Biostatistics Professor Jon Deeks has criticised the Government’s mass Covid testing plan as a waste of “time and money”, highlighting that in some areas only one positive case has been found after 10,000 tests. Professor Deeks, a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Applied Health Research at Birmingham University, told the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Coronavirus that there is “no evidence” to show mass testing works. He is quoted in the Telegraph:
“For this mass test, the Innova test, we have the Liverpool study and the University of Birmingham study, that’s a total of 78 cases where we know how well it detects (positive cases).
“That is absolutely outrageous that we are now testing the whole population based effectively on data from 78 people, which actually showed it doesn’t work very well…
“In the South West at the moment, I think we are down to 0.09% prevalence and that probably means we would be using 10,000 tests to find one case in the next few weeks.
“I don’t think that’s a good use of people’s time or money or public health capital to do that. There are far better things we could be doing.”
The APPG is chaired by Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, who said: “[Mass testing] seems to be the panacea at the moment… [but] how reliable is it?”
Earlier this month, the Government promised twice-weekly Covid tests for everyone in England. Sky News had the story.
The Government says the offer is currently for England only and the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will make their own decisions.
A major marketing campaign encouraging people to take up the offer of twice-weekly lateral flow tests will also start in England this Friday…
The programme is effectively the long-delayed “Operation Moonshot” of 10 million Covid tests a day, costing an estimated £100 billion, promised by Health Secretary Matt Hancock last summer.
When he told the Commons it would start as early as December, MPs laughed, prompting Mr Hancock to brand them “nay-sayers” and telling them to “get with the programme”.
Now the Government says that alongside vaccination, regular Covid testing will be an essential part of easing lockdown restrictions and help quickly suppress the spread of variants.
The Telegraph report is worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
And when all the jobs have gone the government will be the peoples saviour by introducing CBDC and universal basic income. Klaus will be happy, a model nation with an enslaved population.
..a model nation with a replaced and mongolised enslaved population …Klaus will have very sticky pants as his wet dream becomes reality .
Thanks Tories .You scum !!
This “Tory Scum” always makes me smile. They’re ALL scum. Every. Single. One. Labour would have just drove the country into the ground quicker. Anyone that thinks what’s happening is because of political allegiance hasn’t been paying attention.
That is why i find GB News tedious now, do they really think there is a real difference between Labour and Conservative!
However, the economy will be so shrunken that we will be very poor indeed. That may lead to violent reaction by the angry proles. Be warned,.political scum.
Reform UK recognise the scam that is Net Zero and will scrap the scheme.
People who consider the Net Zero agenda is both a huge scam and will inevitably impoverish them will be able to register their disgust at the general election later this year.
What will happen when industry is decimated, regular cars eliminated, living standards wrecked? Will they ever go: “Congratulations everyone, we’ve done it, we’ve finally reached the right level of CO2 and we can now sleep easy because catastrophic climate change has been averted.” Will they?
Of course not. This never ends. They’ll tell us we still haven’t reached the right levels of CO2. So, let’s see, what else emits CO2 and contributes to “anthropogenic climate change”? Well, the clue is in the name: humans.
Sorry guys, we’re going to have to cull the human population because we’re disgusting CO2 emitting creatures…
Manwhile is all the Brics countries there wil be deafening laughter !!
All the way to the bank….
“Sorry guys, we’re going to have to cull the human population because we’re disgusting CO2 emitting creatures…”
I have been banging this drum for at least the last two years.
Happy to cull them…..
I have been saying for years that the reason our treasonous Uniparty politicians push the Net Zero agenda has nothing to do with climate. They are doing it at the behest of their globalist overlords and paymasters to wantonly shackle and control the global populace through impoverishment, deindustrialisation, food deprivation and depopulation.
My most recent effort (October 2023) was addressed to several nonentity local politicians who needless to say didn’t reply but was primarily directed at my 100+ Bcc addressees: https://principia-scientific.com/what-rishi-sunaks-recent-net-zero-back-pedalling-really-means/.
The Party believes that ‘something must be done’, and no doubt the King is quite keen on Net Zero, so it (or they) are happy to do something that looks like NZ, whatever the outcome.
Following on from Stewart’s observation
– is there a correct measure that would allow us to say definitively at some point between now and let’s say 2040 ‘right you good people of Great Britain we have got the Co2 concentrations in this country down to 190 ppm. One big push and we can achieve 150 ppm in the next ten years.’
(And guess what we are beating the frogs.)
Is there firkin bollox and I don’t need to insult the intelligence of DS members explaining why.
And this explains why it is all a massive con.
Co2 is not a problem. Greenhouse gases – another load of nonsense – are not a problem, even the suggestion of Anthropogenic Global Warming is nonsense. The climate changes and the forces creating the changes are far too numerous and powerful for tiddly humans to worry about. What utter hubris to assume that we can regulate the temperature of this planet as if it was a domestic oven.
Club of Rome – Limits to Growth 1972.
Realistically the loss of 3,000 and probably more like 6,000 jobs, with supporting trades, at Port Talbot should be described as a Cull for that is most definitely what it represents.
The Port Talbot Cull.
Question to DS.
Why the picture of dark industrial smoke stacks to illustrate an article about Net Zero policy?
CO2 isn’t pollution.
If you want to illustrate British heavy industry, why not show the products, the useful output rather than the externalities?
If you show the pollution that industry produces you promote a negative image of heavy industry and worse still contribute to the erroneous conflation of CO2 with pollution.
Not to mention the fact that the cooling towers are emitting steam, not CO2.
It’s a nice stock image I expect.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/dolans-digest-suddenly-trump-is-in-the-driving-seat/
The commendable Simon Dolan with his take on Trump v Biden.
What do the Dems and deep state do about Sleepy Joe?
Assassination and blame it on Trump?
It’s a repeat of the EU situation when the UK was still a member.
The only countries implementing Brussels’ demands to the letter were Germany and the UK.
One has to wonder what is wrong with these 2 nations and people?
Germany has surprised me the most. Its as if they had a death wish!
Befehl ist befehl!
Anyone who thinks the US is our friend is deluded. America continues causing chaos around the world and we continue holding onto its apron-strings. Meanwhile HMS Britannia is slowing but steadily sinking beneath the waves.
We must have the dumbest politicians ever in our history!
Well, the nation is run by a fifth column plotting its downfall. Or actually, rather not so much plotting its downfalls. It’s being sucked dry by parasites who’d rather carelessly kill their host and then die themselves than admit that they could ever have been wrong about something. And the name of these parasites is Democrats and their European lickspittles. My hope is, by the time that these people have managed sink the USA, we over here can dust ourselves off, shed a few crocodile tears and again worry about our own affairs.
We’ll see who makes the race, Mr Francis ‘wisecrack’ Menton. But remember that you had a head start.
“Net Zero is Dying – But it’s Taking Us Down With It”That is the intent.
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Maurice Strong
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun”
Paul Ehrlich
“We contend that the position of the nuclear promoters is preposterous beyond the wildest imaginings of most nuclear opponents, primarily because one of the purported ‘benefits’ of nuclear power, the availability of cheap and abundant energy, is in fact a liability.”
Paul Ehrlich
“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer “
Paul Ehrlich
“Government in the future will be based upon . . . a supreme office of the biosphere. The office will comprise specially trained philosopher/ecologists. These guardians will either rule themselves or advise an authoritarian government of policies based on their ecological training and philosophical sensitivities. These guardians will be specially trained for the task”
David Shearman An IPCC Assessor for 3rd and 4th climate change reports:
Thanks for these.
They are a few from a very thorough collection of incriminating quotes here:
https://www.c3headlines.com/global-warming-quotes-climate-change-quotes.html
And how about this?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/01/23/rain-is-caused-by-carbon/
Our net zero targets are fueled by Chinese coal.
it makes no difference to the climate which country the emissions come from
Our politicans are quite thick when it comes to the practical effects of their stupid and ignorant decisions. They have no mental horizon other than this week’s news cycle and whether they are in or out. Personal ambition has become the sine qua non of political existence whereas it was once the improvement and advancement of the nation. They are enemies of the people and must pay for their crimes.
This will only get worse under Stalin Starmer.
“the nation was run by a fifth column plotting its downfall.”? It is, with a sixth and seventh waiting in line to plunge in the knife.
The UK shows the world how to grow old and senile