Call yourself a scientist, Vallance?

It is a tragedy that Britain is governed by such a buffoon. However, I expect nothing else from a man whose arrogance and privilege far exceed his ability and morals.

I will let others highlight his many failings. I wish to concentrate on someone who advises the Prime Minister but is, in my opinion, just as culpable as Johnson for the mess we’re in.

This man has my very special contempt because he ought to know better. His name is Sir Patrick Vallance. He is supposed to be the UK’s Chief Scientific Adviser, but all his pronouncements suggest that he is a puppet paid by the Government to push its agenda and make it sound like science.

What had he achieved previously to make him suitable to be appointed this country’s top scientist? For the 12 years prior to his government role, he worked in drug development for the pharmaceutical giant GSK (GlaxoSmithKline) and reached the board and corporate executive team.

During his time at GSK, the company was fined 490million dollars for bribery; 160million dollars for creating addiction; 2.5million dollars for heart defects; 4.2million dollars for flu vaccine deaths and 1.14billion dollars over its antidepressant drug Paxil.

In 2011, GSK paid 250million dollars to settle 5,500 deaths caused by its drug Avandia and set aside 6.4billion for future claims. Just like their counterparts at Pfizer, the board of GSK are convicted criminals who have escaped prison by paying enormous fines, which they are able do because of their even more enormous profits.

Vallance’s title and position as Chief Scientific Adviser suggests that he must be one of the best scientists in the country: His record, since his appointment in 2018, suggests he is nothing of the sort.

A good scientist understands that many things are interconnected and interdependent, and decisions can only be taken after considering all the relevant data.

Albert Einstein said that ‘imagination is more important than knowledge’ because we need to think beyond what we already know. When Covid-19 came along, Vallance – and that other government stooge Chris Whitty – developed monomania.

The obsessive preoccupation with one disease is the antithesis of good science. Vallance supported the idea of locking healthy people in their houses without any harm-to-benefit analysis. He, and Whitty, based their entire approach on reducing the spread until vaccines could be produced, by the pharmaceutical industry he had just left.

He utterly failed to consider the huge number of untreated cancers, heart diseases and mental health problems caused by the lockdown. ‘Saving the NHS’ has, in reality, given the NHS an unbearable burden of untreated patients.

It would appear Vallance has never read the work of Professor Sheldon Cohen, who has repeatedly demonstrated that prolonged psychological stress causes a dramatic decline in our immunity to respiratory diseases. Professor Cohen says that two of the worst stressors for human health are chronic fear and social isolation, which are exactly what we get from ‘lockdown’.

Vallance consistently ignored the importance of a healthy immune system and gave no advice on the proven benefits of dietary zinc, selenium and vitamin D, even though optimum levels of these nutrients have no downside.

The UK’s greatest health emergency is not Covid, it is metabolic syndrome, which puts constant pressure on the NHS. It is especially relevant when the data shows that 95 per cent of the people dying with Covid had pre-existing metabolic disease.

A genuine scientist would have realised that improving our lifestyles and diets would simultaneously reduce metabolic syndrome and Covid fatalities. A cynic might suggest that approach would reduce drug company profits too much.

Vallance convinced me of his uselessness with his comments at COP26. He said: ‘Climate change will be more deadly than Covid. To avoid catastrophe, we need to change our behaviour by flying less and eating less meat.’

Our chief scientist appears to be unaware of all the evidence showing that cold weather kills far more people than hot weather. He also has not realised that previous predictions of runaway global warming have a 100 per cent record; every single one of them has failed to come true.

If he read the work of people such as Professor William Happer, he would understand that carbon dioxide is a trace gas comprising 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere, and only six per cent of that comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

How does Vallance compute the atmospheric cooling effect of persuading ordinary folks to forego their once-a-year flight to the Mediterranean?

Professor Happer has also shown that increasing CO2 levels from 0.04 per cent will make no difference to temperatures, because carbon dioxide’s greenhouse effect is already saturated at these concentrations.

I was appalled when Vallance trotted out the nonsense about ‘eat less meat to save the planet’. I am always amazed there are people who believe that the climate of this planet is controlled by the digestive system of cows and they call themselves scientists.

You only need GCSE Biology to understand how ridiculous this is. Cows and other ruminant animals use a process of bacterial fermentation to digest plant material that humans cannot eat.

A by-product of this process is methane, which, like CO2, contains one carbon atom. Approximately five per cent of the carbon in a cow’s food is turned to methane and belched into the atmosphere, but 100 per cent of the carbon in that food was extracted from the air by the plant during photosynthesis.

Over time, methane is converted to CO2 and is available for plants to use again for growth. Ruminants recycle carbon and have done so for about 50million years. It is impossible for them to add new carbon to the atmosphere.

When cows and sheep are correctly managed, they improve soil fertility and work in harmony with the grasslands they thrive on. Allan Savory, a Zimbabwean ecologist and livestock farmer, has shown that herds of ruminants can reverse desertification in tropical climates.

Some people will point out that methane is more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. This has been shown in laboratory experiments, but not in the real world.

Methane exists in the atmosphere at a mere 1.8 parts per million, or 0.00018 per cent. Professor Happer has shown its effect on the atmosphere is so small as to be irrelevant. I also wonder how reducing our meat consumption by about 20 per cent will reduce methane from 0.00018 per cent to a concentration which Vallance thinks will cool the Earth.

There is a worldwide push to reduce our meat consumption. This has nothing to do with health or ‘saving the planet’. It is all about making vast fortunes for global corporations that want to replace real, nutritious food with their laboratory-processed fake food.

They are nudging us to cut back on meat by about a fifth. But if we all do that, small livestock farmers will go bankrupt and be forced to sell their farms to the big corporations. Our local, small farmers care about their animals, their land and the environment. Global corporations care only about profit.

Monomania gives Vallance away again. He equates eating meat with climate change, but pays no attention to the consequences of the change he wants to bring.

Red meat, and the animal fat and offal that comes with it, are the most nutritious foods our species can eat. Animal foods contain vital nutrients which cannot be found in plants. Vitamin B12 is essential for our cardiovascular and nervous systems; the structure of our brains have 12 per cent DHA (docosahexaenoic acid), which does not exist in plants.

Studies have shown that meat-eaters suffer significantly less depression than vegetarians. There are many more examples, but none of them are mentioned by Vallance.

I believe the UK will never be truly healthy and happy when grossly incompetent lackeys such as Patrick Vallance are in charge of scientific advice.

The People’s Media

Call yourself a Scientist?