Showing posts with label Public Health England. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Public Health England. Show all posts

Wednesday, 29 April 2020

Vital medical equipment is being shipped abroad despite NHS shortages!


Medical Equipment Being Exported Abroad Despite NHS Shortages

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I'm beginning to wonder if that Bunteresque Johnson, and his sidekick, Dom Cummings, aren't exploiting this national emergency to kill off the elderly and the baby-boomer generation in order to cut the social security/pension bill. It may be a kind of “Shock Therapy”, disaster capitalism, approach to cutting public expenditure.


Dominic Cummings is on record as saying  it's "too bad" if the elderly die of the virus, – he later denied saying this - and how else can you explain, the cack-handed way the Government have gone about dealing with this crises?


Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, told us on 23rd January, that Professor Christopher John MacRae Whitty, the Chief Public Health Officer for England, had revised the risk of the UK population getting the coronavirus from "low to very low" and said that the country was well prepared and well equipped to deal with it.


Since then, tens of thousands of people have died of the virus (a thousand in one day), and NHS staff are complaining of a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), and their difficulty in getting tested. There is also a shortage of respiratory equipment.


A week ago, Bill Gardner, of the DailyTelegraph, wrote that millions of pieces of PPE were being shipped from Britain to Europe despite the NHS shortages. He wrote:


Last week five million surgical masks and more than a million respirators were packed onto EU-registered Lorries by one UK wholesaler …and shipped from British warehouses to Germany, Spain, and Italy, despite severe shortages in the UK.


According to Gardner, UK firms had told him that they had “no choice” but to keep selling lifesaving gear abroad because their efforts of help had been repeatedly ignored by the British government.


Milton Pena, who was an orthopaedic surgeon at Tameside Hospital, for 17-years, told me recently that the failure to do widespread testing and not to count coronavirus deaths in the community was 'premeditated', i.e. deliberate government policy. According to MailOnline, No 10 abandoned widespread testing more than a month ago, so the true scale of Britain's outbreak is a mystery. And why is this country still exporting PPE to other countries, when NHS staff, are complaining of a shortage of it, which is putting their lives at risk?


What's also curious is why 15,000 air passengers a day, are still flying into British airports even from high-risk countries, and aren't being screened or quarantined or even observing rules on social-distancing. They just walk onto the streets of Britain, after being given a leaflet, advising them to self-isolate for two weeks, if they feel I'll after landing.


Public Health England have said that screening  is ineffective and the Foreign Office, maintains that there is no evidence that closing borders or travel bans, would have any effect on the spread of infection. Yet, many other countries have done the very opposite. Professor Gabriel Scally, of the Royal Society of Medicine, told the Financial Times:

"The UK is an outlier. It is very hard to understand why it (the British government), persists in having the open border policy. It is most peculiar."


And while this is going on, we're being told to stay at home, keep three metres apart, and risk fines and prosecution, if we infringe lock-down restrictions, much of which is of dubious legality. You couldn't make it up; it's like something out of a comic opera.

Tuesday, 31 March 2020

Would You Adam And Eve It?


by Les May

THOSE of us who had the benefit of a ‘Good Sunday School Education’ are familiar with the story of Adam and Eve.  You remember the one, Adam picks fruit from the forbidden tree, God gets grumpy and banishes the pair of them from the Garden of Eden.

Christians interpret this as ‘mankind’s fall from grace’; I interpret as, ‘when you are in the deep doo-doo look around for someone else to blame’; Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the Serpent.  No one said, ‘you’ve got me bang to rights Gov, I done it’. And that’s the story of mankind in a nutshell!

The latest example of this is Michael Gove blaming China for failing to curb the spread of the SARS-Cov-19 virus which causes the disease Covid19.


So do Gove’s comments stand up to close scrutiny or are they best interpreted as an attempt to deflect from the fact that his government was unprepared for any kind of health crisis?

This is what the World Health Organisation (WHO) had to say in it’s first Situation Report published on 21 January 2020:

On 31 December 2019, the WHO China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. From 31 December 2019 through 3 January 2020, a total of 44 case of patients with pneumonia of unknown etiology were reported to WHO by the national authorities in China. During this reported period, the causal agent was not identified.



On 11 and 12 January 2020, WHO received further detailed information from the National Health Commission China that the outbreak is associated with exposures in one seafood market in Wuhan City.



The Chinese authorities identified a new type of coronavirus, which was isolated on 7 January 2020.


On 12 January 2020, China shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus for countries to use in developing specific diagnostic kits.

From 3 January Thailand and South Korea introduces screening measures for travellers from parts of China. On 9 March The Independent was reporting that travellers from Italy entering the UK from Italy faced “zero checks” for coronavirus at the airport.  At this time 16 million people, a quarter of the population were under ‘lockdown’, there were more than 7000 cases and the death toll was 366.


As I pointed out in my article of 15 March the story from the government is that they are going to do something ‘when they get round to it’.


Gove is trying to fool us into thinking that he can shift the blame for the shambolic situation with regard to personal protective equipment for NHS workers, the lack of testing for infection, the lack of critical care beds and shortage of ventilators, away from the government.  We all know that China initially suppressed news of the seriousness of the disease inside the country, but as we see above cases were reported to the WHO from 31 December 2019 onwards.

It beggars belief that Public Health England and the Chief Medical Officer were not monitoring the Situation Reports from the WHO and passing on to government ministers advice as to how this infection could spread in the UK. The inaction after the first of these on 21 January is down to political decisions taken by this government. 

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