Covid Marie Celestes

by Dr Mike Yeadon

A source just gave me the following information. A hospital in Wales, Nevill Hall in Abergavenny, has 250 beds. 200 beds are empty. The surgeons are bored and pass much time on the nearby golf course. I think this might be one answer to why UK doctors are not investigating to find out why hospitals have no patients in them! Apparently all Covid cases are currently being sent to this hospital. This story tallies with the original evidence which drew me into this ghastly mess we’ve made of our country. I’ve not mentioned this for quite a while but you all should be incandescent about it.

A good friend who’s a Professor of Cell Biology was playing hockey many miles from home. He fell into conversation with one of the opposing team. This person is a fairly senior manger in NHS England and has daily sight of bed disposition across the service. He was upset to have realised that, as intensive care beds emptied because the many COVID-19 patients either recovered or sadly died, they were not being replaced by elective surgical patients. To the best of my recollection, this was late June. I was put in touch with the NHSE staffer by my friend, because he knew I was, by then, telling him all the time that “something is seriously wrong”. I met up with the NHSE manager who, by good fortune, lives less than 10 miles from me. He told me that the utilisation of the ICU beds was at a far lower % than ever in his whole career. Worse, he told me the reason, showing me part of a management briefing he’d recently attended. To my surprise, in the section entitled “NHS Priorities”, the top one wasn’t what I expected to see – to get the NHS back to normal service ASAP. No, that was there, but it was second.

The top priority was entirely contradictory to the second and essentially said “Run the NHS as lightly loaded as possible in order to be prepared to cope with the second wave”. Just so we’re clear, it’s not an accident that it’s hard to get access to the NHS at present. No, it’s a strategic choice: they’re not seeing you, doing fewer elective surgeries, to protect the NHS. Kafka would probably have rejected this as a plot line on grounds that it’s absurd. While there has recently need an increase in utilisation of ITU beds, I don’t know about you, but to me it’s completely unacceptable that someone’s decided it’s ok not to replace your heart valve and certain other elective surgeries. Why? To cope with an expected “second wave”.

This is where and why I got stuck in. Viruses do not do waves. It’s not possible to have a second wave of infections and deaths in a country which has already been intensely infected in spring. This is because those infected and survived, which is 99.8%, are then immune. When a pandemic was self-limiting, as it was in U.K. and almost everywhere I’ve looked, it’s now not possible for the population to enable and support a large, consolidated and growing epidemic. I knew that back in June and of course we’re not experiencing a second wave, but a Secondary Ripple. This, too, will self-limit. I’m sceptical about, but open-minded to, the possibility that what are being labelled as ‘COVID-19 deaths’ actually are as advertised. More likely, the majority are simply people who’ve died of other causes, some of which are respiratory deaths within 28 days of a positive PCR test. PCR testing is wholly unsuitable for the role it’s asked to do.

Scandalously, the Government either cannot or has chosen not to tell us what at present is the operational false positive rate. My own inferences are that it is not implausible that most positive tests are false (subclinical infection, fragments of destroyed virus, cross reactivity with common cold coronaviruses, old fashioned contamination). A total operational FPR of 5% would yield 15-20k positives per day, which is what we’re seeing. In direct contradiction to its own edict, issued after relentless and appropriate criticism of community testing during summer, no steps at all to assess and remove these problems. Based on that internal instruction, testers were required to retest positives, certainly weak positives. They were also charged with responsibility for assessing then limiting the number of amplification cycles used in PCR, so to greatly reduce FPs.

You might ask yourself why they’ve not fixed that glaring error. I can see no reason they’d fly in the face of their own, very good advice, other than to keep people fearful for longer. It’s certainly not saving anyone’s lives. But it provides the cover to order lockdowns. Put simply, it’s terrible practical science, it’s suspicious and you should completely reject the output of mass testing. I think it is telling us less than nothing. If I’m right that, even now, most positives are false, then if unexpectedly the genuine prevalence of virus in the population was to increase, it would be missed.

To finish where I started, I think there is ample justification to be absolutely furious at the incompetence – at best – and lethally incorrect advice coming from SAGE. They’re either the wrong people to advise us, because they lack the expertise I and others have to assess the underlying science, in which case they should immediately resign or be dismissed. Or more worryingly, some on SAGE know exactly what they’re doing, in which case they should be arrested and charged with numerous crimes of conspiracy. But whatever you think of the science of testing, you should be appalled to learn that no serious scientist talks of second waves. It’s an absurdity which doesn’t happen, yet the Government and SAGE have persuaded many to expect as axiomatic and almost certain.

But for me the final straw should be to learn that the NHS chose to allow you, your family and friends to go untreated, to suffer and even to die in order to prepare for a lie. In closing, followers know I’ve been on about pre-existing immune response, before the virus arrived. Some have said I’m building in sand. I say no. This is to be expected. We even know why it occurs. It’s exposure to related viruses that does it, leaving behind a robust and durable immune memory. Here’s an interesting review of that very field in that rather edgy journal, the BMJ.