This Man Is Supposed To Be In Charge.
Earlier this week, the Chief Medical Officer was heckled in the street by someone who disagreed with him. Perhaps not the most appropriate way to make your point – even if the point being made was absolutely correct – but if you are a true leader and you know what you are talking about, you would be able to engage with all manner of collocutors. Watch Roger Federer’s acceptance speech after winning the Australian Open in 2010 to see how to temper hubris and replace it with humility and empathy toward the other person, understanding how they are feeling. Sadly Chris Witty just stood there looking like someone who had just crapped themselves and wanted to find a public lavatory. Presumably there were none open nearby, as they are all closed because of the killer virus of death (the one that continues to not kill people, especially those if infects).
As a result of Hecklegate, deathmongering politicians were falling over themselves to condemn the young lad, concomitantly eulogising good old Chris. After all, he was now a victim and so the encomia were being gushed out thick & fast, auxesis and hyperbole, sycophantic paean layered upon effusive paean. How long before there is a crowdfunding campaign to help poor, sad Chris, followed by a Justgiving page to raise money to top up his gargantuan remuneration package and then a weekly mass Crap Clap For Chris campaign. Unable to contain his obsessive insultive logorrhea, it fell upon the Death Secretary himself to express the emotions of the millions of people who have been adversely affected by his incompetence.
With his usual rictus smugness, Matt Hancock opined that Chris is (are you sitting down?) “one of our greatest living scientists“. Even by Matt Mancock’s litany of lies that is a whopper and a half. The United Kingdom is blessed with some truly great scientists in general, such as Baroness Susan Greenfield; Professor Steve Jones; Professor Lord Winston and the late Professor Bryan Clarke, as well as in respect of SARS-CoV-2 Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Carl Heneghan. The Death Secretary went on to vomit out “his advice to the Government all the way through this, and his advice to all of us in the population, has been incredibly smart and thoughtful, and he is a great asset to this nation.” Get a room.
Chris may be a nice bloke, may look like an anorexic Gollum and he has an impressive CV except we have all employed someone in the past who had a fabulous CV on paper but was utterly useless when it came to performing the actual job required of them.
Conflicted Health Decision Makers Do Not Make Good Decisions.
Along with the Death Secretary, Chris is the architect and enabler of a policy response that had made the situation far worse than had nothing been done. His ‘incredibly smart and thoughtful’ advice is why the UK has almost constantly been in the top ten highest total deaths on the planet and in the top five highest mortality rates on a population-adjusted basis. We reviewed this most recently last month and the data is here, as well as in previous evaluations in September, July, June, April and April (again). So pretty much from the start of this Great Insanity. It is an irony of Buck Murdoch proportions that the only correct thing Chris has done was when Public Health England downgraded SARS-CoV-2 from HCID to LCID on 19th March 2020, before death sentence 1.0 was imposed on the UK population a few days later. Had he been a vertebrate he would have stood up to the politicians but he didn’t.
To quote from the conclusion of the Cochrane review of the UK government’s pointless stockpiling of antivirals following the 2009 influenza pandemic,
“We urge people not to trust…comment from conflicted health decision makers, but to view the information for themselves.” Something we reviewed in October.
SARS-CoV-2 has been attenuating since SG614 became the global, fixed variant around June 2020, as a result of its increased expression of 1-up RBD structures compared to SD614. There has been a significant improvement in both Active and Closed cases since August, as we most recently re-evaluated here last month. Yet the UK continues to rack up shockingly terrifying total deaths and mortality rates. If Chris Witty knew what he was doing, the UK would not be one of the most dangerous places on the planet for COVID-19 disease severity, caused by lockdown-induced viral load and the NHS clinical response.
There is no shame in admitting you are out of your depth and don’t have the competencies for the task, opting to set aside and hand the task to someone who does know what they are doing.
A Competent Scientist Would Know The Differences.
One would naturally hope that the person in charge is a brilliant scientist. As a minimum one would expect them to be a competent one. We would suggest competencies in virology and biology (ideally molecular or cellular biology and immunobiology).
A competent scientist would know the difference between infectiousness and infectivity. There is a massive difference, especially in any decision made based upon their confusion. Yet Chris confuses them either accidentally because he is non-competent or deliberately because he is a liar.
A competent scientist would know the difference between pathogenesis and phylogenesis. Again, massive difference, especially in any decision made based upon their confusion.
A competent scientist would know the difference between the binding affinity of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein RBD and the binding affinity of SARS-CoV-2 entire spike protein.
A competent scientist would know that SARS-CoV bound in the lower respiratory tract but SARS-CoV-2 principally binds in the upper respiratory tract. While both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 can use cathepsin B or L or transmembrane protease serine 2 (TMPRSS2) to assist with cellular fusion & entry, SARS-COV-2 has a greater affinity to TMPRSS2. We identified in August and in September how this difference made SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 hugely different despite their shared nomenclature and sarbecovirus lineage
With SARS-CoV-2 producing approximately 1,963 variants every day – of which 58.1% are single nucleotides polymorphisms – the obsession with the ‘killer mutation of death’ is irrelevant, especially given it does not cause greater disease severity [Korber et al, 2020] unless you ignore viral load. The confining of people indoors for sustained periods of time in close proximity to others causes viral load to increase, with Volz et al [2020] showing that S-VoC / N501Y infections increase during lockdown.
A competent scientist would refer to the R0 as a ratio (which it is) and not as a rate (which it is not). A ratio compares two numbers of the same unit and a rate compares two numbers of different units.
A competent scientist would follow science fact and not sciency speculation. Stochastic modelling and probability models are predictions. A competent scientist would not base decisions upon the wildly fantastical guesswork of a serial clown with a very good track record in being very wrong. You can read some more of Mystic Neil ‘2+2=510,000’ Ferguson’s comedy sciency predictions here.
A competent scientist would understand the difference between the indicative mood (realis mood- something that is a fact) and the conditional mood (irrealis mood – something that is not a fact). ‘Could is not in any way scientific or mathemathic‘ as we explained in September.
As a result of his refusal to say ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I’m sorry, I got it wrong’, Chris Witty is a liability to the nation.
The Rest Of The World Improves, The UK Worsens – Thank You NHS.
Our most recent evaluation three weeks ago showed that government strategy and government & NHS response were responsible for just under 70,000 deaths. Unnecessary and avoidable deaths had those in charge known what they were doing. That was when the UK total deaths (associated and actual) was 87,295 compared to 111,254 today (@ 0500UTC 06/02/21, source: Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and Worldmeters).
Over the past three weeks, the total number of Active cases has been falling constantly:
yet over the same period the UK mortality rate has risen from 4.94 times the worldwide average mortality rate to 5.52 times the worldwide average mortality rate (Source: Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and Worldmeters, @ 0500UTC 06/02/21).
Everywhere else on the planet the virus continues to attenuate but in the UK the government and NHS continue to cause tens of thousands more deaths. The UK death toll, measured as actual COVID-19 deaths where SARS-CoV-2 was the causative agent, should be approximately 20,150. That’s slightly more than in an average seasonal or winter flu (A(H1N1)/(H3N2)) year and fewer than in an average excess winter deaths year.
Instead 91,100 people – that’s equivalent to the entire population of Darlington or Chesterfield or Nuneaton – have died. Unnecessary and avoidable deaths as a result of government strategy and the government & NHS response, of which Matt Hancock and Chris Witty are in charge.
Over the past three weeks, the UK has risen from the 8th highest mortality rate on the planet to the 3rd highest mortality rate (@ 0500UTC 06/02/21, source: Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and Worldmeters).
Chris Witty and Matt Hancock are the individuals responsible for this genocide. Article 6 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court sets out the definition of genocide, which includes where there is intent to;
kill or cause serious mental harm or deliberately inflict conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of life upon a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.
All those virtue-signalling deathmongers, exhorting in hagiographic terms the utter greatest of Chris Witty will do well to remember the ratio of the Akayesu judgment from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda which said that public incitement of others to commit genocide is a crime.
The Death Secretary wants everyone to believe that SARS-CoV-2 is the most dangerous virus ever in the history of the world. In reality, it is a sarbecovirus / lineage B betacoronavirus, a seasonal irritant that is no more dangerous than seasonal or winter flu A(H1N1)/(H3N2) and is continuing to evolve through phylogenesis toward its common cold-causing embecovirus / lineage A relative HCoV-OC43. Something we first suggested last September.
Commenting on why someone would be so bold as to disagree with a liar and genocidal killer, the Death Secretary said “the idea that someone would do something as silly as that is ridiculous.” No Matt and No Chris, presiding over and being responsible for the unnecessary and avoidable deaths of more than 90,000 of your fellow citizens…now that is ridiculous.
Do not panic. Do not worry. Do not follow government advice.