The following is an excerpt from an article by Takayuki Hikawa, a journalist who has always done an excellent job in his serial column titled "Hikawa's Political Talk" in the monthly magazine WiLL released today, titled "Plan to Overthrow the Government" unleashed by Professor Hiroshi Nishiura, who is 80% uncle.
Many people must have felt that Hiroshi Nishiura, who frequently appears on both NHK and TV Tokyo under the title of professor at Kyoto University to predict the number of infected people, is somehow fishy about this corona disaster.
Subscribers who learned about his actual situation, which Hikawa-san has revealed in this work, must have felt angry and wondered what the hell TV stations were reporting.
Preamble omitted.
"The government must take responsibility for the spread of the disease in the fall general election."
Resentment toward the government
On the evening of July 25, a secret meeting was held on the Internet.
Participating in the meeting were Shigeru Omi, chairman of the government subcommittee whose face is not seen on TV; Takaji Wakita, director of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases; and Nobuhiko Okabe, director of the Kawasaki Health and Safety Laboratory.
It was an online meeting to exchange views between the "Corona Expert Group" and the media.
The "volunteer group," which includes most of the members of the government subcommittee, holds regular meetings with newspaper reporters and other media members to exchange opinions.
The meetings were "completely off the record," and there was even a strict condition for participation that the content of the meetings must be kept confidential.
At this meeting, a surprising comment came out from one of the experts.
A reporter from a major newspaper who attended the meeting said, "It was Professor Nishiura of Kyoto University who spoke up toward the end of the session. He said, 'The government shut down our mouths and held the Olympics. The government is also responsible for the spread of delta stocks. The government must take responsibility for the fall election. I was horrified to think that such an expert in ideology was involved in policymaking, no matter how much he said off the record."
Nishiura is known as "Uncle 80%," who has called for an 80% reduction in human contact and is a member of experts' Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare's "Advisory Board."
Nishiura said at an opinion exchange meeting with the media that he was looking forward to losing the ruling party in the lower house election by autumn, exploding a grudge against the government that decided to hold the Olympics.
No concrete measures
A source in the Prime Minister's Office lamented the state of these experts.
"The current members of the subcommittee are all leftists. In the first place, experts on infectious diseases are treated as second-rate people who never see the light of day at medical conferences, and they are very excited that the corona disaster has finally brought them into the light. So the experts gather online every weekend to argue and say, "If this continues, the infection will spread! "The prime minister lacks a sense of urgency! "The government needs to be reminded! The prime minister lacks a sense of urgency! But they've never come up with any concrete measures that matter.
Nishiura proudly announces the forecast, saying, "The number of newly infected people in Tokyo will exceed 10,000 a day at the end of August." Still, the tipster is enough at the betting ticket counter.
Anyone can do it to incite a sense of crisis.
The public wants to know how exactly to prevent the spread of the disease, but no such measures are forthcoming.
As revenge for not being able to cancel the Olympics, Nishiura told a weekly magazine, "If the infection continues to spread, medical care will collapse, and I will have no choice but to recommend that the Paralympics be canceled."
It was met with a chorus of protests on the Internet: "It's been a year and a half, but we don't know how the infection spread, and we don't know what we should do to prevent it. It is not the job of experts to say, 'Medical care will collapse,' or 'Please refrain from doing anything. Please do your job properly," were some of the criticisms.
Mr. Omi, the chairman of the subcommittee, was equally critical.
On July 30, the day it decided to declare a state of emergency in the Tokyo metropolitan area, Omi went to the Prime Minister's office and directly asked Kan to "send a message close to the people as the government."
But how meaningful is this statement?
Prime Minister Suga has been issuing a message to the people at every press conference, and Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike has repeatedly called on the people in her relentless performance.
If only messages could bring the infection under control, the whole world would not be struggling like this.
Prime Minister Suga also made a rare complaint to his neighbors.
"I'd like experts to come up with countermeasures from a more scientific standpoint, but all they say is, 'Send out a one-voice message' or 'Share the sense of crisis with the public.
"If you think normally."
On August 12, Omi held a press conference and called for halving the flow of people in Tokyo, another suggestion that was far too vague.
There is no scientific analysis of the risks involved in going out, at what point, and for what activities.
Will the coronas be contained if we reduce the flow of people by singling out the department stores?
When asked about the impact of the Tokyo Olympics on the spread of the disease, Omi replied, "I think that the Olympics had an impact on people's awareness. We talked to many people and interviewed a lot of people, and it didn't turn out to be something that we could write a paper about as science, but if we think about it in a normal way, we judge that it probably did."
The basis for the claim that "the Olympics loosened people's minds and influenced the spread of the disease" is not "science" but "ordinary judgment based on normal thinking."
The head of Japan's infectious disease control is not shy about presenting a claim with no scientific basis.
In the end, we can only assume that he wants to quarrel with the government for forcing the holding of the Olympics.
Masahiro Kami, president of the Institute of Medical Governance, made an interesting point about Omi on a commercial TV program.
"Fauci, the head of infectious disease control in the U.S., has written a thousand articles, but Omi has only written one. In other words, Mr. Omi is not a scientist. The fact that this non-scientist expert is leading Japan's corona countermeasures is the problem in the first place."
Hearing this explanation, I understood why I had not listened to any scientifically based countermeasures from Omi.
They have done for a year and a half to stir up a sense of crisis among the people.
And they put all the blame on the government.
We need to pay attention to what political agenda is behind the statements of these irresponsible experts.
Postscript.
