Letby: Nearly Three Years On and My Observations and Analysis Continue to Hold up

Or why I get annoyed when things I pointed out more than three years ago are 'discovered' by newer players today.

Many of my readers will have come to the Law, Health and Tech Substack as a result of my long-running series reviewing and analysing the evidence and testimony from the trial of UK neonatal Nurse Lucy Letby.

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.

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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!