Sir Christopher John MacRae Whitty, Chief Medical Officer to H M Government
Common Sage
The word 'SAGE' has several meanings:-
1. Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)
2.Wise, discreet, judicious, (WDJ.) having the wisdom of experience. (Concise Oxford Dictionary)
3..Aromatic herb with dull, grey-green leaves (Concise Oxford Dictionary)
I recently came across an interesting article on the 'Expose' News site, written about a year ago, by Sonia Elijah, on the subject of the UK Government appointed 'Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies' a.k.a. 'SAGE'
' Never have statisticians, mathematical biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, behavioural scientists and a few epidemiologists dictated government policy to such an extreme degree as over the past year.'
By Sonia Elijah
On March 25, 2020, the Coronavirus Act received Royal Assent having been fast-tracked through Parliament in four working days. The Act contained emergency powers to enable public bodies to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, or Sage, and its subcommittees became the de facto leader of the operation. This was the point at which the UK ceased to be governed by elected representatives.
To this day, Sage do not answer to the public – they don’t even answer to the government. They ‘advise’ the government on all things Covid, and the government is then led by the ‘data’ to implement the most draconian restrictions on freedom in our nation’s history. Sage are accountable to no one. In my opinion, Sage have staged a covert coup and hardly anybody has taken notice, let alone the mainstream media.
Below is a list of attendees from one of the early March Sage meetings just before the first lockdown. I’ve highlighted the key members.
Patrick Vallance (Government Chief Scientific Adviser), Chris Whitty (Chief Medical Officer), Jonathan Van-Tam (Deputy Chief Medical Officer), Steve Powis (NHS), Charlotte Watts (Chief Scientific Adviser, Department for International Development), Angela McLean (Chief Scientific Adviser MoD), John Aston (Chief Scientific Adviser, Home Office), Sharon Peacock (Public Health England), Graham Medley (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine), Neil Ferguson (Imperial College), Brooke Rogers (King’s College), James Rubin (King’s College), Jeremy Farrar (Wellcome), David Halpern (Behavioural Insights Team) Ian Diamond (Office for National Statistics), Tom Rodden (Chief Scientific Adviser, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport), Aidan Fowler (NHS), Maria Zambon (PHE), Phil Blythe (Chief Scientific Adviser for the Department of Transport), Wendy Barclay (Imperial College), Peter Horby (Oxford University), John Edmunds (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine), Carole Mundell (Chief Scientific Adviser, Foreign and Commonwealth Office).
If you take a closer look at the key ‘experts’, they have all had connections in some way with either Big Pharma, Big Tech or the Big NGOs, such as GAVI-The Vaccine Alliance, World Health Organisation, World Economic Forum, World Bank, Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Many have had their research funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. In fact, the UK is the biggest beneficiary of university grants given by the Gates Foundation with $744million disbursed to 38 universities, the top beneficiaries being Imperial College London, University College London, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LHSTM), King’s College London and Oxford University.
Many of the key Sage members have held senior positions in the pharmaceutical industry before being government advisers and some hold shares in the pharmaceutical companies they worked for.
In September 2020 the Telegraph revealed that Sir Patrick Vallance, Government Chief Scientific Adviser, had £600,000 worth of shares in GlaxoSmithKline, which was contracted to develop a coronavirus vaccine. In December 2020 the British Medical Journal wrote that ‘by July the UK government had signed a coronavirus vaccine deal for an undisclosed sum with GlaxoSmithKline, securing 60million doses of an untested treatment that was still being developed.’ If this is not a blatant conflict of interest, I don’t know what is.
Vallance not only held GSK shares but was also president of research and development at GSK from 2012-2017. It was while he was president, in 2013, a partnership between GSK and the Gates Foundation was announced to ‘accelerate research into vaccines for global health needs’.
As a researcher at the LHSTM, Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty received £31million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for malaria research.
His deputy, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, joined the pharmaceutical industry as an associate director at SmithKline Beecham (now GSK) in 2000. Van-Tam was Head of Medical Affairs at Roche in 2001 and then went to work at Aventis Pasteur MSD as the UK medical director the following year.
Sir Professor Jonathan Van-Tam. Deputy Chief Medical Officer to HM Government. (W.D.J.)
Van-Tam chaired the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) expert advisory group on H5N1 vaccines and advised the WHO during the H5N1 influenza (bird flu) outbreak in 2009- 2010. The WHO in turn triggered countries around the world, including the UK, to buy enormous quantities of the drug oseltamivir (brand name: Tamiflu) produced by the pharmaceutical companies Roche and GSK, former employers of Van-Tam.
An investigation by the BMJ and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, reported by Deborah Cohen and Philip Carter, said some of the experts advising WHO on the pandemic had ‘declarable financial ties with drug companies that were producing antivirals and influenza vaccines. As an example, WHO’s guidance on the use of antivirals in a pandemic was authored by an influenza expert who at the same time was receiving payments from Roche, the manufacturer of oseltamivir (Tamiflu), for consultancy work and lecturing.’
The BBC ran an article stating that ‘hundreds of millions of pounds may have been wasted on a drug for flu that works no better than paracetamol, a landmark analysis has said’. This was based on The Cochrane Collaboration (a global non-profit organisation of 14,000 academics) review on Tamiflu. Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine, University of Oxford, stated that the side effects of Tamiflu ‘included serious psychiatric adverse events, renal and metabolic adverse events’.
At the heart of Sage is SPI-M. It’s been driving government policy ever since the ‘war’ on Covid-19 began. Only very few media outlets, such as TCW and the Daily Mail, have questioned the ‘dodgy data’ derived from its computerised type of modelling. Anyone who suggests it is not perfect is often branded a ‘Covid denier’.
The man who ran the show at SPI-M at the start of the pandemic was Neil Ferguson. He is also acting director of Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium (VIMC) based at Imperial College, which is funded by GAVI-The Vaccine Alliance, in turn funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as TCW reported here.
Just to give a quick recap on how ‘well’ his previous modelling predictions have gone: in 2001, Ferguson’s modelling of the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak influenced the UK government pre-emptively to cull well over 6million animals at an estimated £10billion cost to the economy. As a result, the farming community was utterly devastated, giving rise to more centralised power by the EU over UK agriculture.
Professor Michael Thrusfield of Edinburgh University, an expert in animal diseases, later described Ferguson’s modelling during the foot-and-mouth period as ‘severely flawed’ and ‘not fit for purpose’. Ferguson’s predictions of ‘worst-case scenario’ were seen as grossly over-estimated.
This pattern of Ferguson’s models over-playing the ‘doom’ factor has been repeated several times. In 2005 Ferguson claimed that up to 200million people worldwide would die during the bird flu outbreak including up to 750,000 in the UK. This led to the stockpiling of Tamiflu in the UK from 2006; this was widely prescribed later in the swine flu pandemic. The World Health Organisation was able to link only 78 deaths worldwide to the bird flu virus.
In 2009, Imperial’s model led by Ferguson gave rise to the prediction of 65,000 deaths from swine flu in the UK; in fact only 457 deaths were linked to the virus. Based on Ferguson’s model, the government spent £1.2billion to prepare for the swine flu pandemic. As a result, more than 20million unused doses of vaccine were left over.
Once more it was Ferguson’s ‘doomsday’ modelling prediction in the March 16, 2020 report from the Imperial College Covid-19 response team that gave the dire warning of 510,000 UK deaths by the end of May 2020 if the government continued with its ‘herd immunity’ response to the pandemic. This catastrophic prediction caused Boris Johnson to do an abrupt U-turn days later and steered the course for the most draconian restrictions and dreadful lockdowns ever since. It was only after Ferguson was caught flouting the rules in May 2020 when meeting his mistress that he resigned from Sage but he is still, remarkably, a member of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag). Given Ferguson’s record, it is hard to understand why he continues to be given a platform to speak and influence UK government policy. It is worth noting that Ferguson was very influential on Boris Johnson’s Christmas U-turn.
While SPI-M provides the ‘mathematical science’ for lockdowns, SPI-B provides the ‘behavioural science’. It’s a key component in its ‘PsyOp’ for the inhumane and disastrous lockdowns that’s estimated to have cost up to 200,000 lives (that’s more than the supposed ‘120,000’ lives taken by COVID-19) and cost the economy £2.4billion a day.
I use the term ‘PsyOp’ in the truest sense of its meaning – a psychological operation or psychological warfare ‘to denote any action which is practised mainly by psychological methods with the aim of evoking a planned psychological reaction in other people’.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfareAnd what was the planned ‘psychological reaction in other people’ that needed to be evoked by Sage last year? Fear. In other words, scare the public senseless and they will do anything you want them to do. This unfortunate truth has been echoed throughout history.
The Johnson government, through SPI-B’s coaxing, expertly crafted a highly effective advertising campaign for COVID-19. The government spent more than £1.1billion of tax-payers’ money on advertising.
Ack. 'Expose' web-site. March 2021. Article by Sonia Elijah.
