The Wry Observer’s Covid-19 update (227): Don’t know, don’t do

A few years back we were on a trip to New Zealand, where I had been asked to give three lectures at a conference in Auckland. We had decided it was pointless for me to fly there alone and straight back, so we arranged a tour encompassing Dunedin, Queenstown, the west coast of South Island, a drive across to Christchurch (I got a speeding ticket then), flight to Wellington and a drive to Napier before returning to Auckland.

While in Queenstown we arranged a trip to Milford Sound in a small plane. I loved it. My wife did not, not helped by our homestay owner asking jocularly as we set off for the airport whether we had made our wills. I had promised my wife a larger plane than the six-seater we had. The scenery as we crossed the mountains was amazing and as it turned out the pilot had been a barman in one of our local pubs in England. After we had landed, he said we had been lucky as the weather forecast the next day was for cloud, so he would not be flying. My wife asked why not. “Well,” he said, “You can never tell whether a cloud might have a hard centre”.

That’s a long anecdote to illustrate a principle. The principle is – if you don’t know, perhaps you should not take a chance. Clouds can hide mountain tops. But in medicine there are many “don’t knows”, and while it might be acceptable to judge the risk-benefit on an individual basis it may not be appropriate to apply a blanket approach for an entire population.

Of course, if you don’t know that there is a risk you might construe that as being that there is no risk. But if you don’t know… well, you don’t know. And what if someone raises the possibility of a risk? Would you still plough on regardless, or would you wait until you knew for certain?

There’s an Arab proverb: “He who knows not, and knows not he knows not, he is a fool—shun him; he who knows not, and knows he knows not, he is simple—teach him; he who knows, and knows not he knows, he is asleep—wake him; he who knows, and knows he knows, he is wise—follow him.” My father added another two: “He who knows not, and knows that he knows, is dangerous – avoid him. But he who knows, and knows that he knows not, he is wiser still – take heed, for he has true understanding”.

I would like to think I am one of those last…

I posted a response to an essay on the Net as follows in response to one of the growing number of analyses of Covid vaccine risks:

“One thing bothers me, and always has – with this and all other disputed items [the issues of Covid and climate change have become interweaved]. If the so-called vaccine deniers who have done careful analyses of available data, like this, are wrong, why are these analyses not properly and scientifically debunked? All we get is bluster, very occasionally quoting improperly conducted trials. There is of course a good reason they are not debunked, and that is because they are correct. Am I wrong?”

I only had 24 “likes” but that’s 22 more than any other of my responses. And this concern is especially important right now as there are official mutterings about the worry of a coronavirus resurgence and the need for booster vaccinations. But there are many unknowns. What is the real risk of post-Covid vaccination myocarditis? What are the potential risks of DNA contamination of M-RNA viruses? Could the introduction of plasmids cause short or long-term changes within cells that have substantial and perhaps frightening consequences?

The answer is – we don’t know. Maybe, but maybe not. The research has not been done (or if it has the results have not been revealed). Given the potential risk, particularly the long-term risk of incorporating foreign DNA into cell nuclei, would it not be wise to suspend vaccination programmes until we do know?

This link underlines the potential problem; also see this one and this one.

And this which underpins my “Don’t know, don’t do” argument: here Maryanne Demasi interviews Phillip Buckhaults, a cancer genomics expert at the University of South Carolina. Initially fearing that a report by another expert, Kevin McKernan, on the risk of DNA contamination was “conspiracy” he decided to debunk the work, only to find out that his own investigation confirmed it. In a remarkably balanced and non-polemical set of answers he makes the point that there may be risks – but we don’t know whether there are, what they are and, if so, how big they are. He suggests “It’s possible that long bits of DNA that encode spike are modifying the genomes of just a few cells that make up the myocardium and cause long term expression of Spike… and then the immune system starts attacking those cells… and that’s what’s causing these heart attacks. Now, that is entirely a theoretical concern. But it’s not crazy and it’s reasonable to check.”

You can access McKernan’s paper here.

That’s an awful lot of concern. It needs to be allayed.

And here’s a ruthless takedown of a paper on vaccine effectiveness.  Oh boy.

I have tried to avoid mixing my Covid posts with things about climate change but the above principle of “Don’t know, don’t do” also applies to that. There is undoubtedly climate change and there always has been. Is what we are seeing now due to human activity? I think some of it is, but it may pale into insignificance compared to the effects of sunspot activity, volcanic eruptions and other natural disasters and I suspect that the contribution of fossil fuel use may be less important than deforestation and water diversion (see Brazilian rainforest and Himalayas for examples of the first, and the shrinking of the Aral Sea for the second). Does an increase in CO2 actually matter? Probably not, as it will aid plant growth. Is global warning as bad as is being made out? Probably not, as temperature measurements are distorted by changes in the local environment of sensors (for example, by becoming more urbanised, or in the most egregious case of the UK’s hottest day ever in 2020 being caused, extremely short-term, by jet aircraft roaring past the sensor with their afterburners going). Most of the “need for change” is driven by modelling, so is no more than prophesy, not least if the models have garbage going in, for then garbage will come out. Many people have raised serious and credible concerns on this and pointed to the reality of observational data which contradicts the prophesies and even the here and now (Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching has reversed; Antarctic warming and ice loss is over the top of active underwater volcanos; the biggest greenhouse gas problem came from the Tonga volcanic eruption which threw vast quantities of water vapour into the high atmosphere), but I have yet to see any serious and credible counter-argument explaining why the sceptics who state these facts are wrong. If there were such arguments, surely they would and should have been deployed. That they have not lends credence to the accuracy of the sceptics’ views and makes one wonder whether the whole climate crisis is just an artificial one that has somehow turned into a cult. If the major drivers of climate change are natural phenomena we are only fiddling with the fringe – the old 1%-99% argument. And that’s before we examine the other side of the coin: is Net Zero economically feasible? Is the overall cost of going electric higher than the cost of the status quo? Can we go all-electric when there are insufficient charging points and the demand on the National Grid will be unmanageable? I fear our politicians and some of our scientists are people who know not and know not that they know not. Maybe some are beginning to grasp reality, but the rest are, as in the proverb, fools. Some are in the know not, but know that they know group, and are dangerous. If we don’t know, let’s not do until we do know, and meanwhile beware of false prophets.

I am not alone in thinking this. Only today David Seedhouse posted a piece on the “Daily Sceptic” site, which he concludes by saying

“We are constantly bombarded with unanalysed assumptions, often presented to us by people with obvious vested interests. Some years ago there was a variety of ways to challenge these assumptions. For example, decent journalists in serious publications would do this and these challenges would filter into the public consciousness. But this seems to happen less and less in the mainstream, where ‘experts’ are presented as authoritative voices on X or Y simply because they say they are, or have a prestigious title, and it is impossible to challenge them directly.

The failure to think deeply, the abandonment of reason, the rush to the preferred conclusion, the desire – even the need these days – to go along with the majority view without questioning it – these are symptoms of a cultural descent into myth, superstition and collective madness. The truth is what we want it to be and what our ‘experts’ say it is and that’s all you need to know.

I submit that this abject thoughtlessness – not ‘the climate crisis’ – is the real ‘test of our times’.”

Hear, hear.

Of course the fool on the hill, in the Beatles song, is actually wise: he sees “The sun going down, but the eyes in his head see the world spinning round”… the most profound Beatles lyric ever? A nod to the sceptics of old – Galileo and Copernicus?

The Wry Observer’s Covid-19 update (226)

Here’s a piece that will make everyone think; Raw data for “Unnatural evolutionary processes of SARS-CoV-2 variants and possibility of deliberate natural selection” | Zenodo 

The abstract reads: 

Over the past three years, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has repeatedly caused pandemics, generating various mutated variants ranging from Alpha to Omicron. In this study, we aimed to clarify the evolutionary processes leading to the formation of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants, focusing on Omicron variants with many amino acid mutations in the spike protein among SARS-CoV-2 isolates. To determine the order of mutations leading to the formation of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants, we compared the sequences of 129 Omicron BA.1-related, 141 BA.1.1-related, and 122 BA.2-related isolates, and attempted to clarify the evolutionary processes of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants, including the order of mutations leading to their formation and the occurrence of homologous recombination. As a result, we concluded that the formation of a part of Omicron isolates BA.1, BA.1.1, and BA.2 was not the product of genome evolution, as is commonly observed in nature, such as the accumulation of mutations and homologous recombinations. Furthermore, the study of 35 recombinant isolates of Omicron variants BA.1 and BA.2 confirmed that Omicron variants were already present in 2020. The analysis showed that Omicron variants were formed by an entirely new mechanism that cannot be explained by previous biology, and knowing how the SARS-CoV-2 variants were formed prompts a reconsideration of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. 

Now this is only a pre-print and being a natural sceptic I will only say that if what they say is true it is extremely worrying. You can also find an analysis of it at “Unnatural evolution”: indisputable evidence for deliberate and systematic creation of circulating covid variants (substack.com). I will let readers make up their own minds. 

In the three years that I have been blogging on the SARS-CoV-2 saga I have never been trolled, until last month when I posted a response to an article on another site suggesting that the serious illness of Covid-19 was in fact a bacterial pneumonia. Shades of the Spanish Flu suggestion… I responded with a brief summary of my cytokine storm theory to be told that I should not bother with unreliable textbooks (I had cited Cron and Behrens, referenced here many times). Well. I was delighted to find someone who had actually read it and asked for an explanation of why they found it unreliable. I was then asked for my area of expertise, which I provided, to receive a summary of theirs. Once again I requested a critique. No, came the reply, I have never read it. 

Is this what medical science has come to? On the one hand doing gain of function research that kills people while on the other offering put-downs having not examined the evidence? I despair. Sadly the whole process of scientific research seems to have been affected (infected?). It is quite appalling that one must distort one’s results into a form that editors, or the majority consensus, finds acceptable or the work remains unpublished. In case you don’t know what I am referring to see I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published | The Free Press (thefp.com). For balance also see Editor of Nature journal slams climate scientist Patrick Brown’s ‘highly irresponsible’ research after he said publications reject studies that don’t ‘support certain narratives’ | Daily Mail Online. 

I am not clear from the second piece whether it is Brown’s research that is highly irresponsible (in which case why was it published) or the post-publication statement he has made. I know which I think, but you decide! 

The Wry Observer’s Covid-19 update (218): medical oxymorons and Settled Science

During the pandemic we became used to, and rather weary of the concept of following “The Science” but just as other terms take on unnecessary qualifiers “The Science” has now morphed into “Settled Science”. The term is of course absurd as any proper scientist will tell you, and I have added it to my list of oxymorons in medicine (read my book “Mad Medicine” for more). Settled Science is a useful term of approbation when trying to rubbish hypotheses, or proofs, that contradict it. It gives a spurious sense of finality in science but there are innumerable examples of how Settled Science is unsettled – and not only in medicine. Think Einstein and the theory of relativity, which was unsettled by the postulation and later discovery of the Higgs boson. Think Galileo and Copernicus, the fools on the hill (who saw the sun going down, but the eyes in their head saw the world spinning round – possibly the most profound Beatles song); William Harvey discovering the circulation; John Snow undermining the miasma theory of infection with his observations on the Broad Street pump; Semmelweis and puerperal fever; Pasteur and bacteria; the electron microscope and cellular pathology. And then there are the various examples of where it becomes apparent that the Settled Science is based on a falsehood; spinach and its iron content, forgetting the oxalic acid that chelates the iron, never mind the decimal point being in the wrong place in the initial calculations; discovering the real cause of peptic ulceration was a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori; thinking that rheumatoid arthritis had something to do with Epstein-Barr virus, when the results were due to a contaminated reagent; climate change statistics muddled by temperature measurements in conurbations, or most recently from a thermometer close to an air force runway where jets were taking off at full blast.

Science is never Settled. It takes but one contrary observation to knock down a long-held belief – the Black Swan principle. For example – coral bleaching as a sign of global warming. It can be a local phenomenon and nothing to do with fossil fuel burning but relating to the warming events of underwater volcanic eruptions, as last year in the Pacific. And a quick question: has the bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef continued inexorably to progress? Actually no; indeed it appears to have reversed. The Settled Scientists prefer to ignore such observations that contradict them, just as they have been downplaying the growing evidence that SARS-CoV-2 vaccines cause harm. This is not science, but dogma, back to the days of the Inquisition. It is not good. So I beg readers not to use the term Settled Science ever again.

The Wry Observer’s Covid-19 update (217)

Today “Trust the Evidence”, the blog of Drs Heneghan and Jefferson, asks whether the pandemic is over, to which I responded:

“The pandemic is over. No-one seems to worry about it except politicians and the WHO. Here in my small town people toss out the fact they have Covid as if it were no more than a cold – which of course it isn’t, whether because of vaccination (doubtful) or viral mutation to a milder form (highly likely). So yet again I ask the question: does a pandemic infection really matter if it doesn’t kill people? It’s rhetorical really, because the answer is no. Do you need to stop transmission of a mild non-fatal virus? No. Do you need to rapidly identify, and appropriately treat, people who get the virus and then, for reasons of genetics, obesity and other such, get very ill (aka Covid-19, cytokine storm, hyperimmune state)? Yes. And yet all the noise is about stopping transmission. As this is impossible let’s simply concentrate on the suddenly seriously sick, which is a relatively simple task. The same applies to future pandemics. And while we are about it let’s ban modelling because of the GIGO principle (garbage in, garbage out).

It irks me greatly that those in charge continue to rely on the wrong experts. If I needed a hip replacement I would not ask a neurosurgeon, so why, when confronted with a serious medical condition like Covid-19, normally treated by physicians and intensivists, are we relying on experts in statistics, virology, public health and epidemiology? Their solutions are unravelling faster than a roll of toilet paper by the Andrex puppy.”

Their article is worth reading, and can be found at https://trusttheevidence.substack.com/p/a-round-up-of-recent-tte-posts-and?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1029183&post_id=116930775&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email

At the same time I criticised a BMJ update “A living WHO guideline on drugs to prevent covid-19” (https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n526) which is, I think, a red herring, oxymoron or whatever, not least as it repeats the fallacy that SARS-CoV-2 infection and Covid-19 are synonymous, but particularly because its main purpose is the continuing discreditation of hydroxychloroquine. So I wrote:

“It is regrettable that this article will serve only to confuse both medical and lay readers.

I have made the point many times that confusion arises from the improper interchangeability of the terms “SARS-CoV-2” and “Covid-19”. They are not the same. Covid-19 is a specific syndrome of severe illness due to the induction of a hyperimmune state (cytokine storm, CSS) by infection with SARS-CoV-2. Thus preventing Covid-19 requires prevention of the development of that hyperimmune state. As the risk of such development depends on several factors (including genetic susceptibility) it is far from certain that SARS-CoV-2 infection will progress to Covid-19 and anyway the risk from more recent virus variants has clearly diminished substantially. But as one cannot predict in advance, the whole concept of preventing Covid-19 is an oxymoron and discussion of prophylaxis is a waste of time.

The vast majority of cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection develop little more than a bad cold or flu-like illness. So is the application of any antiviral drug actually necessary? I think not. What is necessary is a system for promptly identifying incipient Covid-19 (by measuring oxygen saturation in the first instance, and applying appropriate blood tests such as CRP, fibrinogen, D-dimer, platelet count etc) and then appropriately treating that developing cytokine storm with steroids and biologics. One could argue that hydroxychloroquine, a weak immune modulator, might have a role alongside these but none of the trials have employed it specifically in that capacity, and in any case if one was to extrapolate from its use in inflammatory joint disease one would use it in combination or not at all, as there are things that work better. So discussing the hydroxychloroquine evidence is also a waste of time.

SARS-CoV-2 infection is not the only thing that can precipitate a cytokine storm and I remain baffled by the apparent failure of almost every commentator to realise this. We need a hard reset based on longstanding management of the syndrome – which in my view requires everyone to read Cron and Behrens’ textbook [reference given, but omitted here as I have mentioned it ad nauseam et infinitum]. The reaction to the appearance of SARS-CoV-2 was, in retrospect, one of panic and hysteria. Most people need no treatment. Those that do should have the correct treatment applied promptly.”

The Wry Observer’s Covid-19 update (216)

This morning I was returning from the butchers and followed a family of tourists up my cobbled street. The wife, who was walking ahead of her husband and the two children, turned and said “That’s Mermaid Street at the top”, whereupon the older child, aged five or six I suppose, said with great conviction “Ooh! Isn’t that where they sell mermaids? I’ve heard they do.”

Oh for the certainty of innocence and innocent certainty! On the coronavirus front the uncertainty mounts, and my prophecy that many of the accounts so far written were done too early is coming true. Those who said lockdowns were the only solution to transmission, and that the one in the UK should have been done earlier, have been confounded by the Swedish experience of no lockdown; the Swedish case rate was little different from the European lockdown countries. The apparent effectiveness of the Wuhan lockdown is attributed to its rigour. I am not so sure that is the reason for any difference and will go with the Scottish legal conclusion of “not proven”. Those who tried to blame the Wuhan wet market, and bats or pangolins in particular as the source of the virus, have been confounded by its apparent man-made nature, containing as it does an unnatural structure, namely a furin cleavage site, and there is ongoing debate (or conspiracy) that the viral samples were sent from the USA to Wuhan, whence it escaped from the laboratory. Some of the obfuscation surrounding events of late 2019 and early 2020, such as the sudden withdrawal of the Wuhan virus database and the strident protests of scientists later shown to have a major conflict of interest are certainly suspicious; new Chinese research might point to raccoons as a source (the virus has been found in market samples) but there’s nothing to suggest it could not have been humans infecting raccoons rather than the other way round. Masks were not recommended, then they were, then they were deemed ineffective after proper analysis of proper trials. Those who proposed using ivermectin were punished by the science community’s Inquisition. The spike protein vaccines are now deemed to be gene therapies which failed to prevent virus acquisition, have caused significant side-effects and appear ineffective against the newer virus variants, not to mention being a possible cause of “Long Covid” because subcellular organelles, or plasmids, were injected with the messenger RNA and so enabled cells to go on producing that M-RNA.

Uncertainty is rampant. And the spillover from the intense scrutiny of SARS-CoV-2 into rigorous analysis of the climate change data shows that there is increasing uncertainty about how real climate change actually is, quite apart from the argument that much of it is part of a natural cycle, is influenced more by natural events than by man’s carbon emissions and may not matter anyway if increased CO₂ levels help to green the planet. Most advancing this argument are labelled as deniers, just as those querying the value of coronavirus “vaccines” and statin sceptics are. But they aren’t. They are sceptics; no-one denies that the climate changes. It always has. Think where the sea levels were in Roman times. Remember that the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 caused a worldwide 0.4^oC cooling which lasted for several years; that the reversal of the 16^th Century mini Ice Age began long before industrialisation could have contributed; that the desertification of the Sahara was caused by goats overgrazing; and that the disappearance of the Aral Sea was caused by water diversion, not by industrial emissions. On the statin front they do work in reducing cardiac mortality (but not a lot) but because they are anti-inflammatory, not because of their cholesterol-lowering effect which is an epiphenomenon. It’s vital to look at cause and effect; the reduction in SARS-CoV-2 virulence is due to mutation, not to vaccination. The differential risk of the original virus progressing to Covid-19 in certain ethnic groups was to do with genetics, not racial discrimination.

It is valuable to look at the “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918, as Mark Honigsbaum has done in detail. The infallible retrospectoscope reveals many parallels with SARS-CoV-2. Its very name is wrong, as it almost certainly originated in the USA. It was misdiagnosed as a bacterial infection because samples often found Haemophilus Influenzae, although test results were often anomalous, and a one-off experiment proving it wasn’t, was overlooked. There was a clear disparity in mortality between racial groups. Spread was driven by immune profile and crowding; the clinical features of severe and fatal illness fit best with a cytokine storm syndrome, but many people were entirely unaffected. Nonetheless there was widespread panic.

Doesn’t a lot of this sound familiar? It makes it all the stranger than the WHO intends to force governments worldwide, in the event of another pandemic, to adopt measures that at best are questionable and at worst are useless. It also makes it all the more important in the UK that the Hallett Inquiry is not rushed. But I would like to understand why scientists and politicians will never admit that they were wrong, and/or find excuses not to apologise.

The Wry Observer’s Covid-19 update (214)

Wait a month, and more things come out of the woodwork. Yesterday a tranche of Whatsapp messages to and from the then Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, have surfaced, courtesy of Isabel Oakshott, who was given them when writing Hancock’s biography. Never mind that she is said to have signed a non-disclosure agreement; it is a general principle that individual confidentiality is outweighed by the common good. He has denied the spin put on them – usual defence of selective and out-of-context quoting – but it looks as if some of the medical advice regarding both testing and masks was ignored, and that there was an element of the headless chickens scenario (panic, not pandemic). There’s more to come on this, but so far my overwhelming thought is that there was serious panic in and around 10 Downing Street. I don’t think the liberal scattering of swear words and insults is very edifying, but it is little different from the baying rudeness I encountered from a group of MPs when I attended a dinner at the House as a Council member of the Royal College of Physicians. But maybe we get the politicians we deserve…

Then there is further dissection of the virus’s origin; a lab leak from the Wuhan lab is firmly back in the frame, but did the lab get the original from somewhere else? It looks as if some water sampling from 2019, outside China and well before the explosive outbreak in Wuhan, contained appropriate viral elements. Could it be that a mild first wave rippled across the world, and that the virus was identified, sent to Wuhan where a furin cleavage site was inserted, and it then leaked? Plausible. Certainly the sneering dismissals of the theory of a lab leak, orchestrated by someone with a conflict of interest as I have noted before, seem rather awkward.

The Daily Sceptic site looked last week at the current position of the WHO (https://dailysceptic.org/2023/03/03/the-threat-of-global-tyranny-from-the-whos-pandemic-treaty-draws-ever-closer/). In its article it says “The last pandemic to cause major mortality was the 1918-19 ’Spanish Flu’, estimated to have killed between 20 and 50 million people. As noted by the National Institutes of Health, most of these people died of secondary bacterial pneumonia, as the outbreak occurred in the pre-antibiotic era.”

Not true. Look at Mark Honigsbaum’s exposition in his book “The Pandemic Century”. It’s quite clear that the majority of deaths were due to a cytokine storm when you read the clinical descriptions, with signs and symptoms mirroring those of Covid-19. Back in 1918 the ability of pathologists to identify viruses was non-existent and the concept of commensal infection with bacteria unclear. They got it wrong. We now know that the organism blamed back then, Haemophilus Influenzae, is to be found as a normal mouth organism, so deaths were with the bug, not from it. To be fair the original outbreak in the USA was relatively mild compared to the explosive second wave in Europe – a pattern perhaps not unlike that in SARS-CoV-2. But the parallels are eerie. Of course, the quote above refers to a paper written in 2008. One of the co-authors was a Dr Anthony Fauci.

I rest my case.

When I was teaching students I found that respiratory physiology was one of the most difficult things to get across. Pierre Kory’s latest piece shows up my deficiencies in this field in spades. Read it. Then read it again, and you will understand the issues of ventilating Covid-19 patients and the science behind the severe problems of so doing. It’s at https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/the-premature-use-of-mechanical-ventilation. Years ago when I was in charge of a small ICU I learned to work out why something that should work did not. We ventilated an unconscious patient in severe respiratory distress and she got worse, with the pressure needed to ventilate rising steadily. It was only when we repeated the chest X-ray that I realised she had bilateral pneumothorax (air in the pleural cavity) and applying gas under pressure was merely worsening this. We inserted pleural drains and normality was restored – more or less, because she remained unconscious. Remember that a comatose patient cannot tell you they are breathless.

All this apart the dissection of the Whatsapp corpus continues to focus on the wrong things. It’s clear that lockdowns and the rest are the current targets of the lockdown sceptics – which is fine, because they were right, but it’s very easy to conclude that with the benefit of hindsight. What has still escaped the microscopic analysis is what the focus should be on. SARS-CoV-2 only goes bad and produces the severe illness called Covid-19 in certain people – the old, the obese, those with underlying ill-health and certain ethnic groups (interestingly the predisposition of those groups has diminished, much as the pathogenicity of streptococcus in causing rheumatic fever dissipated as a result of bacterial mutation). So, knowing that, knowing the underlying immunology, knowing how to identify a growing cytokine storm, all should have made the high-ups realise that they should concentrate on stopping that process, and on treating those they didn’t stop. Which is, of course, what I explained to Matt Hancock at the end of May 2020 in a written letter with protocol. Did he ever see it? Don’t know. Did action get taken as a result? No. Did that cause unnecessary deaths? Yes. Maybe Isabel Oakshott’s archive contains the answer. Wouldn’t that be nice? I have asked her. No reply yet…

The Wry Observer’s Covid-19 update: 213

Just back from a lovely two weeks in the Far East, learning about Malaysian culture and enjoying a splendid beach on Langkawi Island. This has not stopped me keeping abreast of developments on the Covid front, most of which have shown that one of my local, non-medical friends is the epitome of the little boy who shouted “But he has nothing on!” as his naked emperor paraded through the streets in his finery.

He was a lockdown and mask sceptic from the beginning. I was not, preferring to sit on the fence wearing a cloak of “not enough information” which seemed more scientific in the face of cast-iron assurances and statements from those on high that both were necessary.

I have already expressed my opinion that lockdowns don’t work, and why, although I still maintain that at the beginning when there was real fear of how bad the SARS-CoV-2 virus might be, it was not entirely unreasonable. Once the Chinese started showing film of people dropping dead in the streets (film which we now think was faked) and imposed lockdown I could understand why other governments took fright and did the same, in case a failure to do so would result in the tens of thousands of deaths postulated by the model-makers. Time has shown that the once-vilified Anders Tegnell was quite right to resist in Sweden, where things were no worse without a lockdown. And, of course, lockdowns were never a feature of pre-Covid pandemic planning.

What of masks? The latest Cochrane review has suggested that mask-wearing is useless – a change from the original review, because it has now collated enough proper randomised controlled trials to be able to exclude observational trials that had previously been included. Indeed there has been a see-sawing of opinion on transmission. Airborne viral spread may not be the major problem; spread from surfaces may be more important, and thus handwashing works better than masking. See https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full.

I am convinced; others are not; see https://theconversation.com/yes-masks-reduce-the-risk-of-spreading-covid-despite-a-review-saying-they-dont-198992.

Oh boy. It’s enough to give you a headache but fair to say that most flimsy paper masks, and home-made cloth ones, do not cut the mustard. It was a bit weird to sit on a beach by the Andaman Sea, with an onshore wind carrying zero virus particles, and watch sunbathers and hotel staff with masks on.

And the narrative on vaccination is becoming more worrying also. Apart from the continuing concern over spike protein M-RNA producing an immune response causing myocarditis (and possibly being responsible for an upsurge in Kawasaki disease) there is growing evidence of drug company data manipulation, poor trial designs, gain-of-function research to create new variants for which new vaccines can be developed (why?), and also research suggesting that vaccination creates inadequate antibody responses (because it stimulates production of a less effective immunoglobulin subclass than that produced by actual virus infection). The excess death issue remains a mystery. But I am swinging round to the view that there is little point in vaccinating those at no risk, and agree with those who consider that pressure to vaccinate children to protect the elderly is immoral (see https://www.hartgroup.org/kent-medway/). In woke mode, I wonder if those who have demonised the sceptics now proved to have been right, will be hounded from their jobs. In ordinary mode I hope they will merely be asked to apologise, though somehow I doubt they will. No-one really likes to admit they were wrong, do they?

Does any of this matter? I am not sure that it does because the majority of people who acquire the SARS-CoV-2 virus do not go on to develop Covid-19, and there is satisfactory treatment for those who do which is long-established as safe prior to the pandemic. So there is no need to prevent spread, which will increase herd immunity, no need for masks (the wearing of which will potentially result in fibre particles inducing lung disease – see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720352050 for the theory) and no need for vaccinations. Which brings us neatly back to the Great Barrington Declaration that only at-risk groups require protection, and my own, oft-trumpeted belief that if a virus does not kill people then it does not signify.

Whither “The Science”? Wither “The Science”!

The Wry Observer’s Covid-19 update (212)

If one questions the safety of coronavirus m-RNA vaccines, or the protection that they may or may not confer, the wrath of the establishment is immediately concentrated on one, with accusations of being an anti-vaxxer, spreading disinformation and being generally a danger to society. It’s rather like – an antibody response to a pathogen. Anyone suggesting that the Covid vaccine is a genetic preparation is immediately damned as a stinking liar, because genes are DNA, not RNA.

True. But let’s examine how the m-RNA vaccine works. I quote from Medline Plus:

Vaccines help prevent infection by preparing the body to fight foreign invaders (such as bacteria, viruses, or other pathogens). All vaccines introduce into the body a harmless piece of a particular bacteria or virus, triggering an immune response. Most vaccines contain a weakened or dead bacteria or virus. However, scientists have developed a new type of vaccine that uses a molecule called messenger RNA (mRNA) rather than part of an actual bacteria or virus. Messenger RNA is a type of RNA that is necessary for protein production. Once cells finish making a protein, they quickly break down the mRNA. mRNA from vaccines does not enter the nucleus and does not alter DNA.

mRNA vaccines work by introducing a piece of mRNA that corresponds to a viral protein, usually a small piece of a protein found on the virus’s outer membrane. (Individuals who get an mRNA vaccine are not exposed to the virus, nor can they become infected with the virus by the vaccine.) By using this mRNA, cells can produce the viral protein. As part of a normal immune response, the immune system recognizes that the protein is foreign and produces specialized proteins called antibodies. Antibodies help protect the body against infection by recognizing individual viruses or other pathogens, attaching to them, and marking the pathogens for destruction. Once produced, antibodies remain in the body, even after the body has rid itself of the pathogen, so that the immune system can quickly respond if exposed again. If a person is exposed to a virus after receiving mRNA vaccination for it, antibodies can quickly recognize it, attach to it, and mark it for destruction before it can cause serious illness… Currently vaccines for COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, are the only authorized or approved mRNA vaccines. These vaccines use mRNA that directs cells to produce copies of a protein on the outside of the coronavirus known as the “spike protein”. Researchers are studying how mRNA might be used to develop vaccines for additional diseases.

It is perhaps ironic that the URL for the article is https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/therapy/mrnavaccines/#:~:text=mRNA%20vaccines%20work%20by%20introducing,the%20virus%20by%20the%20vaccine.)

Did you spot that? It’s listed under genetics. But I digress. The point is that the vaccine, or whatever you care to call it, causes the body’s cells to produce a bit of viral protein, to which antibodies are raised and thus protect against the real virus (always assuming that the bit of spike protein being coded for is what the particular virus possesses and hasn’t mutated to something that is different enough not to be recognised).

So whereas a “normal” vaccine is very like the infectious agent itself, and the body raises antibodies to it, an mRNA vaccine stimulates the body to produce a bit of antigen, and the body raises antibodies against that. The process is clearly defined. But there’s many a slip between mRNA introduction and antibody production. First, it’s unclear how many cells will acquire the mRNA and start producing antibodies; where those cells might be; whether there may be a differential response in different genetic groups (or racial groups); whether therefore some people will produce a lot of the antigen, or not a lot; and whether the antigen produced, or the antibodies might cross-react with other cells in the body. The possibility is real. Rheumatic fever caused heart disease because the antibodies produced against the streptococcus cross-reacted with heart cells. It died out as a condition of developed countries because the strep mutated, and the antibodies no longer cross-reacted.

We know that SARS-CoV-2 itself can cause myocarditis. If that is because of cross-reactivity of spike protein antibodies with heart muscle cells then it is theoretically possible for the antibodies generated after mRNA vaccination to do the same thing. Might the reason that it is not a universal phenomenon be that different people produce different amounts of antibody, or do some have heart cells that are, by their genetic makeup, more likely to be reacted against? Whatever, it needs investigating.

It is this set of uncertainties, beautifully described in John Campbell’s interview with the Australian immunologist Professor Robert Clancy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMyERFBdB4E) that have clarified my understanding of the vaccine controversy. I have yet to find anyone who is uneasy with coronavirus mRNA vaccines who is uneasy with conventional vaccines – indeed quite the opposite. So it is strange that as soon as there is the slightest misgiving over coronavirus vaccines those raising those misgivings are immediately “fact-checked” and rubbished. I am faintly surprised than no-one has yet been put in the stocks with an anti-vax label hung round their neck for people to throw rotten fruit at, and generally abuse them. That might almost be less unpleasant than the online abuse they have been getting.

Clancy has been damned by his university as being a Covid-19 “non-expert”. I don’t think you have to be an expert in an individual virus to extrapolate from other material, and I wonder whether any of his detractors have read Cron and Behrens’ book. Actually I don’t wonder at all. They haven’t (if any of you people have, please say and I will apologise, but I do not expect a flood of complaints). I suppose I could be similarly damned because I am not a virologist or infectious disease specialist. (Neither am I a health service economist, but “The Times” printed my letter today about NHS reform, which it has set up a Commission to examine.) But Covid-19 is an immunologically mediated condition identical in its presentation to things I have seen and treated. Clancy is an immunologist. So to suggest he is a non-expert is ridiculous. I rest my case and will continue to try and analyse events. My view is that if you have a serious question, then it deserves a serious answer. But the bottom line is that there are many unknowns here. The so-called anti-vaxxers are in the main asking for a pause until the unknowns have become knowns. Is that so wrong? Other vaccines have been paused or withdrawn for much weaker reasons. So why is this one not being paused? Answers on a postcard please.

The Wry Observer’s Covid-19 update (211)

It is rather depressing to look back to the Januarys of 2021 and 2022 and see my slight optimism that the corner was turning. Nonetheless, a Happy New Year to all my readers! This last year has seen more of the same, but an increasing realisation that “The Science” trumpeted as being followed early on has gradually been shown to be wrong. Politicians and medical bureaucrats alike seem to have had a mental block with the concept that science can change, and that what was once dismissed turns out to be correct. This despite the careful analyses of the Daily Sceptics website, HART and all sorts of individual commentators like me. At this moment we have seen another wave of panic as China realises the damage its vicious lockdown measures has caused, and has lifted travel restrictions, so a great tsunami of Chinese tourists will spread the virus through the Western world once more. And there are the usual predictions that a new variant, Omicron XBB 1.5, is so highly infectious that we must panic once more. It also appears to “avoid” the vaccine protection.

OK. So people get this variant. So what? Does it kill them? So far it appears not, unless it infects an at-risk person (very old, obese etc), but the risk of dying from flu seems much the same. Even the usually gloomy BBC says that most people will just have symptoms of a cold – which of course is what I prophesied in my original poem, and you can find that in my second ever Pandemic blog, March 20^th 2020. And if they get very sick, is there treatment to stop the killer part, the cytokine storm? Yes there is, although my pulse oximeter distribution has yet to occur to identify the people who are drifting into an at-risk situation. I only recommended it in an email to Chris Whitty on 14^th May 2020… But if the new wave is, effectively, no worse than flu, why the hysteria? We don’t mask up, or lock down, for flu. And are the pressures on the NHS really more intolerable (by a substantial amount, judging by press comments) than they have ever been in winter? I recall one bad winter, over 20 years ago, when my hospital was renting space in the local cold storage facility to keep the mortuary from overflowing; it, and the local funeral services, had run out of space.

I am also worried about the insidious growth of evidence that the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits. Now that the vaccines have been around for a while the less common sequelae which would not have been noted in small trials are mounting in number, with particular concern over whether the rising rate of cardiac deaths is attributable at least in part to the vaccine. It is a theoretical possibility. Also getting infected seems to produce better and longer-lasting antibody generation. Many people think Dr Aseem Malhotra is a maverick, but watch his interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News (https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=w3MPnBpfrRk). Then ask yourself – given the outrageous aspersions cast on drug companies and the regulatory bodies – why he has not been sued for defamation? Could it just be that those theoretical possibilities are realities? If so, it is probably worth reminding drug companies and politicians that the truth will emerge eventually.

Dr John Campbell continues to produce regular videos. In his latest, two days ago, he apologises for the taking down of his previous day’s video, but I missed it so don’t have any idea why he had to do this. But the two below are worth watching as they are dispassionate accounts of, on the one hand, the incidence of serious adverse events in the initial vaccine trials, and on the other numbers of people with inflammatory heart disease attending a district general hospital in Swindon. In the case of the former it’s not possible to drill down and find what is deemed a serious adverse event, as the raw data has been withheld, but Dr Campbell points out that a far lower side-effect problem with previous vaccines (swine flu and rotavirus) resulted in their withdrawal. In the latter, the is a huge jump in numbers; part of this is due to the virus itself, because it occurred before vaccines were available, but part is not. Is it vaccine related? Or are later coronavirus variants more likely to produce inflammatory damage? I agree with Dr Campbell that this needs further investigation, not least because if the vaccines are exonerated it will calm the public. And until it is investigated, questions will persist.

And I would love to know, by the by, why the AstraZeneca vaccine has quietly disappeared. I have had a little hunt for why, and it’s not at all clear; it might be related to reports of abnormal blood clotting (which occurs with the coronavirus infection anyway) but it leaves me concerned that the high risk of cardiac issues has not led to the suspension of the others – Pfizer and Moderna – until it is clear what’s going on.

The Wry Observer’s Covid-19 update (210)

Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat. That is, if any are left after the huge cull consequent upon the avian flu problem. I can hardly believe it’s almost a month since my last post. Quite a lot has happened but not a lot has changed. The ex-Secretary of State. Matt Hancock, may think he has redeemed himself in the public’s eye by being pretty good on “I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out Of Here!” but his diary style account of his inside eye on the pandemic (written, it seems, post-hoc) is reported as suggesting that he is trying to excuse himself from government decisions and that he was always right. I have often wondered whether I could somehow bring the phrase “self-exculpatory” into a piece. Now I have.

Meanwhile there seems to be a propaganda war starting up in the UK, with the publication of an article in the BMJ that suggests stronger action should be taken against any who do not toe the government’s line, and that the Hallett Inquiry should examine better ways of countering mis- and disinformation. The piece is “Understanding and neutralising covid-19 misinformation and disinformation” (BMJ 2022; 379 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2022-070331) I penned a Rapid response, which did not appear; when I read the submission guidelines I realised I had exceeded the newly imposed word limit, so cut it down and sent it in again.

It ran thus:

“I am surprised by this article, which appears to malign certain groups (and by association individuals) in a way which is not only unscientific but potentially libellous. Lumping scientific disagreement with fraudulent research is a dangerous game. “The Science” is not immutable and what was today’s dis- or mis-information becomes tomorrow’s truth. Galileo? Copernicus? William Harvey? Ignaz Semmelweis? All expressed doubts about established wisdom and all were right, so seeking to censor dissent runs the risk of later embarrassment when the scientific or medical establishment is shown to be an ass. I have been impressed by the statistical rigour of some if the “dissenting” material.

Criticism of collusion by dissenting organisations and individuals must be balanced by criticism of collusion within the establishment. The recent release of email exchanges about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 between Dr Anthony Fauci and other eminent scientists shows collusion in suppressing the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan laboratory. That dismissal now seems premature (and the clear conflicts of interest of the authors of the dismissal anyway undermined their assertions). As for “campaigns and duplicates” such things occur in real life, and those responsible for examining these are well-versed in spotting and discounting them. Who says what is not entirely irrelevant but what is said is highly relevant, and if there is clear scientific evidence to rebut an opinion or hypothesis, official or otherwise, it must be laid out. In censoring input the wheat is discarded with the chaff.

Official advice is seriously undermined when modelling and statistics that generate policy are flawed. For example, consider the wildly inaccurate modelling estimates of cases and deaths made by the Imperial College group. Furthermore the quoted Covid-19 deaths were based on inaccurate death certification (conflating with and from Covid-19), and numbers were trumpeted – with impossible precision – by date of notification date rather than date of death, thus misaligning deaths with case numbers, allowing false interpretations to be made. One might also ask whether panic was spread by quoting actual numbers of “cases” – which anyway are not cases of Covid-19 but numbers of positive tests – rather than the percentage of tests that were positive. Many dissenters have merely highlighted many such inconsistencies. Does doing this amount to disinformation? I think not.

The article suggests that the focus of the Hallett Inquiry should be “…[to] examine the extent to which groups promoting contrarian messages were able to influence policy… [and] it should inquire into how effective the government was in countering misinformation and disinformation and whether it drew on cognitive science to devise interventions.” The answer to the first, from my own experience, is that contrarian views were routinely ignored. For the second, government was very effective in countering those views simply because it ignored them. What it should have done is provided a proper scientific and evidence-based response of rebuttal, always allowing for the non-immutability of science. The Inquiry should focus on why government and its advisors failed to understand the pathogenesis of Covid-19, why it failed to read the existing literature on virus-induced hyperimmune states and their treatment, and why thereby it delayed recommending established treatments for six months (for steroids) and a year (for tocilizumab) and conducted an entirely unnecessary trial to prove what was already known. If SARS-CoV-2 infections do not kill people they do not signify.”

Still it did not appear. I did enquire what was wrong with it to merit its discard but obviously the usual policy of not explaining was invoked and I have had no feedback.

I do not believe that the Hallett Inquiry should be examining mis- or disinformation if such an examination only looks at one side of the argument. Neither do I think that critical views should simply be silenced or ignored, not least if they have a satisfactory scientific basis. But I still stick to my main argument – does any of this matter if SARS-CoV-2 does not kill people – and it is increasingly apparent that, because it has mutated to a less virulent form and there is now universally agreed (if not implemented) treatment for the hyperimmune state known as Covid-19, it is no worse than “ordinary” flu.

Meanwhile there is continuing concern over non-Covid excess deaths, further analysis of the risk of death by age group (extremely low in the under-20s, higher in the over-75s but especially when there are co-morbidities), concerns over possible vaccine-induced thrombotic episodes and cardiac damage. China appears to have abandoned its zero-Covid policy in the face of widespread protests. Janet Daly writes in the “Daily Telegraph”: “We have returned to the world of Galileo vs the Vatican” (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/17/governments-have-learnt-fear-works-truly-terrifying/) – echoing my Response. Pierre Kory continues his brief autobiography; sanctioned for promoting his “dangerous” views, he was one of the first to recommend – and use – steroids (we corresponded on this topic in July 2020 – see chapter 50).

Argentina win the World Cup; Harry and Meghan have a mega-whinge – airing one’s dirty linen in public is a sad thing and does neither of them any credit; the horrible war in Ukraine drags on. Fuel bills are soaring; lots of strikes in the UK because pay offers are not keeping up with inflation (everyone seems to think they are a special case, but the money has to come from somewhere). I have finished a Christmas short story which I will serialise on the blog.  Nothing to do with pandemics other than a one-line throwaway mention…