A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic - Laura Dodsworth (the first e reader .txt) 📗

By March 2021, Covid hospitalisations were at the same levels as October 2020. Strangely, Simon Stevens did not provide an update to the nation. As usual, numbers were used to scare, but not to reassure.

THE WHITTY AND VALLANCE ‘SHOCK AND AWE’ PRESENTATION

Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty and Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance warned on 21 September that there could be 4,000 Covid deaths per day in the autumn. Nothing like that total was ever reached. The Vallance chart showed infections hitting 50,000 cases a day by 13 October without action. When this day arrived, the moving average was 16,228.

Former Prime Minister Theresa May criticised the government’s approach, remarking that ‘for many people it looks as though the figures are being chosen to support the policy, rather than the policy being based on the figures’. Even The Guardian, which in general took a pro-lockdown approach during the epidemic, commented that the ‘data was selective… determined to cause alarm’.21 In a highly unusual move, the UK Statistics Authority also voiced concerns that the graphs presented to the public were out of date and over-estimated deaths.

THE SECOND WAVE

Public Health England said that more people died in the ‘second wave’ compared to the first wave of the epidemic.22 Yet according to the Continuous Mortality Investigation, set up by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, there were 72,900 excess deaths from March to the end of December. 60,800 of those occurred in the first wave, but just 12,100 in the second.23 It means that, unlike the first wave, huge numbers of people included in the coronavirus death figures would have been expected to die of other causes in those final few months of the year. It seems unlikely – impossible even – that Public Health England would not know this.

THE MOST DEADLY INFECTIOUS DISEASE IN A CENTURY

To mark the anniversary of a year of restrictions, the ONS produced a report which declared Covid-19 to be the most deadly infectious disease to hit Britain for over a century. Naturally this led to lurid doom-laden newspaper headlines such as ‘Coronavirus is the deadliest pandemic to hit Britain since the Spanish flu in 1918 and has caused the worst recession in 300 years – but house prices KEPT going up’,24 ‘COVID-19 most deadly infectious disease in UK in 100 years’25 and ‘Devastating UK Covid data lays bare impact of virus on lives, jobs and society in 2020’.26

But according Covid the accolade of causing ‘more deaths in 2020 than other infectious diseases caused for over a century’ was only possible with a disorientating twisting of truths. The ONS categorised Covid as an ‘infectious and parasitic disease’, putting it in a different category to other respiratory diseases including influenza. In this surprising category, Covid wasn’t even keeping company with sepsis, as David Livermore, Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia, wrote for the Lockdown Sceptics website. As he pointed out, the ONS’s graph ‘wildly underestimates infection deaths’ such as for bacterial sepsis and flu, which falsely elevated the deadliness of Covid.

Lockdown Sceptics asked ‘What was the ONS thinking producing such a misleading graph and report, knowing full well it would grab lurid headlines and feed the hysteria that has characterised the last 12 months?’27 This was a disheartening report from the ONS, but it was at least in keeping with marking a year of the ‘metrics of fear’.

THE PCR TEST

‘We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test,’ said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization, on 16 March 2020.28

How would countries test? Using the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test.

On 14 December 2020, the WHO issued an Information Notice for IVD Users ‘to ensure users of certain nucleic acid testing technologies are aware of certain aspects of the instructions for use for all products’.29

As many doctors and scientists had pointed out, the PCR test can produce false positives as well as false negatives. One problem is that when run at a high cycle threshold (Ct), the test can create a false positive, or pick up that someone had an infection weeks earlier. It is not a definitive test of infection or infectiousness.

As the notice says, ‘when specimens return a high Ct value, it means that many cycles were required to detect virus. In some circumstances, the distinction between background noise and actual presence of the target virus is difficult to ascertain… the cut-off should be manually adjusted to ensure that specimens with high Ct values are not incorrectly assigned SARS-CoV-2 detected due to background noise.’

In Portugal, judges ruled that a single positive PCR test cannot be used as an effective diagnosis of infection for the purpose of quarantining someone.30 Did the WHO issue the notice because of concern about legal action? When only a small proportion of people being tested have the virus, the operational false positive rate becomes important – think how many people might have had to quarantine unnecessarily, missing work, or an urgent medical exam, or to the detriment of their mental health, for example. For some people, being told they were positive with a disease that has been described ‘the greatest threat in peacetime’ could have been very stressful. Lockdowns and restrictions were based on the number of ‘cases’. And absolute totals of cases were used to scare people into complying with the rules.

The Ct in the UK appears to be set at 45. As Professor Carl Heneghan said when he gave evidence in the House of Commons to the Science and Technology Committee on 17 September 2020, ‘A cycle threshold above 35 generally involves people who are not infectious, yet NHS England documentation that has not been updated since January runs cycle thresholds to 45 that identify people who are not infectious.’

Heneghan was asked about introducing random testing – mass testing – as Professor Alan McNally of Birmingham University had recommended. This was his answer: ‘In effect, you are saying that random tests