Expired with Dr. Clare Craig

you're most welcome to this talk and I'm so pleased to welcome Dr CLA Craig to The Talk today CLA welcome and thank you so much for coming on thank you very much for having me John it's good to see you me too now CL CLA Dr CLA C Craig medical doctor uh you were a consultant pathologist for a while in the NHS a diagnostic pathologist a fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists medical researcher researcher in the clinical in cancer arm of the 100,000 Genome Project for wild Glade you worked on that fascinating medical author speaker and generally uh campaigner for good things so um I want to do a quick plug if you don't mind CLA to begin with this is this is your book here expired uh the untold covid story and when I read this honestly it was just like scales falling from my eyes you know everything just made sense and I thought why didn't I see that earlier you know you know cla's got it all worked out here so um and we'll put a link of course make sure you Avail yourself of a copy and completely readable not in medical jargon um really really really interesting thank you background material thank you I'm glad it worked um yeah it's books are one heck of a lot of work I I i' I've decided never to write anymore but I know you're working on another one you might give us spoil we might give a spoiler on that on that later on um so F first question CLA really is you know we heard about this I suppose we first heard about this late you know 2019 and um we sort of we're given an an official narrative really of uh of what happen what was going on um H how did your views on the pandemic evolve during 2020 the first year of the pandemic yeah well so at the very outset I was I think you know going along with the crowds I was absolutely paying attent to what was happening and I was scared by what was happening and um even when things started to sort of you know we start to get bit more information we had the Diamond Princess situation so I started to be a bit less scared for me as an individual but I was still scared for you know the older people that I loved and and the the society as a whole and the NHS might collapse all of that story was still a concern to me and really that carried on right up until the summertime so it wasn't until summer 2020 when you know the the the spring wave had ended and we were still getting this peculiar trickle of cases and deaths every day being reported as if it was all the same as what had gone before and I was sort of questioning that but not able to really look into it because I had four children and it was summer holidays um and so it wasn't until they went back to school that I thought right I'm going to dig out some data on this because I want to understand it better and the question I had was was this trickle of cases just testing errors because you know as a diagnostic testing expert that's always a risk you've got with medical testing you know you might overdiagnose or underdiagnose and you've always got to try and get that balance right and this look like overdiagnosis and you know you can say that but you need to prove it you can't just sort of make that claim and I thought well there there will be ways to prove it because what happened in Spring 2020 um was kind of characteristic there were certain people who were more at risk so you had um men died more than women and um PE black people were more at risk of being an ICU than white people and you know there was sort of all these different signals that were risk factors for covid deaths and covid hospitalizations that you could pick out and say well does it still look like that now and so in the summertime it didn't anymore you know the Su it was equal numbers of men and women and you know that the pattern had changed and so even if there were some genuine covid you know knocking around which isn't impossible the the bigger picture story at that time was that we were overdiagnosing it and so having shown that I thought what do I do about this because you know I think this is important and and I don't know how to or who to tell or how to do something you know I don't want to just have it ignored and I took advice from Carl henan who's the a director of the center of evidence-based medicine in Oxford who I was actually at medical school with and I hadn't been in touch with him for 20 years but you know I knew him and um asked him what I should do and he said well just write a blog and say it you know put it out there and and then people will know it's been said and and and you know if it's in the public domain then it can't be ignored in the same way so I I reluctantly took a photograph and set up a social media thing which all of that stuff I hate but I did it and put my name on it and put my face on it and said I think we got a problem here and I was anticipating one of two responses rather naively I thought either I'm going to be told well you know you're wrong we've looked at this this is actually what's going on and his why or they'd say oh that's interesting we hadn't seen that we'll see what we can do about it and I genuinely thought those were the two outcomes and that's not what happened I just got attacked um and and then also introduced to all sorts of other experts who had had a similar experience when they'd raised a concern um which sort of opened my eyes a little bit to there might be more to this than just my little my little concern and so I started reading about it all in much more depth and learning about things that I've been oblivious about that happened in spring so be having to being brought up in in a life in in a culture where it was allowed to give uh a point of view and to give some counterargument and to discuss and and to work through the the dialectic of scientific development this is how science works you know we discuss we debate all that all that seemed to be beg gone you know your ideas weren't scientifically refuted or scientifically confirmed it was rather that you were attacked personally there seems to have been this huge um what I can only call a massive cultural change really yeah I mean and I think there there was probably I mean I don't know exactly what was behind it I don't know who these people were um but there have been times along the way when it's clear that some of the people who've been causing trouble and attacking people and you know trying to discredit them have been funded by outside funders you know so it's not just individuals who' got a chip on their shoulder I think sometimes it's that but sometimes there's more to it than that and and you know that's just really really telling and obviously there's no way to like have a civil societ Society there no way to do science and you know it's no way to do politics like you have to actually work on the evidence and and argue the cases with facts and if you are immediately having to go for for a personal attacks it's because you haven't got an argument you know if you if you've got the truth on your side then you just expose it and there's something quite interesting that I've learned along this way around the difference between a truth and and a lie and so in under a lie i' include you know misinterpretations and mistakes and whatever else and obviously i' I've made mistakes along the way when I make a mistake it goes everywhere everybody wants to share it they want to use it to discredit me they want to use it so they can show how clever they are because they can show that I was wrong but most of the things I've said have not been like that they have been inconvenient truths and when you say An Inconvenient Truth that doesn't happen you just get attacked and I don't don't want to dwell on this but I've had you know quite serious physical threats from untraceable emails and and things like that um you know this is something there's a real concerted effort against what I would call open discussion anyway um let's get on to some really interesting material from your book now you you've got um a series of of beliefs 12 12 beliefs um and let's just say these are open for discussion MH now the first belief belief one um this is the first part of your book um covid only spreads through close contact yes that's quite carefully worded I'm sure it is please tell us what you mean CLA so so the story that we were told from the outset was that you know if you're up close with somebody that has covid you're at risk of catching it from them and and the the belief was that people would be um almost spitting it in your face that was the idea wasn't it there were droplets coming out of your nose and your mouth as you talked that would be directed at somebody's face and that that is how it would spread and um I said only because I think it can spread like that right you know close contact can be the problem but when you actually dig into the story behind where this belief comes from it's really interesting so some people stop at the point where they say it was some school project in America by this girl who said that if you had social distancing you'd be able to you know reduce epidemological spread this was some you know literally a science project at school but that's not where it really came from where it really came from was going way back to 1910 so there was a public health official who worked in Rhode Island and frankly I mean I I I don't want to completely denigrate this man I think he did good things but he also did a few things that we still having the hangover of he was a bit of a germaphobe you know when you read his book he is talks about how people turn the pages when they've licked their finger and then he has to touch that page and then he has to hold the handle in the trolley cart and other people have been touching it and there's just bits of other people's saliva everywhere he looks and he so you know he's a bit of a character in that way and and he seems to be a bit Evangelical about his obsessive compulsive disorder um but what he knew um based on evidence was that people in hospitals in infectious disease Wards spread that the disease spread was less when you separated the beds a bit so you know that he he sort of knew this and he was really evangelic about it and wanted to make a difference and it may well be that he did make a difference but he felt that people weren't listening to him because they still believed that spread could occur through the air and so this was happening in 1910 now so we're kind of we're more more than 50 years after germ Theory had been accepted as a theory and that was the you know the the result of a a difficult scientific debate that became quite heavily politicized between germ Theory versus myasthma Theory so myasthma theory is that theory that bad smells spread disease through the air and so it you know once they showed that actually it was you know these germs then that theory was was you know shut down but because it was such a politicized debate um The Germ theorists were suppressed with their ideas and they had to fight and fight for years to be believed and then when they were believed they seemed to sort of bring in you know it sort of became more extreme and so when they won they're like right this is it it's germ Theory all of that my Asma stuff is completely wrong because you didn't let us speak so you must have been wrong about everything and so when you get into a situation where things are so poiz like that obviously you lose all the nuance and and you know and so this guy was also losing the Nuance it cannot be my Asma theory he had this phrase the sewer gas bogey he wanted to rid the world of this fear of sewer gas being the thing that was spreading diseas so he and what he then did was he came up with ideas out of thin air so his idea out of thin air was that it was mouth spray that was a spread of infection and it would fall all within um 6ot of somebody so he was the originator of that idea of spread through drop plads with that distance and it wasn't evidence-based and the thing is that when you read his book he's actually pretty sound and he ends the book saying you know I've made a lot of assumptions here I've made Sleeping statements I've sort of bundled all the infectious diseases in as one almost and obviously we've got tons more to learn about this and you know things will evolve as they go along and he also sort of has a section on influenza where he sort of you know he struggles with that one a bit doesn't really fit his model the way the others do so you know I actually respect him a lot and we can't really put the blame on him when a more than 100 years later so this is Dr Kaplan is it yeah this is Charles Chapan yeah we haven't done the work in the meantime you know and so it's not on him it's on us right he came up with a hypothesis and nobody's really shut it down and and actually that's not true people have shut this down but they've always been ignored so physicist who would look at um Aerosoles and droplets and how they move through the air had said for a long time we've got a problem here guys because this mouth spray is on a trajectory it's coming out but it's immediately under the influence of gravity and so if you're standing opposite somebody the chance of it hitting a mucosal membrane like an eye nostril or mouth is not it's just minuscule it's just not going to happen and and you know we know that CU we feel it when it when it does happen it's very very rare that's not how this could possibly be spreading um and there were other um physicists who did this work who sort of started off working in air pollution and then got interested in you know epidemiology and how viruses spread who were trying to raise the alert from early in 2020 saying look you've got this wrong so they know they were sort of absolutely baffled that the epidemiology Community had this idea that anything in inous was falling to the ground as if you know as if it was incredibly heavy and was just going to drop when they knew that the size of the particles that viruses are in is teeny tiny and they're so tiny that they do something that's sort of slightly mindblowing so if you get really high resolution photography you can see that anything that is visible to the naked eye even the tiniest tiniest thing visible to the naked eye is immediately under the effect of gravity so it falls but just anything just below what's visible to the naked eye doesn't do that it's sort of mind-blowing but it doesn't do that because as soon as it's out of your nose and your mouth it starts to rapidly evaporate and becomes significantly smaller and it's also in the warm air from our body and so it goes up so it's not falling to the ground at all it's going up and it's lingering in the air and so the kind of image I have of it is like pig pen from Charlie Brown where people are surrounded by this cloud of aerosols that they're producing all of the time and they're being left behind as they walk down the street and it's and it then can move through the air from place to place and so you know this what that means is that somebody who's very sick at home and producing literally millions of virus particles and you know tens of millions overnight that that material will get in into the general air and if it's at night time there is no UV light around to do anything about it it will move to their neighbors and and we've seen that happen with SARS one so there was a nice study in SAR one of an apartment Block in Hong Kong where there was six tower blocks arranged in a sort of hexagon Arrangement and um uh physicists predicted based on people who are infected in the ground floor Flats of one block who was going to be infected Ed next in the upstairs flaps of blocks in the wind direction and they got it right because that's how it spread it's so interesting for the development of of of just scientific ideas so this this measmer idea where things like spread through the air so you could smell putrid smells 100 yards away and the disease smells the disease spreads in these putrid smells well of course we know it doesn't this is this is what germ theory is taken over but from that idea we had this stereotypical idea of droplet infection I mean that's what we call it these droplets and they just they drop out and the idea that disease could spread through the air had been chucked out in the sort of 1880s or whatever it was with Louis pastor and Philip seov therefore that can't possibly happen but the physicists tell us about these aerosol particles yes yes but they are spreading through the air so the my Asma Theory wasn't completely wrong in that sense no we've gone from G to the opposite yeah that's right so you know I think the fact it was a smell was wrong it was wrong it wasn't a smell but the idea that therefore nothing could ever travel for the air is also wrong and and once you understood this principle all sorts of things start to fall into place so you start to understand why every region at the same time's got a problem you know this didn't this is not what the modeling showed the modeling showed it would start in sort of focal areas largely cities but you they couldn't predict where it would begin and it would spread out to more remote regions over time and they the modeling was suggesting that would take you know weeks and weeks like 14 weeks to reach a peak in every point of the country now that that is nothing like what happened in the real world anywhere in the real world it was on Switched on almost immediately across huge areas but if you look across continents you can see sort of time differences as it moved AC cross so for instance in Spring 2020 Eastern Europe didn't have a problem as if it had perhaps either already gone or or that you know their kind of winter virus season was over and then it spread um from Italy to us in Sweden to you know it kind of went slightly West um and then in the following year we had a much earlier Autumn January first Co winter nothing in Spring and it was Eastern Europe that was hit in the spring so it was starting to move in the opposite direction across the continent so you know when you're seeing it as being spread in aerosols through the area it starts to make sense and and one of the other things the modelers had set out as a claim was that the peak would be in Spring 2020 they reckoned the peak would be in July that was what they were modeling they thought everyone was susceptible it would carry on spreading and spreading and spreading it would peak in July and that their interventions would squash the curve slow the spread And Delay that Peak to after July well it peaked in April it peaked in April and and then when they reduced the restrictions the modeler said oh we'll have a rebound every time we relax there's going to be a rebound and we're going to have to keep intervening to got under control there was no rebound it peaked and then it went away and then it comes back in a season all manner subsequently yeah so many fascinating things there again CLA the sheer human arrogance really that that we can control a virus which are these forces of nature um I mean viruses we need them for the ecosystem of course but in some cases they they go wrong and become pathological but you know human beings we are so clever we could we we can sort this out you know the the the the arrogance of that is quite incredible and this simplistic idea that to put it quite crudely a slobbers on B who slobbers on C who slobbers on D um simplistic be Beyond description and as we've said an antithesis against this my Asma Theory and we already we had evidence very early on that that wasn't the case you know so the if you remember the stories of the the choir rehearsals and the and the restaurants with the air conditioning and the buses you know it was clearly not just people who were in the very close vicinity face to face with people and yet that was all just ignored and suppressed and the people who were saying it spreads through AOS cells were called misinformation spreaders by The Who so you know it's all part of a pattern really isn't it this is this is Airborne as in paratroopers yeah to to misquote ahead of an international organiz organization and then we have these these fascinating ideas that don't quite fit in with the theory so um I mean I've I've had emails from people that are really displeased that they've got the disease I remember one from someone who's in the outback and said I'm in the outback I went into town once two weeks ago and and now now I've got the virus you what's this about you know that they thought they shouldn't have it and we have these weird ideas of uh I think there's an episode of a people on the British Antarctic Survey got an infection when they shouldn't get infections and um people who been on ships at Sea and all of a sudden the infection seems to to come along so the the the way another way science works is we look for the exception surely we should look for the exception and say look this doesn't work in that case therefore does this count cast out on the whole theory on on the whole way of thinking and that just doesn't seem to have been done no I completely agree and I think I think those are important stories and I think you know people sort of dismissed them because I know there are small numbers of people involved in those stories but they they do you know they do prove that the conventional theory is not right at least not right in every case you know there's there are exceptions where you have these very odd stories so you they were talking about that Argentinian fishing vessel which was a we was at C for five weeks and then had an that break and then the the British Antarctic Survey they had tested and isolated and flown to um Argentina and tested and isolated and stayed in a hotel just them and went to the base and then we had an outbreak anyway and so you know that that does suggest that there's more to this story than the conventional story of you've got the lurgy and you're going to give it to me um and and I think the other part sort of sliding onto belief too I think but the the other critical point the that was a mistake was thinking everybody was susceptible and that's a belief that sort of somehow still seems to hold um and that was the belief that leads to this sort of tsunami model where it keeps going and going and going until everybody's caught it and that happened nowhere at any point you know we've seen so many covid waves it's very predictable how long it takes before they Peak naturally we know that from evidence everywhere um and so and this is really really important because I suppose at a stretch if you pretended this virus was something we knew nothing about you could say we didn't know that until that had happened but it's not something we knew nothing about we knew it was a Corona virus and we knew that they are very seasonal and they do have these um sometimes quite you know dramatic surges before they go away again so we did know that and we don't know as much about Corona viruses as we do about influenza but influenza viruses are you know also respiratory viruses which are very seasonal so we could have thought well what do we know about influenza and what we knew about that is that um they only about 5 to 15% are susceptible to any sort of influenza variant as it were um and if you look at papers from before this period where people were talking about what would happen if we had a an influenza you know that was mutated and that was unfamiliar and you know what would the outcome be in fact there was one that was was written about influenza that had been a lab leak sort of gain of function implen what would happen and the the basis of that thesis was well maximum 15% are going to be susceptible well that's a very sound reasoning so why on Earth were people talking about it being 85% you know this is an extraordinary difference really extraordinary and and and there is a problem we have that modelers um first of all their entire career is about this sort of of event so they want to spin it out and exaggerate you know the more the worst they can make it the better it is for them and they become the heroes as it were so they've got all the wrong motivations and on top of that if they say 85% are going to be susceptible and they've got it wrong there doesn't seem to be any consequence for them if they said oh don't worry about this nobody's susceptible that's when they have a consequence because they've underall it so they have this perverse incentive to always be massively overcalling it and it's the politicians who take the Flack for overreacting but they didn't the politicians didn't seem to have the um Common Sense frankly to question these people and and I think that's really sad it's it's almost as if they were being Bamboozled with computer models when actually the question was very very simple anybody could have an opinion on how many people are going to get it how many people are going to die of it it's two numbers you don't need a computer model that's a very simple backof the envelope sum and so you can then as a politician interrogate those two questions but nobody really did the modeling disasters in the pandemic we could spend a long time talking about that assumptions based on essentially no information at all uh fed to uh politicians with essentially no background science at all who were not equipped to ask the sort of scienti specific questions uh that that would have interrogated this data or these this apparent data in an analytical format so what we're saying here just to clarify the science CLA is that in any one wave let's take the Wuhan wave the original virus whatever we want to call that um what what we're saying is only a small number of the population would actually be susceptible to becoming infected and getting sick with that virus is is that what we with that particular form of the virus is that what we're saying yeah absolutely that's what we're saying that that that if you look um there's something slightly odd about what happens that nobody really can explain and I think that's been part of the problem is nobody willing to talk about things we can't explain you know pretending there's no doubt in the situation so one of the things we can't explain is Peak deaths are always in January right respirat virus Peak death yes always happen in January now if viral spread was to do with how we're interacting with each other that that wouldn't be the case it would it would come and go more much more randomly and it wouldn't be predictably always in January now it isn't only always in January know the other Peaks are predictable as well so and if there is an Autumn wave which we have had every time then you see the peak deaths at the end of October beginning of November if you have a spring one you see Peak deaths in early April and if there's a summer one peak deser in July we haven't seen Peak deser falling outside of that pattern so if you can see that pattern then you'll say well why is it that it's always going to be falling in November as we've just seen before rising in December like every single year it has fallen in November before it rises in December so that that is tricky because if you try and model it on anything to do with viral spread as we know it that doesn't fall out and so but if if you think about it as being human susceptibility then you get that predictable pattern so we've got something causing a wave of susceptibility at certain times of the year with predictable Peaks and we can't explain what it is so something causes the fraction of the population to become susceptible and whatever variant is around at the time is the one that will be going with that and that's why the Peaks are predictable and the reason I say that because that is quite a sort of mindblowing way to think about it compared with what people normally think but one of the points of evidence to support that is this if you looked at people who are in hospital you've got two types of people in hospital you've got the ones who are had covid got sick came through A&E so they're the sort of proper Co admissions from the community and then you have people who are in hospital for other reasons who captur in hospital now the conventional story would mean that you had a peak of admissions from the community first and then it spreads in the hospital and you have your Inc your incubation period and then you get Peak oh we've got these patients in hospital catching it now so your um Hospital cases would be after Peak admissions but what actually happens is that the cases in the hospital Peak at the same time as they peak in the community before the admissions so the cases are already falling in hospital before you've got Peak virus in the hospital hospital so that suggests there's a susceptibility thing going on in the community that's also affecting all the hospital patients and of course hospital patients are sick so their their immune systems are already struggling and so the the percentage of people in the hospital environment that are going to end up positive is going to be higher than in a community environment but the timing of it is the same so interesting so there's something about the time of the year the ecosystem of the planet that we live in us as human beings and all the multiple factors that influence our susceptibility to the virus interacting with the innate biology of the virus in its ecosystem that means that this is highly seasonal yes and and the cases tend to move as as as a as a wave almost like pieces of um pieces of wood drifting down a river or something they're all moving kind of kind of moving together yeah and I mean it that's true and it's just it's complicated you know that's a there's a lot of factors at play that we can't pretend to understand and pretending to understand has just made everyone look stupid um and one one lovely analogy that I quite like is to say it's a bit like tomato blight where you know everything's fine in your allotment it's all going well and then overnight they're all gone they've all just like the conditions are such in the environment that suddenly this fungus that was around yeah gets the opportunity to just take off and all the tomato are gone um and I think if you understand it that way you can also understand why some of these periods like spring 2021 here you don't see a wave and and obviously that was attributed at the time to vaccine success but it was the same in Portugal and Ireland I think it was a geographical phenomenon where you just the very Westerly part of Europe didn't have a spring 2021 wave and Eastern Europe had it badly in the reverse of what was seen in 2020 yeah so so any one wave only about 15% of people are susceptible so they got the modelers got the inverse wrong the modelers were saying it's 85% yes it's actually 85% that probably weren't susceptible in any meaningful way exactly the wrong way around most people are by standards really it's it's dazzling how wrong they got this and yet the whole policy was was based on these particular papers from particular individuals who happened to breach the lockdown themselves from particular institutions it's just incredible that so much weight was put on such such tenuous yeah exiguous evidence it's mindblowing words that it wasn't revised that that's the worst crime you okay make a mistake we all make mistakes right but at what point did they say oh look now we've got some actual evidence of how it actually behaves in the real world revised this and they and they failed to do that which is just catastrophic I think one of the one of the things that people haven't talked about much at all which is very very telling is this measure called the secondary attack rate so the secondary attack rate is a measure of how many people in a household will catch covid when somebody in the house has got it and you can see in the literature you see huge variation in the claims on this and that's largely because a lot of people don't take the care to ensure that they're not including people who caught it at the same time as each other so if you've got we've got six people in our house so um when my husband and I were out or caught it we brought it home and then was there was a period and then two of my children were ill so our secondary attack rate was of the four children two of them were ill so it was 50% but if you look at that over over the whole population Public Health enged very careful about how they measured it and wouldn't have included me and my husband in the sum they got 10% it was 10% for the Wuhan wave it was 10% for the alpha wave now after Alpha you know a large number of people vaccinated and so at that point you'd think well it should have reduced the number who are susceptible it should be less than 10% it was 10% for the Delta W you know pattern and worse like the thing that that really hasn't been talked about is it was 10% for that first Omicron wave and the thing is that this does not add up because the other data on Ron from so the PCR positiv say were huge numbers and the public health data on the number of people that developed antibodies also suggested huge numbers of cases but I don't understand how they came to those numbers if only 10% were susceptible like there's something that doesn't add up and they stopped publishing that figure subsequently so from March 2022 we haven't had that figure so the confusion is that uh you you you you and your daughter could have been out both caught the virus maybe at different places a bit at the same time compared to the fact that maybe you could have caught it and then passed it on to your daughter and and this this Nuance wasn't really taken into account in the in the calculations of the secondary attack rate so no it was more the point that say if my husband and I had gone out and both caught it at the same time we're both index cases and so we we shouldn't be counted in each other's secondary attack rate that that was the math yeah got got it got it got it this 10 to 15% um susceptibility CL is this consistent with other diseases how does this compare to influenza for example do we know yeah so for influenza is 5 to 15% for me old it's um you know it is something like over 85% be 90% you know so they that was the model they were using they were using this model of measles and and hypothetical scary virus that they do all their modeling on because that's their career as I was saying earlier you know they they pitch their work to funders on the basis that they can tell you about scary viruses so their models are based on this hypothetical scary thing that doesn't probably exist um because otherwise who cares right you know what are you going to do about it otherwise so they model becomes an irrelevance yeah they have to come up with stories that give them relevance and the stories that give them relevance are these things can spread to everybody they can be lethal and we can do something about them you know you have to have all three for their careers to be relevant mean I'm not biologist but I certainly know that the corona viruses and the measles viruses are completely utterly different yes types of uh types of infection I think probably in our culture as well we have ideas of plague um certainly I was brought up with with ideas of plague 1348 the Black Death 1666 you know we have this sort of culture in our in our background this underlying fear and of course in in in the medical world we' I've been teaching about 1918 pandemic for for for decades and um I guess we were sort of expecting it to fall into that I think I mean I think these things are really really interesting because they are sort of these um that they're so frightening and so far away that that they are sort of mist of our time they've become M of our time and we can't go back to Black Death and plague and actually pick apart what was really going on you know whether people were really well-nourished at the time whether whether the consequences of people's fear around those things were part of the problem we don't know but for 1918 we know a lot actually and what we know is not different is a lot different to what we were told so what we know is that um it's what people what we're told is contradictory in the first place so we're told told a third of the world caught it and that the um the fatality rate was 2 to 3% um and that the number of deaths was absolutely enormous so the the welcome trust currently claim 100 million people died which is just I can't remember that how many people were alive at the time I think it was about about about 400 million probably right so you know it's a ridiculous claim that those three numbers don't add up they don't add up um there's probably more than that but you're right the numbers don't add up no and if you go back to what people were saying at the time they had pretty good recordkeeping in 1918 you know they knew who had died of course um and it was modelers in 1920 who were um made the assumption that the problems seen in Europe and America were could be extrapolated to the whole world um and that based on that assumption and then also assuming that the whole world will have dealt with it in a much worse way so they'll have a higher mortality they came up with a figure of 20 million deaths so why in 1920 were they you know exaggerating the problem and coming up with 20 million deaths and by this you 2020 they're saying it was 100 million it's because over the course of the last 100 years people whose careers depend on they having been something scary in 1918 have have inflated that number fivefold now if you go back to the 1920 modelers we can now say to them look nothing happened in China nothing happened in Japan your assumptions were wrong it could not have been 20 million I'm not saying people didn't die right they did die yeah um but it was not the way it's the story is told and one of the interesting I there's are several reasons why they might have died more than for a regular flu and the thing is that this the 1918 flu continued to circulate still around but it stopped killing people so why did it kill people then and obviously there were people who were really really really malnourished at the time they just been the war the soldiers were living in unsanitary conditions marching and marching at you know exhausted and vulnerable to infection there were people who'd been working in Munitions factories back home and exposing all sorts of chemicals or just living nearby these Munitions factories so they might that might well have played a role I don't know but one thing that one story that does seem to have good evidence base behind it is that there was a um a huge amount of um hope based on the treatment of aspirin aspirin was this new drug at the time they knew it reduced fevers and they thought that this was the way they were going to get through this and people were chucking down aspirin in really toxic quantities there were sort of people describing what was going on with with young young people who were sick with the fever um and that but then being given handfuls of aspirin because they were so frightened that they might die and then if you look at how people died there were two ways people died quite the people who described this very well there was people who died because they had a viral infection turned into a secondary bacterial pneumonia there were no antibiotics and they died there were other people who got sick very quickly turned blue had this very characteristic heliotrope cyanosis they called it on the lips they ended up with really aditus heavy wet red lungs at postmortem this is not the same condition that looks much more like aspirin toxicity so the response to 19 18 seems to have been a lot of what happened it wasn't just what we're told it's just so interesting CLA I had no idea about that aspirin toxicity uh affecting the lungs and causing the so so the the the lungs became inflamed and Demus they weren't taking in the oxygen and that caused the so basically what how did you describe sinosis around the mouth isn't it the red the bless around the mouth yeah so they get yeah which obviously you can get sin is with pneumonias as well but this was characteristic you know they gave it a name it was different looking to what they used to being yeah I mean I I guess I would call that Central sinosis which of course is the most alarming form of of of sinosis it means that the oxygen levels in the blood have dropped quite dramatically that is so interesting so many things we can learn from the past and you the other thing you know just going back to the start of this discussion really was this idea that that consensus of medical opinion got things wrong you know taking the example of aerosolization for for over a hundred years well over a 100 years you know we're talking you know dates Louis Pastor we're probably talking about 1890s and those kind of times and yet yet you know in 2020 the the the the thinking had not been clarified it's uh yeah it's quite incredible the way these myths can be perpetuated it is isn't it and and it's this whole thing around the institutional aspect of science where people you know they sort of have a power base based on the knowledge that they got into that position with and anybody undermining the knowledge that they've built their own little Empire on is a threat to them and you know you can see this through scientist history all the way along there's always you know you you have hook and newturn and their disputes and how that played out politically and and there's that you know Max Plank's expression of science progresses one funeral at a time the trouble is that we haven't had funerals in the same way you know fouchy has been in charge of the n Aid in the US for literally the length of people's entire careers and and and so you're not getting the turnaround you're not getting the new knowledge and the fresh blood and the young thinking coming through ever and instead we've got this sort of entrenchment and we've got medical journals and scientific journals who have been influenced by um money and sort of not rocking the boat and so the you the whole the whole point of science is to have debate and questions and openness and if you can't have openness if there are things that are off the table you won't find out things that you know you won't get near the truth if you have a culture of openness which they did we've had in the past you have you know you have wacky ideas floating around that's just what happens so you have people like Mari Curry who we all you know prays for her important work and physics but she also is into seances and things like that and you have you know other other scientists of the time who similarly made amazing breakthroughs but had sort of funny ideas about the effects of magnetism and hypnosis and you know because everything was on the table so you could talk about these things and over time some of the things you were talking about have come out the other way and and have been disproved which is fine as long as you adapt your thinking as the evidence emerges that should be fine but it's not Isaac Newton spent as much time trying to work out when the Lord was going to return from numbers in scripture I believe as as he did from uh actually working on physics but that's not the point he had a very fertile brain you know that he was thinking aloud and as well as that there vested interests actually work to maintain the status quo now I believe Financial vested interest I mean Barry Marshall Springs to mind in Australia um everyone knows that stomach hes are caused by stress and you have to take an anti-acid tablet every day for the rest of your life supplied by a pharmaceutical company at significant cost but take that one a day for the rest of your life on me you'd be absolutely fine then when Barry Marshall comes along and says no just a minute most of these are caused by a bacteria helor pylori and you know what I know how to eradicate that and yeah you know he wasn't welcome with open arms shall we say and it was only when he actually infected himself and was able to treat him himself that he demonstrated that this actually worked because people did not want the change and revolutionary ideas make no mistake are not allowed you must just have little incremental thoughts you must not get into trouble you must make sure it gets published you must keep the income coming in and we don't want any revolutionary ideas that could actually improve human knowledge in this sort of dialectic fashion it's a a very sad situation it is sad and it is sad because the people who have have created that situation obviously feel threatened by new knowledge what's sad is that they feel threatened by it they're not threatened by it they really are not and yet they feel like they are think well where do you get that weakness from why why are you so weak that you can't actually engage in something something that might be amazing you know you just just won't engage it's scientific Ludi ISM really isn't it you know this is the way we've done it and we're not going to change and sit s sit down young man sit down young woman we don't want to hear from you it's yeah yeah and of course that that actually plays back into that story about the droplets and the a assaults cuz you've got a situation where in the 1930s they'd got the photography up to a standard that meant they could actually sort of start to observe these things and a lot of work was done by engineer William Wells and his physician wife Mildred on what was really happening in terms of drops ATS in AOS cells and how big and how far and how long they'd stay in the air um and they did amazing work that was dismissed by the CDC director Alexander langua at the time because he was thinking this was a threat to germ Theory you know the same old problem this sounds a bit like my asthma I'm GNA SS and he stated this is 1920s CLA from memory so I think the work was in the 1930s but it was in it was wasn't until the 1980s late 1980s when Alexander langur re retired and in his retirement speech he said I got it wrong about those two I know that that their evidence was really good and we ought to be looking at that properly so people started to look at it properly 50 years on so I got it wrong all the time I was in power all the time I was decision maker got it wrong now I'm retiring now I'm retiring now I'm retiring I I'll admit it now yeah yeah well that that is what happened and you can see how the you know you can see that reflected time and time again with powerful position people in science and so he admitted it and then there was this catastrophic era where people were looking back back at the work of these two people to find the number that's of the size of a droplet that would fall to the ground and they misinterpreted the meaning of the word Airborne because Airborne to us now anybody says Airborne means it it travels through the air everybody understands that to be its meaning but when they were using it in the 30s and 40s Airborne meant infectious material of a size that could be spread through the air so you would use that word Airborne to say well it could it's small enough that it could cause an infection rather than it's small enough that's the size it is in the air does that make sense I'm not saying it brilliantly I'll try again so after they did their work generally they focused on TB and TB is interesting because it like measles um can't spread in the upper Airways there are no receptors so anything that any air so that you breathe in that's going to end up you know caught in the upper Airways will have no impact on you it's only the Aerosoles that are small enough that can get deep into the lung that can cause an infection the microparticulates go deep down yeah so these tinier aerosols that could cause an infection they were describing as Airborne meaning they could cause an infection whereas obviously we misinterpret that now and so they the claim became that these teeny tiny Aerosoles were the ones that were dropping to the ground when when that wasn't the case at all it was Far Far bigger the ones that were dropping to the ground right so so very small Aerosoles very small particles it's the same as particles of diesel smoke or wood smoke they can go straight into down into the lungs and they can cause infection because measles as you say doesn't affect the upper Airways it's got to be these small particles so big if someone's slobbering on you with great big droplets um theoretically the risk from measles will be less it wouldn't quite work like that because every time someone's breathing out there's a whole variety of sizes of droplets that's right produced so so people would catch measles by direct contact but they can also catch it through this Airborne an a Airborne then was used to define Airborne was defined pragmatically it's what is capable of transmitting infection is that is that yeah I mean it's really weird to us isn't it because the word is so discreet in its meaning now it's hard to understand it having the other meaning because it just sounds so peculiar but they they did use it to mean something completely different to what we mean now and so this wrong number ended up in the textbooks ended up in all the public health guidelines and and you know people were still like absolute about it even when like physicists today are saying this is rubbish you're just talking rubbish that's not what happens these things do not drop to the ground it's just you know and when you I try in the book to describe it by making everything a thousand times bigger and talking about Giants and so you've got these giant science in the air and the claim is that they're breathing out grapefruit sized things and lentil sized things yeah and that the in reality the grapefruit sized things are going to drop to the ground in about the radius of their height so they're a mile high and within a mile your grapefruits are on the ground and they're saying that that's going to happen to these tiny lentil signs aerosols that they're all just going to come thundering down to the ground and when you can sort of picture that you see how ridiculous that is a mile it's just ludicrous conflation but it's say find it very hard to picture these tiny things and so you can't can't kind of see how ridiculous the concept is because it's all just too small to think about yeah but that's what scientists supposed to do they're supposed to analyze the nature of reality and uh and and the Practical applications in terms of the pandemic for that misunderstanding CLA can you just spell that out for me a bit well yeah so if you think back to the kinds of restrictions that were in place we had one-way systems and perspect screams and you know the perspect screens were counterproductive because if you've got aerosols in the air the perspect screens caused them to collect so that you're getting a higher dosage than you otherwise would do if you had proper air flow through a room so you know they were completely counterproductive and you had all the social distancing that just caused horrible harm in terms of people being allowed to be with other people when they needed to be um and then of course the masks come into play right so if you believe spread is through droplets that are being spat out of somebody's mouth as they talk then a mask is going to help it's going to help you know I I accept that but if if you realize that's not how it spreads then you've got two problems one problem is the gaps all around the cloth mask where that's actually where the air going in and out it has no at all but the other problem is anything that you are spitting onto the mark you're then breathing over it so you're going to aisize what's on the mask and if you look at the data in the real world of what happened when masking mandates were brought in every single time there was a difference between one region and another or one country and another it was always the Mas one that was doing worse interesting yeah one thing I'm just a bit confused about um some someone who was say 10 15% was susceptible to the W hand wave would it be a different 10 to 15% that was susceptible to the alpha wave and a different 10 to 15% that could be susceptible to the Delta wave and the Omicron wave yeah that's a really important question and the answer is essentially yes it's it's of working its way through the population which is what Influenza would have done as well so you'd see with influenza from way back 1930s you could measure antibodies and you would see how you know a fraction each year would be accumulating these antibodies and and then you'd have one particular influenza variant that might skip a year and then it comes back again and so after like 10 to 11 years it's work just way through the population and then you get this new strain of influenza everybody goes into a bit of a panic again and says oh no nobody's seen this one it's going to be worse and then it does its thing and it works its way through as before um so so yes it is working its way through and you can see that with the antibody results and how they just keep increasing over time you know we haven't had periods where they've Fallen away the antibodies just increase and once you've got antibodies from an infection if you were unvaccinated you're sort of pretty much okay so there was for Delta the previously infected were very well protected they were very well protected from hospitalizations and deaths but that didn't really happen if you had the previous infection and they were almost completely protected from infection so 99% % of the infections were first timers and there was like a trickle of people who' been positive before some of whom may have been asymptomatic positives you know well was that ever really a positive I don't think so but with omon that changed a little bit but it was still 95% were first timers so they know there were some people who were becoming infected again um but the people who seem to have had the most infections in with om have been people who've had the most doses of the vaccine so you know that Cleveland study of healthcare workers where more doses they had the higher the infection rate and when they went and checked and said well is this a testing bias no it wasn't is this a bias because the people have stopped being injected because they've had it it wasn't that either it was literally the vaccine was making people immune systems respond lse and they were getting infected more often and the immunologists do tell us that this is a well recognized phenomen that the vaccine can stimulate the suppressor cells and uh stimulate particular types of antibodies which generate immune tolerance it's a Well recognized well recognized it's a big it's a potentially big problem because you've got immune systems that have switched from being on attack mode so if you think your immune system's got two jobs really it has to recognize you as self and ignore it and it has to recognize foreign but it has to make an exception for food because there's food is in you and it's foreign and you don't want to have an allergic response to it so it has a way of saying well let's switch our immune response to say yeah it's foreign but foreign and we can ignore it and that's what's been happening with people who've been injected multiple times is their body is saying well this is foreign but we can ignore it we don't want to be ignoring this it's you know it's a foreign virus you shouldn't be ignoring itely yeah and then there's the additional problem of course that of of that sort of original antigenic sin story where once your immune system is being trained on one particular way of approaching a a pathogen so one partic you know if it's trained up to say it looks like this and in the case of the vaccine this little bit looks like this then every time it sees that virus it's going to approach it with the weapons it learned in the first lesson and so everybody who got vaccinated were taught the same lesson so the viral the virus has then got immense sort of um pressure to evolve to avoid that technique specific Al because then it's adapted and can and can run through that population which is what it's done subsequently um whereas you know if you allow natural immunity to develop then it's a broad range of immunity in an individual and even broader across the population and it doesn't have so much of a chance of sort of finding that Niche and going through yeah so so the the idea that specific vaccination is is a is kind of an evolutionary driver really where whereas if you've got natural immunity you're going to produce an immune response whether it's through tea cells or antibodies to oh I don't know at least 20 different proteins 20 different epitopes from the virus it's poly polyclonal that's right polyclonal response so the the high numbers of antibodies in the community that were cited people like the office for National statistics well up into the sort of high 90s of percent is is that credible given the the the accumulation of repeated infection that people were or the the the the virus that people were exposed to or is there something that's slightly inconsistent with those very high levels of antibodies so there's something about it that I just don't quite buy so I think they were doing a really good measure through Wuhan Alpha and Delta wave you know if and you look at the number of people who were said to like they were looking at blood donors but extrapolating to the population and if you say well if that proportion of the population have now had covid it actually tallied very well with the number of symptomatic people who had tested positive so you've got a measure you know if you've got two measures of the same thing and they're coming out the same that's pretty compelling but and it was also you know similar fraction to the proportion who was susceptible in the household so everything was aligned it was all making sense but then with Omicron they all fall apart and they they're not aligned anymore and what what one thing that sort of came out during the course of the Delta wave was evidence from the madna child it was just one study where they showed that people who had been vaccinated and then had an infection didn't produce n antibodies these sort of Po infection antibodies at the same rate as the unvaccinated it was sort of half or less than half so that would mean that you you know you could have the same number of infections in a vaccinated Community but with an antibody test it would look like there hadd only been half those number of infections and I just wonder if the public health people decided to fiddle with their testing and say well we've got to account for this let's have a much much lower threshold of how much antibody needs to be there for us to say it's real because it was around that time that it all seemed to go that haywire and when you the the sort of one other way I've had a sort of finger in the air is this correct is just to ask people so I've done you know polls on Twitter and just said have you had it it's a very you know are you vaccinated aren you vaccinated have you had it just simple simple questions and I've done that more than once over time and it's very consistent and and it changes over time in a predictable fashion but the answers to those surveys fit with 10% at a time not with everybody's had it now it's over and it's clearly not over you know at the moment Finland has got a higher hospitalization rate than they've ever had right so you know it's coming back it's going to Surge in December here like it does every year it's not over because it hasn't worked as way to the population and if you you speak to people you'll know people who haven't had it yet because not everybody has quite a few people have had it multiple times but there's still plenty of people who haven't had it yet and the there seems to be a pattern that the older you are the less likely you are to have had it and I think that makes perfect sense because our immune systems educate themselves through the course of Our Lives now of course there comes a point in life when you're quite close to death when your immune systems fail and you're going to be more susceptible to everything and anything but before that happens when you're still you know healthy then you've got a very educated immune system at 80 compared to at 20 years old and if you look at the antibody levels across those age groups throughout the whole period there's always been every 10 years older there were fewer people had developed antibodies there had been fewer infections for every 10 year Gap and so you can make an argument about shielding and you can make an argument about young people having a whale of a time but you shouldn't be seeing a gap between 20-y olds and 30 wordss and 30 wordss and 40 wordss you know that that and that that's because of Prior um education of the immune system which means Coss immunity basically is exactly yeah exactly and so it makes sense but it does mean that the the proport the the age groups who are susceptible going forward and not necessarily the ones that were at the beginning as it's working it's because there's these other Corona viruses that are around there's other viruses which have got probably similar shape proteins on the surface these These epitopes are going to be Crossing I mean do you remember that study early on with measles and the MMR immunity that was a fascinating study where they tell us please so they looked at this is like 2020 data and they'd looked at um how sick people had become and and who had got infected and found that people who had antibodies two months were protected and people who had antibodies two months from the MMR vaccine had the best protection of all and it was really a very effective vaccine and it was a vaccine that we had tons of safety data on and yet having shown how protective it was they didn't want to do anything with it because we had to have novel products being given to everybody for some reason um so you know that that was just ridiculous how because it was such a clearcut Improvement in in protection and that just goes to show also that there's this sort of belief some people seem to have that our immune systems have got a clipboard with the tick boxes for each disease you've had your had that one had that one and it's not like that you know what happens is the pathogen is chopped up into multitude of tiny tiny fragments and all your body is doing is saying that's not me I that is that is foreign that bit there but that bit there being foreign is just simply the shape it's in and the shape of a tiny fragment of months can look very similar to the shape of a tiny fragment of a SAS COV too yeah we have this idea that you know I talk to my students that that the immunity is specific you make a specific immune response against a a specific organism but that's simplistic because as you say organisms are not the immune system doesn't say oh well that's the virus that that's the measles that's the MPS that's the rubella it's actually looking at the molecules on the surface of that the subcomponents of that I suppose the counter is that if you have had then no if you didn't have protection from the other things you've seen previously then you have an infection and then it's you able to demonstrate that you've had the full immune response to the whole thing and you can say yes you've got you've had that infection we can show it in your immune response so I guess it's a bit of both on the one hand you don't need to have seen that exact thing before to have some protection but on the other hand having seen that thing you can measure it using things in the immune system and yet we were told this is a novel virus to this we have no immunity we have no resistance this is something completely new yeah which looking back is just just just ludicrous yeah and I think would be ludicrous actually for any pathogen because nothing you know because your body recognize it as foreign not recognizes it because it's seen it before yeah but all life on the planet is basically the same there's the same genetic code the same amino acids making up proteins and and that there is similarity between the shapes I mean we go back to Edward Jena who inoculated this poor boy James fips with cowpox and uh I don't I don't want to go into that story now in detail I know we've got views on that but but the idea is the cowpox gave cross immunity to the small pox it's a different but similar yeah I think that's a useful concept to explain that situation yeah yeah yeah I was looking at you with some anxiety there because I know that's a separate a separate topic so I want to finish shortly CLA because we've done so much but but can you just clarify that the measles Ms through Bella vaccine was that providing protection against against Co yeah it was it was so it's the month's component of it we believe yeah and it maybe only did it for the Wuhan wave you know no nobody seem to have looked at it subsequently but during the Wuhan wave people who had Ms antibodies had very very good protection um but you know there's all sorts of aspects to when we were talking about that sort of 10% a suceptible story think there are lots of different ways in which we're protected from infection and we don't know which one of them is failing you know so we're talking about antibodies as if that was the issue but it may not have been that so for example our respiratory tracts aligned with a mucus layer in fact it's layers of different types of mucus that they're lined by and so if you if you are next to someone who's infected or you know you breathe it through the air you've got a huge dose of virus in your air and your lung that doesn't mean that you are going to be infected because if your mucus layer does its job properly the virus cannot get into a cell it just can't do that so something else has to go wrong to allow the virus to penetrate because that very last layer of mucus that sits right next to the cell is so thick that the like it the the a single virus is is too big to get through it and the layers that are sort of more runny and above that layer are constantly being Swept Away up and then we swallow it and it lands in the acid and it can't cause an infection so something goes wrong with that mucous layer in some people and we don't understand what it is and if we could understand that then that might teach us all sorts of other things around how the virus spreads and what you could do about it so what there's one interesting theory around how the virus can get through the mucos mucous layer which is that it hitch hikes on the back of the bacteria and that's very very interesting because um going back to Charles Chen's time they believed that influenza was spread by of bacteria called nowadays hemophilus influenza which was not the cause of influenza but they could find it in in people who had influenza know not every time but they could find it as if there was a relationship there between those organisms and you see that you know with influenza subsequently that a lot of the problem with viral influenza is actually the bacteria that are hanging around at the same time and you get these secondary bacterial infections and that's why antibiotics have you know been so important and that's also why we have to be very concerned about how viral infection was treated during the course of 2020 onwards because in the past if you were sick in the community you would see your doctor and they would greet you warmly with a smile and then they would say well you know have a listen to your chest you sound like you've got pneumonia I'm going to give you antibiotics I don't know what's caused your pneumonia but this is the protocol you get antibiotics and the antibiotics these people have being given would have prevented these secondary bacterial infections but they also had antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties which would have benefited these people and then on top of all of that you got the psychological benefit of being looked after and not being terrified you when people are terrified their cortisol levels go up and everything goes south so instead we terrified people told them well you know if you really must come to hospital wait till you're blue in the face and then we might look after you and so of course all of that response is going to have had an impact on mortality from respiratory disease in that period because we weren't treating it normally we were you know there were reasons why we gave antibiotics for Community neia even though some of those are viral in the past too it's just the antithesis of everything I've learned and taught over the past 45 years in clinical work and educational work this is exactly how we don't treat patients MH you know I mean you know every first year student look listen feel tap it's how you examine a patient and if you can't if you you can can you look on the phone maybe you certainly can't listen you certainly can't feel you can't palpate and you can't percuss them you know the fundamental basics of any medical examination become impossible I agree and that there's something about when you're in the room with the patient face to face with them you get to a feel for how they're breathing how they're Holdings How concerned they are you know and and that's not all from the words they using and and the idea that they can give you that over a phone call when the distance from a phone call creates a barrier that that you you don't have the trust there it's not just the barrier in communication that's the trust barrier gets broken as well and so people don't get to share in the same way information that the doctor needs to know yeah when I when I retired from full-time education I went back to being a junior staff nurse on A&E it was great there's no emails and no meetings but you know by that time I got a lifetime of of experience and some patients you go into the cubic and you think I'm not happy with them at all might not quite know why yeah and um I would go to the consultant and say you know I'm not happy with Mr Smith there and the Consultants to be fair said well tell you what John they might not have said this but this is what happened if you're not happy I'm not happy and they will go and look at them yeah and nine times out of 10 there would be an unrecognized pneumonia an unrecognized sepsis developing and an unrecognized stroke you know there was something that you just get from from your patient and the idea that you just sweep all that aside yeah reduces medicine to an artificial intelligence not a human interaction exactly that I mean that is the path that we've been traveling down more and more rapidly but prior to covid as well as recently is this idea that doctor's decision making is algorithmic and protocol driven and once you're there you don't need doctors anymore so doctors are doing themselves out of the job by pretending that these interpersonal skills that the trust and that these these signals this pattern recognition this the kind of thing that you can't quite put words to to feed into an algorithm don't count for anything and they do and and moreover the doctors have a very very important role as being ethical and being able to look at the patient in front of them at the time and be an advocate for that patient's needs at that time which will not necessarily fit with any algorithm or protocol because everybody's unique and you know people need to be treated as unique because otherwise they just get mashed through a machine and as well as that you mentioned that this immense placebo effect which we must never underestimate that when when you're with your doctor who you trust just the way they put the stethoscope on your chest Ju Ju Just it just gives that confidence you you you can feel that their confidence I I often used to be the patient for uh for things like trauma courses and you know the the the uh sometimes you get Junior doctors holding your your head you know when I was pretending to be the patient and and and one day I was there was a consultant orthopedic surgeon during the the the the teaching and the way he held my head I could just tell this guy was a superb clinician just the way he was touching me and it was it was you think oh this is fine I'm in good hands here literally yeah literally but the the massive you know and the doctor will just look at you and and oh yes oh yes oh yes that looks all right and you know if if it's someone you trust that the massive positive placebo effect from that and of course what we got through the pandemic was a massive no sibo effect as well yeah well the doctors are frightened of seeing you how will am I if they won't even see me because I'm so deadly sick therefore I'm probably going to die yeah and and and that that can become this idea that you believe you will makes you will and it's true true we also had the additional problem of people treating people as numbers and you know everybody got very obsessed with the pulse oximeters on the end of the finger which I think have a role to play and I think have been actually very important in hospital care but we've never actually tried using them in the community for chest infections to know what normal looks like we don't know what normal looks like and we started to say well if it's dipping to 85 or below 90 you need to come in and I'm not sure that that's right I'm not sure that that's right it might have been but we don't have that control group to say actually when people have chest infections and when they're having coughing fits it will dip and it will come back up and as long as it's coming back up you don't need to be in hospital yeah we slavishly follow British thoracic Society guidelines on that and uh they need to be well basically all this stuff needs to go through the mind of a clinician doesn't it but but but you're right we need to collect data on this and and work out what is normal yeah because very often we don't know the difference between physiology and pathology sometimes the line is BL and you know we had that sort of expression of they have got they've got happy hypoxia do you remember that term you think well if they're that happy why are you treating the hypoxia and they because they might crash at any time it's all going to be disaster and this is what this illness looked like it's not like any other pneumonia ever seen before and maybe they were right maybe they were right but I'm just I think there's a room for a little bit of Doubt there that that was the best way to go about things because once you've told somebody that thing on your finger tells you that you're dying and you need to come into the hospital then you are sort of setting them up for failure a bit you're setting up for the no sibo effect potentially yeah yeah so um I want to I'm going to wrap this up shortly CLA but this Ms at the start of the pandemic there could have been massive efficacy in isolating the MS component of the MMR giving that to people and that would have generated significant levels of protection as far as we understand against uh against Co is that is overstating the case I don't think you're overstating the case and I think that that that definitely looked like a promising route to have tried as a vaccine in a you know in a situation where they we had evidence of That vaccine from you know from before yeah and of course the the MS vaccine we're giving a precise known dose of antigen we're not giving an RNA instruction we're not giving an Ado virus Factor instruction we are actually giving the antigen in a totally controlled precise measure so we know exactly what we're getting we give the right dose of the right drug to the right patient to the right route at the right time and um it's a Pity that wasn't perhaps considered more yeah I mean I think there's always been this thing where uh government seems to like to throw its money behind Innovation they can say well we you know we're doing something new and it means that not only we solving a problem but we're also potentially developing investing in a way that could solve other problems in the future and I think that that there are occasions when that thinking is just ridiculous and detrimental because you're you know there are times when actually it pays to stick with what we know and this was exactly what happened in the swine flu pandemic back in 2009 where the decision was that we needed a vaccine and that the vaccine could not be a conventional influenza vaccine grown in eggs it had to be something novel and it turned out that the conventional influenza vaccine growning eggs was ready at exactly the same time as these novel things so the claim was it would take too long but it was ready at the same time but they went with something novel and the consequence was you about 100 teenagers in this country got narcolepsy which meant the Sleep Center their brain were permanently damaged and they could fall asleep or go into a sleep like paralysis while conscious at any time for the rest of their lives so hugely disabling um and it probably didn't actually have any benefit for swine flu either the Swedish um Public Health um official I can't remember exactly what her role was but she reckoned that it saved six lives in Sweden as as a Max you know well you know how ridiculous you've caused all this harm and you didn't really make a difference the arrogance of not learning from that mistake is just stunning indeed yeah and I like the saying if it ain't bust don't fix it yeah yeah CL um we have more to do um if you would like to that the next the next questions would be which we're not going to do now but um uh Co would likely kill me question mark death certificates a never wrong question mark a new variant spells Doom question mark um if you test positive you have covid yeah there's a lot to say on that question mark one in three people with Co spread it while asymptomatic question mark uh lockdowns save lives question mark lockdowns are not harmful question mark masks reduce transmission I think we're already given a spoiler on that one but uh children are resilient and uh zero covid is achievable so that that's still to come in in the meantime do get this you won't be able to put it down um it's just makes sense of everything and uh as indeed is this discussion helped massively CL so thank thank you so much we've been going for an hour and 23 minutes so you've done very well um and if you'd like to come back to discuss those future questions we will be absolutely delighted for now love thanks for now Dr CLA Craig pathologist doctor researcher author and campaigner for the good of humanity thank you very much thank you J

Channel: Dr. John Campbell

Views: 536,096

Keywords: physiology, nursing, NCLEX, health, disease, biology, medicine, nurse education, medical education, pathophysiology, campbell, human biology, human body

Id: AFA5fTeAJno

Length: 82min 15sec (4935 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 26 2023