Section: Health

The Covid Inquiry is due. The prime minister will no doubt try and dodge it. I am going to post on one major pandemic mistake a few times a week until we get that inquiry. I will focus on mistakes relating to clinical care or impact on health systems. You can judge how this government […]

Today’s Covid announcement was no more led by science than it was by politics. It was led by “Operation Save Big Dog”. Designed to save the skin of the PM. A man not exactly renowned for his honesty and integrity. Doesn’t matter to him that he’s throwing the vulnerable, the less well-off and frontline health […]

Why is the NHS past breaking point? I wish I could bring you good news. I wish I could tell you as the peak of Omicron passes🤞we are regaining the capacity to treat the millions waiting for urgent and routine care. But, honestly, it has never been as bad as this. Why? There are streams […]

When the Omicron variant emerged in early December, there was a big split in the consensus between three views: “Omicron is mild”, “Omicron is just as bad as Delta” and “let’s wait and see what the data tell us over the coming weeks” Unfortunately, while the sensible scientists and commentators were erring on the side […]

As you may already be aware, we have been reporting on the abysmal treatment of the clinically (extremely) vulnerable (CEV/CV), especially since so-called ‘Freedom Day’. Now Johnson has declared a premature end to Covid mitigations in what is clearly a political move to shore up his rapidly-vanishing support. There is no basis for such a […]

Starstruck? It’s not often that I derive inspiration from the front page of the Daily Star, but there we have it: this front page synthesised and articulated my feelings about the sheer bare-faced exploitation which has all too often characterised so much of the ‘economic activity’ surrounding the management of the coronavirus pandemic in the […]

Matt Hicks, a senior nurse, shares his personal views. There’s a lot of social media chatter about mandatory vaccines, especially in the light of the government’s U-turn on the Covid-19 vaccine for healthcare workers. My original position up until recently was that mandatory vaccines had always been accepted as being a legal requirement in healthcare and […]

In my very first West Country Voices article I debunked the claim that “There have only been 388 Covid-19 deaths among the under-60s in the UK,” reported in various newspapers back in December 2020. Last week, a similar claim started doing the rounds. People were tweeting figures such as “only 17,000 people have died of […]

Dear West Country Voices, I couldn’t believe my ears this week when the Government announcement came about the withdrawal of the measures to help protect the public against the dangers of Covid, by 27 January. In reality, rather than an announcement, it was in fact the complete disownment of the English people by the cowboys calling […]

When I got Long Covid in March 2020. I was 38 and healthy. If you are anything like I was then, it is hard to understand how bad Long Covid is. I think that we all have an instinct to just… look away. But, please, it is important that you look. My own low-points: early […]

‘Thrown under the bus’ has turned out to be one of the most-needed, most-overused phrases of the last two years. Fishers, farmers, touring musicians, small businesses and our young have all been chucked under the Brexit bus. The NHS has been subject to a sustained crushing from the bus which carries the greedy ambitions of […]

Dear Editor, I’m exhausted by the Covid pandemic. I think we all are. The ongoing worry that every little sniffle I get might be Delta or Omicron and that I might pass it on to my household and elderly relatives; the constant mental weighing up of how many people I should safely meet while cases […]

Matt wrote to us because he is profoundly angry over #partygate. He wondered whether he should take a deep breath and temper his outrage. We don’t think he should. He’s at the sharp end. We need to hear his voice. Johnson needs to hear his voice. We are sure you’ll agree. Ed There’s something that […]

I’m sorry to distract you from the kerfuffle over Downing St Christmas parties, and who paid for the redecoration of Boris Johnson’s flat etc, but there is something else which should concern us all. There is a massive crisis in social care in this country. We should all be aware of the possible implications for […]

Most people seem to think that Dido Harding’s test and trace programme (NHST&T but nothing to do with the NHS) is a disaster. I won’t go into the reasons why; you can read some of it in the House of Commons committee report. Instead, let’s just look at the costs. The government allocated a budget […]

This government has a history of bad timing. During Anti-Bullying Week in 2020, news broke that prime minister Boris Johnson had decided to ignore that his home secretary Priti Patel had been found to bully her staff, and not to sack her. Then during Parliament Week in November 2021 he tried to undermine the very […]

Emma Monk takes a look at the ease with which Covid misinformation is created and spread and at the cognitive dissonance on display. Within days of scientists discovering a new Covid-19 variant, now called ‘Omicron’, the usual anti-science/anti-vax culprits were trying to find ways to cast doubt over it on social media. I made a […]

Dear West Country Voices,  At a time when Devon parents were expecting to receive consent forms for their children to receive the nasal flu vaccine in schools this Autumn term, we have instead received a letter from Virgin Care informing us that the flu vaccine schedule has been significantly delayed and our children will not […]

Social care may well prove to be Alexander Boris de Pfeffel’s Johnson’s Waterloo, and deservedly so. Out of the blue, less than a week before parliament was to vote on the matter, Number 10 tabled a new proposal (New Clause 49 to the Health and Care Bill) on the social care cap. It significantly watered […]

Dear Tobias I am now retired, but I worked in the NHS (as a nurse, then a health visitor) for 28 years, then for a further 20 years in an NHS-funded post in a university, in teaching and research. I have, therefore, seen and worked through very many changes and reorganisations in the NHS: often […]

As NHS watchers are only too aware, there’s constant wrangling over NHS finances: it’s a bottomless pit; it’s mismanaged; it’s a huge amount; it’s not enough; will never be enough….Where to start with all of this? Let’s take a look… Does the UK spend on healthcare match that of comparable countries? Well, no. Neither as […]

During a BBC interview on 1 October 2021, Boris Johnson added insult to injury by using the phrase: “Never mind life expectancy or cancer outcomes – look at wage growth.” Clearly, the only metric he was interested in was economic. This is deeply offensive to cancer patients and their families, and shows a total lack […]

Dear Editor, I note, with much concern, that health minister Savid  Javid has admitted that the Tory manifesto promise of an additional 6000 GPs, will not be met. It is suggested they had not taken retirements into account! I also note with some scepticism, that he appears to have failed to give any indication as […]

Fellow readers have surely heard about the Immensa scandal by now, which has affected us here in the South West. Their Wolverhampton laboratory was sending false negative Covid test results to people on an alarming scale from September to October. There have been lots of graphs and analyses about this scandal in the press: but […]

Back in July 2020, we ran a story (which you can read by clicking on the image above) in which, Mike Temple explained how Dr Cathy Gardner, from East Devon, a microbiologist with a doctorate in virology, had recently challenged the government in the High Court for not protecting elderly people in care homes, with […]

We appear to be living in strange times, where Covid-19 is running rife in the UK, yet the government and most of the press appear to have moved on from the pandemic! So I was initially pleased to see that the BBC was highlighting the fact that we are the ‘virus hotspot’ of Europe. Then, […]

Just over two months since ‘Freedom Day’ and in many places it feels like Covid-19 is a distant memory. Masks have been abandoned, schools are ‘back to normal’, people are crowding back on tubes; meanwhile you still can’t go into a vet’s consulting room with your pet. So where exactly are we with regards to […]

Dear Editor-in-chief, Nearly a fortnight ago the Prime Minister of Japan, Yoshihide Suga, resigned after taking personal responsibility for nearly 17,000 deaths from Covid-19. This, in a country of some 126 million people which has recently hosted the Olympic Games. Many in Japan thought the games should be delayed again, but they compromised by not allowing spectators […]

At the beginning of August, the headline in the Guardian stated “Johnson faces rebellion over ‘intolerable’ hunger and poverty in home counties”. Steve Baker, MP for Wycombe in Buckinghamshire (and lead Brexiter) was apparently shocked by the crisis in food insecurity after a study by Sheffield University researchers revealed that his constituency is one of […]

MP for Yeovil Marcus Fysh has miraculously become a medic – and an epidemiologist and virologist to boot. Perhaps he’s piloting a new government strategy aimed at filling the shortages in experienced staff across a whole range of sectors whereby an individual has only to express a nodding acquaintance with a subject or a function […]