A review of Expired: Covid the untold story by Dr. Clare Craig.
I sincerely hope Clare Craig feels better after writing this book. Frankly, I felt worse. I was left angrier about what had happened to us over 2020 and 2021 and more depressed about the possibility that those responsible will ever be brought to account. All without the guarantee that what happened in 2021 will not happen again. In that sense, the book is brilliant; it did its job.
I was sceptical about Covid from the outset. I was based in Wuhan when it all kicked off and in almost continual contact with colleagues there on return. I knew that people were not dropping dead in the street. In fact, nobody I knew in Wuhan had caught Covid by the end of 2020. So, I have long been on the same side of the ditch as Clare but that has not immunised me from the disappointment I experience when, yet again, I scan the Covid skyline and realise we were right-royally and collectively taken to the epidemiological cleaners in 2020. Even those amongst us who were sceptics.
Dr. Claire Craig is a consultant pathologist and Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists. I wish I could say that alone means she ought to be taken seriously. But when I think how many of her fellow professionals (and mine) mobbed, pilloried and cancelled me on Twitter in early 2020 I realise that medical qualifications and fellowships alone are no protection against abject stupidity and foul-mouthed invective. After all, the author herself fell for the Covid narrative, initially. One wonders how that is possible, until it is recalled the propaganda, fear and peer pressure generated in early 2020.
After all, a degree in biochemistry and a fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh did not prevent me from seeing the dangers that lurked behind injecting an experimental therapy which made use of the central dogma of genetics to send antigenic spike proteins to the furthest regions of our bodies. I never advocated the vaccines but, then again, for most of late 2020 and early 2021 I never criticised them. The anti-vaxxers and virus sceptics amongst my friends have never forgiven me. Given the vicious treatment meted out to the likes of Dr. John Campbell, Andrew Bridgen, Toby Young and Dr. Aseem Malhotra by comedian and leading Covid commentator Abi Roberts and her ilk, I don’t suppose Clare will ever be forgiven either.
Clare Craig writes with an obvious passion and that passion made this a page turner for me. Forgive the cliché, but it was a journey; a journey through the author’s mind at times and the major impression I got was one of sincerity.
Somewhat smugly, I thought I would have little to learn from Expired. I was wrong. In my own intense reading and writing on face masks I had not encountered so clearly, and in such detail, an explanation of why they don’t work. Covid, like many respiratory viruses, is spread by aerosol, extremely small airborne particles with an almost infinite capacity for spread. These are found atop high mountains and, essentially, anywhere there is atmosphere. Where there is air there are viruses. There is, in fact, very little we can do to combat them and the aerosol theory — with considerable evidence to support it — means all our efforts were in vain: lockdowns, social distancing and face masks.
We were just as likely to catch Covid from the person locked down across the road, with his or her windows wide open as per Government advice, if our windows were likewise open than we were from our spouse. Thus, people locked down in cruise ships and quarantine hotels who never made physical contact or came within proximity spread and caught Covid, seemingly inexplicably. Then, when vaccines, with an absolute risk reduction of approximately 1% proved to be useless, Covid continued to spread. That said, apart from passing and oblique reference to compulsory vaccine mandates, Expired is not about Covid vaccines. That will have to wait.
Having dealt with aerosol spread, naturally the issue of face masks is covered, and it is nothing short of comical to reflect on those heady days of 2020 and further into the prolonged masking on international flights. The author makes frequent reference to ‘Cloud-Covid-Land’, and that just about sums the situation in those days perfectly. It seemed weird enough at the time but, on reflection, it was nothing short of absurd.
The issue of ethics, the ‘inversion of ethical principles’ features in Expired whereby the protection of older people was prioritised over children who, demonstrably, have suffered terribly during Covid restrictions. I was moved to tears at times when I became aware of the effect lockdown and school closures were having on my grandchildren and the pressures it was putting on their parents, one of whom had pre-existing serious mental health problems. Thank you very much Boris Johnson, I will never forgive you, unless you apologise to the British people.
It is crystal clear from Dr. Craig’s book how, on the one hand, the management of Covid was theatre and, on the other hand, how it was utterly incompetent. Craig answered the call to help with the Covid response — and who would not want a consultant pathologist. She heard nothing. Furthermore, there was nobody with her qualifications anywhere across the spectrum of SAGE committees. The emphasis was on epidemiologists whose record of poor modelling and wild catastrophising was plain from previous ‘pandemics’ such as BSE, swine flu and foot and mouth disease. Speaking of epidemiology, I learned something else that should have been obvious: initial estimates of case fatality rates will always exaggerate the severity of an infection as we routinely underestimate the number of infections. We don’t know where all the cases are and that lowers the denominator. Arithmetic!
When it to comes to testing, Claire Craig is on home territory, and she explains clearly why the PCR tests were next to useless due to their hypersensitivity; on the other hand, the LFTs suffered from extreme specificity. One test (PCR) provides false positives (and how!) and the other (LFT) produces false negatives. Neither situation is ideal; they are reciprocal, and anyone remotely involved in developing screening tests understands this well. But both tests were sold as definitive, suggesting that it is possible to believe two contradictory notions simultaneously. Also, note, they were screening tests; like any screening test, they were not diagnostic – they were not clinically determinative of being ill or infected. Yet, somehow, they were considered diagnostic. All this is nothing less than psychometric insanity, but we were living in insane times.
I highlighted so much on my Kindle that it would take a review of many thousand words to include all the cogent points in Expired. But it is more noble to allow others to find these gems themselves. Before the penultimate chapter there is an admission by the author that she fell for the initial Covid narrative and an apology; I found this quite moving. The penultimate chapter is a letter to her children. Having read Mark Woolhouse’s letter of apology to his daughter at the end of his book The Year the World Went Mad I was prepared to be underwhelmed. I became particularly angry with Woolhouse as, despite what he saw in front of his eyes, he was part of what happened to us and bowed to the pressure to conform, at least initially. None of this from Craig who writes to her children with openness and the sincerity that is the trademark of her style. The message could be distilled as: “Kids, don’t fall for any bullshit, stand up for what is right, play your part in righting wrongs.”
This book deserves to be widely read and copies should be in the hands of every Government cabinet member, SAGE member and all the members of the ongoing COVID-19 Inquiry. The book ends with a summary of some main points and refers, as she does elsewhere, to Craig’s forthcoming book Spiked: a shot in the Covid dark.
Expired: Covid the untold story by Clare Craig (2023) is available on Amazon.
Dr. Roger Watson is Academic Dean of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.
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550 mile range in my diesel Audi.
5 mins to fill it.
Heater on, fast as a like.
Plants get free CO2 to eat too.
Plus 12 year black kid in the Congo didn’t have to go down a mine to get the stuff that makes the silly EV work
850 on a tankful in my Renault Trafic. Heater or a/c full on
450+ in my little Hyundai i10 .. with heater, lights and radio on. £30 pa road tax; cheap to insure.
EVs are simply not a practical idea for long-distance driving. But perhaps that’s the whole point. They want us either not to travel far, or to use public transport and ditch private vehicles altogether. Remember the old prediction that people will own nothing, and be happy.
And the most galling thing is that all this inconvenience isn’t going to have the slightest beneficial effect on the climate.
Just like the attacks on Farmers harvest (pun intended) very little. This seems to be part of the Agenda 2030 push to Build Back better.
Or ‘Extract Money Faster’
“EVs are simply not a practical idea..”
You could have stopped there. If they were we would have been driving them for decades instead of ICEVs.
And you wouldn’t need to subsidise them with taxpayers cash or use taxpayers money to provide charging points.
Recall of MPs Act 2015:https://notonthebeeb.co.uk/so/c8PDZE4U1?languageTag=en&cid=426765f9-8b6f-43e7-9ca1-b318db924f5c
£1.12 per kWh is a rip off, if you convert the thermal content of petrol at roughly 9 kWh per litre & guesstimate the efficiency of your engine at around 30%. It’s like paying out £3.50 a litre.
Incidentally, at todays prices my petrol car averages about 9p per mille, with most fuel being bought from ASDA – and a lot of the total is longish M road trips.
The whole “Green Energy” thing is a rip-off. Pay more and get less. (If it’s available, that is. And with unreliables such as wind and solar, that’s not guaranteed.)
The huge question is will TPTB allow us to continue to nurse our ICE cars for as long as we can manage? Or will there be a huge bunch of taxes, ULEZ schemes and restrictions on spare parts so as to ‘drive’ us off the road?
If we are allowed to keep them going? I think there will be a big industry in keeping old ICE cars on the road. But if they force the issue and make it EVs or nothing then it is a dismal outlook. I suspect that new technologies will come along for transportation but the current generation of EVs will spell the end of happy family leisure motoring. At best us hoi-polloi may have a cheap low range Chinese EV for local utility travel.
I’m sure the easiest thing for TPTB would be to target fuel supplies. If they can find a way to stop us getting supplies of petrol and diesel, then it’s basically game over for the ICE vehicle.
And there was me thinking the Government are there to facilitate the will of the electorate!
Oh no, it’s there to shape the nation according to its own will. But first it has to hoodwink enough of the electorate into thinking that they both have the same interests.
What a quaint notion!
Let’s face it – if you remove personal transport then the leisure industry is dead. Unemployment, no tax income follows. Think of all the places that are not reachable by public transport. Think of all those who support motor vehicles who will now be unemployed. The hit to the government finances would make Rachel from Account’s imaginary black hole real by many times more.
Mileage with the heating off is not the proper mileage though. It is like saying my plate of steak and chips will fill me up but only if I eat 3 Kitkats first.
The British writer Patrick Hamiltion wrote about the horror of the motorcar. He is almost completely forgotten these days but his novels are well worth reading. Hangover Square, The Slaves of Solitude. He lives on though in one sense and that is through a play he wrote called Gas Light. There was a good Ingrid Bergman film of it. This term has found its way into modern political discourse, gaslighting, although its meaning has been distorted slightly.
One thing I like about the Brits, the common people, is that they never get all enthusiastic about a new technology like the Yanks do. They might adpot it eventually, usually out of laziness and vacantness but there isn’t any expectation that all of this crap could ever make life better. Although I have read horrible stories in educational supplements about how teachers are applauding the fact that every child in their class has an electronic tablet. Basically a zombie machine and you hear that parent give phones to children as young as ten. This is horrific just slightly less horrific than the demoniac smiles of the Yanks selling this crap.
The number of mobile phones per capita far outreached that in the USA in the 1990s.
The cost per unit of electricity obviously varies depending on which type of tariff you’re on but is at least 40p/kwh so charging the author’s Ford at home would work out as about the same cost per mile as his Honda Civic. Therefore it would be impossible to recoup the massive extra cost of the Ford. Proof that EVs are only for the well off.
It would be interesting to compare the cost per mile of an EV versus a petrol or diesel for urban driving and see if the costs work out about the same as motorway driving. Driving at speed means far more air resistance hence higher energy use per mile but urban driving is often stop start. Accelerating uses far more energy than driving at a constant speed and a lot of this energy is lost when braking so driving in traffic may result in roughly the same energy use per mile as motorway driving.
The nail in the coffin is the cost of battery replacement.
It astounds me that anyone chooses to buy an EV – apart from company car drivers who have to get one and gain some tax advantages.
“if you regularly cover high mileage in an EV, you need to travel when everyone else isn’t to avoid queuing at chargers.”
Au contraire, I see all the BEVVERS travelling in groups. It’s so they have fellow BEVVERS to socialise with while they wait together for two hours to charge their BEVs not too quickly to avoid damaging the batteries. They also get to share enlightening, heartwarming stories about how well they are saving the planet. And they MUST be friends, because fighting over chargers isn’t a very planet friendly look. Too much CO2 is emitted when you fight.
A bevvy of electric car drivers.
“Every cloud has a silver lining though. Your correspondent predicts an impending boomtime for old style garages and the market in spare parts for petrol cars for years to come.”
The Government will simply outlaw cars over a certain age, 12 years perhaps, and maybe make it illegal to sell spares apart from brake pads – all with no reference to Parliament of course.
Drugs are illegal but people get very rich selling them without too much problem.
”To eke out the range I travel everywhere with the heater off, which currently demands a substantial coat, hat and gloves.”
Yes prior to the 1970s cars required that, and many afterwards too for a number of years.
I do so love technological progress.
James May a few years back showed that the range of battery cars had barely increased since the 1890s. Yes, they are more comfortable. Yes, they go much faster….for a short while.
That’s the funniest bit for me – EV’s are not new tech. Sure lithium ion cells and 0-60 times in a few seconds is newish (and pointless day to day), however the electric BEV is over 100 years old… and we ditched them for petrol and diesel powered vehicles… until governments started bribing people with subsidies and tax breaks to start buying them again