It has been one of the most enduring Covid conspiracy theories: that the ‘gold standard’ PCR tests used to diagnose the virus were picking up people who weren’t actually infected.
Some even suggested the swabs, which have been carried out more than 200 million times in the UK alone, may mistake common colds and flu for corona.
If either, or both, were true, it would mean many of these cases should never have been counted in the daily tally – that the ominous and all-too-familiar figure, which was used to inform decisions on lockdowns and other pandemic measures, was an over-count.
And many of those who were ‘pinged’ and forced to isolate as a contact of someone who tested positive – causing a huge strain on the economy – did so unnecessarily.
Such statements, it must be said, have been roundly dismissed by top experts. And those scientists willing to give credence such concerns have been shouted down on social media, accused of being ‘Covid-deniers’, and even sidelined by colleagues.
But could they have been right all along?
UK
Browse the articles related to this topic below.
Join our community on Guilded.
THE PFIZER-BIONTECH vaccine, which relies on technology known as messenger RNA, has been instrumental in the war on Covid. But there are important questions about its side effects. Particularly since a new report has outlined 42,086 case reports, detailing lesser-known adverse events after inoculation with the jab.
The NHS spent billions on Covid tests, but is there any truth behind the claims that the ‘gold standard’ PCRs who too sensitive, and ended up diagnosing cases who were never infectious? Were the pandemic infection figures deliberately ‘sexed up’ to scare people in complying with lockdown rules? And was it really worth spending £37billion plus on testing? The Medical Minefield team investigate with science journalist Jo Macfarlane, public health consultant Dr Allyson Pollock and Dr Al Richards, Associate Professor of Pharmacy at the University of Reading.
http://archive.today/2022.06.21-103256/https://www.mailplus.co.uk/radio/medical-minefield/162080/were-millions-diagnosed-with-covid-when-they-didnt-really-have-it
Britain’s Covid pandemic death rate is much better than previously thought compared with the rest of the world, a Lancet study has shown.
Research by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in the US calculated the excess death rates for 191 countries and territories and found that the UK is now roughly in the middle at 102.
Previously, countries have been judged by death rates alone, which would place Britain at 168 – the 24th worst in the world. Critics of the Government’s pandemic response have often cited this figure as justification for calling for tougher Covid restrictions.
But Britain was found to have an excess death rate of 126.8 per 100,000, very close to France – which had 124.4 per 100,000 – and Germany, with 120.5 per 100,000.
Sweden, which did not lock down, was found to have one of the best excess death rates in Europe, with 91.2 per 100,000. Only Finland, Luxembourg and Iceland fared better.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220310190243/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/03/10/uk-covid-death-rate-compared-rest-world-isnot-bad-feared/
Categories
The Pfizer documents – Dr. John Campbell
“This is quite alarming…”
Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, Pfizer / FDA FOI https://phmpt.org
Adverse event reports
01 December 2020 through 28 February 2021
Cumulatively, through 28 February 2021, a total of 42,086 case reports (25,379 medically confirmed and 16,707 non-medically confirmed) containing 158,893 events. Most cases (34,762) were received from United States (13,739), United Kingdom (13,404) Italy (2,578), Germany (1,913), France (1,506), Portugal (866) and Spain (756) the remaining 7,324 were distributed among 56 other countries. Fatal, 1,223 Since Dec. 11, 2020, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine has been available under EUA https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press… (Approval, 21st August 2021) Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, M.D. While millions of people have already safely received COVID-19 vaccines, we recognize that for some, the FDA approval of a vaccine may now instill additional confidence to get vaccinated. Today’s milestone puts us one step closer to altering the course of this pandemic in the U.S. System Organ Classes (SOCs) that contained the greatest number (≥2%) of events, in the overall dataset, were General disorders and administration site conditions (51,335 AEs), Nervous system disorders (25,957), Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders (17,283), Gastrointestinal disorders (14,096), Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders (8,476), Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders (8,848), Infections and infestations (4,610), Injury, poisoning and procedural complications (5,590), and Investigations (3,693). Cardiovascular AESIs Number of cases: 1403 (3.3% of the total PM dataset), of which 241 are medically confirmed and 1162 are non-medically confirmed; 5. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION Review of the available data for this cumulative PM experience, confirms a favorable benefit: risk balance for BNT162b2. Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research “Our scientific and medical experts conducted an incredibly thorough and thoughtful evaluation of this vaccine. We evaluated scientific data and information included in hundreds of thousands of pages, conducted our own analyses of Comirnaty’s safety and effectiveness, and performed a detailed assessment of the manufacturing processes, including inspections of the manufacturing facilities,” “….. the public is counting on safe and effective vaccines. The public and medical community can be confident that although we approved this vaccine expeditiously, it was fully in keeping with our existing high standards for vaccines in the U.S.” https://childrenshealthdefense.org/de… Austria https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/03/… Karoline Edtstadler the law, passed in January, in force since early February, not proportionate, relatively mild symptoms experienced by most people who contract Omicron
A senior epidemiologist who advised the government during the coronavirus pandemic claims he was told to “correct” his views after he criticised what he thought was an “implausible” graph shown at an official briefing.
Professor Mark Woolhouse has also apologised to his daughter, whose generation “has been so badly served by mine”, and believes that closing schools was “morally wrong”.
The Edinburgh University academic is deeply critical of the use of lockdown measures and says “plain common sense” was a “casualty of the crisis”.
Speaking to Sky News, Prof Woolhouse seemed concerned about a possible “big-brother” approach to the control of information about COVID.He says he was told to watch what he was saying following a briefing given by Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA) Sir Patrick Vallance on 21 September 2020.
Scientists abandoned their objectivity, misled with alarming models and failed to appreciate the damage lockdown would cause, a government adviser has claimed in a damning indictment of Britain’s pandemic response.
In his memoir, The Year The World Went Mad, Prof Woolhouse claimed that lockdowns “had surprisingly little effect” and just “deferred the problem to another day, at great cost”.
He argued that Spi-M was set up to tackle the wrong disease, influenza, and that early models were based on flu dynamics, and so mistakenly thought schools were a major driver while underrepresenting the impact of shielding.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220305142940/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/03/05/britains-covid-experts-misled-alarming-models-abandoned-objectivity/
Long Covid could be being drastically overreported in children, an official report suggests.
The Office for National Statistics said only one in 100 primary-aged pupils actually have the condition, despite half of parents reporting at least one of its symptoms.
Professor Russell Viner, a member of SAGE and child health expert, said it showed ‘just how common tiredness and headaches are in children’.
The report showed that 47.5 per cent of parents said their child was still battling at least one symptom of the virus 12 weeks later.
But almost the same amount (46.6 per cent) had similar symptoms despite never having Covid. Most common symptoms were a sore throat, lost voice, coughs and shortness of breath.
The ONS estimated that fewer than one in 40 secondary pupils in the UK have long Covid.
My last blog discussed the possibility that mRNA COVID19 vaccines significantly increase the risk of myocarditis. Following this, a fellow doctor reached out to tell me about what has happened to them. They too, had questioned some aspects of the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
As a result, they have been sent two threatening letters, which are both of the ‘iron fist in a velvet glove’ variety. I asked their permission to reproduce them here. One is from the General Medical Council (GMC). The other from their responsible officer – I shall explain what this title means a bit further on.
920 applications were filed over death or injury, although strict official thresholds mean no payouts have been made
Scientists did not have accurate Covid case numbers, and were unsure of hospitalisation and death rates when they published models suggesting that more than 500,000 people could die if Britain took no action in the first wave of the pandemic, it has emerged.
On March 16 2020, Imperial College published its “Report 9” paper suggesting that failing to take action could overwhelm the NHS within weeks and result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Before the paper, the UK coronavirus strategy was to flatten the peak rather than suppress the wave, but after the modelling was made public, the Government made a rapid u-turn, which eventually led to lockdown on March 23.
However SPI-M (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling) minutes released to the Telegraph under a Freedom of Information request show that by March 16, modellers were still “uncertain” of case numbers “due to data limitations”.
The minutes show that members were waiting for comprehensive mortality data from Public Health England (PHE) and said that current best estimates for the infection fatality rate, hospitalisation rates, and the number of people needing intensive care were still uncertain.
They also believed that modelling only showed “proof of concept” that lockdowns could help, and warned that “further work would be required”.
“Following the science” became a mainstay mantra of the pandemic, frequently trotted-out to justify unpalatable policy decisions such as banning hugging or denying fathers the right to attend the birth of a child.
Yet as Britain’s epidemic begins to fade away, it is becoming increasingly clear that many influential scientists were ignored, ridiculed and shunned for expressing moderate views that the virus could be managed in a way which would cause far less collateral damage.
Instead, a narrow scientific “groupthink” emerged, which sought to cast those questioning draconian policies as unethical, immoral and fringe. That smokescreen is finally starting to dissipate.
Even here, in the Soviet-style behemoth that is “our NHS”, choice can no longer be taken for granted. There is a defiant reluctance among GPs to go back to seeing patients in person. Many hospital appointments are still online. Hopes that patients could start to enjoy the comforting old normal are dashed by an arrogant, unfeeling bureaucracy which puts its own health first.
“There are no immediate changes to IPC (infection, prevention and control) requirements,” says an ominous letter to clinical staff from NHS England. I am told that masks are so embedded in NHS behaviour that we will probably never again see a nurse’s smile.
Remaining restrictions on travel could be reviewed before Easter but some laws introduced during the pandemic will be made permanent, according to the Government’s plan for living with coronavirus.
The legal requirement to isolate is to be scrapped within days as the Prime Minister vowed to remove “all remaining domestic restrictions in law”.
The Government’s Living with Covid plan sets out its intention for other legal provisions to remain indefinitely, while others will be reviewed at a later date.
“We knew from February [2020], never mind March, that the lockdown would not solve the problem. It would simply delay it,” Woolhouse says, a note of enduring disbelief in his voice. And yet in government, “there was no attention paid to that rather obvious drawback of the strategy”.
Instead, lockdowns – which “only made sense in the context of eradication” – became the tool of choice to control Covid. The die was cast in China, which instituted ultra-strict measures and, unforgivably in Woolhouse’s book, was praised by the World Health Organisation for its “bold approach”. “The WHO,” he suggests, “got the biggest calls completely wrong in 2020. The early global response to the pandemic was woefully inadequate.”
The UK’s largest private provider of children’s care homes sent more than £2 million to its founders’ offshore company in the Caribbean while accepting huge sums in government Covid support.
Caretech Holdings PLC has posted soaring profits in the past two years despite having care homes for the most vulnerable in society that are among the worst-rated in the country.
More than 240,000 calls to NHS 24 went unanswered from September to January in figures described as “astonishing” by opposition parties.
At a time when patients were urged to call the helpline before turning up to A&E, an average of almost 50,000 calls per month to the NHS 111 number failed to be connected.
The highest number of abandoned calls occurred in September 2021 when 68,119 were left unanswered, according to data obtained by the Scottish Conservatives.
Over the festive period, in December, on more than 46,000 occasions callers were unable to speak to anyone.
The Conservatives said that “shockingly” on January 3, very nearly half of all calls (49.7%) were abandoned, accounting for more than 7,000 abandoned calls on that day alone.
Government’s Cobra emergency committee to meet
The government’s emergency response committee Cobra will meet this afternoon to discuss the response to Storm Eunice, No 10 has confirmed.
The Home Office minister Damian Hinds said the military was being readied to help if required. He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain:
Cobra have been convened about making sure the readiness is in place for this storm. Obviously it comes right on the back of Storm Dudley.
“We have had to learn a lot of lessons from previous events like Storm Arwen and others.
“There are troops as you know at readiness if needed, if military assistance is called for, the Environment Agency are of course on the ground, the network operators themselves are also in readiness.”
The wearing of face masks by doctors contributed to the death of a patient in an NHS hospital because they exacerbated communication problems, a coroner has said.
The personal protective equipment “aggravated” a “failure in verbal communication” between two physicians treating an epileptic patient.
John Skinner was admitted to Watford General hospital suffering from seizures in May 2020, during the first Covid wave.
He was given phenytoin, an anti-epileptic drug, by a junior doctor who did not know the correct dose to be administered and asked for help from a more senior colleague who told him to use a 15 mg/kg dose measurement. This was misheard as 50 kg/mg.
Photos of meeting in Kyiv last year – which UK personnel thought was private – were posted by Ukraine’s National Guard (NGU)
UK MoD tells Declassified it has no plans to train NGU and that British commander was misquoted
But UK military is engaging with NGU and aware of “the peculiarities of [its] combat operations”
Apparent member of another far-right Ukrainian group was trained at Sandhurst in 2020
Details and photos of the meeting in the capital, Kyiv, were posted in Ukrainian on the website of Ukraine’s National Guard (NGU) last year.
Declassified understands the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) believed the September 2021 meeting to be private and should not have been publicised. There is no mention of the meeting in any UK records that are publicly available.
Three British commanders of Operation Orbital – the UK military’s training mission in Ukraine – are pictured, alongside three NGU officers. They sit around a table taking notes.