by Rob Lyons
As the old joke goes, “You had one job.” Public Health England (PHE) is an executive agency of the Department for Health and Social Care. It’s fundamental mission is “to protect the public’s health from infectious diseases and other public health hazards”. Yet as the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded, it’s increasingly clear that it is failing.
PHE has long been more interested in lecturing us about our lifestyles than making the crucial preparations for another pandemic. As Christopher Snowdon pointed out in the Spectator, PHE spent £220 million on anti-obesity schemes in 2018-19, but just £89 million on tackling infectious diseases. We can watch our own waistlines, thanks very much, but dealing with a pandemic requires a national response. PHE has been asleep at the wheel.
Critics have noted that the Government’s committee of scientific advisers, SAGE, doesn’t include any public health panjandrums. But why would it? Expertise on developing cartoon-character smartphone apps about healthy eating or running another round of Stoptober anti-smoking campaigns is about as much use in the current situation as the proverbial chocolate teapot.
When PHE has been called upon in the current crisis, it has not risen to the occasion. One important area where PHE could have excelled was rapidly scaling up testing. The UK’s capacity for testing at the start of the crisis was pitiful and the first attempt to launch a ‘track-and-trace’ programme was abandoned in March – in part, it would seem, because the capacity for testing and the ability to turn around results quickly simply wasn’t there. Health and social care services have been crying out for greater testing so that staff could be checked, allowing some to return to work if they tested negative and helping to minimise deaths in care homes.
Part of the problem was that PHE was determined to keep testing in-house, failing to exploit the resources available in other public and private-sector labs. Initially, all the testing was done at PHE’s facility in Colindale, North London. By March 11th, PHE claimed it had conducted 25,000 tests in total and was aiming at some point in the future to get to 25,000 per day. That clearly wasn’t enough.
Fear not, however. At least PHE was getting on with the important task of promoting equality and diversity. In February, when it should have been stretching every sinew to increase our testing capacity, it somehow found time to publish a virtue-signalling equality report. The document begins: “PHE aims to maximise opportunities to become more ambitious in its approach to creating a more diverse, and diversity-aware workforce, and promote equality and fairness in the way it designs or delivers products and services.”
And if you think that’s bad, check out this passage from PHE’s latest annual report:
The Advisory Board met in public on five occasions. Each meeting considered a core area of PHE’s business and provided valuable insight into shaping our approach. The following topics were considered by the Advisory Board during 2018/19: • sugar reduction and reformulation programme • sexual health • environmental public health • an independent report commissioned by PHE from Professor Parish following an employment tribunal, and PHE’s management response
Public Health England Annual Report and Accounts 2018/19
It was only at the end of April, driven by Matt Hancock’s 100,000-tests-a-day deadline, that testing finally ramped up – and PHE has only twice managed to meet that target in May. For all the talk about NHSx’s ambitious “track-and-trace” app, inadequate testing could still delay our escape from lockdown.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that PHE is a less-than-dynamic organisation. Far from being staffed by the brightest and the best, innovative and entrepreneurial, PHE is run by the usual quangocrats. These are people whose CVs describe a merry-go-round ride of one job after another for which they are, at best, only moderately qualified. Having delivered uninspiring leadership in one organisation, they move along to “lead” another, accumulating vast pensions and titles along the way.
The Chair of PHE is Dame Julia Goodfellow. A physics graduate at Bristol University in the early 1970s, her PhD was in biophysics at Oxford and she went on to become Professor of Biomedical Science at Birkbeck College in 1995.
She became Chief Executive at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), one of the numerous public bodies funding research and running research institutes in the UK. In March 2007, the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology noted that BBSRC was the research body “criticised most thoroughly” in an official review by Gavin Costigan. Fortunately, Goodfellow was already in the process of moving on, becoming Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kent that autumn.
As with many universities, Kent under Goodfellow’s leadership had ambitious plans for expansion and aimed to become “the UK’s European university”. However, given what’s happened, what with Brexit and the pandemic, Dame Julia’s decision to take out a loan of £75 million from the European Investment Bank in 2014 to pay for Kent’s expansion now looks questionable. Still, she enjoyed the perks of being the boss of a large organisation. She spent an astonishing £26,635 on flights in 2014–2015 – almost all in first or business class – and was paid a salary of £272,000.
She was the elected president of Universities UK from 2015 to 2017, during which time the organisation was at the forefront of campaigning for Britain to remain in the European Union. Indeed, under her presidency, Universities UK led the Universities for Europe campaign.
In 2018, she became the chair of PHE’s advisory board, which is “responsible for providing strategic advice on the running of PHE, assuring the effectiveness of PHE’s corporate governance arrangements, and for advising the Chief Executive”. So it was central to Goodfellow’s job to make sure that it could deliver on PHE’s most important responsibility – tackling infectious disease. Yet, as we have seen, PHE has been failing in this critical role.
Governments often over-react to news of the latest viral outbreak. One of the reasons we should be able to relax more is because, for a relatively small sum in the grand scheme of things, experts and administrators should be thinking through the kinds of resources we will need to have in place should the worst happen. It’s clear that PHE hasn’t done that.
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Fancy that the BBC shilling for big pharma blob.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/will-disease-x-leaked-2025/5847210
“At this point, it’s quite clear that “biosecurity” is the chosen means by which the globalist cabal intends to seize power over the world. The WHO is working on securing sole power over pandemic response globally through its international pandemic treaty which, if implemented, will eradicate the sovereignty of all member nations.
The WHO’s pandemic treaty is the gateway to a global, top-down totalitarian regime, a one world government. Ultimately, the WHO intends to dictate all health care. But to secure that power, they will need more pandemics. COVID-19 alone was not enough to get everyone onboard with a centralized pandemic response unit, and they probably knew that from the start.
So, the reason we can be sure there will be additional pandemics, whether manufactured using either fear and hype alone or an actual bioweapon created for this very purpose, is because the takeover plan, aka The Great Reset, is based on the premise that we need global biosecurity surveillance and centralized response.
Biosecurity, in turn, is the justification for an international vaccine passport, which the G20 has signed on to, and that passport will also be your digital identification. That digital ID, then, will be tied to your social credit score, personal carbon footprint tracker, medical records, educational records, work records, social media presence, purchase records, your bank accounts and a programmable central bank digital currency (CBDC).
Once all these pieces are fully connected, you’ll be in a digital prison, and the ruling cabal — whether officially a one world government by then or not — will have total control over your life from cradle to grave.”
No offence to Drs Heneghan and Jeffries for interrupting this thread.
In terms of weight loss I think it has to come from a position of self-control because obviously for it to be meaningful and beneficial to health it has to be something that can be sustained ideally for life. Lots of people get a gym membership for a few months but then get bored with it. You have to find a discipline where even if you had twenty lifetimes you wouldn’t be able to indulge it enough. Then you appetites will start to become regulated. Life is short and art is long as they say so it is worth the journey of discovery to find a transcendent passion.
Self control is not allowed in the new order.
Your health is the responsibility of the authorities.
Didn’t you know the easy way to health and fitness is by popping pills? – according to Pfizer at least.
After becoming an expert in weight gain, I now consider myself an expert in weight loss. Having gone from 110kg to 90 in the last two years. I’ve yoyo dieted in the past failing to sustain weight loss. And having an engineering mind grounded in proper physics, for too long I was beguiled by calorie counting. While it’s true the law of thermodynamics is inviolable and we get fat because of too many calories in and two few out, and while it is also true, it was only ever my elbow bending to my cake hole and putting the calories in there, this nevertheless ignores the processes and cycles that generate cravings that will inevitably lead to failure.
TBH losing weight this time and sustaining and sustaining it has been easy (now I am where I am – which I will explain below) because I now have and understanding of how the body works in relation to food an nutrition, much of it curtesy of YouTube and Dr Sten Ekberg, who has produced a brilliant set of videos which paint a very clear picture of how the body actually works to supply nutrition and energy.
The bad news. I’ve given up sugar and alcohol completely. Neither of which I expected I would be able to sustain. But actually having done this has resulted in some deep seated realisations about how the brain works in relation to food such that now staying away from both these vices has become easier than I expected. I’ve also massively reduced my carbohydrate intake. The realisations this has led to has been profound.
But I have an admission to make. I would not have succeeded in any of this if I had not had a profound enough health scare (I suspected cancer) such that I decided I would, for at least 6 months do the radical zero sugar, starve the (suspected) cancer of sugar diet (which also, since there is so much sugar in alcoholic drinks and even for near pure spirits the body converts alcohol to sugar). So I was mentally prepared to go through some barriers I might not have got through were it not for fear of dying.
Got a cure for Cheese n Onion crisps?
PS I’m not overweight, but I do get “crisp cravings.”
Quite right
I’m not in need of losing weight but if I were I don’t think I’d be wanting that thing in me. Being hugely fat is probably not good for most people but I think I’d rather the “public health” industry stopped trying to influence people’s lifestyle choices. Actually I would quite like the “public health” industry to disappear entirely.
Indeed, “public health” has well and truly jumped the shark long ago.
Certainly with regard to “covid” the effect on the health of the public has been net negative.
Honestly the solution to most of this is very simple or should but it can’t be fully understood without looking at the history of the refined sugar industry. Not just its own machinations but the bent that it put upon nutritional science especially from the 1950s in terms of the role of carbohydrates in ther diet. The British and American diets are perhaps the worst in this regard. Most people think that carbohydrates should form the most substantial part of a meal. Of course their cheapness is a factor too and they work well as ballast for an empty stomach and for people involved in heavy manual labour. But in my experience processed carbohydrates tend to have all sorts of deleterious effects. Also most people think that eating fat makes you fat and this is a big problem.
Yep excessive carbohydrate consumption is responsible for much of the ill’s people face today. It results in high blood sugar, which the body can’t cope with, which leads over time to insulin resistance and metabolic disease, which in turn are responsible for a whopping 95% of the ailments people get treatment for. I recommend 1) When you see a food that is primarily carbohydrate, put a big visual equals sign next to it, and visualise a pile of sugar. Because that is what the body very quickly turns it into, and with unnerving efficiency. 2) When you see a pint of beer, transform that also in your minds eye, into a small loaf of bread. So yes, then another equals sign and a pile of sugar. Beer is in many respects akin to liquid bread. Albeit bread doesn’t lead you to feeling so enjoyably drunk.
GB News jab pushers:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzYimCWuuMs
There are presenters and guests on GB News who are “jab pushers”, and there are presenters and guests on GB News who are completely opposed to pushing the jabs, and there are presenters and guests on GB News who are completely opposed to the jabs. It’s a free speech channel, not an echo chamber.
The deeper issue is the parting of the ways. If someone on television tells you something then it is likely to be either nonsense or poison. You only have so long to learn this lesson. The Australian aboriginies started talking about it in 2018. How it would start with a run on toilet paper in the supermarkets. I’m sure we all remember that dismal episode. It really was with the toilet paper and the attitude towards it that the new spirit was born. We don’t care about toilet paper. I am happy to use the same old rag for years or even more primitive methods. I think it is important to mediate on that time in early 2020 and just to understand the nature of the schism.
Toilet paper is actually one of the least efficient methods of washing your anus for several reasion. First of all it is dry and so relies upon absorption. Secondly it tends to pick up some faces but then spread feacl matter around the backside region. It can break leaving parts of itself within the crack which can linger for an indefinite time. It depends on front to back or back to front action. Obviously you don’t want to be depositing fecal matter into the vagina. It really isn’t the best method to begin with.
If you ever run out a handstand in the shower is a better and more economic alternative.
Netherlands and Germany are the latest countries to announce they’ve stopped/paused funding terrorism and are no longer giving money to Jihadist support and training organization, UNWRA. That’s 9 countries so far and hopefully more will follow.
https://twitter.com/HillelNeuer/status/1751337730494054470
https://expose-news.com/2024/01/26/this-is-the-end/
Dr Vernon Coleman giving a heartfelt goodbye. He is ending his writing and the videos in order to look after his wife who is recovering from cancer.
His story of the last four years makes for painful reading.
I am grateful to Dr Coleman because he was one of the first sensible people I found who confirmed my early suspicions re the Scamdemic.
Best wishes and thank you Dr Coleman to you and your wife. A brave man. A brave team.
God bless.