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June 1, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:14:11
Dr John Lee
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Welcome Welcome to the DeliPod with me, James DeliPod.
And before I introduce this week's special guest about who I am so excited, and you will be too.
I just want to mention, if you enjoy this podcast, as I'm sure you will, Please consider supporting me on my Patreon, which is increasingly becoming my home.
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Anyway, I am so pleased.
I am now looking at my guest, Dr.
John Lee.
I've been a fan of yours, John, for, well, however long it was since I read your first piece for The Spectator, right at the beginning, I think, of this lockdown pandemic craziness.
And you were one of the first voices, many congrats on that, to Inject a note of scepticism into the policy that was being adopted by the government towards coronavirus.
And I was inspired today.
You wrote a brilliant piece for The Spectator.
Again, you're feeling increasingly exasperated, I can tell.
And let me just read the bit that really struck a chord from me.
We now seem to have moved on to a purely political phase, focused on rules written in the early phase of the epidemic, Based on incomplete and mistaken information.
So what you're saying, essentially, is that we're not following the science anymore.
This is purely political.
Is that right?
Well, that's the way it seems to me, yes.
I mean, I think it was the 20...
Well, I wrote the piece on the evening of the 20...
The first piece on the evening of the 23rd of March, the evening of when Boris made his announcement, because, you know, I'd been watching what had been happening over the previous few weeks and I felt there was a head of steam developing.
In terms of worry about this new disease that was probably unwarranted.
And then when I heard him announcing lockdown, it really seemed that we'd hit the jackpot in terms of, you know, a combination of public fear and amplification in the media that I didn't think was justified.
So I wrote that article then.
And I felt at the time, I did feel at the time that the government was attempting to do the following the science business.
It did seem that way.
And I think it's difficult now perhaps to remember what it was like on the 23rd of March, because looking back, I think there was genuine fear that this might be a really nasty disease.
Even if it's nastiest, it wasn't as nasty as some diseases of the past.
It was going to kill three and a half percent of us.
But even so, that's an awful lot of people if you multiply 65 million people in this country by three and a half percent.
So I think there was genuine fear at the beginning.
And I think one could understand why the government did what it did at the beginning.
But, of course, what happens with the science is as you gather more data, as you think about things, as lots of different bits of information come in from different places, with different approaches, science is not a fixed thing.
It keeps on moving.
It keeps on moving.
But it seems to me that what we did politically got cast in stone quite early on, and the government have been really struggling to amend their story ever since.
Yes.
So before we go into more detail about that, I suppose I ought to get you to introduce yourself that you're not just some random bloke I found off the internet.
You are actually a doctor and a consultant, a senior consultant from the NHS. Tell me about about your background first.
So okay well I studied medicine at University College in London.
I did an integrated BSc in physiology along the way And then after I've done my house jobs, I actually went back and did a PhD in physiology as well.
So I had a proper scientific training in physiology.
And then I decided to train as a pathologist.
And I trained as a pathologist in Newcastle and Sheffield.
And then I've been, I was a consultant pathologist for over 20 years in Sheffield and Rotherham nearby.
And I was also a professor of pathology at the Hull York Medical School for over 10 years.
As a pathologist, you must be fairly comfortable with the idea of cause of death.
And I mean, that's intimately connected with it, isn't it?
How people die, the myriad ways in which people can die.
Yes, I mean, I think it's something to say at the outset is that most pathologists spend most of their careers dealing with alive people, not dead people, because people have this idea that we do autopsies and we deal with dead people.
But actually, all the lab tests that are done, any lab test at all that's done, whether it's a blood sample or a tissue sample, that comes to a path lab.
So most of our career is spent dealing with alive people.
The point about autopsies is that they allow you to look at tissue and they allow you to figure out what happened in disease in a person's body and perhaps what actually the cause of death was.
And so obviously the idea is to record deaths as accurately as we can do because that's what we really need to be able to make sense of diseases, particularly new diseases.
So tell me about your journey of discovery because I think You make a good point.
It's very difficult now to remember just how things were, even a month ago, let alone two months ago, that the narrative keeps changing as the new evidence emerges.
Was there a point initially when you were quite genuinely worried about this thing?
Or not?
Personally, not particularly.
I think it was Sir James Templeton in investing who was a famous fund manager who did rather well, I think, and he had a famous saying which was the most dangerous saying in investment is this time it's different.
And I think that's probably true of diseases as well.
I mean, you know, we've existed in this world, our species has existed in this world for millions of years, and we've survived all these things before because we have to, because we're here.
So the fact is we have an immune system that's used to dealing with these things and I didn't see any reason at the beginning of this epidemic really to think that this was so different from other things we faced in the recent past to justify the the reaction that we've that we've had.
Right because we yes we had had sort of similar Scares, which had been chalked up and then came to nothing, didn't we?
So we had swine flu.
I remember my children getting swine flu and thinking, what, is that it?
It was a big deal.
And then didn't they stockpile loads of Tamiflu at great, great expense in order to deal with this problem, which didn't really emerge into anything?
Yeah, I mean, there was lots of worry about it.
And as you say, it sort of didn't It didn't turn out to be as bad as people worried about it and of course one of the reasons for that is there's a thing called ascertainment bias and ascertainment bias is that when you, particularly with a new disease, something like this is a new disease or a new virus anyway, although many coronaviruses do infect people every winter and so lots of us do have antibodies to them as it turns out, but the point is this is a new type of coronavirus.
But the thing is when a new disease becomes apparent Where do you first come across it?
You don't come across it in the community with people having asymptomatic infection.
You come across it in hospitals where people who have particularly nasty versions of the disease get concentrated.
So inevitably it means that the first cases you find are nasty ones.
And that's called ascertainment bias.
It makes the disease look worse than it's going to turn out to be.
I mean, it's an inevitable consequence of the way we discover a new disease in the first place.
That's very interesting.
Well, I suppose, look, I was going to come onto that later, but actually this is our chance to talk about another of your very interesting articles where you suggested that by imposing this lockdown on everyone, what we're doing is maybe allowing the worst aspects of the disease to thrive and the milder aspects to be kind of, well, you can explain better than I can.
Well, it's a hypothesis.
I mean, there is some evidence, some studies have come out since the beginning of this epidemic showing that there are varieties of this virus and some of the varieties are more virulent, they're nastier than other versions of the virus.
And so the idea of that article is just to point out one of the way, one of the unexpected ways in which lockdown could be an issue.
So I can't tell you this is absolutely true, but it's possible.
And the idea is that if you If you let the virus spread asymptomatically in the population, then obviously people have asymptomatic disease.
It might not just be to do with the person that they're asymptomatic, it may be that they've got a milder version of the virus.
So if you let that mild version of the virus spread around, we all get antibodies having had a mild version of the virus.
Whereas if you lock us down and concentrate the nasty versions of the virus in the hospital, that automatically means that people are getting a nastier version of the virus causing nasty disease.
So you can see that I don't know how significant that evolutionary pressure on the virus has been or will be in this epidemic, and it's probably going to be impossible to find out afterwards.
But I do know that it's almost certain to have been in effect.
And as with many other things in this lockdown, we implemented a policy of enormous magnitude and enormous repercussions Without considering any of the potential side effects on it.
As a doctor, I mean, going back to 300-400 BC when Hippocrates was active, and he nailed it.
One of his things was, as a doctor, first, do no harm.
So in other words, if you're going to treat somebody for them, you don't just wade in and stick a knife in them or pull their liver out or something.
You've got to be sure that what you're going to do is going to be better for them than letting the disease take its course.
And obviously we were frightened by initial pictures of this disease and lots of people having nasty versions of it, or at least lots of people on our televisions having nasty versions of it.
We didn't know what proportion of people that really was of the disease.
But nevertheless, we were frightened by it.
And so governments across the world were essentially, in my view, panicked into this drastic measure with essentially, apart from Sweden, and they deserve an honourable mention, obviously, but they were panicked into this drastic measure with no consideration whatsoever Of the side effects of the measure we were taking.
And that goes against an absolutely fundamental principle of medicine, let alone anything else.
And I think as time has gone by, it's becoming more apparent that the lockdown is having a very significant effect.
I mean, obviously not just on the economy, but directly on people's health.
If you look at the so in the in the epidemic so far in this country, there have been about 60,000 Excess deaths, according to the figures that we've been getting.
In other words, 60,000 deaths that have happened over and above the number of deaths we might expect at this time of year.
And some of the media narratives have been that all these deaths have to do with COVID. Well, that's not true because on at least 13,000 of the death certificates, COVID wasn't mentioned in the death certificates, so they're not going to be due to COVID. Because what's happened during this panic that we've had Is that the rules for certification have been changed and also I think people's thresholds have been changed.
I think people have been frightened into the idea that they really ought to record Covid if they're even slightly worried that it might be there in the patient because if you don't record Covid we might miss a case and this might be responsible for spreading it around and so forth.
So I think people's threshold for mentioning a respiratory infection or a possible respiratory infection or a possible cause of a respiratory infection causing death It's been really lowered and so the 47,000 deaths that are nominally due to COVID are just ones where it's either been mentioned on the death certificate, it may have been mentioned as a definite cause of death, but it may have just been mentioned as something that people thought was there.
And certainly for the old people's homes, the care home numbers, that can just be deemed or just mentioned on, you know, a statement could be made that COVID might have been present by a non-medical care home provider.
So actually, of those 47,000 deaths, it seems to me that quite a large number of them weren't due to COVID. And so, for the sake of argument, if we say half of them weren't, which I think is probably in the right ballpark, or even more perhaps, but if half of them weren't, that means that a majority of deaths have actually been due to, you know, not COVID, these excess deaths, which really begs the question of what are we doing with this lockdown?
Well indeed, so what you're suggesting is that actually a significant number of the excess deaths we're having are not victims of Covid, but victims of the lockdown.
Would that make sense?
Yes, I think so.
I mean, you know, obviously there's been lots of evidence, hasn't there, that casualty departments have been empty and, you know, cancer treatment has been summarily put on hold for two months and people have been staying at home and not, you know, they've been worried about burdening the health service so maybe when they have pain in their chest or something they've stayed at home and not called the doctor rather than done what they would have normally done.
And I think, yes, I think lockdown would have directly caused, you know, quite a significant number of deaths My judgment on it, I can't prove this at the moment, and there'll be an endless postmortem of the numbers on this afterwards, I'm sure, but my judgment on it is that probably more than half of the excess deaths that we're looking at will be not due to COVID. I mean, let me just give you an example from the 47,000 COVID deaths.
One of the commonest causes, other co-morbidities, if you like, with COVID on the COVID deaths is dementia.
And one in five of the apparent Covid deaths have been mentioned as having dementia.
Now, under normal circumstances, you would never get a specific pathogen mentioned on those death certificates.
The cause of death would either read dementia or would you read dementia due to old age, perhaps, or maybe read bronchopneumonia or pneumonia due to dementia due to old age.
Nowhere would you have a COVID in and you wouldn't know whether that bronchopneumonia was due to a flu virus or a cold virus or a bacteria that they picked up in hospital or because they'd inhaled their own gastric contents or why it was.
There are lots of reasons why people can die of pneumonia with dementia.
But the fact is, under normal circumstances, it would never be recorded and we wouldn't be worrying about You know about people dying of dementia because that is obviously something that happens in old age and bronchopneumonia it used to be you know euphemistically referred to in the not too distant past as the old man or the old woman's friend because in fact it stopped their suffering and allowed them to die and one of the things I've been really rather surprised about is that it seems very difficult to have a grown-up conversation about death or it has
been very difficult to have a public grown-up conversation about death I should say in this country In 2020, I mean, one would have thought that one would be discussing In public, the reasons why people have died and the reasons around those who died just with a mention of the disease versus those who really died of the disease because we need to know who they are because that helps us to understand the disease.
If we can't distinguish between who's really died of the disease and those who just died of something else but with the disease or with a positive test or with an even thought that they might have had the disease, we can't really get to the bottom of what this disease is doing.
And in fact, the response, unfortunately, of the authorities And the media has made it essentially impossible to dissect that now.
It's been impossible to have a grown-up conversation about what's been happening in public.
It's all been about, you know, Everybody's seen on the daily briefing, the politician saying words to the effect of them.
My heart goes out to everybody who's had a relative who died of COVID. Now, obviously, I understand that.
I personally lost my wife in the last two years.
She died suddenly in front of me.
She had a cardiac arrest.
I had to do CPR. She was on ITU for three weeks.
She died at the age of 57.
She'd been previously fit and healthy.
I know how awful it is to lose a relative out of time.
But the fact is, death is a fact of life.
We have to face it and we have to face the fact that particularly old people and people with comorbidities are more susceptible to dying of infection.
So old people are more susceptible to infectious diseases of all kinds than younger people are.
So in order to understand what's going on, particularly with the new disease, we really need to be able to have A sensible public discussion about death.
And, you know, difficult as that may be in circumstances, I mean, in any circumstances, it's important to be able to have it.
And I mean, unless the government are going to go on television ad infinitum apologising to everybody about every death in the country.
I mean, what about the nine out of 10 people who've been dying during the same period who haven't had COVID? They haven't got a mention at all.
I find it extraordinary that politicians think it's a good idea to hype up one particular type of death over all others.
I think we just need to be able to have a sensible, calm, non-emotional discussion about death, which helps us get to the bottom of things.
And I say I understand the grief and the upset of death as well as anybody does.
But the fact is, you know, getting emotional about it or getting too emotional about it when we're supposed to be discussing things rationally actually doesn't help.
Yes, no, I agree.
There was a very, I don't know whether you've seen it yet, there was a very intemperate debate between my friend Toby Young and some American journalist about is the lockdown necessary or not.
And the American journalist, his argument was basically, look at all these deaths!
How can you fail to be appalled by this large number of deaths?
But you've made the point that The death of somebody near the end of their life whose quality of life is not good is very different from the death of somebody, very different from the lost quality of life who is somebody who is healthy and has many years ahead of him or whatever.
Can you talk about that a bit?
Well, yes.
I mean, you know, the life expectancy of birth of somebody in this country is about 82.
Yeah.
So that means, you know, that's how long we can expect to live.
If you live a bit less than those years, well, you may feel aggrieved.
And if you lived a bit longer than those years, you know, maybe you've had a good innings.
But the point is that that is the life expectancy.
And so obviously that means under normal circumstances, quite a lot of people die at a younger age than 82 because it averages out at 82.
Not only do you have to live longer, but you have people living less long as well.
So people do die in their In the 70s.
A relatively small number of people die at younger age groups, but I've just mentioned one example.
But it does happen.
Sadly, it does happen.
So, in talking about death and in talking about the death of individual people in a sort of a scientific way doesn't mean That you're not caring.
It sort of goes back to a bit like the 19th century arguments about, or maybe even more recently the 19th century arguments about science.
Some people will tell you that science just takes all the beauty and mystery out of the world and it makes everything worse and scientists have a miserable load of killjoys and they just spoil everything.
Well I've never seen it that way.
I think that actually by understanding things and by understanding how the world works you can actually understand the beauty of flowers and birds and trees and The sky and the weather and all these things more because it actually deals with more detail.
It gives you more depth to what you're seeing.
And although death isn't everybody's idea of the most enjoyable thing to talk about over a cup of tea in the afternoon, the fact is it is an important thing.
And in a particular situation like this where we have a new disease coming and initially we were frightened by it, you would say that it's actually more important than ever to have a grown-up conversation about this so we can get our responses to it right.
So we can look after the people who need looking after and we can, you know, not overreact.
And my view is that actually what we've done is a huge overreaction.
We've harmed many people who wouldn't be harmed by this disease.
And we've also harmed people who are being harmed by the disease.
So the people who essentially wouldn't be harmed by this disease are most people under the age of 65.
Yes, there are some people who get it and die.
Some of those have pre-existing conditions.
A few unlucky individuals Just get it out of the blue and die.
I mean, that happens every year.
I remember seeing cases myself in my pathology career.
A 33-year-old young woman with a family and she picked up a nasty respiratory bug.
This is quite a few years ago now, you know, 15 years ago I'm talking about.
But no, no, she picked up a nasty respiratory bug, was on a ventilator, couldn't be weaned off the ventilator.
She died.
So the thing is, it's not common, but it does happen.
So, obviously, if somebody at that age, at the age of 33, The difference between 33 and 82 is 49 years.
That individual has nominally lost 49 years of life, many of which may have been good quality years of life.
But of course, if somebody who's 84, say, gets a respiratory infection and dies, although obviously it may be very sad for them and their family, the fact is that they have had a good innings and the number of years of life lost to that disease doesn't compare with the younger person's life loss, which is why in our heart of hearts we all know that we get more upset If a young person or a child dies of the disease than we do if somebody's very old granny or grandpa dies of the disease.
It's just life and we all know that.
And since we all know that it seems to me we ought to be able to have a sort of grown-up conversation about this in public whereby when we say this disease mainly kills older people with pre-existing co-morbidities We then don't descend into some criminatory emotional argument about the fact that the person who said that doesn't care about human life and they want everybody to die.
Obviously that's nonsense, it's not true.
What we're trying to do is have a grown-up conversation about the way life is and therefore what we can do best in the face of a new threat to minimise the threat.
That's surely what we all want to do.
Tell me, do you think you could say this stuff if you were still an NHS consultant?
Well, maybe I'll put it in a slightly different way.
I think most people working in the NHS wouldn't.
I mean, it's quite interesting in the Chief Coroner issued guidelines about the coronial system and autopsies at the beginning of this, near the beginning of March the 29th, I think it was, near the beginning anyway of the And right at the beginning of that, the chief coroner made a statement and it says, I can't quote the words exactly, but it basically says the chief coroner can envisage no circumstances under which a coroner would want to talk to the media in this epidemic.
And it's certainly true in a lot of hospitals that the management put around things telling doctors not to talk to the media.
Now, I'm a slight exception to this because Coming up 20 years ago I actually did talk to the media about it was in the in the wake of the Alderhey child autopsy scandal and you may remember that a German pathologist Gunter von Hagens actually did a public autopsy in London.
Now I was involved in that, I was the guy in the white coat explaining that and I then did two Channel 4 series with him, one called Anatomy for Beginners and one called Autopsy Life and Death in which we discussed pathology and the powers that be in my profession were very anti it actually at the time but In fact, afterwards I felt quite vindicated in it because they were really well received and almost all the feedback I got, either from medical colleagues or from the general public, were very positive and they thought it was worth seeing.
So the thing is, I don't know if I was still working with the NHS whether I would have said this or not.
I feel I probably would have done because I feel strongly about things.
On the other hand, I do think that there's a very strong Inhibitory influence on people sticking their neck above the parapet and saying these things, which is a pity because I think it spoils the quality of public debate we have on these things and we tend to get a one-sided debate.
I mean, one of the things that struck me during this epidemic is that it seems to be there are two types of journalism, if you like.
One type of journalism that is investigative journalism and likes to challenge and criticise stories that are out there with a view to helping elucidate the truth.
And then there's a different type of journalism which essentially illustrates a story that we think we already know.
And I think another word for that is propaganda, actually.
And I do feel that an awful lot of the mainstream media and our national broadcaster has done only that.
They've virtually not criticised the narrative that was set at the beginning at all.
And I think it's an enormous shame and a great pity because I think not only are they frightened Huge numbers of people in this country unnecessarily.
I think they frighten the government into taking a course of action that's unnecessary.
And I think they must take a share of the responsibility for what will, I'm sure, turn out to be an extremely damaging course of action, not just economically, but also directly on people's health as well.
So I do think there's going to be quite a lot of a mirror looking in that ought to be done after this, whether it is or not, I don't know, but it should be.
Yes, so just to recap, we've got this virus, which is certainly no worse than, well, not as bad as the Hong Kong flu of 1968 in terms of its virulence.
Definitely not as bad as the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed mainly young people.
Nowhere near as bad.
Not even as bad as SARS, the original SARS, and yet we've decided, not just in Britain but across the world, to close down our economies.
As you say, at the beginning that might have made some kind of sense when, for example, there were rumours that it might have been a Chinese bioweapon.
Did you ever buy into that?
I suppose my default position is not to believe conspiracy theories until there's good evidence for them.
Pretty quickly people came out saying that there wasn't any evidence on DNA testing and so forth, so I guess I thought that was a conspiracy theory so I didn't really buy it.
Who knows?
But I'm not sure there's evidence for it anyway.
I think, to be honest, it's very difficult to design a virus that did what this one does.
And if you had designed a virus, it's a pretty rubbish bioweapon, frankly, because it's not that bad.
I was going to say it's a bit of a shit virus.
It'll kill off your old people and your fat people.
Wow!
Those aren't the people of fighting age, are they?
I mean, suppose the Chinese were doing that.
That would be a pretty shit effort in the labs.
Yeah.
But at what point do you think in the course of this virus, this viral scare, if you like, should the medical establishment have started saying, Hang on a second.
This is no worse than any other ones.
We're overreacting.
How long should it have taken them to realise that?
Well, I think it was pretty clear within the first month after our lockdown.
Personally, I thought it was pretty clear from the beginning of our lockdown or before the beginning of our lockdown.
But as we said, I can understand the politicians' reaction.
But I think the evidence was pretty clear pretty quickly that, in fact, there was a huge ascertainment bias on this, that it was doing what it was doing.
So I would say after about a month.
But of course, the trouble with it is that if you imagine you're a government scientific advisor, if you stick your head above the parapet and you say, well, actually, I don't think this is too bad now.
I think we can end the lockdown.
Probably if 300 people die the next week, you are going to be forced to resign by a media storm of terrible accusations about the fact you caused these deaths or something like that.
So you can't necessarily, in those circumstances, blame People who are career scientists who, you know, the sort of people who like serving on those committees because that's why they're there.
You can't blame them for not sticking their head above the parapet.
And I feel that this is just another example of the way that committees aren't necessarily a good way of making rational decision making, which is what worries me for the future.
How can we Have a situation.
Essentially, it's been talked about in the NHS, actually, for quite a long time.
After there have been various scandals in the NHS, people constantly try and talk about a no-blame culture in the NHS, that when things go wrong, people can put their hand up and say, actually, this has gone wrong without fear that they will be sort of fired and pilloried in public.
But despite the many, many years of discussion of the no-blame culture, we have the opposite in this country.
We have a massive blame culture that if you put your hand up, And say, oh, I'm sorry, that was wrong or this went wrong or that went wrong.
You will be absolutely a ton of bricks will be thrown down on you.
So, you know, it's not surprising that the government scientists take a very cautious line in their recommendations to government because nobody is going to have it stop on their desk that they were the one who said lift lockdown and it might not be true.
Even if it was 99.9% going to be true, they don't want to be the ones who do that responsibility.
And then, of course, you have the politicians.
They don't want to actually be blamed for anything.
And so they want to hide behind the scientists on it.
So we have this rather unhealthy and unholy combination of people trying to be cautious.
And now that we put ourselves into this situation, it reminds me of that children's story about the little mouse running around saying, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, and all the animals follow around.
And then suddenly he points out that the sky isn't falling, and so he gets a bit of a slapping and they all go away.
But when you convince yourself and enough other people that the sky is falling, how do you then You know, stop doing what you think you're doing to stop the sky falling.
It's a conundrum, isn't it?
Virtually no chance of a second wave.
I think it's pretty clear that this virus was on the way in any way.
Contrary to what was originally said, about 80% of us getting this virus, it looks like 40 to 60% of us already have some resistance to this virus anyway.
I think the whole thing about a vaccine is a red herring because it's unlikely that we're ever going to have one.
I mean, the Common Cold Research Institute spent 43 years trying to make a vaccine for the Common Cold and didn't manage it.
I think track and trace is, unless we want to go down the Chinese model of tracking traces people held forever, which is a real massive big brother society, which, you know, since when do we copy the Chinese in our societal responses?
That's extremely worrying, it seems to me.
And unthought through, because, you know, if we're going to track for this disease, if we can track for other disease, every time a new virus comes along, every winter, none of this makes sense to me.
And the bottom line is, the response that we Could have taken, and in fact that we could now have taken for the last six weeks, is to give people guidance and advice, to say no, our original idea about this virus was wrong, it's not as bad as we thought it was,
but it does affect certain groups of people, certain susceptible groups of people maybe, and so we can give them advice about self-isolating themselves and keeping you out of trouble, if they think that's worth it, because you've got to remember that lockdown and social distancing change society in ways that many of us Well, apart from that, it's ridiculous and not sustainable.
But especially if you're an older person, make life really, why is it worth living?
If you can't see your friends, if you can't see your family, if you can't travel, if you can't go on holiday, if you can't go to a cafe, if you can't go to a restaurant, if you can't do all the things that people have earned their money to enjoy in their old age, really, I mean, what's going on?
And, you know, so I think, you know, quality of life, there's more than just death in this conversation, quality of life.
It's very important as well.
Do we want to live a life in prison?
Is that a quality of life that we've been worth living?
So I think we've got to think about the bigger picture rather than just being COVID blinkered and COVID this and COVID that.
And I think even when we think cursorily about the bigger picture, it's clear that what we could do as of today, schools could go back, businesses could open up, social distancing could stop because it's a nonsense.
I mean, anybody who's been out and about recently can see That it's completely ridiculous.
Many people are not paying attention to it.
You can't socially distance in a shop.
You can't socially distance in a restaurant or an aeroplane or a theatre or a football stadium.
So for goodness sake, we're going to have to get there.
Let's get there now.
The sky is not falling.
But if you're somebody who's potentially vulnerable, if you're given the information about this virus, such as we now know, you can make your own decisions.
I mean, it seems to me the NHS is there to protect us, not the other way around.
So if I'm 85 and I want to go out and see my friends and I catch the virus, the NHS is supposed to be there to look after me.
I'm not supposed to be told to make my life a misery in order that the NHS doesn't have to look after me because I thought that's what I paid my taxes for.
You're right.
The NHS is, or was at least, designed to look after us, not us sacrifice everything for the NHS. So you mentioned what we know now about the coronavirus.
In terms of Suppose I was some kind of, like the woman I went riding with the other day, who actually, somebody adjusted her girth and she let out a yelp of genuine terror.
She thought that she was going to, somehow, the coronavirus is going to leap from the person adjusting her girth onto, I don't know, up her leg or something and probably kill her.
Suppose I'm that kind of panicky person and there were a lot of them about.
What would you say to me about the coronavirus and its risks?
Well I think we have to, well I think it's a sort of two-phase thing and I think it requires some responsibility from government on this and some acknowledgement of changes to the data and it requires some responsibility I do think on the media because they have the biggest reach,
the BBC has enormous reach and they need to change the story and I think we need to first of all say to people look we told you about this virus In the early stages of this epidemic, when we thought we knew this about it, what we now know about it is different, and now we know this about it.
For example, you have a low chance of dying of it at any age, but as you would expect, a much higher chance as you get older, as you get substantially older, over 65, over 75, and if you have other conditions.
So for the vast majority of people in the country, there is very little risk from this virus.
Probably more than half of people who get this virus have it asymptomatically, so you wouldn't even know that you've had it.
Quite a lot of people have already got resistance to the virus.
I mean, fundamentally, the thing is, it can cause a nasty disease.
That's clear.
And it obviously has killed people, and it obviously has killed some people out there.
So if you're a very nervous disposition, you know, you might take some persuading of whether or not you want to go out.
And it's your judgment whether you think that staying at home because of an invisible threat is worth it, Or whether, in fact, you're going to take your chances like you normally do in the wintertime with all the other viruses out there.
I mean, it's your judgment.
But the real key issue is it should be each individual making their own judgment, not a blanket one size fits all government in position, which takes away all of our freedoms and actually spoils an awful lot of the good things about life.
We've worked very hard for the last 75 years since the Second World War to make a society that is, you know, a nice, humane, caring, Prosperous society with good things to do in it.
And at the moment, for example, we're asking all our young people, all the people mainly in the working age group of the country in their 20s and 30s who've got qualifications or trying to get qualifications and who've worked hard to build up a business or to get promotion in their business, they've all been thrown on the scrap heap for a disease that isn't going to affect them at all.
That seems incredibly unfair to me.
And for people who might be worried they're going to get it, well, there are things they can do to protect themselves.
But none of us can reduce risk to zero.
There are always risks out there.
All of us have, within our body, orders of magnitude.
Hundreds, thousands, millions of times more viruses than we've got cells in our body.
Living in us now?
Living in us now, yeah.
You have about 10 times the number of bacteria in your body than you have cells in your body.
Mainly in the gut, but there are lots of around.
And the thing is, so one of the most interesting things that's come out in recent years, for example, is that the mucus in our bowel It protects us from the bacteria in our bowel, not just by being a barrier layer, but there are huge numbers of viruses called bacteriophages, and these are viruses that particularly attack bacteria, which our mucus deliberately binds in the mucus.
So when the bacteria try and invade through the mucus together, they get attacked by bacteriophage and blown up by the bacteriophage.
So actually viruses keep us alive, probably.
Viruses in our body.
Do you know about Mr Burns from The Simpsons?
Do you ever watch The Simpsons?
I know his name, but I probably don't know the story you're about to tell.
Mr Burns, he's very, very old.
Mr Burns is kept alive by the perfect balance of all the diseases in his body.
Anyway, it's good to have it confirmed by an actual doctor.
Sorry, because the viruses are out there and they're in here.
We've all got lots of viruses in us.
You cannot reduce risk to zero.
And the key message I think for people to take home about this virus is that it hasn't changed the risk you face when you go out into the street or meet other people.
The risk you would have had from the combined risks of flu and the common cold and diarrhea and all these other things that are out there.
So my prediction is this, when we look back on this year, We won't see any change in the life expectancy of people in this country.
Yes.
Because of coronavirus.
In other words, it hasn't changed the risk.
Interesting.
And do you think that the lockdown has in itself compromised our immune systems?
Because presumably that they haven't been tested and against all the latest bugs.
Well, people have speculated on that.
I mean, I think, you know, our immune systems are very well designed.
Our immune memory It's pretty solid and it lasts for a long time.
I mean, you get measles or chicken pox when you're a child, you don't get it again for your entire life.
So, generally speaking.
So the fact is, part of the reason why older people are more susceptible to this virus and indeed all viruses is because as you get older, your memory starts to forget things while your immune system starts to forget things too.
So you become more susceptible to things that may be exposed to in the past.
There are lots of common viruses out there that Something like 99% of people have had and most of the time you've had them in your first year or two or three of life and you never knew about them but your immune system dealt with it.
As you get older it gradually forgets some of those and so you do become more susceptible.
As you get older you become more susceptible to lots of things.
Your breathing isn't as good, your heart isn't as good, well your immune system isn't as good either and that's one of many factors that mean that you know as we get older Our chances of surviving the next year gradually go down until eventually we meet our own death.
And now some people meet their death when they're 60, some people meet their death when they're 100.
We don't know who we are because it's a very complicated thing.
There are some random factors in there.
But basically it's not surprising that as we get older we become more susceptible to disease.
I think most people would feel that the way to live life is to accept the fact that mortality is part of the human condition, is part of what makes us human.
My take on it is that the fact that I know there's only a certain amount of time in my life, and I must say, having witnessed the death of my wife, it really brings it home to you.
When you know there's a limited amount of time and you don't know how long that time is, it really makes you want to value every day.
And I would have thought most people in one form or another would agree with that sentiment.
So unless there's an overwhelming risk outside, most people want to carry on with what they normally do because that's what they like.
That's what makes life worth living.
And what we can say for certainty, absolute certainty, is there is no overwhelming risk outside.
Contrary to what you might have thought in the early phases of this epidemic and with the pictures and the rest of it, that was wrong.
I mean, basically, The message that it gave and the image that it gave was wrong.
There is no overwhelming risk out there.
There's a new virus and it contributes a bit to the overall risk, but basically you can go out and wander around the streets now and meet your friends and go to the restaurant, I would say, with Minimally more risk than you could before.
And I think it's wrong to scaremonger the opposite.
And at the end of the day, we don't have any option to this.
The virus is never going back in the box again.
Pandora's box is open.
This virus will exist in equilibrium with the human population.
Most of the time it will be asymptomatic.
Occasionally we'll get flare ups in places.
But, you know, probably the virus will be less in the long term than it was in some places initially.
I think that's very likely.
But nevertheless, we're going to have to live with it.
So do we waste six months or a year or two years or however long of our lives hiding behind the sofa pretending that we can avoid a virus or do we get on with our lives and accept that risk is something we normally face and you know it's okay?
So this is a tough question.
How many doctors, how much of the medical profession do you think is aware of what you've been telling me?
Obviously, I'm not a usual doctor.
I trained as a scientist.
I did a BSc and a PhD in basic science.
I'm a pathologist and pathology is a specialty of medicine.
I'm particularly interested in looking at data and perhaps a slightly more scientific specialty of medicine.
Many doctors in their day-to-day work are very, very busy and very, very tired and they get through the day.
I don't think In my experience, you know, a lot of doctors are smart, intelligent people, but they don't necessarily have a huge amount of time for questioning, you know, complicated scientific things.
Big picture stuff.
Yeah, I mean, that's right.
I think many people believe what they've seen on the BBC or the newspapers.
I think many doctors don't believe that as well.
I think many of them, like a lot of intelligent people around the country, are thinking, you know, what on earth is going on with this?
But they won't necessarily know the detail about it.
You know, I've been retired for a couple of years, so I've had a bit more time to look into this, I think, over the last couple of months or so.
But I think in the same way that there are a lot of doctors out there and they're a selection of the population.
And I think they get their information in the same way that most people do, actually.
And unfortunately, that information has been a very biased, single minded narrative.
That was fixed, almost, in the very early days of this epidemic.
And while the science has moved on, the narrative has not.
And that's a big issue.
And it's something that government and the media ought to be doing everything they can to change.
Because every day that goes by like this, we're suffering the consequences.
And every day that goes by, billions of pounds of economic loss are going by.
There will be a reckoning for this.
This isn't scare-mongering, it's true, and we've got to try and minimise it, and we should minimise it by getting what we need to do now, which is releasing all these unnecessary measures.
As you understand it, was the only reason for this lockdown the Ferguson study for Imperial?
I think it was a combination of factors.
I think it was a mixture of the The apparently worrying fatality rates coming out of Wuhan in China, the pictures from Wuhan and Italy and in Spain, the unselected dreadful pictures of what was happening there, which I think we can all see now weren't representative, but they were very distressing.
Do you have an explanation for that?
What do you think was going on there?
Well, I think, well, again, that's complicated.
I think there may have been In particular circumstances in the healthcare systems in Italy and in New York, for example, where we saw those pictures, I think there was a tendency, because in the original part of the epidemic, people thought they knew that this was an incredibly virulent disease which needed very, very intensive treatment, I think there was a lot of over-treatment going on.
In Italy, in Lombardy, in Italy, they put a huge number of people on ventilators, which can actually make things worse.
So I think there was a change in people's thresholding.
They admitted lots and lots of people to hospital where they then caught the virus, whereas if they left them at home, they may not have caught the virus.
They then did intensive treatment, which may have made it worse.
So there was a whole, again, a witch's brew of things that contributed to it.
And it may be possible that in the early stages of this epidemic, the viral subtypes that were out there were slightly nastier than they now are.
For the reasons I explained where the less nasty type can actually spread more widely, it may have been that actually some of these places did happen.
There's a thing in epidemiology called the founder effect.
So if one person brings in a new disease to an area, then at least initially all the people they infect will be infected with that strain of the disease.
The disease in this particular case then mutates quite quickly and it may be that a more mild strain then becomes established.
But the founder effect means that if somebody with a nasty strain comes in, Then your initial cases, at least, would be quite nasty until it's had time to evolve to a different equilibrium.
So there may have been a bit of that going on.
I don't know.
Obviously, there may be possibilities to study that in due course.
But there was a whole...
So basically, I think initially there was the pictures in Wuhan, the apparent overwhelming of certain healthcare systems.
So that happened in Lombardy, but yet 50 miles away in Veneto, ITUs were half empty.
So it wasn't representative.
And then, of course, on the back of that, you always have a subgroup of scientists who like being in the news, I think.
And, you know, if I'm a scientist and I say, you know, actually, I don't think this epidemic is going to be too bad, that's not really newsworthy, is it?
Whereas if I'm one who says, one in three of us are going to die, I'm going to be on the news.
And, you know, there's a bias and an ascertainment bias in terms of what we hear about.
So I think that also plays a part in it, that if you have a catastrophizing model, you're going to get more traction.
I do think the media, the broadcast media, have been responsible for amplifying the fear and the worry and the models about something they didn't know about, but they've gone to town.
I think we've had some near misses in the last few years, but they really hit the jackpot with this one, and it just shows how nasty that can be.
This is a direct result of the amplification of misinformation at a time when we didn't have enough to be sure.
So my view would be that if you don't know the answer to something, the only rational response is to say we need to wait and see a bit more.
Unless you know that it's the worst disease since the plague, you probably shouldn't do what we've done.
Yes, somebody mentioned that analogy from the movie The Hunt for Red October, that you don't press the red button, mass retaliation to the initial strike until you know the strike's definitely coming.
Yeah, you hope so.
You'd hope so.
So you mentioned earlier that we haven't yet found a vaccine for the common cold, which is a coronavirus, which presumably suggests that it could be Eons, or possibly never, before we discover a vaccine to this.
Do you have any other reservations about this drive that we're hearing from the WHO, and not just from the WHO, from government ministers like Nadine Dorris?
In fact, quite a lot of government ministers, you hear them talking about the vaccine, the vaccine, the vaccine, and you see it in the media as well.
Does that worry you slightly?
Well, it does in the sense that I think it's people who Maybe don't know very much about this, or maybe they do know quite a lot of it, but they're thinking about what will play well with the public, and they're clutching at straws that sound a bit like...
It's the same with this new drug that has been proposed for treating coronavirus.
And the fact is, most viral treatments don't treat the virus.
They're supportive treatment that help people survive viral infections.
So viruses go into our cells and they use our own cellular machinery to damage the body.
So it's very difficult to kill the virus without killing our own cells.
So most of the time what happens is we let our immune system deal with the virus and the treatments we give support in various systems of the body that are affected by whatever virus it is.
So I think obviously in the current circumstances we're in this crazy the sky is falling situation And obviously everybody would love to be able to say, look, out of my bag, I've pulled this magic treatment.
We can all take one of these pills.
Everything's going to go away and we can get to normal.
Well, I'm sorry, but that isn't going to happen.
I mean, it's not the way this works.
These little pathogens have been around essentially since the dawn of life.
I mean, that's another thing that our cellular mechanisms have evolved with these things since we were single celled organisms.
I mean, for two billion years of life on Earth, all life was single celled.
And at that time there were viruses around too.
So as soon as we became multi-celled and started developing into bigger organisms, the viruses came with us.
The viruses predate, probably, cellular organisms.
So the fact is, our body, the mechanisms of our body, which even though we understand a lot of the complexity of them, are still a lot more complex than people understand.
They have two and a half billion years of evolution existing with these things.
So we can let our body sort out the virus.
What we can do sometimes is to, you know, is to support the body in reacting to the virus.
But the drug, for example, I predict it's only going to be useful in a small minority of people with very serious disease.
The vast majority of people who get this virus won't have the drug and won't need the drug.
And in fact, there'll be side effects of the drug, which are probably worse than the virus in the vast majority of cases.
I think a vaccine is unlikely because these viruses exist in the world because they found ways of continuing to infect people After, you know, a lot of the people have become immune to them, otherwise they'd have died out.
So these viruses are out there and the way they work is because they can change and RNA viruses change quite quickly.
So the virus will find a way around this.
I mean, it's difficult to imagine how quickly viral evolution happens because there are so many of them.
So if you've got a cold, you may be excreting 10 to the 11 virus particles per day.
So 100 billion virus particles coming out of your body every day.
That means every breath, it's about 10 million virus particles.
So, you know, you tell me that when we're walking around the supermarket and you're walking behind somebody who's got an asymptomatic infection, breathing out 10 million virus particles a day, and you walk two metres behind them if you're being good, and you breathe in the same air that they've been buying, and if it's a respiratory infection, you're going to be breathing in the viruses.
So you'll either catch it or you won't.
Social distancing is just a total nonsense designed, I think, to You know, it's an opium for the masses sort of thing.
It's designed to reassure the population.
He'd much rather be reassured by being told that this is all over, which would be the truth now.
And so, you know, we can get back to normal rather than inventing, you know, spurious protective measures to look after us and potentially spurious ways in which we're going to beat the virus.
Well, we're not going to beat the virus.
We're going to live with the virus.
And we just need to accept it and get used to it and carry on, like I was saying.
How is it spread actually?
Is it from touching doorknobs or is it breathing air that's infected?
I should think that the strictly truthful answer is we don't exactly know but when you breathe out or when you sneeze or cough you cough out droplets and bits of epithelial cell from your lung and your mouth and all these things that come out And the virus particles will be bound in amongst those and some of them will be separate virus particles and some of them will be stuck to the droplets and so on and so forth.
So the thing is, there's an awful lot of these viruses out there in the atmosphere.
Now, some of those droplets will then settle onto the ground and onto your clothes.
And then if somebody brushes past you, maybe a flake of your skin or something or a flake of your dry snot or something will unfortunately go into the air and you'll breathe it in.
And this happens all the time.
That's what dust is.
We don't need to worry too much about this.
That's just dust.
It doesn't sound very nice, does it?
But this is the world we live in, I'm afraid.
At a microscopic level, you know, there are lots of things that happen you can't see.
And it's probably just as well that we don't need to think about most of the time.
But this time it's important to think about this.
This time it's important to think about them because we need to understand how this works.
So those bits will fly around in the air and the whole business about washing your hands and wearing a face mask is trying to stop the bigger droplets being breathed in where then it could maybe get into your epithelial respiratory cells and start causing the infection.
But of course there will be some independent viruses floating around in the air as well and bits of the RNA and so forth.
They may be infected.
How many do we need to breathe in to cause infection?
Is it one virus?
Is it ten?
Is it a hundred?
How many droplets?
We don't know and the trouble with it is, is the only way you can test viruses like this in the lab is by doing something called viral teeters and so what happens with that is that the virus is isolated and then it's tested in various dilutions on cell cultures and depending on how many of those cell cultures are infected that gives you a viral teeter and it gives you an idea of how infected the virus is or how much virus there needs to be around to catch the infection.
But of course the trouble with that is that's Dealing with cell cultures.
Well, we are a type of cell culture, but we're a different sort of cell culture.
And so actually, whether those teeth is directly translated into infectability in the wide world out there, we just don't know.
I mean, it would seem to me that it spreads probably in the same way that the common cold and flu and other viruses spread, which is by being around in dust and in the atmosphere.
And it's there and sometimes we catch it and sometimes we don't.
And why I catch it and you don't, or If she catches it and he doesn't, we don't really know, but it's probably related to whether we have to breathe in a bit of stuff with enough of the virus on it, whether we've got any pre-existing resistance to the virus, exactly how our immune system is set up and exactly how fit we are.
But yeah, that's a bit hand-wavy, but that's probably the general ballpark of how we catch it, I would say.
And tell me about R, because the government is now going big on R. It's like the key to everything, isn't it?
And we can't We can't go back to normal until r is well below one or something.
Even zero they say.
Well I hope not.
I mean the trouble with it is that r is a modelling number.
I mean r is this idea of how many people one individual person might spread the virus to and obviously the idea is if it's above one you're going to spread it to more than one person so more people will have the virus.
If it's below one you'll spread it to less than one person and the virus will eventually dwindle away and maybe peter out.
The point is, I would have thought by now that we've had a bit of a belly full of models because we've seen how, you know, how to describe this.
I think the thing about models is they can be very useful.
They can be useful when you think you've got an understanding of something because what you do is you take, say you think there are 10 factors affecting this thing, you then make a model with these 10 factors and you plug them in and you see if your model reproduces What just happened accurately.
So it can be useful.
But the trouble is, when you try and use the model for prediction, what you can't predict is other things you haven't thought of happening in the future or out in the real wide world.
So whereas looking back with the model could be quite useful scientifically, because, for example, if you can't mimic the data with your model, it might say, well, we're missing something and maybe we should look at this or maybe we should look at that to try and find out in more detail what's going on.
But when you predict with models, very often, They come out with outrageously wrong predictions.
If you think about it, if you've got a model with 10 variables, there are millions of ways in which you can predict various outcomes from these things, because you can, especially when they're continuously varying variables, you can mix them any way you like and you may be able to predict You know, mimic what just happened and then predict something in the future.
Well, who knows which of those millions of ways of mimicking the past is going to be relevant to predicting the future?
So the fact is, models are pretty rubbish at predicting the future.
And I would have thought that the government would understand that by now because we've had many examples over the past few years with SARS, with MERS, with AIDS, with BSE, mad cow disease.
We've had many examples over the past few years of this being got spectacularly wrong and policy being very wrong as well as a result of it.
And I'm afraid, unfortunately, I mean, C.P. Snow's think about the two cultures, about how we have a culture of science driving the country forward and developing lots of things that are good for us.
But we have a political culture which is pretty scientifically illiterate with very few of our, you know, I mean, they might be interested in science, but they don't seem to understand it very well.
That's a real issue in something like this, because I really feel from what I've been seeing of the politicians performance over the last few weeks is that they don't really understand it.
If you scratch the surface.
And in something like this, that's a problem.
So we've got the scientists being very cautious, the government scientists being very cautious about it, for the reason I explained earlier.
And then you've got the politicians not really being able to see beyond that.
And so taking what they're being told at face value, when their job is really to integrate it or to build up the big picture and not to just look at COVID and what the scientists are making about COVID, but about all the other things that affect our lives.
And it seems to me they've just got onto one track, become obsessed with COVID, Have forgotten the rest of the world that they're supposed to be doing.
They've also, I think, forgotten the fact that leadership is not about telling people what they want to hear.
I mean, you know, we've seen so many occasions over the last few weeks where we're told that an opinion poll greatly supports the continuing lockdown and an opinion poll still believes that this virus is very, very dangerous.
Well, blow me down.
Of course they will, because that's what they've been told.
Leadership is about telling people that's wrong.
This is where we are now.
And I feel that our government, in trying to follow what the population thinks it thinks because of what they told them before, we're in a sort of little cycle of going nowhere.
We're going round and round a circle, sort of tail in the mouth of the cat or the dog type of thing.
And it's just bonkers.
So leadership from our government would mean, you know, properly criticising the science they've been told, looking at the big picture, It's pretty obvious that this is wrong now and telling people that and telling people we're now going to move to something new.
And the thing that I really can't understand and it's really been upsetting me a lot over the last few weeks is the fact that the opposition politicians and in fact the government back benches are not challenging the story at all.
They all seem to have just accepted the narrative as is.
And so they're all talking around the point.
They just It's all, what should we do given that this is true?
Rather than, is this true and should we be doing this?
And of course, the mainstream media, the broadcast media, have been doing exactly the same thing.
I think they like this story.
I think they want it to run forever.
It replaces the emptiness in their lives left from Brexit or whatever hangover from before, I think.
And the fact is, where is the criticism of the narrative?
And until we start getting some breakthrough on that, how can we move out of this Crazy position we've got ourselves into.
Yes, what seems to me to support that, what you just said, is two things I've noticed in the media.
One is a tremendous eagerness to report any stories about Sweden which show it in a bad light, which show its relaxed policy towards the lockdown to have been a failure.
They're always looking for examples of a higher death rate in Sweden.
And the second thing, I don't want to sound tinfoil hat here, but I've spoken to quite a few doctors who've successfully used a combination of hydroxychloroquine and zinc as part of the treatment protocol for their patients, and they're very happy with it.
And yet when I look in the media, I find wall-to-wall stories about here is a Lancet study saying HCQ has a bad effect.
And then you look at the details and what you find is that actually this wasn't a very balanced study, that the people that they looked at were patients who were already on their way out.
They were in ICUs and stuff like that.
So it wasn't a kind of representative study of HCQ in the early stages.
Do you have anything to say about those two things, Sweden and hydroxychloroquine?
Well, take the second one first.
I mean, there's been a...
Well, a worrying tendency in this epidemic.
Because people thought it was an existential threat, there was an obvious desire to get things done very quickly.
Now normally when things are published in the medical or the scientific They undergo a process of peer review.
And peer review basically means that a paper is sent to other people in the field and they read it and they criticise it and they maybe send it back and say, well, you haven't thought of this, you haven't thought of that, you haven't thought of this.
And then the people either do more work on it or they amend their argument and then it goes back and it goes round that cycle again.
And then the paper you get coming out is a better paper and it's a more believable paper because it's been properly looked at and criticised and thought about.
Now, in this epidemic, because of this desire for urgency and what was felt to be a very serious threat, Almost all the papers that have been published on this hitherto have been non-peer reviewed.
They've just been bunged out there because it's more important for people to understand what this is than to waste time in peer review.
But what it means is, what you've just said, is that a lot of these papers Actually haven't been properly criticized and that means they're not proper science.
Basically, that's the bottom line.
If you haven't had it criticized, you can't claim that you've thought of everything and that there might be some flaws in your argument that other people won't think of.
So that's a big worry because most of the papers that are leading the government scientists on this and then leading the government are non-peer reviewed, which means that, you know, we've actually got a much downgraded database to look at with this.
And in fact, we've got a much wider database Much of which will include stuff that isn't going to stand the test of time.
So that's a big problem, I think, and it's a worry because it means that we, you know, it's a bit like I was saying about the death numbers earlier.
At a time when we should have better data than ever, we've downgraded the death numbers.
At a time when we should have better scientific publications than ever, we've downgraded them all.
So now you've got to sift through a whole load of stuff that you may or may not believe.
So that's an issue.
And so an example might be that hydroxychloroquine and zinc story.
Now, I don't know what the truth of That therapy is.
But just for the sake of argument, let's say that coronavirus gets better in, you know, eight days.
So, you know, if after the first couple of days you think, oh, this person is looking a bit ill, so we'll give them this therapy and then two weeks later they're better.
What does that mean?
Does it mean that those treatments have had a dramatic effect on the disease or does it mean that the disease has done what it's done?
Those things, you've essentially done nothing much to the patient apart from maybe make you and them feel a bit better.
So in other words, if you gave them a sugar pill or an aspirin or something instead, would that have the same effect?
Now, I don't know what the chapter in verse on that is at the moment, but the point is you need a controlled study to be able to understand whether those things really have any effect or not.
So whether people have put papers up there claiming that they do or not, the quality of the evidence will determine whether or not it's really true or not.
I don't know the answer.
But I imagine that quite a lot of that evidence at the moment is pretty flimsy.
Because as I say, the point is, viruses live inside our cells.
So when a virus infects your cell, it makes hundreds or thousands of copies of itself inside your cell.
And the way it gets out into the world is by bursting the cell.
So it kills your cell to do that.
So it's sort of difficult to see how a drug...
I mean it may do something, it might bind to the virus RNA or make it fall to pieces or make it less likely to infect another cell or something.
Lots of mechanisms you can imagine.
But the bottom line...
I think, what I've read anyway, is that because hydroxychloroquine is a zinc ionophore, it opens the cells to the zinc and zinc I think is, well you know that, it's very effective in treating common cause.
It's a known thing.
Okay, so there may be some basis for it, the mechanism of which we, inside the cell, we don't necessarily understand yet.
But so it may be true.
I'm not saying, what I'm saying is that to really be sure that it's true, you have to try and do the sort of study in a situation where some of the patients get it and some of the patients don't get it.
And in the current panic, I doubt that second arm of it where the patients don't get it is going to have been being done.
That makes it very difficult to understand what the treatment has done that not doing the treatment wouldn't have done anyway.
And that is the actual fundamental basis of trying to take medical treatment forward because if you don't have that comparison, You know, you don't know about it and that's why for many hundreds of years medical treatment was based on bleeding patients or giving tincture of iodine or a bit of this and a bit of that because it seemed to work and I've seen some patients it worked because they got better anyway.
It's only when you do the controlled trials that you can really dissect out what it was.
So that's the important thing.
I think the evidence is weak at the moment and it's difficult to know with a lot of it.
With regard to the Sweden thing, I think I'd like to recommend a book actually to your listeners and it is one that I've mentioned in one of my articles.
It's called The Righteous Mind, and it's by an American evolutionary psychologist called Jonathan Haidt.
And it's a really good dissection of how people come to make moral decisions about what you think is good or bad.
And in particular, the third section of the book deals with the way that human beings are probably the only animal on Earth, in fact, where group selection has had a really important role to play in our evolution.
And that's because we've got language.
And the point is, language allows us to pass information between other members of our group in ways that other animals can't do.
And that means we can make people conform to what we think the group would like.
There's a lot of evidence on this.
It's very important for the development of religion and the development of statism, if you like, in the past.
But one of the things that it's very clear about is that our minds are pre-adapted to think in a groupish way, particularly when there's an external threat.
So if the group perceives there's an external threat, what we suddenly do is forget all our little internet scene differences about minor petty things and minor political quarrels or differences about this after the next thing.
And we all stand around, we metaphorically all stand around in a circle with our spears pointing out.
And we stand like that and we do that until the threat is perceived to have gone away.
And then we get back to squabbling and argue about what we normally squabble and argue about.
And I think this, and I think it's a perfect description Of what's been happening in this epidemic.
So I do recommend that book.
It's available in Penguins.
It's a paperback.
Really good read.
Really interesting, well written book.
But the point is, it's a dead ringer for what's been happening with this epidemic.
Here we have an invisible threat.
So there's this virus out there, we can't see it.
And it reminds me of the same sort of panic reactions that happened in the 50s and 60s, for example, in relation to radioactivity.
Radiation, it's out there, we can't see it.
Or in relation to the communist scares in America, the reds under the bed.
We couldn't see them, but we believed they were there.
Or even the 5G mask thing now, the radiation coming from the mask.
There's an invisible threat out there.
We can't quantify it.
We don't know what's going to happen.
So we all stand around in a circle with our spears pointing out.
And that's what's allowed the narrative that's taken hold in so many countries, this country, America, lots of other European countries.
It's allowed the narrative to take hold in this groupish way.
Where suddenly everybody's flipped into groupthink.
And because we've all flipped into groupthink, a lot of people then absolutely resent any suggestion that that narrative is wrong.
So Sweden did something different.
Guess what?
It turns out that what we did had no effect on the virus and their method works just as well.
Well, a lot of people who bought into our groupthink are very, very cross about that because it challenges the way they're currently seeing the world.
And so you get all sorts of sniping and carping and Any attempt to portray that in a bad light.
It's the same on the BBC News.
If you look at the BBC website, you only ever see stories about people who've died, health workers who've died, people who didn't believe in coronavirus and now do it.
It's all one way narrative.
There's no balancing narrative from all the other people who don't think that that's right.
And in fact, we've got evidence that it's not right.
So the thing is, that's where I think happened.
We flipped into a type of groupthink about this and the official narrative It's such that it will criticise and complain and denigrate anybody or try to denigrate anybody who challenges that.
And what obviously we're trying to do if we don't buy into that narrative, we think there's a lot of evidence to the contrary, is to explain to people why they should be flipping back out of that narrative.
And obviously the more people can get to flip out of that narrative, suddenly people will become aware that the sky isn't falling and then it will just disappear.
But until we get to that point, we're persisting in an incredibly dangerous And harmful cause of action which is causing more harm than the threat we originally thought about because at the moment we're not able to flip out of it and it's so important that enough people in positions of responsibility in particular think about this and try and become aware of it and try and inform themselves of the truth of the matter rather than what they thought was the truth of the matter so that we can start to get this change happening.
It's really vital and it is long overdue.
It's long overdue in my opinion.
I must let you go, but just before we go, I want you to just clarify.
Is there any evidence that having the lockdown has made any difference?
I mean, I've heard from some epidemiologists who told me that the virus was already pretty much played out, it had already run its bell curve by the time the lockdown started.
Is there any evidence that lockdowns made any difference?
Well, we're back to the modelling again.
I mean, when you look at the initial Imperial College modelling paper, one of the assumptions in that paper, and it's in the very first paragraph of the paper, if anybody wants to read it, in the summary, it says that they assumed that lockdown had an immediate effect on viral transmission.
And then they went on to model the fact that, lo and behold, it had an immediate effect on viral transmission.
The fact is there isn't any evidence that lockdown has a direct effect Except in modelling, because we've only had one life.
We've only done this one way.
What you can see, though, is that somewhere like Sweden, pretty much these curves seem to play out in the same sort of way, irrespective of the societal responses to it.
So there's been a lot of minor variations in societal response across Europe.
Sweden's the one that's particularly different, but you know, I think actually the way that society has responded as being reported in the media is a bit different than the way society has actually responded.
I think, for example, in this country lockdown has been sort of quite a lot looser than a lot of people would like to believe it has been, compared, for example, to Italy or France where you had to get a permit to go out and shop.
The trouble with the R number and the trouble with the lockdown effect and social distancing is even more ephemeral because who knows whether that's got any effect at all.
And it's inverted commas evidence.
That's another thing.
You've got to be careful with language in this sort of thing.
People are calling it evidence, but it's not evidence in the sense that they've gone out there, measured a population, seen how the disease spreads, changed something, measured it again, seen how the disease spreads.
That would be an experimental determination of whether lockdown or anything else has had an effect.
We haven't got that.
We've only got one way in which we've done this lockdown.
And so what happens is people have modelled what happened before and what they think might have happened in the future and what might have happened if we hadn't done this.
So in fact, there isn't any evidence, any measured evidence.
What there is is a lot of modelling hyperbole about it, some of which thinks it was wonderful and it saved all of our lives, some of which says it has no effect at all.
Judgment on that is that when you compare all the different countries, it's much, much closer to having had male effect at all than it is to have made much difference.
Great.
That was really interesting.
Thank you so much.
Very much.
And you're listening to, in case you've forgotten, Dr John Lee.
Thanks.
Thanks very much.
I really enjoyed that.
And good luck spreading the word.
Thanks.
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