Throughout restrictions which Lord Sumption called a “catastrophe”, we were exposed to the mantra of ‘follow the science’. But unfortunately, the only ‘science’ that seems to have been followed in the major decisions is that of modellers and government departments.
Models are akin to opinions. If they are science, the evidence they provide sits on the lowest rung of the ladder. Modellers are accountable to no one; most have never seen a patient in their lives as they have no clinical background, which impedes their understanding of how people behave. Individuals are not herds of buffalos. Some modellers have a consistent track record of getting their predictions dramatically wrong with (again) catastrophic consequences.
Since the start, we have looked at the evidence underpinning the fear-generating narrative pushed by the Government, some politicians, the media and many Twitterati, who overnight forgot the principles of scientific investigation, equipoise or uncertainty and the work of many pioneers in respiratory virus epidemiology spanning a century.
The psychotic narrative rests on three legs of what we call the Covid narrative stool.
The first leg is the number of cases. We have shown that misuse of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based on a superficial understanding amplified the number of ‘cases’ as many of these were not likely to be infectious at all.
The second leg was the hospital pressure theme. Here using data which should have been available (but are not), we have shown that up to 40% of hospital cases were infected while in hospital, a phenomenon which shows no sign of abating.
The data from three devolved nations and our interpretation have been serialised on our website.
Finally deaths. A death in epidemiology is the one inevitable outcome you can observe and tally. The question is: what caused it? This is called attribution. Looking at the data from freedom of information requests made by an alert public and the response at times by patronising authorities, we counted 14 different ways of attributing deaths to COVID-19. The first prize for the most bizarre was the Care Quality Commission’s: it left it to the care provider to decide the cause of death. So it is possible that administrators decided what role SARS-CoV-2 played in your grandmother’s death. In one health authority’s case, deaths of people who tested ‘negative’ were rolled into the Covid total.
So the catastrophe described by Lord Sumption was underpinned by very weak evidence; science was nowhere to be seen. Consequently, it remains impossible to separate the impact of SARS-CoV-2 from that of the policies designed to ‘combat’ it.
As the usual sources start gearing up to call for a new round of interventions and restrictions, have these massive cracks in evidence gathering and interpretation been tackled?
Hands up, who’s got the answer?
Dr. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Dr. Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist based in Rome who works with Professor Heneghan on the Cochrane Collaboration. This article was first published on their Substack page, which you can subscribe to here.
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Let me get this straight. We (mankind) are not doing enough research into new antibiotics to combat existing bacterial infections. The only solution is to create a new* bug and research antibiotics against that? Looks like research funding is being misdirected again.
*Yes, I know the article is about an ‘old’ bacterium but if it’s new to science it’s ‘new’.
It’s like they’ve taken the lid off the Pandora gain-of-function sweety jar and simply don’t want to put it back on. Until we’re all dead.
It might be a good idea to put the money to better use and start filling in the thousands of potholes in the countries roads..
I don’t want my tax money filling in potholes in roads in any other countries, thanks.
Potholes in my own country’s roads, OK, maybe.
Well I was talking about the UKs.. what country are you talking about.. haha
I could name a good few things that might fill the potholes. We have them here too. If I was a conspiracy thinking type, I’d think that there is an agenda to run down the road system and damage the car stock…
Yes and we certainly don’t want to fill the potholes with money.
“Neanderthal bacteria” never went away. Neanderthals still exist. I mean this seriously, by the way, and not as a term of reproach for people like, say, Matt Hancock.
All I can say to these In Q Tel people is “please GOFROC yourself.”
It’s like suggesting that we move the planet into the path of all the planet-killing comets and asteroids out there to look at what killed off the dinosaurs.
Gawd, scientists are a pessimistic bunch aren’t they? Surely we have all bases covered nowadays in terms of antibiotics, antivirals, many other medications, nutraceuticals plus advanced medical technology and healthcare in general. We’re hardly going to fare as badly as in the Middle Ages when the Black Death ravaged the globe and people had basically nothing to fight it with, so I think the amount of expense and all round faff involved in this endeavour cannot be remotely justified. Scientists just like tinkering and generally mucking things up, which demonstrably results in a massive crapfest. Leave zombie viruses and bugs dormant and where they can do no harm…or safely in the fictitious plots of sci-fi books/movies.
Seconded Mogs.
Next step, digging up the bodies of Black Death victims to analyse the Black Death… just in case. Application to the Wuhan lab!
Now, now Dom, no giving Billy ideas.
Am I the only person who got the ‘take home message’ from the film ‘Jurassic Park’..?
Gingers are ginger because of the Neanderthal gene, allegedly. Explains a lot.
Dammit, that face is so intelligent! He’s got a knowing look about him that I could warm to, although he’s not blessed with conventional good looks.
I could do without his bugs, though.
There’s no antiviral in the world that would make it worth doing this stupid thing just to prove that they can. We’ve got plenty of drugs already – they just keep banning the things as soon as they go off-label.
I’m developing a strange interest in Barbara O’Neil’s old-wife remedies: I doubt you’d get serious side effects from sticking an onion poultice on your ear if it ached.
And have you seen her video about cayenne pepper? First aid in the event of heart attacks?