Blair is urging world govts to massively increase testing both in scale & frequency everyone & often. This is preposterous. Those with a good knowledge of immunology know with a high degree of certainty that the best way to return towards normality is to do just that. There are..

..very good reasons to believe that the population of U.K. & of many heavily infected countries have arrived at the politically hated state called ‘herd immunity’. This term isn’t political but is decades old & arose from study of infectious diseases in livestock. It’s how..

..mammals, specifically jawed vertebrates, learned to live with the thousands of viruses that infect every living organism on the planet, not just us, but even plants, fungi & bacteria. The plain facts are that our Govt was & still is advised using a fatally flawed model. Now,

..if that model was correct, we would be a horrible trouble. We’re told only 7% have antibodies to the virus & the model assumes we started with 100% susceptibility, because the virus is new. So then the logic is the virus hasn’t gone away & must sooner or later return. This is..

..the basis of all the 2nd Wave fears you hear. But the model IS fatally flawed & I will now prove it. First, I ask you to take the first bit on trust. It’ll be backed up by others science in a moment. I’ve spent my whole professional life in biomedical research. When I see a...

...graph that has particular characteristics, I’m certain to my core that it’s a natural phenomenon, not human made. Look at the daily covid19 deaths vs time curve for UK. That’s a Gompertz type curve & these are typical of natural, biological phenomena, seen time without number,

..in the thousands of scientific papers I’ve read. It’s the shape of my own research too. So since mid-April, I’ve been looking for the underlying natural causes underlying it. Some very good researchers both practical & theoretical have been hard at work during this time. We..

..now know without a shadow of doubt, that 30-50% of our population already had resistance, call it immunity, to this new virus, before it even arrived. How? Well, SARS-COV-2 is new, but coronaviruses are not. There are at least four well characterised family members which are...

...endemic & cause some of the common colds we experience, especially in winter. They all have striking sequence similarity to the new virus. The way our clever immune systems work, we have certain white cells called T-cells whose job it is to memorise a short piece of whatever..

..virus we were infected with so the right types can multiply rapidly & protect you if you get a related infection. This has been shown in dozens of blood samples taken from donors before the new virus arrived. The paper was published in the top journal, Science, this month.

Prior to this, three other excellent groups including the top immunologists in Germany, Sweden & the USA each independently published similar findings. These papers showed this pre-immunity is geographically widespread, but it was only the Science paper that gave us the why & how

So we modify the Govts model and say at worst, 70% might have been susceptible. It’s actually even fewer, because children, especially young children, appear much harder to infect. This, too, has a recent & solidly scientific explanation. To do you harm, viruses need to get...

...inside your cells. To do that, they exploit as ‘grappling hooks’ receptors on the outside of those cells, in the case of the new virus, at blazing speed, scientists determined it is an enzyme called ACE2. It turns out that the levels of ACE2 are highest in adults & much..

..lower in children, the less, the younger they are. That’s a wonderfully lucky break, and goes some way in explaining why they’ve been spared. Anyway, so now it’s at least 35% who are resistant / immune & will neither get ill nor participate in viral transmission. This is so...

...crucial to understanding where we are. The proportion of the population that need to be resistant to an infection, in order to stop it spreading, depends on the proportion who were originally susceptible AND the reproduction number, or R. If 100% truly were susceptible, then.

...we’d need 65% infected for that to happen. That would have resulted in very many deaths than sadly we’ve had. But if, as well are now sure, a much lower % are susceptible, it takes far fewer to catch the virus before there are too few susceptible people left & so increasingly,

...the virus couldn’t find the next person to infect. That is exactly what has happened. The observation that only 7% have antibodies to the virus is NOT the same as saying only 7% have been infected (though our media often & wrongly assumes so). This is because the antibody...

...system is but one of several tools our immunology has to defend us. There have been at least 2 independent papers published showing that roughly, for every one infected person who goes on to develop enough antibodies for us to easily see them, two further people develop those

..magic memory T-cells. So who knows, perhaps 21% of the population have been infected. It’s my view based on a complex calculation, which may be wrong, that roughly 28% had been. But these estimates are at least in the same range, and this is about to be crucial, too. Other...

..epidemiologists, including some who are regarded as world leading, have crunched numerous formulae. They show that, with the extent of prior immunity that we now know about, only 15-25% of the population is completely sufficient to bring the spread of the virus to a shuddering

...halt. There are a couple of final scientific but sad components to this horrible understanding. We saw, early on in the pandemic, the number of daily deaths absolutely soar. We did not know then where it would stop riding. But we do now have a good explanation for the very..

..steep rise & much slower fall. It’s that it’s been shown previously, and we appeared to have forgotten it, that the most easily infected people got infected earliest. Sounds obvious & in a way, it is. We vary hugely, not only in our responses to viruses, but also in the ease...

...or difficulty the virus finds as it tries to invade us. The most susceptible were those already elderly and/or ill, some very ill, and so we saw very high death rates initially. Once that super-susceptible group were consumed by the virus, it began a slower march through...

...everyone else, slowing all the time, as the % susceptible fell & fell towards the herd immunity threshold. That is where we now are & that is why the virus is disappearing from the environment. While there are some ‘cases’ they are the hardest to infect & I think in large...

...measure they are mostly the least vulnerable medically. That’s why deaths have almost ceased, having fallen over 99% from peak. All the numbers monitored carefully fallen like this, too: the numbers being hospitalised, numbers in hospital, number in intensive care, all way..

.. to 99% lower than peak. You might be asking, where is the 2nd peak? The truth is, that generally doesn’t happen. You don’t generally get infected by the exact same virus twice, certainly not close in time. It’d be a poor immune system which let that happen & we’d probably...

...not have made to the 21st century if that’s how it worked. So there’s an expectation of some duration of immunity. It needs studying, but my experience suggests it you’ve memory T-cells, durability can be very long. One small study showed that people had robust T-cell...

...responses to the first SARS & that was 2003! So what now? Well, the tests we’ve used to date have served us well. The PCR test for virus is good enough to confirm infection in someone with symptoms. Is it flu or is it covid19 was easily answered. What it’s very poor at is...

...what is being asked of it now, in mass, community testing. We don’t know exactly what the false positive rate is, but it is widely believed to be greater that the actual, remaining prevalence of the virus! The result of continuing to use this test alone is to generate a...

..high proportion of false positives. Note that recent so-called’spikes’ were never accompanied or followed by people getting ill, going to hospital & dying in elevated numbers. I truly believe most of the positives from mass testing are false ones. I don’t think the test now..

..helps us at all & IMO it should immediately cease. A couple of closing points, which I can’t ignore, even though they’re embarrassing & some are totally tragic and scandalous. First, lockdown. I think there is no solid evidence that it played any role in slowing transmission.

That’s not so terribly surprising because a little later, we realised that the vast bulk of transmission was going on in & around hospitals & care homes. This is no criticism: it’s where ill people are & these viruses are almost impossible to prevent moving between people.

But given that, general lockdown simply couldn’t be a big factor bearing down on the pandemic. Knowing what we know, we don’t need to conceive lots of transmission going on between strangers in the street. Different on the Tube, I shouldn’t wonder, but in general, it is my...

...view that we needn’t have locked down. I’m going to confess at this point that I myself was scared around that time. I’m accepting that had I been anywhere near that big call, I would have voted for the 1st lockdown & possibly the first extension. Beyond there I believe it...

...was abundantly clear we were gaining nothing from it & we were destroying the economy as well as people’s spirit & mental health. I was truly shocked at recent lockdowns: by then it was certain they don’t work & in any case at that point the pandemic was drawing to a close,

...less & less lethally. The other point I’d make is that the evidence that masks, especially cheap face cloths, block transmission is extremely weak. In the one really large, properly randomised study of respiratory virus transmission generally, the evidence was stark: the...

...worst outcomes was in the group using face coverings. I don’t think the evidence of harm is other than weak, either. But they’re not useful. My final blast is I’m afraid at the position of the NHS. I say right now, it’s not the NHS I blame for its state, but those who’ve...

...asked that it remain ‘Covid19 ready’. The only explanation I can think of is that our Govt sincerely believes there’ll be a 2nd wave. I don’t think that at all & no scientist I’ve conversed with thinks so, either. It’s tragic that there is no doubt at all that a large...

...number of people have died avoidable deaths in recent months. I don’t have any means to assess this, but I’ve heard that, if this position isn’t changed in the next four weeks & certainly long before winter, the effect of our responses to this virus could kill as many people..

..as the virus already has. We have good & improving tests, for covid19, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus & more. If we get excess winter deaths, which every country in our latitude does, we will be able to diagnose what they suffered from. The virus can’t sneak up on us.

If it emerges, we will spot it before it spreads. I expect there will be local, small & self limiting mini outbreaks, hopefully without many deaths. But we must see our precious NHS orientated back to its normal shape & excellent services. I salute those brave NHS staff & care..

..home workers who kept on going to work, especially early on, when we knew too little to guarantee their safety. That’s courage, professionalism & humanity right there. Thank you.

So in closing, what are my hopes? I sincerely hope seniors advising HMG discuss all this, not only with me (I’m a retired scientist with no profile & no wish for one) but with some of the authors of the papers i mentioned by haven’t formally referenced here. I’m helping craft a..

..formal Advisory paper which I hope will be considered in the coming v few weeks. We need to move fast, but the thinking must be honestly pressure tested. All I hope for are 3 things: normalise the NHS by end-Sept; halt random mass testing within two weeks; lift the mask...

..mandate (please). In finishing, please note that every single one of these observations & ideas, (most of which belong not to me, but the scientists who provided the scaffold for this climb), are being cognitated & ruminated on by our peers in all heavily infected countries.

I don’t know what the position is outside a handful of European countries. But people in France, Italy, dare I say Sweden, may have differing or convergent views. So some intergovernmental talking is probably in order. Thanks for tolerating this TL/DR.
Mike Yeadon, PhD