An analysis of the March 14th 'Open Letter' from U.K. scientists calling on the Government "to take stronger measures of social distancing" (i.e. Lockdown). Among various news outlets, the Guardian rapidly publicised the open letter by a group of "scientists" calling for a lockdown in an article on the March 14th. 245 UK scientists including those from Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Sanger Institute, and the Francis Crick Institute, had signed; Including Professors, Lecturers and Researchers in the fields of Immunology, Biology, Medicine and Complex Systems. The resulting media frenzy, together with Imperial Colleges computer model predictions, appeared to have the desired effect of causing a Government U-turn and the first of many lockdowns. The letter appears to have originated from the School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary College London, and is posted on the Queen Mary server. On closer inspection the first 245 UK signatories are made up of the following: 54 (22%) from Queen Mary (of which 42 are from the School of Mathematical Sciences including the first nine signatories)* 41 from Cambridge University22 from Imperial College8 from the Sanger Institute4 from Oxford University2 from LSHTM (neither is a medical doctor. one is also a honorary Research Associate at Imperial)1 from Francis Crick Institute (Theoretical Physics of Biology Lab) The remaining...

This is an explanation of false positives in qRT-PCR: what they are and how they occur. qRT-PCR is the type of PCR used to test for COVID-19 and it stands for 'Semi-Quantitative Reverse Transcriptase-Polymerase Chain Reaction' (a bit of a mouthful, so sometimes people just say 'The PCR test'). To unpack qRT-PCR and understand its use(s), we need to step back and think about genetic information and PCR in the round. Your genes and how PCR amplifies tiny amounts of DNA The genetic information of many species is made of DNA. This is true (as far as we know) for all bacteria, fungi, protozoa, plants, insects and vertebrates, including you. If you need to study the DNA from a small sample of one of these, you can amplify part of it using PCR (polymerase chain reaction - we'll come to the 'RT' part in a minute). This is shown in Figure 1a. PCR is incredibly sensitive. It can start with as little as a single DNA molecule and quickly (in a couple of hours) amplify part of it to produce billions and billions of copies - enough to study in depth. PCR is used widely in research, clinically and in forensic medicine: genomic DNA in a tiny blood stain can be amplified by PCR so that investigators can combine it...

My name is Paul and I am 63 years of age. I live in a village in Wales, with my wife of forty years Kate. Our local is fifty yards away from our home. In mid-May a number of the regulars got together and decided to renovate the pub. The pub was closed under the regulations at this time. The regulars gave freely of their time and money, some spending thousands of pounds out of their own pockets. They didn’t employ anyone as amongst the regulars is every trade known to man. I should point out that all the beer had gone down the drain by May and the beer lines emptied. We joined the group in mid-June. We are both retired. We have both always engaged ourselves in charity work. A Past President of the local Rotary Club, I travelled to Africa to build a bridge over a river in a remote village, water aid etc. I only add this to point out that we are not the local pissheads who can’t go a day without a drink. On July 3rd we commenced work at 10am and during the day painted the walls of the beer garden. A sandwich and a bottle of water for lunch. We were the only people working at the pub that day. From 4pm...

Smoked Salmon: A great source of Vitamin D. Order from Bleiker's Smokehouse in Yorkshire Key points Vitamin D, contrary to popular thought, is not a vitamin. It is an inflammation-regulating steroid hormone involved in many of the body’s essential processes.1 Leaked NHS internal guidance, issued in June 2020, states that “evidence supports a causal role in Vitamin D status and COVID-19 outcomes”, and urges clinicians to “monitor, report and treat”.2 Meanwhile, a NICE rapid evidence review also published in June, states “there is no evidence to support taking vitamin D supplements to specifically prevent or treat COVID‑19.” However, it does re-enforce its September 2018 advice that at-risk groups should take a 10µg supplement all year round.3 Rewind to March 2018: the ‘world’s biggest quango’ NHS England, released new guidance not to issue Vitamin D and many other commonly available over-the-counter (OTC) medicines on prescription, which was intended to save NHS costs by promoting patient self-care.4 Vulnerable elderly care home residents, many of whom lack mental capacity, are unable to obtain Vitamin D without a prescription, as Care and Quality Commission (CQC) regulations prevent tablets being given by care staff without GP Guidance.5 This logistical deadlock has not been resolved, and Vitamin D deficiency has long been known to be widespread in care homes.6 Over 19,000 care home residents in England...

A DJ in Ibiza: The kind of “expert” employed to carry out PCR tests by the Government We were sent the below by someone employed at a PCR testing site in Salisbury. Forgive the intrusion but I was given your contact details courtesy of a mutual friend. I realise the gravity of making this information public and genuinely feel that you are best placed to air my concerns about the fundamentally flawed service provided at testing sites. To be specific, the site operating in Salisbury which has been awarded/allocated without tender or public scrutiny to the unlikely coalition of Mitie and Deloitte. I was accepted for work instantly after applying online at 01.00 in the morning. I filled out a mere two pages of information – no reference checks, no criminal record check, no photographic ID – and started work the following Monday at 08:00. I was deployed into the car park to essentially point and wave at cars for my first two shifts. I was told that we could read books, use our phones and use tablets in our non-customer-facing time. In a 12-hour shift that time could easily be upwards of eight to nine hours. After proving myself with my enthusiastic waving and gesturing to genuinely bemused looking members of the public I was promoted after three days...

I’m not usually a big fan of making predictions. I love the quote, reputedly from Nils Bohr: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. But I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say I don’t think the graph shown by Boris Johnson’s “scientists” yesterday, of over 6000 deaths a day in the UK is going to happen. The fact that it was even shown I just find embarrassing. As a Brit. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s so scientifically illiterate, or whether it’s evidence that the authoritarian elite have so little respect for the people of this country that they can just put up such transparent garbage, to get what they want. Which appears to be the destruction of our wealth and way of life. But there clearly are increasing Covid hospitalisations and deaths currently happening in the UK and in other places. My hypothesis below is that this is because the epidemic was artificially suppressed in April, and now reality is catching up again. The Grim Reaper wants his souls. And I think we can make a reasonable prediction of how many he is coming for, based on how many we tried to prevent him getting the first time around. Apparently, deaths during respiratory epidemics normally follow the Gompertz curve, a feature of which...

The Welsh Dragon is no longer breathing flames. The “firebreak” has demonstrated that there is little resistance to the government line. A short, sharp firebreak has been introduced across Wales to help regain control of coronavirus. This means that a series of restrictive measures will be in place from 6pm Friday 23 October until 12:01am Monday 9 November 2020.The fortnight-long action is needed to save lives and prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed. Cases of coronavirus have been rising sharply in Wales as the virus has woken up for winter. While the national and local measures put in place across Wales have helped to keep that spread under check, there is a growing consensus that additional action is now needed. Who forms this consensus? If numbers are growing, how then have existing measures helped to keep the virus in check? How can the closure of the remaining unlocked 25% of Wales, with little or no incidence, bring down the numbers where the virus is active? The official story says: Between October 9 and 15, there were 4,127 new confirmed cases of coronavirus recorded by Public Health Wales, based on positive test results but the real level of infections will be much higher. The number of people admitted to hospital with coronavirus symptoms is growing daily and sadly so too are the number of...

The Covid Physician Valentine’s Friday, 2020. A quarter century practising medicine. Half in hospitals, half in general practice. I’d been treating unseasonal, politely-coughing, relatively-well patients for the previous two and a half weeks. Extraordinarily, on Saturday at 4am I was abruptly awoken by uncontrollable, whole body, flailing movements. They continued without relent for 5 hours. I’d hypothesised I was having a grand mal seizure, but as I lay violently shaking and goose-pimpled I coldly concluded I was conscious, so these were rigors. I’d witnessed two in my career one as a naïve house officer on a medical ward, and now the second in the comfort of my own bed. It wasn’t my last hurrah. Two Paracetamol, two duvets, two days of bad diarrhoea and I returned to work Monday, a few pounds lighter and clinically puzzled. This was no ordinary fever. As it happens, two other GPs in my vicinity later described similar contemporaneous symptoms, and we all tested negative for Roche’s COVID-19 antibody assay 4 months later. That, however, is not so meaningful since most people are thought to clear the virus without the need for specific SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. On top of this, in PHE’s own studies, Roche’s test demonstrated only 83.9% - 86.7% sensitivity, so it was missing 13-17% of true positives. There are two arms of the...

‘M. Pentadactyla’ On Friday nights in their Delhi sanctuary, Jains light candles to pay tribute to their 24 gods. 1. The original impulse We know that the primary reason for the growth of religion is to satisfy the psychological need for people to come to terms with their mortality. The more death terrifies, the stronger the religious impulse. The essential feat religion must perform is to say that death is not something to fear. Indeed, with the promise of the afterlife, it is not just death’s sting that is removed: death itself is obliterated. “Death hath no more dominion over man”, wrote St Paul in his Epistle to the Romans. In modern times, higher life expectancy and seemingly miraculous life-preserving medical treatments have lessened our fear of death and thus obviated the crippling need for religious consolation. The gnawing anxiety is still there, of course, but it simmers behind the scenes of everyday consciousness, reduced to being, in Flann O’Brien’s words, “an insanitary abstraction in the backyard”. Cut to the beginning of 2020. Like a malevolent star rising in the East, disturbing news emerges from Central China. A potentially fatal novel virus is spreading with the ease of the common cold. There is no cure, no vaccine and no treatment. Modern medicine seems powerless in the face of this new...

by Thucydides I see you have already received a lot of postcards from around the world, but none yet from the country with the longest and most irrational quarantine on the planet! So, allow me to fill in some of the gap (be warned, this gets long). I am a professor in an area of the social sciences (non-woke) related to international politics, and also do some policy analysis for a private institution. Although I miss meeting my students (online classes are in no way a replacement for in-person interaction), I am lucky that my work was not interrupted by the lockdown, my financial position is secure enough that I am well prepared to ride this out. But millions of people are not. South America being so far from the initial outbreaks, we had the benefit of seeing the pandemic unfold earlier almost everywhere else, but it did not do us much good. The images from northern Italy made a strong impression here, since so many people here are descended from Italian immigrants and our cultures have much in common. So, in late March, the Government decided to lock down hard, with the well known argument of flattening the infection curve to allow our inadequate third-world health system to cope with the expected influx of patients. A newly-installed Government facing...