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my name is dr michael yeatonmy original training was a first-classhonours degree in biochemistryand toxicology followed by aresearch-basedphd into respiratory pharmacologyand after that i've worked my entirelife on the research sideof the pharmaceutical industry both bigpharmaand also biotech my specific focus hasbeeninflammation immunology allergyin the context of respiratory diseasesso the lungbut also the skin so i would say i'm akind of a deeply experiencedinflammation immunology pulmonology kindof researchperson i initially became concernedabout theour response to the coronavirus pandemictowards the middle or back end of aprilas early as that it had become clearthat if you look at the number of dailydeathsversus versus the date the pandemic hadturnedreally pleasingly already the wave wasfundamentally over and we would justwatch it fall for a number of monthswhich is what it didand so i became very perturbed aboutincreasing restrictions on the behaviorand movement ofof people in my country and i could seeno reason for it then and i still don'tgovernment's response to emergencies isguided bythe scientific group who sit togetherunder the strategicadvisory group for emergencies or sageso theyshould provide scientific advice to thegovernment about what's appropriate todosages has got several fundamental thingswrongand that has led to advice that'sinappropriateand not only has had horrible economiceffects buthas had continuing medical effects inthatpeople are no longer being treatedproperlysage took the view that since saskoff 2was anew virus that they believed therewouldn't be any immunity at all in thepopulationso i think that's the first thing iremember hearing that and and ipuzzled because i i already knew becausei read the scientific literature thatsarskov 2 was 80 similar to anothervirusyou may have heard of called sars thatmoved around the world a bit in 2003and more than that it's quite similar inpieces of itto common cold causing coronaviruses sowhen i heard that there was thiscoronavirus moving across the world ii wasn't as worried as perhaps otherpeople were because i figured thatsince uh there are four common coldcausing coronaviruses i figured thatquite a lot of population we've beenexposed to one of those virusesand would probably have a perhapssubstantial protective immunityand just to explain why i was soconfidenteverybody knows the story of edwardjenner and vaccinationand the story of cow pox and smallpoxand that theold story was that milkmaids had veryclear complexions they never sufferedfrom things like smallpox that if itdidn't kill you would leave your skinpermanently scarred and the reason thatthey had the protection was that theywere exposed to a more benignrelated virus called cowpox edwardjennercame up with the idea that if it'scowpox that saves the fair maidhe reasoned that if he could giveanother personan exposure to the cow pox he would beable to protect them from smallpox nowhe did an experiment that you can't donow and he never should have done it butapocryphally or really or maybe you'reill we're not sureedward jenner acquired some of theliquid froma person infected with cow poxrelatively mild pustules that then goawayand he got some of this and he hescraped it into the skin of a small boyand a few weeks later he obtained someliquid from some poor person that wasdying of smallpoxand infected the boy and lo and beholdthe boy did not get inand that gave birth to the whole fieldof what's calledvaccination and vax the vaccines vac itcomes fromvaccus the latin name for cow sowe are really familiar with theprinciple of cross immunizationi've thought quite a lot about you knowthe vulnerable people in in care homesandthere's an awareness that even thoughpeople really careful using ppeand so on but that's only going to go sofar ina kind of hot house environment wherepeople are pretty close together in acare home so thequestion i've had all year is once oneor two peopleyou know got the virus in a care homewhy wouldn't almost everyoneget infected and of course the the truthis they didn'tand one interpretation of thatdistinction is that a large proportionof people in the care homeshad prior immunity at this time of yearabout 1 in 30 people have a cold causedby one of these coronavirusesand just like the protection againstsmallpox provided byprevious exposure to cowpox so peopleexposed to having had a cold caused byone of these coronaviruses they're nowimmuneto sarskoff ii so 30 percent of thepopulation was protected before we startsage said it was zero and i don'tunderstand how they could possibly havejustified thatthere's a second and equally fatalunaccountable error that they have madein their modelthe percentage of the population thatsage asserts have been infectedto date by the virus is about sevenpercenti know that that's what they believe andyou can see it in a document theypublished in september callednon-pharmaceutical interventions and itsaysuh sadly more than 90 percent of thepopulation isstill vulnerable it's unbelievably wrongand i'm just going to explain whythey've based their number on thepercentage of people in the country whohaveantibodies in their blood and only thepeople whobecame most ill needed to actuallydevelop and release antibodies aroundtheir bodyso it is certainly true that the peoplewho have lots of antibody werewere infected but a very large number ofpeople had milder symptomsand even more people had none at all andthe best estimates that we can arrive atis that those peopleeither made no antibodies or so lowamounts that they will have faded fromnowrecent publication on the percentage ofcare home residents who have antibodiesto the virusvery very interesting this time theywere using high sensitivitytests for antibodies and they carefullypicked out residents thatnever were pcr positive these are peoplewho never got infectedand they found that 65 of them hadantibodies to the virus they never gotinfected so i i believe there washigh prevalence of immunity in thatpopulation prior to the voice arrivingbig story in the media recently wasthat the percentage of people withantibodies against the virus in theirblood wasfalling now this was cast as by concernthat immunity to saskatchewan doesn'tlast very longwell you know anyone with knowledge ofimmunitywould would just simply reject that it'snot the way immunity to virus works thatwould bet cells so if the antibodies are fallinggradually over time which they have fromspringto present the only plausibleexplanationis that the prevalence of the virus inthe population is fallingand that's why the antibody productiongradually subsidesless than 40 percent of the populationare susceptible even theoreticalepidemiologists would tell you thatthat'stoo small a number to support aconsolidated and growing outbreakcommunity immunity heard immunityso sage says that we're not even closeand i'm telling you thatthe best science by the best scientistsin the worldpublished in the top peer-reviewedjournals saysthey're wrong that more than 60 of thepopulation are now immuneand it's simply not possible to have alarge and growingpandemic really good news genuine goodnews to hear that there's data emergingfrom the vaccineclinical trials and we are seeingvaccines that raise not justantibodies but they're also producing tcell responsesthis is great back to proper scienceproper immunologythat's how immune to viruses worksso my surprise though and it's justannoying thatwhen we're talking about uh thepercentage of the population that'sstillsusceptible we only talk aboutantibodies like seven percent from sagewhy are we not talking about the 50 thathave got t-cell immunityand so you might be thinking if mikeyeah and dr mike eden is telling youthese thingsor how come the pandemic isn't overwell this may come as a surprise to youbut i i believefundamentally it is over the country hasexperiencedalmost a complete cycle now of the virussweeping through the landand we are at the end of it london waswas horribly affected in the spring andsomewhere in early april they wereexperiencingseveral hundred deaths per dayfrom people dying with similar symptomsin respiratory failure anduh inflammation and at the moment thenumber of peopledying of sizkof2 in the capital is lessthan 10 so it'sit's down by 98 or something like thatand the reason it's down is becausethere are now toofew people in london susceptible toallow the virus to magnify to amplify toget an epidemicand and they would have been hit by nowbecause they were the first place hit inthe springand i think what we're seeing now in thenortheast and the northwest would be the dying embers of thespreading out of this virusand i'm very sorry that it is still truethat a small number of people arecatching it getting ill and dyingso why aren't the media telling us thatthe pandemic is overit's not over because sage says it's notso sage consists ofvery many scientists from a range ofdisciplinesmathematicians and clinicians and thereare multiple committeesbut i found to my surprise and i'mactually going to use the word horrorthat in the spring all the way throughthe spring and summersage did not have on their committeesomeone who i would call a card carryingimmunologist a clinical immunologist ihave to say i think that in the springand summer sage was deficient in theexpertise it hadthey should have armed themselves youknow with around the tableall the people required to to understandwhat was happening and they didn't dothatpeople asked me then well mike if it'syou know if it's fundamentally overwhy are we still getting hundreds ofdeaths a dayfrom sarskoff too and i've thought a lotabout thisthere is a test that's performed withpeople have their noses andtonsils swabbed and then a test called apcr test is performed on that andwhat they're looking for isn't the virusyou might think it's looking for thevirus but it's not what they're lookingfor is a small piece ofgenetic sequence it's called rnaunfortunatelythat bit of rna will be found inpeople'stonsils and nose not if they've justcaught the virus and they're about toget ill or they're already illit's also going to be found if they wereinfectedpreviously weeks or even sometimes asmall number of months agolet me just explain why that is ifyou've been infected and you've foughtoff the virus which most people doyou'll have broken dead bits of virusthese are tiny things smaller than yourcellsperhaps spread all the way through yourairway embedded in bits of mucusmaybe inside an airway lining cell andsoover a period of weeks or months youbring upcells that contain broken dead pieces ofthe virus that you have conquered andkilledhowever the pcr test is not able todetect whether theviral rna has come from a living virusor a dead one as i've just described soi thinka large proportion of the so-calledpositivesare in fact what i call cold positivesthey're correctly identifying that thereis someviral rna in the sample but it's from adead virus it can't hurt themthey're not going to get ill they can'ttransmit it to anybody else so they'renot infectiousso that accounts for a large numberof the so-called positive cases theseare people who'vebeaten the virus why are we using thistest thatcannot distinguish between activeinfection and people who've conqueredthe virusthis test has never been used in thisway and i've worked in this field it'snot a suitable technique it's ait's the kind of technique you would usefor forensic purposesif you were trying to do a dna test toestablish whether or not a person was atthe scene of a crimeyou would not be doing these tests by awindysupermarket car parking what looks likeplastic marquee tents on picnic tablesit's not suitable at all and itdefinitely shouldn't be done in the wayit's been doneit's subject to many mechanical errorsshould we say handling errorsif this was a test being used for legalpurposes for forensic purposes like adna identity testthe judge would throw out this evidencewould say it's not admissibleit produces positives even when there'sno virus there at all we call that afalse positive as we've increased thenumber of tests done per dayso we've had to recruit less and lessexperienced laboratory staff and nowwe're using people who've never workedprofessionallyin this area what that does is itincreases the frequency of mistakesand the effect of this is that the falsepositive raterises and rises so if you had a falsepositive rate of one percent which mrmatthancock told us was roughly the numberthey had in the summerthen if you tested a thousand peoplethat had no virusten of them would be positiveastonishinglyif the prevalence of the virus was onlyone in a thousandthat's point one percent as the officeof national statistics told us it wasthrough the summerthen if you use the pcr test only one ofthem will bepositive and genuinely so but if thefalse positive rate is as low as onepercentyou'll also get 10 positives that arefalse some people did say to me wellthere'll be a higher percentage ofpeople coming forward for testing in thecommunityso-called pillar two testing becausethey've been instructed only to come ifthey've gotsymptoms but i call bs on that onei don't think that's true i know lots offriends and relativeswho've been told by an employer wellyou've sat near someone who'stested positive and i don't want you tocome back to work until you've got anegative testi've seen information from many towns inthe north certainlybirmingham was one manchester wasanother boltonwhere councils and i really think theywere trying to be helpfulwe're out leafleting the people of theircities saying we're going to come roundand swab you all because we want totrack down this virusnow once you start testing people moreor less randomly instead ofhaving symptoms you get the same amountof virus in the population as the officeof national statistics found which isat the time was one in a thousand andi've just told youmatt hancock confirmed during the summerthey had a false positive rate of aboutone percentso that means out of a thousand people10 would test positive and it would be afalse resultand only one would test positive and itwas correctthis test is monstrously unsuitablefor detecting who has live virus intheir airwayit's subject to multiple distortionsthat are worsening as we get into thewinteras the number of tests done per dayincreasethe number of errors made by theseoverworkednot very experienced lab staff increasei think it's not unreasonable to saya best guess of the false positive rateat the moment what's called theoperational false positive rateis about five percent five percent ofthree hundred thousandis fifteen thousand positives i thinksome of those positives are reali don't think it's very many now theproblem with this false positiveissue it doesn't just stop it quotescasesit extends to people who are unwell andgo to hospitalso people who go to hospital havingtested positiveand it could be a false positive and ithink most of them are at the momentif you go to hospital and you've testedpositive previously or you test positivein hospital you'll be counted now as acovered admissionalthough there are more people inhospital now than a month ago this isnormal for autumn regrettablypeople catch respiratory viruses andbecome ill and some will diei just don't believe it's got anythingto do with coffee 19 anymorethere are more people in intensive carebeds now than they werea month or so ago that's entirely normalas we move through late autumninto the early winter those beds becomeusedbut there aren't more people than isnormal for the time of year and we'renot about to run out of capacitycertainly as a national levelbut i think you know it is going now ifyou should now dieyou'll be counted as a covered death butthat's not correctthese are people who might have havegone to hospital having had a broken legfor example but they'llthree percent of them will still testpositive and they're not they haven'tgot the virus it's ait's a false positive and if they diethey'll be called a coffee death andthey are not they've died of somethingelseone of the most troubling things i'veheard this yearwas mr johnson telling us about the moonshottesting everybody often maybe every dayis the way out of this problem i'mtelling you it's the way to keep usin this problem that number of tests isorders of magnitude higherthan we're already testing now and thefalse positive ratehowever low it is will be far too largeto acceptit will produce an enormous number offalse positiveswhat we should do is stop mass testingnot only is an affront to your libertyit will not help at all it will beimmensely expensive and it will bea pathology all of its own we'll befightingoff stupid people mostly governmentministers i'm sorry to say who are notnumerous and do not understandstatisticsif you test a million people a day witha test that producesone percent false positives 10 000people a day will wrongly be toldthey've got the virusif the prevalence of the virus was say0.1like the office of national statisticssaid it was in summerthen only a tenth of that number uh 1000would correctly be identified but youcan't distinguish amongst the 11 000who have genuinely got the virus and whoare false positivesmoonshot i think will have a worse falsepositive rateit's not fixable and it's not necessaryeitherthe pandemic having passed through thepopulation not only ofof the uk but of all of europe andprobably all of the worldquite soon it won't returnwhy won't it return well they've gott-cell immunitywe know this it's been studied by thebest cellular immunologists in the worldsometimes people will say well it lookslike theimmunity is starting to fade you'llsometimes see things like that andwhen i saw the first headline like thisi remember being really quite confusedbecause that's not the wayimmunology works just think about it fora moment if that was how it workedit could kill you when you had to fightit off and if you had successfully donethat it somehow didn't leave a mark inyour bodywell it does leave a mark on your bodythe way you fought it offinvolved certain pattern recognitionreceptors and has left you withas it were memory cells that rememberwhat it was they fought offand if they see that thing again it'svery easy for them to get those cells towork again in minutes or hoursand they will protect you so the mostlikely explanation is it'll last a longtimeso i read a bit more about thisso-called tailing off of immunityand i realized they were talking aboutantibodies justincorrect to to think that antibodiesand how long they stay up is a measureofimmune protection against viruses i meanyou can tell i'mi don't agree with this it says therehave been some classic experiments doneon people who have inborn errors inparts of their immune systemand some of them have inborn arrows thatmeans they can't make antibodiesand guess what they they are able tohandle respiratory viruses the same asyou and meso i don't think it's harmful to haveantibodies although some people areworried about the potential foramplifying inflammation from antibodiesbut but my view is that they're they'reprobably neutral and you definitelyshould not believe the story thatbecause the antibody falls away you'velost immunityagain that's just not the way the humanimmune system worksthe most likely duration of immunityto a respiratory virus like saskov to ismultipleyears why do i say that we actually havethe datafor a virus that swept through parts ofthe world 17 years ago called sarsand remember saskov 2 is 80 similar tosars soi think that's the best comparison thatanyone can providethe evidence is clear these very clevercellular immunologists studiedall the people they could get hold ofwho had survived sars17 years ago they took a blood sampleand they tested whether they respondedor not to the original sars and they alldidthey all have perfectly normal robustt-cell memory they are actually alsoprotected against saskov toobecause it's so similar it'scross-immunity so i would say the bestdata that existsis that immunity should be robust for atleast 17 yearsi think it's entirely possible that itis lifelong the style of theresponses of these people's t-cells werethe same as if you've been vaccinatedand then you come back years later toseehas that immunity been retained and so ithink the evidence isreally strong that the duration ofimmunity will be multiple years andpossiblylifelong there have been but a tinyhandful ofpeople who appear to have been infectedtwicenow they're very interesting we need toknow who they are and understand themvery wellthey're probably got certain rare immunedeficiency syndromesso i'm not pretending no one ever getsreinfected but i am pointing out thatit's literally five people or maybe 50peoplebut the world health organizationestimated some weeks ago that750 million people have been infected sofar by saskoff toothat means most people are not beingreinfected and i can tell you why thatis it's normal it'swhat happens with viruses respiratoryviruses some peoplehave have called for zero covid as ifit's some political sloganand there are some people i've heardcalling for it almost every daythey're completely unqualified to tellyou anything something that's reallyimportant to know is that sarskoffii it's an unpleasant virus there's noquestion about itbut it's not what you were told inspring we wereoriginally told that it would killperhaps three percent of people itinfected which is horrifying that's30 times worse than flu we alwaysoverestimatethe lethality of new infectious diseaseswhen we're in the eye of the stormi believe the true infection fatalityratioof covid19 the true threat to life isthe sameas seasonal flow so there's no reasonwhy you would want to try and drivecovey to zeroit's a nonsense that's just not howbiology isand all the means i have heard uhproposed asways to get us there are much moredamaging andpathological i would say than than thevirus itselfit's simply not possible to get rid ofevery singlecopy of the copied-19 virus and themeansto get you there would destroy societyforget the cost althoughit would be huge it would destroy yourliberty you would need to notgo out until you've been tested and haveyour result back and ii have described how the false positiverate would just destroy it from astatisticalperspective i don't believe it can bedone it's not scientifically realisticit's not medically realistic and it'snot what we have ever doneas the virus swept towards the uk in thein thelate winter and early spring i too wasconcerned because at the time we weretold perhapsthree percent might die so when theprime ministercalled for a lockdown i wasn't pleasedabout it but i understoodthat we should try this but it'simportant that you understandthat when we look at the profile of thepandemic as it passed through thepopulationthat it was clear that the number ofinfections every day wasfalling we'd pass the peak quite a longtimebefore lockdown started so we took allthat pain that locked down pain whichwas multiple weeks i don't rememberexactly how manymultiple weeks we took it for nothing ifthere was a really important effectof lockdown on the number of people whodied or the rate of ityou should at least be able to orderthem like these people had locked downand these didn'tand you cannot all heavily infectedcountries shapesare the same whether they had lockeddown or not they don't worki don't know why anyone is allowing youknow you to be pushed into this corneri don't think we entirely know why it isthat some countries were hit harder thanothersbut i have to say i think scientificallythe smart money is ona mixture of forces one would be thiscross immunityalthough china had an awful time inwuhan in hubai provinceit didn't spread elsewhere in thecountry and i suspect that meantbecause a lot of them had this crossimmunity and i thinknearby countries in the main had lots ofcross immunity so that's one possibilitythe other one though is in terms of theseverity ofwhat did the virus do to a particularpopulationwe've seen devastating effects incountries likeuk and in belgium uhfrance and maybe even in sweden and muchsmallernumbers of deaths in other countrieslike like greece and in germanyand you might think well was that whatit was it's something that they didand i wish it was true because if it wassomething we did we could learn from itand do it and it would work in thefuturebut there's no evidence whatsoever thatit was anything humans didthe passage of this virus through thehuman population is an entirelynatural process that completely ignoredour puny efforts to control itso there is this theory i don't like thename very much butit's called dry tinder if peoplein a country who are vulnerable for todyingin the winter usually of respiratoryviruses if you have a very mildwinter season like uk did we had a verymild seasonal flu last year and the yearbeforeand so did sweden then what happens isthere are larger number of veryvulnerable people who are even olderthan usualand and i think that's why we suffered arather large number of deaths it wasstill only0.06 percent of the populationequivalent toabout four weeks of normal mortalitybut countries that had very severewinters recently and greece and germanycertainly hadvery lethal winter flus in the last twoyearsi think then they had a smallerpopulation of very vulnerable peopleand that is the main reason why theylost fewer peopleit's not to do with locking down it'snot to do with testingor tracking or tracing i i personallydon't think any of those measures havemadeany difference at all so belgium and ukand sweden were particularly vulnerablewhereas adjacent nordic countries i iget fed up with hearing about this uhidea that they lock down and that's whyit saved themand fred the other nordic countries hadnormal flu epidemics the last two orthree yearssweden like uk had very mild epidemicsyou can just go and look at the numberof debts it's sub-normal foruk and sweden and now we've got asupra-normal a larger than normal numberof deaths from coverednow there may be other reasons i'm notsaying there are notbut i think those two main forces theamount of prior immunity and theso-called dry tinder what vulnerablefraction of the population did you haveas a result ofseasonal flu being intense or not ithink that accounts for most of itand it's it's just puberistic and uh andand kind of silly that our governmentand advisors tell you thatdoing things that have never worked inthe past like lock downare going to make any difference to thetransfer of respiratory viruses i don'tbelieve it for a moment there's noscientific evidence behind itand there are much stronger scientifichypotheses that do explain ityou might think that in terms of numbersof deaths excess deaths thatcovid has produced such a large numberthat this will be an awfulyear for excess deaths but surprisinglynot2020 is lining up to be about eights ina listsince 1993. roughly 620000 people die every year in thiscountry they sayin life we are also in death and it'strue it's beenawful for those who have been personallyaffected by illness and deathbut it's not particularly unusual interms of the number of people who'vediedso one of the things i've noticed hashappened in in recent yearsis that we almost seem to be moving uhyou know post-sciencepost fact as if as if facts don't matterfor someone who'squalified and practiced as aprofessional scientist for 35 yearsi think it's deeply distressing that idon't think you should listen to me if italked about i don't knowthe design of motorways or somethinglike i don't know anything aboutmotorways oror how to grow trees better i don't knowanything about thatbut i do know quite a lot aboutimmunology infectioninflammation and the way infectiousorganisms move through a populationi've no other reason for giving thisinterview other than i really care whathappens to my countryand we have to pull ourselves out ofthis and ipersonally believe the way forward istwofold it's not difficultone we should cease mass testing of themostly wellin the community immediately it onlyprovidesmisleading and grey information and yetwe're driving policyalmost completely based on it it'sdefinitely wrongshould not do it use the tests inhospital i'm not saying don't testdon't continue mass testing and forgod's sake don't increase the number oftestsit is a pathology all of its own whichmust bestamped out by right thinking people andi'm afraidthe people on stage who have providedthe modelingthe predictions the the measures thatshould be takenthat their work is so badly andobviouslyflawed lethally incompetent that youshould have no more to do with thesepeoplethey should be fired immediately and theeffect of that advice has been to havecost lots ofinnocent people their lives fromnon-covered causesthey should be dismissed andreconstituted using an appropriategroup of skilled individuals especiallyavoiding any who mighteven have the suggestion of a conflictof interesti think we're right at the edge of theprecipice i i really hope that we canpull backyou