Wokery and Government overreach are the great issues of the early 2020s. Lucy Letby isn’t of the same order. Nevertheless, this young woman, of previously blameless character, has been imprisoned for the rest of her life on circumstantial evidence. With rare exceptions, the media have relished turning her into a ghoul. They are ably assisted by the Cheshire Constabulary who, post-trial, drip-feed corroborative detail to add verisimilitude, as in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘The Criminal Cried’. They tell the media that Letby kept an “encrypted diary”, with “L.O.” having some sinister meaning. In fact, Letby has a cursive script and it’s L.D. not ‘L.O.’, being nurses’ common shorthand for ‘Long Day’, or a 12-hour shift. They’ve auctioned the film rights for their investigation, with ITV placing the winning bid. I’d advise ITV to check carefully for spin.
No one who cares about justice should be comfortable with this case. To briefly re-cap: Ms. Letby worked at the Countess of Chester neonatal unit from 2012. From at least 2014 this was a Level II unit, meaning that it took very premature babies. From mid-2015 to mid-2016, 15 infants died and a similar number had major collapses. This was far more than in the preceding and subsequent periods (figure 1). The consultants raised alarms, leading to internal investigations then a review by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), commissioned in mid-2016.
Concern about Ms. Letby arose early, and she was moved to a desk job in July 2016. In response she began a grievance procedure, claiming that doctors were persecuting her. At this stage their concern surely related to competence; no Royal College would touch an investigation that should properly be a police matter. Assertions that “Doctors suspected Letby from 2015” should be read in this light. Post-mortems, performed for six of the seven deaths for which Letby ultimately was convicted, recorded “natural causes”.
Initial findings were in Ms. Letby’s favour. Her grievance was upheld and the RCPCH report, released at the end of 2016, expressed concern about the unit’s staffing and safety, saying that it was unsuitable for Level II. By then it had been downgraded to Level I anyway, with the most premature and sickliest babies delivered or sent elsewhere. There’s no mention of Ms. Letby or any other staff member, but it is beyond credulity, given the consultants’ suspicions, that she wasn’t quietly discussed. Doubtless there were separate confidential communications. They can’t have been damning, for Countess of Chester management notoriously forced the consultants to apologise and indicated that Letby would resume clinical nursing. Unhappy with these outcomes, the consultants involved the police in the spring of 2017, igniting the powder trail.
A 10-year retired paediatrician and professional expert witness, Dr. Dewi (David) Evans was recruited by the police. By his account he reviewed 30-something deaths and collapses, distinguishing 15 (eight murders and seven attempted murders) for which Letby was charged. Unfortunately, we don’t have his workings, nor the exact reason why he excluded seven deaths, except that he told talkRADIO that “they died for the usual problems why small babies die: haemorrhage, infection, congenital problems”. Nor do we know why the judge threw out one murder charge.
Now, go to figure 1 and examine the critical mid-2015 to mid-2016 period. Even if one removes the seven deaths for which Letby was convicted (orange and blue), the remaining eight (grey) form an excess cluster compared with the previous period (the subsequent period is not comparable owing to the unit’s downgrade). That means that we are asked to believe that Letby’s murders coincided, quite by chance, with a spike of other excess deaths, all of them unsurprising. I’d accept this if Letby was a strychnine poisoner, if seven babies died from strychnine and seven died owing to a concurrent viral outbreak. It’d be shocking, but clear. But these were highly-vulnerable babies, mostly premature and with other health issues. Do the suspicious and non-suspicious excesses really divide so precisely? A lifetime in biology and medicine tells me it’d be remarkable if they did. Biology and medicine are full of grey zones.
Dr. Evans says that – very correctly – he was working blind to whether Letby was present at a death or collapse or not. But, given the complexity, why was he the sole reviewer? And how does that much-published list of nurses’ presence and events look if all events, suspicious or otherwise, are included? Was she also present at many non-suspicious events? Maybe she just worked a lot.
The causes of death Dr. Evans found variously included air embolism in the blood (infants A, D) or stomach (C, I and P) or interference with nasogastric tubes (infants E,O). They differed from the natural causes identified at post-mortem by coroners’ pathologists, from whom we heard nothing at the trial. Methods of attempted murders included insulin poisoning (infants F and L), excessive feeding (infant G) and traumatic assault (infant N).
Even if we reject the contemporaneous post-mortems and accept Dr. Evans’s later diagnoses, air embolism is not proof of deliberate injection. A PubMed search combining “air”, “embolism” and “neonates” yields 271 hits. If I then add “infection” I retain 37 hits and if I instead add “enterocolitis”, I have 17. Sato and colleagues describe an infant with bacterial peritonitis producing so much gas that ultrasound revealed “intravascular microbubbles moving into a pulmonary artery”. Smith and Els describe four fatal cases of infant cardiac embolism (i.e., air in the heart) and underscore the hazard of air being accidentally or negligently introduced in infants with difficult venous access. Beluffi and Peroti describe air embolism as a “rare complication of intensive care, noting links to enterocolitis (i.e., gut infection), surgical procedures and infant respiratory distress syndrome (which they call hyaline membrane disease)”.
The possible role of infection should be underscored. The Chester unit’s sewage system, or that of the ward above, was defective, providing an obvious source of infection. That is why the hospital plumber, called as a defence witness, visited repeatedly. Contaminated water systems notoriously cause clusters of neonatal unit deaths. What outbreak investigation was done at the time? Any? None? Were sewage leaks the reason why the Unit was later rebuilt?
Turning to the two insulin cases, which played a major role in the conviction: why was no alarm raised about extraordinarily high readings? A clinical biochemistry department signed them off and a paediatrician received them. Did either read them? The second case (Baby L) was in April 2016, when the unit staff were acutely aware of a string of adverse events. For baby F, in August 2015, there’s the question of how the insulin was delivered. The prosecution alleged it was via an intravenous feed bag rigged to run over 48 hours. But this bag had to be changed after Letby went off-shift owing to problems with the line. As her defence pointed out, it’s inconceivable that it’d be replaced with the one other bag that she’d also spiked or that, if she’d spiked multiple bags, there was no cluster of insulin-poisonings. What really happened is deeply uncertain, and the blood samples were discarded long ago.
Dr. Evans’s analysis was one major factor in Letby’s conviction. The other was her own notes, most notoriously one on green paper (figure 2). This includes the much-quoted phrases: “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them”, “I’m a horrible evil person” and “I am evil, I did this”.
Reading the note is tricky. Words overlap and those on the same line do not always belong to the same sentence. The most convincing decrypt I’ve seen asserts that it was written in five parts shown, colour coded, in figure 3 (though I’d put everything in block capitals into the grey block).
Much is a stream of fear and self-loathing but what’s critical is in green, bottom right, below the heavily encircled “HATE”. This reads: “They accused; they went…”, followed by those claimed confessions. “Accused” isn’t certain to me, being obscured by the heavy circle around “HATE”, but the meaning is clear from “They went”, which is to say that “They [the police] asserted that…”. Read that way, it’s a shell-shocked woman describing a police interview, not a confession.
I do not know that Ms. Letby is innocent. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she wasn’t the world’s best nurse, nor that the doctors had legitimate concerns about her competence. But I am far from convinced that she is a murderess on the evidence that has been presented.
She worked on a Level II unit that, based on the RCPCH report, wasn’t fit for purpose. Her ‘killing spree’ coincided with an excess of other deaths that the principal expert witness says were “due to the usual problems of small babies”. Air embolus – if it was the cause of death – was diagnosed long after the event and can arise for other reasons besides malicious injection. Her ‘confession note’ can be construed very differently. In a remarkably similar case, a Dutch nurse, Lucia de Berk, was convicted of neonatal murders based on circumstantial evidence and an ambiguous diary, then exonerated. Many think that Letby’s defence barrister failed to make the best of her case, with no expert bar the plumber called on her account. It is vital that she is allowed an appeal.
It is vital too that the pending Statutory Inquiry interprets its brief as widely as possible, and considers the possibility, however small, that it is built upon a false premise. The Countess of Chester Hospital was not a happy place to work. In December 2015, one unnamed paediatrician wrote to the management: “Over the past few weeks I have seen several medical and nursing colleagues in tears… they get upset as they know that the care they are providing falls below their high standards,” adding “chronically overworked” and “no one is listening”. Doctors and the hospital management clearly disliked and distrusted each other. Dr. Gilby, who became CEO after Letby’s arrest, is now suing for constructive dismissal, asserting she was bullied and undermined by the Trust Chairman.
Isn’t this the perfect setting for care to go horribly awry, without foul play? Or have we reached the point where it becomes expedient to blame miscreant nurses for the NHS’s failings, just as our 17th Century forebears attributed societal calamities to witches?
Dr. David Livermore is a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.
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“In conclusion, Clauser argues that the negative feedback mechanisms in the Earth’s climate system stabilise temperatures against warming due to increases in radiative forcing.”
Yet one more amazing example among so many of intelligent design – that makes us literally unique in the universe we experience in our lives, in time and space. Our fine tuning is so fine that an infintesemal change in gravity or weak force that holds matter together and we don’t exist.
It’s called the Anthropic Principle – things are the way they are because it they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to notice them. Strictly speaking, this is the Weak Anthropic Principle. Read ‘Just Six Numbers’ by Sir Martin Rees (Astronomer Royal) for an interesting discussion on just how ‘finely balanced’ six fundamental constants have to be for us to be here.
For some people, this provides evidence of a Divinity that arranged the Universe for us. For other (perhaps more humble) people it is not evidence that we are so special as to deserve the attention of the Divinity.
Consider the puddle which observes “Isn’t it amazing! This dip in the ground is EXACTLY the right shape to accommodate me”
So do you think all the incredible fine tuning that enables us to exist just happened by accident for no purpose?
I’m fascinated by the way Earth-colliding asteroids always manage to land in a crater. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220403-an-icy-mystery-deep-in-arctic-canada
Yes, it did. Because if it hadn’t, we wouldn’t exist. There is no old man with a beard hiding out of sight, or even behind the curtain.
Rolling the dice a lot of times got us to where we are, with advantageous conditions leading to things persisting and disadvantageous ones destroying them.
Well I’m inclined to agree because if there were a ‘God’, not only would he not allow kids to suffer and die from terminal cancer but he wouldn’t have invented wasps. They’re not even very effective pollinators, compared with all the lovely, benign bees and flutterbies. No, wasps are the jihadis of the insect world, they lurk in litter bins and wait for an unsuspecting victim to pass by then chase them down the street, completely ignoring all other people, and I think they get a smug satisfaction out of making people behave like Mr Bean doing a demented windmill impersonation, basically humiliating themselves in public. They’re really hard to kill and i once squirted one with WD40 and it didn’t even die. It was like a bloody terminator! One stung me below my eye last year ( a wheelie bin ambush ) and it hurt like a f***er, so when one landed next to me I squashed it with my sandal and thought that was payback at least.
, but I find staying consistently keto and those plug-ins you use overnight very helpful. No amount of garlic consumption works, alas.
Creatures are only meant to attack you if they feel threatened or you’re on their menu, therefore there can’t be a god because such a benevolent being would never create such evil little b’stards.
Speaking of being on critters’ menus, I’m an ‘all you can eat’ buffet for
Yes, it is difficult to understand why God allows suffering. You need to know that you would not exist to comment on the Internet if not for cancer, heart attacks etc. If nobody dies from disease then you have no chance at life at all because the planet could not support life at those levels. Suffering, ie Pain, is necessary to stay alive in our world so we know when things are harmful, when we become sick and that we shouldn’t put our hands in fire. If you have an alternative that is more sustainavle for the big picture,
love to hear it.
Bees mind their own business and are pretty polite. But wasps are nasty pieces of work sticking their nose into everything. “The jihadi’s of the insect world” is a pretty good analogy. A bee would never pass Net Zero, but wasps are a combination of Jim Dale, Ed Miliband and Antonio Guterres.
But wasn’t Jim Dale on Neighbours? Then he seemed to pop up all over the place after that, a bit like Guy Pierce..
Something that I’ve often wondered about bees though is why is it only the fluffy bumble bees i regularly rescue from getting squished on the ground during summer? I’ve never ever needed to come to the rescue of a honey bee.
Answers on a postcard please….
Are we getting mixed up with our Jim Dales?—-The one I am talking about is the cretin always on GB news spouting junk science and running rings around Eammon Holmes and Anne Diamond etc because they don’t know anything about the issue.
Why do you assume that the only two possibilities are a man with a beard controlling everything or a universe which came into being somehow by complete accident with no purpose, and therefore as the former is implausible, it must be the latter? Those are clearly not the only two possibilities.
Quite. Given what we don’t know, the chances of what we do know explaining our reality is close to zero. Most people seem unable to grasp any other idea of an overarching force other than the one of God as depicted by religion. And, for most people, that depiction of God explaining our reality is either true or false – there are no grey areas. But it seems to me to only be a small step to consider other possibilities for our perception of reality. One possibility, for example, is that it is an old man with a beard. This old man, however, sits in a lab, in a future time, running an infinite number of simulations with subtly different inputs. That’s a possibility the ‘there is only science’ people should be able to consider.
Not sure what I believe, but I’ve had a small handful of experiences that cannot be adequately explained by our common understanding of reality. I don’t know what reality is, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t this.
Total nonsense and defies logic.
This is what I send to people that aren’t sure or, amazingly, are sure there is no God. Yet alone intelligent design.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ajqH4y8G0MI
I don’t know about purpose. I don’t see how anyone can know about purpose. But we’re all different and I can only see this from my perspective.
Existence and consciousness seem utterly miraculous, mysterious and intrinsically inexplicable to me. I sometimes wonder if that’s what others call God. The whole business of existence seems utterly surreal to me. And we should keep using hydrocarbons and build more nuclear power stations.
Carbon mechanics are a useful long term storage method, but it’s also reasonable to make real time use of light from the Sun, in a similar fashion as the plants do. Alright, the plants do the medium to long term storage that we exploit, but the somewhat simplistic route of grabbing some energy to generate electrical power is still a decent idea.
Well maybe but you need a backup when the sun isn’t shining, which costs money, or affordable storage.
There is no ‘fine tuning’ – just billions of years of evolutionary trial and error, spontaneous order.
in a word: Yes.
It isn’t known, and probably can’t be known if other combinations of values for the six numbers would also result in a universe in which life could exist. If physicists ever manage to produce a grand theory of everything it could turn out that the values of the six numbers can’t be any different to what they are.
All that means is that in the entire Universe we are exceedingly, infinitely, rare; a probability with lots of zeros to the right of the decimal point, and no integers to its left. One doesn’t have to invoke ‘intelligent design’ – a concept with even even lower probability.
The point is that if some thing, some state, some combination of states, is possible (i.e. that is not prevented by physics) then in a big enough arena, of time and space, the probability of it happening is 100%. We just happen to be it; our universe has adequate temporal and spatial dimensions.
In terms of corporate capture I think the university provides a good illustration of the malaise at large generally in society. You become so dependent on sources of funding and rather used to lavish amounts of money for fancy new buildings – always soulless though regardless of how much they cost, that to go back to a purer time is both unthinkable and unworkable.. And at the point of deep capture it is impossible to relinquish them because everything has been scaled up. Just like how we are complentely dependent on existing systems of trade and global finance because huge populations means there is no credible way to scale back without catastrophe. This Ponzi scheme problem has already started to manifest in terms of falling numbers of overseas cashcow students and loans that were taken out on the assumption of ever growing numbers.
There is a real emergency which could’ve been prepared for if it hadn’t been clouded by the fake one and therein lies one of its evils. Virtually no potato crop in Britain this year because of the wetness. Any attempt to grow stuff in your garden would’ve been met by an unvanquishable number of slugs and snails. There are natural cycles and any responsible leadership would be thinking about how to maintain such high populations under current conditions given long term trends There would be no easy fix but with international collaboration it could be done but it is too late now. We, the golden billion as the Russians call us, think we can just always rely on imports because of the permanence of the petrodollar. The luxury of imports is closing down on many levels. And many other countries are experiencing weather-related difficulties. I used to buy a litre of olive oil for £3 in the supermarket. Now it is £7.50. Things are at crisis point when you can’t even grow your own tatties. Do you really have to meet up with a spiv under furtive conditions in order to buy a vegetable. We think root vegetables are as hard as nails and will be with us forever.
We thought the events of 22/11/63 meant very little at that the time to us.All over Europe there was a geneartion who called themselves Kennedy’s children It was the start of a slow moving plague. Killed in broad daylight. They could’ve killed him by poison but they wanted it to be in the bright sunshine for maximum trauma. Any movement towards redemptive change acknowledges this. Dylan wrote a song about it a couple of years ago called Murder Most Foul.
It is sad for me because I love the Brits but all I see is a suicide pact or acquiesence to doom. No direction home. We are beyond the eleventh hour.
Off-T
https://thenewconservative.co.uk/sunaks-mask-slips/
Frank Haviland gives Fishy a good going over for his desertion at the D-Day ceremony. He’s a horrible weaselly little traitor.
“Unfortunately for Rishi, there is a reason beyond the general election why this D-Day storm is unlikely to blow over: it perfectly adumbrates the fault line along which all political issues are now at play in our nation– the stark divide between patriots and traitors.”
As I have posted more than once, Fishy is definitely on the side of the traitors.
True but I have been slagging them off when they are there including Charles that GBN are sycophants over. Neil Oliver alluded to similar lines in his monologue, maybe he reads the comments LOL.
I like the very simple quote from Judith Curry (Climatologist formerly of Georgia Tech) ———-“Sure, all things being equal CO2 may cause a little warming, but all things in Earth’s climate are not equal”.
How many ordinary people have head of John Clauser or other people like him, and how many will ever read an article like this or these type of studies? I suggest a tiny percentage only will do that. This means they will only be hearing the alarmist version of reality as presented on mainstream media (BBC, SKY News etc)
Here is a little story I read in a book by Stephen Einhorn called “Climate Change, What they rarely tech you in College”———-According to Jewish folklore, The Lord sent two Angels down with a sack full of foolish souls to be evenly distributed over Earth, but they tripped and fell spiling them in a little Polish town called Chelm. Soon a heated argument started in the town about what was more important, the Sun or the Moon. After careful consideration the Chief Rabbi decided the Moon was more important because it shone light at night when people needed it and not during the day when there as already plenty of light. It therefore quickly became settled that the Moon was more important. In fact there was a “consensus” and those who disagreed were classed as “Moon Deniers”.
There is something very similar happening today and many people getting their information from mainstream TV News are like the people of Chelm. They don’t look at facts and empirical science. They listen to Authority.
I don’t pretend to understand all this.
But I do know when I’m being fed bullshit and am being scammed – and the Climate Change propaganda is clearly bullshit and Net Zero is just a scam.
Put another way: what caused 12 000 years of global warming prior to Mankind burning fossil fuels, and when C02 levels were much lower, and what evidence is there that this process stopped at the end of the 20th Century or was so weak to be replaced by Man-made – and only Man-made – CO2 emissions?
Since nobody can answer that, the whole Man-made climate change crisis is a pack of lies. (Like CoVid and ‘vaccines’.)
Am I mistaken in what I seem to read here? A recently accoladed Nobel laureate, qualified in a highly relevant field, denouncing the entire climate scare as a scientifically-illiterate scam?
Why isn’t this covered by the BBC?
Since 2005, BBC policy has been to give no coverage to the climate sceptic viewpoint. And apparently never to revise or even reconsider that policy.
Prof Clauser is by no means alone. His thesis above is a condensed version of Prof Roy Spencer’s small highly readable book Global Warming Scepticism for Busy People. Prof Ian Plimer, distinguished emeritus professor of geology, would stand beside them both in a debate, if the BBC would allow one.
Add Professor William Happer, Professor Richard Lindzen, and many others.
The story of unanimous science support for AGW is simply a lie. It incenses me to think of it.
I will not pay the BBC’s wretched license fee. Let them come and put me in jail.