Head of NHS England Caught Out Spreading Misinformation About Covid Hospital Admissions
Earlier today, Amanda Pritchard, the head of NHS England, made the following claim:
There is no doubt that the NHS is running hot and there are some very real pressures on health and social care. We have had 14 times the number of people in hospital with COVID-19 than we saw this time last year.
Needless to say, this was faithfully reported by various media outlets. For instance, ITV News ran a story on it headlined: “Hospital Covid admissions 14 times higher than this time in 2020.”
There was only one problem: it isn’t true. The number of COVID-19 patients currently in English hospitals is 7,510 according to the Government’s Coronavirus Dashboard, whereas the number in November 2020 was over 11,000.
When the figures being reported by ITV – and Sky News, and iNews – were challenged, NHS England issued a ‘clarification’, explaining that she was comparing August 2021 with August 2020, neglecting to mention that in August of last year the virus had dwindled away to almost nothing. The reason she hadn’t cited more up to date figures, according to the poor flak at NHS England tasked with explaining away this misleading stat, was that “these are the latest figures they have”.
Unfortunately, the cover up was no more true than the initial claim. NHS England has access to more up to date figures than August of this year – the latest figures on the Coronavirus Dashboard, supplied by NHS England, are for November 2nd.
Worse, it seems very unlikely that Ms Pritchard was comparing August 2021 with August 2020 – NHS England just said that because that’s the only way they could get the ’14 times’ figure to work. Christopher Snowdon – yes, that Chris Snowdon – has helpfully tracked down the real source of this bogus stat in a piece for CapX:
Something about this claim dimly rang a bell with me so I went looking for previous mentions of it. This led me to Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director, who had used almost exactly the same words in a press release a few weeks ago. He said: “There is no doubt the NHS is running hot, with the highest ever number of patients seen in A&E in September, 14-times as many covid patients in hospital compared to the same month last year and record 999 ambulance calls.”
Pritchard seems to have liked this statistic so much that she repeated Powis’s comments almost verbatim, complete with the reference to the NHS ‘running hot’. The only words she missed out were ‘in September’. Or maybe an assistant copied and pasted it into a briefing for her. Whatever the reason, a statistic that checked out in September and was just about defensible in October, so long as it was put in proper context, had become a lie by November.
In the not too distance past, it was the the lockdown sceptics who were accused of trafficking in misinformation. A few more howlers like this one, and people will start to realise it’s the lockdown zealots who are pumping out fake news to promote their agenda, not us.
Stop Press: Full Fact has checked Ms Pritchard’s claim and found it wanting. Read the full report here. Contains the following graph:
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Covid patients running 14 times what they were last year. Please correct me if I’m wrong but we didn’t have the “vaccine” last year. So how effective can this so called vaccine be if there’s a 14 times increase. Are all the patients the unvaccinated?
That’s nailed it.
It would appear therefore that the “vaccines” are an unmitigated disaster.
How she didn’t realise the significance of what she was saying is astounding or she really does hold the entire population in complete contempt.
The latter. Definitely, the latter.
Definitely, just like the rest of them.
Nailed it for sure ‘huxley’ they can’t have it both ways.. they’ll have a damn good go though..
Have for 20 months now! And it continues…beyond any reasonable expectation.
You beat me to the same observation. Even assuming her statistics are accurate, wouldn’t this be overwhelming evidence that the vaccination drive has made things worse, at least as it involves hospitalization numbers?
BTW, it’s nice to see one journalist who is not too lazy to actually check the statistics.
It’s not her fault, she was clearly reading from Prof Ferguson’s latest highly credible prediction. 105,140 people in hospital, sounds about right for his estimates.
“Are all the patients the unvaccinated?”
VAGGZINE in BELGIUM – 100 per cent of ICU??? (odysee.com)
Not in Belgium.
“running hot”
The current phrase du jour I presume.
She just needs to be informed that she is either thick or a liar.
…..she is either thick or a liar.
Undoubtedly she is both. Such an outrageous pice of nonsense was always going to be blow up in her oh so smug face. .
.
Yeah.. another new word that seems to be in vogue is ‘surge’..
That one’s not new – it’s been a Doomster favourite throughout most of the past 18 months.
What this really exposes is the media. The statistic is so obviously suspicious that it can only be one of two things:
(a) They are propaganda machines and simply report what they are told to by the authorities – call it the Dellingpole explanation.
(b) They are so utterly useless and incompetent that they don’t even think to check such an obviously ridiculous fact – i.e. the Toby Young explanation.
i’m a Dellingpolian myself.
BOTH!
And what chance of retractions from those media?
Ought to be a sackable offence, in the Private sector deliberately misleading customers would end up with retribution in most cases.
Not in the pharma industry – that’s their sop.
ROTFLMAO. Officially, the bait&switch sales tactic is illegal. My parents fell prey to that at Reading John Lewis with the classic Well, it’s on offer but the offer is not available yet. Instead, you could … and the sole reason why I didn’t myself was because I walked out from (presumably) the same guy when it became abundantly clear that he wasn’t willing to sell what I wanted to buy.
Has the retraction been made public?
Wasnt PHE closed down for telling fibs last year ?
They just print what “authorities” say as infallible and accurate. And it’s not just COVID stories either.
The original claim made the headlines all morning. The retraction will be ignored. Job done.
Be interesting to see what the Daily Mail has to say about it later and their readers tomorrow.
You got it.. the retraction will be ignored.. the initial big headline will do the job..
What a shock. Self-interested folks with their 15 minutes of frame deliberately misleading those who get their news from MSM in order to keep on being important. Glad to see the BMJ finally waking up. When will a major media outlet in the UK follow suit?
“A few more howlers like this one, and people will start to realise it’s the lockdown zealots who are pumping out fake news to promote their agenda …”
That’s the only thing I take issue with. After 20 months, people are still lapping up this sort of dog sick as if it was gold standard data.
Of course, the main problem remains the total absence of real journalism – the sort that would have made mincemeat of such casual nonsense.
It has to be said that this is only the tip of the iceberg of Covid ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ fatuity.
Those absent journalists might also be questioning the definition of Covid admissions, and why – if this disaster scenario is true – the ‘vaccines’ are such a disastrous failure???
There have been a few cat out of the bag incidents before but this one takes the biscuit.
There does seem to be an insatiable public appetite for misery porn and the MSM are only too happy to satiate it.
The lies are running hot.
That brought a smile.
And the liars are increasingly running on empty,
When it becomes serious, you have to lie.
Jean-Claude Juncker
Nothing is more serious than a sinecurist worrying about losing their sinecure.
Funny how the establishment, and our “elites” in general, are so eager to hound people out of work for a tasteless comment, sometimes made decades ago, but can’t seem to bring themselves to bring themselves to condemn, let alone dismiss, outright liars.
This is also almost certainly false. Conflating those who have tested positive for the virus with those who are actually sick with the disease Covid-19
Its all just lies, upon lies, upon lies.
A degree in modern history and never done anything except work for the NHS! Says it all really..
Is anyone really surprised that Toney make it up as they go along
Why would she cite the figures in August when she was supposed to be talking about the present contingency – what a ridiculous lie!
Oh dear, seems like they can’t even get their fictional ducks in a row.
Obviously they don’t give a flying one any more – just spew drivel and hope no-one notices which sadly is most of the time but whoppers like this must surely raise a red flag even to the most jaded mind.
Wifey – unjabbed – works for the NHS and she can’t help noticing how many of her double/triple jabbed colleagues are ill most of the time. The way we’re going it will only be the unvaccinated left to hold the fort assuming they don’t sack them all.
Really couldn’t make this shit up.
Would account for delaying sacking of dangerously unvaxxed staff until April.
Here’s why they’re ill
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8546144/
P.S. I’d only want to be treated by someone unjabbed.
‘The way we’re going it will only be the unvaccinated left to hold the fort assuming they don’t sack them all.’
Indeed. How long can it be before firms start advertising for/recruiting ‘unvaccinated’ workers, claiming they want consistency in their workforce?
And you just know that the Vaccine Cult would be up in arms over this type of discrimination. You can imagine the howls of protest from the segregationists, utterly oblivious to the irony/double standard.
Lies, damned lies, statistics, Covid statistics.
They are not even pretending to tell the truth now Annie.
It’s all gibberish anyway, so why correct a raving psychopath expecting what?
Assume for a moment she really meant to say, “In the summer admissions were 14 times higher than last year.” I know that August is not by any stretch of the imagination “at this time,” but perhaps she had a headache. Yet that would have no bearing whatsoever on the situation in November, any more than it did last year.
Pure disinformation from a career NHS bureaucrat with a degree in history.
It’s an interesting window into the world of those who are keeping this narrative going – highly political, uninterested in the truth, slightly overconfident, leading them to tell careless lies like this one on occasion, arrogant and contemptuous of those whom they are meant to serve.
That would have caused me severe physiological harm had I seen that on the sky or itv, UK Considering Legislation That Would Imprison Internet Trolls she should go to jail for at least 2 years.
Epic own goal.
If her figures were true it proves the vaccines don’t work but as Toby pointed out the figures are a deliberate lie to frighten people so ‘heads we win, tails she looses’. Talk about painting oneself into a corner. Jesus, does she think people are that stupid? I assume she does.
It would be interesting to know how many people believed the headlines that resulted from this bollocks. I suspect the number is disturbingly high. But come on… if it were 14 times higher than November last year (over 11,000, but call it 11,000 for argument’s sake) that comes to 154,000 people admitted to hospital in November this year (and we’re not even half way through November), which is 20 TIMES what the actual figure is for now!
I am still spinning from the prospect of being expected to believe this.
Sadly it seems most are…
Covid passports will be ‘privatised’, outsourced for economic reasons, probably internationally like the EU one.
The only significant uttering at the COP Glasgow debacle was Sunak’s, when he said that the global financial industry was geared up to deliver the required investment for net zero. Carney of course from within the BIS has been working on ensuring this is hard-wired into every financial investment and insurance decision process for the least few years.
The governments have outsourced ‘zero carbon’ and there is precious little we can do about it now.
Same is happening with covid and restrictions. The passports will be handled by private enterprise , within guidelines of course, government overview ( ho ho). Then they are election proof, they will be used as and when the very same financial investors require it.
Global fascism without a shot being fired.
A very long and detailed essay on this very subject has been published on Off-Guardian today, by the esteemed Iain Davis.
Worth reading in full. 😉
Iain is usually excellent, will take a look now. thanks.
Read it, Iain is correct.
https://off-guardian.org/2021/11/08/seizing-everything-the-theft-of-the-global-commons-part-2/
As is their wont when scheduling these events, they do so with perfect kabbalistic timing …
The Iain Davis essay, “Seizing Everything: The Theft of the Global Commons – Part 2”, mentions Garrett Hardin’s, “The Tragedy of the Commons” and John Kerry & Mark Carney’s announcement of their new economic plan called, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero – GFANZ, for the “financial system to help move the global economy to net zero greenhouse gas emissions.”
The GFANZ plan was first announced on 21 April 2021 – on eugenicist Garrett Hardin’s 106 th birthday and the 75 th anniversary of the death of eugenicist & economist John Maynard Keynes
https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/carney-kerry-launch-global-finance-plan-boost-climate-action-2021-04-21/
21 April 2021 also just happened to be an INClusive 911 months after the the Club of Rome, “Limits to Growth” co author, Jorgen Randers was born …
Rent-seeking is the opposite of the economy ! All green mandated costs seem to end up directed by and large to establishment land owners.
Caught with your pants down Pritchard. Stop fucking lying!
She isn’t lying. She’s just telling higher-order truths. It’s not about what’s true or false but about what the public should truly rather believe in the interest of public good. She’s preaching the true creed, so to say, and – as with all religions – the factual truth of religious truths is a tangential property.
What baffles me the most is 1: how people will accept such as statistic and quote the headline containing it, as it is unbelievable how many people have not even a ballpark estimate in their minds of the actual figures; and 2: that the very head of NHS England – that highly trusted bastion of health protection – would so spectacularly betray the trust of the British people and insult them by misleading them by a factor of 14!
Anyone who is concerned about catching Covid and transmitting it to loved ones is going to be psychologically harmed by this announcement, and Pritchard or whoever put her up to this should be held accountable (unless of course it was an honest mistake, but I think the case for incompetence rather than the deliberate presenting of false information is remote).
“honest mistake”
So now we are in the territory of just bare-faced lying? No pretence to even deception? Just lying…
They have had plenty of practice!
Now?
It’s been like that from the very first moment when they used fake footage of Italian hospitals in March 2020. And everything since then has been lies, lies and more lies.
Her faux pass search for the truth remains tantalisingly out of reach methinks.
Or more accurately I should perhaps say she’s just another of the bastards who constantly lie in order to keep the campaign of fear going.
Heaven help them when their house of cards falls.
How much more of this government corruption and NHS lies are the general public expected to take? I want the whole lot flushed out with Jeyes Fluid as the stench is unbearable.
And I hope Sky and co., issue a retraction. I know, I know, fat chance of that…
A lot more. They really want to test whether the public will tolerate a compulsory annual vaccination regime.
It’s not like a government official and the press to spread misinformation, what’s going on? They have been so reliable for the last eighteen months!
Before that, they were all liars though 🤔
Except on Climate Change of course; on that they are as true as every word in the Bible! Oh.
Oh, don’t even get me started with that nonsense.
They were all proven right that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction and that this nation was a national security threat to America. Iraq, as it turns out, was planning to steal some of Americans freedoms. So that plan was nipped in the bud. We were good to listen to those government officials and those think tanks and the press.
That reminds me, what was the “official” reasoning behind Gulf War Syndrome again? It was nothing to do with the jabs was it?
I don’t know if you and others have noticed that over the past week numbers on the Government dashboard for Covid have been delayed or qualified by omissions. Are they massaging the figures? Surely not!
Well looking at the inflation figures that were massaged (hedonically adjusted to include things that are falling in price and exclude things getting more expensive) they’ve just about given up even trying to lie and knowing the so-called Bank (central committee on credit pricing) of England will ignore their own remits to control inflation.
You also have to consider the recent fuel crisis, nobody using Texas tea for months on end, so they had to stockpile it. But they ran out.
Bit like a hosepipe ban after it’s been raining non stop for ten months.
Perfectly believable.
Nah, can’t be. Not the immovable pillars of truth!
I think they got demolished a while ago!
What about the pillars of integrity?
Those too!
I must be missing something still.Covid 19 has all the cardinal symptoms of known respiratory disorders.We all know that the PCR test is fraudulent again how do we determine a true case?.All those victims of the state Euthanasia programme I attended to last year had either no or generic symptoms of respiratory disease.I had full multiple exposures and all I caught was a speeding ticket on the way home.
‘Care bosses call on No10 to ditch no jab, no job policy’
https://mol.im/a/10177945
Boris dodges Commons sleaze showdown claiming ‘nothing more to say’
https://mol.im/a/10177829
Lets go Johnson (and his NHS cronies)
At least the Mail is on the case https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10177849/NHS-boss-Amanda-Pritchard-accused-abusing-Covid-statistics.html
Actually it could be a useful exaggeration. It’s so absurd that anyone with a modicum of understanding will question its truth. Bring on more unbelievable whoppers. How many people will believe that factor of 14 when they stop to think?
How many stop to think?
If they haven’t so far…
It’s very easy to dismiss as a simple faux pas. And there is a lot of cognitive dissonance to work through before the light comes on.
Sheeple don’t think.
Zombies don’t think.
Morons don’t think. That only leaves us.