Spiked: a shot in the dark, by Dr Clare Craig
I was sceptical about COVID-19 from the start. I was in Wuhan when it started (something I only realised in retrospect) and one year into the ‘pandemic’ not a single colleague or friend there had contracted it. I also knew that people were not dropping dead in the streets.
I was not in denial about the existence of a novel virus (to which I eventually succumbed), but I was unconvinced that it posed the existential threat that was presented in the media. After all, I was in Hong Kong when SARS kicked off in 2003 and made regular visits during that ‘pandemic’. The outcome of SARS never matched the hysterical hype that accompanied it.
It took me longer to see through the COVID-19 vaccine scam. To enable me to travel, which was essential for my work, I was a willing recipient of the AstraZeneca vaccine. I happily waved my vaccine passport at airline officials on several visits to Europe and the United States.
Nevertheless, given the low risk from COVID-19, I was also convinced from the health perspective the vaccines were largely unnecessary. And then I started to investigate their efficacy and discovered, much to my consternation, that the COVID-19 vaccines – all of them – were virtually useless. In fact, an early piece of correspondence in the totally COVID-19-orthodox Lancet laid it out explicitly in 2021 by presenting the absolute risk reduction (ARR) and numbers needed to treat (NNT) for the whole range of COVID-19 vaccines.
Their efficacy, in terms of absolute risk reduction, hovered around 1% and the number needed to treat to prevent a single infection was in the hundreds. Given the low case fatality rate, a calculator was not required to work out that, to prevent a single death from COVID-19, the NNT was probably in the thousands.
The above preamble to this review of Dr Claire Craig’s excellent book Spiked: a shot in the dark is presented merely to demonstrate that, even to me as a hardened COVID-19 sceptic and someone with a son who had a stroke because of repeated Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines, the book was still a marmalade dropper.
Somewhere along the line I had somehow managed to miss the fact that the COVID-19 vaccines, with respect to Covid infection, were not only useless, they were worse than useless. People vaccinated with Covid vaccines were more, not less, likely to contract COVID-19 than those who remained unvaccinated. Dr Craig demonstrates this clearly and repeatedly using real data and referring to real studies.
If this is the case, therefore, why is this fact not more widely known? In fact, how has this not been headline news, ever? COVID-19 sceptics will be aware of the reasons which include deception, data manipulation, outright lying, repeated plugging of a false narrative and, of course, suppression and silencing of anyone who dared to counter the prevailing narrative on any aspect of the COVID-19 regime. The fact that the negative efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, which I have now studied quite intensively, was news to me shows how effectively the suppression of COVID-19 or vaccine scepticism was implemented.
Naturally, the author, a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathology, suffered at the hands of the regime, coming under investigation by her professional body, the General Medical Council (GMC). As someone who also came under investigation by my professional body, the Nursing & Midwifery Council (NMC), I was struck by the almost identical wording used in Dr Craig’s indictment to mine. This strongly suggests that we both suffered at the hands of a coordinated campaign of suppression. In passing, I must thank the author for support in her capacity as a member of the Health Advisory & Recovery Team (HART) via a co-signed letter to the NMC with Dr Ros Jones, also of HART.
Regarding the purported efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, Dr Craig refers to the excellent work of statisticians Professors Martin Neil and Norman Fenton. While not using the term ‘cheap’ – the one used by Neil and Fenton – Dr Craig explains how it is possible to demonstrate the effectiveness of a vaccine even when the vaccine is not effective. The ‘cheap trick’ is one of classification, whereby people who are vaccinated are classified as unvaccinated up to a point when the effectiveness of the vaccine is supposed to kick in.
Thus, any illness or death in that initial period – usually two weeks – amongst the vaccinated is credited to the unvaccinated side of the ledger. As Neil and Fenton point out in Fighting Goliath, a vaccine with absolutely no benefit can be shown to be effective merely by the application of the cheap trick.
Incidentally, the cheap trick violates one of the key principles for measuring the outcome of clinical trials without which reputable medical journals such as the Lancet and the BMJ will not publish trial reports. The principle is that of intention to treat, whereby trial results are published based on how people are classified from the outset by their allocated arm (i.e., whether they are in the vaccinated or non-vaccinated group), not by their purported status based on rules of when the vaccine supposedly ‘kicks in’. By omitting this crucial analysis, the COVID-19 regime permitted, even encouraged, breaking the rules of good clinical trial practice.
Spiked is replete with examples of how COVID-19 vaccine data, properly considered, repeatedly show that the vaccines led, paradoxically, to increased risk of COVID-19. In many cases, those developing the vaccines and those with an interest in promoting the pro-vaccine narrative knew that the data did not support their cause. Others, possibly too thick to appreciate the subtleties of examining such data and desperate to have a solution to what they believed was a deadly pandemic (I include prime ministers, presidents and health secretaries) were caught up in what Dr Craig frequently refers to as a ‘pedal-to-the-metal’ mentality. However, as she also indicates, the pedal was to the metal without anyone at the steering wheel.
If the process of developing the COVID-19 vaccines was out of control, that was matched by the fiction of success – the vaccine as saviour narrative – that was being fabricated around the fragile evidence base. Despite no medication or vaccine in history ever being 100% effective, this claim was made repeatedly for the COVID-19 vaccines. I am indebted to Dr Craig for providing references to that as any search on Google now returns the information that such claims were never made.
Of course, as even the high priests of vaccinology eventually had to admit that they were not 100% effective, the narrative changed to accommodate this, and the goalposts were shifted to say that prevention was not the aim. Rather it was prevention of hospitalisation and death that was the aim. But even here, the 100% effective claim reared its mendacious head with US President Joe Biden claiming that they were, as such, “100% effective”.
Perhaps old Joe, then in the throes of advancing dementia, could be forgiven for getting his facts wrong. Except that he was backed up in this claim by no less a person than the chief architect of the COVID-19 narrative, Anthony Fauci. Again, credit to the author for providing the necessary references.
I refer above to the paradoxical effect of the COVID-19 vaccines. However, to experts in the field there should have been no paradox. Vaccines, which have their effect in the bloodstream, are notoriously ineffective at preventing upper respiratory tract infections. Very early in the COVID-19 years I had lunch at the House of Lords with a former member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) who expressed his consternation at the COVID-19 vaccine rollout for that very reason.
The author declares one of the chapters to be more technical than the others and, in this chapter, she explains why the COVID-19 vaccines were having such a deleterious effect on COVID-19 infections. In short, there is a plausible mechanism whereby the Covid vaccines – which flood the body with COVID-19 spike proteins – lead to an initial suppression of the immune system which makes the vaccine recipient more, rather than less likely to become infected with COVID-19.
The immune system does more than fight COVID-19; it helps to fight other infections, and it also participates in surveillance for cancer. While Dr Craig does not include a consideration of increased levels of cancer or the ‘turbo-cancers’ reported by Professor Angus Dalgleish, she does refer to increased deaths from all causes including cancer as a result of the policies implemented during the COVID-19 years.
The increased levels of myocarditis observed in recipients of the Covid vaccines is referred to but the author does not dwell on this. She is more concerned with how an experiment on a massive scale on the population of the world could be conducted in the face of evidence that it was harmful.
Part of the drive to instil fear and push the campaign for vaccination without first investigating the costs versus benefits of such a strategy was the laughable modelling propagated by Professor Neil Ferguson and colleagues at Imperial College London. Dr Craig reflects on previous efforts at modelling pandemics by the same team, for example, for BSE, swine flu and foot and mouth disease, how they got those wrong and the disastrous consequences for the UK economy. She also provides instances of when; to accommodate modelling and predictions that did not reach expectations, the definition of ‘pandemic’ was changed, thereby lowering the bar for what constituted a pandemic.
As the Editor-in-Chief of several academic journals in my field, currently with Elsevier but working with Wiley during the COVID-19 years, I was fully aware of the policies implemented to fast-track COVID-19 papers. I refused to publish any articles on COVID-19 as I refused to participate in the fast-track peer review that was being encouraged. Dr Craig illustrates the damage that was done by this policy, which flooded the public domain with poorly scrutinised articles, all in praise of the COVID-19 vaccines. Articles which cast doubts on the vaccines were systematically filtered out or, if published, were soon retracted by journals succumbing to outside pressure. Pre-print articles were even removed from pre-print servers such as MedRxiv, contrary to the spirit of pre-printing. The academic publishing industry ought to hang its head in collective shame at the part it played in promoting the demonstrably harmful COVID-19 vaccine narrative.
The book concludes with a consideration of the powers that influenced the COVID-19 policies worldwide and the possible influence of both the Russian and Chinese communist parties. The are also communists in our midst who continue to influence pandemic preparedness; for example, Susan Michie who was a prominent member of SAGE, the panel chiefly responsible for advising the UK government. It does not take a genius to work out why ruining the economy of a liberal democracy and giving its citizens a taste of living under an oppressive regime would be favoured by communists.
Spiked: a shot in the dark ought to be in the hands of everyone who played a part, and continues to play a part, in promoting the COVID-19 vaccine narrative. General practitioners would be a good place to start; I continue to receive invitations for COVID-19 vaccine boosters. Every politician should read it and ponder their part in promoting the COVID-19 narrative and encouraging the public to take the COVID-19 vaccines. If ever Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance go to trial for their negligence and deliberate ignorance of the facts then Spiked: a shot in the dark should be ‘Exhibit A’ for the prosecution.
Spiked: a shot in the dark, by Dr Clare Craig is available now from Amazon.
