'It's a complete and utter waste of time.' - Prof. Angus Dalgleish on the PM's Omicron booster plan

now professor angus douglish joins us he's an oncologist and infectious disease experts and a professor at st george's hospital medical school professor douglas we're delighted that you're joining us here on gb news today what's your view of the prime minister's strategy to postpone some medical appointments across the nhs to focus instead on covert booster jabs well first of all i must say i've followed this very very closely and i tend to take far more weight from uh dr the uh curtis the south african uh head of the uh medical association there who's assured us gave a very long chat yesterday that it is a very mild compared to anything else and i think that that is is very very important because that's what we expect as viruses go round and waves they get more infectious and they get less lethal so why would you want to close down the health service yet again for something that is more infectious now i look at it the other way i think that it's so infectious i don't think you can do anything about it just let us look at the figures on lockdown as they again were discussed this weekend very very solid figures who had the worst lockdown in europe it was actually belgium who had the least it was sweden and what was the difference who had the worst death rate it was belgium who had the worst trouble across everything it was belgium people say oh that says european thing and sweden's different no compare california and florida virtually identical climates everything florida no lockdown california massive lockdown and restrictions who has the worst death rate california so i think we need to learn that doing all these uh things trying to prevent spread is especially when they go up a gear and get more infectious i believe it's a complete not a waste of time and that as soon as the the virus goes through the population it's probably the quicker the better and in many ways it could be an infectious um vaccine as it were so with the death rate being much smaller and yes we hear that there's somebody in hospital with the backseat with the variant if they hadn't been in hospital at the very end i'd be very surprised because it's a terribly infectious it's going through like wildfire and people go to hospital and die and they often go with the uh uh covet but they don't diet kobe because they're dying on other things like the tragic case that we heard of someone having to go to hospital with severe abdominal pain they go into hospital and that is the problem and they pick up kovid they get classified as coping so i think a lot of the figures that we hear about people dying of code in hospital is exaggerated and as an oncologist i am really really concerned about people being put up i know so many cases that where the disease has gone from early potentially curable to being lethal or presented stage four disease where it is a really big problem with a high chance of dying so many people i mean the figure in calculation one of the figures was 750 000 people will be affected over the next year or two you cannot keep locking down an economy on a uh and basically that is what they're doing just actually say we're going to have these boosters boosters boosters and that brings me back to another thing is that if you keep giving these boosters for this variant which is escape the last one then the next variant will jump in because it will escape the other antibodies and it underpins what i said right at the beginning of the pandemic you do not go for antibodies in order to treat respiratory viral disease it is the t cell response i propose t cell vaccine which would boost everything and it doesn't matter when you have good t-cell responses what variant is it doesn't matter whether it's coded or flu and it's a very relatively easy thing to do but it has been ignored and i'm very uh very concerned about that and that is the action that i'd be taking instead of getting uh these more boosters which are only going to last three months maximum probably then you're going to need another booster so you'll have the nhs shut down forever no i really think now's the time to be really professor may i come in just because we haven't got too much time um i just want to put just for reasons of balance put what the prime minister has said this morning get your interpretation of it i know you take a different view but i quote from the prime minister i think the idea that this is somehow a mild version of the virus i think that's something we need to set on one side and just recognize the sheer pace at which it accelerates through the population so he says it's not milder basically that he's being advised by the usual heartbreakers of doom uh that they've got to plan for the worst case of the science officers well i mean if we plan for the worst case scenario and we're just going to have to lock down everything and never emerge again so i totally and utterly disagree and i i repeat what i'm saying and i would say why aren't we looking at more you know proper uh advice for people that one of the reasons people get these virus diseases at this time of the winter and they do sweep through all sorts is because they are they're low in vitamin d and they've done nothing about that in spite of all the publicity all right for people who are very vulnerable they decided they'd probably give them a small tablet a dose which is far too low to be of any use at all and this is due to the very bad advice from the scientific advisory committee and nutrition so i i really do think they should be concentrating more on these things than trying to get everybody boosted and see the rest of the nhs collapse professor angus douglas an oncologist infectious disease expert and professor at sun george's hospital medical school thanks a lot for joining us on gb news

Channel: GBNews

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Id: AKHYkHTRTnM

Length: 6min 1sec (361 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021