Sat Mar 23, 2024 11:33 pm by globalturbo
Another courageous GP blows the whistle on COVID
Published on February 9, 2022
Written by Joel Smalley
Dr David Cartland MBChB GP BMedSci (Hons) shares his vast medical and scientific experience in his interpretation of events of the last two years and his anecdotal analyses confirm what we have been reporting for a very long time from the big data.
My name is Dr Dave Cartland, and I am 39 and a practicing GP in the UK down in sunny Cornwall. I qualified in 2014 as a GP, and prior to that worked my foundation years in the West Midland’s Foundation programme and GPVTS (Black country).
I qualified from Birmingham Medical school in 2008 as a graduate entry medic, completed a Biomedical science degree in 2004 with a large component of this reading in immunology, virology, microbiology and medical statistics.
I proudly qualified with first class honours and went on to publish work in Angiogenesis as part of the Birmingham angiogenesis research group in 2005. I am a married father of 4 awesome children who are my life and have two faiths… Jesus Christ and Aston Villa FC.
Anyway, enough about me. Why did I become a Dr I hear you cry? I became a doctor to help my patients, to be their advocate, to help them in their biology, psychology and social circumstances.
I will always remember exactly the moment of my graduation when we recited the Hippocratic oath. Part of this powerful oath is a vow. A vow to ‘Primum non nocere’- first do no harm.
I hope my patients would agree that I am a caring, decent GP. I enjoy my job and the role I have to play in patients’ lives and can safely say this vow has formed the basis of my medical career thus far.
To not recognise, notify or publicise concerns of harm would be contrary to mine and my colleagues’ oath taken at qualification. I am writing this as a commentary and as a personal reflective piece, some of it opinion other from anecdotes others statistical and government data, but am equally happy for it to be shared.
When the COVID pandemic hit the UK, the confusion, fear and medical uncertainty was palpable by colleagues and patients alike. I want to say from the outset that I am by no means a covid-denier, I have seen many people debilitated acutely and chronically with this horrific disease.
I gladly rolled up my sleeve despite reservations about the speed of the development and lack of prospective safety data but to ‘do my bit’ in the face of unknown aspect of a pandemic. What sort of person let alone Dr would I be if I didn’t step forward to help ‘protect the vulnerable’ and of course my own health. I took my first Pfizer jab on 13/1/21 in complete good faith of the science and public health underpinning its roll out, trusting as all patients do the integrity and reassurance of the government and its scientific advisors.
On the 7th of January, 6 days prior I lost my best friend to the pandemic.
At this time, only very short-term vaccine safety data was starting to filter through and obviously medium- and long-term safety data for the Jab was absent, but with the clear and present danger of the disease, a clear weight in the balance for taking it. All seemed logical to this point.
Something that struck me from the very beginning was that (thank God) death and seriously unwell patients at least in my capacity as a GP (and am aware that I don’t see that particular tip of the iceberg), for me never hit the heights of what I was expecting or that was being projected from the various modelling data that was being shared at the time.
‘Nightingale hospital-gate’ as I will call it never took off, and mortality wasn’t as high as the fear levels had perhaps suggested which was great news. This wasn’t just an independent observation. Now as previously mentioned ITU’s and A+Es were full of covid-related morbidity and mortality, however as time went on slowly but surely some things started to seem odd and not make sense to my pre-pandemic experience of medical practices…
Firstly, and very early on, death certification changed, and all the safeguarding related to a second ‘part 2’ Doctor verifying events around death to come to agreement about what we call the medical certificate of cause of death (MCCD), was over-ruled very early on.
This was partly understandable on the face of it given the swathes of deaths that were expected some of the ‘paperwork’ would understandably need streamlining. Over time I started to see patients’ death certificates coming through in patients that were generally severely unwell with multiple comorbidities as MCCD 1 (a) COVID-19, the main cause of death felt by the dr or coroner.
When looking into specifics and looking at the notes I was seeing when they had been admitted to hospital, they had clearly ‘entered the building’ having been unwell with other things… cancer related issues, end stage COPD exacerbations or renal failure, broken bones, strokes, heart issues, a barn door case of urosepsis died in resus.
On entry to the mortuary marked down as 1 a) COVID 19. Out of hospital deaths followed suit. All it seemed to take was the mere mention of ‘cough’ by a relative elicited by the Part 1 Dr (a common symptom around the time of anyone’s death) the MCCD would be confirmed-COVID-19! This was happening with alarming regularity in personal experience. Something odd was happening and didn’t sit right!
The next irregularity seemed to be around testing and the early use of statistics. I won’t mention too much detail here but the testing for COVID 19 was using PCR (the results of which have formed the mainstay of covid surveillance and shielding protocols throughout). With some prior knowledge of this from my science background and an early statement from the inventor of PCR Kary Mullis himself stating that this was not a technology purposed for diagnostics of viral infections.
To use such technology, in knowledge of this, to gather ‘cases’ just seemed very unscientific. PCR is used to amplify a small sample of genetic material and to increase its ‘visibility’, in order to genetically sequence that small initial sample with common practical application in things like forensics.
We had technology to isolate the virus, electron microscopy among other things but not a mention. It is commonly accepted that when using PCR, you have to set a cycle number of amplification. The agreed limit to get a good amplification and reducing false positive ‘signal’ is 20-25 depending which data you look at. To go over and above this cycle threshold yields very high percentage of false detection.
Multiple FOI requests have been returned from many of the testing labs stating that 40-45 cycles have been used as standard throughout the pandemic. Consider this in simple terms as a game of Chinese whispers, in the amplification process translation errors commonly occur in the decoding process and an early error will pass through to the next and subsequent cycles.
Just like Chinese whispers the initial message after 45 people may be very different to the original word in the game/PCR sample compared to 25. Again, warning signals. Essentially if you turn the cycle number up high enough everyone will have a positive result whether true or false positive. This again defied basic science but was still used despite these very well-known limitations.
Furthermore, the medical statistics being used were and are still vague such as ‘death within 28 days of a positive covid test’, about as nebulous as you can get for such key figures important in a worldwide pandemic seemed to be being purposefully blurred.
Let me expand here briefly, surely just report people who have a case definition of what the viruses’ physical symptoms were (again ever changing) and a positive test = a case. Someone feverish with cough and short of breath with a covid positive test prior to their passing was of course likely a death FROM COVID-19; It wasn’t seemingly that ‘simple’.
It certainly didn’t seem good medicine to report a person in intensive care for example that has died of a PE secondary to his elective Total hip replacement and passing away from this as COVID 19 due to asymptomatic positive screening, this just didn’t add up!
For medics even now simplified data is hard to find, with guidance ever changing almost weekly and finding straightforward data e.g., how many of those 150,000 recently surpassed deaths were actually FROM …not WITH COVID-19 seem impossible to lay hands on. Surely for such an inherently important statistic, clarity should be paramount particularly in order to counsel our patients and risk assess for ourselves as independent practitioner.
Again, recent FOI reports I am being made aware of state in one example 2 of the 97 reported covid deaths fulfilled the disease definition and positive test criteria among others! Alarming stuff!
Back to personal experience, the time came for Jab 2 with the ‘friendly warning’ that mandate was coming for NHS staff and after careful consideration and using evidence-based approach myself and my wife reluctantly agreed on 26/5/21. I will say that at that time the data wasn’t as black and white as prior to Jab 1 but for the greater good and all that!
Questions on mine and my patients mind were… Why do I need this again so soon… does this not show the jab isn’t working?… jab one made me quite unwell for a number of days with some very strange symptoms what if this happens again?… and what if jab 2 doesn’t stem the tide surely not a third?… and just around that time a few early signals of a wide selection of ‘Jab reactions’ were starting to find their way to my attention through patient contacts… more on this later.
For example: dysuria and frequency plus E. coli in the urine = UTI (see Koch’s postulates), headache/neurology plus cerebral mass = brain cancer, abdominal swelling and baby in-utero… You get the gist.
However, in the case of COVID-19 people were being told something I have never heard before in my career. You can be a ‘case’, a dangerous ‘threat to your gran’ without even having a symptom. A dangerous spreader of the virus without so much as a sneeze. The hallowed ‘asymptomatic carriage’ (AC).
From my very basic virology knowledge and in view of alarming data re false positives as above all was a little confusing. Asymptomatic disease is true in other areas of biology for example bacteria and some protozoa can be asymptomatic. Sorry to freak you out but your hands are probably covered in Staph Aureus (a natural ‘commensal’ bacteria that colonises skin), and likely coliforms (a medical word for bowel organisms)- despite how much hand gel you are using. They are single independently alive unicellular organisms that reproduce asexually.
Viruses on the other hand are a little more complex. By definition, they are obligate intracellular parasites. They can not live very long at all outside of a human cell as they are fully dependent on human cellular machinery (nucleus, ribosomes and various enzymes) that they borrow to allow to reproduce.
A single virus enters the human cell, takes over the genetic machinery, and causes programmed cell death ‘apoptosis’ of the cell. Having ruptured the host cell and bursting with an exponential number of virion’s compared to the initial individual invading virus those new viruses go on to then infect a multitude of neighbouring cells and before you know it innumerable viruses.
Cell damage left in the wake of this and the consequent immune response to fight this vicious attack. Part of what makes you feel unwell from having a virus is the immune system response aside from the effect of cell damage by the virus. Cytokines, inflammation and pyrogens storm the body to gain control before a critical mass of virus can take hold.
As only males of the world know this is particularly present in the seasonal illness known as man-flu, the consequent myalgia, rigors nausea malaise and near-death experience of man-flu is in part due to this.
I will summarise it this way… and apologies for the lecture on virology… if you have a virus particularly a SARS type respiratory tract virus, you KNOW you have a virus whether it’s a sniffle, aches, pain but still not asymptomatic carriage.
Incidentally the way pandemics become endemic is by exactly the mechanism we see being displayed in Omicron data. As previously mentioned, viruses are parasites and have no interest in killing their host. That wouldn’t make much sense from a survival plan perspective.
Viruses learn to become symbiotic with their host. The perfect storm… spread like wildfire/high transmission and low pathogenicity/harm to the host, survival of species. The misuse of this medical ‘phenomenon’ of AC and not acknowledging the fact of what is happening now with Omicron being a much milder disease is in my medical opinion misleading the public.
A virus pandemic will always eventually become endemic, fact. The AC fallacy use has driven fear into our society as we mask up, avoid others, keep our 2 metres and decide not to visit our elderly relatives is implausible. Aside from that, the collateral harm from all the psychological physical and social/economic harm is a ludicrous idea in the face of such a lie.
To ‘LOCK DOWN’ is inconceivable and unprecedented as evidenced by having never been used as a management strategy for pandemics ever in humanity.
Talking of collateral damage and just while we are on the subject of harm from such an erroneous medical ‘fact’ and subsequent policy. When does the harm to patients for such damage become an important denominator?
From fear of seeing the GP, delayed cancer diagnosis, bottle-necking of NHS services/inflation of waiting lists, palpable mental health distress, social issues such as poverty and loneliness the list is endless? Surely to allow all of this as a trade-off, the threat needs to be ‘bubonically’ high, and the risk of treatment low to allow such measures to become acceptable.
It came about after I was asked to consider the booster (in English a third dose in 6 months of something I had twice in the recent past that gave me side effects and something I and probably no other Dr can say they have experienced before in their medical practice. A tri-6 monthly jab with speculation of even more… Flu Jab annually, Hep B jab lifelong, the ten yearly tetanus et al… something didn’t feel right. To take one (again) for the team or not?
The answer to this dilemma was simple. The ‘vaccine’ needed to confer both personal benefits i.e., if I take it my risk of being ill and even death would/should be reduced, likewise in the interest of being a good citizen and medic of the world that it would also reduce my ability to catch and likewise transmit to my relatives and patients (aside from evolving safety data which will discuss later).
This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here: substack.com
https://principia-scientific.com/another-courageous-gp-blows-the-whistle-on-covid/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email
Thanks to: https://principia-scientific.com
Published on February 9, 2022
Written by Joel Smalley
Dr David Cartland MBChB GP BMedSci (Hons) shares his vast medical and scientific experience in his interpretation of events of the last two years and his anecdotal analyses confirm what we have been reporting for a very long time from the big data.
My name is Dr Dave Cartland, and I am 39 and a practicing GP in the UK down in sunny Cornwall. I qualified in 2014 as a GP, and prior to that worked my foundation years in the West Midland’s Foundation programme and GPVTS (Black country).
I qualified from Birmingham Medical school in 2008 as a graduate entry medic, completed a Biomedical science degree in 2004 with a large component of this reading in immunology, virology, microbiology and medical statistics.
I proudly qualified with first class honours and went on to publish work in Angiogenesis as part of the Birmingham angiogenesis research group in 2005. I am a married father of 4 awesome children who are my life and have two faiths… Jesus Christ and Aston Villa FC.
Anyway, enough about me. Why did I become a Dr I hear you cry? I became a doctor to help my patients, to be their advocate, to help them in their biology, psychology and social circumstances.
I will always remember exactly the moment of my graduation when we recited the Hippocratic oath. Part of this powerful oath is a vow. A vow to ‘Primum non nocere’- first do no harm.
I hope my patients would agree that I am a caring, decent GP. I enjoy my job and the role I have to play in patients’ lives and can safely say this vow has formed the basis of my medical career thus far.
To not recognise, notify or publicise concerns of harm would be contrary to mine and my colleagues’ oath taken at qualification. I am writing this as a commentary and as a personal reflective piece, some of it opinion other from anecdotes others statistical and government data, but am equally happy for it to be shared.
When the COVID pandemic hit the UK, the confusion, fear and medical uncertainty was palpable by colleagues and patients alike. I want to say from the outset that I am by no means a covid-denier, I have seen many people debilitated acutely and chronically with this horrific disease.
I gladly rolled up my sleeve despite reservations about the speed of the development and lack of prospective safety data but to ‘do my bit’ in the face of unknown aspect of a pandemic. What sort of person let alone Dr would I be if I didn’t step forward to help ‘protect the vulnerable’ and of course my own health. I took my first Pfizer jab on 13/1/21 in complete good faith of the science and public health underpinning its roll out, trusting as all patients do the integrity and reassurance of the government and its scientific advisors.
On the 7th of January, 6 days prior I lost my best friend to the pandemic.
At this time, only very short-term vaccine safety data was starting to filter through and obviously medium- and long-term safety data for the Jab was absent, but with the clear and present danger of the disease, a clear weight in the balance for taking it. All seemed logical to this point.
Something that struck me from the very beginning was that (thank God) death and seriously unwell patients at least in my capacity as a GP (and am aware that I don’t see that particular tip of the iceberg), for me never hit the heights of what I was expecting or that was being projected from the various modelling data that was being shared at the time.
‘Nightingale hospital-gate’ as I will call it never took off, and mortality wasn’t as high as the fear levels had perhaps suggested which was great news. This wasn’t just an independent observation. Now as previously mentioned ITU’s and A+Es were full of covid-related morbidity and mortality, however as time went on slowly but surely some things started to seem odd and not make sense to my pre-pandemic experience of medical practices…
Firstly, and very early on, death certification changed, and all the safeguarding related to a second ‘part 2’ Doctor verifying events around death to come to agreement about what we call the medical certificate of cause of death (MCCD), was over-ruled very early on.
This was partly understandable on the face of it given the swathes of deaths that were expected some of the ‘paperwork’ would understandably need streamlining. Over time I started to see patients’ death certificates coming through in patients that were generally severely unwell with multiple comorbidities as MCCD 1 (a) COVID-19, the main cause of death felt by the dr or coroner.
When looking into specifics and looking at the notes I was seeing when they had been admitted to hospital, they had clearly ‘entered the building’ having been unwell with other things… cancer related issues, end stage COPD exacerbations or renal failure, broken bones, strokes, heart issues, a barn door case of urosepsis died in resus.
On entry to the mortuary marked down as 1 a) COVID 19. Out of hospital deaths followed suit. All it seemed to take was the mere mention of ‘cough’ by a relative elicited by the Part 1 Dr (a common symptom around the time of anyone’s death) the MCCD would be confirmed-COVID-19! This was happening with alarming regularity in personal experience. Something odd was happening and didn’t sit right!
The next irregularity seemed to be around testing and the early use of statistics. I won’t mention too much detail here but the testing for COVID 19 was using PCR (the results of which have formed the mainstay of covid surveillance and shielding protocols throughout). With some prior knowledge of this from my science background and an early statement from the inventor of PCR Kary Mullis himself stating that this was not a technology purposed for diagnostics of viral infections.
To use such technology, in knowledge of this, to gather ‘cases’ just seemed very unscientific. PCR is used to amplify a small sample of genetic material and to increase its ‘visibility’, in order to genetically sequence that small initial sample with common practical application in things like forensics.
We had technology to isolate the virus, electron microscopy among other things but not a mention. It is commonly accepted that when using PCR, you have to set a cycle number of amplification. The agreed limit to get a good amplification and reducing false positive ‘signal’ is 20-25 depending which data you look at. To go over and above this cycle threshold yields very high percentage of false detection.
Multiple FOI requests have been returned from many of the testing labs stating that 40-45 cycles have been used as standard throughout the pandemic. Consider this in simple terms as a game of Chinese whispers, in the amplification process translation errors commonly occur in the decoding process and an early error will pass through to the next and subsequent cycles.
Just like Chinese whispers the initial message after 45 people may be very different to the original word in the game/PCR sample compared to 25. Again, warning signals. Essentially if you turn the cycle number up high enough everyone will have a positive result whether true or false positive. This again defied basic science but was still used despite these very well-known limitations.
Furthermore, the medical statistics being used were and are still vague such as ‘death within 28 days of a positive covid test’, about as nebulous as you can get for such key figures important in a worldwide pandemic seemed to be being purposefully blurred.
Let me expand here briefly, surely just report people who have a case definition of what the viruses’ physical symptoms were (again ever changing) and a positive test = a case. Someone feverish with cough and short of breath with a covid positive test prior to their passing was of course likely a death FROM COVID-19; It wasn’t seemingly that ‘simple’.
It certainly didn’t seem good medicine to report a person in intensive care for example that has died of a PE secondary to his elective Total hip replacement and passing away from this as COVID 19 due to asymptomatic positive screening, this just didn’t add up!
For medics even now simplified data is hard to find, with guidance ever changing almost weekly and finding straightforward data e.g., how many of those 150,000 recently surpassed deaths were actually FROM …not WITH COVID-19 seem impossible to lay hands on. Surely for such an inherently important statistic, clarity should be paramount particularly in order to counsel our patients and risk assess for ourselves as independent practitioner.
Again, recent FOI reports I am being made aware of state in one example 2 of the 97 reported covid deaths fulfilled the disease definition and positive test criteria among others! Alarming stuff!
Back to personal experience, the time came for Jab 2 with the ‘friendly warning’ that mandate was coming for NHS staff and after careful consideration and using evidence-based approach myself and my wife reluctantly agreed on 26/5/21. I will say that at that time the data wasn’t as black and white as prior to Jab 1 but for the greater good and all that!
Questions on mine and my patients mind were… Why do I need this again so soon… does this not show the jab isn’t working?… jab one made me quite unwell for a number of days with some very strange symptoms what if this happens again?… and what if jab 2 doesn’t stem the tide surely not a third?… and just around that time a few early signals of a wide selection of ‘Jab reactions’ were starting to find their way to my attention through patient contacts… more on this later.
What makes a case:
I briefly touched on this above but wanted to expand. It sounds very basic to say this but to have a medical condition or to be called a ‘case’ one must satisfy a basic criterion… you must have symptoms and the presence/evidence of the disease like a scan or a test.For example: dysuria and frequency plus E. coli in the urine = UTI (see Koch’s postulates), headache/neurology plus cerebral mass = brain cancer, abdominal swelling and baby in-utero… You get the gist.
However, in the case of COVID-19 people were being told something I have never heard before in my career. You can be a ‘case’, a dangerous ‘threat to your gran’ without even having a symptom. A dangerous spreader of the virus without so much as a sneeze. The hallowed ‘asymptomatic carriage’ (AC).
From my very basic virology knowledge and in view of alarming data re false positives as above all was a little confusing. Asymptomatic disease is true in other areas of biology for example bacteria and some protozoa can be asymptomatic. Sorry to freak you out but your hands are probably covered in Staph Aureus (a natural ‘commensal’ bacteria that colonises skin), and likely coliforms (a medical word for bowel organisms)- despite how much hand gel you are using. They are single independently alive unicellular organisms that reproduce asexually.
Viruses on the other hand are a little more complex. By definition, they are obligate intracellular parasites. They can not live very long at all outside of a human cell as they are fully dependent on human cellular machinery (nucleus, ribosomes and various enzymes) that they borrow to allow to reproduce.
A single virus enters the human cell, takes over the genetic machinery, and causes programmed cell death ‘apoptosis’ of the cell. Having ruptured the host cell and bursting with an exponential number of virion’s compared to the initial individual invading virus those new viruses go on to then infect a multitude of neighbouring cells and before you know it innumerable viruses.
Cell damage left in the wake of this and the consequent immune response to fight this vicious attack. Part of what makes you feel unwell from having a virus is the immune system response aside from the effect of cell damage by the virus. Cytokines, inflammation and pyrogens storm the body to gain control before a critical mass of virus can take hold.
As only males of the world know this is particularly present in the seasonal illness known as man-flu, the consequent myalgia, rigors nausea malaise and near-death experience of man-flu is in part due to this.
I will summarise it this way… and apologies for the lecture on virology… if you have a virus particularly a SARS type respiratory tract virus, you KNOW you have a virus whether it’s a sniffle, aches, pain but still not asymptomatic carriage.
Incidentally the way pandemics become endemic is by exactly the mechanism we see being displayed in Omicron data. As previously mentioned, viruses are parasites and have no interest in killing their host. That wouldn’t make much sense from a survival plan perspective.
Viruses learn to become symbiotic with their host. The perfect storm… spread like wildfire/high transmission and low pathogenicity/harm to the host, survival of species. The misuse of this medical ‘phenomenon’ of AC and not acknowledging the fact of what is happening now with Omicron being a much milder disease is in my medical opinion misleading the public.
A virus pandemic will always eventually become endemic, fact. The AC fallacy use has driven fear into our society as we mask up, avoid others, keep our 2 metres and decide not to visit our elderly relatives is implausible. Aside from that, the collateral harm from all the psychological physical and social/economic harm is a ludicrous idea in the face of such a lie.
To ‘LOCK DOWN’ is inconceivable and unprecedented as evidenced by having never been used as a management strategy for pandemics ever in humanity.
Talking of collateral damage and just while we are on the subject of harm from such an erroneous medical ‘fact’ and subsequent policy. When does the harm to patients for such damage become an important denominator?
From fear of seeing the GP, delayed cancer diagnosis, bottle-necking of NHS services/inflation of waiting lists, palpable mental health distress, social issues such as poverty and loneliness the list is endless? Surely to allow all of this as a trade-off, the threat needs to be ‘bubonically’ high, and the risk of treatment low to allow such measures to become acceptable.
Silence is deafening
Over the last few months something has become startlingly apparent in regard to the latest data from Omicron which didn’t seem to correlate with previous waves. I will say that from the outset, hence my discomfort with current policy in particular the Mandate of a medical treatment for staff.It came about after I was asked to consider the booster (in English a third dose in 6 months of something I had twice in the recent past that gave me side effects and something I and probably no other Dr can say they have experienced before in their medical practice. A tri-6 monthly jab with speculation of even more… Flu Jab annually, Hep B jab lifelong, the ten yearly tetanus et al… something didn’t feel right. To take one (again) for the team or not?
The answer to this dilemma was simple. The ‘vaccine’ needed to confer both personal benefits i.e., if I take it my risk of being ill and even death would/should be reduced, likewise in the interest of being a good citizen and medic of the world that it would also reduce my ability to catch and likewise transmit to my relatives and patients (aside from evolving safety data which will discuss later).
This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here: substack.com
https://principia-scientific.com/another-courageous-gp-blows-the-whistle-on-covid/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email
Thanks to: https://principia-scientific.com
