14th September 2022

Some of you may remember COVID19. We had an epidemic, or a pandemic, or … choose whatever word you like best. The legacy of it still hangs about in many strange, disconnected actions.

My last flight in late August, on Lufthansa, required me to wear a mask. The connecting flight with Swissair, did not. No mask was required whilst waiting at Munich airport or being transported to and from the planes in a crowded bus. Go figure. I am sure this all makes sense to someone, somewhere.

Anyway, I thought it might be good time to have a catch up and see if we can learn anything more about the pandemic and the drastic actions taken to control it. The first thing to say is that this is a complex task. Mainly because the data surrounding COVID19 are unreliable. To say the least.

How many people have been infected with Sars-Cov2? How many have died? I believe we can only really guess. Worldometer, as of the tenth of September 2022, confidently informed me there have been around six hundred million people infected with COVID19 worldwide (613,234,326). The number of deaths is just over six million (6,514,989)¹.

Quite remarkably, this represents infection fatality rate of pretty much bang on one per cent. As predicted by Imperial College London and Professor Neill Ferguson. Take a bow that man? Or perhaps not. How many people think that those figures are remotely accurate? Certainly not me. Just to start with, do we really believe that ninety per cent of people have managed to avoid a Sars-Cov2 infection?

My own belief is that virtually everyone in the world has been exposed to/infected by Sars-Cov2 and at least once. (The concept of what ‘infection’ means has undergone a bit of a transformation, a.k.a. mangling). We already know many people have been infected several times. In fact, as early as the autumn of 2020, doctors were seeing people who had been, proven, to be infected twice. Even then, these cases were considered to be the tip of the iceberg.²

If people were getting infected twice, within six months of the virus arriving, I think we can safely assume almost everyone else has been infected at least once. Maybe a few villagers in the Amazonian rain forest have remained exposure, and infection, free. As for everyone else… unlikely.

And as for the numbers of COVID19 deaths, again, can we know anything for certain? I wrote out four death certificates which included COVID19 as a cause. This was early on, before much testing was possible. I have no idea if they had COVID19, or not. I cannot imagine I was alone in adding to the COVID19 stats, whilst blundering around in the dark.

If we can’t really rely on these, the most basic of facts, then can we learn anything? I think so, I hope so. Indeed, from the very start I tended to focus my attention away from COVID19 specific data, towards data I felt I could trust. Namely, the overall mortality rate.

Although these data do not allow us to be certain who died of COVID19, the numbers are the most robust we have. Someone is either alive, or dead, and it is difficult to get the diagnosis wrong. Yes, there can be some delays in reporting etc. but in general dead is dead and alive is alive, and that is that. One hundred per cent accurate.

Of course, in order to use these figures, I have to make assumption (made by many others), that spikes in overall mortality would be the best way to get a fix on how many people COVID19 was actually killing. A big spike – more deaths from COVID19. No spike, no extra deaths from COVID19 (or very few).

So, did every country show pretty much the same pattern in mortality? Or were there extremes or outliers? I am a believer that it is at the extremes where answers can often be found.

I began by looking for countries – or populations within those countries – that suffered a major increase in overall mortality. Then I looked for matching countries, and populations, that showed no change, or very little change. Because here, maybe, we could find some solid ground to stand on.

The most easily accessed data can be found at EuroMOMO³. This is a resource where data on overall mortality are collated from many different European countries. The site then plots mortality against a (moving) five-year average.

I ended up focussing on European data, not just because it was easy to find, but mainly because most European countries are very similar in many important parameters. Standard of living, health service provision, demographics, life expectancy and suchlike. Which means that you are comparing like with like. Try to compare Norway with, say, Kenya, and you end up with a mess.

On the other hand, you can more reasonably compare Norway and Sweden. There are far fewer differences between them, which should make it simpler to spot the key one(s).

However, to start with I am not going to look at Norway and Sweden. Instead. I want to draw your attention to four countries that are not, in truth, separate countries. They are Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Four different ‘parts’ that make up the single entity known as ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. Longest country name in the world – good pub quiz question.

It is true these four ‘countries’ did not do precisely the same things during lockdown. But the differences in timings and actions, were small – with a few (look at me, I’m locking down harder than anyone else, vote for me … thank you Nicola) variants. However, you will struggle to find any other four countries that were more alike in their characteristics and actions.

Despite their many similarities, one of these populations showed a hugely significant increase in overall mortality, and the other three did not. This difference can be seen most starkly within the age group of forty-five to sixty-four.

First, a short explanation of what you can see in the graphs below.

The – somewhat difficult to make out – dotted line represents the rate of overall mortality five standard deviations above the norm for the time of year. Mortality is always higher in winter than summer, but these graphs take this into account, and are mathematically flattened out.

The darker, spiky line represents the overall mortality rate. If it rises above the dotted line this is considered to be a ‘statistically significant’ event. Or, to put it another way, something is happening that is killing far more people than we would expect to see, and we need to find out what. This is normally due an infectious disease of some kind, almost always influenza.

The scale on the left -10, 0, 10, 20 is not an absolute figure. It represents the standard deviation from the mean (the z score). If it goes above ten, this is big time trouble. Above twenty, look out, the sky is falling. In general, two standard deviations from the mean is considered ‘statistically significant’ in medical research.

OVERALL MORTALITY RATES AGE 45- 64 IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
2017 TO SEPT 2022

As you can see. England had a three major mortality ‘peaks’. Spring 2020. Winter 2020/21 and a far more diffuse mountain range in autumn and winter 2021. The other three countries showed almost nothing at all.

I will just add in here that the difference is not restricted to this one age group. Below is a graph of the sixty-five to seventy-four-year-olds.

OVERALL MORTALITY RATES AGE 65 to 74 IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
2017 TO SEPT 2022

Pretty much the same pattern emerges. Two massive upticks in overall mortality in England, very little elsewhere. Absolutely nothing to see in Northern Ireland. If COVID19 was killing lots of people in Northern Ireland, it was not showing up.

First question, does England have a worse health service than the other three countries? No, it does not. Is the overall health worse in England? Well, in general, the English have a longer life expectancy than those in the other three countries, rather than the other way around. Which suggests that the English are, in general, healthier ⁴.

What was the same in these countries

• The health services
• The age of those dying (I matched people for age)
• The lockdowns (very minor differences)
• The treatments given
• The vaccinations given
• The climate
• Overall life expectancy (very minor differences, should be favouring England)

So, what was different?

Over to you. Because if we can work out what caused all these people to die in England, and not in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, we can probably learn something of great value.

Before that – and changing tack for a moment or two, in the early days of COVID19, everyone jumped around claiming that Norway had done things fantastically well, as they had no change in overall mortality, and very few recorded COVID19 deaths. ‘Look at them shutting their borders and enforcing a very tight lock-down. Way to go whoop, whoop.’

No-one bothered to mention Northern Ireland. Which did precisely the same as England. Yet also had no change in overall mortality, as per Norway. You could argue that Northern Ireland did not fit the agreed narrative, whereas Norway did.

Sweden, on the other hand, famously did not lock down, ‘shock-horror, everyone in charge should be fired, or thrown in jail’. Sweden did have significant uptick in overall mortality. Proof that lock-downs were essential?

Possibly … probably not. Many other countries in Europe which did lock down, have had far more COVID19 deaths, and a greater impact on overall mortality, than Sweden.

Here are the European countries that have recorded more COVID19 deaths, per head of population, than Sweden. In descending order¹:

• Bulgaria
• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Hungary
• North Macedonia
• Georgia
• Croatia
• Czechia
• Slovakia
• Romania
• Lithuania
• San Marino
• Slovenia
• Latvia
• Gibraltar
• Greece
• Poland
• Moldova
• Italy
• Armenia
• Belgium
• UK
• Russia
• Ukraine
• Portugal
• Spain
• France
• Liechtenstein
• Austria
• Estonia
• Andorra
• SWEDEN

Here, I did use COVID19 deaths, as reported on Worldometer – with all caveats recognised. The reason for using these figures rather than overall mortality, is that they were, initially, used to attack, the Swedish response. [People are a lot quieter about Sweden now] Also, calculating the overall mortality increases in these countries represents a very major task – with complex adjustments to be made. So, I didn’t do it here. I would also point out, for the sake of completeness, that Sweden is reported to have had 1,968 COVID19 deaths per one million of the population. Norway 728. [Two per thousand vs. point seven per thousand]

Lithuania, by the way, like Norway, is very similar to Sweden. For about a hundred years they ruled central Europe together within the Union of Kedainiai. In many ways, they have more in common than Sweden and Norway. It should be noted that Lithuania locked down early, and hard. You may note Lithuania pops up at number ten in the list above. Reported COVID19 death rate 3,528 per million.

You may disagree with my definition of European country … Gibraltar? Listen, I got this from Worldometer, so you can fight with them. However, if anyone wishes to tell me that Sweden suffered a unique catastrophe due to their reluctance to fully lock down, they may struggle to convince me that it was the critical factor. In fact, I may give a hollow laugh, even raise a quizzical eyebrow.

So, what else was different between Norway and Sweden? Something that could reasonably explain the difference in both recorded COVID19 deaths, and overall mortality. I believe there is another clue within the EuroMOMO data. If you choose to look at what you are actually seeing.

Below are the data from Norway from late 2017 (slightly annoyingly, their data only started in late 2017).

OVERALL MORTALITY NORWAY LATE 2017 TO 2022 – all ages

What stands out very clearly is that the Norwegian overall mortality rate has never spiked. At least not since late 2017… on EuroMOMO. This was even the case in the winter of 2018, which was a bad flu season across most of Europe. Something that shows up most clearly in Germany, although the same pattern can also be seen, to a lesser extent, in France, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, UK, Portugal, Italy etc.

OVERALL MORTALITY GERMANY 2017 TO 2022 – all ages

Did the Norwegians lock down in 2018. No, they did not. So, what stopped them dying from flu? The answer is … something else. And that something may well be the same thing that stopped them dying of COVID19.

As an aside, why did the Germans not panic in 2018, when more people were dying then, than from COVID19 in 2021? They had a z-score of very nearly twenty. Did anyone even notice? Was it front page headlines? No, of course not. It passed in virtual silence. Compare and contrast, as they say.

Anyway, I hope that I have given you a little puzzle to solve. I have been contemplating this puzzle for some time, and I think I may have identified the key factor that can explain the patterns in the UK, and also between Norway and Sweden. I am interested to see what other people’s thoughts might be.

Before coming back with answers. Remember, these data are age-matched. They compare overall mortality, not the number of recorded deaths from COVID19. They are not the absolute numbers of deaths, but variation from the mean. The z-score.

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

2: https://www.science.org/content/article/more-people-are-getting-covid-19-twice-suggesting-immunity-wanes-quickly-some

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

4: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/bulletins/nationallifetablesunitedkingdom/2018to2020#:~:text=estimates%20for%20Wales.-,Life%20expectancy%20at%20birth%20in%202018%20to%202020%20was%20estimated,for%20females%20in%20Northern%20Ireland.

1st May 2022

[Lessons must be learned]

I love the phrase ‘lessons need to be learned’. It always makes me laugh when I hear it. Usually intoned with a voice of great seriousness by the leaders of an organisation found to have made disastrous errors. It is right up there with ‘safety is our number one priority.’ About the only group I have yet to hear say this are arms manufacturers. Although I wouldn’t put it past them. Maybe … ‘You could take someone’s eye out with that.’

As I have occasionally remarked about airlines … when they tell us that safety is their number one priority. Well, in that case don’t take off. Everything is perfectly safe when your plane is on the ground. It’s that hurling yourself into the air, dashing about in the skies, then landing, where all the accidents take place.

Getting back to lessons learned. The only lesson I have ever learned, about lessons being learned, is that lessons are never learned. The same disasters occur again, and again, for all the same reasons. The reasons being institutional inertia and the overwhelming desire of those at the top to protect themselves from any criticism.

What I have also learned is that the primary function of any enquiry is to make sure that no-one who actually made those terrible decisions can be blamed for anything. A few scapegoats further down the pecking order will be dragged out and punished. Then all goes quiet again.

‘Mistakes were made.’ This is another one I enjoy. Mistakes were made – but who made them? The use of the passive voice is all you ever need to pay attention to Here. You never hear. ‘I made this mistake. Or, that person made this mistake.’ Even more rarely will you hear ‘I, alone, made this mistake.’

Yes, once the dreaded passive voice comes into play, you know that no-one is going to be singled out, no lessons are going to be learned by anyone. Instead, some vague unidentifiable entity will have to learn from the mistakes that some other vague and unidentifiable entity may, or may not, have made.

Mistakes were certainly made in the COVID19 pandemic, and I have found myself bombarded by the ‘lessons have been learned’ claptrap.

The man in charge of healthcare in the UK, when COVID19 crashed upon the world, was Matt Hancock. This was also the time when patients were being flung out of hospitals into care homes, thousands of whom then went on to die.

He chose to hide behind an excuse. ‘No-one told me, so it wasn’t my fault.’ Is that what the Captain of the Titanic thought to himself as his ship slipped beneath the waves?

Here is one article about what went on during that terrible time. I cannot reference it for everyone, because it came to me through doctors.net, which is for doctors in the UK only. Here it is anyway, although, unless you are a doctor you will have no access. ‘Poor planning behind the illegal pandemic care home discharges’¹. By the way, you are not missing anything. It mirrors many other articles that said exactly the same thing:

Bed shortages led to the illegal discharge policies that led to the deaths of hundreds of patients in care homes, the British Medical Association has alleged.

A court yesterday delivered a ground-breaking ruling that the government acted unlawfully in the advice it issued to the NHS on hospital discharge during the early stages of the pandemic.

The advice stated that there was not a risk from patients who had no symptoms of COVID infection. It led to the virus running amok in the care sector and a judicial review by two bereaved relatives gained the support of the courts yesterday.

I would disagree with the statement that hundreds of deaths occurred. It was in the region of twenty to thirty thousand, maybe more. What was Matt Hancock’s response?

Yesterday he (Matt Hancock) claimed the court ruling had not found him culpable, blaming Public Health England for failing to advise that the asymptomatic patients could transmit the virus.

So, what lesson do we think Matt Hancock has learned? ‘A big boy (public health England) made me do it’, seems an adequate summary. Yes, we know there was a lot going on at the time. A great deal of pressure, and panic, and suchlike.

Using pressure in a rapid changing situation as an excuse, as this Government has repeatedly done … This makes me think of a General explaining that all the mistakes he made during a battle were due to people rushing about firing guns and yelling. No-one can possibly concentrate, and get things right, with all that bloody racket going on.

The reason why you had a position of such power and responsibility, Mr Hancock, is that you needed to be the big grown-up boy. You were required to think quickly, and clearly. If people didn’t tell you things, such as the fact that an airborne virus can spread though asymptomatic people – as they all do, then, quite frankly, you bloody well needed to ask.

Of course, it seems he was told, he just doesn’t want to admit that he was … and someone has told him he can probably get away with that pathetic excuse, of an excuse:

Here is what, I think, he should have said. ‘Whilst the situation was difficult, I should have ensured that I looked at this issue in more detail. I needed to find out more about the impact of discharging elderly people back into care homes. The risk of transmission with asymptomatic patients. The difficulty in isolating elderly and often demented patients in that environment. I did not do any of these things adequately. I was the man in charge, I am deeply sorry … please hand me a gun.’

It is not as if this impending disaster was beyond the understanding of us mere mortals. On the 17^th April 2020 I wrote a blog about it:

‘The government’s disregard of care home residents – old, sick people, acutely vulnerable to COVID19 – has been scandalous. As a GP, I regularly visit care homes. At one I visit, they recently had eight residents who died in a week, probably from coronavirus. But there’s no testing, so who could possibly know …

When COVID struck, many things were not known, and could not have been accurately predicted. The transmission rate, the case fatality rate, the best way to treat those infected

However, it was very clear, very early on, that COVID was killing the elderly in far greater numbers than anyone else. In Italy, the early figures released revealed that the average age of death was seventy-nine. The figures were slightly higher in Germany, and around eighty years old in pretty much every other country.

Equally, it was known that amongst the elderly who were dying, almost all of them had other serious medical conditions. Heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, chronic pulmonary disease and suchlike. This is often known in my line of work as “multimorbidity.”

In a world of uncertainty, one thing stood out. Which is that the unwell elderly were the ones who were most likely to die. Equally, they were the ones most likely to end up in hospital, potentially overwhelming the health services. As happened in Italy and Spain.

Ergo, you would think that someone, somewhere in the UK government, would have asked the obvious question. Where do we have the greatest concentrations of elderly, frail, people with multimorbidity? Could it possibly be that they are being looked after in care homes around the country?

Nursing homes, residential homes, care homes. They are all pretty much the same thing nowadays. Nursing homes tend to look after those with greater health needs, and they must have registered nurses looking after patients, but the distinctions have become blurred.

Many care homes are also specialised in looking after the elderly with dementia. In the UK, they are called EMI units [elderly mentally infirm]. These represent a particular problem in that residents tend to wander about from room to room.

So, in care homes we potentially had the perfect storm for the pandemic. They are full of elderly and infirm and highly vulnerable people. Environments where it is often impossible to isolate residents, and staff who have never been adequately trained in isolation measures. Equally, whilst relatives cannot visit hospitals, care homes have been continuing to allow them in.

It is not as if the warning signs were not there, flashing red.

What was the government’s strategy for dealing with nursing homes?  It has been, up until the last couple of days, to make things even worse. The instructions from the Dept of Health have been to send patients diagnosed with COVID out of hospital, and back into care homes, with further instructions to “barrier nurse” them, a term for a set of stringent infection control techniques.  Care homes were informed that they could not refuse to take the residents back …’ ²

It was after this that Dr Kathy Gardner (PhD, not medical doctor) contacted me, as her father had died of COVID19 in a care home. I wrote various lengthy replies to her lawyers about the situation, and my experience thereof. They may, or may not, have used my missives in the court case. The case that she battled so long and hard to get heard. She is quoted in the article:

At the time the Health Secretary Matt Hancock had claimed he was throwing a “protective ring” around care homes.

Yesterday he claimed the court ruling had not found him culpable, blaming Public Health England for failing to advise that the asymptomatic patients could transmit the virus.

One of the claimants, Dr Cathy Gardner, said the “protective ring” had proved to be a “despicable lie.”

Dr Gardner said: “I believed all along that my father and other residents of care homes were neglected and let down by the government. The high court has now vindicated that belief, and our campaign to expose the truth.’

Within the NHS I was also fighting my own lonely battles. Here is an e-mail (identifiers redacted) that I send to my manager in April 2020

‘I had a short chat with A yesterday about nursing homes X and Y.

Although things seem to be getting sorted out at Intermediate Care facility B there do not seem to have been any changes at nursing homes X and Y Both homes have several patients with Covid (proven positive swabs). It seems that the Hub is still sending Covid negative patients into both homes – putting these patients at immense risk. We have had staff to patient transmission at Intermediate Care facility B.

Equally patients are being discharged home without having swabs. So, they are arriving home and potentially infecting any partner living there – usually elderly and vulnerable. Equally, if community staff are going in to visit, they can also get infected – then pass the infection on to other clients in the community. The only patients being swabbed on discharge from nursing home X are those going to other care homes – at that care homes request.

Two out of three swabbed patients in nursing home X have come back positive. Which means we are clearly sending Covid positive patients back home – without a swab. I spoke to H, who said that this was still policy? I am not quite sure who’s policy?

I believe we must stop the hub sending Covid negative patients into our nursing homes. – until they are clear of infection. I also believe we cannot discharge anyone from our nursing homes without a clear swab.

I think if anyone were to be made aware that their relatives were being transferring into a Covid positive care home, where they will be at high risk of getting Covid, they would rightly be up in arms. They would rightly be up in arms because it is unsafe, it is putting staff and patients at risk. We already know that nursing homes are becoming the focus of Covid deaths, we should not be making this situation worse in nursing home X and Y.’

I am no genius. I was not the only one who could see that this was a stupid and deadly policy. I wrote about it, and complained about it, at the time. We have now had a court case saying what was done was illegal. But [squeaky voice] ‘no-one knew…’ The care home managers were all up in arms at the time. They bloody knew. But no-one chose to listen to their inconvenient truth.

So now what happens. It it almost impossible to see that anything of any value will occur as a result of this judicial health review. What lessons we be learned? None by the Department of Health and Social Care. Their comment:

‘A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care, said: “We specifically sought to safeguard care home residents based on the best information at the time.’ Yup, safety was their number one priority.

Well, God only knows what would have been the result if they hadn’t decided to ‘specifically safeguard care home residents, based on the best information at the time.’ It is difficult to think of anything they could have done to make things worse.

‘The best information?’ Who gave them this information? The same vague unidentifiable entity who made the mistakes and will now be learning the lessons I suppose. Maybe it was the exact same god-like entity that was spoken of, in hushed tones, during the pandemic …The Science. Yes, The Mighty Science that works in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.

1: https://news.doctors.net.uk/news/6K3xX7oGioThSkt9LJYz0S?pk_campaign=dnb&pk_kwd=article02_button

2: https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/04/17/care-homes-and-covid19/

10th February 2022

Some observations on the infection fatality rate of COVID19
[Mainly that it does not really exist]

When COVID struck the world two years ago, or thereabouts, the first thing that happened was rather unfortunate. Namely, the instant and widespread distortion, nay destruction, of data. This happened so fast that it became almost impossible to know what on earth was going on. Who to believe … what to believe?

I have never been so naïve as to think that we are not constantly subjected to certain ‘truths’, which may or may not be true. After all, I have been battling against the dreaded ‘cholesterol hypothesis’ for decades. In doing so I have become something of an expert in recognising seriously distorted data when I see it.

I have learned to search for things not said, which are usually far more important than the things that are. I have also learned to treat the words used with great distrust. Words such as ‘fact’ for example. Facts have a disturbing tendency to crumble under pressure … note to the dreaded dementors, sorry fact checkers.

However, I felt I had become pretty expert in navigating the games played. I had learned to sail the stormy waters of scientific truths, or facts, reasonably well. Then came COVID, and the world of fact distortion achieved warp drive. Alleged facts flashed past so fast, and in such great numbers, that it all became a blur.

In this blog I will attempt to remove some of the blur surrounding the issue which became key to ‘The Great COVID Wars’. This is the Infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID19.

You may not feel this was central to everything that occurred, or remains so, but I hope to convince you that it is the single most important ‘fact’ of them all. The keystone. Also, the one most jealously guarded by the fact checkers. ‘Put your weapon down, place both hands in the air, and step away from your IFR.’

To begin. There was a time when epidemiologists, with regard to infectious diseases, used two different terms. Infection fatality rate (IFR) and case fatality rate (CFR). Although it has to be said that the distinction between the two was never exactly black and white.

After all, how do you decide when someone who is ‘infected ‘with a disease, reaches the point when they become a ‘case?’ Historically this happened when someone became so unwell that they were admitted to hospital. Whereupon the disease itself would be diagnosed with a test of some sort – sometimes. Sometimes clinical signs and symptoms were all that were used.

Which means that ‘cases’ have always been somewhat easier to count and compare. However, no-one has ever really known how many people were infected in the first place. By which I mean those people who were not seen anywhere, by anyone, and so never managed to the reach the status of a ‘case.’

In general, those with a mild infection just lay in bed, for a while feeling a bit sorry for themselves. Indeed, the advice for those with ‘flu’ always used to be to stay at home, drink plenty, and take some medication to control the temp and the aches and pains. This represents the traditional three Ps management technique. ‘Take two paracetamol and piss off.’ [Paracetamol is called acetomenophin in the US – take two As and piss off … nah, doesn’t really work]

Ergo, those with few symptoms, or no symptoms, were never seen or counted. So, the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR), which represent the total number of people who become infected, who then die, has always been subject to a great deal of guesswork.

A whole series of the underlying problems with defining IFR [and also CFR] were highlighted in the paper ‘case fatality risk of influenza A (HIN1pdm09): a systemic review.’ The authors looked at the Swine Flu epidemic of 2009, and also reviewed data on infection and case fatality rates from the past.

I shall paraphrasetheir main findings. ‘We haven’t a clue what the infection fatality rate was for this, or any other flu. In truth, neither does anyone else, because the data are complete rubbish.’

Their actual conclusion, couched in more scientific language:

‘A consensus is needed on how to define and measure the seriousness of infection before the next pandemic.’¹

Did this consensus ever happen? You must be joking.

As you may have noticed, we have begun the move into very blurry waters indeed. You may ask how it is possible to compare the Infection Fatality Rate of COVID19 with previous influenza epidemics, when we have no idea what the IFR rate of previous influenza epidemics may have been.

Despite such great uncertainty, this IFR rapidly become a red line issue for the COVID wars.

On one side were the CDC, Fauci, Neil Ferguson and Imperial College London – and suchlike. The ‘establishment’ – the ‘experts’. They confidently stated, from the very beginning, that the Infection Fatality Rate of COVID19 was around one per cent. Meaning that for every one hundred people infected, one person would die (on average).

Quite how they knew this is beyond any real understanding? They say modelling. I say guesswork. Which, in truth, is pretty much the same thing. A brand new, never seen before disease, and they just knew what the IFR was.

This was also at a time before any accurate testing existed, and we had no idea how many people had actually been infected? Indeed, at this point, they were primarily relying on information from China … Oh well, at least we know that Chinese data are always fully reliable … thank God. Just don’t mention that pesky laboratory in Wuhan, or gain of function research. Or pretty much anything else that emanates from China, in truth.

On the other side were…. Well, there wasn’t really another side so to speak of. A rag tag bunch of researchers and epidemiologists who were fascinated by the data coming in, and what it was saying. It included those such as Professor John Ioannidis and Professor Carl Heneghan at the Centre of Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford, and suchlike.

I just watched with interest, at first. My own bias has always been to be very wary of any expert consensus that springs into life. This is because it will almost always be a slave to the inherent problems with human thinking that ride roughshod over a disinterested pursuit of the truth. Particularly in a crisis.

Problems such as: groupthink, confirmation bias, fast thinking rather than slow thinking, deference to ‘experts’, the desperate need to come up with ‘the answer’ and stick to it, and suchlike. We all know what they are. They all came into play, as expected.

Anyway, a key question here was, how did their one per cent figure compare with more common or garden influenza? This is very hard to say. I have seen figures of 0.67% for the flu epidemic of 1967. I have seen far less. ‘Spanish flu’, the big daddy of them all, was estimated to have had an IFR of around two to three per cent.

But how accurate can these figures be? In the paper I quoted above, the IFR estimates for swine flu (HIN1pdm09) ranged from less than one death, per hundred thousand infections, to more than ten thousand. Yes, from one in a hundred thousand, all the way up to ten per cent. This is what scientists call…. A pretty wide range.  You could call it other things.

Cutting to the chase, the reality is that, at the start of the COVID19 epidemic we had no idea what the IFR of a severe influenza epidemic was, nor did we know the IFR of COVID19. You would think that this would make any comparison somewhat tricky.

However, the mainstream consensus rapidly coalesced around two ‘facts’.

Fact one: a severe seasonal influenza has an IFR of around point one per cent. Or, to put it another way, one death per one thousand infections.

Fact two: COVID19 has an IFR of around one per cent. Which meant that COVID19 was going to be ten times as deadly. This, then, became our starting point.

What would this mean in the real world?

The UK has a population of sixty-seven million people. Which meant that if everyone were infected, we would end up with almost exactly two thirds of a million deaths. Which is one per cent of the entire population. The population of the US is three hundred and thirty million, so there would be three point three million deaths

Hold on a minute. The models also predicted that not everyone would get COVID19. Full herd immunity would kick in once about eighty per cent of the population – or thereabouts – had been infected. This, by the way, was another thing that the experts just knew, right from the very beginning. [But what about mutations, and variants, and re-infections I hear you cry…. ‘Oh, do shut up’].

In effect, the COVID19 epidemic would come to an end when eighty per cent of people had become ill, maybe slightly less. Ergo, the overall death figure would be about five hundred thousand in the UK, and just over two million in the US. Or thereabouts.

This is a lot of deaths. Around the entire world pop: ~7.9 billion. We could see nearly seventy million deaths.

This one per cent figure, then, became the trigger for everything that followed. I think of it as the ‘justification’ figure. It was used to justify lockdowns, and everything else that went along with them. Here, after all, was a disease ten times as deadly as a bad influenza epidemic. Something must be done, or millions will die.

A further complication

Of course, things are rarely this simple. Even if the one per cent figure were true, it is essential to ask a follow up question. Who exactly is dying?

The average age of death caused by the Spanish flu was estimated at twenty-eight. Yes, twenty-eight.² The average age of death caused by COVID19 is around eighty-one – in the UK.³

I feel that the fact [and unusually this fact is almost certainly true] that COVID19 almost exclusively kills the elderly, and almost always the elderly who have many other comorbidities, had to be taken into consideration. But it wasn’t.

Instead of a disease that can wipe out young healthy people, aged twenty-eight, we had a disease on our hands that primarily kills those close to the end of their lives. Children and young adults, even middle-aged adults, even nearly old adults, have been almost remarkably unaffected by COVID19. This was known very early on.

What are the actual figures here? Turning attention specifically to the UK, we have had, at the time of writing, around one hundred and fifty thousand COVID19 deaths. Defined as… those deaths with COVID19 mentioned on the death certificate [whatever this actually means – another whole can of worms].

On the other hand, the number of people under the age of sixty, who have died from COVID19, with no other disease mentioned on the death certificate, is five hundred and forty-two. That was, by the 1^st of February 2022.⁴

This is slightly under one per day during the epidemic. Or, to frame it another way, the risk of dying, for a healthy (or at least believed to be healthy – who knows for sure if they are or not) person under the age of sixty has been one in 79,131. [UK pop < 60 = 42,869,306].⁵

This risk, however, has been over very nearly two years. So, the yearly risk of death from COVID19 per years is 1:158,263. Or ~ 0.0075% … for this population. Just to give a comparator. The risk of dying from a road traffic accident in the UK, per year, is around eight times higher ⁶.

1in 20,000 per year vs 1 in 160,000

Thus, for more than two thirds of the population, the risk of dying from COVID19 has been 0.0075%. Instead of one per cent… it has been seven thousandths of one per cent.

Some people will say that this doesn’t matter. All deaths are of equal importance, we cannot discriminate on grounds of age, illness etc. In which case, taking the UK population as a whole, we have had 158,000 deaths with COVID19 mentioned on the death certificate. This represents a total risk of death of 1 in 424. Or ~ 0.25%.

Again, this has been over two years, so the total risk of death, per year [which is how risk is normally presented] has been 1 in 848, or ~ 0.125% per year. Which, as you may have noted, is around seven times less than one per cent.

Strangely, with COVID19, we have not stopped counting at the end of one year, and then started again. We have just kept on adding the figures year upon year – and will continue to do so? We have also continued to add in people who have been infected more than once…Double, treble, nay quadruple counting.

If we keep doing this, the IFR of COVID19 will eventually reach one. Not one per cent, but one. As in the entire population of the world will end up dying of COVID19. Although, at 0.125% per year this, as you may have worked out yourself, will take about seven hundred years. You may want to go and lie down and think about this.

Of course, the rough figures I have calculated above do not represent the Infection Fatality Rate. Instead, they represent the population fatality rate (PFR) i.e., forgetting about IFR and CFR, how many people, in total, have actually died. The population fatality has to be significantly lower than the infection fatality rate because not everyone has been infected… or have they?

The terrain is all?

We must now venture into yet another layer of complication. Yes, this onion has many layers. Most of which, you may be glad to know, I am not going to consider, or else this blog becomes a book. But the next layer is critical.

What does being ‘infected’ actually mean, and can we even know that it has happened?

At the risk of terrible oversimplification, historically there are two camps in the infectious disease world.

• Camp one: the microbe is all (The germ theory).
• Camp two: the terrain is all (The terrain theory).

Camp one believes that if you become exposed to an infectious agent you will inevitably become ‘infected’. You will then inevitably suffer (at least some) symptoms from the infection. You will then become unwell – maybe very unwell – and may even die. The germ theory. The severity of the disease is almost entirely dependent on the ‘viral load’ that you encounter.

Camp two states that the ‘terrain’ of the human body is far more important. We are surrounded by, and harbour microorganisms in our bodies. When exposed to pathogens ‘germs’ we become ill if our defences are weakened by deficiencies or toxicities. The germ itself is pretty much unimportant.

This is the ‘terrain’ theory. It means that many/most people, may not become ‘infected’ at all. Or that they may not even notice it – they simply shrug the infection off.

Historically, the two camps were led by Louis ‘the germ’ Pasteur and Claude ‘the terrain’ Bernard. It is said that, on his death bed Pasteur admitted. ‘Bernard was right, the pathogen is nothing, the terrain is everything.’

Well, yes and no. It is difficult to suffer any symptoms from a disease if you are never exposed to the germ. Which means that the pathogen clearly is something, not nothing. But … but we are making a greater mistake if we think that everyone is going to respond the same way to a germ. An assumption upon which our response has been predicated.

You may not think it, but the thinking behind all the actions taken is that COVID19 will inevitably ‘infect’ anyone who comes into contact with it. It will spread from person to person in a predicable manner, it will cause illness in everyone, and suchlike. In effect therefore, we have acted as if the terrain truly is nothing. Therefore, we must do everything possible to reduce contact, in order to reduce morbidity and mortality. In essence, the microbe is all.

The next assumption, following on from this, is that those who have not demonstrated any signs of symptoms have simply not been exposed to it, or not exposed to a sufficient ‘viral load’.

Personally, I find this impossible to believe. My daughter, a junior doctor who caught COVID19 working on a COVID ward in Wales, stayed at our house, suffered anosmia, and was diagnosed with COVID19 – with a PCR test, no less. No-one else got a snuffle.

At one point during the first couple of months of the epidemic, in May 2020 to be precise, I was standing next to two unmasked nurses in a small treatment room (we were not allowed to wear masks at this time) who were both coughing repeatedly in my face. Both were diagnosed with COVID19 the very next day and went off ill.

Every working day for six months, I went into nursing homes and an intermediate care centre. During which time, thirty-six patients died of – probably – COVID19. All of whom I saw and examined at least once. However, I did not become infected, and I never have. I also showed no antibodies – in a test in Autumn 2020.

If anyone tries to tell me that I was not exposed to the virus, or a sufficient viral load to cause infection, I can only laugh. I would reckon myself to be amongst an elite ‘most exposed to SARS-Cov2 virus in the world’ workforce. For at least two months I was working with no PPE – at all. Surrounding by staff and patients – many of whom died of COVID19 [no staff members, only patients].

If I was not infected, and officially I have not been, it raises the question. What, exactly, does infected mean? I speak as someone who also had to have seven Hepatitis B injections before I was able to raise a feeble, and pretty transient, antibody response. A friend and colleague had, if memory serves, over thirty Hep B vaccinations, and never raised a single antibody.

What does this, in turn, mean? That neither of us has any immunity to Hep B? That antibody tests are hopelessly flawed. That ‘immunity’ exists in ways that we have no idea how to measure – my current view.

Looking more specifically at COVID19, what happens if someone is found to be infected, as part of routine testing, yet has no symptoms, and produces no antibodies. Can you state that they were ‘infected’?

You may want to have a look at ‘The Flawed Science of Antibody Testing for SARS-CoV-2 Immunity.’ ⁷

It quotes this FDA statement

‘…results from currently authorized SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests should not be used to evaluate a person’s level of immunity or protection from COVID-19 at any time, and especially after the person received a COVID-19 vaccination.’

So, antibody tests cannot tell us if someone has been infected, or effectively, vaccinated, nor if they are immune to SARS-Cov2. Just run that idea round your head for a while. Then see what answer pops out.

One small study further suggested that if you were diagnosed with [had a positive test for], COVID19, but suffered no symptoms, there was a 92% chance that you would show no measurable immune response post infection. ⁸

These people, with a positive test, yet no symptoms, and no antibodies, were clearly ‘infected’ – they had a positive test after all [another can of worms]. However, these people must represent the most immune population of all. COVID19 hit them but was simply shrugged off. Leaving behind no sign that it was ever there.

Before I spin off down another hundred complications and side-issues – all of which are fascinating in themselves – I will attempt to highlight one immutable fact.

We have no idea how many people have been infected with SARS-Cov2, primarily because we have no idea how many people have been ‘infected’ yet demonstrate no sign of contact with the virus (unless they were coincidentally tested at the time). People such as, to pluck an example from the air … me.

It follows, therefore, that we cannot know what IFR rate might be. All we really have to go on (for all its further myriad flaws) is the Population Fatality Rate. Namely, how many people have actually died of COVID19.

In this end, this is the key figure. The one that counts [even if I have serious doubts about how this figure is created].

Thus far, across the world, over a period of very nearly two years, we have officially had five point seven million deaths from COVID19.

The total population of the world is seven point nine billion. Therefore:

• The total population fatality rate is 0.072%
• The total population fatality rate per year is 0.036%

This is a long, long way from the IFR of one per cent. Indeed, per year, it is around thirteen times less.

Is this because only one thirteenth of the world’s population have been infected? This is extraordinarily unlikely. The recent REACT study in the UK, found that 65% of those infected with the Omicron variant in January 2022 had previously been diagnosed with COVID-19.⁹

Seven per cent more had symptoms strongly suggestive of previous infection but had not had a confirmatory test at the time. Ergo, very nearly three quarters of those getting COVID19 in January 2022 had been infected before.

The authors are now attempting to backtrack from this finding. Why? Because, if it is correct that the vast majority of people infected represent re-infections, it means that the infection rate must be extremely high, much higher than anyone admits.

It also follows that exposure and transmission is extremely high. This, in turn, means that the IFR is significantly lower than anyone admits – or indeed can admit.

It is no surprise then to find that those running the REACT study are based in Imperial College London. Which is where all the original IFR estimates came from. The lair of Neil Ferguson et all. The originator of the ‘justification’ figure. Those who are now doing all they can to suggest that the number of people who have been infected with COVID19 remains low.

Even more telling, although this is less easy to confirm, we have cases of people with three, or even four, infections. How can anyone get infected four times, when people around them have not been infected once? Are they dancing naked around a flagpole, breathing in deeply from an inverted loudhailer in a COVID19 ward?

No, they are not. The explanation is that those getting re-infected are those who are unable to simply shrug of COVID19, for whatever reasons. Their terrain was different. Which means that they will likely keep on getting infected as new variants appear. Hopefully in milder and milder versions.

On the other hand, if we look at those individuals who show no evidence of infection – those who have never suffered symptoms and developed no antibodies – it is not that they have never been exposed, or ‘infected’. It is that they have more robust defences. As Claude Bernard argued, the most important thing here is not the germ, it is the terrain. It always was, and always will be.

As you may have gathered, I am convinced that we have all been exposed to and ‘infected’ with COVID19, probably all within the first year [even if I don’t know how you determine being infected]. Which means, in turn, that the PFR and the IFR – after two years of the virus spreading around – will have will be very much the same.

Can I prove this. No. If a large number of people develop no symptoms, and there is no test used that can accurately determine infection/exposure, I cannot possibly prove this. Equally, no-one can prove anything in the opposite direction.

A bit of a standout clue, however, is that three quarters of those found to be infected had been infected before. This could only have happened if people have been repeatedly exposed to a sufficient ‘viral load’ to get COVID19. And if they have, so has everyone else.

Of course, if we cannot accurately define what we mean by ‘infected’ no prediction can have been right. In turn, this means that we bet the house on an outcome measure so deeply flawed as to be virtually meaningless.

A strong clue that has been more widely recognised to be meaningless, is that it no longer exists. How so, I hear you cry? Well, it was decreed fairly early on that any positive COVID19 test represents a ‘case’ of COVID19. Something that kind of slipped through, without anyone noticing.

It was a worldwide thing, but the text below is taken from an NHS press briefing conference, using data from coronavirus.data.gov.uk. The bit in bold is most important.

Once this happened, any historical comparison of IFRs, or CFRs, became impossible. If everyone who is infected is also a ‘case’ then everyone is an I/C, (infected/case). There is no longer an IFR. Nor can there be a CFR. There is a combination I/CFR.

This, in turn, means that the IFR rate has been artificially boosted. Case fatality rates will always higher than IFRs [people who become very ill from a disease are always more likely to die from the disease, than those who suffer no symptoms].

Add them together and the IFR jumps up. Or at least it does if no-one notices that you are flipping between, and combining IFR and CFR, at speed, and continue talking about the IFR as if it remains the same thing. Oh, the tricks that are played to inflate the IFR and ‘prove’ that the experts were right all along.

Despite the fact that it is now devoid of any meaning, the one per cent IFR for COVID19 remains the most fiercely guarded figure of all. Dare to state the IFR is significantly lower than the one per cent ‘justification’ figure and the dreaded dementors, sorry fact-checkers, descend from on high.

They will attack you, your personal habits, your professionalism, your motivations, your clear ‘anti-vaxx’ stance, your lack of being an expert – and anything else they can think of to personally denigrate and humiliate.

They will countenance no arguments, no discussion. It will be determined that you are simply wrong, certainly stupid, and unable to understand The Science and probably in the pay of someone evil cabal, or other. It is somewhat irritating. I want to discuss science, if not ‘THE SCIENCE’. They want me crushed and silenced.

End thoughts

We understand far less about infections than we like to think. We are simply scratching at the surface at present. It is all extremely complex. If you are up for it, you may wish to read this paper. ‘Pathogenesis of COVID-19 described through the lens of an undersulfated and degraded epithelial and endothelial glycocalyx.’¹¹

This paper represents a monstrously complex discussion of ‘the terrain.’ Namely, why do some people shrug off COVID19, whereas others may become so seriously ill that they may die?

According to this paper, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the things that we think of as part of the classic ‘immune response.’ T-cells, B-cells, cytokines, antibodies and suchlike. It is almost entirely to do with the ability of cells in our body to prevent viral entry.

Keeping things as simple as possible. If COVID19 (or other viruses) cannot get into an endothelial cell – or find it very difficult to do so – because the glycocalyx is healthy and robust, then SARS-Cov2 simply bounces off, and you will not become seriously ‘infected’. Yes, you will ‘shrug’ the virus off. It may enter your bloodstream, but that is about as far as it is going to get.

I mean, I have always been aware of the importance of cell entry in viral diseases. Both HIV and the Ebola virus enter a cell by hijacking a protein called CCR5 attached to cell membranes. There are a few people who have a thing called the CCR5delta32 mutation. If you have this mutation, it means that HIV and Ebola cannot attach themselves to the protein. Neither virus can then get into the cell and ‘infection’ cannot occur. The terrain is all.

Have any of those on SAGE, or Fauci, or Ferguson, or the CDC paid any heed to such things? I would be very surprised if any of them had even heard of the glycocalyx. A perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger* effect, I feel.

Yet, despite their stunning ignorance about such things, certain individuals and organisations grabbed the reins of influence in order to convince those in power that they had the answer.

The most important ‘answer’ being that COVID19 has an IFR of one per cent, which is at least ten times that of a serious influenza epidemic. Then, as the ‘germ’ is obviously everything, the only way to prevent hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of deaths was through lockdown, mask wearing, societal control, and suchlike.

We must stop spread, the ‘the germ is everything brigade’ cried. Although, with a 75% re-infection rate it is hard to argue that we have managed anything of the sort.

If this IFR figure was grossly inflated, which certainly seems to be the case, then all that we did was to create untold damage – for no good reason. I shall leave you with a post that I put up in a WhatsApp group recently. It followed a study from John Hopkins which estimated that COVID19 lockdowns only reduced deaths by 0.2%. [A study that will be attacked remorselessly, no doubt].¹²

‘Did lockdown work? No, the difference it made was marginal, at best. Were the models that we relied on accurate? No, they were bloody useless. Are the vaccines safe and effective? – Jury is out. Is there anything that was done justifiable by the evidence, in so much as it can be relied upon. I do not believe so.  What we certainly did was to explode the economy, pile vast debt on UK Plc. create a massive backlog of work for the NHS. Fail to diagnose and treat hundreds of thousands of cases of cancer, and suchlike and create a tsunami of mental health problems. We also ran roughshod over incredibly important human rights, that have taken centuries to take hold and grow. In my opinion, almost everything that was done has caused more harm than good. What is the counter-argument? If we hadn’t done all these things, it would have been far worse. The evidence to support this position is sadly lacking.’

*Dunning-Kruger effect is, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general.

1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/

2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3734171/

3: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/averageageofthosewhohaddiedwithCOVID19

4: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/deathsofthoseunder60fromCOVID19withnocomorbiditiesandmortalityratesin2020

5: https://www.statista.com/statistics/281208/population-of-the-england-by-age-group/

6: http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/trasnsportpop.html#:~:text=While%20the%20risk%20of%20dying,risk%20is%201%20in%20240.

7: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2785530

8: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-06-18-latest-data-immune-response-COVID-19-reinforces-need-vaccination-says-oxford-led

9: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/two-thirds-of-omicron-cases-are-reinfections-uk-study-suggests.html

10: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1041270/2021-12-15_COVID-19_Press_Conference_Slides_PUBLICATION.pptx.pdf

11: https://doi.org/10.1096/fj.202101100RR

12: https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-a-preprint-looking-at-the-impact-of-lockdowns-as-posted-on-the-john-hopkins-krieger-school-of-arts-and-sciences-website/

14th January 2022

A few months ago, I resolved not to write anything more about COVID19. I was having zero apparent effect on anything, or anybody, and I was just getting increasingly despondent at the destruction of science, debate, logic, humanity, personal freedoms … life.

However, my New Years resolution was to not have any more resolutions. Which lead to an almost inescapable logic loop from which I have only just managed to extricate myself.

In truth, I believe that I still have a few things left to say about COVID19 that may be useful in stopping some of the most egregious nonsense being repeated. [Fat chance, says the little man on my shoulder].

What I am about to write, I have written about before, in various different guises. However, I think it is worth going back over some old ground again. Hopefully in a more effective manner.

In this blog what I want to do is to look at how we think about a few things, primarily in medicine, and medical science. To try and highlight how some repeated flaws in thought have influenced the reaction to COVID19.

I hope that by doing this, it may help to prevent some us travelling down the terribly well-worn ‘paths of pointlessness’ again. Or, at least, to get people to stop and question how they are thinking, before throwing themselves into the fray.

To begin.

What I saw happening with COVID19 is a pattern that repeats in medicine over and over again:

• We have a serious illness – panic
• Something must be done – grab the pitchforks, run about screaming
• An influential person, or organisation, grabs the initiative – ‘‘experts’ move in.’
• I/We know what to do, you must follow me/us – simple idea + soothing paternalism
• Frightened people latch onto their ideas – two legs good, four legs bad
• A path is chosen – along the side of a cliff
• Momentum builds – the unstoppable charge of the light brigade
• Those who object to the path taken are crushed – 1984

Fast forward a few decades… ‘Oh, it seems that the thing we always do as standard medical practice… Turns out it does more harm than good.’ See under: removal of toxic colon, the radical mastectomy, strict bed rest following a heart attack, cutting teeth, use of radium water, plombage, mercury for syphilis, pre-frontal lobotomy etc.

Of course, this pattern is not true of every medical intervention, not by any manner of means. Sometimes the influential person, or organisation, promotes the best course of action. This has been known to happen from time to time… believe it or not. In addition, medical practice does eventually auto-correct – and ends up doing the right thing. Almost always. We no longer remove toxic colons to cure female neurosis.

But what never, ever, seems to happen is OODA. Defined as ‘a practical concept designed to function as the foundation of rational thinking in confusing or chaotic situation’.

OODA stands for. ‘Observe, Orient, Decide Act.’

It was developed by the Air Force Colonel, John Boyd.

What John Boyd taught was simple. If you don’t know what is going on, do not make immediate decisions. First, work out what is happening, then orientate yourself – before you decide what to do. That way you avoid most, if not all, stupid mistakes. For many years, without knowing anything of OODA my own medical strategy has tended towards ‘don’t just do something, stand there.’

Unfortunately, the medical profession has always battled ferociously against doing nothing. It has always greatly favoured the ‘You must do something, anything, I don’t care what it is so long as it sounds like a good idea. Chaaarge!’ Strategy.

This, the ‘do something strategy’, has always proven far more seductive, and almost always wins. It is easier to attract followers to do something, than to than to do nothing. Why not whack a hole in the skull and split the brain apart to cure various mental diseases? Why not… indeed. Ah yes, the good old pre-frontal lobotomy.

A.N. Other doctor: ‘If you do nothing people will surely die. You cannot just stand there doing nothing.’

Me:                             ‘But what if those things we do end up causing more damage, or killing more people?’

Many years ago, my father said to me. ‘You will always be blamed for failures of omission, rath than commission.’ At the time I was young,  I knew everything, and thought he was talking rubbish. In truth I didn’t really understand his point. Now that I know that… I know nothing, I fully understand how profound his comment was. I wish I had listened to him more.

Yes, doing something will always be looked on in a positive light. Effort has been made, decisions have been taken, activity carried out. In medicine this is reflected in a comment that I have had directed at me, from time to time. ‘At least you tried, doctor.’ Well, seeing as they are now dead, my efforts achieved very little. But thanks anyway.

In addition, if you do nothing, you can be accused of laziness, of being uncaring. You just stood there and watched them suffer, even die. You cruel swine. I see this overwhelming urge to do something, anything, in the person who cannot swim, jumping into a river to try and save their dog from drowning.

What exactly did they think they were going to achieve? Oh well, at least they tried, you may say. No… they were stupid. They drowned along with their dog. But who can stand on the riverbank watching their dog die?

Well, me, actually.

This also moves into the area of survival guilt. How am I still alive when others have died? Better to die trying than to have done nothing? It all further wraps round into it the almost irresistible urge to be seen to be doing something. I think it is hard-wired into our psyche. We must fight to protect those in our tribe and be seen to be doing it. Chop, chop, busy, busy, work, work, bang, bang ¹.  

I am, however, reminded of the philosophy behind recruitment to the German army in the good old days – as recounted to me. Men were divided in to four categories:

• Intelligent and lazy
• Intelligent and hardworking
• Stupid and lazy
• Stupid and hardworking

At which point

• Intelligent and lazy men were taken for officer training
• Intelligent and hardworking men were turned into NCOs (non-commissioned officers)
• Stupid and lazy men became privates – squaddies, to use the UK vernacular
• Those who were both stupid, and hardworking, were taken out and shot, before they could do too much damage

Doing things, doing things, doing things. We place great value on it. Too much.

As Kurt Vonnegut Jnr noted in Cat’s Cradle:

“We do, doodley do, doodley do, doodely do,
What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must;
Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do,
Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust.”

Of course, if there are things to be done, they should be done. But that does not mean we should rush around doing stuff, just because it seems better than doing nothing. Here is what Vinay Prasad has to say in his blog ‘Will science do better post COVID19?’

‘When faced with a pandemic, we re-treated to all the old delusions. Bioplausibilty was sacrosanct— that’s why #maskswork! We can’t run RCTs— these are parachutes. Doing something is always better than doing nothing! More is better than less! Keep boosting, young man!! Newer is better than older. Disease bad; treatments good. Bad people (John Ioannidis) are always wrong (never mind, that a year ago we all thought he was brilliant).’ ²

The additional problem with doing things is that, once you have started doing them, it becomes damned difficult to stop again. After you have decided to blow four hundred billion pounds on lockdown, or thereabouts, then you are pretty much stuck with it. Or else, you are going to look pretty stupid. ‘Sorry, ahem, I seem to have wasted a teensy bit of money. Sorry, my mistake.’

If everyone is ordered to wear a mask, on pain of death, you are stuck with that too. Back pedalling from instant decisions is very, very, difficult. For the scientists and politicians involved you cannot be seen to have been wrong. Reputations must be protected.

At which point, vast amounts of time and effort are expended in trying to batter down anyone who dares to suggest that we rushed into doing things that were completely pointless, even damaging. Science then becomes twisted and bent to justify the errors made. Those in power must retain power. The narrative must be supported:

• COVID19 is really, really deadly
• Lockdowns really, really, work
• Masks really, really, work

If you question these narratives, people will demand an answer to this rhetorical question. Do you want people to die! (That’s always an effective weapon). The correct answer to this question by the way, is usually no – although I am willing to make exceptions.

The other terrible flaw in thinking here, especially in medicine, was also mentioned by Vinay Prasad. It is Bioplausibility. Often closely associated with fast thinking a.k.a. jumping to conclusions, because they just seem right.

Masks, indeed, must surely work. Because? Because they prevent the virus from spreading. In fact, masks represent an almost perfect example of bioplausibility a.k.a. sheer common sense. No-one can argue against using them. If you do, your arguments must be pure sophistry, or simply nonsense. ’You do not understand science.’ That’s a good one, I get that a lot.

‘I think you will find it is not I that fails to understand science.’ I think to myself. But I don’t say it, because it makes you sound like a prat.

Let me remind you of a time when, after a heart attack you had to rest in bed doing nothing for six weeks. The heart has been damaged and must be given a chance to rest. Yes, perfect Bioplausibility, believed by virtually everyone. To question it was to be cast into the outer darkness.

It is now known that the worst thing you can possibly do is to enforce strict bed rest post heart attack. This advice, in place from 1912 to about 1960(ish), killed tens of millions. Maybe hundreds of millions.

As for masks – the sort of masks worn by almost everyone.

‘The use of cloth facemasks in community settings has become an accepted public policy response to decrease disease transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet evidence of facemask efficacy is based primarily on observational studies that are subject to confounding and on mechanistic studies that rely on surrogate endpoints (such as droplet dispersion) as proxies for disease transmission. The available clinical evidence of facemask efficacy is of low quality and the best available clinical evidence has mostly failed to show efficacy, with fourteen of sixteen identified randomized controlled trials comparing face masks to no mask controls failing to find statistically significant benefit in the intent‐​to‐​treat populations. Of sixteen quantitative meta‐​analyses, eight were equivocal or critical as to whether evidence supports a public recommendation of masks, and the remaining eight supported a public mask intervention on limited evidence primarily on the basis of the precautionary principle. Although weak evidence should not preclude precautionary actions in the face of unprecedented events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, ethical principles require that the strength of the evidence and best estimates of amount of benefit be truthfully communicated to the public.’³

How can masks possibly fail to work?

Well, unfortunately, our brains work one way, and the world often works in quite another way. As does, therefore, science. For centuries people thought that heavier than air flight would only be possible if you flapped things that looked very like wings. Why, because birds and bats were the only flying things people had ever seen flying [apart from lemmings] and they mostly flapped about like mad – using wings.

Except that, if you looked closely, they didn’t – not really. If you thought flapping was the key to flight, you were not really looking. An albatross can stay aloft for hours, gliding above the waves, using the wind and updrafts, and barely moving its wings at all.

Yet, and yet, no-one was able to see this. When I say ‘see’ this I mean – look beyond the obvious, in your face, flappy stuff. Observe properly, deeply, to really understand what you are looking at – in this case aerodynamics. Eventually, of course, some people did. Et voila, the Wright Brothers.

With masks… Yes, it is both true, and self-evident, that a mask stops droplets being catapulted across a room after a cough or sneeze, or suchlike. So, they must stop spread…mustn’t they? I mean, you can even see it working in slow motion videos. A man coughs in London, virus ends up in New York – or something. Ah, the dreaded Bioplausibility… that can also be visualised. Double bubble.

But a mask can also turn droplets into an aerosol by breaking the droplet down into far smaller particles. Particles will float in the air for longer, and thus be inhaled for longer. Possibly, probably⁴. You didn’t think of that, did you?

A mask can also become damp and keep viral particles viable for longer. Once discarded – as many masks are – they represent receptacles for viruses and can spread disease when picked up. What happens when masks are used and used, and re-used? As they often are. Superspreading here we come. Blowing viral particles out of a wet mask.

As a wise man also said. Using cloth masks to prevent viral spread it like trying to pick up sand with a tennis racket. Virus particle size ‘x’. Holes in mask size 1000x.

A mask can also mean that people stand closer to each other than they otherwise would. A mask may, simply, never had had a chance to work at all. After all, we breathe in and breathe out the same amount of air whilst wearing a mask than not.

If there is virus in floating in the air, we are still going to breathe it in, and out. Masks do not stop us breathing, and the air has to come from somewhere. Unless masks act as a type of black hole, trapping, then transporting viral particles from here into another universe… I’m not putting much money on that hypothesis.

Some months ago, I wrote about the last people to be infected with smallpox. In one hospital, in Germany, a patient with smallpox was being treated on the ground floor. The patient in the room above, and then the room above that, become infected. Which means that viral particles must have got out the window, drifted upwards and infected those above.

Which just gives you some idea of how few viral particles were needed to spread a disease that was, up to that time, not even believed to spread through the air. No droplets required.

Early on, with COVID19 it was noted that ferrets could be infected with the virus. So, researchers put one ferret in a cage, with another ferret above with a solid barrier between them. The one below was infected with COVD19.

The only route for COVID19 to travel from one ferret to the other was through a tube that bent through ninety degrees, bent again to go upwards through the barrier, then across, and back round through ninety degrees

In essence, this tube was specifically designed to ensure that droplet spread was impossible. As droplets cannot go round corners, travel upwards, turn another ninety degrees… and suchlike.

Despite this, all of the uninfected ferrets became, very rapidly, infected. Conclusion – COVID19 can travel and infect through aerosol spread. Secondary conclusion – masks cannot stop this. At least not the sort of masks that virtually everyone wears, and then re-uses.

Of course, there are masks that you can use to prevent the spread of viral particles. But they have to be airtight, they have to have filters. They are uncomfortable to wear for any length of time, and they need to be changed regularly. They also prevent a great deal of communication, as people hard of hearing will tell you. Oh yes, there are serious downsides to mask wearing.

I only focus on masks here to make the point that masks appear totally ‘Bioplausible’. If, that is, you don’t think about all the issues too deeply. Also, getting everyone to wear masks represents doing ‘something.’ Doing something, especially something visible, is always better than doing nothing.

Yes… doing something, anything, and Bioplausibility. Two bear traps in human thought. Traps that seem impossible to eradicate.

There is another, major trap, which is the urge to draw ourselves into tribes. Then attack and attempt destroy anyone who does not agree with us. Humiliate and silence. Turn the ‘other’ into someone with evil intent. I am not getting into this in any depth here. We have all seen too much of it. The terrible seductive pleasure of righteous anger. Which so easily flips into hatred.

As also mentioned by Vinay Prasad. Bad people (John Ioannidis) are always wrong (never mind, that a year ago we all thought he was brilliant).’

As we all know, it is not just Ioannidis who is attacked. Dare to breathe one word of caution about vaccines and you become ‘dirty anti-vaxxer scum. You deserve to lose your job. Ha!’

This is no way for humans to act towards each other. Crush debate, silence those who dare to think differently. Bring in the Spanish Inquisition a.k.a. fact checkers. All bought and paid for by those who have vested interests in obliterating the opposition, of course.

Question:     When is a fact checker not a fact checker?

Answer:        When they are called a fact checker. [Especially if they work for a company that used to begin with Face and ended in Book. Or Witterpedia]

Also Meta…as in, I meta  ‘n’ idiot – who think it’s okay to silence anyone they disagree with, and claim this is science. Spare me.

Anyway, what do we do next time? How do we do better? How do we think better? Well, I suppose that first of all you have to get those in power to accept that they made mistakes…. Ho hum.

Frankly, that ain’t going to happen. Therefore, we need new people in power. People who can understand that things are complicated. That the immediate Bioplausible and simplistic ‘answer’ is as likely to be wrong, as it is right. More likely in truth.

We really need people to think better:

‘We have a crisis in medicine when it comes to understanding and appraising science. We do not teach this explicitly in medical schools, and it gets short shrift to mechanistic science. Our overemphasis on molecular mechanisms fuels the cognitive distortion that a reductionistic view is superior to empiricism*’ ²

*empiricism is the view that all concepts originate in experience, that all concepts are about or applicable to things that can be experienced, or that all rationally acceptable beliefs or propositions are justifiable or knowable only through experience.

Were there any examples of doing things better from which we could learn? In Sweden they did things differently – at least from most of the rest of Europe. Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist (yes they have such a post) was the man who led the Swedish response. It was to bring in very few restrictions and make almost everything voluntary. Lockdown ‘lite’ if you like.

He was ruthlessly attacked from all directions, but remained superficially calm. Although I imagine he felt most terribly bruised and battered inside. TIME magazine ran a story about the Swedish response entitled ‘The Swedish COVID-19 Response Is a Disaster. It Shouldn’t Be a Model for the Rest of the World.’⁵

You don’t really need to read the article. The title makes it entirely clear what tone was adopted, and also what the conclusion was going to be. Sweden = death and mayhem, run for the hills. Frankly, I am amazed that the Swedish Government held firm in supporting him.

At one point even the Swedish King, Carl XVI Gustaf ‘Gustaf –  the eminent epidemiologist’ as I believe he is also known – had a pop at poor old Anders. But the Government did support Tegnell’s light touch strategy – mostly. They held their nerve.

What was Anders thinking, the mad mass murdering fool? As he calmly stated in the British Medical Journal, after COVID19 deaths in Sweden had settled into the lower half of European figures. Not as good as some, better than most:

… there is still disagreement among scientists about which measures are effective against the spread of infection. “This is what we are still struggling to understand: some measures work in some places, but it is difficult to see patterns.”

“Countries that went through lockdowns are not doing that much better,”⁶

Yes, he is describing his OODA journey. Anders is still observing and attempting to orientate, but he cannot see what to do. He still believes that the evidence for severe lockdowns, and mask wearing, simply does not exist. To put it another way, he cannot yet decide what should be done. So, he isn’t doing it.

Good man. We need far more like Anders Tegnell, and less of those like the members of SAGE in the UK. Screaming blue bloody murder with threats of hundreds of thousands dying if WE DO NOT ACT NOW! The sky is falling, the sky is falling. OMCIRON will kill us all… all I tell ee’. Beware the black spot Cap’n.

We also need more people to be sceptical. To look at the science and the evidence. We need, quite frankly, to learn to think… and grow up. Also, importantly, learn the incredibly difficult trick of doing nothing at all.

As they used to say in a UK advert. ‘Nothing acts faster than Anadin (a painkiller)’

Solution… take nothing

Nothing acts faster than a damn good lockdown

Solution…do nothing

Or, to quote the famous physician William Osler. ‘One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.’ I shall now leave you with two things to consider. The first is an open letter, written by Professor Ehud Qimron, head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University and one of the leading Israeli immunologists:

I suppose I should say that the opinions of Professor Udi Qimron are not necessarily those of the senior management of this blog. I, in exactly the same way as Google and Facebook (Sorry, Alphabet and Meta. ‘As I was going to St Ives I meta man with seven wives’… how many idiots were going to St Ives), and suchlike, am merely the repository for information, and articles. A warehouse if you like. I have no editorial control over content, so you cannot sue me for anything written.

Unfortunately, I am not rich enough to employ Fact Checkers and unleash them upon anyone who disagrees with me. Yet. You have been warned.

The second thing, that I shall leave you with, is the fact that doing nothing can be very rewarding, and sometimes pretty hard work. As outlined by this article in The International Journal of Doing Very little:

‘We’re busy doin’ nothin’
Workin’ the whole day through
Tryin’ to find lots of things not to do
We’re busy goin’ nowhere
Isn’t it just a crime
We’d like to be unhappy, but
We never do have the time,’

‘I have to watch the river
To see that it doesn’t stop
And stick around the rosebuds
So they’ll know when to pop
And keep the crickets cheerful
They’re really a solemn bunch
Hustle, bustle
And only an hour for lunch.’

La-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

‘We’re busy doin’ nothin’
Workin’ the whole day through
Tryin’ to find lots of things not to do
We’re busy goin’ nowhere
Isn’t it just a crime
We’d like to be unhappy, but
We never do have the time.’

‘I have to wake the Sun up
He’s liable to sleep all day
And then inspect the rainbows
So they’ll be bright and gay
I must rehearse the songbirds
To see that they sing in key
Hustle, bustle
And never a moment free.’

‘We’re busy doin’ nothin’
Workin’ the whole day through
Tryin’ to find lots of things not to do
We’re busy going nowhere
Isn’t it just a crime
We’d like to be unhappy, but
We never do have the time.’

‘I have to meet a turtle
I’m teachin’ him how to swim
Then I have to shine the dewdrops
You know they’re looking rather dim
I told my friend, the robin
I’d buy him a brand-new vest

Hustle, bustle
We never do have
We never do have
We never do, never do
Never do, never do, never do have the time
Never do have the time.’⁸

And if that don’t cheer you up, nothing will. And follow my motto. ‘Don’t just do something stand there….’ Whilst observing and orientating of course. Think first, act later.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bnWLTI-QmE

2: https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/will-science-do-a-better-post-covid19

3: https://www.cato.org/working-paper/evidence-community-cloth-face-masking-limit-spread-sars-cov-2-critical-review

4: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7

5: https://time.com/5899432/sweden-coronovirus-disaster/

6: https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n3081

7: It’s an open letter you can go and find it yourself

8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QxvPXK3Gv4

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&#8230;

(4) https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.32&#8230;

(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/