Dr Mike Yeadon is the former CSO and VP, Allergy and Respiratory Research Head with Pfizer Global R&D and co-Founder of Ziarco Pharma Ltd.
Lies, Damned Lies and Health Statistics – The Deadly Danger of False Positives
Excerpts:
“While paying close attention to data, we all initially focused on the sad matter of deaths. I found it remarkable that, in discussing the COVID-19 related deaths, most people I spoke to had no idea of large numbers. Asked approximately how many people a year die in the UK in the ordinary course of events, each a personal tragedy, They usually didn’t know. I had to inform them it is around 620,000, sometimes less if we had a mild winter, sometimes quite a bit higher if we had a severe ’flu season. I mention this number because we know that around 42,000 people have died with or of COVID-19.”…
“We now know that lockdown made no difference at all to the spread of the virus.”…
“Part of the ‘project fear’ that is too obvious, involving second waves, has been the daily count of cases. That all said, Government decided to call a person a ‘case’ if their swab sample was positive for viral RNA, which is what is measured in PCR. A person’s sample can be positive if they have the virus, and so it should. They can also be positive if they’ve had the virus some weeks or months ago and recovered. It’s faintly possible that high loads of related, but different coronaviruses, which can cause some of the common colds we get, might also react in the PCR test, though it’s unclear to me if it does.”…
“Because of the high false positive rate and the low prevalence, almost every positive test, a so-called case, identified by Pillar 2 [used in community testing] since May of this year has been a FALSE POSITIVE. Not just a few percent. Not a quarter or even a half of the positives are FALSE, but around 90% of them.”…
“The likelihood of an apparently positive case being a false positive is between 89-94%, or near-certainty.”…
“Pillar 2 testing has been ongoing since May but it’s only in recent weeks that it has reached several hundreds of thousands of tests per day. The effect of the day by day climb in the number of people that are being described as ‘cases’ cannot be overstated. I know it is inducing fear, anxiety and concern for the possibility of new and unjustified restrictions, including lockdowns.”…
“You will be very familiar with the cases plot which is shown on most TV broadcasts at the moment. It purports to show the numbers of cases which rose then fell in the spring, and the recent rise in cases. This graph is always accompanied by the headline that “so many thousands of new cases were detected in the last 24 hours.
You should know that there are two major deceptions, in that picture, which combined are very likely both to mislead and to induce anxiety. Its ubiquity indicates that it is a deliberate choice.”…
“There are very serious consequences arising from grotesque over-estimation of so-called cases in Pillar 2 community testing, which I believe was put in place knowingly.”…
“I have explained how a hopelessly-performing diagnostic test has been, and continues to be used, not for diagnosis of disease but, it seems, solely to create fear.”…
“This misuse of power must cease. All the above costs are on the ledger, too, when weighing up the residual risks to society from COVID-19 and the appropriate actions to take, if any. Whatever else happens, the test used in Pillar 2 must be immediately withdrawn as it provides no useful information. In the absence of vastly inflated case numbers arising from this test, the pandemic would be seen and felt to be almost over.”
Stop-weather-war 