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 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 U.K. 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 U.K. testing sites were open seven days a week, including Christmas 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 that such an approach that had never been tried before on such a scale worked or, once rolled out, had been evaluated for 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 contact tracing 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 subsequently 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 expenditure – 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 U.K. COVID-19 Inquiry are:
- What was the Test and Trace programme’s aim?
- What evidence was the Test and Trace programme 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 programme terminated after the damming House of Commons report?
- How can the Government prevent such a massive waste of resources on ineffective interventions in the future?
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. It is the first in a series of short notes on topics the authors believe should be addressed by the U.K. COVID-19 Inquiry. If readers have suggestions for other topics, please put them in the comments below or email us here.
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Who actually received the 37 billion? Show me the receipts!
I don’t believe that money was spent for the purposes claimed. Where did it actually end up?
It’s hard to fathom where it all can have gone
A lot of people find it difficult to fathom how much £37Bn is. I always like to type it out with all the zeros. £37,000,000,000.
At the very least we want a detailed report breaking down this obscene waste of taxpayers money.
Probably up some uber-rich people’s noses, lol.
I have stated quite a few times that I believe much of this expenditure was used to install traffic measures on our roads and in due course these will be revealed.
Government at both local and national level are extremely adept at hiding expenditure which they do not want the public to be aware of. If £25 billion of T & T had been declared spent on vehicle trafficking and transport regulatory measures there might have been uproar.
Equally, it’s possible much of the money was redirected to ‘special people.’ The grotesque amounts squandered were not squandered without purpose. The aim was and is to bankrupt the country. C1984 provided the perfect initial cover for such larceny. Chunt’s recent budget nudged the destruction upwards a notch. I expect the economy will be destroyed within twelve months and at that point we will be declared bankrupt and then ‘sold’ to the IMF or BIS, or some such.
As the imposition of all NPI’s was initially sold on the grounds that they would protect public health – they didn’t – so too are all the grotesque tax impositions. Far from helping the economy recover from the devastation that Fishy wrecked, Chunt’s efforts will finally destroy the UK.
It did accomplish something – for the elite. At our expense, they learned some valuable lessons to be able force digital IDs on the population. They perhaps even established some framework that can be used in future.
This will all fit in with the tyrannical statement from the G20 here. Everybody must read this!
See the World Council for Health’s response here.
Question 7: Does anyone trust the usual suspects any more, for any reason, without independent assessments and proper consultation?
Apart from that, it’s a good article. It appears to many of us that they are not making use of “solid evidence of what works”. Are they actually being somewhat selective with the truth, to the benefit of certain industries?
Exactly. Small change for that and them in that regard.
Plus, they and their cronies could fill their coffers up a bit more on the chosen way to the upcoming total implosion.
That reply was meant for Mike Austin.
“selective with the truth,”
….surely not. How dare you!
The Tories FTX.
In all respects:
The money isn’t gone.
It’s just gone to and owned by someone else now.
The aim with most Covid measures seems to have been to shovel public money to the private sector, frighten people, control them and bully them into taking experimental drugs they didn’t need, and usher in a new era of public health bio security totalitarianism.
They succeeded.
“Test and trace cost 37 billion and achieved nothing..” Or did it….?
“Hidden in plain sight, the genome sequencing industry is a beast of huge scale. Globally, the industry is already worth billions of pounds, and it is expected to grow rapidly from this already immense financial base. The top ten genome sequencing companies alone had a value of over £635,000,000,000 in 2020.
The trail led to a very large and murky pond of genome sequencing and related companies, such as Grail, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK Biobank, TwinsUK, Amgen, the Mayo Clinic and Genomics England — all of which overlaps with gene editing technology such as CRISPR. Governments and military also come into the picture, with ARIA and ARPA in the UK and DARPA in the USA. British academia is also well entrenched in the system, with Oxford University and Imperial College London being just two of the many institutions at the forefront.”
https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/pcr-testing-and-the-genome-beast
And in the US the CDC just came right out and admitted to it;
https://thelibertyloft.com/2022/03/03/cdc-admits-it-has-collected-dna-from-pcr-tests/
Thanks for that Mogs.
I’ve not watched the whole video yet but it’s certainly interesting and a revelation. Also I trust Brian Gerrish. He seems not prone to accepting any old sensationalist rumour as fact before he checks out the evidence fully first. Bit like Ivor Cummins in that regard. Nurse Debbie seems to have her head screwed on too.
I am a big fan of all the UK Column team. They practice proper journalism and when they have something to say it is always backed up with evidence. I have been a subscriber for about two years now.
Utterly reliable.
Yes we have to share and support our trusted sources. That’s why we see the same names getting shared around here and linked to repeatedly. My list of legit people is growing actually.
This is definitely a factor but beyond shear crony grift and DNA harvesting the third purpose was to get the technological framework for Digital Biometric IDs and fourthly to get the public accustomed to allowing the state to monitor their whereabouts and control their actions up to snd including home incarceration.
Former Health Secretary Hancock has a financial interest in the gene sequencing companies….
Always, always “Cui bono?”
Indeed, it was basically shutting the barn door long after the horse had bolted.
And let’s not forget that our great Conservative leader at the time originally wanted to sink 3x as much, £100bln, into Operation Moonsh*t, which was later folded and ‘integrated’ into T&T.
The incubation period for respiratory viruses in the host before shedding is about 24 hours. During this time the individual is asymptomatic. Next 24 hours symptoms may be noticed and the individual will be infectious for about 2 – 3 days. (Just like Colds & ‘flu.)
A PCR Test for screening is obsolete immediately after the specimen is taken, since the individual can be infected any time until the test comes back, and even if negative is therefore no guarantee they are infection free. For it to work it should be repeated every 12 hours at least.
In infected asymptomatic and infected symptomatic individuals by the time the PCR Test is carried out and test results come back, 24 to 48 hours or longer will have elapsed during most of which time the individual would have been infectious. Self-isolating after positive PCR Test = closing stable door after horse has bolted, particularly since after 4 days even though viral fragments may be detected and symptoms remaining, that person is no longer infectious.
According to Farr’s Law, deaths peaked and turned downward in the first week of March 2020, therefore infections peaked and turned downward in the first week of February. January was the big spreader month.
Doing anything after first week of February 2020 was futile, counterproductive and a gross waste of money, since the epidemic was over by March, not least because CoV 2 is a seasonal virus and wanes naturally as Winter recedes.
The real question is why none of the experts and ‘The Science’ worshipping deadbeats in Government knew these things. Ditto all the other clowns around the World except Sweden and Florida.
“The real question is why none of the experts and ‘The Science’ worshipping deadbeats in Government knew these things.”
The $cience et al did know these things JXB, without any doubt but the purpose behind all government actions was not protection of public health, in fact just the opposite, but to scare the population witless.
Covid was the excuse to unleash the poisons, whoops “vaccines” which have been developed to maim and kill and also open the gateway to digital ID, CBDC and subsequent enslavement of the masses.
Agreed. We can’t ever let them off the hook by assuming these people in authority didn’t know. Big mistake. On the contrary, they know a damnedsite more than us! They aren’t amateurs or sackless ignoramuses. It was all strategy. Think about it, none of it had any science underpinning it. Not the masks, distancing, lockdowns or tests. That’s why they should all be ditched once and for all but we know why they won’t.
Some of the early public announcements, rather like 2019 election campaigning ones (soon after the 2019 GE), gave the impression that the likes of Vallance et al were being somewhat reassuring. It was along the lines of “don’t worry about it too much….”. But then, they changed tack for whatever reason.
I think they did know pretty much what you describe, but were hoodwinked into the new religion, to hold on to their jobs.
Maybe they were not read into the lab leak story until just before the u-turn
the virus was circulating throughout most of 2019, the study of faeces shows.
Wow our leaders must be very accident prone to make all these ‘mistakes’ what with all the intelligence gathering operations they are the beneficiaries off.
No they have been lying and this was required for a different purpose ,i.e. to build the digital architecture to implement digital currencies and social scoring and to turn us all into slaves and serfs.
Similarly with the ‘climate crisis’. Insert that into the above paragraph.
Indeed. Climate change (or variation) is normal; lack of maintenance and investment (or bad investment, building things in the wrong place) is the real hazard. Poor management and dodgy policies are the real crisis.
It can feed directly into social scoring by creating a spurious reason for measuring each person’s ‘carbon emissions’. It can increase dependence on the state by closing down farms to ‘save carbon’ and cutting back on the precious fossil fuel store of wealth. All roads lead to a communist oligarchy.
Correct.
Why did the PCR testers not reveal the number of cycles they were using or when they did why was it so high as to generate 99.99% false positives ? Even if the test was valid in the first place which it wasn’t.
idiots. It was like trying to eradicate an ant nest with a pair of tweezers while wearing oven gloves.
Whilst blindfolded?
Crucially this kind of contact tracing is not needed for something as generally harmless as Covid
The only pandemic was that of panic among the ignorant so called ruling classes
Sceptical doctor alert:
In medicine, a test is only of use if it leads to a pharmaceutical company making an obscene amount of money.
Covid is but one example.
Cholesterol testing is in the same league, where the majority of patients on statins don’t actually need them.
The treatment algorithms, linked to widespread testing, are designed by Big Pharma, with the doctors playing the role of useful idiots.
That’s spot on Dr G. Unfortunately, for many of us it took the Scamdemic to make us realise this.
“Despite all the resources thrown at it, Test and Trace did not show one measurable difference in the outcomes of the pandemic”, yet the ‘Test & Treat’ program in Uttar Pradesh State in India was a great success. The difference? Test & Treat was a kit with a test & medicines. If the test was positive, they and their household took the preventative/early treatment therapeutics, including Ivermectin. There were no sanctions for testing positive, so every incentive to use the kit, resulting in the state being able to declare itself covid-free. The cost? A fraction of Test & Trace’s £37Bn and no lockdowns.
The PCR test is fraudulent. It does not do what the public are told it does. It has never been calibrated against a baseline isolate, is carried out at 40+ cycles & gives a dirty, corrupted signal. Once that is understood, everything else which flows from these tests can be seen for what they are – fraud, tyranny & the means to control a gullible, scientifically illiterate population (politicians & medical staff included). Thank goodness for the awkward squad who were able to see through this.
The newest US nuclear powered aircraft carrier Gerald R Ford was recently completed. It took thousands of people 6 years to build and 4 more years to commission. It is the most sophisticated warship afloat. The cost 13.5 billion dollars. It is impossible to spend £37 billion in the 2 years on a process and phone app. There is only one way to do that, fraud. A complete audit needs to be done on this abuse and incompetence alone by itself. This abuse is the same as profiteering during times of war. This cannot be covered up.
First class comparison.
I thought that the HoC Public Accounts Comittee is a powerful part of our Government system. I would have thought by now there would have been a very thorough investigation by this Comittee on where this sum of £37 billion pounds has actually gone to. Did any of it get sent to the WEF?
I assume that (without any actual evidence at this stage) the driver of this project was one Matt Hancock – Health Secretary – who several years earlier set up the HoC all party group on ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’ pushed by crazed technology fanatic Klaus Schwab, who dreams up new problems every day and declares they can all be fixed by technology.
I would suggest that Hancock having no training in technology at all jumped at the chance to do his masters bidding by pushing as hard as possible for this TnT technological ‘fix’ for the pandemic, and somehow got the money to do it.