Lockdown Was Ruinous and Masks Were Useless. Here’s What Worked For My Business
I recently submitted, below, to the Covid Inquiry a journal of the actions we took as a business to ensure that we remained open for our customers whilst making sure that our employees could work without risk of catching the virus.
When reading it one has to cast one’s mind back to early 2020 when our politicians and many members of the public were filled with fear and hysteria of catching this unknown disease. Thank goodness those days have passed though in many ways there is now a bigger divide within the population. There are those who were always going for tests every time they had a sniffle who now regard it as little more than a mild cold to those who did what the Government told them to do and are still slavishly getting their boosters and wearing masks in certain situations.
Mankind has had to cope over millennia with respiratory viruses and has learnt many lessons as to how to deal with them. In March 2020 all of this was forgotten and instead the approach taken by China, an autocratic one party state, was followed. The cornerstone of this was a lockdown where people were required to shut themselves in their homes. It seems unbelievable looking back on it and it would appear that no thought was given to the long term effects of this on everyone from children acquiring socials skills to the elderly spending their final years in confinement. Not forgetting, the colossal economic cost and the waste of having people perfectly able to work being paid by the taxpayer to stay at home.
Virtually the only practical advice given by Government was on how properly to wash one’s hands, after that it was go home and await orders.
Taking what we knew from the past and applying it here we carried on operating and by the end of our financial year had almost equalled our previous year’s turnover and profit. We have never had any internal transmission, we ditched masks before we were technically allowed and we ignored the diktats coming from the Scottish Government. We had to be careful on this front as we had to keep employees on side as otherwise I could have been in serious trouble should there have been any internal transmission and I lost their trust. It is again easy to say that in a way we were doing the Government’s bidding but that forgets the panoply of fear induced Covid regulations, many aimed at employers and how they ran their workplaces. Many of these regulations were of the micro-managing, one size fits all variety and were like many of the ones aimed at the general population, stupid.
Almost every practical measure we took to prevent transmission – replacing door handles and touched surfaces with copper, air cleaners and UV scanning – is applicable to the prevention of transmission of any virus. We continue to run the air cleaners as they appear to have reduced the number of days off sick and improve the air quality in the office when it is too cold to have windows open. If we were struck with another viral pandemic I would encourage widespread adoption of these as they both filter out airborne particles and the inbuilt UV light kills viruses, bacteria and other microbes.
To stop infection from respiratory viruses in particular, proper vitamin D supplementation, about 4,000 IU a day, and gargling with salt water or preferably a solution of grapefruit seed extract before bed seems to successfully aid the body to repel the viral invaders. Where employees have not supplemented with Vitamin D3 or gargled and then caught the bug, high dose Vitamin C has helped them recover quickly.
These are all measures that are part of humankind’s acquired general knowledge and should have been adopted rather than the costly and draconian lockdown for which we are now paying the price. That these and other physical methods were not adopted more widely is the real crime from the pandemic
Creating a policy of burying one’s head in the sand and waiting for vaccines, which have brought their own problems, is not and should not have been this or any county’s policy.
One of the reasons for making this submission to the Covid Inquiry was that none of the inquiry modules relate to how businesses dealt with on one side the legal requirements put upon us and on the other survival.
To date I have had a general acknowledgement of receipt and an email saying that it has been passed to the “relevant team”, the name of the team was not mentioned so, for all I know, it may be the wastepaper basket one!
December 28th 2023,
Rt. Hon. Baroness Hallett DBE
UK Covid-19 Public Enquiry
London
Dear Baroness Hallett,
I find it strange that the enquiry you chair goes into lots of aspects of the Covid pandemic but I can’t see that any of the modules actually look at practical ways of mitigating the effects of future respiratory virus pandemics. It also is surprising that there is little on how business handled the situation thrown at it; for the engine room of the economy to be virtually disregarded by your deliberations seems rather amiss.
As a business we could not afford to shut down for an indeterminate amount of time when lockdown was announced. As an engineering company selling into the agricultural and materials handling markets with more than 70% of sales overseas, if we had shut we would at the very least have been seriously knocked back and our customers would have been forced to go elsewhere.
In an engineering business there is only a limited proportion of people who can work from home.
The Prime Minister used, when announcing lockdown, the unfortunate term “essential worker” when referring to those who could go into work. Many of our employees felt that referred to those working for the emergency cervices whilst I understood it to be those essential to this business. As we had a substantial percentage who did not agree with me, I decided to furlough them and work on with those who were happy to come in and some of the office staff who could work from home.
The initial advice about washing hands was about the only truly practical advice we received. However, working on the basis of Covid being a respiratory virus we researched as to what had been shown to work against these in the past. We also worked on the principle that we wanted to keep the disease out of the building and if anyone came in with it then they could be identified quickly and helped to get home. Equally we wanted to help those who were fit and healthy to stay that way and be strong enough to repel the virus should they come in contact with it.
As spring was on its way we were able to make sure that there was plenty of air movement in any enclosed spaces where employees were working. We also ensured that there was a ready supply of salt should anyone want to clear their throats and noses through gargling salt water. The correct strength of hand gel could not be purchased at this time, so we purchased raw Aloe Vera extract and Isopropyl and mixed in the WHO recommended proportions. As it was believed that the virus could be transmitted through touching surfaces, initially all surfaces including computer keyboards were treated with isopropyl (rubbing alcohol). Knowing that viruses are killed by ultra violet light we made a number of handheld UV scanners that allowed us to rapidly treat large areas twice a day.
Knowing that copper kills viruses on contact we made and replaced all the original door handles with copper ones and fitted copper sheet to the tops of work benches and the canteen table to prevent any chance of spread through touch. The door push plates were also replaced with copper. Our forefathers used copper, brass and silver specifically because they were known to stop the spread of pathogens, however, this has been forgotten and now most door handles are made from aluminium or stainless steel which have no anti-viral properties. The other measure we took in summer 2020 was to install an infrared thermometer that took our temperatures on entering the building. I am not sure if it has ever detected someone with an elevated temperature due to Covid but it has picked up plenty who have come in after sitting in a hot car or been outside in the sun during their lunch break.
With summer 2020 turning to autumn we needed to find ways to keep the air in enclosed spaces clean without having lots of doors and windows open. We were also keen to find ways of encouraging all our employees to boost their immune systems in make them more resilient against the virus. To solve the first problem we installed a number of air clearers with Hepa filters and built in UV sterilising lights. I had over the years found UV extremely effective at killing all sorts of micro-organisms and these cleaners have been very effective. As to the second problem, I had read a considerable amount of research prior to the pandemic into how winter supplementation with Vitamin D3 with K is very effective in helping one’s immune system fight off respiratory viruses. As the pandemic progressed there were a number of reports coming from Sweden and Spain that confirmed that Vitamin D3 was similarly effective in helping the body fight COVID-19.
Using a commercial testing company we arranged for everyone who wanted it to receive a Vitamin D and general health blood test. Virtually everyone had very low and some almost non-existent amounts of Vitamin D in their blood. We then made available enough Vitamin D3 in either spray or pill form to give everyone at least a daily amount of 4000 IU which we understood to be the amount required to achieve the optimal blood level. Though we had had one person going down with what later turned out to be Covid in February 2020, we had no cases until just before Christmas 2020 when two went down with it, one having caught it from her son and the other from family or friends. The first person stayed away from work but the second one initially tested negative and was told that he probably had flu. Feeling better after Christmas he worked with us in the three days prior to New Year but then tested positive, on New Years eve 2020, but did not pass it on to any of the rest of us who had been working with him.
So far to date we have not had any on premises transmission, all cases that we have had have been isolated ones or between two people car sharing to and from work. A number have had it more than once but no one has suffered seriously.
Throughout the pandemic we were bombarded by rules and guidelines issued by the Scottish and U.K. Governments. Initially we tried to follow and obey them but as almost every week more were added and they became ever more specific we just ignored them as we could not apply many of them to our circumstances and from our experience they were not going to help the situation. By late 2021 we were beginning to notice a number of things:
- Firstly the vaccine did not offer long term protection, contrary to what we had previously been told.
- Secondly: those taking boosters often seemed to go down with Covid within a month or so of getting the shot.
- Thirdly: tests were often giving a negative result when ill but a positive result when better.
- Fourthly: mask-wearing was ineffective and in fact seemed to exacerbate the illness if it developed.
- Fifthly: gargling with grapefruit seed extract in water after testing positive would clear the virus from your throat and nose and lead to a very quick recovery.
In response to points three and four, we reverted our policy to if you felt ill to stay off work but when you felt better to return and not to bother doing a Covid test. We have not yet had any internal transmission resulting from this change. We also allowed people to go maskless when not in close proximity to others and fairly soon dropped the need to wear masks at all and again this has not led to any sort of internal transmission.
I can’t speak for everyone in the business but most have not taken any more than the first booster and some nothing more than the initial two vaccine doses. The key lessons from our experience has been:
- Boosting natural immunity with winter D3 supplementation is very effective protection both against the disease and also helping to fight it should you go down with it.
- Our UV air cleaners seem to be very effective at preventing transmission within an office or other enclosed environment.
- Virucidal effects of copper can be harnessed to prevent spread through door handles and other frequently touched items.
- Masks were completely ineffective at preventing transmission between those sharing cars.
Despite being visited by council employees early on during the first lockdown who asked why we were open, we stayed open throughout the pandemic and though our U.K. business dropped off steeply over the first few days of the first lockdown we had by the end of our financial year made up almost all of the lost ground.
After being on furlough for three weeks a number of employees started calling to find out if they could come back in and by September 2020 we were once again back to a full complement. Come the end of our financial year we repaid the furlough in full as it seemed wrong for our profit to be inflated by the taxpayer.
Based on our experience with Covid I would certainly not be as trusting of Government and its advisers next time round. Much of what came out of Government has proved to be either wrong or plain stupid. An example being of banning people from meeting outside which flew in the face of all experience with viruses that they do not survive in almost any sort of sunlight.
I believe that we demonstrated that by applying known practical, anti-viral measures the disease could be controlled and spread prevented without affecting economic and general well-being.
Yours sincerely,
Alastair MacMillan
Alastair MacMillan is the founder, with his father, of White House Products in Scotland, manufacturing and selling hydraulic pumps and other machinery around the world.
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All good stuff, however, a cheaper & equally effective strategy was to do absolutely nothing.
Doing nothing was never an option because the whole Scamdemic was an exercise in control. The Lockdowns were simply used to test compliance and given that they were largely successful they provided the go-ahead for the poisonous jibby jabs.
At this point in time Fishy and Co have no idea how much compliance remains within the population but I feel confident that they will get a shock when Billy releases Disease X. Of course there will be a hardcore of stupid people believing everything put out by the government propoganda unit, el Beeb, but people are waking up by the day assisted primarily by the Nut Zero crap.
The virus threat has subsided a little but the media still talk up the possibility of a super virus from the past/ artic/ Dinosaurs/ etc. Then there is the threat of super volcanic eruptions from one active caldera or another, Asteroid extinction events, space debris, toxic flood waters, Brexit. Yet the greatest threat of all from the Blob, through their servants the MP’s (Muppets & Puppets) is never mentioned
Sadly, I don’t think that’s true outside of sites like this one. There are still people wearing masks all around here for God’s sake.
Dear Mr MacMillan,
There was no pandemic.
Regards,
huxleypiggles
You beat me to it 🙂
It might seem like we’re being snide but I am really not and I am sure neither are you. But the more we repeat the “p” word the more we reinforce the Big Lie that “covid” was something of significance that had to be reacted to.
I am not being snidy tof. You have copyright on the phrase but “there was no pandemic” is simply a statement of fact and deserves to be repeated at every opportunity. And as facts go it is easily defended – no excess deaths in 2020 and a big spike when Midazolam Mat sent cattle truck loads of elderly people to be euthanized in care homes. Brutal but factual.
There has also never been a Covid virus. It has never been isolated (the real English meaning, ie pure), never electron micrographed, never properly “sequenced” (although many claims said it had, but they were the result of a bit of PCR and a computer program to give the required result), the “tests” were never specific to an exact anything (and came from China so we do not know how they could be designed as the above points would be required to do so!). The World was conned big time, causing huge economic and social damage, egged on by politicians who made huge sums from the response. The supposed knowledgeable chief “scientists” now work for vaccine companies, on huge salaries for doing nothing useful. Politicians ignore the damage from the alleged vaccine which causes immune system damage and increases the cahnce of catching something identified by the above list. Masks, surface treatments etc did no good whatsoever, and as c-19 is allegedly airbourne, more air circulation actually meant more risk. None of the above is allowed to be mentioned by the Enquiry, several witnesses have tried but they were not allowed to continue, it is all a whitewash, and of zero… Read more »
A laudable effort.
Our office remained open to those who wanted to use it, with no restrictions – my boss might have had a harder decision to make if more people had wanted to, but in the end there were a tiny handful.
We never had a visit from the council AFAIK but we’re not really customer facing so I can’t imagine they would have been bothered.
The problem is that the social contract that existed, necessarily vague, around “infectious diseases” of the mild sort, has been damaged. Opinions vary regarding whether it’s better to stay at home or soldier on, and no doubt it has been a source of conflict, but that’s the nature of being a social animal. Each setting and society finds its equilibrium and lives with it, and it evolves over time. But the scamdemic has created a generation of germophobes who feel entitled to have other people’s choices restricted or dictated by the germophobe’s own “trigger level”.
It really does boil down to that: stay home or soldier on.
And three things have tilted more people towards staying home.
1. People seem much more alert and anxious about catching something from someone else. Before you didn’t really give it much thought.
2. People are more fearful of regular colds and flus, whereas before they just thought it as a nuisance, but oh well.
3. People have discovered the scope to skyve off work is far bigger.
I’m general our tolerance for risk and work and discomfort is dropping like a stone.
We’re closer than ever to becoming Eloi.
I have always been closer to the “soldier on” end of the spectrum but can see that may not always be helpful for others – perhaps in a crowded space all day there is a limit to how much coughing and sneezing is reasonable – but we have gone too far the other way – all enabled by material prosperity and too much welfare. As Ann Coulter puts it here: THE FALL OF ROME, UPDATED – Ann Coulter
“We didn’t have to worry about a third-world invasion during World War II because we weren’t a welfare state. Until LBJ’s Great Society programs, any preliterate people who wandered into our country would starve to death. Now we lure them here with free iPhones, hot meals, hotel rooms, airline flights, housing, gigantically expensive medical care and the promise of welfare for life. All paid for by you, taxpayer.”
Good job, well done. When it comes to the detail about enhanced vitamin D supplements, I did a bit of homework on this, and eventually increased my intake between the Autumn and Spring quite a lot. As it’s now possible to buy 50 µg tabs in the supermarket trade, my winter minimum is now 100 µg/day, with a rough adjustment to what’s on the menu (not much food contains it, as it happens). Evidently Morrison’s, and perhaps others, have spotted the increase in demand. There has been a somewhat quiet doubling of the recommended values on NHS sites – but only from 5 to 10 µg.German sites are more generous, but I prefer the advice from the likes of John Campbell and Ivor Cummins. Never had any measurements done, but between the equinoxes Spring to Autumn I spend a fair bit of time outdoors with bare skin, so it should do it’s natural job making vitamin D much of the time. I like your air treatment comments about the use of UV (UV-C probably for this), especially when air conditioning does recycling. I think historically there have been issues with bacterial transmission with untreated air that way, if certain bugs live in… Read more »
At the outset Vit D was promoted, sensible you may think, as it is also attributed to sunshine, and is benefiting to the body. So they forced a lock down removed the natural; source of Vit D. I never did see the logic of lock down, in any aspect or reason for doing so.
By some accounts 90% of those admitted to hospital (with flu or whatever) were deficient in Vitamin D, and 90% of those going into ICU (with pneumonia) were deficient in Zinc. The remaining 10% could have been treated prophylactically with HCQ or Ivermectin and the country and world could have carried on as normal, as in any respiratory illness event. I reject the assertion there was a pandemic, unless you allow there was one of state sponsored fear. I’m not even certain there was an actual virus called SARS-COV-2 except in a computer gene sequencing program. I have not seen absolute proof that a virus of that type has been isolated, along the lines of Koch’s Postulate. Koch’s Postulate In 1890 the criteria for seeing if a given bacteria was the cause of a certain disease was proposed by Robert Koch, German physician and bacteriologist. (German Koch Foundation) – now corrupted. The bacteria (virus) must be present in every case of the disease. The bacteria (virus) must be isolated from the host with the disease and grown in pure culture. The specific disease must be reproduced when a pure culture of the bacteria (virus) is inoculated into a healthy… Read more »
By some accounts 90% of those admitted to hospital (with flu or whatever) were deficient in Vitamin D, and 90% of those going into ICU (with pneumonia) were deficient in Zinc.
I’ve seen this sort of thing quoted before. Vitamin D may well be a miracle cure, but these stats don’t tell you anything without knowing the general population level of D deficiency (which we are told is high, at northern latitudes at least). If 90% of the population as a whole is D deficient then the % admitted to hospital is exactly the same.
I was very ill over the lockdown period (nothing to do with Covid) and was advised by Doctors to take vitamin D which I still take. Despite having a supposedly compromised immune system and nearly dying twice a few years back I never even get a cold and yet people all around me seem to be picking infections up all the time.
Oh, and I was in hospital a lot during the lockdowns and banning visitors was a kind of torture that I thought would not go on outside of China. Just horrible not knowing when you would seen anybody from outside again.
And yet Doctors (occasionally), nurses, catering staff, cleaners and loads of others just walked in and out of the ward all the time. Did they have Covid tests everyday, of course not. Did anybody die of Covid around me in hospital? Again, of course not.
Absolutely evil period to have lived through and do you know what? I have never had a Covid vaccine…
I found dragging my foot over the arrow stickers on the office floor to be quite effective.
All very correct I’m sure but you were just part of the problem. As others have said you and others in a position like you should have done nothing. A load of probably fit and healthy younger people were in absolutely no danger from Covid.
That you still can’t see through the scam three years later is just appalling.
I think employers were put in a difficult position. I was fortunate that I had sold my business and did not have to manage it during Covid.
I don’t know how I would have done it, not signing up to any of the Covid nonsense. I think it is admirable how he has managed all his staff to see sense and work though it. It will have helped he did not have a public facing business.
Had Mr MacMillan spent no more than one hour on the Internet researching respiratory viruses, their transmission mode, symptoms, and experience from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, he would have saved himself a great deal of time and expense.
His assertions about cures and preventative measures are fantasy – a desire to believe it wasn’t all a waste of time, which it was. To find such remarkable success against a virus actually milder for 99.9% of the population than Common Cold, and which failed to infect most of the population, requires a very active imagination.
“… high dose Vitamin C & D has helped them recover quickly.”
Despite this claim having been around for decades, numerous trials have failed to confirm it. The Common Cold Research Unit spent 50 years postwar looking for cures and vaccines for Colds and ‘flu without success.
“… As it was believed that the virus could be transmitted through touching surfaces…”
It was never ‘believed’ it was known that respiratory viruses are not spread by fomites- it simply isn’t possible to transfer the viral load required into the airways via surfaces to cause an infection. It resides in the same category as “safe & effective”.
Thank you for an excellent taking apart of this nonsense article. It was tiresome when originally posted so repeating it once more is damned infuriating.
Rubbish, wishful thinking and superstition bar possibly Vitamin D and certainly ‘who’s sick stays at home’.
The study on the German kindergartens demonstrated that air filtration makes no positive difference, to the contrary.
And the fever hospitals for the elderly sick before dispatch into a care home suggested here recently ATL by someone who knew what he’s talking about were the only sensible public health measure.
A somewhat reckless use of the word “dispatch.” Or was it?
Masks were worse than useless given the devlopmental imparment of small children at that time. Potentially serious long term effects. There is already substantial data to demonstrate a period of great damage. Especially nasty when you consider that children were hardly efflicted at all by this pathogen. And its effects linger. More and more evidence is that the number one symptom is the inability to engage in physical exercise as a result of spike protein exposure,. This is a very serious matter on every level from that of health to geopolitics. You can’t just let it slide this is a serious attack on humanity.
You damaged a whole generation of children. Old people with dementia saw their condition accelerate and deteriorate.. There is no room for forgiveness or discussion you destroyed lives.
Well done, Mr MacMillan. You obviously did a fantastic job of getting your workforce onside, especially if you are in Scotland where the rules were far more draconian than here. Of course there was no pandemic, but you had to help your staff through all the uncertainty, negotiate the rules, etc etc and it seems as if you did a good job. As a retired couple, we now consistently take high levels of vitamins C and D as well as zinc and occasionally, especially at the first signs of a cold, gargle with salt water and also dilute Lugol’s iodine which is brilliant. I didn’t know that grapefruit seed extract (which I take in pill form for digestive purposes) was good in this regard.
“whilst making sure that our employees could work without risk of catching the virus”
This is at the very heart of the matter, the expectation and demand that an employer/the government could and should be able to prevent their employees/the population from encountering a microscopic viral particle as they go about their daily lives.