This is beyond embarrassing

Idiotic & blatant gaslighting

There is nothing “normal” about being sick so much

Your immune system doesn’t need a “work out”

If we have “high population immunity” to Covid why are so many million sick with it right now?

Pathetic @BBCNews
Gaslighting in the article
- we are all “immune” to Covid (why are so many infected then?)
- it’s “normal” for so many people to be sick in Autumn (it’s not)
- it’s “good” to get sick & build up
your “immunity” (of course its not, flu & Covid change too rapidly for immunity)

Lateral Flows

If it’s +ve you have Covid

If it’s -ve you might still have Covid as it’s got a high false negative rate & for many it may not turn +ve until days into an infection

So why test?
Because a positive confirms a Covid infection
A negative is less useful obviously 🧵 This is described as low test sensitivity (so it may not always turn positive straight away when infected), but a reasonable test specificity (you don’t get many false positives, ie if it’s positive then it’s Covid).

If you did 3 tests and got 1 +ve and 2 -ve you have Covid

“In the current era of high population immunity to COVID-19, additional COVID-19 doses provide very limited, if any, protection against infection and any subsequent onward transmission of infection.”
@DHSCgovuk June 2025

WHO is in charge??? Because this is completely wrong “In line with JCVI advice, frontline health & social care workers (HSCWs) & staff working in care homes for older adults will not be eligible for COVID-19 vaccination under the national programme for autumn 2025” @DHSCgovuk
@theRCN @TheBMA
what are you going to do about this?

It’s 2025 so you all know
- Covid is airborne
- It lingers in the air for hours & that means you will breath in the virus after the infectious person has gone
- 1 way masking isn’t as good as 2way masking
- opening a window helps but doesn’t just fix it
- you can get it outdoors - if you are sharing the air with an infectious person you are at risk, this includes within households & outdoors (airborne, not roomborne)
- duration of exposure generally matters
- mitigations are all layers that will help, some more so, no single one is the entire answer

The “reality” now may be that people are trying to live life as if Covid doesn’t exist or is of no real significance
BUT the problem is that isn’t reality. Covid does exist & it’s still killing & disabling people in large numbers.
This is a crucial point 🧵 The “reality” of society adopting mass denial does nothing to mitigate the continued impacts of Covid infections.
Just because people do something, it doesn’t mean it’s right. Very often what people do is the easiest thing & it’s often wrong…

Most doctors I know don’t realise the UK government stopped counting & reporting Covid deaths ages ago (zero community data), that they’ve never recorded long Covid numbers & they’ve no idea of the impact of reduced testing ie confirmation bias that numbers must be lower now… They also have no idea what excess deaths are, the fact they’ve been high throughout the whole pandemic so far, or how ONS have shifted their baseline for this year so excess deaths now include the Covid associated deaths, again offering confirmation bias that everything is ok

"During draft guidance consultation, consultees highlighted the treatment gap for children. At the second evaluation committee meeting one clinical expert explained that COVID‑19 rarely makes children unwell" NICE Covid Guidance 2025

How can an “expert” say this??? Study; Children’s cardiac risks from Covid💔

‘children & adolescents are at statistically SIGNIFICANT increased risk of hypertension, ventricular arrhythmias, myocarditis, heart failure, cardiomyopathy, cardiac arrest, clots, chest pain, & palpitations’

medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

Study shows “mild” Covid infection causes PERSISTENT brain damage;

“These findings indicate that even mild COVID-19 can result in persistent neurocognitive deficits, structural brain alterations, & functional network abnormalities, both in individuals with & without brain fog” Brain fog isn’t benign. It’s brain damage.
The study shows even a so called “mild” Covid infection causes reduction in brain size (with damage to multiple areas of your brain as a result).
The study: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

@erbrooker Solo masker among doctors in my hospital. It’s a lonely place to be. I’ve been questioned by consultant colleagues fairly regularly on why I’m masking, even though we’ve all been dealing with waves of Covid infections for years now & even though they’ve all had Covid. Why…🧵 @erbrooker Lots of reasons but they boil down to these themes;
1. Doctors are people & most people here are in deep denial as a coping strategy to deal with a pandemic they wish wasn’t happening, so they pretend it isn’t at home & at work
2. Survivorship bias - they haven’t died from it….

How do I know we are still in a pandemic with excess mortality, sudden “unexpected” deaths, chronic illness mounting as people keep getting infected over & over?

Is it the figures, the patients I see, the mountains of peer reviewed journals? Yes but you don’t believe that, so… For you it’s the hidden things that in any other world wouldn’t make sense.

Like mainstream shows telling you to prepare a file for your family in case you suddenly die & Martin Lewis telling you all to get power of attorney before you are too sick to manage your own affairs…

The world is slowly marching towards war, America is closing its doors, authoritarian leaders are gaining followers, empathy is dying, impulse control is waning & we are in the 6th year of a new virus proven to lower cognition & cause brain damage.
These outcomes are inevitable. Empathy, impulse control, filtering & suppression of violence, memory, executive functioning, general intelligence & cognitive ability are all damaged by Covid infections. Infections that people are getting globally, recurrently, while pretending that they are never sick.

The following statement from the JCVI has been copied & pasted into NHS communications this week to "reassure" all staff that we are post covid, that everyone is immune & that its "mild" & death rates & hospitalisations are all low.
I've attached evidence to show this is false.🧵 "Over the last 4 years, population immunity to SARS-CoV-2 has been increasing due to a combination of naturally acquired immunity following recovery from infection and vaccine-derived immunity (this combination is termed ‘hybrid immunity’)"

here's our immune population 2024...

This "State of the Art Review" on the role of masks & respirators in preventing respiratory infection coming out in the BMJ is worth a deep dive. So I've done that for you.
Some important messages in the 🧵 feel free to share them. 1. Keep it on & it works 😷:
“continuous & targeted use of respirators found that respirators were considerably more effective than masks if worn continuously…Intermittent use of respirators or medical masks only when performing high risk procedures was not protective"

It’s only a matter of time until Covid is shown to cause cancer & more rapid cancer growth. Renal, pancreatic, ovarian, melanoma, lung, I’ve seen growth rates & first presentations the like of which I’ve never encountered before. Covid is proven to dampen a tumour suppressor gene But, much like the news that Covid causes increased heart attack, stroke & sudden death risk for at least 3 years after an infection, most people will ignore any news about cancer risk & just keep on pretending like Covid doesn’t exist. Although that’s easier, Covid won’t care.

Covid can give you chronic illness known commonly as Long Covid or Post Acute Covid Syndrome(PACS) with any organ being damaged

It has no cure & no available or accepted treatment

Your chance of recovery is less than 2% over the first 3 years

Recovery isn’t even fully ‘ok’
🧵 You can get Long Covid/ Post-Covid Syndrome after your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th infections. Every time you are infected you run the risk of post Covid Syndrome with a variety of potential life changing complications, none of which have a cure

The most terrible loneliness is not the kind that comes from being alone, but the kind that comes from being misunderstood.
It is the loneliness of standing in a crowded room surrounded by people who do not see you, do not hear you, who do not know the true essence of who you are And in that loneliness, you feel as though you are fading, disappearing into the background, until you are nothing more than a ghost, a shadow of your former self.
George Orwell, 1984

Lone maskers, especially in healthcare settings, may relate to that sense of isolation. Yet…

Dear anyone with cancer,
If you get Covid you might die.
You might die immediately with the acute infection.
You might die after the acute event with blood clots (increased risk already with cancer + Covid).
You might die because your chemo/immunotherapy has been delayed so much. You might die after a prolonged admission with infection & other resultant organ damage.
You might die because your surgery gets postponed because of your Covid.
You might die because you never get back on treatment as you are so unwell post acute Covid.

Wear a mask. Keep safe.

I was on a ward full of immunocompromised patients today with active Covid cases & I was the only one wearing a mask (that includes patients & visitors).

I have reached a point of quiet resignation. I’ve tried & tried to help the patients & the staff but they don’t want help
🧵 Numbers of Covid patients are climbing. Again. Entirely predictable as Christmas parties pick up pace & people gather more in packed crowds, with few vaccinated & absolutely no masks or adequate air filtration. But also predictable on the wards, with no masks or staff testing…

I’ll never forget the family who shouted at us for a whole week & abused all the ward staff because their relative wasn’t dying “quick enough” for them, because they had a holiday booked. The relative was sleeping peacefully with fully controlled symptoms the whole week. I’ll never forget the patient with the bowel obstruction from cancer, who I stopped them from faecal vomiting & controlled their pain & nausea so they could get home again & spend time with their children, so wildly different to the horror stories circulating on here.

🧵Do you fully understand:
- how people usually die
- who can decide on treatments for dying people
- who decides CPR
- how to assess capacity
- power of attorney
- ceiling of treatment decision making
- anticipatory prescribing
- pharmacology & safe use of opioids (eg morphine) - how to estimate a prognosis
- the uncertainty inherent in prognosis & end of life estimates
- common end of life symptoms
- ways to manage these symptoms effectively
- how syringe pumps work & what goes in them
- the pharmacology & safe use of antiemetics or benzodiazepines

Somethings been bugging me. It’s one thing being the lone masker in a hospital, but it’s the hidden layer within my own team that stings most. We have team meetings all the time, they all know why I mask, yet none of them ever do. A constant reminder that they don’t care… They don’t care enough about themselves or their families, they don’t care about their immensely vulnerable patients, they don’t care about me, not enough to slip on a mask at work anymore. Too inconvenient.
Yet they’ll all insist I go to the staff function. That they care about.