Nafeez Ahmed reports on startling testimony that appears to contradict previous Government denials that it is following a discredited COVID-19 policy
A senior official at Public Health England (PHE) has revealed that the UK Government is resigned to the same ‘herd immunity’ strategy outlined by the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’, in startling testimony before a parliamentary inquiry on Wednesday, despite its previous rejection of this strategy.
Speaking before the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Dr Mary Ramsay, Head of Immunisation at Public Health England, said that the UK will need to “allow the disease to circulate in younger people where it’s not causing much harm” while protecting “the people who are really vulnerable”, if the vaccine fails to sufficiently slow or prevent transmission of COVID-19. She also suggested that it may not be feasible to vaccinate the entire UK population, contrary to assurances earlier this week from Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
Dr Ramsay did not refer to the Great Barrington Declaration directly, but clinical epidemiologist Dr Deepti Gurdasani of Queen Mary University described the PHE strategy as “frankly ridiculous,” and “no different from the focused protection strategy outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration, which has been thoroughly debunked as an ideology not grounded in any scientific evidence.”
Dr Ramsay’s comments came after she was asked whether the UK Government planned to vaccinate some 60 to 70% of the UK population, or would settle for certain categories of the population being “asymptomatic” and therefore not needing vaccination.
Dr Ramsay’s comments before the parliamentary committee indicate that the UK Government is anticipating a scenario in which vaccines are not provided to the entire UK population
“I think it’s very likely that the vaccine may have some effect on transmission – it may not be complete. That may allow us to relax in a more gradual way,” she said. But she went on to explain that she saw no guarantee that the UK Government’s vaccination programme would be sufficient to prevent a further cycle of lockdowns:
“I don’t think we’ll be able to say we can definitely stop all of those measures until we know whether the vaccine prevents transmission, and what level of immunity you get in different groups of the population, different age groups, and how long immunity lasts,” Dr Ramsay told the committee. “Because obviously if it protects against transmission only for a few months then clearly we would have to reinstate measures at a later time or go back and boost everyone.”
The False Flu Comparison
As a result of the uncertainties around the immunity granted by the vaccine, she explained, the UK Government may end up shifting to the type of ‘focused protection’ approach advocated by the Koch-backed Great Barrington Declaration – a document drafted by a Ministry of Defence contractor promoting fringe science widely rejected by the global public health scientific community, many of whose ‘thousands’ of scientific signatories are fake.
The Declaration calls on governments to allow COVID-19 to spread while protecting vulnerable population categories. But most public health scientists – as represented by the Jon Snow Memorandum published in The Lancet – reject this as scientifically unjustified. “Uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity and mortality across the whole population,” explains the memo. “Prolonged isolation of large swathes of the population is practically impossible and highly unethical. Empirical evidence from many countries shows that it is not feasible to restrict uncontrolled outbreaks to particular sections of society.”
Yet Dr Ramsay’s comments before the parliamentary committee indicate that the UK Government is anticipating a scenario in which vaccines are not provided to the entire UK population – contradicting repeated claims by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other senior Government officials that the vaccine will offer a game-changing pathway out of stringent lockdowns.
“We may need to accept that if the vaccine doesn’t prevent transmission that we’re going to protect the people who are really vulnerable and are going to die and have serious disease, but we allow the disease to circulate in younger people where it’s not causing much harm,” said Dr Ramsay, who went on to compare COVID-19 to the flu:
“That may be the situation that we are going to, like we are with flu where we accept that a lot of people get flu but we protect those who are most vulnerable. That may be the outcome. I’m hoping it will be a bit better than that.”
Contradicting Assurances
Dr Gurdasani, who co-leads the GeCIP project at the Department of Health and Social Care’s Genomics England, told Byline Times that the “conflation with influenza” has consistently been a problem with the UK re