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Oct. 22, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:47:59
Dr Mike Yeadon
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Time Text
Oh, final question before we start.
How do I pronounce your surname?
Yeadon.
Yeadon?
Yes.
I knew it was either going to be Yeadon or Yaden.
Right, Yeadon.
And it comes from Yeadon, between Leeds and Bradford and whatever.
It's under Leeds and Bradford Airport.
And you don't know this, but it was the site of, I think, the world's biggest aircraft factory during World War Two.
Oh, was it?
Yeah.
Actually, I mean, obviously nothing to do with me, but I'm just rather proud of my great grand ancestors in that apparently almost every factory everywhere got bombed at some point during the war, but this was called Avro Yeadon, where they built Lancasters.
Lancasters, yeah.
And it was buried half underneath this dirty great edge of a farm, and they built a runway, and in fact that runway is Leeds and Bradford Airport.
And what they did is they, so it was largely underground apparently.
God knows how that worked.
But they, the Yorkshire folk were very canny and they thought they'd get bombed.
So one of them came up with the idea of papier-mâché cows.
And every night they had a team that would go around and drag all the cows to different positions on this sort of multiple acre roof.
Never got bombed once.
Brilliant.
Yeah, isn't that a good story?
That is a good story.
It's real.
You can go and find the secret... it's called Secret Yeadon or Avro Yeadon and it's where the Lancaster... biggest Lancaster factory was and obviously... Maybe we should try and find a way of incorporating it.
That'd be great.
Even though the podcast hasn't officially started.
Oh, I'm sorry.
That was a good... that was a good... so anyway, we're going to start and we might even have that bit in beforehand.
So...
Welcome to the Delingpod with me, James Delingpod, and I really am excited about this week's special guest.
I never want to say that because Dr. Mike Yeadon has written one of, I think, one of the most devastating papers anyone has written exposing the massive flaws in government coronavirus policy.
So, welcome to the show, Mike.
It's really good to have you on.
Hello, James.
I'm really glad to be speaking with you.
Mike, before we go into details about your paper, Sage and the Two Fatal Errors, let's call it, Just tell us a bit about your background, that you're not just some random civilian.
You're really quite well placed to talk about this issue from a number of perspectives.
Yes, yes, yes I am.
So actually before we go much further, give me a shout out, I'll give a shout out to Toby Young who runs Lockdown Skeptics.
It's really the only, as it were, virtual print outlet that I have had.
And had that not been in existence, I think I would have just chatted with a few friends and gone back to...
...to normal life.
But anyway, so if any of your listeners want to follow this, I will ask them to open the October 16th version and find the first paper there, which is what mistakes Sage made, what Sage has got wrong, and then ask them to scroll down a few pages to the pie charts, and we'll talk about pie charts later, because it's all you need to know.
So my background, yes, so I have a degree in biochemistry and toxicology.
I worked very hard.
I didn't go to university till I was 21 for all sorts of complicated reasons and so by the time I got there I realised I needed to work like stink and I'm proud to say I got the best Biochemistry, Toxicology, First Class Honours that the University of Surrey had ever awarded.
And I was told, although you'll only get a first, we'd have liked to have given you something different.
So, I'm not saying I was particularly clever, but I worked very, very hard because I was so appreciative of doing some science.
I love science, anyway.
So after that, I did a three-year PhD.
It was a research-based PhD, so you learn the scientific method And I did quite a bit of work on respiratory pharmacology, the effects of drugs on the lungs and along the way you learn lots of things about deposition of particles and infections and so on.
So that's what I did as a training and then by sheer luck My wife found me a great job.
New postdoc required to join a growing respiratory research group and it was at the Wellcome Research Labs in Beckenham that now no longer exists.
And I had seven years working there and it was really largely the University of Beckenham where Most people wanted to get close to the research directors and do really exciting science and try and get Nobel Prizes and I was not interested.
I always liked applied research and so the chemists like me, I was the only person that wanted to test compounds and see, have we got a medicine here?
Is this a new way into treating a problem with lungs, inflammation and allergy and so on.
Now it, with some irony actually, that the place got closed when Glaxo acquired Welcome.
And that formed a company called GW, Glaxo Welcome.
And one of the people that we'll mention later and now, Sir Patrick Balance, I think if he wasn't there, he was soon to be there at Glaxo.
And in fact, he was briefly, he and I worked alongside each other at the Welcome.
That's quite interesting.
And so anyway, so I left in 1995, they closed the site and I was invited to go down to Pfizer's Research Centre at Sandwich, Kent.
And I was there for 17 years and by the time I left I was vice president leading the entire research effort for respiratory.
So that was the most senior research position in this field.
And then for the last nine years I founded my own biotech called ZIARCO.
Z-I-A-R-C-O.
You can look it up.
And I had great fun with several fantastic colleagues.
We converted an unwanted compound into a drug to treat inflammatory disease of the skin.
And it was acquired by Novartis, the world's biggest drug company, in 2017.
And now I'm an early retired private individual.
I do a bit of consulting, helping new biotechs get going.
So I think I am at least as well qualified as any single individual on stage to make the comments that I do.
Yes, it's particularly interesting.
I mean, I think you're better qualified than almost anybody because you are sort of poacher term gamekeeper or vice versa.
You've got both expertise in respiratory infections, but also you are part, like it or not, of Big Pharma, which I think a lot of people are quite suspicious of.
They think it's a rather sinister force, which may well partly be the reason why Politicians have acted in the way they're doing.
I mean, I'm sure later on we'll come along, for example, to Patrick Ballant's connections.
Yes, let's do that.
Yes, we should do that.
Exactly.
But just in defence, so I think, yes, there's no question there's a lot of concerns about, quote, big pharma and big anything.
Big companies end up with big influence.
And lots of money, and there's big lobbying groups for finance and for pharma and so on around lawmakers, that's true.
But my only thing to say is that people in research, people like me, I think you can tell in my voice, I went to do it because I remember as a small child I wanted to know how things work when they're broken, why that is and what can I do to fix them.
I would take apart clocks when I was three and I'm afraid I couldn't put them back together again.
But that's the kind of person, I've always been a tinkerer.
And that's what I do.
And I think somebody commented to me...
I was relatively senior, but I hadn't yet done my biotech.
They said, you know what?
I'm trying to work you out, Eden.
And the person said, I've thought about it.
I've decided what it is.
It said, you've got a nose for spotting faint patterns in sparse data and kind of making sense of something long before your competition.
He said, I don't think you do anything else particularly well.
You're not a good researcher in terms of lab technique.
You're messy.
You're a bit lazy in writing your papers up.
But he said, I think you've got a hunch for spotting something.
And if there's something interesting, you'll go after it.
If there's an inconsistency, you'll call it out.
And I think that's probably, that is probably my defining skill.
So you're basically, Mike, you're a rat-smeller.
Yeah, I am a rat-smeller.
And yeah, and also the other thing I don't like, I don't like, I cannot stand on fairnesses and injustices.
And there's a lot of both going on.
So if you combine rat-smeller with An outrage at what's going on, that's me.
That's what's driving me to 3am tweeting.
There's something seriously rotten in the state of whatever, and we need to fix it.
And I want you to help me, James, persuade other people that I've no incentive, other than I think I'm right, to make the assertions I do.
And if I'm right... My wife reminded me, there's a famous line in my... Famous line?
There's a line in my article.
I was trying to think, why the hell... If Mike Yeadon is right, and I think I am, And that essentially says that the pandemic is over.
And we were trying to think of what to write.
Well, if the pandemic is over, X and Y will be true and A and B won't be true.
And that's all correct.
But eventually I came to the devastating conclusion that the reason the pandemic is over is because Sage says it's not.
That's unbelievable, but that's the reason.
If they stopped saying, you know, you're all going to die, pretty much, and we need to lock everybody down to stop you all dying.
If they stopped saying that, the actual fact on the ground says it's pretty much finished, and we'll talk about what's going on in the North East and North West, but otherwise, you know, you don't need to be wearing masks and washing your hands, which you should do anyway.
It's good hygiene, as your mothers would have told you.
But the masks, the distancing, The lockdowns, the restrictions in movements, it's all well in.
So it wouldn't be needed even if it was around.
And it's not around.
People are happy with the direction of travel.
Then fine.
Let yourself be pushed into a place where you'll be controlled by sort of, I don't know, a Covid pass that you don't need and told whether you can enter or not some area.
Or like me, just stand up and say no.
This is bullshit.
We need to stop.
That's what we need to do.
I think, I agree with you entirely.
This is not merely a scientific issue, although obviously that's important.
It is actually a moral crusade that people like you and me are on.
And I refer you, since you mentioned Twitter, to a tweet that someone tweeted out today when we recorded this.
It says, if you lock down young people because of COVID-19 with little support, then you should expect that they suffer severe anxiety.
The student referred to below is our son and we love him and miss him so much.
I'm cracking up here.
I know, it makes you cry.
It does make me want to cry.
There is cruelty, there is absolute cruelty, and people are tolerating what they know are wrong things because they're told that the technical people, Sage and so on, have told them it's necessary.
Well, one, it's not necessary, and do you know what?
Even if they told me it was necessary, I'd find another way.
I'd just go and get them.
Don't leave your children like that.
Yeah, so that tweet was from the dad of a son who'd committed suicide at university.
And we know anyway that, I think for a variety of cultural reasons, this new generation are particularly susceptible to anxiety anyway.
But the government's response to this has tipped them over the edge.
And I've got kids at university right now.
I know what pressure they're living under because of these These restrictions which have been imposed on them.
My kids get police on their street at 10 o'clock every night knocking on doors, spying on them to see whether they're socialising outside their bubble.
It's just absolutely absurd.
reminding people, and this is slightly off, well, it isn't off topic, really.
It is central to one of the, no, it isn't.
I don't focus on this particularly in my item, and maybe I should have done.
But people should know this, because they think probably it's a dread disease that's going to kill horribly a large proportion of people, a higher percentage than you normally tolerate.
And do you know what?
It's just not true.
So I just need to tell you just a brief story, that when, and this is fair, I don't think the Chinese made this up, when you first get an outbreak of something really unusual, and the SARS effect, the SARS-CoV-2 effects, COVID-19, are a bit different.
They're not flu.
It is a respiratory virus, but it has some additional unpleasant properties that made it look peculiar.
And so lots of people were turning up, allegedly, I guess this is true, in whatever it was, December or so, and they didn't know how to treat them.
And so what they did is they had a much higher fatality rate.
And so the story spread around the world that was this new virus that was killing, I don't know, 3%.
What's called a case fatality rate.
So for every 30 people turning up, you were losing one of them.
What for a respiratory virus?
So, as the winter wore on, and we got told, you know, there's this thing that's 30 times as lethal as flu, because flu's about 0.1%.
One in a thousand, mostly old people, I'm afraid, will die with a respiratory virus.
And so as it moves, it swept across the world and it next exploded in Northern Italy.
It got the same sort of thing.
And so we had this amplified view.
But even then, because I'm a respiratory person and a good friend of mine is connected with the Northern Italian respiratory scene for about 30 years, I had a lot like a ringside seat.
As they move from inappropriate overuse of ventilators, do you remember?
Yes, which basically kill you.
They cause your lungs to fall to bits.
They certainly, yes.
If you do not have obstructed airways disease, and this does not generally cause obstruction, there are a very small number of people who require ventilatory support.
They do sometimes, mostly not.
So what was happening is, In Northern Italy, as you know, that's the part of their country that's full of, you know, venerable people.
You know, a lot of very old people that they have in Northern Italy.
And the reason, perhaps, I think they were infected is that there's a huge Chinese-owned industrial scene in Northern Italy.
And I'm told, I haven't done my research, but this is what I was told, that in 2008 financial crisis, it was the last straw for Scores of multi-generation family businesses in Italy.
They were tooling leather and manufacturers, whatever it was.
Really nice firms, good brand names, but they just thought, you know, we're going to stop now.
And there was a Chinese effort.
to come and purchase these firms.
And it was a great exit for the owners.
It was thanks very much.
You know, they would have the firms bought, they would help with training, and now they're largely staffed with skilled Chinese workers.
And there are, I think, 300,000, maybe it's more, Chinese workers living in Northern Italy.
Yes.
And they own a lot of these firms.
So I think that's why Northern Italy was really badly infected.
But the same story was, oh look, the proportion of people infected that are dying is huge.
Watch out.
And I'm afraid I'm afraid people in our country now probably still have that memory really clearly but it's wrong and I just need to explain why that is.
When you're right in the eye of a hurricane of a new infectious disease Inevitably, the people in front of you, they're the worst cases, the most ill people, and you don't know how to treat them, and they are the most ill.
And so you end up with what's called a high case fatality rate.
What you don't know, and this is always true with respiratory viruses, is there's an enormously long tail.
of people with more minor symptoms and less minor symptoms and none at all and a huge group who don't have any symptoms at all, asymptomatics.
You don't know how many there are, no idea whatsoever.
But actually we do now know and I would say probably the world's foremost epidemiologist, John Ionides of Stanford, who's a Greek physician and epidemiologist, publishes periodically through the year
Estimate, updated estimates of infection fatality ratios and as he has worked, I think it's about 60% of the globe, his paper now includes, as we identify, oh my word, there's even more people who were infected and were not ill than the denominator for the number of deaths.
The denominator gets bigger and bigger and bigger and what we, what he's worked out is the paper released this week Yes.
says the infection fatality ratio is around 0.15%.
Remember I said flu is about 0.1?
Yes.
So it's no more than 50%, maybe double.
Not good, the size of flu.
And that's the average flu.
Some flus are worse and some are better.
What I'm telling your listeners is, in terms of the likelihood of it killing you, it's pretty much the same as flu.
But that's not the impression you are getting at all from the media.
The anti-Great Barrington folks that use the phrase, have you heard them?
We've all used the same phrase, let it rip.
Never a phrase I've ever crossed my lips.
No, and I think it's deliberately contrived to sound callous and cavalier.
And to pretend that's what those favouring it say, and they've never said it, and it's not what you do.
I would say pretty much what I think we should do is what we've already done until quite recently, which is You just ask people to be careful, but otherwise go about their normal life.
That's what Sweden did.
They asked people to be careful.
They made no mandates that have said, look, there's a virus going around.
It's probably a bit more lethal than flu, but it's not Ebola.
So if you could just be careful, and especially if you're old and vulnerable, and young people, please take care of them.
Take care of yourself.
And it will pass.
These things pass.
There are several passed through every year.
It's just, this is the first social media pandemic.
It's the first pandemic that's that's armed and dangerous with what I call molecular biology so we should talk about later the testing it's a it's industrialized molecular biology and we've never done it before ever and we've only been able to do it recently because of the these high throughput tests and
and the social and the internet so we simply could not have had the experience we're having now 10 years again certainly not 20 but and so I think someone has just decided to use the opportunity you know take advantage of the sort of confusion and push society in a particular direction I don't even think it's one group I don't believe it was planned I think it's convergent opportunism people spotted a chance to make a buck To change the way we live, to reduce carbon output, whatever it is.
I think there are a group of people, several groups, and I can't even be sure that they're really at play, but I think there's several groups that like A friend of mine calls it bagging and tagging.
If we can get everybody on the internet at all times, location-wise and control access, that would be good.
They can come up with... I don't know, anti-terrorism would be enhanced, theoretically.
I think it's bullshit, but there you go.
So there's some people who would like to bag and tag human beings for all sorts of purposes.
I think there's others that would rather we used far less carbon each, and I actually got quite a lot of sympathy with that, but I'd rather not be forced there by a huge deceit.
And then I think there are some people who just enjoy the power that they get by having information and being able to scare you with it.
In case people think, oh, is this a conspiracy?
I don't think so.
But I do think that converging opportunism has happened sometime in the middle of the year and it's happening now.
I like your phrase, converging opportunism, and you're right.
If this were a conspiracy, it would be the most impressive conspiracy in the world because it would require so many parties acting in cahoots with one another.
And how would you do that?
I mean, I do think that the scare about the virus has been manufactured, but the idea that it's been cynically manufactured by an evil cabal, I think it reminds me very much, because as you probably know, I read a book about the environmental scare, you know, global warming and so on, and I've seen the same movements, the same currents.
And I said it's not a conspiracy, it's a concatenation of shared interests.
That's it, I like that.
Disparate groups.
That's what I'm saying, convergent opportunism.
Yes.
It's the same thing.
Exactly, exactly.
Can I ask you, because I've noticed you've been, I've noticed you on Twitter and like me you're a bit of a Twitter addict.
I have become so, yes.
Constantly in trouble with your wife.
Why are you doing that?
You're supposed to be on holiday.
Yes.
So I've mentioned earlier in James Goldie-Datterman, as you can tell, I'm quite proud of my history.
But yes, I went into early retirement, whatever it was, 2016-17, and I was quite... I was enjoying having more time with my family, my wife, and also my passion is old Japanese motorcycles, and I enjoy restoring... That is quite niche!
Old Japanese motorcycles?
Old Japanese motorcycles, in fact of the 1970s, and they've got to be two-strokes as well.
So if anyone, any bikers listening, look up Suzuki GT750.
Mine's the Flake Orange No.
2 model.
It's fantastic.
Anyway, so, but I had no time.
And let me tell you why.
Why am I doing this?
So, I have a good friend of mine.
He's not only a professor, but he's a hockey player.
A mad hockey player.
And we met one time after he'd had a hockey match.
And he said, you know, I've been talking to a sort of mid-level NHS manager.
Quite senior person, but not the person you'd hear on the TV.
And he says something very odd is happening with intensive care bed use and he would like to speak to you because I mentioned my mate Mike has kind of looked at this.
I had, I hadn't done much tweeting.
Anyway, we got in touch and it turns out he lives 15 miles from me so we all had a bit of a confab.
At the time, the percentage of intensive care beds that had a person in them in the UK, I think was about 70% or something.
You might think that's normal, but apparently they run almost full if they can.
They're 10% overage for emergencies.
And the reason they do that is that in the winter you do get, you know, lots of respiratory patients and people will have strokes and stuff.
Basically, people who can't breathe for themselves or are obstructed.
You sedate and intubate and ventilate.
But here's the thing.
All the other usage of intensive care beds are planned.
So if you have a failing heart valve, so every time your heart muscle squeezes, it kind of leaks half the blood back into the chamber.
My dad's just had that replaced, yeah.
That's unbelievable.
You'll die if you don't get that.
You'll feel awful all the time and then tighter and then eventually one day you'll just die.
There'll be some clotting problem, whatever.
So I think it's called mitral valve.
I'm not a surgeon, but I think you have valve replacement And of course, it's now quite routine, but my God, you know, you're mucking around with the centre of what keeps you alive, moment to moment.
And so, they schedule a couple of days, a couple of nights in an ITU, so you're being monitored all the time if there's a problem, they can save you.
And what he was saying was, the reason the beds are much more empty than usual, and he said, you know, Mike, this is the lowest ever percentage in my entire 30 years in the NHS.
And I thought, my God!
And he said, the reason... I said, why is that like that?
He said, well, one, people are still scared of the virus and they're kind of not getting surgery up to speed.
But he said, worse than that, and the reason I was talking to your friend Paul and you've spoken to me, your listeners should know.
The underuse of the NHS through the summer, and I think it's continuing now, is not an accident and it's not because people are a little fearful.
That's true.
The main reason is it's the number one official priority of the NHS today is to run the service as light as possible.
Let me tell you again, it's not get the NHS back on its feet to face the winter, they are trying to do that, but the topmost priority is run the NHS as light as possible because they've got to cope with the second wave.
Yeah, saving the NHS by keeping those damned patients out.
And then just one other thing, maybe we can come back to maybe we won't bother, but I think the easiest way of explaining why there's absurdity is viruses don't do waves.
I don't care that you think you know that they do.
The history comes from the First World War, and yes, there were several, quote, waves, but it was the largest movement of human beings ever in history.
And it's 102 years ago.
We don't really know what they died of at all.
They had influenza-like illness.
Many students of this think that we're probably more than one infective agent.
So if that's your whole evidence for waves, then get out of here.
Every other respiratory virus that's ever been studied, and as we've got closer to the present, we can do it with more accuracy, none of them do waves ever.
So this idea That people like Sir Patrick Vallance, who I told you 31 years ago, he and I were in adjacent labs, he was a medic doing a PhD, I was a post-doc, I'd done a PhD, I was now applying my research in industry.
The idea that Patrick Vallance does not know what I just told you, that viruses don't do waves, the idea that he thinks this is still 30 times more lethal than flu, that he hasn't read John Ioannidis' latest paper, You must know that's not possible.
He's a clever guy.
You should assume everything Yidan says that Valens also knows.
He got more senior up the tree than me.
He became head of R&D of one of the world's biggest companies.
That's a pretty tough job.
But I started my own biotech.
I raised the money.
Around the world.
I built a team.
I have fantastic colleagues.
We did the clinical experiment.
We were right and Novartis bought us.
That's not easy Sir Pat.
So I think I'm as clever as he is.
I'm as knowledgeable as he is and I know lots of everything I am telling you.
Isn't an opinion.
I can actually refer you to the peer-reviewed journal articles.
In fact, I don't like using Mike's opinion and Mike's hunch, okay?
I have hunches and then I go and see if they're supported and sometimes I'm wrong and I stop.
So the things that are in that paper are demonstrably and supported by the highest quality Peer-reviewed science in the best journals in the world, like Science and Nature and New England Journal of Medicine.
So this isn't an opinion.
You can't have opinions about things that are objectively demonstrated.
They're true, and he knows they're true.
Now why he's saying some of the things he's saying...
I could guess, but I don't even mention that in my article.
It's not necessary for me to impugn their motives, just to show that they've got it wrong.
And I've just told you it's impossible for him to have got it wrong by accident, because he's clever, he shares a similar training and history to me, and he knows everything that I've told you.
Wow, that is devastating.
Now, just briefly, can we talk about Gomput's curves.
Yeah.
I'm right, am I not?
Yeah.
That all respiratory flu-like illnesses... Yes.
...all follow the same path.
It's certainly in European-type countries.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, briefly, I mean, obviously, a chap called Gomput sort of characterised the phenomenon and actually worked it out, we'll say a bit more in a moment.
But yes, when a new infective organism arrives in a population that's not seen it, Then at first, a few people will catch it and then more people will catch it from those initial cases and so on and so on.
And early on, of course, it might be spreading Very fast, and indeed this one did spread very fast.
But at the time no one's dying because I've said I think it's about 1 in 500 people.
If you take a representative slice of British population from babies to ill geriatrics, 1 in 500 will die.
That's the calculation made by John Ioannidis, his famous papers out beginning, I think it was six days ago.
So, early on, lots and lots of people are getting infected and they're infecting other people.
And then after a while, you start getting the 1 in 500s.
They'll go to A&E, they're really unwell, you try and care for them and they die.
Do you know that's very, very common?
It used to be called the... I'm not sure you can say it anymore because it's sexist, but flu used to be called the old man's friend by physicians in my father's generation.
He was a proper doctor, a medic.
And they called it that because you've got to die of something, I'm afraid.
And if you're 75 or 85 or 95, your probability of making your next birthday falls and falls.
We all know this.
As somebody said the other day, if you don't know this, you've not been paying attention.
So, 1 in 500.
And so, and this is spread across the country, remember, because it might be London first, and it'd be the Hounslow, and then it'd be the Midlands or whatever.
So there isn't much of a story.
And this is what happens anyway.
More in winter, less in summer.
Now, after a while, it suddenly reaches a point where the number of people infected at two weeks ago or three weeks ago, the number of people getting ill, the number of people turning to hospital and dying, breaks through.
And it's bigger than the background numbers.
And that happened sometime in, I think it was March.
And so back to Gompertz you get this long slow acceleration and it like turns a corner like a jet plane with the afterburners on and and it just and it's climbs up and at this point the steepness is a characteristic of the spreading of I'm not good at maths, but I think it's related to R, the logarithm of the number of people dying or being infected versus time of the date.
That steepness, the log phase, I think relates to R in some way.
But here's the thing.
The virus can only keep infecting people if there are people around the person who's got it who are susceptible.
It's a really important concept.
And after a while, there aren't enough people around the people who are infected to infect the next person.
And it slows down.
It slows down and it continues to slow down because here's a principle people might not know.
If you get infected by a virus, if you weren't already immune, if you get infected by a respiratory virus, You fight it and it fights you.
Most of the time you win.
Without exception, if you've got a normal body, a normal immune system, without exception you're now immune.
It's not a debate.
That's how it happens.
And let me just explain why it's certain.
If you were not immune having fought it off, You'd be dead.
The reason you've beaten it is you have developed, you've responded to its arrival, to the things it does to yourselves, in such a way you've marshalled your forces and you've kicked its ass out.
And if that wasn't true, you'd be dead.
If you have done it, it can't now, it can't do you again, probably for a long time.
There are genuine and worthwhile debates about the duration, but I think it probably lasts decades, based on evidence from earlier respiratory viruses, I think it lasts decades, because it's a stable virus and we've got analogous experience.
But back to gone perps, so you've got this slow creeping spread through the population, it turns a corner after burners on, Then this is enormous acceleration.
Then I said it runs out of resource, as some people say.
It runs out of susceptible people to infect.
Dry tinder is one phrase I've heard.
Yeah, exactly.
It runs out of... I want to be respectful.
It runs out of susceptible people to infect.
They're still around, it's just it now is infecting fewer people per cycle, as it were.
And eventually it's looking around.
Imagine the virus is a nasty, maligned force.
It's looking around.
Oh bugger, can't find anybody who's susceptible.
And it falls on its face.
And so what you see now is that the curve of... This is versus time.
If you look at the curve of deaths, the actual number of daily deaths, you can go and look at the daily deaths versus time curve.
It then turns, and it actually turns quite quickly.
It was around middle of April.
And then it started this long, slow, log linear decline and and you know what there's not a single bend in that line let me just describe this almost artistically that if you were drawing the curve i've described freehand you're going along the graph with your pen you twist your wrist it starts to sort of bend up 45 degrees maybe steeper Climbs, climbs, climbs, climbs, climbs.
And then it does a little turn at the top.
It literally turns Tuttle.
And then there's a much lower slope of decline than the slope of the ascent.
And it just kept going, and going, and going, till this is like end of June.
And it's very important this.
If you go and look at that curve, I can ask you, there's a seven-day moving average, so it's reasonably smooth.
If there were major events wrought by humans that had changed the rate of infection between people, Then that curve would have, as it were, a distortion in it, what I would call an inflection.
Because we would be changing what otherwise... This is an entirely, unfortunately, an entirely natural process.
You know, ghastly if you think of the impact, but it's beautiful biologically.
This is the sort of stuff that biologists understand.
When I first saw this curve, I knew it was a Gompertz curve.
And I knew what the turning point meant, which is it's run out of people to infect.
I thought, thank God for that.
It won't come back now, right?
I've just told you, it's not a guess, it's not a hunch, that once it's run out of people to infect, the people on the playing field, you and me, we're not susceptible now.
And so it must continue to decline.
There's no question about it.
But you've not been told that.
But that's what happens every year with respiratory viruses.
So this is the Gompertz curve.
You can see the curve.
And I just forgot my thread of my thought there.
When you look at the long decaying curve, which went downwards for I think 12 or 14 weeks straight in terms of cases, hospitalisations, ITU and deaths, all beautifully curved down.
Not one single wiggle in it.
Despite we were told, you know, to not go to work for a while and then we could go to work, then we had Then we had like Black Lives Matter process, we had full beaches at Bournemouth and stuff like that.
So when businesses reopened, pubs reopened, you know, come on!
If these things had changed significantly, the rate at which the virus moved amongst the population, it must be the case it would be reflected in the death curve.
And it is not.
And it is not anywhere.
These curves are identical in all heavily infected European countries.
Sweden, France, Spain, England UK they're all the same and they went through the turning point you know at a similar similar time and I'm just briefly going to describe something that's very important about that and then they all decayed and and I think that's all correct I don't think it was any funny business.
I think those are pretty much correct.
And the test, the PCR test, the swabbing, I think was being used appropriately in hospital to distinguish people who were ill with SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 versus something else.
Because they look rather similar most of the time.
But I think something awful happened in the middle of the year.
And there's something awful, and you'll remember this now, is the sort of test, test, test notion, as if testing more is good, and if we can test many more people, that's better.
And so what happened is, this PCR, polymerase chain reaction, swab test, so-called Pillar 2, was rolled out with a nasty rumble.
And they started initially, you'll remember, it was like, I don't know, 10,000 a day, and Robert Peston and Laura Coonsworth would flagellate Hancock and the Prime Minister, why aren't you testing more people?
And so they gradually increased the effort, and they were up to like 100,000 a day.
Now, the little thing you should know about this, it's absolutely fundamental.
It's not true that if you test more people, you'll save more lives.
Once you start going out there with an industrial scale test in the population, what you'll find is the average percentage of people with the virus at that time was about, I don't know, 1 in 2,000.
We know that from the ONS.
ONS have done really good work.
They're independent from the sort of witty Valence Ferguson group.
So the population as a whole didn't have viruses.
There were still people coming into hospital, not that many, and the test was good in hospital.
But if you use this test, turn the big guns on the population, when only one in a thousand have got it, then there's this concept called false positives.
That a certain percentage of the tests will come up positive even if there's no virus in it.
A friend of mine used to call it the Bud Light test.
It'll be positive even if you put in the sample you've got it Bud Light.
And it's an unavoidable characteristic of all tests, and you need to know what the... Basically, what does it do at the extremes?
False positive, false negative, and so on.
And I would have been fired in my first job if I was ever using a test, and my supervisor asked me about this, and I said, you know what?
I don't know, and I can't be arsed.
I'm going to use it anyway.
So that's what they've done.
The government didn't publish these characteristics and I remember getting more and more... I didn't have any feeling of something seriously wrong other than just carelessness at this point and I was searching the literature for what the hell is the false positive data and I couldn't find it and that's eventually when I got to A government document by Kate Barker, and she wrote on June the 3rd this year to Sage, saying more or less.
She didn't say this, so sorry if I've misused your words, Kate.
She said more or less, for Christ's sake, don't use this test like this, because it's got an unknown False positive rate and based on all the other tests like this it'll be somewhere between like one and two percent now you might not think that's a big deal but she knew it was and I know it was so if you've got a false positive rate of one percent Then for every thousand people you test, ten of them will come back positive even though they don't have the virus.
But if the prevalence is only 0.1% like ONS said it was in the summer, only one in a thousand are genuine and they will be found positive.
So I've just told you that out of A thousand tests in the summer, one positive was genuine, ten positives were false.
In other words, over 90% of the positives were false.
Now, some people have said to me, well, you know, that's not true.
The testing was done in test centres and you were told only to go if you've got symptoms.
I mean, yeah, that's good, but we all know people who've been told to get a test by an employer or someone at school or college or whatever it was to say, well, you've been near someone that's later turned out to be positive.
We don't want you back at work, Dave, until you've got a negative test.
So this is my assertion that actually most people went to get tests in the community who didn't have symptoms.
And if they did, they could have had one of 20 other viruses.
It doesn't mean it was COVID-19.
And finally, here's the killer that destroys the argument against me that they were all symptomatic and so you're wrong about your stats.
The killer flaw is, we've all seen this, I've seen people have posted them, councils are trying to be really helpful and they will be leafleting their streets in Bolton and Birmingham and Manchester saying In order to help us understand where this damn virus is, we're going to swap the whole street or the whole district to the whole quarter.
That's what they were doing.
That's Pillar 2.
The only way you can test 500,000 or 300,000 people a day is if you marshal your forces and send your testing vans to an area and then you go leaflet or even just go house to house.
So I am telling you that all through the summer the prevalence of the virus was low The false positive rate was unknown, but actually, as it turned out, ten times higher than the genuine rate, and so most of the positives, all summer long, were false positives.
And I can think of no reason, Sir Patrick, why you would think of doing this, knowing, as you do, because you have the same training as me, that what I've said is true, why would you do that?
The only reason you'd do that is if you were interested in keeping people fearful.
There was no other COVID-19 related stuff happening in the news that there were still people dying but it was falling and falling and falling and falling until it was actually like 10 a day which may sound callous but actually 1,700 people die a day in this country.
It was effectively zero.
I think actually they were false positive COVIDs anyway.
So this test was rolled out and it's not stopped rolling.
I think at the heart of what's going on is a failure of everybody initially to appreciate that when the virus is not very common all tests have a false positive rate and I think almost all the testing and it gets worse the more you amplify the testing to get more and more not ill people the more likely you are to get false positives and so we've got this a permanent sense of fear we'll never escape COVID-19, if we keep testing, because most of the results are false.
Yes.
I'll stop at that point, let you go.
Yes, it's being called a case-o-demic, isn't it?
It is a case-o-demic, yes.
And this is not just in the UK either, this is across Europe.
But just going back to the Gompertz curve, which as we know, towards the end, flattens out to the point where it's almost non-existent, the number of people who are... Yes.
Now, Patrick Vallance, who was a former colleague of yours, would know this because this is just basic epidemiology.
It is basic.
I would say it's either Immunology 101 or certainly Epidemiology 101, as the Americans say.
It's like your first term, first lesson.
Right.
Am I right in thinking there's about just plus or minus 200 viruses that give you flu-like symptoms?
I don't know the exact number, nobody does, but I've certainly seen reviews that suggest it's several scores, certainly, and just an unbelievably large number of viruses out there, many of which, as you say, James can give you what they call influenza-like illnesses.
In fact, that's what they call it, even when I don't think it's got anything to do with influenza.
So when you see influenza-like illness, what they really mean is respiratory virus-induced symptoms.
Had Covid-19 not behaved in this way, which is of course what they're trying to tell us, had it not done this, it would be the first such respiratory disease virus probably ever that didn't follow these rules, is that right?
Exactly.
I hate this, but it's because I'm an honest person and I could have just said, yeah, that's right, James, and moved on.
But the thing is, and that is even true of influenza, when it comes through, you survive it, you are, you know, you have resistance, call it immunity.
It's just people know that you need a vaccine if you're vulnerable every year.
And the reason is against influenza, specifically influenza, not just other respiratory viruses.
The reason you need a vaccine is because the damn thing changes its clothes so quickly.
It's what's called a high mutation rate virus.
and so by the time it goes around the world in a way that we don't really understand and comes back and hit bites us in the bottom the next year it's changed enough that the people who survived it last year I'm afraid have not got much protection whereas the coronaviruses Specifically, SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus.
They mutate relatively slowly and so once you've had it and survived and now your immune system has marked its card, knows what it looks like and can wake up and fight it off again next time you're immune.
So, in fact... That's the point.
In fact, I haven't heard this before, so in fact, coronaviruses are less problematic, let's say, than influenza viruses.
In that way.
I mean, again, one wants to take aside, it's important to separate that property, that it's relatively slowly mutating, and so once you've experienced it, you're probably set for years, possibly decades, the evidence is decades, maybe it's for life.
So, because it doesn't change very much, so if you encounter it again, it won't be any biggie.
Whereas influenza, the reason it's such a, just a disaster, and can kill around the world millions of people each year, is because the damn thing keeps mutating.
It's very clever, and thank God, coronaviruses as a group don't do that.
So yes, there's a separate property, and of course it's really important, it's what percentage of the people it infects does it kill.
These things you can see are independent but you view it overall as the collection of properties and I think this coronavirus kills, I think it kills about 0.15, 0.2.
I think it's slightly more lethal than the average flu but the good thing is, to your interruption, the good thing is once it's gone through it won't come back.
Yes.
And this is why I don't understand why, I don't understand, I really don't understand why hundreds of thousands of scientifically, technically and medically qualified people aren't going, excuse me, this one is one of these stable viruses when it goes through the population, the survivors, which is 99.94 of them, that's how many survive roughly, 99.94%.
Once it goes through the population and they've survived, they now have a resistance oblique immunity, let's not argue about the name, and they can't be injured by it again, certainly not anytime soon.
We'd be looking at years for the population constant composition to change.
Why aren't people saying that?
Because it's definitely true, but and I've heard several doctors and other staff in the NHS have been told not to comment on any part of the So, OK.
pandemic or government's response to it or will strike you off that's pretty much what they've been told so okay so in fact if what you say is true i'm sure it is all it would require right now would be for some credible figure to go out there and say look this is how all respiratory viral infections work this is this is This is why you cannot get the so-called second wave.
The second wave is just a made-up phrase that is scientifically untenable.
Yes, there is a possibility of what I've called a secondary ripple.
And I don't mean it disrespectfully from those who catch it and might die.
But the reason I've called it is I'm trying to push back against the ridiculous second wave notions that hear from lots of people, including Sir Patrick, people who know better, and I know that you know this.
So I would say that the people who were furthest from the epicentre, London, that was what was hit most quickly and most intensively, The people who were furthest away, remember the government, God bless their cotton socks, tried to prevent transmission by inhibiting movement to an extent, locking down and so on.
I don't think they were very successful, but imagine they were successful enough that towns in the north-eastern, towns in the north-west, bits of which just didn't get quite that it did not get as intensively infected in the spring and so there's a higher proportion still susceptible there and then once you finally lift all the all the restrictions or maybe transmission is a bit easier in the cool weather that's what they say and i think that's possible then you would see just a little rumble
A few more people would hospitalise, some would die, generally late 70s, late 80s, late 90s, and then it will settle back again, like it always does.
Just a little thing.
We were talking about the Gompertz curves going up, the very steep phase.
I invite people to go on any one of these world data servers.
Isn't it lovely if the world's really, really appreciative, so nice of them, for people to put a huge amount of effort and money ...into building, providing free and maintaining every day these websites that feed every country's numbers of infected people in hospital, those who have died and so on.
Don't you think it's incredibly generous of the world community to have done this?
Anyway, so you can go into Our World in Data, or OID, and you can look at the... per country, you can look at whatever input you want.
I suggest you go and look at deaths in the UK or England or Wales, whatever, and click the log representation.
You can get two.
One is normal, the other is log, and they just toggle.
The thing is, a log time rate tells you something about the... It's this Gompertz curve.
It's the sort of log linear part of the acceleration.
So, put your pencil or a pen and line it up on your screen with the spring elevation.
It's really, really steep.
Now, move your hand across the graph to the right till you reach, sort of, September, October now.
Ooh, you'll notice something.
Now the thing you'll notice is instead of being steep like a jet plane with the afterburners on, it kind of looks like a gypsy moth that's just managed to get over the end of the telegraph poles at the end of the grass field and it's still climbing for height.
And the reason it's flat is not an accident, it's not due to masks, it's not due to gloves or anything like that.
It's that now there's a much smaller percentage of the population that are susceptible.
Yes.
And so it will propagate more slowly.
But people, good people of UK, please know that this has always happened, we've never measured it in the past, but please know that what I'm about to tell you is true.
It's not going to zoom up.
That's not what biology does.
It just doesn't.
When you look at effects in large-scale populations, you end up with these smooth effects, and they tell you something about the underlying biological science.
And I've spent my entire life 35 years learning and thinking, ooh, isn't that interesting?
Because it's like this in every way when drugs interact with its receptor, you know.
And so, biology moves and it keeps moving until something stops it.
So, on this long, slow fall of the Gompertz curve, sorry, the daily deaths versus time, this fall, unless something interrupts it, it just keeps going until the virus vanishes from the population.
Right.
That's what should happen.
And so, I knew, inverted commas, that you couldn't get a second wave.
And when I started to see mass testing rolled out, I knew what was going to happen.
They were going to get an epidemic of false positives.
Later in the year, because it always happens, you'll see a sweeping of wave after wave of different respiratory viruses.
Not flu yet, it's a bit early.
But they arrive and they sweep through and they kill some people and so on.
And I thought, oh God, we're in trouble.
Someone is, for fair reasons or foul, is testing the entire population with an assay whose false positive rate they don't know.
Remember I told you I would be fired if I did that.
And so you will end up with large numbers of false positives.
Then you'll get people with symptoms and people will connect the two.
They're not connected at all.
The people who have gone into hospital and died recently, I think a few of them are genuinely COVID-19 victims.
I think the majority are false positives who died of something else.
So why would I be saying this?
I'm going to draw myself... I'm going to be embarrassed if I'm wrong.
I'll be subject to derision.
Because every sentence I say here is live and I could say things that are stupid and they would be able to, you know, drag me down.
I'm doing this because it's not right what's happening and I've explained in some detail how what has gone wrong has gone wrong and furthermore, as a peer of mine when we were 30, I know that Sir Patrick Balance knows what I've said the same as me and so it's true.
So I want to just mention, we'll come back in a minute if we need to, James, but at some point we need to go on to modelling.
Ah, modelling, yes.
Now this is a form of witchcraft that I've encountered before.
Because, as you may or may not be aware, a lot of the climate change scare, in fact the whole of the climate change scare, is based on modelling, on projections.
Which of course depend on the inputs to the algorithms.
Yes.
Okay, so on that one, I don't know where you're going with climate change.
I don't know enough about climate change to say anything.
No, let's not talk about that.
Because I don't know enough, I'm not going to take a position one way or another.
It's not my field of expertise.
The point is, I don't want people to I don't want people to say Yeadon is a Covid denier.
It's a real virus.
It's a novel sequence.
Do you know what?
It's 80% similar to the previous novel coronavirus called SARS in 2003.
So just briefly, before you've gone to develop your point you're about to make, just tell us briefly about T cell immunity.
Because as I understand it, lots of us have inherited immunity from SARS 1.
Possibly.
I think a lot of us have prior immunity measurable in their T-cells and we'll talk about this in a moment because they've been exposed to Related viruses.
Right.
So, probably not SARS.
Remember, SARS was a much more lethal virus.
Killed a lot of people.
And we hope it's faded away.
I don't think people are having SARS now.
Although it is true that people who were exposed to SARS in 2003, some very clever immunologists, as early as March this year, had this idea that, well, if we go and find these people who definitely survived it and ask, Do they have T-cells?
Do they have continued immunity to this virus?
And they all do.
Every individual they managed to find who had survived SARS in 2003, every one of them, we'll talk about this, have T-cell immunity 17 years afterwards.
Now, if you're a reasonable person, Sir Patrick, don't you think the most likely expectation for SARS-CoV-2 is that once you've been infected, and I've said this is always true, that you have immunity, don't you think the most likely guess as to how long that would last will be years and years and years?
Of course, that's what's going to happen.
If anyone thinks it's less, they need to show some evidence, because I'm saying the evidence all points in the other direction.
So back to T-cells.
When you're infected, you've got, I don't know how many it is, but you've got many lines of defense.
So, I don't know, you have mucosal cells that stop organisms getting into you.
And in that mucus and liquids, in all of your areas that touch the world, top and bottom, there are chemicals in it that can help kill viruses.
Fungi, bacteria that land.
So that's kind of mechanical protection.
But the next level is called innate.
It's that your body's clever enough, it's that we've evolved to recognize that certain pathogens, they all kind of have the same kind of slouch about them, the way they walk, shall we say.
Molecular, has a level of molecular biology with sidling along the walls.
Our bodies have worked out, they're called, I think they're called pattern recognition receptors.
and that basically you can spot a rongan our systems are designed to spot a rongan and if you've got a healthy innate immune system you're able to just throw a coat over its head knock it out and get rid of it eject it from your property very quickly and those people
Don't they will never make antibodies because they've got they ejected the burglar before he did any damage or stone anything But that's so that's innate immunity and I would say most youngish middle-aged just healthy vitamin D people or whatever They all have a really good innate immunity But everybody else it just manages to get past enough of it gets past the innate immunity and you're going to have to tackle it one way or another now really lovely just beautiful science here
Unlike bacteria in the main and fungi always, they don't get inside cells.
They're rather large.
Some of them are much bigger than the cells.
They can't be in the cells.
They're in the tissue, in the spaces between the cells.
And so things like antibodies, if you were to make them, that's where they would joust, do battle, and hopefully overwhelm the invader.
But viruses are tiny.
Even big viruses like SARS-CoV-2 are small.
They easily get inside your cells.
That's what they want to do because they hijack the cellular replication apparatus and force the cell at one point to make billions of millions of copies of themselves.
So once it's inside the cell antibodies cannot touch it.
So antibodies might be important in slightly preventing internal transmission of the virus from cell to cell inside your body.
I'm not convinced it's very important.
A friend of mine said He's studied people who don't make antibodies because they have a problem with their B-cells and they survive respiratory viruses just as well as you and me.
Bacterial infections all the time, but they don't get problems with respiratory viruses.
That tells us it's not antibodies, mostly.
It's T-cells.
T-cells, just think of them as a group of people with special weapons and techniques, and they're all different.
They've all got slightly different guns and ammo and Swiss Army knives and so on.
And there are literally tens of billions of variants, and it's just one of the wonders of
of evolution when you were made by your mum and your dad there was a shuffle in the region that defines which gums and ammo your t-cells get and you've got a whole variety of them and the thing is that when when a new virus gets into your body it's it some cells will turn up realize that there's a wrong in in there and instruct the cell to commit suicide and they grab bits of the virus and they drag it this bits of the virus into your lymph nodes so it might be in your tonsils or under your arms
in your groin and so on and say oi i've just caught i've just caught this uh person invading and causing some smashing causing some damage and what happens is that virus gets chopped up and they examine the body examines it closely and it presents these little bits of the invader it's been chopped up to bits of your immune system the t cells until one of them goes bloody hell i fit that one perfectly and it's literally by A miracle of natural shuffling.
There will be several T-cells that fit the invader perfectly, and then what they do is, some other cells in the system say, right, you fit the invader perfectly, go and multiply.
Literally go forth and multiply.
In a good way.
And so you may end up making hundreds of thousands or millions of cells, T-cells, that have remembered what you've been infected with before, and they just sort of hang around.
And so, if you get infected, again, it will, without any compunction and very quickly, handle the infection.
Now, the last thing is if you don't manage to kill off virus-infected cells with T-cells or natural killer cells or innate immunity and so on, Your last-ditch stand, it's like Custer's last stand, you have to get into the process of, right, we're going to have to really pull out the big guns and that involves making antibodies and you need another set of cells and it takes a long time.
It takes between a week and two weeks, maybe even longer.
And so you can see that anyone who was symptomatic and survived and didn't have symptoms for very long they did not eject the virus because they made antibodies they ejected the virus because of one of the other reasons and on t-cells the most important thing to tell you about t-cells is if you've been infected by a virus that's got some similarity doesn't have to be identical some of your t-cells would have recognized one of the chopped up bits that's similar so you imagine cutting up
Sars-CoV-2 into like, I don't know, 30 pieces.
One of those pieces that your body now remembers as part of a badden and is able to be immune to, if that's the same piece in another virus, You'll probably be immune to that one, too.
Because, basically, you haven't encountered SARS-CoV-2 before, but you've met its cousins and brothers, and you've beaten them off.
And so, that's what's happened.
And this is the thing I'm going to tell you that people will think, why weren't we told this?
There are, as you said earlier, many scores of respiratory viruses that can make you ill.
Amongst those are the Coronoviridae family.
Really?
Yeah.
And there are four of them that are what's called endemic in Western... probably around the world.
Endemic.
That means they just wander around.
They don't kill very many people.
In fact, they kill very few people.
But they cause about one third of the common cold.
Common cold-causing coronaviruses.
You can look them up.
OC43, HKU1, 2290 and I forget the other name.
But they exist and we've known about them for 55 years.
So, they'll be in, wouldn't they be in, I don't know, textbooks of immunology.
Even Sir Patrick Vallance has read, possibly.
I'm going to go somewhere else, just very briefly, Professor Semple.
So, Professor Semple's been on the TV a lot recently, saying things that I know are not true.
He can sue me if he would like.
So I looked him up because I thought, what's his training?
And we'll get back to Sage in a minute.
Virtually none of them are scientists, biologists or medics.
Most of them are very clever mathematicians who mean well and have been utterly led astray by people who do know what I've just told you.
But I'll just have a little deviation.
I've been teaching, doing a teaching on immunology and I did have a bit of immunological training but most of what I know I've learnt during my, you know, I've used it during applied research.
So I've read a huge amount over the last 35 years.
I'm not an expert, but I know enough to spot someone who's not and lying.
So, where was I?
Yeah, so, this method of carrying memory to related viruses like common cold-causing coronaviruses About a third of us have got exposure to them previously because there are scores.
How many colds do you have in a lifetime?
It's not that many.
So people say, oh, well, we'd all be immune, wouldn't we?
No.
How many colds have you had in your lifetime?
It's not that many.
Some people get one every six months.
My wife hasn't had a cold since I've met her.
So seriously, some people, she's probably got good innate immunity, right?
She can knock, she spots a wrong one and kills them before they get into her immune system.
So, but this is the point.
It's known.
It's not a guess.
It's not an opinion.
There have been six research groups that are, let's call it Oxbridge quality, so that you know what I'm talking about.
Karolinska Institute, things like that.
And six independent research groups of the best clinical and cellular immunologists in the world have published independently six papers on this topic.
And several of the papers are in the best journals in the world.
Peer-reviewed journals.
You don't argue with those.
Not often, anyway.
Science and Nature.
Top research journals.
So, and what they say, James you asked me the question, what they say is between 20% and 80% of every single population they studied between them had prior immunity.
That is, they could take their T-cells at a time when the virus had not arrived.
So this was done like in March or April.
And they put their little extracted T-cells in some sort of test tubes, like a plate, and they could then offer it various pieces of various viruses.
And they found that they had, 30% of them, were able to respond incredibly vigorously to SARS-CoV-2.
And they'd never seen it.
And in case people say, well, maybe that didn't actually confer immunity, I'd go, no, that's how it works.
If they had stimulated them, say, because they did, with something else that they'd been vaccinated against, like measles or something, They could get the same style and intensity of response in their cells.
So, no, it is important.
That's how it works.
And so, groups around the world showed that roughly, probably the middle estimate was 30% of the population had prior immunity.
And then there was a fantastic paper published, I think it was in June.
They know who they are.
It's unbelievably clever work.
They did what I've described the immune system of doing.
They cut up Various viruses, and they got cells from people who had not yet.
These were blood-doning.
Blood-doning, so they'd been stored a long time, but they're still good.
They tested the cells by asking whether the teased cells would respond to SARS-CoV-2.
Yes, they did.
And then in a parallel tube of the same person's cells, they gave them chopped up bits of SARS-CoV-2, and they gave them chopped up bits of common cold-causing coronaviruses.
And you know where this is going now, don't you?
That when they came to the bits that are most similar between common cold-causing coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2, the cells lit up equally to both of those.
And so it wasn't just by some happenstance that 30% of the people had prior immunity.
This is the reason.
This is the mechanism.
So, when you look at, if you're looking in my Lockdown Skeptics article, October the 16th, and you've got to this point of the podcast, please go to the one figure in it, maybe there's two, but the figure of brightly coloured pie charts, which thanks to my daughter.
And you'll see that most of... Sage tells you that most people are still susceptible.
Yes.
I'm telling you, I'm telling you and I can prove it and people would not... I can show you the scientists and the quality of the work and so on.
It's not true.
It was never true that 100% was susceptible.
At worst it was probably 70%.
And you know this is just so important.
So look at the right hand pie chart.
30% carried prior immunity.
There is no argument about it between immunologists and anyone who studied immunology.
Anyone who studied immunology under, say, the most famous immunologist in Britain at the time was a guy called Ivan Royt.
R-O-I-T-T.
Every undergraduate of my era that studied biological sciences had their well-found copy of Royt's Essential Immunology.
Mine was like version 6.
He's retired and still alive.
Well done, mate.
Fantastic.
He's a colossus of science.
So, the thing I'm going to tell you is that Professor Callum Semple, who is a, if I've got this right, he's a consultant respiratory paediatrician.
I'm sure he's a good and clever doctor, really.
He trained under Ivan Reut.
This man knows.
He knows about the immunology that I've just described to you.
I know he knows.
He's a clever professor of, you know, respiratory and paediatrics and so on.
You don't get there by accident.
You get there by studying and being really careful and good at your work.
So, if you then compare what I've just described, what his teacher, Roy, would have told him, and that he would have learned subsequently, because some of this stuff's only been learned more recently, you would reasonably expect Professor Callum Semple, if he was sitting alongside me, and we weren't fighting about coronavirus, but just having a chat over a glass of wine, he would pretty much agree, I would say, with most of what I've said.
If he comes on the air to try and pick holes in something, he's going to have to work quite hard.
And if he went through the podcast, he shouldn't be able to pick out, you know, the ten things I've got wrong.
I think he would struggle to find one or two.
So I'm saying to you that loads of people who I know, know what I do, and probably know better about what I do, know that 30% of the population roughly carried Prior immunity that was functionally important, and it was due to exposure to common cold-causing coronaviruses, the relevance of which is so important, you'll be surprised, I hope, the listeners, why haven't the BBC told us about this stuff?
Why hasn't Hugh Pym got an expert in to tell us about common cold coronaviruses?
It's a good question, isn't it?
Anyway, so they're either stupid or they've just decided not to tell you.
But here's the point.
On my pie chart, if 30% have immunity, that means only 70% at least could theoretically be infected, might get ill, could participate in transmission and could die.
And so, the most important other slice of that pie chart is what percentage have been infected.
If you look at the one on the left, according to SAGE, and this is what really got me angry, Sir Patrick Vallance said recently, sadly, at least 90% of the population, or more than 90% are still susceptible, dot dot dot.
I got that from the leaked SAGE advice to ministers.
You know, when Boris put in place the tiers, I think it was a week ago, or last Monday.
Within 10 minutes of him doing that, because that's not what Sage wanted him to do...
This advice to ministers, I think it's September 21st of this year.
Paragraph 2 contains lies.
It says, regrettably, more than 90% of the population are still susceptible and thus if the virus proceeds unchecked with the population it will lead to an extremely large loss of life and a collapse, I think, of NHS.
I'm sorry, that's demonstrably a lie.
Because I told you, not even 90% were vulnerable when we started.
Here's the thing what percentage have been infected sage says six or seven percent.
I couldn't find the right reference.
So forgive me That's the only reference where it's not quite right.
I found a reference to six percent, but I'm sure I've heard seven percent so and the reason they think seven percent is because that's the percentage of people on average across the population if they take a blood sample or a fingerprint sample and measure do they have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 or not and Only 6 or 7% do.
And so, they've fooled you, the average member of the public, who should not be expected to know that that's not a fair thing to conclude, but that's what they've told you.
Now, the reason it's not is, if you listened to the earlier sort of rubbish introduction to immunology, you'll realise that actually it's only when all the guns and ammo have failed, the invaders in your house, they've set fire to your garage and you're fighting them in the last room, At this, you're in whatever, a panic room or whatever, and you make antibodies.
If you're lucky, if you're lucky, you'll be able to absorb them.
Think of it as like a net, and you throw it over their head, and they're falling around, and they cross, and you manage to get down the stairs and get out.
So antibodies are not a great defense, but my God, if you are driven into the panic room, you're glad you've even got this last one.
Only, I think, only a quarter, roughly, of people were ill enough for long enough for their bodies to have had time enough.
to have made antibodies at all.
And the most people, they ejected the virus quickly using one of the other guns and ammo and personal fighting techniques, nunchucks, sticks, whatever.
And so to then say to people, we've sampled how many you've got antibodies and it's only 7%, so most of you are still vulnerable, is just not true.
It's a manufactured lie.
No one believes that at all.
And it's difficult to know how many have really been infected, but I think, given most people were asymptomatic, a much larger number had slight symptoms, some were very ill, and a tiny number were so severely ill that they died, and I think it's the penultimate group really, really ill for quite a while.
Most of them probably have antibodies, and almost all of the rest Don't!
And so it's an underestimate by, say, threefold or fourfold or fivefold.
We don't know.
Interestingly, when you multiply seven by threefold, fourfold, fivefold, it is roughly the number I'm going to tell you about.
But this is the percentage who've been infected.
John Ioannidis, the world's most prestigious epidemiologist at the moment, and certainly subject matter expert deluxe in SARS-CoV-2, published earlier this week, That the infection fatality ratio is about 0.2%, 1 in 500.
It's really important you understand this, 1 in 500.
Let's say it was 1 in 1000 for the thought experiment, because it's easy maths.
If it was 1 in 1000, 43,000 deaths means 43 million infections.
Just to say that again, if it's one in a thousand, you add three more noughts.
43,000 deaths would have meant 43 million infections, but I'm saying it's not quite that much.
It's half as much.
It's one in 500.
So instead of 43 million infections, it's like 21.
and that's roughly 30 just over 30 percent of the population so if you add that number which is definitely true it's got it's derived from using our total deaths and the world's most prestigious epidemiologist working in this field today
If you use his number and our number, you get that percentage who have been infected and if you trust the most prestigious immunologists working anywhere in the world today, across the whole world actually, and there are six papers, some of which are in Science and Nature, 30% prior immunity.
If you add those two, you get more than 60% already and no longer susceptible.
Also, as we know, a slice of the youngest children appear not to either get infected or not to participate in transmission.
So my slice of children in my pie chart isn't all young children.
We had a back and forth with some scientists on this and we thought we can't claim all of them because some of them do seem to transmit.
Mostly they don't get ill and mostly they don't seem to transmit.
So I assert That less than 30% of the, on average, of the UK population are now susceptible.
And this is immunology 101.
It's not some special weapons and techniques here.
These are things you can find in textbooks.
And I've got the scientific journals.
They are cited in my work, or if not, then the previous paper I wrote.
There isn't any doubt about this.
So any people who are scientists, who are numerate, who are, say, medical or nursing, or members who have learned bodies like Royal Society and so on, you know, if you listen to this, you know what I've just told you is true.
Check it out for yourself.
And if it's true, you need to now get busy, unless you don't mind the world being turned into some dystopian nightmare.
But if you do mind, you need at this point, perhaps, to get your professional body to issue a press release.
Yes.
To say, we the undersigned have looked at this, and what Sage is telling you is incorrect, and you should not pay any attention to it.
I think if the Royal Society did it, how about Society of Biology, whatever it is, Biology Soc, or Immunology, or British Pharmacological Society, come on out there, I've been a member of some of these groups.
You know what I'm saying is true.
Any of these professional groups, they just need to put together a one-pager.
Don't just quote me.
Quote the proper immunologist.
Quote Ionides and so on.
And then give it to all the main media and give an interview.
It'll take you one minute to do the interview, which is unfortunately... I'm not impugning motives, although I think they are bad motives.
In my article, I don't say anything about who's done wrong or why they've done it.
It's not necessary.
I'm just telling you objectively that we're all being taken for a ride.
One of these professional bodies Probably won't be the BMA, will it?
Because they're allowing their doctors to be terrified, but whatever.
Some of these professional bodies just need to be, could be a group of lawyers that have hired some really, really good consultants and they would need to be proper names, you know, not me.
I could be on the list, but I'm not it.
And they just need to say that, for reasons unknown, the advice to ministers provided by Sage is clearly in error and is leading the country in a dangerous direction.
That's all they need to say.
Yes.
So this is... I'll just mention a little bit about Sage.
I don't need to get that personal.
I'm clearly personal about Sir Patrick.
I mind about this.
Science is important.
It's not important for determining whether I'm in love with my wife, which I am, or that I would literally give my life to save my children or grandchildren, which I would.
Science is no good at that sort of stuff, I don't think.
But there are certain things like determining immunological responses to novel viruses.
You know, that is science.
It's not a matter of opinion.
I don't want professors ...of, sort of, global health, coming on the TV every night, telling us this, that and the other, when, and you know who you are, I'm not going to mention you because it's too insulting, but one of them has a two-year abbreviated biology degree and no other training.
They've then, you've got a position of global health and they get, I don't know, five or ten minutes every day on lots of channels.
And they are more influential than I am.
And I don't care about that.
But you should care.
You should care because I've spent all my life doing this stuff.
I'm a scientist.
And when it's science stuff, it matters.
Facts matter.
Science matters.
It's all that separates us from Working out, you know, whether you'll survive or not by throwing chicken entrails in a china bowl.
But once you lose the scientific method driving science-style stuff, you are lost.
It's not a matter of opinion.
So, professional bodies, if you don't save the country in the next few weeks, I know it's hyperbolic, but the pace things are moving, I think we'll all end up being tested very often.
I've told you that there'll be a false positive rate, because there always is.
That means it'll never end.
And you won't be able to move around from one place to another without access control of proving you're negative for this virus.
And it's absurd.
It's slightly more lethal.
Maybe.
It's slightly more lethal than the average seasonal flow and it's been through the population, as James says, through the Gompertz curve.
That's what's called a complete passage through a population.
Again, it's not an opinion.
That's actually a classical curve you'd find in, if not Ivan Reut's book, other primers of immunology.
They'll show it to you.
And it can't come back, at least not for a long time, because people have this T-cell immunity.
And so what you're seeing, I'm afraid, flies in the face of every piece of known science.
And every scientist with my training knows that what I'm telling you is true.
And it's not good enough to just look the other way.
Because if you look the other way, I think something horrible is going to happen.
I don't know exactly what it is.
I don't go into motives because I don't really know.
So this is really the way to solve this.
And it sounds stupid, but it's really simple and it's logical.
The way to stop this is for learning societies to say, you know, this is completely wrong what you're being told.
And the most egregious problem is the mass testing of, as it were, the well population.
You can stop doing that.
Most countries are not mass testing their populations, so it's not a good thing.
It's not necessary.
What you should do is restrict the tests to people who are unwell.
It's a bloody good test.
Molecular biology is really ace.
It's really good.
You can distinguish between influenza RNA in your secretions and SARS-CoV-2.
Sometimes you can have both, you know.
People can get infected by several viruses at once.
So keep using the technique, but only where it's appropriate.
Stop testing the mass population, generating false positives, fear and control.
If people don't, if people don't follow me in this line and get that done, I think in weeks we've lost it and it won't come back.
Because once they've got an online system called Covipass or whatever it is, where every day your result will pop up and you will have to be clear or you can't go out.
Oh my gosh!
That's where we'll get to.
And also, so I'll just say these things because I thought of them the other night and I became very afraid I thought, oh, we'll have ages to argue about this.
Just imagine that there starts to be, politically, back and forth about lockdowns, like, circuit breaker lockdown.
That's a phrase, and what the hell does that mean?
Basically, if you're locking down, you're asking people or telling them not to leave their house or their district, except for certain things, and maybe eventually not at all, except for life-saving things.
And I think, because the cases I'm telling you about, that you see every day, Most of them, I'm afraid, are fake.
They are false positives.
And it's not the tester's fault.
The poor overworked people that you see in these plastic tents that look like a temporary marquee, who are busily moving samples around on what look like white picnic tables, it's not their fault.
None of them are doing anything other than working really hard.
But the person that's got that test to that spot and is swabbing people, whoever they are, they're committing a crime.
Because you don't need to mass test the population.
If they're ill, they'll bloody tell you.
You don't need to do it.
And almost no one else is doing this.
Most countries are not doing this.
And they don't do it for the reasons of flaws.
It doesn't give you useful information.
But if you don't stop this... As I say, I woke up with this nightmare, which is...
...that there's lots of political discussion about the need for lockdowns and circuit breakers and crap like that.
There's a back-and-forward fight between London and towns in the North-East and the North-West.
It's eventually solved, partly with money.
They're told, look, I know you don't want to lockdown, but here's five billion, just to make things right.
One word.
I mean, who would turn that down?
It's only a couple of weeks after all.
And so that's what they do.
They go into lockdown.
Did you know that London is in this highest tier of restrictions?
And London, by the way, is already protected by population or community immunity.
There are too few people in London now who can get it.
So certainly you could still catch it.
You could even die.
That's normal.
That's life.
That's influenza next month.
But what you won't do is be able to infect another person and then a hundred and then a thousand.
Yes.
That's the key point.
It is impossible to have a large growing consolidated epidemic in London.
So by extension it's impossible to have a so-called second wave.
It's impossible.
I'm sorry.
It's impossible.
Yes.
And that's, I've explained it probably, I talked too long but I know my stuff.
I'm here because I care.
I've no other incentive because other than A crime is being committed and I told you earlier, apart from tinkering and spotting faint patterns in sparse data before others do, the other thing I can't stand is injustice.
That's why Eden is on this call and no other reason.
I wish, I wish Mike, that everyone in the country could hear this podcast or hear you talking about this on other podcasts.
Yes, so I'll just finish then with the, if I could, with my scenario.
We end up already, so London's in, is it tier 3?
I don't care.
I think they're just stupid anyway.
It's tier 2.
There's no need.
E.T.' 's impossible for there to be a large growing epidemic in London.
Impossible.
And everyone, everyone who has a medical oblique biological training who's on SAGE knows this is true.
I don't think the mathematicians know that.
Why the hell would they know that?
So there's lots of people on SAGE, not many, sorry, lots of people who don't know what I've said.
It's true, because they were not recruited to do this.
Did you know they had seven mathematical models on SAGE and not a single clinical immunologist in the spring?
They didn't.
If they'd just borrowed me, I'd have said, hang on a minute, I'm not 100% certain, but you need to consider these three factors, and I'd then go to my...
Go to the mattresses and go and find the science.
But they didn't have any of those people.
So that's why they've got these projections, the predictions, which is... So if they're correct, of course the world's about to just melt down.
The country's going to melt down in like a sea of sick people.
But it's impossible.
because the right-hand pie chart it may not be correct to the percent one plus or minus a percent no one knows these things but you can see that the overall effect is to have made large growing epidemic in London impossible and so you don't need to have tears you need to stop testing them why would you do that people are already let me just tell you point out to you because people hate I've not mentioned the phrase till now.
Yes.
But people seem to dislike community protection through most of your colleagues being immune.
And you shouldn't be.
It's a really good thing.
So let's say I'm 80 and I live in a part of London that had a lot of deaths in the spring.
And I managed to stay, you know, isolated or whatever.
Maybe I had a better immune system than I thought or whatever.
Now I feel a bit vulnerable.
Let's imagine there are a thousand such people around districts in London.
They've gone out today and they've said hello to the guy at the corner shop and Well, they didn't really sniff the air properly because of the mask, but they just thought, my God, it's great to be alive.
And over the next few weeks, almost none of them will catch SARS-CoV-2, get ill and die.
I do think maybe three or four of them, I'm afraid, are going to catch other respiratory viruses, maybe influenza, despite the vaccines they get and will die.
So they're at much greater risk now in London from catching other viruses than SARS-CoV-2.
And they're protected against SARS-CoV-2-likely infection.
Because the people around them are not susceptible, so they can't be carrying the virus.
That's the other thing I forgot to mention.
If you're immune, the virus can't get a ride on you.
You can't be infected and infectious if you're also immune.
Right?
Yes.
I forgot to mention that.
So, herd immunity, population protection, community immunity, it's already in play in London.
And you know how you can be sure of this.
All of you don't even need to be an expert.
You just need to look at the number of deaths.
from respiratory viruses, specifically SARS-CoV-2.
And I think it's hovering around 10 a day.
They're real deaths, and I'm sorry they've died.
But I don't believe they died of SARS-CoV-2, or even if they did, that would be the kind of endemic number that you get.
Not 1,000.
Look how many were dying every day this time in March or April in London.
It was more than 1,000.
And now it's less than 1% of that.
So how did that happen?
If Sage's advice to you is correct, London ought to be ablaze with infections and death and they're not.
So maybe Eden's right and the underlying scientist that he's referencing, that's right, that's all it is.
Maybe the underlying expert science in cellular immunology and epidemiology is right.
How can that not be true?
The viruses don't do a swerve, you know, just go round.
And so I just wanted to finish then perhaps with the The labs and the testers, I think it's awful that there's no need to be doing any of the stuff as I've said and if we would only, the only thing we need to do is stop doing mass testing in the community and instead reserving the tests for people who show up with illness.
If we did that, The rest of the year will turn into a normal year, apart from the National PTSD, as one of my youngest child called it.
She said, if we carry on any longer, we'll have National PTSD.
Yes!
Isn't that a great phrase?
So, yeah.
And so, the Lighthouse Labs.
This is really spooky.
I think it was two nights ago on the BBC News.
Maybe it was three nights ago.
You can check.
At about halfway through the 10 o'clock news on BBC, there was a long piece, and they were interviewing some chap who had just resigned publicly from running one of the Lighthouse labs.
He was about my age.
Skillful scientist, a practical applied scientist.
And he said, earlier in the spring, we had really good staff.
We were borrowing them from universities.
These people knew their way around labs.
Some of them had even done this technique, but they knew how to handle the equipment.
And he said, but now we've got these big, you know, tents on the edge of airfields or whatever it is.
And he said, we've run out of good, we've run out of experienced staff.
I'm sure they're wonderful people, but they're, they're now taking people perhaps who had a science degree or maybe not even that, but they've never worked professionally in a laboratory.
So they might even get the lab coat done up wrong or they're not sure what to do with gloves.
How do they take them on and off?
How do you even stay safe?
So here's the thing, here's the best analogy I can give you.
At some point in your life you've admired watching somebody say, screw it, put a door up.
Something really simple.
And they've used a screwdriver and they've got this adeptness about how to apply the head of the tool into the fastener and what force to apply.
And they can talk to you while they're twiddling it.
And then you have a go.
Unless you're an expert.
You have a go and you think, oh my god, I can't even do up or undo a screw properly.
It's slipping out.
I'm stabbing myself on the hand.
I've marred the paintwork.
That's me.
So something as simple as a screwdriver is a really skillful bit of kit.
And the close analogy is the precision pipette.
Where you'll put the tip in, you'll plunge the plunger where your thumb is, you'll dip it into some liquid, you'll suck it up, and then you'll transfer that somewhere else.
It looks so simple, but actually it's a subject to mistakes as the inept user of the screwdriver.
And as they did this interview on BBC News, which I'm afraid I think, and this is awful, It's vanished and I've been looking for it for two days and it's vanished.
I cannot find it on iPlayer.
My wife knows it was there.
She even recorded when it started and she's looked and she can't find it.
But anyway, Jeremy somebody, a doctor, a supervisor, said, I'm resigning because we can't get good enough staff.
He said, the people here, they're trying hard, but they don't even know how to use the basic equipment like the pets.
Imagine the transfer errors you get when you've got a thousand swabs in little plastic bags on picnic tables between you and they're moving backwards and forwards.
They're doing a wash of the swab before they put it into a tube and send it off for PCR testing.
that you know they're dropping tubes splashing liquid creating aerosols that the chances that this will be done well this this should be uh judicial quality or equal this should be for forensic quality this is an equivalent not quite the same but you know when you have a dna test for court purposes this is it's a similar technique or at least it can be there are some techniques that are similar
If your lawyer saw what was going on and your sample was being tested about were you present or not, I think you would take a video and show the judge and he would say to the other side, inadmissible.
Absolutely inadmissible.
The techniques you used here are not consistent with being able to trust the data.
And I don't think you can trust the data.
They have overdone it.
They've run out of expertise.
They're using people who are not skilled in even basic equipment.
That will produce a higher false positive rate.
And I just need to say something about that.
When we started, Julia Hartley Brewer and I managed to work a number on Mr. Hancock and get him to admit live on air that the false positive rate of the test in the community at the time was about 0.8%.
That's how we worked it out.
We don't know what it is now because no one publishes it, even though I've told you it's a fundamental requirement of any test to be used and they're not telling you.
I think it is now between 3% and 5% and I don't mind if people laugh in derision and I think that because 3% of the population at any time have a common cold coronavirus.
It is true if you look in the leaflets of some of these PCR tests that they cross-react with some regions of common cold coronaviruses.
So look, potentially 3% will be false positives, they'll respond positively to the SARS-CoV-2 PCR test because they've got something similar.
And then on top of that, on top of that, you'll detect dead virus, as Carl Hennigan has said in many papers.
So if you had the virus a month ago or two months ago, that's what I call a cold positive.
That will be positive.
And then lastly, these poor overworked young people, probably paid minimum wage and working in a tent, And their supervisors resign because it's not only not good science, it's not even safe.
And so these transfers and errors and mistakes, I think, will add another few percent.
Let's say I'm right and it's 3%.
That's like minimum, just from common cold coronaviruses.
If you're doing 300,000 tests a day, that's 10,000 false positives.
Let's say it's 5%.
That's 15,000 false positives dot dot dot.
Roughly what's the number, James?
You don't even need to look this up, do you?
Roughly what's the number of positive cases we're told about every day?
15%.
It's 15,000.
Right.
So, that's the end.
I shall stop at this point.
I shall stop at this point.
Oh, actually... Actually, let me ask you two questions, if I may.
Go on, you go ahead.
I have two questions for you.
The first is kind of a $64,000 question.
Yeah.
Given that we've established that this is Epidemiology 101, this is entry-level stuff.
Yes.
Anyone who's gone through medical training presumably must have been made aware of this basic Yeah, they probably have forgotten that they have the legs.
They don't need to, you do it.
But lots of people know it.
They will understand the principle if it's described to them and asked what do they think, yes.
You must have various theories about somebody like Patrick Balance, who presumably was a mate of yours.
No, we weren't mates.
He was a very clever man.
He was very, very ambitious, very pushy.
He was also very clever.
I admired him because he was...
He had a medical degree and was doing that most unusual thing, trying to be a doctor doctor.
So he did a research-based PhD very quick.
He did good work and he had a medical degree.
And I thought, my word, that's good.
So it's even worse.
This is a guy you admired.
Yes, absolutely.
And now I imagine he is... You're not very impressed with him now.
Do you have any thoughts about what might be motivating him?
I don't know.
I mean, the people have said, oh come on Mike, it must be about money.
It just, he's about, he must be about the same age as me, plus minus a year.
Yeah.
Because I went to university at 21, but he had already done a medical degree.
So yeah, he might be, he'd be plus minus my age.
People who've been as senior as he has been in large drug companies have already made millions and millions of pounds.
So unless he's got a extremely expensive habit that we don't know about, then I just don't see how he would need more money.
Interesting.
But he would make more money if, you know, if this continued and vaccines are all, oh, God, we have to talk.
Maybe we should do another podcast about vaccines.
Well, that was actually my second question.
Maybe we're just a taster.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but it seems to me that there are various reasons why the public health establishment is steering us in this particular direction.
But one, it seems to me, is they seem to have bought into the line that we must have a vaccine and life can't go on.
And so people like me who say, well, this is the evil hand of Big Pharma.
We get accused of being conspiracy theorists and whatever, but you, while I've got you, as a sort of former member, representative of Big Pharma, do you have reservations about the vaccine?
Absolutely.
Why?
I think I've told you in detail, if you look at the Gompertz curves and Immunology 101, the virus, especially one that doesn't mutate very quickly like coronaviruses, they pass through the population and then they go.
So why the hell would you want a vaccine?
By the way, yes, of course, there will be only 1% of the vulnerable people in our country.
That is like, I think it was over 80, something like that.
I think 1% have died.
But actually, usually 10 times that number will die of other causes.
So, even for the people who were unfortunately taken from us by SARS-CoV-2, given there are loads of ways in which your life ends, you know, when your old probability gets, you're not gonna make your next birthday and so on.
SARS-CoV-2 has never really been a public health emergency.
It really hasn't.
We thought it was when we thought it was killed over 3% of the people.
That's a big deal.
Slightly less than 1% of the population die every year in this country.
The number of people who've died with or of COVID-19 is 0.06% and funnily enough it's that number in everywhere where they were severely affected and lower in other places.
There's one or two exceptions but I think the data are broken.
but in places where they've got advanced economies and use the tests and use them reasonably well with known weaknesses 0.06 and the reason it's exactly that number is if you've got a similar distribution of ages and you know similar density and so on like Italy and France and Britain and Sweden who's slightly more slightly more dense living than we are of course it will go to in the same way and stop Like it stopped in Sweden.
Right.
There's nothing... it's not possible for there to be something unique.
It's almost a racist idea, isn't it?
Aren't we from the same stock?
You know, they turned up and we mingled and then we mingled with the French and the Germans and so on.
We're largely the same stuff.
And we're a few hundred miles over the sea for crying out loud.
No one can believe that what's happened in Sweden, for example, where I think they played a straight bat, to use a cricket expression.
I do think what's happened there is probably the genuine article.
And they made some mistakes too, and more people died than should have done in old people's homes.
But that's the control.
So number one, we don't need it.
Do you have a number two on the vaccine?
I mean, presumably there is a risk, is there not?
Yes, so back to the vaccine.
My point was you do not need a vaccine to return to normal.
And the reason is most people aren't very susceptible to the virus, will not be made ill by it.
I think a third of us actually had it.
another third have probably been immune anyway from exposure to other related common cold coronaviruses so you're not at risk you can't catch it and if you did you wouldn't die because a tiny number of people who were younger on the younger end and didn't have illnesses have died it's a tiny number more people have Certainly more people have died in car crashes in the normal year and far more people have permanent life-changing injuries from auto smashes.
Just an unbelievably large number.
So I'm not being ruthless or cruel about the number of the young people who are not already ill that have died.
I'm just telling you it's probably 1% of the number of people who've been killed or had permanent serious life-changing injuries in one year from car crashes.
So And we accept that risk because we recognize the advantages of being able to move around and the freedom and so on.
So you don't need a vaccine.
If you are vulnerable, relatively elderly and you've got some illnesses, I would say if the vaccine turns up soon, read the leaflet, seriously consider getting it.
I'm not ill or old and I won't bother with it but if I was 15 years older and I had diabetes and You know, some immune problem.
I seriously would think about it.
I think it's a good idea.
But didn't Kate Bingham say who's in charge of it?
Kate Bingham.
Yes, I know.
I slightly know Kate.
I know Kate.
I pitched to her once and didn't get the money.
I like Kate.
I mean, she's a good person.
She's not a bad actor.
No, absolutely.
But she says that the best case scenario is we get about 50% immunity.
Sorry, vaccines are 50% effective.
Yes.
So that's the thing.
That's another thing.
I thank her very much because I was wondering, are we going to allow
the the illusion of magic of it being a magic bullet to persist because I thought well it's really unlikely that a vaccine will do really much different in the population to what being in natural infection why why would it it's basically you're presenting to the body something that's you know the essence of the virus some of them are killed viruses some are like a genetic sequence of part of the virus and so on so in fact I'd be surprised if a vaccine was anywhere near as good as natural
I thank her for being honest and saying that while we don't know exactly what will happen the sort of best reasonable best outcome is you're not going to you're not even kind of going to come close to protecting everybody and so you know it occurred to me that the vaccine is not going to change anything.
If you are so worried about the spreading of the virus to the community that you'll have to continue Masking and distancing and locking down.
Because it won't make it won't make enough difference but so so so all of that's a lie so I'm afraid all of you scientists and qualified people and professional bodies if you don't stop this I do think the vaccine will be proposed for people and offered to people and then it'll be you don't have to have it but if you don't dot dot dot so yes will be made difficult and eventually you'll think to hell with it I want to go on holiday I have to have the vaccine so that's called coercion it's illegal So thus far?
It is actually illegal.
You're not, yeah, whatever.
So the vaccine is unlikely to be a magic bullet.
We never, scientists never thought it would be.
It might be a useful tool to help protect some people, but again the thing people don't like you to know about often is, and this is true of the flu vaccine, one of the reasons, the people who you would hope would be most protected by a flu vaccine, the people most vulnerable, the elderly or already ill, One of the problems is that their immune system is often not very good and that's why they're vulnerable to infections.
But unfortunately it means they don't respond well often.
They don't respond well to vaccines and don't get protected.
It's awful to say this, that even with the presence of the flu vaccine, the most vulnerable people die anyway.
And I'm afraid that's going to be true with the COVID-19 vaccine.
The ones who are most vulnerable and likely to die will die anyway.
So it's not going to solve anything.
And you must now see, you medical, scientific, legal people, you must be able to see now and say that it's our professional view that SAGE is providing Aberrant, seriously, lethally wrong advice.
You don't even need to impugn their motives, but tell them.
The government should... the people of this country and the scientists and professional bodies should demand their immediate ejection.
There are plenty of clever, well-intentioned people who would like to help.
I would put my hand up for no money.
We need to get people out who have conflicts of interest and, aside from that, have demonstrably acted in bad faith because I know they know things that means what they've said and done makes no sense.
So it doesn't matter what you think about motives.
It doesn't matter at all.
They need to be removed on Monday and replaced.
So SAGE should be dissolved and reconstituted by people who, I guess, have shown their willingness to help through their research experience, medical knowledge, epidemiology skills, and can provide good advice.
And you know what?
The first thing I would do is call the epidemiologists in other countries.
Because I would think, well, I don't want to make a complete blooper and fool of myself.
So what are they doing in France and Italy and maybe Sweden?
And once you've collected your information, then wouldn't you feel, I feel a lot more confident, I've tested my thinking against other people who do this for a living.
And they've corrected a few places, but fundamentally I've had it right.
So now I can give good advice.
So that's what should happen.
And I've got something really important, one sentence to say, or two sentences.
So my wife asked me the other day, I was writing this report, this last article published October the 16th in Lockdown Skeptics, she said, Mike, if you're right and it's effectively over and there's all false positives that are causing the news problems, she said, well, why isn't it over?
And I thought, and I thought, and I thought, and I came up with a few reasons, and then it hit me between the eyes.
James, listeners, the reason the pandemic is not over is because Sage says it's not.
That's it.
That's it.
You haven't pulled your punches, Mike.
Thank you.
I don't care of anyone.
I don't.
So when I've made comments that might impugn people and they might be inclined to serve a writ on me, you know, that's fine.
If I've made a mistake, I'm going to apologize in front of the judge.
I'm going to profusely apologize to the public about the wrongs I've said about this person.
So I don't wish ill to anyone.
I've never been a vindictive person either.
So if I've said things that are wrong and you see me and don't care about that, I'm going to pay the fine and I'm going to apologize.
They're not going to hang me or put me in prison.
But I think I'm right.
And you know, it's interesting.
Just in closing, I've said such awful things about several named individuals, and I can't believe no-one's jogged their elbow and pointed them to it.
Hi Pat!
So, he knows what I've said.
Why hasn't he sued me?
Okay, the government's easier response to irritants like me.
is that they would just ignore me.
That's the easiest thing.
But I've been quite persistent in my criticism and I've said why what he is saying is not true.
And when you say in public something that I know you know is not true and you use it for a purpose, then I think the phrase lie is correct.
Right.
It's not a slip of the tongue.
It's not a mistake.
Everybody does those things.
I do these.
I've probably made loads of mistakes.
But when someone gets up And regretfully, in tones about that, well, sadly, this, that and the other.
And they say things that I know that they know is not true, and I can show that, like the first lesson of immunology, the first lesson of epidemiology.
So I've accused him of lying.
So why hasn't he sued me or put an injunction on me?
And I tell you the two reasons why not.
One is, first, he would lose.
I would be able to show, I think, to any reasonable judge that what I have said is supported by our history and the science that we share, the medium of science.
We can both read this stuff.
I know what he says.
What he said is not true.
So if his defense was, I wasn't lying, it's true, we'll have a fight about that and he'll lose.
And if he says, I didn't realise it wasn't true and I'm sorry, then that would be fine, wouldn't it?
I would say, well, you know, you really ought to resign if you're that incompetent.
So he's either lying or he's incompetent.
There is no innocent explanation for it and yet he's not sued me and I'm doing it again today.
Come at me, I don't care at all.
So as I say, the reason it's not over is because Sage says it's not.
Great.
I think that's a good way to end.
Thank you, Mike, so much.
Great pleasure.
I hope you can edit that down into something usable.
No, listen, the people will just listen to it on their jogs or their car journeys.
I apologise to all your listeners.
You can tell I'm passionate.
No, it's great.
It's absolutely great.
I know, but I don't listen.
I've even got a post-it note on my table from my dear wife.
Who says we haven't listened?
I haven't, have I?
Anyway, look... It's been a pleasure.
Thank you very much, James.
Good luck.
Thank you very much.
And I say this in the nicest possible way, but I hope Sir Patrick Valance sues the arse off you so that you can smash him in court.
I think I would win.
It would be fair comment, so that's fine.
OK, then.
Thank you very much.
Thanks a lot.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Welcome to The Deling Pod with me, James Deling Poe, and my very special guest, Dr. Mike Yeadon.
Please remember that I really, really appreciate your support.
These podcasts do take a lot of time and effort.
Yeah, if you want me to do more of this stuff, and I think some of you do, please remember to support me on Patreon or on Subscribestar.
I really appreciate it.
We're building together this wonderful community of like-minded folk.
And my God, the way the world's going, we need to stand together.
We keepers of the flame of truth and those of us who are prepared to stick our necks out and poke our heads above the parapet or whatever other analogy you want to use.
I think we are entering a very dark period of our history and we few, we happy few, although I hope it's more than the few, must stick together.
Thank you very much.
Goodbye.
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