Day: 20 November 2020

Dr. Kerry Nield PhDDr. Juergen Dobmeyer MDDr. David Cook PhD. DisclaimerThis article represents the opinions of the authors and does not represent the opinions of any business or entity for which the authors work or have worked. One of the central tenets of healthcare provision is that all patients have the right to expect equal treatment. Unfortunately, much as we might wish to offer the best treatments to all, there are only finite resources available and so it is necessary to balance the needs of different patients to ensure their fairest distribution. This is a difficult balancing act, but over the years we have developed approaches to ensure such judgements are as objective and as equitable as possible. In the UK, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE1) is responsible for doing this, but the approaches taken by NICE are not unique and similar methods are used by healthcare systems around the world.2 Non-pharmaceutical interventions such as the imposition of societal restrictions, ‘lockdowns’, aim to have clinical outcomes i.e., a reduction in COVID-19 cases and deaths. However, unlike almost all other medical inventions these have not been subjected to the normal assessments used to test their effectiveness and worth. So, what if lockdowns were a new treatment, ‘Lockdown™’, would we use it? Three important areas are considered by ...

Health and Safety Breaches at a Lighthouse Lab What follows is a guest post by Toby. Those of us who are dubious about the number of daily cases being announced by the Government each day tend to focus on the false positive rate, as well as the low professional standards at testing centres, leading to cross-contamination before the samples make it to the labs. But focus has now begun to shift to the labs themselves, with Channel 4 broadcasting a Dispatches on Monday night that revealed various lapses at the superlab run by Randox in Northern Ireland that analyses COVID-19 tests from across Britain. An undercover reporter discovered serious failings, including cross-contamination of test samples. One expert told Dispatches that the lab's “cavalier approach to safety” could lead to cross-contamination and potentially wrong test results. And by "wrong" they mean a person could be wrongfully diagnosed as positive. After all, if two swabs contaminate each other – one negative, the other positive – they both end up as positive. If cross-contamination is happening at these superlabs – and we have every reason to believe it is – the number of positives is being inflated. Today, Lockdown Sceptics is publishing an original piece by Dr Julian Harris, a veteran scientist. He got a job in July at the Lighthouse lab in ...