Cassandra Voices

Author: Billy Ralph

  • Manchurian Monkeys

    Acts of commission – such as an amputation of the wrong leg or a dose of morphine an order of magnitude higher than recommended – generally elicit moral outrage. This anger usually extends to the relatives of the deceased should the victim pass away. Based on figures from the U.S., where medical error is the third leading cause of death, we may infer that five thousands are dying each year occur as a result of medical examination or treatment in Ireland through either commission or omission. The likelihood is that the former outnumbers the latter (see Oops! Why Things Go Wrong: Understanding and Controlling Error by Niall Downey (Liffey Books, 2023))

    Over the course of the past century the medical profession has been responsible for horrendous, large scale acts of commission, usually in service of an ideology that made perfect sense at the time. Thus, various documentaries depict old Nazi or Japanese doctors recalling with rheumy eyed nostalgia ‘the good old days’; when everything made sense and boiling, freezing, vivisecting and poisoning human beings was all in a day’s work.

    Japanese Unit 731 inflicted unspeakable brutality on the population of China (Manchuria) and Korea. Their experiments were published in prestigious medical journals many of which were aware that the Manchurian monkey-subjects were in fact Chinese peasants (see Japan’s Infamous Unit 731 by Hal Green and Yuma Totani (Tuttle Classics, 2019). Many died during the experiments – one rarely survives vivisection – and the remainder were murdered before the laboratories were destroyed.

    Most will be familiar with accounts of the Nazi doctors – of whom a tiny fraction were put on trial at Nuremberg in 1947 – and from which we derive the Nuremberg Code on human experimentation. 50% of German doctors were members of the Nazi party in the early 1940s by which time the euthanasia programme were in full swing.

    Doctors’ trial, Nuremberg, 1946–1947.

    For the Greater Good?

    The rationale for carrying out much of this barbaric work was apparently ‘for the greater good’, clearly not of the subjects, but for those who held sway over life and death by virtue of their power. The academic brilliance of many of the Nazi doctors led to them being spirited away to the USA to prevent the Soviets accessing their genius. Many of today’s pharmaceutical companies benefitted from their discoveries, e.g. sulfanilamides, methadone, phenol to name but a few (See The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert Jay Lifton, Hachette Book Group, 1986).

    Of course it wasn’t only the Germans and Japanese who had a penchant for inflicting carnage on the human race; the USA’s own Fort Detrick was a bio-weapons development site, which has had several accidents since the 1960s (See Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick, by J. David McSwane Simon and Schuster, 2022). It was even cited in Professor Jeffry Sachs’ 2022 Lancet report concerning the possible source of Sars-CoV2.

    Less often discussed are acts of omission, unless one regards inordinately long waiting times for operations and treatments as omissions. These are not to be dismissed and would include the tragic deaths of children here in Ireland awaiting scoliosis surgery.

    The type of omission that we wish to speak about is perhaps more sinister and it doesn’t lend itself to explanations such as ‘scarce resources’ or ‘bureaucratic bumbling.’ Some omissions hint at a systemic evil.

    In 2020 at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic (a pandemic generated by fear and hysteria as much as illness), it was widely believed, and stated by the majority of family physicians, that there were no safe and effective treatments for the condition. After all, they had been told as much in a the guidelines that were issued by the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) in April 2020: ‘Care of the Covid-19 presumptive or test positive covid-19 patient at home, including management of the deteriorating patient.’ The document stated that 16% of those over eighty years could die and that 50% of deaths could occur in the community.

    Repurposed Drugs

    At that time, however, there was a growing number of doctors around the world using repurposed drugs, i.e. medications that were known to have effects outside of what they were designed to do, and that these features might be helpful to fighting this novel yet potentially deadly situation. This is referred to as ‘empirical treatment’ and doctors have been practising it for decades, if not centuries. Examples include the use of blood pressure tablets for headaches, aspirin in the treatment of heart attacks or sildenafil (Viagra). Many are eternally grateful for empiricism!

    To the long list of empirical treatments one should add hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and ivermectin (IVM). However, these once safe, cheap and readily available drugs were transformed by a sustained media campaign into potentially lethal, prohibitively expensive and scarce medicines. Debate around their possible merits bordered on the disavowal of heresy. Indeed, mentioning them on social media platforms resulted in suspension or banning as an army of so-called ‘fact-checkers’ protected the world from empiricism.

    Thus, the medical profession, scientists and public health officials abandoned critical faculties and moral courage and joined the mob to bray and bark out any nonsense fed to them by Anthony Fauci, Mike Ryan, Luke O’Neill and other such figures. None of whom had clinical responsibility for patients.

    Whilst all of this was unfolding there were people within the Health Service Executive (HSE) here in Ireland, and no doubt in many similar organisations around the world, who knew that repurposed drugs could have had a vital role to play. Indeed, Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India with over 241 million inhabitants, made readily available, take-away packs containing these drugs.


    Freedom of Information Request

    A recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveals the National Clinical Advisor and Group Lead at the HSE was issuing entirely conflicting instructions to hospital CEO’s around the country in respect of Hydroxychloroquine. A letter to the CEO’s of Irish Hospitals ,dated 24/March/2020 instructs that:

    Hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) has been identified as having antiviral activity against SARS-CoV2.There is sufficient rationale and pre-clinical evidence of effectiveness to include it as an antiviral treatment option and is included in the guideline.

    Its use was not, however permitted in the community or the Nursing Homes. Even more bizarrely in another letter of the same date, issued by Primary Care Reimbursement and Eligibility at the HSE instructed that all pharmacists in Ireland to report any doctor writing prescriptions for this medication.

    NPHET and/or the HSE had decided that patients would not be treated in the community despite us having effective medication (chloroquine has been known since 2002/3 to have antiviral properties) and despite it being prescribed, albeit empirically, by family physician (See: ‘Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread’ Virology Journal, 2005).

    Physicians working within the community – GP’s who cared sufficiently to question the guidelines – looked into using Hydroxychloroquine and found the available evidence instructing that Hydroxychloroquine was most effective if used early in treatment. This is a common theme with most antibiotic or antiviral medications. So, it ought to have been abundantly clear that hospital was not the place where the treatment was needed, nor the setting where the treatment might even work. Of the c. 2000 Covid deaths that occurred in the Irish Nursing Home Sector it is doubtful if any one of them had access to this ‘effective antiviral treatment,’ which might well have saved their lives.

    A ‘visiting window’ at a nursing home in Wetherby, West Yorkshire.

    Loss of Hope

    It’s shocking to consider that while politicians, journalists and medics were ridiculing the U.S. President for using Hydroxychloroquine – at a time when Irish GP’s were being disciplined and placed under investigation for trying to use it to treat the sick and the dying – the doctors in charge of policy knew perfectly well that it was a safe and effective treatment.

    Even if decisive evidence was lacking, their application might at least have given people hope, which could plausibly have had a placebo effect. It seems as if ‘hope’ is precisely what they wanted to remove. The absence of hope certainly contributed to many lonely deaths.

    This seems to have been designed to serve a Pharmaceutical Agenda. You see Covid genetic vaccines were licensed for use under ‘Emergency Use Authorisation’ (EUA). They could only escape the necessity of appropriate trials and be released onto the market on condition that there were no available treatments. So, effective medications were withheld and carnage ensued in the nursing home sector, where victims were deprived of an opportunity to say goodbye to loved ones weeping in car parks. Their deaths facilitated a Pharmaceutical Agenda. They apparently died ‘for the greater good’.

    This theme of no treatment, in spite of thousands of case studies from around the world, was perpetuated in a February 2021 HIQA report. It was an approach demonstrating either willful blindness or callous disregard for the need to ‘first do no harm.’

    In hindsight, and having climbed in and out of so many rabbit holes, it’s hard not to believe that most people just follow orders – they don’t think, they don’t read, they just pay the mortgage, feed the children, get through the day and find comfort in wearing blinkers. And who could blame them?

    The reality is probably more than most could bear. Manchurian Monkeys are everywhere and they need to be controlled. One can’t have liberal democracy upsetting the plans for a greater, if less populated, future. Thus, insidiously unelected and unaccountable bodies – such as the EU Commission, UN, IMF, WHO and WEF slowly dismantle any democratic processes that might thwart their path to political hegemony: suppressing free speech, the right of travel, right of assembly, bodily autonomy, online anonymity, cash transactions and soon perhaps all forms of political dissent.

    Feature Image: Building of the Unit 731 bioweapon facility in Harbin

  • The Birth of a Doctor

    The title of this article may seem somewhat prosaic, but given that it really is about birth after death it seems appropriate. For I really did die on July 25 2022, and that which came back to life was not the same person, and certainly not the same doctor.

    Prior to 2020 I hadn’t asked the question: ‘what is a doctor?’ I entered medical school to escape working class powerlessness, and successfully developed unhealthy delusions of grandeur reveling in a body of knowledge that I now know to be about as substantial as clouds. I did have some moments of sober reflection during my undergraduate days, but they were not in Dublin. Rather, the people and doctors of Moscow taught me to see the world from a different perspective. I have no love of Soviet-style Communism, and no wish to eulogize it, given the millions of lives lost or destroyed, but the sense of classlessness I experienced in the Russia of 1990 was liberating. It was a feeling that soon evaporated on returning to the ‘land of the free.’

    Reflecting now on how I practiced medicine, I think that it was fortunate that for much of that time I worked in low-risk environments. This was fortunate for the patients who encountered me at that time. Despite my paucity of knowledge and practical skills I succeeded in doing some good by listening and tried to understand complex human relationships, and the societal forces shaping these. With that perceived limited skill set – perhaps created by impostor syndrome and the pressure of the short duration of time per consultation – one invariably becomes a conduit for the distribution of pharmaceutical products. The quick pattern recognition followed by the reflexive use of the prescription pad. I was getting well paid. I was doing the same as my colleagues, or at least that’s what we told each other in practice meetings, and all was right in the world.

    Of course, I never really questioned what world I was actually referring to, my own or my patients. On reflection I chose willful blindness over open scepticism, a strange position to take for a young man brought up in Ireland since the 1960s. This was a country that showed clearly – at least to anyone who chose to look – that those in power and positions of authority had feet of clay. That period revealed clerical abuse, government corruption and waste, medical malfeasance in the form of vaccine experiments and the selling of children to wealthy Americans in collusion with the Church. Then we had the banking and economic collapse leading to the selling off of the country and its sovereignty, and more recently the Covid-19 scandal. Why did I think that the biomedical model served anyone other than those corporations and professions earning vast profits from illness?

    Image Daniele Idini.

    Awakening

    A growing cynicism and scepticism coalesced into an awakening on St Patrick’s day March 17, 2020 when then Taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar paraphrased Winston’s Churchill’s World War II speech: ‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ It was then, to quote Emily Dickenson, that I felt “a cleaving in my mind”. The juxtaposition of such incongruent images as the much loved and revered patron saint of Ireland with his herpetology skills, and the current barely re-elected and much reviled Taoiseach conjuring up images of the London Blitz when speaking about an impending wave of beta-corona virus infections recalled a Monty Python sketch.

    The more I listened to mainstream media in Ireland that mainly consisted of the state-funded Raidio Teilifis Éireann (RTÉ), the more the absurdities flowed and the cleft grew. Eventually, this dislocated myself and a few like-minded colleagues from the rest of our colleague’s apparent embrace of what to us seemed a clearly fabricated, dystopian reality. Doctors shut their practices, refused to see or treat patients because the Irish College of General Practitioners told them that there was no treatment available. Yet, the HSE had been claiming that hydroxychloroquine was effective in treating Sars-CoV1, from 2003, sending a circular to pharmacists suggesting they stock up on the drug and reserved it for treating patients in hospital with Sars-CoV2.

    Who thought that this was ethically and morally appropriate? The rest of society followed suit accepting with slack-jawed-gormlessness curious phrases such as ‘apart together’,’social distancing’,’flatten the curve,’ along with the ultra-dystopian ‘build back better’ and the ‘new normal’. What did any of these inane statements even mean?

    Societal strategies such as mandatory mask-wearing were inflicted with the emphatic certainty only fools can generate and even bigger fools gorge themselves on. Masks of any material, worn walking through restaurants, but not seated, even masks for solo journeys in cars. Then we had the perspex screens over which, apparently, viruses couldn’t jump, the safe purchasing practice of beer and crisps, but not socks and shoes, within the same department stores, and the viral-repellent Nine Euro Meal, along with the destructive removal of children from school for months.

    The sacred was not spared the ravages of this banal evil. Burials were in closed caskets, while no wakes were allowed, and only a ‘safe’ few mourners were permitted; weddings were cancelled, and masses went uncelebrated.

    The medical profession adopted its own dystopian practices such as artificially ventilating cases initially, at least until they realised they were actively killing people. Within general practice the main concern expressed on a well known GP support website was the potential loss of income if we couldn’t see patients. Any attempt to discuss the ramifications of drastically altering the daily rhythms of society was met with ridicule, and dismissed as irrelevant. After all, this was a pandemic and we could lose a substantial amount of our income! Later, when the topic of vaccine adverse events were raised, many of the same people urged us to shut up and vaccinate.

    Nursing Homes

    Meanwhile, in the nursing homes around Ireland, the elderly were left alone, unloved, unvisited and untreated unless it was end of life care. How ironic and criminally sad that these people should be treated this way for ‘their own good’.

    A personal story about a patient of mine may bring home the human tragedy. Jim and Mary were married for close to sixty years. Mary was moved to a nursing home after her dementia worsened to a point where she could no longer be cared for at home. Once that happened Jim visited her every day. Speaking to him after several of these visits he expressed his frustration at her memory loss. Then one day after a visit he came out and told me that he discovered that Mary had excellent recall of the events of their early life together, so he would just talk about those memories. For a while he had the woman he married back.

    Then the nursing homes prevented people visiting on account of Covid. Neither the residents nor their families were asked for their permission to be separated. Jim still visited everyday but he would come away frustrated. Mary would be placed in the window, like a mannequin, and Jim would stand outside. On a sunny day he would stand there looking at his own reflection, unable to see his wife.

    Jim was finally allowed in to see Mary, but by then she was on her death bed and was unable to share any memories or even say goodbye. This was for the greater good of course.

    What wasn’t used for anyone’s ‘ good’ were treatments such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine despite emerging evidence of efficacy from around the world from reputable clinicians. Curiously these ‘reputable’ clinicians rapidly became disreputable, despite decades of blemish-free clinical service to their patients. Some had very respectable research and academic careers. Yet, they became outcasts, renegades, not to be trusted according to the ‘fact-checkers.’ This latter group of reprobates turned out to be captured academics with vested interests in protecting certain ideologies or social media companies, pressurised by the U.S. state department and FBI to suppress all ‘thought crime’.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    But One Hope

    Fear was thus weaponised as the great and the good climbed aboard the gravy train and stoked fear until a mental paralysis gripped the nation. Any dissenting voice was dismissed as selfish and lacking a social conscience. We had but one hope: the vaccine, which was arriving at ‘warp speed,’ while Ursula von der Leyden was exhausting her texting thumb making sure that we in Europe would be saved.

    Everybody would be rescued, whether they wanted it or not, and sure who wouldn’t want a novel pharmaceutical product that was still in phase 3 of clinical trials. Trials that were confounded by giving the placebo arm the product, a product never before used successfully as a vaccine. This was a product for whom the English language had to be subverted in order to accommodate it. Only the insane or the selfish would not want to be rescued, and we don’t want those type of people in our ‘new normal’ world was the message that came from politicians, celebrities and doctors via a complicit media. They pleaded for all our sake to get vaccinated. These were people who at any other time would not give a moments reflection to inordinately long waiting times in our public hospitals, the overcrowding in our prisons, the record levels of homeless children, or the plight of the working class suddenly wanted to embrace collectivism, and ideas about humanity sharing the burden of this ‘pandemic.’ And it worked. Beaten down by fearmongering propaganda and the mind-numbing effects of Netflix, beer and pizza most people walked towards the light, or rather what they were told was the light.

    As of 2025 homelessness in Ireland is at a record high, along with immigration and the cost of living. Excess deaths, which remained steady until 2020 (2018: 31,116; 2019: 31,134; 2020: 31,765) rising to 33,055 in 2021, 35,477 in 2022, 35,459 in 2023 and 35,173 in 2024. Cancer is also on the rise. We have the second highest rate in Europe as of 2022 (our Minister for Health’s office informed me that this was because we are so much better at recording than other nations). International events have further revealed the powerless of many nations and that the rule of law isn’t universal. There is no rules based order. There is only power and money and the golden rule is that those who have the gold rule!

    Image: Polina Tankilevitch.

    Vaccine Injured

    Amongst the flotsam and jetsam post-Covid are the inadequately accounted injured by these vaccines. They are deemed to be invisible, however, even inconvenient and regularly have their realities denied by the very people who created the problem. The medical profession is still clinging to the idea that they saved the world from the plague and are indignant that more gratitude hasn’t been shown.

    The medical profession according to JAMA(Journal of the American Medical Association) has seen a 30% drop in public trust. This will have complex reasons behind it, but the combination of snout in trough and downright dishonesty will have contributed. Gaslighting those who were previously well and now cannot function after receiving Covid vaccines has only added to this.

    People will reflect on the misuse of the Covid vaccines, the profits made and the lies told about its efficacy and safety, and wonder how many times these same scenarios played out in a greater or lesser form in the past.

    After thirty years of practice, I simply can no longer engage with a profession that has been captured by an industry whose sole aim is profit. Most postgraduate medical training is paid for or delivered by the pharmaceutical industry. One has to question what are the priorities of an industry that spends $19 dollars on advertising and marketing for every dollar spent on research.

    This results is a disease model rather than one that examines the root cause. The former results in conditions that coincidentally have pharmaceutical products as alleged solutions. This chronic disease approach rarely if ever returns a person to a state of health. With such an interventionist approach one can understand why around a quarter of a million people may die each year at the hands of the medical profession in the USA, and perhaps 5,000 per annum in Ireland. An emphasis on sleep, diet, breath and movement is unlikely to result in such carnage or in such vast profits.

    The shifting of a paradigm is rarely easy to achieve, but it is doubly troublesome when the concepts are unfamiliar to the people one is seeing on a daily basis in practice. Not only have the medical profession been trained to view health through the lens of chronic disease but the population at large connect health this with pharmaceutical products. They receive this message from most hucksters who want you to buy their products/procedures/cleanses etc. So when it comes to the person taking control of their lives there is a gargantuan effort needed to shift many people’s locus of control from the external to the internal. And it can be financially risky to give a person agency over their own health.

    Image: Brett Sayles.

    Growing Awareness

    Fortunately, there is a growing awareness that lifestyle is more than a sidebar to achieving health. Instead it is health. One aspect in particular has gained a wide interest recently, the issue of insulin resistance.

    This is this concept that I now spend most of my consultations discussing with amenable patients. The subject can be as complex or as straight-forward as one wants to make it. Fundamentally, we do not need carbohydrates, another large industry – the misnamed ‘food industry’ – would disagree, but physiology says we don’t.

    Up to 70% of the Western diet is composed of carbohydrates. Most of the items in our supermarket trollies are in packets with barcodes and usually contain a lot of carbohydrate, and worse still refined carbohydrates. These products are broken down into the main fuel of the body and in particular the brain, i.e. glucose. However many of these products contain fructose, or more precisely high fructose corn syrup, a substance that causes a great deal of problems for our mitochondria and subsequently our cells and energy levels. Most of the health problems that we develop are ‘energy’ problems. Using this term runs the risk of wandering into the land of ‘woo,’ but slowly the concept of energy deficits as a cause of many inflammatory conditions, such as diabetes, cancers and dementia is gaining traction.

    Returning to insulin resistance. This is a phenomenon that occurs when we consume and create more glucose. Then our body habitus changes, i.e. we get more fat than muscle and we move less. We then need more insulin to regulate our glucose levels. And this is where current medical thinking creates the problem that it then goes on to profit from.

    We measure glucose not insulin. Glucose stays within the normal range for decades before it rises above some arbitrary threshold to be called Type 2 diabetes mellitus. But insulin has been raised for decades resulting in high blood pressure, altered lipids, migraines, anxiety, depression, IBS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, dementia, cancer and insomnia to list but a few. All of these conditions are seen as separate problems when in fact they have a common treatable root cause.

    Let me just clarify something at this stage. I am not saying that these complex conditions are solely caused by insulin resistance (IR), but IR is a fundamental feature and if more effort went into reducing IR through actual lifestyle changes then people could actually return to and maintain a state of good health.

    Image: Josh Sorenson.

    Suicide

    At the beginning of this article I alluded to how I died in 2022 and that was the death of this doctor. From that suicide attempt, an attempt precipitated by increasing dismay at the state of the world and my profession in particular, I have rejected many of the beliefs and gods of the past. I have found hope in taking an approach to both my lifestyle and that of my patients which actually has tangible results, and is not based on probabalistic forecasts. My own state of health is fundamental to how I practice medicine and is reflected in my consultation style and physical presence with my patients, and whether they ‘believe’ what I tell them until they see that it is or isn’t working for themselves. Then we rethink and try again. This is unlike the medical model that expects the patient to believe regardless of the almost inevitable side effects.

    The physician needs to be and live in the state of health that they want the patient to obtain. Patients are driven by emotion and to some extent by optics not by rational argument. An overweight, flatulent and out-of-breath doctor is not going to promote anything healthy in his or her patients. They can, however, empathize with the pill for every ill model because they have clearly embraced that wholeheartedly.

    The role of the doctor has declined in significance over time and will continue to do so with the evolution of more advanced AI models if doctors continue down the same road using the same disease model paradigms that are conveniently linked to pharmaceutical products. Instead, doctors need to revert to the model of the physicians of old, and perhaps once again let ‘food be thy medicine’ and be role models for their patients. Optics in today’s age of forever-on-screens is a useful adjunct, but the doctor-patient relationship untainted by influence from the pharmaceutical industry should still be the bedrock of the practice of medicine.

    Feature Image: Pixabay

  • Covid-19 Vaccines: Informed Consent?

    What if I told you that I had a new product – never before used on a population-wide basis – and after coming into use the manufacturer requested that a court compel the authorities to lock away the results of the initial trials from prying eyes for seventy five years?

    This same product is made using E.coli bacteria. Yes, they are the little buggers that can give you the runs, but they are not all bad. These same clever E.coli make strands of genetic material or recipes for a protein that’s actually found on the outside of the virus, Sars-CoV2,a beta-corona virus that in healthy people may give them a bad cold. For others it can prove nasty, but in this unfortunate group of people almost anything can prove nasty. This is the same spike protein that is thought to provoke the worst excesses of the immune response when one encounters a beta-corona virus.

    The genetic material uses a unique substance N1-methyl pseudouridine, a synthetic base not found in nature as one of the letters spelling out the recipe for spike protein production. This substance, we are told, stabilises the recipe and helps the cell produce spike protein for longer. That can be a good thing because we want spike protein, to allow our immune system to react to it and produce protective antibodies for future use.

    That would be all very well if that’s all it did. Pseudouridine, however, produces a phenomena called frameshifting so that the reading of the recipe can go a bit off track. It’s a bit like reading ‘add  4 cups of flower’ and instead adding ‘flour’ to your scone mix. Who knows what you might end up with. Actually nobody knows for sure.

    And that’s not the only problem with letting E.coli make products for humans. E.coli have their own agendas. They are living creatures and not machines. They are under evolutionary pressure to disseminate their genes. One of the ways in which they do so is by packaging them into a little envelope called a plasmid and ejecting it out into the world. This is the process used to make the mRNA for the Covid vaccines, only the bacteria don’t just follow the recipe. They are artists and so embellish and improvise and sneak their DNA into the end product.

    Now the manufacturer assures us that they are one step ahead of these fiendish creatures and have managed to remove most, but not all of this foreign material. The manufacturers have in the past few years caught a break from the regulators who once upon a time said that the DNA from bacteria had to be so low that it was measured in picograms. It’s now measured in nanograms, which is one thousand times greater!

    They reassure us that this tiny amount – albeit one thousand times greater than was previously permitted – is broken down by the immune system. The immune system doesn’t like ‘naked DNA,’ i.e. DNA free-floating in the body. What if it’s not naked, but contained within the lipid nanoparticle, and it enters the cell with the rest of its encapsulated material?

    If the DNA passed on to us humans from our E.coli cousins were to confer the ability to photosynthesise, I’d gladly accept the reduction in my food bill, but what does the bacterial DNA code for?

    But its ok, or at least the manufacturers tell us it is. The level of DNA set by the FDA is what the manufacturer says is in their products. They’ve tested them and the various regulatory bodies believe them. Fingers crossed behind the back etc etc.

    Several independent researchers, however, noticed the crossing of fingers trick and had a look for themselves and found a lot more bacterial DNA. Now who do we believe?

    If that isn’t bad enough something else in the vials, and I don’t understand why it is there. This wasn’t presented to the FDA in the original application for licensing as ‘it was considered to be a non-functional part of the plasmid.’ Its presence has been disputed by some regulatory bodies and researchers, but is now actually recorded in the manufacturer’s literature.

    This substance is Simian virus 40, not all of the virus, just a portion called a promoter/enhancer sequence. In another incarnation this same substance – genetic material from a monkey virus – facilitates the entry of genetic material into the nucleus and hence the genome of the individual treated. This is the desired aim in this other incarnation, but is it the desired aim in the Covid vaccines? If not then why is it there?

    Authorities have sought to reassure those asking questions about SV40 that it is a ‘naturally occurring virus’. Somehow telling me that I am to be injected with a portion of genetic material from a virus that infects monkeys doesn’t reassure me.

    Let us speculate for a moment on the ramifications if this genetic sequence did facilitate the entry of the vaccine genetic material into our genetic material. If it was a heart cell or a liver cell nothing might happen. That genetic material may never again be expressed in the lifetime of that individual especially if they were elderly, wherein cellular activity, like most other activities, is slowed right down. If, however, the genetic material is incorporated into a sperm cell, what then? It could theoretically be transferred to the next generation through a baby with rapidly growing cells. What then?

    Pseudouridine is a synthetic substance not found in nature. Will we have then created semi-synthetic life forms or trans-humans? And just to stretch this concept to the point of being almost ridiculous, who owns the genetic material? Does the manufacturer have any proprietorial rights over the trans-human creature? When I discussed this with ChatGPT it gave me a long winded explanation as to why this is a complex medicolegal area, but it didn’t say ‘no’.

    Maybe I’m over-reacting. Maybe N1-methyl pseudouridine, bacterial plasmid DNA and fragments of SV40 will do me no harm. But what about the lipid nanoparticle?

    Surely a fatty bubble couldn’t do us harm, or could it?

    Once again, regulatory authorities dispute that there is substantial risk to us humans. They deny the amount of DNA, whether the DNA can incorporate into our genome, whether the mRNA can incorporate into our genome, significance of the SV40 fragment and the potential side effects of synthetic lipids.

    The title of this essay is ‘Informed Consent.’ At the time that these products where given emergency use authorisation they were still technically experimental and given the abundance of unanswered questions I would say they remain experimental.

    The 1947 Nuremberg Code, formulated after the trials of the Nazi doctors stresses the concept of informed consent before an experimental medical procedure is carried out on a human being. What percentage of the 70% of the world’s population who received these products can say that they gave ‘informed consent’?

  • G.P. Practice: Foreshadowing Dystopia?

    When the Irish government via the HSE (Health Services Executive) introduced a Chronic Disease Management programme into general practice, and offered to pay G.P.s for running with it I thought that at last Irish general practice was moving away from its original reactive model and embracing a NHS-style piece work-approach.

    We could now show our paymasters what we had done during the working day, not unlike the majority of ordinary people who work for a living. How very plebeian.

    As mentioned, a version of this system already exists in the U.K., having been introduced in 2004, against much resistance from the usual suspects. However, once income rose by 25% within a short period of time, a mouth full of gold seemed to make it impossible for anyone to grumble very loudly.

    It didn’t take long before problems became apparent, as G.P.s focused on the work that generated most income, waiting times for appointments increased. The government required large amounts of data, so administration workloads increased; a tension thus arose between the demands of actual general practice and that of the masters they served.

    That last point needs a little clarification. In the UK the software most commonly used is EMIS. Once a consultation begins, EMIS makes certain demands of the G.P. on behalf of the Department of Health, which appear on the computer screen. The G.P. is paid based on the responses given to these demands, not on what the patient needs, wants or demands. The poor G.P. is now serving two masters, one of whom values metrics, the other maybe just some empathy. But the former pays the bills. Having worked and trained in the U.K., I soon became aware of the grumblings of family doctors and the frustrations of patients.

    We now have a similar system in Ireland. It would be nice to think that this will improve the lives of patients and outcomes, and not just increase the incomes of G.P.s, the pharmaceutical industry and any other entities that benefit from illness in society. In the U.K. the evidence would suggest that the management of chronic diseases was improving pre-2004 with the introduction of national and international guidelines and the use of clinical audits in practice.

    No Difference to Mortality

    There is some evidence to suggest that the management of specific conditions such as asthma and diabetes did improve after 2004, especially in lower socio-economic areas resulting in less emergency admissions, but there appears to be little or no evidence that it has made any difference to mortality.

    Having written that last sentence I’m not sure I fully understand it. I’m assuming that the conditions being paid for improved, as per the metrics. Or did it just look good on paper but not translate into increased longevity for the patient?

    I wonder who benefits from gathering metrics, moving them up or down, using them to diagnose and prescribe? I suspect there is a health benefit for those suffering from chronic diseases. They see their G.P. regularly and are told at least twice per year that they ‘could do better’, are given more medications and the promise of a dietitian, physiotherapist, occupational therapist or perhaps the mythical unicorn of the health service, a psychologist.

    But what are we really doing with this programme which, since 2022, provides ‘opportunistic case finding’, AKA finding customers for Pharma?

    As G.P.s we are incentivised to find and manage illness, not return people to health, we maintain the status quo and consider our roles to be central to the process.

    I would argue that we are central because without G.P.s the pharmaceutical industry would experience a profit crushing bottleneck. We therefore accept their ‘educational’ courses and their biomedical model of illness as a unidirectional process. Nowhere do we engage our patients in the fundamentals of health, such as how to breathe, sleep, eat, move and connect with others. Strangely, these crucial determinants are seen as by-the-ways, not fundamentals.

    We have a society where the state we call health is detrimental to the wellbeing of the shareholders of the large pharmaceutical companies based here.

    Fat Boy Slim

    For many the Mediterranean lifestyle consists of a takeaway pizza and imported Spanish beer consumed whilst wedged into a Fat-Boy recliner watching perfectly coiffured people extolling the virtue of the Mediterranean lifestyle.

    When watching sports becomes the nations favourite activity; when luxury, ease and relaxation, are lauded ambitions; when a narrow STEM education is promoted over the breath of the arts, is it any wonder that we have become a society of vacuous, soft-shelled and compliant serfs?

    Maybe we need a dose of Hobbesian reality, to go with our morning lattes, and make us realise that we won’t be protected from the ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ life by accumulating ‘likes’ ,’followers’ or virtual friends on social media. Alas, we are creating William Blake’s ‘mind forged manacles’, as we shackle ourselves to a beast that cannot be satiated.

    In my view the simplistic associations that we are developing between metrics such as blood pressure, cholesterol etc, the remuneration of doctors and alleged health outcomes is a road leading to obsolescence of G.P. practice, as AI (Artificial Intelligence) can do this far more efficiently and quickly than any human, and it won’t take ten years to train it to perform the role.

    When we structure a health service around metrics, data and finance we are defining these as our goals. Lip service is paid to actual health. These numbers then become a society’s hallmarks of health.

    Systems of Control

    It doesn’t take too much of a stretch of the imagination to link all possible systems that use metrics to make decisions about human beings and turn them into systems of control.

    The Internet of Things will in theory provide this interconnectedness so that our financial, health, consumer and in some circumstances political data can be knitted into societal straitjackets, for our own good of course.

    Yuval Noah Harari has made a career frightening the pants off people on this subject. And Mustafa Suleyman in his book The Coming Wave documents the alarming power the already all-pervasive influence of AI, and what it might be in the future.

    For those of us who enjoy chaos and unpredictability this is, to coin the exhausted hackneyed phrase, dystopian but if one is of an authoritarian bent, or just has a deludedly ‘in control’ mindset, this shouts out as an opportunity to create a barcoded Nirvana.

    We could control everything from what people eat, what they wear, how far they drive, how much they move, physically, and even who they associate with, using personalised algorithms.

    The technology already exists. Ubiquitous facial recognition technology, central bank digital currency, social credit scoring systems, wearable devices that record movement and supermarkets that would allow purchases of the ‘right’ sorts of goods for you if you are the ‘right’ sort of person for that product. This could all be linked to one’s current PPSN (Personal Public Service Number).

    What could be simpler. A benevolent government could ‘incentivise’, initially, the consumption of the ‘right’ foodstuffs, consumed in the company of the ‘right’ people, whilst watching the ‘right’ types of programmes followed by the ‘appropriate’ amount of exercise.

    Brave New World?

    Wouldn’t that be such a healthy world? We could prevent obesity, under-activity, mindless viewing of soaps, loitering, even voting for the wrong candidate!

    The preceding description is one of an idealised world, in which those in power have our best interests at heart, but it could have a darker side.

    A healthy population would be bad for business and business owns politics through a process euphemistically termed lobbying. There is something malodorous about the funding of the main regulatory bodies in for example the pharmaceutical industry. The FDA in America, EMA in Europe and the TGA in Australia are over 70% funded by the industry they are charged with regulating.

    Not only is the fox in charge of the chicken coop but he also has the farmer in his employment. This leaves us chickens stuffed and roasted and, perversely, eternally grateful.

    A truly nefarious government influenced by business might even encourage the production of foodstuffs that make us ill, whilst our minds are hijacked by media that have the intellectual value of chewing gum. Meanwhile our bodies convert the ‘food’ into surplus, never to be utilised, into fat.

    A few decades of this and we are ready to invite another business into the rest of our shortened existence, the erroneously named, health industry and all it has to offer.

    As a species we would only have value as consumers, passed from one corporate entity to the next for, for the seventy or less years that we spend on this Earth, our value measured accurately at each stage by metrics dictated by the needs of the individual corporations.

    Thankfully such a scenario is only found in dystopian science fiction.

  • Psychedelic Eucharist

    In October 2018, I wrote an article for the Irish Medical Times entitled: ‘Acid Test-are hallucinogens finally shaking off their taboo?’ The impetus came from reading Michael Pollan’s How to Change your Mind (New York, 2018), Michael A.Lee’s Acid Dreams The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (New York, 1985) and James Fadiman’s The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide (Maine, 2011), all of which explore the history, myths and indisputable facts around what has been, over many decades, a highly contentious subject.

    I was surprised that the Irish Medical Times deigned to publish it. After all, these are schedule 1 substances, i.e. ‘dangerous substances with no medical or scientific value’ according to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977.

    In hindsight, I consider my 2018 article naïve and anachronistic, leading the reader to believe that these substances are, for the most part, recent cultural adjuncts.

    Psychedelic Therapy – “Love is the Glue”

    The Immortality Key

    A recent award-winning book by Brian C. Murareska, The Immortality Key The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (New York, 2020) on the use of ‘mind-manifesting’ (psychedelics) or ‘god-inspiring’ (entheogens) and their use in human cultures for millennia prompts this revisionist take.

    The book explores such practices as the use of kykeon, a plant-infused wine used during the infamous, but little understood, Eleusinian Mysteries; the Vedic traditions of India in which a similar psychedelic substance called soma was consumed; and the cultures of south and central America where ayahuasca, peyote or psilocybin are still used in their religious ceremonies.

    The human desire to ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’ long predates Harvard Universities notorious Professor Timothy O’Leary, once labelled ‘America’s most dangerous man’. Although, this latter titled was supposedly bestowed on him by a President who vowed to bomb an agrarian society ‘back to the stone age’ in the name of democracy.

    What can explain a near universal desire, traversing cultures and millennia, for psychedelics? And why has its practice been vilified, persecuted and legislated against, pushing it into the underworld of crime, rather than exalting and exhibiting it as a means to transcendence and spiritual enlightenment?

    Drug use in the 1960s was portrayed by the media – with help from the CIA – as posing a threat to respectable society – middle class, consumerist values hypocritically portrayed as love of family, country and God. What it really represented was a genuine threat to production of drones for the corporate, industrial and military establishments.

    Evidence of the health benefits of these substances, if used in controlled and supervised environments, were clear, even in the 1960s. By then a thousand research papers were in print demonstrating dramatic therapeutic effects for conditions such as chronic depression, alcohol dependence and anxiety in cancer patients.

    Canadian psychiatrist Humphry Osmond obtained abstinence in 45% of his alcohol dependent patients at one year post treatment. There are no products today in the field of addiction medicine that can produce such impressive results.

    Then all studies were stopped, the substances were deemed dangerous and subsequently made illegal, even in research settings; this despite their non-addictive nature. In fact, repeated dosing has less and less of an effect.

    Yet these are drugs with an excellent safety profile, as it is almost impossible to overdose. They have clear health benefits and provide spiritual insights. Nonetheless, for over thirty years no further research was allowed to be carried out.

    Finally, in early 2000 Professor Roland Griffiths at St. John’s Hopkins University, Baltimore carried out the first of the latest wave of research using psilocybin (the active ingredient in several species of fungi, P.semilanceata, or Liberty cap mushrooms – that can be found here in Ireland).

    Now Imperial College, London and even Tallaght University Hospital have carried out research using these substances.

    What We Learn On Psychedelics

    Caveats

    Before going any further in extolling the virtues of psychoactive plants from historical, cultural or medicinal standpoints it is worth highlighting serious caveats.

    Psychoactive substances, and that includes alcohol, should not be used by those with immature brains, i.e. those under twenty-five years-of-age. Before this age the prefrontal cortex – that bit of the brain that makes you do the right thing when the right thing is the hard thing to do, according to Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: the Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York, 2017) – is not fully developed.

    Clearly, as witnessed in our world at large, this maturation process is not inevitable. Two essential conditions for the safe use of these substances are usually absent when young people ‘drop a tab’ washed down with a bottle of vodka on an all-night bender, with equally immature and vulnerable friends.

    These are the set (the mindset) and the setting (an appropriately supervised environment). These substances were never meant to be abused in this way. Indeed, there are so many things in our society that were never meant to be abused – love, trust, community, friendship etc.

    If we broaden out the list of psychoactives, beyond the schedule 1 substances, we do encounter substances as harmless as nutmeg, nausea-inducing fly agaric (the iconic red and white fungus of children’s storybooks), the lethal mandrake (of witch folklore) and Deadly Nightshade. Apart from shamans in Lapland drinking fly agaric laced reindeer urine, who even knows about these substances?

    So why the paternalistic need to protect society? To my mind it is part of a sinister power play between the perceived powers of good, i.e. Church and State and evil i.e. the ungovernable, the anarchistic psychonaut.

    This is of course a nonsense, fairytale for adult consumption. Those who have used and currently use psychadelics responsibly are looking for shortcuts to enlightenment by transcending the world of the everyday perceived consciousness, in order to experience the numinous.

    Anarchy

    Such aspirations are equated with anarchic ideas questioning the need for the boundaries of laws and earthly rules if one experiences transcendence.

    The question may be asked: what need is there to fritter one’s life away in meaningless work to earn valueless money to spend on vacuous consumer goods if one can experience Nirvana?

    And what need would there be for the religious authorities of the world, if one achieves direct access to the heavenly realm whilst still on earth, or if one can die before one dies?

    These very concepts bring us to the main theme of Brian C. Muraresku’s The Immortality Key, exploring various ancient traditions, over three thousand years, in which psychedelic substances were used to achieve these transcendent states.

    These were traditions and practices guided and controlled mainly by women, and they continued up until their brutal eradication by the many Inquisitions of the Catholic Church.

    These psychedelic ceremonies were disruptive because of their use of drugs by women to bypass manmade barriers to transcendence. Muraresku’s research supports The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis that implies that much of Christian and indeed Western culture has borrowed more than it wants to admit from ancient ‘barbarian’ cultures.

    Depiction of the Aztec goddess Itzpapalotl from the Codex Borgia.

    Role of Women

    The role of women as holders of sacred knowledge was systematically undermined from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries, especially by the Papacy during the many Inquisitions, and also by the early Protestant churches. Tens of thousands of women were tortured and murdered because of male fears of their sacred, potentially subversive knowledge, and not because they were ‘witches’, wreaking havoc on innocent communities.

    The Church has always feared woman. Mary Magdalen should have become the first Pope ahead of Peter, and spread the word of Jesus, which required no institutions to disseminate, and no male power to dominate.

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote lucidly about the Catholic Church’s dilemma in The Brothers Karamazov. ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ a Jesuit, clearly explains to the returning Jesus why his potentially disruptive presence is unwelcome – and that his religion of personal responsibility on the path to enlightenment could negate the role of all-powerful Church.

    Today our society reflects this loss of spiritual responsibility. Those practising formal religions may read the holy books but generally take them too literally, and often live lives devoid of profound contemplation.

    Many of the flock consume religion like they consume capitalist goods, failing to question the meaning of the texts as they fail to explore the source of their cheap consumer goods surrounding them.

    Similarly, we consume products that are allegedly food, but don’t nourish us; information from media companies that doesn’t inform us; and pharmaceutical products that promise health, but perpetuate illness. All are profiting from a sick society.

    Preparation of Ayahuasca, Province of Pastaza, Ecuador.

    Full Circle

    What effect would widespread use of psychadelics achieve today? Perhaps a reduction in the level of fear in society; and less social atomisation as we move away from an increasingly locked-in and isolated world of gadgets and home deliveries.

    It could perhaps lead to greater rejection of hierarchical authority, one often based on arbitrary rules and which offer only self-serving explanations about why society should be moulded in one way as opposed to another, more intuitive, way. Psychedelics might even lead to greater self-reliance, and a more human-centred form of socialism.

    The wisdom our ancestors knew, and cherished, which, for the most part, we have arrogantly disregarded in favour of materialist theories in science, offers great insights.

    Perhaps we are coming full circle, as Bernardo Kastrup discusses in his series of essays Science Ideated: the fall of matter and the contours of the next mainstream scientific worldview (New York, 2021).

    Traditionally, science has mistakenly assumed mind and consciousness to be epiphenomena of materialism. However, having reached an impasse, especially in the science of consciousness, we require a revaluation, and perhaps greater humility towards the wisdom of Hinduism, Buddhism and the Sufi tradition of Islam, as we consider what these have to say about mind and consciousness.

    The awakening of an interest in psychedelics, both in academia and in society at large, perhaps reflects an intuitive desire to know more than science can explain, and learn more than fundamentalist religious teachings can reveal, instead validating a felt experience at a deep spiritual level.

  • Covid-19 Absurdities

    Foremost among Utopian absurdities, we had the false promise of ZeroCovid. This continues to inflict untold damage on millions of lives and livelihoods that have been lost along the mystical path to salvation.

    Although the ZeroCovid leaders identified themselves with logic and rationality, the fanciful idea of every country excluding an influenza-like virus appears to have been a hangover from Judeo-Christian eschatology, which purports to save human beings from themselves.

    Other Utopian modern ideologies including Communism, Nazism and even neoconservatism, adopt a similar schema, wherein a vanguard elite guides the flock to safety.

    The nonsense started before the ZeroCovid concept grew legs, as China, the source of our slave-produced consumer goods, provided carefully choreographed footage demonstrating how instantaneous death ensued after infection with the deadly pox. All dutifully conveyed by compromised media.

    That China also runs concentration camps for the Uyghur Muslim minority, and harvests organs for transplantation from healthy executed prisoners was ignored. The West adopted a lockdown policy that represented the onset of another, dystopian Cultural Revolution.

    The WHO advised the West that lockdowns were essential. This advice arrived despite the 2019 WHO pandemic preparedness document containing no such recommendation. China then supplied genetic sequences they happened to have lying around to dodgy German academics to create the PCR test, which is a research tool not a diagnostic test.

    Weren’t we so lucky that the Wuhan Institute of virology is located near the alleged ground zero? It just so happened to be doing gain of function research on bat corona viruses in conjunction with the Americans.

    Herd Immunity

    Initially there were sensible discussions – including from the U.K.’s chief scientific officer Patrick Vallance – around herd immunity, the limited lethality of corona viruses in general, and the potentially disastrous effects of shutting down entire societies.

    Sweden, then a bastion of social democracy, held on to its rational faculties. Sadly, the government of no other major Western democracy seriously weighed up the effects on society of its public health policy. In an atmosphere of acute hysteria some governments acted against the advice of their health authorities.

    Resistance to drastic measures broke down once the Italians began singing to the world from their balconies, and army trucks were filmed removing dozens of bodies from hospital morgues. Strange how film crews always seem to know when to turn up to capture such footage.

    In what was the final twist of the thumb screw, our old friend Professor Reliable Data from Imperial College pulled scary figures from a dark orifice and waved it in the face of sceptics. Bear in mind, the same guy had predicted in 2005 that up to one hundred and fifty million people could die from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.

    Despite the reasoned arguments of Nobel laureate Professor Michael Levitt, which few were able to read or hear, the British and others opted for the doom-laden scenario.

    T-Shock

    Meanwhile, on our own benighted little island of Ireland, beloved of Big Pharma and Big Tech, T-Shock Varadkar took to the podium to address the nation in our solemn hour, as the spectre of a common cold virus loomed on the horizon. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill’s World War II speech, he told the nation ‘this is the calm before the storm…’ before opining that there could be up to 85,000 deaths.

    Severe limits were placed on our freedom to roam freely and meet one another, as if we faced the impending Blitzkreig. He asked us to perform the unlikely feat of ‘coming together as a nation by staying apart.’

    Ironically, the wellbeing of the nation had become the central focus for a right-wing government, as individual needs and desires were cast aside, apparently for the common good. A country that had racked up vast personal and household debt worshipping at the altar of Mammon was expected to do a U-turn and become altruistic. But beneath the surface snouts were in the trough.

    For the first time in the history of infectious diseases the entire global population, healthy and infirm, would now be forced to quarantine, as apparently we could be asymptomatically-ill, or healthy-sick.

    Staying apart from each other meant no visits to elderly relatives, because grandchildren might kill their grannies. Children might even infect one another with a disease less likely to kill than being struck by a fork of lightning.

    Naturally outdoor sports and music events would have to be prohibited too. After all, they wouldn’t want people to be discussing the bullshit over a few pints. And finally, most small and medium sized businesses were to be closed down, regardless of the long-term effects.

    Well not all small businesses. Off licences, fast food outlets and supermarkets would still be open. These however are usually staffed by low skilled, low-wage earners. Young and expendable in other words.

    The propertied middle class would stay at home, protected from the menace of infection behind computer screens, home deliveries and A-rated houses. These were the civil servants, tech workers, teachers, and professional classes.

    This ‘Zoomocracy’ would ‘stay safe’, while boosting the profits of Messrs Bezos, Gates, Dorsey, Zuckerberg et al. Somehow the top ten wealthiest men in the world managed to double their wealth in the midst of the biggest international crisis since World War II. It would make you wonder who was really in control.

    Garda Checks

    We were treated to the daily sight of embarrassed members of the Gardai stopping ordinary citizens on their way to shops enquiring as to the purpose of their journeys.

    Other brave fellows formed road blocks at entry points to beaches or mountain trails. A particularly bizarre incident took place one Sunday near the tiny Cavan village of Mullahoran, when the only four roads leading to the Catholic church were blocked by garda cars preventing parishioners accessing their place of worship.

    The terror was augmented by the obscene nightly roll call of death and pestilence, which had the desired effect on the majority. Those who didn’t succumb to the fear were subjected to ridicule, or simply starved of the oxygen of publicity. Dissenters were forced to resign from their jobs.

    Throughout, we were repeatedly assured as to its deadliness, yet the median age of death was eighty-two years of age. The true figures for the numbers who died of (not with!) this virus will never be known.

    Paradoxically, despite the elevated risk of those over eighty years of age dying from COVID-19, their family doctors were advised that they didn’t need to see their patients.

    There were simply no treatments available. This despite Professor Didier Raoult from Marseille, Professor Paul Marek from Virginia and Professor Peter McCullough from Texas successfully repurposing drugs. The advice for the Irish patient was to take two paracetamol and at the first tinge of blue call an ambulance. Primum non nocere, my arse.

    https://twitter.com/BillyRalph/status/1458052402372923392

    Psychological Torture

    Fear, like any stimulus exhausts itself, so using the support and advice from various purveyors of psychological tortures, such as Susan Michie, governments introduced curveballs to confuse the population even further. We couldn’t have people waking up and smelling the bullshit when they reflected on how many in their social circles had actually died of this deadly virus, relative to an average influenza season.

    ‘The New Normal’ was a term coined by very shady unelected people and repeated ad nauseum by some equally shady elected individuals.

    Once measures designed to ‘open up’ society were introduced we were treated to the infamous €9-45 minute meal and a pint. No meal, no pint. Then we had the restricted purchasing within supermarkets – crisps and condoms, but no socks or Nerf guns.

    Then came the masks, for almost every setting, including eventually, primary schools. Lone occupants of cars and swimmers at the Forty Foot and even people out picking blackberries in the remotest parts of Ireland weren’t excused.

    All of this imported from totalitarian China! And woe betide anyone not wearing their badge of allegiance. These untermensch were jostled by shopping centre security guards, refused access to medical care and even arrested, regardless of their age. And in the final entry in this sorry list, jailed.

    Having endured the relentless propaganda, lockdowns, masks, social isolation, endless hours of Netflix, nourished on the finest delicacies from Dominoes and McDonalds, the vast majority of the country’s wage slaves were simply dying to become commuters and patrons of the country’s pubs, cafes and restaurants once again.

    Safety First…

    So, when the experimental mRNA gene therapy, also known as the Covid vaccine, became available the population had been primed. Primed by the most successful advertising campaign in history, a global conformity Edward Bernays and his admirer Joseph Goebbels could have only dreamed of achieving.

    That ‘vaccine’ is the gift that keeps on giving – to its manufacturers. If Bill Gates’s wish comes true all seven billion humans on the planet will receive it.

    It is so safe that one manufacturer persuaded a court that its supporting data should be hidden away from prying eyes for seventy-five years. Nonetheless, the post-mortem in the peer reviewed literature is revealing serious adverse reactions.

    We heard from many sources including our own resident expert Professor Luke O’Neill that the vaccine was a game changer, while potential conflicts of interest were never disclosed or discussed during the extended time he spent on air.

    Other worthies such as dear old Joe Biden advised that you would not catch the virus, it would stop the transmission of the virus, and even stop hospitalisations and deaths.

    Fast forward a few months and you can catch the virus, you can transmit it, you can end up in hospital and die despite two, three or even four shots of this miracle medicine.

    Worst of all, we now can’t have an open scientific debate because the truth might get in the way of the vast profit potential for the manufacturers how inept our so-called experts really are, and how venal politicians in so-called democracies became as they made light of civil liberties.

    Medical Profession

    Today in Ireland, most of the medical profession are reluctant to acknowledge the damage inflicted on societies by their gullible and myopic approach of shutting down society, and they most certainly do not want to kill the golden goose, especially in general practice.

    No heed is taken of the CDC-VAERS data, Eudravigilance, WHO’s own reporting, the Yellow Card system in the UK, the up to 40% rise in life insurance pay outs in some European countries; resistance to exposing drug trial data to public scrutiny.

    A company that previously paid out the largest health care fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine is now making billions in profits.

    No heed is taken of the meteoric rise in the careers of so-called celebrity scientists and doctors whose integrity and ethics were dispensed with at the first whiff of the profits on show.

    Contrast this with some real academics and scientists whose careers have been badly damaged by retaining their integrity; for example Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, Professor Martin Kuldorff of Harvard, Professor Jay Bhattacharya and Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford, and Professor Peter McCullough of Texas A&M.

    This latter group called for the availability of early treatments, focused protection of the vulnerable, but for society to function as normal to limit unintended damage. They also advocated for judicious not widespread use of an experimental product, avoiding children and pregnant women in particular, and most importantly preserving scientific debate.

    Instead, we got lockdowns and restrictions on civil liberties, no early treatments, and a coercive vaccination campaign straight form the CCP playbook.

    Feature Image is a still from RTE’s Claire Byrne Live of Professor Luke O’Neil trying ‘Zorbing’.

  • Is General Practice a Victim of Pandemic?

    I loved working for the NHS (National Health Service), especially as it was configured in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Bradford was a health action zone, and probably still is due to its high level of social deprivation. This meant it got more funding for health and social initiatives.

    Darndale, Dublin or Moyross, Limerick would be areas with similar issues. The practices in Bradford were large and covered virtually everything except performing major surgeries and delivering babies, meaning there was an eclectic mix of health professionals, all under the same roof. This was referred to as a ‘primary care team’. A team?

    After completing my undergraduate training in Dublin I arrived under the impression that being a GP was essentially a solo effort, a bit like being a snooker player.

    In his own eyes the GP is the hero, even if in Ireland he is a failed consultant in other people’s view. Not so in the NHS, and certainly not in Bradford, where GPs were part of a multidisciplinary team approach to the provision of health services. Each person was a cog in wheel that contained management, administration, nursing, occupational therapy, physiotherapy and community pharmacy services. They even held meetings, spoke to each other civilly and advice flowed in various directions. How radical!

    On a wider scale, local practices provided many of the out-patient services traditionally provided by hospitals including cardiology, neurology, rheumatology and chronic disease management; they even carried out minor surgery and endoscopies. GPs were encouraged to upskill to become what they called ‘GPs with special interests’ or GPSI (pronounced Gypsy). All of this occurred in close proximity to their patients and in familiar surroundings. These practices were based in large urban centres, although I would imagine it would have been difficult to replicate this model in rural areas with widely dispersed populations.

    Unemployed outside a workhouse in London in 1930.

    Beveridge Report

    The NHS emerged in a society with a different history to Ireland’s. The 1942 Beveridge report highlighted that urban poverty was widespread in the U.K., as George Orwell’s account in The Road to Wigan Pier bears testament. One can get all misty-eyed about Beveridge’s recognition of the plight of the working class; the reality was a fear that workers’ poor health would impact on profits, and might turn revolutionary.

    Nevertheless, the post-War drive to correct some of these deficits lay behind the birth of the Welfare State, including the establishment of the NHS in 1948. This was strenuously resisted by the medical profession, much as the profession in Ireland, along with the Catholic Church, were resistant to Noel Browne’s Mother and Child Scheme. More latterly the mere mention of ‘Sláintecare’ induces apoplectic rage among certain members of the ‘caring’ profession.

    This may seem naïve, but I fail to see what’s wrong with a universal health service, ’free at the point of entry from the cradle to the grave’, paid for out of taxation revenue and borrowings; this is a service that encourages the utilisation of all health-related services in a country, public and private, for all citizens, based not on ability to pay, but need. But apparently this isn’t a good idea.

    I have come across many ideas that were thought not to be good ideas in my twenty-seven years of practice, but few had credible reasons for their outright rejections. Chronic disease management, i.e. diabetes, heart failure, COPD or renal failure should be undertaken by a person known to the patient – i.e. a GP – living in close proximity to where they live.

    ‘Too Busy’

    This has been the bread and butter work of GPs in the U.K. since the 1990s, but apparently in Ireland during the 2000s this wasn’t a good idea, because we were ‘too busy’. Doing what I wonder?

    Integrated services would allow GPs to order investigations directly. In Ireland at present, if, for example, a chap without health insurance injures his knee playing Sunday football and his GP thinks it could be a torn cartilage, he will have to wait up to two years to see an orthopaedic surgeon. He is then put on a waiting list for perhaps another year, until finally he has his MRI scan and discovers he has a torn cartilage.

    By that time, however, he is no longer playing football and is twenty kilos overweight, having spiralled into an unhealthy lifestyle. To add insult to injury he will receive a letter from the hospital asking if he wishes to remain on the waiting list for his knee operation, by which stage he might as well get in the queue for a knee replacement.

    Big Pharma

    Nowadays, it’s not a good idea to refuse to meet pharmaceutical reps when they call to the practice. Having trained in Bradford – where none of the practices or the training scheme’s educational events gave access to reps – I thought that it was reasonable to turn them away. We didn’t meet reps selling toilet rolls or coffee, so why meet representatives of multibillion dollar pharmaceutical corporations? Such companies spend more on advertising and marketing than research because they know how it works.

    Alas, we dopey doctors assume they are sharing their scientific data with us whilst buying us lunch, giving us pens (with names of drugs emblazoned on them), stationary, wall clocks, mugs etc. So, they do share ’their’ science, the bits of their research that shows their product in a good light, not the science or the research warts, or heart attacks, and all.

    After all, we G.P.s are trained professionals and would never be influenced by such inducements. Forget about the science demonstrating a correlation between drug prescribing and frequency of pharmaceutical rep visits.

    Cosy World

    A cosy world of Irish general practice featuring golf, rugby and tweed had been frozen in time until 2008. The GMS contract which began in 1970s paid well, but we still had our ‘privates’. In other parts of the English-speaking world ‘privates’ usually refers to one’s genitalia, but in an Irish GP setting this refers to the paying customer.

    In some practices private patients are given preferential access to appointments. Invariably, this will involve nothing more than prescribing an antibiotic for a cold. Such patients usually have their own cardiologist or several oncologists they refer to using their first names. However, from 2008 onwards when the International Monetary Fund invaded Ireland and took control of the purse strings, the government of the day unilaterally took 35% off the GMS contract payments. Then the privates became more important, but these patients were increasingly hard up too with the world’s economy in a mess.

    The next few years for me remain a blur. My recollections arrives through the haze of mental illness and stress brought on by a Celtic Tiger mortgage, business partnership shenanigans, and yo-yoing emigration-immigration, amongst other adventures.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Pandemic

    Fast forward to 2020 and the unknown quantity that was the Sars-CoV2 escape from Wuhan’s virology research centre – known as the Wuhan Wet Market dose to some, depending on your trust in media, governments and power elites.

    Then the WHO advised GPs via august bodies such as the Irish College of General Practitioners to do nothing, as there were no treatments despite it being a deadly pandemic. Furthermore, we didn’t even need to see patients. We locked our doors, sat by the phone, ‘stayed safe by staying apart,’ among a litany of other trite statements.

    It was heartening to note on some well-known GP websites that some practitioners were one step ahead of WHO/HIQA/NPHET insofar as they immediately sensed a threat to ‘the privates’. Not as an unwanted symptom of a Sars-CoV2 infection, but as a result of the hatches being battened down. How could the privates access their GPs and more importantly pay them?

    The unelected and widely disrespected government with its GP-trained Taoiseach knew instinctively what to do. More accurately Leo Varadkar knew what to do. He found the answer to this most perplexing question and saved the day. Make everyone private. GMS patients ringing up resulted in a fee, privates ringing up resulted in a fee from the government.

    So the gravy train sloshed its merry way through the pandemic. An entire profession was bought, and continues to be bought by vast sums of money for examining patients that one is already being paid for, vaccinating all and sundry against influenza, Sars-CoV2-twice or is it three times, who knows, who cares, the money spigot is stuck on maximum flow.

    Money that was not available up to 2020 is now flowing like goodies from the proverbial cornucopia. This has bought compliance with ways of treating people that run counter to the codes of practice of any good doctor.

    Practices are now treating patients like lepers, creating nonsensical plastic barriers, one way passes through surgeries, discouraging unvaccinated patients, disrespecting patient autonomy, and offering a paternalism reminiscent of the Victorian era. But worst of all is a refusal to treat patients in the early stages of Sars-CoV2, regardless of how medically vulnerable they may be because of ignorance and hubris.

    This is what buying a profession produces.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    Eau de BS

    Born and reared in a working class Dublin area with a healthy disrespect for all authority, I have always been a contrarian. That disrespect has served me well. So, when I hear people in authority asking citizens to pull together or to do deeds for the good of the nation I instinctively smell eau de BS.

    Supposedly for the good of the nation, we are creating a society that is comfortable with meaningless segregation based on vaccination status that is supported by the medical profession. We even have the prospect of hospitals taking young people off transplant lists and families being refused access to a dying loved one in a care home. Now we are witnessing a clamour for a dubiously effective pharmaceutical product to be inflicted on children as young as five.

    The medical profession has allowed one of the highest levels of trust to be stolen by greedy fools who use it to ensure people think that their products can also be trusted. The medical profession has become avaricious, self-serving, vindictive, patient-averse, opinionated and authoritarian, and is failing to foster the doctor-patient relationship.

    I fear that relationship which is the bedrock of general practice has been irrevocably damaged. What need then will there be for GPs if artificial intelligence can deliver the information in an up-to-date, rational, non-judgemental and timely fashion in the comfort of anyone’s home?

    It seems that when this older generation pass into retirement, a tech savvy generation will not want what they never really had: a genuine doctor-patient relationship.

    Featured Image: Aneurin Bevan talking to a patient at Park Hospital, Manchester, the day the NHS came into being in 1948.

  • Could Ivermectin End the Pandemic?

    The bacterium streptomyces avermitilis was discovered by Satoshi Omura at the Kitasato Institute in Japan in conjunction with William C. Campbell at MSD (Merck, Sharpe and Dome) in the early 1970s. From this compound the medicine Ivermectin was developed. Ever since, it has proved a wonder drug for the treatment of parasites in humans and animals.

    Most of these infections occur in Africa and Latin America, but it was nevertheless a lucrative drug for MSD. Nonetheless, in 1987 they provided the drug to the world free of charge as the Kitasato Institute gave up rights to any further royalties from its sale. This was an exceptionally generous gesture as it was a $1 billion per year product, and had been for several years. Its extensive and widespread use in humans has been described by Chris Whitty, Chief Scientific Advisor to the British government throughout the COVID-19 pandemic as ‘a drug with a good safety profile’, with a serious adverse drug reaction rate of 1/800,000’

    Another paper says ‘Ivermectin was generally well tolerated with no indication of associated CNS (central nervous system) toxicity for doses up to 10 times the highest FDA approved dose of 200mcg/Kg’. In a nutshell, it is a safe drug, in use for a long time, and the nuances of clinical usage are therefore known to many physicians.

    A recent paper from India using ivermectin as a preventative used 15mg on average, twice per month at a cost of $1.20 per month in healthcare workers resulted in a 72% reduction in infections. In a recent online enquiry to a wholesaler in India I was offered 100 x 3mg tablets for $12. Yet remarkably this same dose in Ireland would cost €100 per month.

    As is well known by now, in early 2020 the WHO alerted the world to a pandemic virus that apparently emerged out of China, a virus for which there was no known treatment available and which was most dangerous in elderly patients with underlying conditions.

    The illness presented with cold-like symptoms that after a period of between five and eight days could develop into severe respiratory symptoms, requiring hospitalisation and sadly in some cases leading to death.

    Guidelines for General Practitioners

    The Irish College of General Practitioners stated in their guidelines to general practitioners in April 2020: ‘Clinicians should be aware of the potential for some patients to rapidly deteriorate one week after illness onset’ (members access only: https://www.icgp.ie/speck/properties/asset-Interim Guidance for General Practitioners).

    The same document lists those conditions and age groups in which this is a possibility. It goes on to state that ‘no medications have shown any therapeutic benefit on the progress of Covid-19 pneumonia.’

    This advice has not been updated since April 2020. So ‘do nothing until the patient turns blue’ appears to be the invaluable advice from a national body sixteen months into this crisis. However, in the spring of 2020 if you were unfortunate enough to find yourself in a nursing home your blue pallor would not summon the arrival of a flashing blue light, but instead you would receive midazolam and morphine, both respiratory depressants, whilst you awaited the Grim Reaper.

    GPs were discouraged from examining their patients. Even the use of the stethoscope was deemed unnecessary. Shades of blue were everything. The ‘do nothing’ approach is still supported in the guidelines issued by HIQA in February 2021, despite over forty studies demonstrating the efficacy of ivermectin in the intervening period.

    HIQA Advice

    HIQA currently advise that ‘individuals do not prescribe or use interventions for the treatment of COVID-19 that do not meet the necessary minimum criteria’, but don’t outline what these criteria are.

    They go on to ensure that ‘practitioners are not criticised for not prescribing these interventions.’ This latter is a somewhat curious statement if a body is so confident that their evaluation of the evidence is above reproach.

    Yet William C. Campbell co-discoverer of Ivermectin with Satoshi Omura – with whom he shared the Nobel prize – in a speech to the Royal Irish Academy in April 2020 stated: ‘there is the possibility that a safe dosage of Ivermectin might reduce the rate of viral replication in the mammalian body, or affect the virus in other ways that might be revealed by further research.’

    Ivermectin (IVM) bound to a C. elegans GluClR.

    Fortunately for some Irish patients, a few brave GPs looked beyond this island for guidance. Asking doctors to do nothing, and specifically indicating certain actions that they should not take, is a restriction that disconcerts many experienced doctors, if not being a downright interference in the doctor-patient relationship.

    As GPs in the community we deal with people who are part of a family within a social setting. We are therefore cognisant of many features of health – which outsiders might consider superfluous to the ‘science of medicine’.

    Now I laugh each time someone juxtaposes those words, especially when I consider the absolute chaos that is general practice’s interaction with people. At the end of some consultations, I’m lucky to be able to spell my own name correctly, let alone apply the cold, steely, rational logic of science to solving any problems.

    But no matter how chaotic or complex, or even futile, medical interventions may be, one must never vanquish a patient’s hope. Even when close to death, hope – if not for further life at least for a peaceful death – is something the GP can bring to the situation.

    So who are these people in the ICGP or HIQA to say to GPs that there are no treatments available for their vulnerable patient who develops a SARS-CoV2 infection; to say ‘well let’s wait and see, and sure if you turn blue we’ll get an ambulance’?

    We won’t visit or examine you, and you won’t be coming to our surgeries, but we’ll look after you by proxy. So why were we as doctors advised to do nothing? Not even to try a cheap, effective and safe drug, if only to elicit the placebo effect?

    Criminal Charges

    In India WHO’s chief scientist Dr Soumya Swaminathan is facing criminal proceedings brought by the Indian Bar Association for disseminating disinformation about ivermectin and its effectiveness as a preventative and early treatment for SARS-CoV2 infection.

    Should those in HIQA who made recommendations to Irish doctors not face similar charges? Is this not a case of wilful blindness?

    In the USA two distinct groups of doctors-intensive care physicians lead by Drs Pierre Kory and Paul E. Marik set up the FLCCCA (Front Line Covid Critical Care Alliance), and community-based physicians led by Professor Peter McCullough of Texas A+M University, in conjunction with AAPS (American Association of Physicians and Surgeons), devised protocols in their respective fields using Ivermectin and other medications, deemed ineffective by the WHO.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEmOCWOZPk8

    Their rationale was based on medical ethics and a professional desire to give their patients a fighting chance against this condition. They have faced vilification and attempted sanctions, as have doctors in Ireland who were simply trying to help their patients. And some patients even had the temerity to get better.

    I’m not sure what irked the Medical Council of Ireland more, the survival of the patients despite being given a HIQA/WHO proscribed substance, or some previous impotence at not being able to impose their second hand thoughts on all members of the medical profession.

    There is no money in helping patients as the current system is set up. One makes more money merely by ascertaining how ill someone is by using the phone. Even if these medications do nothing beyond the placebo effect why has there been a concerted effort to block the use of what has already been shown to be a relatively low risk intervention?

    Meta-Analysis

    The most recent Systematic Review, Meta-analysis, and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines by Laurie, Bryant et al in the American Journal of Therapeutics found a 62% reduction in death in a meta-analysis of fifteen RCTs. It concludes:

    Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.

    The WHO’s own assessment of seven trials showing an 81% risk reduction was diminished in significance because of ‘imprecisions’ resulting in the WHO falling short of recommending the use of ivermectin. Fudge, fudge and more fudge.

    Let’s cut to the chase here with this and perhaps many other substances. There are powerful vested interests steering advisory bodies away from the evidence, buying up integrity and burying it in a deep dark place.

    The current vaccines are deemed to be the only safe and reliable treatments. This is ironic given that these products are all still in phase 3 trials, and safety data will not be fully available until late 2022 at the earliest.

    The fact is that emergency use authorisations (EUAs) issued by the FDA in America and the EMA in Europe are contingent on there being no other treatments available in a public health emergency deemed to be effective. This is about money, vast sums of money. It is about wilful blindness at the highest echelons of the WHO, national governments and so called scientific advisory bodies.

    It is about conflicts of interest, and the damaging and intellectually limiting dependency that science has placed on large corporations, and it would seem that now governments are in the same stranglehold.

    As it is often said, the first casualty of war is truth. Clearly this also applies to pandemics, where body counts mean money, power and influence. And as in war inflation of body counts has always been good for business. Death may evoke much front of camera hand wringing but behind the scenes there is even more palm rubbing and back slapping.

  • Covid-19: Unanswered Questions

    Confusion and fear are to be expected in novel situations where experience is limited; this should fade as understanding grows. Such is the natural cycle. When governments employ behavioural psychologists to induce fears in order to control and coerce the population, however, we have to question their motives and methods.

    Initially we were advised that a zoonotic virus crossed species: horseshoe bat to pangolin and then to humans, via the food chain. Ghastly images were shown nightly of a range of exotic creatures that Chinese people – portrayed in somewhat xenophobic terms because of their, to us, foreign tastes – supposedly enjoy consuming. This outbreak witnessed sagacious, and wealthy, heads knowingly saying ‘I told you so.’

    And apparently we can expect much more, and worse, in the future because of the ways in which we live and eat. Last year any question of whether it could have come from any other source was shot down as absurd by dubious fact checkers, and freighted with conspiracy theory fairy dust.

    This despite Wuhan containing a level 4 BSL laboratory, and three members of its staff being hospitalised in November 2019 with coronavirus-like respiratory symptoms. Furthermore, this same laboratory was conducting gain of function research into coronaviruses, through a grant form EcoHealth Alliance, an organisation funded by U.S. National Institutes for Health. This type of research using viruses was banned by the Obama administration as being too risky.

    Weaponising

    This same research is not far removed from the process of weaponising a pathogenic organism. So why did NIH fund this laboratory to carry out this type of research, and who else knew of the potential risks, and incentives, for finding a novel infective agent and researching possible treatments and vaccines?

    The first we in the West learnt about any of this came from the videos on TV and social media of people dropping dead in the street – in hindsight clearly not coronavirus cases – and the Chinese locking down it citizens. Next there was Italy, with coffins being carted away by military trucks.

    These were all carefully orchestrated publicity stunts, but who was responsible? Who decided to broadcast uncritically these sensational images? The world took note, a pandemic was declared and governments around the world, almost uniformly, imposed harsh and unprecedented restrictive measures on their citizens.

    In Britain the initial plan was to protect the vulnerable, through cocooning, whilst awaiting herd immunity in the young. But there followed a swift turnaround in the face of public outcry. In Europe only Sweden resisted the clamour to lockdown and was pilloried in the international media. ‘Sweden has become the World’s Cautionary Tale’ declared The New York Times in July, 2020.

    The British government’s approach was strongly influenced by the epidemiological modelling of Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson, of previous forecasting fiascos. For example, he predicted three to four million deaths from Swine Flu in 2009, which ultimately resulted in less than 300,000 global fatalities.

    Ferguson’s Imperial paper predicted 500,000 deaths in the U.K. in an unmitigated scenario, and on March 20th, told the New York Times that the ‘best case outcome’ for the U.S. was a death toll of 1.1 million, rising to 2.2 million in a worst case scenario. As of June, the U.S. has seen just over 600,000 deaths, and the U.K. 127,945, in circumstances where the attribution of death to Covid-19 is often deceptive.

    Further doom and gloom laden scenarios was provided by Professor Christian Drosten, head of the institute of virology, Charite university hospital, Berlin, while alternate modelling provided by Professor Michael Levitt, Stanford University and Nobel laureate was ignored.

    PCR Testing

    Dorsten’s main contribution to this story is his paper ‘Detection of 2019 novel corona virus by real time RT-PCR’ outlining the basis for the widely used Drosten-PCR test that has been criticised for multiple errors, and the haste with which it was published. This test is now the most widely used diagnostic test for Sars-CoV2.

    This is despite its invenor Kary Mullis’s – Nobel laureate for chemistry for his work with PCR – stating unequivocally ‘it doesn’t tell you if you are sick’.

    https://twitter.com/zaidzamanhamid/status/1384873889591873536

    There are a number of criticisms of the Drosten method in that he reportedly developed it using partial genetic sequences provided by the Chinese, in conjunction with sequences from other corona viruses. Furthermore, the test which according to Kary Mullis is a quantitative test, is not reported to clinicians this way.

    Instead a qualitative result ‘detected’ or ’not detected’ is reported without giving the cycle threshold, even after the WHO suggested physicians should be given this figure. The significance of the cycle threshold harks back to Kary Mullis’s ‘it doesn’t tell you if you are sick.’ Even Dr Anthony Fauci of the NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) has stated that at ct values of greater than 35 it is unlikely that any live virus is present in the patient.

    https://twitter.com/jimgris/status/1326518250386063361?lang=en

    Why then did Irish laboratories use ct values as high as 45? And why did we go from testing inpatients with PCR, knowing the false positive rate, to the community setting and especially the asymptomatic, given asymptomatics are often ‘false positives’, leading to an inflated ‘case’ count.

    One has to wonder if the state’s spending of an estimated €400 million on PCR testing has been a case of noses in the trough not wanting to avoid the public smelling the coffee. Who were the people with vested or conflicted interests in this issue?

    Churchillian Speeches

    Most Western governments, including Australia and New Zealand, paraded their respective Prime Ministers before the cameras to make speeches of Churchillian gravity, implicitly likening the threat of Sars-CoV2 to World War II. Leo Varadkar even paraphrased Churchill in his first speech to the nation -’never will so many ask so much of so few,’ before imposing unprecedented draconian lockdown measures, based on fear.

    Along the way we have heard words of caution from notable academics including Stanford Professors John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya, as well as Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University. But these voices were hardly ever heard on Irish mainstream media.

    These authorities cautioned that measures would disproportionately hurt the poor and vulnerable; that severe illness was mainly confined to a recognisable cohort, and that there was no evidence for the efficacy of lockdown measures.

    Nobody listened. Instead the government closed schools, prevented people from earning a living, stopped all cultural and sporting activity, prohibited religious worship and confined travel to within five kilometres of home.

    For months elderly people languished alone in nursing homes and hospitals, some dying alone; women gave birth without their partners; funeral rites were severely curtailed, as basic civil rights were completely ignored in response to an illness with an estimated infection fatality rate of 0.05% for anyone under the age of seventy years.

    Every night the state broadcaster became the government’s harbinger of doom with the recitation of nightly death tolls. What purpose other than ratcheting up of fear did this serve?

    Through the diligent questioning of Michael McNamara TD, however, we know that the reported mortality figures included anyone testing positive in the previous twenty-eight days with a PCR test, no matter what their underlying condition. Deaths unassociated with Sars-CoV2 were obviously irrelevant.

    They turned out to be very relevant as the CSO annual death figures of 6.4 per 1000, which were little different to previous years, and even less than 2013. Why then, when death figures dropped, did reporting switch to the spurious concept of ‘cases’, defined by a positive PCR test? Why did the Irish government shamefully enlist the services of RTE in terrifying the nation, and why did the state broadcaster acquiesce? Answers on the back of a postcard…

    Disproportionately Affected

    The message ‘we are all in this together’ was a big lie. The disease disproportionately killed people over the age of eighty, especially those in nursing homes, many of whom were needlessly infected after being transferred to hospitals with testing withdrawn at the height of the pandemic in spring 2020. The obese, those with diabetes, chronic heart and lung diseases are also disproportionately affected.

    These pre-existing morbidities are more prevalent among lower socioeconomic groups in society. So we were clearly never all in this together.

    Civil servants, including politicians and the medical profession, those working in IT and for media corporations, could easily work from home, but nearly half a million people had to stop work for the duration, especially those in the tourism and hospitality sectors. These are mainly young people, and like children, most would only have been mildly effected by the virus. So why were they forced to suffer unnecessarily?

    Moreover, why did small retail outlets have to close for months on end, while off licenses and fast food chains were deemed essential services?!

    States of Fear

    The kind of Propaganda devised by Sigmund Freud’s grandson Edward Bernays who infamously made it fashionable for women to smoke, was evident in the government’s manipulation of the figures, and the media’s delivery. Bernays wrote in Propaganda (1928) ‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.’

    A host of celebrity scientists appeared, many with Conor McGregor levels of empathy, only better elocution, a gentler demeanour and less tattoos. Trite experiments were undertaken on popular TV shows, where we found dour funereal forecasts from infectious disease experts, who were invariably wrong in their predictions, and inane squeaking from a misplaced neuroscience.

    All of these ‘experts’ sang in unison. Dissenting voices were heard briefly and infrequently. Some lost their jobs merely for disagreeing with the bull-in-a-china shop approach taken by the HSE/NPHET/government.

    In her new book States of Fear Laura Dodsworth outlines how the UK government used behavioural psychologists, probably via their Nudge unit, to control the population through the deployment of carefully selected ‘experts’ and repetitive messaging on news broadcasting.

    This was substantiated in the recent testimonies by Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser to Boris Johnson. ISAG were also familiar with scaremongering techniques, as intercepted emails highlight their tactic of targeting and discrediting individuals, and keeping fear ramped up as a tool in their ZeroCovid campaign.

    To quote Bernays again ‘there are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realised to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scene.’

    Using this sinister playbook, between them NPHET, ISAG and the government managed to sow a level of fear, suspicion and division in society that may take years to unravel.

    Flatten the Curve?

    Despite all the hype around flattening the curve to save the health service at the beginning of the pandemic, and the use of draconian measures to do so, alas nothing was done to treat patients at home.

    Several readily available, cheap and relatively safe products, were hypothesised to have positive benefits in the early stages of a Sars-CoV2 infection, but there were systematic efforts to steer physicians away from these.

    The ICGP guidelines for GPs on the treatment of early Sars-CoV2 amounts to do nothing, and wait for patients to get better, or if they fall really ill send them into hospital. Some doctors in the USA lost their licenses for prescribing these medications, and others in Ireland faced censure by the Medical Council.

    According to physicians like Peter McCullough, Professor of Medicine at Baylor University, Texas in conjunction with AAPS (The association of American Physicians and Surgeons), and separately Dr Pierre Kory of FLCCCA (Front Line Covid Critical Care Alliance) Sars-CoV2 was empirically treatable, especially in that first week before the patient became very unwell.

    https://vimeo.com/560523610

    So, despite a concerted effort to vilify them, they treated their patients. Why did Irish GPs, save for a few, fail to do so?

    In doing nothing did many patients needlessly died? With our widespread application of lockdowns and our disregard for focused protection measures, as advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration (which has garnered 850,000 signatures, including 43,000 from medical practitioners) coupled with our refusal to at least try and treat patients, have we done a great disservice to our patients?

    Silencing of Dissent

    Sweden did not adopt anything like the same draconian measures, and their economy and society has not been disrupted to anything like the same extent as Ireland’s. Yet their mortality figures compare favourably, especially when adjusted for the relative age of each population.

    Perhaps one of the main reasons for the concerted campaign to ensure that no other treatments were deemed suitable for the early treatment or prevention of the disease was the FDA criterion for an EUA (emergency use exemption).  No such exemption would have been granted to a product in such an early stage of development, without animal or human study data, except in what are deemed to be extraordinary circumstances.

    €26 billion – the amount Pfizer expects to earn this year after producing the first Covid-19 vaccine – might buy a lot of scientific validation, and political influence.

    The undue haste with which these vaccines have been rolled out demands sceptical enquiry, especially in relation to two particular cohorts: pregnant women and children. As clinicians we generally exercise extreme caution in these groups.

    So why is it that for a condition with an overall IFR of 0.15% have we discarded this caution? Linking vaccination status to the right to work, travel, attend cultural and sporting events is divisive, coercing those who wish to exercise a degree of caution and/or exercise autonomy over their health.

    Without the questionable concept that is asymptomatic spread, there is no justification for vaccinating anyone in low risk groups, and certainly no justification for using bully tactics.

    Despite all these glaring questions, there has been a deafening silence from the medical profession in Ireland, and those that have spoken out have been quickly silenced. Is this how we are going to deal with complex issues in future? Adopting binary, categorical approaches without nuance leaves no room for debate.

    RTE have paid lip service to the notion of an informed debate, hosting Martin Feeley and then later pitching Professors John Lee and Sunetra Gupta into debate with hand-picked stalwarts.

    Moneybags

    In Ireland today scepticism is viewed as a contagion to be eradicated, with compliance seen as the perfect state of health. As a nation we must ask: why have so many been so quiet; why has fear replaced reason, and groupthink taken over once again?

    One must question the role of doctors ‘stuffing their mouths with gold’ as Aneurin Bevan put it in relation to British doctors at the inception of the NHS. A quick look at the 2019 PCRS payments to GPs shows a healthy €85 million in government expenditure. This, however, mushroomed to over €200 million for the same period in 2020.

    Some were clearly making a killing during the pandemic. And whose idea was it to advise doctors not to see patients face-to-face during the pandemic? If a doctor won’t see you who will?

    Further to this windfall will be vaccination payments at a cool €60 per patient. Is it any wonder GPs want everyone vaccinated?

    There may even be boosters for variants required for everyone on the planet! The media should be asking the question: who is benefitting from this Monty-Pythonesque situation?

    Certainly any government with the slightest authoritarian bent, which it transpires appears to be most Western ‘democracies’. It really is worrying how little opposition there has been to Chinese-inspired lockdowns, with opponents dismissed as a far right fringe – even by the apparently left-wing opposition – despite the obvious damage these policies have done to the poorest, who were also least protected by the measures.

    Why did so many European governments fall into line so quickly, when even a passing familiarity with EU politics would indicate that it can take years for Member States to agree on the number of legs that the average cow possesses?

    If you intuit that something is just not right, and baulk at jingoistic phrases like ‘the new normal’ and ‘build back better’ ask yourself cui bono or ‘who benefits’, and don’t let the fear of being labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’ dissuade you from asking reasonable questions.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Covid-19: Questioning the Three Mantras

    The three mantra for this pandemic in Ireland are: wash your hands; socially distance; and wear a mask. Stated repetitively with suitable gravitas the guidelines have been internalised by most of the population. Fears around the spread of the ‘deadly’ virus are even driving people to police one another. The valley of the squinting windows is alive and well.

    But what are the inherent costs to these three injunctions? And why shouldn’t we keep measures in place when this pandemic abates, as has recently been argued?

    Throughout this pandemic we have witnessed very little meaningful scientific debate in Ireland. Irish experts are drawn from a small circle of academics, some with vested interests, supporting the government’s highly successful publicity campaign. In other countries, in contrast, there are heated public debates between scientists as to whether to adopt a dominant approach of blanket policies, or one of shielding elderly populations.

    But in Ireland Nobel laureates and professors from prestigious universities around the world are routinely dismissed with smart quips by gullible journalists. But let us examine the three mantras in a dispassionate way that acknowledges each of their adverse impacts.

    Wash Your Hands

    The first injunction to ‘wash your hands’ is sound advice, which unless you are living on another planet you will be aware of by now. Do we always follow this injunction? Probably not. Are we all dying of ghastly flesh eating infections or coughing up great globules of blood stained mucus? No we are not. Why? Because very few of the billions of micro-organisms with which we share our bodies are actually pathogenic.

    We have existed as a species for approximately a quarter of a million years, and as part of the great evolutionary flow of life for over four and half billion years. In that time adaptation to adversity has been the rule; hence homo sapiens is now thriving, sadly often to the detriment of the rest of the natural world.

    In the advanced economies at least, most of us are now almost invincible until old age. Thus, over the past two hundred years improved nutrition, housing and sanitation have brought life expectancy up to almost eighty years in many countries.

    Medical science, including antibiotics and vaccines, has contributed to this longevity, but not to the extent some of us doctors would have you believe. The authors of The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Floud et al., Cambridge, 2011) state:

    it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of scientific medicine when one considers that much of the decline in the mortality associated with infectious diseases predated the introduction of effective medical measures to deal with it

    So yes washing your hands regularly is a good idea. Soap and water should be the principle means, not the bactericidal or viricidal gels we now find on entering every shop or building, some of which are to be avoided – especially the 52 sanitation products the Department of Education has told schools to refrain from using.

    Our skin harbours myriad micro-organisms – that form a part of the human microbiome – all vying for space to live, raise a family and grow old peacefully in a quiet stable neighbourhood. They generally live harmoniously with us in what is referred to as a state of homeostatic balance.

    What happens when we kill off all the good micro-organisms, repeatedly, just in case there is a bad micro-organism on our skin? First, these agents damage our skin’s protective oil barrier, and kill micro-organisms with which we live symbiotically, contributing to our health and wellbeing.

    These ‘good’ bacteria and other microorganisms are easily replaced by ones that are resistant to the effects of the gels, and who can then run amok when given the chance.

    Prior to this pandemic, excessive hygiene measures against infections has given rise to the hygiene hypothesis, according to which ‘the decreasing incidence of infections in western countries and more recently in developing countries is at the origin of the increasing incidence of both autoimmune and allergic diseases.’ So let us be on our guard against excessive hygiene.

    “Social” Distancing

    Hannah Arendt in 1933.

    The second part of the mantra and perhaps the most dystopian is the injunction to distance ourselves socially. It recalls Hannah Arendt’s warning in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) that ‘The evidence of Hitler’s as well as Stalin’s dictatorship points clearly to the fact that isolation of atomized individuals provides not only the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the top of the whole structure.’

    This “safe” distance is anywhere from the depth of the average grave – two metres – to imprisoning ourselves in our homes and limiting the number of fellow humans we allow to enter that space, which is no one from another household under current ‘Level 5’ Irish regulations; or previously an arbitrary number such as six, a figure no doubt chosen after repeatedly employing the reading of the runes technique.

    Not seeing anyone at all would be ideal, but the illuminati could not depend on the imbecilic general public abiding by their lofty standards, or reverting to having sex online to limit the spread of the virus, and so some meagre concessions have been made to human frailty, with the advent of support bubbles.

    Yet social isolation is a potential pathway to madness and a lonely death. We are social creatures and in solitary confinement few can flourish. A Screen New Deal is a recipe for Surveillance Capitalism, and enrichment of the billionaire class. Human touch brings emotional balance and better health.

    A person may be technically alive but is he or she really living without conversing directly with others, dancing, or otherwise demonstrating his love and empathy? We are not avatars in a complex, visually stunning computer game. We are connected physical beings. Those connections extend back into the past, embrace the present, and reach forward into an unknown future.

    It is impossible to tell whether the shocking spate of domestic homicides and suicides that occurred in the last week of October in Ireland, just as stricter measures were introduced, are the product of isolation, but the UN has described the worldwide increase in domestic abuse as a ‘shadow pandemic’ alongside Covid-19.

    Irish incidents include a murder-suicide in Cork involving a father and two sons; the apparent murder of a mother and her two children in Dublin; and the death by suicide of a Dublin nurse along with the death of her young baby through asphyxiation.

    Moving forward, we just have no idea what effect the injunction to “socially” distance – and the attendant loss of touch will have on us – a very tactile people.

    Recall that in shaking hands we make character judgements based on grip and duration; we embrace and kiss those we love with warmth and energy, and those we like with fleeting touching cheeks; we cup the faces of babies and ruffle the hair of cute children – especially if they possess more than us.

    We are now ordered to stop doing all of that, but for how long? Is there any evidence to suggest ‘the virus’ passes from one healthy person to another when we hug? Hasn’t common sense always dictated that we avoid hugging when we are under the weather?

    In this precarious age, however, it is necessary to assume we are guilty of being ‘asymptomatic’ into what seems like an interminable future, and either hug with extreme caution, or not at all. I fear these tactile behaviours will disappear altogether given Covid-19 is very unlikely to vanish.

    Mandatory Masks

    The third and final of the government’s mantras is perhaps the most pernicious: the mandating of masks. It has infantilised the population and turned people into part-time police officers.

    We’ve heard Irish and other experts overturn forty years of science, allowing celebrity doctors to demonstrate to the Irish public, with a cheeky Charlie smile, that masks will prevent contagions. In fact, the only masks that offer real protection are N95 masks or similar respirators. The popular cloth masks are of little more than symbolic value in preventing contagion.

    Instructively, in Norway, which has had among the lowest incidence of Covid-19 in Europe, but where case numbers have increased in recent weeks, the latest national measures do not include a requirement to wear masks in public, although this option is left open to municipal authorities in the event of high infection levels.

    Yet in Ireland journalists and ‘social influencers’ have accepted as self-evident that masks are a form of panacea; failing to recongise that approach is not backed by experimental data, and is in fact the lowest form of evidence.

    Now armed with the received wisdom – mumbling ‘I follow the science’ – righteous members of the public are on the lookout for slackers, and woe betide anyone not wearing a mask when shopping or travelling on public transport; it has reached a point of such absurdity that some even wear them while alone in their cars.

    But you might ask: what is the cost apart from mild to medium, or even extreme, discomfort, depending on how long it has to be worn? And as most of us don’t have to wear them other than when we enter shops then what of it?

    Masks hide our faces so that we have difficulty recognising and communicating with each other. Indeed, our brains have evolved to recognise faces. We see faces in clouds, bushes and cracked tiling, a phenomena called pareidolia. I have yet to hear of such an occurrence where the face is obscured by a mask.

    Pareidolia

    Our face has a remarkable forty-two muscles and is the site from which we deliver most of our body language. Ask a mother of a new born to stare at her child without changing her facial expression for more than a few moments and the baby will become distressed and cry. This is how hardwired our need is to read faces.

    Facial coverings – called surgical masks for good reason – are useful in clinical settings to prevent bacteria, hair, skin cells and mucus from falling into open wounds, but hardly when worn by unruly schoolchildren in class. The best reason to wear one now is simply to make people comfortable who believe they confer protection.

    Asians, have worn masks for various cultural and environmental reasons, including non-medical ones, for decades. In Japan people who feel ‘under the weather’ wear them to be polite.

    But there is no reliable scientific evidence to support widespread use, as Professor Carl Heneghan of Oxford University pointed out to the Dáil Committee on Covid-19 Response. There have only been three registered trials on the use of masks in the community: one in Denmark, one in Guinea Bissau and one in India – but none have reported outcomes so far.

    Now let us for a moment indulge in that age old technique of the thought experiment. Viruses are measured in nanometres. If we looked at the material from which most of these facial coverings are made under an electron microscope we would see more holes than material.

    A virus leaving your mouth, journeying out into the big bad world, is like a football passing through your front door. The football could hit the door frame and bounce back, but this is unlikely. The pseudo-scientific argument is that the virus travels first class in a large globule of spit and this globule gets jammed in the doorway, “proving” the efficacy of masks.

    Ahh, but wait a minute, mask are often worn for hours by kids and cashiers in shops, so what about all the other graduating viruses and their globular carriages? I doubt they are all just clinging for dear life on to the mask for fear of upsetting the Irish expert.

    Instead the globule eventually evaporates, after all it is mostly water vapour, the front of the mask dries and the viruses, being virtually weightless, just waft off on their merciless way.

    Other Approaches

    Now when I hear the mantra ‘wash your hands, social distance and wear a mask,’ I consider: are we running the risk of undermining our society to preserve some cherished scientific authority? We are supposed to be entering the second wave of a pandemic, yet while hospitals in countries such as Italy are under severe pressure – as was the case last February – few Europeans countries are now showing excess deaths. Yet the doomsday models that were wildly inaccurate last time around are being revisited.

    Excess mortality in Europe source since 2017: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#excess-mortality

    Shouldn’t our health authorities, especially in Ireland – which has had among the most stringent measures in the world throughout the pandemic – also be conscious of maintaining our humanity, and recognising the huge value – in terms of our health and wellbeing – of being able to gather, kiss, hug, talk, sing and laugh with abandon, without fear of breaking the law? We especially need to explain to our children that the world they currently live through is not going in a normal phase.

    In preventing infections with a respiratory disease such as Covid-19, we might look back on what the great American polymath and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin once observed:

    From many years’ observations on myself and others, I am persuaded we are on a wrong scent in supposing moist or cold air, the cause of that disorder we call a cold. Some unknown quality in the air may perhaps produce colds, as in the influenza, but generally, I apprehend they are the effect of too full living in proportion to our exercise.

    Franklin observed  a connection between succumbing to an infectious disease and poor dietary choices (“too full living”) and a lack of physical exercise that contributes to obesity, which we know significantly increases the likelihood of death from Covid-19.

    He also had the following to say on the benefits of being outside into the fresh air:

    I hope that after, having discovered the benefit of fresh and cool air applied to the sick, people will begin to suspect that possibly it may do no harm to the well. I have long been satisfied from observation, that besides the general colds now termed influenza (which may possibly spread by contagion, as well as by a particular quality of the air), people often catch cold from one another when shut up together in close rooms, coaches, et cetera, and when sitting near and conversing so as to breathe in each other’s transpiration, the disorder being in a certain state.

    During this pandemic, and moving forward, we should thus be addressing a pre-existing obesity pandemic that is being exacerbated by some of the current restrictions on sports especially. Franklin also seemed to have recognised the importance of adequate ventilation in buildings.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Thus addressing the underlying conditions exacerbating the Covid-19 pandemic may prove to be the optimum response, as the editor of The Lancet Richard Horton has argued:

    we must confront the fact that we are taking a far too narrow approach to managing this outbreak of a new coronavirus. We have viewed the cause of this crisis as an infectious disease. All of our interventions have focused on cutting lines of viral transmission, thereby controlling the spread of the pathogen. The “science” that has guided governments has been driven mostly by epidemic modellers and infectious disease specialists, who understandably frame the present health emergency in centuries-old terms of plague. But what we have learned so far tells us that the story of COVID-19 is not so simple. Two categories of disease are interacting within specific populations—infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and an array of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). These conditions are clustering within social groups according to patterns of inequality deeply embedded in our societies. The aggregation of these diseases on a background of social and economic disparity exacerbates the adverse effects of each separate disease. COVID-19 is not a pandemic. It is a syndemic. The syndemic nature of the threat we face means that a more nuanced approach is needed if we are to protect the health of our communities.