3rd September 2021

Thank you to the many people who have e-mailed me recently and asked if I have been silenced. I have not. I have had letters from Public Health England and the General Medical Council, informing me that I was under investigation for daring to question anything about COVID19, particularly vaccines.

The good news is the investigations ended up nowhere, and were closed down. I have also had irate phone calls from doctors, telling me that I must not question vaccination and suchlike. This has been somewhat wearing and has caused me to remain silent for a while and think about things.

However, I do know how to play the medical regulations game. Don’t make a statement you cannot reference from a peer-reviewed journal. Don’t give direct advice to people over the internet. Provide facts, and do not make statements such as ‘vaccines are killing thousands of people.’ Or suchlike.

Not that I ever would. My self-appointed role within the COVID19 mayhem, was to search for the truth – as far as it could be found – and to attempt to provide useful information for those who wish to read my blog.

The main reason for prolonged silence, and introspection, is that I am not sure I can find the truth. I do not know if it can be found anymore. Today I am unsure what represents a fact, and what has simply been made up. A sad and scary state of affairs.

This is not just true of the mainstream and the mainstream media, which has simply decided to parrot all Government and WHO statements without any critical engagement…or thought. For example, the BBC intones that ‘In the last day, fifty people died within twenty-eight days of a positive COVID19 test…’ Or a hundred, or six. What the hell is this supposed to mean? It means nothing, it is the very definition of scientific meaninglessness.

Especially when it seems that very nearly a half of those admitted to hospital with COVID19 were not admitted to hospital with COVID19. They were admitted with something else entirely, then had a positive test whilst in hospital. In short, they were not admitted to hospital with COVID19, and almost certainly did not die of COVID19. They died with a positive COVID19 test. With, not of.

But the misinformation is equally a problem for those on the other side. Claims are made for the benefits of Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that simply do not stand up to scrutiny. Yes, I believe both drugs may provide some benefit, but not the claimed 90% reduction in deaths that I have seen trumpeted.

So, I have given up on COVID19. It is a complete mess, and I feel that, without being certain of the ground under my feet, I have nothing to contribute. I too am in danger of starting to make statements that are not true.

However, before leaving the area entirely, I would like to make clear some of the things I currently believe to be true, and what I do not believe to be true. If this is of any assistance to anyone. Very little is referenced, because I can very easily find a contradictory reference to any reference I provide. For each fact, there is an equal and opposite fact.

1: SARS-CoV2 exists

Many people have stated, probably correctly, that the SARS-CoV2 virus has never been fully isolated. Whatever exactly that means. Have Koch’s postulates been met? [see a bit later on] I think for viruses, Koch’s postulates are very rarely, if ever, met. Does it matter, not really.

Despite this gap I believe that SARS-CoV2 truly is a ‘new’ virus that did not exist before. So, it must have mutated somewhere, or been mutated somewhere, from another coronavirus… probably. Although it seems that SARS-CoV2 does not mutate. Instead, it creates variants which, somehow or other, is a completely different process to a mutation! I have found that language in this area means little, and words are simply twisted to suit a particular narrative.

I feel it is most likely this mutation occurred within a laboratory in Wuhan during gain of function research. But I don’t suppose we will ever know. It seems unlikely to be something that the Chinese authorities are ever going to admit… ever. As a general rule, the more fervently, and angrily, the Chinese state denies something – the more likely it is to be true.

This is a special case of a general rule that I modestly call the ‘Kendrick reverse meaning law.’ Which developed from P.G. Wodehouse’s observation that ‘When an Englishman says ‘trust me’ it is time to start counting the spoons.’

This reverse meaning was seen clearly when Matt Hancock (UK Health Secretary at the time) stated that ‘Right from the start we’ve tried to throw a ring of steel around our care homes.’ Which actually meant that ‘Right from the start we threw care homes under a bus.’ Unless, what he actually meant was that the ring of steel was put up to stop care home residents escaping. ‘Halt, who goes there….’ Sound of heavy machine gun fire, whistles screeching, attack dogs baying at the leash. ‘Go for the Zimmer frames, that should bring them down.’

2: SARS-CoV2 is generally more deadly than influenza

Of course, SARS-CoV2 is most certainly not deadlier than the influenza epidemic of 1918-19. Which is estimated to have wiped out 2% of the entire world’s population. It is probably not more deadly than the 1957 epidemic, or the 1967 influenza epidemic. But it seems more deadly than anything in the last forty years, or so. So, a bit more deadly than most influenzas that sweep through humanity every year, or so. Give or take.

Currently, SARS-CoV2 is reckoned to have killed four and half million people across the Globe. Which is 0.07% of the world’s population. However, there is an immediate problem here. With influenza, we count for one year, then start again the next year. With COVID19 we have just kept on counting, adding this year figures to last years, and so on!

Eventually, therefore, assuming COVID19 comes and goes like the flu, and we just keep on counting without end, it will end up killing a hundred million. Making it the deadliest virus ever. Far worse than any influenza? At the current rate this will take another thirty years, or so. Within one thousand six hundred and sixty-six years it will have killed everyone. Of course, there will have been a few billion replacement humans created during that time.

What is far more important is to know the infection fatality rate (IFR)? That is, what percentage of those infected with SARS-CoV2 will die? This, I am afraid, we are never going to know, as the definition of what the word ‘infected’ means has flipped this way and that and can never be pinned down.

Does it mean a positive test? Does it mean a positive test plus symptoms? [Which used to be called a ‘case’] Does it mean something else. What does infected actually mean…

Here, I defer to the Master – Lewis Carroll:

‘When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.”

Accepting that no-one will define what COVID19 infection actually means, I believe the infection fatality rate is, (using previous used definitions) settling at around 0.15%. At least it was last time I looked. This was never enough to justify the panicked actions that have taken place around the globe. Never.

3: The figures make no sense – and never will

One of the central problems here, form which all other problems flow, is that the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test is the test against which the PCR test itself is tested. We have nothing better. So, we are completely reliant on it being accurate. However, we cannot know how accurate it truly is, because there is no test against which to compare it.

I mentioned Koch’s postulates earlier. These are the tests which can prove if a ‘micro-organism’ is actually causing the disease. The ultimate gold standard:

• The microorganism must be found in abundance in all organisms suffering from the disease, but should not be found in healthy organisms.
• The microorganism must be isolated from a diseased organism and grown in pure culture.
• The cultured microorganism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy organism.
• The microorganism must be re-isolated from the inoculated, diseased experimental host and identified as being identical to the original specific causative agent.

And good luck with all of that. The truth is that these postulates can work for bacteria, but not really for viruses. Because it is very difficult to meet them. I am not sure if they have ever been truly met for any virus.

On the matter of finding out if the virus is truly present, in anyone diagnosed with COVID19, here is a letter that was published in the BMJ in October last year

‘We are told that the virus is everywhere – in the air, in our breath, on fomites, trapped in masks – yet public health authorities seem not to be in possession of any cultivable clinical samples of the offending pathogen.

In March 2020, the World Health Organisation instructed authorities not to look for a virus but to rely instead on a genome test, the RT-PCR, which is not specific for SARS-CoV-2 (1) (2).

A Freedom of Information request to Public Health England about cultivable clinical samples or direct evidence of viral isolation has no information and refers to the proxy RT-PCR test, quoting Eurosurveillance (3).

Eurosurveillance states: “Virus detection by reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) from respiratory samples is widely used to diagnose and monitor SARS-CoV-2 infection and, increasingly, to infer infectivity of an individual. However, RT-PCR does not distinguish between infectious and non-infectious virus. Propagating virus from clinical samples confirms the presence of infectious virus but is not widely available (and) requires biosafety level 3 facilities” (4).

The CDC admits that, “no quantified virus isolates of the 2019-nCoV are currently available”, and used a genetically modified human lung alveolar adenocarcinoma cell culture to, “mimic clinical specimen”(5).

It appears, therefore, that we have public health bodies without clinical samples, a test which is non-specific and does not distinguish between infectivity and non-infectivity, a requirement for biosafety level 3 facilities to even look for a virus, yet we are led to believe that it is up all our noses.

So, where is the virus?’

(1) https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/10665-331501

(2) https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m2420/rr-5

(3) https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/679566/response/1625332/attach/ht…

(4) https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.32…

(5) https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download ¹

After reading this, do I still think SARS-CoV2 exists? Yes, I do. I firmly believe that I watched people dying of it, from it. They died in a way I have never seen people do so before, and I have seen a lot of people die. They seemed quite well, then suddenly their oxygen sats dropped like a stone – they still seemed okay otherwise – then they died. The end.

Very strange, and rather disturbing. I started slipping an oxygen saturation monitor onto my finger from time to time. Just in case. 99% is my average reading, if you are interested. It never dropped.

However, getting back to the testing. If you truly want to confirm the presence of a virus in a sample, you need to send it to biosafety level 3 facilities to isolate it, grow it (not really the correct word for a virus), and suchlike. This is never done in the clinical setting.

You could argue that if you wait for antibodies to develop, you can ‘prove’ that someone was infected, or not, and thus work out how accurate the PCR test has been retrospectively. Perhaps…

I speak as someone who needed seven Hepatitis B vaccinations before I produced any detectable antibodies. Did I have immunity after the first six, or not? Am I someone who simply does not make many antibodies, but still have immunity through other mechanisms?  Do others simply not produce antibodies, or their level drops so fast, that they effectively disappear?

Yes, serological testing (looking for antibodies), has its own very significant problems.

‘Serological tests for SARS-CoV-2 have accuracy issues that warrant attention. They measure specific antibody responses which may take some weeks to develop after disease onset reducing the sensitivity of the assay. If blood samples were collected during the early stage of the infection, they may produce false negative results. They do not directly detect the presence of the virus. Further, antibodies may be present when SARS-CoV-2 is no longer present giving false positive case diagnosis.’ ²

In reality, we are relying on a PCR test to diagnose SARS-CoV2 infection, the accuracy of which is entirely dependent on believing that the test is accurate. Yes, that is the route to madness.

At present, in the UK, we are doing about one million tests a day ³.

We are getting about thirty thousand ‘positive’ results. Or, about 3% positive. How many of these are truly positive? Well, you can take a wild guess on that one. At one point, the CDC stated that 30% of the PCR tests were false positives. A ‘false positive’ means that test says you have the disease, when you do not. [A false negative informs you that you do not have the disease, when you do] ⁴.

The thirty per cent cannot be the case currently, because that would mean if you did one million tests, you would get more than three hundred thousand false positives. Instead we are getting thirty thousand, which means that it is impossible for the false positive rate to be higher than three per cent.

So, what is the true rate? Well, if is three percent, then virtually every single positive test is a false positive test. [Three per cent of one million is thirty thousand] Which would mean that no-one in the UK currently has COVID19, and everything we are doing is completely pointless. It also means that people admitted to hospital with COVID19 do not have the disease, they are suffering from, and dying from, something else with a false positive COVID19 false test stamped on their forehead.

Is it possible that no-one actually is infected with SARS-CoV2? Well, it is certainly not impossible. Here is a graph of overall mortality (risk of dying of anything) from England. These figures, unlike most others, are pretty much fully reliable. Someone is either dead, or they are not. It is a difficult thing to get wrong, or manipulate. There can be some delay in registering a death, but this is not normally a major issue.

The graph starts in last quarter 2017. As you can see, a spike in overall mortality in Spring 2020, A spike in Winter 2020/21. Currently, no excess mortality at all. So, if COVID19 is infecting hundreds of thousands of people each week, it is not showing up as any excess deaths… at all ⁵.

Does this mean that COVID19 has gone, and we are rushing around panicking about false positive tests? Or is it still here? Still here I think… but who knows… who knows.

This is the main reason I have given up. I just don’t know what to believe – apart from overall mortality figures. The figures are spun and massage, twisted and mangled.

Another reason why I have given up trying to make any sense of COVID19 is the enormous differences in overall mortality seen in countries that are virtually identical in life expectancy, healthcare systems, actions taken against COVID19 etc. etc.

Afters studying the figures from England, I looked at the figures from Northern Ireland.

Both countries [yes, Northern Ireland is not actually a separate country, it is part of the UK] did almost exactly the same things when it came to COVID19. They both have the National Health Service, they are as close to each other as can be – in terms of COVID19, and most other things. Here is the graph of overall morality for Northern Ireland.

Which means that something very dramatic happened in England, with regard to COVID19? Yet nothing happened in Northern Ireland. This, to me, is fascinating, although I cannot explain it. However, I know that if you were able explain why these two graphs are so weirdly different, you will be unearthing some critical truths with regard to COVID19.

Of course, no-one is remotely interested in such anomalies. Instead, they point to a country like Norway and say – ‘Look how well they did with their rapid lockdown, and preventing people crossing the border’. No-one points to Northern Ireland and says, ‘look how well they did with all their….’ All their what? All their doing exactly the same as England.

Yes, Northern Ireland does not fit with the approved narrative, so it is ignored. Anything that does not fit with the mask wearing, social isolating, vaccination will save the world narrative is simply ignored.

Or it is shouted down or censored by the self-appointed Fact-checkers. Those mighty intellects who can determine what is true, and what is not. It was thoughtful of them to descend from Mount Olympus to mingle amongst feeble minded humanity and tell us what we should, and should not, be thinking. We must all be eternally grateful that the ‘Truth Gods’ now live amongst us, to firmly inform us all what, and how, we should be thinking. And shut us down if we veer from the official narrative.

Anyway, faced with a situation where there are almost no facts that can be relied upon, from anywhere, I have officially removed myself from all discussions on the matter of COVID19.

Instead, I shall return to other areas where, whilst the truth is constantly battered and bruised, and lying in a bruised heap the corner, it is still breathing … just about alive. Sometimes it is capable of weakly raising its head and whispering quietly into my ear. I shall let you know what it says.

1: https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3379/rr-2

2: https://systematicreviewsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13643-021-01689-3

3: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/?_ga=2.38943459.111756282.1590603430-1775824629.1590603430

4: https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1411/rr

5: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

16th June 2021

This article first appeared in RT.com https://www.rt.com/op-ed/526539-catastrophic-care-homes-matt-hancock/

As a GP working mainly with elderly patients in Care Homes and Intermediate Care I witnessed, at first hand, the absolute disaster that was the Government policy at the start of the COVID19 outbreak. Elderly patients who were COVID19 positive, or not tested, perhaps even negative, were simply shovelled out of hospitals and into care homes. ‘The hospitals must be cleared out… nothing else matters.’

At the time there was no personal protection equipment (PPE) available… at all. In fact, in many care homes staff were actually ordered by the management not to wear PPE. This was also the case in hospitals. Not that it would have made a great deal of difference in most care homes where patients with dementia often wander happily from room-to-room without masks, and oblivious to any potential danger. I had to usher one or two out of the nurse’s office from time to time.

In my work with Intermediate Care patients, looking after those who were too well to be in an acute hospital bed, but not yet well enough to be at home, we were placed under massive pressure to just send everyone home. That is if they were COVID19 positive, or not, or untested, where they could spread it to their – often elderly – relatives. Alternatively, they could infect their carers who would then travel to the homes of other elderly people they were looking after, without PPE.

In fact, if you wanted to design a system of ensuring that every single, vulnerable person in the country gained full exposure to COVID19, you could not have a done a better job. I wrote several increasingly frustrated e-mails to various managers, but they simply stated they were just following policy so ‘you can’t blame me’. Policy set at the very top.

Here is an example of the type of e-mail I was sending in April 2020. You may sense the frustration (I have changed the names of the unit and wards for confidentiality reasons).

I think this is very simple, Unit A is currently ‘hot’. We have five patients and four staff ‘COVID positive’ swabbed. Eight patients have now died of COVID.

If we admit COVID negative patients into Unit A this is putting them at great risk of being infected. So, we should stop admissions. The only ones that should come in are those found positive, recovered, and 14 days post positive swab – at least.

Equally if we discharge patients, we are, almost certainly, spreading COVID around the entire care community. Until fourteen days have passed.

There is also a plan to send COVID positive patients to ward B, and keep Unit A as green (no COVID). The only way Unit A can be green is if we stop admitting patients. Because, once new patients reach Unit A they are likely to get infected, then another 14 – 21 days must pass. So, we will go round and round, forever.

Also, another plan is to send high risk staff to Unit A, and have low risk staff in ward B, so the staff will be swapped around. Again, Unit A is currently red hot. We will be endangering high risk staff if we send them to Unit A. Some of them will get infected. Then, they will incubate for 7 – 14 days. They will infect patients, and other staff, then they will go off sick. Then, some of them may well die.

The current plan seems to be to admit elderly vulnerable patients into a high risk COVID ‘hot’ environment and hope they don’t get COVID. We have already seen staff to patient transmission in Unit A. So, some of these patients will get infected, with a very high risk of dying….

In a way, it is hard to blame management who were trying to follow ever-changing edicts from above. Edicts often directly contradicting what they had been told the day before. It was chaos. Now, we have Matt Hancock, the UK Health Secretary stating, amazingly without being struck down by a lightning bolt, that he threw a ring of steel around care homes and elderly hospital units at the time. A… ring… of… steel. This was presumably to stop anyone escaping somewhere safer. Of course, he now says that the most important word in his statement is ‘tried’ as in ‘We tried to throw a ring of steel…’

This will now be his perfect defence. I didn’t say we succeeded, I only said that we tried. How completely pathetic. First, he did the exact opposite of trying. He put in place policies that were directly responsible for the massive number of deaths in care homes. He commanded that hospital were emptied out of elderly patients. What’s his next excuse. ‘Lots of the other countries did the same thing.’ Which is true. But you can hardly claim you are a leader, if all you managed to do was follow others down a disastrous policy failure.

How many deaths did this cause? Well, during the first wave of COVID19 it has been estimated that forty per cent of deaths occurred in care homes. Here from the Nuffield trust:

‘…the burden of the virus fell much more severely on care homes (relative to the population generally) in the first wave. Of the 48,213 COVID deaths registered between mid-March and mid-June, 40% were care home residents.’ https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/COVID-19-and-the-deaths-of-care-home-residents

There are around half a million residents in care homes, which is nought point seven per-cent (0.7%) of the entire population. Yet they had forty per cent (40%) of the deaths.

Yes, the elderly, especially those in care homes were most likely to die from COVID19. But this was known very early on. In Italy, where COVID19 first hit Europe, the average age of death was eighty two, and almost all of those who died had other, significant diseases.

If there was one population that needed to be protected it was elderly, vulnerable care home residents. Matt Hancock presided over policy decisions that threw care home residents under a bus. Now he is trying to claim he did all he could to protect them. Anyone who works in the health service, or in the care sector, knows exactly what he did.

24th May 2021

I haven’t written a blog for a while. Instead, I have been sorting out two complaints about my blog made to the General Medical Council. Also, a complaint from NHS England, and two irate phone calls from other doctors, informing me I shouldn’t make any negative comments about vaccines.

For those in other countries, who don’t know about such things, doctors in the UK are ruled by many different organisations, all of whom feel able to make judgement and hand down various sanctions. The deadliest of them, the ‘Spanish Inquisition’ if you like, is the General Medical Council (GMC) who can strike you off the medical register and stop you working as a doctor. They have great power, with no oversight.

Prior to this, I had been phoned by, and attacked by, two journalists and a couple of fact-checking organisations that have sprung up which can decide your guilt or innocence with regard to any information about COVID19. Of course, no-one can check the fact-checkers. They are the self-appointed guardians of ‘truth.’ quis custodiet ipsos custodes – indeed. (Who guards the guardians?)

In truth they have not scared me off, just greatly annoyed me. The problem is that if they really decide to hunt you down, then you are wiped from the system. Dr Mercola, for example, is having to remove information from his site in great haste. Once wiped from the internet, it becomes very difficult for anyone to read anything you write or listen to anything you say. A major problem if this is how one makes a living.

I was removed from Wikipedia a couple of years ago, but I do have a couple of insulting pages on Rational W (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Malcolm_Kendrick) to take their place. Edited and controlled by – who knows?

I think it is the extreme wing of the Vegan party who decided to write my history, and thoughts, on rational Wikipedia. I say this because a large number of other people I know who are critical of the diet-heart hypothesis, those who dared to suggest that eating animal products is perfectly healthy, were also obliterated from Wikipedia at pretty much the same time.

I did rather like the idea of Wikipedia when it started, but it has been taken over by people, some may say zealots, with their own agendas. This is particularly true of a few scientific areas I am particularly interested in. Diet, heart disease and COVID19.

Frustratingly, there is nothing you can do if Wikipedia decides to wipe you out. There is no appeal. Those who have gained the power to edit Wikipedia are answerable to no-one. They rule their little empires with absolute power. They are, of course, exactly the sort of people who should have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with science. Their minds were made up years ago. They have agendas, they are the anti-science, anti-scientist brigade.

The main purpose of science is to question and attack. To subject ideas to the greatest scrutiny.  Those who decide to shut down and stifle debate … whatever they may believe themselves to be doing, they are in fact traitors to the cause of science. Stranglers of the enlightenment, assassins of progress.

They are not alone, and things have got far worse, in the last year or so. Science has taken a terrible battering with COVID19, I have always known that dissent against a widely held scientific hypothesis is difficult.

Just trying to get published is a nightmare. The peer-review system is one of the many weapons used against innovative thinking. ‘Let’s see what the current experts think of this new idea which threatens to overturn everything they have researched and taught over the last thirty years, and have built their reputations on… I wonder if they will like it, and approve it?’

Experts certainly create a formidable barrier to change. As described by David Sackett (a founding father of evidence-based medicine) in his article ‘The sins of expertness and a proposal for redemption.’

‘….It then dawned on me that experts like me commit two sins that retard the advance of science and harm the young. Firstly, adding our prestige to our opinions gives the latter far greater persuasive power than they deserve on scientific grounds alone. Whether through deference, fear, or respect, others tend not to challenge them, and progress towards the truth is impaired in the presence of an expert.

The second sin of expertness is committed on grant applications and manuscripts that challenge the current expert consensus. Reviewers face the unavoidable temptation to accept or reject new evidence and ideas, not on the basis of their scientific merit, but on the extent to which they agree or disagree with the public positions taken by experts on these matters.’ ¹

And his proposal:

‘But there are still far more experts around than is healthy for the advancement of science. Because their voluntary retirement does not seem to be any more frequent in 2000 than it was in 1980, I repeat my proposal that the retirement of experts be made compulsory at the point of their academic promotion and tenure.’

Expertise is great. ‘Experts’… well, that is a completely different matter. We certainly have a few formidable ones kicking about with COVID19. In the UK we have the great and good of the SAGE committee made up of – who knows? – chosen for whatever reasons. They wield enormous power, and never disagree on anything. In the US we have Fauci and the CDC. Ditto.

In the background we have the WHO … who can tell you what way the wind is blowing if nothing else. They remind me of Groucho Marx’s famous comment. ‘These are my principles. And you if you don’t like them…. I have others.’ However, we at the WHO would like to make it clear that nothing about COVID19 has anything to do with China, in any way. Can we have more money please?

Anyway, where are we with COVID19, and science?

In my opinion COVID19 succeeded in breaking my last vestiges of faith in medical scientific research. I cannot believe anything I read. I accept no mainstream facts or figures.

We are told such utter nonsense. For example, the ‘fact. that vaccination protects against COVID19 more effectively than having had the disease itself… This is just utter nonsense.

We were told that COVID19 was spread by touching contaminated surfaces… Really? We were told it spread though droplets, not aerosols. Which is the most complete garbage. We were told that everyone has to wear a mask. We were told it could easily be passed on by asymptomatic people. Based on nothing at all. I could go on.

Yet, no-one seems remotely bothered by any of this utter nonsense. The public seem to lap it up, and attack anyone who questions the current narrative. I feel that I am clinging onto a dying religion. The religion of Francis Bacon and the enlightenment.

‘Baconian method, methodical observation of facts as a means of studying and interpreting natural phenomena. This essentially empirical method was formulated early in the 17th century by Francis Bacon, an English philosopher, as a scientific substitute for the prevailing systems of thought, which, to his mind, relied all too often on fanciful guessing and the mere citing of authorities to establish truths of science.

After first dismissing all prejudices and preconceptions, Bacon’s method, as explained in Novum Organum (1620; “New Instrument”), consisted of three main steps: first, a description of facts; second, a tabulation, or classification, of those facts into three categories—instances of the presence of the characteristic under investigation, instances of its absence, or instances of its presence in varying degrees; third, the rejection of whatever appears, in the light of these tables, not to be connected with the phenomenon under investigation and the determination of what is connected with it.’ ²

This way of thinking it seems, lasted from 1620 to 2020. Four hundred years of immense scientific progress. The age of enlightenment. We are moving back to the prevailing systems of thought… on fanciful guessing and the mere citing of authorities to establish truths of science.

The Dark Ages are returning.

1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1118019/

2: https://www.britannica.com/science/Baconian-method

24th April 2021

What has happened with COVID19 has happened. All around the world Governments and their advisors have blundered about, all claiming they did absolutely the right thing. Maybe a bit slow in locking down here and there.

However, essentially, it is very clear that the COVID narrative has been written. It has been written by those in charge, who have far too much to lose if it is found to be nonsense. So, it is not going to change.

What was the narrative? I have never seen it formally written down, but I think it is pretty much as follows:

• COVID19 is a new, mutated coronavirus, that is far deadlier than influenza. With an infection fatality rate of around 1%*.
• In the UK, around 500,000 people were going to die from it. Around 2.5 million in the USA, unless action was taken.
• It was going to overwhelm health services unless drastic action was taken. Therefore, even more people would die if we just let it run its course.
• The agreed action was lockdown, which has now been demonstrated to be highly effective at lowering the rate of infection in all countries.
• Masks are highly effective at reducing spread.
• More generally, PPE is highly effective at reducing spread.
• It can be spread by asymptomatic people to almost the same extent as those with symptoms.
• It is spread by droplets, not aerosols, which is why masks are so important.
• Herd immunity is not possible through allowing people to become infected naturally.
• There would be far greater damage to the economy if we allowed it to spread unchecked, than would ever be caused by lockdown.
• Virtually everyone recorded as dying of COVID19 has died of COVID19 – not with COVID19 – or from something else altogether.
• Vaccination provides stronger immunity than catching the disease, overcoming it, and building up natural immunity.
• Remdesivir is effective at controlling symptoms and saving lives.
• Hydroxychloroquine, Zinc, Vitamin D, Ivermectin, Vitamin C are all completely useless and damaging and should not be given to anyone. Doctors prescribing them should be (and have been) struck off.
• Steroids can dampen down the immune response and reduce mortality.

*No agreement on where it actually originated. However, China and the WHO have told us it couldn’t possibly, in any way, have been due to ‘gain of function’ research in a lab in Wuhan – so that’s been cleared up then. I am fully satisfied, and you should be too.

I have not referenced any of this, because you will all have seen these messages repeated… repeatedly. In one form or another.

How much of this is likely correct? Some of it? None of it?

I think there are two things on that list that I fully agree with. COVID19 is a new, mutated, coronavirus that is more deadly than (most forms) of influenza – in the elderly at least.

I don’t think anyone is yet arguing that COVID19 has been, or will be, deadly than Spanish flu. Whether or not the Russian flu of the 1890s was worse? Maybe.

The other major influenza epidemics of 1957 and 1967/8 were pretty bad, just as bad, possibly worse?

There were, again probably, fewer overall deaths, but the world’s population was only a half of what it is now. The figures on deaths are almost impossible to make sense of anyway.

The other thing I agree with is that steroids are effective in reducing mortality. If given at the right time. As for the rest of it? I think it is pretty much wall to wall nonsense from start to finish.

I believe that the images from China, with people apparently dropping dead in the streets, spooked almost everyone. Then, when Italy was first hit, there were the images of overwhelmed hospitals filling our television screens. At which point the glass was smashed and we hit the ‘we’re all going to die’ red button. Fear was unleashed.

It certainly all happened very suddenly. On March the 26^th Anthony Fauci stated the following in the New England Journal of Medicine:

” If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.” ¹

In the UK, on the 19^th of March 2020, we had the following statement from the Advisory Committee of Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP):

“COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK”.

“The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.

“The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.

“The need to have a national, coordinated response remains, but this is being met by the government’s COVID-19 response.²”

However, the doomsters had already managed to grab the narrative, and all attempts at scientific discussion were blown away. Fauci rapidly and completely changed his mind. COVID19 was, in fact, absolutely deadly and we must do absolutely everything possible to control it. At which point no-one else dared say anything else. Within a week the UK began, what is now called, Lockdown. An enormous, world altering decision had been made.

I find it slightly weird that, on March the 16^th, Sir Patrick Vallance was recommending lockdown. Three days before this, the Advisory Committee of Dangerous Pathogens decreed that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as a high consequence infectious disease. Make your minds up guys.

Anyway, at some point in late March 2020, across the world the narrative had spread across the world like an iron curtain. There was to be no dissent from the party line. In the UK the BBC turned into the communications department for the Government, with health correspondents telling the public what they now needed to do. No longer reporting…instructing.

There was not, and has not been, the slightest attempt by the mainstream media to ask any serious questions about lockdown, or any other aspect of the actions taken. The opposition parties have all been falling over themselves to push more, ever tighter lockdowns, more punishment of offenders.

A ten-year jail sentence for making a mistake filling in a COVID questionnaire form. Yes, that is in place, although I very doubt anyone is ever going to be prosecuted for it. UK parliamentary democracy has been replaced by a dictatorship. No parliamentary scrutiny – at all.

In another sinister development, various agencies and fact checkers sprang into action. If you dared to question the narrative, you were subjected to the modern-day equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition. Accounts suspended, posts removed, access denied. Attacks raining down. At least you didn’t get burned at the stake – only your reputation went up in flames.

In stark contrast, a company called Surgisphere managed to publish an article in the Lancet, no less, claiming that hydroxychloroquine was useless. Which suited the narrative. It turned out they had simply made up their figures. In addition, they were closely financially connected with the pharmaceutical company that makes Remdesivir ³.

Where were the fact checkers on this …yes, completely silent, as they have been about anything in support of the narrative. On the other hand, dare to question the validity of, say, mask wearing, and they are down on you like a ton of bricks.

Levels of censorship like this have never been seen before in the West. Ever. Even the President of the US was being censored – by unelected and faceless individuals. Whatever you may have thought of The Donald, the office of President should command respect and it should have been several steps too far to shut him down.

In amongst all this censorship, where is the truth? Where are the facts? I am finding it very difficult to know. I consider myself pretty good at finding out what is going on, digging down to the truth. Analysing papers, sifting the evidence and suchlike. Helping others make sense of data. It’s kind of my thing.

Unfortunately, when I look to the voices on ‘the other side’ for balance they seem to have gone just as mad in the opposite directions. ‘Vaccination will kill hundreds of millions, women will be made sterile, it will drive the virus to mutate into a deadly, deadly, deadly, killer.’ Look, I am perfectly willing to accept that these vaccines were rushed through and may cause some significant health problems – some deaths. Which have already happened. But nothing destroys credibility faster than screaming blue bloody murder.

In my last blog I commented on a strategy known as OODA. Observe, orientate, decide, act. I have done a lot of observing. As for orientating. My current orientation is that everything we see around us has led from one error. As often happens.

The decision to lockdown was so massive, that it became impossible to question. If it was the wrong decision, all of those involved in making it would inevitably be held responsible for economic chaos, hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, massive job losses and unprecedented social upheaval.

‘What was your legacy Boris’.

‘Well, harrumph, I made millions of people unemployed. In addition, by terrifying the public, I caused tens of thousands to stop attending hospital, who died unnecessarily. I blew four hundred billion, or thereabouts. I crushed personal freedoms. I prevented cancer diagnoses and treatments, and increased waiting lists by years – so people continued to suffer for years to come.’

‘Yes, but apart from that. How was lockdown?’

‘Well, to be quite frank, it achieved bugger all. Anyway, do you like my hairstyle. It does make people think I’m a bloody good chap.’

Can’t quite see anyone admitting to having made the greatest mistake in the history of the world. So now, everything is directed to the cause of ensuring that lockdown was seen to be the best thing to do, the only possible action that could have been taken. We had to the stop the infection spreading or everything would have been worse.

Anything, or any country, that does not follow that narrative has been attacked or explained away. For example, Sweden didn’t lockdown as much as the UK, or most other countries in Europe, and their actions have been ruthlessly attacked from all sides. They could not possibly be seen to have done better – than anyone. They have actually done far worse…look how badly it is going in Sweden… say what?

Standing in direct contradiction, but never commented on, it is simultaneously stated that they actually did lockdown. In fact, because the Swedes are so naturally law abiding, they locked themselves down. Suddenly everyone was a world leading expert on Swedish psychology.

Japan didn’t lock down. Ah, but they all wear masks, and don’t interact in the same way. Belarus didn’t lock down. Ah, but we don’t believe their figures. But we do believe the Chinese figures?

A randomised controlled study from Denmark showing that masks don’t really work was dismissed as useless and stripped apart by the Fact Checkers…. Studies from the US demonstrated that states that locked down tightly did no better than those that didn’t…. Oh, it was population density, atmospheric pressure, ethnic make-up, temperature. Throw whatever made-up evidence free explanation you like into the air.

This is the scientific equivalent of a fighter plane releasing chaff into the air to confuse and misdirect an incoming missile. You no longer have one target, you have thousands.

It is something I have been battled against in my cardiovascular research. Attack the ‘cholesterol hypothesis’ and it disintegrates into hundreds of different pieces in front your eyes. HDL, LDL, particle number, small dense LDL, light fluffy LDL, dyslipidaemia…. On and on it goes. A lifetime can be fully wasted examining each piece of chaff in minute detail. My advice, don’t bother, just learn to recognise chaff when you see it.

Which all gets us where?

Where, is that nothing is going to alter the direction of the narrative right now. It has the support of everyone in positions of power, almost everywhere around the world. Science is being bent to fit the narrative, and you can see it happening, if you know what to look for. Recently Boris Johnson stated that vaccination hasn’t really made any difference to falling rates in the UK, lockdown did the heavy lifting.

Why is he saying this? Because the pro-lockdowners are building the narrative fortress higher and higher to protect it from the inevitable future attacks. The likes of Imperial College London, and Neil Ferguson, who have massive responsibility for lockdown, can see there are now more and more scientists who are readying the evidence against lockdown. And it is starting to look strong.

A battle will be fought, and the pro-lockdowners are trying to get politicians to nail their colours fully to the lockdown side. They know that politicians around the world will happily throw all the pro-lockdown scientists to the wolves the moment it begins to look politically expedient. ‘They made us do it. We just followed their advice. Boo Hoo, it wasn’t my fault. Don’t be nasty to me.’

Yes, we have realpolitik in place. Maybe we should call it realscientik. Neil Ferguson, and his ilk, pressed the emergency red button. It is a button they have been itching to press for years, decades. It is the ‘Here is the infection that is going to kill us all’ button. That infection may turn up at some point. COVID19 isn’t it. The button should never have been pressed.

The truth about the actions taken, and the true effectiveness of lockdown, and the damage of lockdown. This will not emerge for many years. By which time, the likes of Boris and Angela and Emmanuel, and Scott and Jacinda will be long gone, and won’t care. In my opinion there should be a reckoning. However, there won’t be.

1: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejme2002387

2: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid?fbclid=IwAR0VTwze8V8AORcSTAiBHZjw502Qav36yg-5WtGPazMuyL4YeEpGrGXzmdY#status-of-covid-19

3: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/10/surgisphere-sapan-desai-lancet-study-hydroxychloroquine-mass-audit-scientific-papers

8th April 2021

Early on in the COVID19 saga I came in contact with Sebastian Rushworth. He was, and is, working as an emergency care doctor in Sweden. It seemed we shared very similar ideas about what was going on. It was fascinating as he was working in Sweden, which has been attacked from all sides, for following WHO advice on the best actions to take in a pandemic.

Sweden did not fully lockdown, most schools remained open, as did bars and restaurants etc. As a result of this everyone died… Start again. As a result of this Sweden suffered around the average number of deaths (per head of population) in Europe.

European countries, above a certain size, that have done worse than Sweden, so far, include:

1. Czechia
2. Hungary
3. Bosnia and Herzegovina
4. Bulgaria
5. Belgium
6. North Macedonia
7. Slovenia
8. Slovakia
9. Italy
10. UK
11. Portugal
12. Spain
13. Peru
14. Croatia
15. Poland
16. France
17. Lithuania

(NB: I left out micro-countries’ such as Gibraltar, San Marino, Andorra etc.)

You would think, from the howls of anguish that Sweden was now a smoking ruin, with hospitals full of the dead and dying. Which serves them bloody well right. They should have done what every other country did.

Anyway, it was interesting to link up with Sebastian to get a first-hand account of what was going on. You hear so much rubbish from the mainstream media, that it is difficult to know what is really going on. We live in a scary, censored world. Patrolled by self-appointed fact-checking dementors.

Sebastian has his own website at https://sebastianrushworth.com/ which I recommend as a good place for sensible thinking.

Now he has written a book. I should know, because he asked me to write the foreword for it, which I gladly did. It isn’t long, it is very readable, and you will learn a lot if you read it. It covers:

• How Dangerous is COVID
• Are the tests effective?
• Does lockdown work?
• Why did Sweden have more deaths than Norway?
• Do face masks stop the virus?
• Are the vaccines safe and effective?

I recommend it to everyone, and you can find a link to it on his website.

6th March 2021

“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

1: ‘The Concept of Coronavirus Herd Immunity Is Deadly and Dangerous’ https://www.self.com/story/coronavirus-herd-immunity

Since COVID19 first hurtled over the horizon, before landing upon us all with great force, I find that I have been asked to believe in many impossible things. First, I was told that attempting to create herd immunity was not achievable. It would also be extremely dangerous and would inevitably result in many hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.

Then the vaccines arrived at fantastical speed and I was told that mass vaccination, by creating herd immunity, would be the factor that would allow us to conquer COVID19 and return to normal life. I am not entirely sure which of these things is impossible, but one of them must be.

2: ‘Vaccines, on the other hand, are believed to induce stronger and longer lasting immunity.’ https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/does-the-vaccine-give-better-protection-than-having-fought-off-the-virus_uk_601c0663c5b62bf30754c563

I was then told the vaccine would provide greater immunity than being infected with COVID19. Which was interesting. I am not sure if this is actually impossible, but it seemed unlikely that anyone could make such statements after about three hundred people had actually been studied, and just two months had passed.

At the time I was aware of two people proven to have been re-infected with COVID19, out of about ten million cases. So, getting infected certainly seemed to provide a pretty good degree of immunity. A re-infection rate of 0.00005%

I also know that vaccinations can only ever really create an attenuated response. Whereas a full-blown infection triggers a full-blown immune response. So, I think it is pretty close to impossible that vaccination can provide greater protection than that from getting the actual disease. Which is why I think it is utterly bonkers we are actually vaccinating people who have circulating antibodies in their blood.

3: ‘Universal mask use could save 130,000 U.S. lives by the end of February, new study estimates.’ https://www.statnews.com/2020/10/23/universal-mask-use-could-save-130000-lives-by-the-end-of-february-new-modeling-study-says/

I am also being asked to believe that face masks are essential to stop the spread of COVID19 and prevent millions of deaths worldwide. The use of masks to prevent viral spread is something I actually researched in depth before COVID19 arrived (for various reasons), as did the WHO. They looked at non-pharmaceutical interventions for prevention of influenza, and produced a hefty report, which covered the use of masks.

Yes, I agree, influenza is not exactly the same as COVID19. But it is pretty much the same size of virus, and it is thought to spread in much the same way. Anyway, the WHO reported their views on masks in 2019, using data from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) – the gold standard.

‘Ten RCTs were included in the meta-analysis, and there was no evidence that facemasks are effective in reducing transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.’ https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789241516839-eng.pdf?ua=1

Since then, there has only been one RCT done on COVID19 transmission, in Denmark. It did not find any significant benefit from masks in reducing spread. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33205991/

Never has a trial been subjected to such immediate and hostile reporting. Fact-checkers (whoever exactly they might be, or what understanding they have of medical research) immediately attacked it. One such, called PolitiFact, made the following judgement, which amused me.

“Social media posts claim, “The first randomized controlled trial of more than 6,000 individuals to assess the effectiveness of surgical face masks against SARS-CoV-2 infection found masks did not statistically significantly reduce the incidence of infection.”

The study concluded that wearing masks did not offer a very high level of personal protection to mask wearers in communities where wearing masks was not common practice. The study noted, however, that the data suggested masks provided some degree of self-protection.

We rate this claim Mostly False. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33205991/”

So, according to PolitiFact, masks provided self-protection, but not personal protection. An interesting concept. Note to self, try to find out the difference between these two things.

In fact, this was just one of hundreds of critical articles, with self-anointed fact checkers clearly desperate to pull it to pieces. Yes, we have now entered a world when political fact checkers feel free to attack and contradict the findings of scientific papers, using such scientific terms as ‘Mostly false.’ Maybe they should have called it ‘very unique’ at the same time. Or, like the curate’s egg, that was good in parts.

Ignoring the modern-day Spanish Inquisition, and their ill-informed criticisms, I will simply call this study. More evidence that face masks don’t work. Perhaps someone will come along with a study proving that face masks work. So far … nada. Another impossible thing.

4: As of the 2^nd March 2021 there have been 122,953 deaths from COVID19 in the UK.

Unlike many people I have actually written COVID19 on death certificates. Mostly they have been educated guesses. On at least five of them, early last year, there had been no positive swab to go on. So, I was just going on probable symptoms. As were many other doctors at the time.

Which means that you can take five off that number for starters. Although, of course, once written, that is very much, that … when it comes to death certificates. In fact, early on in the pandemic, we were probably underdiagnosing as often as over diagnosing deaths from COVID19. Although no-one will ever know. With no positive swab – and few swabs were being done – and almost no post-mortems – you were simply guessing.

As for now … NOW we have the very strange concept that any death within twenty-eight days of a positive COVID19 swab is recorded as a COVID19 death. Simultaneously, I am told that if I have a positive test at work, and then take some time off work (I can never remember the latest guidance). I am not to have another swab for ninety days.

How so? Because it now seems (I actually knew this a long time ago), that swabs can remain positive for months after the infection has been and gone [or was maybe never there to begin with]. Or to put this another way, you can have a positive swab long after you have been infected – and recovered. There are just some bits of virus up your nose that can be magnified, through the wonders of the PCR test, into a positive result.

Which means that an elderly person, infected months ago, can be admitted to hospital for any reason whatsoever. The they can have a positive swab – everyone is swabbed. Then they can die, from whatever it was they were admitted for in the first place. Then, they will be recorded as a COVID19 death.

In truth, this is just the start of impossible things when it comes to the number of COVID19 deaths. Do not get me started on PCR cycle numbers, and false positives. We would be here all day.

Equally, how many people have truly died of COVID19, instead of simply with COVID19? If I painted a blue circle on your forehead, then you died, I would not say that you died of a blue circle painted on your forehead. I would say that you died with a blue circle painted on your forehead.

5: The Swedish COVID-19 Response Is a Disaster. It Shouldn’t Be a Model for the Rest of the World

This was actually the headline title from an article in TIME magazine. The article went on to state that ‘The Swedish way has yielded little but death and misery. And this situation has not been honestly portrayed to the Swedish people or to the rest of the world.’  https://time.com/5899432/sweden-coronovirus-disaster/

Death and misery. Hmmmm, I might make this the title of my next book. Bound to be a best seller.

Yes, Sweden has been attacked from all sides with terrific venom, for holding out against imposing severe lockdown. How dare they… follow the WHO’s initial advice. That everyone else ignored.

So, have they done well with regard to COVID19 deaths? Not particularly. Have they done badly?Not particularly. On Worldometer they rank twenty fourth highest for deaths per million of the population. Which is pretty much bang on average for Western Europe.

One reason why they might not have appeared to do better is that, in the year 2019, they had their lowest rate of death for at least ten years. Three and a half thousand less in total than in 2018 https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ . In Norway, a country  used to beat Sweden with, due to their very low COVID19 deaths there was no difference in death rate between 2018 and 2019. To be blunt, the elderly population in Sweden had some catching up to do.

Once you factor this in, the much-lauded difference in deaths, between Norway and Sweden, kind of disappears.

‘Our study shows that all-cause mortality was largely unchanged during the epidemic as compared to the previous four years in Norway and Sweden, two countries which employed very different strategies against the epidemic. Excess mortality from COVID-19 may be less pronounced than previously perceived in Sweden, and mortality displacement might explain part of the observed findings.’ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v1.full

In absolute figures. Sweden had

• 92,185 deaths in 2018
• 88,766 deaths in 2019
• 97,941 deaths in 2020

A drop, then a rebound. Perhaps another way to look at the figures is to compare 2020 with a bad Swedish year in the past. In 2012, 91,938 people died. However, the population was lower at 9.5 million vs 10.2 million. So:

• The absolute death rate in 2012 was 0.957%.
• The absolute death rate in 2020 was 0.969%.

The difference between 2012 and 2020 is 0.012%. That is 120 extra deaths per million of the population, which is 1,224 people in population of 10.2 million. The statistics tell us that twelve thousand people died from COVID19 in Sweden. Maybe you can make all that add up. Frankly, I find it impossible.

6: Lockdowns have worked.

Before COVID19 came along, no country had ever attempted a lockdown – ever. So, no-one had any idea if such a thing could possibly work. There was no evidence, from anywhere, to support its use.

It was the Chinese who started it, and who claimed great success for their jackboot lockdown tactics. Well, they convinced me… not. Frankly, if I had to choose a country from which to obtain high quality, unbiased information, about anything, China would not feature in my top one hundred and ninety-four countries

But there you go, lockdown worked under the control of the kind and caring CCP. Hoorah, cheering all round, and the first person to stop cheering gets shot. Well, we don’t want any damned nay-sayers, do we? After that, according to almost everything I have read, everywhere, it worked for everyone else too. Remarkable.

Yes, it is certainly true you can find countries that locked down, closed their borders, and kept the rates low. That, however, is not proof of anything at all. The scientific method requires a little more rigour than this.

In fact, the main thing that scientific rigour requires is that you specifically do not go around looking for facts that support your hypothesis. Because that, I am afraid, is the exact opposite of science. What you need to do, instead, is to go around looking for facts that disprove your hypothesis. This is what Karl Popper called falsification.

For example, my hypothesis is that “all swans are white”. I seek, and find, only white swans. So, this makes my hypothesis is correct? No. What science requires you do is to hunt tirelessly for black swans. If you never find one, fine. However, you need to be aware that the moment you do, your hypothesis has just been disproven. In real life things are very rarely as simple as this, but that is the basic principle.

However, with lockdown (and I recognise that no two countries locked down in the same way) the hypothesis is that countries which did not lockdown will have higher rate of death for COVID19 than those that did.

So, let us look, first, at the countries with the highest rate of COVID19. Excluding very small countries e.g., San Marino, or Gibraltar, we have, in descending order of deaths per million of the population https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ .

• Czechia
• Belgium
• Slovenia
• UK
• Italy
• Montenegro
• Portugal
• USA
• Hungary
• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• North Macedonia
• Bulgaria
• Spain
• Mexico
• Peru
• Croatia
• Slovakia
• Panama
• France

Every single country in this list carried out fairly strict lockdowns. The UK, apparently, has the strictest lockdown in the world, this winter.

Four countries that have been roundly criticized for having far less restrictive lockdowns are: Sweden, Japan, Belarus and Nicaragua (Realistically there are others, in poorer countries, where lockdowns have not happened – because they can’t afford it)

In these four ‘non-lockdowns’ countries, the death rate is, on average 391 per million.

In the top twenty ‘lockdown’ countries, the death rate is, on average 1,520 per million.

The only non-lockdown country in the top ninety for death rates is Sweden. It comes just below France, at number twenty-four.

Now, if the difference between lockdown and non-lockdown countries were ten per cent, or even fifty per cent, I would fully accept that there are many other variables that could explain such finding away. Although, of course, we should really look at a higher rate in the non-lockdown countries, not a lower rate.

Yet although this evidence is out there, I am being asked to believe that lockdowns work. At least the WHO agrees with me on this impossible thing. As Dr David Nabarro, the WHO special envoy on COVID19 said:

“We really do appeal to all world leaders, stop using lockdown as your primary method of control,” he said.

“Lockdowns have just one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-12/world-health-organization-coronavirus-lockdown-advice/12753688

Lockdowns, according to the WHO, in unguarded moments, have just one consequence. They make poor people an awful lot poorer.

‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If this is granted all else follows.’

17th February 2021

I have spent large chunks of my life trying to untangle medial data and research. COVID19 has long since defeated me. I have been unable to make any sense of the information we are bombarded with daily. So, I decided to go back to basics.

At the start of the COVID19 saga, I was interested to know what the infection fatality rate (IFR) was likely to be. I felt I could then have a go at comparing it to other diseases, primarily influenza.

The infection fatality is the number of people infected with the virus who then die. This is very different to the case fatality rate (CFR), which is the number of people infected with the disease who become unwell enough (sometimes, but not always) to be admitted to hospital – the ‘cases’. Who then die.

Before COVID19 appeared, there used to be a reasonably clear distinction between the infection fatality rate (IFR), and the case fatality fate (CFR) and it is important that they should not get mixed up. Because the case fatality rate is almost always far higher than the infection fatality rate – as you would expect. People who are ill enough to go into hospital are far more likely to die than people who do not suffer any symptoms. Bear this in mind.

Another thing to bear in mind is that, at the start of any epidemic it is simpler to establish the case fatality rate, because most people who are seriously ill end up in hospital and/or will have tests to see if they have the disease in question. Those with no symptoms may never cross the path of a medical professional and are very unlikely to be tested.

What is the ratio between the two? It depends on the virus. With Ebola the infection fatality rate and case fatality rate are closely matched – more than fifty per cent of people who are infected, die. With the common ‘coronavirus’ cold, the spread is far wider, maybe a hundred to one, or a thousand to one – perhaps more.

The fact that most infections are never noted, is one of the reasons why the infection fatality rate for previous flu epidemics can vary so wildly from paper to paper. However, with influenza the CFR/IFR ratio has generally been estimated to be about ten to one. By which I mean that, for each ten infections, one will be severe, and it is amongst the severe infections that you get the deaths.

Armed with such knowledge, and assuming COVID19 had a similar case: infection ratio to influenza you could have a go at working out the infection fatality rate. Always bearing in mind that people with no symptoms, who are not tested, are very unlikely to appear in any figures.

You are always guessing – to some degree or another.  

However, you always know three things:

1: The infection fatality rate must always be lower than the case fatality rate.

2: The case fatality rate will appear to fall as less severely infected people are tested.

3: The infection fatality rate will also appear to fall as more people with no symptoms are found to have had the infection.

For example, in China, at the start of the COVID19 pandemic, the infection fatality rate was reported to be three to four per-cent. This rapidly fell. Then it went up a bit, then it fell, then it went up. Then, everyone started giving different figures. The highly influential Imperial College group, led by Professor Neil Ferguson, decided to use an infection fatality rate of 0.9% for their modelling.

Somewhat later on, John Ioannidis, an influential figure in the world of medical research, estimated the infection fatality rate to be 0.27%. This was a couple of months after the Imperial College figure was published ¹.

Peter Gotzsche, who established the highly regarded Nordic Cochrane collaboration, put the figure even lower than this. He looked at a study in Denmark, where blood donors were tested for antibodies. Using these data, the researchers established an infection fatality rate of 0.16% ². Other figures came in higher, some lower.

The most tested population in the World – per head of population – is Iceland. Last time I looked, Iceland had 6,033 ‘cases,’ and twenty-nine deaths. This represents a case fatality rate of 0.5%, which suggests an infection fatality rate of 0.05% ³.

However, these figures I am quoting from Iceland come from a time after everything changed. At some point, difficult to put an exact date on this, it was decreed that if you had a positive PCR COVID19 test, with or without symptoms, you were to be defined as a case. No matter if you had symptoms, or not. This had the result of making the infection fatality rate, and case fatality rate, the same thing. Suddenly, all cases are infections, and all infections are cases.

Which means that any comparisons of the infection fatality rate with COVID19, and other diseases became virtually meaningless. The infection fatality rate suddenly shot up to match the case fatality rate, which point I gave up trying to work out the infection fatality rate. I doubly gave up when I tried to find out the accuracy of the PCR tests. Were these tests over-diagnosing, or under-diagnosing?

So, I thought I would turn my attention to the population fatality rate instead. That is, how many people has COVID19 killed in a population, or country. This figure is the bald, unvarnished, death rate. It does not, necessarily, tell you how many people have been infected. It does not tell you the percentage of cases, that die. It simply tells you how many people have died… with COVID19 written somewhere on their death certificate. [Or even not written on their death certificate]

At present, in the UK, the total number who have died is one hundred and seventeen thousand. This represents a population death rate of 0.17%. if you knew how many people had been infected, in total, you could work out the infection fatality rate from this. But we don’t know how many people were infected, and now we never will. Because so many people are now being vaccinated. They will show antibodies, and it will not be known if that is because of an infection, or due to vaccination.

So, where to turn to next. If you look at the entire world, the current figure of COVID19 deaths, on the fourteenth of February, stood at 2,406,689 ³. Which is a little over one in three thousand, or 0.033%. How many people in the world have been infected? Nobody knows that answer to this question. There are some countries that have done very little testing, others far more.

On the basis that there are so many questions, with very few clear-cut answers, I thought I would try to compare the two point four million figure with previous influenza epidemics.

A study was done in 2016, looking at the influenza epidemic of 1957 – one of the worst in recent history. They extrapolated the mortality figures from 1957 to 2005, because the World’s population doubled during that time period (I am not entirely sure why they chose 2005). Their conclusion was that a flu epidemic of similar magnitude to that of 1957 could kill two point seven million people.

‘In conclusion, our study fills a gap in the availability of global mortality estimates for historical influenza pandemics, which can help guide pandemic planning. Our model extrapolates 2.7 million influenza-related deaths (95% CI, 1.6 million–3.4 million deaths) should a virus of similar severity to the 1957 pandemic influenza A(H2N2) virus return in the 2005 population, which is intermediate between global estimates for the 2009 pandemic (0.3 million–0.4 million deaths and a devastating 1918-like pandemic (62 million deaths; range, 51 million–81 million deaths)’ ⁴.

Extrapolating onwards to 2020, where the population is significantly greater than in 2005, then the figure from the 1957 epidemic would now be just over three million deaths. Which means that, up to this point COVID19 has been thirty per-cent less deadly than the influenza epidemic of 1957 – per head of population.

If the Imperial College infection fatality rate of 0.9% is accurate, once around eighty per cent of the world’s population has been infected [at which point population wide immunity would be reached] we should see fifty-four million deaths. We are currently nowhere near that figure, and at the current rate of deaths, per year, it will take twenty-two and a half years to reach the fifty-four million figure.

Of course, people will argue that this outbreak is far from over, and millions more will certainly die. Yes, more people will die, but the current number of new cases and deaths is falling pretty rapidly worldwide, rather than rising. We may reach three million, we may not. It is exceedingly hard to believe we would ever have reached fifty-four million even without any vaccines.

So, how deadly is COVID19? It seems, so far, to be equivalent to a bad flu pandemic. Worse than most in recent times. However, it seems to have had an extremely variable impact.

In Singapore, there have been nearly sixty thousand ‘cases’ and twenty-nine deaths. A case fatality rate of around one in two thousand, or 0.02%. The UK has had four million cases and one hundred and seven thousand deaths. A case fatality rate of 3%. Therefore, if you get COVID19 you are one hundred and fifty times more likely to die of it in the UK, than in Singapore ³.

Yes, I went back to basics and the figures still didn’t make any sense.

1: https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf

2: https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4509/rr

3: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

4: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4747626/

27th January 2021

This blog was published on RT-com, after much discussion and a few changes. It can be seen here  It took a few days. The editors were concerned about the fact-checkers having a go at it and demanding retraction.

We went back and forward. I assured them that all my quoted facts were correct, so the fact-checkers could only attack the ‘opinion’ stated. Which they may well do. If so, fact checkers are no longer checking facts, they are decreeing which scientific opinions are correct, and which are wrong.

Which puts them in a very dangerous place indeed. We do not know who the fact checkers are, we do not know how much they are paid, we do not know what editorial control is exerted over them. We know nothing about them, yet their pronouncements are decreed final on all matters.

This is the recreation of Soviet show trials of another era. “We know you are guilty, you will be found guilty, all that is required of you is that you admit your guilt. We, the judges in this case, however, are subject to no control, no-one can find us in the wrong, or punish us in any way.”

Anyway, the main concerns of Russia Today were that I did not look at enough variable factors. What about population density? What about secondary lockdowns etc. I replied it was impossible to assess all variables fully. I sat and thought about the confounding variables inherent in lockdown, that you would probably need to include in any study on them:

Number of tests carried out
False positives
False negatives
How deaths are recorded/validated
Population density
Percentage of population living in cities [not the same as population density]
Population density within cities
Number of single person households
Average age of population
Age distribution
Percentage of ethnic minorities
Primary ethnicity of population
Number of people with multimorbidity’s
ICU beds per head of population
Time of first lockdown
Time of relaxation of first lockdown
How well lockdown measures were followed.
Time of second lockdown
Restrictions within lockdowns curfews etc.
Test and trace set-up
Vitamin D levels
Northern or Southern hemisphere
Strain 1 COVID
Strain 2 COVID
Strain 3 COVID
Air pollution
Main method of commuting, underground, buses etc.

That’s just for starters.

The total number of interactions between these twenty-seven factors is twenty-seven factorial 27 x 26 x 25….x 3 x 2 x 1

Which is …

10,888,869,450,418,352,160,768,000,000 possible interactions.

So, if anyone says you have not taken the interactions of all variables into account, you can say that this is – effectively – impossible. Perhaps they would like to demonstrate they have done so.

I also pointed out I was not the only person to believe that lockdowns had little, or no effect on transmission rates and death from COVID. Here is part of an article from South Africa, based on the paper ‘COVID-19 in South Africa’

The article was published on Prevention Web:

Lockdown didn’t work in South Africa: why it shouldn’t happen again

By Benjamin T H Smart, Alex Broadbent and Herkulaas MvE Combrink

At the start of October, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Chinese government lauded South Africa’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Yet data concerning both the spread of the virus and the indirect consequences of the lockdown suggest that the severe restrictions imposed in South Africa – some of the strictest in the world – were far from effective.

We recently reviewed the evidence for the effectiveness of the lockdown at slowing the spread of the pandemic. The mitigation strategies initially implemented may well have gone some way to “flattening-the-curve” – that is, reducing the rate at which the virus spreads through the population. But we found no decline in either daily new cases or deaths between around 27 March, which was the first day of level 5; and the latter part of July, when cases began to tail off during level 3.

Lockdown level 5 in South Africa was one of the world’s strictest. Citizens weren’t allowed to leave their residence except for essential purposes such as grocery shopping and medical care. All non-essential businesses were shut down, and cigarette and alcohol sales were banned.

If this “hard lockdown” had been effective, the rate of infection would have dropped significantly 7-14 days after lockdown was implemented. Note that one must look for a delay due to the disease’s 5-6 day average incubation period, and time for test results to be released. This simply did not happen.

Of course, the number of cases did increase over time, but what counts is whether the rate of increase changed when lockdowns changed. We found no such changes. As lockdown restrictions were relaxed and South Africa entered levels 4 and 3, when much of the economy re-opened and restrictions on movement were substantially reduced, there was no increase in the rate of infection.

In fact, during level 3, the pandemic peaked. And as the country entered level 2, the pandemic started to recede. If lockdown regulations were having the intended effect, one would expect the rate of infection to spike as restrictions were relaxed. This did not happen…..

Here is the article that first appeared in RT-com:

The scientific evidence so far on COVID lockdowns suggests that they don’t work – and may actually increase the death rate

We are being told that lockdowns halt the spread of the infection, but where’s the proof? The places with the worst death rates all followed that path – and the ones who didn’t have generally fared better. 

‘Paradoxically, human beings, when compelled to act, learn to justify a chosen course with an assurance unwarranted by the evidence for the course chosen.’ Bernard Lown.

I have studied the history of medicine, and medical interventions, for many years. The most extreme disasters have always followed a fairly distinct pattern. A series of steps, if you like.

Step one = we have a serious disease that is killing lots of people.

Step two = it creates great fear, and the medical profession has nothing much in place to deal with it.

Step three = a charismatic leader emerges to decree that he (almost always a ‘he’ up to now) knows how to treat it/control it, etc. This is ‘the idea’.

Step four = The ‘idea’ is enthusiastically taken up around the world and becomes mainstream thinking.

Step five = the ‘idea’ becomes standard practice.

Step six – the ‘idea’ is taught to medics and becomes accepted truth, a fact.

Step six = anyone who goes against the ‘idea’ is ruthlessly attacked.

There is always, of course, the possibility that the ‘idea’ is the best thing to do. This happens from time to time. However, there seems to be little or no correlation between the enthusiasm, and speed, with which ideas are taken up, and the likelihood they are correct.

The problem, as I came to recognise, lies between step two and step four. By which I mean that a charismatic figure convinces everyone that they have the answer, before there is any evidence to support it. The person may not be charismatic, simply someone who has the ability to grab attention and push the ‘idea’ forward. Such as the Chinese Premier.

Another thing that leads to disaster, which is perhaps of even greater importance, is that the ‘idea’ must sound like the most obvious common sense. It should trigger a response along the lines of ‘Yes, of course, that sounds perfectly reasonable’. Once that’s been achieved, the ‘idea’ drops neatly into people’s minds, settles down, and grows roots, creating not a ripple of cognitive dissonance.

At which point it cements itself in, and becomes difficult, even painful, to remove.

To quote the film Inception: ‘What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed – fully understood – that sticks; right in there somewhere.’

We love ideas, they make us who we are. We defend them, sometimes with our very lives.

“Why do people insist on defending their ideas and opinions with such ferocity, as if defending honour itself? What could be easier to change than an idea?” J.G. Farrell.

So, yes, I have no illusions about the strength of ideas. They are so powerful, and so dangerous that you must be very careful where you aim them. Because ideas also have a God-like power, which is that they are immortal.

The damage inflicted by medical ideas

You can kill a person who holds an idea. You can kill thousands of people who hold the same idea – but you cannot kill that idea. Unless you kill every single person who believes in it, then wipe it from the historical record, so that no-one can ever think it again. See 1984.

I will give you a couple of examples of horribly damaging medical ideas. The first is the radical mastectomy. An idea first driven by William Halsted, a US surgeon from the end of the nineteenth century. He believed, as did almost everyone else at the time, that breast cancer spread locally – as did all cancers. Therefore, anything located anywhere near the cancer had to be cut away in case it had already been polluted.

With a radical mastectomy the entire breast, the other breast, muscles on the chest wall, lymph nodes, more muscles were cut out. Almost anything that could be removed without actually killing the women in the process.

The mutilated women were immensely grateful, and the surgeons proud of their expertise. They were doing a good thing, because the idea was considered to be inarguably correct. Questioning it was to be met with the response like, ‘Do you want these women to die – you heartless swine?’

Except that it wasn’t correct. Breast cancer does not spread locally. At least, when it does, it does so very slowly. The spread that causes problems, and kills women, is not local. Cancer cells get into the lymphatic system, and the bloodstream, and spread widely around the body, very early on. Often, long before the primary cancer can be detected.

Those who questioned the radical mastectomy, were attacked. Geoffrey Keynes, brother of John Maynard, tried less radical surgery in the 1920s. It did not go down well:

‘Halsted’s followers in America ridiculed this approach, and came up with the name “lumpectomy” to call the local surgery. In their minds, the surgeon was simply removing “just” a lump, and this did not make much sense. They were aligning themselves with the paradigm of Radical Mastectomy. In fact, some of the surgeons even went further to come up with “superradical” and “ultraradical” procedures that were morbidly disfiguring procedures where the breast, underlying muscles, axillary nodes, the chest wall, and occasionally the ribs, part of the sternum, the clavicle and the lymph nodes inside the chest were removed. The idea of “more was better” became prevalent.’

More is better… this is another of the deadly repeating themes of ‘the idea.’ The idea can never be wrong, it is just that people are not doing with sufficient vigour. If women are still dying from metastatic breast cancer, even after radical mastectomies (and they were), the answer could not possibly be that the procedure doesn’t work. The answer is that we are not being radical enough: ‘Hack away more, and then more.’

 ‘I was greeted with hands stretched out in a Nazi salute’

Another big medical idea is that of bed rest following a heart attack. It was thought, at one time, that all heart attacks were fatal. James Herrick, another US doctor, described the first non-fatal heart attack in 1912, then suggested that following such an attack, strict bed rest was important. This would take pressure off the heart and allow it a chance to heal. Again, this sounds perfectly reasonable. As described by Dr Bernard Lown, a professor of cardiology and the developer of the  defibrillator:

“To a medical novice like me, the justification for enforced bed rest was persuasive. It was based on a sacrosanct therapeutic principle, the need to rest a diseased body part, be it a fractured limb or a tuberculosis-affected lung. Unlike a broken bone, which could be immobilized in a cast, or a lung lobe, which could be collapsed by inflating the chest cavity with air, the heart could not be cradled into quietude. The only approximation for a diseased heart was to diminish its workload. It was long known that during recumbency the heart rate slows and blood pressure drops, both indices of less oxygen usage and therefore of decreased cardiac work. Heart rest was therefore equated with bed rest.”

And so it became standard practice. It was simply what you did:

“Patients were confined to strict bed rest for four to six weeks. Sitting in a chair was prohibited. They were not allowed to turn from side to side without assistance. During the first week, they were fed. Moving their bowels and urinating required a bedpan. For the constipated, which included nearly every patient, precariously balancing on a bedpan was agonizing as well as embarrassing.

“Because world events might provoke unease, some physicians prohibited their patients from listening to the radio or reading a newspaper. Visits by family members were limited. Since recumbency provoked much restiveness and anxiety, patients required heavy sedation, which contributed to a pervasive sense of hopelessness and depression. Around one in three patients died.”

Bed rest started as a relatively mild thing. However, as it is with almost all things, it became increasingly ‘radical’. Lown, along with his mentor Dr Samuel Levine, tried to change this. He became involved in trying to get patients up out of bed to sit in a chair:

“Little did I realize that violating firmly held traditions can raise a tsunami of opposition. The idea of moving critically ill patients into a chair was regarded as off‑the‑wall. Initially the house staff refused to cooperate and strenuously resisted getting patients out of bed. They accused me of planning to commit crimes not unlike those of the heinous Nazi experimentations in concentration camps. Arriving on the medical ward one morning I was greeted by interns and residents lined up with hands stretched out in a Nazi salute and a “Heil Hitler!” shouted in unison.”

Step six = anyone who goes against the ‘idea’ is ruthlessly attacked

No evidence, no problem

Then, among all the other problems with ‘the idea’, between steps two and three, is one that I have not yet mentioned. It is that no study is ever done to find out if the idea works, or not. It is just conceived to be so obviously beneficial, such common sense, that there would be no point in wasting time and resources trying to prove it works.

No-one ever did a study to find out if the radical mastectomy improved survival. No-one ever did a study to prove that bed rest saved lives. They were both introduced on the back of absolutely nothing. In time, eventually, the folly of both was finally recognised. It took seventy years for radical mastectomy, fifty for bed rest.

Which takes us to lockdowns. The most expensive, invasive, and potentially destructive medical intervention ever attempted by humanity.  Was there any evidence from anywhere, in history, that lockdowns would work? No, there was none. But we have the six steps on full display here.

Step one = we have a serious disease that is killing lots of people – check.

Step two = it creates great fear, and the medical profession has nothing in place to deal with it – check.

Step three = a charismatic leader emerges to decree that he (almost always a ‘he’ up to now) knows how to treat it/control it etc. This is the ‘idea’ – check.

Step four = The ‘idea’ is enthusiastically taken up around the world and becomes ‘mainstream thinking’ – check.

Step five = the ‘idea’ becomes standard practice – check.

Step six – the ‘idea’ is taught to medics and becomes accepted truth, a fact – check.

Step six = anyone who goes against the ‘idea’ is ruthlessly attacked – check.

Does it work – have lockdowns worked? You can pick and choose countries to support the case that it does and dismiss any evidence you don’t much like. Unfortunately, once you introduce a medical intervention that affects everyone, everywhere, you have lost the possibility of carrying out a controlled experiment of any sort.

Despite the lack of any randomised evidence, most people are absolutely convinced that lockdowns work to control the spread of COVID-19. They point to various countries, e.g. New Zealand, Norway, Australia and Taiwan, to prove their case. They always have a ready explanation as to why countries that underwent lockdown still have high death rates and vice-versa.

The ‘idea’ has become the truth. Its proponents now demand that those who doubt the efficacy of lockdowns prove that they don’t work. However, I don’t believe it’s up to those who don’t believe that lockdowns work, to prove that case.

The starting point, for any scientific hypothesis, is for the proponents to disprove the null hypothesis. Demanding that those who believe something may not work, to prove that it doesn’t, is to turn the scientific method upside down. You can never prove a negative.

The null hypothesis, by the way, is that there is no difference between two things. Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) in medicine are designed to prove, statistically, that there is an actual difference between doing A or B. This is how science is done, how research is done.

We must look carefully at the death rates

Unfortunately, it is not possible to do a controlled trial with COVID-19. The possibility of doing any randomised study was lost very early on. Which means that we are forced to rely, instead, on observational studies. We can look at country X, that did Y, and see how it compares with country Z that did not do Y.

Or we can look at two countries that did Y, to see how they compare. Or two countries that did not do Y. With COVID, of course, no two countries did exactly the same thing. Not even the four ‘countries’ within the UK. So any observations become more difficult to rely on due to this ‘confounding variable’.

In some UK countries, six people could meet up, in others it was eight, or two households, or only one household etc. In some, restaurants were open, in others they were shut – at varying times. From a scientific perspective, it’s a mess.

Anyway, to simplify things, let’s look at the 10 countries around the world with the highest death rate from COVID. That is, deaths per million population (I have left out countries with population of less than one million, such as Monaco, or Liechtenstein, or Andorra because a few deaths here or there can distort the death rate considerably)

What did they do differently, what did they do the same? Looking only at first lockdown dates:

Belgium first locked down on March 18^th, 2020.

Slovenia first locked down on March 20^th, 2020.

Czechia first locked down on March 16^th, 2020.

The UK first locked down March 23^rd, 2020.

Bosnia-Herzegovina first locked down March 16^th, 2020.

Italy first locked down March 9^th, 2020.

North Macedonia first locked down March 18^th, 2020.

The USA is highly federal and different states took different approaches – seven states did not issue lockdown orders: Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. In those seven states the death rate from COVID averaged at 1,280 per million vs. 1,254 as the US average.

In comparison, New Jersey first locked down March 21^st, 2020, and its current death rate is 2,310 per million. New York locked down on March 12^th – its current death rate is 2,130 per million. These states have the highest COVID related deaths in the US.

Bulgaria first locked down on March 13^th, 2020.

Hungary first locked down on March 28^th, 2020.

All countries locked down, Italy first, Hungary last.  As you can see, the date of first lockdown is unrelated to the death rate. The other stand out facts are that these are all ‘European’ countries. All with majority Caucasian populations. They are all in the Northern hemisphere.

If I were thinking of running a clinical trial where the hypothesis was that a lockdown was the best way to prevent deaths from COVID, then I would start by looking at observational data such as this.

I would find that the ten countries in the world with the highest death rates all locked down at similar times, with similar restrictions.

I would look at the US where the death rate in states that locked down, and those that did not, were almost the same rate (or vastly higher in the cases of New Jersey and New York), and I would conclude that the observational studies had – thus far – failed to disprove the null hypothesis. In fact, the evidence up to this point could suggest that lockdowns may actually increase the death rate.

In short, I would look for another idea.

30th December 2020

I have not written much about COVID19 recently. What can be said? In my opinion the world has simply gone bonkers. The best description can be found in Dante’s Inferno, written many hundreds of years ago.

In it, Dante describes the outcasts, who took no side in the rebellion of angels. They live in the vestibule. Not in heaven, not in hell, forever unclassified. They reside on the shores of the Acheron. Naked and futile, they race around through a hellish mist in eternal pursuit of an elusive, wavering banner, symbolic of their pursuit of ever-shifting self-interest.

I find this description of the desperate pursuit of an elusive wavering banner rings rather true. This, it seems, is pretty much the place we have arrived at. Which banner have you decided to follow?

The ‘COVID19 s the most terrible infection ever, and we must do everything in our power to stop it, whatever the cost’ banner.

Or the ‘What on earth are we doing? This is no worse than a bad flu, and we are destroying the world economy, stripping away basic human rights and killing more people than we are saving’ banner.

There may be others.

Between these two, main, completely incompatible positions, lies the truth. It is in pretty poor shape. It has been crushed, and bent out of shape, smashed, and left as a broken heap in the corner. I search where I can, to find the fragments, in an attempt to bring together a picture that makes some kind of sense.

But what to believe? Who to believe?

I feel somewhat like Rene Descartes. In order to find the ineluctable truth he scraped everything away until he was left with ‘Cogito, ergo sum’. ‘I think, therefore I am.’

I have stripped away at the accuracy of PCR COVID19 testing. I found myself left with nothing I could make any sense of. I hacked down to establish the way that COVID19 deaths are recorded. All I found were assumptions and difficulties.

Did someone die with COVID19, of COVID19 – or did it have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with COVID19? Who knows? I certainly don’t, and I wrote some of the death certificates myself.

Have we overestimated deaths, or underestimated deaths? I do not know … and so it goes on.

So, what do I know? I know that COVID19 exists – or I am as certain of this as I can be. Was it a natural mutation from a bat, or was it created in a laboratory? Well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It’s here, and there is no chance that any Government, anywhere, would ever admit responsibility for creating the damned thing. So, we will never know. If you asked me to bet, I would say it was created in a lab, then escaped by accident.

Is it deadlier than influenza? Well, it is certainly deadlier than some strains of influenza. Indeed, most strains. However, Spanish flu was estimated to have killed fifty million, when the world’s population was about a fifth of what it is now. So, COVID19 is definitely less deadly than that one. About as deadly as the influenzas of 1957 and 1967. Probably.

Will it mutate into something worse? Who knows.

Will the current vaccines work on mutated strains? Who knows.

Can it be transmitted by asymptomatic carriers? Who knows.

How effective are the current vaccines going to be? Who knows.

What are we left with?

At the beginning, I kept relatively quiet on how deadly COVID19 would prove to be. Because I didn’t know. The figures raged up and down. The infection fatality rate become a battle scene, with warriors lined up on either side to defend their positions.

I even got attacked by factcheckers, the self-appointed know-it-alls who are, it seems, capable of judging on all matters of scientific dispute. Truly, the Gods have descended to live amongst us. Those who can determine what is true, and what is not. No need for any further clinical trials, or any more scientific studies of any sort, ever. We just need to ask the Fact Checkers for the answer, to any given question.

Anyway, it appeared that tens of thousands died in some countries, almost none in others. What I was waiting to see, was the impact on the one outcome that you cannot alter, or fudge. The outcome that is overall mortality i.e. the chances of dying, of anything.

I did this because, when it comes to recording deaths from a specific illness, things can go in and out of fashion. A couple of years ago I looked at deaths from sepsis. At one time this was a condition of far lower priority. Doctors didn’t routinely search for it, or routinely record it, on death certificates.

Sepsis is an infection that gets into the blood, toxins are released, and people die. Everyone knew it happened. Or at least I hope they did.

Then, all of a sudden, there was a gigantic push to look for it more diligently, diagnose it more, treat it better. I think this was generally a good thing. Sepsis is eminently treatable, if you think to look for it, and lives can be saved. We now have initiatives like ‘Sepsis six’ and warnings that pop up on computers. ‘Have you considered sepsis,’ and suchlike. I love it … not. Because I do not love being told how to think, and do my job, by a computer algorithm programmed with ‘zero risk’ as their touchstone. But, hey ho.

In 2013, in the UK, a report was published by the health ombudsman ‘Time to Act – severe sepsis, rapid diagnosis and treatment saves lives.’ As the report stated.

‘Sepsis is a more common reason for hospital admission than heart attack – and has a higher mortality.’ The UK Sepsis Trust ¹

That last statement is somewhat disingenuous, as many people with sepsis are very elderly, often with multiple morbidities, and suchlike. They were probably going to die, shortly, from something else.

Anyway. With all this activity, with all this increased sepsis recognition and treatment, you would expect the rate of deaths from sepsis to fall. It did not. The rate has gone up, by around 30% since 2013. Does this mean there is far more sepsis going about? Or, that it is just more often written on death certificates? I suggest the latter. I use this example, simply to make it clear that even the cause of death written on a death certificate is far from rock solid evidence.

With COVID19, this is a massive problem. In the UK, and several other countries if you have had a COVID19 positive test (which may, or may not, be accurate) and you die within twenty-eight days of that positive test, you will be recorded as a COVID19 death. I do not know much for sure about COVID19, but I do know that is just complete nonsense.

There are so many cases where – even if the COVID19 test was accurate – COVID19 would have had nothing whatsoever to do with the death. Another thing known, or at least we probably know, is that the vast majority of people who die had many other things wrong with them.

In the US, the Centre of Disease Control (CDC) found that ninety-four per cent of people who died of COVID19 ‘related deaths’ had other significant diseases (co-morbidities) ².  This ninety-four per-cent figures would only be the co-morbidities that were known about – who knows what lurked beneath? Especially as people stopped doing post-mortems (i.e., autopsies in the US).

So yes, they had COVID19 (or at least they had a positive test – which may not be the same thing), but they were often very old, and already severely ill. Using an extreme example, someone with terminal cancer who is a week from death, catches COVID19 in hospital, and dies. What killed them? The statistics say COVID19. I say, bollocks.

When I started in medicine, ‘bronchopneumonia’ (a bad chest infection) used to be known as the ‘old man’s friend.’ For those who were very old, and frail, often demented, lying in care homes, often incontinent, a chest infection represented a reasonably painless way to die.

Very often we would not actively treat it, instead we allowed for a peaceful death. Indeed, this still happens. Less so now, as someone, somewhere, often a relative from a country far, far, away – who has not visited for years – is far more likely to sue you.

Did they really die of bronchopneumonia? You could argue yes, you could argue no. Yes, it was the thing that finally pushed them over the edge. No, they were already slowly dying as their body gave out. In the end, what does anyone actually die of? My Scottish grannie, who lived to one hundred and two, used to say ‘they die frae want of breath.’ Entirely accurate, but, alas, also completely useless.

So, what you need to do, is look beyond what is written on death certificates. You need to look at what is happening to the overall mortality. Whilst you can argue endlessly, pointlessly, about specific causes of death. What you cannot argue about is whether or not someone is alive, or dead. Even I usually get this one right. No pulse, no breathing, no reaction of the pupils to light, no response to pain… and suchlike. Yup, dead. Now… what they die of? Um… let me think.

Thus, I have tended to look to EuroMOMO. The European Mortality Monitoring project. As they say, of themselves:

‘The overall objective of the original European Mortality Monitoring Project was to design a routine public health mortality monitoring system aimed at detecting and measuring, on a real-time basis, excess number of deaths related to influenza and other possible public health threats across participating European Countries.

Mortality is a basic indicator of health. Therefore, understanding its epidemiology is fundamental for effective public health planning and action.

Mortality monitoring becomes pivotal during influenza or other pandemics for several reasons. In a severe pandemic, mortality monitoring can be a robust way to monitor the pandemics progression and its public health impact when other systems are failing, due to an overburdened health care sector. Decision makers will require data on the pandemics impact and on deaths by age and geographical area in various stages of the pandemic. Mortality monitoring can provide such estimates, which will be important to guide and prioritize health service response and decision-making, i.e. use of antivirals and vaccines.’ ³  

Here are the data that you can therefore, pretty much, fully rely on. It is where I go to see what is really happening across Europe. Not all of Europe, as some countries do not participate. However, there are more than enough, to get a good picture. It encompasses key countries such as Spain, Italy, the UK (split into four separate countries), Sweden and suchlike.

Here is the graph of overall mortality for all ages, in all countries. The graph starts at the beginning of 2017 and carries on to almost the end of 2020.

As you can see, in each winter there is an increase in deaths. In 2020, nothing much happened at the start of the year, then we had – what must have been – the COVID19 spike. The tall pointy bit around week 15.

It started in late March and was pretty much finished by mid-May. Now, we are in winter, and the usual winter spike appears. It seems to be around the same size as winter 2017/18. It also seems to have passed the peak and is now falling. But it could jump up again. [The figures in the most recent weeks can always be a bit inaccurate, as it can take some time for all the data to arrive]

Two things stand out. First, there was an obvious ‘COVID19 spike’. Second, what we are seeing at present does not differ greatly from previous years. The normal winter spike in deaths.

If we split this down into individual countries, this reasonably clear pattern falls apart.

Here are the figures from England

Unlike the first graph, the scale on the left is not absolute numbers. It is a thing called the Z-score. Which means standard deviation from the mean. Sorry, maths. If the Z-score goes above five, this means something significant is happening. The red, upper, dotted line is Z > 5. As you can see, despite the howls of anguish from England about COVID19 overwhelming the country, we are really not seeing much at all.

What of Sweden, that pariah country? They did not fully lock-down, the irresponsible fools (all they did was follow WHO guidance – by the way), and we are now told they are suffering terribly, they should have enforced far more rigid lockdown, their ‘experiment’ failed etc. etc. COVID19 shall have its vengeance. Or to quote Arnie – I’ll be back.

As you can see, nothing much happening in Sweden either.

Then, if you look further, there are anomalies all over the place. Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, and did exactly the same things as the rest of the UK with regard to lockdown, masks etc. At least it did in the earlier part of the year. However, it shows a completely different pattern to England. Or, to be fully accurate, it shows no pattern at all. No waves, and nobody drowning.

What of Slovenia?

As you can see absolutely nothing happened earlier in the year in Slovenia. Now, it has the biggest spike of all – apart from, maybe, Switzerland. Earlier in the year it was held up as a great example of how brilliantly effective masks were. Now… you don’t hear so much about masks. Maybe masks only work in months beginning with M. [Maybe, whisper it, they don’t work at all].

So, what have I learned from euroMOMO? First that it appears to have made absolutely no difference if a country locked down hard, and early, or did not. Everyone points at Norway and Finland as examples of great and early government action, and how wonderful everything would have been if we had done the same.

Well, look up at Northern Ireland. Then look at Finland

Spot the difference. There is none.

Of course, much of the most heated debate surrounded what happened during the so-called first wave. Who dealt with it well, or badly. Now, everyone in Europe is doing much the same things. Lockdown, restrictions on travel, restrictions on meeting other people, everyone wearing masks, etc. etc. Yet some countries are having a new wave, and others are not.

There is a special prize for anyone who can match up the severity of restrictions in various countries, to the Z-score. I say this, because no correlation exists.

So, again, what have I learned about COVID19? I learned that all Governments are floundering about, all claiming to have exerted some sort of control over this disease and ignoring all evidence to the contrary. In truth, they have achieved nothing. As restrictions and lockdowns have become more severe, in many cases the number of infections has simply risen and risen, completely unaffected by anything that has been done.

The official solution is, of course, more restrictions. ‘We just haven’t restricted people enough!’ Sigh. When something doesn’t work, the answer is not to keep doing it with even greater fervour. The real answer is to stop doing it and try something else instead.

I have also learned that, in most countries, COVID19 appears to be seasonal. It went away – everywhere – in the summer. It came back in the autumn/winter, as various viruses do.

On its return is has been, generally, far less deadly. Much you would expect. The most vulnerable died on first exposure, and far fewer people had any resistance to it, at all. Now, a number of people do have some immunity, and may of the vulnerable are already dead.

Which means that, in this so-called second wave COVID19 is of no greater an issue than a moderately bad flu season.

If I were to recommend actions. I would recommend that we stop testing – unless someone is admitted to hospital and is seriously ill. Mass testing is simply causing mass panic and achieves absolutely nothing. At great cost. We should also just get on with our lives as before. We should just vaccinate those at greatest risk of dying, the elderly and vulnerable, and put this rather embarrassing episode of mad banner waving behind us.

Hopefully, in time, we will learn something. Which is that we should not, ever, run about panicking, following the madly waved banners… ever again. However, I suspect that we will. This pandemic is going to be a model for all mass panicking stupidity in the future. Because to do otherwise, would be to admit that we made a pig’s ear of it this time. Far too many powerful reputations at stake to allow that.

1: https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/sites/default/files/Time_to_act_report.pdf

2: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm?fbclid=IwAR3-wrg3tTKK5-9tOHPGAHWFVO3DfslkJ0KsDEPQpWmPbKtp6EsoVV2Qs1Q&_ga=2.83596054.1497558416.1598967201-386365132.1598967194#Comorbidities

3: https://www.euromomo.eu/about-us/history/

28th November 2020

This YouTube interview is me, speaking to Ivor Cummins, and discussing many things COVID. Lockdown, the weird statistics, the absolute lack of any real science, the crushing of dissent, and suchlike.

I have known Ivor for years, as he has been a long-term critic of the dietary guidelines, and a fervent supporter of the low carbohydrate high fat (LCHF) diet as a way of treating type II diabetes.

I find it interesting that many of the people I know who are critical of the mainstream thinking on diet and heart disease also find themselves critical of the mainstream response to COVID. I like to think this means we are all highly intelligent, with a clear understanding of the scientific method. Maybe we are all just stroppy buggers, who like a bit of controversy. I think that is for others to decide.

Anyway, the interview is on YouTube, and can be found here

26th October 2020

[What is the true Infection Fatality Rate]

This article appeared in Russia Today https://www.rt.com/op-ed/504167-facebook-fact-checkers-censorship/ I have made a couple of small changes to it

Facebook fact checkers censured me, and informed me I was wrong, when I said COVID infection fatality rate was around 0.1%. But what do the latest studies say?

The world’s top scientists can’t yet be certain how deadly COVID-19 is, so why are Facebook’s censorial police consistently flagging stories saying this is ‘misinformation’ & claiming the rate is NINE times worse than my estimate?

COVID-19 has impacted the world with massive force, a pandemic beyond anything seen in living memory. There has been an unprecedented reaction – some would say an unprecedented over-reaction. But what are the real figures, what is the true risk from the virus?

It is very difficult to know. At the start of any pandemic, no-one can be sure how many people have been infected. As the World Health Organization states:

“Under-detection of cases may be exacerbated during an epidemic, when testing capacity may be limited and restricted to people with severe cases and priority risk groups (such as frontline healthcare workers, elderly people and people with comorbidities).”

As a general rule, the fatality rate starts by being significantly overestimated, and then falls, as more and more people are tested, and those with mild or asymptomatic infections are identified. With swine flu, the lowest estimated infection fatality rate – the total number of people who die after being infected, whether or not they suffered any symptoms – was one in a thousand, ten weeks into the pandemic. It ended up at 2 in 10,000. Five times lower.

A few weeks ago, I suggested the final infection rate from COVID-19 could be as low as 0.1%. By which I mean that out of every thousand people infected, one would die.

This created something of a storm and various self-appointed fact-checking ‘authorities’ decreed that this figure was completely wrong. Under the heading ‘What is the real death rate’ it was stated that:

“By looking at English data, it is clear that the death rate in this country must be much higher than 0.1%. The researchers who conducted the REACT-2 survey produced a more detailed analysis, which estimated an overall death rate that is nine times higher, at about 0.9%.”

Of course, this is important to get right. If the infection fatality rate is 0.1%, then the total number of deaths in the UK will top out at around 67,000. If it is 0.9%, the final death toll could be over 500,000, which means we have (potentially) another 450,000 deaths to go. Indeed, it is the fear of the ‘450,000’ figure that is driving the renewed lockdowns.

So, where do we stand now? The figures are still all over the place, with some perhaps more reliable than others. Interestingly, the WHO (perhaps inadvertently) estimated the infection at far lower than 0.9%

Around two weeks ago, Dr Mike Ryan, the executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies programme, stated the WHO estimated that 750 million people have been infected worldwide:

‘An estimated 750 million, or 10 per cent of the world’s population, have been infected by COVID-19, World Health Organisation (WHO) official Dr Mike Ryan has said.’

At the time of his statement, there had been just over one million deaths recorded worldwide (1,034,068 to be fully accurate). Using these two figures, the IFR can be easily calculated. It is 1,034,068/750,000,000 = 0.138%. How accurate is this figure? Well, who knows for certain? It is probably as accurate as most other current estimates.

Yet even using these WHO-endorsed figures is apparently verboten in the eyes of the Facebook ‘fact checkers’. Another site that reported these numbers also found its story flagged as “misinformation” by Facebook, and has subsequently accused the social media giant of “selling falsehoods and re-writing history”.

One wide-ranging piece of work, a review of 61 studies of COVID deaths covering 51 countries, was done recently by John Ioannidis, a professor of epidemiology at Stanford University, and a man described as “a lion of medical science”. The article, peer-reviewed and published by the WHO, concluded that the infection fatality rate currently stands at 0.23%, and suggested it would fall further, warning: “The inferred infection fatality rates tended to be much lower than estimates made earlier in the pandemic.”

Who would one rather believe on this matter? A Harvard-trained infectious disease specialist, author of some of the most cited articles in medical history, and a man who “The Atlantic” has called “one of the most influential scientists alive”? Or some ‘fact checkers’ who, I’m confidently guessing, don’t have quite such a track record or expertise?

It is true the fatality rates currently differ widely from country to country, influenced by other factors such as age and health. In Singapore, there have been nearly 60,000 ‘cases’ recorded, with twenty-eight deaths. This represents a case fatality rate of 0.02%.

As for Iceland, which was (proportionately) the most tested population in the world and used as a benchmark in the early days of the pandemic, things have moved on. As of late October, they have had just over 4,000 ‘cases’ of COVID19 and eleven deaths.

This represents a case fatality rate of 0.26%. You may have noticed my switch to case fatality rate. Case fatality rate means (or used to mean) those with symptoms of the disease, not just those infected. So, the case fatality rate will always be higher than the infection fatality rate, as the infection fatality rate includes those with no symptoms. Many of whom will be untested and undetected.

Another, more recent paper, by Prof. Ioannidis looking at the global Infection Fatality Rate came to the conclusion that it stood, as of October 7th, at 0.15‐0.20%.

Of course, this figure is for the entire population, including the elderly, and those at higher risk because they have other serious medical conditions. His latest estimate of the IFR in the population aged under 70 is 0.04%. Which is 4 in 10,000, and this figure includes people with serious underlying medical conditions.

What would it be for healthy people under 70? Almost certainly a lot less, but I have seen no good figures on this.

As is very clear, the figures have not yet settled down, and different countries have very different estimates. One constant thing though, as with previous pandemics, is the high fatality figures found at the start are steadily falling. The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford have been looking at the declining case fatality rates over time, and says:

“Crude estimates of the CFR over time show that for people aged 80 and over the average CFR was 29% up to week 18, fell to 17% in weeks 19 to 27, and for mid-July onwards the CFR was 11% – a decrease of 61%.

“A larger decrease is seen in the ages 60-79 with average CFR ~ 9% in March/April falling to 2% in July August.”

Of course, it is up the individual to decide which figures they believe to be the most accurate. This is an area where the science is clearly not yet settled. Different authorities are claiming very different fatality rates. But – despite what Facebook’s ‘fact checkers’ maintain – very few researchers currently appear to believe the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is anywhere near 0.9%.

What about those who believe that they can determine what the infection fatality rate for COVID19 really is, and will be, and also believe that they can act as judge and jury in determining who is right, and who is wrong, on this issue? Well, at the risk of being damned again, I politely suggest a bit of humility would be appropriate. Attempting to shut down debate in science used to be the role of the Spanish Inquisition. I thought we had moved on. Debate is the lifeblood of science.