Donate

Why Boris Must Halt the Child Vaccine Programme

There follows a guest post by Dr Ros Jones, a retired consultant paediatrician and member of HART.

If, a year ago, someone had asked if we should give children a brand-new vaccine with no long-term safety data for a disease that barely affects them, they would have been laughed out of court. But here we are today, considering doing exactly that and not even with the pretence that it is for their own safety. It is because adults think it is okay to ask children to take a medicine which may cause them harm to protect us. Yet the adults clamouring for this have all been vaccinated already. 

Two weeks ago, 40 UK doctors wrote to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) calling for a halt to any proposals to widen the temporary emergency authorisation for COVID-19 vaccines to include children on the grounds of major safety concerns. We now learn that this is such a complex ethical question that the JCVI will pass the responsibility to the Prime Minister. The entire management of the pandemic has been politicised to the detriment of open scientific and ethical debate and it is totally inappropriate for child health to become a potential political football.  The urgency for such debate has increased by the approval, first in North America and now Europe, for vaccination of 12-to-17-year-olds, and Pfizer’s application is currently lodged with the MHRA. So what is the medical, ethical and legal basis for such a move?

The medical case for children

Children are mercifully at incredibly low risk for COVID-19, with the vast majority having mild to no symptoms, few hospital admissions and even fewer requiring intensive care. There were nine Covid-associated deaths in under-15s in the whole of 2020, all with prior life-limiting conditions and accounting for 0.3% of all cause deaths in this age group. Any adolescent at extremely high risk may already receive a vaccine and this should not inform policy for an entire age group. Long Covid has also been raised as a concern, but in children it is milder and shorter-lived than in adults, with studies reporting complete recovery.

Safety

So if the disease is extremely mild for children, what of potential adverse effects of vaccination? Tragically, in recent weeks we have seen reports of thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT), an extremely rare condition, occurring in a significant number of young adults following vaccination, with cerebral venous strokes, some fatal. VITT was not detected in any of the trials but the MHRA now quotes the incidence following AstraZeneca vaccination as 1 in 77,000, stating ‘the data shows there is a higher reported incidence rate in younger adult age groups compared with older groups’. Doctors advising an individual on benefits and risks are left to guess how much higher but AstraZeneca vaccine was withdrawn for under 30s and latterly under 40s, and the Oxford children’s trial was suspended. Pfizer appears to have similar thrombotic problems though possibly at a lower rate and this is likely to be a class effect involving the spike protein. With Pfizer, the Israel Health Ministry have confirmed that myocarditis is occurring  at a rate of 1 in 41,730 for the 2nd dose in young men aged 16-30s, but highest in 16-19s. These are not trivial side-effects: they are potentially fatal or life-changing and appear to be occurring at a rate which is higher than that of severe outcomes for childhood Covid infections. This is without considering any as yet unknown longer-term adverse effects and bearing in mind that only 1,134 children were vaccinated in the Pfizer trials. Following the tenet “First do no harm”, routine vaccination of children against COVID-19 is contra-indicated.

Why Boris Must Halt the Child Vaccine ProgrammeRead More

By Will Jones  /  3 June 2021 • 12.22
       
125 comments

Michael Gove Hints at Extension of Furlough Scheme

The Government is “open minded” about extending the furlough scheme, according to Michael Gove, amid pressure from Nicola Sturgeon. Gove insisted that spending in response to Covid will remain high to help the country “build back better”. The Evening Standard has the story.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will use a Four-Nations Summit with the Prime Minister on Thursday to push for the job retention scheme to continue beyond its current September expiry date.

Now Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove has indicated it could be continued.

Asked about the possibility of this, he said: “We are open minded, yes.”

Speaking ahead of the Four-Nations Summit on tackling Covid, Mr Gove said the initiative, which sees the taxpayer pay cash towards workers’ wages, had been a “huge success” that was only possible “thanks to the broad shoulders of the U.K. Treasury”.

The U.K. Government minister insisted higher spending as a response to the coronavirus pandemic would continue, as the country as a whole seeks to “build back better”.

The Scottish Government has voiced concerns about a possible return to austerity from the Conservatives at Westminster, but Mr Gove told BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme: “We’ll be spending more.

“We’ll be spending more on the NHS, we will be spending more on education, we will be spending more on criminal justice, because in all of these areas it is absolutely vital that we build back better.

“Extra funding for everyone will continue, and it is important we all learn from each other about how that money should be spent.”

Last week, hospitality industry bosses called on the Government to do the opposite, to end the furlough scheme, arguing that people on furlough would rather stay at home than work. The Sun highlighted that there are currently 188,000 job vacancies in hospitality where more than 250,000 workers remain on furlough.

The Evening Standard report is worth reading in full.

By Michael Curzon  /  3 June 2021 • 11.59
   
68 comments

Portugal Axed from “Green List”

Portugal is due to be removed from the Government’s “Green List”, being placed on the “Amber List” from next Tuesday. It seems completely incomprehensible, given that the British Government just allowed 16,500 English football fans to travel there en masse to watch last week’s Champions League final. The Telegraph has the story.

Portugal is set to be axed from the U.K.’s green list, forcing thousands of British holidaymakers to cancel their trips or cut short their breaks to avoid quarantine.

Ministers are understood to have decided on Thursday morning to add Portugal to the amber list from next Tuesday at 4am after tests revealed what are believed to be previously-unknown variants of Covid. It will mean anyone returning from Portugal after then will have to quarantine for 10 days and take at least two PCR tests.

Sources said ministers had decided that with just weeks to go to the lifting of the final Covid restrictions on June 21, they should “not do anything that jeopardises further unlocking at this point.”

In another report, the Telegraph speculates that cases could be rising in Portugal due to – you guessed it – the British Government’s decision to allow English football fans to attend the Champions League final in Porto.

Two events have served to spark new concerns over rising infection rates in Portugal – and both involved football.

The celebrations for Lisbon’s Sporting Clube de Portugal title win saw thousands of fans gather in a cavalcade before moving into the city centre, many maskless, with few socially distancing and most singing.

It has been linked by experts to a surge in cases in the capital that saw the city centre placed on alert last week, with more than 120 cases per 100,000 people per fortnight.

The second involved the 16,500 English fans who arrived in Porto at the weekend to see Chelsea’s 1-0 victory over Manchester City in the Champions League final. Thousands were pictured ignoring social distancing rules and wearing face masks as they thronged in bars by the Douro river.

The regional health authority for the Porto area said those who were in or near fan zones at the weekend should “reduce contacts over the next two weeks” and look out for Covid symptoms.  

Worth reading in full.

What makes this decision so odd is that cases don’t appear to be rising in Portugal – at least, hardly at all.

Stop Press: No countries have been added to the “Green List” today. MailOnline has more.

By Michael Curzon  /  3 June 2021 • 11.40
     
49 comments

Sweden’s Mortality Rate Last Year Was Lower Than in 2015

As I’ve mentioned several times, when you calculate mortality the correct way – as the age-standardised mortality rate, or as life expectancy – the year 2020 in England doesn’t look that unusual. Last year’s rate was a fair bit higher than 2019’s, but that was a year of unusually low mortality. 

Plotting the age-standardised mortality rate over time (as the ONS has been doing each month since July of 2020) shows that mortality last year rose to a level last seen in 2008. So while the year-on-year change was large, the level wasn’t particularly high – at least by historical standards. 

Interestingly, this point even found its way into a BBC article last September. The author noted:

And if you look at the age-adjusted mortality rates, which take into account the size and age of the population, you can see that while 2020 has undoubtedly been a bad year compared to recent years, what has been seen in terms of people dying is not completely out of sync with recent history. It is actually comparable with what happened in the 2000s.

Given that 2008 – which, to repeat, saw a higher level of morality than last year – wasn’t that long ago, one might argue the pandemic’s lethality has been overhyped. Of course, others would contend that, if we hadn’t taken the drastic measures we did take, mortality would have risen to a far higher level.

But I’m not convinced the UK’s lockdowns did do much to curb mortality, over and above the effect of restrictions on large gatherings and voluntary social distancing. And I’d argue that we could have saved more lives with a well-executed focused protection strategy.

However, many people continue to insist that mortality would have been far higher in the absence of lockdowns. It’s therefore worth looking once again at Sweden – the only major European country that didn’t lock down.

We already know that Sweden’s age-adjusted excess mortality up to week 51 was only 1.7% – below the European average. But when was the last time its mortality rate was as high as last year?

Going up to the end of week 52, the rate for 2020 – based on the European Standard Population – comes out as 16.4 per 100,000 (which is actually lower than in Denmark). And the last time Sweden saw this level of morality was in 2015 – just five years ago.

So despite taking the least restrictive approach of any major Western country, Sweden’s mortality rate only returned to the level of 2015. This casts doubt on the claim that mortality in the UK would have been much higher in the absence of lockdowns.

By Noah Carl  /  3 June 2021 • 08.31
     
21 comments

End the Mask Mandates Now: Launch of the ‘Smile Free’ Campaign

We’re publishing today a new piece by Dr Gary Sidley, a retired Consultant Clinical Psychologist and member of HART, to coincide with the launch of the ‘Smile Free’ campaign that he and colleagues have started to campaign for the repeal of mask mandates in the U.K.

Dr Sidley’s core argument is: “Never mind that masks don’t work, masking the healthy harms us all socially and psychologically: all mandates must end on June 21st.”

Here’s the opening:

The Government requirement for healthy people to wear a face covering in a range of indoor community settings, purportedly to reduce the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has arguably been the most insidious of all the coronavirus restrictions.

Anyone reluctant to wear a face covering risks being challenged by others: “It’s only a mask”; “It’s no big deal”; “If it prevents just one infection, it’s worth it”. These comments are based on the premise that healthy people have nothing to lose from donning a mask when moving around their communities, but they fail to recognise an important truth: Masking the healthy is not, and has never been, a benign intervention.

Anyone remotely sceptical may already know that, prior to June 2020, public health organisations and their experts did not endorse masking healthy people in the community as a means of reducing viral transmission and that, in the real world, mask mandates or the lack thereof appear to have made no discernible difference to the spread of coronavirus.

Famously, the decision of Texas to ditch their mask mandates was called “Neanderthal thinking” by President Biden – only for the Lone Star State to witness declining cases ever since.

Worth reading in full and get involved with the campaign here.

By Will Jones  /  3 June 2021 • 08.18
       
45 comments

The Virus “Looks Engineered”, Dr Fauci was Told by a Leading Scientist, Before Both of Them Actively Suppressed the Lab Leak Theory

Why did senior U.S. Government Covid adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and other leading scientists seek to quash any suggestion of a lab leak origin back in early 2020 and ensure it was written off as a conspiracy theory? That’s what many people are asking now that a lab leak is being seen, including by Dr. Fauci himself and President Joe Biden, as a possibility worth investigating.

In May 2020, Dr Fauci was unequivocal: “If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated… Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.” Yet now he has changed his tune. On May 11th he stated that he is “not confident” the virus developed naturally and he is “perfectly in favour of any investigation that looks into the origin of the virus”.

The controversy has escalated in the last couple of days after the publication of emails from February 2020 that show Dr. Fauci being told by Dr. Kristian Andersen, Director of Infectious Disease Genomics at the Scripps Research Institute, that SARS-CoV-2 features “look engineered“.

In the emails, obtained by BuzzFeed through Freedom of Information enquiries, Dr. Anderson wrote: “I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.”

It seems the opinions did change, as six weeks later Dr. Anderson was a lead signatory of a letter in Nature that declared: “The evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus.”

In the wake of the revelation about his February email, Dr. Anderson has doubled down and defended his Nature letter, tweeting: “As I have said many times, we seriously considered a lab leak a possibility. However, significant new data, extensive analyses, and many discussions led to the conclusions in our paper. What the email shows, is a clear example of the scientific process.”

The Virus “Looks Engineered”, Dr Fauci was Told by a Leading Scientist, Before Both of Them Actively Suppressed the Lab Leak TheoryRead More

By Will Jones  /  3 June 2021 • 01.46
       
115 comments

News Round-Up

By Jonathan Barr  /  3 June 2021 • 01.31
 
29 comments

Postcard From Toronto

We’re publishing a new postcard today, our first in a while. This one is a postcard from Toronto, which has been in lockdown in one form or another since last November. The Ontario Premier Doug Ford hit the “emergency brake” in April, ramping up restrictions, and it hasn’t been released yet. Our correspondent, Catherine Brennan, is more than a little fed up. In the following extract, she writes about attending her first anti-lockdown protest a couple of weeks ago:

I have to admit, I felt somewhat nervous about going to the rally. Would I be arrested? What would these protesters be like? An unruly mob, frothing at the mouth with questionable personal hygiene? One left-leaning politician (and in Canada we’re all rather left-leaning – so this guy is practically falling over), warned that these rallies were full of white supremacists. While I am white, and no amount of self-tan can disguise my Irish legs, I struggled to find anyone to fit that description so cruelly slurred by the noticeably absent MP. How did he know who attended when he himself wasn’t there? So I asked my friend, she of Russian-Jewish parents who fled the pogroms living in barns for two years – was she secretly a white supremacist? I asked the lovely black couple who, very sensibly, set up lawn chairs to enjoy the convivial atmosphere. Why are you here, I asked. They answered, like so many other people I spoke with, that they were worried for their kids, whose lives have been on hold. They too had called their local politicians only to hear canned responses. Like me, they wondered whether a better balance might be struck between absolute risk and relative risk. They were disturbed by the political deafness on how lockdowns have affected kids’ welfare. These were not anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers or any other of the ad hominem name-calling around dissent these days. They were there to show support in a time of great isolation.

Worth reading in full.

By Toby Young  /  2 June 2021 • 19.39
   
8 comments

How Far Should We Take Civil Disobedience to the Public Health Police State?

We’re publishing another original essay today by Donald S. Siegel and Robert M. Sauer, two professors of social science, about what ordinary people can do to push back against what they call “the public health police state”. They believe a good role model is Artur Pawlowsky, the Polish-Canadian minister who saw off the police when they tried to shut down his Calgary church on Good Friday. Here is an extract:

Unfortunately, resistance to the Branch Covidians has been too passive. We are reminded of the famous scene from the Godfather, involving Johnny Fontane and Don Vito Corleone. Johnny Fontane was the godson of Don Vito Corleone and a famous singer.

In the scene, the whimpering Fontane is complaining to the Godfather about the studio head who will not give him a movie part that is ideally suited to him and will launch his film career. He whines to Don Corleone, stating: “Oh, Godfather, I don’t know what to do.” The exasperated Godfather takes him by the neck and screams the following: “You can act like a man!”

An example of such a real man is Artur Pawlowski, a Polish-Canadian minister based in Calgary, who has bravely defied the Government’s COVID-19 public health orders. In Calgary, as in other parts of Canada, the severity of coronavirus restrictions is matched only by the paucity of the virus. Artur became a YouTube sensation when he openly defied the police and the public health inspector when they interrupted his religious service on Good Friday, referring to them as “Nazis” and “Gestapo” and belligerently demanded that they leave the church. He was ultimately arrested by the authorities.

In our view, Pastor Pawlowski is the modern-day equivalent of Cardinal József Mindszenty, leader of the Catholic Church in Hungary, who came to represent uncompromising opposition to fascism and communism in Hungary. After WWII, Cardinal Mindszenty was jailed and tortured by the Communists and given a life sentence in a 1949 show trial that was widely condemned in the West. Midszenty was ultimately freed and remains a potent symbol of opposition to Communism and a great example of resistance to the totalitarian repression of religious freedom. We need more religious leaders like Pawlowski and Midszenty to stand up to the public health police state. We also deeply admire the courage of the ultra-orthodox Jewish leadership in the U.S. and Israel for their enlightened opposition and vigorous civil disobedience.

Worth reading in full.

By Toby Young  /  2 June 2021 • 19.16
     
37 comments

Almost 40% Of Recent Covid Victims Died Primarily of Other Conditions

Reported Covid deaths have been low in recent weeks but the real number of people for whom the virus was a major cause of death is lower still, according to the latest figures which show that almost 40% of recently registered Covid deaths in England and Wales were people who died primarily from another condition. The Telegraph has the story.

Out of 107 Covid deaths registered in the week ending May 21st, just 66 had the virus recorded as the underlying cause of death – 61.7%. 

For the rest of the cases, although coronavirus was mentioned on the death certificate it was not a major cause.

It is the lowest number of deaths with Covid as the underlying cause since the week ending March 13th, 2020 – the first week that deaths involving Covid were registered in England and Wales, when just five registrations were listed.

The ONS continues to include those who did not primarily die of Covid in its official statistics, even though the World Health Organisation has issued guidance warning they should not be classified as Covid deaths in official figures.

The data lends support to claims that although cases have been rising in Britain in recent weeks, due largely to the Indian [“Delta”] variant, that is not so far translating into a significant increase in deaths.

On Tuesday, the Government announced the first day without any Covid deaths since before the first lockdown in March last year…

The weekly ONS data show that Covid is now mentioned in only around one in 90 death registrations in England and Wales – the equivalent of just 1.1% of all deaths registered in the week.

It is the lowest proportion since the week ending September 11th, when the figure was 1.0%. At the peak of the second wave, in the week ending January 29th, the figure stood at 45.7%. 

The number of Covid deaths registered in England and Wales in the most recent week, to May 21st, is also the lowest since the week to September 11th.

Worth reading in full.

By Michael Curzon  /  2 June 2021 • 15.38
   
30 comments