Grave Letter of Warning to UK Government from a PhD in Applied Mathematics and Statistics

[jesuitsdidit]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7lmagja3mlsidy2/MP Letter.pdf?dl=0

 

 

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Dear Members of Parliament,
I am writing to you to express my grave concerns regarding the 
Government’s policies in respect of coronavirus. I am an airline 
pilot with a major UK operator. As such I am used to processing 
information and analysing it logically and am not prone to 
hysteria. Before I was an airline pilot I qualified with a PhD in 
Applied Mathematics and Statistics. I spent nearly a decade as 
a researcher and lecturer in The Division of Epidemiology and 
Biostatistics at The University of Leeds and have published 
numerous papers in internationally refereed journals on these 
subjects. Much of this letter is based upon my experience in 
this field, in which I am qualified to hold an opinion, and the 
remainder I present as an extremely concerned citizen. The 
analyses I present in the appendices to this letter are either my 
own or from trusted academic sources. 

The most important message to convey is that I strongly believe 
the Government’s response has been, and continues to be, 
disproportionate to the true threat posed by this virus. While this 
was, perhaps, understandable in March when less was known, 
the policies that are still in place, which are both economically 
and societally ruinous, are now much less credible. The 
Government appears to be locked into the single objective of 
dealing with this one virus at the expense of a myriad public 
health issues, many of which are exacerbated by the current 
COVID-centric policy choices. 

The first recorded outbreak of the virus in the spring teaches us 
that the health impact of the virus was, in terms of clinical 
impact, akin to a severe influenza season. Indeed Dr Anthony 
Fauci said in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 
that the “clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more 
akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza”. The data both in the UK 
and worldwide have borne this out. The mortality burden of 
COVID-19 in the UK has been similar to the relatively severe 
2018/19, 1998/1999 and 1999/2000 influenza seasons, and 
significantly lower than the 1968 H3N2 influenza pandemic

[jesuitsdidit]

Subsequent pages to follow

[jesuitsdidit]

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which killed approximately 80,000 people in the UK. These 

outbreaks were as severe, if not more so, than the current 
COVID epidemic and yet the country was not closed down 
risking economic ruin and serious long-term public health 
consequences. 

Appendix A deals with the statistics of the present epidemic 
and its associated mortality burden. It demonstrates that the 
mortality burden is felt substantially by the over 70s and even 
then the majority of those individuals (over 90%) have one or 
more co-morbidities so that recovery from any respiratory 
illness is likely to be compromised. This defines a clear 
vulnerable group who may need to take some extra precautions 
during the epidemic. It is not the function of the state to force 
them to do so however: they are old enough and wise enough 
to make their own decisions if provided with an objective 
assessment of the true risks they face. In this regard the 
Government has completely failed in its duty to its citizens by 
instilling fear rather than providing rational and proportionate 
public health messaging. 

SAGE minutes from March 22nd on ways to increase adherence 
to social distancing contains the following: “[t]he perceived level of 
personal threat needs to be increased among those who are 
complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging”. The proposed 
means of achieving this include advice such as “use media to 
increase sense of personal threat” and “consider use of social 
disapproval for failure to comply”. Since the spring the media been 
keen to maintain the hard-hitting emotive narrative of a deadly 
virus that is dangerous to everyone, which is simply not 
supported the data. Rather than providing simple, effective and 
proportionate public health education the Government and 
media opted for a policy of “psychological warfare” against our 
citizens.
In terms of the wider public health effects, during the lockdown 
there was a 50% reduction in A&E presentations for heart 
attacks according to the British Medical Journal's Open Heart. 
A similar figure applies to strokes. Both of these conditions have

 

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poor outcomes unless treated in a clinical setting. The lack of 

A&E presentations is thus a serious concern because it points 
to significant excess mortality for those conditions. 

Cancer diagnosis and treatments were, and continue to be, 
severely disrupted with Cancer Research UK estimating that on 
average 2,500 cancers were going undiagnosed each week 
during the lockdown. A study conducted by DATA-CAN, the 
Health Care Research Hub (HDR UK) for Cancer, estimates that 
the number of excess cancer deaths attributable to the 
disruption of cancer care could be as many as 35,000. The 
additional mortality burden from just these three conditions is 
likely to be broadly similar to that of COVID-19 and those 
additional deaths are attributable to the Government’s policies 
which have clearly dissuaded, and continue to dissuade, 
contact with the NHS. Recently released SAGE minutes 
estimated that the indirect mortality burden caused by the 
coronavirus measures could be as high as 75,000. 

All of this is without considering the long-term damage done to 
children’s education, widespread mental health issues from 
loneliness and reduced social interactions, failed businesses 
and rapidly-increasing unemployment despite the Treasury’s 
Furlough and Job Retention Schemes, which are merely 
delaying the problem because the markets supporting those 
jobs are collapsing. 

The origin of the first of many U-turns from a policy of “herd 
immunity” to more stringent measures seems to be Imperial 
College’s Report 9 based on the modelling of Neil Fergusson. 
Appendix B deals with some aspects of the credibility of this 
model and its assumptions. Although framed as a “reasonable 
worst case scenario”, it was evident to other eminent scientists 
that the scenario therein was most unlikely to be a credible one. 
Professor Johan Giesecke (former Swedish State 
Epidemiologist and current member of the World Health 
Organisation’s Strategic and Technical Advisory Group for 
Infectious Hazards) was one such doubter as he made clear in a 
media interview with Freddie Sayers on 17th April. Professor

 

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Michael Levitt, a Nobel Prize winner, also predicted that 
Imperial’s modelling would over-predict deaths by at least a 
factor of ten. Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University 
doubted the Imperial model and its high death toll was credible. 
Last month John Ioannidis, Stanford professor and the most 
referenced scientist in the world, released a preprint paper 
demonstrating that lockdowns in Europe had little to no effect 
and that the Imperial modelling is not robust and built on faulty 
assumptions. 

These people are not crackpots and their predictions of a sharp 
rise of cases for a month, followed by a long tail of two or three 
months, have been correct from the outset because they 
predicted SARS CoV-2 would behave like every other 
respiratory disease in the northern hemisphere. This has 
happened irrespective of the severity of lockdown with Sweden 
being the oft-quoted comparator. I would encourage you to 
seek out their various interviews, both video and written, 
because their narrative is different and, importantly, they have 
been correct in their predictions.
From the beginning the Government claimed to be “following the 
science”, giving the impression of a definitive path, when in fact 
the science was far from a settled matter and there were 
alternative viewpoints which should have been considered and 
debated. Aside from the occasional disquiet among members of 
SAGE, there are no signs that the Government seriously sought 
any alternative viewpoints, and understanding why they did not 
will be a key matter for the inevitable Public Inquiry. 

More recently, a letter to the UK Government from a panel of 
experts led by Professors Carl Heneghan, Sunetra Gupta and 
Karol Sikora, and another signed by 66 General Practitioners led 
by Dr Ellie Cannon, highlighted the additional public health 
effects of the Government’s continued COIVD-centric approach, 
including physical and mental health effects. Abroad a similar 
letter from Belgian GPs to their Government and The Great 
Barrington Declaration and Petition are examples demonstrating 
that scientists and doctors with “dissenting views” are, rightly, 

 

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becoming more vocal and insisting on a meaningful scientific 
debate. 

Turning to the matter of a vaccine it should be noted that there 
hasn’t been a successful vaccine for a coronavirus in humans or 
animals. The flu vaccine, for example, has failed to reach 50% 
efficacy in seven of the last ten years. There have been recent 
murmurings of the possibility of compelling, either by mandate 
or “social coercion”, the population to take this vaccine once it 
is available. It is extremely important to be aware that forced or 
coerced vaccination would contravene the Nuremberg Code, 
which the UK was instrumental in creating, protecting any 
person from medical interventions without informed consent. 
There will be many people who are well-informed of the true 
risks of this disease who will exercise their right to deny consent 
for an expedited, essentially experimental, vaccine, the longer-
term health effects of which are by definition unknown. As an 
example the Swine Flu vaccine was found to cause narcolepsy 
in some individuals.
It does seem that the Government’s policy endpoint is presently 
mass-vaccination supplemented by mass-testing until the 
vaccine is available. While I am not implying the pharmaceutical 
industry is behind a conspiracy it is nevertheless an industry 
which has a history of exploiting public health scares for its own 
profits. Following the 2009/2010 H1N1 pandemic the European 
Council launched an investigation into the influence of the 
pharmaceutical industry on the WHO and the global swine flu 
campaign. This was seen as a step towards improving 
transparency of what it called “the Golden Triangle of 
corruption” between the WHO, the pharmaceutical industry and 
academic scientists. The Parliamentary Assembly of the 
European Council adopted Resolution 1749 (2010) calling for 
more transparency and changes to the handling of future 
pandemics. A selection of the salient points, which are instantly 
recognisable and applicable to the present COVID “pandemic”, 
are reproduced in Appendix C. Regrettably little appears to 

 

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have been learnt in the decade since this resolution was 
adopted.
Prior to a potential vaccine the Government appears to be 
relying on mass-testing as a means to identify viral outbreaks; 
the so-called “Operation Moonshot”. This is also a poorly-
thought-out policy with a questionable scientific basis. Firstly 
there are doubts about the diagnostic ability of the PCR 
technique: PCR tests were never intended for diagnosis, and in 
particular for SARS-Cov2 there exists no “gold standard” 
against which to assess their diagnostic capability. Appendix D 
deals with the significant issue of false positives, which is a 
substantial flaw of mass-testing schemes. Briefly, throughout 
the summer the virus prevalence was low according to The 
Office for National Statistics. In these circumstances the testing 
produces mostly false positive results (around 90% of positive 
tests are false positives), even at the apparently-low 0.8% false 
positive rate quoted by the Health Secretary. Belgium, for 
example, terminated its community testing programme in 
September in part due to these issues. 

Through the summer months the COVID mortality rate of 
hospitalised patients fell to the normal background hospital 
mortality rate of around 1.7% and the strong correlation 
between hospitalised cases and deaths, which was present in 
the spring, completely decoupled. This is suggestive of the 
majority of summer positive results being false positives. This is 
bad news for two reasons: first uninfected individuals have been 
labelled as “cases” on the basis of a false positive test and 
second, the high proportion of false positives obscures any real 
increase in the viral prevalence should it occur. Essentially the 
Government was “working in the dark” and basing its summer 
and autumn policies on flawed tests and data. 

Surveillance data from NHS Triage, The ONS population 
sampling campaign and the UCL Zoe App all show a plateau or 
even a reduction in the number of actual symptomatic cases in 
the last fortnight. The official testing data however, still shows a 
significant rise. As one of several examples of data-illiteracy in 

 

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Public Health England, every positive test is reported—even 
repeated positives—but individuals with negative results are 
only reported once even if they test negative multiple times. 
This failure to accurately capture repeated testing is artificially 
inflating the proportion of positive tests. 

You may also recall that PHE were recording deaths of persons 
who tested positive at any time previously. An individual with a 
positive test who made a full recovery, but subsequently died 
months later of an unrelated cause, was considered a COVID 
death. Fortunately this bizarre practice was highlighted and 
stopped, but it seriously calls into question the veracity of the 
Government statistics and official data, which have consistently 
appeared to inflate the magnitude of the COVID issue. These 
are not isolated examples, but are, perhaps, the most well 
known. 

Appendix E deals with the present trajectory of the so-called 
“second wave”. On the basis of the available data it is not 
appropriate to call the trajectory a second wave, and I believe it 
was irresponsible of the Prime Minister to declare to the media 
that we “are in the second wave”. I also believe it was highly 
questionable that the Chief Scientific Advisor presented to the 
public essentially a guess as to case numbers at various time 
points which, although he claimed was “not a prediction”, 
nevertheless has the capacity to reinforce fear in members of 
the public who are less well informed or rely on the Government 
and mainstream media for their information. 

The data are once again misrepresenting the true situation 
because they are reported on the basis of absolute numbers 
rather than per 1,000 tests or a similar standardising measure. 
The increases in tests performed, coupled to the false positive 
issue and incorrect reporting of multiple testing mentioned 
earlier, can account for much of the apparent-rise in “cases”. 
Appendix E shows some of these data presented in a correctly 
standardised format based on work by Professor Norman 
Fenton, Professor of Risk and Probability, at Queen Mary 
University London. 
 

 

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Much of the “second wave theory” is built on the Spanish Flu 
pandemic which was over a century ago. It is also widely 
believed that the apparently-larger second wave of Spanish flu 
was in fact a completely different pathogen and so the 
comparison is probably flawed. The most likely outcome for 
SARS-CoV2 is a seasonal endemic respiratory virus; the same 
as most of the pandemic-causing viruses of the past, including 
the 1968 H3N2 virus, which remains endemic and in circulation 
today.
I have concerns over the way that the Government imposes it’s 
ad-hoc policies through the Public Health Act (1984). This act 
gives Ministers the same powers as Magistrates and allows the 
confinement of infected individuals for the prevention of 
infection or contamination. I, and many other people more 
schooled in the law than me, believe the Government is 
overstepping its authority under this act. Retired Supreme Court 
Justice Lord Jonathan Sumption has been vocal on this issue 
and the Government’s avoidance of scrutiny through the use of 
this act. The act of parliament that does confer the rights to 
take some of the steps the Government has is the Civil 
Contingencies Act, but measures taken under this act are for a 
very limited duration and subject to significant parliamentary 
scrutiny. This is a Government that seems to prefer to avoid 
scrutiny and debate, for example the attempted prorogation of 
parliament in the final act of the Brexit debate. I believe at this 
stage wider scrutiny of all the Government’s policies and 
scientific data would be appropriate. Some progress was made 
in this regard by the recent actions of Sir Graham Brady, but I 
still feel that the concessions made by the Government did not 
go far enough.
Much has been made of the “Swedish model” for handling the 
virus and I have always believed their approach was 
significantly more sensible. Appendix F looks at the Swedish 
epidemic which should teach us, among other things, that 
lockdowns do almost nothing to prevent the spread of disease 
epidemics. Swedish education has been significantly less 

 

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disrupted, the Swedish economy is less impacted and 
importantly their policies have the substantial benefit of being 
sustainable over a longer period of time. Video from Sweden at 
the height of the epidemic showed life continuing largely as 
normal: people were shopping, visiting restaurants and bars and 
were not wearing masks. Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders 
Tegnell realised at an early stage that it might be necessary for 
society to live with this virus, as we have many before, over an 
extended period of time while natural immunity was established. 
Fortunately natural immunity may not be as far away as first 
believed—see Appendix F. This will of course negate the need 
for widespread vaccination outside the most vulnerable and any 
kind of digital tracing or “health passes”. Doubtless the 
pharmaceutical and biotech companies won’t agree with this 
and will lobby for their adoption, but I am certain we have 
progressed to a stage of this epidemic where these measures 
are unnecessary and can be written off as the hideous 
apparatus of a police state: the total antithesis of a civilised and 
free western society. 

I believe this is the most important single issue for our country 
in our lifetime. If you are accepting the Government’s narrative 
at face value I would ask that you use the information in this 
letter and the appendices to consider an alternative view which 
has over recent weeks and months gathered momentum among 
the scientific community and public alike. The Government’s 
ad-hoc policies have been confusing, largely inconsistent and 
have prevented businesses and individuals from forming 
coherent plans. The quarantine of those arriving from abroad, 
for example, is based on a completely arbitrary unscientific 
threshold of 20 “cases” per 100,000 and is destroying the travel 
industry, a vital economic engine, en masse. The Government is 
undeniably “fiddling while Rome burns”.
Holding the British public and British businesses in the current 
state of purgatory is not a viable long-term strategy because it 
inflicts incredible economic and social damage. I am 
determined that the the post-Brexit dream of “Global Britain” 

 

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does not die in this economic and socially-destructive 
nightmare before it begins. As the divisions in Parliament 
become more apparent in the coming days I would ask that you 
use the information I have provided to assist in deciding where 
to place your support. The stakes are extremely high: what 
happens in the next few weeks and months will determine our 
country’s path and prosperity for decades. 

 

Yours faithfully
NAME WITHHELD TO PREVENT EARLY SUICIDE (jdi)

 

 

APPENDIX A. UK MORTALITY SITUATION FROM 
ONS DATA

It is a simple matter to verify which age groups are most 
affected by mortality from COVID. By plotting the UK mortality 
data up to and including the week ending 18th September 
(week 38) reveals that:
• excess deaths are occurring in all age-groups over 45
• A substantial proportion of excess deaths due to COVID and non-
COVID causes are in the over 70s.
Note that over 90% of COVID deaths are to those with a pre-
existing medical condition, most notably heart disease and 
diabetes 
 

 

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Fig. A1. Age distributions of COVID and non-COVID deaths for 
females and males.
Using the Office for National Statistics Deaths registered weekly 
in England and Wales for 2020 to Week 38 (ending September 
18th) gives Fig A2. 

Through the peak of the pandemic mortality was above the five-
year average for 12 weeks, producing an excess mortality 
burden of approximately four weeks of normal-rate mortality. 

Between the week ending 26th June and the week ending 14th 
August mortality had returned to below average levels. The 
heatwave in late July and early August accounted for some 
above average mortality showing in the data throughout the 
month of August as explained in the ONS’s Statistical Bulletin 
for the week ending 14th August 2020. (https://
www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/
birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/
deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/
weekending14august2020). At the beginning of September 
mortality is approximately average, or very slightly above, 
mostly not driven by COVID which accounts for only around 
1.5% of all deaths in England and Wales. 
 

[jesuitsdidit]

In total it is 35 pages

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[sickofallthebollocks]

Wow,?  Phew.....  That is one comprehensive and complete run down of the last 8 months.  Well done and respect Jesuisdidit for posting this! 
I've whizzed through it and it does seem extremely well written and thought out.  Will go back to delve in, in greater detail later.
If and when I need to encapsulate the sheer craziness to someone I will give them a copy of this letter - and memorise as much of it as I can myself.

 

 

 

Edited October 31, 2020 by sickofallthebollocks

[suzredfern]

Excellent post. I ran out of 'likes'. Thank you for posting such a concise explanation that many of are thinking or know.

[HAARPING_On]

Superb post.

 

An accurate and clearly descriptive essay into what is really going on. 

Have downloaded and will be giving this to a few people.