I was invited today to on @NickFerrariLBC to comment on the recent letter by 22 scientists on ending mask use in schools, and opening up the UK without masks & social distancing by June 21. I was *not* told that this would be a 'debate' with Anthony Brooks, one of the signatories
This is a letter that's been signed by Carl Heneghan, Sunetra Gupta, Karol Sikora - the architects of the pseudoscience & several debunked papers that led to the Great Barrington declaration - that caused untold damage to pandemic response across the world.
Both Heneghan and Gupta predicted there would be no 2nd wave. Gupta said early last year that 50% of the population was already immune, and we would reach 'herd immunity' soon. Both opposed pandemic control - & suggested we should let the virus spread through young people.
In September, they, in opposition to SAGE advice, advised Boris Johnson against lockdown even though cases were showing exponential rises. Ultimately, the govt was forced to lockdown in Nov. It's estimated that the delay cost tens of thousands of lives in the 2nd wave.
In the interview, Anthony Brooks started by suggested that cases and deaths in India are a small proportion of the total population, and the current devastation was due to 'poor health infrastructure' and not the proportion of cases, & that the UK could 'easily cope' with this.
We know this is completely incorrect. And hugely minimises what's happening in India at the moment. Cremations suggest deaths have been underestimated by between 4x-100x in different states, and cases by ~10x.
He went on to say that 'SAGE has claimed that the UK has attained herd immunity', and that the risk to young people of being infected was very low, and that SARS-CoV-2 was like the flu.
SAGE has never claimed the UK has attained herd immunity. They suggested that opening up rapidly even alongside vaccination could lead to hospitals and ICUs being full similar to the 2nd wave with tens of thousands of deaths - warning repeatedly that opening up must be cautious.
Very clearly 'herd immunity' hasn't been reached, also given the rapid 4-6 fold rise in infection among children we saw in Scotland when schools re-opened. And none of this addresses the fact that 1 in 5 young & healthy people get long COVID
We only have to look to what's happening in Chile, where vaccination rates are just behind the UK, and hospitals & ICUs have been overwhelmed exactly due to the sort of thinking supported by these scientists.
These scientists want to remove basic protections for children/staff in schools- when 43,000 estimated children & 110,000 staff are living with long COVID. Infections rose rapidly among children, increasing R when schools re-opened prior to Easter.
The situation is better now, only because Easter break was associated with a drop in infections among children, and a drop in R in the community. We see a clear relationship between school closure & positivity.
18% of our pop is fully vaccinated and 50% partially vaccinated.
Also no mention of the threat posed by variants- the B117 variant which is a result of our 'let the virus spread through the population' strategy is now causing devastation across Europe, and the US, after having claimed tens of thousands of lives in the UK following late action.
Many of us warned that allowing transmission to continue alongside vaccine roll-out will pose a threat to our vaccines, and pandemic control. Yet, we've done nothing to address this. We now have non-B117 variants at between 15-20% in London & South-East.
I really really hope much of this is travel and surge testing related, and not rises in the community - I don't know because the data aren't provided here. But in Maharashtra and W. Bengal, we saw B.1.617 become dominant while B.1.1.7 was prevalent (small nos of sequences though)
And data from the PHE on travellers shows the same- that B.1.617 became dominant among travellers from India alongside B.1.1.7. We don't know exactly what this means, but it is really concerning.
Despite all this, we're still platforming pseudoscience, and listening to scientists whose damaging pseudoscience has directly informed policies that have led to thousands of deaths. We can't do this again- 15 months into the pandemic- we must resist this.
The media & the govt has provided disproportionate attention to these fringe voices right from the start- and has not held them to account despite so many claims having been debunked. Disinformation costs lives. This needs to stop now.
I don't normally debate scientists who push fringe pseudoscientific views because I think this legitimises them and gives false balance to discussions. I would have never agreed to 'debate' Anthony Brooks had I known this was what was planned. Why is @LBC platforming this?
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The idea that people are chronically ill or disabled because they don't want to get better or aren't trying to get better is borne out of nothing but abelism. It's easier to think it's the patient's fault rather than acknowledge you don't know how to help patients. 🧵
There isn't a shred of evidence to support this view, yet it gets constantly doled out by medics to patients who are struggling & would do anything to get better. The impact is further gaslighting a patient population that has been offered very little for decades.
The lack of curiosity about patients' illness means that no one delves further to try and understand it, because it's so much easier to just throw up your hands, and blame them for being ill. As if anyone would want to live with debilitating chronic illness if they had a choice.
Rather concerning that only 5% of dairy farmworkers *exposed to ill cows after H5N1 detection* wore CDC recommended PPE. H5N1 (avian influenza) is highly pathogenic, and this is really worrying, given the large numbers of spillover events that have been observed in humans lately
H5N1 has been adapting to mammals, with the recent circulating strain in dairy adapted specifically to binding to cells in the human respiratory tract. Mammal to mammal transmission has been suspected in specific outbreaks (e.g. mink in Spain), but not shown clearly in others.
Thankfully, efficient human to human transmission hasn't been observed yet, but if it's given a chance to spread across mammals in farms, with multiple spill overs into humans, it's only a matter of time.
The hubris of blaming those whose families & communities have been slaughtered by your leaders for not voting for those same leaders - because now *you* feel unsafe - while sitting in your intact homes that are not being razed to the ground, with your children alive and safe.
Implicit in this cry of American liberals is the devaluation of brown and Muslim lives. If it were their relatives murdered by their government, against their screams and protests, it's unlikely they would've voted for them. But white lives and safety always matter more.
A genocide becomes 'a single issue'. If it were a genocide of white Americans, I can guarantee it wouldn't be a 'single issue'. You can just see this by all the tweets about how Americans now feel unsafe.
If you've lived this long and have not had to realise that - *everything*- where you live, what you read, the streets you walk, what you eat, what you feel, where you work, the climate you live in, and even the air you breathe is political, I have news for you: that's privilege.
I automatically find myself looking at how people parse the world, and whether they fit into the former or the latter.
People who understand the systemically unjust & violent nature of the world, and how literally everything is shaped by capitalism, imperialism, colonialism are the people who understand the need for change, and the radical means necessary to enact this.
COVID has disproportionately affected disabled, clinically vulnerable, deprived & black/brown/indigenous communities. To say that that airborne precautions worsen inequity is BS. Rather, these protect *everyone*. If you care about equity, set air Q standards, provide respirators.
The WHO has done so much harm in this regard, & still continues to, because they simply cannot seem to acknowledge that they were wrong, and that very likely caused harm - which led to loss of life, and to chronic illness in many. We need accountability & learning here. Not lies.
If @WHO wants to restore any trust, they must acknowledge mistakes that have caused untold harm, and seek to show learning and change. None of this is happening when they say BS like this, and parade people like Farrar with more lies and BS to try to justify the unjustifiable.
I remember all those who told us that RAT sensitivity was near 100% to detect 'infectiousness' - this study reports 47% compared with RT-PCR and 80% compared with viral culture. The lowest sensitivity is for those who are asymptomatic, and also during the pre-symptomatic phase.🧵
Sensitivity of RATs tends to rise when symptoms begin, but there is infectiousness before this that may not be picked up. Apart from the obvious impacts on transmission, this also has v. important impacts on treatment for people who are clinically vulnerable.
For many people who are clinically vulnerable, the primary consideration is getting treatment to them on time. Given the low sensitivity of RATs against PCR, especially in the early periods of infection, treatment may be significantly delayed by reliance on RATs over PCR.