COVID Vax, KIDS & CONSENT: A Red line to the Rubicon

6th July 2021

The Covid Physician

Jul 06, 2021

An Open Letter of Accountability

July 6th 2021

FAO: PM, CMO, SoS Health, SoS Justice, Vaccine Minister, MHRA, GMC, NMC, RCGP, RCS, RCPCH, RCN, NHSE

Dear Sir/Madam,

This is an open communication which is copied to a number of official bodies. Its aim is to officially record some professional concerns. Your opinion and evidenced reassurance is sought.

Background

Over the course of the acute reaction to SARS-CoV-2 medics received many NHS communications on how to react to the perceived scale of emergency. This perception was based on inaccurate Imperial College modelling. It overestimated ‘first wave’ mortality by a factor of 10, perhaps more considering the overlooked nuances of misattribution and false positives. SARS-CoV-2 was correctly reclassified by PHE as not being a HCID (high consequence infectious disease) on 19.3.20. Nevertheless the government locked-down, a few days later.

The government settled on lockdowns, non-medical face masks, droplet spread, asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread as key principles for its subsequent policies. These types of official responses which were contrary to the medical norm engendered and fuelled further wrong-thinking, professional panic, and social fear. Political rhetoric replaced balanced scientific dialectic and overrode established medical facts and principles. It is concerning that these early, fundamental perceptual, conceptual and policy errors were not corrected as counter-evidence accumulated, and continue to be perpetuated beyond their natural endpoints.

One result of that rhetoric is an unprecedented human gamble with novel and relatively untested pharmaceuticals at great scale. But who takes the risk? Not the pharmaceutical companies – they are safely indemnified by the government. Suffice to say, the safety, efficacy, longterm consequences and whether these pharmaceuticals cause more overall harm than benefit remain very uncertain.

In stark contrast, patients and their healthcare vaccinators may not be fully indemnified from the gamble. Recklessness is never appropriate in medicine.

BBC Newsround & Devi Sridhar

One concerning example of recklessness was noted on Children’s BBC’s ‘Newsround’ programme on 8th June. A person without medical qualification nor licence, Devi Sridhar misled our children. She said some of the the experimental pharmaceutical products genetically coding for spike protein were ‘safe and effective’ and if children took them they would protect themselves, their parents and teachers. She said ‘the benefits definitely outweigh the risks’ and ‘The benefit of getting the vaccine is you don’t need to worry about Covid-19’. As a parent and experienced doctor it seems she and the BBC have deceived our children, whether through ignorance, inadequate research, or intention. Surely, this is a child-safeguarding issue remaining to be addressed? Detailed analyses of her remarks have been made by our medical colleagues at UKMFA and HART. Sridhar was given a further national ITV platform to mislead parents on GMB, 28th June 2021.

It remains uncertain if Ofcom has censured these persons. It is certain that Ofcom had a mandate from government since 23rd March 2020 to suppress ‘harmful Coronavirus-related programming’. The subjective interpretation of this vague phrase is not conducive to patient safety nor public interest. It has not been properly applied against Sridhar’s recurrent harmful Coronavirus-related programming.

Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs)

This author, a general practitioner, does not recall receiving any official notification of safety concerns regarding the experimental vaccine therapies. If she is not alone, such uncharacteristic and unsafe re-prioritising and compartmentalising of medical information seems contrary to achieving GMC Good Medical Practice standards.

It is understood the combined UK, Europe and US figures alone on voluntary reported complications is over 20,000 deaths and over 2 million ADRs in only 6 months in relation to these pharmaceutical products. These products seem dangerous by orders of magnitude like no other authorised vaccine or pharmaceutical before, surpassing perhaps even thalidomide.

Normally, one would have had letters in the post and official emails informing of these risks. There would have been extensive media coverage. Those products might have been withdrawn from the market at less than 50 deaths. But, one has not received anything official to suggest these products are dangerous. One has resorted to actively searching for this under-reported data via the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) yellow card scheme, EudraVigilance and VAERS. Any search for safety information is marred by internet censorship, and confusing propaganda proclaiming these products’ reassuring safety and efficacy.

At the very least all hospital and community doctors should have been warned by the CMOs to consider running baseline investigations such as full blood counts, cardiac enzymes, and clotting screens with D-dimers on anyone appreciably unwell post-vaccine. Instead, there is a growing official wall of studied silence. Our patients and their doctors have been abandoned to chance. This is at the very least criminally-negligent of those responsible.

Some of these severe complications were predicted in early March 2020 by Doctors for Covid Ethics but its prescient warnings were dismissed by the European Medicines Agency.

There remain scientifically valid concerns regarding a generally inadequate and only short-term safety profiling of these products in humans and animals There seems particularly inadequate attention to pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, genotoxicity, gene treatment mutations, and widespread tissue toxicity. There are reasoned concerns that these iatrogenic, bio-toxic spike protein encoders may make matters worse for recipients whether pre-exposed, unexposed or when exposed to SARS-CoV-2. Pathogenic priming, future antibody dependent enhancement, molecular mimicry and vaccine derived virus interference all remain concerns.

There are well-founded concerns these proteins are responsible for possible and reported clotting disorders, cardiovascular disease (notably myocarditis and vasculitis), dysfunction of male and female reproductive organs. Potential for deposition in the nervous system has generated concerns for dementia, other neurodegenerative disease and prion protein encephalopathies. Not being sure of these risk potentials is every reason to have a moratorium, not a reason to continue unrelentingly towards our youth and children, who are at next to no risk of dying from COVID-19.

Yet, our youngest children can come home and be informed by a BBC-sponsored, medically-unqualified person of the complete safety and efficacy of these products. Such gross, prejudiced misinformation would be illegal for a pharmaceutical advertisement in a medical journal.

None of above sits comfortably. To suggest experimenting on the whole global population indiscriminately based on the data of SARS-CoV-2 and limited research does not at all seem safe, scientific, reasonable, necessary or justifiable. A recent study showed for three deaths prevented by vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination and eight serious ADRs.

We are a approaching a crossing of the bioethical Rubicon in regard to our youth and children. This summer, news is full of untreatable and rampant variants, yet general and covid mortality is at an unsurprising summer low. There are 2 months until parliament votes on extending emergency coronavirus legislation in September. Inevitably, there will be a winter surge in respiratory deaths from many different diseases.

The timing of Devi Sridhar’s unbalanced and unacceptable psychological intervention upon our children should concern our society. As a further winter lockdown looms, denial of normality may well be used as a tool to coerce, compel and incentivise our young and those remaining to be injected in a non-medical transaction to avoid a further restriction of basic socioeconomic, mental, and physical necessities. This may include more restrictions to education in schools and on university campuses as a new academic year fast approaches.

Medical Ethics, Bioethics & Illegality

This brings one to the key issue of coercion and consent. Particularly child consent. Your urgent advice on this matter is sought. It deserves to be openly discussed, despite a sense that even valid, expert and responsible free speech is no longer condoned in our society, not even in regard to a medical matter of life and death. The premise of the concern is the risk-benefit ratio for experimentally vaccinating young persons is unreasonably high. Recommending or coercing all of them and their parents to accept this will inevitably result in unnecessary, predictable and preventable child deaths and injuries.

(a) Can one be given reassurances that those who take consent for young patients to be vaccinated will not be guilty of, or complicit in offences against the person, such as battery, ABH and GBH; or even of fatal offences? A defence for such crimes is consent. Legal consent requires for it to be positive and genuine. Submission is not consent. Fraud and lack of comprehension vitiate consent. There are certain situations where adults cannot mutually consent to causing and receiving ABH and GBH (R v Brown, 1993). Thus, (b) how may a healthcare professional (HCP) properly obtain consent from a paediatric patient to an experimental, inadequately safety-profiled unnecessary substance of no benefit to it, and with every risk of irreversible harm or fatality?

There exists a principle of Gillick competency where a child can consent to a treatment if it has adequate mental capacity to comprehend the nature of the treatment, but only then if the treatment is in their best interest. (c) How may one truthfully say these experimental genetic therapies are treating them in their best interests?

Further, when doctors do not have the necessary ADR information to decide amongst their peers what is the right way to proceed, (d) how can one properly assume or take informed consent in a lay adult, let alone a child?

Do we leave it to Devi Sridhar, ITV and the BBC to implant the germ of future co-operation for an opportunistic injection at school under the masquerade of Gillick competency? We must not. There is no immediate nor patient confidentiality reason to inject them without first consulting their parents, as might arise if a child sustains a broken an arm and attends an accident and emergency department alone, or confidentially requests contraception from a GP.

Montgomery ruled doctors must discuss substantial uncommon risks, benefits and alternatives with patients before they can properly be consented, including those which are rare but serious. Only then may consent be fully informed.

Article 6 of Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (2005) reinforces these established principles of consent, but deals specifically with the current experimental situation. Implied consent is inadequate, it must be “prior, free, express and informed consent of the person concerned. The information should be adequate, provided in a comprehensible form and should include modalities for withdrawal of consent.”

Moreover, such seems the official censorship of scientific debate and restriction on diverse scientific information, how may some of our medical and nursing colleagues even know there is a risk to their patients? Could this mean, regarding vaccine and elderly care home deaths, the Department of Health itself is also culpable of crimes including corporate manslaughter, as might be complicit corporations and employers stipulating covid vaccination?

These experimental, uninformed and coercive aspects have introduced an unexpected and anachronistic medico-legal anxiety to clinical practice. Pre-covid it was unimaginable the Nuremberg Code could become so relevant to UK medical practice. Today, all ten points of the Code concentrate the medical mind. The Code’s origin in the Nazi Doctors’ Trial heightens concern that the it is currently being violated by our state health system and its registered doctors and nurses.

Articles 6, 7 and 8 of the ICC Rome Statute proscribe phenomena comparable to what we may be observing develop. Experimental medical apartheid, and intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health are amongst them. We have former prime minister denying there is de facto coercion yet promoting distinction between vaccinated and unvaccinated. These will divide populations, prohibit free movement in accordance to who is prepared to take unnecessary pharmaceutical risk. (e) How do such socioeconomic threats amount to real choice and not coercion?

Lowering the threshold of proper consent to experimental treatments on children has other possible consequences. (f) Will this be the gateway consent to lowering the age of sexual consent and the entire removal of parental consent and responsibility?

On June 16th the world was witness to the Health Secretary’s extraordinary allusion to cause punitive and calculated health inequality by discriminating to deny treatment to persons who decline risky and experimental therapy. He said, ‘The duty that we have when somebody has not been offered the vaccine is greater than the duty we have when we have offered a vaccine but somebody has chosen not to take it up.’ This is tantamount to claiming that we have less duty of care if someone makes any decision we decide is against our advice, such as eating sugar. (g) Would it ever be condonable for any healthcare practitioner if she arbitrarily or prejudicially refused to treat a patient?

Mandatory influenza and COVID-19 experimental vaccine therapy is already happening in some employment sectors even though it has always been a principle that treatment is by patient choice. It is believed the Royal College of Nursing and Royal College of General Practitioners have declined to recommend its members are mandated to have COVID-19 therapies. How long will they sustain this position?

Based on such recent experiences perhaps it is only a matter of time before the concept of forcing treatments on patients with full mental capacity becomes an acceptable point of debate in the media and parliament. Would a detention camp be the ultimate destination for those who assert sovereignty and integrity of their own bodies?

Legal human rights standards are therefore at grave risk. Experimental or not, beneficial or not, coerced, mandated or forced treatment is inhuman and degrading treatment, and remains illegal under several international human rights standards. Given the fatalities from treatments, the right to life, provisions are also material. Neither Articles 2 or 3 can be derogated from under ECHR provisions.

Other relevant, fundamental legal human rights such as Articles 8-11 freedoms of assembly, association, expression, thought, conscience, religion, and right to a personal and family life, may be restricted, for instance, if deemed necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. As time progresses, and epidemiological data accumulates and there is a movement to vaccinate the young, it seems that government coronavirus policy is increasingly disproportionate and unjustifiable on these grounds, and even counterproductive to these grounds.

Section 45E Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 proscribes forced treatments, including vaccinations in regard to its own sections 45B and 45C international and domestic restriction provisions. One can only take cold comfort from this as an ethical doctor and a moral person because these have become politically inconvenient provisions and the Government has shown an extreme capacity to force any legislation it likes through with little challenge from MPs.

The restrictions justified by such public health legislation may well be based on flawed and unjustifiable medical concepts such as asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic respiratory spread. This has never been an accepted guiding principle of respiratory infections in clinical experience. Despite the scientific and medical evidence to the contrary, non-medical face-mask wearing in the community remains a pillar of government infection control policy and symbol of social reinforcement of its ideas. Nor are the covid vaccinations said to guarantee prevention of SARS-CoV-2 infection, disease or transmission.Thus, these measures do not seem to guarantee an ending of social restrictions or mask-wearing. (h) Therefore how can we reasonably conclude such measures are necessary in a democratic society?

MHRA Yellow Card System

It strikes one that if clinicians and the public are not formally made aware of the extraordinarily numerous ADRs, and spike protein gene therapy concerns, we are correspondingly unlikely be alert to report and clinically act upon them as such. It is understood the MHRA yellow card system is designed to be an ‘early warning system’. One is no longer certain the system is safely functioning, given the reported ADRs stark contrast with government messaging. It seems insincere to remain muted on the precautionary principle for fatal and serious ADRs only to disproportionately continue vigorously exercising it for SARS-CoV-2 risk.

It is a grave position to have the trust and life of a patient in one’s hands, and one is increasingly at a loss to know what to say to patients and parents regarding covid vaccine safety.

The starting point for professional medico-legal concerns in this regard are the Medical Act 1983 & the GMC Good Medical Practice document, particularly, but not exclusively:

Medical Act 1983

(1B) The pursuit by the General (Medical) Council of their over-arching objective involves the pursuit of the following objectives—

(a) to protect, promote and maintain the health, safety and well-being of the public,

(b) to promote and maintain public confidence in the medical profession, and

GMC Good Medical Practice

Domain 2

‘Safety and quality’ – ‘Contribute to and comply with systems to protect patients’, section 23 (b-d),

23 To help keep patients safe you must:

…

b) contribute to adverse event recognition

c) report adverse incidents involving medical devices that put or have the potential to put the safety of a patient, or another person, at risk

d) report suspected adverse drug reactions

and,

‘Responds to risks to safety’ section 24,

24 You must promote and encourage a culture that allows all staff to raise concerns openly and safely.

Conclusion

As doctors, we are more qualified than the BBC, Devi Sridhar and politicians to speak on medical and bioethical matters. When our patients’ lives are at stake in such medical situations, it is our duty to create a constructive debate when the domineering, unipolar narrative risks the science and ethics we should stand for.

Among 12 to 17 year-olds, VAERS data, from Dec. 14, 2020 to June 11, 2021, show: 6,332 total adverse events, including 271 rated as serious and seven reported deaths 974 reports of anaphylaxis among 12- to17-year-olds with 98% of cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine, 1.4% to Moderna and 0.2% (or two cases) to J&J. 109 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis (heart inflammation) with 108 attributed to Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. 24 reports of blood clotting disorders, all attributed to Pfizer .

Dr. Tess Lawrie summarised in an urgent, independent yellow card preliminary report the general serious vaccine concerns in a letter to the MHRA. Colleagues at UKMFA have raised independent paediatric COVID-19 vaccination concerns to the MHRA.

Doctors should strive to both prolong and improve life. We do these instinctively by performing constant risk-benefit analyses of our interventions based on data and experience. A concern is some in the health professions are being politically and socially coerced into a position they may believe is professionally unjustifiable since it is not beneficial to the young (possible numbers needed to vaccinate to save one child, is >2 million children) and will result in unnecessary, inevitable injury and deaths in our youth and children who are at no risk of covid, with many already immune.

SARS-CoV-2 presents virtually no risk to children or young adults. In comparison influenza poses more risk to children. We do not coerce or mandate influenza vaccines in all children. We recommend influenza vaccine only for vulnerable groups such as the elderly and those with risk-increasing co-morbidities. Why then push experimental covid therapies upon children and other not-at-risk populations?

There is valid discussion of prioritising vulnerable children for covid vaccines, but it must be an equal concern that covid vaccine ADRs such as clotting disorders, anaphylaxis and myocarditis may be of even more risk to certain vulnerable paediatric groups.

As human experience of this disease prolongs, so does the potential for far safer, better longer-term natural herd immunity, particularly amongst the young. Most of the paediatric (and adult) population are already be immune, and pose little or no risk to the vulnerable-but-vaccinated elderly. They may well handle infection asymptomatically and with a low viral load and therefore pose an insignificant or no risk to others. This risk to vulnerable older adults may be even less if the government is correct in its belief its experimental vaccines, are extraordinarily safe and effective.

ONS antibody surveys show approaching 60% 16-24 year olds and 90% of adults are antibody positive. If one factors for these percentages rising every week, for pre-existing T-cell immunity and antibody levels too low to detect, 2/3 to 3/4 of children should have immunity, and almost all adults, if the vaccines are effective.

It should go without saying that, if there were a proven safe pharmaceutical that prevented a serious infectious disease and its transmission, there would be no need for censorship, reprisals and coercion to promote its acceptance.

We can learn to live with this issue, assisted by alternative approaches to conceptualising and managing the problem, without a major destruction and rebuilding of society. These would include other combination treatments proven in the field and ‘focussed protection’ to protect the vulnerable and enable the majority in society to carry on much as normal.

Would you please urgently, particularly as the consideration to vaccinate the young is active, clarify these issues and questions for healthcare professionals?

Questions

1. Presumably, you have already considered these above medico-legal/ethical questions (a) to (h)? If so, what are the outcomes of your legal assessment of these issues and their impact on doctors? If not, can you answer these questions, please?

2. A doctor must not be complicit in the maiming or death of a person or child by exposing it to unnecessary risk. Will you support HCPs (healthcare professionals) who assert this stance?

3. Based on the ADRs and known and unknown risks, many could not justify, administer or recommend these experimental treatments to our youth and children. Would you support doctors and other HCPs who find themselves reasonably unable to comply with such state edicts at this grave medical and bio-ethical juncture in world history?

4. Will you support HCPs’ right to voice our dissenting professional concerns in open forums of debate, free from censorship and repercussion?

5. Some seem already to have accepted preparatory paediatric psychological inducements to future covid vaccination of our children by the BBC and Devi Sridhar, and politicians’ suggestions of medical apartheid and discriminatory medical treatment. Overt material inducements have occurred in other countries. Will you condemn such behaviour?

6. Would you concur, even if these pharmaceutical manufacturers are indemnified against their products’ harm, individual vaccinators cannot take informed consent properly unless the basis of the treatment is not fraudulent, and they explicitly inform the patient of risks, benefits and alternatives, including but not exclusively, about the:

a. absence of meaningful commercial liability;

b. presence instead of only a very limited state vaccine damage payment scheme for only severe disability, but not necessarily for death;

c. serious and common risks to the patient, including current death and ADR passively identified by VAERS, MHRA and EudraVigilance;

d. experimental, novel genetic nature of the therapies with unknown consequences, which may cause additional future fatal or serious harms;

e. fact that it is not fully-established how well the vaccines prevent infection, disease or transmission, reduce mortality or prevent the need for further experimental injections, masks, restrictions and lockdowns;

f. true risk benefit analysis of the particular demographic being vaccinated;

g. treatment alternatives, including not having treatments?

7. If they do not do as per point (6), would you agree our colleagues as individuals HCPs risk breaching GMC Good Medical Practice guidance, and acting illegally, to include negligently and/or criminally? If not, why not?

8. Would you agree it can be unacceptable for a doctor to indiscriminately follow government edict and expect absolution from professional or legal consequences, and further, that an ignorance of vaccine risk-benefit profile, following government policy, or misplaced loyalty may be no defence or mitigation? If not, why not?

We remain imperfect in a complex and challenging situation. No one body or person is expert in all the aspects. Please correct me if any issue has been misapprehended. By discouraging open scientific debate we will never arrive at any useful truth to extricate our society from this extraordinary global grip. To accept such gross transgressions of medical conduct complicitly and silently may mean we and the health professions stand for little of real, ethical substance.

No doctor should be complicit in hiding the above critical medical information. If they do, they act in the-best interests of pharmaceutical-industrial complex and the government, not their patient. The fact I cannot personally sign this letter since the NHSE’s summary professional dismissal of colleague, Dr. Sam White for expressing safety concerns should shame any one who claims to care. Such authoritarian conduct has no place in patient care. How NHSE can do this yet let NHS workers perform choreographed dances in hospitals on social media without professional reproach in an apparent medical emergency is incomprehensible.

Moving forward, how we respond to this extraordinary global event will determine future standards of care and safety in medicine. It may be they have already irreversibly collapsed. Your reasoned and evidenced public reassurances to all HCPs will be appreciated.

Kind regards,

An NHS Doctor

Sent to:

Boris Johnson, Prime Minister

Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Health

Robert Buckland, Lord Chancellor & Secretary of State for Justice

Nadhim Zahawi, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Minister for COVID Vaccine Deployment) Dr. June Raine, MHRA Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer of England

Chief Executive NHS England

Andrea Sutcliffe, Chief Executive Nursing and Midwifery Council

Clare Marx, Chair General Medical Council

Denise Chaffer, President, Royal College of Nurses

Amanda Howe, The President, Royal College of General Practitioners

Camilla Kingdon, The President, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health

Neil Mortensen, The President, Royal College of Surgeons of England

The Covid Physician is an unheroic NHS doctor. This article is a personal view and does not necessarily represent the views of the NHS. Dr. TCP tweets at @tcp_dr