The UK Covid official narrative

A stool with three (very wobbly) legs

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Respiratory viruses are both unpredictable and commonplace. The name of the most well-known one, Influenza, originated in 15th century Italy, and comes from the old Italian expression influenza dei pianeti or influenza degli astri, meaning the influence of the planets. Our ancestors could not explain its sudden and unaccountable behaviour and ascribed its capricious nature to the influence of planets. 

Think of the SARS coronaviruses: where did they come from? Where did some of them go? Has anyone seen a rest home for retired respiratory viruses?

Influenza is just one of the many agents involved in active respiratory infections; scores of known ones give a spectrum of clinical presentations, from a mild cold to severe pneumonia. We have no idea how many agents there are. Since 1970, 1,500 pathogens have been discovered – 70% have come from animals. Some authors report that up to 40% of respiratory infections have no recognised causes. In his rule of three, David Tyrrell talks of about a third.

Over 30 years, we have studied physical interventions, vaccines, and antivirals for registered compounds and ones which never made it to market. In 2014 we encouraged Roche and GSK to give up the business part of their regulatory submissions for their antivirals, opening up a whole new source of clinical study report evidence that is infinitely more reliable and complete than biomedical journal publications. Publications have the imprimatur of science, but we have seen that the quality assessment process has never been properly tested.

So when SARS-CoV-2 struck, we watched unfolding events with curiosity. We tried to understand the effects of the agent and those of our leaders’ responses. To tease the two apart, you need reasonably good data. For now, we have to settle for our timeline of events which covers selected periods. No in-depth analysis is possible through a lack of resources.

We are used to wastage, error, and poor-quality research underpinning patient care. The influenza field is further affected by flawed science, pandemic conspiracies and political contamination that leads to the inevitable box-thinking with the advent of a newly identified agent. 

The forthcoming interview with one of us with Der Spiegel, dated July 2009, will set these statements into context.

In the UK, like in most other countries, the daily situation briefings delivered by top scientific advisers who we knew had little experience in respiratory virus epidemiology set the pace of the pandemic and the subsequent psychosis.

The briefings were devised to illustrate the seriousness of the COVID-19 situation by presenting running totals of new cases, hospital admissions and deaths. We call this the three-legged stool of the COVID narrative. The stool provided the rationale for unprecedented restrictions on civil liberties and governmental diktats designed to control the unruly populace in the hope of managing – or even eradicating – the agent.

After exploring aggregate data, we looked in-depth into the science of the three legs: speaking daily, we discussed and analysed the certainty behind the summary figures and trends presented every night. Finally, we asked ourselves: what props the stool up?

We tried making sense of the various government websites, the relevant papers in biomedical journals, and the tests applied to identify “cases.” We soon understood that the PCR was inappropriately used as a mass screening tool. Those reporting its results or those presenting aggregate data did not understand its limits. 

Even with correct specimen management and a competent laboratory process, a simple PCR test cannot distinguish active cases from those recovering from SARS-CoV-2 infection who are no longer infectious and a danger to no one.

We used our systematic review skills to analyse the studies comparing the culture of SARS-CoV-2, the best indicator of current active infection and infectiousness, with the results of PCR. 

Complete viable viruses are necessary for transmission, not the fragments identified by PCR. PCR picks up minute particles which take weeks to be cleared by our immune systems, not complete viruses, so governments were locking up the contagious with the non-contagious. 

The Misuse of PCR underpinned the whole narrative. It's very high sensitivity, and robotic acceptance as a gold standard created the illusion of many more cases (i.e. active infections) than were really present and prompted long quarantines, disrupting society and lives.

Therefore, the first leg of the stool is unstable, made worse by the absolute refusal to link PCR results to the reporting of viral load estimates, which could (coupled with accurate history and thorough epidemiology) give a likelihood of infectivity.

The second leg, attribution of death, was affected by bureaucratic bungling and PCR misuse. We discovered that UK public health bodies had 14 different ways of attributing the role of SARS-CoV-2 to a death. Some totals included deceased who had tested negative. Post-mortem examinations were uncommon, as was independent verification of causes of death. So aggregate attribution of mortality figures was questionable – the second leg started wobbling too.

What about the third and last leg of the stool: hospital cases or Covid induced hospital pressures? Hospital episodes took time to reconstruct, but they were also underscored by PCR misuse, poor definitions, and confusing messaging. A coherent dataset is unlikely to exist, so we pieced the puzzle together. We found that a variable but high proportion of “new admissions” in the devolved nations were infected in hospitals. The variations showed a clear correlation with community viral circulation and seasonality, as seen in the figures and bear little relationship with the imposition of restrictions. 

Anything up to 40% of “hospital cases” had caught Covid in hospital.

We reported our findings in a series of web reports for a charity and the mainstream media, the only avenues that evade some censorship. 

Our data came from the only section of society with an idea of what was going on or at least asking questions: the public.

Freedom of Information (FOI) request sites in the UK are sources of amazingly bright questions and bureaucratic and sometimes misleading answers. Here are some examples. Public Health England does not know whether hospitals have a financial incentive to classify an admission episode as COVID-related, so how can they interpret the data? 

Some deaths are classified as COVID-related, even though negative. The Department of Health has no idea how many and which of the PCR kits are in use, all with different performance that has not been standardised. So they added apples with trees and hay bales and reported the consequent nonsense daily.

The power of FOI-host websites like WhatDoTheyKnow is immense and underutilised. The questions and responses are public for everyone to see, and most of the public’s questions are pin-sharp.

The FOI ACT provides access to information held by public authorities who are obliged to publish certain information about their activities, and members of the public are entitled to request information from public authorities. 

However, the FOI respondents show poor science, bureaucracy, delegation to juniors to respond to “nuisance” questions and a lack of coherent vision – at times, the response is dismissive. Still, there are occasional nuggets of vital information. 

Our attempts at getting to the bottom of hospital episodes in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have been reported in Trust The Evidence (see list at the bottom of the post). 

The stool’s three legs remain vital to understanding the rationale for restrictions imposed throughout the pandemic. We fear that this or similar posts will be the only place where you will get some idea of how badly we have been misled.  

An earlier version of this article appeared in:

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-uk-covid-response-a-stool-with-three-legs/