Statistics and data manipulation

Yoon K Loke, Carl Heneghan People living in England have become increasingly concerned in the face of Public Health England’s

The UK government’s plans to carry out up to 10 million covid-19 tests a day by early next year as part of a £100bn expansion of its national testing programme raise many questions Gareth Iacobucci examines the leaked documents It refers to the government’s plan to deliver a mass population testing programme for covid-19 by early 2021, with the aim to test the whole UK population each week. A confidential briefing memo sent to Scotland’s first minister and cabinet secretaries, seen by The BMJ ,1 reveals plans to grow the UK’s testing capacity from the current 350 000 a day to up to 10 million tests a day by early 2021, costing “over £100bn to deliver.” The plans are dependent on a huge upscaling in diagnostic capacity and the use of as yet unvalidated technologies. They envisage a prominent role for the private sector in planning and delivery. The government’s aim is to “utilise the full range of testing approaches and technologies to help reduce the R rate, keep the economy open and enable a return to normal life.​” The Whitehall memo makes it clear that the prime minister views mass testing as the UK’s “only hope for avoiding a second national lockdown before a vaccine, something the country cannot afford.” He would also like this to support the opening up of the economy and allow the population to return to something closer to normality. Many suspect that the desire for positive headlines is also driving this particular agenda and the eye catching numbers behind it. The current government advice is that only people with symptoms should have a covid-19 test. The Moonshot strategy moves way beyond this, stating that the plan is to eventually test the whole population, including people without symptoms “where testing enables economic or other vital …

It has been one of the most enduring Covid conspiracy theories: that the 'gold standard' PCR tests used to diagnose the virus were picking up people who weren't actually infected.

Have Covid stats been inflated by wrong use of PCR tests?

Elizabeth Spencer, Tom Jefferson, Jon Brassey, Carl Heneghan We are constantly following the tally of Covid-19 cases. But one question

Overall, PCR mass testing achieved essentially nothing but hundreds of billions in unnecessary costs and large-scale psychological trauma, especially in children.

“The … crisis we face is unparalleled in modern times,” said the World Health Organization’s assistant director, while its director general proclaimed it “likely the greatest peacetime challenge that the United Nations and its agencies have ever faced.” This was based on a CDC computer model project

We address the question of: ‘how many deaths in England and Wales are due to COVID-19?’ There are two approaches to measuring COVID deaths – ‘COVID associated d

Daniel Howdon, Carl Heneghan The slides leaked to the BBC on estimated COVID-19 deaths, and presented at the government press

What forces Covid into reverse? To many, the obvious answer is lockdown. Cases were surging right up until the start of the three lockdowns, we’re told. It’s often said that all else failed. The Prime Minister said on Tuesday that lockdown, far more than vaccines, explains the fall in hospitalisations, deaths and infections. But how

Throughout the pandemic, the government and its scientific advisers have made constant predictions, projections and illustrations regarding the behaviour of Covid-19. Their figures are never revisited as the Covid narrative unfolds, which means we are not given an idea of the error margin. A look back at the figures issued shows that the track record,

When good science is suppressed by the medical-political complex, people die Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling. Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health.1 Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science. The UK’s pandemic response provides at least four examples of suppression of science or scientists. First, the membership, research, and deliberations of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) were initially secret until a press leak forced transparency.2 The leak revealed inappropriate involvement of government advisers in SAGE, while exposing under-representation from public health, clinical care, women, and ethnic minorities. Indeed, the government was also recently ordered to release a 2016 report on deficiencies in pandemic preparedness, Operation Cygnus, following a verdict from the Information Commissioner’s Office.34 …

Data should be fully and immediately available for public scrutiny In the pages of The BMJ a decade ago, in the middle of a different pandemic, it came to light that governments around the world had spent billions stockpiling antivirals for influenza that had not been shown to reduce the risk of complications, hospital admissions, or death. The majority of trials that underpinned regulatory approval and government stockpiling of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) were sponsored by the manufacturer; most were unpublished, those that were published were ghostwritten by writers paid by the manufacturer, the people listed as principal authors lacked access to the raw data, and academics who requested access to the data for independent analysis were denied.1234 The Tamiflu saga heralded a decade of unprecedented attention to the importance of sharing clinical trial data.56 Public battles for drug company data,78 transparency campaigns with thousands of signatures,910 strengthened journal data sharing requirements,1112 explicit commitments from companies to share data,13 new data access website portals,8 and landmark transparency policies from medicines regulators1415 all promised a new era in data transparency. Progress was made, but clearly not enough. The errors of the last pandemic are being repeated. Memories are short. Today, despite the global rollout of covid-19 vaccines and treatments, the anonymised participant level data underlying the trials for these new products remain inaccessible to doctors, researchers, and the public—and are likely to remain that way for years to come.16 This is morally indefensible for all trials, but especially for those involving major public health interventions. Pfizer’s pivotal covid vaccine trial was funded by the company and designed, run, analysed, and authored by Pfizer employees. The company and the contract research organisations that carried out the trial …

Covid and the crisis of scientific integrity

Covid and the crisis of scientific integrity

After 7 month delay - the same (and worse) systemic problems and multiple flaws

Investigating and exposing corruption in both public and private institutions.

According to an analysis, published this month in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial data, the vaccine makers hid fatality data from regulators in order to qualify for Emergency Use Authorization.

It’s very bad to have LNP in the liver, ovaries, spleen, and more...

For over two years (since the start of the covid vaccine roll-out) we have been reporting on the fact that all the observational studies claiming to show vaccine effectiveness suffered from systematic flaws. The most recent summary was here: But, for the record, and at the risk of repeating ourselves, examples of our earlier articles which provide details and explanations can be found

Aaron Siri was finally able to force the CDC to relinquish their V-safe data, which showed over 10% of recipients suffered significant adverse reactions to vaccination. This article will explain why that is so important. Introduction One of the major challenges with the COVID-19 vaccination has been that it has been impossible to get any clear safety data on it. The two key issues have been:

Cohort Bias: How they make the Pro-Vaccine Covidian Omelette

The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research : Jureidini, Jon, McHenry, Leemon B.: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Nature - It’s time to take trials out of the hands of pharmaceutical makers, argues the latest in a long line of books on corruption and the pharmaceutical industry.

Freedom of Information Act requests are rarely speedy, but when a group of scientists asked the federal government to share the data it relied upon in licensing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, the response went beyond typical bureaucratic foot-dragging.