Mass Testing and Other Scams

The government, last week, introduced a mass testing scheme, for COVID19, in Liverpool.  The scheme is supposed to offer fast - 20 minute - testing for the city's half million people.  The idea is that, by also testing people who are asymptomatic, it will be able to identify many more people who are carrying the infection, and so be able to trace those they have been in contact with.  But, as with all the other measures introduced in relation to supposedly dealing with COVID, it is really just a load of smoke and mirrors.

First of all, according to BBC, the number of tests done on Friday was 12,000, or about 2,000 per test site.  A further 8 sites were being established, which, if the level of demand remained the same, would mean around 30,000 tests per day being undertaken.  But, 30,000 tests, whilst seeming a lot, is less than 10% of the population of Liverpool, and that assumes that the demand for tests shown on the first day, was maintained, which is probably unlikely.  Assuming that was the case, however, it means that, in a week, 200,000 tests would be done.  Even at this level of mass testing, it would then take three weeks to test the population of Liverpool.

That, however, assumes that people only need to be tested once.  With testing only to see whether people are currently infected that cannot be the case.  The fact that someone is tested at 9.a.m. on a Monday, and shown to be negative, does not mean that by 10 a.m. they don't get infected.  In fact, turning up to public locations with lots of other people, many of whom might have some reason to think they might be infected, is probably the most certain way of ensuring that you do get infected!  On any one day, only 10% - at best - of the city's population are being tested, and that means that the other 90%, might have the virus, and spread it to those who only hours before had been given the all-clear.  That can only spread a false sense of security.

In reality, its necessary to test everyone, at least, once a day to be able to get the kind of level of confidence that you have identified all of those infected.  Even then, that would not be adequate, because, in practice, many people would not get tested, and, because Liverpool is not a closed city - thousands of people move into and out of it each day, each one being a potential carrier of the virus.  Moreover, the indications are that, because of the test being a rapid test, it does not pick up low levels of the virus in infected people, and those that are asymptomatic are known to tend to have such low levels of the virus in their body.  So, the tests may be pointless in themselves, and again give a false sense of security, if they even just fail to pick up infections amongst those tested.

Allyson Pollock, Professor of Public health at Newcastle University, said “searching for symptomless yet infectious people is like searching for needles that appear transiently in haystacks”.  And, noted, “The potential for harmful diversion of resources and public money is vast. Also of concern are the potential vested interests of commercial companies supplying new and as yet inadequately evaluated tests.”

In other words, here we have, again, an example of the medical-industrial complex milking the public purse to the tune of billions, for no discernible real benefit to the public.  Boots are charging £120 for a COVID test, and its unlikely that these tests are being supplied by profit hungry companies for less.  Even if everyone in Liverpool was tested just once, that is a cost of £50 million, let alone the cost of providing the test centres, and staffing them up.  The mass testing in Liverpool is part of the government's proposal for a "moon shot" to test 10 million people per day, nationally.  That would amount to a cost of around £1 billion per day, going straight into the coffers of the drug companies, and much more into the pockets of the medical-industrial complex.  Its more like moonshine than moon shot.

Angela Raffle, a public health consultant in Bristol, quoted in the Guardian, said she had looked carefully at the Liverpool proposals and concluded they were not fit for purpose.

“Experience with screening tells us that if you embark on a screening programme without having carefully evaluated it first, without a proper quality-assured pathway, without certainty of test performance in field settings, without full information for participants, and without the means to ensure that the intervention needed for those with positive results does indeed take place, the result is an expensive mess that does more harm than good,”

The real purpose of this test and trace nonsense is purely as smoke and mirrors to persuade a gullible public that something is being done to deal with the virus, whilst all the time it is ineffective, other than as a means of channelling billions of pounds into the pockets of the medical-industrial complex.  It strings people along for a while longer with the deception that the policies of lockdowns are all required and necessary, in order to provide the breathing space for such testing and tracing to take place, whilst, in the meantime, a vaccine might be developed.  Well, the prospect for a safe vaccine being rolled out, on a widespread basis, is at least 6 months away, and given that it usually takes around 5 years to produce such a vaccine, who is going to want to be one of the guinea pigs for one rushed out in just a year?  Certainly if you are one of those in the vulnerable category - who are really the only ones who would benefit from it, as against everyone else who could safely obtain natural immunity for free, simply as a result of infection - you could be forgiven for being wary about voluntarily exposing yourself to it.

Its all a bit like the role of the medical-industrial complex in persuading mothers to buy bottled milk for their nursing infants, rather than breast-feeding them for free, and, thereby, also more safely, and with all of the benefits of natural feeding.

But, test and trace is not the only case of smoke and mirrors.  The Labour Opposition has been marked by the extent to which it has reduced itself to being merely cheerleaders for Boris Johnson, whether in relation to Brexit or to lockdowns.  Starmer has criticised Johnson for not having wrecked the economy more, by introducing harsher lockdowns sooner.  Of course, the idea that some three-week lockdown was going to achieve what a six month lockdown had failed to achieve was ludicrous.  And, in fact, we don't have to speculate on that.  We can look at the success of where the strategy was implemented, by the Labour government in Wales.

It introduced such a lockdown when Starmer proposed it, and the three week period has now been completed.  Did it work?  Absolutely not.  At the start of the three week lockdown, he number of reported positive infections, in Wales, was around 8,000, whilst at the end of the period, it was more than three times as high at around 26,000.  Rather than reducing the amount of new infections they have risen during the period!  Officials and politicians have tried to pass this off as being merely due to the fact that it takes 2-3 weeks for infections to work their way through.  That is an explanation for why mortality rates or hospitalisation rates do not fall until 2-3 weeks after infection rates have been reduced, but it is no explanation as to why infection rates themselves increase rather than decrease!

Again, ineffectual lockdowns are being sold to a gullible public to pacify them, and get them to accept these restrictions for longer, in the belief that something will turn up, whilst the truth is that neither governments nor oppositions have any credible plan for dealing with the virus.  The only credible plan for dealing with it is that of focused protection set out in the Great Barrington Declaration, but neither governments nor oppositions will admit it, because to do so means admitting that the lockdowns they imposed did not work, have unnecessarily sent the economy into the worst slowdown in 300 years, created astronomical levels of debt, whilst having caused the deaths of tens of thousands of vulnerable people, in care homes, hospitals and elsewhere, who should have been isolated and protected, but who were instead exposed to the virus, in what can only be described as an act of gratuitous recklessness, carelessness and abandon.  It is similar to the MRSA, and other scandals in the NHS several years ago, but on a much, much larger scale.

Yet, the Welsh government, despite the abject failure of its short sharp shock treatment for COVID has lifted it anyway, showing, if any proof were needed, that it was all for show, because if you really believed it could actually work, why would you lift it, at a time when the number of infections is greater than when you started it???  Its all smoke and mirrors.  The only actual effect of the lockdown in Wales has been to crater its already faltering economy even more.  With a crash out Brexit still hanging over the economy like a thunder cloud  over the valleys, the last thing the Welsh economy needed was yet more self-inflicted damage from such lockdowns.  What Welsh Labour has offered its people, just as Starmer would be offering the rest of us, if he had the chance, is not any real solution to COVID, but simply economic catastrophe - from his pro-Brexit stance as much as his lockdown stance - that will devastate the lives and livelihoods of millions of workers for decades to come.