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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Great article; good to see these two featuring here
Whaaatttt, all those ppl dying within 28 days of a PCR test were dying of other things. Mind like totally blown.
A good article. Following the theme of 3-legged stools, one could add financial opportunism committed by some as well. One would need quite a few stools, though, going through a list of opportunistic actions! How about processing labs, call handling for “track & trace”, misuse of blu tooth via “smart” phones, over the counter sales of things that don’t actually work, and so on.
Excellent article. These guys have been a consistent rock of stability and sanity since covid clown world began. Seems a lot more people are gradually waking up to the monstrosity they blindly supported and staying rather quiet. When I post this to FB nobody will argue it anymore like they did two years ago. Or FB are shadow banning the Sceptic… Probably the latter..
As the usual sources start gearing up to call for a new round of interventions and restrictions,…’ they will once again say the virus can be spread by people who are not unwell.
It baffles me that Prof Heneghan does not address this canard, shoot down this duck flying in front of the whole echelon of covid lies.
He is the Professor of evidence-based medicine. When was an acute respiratory virus ever transmissible by persons not already coughing, sneezing and running a temperature? What evidence is there that sarscov2 is a unique exception?
Coughs and sneezes spread diseases – wrap the germs in a handkerchief. Thus was the public health mantra in the 1950s/60s.
A pandemic requires over half of the population in a wide geographical area to be sick with the disease, not necessarily hospitalised or moribund, but sick no the less. So in Britain during January to March 2020 there should have been around 30 million noticeably sick people with severe Cold/‘flu-like symptoms, mostly staying at home. There would have been a natural shutdown… lockdown wouldn’t have been necessary.
But there weren’t. In fact very few had any symptoms and then mostly mild. To cover up the lie, positive tests became ‘cases’ even when most had no symptoms, thus no disease, thus were not sick. To carry the deception the nonsense about ‘asymptomatic spread’ was promoted.
Then lockdown to mimicking the situation if there had been a pandemic.
It was a Fakedemic.
Radio ads starting again as Autumn approaches about how to protect against CoVid – keep your windows open apparently. Will this nonsense EVER end?
Switching off the channels that broadcast fake news, a cynic might suggest. The other issue that emerged during the 1950s/60s via the Common Cold Unit (CCU) was that there wasn’t a chance in hell using vaccination as a technique against CC’s caused by rhinoviruses, given the variation within that group. Of course, they also found the group of coronaviruses (as well as inventing the nomenclature), that causes some of them.
Maybe the WHO didn’t exist then (except the band of the same name), otherwise they might have come up with some scary names for them, instead of awkward ones like HKU-1, 229E and so on!
“Keep your windows open”.
But we won’t be able to turn the heating up!
So a decision has been taken at a senior level not just to maintain the fear campaign but to ramp it up again.
It is difficult not to conclude that the most senior members of the British government have taken decisions knowing that they will seriously harm and might possibly kill people.
None
The notion that a model needs to be validated against reality to hold any credibility also seems to have been completely abandoned by academics and scientific publications.
A child could see that choosing which parameters of a model to include, exclude or fudge allows you to prime it to give the answers you want with the worst kind of post-hoc reasoning. That reliance on unreliable data (deaths ‘with’ Covid, grossly oversensitive PCR tests, or adjusted, ‘infilled’ or contaminated surface temperature records for example) will deliver model results that reflect the bad or cherry-picked data. That throwing multiple models at a problem and ignoring all but those which fit your preconceptions turns modelling into the perfect example of a barn door fallacy.
The people funding and directing science will know all this perfectly well. That they seem to wilfully ignore these limitations (sometimes substituting flimsy circular exercises in justification like ‘hindcasting’ for validation), and promote computer modelling, at least to the press, the public and their paymasters in government, as some sort of crystal ball, indicates there’s more than just confirmation bias in play – more a total corruption of science by post-normal ideology.
Oops, brain fog, I meant the Texas sharpshooter fallacy..
How bad would the current excess deaths have to be, to be worse than covid in 2020?
I got the 2020 death numbers from the ONS, which are in 5-year bands.
0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25.. 75, 80, 85, 90+
80820 dead:
3, 1, 5, 11, 34, 70, ..11066, 15374, 16547, 17404
Assume that data is pure and legit. How many life years were lost? If life expectancy at birth is 85, for each band, with a fiddle at either end, we get:
85, 85, 80, 75, 70, … 15, 10, 7.5, 5
And so the years lost
255, 85, 400, 825, 2380.. 165990, 153740, 124102, 87020
1099000 life-years lost over 9 months.
I can equal this life-year total by doing away with 1275 people from each age band over the 9 months: 1275 * the years-remaining-for-each-band. 24000 deaths, which is 670 people per week.
Conclusion: the current excess rate, 1000+, is worse than covid year 1, in terms of life-years lost.
Good point. In the UK we use QALYs – life years that are quality adjusted – to decide which therapies are worth spending money on. Resources are not limitless so trade offs are required which will leave some people without a preferred treatment – cruel, but there’s no sensible alternative. The idiot general public seem to think healthcare resources ought to be limitless, but in the main don’t want to give up other personal spending to augment NHS budgets. The government probably decided people were too childish to understand the arguments, so they just pretended that all lives were equally worth “saving”.
And look what’s coming home to roost: stagflation.
People might not want to give up other personal spending to augment NHS budgets as they realise the money will be wasted on salaries and pensions for worthless non clinical roles?
Can anyone demonstrate, using “The Science”, that any models on either climate prediction or Covid prediction, have been any better than examining dead chickens’ entrails?
If not, why are the modelers never held to account by the MSM?
Because the MSM are both scientifically illiterate and also funded by those supporting the approved narrative. Believing in nonsense is very easy when your salary depends on it.