Lockdown Was Ruinous and Masks Were Useless. Here's What Worked For My Business

I recently submitted, below, to the Covid Inquiry a journal of the actions we took as a business to ensure that we remained open for our customers whilst making sure that our employees could work without risk of catching the virus.

When reading it one has to cast one’s mind back to early 2020 when our politicians and many members of the public were filled with fear and hysteria of catching this unknown disease. Thank goodness those days have passed though in many ways there is now a bigger divide within the population. There are those who were always going for tests every time they had a sniffle who now regard it as little more than a mild cold to those who did what the Government told them to do and are still slavishly getting their boosters and wearing masks in certain situations.

Mankind has had to cope over millennia with respiratory viruses and has learnt many lessons as to how to deal with them. In March 2020 all of this was forgotten and instead the approach taken by China, an autocratic one party state, was followed. The cornerstone of this was a lockdown where people were required to shut themselves in their homes. It seems unbelievable looking back on it and it would appear that no thought was given to the long term effects of this on everyone from children acquiring socials skills to the elderly spending their final years in confinement. Not forgetting, the colossal economic cost and the waste of having people perfectly able to work being paid by the taxpayer to stay at home.

Virtually the only practical advice given by Government was on how properly to wash one’s hands, after that it was go home and await orders.

Taking what we knew from the past and applying it here we carried on operating and by the end of our financial year had almost equalled our previous year’s turnover and profit. We have never had any internal transmission, we ditched masks before we were technically allowed and we ignored the diktats coming from the Scottish Government. We had to be careful on this front as we had to keep employees on side as otherwise I could have been in serious trouble should there have been any internal transmission and I lost their trust. It is again easy to say that in a way we were doing the Government’s bidding but that forgets the panoply of fear induced Covid regulations, many aimed at employers and how they ran their workplaces. Many of these regulations were of the micro-managing, one size fits all variety and were like many of the ones aimed at the general population, stupid.

Almost every practical measure we took to prevent transmission – replacing door handles and touched surfaces with copper, air cleaners and UV scanning – is applicable to the prevention of transmission of any virus. We continue to run the air cleaners as they appear to have reduced the number of days off sick and improve the air quality in the office when it is too cold to have windows open. If we were struck with another viral pandemic I would encourage widespread adoption of these as they both filter out airborne particles and the inbuilt UV light kills viruses, bacteria and other microbes.

To stop infection from respiratory viruses in particular, proper vitamin D supplementation, about 4,000 IU a day, and gargling with salt water or preferably a solution of grapefruit seed extract before bed seems to successfully aid the body to repel the viral invaders. Where employees have not supplemented with Vitamin D3 or gargled and then caught the bug, high dose Vitamin C has helped them recover quickly.

These are all measures that are part of humankind’s acquired general knowledge and should have been adopted rather than the costly and draconian lockdown for which we are now paying the price. That these and other physical methods were not adopted more widely is the real crime from the pandemic

Creating a policy of burying one’s head in the sand and waiting for vaccines, which have brought their own problems, is not and should not have been this or any county’s policy.

One of the reasons for making this submission to the Covid Inquiry was that none of the inquiry modules relate to how businesses dealt with on one side the legal requirements put upon us and on the other survival.

To date I have had a general acknowledgement of receipt and an email saying that it has been passed to the “relevant team”, the name of the team was not mentioned so, for all I know, it may be the wastepaper basket one!

December 28th 2023,

Rt. Hon. Baroness Hallett DBE
UK Covid-19 Public Enquiry
London

Dear Baroness Hallett,

I find it strange that the enquiry you chair goes into lots of aspects of the Covid pandemic but I can’t see that any of the modules actually look at practical ways of mitigating the effects of future respiratory virus pandemics. It also is surprising that there is little on how business handled the situation thrown at it; for the engine room of the economy to be virtually disregarded by your deliberations seems rather amiss.

As a business we could not afford to shut down for an indeterminate amount of time when lockdown was announced. As an engineering company selling into the agricultural and materials handling markets with more than 70% of sales overseas, if we had shut we would at the very least have been seriously knocked back and our customers would have been forced to go elsewhere.

In an engineering business there is only a limited proportion of people who can work from home.

The Prime Minister used, when announcing lockdown, the unfortunate term “essential worker” when referring to those who could go into work. Many of our employees felt that referred to those working for the emergency cervices whilst I understood it to be those essential to this business. As we had a substantial percentage who did not agree with me, I decided to furlough them and work on with those who were happy to come in and some of the office staff who could work from home.

The initial advice about washing hands was about the only truly practical advice we received. However, working on the basis of Covid being a respiratory virus we researched as to what had been shown to work against these in the past. We also worked on the principle that we wanted to keep the disease out of the building and if anyone came in with it then they could be identified quickly and helped to get home. Equally we wanted to help those who were fit and healthy to stay that way and be strong enough to repel the virus should they come in contact with it.

As spring was on its way we were able to make sure that there was plenty of air movement in any enclosed spaces where employees were working. We also ensured that there was a ready supply of salt should anyone want to clear their throats and noses through gargling salt water. The correct strength of hand gel could not be purchased at this time, so we purchased raw Aloe Vera extract and Isopropyl and mixed in the WHO recommended proportions. As it was believed that the virus could be transmitted through touching surfaces, initially all surfaces including computer keyboards were treated with isopropyl (rubbing alcohol). Knowing that viruses are killed by ultra violet light we made a number of handheld UV scanners that allowed us to rapidly treat large areas twice a day.

Knowing that copper kills viruses on contact we made and replaced all the original door handles with copper ones and fitted copper sheet to the tops of work benches and the canteen table to prevent any chance of spread through touch. The door push plates were also replaced with copper. Our forefathers used copper, brass and silver specifically because they were known to stop the spread of pathogens, however, this has been forgotten and now most door handles are made from aluminium or stainless steel which have no anti-viral properties. The other measure we took in summer 2020 was to install an infrared thermometer that took our temperatures on entering the building. I am not sure if it has ever detected someone with an elevated temperature due to Covid but it has picked up plenty who have come in after sitting in a hot car or been outside in the sun during their lunch break.

With summer 2020 turning to autumn we needed to find ways to keep the air in enclosed spaces clean without having lots of doors and windows open. We were also keen to find ways of encouraging all our employees to boost their immune systems in make them more resilient against the virus. To solve the first problem we installed a number of air clearers with Hepa filters and built in UV sterilising lights. I had over the years found UV extremely effective at killing all sorts of micro-organisms and these cleaners have been very effective. As to the second problem, I had read a considerable amount of research prior to the pandemic into how winter supplementation with Vitamin D3 with K is very effective in helping one’s immune system fight off respiratory viruses. As the pandemic progressed there were a number of reports coming from Sweden and Spain that confirmed that Vitamin D3 was similarly effective in helping the body fight COVID-19.

Using a commercial testing company we arranged for everyone who wanted it to receive a Vitamin D and general health blood test. Virtually everyone had very low and some almost non-existent amounts of Vitamin D in their blood. We then made available enough Vitamin D3 in either spray or pill form to give everyone at least a daily amount of 4000 IU which we understood to be the amount required to achieve the optimal blood level. Though we had had one person going down with what later turned out to be Covid in February 2020, we had no cases until just before Christmas 2020 when two went down with it, one having caught it from her son and the other from family or friends. The first person stayed away from work but the second one initially tested negative and was told that he probably had flu. Feeling better after Christmas he worked with us in the three days prior to New Year but then tested positive, on New Years eve 2020, but did not pass it on to any of the rest of us who had been working with him.

So far to date we have not had any on premises transmission, all cases that we have had have been isolated ones or between two people car sharing to and from work. A number have had it more than once but no one has suffered seriously.

Throughout the pandemic we were bombarded by rules and guidelines issued by the Scottish and U.K. Governments. Initially we tried to follow and obey them but as almost every week more were added and they became ever more specific we just ignored them as we could not apply many of them to our circumstances and from our experience they were not going to help the situation. By late 2021 we were beginning to notice a number of things:

Firstly the vaccine did not offer long term protection, contrary to what we had previously been told.
Secondly: those taking boosters often seemed to go down with Covid within a month or so of getting the shot.
Thirdly: tests were often giving a negative result when ill but a positive result when better.
Fourthly: mask-wearing was ineffective and in fact seemed to exacerbate the illness if it developed.
Fifthly: gargling with grapefruit seed extract in water after testing positive would clear the virus from your throat and nose and lead to a very quick recovery.

In response to points three and four, we reverted our policy to if you felt ill to stay off work but when you felt better to return and not to bother doing a Covid test. We have not yet had any internal transmission resulting from this change. We also allowed people to go maskless when not in close proximity to others and fairly soon dropped the need to wear masks at all and again this has not led to any sort of internal transmission.

I can’t speak for everyone in the business but most have not taken any more than the first booster and some nothing more than the initial two vaccine doses. The key lessons from our experience has been:

Boosting natural immunity with winter D3 supplementation is very effective protection both against the disease and also helping to fight it should you go down with it.
Our UV air cleaners seem to be very effective at preventing transmission within an office or other enclosed environment.
Virucidal effects of copper can be harnessed to prevent spread through door handles and other frequently touched items.
Masks were completely ineffective at preventing transmission between those sharing cars.

Despite being visited by council employees early on during the first lockdown who asked why we were open, we stayed open throughout the pandemic and though our U.K. business dropped off steeply over the first few days of the first lockdown we had by the end of our financial year made up almost all of the lost ground.

After being on furlough for three weeks a number of employees started calling to find out if they could come back in and by September 2020 we were once again back to a full complement. Come the end of our financial year we repaid the furlough in full as it seemed wrong for our profit to be inflated by the taxpayer.

Based on our experience with Covid I would certainly not be as trusting of Government and its advisers next time round. Much of what came out of Government has proved to be either wrong or plain stupid. An example being of banning people from meeting outside which flew in the face of all experience with viruses that they do not survive in almost any sort of sunlight.

I believe that we demonstrated that by applying known practical, anti-viral measures the disease could be controlled and spread prevented without affecting economic and general well-being.

Yours sincerely,

Alastair MacMillan

Alastair MacMillan is the founder, with his father, of White House Products in Scotland, manufacturing and selling hydraulic pumps and other machinery around the world.