The World Health Organisation (WHO) did not acquit itself very favourably during the Covid-19 pandemic. They believed herd immunity should be achieved only “through vaccination, not by allowing a disease to spread through any segment of the population”. This contradicted established conceptual frameworks demonstrating that natural immunity is the primary route to achieve and maintain endemicity for viruses such as Covid, which do not confer lifelong immunity against infection.
My Wikipedia page (which, as we all know, is impossible to correct) continues to purport that the focused protection strategy, which I and others advocated through the Great Barrington Declaration, is “dangerous, unethical, and lacks a sound scientific basis”, in spite of the mounting evidence of the harms of lockdown and the feasibility of reducing individual risk among the vulnerable.
The WHO has also hired as their chief scientist, an old and trusted friend and colleague – Jeremy Farrar – who did not once hesitate to suggest that I had trumpeted “ideology masquerading as science” for daring to point out that the supposed benefits of lockdowns were dwarfed by their known costs.
And yet, I am unmoved by efforts on part of spokespersons from developed countries to challenge the efforts of the WHO to put in place a “pandemic prevention, preparedness and response accord”. Why? Am I just being insufferably gracious? Am I reluctant, knowing how much good the WHO has achieved in my lifetime, to simply condemn them for putting together a document that attempts to bring some international unity to our pandemic response?
The truth is that a properly executed global agreement would be enormously useful for such eventualities as long as it was based on logical principles. For example, under a coordinated international response, we may well have advised remote islands to close their borders until a vaccine was available to potentially protect their vulnerable population – we could have supported them to mitigate the costs of shutting borders (especially for an economy that is dependent on tourism), and they might have in turn conducted extensive safety and immunogenicity trials to advance our vaccine development efforts. --->READ MORE HERE
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The Covid-19 pandemic and the botched handling of it have been tragic in many different ways. One of the still emerging tragedies has been delays in the diagnoses of and care for other types of medical conditions because people weren’t being seen in clinics and hospitals as regularly as they should have. That’s probably left a lot of people “shoulding” all over themselves as in should’ve, could’ve, would’ve gotten treatment earlier. For example, a study recently published in BJU International estimated that the “pandemic led to 20,000 missed prostate cancer diagnoses in England alone,” in the words of the study authors.
That’s just England, which has a population of around 56 million, about a fifth of the U.S. population. Now “handled it well” wouldn’t be the first words that you may think of when it comes to the U.S., the U.K., and the Covid-19 pandemic. The U.S. has had the most deaths (over 1.18 million) from Covid-19 in the world while the U.K. has had the sixth most (over 233,00). Both countries had leaders claiming that they pandemic was “rounding the corner” or “we can turn the tide” in 2020 when guess what neither happened.
Let’s assume then that the U.S. had a similar rate of missed prostate cancer diagnoses as England did. The 20,000 in England number would mean that potentially well over a 100,000 men in the two countries have been or will be left wondering, “What if?” What if the U.S. and U.K. had better functioning healthcare systems during the pandemic? What if their prostate cancer had been detected one, two, or three years earlier? What if their disease had been detected before it had spread and potentially become less treatable?
To get the 20,000 number, investigators from the University of Surrey (Agnieszka Lemanska), the University of Oxford (Colm Andrews, Louis Fisher, Seb Bacon, Amir Mehrkar, Peter Inglesby, Simon Davy, Ben Goldacre, Brian MacKenna, and Alex J. Walker) and the OpenSAFELY Collaborative conducted analyzes on the OpenSAFELY-TPP dataset of 24 million patients, which comprised about 40% of England’s population. They graphed the monthly rates of prostate cancer incidence, prevalence, and mortality per 100,000 adult men that were reported from January 2015 through July 2023. Then they used statistical methods to extrapolate what the rates from March 2020 and beyond could have been had the Covid-19 pandemic not occurred.
These analyses showed a lot of should’ve, could’ve, would’ves. The year 2020 saw a 4,772 (31%) drop in the reported incidence of prostate cancer while 2021 saw a 3,148 case drop. The patient’s average age at diagnosis moved up too from 71.3 in 2019 to 71.6 in 2020 and 71.8 in 2021. Adding the 4,772 and the 3,148 case numbers gives you about 8,000. Dividing that by 40% leaves you with around 20,000 cases. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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