Pick of the week – 30th September 2024
Pick of the week – 30th September 2024
Another few extras we hope will be of interest
🔗Stop the Northern Ireland Public Health Bill
UK Medical FReedom Alliance, 24th September 2024We covered the proposed Bill last month in the HART bulletin inviting readers to respond to the consultation, and apparently there has been such a big response that the deadline has been extended to 14th October. Cynically, one wonders is that to give time for those of a different persuasion to respond by saying the Bill is the best thing since sliced bread. So, if your plan to respond is like mine still sitting on that endless ’to do’ list, then help is at hand from the team at UKMFA who have responded and put their answers up on their website for people to use if they wish or modify. In particular, some items outside their remit have been marked n/a but you may wish to disagree. One suggested reply is that individual decisions have a better outcome than centralised top-down decision-making, with the government’s role being to keep essential services going and provide accurate information. Similarly, the individual is always better placed than a blanket use of statistical averages to assess your personal risk, as we have learnt only too well in the last 4 years.
Do not be put off by this being for Northern Ireland, as one of the stated aims is to “to align with UK jurisdictions, where appropriate“, so what gets passed there, will almost certainly come to the rest of the UK sometime soon.
🔗BREAKING: Journal pressured to retract study on covid-19 vaccine harms
MaryAnne Demasi, 23rd September
This is an extraordinary account of an Indian pharmaceutical company, Bharat Biotech International Limited, not only pressuring the Editor of the journal Drug Safety to retract a peer-reviewed article on Long-Term Safety Analysis of the BBV152 Coronavirus Vaccine in Adolescents and Adults: Findings from a 1-Year Prospective Study in North India, but also launching a libel suit against the journal and the 11 authors because their postmarketing safety review did not find the covid-19 vaccine Covaxin to be squeaky clean. The authors have held out but the Editor seems to be on the point of caving in (the article is still available now so worth downloading). Meanwhile, over 250 Indian scientists, researchers, ethicists, doctors and patients have signed an open letter addressed to BBIL, ICMR and the editor at Drug Safety, demanding the lawsuit be withdrawn, and the study remain published.
UPDATE: Since Mariam Demasi wrote this news item, the article was indeed retracted by the editor and unlike most retgr
🔗NHS staff drafted into schools to coach lockdown children on potty training
Michael Searles, The Telegraph, 14th September
This article paints a depressing and entirely predictable picture of the rising-5s entering school this term, a cohort born between 1st September 2019 and 31st August 2020. These children are reaching school age with delayed language development, social interaction, even toileting needs. At one time, being ‘toilet trained’ was a prerequisite for a place in preschool. But now charities are setting up sessions to teach parents how to teach their children these basic skills. There is further detail in the Times Educational Supplement (TES) and both articles refer to a commissioned report: “The COVID-19 pandemic may be a thing of the past – its impact in schools is not”, by Tim Oates, from Cambridge University Press & Assessment. HART members first wrote of the impacts of covid measures on children in March 2021 with an update in 2022, and it is very depressing though not surprising to see that the harms imposed on babies and toddlers through lockdowns are now coming through with no real government effort to understand or repair the damage. Tim Oates predicts children will be struggling for at least a decade and some may never regain the losses suffered by the draconian and uncosted measures.
🔗FIRST! DO NO PHARM
https://nopharmfilm.com/
23rd September 2024
Well worth watching this documentary, premiered at The Odeon Leicester Square and now available online. Aseem Malhotra has charted the pattern of pharmaceutical harms, often hidden from the public for decades. From Vioxx to Oxycontin, to Statins and Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), the list goes on. Wegovy is the latest in a long string of wonder drugs which you can buy online as a shortcut to the free but more difficult life-style changes. Some excellent contributions including Fiona Godlee (past chief editor of the BMJ), Jay Bhattacharya (professor of Medicine, Stanford University), John Abramson (Harvard Medical School, lecturer in public health policy) and Kim Witczak (patient advocate whose husband died of a drug adverse effect).
Many doctors will have been aware of the pressure to prescribe, the subtle freebies, the conference sponsorship etc but for many of us it is only in the last 4 years that we have come to realise the enormity of the regulatory and academic capture. Of course, everyone in the room was thinking about covid vaccines but perhaps wisely, Dr Malhotra wanted to use this film to wake people up using other examples. I sincerely hope he does a Part 2.
🔗 UK Covid 19 Inquiry – Module 3 Hearing – 26 September 2024 AM Professor Sir Chris Whitty
If you can bear to listen to it, you will hear some perhaps surprising admissions of doubt over a number of aspects of 2020. Baroness Hallett pushed Chris Whitty quite hard on preparation, asking “Do you have any views as to when during a month or two lead-in to the pandemic hitting that surging and scaling up should take place?” to which he replied, “Well… the key thing, which is the very limiting thing for scale-up, is people. Trained people. So you can buy beds. You can buy space. You can even put in oxygen and things. But, fundamentally, the limit … is trained people, and there is no way you can train someone in six weeks to have the experience of an experienced ICU nurse or an experienced ICU doctor. It is simply not possible” Q“So does that mean we need more potentially skilled-up ICU nurses, for example?” A. “Well, I think — I mean, there are strong arguments for that in between emergencies, and I think the argument — the argument for having them in the hope that we can be better off for a one in 100 year event I think is less strong than some of the other arguments for having more ICU capacity.” Good to know that Chris Whitty thinks this was a 1-in-100-year event – perhaps he has had a word with Bill Gates or Tedros Ghebreyesus and told them we don’t want another one!
Also on the early management of the lockdown: “do you think there was strong enough messaging or communication of the long-term risks to the public when we went into lockdown for example?”. In response Prof Whitty admitted that “in retrospect,” he still worries about whether the government “got the level of concern right.” “Were we either overpitching it, so that people were incredibly afraid of something when in fact their actuarial risk was low, or were we not pitching it enough and therefore people didn’t realise the risk they were walking into.” He went on to say, “I think that balance is really hard and arguably some people would say, if anything, we overdid it rather than underdid it at the beginning.”
Regarding shielding, he certainly acknowledged the downsides in terms of isolation and poor mental health and he also discussed the poor evidence for efficacy, given the airborne nature of transmission of all respiratory viruses. When asked, “in the event of a new pandemic, would you devise a shielding programme again?” he gave a quite unexpected reply: “I think there are two things I would definitely do. I think shielding I’m unsure about. It would depend on the situation. I definitely think that the risk stratification is really important….it’s important to put in place a mechanism to support people who rationally have chosen to take themselves out of society to the best of their ability to protect themselves. Whether the particular approach to shielding we took is an appropriate one to use again in a respiratory infection, I honestly don’t know.” I guess that’s as near as we’ll get to him saying “maybe, just maybe, the lockdowns weren’t a great idea.”
🔗Birth rate in the Netherlands remains low Artsen Collectief, 10th August 2024
The Artsen Collectief is an independent non-profit organisation of around 3000 medical professionals in the Netherlands, set up in 2020. Their website is well worth a look, especially this latest article about falling birth rates since 2022. On a background of a more gradual decline, there has been a step change seen in several countries. Citing reports of menstrual problems, reduced sperm counts and animal studies of the dreaded lipid nanoparticles concentrating in rats’ gonads, the author not unreasonably is still calling for a proper assessment of the mRNA vaccines so widely rolled out in 2021. Pause for thought. MHRA are still refusing to release their pregnancy monitoring data first requested by FOI in April 2023.