Many of you know that I didn’t get tenure at King’s. Nay, in fact, and after not one, not two, but three rounds of advertising the post and interviews, they eventually replaced me. For my first update I was reliably informed by people who have experienced the new and *cough improved digital technologies for healthcare class that I pioneered and as taught by my replacement, that it is not in any way receiving the massively positive student evaluation scores and feedback that I received. No hard feelings or gloating on my part. I was uniquely placed to develop and teach that class. I was someone who trained in nursing a long time ago but spent almost two decades working on technology, including health technology. While my version received high praise on its first outing a new lecturer, even one who by all accounts may even be an excellent nurse first but who presents with no actual computer science, electrical engineering or solution development training or experience, might not be the best option to present such a cross-domain course.

It is a sad reflection on many non-computing domains that they figure they are, by virtue of having played with spreadsheets and a few apps on her phone, and after chatting with some hallucinating AI in a web browser, experts in digital technology. In truth, and I published a substantive paper on this with Professor Norman Fenton and members of his team reviewing a large number of academic papers on health AI that bear this fact out, too many nurses and doctors think that using Grok and ChatGPT or an app on their iPhone makes them an expert in technology and, similarly, an even larger number of computer scientists with no training in the health domain think that reading a few academic papers on angina, type 1 diabetes mellitus or cancer in order to create a computer model makes them an expert on complicated health conditions. Many professional schools, whether those training doctors, nurses, midwives, lawyers, accountants or some other form of certified professional, recognise that they need to teach some technology to the next generation. However, rather than having someone like myself with training and experience in both their own and the technology domain, they employ people exclusively trained in their own domain who simply profess an overactive (or in some cases hyperactive, as in ADHD or Asperger’s) interest in the tech. Along with DEI and the whole gamut of Marxist nonsense unrelated to the actual qualification being studied that is foisted upon today’s tertiary student, this is another reason why current day university education is a race to the bottom. To stupidity. To the future portrayed in the Idiocracy movie.

Have you ever noticed how university academics often claim a long laundry list of additional expertise, often under the sometimes misleading banner of research interests. Too many university lecturers and professors claim expertise in areas that are anything from at best peripheral to almost not even incidental to their actual training and qualifications. Law professors with an undergraduate qualification in general law subjects and PhD research in civil small claims law that claim expertise in international space law. Nursing lecturers who hold a general/adult nursing Bachelors degree, a Masters in Critical care, experience solely in medical/surgical wards, one critical care unit and elder care, and who wrote a PhD in something like clearance of the breakdown elements of medicines in critical care nursing who claim an expertise in the development of neural networks to diagnose and treat epilepsy and other acute neonatal neurological conditions. Some do this simply because these additional areas that were demonstrably not covered in the modules they studied are areas of personal interest - that because they are interested in the topic and maybe read some the often consensus-repeating and potentially useless “peer reviewed” papers on the topic, they are an expert. Others claim this expertise by virtue of the fact that one of the students they had wrote a research assignment or thesis on the topic - effectively claiming to have acquired the knowledge from their student, perhaps purely by osmosis?

I use these examples because they are similar to ones I saw during my limited academic career. First, an early-to-mid twenties senior lecturer with only an undergraduate degree in Law and a postgraduate certificate in tertiary teaching who admitted no training or experience in software development, computer science or technology who were hired to develop and teach a Masters qualification in AI and Law where the individual was attempting to teach development of legal neural networks by showing a class of undergraduate Law (LLB) graduates lecture videos from another university’s online MOOC course, never mind that he could not program these models himself nor assist the students when they attempted the assessment activities described in the MOOC course. Second, I also saw a nursing lecturer who appeared to have only minimal clinical experience and no training in computer science who presented herself as an expert in health data science and the use of AI who, after claiming this expertise in a lecture before other academics and a large group of students, proceeded to give a demonstration of the use of an AI processing health data. Showing the full screen of her laptop on projector screens over her head, she opened a Chrome browser window, logged into the well-known LLM AI tool’s website, and proceeded to have it process several hundred patient records from a local folder on her laptop. She stated that the records were real but had been anonymised but, when shown on screen, clinicians from that hospital immediately commented that they clearly still included the patient’s unaltered record ID number from the hospital’s computer system, as well as the patient’s home postcode, age and significant diagnosis and medicine dispensing data that would make re-identification of the patient fairly easy1. When asked, she demonstrated her ignorance of how the LLM AI tool she was using worked. She incredibly claimed that because the health records were on her laptop, the browser-based AI processed them using her years-old £600 Dell laptop and was not uploading or consuming them into the website servers the tool operated from. Even when it was shown to her that the icon for her wifi connection was showing hundreds of megabytes of data being sent to, not received from, the network, and that absent installation of a local version of the AI model, the data had to be sent to the AI model’s servers for ingestion. Even when she was shown evidence from the AI tool’s provider website that categorically stated that documents shared with the AI in a browser session were uploaded to their servers for analysis and processing, she still argued she knew more than several qualified and experienced technologists, myself included, who were present in the lecture theatre. This senior lecturer ignorantly gave what she admitted was real, and almost certainly re-identifiable, patient data to a commercial LLM AI product.

You cannot become proficient, let alone expert at something, if you are learning it from a professor who themselves is not an expert in that domain. I was the rare exception in that when I wanted to do research or teach in a domain, be it nursing, medicines and medicine, law, business, information and data science or computer science, I at least successfully studied the core modules or an entire degree and got some runs on the board in that domain first. Why? Because I believe a researcher, lecturer or even professor who either taught themselves a domain outside their qualification by reading the half-baked nonsense in many present-day “peer reviewed” academic papers, or who learned the incomplete things they are teaching from a prior unqualified inexpert making what they are teaching today, much like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, of even lower academic quality, is categorically not an expert and their teaching is not worth the thousands of dollars in fees each student is expected to pay. At best they are the blind leading the blind.

Which is an unfortunately apt segue into the next update…

It is five days later that I come to write the second update. Over the intervening five days my eyesight has continued to randomly shift between mostly okay to completely blurry with polyopia (double, triple and sometimes even quadruple vision in one eye), and for four out of the five days I had some variation of moderate headache or migraine and upper cervical (neck) pain and nerve spasms in my left shoulder. The problems with the vision in my right eye (my only working eye) have been intermittent for most of the last thirteen weeks - where I have either had mostly clear distance-field vision but blurry near-field vision, mostly clear near-field vision with blurry distance-field vision, or blurry vision in all fields. On some very rare days, perhaps one in every ten, I have had my normal mostly clear and functional vision back. Something I have found interesting, scientifically speaking, is the effect of what I believe our friends in the physics domain might call interference patterns… those times where the misaligned diplopia or triplopia images cross over or cancel each other out. I have observed these turning an X on a number plate about four metres away into first what looks like a capital A, and then after blinking a few times, into a capital V. It is like seeing some version of British polymath Thomas Young’s2 1801 double-slit experiment in my own head. Interesting, but I can tell you, also extremely disconcerting.

If you have never heard of it, this image is an approximation of what diplopia/triplopia looks like. It makes it very hard to read signs, look at text on a screen or in books, or even to simply make yourself a sandwich without potentially cutting yourself. Ask me how I know…

Sadly, a lot of my research has come to a halt. It is very difficult to read academic papers, Letby court transcripts and textbooks when text appears as a long grey snake with occasional lines in it due to the polyopia. While the text size on the huge 57” Samsung G9 monitor I am forced to use has had to be enlarged several times, the headaches and migraines have made it impossible to sit in front of a screen most days. I have seen several doctors and already been subjected to hours of tests. One doctor thinks it is all in my head - oh great, so I am imagining that my vision is so blurry that I walk into walls, fail to see steps and trip, reach to pick up things that turn out to be not where my brain thinks they are, have already accidentally put a steak knife through my left thumb and had to stop driving and flying drones. Another said it was temporary and would get better on it’s own - except that thirteen weeks later it is still here and not getting any better. A third thought there may be a brain tumor - I am hoping (rather, I am pretty sure) that the MRI I am about to have will allow me to channel my inner Arnie.

A fourth thinks it might be neurology’s latest catch-all diagnostic ‘explanation’, benign intracranial hypertension, which enables neurology’s latest panacea, regular lumber puncture draws to reduce the amount of circulating cerebrospinal fluid. A fifth finally considered something I have had for several years, meibomian gland dysfunction (MGD) which causes extreme dry eyes, and at least treated that. However, while treating that made my eyes sting less, it didn’t resolve the polyopia or headaches. The third at this point re-evaluated his tumor diagnosis and referred me to a sixth doctor who was another eye specialist who found ‘a few inflamed cells of posterior uveitis’. This, he treated with prednisone drops which, I must admit, got rid of the feeling that my right eye was going to pop out of my head… but sadly, it did nothing to resolve the polyopia or headaches. And so, at this point and after my wallet has been made considerably lighter, the original issue persists and we have ruled out several potential differential diagnoses.

Given that today I have had a few hours of semi-working vision, I have developed my own admittedly crude differential diagnosis model using Bayesian networks (thanks to Profs Fenton and Neil). That model, using academic literature and a dataset of over 3.2 million anonymised health records, resolves that a brain tumor has only a 4% probability, and a blocked gland causing transient horizontal astigmatism is 9% probable - and given I have a blocked gland in the upper lid is maybe more likely than that. It also strangely found based on some other symptoms I have at the moment that RA or SLE autoimmune disorders affecting my vision and causing headaches is 19% probable. However, the diagnosis that apparently accounts for the largest number of symptoms at 38.94% probable is that compressed, pinched or irritated upper cervical nerves that can also cause referred issues with blurred or double vision and headaches. I managed to identify several published case notes and academic papers supporting this potential diagnosis and, after some considerable back-and-forth, managed to use these to convince the last specialist to extend the MRI brain that has been ordered to also look at the cervical spine and nerves. My wallet will be even lighter as I have to pay for this MRI, but it will at least rule in/out a tumor, referred cervical nerve issues and a number of potential issues with blood flow such as a clot, mini-stroke or blood vessels restricting or impinging on the optic nerve or occipital lobe. Given I have no income and cannot effectively work, or work safely, when I cannot see… spending hundreds of dollars each week to find out or test treatments that aren’t the cause is frustrating.

The third update is that I have to call out the disgraceful lack of support I receive from the country of my birth. A country that is more willing to support and provide discounted homes to the more than one million Indian immigrants. A country that has spent millions to bring ISIS terrorist brides and their children who have almost certainly been inculcated to hate our western values here and provide them with housing and income support benefits. A country that spends hundreds of millions on failed green energy and electric car and truck projects while stealing arable land from our farmers and driving up the price of everything. A country where the Prime Minister’s obscene $7+ million dollar annual expense claims, a rate double that of his predecessor and more than four times that of any prior Prime Minister, is totally overlooked and treated as normal. A country that has brought in over 60,000 Pakistani muslims in the last couple of years under the ‘skilled migrant’ visa class, of which at least 13% are currently said to be receiving unemployment, carer or some other form of social welfare benefits - a benefit recipient rate that is 300% more than the 4% of white Australians in the same position.

In that same country I was interrogated, investigated and made to wait two months before finally receiving any form of benefit at all. I received a part-payment of that benefit for less than a month (April) before… you guessed it… even that was taken away from me and I was subject to the claim that in giving me those few weeks of part-payments, I had been ‘overpaid’. They got here through gross manipulation and deception. First, they sent a single letter saying I needed to call within fourteen days of the date on the letter or payments would be stopped. The date on the letter and the date on the envelope’s postmark were eleven days apart, but you never get an explanation as to why this might be the case. In any event, I called three times on the day I received the letter. Each call was met with a recorded message telling me their phone service was busy, that operators were not available to take my call, and thanking me for my call before terminating the call. My mobile phone bill shows each of these calls. So I called at 8:30am the following morning and was told I had been put ‘in the queue’, and that my approximate hold time would be forty-five minutes. Three-and-a-half hours later I was finally answered by a chap who told me he was located two time zones away from me. He followed this by telling me he was somehow unable to ask me the simple questions that the letter writer intended… even though he actually did ask and he recorded my responses in notes attached to my file. He concluded by saying someone else would have to call me, and he allocated a specific time when he said this would occur. But here is where the games begin…

The person who was allocated to call called on the right day, but at a time earlier than the allocated time. In what was clearly a non-native accent she failed to appropriately identify herself before launching into asking me for a lot of my own personal details. When I challenged this, she stated that in telling me her first name, she had ‘identified herself’ and that any doubt should be allayed by the fact that I should have received a text (SMS) message telling me to expect her call. Truth be known, the text message arrived to my mobile at 11:04am, almost two-and-a-half hours after this call ended. It should not be forgotten that when you send a text message may not be the same as when that text message is received. This results from a myriad of telephony provider inter-network or handoff and intra-network issues, and simply whether your mobile has ‘service’ at the time. Leaving this aside, the government’s own intelligence and cyber-security websites currently tell citizens on their landing page that hackers and fraudsters are faking text messages from important financially-related services like the tax and benefits departments, and not to trust, respond, follow links or act on such messages. Which is it? Are we supposed to believe these messages, even when they come late, represent the government department or public service and hence give our personal details to the person who calls and says they sent that message, or are we to consider them entirely suspect and not respond? In any event, it is hard to know when the person calls at a time other than the one that has been recorded, and the text message comes more than two hours late. When I informed the caller that her call was at the wrong time, that I had not received the text message she claimed had been triggered that morning, and that unless she could provide me with some proof that identified she was from the department she claimed to be from, I did not feel comfortable providing her with a continuous stream of personally identifiable information beyond that which I had already provided. She became argumentative and abusive, and when her abuse only received the same considered and calm response from me, she said something that sounded insulting and terminated the call. Unbeknown to me, she had been from the benefits agency and after ending the call, put some fairly unkind notes into my digital record. She also scheduled a new telephone appointment but, and here’s the kicker, disabled the requirement for me to be sent a letter or notification of that new appointment time. This meant I was not advised in writing, either by email or post. However, on this second occasion, two days later, I received a text message at 9:34 am that said someone would call from a Private Number at 10:15am. Nobody called at 10:15am, nor any time after that. Rather, my phone received a call at 9:48 am, almost half-an-hour early and while I was in the bathroom. My phone shows that unanswered call rang for all of seven (7) seconds, not even completing the second ‘ring’ before it was terminated by the caller. A second call followed at 9:52 am that rang for four (4) seconds before the caller hung up. I only found these calls when I came to pick up my phone just after 10:00am to pair the phone to my bluetooth headset. When I found out the following monday that my benefits claim had been reversed, and I called to ask why, I was told that because I had not answered these calls that came almost half-an-hour before their allocated appointment time and which were terminated before most normal people could have answered them, I was at fault and I was no longer entitled to support. Never mind that they acknowledge there are no suitable jobs for me where I am now forced to live. Never mind that I have a dependent child. And never mind that I am currently being treated for a medical condition that means I am without clear sight in my only working eye and even if there was a suitable job, I would be unfit for and therefor unable to undertake it.

To add insult to injury, even after reversing my benefits ‘claim’, they are still sending me letters demanding that I immunise my thirteen year old son to the degree that pharma money conflicted politicians have decided, else I will lose more. Fun fact, and leaving aside that coercion is not consent, when you have taken everything away Mr or Ms public servant, there is nothing else to take. Even if I was inclined to poison my child with the up to sixty toxic injections they are insisting he receive within 12 weeks, there is no incentive to do so when they have already taken all financial support away. Their threatening and coercive letter is at best vapid hot air, and at worst the work of mentally deficient public servants seeking to rub salt into the wound. If they want to spend what would undoubtedly be over $8,000 in public funds and doctor’s fees to give him all these jabs, why not give me that money as the benefit you are supposed to be giving me to feed and house him? What a retarded world we now live in that it is more important to pay money to doctors and pharma bros to turn our children into patients for life than to help their parents to feed, clothe and house them. In any event, this third update is exemplar for why I have spent most of my life working and living overseas. Through my adult life I have yet to receive anything approaching support, or even a job, from the country of my birth. Instead I continue to watch as my country, and likely yours too, spends our tax dollars to support people from other countries… people who are orders of magnitude more populous than us but who disingenuously claim minority status in our previously sane but now Marxist DEI overrun western countries.

I finish this post not knowing what my vision and visual acuity will be like when I awake tomorrow. I can already see the telltale signs of diplopia, double vision, returning, which doesn’t bode well. I have to wait another six days for that expensive MRI, and even then I am not assured of answers. The country town I grew up in has gone from having some of the best GPs and two of the country’s most respected eye surgeons3 when I was young, to being a dumping ground today for doctors, many of which were trained in places like India and central Africa or are simply those who didn’t make the cut to get into a specialty in what we call the big smoke. Too few chose to be here… and I suspect it might be only the ones who actively chose to be here that make up for the rest. While a couple of the ones I have had to meet in the last thirteen weeks have been really good, I admit to being worried for the patients of the rest. After all, every single one has had an opinion on what they think my diagnosis is…

But three months in, I still don’t have a cure.

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Don’t forget that my book about the corruption between academics and big pharma is available via a donation and digital distribution model. Anyone who would like a digital copy can donate GBP £12, AUD $23, CAD $22, USD $17 via my Buy-Me-A-Coffee page. Forward the receipt or drop me an email to redscott@techie.com so that I can match it up at my end and I will reply with a copy of the digital PDF file.

If you are a publisher who is willing to print my book, message me.

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Law, Health and Tech is a user funded publication. You can support this publication and my ongoing work either through a paid subscription here on Substack, or by making a donation on my Buy Me A Coffee page.

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If you had to provide a fifty-thousand-feet bird’s eye view of your take on the Letby case, what would it be?

Given that I like to try and respond to most, if not all, messages from my paid subscribers, I will try to answer that question in this post.

I consider a bird’s eye view to be a synopsis of the key events, outcomes, and issues; and such a synopsis should be only a couple or a few pages (2-4 at most). It took me a couple of days to whittle all the key notes I had for my book down to this small, concentrated post.

My Synopsis or Background of the Letby Case

Lucy Letby grew up nearly two-and-a-half hours south of Cheshire in Hereford, England. She completed her tertiary studies in children’s nursing at the University of Chester while living in on-campus student accommodation, and attended practicum placements at Liverpool Women’s Hospital and The Countess of Chester Hospital1.

In stark contrast to the easy-going and friendly version of Lucy portrayed by several of her friends2, some former colleagues retrospectively claimed during the Thirlwall Inquiry that Lucy didn’t always respond in a manner consistent with how most people would in certain types of stressful or emotional situations. One former mentor, Nicola Lightfoot, described how Lucy reacted with what she perceived was excitement or interest at the death of a poorly baby, while another described Lucy as awkward and quiet3. Even fellow nurse Melanie Taylor, who records show had almost as much involvement with many of the neonates that died as Lucy4 and who some believe had good reason to deflect any negative attention from herself by speaking against Lucy, repeated Lightfoot’s claims that Lucy discussed a child’s death in a way that Taylor, on reflection, found unusual5. It is possible from the differing descriptions to conclude Lucy may have had some degree of Asperger’s Syndrome. Young people with Asperger’s tend to: (i) perform fairly well academically; (ii) react inappropriately in social situations; (iii) respond with the wrong emotion, such as laughing at a funeral, becoming frustrated when praised or asked simple questions; (iv) become upset when routines change or rules are not followed; and (v) often misunderstand subtle cues like body language, humour and sarcasm6.

On the evening of Wednesday 4^th of July 2018, news broke of the arrest7 and questioning8 of a young neonatal nurse for harming infants in her care. Lucy had been arrested very early on the previous morning. Police would go on to allege she was involved in the deaths of eight babies, one of which would be dismissed by the judge before the start of her trial, and the attempted murder of seven more. These events were said to have occurred during 2015 and 2016 while she was working as a neonatal nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital. The police detective in charge of the case began seeking his fifteen minutes of fame early, making sweeping statements after her first arrest that compared the Letby investigation to incarcerated nurse Beverly Allitt who was nicknamed the angel of death for the serial murder of four children and attempted murder of three more. While he appeared more circumspect in his comments to the media when re-arresting Lucy a year later9, his controversial comments during that first arrest irreversibly primed the public to believe Lucy was a serial baby killer even before she had been charged, tried or convicted. So it wasn’t surprising that even as prosecutor Nicholas Johnson was making his opening address at her trial, and before the first real evidence was heard, Lucy was being vilified in the mainstream media as The Baby Poisoner, the Poison Nurse who killed seven babies, and the Malevolent Nurse10.

What was less well known at the time was that police initially claimed to have been looking into all seventeen deaths that occurred at the neonatal unit across 2015 and 2016, even though they eventually focused on only those they could easily connect to Lucy. Similarly, few at the time knew that Dewi Evans, the person whose self-serving, incredible and perfunctory investigation in ten minutes over a coffee11 diagnosed murder from cherrypicked and incomplete medical records, had driven to Cheshire and insinuated himself into the investigation. Evans went on to claim he had reviewed thirty-three cases in total during his initial involvement12. Often polemic13, inflexible14 and incredibly prejudiced15, Evans flippantly told psychiatrist Raj Persuad that his participation in the investigation, which we now know was not driven by altruistic or rightful interests and saw his paediatric consulting company16 receive hundreds-of-thousands and potentially up to a million UK pounds17 in taxpayer funds, was to keep my son in cars and my daughter in horses18. If his ten minute review hadn’t declared that single infant’s death murder after reading the few pages of that first medical record he had been given by police, his bank balance might never have benefited from the vast income he went on to make from the case. By any measure, Evans had a vested interest in finding and spinning what some contend are fanciful tales of how Lucy must have murdered these babies.

In all, Lucy was arrested three times during the investigation: July 3, 2018; June 10, 2019; and November 10, 2020. The first arrest occurred early in the morning at Lucy’s home in Cheshire. She was held in police custody and questioned repeatedly over three days while a tent was set up in her driveway and her house and grounds were searched. She was released on police bail. Her second arrest also occurred early in the morning, but at her parent’s house in Hereford. She was again held in police custody, repeatedly questioned over another three days, and again released on police bail. The third and final time was also a morning arrest at her parent’s house. She was held overnight and officially charged the following day, bail was denied as is common in the UK for murder accused, and she was remanded into custody.

Lucy was initially held in HMP Bronzefield in Surrey, England. This necessitated lengthy journeys of at least four hours each way in prison vans for every pre-trial appearance at Manchester Crown Court. Given Lucy would have been required to be delivered to the court up to an hour before the usual 10:30am start time, she was likely being woken before 4:30am to prepare for transport. Public records show that just prior to her first trial she was moved to HMP New Hall in West Yorkshire, a more reasonable ninety minutes average travel time each way to and from Manchester Crown Court. At New Hall, she was being woken around 5:30am in order to be present in the court cells prior to the trial commencing at 10:30am each day. Most days she was arriving back at HMP New Hall as much as two hours after the inmate population had sat for the evening meal.

Letby’s first trial lasted around ten months, with the jury hearing evidence for a total of 145 sitting days. More than three-dozen witnesses testified for the prosecution, several with significant issues or conflicts of interest. For example, Peter Hindmarsh, a paediatric endocrinologist who claimed Lucy attempted to murder two babies by injecting insulin into their fluid bags, failed to disclose that he had been terminated from his clinical roles with University College London Hospitals and Great Ormond Street Hospital on the basis of serious allegations including that he harmed patients in his care19. Stephen Brearey, one of Lucy’s accusers from the Countess of Chester Hospital, was one of the witnesses who testified Baby O died of blunt force trauma claimed to have been caused by Lucy. Brearey has been identified as the doctor who is alleged to have fatally pierced Baby O’s liver with a needle he was using to release air from the baby’s abdomen during resuscitation. During testimony Brearey admitted stabbing Baby O with a needle but emphatically denied the needle was inserted near the liver. However, two post mortem pathologist’s reviews contradict this. Since the Lee Report was released, Brearey has not denied this potential clinical error but has preferred instead to hide behind claims of respecting patient confidentiality while declining to comment either way on the clearly serious and strongly supported accusation20. Finally, Dewi Evans. Judge Lord Justice Jackson took the unprecedented step of writing to Lucy’s trial judge, Justice Goss, to warn him that Evan’s work on a case before the Court of Appeal was worthless, tendentious, and makes no effort to provide a balanced opinion21. Jackson went on to say no attempt has been made to engage with the full range of medical information or the powerful contradictory indicators. Instead, [Evans] report has the hallmarks of an exercise in ‘working out an explanation’ that exculpates the applicants22. Evans claimed in one interview to have never lost a murder, manslaughter or serious abuse case23 as if he was the prosecutor rather than a prosecution witness. He has a serious financial conflict of interest arising from the huge amounts of money he was able to invoice for his involvement by virtue of miraculously finding murder in each baby’s medical record. This clouds his involvement in the Letby case.

Letby’s second trial ran for four weeks across June and into early July of 2024. It was a retrial on the single count of attempted murder of Baby K on which the first trial’s jury had remained undecided. Prosecutor Nicholas Johnson began the second trial with an opening statement that in hindsight could be characterised as prejudicial. First, because it commenced by telling the jury Letby had already been convicted of multiple other murders and attempted murders; a propensity argument that effectively said to the jury: the defendant was found guilty of these other murders and attempted murders, therefore you can believe us when we say she is guilty of this one, too. Second, Johnson told the jury that Letby was caught virtually red handed by a doctor, Ravi Jayaram, attempting to murder Baby K by intentionally dislodging the baby’s breathing tube. Meanwhile, subsequent evidence that would have been available to police and prosecutors at the time had their investigation followed protocol and cast the requisite wide net for suspects and evidence, has discredited the prosecutor’s claim and Jayaram’s testimony. We will see later that this evidence strongly suggests Jayaram may have misled the jury and committed perjury24 in giving that testimony.

In total, Lucy Letby has been given fifteen whole-of-life sentences, yet her vilification continues. Mainstream journalists seeking to continue the story beyond all reason have released disingenuous articles claiming Lucy formed a prison gang25 with a baby poisoner and the murderer of a British teen, that the standard provisions for compliant prisoners in the jail where she is being held make her incarceration luxurious26, and that spending the free time she has when not engaged in her prison cleaning job playing chess with other inmates is a grim spectacle27. Each of these articles portrays Lucy’s incarceration as some sort of enjoyable indulgence holiday. They also assert her increasingly evil nature based on nothing more than unavoidable associations with other criminals. Unstated is the more sensible conclusion that her interaction with these other prisoners arises not out of choice, but as the natural result of their being housed together in the same locked unit.

Lucy’s story continues to polarise many. Some, based on little more than that she stood accused, or was later convicted, believe she is a guilty evil baby killer. Others have a more nuanced take that, whilst not understanding the differences between direct and circumstantial evidence, believe she must be guilty because so many coincidental circumstantial things pointed in her direction. However, and while at the start and during the first trial there was only an upwelling of a handful that included myself, there is now a tidal wave of people from all walks of life, from parents to professors and researchers to clinical experts, who believe Lucy’s convictions to be a miscarriage of justice. Some outright say she is innocent, while many of us point to the long list of deficiencies in the criminal investigation, forensic re-analysis and procedures. Others question how someone who was not a true expert in neonatology was not only allowed to insinuate himself into the case, but to effectively become Lucy’s judge, jury and executioner while drawing a significant income from telling his potentially biased version of the facts as he claimed to see them. No matter what the eventual outcome is, and no matter whether you believe she did it or that she is innocent, there are enough questions around investigatory process, interpretation of findings, prosecutorial approach and judicial interventions that almost entirely favoured the prosecution, that the resulting outcome cannot be considered a fair and unbiased application of justice. Even if you believe her to be guilty, you should still want all of the questions that are being raised about Lucy’s case to be answered. Even if only to ensure that should you ever come before a court, you can believe you will receive a fair, just and unbiased trial. After all, if even one unfair, unjust or biased verdict is allowed to stand, then what is to stop the same court from taking your life from you in a similar unfair, unjust and biased way? Or, as Blackstone’s ratio posits:

“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

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Don’t forget that my book about the corruption between academics and big pharma is available via a donation and digital distribution model. Anyone who would like a digital copy can donate GBP £12, AUD $23, CAD $22, USD $17 via my Buy-Me-A-Coffee page. Forward the receipt or drop me an email to redscott@techie.com so that I can match it up at my end and I will reply with a copy of the digital PDF file.

If you are a publisher who is willing to print my book, message me.

*** *** ***

Law, Health and Tech is a user funded publication. You can support this publication and my ongoing work either through a paid subscription here on Substack, or by making a donation on my Buy Me A Coffee page.

*** *** ***

Prologue

Most observers remain blissfully unaware that much of what goes on in the courtroom is less about truth-seeking and more about appearances. That the courtroom is a theatre. A stage where the words of the actors, the legal counsel, are usually carefully chosen and intended to influence the decision-making process of the trier of fact; whether that role be filled by judge alone or the twelve lay members of an empanelled jury. During my own legal training I observed several of these courtroom dramas; choreographed plays laid bare before the open court. I have watched as evidence was produced and decisions were handed down on everything from seemingly trivial and mundane matters like minor speeding offences, through to complicated multi-day and even multi-fixture fraud, family court and international Hague trials. Several have stuck with me over the years, but none more than the time I spent watching the trial of British nurse, Lucy Letby.

What I saw during the Letby trial compelled me to read further. To consume hundreds of pages of transcripts, review complicated and distressing clinical evidence, and has even led me to write. Some who pick up this book are doing so because you have read the series of articles I wrote on the Letby case on my Law, Health and Technology Substack. While this book will draw on some of the timelines, analysis and articles found there, it will also do much more. While reviewing the evidence and helping you, the reader, to decide for yourself whether Lucy Letby did or did not have a case to answer, it will also introduce you to the law and legal process. It will open your eyes to the rules and procedures that form the structure; the acts, scenes and soliloquies of the play. It will discuss how and where the script commonly deviates from the story; those now-frequent examples where modern justice has ceased to be blind, fair and impartial. And through comparison to other more minor and, perhaps to us on the outside, mundane cases I witnessed, it will do all this while showing that it isn’t just the high stakes so-called capital crimes of the century like those Lucy Letby stood accused of that have been going off-script.

Chapter Two: She’s a liar!

June 9, 2023 - Lucy’s cross-examination by Nicholas Johnson KC

After several escalating parleys with Lucy regarding her relationship with one of the doctors on the unit, Doctor A, prosecutor Nicholas Johnson shifted his gaze from his notes on the lectern in front of him to look directly at Letby.

“You have deliberately misled this jury about your background, haven’t you?” was his rejoinder as he first indicated in the general direction of, before turning his head to glance directly at, the jury box.

“No.” Lucy replied, struggling to relate this harsh and overly broad question with the more direct questions of last few minutes. It sounded to her like he was accusing her of lying to the jury, but about what?

“You have deliberately misled them about your circumstances following your suspension from that unit, haven’t you?”

“No.” She replied again.

“And you have also deliberately misled them about the circumstances of your arrest, haven’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, just remind us about what happened when you were arrested.” Johnson countered, without actually identifying which of the three times she was arrested that he wanted her to recount.

“What do you mean?” Lucy asked, confusion written all over her face.

“You really don’t remember?” Johnson challenged, glancing around at various different faces in the court room, seemingly hoping they saw what he believed he saw; that he had rattled Lucy.

“You want me to describe how I was arrested?” Lucy asked.

“Yes. How awful it was. And why it was so awful.”

“I’ve already explained that once.” Lucy responded.

“Yes. Well. It was a long time ago and I’d like you to remind us please.” The prosecutor replied, sweeping his right arm out and indicating towards the entire courtroom.

“They knocked at my door at 6 o’clock in the morning and they arrested me.” Lucy said in a tone half-way between resignation and exasperation. This was generally true of the first two occasions she had been arrested. In both instances police had arrived, first at her own house and the second time at her parents, in the early hours of the morning at around 6am.

“And how were you dressed when you left the house?” Johnson asked her, seeming to come to what he was really after.

“I think I had a nightie on, and then a tracksuit bottom and top and trainers.” Lucy replied. It is possible that, given the early hour, she did have a nightie on under the Lee Cooper tracksuit when she was arrested the first time. However, it cannot be contested that she was in her bedclothes, her pyjamas, when she was awoken and arrested the second time.

“Oh, but you told the jury you were taken away in your nightwear. In your pyjamas I think was how you put it.”

“Yes.”

“You were taken away in a blue Lee Cooper leisure suit, weren’t you?” Johnson demanded, referencing the clothing Lucy was wearing on the first occasion she was arrested.

“I don’t recall exactly. I just know I had a nightie on.” Lucy responded.

“Do you want me to show you a video of it?” Johnson admonished.

“No.” Lucy replied.

“Well. I ask you again. You were taken away in a blue Lee Cooper leisure suit, weren’t you?” Johnson demanded.

“Yes.” Lucy responded, clearly withdrawing in her seat.

“On 10 June 2019, when you answered the door, you answered in your nightie.” Johnson swept straight into his next challenge of Lucy’s veracity, but at least he was now being specific about the particular arrest.

“No. I didn’t answer the door in 2019.” Lucy replied.

“Oh. You’ve got a very clear memory of this then, haven’t you?” Johnson riposted with barely concealed disdain.

“Yes. I remember this through the... the arrests. Yes.”

“When the police came face-to-face with you, you had a nightie on, didn’t you?”. What Johnson left unsaid was that when police came face-to-face with her during that second arrest, they had entered her bedroom at her parent’s house and awoken her.

“In 2019?” Lucy asked.

“Yes.” Johnson replied,

“I had my pyjamas on, yes.” Lucy stated confidently.

“No.” Johnson argued. “You had a nightie on.”

“Okay.” Lucy replied, the distinction between calling her sleepwear a nightie or pyjamas seeming not to land with her.

“Do you want to see a video?” Johnson challenged, bluntly.

“No.”

“Do you remember having a nightie on?” Johnson asked.

“I can’t recall specifically which night. I was in bed.” Lucy replied. Johnson’s manipulation was clearly making her doubt herself.

“Do you remember what you left the house wearing?”

“Um... No. I know I was unable to get dressed, and I think I took a dressing gown as well.”

“You put your blue Lee Cooper leisure suit on again, didn’t you?” Johnson demanded.

“Yes.” Lucy said, resigned but clearly confused.

“Then you asked them to let you put your dressing gown on over the Lee Cooper leisure suit, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” At this point, the look on Lucy’s face suggested she didn’t know what to say and was just saying what the prosecutor clearly wanted to hear.

“So you weren’t taken away in your pyjamas, were you?”|

“No.”

“And you remember this, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And why did you lie to the jury about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Johnson rejoindered. What advantage were you looking for by telling the jury that you were taken away by the police in your pyjamas? What benefit was there?” He demanded.

“Because that’s what happened on the first time. That was how quickly everything happened.” She replied, almost pleading. The prosecutor had clearly gotten her confused and doubting herself about events she experienced and had been, almost, certain about.

“No, no.” The prosecutor admonished. “On the first time you were taken away in your blue Lee Cooper... Do you want to watch the video?” It was clear that prosecutor Johnson was becoming increasingly emboldened as Lucy’s confusion and emotional restraint diminished.

“You are a very calculating woman, aren’t you, Lucy Letby?”

“No.” Lucy responded, again confused.

“You tell lies deliberately, don’t you?”

“No.”

“And the reason you tell lies is to try to get sympathy from people, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“You try to get attention from people, don’t you?”

“No.”

“In killing these children, you got quite a lot of attention, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t kill the children.”

*** *** ***

During cross-examination, skilled prosecutors use many different strategies to expose inconsistencies in a defendant’s story, and to compare and contrast aspects of the defendant’s prior statements to police with the testimony they are providing now. Often, they will vary the chronology of events or focus on irrelevancies such as what someone was wearing, the weather, or the colour of their eyes. They may even adopt an argumentative or hostile approach towards the defendant in order to elicit an angry or emotional response. These challenges are a common and even necessary approach for putting the prosecution case directly to the defendant.

However, prosecutors with fewer ethics or weaker cases have used high-pressure cross-examination tactics to make even honest and potentially innocent defendants appear deceptive or inconsistent. Yet, under both common law and the evidence statues of many jurisdictions, protections are afforded to any witness, even the defendant, from misleading, harassing, repetitive, intimidatory or vexatious cross-examination1. Even if unintentional, there is very real potential for prosecutors to stray from their role assisting the court through fair argument that validly challenges the defendant’s evidence into something that either asserts facts that are not in evidence, or completely mischaracterises those facts that are. This approach is often made more successful in combination with other less professional practices, including those that cross the boundaries of prosecutorial misconduct such as withholding evidence.

During heated exchanges while challenging a defendant’s testimony, some prosecutors have outright accused that defendant of lying, while others have gone on to caution the jury that in believing the defendant’s version of events, they must equally also believe that police and other prosecution witnesses have lied. Finally, some prosecutors have made statements that effectively vouch for the veracity of their own witnesses, effectively telling the jury that when testimony is in contention, it is the defence witnesses who must have lied. Multiple appellate cases in different jurisdictions have established that prosecutors using these pejorative ‘somebody must be lying’ arguments unfairly prejudice the defendant2^,3.

To avoid these prosecutorial practices, most defence barristers advise their client not to testify during a trial. However, this too can become a double-edged sword. What you avoid on the first pass often ends up being used to severely hurt you later on. This is because while judges in some jurisdictions including Australia and the United States generally cannot instruct a jury that the defendant’s reticence to take the stand is or may be evidence of guilt, they often do provide a more carefully worded comment advising the jury that the defendant’s silence is a factor they can consider when deliberating on the case. Thus, negative attention will almost always be drawn to the defendant’s choice not to testify. Even worse and in exceptional circumstances where the prosecution case is entirely reliant on circumstantial evidence that, it is contended, only the defendant can refute, a judge may be allowed to tell the jury they can more safely infer the defendant’s guilt from their choice not to take the stand. This, for no other reason than that the defendant exercised their right to remain silent and the absence, therefore, of their explanation for the evidence. This Weissensteiner Direction was routinely admonished as shifting the burden of proof from the prosecution to the defence. While this claim was denied, the direction itself is rarely used today due to the impression of bias it creates.

Finally, if a prosecutor actually advances the claim a defendant has lied as circumstantial evidence of guilt, it may become necessary for the judge to protect both the eventual verdict the jury will deliver and the defendant from being convicted on their lies alone by giving the jury a Lucas Direction. With a Lucas Direction: (i) the lie must be clearly proven; (ii) the defendant is most likely lying for an innocent reason such as embarrassment, fear or in panic rather than out of guilt; and (iii) the prosecution has actively invited the jury to infer guilt from the lie.

During just the single day that the cross-examination excerpt on the preceding pages occurred, Nicholas Johnson unequivocally accused Lucy of lying at least five times. Indeed, as Lucy’s barrister Ben Myers pointed out during his final summation on June 27, 2023, Nicholas Johnson not only accused Lucy of lying many times, he had described aspects of the prosecution case as binary choices; that either Lucy was lying, or the prosecution witnesses were. Essentially, what we see throughout is that at any time where Lucy’s statements or testimony doesn’t perfectly align or agree with those of the doctors who raised the original police complaint, the neonate’s parents, or the prosecution’s overarching theory that Lucy was a murderer, Nicholas Johnson accused her of wholesale lying or making stuff up. Often, he does this on nothing more than that one other person remembers some version of events differently to Lucy and in a way that casts a bad light on her. Meanwhile, he often ignored or at least failed to draw the jury’s attention to the fact that there may have been three or four versions of that same event described into the record, with each witness’ recollection being entirely different as to that particular key point.

July 3, 2018 - Lucy’s First Arrest

The slim twenty-eight-year-old blonde woman stepped into the vestibule at the front of the small unassuming terrace house at 41 Westbourne Road, Chester. She had been quite pleased when she purchased the house only two years before, not even minding that it backed onto the large cemetery and Chester crematorium. Lucy was dressed in a blue Lee Cooper tracksuit over a long dark top. She was responding to several loud knocks issued from the outer door less than a minute before. It was only 6am and much of the street was still in shadow. It was early enough that most people would either still be in bed, or those with day jobs were waking and preparing to leave for work.

After closing the internal timber door to keep the warmth in, she opened the white polyurethane outer door to find a tall gentleman standing before her holding out a plastic card.

“Hello. Lucy, is it?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Hello. My name’s [redacted] from Cheshire Police. Is it okay to step in for two seconds?”

Without pause, she immediately responded. “Er… Yes”

“Yeah. Thank you”

As he followed her into the house, he enquired whether there was anyone else at home. Lucy replied that her dad was upstairs. A female uniformed police officer began an informal search of the house looking for other occupants.

Shortly after and fighting back tears, the unintimidating young woman in the blue tracksuit was escorted in handcuffs through the same vestibule and out into the waking street. This was when Lucy first realised there were several police cars and vans parked up and down the street on either side of her small driveway. A waiting female police officer placed Lucy in the back seat of an unmarked silver Ford hatchback parked in front of the neighbouring house.

This was the first of three times that young Lucy would be arrested. She would be held in police custody for three days, repeatedly questioned for hours at a time, and was not bailed and released until late on July 6, 2018.

June 10, 2019 - Lucy’s Second Arrest

A bald, bearded man in a dark suit intruded loudly into her bedroom doorway. The detective had been preceded by a tall female uniformed officer, who turned on the ceiling light and positioned herself on Lucy’s right between the bed and the wardrobe. Lucy had been asleep and, in her waking confusion, rose only slightly such that her ashen face and shoulders barely showed over the light blue and white striped Winnie the Pooh duvet. Squinting out through sleepy eyes and unable to fully focus without her glasses, Lucy appeared to hold the bedclothes in front of her like a shield. All of this, her cowering behind the Disney duvet, her inability to focus and the pallid look of confusion, made her seem child-like and timid. Lucy looked more like an animal caught in headlights on a moonless night than the highly trained and self-assured neonatal nurse many had known her to be.

“Hi Lucy. Sorry that we’ve come around so early and woken you up. I’m [redacted] from Chester MIT – the major investigation team. I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder and attempted murder.”

“You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.

“I appreciate it’s quite a shock,” He continued in a clearly practiced and emotionally detached drawl. “What we need for you to do now Lucy is we need for you to get up and get yourself dressed.”

With her heart racing, the pale and confused young woman who could barely keep her eyes open was taken from her parent’s house. She was escorted to awaiting police vehicles and in contradiction to the police detective’s spoken direction that she was going to be allowed to get herself dressed, she was led away still clothed in the dark coloured nightie and light-grey blanket hoodie she had been wearing in bed only minutes before. Her mother, who had started crying as police entered the home, could still be heard crying.

*** *** ***

Whether Nicholas Johnson was: (i) being intentionally scattershot; (ii) confused; (iii) playing fast and loose with the facts; (iv) legitimately testing Lucy’s memory of events; (v) trying to rattle her to see if he could trigger an emotional outburst; or (vi), intentionally misleading the jury and Lucy in order to create confusion and manufacture the impression she had lied when she hadn’t, we may never know. However, we should question in hindsight whether he may have crossed a professional conduct or ethical line. Perhaps most incredible is the fact that in Lucy’s original testimony that Johnson was calling back to, she used the word pyjamas but never once mentioned nightie. It is Johnson who first mentions nightie during her cross-examination when he begins the line of questioning that accuses her of lying about it. He plants the notion that she was wearing a nightie and Lucy, ever eager to please and clearly trying not to contradict or argue with him, simply follows where he leads.

Johnson’s actions could at best be characterised as manipulating the situation to turn Lucy into a pariah, casting her out to be vilified, and sadly the mainstream media and general public’s response was entirely predictable. The media began by simply reporting that she lied to the jury about being taken away in pyjamas4. This was followed with reporting that proclaimed everything and anything she said to be a lie. Even when she agreed with police that she and the other nursing staff were concerned that there was a rise in deaths based on previous years, this was incredibly reported under headlines of the sickening5 moment nurse lies to police6. And when she wasn’t lying, she was both acting and lying7. Songs were even sung about the pyjama lie Johnson had supposedly, but hadn’t really, caught Letby in8. Members of the general public came to question whether everything Lucy had said was untrue9.

Johnson had access to video evidence of Lucy being arrested and taken away in her pyjamas just as she had claimed that he chose not to make available to the jury or general public. He used that gap in our collective knowledge to implicate Lucy as a liar and if Netflix had never gotten access to the police bodycam footage of the second arrest we would never have known. He used misdirection to further incriminate Lucy, introducing the idea that it was a nightie rather than pyjamas that he claimed she had lied about. Especially given that both her first and second arrests occurred at around or just after 6am and it was reasonable to assume she might have had a nightie on under either or both outfits she was arrested in. Save for location and that she was in bed asleep the second time, both events shared enough similarity in time and emotion that it was almost certain he would be able to get her confused enough to doubt even her own mind. Relying on the weak inferences that could be drawn from a purely circumstantial case and lacking any single item of concrete evidence, attacking Lucy’s credibility seemed to have been the prosecutor’s last best hope. Perhaps even his only hope. Some might consider manufacturing belief that Lucy was a liar was good lawyering, while others might prefer to call it malfeasance. Either way, and with that 20/20 clarity that only comes from hindsight, it seems almost certain that the bias against Lucy it created was entirely intentional. Tactics like this suggest the prosecution case was less about finding truth...

... and more a demonstration of absolute stagecraft.

Similarly, there are many courses with modules that are non-academic and have nothing to do with the degree being studied, add thousands to the student’s fee burden, and are there simply because some middle-aged white person with a saviour complex decided that all graduates must be exposed to Socialist Marxism or their particular social justice warrior bent - be it net zero environmental fatalism, globalist-enriching sustainable development goals, or virtue signalling and race-grifting. At some universities now these woke ideology courses and activism classes now outnumber or are more important than the core modules of their chosen field of study. These are the so-called Woke Modules.

Many university courses were developed, written, recorded and uploaded to the university’s chosen online portal, be it Moodle or Blackboard, as much as a decade ago. Often, the lecturer whose name is on the original documents or whose face is seen in the video no longer works for the university. Worse still is that the content may be so outdated and obsolete as to be unsafe in some domains. These are the Recycled Materials Courses.

Of them all, the only possibly honest ones are the openly fraudulent universities and tertiary colleges, the degree mills, who simply take your money and give you a degree you never actually studied for. At least with them you actually get what you pay for... a bit of paper with a fancy title on it. No effort required. The clearly Fake Qualification.

At some point in my life, I have experienced all except the last one.

Leaving aside that I worked sixteen years in Information Technology (IT) before returning to university, in total I have ten tertiary qualifications: three Diplomas (Dip); one Graduate Certificate (GradCert); three Graduate Diplomas (GradDip); two Masters Degrees (an MPhil and an LLM); and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). My academic career includes: (i) pyramid scheme degrees - such as the Diploma of Researcher Development that was foisted on me while I was undertaking my PhD, and is entirely about preparing the student to teach research to the next generation of PhD candidates; (ii) woke modules in unconscious bias training that are known to create rather than reduce racial tensions, aboriginal and first nations cultural race grifting and, most recently, a class that was supposed to be in Australian public health that was actually a filler module promoting UN sustainable development goals nonsense in third world countries that was more about globalist self-promotion and enrichment; and (iii) modules that were designed and recorded in the mid-2010s by middle-aged white cat-stroking academics who had long since been cast aside and replaced by immigrants who struggled to form a single literate English sentence.

In amongst all of my academic toilet paper qualifications I have not one... not two... but three law degrees. An undergraduate Diploma of Law (DipLaw), a qualifying Graduate Diploma of Law (GDL), and a Master of Laws (LLM). Yet, and here’s the true test of how useless anything your child will do at university really is; even combined these three university qualifications and their attendant twenty modules of legal study that I successfully completed, with consistently high grades and even a letter of commendation for my results on the GDL...

...are insufficient for me to undertake the next step to become registered in the legal profession.

Let that sink in for a moment. Three degrees. Twenty modules of study. In some cases, the very top marks. A letter of recommendation. Years of study. Tens of thousands in university fees.

Today, and after I was made to wait almost seven months during which I could have completed four or more modules of study, the Legal Practice Admission Board emailed me to tell me that I need to undertake a whole new Diploma - they recommend theirs, of course - consisting of at least ten more modules. And at a cost of at least AUD$13,000.

Leaving aside the conflict of interest that arises when you have the organisation that also provides the courses also deciding on whether you have completed a sufficient number of courses to register, It is what courses they exempted me from versus which ones they insist I should take with them that is interesting. For example: I completed a unit in Estate Planning (what lawyers call estates, wills and trusts) as part of my LLM. The content of that module ostensibly covered all of the same areas, case law and even cases as the LPAB’s own module 13 - Succession. Yet, they have deemed that I failed to cover this area in my training (leaving aside that I taught the estates, wills and trusts module for one semester at a UK university). Is this simply because the module I completed had a different name? Is this because it was a Masters level module that surely was more advanced than the related Wills and Estates undergraduate unit? Or is it something else?

There were several examples like this. Such as the fact that one of my postdoctoral projects saw me spend almost a year integrated with commercial property conveyancers preparing lawmaps that diagrammatically documented the minutia of the conveyancing process, integrating that with the legal requirements and case law, verifying that against thousands of client records and then using that in the development of an AI- and Knowledge Graph-based digital tool. The lawmaps can be found published in the academic literature. Several of my research and case analysis findings were used to update the standard textbook on Property Law that is currently used. And the AI tool is in commercial use. But apparently, I still need to go back to school and pay thousands to learn conveyancing.

To my mind one or more of three things are possibly true.

The first is that the typical university style rules that are intended to keep the huge student incomes rolling in has intervened. That there are maybe three, four or if we were to be generous, six subjects I probably should take even though I have three law degrees, but because most universities set a rule that you must take at least 50% of the academic qualification with them, they have inflated the list of subjects to magically arrive at a number of modules that I cannot help noticing just happens to be exactly half their entire diploma of law degree. Let’s call this The Degree-Granting Institution Greed Rule.

The second is that the typical university likes to massage course content or change course codes every few years in order to be able to say that the module you passed four or five years ago is outdated or no longer part of the degree program. Estate Planning has become Succession Planning, and while they look ostensibly similar, we rewrote the module pitch simply to emphasise different keywords. Let’s call this The Curriculum Re-Badging Greed Rule.

The third arises because I cannot help but noting that even spending tens-of-thousands of dollars and completing ten more modules with them does not actually qualify me to be on the register. You see, after I spend 18-24 months completing those ten modules, they then want me to spend another 6-12 months completing their Legal Practice Course (LPC) - what would be my fifth law degree. And that leaves aside the potential for delay where not all modules run in any given academic year, and the 3-6 months in the middle again waiting for them to re-accredit my qualifications and decide that I have finally met their latest round of requirements. This means they have students who started in February this year who will potentially qualify and get a practicing certificate before me, even though they started fresh with no background in law and I started with three degrees, three years of teaching law modules at three UK universities, while supervising law research student projects and publishing legal research and book chapters. Let’s call this the We Don’t Want You In Particular To Qualify So We Are Going To Make It As Difficult And Unlikely As Possible Rule. Or maybe even the Screw You Rule.

It could be any one. It could be all three.

I don’t know.

You decide.

But I sit here with ten academic qualifications. Not one leads to a tangible job outside the academic industrial complex…

And we know how welcome I am there.

I began publishing articles on the Letby case during the first trial, highlighted the now widely accepted issues with bacterial pathogens on the unit even while the jury were deliberating Lucy’s fate, and even demonstrated that it was not uncommon for doctors to make associations between nurses and neonatal deaths, whether fair or unfounded. Unlike the pathetic mainstream media who spent more words in disparaging Lucy as a ‘babykiller’ than critically appraising the (lack of) evidence against her, I was also early to report the issues raised with the evidence of ‘Doctor Evidence for Hire’ Dewi Evans, and to highlight the misleading and disingenuous but repeated claims in testimony by the doctors from the Countess of Chester that there were ‘no concerns’…

Or that sometimes incredibly premature and patently unwell babies whose charts recorded not just their gradual and neglected demise, but other doctor’s concerns for potential sepsis and the administration of antibiotics in the delivery unit, were ‘stable’, ‘healthy’ and ‘doing well’.

Three years ago I reminded my readers that insulin has not one but two important roles in the human body. While the first and more well known role is to mediate sugars, the second is as a systemic anti-inflammatory agent. Solid research shows that neonates with sepsis (a systemic infection), and especially those that advance to the far more serious necrotising enterocolitis (NEC), have systemic inflammation that can have sometimes misunderstood or misdiagnosed effects on insulin production, absorption and function.

I also highlighted the discrepancy perpetrated in the mainstream media that claimed no babies were being prescribed insulin at the time Lucy Letby allegedly poisoned a child with the medicine…

…when it was a matter of public record that Baby F, a baby who a pathologist said almost died of NEC and the baby Lucy allegedly poisoned with insulin, died beside his twin, Baby E, who WAS being prescribed insulin at the time.

These facts have, more recently, also been born out by the work of others reviewing the scientific literature.

I also provide an explanation for how it might be possible that Baby F could have come to innocently be administered Baby E’s insulin - an unintended accident that could have been committed by any nurse on the unit. Accidents like this have happened before, and will happen again.

In any event, these and other things I proposed in my series of articles - the harm visited on the babies by junior and student doctors that almost certainly was more relevant than anything Lucy was alleged to have done, the errors in medical record presentation that saw not only notes made regarding one baby in another baby’s electronic medical record but that eventually led the police analyst to admit that clinical notes were presented out of order or in the wrong bundle that misrepresented facts to which she had testified, the presence of bacterial pathogens both as biofilms and airborne pathogens on the unit, and the fact that almost every baby as well as other babies that were not part of the trial had questions in their medical record or treatment for sepsis and more serious systemic infections - have all been borne out in the cold harsh light of evidential reality.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, this week I was made aware of yet another…

Nurse Mel Taylor and Doctor Harkness

I was also the first (outside of a suggestion in then-undisclosed internal interview minutes at the time of Lucy’s grievance investigation that I had not seen) to very cautiously hint at, and eventually assert, a strong or potentially stronger relationship between other staff on the unit and the demise of babies Lucy Letby was prosecuted for harming. Several times in my series I discussed the higher degree of involvement and inconsistency of evidence from certain ward staff…

Bearing in mind that I had already read ahead in the evidence and testimony and scoped out much of the first nine articles, it was in only my fourth article and while jury deliberations were still ongoing that I pointed to the unusually high intersection of evidence suggesting Nurse Taylor had as much or greater correlation than Lucy in the demise of these neonates.

Nurse Mel Taylor would show up time and again. For example, in my early analysis of even only the limited patient notes and testimony on the first six neonates I had access to, I identified her involvement with, at a minimum, babies A, B, C, E and F (and later others, such as Baby K).

More often than not she was either the designated nurse responsible for their care on the penultimate shift that handed them over, or on the ultimate shift where they were alleged to have been harmed. For this reason, nurse Mel Taylor’s cumulative involvement score - a measure I derived to enable computational understanding of the degree of involvement and responsibility staff had for the care provided to each baby - was eventually found to be 21 for the first six neonates, and equal to Lucy’s own.

On April 15, 2026 - and three years after my own commentary on nurse Taylor - Stuart Gilham (@gilham_stuart on X) released a video in which he reviews evidence from the grievance process Lucy endured at Countess of Chester Hospital. Given that all potentially exonerating evidence, and certainly anything that might have shown the doctors from the Countess were being anything less than reliable, consistent or candid in their evidence was excluded by Justice Goss, these revelations have only come to light by virtue of documents releases during the Thirlwall Inquiry.

In his video from timestamp 15:20 Stuart discusses the contents of this file that reports the minutes of interview of Eirian Powell, nurse manager of the neonatal unit and therefore Lucy’s boss, during the hospital’s grievance investigation. During what is effectively a deposition-style interview, Ms Powell had stated that she advised senior doctor Stephen Breary that nurse Mel Taylor also showed commonality with the identified neonates and events. In his response and after Ms Powell had emphasised her concern that the accusations might lead Lucy to suicide, Stephen Breary is said to have seemingly callously responded that he didn’t care [if Lucy did commit suicide], and to have effectively alluded to the fact that his focus on Lucy rather than nurse Taylor was more about the fact that Lucy had made a formal whistleblower complaint about him and the other doctors. He is said to have replied, ‘…but Mel is nice,’ as if nurse Taylor being more affable would somehow negate any involvement she may have had in the events Lucy stood accused of.

Somewhat prophetically, I also highlighted that Dr Harkness had a similar cumulative involvement score to Lucy, and highlighted that while he was immediately identified in notes for one fewer neonates than nurse Taylor, there were several questionable incidents that involved him.

Indeed, while other doctors were seen to have made seemingly more egregious and harmful clinical errors than he, Dr Harkness appears to have been the most involved doctor during the demise of at least the first six neonates - and this was something Eirian Powell had also raised during the same interview.

I do not believe any of this confirms that they are any more culpable than I (don’t) think Lucy is at this point. It simply highlights that if, as we have seen, correlation alone was the deciding factor for identifying Lucy, it should have also identified Mel Taylor and Dave Harkness as well…

…unless you have blinkers on and are solely focused on the one nurse who was already reporting issues on the unit, and who could potentially bring outside prying eyes to the under-staffing, unsanitary and negligent medical care being provided on the unit - Lucy Letby.

I have mentioned more than once in response to conversations of the Letby evidence on X that I gave up my ongoing research on the case - primarily because others were being credited as identifying these things that I had already posited, two or more years after I wrote about them. It has been suggested that at some point I should roll up my research and observations from the original and subsequent trial evidence and clinical notes, and turn it all into a book. And I may yet do this. However, I suspect it will also be censored and publication prevented in much the same way as my postdoctoral research on the corruption between academia, industry and politicians that misdirected addiction research and misled the public regarding the role of over-the-counter pain medicines containing codeine in Australia.

**************

Don’t forget that my book about the corruption between academics and big pharma is available via a donation and digital distribution model. Anyone who would like a digital copy can donate GBP £12, AUD $23, CAD $22, USD $17 via my Buy-Me-A-Coffee page. Forward the receipt or drop me an email to redscott@techie.com so that I can match it up at my end and I will reply with a copy of the digital PDF file.

If you are a publisher who is willing to print my book, message me.

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Law, Health and Tech is a user funded publication. You can support this publication and my ongoing work either through a paid subscription here on Substack, or by making a donation on my Buy Me A Coffee page.

*** *** ***

Erratum: Pat Gurney kindly pointed to the fact that in my haste I said the pathologist said Baby F HAD died of NEC, when the pathologist said Baby F nearly died of NEC. Thank you Pat!

A strongly negative experience can result in deep-seated aversion, even to places that only look similar to that where the bad experience occurred. This is exemplified with people who cannot even stand to visit someone in a nursing home after suffering or witnessing a traumatic experience - such as a painful procedure or a loved one’s death in a hospital. We have a word for this example: nosocomephobia. Even just the implication of the negative experience, absent the actual face-to-face experience, can cause nosocomephobia. Many of us know people today who no longer trust and most certainly do not want to go near hospitals after the experience of being locked out of hospital and not being able to see a loved one as they died, or were allowed to die through inappropriate or withheld care, in the name of Covid. Based on the experiences of people being deposed during the various national and international Covid enquiries and with good cause, trust in healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals is, mostly doctors and the so-called ‘dancing nurses’ (what narcissist thought that was a good thing?), at an all-time low.

At the more preferrable end of the spectrum a pleasant or even pleasurable experience can engender feelings of safety, love and comfort, and thus create the desire to be in that exact or very similar places. Some of you will have this pleasant attachment to your childhood home, your grandparents’ house, that treehouse your father built for you in the back yard, the place where you spent your wedding night, or other locations that bring back fond memories from your life. The locations each of us emotionally connect to are individualistic places that really matter; but they often matter only to you.

In an entirely contradictory way, and for completely different reasons, I have both responses to a place known as Keepit Dam.

My negative reaction stems from having been ‘sent off to camp’ during the school holidays twice when I was in primary school. The NSW State Sport and Recreation Department had constructed a facility that during my childhood consisted predominately of a pair of adjoining long buildings with boarding rooms for 150-180 children and camp counsellors (the two longer connected buildings in the bottom right corner of the image below), and a large camp kitchen and eating hall (that then was out of picture, off to the bottom right).

I was one of those awkward kids who was more interested in reading, computing and other scientific ventures and far less, or maybe entirely dis-interested, in the more physical and sporting pursuits. Trudging through the trees orienteering or learning to kayak and being dunked in the lake and having to swim back to shore was the complete opposite idea of anything I remotely considered ‘fun’ or ‘exciting’.

There also tended to be three types of kids at these holiday camps:

The first were the rich kids whose parents often worked or jet-setted around the place. Kids who turned up in the latest expensive Rip-Curl clothing and with things like the latest hand-held gaming devices of the day (see below), and who cruelly drew great enjoyment from refusing to let those of the other two groups even watch as they played with them.

The second group were kids who were in State or foster care, for whom such experiences were funded by Family and Community Services (FACS) to enable their carers to have some ‘free time’. Some of these kids had been abused or neglected, making them extremely shy and withdrawn. Others responded to the less fortunate experiences of their lives by becoming aggressive, destructive, demonstrative or deflective.

And the third, much like the second, were the children of lower-middle income families where the parents simply wanted to ‘get rid of’ the kid so they could have some ‘parent alone time’, and there was nowhere simpler or cheaper (like, say, with the grandparents) to dispose of their unwanted charge.

Kids in the second and third groups tended to be at the complete opposite end of the financial spectrum than those of the first group. However, and ultimately, the vast majority of children of all three groups shared one common feeling - that of having been abandoned. Being unwanted. Or more simply of having been ‘disposed of’.

Both times I was forced to go there I was housed in the same room along the timber deck on the left of the image below. But for someone who wasn’t particularly fond of, and who got bullied at, school - spending two weeks eating, sleeping and abluting in buildings that were built to the same design and were constructed of the same materials and strange primary-colour-striped decoration scheme as those of the school I went to for most of the year just enhanced the negative emotional reaction I still have even to images of this facility.

On the flip side, my positive reaction to Keepit Dam stems from the few times in my childhood that we went there as a family - to go fishing, have a BBQ, or to attend a larger family or work gathering.

The Keepit Dam of my childhood was free and open. A place that, just like roads and parks, all tax- or rate-paying residents paid for. It was largely accessible and open to all comers. I recall our driving across the old dam wall under the old crane-like device you can see in the first image, only to park up on the other side and stand leaning on the edge to watch the water. There were a small group of houses and families who lived there, open access to boat ramps for fishing, boating and water sports, and camp grounds where people overnighted in campervans and tents. As a child I even got to go down and tour inside the dam wall itself.

It was in seeking these more positive experiences that I decided to take my own son to Keepit Dam yesterday. Except the Keepit Dam I found no longer resembles anything of the fond memories of my childhood.

Governments of today tend to either sell or protection off anything that used to be considered public property. Or worse.

Large tracts of public land such as national parks that were once places that families enjoyed are now either closed off for large portions of the year, or are no longer accessible to the general public whose taxes pay for them. The swings, slides and play gyms at the local park that we played on as children are either gone, or have been replaced by gated soft-play areas that the health and safety protectorate have made either only suitable for the very youngest, or completely unenjoyable to all. And in countries where the governments have encouraged both legal and illegal migration of people, some of whom like the Bondi shooters might be considered by most of us as entirely undesirable, public places like the dam wall we walked or drove across as children are now under the protection of ten-foot high chainmail and barbed-wire topped fences, boom gates, and armed patrols. Inaccessible to all.

It is this which greeted us on arrival to Keepit Dam yesterday. Many of the roads around the dam were either gated off entirely or carried contradictory warnings on threatening notices that you were entering inclosed, and therefore private, publicly owned land.

And worse: the attractive and previously freely accessible public areas where you could launch your boat to waterski, swim, or have a BBQ, have now been rolled up into what disingenuously looks like a private ‘holiday park’ behind secured boom gates and number-plate recognition cameras with signs that demanded a $15 ‘tax’ for even a brief casual entry, payable at the holiday park canteen that because yesterday was a public holiday, was closed. Failure to pay on the day, we were informed, apparently attracts a significantly larger ‘tax’ payable as a fine in the mail to the vehicle owner. Never mind that the company called Reflections Holidays is actually a State Government front being used to collect yet more money from taxpaying citizens for access to public lands we already pay taxes to maintain. Reflections Holidays is almost universally lambasted across the internet for the government’s shameless privatisation and profiteering from public resources, and their use of this public privatisation to ubiquitously reduce public access to foreshores and other public-owned reserves.

Sadly today there is a well-researched and documented trend showing high mobility, modernisation and digital, rather than physical, engagement is reducing our children’s ability to form emotional bonds, and therefore attachments, to place. It is also suggested that a loss of place attachment increases overall feelings of loneliness and an inability to connect with the places where we live. When, for many, the feelings of connectedness and rootedness stem from the places we have profoundly fond and positive memories of as kids, and many of these places are no longer accessible to us and our children, I worry that the children of today, children like my own son, will fail to form these important and necessary connections.

Epilogue:

Note that I am not the only person to find the State Government’s privatisation of public land scam has despoiled fond childhood memories of Keepit Dam. I found comments like those shown below from TripAdvisor across several travel websites...

Nice. There’s another childhood memory ruined by politicians and greed.

His academic and scientific interests have seen him, after visiting Bletchley Park and seeing and having the engineering and technical processes of Turing and Keen’s Bombe machines used for breaking Germany’s Enigma code during the later stages of World War 2 explained to him, develop a python program that can perform the decryption of a whole wall of Bombe machines in seconds. He has since gone on to add such things as identification, encryption and decryption of morse code to his personal ‘digital bombe machine’.

It was therefore no surprise that he also has a keen interest in astronomy and astrophysics. He loves documentaries about the formation of planets, the processes inside stars and, naturally, is an avid consumer of science fiction books - with a personal bookshelf of space stories from James S. Corey (thanks to my PhD supervisor Professor Norman Fenton), Sir Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, just to name a few. He was even given the opportunity through contacts at the university where I worked to meet Astrophysicist Brian Cox when he was going to be making an appearance to talk to students at a school in Tower Hamlets, and front row seats at the O2 dome to see Cox’s show ‘Horizons’... except that Covid intervened in 2020 when these things were supposed to happen.

In late 2017 when the interstellar Oumuamua comet passed through the solar system I purchased an old 8” or 200mm Dobsonian telescope. I took my son out in the country north of Cambridge in the UK and set the telescope up in a cow paddock. While we couldn’t see Oumuamua, he did get to see Jupiter and at least six of its moons and, sort of peeking over the shoulder of Jupiter, Saturn and her rings. This ignited his interest in astronomy. In 2025 he received the gift of a Celestron 8SE Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope that he only got to use once before I was denied tenure and our lives changed. During that one use and in spite of significant light pollution in Derbyshire, he was able to clearly see craters on the surface of the moon. The image below was taken that night through the Celestron using a 25mm lens and an iPhone mount.

It was quite disheartening for my son when, after it had spent six weeks on a container ship catching up with us, we unpacked and set up his telescope to find it could not even focus on something as large and obvious as the moon. This was an incredible bit of potentially expensive bad luck. It was clear that something had happened during its long journey. Telescopes are, after all, finely tuned and easily misaligned scientific instruments.

In desperation I looked to see if there was a local astronomical society or amateur astronomy group and, as luck would have it, there was. I reached out and they made contact and. while they normally had public open nights on Thursdays, they happened to be having an extraordinary Friday night session in their observatory for a small handful of club members. We were, I was told, welcome to bring the telescope up in the hopes that one of the members might be able to assist us in identifying what was wrong.

What we found was nothing short of amazing. During the preceding decade a small group of amateur, semi-professional and even one or more professional astronomers had secured funding to build a museum and education centre, along with an observatory space that was around ten-by-five meters with a ceiling that slid away on motorised rails to expose the sky above. Indeed, it also transpires that some of the very small handful of original members (four or five in total) were the people responsible for my own interest in astronomy and astrophotography. Four decades ago in 1986 when Halley’s Comet last visited they had set up telescopes in the centre ring of the race course in my home town and invited members of the public to come at 4am to view the comet at the closest point to Earth on its passing. That had been in the last days of March 1986, weeks before my eleventh birthday. Today, their membership numbers in the several hundred and includes people living and working not just in New South Wales, but even some who have or are working for Nasa, and many from quite disparate scientific domains.

A pair of older affable gents introduced themselves. After a brief tour of the observatory space that was being used that evening by around half a dozen people aged, I would estimate, from an eight or nine year old all the way up to septuagenarian. Indeed, I gathered that the youngest and oldest people using the scopes were grandfather and grandson, with one of the other gents completing what was three generations of the same family that were all keen astronomers.

The two older chaps with cordial and cheerful banter worked through potential sources of the issue we were seeing with my son’s Celestron, very quickly resolving that the issue was actually not with the telescope itself. Rather, and in what can only be described as really good luck, it was an issue with possibly the cheapest and easiest component to replace, the component known as the star diagonal - an L-shaped accessory containing a mirror that sits between the telescope and the eyepiece lens.

Another suitable star diagonal was located amongst the spare parts the observatory had collected and once it was temporarily installed, the image below shows my son again observing individual craters on the surface of the moon.

While my son was once again pleased to be distracted by the sights amongst the stars, I happened to open my laptop in the communal office space next to the observatory - with the following image that I took almost 14 years ago in New Zealand showing on the desktop.

One of the two older chaps seemed amazed at the content of the image. Based on his questions, I believe he thought the image was either the product of AI or a photoshop of two images, with the sky taken at night and the rusty sheds taken in a separate frame during the day. He asked me about the light source illuminating the sheds, and seemed surprised to learn that it was a half-moon located that night over my left shoulder as I took the image. He also seemed surprised to learn that the entire image was the product of a single long exposure of around eighteen seconds duration.

You see, unlike much of the astrophotography we see today that is nothing more than the product of photoshop manipulation and the merger of multiple exposures, my rule has always been that what you see in my own astrophotography must be what the camera saw. What you see above, except of course for my copyright logo in the bottom right, is also what you find in the original over-50mb RAW image file recorded by the CCD in my Canon 5D Mark III. The same is true for the images below.

Given my need for a new income stream, if there ends up being any interest in these or my other (low resolution) collections, I may partner with my wonderful friend Tracey Ashton ’s company My Canvas to offer a limited run of numbered photographic and large canvas prints.

**************

Don’t forget that my book about the corruption between academics and big pharma is available via a donation and digital distribution model. Anyone who would like a digital copy can donate GBP £12, AUD $23, CAD $22, USD $17 via my Buy-Me-A-Coffee page. Forward the receipt or drop me an email to redscott@techie.com so that I can match it up at my end and I will reply with a copy of the digital PDF file.

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Law, Health and Tech is a user funded publication. You can support this publication and my ongoing work either through a paid subscription here on Substack, or by making a donation on my Buy Me A Coffee page.

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Erratum: I realised this morning I made a typo… 1996 should have been 1986.

Medical Advice tainted by pharma money is no better than marketing

and

Optometry is not Ophthalmology

Over the last three-to-four weeks I have experienced a rapid deterioration in my eyesight. I went from occasionally having dry and tired eyes, to having chronic dry eyes (keratoconjunctivitis Sicca most likely related to an exacerbation of preexisting meibomian gland dysfunction) and losing visual acuity, both nearfield (myopic) and distance (hyperopia). I had already been to several pharmacies looking for preservative and additive free saline solution - which is what I had always used. In the UK pharmacy chains like Boots sold a brand of saline solution whose ingredients, even the small amount of stabiliser (0.025%) and pH buffer, are sodium-based (disodium edetate and sodium phosphate). Both have been heavily studied and by all accounts there is so little in their saline that I have never noticed any effect from them.

In Australia I can see that every saline solution offered for sale in pharmacies is ‘enhanced’ or asserts its suitability for people with ‘sensitive eyes’. However, I am yet to find one without a laundry-list of such additives. These include:

potassium dihydrogen phosphate - which the manufacturers claim is there to treat low blood phosphate levels without actually explaining the mechanism by which it is supposed to get from the outer sclera of your eye into your blood stream, nor how they come to think that people using their saline product universally have low serum phosphate levels in the first place. This is much like the government’s idea that a little bit of folate or thiamine is good for pregnant women, so a lot of it in practically every flour, bread or baked comestible consumed by everyone, pregnant or not, is better... right? Except it really isn’t.

phosphate stabiliser salts - such as disodium hydrogen phosphate, that are also known to laboratory scientists to have interesting effects on proteins and DNA, and are claimed by manufacturers to ‘enhance protein functionality’. When used in milk products they were seen to increase viscosity and particle size of some proteins (retenates) while markedly lowering natural sugar levels. The laboratory product sheet provides significant warnings that even the most minor exposure to this additive will irritate eyes and can cause severe inflammation and corneal calcification - exactly what you don’t want to hear about the second highest ingredient by concentration after the saline itself in your eye wash or saline solution.

polyaminopropyl biguanide - added as a cationic surfactant preservative supposedly to stop the saline, a salt-water solution, becoming infested with microorganisms. This additive is well known to result in significant ocular toxicity with extended use (some studies suggest toxicity can arise in as little as 6-10 days). Curiously, the manufacturer reports on the Boots saline suggest this additive is included in batches manufactured in India, but at a much lower concentration (less than 0.001%) than that which is included in some Australian ‘saline solutions’ (closer to 0.04% - or 4000 percent more). Further, this additive is banned or strictly limited to very low concentrations in the EU.

An ophthalmologist (eye doctor) who only offered non-emergency and non-surgical consults over the phone told me the loss of visual acuity was most likely related to an exacerbation of my meibomian gland dysfunction (MGD), and simply to keep wetting/flushing my eyes with the Reclens brand of product, preferably their “Saline Solution” which he said was for people like me with “sensitive eyes”. Perhaps not surprising, his website even had advertising for Reclens products that linked through to an online pharmacy that offered “click-thru” loyalty discounts for his patients. The issue here was that I had already been using the Reclens ‘saline solution’ for ‘sensitive eyes’ - and I was finding the more I used it the more I had to use it (i.e. that it was making my condition worse), and I was at the point that I was now experiencing minor swelling and discomfort around my eyes, down into the back of my nasal cavities and even into my ears (presumably via the Eustachian canals). That consult was $300 not well spent.

A trip to the optometrist for an eye test resulted in the diagnosis that I had age-related presbyopia and, again unsurprisingly, separate pairs of glasses for distance and nearfield vision were recommended. Even while having trouble focusing on anything, I found it curious to observe that once the optometrist had done the eye test and shooed me out the door into the waiting arms of his bevy of mostly young, female, sales assistants, they were all wearing the store’s products on their faces - except that even I could see that four out of the five young hotties had no actual prescription in their frames. When one put hers down and walked away I picked them up and looked through them myself, finding that they offered no magnification and were nothing more than window dressing with straight glass - much like an actor with 20/20 vision might be made to wear when in character for a film.

It seemed to me that much like all modern medicine now, neither so-called specialist was interested in actually identifying the root cause or curing the issue. Partnership deals, product placements and upselling are perhaps the medicine of the future... So yet again, I decided to deal with it myself. Your eyes don’t just go from working to completely useless in three-to-four weeks for no reason... and in my case, there were several differences to consider (different location, different house, different food... well same food but grown in a different country, and different saline solutions). I decided to focus on the saline, as that seemed to be the one with the most direct connection to my eyes.

Given I was hitting a brick wall trying to find saline solutions that didn’t contain the additives described above, I asked a nurse friend to look into what they had in the hospital. She identified two products - a 500ml large open bottle saline product that was, as it said on the tin, 0.9% salt water absent preservatives and enhancers, and the little saline for injection pods that, when I was training, we used for mixing medicines for injection or flushing an intravenous (IV) line. She grabbed a handful of these and gave them to me, suggesting I try them for a day.

That was two days ago. I used them exclusively for the rest of that day and into the night and awoke yesterday with slightly clearer vision than I had had for almost a month, and with slightly less facial pain. In order to give it a full test, I went to several chemists yesterday until I found one who could sell me a whole box (50) of the same little ampules, and continued using these exclusively yesterday and into last night. This morning, much to my surprise, I found that when I sat up in bed, I could see the tiny print on my phone screen that had looked more like a long furry grey worm the morning before. It was clear and I could actually read it!

That was 90 minutes and this post ago.

Returning to the two maxims I posited at the start of this post... some of you will rightly see that they are essentially the same. Both identify a present day medical person who is more salesman than clinical professional. One is increasing his income by promoting the products of those pharmaceutical companies who financially support him in some way - whether through free trips to Continuing Professional Development (CPD) conferences, visits from bimbos with pens and notepads, or advertising sponsorship on his website. The other uses his younger attractive female staff rather than a website as the advertising medium and makes money by solving every problem that comes through the door, even those that don’t need it, with the products of his suppliers. The first extensively trained but for many patients only pretends to be the learned white lab coat wearing professional at the top of his game, failing those like me that he possibly deems to be beneath his vast skillset. The second is in no way but extensively pretends to be something alike the first - a peer professional perhaps one level removed, but is little more than a marketing vehicle for selling Gucci, Tom Ford, Prada and Versace designer glasses frames. Neither provides that old fashioned medical service where you treat each patient as the individual that they are walking through the door. Neither is learning or developing their skill.

Well... unless that skill is grafting for money.

And let us not forget that Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration, long known for hiding the documents and burying the bodies well and deep, lets this happen. Various product sheets and laboratory analyses posted online also suggest they allow as many as six other additive ingredients that the manufacturer is exempted from having to declare. So when you are buying eye wash and saline solutions in Australian pharmacies... caveat emptor.

Buyer Beware!

One key course presents itself as providing nurses and midwives with a foundational understanding of Australian healthcare culture, public health and social care models. However, my review finds it is entirely captured, with the first five weeks of lectures focusing on a mix of overturned, superseded or otherwise misguided WHO frameworks - several that are actually not in use or relevant to the Australian context, and ideological inculcation with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

If that wasn’t bad enough, the first assignment prescription takes the student completely outside of what is supposed to be the Australian context…

That’s okay, you might say. They are just learning about healthcare in another country. Except, sadly, at no point in the ten-week module does the topic return from these globalist ideological agendas to actually help the student to learn about the Australian context.

Let us briefly consider the UN SDGs for a moment…

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) were adopted in 2015 to replace the previous and largely ineffectual UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG). The SDG manifesto describes 17 goals which in turn have 169 targets - a list comically described as too many items and too little content for each one1, 169 Commandments that are worse than useless2, and a high-school wish list on how to save the world3. The SDGs are at best another stark lesson in preachy performative art by the rich and political classes. At worst, they are another wealth generation exercise by the rich dressed up as altruism for the poor.

Focus: For many of the goals, but especially poverty (Goal 1) and hunger (Goal 2), the UN’s focus is solely on those at one end of the spectrum who lack or under-consume, with no attention given to the even larger group at the other end of the spectrum who over-consume. Effectively, the UN focus is on increasing essential resources for the poor who cannot fulfill basic needs like food and water, with no regard for reducing over-consumption by the rich who often excessively waste those same resources.

Poverty: The UN defines poverty overly broadly and in terms that go beyond simply being poor or a lacking income. Under the term poverty they include limited access to productive resources, education and other undisclosed basic resources. They also include social discrimination, exclusion, and the absence of participation in decision-making on indeterminate issues4. By this incredible definition wealthy non-White people in Western countries who claim to have been the subject of microaggressions like derogatory comments5 are also living in poverty.

The UN applaud an almost 70% reduction in the number of people they claim were living in poverty in the 24 years between 1990 and 2014 (an average of 2.9% annually), but complain that this annual reduction was seen to slow between 2014 and 2019. This omits that it is not uncommon for such public measures to slow, especially as interventions that bring the biggest ‘wins’ become exhausted and different approaches are required to address less common, more remote, or previously unknown causes for the target issue.

While Target 10.1 seeks to achieve income growth in the bottom 40% of people at higher than the national average, the SDGs are silent as to how or even whether this can be achieved. This means that in the UN SDGs, gross financial inequality gets largely overlooked. Already the UN have had to backpedal on the original SDG document targets. Goal 1 in the ratified 2015 version sought to end global poverty by 2023 with no population anywhere on the planet living below the poverty line6. While never admitting that the goal had failed, the current version available on the UN website has amended this goal to seek just the eradication of extreme poverty by 2030.

Growth: The SDGs focus heavily on growth. They seek to achieve harmony with nature through a call for sustainability in production and consumption, effectively calling for caps on or reductions in growth in agriculture and all other forms of production - while in stark contradiction Goal 8 is also calling for increases in growth of 7% or greater in less developed countries, and higher levels of overall productivity globally.

The UN SDGs assume growth resolves poverty, without establishing a relationship exists between the two. Global GDP in 1990 was US$22.99 Trillion, and had risen to US$75.8 Trillion by 2015 (a 230% increase) and US$111 Trillion by 2024 (a 383% increase)7. However, during the same periods the prevalence of food inadequacy (undernourishment) globally for people engaged in normal levels of activity remained the same, and for people involved in intense activity such as unmechanised agriculture rose by around 13%8. This rebuts any suggestion of a causal relationship between growth and poverty.

Scale: The UN currently claim that 700 million of the currently 8.3 billion global population live in financial poverty which on their website they define as less than US$2.15 per day. However, it has been noted that in reports the UN used to estimate how many were living in poverty, they incredibly used unreliable self-selected and self-reported household surveys to estimate individual incomes and actually applied the lower rates of US$1.90 per day to define poverty9, and later, US$1.25 per day to define extreme poverty10. Some argue that setting the poverty line at such seemingly low amounts is insufficient to ensure adequate nourishment in many countries. However, first-hand accounts from, for example, Nigerians11 and Tanzanians12 suggests USD$1 per day has significant buying power and is more than adequate in their countries.

While setting a global poverty line at $3 per day (global line), Our World in Data state that poverty is an unequal measure usually based on where the individual lives (national line)13. In any event, the UN admit that even with absolute adherence to their 2030 UN SDG goals poverty will remain unchanged for the vast majority (86%)14.

The UN incredibly propose that every issue their SDGs seek to address, even the majority that are poorly defined or described, are global problems that necessitate limiting or withdrawing resources from, the imposition of a financial penalty on, and the mandatory curricular integration or embedded training that often produces backfire results of, the vast majority of the global population (>92%). This we are told is required to address issues for a mostly remote minority (<8%) that were either created by or only exist in the eyes of the extremely wealthy and political classes...

Or that they have publicly admitted are largely unsolvable problems even if we all accede to their SDG demands.

The example provided to students to emulate demonstrates the complete ignorance and stupidity of both the UN SDGs, and their application as a training tool to help nurses and midwives understand public health in Australia.

Leaving aside that there is no correlation between the health system of Yemen and that of Australia, there is little point disparaging Yemen for lacking access to healthcare and medical equipment, or for the high cost of what medical care is available. Yemen has been embroiled in decades of conflict, less than half of health facilities are functional, most clinical staff go months without adequate or even any pay, and in spite of all the WHO and UN SDG scenery chewing - the rich globalists and their ostensibly philanthropic organisations like Bill Gates and his Gates Foundation that fund much of the WHO and WEF, actively avoid funding actual front-line health services in countries like Yemen that desperately need that funding. Rather, they prefer to tell the citizens of countries like Australia through ideological teaching like the lessons of these universities that these problems are social and cultural issues of the citizens of the target country and that we, the average citizen of Western countries who are suffering our own inflation and high mortgages, should give even more to pay for it.

Wasting the time and academic fees of nursing and midwifery students, many of whom will struggle for decades to pay off their degrees, is reprehensible. That so many come out without even a basic understanding of proper anatomy, physiology and medicines and can potentially harm patients because they simply haven’t been taught properly15, or believing that it is okay to adopt and foisted similar ideological propaganda to the psychological harm of their patients16, is a sad indictment on every university and lecturer who teaches this globalist Marxist socialist nonsense.

Except I am not.

You see, today I was meant to be celebrating the release of my new book. This is a book about the academic corruption that has misdirected opioid research and medicines policy in Australia and New Zealand over the last two decades, and how patients in pain have and continue to suffer while a small group of academics get their fifteen minutes of fame and lots of money. A book that faithfully reports on over a year of research and analysis of hundreds of academic papers, academic blog posts and public announcements, media reports and even regulatory panel meeting minutes released under freedom of information.

I was supposed to be directing you to the Amazon website where it was to be offered for sale. Except that, yet again, I have been censored. This is a book whose content they have not and cannot refute, so they threatened me. And when that didn’t stop me, they shut down my means of publication to ensure you can’t see it.

Let me backtrack a little here to give you some idea of what has happened along the path that has led to today.

During 2023-2024 I undertook independent research over and above that which I performed on maternal health Bayesian AI models and digital health technologies as part of my role at King’s College London. I worked nights and weekends at home investigating the academic research and academic’s roles in the upscheduling to prescription-only of what, until 2018, had been largely appropriate and safely used over-the-counter low-strength low-dose codeine preparations in Australia. In its first version, this research resulted in a 120-page research monograph.

When I finally showed a few of my closest and most respected research colleagues, I was encouraged by them to identify a small number of distinct issues or themes raised within the text, and to publish these as short, focused papers in the academic peer-reviewed journals. I worked earnestly for over a month before presenting three such papers.

The First Paper

The first paper was an analysis of the knowledge transfer and critical relationships between the tripartite of academia, industry and government, applying the Triple Helix Model (THM). This paper emphasises how the THM fails to consider the potential for ethical and other negative aspects to inhabit and misdirect the outcomes of the tripartite relationship.

As a test of the honesty and openness to competing ideas in the addiction science domain, the paper was initially submitted in January 2025 to an academic journal, the Wiley Drug and Alcohol Review. I knew that several of the addiction academics whose work is critically appraised within the paper (and my book) are editors on the journal (Suzanne Neilsen, Amy Peacock and Tina Lam, just to name a few), and while I expected push back, the Managing Editor rejected it out of hand without even referring it for peer review. However, what was even more telling and quite disturbing was that the Managing Editor replied with an incautiously worded threat of a defamation lawsuit should the work be published.

What the Managing Editor of Drug and Alcohol Review failed to disclose in that email was that he had been a collaborator and had published with several of the academics whose work I reviewed. For those who will eventually read my book, you will learn that failure to disclose sometimes quite serious conflicts of interest is a common theme in all addiction science research.

If you were to google the title of this first paper, you will eventually find a link to the 2025 Triple Helix Conference that was held in Monterey, Mexico. This paper was eventually peer reviewed and accepted for publication, and was presented by me at that conference. However, while the papers from that conference have been made available in conference proceedings published by the IEEE, the last correspondence I have advises that a “complaint” was made regarding my paper and that it will very likely not be released. We could guess where that complaint came from, but I am sure that would be pure speculation.

A preprint of this paper released on ResearchGate has been downloaded 144 times during the last few months.

The Second Paper

The second paper proposed an analysis method for and critically appraises the five most frequently used addiction datasets from the collection of papers authored by the reviewed academic researchers. It finds serious issues with every dataset that would lead to under- and over-estimation of what are often surrogate outcomes. These unreliable results are used to create the irresponsibly inflated claim of an opioid crisis related to pharmaceutical opioids, and especially over-the-counter codeine preparations, in Australia.

This paper was submitted to and swiftly rejected by the Journal of Health Informatics Research. Their response? They couldn’t find suitable people to review the work. It was eventually resubmitted to the online academic journal PLoS One Digital. PLoS One have already run it through two separate cycles of peer review with three reviewers in each. While the paper was significantly updated after the first round, several of the points raised in the second round are so contradictory to those identified in the first that it would necessitate both completely changing the entire research paper and methodology, but also reversing changes made arising out of the first round reviews. This approach is one often employed by editors and sub-editors of academic journals who really don’t want to publish a work, but who also don’t want to be so obvious as to just reject the work out of hand.

A preprint of this paper has been released today on ResearchGate for my readers.

The Third Paper

While the third paper had several working titles, my favourite and the title it was eventually submitted under was one that came from one of my research collaborators. This paper brings together several of the more important issues identified from my review of Australian addiction research, including significant conflicts of interest, demonstrable biases that saw negative results regarding the research funder’s opioid product removed from the main paper to the often unread supplementary materials, and methodological weaknesses that led to unreliable results and exaggerated conclusions.

This is the paper I have previously discussed both here on Substack and on X, because the British Medical Journal (BMJ) summarily desk rejected it in only seventeen (17) minutes from submission.

A preprint on ResearchGate has been downloaded 172 times in recent months.

The Book

After having no success getting the academic papers published I returned to the monograph in November 2025, seeking to turn it into a book that I could self-publish. With the encouragement of a great group of collaborators and friends, I focused on developing the manuscript during December and into early January 2026. I created a new Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) account and invested time in setting out the manuscript in the Kindle template. The amazing Clare Craig gifted me the time of the graphic designer she used for her recent book, Spiked, who improved upon my ideas for the cover and laid the resulting images out in Adobe Illustrator. I uploaded the manuscript and cover in both hardback and paperback forms, pushed go, and the rest was supposed to be history.

Except it wasn’t.

The first email from Amazon’s KDP reviewers came several days later, and stated that they were blocking the paperback version of the book because there were “template elements showing through in the cover image”.

The graphic designer and I reviewed the image file and on finding that there were absolutely no template elements showing in the final cover image, exported a new pair of clean files from Illustrator anyway and uploaded it again. Both passed digital validation and the paperback book again showed as ‘in review’. I requested and paid for proof copies, which arrived several days later.

The more detail oriented amongst you will notice that the paperback version on the right has a red border around it. This red border appears to be the so-called template element that we were told was showing in the cover art, yet this red border was nowhere to be seen in the cover art we had uploaded to KDP, and in the second version we exported and uploaded we had copied the graphic elements into a virgin Illustrator file to be sure, so no ‘template elements’ could possibly have existed in that image.

Two days after the proofs arrived, the hardback book passed its review and I was able to order author copies. I ordered twelve hardcover author copies at a total cost of over £170, none of which have ever arrived. By the way Amazon... a refund has also never been issued to my bank account. Perhaps you can get onto that?

The next email I received advised that Amazon KDP would not be accepting my book because it “might result in a disappointing customer experience”.

Three days later I received the following email that confusingly suggested my book, which they had already blocked from release, was actually still going to be released.

That same day, after I dared to ask why my book was being blocked, I received the following cryptic response:

Given that I have never read anything on KDP, and I have never owned a Kindle device that would allow me to read anything on KDP, the only conclusion to be drawn is that some pimply faced youth in Amazon’s review team had decided that my factual research book violated their content guidelines.

Amazon have not responded to requests seeking clarification of what content violated their rules, as it would seem on review of their content guidelines that no rule has been violated. This means the retraction of my book and closure of my KDP account can only be censorship. My guess? That the same person (or people) at the journal who summarily rejected the first paper and who were very likely responsible for the complaint that has seen the second paper presented at conference withdrawn from the conference proceedings, have approached Amazon and made false claims about the content of the book.

Where to now

At the moment things are in limbo. There is suggestion that the book might be picked up by another publisher who has been instrumental in publishing Covid and post-Covid era censored and dissident works, however things have gone quiet on that front at the moment.

The best I can do right now is to offer this work to my subscribers and anyone else who wants a copy via a donation and digital distribution approach. Anyone who would like a digital copy can donate GBP £12, AUD $23, CAD $22, USD $17 via my Buy-Me-A-Coffee page. Forward the receipt or drop me an email to redscott@techie.com so that I can match it up at my end and I will reply with a copy of the digital PDF file.

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Law, Health and Tech is a user funded publication. You can support this publication and my ongoing work either through a paid subscription here on Substack, or by making a donation on my Buy Me A Coffee page.

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The study attached below was done by the Henry Ford Health System (HFHS) and includes over 18,400 kids - a reasonably large cohort to evaluate. If nothing else, it is a damning indictment on childhood vaccination that (almost) nobody has ever seen. But everyone should read.

Entered Into Hearing Record Impact Of Childhood Vaccination On Short And Long Term Chronic Health Outcomes In Children A Birth Cohort Study

268KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

HFHS are pro-pharma and pro-vaccines and had the study shown vaccines worked or were beneficial, we can be certain they would have flown this study from every flag pole and media outlet in the world.

Instead... they buried it so deep very few people have found it. When they got called out for burying it the senior medics in charge of HFHS decided at first to say their staff didn’t do the study at all... And then, when it recently came before the US Senate, the same senior medics changed gears and claimed they didn’t publish it because it was flawed. Many of us might agree that it was flawed... but WHY it is flawed is interesting and actually speaks to the issues we raise about how chronically negligent and misguided the pro-vaccine lobby is. Also, as you will see, the flaws don’t invalidate the conclusions we can draw from the data in the way the HFHS senior pro-vaccine and pro-pharma doctors would like you to believe.

The “Flaws”

First, we are told that the study is tilted heavily in favour of diagnosing the vaccinated children. Why? Because vaccinated children see a doctor more frequently. But why do they see a doctor more frequently? Because their parents take them in like pets to receive their ‘shots’. This, we are told by pro-vaccine media articles quoting people like Dr Jake Scott, must naturally bias the number of diagnoses in favour of vaccinated children because every trip to a doctor becomes an opportunity for a diagnosis requiring more expensive medical and pharmaceutical treatment. The null hypothesis to this must surely be that parents who don’t vaccinate are also not taking their children to the doctor when they are seriously unwell.

But this argument is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy with a twist that the apparently pharma-owned and clueless Dr Jake Scott couldn’t manage to see. What do I mean by this? Consider the following statement: The leading cause of death is doctors. Then ask yourself: Is this because a doctor is the person who pronounces death or is it because a doctor is the person treating the patient when they die irrespective of whether the doctor is highly skilled and acting properly at the time, pharma corrupted, or simply negligent? I would argue based on experience that even parents who don’t vaccinate their children would take their kid to the doctor if they had any of the serious medical conditions evaluated in the HFHS study, and the study’s data when analysed with more information bears my contention out.

Google’s (useless) AI tells us that studies across America report that the percentage of unvaccinated children in America is between 0.5% and 1.1%.

I think this value is likely quite low. Low enough to be incredible. Pro-vaccine politicians in Michigan, the US state where HFHS is based, exaggerate the unvaccinated number for adolescents as somewhere between 20% and 25% (here) when trying to coax more parents to offer up their children’s arms. Michigan’s immunisation scorecard that the politicians should be using is confusing, but puts kindergarten and school age vaccination rates as high as 90% (meaning an approximately 10% unvaccinated rate) based on Michigan Care Improvement Registry (MCIR) data, and when averaging across multiple datasets for school-aged kids at 85% (meaning an approximately 15% unvaccinated rate).

With these figures in mind we look at the HFHS study and find that 11% of the children included in the study are unvaccinated - slightly higher than the low end of the MCIR school/childcare value. This tells me that parents who choose not to vaccinate their children are not as irresponsible or flakey as people like Dr Jake Scott like to make out. Generally, they are taking unwell children to the doctor when they are truly unwell and are not trying to treat significant mental health, neurodevelopmental, endocrinal or autoimmune disorders at home through re-aligning the children’s shakras or homeopathy.

Second, we are told to discount the study because vaccinated children were followed longer - twice as long, according to Dr Jake Scott - as unvaccinated children. His argument is that the neurodevelopmental disorders, only one arm of the study, are most often only identified after the age of four - and that you don’t see what you aren’t looking for.

I think the man doth protest too much. The study itself is retrospective - meaning they are not ‘following patients as things happen’ (i.e. a prospective study). Rather, they are looking back at the patient records to see what happened and was recorded therein during a defined period. Okay… so let’s look at what the defined period was:

On even a critical read of the study design, vaccinated and unvaccinated children’s health records were treated identically.

This is true for the study population definition as well.

The only part of the study where we see any suggestion that there was a difference in the length of time participants were studied is in the sensitivity analysis section, where the authors are very clear about having undertaken appropriate statistical measures to correct for the difference observed in unvaccinated children.

But again, I ask you to think more broadly about this. Vaccinated children in the study had a median number of 18 vaccinations over the duration of the study (up to five years). This means that even if a vaccinated child had no other interactions with the health service, they would have a record spanning multiple appointments every year for most, if not all, of five years.

An unvaccinated child only interacted with the health service when they were unwell. This means it was possible for an unvaccinated child to never need to interact with the health service once they were discharged after birth. It also means the core of Dr Jake Scott’s argument here is that he discredits the absence of more interactions in the unvaccinated child’s health record by blaming the unvaccinated child for their good fortune to be healthy. That is, for having exactly what the study found overall - far fewer chronic or serious health conditions.

Is Dr Jake Scott arguing that the unvaccinated children’s requirement for far fewer doctors appointments because they were not getting vaccinated in a pro-vaccine health service is a conspiracy of poor follow-up on the part of the study’s authors? Is he suggesting that the authors failed to review the medical records for a long enough catchment period? Does he imply that the parents of all the unvaccinated children simply withdrew them from this healthcare provider at a rate far in excess of the vaccinated ones? Maybe he means to suggest that if only the children had more apparently unnecessary doctors’ appointments they would also have had similarly high levels of chronic and debilitating diagnoses?

I think this last contention is the one that gets us closer to the most obvious answer. If, as the data shows, unvaccinated children have far fewer chronic, neurological and serious health conditions they would need fewer doctors appointments and therefore while still being enrolled at or insured with the health provider, would have a far longer period between doctors visits.

QED: When you base your inclusion period on the last time they saw the doctor many of the unvaccinated children might appear to be enrolled in the study for a much shorter period when they are, in fact, nothing more than healthy kids with none of the listed health conditions you are looking for. Therefore, you can still safely be comparing apples with apples for the whole five year period and, I am sorry Dr Jake Scott, what you would be seeing is not a study flawed by unequal followup times. Rather, you are simply seeing that unvaccinated kids aren’t having as many health issues as their vaccinated peers.

Third, while being reported first, Dr Jake Scott’s final last-gasp argument is that the vaccination group is confounded by being much more diverse racially and in other ways, and by having more premature births and respiratory distress.

These arguments might have some superficial appeal when we look at the statistics - but primarily on a relative risk ratio (RR) rather than an actual risk (AR) one. Premature birth in the vaccinated cohort (Any Vaccine) was 4% (actual) or 300% (relative) higher. Similarly, respiratory distress was 3% (actual) or 400% (relative) higher. And there are differences in both directions for the ethnic groupings. The important thing to note is that the study’s authors show that despite the P-values of each of these differences being so low (<0.001) - because some slight differences would be expected in any comparator groups, especially those that are non-random as in a study like this that is looking at actual values in a total population rather than crafting researcher-managed population-matched and heavily curated cohorts - they are not significant in terms of explanatory power for the differences in health outcomes observed.

Further, incidence rates for the different medical conditions are reported in incidence per patient years - which the authors state in the sensitivity analysis section (reproduced as Figure 4, above) were computed by comparing patients from both cohorts enrolled in the study for 1-year, 3-years and 5-years. This means rates of disease are reported by an equal measure for the reader to compare and contrast, even though the original cohort sizes observed in the data were unequal. The authors also make a point of stating at the bottom of Page 12 that their results come after they controlled for gender, race, birth-weight, prematurity and other factors - completely mitigating Dr Jake Scott’s third claimed flaw.

The Findings

In round numbers, vaccinated children were shown to be over:

• 400% more likely to have an Asthma diagnosis and 600% more likely to have had an acute asthma attack

• 600% more likely to have acute and chronic ear infections

• 600% more likely to have an autoimmune disorder

• 800% more likely to have had an anaphylactic (serious allergic) event

Overall the authors report a 250% (2.5-fold) increased risk of developing a chronic health condition in children who receive childhood vaccinations when compared to children who remain unvaccinated. This is consistent with other vaccinated versus unvaccinated comparator studies - both those that Big Pharma and the industrial medical complex have forced into retraction, and those that remain.

Curiously, while several neurodevelopmental and endocrinal disorders were observed to affect some of the over 16,500 vaccinated children - ADHD (12.1%), Autism (1.1%), Diabetes (1.7%), Behavioural Disability (7.6%), Learning Disability (3.0%) and Tics (2.1%), the authors found no incidence of these disorders in the almost 2,000 unvaccinated children in their study. This too is something observed in the studies I cited in the opening paragraph of this article.

That said, I think it is a bit premature to make the claim that vaccines are the sole cause of every incident of these disorders, but it does strongly suggest one of three possible positions. Either: (i) that there may be some increased susceptibility in today’s children that vaccines might activate; (ii) that vaccines might somehow make children more susceptible to them and something else in the environment activates the condition; or (iii) that something about vaccines on their own can cause these conditions in children. In any event, whether one, more or none of these positions is correct is not something I could really make a call on from the data I have access to at this time.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) failure ran for up to two days for some clients and affected everything from major banks (including Lloyds, Hallifax, Bank of Scotland, Barclays, NatWest) and finance apps (including Coinbase, Xero, Square) to several thousand ‘smart’ beds, smart home systems (including Ring, Bluetti and Home Assistant), and even educational, retail and recreational apps (including Snapchat, Slack, Signal, Roblox, Wordle, Duolingo, Starbucks).

More importantly for anyone paying attention, it also completely disabled parts of His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the UK tax collector, and the UK Government’s National One Login system - the core of their Digital ID infrastructure and the primary platform on which around 2-3 million UK company directors are meant to be creating Digital IDs, needed to file mandatory company returns, at the moment.

The Microsoft Azure failure that followed close on Amazon’s heels also affected the online services of banks (NatWest) and recreational apps (Minecraft), but went further by affecting critical services for organisations like Heathrow Airport, Alaska Airlines, supermarket chains ASDA and Marks & Spencer (M&S), mobile telephony operator O2, and email for tens of millions of global Office and Outlook 365 users.

Again, we also saw government and public service systems affected, including voting systems in the Scottish Parliament.

Respected and knowledgeable online commentators including David Linthicum, and even the cloud providers themselves, have anticipated the accumulated cost for each outage will likely run to US$1bil. However, the key thing for us all to understand is that these outages demonstrated how it isn’t just individuals’ connectivity to the internet that is a single point of failure, but also our dependence on what has been known for two decades as ‘the cloud’ - especially the two primary global cloud providers, Amazon and Microsoft.

The Costs and Issues Affecting Your Ability to Trust Digital ID

While losing your cloud service provider is one issue affecting the reliability and robustness of Digital ID infrastructures, another issue for Digital ID infrastructures is that they also demand recent-model smartphones running the latest version and sub-version of that device’s operating system. Is your smartphone more than 2-3 years old? Digital ID won’t work for you. Is your smartphone running an old version of the operating system? Digital ID apps will demand you update the operating system. Is your version of the Digital ID app itself more than maybe 2-3 months old? The Digital ID app itself will refuse to work until you update. In order to update the app your device’s operating system will have to be up-to-date, and in order to keep your operating system up-to-date, your device itself will have to be a current and supported model. Unsurprisingly circular logic, because if you cannot afford to upgrade to a current and supported model, you are effectively no longer able to participate in society. This is what we suspect resulted in some large percentage of the 86 million seized bank accounts when Vietnam turned on their mandatory biometric Digital ID requirements - that while the Vietnamese government and government-controlled media tried to deflect blame by claiming they were old, forgotten or accounts created by fraudsters, the influx of people seen at Vietnamese banks trying to regain access show they were people who were either poor (those, like subsistence farmers, who are unable to afford a recent model smartphone), security conscious (those who don’t like the idea of keeping all their identity eggs in one basket) or contrarians (those who simply don’t want the government to be their lord and master, in control of and monitoring everything they do).

With the systems our politicians want us using on behalf of their capricious bond-villain-like globalist sponsors, if the mobile phone network is down, if the internet is down, if as we have just seen the infrastructure service providers like Amazon and Microsoft are down, or if your device is not currently supported and either or both the operating system and apps are not up-to-date... you won’t be able to prove your identity (Digital ID), prove you are legally entitled to drive (Digital Drivers’ License), access bank accounts and make purchases (CBDC), access social welfare benefits (UBI), attend to and receive refunds or pay your personal or corporate taxation, travel (e-Passports and eVisas) or, in a potential post- eKaren world, even access the internet, telephony, email and social media services.

Even when the platforms underpinning these Digital ID infrastructures appear to be working, there are countless examples showing the enormous potential not just for flaws...

Like the fact that some not insignificant percentage of company directors in the UK are being told their attempts to create the ‘One Logon’ Digital ID being forced upon them to manage corporate affairs and returns ‘failed’. The worst part is there is nothing they can do but wait and, it seems, incur late filing penalties while the UK Government work out the ever-increasing number of ‘bugs’ in their lacklustre and insecure Romanian-developed software solution. And, like the UK’s own attempt, examples from other WEF and EU-sponsored countries were developed and deployed whilst being knowingly non-compliant and incompatible with international IT security and safety standards that have meant their digital driver’s licenses and e-Passports are not accepted even in other Digital ID countries.

And also, fraud...

Most damningly, the High Court of one country has already ruled the rollout of Digital ID illegal because in that country, as in every other country the WEF and EU are foisting this globalist digital nightmare on, there remains no clear documentation of the potential data privacy risks, nor a clear and defined strategy for measuring, mitigating and dealing with those risks. The issues that court pointed to were exactly those that IT Security and Data Experts like me have pointed to for nearly five years now - that Digital ID keeps too much personally identifiable and biometric information in one basket thus creating a new and exciting single point of failure. We have already seen this attract hackers who have stolen hundreds of millions of identity documents with their attendant biometric data (photos, iris scans and fingerprints) from Digital ID repositories in India, Estonia and Romania - including those of Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu. Two things are common in each case. First, is the exposure and loss of faith in the Digital ID records - not just because of the records being exposed when they are leaked or offered for sale on the Dark Web and the loss of faith not just by the citizens who lose trust in the government’s ability to maintain their digital ID securely, but also in the extra work that is required by banks, government departments and other authorities to ensure that the person presenting a digital ID for verification is presenting one that hasn’t been tampered with during the attack on the system.

Second, is that even as an uptick in fraudulent activity using the stolen digital ID data is observed we see repeated statements by politicians, many of whom are more heavily protected and thus not at risk, and the globalist-funded mainstream media denying any theft occurred but later admitting it while downplaying the clearly enormous risk to everyday citizens, and stating that theft of Digital ID data that is most certainly being sold and misused is ‘expected’ and acknowledging thefts will only continue to grow (here and here). Indeed, the focus even in official reports of digital ID theft incidents reproduced on Cyber Security platforms is on the potential impact to the government’s computers and public-facing services, completely avoiding any mention whatsoever of the myriad risks that could befall individual citizens (here).

Note that I am in no way being comprehensive. There are many other incidents involving repositories of digital ID that a web search might uncover.

However, in trying to illuminate why it is incomprehensively stupid to keep all digital identity data about citizens in a single repository, I should draw your attention to the ongoing lawsuit regarding the nearly 3 billion individuals whose digital identity data was stolen and sold on the dark web after the United States’ National Public Data (NPD) breach in April 2024.

There’s also the incident where hackers accessed, copied and potentially manipulated the Digital ID of all 233,000 people who work for the UK Police force, including the estimated 164,000 police officers, before encrypting the entire dataset and issuing ransomware demands to unlock it. Not only did the mainstream media barely report on such a significant incident (see here), they downplayed it as only affecting variously some thousands of officers or 12,500 officers and staff of a single, Greater Manchester, police district while ignoring the potential that altered and reactivated or newly created IDs could have been implanted in the system or that there was sufficient ID information to enable quite serious identity fraud. My search identified only one media outlet that acknowledged, but still downplayed, that the government-contracted service provider involved maintained databases for most or all UK Police forces, NHS trusts and UK Universities (here). The unspoken part of their acknowledgement must certainly be that the hackers had access to potentially millions of digital ID records that access secure sites and systems of police and public services, NHS hospitals, GP clinics and pharmacies, and even university campuses - and we may never know whether the hackers or the people the IDs are on-sold to are using them.

The citizenry of every country that has already rolled out Digital ID systems have been negatively affected. The citizenry of countries like the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand whose politicians are pushing to roll out Digital ID need to wise up, stand up, and reject both the politicians proposing it and the Digital ID itself.

Before it’s too late for us too.

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Law, Health and Tech is a user funded publication. You can support this publication and my ongoing work either through a paid subscription here on Substack, or by making a donation on my Buy Me A Coffee page.

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As I mentioned in yesterday’s article, only a few hours before I published CommBank had yet-again managed to lock thousands of people out of their accounts due to a *cough ‘technical issue’ and for at least the third time in less than a year, as best as I can tell (here). While all those customers suffered the indignity of not being able to pay for necessities like fuel and food or withdraw cash for most of yesterday (here), CommBank themselves downplayed the issue, describing it as being limited to only 7,000 netbanking customers (here). Curiously though, I and several of my readers checked CommBank’s own service updates page and even, as shown in the screenshot below, during the height of the issue when news media around the world were reporting it, CommBank were reporting no issues at all!

That in and of itself is misleading and deceptive conduct. It is effectively saying “Look at us, we are awesome. Our systems are working perfectly!” even as thousands of customers are locked out of their accounts due to a glitch that very likely began in the software platform operated by their clearly overzealous Fraud department.

A Twitter X user pointed me to this article published yesterday morning (UK time) in the Daily Mail. The irony attached to this article is two-fold - firstly because a different journalist who contacted me in the hour before that article ran said they had called CommBank for comment on my situation and, after being told that CommBank ‘don’t comment on individual customer circumstances’ (leaving aside all those articles I linked to yesterday where CommBank were happy to throw customers under a bus and blame the customer for events that led to their missing money), CommBank sought to blame the poor training of a call centre employee who was employed in a call centre ‘overseas’.

Okay... So in spite of the fact that when your call connects to the CommBank customer line you are boldly told that “all our customer service and call centre staff are 100% located in Australia,” does that mean CommBank are suggesting that the incompetent person who potentially breached Australian financial regulations in his dealing with me and my account issue that called himself Daniel is one of these Indian call centre staff?

Pinocchio’s nose is growing yet longer!

But... it is what happened between 11:00pm and midnight last night UK time (8:00am-9:00am Sydney time) that is really telling.

I embedded a tracking pixel in yesterday’s article (now removed). That tiny white tracking pixel referred back to a secure webserver that I hosted elsewhere, and where the IP address or domain of the reader’s computer was located in Australia it triggered a fairly common script to collect browser and device data from the reader’s computer (similar to but far less invasive as those used by Amazon, Facebook and practically every website you visit - and indeed even CommBank themselves). Between 09:44 GMT when I published yesterday’s article detailing my interactions with CommBank and the first email from someone at CommBank just before 23:20 GMT (8:20am Sydney time), the browser and device data of seventeen separate computers that appear to live in three separate internal domains of CommBank accessed my article - and, as best as I can tell, five of those computers live behind the public-facing router of CommBank’s headquarters in central Sydney.

Just before 8:20am Sydney time I received the first of three emails from a cba.com.au email account. This first email in very brief and unctuously placating terms simply apologised for the fact that I felt upset at how I had been treated by the bank’s customer service and fraud staff - the classic false or non-apology apology that was clearly all about avoiding any implication of accountability and shifting the blame on me for how I felt, rather than the actual failings of the bank’s staff. However, notably missing from this email was any intention to put things right and ensure it doesn’t happen again... or, more importantly, to restore my access to what was my own money.

A little over eighteen minutes later at 8:38am a nondescript autogenerated email advised me that my netbanking access had been restored.

Now, you may be forgiven for thinking that the second email was simply the fraud team putting things right as part of business as usual... except something else happened that tells me someone somewhere up the chain in CommBank issued some instructions. The second email was followed by a third email which was verified when I later logged into the netbanking app - advising that the information of the customer service person who told me a ‘visa debit’ type card was not a thing the bank did was... you guessed it...

Entirely wrong!

Someone had ordered that a debit Mastercard (same thing, different name) be generated for my account.

The question that naturally follows is this:

Is the training CommBank provide to customer service staff: (a) so profit hungry and greed motivated that they instruct staff to manipulate customers into taking out actual credit cards when they ask for a Visa debit/Mastercard; (b) so lacking that customer service staff don’t actually know what products and services the bank can provide; or (c) are the staff actually so incredibly dim that they are unable to generalise from the concept Visa debit and get to the identical concept debit Mastercard?

Maybe it’s a little of all three?

At this point I decided to follow through on the final paragraph of yesterday’s article and move the funds in my CommBank account out. However, and again, here’s where CommBank doubles down on criminalising legitimate customers with overzealous and ignorant fraud nonsense. Even after their system had acknowledged checking with the receiving bank to see that the account I was moving the funds to was in my name - CommBank’s fraud software incredibly refused to transfer the funds, told me that they were taking the funds (which were immediately removed from my account), and then sent me two emails telling me that I would no longer have access to my money until they decided whether I was allowed to transfer my own money as I had said I would. This was followed by a call asking me why I was removing almost the entire balance of the account.

I see it this way.

CommBank are like that sleazy middle manager guy called Bob who works in your office. All the girls who work there know to steer clear of him but the naïve new girl that just started this week doesn’t get the memo. She accepts an invitation from Bob to a dinner date and that night he takes her to a nice 3- or 4-star restaurant and spends maybe $250 on her. Everything seems okay until he walks her to her door. At that point, and rather than learning from his own fear response to previous incidents where he was investigated by police for allegedly forcing himself on Belinda from accounting (no charges laid for lack of evidence), and that time he tried to feel up the skirt of the young receptionist at the Christmas party and she resigned the next day for fear of having to be anywhere near him ever again, Bob waits until the new girl opens her door and they kiss goodnight to try and push her through the door so that he can ‘collect’ on his ‘investment’.

Like Bob, CommBank are not learning from each of these incredibly shameful and destructive incidents. CommBank get up each day and double down - each time engaging in a virtual, financial kind of sexual assault on the customer and taking it a little further than the last time to see whether they can get away with it.

Sorry Bob... err, I mean CommBank. Bit of an own goal, no? Just transfer my money and crawl back under your rock. Like the young receptionist in the analogy above I am not willing to hang around for your third attempt at using me to play ‘stink finger’.

Except, it seems… when they are discussing Australia’s Commonwealth Bank.

Until this week I was unaware that the Commonwealth Bank (CommBank) brand has become synonymous online with a true thieving bank - an entity that for often specious and made-up reasons capriciously treats its customers, a Bank’s reason for existing, as criminals.

Stories describing similar incidents to the one I will recount here have sprung up, that show the Commonwealth Bank are leaning quite far out over their skis in order to come up with novel ways to malign their customers and withdraw access to what is the customer’s own funds.

For example, Louis Christopher in May this year was locked out of his account while staff in CommBank’s fraud department made invasive and unreasonable and potentially commercially sensitive demands for information about how the research company founder and long-standing customer made his income, whether he was storing money as cash at home, and why he was making transactions to particular commercial partners and entities. Demands that were well outside their purview as a bank account provider.

Other complaints include CommBank holding prepaid travel bank card amounts to ransom, entire TikTok threads of people recanting their stories of how CommBank staff mistreated them and/or closed their accounts - sometimes with little warning and without making the funds in those accounts available, and the fact that CommBank often scores very low or at the lowest in customer service reviews.

There are also whole Reddit and Facebook threads like this one and this other one, where people discuss CommBank’s fraud department locking them out of their accounts while they are overseas and making unreasonable demands that they fly home and attend a branch to be ‘verified’ before they can again have access to their own money, charging pensioners thousands in fees on what are supposed to be fee free accounts, and capriciously closing customer accounts because of who the bank’s fraud department erroneously believe you might have sent money to or received money from.

And all of these issues are outside of the ‘glitches’ the bank’s overzealous software has that have locked thousands of people out of there accounts en masse in the last 12-18 months (here and here). Apparently only five hours before I sat down to write this article today tens of thousands of CommBank customers in Australia found their netbanking and ATM access was again ‘out’.

Yet, has CommBank’s overzealous and capricious fraud department actually been preventing bank fraud? It appears not when you look at the number of headlines where CommBank customers relate how the Bank were sometimes even facilitating the fraudsters, only to blame the customers and tell them it was their fault that the scammers took their money (here, here and here).

Taken together, all of this gives an extremely poor impression for what should really be Australia’s national bank.

My Story

I have been an on-and-off CommBank customer since I was maybe seventeen. While I have had cheque and savings accounts, I don’t believe I have ever had a credit facility through them, and given that I have been working overseas for most of the last two decades, I haven’t really been a recent customer.

That changed last week when I re-opened my account with them to prepare for a move back to Australia’s seemingly upheaval filled shores. During the first of four phone calls I re-established myself with the bank seemingly without issue - which required them sending a link to my UK phone and me providing them with up-to-date versions of my 100 points of ID (including Aussie Driver’s License and Passport) and setting up new netbanking passwords etc. Everything seemed fine. I then proceeded to have an amount of money transferred from the UK to this new account so that there would be money available there when I arrived, and so that there would be funds for me to give to my brother, who is helping me get situated, to make living arrangements for me and get my possessions out of storage there.

During a second phone call I asked about getting something like a Visa Debit card - because I still have a few trips I am supposed to make and normal Australian debit cards don’t tend to work overseas. These trips ironically include the fact that I am supposed to give a talk and sit on a panel on the use of Forensic Statistics in court cases at the International Statistical Institute (ISI) conference in The Hague next week, followed by my presenting my Triple Helix evaluation of knowledge transfer and collusion between the triumvirate of government, academia and industry at the IEEEs Triple Helix conference at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico on my way to Australia.

The lass I spoke to said that she didn’t believe CommBank did a visa debit card, and that her suggestion was to apply for a normal visa card and simply move the money from the bank account into the card that I wanted to access while overseas. So… I did exactly what she suggested.

Except it was at this point that CommBank decided to make me the latest victim in their overzealous Fraud Department lock-out and steal scam. The Fraud department decided to close my account and, during the course of three more calls, some that I have recorded, have seemingly given me different excuses that ranged from: (i) “there was a fraudulent application for a credit card on my account” - no, I made that application based on the advice of your staff; (ii) “there is something wrong with your app - what exact phone device are you using?” - apparently their smart device fingerprinting software hidden in their app doesn’t like that my GrapheneOS phone sandboxed the CommBank app and won’t let it traipse around my device and access the GPS hardware or random data and records in other parts of the filesystem; and (iii) they then speciously claimed that they hadn’t collected my ID - no, the process to re-establish my bank account had required me to provide up-to-date ID and I still have the email your system sent to my phone with the link in it to provide the ID documents.

In the fourth and most lengthy call a CommBank Fraud team staffer who claimed his name was Daniel made each of the three claims above at different times - some more than once, and each time he has a different answer for why he is right and I am wrong. He then proceeded to claim that I needed to yet again provide my ID, and that I should send it to an email account “appfraud@cba.com.au” - never mind that even in today’s encryption-conscious world that email is hugely insecure. The irony of the fact that he had used my Australian Driver’s License, one of the ID documents he claimed not to have, as one of the things to identify me when he started the call didn’t seem to dawn on him - not even when I pointed it out to him. Which tells me this was just more hoop jumping nonsense. Anyone would think the Fraud team gets a percentage of the customer accounts they seize or something?

In a fifth call - last night, my time - I was again taken through a process to identify me using ID documents that Daniel claimed not to have - only to hear snickering on the phone when it was transferred to the Fraud team. Clearly, this process of getting people to take hostage images with their ID isn’t about verifying the customer, it’s about amusing the Fraud team staff. I can see why some in those forum links above misspell the CommBank name as C#ntBank.

In any event I simply want my money back. After that I am more than happy to bank with anyone else but CommBank. Should someone in CommBank grow a conscience, feel free to contact me on the phone number linked to my account and I will give you the account details to return the money to my UK account where you know it came from in the first place. I know that you know the money came from a UK bank account in my name because the bank that sent it to you have provided me with a letter for each of the two deposits showing that they verified me as the sender and intended recipient to you.

After all, it’s my money, not yours.

Over the last few days we have seen headlines proclaiming the implementation of Digital Biometric ID in Vietnam led to 86 million bank accounts being closed (here and here) where the owners of those accounts, and any money in them, had not established and verified their semi-voluntary but nationally mandated Digital Biometric ID. In Part 1 I reflect on the flawed global push for Digital ID and how what happened in Vietnam may be by intention. In Part 2, I use myself as a Guinea Pig to remotely test the current state of Digital Identification currently being implemented in Australia.

The Flawed Push for Digital ID

I have written previously about State-sponsored electronic surveillance the shift towards Digital ID and Digital Driver’s Licenses. I described the flawed push towards digital ID from the prospective of the three fallacies of security. First, the fallacy that a device, software application or smart technology can ever be totally secure. Second, the fallacy that governments and law enforcement will act in our digital best interests and maintain our right to digital privacy and security. And third, the fallacy that digital integration is always nett beneficial and safe.

In my work I describe how legislation in countries like the UK, New Zealand and Australia has been gradually manipulated to allow warrantless searches and, where they find digital devices, make specious or vaguely plausible excuses to compel first passwords and, more recently, encryption keys. When courts in countries like the United States ruled against compelling passwords and passcodes on grounds of self-incrimination, but started allowing police to force suspects to provide biometric identifiers like fingerprints or facial images to unlock devices1, I predicted that biometrics would become the go-to method globalists and governments would want to use for identification and social control. While the US Supreme Court this year in U.S. v Brown ruled forcing a suspect to unlock a phone with a fingerprint did, in fact, violate protections against self-incrimination, the push towards using biometrics tied to Digital ID has continued unabated.

I predicted that with digital driver’s licenses would come the potential for abuses by police when Digital ID verification systems are unavailable, and even when they are. In order to show an officer your digital driver’s license you are required to unlock your phone and then unlock either your digital wallet or a state-provided digital ID app. While the public is repeatedly told officers are not allowed to handle your smart device during this process, how much faith do you have in the average law enforcement officer during an often-unwitnessed roadside or pretext-stop to not demand or seize your device? After all, it’s not like law enforcement officers haven’t ever violated rules like this to access information and pictures inside smart devices before (see: here, here, here and here). Police in some jurisdictions have even begun using obscure regulations to fine thousands of drivers whose only crime is forgetting or being unable to charge the smart device on which their digital wallet, Digital ID and hence, Digital Driver’s License, is stored.

We now have laptop computers, smart device operating systems, and banking and social media apps with nag screens pushing you towards using your face or finger instead of passwords - because, they say, it’s incredibly quick and easy and significantly harder to replicate or steal. However, companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google leave the most important fact unsaid - that like those 2FA codes and RSA tokens, biometrics are not a foolproof solution and anyone intent on hacking your device or Digital Identity will still get in. At the simple end of the spectrum there are examples all over the internet of children being able to use their own fingerprints to unlock a parent’s fingerprint-secured device (see: here, here, here and here). Others got around the more recent government requirements for age verification using biometric facial scans in the UK and Australia by holding devices up to scan images of characters from computer games and freeze frame images of US President Donald Trump (here and here). And while we are told that Digital Wallets are safe and effective (that sounds familiar), their use has simply socially engineered into a lot of people to keep all their eggs (credit cards, user accounts, digital identification and even digital car keys) in one digital smartphone basket. This has resulted in a new type of fraud known as Digital Wallet Fraud. It was incredibly quick and easy (there’s that term again, too!) for fraudsters to evolve and this il-considered digital consolidation simply offered a new and, some say, easier attack vector where a link in a text message or near-field over-the-air malware attack can expose all of your account, card and payment details in seconds.

I also predicted that the ubiquitously voluntary Digital IDs2 (here, here, here and here) would quietly become mandatory for accessing social welfare payments and other government or public services. While they have denied it for years we are already starting to see politicians and public services acknowledge their intention towards or requirement for mandatory Digital ID (here and here) - and this is where we return to the rollout in Vietnam. I have mentioned online that I believe one of the key issues with implementing Digital ID is that it is a pro-business move that creates two classes of people - those who can afford or who have sufficient income or credit to keep moving with technology, because just like the Covid track and trace apps users of older smartphones or non-smartphone devices that are unable to run the most recent versions of Apple’s IOS or Google’s Android operating systems and Digital ID apps get intentionally left behind in the rollout of this Digital ID infrastructure. I suspect this might explain many of Vietnam’s 86 million closed bank accounts - that some large percentage of these accounts belong to farmers or other remote, country-dwelling and non-tech savvy citizens. Many of them may be nothing more than collateral damage in the globalist push to make us all digital, trackable, predictable and controllable.

Consider... If, on average, each closed Vietnamese account only held the equivalent of £1 Great British Pound (₫35,500 Viet Dong), that’s £86 million that effectively just disappeared from the Vietnamese economy. Who gets to keep the funds in those 86 million bank accounts? Do the funds simply disappear? Get absorbed by the banks? Or is there other legislation at play that incredibly renders them bona vacantia and, thereafter, property of the State? My bet is on the latter. And this may have been by intention for several reasons. First, it gets a lot of poor and country people out of the country’s economy - without the VNeID these country and farming people can no longer access government services to receive low-income benefits and age-related pensions, apply for driver’s and other forms of licenses, sign rental agreements, pay their taxes, educate their children at university, get a passport or participate in much of Vietnam’s cashless digital economy. Second, it reduced the burden for the State Bank of Vietnam who, prior to the VNeID, were operating around 200 million personal bank accounts for the 101 million strong population. Third, it potentially allowed politicians, on behalf of the State and under the self-imposed colour of right, to seize the funds in those accounts.

However, and aside from a couple of preprints on arXiv and Researchgate (for example: here and here), you won’t find my research on these issues published in the ‘accepted’ academic literature. You won’t easily find this work because I was rebuked several times by senior academics at the University I was working for at that time; a university with many senior academics who were members of or funded by organisations pushing Digital ID such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), Turing Institute, United Nations, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). I was also unequivocally reproached by the editors of several academic journals, many of whom have similar financial conflicts of interest and whose desk rejections of my research work came and still come with uncompromising rapidity. I was ostracised because I dared to point out the problems and potential pitfalls of adopting these globalist-promoted WEF, Gates and Tony Blairite unsafe digital control measures. You see, the adoption of Digital ID infrastructures has little to do with their claims about protecting you from hackers or identity theft (here, here and here), and even less to do with protecting our borders from illegal boat people who are known to toss identity documents and devices overboard before making landfall. Digital ID infrastructures are about governments, police and globalists being able to track your every movement, your every word, your every purchase, your every click on the internet, your every phone call and your every association (here and here). Digital ID are about creating a complex and complete picture of you in order to implement other even more draconian technologies like Chinese-style Social Credit systems. These technocrats openly admit their intention to use all the data they collect from your use of Digital ID infrastructures to create a blended reality where your real interactions and transactions are used to compute a digital twin of you, aka your Social Credit Score, that incorporates your present and future economic, social and environmental sustainability.

I do wonder what they will do with the vast numbers of us their algorithm deems to be unsustainable.

I also wonder, if one of them decides they don’t like the inference they draw from your most recent social media post or unguarded comment at that dinner party last week, whether they will have some sort of virtual switches and levers to capriciously deplete even an otherwise respectable person’s social credit score.

Only time will tell.

Assuming you all continue to let them go ahead with this draconian Orwellian nightmare.

My Experiment

I decided to conduct a test of Australia’s currently highly integrated digital identity platform in order to discuss why the move to integrate even access to the internet into the government’s Digital ID platform could enable even easier digital fraud and identity theft.

Let me start out by saying that for the purposes of this experiment I used myself, and only information about myself. No other individual was contemplated or harmed, and no fraud was committed. Using myself may have made it easier for me to surface the flaws in the system but, I would argue, if the flaws exist, they exist for everyone.

Step 1: Open a Bank Account

The first step in my experiment was to see if I could get access to a bank account. I went to the website of one of the well-known but second tier banks in Australia. The bank I chose operates as one of several subsidiaries of the much larger Westpac Bank. I started to go through the process of establishing a new everyday transaction (i.e. non-savings) account but found myself stymied not by the Digital ID requirements. Rather, I was caught short by the need for a local mobile phone number to receive the incredibly annoying and often insecure 2FA 6-digit codes. This led me to undertake Step 2 at this point, in which I got an Australian eSIM and mobile phone number before continuing.

With a working Australian mobile phone number, I only needed to call this particular bank’s customer service number, give then the Access number their website had issued to me, and have them add the phone number to that account. The young and naïve sounding girl who answered did little more than verify the account and access numbers the website had issued me only minutes before, before adding the mobile number to the account. Simple, efficient, and scarily easy.

I then continued the process on the website to open the first bank account. Establishing Digital ID for the account was as simply as typing in a physical driver’s license number and a passport number and typing in the 6-digit 2FA code that was sent to the mobile phone number. As a test, the passport I used was well out of date and expired and had already been replaced by a new one some time ago. Incredibly, the Australian Digital ID verification system API accepted and verified it as a current identity document. No taking a photo. No biometrics. And nothing beyond the couple of 10-12 digit numbers and the 2FA code and I had an open, working bank account. The website even claims to have posted out a debit Mastercard to the family member’s physical address I entered into the website. In their banking app on one of my smartphones it showed me the card numbers and pin that had been generated for the card, even though the card probably won’t arrive for several days.

Step 2: Get a local eSIM

The lesson from this experiment is that getting the eSIM and local phone number should have been Step 1. Never mind. Lesson learned. Getting an eSIM was equally easy. I opened a user account on one of the three Tier-1 mobile service providers with the same physical ID numbers, and signed up for a month-to-month mobile service using my UK credit card. Within five minutes I had a working phone service that my brother in Australia verified by sending me a rather humorous text message:

Step 3: Open a second bank account

I decided at this point that it must have just been blind luck. That surely a Tier 1 mainstream bank would not make it so easy to open an account using Australia’s digital identity verification system. I went to the website of one of the largest and most well-known banks in the country. Their process was the only one of the three to use live camera to ‘scan’ the ID documents and was also the only one to recognise that the expired passport was... expired. Their process sent a link to my then unverified email account that allowed me to open up their website on my smartphone directly into the current step in the account process. It required me to take pictures of the front and back of the physical driver’s license and expired passport but, after identifying that the passport was expired, it accepted a photo of a print from my HP printer of a photo of my current passport in place of the real passport. The other difference in the second bank’s process was that it wanted a picture of me that matched the photo on the identity documents. Similar to the kids who recently showed that age verification tools were susceptible to images of game characters and stills of Donald Trump, I held the phone camera in front of a photo of me from about 15 years ago hanging on my office wall... and it worked. They asked for a third identity document and the list of options included details of the debit or credit card on an account with another Australian bank. If you’re thinking I used the debit Mastercard number from the first bank, a card that hadn’t even been posted out yet, then you’d be right. Incredibly, that worked too.

All of this means the third-party tool they integrated into their website to connect to the Australian Government digital identity verification API for Know Your Customer (KYC) checks lacked the ability to tell the difference between a real object and a low-resolution print of an object. Given that the debit Mastercard had only been made available on the first bank’s app about fifteen minutes before and it hadn’t been activated, had never been used or even stamped and posted out yet, their KYC process was simply collecting and storing rather than verifying this information. It couldn’t even tell if the person it was looking at was a living 3D human or a 2D photo behind glass on a wall.

Conclusion

You may be wondering why this is important, so I invite you to consider the following scenario.

You are on holiday overseas for two weeks. During your holiday someone breaks into your house and finds your old, expired passport and a letter to renew your driver’s license in a drawer. They take these, and snap a quick picture of you in your wedding portrait that’s on the wall in the hallway. With the information from these three things my experiment has shown they have every piece of information needed to use the Australian Government’s digital identity verification platform to open a new phone account in your name, and use that phone number for 2FA verification to identify as you to banks and other institutes. Once they have a new bank account in your name, they can easily seek credit cards and loans from that bank in your name. It really is that simple.

The old system that required you to go into the bank or other places and identify yourself with three pieces of ID (100 points) might have been time consuming and annoying, but it at least required considerable effort on the part of the fraudster to create fake but believable looking copies of your ID with their photo on it, if they wanted that ID to be accepted. This new digital identity verification API has made it considerably easier. They can do it from London. Or Toronto. Or Nigeria. Or just about anywhere with an internet connection.

Digital ID and digital identity verification isn’t making it safer and more secure for us. But it is doing two things. It’s making it easier for governments and police to capture every aspect of our lives - to track your every movement, your every word, your every purchase, your every click on the internet, your every phone call and your every association. It’s also making it far easier for fraudsters to hijack your identity while maintaining much more than arms distance.

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Law, Health and Tech is a user funded publication. You can support this publication and my ongoing work either through a paid subscription here on Substack, or by making a donation on my Buy Me A Coffee page.

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This article is being cross-posted as a series of three articles on The Conservative Woman here.

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I concluded my last post by observing that my initial interactions with the research systems IT Manager and clinical research academic of a particular oxbridge university suggested that they appeared to be playing fast and loose with your private health information, and posited that this is a common theme seen over and over again with health records in the control of academics. Today I will explain…

Researchers love to write papers telling us how using patient records for post-clinical or secondary use1 research may breach patient privacy and confidentiality, that ethics committees weaken trust and do little to adequately protect individual patient’s values and interests, that it can be unethical, may expose patients to potential criminality such as doxing or identity theft, or risks damaging the doctor-patient relationship (for example: here, here and here). Yet, we see researchers abusing your and your children’s private health data and even specimens and test results all over the world - from exploiting disagreements and loopholes in the law to store and later access Newborn Screening heel prick test cards without consent in Australia and New Zealand, using incomplete coded versions of our health records to make broad, and potentially misleading claims regarding the existence of or extent of patient’s alleged opioid abuse, or allowing third party organisations to simply and unlawfully remove copies of patient’s health records for ingestion into overseas and potentially unregulated aggregate data collections.

If you ever wanted to understand why I believe health law, ethics, morality, and simple human decency are needed when individuals handle or have access to our medical records, and why I believe most of the highly political and profit-driven people in charge of that clinical data right now are little better than criminals, then I am more than pleased to give you this small primer.

Most people believe that privacy laws protect their health records. However, regulations like HIPAA in the United States and the UK’s Data Protection Act 2018, Health and Social Care Act 2012, NHS Act 2006 and Human Rights Act 1998 that all portend, or perhaps it should be pretend, to protect the privacy and confidentiality of our medical records and associated health data actually do more to enable the sharing of that data than prevent it. You see, what they do isn’t so much to lock away our private data in order to keep it out of the hands of people we might not want riffling through it. Rather, they ostensibly dictate how that patient data is supposed to be looked after and processed once collected. However, instead of granting your right to absolute privacy they actually define and prescribe a myriad of exceptions that enable patient information to be shared and, where these are insufficient, create pliant loopholes like ‘the public interest’ that can and have been bent to serve almost any cause celebre. They have enabled an incredibly large and profitable business selling your private health data: directly to everyone from defence contractors to the governments of other countries (£330-500m), international pharmaceutical companies (up to £330k per company), AI providers like Google DeepMind and to a multitude of academic and quasi-academic research projects (between £6-25k per use); and indirectly through companies like IQVIA who are disingenuously presented as a ‘privacy enhancing contractor to the NHS’ but whose primary business model is to acquire by any means and either repackage your health data for sale to other health data aggregators, or use it to create larger datasets of fake, synthetic health records2 (sometimes incorrectly described as Digital Twins - you will see in the slide below why they are NEVER twins) that they can tweak and manipulate to suit any research question and sell to academics.

Side note: Leaving aside that governments, healthcare providers and companies like IQVIA are making money from your personal health data, many academics use IQVIA’s synthetic patient data in research that has been used to make incredible (meaning: not credible) ‘new’ discoveries and inform decisions that affect your healthcare without declaring or sometimes even recognising its synthetic nature. If you want to understand synthetic health data, look no further than the slide below from my digital health technology course. Synthetic patients made from the health records of real patients are nothing more than mix-and-match collections of demographics, symptoms, treatments and outcomes and anything you might discover that appears ‘new’ is nothing more than an accident created in the way aspects of real patients are matched up by the engine that generates the synthetic patient. Clinical decisions affecting real patients should not be made on the basis of these synthetic health datasets.

In several small ways your ability to object to the sharing and sale of your health data has been gradually whittled away, first through changing opt in rules to opt out through the flick of a politician’s pen - making all health records shareable and saleable until you object, and later by removing from the legislation some of the grounds by which you could object. For example, the Health and Social Care Act 2012 simply removed parts of Section 10 of the Data Protection Act 1998, eliminating both the patient’s ability to object on specific grounds that included that releasing of or selling the record might cause significant harm or distress to the patient or another person, and the requirement for patients to be informed that their data was going to be shared or sold because that gave them the opportunity to object. And most people still don’t understand that the Data Protection Act 2018 never actually gave patients the right to object to the sharing or sale of their personal data in the first place. This became blatantly obvious during Covid when all pretence that the Data Protection Act, GDPR or even the Common Law Duty of Confidentiality acted to protect your privacy evaporated entirely so that private companies and researchers could be given broad access to the medical records of anyone whose data had any mention of covid or coronavirus-related health concerns. This even included people who had previously opted-out of sharing their medical records for any purpose. Many of these records ended up in the hands of researchers from UCL, King’s College London, Cambridge and Oxford - and aside from incredible publications like those of the ONS and Queen Mary University of London that claimed BAME were more likely to suffer from severe covid, and their being matched with Tim Spector’s ZOE app data to incredulously proclaim almost any symptom common to a broad range of regular ailments was a covid symptom, we have no idea what was done with most of these health records and by whom.

You would be mistaken if you think this is just happening in the UK or United States. This is happening everywhere. For example, Australians are expressly told that their My Health Record is never sold to third parties for commercial purposes, yet the framework that governs secondary use of the records actually allows the sale of health datasets for limited commercial use as long as the use could have a research or public health purpose - so selling a significant subset of health data to the app developer that customised Australia’s COVIDSafe Track and Trace App was a commercial sale that was allowed on the specious belief that it would have (but didn’t) a public health benefit. Nobody I approached seems to know for certain who at that Australian software company, the Singaporean company that designed the original underlying app code, or the webhost the government contracted to host and support the app, had access to that data or even where the data is today. It seems that the only people accessing COVIDSafe’s supposedly protected, encrypted and confidential personally identifiable health data that anyone cared about were the police, who defiantly refused to agree to stop accessing it even after they had been caught.

The biggest loophole that enables sharing and sale of your personal health data for secondary use purposes is something referred to under several, sometimes misapplied and easily misunderstood, terms - the most common being deidentification and anonymisation. If it’s anonymised, to our NHS and others, it becomes fair game.

Deidentification and anonymisation are often described as the removal or transformation of personally identifying information in the record - for example, deleting your name, removing your house number and street and leaving only the first four characters of your UK postcode, and removing your date of birth and replacing it with your age in years. While several deidentification documents (and even Google’s AI) will tell you that deidentification would remove information about rare medical conditions you might have, this almost never happens. Why? Because removing that data might affect how we interpret the rest of your medical record. For example, if we removed the information regarding a Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE or lupus) diagnosis for a 24 year old female, we might be left asking why she has so many GP and rheumatoid specialist appointments when she doesn’t appear to have a rheumatic condition, or why she is taking an antimalarial and strong anti-inflammatory and expensive biologics drugs when she has never been to a malaria-prone country, has never been diagnosed with malaria, and doesn’t have an inflammatory or autoimmune disease diagnosis. Often, it is the rare medical conditions that provide informative context for the rest of the medical record - left lower lobectomy for lung cancer that might explain ongoing shortness of breath, scarring at the surgical site and a history of chemo- and radio-therapy; enucleation of the eye after a penetrating injury that might explain ongoing migraines and the need for maxillofacial prosthetics consults, orchidectomy of the right testes that might explain gynecomastia, hormone injections for low testosterone and what might look like an inguinal hernia scar. Remove that diagnostic context and the rest of the record can become entirely worthless.

So, if the health service wants to profit from your data... I guarantee you they don’t remove it.

However, it is often that data and something as simple as a google search that can turn the deidentified or anonymous health data into a re-identified health record. Healthcare providers and governments have been profiting from the sharing or sale of patient’s health records for over three decades. In 1997 while at Carnegie Mellon University, Professor Latanya Sweeney demonstrated using basic searches of electoral rolls, newspapers and the far less sophisticated Google of the day (BackRub at Stanford University’s URL google.stanford.edu) that re-identification of deidentified health records was a simple task. While a senior politician assured patients that their data had been anonymised and privacy was assured, Sweeney identified that politician’s health record from within tens of thousands of these anonymised records and had FedEx deliver a paper copy to his office. While Sweeney’s work led to significant change in HIPAA, that change which ostensibly was to protect patients privacy has been seen today to enable increased exploitation of patient data, political malfeasance and financial greed.

Having worked briefly inside one NHS Trust’s data team, I can tell you from experience that this type of research collective usually have significant funding from Pharma companies, the Wellcome Trust or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that they use to ‘compensate’ the NHS Trust to identify and anonymise (read: purchase) fairly complete copies of the health records of patients that fit a particular study criteria - which can be anything from highly specific (everyone who had a particular type of pacemaker implanted for cardiac irregularity between March 2012 and January 2014) to highly generic (everyone who had this type of X-Ray/CT/MRI on or after 2007).

Let us return to the example of the health data these academic chaps that emailed me for the job interview ‘test’ are in control of. For the sake of argument and to give us a concrete example, let’s say that it is limited to basic demographics and health histories of patients who had, choosing something relevant at random, a CT or MRI of their skull - what we colloquially might call a brain scan. I am not saying that this is what it is, I am only reaching for an example that I can use to show why you might not want academic institutions and IT wonks in charge of your identifiable or even deidentified NHS health records data. So, in our fanciful example, let’s say these chaps have every brain scan that was done across the NHS for the last decade - and while that might encapsulate several tens of thousands of patient records, re-identifying one, as Professor Sweeney demonstrated, can be as simple as reading the newspaper.

For example: let’s say you know from a newspaper article that in March 2016 a 19 year old male died within 24 hours of admission to hospital with a traumatic brain injury that resulted from blunt force trauma involving self-administration of fall-risk-increasing-drugs (FRID) that caused him to fall down a flight of stairs. If the medical record has already been coded you might simply be searching for that one record that has the right combination of dates, location, age and ICD-10 codes. Perhaps: S09.90XA - initial encounter for unspecified head injury that may later be updated to or include S06 - intracranial injury; F16.xx - Mental and Behavioural Disorders due to use of or acute intoxication caused by hallucinogens; W19.xxxA - initial encounter for unspecified fall, which may later be updated to W10 - falls on or from stairs; and possibly R96.1 - death occurring less than 24 hours from onset of symptoms. But if the medical record is still clinician’s free text, this search remains markedly easier. Further, that patient would be easy to differentiate from, for example, this patient - who while also having a traumatic intracranial brain injury and being 19 years of age, would have other descriptors or codes related to being a passenger in a motor vehicle accident on a different date in October 2024 with death occuring after a 48 hour admission to hospital.

Studies have shown that on average one-quarter of all deidentified or anonymised health records can be re-identified (range: 1 - 79%), and that uniqueness rates can be almost absolute (80-90%) when working with as few as three matchable data points - meaning it may be possible with today’s more information-dense datasets, powerful computers and AI to re-identify 8-9 out of every 10 subject patients from their anonymised health records where we have independently established only three data points about the sought individual.

Oh... and what happens to academics like me who, even sometimes quietly, point these issues out? While regulators and politicians bury their heads in the sand and pretend it isn’t happening, or that it can be prevented with speeches and proposed legislation simply telling people not to do it, they either, as in my case, use censorship of publications and grant applications, prolonged academic probation or the expiration of short-term contracts to take away our livelihoods and make us unemployable elsewhere or, as in this Australian Melbourne University example, apply increasing pressure on our employers until we quit are constructively dismissed.

These secondary use people accessing your personal health information may view it as anything from a mere research tool, a financial resource, or an amusing curiosity, through to a potential source of information that can be used against you. I don’t know whether the two people at the Oxbridge university, research systems IT Manager and clinical researcher academic, were simply so disorganised that last minute interviews and incredible demands for rushed, highly specific and detailed long-form answers to information-poor questionnaires was a one off or, as I suspect based on almost two-decades of experience in IT environments, an established part of their day-to-day management style. I also don’t know whether today’s breed of IT Managers with their let’s throw everything in ‘the cloud’ and spin up ‘an app’ around it with ‘digital ID’ and 2FA without truly assessing all of the security, privacy, ethical and moral considerations should be allowed anywhere near our highly sensitive and confidential health data.

After all... Do you really want your or your family member’s health records in the hands of people who might be greedy, malicious, ethically challenged, capricious, clumsy or simply ignorant of the potential harm its accidental release, intentional sharing or profit-motivated sale might bring?

I know I don’t.

This article is being cross-posted as a series of three articles on The Conservative Woman here.

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The process of being invited to my first job interview after almost 50 curt rejection emails in two weeks quickly deteriorated last Friday into another example of why academia is arrogant, self-serving and corrupt. And needs reform.

Just before lunch last Thursday I was emailed by a very apologetic office administrator inviting me to interview with her ‘boss’ in what was only 48 business hours from her message. While she acknowledged the incredible short notice, she seemed more concerned about my potential and mandatory commute to the office five-days-a-week if I was offered the job. Around an hour later I received the calendar invite and Teams meeting link.

The next email I received was from her ‘boss’, the research systems IT Manager, after lunch the following day, Friday - and only 24 business hours before the interview was scheduled to occur. This curt, unapologetic and far less congenial message told me that he, presumably under the direction and guidance of another person, the senior clinical researcher for the health information system, would be meeting with me on Monday and required me to complete four questions contained in an attached document. The email made it seem like they would be simple questions that could be easily answered in a single paragraph each. Oh… and he wanted the answers back as quickly as possible so they could consider them prior to the ‘interview’.

The document provided a 1.5 page ‘scenario’ - except calling it a scenario is akin to observing a Scottish highland creek and calling the water you see 25 Year Old Sherry Cask Single Malt Whiskey1. It unashamedly lacked any real detail and told you nothing about the environment, stakeholders, users or technologies in use beyond the statement that the plan is a migration into centrally managed network and storage and a small number of generic terms: Desktops, Linux, VMs, Virtual Servers and Lab Equipment. It told you nothing about the systems, equipment, types of applications or data in the existing platform, nor whether these were available or had to be defined and created in the future location. However, and in stark contrast, the questions asked you to describe in detail actual methods and the names of the specific software tools you would use or might need to migrate and integrate the ‘systems’ [not] described in the generic and detail-absent ‘scenario’. It called for you to provide some sort of plan for a migration you knew nothing about, and for managing the needs and expectations of users and support teams whose needs and abilities were an entirely unknown quantity.

Essentially, and as was confirmed when I raised this issue by return email, what they sought was for you to tell them how you would do their project without actually knowing anything about their project. It honestly seemed more like they wanted me to give away any commercial advantage someone like me has from having done multiple migration and datacentre consolidation projects by telling them how to do it and with what, so they could do it themselves without ever once having to pay me a penny. And that leaves aside that every single one of those migrations was different based on the difference in systems, networks, applications, services and people involved.

Don’t get me wrong - I can understand trying to evaluate whether a person has the necessary knowledge, skills and experience needed for a job. However, I think that the approach used here tells you a lot about the type of person you would be working for, and how they deal with the personal medical information of the potentially tens to hundreds of thousands of patients they have in this medical records research system that they need to migrate from its own server room into the main university datacentre.

In any project, but especially an IT project where functionality must be maintained throughout (Q3 of the document), nothing should be rushed or pushed through at the last minute - not even selection and interviewing of the IT resource that will be undertaking the work. Already here we can see that last minute requirements definitions and demands are something that may be normal operating procedure for this research systems IT Manager - and I have learnt through bitter experience that is a bad thing. If your manager is willing to do this sort of thing to you at this early stage in your [potential] working relationship, then he will very likely be the type of person who will chop and change requirements on you at a moments notice… And worse. I have had IT and Project Managers like this come at me as the solution architect or my development and engineering team and make significant late-stage demands late on a Friday (as this chap was doing to me) that they were aware of well before (he could have had his admin girl send me the document the day before, no?) - and which I have seen ruin the plans of more than one weekend for some number of people. This last-minute-unexpected-demands type of manager creates chaos and significant stress in a team, making it difficult for the workers to know what priorities they are supposed to be working towards because the priotities chop and change with each demand. It demonstrates poor planning, a lack of boundaries, and that the ‘team’ is run more alike their own personal fiefdom. It creates an environment for poor decision-making, distraction, and unintended mistakes, which isn’t a good or comfortable place to be.

More significantly, it can also demonstrate that they are risk tolerant, may not follow change control processes and will visit other unrealistic expectations on their staff - except that what is important to note in this case is that he is being risk tolerant about, and stressing out the engineers that have power over and access to, your personal health data. The system involved in this case holds electronic health records and patient data related to tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of patients of a particular and clinically significant type who have had a particular clinical diagnostic test.

If nothing else, it strongly suggests he is playing fast and loose with your private health information, and sadly, this is a common theme seen over and over again with health records in the control of academics.

But more on that tomorrow…

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Law, Health and Tech is a user funded publication. You can support this publication and my ongoing work either through a paid subscription here on Substack, or by making a donation on my Buy Me A Coffee page.

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They want what I can do for them, they just don’t want me

Since receiving my marching orders from King’s several things have happened in rapid succession.

First:

I had two different higher-ranked academics in the nursing school request the complete course materials for the popular digital health module I developed and taught. While they already had access to the complete 12-week set of lecture slides, the assignment prescription and the supplemental readings in their online learning environment, what they appeared to be demanding was the actual narrative, the talk I give, when presenting each lecture. In much the same way actors put their own custom and indelible take onto a character in a tv series that a substitute actor can never quite match, the art of delivering the lecture is, or should be considered, a copyrighted performance. Two lecturers delivering the same material verbatim will never quite put the same inflections on the same key points, and will never have had the same extant experiences that are captured in the experiential anecdotes they might use to support those points. The module I developed was built in no small part on my own experiences over almost two-decades in IT, and more specifically with the systems, software and users of a broad range of health information systems (HIS). Neither of the people who wanted my lecture notes had any experience at all in HIS beyond briefly being a clinical user entering patient data into a specific HIS, and while they could easily facilitate the more basic student-led portions of my curriculum they would have been entirely unable to support the technical or experiential discourse necessary for getting to those student-led discussions. It wasn’t the material alone that made the course so popular. It was the combination of my material, my knowledge and experience in both the IT systems and user domains and the particular way I led the class that made it popular and resulted in extremely positive student evaluations in the top quartile.

My Digital Health and Technology Solutions module had eight confirmed enrolments for Semester 1 of the new academic year (September-December 2025) as at the start of last week, and over the last ten days has had another five clinical users select it as an optional elective and three further enrolment enquiries by email. This means it could have had thirteen confirmed enrolments and potentially sixteen total students. For a small elective module where the university charge £3,400 per student, that represents between £44,200-£54,400 of lost revenue. Beyond that, the module was a required course in Semester 2 through the Nursing School’s Chinese partner - Hong Kong University Space - as part of their Clinical Nursing MSc (see image). I had already been told that the likely enrolment for Semester 2 (January-April 2026) from HKUSpace was twelve - representing a further £40,800 in lost revenue for King’s, a total of almost £95,000 for the year and around double what King’s had been paying me.

Conclusion: They want my module and the potential income it can bring. They just don’t want me.

Second:

While my maternal outcomes model research was initially rejected for publication 4 times by academic journals that included AI in Medicine (AIM) and Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), it was eventually peer reviewed and published first at the prestigious IEEE International Conference on Health Informatics (here), and later with more expansive detail and validation in the highly regarded journal Computers in Biology and Medicine (here). In total now three different researchers within the King’s Nursing school, including two in midwifery who I had previously invited to collaborate with me on my maternal outcomes Bayesian AI clinical decision-support model but who had rejected that invitation, have come forward seeking whether there is any remaining open research or data from the project that I might simply give to them because they asked nicely.

Conclusion: They didn’t want to collaborate with me on my research, but since some of it got published they are happy to take any data and open research questions or unpublished findings I might have as I am being escorted abruptly to the door.

Third:

In the engineering and computer sciences school at QMUL it had been common for the school to offer to support the research grant application by providing one or more PhD students fees and stipends when academics such as myself were applying to UKRI funders for a significant research grant (for example, my PhD fees had been covered by the school as part of the package the school put forward to demonstrate support for Professor Norman Fenton’s PamBayesian funding application to the EPSRC). In contrast, professors in King’s nursing school emphatically told me I would not receive such support. A school offering to use part of their almost 50% portion of the grant to support at least one PhD student is often seen as a necessary element that, when absent, can almost entirely reduce the likelihood that your project will be funded. True to their denial, not one of the six primary funding applications I made includes anything more than a letter saying that I worked there and they would continue to support my post for the duration of the project, if funded - and at least one didn’t even include that. When other funding applications included far more expansive support from the host school and mine did not, is it any wonder mine were rejected without even being sent out for peer review?

This also meant that in order to build my academic profile and ensure I had the necessary minimum two PhD supervisions on my record for my academic probation, I had to find self- or employer-funded PhD candidates. Demonstrating that I am never one to shy away from a seemingly impossible challenge in today’s financially restrictive and almost-recessional financial environment, by the end of the second year of my academic probation I had secured two - the first is a nurse educator whose PhD was funded by her academic employer in Indonesia, and the other is a British-Zimbabwean workplace health and safety nurse who was initially self-funded but we have since been able to secure full funding from her mining industry employer.

Within only about twelve weeks of the first PhD student starting her project at King’s, she had been approached not once, but three times by the Senior Lecturer they had employed and given the digital health hub seat and funding I had originally been told I would receive as part of my post. That senior lecturer without establishing a reason for her own inclusion, first asked the PhD student to ask me to include her as a third supervisor on the PhD project and, when I declined, impressed upon the student that she could demand that I allow it. After I demonstrated that I had actually read the doctoral regulations at King’s, and that those regulations only allowed for inclusion of a third supervisor where there was a significant need to justify inclusion, the matter appeared to be dropped. Except that it wasn’t. When my PhD student presented the results of her initial scoping review at an internal postgraduate students research seminar, the same senior lecturer again approached her and sought for the student to work with and publish her results with her, rather than with her PhD supervisors as is normal. Among other issues I have with the way this senior lecturer comports to self-promote both herself and her research, I find it equal parts unethical and despicable that she would attempt to poach another academic’s successful PhD student.

Incredibly, three hours hadn’t passed from my receiving the academic probation decision that I was immediately fired before I received the first of multiple emails asking me whether I had told my PhD students and who, as first supervisor, I would be giving them to. The eventual consensus between several of the academics emailing on this issue was that they were going to give them both to that same senior lecturer. So not only had the senior academics in the school not once admonished her for her unethical and despicable behaviour, they were going to be complicit in it by rewarding her for it!

Conclusion: Ultimately they want the almost £30,000 per year my two PhD students bring in. However, they again just don’t want me.

Fourth:

While I had been promised by two senior academics, both professors, that I would be given the opportunity to meet with and advise both PhD students of my departure before anyone in the faculty stepped in, one of those same two professors, the one who unashamedly supports giving both to the senior lecturer, called up the second of my PhD students at home and told her. Even after that PhD student told her she had not had a formal meeting with me yet as one had been scheduled for the following week, the professor proceeded in telling her anyway. That student formally, in writing, advised that not only was her funding and ethics approval was secured with my assistance, but that I was named on both and continued funding at least might be contingent on my ongoing supervision of the research. She concluded by stating that she expected King’s nursing school to ensure and maintain my ongoing supervision of her PhD - after all, she had come to King’s seeking to work with me, not someone else.

The professor who made the phone call to the student proceeded by email to tell me I should agree to be a silent third supervisor on the student’s project - as my inclusion would meet the test for approving a third supervisor. However, I would be required to provide that support in my own time and, more importantly, for free. King’s are happy to take around £10,000 in fees per year from that second student but they were demonstrating sheer academic greed in their unwillingness to spend any of that money to provide the support or resources the student was requesting.

Conclusion: They not only wanted to retain the income and any potential research publications from my PhD students, they wanted me to continue to provide my three decades of health information systems knowledge, extensive qualifications and technical abilities to those students as a silent, unnamed, third supervisor for free and, I suppose you could say, out of the goodness of my heart.

Thank You

In the week since I came out publicly and shared with you all how King’s had sacked me and the unfortunate position this placed me in, the outpouring of support has been overwhelming. Not only have some of you used your own platforms to share my story both here on substack and through other online media (including the amazing Professors Fenton and Neil at Where are the Numbers, the inimitable Clare Craig at Hart, and even the awesome folks at The Conservative Woman).

But further, three of you asked me to set up a Buy Me A Coffee page and around fifty of you absolutely wonderful people have made donations there. I have been moved by your generosity. Your £1,200 will keep the mortgage paid and the lights on for an extra couple of weeks while I navigate the frighteningly dark space that is trying to find a new job (more on that minefield of demons and vampires in my next article). I also extend my thanks to another of my readers who surprised my son and I with a gift that appeared unannounced this morning - I will email you separately after this post goes ‘live’.

To all of you I say an emotional and truly heartfelt Thank You.

After three years. After meeting and exceeding almost every academic probation requirement and clearing more than a few hurdles that had been placed before me. And even after receiving some of the top student reviews in the school for my course content and teaching; I have been sacked from my academic role in the nursing school at King’s College London.

Did I steal from the stationary cupboard?

Hang on... There’s a stationary cupboard? How was I there for three years, spending hundreds of pounds of my own money to buy printer paper, pens, pencils and highlighters, and I never knew this?

Did I make a pass at a student?

Of course not. Have you seen me? For that matter... Have you seen the students?

Did I call my boss’ boss a complete pr*ck?

While we all think it from time to time, even I am not that stupid.

Did I steal someone else’s research results and publish them as my own?

Given the elitist attitudes in King’s nursing school, their seeming unwillingness to engage with anyone non-clinical, and the fact that nobody wanted to work with some geeky IT AI keyboard fondler. This too never happened.

So, you may be wondering, what actually was my ‘crime’ ?

Well, I’m really glad you asked. I am guilty of being outspoken on particular issues, such as freedom of speech, the unfairness and injustices of many criminal prosecutions but especially that of Lucy Letby, and political corruption and the (ab)use of political power to promulgate policies like those of covid and net zero.

Yet, I never set out to be a crusader. Many years ago in a country far far away I dared to want what most young people want: a chance to study, to contribute, to carve out a meaningful life of knowledge and service, a place to call home, a cool car, and perhaps even the ability to travel and see the world. But over three decades academia has repeatedly turned that aspiration into a gauntlet of discrimination, exploitation, censorship, and political persecution. My academic story, abridged here, is not simply personal—it is a cautionary tale for whistle-blowers. A warning of what happens when universities abandon scholarship for ideology. And an example of what happens to good people when free inquiry is traded for conformity to dogma.

Early Encounters: Expelled for Asking Questions

My first taste of academic injustice came when I was a student for a semester at what was supposed to be a fairly relaxed and progressive theological college in Australia. I was nineteen, bright, eager, and willing to probe. Unlike most of my classmates, I questioned the logic of some contemporary biblical interpretations. I raised legitimate comparisons with older texts and translations. Yet, for my inquisitive nature, I was sternly admonished and told to sit silently at the back of the class.

Soon after, I went to the movies with a female classmate. We talked, enjoyed each other’s company, and shared a kiss at her door. The next morning the Dean called me in, accused me of impropriety, and expelled me from the college. No hearing. No defense. I was given a week to leave.

This was my initiation to the grim truth that questioning authority—whether theological or ideological—was not permitted. Even ordinary human interactions could be weaponized into grounds for expulsion.

Nursing School: Bureaucracy as Punishment

Next, I embarked on nursing. Initially I thrived, but soon I ran afoul of a Year Advisor. The policy allowed students with 200 hours of paid aged-care work to skip a six-week unpaid placement. I had more than 340 hours of paid work—more than several classmates, all female, who were granted exemptions. My application was rejected, again and again, with shifting excuses.

When I persisted with paperwork proving my hours, she simply moved the goalposts: wrong employer, wrong facility, wrong mix of hours. Finally, she whittled my 340 hours down and ruled I had “197 not 200”. She declared I was three short by her count. My assignments and exams—all passed—were marked as failures for “not completing the placement.” I lost thousands of dollars in fees and months of academic progress.

Other male students experienced the same discrimination. By the end of year two, of nine male students only one remained. The rest had left under pressure. Nursing school had purged them.

Harassment and Targeted Failures

A year later at another university, my clinical supervisor during a psychiatric nursing rotation abused his authority. Competencies signed off and exams passed—yet he failed me by fiat. He even phoned me at home, insisting “a nurse has no private life,” telling me he could scrutinise me at any hour. A few years later he was struck off after multiple complaints about his personal intrusions by female students. My legitimate education was derailed in the process.

Disillusioned, I left nursing. I spent my third year studying computer science, left university without a degree, and for nearly two decades I built a career in IT.

A Return to Studies: Exploited for Revenue

Nearly two decades later, I returned, encouraged by colleagues to pursue graduate studies in health informatics. At Massey University, I completed module after module and was awarded a Graduate Diploma in Information Science with top marks. Yet, while I had completed three years of undergraduate study and this Graduate Diploma, but because I didn’t have an undergraduate degree, the enrolments office forced me into unnecessary “extra” courses from the Masters of Information Science program in order, he said, for me to prove my academic ability; extracting more fees and dragging out my progress. At the end I had completed 345 credits—enough for three full graduate degrees—but was only awarded a Graduate Diploma (90 credits) and an MPhil (120 credits); both with top marks and an award of academic distinction. The university had milked thousands in unnecessary coursework towards a taught Masters in Information Science and made me endure an additional full year of study, but while I had the extra 120 credit points necessary for that award, excuses were made and it was never granted.

This was my first direct encounter with higher education as a revenue machine: manipulating students into paying for modules they didn’t need, and keeping oversized tuition pipelines open while delivering often far less than was promised.

Entering Academia: Precarity and Punishment

When I became a researcher and later a lecturer, the exploitation grew worse.

At Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL), where I completed my PhD in only two-years and around half the time of most PhD students, I was kept on a series of short-term contracts for over five years by an administration illegally avoiding conversion of long-serving staff to full-time permanent posts. Universities today thrive on this “gig economy” model, keeping junior academics permanently insecure. Precarity is the leash by which dissent is silenced.

But in my case, it didn’t silence me. And it is that which sealed my fate.

Censorship by Complaint

At QMUL, I responded to a tweet by a junior academic who had attacked a senior virologist’s peer-reviewed paper with no evidence. My reply was measured: incredulity at the fact that careful science could be trashed so casually on Twitter. For this I faced a barrage of orchestrated complaints that I was “racist” and “sexist.”

I was hauled before a kangaroo-court investigation run by a professor-activist intent on a guilty verdict. With no evidence other than prejudice, in his ‘court’ of persecution all five DEI-themed charges he had raised against me were “upheld.”

Weeks later and only after the damage to my career, credibility and public opinion had already been done, QMUL’s administration overturn the charges; admitting there was nor had ever been anything racist or sexist in my words. My reputation was poisoned. My career future was compromised. My mental health was certainly scarred. But in the broader sense—the lesson was clear. In my case I was considered to have well crossed over, given my name was on work questioning covid and the covid statistics and the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, and in spite of the fact that most of it used little more than the government and Office of National Statistics own data to demonstrate what they were telling us was, more often than not, a pack of lies. It’s not about whether you acted wrongly. It’s about whether you crossed that ideological line.

Or, as some academics are just now working out; it’s ideological Lawfare. A soul-crushing ordeal navigating a legal or quasi-legal system with significant time, financial and emotional costs that themselves are used as retribution, regardless of the adjudicated outcome.

To put it more succinctly; the process is the punishment.

Blacklisting and Leaks

During 2020 I was awarded a prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship with a fixed start date in 2021. When, as a result of the professional and emotional insult I had experienced at QMUL, I sought to move my Royal Academy fellowship from QMUL to Edinburgh University, QMUL staff deliberately sabotaged me: leaking the confidential kangaroo court outcome report (already overturned in-house) to HR at Edinburgh, absent context of the second report that overturned it. This poisoned the well, led to significantly increased scrutiny of me by Edinburgh’s HR and, after several weeks, resulted in my being removed from post.

Almost immediately I was offered a Senior Lecturer post at Liverpool John Moores University. After almost six months there the same leaked kangaroo court outcome report mysteriously surfaced again, waved at me during a disciplinary meeting based solely on accusations that sounded like they had been lifted directly from that report. Despite admitting they were relying on tainted evidence; the university sacked me. Only under threat of employment tribunal action did they compensate me for early and unfair termination, effectively paying out my entire employment contract with a healthy notice period on top.

This practice—weaponizing anonymous complaints and confidential reports that are intended to be taken out of context, and circulating them across institutions—is blacklisting in all but name.

A similar thing was happening with academic journals at the time—lists of names of academics like myself whose research questioned the covid narrative were, we are told, shared among journal editors—with research submitted for peer review by academics on those lists desk-rejected, sometimes within only minutes of submission.

Kings College London: Three More Years of Probation Hell

Finally, at King’s College London in 2022 I was hired to lead digital health teaching and research. On paper, my academic probation required publishing, teaching, securing funding, and student supervision. I excelled: several high-impact publications, a successful new digital health module, top student evaluations, and even a PhD completion.

Yet my funding applications, caught in post-Covid and post-Brexit hyper-competition, were unsuccessful. Despite this being entirely normal (hundreds of rejected applications for each of a handful of grants), I was told my “failure to secure external funding” meant I was unfit for academia.

The school manipulated probation: three years (double or triple some other institutions), repeatedly failing to assign appropriate mentors or reducing mentor’s working hours and telling them to no longer perform this vital function, and making it my problem to find my own mentor such that I had three over the three-year period. They also scheduled and cancelled my final academic probation hearing three times, eventually fixing it for one day after my employment contract expired and ensuring my direct-report professor could not attend to defend or support me.

The outcome was preordained and predictable: immediate termination. My course was popular, my students successful, my publications solid, my teaching reviews excellent—and yet, because I was not pliant, I was cut loose.

The Speech Police

Alongside this institutional sabotage came ideological censorship.

When I robustly analysed the Lucy Letby trial in a series of published articles and interviews, even correcting a minor misstatement by another academic in an online interview, I was reported by KCL to the Nursing and Midwifery Council—despite my not being a registered nurse. KCL faculty themselves filed the “incident report” to distance the institution from me.

When I researched Gillick competence and medical consent in minors, a DEI officer demanded to see my manuscript, merely because it reviewed a small number of court transcripts from transgender cases. “Future work on race, gender, or transgender issues,” I was told, “must be sent to a DEI team member for approval.” This was not peer review—it was political pre-clearance.

Universities are no longer content to gatekeep hiring and promotion. They now claim authority over the research questions you may pursue, the words you may speak, and the conclusions you may draw.

A Pattern

From Australia to New Zealand to Britain; my experiences are consistent:

· Expelled for questions.

· Failed for persistence.

· Harassed for being male.

· Exploited for money.

· Kept precarious to ensure conformity.

· Accused and condemned without evidence.

· Blacklisted across institutions.

· Threatened for research that cuts against fashion.

This is no longer about me as an individual. It is a system-wide problem. Higher education, once the home of open debate and fearless inquiry, has become an ideological machine—financially exploiting our children, policing behavior, stifling dissent, enforcing conformity, and punishing whistleblowers.

Context: The Free Speech Wars

We see the same battles all across society today. Governments push “disinformation units” to police online speech. Corporations censor debate around medicine, gender, climate, and immigration. Universities, far from resisting, have become enforcement arms: hunting “wrong thinkers,” ostracising dissenters, and sacking and deplatforming anyone who challenges orthodoxy.

What better way to silence whistleblowers about misconduct, fraud, or bad science than to tar them with accusations of racism, misogyny, or “disinformation”? What better way to protect entrenched bureaucracies most often staffed by middle-aged white liberals than to purge talented but awkwardly independent-thinking staff?

The new academic value is not truth, but conformity.

Not rigor, but allegiance.

And those of us who resist pay with our livelihoods.

The Call

The point of telling this story is not self-pity. It is alarm. If I can be silenced despite strong research, high evaluations, publications, grants, and public engagement—then so can anyone.

Academic freedom is not a luxury. It is the foundation of universities’ very existence. Without it, we are seeing education decay into indoctrination, research collapse into propaganda, and society has lost one of its last remaining arenas for truth-seeking.

Whistleblowing is not misconduct. Questioning consensus is not hate speech. Pursuing politically inconvenient research is not harm. These are the duties of academics.

The system is broken. It has become a factory of fear and conformity run by HR bureaucrats and ideological enforcers instead of scholars. It must be reformed—fundamentally. Permanent contracts must replace precarity. Anonymous complaints and confidential reports must not be used as portable weapons. DEI departments cannot police research output. And universities must restore freedom of speech as their highest principle.

Until then, more promising academics will be hounded out, more truths will be buried, and more injustice will flourish under the guises of “diversity”, “tolerance”, “inclusion” and “safety.”

The wars over “disinformation” and “free speech” are not abstract. They are being fought right now inside the very heart of our universities. If we do not defend academic freedom today, we will reap only silence tomorrow.

My Situation

I am one of many being hounded out of academia. But I ask you: Please consider my story before you or your child embarks on their academic journey. Do they really need the qualification? Will the debt it creates be commensurate with the future outcome? Do you really want to spend years undertaking a Masters and PhD to join the ranks of an academia that is so fraught and corrupt? Going into academia has meant losing the long-established IT career I had. Going into academia might also now mean losing the house I spent everything to buy in order to be close to London and King’s campuses, and having to distance myself from my young son so there is no potential for financial blowback on him.

That said, the one thing that going into academia has done for me is that it has shown me how and why so many people in our world - in medicine, in pharmaceuticals, in education, in agribusiness, in politics, in social services, in the tech industry, and in the media - have all become corrupted. The corruption of body, mind and spirit now starts in kindergarten (here). It pervades all of education (here, here and here). But it gets reinforced and amplified when our children go to university. Even worse than that, it is the corrupt academics at the universities that complete the link and perpetuate the cycle; they create the corruption and teach it to university students who become the next generation of teachers, those teachers go on to teach ideology as scientific fact and indoctrinate children in schools all around the country, those children grow up repeatedly hearing and absorbing incredible nonsense that gets reinforced and expanded upon when they too go to university. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The eight years of academic probation I have endured, including the last three at King’s College London, has taken a stiff toll. Universities use academic probation to restrict the academic’s access to pay rises and promotion. Made worse in my case because King’s demoted me from Senior Lecturer, which had been my title with commensurate pay grade in my immediately previous role, to Lecturer.

It is really beginning to feel like my race is run. I have been diligently applying for a variety of roles both within and outside academia. IT companies and departments, like those where I worked for almost two decades before coming to academia, have directly or indirectly judged me either too old, overqualified, or too long out of “the game” for consideration in the senior systems engineer, infrastructure architect, IT Manager or Project Manager roles I used to excel at. More than twenty universities have sent me rejection emails seemingly without any consideration of my qualifications, potential or long-established skillsets in computer science, digital health, Bayesian modelling for intelligent decision-support, or health and cyber law. As at 10:00am this morning I have received 43 faceless and curt rejection emails in two weeks.

I have no family or support structure in the UK which further limits some of my options. My son is already afraid that he will be sent overseas to live with family he hardly knows because, absent some luck and without the benefit of a new job, I will be forced to put my house up for sale in less than six weeks.

This is the legacy of contemporary academia.

*******

The first few people who read this post asked me to provide a link so that they could support me as I navigate my new-found unemployment. On their encouragement I have set up a Buy Me A Coffee Page:

https://buymeacoffee.com/lawhealthtech

Even better: If you are hiring for a role that I might be suitable for so that I can keep my lights on and pay my bills, drop me a private message

Thank you to everyone who reads my Substack. You are a fantastic bunch of people.

Setting The Scene

Around lunch time during my third day in the hospital I was moved from the Surgical Assessment Unit onto a medical/surgical ward. I was placed into a four-bed room that, with my addition, was fully occupied. To my right was a middle-aged middle-eastern and clearly muslim man who, with his visitors, spoke almost exclusively an Arabic dialect. I think I might have heard him speak English three times and that was only to the nursing staff twice and consultant’s registrar once. Diagonally opposite me, and opposite the man to my right, was an African man who was clearly also muslim and, like the man to my right, had clearly been raised in another country. When talking or acknowledging me, both men were quite polite. When the African man’s smartphone went flat, I lent him the USB-C charger from mine so that he could charge his device and call someone to come collect him because he was being discharged. His English was typical for many Africans from countries like Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone that I know, well learned and quite formal. Where things fell down was that when dealing with some of the nursing staff, especially two of the nurses we had over the course of that first day and evening who were clearly Christian (the obvious sign being crucifix necklaces), both suddenly either didn’t understand what they were being asked or were simply being intentionally discourteous. However this, whilst clearly a problem on its own, was not the thing that truly disturbed me.

In the bed directly opposite mine was an indigenous British white man in perhaps his late 50’s. This man kept to himself. It was clear to me as someone who originally trained for several years in both adult and psychiatric nursing (I admit, almost 30 years ago) that he was uncomfortable and embarrassed either about his medical condition, or simply about being stuck in hospital and away from his home environment. He had suffered some recent insult to his health, possibly a stroke, that had caused paralysis on the left side of his body. This paralysis meant it was clearly difficult for him to roll over in bed, or to get up and address what in nursing we refer to as his activities of daily living (ADLs)1. However, when I did hear him speak to the doctors during medical rounds the next morning, it was clear he had had a formal private school education. He was neither stupid, uninformed, nor belligerent. However, what was visited upon him during the night was all three of these things. Possibly, worse.

The nurse on night shift for our room and the adjacent four-bed room was a rather robust African lass in her 40’s with a heavy accent that I believe identified her native language as isiZulu2. She wore a Christian crucifix and while no-nonsense was very polite with me, but was clearly standoffish with the two muslim men. Incongruously, with the British man in the bed opposite mine I observed that she was very clearly dismissive. I had seen him at least twice during the afternoon call upon the day staff for assistance to toilet; assistance he had received in reasonably short order and for which he had shown himself to be embarrassed but grateful when it was received. However, this night nurse told the man she was too busy and if he couldn’t address his toileting need on his own, she would have to come back later. This is where the problems began. He tried to explain to her back as she walked away that he was paralysed on one side and could not stand on his own. She didn’t turn around or acknowledge him. So he did the only thing he naturally could do. He was left by her absence of care to the humiliation of soiling himself and his bedclothes. And while it was not in any way his fault, I can tell you that even from across the room it smelt offensive to the rest of us.

What Happened Next

Three hours into her shift at 10:30pm our night nurse finally returned to our room to do the medication round. This was also at least two hours since she had told the man in the bed opposite that she would return to help him use the toilet. Other than to say I observed no emergencies or issues on the ward and suggest that she may have simply forgotten, I cannot say what she may have been doing during that protracted period of time. In any event when she got to the British man, she became very curt and clearly upset with him for his unavoidable misfortune. She again concluded by telling him she would ‘come back’ shortly. And, as you may already be thinking, she again didn’t return to him for at least another hour.

On a side note this was not her only example of poor planning and time management. I had been scheduled for intravenous pain medication at 8pm. In fairly severe pain I had hobbled my way out into the corridor at around 9:15pm and politely asked her if she could please ‘hang’ the medication3 I was meant to have already received at 8pm. I reminded her I had received my last medication before lunch and it was clear from my being hunched over and having cold sweats that the pain had finally gotten too much for me to manage4. When she came at 10:30pm to do the medications she realised she had forgotten the medication ordered for me which was already two-and-a-half hours late. By that time I had already done something I don’t recommend any of you do. I had been in so much pain that I was literally curled up in a ball and was, at times, crawling about the bed on all fours. In my backpack I had some plain liquid Ibuprofen tablets and some 30mg codeine tablets I carry for when I have the occasional visually impairing, vomit inducing, migraine. When she hadn’t returned by 9:45pm I had self-administered a couple of the liquid ibuprofen tablets in the hope that, as an anti-inflammatory analgesic, it would take the edge off my incredibly swollen pancreas and abdomen. It did. Just enough that I was able to at least sit still. She didn’t manage to start my IV medication until 10:52pm. Only, almost, three full hours late.

Not long after 11:30pm I was standing at the foot of my bed after visiting the bathroom. The nurse returned with another nurse who, I gathered from their conversation, was working in the patient rooms down the left hallway perpendicular to the one our room was located on. This nurse, dressed in the same uniform, was an even larger, louder, and more abrupt woman of African descent with a different accent I was unable to identify. Even though it was after 11:30pm and the rest of us had our lights out, and in spite of the fact that he was not her patient, she proceeded to castigate the British man in what my grandparents would have called her outside voice.

“Oh, David5. Look at you. You have shit yourself and shit all over your bed.”

“If you needed help you should have asked for it. We would have helped you had you asked for it. Now look what you have done. You’ve shit everywhere.”

When the man tried to tell her he had, in fact, asked for help, she proceeded to talk over the top of him.

“Now I have to clean up your shit. It’s everywhere! You’re disgusting. How could anyone be so filthy.”

Hearing what was being said I had peeked through the join between where the two curtains around my bed came together. Leaving aside the loud scolding, the nurses had also made no attempt to protect the man’s physical privacy or dignity. His curtains were fully open and his naked body was on full display to the other two men in the room who did not have their curtains drawn as I did. Worse than that, they were rough-handling him. They were using their arms under his armpits to pick him up and flip him to one side to the other, back and forth, by the shoulders. He started to protest, quite clearly telling them to take care with his arm as he was paralysed, was in pain, and was not enjoying how he was being treated. The second nurse, not content with her continued loud debasement of his having soiled himself, picked him up by the paralysed arm at the shoulder and elbow and proceeded to roughly toss him in the direction of our nurse so that she could change the sheet under him on her side.

It was clear from his face and his reaction that her rough treatment this time had caused him considerable pain, and he said as much. When this second nurse again reached for his paralysed arm, he used the other functioning hand to push her hand away. There was no real venom or force in what he did, and speaking as an outside observer I wholeheartedly believe his response was justified and reasonable. However, this prompted an even louder tirade from her:

“Look at him. He just assaulted me! How dare you hit me! You evil man!”

He responded, again telling her he was paralysed on that side, that she had hurt him, and he didn’t want her to touch him.

“I don’t know why I work here. Every time I work here, I get assaulted. And it’s always these racist white people. I’ve been married for 27 years and my husband has never hit me. How dare you hit me.”

When he began to repeat his protestations, she proceeded to threaten him:

“If you hit me again, I will call security and have you thrown out of here. I don’t care what is wrong with you. I will call the police and have you arrested.”

To our nurse she repeated:

“He hit me! I’ve been married for 27 years and my husband has never hit me and this guy hit me!”

When they had finished, and without even attempting to dress him, they threw a sheet over his naked body, turned out the light, and left. It was the most disgusting example of nursing care I had ever seen and unfortunately, when I read some of the online patient and public involvement (PPI) forums, I can see it has become all too common. While we are constantly led to believe that it is patients who are rude and abusive toward the nursing staff, reports like the investigation into the criminal acts of patient abuse at Winterbourne View Hospital:

...and Greater Manchester NHS Foundation Trust’s Edenfield Centre:

...and Oxford’s John Radcliff Hospital:

And the fact that the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) regularly deal with reports of nurses physically assaulting patients (but cover up the name of the nurse and name of the organisation if the NHS request it):

...mean that these examples are just the known tip of a very large, ocean liner sinking, iceberg.

Sadly, the gentle and caring profession is not always so.

My Response

There was little point my attempting to intercede at the time. All that would have happened was that my care would have also been compromised, and potentially it would have resulted in these nurses, or at least the second one, either escalating her aggression towards the man or redirecting her ire towards me. The following morning I attempted to seek out the day shift Nurse Manager in order to have a confidential chat with her. Almost as if she thought I was going to complain about something that had or had not happened to me, she brushed me aside twice and by lunch time had failed to come and speak to me. Not wishing it go unreported, I turned to the least qualified person on their team - the healthcare assistant (HCA). She was an older woman who I had seen have several positive interactions with the man opposite me during the morning. I asked her if I could speak to her outside the room, told her what I had seen and heard, and explained to her I had been trying to get a few minutes with the Nurse Manager to formally report these events. I asked her if she would please raise them with the Nurse Manager on my behalf.

Not even ten minutes later the Nurse Manager came to see me. We went into the sluice room across the hall and I described the events I witnessed the night before. I also described that I had seen the previous day’s staff interact with the man positively, and my observations that morning. I explained that I added these observations for context - that it was clear, for example, that the man had dealt with staff who maintained his dignity by approaching him, telling him what they were going to do and seeking his assent, politely and with respect. That the two nurses from the night before had failed to tell him what they were going to do, failed to seek his consent, denied him any dignity by not only telling the whole ward that he had soiled himself but also by calling him names, accusing him of doing to them what I had observed them doing to him, and exposing his naked body for all to see. The Nurse Manager responded that no, that is not how we treat patients. I replied that I knew this, which is why I was coming forward to make the complaint. She proceeded to try and tell me that it must have been HCAs and not registered nurses, to which I replied I knew the difference.

“How?”

I asked her what colour the registered nurse’s uniforms were in this NHS trust.

“Like mine. Dark blue.”

I then asked her what colour had I told the HCA the uniforms of the two nurses from the night before were. When she replied that she couldn’t recall, I prompted her to go ask because she will find that I correctly described their uniforms as both being the same - they were both dark blue. I knew the RN’s uniforms were dark blue, and every HCA I had seen had been dressed in maroon. Further, I added that it would be unlawful for the first nurse, the one who had administered my and other patient’s IV medications, to do so if she were not in fact a registered nurse. HCAs cannot administer medications, especially not IV medications.

This elicited a very defensive “How would you know?”.

To which I replied:

“I not only trained for several years in nursing a long time ago, I am currently a lecturer in a nursing school and I hold a law degree in health law.”

She stopped. Looked at me for about fifteen seconds. And then told me they were just about to have a staff meeting about the events of the night before, which tells me that the second nurse had likely raised an entirely unfair and improper complaint against the patient. She thanked me for speaking to her and walked away.

I expect nothing will have been done and the nurses who perpetrated this assault upon the man will simply continue in providing sub-standard and abusive care unabated.