Three recent news items about coronavirus are worth passing along.

Long Covid and olfactory nerves

One of the many drawbacks of long Covid is the loss of the sense of smell.

To some extent, this can happen with any virus. Fifty years ago, my mother contracted a winter virus and lost her sense of taste and smell for two years. Although she wasn’t a foodie, her inability to enjoy our daily family dinner disappointed her the most. Her GP said there was nothing he could do. She would have to wait and see what happened. Two years later, suddenly, her olfactory senses returned and she had no more problems.

A December 22 article in The Times said that researchers are working on a similar problem with long Covid. It seems that the immune system blocks olfactory nerves (emphases mine):

The loss of smell suffered by people with long Covid is caused by an immune response affecting nerve cells in nasal tissue, scientists have said.

The researchers who conducted the study found that there was a decline in the number of these nerve cells in such patients.

The study, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, was led by researchers at Duke University in the US and involved colleagues from Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego.

They looked at tissue taken from the olfactory epithelium, found in the nose, where nerve cells responsible for smell are located …

The single-cell analyses revealed that there was a widespread infiltration of T-cells, a type of white blood cell used by the immune system, engaged in an inflammatory response in the nasal tissue.

Researchers found this immune response from these T-cells continued even when there were no detectable levels of Covid in the patient …

Dr Bradley Goldstein, an associate professor in neurobiology at Duke, who was a senior author for the study, said researchers had been encouraged to find that nerve cells appeared to maintain some ability to repair themselves.

He said learning which sites in the nose were being damaged and what cell types were involved would be a key step in designing treatment. “We are hopeful that modulating the abnormal immune response or repair processes within the nose of these patients could help to at least partially restore a sense of smell,” he added.

In the meantime, the only prescription is patience. Patience is a virtue.

Recovering from long Covid: mind over matter

On November 19, The Times featured an article by Francesca Steele, a long Covid sufferer, detailing how she overcame her debilitating condition.

Steele had tried everything and ended up spending £15,000, most of which was for naught. In fact, some of the medical treatments she underwent made her feel worse.

As a last resort, she embarked on putting mind over matter. The old saying worked.

She describes the journey back to normality:

It was on a particularly bad day that I started to wonder about mind-body courses, which suggest you can control the reactions of your body by “retraining” your brain. I had come across people who had success with these courses while searching online. One that kept cropping up was called the Lightning Process (LP), a short brain-training programme that, enthusiasts said, also had an impact on the body.

Developed in the Nineties by the British osteopath Phil Parker, LP is a three-day seminar (which you can do in person or on Zoom, with a range of coaches you can find online) that combines neuro-linguistic programming with life coaching, hypnotherapy and osteopathy. Its goal is to give people tools to help themselves with a range of conditions, including post-viral fatigue syndromes, chronic pain and anxiety, by reducing the brain’s stress response. It claims to have helped 25,000 people around the world.

Whenever I found someone online who claimed to have recovered from post-viral fatigue conditions in this way I tried to track them down and speak to them directly to check they were real and not invented by snake oil salesmen. They weren’t. I spoke to a journalist who said the techniques had cured him entirely of ME. I spoke to a GP who had gone on to train as an LP practitioner after it helped her ten-year-old daughter to recover after three years. I chatted to several writers who said mind-body work had “cured” them of long Covid but they were afraid to speak out, something I understand because I was trolled after mentioning the concept on Twitter …

However, I kept hearing positive things about it on social media, and decided it was at least worth a shot. In March I did the course. The thinking is that a serious shock like a bad virus can send your body into permanent “fight or flight” mode and that your nervous system gets stuck sending messages of sickness that are no longer needed. Using the science of neuro-plasticity, which says that the brain adapts to the neural pathways used most often — and that in this case your brain has adapted to using neural pathways that prompt a sickness response — the course teaches you to “train your brain” to send different signals. So, instead of your immune system, your endocrine system and your inflammation responses all gearing up for an attack, they relax. Your hormones, your blood pressure, your heart rate, your thermoregulation and so on, all, in theory, return to normal. As Dr Anna Chellamuthu, a GP and LP practitioner, puts it: “The LP is absolutely not saying, ‘This is all in your head.’ This is a physical illness. It’s saying that physiology can change when you change your thoughts.”

During a £750, three-day Zoom course, our coach talked the three of us (all with long Covid) through various exercises and taught us all a routine to interrupt negative thoughts. Every time I had an anxious thought about symptoms, I had to say “Stop” and do an intense visualisation, imagining myself in a situation where I was energetic, healthy, confident.

It was not easy to stick to. Constantly interrupting your thoughts feels unnatural at first and there were times I was out at the park with my kids when I really didn’t feel like scooting off to do the process behind a tree. I often doubted it would work. Yet within a month I was back at work. Two months later I celebrated my 40th birthday with a long walk and delicious dinner. Seven months on from the course, I am about 80-90 per cent back to my old self. I do sometimes get symptoms but they are far fainter and less frequent than before.

To those who say that I’d have got better anyway and that LP just happened to coincide with my recovery, I strongly disagree. I was unable to walk beyond our street for months. Within a week of the course I was able to go much further; within eight weeks I was able to run, after 16 months without exercise.

Various studies suggest the efficacy of mind-body work. In a recent pilot study conducted by a professor at Harvard Medical School, for example, all symptoms of patients with long Covid improved on a 13-week psychophysiological course. There is no doubt that more biomedical research is needed into post-viral fatigue conditions, and I, like others, hope that more evidence is found of the exact mechanisms at play. Dr Boon Lim, a consultant cardiologist at Imperial College Hospital who has treated many people with long Covid, says: “As medics we have been taught to focus all our attention on physical issues, to the detriment of patients. I think you need both physical and mind- body help to improve.”

I am also conscious that mind-body courses can be expensive. LP costs £750 (plus more for follow-up guidance). I found the intense nature of it uniquely motivating but cheaper mind-body work does exist, including the app Curable (I know one woman who recovered from 14 years of ME using it) and Suzy Bolt’s extremely compassionate, cheap (and some free) online classes.

For me, the process has been gradual, not immediate. I don’t claim that it will work for everyone or even that the theory is definitely correct, but I feel as if I’ve come back from the dead. Before it, I tried everything mainstream medicine had to offer, to no avail. Mind-body work has got me this far, and I believe it will get me the rest of the way. Without it, I believe I’d still be in bed, without hope.

What an encouraging story. This is further evidence that alternative medicine is viable and worth trying. As with any treatment, conventional or otherwise, doing one’s homework beforehand is a prerequisite.

Parliamentary debate on vaccines: broken silence

On Tuesday, December 13, the Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen was granted an adjournment debate in the Commons on the potential harms of coronavirus Vaccines. Finally, someone had the gumption to break the silence in Parliament.

I had just tuned into BBC Parliament by chance at the moment he started speaking. How providential.

Here’s the beginning:

The transcript is here. Excerpts from his hard-hitting speech follow:

… Only a couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by a journalist from a major news outlet who said that he was being bombarded by calls from people who said that they were vaccine-harmed but unable to get the support they wanted from the NHS. He also said that he thought this would be the biggest scandal in medical history in this country. Disturbingly, he also said that he feared that if he were to mention that in the newsroom in which he worked, he would lose his job. We need to break this conspiracy of silence.

It is instructive to note that, according to pharmaco-vigilance analysis, the serious adverse effects reported by the public are thought to represent only 10% of the true rate of serious adverse events occurring within the population. The gold standard of understanding the benefit and harm of any drug is the randomised controlled trial. It was the randomised controlled trial conducted by Pfizer that led to UK and international regulators approving the BioNTech-Pfizer mRNA vaccine for administration in the first place.

Contrary to popular belief, that original trial of approximately 40,000 participants did not show any statistically significant reduction in death as a result of vaccination, but it did show a 95% relative risk reduction in the development of infection against the ancestral, more lethal strain of the virus. However, the absolute risk reduction for an individual was only 0.84%. In other words, from its own data, Pfizer revealed that we needed to vaccinate 119 people to prevent one infection. The World Health Organisation and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges have previously stated and made it clear that it is an ethical responsibility that medical information is communicated to patients in absolute benefit and absolute risk terms, which is to protect the public from unnecessary anxiety and manipulation.

Very quickly, through mutations of the original strain—indeed, within a few months—covid fortunately became far less lethal. It quickly became apparent that there was no protection against infection at all from the vaccine, and we were left with the hope that perhaps these vaccines would protect us from serious illness and death. So what does the most reliable data tell us about the best-case scenario of individual benefit from the vaccine against dying from covid-19? Real-world data from the UK during the three-month wave of omicron at the beginning of this year reveals that we would need to vaccinate 7,300 people over the age of 80 to prevent one death. The number needed to be vaccinated to prevent a death in any younger age group was absolutely enormous.

At this point, Bridgen’s fellow Conservative, Danny Kruger (Prue Leith’s son), intervened to ask whatever happened to the initial policy (Matt Hancock’s) to vaccinate only the vulnerable and certainly not children. Note the pro-vaccine statements BBC Parliament put up when he spoke:

Kruger said:

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing this debate to the House. It is a very important debate that we should be having. He is talking about the relative risks for different cohorts of the population. He will remember that, when the vaccine was first announced, the intention was that it would be used only for those who were vulnerable and the elderly because, as he says, the expectation was that the benefit to younger people was minor. Does he agree that it would be helpful for the Minister to explain to us why the original advice that the vaccines would be rolled out only for the older population, and would not be used for children in particular, was laid aside and we ended up with the roll-out for the entire population, including children?

Bridgen responded as follows, then continued:

Bridgen then went on to discuss conflicts of interest and how they influence vaccine approvals. He then talked about a few subsequent investigations:

In a recent investigation by The BMJ into the financial conflicts of interest of the drug regulators, the sociologist Donald Light said:

“It’s the opposite of having a trustworthy organisation independently and rigorously assessing medicines. They’re not rigorous, they’re not independent, they are selective, and they withhold data.”

He went on to say that doctors and patients

“must appreciate how deeply and extensively drug regulators can’t be trusted so long as they are captured by industry funding.”

Similarly, another investigation revealed that members of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation had huge financial links to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation running into billions of pounds. Ministers, the media and the public know that the foundation is heavily invested in pharmaceutical industry stocks.

Unfortunately, the catastrophic mistake over the approval, and the coercion associated with this emergency-use authorisation medical intervention, are not an anomaly, and in many ways this could have been predicted by the structural failures that allowed it to occur in the first place. Those shortcomings are rooted in the increasingly unchecked visible and invisible power of multinational corporations—in this case, big pharma. We can start by acknowledging that the drug industry has a fiduciary obligation to produce profit for its shareholders, but it has no fiduciary obligation to provide the right medicines for patients.

The real scandal is that those with a responsibility to patients and with scientific integrity—namely, doctors, academic institutions and medical journals—collude with the industry for financial gain. Big pharma exerts its power by capturing the political environment through lobbying and the knowledge environment through funding university research and influencing medical education, preference shaping through capture of the media, financing think-tanks and so on. In other words, the public relations machinery of big pharma excels in subterfuge and engages in smearing and de-platforming those who call out its manipulations. No doubt it will be very busy this evening.

It is no surprise, when there is so much control by an entity that has been described as “psychopathic” for its profit-making conduct, that one analysis suggests the third most common cause of death globally after heart disease and cancer is the side effects of prescribed medications, which were mostly avoidable … 

It has also been brought to my attention by a whistleblower from a very reliable source that one of these institutions is covering up clear data that reveals that the mRNA vaccine increases inflammation of the heart arteries. It is covering this up for fear that it may lose funding from the pharmaceutical industry. The lead of that cardiology research department has a prominent leadership role with the British Heart Foundation, and I am disappointed to say that he has sent out non-disclosure agreements to his research team to ensure that this important data never sees the light of day. That is an absolute disgrace. Systemic failure in an over-medicated population also contributes to huge waste of British taxpayers’ money and increasing strain on the NHS.

Danny Kruger intervened a second time:

My hon. Friend is being very good with his time. I just want to call his attention to some research, since I chair the all-party parliamentary group for prescribed drug dependence. He refers to the waste of money; there is £500 million being spent every year by the NHS on prescribed drugs for people who should not be on those habit-forming pills, causing enormous human misery as well as waste for the taxpayer.

Bridgen acknowledged what Kruger said, then concluded his speech:

I thank my hon. Friend for making a point that only reinforces the items in my speech that the public need to know. I thank him again for his support.

We need an inquiry into the influence of big pharma on medications and our NHS. That is been called for many occasions and by some very influential people, including prominent physicians such as the former president of the Royal College of Physicians and personal doctor to our late Queen, Sir Richard Thompson. On separate occasions in the last few years those calls have been supported and covered in the Daily Mail, The Guardian and, most recently, The i newspaper.

We are fighting not just for principles of ethical, evidence-based medical practices, but for our democracy. The future health of the British public depends on us tackling head-on the cause of this problem and finding meaningful solutions …

That first step could start this evening with this debate. It starts here, with the vaccine Minister and the Government ensuring in the first instance an immediate and complete suspension of any more covid vaccines with their use of mRNA technology. Silence on this issue is more contagious than the virus itself, and now so should courage be. I would implore all the scientists, medics, nurses and those in the media who know the truth about the harm these vaccines are causing to our people to speak out.

We have already sacrificed far too many of our citizens on the altar of ignorance and unfettered corporate greed. Last week the MHRA authorised those experimental vaccines for use in children as young as six months. In a Westminster Hall debate some weeks ago, I quoted a report by the Journal of the American Medical Association studying the effect of the covid-19 mRNA vaccination on children under five years of age. It showed that one in 200 had an adverse event that resulted in hospitalisation, and symptoms that lasted longer than 90 days.

As the data clearly shows to anyone who wants to look at it, the mRNA vaccines are not safe, not effective and not necessary. I implore the Government to halt their use immediately. As I have demonstrated and as the data clearly shows, the Government’s current policy on the mRNA vaccines is on the wrong side of medical ethics, it is on the wrong side of scientific data, and ultimately it will be on the wrong side of history.

Conservative MP Maria Caulfield responded on behalf of the Government. She is a nurse who worked on the front line during the darkest days of the pandemic. Not surprisingly, she strongly, but politely, disagreed with Bridgen:

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) for securing the debate. It is important that all Members get to discuss and debate such issues, and they are entitled to their opinion.

I have to say that I strongly disagree with my hon. Friend, not only in the content of his speech, but in the way he derided doctors, scientists and nurses. Many of us worked through the pandemic and saw at first hand the devastation that covid caused. There is no doubt in my mind that, despite the personal protective equipment, social distancing and infection control, the thing that made the biggest difference in combating covid was the introduction of the vaccine …

Caulfield told us things we already know about the Government’s support of the vaccine and how the yellow card system works. She refused to take an intervention from Bridgen but did take one from Kruger, who asked about vaccinating children:

I am grateful. The Minister’s predecessor had asked the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation to review the evidence behind the decision to roll out the vaccine to children. Can she update the House or write to us to explain where that review has got to? Does she agree that the JCVI should be looking at the vaccination of children?

She responded, then continued:

In the end, Bridgen got his intervention:

I thank the Minister for giving way on that important point. The claims about the number of lives saved worldwide by the vaccination are sponsored by vested interests. The modelling is the lowest form of scientific evidence—in fact, it is more science fiction than science fact.

Needless to say, Caulfield disagreed and concluded by promoting the vaccines:

I completely disagree. I worked on the covid wards with patients who were dying from that virus. We had infection control measures, antibiotics, dexamethasone—a steroid—and every known facility available, and the only thing that made a difference was when those vaccines were introduced. They do not necessary stop people from getting the virus, but they certainly reduce its intensity and the likelihood of someone dying from it.

I completely debunk the conspiracy theories about a whole group of people benefiting financially from the roll-out of the vaccine and would gently say to my hon. Friend that if he has evidence, there are mechanisms in place for raising concerns, as we have seen with other drugs. Only today, I was before the Health and Social Care Committee talking about sodium valproate—we also had an Adjournment debate on that last week—where there are genuine safety concerns. The MHRA is taking that extremely seriously. It is not worried about pharma concerns; its first priority is patients, and it is exactly the same with the covid vaccine. So if there is evidence—I am not saying that there is not—it absolutely must go through the proper channels so that it can be evaluated.

We have launched a nationwide campaign to encourage people to come forward this winter to get their booster. I recommend that people do that safe in the knowledge that the vaccine is safe for people to have.

The debate ended and the House was adjourned.

Last Saturday, December 18, GB News’s Neil Oliver covered Bridgen’s debate and Aseem Malhotra’s findings in his editorial. Oliver rightly wonders why the vaccine scandal isn’t getting plastered all over the media the way coronavirus statistics were in 2020 and 2021. Instead, he says, there is nothing but deafening silence:

Dr Aseem Malhotra’s journey

When governments first announced the vaccines, Dr Malhotra, a cardiologist, was enthusiastic and encouraged everyone to get them.

Like the rest of us, he believed it when world leaders said the vaccines would prevent transmission. We saw that they did not.

Then, Malhotra’s father fell ill from one of the jabs. While he was an older gentleman, he was fit and ran daily. He also led an active life.

Malhotra examined his father and saw that he had suddenly developed heart problems.

On October 6, the cardiologist spoke publicly at the World Council for Health about the dangers the vaccines pose. He also said he doubted whether the original claims about preventing transmission were true. He urged a pause in vaccine roll outs:

Even with treatment from his son, Malhotra senior died in October. What a blow that must have been:

On December 17, Malhotra and Dr Peter McCullough discussed the vaccine’s dangerous side effects with Jan Jekielek of Epoch Times:

Medical practitioners now speaking out

Fortunately, within the past week, medical practitioners have begun speaking out about the dangers of the vaccines.

On December 16, a vascular specialist urged a pause in the vaccine roll out:

On December 17, a British GP said he would like an investigation into the vaccines:

Doctors for Patients UK aired their views on Wednesday, December 21:

Their video was taken down for a time but is now back up and running:

Apparently, one place where speaking out is forbidden is California, where one’s licence to practice can be suspended. No surprise there:

We can but hope that 2023 blows the vaccine controversy out into the open once and for all.

I can bet you dollars to doughnuts that every media outlet knows these interventions don’t work and are injurious to health. As Andrew Bridgen said of the media personality he spoke with, they’re afraid of losing their jobs if they say something openly.

One media outlet that is covering the vaccines is GB News, particularly on Mark Steyn’s weeknight show. My best wishes go to him as he recovers in France from two heart attacks in succession. I hope they are not related to ‘the jabs’.