…I noted that:

The current UK government has introduced new legislation to require millers and flour producers to “fortify” flour by adding synthetic folic acid (which is different to natural folates):

It’s one of those irregular verbs:

• I fortify…

• You add…

• He adulterates…

For context, this is what the NHS says about who can and cannot take folic acid:

More details and links can be found in this section of the October Updates post and this recent HART article. As far as I can tell, the available evidence suggests that fortifying/adulterating flour with folic acid will do rather more harm than good.

The NHS

Interestingly, the Who can and cannot take folic acid section of the NHS website, which at the time of writing was last revised on 5th May, now reads as follows:

Spot the difference.

There is now no reference to those having haemodialysis, or to those with a stent in their heart.

For context in relation to the latter, according to mypatientadvice.co.uk, NHS data indicates that over 100,000 coronary stenting procedures are performed every year.

But removing some of the conditions from the NHS website that describes “who can and cannot take folic acid” hasn’t changed human biology. The relevant people are still at risk from ingesting a synthetic product that is chemically distinct from natural folates.

I wonder why the information has been changed…

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The Consumers’ Association

The Consumers’ Association is a UK charity that aims “to empower consumers to make informed choices about goods and services by undertaking research and publishing the results of that research”. And in 2002, in the context of a decision by the Food Standards Agency not to recommend that folic acid be added to flour, this BBC News article…

…reported that:

The FSA decision has been welcomed by the Consumers’ Association which warned not enough was known about the risks for the body to recommend to ministers fortification of flour.

Sue Davies, principal policy officer for the Consumers’ Association, said: “We welcome this decision.

“Now it’s important that the Food Standards Agency and the Department of Health address the many issues that need to be researched before revisiting this subject.

“These include effective ways of monitoring of possible B12 deficiency if folic acid were added to flour; the possible long-term effects of high doses of folic acid for the whole population; and the issue of choice: consumers would need an alternative if they don’t want to eat fortified products.”

I cannot find any evidence of pushback from the Consumers’ Association this time around. Or indeed of how closely it has looked at the evidence in the published literature. At the very least, surely consumers should be entitled to buy unadulterated white flour, and warned on the packaging of the potential risks from the addition of folic acid.

Which? is the brand name of the Consumers’ Association. And the Which? website has a Get in touch page inviting members and non-members to call or email. I wonder if they might be more willing to consider the evidence than e.g. Miles Healy at the Department for Environment, who, according to this government memorandum, can be contacted at foodcstandards@defra.gov.uk.

Reasons why adding synthetic folic acid to food is a bad idea

For more reasons and context as to why adding synthetic folic acid to flour — or any food — is a bad idea, I recommend this recent conversation between Dr Clare Craig and Dr Liz Evans.

I will post an annotated transcript of that informative discussion in a separate article (available here from tomorrow) but below are some of the key issues in summary. A longer version of this overview can be found here on the UK Medical Freedom Alliance Substack:

• Flawed data
  One of the main reasons given for the addition of synthetic folic acid to flour is that it prevents neural tube defects (NTDs) But a close examination of the safety data from a prominent Hungarian trial shows that, for every single NTD prevented, nine babies died.

• Statistical illusion
  Claims that increasing folic acid intake reduces NTDs overlook the substantial rise in advanced ultrasound diagnostics and targeted terminations for babies with NTDs during the 1990s.

• Excessive folic acid in existing diets
  The pharmaceutical industry pushed for recommended daily allowances of folic acid to be doubled, risking exposing citizens to excessive doses of what is essentially a synthetic drug.

• Informed consent violation
  Adding a synthetic drug to a staple food is unethical mass-medication of the public without individual consent. Such a one-size-fits all approach does not take into account the widely varying needs of individuals.

• Unnecessary risks to those carrying a common gene mutation
  Addition of folic acid poses serious risks to the 40% or so of the population who carry the MTHFR1 gene mutation, and who cannot metabolise folic acid efficiently. Associated risks include:

  • the masking of vitamin B12 deficiency (which can cause symptoms resembling dementia)

  • increasing the risk of developing colorectal polyps and prostate cancer

  • other side-effects such as headaches, anxiety, sleep and digestive issues

All this is made worse when no alternative non-wholemeal flour is available, and many people are unaware of the risks.

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In early 2024, Dr Patterson wrote to the GMC (General Medical Council) in support of fellow cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, who had spoken out in the context of covid vaccine harms.

According to this March 2026 article in the Guernsey Press:

[Dr Patterson] has had his medical licence suspended by the General Medical Council [GMC] and is no longer a partner at the Medical Specialist Group [MSG].

He had not been involved in patient care since February 2025 and ceased to be a partner at the MSG [in March 2026], the group said in a statement issued in response to Guernsey Press questions, the newspaper having discovered the GMC’s suspension of his licence last month…

[The MSG] confirmed that [in February 2026] the General Medical Council imposed a 12-month suspension of Dr Patterson’s medical licence as an interim order pending the outcome of fitness to practice proceedings relating to him. Dr Patterson is appealing this suspension.

‘The investigation by the GMC is ongoing, and it is important that this process is allowed to run its proper course,’ said the MSG.

‘Separately from those GMC proceedings, following the conclusion of our internal processes, we can confirm that as of 19 March, Dr Patterson is no longer a partner at the Medical Specialist Group.’

“The process is the punishment.”

Prior to the above recent developments, Dr Patterson told his story here in conversation with orthopaedic surgeon-turned-podcaster Doc Ahmad Malik:

It is a fairly long podcast, and the transcript below — of the most salient parts, plus occasional links and comments — makes for a lengthier post than usual. But it is, I think, worthwhile.

Background

[Doc Malik] Dean Patterson… I think you’ve got a lot of interesting things to say… tell me a little bit about yourself…

[Dr Patterson] …I’m based in Guernsey… a Channel island… about 80 miles south of Southampton… a crown dependency… a… unique legal disposition in terms of… part of the UK… population 65,000…

I was born in South Africa and I [did] my medical degree there… I left in [the 1990s]… I… worked in Cheltenham [in England]… and then I went to Scotland. I trained in cardiology and vascular medicine [and] did some research in cardiovascular therapeutics [where] I saw quite blatantly how pharma was calling the shots… when the big drug companies were involved, the data was… held by the drug companies… ghostwriting was taken for granted… the system is not set up right….

I was looking to possibly head to Australia… and found in the career section an advert for Guernsey. So I came here. And I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been really tough. It’s a sort of hybrid system where we work as a partnership. [And on that note] these views that I’m expressing are my own… they don’t represent the partnership. I’ve been asked to say that by the management of the partnership.

We have a contract with the state of Guernsey and we provide secondary healthcare services… apart from radiology, psychiatry and pathology… about 50 specialists. I was a cardiologist on my own from 2006 to 2016, and then we recruited another colleague. [And] I’ve just been doing what I’ve been normally doing… listening to my patients.

I pride myself as being a very ethical diagnostician. I stick to what I call classical medicine in terms of… the history tells us nigh on everything that we need to know to make a diagnosis. And that’s all I’ve been doing… when I entered this covid situation… I was just following my standard principles…

Wisdom is something that you accrue over time and you never stop learning. But… when you get to a certain age and… level of experience, you know, in your heart… in your gut… you know absolutely when you have something that is on the money… that there’s a problem.

Spring 2021 observations

And I noticed [in Spring 2021] one of my patients [with] heart disease… admitted with an acute coronary syndrome… chest pain… he was admitted by a colleague [and] I took… over [his case] the next day.

I knew him really well and… I said to him, “How are you feeling today?” He was feeling a lot better, and I had a look through his notes… and I said, “This is really interesting… you were here in October last year… 2020… you [had investigations] in Southampton and they couldn’t find anything wrong with you… and you look like you’re having exactly a replica of [what happened last year]…” [So] I said, “What do you think is triggering this…? What’s been going on?”

He said, “I’ve actually been fine between these two events… [and] actually, Doc, the only thing I can think of is the fact that… five days before my admission in October last year I had my flu vaccine… and I’ve had my covid vaccine seven days before this admission [in Spring 2021]”.

[Doc Malik] Wow…

[Dr Patterson] And that was the first point where I actually thought… ever in my life… that a vaccine could do something to any of my patients. It wasn’t something against covid. It was really just listening to the patient…. You bury it in the back of your head and you think, “Okay, maybe he’s got a point.” He set it down… we managed it medically… he’d been thoroughly investigated on many occasions so he wasn’t keen on having further investigations… he was known to have had reasonably complex coronary disease, but… he was living quite a good quality of life apart from those two episodes… I followed him up subsequently…

But… it was literally a week later… another patient was… admitted within 24 hours [of a vaccine] with chest pain… And then a week later I had [a] patient who was probably one of the worst sort of coronary patients… diabetic… poorly controlled… [had] not really looked after himself… had a bypass and was… not expected to do that well… but he was in his sixties… he was admitted, and he collapsed… and he was in intensive care…. we weren’t sure what it was… [And] I’ve gradually got [more and more of these instances] of people getting admitted with… cardiovascular collapse and odd things that didn’t quite fit.

And then one of my patients [who] I’d been seeing for 10 years… she went to the emergency department and she’d become breathless within a week of her first jab… I knew her well because she had a previous [episode of heart trouble]… about 10 years before. But she [had been fine since]… no previous admissions apart from the one ten years before… when she was [first] diagnosed…

I had a look at her… we investigated… her breathlessness… and my gut told me that there was something going on… and I just couldn’t… figure out what it was in this particular instance… because she had a complex previous history… she was on [anti-clotting] medication. And then she got a second shot… she was in [intensive care] and she collapsed with cardiogenic shock [when your heart cannot pump enough blood and oxygen to the brain and other vital organs] and she passed away…

At that point I thought to myself… “There’s definitely something brewing here… And I had to stand up for myself… for the first time ever… I’ve never in my life had to stand up and say, “Look, I want a post-mortem…” She was in her 40s. She was stable in my care for 10 years. I knew her. She relied on me. And I felt that we had let her down. And I had to stand my ground. And I said to the pathologist, “Look, I want a post-mortem. I’m not backing down.” And everybody was trying to tell me, “Don’t push for a post-mortem…” my colleagues... I felt the pressure… people were saying, “This is unnecessary.”

[Doc Malik] Why? Why is it unnecessary?

[Dr Patterson] Well, they were [making out that it was] just a foregone conclusion… she had medical conditions... a [history of heart problems]. [And that] she died because of her known condition. I said to them, “No, I don’t buy that, because it was a temporal relationship with this vaccination, and she was stable before.” She had been stable for ten years and she never had covid… we had tested it… Also… when patients honour my care, I stand by them. I’m there to protect… if things go wrong, I will do my best to figure out what went wrong and document it. [In] medicine we need to learn through our mistakes… that’s the ultimate judge… if we make an error, we have to actually own up to it.

[Doc Malik] In surgery, we have something where… if you die within 28 days, you’re meant to discuss at an M and M [mortality and morbidity] meeting and have a post-mortem. Does that not exist in the field of cardiology…. where if there’s a medical intervention or something…?

[Dr Patterson] It does… but… I’ve never… formally ever before recommended a post-mortem… I’ve taken advice [when I’ve] asked for post-mortems… when people say, “No, we’ll just leave it.” But in this particular situation I felt strongly enough because of the uniqueness of the patient. She was young [to die]… and she had a youngish daughter. And the fact that she was so stable under my care… and the abruptness of the deterioration… And… these inklings [I had had] before made me think… “Hang on… you can’t let this slide… we have launched this vaccine quite quickly and we don’t have any long-term safety data…”

The post-mortem came back and I got [an] apology from the pathologist… she apologised to me personally and in front of the M and M meeting. The patient had what we call thrombotic endocarditis… basically a [heart] valve being destroyed by [blood clotting]… But on top of that, she had devastating myocarditis [inflammation of the heart muscle]. [The left chamber of her heart] was completely destroyed.

I was at that point picking up some post-mortem findings from... a pathologist from Germany… I got in touch with him and I tied it in with our local pathologist because she wasn’t experiencing all these things. And we managed to try and get some headway on this to find out… is this from the vaccine… how do we diagnose it etc. The post-mortem… against my wishes… stated that they could not exclude covid-19 as a cause for her death… whereas I actually felt that this was… clear… In any other situation where… an intervention had happened… and a patient dies with that temporal relationship… then you have a duty of care to say that this is a probable cause of her death. You don’t say… “unable to exclude [X] as a cause of death”. That’s a real cop-out. So I wasn’t particularly pleased about that.

[Doc Malik] The flip was also true… if you died of even a car crash within 28 days of a covid test, you “died of covid”. So why is the flip not also applicable… where if you die within a week of the jab, it’s likely to be the jab… or it has to be the jab until proven otherwise…

[Dr Patterson] Yes… so that was a moment to… stand up and say, “Actually, there is a problem”, but still a lot of people just saw those patients having chronic disease [as] being unlucky, and they didn’t even want to know whether it was anything to do with the vaccine.

And [then]... I think it was because they started to vaccinate younger people… we had a 20-year-old who was admitted with what we think was [a heart attack]… He first had a little rash and then he started getting this ache in his chest and he was admitted to the hospital… [around] 36 hours after his Pfizer vaccine, and he was in a real state… [the] worst chest pain you could ever think of. He was extremely lucky [to survive]… [and] this [sort of presentation] is something I’ve never seen in my life [before the covid era]…

And… there were two other cases in younger patients… of myocarditis… [in] a population of 63,000. So according to data estimates from the Office for National Statistics, we should be seeing… over a ten year period… two or three hospital admissions with myocarditis and maybe ten [related] cases overall. [But] I had this patient pass away… I had two other patients come to hospital... one… female, another male… in their 30s and 40s… with myocarditis. And then this patient who was 20… with myocarditis.

I am reminded of this UK government data (p18 here) for the most serious ambulance calls shows that the numbers rose substantially during 2021 and continue to remain high:

An extra 600 or so serious ambulance calls per day amounts to roughly 200,000 extra per year. Four serious ambulance calls instead of three.

[Dr Patterson] And then… I had an 82-year-old man who only took his vaccine because he wanted to go to America to be screened at the Mayo Clinic… his view was, “You can go to the Mayo Clinic and get everything done in a week which the NHS will take a year to do…” So he got a Moderna vaccine and then within four weeks he was having this strange chest pain... I admitted him [to hospital]… it wasn’t typical of chest pain from a [heart attack]...

And the next day he said to me, “Dean, I want to go home…” He was one of these independent men… a self-made man… didn’t like hospitals. And I said to him, “No, you can’t go home… your troponin has gone up to 8,000.” He said, “No, I feel fine.” And he was adamant, and he was… glaring at me. He was stood up… as tall as me… and he was quite intimidating. And I had to spend the next 45 minutes trying to talk him from going home. And his troponin [see below] sat there… no chest pain… at… between 7,500 and 8,000 for about five days. And that doesn’t happen with [a heart attack]…

And in that week I had about four other patients I diagnosed in the outpatient department with myocarditis… When you vaccinate people in cohorts like this… you get waves and ripples coming through which are associated with each other…

[Doc Malik] Can I just stop you there… You’re a really smart cardiologist… and I hate to interrupt you… Can you please explain what troponin is? Why are you measuring it? What is the normal range…?

[Dr Patterson] Troponin is a protein that’s found inside [heart] cells. It can be released from other areas as well to a lesser degree, but it’s very specific to [heart] tissue and it leaks from damaged tissue or dead tissue… We have… a very, very sensitive test. So if you were to have what we call a heart attack that people in the street would be able to diagnose… clutching [the] chest, sweating… and if you have pain for an hour and you don’t go to the doctor… and you only get to the hospital four hours later… your troponin will go up.

Commonly it’s… [10,000 to] 20,000 if you don’t get medical attention. It really climbs up high. But… [the test] can pick up small… but significant releases [of troponin from the heart muscle] which tell you what’s going on with the patient. So it’s a fantastic test for telling us when you’re getting damage in the heart muscle, from whatever cause that may be... [And] it’s used [everywhere] across the world now.

When you have a normal heart attack, it goes up and comes down in a… standard fashion over the period… [after] your chest pain. It will climb for the first 24-36 hours and then start to come down over the next 24 hours. And assuming that your pain is just one episode, it will go up and come down. It won’t just go up and stay there when you have a heart attack. Whereas if you’ve got inflammation in the muscle [that] is not being resolved, it will stay up as long as the inflammation is present…

[Doc Malik] What is the normal value of troponin…?

[Dr Patterson] …in extremely healthy people, you should have less than 3 as your result… We have a range… between less than 3 and 13, which is considered normal range...

[Anyhow] this [82-year-old] chap… he stayed in hospital [but] he refused to go for any invasive investigations. In any event [though] at that stage I’d accrued [at least] 20… patients where I thought, “Hang on a minute.” [And] it wasn’t just me… my colleague had [also] seen some patients…

And I’ve been raising this issue with the local… risk clinical governance team and things like that… and reporting yellow cards… But the Yellow Card System [which, according to its website, “safeguards medical products quality and efficacy in the United Kingdom”] to my mind hasn’t been… very responsive… I didn’t feel they were taking what I was putting in… seriously… It’s basically drop-down menus and… you use a bit of free text… fill in all the fields… you put a lot of detail in there…

And on a few occasions they sent me a request by email to fill in a Word document, which was basically the same data that I’d already submitted to the database online. [And] I thought, “You’re gaslighting me. I mean, you’re telling me [when] I’ve already sent you this information [that] you want me to be your little skivvy and write a Word document for you?” I don’t have time for that. I was like, “You must be crazy.” It just made me quite angry when I saw that. I thought… the people they’ve got running their systems are clearly not taking this with the seriousness which I felt it should be [taken].

So it’s been a difficult time… because… I think people are not willing to accept [what is happening]… People… take on… the trusted views of the medical establishment and then don’t question it for… up to… a couple of years. It must be quite difficult to turn yourself around and change your mind... I think I wouldn’t find it difficult, but I think there must be some… sort of psychological… rationale why people… when somebody’s trying to raise alarm… cling to the [idea] that this person must be wrong rather than entertaining the [possibility] that maybe they have a point.

I am reminded of the many minority reports of the past, not least in the realm of medicine and health care:

[Dr Patterson] And why would I [raise the alarm if there were no issues]? I’ve got no incentive in this at all. I’m extremely busy. As I said, we run a consultant-only service… there’s no juniors. [And] that’s why I think I get a much finer feeling for the pulse of this. In the NHS, there’s… lots of sub-specialties. [But] I’m a general cardiologist and a physician… so whatever goes on, you get a feeling for it. Whereas in the NHS, I can imagine… if you’re a young person with chest pain, you [might just] get a telephone consultation, or you get a chat to one of the paramedics... They might do an ECG if they come around to your house and [then] say, “No, you don’t need to go to the hospital…”

The influence of Big Pharma

[Doc Malik] Right at the beginning you talked about being in Scotland and witnessing cardiology [the study of the heart] and the influence of Big Pharma and how money was involved… Can you explain… a little bit more…?

When I was training as a junior doctor I saw the drug reps come… they would host meetings and provide food and drinks and… it’s unbelievable what cheap food can do and how people can be bought with just free donuts and sandwiches… and free pens… and they promote one drug or another… and people would just go and then start prescribing it… it was as simple as that… that kind of simple benign interference. [But in your experience] was it anything more?

I am reminded of the extraordinary pen collection of US cardiologist Dr Jeffery Caren:

[Dr Patterson] [In my experience] it was more about the research grants and the power of drug companies when it comes to doing actual research… and research that’s done in universities, I think, is very much on [drug companies’] terms, and there’s very much... a systematic method of this being done. And I don’t feel that the universities [actually] have… control when they’re doing the research. I think it’s very much [that the universities have] been… almost just a service provider… rather than independent… I feel that the system that is open to abuse… I just think that there is not enough ethical control on the data… independently… with the drug companies being able to veto things. And that was well-established as a reality.

And it was also well-established that drug companies would have guaranteed publications in top journals purely because of the mechanism of the funding. There were all sorts of back doors to getting a publication… One of them was… drug companies would get a publication because the journal knew that it was unofficially a rule that the drug company would order half a million reprints from the journal… and they cost $5 or $10 each. So that’s the back door to getting [pharma] funding [to the journal] for [the] publication. Whereas if you’re just an average Joe trying to get your publication… into a top journal, you’re fighting against that sort of level of financial conflict.

That is a well-established thing which I learned about… Not many people knew… [And] I just found that the university setting was not the place where you get proper blue-sky thought… independent… If you tried to propose some rigorous research, it wouldn’t go anywhere because it was always the drug company’s terms and conditions.

I am reminded of this discussion in this post relation to The Lancet:

[Doc Malik] I think people need to understand [that, in] these universities and big established departments, doctors chase the kudos… the reputation… the “Look at me… I’m head of cardiology…” “Look, I’m a professor… a senior lecturer.” There’s a lot of prestige attached to these titles… and then you get invited to the lecture circuit… you go to international meetings… you become a bit of a superstar in that little field… Joe Bloggs might not know who you are, but amongst your colleagues and peers you’re a respected authority. So even if you’re not getting a financial backhander… if you’re publishing research and getting promoted and you’ve got papers in distinguished journals… that adds to your reputation. You get the prime trainees working for you… the prime jobs… the lecture circuits. Am I right?

[Dr Patterson] Yes… I think the relationship has led to a situation… that we’ve all come to realise… where so much of what is published is of very dubious quality. And that’s because a lot of these papers are written before the results are through… they just fill in the blanks when the data comes in. And… there is not enough independence in universities... not enough… rigour when it comes to the ethics… Unfortunately pharma has gradually taken [more] control of universities and… I would imagine [it has] got only worse since… I’ve been in Guernsey for 17 years. I think it would be a lot worse [now].

There’s a lot of money now coming through… for example, the mRNA platform. If you look at most tertiary centres [large hospitals that provides specialised medical care] in the UK and across the world, they’ve been planning… launching research projects for not just vaccines, but for all sorts of mRNA technologies to treat cancer and [heart] disease… probably patients with myocarditis, I would imagine… I think there is definitely a huge amount of vested interest...

And unfortunately this is very much on Big Pharma’s terms… because… I don’t feel the tertiary centres are truly independent because they don’t have enough power financially… and the money from Big Pharma isn’t held independently. It should be held in an escrow account, and there should be complete independent editorial oversight from the tertiary centres… and the money should be much more traceable. [At present] money can be flowing in [through] back doors in ways which it shouldn’t, and I think we should avoid that.

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Speaking out

[Doc Malik] Going back to Guernsey… [it’s] not the NHS… [but] a different system… you’re not in the same legal structure as England and Wales and Scotland. You’ve got this hybrid system, and you and a group of other doctors offer your services and contract out for the local government… very different from the NHS…

Is it the fact that you were having these thoughts [about Big Pharma] as a trainee… and the fact that you work in Guernsey and have this different system out there… [is that] why you’re more vocal? Because Aseem Malhotra is full-time private… he’s not in the system… that’s why he’s speaking out… It seems like that’s a common theme. You’re independent and you’re not under the thumb of the state regulator or state government. Is that one of the reasons why… you spoke out?

[Dr Patterson] Well, it’s the reason why I was able to speak out. I was put [under] some pressure. I wrote an open letter to the head of the local government [in Guernsey]… where I was openly critical of everything that had happened. I recommended that we follow Sweden and the Great Barrington Declaration. And… I thought [this letter] was pretty good… I’ve got a lot of good feedback from it.

And then subsequent to that… after I’d seen these cases of myocarditis, I wrote an email to the Board of Health and I said, “Look, I would like to know that you are auditing the unintended consequences of your policies.” I listed things like misdiagnosis for cancer, mistreatment for cardiovascular disease, suicide, divorce… people becoming bankrupt… [and] a number of other things I listed there as negatives. And within 48 hours, I was asked by a clinical governance lead to meet him because he said I’d been recommended to have an occupational health assessment because they were worried about me. And I was like, “Well… who made this recommendation?” And he said, “Oh, I can’t tell you.” And so this is a way of putting pressure on you.

I can say other things as well, where I was told… “Why are you seeing this patient? Why are you recommending…” Because this patient [had come] to see me about the vaccination… wanted my opinion… [And the authorities] invited me in on numerous occasions, giving me… this thumb of pressure.

So it’s not been easy… Subsequently… I became more vocal on [social media]… and I’ve then been invited to the management at my partnership and told I’ve broken the social media policy, and that they want… to have a disciplinary process… And I just told them straight, “Look… I’m following GMC guidance… I’m standing for the safety of patients…” And I said, “You should do the same.” I’m not backing down. I’ve reached the point in my life where I am never backing down on this… I won’t back down because I know there’s a problem and… we can’t let this happen…

[Doc Malik] You’re a good medical doctor… you’re abiding by GMC guidelines… you have integrity and you have ethics. And you’re standing up and speaking out for your patients. And in this upside-down clown world you’re getting [persecuted]…

It’s the same script [I’ve seen in other cases]… I got pulled up by the national hospitals management team… the two different hospital groups… same thing… you’re breaching our social media policy guidelines… And I threw it back at them. I’m like, “Policy GMC guidelines 23 and 24… I’m speaking out for my patients. Are you telling me not to?” And then they backed down…

I don’t know what kind of pressure you’ve had, but [from the GMC] it’s just constant pressure… emails… threats for investigations… demands for meetings… And… I’ve… been referred to GMC for apparently being transphobic… because they couldn’t really get me on the covid stuff… And [I’m] just like, “Just back off… because I ain’t stopping. I’m going to keep speaking up for my patients…”

[Dr Patterson] It’s just another massive red flag. When people do this to me, I’m like, “Hmm, okay. I’m learning so much about you people. I’m questioning why I became a partner. Because if you’re all like this, I’m thinking to myself, “Maybe we don’t share the same views. Maybe I need to re-evaluate my compass and actually who I invest my livelihood with.”

I am reminded of this post:

[Dr Patterson] It’s a really tough place to be… but I think I’m slowly… winning people over. You’ve just got to stand up and say it like it is again and again. I feel a bit like an evangelist.

My wife… she’s getting stressed. She said, “Dean, you’re obsessed.” I said, “No, I’m not obsessed. I’m doing what’s right. If I don’t do this, who is going to do it…? Someone has to stand up for the truth.”

I can particularly identify with the second part of that last paragraph.

Fighting for our children’s future

[Dr Patterson] It’s ridiculous... absolutely insane… obscene… as a general physician and cardiologist… all my livelihood I’ve spent… late nights… a lot of people would have packed [it] in. And [then] it comes to… where they do this… and you think I’m going to stand down? You think I’m going to walk away? You think I’m going to keep quiet? It’s not going to happen. It’s never going to happen. Because once you know that… they’ve transgressed and… this is a problem… and they’re not admitting to it… then you know the problem is even bigger than the problem that you’re actually dealing with.

There is a problem behind the problem and we need to fix it… and fix it properly for [our] children… Otherwise, what’s it going to be like for our kids…? I’m 56 and… I’ve got three boys… I work hard now for them… I’ve had my fun, I’ve been around, done a bit of traveling. Yes, I might want to have a nice retirement, but the hard work that I’m putting in… the hard yards… are really for my family. And… you can’t let it go and say, “Oh, it doesn’t matter.” It’s impossible.

[And] it’s not just myocarditis... I’ve seen so many other bizarre things… I saw a 20-year-old chap…. the nurse said, “Come and see this guy… he was admitted by the neurologist… the neurologist didn’t know what was wrong… normal CT… normal MRI… and I went to see him and I looked at him. He was paralysed on the left-hand side of his body… I don’t know if you know what clonus is… the most exaggerated reflex you can have… it’s when your leg starts to jerk heavily. And this guy had… the worst clonus I’ve ever seen… And I looked at him and I was like, “What’s going on with you? You look like you’re having a massive stroke...” And I just got on the phone… I said to the guys in Southampton… “You’ve got to take this kid. It’s seriously something unusual going on here.” And this was in February 2021… I remember this because I’ve never seen anything like it in my life…

Later on that year… I remember the physician who admitted him, because when you admit someone… you’re responsible for when they come back… the patient is yours… [And] I said to her, “What happened to this chap? What was the diagnosis?” She said to me, “Oh, they think it was Lyme’s disease.” So I said, “Lyme’s disease? We don’t have Lyme’s disease here…” I thought… he couldn’t have been traveling very much because we’ve had all this lockdown and stuff…

Anyway, I’m just a naturally inquisitive guy, and I thought, “This sounds really odd.” So I phoned him up and I said to him, “Hi, I’m Dr Patterson… I sent you over to Southampton... Can you tell me what happened?” He said, “Yes… they thought I had Lyme’s disease but then they realised the tests for Lyme’s disease were false positive… Then they diagnosed me with the Guillain–Barré Syndrome…” In layman’s terms… [that] is what we call an ascending paralysis. It starts in your feet and comes up and gradually comes on. And it’s classically with… no reflexes. [But] this chap had clonus, which is the complete opposite… the most severe reflex you can ever have… And he said to me, “Oh, this [is the] Miller-Fisher variant of Guillain-Barre syndrome.”

I was like, “Hmm… I’ve never seen anything like this…” And this was… about the time that this patient of mine at 42 had died. And I said [to the 20-year-old], “Have you had the covid vaccine? Because you’re only 20… you shouldn’t have had it.” And he said, “Yes, I’ve had it.” He had it early. I think someone in his family was a healthcare worker who said he got early access to it.

It’s these things that make a huge difference to your understanding… I feel like I’m seeing the grains of my career… and everything founded upon these things… which people willingly just gloss over. This is absolutely impossible to walk away from. If any clinician had seen a patient like this, you’d remember it… because it is the most severe presentation you would see in a 20-year-old…

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Why are so few cardiologists raising the alarm?

[Doc Malik] Dean, how many cardiologists are there in the UK?

[Dr Patterson] I’m not sure, to be fair. I’m not sure… probably a thousand… or maybe two.

[Doc Malik] Why have we not heard from any other cardiologists…? Is it just bad luck in Guernsey…?

[Dr Patterson] I’m at the coalface. We have no juniors. When there’s a problem… something odd happens… you see it. I’ve been here 17 years. I know... the pace of this place…

In big centres and in smaller centres, there is shift-working… you have junior doctors working shifts, coming in, going out… every few months there’s a whole new set of juniors. There’s that effect. [Then] you’ve got the middle grades and… consultants in various different levels and different centres working different shift patterns. In some tertiary centres, some consultants do one shift in a month and a half. So it’s going to be a very delayed signal.

Then in cardiology, you’ve got [dedicated] centres… where if you get chest pain and they think you’re having a heart attack, you go directly… [and] have consideration for a stent. Anyone not fulfilling those criteria will get bounced around between the emergency department, which… is a horror show… or telephone consultations… a popular thing since covid… So you’ve got this perfect storm where the signal is going to be very much dampened down. And that is the problem.

People have also been brainwashed to say that covid causes myocarditis and the vaccines are safe and effective. And they’ve just… said, “Yes, we believe you.” And they’ve become absolutely convinced that they are right based upon that simple, flawed interpretation… a lack of critical thinking. And I think it’s going to be a very difficult time for people to… actually get over this. Because… it’s quite apparent to me that… these vaccines… it’s impossible to say they’re safe and effective… even if they were safe and effective… because the data wasn’t there.

So we had to [look to] real-world assessment of our patients. But we were told that [the vaccine] was safe and effective. [And] anybody that was going to question whether a patient’s admission could be from [a] vaccine side-effect was told not to consider that, which is completely against ethics… completely against any common sense thinking or any normal practice… Can you imagine pre-covid, if we had launched some product with such a short research background and then told people to ignore it. They wouldn’t have… They would never have done it. But it was that complete media propaganda storm that sold everyone into this lie…

[Doc Malik] And I think… they piggy-backed onto the term “vaccine”, which they’ve massaged into the people’s minds [as] being the sacred cow. Because of [Andrew] Wakefield and the scandal, no-one can...

[Dr Patterson] Yes, it was the saviour. It was like a religious thing… “Once we get the vaccine, we’ll be safe.” Once we vaccinate… what [was] it… 15 million people, we’ll stop. You know the story…

There were so many aspects of the covid era that resembled religion:

[Doc Malik] That’s the problem… they’ve used the sacred cow vaccine… because you can’t question it. If you question a vaccine, you’re a quack and an anti-vaxxer and a dirty idiot. And the funny thing is… this isn’t even a vaccine… it’s gene therapy [or a] gene mis-therapy… It’s a lie on a lie.

[Dr Patterson] Yes… vaccines are given a light-touch regulation compared to drugs… This new type of treatment should, in my view, be given even greater scrutiny than drugs. Instead, it’s been dumbed down into the vaccine slot where they do the basic studies in animals… but when it comes to the humans, the vaccines don’t get any of that assessment, whereas drugs do. So the vaccines get away with it… because all they’re interested in, once they transition to humans, is… they make sure no-one drops dead immediately, which is obviously a big safety signal… They just… want to know about antibodies. If [a vaccine] produces antibodies, they go, “Oh, we’re onto a winner. It’s a vaccine, guys. We’ve got antibody production...” And then they just go into… what they call… long-term safety… where they look at clinical outcomes…

I am reminded of this presentation from US civil rights lawyer Aaron Siri summarising many of the issues in relation to childhood vaccines generally, and particularly the lack of long-term safety data:

Covid, myocarditis and how trials are conducted

[Doc Malik] Moving back to covid, can you tell me… what is the reality of covid and myocarditis…? Does covid cause myocarditis…? Can you shed some light on that?

[Dr Patterson] I think covid is like any other virus in terms of its incidence of myocarditis. I don’t think covid has a specific predilection for myocarditis. I really don’t. I think… if you’ve got a sick patient and have a viral infection or sepsis… myocarditis can be a consequence…

I’ve seen so many people come to me and say, “I went to get my booster and I’ve got a side-effect.” And I said, “Were you feeling well before the booster?” They said, “No… I was breathless, ever since the shot I had before.” And there are so many people who’ve had symptoms [like that]… [And] when you go and get your vaccine, they don’t quiz you. The fact that you arrive is [taken as] “You’ve consented, because you’re here.”

Whereas when you enter… a research project, you get assessed by either a research nurse or a research fellow… a very strict protocol, and they ask question by question, “Have you got any of these things?” So anybody that was coming for their booster who might have been… slightly off… [from] the previous jabs… would get thrown out… And you can see that they… screened 1,800 people to get 800 into the studies… there were… more than twice the number of people… they needed… so there were obviously a lot of people that they didn’t allow to enter the study… [And] that’s odd… because these people were… students and staff at the university… they weren’t people in hospital So, why have these people all been excluded? You’ve always got to look when you see research… [and ask] “Why are the people being excluded…?”

[On a] video I presented, [one] study had a really interesting protocol. They had what we call a screening six-week period where they gave you [a statin to lower your cholesterol] and then they reassessed you. And then they tested your cholesterol and they asked you how you felt. And if you didn’t feel very well on [that statin] or your cholesterol didn’t change, they rejected you from the study. That was called the “screening exercise” [laughs]… there were 6,000 people rejected from their study… and they weren’t able to tell us the screening [results]…

[Doc Malik] Yes… the patients that prove the thing doesn’t work… they just get rid of… politely…

[Dr Patterson] I think they had… maybe 20,000 people in the study, but they had to screen 26,000 people to get the 20,000. So there were 6,000 people that potentially either didn’t tolerate [the statin] or [for whom] didn’t work… which tells you about side-effects and efficacy. And they just ignore that…

I am concerned…. in the last couple of months, I’ve been testing anti-spike antibodies, purely because I’m trying to get a grip. We haven’t got the ability to determine what’s going on in patients. Some people had four or five shots and some people have only had one or two. And we don’t really know how the safety signal works. If you have two, can there be [something] that leads you to having a side effect [several] years later? Or is it only in people that have [had] a fairly recent vaccine… say within the last six months…? When is it safe after the vaccine? When do you feel that your risk is going away? How do we know? We don’t know so many things…

And so I’ve been testing this… you can measure the level of the antibody... [and] it’s been fascinating, because I’ve tested about 30 people who’ve had the vaccine, and 26 of them have got levels of antibody more than the upper limit of the [test]… the [test] can only measure up to 2,500… and 26 out of the 30… it might be more than that… have got levels of antibody above the upper limit...

Now these patients… some of them have had a vaccine two years ago and have no symptoms. Some of them were invited for the booster, and I said, “Well, hang on a minute, I’m not sure about the safety of this.” And they trusted me. So I said, “Well, let’s check your antibodies. They’re about to be boosted.” And the antibodies are more than 2,500... I don’t know how high. We don’t know because the test… stops at 2,500.

Now for comparison, unvaccinated patients… I’ve looked at their results, and they tend to be around 40… 50… maybe up to 100… I’ve not been vaccinated. I’ve had covid. I’ve got antibody levels of 50 to 100. Whereas people that have had… either two jabs or four… and some of them might have had covid… some of them not had covid… why have they got levels of antibodies so high? What is going on? This doesn’t make sense. We were told [the vaccines] don’t work for very long… they don’t have durability…

[Doc Malik] But these are the questions… how long do the spike proteins last for? How long are they made in the body…?

[Dr Patterson] As clinicians… we need to look into this. I don’t want to be alarmist to people, because I think it’s not clear. But my advice to people who have had the vaccine is to understand that you can upset your genes, and the human body is fairly resilient, and you have this thing called the phenotype which is the person you see, the person that grows from [a] baby. The baby is programmed genetically, and what the adult looks like and what the adult suffers with respect to illnesses in their life is down to what you do to those genes. And that’s called the phenotypical expression…. it’s the output from the genetics…

[And] it’s very important to understand that there’s a huge amount that can be done to ensure that you promote the safe expression of your genes and your genetic function. There are some people that have inherited genes from their parents that could cause certain illnesses… and they don’t always get those illnesses. And that’s due to the effect of lifestyle... There may be people out there who’ve got high levels of antibodies who are living… healthy lives… [and have no issues]. It’s very important that we ensure that we don’t stress people. We’ve had too much stress in the last few years, and I think it’s very important to get that message over… that we’re inquiring about this for the right reasons. We don’t want to alarm people. We want to help them

[Doc Malik] Yes… I agree with all of that. We don’t want to be stressing people out. We don’t want to all be doom and gloom… I believe that the human body is very resilient. We are more than just our genes. Hereditary disease is a tiny fraction of illness. Most of it is influenced by epigenetics… by our lifestyle… our environment… stress. So it’s very important to think positively.

Now, I just want to go back to a couple of things… you talked about measuring antibodies… what is the test that you can do…?

[Dr Patterson] It’s the… covid spike antibody test, and it’s measuring the amount of antibody. You can [also] do a test which tells if you’re positive or negative, which is not a numerical result. [But] this specific test will tell you numerically, on a scale, in units per millilitre of blood… how many antibodies you have… the concentration…

[And] we’ve been told that the covid vaccination induces some immune protection, but you require boosters because your immunity wanes. And that would mean that your antibodies should drop after vaccination… they should disappear or become very low. It’s important to understand that… these… antibodies will be produced when you have covid or when you get the vaccine. And… we need to learn how your antibody response is determined when you do get covid after [getting] one or two or three or four vaccines. And then some people have had covid after vaccination and then got a booster. And… quite a few people have had the vaccine who have had covid more than once. And I think there is some sort of immunological interplay there…

[Doc Malik] I don’t know about you, but [now] I just have so many questions… What are these spike proteins doing to the body? How long are they being made for? Where are they going in the body? How long will they last for? You said you can’t measure spike protein. Why can’t we measure it? The body’s meant to be making spike protein…

[Dr Patterson] It’s amazing. We had the PCR test developed so quickly after we discovered this unique virus called covid… rolled out within months. And yet we can’t test… in a commercial sense… for the spike protein. There are some people who have done it in the laboratory and… reading up on that… it does sound like a fairly complicated procedure… but… most blood tests are quite complicated… it’s like a mobile phone… they’re very complicated, but when you commercialise it and start selling in volume it becomes economically viable. You just have to invest in the technology… [and] I think there’s no one wanting to invest in [testing for spike protein]…

For anyone whose health has declined since 2021, and who took the covid injections (and especially the boosters), it is worth at least considering the possibility of covid vaccine injury. I have reproduced some advice from GP David Cartland in this footnote1 for reference.

[Dr Patterson] We know that there is so much money riding on… the mRNA technology empire… that it’s extremely difficult for people to be allowed to speak out. You know this… people in the NHS and across the world… have been censored… dismissed… they’ve lost their jobs… even for not taking the vaccine, never mind questioning it. And [I’m] in a unique position… I’m in a partnership where if they dismiss me… it’s a hard blow for the partnership because… you can’t just recruit people into Guernsey… and then you have to have a locum and all that… financially it’s equally hard for them as it is for me. And it wouldn’t go down well because… I think I’m reasonably well-respected amongst my patients… I’m not perfect [but] I’ve always aimed [for] 100%…

The long haul

[Doc Malik] My colleagues tell me… a strange thing is happening. They tell me it’s the vaccine. And I tell them “Why don’t you speak up about it?” And… they say, “No… I’m not going to do that.” They shake their head and rush out of the room. I’ve had three consultants tell me, “You must be kidding… No… I’m not saying anything now.” And that’s desperately sad. What kind of state of affairs are we in now… where doctors are terrified to speak up on behalf of their patients because they’re worried about what’s going to happen to their career and their jobs…?

Do you worry that you… if you carry on talking and speaking up… are going to be made an example of… like Andrew Wakefield…? Because they went for him big time… I’ve had lawyers and journalists tell me that he was made an example of… he was made a scapegoat so that no one would question vaccines… Are you not slightly nervous that they’re going to come for you… they’re going to take your licence away… they’re going to get rid of you… they’re going to discredit you somehow? Are you not even remotely worried about this?

[Dr Patterson] I know the system has to change. I think I’m in a battle. I’m in it for the long haul… for the rest of my life. I don’t expect to see tangible results of my battle personally, but I’m doing this so that my children will inherit something that resembles a respectable system of health. And nothing else matters… at the end of the day… they can chuck me out… go on… do it… I’ve reached the point of realisation… [and they] will just empower me to become [a] bigger voice because I’ll have the freedom to speak, and be the person who I am becoming. [They] will just accelerate me into a place where I can have that personal freedom.

I think there’s [two] sides to this coin. And the people on either side of it need to listen to each other. I think civilisation really needs people to start listening. It’s really important that we do this for societies… for the benefit of the greater good. That’s really, really key to what I’m trying to do. Because there’s bigger things at play here…

[Doc Malik] If you could say anything to your colleagues… all the doctors out there, what would it be…?

[Dr Patterson] If I were to sit down and have a chat… I would say to them… “Why are you in medicine? What are you actually in this for…?”

Everything hinges on that. Because… believe it or not, I think a lot of doctors are completely lost. I think they’re in medicine for the wrong reasons. And once you know who you’re talking to… a clinician [or] a businessman… your response to them will be guided by that… it’s very difficult to have one answer…

If they aren’t engaging, I do what I do every day with them. I say to them, “Look, there is a problem. I think that I am an intelligent, wise clinician. I listen to my patients. I have my patients’ best interests and… your best interests at heart. I am not the type of person to waste anyone’s time on frivolous tasks… I am the type of guy who calls a spade a spade… [and] I’ve got 101 other things… I could be doing… but I can’t let this slide…”

And this is the sort of doctor that the GMC suspends…

In more ways than one, this stirring instrumental track seems an appropriate way to end this post. Its name is Heart of Courage. It is by Two Steps from Hell. And it is taken from the album Legend:

It would be a fitting tribute to anyone who has spoken out in the context of the events of the past few years, not least those in the medical profession.

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And also:

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The UK government document Working Together to Safeguard Children 2026 — “A guide to multi-agency working to help, protect and promote the welfare of children” — begins:

Nothing is more important than children’s welfare. Every child deserves to grow up in a safe, stable, and loving home. Children who need help and protection deserve high quality and effective support. This requires individuals, agencies, and organisations to be clear about their own and each other’s roles and responsibilities, and how they work together.

This 2011 Statement of Government Policy on Adult Safeguarding opens by saying:

The Government’s policy objective is to prevent and reduce the risk of significant harm to vulnerable adults from abuse or other types of exploitation, whilst supporting individuals in maintaining control over their lives and in making informed choices without coercion.

The Government believes that safeguarding is everybody’s business with communities playing a part in preventing, detecting and reporting neglect and abuse. Measures need to be in place locally to protect those least able to protect themselves. Safeguards against poor practice, harm and abuse need to be an integral part of care and support. We should achieve this through partnerships between local organisations, communities and individuals.

“What’s not to like?” we might ask.

But while I appreciate the importance of the care and protection of children and adults, I am also mindful of some of the potential unintended consequences of well-intentioned but over-eager application of safeguarding policies. And the primary purpose of this short post is to flag up some of the ways in which over-zealous compliance in the context of safeguarding can lead to undesirable outcomes.

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Not least because I have reservations about writing anything in relation to sensitive safeguarding cases of which I have only limited knowledge, I asked AlterAI — featured in this post and well worth a go if you haven’t tried it — to generate some specific hypothetical examples by way of illustration:

Give three specific hypothetical examples of how raising well-intentioned safeguarding concerns could have bad consequences in a school context (50 words each)

And I got this response:

1. The Chilling Effect on Student-Teacher Mentorship
A teacher provides extra guidance to a struggling student, but a “safeguarding” report is filed based on suspicion of boundary-crossing. The teacher, fearing professional ruin, withdraws entirely. The student, now isolated and lacking a critical support system, spirals [downwards] academically and socially, losing the only adult connection that kept them grounded.

2. Eroding Family Autonomy and Trust
An school flags a student for “emotional neglect” because of non-traditional parenting styles or strict discipline. This triggers aggressive state intervention, tearing the family apart. The trauma of the investigation and the resulting separation cause profound, lasting psychological damage to the child, far outweighing the initial, subjective “concern” for their welfare.

3. Weaponisation of Mental Health Protocols
A student expresses temporary academic frustration, but rigid protocols escalate this to a mental health crisis. The student is forced into psychiatric screening and labeled with a disorder. This medicalisation transforms a normal adolescent challenge into a permanent record, limiting their future opportunities and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of instability.

There is of course plenty of scope for more examples, but those above go some way to illustrating the general idea.

Stepping back, I can’t help but think of other instances of authorities encouraging people to report their neighbours for minor misdemeanours: not least the East German secret police; the Chinese social credit system; and indeed the covid era.

And as to the broader notion of safeguarding, I am reminded of the extent of the activities of rape gangs as discussed e.g. in the testimony featured in this post…

…and how little the government, the authorities and the media appear to be doing about it.

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This article on the general notion of systemic evil:

This piece detailing how DBS has been weaponised against GP Dave Cartland in the context of his speaking out about medical ethics and patient safety in relation to covid vaccines…

…and this related section — DBS as a censorship tool — from March’s Updates post, featuring nurse Carly Stewart.

And this short article:

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This is a brief post to illustrate the contrast between the hype and the reality around Ebola.

Here are the recent results of a search on the BBC website for “Ebola”:

More than 30 articles in just over two weeks…

And here is a summary of the current situation from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the national public health agency of the United States):

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For context, here is some recent World Health Organization information on malaria:

• In 2024, there were 579,000 malaria deaths in the WHO African Region in a single year

• More than 400,000 of those deaths occurred in children under 5

And a search of the BBC News website for “malaria” reveals… no news story for almost a year.

Make of that what you will.

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…I was recently reminded by a conversation at home of being told years ago, by my grandfather, that Mars, the company that makes Mars bars, also makes pet food. I guess I might still have been at primary school at the time I first learned that, but it was quite an eye-opener for me.

And that in turn reminded me of Jeff Webster, who launched Hunter and Gather with his wife Amy. The company sells food with “no refined sugar, grains (gluten) or cheap, inflammatory seed or vegetable oils”. I can recommend their products from personal experience, especially their avocado oil mayonnaise.1 But the most striking thing I remember Webster saying (in this podcast from 8:20) is that:

The big, big red flag for Amy was when she saw big vats of caramel going into Whiskas pet food… and no-one had any answers for it. She was at a factory tour, and no-one had any answers…

I find diagrams like this one intriguing:

But while such illustrations are useful to show how so many branded products are ultimately owned by just a few large companies, for me such visuals border on information overload. So I broke down the above chart into sections featuring the individual corporations. And I thought I’d share the result, not least to raise awareness.

A couple of caveats: such charts soon go out of date, and this is no exception: e.g. Kraft became Mondelez and Kraft Heinz. And in some cases the situation is not straightforward: e.g if a product is manufactured by one corporation and marketed by another. So please forgive me if you find minor discrepancies and inaccuracies here and there.

I will start, perhaps fittingly in the light of the Jeff Webster’s revelation, with Mars, and then work round clockwise. All the companies are American-owned apart from two of the largest: Unilever (Anglo-Dutch) and Nestlé (Swiss). And the revenue figures are for 2024. For each corporation I have also highlighted just a few headlines from over the years under the heading “profits over ethics?”

Mars Inc.

$50 billion, roughly the GDP of Bolivia

Mars’ brands include Wrigley’s, Hubba Bubba, Starburst, Skittles, Mars (unsurprisingly), Maltesers, M&M’s; and also Ben’s Original (formerly Uncle Ben’s) and Whiskas and Pedigree pet foods

And also: Galaxy, Celebrations, Tunes, Tracker, Dolmio Sauces, Seeds of Change organic meals, KIND bars and Nutro pet food

Mars profits over ethics?

Unilever

$65 billion, roughly the GDP of Myanmar

Unilever’s brands include Knorr, Hellmann’s, SlimFast, Pot Noodle, Colman’s mustard, Bovril, Ben & Jerry’s, Cornetto, Magnum, Lipton, Dove and TRESemmé:

And also: Marmite, Radox, Pot Noodle, Wall’s Ice Cream, Pukka Herbal Teas, Graze snacks, Cif, Domestos, Surf, Persil, Lynx and Simple Skincare

Unilever profits over ethics?

Johnson & Johnson

$86 billion, roughly the GDP of Lithuania

J&J’s brands include the sweetener Splenda, Listerine, Band-Aid, Nicorette, Benylin and Tylenol (Calpol in the UK):

And also Benecol, Savlon and CareFree feminine care

Johnson & Johnson profits over ethics?

Procter & Gamble (P&G)

$83 billion, roughly the GDP of Ghana

Procter & Gamble’s products include IAMS pet food, Pringles,2 Bounce, Febreze, Head & Shoulders, Pantene, Gillette, Old Spice, Tampax, Always, Oral B, Crest, Vicks, Duracell and Braun:

And also Bold detergent, Ariel Pods, Fairy, Native Deodorant, and The Art of Shaving

Procter & Gamble (P&G) profits over ethics?

Nestlé

$110 billion, roughly the GDP of Bulgaria

Nestlé’s products include Nescafé, Coffee-Mate, Perrier, S.Pellegrino, KitKat, Aero, After Eight, Wonka, Carnation, L’Oréal, Garnier, The Body Shop, various well-known perfumes, and pet foods such as Felix:

And also Cheerios, Shreddies, Shredded Wheat, Golden Grahams, Toblerone, Milkybar, Yorkie, Toffee Crisp, Pure Life Water, San Pellegrino, Maggi and Garden Gourmet plant-based foods

Nestlé profits over ethics?

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Kraft Heinz/Mondelez

$26 billion, roughly the GDP of Haiti

NB Kraft Foods was founded in Chicago in 1923. In 2012 the company was renamed Mondelez and its North American grocery business was spun off to a new company which merged with Heinz in 2015 to form Kraft Heinz.

Products include Cadbury, Green & Blacks Schweppes, Orangina, Halls, Clorets, LU, Toblerone, Milka, Philadelphia, Del Monte, Capri-Sun, Ritz, Kenco and Maxwell House:

And also Heinz (of “57 varieties” fame), HP Sauce, Lea & Perrins and Daddies sauce

Kraft Heinz profits over ethics?

Coca‑Cola

$45 billion, roughly the GDP of Paraguay

As well as the obvious, Coca-Cola’s brands include Sprite, Minute Maid, Five Alive, Fanta, Monster Energy and Glaceau Smartwater:

And also Oasis, Costa Coffee ready-to drink, Appletiser, Capri‑Sun, Oasis, Schweppes, Minute Maid and Innocent Smoothies

Coca‑Cola profits over ethics?

PepsiCo

$91 billion, roughly the GDP of Croatia

As well as the obvious, PepsiCo’s products include Ocean Spray, Mountain Dew, 7UP, Tropicana, Doritos, KFC, Pizza Hut, Harvest Crunch and Quaker:

And also Walkers, Monster Munch, Quavers, Mikado, Naked Juice and SodaStream

PepsiCo profits over ethics?

General Mills

$20 billion, roughly the GDP of Chad

General Mills’ brands include Green Giant, Old El Paso, Yoplait, Häagen-Dazs, Cheerios and Golden Grahams (manufactured by GM but marketed by Nestle):

And also Nature Valley, Jus‑Rol pastry, Liberté Yogurt and Yes Bar

General Mills profits over ethics?

Kellogg’s

$14 billion, roughly the GDP of Namibia

NB in 2023, the Kellogg Company changed its name to Kellanova, and spun off some assets into WK Kellogg Co. And in 2025 those two companies were acquired respectively by Mars — see earlier — and Italian multinational Ferrero (of Ferrero Rocher fame) that owns Fox’s biscuits, Burton’s Biscuit Company, Tic Tac, Kinder, Bueno and Nutella.

Kellogg’s brands include Pop-Tarts Nutri-Grain, Corn Flakes, Special K, Froot Loops, Bran Flakes, Rice Krispies and All-Bran:

And also Coco Pops, Frosties, Crunchy Nut and MorningStar Farms veggie foods

Kellogg’s profits over ethics?

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And that completes the survey of giant food corporations. It seems to me that, for both nutritional and ethical reasons, their products are best avoided where possible.

If the title of this post led you to expect this sort of thing…

…I can only apologise and thank you for reading this far.

One final thought… the giant corporations that comprise Big Food are of course only as successful as they are because we buy so many of their products. And the marketing starts very early:

The conflict of interest at play when commercial food companies sponsor or organise children’s breakfast clubs, activities, and educational material is obvious when their primary duty is to their shareholders. It gives these companies another opportunity to get their logos and distinctive branding in front of young so-called consumers and their carers, all while dressing the initiative up as purely educational and legitimising their brand.

Even before a child has learnt how to read, they can readily recognise brands, and a child’s knowledge of food brands can be a significant predictor of adiposity. We should not underestimate the power of marketing in fuelling childhood obesity, and should see the presence of food brands in nurseries and schools in the context of their wider tactics to promote their products.

If only governments were as keen to promote genuinely healthy eating as they are to promote breakfast clubs…

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The author, Dr Joseph Fraiman, is an emergency medicine physician in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The article relates to an episode of Everything is Fake on BBC Radio 4:

Dr Fraiman begins by summarising the context:

The serious-adverse-event signal found in the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA Covid-19 vaccine trials has been in the peer-reviewed literature for nearly four years. Mainstream media outlets, on the rare occasions they address it, have treated it not as evidence to be weighed but as misinformation to be managed — dismissed on the authority of experts without relevant expertise, or simply ignored. A recent BBC Radio 4 broadcast is a near-textbook example.

The broadcast aired on Everything Is Fake and Nobody Cares, a BBC Radio 4 series hosted by Jamie Bartlett, whose stated purpose is to ask why, in so much of modern life, fakery is no longer punished but rewarded. It is a reasonable question. The most direct answer the series has produced to date appears inside one of its own episodes.

In the episode in question, Bartlett devoted his broadcast to Dr. Aseem Malhotra and Covid-19 vaccine safety. As part of that segment, he aired a specific claim about a peer-reviewed paper I led, published in the journal Vaccine in September 2022.

He points out that:

To evaluate Dr. Malhotra’s on-air statements, Bartlett brought in Dr. Vicky Male, a reproductive immunologist at Imperial College London.

Here is Dr Male:

As it happens, she works for the same university as Prof Neil Ferguson — also known as “Professor Lockdown”.

Fraiman continues:

Dr. Male told listeners that the authors of the paper had been “specifically told to make it clear this paper should not be used” to support the kinds of claims Dr. Malhotra was making.

And contends:

That statement is not true. No one told us that. The paper does not contain such an instruction. I am one of its authors; I have the peer review correspondence; I know what the journal asked of us and what it did not. Anyone could have checked this in five minutes by reading the paper, which runs eight pages and is open-access online. Jamie Bartlett did not check.

On the basis of an unchecked false claim about a scientific paper, Bartlett told his audience that Dr. Malhotra was spreading false information — on a podcast whose central premise is that modern life now rewards exactly this kind of thing.

Whether that reflected willful dishonesty or plain incompetence, I cannot say.

The case that follows lays out what happened in enough detail for readers to decide for themselves. Both possibilities reflect poorly on a national broadcaster. Only one of them would be excusable.

In the four sections that follow, Dr Fraiman takes Bartlett to task.

Part I

In part I, he explains the contrast between what the paper actually says versus what Dr Male claims:

The most consequential of Dr. Male’s on-air claims was the one I opened with: that the authors were “specifically told to make it clear this paper should not be used to make the kinds of claims Dr. Malhotra is making,” and that Dr. Malhotra’s statement “is not actually correct. The paper doesn’t show that that’s true.”

He asks, not unreasonably:

Told by whom?

And points out:

Dr. Male did not say. Scientific papers pass through three groups of people who could, in principle, issue such an instruction: peer-reviewers, journal editors, and — in some fields — regulators or sponsoring agencies. None of them told us any such thing.

He adds that:

The peer review correspondence for our paper is not private. We deposited it publicly alongside our adjudication records and study data at a Zenodo archive, and the paper’s data-availability statement directs readers there. Anyone can read the reviewers’ comments.

As to what the paper actually says, he comments:

The closest sentence to the claim Dr. Male described — and this is the one critics occasionally misread — is a standard scope statement from the introduction: “Our study was not designed to evaluate the overall harm-benefit of vaccination programs so far. To put our safety results in context, we conducted a simple comparison of harms with benefits to illustrate the need for formal harm-benefit analyses of the vaccines that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes.”

That is a description of what the paper did and did not analyze. It is not a disavowal of the paper’s findings. Every careful research paper contains a sentence like it.

What the paper actually concluded, in its own words, is that the findings “raise concerns that mRNA vaccines are associated with more harm than initially estimated at the time of emergency authorization,” and that formal harm–benefit analyses stratified by risk of serious Covid-19 outcomes are needed.

He adds that:

Dr. Malhotra’s on-air statement — that a trial participant was 2 to 4 times more likely to suffer serious harm from the vaccine than to be hospitalized with Covid — was, if anything, a conservative rendering of what the paper reports. The Pfizer ratio sits just above the top of the range he stated; the Moderna ratio sits near the bottom. Both numbers appear in the paper’s own harm–benefit section. Dr. Male’s statement that the paper “doesn’t show that that’s true” is directly contradicted by the paper itself.

Part II

In part II, which is somewhat technical, he addresses in detail four additional methodological criticisms of the paper made by Dr Male, stating that:

Each is answerable on the record…

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Part III

In part III, Dr Fraiman graciously points out that, while Dr Male is a respected scientist, she does not claim expertise in clinical trial methodology or evidence-based medicine.

He says that:

My issue is with the journalist. The BBC is the broadcaster UK audiences consistently rank among their most trusted sources for news. It is not a fringe outlet, and a failure of basic journalistic practice there is not a fringe problem.

I sometimes wonder what it would take for people to stop trusting the BBC…

Fraiman reminds readers that:

This is the same [BBC] whose Director-General and Head of News resigned in late 2025 after the corporation misleadingly edited a speech by Donald Trump — a failure its own reporter acknowledges, on tape, inside this very episode.

And points out that:

Jamie Bartlett told his audience, more than once, that much of what Dr. Malhotra said sounded reasonable, but that he himself was not a doctor and could not evaluate the clinical evidence being cited. He said he needed to find an expert who could help him sort through it. That framing — I am the humble generalist, I need a specialist to guide me — is a legitimate journalistic move when the specialist actually has relevant expertise.

He draws a distinction between Dr Male and Dr Malhotra:

Dr. Male is an immunologist who studies NK cells in pregnancy. She is not an epidemiologist, a biostatistician, a pharmacologist, or a clinical trialist. She does not hold a medical degree and does not treat patients. She has no published record in the interpretation of randomized controlled trials, harm-benefit analysis, or vaccine safety signal detection.

Whereas:

Dr. Malhotra, whatever one thinks of his public positions, is a consultant cardiologist who treats patients and is the author of a widely cited BMJ editorial on evidence-based medicine. He has spent over a decade writing and lecturing on the interpretation of clinical trial evidence for public audiences — which is, in fact, exactly the skill set Bartlett said he was looking for.

Dr Fraiman points out that:

Bartlett knew whom he had found.

And yet:

He chose to present Dr. Male to his audience as the expert who could adjudicate Dr. Malhotra’s claims about a clinical trial reanalysis.

As Fraiman puts it:

That is not a neutral editorial decision.

He continues:

What followed was worse. By the end of the segment, the same reporter who had opened by confessing he was unqualified to evaluate the evidence had graduated to confidently declaring that Dr. Malhotra’s claims were not true, that he was unsure why Dr. Malhotra held such views, and that the audience should regard them with deep suspicion.

The journey from “I’m not a doctor and I can’t evaluate this” to “I can now tell you this is false” was accomplished entirely by outsourcing the evaluation to someone who lacked the relevant expertise to perform it — and then treating that person’s answers as settled fact.

Dr. Male’s most consequential claim on the segment was the one at the top of this piece: that the authors were “specifically told” not to use the paper the way Dr. Malhotra was using it. You do not need a medical degree or a PhD in epidemiology to check whether a published paper contains a specific sentence. You need to be able to read. The paper is eight pages long, open-access, and was the centerpiece of Bartlett’s own segment.

A reporter who built an entire broadcast around a peer-reviewed study, and who took the time to record cheap shots about how Dr. Malhotra was “bombarding” him with data and telling stories that are “just more exciting,” could not be bothered to read the paper himself and verify whether Dr. Male’s most important claim about it was true. It was not.

Dr Fraiman points out the irony:

The host of a podcast about why fakery is no longer punished had, in his own broadcast, produced a specimen of exactly that phenomenon. On the basis of that unchecked claim, he told his audience that Dr. Malhotra was spreading false information.

And he goes on to highlight an additional failure of basic journalism:

During the segment, Dr. Male stated that she does not receive pharmaceutical industry funding. Bartlett accepted this at face value and used it to frame Dr. Malhotra’s concerns about financial conflicts as conspiratorial thinking. Two minutes of searching would have complicated the picture.

A Google search for “Dr Viki Male funding” gives Dr Male’s profile at Imperial College as the top hit:

And there is no shortage of other links which also mention her funding.

Dr Fraiman continues:

Dr. Male’s publicly declared research funders include the Wellcome Trust and the UK Medical Research Council.

And notes:

The Wellcome Trust was founded from the estate of Sir Henry Wellcome, the pharmaceutical magnate who built the company that became GlaxoSmithKline; from 1936 to 1995 the Trust was the sole or majority owner of that pharmaceutical company, and its current £37.6 billion endowment derives from that origin. The UK Medical Research Council describes “alignment with industry” on its own website as central to its strategy, with formal partnerships with AstraZeneca, GSK, Janssen, Lilly, Pfizer, Takeda, and UCB, and more than £100 million in industry contributions to MRC-funded research since 2010.

I am again reminded of investigative journalist Johnny Vedmore’s The Wellcome 5, which is well worth a read if you haven’t seen it:

Neil Ferguson again…

Dr Fraiman acknowledges that:

It is entirely possible that Dr. Male has never examined the provenance of her grant funding, and I do not fault her for that — most researchers do not.

And takes more issue with Jamie Bartlett:

But the journalist who spent time on air suggesting that Dr. Malhotra was peddling conspiracy theories about pharmaceutical influence could have determined, with a single Google search, that the expert he had chosen to adjudicate that very question receives her salary support from organizations founded by, or formally partnered with, the pharmaceutical industry. He did not perform the most basic job of a journalist — to fact-check his source. Instead, he had a recording of a denial, used it as a sound bite, and moved on to the next cheap shot.

I cannot determine from the evidence available to me whether Jamie Bartlett knew any of this and broadcast his claim anyway, or whether he simply failed to do the work. The case for either reading is in what he aired.

Part IV

In part IV Dr Fraiman explains what he calls “a second, uglier layer to the claim that the authors “were told” anything”:

After our paper was published, Vaccine published two Commentaries critical of our findings — one in 2023, another in 2024. In both cases, the journal declined to share those critiques with me or my co-authors in advance, and declined to invite us to respond — a courtesy that is standard scholarly practice, and that one of the editors had promised in writing. In January 2025, we submitted a short response letter on our own initiative. The editor-in-chief rejected it without peer review.

He notes:

A scientific journal willing to publish criticism of a paper it had peer-reviewed and accepted, and then unwilling to publish the authors’ response to that criticism, is the opposite of how scholarly exchange works. None of my co-authors had ever encountered it before, and we have looked.

And that:

The same pattern reaches beyond the journal. Our paper was labeled “misinformation” on social platforms after publication — a label that, to my knowledge, has never been applied to any peer-reviewed study reporting favorable vaccine outcomes, however methodologically thin.

Dr. Male, through her commentary on the BBC, does not appear to realize that any of this is happening. That is itself part of the problem she is describing — an expert confident in the consensus because she cannot see the filter that produced it.

Conclusion

In his conclusion, Dr Fraiman points out that:

The paper I led still stands. Its findings have not been refuted; they have been disputed, and the dispute has been handled by a scientific journal in a manner that none of us had ever encountered before.

He reiterates the gist of the paper:

Our finding is straightforward: in the pivotal phase III trials of the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, serious adverse events of special interest occurred more often in the vaccinated group than in the placebo group, at a rate that exceeded the reduction in Covid-19 hospitalizations within the trial window.

And points out that:

The evidence would be settled quickly if Pfizer, Moderna, and the FDA released the individual participant data.

I am reminded of how the FDA attempted to conceal covid vaccine-related data for many years:

Dr Fraiman contends that:

Until [the individual participant data is released], the public is entitled to a more honest discussion than the one broadcast on the BBC.

If the data showed that the vaccines were as “safe and effective” as claimed, the authorities would surely release it (in anonymised form)…

He adds that:

Dr. Male is welcome to disagree with my conclusions. She is not entitled to tell listeners that the paper says something it does not, and neither the BBC nor Jamie Bartlett is entitled to build a narrative of false information on the back of a claim they did not bother to verify.

He points out that:

The paper is in the public record. The journal that published it is in the public record. The journal’s subsequent refusal to publish our response is, now, also in the public record. Readers are intelligent adults. They can weigh the evidence themselves — which is, after all, the only reason peer-reviewed science gets written down in the first place.

And that:

What the BBC broadcast illustrates — whether one reporter’s willful dishonesty, one reporter’s incompetence, or both — fits a pattern that has been in place for nearly four years: mainstream coverage of Covid-19 vaccine safety outsourced to experts who were not asked to read the evidence, and the evidence that remains labeled “misinformation.”

The public has been entitled to a more careful discussion from the start. Readers are welcome to decide for themselves whether that is what they have been given.

Jamie Bartlett’s podcast is called Everything is Fake and Nobody Cares. He is half right.

I wonder what Jamie Bartlett and Viki Male might say in response. But I won’t be holding my breath for their reply.

As to the BBC, I am reminded of this 2021 attempt on Radio 4’s More or Less to discredit a landmark British ivermectin study, where none of the authors was even offered a right to reply(!):

And if you are unaware of Viki Male’s previous activity in promoting covid vaccines for pregnant women, I particularly recommend this post from medical whistleblower Arkmedic:

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…although in this case there is at least agreement that men can’t get pregnant…

Here is a recent video from the Australian Senate, featuring Liberal Senator Michaelia Cash questioning Sex Discrimination Commissioner Dr Anna Cody over pregnancy protections for transgender women in the workplace:

[Senator Cash] If I could… Commissioner Cody… continue with questions… We’re interpreting the law. This is the good news about this estimates [Senate committees examining the operations of government]… it is literally… as Senator Roberts has just said… the changes in 2013… where the definition of male and female on the basis of biology was removed… [have] led us to this position.

In your… submissions… is it correct that you treated pregnancy protections… as available to trans women?

[Dr Cody] No, Senator. Clearly trans women cannot become pregnant. The discussion was around [the] technical meaning of the pregnancy and potential pregnancy and meanings within the Sex Discrimination Act.

[Senator Cash] Okay, so you weren’t advocating for pregnancy protections for trans women, on the basis that they can’t become pregnant.

[Dr Cody] The words relate to potential pregnancy… that is included within pregnancy, and that was the discussion.

[Senator Cash] So… you’re not advocating that trans women can potentially become pregnant though… are you?

[Dr Cody] No, Senator.

[Senator Cash] Yes, because they’re biological males, so you can’t… obviously… become pregnant.

So, in terms… did you ask the federal court to extend pregnancy protections… to transgender women…?

[Dr Cody] In the submissions we talked about the meaning of pregnancy and potential pregnancy and how that may apply…

[Senator Cash] Can I ask, how do you see that applying in the Act currently to trans women?

[Dr Cody] Trans women… if someone… applies for a job, for example… a trans woman… she may be asked whether or not she intends to have children. And if she replies, “Yes, I do,” and then doesn’t get the job because that employer doesn’t want to employ women who may be of childbearing age, then she may have been subjected to unlawful discrimination on the basis of potential pregnancy.

[Senator Cash] I’m very confused. A biological male can’t become pregnant.

[Dr Cody] But the grounds of pregnancy includes potential pregnancy as well as pregnancy.

[Senator Cash] But if they can’t become pregnant… how can [they] become potentially pregnant?

[Dr Cody] It’s about the unlawful treatment by the employer. If someone is treated unfairly on the basis of pregnancy or potential pregnancy, then that is unlawful discrimination on the basis of pregnancy.

[Senator Cash] So if a bloke came in and they said, “Are you going to have children?”… which is the same question, really… and he said, “Yes, maybe,” are you saying that he could also claim that ground?

[Dr Cody] If he didn’t receive the job because...

[Senator Cash] They can’t get pregnant.

[Dr Cody] No… a man who is seeking a position… then it’s not going to apply to a man.

[Senator Cash] They’re both biological men. It makes no sense. A biological man… you stated before… a biological man can’t get pregnant. Am I correct…? Because if I’m not, I’ve got to go back to school… I seriously do... because I missed that lesson in biology.I went to a convent school. The nuns may not have told me about it. But you said a biological man can’t get pregnant…

[Dr Cody] That’s correct, Senator. But someone who is a trans woman may be assumed to be pregnant, or to be able to be pregnant.

[Senator Cash] So what stops a man putting on a dress, walking in and claiming the protections? He’s now a woman. You’ve admitted that.

[Dr Cody] That would be up to a court to decide whether or not it was discrimination on the basis of pregnancy.

[Senator Cash] With all due respect, it is the absurdity of the law yet again, which shows, again, the law does need to be changed. Because, for the record, biological men… it doesn’t matter what way you cut it… you cannot get pregnant. And, quite frankly, it is an insult to women who actually are discriminated on… because they want to have children when they biologically can get pregnant. But the good news is what we’re proving today is the law needs to be changed.

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It is more than a little reminiscent of Monty Python’s Life of Brian…

I want to have babies.

You want to have babies?!

It’s every man’s right to have babies if he want them…

But you can’t have babies…

Don’t you oppress me…

I’m not oppressing you, Stan… you haven’t got a womb! Where’s the foetus going to gestate?! Are you going to keep it in a box…?!

We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother… sister… sorry…

What’s the point?

What…?

What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?

It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.

It is symbolic of his struggle against reality…

I wonder what was going through the minds of the Monty Python team when they performed that sketch. And what they make of developments in the subsequent fifty years or so…

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Many thanks to readers sharing articles, which is much appreciated. And much gratitude to everyone for reading.

Google’s former CEO booed

Further to this post…

…and in the context of reports such as this one…

…I noted with interest the reaction to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s speech at the University of Arizona commencement ceremony — an event for graduating students.

A transcript of the section from 5:25-6:11 is below, but it is much more instructive to watch those 45 seconds or so and to listen to the crowd’s reaction.

If science is not your passion… if you don’t care about science, that’s okay, because AI is going to touch everything else as well [chorus of boos]. Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done.

If you have an idea for a company, you can build a website overnight. If you want to learn something entirely new, and you want to have a personal tutor in any language, for the cost of an internet connection you can have it. If you have a problem in the world you want to solve, you can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own [chorus of boos].

When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on…

Digital ID developments

Further to this post…

I was intrigued to see that the Polish president has apparently vetoed legislation that would have implemented the EU’s flagship Digital Services Act (DSA) into national law:

Poland’s president on Tuesday vetoed legislation that would have implemented the EU’s flagship Digital Services Act (DSA) into national law, derailing long-planned reforms on online safety, Big Tech oversight, and piracy enforcement.

Karol Nawrocki confirmed the veto late Monday, saying the bill “contains provisions that are simply harmful” despite recognizing the underlying EU rules were “necessary.”

The European Commission has repeatedly warned Warsaw and other lagging states that failure to transpose the DSA risks infringement proceedings.

“There are boundaries that cannot be crossed. Those in power must understand that I am not their notary,” the president said in a statement on his official website…

Nawrocki was elected last year. He has positioned himself as an independent check on the centrist government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Government officials accused the president of blocking implementation of EU law for political theater.

Privately, lawmakers admit that last-minute amendments tacked onto the bill — reportedly touching on data retention and online speech liability — gave Nawrocki an opening to reject the package on constitutional grounds…

The bill must now return to parliament…

Meanwhile, in the UK there are some enterprising children…

More broadly, it seems that there are inherent problems with data security:

The French government has confirmed that its database used to secure identity documents has been breached, exposing around 19 million records containing passport, national ID card, and driver’s license data.

National Agency for Secure Titles (ANTS), now called France Titres, is the French government’s main platform and official system for secure identity documents.

Zut, alors!

Meanwhile, in the UK…

Ministers have been urged to do more to protect the public after data from 500,000 people who volunteered their health information to the UK Biobank was breached and offered for sale online in China.

And, according to the British Medical Journal, UK GPs and hospitals are to be “forced to share patient data as US tech giant Palantir is granted ‘unlimited access’ to identifiable information”:

If I had downloaded the NHS app, I think I’d now be inclined to delete it.

I wonder how many people have to push back before the authorities change course.

I am reminded me that, for company directors who want to avoid the Government’s “One Login” system, Together have this “toolkit”…

…and more information here.

Poland, Sweden and the UK

Back on the subject of Poland, and further to this post…

…consider the Sexual Violence: Rape numbers from this United Nations website:

The contrast between e.g. the UK, Sweden and Poland is particularly striking:

And presumably these figures do not include unreported incidents.

Fewer infant deaths in 2020

Further to these posts…

…I noted with interest this research article published in the European Society of Medicine journal:

Figure 1 shows that the number of births in the Philippines has fallen markedly since the covid era:

But what I found particularly striking was the number of infant deaths in 2020:

I find it rather curious that, in the context of a lack of perinatal care due to the chaos of the covid restrictions, the infant mortality rate fell sharply…

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The tip of the iceberg

James Cameron

On a related note, and further to this post…

And particularly this one…

…I recommend this recent article by Jonathan Engler:

“Is his case the tip of the iceberg?”

Fallout from the Rollout

On the subject of metaphorical icebergs, and further to posts such as these…

…which I put together to convey aspects of the nature of the individual suffering behind vaccine injury statistics, this book — Fallout from the Rollout: Case Studies the UK Covid Inquiry Didn’t Publish — was published last month:

“Those who were damaged by the vaccine rather than protected deserve proper recognition.”

So said Baroness Hallett, Chair of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, in her report on Module 4: Vaccines and Therapeutics, published on April 16th, 2026.

And yet the Inquiry did not publish the accounts detailing the suffering of these people.

I am reminded of this post:

I find the Contents pages of Fallout from the Rollout quite sobering.

Recurrent themes

More denial of data

Further to these posts…

…Dr Clare Craig reports that the MHRA have refused her request to see anonymised data behind one of their recent publications:

This is the FoI request:

Hiding data is plainly not a good look. Which suggests that the alternative would, from the point of view of the authorities, be worse.

Maybe this has something to do with it?:

Meanwhile, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities has announced a “pause in reporting” on excess mortality in England:

More hounding of Irish GPs

Further to these posts featuring Irish GP Dr Marcus de Brun…

…another family doctor — Billy Ralph — has faced a “fitness to practise” inquiry:

News of recent developments can be found here c/o freelance reporter Louise Roseingrave:

The article on legal advice is particularly striking:

Three aspects of legal advice offered by Ms Dillon [legal advisor to the IMC Committee] appear to have prompted this quiet protest [from the public gallery]. These were examples of case law selected by Ms Dillon to illustrate gross professional misconduct.

One concerned the case of a doctor that had sexually abused his daughter. (A County Council v W and Others, England and Wales, 1996.)

Another was the case of a farmer who was a qualified vet (but not practising) that did not dispose of dead animals correctly. (Martin v. Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, England, 1945)

A third example was that of an actuary accused of misconduct while managing the financial affairs of the estate of his deceased brother and mother. (E.G v Society of Actuaries in Ireland, 2017)

This comes in the context of a GP speaking out about the risks from a novel technology product with no long-term safety data.

Moreover, as Dr de Brun pointed out, it was rather odd that:

Professor Dalgleish of St George’s University Hospital London, one of the UK’s top cancer experts, takes the stand at Dr Ralph’s hearing and states — clearly, categorically and under oath — that covid vaccines are dangerous, that they result in cancers and are the cause of excess mortality figures...

Yet [Irish broadcaster] RTE report NOTHING... and the Irish Times report that the Professor is merely: ‘against masks and lockdowns’…

As well as Dr Ralph, retired GP Dr Mick McConville is also being hounded by the Irish Medical Council:

I wonder whether the IMC will come to regret what they are doing.

More pandemic simulation

Further to these recent posts…

…and also to this one…

…it transpires that last month the WHO carried out another simulation of a major disease outbreak:

I also recently came across this tabletop exercise conducted in 2018 by the US Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security:

Here is a snapshot (at 3:19) from Segment 4:

I am beginning to wonder about previous PHEICs, going all the way back to swine flu in 2009…

…which was featured in this 2010 Channel 4 news report:

It is one of the greatest medical scandals of the century according to a leading health expert in Brussels. The Council of Europe’s health chief has accused major pharmaceutical firms of organising a campaign of panic and unduly influencing World Health Organization decisions. And with European countries now burdened with bills for millions of unwanted doses of the swine flu vaccine, he wants an investigation…

Climate change lies

Further to posts such as these…

I was interested to see this recent op-ed in the New York Post:

The United Nations-backed International Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] is responsible for the “climate catastrophe” and “the world is burning” scenarios that environmentalists, academics and many politicians have promoted to force high-cost, coercive energy policies on Americans.

Yet last month, the IPCC quietly determined that those extreme scenarios are “implausible” — by which they mean impossible.

The most notorious of them — Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, or “RCP 8.5” — posited a hellish world of 12 billion people in the year 2100…

They relied on academics whose careers depended on using RCP 8.5 and several other worst-case scenarios to predict everything from the demise of French wines and the end of pasta to aliens destroying the earth. (No, really.)

The claims were ludicrous, but the money that flowed to green groups and politicians to promote them and their preferred “solutions” was only too real.

Not for nothing did environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council collect hundreds of millions of dollars to institute bans on natural gas for heating and cooking.

And the economic and, ironically, environmental damages from the policies we’ve adopted to “save us” from climate change have been disastrous.

It’s safe to say that many hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars have been wasted on them worldwide…

According to this article:

46 IPCC scientists have resigned because they are not being listened to because they hold opinions that are contrary to the current narrative

The same article quotes each of those 46 IPCC scientists.

But it’s been quite a while since the BBC had anything to say on the matter…

The 1903 Nobel Prize

And finally, following on from the Bring me (more) sunshine section of last month’s Updates post, I was intrigued to learn that, in 1903…

Niels Ryberg Finsen was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine “in recognition of his contribution to the treatment of diseases, especially lupus vulgaris, with concentrated light radiation, whereby he has opened a new avenue for medical science”

The Nobel Prize website also states that:

Niels Finsen was born in the Faroe Islands, grew up in Iceland and moved in 1882 to Copenhagen to study medicine. In 1893, after a couple of years as a general practitioner, he devoted himself to research. Finsen suffered from a metabolic disease that caused weakness and fatigue, but he noticed that light made him feel more energetic. This led him to study the medical benefits of light…

According to this article from last year…

Finsen saw sunlight as a powerful healer of skin disease. Modern science expanded that vision, revealing that sunlight influences not only the skin but also the immune system, hormones, mental health, and systemic well-being…

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Previous Updates posts

April: How the intelligence services operate; resilience to war propaganda; smart meters; cash; cardiac and cancer developments; mRNA demise; bring me (more) sunshine; Together rally

March: DBS as a censorship tool; more Wikipedia corruption; Talla context; “cop nights”; disability update; measles coincidence; assisted suicide; the “four olds”; digital ID by the back door; quotes again

February: BBC lack of coverage…; “You cannot change your sex”; icy Great Lakes; “our cancer mystery”; measles scaremongering; the VDPS; germ versus terrain; BBC bias; “Hacking wiki again”; digital ID pushback

January: Streisand again; yet another personal story; ambulance calls; sex-selective abortions; Talla context; reputation; after the event; a woman who said No; defections to Reform; digital ID via children

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“33C blowtorch heat…”

And forecast maps like this…

I wonder what colours the Mirror will use if temperatures higher than 33C are predicted later in the summer…

Anyhow, according to the UK Met Office, the record for the highest daily maximum temperature in May is 32.8°C, held jointly by:

• Camden Square (London) — on 22 May 1922

• Horsham (West Sussex), Tunbridge Wells (Kent) and Regent’s Park (London) — on 29 May 1944

The Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TORRO) website mentions a disputed recording of 33.4°C at Rickmansworth (Hertfordshire) on 30 May 1947.

The Met Office records for the highest daily maximum temperature in April and June were also set a long time ago:

• 29.4°C at Camden Square (London) — on 16 April 1949

• 35.6°C at Camden Square (London) — on 29 June 1957; and Southampton Mayflower Park — on 28 June 1976

I wonder to what extent Camden Square is affected by the urban heat island effect.

I wonder too whether the highest temperature recorded this week will be on an airport runway or in a city’s botanic garden.

Related:

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The context is what I described in this recent post as a crescendo of scaremongering:

A transcript of the most pertinent parts is below, along with occasional comments and links.

I do have several posts lined up on rather different subjects… but I have deferred them for now.

Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEICs)

In his introduction, Dr Drew points out that:

[Dr] Clare Craig… pointed out something that I thought was very interesting, which is that Ebola has been named a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization… the WHO has declared a PHEIC, a Public Health Emergency of International Concern…

[And] Dr Craig pointed out very appropriately that that is pronounced “fake”…

Here is the news story on the United Nations website:

Dr Drew starts the interview by following this up:

[Dr Drew] Did I characterize your representation of the acronym accurately… or did I misrepresent what you had said on social media?

[Dr Craig] No, that’s absolutely how it’s meant to be pronounced… they didn’t have to choose that series of lettering… that’s what they chose. Public Health Emergency of International Concern… it’s almost as if they forced the words to those letters…

Hantavirus and rats

[Dr Drew] Let’s go… back to hantavirus… In my eye, immediately there was a high probability of common exposure. They should have gotten these poor people off… the ship, immediately. And if they wanted to quarantine them, great. But not on the source of the potential source of the virus. There’s a million reasons to get off that ship immediately. And the bureaucracy that we call the World Health Organization [WHO] put those people in harm’s way…

[Dr Craig] I totally agree with you… the evidence base for hantavirus, which is something I’ve read a lot about... I don’t have clinical experience… but I’ve read [plenty enough…] It was established for decades that these viruses spread from rats to humans. [And] when [the viruses] get into humans, they head for the blood vessels, and they replicate in the blood vessel lining cells… the endothelial cells.

So where the virus is being replicated in a human, it’s not accessible to other humans. It’s predominantly in the blood. So… it might spread [in a] similar way to hepatitis B… it can be in saliva… it can be in bodily fluids, but it’s not being breathed out over people…

The accusation that it was spread human-to-human is entirely based on one paper… about an outbreak in Argentina in 2018. And it covers… four months worth of disease. And what they did is… instead of saying… we think this is spread by rats, and if we’re going to disprove that, then we need to… say what the control group was… and then compare that to what actually happened…

But they didn’t do that. They just… collected the cases and then… because the incubation period is between 4 and 42 days… you have these enormous lengths of time in which people could meet each other. And then they drew all these connections between people.

Now the reality is there were 34 cases, and all 34 of [the people involved] were exposed in the same town. So [a straightforward explanation is that] the rats in that town must have had the virus, and all those people were exposed. There were three people they claimed were exposed in a hospital setting, but all three of those were also in that town… around that time... And there were 82 health care professionals who did not have proper PPE… they might have had gloves but that was about it… And not one of them got sick. So to say that that’s evidence of human-to-human transmission is a massive stretch.

[Dr Drew] Yes. They did not control for other potential routes of transmission. And then they just concluded… it’s incredible… and that virus was well-known to be present in that town in… multiple sources at that time. So [it was] wild that people ran to that…

And then the next thing we hear is that the World Health Organization is telling us… “Be careful… it’s in men’s semen and it’s in their tears…”

See also:

[Dr Drew] I have… a point and a question. The point is… this isn’t like AIDS, where there’s a tremendous amount of virus being produced while someone is asymptomatic. This is not like that… and even AIDS wasn’t a pandemic… it was an epidemic… [and it] has to be fluid-transmitted. [And] that’s the way this virus is transmitted… if at all human-to-human… only when [people are] symptomatic, as I understand… I’ll let you put a coda on that. Is that true?

[Dr Craig] Yes, that’s true. It’s symptomatic spread. [But]… there are separate arguments around the evidence that haven’t been put… One point worth making is that in Argentina they have about 100 cases every year… some years a bit more, some years a bit less… [But] the year they had these 34 supposedly human-to-human transmission cases, they still had about 100 overall that year. So… nothing changed. It was still the rats that were underlying it…

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“There is nothing good about fear”

[Dr Drew] How can medicine be practised worse than this…? And… why in the world are they so addicted to scaring the public? What is going on here… that they keep returning [to scaremongering]…? Deborah Birx [US public health official]… the World Health Organization… returning to… these dire predictions that are clearly… I’m trying to contain my language… inaccurate...

[Dr Craig] I completely hear you. It’s the role of public health to prevent panic… to calm people down… to [stay] rational. It’s the role of public health to say, “Actually, we know what to do with Ebola. We have it every year. We can handle it. Trust us… we’ll get on with intervening.” That’s what public health officials would say. And to be fair, that is what some public health officials are saying…

[Dr Drew] [Not many…] I know [some are] out there, but the rest of them… no. They’re either addicted to this, or they must get money from it, or something. Something is going on here that is just horrible. Or it’s just how bureaucracies work when they’re out of control… and they should be defunded if that’s the case, because they are harming people. I don’t know what to do…

[Dr Craig] There is nothing good about fear. Fear is always a bad thing. And for anyone to be amplifying it is always a bad thing. And what is interesting and what might reassure some of your listeners is that the WHO have a conference every year… the World Health Assembly they call it. And in the lead-up to their conference, they always manage to get these fear articles into the press.

And they’ve done a good job this year… we’ve had hantavirus, we’ve had Ebola, we’ve had dengue fever, we’ve had norovirus. I saw monkeypox again today as well. So they’re really going for it from any angle… bird flu…

[Dr Craig] With the outbreak that we’ve seen, every single person who’s been sick was exposed to that boat. And as you said… for a long time… much longer than they needed to be… And the company whose cruise ship it was obviously don’t want to be blamed for having rats on board, but [the] reality is… rats get on board ships… that just will happen.

[Dr Drew] Did you hear that… [ships] have a log that they have to present to every port they go to… that they’ve documented clearing the ship of rats… [The captain] neglected to do it when he landed in Argentina… he refused to disclose it… so… this [might] suggest… they’re hiding that there was a rat problem on that ship…

And it is not only the captain who has a vested interest in the rat problem not being disclosed.

Briefly on the covid era

[Dr Craig] Expired was a book I wrote in 2024. It was very much focused on masks and lockdowns and viral spread… the… aerosol droplet story… which is quite an interesting story about how that actually evolved.

[Dr Craig] And [my recent] book Spiked is about the v-word. It’s a bit more controversial and it’s really focused on the fact [that] the vaccines didn’t work… couldn’t work, and that people knew that from the outset… and that people weren’t told. It’s about the censorship that followed that, and what happened to me in terms of medical registration and all that kind of thing.

I’ve tried to make it human and full of stories. But it’s essentially: these vaccines did not work. And I think it’s really important that we have that written down and referenced… something that people can use as a reference point… because when people talk about safety they never get heard because they get shut down with the “It saved millions of lives” lie.

[Dr Drew] I had the hunch… that during alpha and delta there was some benefit for the very elderly. That was my clinical hunch… but absolutely no reason to give it to 20-year-old males that got myocarditis instead…

[Dr Craig] I started with that belief as well… There were lots of papers that made it look like that, and, having dug into it quite deeply, I think I understand why those papers look like that. And I explain that in the book.

But fundamentally, you could look at the wastewater virus levels in the US… which was tracked… and that’s a measure of the population level of infection. And if you put that graph up against the hospitalizations… or the death graph for the whole country… the two lines don’t deviate… The same amount of infection was resulting in the same amount of severe disease and death. So I don’t think [the vaccines] did what we were told at all… [they] didn’t work.

The “PHEIC” and vaccines

[Dr Drew] So let’s talk about the “PHEIC” and vaccines… Hantavirus vaccine… Ebola vaccine. You know… Congo DR has outbreaks of Ebola on a regular basis… They know how to contain it. They know how to deal with it. They know what it is. [But] now it’s a PHEIC… a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, pronounced “fake”…

What is going on here? Is there something more sinister afoot? We’ve already established [that] the World Health Organization has bad judgment. It’s out of control. It’s looking for funding. But is there something on the vaccine front with all this virus talk?

Another coincidence…

And ten Ebola-related articles in two days from the BBC…

…including this one…

“Ebola vaccine could take nine months…”

[Dr Craig] I don’t know. I do know… that the WHO have written down their intentions, and we’ve been able to read them. And they’ve made [it] quite clear they want an international digital database of every single traveler. And they will scare people to get that, I reckon. And the situation we’ve got now with Ebola is that already… today… Hong Kong are screening passengers on arrival and… the… window to start collecting that kind of data is starting to open…

I think the fear and the vaccines and the actual illnesses are probably not the main thing we should be worried about. The thing we should be worried about is how the WHO are using that to their advantage. And of course… the thing with travel is that there is a… grey area in terms of who owns it, because it’s international. It’s a space where [the WHO] can… move in. And I… think that might be happening.

And the fact is [that] the WHO… have lost power since declaring they wanted to do all of these things. And [while] they don’t have proper power over sovereign countries… they have a lot of soft power. If the WHO says that something’s necessary, then the civil servants in the country want it, and the public want it. And so… it puts the politicians under enormous pressure. And I think… the problem we have is that politicians are not awake to this agenda….

[Dr Drew] Clearly Tedros Ghebreyesus [the WHO director-general, who doesn’t have a medical degree] is not someone that we should be leaning on for clinical judgment and making good calls. [But] is there someone at the World Health Organization we can look to… and say, “Okay, that person’s at least well-trained… got good judgement… seems to be making sense…” I saw a woman [commenting on hantavirus]… they immediately pushed her underground… who was… saying, “Don’t worry. No big deal. Relax. We got this… it’s an outbreak… people get hurt... bad illness…” Is there somebody in your mind?

[Dr Craig] I’m sure there are good people at the WHO. It’s a big organization, and the kind of people that want to go and work for them… there are bound to be good people there. The trouble is [that] Tedros is a dictator within [the WHO]. The constitution was written with people thinking that only good things could ever come of it. So there were no safeguards. And for monkeypox in 2023, [Tedros] declared a PHEIC after his emergency committee had voted 9-6 to not declare one. He said that 9-6 was very close and they had to have a tie-breaker. And his tie-breaker was that they would declare it.

Now this time, with Ebola, he didn’t even call the committee. He just declared [a PHEIC] completely unilaterally… [Tedros] has… become the dictator of the WHO. So no matter how many good people there are… he’s in charge and he’s doing what he wants.

[Dr Drew] Terrible…

The need for doctors and healthcare professionals to speak out

[Dr Drew] I appreciate you being out there fighting the good fight… In this book, Spiked, you chronicle what has happened to you… Have you been able to… reinvent what you’re doing in such a way that you’re feeling satisfied with your work again? Or are people are people looking at you and going, “Okay, she was right. Sorry.”

[Dr Craig] Oh, I’ve not had any apologies… I’ll keep waiting for them. And I’ve not rushed back into a… career in the healthcare sector… I’ve not gone backwards. I’m still looking forwards, but I’ve not been employed since… So… forgive me for plugging my book… bu it’s my source of income, and I’m not making very much money on it…

There are so many doctors and other healthcare professionals who’ve been in touch with me… hundreds… who understand all of this and won’t speak…

[Dr Drew] I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want to go through it… They’re trying to do their job… to keep their head down… But we need them. We need them very, very badly… to step up… These things happen from the bottom up. And… to the extent that these outrages have been perpetrated [during the covid era]…we cannot let it happen again…

Particularly pertinent:

Also:

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First some context:

For anyone who has forgotten, that’s these people:

And Vallance and Gates are but two of many.

If nothing else, the financial incentive for “the next pandemic” is undeniably there…

…as it has been for years:

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But even leaving aside covid, the scaremongering seems to have been ramped up in the last few years:

This headline is from only a few weeks ago:

In a report on a public inquiry into the pandemic released today (Thursday, April 16) chairwoman Baroness Heather Hallett issued a warning to the UK government to prepare for the next pandemic, which she says is a matter of when, not if.

It came in the context of the hype over recent months in relation to flu…

…and meningitis:

At least 30 articles from the BBC on that in the space of a couple of days…

And it has been followed by this month’s crescendo of fear in relation to hantavirus, norovirus and Ebola…

…which has a distinctly familiar ring to it.

It would appear that the authorities are increasingly desperate for another “global health emergency” and that the mainstream media is doing all it can to facilitate one, along with the help of paid influencers (and useful idiots1) on social media.

But I sense that the propaganda is now not nearly as effective as it was in 2020.

Not least for context, I will finish with these words of Denis Rancourt, formerly Professor of Physics at the University of Ottawa, who has looked carefully at mortality over the past century or so and concluded (emphasis added):

Interestingly, none of the post-second-world-war Centers-for-Disease-Control-and-Prevention-promoted (CDC‑promoted) viral respiratory disease pandemics (1957-58, “H2N2”; 1968, “H3N2”; 2009, “H1N1 again”) can be detected in the all‑cause mortality of any country. Unlike all the other causes of death that are known to affect mortality, these so‑called pandemics did not cause any detectable increase in mortality, anywhere.

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Particularly:

And also…

These articles for some historical context:

And these other posts in relation to the media:

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[Hobbs] I wanted to ask you… Angus… this combination of ivermectin and fenbendazole… what’s your view on it?

[Dalgleish] There is absolutely no doubt at all that ivermectin would have completely ruined any chance of any [emergency-use] vaccine coming. [What I have already said in terms of] the general management would have greatly reduced [the impact of covid]… [but] ivermectin would have reduced it to zero.

I put friends and patients and relatives etc. on [ivermectin] with… high-dose vitamin D… and they all recovered…

I had two people that [were] really, really bad… that weren’t doing well, and they refused [to go to hospital]. So I put them on ivermectin [and] they both recovered dramatically… really quickly. So we knew we had something...

[But]… [Tony] Fauci went out of his way to kill [ivermectin]… even putting up posters… “You’re not a horse… etc.” [But] any rate it drew attention to… ivermectin, mebendazole and fenbendazole.

Now [such drugs] are anti-falarial… [i.e.] for [treating parasitic] worms. Ivermectin… people forget… since penicillin it is the only drug to get its own Nobel prize… basically… in 2015…

In 2015, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura “for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy [ivermectin] against infections caused by roundworm parasites”:

The link between avermectin and ivermectin is explained on the third page of the press release:

[Dalgleish] Is it an anti-cancer drug? Well, I’m very interested in non-obvious anti-cancer drugs… and I developed lenalidomide and pomalidomide from thalidomide with [US pharmaceutical company] Celgene. They were the only people who were interested in that project and... they [have] been made rich through it… they got bought out. They all did really, really well.

So I saw similarities here because lenalidomide we could use in low doses with virtually no toxicity… highly successful for years. Ivermectin had the same… hallmarks. It attacked many different pathways, and some of those were anti-cancer pathways. So it made perfect sense…

Quite a few people combined it with fenbendazole and mebendazole. Now they’re [essentially] the same drug. Fenbendazole has been aimed at the veterinary market and mebendazole [at humans]. So I can write a [prescription] for mebendazole but I can’t do it for fenbendazole.

Both fenbendazole and mebendazole first came into use in the 1970s, and thus have long been off-patent, allowing other manufacturers to produce and sell them, typically at a low cost.

[Dalgleish] [And] there’s quite a bit of evidence that fenbendazole might be slightly better… and people can obtain both ivermectin and fenbendazole through the veterinary market very easily… because… they’re so useful for horses and other valuable animals.

I have looked at that, and there’s no doubt there is a signal between ivermectin… and fenbendazole or mebendazole… some people give a mixture of both… in high doses… I’ve used them in much lower doses… and there’s evidence now coming together that some dose in the middle is probably the optimum.

So I am very, very keen and I think that for oncology not to… explore it properly… it is negligence [on the part of] the oncologists who say they’re looking to push forward the barriers… these [drugs] have no patent for cancer so… Big Pharma… they’re not there [because there is little money to be made]… But I give [these drugs] to my patients if they fail first- or second-line therapy, and… there [are] some very, very good stories…

According to this 2023 study (emphasis added)…

…between January 1, 2015, and December 31, 2020, there were 224 cancer drug approvals across 119 individual drugs. The median annual cost was $196,000…

In contrast, generic fenbendazole, mebendazole and ivermectin — all of which are off-patent — cost next to nothing.

Related:

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Long-time readers of this Substack may recall the roundtable discussion featured here…

…which was also chaired by Hobbs. On that occasion the participants were Dr Clare Craig, Dr Jonathan Engler, Dr Liz Evans, Dr Ros Jones and Dr Gerry Quinn.

For this podcast, the two guests are UK professor of oncology Angus Dalgleish, who I featured here and Irish GP Dr Marcus de Brun, who I featured here in conversation with UK GP Dr Dave Cartland.

Background information on Hobbs, Dalgleish and de Brun can be found in the above-mentioned three posts.

A transcript of their recent discussion, along with links and comments, is below. I found the podcast to be a useful and accessible overview of some important issues.

Exaggeration and fear

[Hobbs] A lot of people still… out there… think that the “global pandemic” was a serious thing… [that] this covid thing was serious... What’s the proof that the framing wasn’t all that it seems to have been?

[Dalgleish] Well, I would say first of all… everything was exaggerated. [The authorities] were more interested in discussing with psychological people how to control the coming pandemic… certainly… in the UK [with] the so-called SAGE committee that was the main advisory… to the government… There [were] very few doctors on it… [plenty of] psychologists… interested in how to control populations… to [make them afraid]... when the pandemic hit… the exaggeration was just outrageous. They went on every day saying how many people got covid… and the death rate [was]... highly exaggerated.

What people do need to know was that the tests [that] labeled people as having covid were unbelievably useless. They gave false positives. And certainly in my own hospital, I witnessed that people who came in with anything but covid were kept in hospital and [repeatedly tested] with these useless tests until they were positive… and then… “They died of covid…” “[They] caught covid”…the whole thing was a manufactured scam for fear… Why… we did not know at the time… [but] we [now] know that [the establishment] were hellbent on “saving the world” with a vaccine program.

But there was nothing [that we needed saving from]. It was very obvious… and I was on the ground. I was working in the hospital when all this came… and I saw it. And there’s no doubt that the virus caused people to be ill… and some of them were very ill… but the death rate was not significant unless people were [already] very ill. And in a very short time we could see the average age of death [from covid] was over 80… very few people died at less than that [age]. And I… who had gone through decades of NHS winter flu… concluded this was no worse. They were just making a big song and dance about it in order to get people primed and prepared for the vaccine programme.

This is consistent with figures from the UK’s Office for National Statistics, which show that, before the “covid measures” were introduced on March 23rd 2020, the number of people dying was at or below normal levels…

…despite covid having reportedly been circulating since the end of January.

Fraudulent testing

[Hobbs] Are you suggesting that the PCR test… the amplification of it… at… whatever it was… 45 cycles was… far above… its use… even if it was useful. And… if that’s the case… were we… looking at a phantom pandemic then… when we were watching television every evening and we were looking at the charts and suppressing the curve and all that kind of stuff…?

[Dalgleish] Yes, we were… I went on a molecular biology course… to fully understand it… because of the potential use of looking for oncogenic mutations in tumours. So I was very interested in it. And the thing that really struck me was that we were told, “Don’t go over 37 [cycles] otherwise you will get all sorts of answers. You might want them, but they’re meaningless. And, by the way, if you’re looking for viruses, [the test] cannot tell the difference between a live [virus] and a bit of dead slough…”

And then I found that they were told to do 43 [cycles]. Now the only reason you do 43 is because you wanted to get a false positive result… It could only be for political reasons. It certainly couldn’t possibly be for medical reasons…

This post, featuring Kary Mullis, the Nobel prize-winning inventor of PCR, who died unexpectedly in August 2019, provides further context:

A discussion of how false positive test results can create the impression of an epidemic when, actually, there isn’t one, can be found e.g. here.

Why didn’t other doctors speak up?

[Hobbs] Can I ask you… Marcus, when you look at the Irish situation… when you look at informed consent… the basic principle… why was it that the bulk of the medical profession went along with this…? If [Angus was] finding what [he was] finding in London… where were all the other doctors making their own independent assessments of what they were seeing? And why [weren’t] they speaking up?

[de Brun] We’ve come out of very surreal times. I think covid has changed everything in terms of the landscape of politics… the landscape of science… You asked the initial question about the burden of proof… and when are we going to reach a point where there’s enough evidence… for people to realise that… many aspects of the pandemic were entirely fabricated… that the vaccine itself is not a vaccine… that it’s actually quite a dangerous genetic therapy that’s been given to… countless millions of people…

To answer the question specifically as to why doctors and GPs [haven’t spoken out]… general practitioners like myself… were tasked with the rollout of the vaccine… We were paid… and… we were given the task of administering the vaccine to the public. And… I don’t think that… we’ll ever reach a burden of proof because… no matter how much evidence you present to people… there’s too much investment… GPs invested too much of themselves… the general public were coerced into taking the vaccine… [and] everybody feels a degree of complicity into what happened. So, it’s very… difficult to get past this evidential barrier…

As I noted here in January 2025’s Updates post, the Chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners reported to the UK’s Chief Medical Officers in September 2021 that his organisation had “consulted widely across GPs, and there is a strong consensus in favour of vaccinating 12-15s”.

For context, this NHS document…

…which has apparently been removed from its original location on the official NHS website, has the following information on page 6:

£12.58 “service fee” plus “a further supplement of £10… per vaccination dose to eligible children and young people aged 12-15…”

As the UK’s Health Advisory & Recovery Team point out in this article:

If the juxtaposition of these various paragraphs above is not mind-blowing enough, note that the entity behind [that document] also saw the need to point out to its audience of over-enthusiastic injectors that only a single ‘£10 supplement per vaccination is claimable’. One would have thought that medics of professional standing would know that fraud is a crime… but perhaps they know more than us about the realpolitik of day-to-day medical accounting.

They conclude:

And there was us thinking that doctors might be prioritising patients’ needs and following the cardinal maxim of “First Do No Harm”.

Silly us for being so damned naïve.

In terms of numbers, this Nature article gives a figure of 3,433,483 children and young people aged 5–17 years across all UK nations receiving covid vaccines between 4th August 2021 and 31st May 2022.

For each dose, that amounts to “service fees” of more than £43 million, with the supplementary payments running into further tens of millions.

I wonder what the grounds were for the “strong consensus [among GPs] in favour of vaccinating 12-15s”…

[Hobbs] But I have to put it to both of you… if you take it… that there’s a lot of global evidence as well as local evidence on excess deaths… we can see the numbers… How do you [distinguish]… between the effect of lockdown… the effect of poor treatment at the outset… doctors… giving the wrong treatment…actually killing people by accident… the use of of drugs in nursing homes… basically end of life drugs… how do you [distinguish] that from [harm from] the mRNA [in vaccines] itself… how is that done?

[de Brun] Physicians like myself… I’ve been giving the children their childhood immunisations for the past 20 years of my career And I’ve never really questioned that. And I’ve never really looked into the ingredients and what’s in the vials.

If I was to question every single pharmaceutical product that I prescribe or I inject into people, I’d have to spend an awful lot of time doing an awful lot of reading. And none of us do that. We don’t jump into our car and get the car manual out and figure out how the engine works. We have a trust… And physicians such as myself… GPs across the board in Ireland… have a trust in regulatory bodies, in the HPRA [Health Products Regulatory Authority in Ireland], in the WHO [World Health Organization]… in the organisations that filter through vaccines and drugs and things…

In relation to childhood vaccines, reading through (or watching) this recent presentation from US civil rights lawyer Aaron Siri gives a great overview:

As to regulators, the UK’s MHRA is featured in this post:

As to the WHO, I recommend the discussion here:

TL; DR: regulators and the WHO are not our friends.

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The erosion of trust

[Hobbs] You brought up a very important word there… which is “trust”… [and] an awful lot of people are looking around, and they can see members of their family… they can see friends… that have been badly affected by the whole event, whether it was lockdown or whether it was the injections or whatever… we’re seeing cancer… stage four cancer… appearing here, there and everywhere… the data is there… [and] people in their local communities can see see it going on around them.

And the damage that was done to the trust in the medical profession over these number of years seems to be… to me… the biggest problem we’ve got… and the feeling that this could all kick off again with some other event… because the people that are responsible for the psychological operation [during the covid era] are still in place… everywhere. The WHO [World Health Organization] hasn’t changed. The Chief [Scientist] of the WHO [Jeremy Farrar] is the former CEO of the Wellcome Trust. And so it goes on.

And… in Ireland, we have an “investigation” into our handling of covid which… disallows looking at anything serious… it’s been designed by the very people that actually implemented the pandemic response in Ireland. And… the Irish Medical Council are putting GPs like you [Marcus] and a few others into the stockades years later. It’s way beyond a medical mess…

[Dalgleish] In our Covid Inquiry in the UK we had section four… on the vaccines, and it was all run by a [KC] with the chairman… [Baroness] Hallett… There [were] 170,000 people who had given evidence etc. that they had serious illnesses after the vaccine… [And] the introduction of this… module… by Hugo Keith [the KC] summed up what we’re dealing with. He gave the conclusion in the introduction. [And] he said, “We all know that the vaccines have saved millions of lives. And we’re here today because only a very, very few of them have developed conditions… which they think is due to the vaccine. However, there’s no proof.” That was [essentially] his introduction.

And then they discounted all the scientific evidence of how the vaccine could cause these diseases... [which had been submitted] by myself and and many others in different groups such as HART and the Children’s Covid [Vaccine Advisory Council]… Ros Jones… who’s written some wonderful summaries etc… These were all discounted... how you can actually say this evidence isn’t relevant to the inquiry… because that’s what they did…it’s just beyond belief. But that’s what you’re dealing with. They have made the decision what the outcome is… and that the vaccines save millions of lives… and overall it’s for the common good.

Modelling studies… based on the assumption that covid was deadly and the vaccines were safe and effective…

A series of posts exposing the UK Covid Inquiry’s Module 4 can be found here:

The “next pandemic”

[Dalgleish] Now the real danger is that… the government signed up to the WHO… that [the WHO] will take charge of the “next pandemic” which they will immediately oversee… and there will be another “pandemic”… And that’s why I think Trump did absolutely the right thing to pull the US money from the WHO, because [the WHO] is no longer fit for purpose and it should be completely disbanded… I really do believe that.

Look at the people they recruited… Susan Michie who was the communist psychologist chairman of SAGE… and [Jeremy] Farrar who was a head of the Wellcome Trust… and who co-ordinated with [Anthony] Fauci [in the US]… that the virus came from the wild and therefore [it] was a terrible pandemic. And anybody like me who said, “It’s bloody obvious that it could only have come from the lab because it’s got these inserts in…” [and Jeremy Farrar should know… he’s meant to be in this field]… [we got ignored]… [The authorities] had this agreement to lie… lie… lie… [and] they’ll do the same again. Bill Gates has gone on record saying there’s another [“pandemic”] coming along. Well, of course… because they’ve got this big vaccine industry now.

The financial incentive is certainly there:

And the media hype surrounding e.g. monkeypox in 2022, and more recently in relation to flu, meningitis and hantavirus, has a distinctly familiar ring to it.

Fear. Dubious PCR testing. Asymptomatic spread. Isolation. Contact tracing. Te$ting of contacts. False positives. And round we go. With ma$ks to perpetuate the fear. And with “vaccine$ as the only way out”.

[Dalgleish] I don’t know about Ireland, but [former UK Prime Minister] Sunak signed off for Moderna to build another big factory near Oxford… already… for the next pandemic. And I would say to people listening [that] I have looked now [retrospectively]… going back to the Spanish flu. [And] I don’t believe there’s been a single pandemic that’s been caused naturally. A whole range of them… the bird flu… swine flu… Ebola… all of these I think… were entirely due to people interfering with viruses in laboratories… except this time [for covid] they went one [step] further… to use genetic inserts… whereas before they jumped about with different cells… infecting different animals etc… This whole business should be stopped…

What Dalgleish says is consistent with what Denis Rancourt, formerly Professor of Physics at the University of Ottawa, says in this article:

Interestingly, none of the post-second-world-war Centers-for-Disease-Control-and-Prevention-promoted (CDC‑promoted) viral respiratory disease pandemics (1957-58, “H2N2”; 1968, “H3N2”; 2009, “H1N1 again”) can be detected in the all‑cause mortality of any country. Unlike all the other causes of death that are known to affect mortality, these so‑called pandemics did not cause any detectable increase in mortality, anywhere.

The large 1918 mortality event, which was recruited to be a textbook viral respiratory disease pandemic (“H1N1”), occurred prior to the inventions of antibiotics and the electron microscope, under horrific post-war public-sanitation and economic-stress conditions. The 1918 deaths have been proven by histopathology of preserved lung tissue to have been caused by bacterial pneumonia. This is shown in several independent and non-contested published studies.

I wonder how many of the “Spanish flu” deaths were caused by aspirin overdose:

Investigating vaccine harms (or not)

[de Brun] Angus… is… talking about… the academic research that’s been done to date. [And] there’s a massive amount of it pointing to how dangerous these vaccines are… and to how [the] overall processes were… completely wrong and misguided throughout the pandemic.

But one thing… that he hasn’t touched upon is… when you say that people are not looking at the evidence… or are willfully suppressing the evidence… from a clinical perspective, in the community… doctors are not allowed [to do certain basic things]. For example, there’s a very easy blood test… if somebody came to you after they had a covid vaccine for example… with a side-effect…

[And for context]… if [patients] want to record the side-effect… there’s a seven-page form that you have to fill out online. [And] for an elderly person to get online and fill out a seven-page form with the [regulators]… it’s a very complicated process to even register an injury.

But [even] if the GP was remotely interested… and many aren’t… [though] a few are… in pursuing the potential of a vaccine injury with a genetic vaccine… the tests that could be done are relatively simple… in terms of antibodies to spike protein or in terms of spike protein in the blood… They are simple tests, but they’re not being done. The State… is not making them available. The Irish College is not recommending them…

[Hobbs] Has this been replicated in post-mortem investigations?

[de Brun] Absolutely. So when we say [that] there’s a degree of suppression [of]…the very strong body of academic papers and literature pointing to the danger of these vaccines… on the ground [in clinical practice] there’s very, very little [that is allowed to happen]. If you want to test to see have you been… injured… is spike protein still circulating in your body after you’ve had the vaccine… if you want that test the GP would have to send it off to a private laboratory in Germany. [And] these would be easily done in Ireland. So there’s a wilful suppression… [to prevent] the clinical evidence [coming] out. The academic studies are there… the science is there… but… to back it up with clinical patients is very difficult, if not impossible…

Try searching Google Scholar for “covid vaccination XXX”, where XXX is (for example):

• heart

• lung

• brain

• blood

• spinal cord

• eye

• menstrual cycle

Or if you prefer more technical terms, try (for example):

• myocarditis

• thrombosis

• neuropathy

• myelitis

• prion disease

• autoimmunity

• Guillain-Barré

And keep scrolling and clicking through the results. There are literally thousands of papers. And of course only a relatively small proportion of cases end up being reported in the scientific literature.

[Dalgleish] It’s political… Everything you said is absolutely correct, and, with the link to cancer, which you noted, I basically said that what I want to do is to see the spike protein and measure it… that’s something we can do very easily… there’s a very straightforward test for that…

And they said, “Oh, we can’t afford to do that.” [The authorities that] spent [£]37 billion on test and trace… let alone useless PPE… they’ve got no sense of irony at all…

And I said… “I know… a charity that will pay for this…” And this person… representing the NHS told me… “Well, if you do… I’ll make jolly sure you don’t get ethical permission to do it.” Think about that… that is absolute top-down suppression…

And the reason I wanted to do this is… if… you’ve got a very high level of spike protein and you’ve got a cancer [that] you’re suspicious has started… or a very bad autoimmune condition… you then want to know, as a clinical scientist… if [the spike protein level] is high, can I use something to reduce it… and will I improve it? That’s a real scientific thing. Is it causal and is it linked? And that’s… all I wanted to do, and they didn’t want me to do that!

And when I discussed it with [other] people, they said [that the authorities] clearly don’t want anything that proves that they were wrong. That’s one way of looking [at it]. I think it’s more sinister than that. With several colleagues [around] the world… where we’ve been talking together and sharing ideas… we know we can reduce that spike protein with… drugs that are really quite cheap and non-toxic…

The important role of vitamin D

[Hobbs] I want to try and look at [some] positives… how does medical science help to promote or boost the human immune system…? We were talking just before we went on camera about vitamin D. Can you… tell me about that?

[Dalgleish] I happened to read [David Grimes’] book [Vitamin D and Cholesterol: The Importance of the Sun]…

[Dalgleish] I don’t think it’s in print anymore but… it’s a survey of all the [relevant] literature. I read it and absorbed it… long before [covid]… and I thought this is incredibly important because it clearly affects the immune system.

And so when we were looking at why people didn’t respond to early immunotherapy and why they did, vitamin D was the most significant thing. The vast majority of people did not [respond] because the vast majority of people had low vitamin D [levels]. And we found that when we supplemented [with vitamin D at thousands of international units] they started to improve… [and] that’s been shown worldwide.

Now when we got a respiratory disease with people dying… and I was in Tooting and London Euston… where they go around jabbing everybody with influenza jabs every year… (they’re completely useless but they’re very, very profitable and they try and get everybody jabbed)… I’d already worked out that the people who had good vitamin D on my trials… they never got the flu… they never got the cold. And then I found [out] that [vitamin D] it basically protects you through the immune system.

And [during the covid era] I said… if you could do nothing else, just put everybody on high dose vitamin D, and there’ll be hardly any deaths at all from covid. And [Chief Medical Officer Chris] Whitty… he basically turned it down… “not enough evidence”… I sent him a hundred references… He should have taken notice… because I had all this experience.

And then this Spanish group came out… and I think this is really important… because they had five hospitals or so, and what they did was a retrospective study… Everybody really ill who presented to a Spanish hospital… who went to intensive care and [in some cases] died… they counted those who went to intensive care and they counted those who died… and they analysed what the difference was.

I’ll cut straight to the chase: if your vitamin D was below 30 [ng/mL], you had a 77% chance of dying; if your vitamin D was over 75… your chance of dying was 2%. Now, you don’t need a statistician to tell you [this] is… more important than any drug trial and any vaccine trial…ever. So that’s why [vitamin D is] so important.

[Hobbs] [to de Brun] And do GPs… generally speaking… do they test for vitamin D when people are getting their bloods done?

[de Brun] We’ve known… in clinical practice for years that vitamin D is essential, and [that] it’s beneficial for the immune system… [but] when the Irish College of General Practitioners issued their guidelines for the treatment and management of covid there was nothing on the guide… no treatment recommended other than end-of-life care… referral to palliation [easing the severity of a pain or a disease without removing the cause]… and midazolam use…

See e.g. this section of this post…

…for more discussion on midazolam. Later on in the same article there is discussion of other treatments for covid, such as ivermectin (also see below).

[de Brun] The evidence that Angus is citing is absolutely sound… I agree 100% with what he said… but it’s important to make the point… therapeutics, vitamins, things that could have made an enormous difference to the pathology of covid 19, which predominantly spread through the nursing homes… and killed a huge amount of vulnerable people… all of those therapeutics, be it vitamin D… be it hydroxychloroquine… whatever… all of the opportunities to treat were withheld, and they were willfully withheld by collusion between the Irish College of General Practitioners, the HSE and the government.

[And] they were withheld for one reason and one reason only. That was because, if there was any treatment available for covid-19, emergency use authorisation for genetic vaccines wouldn’t have been passed and the vaccine wouldn’t have been allowed onto the market. So the elderly were deprived not only of vitamin D but of a myriad of treatments that could have provided a huge amount of benefit… and certainly vitamin D would have provided a huge amount of benefit and would have done no harm whatsoever… but it didn’t form part of the guidance…

[Hobbs] Anybody listening to the discussion we’ve just had for the last five minute would come to the conclusion that the whole thing is corrupted from top to bottom… we all understand vitamin D, and it wasn’t on the list and and yet all of this experimental stuff was… and now we’re dealing with the fallout from all of that….

[de Brun] [Vitamin D] was withheld from the list because GPs and doctors and physicians and clinicians and scientists… all of us are well aware… dairies are well aware… that vitamin D is absolutely crucial…

[Hobbs] But how can that be defended?

[de Brun] It’s indefensible…

Premeditated mass euthanasia

[Dalgleish] I… got into trouble with the Royal Colleges… [a] whole range of people… they were all basically arguing against… and reasons why not… what have you… It is beyond belief. It’s like they’d all been brainwashed and part of a [psychological operation].

This was premeditated mass euthanasia… It went on at every level. When people were ill, [medics] were told not to treat them. I and many others gave a package… it wasn’t just vitamin D… you give anti-inflammatories… you can squirt interferons… up your nose… And if it starts to go to the chest, you give them [medications] like [those for] asthma. And if they start [to get] short of breath, you put them on dexamethasone [which is commonly used to reduce inflammation and lower the immune response]. And then you add in an antibiotic just so you don’t get any secondary infection.

But the UK “covid protocols” denied antibiotics to patients “with covid”…

See e.g. this post:

[de Brun] Absolutely…

[Dalgleish] That works perfectly... the premeditation was to drag this out. They had a trial in the UK called RECOVERY. There were six drugs in this trial. One of them was dexamethasone, and that was the only one that was positive on this trial. [And] my friend who’s a respiratory physician said this trial was premeditated murder of 4,500 people who failed to get dexamethasone, which is the standard treatment they would have got without the trial.

So this is how premeditated all this was. And if [people] did very, very badly, they were put on a ventilator… they ordered tens of thousands… this is UK… of these ventilators, not realising… if you get inflammation of the lungs from an infection, you need to treat that like cystic fibrosis. You use ventilators when you’ve got cardiopulmonary failure and you get fluid leaking out into the lungs. The ventilators push that back in until you correct the cause of it… To contemplate that you needed ventilators just showed that all… proper medicine was put on hold or stopped… And then when [people] got ill, they didn’t treat them properly… they put them on what is a death pathway.

And when they did allow a drug to come through, it was remdesivir, which had failed in Ebola. Its side-effect was so horrendous that the nurses called it “run… death is near”. And that was the only one they approved. And in the States they gave every hospital a $5,000 bonus if they put a patient on it.

[Hobbs] What you’re describing there… is… the death of the scientific method in the medical profession...?

[de Burn] Well [yes]… the orchestrated usurpation of it… or certainly manipulation of it for a pharmaceutical agenda…

[Hobbs] Very senior people are involved… with the medical profession… the regulators…

[de Brun] My constituency is Ringaskiddy which is Pharma Central in Ireland… that’s where the pharmaceutical companies are based…

[Hobbs] [During the covid era] we had a leader of government who was a GP… Leo Varadkar… and… he was on television telling people that this was a pandemic of the unvaccinated…

The discrediting of ivermectin

[Dalgleish] There is absolutely no doubt at all that ivermectin would have completely ruined any chance of any [emergency-use] vaccine coming. [What I have already said in terms of] the general management would have greatly reduced [the impact of covid]… [but] ivermectin would have reduced it to zero.

This website has a timeline of the 100+ studies on the use of ivermectin as a treatment for covid:

An overview of the data can be found here.

[Dalgleish] I put friends and patients and relatives etc. on [ivermectin] with… high-dose vitamin D… and they all recovered. None of them wanted to go near the hospital because they knew if they went to the hospital they would probably get killed [by the “covid protocols”]… and that was quite a reasonable assumption.

I had two people that [were] really, really bad… that weren’t doing well, and they refused [to go to hospital]. So I put them on ivermectin [and] they both recovered dramatically… really quickly. So we knew we had something. Pierre Kory in the [United] States had pioneered [the use of ivermectin] and… even… people [who were] aged… with other conditions… had zero deaths. This was just absolutely fantastic… [and] would have killed [the vaccine programme].

[But] the real story is [that] [Tony] Fauci went out of his way to kill [ivermectin]… even putting up posters… “You’re not a horse… etc.”

I am reminded of this article by independent journalist Maryanne Demasi:

The top FDA official concerned is Dr Janet Woodcock — the head of the FDA’s drug evaluation and research division from 1994, who in 2020 was appointed therapeutics lead for “Operation Warp Speed” to help fast-track covid vaccines and treatments:

In June 2020, Woodcock was keen on the idea of testing ivermectin:

And in January 2021 she apparently reaffirmed her support for the evaluation of repurposed drugs:

But in that same month, Woodcock was appointed acting commissioner of the FDA…

And in August the FDA put out this now-deleted post on Twitter:

The BBC — which spearheaded the Trusted News Initiative — also played a role in discrediting ivermectin, through the Radio 4 programme More or Less:

BBC Radio 4 made no attempt to contact any of the study authors for interview or ‘right of reply’

Back to the podcast….

[Dalgleish] Now [such drugs] are anti-falarial… [i.e.] for [treating parasitic] worms. Ivermectin… people forget… since penicillin it is the only drug to get its own Nobel prize… basically… in 2015…

In contrast to remdesivir and mRNA vaccines, the cost of ivermectin — which is off-patent — is minimal…

Covid vaccine harm: what can be done?

[Hobbs] One last question… Marcus… Lots of people watching this will have got the vaccines… some people twice… some people three times… in Ireland… and they’ve survived. They might have had some doubts about the impact it might have had on their overall health system… but they might be putting that down to getting a bit older [etc]… But there’s a doubt…

And the question I wanted to ask is… What percentage of people that have managed to live until now without any major health decline… are still generating… [covid] spike protein within their system… And should they be getting tested…? What should they be taking to help their immune system clear itself of the spike protein? Is [the need to clear the immune system of spike protein] a thing? And, if it is a thing, is it with [say] 10% of the people that were vaccinated… or is it a higher number?

[de Brun] Well, I think Angus could probably speak… better than me… in advising people of what they should be taking, but… certainly there [have] been studies in the States and studies in the UK showing that spike protein is still present after vaccination for several years… there’s no mechanism to shut off production.

[Hobbs] But are we past the threshold now, or is it still prevalent?

[de Brun] That I don’t know… you used the word “corrupted”… when you talked about what’s happening. But I think… the correct word is [actually] “corrupt” [present tense]… because patients should be able to come to people like myself… the general practitioners… and ask… for a simple diagnostic test to see if spike protein is present. And because that simple test is wilfully suppressed and people are being deprived of it, we’re actually in the realm of a human rights issue because… people have a right to find out…

They were given… a vaccine which wasn’t a vaccine… it was a genetic product. They didn’t get informed consent. The GP who gave the vaccine… in the vast majority of cases didn’t know what was in the vial. So society at large is a victim of this process, and they should be… permitted to come to a GP and get a free test to see if spike protein is circulating.

And unless we get to that point, I think advising… what we should be doing if spike protein is still present or not is pretty much a moot point. The fact that the government has wilfully suppressed any notion of autonomy or any notion of patient freedom or human rights in that regard makes it a very difficult situation…

[Hobbs] What do you think, Angus?

[Dalgleish] Well… I’ve made it very clear… if I [were] the Chief Medical Officer that’s the first thing I would do with everybody… to get them to have a test [for spike protein] and then have trials to see how can we get [the level of spike protein] down to zero.

There’s no end of [drug] candidates… [that aspect] is very easy… My own [preference] is low-dose naltrexone [which is used in the management of alcohol and opioid use disorders] which I’ve been working on for 20 years… and we find that it’s a very good way of reducing inflammation through the IL-6 pathway… [We’ve] been doing it in cancer and… we were the first to show [that naltrexone] suppresses the IL-6 inflammatory pathway. [And] what was the inflammatory pathway of covid? IL-6. [And] what is the determinant of “long covid”… which is [actually] “post-vaccine covid”…? That’s the only “long covid” you’re going to see now…

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The most-read articles can be found here

…this is not an article about the company associated with asbestos in its Baby Powder, as reported here by Reuters in the days before the Trusted News Initiative:

It is a post about father and son Stanley and Boris Johnson. Who have much in common, not least in having appeared on the BBC television panel show Have I Got News for You. Boris featured on seven occasions from 1998 to 2006, including an episode that he hosted. Stanley appeared on the programme in 2004.

Let’s start with Stanley…

Johnson Sr

In the words of the website stanleyjohnson.org, Stanley Johnson…

…is a former Conservative member of the European Parliament (MEP) where he served (1979-1984) as Vice Chairman of the Parliament’s Committee on Environment, Public Health and Consumer Protection.

He has also worked in the European Commission (1973-1979) as Head of the Prevention of Pollution division and (1984-1994) as Senior Adviser to DG Environment and as Director of Energy Policy.

Before joining the Commission, Stanley served on the staff of the World Bank and the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

But there is no mention of his 1970 book Life Without Birth:

Here is the Contents page:

And here (c/o Thinking Coalition) is an excerpt:

The fourth and last plank in the strategy, if it was felt that within the context of marriage parents would always want “too many” children, would be to discourage marriage itself as we know it. In order to preserve other fundamental freedoms for society as a whole, the government would attempt to limit the opportunities for breeding by limiting the opportunities for marriage. It would use the weapons of the modern state (still, of course, within the “context of voluntarism”) not just in pursuit of antinatalist policies but of antinuptialist policies as well. This might involve promoting — for some proportion of the society — other forms of union (homosexual or heterosexual) which from a demographic standpoint may be more desirable.

The last plank in the strategy… discourage marriage itself as we know it… use the weapons of the modern state… this might involve promoting… other forms of union…

Here is the latest data for opposite-sex marriages from the UK’s Office for National Statistics, with the rate on the y-axis being marriages per 1,000 men or women:

And here is the data for same-sex unions (and opposite-sex civil partnerships):

I wonder what Stanley Johnson makes of the trends since 1970, the year of his 30th birthday.

In case you are wondering whether his views might have changed, not least in the context of having had six children, here is an article from the Express in 2018:

It appears that this is the interview mentioned (a partial transcript is below):

[Interviewer] In the 1970s… there was a huge movement to basically end growth… That was one of the prime areas of the… new environmentalist agenda which was, “We do not need growth. We should not have growth.” And there was a very active movement. That’s gone out of the window…

[Johnson] That’s where I come from… If you said to me, “Who is right in the argument? The “no growth” people or the “let’s go for growth” people?” I would certainly say the “no growth” people.

But I’d add as a corollary to that… you have to get population under control as well, because if you look at it in sheer economic terms, how can you sustain increases in per capita income at a time when you have rising population without rising economic growth? Whereas if you have a declining population, which is what I would aim for, then of course even a stable economic growth situation will give you increases in per capita income. So that’s where I stand…

[Interviewer] Do you do have a sense of what the carrying capacity of Britain is, or of the world as a whole…?

[Johnson] Well, Britain… I’d put it at 10 or 15 million [laughs]. I think that’d be absolutely fine… That would do us really splendidly… At a limit, 20-25 [million]…

I think it’s complete nonsense that we are now confronted with an island of… would you believe it… 70 million people. I wrote a paper… I think it’s the only paper the Conservative party has ever published… and it was published as an Old Queen Street paper in June 1972…

When I started writing this article several months ago, I found this link which gave that Old Queen Street paper advertised on eBay (snapshot below), although at the time it was “currently sold out”:

Alas the link no longer gives the Old Queen Street paper. But I did find these two books when I searched eBay for “population policy stanley johnson”:

I also found this video, apparently from 2019, featuring Johnson Sr joking about a then-recent Sun headline with Joanna Lumley, who is apparently a family friend:

[Joanna Lumley] A gas explosion tears through Russian bioweapons lab containing smallpox, ebola and HIV virus, sparking major emergency…

[Stanley Johnson] That is absolutely wonderful, because, as an environmentalist, I say to myself, the best possible news would be some mega-emergency which got rid of huge chunks of the human race. [Laughter and applause]

And on the subject of writings and viruses, I am also reminded of Johnson Sr’s book The Virus, re-published in June 2020, i.e. during the first covid lockdown:

The book is apparently:

Astonishingly prescient, with uncanny parallels to the… Covid-19 pandemic.

I can’t help wondering what was actually on Stanley Johnson’s mind when he wrote The Virus.

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Johnson Jr

At the time I started writing this article, I found the website boris-johnson.com, which looked like it could do with an update. Alas the link that I had bookmarked now points to a gambling page. But the information that I found is consistent with other sources that state that Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was…

…educated at Eton (King’s Scholar), and Balliol College, Oxford (Brackenbury Scholar in Classics).

He then went on to work for:

The Times, The Wolverhampton Express and Star before joining The Daily Telegraph, where he was successively a leader and feature writer, EU Correspondent, and Assistant Editor.

And he also worked as Editor of The Spectator.

In 2001 he became Conservative MP for the safe seat of Henley (in Oxfordshire), and in 2008 was elected Mayor of London. He was re-elected as Mayor in 2012, and in 2015 he returned to Parliament, again as a Conservative MP, for the fairly-safe seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip (in Greater London). After featuring prominently in the successful Brexit campaign of 2016, he became Foreign Secretary in Theresa May’s government. Following May’s resignation in 2019, he became the leader of the Conservative party and thus Prime Minister. Several months later, he led the Conservatives to victory in a general election only a matter of weeks before he ordered the nation to “stay at home”.

And it was in 2007, while he was MP for Henley…

…and shortly after winning the Conservative nomination for the 2008 mayoral election, that he penned this Telegrapharticle, Global over-population is the real issue:

It features these words:

The primary challenge facing our species is the reproduction of our species itself…

There are more than 211,000 people being added every day, and a population the size of Germany every year.

As someone who has now been travelling around the world for decades, I see this change, and I feel it…

You can see it as you fly over Mexico City, a vast checkerboard of smog-bound, low-rise dwellings stretching from one horizon to the other; and when you look down on what we are doing to the planet, you have a horrifying vision of habitations multiplying and replicating like bacilli in a Petri dish…

There was a time, in the 1960s and 1970s, when people such as my father, Stanley, were becoming interested in demography, and the UN would hold giant conferences on the subject, and it was perfectly respectable to talk about saving the planet by reducing the growth in the number of human beings.

But over the years, the argument changed, and certain words became taboo, and certain concepts became forbidden, and we have reached the stage where the very discussion of overall human fertility — global motherhood — has become more or less banned.

We seem to have given up on population control…

This is a straightforward question of population, and the eventual size of the human race.

…Isn’t it time politicians stopped being so timid, and started talking about the real number one issue?

I find the comments in the Mexico City paragraph particularly striking…

A horrifying vision of habitations multiplying and replicating like bacilli in a Petri dish

Bacilli being a genus of bacteria.

As to the phrase “We seem to have given up on population control”, it now seems rather apt for Boris, who has apparently had at least six children.

As with his father, it seems to be a case of “Rules for thee but not for me”…

I wonder what someone in 2007 would have said if they had been told that the author of the above piece would one day become Prime Minister only a matter of months before the apparent emergence of a virus reminiscent of the one that his father had written a book about…

Which reminds me… that it is also worth noting these words from Boris Johnson as a young man:

On the whole “elite” thing, I’m not actually against elites. I’m not against elitism.

Every society we’ve ever known… every society open to our direct observation has been ruled by an elite. Communist Russia. Communist China. Everywhere is ruled by a very, very tight oligarchy.

I wonder what was on his mind when he stated that everywhere is ruled by a very, very tight oligarchy…

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The issue of “overpopulation” has of course been raised by plenty of prominent people, not least — according to this 2009 Sunday Times article — “some of America’s leading billionaires” who “met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population…”:

But ever since I first saw presentations by Hans Rosling — perhaps 15-20 years ago — along the lines of this one…

…I have wondered how much of a problem overpopulation actually is.

And, according to this Our World in Data chart from earlier this year, Rosling’s sober and sensible statistical take seems to have aged rather well:

As to the UK, the total fertility rate has decreased to around 1.4 (with 2.1 being the “replacement rate”):

The trend does not suggest a turnaround any time soon…

Here is the projected population based on today’s total fertility rate with the number of people entering the country equal to the number of people leaving:

And here is Boris Johnson — who is hardly renowned for telling the truth — offering his opinion to Daily Mail readers earlier this month:

I have just returned from the Tuscan hills where the bells are tolling for far more funerals than weddings.

In the UK, once one of the fastest-growing populations in Europe, the latest figures show that deaths this year will now exceed births for the first time since the mid-1970s.

I say, ‘Crisis, what crisis?’…

I wonder what was on Boris Johnson’s mind as he wrote that Daily Mail article, and what the verdict of history will be on his echoing the words of that famous 1979 headline from The Sun.

Related:

Also:

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When I was at university, another student, my “college father”, died in a mountaineering accident in his early 20s. And several years later, a friend died of leukaemia shortly before his 30th birthday. I have also known several people who have died in their 40s and 50s — not least my mother, as I described in the introduction to A dark day.

Coming to terms with the loss of a friend or relative can be hard enough, but the death of someone who has “died before their time” is often particularly difficult to bear for those left behind. Not least children who go through adolescence and into adulthood without their father or mother. And parents who are left grieving for an adult son or daughter.

I suspect that my own experience is somewhat unusual. But on an individual level, it is reasonable to expect that, all other things being equal, some of us will know more people who have died relatively young, and others rather fewer. In contrast though, the number of younger people dying at a population-wide level does not usually vary very much.1 A rise or fall of more than 3% from year to year would ordinarily be considered unusual.

That is what makes 2021 so striking. For in that year in England there were around 15% more deaths among those aged 25-64 compared to pre-2020 levels. In absolute terms, that means that the number of people of working age who died in 2021 was well over 10,000 more than expected. If it helps to comprehend the scale of this, that’s roughly the numerical equivalent of an average passenger plane crashing every single week and leaving no survivors.

The purpose of this fairly brief article is not to discuss in any detail the reasons for those thousands of extra deaths. For the record, it seems likely to me that there were multiple factors involved, and that some of those factors were much bigger than others. It is worth noting too that people aged 25-64 are at relatively low risk from respiratory viruses. But what I want to focus on here is how we have collectively responded (or not) in the context of such an exceptionally large loss of life among people who would ordinarily have been expected to live for many more years.

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While the cause of death is not always clear, death itself is unambiguous and generally easy to track. It is essentially a matter of counting bodies. And we have been able to count bodies reliably for a long time. So the fact that the number of working age people who died in 2021 was at least 10,000 more than usual is not a matter of opinion. It is not something that we can reasonably agree to differ about. Or something that we need to leave to experts.

One of the most striking things about the behaviour of the government, the public health authorities and the media is the contrast between the reporting of deaths in 2020, “the year of the pandemic”, and in 2021, during which “covid restrictions” were lifted and life returned to something resembling normality. In 2020 the number of “covid deaths”2 was widely and relentlessly reported day after day, even when it dropped to close to zero during the summer. Yet in 2021 there was curiously little discussion of the unexpectedly large number of working age people dying.

In the five years or so since, little has changed. And I find the ongoing silence eerier than ever. But what I find most troubling is that it is not only the government, the public health authorities and the media that appear to want to act as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. The same is true of most of the rest of society. There seems to be an element of wilful blindness. I wonder how many subjects there are today that are more taboo. I detect little or no interest in looking back openly and objectively at what happened in 2021, let alone learning lessons.

Each November in the UK we rightly remember those who have died in conventional wars and conflicts, including, in the past 60 years or so, around ~1,800 military personnel and ~2,050 civilians.3 But it would appear that, when an unexpected extra 10,000+ working age civilians are lost in a single year, almost no-one wants to talk about it. There is no public prayer — from the leaders of any religion — for the many missing mums and dads, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons who sit no more at familiar tables of home. There is no acknowledgement of their departure long before their time. And so far at least, there is little by way of indication that, at the going down of the sun and in the morning, will we ever collectively remember them.

What have we become?

And where do we go from here?

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Both parts relate to the erosion of medical ethics, which is why I have put them together. The first part, starting at 18:34, comes in the context of discussion in relation to a paper in The Lancet that is covered in this post:

The erosion of medical ethics

[Nelson] …the stakes are so high… it’s people living and dying over this, right?

[Craig] Yes… and actually beyond living and dying… if you can go beyond that as something more serious… there is a risk to… the ethical framework that we are living under…

I have children, and I hope to have grandchildren, and I care about the future… I also care greatly about now… but the problem we’ve got is this switch in how we consider… ethics at a societal level.

Since the Nuremberg code… which came out of the Nuremberg trials… that was the first time it was written down that people should be protected from medicine… the idea that you needed any kind of protection wasn’t really a thing until then. And when it was written down then it was very specifically about medical experimentation, because that was the issue at hand. And we were taught about this at medical school… I’m not sure that people always are anymore… And maybe it doesn’t matter because things have moved on…

The ten points of the Nuremberg Code can be viewed here:

Here is the first point (emphasis added):

1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.

The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.

Back to the podcast…

[Craig[ In 1964… the World Medical Association group… nothing to do with the WHO… [the WMA] are a group representing all of the different medical associations… the American Medical Association… Australian Medical Association… basically… doctors’ unions… they’re not anything more than that…

But they got together and said, “Look, we have a problem, because the only ethical code we’re working to is Nuremberg. And that feels like it was designed to stop really evil doctors doing really evil things. And actually we need something for day-to-day use about… what the ethics of medicine should be.”

So they got together and they wrote down how it should work, and… the wording by 1975 was that individual rights [need] protecting over the needs of science and society. So you’ve got there in that line the protection of the individual over any kind of medical research… that’s your Nuremberg bit… and society.

Here is the original Declaration of Helsinki 1964:

[Craig] Now the “and society” bit is a public health line. That’s what that means… [The doctors] knew there was a risk to the individual from a public health “greater good” ideology. And so they said, “No, the individual must be protected.” And they were right to say that, because if you live in a society where every individual is protected then you live in a society that’s protected. That’s how it works. It flows from that idea.

If you live in a society where the needs of the greater good are put above the needs of the individual, then in that very term “greater good” you have inherent sacrifice... And you have moved to a utilitarian ethical system. And we know about utilitarian ethical systems, because we’ve seen [how they] play out politically in communist countries and in fascist countries. And it’s not a good thing. And it is a thing we need to be protected from.

Now… concerningly, [the] declaration of Helsinki has continued to evolve. And over time the words “science” and “society” got changed… They’re still clear that the individual needs protection… but now it’s from the… needs of research… they dropped the society bit…

And they’ve added in a line about [how] this is true even in emergencies. [And that] sounds [like] quite a good line. But the thing is that, if you don’t say that, it means this is true all of the time and forever this is true. If you add in “it’s true even in emergencies” then someone can come along and say, “Yes, but they didn’t think about this emergency did they?” And then… you actually let in a chink of light.

And so if you watch how the wording has changed for that… among the doctors… you can see how the thinking of the medical profession has drifted… They are not utilitarian in that Declaration of Helsinki yet, but it’s headed in that direction… [and is] pointed slightly more towards it…

The thing is that public health as a… body of knowledge… and their ethos… is a utilitarian one. And it always has been. And this is not the only time when that’s a problem. One of the problems we have in the UK… I don’t know what it’s like in the States… public health has always been a specialty that has not been well-rewarded. And so doctors tended not to want to go into it. So a lot of the day-to-day work before 2020 was things like managing environmental health… vaccines were a huge part of it… of their day-to-day [work]... And they would trace food poisoning episodes… that kind of thing.

And so what had happened over time is that doctors chose not to do it, and other people were stepping in. So a lot of our public health officials… not at the top… but at lower rungs… are not qualified doctors. And that means they’ve not had any ethical training along these lines… at all. That I think is an enormous problem…

Within the medical profession more broadly we’ve also got a huge problem here of importing doctors who haven’t had that same ethical training. And if you’re importing doctors from other cultures, where it might be more utilitarian, then I think that needs to be addressed. You can’t just import doctors without addressing our ethical framework and what it means to be a part of this society that we live in.

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And now the second part, on a related note, in terms of what it means to be a part of this society that we live in.

Following the further discussion featured in these posts…

…in the “any other business” section at the end of the podcast (from 56:20), Dr Craig briefly highlights an important legal case in which she is involved:

[Craig] I’m involved in [a] European Human Rights case… There’s a Finnish man called Mika Vauhkala, who, at the age of 41, was unvaccinated and hadn’t paid for his €200 PCR test. And on 10th December [2021] he entered a chain cafe and ordered a coffee and a croissant and was denied them. [This case] has worked its way through the Finnish courts… through all the different layers… and his case is now going to be heard at the European Court of Human Rights [EHCR]. And I’m doing a witness statement for him.

I do think it is a really important case, and I think the fundamental point is… what kind of society are we? What are the medical ethics? Are we going to stay in a system that protects the individual? Because… as a 41-year-old… healthy man, he was not at risk from covid, and his choice to not be vaccinated with a vaccine that had demonstrated safety issues by the 10th December 2021… actually… the people who were charged with the rollout of it had admitted that it couldn’t work and that it didn’t work… and yet he was being forced to have this medical procedure that late on in the day.

So I think it is an important case, and I just really hope that the judge realises the importance of it and… draws a line around why we have these declarations of human rights, and how they can’t just be thrown in the bin when it’s politically convenient.

More details are available here:

And also here — including Dr Craig’s testimony at these links (parts 1 and 2 respectively):

In summary:

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Particularly:

Also:

Other posts based on the same podcast include this one…

…and the articles listed in its introductory section.

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…I thought it worth re-issuing this post from last summer, not least for those who missed it first time round:

Some important context here includes the notion of “Problem… Reaction… Solution”…

…and the way that events are carefully crafted and used by the-powers-that-be to push certain agendas:

To my mind, it is not a question of whether high-profile media stories are created and used by the establishment, but the extent to which it happens.

And this sort of thing is not a new phenomenon.

I wrote this article to demonstrate how such propagandising has been going on for at least a hundred years.

And this post to illustrate how the manufacture of consent is also anything but a novel concept:

I also put out this piece to highlight the fact that there are highly professional organisations who make their living by staging crisis incidents:

I am now inclined to think that the extent of the use of high-profile media stories to advance certain agendas has been much greater and going on for much longer than I thought even when I wrote More media musings… and Again, watch out that you are not deceived:

It seems to me more important than ever to ask basic questions about the truthfulness of any unusually high-profile media story that has at least some of the following features:

• Strong emotions are evoked

• There is widespread mainstream media coverage

• Responses to the story are amplified by large social media accounts and/or bots

And in doing so, it is important to keep in mind that, in the context of even quite large-scale projects, the number of people involved who understand the full scope of what is going on can actually be rather small.1

It is in the context of the above that I have reproduced below what I wrote last year about the matter of the mystery of Madeleine McCann.

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More media musings…

[originally published in June 2025]

Until recently, I was unaware of just how many people go missing in the UK. Here is p9 of the Missing Persons Data Report 2022/23 from the National Crime Agency:

156,454 people!

That’s roughly the population of West Berkshire. Or South Tyneside. Or the Isle of Wight. Or — if you prefer towns and cities — Oxford, Preston or Swansea.

For context, relatively few of those incidents involve children under the age of 12 (see p10). And of course in the vast majority of cases the duration of the missing incident is relatively short (see p17). But there are some young children who do go missing for long periods of time:

…according to the UK Missing Persons Unit, there are 1,514 children in the UK recorded as “long-term missing”, meaning that they have been missing for more than 28 days.

That quotation is from a 2023 article — Madeleine McCann: Young children who have been missing for more than a decade — that features the cases of Daniel Entwistle, Ames Glover, Holly Bringan, Aamina Khan, Ben Needham and Mary Boyle.

Now it could be that I do not pay enough attention to such things, but there were only two names in that list that I even vaguely recognised. And if I had been stopped in the street and asked, before seeing that article, “Can you name any well-known unresolved cases of missing children in recent years?”, there is only one that I could have cited with any degree of confidence. It is of course the one featured in the headline of that article. And I suspect the vast majority of people would say something similar.

And why? Well, the matter of the mystery of Madeleine McCann has had an extraordinary amount of press coverage.

For example, a search for Madeleine McCann on The Guardian website turns up no less than 504 articles over 26 pages, including five so far this month:2

504 articles over 18 years works out at an average of 2-3 a month.

A search in The Telegraph gives similar results:

There are seven pages featuring links to around 200 articles, but going back only as far as 2016.

By way of illustration, here are the 32 articles on p6, spanning a period of just under 12 months in 2016-17:

As it happens, that is also an average of 2-3 a month.

Looking back, it appears that the Madeleine McCann case has rarely been out of the headlines for more than a few months. And there was one month — June 2020, at the end of the first covid lockdown — during which the Telegraph had around 70 (yes, seventy) articles related to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

And there was me thinking that the tabloids would be the main place to go for such coverage.

The context

For context, Madeleine McCann was reported missing in May 2007, a few days before her fourth birthday.

Around a year later, an article in The Telegraph opened with these words:

The first anniversary of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann will be marked next week with a two-hour television documentary which is the highlight of a carefully stage-managed publicity offensive.

And described the investigation as:

the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history.

That was in 2008. I wonder what The Telegraph would have said in June 2020. Let alone what it would say today, 18 years since the disappearance was reported.

For anyone interested in the timeline since 2007, and the various twists and turns, this Wikipedia article with 300+ references looks comprehensive.

And there is this Netflix series featuring “the world’s most famous missing child case”:

Though I should perhaps at this stage at least flag up this article featuring Wikipedia…

…and the fact that Marc Randolph, the first CEO and co-founder of Netflix is the great-nephew of Edward Bernays (author of Propaganda), who is himself the nephew of the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud.

Which reminds me of Clement Freud, Sigmund’s grandson, who the BBC reportedin 2016 as having been posthumously “accused of abusing two girls between the late 1940s and 1970s”.

That BBC article also states:

Freud was friends with Gerry and Kate McCann — parents of three-year-old Madeleine, who disappeared in Praia la Luz, Portugal, in 2007.

The BBC journalist

The 2008 Telegraph article mentioned above — Master of media circus for Madeleine McCann — features Clarence Mitchell, who, according to his CV:

…was an on-air BBC News Correspondent, Royal Correspondent, Political Correspondent and Presenter, during a 20-year career with the Corporation…

He was profiled in this 2007 BBC article:

He was one of the first reporters to arrive… when the immensely popular BBC TV presenter Jill Dando was shot dead in a murder many feel has never been satisfactorily explained…

…led coverage of the murder of the Surrey schoolgirl Millie Dowler in 2002. The case has never been solved…

…was deeply involved in coverage of the post-Diana era and the death of the Queen Mother…

But in 2005,3 he:

…left the BBC quite suddenly, making a move into the Labour government as director of its Media Monitoring Unit. His salary was widely reported to be £70,000 a year.

Around £120,000 in today’s money.

And in 2007:

As the Madeleine McCann story exploded… it became clear that a high level of control and organisation would be needed to cope with the media maelstrom…

So:

[Mitchell] was plucked from his job, and sent out to handle the media, rather than be part of the media, on a massive crime story.

Several years later, in 2013, the former director of the Labour government’s “Media Monitoring Unit, controlling the flow of information to newspapers”, was chosen as the Conservative candidate for Brighton Pavilion:4

According to that article in Brighton’s The Argus, in 2008, Mitchell:

…was involved in a row with Portuguese police who accused him of “lying with as many teeth as he has in his mouth” after McCann family statements were leaked to the media.

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The Crimewatch producer

Stepping further back, but still on the subject of the BBC, it so happens that, according to this 2007 Guardian article:

Bridget O’Donnell and her partner were making friends with another holidaying family while their three-year-old daughters played together. But then Madeleine McCann went missing…

And this is what O’Donnell says about herself in that article:

I once worked as a producer in the BBC crime unit. I directed many reconstructions and spent my second pregnancy producing new investigations for Crimewatch…

Crimewatch (formerly Crimewatch UK) being:

a British television programme produced by the BBC, that reconstructs major unsolved crimes in order to gain information from the public which may assist in solving the case.

O’Donnell even has an IMDb entry:

Hmm.

The actress?

Finally, one of the most recent — and perhaps most curious — developments in the mystery of Madeleine McCann is the reported arrest of Julia Wandelt, who apparently “claimed to be Madeleine McCann”:

And who bears at least some resemblance to this Julia Wandelt, an actress based in Arizona:

If you are unsure, try browsing the Photo gallery (bottom left on the snapshot above).

And so…?

Make of the above what you will…

But to anyone wondering, quite reasonably, why the media has given — and indeed why the media continues to give — so much prominent coverage to this one particular case of a missing child, it is worth trying to put yourself in the minds of the invisible governors…

…who exert influence on what we see and hear.

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to wonder if the-powers-that-be might, for any of various reasons, want to keep a closer watch on the masses. And that one of the ways they might envisage doing that is by implanting microchips in people.

And if that were their intention, I don’t think it would take too many brainstorming meetings to come up with these two strategies:

[i] Introduce microchipping for pets to get people used to the idea

As I guess many readers will know, it’s already a thing — and hardly an optional one — for dogs and cats.

“For their safety.” “For your peace of mind.” And so they can be tracked and traced. And so you don’t get fined a monkey.5

[ii] Create a perceived need to microchip children for their safety

Despite the apparent keenness of many parents to embrace digital technology, I suspect that even the laptop classes might baulk at the idea of the State microchipping their children.

But, with careful manipulation of the media, and prominent stories where the moral is ultimately “This could have been avoided if only she had been microchipped”…

Along with a nudge here and a nudge there from Auntie…6

…who knows?

I wonder how long it will be before there is a page on the UK government (or NHS) website that says “Get your child microchipped”…

And where that might lead to…

Not unrelated:

And:

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Also striking, in a rather different way, are the results from different search engines when searching for news stories on Katy Talento. But I will come to that later…

Below are some excerpts from the above article:

I was a Harvard-trained infectious disease epidemiologist. I believed, religiously, that vaccines were the gold standard of public health interventions….

It was 2017, and I was… President Trump’s lead health advisor on the Domestic Policy Council, and we were all still trying to find the bathrooms in the White House…

I still believed with all my heart that vaccines were life-saving, critically-needed interventions to protect children, and that they worked best when uptake and the subsequent herd immunity was high.

I was told that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, an acquaintance of candidate Trump, had gotten him to commit to establishing a Vaccine Safety Commission once he was in office. Mr. Kennedy was now calling and wanted to get the promised commission going.

It was my job to make this problem go away.

I was all in…

I called up NIH leaders Francis Collins and Tony Fauci and asked them to go ahead and take the meeting, but off-site somewhere, far from the White House and the public view…

When COVID landed… I published an op-ed — Here’s How To Prepare If The Coronavirus Comes To A Quarantine — in March [2020], expressing relief that my friend and former colleague, Deborah Birx, had just been appointed the head of the White House COVID response. In the summer and Fall of 2020, I helped the Trump re-elect campaign by doing media interviews defending the administration’s COVID efforts.

I put on a happy face for the cameras, but as the year wore on, the unscientific demands from The Authorities were causing cognitive dissonance.

Masking mania made no sense in light of the size of a viral particle. Masks worn loosely, re-used, touched with unsterile hands all day, and forced onto children were a crime against epidemiology. And yet, The Authorities like Birx and Fauci, who I knew would know better, were still pretending.

Lockdowns were being implemented in ridiculous and scientifically unjustifiable ways. Churches - no. Mom-and-Pop restaurants - no. Gyms - no. Walmart - yes. There seemed to be no effort to explain the totalitarian disconnect that was being imposed from on high.

In the context of having watched the documentary Vaxxed, which tells the story of the CDC’s1 early 2000s vaccine/autism research, Talento recalls how she sent this text in September 2021:

Here is the text I sent… as the credits rolled, along with the tears down my cheeks:

She also describes some of her experience during the covid era:

I became the Underground Railroad in our community for [early treatments for covid such as] hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, nebulized steroids, and other countermeasures frowned on by The Authorities. Whenever someone in our social circle would fall desperately ill, I would help them get medicines from the semi-secret network of doctors, bravely providing these lifelines by telemedicine across the country…

I watched in disgust and confusion as the new administration doubled down on crazy, with so many in federal and state governments seeming to throw basic rules of microbiology and epidemiology out the door.

And a pivotal moment around the same time as she watched Vaxxed:

…something happened in late summer of 2021 - a set of legal contortions between Big Pharma and the FDA that started to make everything painfully clear.

She describes how cost-effective and safe treatments, which have been shown to work, were deliberately suppressed and delegitimised because otherwise…

…the coming vaccines - new, experimental products with limited safety trials conducted at “warp speed” - would be subject to crippling lawsuits if they injured anyone…

She recalls how the vaccine clinical trials…

…weren’t coming out so great: of the 29 deaths in the clinical trial leading to licensure, 15 were in the vaccinated group, one more than in the unvaccinated group.

And how there were two further problems faced by the vaccine promoters:

Problem #2: Only FDA-licensed products can be mandated or added to the childhood schedule, not EUA [Emergency Use Authorization] products…

Problem #3: The FDA license for the Pfizer vaccine would not apply to the whole population because the clinical trials that would form the basis of that approval didn’t include important sub-groups, like pregnant women and children under 16…

And the “diabolical solution to both problems 2 and 3” that happened in August 2021:

• The FDA approved the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine - a legal artifact because this product label wasn’t actually being used in the U.S.

• Simultaneously, the FDA extended the EUA on Pfizer partner BioNTech’s vaccine, which wasthe vaccine label being used widely.

The EUA on the product being used (including for kids aged 12-15 yr) remained protected by the PREP Act liability shield. And the identical product label not being used anywhere in the U.S. by anyone received FDA approval so that it could be mandated by the feds for all employers nationwide.

Talento notes that:

No news outlet reported what had happened.

They all announced that the vaccine everyone was getting in their arms had received FDA approval, which wasn’t true. Nationwide mandates were announced two weeks later.

And that she came to the conclusion that:

It was clear that there were dark, powerful forces at work behind the public health enterprise and I no longer wanted any part of it.

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Talento then describes what happened to her in relation to RFK Jr:

I had started listening to Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s podcast. Having thwarted his efforts, years prior, in the White House, I was now ironically mesmerized by how rational he (all of a sudden) seemed.

When Mr. Kennedy’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, was released in Fall of 2021, I devoured it.

The book is well worth reading — or listening to it as an audiobook (as I did):

She continues:

Kennedy’s meticulously-sourced description of how The Authorities had been planning for a global coronavirus pandemic - just a few months before it actually happened - was chilling.

But even closer to home was the detailed accounting of Fauci’s funding of ghoulish, invasive and debilitating HIV/AIDS experiments on often very ill foster children across the country…

And notes that:

If untrue, the claims in Kennedy’s book were so utterly defamatory that they should have spurred a parade of lawsuits. To my knowledge, no such lawsuits have ever been filed.

That is surely an important observation.

Talento came to a stark realisation:

…as I listened to Mr. Kennedy speak out about his experience with the first Trump administration, I understood that at the very least, the vaccine safety conversation that is going mainstream todaycould have gotten a major head start.

And she acted accordingly:

So in January of 2022, I wrote Mr. Kennedy a contrite email confessing my sins, probably hoping for some sort of absolution. He was gracious, and he looped in his colleague Lyn Redwood from Children’s Health Defense. When we spoke shortly thereafter, she slyly asked me what I planned to do to atone for my sins - how I would contribute to the movement. I had no answers at that time. I was still totally disoriented.

She adds:

The Secretary is ever gracious and forgiving - even yesterday, as he posted in support of this story.

Talento then turns to describe her journey since 2022:

The nationwide COVID vaccine mandate that had been announced in the Fall took effect in January (though, thankfully, was stymied in part by a number of lawsuits). Regardless, I would not comply. I never wore a mask again. No one in my family would get another vaccine. And I would never blindly trust a white coat (or many of the products they peddle) ever again. They’re not malicious (most of them anyway), but their education was just as flawed as mine…

Most importantly, I realized that no one from Washington and no white coat is coming to save my health or anyone else’s…

She adds:

It’s a strange thing to realize that my biggest failures weren’t the fights I lost - but the ones I didn’t start. And that, in some of the stories I’ve been telling myself about my career, I was the villain and not the hero.

I wonder how long it will be before we hear anything similar from someone prominent in public health in the UK. Or indeed from any of the church leaders who promoted the covid narrative and/or the covid vaccines:

But in any case I doubt that we’ll be hearing about confessions such as Katy Talento’s in the mainstream media anytime soon. Below are the search results I mentioned earlier.

From a Google search under the News tab:

Nothing since 2017…

From the same search on DuckDuckGo:

“No news articles…”2

In contrast, here is what I got from Brave under News:

Related:

And:

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This article — Sydney Anglicans Confront COVID Failures as Conscience Violations Finally Named — on Australia’s largest Christian news site The Daily Declaration has a summary:

It begins…

The Diocese [of Sydney] has produced Australia’s most honest church COVID review, with one dissenting committee member pressing further, calling for a “Truth and Reconciliation Day” and apologies to those coerced against their conscience.

The Sydney Anglican Diocese has become the first major Australian denomination to formally examine its COVID-19 response.

In a 35-page report, which presents a mixed assessment of the Diocese’s response, the diocese also published a pointed critique from one committee member who lamented the denomination’s emphasis on legal compliance over prophetic courage, and its poor treatment of conscience-bound parishioners…

…and goes on to explain that the report is structured in two parts:

• a joint committee report offering balanced reflections and practical recommendations

• a lengthy individual contribution from one committee member, the Rev Zac Veron of Bayside Anglican Church

The rest of the article from The Daily Declaration is well worth reading. But my aim in writing this post is to highlight some of the comments in the 35-page report, and particularly those of the Rev Zac Veron.

At least part of my motivation comes from these words from the book of Proverbs:

Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.

From the Key Points

From the third of the key points:

…individuals and families still grappling with health concerns, economic hardship, and emotional strain. Acknowledging this ongoing suffering is vital…

Leaving aside here the nature of “the Pandemic”, I am reminded that the “cost of living crisis” could perhaps more accurately be described as the “cost of lockdown crisis”. The knock-on economic effects of covid era policies will be felt for many years.

From the joint committee report

From the Background section

8. The Committee therefore wishes to acknowledge, on behalf of many in our churches, that the negative impact of the Pandemic was not limited to infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus but included psychological, relational, educational, financial, social, and spiritual burdens that were shared across the community and our churches, and experienced by some people and subsets of society more than others…

There follows a lengthy section detailing some of what happened in Australia during the covid era, some of which is referred to in the later comments from Rev Zac Veron.

From the Discussion section

93. …In an anxious situation, we are easily influenced by spin, sound bites and stirring anecdotes… one powerful outcome of this is that tribalism has increased and our ability to listen, consider and discuss has significantly decreased…

94. …This has caused unnecessary division, distrust and even hatred amongst believers, just as it has done in our community. However, as disciples of Jesus Christ… we are called to speak with each other in a manner which shows to whom we belong, and to examine ourselves…

96. …we should commit to the process of critical self-reflection and review after a crisis to examine our actions and responses and reflect on whether there are things to learn or do differently in the future.

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Then come the comments from the Rev Zac Veron.

From committee member Rev Zac Veron

151. I wish to express my appreciation for the opportunity to participate in this important review. Nevertheless, I note that the Committee’s ability to fully reflect on the Diocesan leadership’s response was significantly constrained by several obstacles.

152. Foremost among these was the inability to access any of the legal, medical, ethical, or theological advice that was relied upon by the Archbishop and the COVID-19 Taskforce…

154. …we encountered reluctance among some Diocesan leaders to engage openly with concerns, especially when those concerns came from members of the minority who objected to certain public health measures...

I am reminded of the many occasions throughout history when minority reports have proven to be correct:

As to transparency about the advice received by church leaders, I wonder what the situation was in the UK, particularly in relation to the advice to Archbishops and Bishops — but also their advice to local church leaders.

Concerns regarding balance in the Diocesan senior leadership’s response

155. The response of our senior leadership appeared driven by legal liability, risk minimisation, and a concern not to offend public health authorities. These are understandable instincts in some respects, but they must never override our responsibility to uphold truth, defend the powerless, and maintain fidelity to Christ’s call to shepherd his flock with courage…

156. In hindsight, the Diocesan response lacked balance... Those who tried to raise these concerns within Diocesan structures often found little sympathy or engagement.

Over the past few years, these words — from religious leaders to a person in the New Testament who was telling inconvenient truth that seemed hard to believe — have often sprung to mind:

Many of them said, ‘He is demon-possessed and raving mad. Why listen to him?’

157. This is not a call to attribute blame, but to seek wisdom. We must be better prepared in future crises to discern truth from propaganda, to prioritise theological integrity over compliance, and to provide pastoral care that honours both conscience and Christ…

In my experience, there alas seems little appetite for seeking wisdom in this context. I hope that the example of the Anglican Church in Sydney will inspire others.

Concerns regarding a loss of our practical religion…

158. The Archbishop served the Diocese well in acting as a signatory to a 1 September 2020 letter sent to the Prime Minister, which expressed ethical concerns regarding the vaccine developed by Oxford University. The Prime Minister was not deterred by the stated concerns… This raises the question whether traditional avenues of advocacy with government need to give way to more effective measures.

159. Acting against your conscience is always sinful... Sadly, not a few Anglicans were coerced by their spiritual leaders into taking a vaccine against their conscience!

This cartoon — “False Idol” by Bob Moran — captures so much:

160. A notable concern… there are credible reports, verified to the Synod, that many individuals were stood down from ministry roles, denied opportunities to serve, and in some cases publicly or privately shamed for not receiving an experimental and provisionally approved COVID-19 vaccine (which did not work as originally promoted). These individuals were not acting from malice or selfishness, but often from a biblically-informed conscience, medical caution, or ethical concern…

165. We must reflect seriously on how we treat those whose convictions place them at odds with prevailing norms. The gospel calls us not to uniformity, but to unity in Christ. We are to bear with one another in love, especially when decisions are shaped by conscience, wisdom, and fear of God, not fear of man.

167. …13 employees and church workers in diocesan organisations and churches were sacked, stood down or resigned over COVID-19 vaccine mandates during 2021-2022.

168. There was no evidence presented to the Committee that any of these people subsequently received an apology.

In relation to apologies, I am reminded of this conversation between two Australians: former senator Gerard Rennick and television presenter and journalist Karl Stefanovic:

And again of these words that I read recently in a (secular) book on management:1

Some people simply cannot admit to having done something wrong. When they move into management positions, they unfortunately gain the extra power and means to cover up for their mistakes…

169. Could this represent, in part, a loss of our practical religion? James 1:27 defines true religion as caring for the vulnerable and remaining unstained by the world, not as drawing lines of fellowship based on government compliance…

171. Looking ahead, our Diocese must reaffirm its commitment to uphold both the conscience and dignity of each believer, especially in times of crisis…

172. It is recommended that our churches must never again be places of segregation or silent judgement. Instead, we must recommit to being sanctuaries of grace, especially for those who have paid a high cost to walk faithfully with Christ.

173. The… at least 22 people who were stood down from their church-based ministries for resisting vaccine requirements should receive sincere apologies from those who stood them down…

Concerns regarding the Diocesan leadership’s understanding of the relationship between church and state

174. The relationship between Church and State has long been a subject of theological reflection within the Anglican tradition… It is the considered view of some within the Diocese that the senior leadership failed to give sufficient theological consideration to this issue…

175. The New Testament affirms government as instituted by God to restrain evil and promote good... However, this affirmation is not absolute. When rulers defy God’s moral order or infringe upon obedience to their Lord’s commands, Christian obedience to God must take precedence…

176. …The closing of church buildings, the silencing of congregational singing, the segregation of unvaccinated believers in some churches, and even the limiting of pastoral visitation in aged care facilities, were all done with little theological resistance. In some cases, the Diocese appeared to exceed even the government’s requirements…

179. Theologically, the lack of strong public objection emanating from our senior leadership was concerning. The suspension of Sunday services, intended to mitigate health risks, may have amplified a “gospel of fear” rather than the “gospel of hope”… The September 2021 Zoom meetings, focusing on legal liabilities rather than spiritual resilience, reflect this shift, with some of the bishops amplifying government messaging of fear over biblical encouragement. This contrasts with the early church’s boldness, meeting in homes under Roman persecution, or even modern examples like John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church (one church among many other similar examples in the USA), which defied California’s closures in 2020, facing fines but no arrests, and saw attendance grow…

180. …Fear of legal liability and reputational harm appeared to outweigh the imperative to offer a gospel of hope and courage amid fear.

181. …The suggestion (sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit) that Zoom services were a God-given equivalent to gathering in person revealed a troubling pragmatism…

182. The deeper concern, however, lies not only in what happened but in what it revealed. The Diocese’s pandemic response exposed a tendency to place government above Scripture in shaping ministry practice… the combined voice from much of the Diocesan bishops and clergy often echoed the anxieties of the state.

183. What would a different response have looked like?

184. First, it would have asserted the essential nature of public worship. Church gatherings are not optional; they are commanded... They are vital not only for spiritual nourishment but as a visible witness to a watching world. Closing church buildings should have been a last resort, not the first…

185. Second, it would have upheld the rights of conscience. Many Christians resisted mandates not out of rebellion, but because of deeply held conscientious beliefs. These believers were often silenced or marginalised, both by government and, tragically, by some in leadership positions. This was a failure of pastoral care and a betrayal of Christian liberty.

186. Third, it would have distinguished between loving one’s neighbour and obeying every health directive. The claim that taking a vaccine was a Christian duty to “love thy neighbour” bordered on being spiritual abuse at the time and has aged poorly… And yet, the rhetoric remains largely uncorrected by church leaders who initially endorsed it. This undermines the church’s credibility and damages trust.

I was particularly aghast at the way in which church leaders, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, were pushing the novel gene-based covid injections in the UK. My own church leaders refused to distance themselves from what seemed to me a plainly unethical and deplorable stance. It felt as if they were ignoring everything I had said and written on the matter.

Moreover, in a blogpost in October 2021, our vicar, who by his own admission has no expertise on vaccines and would I think say that statistics need to be handled carefully, praised God for the covid injections and described them as seemingly highly effective. And as far as I am aware, he has not made any public statement on the matter since.

187. …Church leaders should not be silent when governments enact unjust laws, segregate society, or use fear to coerce behaviour. The role of the Diocese is not to reinforce the prevailing fear-based narrative, but to offer a counter-narrative of hope… we must not punish or shun or bully our people who can read the signs of the times, and who try to warn others when rogue government and false religion conspire to persecute the faithful for political and financial gain.

188. The Anglican Reformers understood these tensions well. They did not advocate blind submission to civil rulers, but a robust engagement that held Scripture as the final authority. We must recover that tradition…

189. In conclusion, this is not about criticising past decisions for their own sake but about learning from them… good intentions are not enough. We must explore a biblical theology of resistance to unjust laws and lead courageously…

I find it refreshing to read those words.

Concerns regarding… not publicly challenging questionable public health orders from overreaching government officials and departments.

203. …Revelation 13, along with countless historical examples, reminds us that when the state overreaches, church leaders must not remain silent. Nor should church leaders ever again embrace a religious-like belief in a vaccine to save them from the plague, like a talisman, making them feel safe and secure, despite large numbers of vaccine injuries, disabilities and sudden death tragedies.

204. In conclusion, the lost opportunities during COVID-19 are not just regrettable — they are instructive. We must learn from them... Let us not outsource moral clarity to government but recover our prophetic voice.

Concerns regarding unintended negative consequences on church members flowing from actions and decisions taken by the Diocesan senior leadership

213. It is hoped that this reflection leads to repentance where appropriate, renewed pastoral sensitivity, and a commitment to uphold the unity of the [Church] especially during times of public crisis and political pressure. It is recommended that the pandemic Archbishops hold a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Day’ event in 2026 to hear the stories of Anglicans that felt abandoned by their spiritual leaders and churches, pray together, share any lessons learned, forgive and repent where appropriate, and agree to move forward together in a spirit of Christian unity.

“A ‘Truth and Reconciliation Day’ event… to hear the stories of Anglicans that felt abandoned by their spiritual leaders and churches…”

I wonder how long we will have to wait in the UK for anything similar…

Concerns regarding the lack of awareness or interest among the Diocesan leadership, in the “Excess Death Rate” Australia has suffered from, in all age groups…

214. One of the more sobering realities to emerge post-pandemic has been the significant rise in Australia’s excess mortality rate within the time period examined by the Committee (1 January 2020 - 20 September 2022)… The excess death rate was raised in the Senate on several occasions, yet within our Diocese, there has been an unsettling silence. No formal mention, no public prayer, and no pastoral lament has been offered for the thousands of additional lives lost.

I find that last sentence quite striking.

For context, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics can be found here.

This figure shows all-case Australian weekly deaths from 2019-2025…

…and this one shows cumulative excess deaths:

Here is another way of visualising Australian deaths from 2019-2025:

I am reminded of the situation in the UK, where, until the “covid measures” were introduced on March 23rd 2020, the number of people dying was at or below normal levels…

…despite covid having reportedly been circulating since the end of January.

And also of the questions raised in these posts:

In 2021, there were thousands more deaths among UK working age people than expected. And these people were at minimal risk from covid.

And yet, in contrast to 2020, when we had daily reports of “covid deaths”, the authorities and media are essentially silent. As are most church leaders.

215. The lack of engagement with this reality raises serious concerns about our theological attentiveness and pastoral sensitivity...

216. Moreover, there has been little to no formal acknowledgment within the Diocese of the growing number of Australians reporting injuries linked to the COVID-19 vaccines…

I am reminded of Australia’s Forest of the Fallen…

…and this poignant song:

There have also been similar displays in other parts of the world, including this one in London:

219. I urge that the members of the Diocese… demonstrate pastoral leadership by naming collective suffering and praying corporately for healing, justice, and truth. These are not merely political or medical matters, they are deeply spiritual concerns.

Amen to that!

Recommendations

In the final section of the report, the Committee recommends actions including:

That consideration be given to —

(e) Holding gatherings sharing experiences of the Pandemic and for thanksgiving, healing, and prayer (for bodies, minds, spirits, and relationships)

That parishes be encouraged to —

(k) Consider providing an opportunity for church members to share their experience of their church’s response to the Pandemic.

I wonder when we will actually see such gatherings happen…

Related

And this testimony from former Southampton and England footballer Matt Le Tissier:

Unexpected Turns homepage

The most-read articles can be found here

Ed Dowd is a former hedge fund manager. His success in his job relied on making accurate predictions based on shrewd observations and analysis.

On 3rd May 2020, around six weeks into the first covid lockdown, he put out the thread below on Twitter, when posts were limited to 280 characters. It is worth reading carefully:

Unlike many tweets and threads from the covid era, the above prophecy of sorts has aged well. But it requires no supernatural explanation. It is the result of someone making observations, thinking carefully and joining the dots.

I am inclined to think that things could have worked out rather worse than they actually did in the covid era. Consider e.g. these words from Keir Starmer, then Leader of the Opposition, speaking in January 2021: