Thread by @dgurdasani1

I recently did an interview where I was asked to give my opinion on recent changes in UK border policy as an expert. After I did this, the two hosts discussed me, suggesting that I was out of touch, & didn't understand that we need to 'accept' risk.
🧵 on 'accepting' risks.

My opinion was clearly out of vogue in the UK, despite being in line with scientific consensus, because the UK has it's own consensus- not based on science. And scientists can either fall in line with it, or be seen as 'alarmists', out of touch with media/public sentiment.

This is a key reason I don't do media anymore. I've realised that when I'm invited for interviews, it's not because people want my expert opinion. It's because they want a fall guy to present as fringe and extreme, to normalise the dystopia that we live in.

And it is dystopian - to say we should 'accept' 800 deaths a week, and NHS that's to overwhelmed to provide emergency care, an increasing burden of long COVID - with >1 million people and rising living with with. '

Accept that 1 in 14 of our adolescents are infected when they could've been vaccinated. Accept that children have died of COVID-19 when they could've been protected by vaccination like they have in other countries. Accept that >50,000 children are now living with long COVID.

Accept huge jumps in numbers of young people with long COVID as the ONS data shows now, because our govt and even our CMO was happy to promote a mass infection strategy in children, when vaccines and simple mitigations could've protected them.

https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1446537995054723080?s=20

Accept that our govt won't invest in ventilation in schools, when other European governments have spent millions on this to make schools safer-and have managed to open schools without the huge outbreaks and educational disruption we see here.
bbc.co.uk/news/world-eur…

Accept that JCVI still hasn't released the data behind it's exceptional decision to not offer vaccines to adolescents which is out of line with all evidence and led to delays that were fatal for some children & tragic for their families.

https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1444326113774383108?s=20

MSM is complicit in this normalisation of *preventable* death and suffering. Many other countries are preventing this without a huge cost to society. We have one of highest 'acceptable' case, hospitalisations and deaths rates across Europe. Why?

https://twitter.com/whij/status/1446711269935943681?s=20

And please don't tell me about our 'free society'. This isn't freedom. When our clinically vulnerable are pushed back into unsafe workplaces, where 1 in 70 people are infected and almost no one is wearing masks. Forcing children back into unsafe environments, knowing the risks?

Many scientists are complicit in this as well. COVID scepticism runs deep in the UK (in a way it doesn't in many other countries). Which means that mainstream science becomes fringe science here, because there are scientists who constantly compare SARS-CoV-2 to flu & minimise it.

What's happening in the UK scientific/paeds community should be a scandal. When a former member of JCVI (Dingwall) has links to a disinformation lobby group (HART), and is referred to as their person on the inside in #HARTlogs
bylinetimes.com/2021/10/01/ins…

When we have a current member of JCVI thanking UsForThem, an anti-vaxx group for their support- because both of them support parents waiting for 6 months to vaccinate their children. Which means almost certain infection and its consequences - rather than vaccination.

When we have Russell Viner, a member of SAGE and former president of the RCPCH quoting widely debunked estimates of vaccine associated myocarditis from the Hoeg paper using VAERS in an opinion piece in the Guardian unchallenged.

https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1437857599874031623?s=20

When the *current* head of RCPCH is advocating for an end to asymptomatic testing in children, presumably fully knowing that most transmission happens prior to symptoms. This is essentially no different from saying spread of infection among children does not matter.

When many in our scientific have normalised a strategy of mass infection in children. We are one of the very few countries in the world with no contact tracing or isolation, or even testing contacts in schools - a strategy that led to >200,000 children off ill with COVID last wk.

I'm tired of challenging this, given the hopium and copium that's it vast supply in the media and scientific community. Any challenge to the complete scandal that is the UK pandemic policy will be cast as 'alarmist', 'fear-mongering', or the inability to 'accept' risk.

My opinion might seem fringe here, but it's based on the global evidence. Scepticism runs deep within the scientific and paediatrics community in the UK - and has rationalised some of the most reckless, exceptonal policies - that are already having a huge impact on society.

A yr ago many of us wrote & signed the John Snow Memo, a global scientific consensus on SARS-CoV-2. To combat dangerous misinformation on 'herd immunity through infection'. Everything we said then is still true. But sadly fringe science has won here. And is no longer fringe here.