Since retiring from NHS medical practice I have published 15 books. My latest The Great Covid Panic casts a critical eye over the Government’s Covid response and explains how it caused a series of events which will almost certainly lead to the election of a Labour Government by January 2025.
Back in March 2020 I originally supported the Government’s Covid response even though I felt the introduction of lockdowns was a step too far. As the months passed and more information became available (particularly from this website, then known as Lockdown Sceptics) my views changed.
It was clear that the threat posed by Covid had been wildly exaggerated by Government scientists, civil servants and politicians, aided and abetted by a hysterical mainstream media which was baying for a lockdown. Who can forget Professor Neil Ferguson’s paper which concluded that 510,000 people would die in the U.K. if lockdown measures were not implemented? We now know that this paper – produced using computer modelling – was based on a number of false assumptions including a mortality rate of 0.9%. Professor Ferguson also presumed that 85% of the population would be susceptible to Covid. We now know this was incorrect. In her book Expired: Covid The Untold Story Pathologist Dr. Clare Craig suggested that as little as 15% of the population might be susceptible to each Covid variant due to T-cell immunity created by contact with previous coronaviruses. It is also known that the mean age of a Covid death was 82 with an average of three underlying conditions. So the virus was really no threat to most people.
Since mid-2021 there has been an epidemic of unexplained excess deaths which the Government seems determined to ignore. Andrew Bridgen MP has held debates in the House of Commons on excess deaths but on each occasion the debating chamber has been almost empty.
The ineffectiveness of lockdowns is described in detail in the book. The U.K. went into lockdown on three occasions in 2020 and 2021 but each time the number of cases had already started to fall before lockdown started so the same outcome would have been achieved if no lockdown had been ordered. It is also widely known that countries which did not lock down (such as Sweden) fared better than countries which did.
The book is also highly critical of the so-called Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) which were ineffective and unscientific. There is particular criticism of facemasks which have been proved to be useless in the prevention of Covid in a number of scientific papers including the recent Cochrane Collaboration Review, plus the Danish Mask study which was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Three books have now been published on facemasks and have concluded that they are useless and possibly dangerous.
There is also mention of the numerous breaches of lockdown rules by various politicians and civil servants including the infamous ‘Partygate’ scandal which led to the resignation of Boris Johnson and the decline in the fortunes of the Conservative Party.
Vaccine safety and efficacy are also discussed in the book. In a chapter entitled ‘Safe and Effective Treatments’ it is pointed out that doctors have been using poorly tested and unsafe treatments for decades. In the 1930s it was believed that radium was good for you and Radium-infused chocolate and mineral water were widely consumed by the general public resulting in many deaths.
In the past, many drugs have been released for prescribing without proper testing. The best known of these would be Thalidomide, which was originally available in West Germany without a prescription and was marketed as a treatment for morning sickness. Unfortunately it was found that it was unsafe for pregnant women at it caused birth defects. This resulted in it being withdrawn from sale.
Thalidomide is the best known example of a drug which was originally thought to be safe but then had to be withdrawn some years later after its side-effects became well -known. There are many other drugs which were also withdrawn after a few years. These include the anti-inflammatory drug Opren, the painkiller Norgesic, the tranquilliser Trancopal ad the sleeping pill Halcion (which was withdrawn in the U.K. but continues to be prescribed in the USA).
Although the U.K. Government has repeatedly claimed that the Covid vaccines are “safe and effective” there is considerable evidence that this is not the case. According to data from the clinical trials there is a one in 800 chance of a serious adverse effect following vaccination, particularly pericarditis, myocarditis, heart attacks, strokes, convulsions and transverse myelitis. The U.K. Government has given legal indemnity to vaccine manufacturers but despite this a number of court cases are looming around the world which challenge the claim that covid vaccines are 95% effective.
The final section of the book describes the long-term effects of the pandemic which have included rocketing inflation, tax rises, record levels of debt, business failures and permanent damage to the NHS.
Most health centres (and some hospital outpatient clinics) introduced telephone, video and email consultations during the pandemic and these have now become permanent features of the NHS, resulting in a poorer standard of care and a likely increase in the number of misdiagnoses. A&E units are now overwhelmed with some patients having to wait up to four days to be seen. Waiting lists for elective surgery are at an all-time high with many patients forced to pay for operations at private hospitals.
The aftermath of the pandemic has also seen a renewed drive towards Net Zero and the implantation of greater surveillance, attacks on free speech and an attempt to phase out cash. People were instructed to go cashless during the pandemic as it was claimed that the virus could be spread by cash. There was never any scientific evidence to back up this claim. It is no wonder that Professor Angus Dalgleish recently said that the Covid pandemic has resulted in the “death of science“.
The Great Covid Panic by Colin M. Barron is available from Amazon in both Kindle and paperback versions.
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Say no more.
It was giving in to the panic at the outset that enabled everything else.
Sorry I have no time for people who were willing, however grudgingly, to go along with the government initially, but then think it all went too far. As if the two things weren’t linked.
Great that you’ve had your cone to Jesus moment and are now an evangelist of the horrors of the covid response. Bit go preach elsewhere.
I understand the sentiment, we have every right to be angry after what was done to us, but I think we need to show some acceptance to people who see the light, however late to the party. I did not downtick.
There are so many people I considered intelligent and rational who just lost their heads over this bout of flu. The blame lies with government and media in equal measure.
Yes, doctors and medical experts should have known better, should have applied some common sense and basic questioning, but the whole profession was taken over by scum and if you dared question the official narrative your career could be over. It takes a strong character to be able to stand up to their entire profession and its professional bodies.
We don’t have to forgive these people, but everyone who see’s the light is an ally.
If doctors and nurses actively supported the narrative, administered the injections and actively encouraged people to take them or follow other senseless NPI’s (all of them) then they may at some future point need to answer for those actions – if they failed to abide by the Hippocratic Oath. And this applies, even if they have subsequently seen the error of their ways. There must still be a reckoning. Ideally, along the lines of the Nuremberg trials. We could welcome their epiphany but they don’t get a free pass.
Without an acknowledgment that giving in to the initial panic was what caused everything that came after, I don’t find what this mam is doing particularly useful.
Well done him for jumping on the now popular “the whole thing was a shit show” bandwagon. And good luck to him selling his book.
Is he trying to launder his conscience for having initially supported the government by now saying how terrible it all was? Or is he just trying to make a buck with another book. The opening statement very much suggests at least the latter.
Maybe the DS is a fertile ground for his self promotion, but I’ll pass.
So you are telling me that you knew with absolute certainty that all we were told were lies in March 2020?
I personally did not understand what they were doing, but it took a while to find the information to understand what they were doing was wrong, especially with the censorship and relentless propaganda.
I could never understand why Emergency Powers were introduced when the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 provided a suitable framework for the Government and other agencies for pre planning, response and return to normality in the event of an emergency (particularly a ‘flu pandemic).The National Flu Plan was well and truly ditched without dusting it off. This was NOT a Government in panic mode, it was orchestrated to provide a certain outcome, the mass jabbing of the whole population. Fortunately people fought back against the sinister introduction of health passports. Unfortunately, in the words of Arnie, they’ll be back….
As a scientist I did not understand what they were doing in early 2020. It did not make sense. So I initially thought ‘what am I missing?’. And it took a while, following data, to realise the world had gone mad.
You have to remember that the narrative and propaganda was relentless. And there was no obvious counter narrative. I felt very alone in my views.
There was an obvious counter narrative but it was effectively crushed by the media…
I disagree. It shows a thinking process and some bravery to reverse one’s position.
Caveat: this mirrors my behaviour. I said to my wife in early March:’ This will be like a tsunami. It will wash over us,cause a lot of damage,but we just have to brace ourselves and survive.’
Reflexively opposing something just because it comes from government also shows a lack of thinking. Balancing on a seesaw is always harder than sitting firmly at one of the ends.
I’m glad the Dr is appalled and is saying so loudly and publicly.
But I do not believe there was a “pandemic” and I do not believe that at the highest levels there was “panic”. The whole thing looked and looks like a theatrical production to me. I believe us “conspiracy theorists” would term it a “psyop”.
No, there was no pandemic, and people need to stop using their altered terms, at the very least say so-called pandemic. Just like the so-called Climate Crisis, the so-called vaccine and the so-called panoply of genders, etc.
Looking back to the start of it, that was my impression as well. Because it was so soon after the Dec 2019 election, it looked much like another political campaign. That turned out to be a political charade with no real opposition – the Labour opposition caved in and more or less said that they would be even worse than the recently elected lot.
Yet so many now think that a Labour Government will be so much better for us. My view is we’re f*cked now, when labour takes power we’ll be really f*cked.
There was no pandemic – there was a Plandemic – a criminal attempt to destroy people’s immune systems for profit!
I’m just glad women can’t vote and are kept out of politics because imagine how much worse it would’ve been!
Oh wait…..not sure the entire shitshow could’ve been any worse, thanks to all concerned.
Pitchforks at dawn..
After all, everybody knows that social engineers, globalists, politicians and general psychopaths are only available with XX chromosomes.
For example, can you imagine the field day the misogynists would have had if Matt Hancockwomble was female, let alone those three stooges pictured up top?!
Yes,it took me several weeks,but when I was turned down as a volunteer nurse in ICU,despite my medical degree, I realised that this was no true emergency.
A close friend of mine worked at one of the largest hospitals in South Manchester. She maintains that for the majority of the time the place was like a ‘ghost town’ with large parts of the place closed.
Ferguson’s modelling was no improvement, indeed a disaster, compared with simply following Farr’s Law or the Gompertz Curve for the spread of infectious diseases. Using data from the PHE around March to June the initial rise (mere hundreds of cases) was indistinguishable from an even simpler model of exponential growth. The big question was guessing when the inevitable evolution to Farr’s Law would take place, tracked most easily by simply watching and relaxing at the sight that the observed “doubling time” (about a week at that point) clearly keeps increasing. This point was visible, though not clearly so, days before The Lockdown. Indeed, with hindsight, allowing for the delays in infection translating to infection and reporting, the point was a couple of weeks or so before lockdown. At this point, if Farr’s Law is applicable, a plausible estimate could be made about the future number of cases and of deaths: about two orders of magnitude less than Ferguson’s. The pressure on the Cabinet must have been to get Lockdown in place before the press and public spotted that the lurid predictions were over-hyped and overuse of the word “exponential” were becoming irrelevant. At that point (measured by the Guardian’s abrupt dropping of publishing daily PHE figures) the PHE figures suddenly got chaotic, partly because of the decision to suddenly include care home deaths for the preceding months. That leads me to a further suspicion: that the early PHE figures, though not wrong in scale, were “adjusted” to fit perfectly to an exponentially rising curve, thus creating a bogus impression of very tight confidence limits and consequently a bogus confidence in the model. I queried this at the time from the PHE but got no response.
The laws of Mathematics combined with Farr’s Law of 1840 imply that epidemics never grow exponentially – unless there’s some trick as can be performed in a laboratory. There is never any evolution from one curve to another. Epidemics experience logistic growth as has been known since 1927. Unfortunately it’s easier to draw a straight line on a log-plot than to do the graft.
Indeed, though I query your comment about “evolution”: the best fit graph will evolve, the raw data does what it does. However, in the early stages, the “noise” in the data makes distinction between exponential growth (straight line upwards on log-plot), Normal Distribution (tails off) and logistic or Gompertz growth (fast up, slow down) impossible. Obviously the ultimate trajectory cannot be exponential, but must instead limit somewhere, even if that is 100%! Once you have enough data to mask the random noise (and to deal with reporting delays and weekly periodicity), you can see the “evolution” from simple exponential to a more refined model, and can make a stab at the final value, assuming Farr’s Law (simple symmetry). The PHE “best-fit” line/curve moved from being straight and became “bent over” (i.e. below exponential) just before Lockdown. “Multiple-wave”-excepted, that final value was around 100,000 dead[?]. I’ve never found out what Ferguson’s model was, let alone what parameters it had and how they were “tuned” (entirely justifiably) to fit the noisy data that was emerging. Eventually the early non-noisy (arguably faked) PHE data was overwhelmed by the chaos regarding care homes, “with” or “of” and numerous other factors, so the curve-fitting game became rather pointless once the scary “doubling every 5/6/7 days” headlines and R-factors had become irrelevant. (I believe Christopher Monckton, of this parish, got uncharacteristically muddled over this “doubling” issue.)
I believe all the previous Cochrane Reviews said there was no evidence that face masks worked. The Common Cold Unit said, maybe in the 1960s, that masks made the spread of rhinoviruses worse.
Rather a shame if the book cannot reference all the decades of prior art that show up the incompetence of officials and politicians.
It does seem strange that an experienced Doctor agreed with the Government’s preposterous Lockdown idea (albeit only initially). Lockdown had never been tried or tested before (red flag) and it completely turned its back on the existing Pandemic plans.
There was also huge circumstantial evidence that a nasty bug had been going around since Dec 2019. People I spoke to in the winter of 2020, said they had a flu-like illness that took at least a couple of weeks to shift. Finally the evidence from the Diamond Princess & USS Theodore Roosevelt completely proved that this was not a virus that was going to wipe out any population.
I am surprised that an experimental medical professional fell for the Government propaganda and didn’t display proper critical thinking. (However I might just take a look a the book as well!).
‘Experienced’ not ‘experimental’. Bl**dy autocorrect.
Edit tool has disappeared again!
‘Hysterical mainstream media baying for a lockdown’. Hmm. My opinion on this is that all forms of social media were infiltrated by paid government agencies posing as your average man or woman in the street, calling for lockdowns and generally whipping up fear. The same goes for masks, vaccines etc. The mainstream media is often guilty of lazy journalism and spend time browsing popular forums etc, and then just report what they are reading there. It’s a complete circle of manufactured fear.
I recall reading that there were numerous ‘bot’ accounts deployed to push the ‘correct’ responses, I’m not clear by whom, but suspect a mix of actors, both foreign and domestic. It’s rather simple to achieve programmatically.
The number of bot accounts was a source of speculation when Twitter was being purchased. I wonder if Elon has managed to get a handle on this now he’s the owner.
Now after all this time I look back on the madness that took hold of the majority of people and wonder how on earth it was allowed to happen. Yes its good some people are seeing the light but look at the problems we are now facing as a result of the insanity. Our world has changed and not for the better – the future looks very bleak and no one has been held accountable – that really angers me!
As the doctor said the NHS GPS are not going back to the pre Covid style appt systems and the Hospital doctors are pushing for a more convenient working week Mon to Fri 9-5.
The excess deaths and jab damage is ignored by the MSM who have moved straight on to the Nut zero madness with the same closing down of the debate and actual science.
My only thought is that the people who push the propaganda are the most likely to have had the jabs and may have shortened their lives as a consequence.
No mention of what must be the biggest scam of the Covid pantomime, the PCR test which told perfectly healthy people that they were ill and kept the scare well and truly alive by the continuous counting of ‘cases’. For me it was the PCR testing that convinced me that the whole response was a complete and utter fraud. Wonder what happened with all of that DNA collected?