I sent this letter to my local MP on 8 September. It is now 23 September and he has not bothered to respond.

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Dear Jeremy Quin MP,

I am writing to you to urge you to vote against any renewal of the coronavirus act 2020 in parliament at the end of September.

The act has done irreparable harm to democracy, destroyed the public’s faith in science and exposed deep-seated systemic failures at all levels within the civil service, NHS, and public health. The execution of the powers within the act have led to the subjugation of the common law to ministerial whim and fiat, in a way we British would normally associate with a banana republic.

As a professor and scientist, I am appalled at the lack of public debate in the media, and am extremely concerned at the suppression and censorship of dissenting views of well-established and credentialed experts from the fields of epidemiology, virology, health etc. I have published numerous papers on covid-19 prevalence and infection rates, track and trace etc and am convinced the infection fatality rate is around the USA CDC’s published Covid fatality rate of 0.26%: similar to that of a ‘bad’ flu year. Why the massive overreaction? And why does this overreaction persist?

One of my friends died in April. He had leukaemia and was released from hospital after a relapse. He died ‘of’ covid-19 and I was told he was released into the block of sheltered housing with two covid-19 positive tests under his belt. Why did this happen? It was NHS policy, passed in response to the government’s coronavirus act. How dysfunctional can things be for this to happen? Whether he died of or ‘with’ coronavirus is of course a moot point, and one the government fails to recognise given the NHS has suspended post-mortems and, in tandem, has approved unethical changes to the death certification process. When are these safeguards against malpractice coming back?

The NHS is empty. I was diagnosed with skin cancer a month ago and have had to coordinate every single step in my treatment (CT scans, surgery, wound care etc), including having to pay a consultant privately for an appointment to get treatment initiated. The hospitals were empty; surgery was carried out at the Nuffield because the NHS hospital was preserved in aspic to be ‘covid free’ and ready for a ‘second wave’. At the Nuffield they threatened to cancel my surgery on the morning it was scheduled because they had lost the covid test result (upon which they said my treatment was conditional). I had to advise matron to use the new dna-nudge cartridge test, which they admitted they had not even unboxed yet. Fortunately, this test result came back negative, otherwise they would have cancelled the lifesaving operation. At no stage did they accept that the surgeon’s judgement, that my operation should go ahead, should be given priority over misplaced bureaucratic protocol and that their risk assessment was woefully imbalanced against the interests of the patient (me!) Now I am told the biopsy result will take 4-6 weeks, when the target is supposed to be 2 weeks.

Patient centred and evidence-based medicine is dead in the NHS. They have also killed it now in the private sector, leaving patients with nowhere to turn. In effect to get anywhere I had to play and battle against the system which was just as much an immediate danger to my health as the disease. Cancer is bad enough but the stress of fighting bureaucracy in the NHS does not make it any easier. Luckily for me I can navigate this nonsense and know what levers to pull, but what about those who have been terrified by the government’s messaging into accepting their fate?

Parliament has been absent without leave. It is a disgrace and its members should be ashamed of themselves. The government is myopic, suffering from panic and group think and is not open to evidence it does not want to hear. It needs shock treatment and action.
I strongly urge you to vote against renewal, for if you do not do so the avoidable deaths of many of your constituents will be caused by your complicity in this ongoing tragic farce.

Yours,

Prof. Martin Neil