How Shielding Can Prevent Premature Deaths

When I was choosing my O’level subjects, my school’s science teachers were all pitching me, saying I could find the cure for the common cold if I took their subject. Unfortunately, due to the ridiculous education system, I could not do physics and only took general science, closing the door to future qualification and credibility in the health sector.

After my mother lived through 9 cancers and then died after months of chemotherapy treatment, I begun to wonder about medicine. I didn’t take painkillers and followed stories about medicine from cancer research, legal issues concerning chemotherapy and mentions in the press and on TV to see if there was a pro-pharma bias. People who had concerns tended to be ridiculed and their views dismissed, rather than being given information to answer their fears. This is pretty much the behaviour pattern on social media today. Whenever anyone takes a metaphorical hammer to a pin, I wonder what their ulterior motive is. So I followed the money.

When my dad called me to say he had been diagnosed with Cancer in May 2013, I contracted the most severe cold I had ever had, which continued for 6 weeks. Eventually I used Chinese medicine to ensure I had got my voice back in time for his funeral in July 2013.

I still remember my mother telling me when she had her last Cancer diagnosis before chemo began. She made out it was a relief she didn’t have arthritis. Mum detested and dreaded taking any medication and asked me to call them ‘white rabbits’.

My mother’s father qualified as a doctor in 1931 and worked at Great Ormond Street and Guy’s and ran King’s College Hospital through the second world war. In the 1960s, he had a GP practise on Harley Street and was also an allergy and immunology specialist and had some involvement in the development of penicillin. He believed strongly in holistic medicine and prevention rather than cure. He disapproved of doctors who became specialists for profit, who had a narrow focus instead of treating the whole body and mind.

In 1991, I took Roaccutane for acne and had to visit a specialist on Upper Sloane Street called Dr Peter “Dr Spot” Copeman, who seemed dismissive of any symptoms I described in the check-up each time I collected my prescription. He was earning more than I lived on for a week each time I had to go and see him. I was a little suspicious of his work ethics and persuaded the receptionist to send me the last prescription, which she agreed to. As my acne had all gone before halfway through the prescribed dose I stopped taking the pills less than half way through the prescribed amount. I’m so glad I followed my instincts, not the medical advice.

My skin has been great since and the only last side affect was the change to my hair texture. I wrote about this years ago and a fan of Copeman attacking me for sharing my experience. I still find aggressive strangers lack credibility and come over as biased, serving an agenda. It seems Copeman’s records from Sloane Street were not carefully kept. Copeman’s records about Prince Charles and Princess Diana were discovered in a warehouse in 2016, according to the Sun.

Today, in 2020, our conservative government interferes in the daily lives of responsible, intelligent adults as if we were dysfunctional children. Despite the labour market being full, discrimination being rife, reasonable adjustments not clearly ringfenced for funding to ensure accessibility and diversity, politicians tell people if they can work, whether they have suitable job opportunities available to them or not. If not and the government, not a doctor, decides they can work, they could starve to death. UN poverty affairs expert Philip Alston says the British government are utter hypocrites in their response to COVID-19.

“Governments have shut down entire countries without making even minimal efforts to ensure people can get by,” he said. “Many in poverty live day to day, with no savings or surplus food. And of course, homeless people cannot simply stay home.”

– Philip Alston, UN poverty expert

Can you imagine the type of response we have had to COVID-19 in the time Plague in 1665? Censorship? Pamphleteers deciding what you heard and what you didn’t? All the news being about Charles II? Samuel Pepys diary being banned from publication? I just read that gambling firms will not advertise during the lockdown. If you search gambling firms on Google, you don’t get this news but you get plenty of enticements to gamble. Is that responsible? Is that exploitation of vulnerable people for profit?

Without any of our technology or modern medical science, the plague was quarantined where it spread via contagion in material sent from London to other parts of the country, such as Eyam in the Peak District. This Guardian article looks at what Eyam learned from their 1665 month’s quarantine for their COVID-19 response. Church services and town meetings were held outside, with “social distancing”. Decision making was local and specific to the village’s needs the Duke of Devonshire ensured people had food throughout the crisis.

During the plague in London, the National Archives describes what went on:

Watchmen locked and kept guard over infected houses. Parish officials provided food. Rich people fled London and Charles II moved to Hampton Court then Oxford, where court cases and parliament were held.

The Black Death was in 1348 – when tree ring records show it may have coincided with an environmental catastrophe – and The Great Plague More recently, a physician brought an end to small pox with the cow pox vaccination (hence the Latin for cow in its name), The Spanish Flu in 1918, killed 50 million people, then The Pea Soup Fog of December 1953 killed thousands and modern day pollution kills vulnerable people. If people are vulnerable, we ought to know how to shield them anyway, and COVID-19 has only just brought this to light. Ought we to quarantine healthy people or provide parameters for social distancing? Will 2020 be remembered as the year that humanity hid from a vicious cold. Why isn’t government decentralised to let different counties set the boundaries for their local populations? One size fits all doesn’t work at all, as vaccines show.

The point of this blog is to ask questions and talk about things that are being silenced by censorship. Social media is working with government and the media to block out messages that do not conform to the official government message. This is questionable and brings out the worst in many people, acting as little agents carrying out the will of the establishment even if it is directly opposed to their own best interests. There is a community support group for my area on Facebook. Can I find it with an exact word search? Can I fuck? All I get is official web pages about COVID-19. What about the people who rely on this page to get food? What about them?

If you do not think censorship is sinister, see the Great Hack on Netflix. This is the story of when Cambridge Analytica worked with Facebook to carry out nefarious campaigns to manipulate elections in favour of their paying clients through mass population manipulation behind closed doors. We need transparency in the UK. We need to eradicate conflicts of interest in matters of public health and ensure there are no industry biases influencing health targets such as smoking cessation, nutrition and, very importantly, disease prevention. We do not need people to call themselves vice president of integrity, we need integrity. Transparent, verified, up to date integrity.

I am a journalist, have been a member of the NUJ, have had many articles published and yet I have not earned much or tried to earn more because I do not sell out on my values for a quick bob. I’m not at all resentful as I can earn money doing editorial publicity, which I enjoy. I have turned down paid articles and jobs because I do not want to write biased articles for politically leaning newspapers. I have sold advertising and written advertorial copy, but always advised advertisers to use credibility to deliver their message over PR puff.

To me, marketing does not have to be bullshit. When I write press releases for artists I get them published as I write them exactly as a newspaper would report them, objectively, understated, leaving their audiences to make up their own minds. To me, how we talk to our audiences matters. If we hide information or silence some points of view, we grow suspicion and distrust.

I want to seek the truth, whatever it is. Bias usually gives itself away with cognitive dissonance. The evidence and the conclusions drawn from it do not correlate. There is a very well paid spanner in the works.

Returning to the vaccine, this is the first point I think modern medicine may have forgotten. Cow Pox was mild and harmless.

In 1796 English Physician, Dr Edward Jenner used the cowpox virus to inoculate a patient to prevent them from contracting smallpox.

Can we not surmise from this that vaccinations require a harmless infection from the same family of viruses to create immunity from more serious ones?

From the DermNet NZ website: “Cowpox is a viral skin infection caused by the cowpox or catpox virus. This is a member of the family, which includes the variola virus that causes smallpox. Cowpox is similar to but much milder than the highly contagious and sometimes deadly smallpox disease”.

The second point we are missing is how many vulnerable, elderly or immuno-deficient people die from colds or flu? Does this sound familiar?

The common cold is normally a mild illness that resolves without treatment in a few days. And because of its mild nature, most cases are self-diagnosed. However, infection with rhinovirus or one of the other viruses responsible for common cold symptoms can be serious in some people. Complications from a cold can cause serious illnesses and, yes, even death – particularly in people who have a weak immune system. – The Conversation

Firstly, they say healthy adults have 2-4 colds a year and children have 2-9. Has anyone even asked how many people had a cold before the COVID-19 outbreak and hasn’t been infected? According to this Vox article, there are 4 strains of coronavirus that affect people as a cold. Why aren’t we using the very good C-19 app by Tim Spector, his team and King’s College London to trace, track, contain and isolate COVID-19 so we can go back to normal. The way this app has been ignored (2 posts on the whole of Twitter. TWO!) and the NHS is working on a more sinister one that uses Bluetooth to tell users how close they are to someone else instead of simply asking everyone to report on their own health and they can report for others too. SImple? Yes. Why is it being ignored?

Has Sweden benefitted from clear leadership, direction and treating tis nation like responsible adults? The BBC discusses the Swedish approach.

Google searches do not reveal even one discussion as to whether a mild cold coronavirus could be used to inoculate people against COVID-19 or SARS-COV2. No one’s even talking about it. Has this even been explored? Are approaches ignored because they aren’t profitable enough. How would a vaccine work with people either already recovered or not infected? Flu jabs seem to have only made strains of flu more virulent, and yet I have not had it since 1982. Once in half a century. Once! There is a big conflict of interest here and the great thinkers are being censored, silenced and ignored, like Dr Eoghan Colgan. This article shows how his ads to help as an NHS doctor were disallowed by Twitter and Facebook.

The blame for anti-biotic resistance has been placed on the consumer. Since when did patients tell doctors what tot do? How can a patient be blamed for taking anti-biotics for a sore throat? Surely over-prescription is the responsibility of health providers getting their prescription pads out too quickly?

Previously, when I have had a cold, I have not been allowed time off work and had to go into the office. I duly spread my cold around my colleagues and wondered what advantage was gained from sales made by snuffly, sneezing, coughing and croaky people. What impression does that make on customers? Yet food poisoning, which is not infectious, is deemed a free reign of time off. Well it was at this particular company.

Perhaps what we can take from this response to COVID-19 is how:

To save our loved ones from premature death from colds or flu infections?
To control the spread of viruses or flu so they do not prematurely kill vulnerable people?
To reduce dependence on healthcare providers?
Flu actually works and how long we are immune after recovery?
We gain immunity from a cold virus against more serious infections?
To keep our immunity up through better education about diet and nutrition
To use DNA testing to find out about our own genetic deficiencies
We can choose what we eat and complete our nutrition with dietary supplements.
Healthcare can focus on prevention rather than cure
We can use our healthcare system to pay it forward with proactive self-care.

Various articles about searches for vaccinations against the common cold also seem to miss the point. Firstly, certain types of vaccinations cannot be used on immuno-deficient people. The idea of a vaccine with a small enough dose of the infection that it will not make the person is ill is, surely, the small particles of COVID-19 left on surfaces, which are too small to work as a contagion in the way that sneeze or cough particles might. These fragments of virus could hold a clue to immunity as they are too small to infect any but the very vulnerable.

Viral load also ought to tell us something. Have you noticed how many people died in 2016 and 2019 that you knew or had heard of? Will we now, retrospectively, be more aware of harmless viruses passing around that kill people when their immune systems are down? Like when my father said he had cancer, my immune system crashed and allowed in the most severe cold I had ever had. I have had flu once in my life of 49 years. I wonder how many people contracted flu after a visit to the Planetarium and Madame Tussauds in 1982 after I fell asleep at every juncture.

The censorship of discussion about COVID-19 and the secrecy of the SAGE advising our government are akin to a dictatorship. This is not the governance our sophisticated and educated modern people deserve. There is far too much red tape for ordinary people, while corporations are deregulated and loopholes make shell companies and offshores unaccountable to their customers as well as avoiding tax.

We must have transparency and accountability in Westminster. Government has never caused social progress. That has also come from ordinary or extraordinary people, collective effort, campaigns and exposure to discussion and scrutiny.

The COVID-19 response is devastating many people’s lives and that, alone, means that open discussion and discourse is vital to unite people to fight it successfully.

Overall, media discussions about symptoms also miss the point. Symptoms such as fever, runny nose, cough and sneezes are our bodies mobilising their defences to fight a virus. They are not discussed in that context.

As well as a vaccine against the cold sounding like purely profit motivated, do people know the difference between a flu and cold? COVID-19 has symptoms similar to flu: muscle aches and tiredness due to blood extracting protein to fight the virus. Again, an immuno-response. Colds cannot be cured, treated or vaccinated against as our bodies know more than we do. A lot more. Our efforts to make more money hide a lot of truth from us because barriers are put up to stop us from seeing the whole picture. This has been characteristic of our politicised response to COVID-19.