Interview: Professor Angus Dalgleish (Professor of Oncology, St Georges Hospital Medical School, London) interviewed by Stephen Nolan – the Stephen Nolan Show, BBC Radio 5 Live,
Sunday 19 December 2021, 21.50 hrs
Available online for 30 days at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0012mj4
Start at 49 mins, 40 secs; and then at 1 hr 3 mins 25 secs.
Verbatim Transcript
Stephen Nolan [SN]: Professor Angus Dalgleish is professor of oncology at St Georges Medical School in London; Angus, good evening to you.
Professor Angus (Gus) Dalgleish [AD]: Good evening.
SN: Hi. So you wrote a piece for the Daily Mail yesterday, and it was entitled ‘I believe a climate of dread around Covid is deliberately being manufactured by scientists and my fellow medics’. Why do you believe that?
AD: Well first of all, what I believe has happened here is that we have a new variant – and a new variant which has come out of – well, it probably hasn’t, but it was first discovered in South Africa, but is now everywhere, as these things are going. And we have this new variant which is highly infectious, and the scientists are showing that it’s 70 times more transmissible, but it’s ten times less to go to your chest and cause disease. And what we have is a whole load of people like Chris Whitty – who I think has behaved very irresponsibly – basically saying that it could be much worse – and doom and gloom and everything.
I actually think that a variant that spreads at a doubling time of two days – if you worked it out, within a month everyone will have been infected with it; and if nobody is going to get particularly ill with it, it’s the best thing we could possibly have…
SN [interrupting]: That’s a big ‘if’, Angus… – if nobody is going to get particularly ill – and governments across the world don’t know that yet.
AD: Yes, it’s a big ‘if’; but this is the way that viruses tend to go: they become more infectious and they become less lethal. And this is what this variant is looking like it’s doing. And so I do really believe that we should stop being so fear-mongering. You have the people who say, ‘Well if it goes this far and it’s much less toxic, it’s still going to put a strain on the NHS…’. But we’ve been in this for nearly two years; is it not about time that if there’s any competency in the NHS, they should have predicted and looked after this situation? Is it not time that we shouldn’t have an NHS that leaps upon symptoms and deals with them before people get ill enough to go to the NHS? No, we’ve had none of that! Everything’s been going into getting people into hospital and looking after them…
SN [interrupting]: How would you do it differently?
AD: Right at the beginning, how would I have done it differently?
SN: No, not at the beginning – now.
AD: Well the same as I would have done nearly two years ago…. This is an air-born unknown infection; we don’t know what it is, but it’s very infectious. We do know from just tons and tons of data that you are more likely to die of an air-born infection, whether it be a cold or flu or anything else, if you’ve got low Vitamin D. This country is endemically low in Vitamin D, and we’ve got data after data saying that if you’ve got good Vitamin D, you’re less likely to die. It would have been dirt cheap – £20 per person – to do this….
SN [interrupting]: Sorry, boosting people with Vitamin D does NOT – does NOT – prevent them from entering into the hospital with Covid now, does it?
AD: No, but it prevents the virus from causing the disease that will take you to hospital…
SN [interrupting again]: Sorry, sorry… – you’re telling me that the simple issue of Vitamin D would prevent infected people from entering hospital; that’s what you’re telling me?
AD: That’s what I’m telling you because we know…
SN [interrupting again]: So how come there’s no government in the world doing it?
AD: Well it’s really quite bizarre that no-one wants to know this data: there are hundreds of papers out there; and one of the ones I told Cabinet about was, which is just unbelievable how important Vitamin D is, is that there was a big study done in Spain, where they looked at everybody going into the hospital; and they looked at those who went into hospital and those who died. If those patients had a high Vitamin D, a normal Vitamin D, and they went into hospital with Covid, they had a 2 per cent chance of dying. If they had a low Vitamin D, [inaudible], they had a 77 per cent chance of dying. And then the government wants to know why people from ethnic minorities with dark skins are more likely to die: they run a Vitamin D level of 30 or less. I’m telling you, it really is very very simple – and that is ….
SN [interrupting again]: That is not conclusive evidence, obviously.
AD: …Can you show me the data? I’ve got tons of data! – I presented [inaudible] to the government that it’s the simple, most useful thing that could have been done right at the start of the pandemic – but all they did was basically, ‘Save the NHS’. No – the NHS’s job is to save us; and that was a very simple way they could have started to do it.
The other thing we know now is that if you go into hospital and you’ve been taking aspirin, which is another very simple thing you do if you’ve been having a respiratory infection – if you take aspirin and gargle, you lower your chance of dying by half if you go to hospital, even if you’re very very ill. So why weren’t these simple…? – and I’m not alone, by the way: there are enormous numbers of doctors and various associations on various websites who’ve been saying this sort of thing. So, you ask me what I would have done? – this is exactly what I would have done.
And before we have a special specific vaccine, I would have boosted the t-cell immunity of the population, which actually drops off quite dramatically after the age of 50. We do know from lots and lots of investigations that ECG and other non-specific t-cell boosters make an amazing response; and only the other day I was reading that they did a trial in India with ECG which had highly specific protection rates for dying from Covid. So why were all these very simple things that doctors in the universities would normally do… – why were they all ignored? Why did we wait for a year and do nothing till we had a vaccine programme, and then bulldoze the vaccine programme?
So you ask me what I would do – I’m telling you what I would do. And in retrospect, I get more and more annoyed that they didn’t do it.
SN: Yeh, I’m reading the BBC website now. This was an article on 5 April 2021; and it says ‘…many studies have shown an association between Vitamin D and Covid outcomes. Umm – observational studies do show that certain groups are more likely to get Vitamin D deficiencies and to catch Covid; older people, people with obesity, people with darker skin including black and South Asian people. It may be that Vitamin D deficiency is why these groups are at a higher risk. Umm – levels of Vitamin D can fall as a consequence as well as of a cause of illness…’. And it then talks about the Spanish study you referred to, one particular paper from the University of Barcelona, suggesting Vitamin D had a staggering success, with an 80 per cent reduction in intensive care admissions and a 60 per cent reduction in Covid deaths. But it has since been removed from the Lancet’s pre-print server for concerns about descriptions of the research, and it’s now being investigated. So that’s some of the context behind what you’ve just said.
AD: Yeh, well, that’s one case; but since Covid started, there’ve been 90 papers published showing a positive association with Vitamin D and Covid. Now it’s not the only thing, ….
SN [interrupting again]: You’re going beyond that, professor, aren’t you? You haven’t said tonight ‘there’s a positive association’; you’ve said that taking Vitamin D by people with Covid would lead to people not needing hospital treatment. Now I would find that extraordinary that governments around the world are spending collectively – what, billions of pounds? – when all they need to do is give a Vitamin D pill. I would find it extraordinary.
AD: So do I! I find it extraordinary. And I’m afraid that as an oncologist, I am continually dealing with cheap, non-toxic drugs that are very effective and that no-one takes any notice of. Whereas expensive toxic drugs are continuously pushed through from the top; and this is actually a very very important issue that I think we need to address; because Covid has been dominated by Big Pharma driving very expensive vaccines and other expensive treatments, and they have gone out of their way to get rid of cheaper drugs like Vitamin D and aspirin, and simple drugs like [inaudible] etc., which have been pushed out of the way ‘because there’s no evidence, no evidence’… – well nobody does the evidence! – because the only evidence you get is when you do Big Pharma trials! So I think it’s about time we aired all this stuff out there now.
SN: You’d advise people to get the vaccine and get their booster, wouldn’t you?
AD: I advise everybody, as you know, to take their vaccines, but I would not – and this is something that I can’t be two-faced on – I have basically written to the government with my colleagues and put an enormous amount of pressure on the government about the booster programme… I would not have a booster programme for the vaccine unless I’d had a test to see whether I needed it. It’s very easy to do a test…
SN [interrupting again]: The scientific, the government’s scientific advice is if we take that booster, we’ll increase our protection from 30 per cent to 70 per cent.
AD: Yes, but what is that data based on? I still think that….
SN [interrupting again]: Stay there for me… – it’s an important conversation we’re having, we’ll come back to it after the 10 o’clock news. [Break for the news]….2 The reason I’ve kept Angus on after the news is because he’s saying that he would not advise people to get their booster, unless – what, Angus? – just remind me?
AD: …unless they’ve had a test to say that they need it; because there’s a lot of people who’ve had their vaccines, and they will have a perfectly good immune response so that they don’t need a booster.
SN [interrupting]: I’m looking here at articles in The Lancet, at articles in the British Medical Journal, I’m looking at a study by the UK Health Security Agency, saying that at least 20 weeks after being vaccinated with two doses of Astra Zenica, vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic disease was 44 per cent, and two weeks after a booster dose, protection against symptomatic infection increased to 93 per cent. So we’ve got all the chief medical officers throughout the UK, all the chief scientific advisers, the UK Health Security Agency, governments throughout the world trying to get people boosted – and here you are, as a professor of oncology, advising people not to unless they need it. Is this not irresponsible?
AD: I can’t see how you can say it’s irresponsible to see whether you need a vaccine. Now people of my age, we went through – we had a TB vaccine, BCG, but we did not have it unless we had a test that showed that we needed it. So why after two vaccines are we not doing something similar? – that’s all I am saying….
SN [interrupting]: Because we don’t know whether we’re going to catch Covid; we, we… – Covid is such a transmissible disease, as you know, that we’re trying to protect ourselves as much as possible. How do you know if you need it if you don’t know you’re going to get it?
AD: Well you can do a very simple test. Look, 94 per cent of people have anti-bodies to Covid in one study, so why on earth do you think you need…
SN [interrupting aggressively again]: After how long? – after how long after a second dose?
AD: How long?…
SN: How long after the second dose – that 94 per cent anti-body rate – it stays with you how long after the second dose?
AD: I don’t know that, that’s just the figure that shows…
SN [interrupting aggressively again]: Exactly!… [interrupting Dalgleish again]… You don’t know that!
AD: Yes, but when your anti-bodies go down it doesn’t mean that you’re not protected because this is a virus that’s controlled by the t-cells, not the anti-bodies. If you have your t-cells trained, you don’t need your anti-bodies [inaudible] all the time….
SN [interrupting again]: Well no – there are two lines of defence, aren’t there? – as a professor of oncology you would know this. There are the anti-bodies and the t-cells.
AD: Yes.
SN: So you’re advising people not necessarily to get a booster; you don’t know how quickly someone’s immunity depletes. And yet here you are as a medical professional advising people not to get a booster, but you haven’t read into…
AD [interrupting]: …Listen to…
SN [interrupting aggressively again and talking over Dalgleish]: …So let’s move on to t-cells: how quickly do your t-cells deplete?
AD: I measure these things. Once you have a boosted t-cell response, it will stay there for years; and if you keep boosting your anti-bodies, you’ll decrease your t-cell response. So this is where I’m coming from. If we do the boosters, we’ve got [inaudible]; so we do the boosters, then the next variant is going to come through. At what point are you going to give up boosting, boosting, boosting – so that’s where I’m coming from. This is a disease that has a very very small death rate, and it’s a disease for which the vast majority of people have just symptoms, and often no more…
SN [interrupting again and talking over Dalgleish]: You, you say that omicron has a small death rate. Again I’m curious, because I’m hearing nearly every government in the world, including the World Health Organisation, saying that we don’t have enough data yet to know what the death rate is associated with omicron. How do you know?
AD: Well, I can only get my sources from everybody else. But I have … [Nolan interrupting – ‘Which is what?’] … the head of the South African Medical Association, and the GP in Cambridge who said that his experience was that…
SN [interrupting again and talking over Dalgleish]: …the World Health Organisation is saying we don’t have enough data yet, governments throughout the world are saying we don’t have enough data yet, but you’re relying on a GP – where, in Birmingham?
AD: I’m not relying on a single GP; I’m talking about one person covering the whole of South Africa and one GP who’s doing a very big survey in Cambridge…
SN [interrupting again and talking over Dalgleish]: inaudible heated exchange…
AD: You’re going down the route of frighten everybody to death, get them all locked up, make everybody’s life a misery and have a horrible horrible time when this thing might be no worse than another bout of flu. [SN [interrupting again – ‘Might. Might’]. I’ve been a doctor for a very very long time, and every winter we are plagued with pneumonia, with the flu and up to 30,000 people die. It is not unusual – you’re making a tremendous…
SN [interrupting again and talking over Dalgleish]: …30,000 people die each year from the flu. How…
AD: Between 20,000 and 30,000.
SN: And how many people died this year from Covid?
AD: I don’t know exactly how many people have died in exactly the same time from flu, from Covid, but it is nothing like some of the other things we have had to put up with in my lifetime. And I tell you as an oncologist that I am seeing people dying in droves now who would have been saved, had it not been for the totally unnecessary lockdown that we’ve put up over the last year, which I think was actually unbelievably unnecessary, and you do not count those people until we will have people who will audit what is the risk/benefit analysis of locking down from an infectious disease compared to… – one in every two people get cancer; and the cardiac assessment – I don’t know anyone who hasn’t [inaudible] from cardiac treatment. You’re ignoring all this stuff – let alone the mental suffering…
SN [interrupting again and talking over Dalgleish]: There’s a [inaudible exchange] I’ve got to go to the head of the CBI now. There’s a huge conversation to be had, Angus, and a debate between the merits and the disadvantages of lockdown, because lockdown does cost lives, poverty costs lives, people losing jobs costs lives, and we’ll be talking about that in a second; I absolutely get that. But to hear a professor of oncology at St Georges Hospital Medical School in London telling people ‘Don’t get your booster unless you’re sure you need it is in complete contrast with every government message I’ve heard. Now that’s free speech from you, but I’d like to do a lot more reading into this and maybe we can get you again, Angus. I appreciate your time; thank you so much indeed. Sorry we can’t continue with that…
*****
NOTES:
1 See also Daily Mail, 17 December article, here >> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10322873/ANGUS-DALGLEISH-believe-climate-dread-Covid-deliberately-manufactured.html >> ANGUS DALGLEISH: “I believe a climate of dread around Covid is deliberately being manufactured by scientists and my fellow medics”
2 It soon becomes clear that Nolan used the news bulletin break in order to be fed studies which were an attempt to discredit what Professor Dalgleish was saying. This is par for the course for the flagrant BBC propagandising which has dominated and bullied their listeners for some 21 months since March 2020.
WORD COUNT AND INTERRUPTIONS – empirical analysis:
In this interview, Nolan interrupted and forcefully cut across Professor Dalgleish at least TWENTY times; Professor Dalgleish interrupted Nolan just once (possibly twice, in what was a tit-for-tat exchange). By any conceivable standards, this is disgraceful journalism, and is far more akin to disrespectful bullying.
Nolan spoke 1,008 words in the interview; Professor Dalgleish spoke 1,788 words. These are highly revealing statistics for what was meant to be an ‘interview’ by a journalist with a medical expert. Had the interviewee been with an ‘expert’ supporting the BBC Covid narrative (as virtually all of them are), the proportion of the interview taken up with Nolan’s contributions would no doubt have been far less.
Transcribed and analysed by Richard House, Ph.D., C.Psychol. – 21 December 2021