alicespringstomind

It seems I’m listening to many courageous people who receive no air time on mainstream media and are therefore considered charlatans and/or conspiracists. Their varied roles include advisors to big pharmaceutical companies, medical consultants with national health services, senior pathologists, immunologists, epidemiologists, pharmacologists, sociologists, psychologists, geneticists, mathematicians, researchers and professors at top universities in a range of disciplines. The variation in their specialties represents the wide ranging endeavour that is public health which requires extensive skill sets to make the best possible recommendations for the most benefit to the most people.

What these (current) outliers share is an ability to understand scientific process through critical analysis, combined with a lack of political motivation. The science they speak about is complicated, can be counter-intuitive and does not necessarily make easy sense to those of us without the training. This has contributed to public division and animosity due to difficulties in communicating complex information to a public who are largely informed via sophisticated techniques which can easily convince us of incorrect information. Yet commitment to their scientific training independent of politics means that these people have no reason to want to lie to us. Most of them seem to be experiencing levels of frustration and dismay at the evolving crisis. It feels to many, including myself, as though basic public health has been hijacked by sensationalist journalism and political contrivance.

Public health specialists who hold politically connected roles (such as public servants) do not necessarily intend to lie, or to omit information, but they are often accountable to elected officials and constrained by bureaucratic regulations and limited systems. Not everyone is in a position to speak candidly about what they know. Especially when politicians are determined to display their strength against what is perceived as a horrific threat to the safety of us all. That political strength has grown into a display of grandiose decision making not necessarily connected to evidence based public health decisions, which usually have a nature of calm following systematic procedures and principles.

Clare Craig, the English pathologist I’ve referenced before, stated days ago, in specific reference to the current UK situation, that “PCR is one of the most reliable medical tests when it is done well. So people have a lot of faith in it because … it can be hard to mistake things <using this technique>. But we know from past experience that it can go wrong and there is a phenomenon known as a false positive pseudo-epidemic, which has been written about in the medical literature, where PCR testing particularly, it can happen with other tests too, but particularly with PCR, you can create the illusion of an epidemic. And it’s difficult to prove you are not in one. But I have attended lectures where I have been taught how you prove you are not in one. So I can prove to you that we’re not in one“.

Dr Craig also said in a recent podcast with Alex McCarron, that “I’ve been digging and digging through the data, and there’s enough evidence now. Now what I need to do, is communicate it. And I don’t think I’ve been very good at communicating it because I communicate as a scientist, with numbers and graphs, which isn’t accessible to everybody. I need to concentrate on getting the message out there in a way that everybody can understand. Because my followers are physicists and mathematicians, and that’s not what I want. I need to get the message out to the powerful people“.

She discusses the evidence around Britain’s current pseudo-epidemic from 1h52m into the long scientific meeting recorded at Michael Yeadon, Clare Craig and Reiner Fuellmich discuss Covid-19. Complicated by the fact that she is not receiving air time via mainstream outlets, who have sophisticated communication expertise, this video demonstrates the very real need for communication specialists as a part of any public health team. Dr Craig, along with Dr Yeadon, are sitting on a Zoom call with four Germans in a conference room, messing around with language translations, telephones interrupting, unprepared attempts to share powerpoints via Zoom and other amateur but easily fixed communication issues. This adds to her message being less accessible to most of us. Nevertheless they predict an audience of up to 100,000 and it seems that eventually this will become a well known part of the 2020 pandemic story.

Meanwhile Dr Craig states that “there are reasons to be concerned that even the <seemingly accurate tests> might be giving erroneous results because <modeling is being used and trusted in the testing and quality check process>. There are certain aspects to <the laboratory process> that I’m really uncomfortable with but noone will challenge them on it because it’s a very egotistical, very difficult science. The people like me who understand the false positive epidemic are not in a strong position to say “you need to check this better”. I’ve been saying it anyway, but I’ve been attacked horribly for saying it“.

It’s really a complicated situation of experts struggling to communicate a message to people with different expertise, and to the general public, without the appropriate communication support and skills needed. Political motivations drive a desire to ignore these expert messages which don’t support a narrative which has grown over many months. They have been excluded from the narrative and painted as imposters. Yet ultimately these are the people who, due to their analytical skill, and their courage to speak out against the tide, will provide the solutions to this public health crisis. As soon as they receive the communication support that they urgently need.