Covid-19: Response and Excess Deaths

Debate between Graham Stringer and Andrew Bridgen

Thursday 18th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stringer]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman to a point. In March, when the first decisions were made, nobody knew what was going to happen. There was a panic to go into lockdown, which was understandable while people were seeing what was going on, but very soon after that people did know. What I think was, and is, indefensible was to carry on with policies that we knew were damaging the economy and were not protecting people. I therefore voted against my own party, which supported the Government and more on this issue. I went through the Lobby with a small number of colleagues from my party and the hon. Gentleman’s party to say that what was happening was wrong, and that the damage being done by the policies was probably worse than covid. It might be hindsight for March and April 2020, but not for the rest of the time and the second lockdown.

Once we knew the profile of the disease, we knew that we were damaging children. I go into schools and meet eight and nine-year-olds who were locked down when it was known that children were not at risk. A very small number of children died and, as far as I know, they all had comorbidities—I stand to be corrected—so covid was essentially safe for children. We have damaged both their mental health and their ability to learn. I go into schools from time to time, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman does, and teachers tell me that it is very difficult to catch up. I am still annoyed about the response, and I do not think it is hindsight.

I went through the Lobby with a minority of colleagues. One of the two failures of our democracy’s normal checks and balances was that this place was not functioning, as the Easter holiday was extended. Surely the most important thing in a crisis is for our democratic institutions to function properly. We could not ask proper questions and there were no follow-ups. We kept our Select Committee going but, with the best will in the world, it was a pale imitation of what had gone before. There was a complete failure to insist on more accountability from the Government while the economy was shut down. Some of us, although we were not very many, came here to try to keep it going.

Our democracy’s second important check and balance is the fourth estate. These publications are not normally my politics but, with the exception of The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, and the Daily Mail to a certain extent, the rest of the media, led by the BBC, were quite uncritical of what was happening. People say that BBC reporters were told not to criticise and not to ask difficult questions, and political journalists—not specialist health journalists who might have asked more pertinent questions—were sent to the press conferences. It was a political question, but it was also a science and health question. We were really let down by the BBC primarily, and by other parts of the media.

The hon. Member for Christchurch and other hon. Members have talked about the Hallett inquiry. I supported the inquiry but, having seen the way it has gone, I have given myself a good talking to. I do not think I will ever again support an inquiry. Do we really want to spend half a billion pounds on this inquiry? I attended the previous debate on recompense, and we heard how lawyers are getting fat on all these inquiries. I do not know when the Hallett inquiry will report, but it may well last for years and cost half a billion pounds. It certainly will not provide us with any advice on what to do if there is a pandemic next year—I suspect that advice is what we all want. By the time it reports, there may have been another Government or two and it will be a historical document. Sweden is not a perfect society, but its inquiry has reported. The motion before us calls for the fourth part of the inquiry, which will be on vaccines, but is the inquiry really the technical body to do that? I do not think so.

In the first stage, the inquiry has shown an extraordinary bias towards believing in lockdowns. I would want to know a number of things from an inquiry: did the lockdowns work? Did they save lives? Have they cost lives? Where did the virus come from? The inquiry is not even looking at that and it is not dealing with any of those things, but it is taking a long time. It has made it abundantly clear that it is going to look at the impact of the virus on social divisions and poverty. I am a member of the Labour party and I can tell the inquiry, because I know, that poor people come off worse from diseases. It can go back to look at the Black report from 1981, I believe it was, if it wants to see that, as it talks about both regional and class disparities. We do not need to look at this issue, as we know that poor people do badly when there are epidemics—that has been true for all time.

[Andrew Bridgen]

The hon. Gentleman is making an eloquent point. Given our experience of inquiries, be it the current covid inquiry or the ongoing Post Office Horizon inquiry, is it any surprise that even the sub-postmasters have come to the conclusion that there is no justice in these inquiries and they are now considering bringing private criminal prosecutions to get their own justice?

[Graham Stringer]

No, I am not surprised about that. Inquiries take a long time and their reports and recommendations often gather dust. I have never made this point before, and I hope I am not going off-piste too much, Madam Deputy Speaker, but every time there is an horrific murder of a child we get a report with 90-odd recommendations, and the question is: does that protect the next child? No, it does not. I do not believe that these inquiries do. We need serious cultural change in many of these organisations, rather than another report on something. That is an easy thing to say and a very difficult thing to achieve.

Let me come on to the other part of the debate, which is about excess deaths and the number of deaths. It appears that just over 200,000 people were killed in this country by, or died of, covid. I had my doubts about these figures from the beginning. On a number of occasions, right from the start of covid, the Science and Technology Committee heard from statisticians. We had Sir Ian Diamond and Professor Spiegelhalter in to talk to us about the statistics. We heard from people from what is now the UK Health Security Agency but was then a named part of the NHS. We asked them whether they had the statistics on the difference between people who died from covid and those who died with it. If someone was dying of cancer and went into hospital, there was a fair chance that they would have got covid, because there was not perfect protection within hospitals. Such a person would then be registered as having been a covid death, but clearly they were going to die of cancer. From the very beginning, that obscured the statistics.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stringer]

I am not suggesting that at all. I am suggesting that at that time, when it was difficult to examine people because there was a distance between clinicians and the people who had suffered death, there was a temptation and a view that covid should go on the death certificates. I suggest no conspiracy, though. I do not believe in conspiracies.

[Andrew Bridgen]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that the AstraZeneca vaccine was withdrawn eventually in the UK and around the world. It was withdrawn because of the rarest of blood clots on the brain. It was not put down on any death certificates in the UK by doctors until after the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency admitted, due to international pressure, that there was that risk. After that, the death certificates started to appear with vaccine-related harms. I put it to the hon. Gentleman that that was because doctors were intimidated by the idea that their reputations would be smeared for putting anything down as a vaccine harm or by having the GMC on their back.

[Graham Stringer]

The hon. Gentleman has made his point. I do not believe in conspiracies. I do believe that, from time to time, one gets a view, both in professions and outside professions, that pushes judgments in one particular direction. I believe there is one point on which we can reach a consensus in the debate: Government Ministers said that the vaccines were 100% safe—it was particularly egregious when that was said about children— but no vaccine or treatment, as right hon. and hon. Members have said, is 100% safe. I think it was a mistake to say those things.

Excess Death Trends

Debate between Graham Stringer and Andrew Bridgen

Tuesday 16th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Bridgen]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. He is a medical doctor, so he clearly has some knowledge. Correlation is not causation, but it is an alarm bell. Alarm bells are going off all over the building, but no one wants to open the door to see whether there is a fire.

Future generations will ridicule us for what we have done in response to a seasonal airborne virus. We have apparently lost our collective minds. We have imposed a brand-new type of quarantine on a healthy population, in breach of all previous public health advice and our own carefully crafted expert pandemic plan, and in flagrant breach of the sensible and experienced advice of many professionals.

The noble dissenters are inevitably being vindicated, one by one, as the suppressed, shaming, real-world evidence finally emerges. I will not mention those who harass, discredit and ridicule the dissenters; they loudly parade their egotistical virtue on social media, in the press and on television. I know exactly how harassment feels.

We inflicted social distancing, masking and school closures on healthy children who were at no risk from the virus. We did that to protect adults, at the expense of our children’s social and mental health. People raised the alarm, but nobody listened. A society that consciously and knowingly sacrifices perfectly healthy children for adults is sick. This time will not be looked on well by future generations. That will be our legacy, and I call on this House and those in authority to right that grievous wrong quickly. With unbearable cruelty, we isolated even those who would gladly have made the individual choice to see their grandchildren.

Worst of all, we bypassed the procedures, protocols and science to inflict on a healthy population a brand new and untested product that had never before been used outside clinical trials, never mind approved. There was no long-term safety data. The safety analysis in the trials was eight weeks, and then the control group was vaccinated. There was no age stratification for recipients of an experimental medication for an illness with an average mortality age of 82. There was no liability under any circumstances for the manufacturers of those experimental treatments. Furthermore, there were good reasons, based on the science known at the time, for thinking that those products might be harmful. Rather than ridicule us, future generations may come to loathe us. We will forever be the poster boys and girls of a society that collectively lost its mind and its moral compass. They will hang that millstone around our necks for eternity.

What is the flaw in human nature that latches on to things and destroys all before it? It has been dubbed by some as the madness of crowds or a kind of mass formation psychosis. It is the sort of thing that allowed China to commit population Armageddon with the one-child policy for decades. It is the sort of thing that allowed us to slaughter millions of cattle during the apparent foot and mouth outbreak, when we were persuaded not by the science but by the plausible patter of provable idiots such as Professor Neil Ferguson—yes, the very same. His advice led to the bankruptcy, immiseration and utter despair of countless farmers who were forced to destroy their livelihoods in a futile attempt to prevent the spread of an airborne virus, which had already managed to pass in the air all the way from France to the Isle of Wight. How many times must the so-called experts be caught with their pants down as their models fail yet again? How long must we be subjected to debunked drivel dumped in our political discourse? How long must decision makers deal with discredited modelling and moribund and captured institutions? Why will no one listen to reason when they have been proved wrong so many times?

There are many other examples in medicine, from bloodletting with leeches to pointless lobotomies to not washing hands between the mortuary and the labour ward. Doctors and scientists are far from immune from groupthink, and the current batch are living proof.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

This will not be the first, or I suspect the last, Government in history not to follow the evidence when it comes to difficult issues. When Governments make mistakes, protect themselves and do not look at the evidence, we as a democratic society should expect there to be an inquiry that establishes what happened, what should have happened and what should happen in the future. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the inquiry that we set up is failing to do that job, and is assuming that lockdown was right from the beginning?

[Andrew Bridgen]

I agree wholeheartedly. This is not a political issue; it is a public health issue that affects every constituency. The so-called covid inquiry has already set out the answers it wants to get. It has all the appearance of a whitewash. It was deeply disappointing that it announced this week that the module on the safety and efficacy of the vaccines has been put off indefinitely—certainly until after the general election, which is extremely disappointing.

I contacted every public and media body I could think of in 2014 to tell them again and again that the sub-postmasters were innocent, but no one listened. I knew the sub-postmasters in my constituency were completely honest; anybody who knew those pillars of society knew it. The innocent were falsely accused of dishonesty over the Horizon scandal and were relentlessly pursued by a merciless, mendacious and malicious bureaucracy. It is the coldness that shocks most—the imperious arrogance and the mercilessness that capture institutions and cowards in authority when a single narrative closes our collective minds to nuance, to experience and to the inconvenient truths. No one listened to the sub-postmasters; no one cared. No one in power moved a muscle to help, but now, all of a sudden, one media programme has shifted the narrative to reveal that the experts were wrong, our institutions were wrong, those in authority were wrong and an infallible computer system was, in fact, fallible. Even our justice system got it so tragically wrong, with thousands of court hearings and judges making wrong judgments. Will the Post Office lessons be learned regarding the covid insanity?

Who is actually dying now? It is not the old and frail, as it was with covid; in fact, deaths from dementia, a key benchmark of elderly deaths, have been in deficit ever since covid, as we would expect after a period of high mortality. Instead, particularly for cardiovascular deaths, there has been incessant week-on-week excess mortality for months and months in the young and middle-aged. Every age group is affected, but the 50 to 64 age group has had it worst—I declare an interest. They were struck with 12% more deaths than usual in 2022 and 13% more in 2023, and at least five in six of those deaths this year had nothing to do with covid whatever.

My constituent, Steven Miller, was a healthy IT engineer in his 40s. He had two doses of AstraZeneca jabs in the summer of 2021 and was ill shortly afterwards. His side effects were so bad that he lost his job, and in November 2021 he was rushed into hospital. He now has cardio- myopathy and ventricular failure with a maximum of five years to live, taking him to 2026, unless he has a heart transplant. When I saw him last, he had a resting heart rate of 145 beats per minute. He has subsequently lost his partner and access to his child, and he is at risk of losing his house. He now has a diagnosis from Glenfield Hospital in Leicester of vaccine-induced cardio- myopathy, and I want to help him to try to get his compensation. However, he is just one example among my constituents who will probably have 30 years of his life stolen from him. His child will lose his father. How is £120,000 of compensation possibly adequate for that?