The Great and Good are busy trying to justify instructing the discharge of elderly patients, of uncertain Covid status, from hospitals to care homes. The result, back in March 2020, was to seed multiple care homes with Covid. The virus was then spread by staff who worked shifts for multiple sites. Care home residents account for around 45,000, or 20%, of all U.K. deaths attributed to Covid, rising to between a third and a half of those in the first wave.
Jenny Harries, then one of Chris Whitty’s Deputy CMOs and now Chief Executive of the UKHSA, e-mailed in March 2020, “The reality will be we need to discharge COVID-19 positive patients into residential care settings.” She perfectly understood the implications, last week telling the Covid Inquiry that it “sounded awful” and adding that she had been taking “a very, very high-level view”.
Matt Hancock further informed the Inquiry “The only choice is between bad options… I have gone over and over in my head the decisions that we took… Every decision was a choice between difficult options, and nobody has yet brought to me a solution to this problem that even with hindsight (my italics) would have resulted in more lives saved. If there is one, I want to know about it because it’s crucial that we learn these lessons for the future.”
What is remarkable about all this is that there was an obvious way to mitigate the problem. It’s what Sunetra Gupta, in Saturday’s Telegraph called “fever hospitals”, and what I’d call ‘cohorting’. Put simply, you take over a few care homes and you send all the possibly infected discharges there, instead of scattering them hither and thither. It’s not perfect – some uninfected discharges find themselves together with a high concentration of the infected, increasing their risk. But it’s a damned site less bad than seeding scores of sites. What’s more, you can ensure that these few sites are served by dedicated staff who aren’t also working elsewhere.
It’s basic infection control, and it’s hard to think that no one proposed it…
That said, it is just about possible, because the Department of Health has form:
From 1997 to 2011, I ran the Antibiotic Resistance Laboratory for the then Health Protection Agency (HPA), which is the UKHSA under its previous moniker but one. Any hospital that encountered unusually resistant bacteria could send them to my team for confirmation of their own results, advice on what antibiotic to use and investigation of the bug’s resistance mechanisms. We watched to see if similar resistance types were cropping-up at multiple hospitals, indicating an emerging national public health issue. Colleagues in the adjacent Hospital Infection Laboratory performed DNA fingerprinting, identifying whether new resistance types were spreading across different hospitals.
In Spring 2011, I was surprised to receive Acinetobacter and Klebsiella (genera of bacteria) from a dozen intensive care units in the same week with similar resistance patterns – but very unusual ones for the U.K. DNA fingerprinting confirmed clusters of isolates belonging to the same strains from the different ICUs. It was bizarre for something like that to arise out of the blue; multi-site problems usually build slowly and progressively.
Usefully, a couple of submission forms noted “Patient transfer from Libya”. Most other patients had Arabic names too, so we phoned around the hospitals and discovered that these too were “Patient transfer from Libya,” or were in a nearby bed to “Patient transfer from Libya.”
We gathered that the Department of Health, in its compassionate wisdom, had imported war casualties from Libya and distributed them across NHS sites, “so as not to overload a single ICU”. Other European countries had taken Libyan war casualties too, and reported similar clusters of resistant bacteria, as here, here and here.
I did my best to create a stink, raising the topic at the Government’s Antimicrobial Resistance, Prescribing and Healthcare Infections Advisory Committee. I could never find out exactly who was responsible for distributing the patients, nor what hospitals (in North Africa or Malta?) they’d passed through before reaching the U.K. Nevertheless, I felt confident that I’d created enough noise, and that the message had filtered back.
I was wrong. Later in 2011, I moved from the HPA to the University of East Anglia but, until 2018, retained a day and a half each week subcontracted to my old lab at the HPA, now PHE. I was no longer Lab Director but still chaired the Clinical Meeting, reviewing the week’s submissions. And, one week late in 2015, we had unusually-resistant Klebsiella, Acinetobacter and Pseudomonas from multiple burns units.
Once again, bacteria of the same species were similar to one another but very different from our domestic problem strains. Several Pseudomonas had a very exotic antibiotic-destroying enzyme called VEB-1 and shared a DNA fingerprint. And, this time, the local microbiologists were phoning to complain, telling us that their burns units had been instructed, with minimal notice, to accept compassionate transfers from a fire in Bucharest, coming to the U.K. for skin-grafting.
These patients had already spent many days in a Romanian burns’ unit, where their wounds had acquired an unpleasant microflora. Which was then introduced, not to one U.K. burns unit, but to several. Burns units are notorious for the spread of infection and great care is taken to prevent this. Yet, in contravention of all good practice, there was no pre-transfer screening, and no microbiology notes for the transferred patients. Worse, some patients were too unwell for grafting, meaning that their transfers were pointless, only adding to their suffering.
In each of these cases it is to the credit of the individual NHS physicians, nurses and infection control teams that they prevented, or limited, the spread of the bacteria imported to their units. There were some cross infections, but no major local or national outbreak. Malta was less fortunate: Klebsiella with OXA-48 – an enzyme that destroys the most powerful penicillin-related antibiotics (‘carbapenems’) – was imported with Libyan war casualties and thereafter swiftly became endemic across the island nation.
Each time, just as with the discharge of Covid cases, the same risks were negligently run. Possibly-infected patients were distributed to multiple sites, creating a much greater risk than if the transfers were concentrated to a few well-prepared sites. For the Libyan and Romanian stories you can support the humane intent whilst deploring the haphazard execution. In the case of Covid it is likely that the virus likely would have found the care home patients eventually anyway, but cohorting would have minimised the early deaths.
First do no harm. Will the Department of Health ever learn about ‘cohorting’? And tell Matt Hancock?
Dr. David Livermore is a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.
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“Hate Speech Law”. = The Enforcement of Liberal Progressive Dogma.
It’s just the methods pioneered by the western “liberal democratists” to subjugate hostile countries in perpetuity applied to themselves on the grounds that the history of mankind isn’t particularly pretty on either side and that there’s thus obviously no moral case for this strange victor’s exemption.
Be careful what methods you employ against others because someone might want to apply them to yourself, given that they demonstrably “work” (sort-of, at least), and that your use of them means they must be legitimate.
And you’d have thought that it would already be illegal to spit at people!
agreed, they are forcing people to accept lies as truth, I am sorry if a man who declares himself to be a woman and photographs himself with an innocent baby sucking his pectoral, for his pleasure, after all he cannot sustain a child, it would under normal circumstances be considered child abuse. but yhe well being of the baby is not even considered if a biological man forces his perceived reality on it, and the public who are horrified are the ones jailed for hurting his feelings.
Men can wear dresses, make up, and imitate women, but they are not women, and no damn politician who seeks votes over the well being of an infant is going to make me spout their untruths.
ie Maoism
So I’ll no longer be able to ridicule Britain’s greatest (IMHO) Mastermind David ‘Lamebrain’ Lammy – possibly the most intellectually-challenged politician in the world. And I’ll no longer be allowed to ridicule the (IMHO) mentally-deranged, climate fantasist Edward ‘clueless’ Milibrain. And all satirical references to thin-skinned, multi-tier, gimme-free-gear, Keir ‘granny-harmer’ Starmer will become criminal offences.
“multi-tier, gimme-free-gear, Keir ‘granny-harmer’ Starmer” this could run and run.
Let’s hope so.
There’s ‘Queer’, ‘Brown Spear’ opportunities as well.
Diane Abbot and David Lamy… it’s a close run thing.
The purpose of this round of censorship is to provide cover for the failure of madleft’s social policies: anti-whitism, mass unlimited immigration, anti-manism, worship of the Left’s Favourite Religion, worship of people of sacred skin colour, internationalism, worship of men pretending to be women, etc, etc. In particular, the feedback from reality has to broken, and people have to be prevented from noticing reality (or if they do notice reality, they have to be prevented from saying so). The longterm intention is the atomisation of the population in order to facilitate the Great Replacement.
And Great Reset!
A real gem from the “the origins are soviet” article (in itself too long to read completely):
It has been argued that the Western opposition to the prohibition against hate speech in Article 19 was disingenuous, given that the Allied Powers had imposed obligations not to permit fascist organizations and to prohibit hostile propaganda in peace treaties with countries such as Hungary, Bulgaria, Finland, Italy, and Romania in the late 1940s, as well as in the 1955 State Treaty with Austria [and Germany, obviously, but that place is just too ghastly to even admit that it exists].
[…]
However, these obligations are easily distinguishable from Article 20 […] as they were […]
related to the most exceptional of circumstances in countries that had been led by authoritarian regimes and thus had little tradition of liberal democracy.
Or, put into plain English, the Anglo-Saxians had absolutely no problems with forcing draconic “hate speech laws” onto their erstwhile enemies but – obviously – didn’t mean to be bound by them themselves. It’s such a pity that this genie, once let out of its bottle, proved to be difficult to contain because the power to employ censorship to fight “really bad-ism” of any nature, once generally legitimized, was too tempting to not try to employ it for purposes of domestic politics everywhere.
Or – as they say – chicken coming home to roost at last. Have fun with your own medicine.
So if you ridicule a female MP over the Covid jabs, would you end up in the slammer for sexism?
““Vilification laws are easily weaponised to silence free speech and suppress opposing views on contentious social issues,” he warned”
Of course they are, that is the whold fuc*ing point. Notice that is in Victoria, a haven of democracy during the Covid PsyOp.
“submissions to the Victorian Government’s consultation on the proposed anti-vilification laws” Consultations are the new foregone conclusion tactics, of plain old fascism.
This kind of “really bad stuff” censorship is a tactic of pain old antifascism. It’s just that the “no human rights for the hereditary enemies of humans rights” was meant to remain restricted to these, ie, “No freedom of speech or religion or … etc for people from Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria, Finland, Germany and Japan!”, not “No freedom of speech or .. etc for the coalition of Very Good And Just People who conquered them.”
But the idea that liberal democracy needs state repression to be safe from the masses evil people who might not want it – Liberal democracy doesn’t want you to have a choice because you might not chose it! – then apparently took on a life of its own as people didn’t understand why only their liberal democracy was supposed to go its way naked and alone, without this essential harness of protection against ubiquitous miscreants.
Australian, American, British and Canadian liberals hold their liberal democracy as dear as German liberals do and they absolutely want it to be protected in the same way.
—
That’s obviously sarcasm. But the notion that the universal declaration of so-called human rights was always meant to have an implied “But not for these peoples, as they’re especially bad and need to kept on much tighter leash!” condition to it, ie, that there are no human rights in the conventional sense of the word and that such human rights were never even meant to exist, was actually new to me.
OTOH, that’s probably a good reason to do away with this stupid concept. Citizens of some state have (or don’t have) rights because they’re legally subject to it. But as there’s no such thing as a global state, mere humans cannot have any rights.
“will create new criminal offences for threatening force or violence against targeted groups”
Well they certainly targeted groups of people who didn’t want the jab if I recall, and had those quarantine camps for those that were next to someone who tested PCR positive. They even had a Running Man style commentary on some who escaped.
Giving active Rights by legislation to one group ALWAYS takes away passive Common Law and Constitutional Rights to the rest of us.
It is not the rule of law, it is not equality and equity before the law, it is the two-tier justice and policing now established in the UK.
Under Common Law, freedom of speech has never been a defence when inciting hatred and violence.
So why is legislation needed?
So why is legislation needed?
To shut us up. We notice reality and therefore must be silenced.
Technically, because there’s an international (UN) anti-racism convention dating back to 1969 which demands this.
Unless you’re canny you had better keep your mouth shut because they hate you with a passion and I guarantee that thase penalties will become even more harsh in the next couple of years. Not a thing you can do about it because the police, prison service, armed forces etc are made up of the plebs who will ask how high when they are told to jump such is their fear. You should’ve gotten out of this country a while ago. Not so easy now. Some countries are imposing massive leaving taxes so if you have the means and the wherewithal then get out now.
We are moving to a situation when everything we do or say will be either compulsory or forbidden, the space between the two is getting smaller every day