Johnson’s scaremonger scientists should be struck off
Sat 11:04 am +00:00, 19 Dec 2020 2

NADINE Montgomery has diabetes and is of small build. While pregnant she asked her doctor repeatedly if her baby’s size would be a risk if she had a vaginal delivery, but her questions ‘were not really answered’. Nadine’s baby experienced inadequate oxygen levels and has cerebral palsy as a result. She sued for negligence, arguing that had she known of the increased risk, she would have requested a caesarean section. The Supreme Court of the UK found in her favour in March 2015.
Informed consent to medical interventions has been necessary for many years, so long as a doctor’s decision was supported by a ‘responsible body of clinicians’. But now, thanks to Nadine’s courage, the law entirely reflects the interests of the subject whatever the health professional thinks. Obtaining consent to interventions where there are foreseeable risks that may affect a person’s physical or mental health has become an absolute principle in healthcare law and ethics. There is now no doubt that the most basic ethical requirement on doctors – and other professionals – is to give balanced, factual information explaining the benefits and risks of a proposed course of action. Above all else you must be honest. If the patient declines an intervention, no matter how much you believe it to be in their best interests, you cannot legally or ethically carry it out.
Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief advisers, are both medically qualified. They are surely aware of the importance of informed consent in medical law and ethics, and yet they continue to be complicit in endless breaches of it.
One of their most stunning contraventions of accepted moral standards was their approval of recommendations from behavioural science experts made in a sparsely argued paper written on March 22, 2020.
The document set out options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures. These included intentionally heightening ‘the perceived level of personal threat . . . among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging’, changing the ‘messaging around (sic) the low level of risk to most people’, using coercion ‘to compel key social distancing measures’ and fostering ‘social disapproval’ for failure to comply. The proposals were discussed and agreed the next day by both chief advisers at Sage meeting 18, chaired by Vallance.
In simple language, the Sage behavioural science sub-group (SPI-B) who authored the paper argued that the government should purposely frighten people into changing our behaviour by targeting emotive messages at our human vulnerabilities, should deny the scientific fact that Covid-19 is not a ‘high consequence infectious disease’ (Public Health England’s official position), and should force people to obey the rules, however often they change and however baseless the science which supposedly informs them.
So let’s be quite clear. Deliberately setting out to scare people is not ethical, whatever the end you are trying to achieve. Deliberately exaggerating risks, continually manipulating evidence, coercing people to stop normal human behaviours, using blatant propaganda to turn citizens into guilt-mongering agents of social control is not ethical either.
Ethics is not science. It is contestable. You cannot absolutely prove that a behaviour is ethical or unethical. But it does not follow that ethics can mean anything, and it certainly does not follow that if you are professionally committed to fundamental ethical principles you can advise exactly the opposite. At the very least you must be consistent. However much your peer group convinces itself otherwise, you cannot with any credibility have it both ways.
There is a general way to think of ethics with which almost all scholars in the field would agree. Namely, a decision designed to enhance knowledge and choices is prima facie ethical while a decision to indoctrinate and limit options is not. Full stop.
Just as it was not ethical to decide how Nadine Montgomery should deliver her baby without her involvement and consent, it is not ethical for professionals to disregard completely legally grounded Codes of Ethics. The constant propaganda, positioning by the media, and infantilisation of the population is pointedly unethical. Had citizens been officially informed in the spring of the increased risks to human and economic wellbeing foreseeable because of government policy, we would surely have demanded alternatives.
Cherished standards of truth, honesty, journalism, political debate and plain credibility have been thrown to the winds by supposedly educated people who presumably consider themselves upstanding citizens. Tragically, the perpetrators are not only unaware of their vandalism, they congratulate themselves on it.
Were they to be judged by normal professional criteria, fought for by many thousands of citizens for over half a century, Professors Whitty and Vallance would both be struck off, along with the other one-eyed advisers who have so casually disregarded scientific and ethical standards.






David Mellor ex Barrister MP Minister for Health in 1988 eviscerates Hancock. See Mail on Sunday.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9071311/Public-deserve-break-Matt-Hancock-writes-former-Cabinet-minister-DAVID-MELLOR.html
precipitate
verb
1. cause (an event or situation, typically one that is undesirable) to happen suddenly, unexpectedly, or prematurely:
“‘Follow the science,’ Hancock burbles, like a well-trained parrot. What science, Matt?
There is no such thing as ‘the science’, just a lot of argumentative experts ineffectually ring-mastered by Whitty and Vallance.
They draw up tendentious proposals for Hancock to swallow, or provide him with excuses, like the latest claim that a new strain of the virus is running amok and could lead to untold deaths.”
“Hancock failed to anticipate the arrival of the virus. He failed to stock up on PPE to deal with it, even handing a lot back to the Chinese to help them resolve their problems in Wuhan.
He failed to stop infected people being returned to care homes, thereby precipitating an appalling death toll among the elderly and vulnerable. ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mellor
In January 1988 during an official visit to Israel he protested angrily in front of press and TV cameras to an Israeli army colonel about what he saw as the “excessive” and brutal way troops were treating local Palestinians. Mellor’s furious demand that it be stopped, and later statement to journalists that the treatment was “an affront to civilised values” was broadcast around the world, and caused an international incident for which Mellor refused point blank to apologise. He was later privately reprimanded by Thatcher.
He was briefly Minister for Health in 1988, where he was responsible for health service reforms, before he was made a Privy Councillor in 1990 by Margaret Thatcher, shortly before she resigned as Prime Minister.
Following the Dunblane school shooting in 1996 when Thomas Hamilton shot dead 16 children and their teacher before killing himself, Mellor participated in a backbench revolt against the Government, which subsequently led to the almost complete banning of the owning and possession of handguns.
In a precursor to the “phone-hacking” scandal that would engulf Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World in 2006 and later in 2010, their telephone conversations had been secretly recorded by de Sancha’s landlord, an activity which at the time was entirely legal in England.[13] The Sun, relying on material supplied by publicist Max Clifford, made a number of lurid fictional claims about the relationship that de Sancha later admitted in a newspaper interview were entirely untrue;[14] this was subsequently confirmed by David Mellor in 2011 at the Leveson Inquiry into Press Behaviour.[15][16]
Preciptating the premature death of another is MURDER !
#GRANNYCIDE #HANCOCK