It’s been another busy week at the UK Column. A week feels like a day, and time continues to feel as though it is speeding up. The news never stops to sleep, and more so than ever before, the dramatic fake news stories just keep on coming. If you are breathless, I understand perfectly. So am I.
It certainly is all about change. By the time you are reading this, the UK will have a new Prime Minister. God help all of us. We may also have another US Democratic presidential nominee in place of sleepy Joe Biden. And for sure, Dame June Raine will be starting to clear her desk, making it ready for her successor at the MHRA. Who that will be remains a mystery. Considering we have been banned from watching Dame June’s last meeting as CEO, I will assume that the MHRA Board Members are getting worried about our presence. Why else would we be banned? I will take that as a badge of honour. Good luck, Dame June. We will watch with interest as to where you go next.
Health ‘Fearlines’
With so many health stories springing up, I decided to write a section entitled ‘fearlines’, which is my term for mainstream media (MSM) ‘headlines’.
Over the past week, I have lost count of all the health scares in the MSM. MPox Clade 1.b is allegedly a new public health crisis in the making, whilst we have a first for Finland who are busy jabbing humans with a vaccine, designed for birds. The E. coli fearmongering continues to ramp up, as does drinking water contamination. Perhaps the Daily Express have been watching UK Column?
If you are not incapacitated on the toilet, perhaps you are coughing and spluttering? Whooping cough/pertussis,otherwise known as the 100-day cough, is on the rise in both hemispheres. The intention is of course to scare you, to inject you, and ultimately to refuse you antibiotics or other helpful therapies. Many children who have already had the‘whooping cough’ vaccine still get whooping cough. Go figure.
As a young child, I had whooping cough, as did one of my sons at the tender age of three months. As you can see, I am fine, and my son is doing very nicely at almost 40. Whooping cough can be very distressing to watch; witnessing your baby coughing himself or herself into exhaustion is upsetting and worrying. Luckily, babies are born with beautifully strong and resilient immune systems, and they have a thymus gland, which is more than capable of healing them and giving them protection from diseases for the rest of their lives. The doctors will tell you that because we cannot vaccinate babies against whooping cough until eight weeks old, we must encourage all pregnant mums to get thewhooping cough jab to protect their babies from birth to eight weeks. So, who do you trust? God, who created and gave your baby a perfect thymus gland? Or Big Pharma, who will give your baby an unnecessary lab-generated or AI-generated novel jab? Everyone must make their own decisions on this based on their own beliefs and research. Would I encourage a pregnant mum to ‘grab a jab’? No, I wouldn’t give pregnant mums anything unless necessary. I am old enough to remember thalidomide.
But if you don’t fancy any of the above, there are more exotic diseases on their way to the UK that you could allegedly encounter. Dengue is just next door in Europe, whilst Vole Fever is allegedly jumping from animals to humans in some parts of Europe. I could go on, and I probably will in the coming weeks. It’s safe to say, however, that the campaign to isolate us, frighten us, test us, medicate us, and control us is ramping up.
On a more serious note…
Flu/COVID-19 mRNA Shots Are on the Way
Who wants two shots when just one will do? To reduce the burden of ‘taking shots’, Big Pharma thought they may as well mix and match to make life easier for all of us. Moderna has announced that they are delighted to have been able to develop a single vaccine that is effective at providing immunity against both flu and COVID-19 for the over 50s.
Moderna’s latest mRNA poison has successfully completed Phase III clinical trials. Clinical trials are not what they used to be. Today, Phases I, II and III all run parallel to one another to save time and money. But at what cost to humanlives? Does that make you all want to rush out and grab one? It’s a ‘no thanks’ from me!
Customers Continue to Be Locked Out of Their Bank Accounts
Thanks so much to Jane, one of our loyal members, for informing me that her bank had locked her account after she transferred money to a friend in South Africa. She is currently being asked to provide photographic and written evidence that the person she made the transfer to is known to her. This story lit up our UK Column members’ chat box. Many of you seem to be experiencing similar events. Whilst Jane was warning of transferring funds to other countries, other members in the UK have had their accounts locked for transferring money to their children who are also in the UK!
Some questions we are receiving, and yet are unable to answer, include:
- If you have accrued a debt, can the bank lock your account until the debt is paid?
- If someone isn’t paying council tax and receive regular visits from bailiffs, can the council ask the bank to lock the person’s account?
- Who has the right to demand that an account is closed?
- Who can view your account?
- What should you do if your account is locked?
If you have any experiences to share, please pop them in the members’ forum, where you will find my blog posted every fortnight. This may be a bigger problem than we are being led to believe now that the MSM stories of Nigel Farage/Coutts and National Westminster Bank have died down.
Beat the Street
Thank you so much to Dr Christian Buckland for drawing my attention to a 12-month community-wide UK Government initiative designed to improve the health and wellbeing of cities and towns. How? Beat the Street is a scheme to get adults and children ‘moving’, which in essence means walking or cycling. It is a new ‘behavioural nudge’ to get you to comply to what, exactly? By creating a ‘social norm’, it is intended to lead to ‘long term behaviour change’. Where have you heard that before? This time, the behavioural change agenda is slow and steady. It is split into three phases, which are aptly called anticipation, experience, and legacy.
Anticipation – Three months are spent softening the community up, although they pitch it as ‘engaging’ with communities, stakeholders and champions. Local knowledge is handy if you are looking to gather intelligence, after all. Feel like being a part of it? No thanks.
Experience – You have two months to turn your town into a giant playground. Game on! Pick up your radio-frequency identification technology (RFID) chips, and then you can run around your town, tapping the ‘beat boxes’ located on lamp posts to say you are active. Whoever taps the most beat boxes gets a prize! Whoop whoop! Perhaps a school may want to create a ‘beat box’ team? The beat box, before you get too excited (I know you won’t), contains sensors which will track and trace your every move. What is more important to you? A prize or privacy?
Legacy – Once the time is up and the ‘game’ is over, it will leave a ‘legacy’ of physical activity. By using the ‘game’,you will be instantly signposted to events and activities in your area. Work with local stakeholders will take place to maintain and expand ‘active’ communities. Does that sound like a public-private partnership to you?
A company called Intelligent Health created this scheme. The company has made it its mission to ‘connect’ people and to create active societies. Is your area participating? Who will your ‘local champion’ or ‘trusted messenger’ be? More on this soon.
Big Change — Introducing Holly Branson
I have been advising everyone for a while to watch the word change. It will be ringing in your ears by the time the year is finished. And get ready, because big changes are most definitely ahead. Staying on the subject of young people, and the business of keeping them supported and active in times of change, I never had a problem with either when I was growing up. Life was changing all the time, although the closest we got to new technology was a red telephone box, and maybe a black and white television, if we were lucky. With the advent of the highly addictive black screens, it would appear we now need big corporations and famous names to support, advise, and nanny our youngsters.
Who has heard of Big Change? Like father, like daughter: the big brain behind Big Change is Richard Branson’sdaughter, Holly, who has in her own right become a high-flying entrepreneur, businesswoman, and philanthropist. Having completed five years of medical training to become a junior doctor, she decided to defer after being enticed into her billionaire father’s company, Virgin Unite. Perhaps that is why Richard Branson has been so interested in acquiring GP surgeries. What better medical advisor to have than your very own home-grown doctor?
After the London Riots in 2011, Holly was having a chat with some friends over a coffee when she decided she wanted to ‘change’ the world. But for whom? Her friends or your friends? Deciding to back young people’s ideas, inventions and innovations, she set up the organisation. She has wished for 10 main changes, including a complete redesign of both Ofsted and the UK education system. Holly’s goal is to create and unite communities of supporters and pioneers to direct funds to the areas of greatest ‘impact’ and to reimagine and transform education. The Big Education Challengeoffers incentives to youngsters who share their ideas with Big Change: ‘Finalists have access to pro bono support through the Young Foundation, to help them test and build their bold ideas to transform education and learning in the UK’. Does that sound like control, conditioning, and grooming to you?
With a pedigree such as Holly’s and some impressive backers, together with a £1 million prize fund to entice young innovators, you wouldn’t think they need public donations; however, they think otherwise. Why do big organisations with wealthy backers, such as this one, need public donations?
As if that were not enough to do, Holly finds time to write books. In 2018, she published her first book, co-authored with Marc and Craig Kielburger, called WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make A Living, and Change the World. Holly appears to be following her own advice with the full support of a very close family and doing very nicely. In my day, the word ‘change’ meant menopause, but now it means so much more. I will be paying more attention to the Branson Dynasty in the future.
Stories in Brief
Prof Diane Rasmussen McAdie and Debi Evans Podcast
Diane and I intend to start a podcast together for UK Column. We are looking forward to welcoming our friend Cheryl Grainger as one of our first VIP guests. We would love to get some feedback from you. What topics would you like to see discussed? How long do you think you could spare time to listen to? What time of day is best to listen? Jot down your thoughts on the forums if you are a member, or tweet us @dianeukc and @DebiEvansUKC. Perhaps you have something to say and would like to be included? We will do our best to fit as many of you in as we can. Don’t be shy! All ideas are welcome.
Bill Gates
It would appear not all in the garden is rosy for Bill Gates. His ex-wife Melinda French Gates has pulled out of The Gates Foundation. More recently, it has been announced that his biggest backer of all time, Warren Buffett, has also decided that after his death, he too will no longer be a supporter of Bill’s philanthropic efforts. As Warren Buffett is 93 years old, Bill Gates’ gravy train is about to come to an abrupt halt.
UK food and water contamination
As I asked above, have the Daily Express been watching UK Column? This story came up on my news feed this week. At first glance, I thought I had written it! The headline reads: ‘Expert’s warning that food and water contamination could become increasingly common in UK’. According to the story, Dr Bruno Silvester Lopes, Lecturer in Microbiology at Teesside University, outbreaks of E. coli and cryptosporidiosis could become more common as the world’s population increases.
I don’t see any evidence of population growth in the world currently; in fact, there is a significant decrease in global population according to the authors of the book ‘Empty Planet’. If it isn’t population to blame, I guess they will revert to climate change.
Watch the water.
Supermarket checkouts… and check-ins?
Apparently, supermarket customers are not happy about checkouts being replaced by self-service checkout tills. I know the feeling.
Last week, I had the misfortune of going to my local Tesco. I don’t like shopping during busy periods, so I leave my visits to early morning or late evening when it’s quieter. You learn to do that when you live in a holiday resort! I never use the self-service tills. At 8:30pm, I was a little shocked and surprised to see a bank of 10 self-service tills that were empty, and one human cashier till that was open, with six people (me included) queueing with trollies of shopping. For a start, it is not practical for one person to empty a trolley’s worth of shopping on the tiny area provided for scanned goods in self-service. What was worse was that there were two checkout operators standing gormlessly watching 10 empty tills. The supervisor appeared to be angry. I am not sure why, but she refused to open another cashier-controlled till because she said she didn’t have any spare staff!
Not only was this queue very inconvenient for everyone, but it was also unfair and unnecessary, and it created an obstruction right down a shopping aisle. It may be worth noting that my queue consisted of mainly older people;however, there was a mum with a toddler in the trolley who was also waiting. So, it’s not just us oldies who don’t like change.
I am relieved to know I am not alone, however. Last week, The Sun reported on self-service checkout rebels at aSainsbury’s in Surrey. When did the phrase ‘the customer is always right’ go out of the window?
What should you do? You should keep queueing and make your feelings known. As horrid as it is, try to shop later or earlier in the day, and be prepared to add 10 minutes or so to your trip. Avoid self-service tills and the cameras placed above them. Do you know who or what has scanned your face and taken your photo? Do you know where that data has gone, to which cloud, and who owns it? Think carefully next time you are tempted to beat the queue.
And when you can’t get out of the supermarket without a hassle, imagine if you can’t even get in to start your weekly shop! Professor Diane sent me a photo of the entrance to her local Sainsbury’s in Edinburgh showing me their newly installed entrance gates that look rather full of technology. She noticed the edges of the swinging doors changing colours between red (stop?) and green (go?). After some research, Diane thinks they are not simply entrance gates, but they may include more advanced technology. They look just like the Servo Motor Turnstile Swing Gate MT310. These gates ‘support OEM and ODM. Support third-party biometric devices, such as fingerprint scanner, face recognition camera. RFID card reader, QR code scanner’.
Will we be required to scan a QR code or, even worse, our fingers and faces to enter the supermarket in the very near future? It looks that way in Scotland for Diane, and it won’t be long before those of us in England, N. Ireland, Wales and Crown Dependencies will be following suit. Note to self: shop in local shops and farm shops from now on. I suggest you consider doing the same. Thank you for the heads up, Professor Diane.
Medicine shortages
I need to revisit this subject. The number of medicines now in short supply is alarming. I have been reporting on shortages of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), antibiotics, ADHD medication, and now hay fever medications.
The agenda to cancel the medicines we have become so used to, many of them over-the-counter preparations, is so obvious that we can almost predict what will happen next. As the weather is expected to get hotter and sunnier, pollen levels will increase. If you are a hay fever sufferer, you may want to stock up on antihistamines just in case you can’t find any in your local store or chemist. Are you prepared to play ‘pharmacy bingo’?
I am noticing shortages on things that I keep as a staple in my first aid cupboard. Magnesium sulphate paste, a great gooey sticky ointment to draw pus and infection from wounds, is unavailable. Epsom salts are unavailable. Pepto Bismol for gastric irritation is unavailable. The pharmacy’s over-the-counter shelves are looking emptier by the day. Take note.
New clothing line that can trick AI cameras without covering your face
Here is a bit of good news for a change. CAP_ABLE is offering the first collection of garments that will shield the wearer’s face from facial recognition software in AI cameras. The Manifesto Collection includes trousers, t-shirts and dresses that will give you the ultimate in privacy. The company says that cameras will either fail to identify the wearer or they will think that they are one of the animals, such as a zebra, giraffe or dog embedded into the pattern. The pattern has been tested by YOLO, a common algorithm used for real time object detection systems. Although as a word of warning, their garments aren’t cheap.
And Finally
July has arrived. The children will soon be on school holidays, and families will be packing their bags in anticipation of a well-earned vacation. Please enjoy yourselves and get as much fresh air and sun as you can, whilst you can. I do have a few warnings for you as you pack your swimwear. As I have already mentioned, I have serious concerns about drinking water and bathing water, so for those of you who may not live in a coastal area, here a couple of tips to take with you.
Holidays are fun, and days on the beach, swimming and paddling in the sea are what coastal holidays are all about, right? But don’t expect the bathing water to be clean, because it isn’t. Rivers, waterways, and the sea are dirty. One precaution you can take is not to swim after it has been raining. Many water companies use rain as an opportunity to pump as much sewage as possible during rainfall. It won’t just be E. coli you are swimming with, to put it politely. Keep well-hydrated. Some locally harvested food may be farmed in water that may be contaminated with E. coli. Oysters and mussels are filter feeders. I will say no more.
If you are coming to Cornwall for a holiday, be aware that Cornwall is home to over 500,000 residents, many of whom are elderly. We are very happy for you to enjoy the breath-taking coastline and landscape that we love. But, with great respect, we only have one main hospital to serve us all. In the holiday season, Cornwall can expect to see 5 million visitors a year. That often puts a huge strain on our already overwhelmed and not very efficient ‘health’ service,particularly Accident and Emergency. Recently I have been hearing of young mums taking children to A/E for minor spontaneous nosebleeds (probably due to nose picking). In my day, we would not even have dreamt to have done that unless it was a very serious injury that had caused it. Please use common sense and come prepared for minor accidents and illnesses. Don’t forget to pack any prescription medicines, as you will be asked not to contact a doctor in Cornwall,but rather to refer to your own GP at home. Visitors have been asked before to bring their own first aid kit. It appears the MSM are warning us of an influx of mosquitoes. I am prepared; are you? Of course, it will all be blamed on climate change. Yawn.
As a born and bred London girl, I have lived in the countryside long enough now (40 years) to be able to spot a townie driver! The South West of England, as pretty as it may be, also has narrow, windy roads that can catch drivers not used to the terrain off guard. It is not uncommon to see a sheep or deer in the road, so please be mindful and drive carefully. Things are done a little slower down here. The Cornish call it ‘dreckly’, meaning if they promise to do something, it could happen anytime, or never!
For those going abroad, travel delays appear to be the new normal now. Expect to be delayed, and if you aren’t, it will be a pleasant surprise. Ensure you always have adequate access to medication and water. If you are travelling with young children, take some games and books to keep them entertained. If you are travelling to an EU country, do you need an e-visa?
Have a blessed week and keep the faith. If you don’t already have an emergency plan, now is the time to make one. Don’t be scared but be prepared.
Until next time
God Bless
Debi
Luke 8:17
For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither anything hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.
