The Delingpod
In Dr Mike Yeadon’s paper What SAGE has Got Wrong
He says the Covid pandemic is over, there will be no second wave, we have already achieved herd immunity, Sir Patrick Vallance, Britain’s Chief Scientific Adviser, is a liar and the vaccine is a waste of time
Three facts No 10’s experts got wrong: DR MIKE YEADON says claims that the majority of the population is susceptible to Covid, that only 7% are infected so far and virus death rate is 1% are all false
By DR MIKE YEADON FOR THE DAILY MAIL 30 October 2020
Firstly, Sage assumes that the vast majority of the population is vulnerable to infection; second, that only 7 per cent of the population has been infected so far; and third, that the virus causing Covid-19 has a mortality rate of about 1 per cent.
In the absence of further action, Sage concludes that a very high number of deaths will occur.
If these assumptions were based on fact, then I might have some sympathy with their position.
After all, if 93 per cent of the country – as they claim – was still potentially vulnerable to a virus that kills one in 100 people who are infected, I too would want to use any means necessary to suppress infection until a vaccine comes along, no matter the cost.
The reality, though, is rather different.
Firstly, while the Covid-19 virus is new, other coronaviruses are not.
We have experience of SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012, while in the UK there are at least four known strains of coronavirus which cause the common cold.
Many individuals who’ve been infected by other coronaviruses have immunity to closely related ones such as the Covid-19 virus.
Multiple research groups in Europe and the US have shown that around 30 per cent of the population was likely already immune to Covid-19 before the virus arrived – something which Sage continues to ignore.
Sage has similarly failed to accurately revise down its estimated mortality rate for the virus.
Early in the epidemic Sage modelled a mortality rate of around 1 per cent and, from what I understand, they may now be working with a number closer to 0.7, which is still far too high.
After extensive world wide surveys, pre-eminent scientists such as John Ioannidis, professor of epidemiology at Stanford University in California, have concluded that the mortality rate is closer to 0.2 per cent.
That figure means one in 500 people infected die.
When applied to the total number of Covid deaths in the UK (around 45,000), this would imply that approximately 22.5million people have been infected.
That is 33.5 per cent of our population – not Sage’s 7 per cent calculation.
Sage reached its conclusion by assessing the prevalence of Covid-19 antibodies in national blood surveys. Yet we know that not every infected individual produces antibodies.
Indeed, the immune systems of most healthy people bypass the complex and energy-intensive process of making antibodies because the virus can be overcome by other means.
The human immune system has several lines of defence.
These include innate immunity which is comprised of the body’s physical barriers to infection and protective secretions (the skin and its oils, the cough reflex, tears etc); its inflammatory response (to localise and minimise infection and injury), and the production of non-specific cells (phagocytes) that target an invading virus/bacterium.
In addition, the immune system produces antibodies that protect against a specific virus or bacterium (and confer immunity) and T-cells (a type of white blood cell) that are also specific.
It is the T-cells that are crucial in our body’s response to respiratory viruses such as Covid-19.
Studies show that while not all individuals infected by the Covid-19 viruses have antibodies, they do have T-cells that can respond to the virus and therefore have immunity.
I am persuaded of this because, of the 750m people the World Health Organisation says have been infected by the virus to date, almost none have been reinfected.
Yes, there have been a handful of cases but they are anomalies, a tiny number among three quarters of a billion people.
The fact is that people don’t get reinfected. That is how the immune system works and if it didn’t, humanity would not have survived.
So, if some 33.5 per cent of our population have already been infected by the virus this year (and are now immune) – and a further 30 per cent were already immune before we even heard of Covid-19, then once you also factor in that a tenth of the UK population is aged ten or under and therefore largely invulnerable (children are rarely made ill by the virus), that leaves about 26.5 per cent of people susceptible to being infected.
That’s a far cry from Sage’s current prediction of 93 per cent.
