This week has been traumatising. I woke up this morning and turned on the radio, as I always do, and was greeted by wall-to-wall celebrity doctors, NHS leaders, and epidemiologists telling me to step up and take responsibility. Not sounding too traumatising yet? Well, let's dig a little deeper.
I am being asked, as are you, and most importantly, so are our children, to take on, once again, responsibility for protecting the NHS. The NHS, which has the sole responsibility of protecting us, of fixing us when we are broken, when we are at our most vulnerable.
But once again, they are sick; they need us not to be sick, or at least, not to bother them if we are! Our children are being excluded from school to 'protect' their family, the teachers and the NHS.
For goodness' sake. Did we learn nothing in the awful lockdowns and mask-wearing of covid? Did we not just spend £200million on the first part of a lengthy enquiry to learn the lessons of the past? Clearly not, which, to be honest, is not surprising.
The blinkered, ‘scientific approach’ that ignores the human part of human beings is back. Once again, we are sacrificing human beings on the altar of the great deity, the NHS.
I want to scream, I want to cry. As someone who very much worked on the frontline during covid, in both my GP surgery and at A&E, I saw the damage that this kind of rhetoric did and the very limited, if any, benefit to anyone.
In fact, the only beneficiary was the NHS with empty clinics and wards, as people who really needed it stayed home as they were told to, and many, as a consequence of not accessing the lifeline that the NHS should be, died. Sooner than they should.
And as for schools shutting… what a disgrace. Those head teachers, the government ministers who are not stepping in and telling them to get a grip and stay open, should hang their heads in shame.
Closing the schools in covid, which don’t forget we did for longer than any, bar one other country, damaged a whole generation in a way that will affect their life chances and health forever.
We are once again sacrificing human beings on the altar of the NHS. I want to scream — Renee Hoenderkamp | Getty ImagesNotwithstanding this, people are calling for masks again. Today I have heard politicians, NHS bosses, doctors and the puritanical on social media calling for masks. Masks are not a simple risk risk-free intervention.
Those with hearing issues find it hard, if not impossible, to communicate, so they stop. They get lonelier. We can’t read social cues essential in human interaction, we depersonalise people and that the very essential human need, contact and communication, is stifled.
Multiple studies show small but significant drops in blood oxygen and rises in CO2 and increased work of breathing when wearing a mask. Skin issues are common, from acne to dermatitis. People with glasses really struggle.
Children don’t develop in the normal way because they can’t see faces. In Covid, when I did an eight-week baby check, I quickly realised that a baby never smiled when I wore a mask, but as soon as I took it off and smiled, they smiled back. This is how a baby's brain develops. Every smile is a new neural pathway developed. I could go on.
Let’s be sensible; the human body works and develops by catching and fighting infection. If we are naive enough to think we can reach a point in the complex microbiome that we share with viruses and bacteria, where we never catch one, we are truly doomed. An immune system needs training.
It trains at school, which is why most five-year-olds spend the entire winter with a runny nose, cough and fever! Take that away, and we stop their immunity from developing. Are we mad?
Now, to get to the nitty-gritty of this. You cannot stop or eliminate a highly transmissible respiratory virus like flu with masks, isolation and lockdowns.
What all of these highly damaging measures do, each damaging in its own unique way, if anything, is slow the spread and change the timing of infections.
This just pushes a large fraction of infections down the road rather than stopping them. So what is this all for? It's for the NHS. Protect the NHS.
Well, I am sorry, that’s not our job. The NHS is here to protect us, not the reverse. So if it can’t do this, the ‘serious conversation’ that I have heard NHS leaders calling for today is not one about masks, school closures and lockdowns; it should be about the failing of the NHS to protect us at points where it should step up and do so.
It should be about how and when we change it, dismantle it and reassemble so that it can step up when it is most needed instead of asking us to step down.
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