It Seems Only Certain People Are Allowed to talk about Lucy Letby
On 5 August 2024 Channel 5 screened a documentary which looked critically at the evidence in the case of nurse Lucy Letby, who was convicted (in two trials) of seven murders and seven attempted murders of babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital intensive care unit during 2015-16
While many have raised concerns about the evidence following her most recent conviction on 2 July 2024, my colleague Scott McLachlan (along with statistician Richard Gill) was raising legitimate concerns about the case well before Lucy’s first trial ended in August 2023.
Although many people have now jumped on the “Maybe Lucy is innocent after all” bandwagon, at that time nobody else was raising such concerns.
Indeed (as I show below), anybody who did raise such concerns was labelled a mad conspiracy theorist.
An interview I did with Scott in September 2023, shortly after the first conviction, was watched by over a million people on twitter, youtube and rumble.
Scott is a Lecturer in Digital Technologies for Health at Kings College London in the Division of Digital Health and Applied Technology Assessment within the Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care.
In addition to his PhD in computer science he has extensive training in law and nursing and has a forensic knowledge of the case. Qualifications that speak for themselves. Scott has written dozens of the most extensively detailed articles and updates about the case on his substack, including some which pre-date the conclusion of the first trial.
My own interest in the case focuses on the ‘probability of coincidences and clusters’; it was the ‘too many deaths occurring when Lucy was on duty for it to be a coincidence’ narrative that was a major driver of the case against her.
Using Bayesian probability analysis, I had previously written about how such clusters of deaths are likely to occur without any malpractice and had provided such evidence to support the case for appeal in a similar case (Ben Geen).
When the company making the documentary for Channel 5 approached Scott and me to be interviewed for it we were happy to oblige. It was agreed filming would take place in my house in July 2024. A crew came and filming lasted all day.
Scott was interviewed for several hours about all aspects of the case, while I was interviewed for about 90 minutes about the statistical and probabilistic aspects only. The documentary producers told us they very happy with our interviews.
However, on 2 August Scott and I got phone calls informing us that, because of some of our views expressed on X (twitter), they were cutting our interviews from the documentary.
These ‘views’ had nothing to do with the Lucy Letby case and our investigation of it. No specific examples were given.
What is more important in a documentary whose strapline was “Unpacking and questioning the evidence used to convict neonatal nurse Lucy Letby” That our investigation, prescient and hitherto considered crucial enough to include, is heard, or omitted due to what can only be described as the chilling vagaries of cancel culture?
One of our chief concerns surrounding Lucy’s trial is that evidence that should have been heard, was not, potentially leading to a miscarriage of justice. It is ironic therefore, that the makers of this documentary sought to do the same.
It illustrates just how pernicious cancel culture has become.
In my phone call, I said I hoped they would reinstate our interviews, as it is vital that all the concerns about Lucy’s trial be heard. If they did not, I was prepared to write about it publicly and so I am.
It goes without saying, Scott and I would be happy to help in any way we can to see that justice is eventually done.
In this short clip we discuss the flakey ‘statistical’ evidence that was pesented to the jury in the first trial, which many have claimed had a profound impact on them.
One of the most high profile people who has recently joined the campaign to question the fairness of the Lucy Letby convictions is Rt Hon David Davis, the Conservative MP for Goole and Pocklington.
Interestingly, I had previously met Mr Davis in the House of Commons when there was a special meeting to discuss the safety of the covid vaccines. I reported on that meeting here.
At his request, after the meeting I provided Mr Davis with a statement on what hypotheses he should present to the Office for National Statistics in order to obtain the kind of ‘record-level’ data that would finally end all debate about whether or not the vaccines were safe and effective.
A few days after the Channel 5 documentary went out (minus the contributions of Scott and me!) Mr Davis called me to discuss the Lucy Letby case. We spoke for over an hour about the statistical issues, and I was very impressed by his knowledge and understanding.
Having someone like him take up the case is an important step forward. I recommended Mr Davis speak with Scott as he was the person with the most extensive understanding of the wider details of the evidence.
As a result Scott spent several hours with Mr Davis the next day discussing the case.
Although Mr Davis had already made known publicly that he had concerns about Lucy Letby’s conviction, an interesting twist in the tale came shortly after the strange death of Mike Lynch (the Bayesian) that we reported on here.
On 25 August Mr David announced in The Times that he and Mike Lynch ‘were ready to investigate the Lucy Letby trial’. However, the article did not reference the discussions that Scott or I had already had with him already about the statistical and other issues.
Now that so many people are openly questioning the evidence used to convict Lucy Letby here’s an interesting reminder of a reason the NHS lawyers gave as to why my talk in June 2023 to their Analytics in Healthcare conference was cancelled:
Since 20 June 2023, the Defendant has been aware that the Claimant also maintains an active profile on Twitter as a controversialist.
For example, in recent weeks, he has repeatedly tweeted arguments against the conviction of NHS nurse Lucy Letby for the murder of seven babies.
He is a climate crisis denier, tweeting and retweeting about climate change as “climate catastrophe propaganda” and criticising “the tyrannical Net Zero policies being foisted upon us all under the guise of solving the non-existent ‘global boiling crisis’.
As it so happens, I’d actually tweeted NOTHING about Lucy Letby before my cancellation, and the first time I did so was to post the above first interview I did with Scott three months later.
But, for the record, I am of course very happy to confirm that I do indeed hold those views that the NHS feel are so outrageous, along with the view (which they expanded on in a different part of their response) that the covid vaccines were neither effective nor safe.
See more here substack.com
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