From Tragedy to Farce: Boris Forgets His Own Rules
Several million people in the North-East had yet more Byzantine regulations inflicted on them yesterday by a Government that seems never to see a nut that doesn’t put it in mind of a hammer. Yet hours later, the Prime Minister himself was unable accurately to explain the new rules. Ross Clark in the Telegraph has more.
The Prime Minister has never exactly been a details man, but even so his failure accurately to recall the rules he had imposed on several million people in the North-East only hours before marks a new low in the Government’s handling of COVID-19. To come up with this myriad of rules, change them every few days, and to impose massive fines for failing to remember them, is a form of arbitrary rule which would have shamed one of the Tsars, let alone a democratically-elected UK Government.
The PM’s gaffe comes on the same day that ‘Skills Minister’ Gillian Keegan was asked on the Today programme whether the new restrictions announced for the North-East would allow two households to meet outdoors, and she said she had no idea.
Such embarrassments expose the mess which the Government has created in its fondness for local lockdowns. If members of the Government can’t keep up, what hope the rest of the population?
It’s not as if local lockdowns work, points out Ross:
Just what is the point of local lockdowns anyway? In dreaming up ever more bizarre regulations and huge fines to go with them, the Government has overlooked evidence that is staring it in the face: local lockdowns don’t work. Take Bolton. In the week before local restrictions were imposed on Greater Manchester boroughs at the end of July, 3,886 cases of COVID-19 had been recorded in Bolton. In spite of its residents have since been deprived of freedoms which most of the rest of the country enjoyed through the summer, the number of cases there has since mushroomed to a cumulative 9,274.
Perhaps someone should tell Angela Merkel, as she readies Germany for local lockdowns to counter their “second wave”.
Is Madrid The “Capital of Europe’s Second Wave”?
The Telegraph has run another scare article about how bad things are in Spain. I have to say it’s very disorienting reading the Telegraph at the moment. Almost all the comment is of an outspoken, sceptical flavour but the news section seems to be colonised by lockdown zealots. It makes it feel like they come from two parallel universes, one where COVID-19 is an overrated virus to which we’re all overreacting and the other in which we’re all doomed.
Anyhow, here’s what one news reporter has to say about Madrid, which he has dubbed “the capital of Europe’s second wave” .
The Madrid region, dominated by the city and its large suburbs to the south, has a cumulative caseload of 722 positives per 100,000 inhabitants in a two-week period – 2.5 times the average for Spain as a whole. In Paris, that number is just 204, despite France having daily case numbers to rival those of Spain.
The hurried reopening is just one example of carelessness on the part of local government, critics say, which extends to currently underestimating the strain on hospitals and failing to establish a working test and trace system.
Spain’s Government is threatening to intervene once more and ramp up what it sees as limited measures put in place by Madrid, which last week placed one million people in 45 of 286 districts under local lockdown, meaning they can only leave their home areas for essential reasons.
Sounds frightening, right? But here’s what they don’t tell you. The epidemic in Spain peaked weeks ago. According to the Carlos III Public Health Institute new cases by date of symptom onset peaked and plateaued by the end of August. Here’s the graph, courtesy of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine:
What’s happening in the hospitals right now? Here are the graphs for Spain and Madrid:
In other words, no growth for over a week. This represents around 10% capacity nationally and 25% in Madrid. Here’s the graph of deaths:
Deaths appear to have peaked on September 17th, though are yet to enter sustained decline (these figures are by date of death so the most recent figures will likely be revised upwards in coming days).
So the “second wave” in Spain, far from exhibiting exponential growth towards the catastrophic levels predicted here (and recall that Spain was one of the cautionary tales highlighted by Witless and Unbalanced at their press conference last week), stopped growing over a month ago and is nowhere near overwhelming the healthcare system.
Is this because the new restrictions imposed on the population were successful at “controlling” the virus? Nope. Madrid has been resisting imposing new restrictions, only doing so in certain parts of the city last week. Some lighter restrictions, such as lowering limits on venue capacity and gatherings, were imposed citywide on September 7th. All of these measures came well after the epidemic peaked and plateaued near the end of August.
The lesson: yet again a COVID-19 epidemic goes into spontaneous decline before lockdowns or other interventions could possibly have made a difference. Why? Almost certainly due to the further development of collective immunity – in this case presumably making up for delay caused by the strict lockdown in the spring. Spontaneous decline is a pattern seen in Sweden, in Belarus (where the excess deaths as reported to the United Nations suggest a Covid death toll about the same as Sweden’s), and in South Dakota, all of which refused to lock down and none of which saw more than 0.06% of their populations die, most of them very elderly. All had a lower death toll per million than the UK.
When will our Government and its advisers open their eyes to the plain evidence that COVID-19 does not infect or kill anywhere near as many as they initially feared?
Boris is due to appear with Witless and Unbalanced for a press conference again today (this time with questions, it is rumoured). Will we see a change of heart and strategy? Not likely.
Stop Press: Yesterday the UK reported a record 7,143 new cases, to the unconfined joy of the doom-mongers. But note that this follows three consecutive days of sharp decline, and when plotted by date of specimen still doesn’t yet show any significant growth in the last week. They’re still clearing the backlog from the ramp-up in testing. Prof Carl Heneghan and the team at CEBM have started following the cases here to see how they compare with the graph of doom.
New Paper Blows Imperial’s Catastrophic Predictions Out The Water
A team of epidemiologists including Dr Gabriela Gomes published a new preprint yesterday with a model that they say fits the data better and makes better predictions. It is based on assuming greater variation in pre-existing immunity and susceptibility, and concludes that “most of the slowing and reversal of COVID-19 mortality is explained by the build-up of herd immunity”. Here’s the abstract:
The classic Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model formulated by Kermack and McKendrick assumes that all individuals in the population are equally susceptible to infection. From fitting such a model to the trajectory of mortality from COVID-19 in 11 European countries up to 4 May 2020 Flaxman et al. concluded that “major non-pharmaceutical interventions – and lockdowns in particular – have had a large effect on reducing transmission”. We show that relaxing the assumption of homogeneity to allow for individual variation in susceptibility or connectivity gives a model that has better fit to the data and more accurate 14-day forward prediction of mortality. Allowing for heterogeneity reduces the estimate of “counterfactual” deaths that would have occurred if there had been no interventions from 3.2 million to 262,000, implying that most of the slowing and reversal of COVID-19 mortality is explained by the build-up of herd immunity. The estimate of the herd immunity threshold depends on the value specified for the infection fatality ratio (IFR): a value of 0.3% for the IFR gives 15% for the average herd immunity threshold.
It’s written in technical language so not an easy read for non-specialists. But it’s an important scientific contribution to modelling this virus and is well worth a look for any armchair (or trained) epidemiologists. According to the researchers’ calculations, the Imperial College model overestimated the “counterfactual” deaths from COVID-19 – the number that would have died in the “do nothing” scenario in Professor Ferguson et al‘s infamous March 16th report – by a factor of 11.4. If you divide 510,000 by 11.4 you get 43,814, which is almost exactly the number that have died so far. In other words, the NHS was never in danger of being overwhelmed, the lockdown made zero difference and there will be no second wave.
Stop Press: Watch a new interview with Professor Sunetra Gupta on “Something that is becoming a scientific fact: Pre-existing resistance to COVID-19“. Can someone please tell Chris Whitty?
Curfew Chaos
As the new 10pm curfew on nightlife causes some of the biggest closing time chaos ever seen (leading Manchester mayor Andy Burnham to call for the curfew to be scrapped) a reader sends us the messages he received from his daughter who had been out in it.
“I went out on Saturday night in Manchester for the first time since March and the 10pm curfew was a bloody shambles! It was horrendous! It was worse than any normal kickout time I’ve ever seen in town! Throw into the mix that all the takeaways shut at the same time so no one could get post drink food, and it was bloody bedlam! The streets, taxi ranks, bus stops, trams were rammed way more than they would have been under normal circumstances. It’s put me off going out again. Bloody joke!”
She went on:
“I’ve never seen anything like it. I’d had a lovely evening and the bar I had been in had done loads to ensure it was a safe and pleasant experience and not too different to how it would have been prior to lockdown, in fact it was better, as the music was at a volume where we could still talk, it wasn’t packed and sweaty like normal and it was table service so there was no queuing at the bar etc and then we walked out into absolute chaos! I ended up spending more than I planned so I could get a taxi home rather than squeezing on to the tram”.
“Apparently that’s safer though than three children, who spend all day every day playing together and interacting at school together, having a sleepover in a safe, clean and supervised environment. Madness!”
She’s had to cancel our granddaughter’s (already greatly diminished) upcoming eighth birthday sleepover with four friends (she’d booked a company to come round and put up mini teepees in the lounge with fairy lights and all sorts) and now it’s just her and her step-sister, because they’ve received an email from their school ‘reminding’ them they should not be socializing between households.
Her WhatsApp message below illustrates the further madness and overlooked cruelty, not to mention the negative impact on local businesses such as the party entertainment company, that all these wholly unnecessary and unevidenced restrictions are having on just about everyone. Or in my daughter’s more succinct language – bulls**t.
“I didn’t have an issue with it and neither did the other parents, seeing as they are all in the same bubble at school all day but school sent out an email this morning saying that they’ve become aware of families socialising and having sleepovers etc, which puts the school at increased risk of an outbreak and possible closure, so they have said if they become aware of any more breaches, they will have no choice but to report them. I can’t expect my daughter and her friends not to talk about it and don’t want to tell them to keep secrets, so we’re going to organise something for once it’s all over. She was a little upset to start with but she handled it so well, I was so proud of her. She nearly made me cry because after she’d got over the initial upset, she thanked me for still organising it for her! She’s such a thoughtful child. I hate that she’s missing out on so much because of all this bs!!”
Snooping Neighbours: Police Crash Girl’s Tenth Birthday Party
Perhaps she was right to cancel the party, given the way the police behaved in Ayrshire, Scotland. The Mirror has the story.
Two police officers turned up at a 10-year-old girl’s birthday party after a neighbour reported the family for breaking Scotland’s strict Covid rules.
Mum Leanne Macdonald claims relatives had been “nipping in” to her house to hand little Myla her presents.
She said she “could not believe it” when two uniformed officers later entered her home warning her she was “on alert” and would be fined and charged if she broke the rules again.
Leanne told the Daily Record : “I could not believe it. They came to the door and told me I had been reported for having people in my house.
“I was shocked. The funny thing is, they actually came in to my house to tell me my home was ‘on alert’ and if I broke the rules again I would be fined and charged.
“So the police can come in my house, but my family can’t?”
She said she hadn’t been aware of a change in the rules and had arranged for family members to come at different times so they didn’t go over the limit. What an appalling state our liberties are in when a 10 year-old girl can’t have her relatives visit on her birthday.
Eric Clapton Joins Van Morrison’s Anti-Lockdown Campaign
Another wrinkly rocker with sense. Here’s the press release.
Van Morrison has thanked fans for their recent support – as Eric Clapton joins his campaign to Save Live Music.
Belfast musician Van played a series of three concerts at the London Palladium last week and also released the first of his three new anti-lockdown songs “Born To Be Free”.
Van has been calling for venues to reopen again at full capacity. Now Eric Clapton has come out in support of the campaign.
Eric Clapton said: “It is deeply upsetting to see how few gigs are going ahead because of the lockdown restrictions. There are many of us who support Van and his endeavours to save live music, he is an inspiration! We must stand up and be counted because we need to find a way out of this mess. The alternative is not worth thinking about. Live music might never recover.”
Van released “Born To Be Free” last Friday and it was made available for download and streaming on major music sites including Amazon Music, Apple Music and Deezer. The track has clearly resonated with many who share his frustrations.
Van Morrison said: “Thanks to everyone who came to the Palladium shows and who have supported the new single. The gigs were great and proved that live performance can operate safely. Now we need the Government to ease restrictions further and instil confidence that venues are safe and enjoyable places to be for everyone.”
If enough Lockdown Sceptics readers download “Born To Be Free” will it get to number one on iTunes? You can download it here.
18 Year-Old Writes To His MP
Lockdown Sceptics reader Gilbert Jackson is just 18 but he has wasted no time in writing to his MP to tell him what he thinks of how the Government is trashing his youth and education.
I did not think I would have to be writing to my local MP at the age of 18, but I feel compelled to do so as my civic duty. The restrictions are becoming increasingly absurd and restrictive yet again, with no evidence whatsoever that they are proportionate or necessary. They are taking an unjustified toll on the mental and physical health of the entire country, and they have to end now. This is why I am urging you to vote against the renewal of the Coronavirus emergency powers on Wednesday September 30th. Emergency powers are not justified for one day longer, and certainly not for two more years.
I would first like to make you aware of the damage that lockdown and continuing restrictions has had on my life. I did not see friends for three months from March, which significantly harmed my mental health, and still haven’t seen some. I was meant to be in university now, however I realised when I arrived that it was simply not what university should be. Masks everywhere, online teaching, threats of expulsion for partying, all for students who have a greater chance of being struck by lightning than killed by Covid. This is proved from the US: 48,000 positive tests in students so far, two hospitalisations and zero deaths. 305 people under 60 have died with Covid without pre-existing conditions here in the UK, in a population of 68 million.
Do you remember the initial three week lockdown to protect the NHS, flatten the curve and save lives? I was on board with that as was almost the whole country as it made sense due to the catastrophic predictions of hospitals being overrun. The three weeks ended, deaths had fallen dramatically, so had infections, and it was clear we were past the peak and hospitals had been nowhere near being overrun. Nightingale hospitals weren’t even needed (and are now being decommissioned at eye watering cost). Yet we were then told we needed to stay indoors for an additional 12 weeks. A big ask, but acceptable, we thought. Six months on from that and we are being told to expect an additional six months of restrictions. …
How can it be such a deadly disease that you need to be tested to know if you have it? The real data we have (not Imperial College’s imagined model outputs) suggests that age isn’t even the main risk factor, the presence of other serious medical conditions is (which do of course correlate with age). 95% of deaths had at least one comorbidity, and the average age of death is over 80. These are official figures from the ONS freely available to everyone. Also, the ONS figures have plainly shown that the pandemic has been over since May. Deaths have continued to trend downwards, now accounting for 1% of all weekly deaths. The data shows no spikes for any protests or mass gatherings that were talked up into a frenzy in the news. The Government, scientists on SAGE, at Imperial College London and elsewhere seem entirely ignorant of the real world data which time and again is not fitting with their models.
The smearing by the media and politicians of those who have sought to look at the data themselves and come to different conclusions than the Government scientists as conspiracy theorists has been despicable. Heavy-handed treatment of lockdown protestors is entirely unjust when they are simply standing up for basic freedoms which are now being withheld for an indeterminate length of time by the Government who give no indication of wanting to restore them any time soon.
This is why the Coronavirus emergency powers need to be revoked in full, rather than the amendment proposed by Sir Graham Brady. With Parliament appearing almost entirely supportive of suppression regardless of cost until a vaccine, which will likely not come for years or be as effective as people profess, I simply do not trust that the amendment will have much of an effect in stopping the immense harm being done to the British public. Life can be normal again. It is only the irrational fear promoted as a policy of Government that is preventing it.
I urge you to vote against the renewal of the Act, and that you and your colleagues look at all the available evidence and listen to all the viewpoints of eminent scientists such as Professor Carl Heneghan and Professor Sunetra Gupta. It is time to hold the Government to account for their arrogance, lies, and the vast amount of damage they are doing to the economy, livelihoods and mental and physical health.
Find Gilbert on Twitter at @youth_unheard.
Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson Censored on Twitter
Telegraph columnist and Planet Normal host Allison Pearson was suspended from Twitter for her “abusive” sceptical views. She writes:
I woke yesterday morning to find that I had been locked out of Twitter for “violating our rules against abuse and harassment”. I was dumbfounded. Which of my recent tweets had been abusive or harassed anyone? I glanced down the email to see something I had posted last week in response to yet another We’re All Doomed! report on the BBC news. “How hard is it for people to understand? We WANT students to get the virus. They will speed us towards community immunity. It may not be very far off.”
Whether you agree with my tweet or not, it accurately represents the opinion of a number of distinguished scientists, including Oxford’s Prof Sunetra Gupta (whom I interviewed for the Planet Normal podcast) and Prof Michael Levitt, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2013. Neither is a wacky Covid-denier. They just happen to agree that the worst-case scenario of 500,000 deaths arrived at back in March by Professor Neil Ferguson, which presumed (wrongly) that all age groups were equally susceptible to the virus, was possibly inflated by a factor of 10 or 12. They also reckon that the best strategy now is to shield the elderly and the vulnerable and allow the virus to infect the healthy population, notably the young, so we build up that terrific community immunity that seems to have served the Swedes so well.
She concludes:
The cure is now far worse than the disease, Prime Minister. There are people who would rather die than live in this theatre of the absurd. The risks your scientists frighten us with are vanishingly small. Even under Imperial’s worst case scenario of 500,000 deaths without lockdown, only 99.3% of the UK’s population would not have succumbed to the virus. Many will suffer with loneliness and some will lose the will to live. Many, many more will perish from other diseases. It’s quite simple; shield the vulnerable and let the rest of us get on with pulling this great country out of the mire.
You may get locked out of Twitter for saying it, but I won’t stop. Censorship be damned. The truth will out.
Worth reading in full.
Round-Up
- “Is the second wave slowing?” – The ever dependable Ross Clark in the Spectator
- “False positive tests” – The latest from Dr Malcolm Kendrick
- “Tax hikes or austerity needed to pay for Covid spending, warns IFS” – What do they know, haven’t they heard of the magic money tree?
- “Co-op Funeralcare staff use ‘tricks’ to boost profits after lockdown” – Miserable story in the Telegraph about the underhand pursuit of profits and disrespect to the dead during the epidemic
- “Richard Madeley: Lockdown doesn’t work, this pointless game of hide and seek must stop” – The presenter goes full sceptic on talkRADIO
- “Sweden’s Covid stance is a lesson for Britain” – Some good stuff here from Clare Foges in the Times. But it is yet another article that argues Sweden is too different from the UK for its approach to be applicable here. The world appears to be entering a phase of some serious denial
- “These restrictions are a concerted assault on our civil liberties” – Richard Littlejohn in the Mail is justifiably crowing that he told us so, pointing out that way back on March 3rd he was warning about the zeal of public health advisers: “What you have to remember is that pandemics are their World Cup Final, their Six Nations, their Wimbledon tennis championships, all rolled into one. Out will come the hi-viz jackets, the face masks, the tented decontamination units…”
- “Boris has become a Puritan” – Tom Hodgkinson in the Idler on how Boris has morphed from Charles II into Oliver Cromwell
- “Leaked data gives first view of growing cancer waiting list post Covid peak” – Rebecca Thomas in the Health Service Journal on how official data from mid-September shows that nearly 6,400 people had to wait more than 100 days following a referral to cancer services
- “NHS chief warns against ‘age-based apartheid’ in coronavirus response” – Apparently we have to live in eternal lockdown because it isn’t practical to shield the high risk. Sometimes you feel that they just don’t want it to end, so weak are the excuses they come up with for dismissing any solution except lockdown or vaccine
- “‘Tougher and tougher rules’ won’t win war on Covid, says WHO envoy” – The solution is that we must all willingly conform to the New Normal. Simple
- “Do those scary Covid stats really add up?” – Diana Kimpton takes issue with the Government’s presentation of the data in Conservative Woman
- “Media Gunning For Scott Atlas Because He Keeps Exposing Coronavirus Lies” – Trump has brought a true and informed sceptic into his inner circle and the media are not happy
- “Other countries have shown how we don’t need a lockdown to supress coronavirus” – Prof Devi Sridhar has become a lockdown sceptic – kind of. She now thinks it’s all about strict border controls, track and trace, and self-isolation, forever. Anything except immunity…
- “Even Theresa May looks a paragon of competence against this lot” – It’s safe to say Jeremy Warner is unimpressed in the Telegraph
- “Sorry Mr Hancock, here’s why I won’t be downloading your app” – Philip Johnston in the Telegraph lays it on the line
- “It is sheer hubris to think you can ‘defeat’ a virus” – Sean Walsh in Conservatives Global thinks the Government has bitten off more than it can chew
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Three today: “The College Student Blues” by Alchemeleon, “College & Prison” by Najje and “Germ-Free Adolescents” by X-Ray Spex.
Love in the Time of Covid
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums, including a dating forum called “Love in a Covid Climate” that has attracted a bit of attention. We have a team of moderators in place to remove spam and deal with the trolls, but sometimes it takes a little while so please bear with us. You have to register to use the Forums, but that should just be a one-time thing. Any problems, email the Lockdown Sceptics webmaster Ian Rons here.
Update: Some of you have asked how to link to particular stories on Lockdown Sceptics. The answer used to be to first click on “Latest News”, then click on the links that came up beside the headline of each story. But we’ve changed that so the link now comes up beside the headline whether you’ve clicked on “Latest News” or you’re just on the Lockdown Sceptics home page. Please do share the stories with your friends and on social media.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a one-stop shop down here for people who want to buy (or make) a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and it has the advantage of not explicitly claiming you have a disability. But if you have no qualms about that (or you are disabled), you can buy a lanyard from Amazon saying you do have a disability/medical exemption here (takes a while to arrive). The Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. You can get a “Hidden Disability” tag from ebay here and an “exempt” card with lanyard for just £1.99 from Etsy here. And, finally, if you feel obliged to wear a mask but want to signal your disapproval of having to do so, you can get a “sexy world” mask with the Swedish flag on it here.
Don’t forget to sign the petition on the UK Government’s petitions website calling for an end to mandatory face nappies in shops here.
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption.
And here’s a round-up of the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of mask (threadbare at best).
Samaritans
If you are struggling to cope, please call Samaritans for free on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email jo@samaritans.org or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch. Samaritans is available round the clock, every single day of the year, providing a safe place for anyone struggling to cope, whoever they are, however they feel, whatever life has done to them.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the past 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. Doing these daily updates is hard work (although we have help from lots of people, mainly in the form of readers sending us stories and links). If you feel like donating, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links we should include in future updates, email us here.
And Finally…
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Start by firing the top management.
Correction. Start by firing at the top management. Preferably with automatic weaponry.
I jest. But only slightly. Semi-automatic will do.
Start by de-extorting it.
The problem with the NHS is that what you pay for it’s “services” is not aligned with your lifestyle.
The Nazis found( that as a measure of economy ), if you stood six in a row ( one behind the other)you could take them all out with just one bullet.
‘I apologise to readers for a fairly dismal and dense piece today.’
Spot on. My thoughts exactly. Not only did this piece stand out, emphasising how good they are as a writer and what relevant subjects they always choose, but also, in such awareness, they demonstrate how much they always relate to the reader. Good, useful stuff.
“I understand applications to study medicine and nursing have risen recently – attributed to the crisis inspiring young people to contribute to their communities. ”
However obsessive rule following, closing University lecture halls to go online, pedantic mask wearing, sanitising and testing rituals that make the hospitals look lax – all to ‘send a message about professionalism’, plus excessive bureaucratic ‘absence’ processes when students are forced to isolate are putting an awful lot of them off the job.
Placements are cancelled at the last minute, or shuffled around because the NHS has less training capacity than the minscule amount it normally has, mean students are not getting the hands on training they need.
The message to medical students is that following the process is more important than the delivering a service to patients.
Unsurprisingly quite a few are reconsidering their career choices, or making plans to get out of Blighty as soon as they become medically qualified.
It would be difficult to come up with a system that is better designed to accentuate a skills crisis than the one we have.
Made the mistake at the start of the pandemic of asking my boss “I’ve had a persistent cough for x years, what do I do now”? 2 years later they still under-employ me from home and I don’t know what else I can do to go back to my NHS job. Constant shifting goalposts and they are keeping me off now for conditions they were happy for me to work with before the pandemic. What a complete sh”tshow.
If you substituted ‘chancers’ for ‘experts’, that would be closer to the truth. Casting chicken bones might have proved more accurate than their ‘models’.
When someone is consistently wrong more than by chance you have to wonder if their poor predictions were relied upon for some other hidden reason
How disappointed the “experts” must be!
I don’t yet have much experience with the NHS as a patient, fortunately.
But when I once used it, it struck me that I was the only one who seems to have kept his appointment scheduled 4 months earlier. As a consequence, the consultant arrived at 11 and left at 12 that day.
My daughter went for a minor procedure in an NHS hospital recently. She is a student at uni so for 2/5 of the year lives nowhere near the hospital. It took four appointments before we struck on one that she could actually attend – each time, she’d phone to cancel and each time they’d send out her appointment via the mail to her halls of residence (she is in her third year so hasn’t lived there for a while) and if it arrived during the holiday it would be forwarded on to her (once arriving so late that the appointment had been and gone). There was no way you could just ring up and book yourself into a suitable slot. Rinse and repeat. She’s a student so could be fairly flexible but imagine if you had to organise it around a paying job or around childcare! I used to think things were bad thirty years ago when I worked in the NHS but honestly if you had to design a booking system that cost the most amount of time and money, you would need to look no further than this frustrating waste of time and money. The sad thing is that everyone just seems to accept that this is the best that can be done. It’s shameful really.
The NHS is run for the convenience of staff, not patients.
My GP suggested I had to ‘self-refer’ for physiotherapy recently, this involves phoning a number every day at 8am hoping that you will get through to the operator before everyone else, in which case they will (apparently) call you back to find out whether you need physio or not. If you are too late, all the slots for call backs are gone and you have to try another day. I say apparently because after 4 days I gave up trying.
My mother was scheduled for cataract surgery which she had successfully but was still in the recovery phase when she received a date for bowel surgery. It was very short notice so I phoned to explain why she couldn’t have the bowel surgery. She was then sent another very short notice date which was no use. I called again and was told she was now off the list and would have to go back to her GP.
Sue Gray’s “update”, that most of the media are calling her “report”, is here.
Gray is pretending she had to leave stuff out because the police told her.
Liar! Liar!
She’ll get a peerage soon. “Baroness Gray the Liar and Shagger-Helper”.
Here’s the main point:
Cabinet Office civil servants do NOT have to follow police instructions about what they do and don’t report to the prime minister.
Gray is a liar.
Sue Gray…
She’s supposed to be a civil servant. She sounds more like a press officer in Johnson’s private office.
I have read it – it didn’t take long.
Back in the day, professionally speaking, we would have described it as “thin” in terms of its content.
It proves the point that something of the gravity of these issues should have been independently scrutinised, by someone completely outside the government machine – difficult I know but I am sure they could have found someone – and not by a member of the civil service, of which Gray states in her report that she is proud to be a part.
Phil Hyland of PJH Law did write to the Hammersmith CID team who are investigating the PM & various other members of government or civil service who have advised on the handling of the pandemic, covid jabs etc & asked that these allegations of criminal acts be added to the Crime Ref No: 6029679/21 currently under investigation. So if we are being absolutely fair, she is probably correct in what she says. Do you really want any of the Junta to get away with how they have acted whilst terrorising the citizens of the UK into compliance with their stupid & useless ‘rules’?
I sure as heck hope that the CPS agrees that prosecution is in the public interest & that the presiding judge hasn’t been bought by the Junta so that justice does prevail.
I am amazed at the contrast between the severity of handling a political party compared to the handling of someone who admitted they drove on public roads to test potentially defective eyesight.
Excellent as always, I loved this line:
“the precise mechanism and characterisation of ‘Long Covid’ remains opaque. The potential for exploitation is obvious and requires no further comment.”
Our NHS – the Envy of the Third World.
The Nominal Health Service [apologies to the author – but when you have been let down by it on what feels like more times than you have had hot dinners and had almost zero healthcare for over 2 years it is hard not to be a bit bitter]
Notional Health Service
notional
Thanks – I understand the meaning of notional – and its application to the “NHS”
I prefer ‘nominal’ – meaning “existing in name only”. Geddit?
“We are on the downslope of the Omnicon wave which has, with tiresome yet ubiquitous regularity, fallen far short of predictions by epidemiological experts.”
An interesting insider perspective. All I’d say (having the perspective of experiencing really good NHS treatment over recent years) is that there are two sets of problems :
But one thing is certainly true :
“If someone was actively trying to mess up the healthcare system, I can’t think of a better way to do it …”
… follow the money …
If someone was actively trying to mess up the health and wealth of the nation, I can’t think of a better way to do it than start an NHS”
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Although I see and hear ‘learn to live with …..’ as it’s printed and said, my head, ever since the first time I encountered that phrase, has invariably translated it into ‘learn to live with restrictions.’ I think it’s a trick of WEF et al and their puppets.
“Learn to live with covid” first cropped up about the same time as “embrace the new normal” but at that time it was in support of the original lockdownsceptic point of view.
Yes … it seems sinister. See my above comment on supermarkets & face coverings.
Saying ‘the government expects’ is not abolishing restrictions … it’s nearly the policy of Michie the Mad Marxist.
Very true: a culture of wearing disposable gloves for everything came in when Fauci said that AIDS could be spread by casual contact, and was never rescinded. And memory fades on whether banning re-useable instruments for minor surgery came in with the BSE scare or something else, but it was still in force when I retired and probably still is.
Time, money and materials all squandered by the safety ratchet.
While agreeing with what you say about Fauci “AIDS can be caught by sharing a bottle of wine” and NHS resources squandered, I’ve had a few visits to hospital these past twelve months, mostly Day Case but also some weeks unplanned inpatient and am pleased to report that routine cleanliness and hygiene are in a different league compared to twenty years ago.
When my mum (40 years SRN Nurse) visited my dad towards the end of his unsuccessful colon cancer treatment his catheter was on the unswept and dusty floor beneath his bed.
Knowing better than to antagonize the staff she very politely mentioned to the duty nurse that this was likely to lead to infection.
The response was
“yeah well they all get infected sometime . . .”
before going to stick the catheter straight back in him although mum was able to prevent it that time.
Things had not much improved 10 years later when mum followed him into the same (rebuilt showcase hospital) see post above “cohorting patients”.
My experience recently is that cleanliness is a top priority, it happens frequently from early morning into the evening, so far as I can tell, thoroughly, taking priority over all other non medical activities on the ward.
To your other point, nurses, trainees, healthcare assistants, domestic staff &etc. all wear gloves,
Consultants and Registrars do not.
The general cleanliness thing was the result of the drug-resistant Staph aureus scare… and probably became necessary because management had been saving money by using cheap contract cleaners until it caught up with them.
That does make a difference – not so sure about gloves if proper hand-scrubbing is practised. Obviously the good old days of wiping the amputation knife on your frock coat before the next one left something to be desired…
I’d scrap the NHS and introduce a system based on lessons from Germany, Singapore, …
The NHS is so bad that the only defence you read of it is basically to say that it’s better than in the USA. That’s an awfully low bar.
I don’t see many yanks going to the UK for treatment, but I remember people starting charities to get British sick to the USA…
Usually to get experimental treatments that cost thousands of pounds hence the need to set up a charity, hundreds of people a year are made insolvent in the US because of their medical bills, none in the UK.
You could try reading a bit – why not start here?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-which-country-has-the
‘Lessons from Germany ‘…..hmmm …never thought I would feel uncomfortable with that again.
The new ‘NHS’ is a digital version. No more hospitals, GPs. Lockdown collected more data in order to usher in the new system. All going through Amazon and Microsoft. Nurses and doctors being got rid of down to a quarter. Goal is for this to be fully up and running by 2025.
https://www.nhsx.nhs.uk/
Bit like XR then.
X stands for the extinction of the NHS. Very clever.
The new NHS will be called NHSX. It’s all explained here. https://www.bitchute.com/video/aFioCUiQlF8P/?fbclid=IwAR0fMDpX7X_oKNI568h-2bPZUu3kIL-nfS38XOUyv9zQeXziR51QnYHGAdo
NHSS more like.
Cohorting Patients.
Not obviously on topic but when my mum was recovering from a hip replacement, after 40 years as an NHS nurse, someone on the ward was diagnosed with Hospital Disease.
Mum knew a bit about infected control so was surprised when the entire ‘cohort’ was decamped to an isolated unit (not isolation, just isolated) where they nearly all duly went down with the Norovirus (or whatever) including mum who spent 2 months in conditions that she did not care to discuss subsequently.
No visitors although I was allowed to drop off domestic bits and bobs at reception and I had some contact via a fellow patients mobile phone.
Following discharge she never really recovered and barely lasted another three years but they put something else on the Death Certificate.
The similarity with Covid is that Hospital Disease was then the all consuming Rage throughout the media and any evidence of NHS culpability would be pounced upon by the media, politicians, YouTube Influencers and anyone else so it is little wonder that Managements main interest was to keep any outbreak as low key as possible regardless of the consequences to individual patients.
Boris and his inner cabal were happy to have endless parties getting pissed up in large groups on a regualr basis because they knew the virus was of next to no threat to anyone.
They unleashed the full force of the State’s propaganda machine on the British people in order to terrify us into compliance because that sense of terror could be used to justify them spending collosal sums of money on completely unnecessary covid counter measures.
The Tories used the faux state of emergency to by pass normal procurement procedures in order to direct massive amounts of money to their corporate sponsors and chums.
See Owen Paterson as an example of the corruption that took place (corruption that Boris was more than happy to excuse).
We have been ripped off by the Tories to a mind bending degree.
The most egregious aspect being that Boris has been trying to sell off access to our own bodies to pharma via the state pushed vaccines and the vaccine passport dressed up as the NHS app.
Thank you, all so bloody true.
A GP was boasting in the pub that he hadn’t had a face to face meeting with a patient for 18 months
I Wish the NHS sinecurists would get a similar delay to the pension payouts after retirement
Shameful.
And he walks off with £150K or more for doing sweet f**k all. AI can do a GP’s job much cheaper and probably with better results. Idiot GPs are heading for the dole queue.
the NHS won’t be resuming normal service
Normal “service” wasn’t sunni it was absolutely shi’ite. So gawd only knows how many unfortunate souls will be killed by the virtue signalling taxpayer-enslavers of the notional health service.
Crumbs. You can’t afford to be ill thesedays, unless you can afford to be bupa ill.
This from a third year Politics Philosophy and Economics examination at a top UK university
Question 4
When tyrants and dictators are discovered committing crimes against humanity do they
(a) Fully admit their crimes and surrender themselves to the relevant judicial authorities
(b) Lie, cheat, take part in cover ups and kill even more people in an attempt to get away with it
*85% of candidates answered (a)
Hmm…a “top” university… Are there any in G5 that offer PPE other than Oxford and the LSE?
Pleading guilty to crimes against humanity is exceptionally rare. I can’t think of any tyrants and dictators who have done it. The only person I’m aware of who has done it is Drazen Erdemovic, a low-ranking Bosnian Serb soldier, in respect of the massacre at Srebrenica.
They need re educating on the realities of life
Dominic Cummings crackup watch: he has now retweeted a message reporting the statement that “mass extinctions follow a pattern – every 27.5M years“.
This comes shortly after he told the New York Magazine that Boris Johnson was “a complete f***wit”.
This guy is cracking up. Johnson is many things, but he is not a complete f***wit. Nor is this something that Cummings is in the habit of calling his opponents. For example, he doesn’t think it was stupid to back Remain.
Anybody who thinks mass extinctions follow a pattern of happening every 27.5 million years is a loon.
I don’t often agree with Cummings, but Johnson is definitely a complete “f***wit”.
The Pig Dictators response to the Gray report is to grab more power
These are allegedly the words of Danny Mortimer, CEO of NHS Employers.
This person should tender their resignation immediately if true.
Two dispiriting experiences today …
The Lidl supermarket I visit weekly now has a notice saying [maybe not verbatim]:
‘… the government expects and recommends people to wear face coverings’.
Well sod that. They could just have settled on no notice. Judging by the number of bare faces in the store, 30% seemed to agree with me.
A Tesco supermarket I occasionally visit still has a one-way system, i.e. probably even worse.
It is your moral responsibility to go the wrong way round the Tesco. I had a surly and unnecessarily rude “team leader” there try to give me hassle, initially for not wearing a burqua (“i’m exempt”) then for going the wrong way – in her words it was about facing the same way as everyone else so for a laugh I reversed my way around, facing the same way as everyone else but heading in the opposite direction.
Tesco is a human rights serial offender. Find a local shop that wants your trade, even if it costs a bit more.
‘… the government expects and recommends people to wear face coverings’.”
Bullshit. The government is relying on its corporate stooges to do the dirty work without all that messy business of implementing laws.
Was Johnson coerced into the lockdown rules, by powers bigger than him, and was he sending subliminal messages by having gatherings that it was actually safe and he also spelled it out that the vaccine does not stop spread and does not stop infection.
The efforts to get him sacked with partygate came very shortly after his “gaffe” of accidentally telling the truth about the clot shots uselessness.
Boris Johnson on boosters – YouTube
Indeed
If it were so, then Johnson would still belong in jail. There are also many others in government and positions of power who deserve exactly the same fate.
“In normal times chronic disease management is the function of . . . GPs”.
Late last year, as reported here at DS, I spent two weeks failing to gain an appoitment with my GP despite 8 emails outlining my various deteriorating conditions. The best they could offer was a ‘consultation’ in January, on the phone.
As things worsened and only with the backing of one of my hospital specialists I got myself into EMU and two weeks either side of Christmas in the sealed specialist wing most appreciate to my needs.
I sent my GP Practice an email on Boxing Day reminding them of Spike Milligans epitaph.
“I told you I was ill’.
In my part of the world, you also have to make do with a useless telephone consultation and you get to pay the same fee you would pay if you were seen in person.
There is an age old solution to the many and persistent problems of central planning. It’s called free exchange and the the free market.
Time to scrap the NHS, give medical insurance vouchers to the public (because as a society we have accepted that everyone has a right to medical care) and let market forces put everything in its proper place.
It has worked with the airlines, with telecoms, which were awful before privatisation.
It hasn’t worked well with services that don’t lend themselves well to competition like the railways.
But healthcare is definitely susceptible to improving through market forces. The market is enormous and people could end up with several healthcare choices, which would be ideal.
Like every other (bar USA) developed world health care system, most of which outperform the UK NHS systems in most outcome measures. Just to reinforce the message, but there is no UK NHS, there are four, with very different characteristics. I am not sure all of thepoints made have equal read across or weight in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.
Nice idea, but in actuality, the head of the NHS is linked to US for-profit ‘healthcare’ (hospitals in the US have been receiving a $35,000 bung for each covid case diagnosed – no conflict of interest there, no siree) so the UK will get a poor impression of the US system which is 4x the cost of other systems with a substantially poorer outcome.
Having State health care is a really bad idea as the State has a vested interest in killing you when you are old in order to save on health care, social care and pension costs.
This is one of the main purposes of the covid fraud and why Matt and Boris murdered lots of elderly with midazolam after throwing them back into the care homes and forcing DNR orders on them.
A seemingly sensible article, but I can’t really take seriously a medical professional who says at point 7 :-
For clarity, I am fully vaccinated and boosted because I consider it reduces my personal risk of becoming seriously ill with Covid.
This throw-away attitude might have been excusable in early 2021, but to still hold that view one year later suggests that our in-house doctor has lost touch with reality.
At least they are correctly identifying that they took the jab for their own safety on their own terms, and not saying they took the jab to protect patients et al. Of course there can be separate debate on whether the personal decision was properly informed and sensible.
Have I got it wrong? Wasn’t destroying the dysfunctional NHS with a fake pandemic one of the objectives of this scam to allow US Health Insurance providers and Big Pharma to move in and make a killing? Will GAVI be far behind?
Isn’t this what ‘Globalist Corporatism’ and Billionaire Rule is all about?
I would say the NHSas I support Doctors and Nurses who decline a supposed vaccine still in trial till 2023 , I am someone who has not much dealing with the NHS as I try to eat a healthy diet lean protein vegetables fruits seeds and do some daily exercise walking spinning running yoga about four times a week aside daily blood pressure weight , and annual health checkup spream tests I get every six months .
but I can say no healthcare system is the world leaves people 17 hours for seeing someone concerning cancer ,hip replacements .
I had this myself at St Ann’s hospital I waited from 2:00pm till about 9pm this was in 2013 for about 10 hours to speak to a mental health doctor prescribed by my GP, concerning mental anxiety I have very badly since 2008 getting bad as mask wearing is still 90 percent, where I live and people wear them in the street alone in their cars.
As for my dentist a NHS practitioner some private dental work Veneers, and I just had a appointment today first time in 23 months the dentist’s were all masked my dentist masked and wearing a face shield I had my teeth looked at and cleaned and washed as for appointments for concerns my local GP practice will only allow you to book a appointment on the day not four or five days or a week in advance to see them .
I think a conversation needs to be had how can we going forward having a health care service which is knowledgeable about food health advice , and not so keen to just treat a disease which kills the obese elderly , like Covid-19 a real disease which has killed some people mostly with , and also not just giving harmful fake vaccine boosters to young thin people who did not need a third or second jab the NHS seems mostly keen to jab everyone in sight without caring about infertility and legs swelling up and possible bad side effects,
it needs to be revamped and these manger directors need to stop being paid about 70,000 a year for sitting at home not seeing or refusing to treat cancer it certainly does not need more investment or tax payers to pay more for a failing health service which had about 30 million put in it by our Tyrannical Government so they can’t ever cope they say can’t cope with that amount of people invested in them , should be defunded or privatised .
The managers will be getting much more than £70K. A good saving would be to sack the lot of them and any also doctors who still believe that Covid is a good excuse for sitting on their backsides and twiddling their thumbs, while patients go untreated.
The UK system has more managers than beds, probably substantially more following Khunt’s Kruelist Kuts.
The NHS also have become a religion as now people do not worship god or church instead the fat overweight don’t eat vegetables fruits nuts seeds worship it so do some people I know who only used it to give birth, I ask why is the NHS so wonderful at work sure some Health care systems might not be as good America private cannot afford health care do not get any or on state benefits do not get seen .
I just think the NHS cannot be criticised for it faults most people I know especially briefly not friends from College just people at work mostly aged 50 plus defend it the ones who never saw their mother for 18 Months had those virtual signalling signs Rainbows on the Wall watched the BBC daily they just say it is Wonderful for no reason no opinion of the bad side of the NHS long waiting hours the Liverpool pathway neglect of the elderly in care homes and hospitals , the campaign of terror they went a long with the government some including one doctor on the NHS in January 2021 Montgomery said people who do not wear masks have blood on their hands .
The NHS must also prepare for the mental health pandemic and all the people neglected with cancer , who died last summer not being seen due to their neglect as they only treat Covid no other Heath ailments, as they were suppose too ,
I think some doctors nurses work hard and do excellent jobs but they are not angels just workers doing a harder job then most good article though .
I just had to call an ambulance for an old gentleman with Parkinson’s who fell over on a poorly lit, rough pavement outside.
He had smashed his chin, tooth and hand quite badly.
The call handler was from a national based call centre and more worried about had myself or the patient had the big C in the last few days or come into contact with anyone who had….
I didn’t want to spoil the fun by telling them I’m not vaccinated, not once wore a mask, never taken a test but here I am covered in a pensioner’s blood at nearly midnight in the freezing cold.
To top it all off….a quoted up to TWELVE hour wait for an Ambulance.
Luckily another neighbor helped me lift the gentleman into a car and he was not seriously hurt and we got him to his house.
Still no sign of the emergency services. I’m lucky to be back home in bed unharmed but this experience has taught me that the NHS should be ashamed of what it has become.
The list often is almost identical to the list of NHS problems I created in 2018 for my book “Mad Medicine”. I retired from the NHS 11 years ago. Nothing has changed. And indeed nothing has really changed since 1948 in terms of pressures on the service because medicine has been able to do more and more at ever greater cost. Reorganisation has occurred on numerous occasions and has never solved the underlying problems. If you want a system that can always cope you need to build in slack time redundancy; a bed occupancy of over 85% creates problems but to keep it below that at busy times requires a normal occupancy of 60% or less. So you have to decide whether to be economically efficient and run the risk of being overwhelmed at busy times, or inefficient and expensive. Successive governments have chosen the latter.
I have encountered good and bad managers but even the most brilliant cannot run a bankrupt business, so firing them merely means you bring in new people who still won’t cope, not least because they don’t know the business.
I believe that COVID is only a blip. The underlying problems of the NHS will still be there when COVID is gone.
Of course it won’t return to normal anytime soon. It was never intended to. The plandemic was engineered in order to deconstruct the NHS and bring in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backed digital NHSX. Gates proudly boasted that by 2025, ‘doctors will be no more needed than car mechanics’. We already know that bringing in electric cars is the first step in preventing car ownership, meaning car mechanics ultimately will be redundant. So what is the plan, in only 3 years, to similarly make doctors unnecessary? I hope Deagel’s population forecast for 2025 for the UK – only 14 million – isn’t about to come true!
If it was all about undermining and undoing the NHS, why are so many other countries involved in the same agenda with the same harms inflicted on their populations? The agenda being played out is more than solely targeting health systems.
Why do people feel the need to declare their vaxx status. It removes validity to their discussion on all issues covid. It is obvious the vaxxes, simply do not work. Negative efficacy abounds. And yet medically educated people insist on telling us they took the vaxx for whatever reasons? As far as I can tell all common and scientific sense is thrown right out the window.
GPs are never coming back. The NHS gatekeepers will be gestapo-trained receptionist and AIs. All part of the plan. You will die at the end of your working life, and you will be happy.
Very revealing article. However I have been learning recently of an even bigger and long standing problem for the NHS. It’s what’s being described as the covert dismantling of the NHS into the hands of big American corporations. Dr Paul Hobday & Dr Bob Gill explain it well, as did John Pilger in his 2019 documentary “The dirty war on the NHS”. And also look out for the Health & Care Act coming our way in the summer. It doesn’t sound like good news.
The US corporates want rid of the universal coverage aspect. They just want to be able to select the most profitable cases for ‘treatment’.
Thanks for the honesty. I had Hartmanns procedure in December 2020 as an emergency y and was told I’d need to wait for a reversal for 9 months. In December 2021 I was told it would be 2 years. The nearest private hospital fir this is either 200 or 400 miles away. I am lucky- I’m totally back to normal, but I will now be at least 77 if the op is done then. Yes, I can open perfectly well and understand the backlog of people far far worse than I, but it is nevertheless frustrating when I read articles like this
Patients testing positive?
I think I see part of the problem there.
Perhaps the NHS could provide proof of asymptomatic transmission from ostensibly healthy individuals. Just one measly fully documented case arising in the hundreds of thousands of case on record. Just one will do.
Medical clinics and hospitals in USA are denying life-saving Ivermectin medicine even with court orders. Big Pharma doing all that they can to push the vaxx and inoculate us while effective and cheap COVID cures exist. There turns out to be censorship that we have never seen before for those who are looking for these treatments. We say over and over again that indepenedent researchers found Ivermectin safe and very effective for these Flu-Corona symptoms. Getting Ivermectin is easy https://ivmpharmacy.com