Pick of the Month June 2024:

A belated short selection

Sentenced to death – the lonely thousands in care home lockdowns

Sally Beck, TCW, 24th June

Sally Beck paints the dismal picture only too well recognised by anyone with a family member in a care home in 2020, one of elderly people deprived of visits by family or friends, visits which give meaning to life. 

In the absence of visitors, there was no one to help with meals or fluid intake, no one to check on level of care provided, no one to provide the will to live. 

Couple that with deliberately discharging patients from hospital back into care homes, blanket DNAR orders across care homes and refusal by hospitals to admit anyone with a DNAR notice in place. 

No wonder Amnesty International got involved – the UK is not usually a target of their reports. 

Infected blood scandal: British medicine’s worst moment

Kamran Abassi, British Medical Journal, 6th June 2024

The BMJ’s Editor-in-Chief reports The six year Langstaff inquiry into the scandal is a 2500 page indictment of doctors, governments, blood services, and researchers. The intervention was overpromoted, including in children, and long term harms were disregarded. If anyone needs an argument for caution and evidence based practice then this is it.” He goes on to say, “The balance of benefits and harms was spectacularly misjudged. The UK was slow to acknowledge the risks of a high risk intervention, slow to respond to the deep concerns of patients and carers, slow to organise a national inquiry, and slow to apologise to the people affected and compensate them. By contrast, the UK was quick to adopt an unproved commercial intervention, quick to roll it out widely, quick to experiment on children, and quick to be swayed by one influential clinician at the heart of the decision to use infected blood products and transfusions.”

Looking beyond the infected blood products to the disaster of pelvic mesh surgery, he describes “ a commercial product quickly adopted by clinicians on the basis of uncertain evidence, contempt towards patient harms, and a slow professional and governmental response to the scandal.” 

He observes that, “the rush to advocate for, adopt, and roll out insufficiently proved interventions is one that doctors, health services, and politicians find hard to resist.”

I’m sure our readers will have no difficulty spotting the glaring omission in his article. Is this a case of ostrich head in sand or of wilful blindness?

We have a judgement (Part 1)

Dr Malcolm Kendrick, 25th June

Good to see that finally two HART members, Malcolm Kendrick and Zoë Harcombe, have won their libel case against the Mail newspaper whose article in 2019 accused them of being ‘statin deniers’ whose misinformation had caused thousands of people to die of heart attacks or strokes because they stopped taking their medication. 

Legal challenges from around the world: 

House Oversight in US – Dr Brad Wenstrup interviewing Dr Anthony Fauci 3rd June

IT HAS BEGUN: Swedish prosecutors INVESTIGATING vaccine death 12th June

Happening now in Australia: Senate hearing on Excess Deaths 13th June

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