A Bill led by Baroness Jenny Jones through the House of Lords received strong cross-party support at its second reading today and holds out a real opportunity to save tens of thousands of lives every year, while greatly improving the quality of life in towns and cities across the country – including the South West. […]
Dear Sheryll Murray MP I am writing to you with grave concerns that the government is going to remove special Covid sickness rules for NHS staff in the coming days. My fellow NHS colleagues have had to work tirelessly against a background of a decade of poor investment to fight a pandemic. Boris Johnson and […]
If there is one lesson we should take from Covid so far, it’s that we live in an age of disinformation and political Spin. And it works! Arguably, the ease in which we are manipulated is one of the greatest threats to humanity and social justice. Covid is a good example… 🧵 At the point […]
Our children’s services are there to protect and care for vulnerable children in our communities, providing a lifeline for those in difficult situations. But doesn’t it seem wrong that private companies are able to run these services and prioritise profit over the children they are meant to protect? The government recently dropped its unpopular plans to reduce council responsibilities […]
Even as some hard-core Brexiters concede that the project isn’t working for the country, they reach for tired claims that there have been benefits in certain high-profile areas. The reality is very different, as Andrew Levi explains, in the case of the Covid vaccine public health response. Radical Remainers ‘The Great British, world-beating, Covid vaccine […]
Some seem to think doctors, nurses and paramedics working in urgent care spend their day saving lives. And we do, sometimes. But actually, we spend most of our day saving organs – brain, heart, kidneys, etc – to prevent disability so people can make the most out of life. There are occasions when we have […]
Editor: This is the first in a series of articles about the privatisation/monetisation of a number of aspects of social and health care. For every pound that was once spent directly on providing a service and those being cared for by that service, a chunk will now go to shareholders. With a profit motive driving […]
Dear Sheryll Murray I noted a tweet by Kwasi Kwarteng and other Conservative ministers today telling us, in effect, to move on from the series of events known as Partygate. He said that the government had important things to get on with. Reflecting on a selection of current crises: the cost-of-living crisis was created […]
Truth doesn’t matter? Integrity doesn’t matter? Honour doesn’t matter? Is all that matters remaining in power to prosecute an agenda of enrichment for cronies and supporters, a grave reduction in human rights and a whole slew of policies which will serve to widen the inequality gap and deepen poverty and deprivation? It would seem so […]
There are any number of ways of seeing the photograph’s issued yesterday of the party Boris Johnson attended on 13 November 2020. Denis Swayne MP managed to call it a work event yesterday, which was no excuse. No doubt Grant Shapps will destroy any remaining credibility he has by telling the morning media round some […]
It’s hard trying to raise awareness of governments’ failure to manage the pandemic properly. It shouldn't be, but it is. Why, and why keep going: 1. There is a small but powerful minority who want the public to forget about Covid, even if that means more death and disability. Consumer confidence is hit hard when […]
The NHS is being reorganised again, and if you’re like most people you’ll have questions. So what’s happening? Campaign group We Own It have given us permission to reproduce their guide to Integrated Care Systems (ICS). In an upcoming article, we’ll talk about what’s going on in the south west, with information from Save Our Hospital […]
Some two million people in the UK are experiencing longer-term health impacts from Covid. Suffering from post-Covid brain-fog himself, Tom Scott had a look at some recent research into Long Covid and possible treatments for the condition. Last month I finally caught Covid, along with dozens of other people who had unwisely attended a friend’s […]
Omicron is far more dangerous than the flu, explains Dr Dan Goyal. Many have bought into the “Covid is now like the Flu” narrative. So here’s the science without the scientific jargon. Judge for yourself. For the ‘Too long, didn’t read’ folk: like for like: infection fatality ratio (IFR) approximately six times that of flu; […]
Dear West Country Voices, My wife is a GP and also works regular shifts in A&E. Last Friday she was diagnosed as having Covid. She worked all through the darkest days of 2020 and wonders how she has escaped it so far. I had it in October last year at the same time as our […]
Russ’s epic and epigrammatic summary of the madness and horror that is the current UK political scene. We’ve left the numbers in so you don’t get lost! Buckle up! I was going to do #TheWeekInTory, but try as I might, I can’t find a single thing they’ve done wrong this week. Only kidding. It’s been […]
The current government strategy against Covid is not working. Putting your fingers in your ears and shutting your eyes to pretend it isn’t happening is not a strategy; in fact, it is the perfect definition of the opposite, and furthermore, a total abdication of the responsibility of good government. Our hospital has had to declare […]
Almost two years since the first pandemic safeguards were introduced on 23 March 2020, unvaccinated people arriving in the UK will no longer have to take tests, and passenger locator forms have been scrapped. The testing rule had already been lifted for people who have been vaccinated, and the government removed the last of their […]
The NHS is one month older than I am. It has been a constant companion, there at my birth, at the birth of of my children and grandchildren and at the side of my parents and parents-in-law at the end of life. The NHS offer of universal healthcare, based on need rather than capacity to […]
One of the worst pandemic mistakes, in my opinion: iIn the UK in April 2020, a nationwide directive to ration oxygen was issued. Rationing oxygen, in the UK! A bit of background: 1. For the vast majority of Covid patients, the lower part of the lungs are unaffected. Most symptoms come from the infection in […]
Did we try hard enough to “Find the Sick!”? Dr Dan Goylan exposes another Covid mistake. Symptom Profiles: Why did the UK not include the other common symptoms of Covid for testing and case I.D.? Does this expose the true motives of the UK’s approach? By now we have all learned the symptoms of Covid, […]
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 […]
This is going to be a no-holds-barred piece…and it needs to be, because something appalling is happening that, frankly, tops all the very many appalling things that have and are still happening under Boris Johnson’s reign of horror. Covid is killing and harming kids. Lots of them. It’s not mild. It’s not benign. It’s not […]
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 […]