The World Health Organization amplified false Chinese statements about COVID-19 initially, while it dragging its feet on declaring an international emergency. Pandemic experts here clung to flu epidemic plans too, ignoring observable COVID-19 successes in East Asia and so ruling out any similar possibility of test-and-trace containment in the UK from the off.
Most public health experts then pivoted to being extremely pro-lockdown, but stuck rigidly to this even as the context, and so the costs and benefits of restrictions, changed with the vaccines and omicron.
Epidemiologists proved especially stubborn. Their modelling usually ignored the role of voluntary behavioural change entirely, so erred on the side of assuming catastrophic public health outcomes absent government mandates and restrictions. Hence, Freedom Day was dubbed “criminal” by scientists, while the government’s scientific advisers called for more restrictions last Christmas. Both proved wrong in retrospect.
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The National Grid is paying households to ration their power usage at peak times amid a scramble to reduce pressure on Britain’s energy infrastructure.
From Friday up to 1.4m households will be paid if they cut their normal electricity consumption at certain two-hour periods during the day, as an experiment to see how households’ behavior might be changed.
The move is a pilot scheme intended to pave the way for a broader overhaul of the country’s billing system as the UK ditches reliable but dirty fossil fuel plants.
The Government’s “grossly unethical” uses of its “nudge unit” inflated fear among the public during the Covid pandemic, psychologists have said – prompting MPs to launch an investigation into scare adverts.
A group of psychologists have written to Parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, warning that a team of civil servants dedicated to “nudging” public behaviour during the pandemic were unaccountable and unethical.
The letter’s 40 professional signatories – led by Dr Gary Sidley, a retired clinical psychologist – said they opposed the use of dramatic adverts, which included slogans such as: “If you go out you can spread it, people will die.”
Daily reported Covid death figures are too high because people are dying from conditions unrelated to the virus after testing positive, Sajid Javid has admitted.
On Wednesday, there were 359 deaths reported in Britain, but the Health Secretary said that “many” people were being included in the count who “would not have necessarily died of Covid”.
His comments came after death data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show a large discrepancy in weekly death registrations compared to the figures released on the Government dashboard.
For the week ending Jan 7, the UK Health Security Agency reported 1,282 deaths of people who had died within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus.
However, ONS data show there were just 992 death registrations with Covid mentioned on the death certificate in that week.
How did we listen to that bonkers, ahem, advice with a straight face? I thought it was worth compiling a list of the 50 craziest measures
Children with learning disabilities were offered “do not resuscitate” orders during the pandemic, The Telegraph can disclose.
GP surgeries asked if teenagers with autism and Down’s syndrome wanted not to be resuscitated, amid concerns about the pressure on the NHS.
The Telegraph has spoken to two families who were asked about the controversial orders – known as DNACPRs – during routine appointments.
The omicron epidemic is being driven by young, vaccinated people, according to mounting data from countries as diverse as the UK, Denmark and South Africa.
The new variant has now been detected in more than 60 countries, including 24 in Europe, with a similar pattern of infection and characteristics being reported across the globe.
…Data from Denmark – a world leader in genetic sequencing – shows that, of 3,437 omicron cases detected, just over 70 per cent have been among those younger than 40, according to the breakdown from the Statens Serum Institut published on Monday.
Some 75 per cent of these cases were in fully vaccinated individuals, the institute added, confirming that even the double jabbed can carry the virus.
Up to 740,000 potential cancer cases that should have been urgently referred by GPs have been “missed” since the first lockdown, according to a damning report.
Watchdogs also warned that NHS waiting lists could keep growing until 2025 and even reach double the current six million.
Charities said the report by the National Audit Office (NAO) reflected a “devastating” situation for many patients, with medics warning of “the biggest cancer catastrophe ever to hit the NHS”.
Only six healthy children with no underlying health conditions died as a direct result of catching Covid during a 12-month window, NHS analysis has revealed.
Four died from Covid, while two developed a Kawasaki-like inflammatory condition called Pims-TS, caused by the virus.
The data calls into question the wisdom of closing schools and forcing children to spend months at home when the health risk to under-18s is so small.
Children ‘have 99.995 per cent chance’ of surviving virus
Covid may no longer be the most “significant” threat to health, Dr Jenny Harries has said.
The chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency said today that Covid was possibly no more dangerous than flu, as she warned that there would be a lower immunity to the illness this year.
She said: “It is important to remember that for an average flu season it’s about 11,000 deaths a year, it’s somewhere between four (thousand) to 22,000 over the last four to five years.
Part of the rush to dismiss women on the basis of little to no evidence comes – no doubt – from a well-meaning, but ultimately misguided effort to reduce vaccine hesitancy in young women, although if anything will drive hesitancy it is surely exactly this kind of medical gaslighting. More broadly, being disbelieved and dismissed by the medical establishment is nothing new for women, who are used to being, for example, prescribed antidepressants when they present to doctors in pain (men who present with similar symptoms are more likely to be prescribed painkillers). Women are simply not considered to be reliable narrators of their own bodies.
A lack of face-to-face appointments during the coronavirus pandemic may have contributed to stillbirths in the first wave, investigators have found.
The study by the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB) into 37 cases found that remote consultations may have driven down the ability to carry out key pregnancy checks, with some doctors unable to access medical records.
The review was prompted by an increase in stillbirths after the onset of labour referred to the HSIB between April and June 2020 – 45 compared with 24 in the same period in 2019.
None of the women were recorded as having Covid, but the report found the pressures and changes as a result of the pandemic may have affected the care they received.
The mRNA technology, which has proved so crucial to the vaccine breakthroughs, was, at the time, also considered too experimental by Dr Phil Dormitzer, Pfizer’s vice-president and chief scientific officer for viral vaccines.
All but one scientist who penned a letter in The Lancet dismissing the possibility that coronavirus could have come from a lab in Wuhan were linked to its Chinese researchers, their colleagues or funders, a Telegraph investigation can reveal.
The influential journal published a letter on March 7 last year from 27 scientists in which they stated that they “strongly condemned conspiracy theories” surrounding Covid-19.
Teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems from the vaccine than be hospitalised from Covid-19, a major study has found.
Children who face the highest risk of a “cardiac adverse event” are boys aged between 12 and 15 following two doses of a vaccine, according to new research from the US.
The first thing to emphasise is that this fall is not the result of some special temporary factor. It isn’t that there was a week of glorious sunshine, the temporary introduction of a new set of restrictions, a sudden change in the testing rules or even the dropping out of the numbers of a previous shock that had temporarily raised numbers. It’s simply that the collective immunity we now have, through a combination of vaccines and people recovered from illness, is sufficient that, given the way we behave (eg more working from home) and given the time of year (August) the virus cannot find enough susceptible people to infect for its rate of spread to accelerate. That means, that, by definition, we have reached what is called the “herd immunity threshold” (HIT) – the collective percentage immunity, across the whole population, at which the virus can no longer sustainably spread.
Vaccines typically do not outperform natural immunity, so it should come as no surprise that Covid vaccines do not offer long-term protection against infection. At the same time, we can be confident that they will continue to work well to prevent severe clinical outcomes. The role of these vaccines is to offer protection to the clinically vulnerable; to foist them upon those who are at negligible risk in the hope of augmenting herd immunity is illogical…
Will boosters achieve what two doses could not? For those who are extremely vulnerable and show no evidence of mounting a significant immune response after two doses, it is entirely reasonable to attempt a third dose.
But it can be to no-one else’s individual gain to submit to a third jab, having already reduced the risk of severe disease (which was very small in the first place for most) by receiving two inoculations. For there to be the collective benefit of herd immunity, the booster would have to provide life-long protection against infection – unless we are willing to accept repeated mass vaccination into the foreseeable future. Aside from being a colossal diversion of limited resources, that would open the door to a permanent state of lockdown as we lurch from one booster campaign to the next.
The NHS drew up secret plans to withdraw hospital care from people in nursing homes in the event of a pandemic, The Telegraph can disclose.
Confidential Whitehall documents show that the NHS plans refused treatment to those in their 70s and that “support” would instead be offered to use so-called “end of life pathways”.
The strategy was drawn up by NHS England following a pandemic planning exercise in 2016 and was designed to stop hospitals being overwhelmed.
More than half of Covid hospitalisations are patients who only tested positive after admission, leaked data reveal.
The figures suggest vast numbers are being classed as hospitalised by Covid when they were admitted with other ailments, with the virus picked up by routine testing.
Experts said it meant the national statistics, published daily on the government website and frequently referred to by ministers, may far overstate the levels of pressures on the NHS.
The leaked data – covering all NHS trusts in England – show that, as of last Thursday, just 44 per cent of patients classed as being hospitalised with Covid had tested positive by the time they were admitted.
…Prof Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, said: “This data is incredibly important, and it should be published on an ongoing basis.
“When people hear about hospitalisations with Covid, they will assume that Covid is the likely cause, but this data shows something quite different – this is about Covid being detected after tests were looking for it.”
Billionaire philanthropists George Soros and Bill Gates are part of a buyout of Bedford based developer of lateral flow tests.
The founder of Microsoft founder joined the Soros Economic Development Fund in a deal to buy Mologic, which has developed 10-minute Covid tests that it aims to make for as little as $1.
The consortium will pump £30m into Mologic to focus on the low-cost development of tropical diseases such as dengue fever and river blindness, taking it on from current owners Foresight Group LLP and Calculus Capital.