The Response – Appropriate and Proportionate?
The two questions above are absolutely fundamental and are being ignored by the official Scottish Covid-19 Inquiry, and its UK equivalent, despite the thousands of hours and millions of £s being spent on them. In frustration Common Knowledge Edinburgh recently set up its own Scottish People’s Covid-19 Inquiry and I was asked to address these questions directly. It was a fascinating, often moving, and lively day – talks are available here, and below I summarise the evidence I presented and the conclusions I reached.
A tsunami of deaths?
Prior to the first lockdown at the end of March 2020 what did we know about the likely impact of this new disease to help us calibrate our response, particularly in terms of its mortality ? The table below shows some of the very first estimates of case fatality ratios (CFRs) that emerged:
At the end of January 2020 China reported a CFR of 2.2%, then the following month 2.3%. One week later the WHO/China Joint Mission had somehow found double the number of deaths and 10,000 more cases estimating the CFR at 3.8%. Finally, the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship quarantined in a Japanese port because of COVID-19 on board, identified seven deaths amongst 301 cases giving a similar CFR to the earlier Chinese estimates.
In a previous article I have commented about the unusual and over-inclusive definitions of COVID-19 cases, hospitalisation and deaths, as have others, and some have also questioned the specificity of the COVID-19 tests (likelihood of tests being positive with other viruses), all of which tend to exaggerate official statistics. However there is an additional concern about CFRs. Early estimates of CFRs for a new disease come from hospitals, which of course only admit seriously ill people, and therefore miss in their count of cases those patients with milder disease in the community – potentially a far larger group. For this reason CFRs overestimate mortality. What we all wanted to know back in spring 2020 was the likelihood of us succumbing if we caught COVID-19 – this statistic is the infection fatality ratio or IFR (deaths/everyone infected rather than only hospital cases). Table 2 gives three pre-first lockdown estimates of IFR:
Continued widespread testing of the 3,711 passengers and staff on the Diamond Princess identified a further 328 people who had been infected and provided the first estimate of IFR at 1.1%, half of the CFR. And this figure is likely to be higher than the UK would ever experience because of the older age distribution on the cruise ship. Next came an article from Imperial College which estimated the proportion of infected people in China from testing of returning ex-pats from China to Europe giving an IFR of 0.66%. Finally I derived an estimate of IFR using the highest Chinese CFR of 3.8% and a figure taken from the UK Pandemic Preparedness Strategy, which suggested 1-4% of patients with flu are likely to be admitted to hospital, using the upper limit of 4%. This suggests an IFR of 0.15%, and even if 10% of patients with COVID-19 are admitted the IFR would still only be 0.38%.
So the IFR seems to be below 1%, or to put it another way, 99% of people who develop COVID-19 survive. This estimate is very helpful in assessing the potential impact of this new disease, but it has the limitation of being an overall population average – so it would also have been helpful to know which groups in the population are at greater risk and which at lower risk. Fortunately we had such data back in spring 2020 too, for example from the second Chinese CFR article in Table 1 which provided such “epidemiological characteristics”. This article concluded that COVID-19 was highly transmissible, that most people had only mild symptoms, that the CFR was “low” (2.3%), and importantly It observed that most deaths occurred in those over 60 years and those with co-morbidities, see tables below:
Turning firstly to age, and bearing in mind that these CFRs are all higher than the IFRs, it is clear that the average CFR of 2.3% hides huge variation across the age spectrum from 0.2% in 10-39 year-olds to 14.8% in those 80 years or older. It is also worth noting that even in the oldest age group over 85% survive an encounter with COVID-19.
The list of common chronic diseases or co-morbidities in table 3b all appear to increase the risk from COVID-19 with the highest being cardiovascular disease at 10.5%, compared to the risk with no co-morbidity of 0.9%. Unfortunately no cross-tabulation of age by co-morbidity was presented in this article to show for example the risk to those under 60 years with no co-morbidity, likely to be significantly lower than the rates in table 3a, nor the risk to older people with multiple co-morbidities, likely to be higher than those in table 3a and 3b.
Figure 1 below shows numbers of deaths reported in the first Instituto Superiore di Sanita report from Italy on March 20th 2020 – as well as confirming that there are few deaths below 60 years it shows far more deaths in men:
So, what should we have made of these data back in March 2020? Did we face a major health emergency, a veritable tsunami of deaths? To assess this and give perspective a comparison with previous pandemics is helpful and Table 4 does this, presenting mortality on pandemics over the last century or so:
There are various estimates of global deaths from Spanish flu but most suggest an IFR of between 3% and 8%. The UK Pandemic Strategy quotes a WHO CFR estimate of 0.1-0.2% for Asian flu and 0.2-0.4% for Hong Kong flu, whilst the more recent Swine Flu had a higher CFR at 2.9% but lower IFR at 0.02%. Turning to coronaviruses, the first Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003 had a widely differing impact, in large part thought to be due to the different age groups affected, from a 3% CFR in Beijing to 28% in Taiwan. Finally Middle East Respiratory Syndrome had the highest CFR at 42% and IFR at 22%.
Although the comparison is bedevilled by not having IFRs on all pandemics it is still clear that in terms of mortality COVID-19 with a CFR of 2.3% and an IFR below 1% is no Spanish flu, SARS or MERS, and seems closer to Swine, Asian or Hong Kong Flu. We also have to bear in mind the exaggeration of COVID-19 deaths (numerator) discussed earlier, although there was also an exaggeration of cases/infections (denominator), so the net effect is uncertain. In terms of transmissibility it also seems more similar to these previous flu pandemics than to SARS or MERS (which had low transmissibility). However, there is an important proviso in the mortality comparison, and this is that unlike these flu pandemics COVID-19 does not affect young people significantly. The steep age stratification of mortality from COVID-19 is unusual and it reduces its impact in terms of “years of life lost”, and also provides opportunities for its management.
Were these early estimates for COVID-19 mortality borne out by subsequent studies and would we have erred if we’d relied on them? Well, one of the first seroprevalence studies, where the proportion of people infected is based on sample surveys of serum antibodies to SARS-CoV2, was reported from Santa Clara county in California at the end of April 2020. The authors estimated that 54,000 people had been infected at the time when known COVID-19 cases were only 1,000 and deaths 94. This gives an IFR of 0.17%. Then in early May Iceland, which at the time was conducting PCR testing more widely than any other country, identified 10 COVID-19 deaths, 1,798 cases and estimated that there were 3,640 infected citizens, suggesting an IFR of 0.3%. Following these early post-first lockdown estimates other studies came thick and fast so Ioannidis published a systematic review of seroprevalence studies globally on January 1st 2021 and concluded that 0.23% was the best estimate of IFR. Subsequently he reviewed all systematic reviews and in May 2021 produced an overall global estimate of 0.15% (with significant local variation). So subsequent studies confirmed that the IFR was below 1% and almost certainly significantly below 0.5% globally, with IFRs for individual countries largely dependent on their age structures. So the early IFR estimates and conclusions that COVID-19 was likely to be more similar to Swine, Asian or Hong Kong Flu in its impact are supported by subsequent studies. Thus if you take official statistics at face value, COVID-19 would seem to be a serious disease putting some at significant risk, but presenting minimal risk to healthy people below 60 years – so no tsunami.
Comparing the standard and COVID-19 pandemic response
Table 4 demonstrates that over the last 50 years or so there has been considerable experience of pandemics, and pandemic plans have been reviewed and refined after each. So what did these plans say we should do to respond to a new pandemic?
Firstly, measures to reduce transmission of a virus included (i) respiratory and hand hygiene (use of tissues, safe disposal then hand washing), (ii) isolation of those with symptoms to minimise onward transmission, (iii) contact tracing and school closures were only recommended early in a pandemic if at all, whilst (iv) mask wearing was reserved for healthcare staff, and finally (v) the importance of accurate public messaging without causing panic was emphasised, with tailored messaging to those at highest risk (but not amounting to shielding or “focused protection”). The quotes below from the UK Pandemic Preparedness Strategy of 2011 give a flavour of the recommended approach:
These plans were based upon regular systematic reviews of the evidence on what was effective, conducted over the years by the Cochrane Collaboration and the WHO, the latest of which was published in September 2019, only a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic started. And of course they were based upon the experience of managing previous pandemics, particularly over the last 50 years. So how does the actual response to COVID-19 compare with this standard response?
Table 5 provides a direct comparison on the measures to reduce transmission and clearly demonstrates an exaggerated response to COVID-19 in most areas:
Widespread community testing at its peak generated thousands of false positives each week with isolation not only of them, but also their contacts. There was also population-wide use of masks, frequent and long school closures, public messaging that was not always accurate nor appropriate and used to deliberately spread fear, lockdown of businesses and people in their own homes, and the transformation of the NHS into a COVID-19 service. The measures taken were not only contrary to the evidence and previous experience but they were also implemented despite the harms that inevitably resulted having been predicted beforehand.
Table 6 provides a similar comparison of standard and Covid-19 responses for measures to protect and treat individuals:
The coercive population-wide rollout of COVID-19 vaccines despite limited evidence on their effectiveness and safety was unprecedented. The failure to use and evaluate alternative drugs (in addition to antivirals) to prevent deterioration in high risk patients despite evidence was also remarkable. Finally, major lapses in medical ethics in relation to the vaccine rollout, antibiotics, DNAR orders and use of midazolam and morphine were alarming.
Conclusions
Any critical review of the COVID-19 response cannot but conclude that most of it was inappropriate – in that it was not based on firm evidence or experience, nor did it seek to balance risk from the disease with the benefits and potential harms from interventions at both a population and individual level, making informed consent impossible. Furthermore, as the IFR estimates before the first lockdown were below 1%, the response was also disproportionate. The enormous and widespread harms that would result from such an inappropriate and disproportionate response should have been clear to those advocating it.
So what would a more appropriate and proportionate response have involved? Well, firstly it would have involved honesty, providing the public with accurate information on the levels of risk and how this varied by age, sex and co-morbidity. And accurate information on what they could do to minimise the risk to themselves and those around them by use of respiratory and hand hygiene, avoiding contact with anyone symptomatic and isolating if they were symptomatic themselves, and shielding for those at higher risk during the first few waves. Healthy people below 60 years should have been advised to carry on as usual. Accurate information on the evidence for the effectiveness and safety of drugs for early treatment and vaccines was essential, with clarity about remaining areas of uncertainty. Then our governments and authorities should have treated the public as adults and let them make their own decisions, rather than taking a coercive and authoritarian approach. In other words our governments and their advisors should have followed standard public health practice and existing codes on medical ethics and informed consent.
Dr Alan Mordue is a retired consultant in public health medicine.
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A well informed conclusion. The real Tsunami was a bureaucratic earthquake that caused it, by the look of it. And isn’t there a bit of inappropriate identification, to wit the use of the term SARS. If it was neither severe, nor acute for most of us, those letters should have been deleted. We are used to loads of other RS infections, quite a lot of which are related to other coronaviruses, after all. It would have been another branch of “common colds”. No profit from that, of course.
Totally agree
Another excellent article
I remember seeing the hundreds of graves that were dug in Brazil at the time yet they were all empty and very shallow!
Dug for the terror effect no doubt
Off topic apologies:
Another cargo ship fire carrying evs
https://gcaptain.com/fire-erupts-on-car-carrier-with-electric-vehicles-in-belgian-port-of-zeebrugge/
There was no pandemic, it was scam/plandemic, 20 years in the planning.
IFR was 0.3% or same as the flu. Flu disappeared. Overall death rate did not change. Deaths ‘spiked’ only after the major stab programmes. People were murdered with midazolam and counted as Rona etc etc.
Flying viruses don’t exist. Poisons, toxins, murdering old people, killing innocents with drugs and lockdowns did exist.
Ta. Saved me the bother.
Scamdemic.
“Accurate information on the evidence for the effectiveness and safety of drugs for early treatment and vaccines was essential, with clarity about remaining areas of uncertainty.”
Good luck with that. Safe and effective treatments were banned to make way for Fake Vaccines.
All these “covid enquiries” are just part of the pantomime.
Exactly.
It was all a scam to prepare us for their reset and replacement program which Kneel is attending to with gusto.
I am not in the slightest bit interested in these sorts of articles because they start from the premise that the C1984 was real.
Scamdemic.
“There was no pandemic, it was the State that killed Granny“:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-denis-rancourt-there-was-no-pandemic-it-was-the-state-that-killed-granny/5876206
“As a scientist, what I decided to do was to look at all-cause mortality data…
…Our nations collect very good data about the number of deaths
…That is something you cannot be biased about
…When we look at all-cause mortality data, there is no pandemic
…There was a peak of deaths at the beginning in certain hotspots
…That was directly due to how people were treated in hospitals and care homes.”
Became a self-fulfilling prophecy, from the moment it was labelled “SARS” and called by the WHO “a pandemic”.
As for innoculating fit and healthy young people with a vaccine developed at warped speed, that was called out in the Daily Sceptic as long ago as September 2021 by “an executive in the pharmaceutical industry”:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/09/16/the-ethical-bankruptcy-of-vaccinating-12-15-year-olds-against-sars-cov-2/
“Government and politicians are ultimately responsible and accountable for what happens to people taking this experimental treatment.
So I’d suggest that they familiarise themselves with the principles in the Declaration of Helsinki and the Nuremberg Code and read about Good Clinical Practice, because you never know but perhaps at some future point a competent authority could come knocking on the door.”
Helsinki and Nuremberg are still waiting patiently.
According to Was brauchte der Weltkrieg (Otto Rebieke, Hase & Koehler 1936), 303,544 soldiers of the German army were hospitalized beause of influenza between 1914 and 1918 and 999 of them died (p. 180). That’s a CFR of 0.33% among a demographic where a highly deadly contagious disease had had a field day (malnourished and continously overtaxed men living in cramped and unhygienic accomdations when they were living in accomodations at all).
The percentage of German soldiers sick with influenza who got hospitalized is also approximately known: Less than 15% (Der Weltkrieg 1914 – 1918, vol. 14, p. 517). Assuming that all of the 303,544 got the so-called Spanish flu (almost certainly too high), there must have been more than 2,023,626 cases in total, meaning the real CFR was about 0.05%. No numbers are available for the – how a Covidian would call it — asymptomatically sick and hence, the IFR is unknown. But it’s certainly much smaller than 0.05%.
The Spanish flu was the first ‘modern’ influenza pandemic in the sense that it was all just total hysteria in the USA while the rest of the world barely noticed. Unfortunately – meanwhile – total hysteria in the USA means the square of total hysteria in Europe as our political leaders usually ‘feel obliged¹’ to repeat every American folly to letter.
¹ Or just following orders.
Spanish Flu was not caused by a virus. Challenge studies conducted by Rosenau and his colleagues failed to demonstrate contagion. Instead, deaths falsely attributed to a viral pathogen were more likely caused by the medications and vaccines applied in masses at that time, which contained highly toxic substances (heavy metals, arsenic, formaldehyde and chloroform etc). The introduction of toxic pesticides post 1918 was also a contributor as well as thousands of soldiers suffering post war trauma.
The USA didn’t provide vaccines which didn’t even exist back then to its enemies, no matter how impossible it apparently is to get certain people from the USA to understand that there’s actually a world outside of it.
It’s also documented (in the same official German history of the first world war) that the 1918 influenza started on the Entente side of the trenches and crossed over to the Germans in summer 1918, peaking in July with 400,000 documented cases.
Virology is pseudo-scientific and its basic premise is based on circular reasoning. The PCR test is meaningless, therefore by default, the covid-19 pandemic is meaningless.
End of discussion.
People died, but what they died of was most definitely not a pathogenic virus.
An excellent analysis confirming my strategy set out, and sent to those in charge, that all we needed to do was treat correctly those who got ill and nothing else. Our local paper, Rye News, published my ironic poem expressing this – on 13th February 2020. It was reproduced on this site on 20th January 2021.
Is there some award for correct prophesy?
Table 5 is not emphasising the big one.
Locking up and restricting movement of a healthy population.
Good article. I’d like to add a couple of things, as a critical care consultant in the thick of it.
1. Critical Care patients were denied standard treatment with high flow nasal canula oxygen or CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure via a tight face mask), and instead many patients were sedated and ventilated, which has more risks and also causes more changes to blood and air flow in the lungs. This was a national edict due to the unproven risk to staff of these treatments. Therefore they were denied a safe standard treatment, and given what may have been a more harmful treatment, resulting in a higher mortality rate due to treatment.
2. I saw no attempt to understand the pathophysiology of the disease. It was assumed it was due to a pneumonitis, which was true for many people but not all, in the early days, and now even less so, as it seems to be a multi organ illness, but no longer causes pneumonitis. We saw a lot of pulmonary thrombosis (development of blood clots in the pulmonary arteries themselves, rather than the more usual pulmonary embolism, a clot that travelled to the lungs from elsewhere), but there has been little attempt to work out what the pathophysiology was, which is necessary to find effective treatment.
3. It was apparent by September 2020 that young healthy people were at no risk. There was a fantastic opportunity to do research using students returning to university, which could have identified how fast and easily people became infected, how symptomatic and infectious they were.
It was apparent in March 2020 that young people were not at high risk.
Average age of people dying with Covid was around 80 years old.
Thanks for your perspective. You may find this article interesting: https://dailysceptic.org/2025/03/22/a-new-journal-of-the-plague-years/
Thanks for your comment vctinnett. I’m sure you’re right that initial national edicts to ventilate caused much damage and deaths. Other iatrogenic deaths arose because of the coercive vaccine rollout to those not at significant risk and without informed consent, inappropriate use of midazolam and morphine, withholding antibiotics, DNAR orders without consent and edicts to “protect the NHS” so that cardiovascular deaths shot up as people with heart attacks and strokes stayed at home. We often intervened when we shouldn’t have, and didn’t intervene when we should have !
Some clinicians were considering the pathophysiology and responding sensibly but they were usually vilified and censored. For example I’d recommend the article by Peter McCullough et al “Pathophysiological basis and rationale for early outpatient treatment of SARS-CoV2 (Covid-19) infection (Amer J Med 2020).
Finally I think it was obvious that young healthy people weren’t at significant risk in Feb 2020 !
Thanks Alan great article. I think table 6 re DNAR midazolam and withholding of antibiotics is pretty damning. I come across elements of this protocol elsewhere who are its authors?
National Institute for Health & Care Excellence (NICE) produced the guideline with midazolam & morphine, but it may be hard to find now as it was withdrawn I believe. Not aware of specific guidance pushing DNAR orders or withholding antibiotics but general ambience of crisis and fear that was generated must have influenced the system. Also Imperial College modelling study in March 2020 predicting that ICUs would be overwhelmed…
Are we allowed to refer to the demographic of those most at risk from the virus? No, thought not!
Hmm I think it’s called common sense sadly lacking over the last few years and it appears to be carrying on in the same vein unfortunately.
Firstly, one should forget all the Hollywood dramas about the human race succumbing to some dreadful disease: improved hygiene – primarily clean drinking water and effective sewage treatment – as well as good nutrition, guarantee that the days of the Black Death, smallpox and the like are long gone.
One would normally add good medical care to the list of today’s benefits but exactly that was turned into vicious mistreatment during the ‘pandemic’ and was the cause of so many deaths.
The Nobel Prize winning inventor of the PCR technique, Kary Mullis, stated many times that his technique cannot be used to identify illness. So why was it used across the world to do precisely that?
Kary Mullis was an outspoken individual, who openly accused Anthony Fauci of falsehood concerning the supposed disease called AIDS, and who very conveniently died in August 2019. If he had not died, one can be sure he would have called out the misuse of his technique to supposedly identify a virus.
So where were the doctors and what were they doing during the ‘pandemic’? Were all British surgeries suddenly overwhelmed with sick people, all showing the same symptoms? Were the mortuaries filling up with bodies? No, not at all, at least not until the doctors started obediently, or slavishly, following the orders of the WHO, pumping supposed patients full of toxic levels of hydroxychloroquine in accordance with the WHO’s RECOVERY and the like programmes, or finishing mistreated patients off with Midazolam. Not to mention finally pumping people full of what were obviously completely insufficiently tested ‘vaccines’.
Instead of repeatedly wishing for there to have been a pandemic and writing in-depth analyses of what never was, the medical profession should be asking how on earth it allowed itself to be so misled.
It was a PCR test and lies Tsunami.