On December 1st, The U.K.’s Department of Health and Social Care published the Technical Report on the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.K.
The report is a long 11-chapter document describing the U.K.’s response and pointing out suggestions for dealing with future pandemics.
The report is dubbed “independent”, but the authors are public health civil servants and a handful of academics. Given that the authors were instrumental to a greater and lesser degree in implementing the catastrophes of lockdowns, the content is as independent as President Xi’s assessment of his policies.
Readers of Trust the Evidence will face problems reconciling some of the report content with what we have written. For example, there is no mention of the misuse of PCR or the failure to follow closely other nations ahead of the curve whose contact tracing systems had been overwhelmed in days.
It was important – and the U.K. did not always get this right – to align testing aims, use cases, technologies, data flows and communications in coherent testing strategies.
There is no apology for the evidence-free mass testing, the segregation of healthy people and the lack of identification of truly infectious cases.
Pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic transmission, in the absence of routine mass asymptomatic testing, are a huge challenge for even a highly effective contact tracing system.
A better wording might have been: contact tracing is hugely challenging, and it won’t achieve its intended outcomes and was, therefore, a waste of £37 billion – something the Lombardy public health operators had realised by the beginning of March 2020 and the U.K. Parliament considered was an ‘unimaginable’ cost.
Hospital-acquired infections are ignored. And yet, up to 40% of ‘hospital cases’ were infections acquired in hospitals. Moreover, their distribution shadowed that in the surrounding community, suggesting that whatever ‘protection’ measures the hospitals were taking did not work.
The low risk to school children and teachers is portrayed as a tension between missing education and stopping transmission.
In restricting attendance in educational settings, this must be heavily caveated with the health and wellbeing impacts of limiting attendance in educational settings to priority groups – which are substantial. They include:
- missed learning
- a reduction in non-COVID-19-related healthcare utilisation
- exacerbation of existing inequality for both children and parents
School-age children had the lowest risk, and the effects of the immunological segregation are now reaped with a whirlwind of influenza-like illnesses. Not to mention socialising and schooling – mere details.
There are a few mentions of the true costs of lockdowns.
There is little doubt that delays in presentation, reductions in secondary prevention (such as statins and antihypertensives), postponement of elective and semi-elective care and screening will have led to later and more severe presentation of non-Covid illness both during and after the first three waves. The combined effect of this will likely lead to a prolonged period of non-Covid excess mortality and morbidity after the worst period of the pandemic is over.
However, the type of evidence cited in footnotes and references is remarkable: mainly models, i.e., opinions formulated by those with a long history of getting it wrong or citing selective pieces of work.
However, our requests for the cause of the current excess in deaths have gone unanswered. “What is the point of public health surveillance if the same point is being made repeatedly, and no investigation follows as a consequence?” we ask. If lockdown has caused the excess, as stated in chapter 10, then the consequences are that the harms of restriction outweigh any benefits. The lack of such an analysis damages the credibility of any calls for future restrictions.
There is no mention of the need for proper planning to plug known gaps in the evidence. For example, suppose you need to know whether masks or other physical interventions work in the community and in which mix. You prepare protocols for trials designed to give answers in a short time. In that case, you get prior ethical approval and fire the starter pistol when WHO declares a pandemic or even a serious problem.
Oh yes, there is plenty of precedent for this kind of preparation. That is what happened in 2009 with mock-up influenza pre-pandemic vaccines. So there can be no excuses here, just a disregard for crucial gaps in the evidence and a reluctance to address them. It is even easier in the case of non-pharmaceutical interventions as there are no regulators breathing down your neck, just the odd CE mark for regulatory purposes that can be obtained years or weeks beforehand.
There are also gaps in the evidence base on NPIs, which we expect will continue to evolve in the coming years…
Yet, there’s only one randomised trial that assessed the wearing of masks in the community – the reason for the reluctance to reduce uncertainties over whether and which NPIs work remains unclear.
It may never be possible fully to disentangle some of the effects of individual NPIs in this pandemic, as many were used together… Observational studies on NPIs were often complicated by several potential confounders…
Due to the sheer number of interventions tried at any one time, we may never know what works, particularly if we also rely on low-quality observational studies – as we have done – to inform policy.
In the absence of pharmaceutical interventions, NPIs are the only option for pandemic control.
But none of this matters: it’ll be more of the same next time.
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 blog, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.
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“On December 1st, The U.K.’s Department of Health and Social Care published the Technical Report on the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.K.
The report is a long 11-chapter document describing the U.K.’s response and pointing out suggestions for dealing with future pandemics.”
Ah, the mythical “future pandemics.”
As we have not been living through a pandemic, not even an epidemic, and as the last possible pandemic was the Black Death of the 17 century I am at a loss to know how ANY “pandemic” might arise. Scamdemic, quite likely but pandemic, no, certainly not. And if Billy releases one, shortly after the Plandemic treaty well we know the reason.
Dr Mike Yeadon has thoroughly debunked the “future pandemics” lie but I cannot find the link. Has anybody got the link to download?
All credit to Drs Heneghan and Jefferson for taking this report apart and showing it up for the garbage of a whitewash that it is.
A report comfortably in line with what we expected.
It’s obvious that it is not “independent”. They are potential culprits themselves. Could it be that the purpose of their report is to defend themselves at a forthcoming Inquiry? Either that, or it might be a trial script for another future panic.
“potential culprits themselves.”
“potential?”
Come on John what you smokin?
Ivermectin, anyone? I don’t see it mentioned in the report or this article.
What about any early stage treatment – and prophylactics – that were suppressed?
Whatever ‘sars-cov-2’ was, the symptoms were treatable – but treatment was denied.
Had these treatments been openly available, all the nonsense in 2020 would have halted after a few weeks
Not much sign of it saying anything about effective ways of maintaining one’s general health to reduce the risk of any such infection – not in chapter 8, where it would seem to be logical to slot it in. There is a built in assumption that non-pharmaceutical intervention is the only alternative to drugs, which is nonsense.
There was no built in assumption. Undermining public health in any and every way was part of the plan.
You are defaulting to cock-up theory John and this is not a cock-up we are living through. Everything that is happening is pre-planned.
Climate crisis bullshit – pre-planned.
Destruction of our health services – pre-planned.
Destruction of Western economies – pre-planned.
Deliberate raising of energy bills – pre-planned.
Coming food shortages – pre-planned.
This is a technocratic takeover with an initial target date of 2030.
Net zero 2050 is net zero you and me.
You forgot:- welcoming in fighting age invaders, mainly adherents of the Religion of Peace. – no doubt also pre-planned.
“Had these treatments been openly available, all the nonsense in 2020 would have halted after a few weeks.”
And it is snippets such as this which confirm that the C1984 was deliberate, pre-planned. Released from a lab? Who cares? Re-branded ‘flu, so what. A pandemic was released and the alleged virus was simply the cover for what came after and the first part of that was getting everyone injected with poisons.
Mogwai posted this morning that PHE downgraded C1984 at the start because if it was left as a High Consequence Disease all prophylactics had to be made available so it was downgraded in order to facilitate the banning of Hydroxichloroquine and Ivermectin – if that doesn’t give the game away I don’t know what does.
“The nonsense” of 2020 was always going to happen as it panned out because it was planned that way. Worldwide.
They also went overboard poo-poohing Vitamin D, preferring the “Covid is Racist” meme and ignoring how much sunlight, wearing Pakistani village apparel in Bradford, does for your Vitamin D levels.
We could try fighting the next pandemic by immediately implementing a tight lockdown of all so-called public health experts, ie, require them to stay in their houses and away from cameras and microphones. And then wait if anyone actually notices that something extraordinarily dangerous is happening. If not, a hugely effective NPI has been found.
Nah! Therr must be an active volcano somewhere that Professor Pantsdown, Whitty, Vallance, Michie, Farrar etc could be tossed into.
No need for half-measures when fighting a Plandemic!
I find this far more convincing and can quite clearly see their role in this too. https://off-guardian.org/2022/12/01/the-real-reason-behind-chinas-zero-covid-policy/
when are we going to be treated to these two clowns being asked inconvenient questions live on TV? ‘next slide please’ and the slide would say: ‘why have you insisted on lockdowns with all prior knowledge and conclusions against them?’, ‘why didn’t you voice concerns about highly probable lab leak origin of covid?’, ‘why did you insist on blanket vaccination without any data supporting the claim that they prevent transmission?’
“Why did you insist on the masks that even the firkin’ WHO had always advised against until April 2020??’
This perfunctory inquiry echoes similarly ones being performed across the western world.
All conducted by the orchestrators of the tyranny and without a shred of remorse or empathy towards the victims.
And, in agreement with other commentators, not a mention of even lifestyle factors, let alone Vitamin D ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine , etc.
Pure totalitarian, fascistic tripe.
How can the end goal not be total world control and depopulation?
The UK’s grossly disproportionate and ill-targeted Covid-19 response has been a disaster, not just in the UK, but also impacting around the world.
See for example my emails to Neil Ferguson:
My emails to Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty:
Dirty Rotton Scoundrels!!!…
Witless and Unbalanced can go take a long walk off a short pier!
Those two criminals should return their erroneous knighthoods and be made to join “I’m a celebrity, get me out of here” and made to take the vaccine challenge each day
A wrecked economy; millions of lives destroyed; a collapsing health service and 2,200+ British citizens killed by a mass medical experiment.
They are two of The Guilty Men.
In a just world, they’d be questioned by a top QC and be giving their evidence in the High Court.
Or even a KC. If it does it’s job, the Hallett Inquiry could be useful, but I think that the paperwork under discussion, produced by the Civil Service, is a defensive tactic for the culprits. Nothing much more than that. In simple terms, it’s a whitewash job.
Did anyone truthfully expect anything else?
Any report on failure authored by those who failed so badly will never be worth the paper or network space its printed on. The failure of lockdown and the stupid restrictions alone are causing deaths and will continue to in excess of any they saved from covid. Then there is the hopeless Test & Trace debacle that provided no benefit whatsoever but has cost us taxpayers billions and was claimed by Boris Johnson, that idiot Hancock and these incompetent supposed healthcare experts to be world beating. It was only world beating in its total waste of our money. The lack of normal care from the NHS suspended and blamed on covid is causing a large number of deaths from unidentified cancer and heart problems. I can’t see how our incompetent government appointed health experts and the government itself can deny that their response to the covid virus was anything less than an almost total failure. Lets have a proper independent report from some of those who advised that the actions of our government at the time were not based on accurate science and were wrong and lets ensure the people reponsible for this disaster are never again in a position to advise any government on health matters again.