HighWire Dispels Misinformation About Measles
The HighWire with Del Bigtree | February 28, 2025
Del does a deep dive into the science behind the measles virus, dispelling decades of misinformation from public health agencies, as well as what is actually driving the recent measles outbreaks in the U.S. See a shocking scientific equation comparing the number of individual deaths that would occur if the measles vaccine had never been introduced based on pre-vaccine stats to the number of deaths from MMR injury.
How Speaking Out Against Harmful COVID Policies Can Get You Banned by the NHS
The story of a bizarre punishment
By MJ Sutherland | Health Advisory & Recovery Team | December 27, 2024
It’s been an incredible journey.
At the end of July 2021, I walked out of a well-paid job with Dumfries & Galloway Council. I resigned in protest—against fraudulent COVID testing, child maltreatment through misuse of tests and enforcement of mask mandates, and the complete disregard for their lack of authority to do any of it. What they were doing to Other People’s Children in schools was indefensible, and I wasn’t going to stay silent. Later I forced them to admit, via the Scottish Information Commissioner, that they had no legal authority for any of it. I’d long since left the council by this time.
At first, the threats were thinly veiled: hints that speaking out could jeopardise my job, suggestions that I should “be careful” what I said, because “we don’t want to lose you…” But when I refused to back down, their tactics became more direct. I was accused of spreading misinformation—despite providing mountains of evidence—and warned that my activism could “damage my reputation.” It was clear they wanted me to stop asking questions. I didn’t, and after being warned about my “behaviour” once too often, I walked out – but not before sending a damning email to hundreds, if not thousands, of council workers, accusing the council’s top brass of fraud, misfeasance and child abuse.
By October 2021, I was working with Phil Hyland of PJH Law, and together we sent the council a formal letter warning them of the crimes they’d be complicit in if they continued. It still feels surreal that I got to be part of that. I’d already sent similar notices and detailed evidence to the local health board, but both the council and NHS ignored everything I submitted.
Then, in December 2021, things escalated when an NHS “Consultant in Public Health” closed a local primary school, forcing children into self-isolation until they could produce a negative PCR test before they could return. Knowing the truth about these tests—their inaccuracies, their misuse—I couldn’t stay quiet. This wasn’t just bad policy; it was child abuse. We issued a Notice to Cease and Desist to Dr Regina McDevitt. We attached the PJH Law letter we’d sent to the council, along with the evidence pack detailing the harm these policies were causing.
This time, there was a reaction. But instead of addressing the harm to children or engaging with the evidence, NHS Dumfries & Galloway’s CEO, Jeff Ace, decided instead to ban me from all NHS premises for six months.
This was a bizarre move, especially since I hadn’t set foot in an NHS building for years. I was still entitled to go for medical appointments (although I had none), but presumably not allowed to visit patients, although I didn’t know anyone in hospital at the time, so no difference there. I was still entitled to submit FOI requests as I had been doing, but presumably not allowed to protest by waving placards outside NHS buildings, which I wasn’t doing anyway. But, as pointless and absurd as it may be, banned I was.
I can only suspect Jeff’s motive was to to feel better about himself, like he’d actually achieved something, but here’s the irony: while they were busy “punishing” me, they quietly dropped the requirement for children to produce negative PCR tests before returning to school. So, in the end, something got through. But the message was clear: dissent would not be tolerated.
Since then, I’ve kept busy. I’ve been prodding, poking, and shining a light on the fraud and abuse that fuelled the covid tyranny. This wasn’t just about masks or tests; it was about the false claims of authority that let these institutions get away with it all.
Last year, I had the honour of being interviewed by Dr Ahmad Malik about my activism. We discussed the council’s capitulation on masks, the informed consent documents I created, and how this fight has unfolded. And now, HART have invited me to share my story as someone who chose the difficult path by communicating the truth about covid policies and their effects.
Looking back, I’m pleased to say that the threats didn’t stop me. Neither did losing my career. And while I’ve chosen that difficult path, I wouldn’t change a thing.
Like I said, it’s been an incredible journey.
MJ Sutherland
Founder of Declaration of Dumfries
Kafka-NHS
The witch hunts against dissident doctors continue
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | June 8, 2024
In June 2021, Dr. Sam White, a general practitioner, released a video calling out harmful covid policy. From a scientific perspective every word he said was entirely defensible. Moreover it is clear that he was speaking from an ethical position of wanting to protect his patients from harm. He pulled no punches in addressing the most prominent issues that were causing harm – lack of treatment for the frail, inappropriate gene therapies and masking. In interviews, in 2022, he called the situation a war between good and evil. In doing so he unleashed a torrent of anger among those in a position of power over him, which, three years on, continues to harm him.
He had already resigned from his GP partnership in protest at their vaccination policy in February 2021. His conscience had been keeping him awake at night because he did not want to be a part of the vaccine rollout. Consequently, after resigning he was signed off with stress rather than having to work his notice. NHS England still saw fit to suspend him with an emergency order in June. Dr White managed to record a conversation with an NHS senior clinical adviser who implied that he was mentally unwell. Dr White believes that possession of that recording led the NHS to revoke their suspension. However, by then the NHS had referred him for a GMC investigation and an automatic GMC suspension.
The GMC overturned the suspension in August 2021 but imposed restrictions on him including a ban on mentioning covid on social media and requiring the removal of his previous posts. The legal position is that doctors have a right to free speech but if the GMC could prove Dr White’s speech was a threat to the health of the public or undermined trust in the profession then he could be sanctioned.
Dr White looked to his indemnity provider for support to fund his legal case but they washed their hands of him saying it was a “conduct issue”. With the help of crowd funding support, Dr White took the case to the High Court in November 2021. The verdict was published in December 2021, overruling the GMC and saying they had not followed due process in their actions. The High Court documentation was removed from the judiciary’s website in September 2022 such that other doctors in a similar position will be unable to refer to it in their defence. It is available on the Wayback Machine.
Dr White has asked to be removed from the register, as he is no longer practising conventional medicine, but the GMC have refused and are continuing to persecute him. Every interview he has undertaken has been transcribed and put forward as evidence that he is undermining public health policy and causing the public to lose trust in the profession. The next tribunal hearing is scheduled to last three weeks in August and September 2024. This ongoing investigation, three years later, indicates a relentless effort to discredit and punish Dr. White for his dissenting views.
If that sounds bad, wait until you hear about the NHS’s role.
The same day as the High Court hearing, unbeknown to Dr White or his lawyers, NHSE had a meeting where they decided to refer Dr White for a health assessment, despite the fact he no longer worked in the NHS. This was an opportunity to reopen the investigation into him. They have repeatedly asked if he had returned to NHS work and said he must tell them if he did. What was their intent here? Were they planning to ask any future employer to suspend him all over again?
NHS England has a list of “approved providers”. Any doctor not on their list cannot work for the primary employer of doctors in the country. In 2023, NHS England removed Dr White from their list, effectively barring him from practising within the NHS. He had already shifted his practice to private healthcare with a holistic focus, but this further punishment leaves him with no other options.
The GMC is far from perfect but at least it has due process and a system of appeal for where there might be an injustice. NHS England can unilaterally destroy a career, with no legal recourse.
In some ways, the most disturbing aspect of the whole affair was revealed in the communications between the GMC and NHS England. Firstly, the derogatory terms used about the doctor to justify their behaviour are shocking and reveal a lack of professionalism and intolerance for differing opinions within the medical establishment. Moreover, this language served as a means to rationalise their harsh and unjust actions towards him. Secondly, they appeared to be acting in cahoots. The GMC’s apparent open and fair processes have been bypassed by direct communication with NHS England, stripping Dr White of a right to employment.
Dr. Sam White’s case is a stark example of systemic injustice and the erosion of professional rights within the NHS and the GMC. His ongoing persecution for voicing dissenting views underscores a troubling intolerance for ethical and scientific debate, reminiscent of a Kafkaesque nightmare where rationality and justice are subordinated to bureaucratic oppression.
From Florida’s Surgeon General, a devastating indictment of the vaccine and its pushers
By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | June 22, 2023
When it comes to error correction, the USA’s 50 sovereign states offer more opportunity for an authoritative challenge to the misuse of power than we enjoy in the UK. Dr Joseph Ladapo, the Florida Surgeon General, has made public a letter excoriating federal health officials over their promotion of the mRNA Covid vaccines. The government, he said, ‘has relentlessly forced a premature vaccine into the arms of the American people with little or no concern for the adverse ramifications’.
The letter was to Drs Robert Califf, head of the Food and Drug Administration, and Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lapado wrote: ‘Your ongoing decision to ignore many of the risks associated with mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, alongside your efforts to manipulate the public into thinking they are harmless, have resulted in deep distrust in the American health care system.’
As reported here earlier this year, senior American scientists have called for a ‘bipartisan, scientifically minded Covid-19 commission so the public health disaster of the past three years is not repeated’. They face an uphill struggle in achieving that aim, but Ladapo’s no-holds-barred letter means that at least some of Florida’s 22.6million citizens have a chance of knowing the jabs are not ‘safe and effective’, as the British public are constantly being told.
Ladapo would surely have been less forthright if Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor and a possible future US president, were not also on the warpath over the Biden administration’s handling of the pandemic. The Florida Supreme Court has approved DeSantis’s request to convene a grand jury to investigate ‘wrongdoings’ associated with the vaccines.
But DeSantis is not alone. The Texas Attorney General has launched an investigation into whether Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, the companies producing the jabs, misrepresented their safety and efficacy and manipulated trial data. The investigation could open the door to lawsuits by people injured by the mRNA products.
Meanwhile, what hope of redress do Britons have, not just for vaccine damage but for the lives shattered by cruel and unprecedented lockdowns?
The public inquiry led by Baroness Hallett looks likely to be worse than useless, as Laura Dodsworth, author of the best-selling A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic, has described.
It is in ‘the wise and noble tradition of the great British public inquiry’, Rod Liddle commented in the Sunday Times last weekend. That is, keep the public away from it for as long as possible, and say nothing useful or meaningful unless ‘at least 20 years after whatever it is that they are inquiring about, at which point most of the relevant people are stiff as a stoat’.
The headline on Liddle’s article declared: ‘The data is clear: lockdowns are useless. But you won’t hear that from the inquiry.’
Sadly, neither the Sunday Times nor its daily stablemate, nor just about any of the mainstream media in the UK, have yet ventured into questioning the ‘safe and effective’ narrative about the vaccines. So let’s look at what Ladapo, who as state surgeon general can hardly be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, has told the American public.
‘Data are unequivocal,’ Ladapo wrote. ‘After the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) reporting increased by 1,700 per cent, including a 4,400 per cent increase in life-threatening conditions.
‘Dismissing this pronounced increase as being solely due to reporting trends is a callous denial of corroborating scientific evidence also pointing to increased risk and a poor safety profile. It also fails to explain the disproportionate increase in life-threatening adverse events for the mRNA vaccines compared to all adverse events.
‘Based on the CDC’s own data, rates of incapacitation after mRNA vaccination far surpass other vaccines.’
Ladapo cited a recent study which found an excess risk of serious adverse events ‘of special interest’ for 1 in 550 people after mRNA vaccination. He wrote: ‘As you are aware, this is extraordinarily high for a vaccine. In comparison, the risk of serious adverse events after influenza vaccination is much lower. For you to claim that serious adverse events such as these are “rare” when Pfizer and Moderna’s clinical trial data indicate they are not, is a startling exercise in disinformation.
‘I want to re-emphasise that these questions could have been answered if you had required vaccine manufacturers to perform and report adequate clinical trials . . . I anticipate with regret that you will repeat past mistakes and prematurely promote new therapies to Americans without accurately and truthfully weighing data on risks and benefits.’
Ladapo then asked Califf and Walensky to answer 12 questions relating to the safety data, and concluded: ‘Your organisations are the main entities promoting vaccine hesitancy – Florida promotes the truth. It is our duty to provide all information within our power to individuals so they can make their own informed health care decisions. A lack of transparency only harms Americans’ faith in science.’
Regular readers of TCW as well as The Daily Sceptic know that numerous scientists support Ladapo’s position, such as reported here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
At present, however, the FDA and CDC, like the NHS, continue to ignore such reports, asserting that ‘the known and potential benefits of these vaccines clearly outweigh their known and potential risks, and that ‘being up to date on vaccinations saves lives compared with individuals who did not get vaccinated’.
Broken Trust
Can the relationship with state healthcare ever be repaired?
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | April 21, 2023
For many people, the words ‘trust the experts’ now invoke a sort of pavlovian horror response. This trope serves as a visceral reminder of 3 years’ constant gaslighting for daring to question the narrative, the relentless stream of celebrity medics repeating the ‘safe and effective’ mantra and the bullying and coercion to take a ‘vaccine’ that millions of people didn’t feel they needed or wanted. It had all the hallmarks of an abusive relationship. Core medical ethical principles were destroyed, the weaknesses of protocolised top-down healthcare delivery were exposed and of course there was direct harm to individuals. Is it any wonder that a great many of the British public never want to hear the words ‘our NHS’ ever again, cringing as they remember the weekly clapping ritual.
An inclination to throw the baby out with the bathwater is now a strong instinct for many who feel completely let down. If the relationship with state healthcare stands any chance of being repaired, harms enacted in recent years need to be properly acknowledged and people’s concerns carefully listened to. The uncomfortable question as to whether the NHS can function in its current incarnation should be aired. For a lot of people a ‘great reset’ of the medical profession would be a necessary condition of return. Indeed, many medics wonder if they can remain in a system that is clearly failing those it is supposed to serve.
As one doctor with decades of experience laments:
“If I continue to practise conveyor belt and recipe book medicine under the current system, the benefit is only to the Medical Business Model; hospitals, laboratories, diagnostic centres and the pharmaceutical industry all benefit in a model designed to keep the patient sick.”
Another consultant doctor reflecting on the past few years, had the following comments:
“The most odious revelation to me was when early on the directive came forth forbidding doctors, on pain of GMC punishment, to use their own initiative to treat a Covid patient with any other substance, drug, or agent whatsoever than that which was approved officially (of course at this point there was nothing in that category), save only for using it in an officially approved Clinical Trial. I felt utterly betrayed as a doctor. The whole essence of the doctor-patient relationship was abruptly abolished. We were now in the CMO-patient relationship. My role was merely to be a minor minion box-ticking algorithm slave. No clinical discretion. No discussion along the principles of best interest of the patient with informed consent. Oh no, that’s old hat! I saw the moral authority and overshadowing support of the entire medical establishment wither up like Jonah’s gourd.”
Multiple articles are now appearing reporting that morale for those working within the NHS is at an all-time low.1,2,3 One can only imagine that bearing witness to some of the most inhumane policies in NHS history for 3 years straight has not helped. Add to this the long hours on low pay, with increasingly limited time to spend with patients due to unmanageable waiting lists, and you have a perfect recipe for abysmal job satisfaction. Do we really want those in charge of our healthcare decisions to be forced to work under these conditions?
So now to the question of trusting medical advice that has been co-opted, protocolised and politicised, not to mention censored and distorted by financial interests. The UKHSA is supposed to be the government gatekeeper that is ‘responsible for protecting every member of every community from the impact of infectious diseases’. Just yesterday the agency was still urging people on Twitter to go and get their first and second covid vaccine. This is now so ludicrously at odds with the available evidence that any sane member of the public should conclude that the regulatory system in the UK is officially broken. It is worth taking the time to read the comments under the tweet to see that the public’s natural survival instincts seem to have well and truly kicked in. This random selection suggests the UKHSA may need to read the room:

If you tuned in to the Twitter Space on Sunday ‘Are mRNA injections causing cancers?’ hosted by Dr Kat Lindley and Neil Oliver, you would have heard a heated exchange between consultant orthopaedic surgeon Dr Ahmad Malik and London-based oncology professor, Angus Dalgleish. Dr Malik wanted to get to the bottom of why Professor Dalgleish felt moved to write an article advocating for young people to take the covid vaccine in July 2021 entitled:
What every young person who fears the jab MUST be told: Vaccine expert ANGUS DALGLEISH dismantles beliefs that have seen rates stall among the 18-30s
Well that seems like a pretty clear message. Get the damned vaccine.
Given his background in vaccine research, Prof Dalgleish would have been very clear that long-term safety data is not an optional extra when injecting young people or pregnant women. When questioned, Prof Dalgleish revealed that he did not actually write the article himself. There was a phone interview with a Daily Mail journalist, which he described as ‘bullying’ and the article was an entirely perverted representation of that call. Nonetheless, his name appears alongside the article with the effect that the message therein appears to come from a distinguished professor of medicine.
Professor Dalgleish dramatically revised his position on covid injections after his son suffered acute myocarditis following the shots. Whilst it is obviously a good thing that he was courageous and open-minded enough to change his stance, it is very worrying that he is still an outlier. One can count on one hand the working medics willing to speak out on this issue. And it begs the question, what if Professor Dalgleish’s son hadn’t been injured? Would there have been more advertorials in the Daily Mail with his name alongside? Why are journalists ‘bullying’ through a particular narrative on medical matters? This rather suggests they have a particular agenda. As one Dr Roger Hodkinson, an eminent Cambridge educated pathologist says, “when politics plays medicine, that’s a very dangerous game.” Notably Dr Hodkinson is now only available to view on Bitchute, having been deplatformed from the more mainstream channels such as YouTube. More media censorship of highly qualified counter-narrative voices.
Working for a monopoly such as the NHS, with a mortgage and a family to feed, one might well find medical ethics end up somewhere below personal financial obligations. This is regrettable but understandable. Medics are human beings. Perhaps it is the fault of an increasingly secular society that somehow medics have been elevated to demi-gods and as a result their word is often deemed infallible. However, many more people now realise that this is simply not the case. If this disordered power dynamic is to be realigned, certain conditions need to be met:
- A genuine admission that mistakes were made. Not that ‘The Science™’ changed. It did not change and millions of people who resisted the military grade psy-op are fully aware of this;
- An overhaul of medical training so that clinicians do not feel afraid to speak out when they see something is wrong, and in fact should be encouraged to do so;
- The gaslighting must stop altogether. Those who have suffered injury or trauma need to be given proper air time and have their concerns addressed. They also need to be properly and fairly compensated.
- Open and unfettered discussions need to take place, allowing medics to speak freely about what has happened during the past 3 years, identifying with honesty and integrity what must not be repeated.
Taxpayers spend in excess of £220 billion per annum on the NHS. Weekly excess deaths are presently consistently way above average, whereas after a period of high mortality in the frail and elderly it should be well below normal levels. The public (and indeed the staff) deserve better. If this is impossible, perhaps the entire system needs to be completely reimagined.
Footnotes
Open Letter to Therese Coffey Urging Her to Apologise to the Care Workers Forced Out by Vaccine Mandate
BY TOBY YOUNG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 10, 2022
Campaign group Together’s latest campaign, an Open Letter to Health Secretary Therese Coffey urging her to “Apologise, Reinstate, Compensate the 40,000 Care Workers Forced Out by Covid Jab Mandate” has attracted over 10,000 signatures within a few hours of going live. Here is an extract:
Forcing out approximately 40,000 social care workers for declining the Covid jab was not just unethical, but disastrous for the care sector and those it supports. The sector now has 165,000 vacancies, with 500,000 members of the public waiting for assessments, care or reviews. The situation is grave and urgent, not least as without a functioning care sector the NHS will collapse.
Failure to respect bodily autonomy was wrong in principle. ‘No jab, no job’ amounted to blackmail. But even on a practical level, the ‘mandate’ policy was always illogical and ill-advised.
For starters, natural immunity was totally ignored as a factor – for reasons that remain unclear. Throughout most of 2021 it was clear that Covid jabs did not prevent transmission and by October, the Guardian was explicitly reporting that ‘research reveals fully vaccinated people are just as likely to pass (the) virus on… whether an infected individual is themselves fully vaccinated or unvaccinated makes little or no difference to how infectious they are to their household contacts’. This alone should have been enough to kill off this divisive policy. Yet, seemingly oblivious to the actual scientific data, your predecessor Sajid Javid took to television the same month, belligerently ‘warning’ care workers ‘if you cannot be bothered to go and get vaccinated then get out… go and get another job.’
On November 9th 2021, the Department of Health and Social Care warned Javid that his ‘mandate’ policy would result in upwards of 40,000 care staff leaving the sector. He persisted with it anyway, and on 11 November workers who had not already been forced out were sacked in droves. Many lost not only their jobs, but also their pensions.
Already a range of well-known people including Prof Carl Heneghan, journalists Allison Pearson and Julia Hartley-Brewer, author and broadcaster Laura Dodsworth, Richard Tice of Reform UK and Laurence Fox of the Reclaim party, medics Dr Tony Hinton, Dr Renee Hoenderkamp, Dr Clare Craig and Dr Teck Khong, and sportsman Matt Le Tissier, have all signed.
You can read the Open Letter in full and sign it here.
The NHS just edited their Monkeypox page… to make it scarier
OffGuardian | May 24, 2022
Afew days ago the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) edited their Monkeypox page to alter the narrative in a few key ways.
Firstly, they removed a paragraph from the “How do you get Monkeypox?” section.
Up until a few days ago, according to archived links, the Monkeypox page said this, regarding person-to-person tranmission [emphasis added]:
It’s very uncommon to get monkeypox from a person with the infection because it does not spread easily between people.
… this has now been totally removed.
Secondly, they’ve removed this paragraph, which was present up until at least November of 2021 (and maybe much more recently, there are no archives between November and May) [emphasis added]:
[Monkeypox] is usually a mild illness that will get better on its own without treatment. Some people can develop more serious symptoms, so patients with monkeypox in the UK are cared for in specialist hospitals.
The new “treatment” paragraph reads [again, emphasis added]…
Treatment for monkeypox aims to relieve symptoms. The illness is usually mild and most people recover in 2 to 4 weeks […] You may need to stay in a specialist hospital, so your symptoms can be treated and to prevent the infection spreading to other people.
So, they remove that it will “get better on its own”, and again reinforce the idea of spreading the disease despite this being described as “very uncommon” as recently as last week.
They even add a line about self-isolating, which was never mentioned before:
as monkeypox can spread if there is close contact, you will need to be isolated if you’re diagnosed with it.
Finally, they now include a warning you can get Monkeypox by eating undercooked meat, which will doubtless feed into the anti-meat narrative too (oh, wait, it already is).
To sum up, history is being re-written a little here.
Before, monkeypox “did not spread easily between people”. Now it does.
Before, monkeypox would “get better on its own without treatment”. Now it won’t.
It’s early days to say that Monkeypox is going to be the “new Covid”, and maybe this rollout will stall and be forgotten in a couple of weeks, but there’s no doubt they are taking some tips from the Covid playbook so far.
If Hospitals Are Currently Under Pressure, They Only Have Themselves to Blame
By In-house doctor | The Daily Sceptic | April 10, 2022
There follows a guest post by our in-house doctor, a former senior NHS medic, who says the latest ‘perfect storm’ causing pressure on the health service in parts of the country is more a self-induced squall.
In the middle of last week, several NHS Trusts issued warnings about the acute strain their services were under. The South Central Ambulance Service went so far as to declare a critical incident – normally reserved for a situation in which demands on the service exceed the capacity to manage those demands. I was surprised that so many NHS bodies spread over a wide geographical area issued public warnings about their failure to cope at the same time. Statements referred to high demand on services (hardly news) and lacked any specific detail about critical capacity constraints. Accordingly, the Daily Sceptic asked me to interrogate the available data to work out the extent to which a Covid resurgence might be responsible for the latest ‘perfect storm’ to hit the NHS.
Graph 1 shows daily admissions of Covid positive patients from the community. Admissions have risen in the last few weeks, but seem to be tailing off. Data from Graph 1 have been the subject of hysterical articles in the mainstream press implying the latest Omicron BA.2 subvariant may be triggering a new wave of acute Covid infections. It’s not sensible to interpret Graph 1 as a stand-alone figure without considering contextual information from other datasets.

Graph 1
Graph 2 for example shows information from the Primary Diagnosis dataset. Regular readers will recall this set shows the numbers of patients admitted suffering from acute Covid compared to the patients testing positive for Covid but admitted for another condition. The grey line shows the ratio is gradually falling – in other words the headline figures in Graph 1 are misleading, because nearly 60% of those patients are not actually ill with Covid but admitted for other reasons.

Graph 2
Graph 3 shows the numbers of patients testing positive for Covid in intensive care departments. The rise in cases seen in Graph 1 since the beginning of March 2022 is absent – so although there are more hospital inpatients testing positive for Covid than at the end of February, they are not ending up in critical care. Further, the data from the most recent ICNARC report reveal that the latest tranche of Covid ICU patients have lower oxygen requirements and better respiratory ratios than the cohort from this time last year – in other words, they are not as acutely ill.

Graph 3
Graph 4 is very instructive. It shows the average length of stays of Covid patients up to the end of December 2021. This data was released in March and unfortunately is only complete up to the end of 2021, but it is reasonable to infer that current length of stay is unlikely to be worse now than in December of 2021, due to increased availability of new monoclonal antibody drugs which reduce disease severity for the highest risk patients. Graph 4 expresses average length of stay as the mean average (blue bars) and the median average (orange bars). Both these averages are steadily reducing with the median length of stay being down to four days by the end of December 2021. For the information of statistically curious readers, the median average in this case is probably more representative of the situation as the mean average can easily be skewed to the upside by a small number of very long-stay patients.

Graph 4
Overall, from the available Covid-specific patient data, we see a rise in total positive Covid tests on admission from the community, but fewer than half of these patients are symptomatic for Covid. Very few patients are ill enough to need ICU care and the length of stay for acutely ill Covid patients continues to fall. The vast majority require a few days of supplementary oxygen, intravenous steroids and monoclonal antibody infusion (or other adjunctive therapies) before being fit to discharge. So where is the problem?
Last week Saffron Cordery, deputy CEO of NHS providers, commented that staff absences played a part in the current crisis. Graph 5 shows the data for Covid related staff absences up to March 2nd (the latest figures released) – they don’t seem to have changed much lately and were on a downward trend since the turn of the year. It’s possible they may have started to increase again, but the figures are not yet released for public scrutiny.

Graph 5
My personal suspicion is that Graph 6 shows the main issue causing trouble in hospitals. Graph 6 shows the number of patients in hospitals deemed medically fit for discharge. It is shown as a stacked bar chart, so the blue bar represents the patients who actually were discharged and the orange bar shows patients who were fit for discharge but had to remain in hospital for administrative reasons (often referred to as ‘bed blocking’). Readers will readily notice the ‘weekend effect’ in the figures, and that about 11,000 patients per day are in hospital when they are fit to be discharged – about 10% of the total NHS bed stock.

Graph 6
Over two years into the pandemic, the NHS does not yet seem to have solved fundamental administrative problems in relation to patient flow through the system. I am also aware from personal communication with colleagues that most NHS trusts are still imposing unnecessary Covid protocols which add to the time taken to complete basic episodes of care such as routine operations. This reduces efficiency still further in a healthcare system not renowned for operational efficiency in the first place.
Speaking about the latest crisis, Mark Ainsworth, Director of Operations at the South Central Ambulance Service, said declaring a critical incident meant it could focus its resources on the neediest patients.
Discharging medically fit patients from hospital and exercising a modicum of common sense when compiling Standard Operating procedures might achieve the same effect.
The UK wants to criminalize “misinformation” online as its own health service gets caught posting falsehoods
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | February 11, 2022
Less than a week after the UK proposed criminalizing the posting of some types of “knowingly false” information online, England’s National Health Service has taken down a social media video over inaccurate information.
Last week, NHS England posted a video on its Twitter account with more than half-a-million followers to promote vaccination in kids.
The video claimed that 1% of children will be hospitalized because of Covid, 136 kids in the UK had died because of Covid, and 117,000 children have “long Covid.”
The video went viral attracting comments and retweets from some of the most popular influencers in the health category.
But some, including Dr. Robert Hughes, a clinical research fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, questioned the accuracy of the data.
“As both a parent and scientist who has been involved in research on symptom duration and severity of covid in children, the cited statistics didn’t make sense to me,” Hughes wrote in an article in UnHerd. “The idea that 1% of children with Covid are hospitalized for it didn’t pass the ‘sniff test.’”
The video also shared the story of a kid aged 11 that was suffering from long Covid. According to Hughes, the story contradicted the vaccination guidance in the UK, as it does not even recommend vaccination for that age group.
Additionally, there is not yet any substantial evidence to support that the vaccine prevents long Covid.
Hughes also notes that NHS England was silent when he and others questioned the accuracy of the data.
“Several people agreed with me, sharing their working for why these numbers are at best long outdated, may be orders of magnitude out, and risk undermining confidence in vaccine communications and uptake.
“But others seemed to dig in, praising both the content and tone of the messaging when challenged, and directing the discussion into an important, but different, one about the merits of extending Covid vaccination to children rather than the need for accurate and honest communication about vaccination,” Dr. Hughes wrote for UnHerd.
Hughes contacted the Office of the Statistics Regulator about the numbers. The Statistics Regulator agreed that it was important that the NHS provides accurate figures.
“It is important that figures provided by NHSE&I are accurate and reliable,” the Office of the Statistics Regulator said. “In this case the claim made in the video fell short of these expectations – we contacted NHSE&I and it acknowledged that the data were historic and had methodological shortcomings. We are therefore glad that the content has now been removed from Twitter.”
Before its removal, the video had already been widely shared.

