Censorship and Cancel Culture

When their voice, not yours, should be heard

This week I have enjoyed the fun of someone trying to use cancel culture to silence me. That person, a retired nurse so I am told, believes her own unassailable belief in Lucy Letby's guilt should be the only voice you hear on the matter.

The final word, if you will.

This ‘retired nurse’ believes that anyone like me who suggests the evidence might lead to other, and in some cases more likely conclusions, should be silenced. Further, she believes that if she cannot be successful in her threats and attempts to get people like me silenced from social media and blogging platforms - it is her job to relieve us of our incomes and employment and to ensure our families suffer not just for our dogged determination to ensure everyone sees the bigger picture…

…but also for our unwillingness to simply accept and adhere to ‘groupthink’.

This ‘retired nurse’ wasn’t the first to make such threats, and likely won’t be the last. Like the poster of the comment in the image below, even people who on first glance you would expect to be reasonable and open-minded because these qualities are core to the role on which their qualifications and career are based, can be so closed minded (possibly because of their history consulting for and being paid by the pharma industry) that their first and only response is vitriolic hate.

I am certain that if someone was to attempt to rob Dr Davies of her livelihood simply because they didn’t agree with her position questioning some issue du jour then she would be the first to complain.

Or sue.

Davies’ comment, made here on my substack, was in response to the same item identified in the email to my employer from the ‘retired nurse’. Both complained about the 40 minute video Professor Norman Fenton released in which he interviewed me about the questions I have raised regarding the prosecution evidence, expert witness statements, and the ultimate conclusions that an unfamiliar and non-expert jury of normal every-day citizens were left by the court to simply ‘infer’.

Davies’ contention was that I ‘misrepresented the numbers’ with respect to how many babies there were that might have died whose cases and details were not laid before Lucy Letby. I suggested that more than the 7 neonatal deaths that she faced during the trial had died, yet she had not faced charges for those and the jury had been largely unaware that they even existed. I also contended that when considered from a Bayesian perspective, their existence, though unfortunate, makes it less likely that Lucy is a murderer. Ms Davies disagreed, even though:

1. one neonate that died who was part of the original laundry list of charges was ordered removed with a finding of not guilty recorded by the judge even before the first day of open trial,

2. an FOI response made by the Countess of Chester Hospital showed that there were at least ten other babies that died ‘on the neonatal unit’ during the 18 month period whose deaths we know from the trial were not laid at Lucy’s feet even though she would have been there at the time (and note that CoCH in their response avoided all reporting of babies that passed through the unit and died elsewhere by sticking to the letter of the request and only reporting neonates that died ‘on the unit’);

3. a 2017 newspaper article showed that two neonates transferred out of CoCH to Arrowe Park had also died;

4. a more recent email sent by Liverpool Women’s Hospital (LWH) management to maternity and nursing staff shows they are also investigating two neonatal deaths;

5. a newspaper article from 2015 shows that a premature neonate known only as Jacob became infected with sepsis not once, but twice, when present on the CoCH neonatal unit during the same weeks as Babies A-D all became unwell and Babies A, C and D all died. Had Jacob not been transferred out and treated by LWH, he would have likely been one of the deaths Lucy Letby faced.

That a ‘retired nurse’ would also seek to cancel me through complaint to social media platforms and my employer is even more striking - especially given that the primary stance in my series of Lucy Letby Trial analysis articles is that we shouldn’t instantly rush to ‘pile on’ and blame nurses when something goes awry, that nurses do amazing things, and that even in extreme examples where nosocomial infection does track back to the nurses, cooler heads will almost certainly find that it was entirely unintended and no culpability exists. How entrenched must a nurse’s belief in the mainstream ‘baby killer’ narrative be when she has to attack one of the few people who advocates for nurses and simply urges that we consider the full picture lest we set off a witch hunt and in doing so: (i) unfairly malign the profession, and (ii) make potential and current nursing students afraid or completely unwilling to practice in certain high-risk clinical areas.

I have been careful not to stumble blindly into making claims as to Lucy Letby (or anyone else’s) guilt or innocence. Such decisions are for the courts. That being said, we should all be interested in ensuring that the law, the trial process, and the outcome is as fair and correct as it can possibly be. If an expert witness has previously (and recently) been admonished and ejected from a court for giving tendentious and biased opinions that were outside his expertise, if there is other evidence that tends towards showing the defendant is innocent but that evidence was withheld from the defence or jury, or if the conclusions the court or jury are asked to draw from certain evidence is based on outdated or more recently updated science, we should all be ringing the alarm bells. For if we let convictions in such situations stand, we allow potentially innocent people to go to jail. We too could all fall victim to such blind injustice.

And finally, we forget the most basic tenent of the criminal law often mis-attributed to Benjamin Franklin…

Blackstone’s Ratio:

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.¹

Oh, and to borrow the words of Elton John…

1. Blackstone, Sir William. (1753). "Commentaries on the laws of England". J.B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, 1893.