Interview to Dr. mike Yeadon on PCR Testing (21 September 2020) - Transcript

 transcript from Dr. Nannai

The Dr. Mike Yeadon has trained a first class honours degree in Biochemistry and Toxicology, obtening his PHD into respiratory Pharmacology from the University of Surrey (UK) in 1988.

Expert in the Area of Immunology of Pharmacology and Allergology of Respiratory System, with 23 years in the Pharmaceutical industry (Big-Pharma). 

Joining Pfizer in 1995, he was responsible for the growth and portfolio delivery of the Allergy & Respiratory pipeline within the company. He was responsible for target selection and the progress into humans of new molecules. Dr. Yeadon has pubblished over 40 original research articles and now consults and partener with a number of biotechnology companies.

Interview to Dr. mMke Yeadon on PCR Testing (21 September 2020) – Transcript

My name is Dr. Michael Yeadon.

My original training was a first-class honours degree in biochemistry and toxicology. Followed by a research-based Phd into respiratory pharmacology

and after that i've worked my entire life on the research side of the pharmaceutical industry both Big Pharma, and also Biotech.

My specific focus has been inflammation, immunology, allergy in the context of respiratory diseases the lung, but also the skin. So, I would say i'm a kind of a deeply experienced inflammation, immunology, pulmonology kind of research person.

I initially became concerned about our response to the coronavirus pandemic towards the middle or back end of April as early as that. It had become clear that if you look at the number of daily deaths versus the date the pandemic had turned. Really, pleasingly, already the wave was fundamentally over and we would just watch it fall for a number of months which is what it did.

 And so i became very perturbed about increasing restrictions on the behavior and movement of people in my country and I could see no reason for it then and i still don't.

 

Government's response to emergencies is guided by the scientific group who sit together under the strategic advisory group for emergencies or SAGE. So, they should provide scientific advice to the government about what's appropriate to do. SAGE has got several fundamental things wrong and that has led to advice that's inappropriate and not only has had horrible economic effects but has had continuing medical effects in that people are no longer being treated properly.

SAGE took the view that since SARS-CoV-2 was a new virus that they believed there wouldn't be any immunity at all in the population.

So, i think that's the first thing i remember hearing that and I puzzled because i already knew because i read the scientific literature, that SarsCov-2 was 80% similar to another virus you may have heard of called SARS that moved around the world a bit in 2003 and more than that it's quite similar in pieces of it to common cold causing coronaviruses. So when I heard that there was this coronavirus moving across the world I wasn't as worried as perhaps other people were because i figured that since uh there are four common cold causing coronaviruses i figured that quite a lot of population we've been exposed to one of those viruses and would probably have a perhaps substantial protective immunity. Just to explain why i was so confident.

Eerybody knows the story of Edward Jenner and vaccination and the story of cowpox and smallpox

and that the old story was that milkmaids had very clear complexions they never suffered from things like smallpox that if it didn't kill you would leave your skin permanently scarred and the reason that they had the protection was that they

were exposed to a more benign related virus called cowpox.

Edward Jenner came up with the idea that if it's cowpox that saves the fair maid he reasoned that if he could give another person an exposure to the cow pox he would be able to protect them from smallpox.

Now, he did an experiment that you can't do now and he never should have done it but apocryphally or really or maybe really, we're not sure, Edward Jenner acquired some of the liquid from a person infected with cow pox relatively mild pustules that then go away.

and he got some of this and he scraped it into the skin of a small boy and a few weeks later he obtained some liquid from some poor person that was dying of smallpox and infected the boy.

And, lo and behold, the boy did not get in and that gave birth to the whole field of what's called vaccination and vax the vaccines vac it comes from "vaccus", the latin name for cow.

So, we are really familiar with the principle of cross immunization.

 

I've thought quite a lot about, you know, the vulnerable people in care homes and there's an awareness that even though people really careful using PPE and so on but that's only going to go. So, far in a kind of hot house environment where people are pretty close together in a care home.

 So, the question I have had all year is once one or two people you know got the virus in a care home, why wouldn't almost everyone get infected and of course the the truth is they didn't. And one interpretation of that distinction is that a large proportion of people in the care homes had prior immunity.

 

At this time of year about 1 in 30 people have a cold caused by one of these coronaviruses. And just like the protection against smallpox provided by previous exposure to cowpox.

So people exposed to having had a cold caused by one of these coronaviruses they're now immune to SarsCov-2.

So, 30 percent of the population was protected before we start.

SAGE said it was zero and i don't understand how they could possibly have justified that.

There's a second and equally fatal unaccountable error that they have made in their model.

The percentage of the population that sage asserts have been infected

to date by the virus is about seven percent.

I know that that's what they believe, and you can see it in a document they published in September called non-pharmaceutical interventions and it says:

"Sadly, more than 90 percent of the population is still vulnerable". It's unbelievably wrong!

And i'm just going to explain why.

They've based their number on the percentage of people in the country who have antibodies in their blood and only the people who became most ill needed to actually develop and release antibodies around their body.

So, it is certainly true that the people who have lots of antibody were infected, but a very large number of people had milder symptoms and even more people had none at all.

And the best estimates that we can arrive at is that those people either made no antibodies or so low amounts that they will have faded from now.

A recent publication on the percentage of care home residents

who have antibodies to the virus very, very interesting! This time they

we’re using high sensitivity.

Tests for antibodies and they carefully picked out residents that never were PCR positive: these are people who never got infected.

They found that 65% of them had antibodies to the virus, they never got infected.

So, I believe there was high prevalence of immunity in that population prior to the virus arriving.

 

Big story in the media recently was that the percentage of people with

antibodies against the virus in their blood was falling.

Now this was cast as by concern that immunity to SarsCov-2 does not

last very long.

Well, you know anyone with knowledge of immunity would just simply reject that it's not the way immunity to virus works that would be T cells.

So, if the antibodies are falling gradually over time which they have from spring to present.

The only plausible explanation is that the prevalence of the virus in the population is falling and that is why the antibody production gradually subsides.

Less than 40 percent of the population are susceptible even theoretical epidemiologists would tell you that.

That's too small a number to support a consolidated and growing outbreak community immunity herd immunity. So, SAGE says that we are not even close and I'm telling you that the best science by the best scientists in the world published in the top peer-reviewed journals.

Says they're wrong that more than 60 of the population are now immune and it's simply not possible to have a large and growing pandemic.

Really good news, genuine good news to hear that there's data emerging from the vaccine clinical trials, and we are seeing vaccines that raise not just antibodies, but they are also producing T cell responses this is great back to proper science proper immunology

that's how immune to viruses works.

So, my surprise though and it's just annoying that when we're talking about, uh, the percentage of the population that's still susceptible.

 we only talk about antibodies like seven percent from SAGE why are we not talking about the 50 % have got t-cell immunity and so you might be thinking if Mike Yeadon, dr Mike Yeaden is telling you these things or how come the pandemic isn't over.

Well, this may come as a surprise to you.

But I believe fundamentally it is over.

The country has experienced almost a complete cycle now of the virus

sweeping through the land, and we are at the end of it.

London was horribly affected in the spring and somewhere in early April they were experiencing several hundred deaths per day from people dying with similar symptoms in respiratory failure and, uh, inflammation and at the moment the number of people dying of SarsCov-2 in the capital is less than 10.

So, it's down by 98% or something like that and the reason it's down is because there are now too few people in London susceptible to allow the virus to magnify to amplify to get an epidemic.

And they would have been hit by now because they were the first place hit in the spring and i think what we're seeing now in the northeast and the northwest would be the dying embers of the spreading out of this virus.

And, i'm very sorry that it is still true that a small number of people are catching it getting ill and dying.

So, why aren't the media telling us that the pandemic is over?

It's not over because sage says it's not.

So, sage consists of very many scientists from a range of disciplines

mathematicians and clinicians and there are multiple committees but i found to my surprise and i'm going to use the word horror

that in the spring all the way through the spring and summer sage did not have on their committee someone who i would call a card carrying

immunologist, a clinical immunologist.

I have to say i think that in the spring and summer sage was deficient in the expertise it had they should have armed themselves you know with around the table All the people required to to understand what was happening and they didn't do.

People asked me then well mike if it's you know if it's fundamentally over why are we still getting hundreds of deaths a day from SarsCov-2?

And i've thought a lot about this there is a test that's performed with

people have their noses and tonsils swabbed, and then a test called a PCR test is performed on that and what they're looking for  isn't the virus you might think it's looking for the virus but it's not what they're looking for is a small piece of genetic sequence it's called RNA.

Unfortunately, that bit of RNA will be found in people's tonsils and nose

not if they've just caught the virus and they're about to get ill or they're already ill, it's also going to be found if they were infected previously

weeks or even sometimes a small number of months ago.

Let me just explain why that is if you've been infected and you've fought off the virus which most people do, you'll have broken dead bits of virus these are tiny things smaller than your cells.

perhaps spread all the way through your airway embedded in bits of mucus, maybe inside an airway lining cell and so over a period of weeks or months

you bring up cells that contain broken dead pieces of the virus that you have conquered and killed.

However, the PCR test is not able to detect whether the viral RNA has come from a living virus or a dead one, as i've just described.

So, i think a large proportion of the so-called positives are in fact what i call cold positives they're correctly identifying that there is some viral RNA in the sample but it's from a dead virus it can't hurt them they're not going to get ill.

They can't transmit it to anybody else.

So, they're not infectious!

So, that accounts for a large number of the so-called positive cases these are people who've beaten the virus why are we using this test that

cannot distinguish between active infection and people who've conquered the virus.

This test has never been used in this way and i've worked in this field it's not a suitable technique.

It's the kind of technique you would use for forensic purposes if you were trying to do a DNA test to establish whether or not a person was at the scene of a crime.

You would not be doing these tests by a windy supermarket car parking what looks like plastic marquee tents on picnic tables.

It's not suitable at all and it definitely shouldn't be done in the way it's been done. It is subject to many mechanical errors should, we say handling errors.

if this was a test being used for legal purposes for forensic purposes like a dna identity test.

The judge would throw out this evidence would say it's not admissible.

It produces positives even when there's no virus there at all we call that a false positive.

As we've increased the number of tests done per day.

So, we've had to recruit less and less experienced laboratory staff and now we're using people who've never worked professionally in this area what that does is it increases the frequency of mistakes.

and the effect of this is that the false positive rate rises and rises.

So, if you had a false positive rate of one percent which Mr. Matt Hancock told us was roughly the number they had in the summer.

then if you tested a thousand people that had no virus ten of them would be positive astonishingly.

if the prevalence of the virus was only one in a thousand that's point one percent.

as the office of national statistics told us it was through the summer.

then if you use the PCR test, only one of them will be positive and genuinely be safe, but if the false positive rate is as low as one percent

you'll also get 10 positives that are false, some people did say to me well there'll be a higher percentage of people coming forward for testing in the community so-called SarsCov-2 testing  because they've been instructed only to come if they've got symptoms but i call bs on that one.

I don't think that's true.

I know lots of friends and relatives who've been told by an employer.

Well, you've sat near someone who's tested positive and i don't want you to come back to work until you've got a negative test.

I've seen information from many towns in the north certainly birmingham was one manchester was another bolton.

Where councils and i really think they were trying to be helpful.

We are out leafleting the people of their cities, saying we're going to come round and swab you all because we want to track down this virus.

Now, once you start testing people more or less randomly instead of

having symptoms, you get the same amount of virus in the population as the office of national statistics found which is at the time was one in a thousand and i've just told you Matt Hancock confirmed during the summer they had a false positive rate of about one percent.

So, that means out of a thousand people 10 would test positive and it would be a false result and only one would test positive and it was correct.

This test is monstrously unsuitable for detecting who has live virus in their airway.

It's subject to multiple distortions that are worsening as we get into the

Winter as the number of tests done per day increase the number of errors made by these overworked not very experienced lab staff increase.

I think it's not unreasonable to say a best guess of the false positive rate. At the moment, what's called the operational false positive rate is about five percent. Five percent of three hundred thousand is fifteen thousand positives. I think some of those positives are real.

I don't think it's very many, now the problem with this false positive

issue it doesn't just stop it quotes cases.

It extends to people who are unwell and go to hospital so people who go to hospital having tested positive and it could be a false positive and i think most of them are at the moment if you go to hospital and you've tested positive previously or you test positive in hospital you'll be counted now as a covered admission although there are more people in

hospital now than a month ago. This is normal for autumn regrettably.

People catch respiratory viruses and become ill, and some will die.

I just don't believe it's got anything to do with Covid-19 anymore.

There are more people in intensive care beds now than they were a month or so ago that's entirely normal as we move through late autumn into the early winter those beds become used.

but there aren't more people than is normal for the time of year and we're not about to run out of capacity certainly as a national level, but i think you know it is going now if you should now die, you'll be counted as a covered death but that's not correct!

These are people who might have gone to hospital having had a broken leg, for example, but they'll three percent of them will still test positive.

And they're not they haven't got the virus it's it’s a false positive and if they die, they'll be called a Covid death and they are not they've died of something else.

One of the most troubling things i've heard this year was mr Johnson telling us about the immune shot testing everybody often maybe every day is the way out of this problem. I'm telling you it's the way to keep us in this problem that number of tests is orders of magnitude higher.

Then we're already testing now and the false positive rate however low it is will be far too large to accept.

it will produce an enormous number of false positives.

What we should do is stop mass testing not only is an affront to your liberty. It will not help at all; it will be immensely expensive, and it will be a pathology all of its own we'll be fighting off stupid people.

Mostly government ministers i'm sorry to say who are not numerous and do not understand statistics if you test a million people a day with a test that produces

one percent false positives,

10.000 people a day will wrongly be told they've got the virus if the prevalence of the virus was say 0.1 % like the office of national statistics said it was in summer then only a tenth of that number uh 1.000, would correctly be identified but you can't distinguish amongst the 11.000

who have genuinely got the virus and who are false positives moonshot i think will have a worse false positive rate. it's not fixable and it's not necessary either

the pandemic having passed through the population not only of the uk but of all of Europe and probably all of the world quite soon it won't return.

Why won't it return? Well, they've got T-cell immunity we know this it's been studied by the best cellular immunologists in the world.

Sometimes people will say well it looks like the immunity is starting to fade you'll sometimes see things like that and when i saw the first headline like this i remember being really quite confused because that's not the way immunology works.

Just think about it for a moment if that was how it worked it could kill you when you had to fight it off and if you had successfully done

that it somehow didn't leave a mark in your body well it does leave a mark on your body the way you fought it off involved certain pattern recognition receptors and has left you with as it were memory cells that remember what it was, they fought off and if they see that thing again it's very easy for them to get those cells to work again in minutes or hours and they will protect you, so the most likely explanation is it'll last a long time.

So, i read a bit more about this so-called tailing off immunity and i realized they were talking about antibodies. Just incorrect to to think that antibodies and how long they stay up is a measure of immune protection against viruses.

I mean you can tell I’m I don't agree with this. It says there have been some classic experiments done on people who have inborn errors in parts of their immune system. And some of them have inborn arrows that means they can't make antibodies and guess what they they are able to handle respiratory viruses the same as you and me.

So, I don't think it's harmful to have antibodies although some people are worried about the potential for amplifying inflammation from antibodies, but my view is that they're they're, probably neutral and you definitely should not believe the story that because the antibody falls away you've lost immunity.

Again, that's just not the way the human immune system works. The most likely duration of immunity to a respiratory virus like SarsCov-2skov to is multiple years.

why do i say that we actually have the data for a virus that swept through parts of the world 17 years ago called Sars and remember SarsCov-2 is 80% similar to Sars so i think that's the best comparison that anyone can provide the evidence is clear these very clever cellular immunologists studied all the people they could get hold of who had survived Sars 17 years ago, they took a blood sample and they tested whether they responded or not to the original Sars and they all did

they all have perfectly normal robust T-cell memory they are actually also

protected against SarsCov-2 too because it's so similar. It's cross-immunity. So i would say the best data that exists is that immunity should be robust for at least 17 years.

I think it's entirely possible that it is lifelong the style of the responses of these people's t-cells were the same as if you've been vaccinated and then you come back years later to see has that immunity been retained.

And so i think the evidence is really strong that the duration of immunity will be multiple years and possibly lifelong.

There have been but a tiny handful of people who appear to have been infected twice Now they're very interesting we need to know who they are and understand them very well.

They're probably got certain rare immune deficiency syndromes. So, I’m not pretending no one ever gets reinfected but i am pointing out that it's literally five people or maybe 50 people, but the world health organization estimated some weeks ago that 750 million people have been infected so far by SarsCov-2; That means most people are not being reinfected and i can tell you why that is it's normal it's what happens with viruses respiratory. Some people have called for zero covid as it's some political slogan and there are some people I’ve heard calling for it almost every day.

They're completely unqualified to tell you anything. Something that's really important to know is that SarsCov-2, it's an unpleasant virus.

There's no question about it but it's not what you were told in spring we were originally told that it would kill perhaps three percent of people it infected which is horrifying that’s 30 times worse than flu.

We always overestimate the lethality of new infectious diseases when we're in the eye of the storm.

I believe the true infection fatality ratio of covid19 the true threat to life is the same as seasonal flow.

So, there's no reason why you would want to try and drive Covid to zero

It's a nonsense! that's just not how biology is.

And all the means i have heard uh proposed as ways to get us there are much more damaging and pathological i would say than than the virus itself.

it is simply not possible to get rid of every single copy of the Covid-19 virus and the means to get you there would destroy society forget the cost that be you.

it would be huge it would destroy your liberty, you would need to not

go out until you have been tested and have your result back and i have described how The false positive rate would just destroy it from a statistical perspective.

I don't believe, it can be done it's not scientifically realistic it's not medically realistic and it's not what we have ever done.

As the virus swept towards the UK in the late winter and early spring

i too was concerned because at the time we were told perhaps three percent might die. So, when the Prime Minister called for a lockdown i wasn't pleased about it but i understood that we should try this.

But it's important that you understand that when we look at the profile of the pandemic as it passed through the population that it was clear that the number of infections every day was falling, we'd pass the peak quite a long time before lockdown started.

So, we took all that pain that locked down pain, which was multiple weeks, i don't remember exactly how many multiple weeks.

We took it for nothing.

If there was a really important effect of lockdown on the number of people who died or the rate of it you should at least be able to order

them like these people had locked down and these didn’t, and you cannot all heavily infected countries shapes are the same whether they had locked down or not.

They don't work! I do not know why anyone is allowing you know you to be pushed into this corner.

I don't think we entirely know why it is that some countries were hit harder than others.

But, i have to say i think scientifically the smart money is on a mixture of forces one would be this

cross immunity.

Although China had an awful time in Wuhan in Hubai province,

it didn't spread elsewhere in the country and i suspect that meant

because a lot of them had this cross immunity and i think nearby countries in the main had lots of cross immunity.

So, that's one possibility! The other one though is in terms of the severity of what did the virus do to a particular population.

 We've seen devastating effects in countries like UK and in Belgium uh... France and maybe even in Sweden and much smaller numbers of deaths in other countries like Greece and in Germany.

And you might think well was that what it was it's something that they did.

And i wish it was true, because if it was something we did we could learn from it and do it and it would work in the future.

But, there's no evidence whatsoever that it was anything humans did.

The passage of this virus through the human population is an entirely

natural process that completely ignored our puny efforts to control it.

So, there is this theory i don't like the name very much but it's called "dry tinder".

If people in a country, who are vulnerable for to dying in the winter usually of respiratory viruses if you have a very mild winter season,

like UK did we had a very mild seasonal flu last year and the year before and so did Sweden, then what happens is there are larger number of very vulnerable people who are even older than usual and i think that's why we suffered a rather large number of deaths.

It was still only 0.06 percent of the population equivalent to about four weeks of normal mortality but countries that had very severe winters recently and Greece and Germany, certainly had very lethal winter flus in the last two years.

I think then they had a smaller population of very vulnerable people

and that is the main reason why they lost fewer people.

It's not to do with locking down, it's not to do with testing or tracking

or tracing, i personally don't think any of those measures have made any difference at all.

So, Belgium and UK and Sweden were particularly vulnerable whereas adjacent nordic countries I get fed up with hearing about this uh idea

that they lock down and that's why it saved them.

And fred the other nordic countries had normal flu epidemics the last two or three years.

Sweden like UK had very mild epidemics you can just go and look at the number of debts it's sub-normal for UK and Sweden and now we've got a supra-normal a larger than normal number of deaths from covered.

Now, there may be other reasons i'm not saying there are not.

but, i think those two main forces the amount of prior immunity and the so-called "dry tinder" what vulnerable fraction of the population did you have as a result of seasonal flu being intense or not.

I think that accounts for most of it and it's just puberistic and uh and and kind of silly that our government and advisors tell you that doing things that have never worked in the past like lock down are going to make any difference to the transfer of respiratory viruses. I don't believe it for a moment there's no scientific evidence behind it and there are much stronger scientific hypotheses that do explain it.

You might think that in terms of numbers of deaths excess deaths that Covid has produced such a large number that this will be an awful year for excess deaths, but surprisingly not 2020 is lining up to be about eights in a list since 1993.

Roughly 620.000 people die every year in this country. They say in life we are also in death and it's true.

It's been awful for those who have been personally affected by illness and death. But, it's not particularly unusual in terms of the number of people who've died. So, one of the things i've noticed has happened in in recent years is that we almost seem to be moving uh you know post-science, post fact as if as if facts don't matter, for someone who's qualified and practiced as a professional scientist for 35 years.

I think it's deeply distressing that I don't think you should listen to me if I talked about i don't know the design of motorways or something

like i don't know anything about motorways or or how to grow trees better i don't know anything about that but i do know quite a lot about

immunology, infection, inflammation, and the way infectious organisms move through a population. I've no other reason for giving this interview other than i really care what happens to my country and we have to pull ourselves out of this and i personally believe the way forward is twofold it's not difficult.

One, we should cease mass testing of the mostly well in the community,

immediately it only provides misleading and grey information and yet

we're driving policy almost completely based on it it's definitely wrong!

Should not do it. Use the tests in hospital I’m not saying don't test

don't continue mass testing and for god's sake don't increase the number of tests.

It is a pathology all of its own which must be stamped out by right thinking people and I’m afraid the people on stage who have provided the modeling the predictions, the measures that should be taken, that their work is so badly and obviously flawed, lethally incompetent.

that you should have no more to do with these people.

They should be fired immediately, and the effect of that advice has been to have cost lots of innocent people their lives from non-covered causes. They should be dismissed and reconstituted using an appropriate

group of skilled individuals, Especially, avoiding any who might even have the suggestion of a conflict of interest I think we're right at the edge of the precipice i i really hope that we can pull back.

 

The End