UK Govt Coronavirus Response: Sceptics Thread

9.3k · December 27, 2023

JC-noticeable rise in cardiac deaths amongst younger demogrpahics

also that Daily Telegraph was warned off reporting on Vaxx injuries in 2021 by MHRA and threatened with being banned from briefings if it didnt push official narrative.at 4 misn 25 JC states 865 of MHRA funding is by the industry

from 7-28

at 10 mins

2.7k · December 27, 2023

On 18/12/2023 at 02:32, tlc said:

I rejected it long before anyone was vaxxed with the poison.

mRNA animal experiments=death

Thanks Dolores

They've done this before and hit reverse gear 1974? Swine flu, 2009 h1n1? Was mine.

And the CT scans of ground glass wool over the front pages that if you put in pneumonia into image search you get the same / similar looking CT scans which then changed to covid causes pneumonia.

Although this was Jan, Feb 2020 and could be part of the learning process of what it was when more information came to light but it luckily worked out alright like Poly and HBR and Argo Blockchain and..

2.6k · December 28, 2023

TMobile Provides Government Access To Your Texts | Armstrong Economics

1.7k · December 29, 2023

On 28/12/2023 at 05:50, Onsamui said:

TMobile Provides Government Access To Your Texts | Armstrong Economics

wow. you'd have to be conpletely nuts to sign up to that.

in addition to general violation of vague restrictions on things said categorused ad sex hste alcohol etc, you could do something perfectly legal in the state of sender and recipient but get "fine" .... oh do fuck off its clearly a bill and will be enforceable only via contract law in courts .... of x000 if its illegal in any other state.

three questions ...

is oral sex still illegal in some states?

is it still legal to campaign for the maga king in states where courts have made it illegal to nominate him?

how do i short t mobile?

Edited December 29, 2023 by BWW
too many zeros

9.3k · January 4

Dr Clare Craig admits making masks....she examins why and debunks the whole masks myth.

'it's a total nonsense,that not how it spreads.The virus is in the aerosols not in the big globlets of saliva'.......

Edited January 4 by sancho panza

9.3k · January 13

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/01/12/deaths-in-2023-were-20-above-the-expected-level-why-are-so-many-people-dying/

Deaths in 2023 Were 20% Above the Expected Level. Why Are So Many People Dying?

As new mortality data come in, it’s increasingly clear that something abnormal happened in the spring of 2021 when it comes to people dying of causes other than flu, Covid and other respiratory diseases.

I have updated the non-respiratory data to the end of 2023, so there are now four years of Covid-era data included in it. The progression can however be traced back all the way to 2010, as shown below (the red line is the running 52-week average), and the sharp rise from early 2021 is now clear as day. Whatever is behind this has caused a rising trend in non-respiratory mortality (NRM) that has now stabilised, but at a much higher level than before the whole Covid imbroglio began. In fact, 2023 showed the worst total non-respiratory mortality figures than in any of the three preceding years, at 9.5% above the pre-Covid 2015-2019 average. In recognition of this sorry reality, the ONS this week said that life expectancy has gone backwards by 12 years to 2010 levels.

Take a look at the chart below, which shows the NRM pattern during the period 2015-2019 as well as the corollary for respiratory disease mortality (RD). Averages for each week are shown. The deaths from respiratory illness are by definition from acute disease, at least those that were properly registered as ‘died from’ rather than ‘died with’. The two lines match very closely in shape at least, the only real difference being the total numbers involved in each case (note the different range for respiratory disease on the secondary Y axis on the right hand side).

Non-respiratory mortality (NRM) and respiratory disease mortality (RD) average 2015-2019

To emphasise this similarity further we can compare the ratio of non-respiratory mortality to respiratory disease mortality for each year from 2010 to 2019. They run like this:

2010 6.33
2011 6.16
2012 6.08
2013 5.82
2014 6.58
2015 5.98
2016 6.28
2017 6.26
2018 6.07
2019 6.36

Average for the whole period is 6.18.

The maximum variation in each year from the average proportion of NRM deaths to total deaths (average of 86.1%) is only 0.75% (up or down). This all goes to show that there is a strong consistency to the overall yearly figures, despite the large variation in weekly death numbers for both non-respiratory mortality and respiratory mortality over the course of each year.

NRM is clearly highly seasonal, so even though the bulk of these deaths arise from chronic morbidity, whatever it is that tips an individual over the edge to his or her demise varies over the course of the year.

My working assumption is that whatever factors drive normal seasonal variation in acute respiratory disease mortality are also responsible for a similar variation in the proportion of people dying from chronic disease during any given week of the year. The importance of studying seasonal variation as the main driver of disease variability was emphasised in a recent paper in the peer-reviewed Journal of Clinical Medicine, which strikingly found no noticeable effect on Covid incidence patterns from vaccines and non-pharmaceutical interventions but a clear link with the seasonality of coronaviruses.

The most likely common factor to search for is whatever causes a variation in the vulnerability of people to any form of external shock, e.g. a reduction in their immune defences. In the normal course of events this may for example be something climate related (e.g. cold weather) or perhaps depends on some other natural variables like sunlight intensity.

Could a man-made event that may have had a large influence on the immune status of large sectors of the population have changed the overall picture in a very different way? It may be a worthwhile exercise to look for such a signal in the mortality figures.

Turning to the Covid years, the chart below shows the excess mortality for both NRM and RD for the period 2020-2023, as well as the number of vaccine doses administered. Here we can see that the usual mortality patterns are at first completely disrupted, and this is consistent with the argument that a new pathogen which had never been encountered before had arrived and consequently had an outsize influence on acute mortality. However, by 2023 we can see that the ratio between NRM and RD has once again settled back to normal:

2020 3.27
2021 3.88
2022 5.86
2023 6.16

Average for the whole period is 4.49.

Already with this chart it is possible to see that, by comparing the different way the NRM and RD excess mortality responded to the initial Covid waves, the component of non-respiratory mortality derived from the after-effects of Covid itself (i.e., Long Covid) is probably relatively small. This is because NRM excess (blue line) was falling significantly – as expected due to mortality displacement – after the initial spike of deaths in the spring of 2020, even while the second RD spike (red line) was in full flood. This suggests that the after-effects of the first wave did not markedly increase non-respiratory mortality during the rest of the year.

This is not the case with regard to the vaccination campaigns. To illustrate this one can look at the percentage changes from the 2015-2019 pre-Covid baseline for both non-respiratory and respiratory excess deaths (see charts below). NRM excess percentage (bottom chart, red line, right-hand axis) has been increasing year-on-year since the vaccine campaigns, whereas RD excess percentage (top chart, green line, right-hand axis) has been diminishing. The respiratory disease mortality has been falling despite the number of vaccine doses also falling each year. Note the different values on the secondary Y axis (right hand side) in each chart.

Vaccines delivered:

2020 75 million (doses one and two)
2021 40 million (dose three)
2022 25 million (doses four and five)
2023 17 million (doses six and seven)

Respiratory disease excess over 2015-2019 baseline (RD):

2020 91.3%
2021 62.6%
2022 13.9%
2023 9.9%

Non-respiratory mortality excess over 2015-2019 baseline (NRM):

2020 1.0%
2021 2.0%
2022 7.9%
2023 9.5%

The fall in respiratory mortality can perhaps best be explained by the attenuation expected from a gradual increase in population immunity to the new pathogen, and also by a declining virulence of the pathogen itself (e.g. the less deadly Omicron variant). But how does one explain the non-respiratory mortality changes, other than through a general long-term decline of the overall health of a population?

Unfortunately, it is still not possible to state with any certainty which component of the public health measures employed (vaccines or NPIs) can give the most plausible explanation for the bulk of the non-respiratory excess death phenomenon (assuming, as noted above, that the contribution from the virus by itself is relatively small). Many who have commented on these developments believe that the vaccination campaigns primarily caused the uptick. This can only be confirmed once the authorities release full mortality data including the vaccination status of all individuals at the time of their death.

The recent whistleblower data release in New Zealand provided in my view the strongest evidence to date of a temporal association between vaccination status and increased excess mortality. It is now all but impossible for the authorities to deny the link. If they want the public to feel safe about Covid vaccinations again, it is now up to them to disprove that vaccinations were causative in the excess mortality experienced over the last three years.

The key insight to be gleaned from separating overall mortality data into the two components of respiratory and non-respiratory disease is in recognising that both are subject to the same seasonal variability in population health vulnerabilities. They are coupled together such that as one rises, the other falls. This is presumably because they depend on the same pool of vulnerable people who are at risk of dying at any particular time.

Covid was a novel pathogen that in 2020 disproportionately increased respiratory mortality and thus, due to their synergy, pushed non-respiratory mortality downwards (part of the mortality displacement effect). Something then happened in 2021 that increased the size of the pool of vulnerable people over the following two years. The normal relationship between the two mortality types has re-established itself in 2023 (e.g. the proportion between them was restored), but at a level around 10% above pre-Covid mortality.

Total excess deaths for the four years (compared to 2015-2019) have now reached around 225,000, which should under normal circumstances lead to a fall of around 9% (i.e., 20,000) in annual deaths in subsequent years due to mortality displacement as deaths of the old and vulnerable are brought forward by some unusual event. Instead, what we see is excess mortality in 2023 reaching a new peak of 10.6% with currently no signs of slowing up. Once you take into account that instead of 9% fewer deaths we have 10.6% more, this adds up to a huge nearly 20% rise above expected levels. Welcome to the new normal.

9.3k · January 13

All cause mortality is one of the few data points that can't really be argued.

2.9k · January 13

31 minutes ago, sancho panza said:

All cause mortality is one of the few data points that can't really be argued.

They should do it per capita - that are probably 2 million more residents in 2023 compared to 2018

19.9k · January 13

3 hours ago, sancho panza said:

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/01/12/deaths-in-2023-were-20-above-the-expected-level-why-are-so-many-people-dying/

Deaths in 2023 Were 20% Above the Expected Level. Why Are So Many People Dying?

As new mortality data come in, it’s increasingly clear that something abnormal happened in the spring of 2021 when it comes to people dying of causes other than flu, Covid and other respiratory diseases.

I have updated the non-respiratory data to the end of 2023, so there are now four years of Covid-era data included in it. The progression can however be traced back all the way to 2010, as shown below (the red line is the running 52-week average), and the sharp rise from early 2021 is now clear as day. Whatever is behind this has caused a rising trend in non-respiratory mortality (NRM) that has now stabilised, but at a much higher level than before the whole Covid imbroglio began. In fact, 2023 showed the worst total non-respiratory mortality figures than in any of the three preceding years, at 9.5% above the pre-Covid 2015-2019 average. In recognition of this sorry reality, the ONS this week said that life expectancy has gone backwards by 12 years to 2010 levels.

Take a look at the chart below, which shows the NRM pattern during the period 2015-2019 as well as the corollary for respiratory disease mortality (RD). Averages for each week are shown. The deaths from respiratory illness are by definition from acute disease, at least those that were properly registered as ‘died from’ rather than ‘died with’. The two lines match very closely in shape at least, the only real difference being the total numbers involved in each case (note the different range for respiratory disease on the secondary Y axis on the right hand side).

Non-respiratory mortality (NRM) and respiratory disease mortality (RD) average 2015-2019

To emphasise this similarity further we can compare the ratio of non-respiratory mortality to respiratory disease mortality for each year from 2010 to 2019. They run like this:

2010   6.33

2011   6.16

2012   6.08

2013   5.82

2014   6.58

2015   5.98

2016   6.28

2017   6.26

2018   6.07

2019   6.36

Average for the whole period is 6.18.

The maximum variation in each year from the average proportion of NRM deaths to total deaths (average of 86.1%) is only 0.75% (up or down). This all goes to show that there is a strong consistency to the overall yearly figures, despite the large variation in weekly death numbers for both non-respiratory mortality and respiratory mortality over the course of each year.

NRM is clearly highly seasonal, so even though the bulk of these deaths arise from chronic morbidity, whatever it is that tips an individual over the edge to his or her demise varies over the course of the year.

My working assumption is that whatever factors drive normal seasonal variation in acute respiratory disease mortality are also responsible for a similar variation in the proportion of people dying from chronic disease during any given week of the year. The importance of studying seasonal variation as the main driver of disease variability was emphasised in a recent paper in the peer-reviewed Journal of Clinical Medicine, which strikingly found no noticeable effect on Covid incidence patterns from vaccines and non-pharmaceutical interventions but a clear link with the seasonality of coronaviruses.

The most likely common factor to search for is whatever causes a variation in the vulnerability of people to any form of external shock, e.g. a reduction in their immune defences. In the normal course of events this may for example be something climate related (e.g. cold weather) or perhaps depends on some other natural variables like sunlight intensity.

Could a man-made event that may have had a large influence on the immune status of large sectors of the population have changed the overall picture in a very different way? It may be a worthwhile exercise to look for such a signal in the mortality figures.

Turning to the Covid years, the chart below shows the excess mortality for both NRM and RD for the period 2020-2023, as well as the number of vaccine doses administered. Here we can see that the usual mortality patterns are at first completely disrupted, and this is consistent with the argument that a new pathogen which had never been encountered before had arrived and consequently had an outsize influence on acute mortality. However, by 2023 we can see that the ratio between NRM and RD has once again settled back to normal:

2020   3.27

2021   3.88

2022   5.86

2023   6.16

Average for the whole period is 4.49.

Already with this chart it is possible to see that, by comparing the different way the NRM and RD excess mortality responded to the initial Covid waves, the component of non-respiratory mortality derived from the after-effects of Covid itself (i.e., Long Covid) is probably relatively small. This is because NRM excess (blue line) was falling significantly – as expected due to mortality displacement – after the initial spike of deaths in the spring of 2020, even while the second RD spike (red line) was in full flood. This suggests that the after-effects of the first wave did not markedly increase non-respiratory mortality during the rest of the year.

This is not the case with regard to the vaccination campaigns. To illustrate this one can look at the percentage changes from the 2015-2019 pre-Covid baseline for both non-respiratory and respiratory excess deaths (see charts below). NRM excess percentage (bottom chart, red line, right-hand axis) has been increasing year-on-year since the vaccine campaigns, whereas RD excess percentage (top chart, green line, right-hand axis) has been diminishing. The respiratory disease mortality has been falling despite the number of vaccine doses also falling each year. Note the different values on the secondary Y axis (right hand side) in each chart.

Vaccines delivered:

2020 75 million (doses one and two)

2021 40 million (dose three)

2022 25 million (doses four and five)

2023 17 million (doses six and seven)

Respiratory disease excess over 2015-2019 baseline (RD):

2020 91.3%

2021 62.6%

2022 13.9%

2023 9.9%

Non-respiratory mortality excess over 2015-2019 baseline (NRM):

2020 1.0%

2021 2.0%

2022 7.9%

2023 9.5%

The fall in respiratory mortality can perhaps best be explained by the attenuation expected from a gradual increase in population immunity to the new pathogen, and also by a declining virulence of the pathogen itself (e.g. the less deadly Omicron variant). But how does one explain the non-respiratory mortality changes, other than through a general long-term decline of the overall health of a population?

Unfortunately, it is still not possible to state with any certainty which component of the public health measures employed (vaccines or NPIs) can give the most plausible explanation for the bulk of the non-respiratory excess death phenomenon (assuming, as noted above, that the contribution from the virus by itself is relatively small). Many who have commented on these developments believe that the vaccination campaigns primarily caused the uptick. This can only be confirmed once the authorities release full mortality data including the vaccination status of all individuals at the time of their death.

The recent whistleblower data release in New Zealand provided in my view the strongest evidence to date of a temporal association between vaccination status and increased excess mortality. It is now all but impossible for the authorities to deny the link. If they want the public to feel safe about Covid vaccinations again, it is now up to them to disprove that vaccinations were causative in the excess mortality experienced over the last three years.

The key insight to be gleaned from separating overall mortality data into the two components of respiratory and non-respiratory disease is in recognising that both are subject to the same seasonal variability in population health vulnerabilities. They are coupled together such that as one rises, the other falls. This is presumably because they depend on the same pool of vulnerable people who are at risk of dying at any particular time.

Covid was a novel pathogen that in 2020 disproportionately increased respiratory mortality and thus, due to their synergy, pushed non-respiratory mortality downwards (part of the mortality displacement effect). Something then happened in 2021 that increased the size of the pool of vulnerable people over the following two years. The normal relationship between the two mortality types has re-established itself in 2023 (e.g. the proportion between them was restored), but at a level around 10% above pre-Covid mortality.

Total excess deaths for the four years (compared to 2015-2019) have now reached around 225,000, which should under normal circumstances lead to a fall of around 9% (i.e., 20,000) in annual deaths in subsequent years due to mortality displacement as deaths of the old and vulnerable are brought forward by some unusual event. Instead, what we see is excess mortality in 2023 reaching a new peak of 10.6% with currently no signs of slowing up. Once you take into account that instead of 9% fewer deaths we have 10.6% more, this adds up to a huge nearly 20% rise above expected levels. Welcome to the new normal.

3 hours ago, sancho panza said:

All cause mortality is one of the few data points that can't really be argued.

2 hours ago, reformed nice guy said:

They should do it per capita - that are probably 2 million more residents in 2023 compared to 2018

Agreed @reformed nice guy

Plus we've got an aging population. Fewer than 1% of the population dying per year is not sustainable unless we're all living to 100y/o.

I've debunked this excess deaths statistical tomfoolery numerous times in the Covid section.

20.7k · January 13

1 hour ago, Stuey said:

Agreed @reformed nice guy

Plus we've got an aging population. Fewer than 1% of the population dying per year is not sustainable unless we're all living to 100y/o.

I've debunked this excess deaths statistical tomfoolery numerous times in the Covid section.

File under 'bollocks claims of huge size' please, Bob.

19.9k · January 13

2 hours ago, wherebee said:

File under 'bollocks claims of huge size' please, Bob.

What's your expectation of average number of deaths per year, as a percentage?

Surely it's = 100/Life expectancy

1.9k · January 13

56 minutes ago, Stuey said:

What's your expectation of average number of deaths per year, as a percentage?

Surely it's = 100/Life expectancy

No, only in a stable population structure. If there has been immigration of preponderantly young people, or if there has been population growth through birth, the mortality rate will be a lot lower than one over life expectancy.

The ons has age standardised total mortality per 100000, which I haven't looked at recently. This is very sensitive to deaths in older people (in fact it will be completely dominated by this, unless they segment it by age (which they don't)). That makes the statistic very good for showing that the disease was not very serious (given it predominantly affects the elderly). I need to have a look at the more recent data, which should tell us (for the elderly) if something else has been killing them, lately.

2.7k · January 14

On 13/01/2024 at 07:39, Stuey said:

What's your expectation of average number of deaths per year, as a percentage?

Surely it's = 100/Life expectancy

So I herd u liek spreadsheets!

For each age, multiply the cells in columns F ("male") and G ("female") in "Population Estimates Table" in this:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/datasets/analysisofpopulationestimatestoolforuk

by the corresponding cells in columns C ("qx", male) and J ("qx", female) in "2020-2022" in this:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/datasets/nationallifetablesunitedkingdomreferencetables

("qx" is the probability of a person of a given age dying before their next birthday, which is a disturbing figure to look up for yourself and/or anyone you might care about)

Take the total, and divide by the total population in the first file to give you a figure.

I can't be fucked to do this for you, you're the one earning ~~£130k~~ ~~£160k~~ more than me

Edited January 14 by apples

9.3k · January 14

On 13/01/2024 at 01:10, reformed nice guy said:

They should do it per capita - that are probably 2 million more residents in 2023 compared to 2018

Thats part of the point of excess deaths,pre coof peak was 541k,post coof average 580k.

take home is that all cause mortlaity is really really high on an age adjsuted basis

bulk of popn growth is migration,ergo,it's working age mainly,therefore with ave age of death still around 80,this isnt migrants dying

popn of UK up 10%ish since 2000,all cause mrotality up by that in last four years.

ppopn england and wales up from 59mn in 2018 to 60mn now so up 2% or so.stark figures these.

jsut goes to shwo what a cluster f**k the lockdowns were and are.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/datasets/estimatesofthepopulationforenglandandwales

Edited January 14 by sancho panza

9.3k · January 14

As if by magic,Campbell interviewing Dr clare craig on the harms of lockdowns.

only 10 minutes.couldnt agree more.Utter waste of time in terms of preventing covid and aboslutely devastating in terms of isolation,mental health and the onleiness of dying alone.

9.3k · January 17

Tory MP whos a Paediatrician discusses child excess deaths up 8%,asks how govt is investigating it especially in light of increased suicides and asks whetehr vaccines/lockdowns worked.

Only 5 minutes.

Edited January 17 by sancho panza

9.3k · January 17

Bridgen Debate,well worthe a listen,inlc why so many young people are dying.Excess deaths higher in younger age groups

At 8-30 another MP Dr asks whetehr the cause of excess deaths was lockdown,vaccines or the NHS not dealing with patients.Good question

Really super speech all in.

Aseem Malhotra in the background

Edited January 17 by sancho panza

9.3k · January 19

Vaxx deaths and how the MHRA is funded

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/01/19/2500-reported-deaths-and-the-true-number-could-be-10-times-that-how-the-yellow-card-scheme-failed-for-covid-vaccines/

2,500 Reported Deaths – and the True Number Could be 10 Times Higher. How the Yellow Card Scheme Failed for Covid Vaccines

The MHRA’s reports on the COVID-19 vaccines, which are updated in line with its summary of the Yellow Card reporting publication. The MHRA Summary of Yellow Card Scheme Reporting for COVID-19 vaccines was published on March 8th 2023.

Since January, the reports have focused on the vaccines from the beginning of the Autumn 2022 booster campaign.

As of February 22nd 2023 in the U.K., 4,096 Yellow Card events were reported for the bivalent COVID-19 vaccine Pfizer/BioNTech, 5,108 for the bivalent COVID-19 vaccine Moderna, 57 for the COVID-19 vaccine Novavax and 2,319 were reported where the brand of the vaccine was not specified.

The MHRA had received 30 U.K. reports of suspected adverse drug reactions (ADRs) with a fatal outcome to the bivalent COVID-19 Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and 42 fatal reports of suspected ADRs with the bivalent COVID-19 vaccine Moderna. The MHRA received no U.K. reports of a fatal outcome for the COVID-19 vaccine Novavax.

Interactive reports for each vaccine can be found here:

It is not clear, though, why the reports focus on the ADRs since the booster campaign.

The full analysis reports substantially more data, with nearly half a million reports of suspected ADRs for the Covid vaccines and 2,546 suspected ADRs with a fatal outcome.

https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.ama

The reports are likely to be an underestimate of the actual number of suspected adverse reactions.

The MHRA considers its previous estimates of underreporting (that only 10% of serious reactions are reported) should not be used as indicators of the reporting rate for COVID-19 vaccines, as it considers there is high public awareness of the Yellow Card scheme. There is no evidence of this heightened awareness, and it is plausible, given the previous estimate, that the number of suspected adverse reactions could be 10-fold higher than the number reported. Given the seriousness of the issues, it is unclear why the MHRA does not perform validation studies to ascertain a more robust estimate.

The MHRA says it takes all reports with a fatal outcome in patients who have received a COVID-19 vaccine very seriously, and every report with a fatal outcome is reviewed carefully.

However, the MHRA does not attempt to assess or compare the safety of different vaccines. This occurs because it uses inadequate reporting in the system to prevent any analysis.

It is not possible to compare the safety of different vaccines by comparing the numbers presented in the vaccine reports. Reporting rates can be influenced by many factors, including the seriousness of the adverse reactions, their ease of recognition and the extent of use of a particular vaccine. Reporting can also be stimulated by promotion and publicity about a product.

The information for healthcare professionals and the recipient provides a list of the recognised adverse effects (see here).

Systems across other countries are better at identifying adverse reactions to vaccines. Health authorities in Denmark, Norway and Iceland suspended the use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine in March 2021 following reports of the formation of blood clots, while the European medicine regulator reported the vaccine’s benefits outweighed its risks and could continue to be administered.

On April 7th, the U.K. JCVI advised the AstraZeneca vaccine should be restricted to people aged 30 and over because of the risk of blood clots.

Yet, at the same time, the MHRA was “not recommending age restrictions in COVID-19 AstraZeneca vaccine use”. The MHRA’s scientific review of U.K. reports of blood clots with lowered platelets concluded the evidence of a link with AstraZeneca’s vaccine was stronger, but more work was still needed.

On May 7th, Britain restricted AstraZeneca to people aged over 40. However, within a week, Norway permanently removed AstraZeneca from its vaccine programme, and several countries followed suit.

The Norwegian Medicines Agency publishes weekly overviews of suspected adverse reactions associated with COVID-19 vaccination. Furthermore, in Norway, ADR reporting has been defined in legislation: pharmaceutical companies, doctors and dentists are obliged to report on severe or unexpected ADRs, and healthcare staff and patients are recommended to report ADRs spontaneously.

Influence of industry

In 2005, the House of Commons Health Committee reported on the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. At the time:

The MHRA was unusual in being one of few European agencies where the operation of the medicines regulatory system was funded entirely by fees derived from services to industry (drug regulatory agencies in other countries are more often only partly funded by licence fees). The MHRA’s activities are 60% funded through licensing fees paid by those seeking marketing approvals and 40% through an annual service fee, also paid by the industry.

The committee reported that the MHRA had “failed to adequately scrutinise licensing data and its post-marketing surveillance is inadequate”.

The MHRA continues to be primarily funded by income from fees for sales of products and regulatory services: the breakdown sees 50% fees for services, 25% industry periodic fees and 25% department funding.

Improving the reporting of suspected adverse drug reactions

In Wales, Yellow Cards submitted by GPs more than doubled with the introduction of a National Reporting Indicator in 2014. Reporting rates continued to increase yearly through 2018-19, with the NRI still in place.

Also, in Wales, a study including 1,606 public members reported nearly half had previously experienced an ADR. Before the educational video, 18% knew how to report an ADR via the Yellow Card System immediately after watching it, 71% reported knowing how to report, and 82% reported being confident.

A guide for children and young people has also been shown to inform them how to report a suspected ADR to the MHRA and increase their knowledge and confidence in reporting.

However, one of the major barriers to public participation in ADR reporting remains uncertainty about the legitimacy of involvement in the Yellow Card Scheme and doubts about the value of the information provided.

A survey of U.K. pharmacists suggested they lack interest in and do not promote direct patient reporting. Only 19% of the respondents displayed a poster promoting the Yellow Card Scheme in their pharmacy.

In 2020, the MHRA published what it will do differently, identifying four main themes:

Awareness: Levels of public awareness of the agency and its role and responsibilities are still relatively low, although higher than when we previously surveyed stakeholders and patients some years ago.

Transparency: There is a perceived lack of transparency about how the agency makes its decisions and the information that it currently provides.

Responsiveness: There is a lack of responsiveness from the agency when concerns are raised, especially by patients, who say they often do not feel listened to and that the agency’s response is not always proportionate to the seriousness of patients’ issues.

Partnership: (including patient and public involvement) The development of partnerships with stakeholders, including the involvement of patients in the agency’s decision-making process, as well as further development/use of digital communication channels, will be key to addressing the issues around awareness, transparency and responsiveness.

The MHRA also published a proposed ‘Patient and Public Involvement Strategy 2020-25‘, aiming to adopt a more systematic approach to listening to and meaningfully involving patients and the public. However, the strategy lacks specifics about improving patient safety and performance metrics. For example, the MHRA’s strategy states one of the ways to achieve its objective is to improve the user experience of the Yellow Card scheme — nothing on under-reporting, analysis of signals or assignment of causation.

Conclusions

There are widespread problems with the reporting of adverse drug, biologics and device reactions, which substantially compromises patient safety.

Adverse drug reactions are a major cause of hospital admission, a major concern for inpatients and a considerable burden on the quality of life for those afflicted, leading to death in the most severe cases.

The accumulating evidence and the IMMDS review (the Cumberlege report) showed the MHRA’s approach to patient safety requires a radical overhaul.

Patient reporting can bring novel, meaningful information about ADRs, complementing information from healthcare professionals. However, it is rare, and the level of underreporting is substantial – as many as 98 out of every 100 ADRs go unreported. The problems in the system have been overseen by the MHRA, which has failed in its remit to keep patients safe. Conflicts beset the system, and it is often too late to act to detect serious harm. The cost to the health system of adverse drug and device reactions is substantial, and failure to act will only lead to more harm.

The pervasive problem with identifying adverse severe drug, biologic and device reactions requires a parliamentary select committee to make recommendations that encompass legislative changes as to who is obliged to report adverse reactions, funding changes to the MHRA, separation of regulatory approval duties from post-marketing pharmacovigilance, and more inclusion of patients to improve the current system.

Prof. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Dr. Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist based in Rome who works with Professor Heneghan on the Cochrane Collaboration. This article was first published on their Substack, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.

28.4k · January 20

A new international study on the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in six northern European countries has unexpectedly discovered that the pre-existing seasonal nature of coronaviruses may have played more of a role during the pandemic than any of the government public health intervention policies – including vaccinations, lockdowns, masks and travel restrictions. The scientific study was published in the peer-reviewed journal, Journal of Clinical Medicine.

https://www.ceres-science.com/post/natural-seasonality-of-coronaviruses-had-more-influence-on-the-covid-19-pandemic

2.5k · January 25

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/25/covid-inquiry-bbc-misrepresented-risk-pandemic/

Not a word wasted in this from The Telegraph.

9.3k · January 29

The cost of lockdown is still becoming more devastating by the day

Young Britons will continue to pay the price of lost education for a generation to come

Few, if any, of the external shocks that have mercilessly battered the world economy in recent decades have proved quite as devastating in terms of long term cost as the pandemic – or rather, the great panoply of measures that were put in place to mitigate its impact on public health.

Just the immediate fiscal and economic consequences alone were bad enough, but now up pops the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to warn that the impact on educational standards, and therefore future growth potential, is likely to be with us for decades to come.

Recent declines in educational performance would “reduce the size of G20 advanced economies by at least 1pc”, Clare Lombardelli, the OECD’s chief economist, said this week in launching the organisation’s economic outlook. This may not sound like much, but cumulatively, over the years ahead, it digs a mighty hole in what might have been.

Whatever else governments do, closing schools must be a last resort that can only be justified by particularly lethal pathogens that affect the young and old in equal measure.

As quite rapidly became apparent with Covid, the virus’s effect on the young was little worse than ordinary flu. There were of course exceptions, which clinicians are still struggling to explain, and there was a perfectly legitimate concern that schools could become petri dishes for spreading the virus out into the wider population.

Yet the fact of the matter is that the young have paid an enormous price in lost education to protect the elderly from what was, for them, a much more deadly disease.

It’s not just the lost school hours. Lockdown has also virtually bankrupted the country, it’s poleaxed the health service, it’s destroyed the work ethic, and it has left a debilitating legacy of mental health issues that has plunged the welfare budget into deep crisis. Younger people will be paying the costs for a generation to come.

Even in the initial, panicked stages of the pandemic when we didn’t quite know what we were dealing with – what I like to call the “we are all going to die” phase – it seemed likely that policymakers had massively overreacted without properly considering the long term consequences of what they were doing. From the outset, the supposed cure threatened to become worse than the disease itself.

Yet it would have been politically impossible for a major economy such as the UK to stand alone in eschewing lockdown policies when much of the rest of Europe was pursuing the precautionary, better safe than sorry principle. Any government that adopted such an approach in the face of a mounting death toll would have been electoral toast.

It is also true that life is all we have, and it cannot therefore be priced by cold-hearted cost benefit analysis, or cynically defined by the sort of numerical value that is sometimes applied to it in compensation and insurance claims. All human life is in this sense priceless. It cannot be weighed.

Besides, it may not have required a formal, legally imposed lockdown to spark a very similar behavioural response. People would very probably have voluntarily imprisoned themselves in their own homes at the sight of patients dying on ICU wards in China and Northern Italy.

Without the financial support that came with enforced lockdown, the damage to the economy, education and the health service might have been even worse.

All the same, it quite quickly became apparent that, though considerably more deadly than seasonal flu, Covid was a manageable disease that for the vast bulk of people was relatively harmless.

It sounds callous to say it, but many of those whose lives were saved by lockdown will now be dead anyway. The older you were, the more likely you were to succumb to the disease.

Yet even today, now that the pandemic has subsided, the virus continues to take its toll among those with other life-threatening conditions that may have been left untreated during the long months of lockdown.

In most regards, I don’t much buy the intergenerational unfairness complaint; but the pandemic is an exception, and in a sense a case study in how older cohorts have stolen all the goodies.

The young have been forced to make massive sacrifices, which overwhelmingly they did generously and willingly, so that the elderly could be protected. Stunted education – likely, as Clare Lombardelli observes, to inflict permanent damage on economic progress – is only the most visible of these sacrifices.

The vast, £400bn-plus costs of lockdown, spent mainly on furlough, the NHS, and the tragi-comedy of the Government’s belated Test and Trace arrangements, will also be borne by younger generations in higher taxes and debt servicing costs for years to come.

None of this should really come as a surprise, for the policy response to Covid was determined as much by demographic bias, where ageing cohorts exercise disproportionate democratic power, as it was by anything else. Thus is spending on the past – pensions and healthcare – deliberately prioritised by the politicians over investment in the future – education, infrastructure and defence.

The same concerns instructed the Government’s approach to Covid, where the young have ended up paying for the protection of the old.

Human capital is a key foundation of growth, affecting productivity, innovation and knowledge diffusion, and ensuring access to employment opportunities for all, the OECD notes in its economic outlook.

Yet the pandemic cruelly interrupted its ongoing accumulation. The resulting deficiency may be particularly acute in the UK, which appears to have lost more school days to Covid than almost anywhere else.

School closures were understandable in the early stages of the pandemic, when nobody knew what we were dealing with, even if Sweden seems to have managed perfectly well without resorting to such drastic action.

But closure grew steadily less justified with each successive wave of the virus and ended up lasting almost a year.

The consequent shortfall in educational standards and individual development will blight pupil prospects and the wider economy for years to come. Perhaps the greatest curiosity of the Covid inquiry is its apparent assumption that, if policy was at fault, it was in not locking down hard or fast enough.

Maybe we’ll eventually get there, but to date, little weight has been given to the counter view, or the humongous legacy costs.

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