DOES anyone remember the UK Covid-19 Inquiry? Remarkably, it is still going on. Starting in June 2023, two years ago, it is being run under ten modules, and this week it had only started the public hearings related to Module 6. The module has been running since the end of last year.
Nobody knows when the inquiry will end. According to the chair it will begin its final public hearings in 2026. The cost per day is estimated at £136,907 and the total cost will be over £196million. I’m sure Professor Sir Chris Whitty will be happy the longer it trundles on in the hope that by the time it is over most people will have lost interest and, perhaps, some of us seasoned commentators will have gone to our eternal rest.
Whitty’s actions early in 2020 are very relevant to the theme of the current module. Module 6 purports to ‘investigate the impact of the pandemic on the publicly and privately funded adult social care sector in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It will consider the consequences of government decision-making – including restrictions imposed – on those living and working within the care sector, as well as decisions concerning capacity in hospitals and residents in adult care and residential homes’.
The decision early in the ‘pandemic’ to clear out general hospitals by discharging older people into the community to nursing and residential homes was, predictably, disastrous. More than 20,000 excess deaths occurred. Chris Whitty has denied being part of that decision, but emails emanating from his department indicate otherwise. Nevertheless, he will probably emerge from the cesspit of the Covid Inquiry smelling of roses.
If past form is anything to go by, the inquiry will not get within a light year of investigating the real causes of the excess deaths in nursing and residential homes. The groundwork is already being laid and, as usual, the BBC is playing its part as the mouthpiece of pandemic propaganda.
Clearly, the industrial level of deaths among older people is newsworthy and, rightly, people are angry. But over the past two days on the BBC Radio 4 Today and PM programmes whenever interested parties, mainly relatives of older people who died, are interviewed about the public hearing for Module 6 the same mantra is repeated: they moved people into the community without testing them. It is assumed, therefore, that they are ascribing the excess deaths in the care homes to covid.
As with all things related to the ‘pandemic’, the narrative around this will be closely controlled and only the voices of people pointing to covid and the lack of testing will be broadcast. It is assumed, also, that the covid tests were accurate, worth doing and if only they had been used the number of deaths would have been reduced.
Thus, the covid inquiry already has an answer to the excess deaths in nursing homes. All that remains by means of tightly controlled proceedings at the public hearings is to ensure that they hear only evidence leading them to that answer. We will hear nothing about isolation, neglect, withdrawal of whatever care they were receiving in hospital and the overuse of the sedative midazolam.
It is interesting to note that testing was not used prior to the wholesale removal of older people to the community. Was this, perhaps, deliberate? Early in the ‘pandemic’, the notorious PCR tests were available and were already being used in other circumstances, for example, to test people who wanted to travel abroad or enter the country.
The PCR tests are useless at indicating accurately whether someone has covid. The problem is that they are prone to false positive results. This means they wrongly indicate someone has covid when they do not. As I wrote on my Substack: ‘PCR testing for Covid is known to be highly problematic due to the phenomenon of false positive test results. They are also unable to distinguish between complete “live” viruses and fragments of viral DNA from “dead” viral particles. This was discussed on GOV.UK on 3 June 2020 where the following was stated: “DHSC figures show that 100,664 tests were carried out on 31 May 2020 (Pillar 1 and 2 RT-PCR tests). 1,570 of those tests were positive for SARS-CoV-2 (1.6%). The majority of people tested on that day did not have SARS-CoV-2 (98.4% of tests are negative). When only a small proportion of people being tested have the virus, the operational false positive rate becomes very important. Clearly the false positive rate cannot exceed 1.6% on that day, and is likely to be much lower. If the operational false positive rate was 0.4%, 400 of the 1,570 positive tests would be false positives. That would represent 400 people being isolated when they are well, and much wasted effort in contact tracing. It is possible that a proportion of infections that we currently view as asymptomatic may in fact be due to these false positives”.’
If PCR testing, the only covid testing then available, had been used prior evicting older people from hospital it would most likely have shown that thousands of the older people had covid. Amongst these would have been an unknown number of false positives. That would, inconveniently, probably have halted to the plans to clear the general hospitals.
Once warehoused in the care homes and residential homes older people were deprived of visits from family. Many will have become lonely and depressed, stopped eating and died as a result. The WHO reckons that 100 people die hourly from loneliness. The sudden increase in resident to carer ratios can only have reduced the quality of care received by these older people and many will have died as a result. This will later have been compounded by the vaccine mandates in care homes which caused many staff to leave or to be dismissed.
With the NHS closed, many of the older people will have been deprived of investigations and therapies received in hospital and will have died as a result. Finally, it seems, those too stubborn to die of depression, starvation and neglect may have had their deaths hastened by the unnecessary prescription of midazolam. If not, then what explains the spike in use of this drug early in 2020 when its use doubled in March, coinciding with the guidance to move older people?
Freedom of Information requests were submitted to this effect to the Office for National Statistics which said (conveniently): ‘Unfortunately, information relating to prescribed medication is not recorded on the death certificate. Therefore, we do not hold the information requested.’ The person was directed to the Care Quality Commission, who issued a series of boilerplate responses but were no help regarding the use (or overuse) of midazolam during the early days of covid-19.
If the Covid Inquiry is to have any level of public trust, it must look beyond the tidy explanations and be willing to confront the uncomfortable complexities of what happened in our care homes. This includes not only questions around testing and transmission, but also the broader impact of policy decisions: isolation, staff shortages, the abrupt withdrawal of hospital care, and the questionable use of sedatives. The search for truth must be open to the possibility that harm was done not just by omission, but by commission.
