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September 10, 2020

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Systemic Patient Abuse and State Repression

 

These days every country seems to have evolved its own bureaucratic methods for inflicting misery on its citizens. This article documents the complicity of the British state and politicians in the continued deliberate practice of medical abuse. It results from the recent report of veteran Conservative politician, Julia (Baroness) Cumberlege into instances of iatrogenic (medical) harm and patient abuse. Though the report, First Do No Harm commissioned by the former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, was excellent in itself, it only looked into three areas: hormone pregnancy test (abandoned long ago in the late 1970s), the epilepsy drug sodium valproate and vaginal mesh implants. At the time of commissioning the report Hunt had already stated:

“It is an essential principle of patient safety that the regulatory environment gives sufficient voice to legitimate concerns reported by patients, families and campaigners, works alongside them and responds in a rapid, open and compassionate way to resolve issues when they are raised. My view is that that did not happen in the way I would expect in these three cases.”

It is more like underneath the motto of ‘first do no harm’, the real imperative is to see how much harm you can commit on an industrial scale, and not get held to account.

These are excellent sentiments but the question remains whether the British government is prepared to look into abuse in areas other than these. It seems unlikely that the issues involved, such as failure to identify serious harms and the ignoring of patients or their representatives when they speak up about horrifying side-effects, only occurred in connection to these three groups of products. In this regard Julia Cumberlege has written to me:

“Our Review focussed on 3 particular medical interventions, as per our terms of reference, and as such we cannot comment on anything outside this scope. We do hope however that our recommendations, if implemented, will have a far reaching impact in many areas of the Healthcare Service.”

You might think that if the government wants to encourage acceptance of the new collection of COVID-19 vaccines that they are preparing to unleash on the populace that they would want to reassure people of their concerns about any resulting harm. But obviously this is not the way they are going, and steps are well underway to protect the government, the manufacturers, and the irregular army of semi-medical practitioners being hired to administer the products. And even against the customary background of government medical negligence the rhetoric of Prime Minister Boris Johnson is exceptionally hard-nosed and crude. It is more like underneath the motto of ‘first do no harm’, the real imperative is to see how much harm you can commit on an industrial scale, and not get held to account.

Recently, I compiled a collection of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s hate-language quotes regarding the critics of vaccination in a letter to British Medical Journal online. This is gaslighting and it is grotesque that a modern politician should stoop so low:

Regarding the Use of the Term “Anti-Vaxxer”

Thank you Karyse Day for drawing attention to the problem of the bias and intimidation inherent in the term “anti-vaxxer”. The term has been around perhaps since the 19th century but has evolved a new context. Three years ago I drew attention to the remarks of Seth Berkley, director of the vaccine lobby organisation GAVI, in the Spectator proposing that “anti-vaxxers” be excluded from social media, which meant in effect not only that certain people should not be allowed on social media but that criticism of vaccines should not be allowed on a generic basis – an extremely serious matter.

Unfortunately, this has also been a hobby-horse of the present Prime Minister. In August last year Reuter’s recorded Boris Johnson as saying :

“I’m afraid people have just been listening to that superstitious mumbo-jumbo on the internet, all that anti-vax stuff…”

On 24 September 2019 he told the UN :

“There are today people who are still actually anti-science, a whole movement called ‘the anti-vaxxers’ who refuse to acknowledge the evidence that vaccinations have eradicated smallpox and who by their prejudices are actually endangering the very children they want to protect.”

By February this year the Sunday Telegraph was reporting :

“Posting anti-vaccine propaganda on social media could become criminal offence, Law Commissioner says…

New Law Commissioner Penney Lewis is leading a wide-ranging review into whether UK’s offence and abuse laws are fit for the Social Media age…”

And once again the Prime Minister was quoted last month:

“There’s all these anti-vaxxers now,” Johnson told medical workers at a doctor’s surgery in London. “They are nuts, they are nuts.”

While there are a lot of very fed up people I am extremely dubious there is a movement called “the anti-vaxxers” or that they are posting propaganda; at the very best this is a simplistic claim. At a time when the government is supposedly trying to earn trust for a range of potential SAR-CoV-2 vaccines the continued disparagement and repression of people who raise questions about a class of products – which after all cannot be inherently safe – speaks for itself. It creates an atmosphere of prejudice and intimidation – such as described in the Cumberlege review and should be seen and understood for what it is.

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