It might be a new year, but on the healthcare beat it is very much back to business as usual. Which, to be clear actually means lack of business as usual, due to an upcoming six-day junior doctors strike, following on from the three-day strike in Christmas week.
In an odd way I have to admire the cynicism of the Junior Doctor leadership. Pulling emergency cover from the NHS during the traditional winter permacrisis was bound to attract criticism, but scheduling the walkout over the festive period will probably increase strike cohesion. I had suspected that support for the BMA might have been waning, but the prospect of taking an extended Christmas break, perhaps getting a few days of Yuletide skiing while someone else attends to the sick and injured is probably quite hard to resist for many junior colleagues.
Cue choreographed squawking from various quarters. On the one hand tedious talking heads from NHS high command predicting imminent catastrophe, on the other the disingenuous BMA claiming noble doctors are striking to save our beloved NHS from decades of underinvestment by the evil Tory government. Yawn – déjà vu all over again.
And there in fact is the point. A couple of years ago, the concept of a group of doctors refusing to staff on call rotas for the sole national provider of emergency healthcare would have been unthinkable. Now it is commonplace. The Rubicon has been crossed on so many occasions that it is quite possible we have a ‘new normal’ and that our current cohort of young doctors will regard these tactics as legitimate methods of extracting more money from the taxpayer – to use contemporary parlance, we are witnessing the ‘weaponisation of patient harm’. It is important to appreciate that not all ‘junior doctors’ are acting like militant train drivers. The term ‘junior doctor’ covers a wide spectrum of medical professional from a recently qualified graduate to a trainee with 10 years of more of sustained effort and experience. It is hard to say precisely how many junior trainees are participating in the strike, because the figures are not readily available, but anecdotal reports suggest up to 50% are refusing to turn up for duty.
Regular readers will know my inbuilt scepticism about shroud-waving by NHS senior leadership, but on this occasion, I fear the shrouds are real – there is mounting evidence that significant harm is occurring to patients, over and above the legacy of lockdown.
How has it come to this? The arguments on either side have been rehearsed at length in the mainstream media, with customary distortions on either side. From reading and listening to various opinions a few points emerge.
It’s inconceivable the BMA Junior Doctors committee are unaware of the consequences of this strike for patients and their senior colleagues. The inescapable implication is that the JDC believe behaving in a manner known to cause harm to the sick is a reasonable way for doctors to conduct themselves. This is a radical departure from previous generations of medical professionals. If that is the case, there is little to prevent the current crop of young medical graduates from employing the same methods in the future, even when they have completed postgraduate training and become consultants or GPs.
Their rationale for such action is that short term harm to some patients is justifiable to prevent greater long-term harm to many more, and that giving doctors a 35% pay rise will prevent harms in the future. Further, that the refusal of the Government to accede to their demands in full ‘forces’ the doctors to go on strike. They have no alternative; they didn’t want to hurt the public, but the evil Tories forced them to.
That line is a tough sell, particularly when one considers the latest available data about medical working practices.
For example, the General Medical Council has produced a recent report on the matter.
It will come as no surprise to regular readers to discover that the U.K. medical workforce trends continue to feature more female doctors, more international medical graduates and more part-time working by doctors. Readers will be pleased to read that the chair of the GMC celebrates the fact that the medical workforce continues to be “more diverse” and that is “undeniably a positive thing”. Well, that may be her opinion, but from my perspective I would prefer a workforce that put in a full shift, irrespective of gender and ethnicity balance. The fixed costs of training a doctor are the same whether the graduate works full- or part- time – more part-timers mean a proportionate loss of training costs and associated reduction in productivity.
In 2022, the GMC calculates that 61% of the workforce were home grown medical graduates with 8% from the EEA and 31% from other countries. Interestingly, the proportion of European graduates was 9% in 2015, so it is hard to spot a significant ‘Brexit effect’ at this time. Furthermore, even with the putative increase in U.K. medical school places, the GMC estimates that the percentage of foreign medical graduates required will increase to 42% by 2027.
The NHS-oriented think tank The Kings Fund conducted its own survey of working intentions of junior doctors training to become GPs. In this survey 41% of respondents indicated that they intended to work five or six sessions per week (20 to 24 hrs) once they had been fully trained. Perhaps that’s why they want a 35% pay rise – almost the same money for half the workload.
Of even more interest is a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies about part time working by Hospital Consultants in the NHS.
In 2012, 15.6% of consultants worked less than full-time in the NHS, but by 2021 this had risen to 21.6%.
These headline figures conceal important differences between female and male consultants. In summary, one in three female consultants aged under 60 work “less than full-time” compared to one in 10 males. Unsurprisingly, this is because female consultants tend to work full-time until they have children, then go back to work part-time (Lachish et al. ‘Human Resources for Health’ (2016) 14:62).
Extraordinary finding. Who knew?
There is a lot in this report, and I encourage readers to explore it for themselves. One missing point is a comment about the gender demographics of consultants by age cohort. Simply put, the older cohorts of consultants have a male preponderance. My conclusion is that as older males retire from the NHS, the overall proportion of part-time consultants will rise. I should stress to readers that these findings relate to the hospital specialist workforce – the part-time issue in general practice has been documented on multiple occasions and is a well-known issue dating back many years.
It is not immediately clear to me how paying junior doctors 35% more fixes any of these problems. Nor is it obvious how this dispute will end. Even the Guardian appears to be running out of patience with the juniors, describing their action as “an unapologetic V sign” to the Government; contrasting it unfavourably with the consultant cohort’s pragmatism in agreeing a deal which, subject to an upcoming ballot should resolve their dispute.
For once, I find it difficult to argue with a Guardian columnist. Strange times indeed. Happy New Year.
The author, the Daily Sceptic’s in-house doctor, is a former NHS consultant now in private practice.
Stop Press: The Mail reports that the NHS bosses running the 11 trusts with the longest referral waiting times – where the average delay for treatment is more than a year – all earn more than the Prime Minister (who’s on around £160,000), some up to £300,000 a year.
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The short answer is No it is not time to start the Dangerous New Virus!!47 game afresh. It’s time to end it.
A thorough and interesting article covering the origins of Omicron. Was it the result of a lab leak in S. Africa where virology/vaccine research was taking place?
https://www.stopgof.com/english/omicron-origin/
This article isn’t awful, but I don’t think it’s really a good fit for the Daily Sceptic readership. If it appeared in the Guardian then maybe TDS could have a an article about that. That would be mildly newsworthy.
The principal problem with this article is that it accepts the ‘Covid was really dangerous’ lie. A quick look at the footnotes to that FT chart should make the problems with it immediately obvious. The statement that Covid once was 20 times as lethal as the flu is arrived at by comparing all deaths where Covid was mentioned AT ALL on the death certificate (most likely massively overstating Covid deaths, with infection data from the ONS (quite possibly massively understating infections). That then is compared to IFR for regular flu – which the footnotes suggest might have been done properly (who knows of course).
No, this is the biggest lie of all and the one that we must keep challenging as everything that followed flowed from it. Expecting the average person to understand the reasons why vaccine coercion and lockdowns both don’t work and are morally unacceptable, even in response to a truly lethal virus, is too ambitious.
Separately, I’m quite happy for people to believe that Omicron is the much less lethal end state of Covid. It provides and ending of sorts to this story. I don’t want people to believe that Covid is still out there hiding, waiting to kill us all.
Indeed. Only 6000 people out of 130k deaths classified as Covid deaths in England&Wales had Covid as the only cause on their death certificate.
And that is an official figure, likely still overestimating the real one in light of the prohibition of autopsies and other dynamics at play here.
My first thought when reading the headline was, is it time to accept that CoVid 19 is not CoVid 19?
CoVid = abbreviation of Coronavirus Disease = Common Cold.
The ‘19’ (2019) was to give the pretence that it was a ‘novel’ disease caused by a ‘novel’ virus, instead of the same disease that is caused by a number of viruses, including other ancient coronaviruses, of which we have another rather mild variant.
It should have been called JAC… Just Another Coronavirus.
Somewhere in the deepest recesses of the internet suggested it stood for.. ‘Certification Of Vaccination ID – (AI = 1,9)? They’re kidding!!!
Unfortunately the regulators behind the Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) are funded by the pharmaceutical industry and the Big Pharma have no incentive to lose the extraordinarily profitable EUA. Pesky safety trials to ensure a new product is safe and effective are simply not profitable, and as there is no liability then unsafe and ineffective is just fine provided it is highly profitable.
Of course there could have been no EUA had there been any safe and effective treatments like ivermectin and HCQ…. hence the cheep effective treatment bashing by Big Pharma lackeys.
Is it time to start building a gallows yet?
And the Times muppets will not allow their journalists to properly investigate this conflict of interest. Probably for similar reasons.
My conclusion to this article is actually that it shows what a colossal mistake it was (almost certainly a deliberate one) to allow PCR tests to define the disease.
If COVID is a set of symptoms then you can’t declare someone has a disease just because of a test that indicates the probability of the presence of viral material.
We’ve spent 2+ years calling COVID many things that were not COVID.
Is Omicron not COVID? Almost everything that was called COVID since March 2020 hasn’t actually been COVID. Start with that.
Yep. PCR is a gigantic fraud, even without the ones instituted on top of it like non-standardization, arbitrary higher/lower CT for vaxxed/unvaxxed, non confirmation, single snippet search etc. that were all known by June 2020 the latest.
But a very profitable and absolutely essential one to create and milk a plandemic.
I read yesterday that thousands of tests got an EUA, but none has gotten full approval yet, to prevent liability issues.
What else does one need to know?!
Even worse, we’ve spent 2+ years calling people in perfect health ‘infected’ or a ‘case’ (as in an ill patient) when they were no such thing.
Let’s just go back to what we have done for decades and start calling respiratory ailments what we have always done – a cold when mild, a flu when worse. I find the point that a flu virus is far worse than a cold virus moot, as we now know one and the same virus can be a mild cold for some and can lead to weeks of bed rest and pneumonia for others. As generally we did not test for viruses, who knows how many of us in reality did have a flu virus but called it a cold as we were not ill enough to think otherwise.
And yes, above all, let us stop with testing people who are clearly not ill. Having a sniffle or a sore throat is not being ill, it’s being under the weather. The one thing Fraudci was right about (although it was in a vain attempt to try to hide that his pet poison was not working as advertised) is that people should only test if they are admitted to hospital. In someone that ill it may be worth knowing what the exact virus is, for the rest, stay home, have some Lemsip, get some rest, have some Vit D and C and move along.
PCR became the disease. It is a first in medical science that a laboratory reagent to detect a pathogen is a disease.
There can be no disease without symptoms. Being infected is not disease. Daily we are infected with a variety of micro-organisms which we don’t notice because they are innocuous, in insufficient quantity to cause affect, or our immune system bumps them off quickly.
Maybe all this is merely an artefact of testing for a “virus” which has only been characterised by computer simulation of a random sequence of nucleotides apparently found in patient zero (thank you China).
All the rest is a farrago of an intrinsically dodgy PCR/LFT regime?
There is clearly something going round but we have not achieved herd immunity because there is an insufficient reservoir of immune people, ie the had covid but never jabbed.
Unfortunately covid or whatever will continue to circulate due to the vast number of people jabbed with a none sterilising gene based product.
This is evidenced by the jabbed getting repeat infections, despite, or rather because of the jab. There is scientific evidence of VAIDS, OAS, and ADE.
See G.V.Bossche.
Yet we are still jabbing and jabbing kids.
Criminal and madness.
Me thinks Omicron was the wild version, created by leaky mass gene-therapisation against the original man-made bioweapon.
And the only really interesting question left is whether that bioweapon was released accidentally or intentionally.
If it carries on at this rate, ‘The Science’™️ will discover the Common Cold.
Must admit I am partial to Hobgoblin…
Maths teacher in the year 2030. “Today children we are going learn about the dangers of Mathematical Modeling and how it destroys society”
Omicron was never Covid-19 and neither were any of the other variants. Covid-19 is the serious hyperimmune state that may occur following SARS-CoV-2. The same syndrome occurs after other viruses and spontaneously. Different types of SARS-CoV-2 have different risks for Covid-19. Omicron simply has a lower risk. Using the terms SARS-CoV-2 infection and Covid-19 interchangeably, as continues to be done, is clinically and scientifically inaccurate.
One has to wonder whether lab leaks are more common than is being made out. No one has looked back at the sudden emergence of HIV/AIDS in the late 1970s, in light of COVID-19, for starters…
Dr Hope-Simpson was a sceptic who questioned medical orthodoxy. He studied chickenpox and shingles, showing how immunity conferred by natural chickenpox in childhood waned with age; the two conditions were known to be related, but the nature of the relationship was unclear. He showed that a virus could lie dormant in the human body for years or decades and reappear in another form. Later, the single virus responsible for both diseases was identified and isolated by Thomas Huckle Weller.
Hope-Simpson’s career-long interest in the transmission of respiratory viruses was equally inventive. He questioned the theory of person-to-person transmission being enough to explain the simultaneous appearance of influenza in places far apart. He proposed that influenza epidemics during winter may be connected to a seasonal influence, perhaps a lack of vitamin D, as outbreaks in temperate latitudes peak in the month following the winter solstice and disappear the following spring/summer. As the virus mutates, it becomes less virulent and more infectious until the outbreak ends.
Hope-Simpson describes the course of the COVID-19 epidemic pretty well so far, although this virus took longer than flu usually takes to “burn out.” Most respiratory viruses mature and change their character during an outbreak that begins suddenly and then gently subsides.