"The lady doth protest too much, methinks"

How the UK has been egregiously misled by a group of extremist neo-Marxists

6th March 2023: Updated at section 3 with actual numbers of ECMO patients in 2021.

1 Introduction

In recent days, a high profile Twitter account run by an anonymous medical professional has accused an intensive care practitioner in the UK of serious malpractice. The charges laid range from effectively bringing the medical profession into disrepute, by lying, to murder/manslaughter of unvaccinated Covid patients.

In a sane world, where the accused consultant has nothing to hide and no agenda to push, you would expect such claims to be summarily dismissed as ridiculous, completely ignored, or possibly used as the basis for a defamation claim. But this is not what happened. The accused consultant spent many hours on Twitter in an unseemly public row with the accuser, and several other ICU specialists joined in with gratuitous and entirely unprofessional insults aimed at others in the ‘conversation’.

The NHS employees of this story are, at the very least, engaged in an insane, ideologically driven war on the people they are supposed to serve, and they are a disgrace to their profession. The behaviour of the accused individual at the heart of the story brings to mind the famous quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet used as the title of this piece; "The lady doth protest too much, methinks".

This article examines the story and adds further detailed information, not previously in the public domain, about a related case from several months ago. The additional information supports the charge that NHS specialists and managers have been systematically lying to the public and, together, these incidents are a damning indictment of the individuals and the NHS culture which allows - even encourages - them to operate against the best interests of those whose taxes pay their salaries.

But what does this have to do with the BBC? Read on to find out …

2 Backdrop

2.1 Globalist Neo-Marxism

This is a story about a deliberate conspiracy to propagate Covid vaccine disinformation by a group within the NHS and BBC.

But it’s really a story about the neo-Marxist globalism which threatens our very way of life. To keep it brief, I will not provide detailed information on the “Long March through the Institutions” - an online search will provide a full background for anyone who needs it. Suffice to say here that the “Woke” lunacy we see all around us is the result of Long March neo-Marxist ideology having infiltrated every public institution in the UK - including the NHS and the BBC - over many decades. In recent years, many large private corporations have also fallen victim to the cult.

To be successful in the 21st century, Marxism must be global. It’s been tried by individual nations many times and failed dismally on each occasion; while there is a capitalist alternative with which to compare results, neo-Marxist disasters will always be exposed. The ever-increasing authority vested in supra-national institutions - the UN (and its agencies the IPCC and the WHO), NATO, the EU, the ECHR and others - is intended precisely to facilitate the imposition of neo-Marxist globalism, and it’s working like a (bad) dream.

The hysteria-driven worldwide response to Covid - an entirely routine pandemic with consequences, in population adjusted terms, similar to the Asian and Hong Kong Flu outbreaks in the 1950’s and 1960’s - only makes sense when seen in the context of this neo-Marxist globalist ideology. Nothing to do with the response was ever really about ‘Public Health’; we see the evidence constantly in the “far right, anti-mask, anti-vaxxer” slurs which pervade mainstream media propaganda, state censorship, and social media discourse.

It is important, in March 2023, that the sane among us do not fall into the trap of endlessly fighting “yesterday’s battles” which are mostly already lost. By far the greatest threat to democratic freedom now is not from the exaggerated pandemic, but from the false “Climate Emergency” narrative intended to pave the way for the insanity of Net Zero and the CBDC’s that will facilitate the enforcement of individual Carbon Budgets. AKA control of the people in the neo-Marxist “Great Reset”. My colleague and I addressed the madness of the Net Zero agenda in a recent paper.

What is needed now is for a truly independent enquiry to be established to reveal the truth about the Covid fiasco, so that the rest of us can get on with rejecting the wider madness safe in the knowledge that Covid crimes will not go unpunished. Such an enquiry will clearly not happen in Europe but, now that Republicans have control of Congress, there are encouraging signs that a proper investigation could soon be underway in the US; time will tell.

In a related development, perhaps the main benefit of the current “WhatsApp Files” revelations from the Daily Telegraph is that people will finally see the utter futility of expecting anyone in the UK ‘establishment’ being the slightest bit interested in investigating the actual “Science”.

However, every now and then, there is a specific incident or - as in this story - a group of related incidents which shine an evidential light on the egregious lies of ideological lunatics in the institutions to which we mistakenly lend our unquestioning trust. In such cases, we need to learn the lessons of the past in order to avoid falling for the same deceit in future battles.

2.2 The Unravelling Narrative

Anybody not in the neo-Marxist globalist cult knows by now that they have been fed a non-stop diet of complete nonsense about the pandemic and the response for the past 3 years, and the Telegraph “WhatsApp files” provide further confirmation of that by the day.

• Lockdowns have led to economic disaster, double-digit inflation and the worst industrial unrest since the 1970’s.

• Population mask mandates were useless, as the Cochrane Review has shown.

• Vaccines did not prevent infection, viral spread, or disease. They did lead to many injuries and deaths among the vaccinated.

• None of it was based on genuine “science” or empirical evidence.

The initial response response also led to many “iatrogenic” deaths. That is, deaths resulting from unnecessary or inappropriate medical treatment among those who would otherwise have survived the disease itself. Again, for the sake brevity, I will not re-visit this subject in detail here - many others, notably those in the PANDA group, have discussed this in detail, but a short summary is useful here to provide context for the details which follow - indeed, for any discussion of the Covid response.

My colleague and I, in a previous paper, estimated that the true number of pandemic deaths in England and Wales has been around 90,000. Excess deaths above that number are almost certainly the result of lockdown measures and/or vaccinations.

It is beyond reasonable doubt that some of those 90,000 deaths were iatrogenic, but there is not sufficient publicly available data to estimate an accurate percentage. Given everything we do know however, as documented in the totality of our earlier papers, it is entirely possible that it was 50%, or more.

• According to the ONS, there were nearly 20,000 deaths of care home residents “involving Covid” between 2 March and 12 June 2020. We know that many elderly people were assigned ‘DNAR’ (do not attempt resuscitation) at this time, that residents were isolated from family members, and that prescriptions for Midazolam went “through the roof”. Join the dots.

“there were 66,112 deaths of care home residents (wherever the death occurred); of these, 19,394 involved COVID-19, which is 29.3% of all deaths of care home residents”

• We also know that large numbers of hospital ICU patients were put on ventilators (‘intubated’) during this time, at least some of them for dubious reasons - e.g. to minimise the chance of them spreading viral particles as a result of less ‘containable’ breathing support methods, e.g. CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure).

• There has been much controversy over the inappropriate use of risky therapeutic drugs, notably Remdesevir, to treat Covid patients in hospital.

• Finally, the withholding of early therapeutic drugs (e.g. Ivermectin), based on suspiciously vociferous and poorly evidenced claims of their ineffectiveness, and the lack of guidance around prophylactic treatments (e.g. Vitamin D & Zinc), probably meant that some unfortunate people progressed needlessly to serious illness and death.

In summary, it is possible, had the government made no interventions at all in March 2020 or since, that the total number of Covid deaths in the UK would have been no more than 50,000 people - compared to the hundreds of thousands of excess deaths we’ve actually seen so far. Without a truly independent enquiry, which we are unlikely ever to see, we will never know the truth. What we do know is that, tragically, we have not seen anything like the truth so far.

3 The Twitter Fight

In the last few days, there has been a prolonged and bad-tempered exchange on Twitter between a high profile ‘vaccine sceptic’ account, @Jikkyleaks, and a UK ICU consultant, Dr Caz Sampson, @caz_sampson.

Like many Twitter threads, especially emotive ones, this ‘debate’ quickly gets very fragmented, and goes off on the odd tangent, with several of Dr Sampson’s colleagues and Jikkyleaks’ supporters joining in. Anyone with a Twitter account can browse the thread themselves, but I’ll try to summarise the key points.

Essentially, Dr Sampson makes an assertion that “98.7% of our covid ECMO patients were unvaccinated (i.e. had received no vaccine doses)”. Jikkyleaks claims there is no evidence that - in the cohort of interest - the unvaccinated were any sicker (any more in need of ECMO treatment) than the vaccinated and, inter alia, accuses her of targeting the unvaccinated for risky interventions because of her alleged ideological stance of hating them.

Implicit in that specific accusation is that ECMO introduces additional risk to the patient and was a factor in the subsequent deaths of some of them. S/he is basically alleging manslaughter/murder.

So what is ECMO? ‘Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation’ basically pumps blood from the body and oxygenates it in a specialist life support machine that temporarily replaces the function of the heart or lungs. It then pumps the blood back into the body, as though it’s been processed ‘normally’ by the patients own lungs. For the purposes of this discussion, an ECMO machine is an artificial lung.

It is not obvious, in the context of ICU patients who are already of course very sick and possibly already mechanically ventilated (unclear), exactly what level of additional risk this subjects the patient to. But Dr Sampson does not refute the claim, in fact she explicitly endorses it.

Unsurprisingly, she does reject any allegation of deliberately killing her patients. But, regardless of any potential medical misconduct, there seems to be a definite attempt on the part of Dr Sampson to mislead her Twitter audience, based either on her inability to understand the data she presents, or - more likely in my opinion - on her disinterest in caring to understand, in favour of ‘making stuff up’ to further her ideological bias and “antivaxxer” crusade. Or indeed, if the allegations made by Jikkyleaks have any substance, to cover up wilful misconduct.

Initially, she did not transparently reference any specific cohort in support of her “98.7% unvaccinated” claim, but she later tweeted this.

So essentially her claim relates to “many” ECMO patients in “wave 3”. Whatever she means by that. Then she also tweets this (ICU data from ICNARC, not specifically ECMO, which is a tiny subset of ICU patients):

Of course, there were “many” younger people who hadn’t yet been vaccinated as of 1st May 2021, as publicly available UKHSA data shows.

Update 6th March 2023: Subsequently - on March 4th, while I was drafting this paper - Dr Sampson posted a link to an excel file with specific ECMO data:

This ECMO-specific file shows that, for the period July-Nov 2021, approximately 92% of ECMO patients were indeed unvaccinated - a ratio of 11 unvaccinated patients for every 1 vaccinated. So (assuming the data is accurate) the unvaccinated were either genuinely sicker, as claimed by Dr Sampson, or were subjected to more cavalier treatment, as alleged by Jikkyleaks.

Note however that the total number of unvaccinated patients she is referencing here, over a 5 month period and across the whole of England, is 141. Furthermore, it is not clear what definition of “unvaccinated” applies - controversially, people have typically been classified as unvaccinated for 2 or 3 weeks post-vaccination. It is also unknown how many of these patients survived, although in the Twitter thread Jikkyleaks links to a paper quoting an ECMO mortality rate of 39% from an earlier period. Even if we were to take everything Dr Sampson says as true, that would imply a potential additional death toll of around 55 unvaccinated people nationwide. Or 55 potential malpractice victims if Jikkyleaks is correct.

Interestingly, the excel file also provides separate statistics for pregnant women - very pertinent to the discussion in section 4 below.

A brief diversion is warranted here, to illustrate the important point that Dr Sampson is in no way exceptional when it comes to showing contempt for a large segment of the public. Several medical accounts joined the row; “Balazs” being representative of the neo-Marxist radical activists who have appointed themselves gods in this dystopian fiasco:

The claims of Dr Sampson (and her supporters) are all over the place. They are not supported by the data she selectively presents and deliberately conflates and, to this professional data analyst, her credibility is in tatters. Especially when another ICU/ECMO controversy from several months ago is taken into account:

4 Previous Form

On August 5th 2022, the BBC published an article entitled “Covid: Mum urges vaccination take-up after baby loss” on their web site:

This is clearly an article primarily designed to promote the “get vaccinated” message - in August 2022 when, in Dr Caz Sampson’s own words, as above, “No one has been on ECMO for severe Covid in 2022 in my hospital”. This is important, and I’ll return to it shortly.

The original BBC article included the outrageous lie that “one in five people in intensive care units are women who are pregnant who haven’t been vaccinated”. This is in quotation marks in the article - either Dr Anustha Sivananthan made this exact comment, or the BBC reporter, Gill Dummigan, made it up. Those are the only two possibilities.

Either way, the claim is risibly false, as can be easily verified with reference to ICNARC data which, in other circumstances, Dr Sampson is so keen to quote.

Between January and August 2022, 31 out of 4262 people admitted to ICU “with Covid” were pregnant women. One in 137 - regardless of vaccination status. There is no available breakdown of how many of these were unvaccinated, but we are constantly subjected elsewhere to the propaganda that most people in the UK are vaccinated, so it’s reasonable to estimate that the relevant true statistic is not “one in five” but closer to 1 in 1,000.

The outright deception was immediately obvious when I first saw this article, and I made a formal complaint to the BBC. A short time later, I received my first response - they were busy “dealing with a higher than normal volume of cases”.

Incidentally, to any organisation less wilfully myopic than the BBC, to be "currently dealing with a higher than normal volume of cases" might tell them something, but not to this publicly funded body with an overall annual income upwards of £5 billion.

I digress. On October 18th, more than 10 weeks after my complaint was made, I finally received the BBC’s “substantive” response:

There are many things to note about this reply; I have highlighted four of them.

1. They quoted Dr Sivananthan directly. She actually made that completely false claim, on the record. But, of course, because it accorded with the BBC’s pre-existing bias - that Covid was now an “epidemic of the unvaccinated” - they didn’t conduct the most basic of editorial sanity checks.

2. There’s that now-familiar topic - ECMO. This was a claim based (fraudulently as is now clear), on ECMO patients. More on that below.

3. Ms Lewis still insults our intelligence with the claim that “This article was primarily about a mother who lost her baby after getting Covid-19 while she was pregnant”. This was ‘primarily’ an article urging vaccination, as both the headline and the content make very clear.

4. Ms Lewis is “now satisfied”. Again, more on that below.

The very slightly revised article is still available on the BBC web site.

But the BBC made no attempt to actually clarify their outrageously false propaganda - which, in any case, had been present unaltered on their web site for over 10 weeks and used to justify further “anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory” hate speech on Twitter.

As we have already heard from Dr Sampson; “No one has been on ECMO for severe Covid in 2022 in my hospital”. So how many people was Dr Sivananthan referring to in her fearmongering “one in five” statement?

Had the original story been even close to true, one in five of the 4262 people admitted to ICU in 2022 would have been around 850 people - pregnant women “in ICU because they hadn’t been vaccinated”. This was clearly the message the original deceptive article was intended to convey - that hundreds, possibly thousands of unvaccinated pregnant women were at risk of severe Covid (Omicron) in mid 2022. And it is still the message of the ‘corrected’ article (which “now adheres to our Editorial Guidelines” according to the lazy and/or disingenuous Ms Lewis) to the millions of ordinary readers who have never heard of ECMO.

The truth is that ECMO treatment is exceedingly rare. There are only a few treatment centres in the UK and at the height of the pandemic (April 2020) one of them, St Barts, peaked at 11 patients. Across the whole of the UK at that time, it would have been around 100.

To my knowledge, figures for August 2022 are not publicly available, but Dr Sampson did provide the equivalent statistics for a year earlier, as discussed in section 3 above.

In August 2022 (in the Omicron period) the numbers would have been significantly lower - possibly 10 simultaneous ECMO patients nationwide (no doubt the honest Dr Sampson or Dr Sivananthan could tell us, in the name of transparency). “One in five” of that number would be one or two people at any one time. Not the many hundreds or even thousands that the BBC were and still are attempting to imply.

5 Conclusion

Whether or not the more extreme Jikkyleaks allegations - of serious medical malpractice leading knowingly to unnecessary patient deaths - are true, this whole story is an example of disinformation propaganda pushed in support of the ideological neo-Marxist agenda described in the introduction.

Are those extreme allegations true? In the opinion of this author, they are unproven on the basis of the circumstantial evidence. Anything in Dr Sampson’s Twitter history which could conceivably be construed as an admission of guilt is actually a consequence of her disingenuous presentation of misleading “data”, to promote her campaign against “far-right anti-vaxxers”. Nothing she claims bears serious scrutiny, but it seems the “15 to 1” ratio central to the Jikkyleaks case is not too far off the mark; actually 11 to 1 as per the updated information in section 3.

This of course does not mean that the allegations of unlawful killing are provenly untrue; we have seen numerous horrendous examples of euthanasia and murder by NHS personnel in the in the past - Dr Harold Shipman being perhaps the most notorious.

Given the clear ideological extremism displayed by the key actors in this saga, it would be a very naïve person who entirely dismissed the possibility of foul play. People this delusional, so in the grip of what has been described elsewhere as “Mass Formation Psychosis”, and who see themselves as judgemental gods, are capable of pretty much anything, as has been proven time and again throughout history.

Aside from the possible investigation of criminal medical malpractice (surely merited here), the only question that remains is; what was the source of the original claims by Dr Sivananthan in the BBC story of August 5th 2022 - was there a deliberate attempt by a cadre of NHS ideologues, aided and abetted by the BBC, to mislead the public?

I believe there was.

How would Dr Sivananthan - medical director at Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust - even have known about the specialist ECMO statistics? Can her words, as quoted directly by the BBC - “one in five people in intensive care units are women who are pregnant who haven’t been vaccinated” - be excused as a ‘slip of the tongue’?

For someone familiar with this very esoteric data set to make such an error is entirely beyond credibility. Do Dr Sivananthan and Dr Sampson know each other? Did they cook up this story together in a deliberate attempt to promote a coordinated conspiracy?

Furthermore, is it likely that alarm bells would not have rung in the mind of a genuinely impartial Health Correspondent for BBC North West? If it was so obvious to me that the original story was arrant nonsense, why wasn’t it obvious to Gill Dummigan?

The two related stories I have detailed above point to a clear and obvious attempt by certain elements within the NHS, and their BBC collaborators, to wilfully mislead the public about the vaccines and other aspects of the Covid response.

Something very sinister has happened here. But this is just one example. Activist factions within the NHS and the BBC have clear form throughout the last 3 years for this kind of deceptive nonsense - as do various other actors in government and the civil service, illustrated so compellingly by the Telegraph WhatsApp files.

Many thousands of people have lost their livelihoods and their lives as a result. These people have blood on their hands.