We Need more Joes
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Professor Ian Young is Northern Ireland’s Chief Scientific Officer. He also sits on the UK-wide SAGE committee. On Tuesday he appeared on a local BBC radio programme. It proved to be controversial. I’ll explain the controversy shortly. But it’s worth conveying some context because I believe it’s important that a wider audience knows a little more about Young and why his attendance at SAGE meetings has been patchy.
On Tuesday, Young appeared on the BBC Talkback programme, a lunch-time chat and phone-in format programme that is normally hosted by William Crawley – but on this occasion was hosted by Mark Carruthers. None of these characters will be known much to a UK wide audience. They’re both fixtures on the local BBC.
The Talkback format tends to be confrontational. Typically, two ‘commentators’ will appear to represent two sides of an argument. Then the phone-line is opened-up. All hell is let loose. So, the format is like many others on talk radio stations.
However, this format is set aside when Professor Ian Young appears. The questions are soft-ball. They are set-up to provide an opportunity to allow the learned professor to convey key messages: the importance of the Covid-19 vaccination programme, the need for young people to come forward and be vaccinated, the safety of the vaccines, the success emerging from the vaccination programme. Statements of opinion are allowed to be made unchallenged. They hang in the air as fact because the learned professor has conveyed his learnedness from on-high.
But on Tuesday things went slightly awry. A caller called Joe (we only got his Christian name – only invited guests are identified in full so that the callers can be patronised by Crawley or Carruthers) wanted to ask two questions. Joe’s first question was to ask if the Covid-19 vaccines had been licensed. The professor answered that, yes indeed, they had been licensed by the MHRA. But Joe refined his question. “Have they been licensed under emergency use?” The professor took a while to answer and his answer was vague. Joe pressed him to answer. Carruthers intervened and asked, “I don’t know why it matters.” Joe made clear to Carruthers that it did matter. But Carruthers persisted, “but does it actually, really matter?”
Joe seemed incredulous. So was I. I suspected that even the professor was shifting in his seat, but he’d been let off this one. Carruthers pressed Joe to move on to his second question. Joe asked, “Are they experimental?”
The professor answered with a generic answer – a slippery answer – that many drugs are subject to ongoing trial even when they are being administered. It didn’t sound very convincing. It didn’t seem to be an adequate answer when he and we know that millions of people are being injected with these ‘vaccines’ – could it possibly be the case that they are all subject to a huge experiment? Joe pressed on, incredulous that the Professor was answering with stock answers when he just wanted to know were these vaccines being trialled, were they at trial, when was the trial end-date? And Carruthers interjected again, “we’re not sitting in a court here,” he pointed out. Joe’s final contribution, on-air, before being ejected from the show was that the professor was a “proven liar”. Carruthers made clear, after Joe’s exit stage left, that he had no idea what Joe was referring to.
One reason why Northern Ireland had no representation on the SAGE committee for the first few months of the year is that Professor Ian Young was on leave for health reasons – pending a decision by the high court relating to an attempt on his part to block an investigation by the general medical council into evidence he gave at the original inquest relating to the death of nine-year-old Claire Roberts. Claire Roberts’ death was examined by the Hyponatraemia Inquiry – a public inquiry that was set up to examine the deaths of five children and that reported in 2018. A new inquest into Claire’s death was ordered by the inquiry after the chair of the inquiry said there had been a cover-up to “avoid scrutiny” by the Belfast Health Trust. The inquest found that Claire’s cause of death was an overdose of fluids administered by the hospital. The inquiry report made clear that there had been a cover-up by the Trust to avoid scrutiny. In fact, the report was nothing short of damning. Young’s attempts to block the inquiry by the GMC failed.
After the inquest, Claire’s father said, “We as Claire’s parents have a clear message for the Belfast Trust, the implicated doctors and the chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride – hang your heads in shame.” Dr McBride and Professor Young now lead the charge in terms of the Vaccine roll-out in Northern Ireland.
The question, of course, is why Professor Young and Dr McBride (and other public health ‘experts’ in England, Scotland and Wales) are given a clear-run by the media when it comes to Covid response and the vaccination programme? Perhaps the BBC is acting under severe restraint. The BBC provided very detailed coverage – and broadcast time, even nationally – to the Hyponatraemia Inquiry and the second inquest into Claire’s death. But now we seem to need a member of the public to sneak on to a talk show, providing evasive answers to researchers’ screening questions, to make it on air and ask difficult questions.
And Joe was effective. But other questions need to be asked. How can Professor Young and Dr McBride still be in positions of power given the extent to which their professional reputations been damaged by the Hyponatraemia Inquiry? To what extent can we give any credibility to their expert advice when expert advice was used as a tool to cover-up catastrophic failings on the part of NHS hospitals supposedly treating (but killing) children?
In addition, questions also need to be asked about the independence of advice being given by senior UK public health professionals in relation to Covid-19 vaccines. Professor Young is very keen to stress the importance of the vaccination programme. Since 2008 Professor Young has been a Professor at the Centre for Public Health, Queen’s University Belfast. The centre has been a major recipient of funding from the Wellcome Trust. As has the Wolfson Institute at Queen’s. Wellcome, and the Bill Gates Foundation, are heavily invested into vaccines as the means of ‘escape’ from the ‘pandemic’. However, the only solution that seems to be on offer is pharmacological and fear driven. The loss of freedom and the loss of our civil society seems to be a price worth paying according to the NHS and its public mouthpieces. It’s a narrative that’s never challenged.
When Young and his peers in the other regions claim that the vaccine is resulting in lower hospitalisations they are referring to a vaccine roll-out that started in December last year (targeting the most vulnerable) but resulted in a pretty sharp spike in excess deaths in January 2021 – many of whom were very elderly in care homes – the first to be vaccinated. I’m not claiming causality but it’s an odd coincidence.
However, Young has little hesitation in claiming vaccine causality for the sharp drop in Covid hospitalisations this Summer. He fails to mention that respiratory diseases (and hospitalisation resulting from them) always fall off in Summer. It happens every single year. Meanwhile deaths ‘at home’ with non-Covid conditions have peaked massively – as the NHS waiting lists have reached all-time highs and GPs are still refusing to see patients in-surgery.
There are too many vested interests and boys’ clubs at play in the Covid scandal. Many of our centres of research are essentially owned and funded by big pharma under the guise of Wellcome and Gates. The narrative that a pharma solution is the only solution does not have consensus and must be challenged. The argument that we need to be masked in Northern Ireland while masks have been dumped in England, makes no sense. Many think it’s theatre for the stupid. And many think that vaccine passports are morally repugnant – it’s a valid position, it deserves an airing, despite what Young, Vallance, Johnson, Javid or Gates think.
So we must applaud the Joes of this world. Challenging these narratives is what we must do. This nonsense and these egos have to be challenged, constantly. Because the alternative is too repulsive to contemplate. The parents of Claire Roberts claimed there were “no alarm bells” when they brought Claire to the Royal Victoria Hospital for what they thought was “just a tummy bug”. The experts at the hospital left Claire dead. More experts were called in to cover-up the failings. Remember that in future when you hear medical experts on the radio, telling you what’s best.