Interviews you might have missed
There are three excellent interviews that you might have missed that we felt were worth sharing.
Firstly, Australian virologist Professor Robert Clancy is interviewed by John Campbell. He talks in a clear and compelling way about regulatory failure regarding the covid vaccines.
Secondly, our own expert in statistics and risk analysis, Professor Norman Fenton is again interviewed by John Campbell. Again the discussion is very accessible to a lay audience. They discuss risk with regard to judging the benefits and risks of a treatment and how these numbers can be manipulated for marketing purposes.
The third interview you may well have seen as it has had 22 million views on one twitter post alone. Cardiologist, Dr Aseem Malhotra, was invited on to the BBC to discuss Chris Whitty’s suggestion that recent excess cardiac deaths could be explained by a reduction in prescriptions for statins. Director of the Centre for Evidence based Medicine in Oxford, Dr Carl Heneghan had already pointed out that there was no reduction in prescriptions for these drugs. He added, “A large meta-analysis of the effects of statin use in primary prevention compared to placebo reported a number-needed-to-treat (NNT) of 138 people with statins for five years to prevent one death, 49 to prevent one cardiovascular disease (CVD) event, and 155 to prevent one stroke.”
Dr Malhotra has campaigned on overuse of statins for many years and is (or was?) on the BBC list of experts on this issue. He explained that the length of time for statins to have an effect on lives lost from cardiac arrest is too long for this to be the explanation. Statistician David Speigelhalter said the reduction in heart healthcare was only making a “negligible” contribution to recent cardiac deaths and calculated that — even if you assume those who were not treated during lockdown never got treatment — this would cause ‘only’ two extra deaths per week. Leaving aside the fact that two additional deaths are two too many, according to UKHSA the second half of 2020 saw an excess of 450 non-covid deaths per week with a mention of cardiovascular disease, half of which mentioned ischaemic heart disease on the death certificate.
Dr Malhotra blind-sided the interviewer by matter of factly explaining that the key question that must be answered about recent cardiac deaths is the role of the covid vaccinations. This resulted in a lot of awkward paper shuffling and then a painful return to the question of statins. It has been hard to have any such concerns aired by mainstream media. It is also astonishing how many people will only pay attention to something when it is presented with the BBC logo on it. With that in mind please share this video as widely as possible.
