With apologies to the nervous flyer, I’m sorry to tell you that flying became less safe on December 8th 2020 when MHRA authorised Pfizer’s Covid vaccine in the U.K. Let me explain.
Last month I wrote about Pfizer’s latest analysis of millions of patients’ data from a range of European national healthcare systems including the NHS. The data are segmented by categories like age, sex and, importantly, the Covid vaccination status of each patient (the very data which governments around the world continue to refuse to make public). Pfizer’s results include a ‘Hazard Ratio’ (HZ) which is a measure of the relative frequency of a serious adverse event between the Covid vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. As I said last month, Pfizer itself is now reporting to medicine regulators that its Covid vaccine has significantly increased the occurrence of a range of heart conditions. Here’s a screenshot :
What I didn’t say at the time is that I had also written to Sir Stephen Hillier, the Chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority, asking for his comments about the implications for aviation safety, and in particular the increased likelihood of a Covid vaccinated pilot being incapacitated in-flight by a cardiac issue. I didn’t mention that in my article because I had decided to give the CAA a chance to respond to my letter. However, a month on, it still hasn’t replied despite being chased – hence this further article.
“Not so fast,” you might say. “Even if Pfizer itself is now saying that its Covid vaccine increases the frequency of heart problems, the affected pilots will no longer be flying because they will have been screened out by the regular medicals which pilots have to pass to keep their licence.” And it’s true, the number of U.K. pilots failing their aero medicals (all causes) has soared. Shout out to Sally Beck for reporting on that late last year:
Unfortunately, the CAA has just refused my FOI request for data on what proportion of those medical ‘fails’ were for heart conditions. It would only give me data for 2021 onwards – which of course prevents any pre/post-vaccine comparisons.
However, there is still a major problem. The periodic medical examinations required by aviation regulators don’t eliminate the risk of in-flight incapacitation. They never did. In fact, aviation regulators have, for years, scaled the periodicity and depth of those medicals against the frequency of sudden incapacitation in the general population. For dual pilot flights, aviation regulators use a ‘1% rule’: the probability of one of the pilots becoming incapacitated mid-flight must be less than 1% per year.
The corresponding ‘rule’ for a solo pilot is an order less (0.1% per year) because there is no second pilot to take over.
The problem should be obvious by now but I’m going to make it crystal clear. Pfizer’s latest report of increased heart problems in the Covid vaccinated has most likely invalidated CAA’s prior assumptions about the risk of incapacitation in the general population on which it based the periodicity and depth of its pilot medicals. So flying has become less safe since December 8th 2020 when MHRA authorised Pfizer’s Covid vaccine.
Pfizer’s latest report obviously comes on top of the numerous media reports over the last four years of pilots becoming incapacitated mid-flight. That has always happened – aeromedicals just reduce the risk, they don’t eliminate it – and CAA collects information (called Mandatory Occurrence Reporting) on all such incidents. However, it is impossible currently to judge if there is any recent increase in heart-related pilot in-flight incapacitation because CAA states that “the release of occurrence information to the general public or the media, including in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, is not permitted”.
Nevertheless, Pfizer’s latest reported figures are now there for all to see. Worryingly, CAA was unsighted until I alerted the CAA Chairman to Pfizer’s latest report in my letter of October 12th. How do I know? Because the MHRA admitted in a recent Parliamentary Written Question that it has not discussed Pfizer’s report with any industry safety regulators.
“Why not”, you ask. My guess is that MHRA didn’t make the connection. The problem is that medicine regulators’ idea of safety management is that a medicine is safe if ‘benefit outweighs risk’. That’s relative. If the risk increases it just carries on if its staff perceive (or can argue, however spuriously) that the benefit still outweighs it. That’s their whole mindset. I doubt they even saw the link to aviation safety because there’s probably no-one in MHRA with knowledge, experience or training about conventional safety management in other safety critical sectors, aviation or otherwise, all of which deal in absolute safety risks. Aviation regulators, rightly, don’t consider the ‘benefit’ of flying when assessing safety. It’s either safe or it’s not.
I think it’s also likely that CAA was reassured by MHRA’s ‘safe and effective’ narrative without realising that the medicine regulators define safety in such a relative way (‘benefit outweighs risk’). I wouldn’t be surprised if the CAA is now spitting feathers at MHRA for not having consulted it about Pfizer’s latest report.
To me, the solution is not just for MHRA and CAA to start that consultation. It is actually for medicine regulators to be stopped from maintaining the charade that safety should be defined as ‘benefit outweighs risk’. As I have suggested before, medicine regulators should be forced to adopt the same safety management principles as everyone else and have a minimum tolerable level of risk – how many people can be allowed to die or be seriously harmed before a drug is suspended. That level would be different for chemotherapy drugs compared with over-the-counter painkillers, but my point stands. I would hazard a guess that this would render a lot of drugs unsafe overnight. I wonder if Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Donald Trump has empowered to “Make America Healthy Again” by reforming the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, will address this obvious anomaly.
A few other things are worth pointing out:
- This is a ‘damage has been done’ issue. Heart damage is usually persistent. It’s irrelevant that airlines stopped mandating the Covid vaccine a few years ago, that a pilot might last have had the Covid vaccine several years ago, or even that it’s no longer being offered routinely to under 65s.
- One of CAA’s required medical tests is an electrocardiogram (ECG) which records the electrical signals in the heart which, in turn, can indicate a wide range of cardiac problems. If the routine ECG is abnormal, CAA specifies a range of follow-up tests. Perhaps Pfizer’s findings mean that aviation regulators like CAA should now require additional routine or follow-up heart-related tests, e.g. Troponin which is a biomarker for heart muscle damage and D-Dimer which detects blood clots.
- All of the above also applies to Air Traffic Controllers. They, too, are required by aviation regulators to pass periodic medicals.
- This is a global issue. Although Pfizer’s results are based on national healthcare data from just a handful of European countries (albeit covering tens of millions of patients), they are surely indicative of an increase in heart problems in Covid vaccinated pilots worldwide.
There is one final important point worth making. Pfizer’s report also has implications for other sectors where an individual is in control of a safety critical system with potentially catastrophic (i.e., fatal) impact on third parties. The obvious ones are drivers of buses, coaches, lorries and trains. They, too, are required by their respective safety regulator to pass a medical as a condition of a licence to operate. In those cases it’s the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) and the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) which, like the CAA, are accountable to the Department for Transport. Perhaps the House of Commons Transport Select Committee will investigate the safety impact of Covid vaccines on aviation and all the other sectors within its purview. Or the Covid Inquiry.
Or, as many think, are they all just in denial of the adverse safety profile of the Covid vaccines, or want to avoid the economic impact of loss of confidence in air travel and mRNA technology?
But at least none of them can deny having been warned – by Pfizer itself, no less.
Until Nick retired a few years ago, he was a Senior Civil Servant in the Ministry of Defence responsible for the safety and effectiveness of ammunition used by the Armed Forces. He is co-author of the Perseus Group report on U.K. medicines regulator the MHRA.
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Two things worry me about Covid responses around the world:
1). How can there be so many different ones, for a single ‘real’ disease?
2). Doesn’t Covid-treatment and policy relativism really mean total epistemological anarchism in ALL science and medicine from now on?
In other words, anything goes. Science and medicine are hopelessly politicised and relativised. And that’s scary if YOU have an objectively real disease that needs curing.
Yup. If it’s taken too far it’s the death of science. Science will stop delivering benefits, bridges will collapse, aeroplanes will fall out of the sky. A second dark age.
You don’t think you’re making the word “science” do too much work in those sentences?
When was the golden age of science, in your view? 1600? The 1920s when scientific “research” first got organised in a big way (by DuPont the chemical company)? In 2019 just before the Covid lies took off? Or it’s still to come maybe, with the internet of things and artificial “intelligence” etc.?
Well the “science” died a while ago with the great global warming fraud.
Now just follow the money – that’s science.
When was the heyday of non-money science?
I don’t know enough about the history of science, but it seems much more politicized than it used to be in my living memory.
It’s fine to hold tongue-in-cheek epistemological anarchism like Feyerabend; in other words to believe that in medieval times, trepanning really did work (or why did they keep doing it?), or native American medicine really did cure cancer (perhaps God is a relativist and allowed past techniques to work – in the past?); but to do so in earnest today would surely be Wokery madness biting too close to the bone…
Or people believing covid vaccines work..
….and fairies live at the bottom of every garden!
The corrupt Globalist Billionaires and the Pharma Companies have killed objective science – politicians stood and watched.
“The Science” seems to adapt to how each populace can/has to be controlled. Give it a few weeks and this whole pack of cards is going to fall. Wall St are dumping Pharma stocks – they know the FDA hid clinical trial data.
Search for video’s with “Edward Dowd”, he’s been looking into Life Insurers 4Q reports.
A cynical person might conclude that there is a giant, worldwide experiment going on. But, of course, as I have been told numerous times, “do you really think that governments get together to discuss plans and decide policies?” . No, they just meet up every few months to swap family photos and talk about how the roses are getting on in the garden at home, and how well the grandkids are doing at school.
Only diseases that can make money for Pharma will be ‘cured’. How do we imagine they are going to reduce population by the crazy numbers they want to see? Gates talks of a 15 % reduction – that’s 1 billion just for starters.
( Leave out the Chinese because with an ageing population they want to se an increase in birthrate!)
Why do people still get tested in HK if it means 3 weeks of lockup in a hospital, despite probably having nothing wrong with their health, or, at worst, having a mild cold? Are many forced to get tested or what? Or are they naive, trusting of the authorities, and selfish? There’s got to be a reason.
It’s close to China. They probably can’t get away with farting without a fine.
A reason? Chinese heavy policing perhaps ?
If Hong Kong has a crisis, then it is because Hong kong wants a crisis. Utter madness.
Toby,
Please get on to the Canadian situation. It has gone beyond crazy.
The Canadian government says it’s considering sending even more soldiers to Latvia – to defend Ukraine’s “right” to have US NATO bases – but it can’t control the streets in Ottawa. All mouth and no trousers?
Custer’s Last Stand? Freedom’s last stand?
Comical. Explains why the pictures showed them on their trollies smothered in masks – obviously because there was very little wrong with them and they certainly weren’t struggling to breathe.
It’s not easy seeing the world gripped by insanity. We just haven’t been brought up to believe that most of the people around us could go mad.
They are trapped in the idea that they have to have zero covid cases and are incapable of seeing their lunacy.
I still don’t believe in this photo-op crisis. The orginal statement was that some hospitals were operating at more than 100% capacity. Technically, that’s nonsense as nothing can operate at more than 100% capacity. Hence, it really means some hospitals are treating more patients than someone believed they would ever treat. Note the some here. This means less than all and also, less than most and one could presumably replace it with
a few.
I’m no expert but I think this is the first piece I’ve read that seems totally genuine, not quite what I was expecting. Reading between the lines, this person is acknowledging that they (not the individual) have been duped but are too proud to admit it. I believe we can all understand that, which is an unfortunate character trait of those in power. It would take a brave person to admit being taken in by this farce. The only saving grace would be, being the first nation to publicly announce that the spell has finally been broken and the covid-19 farce demolished. Read between the lines.
There is a sickness……and it’s not “Covid”.
It’s not the vaccines that were administered to the vast majority of adults in the world; it’s those Stupid Pills someone slipped into the water supply … They apparently were “75 percent effective.”
See Canada and NZ for a particularly nasty and life damaging outbreak among the manic political class!
But…but.. I thought the far east countries were the clever ones, the ones who had learned from the experience of the first SARS, had learned the valuable lessons and so were the ones who were the example of how to manage the COVID crisis?
I’m literally wetting myself with laughter seeing how these zero covid idiots are going to get themselves out of the hole they’ve dug themselves into.
UK Column News showed a clip today of some sort of honey trap where some executive from the CDC was discussing rolling out the new Covid jabs for kids and admitting that the safety trials should be longer. He also mentioned that we’re not going to announce anything yet because we don’t want to get people too agitated. That sounds a bit like last summer in UK when vaccines minister said, ‘we have no intention of introducing vax passes, they’re not the British way, also hand job also said the jab it not going to be rolled out to children.
Is all of this stuff I read at the Daily Skeptic really happening?
Did the world ever really go through any kind of Enlightenment?
Absolutely nothing to do with China.
Everything to do with the chinks IMO
I’ve been in hospital in HKG. Old system. Brilliant efficient setup. Then the communists got their hands on it.
‘but test positive, you can look forward to an enforced stay in a hotel room …with no windows that open…’
I thought the advice was to fling the windows open, freezing half to death – or has that changed now? Is that only if granny is in the room?
In response to the previous article (asking the question about why hospitals are seeing so many cases), I commented that it was perhaps because a lot of them weren’t actually ill. Looks like I was right.
Yes and why do readers have to provide the obvious answer rather than the journalists constantly asking questions which have such obvious answers?
Medical Phoney War against the people of Hong Kong – part of the Globalist campaign to weaponise ‘health’ against the global population sponsored by Gates’ “World Health” agenda, the WHO the WEF and the UN.
Population control through making people sick, using that as an excuse to control and inject them to make them sicker and then and providing ung the ‘experimentl’ cure to the obedient. What an earner for Big Pharma!
It seems the planned ‘New World Order’ NHS is destined to play a big part in this policy!
Wait until the British public find out! The cynical would say you can’t beat them, so join them and buy Pharma shares!
It’s certainly not the wonderful, free-wheeling place I recall from living there in the early 1970s. More’s the pity. Wonder if it’s got anything to do with the new landlords?