The Open Rights Group has reported the Test and Trace system to the Information Commissioner’s Office watchdog (ICO), sparking a fresh headache for ministers as they seek to prevent a second peak of Covid-19.
The group claims that the programme does not have strong enough safeguards for the sensitive health data that will be collected on potentially millions of people. It is also concerned about who will have access to the data, which is to be held for 20 years, and how it will be used in the decades ahead
EvidenceNotFear
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If social distancing made things better, we would expect a positive correlation on both of these graphs – in other words, earlier social distancing would lead to both earlier flattening of the curve and lower total deaths, meaning these points would all sit close to a diagonal line sloping up from left to right. Instead what we see is very little correlation at all, and what there is is negative. So early social distancing is either doing nothing or making things worse. This is likely because the virus spreads mainly in hospitals, care homes and private homes rather than in the community, so social distancing of the wider population beyond a basic minimum (washing hands, self-isolating when ill, not getting too close, and so on) has little impact.
However, new research from Johns Hopkins University (MD, USA) has found that the chance of these tests giving a false negative – stating no infection when the individual actually is infected – is greater than 1 in 5, at times being far higher. The study, which analyzed seven previously published studies that evaluated RT-PCR performance, calls into question the accuracy of the predictive value of such tests.
Biotechniques, 29 May 2020
In the final analysis, our future depends not on a handful of ministers, but on us, the great majority of the British people, from schoolteachers and shopkeepers to car workers and business leaders.
- There was genuine fear at the beginning but the COVID-19 response is now political.
- Nothing at the beginning of the epidemic justified the subsequent reaction.
- The community suffered from ascertainment bias: hospitals saw the worst form of the virus so they thought we were dealing with a big problem.
- Lockdown means people will be getting nastier versions of the virus.
- We implemented a policy of enormous magnitude without considering the implications. This goes against the most fundamental principle of medicine.
- A significant number of the excess deaths are not victims of COVID-19 but of the lockdown. More than half of the deaths may be found due to other causes.
- The response of the authorities and media has made it impossible to understand what was going on.
- Our huge and emotional overreaction has caused more harm.
- Years of life lost is a more important metric than the number of deaths.
- Most people working in the NHS wouldn’t speak out about these things.
- There were two types of journalism during the epidemic: investigative journalism and illustrative journalism (propaganda). Most of the mainstream media were engaged in propaganda and ended up frightening the people and the government. They need to take their share of the responsibility of the damage caused.
- COVID-19 is nowhere near as bad as previous epidemics.
- The medical establishment should have been speaking out since the beginning of the lockdown. The evidence was pretty clear, pretty quickly.
- Vaccine is a red herring because it’s unlikely we’re going to have one. The Common Cold Research Institute spent 43 years trying to make a vaccine for the common cold and didn’t manage it.
- Track and Trace is extremely worrying and not thought-through with its implications for a Big Brother society. None of it makes sense.
- Social distancing is nonsense. Vulnerable people should be given information and allowed to make their own decisions.
- The NHS is there to protect us. That’s what we pay our taxes for.
- Young people are being thrown in the scrapheap for a disease that isn’t going to affect them.
- As you get older, your immune system starts to ‘forget’ diseases you’ve already had. That’s why older people are more susceptible to getting sick.
- We can say with absolute certainty that there is no overwhelming risk. It’s wrong to say the opposite.
- Many doctors are smart but don’t have a huge amount of time to question things. Most doctors get their information in the same way most people do and unfortunately that information has been very biased. The science has moved on but the narrative has not.
- The media was responsible for amplifying the fear about something they didn’t know about.
- Models are useful scientifically when you have an understanding of something but they’re very bad at predicting outcomes. The government should have known this because we’ve have many examples of models and resulting policies being spectacularly wrong.
- Politicians have forgotten that leadership is not about telling people what they want to hear. Where is the criticism of the narrative?
- There is no evidence that lockdown has had any effect except in modelling. The evidence show that the lockdown plays out in similar way.
Professor Karl Friston is a computer modelling expert, world-renowned for his contributions to neuroscience. He has been applying his “dynamic causal modelling” approach to the Covid-19 pandemic, and has reached some startling results.
– The differences between countries are not primarily down to government actions, but due to ‘intrinsic’ differences in the populations
– We don’t yet fully understand what is driving it, although there are theories ranging from levels of vitamin D to genetic differences
– In each country, there appears to be a portion of the population that is ‘not even in the game’ – that is, not susceptible to Covid-19. This varies hugely between countries
– In the UK, Professor Friston estimates that portion to be at least 50%, and probably more like 80%
– The similar mortality results between Sweden (no lockdown) and the UK (lockdown) are best explained by the fact that in reality there was no difference
– the impact of the legal lockdown in Professor Friston’s models “literally goes away”.
Finally, we can say with confidence what many of us have suspected for weeks: not only is the end of the pandemic now in sight but also the people best-placed to recharge our economy have little to fear from it.
Thanks to definitive figures released yesterday by Public Health England, we know that Covid-19 is not a random killer, but one that targets specific groups – namely the old and those with pre-existing conditions such as diabetes or dementia.
Professor Carl Heneghan, an Oxford University epidemiologist, expects no ‘excess deaths’ by the second week of June, for which the data will not become available until mid-June.
The weekly death toll in England and Wales dropped to its lowest levels since the lockdown began, an Office for National Statistics (ONS) report said today. A total of 1,983 people in England and Wales died with Covid-19 in the week ending May 22, down almost 30 per cent in a week and the lowest figure for two months.
Neil Ferguson, who became known as “professor lockdown” after convincing Boris Johnson to radically curtail everyday freedoms, acknowledged that, despite relying on “quite similar science”, the Swedish authorities had “got a long way to the same effect” without a full lockdown.
The way the data are analysed and presented currently gives them limited value for the first purpose [of understanding the epidemic]. The aim seems to be to show the largest possible number of tests, even at the expense of understanding. It is also hard to believe the statistics work to support the testing programme itself. The statistics and analysis serve neither purpose well.
In a blog post written last month, Mayer said she emailed Gill’s thoracic specialist to ask the question. “His response winded me,” she wrote. The consultant said: “It seemed to me at the time of Andy’s illness that we had not fully understood why he deteriorated as he did. Once we learned more about Covid-19, I thought there was a real possibility that Andy had been infected by Sars-Cov-2.”
Opponents claim exemptions to rules could mean great economic pain for little public health benefit
COVID-19 is losing its potency and no longer clinically exists in Italy, a senior Italian doctor has claimed.
A study conducted at the San Raffaele hospital found that the number of viruses present in people who tested positive decreased significantly between March and May.
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-no-longer-clinically-exists-in-italy-top-doctor-says-11998608
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Lockdown is over – Spiked
And yet the government and the media perpetuate the fiction that lockdown is still in place.
With lockdown at an effective end, this foolish belief will only do us damage. The UK’s GDP is estimated to have fallen by two per cent in the first quarter of 2020. Other factors are inevitably at play, but the first quarter only includes the first week of lockdown. What effect will the past seven weeks of lockdown have on the economy in the second quarter?
Misleading models based on the Spanish flu cannot be allowed to dictate our policy on lifting lockdown
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/01/no-evidence-suggest-coronavirus-second-wave-coming/
When you think about it, there is something very odd about the farrago of the last week. Endless numbers of MPs, many of them Conservative, and a similarly vast array of media outlets received outraged demands for the sacking of the prime minister’s adviser because he allegedly transgressed the rules which have damaged the quality of life of ordinary people. Those who complained said that the deprivations and sacrifices which they have endured at such cost to their personal happiness and welfare were mocked by Dominic Cummings’ actions.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/30/sleepwalking-one-denial-liberties-even-insidious-phase/
Masks and respirators do not work. There have been extensive randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies, and meta-analysis reviews of RCT studies, which all show that masks and respirators do not work to prevent respiratory influenza-like illnesses, or respiratory illnesses believed to be transmitted by droplets and aerosol particles. Furthermore, the relevant known physics and biology, which I review, are such that masks and respirators should not work. It would be a paradox if masks and respirators worked, given what we know about viral respiratory diseases: The main transmission path is long-residence-time aerosol particles (< 2.5 μm), which are too fine to be blocked, and the minimum-infective-dose is smaller than one aerosol particle. The present paper about masks illustrates the degree to which governments, the mainstream media, and institutional propagandists can decide to operate in a science vacuum, or select only incomplete science that serves their interests. Such recklessness is also certainly the case with the current global lockdown of over 1 billion people, an unprecedented experiment in medical and political history.
Update: The researchgate.net link no longer works but an archive on archive.org is available:
Update 2 July 2020: Denis Rancourt talks about his paper in this video.
Update 30 July 2020: Del Bigtree’s channel has been censored by YouTube. His video with Denis Rancourt has been mirrored below.
Three mothers are considering suing the Government over school closures – amid claims they may have breached children’s human rights and pupil’s are being ‘treated like they’re germs’.
The women have also written to the Secretary of State Gavin Williamson to ask whether the ‘long term physical and mental welfare’ of pupils has been considered, and to raise concerns about social distancing.
While news headlines might still be dominated by the healthcare issues around coronavirus – when they’re not about Dominic Cummings – new YouGov tracker data reveals that economic concerns have been quietly rising among the population.
In fact, Britons are now almost as likely to say that ‘the economy’ is one of the top three issues facing the country (61%) as they are to say ‘health’ (66%).
Pharmaceutical companies are putting pressure on scientific results says Philippe Douste-Blazy, Cardiology MD, Former France Health Minister.
Mirror: