Western University Drops ALL Vaccine Mandates
By Igor Chudov | November 29, 2022
Remember the scandal with Western University in Ontario, Canada, that was requiring boosters from its students?
That’s the college that required bivalent boosters for fall classes.
The uproar was momentous. How can a college require completely unproven “boosters” to be taken by young, healthy students who had one or more Covids anyway?
The college finally relented and fully discontinued Covid vaccination requirements:
Note the BLUE highlighting of “medical experts” in both above images. In three months, the brilliant “medical experts” have completed a 180-degree turnaround in their deep evidence-based scientific thinking and no longer demand the boosters.
What made them change their minds?
I am sure it is you, the protesters, the public, substack authors, etc.
The experts are possibly starting to worry that their role in the “pandemic” will soon be subject to pointed questions from the disappointed public worried about health and fertility.
Personally, I will do my best to continue exposing Covid criminals so that they are not let off the hook and their crimes are not forgotten.
Doctors who are accused of spreading “misleading information” could be jailed under new British Columbia law
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | November 29, 2022
During the pandemic, several doctors in the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC) hit the headlines for opposing Covid measures. State-sanctioned medical authorities responded by warning physicians that if they “put the public at risk with misinformation,” they may face investigations and regulatory action. Now, just 18 months later, these threats from medical authorities have evolved into a sweeping piece of legislation that includes two-year jail sentences for doctors who are deemed to be spreading certain types of “false or misleading information.”
The new legislation, Bill 36 — Health Professions and Occupations Act (HPOA), was approved by the legislature last Thursday and immediately received Royal Assent. A Cabinet order will determine when it comes into force.
According to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that defends the freedoms of Canadians, the bill will permit BC’s Health Minister to appoint College Boards who have the power to enforce many of the bill’s provisions. The bill also gives the Health Minister powers to enforce some provisions.
These combined powers can be used to jail, fine, and suspend doctors who are deemed to have spread certain types of “false or misleading information to patients or the public” and force doctors to get vaccinated as a condition of being eligible to practice. These powers are outlined in sections 259, 514, 518, 506, 511, and 200.
You can see the full text of Bill 36 here.
Powers to suspend and impose limits on health practitioners
Section 259 (“Summary protection orders”) states that health practitioners can be suspended or have limits imposed on their practice authority if they provide “false or misleading information to patients or the public” and it’s deemed that “a person who acts on the information is significant risk of harm” or providing the information is deemed to be a “health hazard” under the Public Health Act.
The Public Health Act classifies any activity that “is likely to interfere, with the suppression of infectious agents or hazardous agents” as a health hazard. This definition is broad and could easily be applied to criticism of vaccines, masks, lockdowns, thermal surveillance, lateral flow tests, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, antibody tests, and any other measures that authorities claim are necessary to stop the spread of Covid or another infectious disease.
Bill 36 also doesn’t define “false or misleading information” which raises the possibility that doctors could be suspended for sharing something that challenges the current narrative and later turns out to be true.
During the pandemic, multiple statements that were branded false later turned out to be true, such as those related to vaccines. Initially, high-ranking public health officials praised the purported 90% Covid-19 vaccine efficacy rate and said the vaccine will protect against the delta variant. Big Tech platforms made questioning the effectiveness of the vaccine a bannable offense. Yet this year, high-ranking health officials have reversed their stance and admitted that they “knew” Covid-19 vaccines wouldn’t prevent infection.
Powers to jail and fine health practitioners
Section 514 (“Offences”) and Section 518 (“Penalties”) permit fines of up $200,000 per individual or $500,000 per company and prison terms of up to two years for those that “knowingly” disclose information that contravenes a provision of Bill 36.
This seemingly suggests that someone who “knowingly” violate’s Bill 36’s rules on false or misleading information can be jailed or fined.
Just like the term “false or misleading information,” the term “knowingly” isn’t defined in Bill 36 and there’s no methodology or test in the bill that describes how courts will determine whether someone knowingly violated the rules.
Powers to perform warrantless search and seizures
Section 506 (“Search and seizure order”) permits judges to authorize a person to search and seize items from a health practitioners’ premises on the pre-crime-esque premise that the target will “likely contravene” a provision of Bill 36.
And section 511 (“Warrantless search”) allows those petitioning the judge for a search and seizure order to perform warrantless searches if they deem there to be “grounds for a search and seizure order” and “the delay necessary to obtain the order would result in the loss or destruction of evidence.” Those performing warrantless searches are also allowed to prevent the lawful owner of the premises from entering and seize items if they deem there to be “reasonable grounds” for it.
This seemingly means that if a health practitioner is deemed to be “likely” to break the bill’s false or misleading information rules or “likely” to push back against the bill’s mandatory vaccine provisions, even when they haven’t actually done any of these things, they could have their premises searched and items seized without a warrant if the person performing the search decides that there are grounds and that evidence could be destroyed.
Powers to force health practitioners to get vaccinated
Section 200 (“Eligibility to practise”) allows the Health Minister to introduce regulations that make being “vaccinated against specified transmissible illnesses” a condition of eligibility to practice. This means that doctors could be forced to get the Covid vaccine and any other vaccines specified by the Health Minister in order to continue practicing.
“An end run around democratic checks and balances”
Bill 36 has been blasted by legal groups and political parties.
“The legislation represents an end run around democratic checks and balances,” the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms wrote in a statement on Bill 36.
BC lawyer Charlene Le Beau added: “The enactment of Bill 36 would evidence a further erosion of the rights and freedoms our Charter is supposed to protect, particularly individual liberty. As Aristotle posited, ‘The basis of a democratic state is liberty.’”
David Leis, the vice president of engagement and development at the public policy think tank the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, called the bill “a full-frontal assault on the professional integrity and freedom of the health-care professions” and said the bill is “entirely inappropriate.”
“The Missing Babies of Europe”
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 29, 2022
Yesterday, I conducted the first interview for our new podcast, The CounterJab with Dr. Peter McCullough and John Leake. For those who are not familiar with “the sweet science,” a counterjab is a jab punch thrown in reply to an opponent’s punch. In informal British English, the word jab became (at some point in history) commonly used to refer to vaccine injections.
Nowadays it seems that so much of our opposition of assorted authoritarians, monopolists, gangsters, frauds, villains, and humbugs are united in their common advocacy of “the jab.” And so Dr. McCullough and I intend to reply with our own series of counterjabs.
I thought it poetic and appropriate that our first guest for bringing this project into the world is the obstetrician and gynocologist, Dr. James Thorp. With over forty years of clinical practice, taking care of unborn babies and their mothers is his life’s mission. What he told me in the course of our conversation (soon to be released as an audio-visual podcast episode) was probably the most disturbing thing I’ve ever heard in my life. In summation:
1). The cursory animal studies for the novel mRNA vaccines yielded an array of birth defects.
2). Pregnant women were excluded from the cursory human trials conducted in 2020.
3). The data presented in Pfizer’s own 5.3.6 CUMULATIVE ANALYSIS OF POST-AUTHORIZATION ADVERSE EVENT REPORTS OF PF-07302048 (BNT162B2) RECEIVED THROUGH 28-FEB-2021–released only after a contested FOIA request–was abysmal.
About halfway into the interview, I received a text from my friend and fellow investigative reporter, Mary Beth Pfeiffer, alerting me to her latest post on RESCUE Substack with Michael Capuzzo. I highly recommend reading “The Missing Babies of Europe.” The results of her investigation are consistent with Dr. Thorp’s exposition of the grave dangers of the mRNA vaccines for fetuses and their mothers.
Oblivion: the best cure?
The effects of lockdown, now becoming clearer by the day, should never be forgotten.
By Tom Jefferson | Trust the Evidence | November 29, 2022
My grandfather was a decorated WWI veteran. He was lucky and got back home minus a hand. My dad participated in the Battle of Britain, North African and Italian campaigns. He got home apparently unscathed. However, both had one thing in common: they would not speak of what they had done and seen. What they had been through was too terrible to describe, and people were not interested; it was all in the past. That is one of the reasons why we have wars: few people have any idea what it’s like.
It’s going that way with the most traumatic experience in this lifetime: lockdowns.
Looking at the media, you would think nothing extraordinary has happened since 2020.
Well, let me remind you.
Our civil liberties were severely curtailed, drones were sent after lone runners on deserted moorland, children could see but not touch toys in stores (if they were let in at all), our elders died abandoned in nursing homes or their own homes, governments spurted gibberish on the advice of modellers and overnight experts. The media ran a wall-to-wall campaign to get the populace to toe the line. Crooks were allowed to run away with billions of public money while massive amounts were spent on useless tests. That is why the Chancellor has a large hole in his books. While patients likely to be infected were moved around hospitals, in some casualties, separation consisted of taped bin bags stretched across walls, GPs were not accessible, and the police were checking people’s movements and compliance with government policies. Children were confined to home; people stopped exercising and took to drinking. People with serious illnesses did not get treated, partly because they were rightly scared of catching the plague when in hospital. Few people questioned what was going on.
Data, real data on which momentous decisions were made, were absent. We do not know how many real infectious cases or deaths attributable to SARS-CoV-2 there were. Even deceased who tested negative were wrapped up in the Covid death tally. So we cannot separate the impact of the agent from the self-inflicted devastation.
The current economic crisis has its genesis in the demented and wasteful response to an unknown unquantified threat, then came the war in Ukraine, but the lockdown came first. Remember how many businesses stopped paying taxes because they had gone bust or could not trade?
Parliament had little say in what went on while large swathes of politicians were trying to outdo each other in demanding more restrictions and closures.
Scientific evidence, when available, was used as a political weapon regardless of its quality and credibility.
So now that I have refreshed your memory and now we know that no one will ever be held responsible for the greatest catastrophe in our generation, I ask you, when will the next round be? There is ample precedent, so it’s only a matter of time.
The government is now bending over backwards it seems to address four problems: cancer, obesity, addiction and mental health, throwing more money at four problems which its policy magnified and worsened. I will save you the effort of searching. In the glossy press release, I failed to find any mention of restrictions, isolation or lockdown.
Perhaps my grandfather and father should have spoken about the war and reminded those who wanted to forget that oblivion is the road to perdition. For our democracy, our society and our families.
Twitter quietly changes Covid-19 policy
RT | November 29, 2022
Twitter has said it will no longer enforce its coronavirus misinformation policy, according to an update on the platform’s Covid-19 transparency page that went largely unnoticed since it was posted last week. The move came as its new owner Elon Musk announced a “general amnesty” for previously suspended accounts.
The misinformation policy was initially developed in 2020 amid the outbreak of Covid-19 and was meant to combat “harmful” misleading posts about the coronavirus, government policies aimed at curbing its spread, and related vaccines.
Users who violated the rule received strikes. After two or three strikes, their accounts were suspended for 12 hours. After four, they would be locked out for a week, while offenders with more than five strikes were permanently banned from the platform.
According to statistics published by Twitter itself, between January 2020 and September 2022, the platform’s moderators challenged over 11.72 million accounts and suspended more than 11,000 for violating the rule. They also scrubbed nearly 100,000 pieces of content worldwide under the policy.
The extensive moderation policy became a topic of heated debate. Some called for more censorship of posts deemed to be harmful, while others argued this constituted suppression of free speech.
Since Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion last month, he has made a number of dramatic changes at the company, including laying off nearly two-thirds of its staff and significantly cutting the site’s moderation and management teams.
Ahead of Thanksgiving, the billionaire also vowed to extend a “general amnesty” to an unspecified number of suspended accounts after holding a Twitter poll, in which more than 72.4% out of 3.1 million respondents supported the move.
Critics have argued that the social networking service could soon become a hotbed for misinformation, right-wing extremism and hate speech. Musk, however, has insisted that he wants Twitter to become a level playing field and a bastion of free speech where people can peacefully exchange their views on a wide range of topics.
Pfizer CEO, who said online “misinformation” is criminal, is found guilty of “misleading” vaccine statements
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | November 27, 2022
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, last year at the Atlantic Council, called people who spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation “criminals,” in his calls for censorship of misinformation online.
However, this year, Dr. Bourla is himself found responsible by the UK’s pharmaceutical regulator of making “misleading” statements about vaccination of children.
Last December, in an interview with the BBC, Dr. Bourla said that “there is no doubt in my mind that the benefits, completely, are in favor of” vaccinating children between the ages of five and 11.
He continued to say that “Covid in schools is thriving.”
“This is disturbing, significantly, the educational system and there are kids that will have severe symptoms.”
The interview was conducted before the vaccine was approved for children between the ages of five and 11 in the UK.
After the interview was published, parent campaign group UsForThem filed a complaint with the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA). The complaint accused Dr. Bourla of making “disgracefully misleading” comments about vaccinating children and that the comments were “extremely promotional in nature,” and that he violated several clauses of the code of practice by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI).
“There is simply no evidence that healthy schoolchildren in the UK are at significant risk from the SARS COV-2 virus and to imply that they are is disgracefully misleading,” the complaint said.
PMCPA convened a code of practice panel that found that Dr. Bourla had indeed violated the code of practice in a few ways, including failure to present information to the public in a factual and balanced manner, misleading the public, and making claims that cannot be substantiated.
The Telegraph reported Pfizer appealed against the findings of the panel and strongly disagreed with UsForThem’s claims that the CEO violated the code of practice. The company argued that Dr. Bourla’s remarks were based on “up-to-date scientific evidence” and they could be proven through “publicly available independent benefit-risk assessments.”
An appeal board upheld that Dr. Bourla misled the public, made claims that were unbalanced, and made unsubstantiated claims.
However, it ruled against claims that Pfizer discredited the industry, encouraged reckless use of a treatment, and did not maintain high standards.
As an Oncologist I Am Seeing People With Stable Cancer Rapidly Progress After Being Forced to Have a Booster
BY DR ANGUS DALGLEISH | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | NOVEMBER 26, 2022
There follows a letter from Dr. Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at St George’s University of London, to Dr. Kamran Abbasi, the Editor in Chief of the BMJ. It was written in support of a colleague’s plea to Dr. Abbasi that the BMJ make valid informed consent for Covid vaccination a priority topic.
Dear Kamran Abbasi,
Covid no longer needs a vaccine programme given the average age of death of Covid in the U.K. is 82 and from all other causes is 81 and falling.
The link with clots, myocarditis, heart attacks and strokes is now well accepted, as is the link with myelitis and neuropathy. (We predicted these side effects in our June 2020 QRBD article Sorensen et al. 2020, as the blast analysis revealed 79% homologies to human epitopes, especially PF4 and myelin.)
However, there is now another reason to halt all vaccine programmes. As a practising oncologist I am seeing people with stable disease rapidly progress after being forced to have a booster, usually so they can travel.
Even within my own personal contacts I am seeing B cell-based disease after the boosters. They describe being distinctly unwell a few days to weeks after the booster – one developing leukaemia, two work colleagues Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and an old friend who has felt like he has had Long Covid since receiving his booster and who, after getting severe bone pain, has been diagnosed as having multiple metastases from a rare B cell disorder.
I am experienced enough to know that these are not the coincidental anecdotes that many suggest, especially as the same pattern is being seen in Germany, Australia and the USA.
The reports of innate immune suppression after mRNA for several weeks would fit, as all these patients to date have melanoma or B cell based cancers, which are very susceptible to immune control – and that is before the reports of suppressor gene suppression by mRNA in laboratory experiments.
This must be aired and debated immediately.
Angus Dalgleish MD FRACP FRCP FRCPath FMedSci
Angus Dalgleish is a Professor of Oncology at St George’s, University of London.
The Doctor Who Can Rebuild Trust: Joseph Ladapo
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | November 22, 2022
If you are like me, you are exhausted of the lies. Every day seems to bring new revelations about how our lives came to be upended. The connections are becoming clearer between the pandemic response and the growing economic crisis, the ballooning debt, the growth of the surveillance state, the corruption and scams, chilling absence of integrity in public life, and, with the failure of FTX, the way in which an outright financial scam was integral to the calamity.
While we await new revelations, depositions, coverups, pleas for amnesty, and bad economic news, whom can we trust? Is anyone telling the truth?
Today was Anthony Fauci’s last White House press conference, and he spoke as if life is all normal and everything is fine. It’s as if the whole disaster never happened. He never locked anyone down, he says. He is happy for any investigations, he says, because he has nothing to hide. And then he ended with a final push for everyone to get booster #5 or whatever number we are on.
It’s like we live in two universes: our own lives in which we read true things in some places, and official life, in which shills and publicists keep repeating the same nonsense over and over without flinching or providing anything like an honest account of these last three years.
Perhaps for this reason – and also because by any historical standard this is a tremendous autobiography – reading Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s Transcend Fear is a welcome relief from the nonsense of our times. It is brutally honest. It is emotionally affecting. It is careful and precise but also deeply radical in its observations. If what’s called the “public health world” has lost touch with both the public and health, this book provides a path to restoring it. In short, it is a beautiful and inspiring experience.
Dr. Ladapo is the Surgeon General of the State of Florida, picked by Governor Ron DeSantis to forge and explain the state’s health decisions and priorities to the public in the midst of a grave crisis. He has faced down the national press time and time again with Zen-like wisdom. He seems emotionally unflappable while also sticking to the science as he understands it. He is the only public health official in the country who has been upfront about the limits of the vaccines and warned healthy young people that they don’t need them.
What we learn from this book is that he has been a warrior against pseudoscience from the very beginning of this pandemic and the government response. After the lockdowns, most scientists and health professionals fell silent, fearing reputational and financial loss. Dr. Ladapo was different, On March 24, 2020, still within the window of “15 Days to Flatten the Curve,” he wrote in USA Today:
We are fretting and we are fuming. As a country, we have been caught miserably flat-footed after receiving warnings about what lay ahead when cases of Covid-19 began exploding in Wuhan, China. Messages from local and state leaders about how to respond to the pandemic change almost daily—a sure sign they have no idea what they are doing. Shutdowns are happening here in California and in New York, and will probably spread to the rest of the nation….
Here’s the problem: Because of the (understandable) fear and hysteria of the moment, few US leaders are seriously talking about the endgame. The epidemiologic models I’ve seen indicate that the shutdowns and school closures will temporarily slow the virus’ spread, but when they’re lifted, we will essentially emerge right back where we started. And, by the way, no matter what, our hospitals will still be overwhelmed. There has already been too much community spread to prevent this inevitability.
We don’t have a totalitarian government like China, and we value our civil liberties too much to take the measures (i.e., total lockdown) that would be needed to rapidly decrease the infection rate to zero. This means that, even with shutdowns, the virus will still spread. Unfortunately, this also means that rates of “community immunity,” often referred to as “herd immunity,” will slow. As a result, we will always be vulnerable to the virus spreading rapidly again as soon as shutdown measures are lifted, unless they are immediately reimplemented—over and over and over again.
Was he the first post-lockdown voice from public health profoundly to object in a public forum of this magnitude? Perhaps so. Consider the bravery and presence of mind it required to write those sentences. The entire country was on a wartime footing with unprecedented horribles taking place. The media was screaming “Run for your lives” but most of us weren’t even allowed out of our homes to do that.
These were utterly crazy times. The whole world was going bonkers. And yet this man kept his cool.
This book explains where his cool comes from. You see, he is the son of an immigrant from Nigeria, born 1979. A math and science whiz, he attended Wake Forest and then entered Harvard Medical School. While he was involved in his studies, he noted the existence of the Kennedy School of Government and enrolled there too. On graduation day, he was granted a MD plus a PhD in public policy. So essentially: the highest credentials in two fields that this country offers. He became professor of medicine at New York University and then the University of California, Los Angeles.
The trouble was that none of his training had prepared him to deal with medical issues closer to home, namely his wife’s unrelenting migraines that often landed her in the hospital and his own underlying psychological fears of social interaction. The details are very painful and told in this book with disarming detail. Long story short: his search for answers led him toward alternative medical paths that eventually fixed both issues, and burned a lesson in his mind. Health is individual, and the right path is not the same for everyone and not always found in expertise as codified in the textbooks and institutions.
It was soon after these difficult times that the pandemic broke and, along with it, the claims that the experts had all the answers in lockdowns and eventual universal mandates for vaccination.
Dr. Ladapo had meanwhile developed the self-confidence to speak about such matters truthfully and fearlessly. And he never stopped. He wrote for every venue he could, month after month, urging an end to the lockdowns, a focus on therapeutics, attention to the science we had, and genuine concern for the health of actual individuals, who are not lab rats but people with human rights and freedom.
Even though Dr. Joseph Ladapo is obviously a hero (and one for the ages, so far as I’m concerned), the prose here is remarkably lucid, humble, and precise. That’s why I say that the humane concern in this book is an inspiration. Moreover, reading it is a form of therapy because he connects with a common sense that we all had in 2019 before the world descended into utter madness.
What’s more, this book shows a path forward not only for public health but for all of us as individuals. He urges personal reflection as the first step in recovery, overcoming whatever hidden fears we had that caused too many among us to go along with the preposterous parade of dangerous nonsense that controlled our lives for so long.
In my own view, this book is a classic of our times. Its value added is not only the author’s credentials, though he has them galore, or even how it speaks so directly to issues that have profoundly affected all our lives. Its real value is as a model of autobiography that offers lessons for all of us without exception.
I write as Dr. Fauci just finished his last press conference without offering so much as a hint of apology for what has happened. Meanwhile, I’m sure Dr. Ladapo is tending to his work in Florida where he has been charged with dealing with public health policy with honesty, truth, and wisdom. I know who gets my vote for hero of the pandemic.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.
Courage to Face COVID-19: Book Trailer
https://rumble.com/embed/v1uk8xs/?pub=4
Written by John Leake and produced by Daniel Hancock | November 25, 2022
At the beginning of 2020, Dr. Peter McCullough was a highly regarded practicing physician, program director, teacher, and clinical investigator at a major academic medical center in Dallas, TX. When COVID-19 arrived in March, he felt a duty to find a treatment for the disease. He wasn’t alone. Other doctors all over the world were also searching for a cure. They followed the longstanding principle that it’s best to tackle a sickness early, before it becomes life threatening. This is the story of how Dr. McCullough and his colleagues developed an early treatment protocol of generic, repurposed drugs and supplements that has saved millions of COVID-19 patients from hospitalization and death.
In spite of their success, their early treatment protocol was not welcomed by public health officials. On the contrary, the news of their promising results was dismissed as soon as it was reported. At first this seemed like conventional skepticism, but then fraudulent papers maligning the protocol’s repurposed drugs were published in academic medical journals. This and other acts of fraud revealed that a coordinated smear campaign against early treatment was being waged. Dr. McCullough and his colleagues soon found themselves censured, censored, vilified in the media, and fired from their jobs. The greatest victims of the smear campaign were COVID-19 patients who were consequently deprived of early treatment. Hundreds of thousands needlessly died of the disease.
At the same time early treatment was suppressed, the US government and mainstream media proclaimed that the cure to COVID-19 lay in a new generation of vaccines that were being developed at warp speed. These were heralded as a forthcoming panacea that would save mankind and restore normalcy. As soon as they were mass deployed, public health officials would lift the restrictions on social and economic life.
While many observers were thunderstruck by this turn of events, there were historical precedents. In his 1961 Farewell Address, President Eisenhower warned, “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes”. As Dr. McCullough and his colleagues learned, Eisenhower’s warning has become equally applicable to the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex of multinational drug companies, the NIH and other federal agencies, research and virology labs, and the Gates Foundation. Since COVID-19 arrived, this Complex has obtained misplaced power over every aspect of our lives and taken our liberties. The Courage to Face Covid-19 recounts how Dr. McCullough and his colleagues began their work by fighting a novel infectious disease, and then became leaders in fighting the tyrannical regime that endangers our American way of life.
One for the Enquiry: Test and Trace to bankruptcy
How the Test and Trace policy based on shaky science has helped bankrupt the UK
By Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan | Trust the Evidence | November 24, 2022
We plan to write up a series of short notes on topics that, in our view, should be addressed by the Covid enquiry. So, we are calling these One, Two, Three etc., for the enquiry. But, as always, we rely on our readers to suggest other topics.
Here’s the first one.
In public health, identifying symptomatic subjects and their subsequent isolation is proposed and used for infectious diseases to slow outbreaks and, in some instances, stop them.
The conceptual nub of the issue is that in the vast majority of cases, an infectious disease is contagious for a short time. During that period, the source of infection (known as the index case) may infect other people (contacts). Therefore, if you stop contact from the index case and/or their secondary cases (family, acquaintances, colleagues), you will interrupt or disrupt the chain of transmission of the agent.
Cases are only of interest if they are contagious, i.e. producing so-called replication-competent viruses that can be passed on from A to B and so on, which need to be identified and traced, then isolated to prevent onward transmission.
In the explosive phase of an acute respiratory viral epidemic, testing, tracing, and isolation are incredibly labour-intensive as cases multiply exponentially to then level out and fall as the contagion curve obeys Farr’s law.
In Lombardy, by the second week in March, public health had given up testing and tracing as the numbers of supposed cases rapidly overwhelmed public health resources. Tracing, you see, needs to be done based on history taking. It is time-consuming, and the window of contagiousness is sometimes very short, lasting as little as two days.
No problem, enter PCR as a tool for diagnosis. If applied in large numbers in what amounts to mass testing of whole populations, it can quickly tell you who is “positive”. No need to use those old rusty tools of clinical investigation and history-taking, considered old fuddy-duddy stuff in this age.
So in a very short time, PCR capacity went from niche testing in a few laboratories to people waving swabs at motorists in drive-ins – the way out of the pandemic and the return to normal was imminent, we were told.
Except, as discussed in the third instalment of our transmission riddles, qualitative PCR (positive/negative) on its own without recourse to clinical history and an estimate of viral burden cannot distinguish between contagious, convalescent and spurious cases, i.e. due to environmental contamination. If you then set arbitrary cut-offs for positivity, as has been done in most UK laboratories, you increase the number of “cases” by an unknown factor.
The consequence, apart from the cost of setting up a programme not founded on science and clinical medicine, is the lengthy isolation of those who never came into contact with SARS-CoV-2 or those who are convalescing, regardless of whether they knew they had been infected. Convalescents can still test positive for PCR as the technique is so sensitive that in the presence of an arbitrary cut-off, the test is picking up viral debris, which is of little interest.
So, we have an expensive programme with no clear, evidence-based objectives. The initial budget was £15 billion; by November 2020, this rose to £22bn; by the time the service was halted in February 2022, it cost £37bn. At its height, over 700 UK testing sites were open seven days a week, including Xmas and New Year’s day.
In the digital era – phone technologies were considered the answer – the dreaded ‘pings’ went unanswered, that’s if you downloaded or switched it on in the first place. But yet again, interventions were untried and untested; however, this didn’t stop them from being rolled out at speed.
But at any point, did anyone ask if there is evidence for such an approach that had never been tried before on such a scale worked or, once rolled out, evaluated its effectiveness?
Although contact tracing has a clear logic, its effects depend on the characteristics of the organism, how it is transmitted, the duration of the asymptomatic phase before symptoms manifest, the time the agent is transmissible, the size of the outbreak and the behaviour of the population.
By the time it shut down in February 2022, 16 million cases had been detected in England, whereas the ONS infection survey estimated 67.6 million had tested positive for covid-19. Therefore, only about one in four “cases” were detected, and of those testing positive, there was no indication of whether they were infectious at the time.
Given the scale of the outbreak and the nature of the SARs-COV-2 agent, it was clear early on that Test and Trace would be an expensive waste of resources. But at the outset, those in power extolled its virtues.
One of the arguments is that Test and Trace was rolled out too late. Early on, Germany was praised for its Test and Trace strategy. Some advisors incorrectly extolled their strategy; however, Germany equally struggled and ended up gripped by panic. As a result, it was late in coming out of covid measures in 2022.
The Test and Trace program ignored the basic rules of infectious disease epidemiology leading to massive disruption of society. Models are insufficient evidence to support £37bn of expenditures – lacking evidence, no other area of healthcare would tolerate such waste.
But you don’t need to take our word for it: in October 2021, The House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, in its Test and Trace update, similarly considered the program a waste of resources.
- ‘In March this year, we reported NHS Test and Trace Service’s (NHST&T) failure to deliver on its central promise of averting another lockdown.‘
- ‘In addition, most of the testing and contact tracing capacity that NHST&T paid for has not been used, and despite previous commitments to reduce dependency on consultants, it employed more in April 2021 than in December 2020.’
- ‘NHST&T’s overall goal is to help break the chains of COVID-19 transmission and enable people to return to a more normal way of life, but there have been two national lockdowns since October 2020 and at the time of our evidence session cases were increasing again.’
Despite all the resources thrown at it, Test and Trace did not show one measurable difference in the outcomes of the pandemic – it did not avoid further lockdowns as promised. Instead, the £37 Billion could have paid for roughly a million nurses for the year, or a year and a half of social care cost for everyone that needed it. In October 2020, the PM announced £3.7 billion for 40 hospitals in the biggest hospital-building programme in a generation – He could have nearly rebuilt the whole NHS estate with £37bn. We’ll leave you to consider what you may have better spent the money on.
The budget for Test and Trace now seems unthinkable in the face of a deep recession where every penny counts. Effective healthcare is built on solid evidence of what works, not on opinions of what we think might work. The fact it made no measurable difference is now clear.
The Questions for the enquiry are
- What was the Test and Trace program’s aim?
- What evidence was the Test and Trace built on?
- How was the quality of the evidence assessed?
- What were the metrics for effectiveness? These should not be process measures such as number tested as these do not measure the spread of the agent.
- Why wasn’t the Test and Trace program terminated after the damming PAC report?
- How can the government prevent such a massive waste of resources on ineffective interventions in the future?
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Seyed M. Marandi: Negotiations Collapsed – Return to War
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From the Archives
The US-Iran Scenario That Most Scares Israel
By Ali Haydar | Al-Akhbar | October 9, 2013
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a series of threats toward Iran and its interlocutors in the West, including the US, as serious negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program seem more plausible.
As a possible rapprochement looms between the US and Iran, Netanyahu has attempted to impose impossible Israeli conditions on the negotiators, such as the full dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program, not to mention threatening military force.
Whatever the deal that could materialize between Iran and the West, Israel is going to find itself before an open-ended path. One can foresee three possible scenarios… continue
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Aletho News- Seyed M. Marandi: Negotiations Collapsed – Return to War
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