Open Letter to Scotland’s First Minister on mishandling of Coronavirus

Written by Doug Brodie on October 16, 2020. Posted in Current News

Dear First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, MSP, This open letter is to express my anger at your government’s unscientific mishandling of the Coronavirus crisis. You talked in the early days of having “an adult conversation” with the Scottish people but we are still waiting.

We have listened to many words from you over recent months so I hope you will do me the courtesy of reading all of this necessarily longish email – Coronavirus is a complicated subject.

Instead of accepting data showing lower mortality you are bent on prolonging lockdown restrictions to suppress the virus when it has already subsided naturally to a level where flu and pneumonia are currently killing far more than Covid, as shown below by the following:

Unscientific mishandling of Coronavirus

Summary of the problem

When we were suddenly confronted with this new virus, most people accepted that the uncertainties justified a lockdown for a few weeks in order to “flatten the curve” and avoid overwhelming the NHS, having seen how Covid chaos unfolded in the Italian health system.

The problem is that almost seven months later, science, logic and rationality seem to have gone out of the window. The UK Coronavirus epidemic effectively ended back around July with herd immunity largely achieved because the immunity threshold turns out to be much lower than was originally thought possible, mainly because of natural T-cell cross immunity in the general population.

The hard evidence is that flu and pneumonia are currently killing far more than Covid, as shown below by the latest ONS data for England and Wales.

Your disregard for the science and the societal collateral damage caused by your disproportionate measures is unfathomable. I can only think that you know in your heart of hearts that the original lockdown was a disastrous overreaction but you can’t bring yourself to admit it, so you double down by imposing “fanfare” restrictions in the hope that you can bluff your way through it, hoping you can convince the brainwashed public that your measures did the trick when normality finally returns.

Political lack of understanding and denial of reality (or is it all an act?)

I find it incredible that seemingly the entire political class, their advisors and the MSM can be so hopelessly at sea in their lack of understanding of Covid herd immunity and the illusory second wave created by the problems of PCR testing and the normal autumn increase in respiratory illnesses.

It’s like watching them debate “climate change”, so muddled in their scientific illiteracy. I don’t know if it is down to lack of technical competency or if it’s just an act to cover up the panicked initial lockdown overreaction or even if it is motivated by something more sinister, e.g. the so-called “Great Reset”. Whatever the reason, it makes me very angry and very sad for the future of the country.

The graph of Scottish Covid-19 weekly deaths copied below with annotations for context shows that your frantic ratcheting up of restrictions over the summer has had negligible impact on the naturally near-flat curve of Covid deaths and that there is no cause for panic going into winter.

The latest weekly Covid death toll shows a small rise to 25 yet you claim that your latest restrictions are essential, otherwise “we are likely to return to the peak level of infections that we had in the spring by the end of this month”. This is even more far-fetched than the already-failed projection from Professors Whitty and Vallance that UK cases could reach 50,000 by mid-October, although not as intelligence-insulting as UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s hysterical claim that “hundreds of thousands of deaths” could follow if the virus is allowed to “rip through” the country again.

The above Covid mortality graph – a Gompertz-type curve typical of natural biological phenomena, a very steep rise followed by a slower steady fall – has been replicated (with seasonal variations) in every country stricken by Covid regardless of the degree of lockdown imposed, or not in the case of Sweden, Belarus, Brazil and several states in America. This signature trajectory was identified early in 2020 by Nobel laureate Prof Michael Levitt but he was widely ignored. For a full explanation, see this must-watch video with over 1.5 million views by expert analyst Ivor Cummins.

Prolonging the lockdown has most probably been counter-productive, merely delaying (at huge collateral damage cost) the eventual attainment of endemic equilibrium. A paper published in the Lancet and five other published papers (says Ivor Cummins) have all found that lockdowns are ineffective. New York data showed that the majority of new infections occurred in the locked-down population. There have been no credible published papers to show that lockdowns are in any way effective; if there had been the lockdown ideologues would have proclaimed them to the rafters.

Quite apart from the proven non-efficacy of lockdowns, the scientific reality is that what you are now presiding over is not an incipient “second wave” but a relatively harmless so-called casedemic, shown in the graph below of Scottish Covid-19 daily cases. The number of positive test results (“cases”) has soared as mass testing has been ramped up but the fact that the above deaths graph has flatlined over the same period (average elapsed time from infection to death is about 3 weeks) shows that very few of these “cases” equate to genuine, serious, transmissible infections.

This is unambiguously shown by analyst Tony Heller in his video featuring a graph of superimposed UK cases (blue) and deaths (red), copied below. It shows how the rising trend in cases back in March was followed within a few short weeks by the rising trend in deaths yet the dramatic rise in “cases” from the end of August has had only a tiny, autumnal impact on the flatlining level of deaths.

The major unscientific flaw in your strategy, shared by most of the Western establishment, is that the PCR antigen test which is being used to direct national Covid policy is wholly unsuitable for population screening to diagnose Covid-19 infections, as your national clinical director let slip, a political embarrassment which you covered up by dissembling. The PCR test is a useful locating tool in the early stages of an epidemic but is of limited use in the later stages when prevalence is low.

As illustrated below by analyst Ivor Cummins talking to Julia Hartley-Brewer, the problem is that by the nature of its amplification process, the PCR test will find many false positives from old viral fragments (not necessarily Covid), it will find people who had the illness perhaps months previously but who are no longer infectious and it will find people who have an extremely low viral load of negligible significance or transmissibility. (The latter would have been present in April but most cases would not have been detected because of the low level of testing at that time). On top of these it will find a small number of genuine, symptomatic, potentially serious and transmissible infections.

The PCR test counts all these sub-cases (A+B+C+D on the graphic below) when only D “concerning positive” is relevant, leading to a possible overestimate by a factor of about ten-fold or even more (ref. Dr Mike Yeadon). If mortality is relatively low this creates a “casedemic” where aside from the huge flurry of positive test “cases” there is nothing very untoward going on.

If you politicians carry on like this with your unscientific denial of reality we could be stuck all winter in a never-ending illusory epidemic (ref. Prof Carl Heneghan) with huge ongoing collateral damages.

It is a disgrace that the biased, fear-mongering MSM, especially the BBC, ignores this casedemic phenomenon and carelessly (or deliberately?) mixes up the terms (PCR) “cases” and “infections”. Most politicians (e.g. Starmer) are just as bad, being by nature relatively weak on technical analysis (just as many of them haven’t a clue about “climate change” and energy infrastructure engineering).

Looking ahead

The vast majority of the Covid-19 mortalities have involved the very old, mostly with serious pre-existing conditions while the young are barely touched by it, an almost thousand-fold difference in severity between old and young. This makes your application of restrictions to the entire healthy population particularly perverse. You seem to have forgotten that you said in the early days that we would probably have to learn to live with the virus, all the more apt now with the recent revelation that the vaccines currently under trial are likely to be little more than a glorified version of Lemsip.

The publicly-stated initial UK approach to handling Coronavirus was to work towards herd immunity using social distancing and hygiene measures in line with the standard WHO guidelines. This was clearly working as the rate of infection had already begun to fall before lockdown was imposed, as acknowledged by Prof Whitty to a select committee in July. Unfortunately this approach was overtaken by full lockdown after Prof Neil Ferguson came out with his grossly-exaggerated predictions of Covid mortality. Nobel laureate Prof Michael Levitt wrote to Ferguson in March to tell him that his predictions were too high by a factor of ten (now proven) but he got no reply.

Fast forward to now and UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock similarly refuses to debate the issue. He misrepresents the herd immunity approach as “letting the virus rip” through the population and insultingly implies that anyone who supports this approach is callously willing to let thousands of grannies die, seemingly oblivious to the fact that herd immunity has already been largely achieved. Meanwhile, many thousands are dying of other causes due to the monomaniacal focus on Covid-19.

Respiratory illnesses are slowly increasing as is normal in autumn (ref. Prof Carl Heneghan) and deaths can sadly be expected to keep increasing, but we need to keep things in perspective. It is not unusual for respiratory illness hospital admissions to double from late summer to the peak in December and January. Also, the numbers are being fiddled. The NHS is always stretched in winter but at least we now have the new Nightingale hospitals (except that yours is due to be dismantled). Any impending stress on hospital capacity will sadly be down to NHS unpreparedness. The Covid data from France and Spain who are several weeks ahead of us show that their alleged second waves are turning out to be largely the normal seasonal increase. The much-hyped major second wave is a fiction promoted by the fear-mongering media as there is no scientific evidence (ref. Dr Mike Yeadon) from decades of experience of coronaviruses that any such second wave ever occurs.

You may learn something useful from this video of a German lawyer explaining why he is planning to sue the WHO through a class action lawsuit in the USA for Covid fraud, which he dramatically describes as “the greatest crime against humanity ever committed”. The misuse of PCR testing is central to his case for the prosecution (23 minutes in).

Talking of class action lawsuits, I won’t need to remind you that your own record on Covid-19 care home deaths probably ranks among the worst in the world on a per head of population basis.

It is high time we had the “adult conversation” on Covid that you promised months ago, or even an honest debate. Instead of the unscientific pretence that we can suppress or even eliminate the virus (to do that we would have to isolate everyone in their own private bubble, clearly not a realistic option for the modern world), we need a realistic plan for living with it (says IDS).

We could follow the USA in backing the Great Barrington Declaration already signed by thousands of health scientists and doctors around the world recommending the alternative approach they call “focused protection”, although the UK government has already poured cold water on it with the profoundly unscientific UK Heath Minister tweeting “there is no such thing as herd immunity”. To add to the establishment’s discomfiture, one of the originators of the declaration has co-authored a new article saying that “contrary to conventional public health wisdom, most of the hope placed on contact tracing efforts to control the epidemic is ultimately futile”.

We would do well by copying Sweden, much abused by misinformed (or dissembling) lockdown supporters but judged to be the “gold standard” of epidemic management by expert analysist Ivor Cummins. They are now “home dry” after minimal Covid lockdown, minimal school disruption and no face masks. Ironically (and tellingly), Sweden only achieved this because the Swedish constitution prohibits their politicians from infringing on basic human rights such as freedom of movement.

The current crisis is put into perspective by this graph of Sweden deaths since 1851. It shows that many years over past decades have been far worse than 2020 and, surprisingly, that Swedish mortality summed over 2019-2020 has been close to average. We don’t lock down the economy for an outbreak of influenza or pneumonia (currently far worse than Covid). Surely all that is needed at this stage of Coronavirus is adherence to a sensible mantra such as “Wash, Face and Space” coupled with shielding and protecting of the vulnerable. It’s time to stop the scaremongering propaganda and allow things to get back to something like normal, as currently prevailing in Sweden.

The ongoing problem of political groupthink

Finally, to go off on a slight but I believe important tangent, it is striking to observe how the abuse of science on Coronavirus perpetrated by you, your advisors and most of the Western establishment mirrors the abuse of science on the similarly contentious issue of alleged man-made global warming.

The two graphs below show how the UN IPCC’s exaggerated predictions of runaway global warming mirror Professor Neil Ferguson’s exaggerated predictions of runaway Covid-19 deaths, e.g. 500,00 in the UK and 40,000 in Sweden, actual Swedish outcome with minimal lockdown about 6,000.

Both of these dubious modellings were swallowed by the groupthinking establishment as gospel, unscientifically dismissing a wealth of contrarian empirical evidence.

In the same vein, scaremongering talk of a scientifically-unjustified “climate emergency” is matched by hysteria about an imagined Covid “second wave”. Ditto the brainwashing of the general public by “Project Fear” propaganda and the general refusal of politicians to engage in honest public debate on either subject. Anything to protect the precious “official” political narrative, no matter the cost.

These two political overreactions differ only on timescales. It has taken just months for the Covid overreaction to bring the economy to its knees while the cold light of reality is already disproving the unscientific scaremongering. The climate change overreaction has been building up for many years and it is surely only a matter of time before the lights go out, as realists have been warning for years.

When are you going to start following proper science rather than the selective, obviously-flawed   science which supports your ulterior political agendas at huge cost to the wellbeing of the country? Your ulterior agenda on Covid is difficult to discern but given that your mantra is “independence transcends everything”, it probably has something warped to do with that, if only to try to come out of the crisis supposedly “better” (more authoritarian?) than Boris Johnson.

To paraphrase Shakespeare in a topical imprecation, “a plague on all groupthinking politicians”!

Yours faithfully,

Douglas Brodie, Nairn, 15^th October 2020

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