20 May 2021 – News this week has focused on the rise in the Indian variant. The proportion of sequenced samples that are from the Indian variant has indeed increased and is now approximately 30% of those sequenced.
News
Is the peer-review system broken?
20 May 2021 – Peer-review is supposed to be the gold standard of research, underpinning credibility and accuracy in academic and scientific findings.
Protesters gather in London
20 May 2021 – Protestors gathered outside BBC offices in Cardiff, Manchester and Broadcasting House in London to express their disgust at the corporation’s reporting of events over the last 14 months.
Medics and scientists urge caution over child vaccination
20 May 2021 – Vaccine rollout to children faces backlash says the Telegraph, reporting on an open letter to the MHRA from over 40 medical professionals including several members of HART.
The ‘weaponisation’ of behavioural psychology
20 May 2021 – Dodsworth has conducted the investigative journalism that her mainstream media counterparts manifestly failed to do.
COVID-19 child vaccination: safety and ethical concerns
20 May 2021 – Recently leaked Government documents suggested that a COVID-19 vaccine rollout in children over 12 years old is already planned for September 2021, and the possibility of children as young as 5 years old being vaccinated in the summer in a worst-case scenario.
Petition to end the mask mandate
13 May 2021 – The petition from HART member Dr Gary Sidley calling for the immediate lifting of the mask mandate has now received over 65,000 signatures.
Vaccine developments
13 May 2021 – While the UK government continues to move towards some sort of vaccine passport (renamed “Covid certification”), this is being ruled out in many places.
The mental health costs of coronavirus restrictions
13 May 2021 – The most effective way to aid recovery would be to lift all coronavirus restrictions and change the fear narrative surrounding those affected.
Welcome to ‘Zero Covid’
13 May 2021 – It is not possible to carry out over 6 million tests a week and return no positive results. Every test has an error rate and will return false positive results at a constant low percentage of tests.
You said we could go on holiday if we got the jab…
13 May 2021 – The continued restrictions on freedom of movement are as baffling as they are outrageous. HART has outlined in briefing papers how flawed the thinking around closed borders and the appearance of variants is, scientifically speaking.
To hug, or not to hug
13 May 2021 – This week, Boris Johnson stated that hugging friends and relatives will be ‘allowed’ as long as people use their common sense. Quite what this ‘common sense’ algorithm might look like is anyone’s guess.
London lockdown protest: two weeks on
13 May 2021 – When huge crowds marched through London on Saturday 24 April, some celebrities and NHS staff were quick to take to Twitter to express their horror and contempt. But here we are, just over two weeks on, and there’s still no sign of any increase in cases.
Natural vs vaccine immunity: which is safer or more protective?
By Dr Gerry Quinn Post-doctoral Researcher in Microbiology and Immunology The long-term implications of COVID-19 vaccines for both safety and long-term protective immunity are currently completely unknown. It would be irresponsible to make premature claims The NHS advert seen below states that:‘It’s much safer for your immune system to learn how to protect itself through […]
6 May 2021
It is a profound blessing that children are barely affected by COVID-19 — we have not seen deaths in previously healthy children in Britain. There have sadly been a very small number of children with serious life-limiting conditions who have died with COVID-19, but paediatricians can already organise vaccination for very high risk children under compassionate grounds, once the risk and benefits have been carefully weighed up. We don’t need to vaccinate healthy children for the sake of vulnerable ones. We also do NOT need to vaccinate healthy children to provide herd immunity for adults.
29 April 2021
Decades of evidence on viral seasonality, acquired immunity, prior immunity are being ignored, with those in charge claiming that the virus will wreak havoc if we go about our normal lives. Most people agree that, on some level, the rules don’t make any sense. And yet still they remain.
Vaccination certificates – impact on the high street
By Professor Marilyn James Professor of Health Economics The road to recovery will be hard, our hospitality and retail sectors do not deserve for this road to be even harder with more bureaucracy. This briefing was published on 28 April 2021 and did not feature in the original COVID-19 Evidence review document. The economic picture […]
22 April 2021
Mortality risk from COVID-19
The constant portrayal of COVID-19 as a threat has caused distortion in people’s perception of their risk of dying from it, if they are unlucky enough to catch it. This data will be an overestimate as it comes from table 1 of this study published in August 2020. The study estimated an overall infection fatality rate in Western Europe to be over 1% and even Professor Neil Ferguson agrees that it is more like 0.8% with WHO estimates now substantially lower than that.
