WHITTY: For Sale – one damaged moral compass

In his coming address to us today, Boris Johnson will cancel June 21st, and ask for “one last heave”. Entirely apt – one last cliché. BoJo has worked his way through the entire Thesaurus, adding only one – Build Back Better – which was not, of course, his idea. Most observers have, however, at last spotted that the country is being run by two compromised science/health bureaucrats: Patrick Vallance (a Pharmafia capo) and Christopher Witty…an, um, well, yes, ooh – ‘ere missus – no, as Frankie Howerd might well have said. Not only is Whitty the more interesting subject; he is probably a much great threat to our way of life – for myriad reasons. The Slog excavates the oddball pyramid occupied by our Chief Medical Officer.

Talk to people who “know” the UK’s CMO, and you are left in no doubt as to the bloke’s dedication. Some marry Christ; Christopher John MacRae Whitty CB FRCP FFPH FMedSci is married to medicine.

“He works every day, rarely takes holidays, is passionate about unnecessary deaths from illness and is at his happiest working on children’s wards on Christmas day,” says one. Another is more blunt:

“I honestly doubt if he’s ever had sex in his life. It holds no interest for him. His sole concern is medical advance”.

Passion about medical advance is the best starting point for an understanding of Britain’s most famous medic. But there are also dilemmas and, in a way, a profound tragedy in the nature of his path down that road. In turn, the Pilgrim’s progress reveals elements in his life of which very few are aware. There is a fine and fuzzy line between passionate dedication and obsessive fanaticism.

He’s no stranger to personal tragedy. While living abroad as part of a diplomatic family, his father was murdered by ‘Socialist Muslim’ terrorists. Christopher was 17 years old at the time; he was sent back to England for his education. Such would be a double trauma for anyone. But Kenneth Whitty was a Cultural Attaché. A former senior foreign office press contact says, “Ken was a low-grade spy. The murder was a planned assassination. At least, that’s what we assumed.” Christopher’s subsequent career has, as we shall see, involved regular contact with Britain’s security services.

After a series of outstanding educational achievements, he worked as a physician and researcher into infectious diseases in the UK, Africa and Asia. Within twenty years of his father’s death in 1984, Whitty was approaching wunderkind eminence. His years abroad and experience of Third World life taught him two things: infant mortality was rampant there, and the best weapon against it was munneeeee.

Whitty is a talented analyst, but in a narrow field . His interest in infant mortality is based on his belief (almost certainly correct) that the Malthusian view of life is bunk: ensure more kids survive, and in turn families get smaller, so population stabilises. However, while his speeches and articles display a firm faith in that approach, they also give off an air of inflexibility.

For example, examine his published works, and you’ll see – over and over – his genuine concern for child survival as the key to ZPG. The words, “underfunded”, “unnecessary infant mortality”, “too many deaths through lack of funding” appear everywhere….as does a certain pride in playing a major part in this. In 2017 he said:

“Since 1990 the number of deaths in children under five worldwide has declined from around 12.7 million to around 6 million now and is still dropping rapidly….in every country where child mortality has been relatively low for a sustained period, fertility dropped rapidly.”

That said, there’s a flaw in his logic. For the biggest problem facing a world of limited resource capability isn’t food, it’s water. Smaller families with more earners inhabit better housing with better sanitation: the figures so far suggest that they use around twelve times more water per head than those at the poverty level. Medicine alone can’t solve every problem: sometimes (as with the development of anaesthetic and antibiotics) Utopian dawns are followed by dark dystopian nights. Whitty doesn’t seem to accept this.

The speech linked above has a title including the phrase ‘a world shaped by medicine’. As I shall further illustrate, this belief is at the core of the CMO’s belief system. His only interest in business as such is the money it can generate for medical research: that is, to say the least of it, a cockeyed view. His pronouncements on this and associated approaches to infection control give the objective reader who’s awake plenty of food for doubt about him: (my emphases)

“Government is generally on safe ground with public opinion when combating infections”

“When new diseases have arisen, excellent research has tended to surge in to meet them. They are novel, interesting and tend to be well funded because of the panic they engender“

So you see, our Chris is no water baby: he knows what sells, and he knows how to both scare and motivate Government: In July 2020, during a heated exchange with former health secretary and chairman of the Health and Social Care Committee Jeremy Hunt, Professor Chris Whitty told MPs that widespread community testing earlier on in the outbreak required “an infrastructure we did not have“. Whitty blamed “incredibly limited testing capacity” and lamented “previous failure to build up the UK’s health infrastructure” as the reason why “a test, trace and isolate system was not modelled ahead of the pandemic.“

Several things pop out of this: it was a scathing attack on the former Health Secretary, it showed an obsessive insistence on unlimited healthcare funds, it suggested a left-wing political bias (he has written pamphlets with Neil Ferguson) it tried to accuse political operators but didn’t mention the Pharmafia….and of course, reaffirmed a commitment to modelling as A Good Thing. [Elsewhere, Chris mentions “the defeat of BSE”, but spectacularly leaves the expensive mistakes of his chum Ferguson out of the account]

This is an important point: one thing Horby, Landray, Ferguson, Whitty, Michie and pretty much everyone from Imperial College all have in common is a preference for Big Pharma over Government. The reason is obvious – Pharma money is motivated by profit, whereas Government needs to balance the books. “Big Pharma lays the golden eggs, whereas Westminster is full of rotten eggs”. This outlook leads not only to a leftist tendency, it also creates a moral hazard. The fact is that medical research sups with the Devil, but stopped using a long spoon decades ago. Whitty is very far from being an exception to this rule.

Nothing in Christopher Whitty’s subsequent career has done anything to alter his Weltanschauung: he was Professor of Public and International Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) where he was also Director of the Malaria Centre. In 2008, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded the LSHTM £31 million for malaria research in Africa. Gordon Brown was considerably less generous: but then, all Chancellors deal with an idolised NHS that costs £140 billion to run. Whitty is no more impressed by that argument than any of his disturbingly similar colleagues: his unwillingness to face economic realities is up there with his at times astonishing inability to accept that models have been universally wrong – but always in favour of the “pandemic emergency” impression.

To repeat his words from earlier: ” They are novel, interesting and tend to be well funded because of the panic they engender”. As well as being very expensive and about as much scientific use as the study of frog innards.

So why does the Prime Minister place such trust in Professor Whitty? Well, in 2017, Bojo was the Foreign Secretary in charge of the Novichok fiasco. During 2017-18, Whitty was interim Government Chief Scientific Adviser and head of the science and engineering profession in government. During this demonisation of alleged Russian desires to wipe out Britain with Nerve Agents, Whitty chaired the government SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group in Emergencies) and advised COBR during the “crisis”.

In the only way he knows, Boris Johnson lied about what the UK Government nerve-agent centre (spookily close to Salisbury where the attack was discovered) had told him about the origin of the chemical. Whitty must have known that it was a Psy-Op: but was it also a “dry-run” for the terrorism used to sell Covid19 as “a deadly killer virus”? There were men in space suits spraying everywhere and everything (bit like China in January 2020, really) and the victims were obviously doomed because there was “no antidote to Novichok”. [Novichok is Russian for ‘new stuff’ – the answer given by a Russian scientist to a nosey visiting American. It has patents registered in the US and elsewhere. The ‘gravely ill’ policeman checked out of hospital three days later, and both the double agents attacked survived. Salisbury hospital was subjected to an official D-Notice. All FOI attempts to get at the COBR minutes have been turned down flat.]

At the time, Boris told an FCO Sir Humphrey that Whitty was “a class act”. Draw your own conclusions. But this was the start of the Professor’s celebrity. Celebrity is a money magnet.

When his name was first used in relation to the Covid19 “emergency”, the hacks in the Leftlib corner moved quickly into Messiah mode: the BBC’s health editor Hugh Pym dubbed him “the official who will probably have the greatest impact on our everyday lives of any individual policymaker in modern times”. He wasn’t wrong – although his approval was. The Guardian’s John Crace referred to him – almost deferred to him – as “the Geek-in-Chief, whom everyone now regards as the country’s de facto prime minister”. Everyone, or just the Mensheviks who read the Guardian? Clearly the brief had gone out: this guy’s on our side.

It’s hard to deny that some of this laudatory drivel went to Whitty’s head. Not only is he (according to numerous press contacts) an incorrigible leaker, he shows zero loyalty to, or respect for, those supposed to be his political masters. At a televised briefing on 12 October 2020, where BoJo introduced three tiers of localised restrictions, Whitty said he was not confident that the measures in the highest tier would be “enough to get on top of it”. Whitty and Valance presented updated data and forecasts at a televised briefing 19 days later, at which point the Prime Minister announced stricter measures for the whole of England. From the moment Johnson made his June 21st promise, the two men made it their life’s work to doubt the wisdom of the move….aided and abetted by their constant ally Matt Hancock. Just exactly what that’s all about should be the subject of MSM investigative journalism….but isn’t.

I draw conclusions from all this.

A man with no personal family life at all – and no experience of the psychiatric consequences of Lockdown – is the lynchpin Lockdown hawk advising the British Government.

His view that medicine is the paramount driver of human advance – and Big Pharma the petrol for the engine – has led him to lose a large proportion of the ethical plot.

He is more savvy about fear creation as a key to government funding than people realise. This leads him to keep on supporting alarmist models with little or no basis in reality, and leak selectively “dire” stats that are hugely misleading.

He is uninterested in Constitutional niceties, happy to curry favour with the Intelligence community, dismissive of business and relaxed about indulging in propagandist nonsense.

In short, he is the standard cultural Marxist: the ends justify the means. A worshipper at the altar of Berthold Becht and his “Good Lie”.

One final note. Much to BoJo’s annoyance, he was passed over in the Queen’s birthday honours. The gong was vetoed by a senior mandarin who felt it should wait until a full Covid19 enquiry has been completed.

What does Simon Case know that we don’t, I ask myself.