Yeadon on the Covid immunity, PCR testing, Covid policy
Former Pfizer Vice-President & Chief Science Advisor Dr. Michael Yeadon
https://www.bitchute.com/video/dPfZJTjyiT9X/ 2 November 2020
(This talk was removed from YT for “violating YouTube’s terms of service”.)
NOTE: Transcript is Unofficial, 99% automated, and possibly fraught with errors. It is here for the convenience of those who want to read, not listen. All reference, rebuttal, kudos should refer back to the original at bitchute, a great site that deserves support.
My name is Dr. Michael Yeadon. My original training was first class honours degree in biochemistry and toxicology followed by a research-based PhD into respiratory pharmacology. And after that I’ve worked my entire life on the research side of pharmaceutical industry both big Pharma and also biotech. My specific focus has been inflammation, immunology, allergy in the context of respiratory diseases of the lung but also the skin so I would say I’m a kind of deeply experienced information immunology pulmonology kind of research person. I initially became concerned about the response to the coronavirus pandemic towards the middle or back end of April as early as that. It had become clear that if you look at the number of daily deaths versus, and this is the date, the pandemic had turned, really pleasingly, already the wave was fundamentally over and we would just watch it for for a number of months, which is what it did. And so I became very perturbed about increasing restrictions on the behavior and movement of people in my country and I could see no reason for it then, and I still don’t.
1:17
Governments responses to emergencies is guided by the scientific group who sit together under the Strategic Advisory Group for emergencies or SAGE, so they should provide scientific advice to the government about what’s appropriate to do .
SAGE has got several fundamental things wrong and that has led to advice that’s inappropriate and not only has that horrible economic effect, but as had continuing medical effect in that people are no longer being treated properly. SAGE took the view that since SARs-Cov-2 was a quote new virus that they believed wouldn’t be any immunity at all in the population. So I think that’s the first thing I remember hearing that and I puzzled because I already knew because I read the scientific literature that SARs-CoV-2 to is 80% similar to another virus. You may have heard of called SARs that moved around the world have been in 2003 and more than that, it’s quite similar in pieces of it to common cold causing coronavirus, so when I heard that there was this coronavirus moving across the world, I wasn’t as worried as perhaps other people were because I figured that since there are four common cold causing coronaviruses, I figured that quite a lot of population would have been exposed to one of those viruses would probably have a perhaps substantial protective immunity.
Just to explain why I was so confident -everybody knows the story of Edward Jenner and vaccinations and the story of cowpox
2:56
and smallpox and that they’re sort of old stories that milkmaids had very clear complexions. They never suffered from things like smallpox. If it didn’t kill you would leave your skin permanently scarred. And the reason that they have the protection was that they were exposed to a more benign related virus called cowpox. Edward Jenner came up with the idea that if it’s cow pox that saves the fair maid, he reasoned that if he could give another person an exposure to the cowpox, he would be able to protect him from smallpox. He did an experiment that you can’t do now and he’d never should have done it. But apocryphally or really well maybe real we’re not sure it. Edward Jenner acquired some of the liquid from a person infected with cowpox ,relatively mild postures that then go away, and he got some of this and he scraped it into the skin of a small boy. A few weeks later, he obtain some liquid from some poor person that was dying of smallpox
3:55
and infected the boy and lo and behold the boy did not get it and that gave birth to the whole field of what’s called vaccination. Vacc comes from vaccus, the Latin name for cow. So we are really familiar with the principle of cross immunization.
I’ve thought quite a lot about the vulnerable people in Care Homes and is an awareness that even though people really careful using PPE and so on but that’s only going to go so far in a kind of Hothouse environment where people are pretty close together in a care home. So the question I’ve had all year is once one or two people got the virus in a care home. Why wouldn’t almost everyone get infected? And of course the truth is they didn’t. One interpretation of that distinction is that large proportion of people in the Care Homes had prior immunity.
4:55
At this time of year about 1 in 30 people have a cold caused by one of these coronavirus has and just like the protection against smallpox provided by previous exposure to cowpox, so people exposed by having had a cold caused by one of these coronavirus has their now immune to SARs-CoV-2 too.
5:15
So 30% of the population was protected before we start. Sage said it was a zero and I don’t understand that they could possibly have justified that. There’s a second and equally fatal, unaccountable error that they have made in their model. The percentage of the population that Sage asserts have been infected to date by the virus is about 7%. I know that that’s what they believe and you can see it in a document they published in September called non-pharmaceutical interventions
5:48
and it says, sadly, more than 90% of the population is still vulnerable.
It’s unbelievably wrong and I’m just going to explain why. They base their number on the percentage of people in the country who have antibodies in their blood, and only the people who became mostly ill ,needed to actually develop and release antibodies around their body. So it is certainly true that the people have lots of antibody were were infected, but a very large number of people had milder symptoms, and even more people had none at all. And the best estimates that
6:24
we can arrive at is that those people are either made no antibodies or so low amounts that they will have faded from now.
Recent publication on the percentage of care home residents who have antibodies to the virus and very very interesting. This time, they were using high sensitivity test for antibodies and they carefully picked out residents that never were PCR positive. These are people who never got infected and they found that 65% Percent of them had antibodies to the virus. They never got infected. So I believe that was high prevalence of immunity in that population prior to the rise arriving.
Big story in the media recently was that the percentage of people with antibodies against the virus in their blood was falling. Now this was cast as a concern that immunity to SARs-CoV-2 doesn’t last very long. Well, you know, anyone with knowledge of immunity would just simply reject that. It’s not the way immunity to the virus works. That would be T cells.
7:29
So if the antibodies are falling gradually over time, which they have from spring to present, the only plausible explanation is that the prevalence of the virus in the population is falling, and that’s why the antibody production gradually subsides.
7:45
Less than 40% of the population is susceptible. Even a theoretical epidemiologists would tell you that that’s too small a number to support and consolidate a growing outbreak. Community immunity and herd immunity. So Sage says that we’re not even close and I’m telling you that the best science by the best scientists in the world publishing the top peer review journals says, they’re wrong that more than 60% of the population are now immune and it’s simply not possible to have a large and growing pandemic.
‘Really good news, genuine good news to hear there’s data emerging from the vaccine clinical trials and we are seeing vaccines that raise not just antibodies, but they also producing T Cell responses.’
This is great. back to proper science, proper immunology.
8.38
That’s how immune [inaudible] viruses works. So my surprise that -it’s just annoying- that when we’re talking about the percentage of the population that still susceptible, we only talk about antibodies like 7% from Sage. Why are we not talking about the 50% that have got T Cell immunity?
So you might be thinking, if Dr. Mike Yeadon is telling you these things, well, how come the pandemic isn’t over?
9:02
Well, this may come as a surprise to you, but I believe fundamentally it is over. The country has experienced almost a complete cycle now of the virus sweeping through the land and we are at the end of it. London was was horribly affected in the spring and somewhere in early April, they were experiencing several hundred deaths per day from people dying with similar symptoms and respiratory failure and inflammation. At the moment, the number of people dying of SARS CoV-2 in the capital is less than 10. So it’s it’s down by 98 percent or something like that. And the reason it’s down is because there were now two few people in London susceptible to allow the virus to magnify to amplify to get an epidemic and they would have been hit by now because they were the first place hit in the spring and I think
We’re seeing now in the Northeast and the Northwest
9:59
would be the dying embers of the spreading out of this virus and I’m very sorry that it is still true that a small number of people are catching it, getting ill and dying.
So why aren’t the media telling us that the pandemic is over? It’s not over because Sage says it’s not.
10:18
So Sage consists of very many scientists from a range of disciplines ,mathematicians and clinicians and there are multiple committees, but I found to my surprise, and I’m actually going to use the word horror, that in the spring all the way through the spring and summer, Sage did not have on their committee someone who I would call a card-carrying immunologist, a clinical immunologist. I have to say
10:43
I think that in the spring and summer SAGEwas deficient in the expertise of had. They should have armed themselves around the table all the people required to to understand what was happening and they didn’t do that.
10:56
So people ask me then, “Well, Mike, if it’s you know, if it’s fundamentally over, why we still getting hundreds of deaths a day from SARs-CoV-2?” and I thought a lot about this There is a test that’s performed … people have their noses and tonsils swabbed and then a test called PCR test is performed on that. What they’re looking for isn’t the virus. You might think it’s looking for the virus, but it’s not. What they’re looking for is a small piece of genetic sequences called are RNA.
11:27
Unfortunately that bit of RNA will be found in people’s tonsils and nose, not if they just caught the virus and they’re about to get ill,
11:36
or they’re already ill. It’s also going to be found if they were infected previously, weeks or even sometimes a small number of months ago. Let me just explain why that is. If you’ve been infected and you fought off the virus, which most people do, you’ll have broken dead pieces of virus. These are tiny things smaller than your cells, perhaps embedded all the way through your airway.
12:00
Embedded in bits of mucus maybe inside an airway lining cell and so over a period of weeks or months you bring up cells that contain broken dead pieces of the virus that you have conquered and killed. However, the PCR test is not able to detect whether the viral RNA has come from a living virus all the dead one as I’ve just described so I think a large proportion of the so-called positive
12:27
are, in fact, what I call cold positives. They’re correctly identifying that there is some viral RNA in the sample, but it’s from a dead virus. It can’t hurt them. They’re not going to get ill. They can’t transmit it to anybody else. They’re not infectious. So that accounts for a large
12:46
number of these so-called positive cases. These are people who’ve beaten the virus. Why are we using this test that cannot distinguish between
active infection and people who have conquered the virus.
This test has never been used in this way and I’ve worked in this field. It’s not a suitable technique. It’s a it’s the kind of technique you would use for forensic purposes. If you were trying to do a DNA test to establish whether or not a person was at the scene of a crime. You would not be doing these tests by a windy supermarket car park in what looks like plastic Marquee tents, and on picnic tables. It’s not suitable at all and it definitely shouldn’t be done in the way. It’s being done. It’s subject to many mechanical errors. Should we say handling errors? If this was a test being used for legal purposes for forensic purposes, like a DNA identity test, the judge would throw out this evidence & say it’s not admissible.
13:44
It produces positives, even when there’s no virus there at all. We call that a false positive. As we’ve increased the number of tests done per day. So we’ve had to recruit less and less experienced laboratory staff and now we’re using people who’ve never worked professionally in this area. What that does is it increases the frequency of mistakes and the effect of this is the false positive rate rises and rises.
So if you had a false positive rate of 1% which was what Matt Hancock told us was roughly the number they have in the summer,
14:18
then if you tested a thousand people that had no virus, 10 of them would be positive, astonishingly. If the prevalence of the virus was only one in a thousand that’s 0.1 percent, as the office of national statistics told us it was through the summer, then if you use the PCR test only one of them will be positive and genuinely so, but if the false positive rate is as low as 1% you’ll also get 10 positives that are false. Some people did say to me, well,there’ll be a higher percentage of people coming forward for testing in the community so-called pillar 2 testing because they’ve been instructed only to come if they’ve got symptoms.
15:05
But I call BS on that one. I don’t think that’s true. I know lots of friends and relatives have been told by an employer, “Well, you’ve sat near someone who’s tested positive and I don’t want you to come back to work until you’ve got a negative test.” I’ve seen information from many towns in the north, certainly Birmingham, was one, Manchester was another, Bolton where councils and I really think they were trying to be helpful. were out leafleting the people of their cities saying we’re going to come around and swab you all because we want to track down this virus now.
Once you start testing people
15:40
more or less randomly, instead of having symptoms, you get the same amount of virus in the population as the office of national statistics found, which is at the time was one in a thousand. And I’ve just told you, and Matt Hancock confirmed during the summer,
15.56
they had a false positive rate of about 1%. So that means I don’t know. Some people 10 would test positive and it will be a false result and only one would test positive and it was correct. This test is monstrously unsuitable for detecting who have live virus in their airway. It’s subject to multiple distortions that are worsening as we get into the winter as the number of tests done per day increase, the number of Errors made by these overworked not very experienced lab staff increase .
It’s not unreasonable to say a best guess of the false positive rate at the moment, what’s called the Operational False Positive rate
16:40
is about five percent. 5% of 300,000 is 15,000 positive. I think some of those positives are real. I don’t think it’s very many. Now the problem with this false positive issue. It doesn’t just stop at “cases”. It extends to people who are unwell and go to hospital. So people who go to hospital having tested positive, and it could be a false positive, and I think most of them are at the moment. If you go to hospital and you’ve tested positive previously or you test positive in hospital, you’ll be counted now as a covid admission,
17:17
although there are more people in hospital now than a month ago. This is normal for Autumn. Regrettably, people catch respiratory viruses and become ill and some will die.
I just don’t believe it’s got anything to do with covid-19 anymore.
But there are more people in intensive care beds now than they were a month or so ago. That’s entirely normal as we move through late Autumn and into the early winter those beds become used but aren’t more people than is normal for the time of year. And we’re not about to run out of capacity certainly not at a national level.
I think you know where this is going now. if you should now die you’ll be counted as a Covid death
17:36.
But that’s not correct. These are people who might have gone to hospital having a broken leg for example, but 3% of them will still test positive, and they haven’t got the virus, it’s a false positive.
If they die, they’ll be called a Covid death, but they’re not, they’ve died of something else.
One of the most troubling things I’ve heard this year was Mr Johnson telling us about the moon shot -testing everybody often maybe everyday is the way out of this problem. I’m telling you it is the way to keep us IN this problem.
18:30
This is orders of magnitude higher than were already testing now and the false positive rate however low it is, will be far too large to accept. It will produce an enormous number of false positives. What we should do is stop mass testing. Not only is it an affront to your liberty, it will not help at all, it will be immensely expensive. and it will be a pathology all of its own.
18:56
We would be fighting off stupid people, mostly government ministers, I’m sorry to say, who do not understand statistics.
19:07
If you test a million people a day with a test that produces 1% false positives, 10,000 people a day will wrongly be told they’ve got the virus. If the prevalence of the virus was, say, 0.1% the office of National Statistics said it was in summer, than only a tenth of that number 1000 would be correctly identified. But you can’t distinguish amonst the 11,000 who have genuinely got the virus and who are false positives.
Moonshot, I think, will have a worse false positive rate.
It’s not fixable and it is not necessaryeither.
19:43
The pandemic having passed through the population not only of the UK, but probably all of Europe and all of the world quite soon, it won’t return. Why won’t it return?
Well, they’ve got T-cell immunity.
Well, we know it’s been studied by the best cellular immunologists in the world
Sometimes people will say it looks like the immunity is starting to fade. When I saw the first headline like this, I remember being quite confused, because that’s not the way immunology works. Think about it for a moment. If that was how it worked, it could kill you or you could fight it off. But if you’ve successfully done that, it would somehow not leave a mark in your body. But it DOES leave a mark in your body. The way you fought it off involved certain pattern recognition receptors
20:33
and has left you with, as it were, memory cells that remember what it was they fought off.
20:40
And if they see that thing again it is very easy for them to get the cells to work again in minutes or hours. They will protect you. So the most likely explanation is that it will last a long time. So I read a bit more about this
so-called tailing off of immunity and
20:55
so I read a bit more about this so-called tailing off of immunity and I realized they were talking about antibodies. Just incorrect to think that antibodies and how long they stay up is a measure of immune protection against viruses. I mean, you can tell I’m I don’t agree with this. There have been some classic experiment on people who have inborn errors in parts of their immune system, and some of them have inborn errors that means they can’t make antibodies, and guess what, they are able to handle respiratory viruses the same as you and me, so I don’t think it’s harmful to have antibodies, although some people are worried about the potential for amplifying inflammation from antibodies. But but my view is that there are probably neutral and you definitely should not believe the story that because the antibody falls away you’ve lost immunity.
21:41
Again, that’s just not the way the human immune system works the most likely duration of immunity to a respiratory virus likes SARs-CoV-2 is multiple years. Why do I say that? We actually have the data for a virus that swept through parts of the world 17 years ago called SARS, and remember SARs-CoV-2 is 80% similar to SARS. So I think that’s the best comparison that anyone can provide.
The evidence is clear. These very clever cellular immunologists studied all the people they could get hold of who had survived SARs 17 years ago. They took a blood sample and they tested
22:22
whether they responded or not to the original SARs and they all did. We all have perfectly normal robust T cell memory. They’ve actually also protected against SARs-CoV-2 because it’s so similar – this cross immunity. So I would say the best dated that exists is that immunity should be robust for at least 17 years. I think it’s entirely possible that it is a lifelong. The style of the responses of these peoples T cells were the same as if you’ve been vaccinated and then you come back years later to see hasthat immunity being retained. And so I think the evidence is really strong that the duration of immunity will be multiple years, and possibly lifelong. There have been but a tiny handful of people who appear to have been infected twice.
23:11
Now, they’re very interesting. We need to know who they are and understand them very well. They’re probably got a certain rare immune deficiency syndrome. So I’m not pretending no one ever gets re-infected but I am pointing out that it’s literally five people or maybe 50 people.
But the World Health Organization estimated some weeks ago that 750 million people have been infected so far by SARs-CoV-2. That means most people are not being reinfected and I can tell you why that is. It’s normal.
23;41
It’s what happens with viruses respiratory viruses. Some people have called for zero covid as if it’s some political slogan and there are some people I’ve heard calling for it almost every day. They’re completely unqualified to tell you anything. Something that’s really important to know is that SARs-CoV-2 is an unpleasant virus . There’s no question about it, but it’s not what you were told in Spring. We were originally told that it would kill perhaps three percent of people it infected which is horrifying. That’s 30 times worse than flu.
We always overestimate the lethality of new infectious diseases when we’re in the eye of the storm. I believe the true infection fatality ratio of covid-19. The true threat to life is the same as seasonal flu. So there’s no reason why you would want to try and drive Covid to zero. It’s a nonsense. That’s just not how biology is, and all means I have heard proposed as ways to get us there are much more damaging and pathological, I would say, than the virus itself.
It’s simply not possible to get rid of every single copy of the covid-19 virus and the means to get you there would destroy Society.
24;59
Forget the cost, although it would be huge. It would destroy your Liberty. You would need to not go out until you’ve been tested and have your results back and I have described how the false positive rate would just destroyit from a statistical perspective.
I don’t believe it can be done. It’s not scientifically realistic. It’s not medically realistic and it’s not what we have ever done.
25:20
As the virus swept towards the UK in the in the late winter and early spring, I too was concerned because at the time we were told perhaps three percent might die. So when the Prime Minister called for a lockdown, I wasn’t pleased about it, but I understood that we should try this. But it’s important that you understand that when we look at the profile of the pandemic as it passed through the population, that it was clear that the number of infections everyday was falling. We past the peak quite a long time before lockdown started. So we took all that pain that lockdown pain which was multiple weeks. I don’t remember exactly how many. We took it for nothing. If those are really important effect of lock down on the number of people who died or the rate of it, you should at least be able to all of them, say: these people had lockdown and these did not, but you cannot. All heavily infected countries’ shapes are the same, whether they had lockdown or not. They don’t work.
26:53
I don’t know why anyone is allowing you to be pushed into this corner
26:29
I don’t think we entirely know why some countries were hit harder than others, but I have to say I think scientifically the smart money is on a mixture of forces.
One would be this cross immunity. Although China had an awful time in Wuhan in Hubei [sp?] province, it didn’t spread elsewhere in the country and I suspect that meant because a lot of them had this cross-immunity, and I think nearby countries in the main had lots of cross-immunity. So that’s one possibility. The other one though is in terms of severity of what did the virus do to a particular population- we’ve seen devastating effect in countries like UK and in Belgium, France and maybe even in Sweden and much smaller numbers of deaths in other countries like Greece and in Germany, and you might think, well, was it something that they did, and I wish it was true,
27:25
because if it was something we do we could learn from it and do it in the future. But there’s no evidence whatsoever that it was anything humans did. The passage of this virus through the human population was an entirely natural process that completely ignored our puny efforts to control it. So there is this theory –I don’t like the name very much– but it’s called “dry tinder”. If people in a country to a vulnerable for to dying in the winter usually of respiratory viruses. If you have a very mild winter season, like UK did -we had a very mild seasonal flu last year and the year before, and so did Sweden- then what happens is there are a larger number of very vulnerable people who are even older than usual. And and I think that’s why we suffered a rather large number of deaths. It was still only 0.06 percent of the population, equivalent to about four weeks of normal mortality. But countries that had very severe winters recently, and Greece.
28:29
Germany certainly had very lethal winter flus in the last two years. I think then, they had a smaller population very vulnerable people, and that is the main reason why they lost fewer people. It’s not to do with locking down. It’s not to do with testing or tracking or tracing. I personally don’t think any of those measures have made any difference at all. Belgium and UK and Sweden were particularly vulnerable. Whereas adjacent Nordic countries, I get fed up with hearing about this. idea that they locked down and that’s why it’s saved them. I’m afraid the other Nordic countries had normal flu epidemics the last two or three years. Sweden like UK had very mild epidemics. You can just go and look at the number of deaths. It’s subnormal for UK and Sweden. And now we’ve got a supranormal, a larger than normal number of deaths from Covid. Now there may be other reasons. I’m not saying there are not,
29:23
but I think those two main forces -the amount of prior immunity and the so-called dry tinder -what vulnerable fraction of the population did you have as a result of seasonal flu being intense or not.
I think that accounts for most of it, and it’s just hubristic and kind of silly that our government and advisors tell you that doing things that have never worked in the past, like lockdown, are going to make any difference to the transfer of respiratory viruses.
I don’t believe it for a moment. There’s no scientific evidence behind it and there are much stronger scientific hypotheses that do explain it.
29:59
You might think that in terms of numbers of deaths, excess deaths that covid has produced such a large number that this will be an awful year for excess death, but surprisingly not. 2020 is lining up to be about 8th in a list since 1993, roughly six hundred and twenty thousand people die every year in this country. They say ‘in life we are also in death’ and it’s true. It’s been awful for those who’ve been personally affected by illness and death.
30:28
But it’s not particularly unusual in terms of the number of people who have died. So one of the things I’ve noticed is happened in recent years is that we almost seem to be moving to post-science, post-facts, as if facts don’t matter.
For someone who’s qualified and practiced as a professional scientist for 35 years, I think it’s deeply distressing . I don’t think you should listen to me if I talked about, I don’t know, the design of motorways or something like that. I don’t know anything about motorways or how to grow trees better. I don’t know anything about that. But I do know quite a lot about immunology, infection, inflammation and the way infectious organisms move through a population. I’ve no other reason for giving this interview other than I really care what happens to my country. And we have to pull ourselves out of this, and I personally believe the way forward is twofold. It’s not difficult.
We should cease mass testing of the mostly well in the community. Immediately. It only provides misleading and grey information and yet we are driving policy almost completely based on it. It’s definitely wrong. We should not do it. Use the test in hospital – I’m not saying don’t test. Don’t continue mass testing. And for God’s sake don’t increase the number of tests. It is a pathology all of its own which must be stamped out by right thinking people.
And I’m afraid the people on SAGE who have provided the modeling, the predictions, the measures that should be taken, that their work is so badly and obviously flawed. Lethally incompetent.
32:06 that you should have no more to do with these people. They should be fired immediately. The effects of their advice has been to cost lots of innocent people their lives from non-Covid causes. They should be dismissed and reconstituted using an appropriate group of skilled individuals, especially avoiding any of who might even have the suggestion of a conflict ofinterest I think we are right at the edge of the precipice and I really hope we can pull back. 32:44
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