It’s hard to recall that we *thought this. SARS-COV-2 was new, but structurally it’s akin to other, endemic CoVs (229E, NL63, OC43, HKU1). Yet it was decided that:
“Because this virus is new, *no-one has any immunity to it”.
It was in this basis that Ferguson’s Imperial model..

..assumed 100% initial susceptibility. That meant, if the reported lethality from Wuhan was taken at face value, we should expect 500,000 deaths if not mitigated. Obviously, a large number of clinical immunologists thought otherwise, because one of the first expts reported...

...about this new virus was just how many people had circulating T-cells which mount vigorous responses to a virus they’d never seen. In less than one month, which I’d light speed in anything involving human subjects, Drosten’s lab in Berlin reported unequivocal & strong T-cell..

..responses to SARS-COV-2 in vitro in around 30% of healthy volunteers. This has been confirmed & extended across top labs in four countries including the Karolinska in Sweden & USA (U North Carolina/La Jolla, NYC) who showed up to 50% had prior immunity. By July, we knew..

..exactly why this was. Le Bert’s lab in Singapore demonstrated that multiple, short pieces of the viruses which cause a third of common colds were overlapping, similar or identical to analogous regions in the new virus. Those people hadn’t met CoV-2, but they knew his little..

..brother & knew how to defeat him easily. It might be me, but I don’t recall a very large revision to Imperial’s chilling forecasts within a month of lockdown? I’d read the literature so knew it wouldn’t be 500,000, 250,000 or 20,000. But other than Ferguson claiming limply...

...that, now we’d locked down, it’d be much less. Thing is, it was obvious to many of us that lockdown was absolutely NOT the cause of the pandemic turning & reducing fast, because that all happened before lockdown. There are several papers showing this in painstaking detail.

If I could see that peak daily deaths occurred on a date far too close to lockdown for that intervention possibly to have made a blind bit of difference to transmission, surely so could Ferguson? If not, that’s an appalling bad gap in the team’s literature surveillance, and if...

...he did know, what possible motive could he have had in not communicating these exciting insights? And then not revising down his model?
There were already two massive Cluedo hints by then. Far fewer than everyone could catch it & within a few weeks, R crashed below 1, where..

..it’s substantially remanded ever since. Shortly after that, independent modellers & epidemiologists like Profs Gupta & Gomez showed how, because of the background resistance to ‘CoV-2 in the population, after a far smaller number of people than Prof Ferguson assumed,

..transmission was anticipated to grind to a halt. It’s hard to estimate how many people have been infected in U.K., but using two methods (IFR estimates & deaths; seroprevalence admittedly coupled with some reasonable but unevidenced assumptions) it’s consistent with...

...those epidemiological papers from Oxford, and not by coincidence, we are all but at the end of the pandemic. I have no idea why we’re running around, mass screening the well, using an assay with an intrinsic (built in) false positive rate which rare is higher than the...

...measured prevalence of the virus. The virus is now at low levels. We don’t need & should not use in this way, as assay that fails just to identify the infected, but picks up 10x or 20x as many completely well people who aren’t carrying live, infectious virus. We’re smashing...

...up peoples lives, further wrecking the economy, each time we let known-bad data drive bad-superfluous acts. We could just STOP. If folk start to get ill, we’ll know it faster than through testing, by monitoring NHS111, visits to A&E etc, and we can then respond well and...

...appropriately. I hereby courteously invite Prof Ferguson & Matt Hancock to debate this backdrop. There are very many leading scientists who know quite well that this phase of the pandemic in Europe is long done. I, like them, will be the first to say that no one can be 100%...

...sure about all this, but the disappearing illness, hospitalisation, ICU occupancy & deaths are all 99% down from their peaks. So let’s work hard to normalise the NHS, from primary care (GPs), through urgent referrals for cancer & other life threatening diseases, as well as...

...on elective surgery. Some areas are improving fast, but electives are still 50% down on normal, as are urgent referrals. This isn’t a theoretical debate, here. So long as HMG persists in dancing to the Imperial model’s turn, they’ll run us right into winter with the NHS so...

...well protected that many of it’s needy patients cannot get in. No question, as long as this persists, our relatives & friends are dying avoidable deaths & remaining in treatable suffering, all the while waiting lists rise.
Be brave, Neil, be brave, Matt & Boris. Do the...

...right thing. And for the love of God, do it now.
Ps: all that I posted here & more is available as a position paper, replete with literature references. You should at absolute minimum, ask SAGE to meet with me & my two coauthors.