I wrote this on the RCGP website a few days ago. As yet there has been minimal comment – I’m hoping more will come.
I’d be interested to know what anyone reading it on here feels. Do comment so I can see and understand other people’s views. Thanks 🙂
I have also included at the bottom a few links I personally think are well worth a watch / listen to / read. I don’t know what I think to Dr Yeadon’s claim that “the pandemic is over” … but I certainly, having heard the evidence, don’t dismiss it out of hand.
My RCGP post:
I am one of a growing number of GP’s I see and talk to who are far more concerned with ensuring we see and treat our patients fully, well and holistically rather than ensuring a culture of protectionism. I know that there will be a range of opinions as to how GPs need to do this, and obviously we need to stay well and safe ourselves to see and treat others. (The first rule of First Aid I learnt as a Brownie!) However, I am more and more baffled and perturbed that we are not as profession standing up together and calling out some of the utter rubbish that is being peddled. I am aware that others who have spoken up – well known people such as Dr Ellie, Dr Malcolm Kendrick, Prof Carl Henegan, Prof Tom Jefferson, Prof Sunetra Gupta to name a few, have been vilified and dismissed, so I don’t expect much different if / when I speak out, (although it will be less as I am not well known, just an on the ground part-time GP currently working in OOH) but I am also aware that we are only hearing one side of a story in the media and I am very worried about it. We are clinicians – this means we are trained to look at data, interpret it and then crucially to see it in the context of the whole patient, or even the whole community. However we are being presented sometimes misleading data, misnamed facts and to be quite honest some very odd interpretations. Some of this is exacerbated by the remarkably laughable (in less serious situations) pillar 2 Test and Trace. – The definition of “a case” has changed over the 6 months since the pandemic started, and we are now presented frequently with different streams of data that use different definitions. This along with the fact the the false positive and false negative rates of the test are not publicly quantified, the fact that ‘old virus’ can be picked up, and the fact that there is as yet no conclusive data on viral loads needed for transmission, make the situation almost unintelligible.
As GP’s I feel we need to stand together and to stand up to the ever increasing restrictions that are putting the poor and most socially vulnerable at more and more risk. I am fed up with patients not being allowed to have their relatives visit them in hospital (or even go with them to A&E) and I see this as the greatest barrier, in those I treat, to them being willing to go to hospital; I am fed up with the narrative that insists many die alone and not with loved ones present – and with the trauma that brings on both sides; and I am fed up with the narrative that says to struggling families “hugging your grandmother could kill her”. We know from our education, from experience and many years of academics in the field researching it, that loneliness kills; that those who don’t get enough human touch die more easily; and that socio-economics and health are intrinsically linked.
Why are we as a profession (and as a College) not standing together to say “no more inhumanity”, “no more lockdown”, “no more keeping families forcibly apart”?
Here is some of the evidence and reasoned opinions I am looking at. At the bottom is also the link (click the picture) to TimeForRecovery which is a group trying to gainer support for a different way to look at things and is fully in line with my previous posts on the subject.
https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3563
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-ten-worst-covid-decision-making-failures
EcoGreenGP Ponders... 