Living on Plague Island

This morning the BBC ‘struck again’ with an article on their News Website about Covid.

Whilst the article does acknowledge that Covid is continuing to make people ill, sometimes for weeks, the BBC continues to avoid bringing in leading immunologists to comment. And they continue to cling onto the idea of achieving some kind of ‘herd immunity’. Their narrative has, nevertheless, changed to at least acknowledge that it may be a long term rather than short term goal, but it is still there.

Complaint wording

It is misleading to imply that people need to be exposed to the virus in order to top up their immunity, and misleading to say we have not yet reached this point, but if we keep getting infected we will, eventually reach a point where we are immune. The immune system is not like a muscle that needs to be exercised in order to build it up. Viruses don’t evolve to be milder for our benefit, they evolve to be immunologically different over time, and this helps them to reproduce. 

A growing number of studies  show that Covid infections damage every part of the body, including the brain and can cause blot clots, and damage the autoimmune system. How does this all square with the hypothesis that we need to keep getting infected? You also seem to airbrush long covid out of the equation as something that might occur ‘occasionally’, despite the evidence that about one in ten infections lead to long covid.

Covid infections are of course particularly serious for the clinically vulnerable who often fail to respond to vaccination by generating anti bodies in the way that other people do. These people make up a very significant proportion of the people being hospitalised and dying due to covid. Are you really arguing that we should continue to lead restricted lives whilst the virus is allowed to rip?

Rather than advocating for people getting repeatedly ill with what you acknowledge to be a pretty nasty virus, should you not, as the public broadcaster, be advocating for alternative ways to protect people. Should we not be vaccinating a bigger proportion of the population, as in other developed countries, as well as for clean air filtration across public buildings?  Why are you not leading a debate about how to protect society and the economy from harms associated with people being repeatedly ill, as well as the need to protect health systems from being overwhelmed with ill people all year round?

I will post an update in due course.

Update Tuesday 19 December

I copied the above letter onto my twitter feed and it seemed to go viral with thousands of views and over 500 likes and retweets. Many other people also took to social media to complain about it on what was a sunny Sunday before Christmas.

Since then the BBC and other media seem to have changed their stance somewhat. Professor Danny Altman appeared on the BBC R4 Today programme, admittedly at 6.50 a.m. on Monday and went on to appear on other media, including Sky News where in response to quite sympathetic, encouraging questioning from Mark Austin he briefly demolished key planks of the government’s living with Covid strategy.

Update 27 December

I have received a holding reply from the BBC which says they may take longer to reply to my complaint than is usual.

Meanwhile, a number of balanced Covid stories have appeared across a number of BBC regional channels, and on 20 December BBC West ran a story about a women who has been shielding for three years.

Is this a change in the direction of BBC reporting? I think the jury is still out on this!

Update 29 December

I have received the following response to my complaint:

‘Dear Ms Smith 

Thank you for getting in touch about our article “Why Covid is still flooring some people” (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67726685) written by James Gallagher from our health team. 

The article focused on how some people were experiencing more severe symptoms than with previous bouts of Covid and also explored why this might be happening, with expert input from two immunologists.

Some readers felt the article minimised the impact of Covid however that was not the intention. We quoted Prof Eleanor Riley as saying that for many people antibodies are now lower and “a higher dose of the virus is getting through and causing a more severe bout of the disease”. We also reported Prof Peter Openshaw’s view about repeated infections building up immunity. 

Others felt we did not devote enough attention to ‘long Covid’, something which Prof Openshaw mentioned in his interview, calling the virus “surprisingly devious” which sometimes made people “quite ill and occasionally leading to having ‘long Covid’”.

‘Long Covid’ was certainly mentioned but in a short website article we have to focus on one angle, in this case the immediate impact of Covid. However we have covered ‘long Covid’ on the website previously and on December 20th ran an ‘explainer’ on latest official advice. It included a section on ‘long Covid’ where we reported “Between 2% and 20% of people catching Covid go on to have longer-term symptoms, ‘long Covid’ research suggests.” We also linked to ONS data on people reporting symptoms lasting more than four weeks. 

Thank you again for contacting us to make your views known. All feedback from readers is appreciated and shared with senior editors so that they are aware of audience concerns.

Kind regards,

BBC Complaints Team’
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

It is worth noting that this would seem to contradict what Openshaw has said on twitter – specifically that he is not advocating getting repeated infections as a way to build up immunity.