned into a citadel of unscientific, hysterical group think. Perhaps it’s because the new Master is Sally Davies, the former Chief Medical Officer.

Treating young people in this way is cruel. Dressing it up as a “Community Statement” which “represents a commitment” by students – a commitment they had no choice about whether to make – is Orwellian doublespeak. If they don’t make this supposedly voluntary “commitment”, they lose their place at Cambridge.

We are used to “Generation Snowflake” complaining of micro-aggressions and wanting safe spaces and trigger warnings – fatuous nonsense, which is nonetheless frequently indulged by university authorities. Yet here we have a genuine example of oppressive treatment likely to cause harm to students’ well-being and mental health that’s due to the snowflakery of the grown ups. All in the name of protecting people from this “deadly” virus. Yet a recent analysis by Professor David Spiegelhalter in the BMJ has shown that the risk to people under 35 is almost zero.

All these rules and restrictions are in place for the benefit of much, much older people suffering from co-morbidities, in other words. What a dreadful burden to impose on the young, who have already had their education disrupted, their exams cancelled and been put through an A-Level grades fiasco which left many of them unsure whether they’d get a place at university until the last minute.

Students are informed at the end of the Statement that the College has “a Mental Health and Wellbeing Advisor as well as a Counsellor”. They’re going to need them.

Boris Needs to Look Again at the Facts About Covid

Too many people still assume that lockdown is the only thing that stood between us and Armageddon, and that restrictions of varying severity must continue until there is a vaccine or a cure. But is that what the evidence tells us? I wrote a piece for the Spectator yesterday making the case that Boris and the Government need to look again.

To get to the truth of what is happening – and to work out the approach we need to take – we need a control, something to show what happens when things are done differently. Peru offers one possible example: it has one of the world’s strictest lockdowns, yet also the world’s highest official death toll, at a rate of 929 per million. We also have Sweden, which favoured a light-touch approach; there has been no new big rise in cases or deaths and the country’s economy is getting back on its feet.

Critics point out that Sweden fared significantly worse than its Nordic neighbours, with 578 deaths per million, compared to Denmark’s 109 and Finland’s 61. However, Sweden, which never took on the burden of indefinite suppression, is now in a much stronger position to contemplate a return to normal life.

What’s more, an international comparison in the Lancet in July offered little conclusive evidence connecting the timing and strictness of lockdown in a country and the COVID-19 death rate. Yet still our leaders insist that wide-ranging restrictions on social and economic life are the best way to respond to this threat.

The public can be forgiven for overestimating the severity of the virus, having been subjected to a barrage of terror for the past six months. But the government and its advisers have no excuse. They ought to have twigged by now that, for most people, the threat has been overegged and the response to it far out of proportion to the danger it poses. Being able to step back and reappraise evidence and change direction in light of that – and then, crucially, bringing the public along with you – is an essential characteristic of a good leader and one that we are in desperate need of right now. On this count, Boris is failing badly.

Read more at lockdownsceptics.org

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