How to try and suppress free thinking and dissent with Government policy - Part 3

It is time to look at what charges Mr O’Brien MP and his fellow information warriors levelled in their personal attacks on the people listed as targets on their authoritarian website.

Share Trust the Evidence

Let’s start with Julia Hartley Brewer.

The full page from the now-defunct website is reproduced here for our readers’ delight, but we want to highlight a few bits that may have escaped Mr O’Brien and his information warriors.

	Julia Hartley Brewer 2.38MB ∙ PDF file
Download

The warriors kick off by mentioning Ms Hartley-Brewer’s opposition to “project fear”

They also added Ms Hartley-Brewer’s assertion that cases were not really cases in the vast majority of cases (no pun intended). We do not know whether Ms Hartley-Brewer is/was one of the few humans who understands the meaning of infectiousness and how PCR works (PCR at the time was the number 1 test).

But she was right. Lockups or isolation are practised in infectious diseases to interrupt transmission by allowing the identified active, infectious case to “burn out” (or die, as the case may be). If they become no longer active during isolation, eventually the plague will die off.

As no one was seriously assessing infectivity at the time, we did not know what was going on, other than that lockups had the foreseeable consequences of wrecking lives, the economy, and, more broadly, society.

COVID-19 – The Tipping Point - please note the date of the original post.

Since no one knew what was going on, despite what must rank as the clearest explanation of how to identify infectious individuals (Understanding cycle threshold (Ct) in SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR. A guide for health protection teams by Public Health England in October 2020) and our systematic review which got 200,000 views in the space of a few weeks, talk of lockups was clearly very dangerous nonsense.

Ms Hartley-Brewer clearly saw through the leaky logic: don’t know what is going on, let’s close down any form of life. Do something, anything: a lemming falling off the cliff job.

Donate to keep TTE doing this stuff

As for the “false positives”, there are two aspects that the information warriors missed, as we doubt they even knew what day of the week it was.

First, as often repeated on TTE, a positive PCR is not a sign of active infection.

The SARS-CoV-2 Transmission Riddle - Part 4

Second, as we have shown, up to 40% of people who turned up in hospital for reasons other than SARS-CoV-2 tested positive 5-8 days after admission. So, you want Covid? Get admitted to hospital.

COVID 19 acquired in UK hospitals - what does it all mean? Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson · August 25, 2022 Read full story

Equally, Ms Hartley Brewer was right in questioning the mantra of excess deaths. As we have shown, attribution is very difficult, and at the time in the UK, there were 14 (yes, fourteen) different definitions of death by Covid or with Covid. One of them could be adjudicated by a nursing home administrator.

Smokescreens - Part 7 Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan · January 9, 2024 Read full story

We will never know what happened, but the likelihood of the summing up of isolation, lack of basic hygiene, hospital-acquired infection and suspension of normal services accounted for many excess deaths, as our readers pointed out. Without forgetting the biggest and most cruel of all: the elderly abandoned in abodes of horror, without food, water or human contact.

As for Project Fear. Julia was again on the mark. In testimony to the Covid‑19 Inquiry, Professor Whitty said, “I worried at the beginning, and I still worry, did we get the level of concern right? … Some would say, if anything, we overdid it at the beginning.” Even by late 2021, the Chief Medical Officer’s firm belief (which, again, proved wrong) was that the NHS could face the highest peak yet in COVID admissions. Furthermore, the Government got Project Fear wrong when it was forced to reissue key charts used to justify the second lockdown after the Chief Scientist overstated projected deaths. However, by then the damage had already been done.

So, shall we let Julia off?

This post was written by two old geezers who think the media’s role is to ask questions and the minister’s is to answer them.