Book Launch!

My first book has been published

The last three years have been a very strange time for me. I have learnt a lot, written more than I ever thought I could, made friends with some incredibly talented and ethical people and stopped worrying about what I am going to do next. In the meantime I stopped earning a salary and have made no money from three years of intense work, seven days a week (except £78 from buymeacoffee).

I want to at least break even on this project which if it reaches average book sales of 2,000 copies should be achievable. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Expired-untold-Dr-Clare-Craig/dp/1739344707/

In 2021, it became apparent that it was impossible to explain what had happened to people face to face. If successful in explaining one aspect, the listener would be left with cognitive dissonance, because you had not yet explained the rest. It struck me that the only way to hold someone’s attention for long enough would be with a book.

I set out to write a book that would provide a balanced evidenced based view that would help people understand why they had believed things that were not true as well as why those things were not true. My aim was that no-one would toss it aside because it was too oppositional to their current view.

In writing it I learnt a lot of new information and it should therefore also be an appealing book for people who already know the core of the story.

Expired tackles 12 key beliefs to do with viral spread which were not supported by evidence.

Here’s the contents to give you a feel:

There will be an audiobook narrated by me out next week.

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I will leave you with the introduction:

Introduction

Covid brought with it a new era of uncertainty. Assumptions had to be made about what might happen. Fear of a worst case scenario caused further exaggeration of these assumptions which were then presented as fact. After months and years of repetition these ‘facts’ became beliefs. The result has been two years (and counting) of most of our society living in a belief system based on myths. Welcome to Cloud-Covid-Land.

If we want to leave Cloud-Covid-Land, the first step is to understand how we arrived there. I have attempted to turn my diagnostic skills to focus on understanding the origins of each belief and where they conflict with reality. There are too many such beliefs to include in one book therefore this book focuses on those that relate to how the virus spreads.

It is possible to present counter arguments and claims, but rather than present alternative articles of faith, I have investigated the foundations for each belief, with a view to critiquing its evidence base. These foundations were often based on mistakes and careless regard for secure evidence. I attempt to show how these errors and the oversights that led to them were uncovered. I explore the major areas of conflict and how certain beliefs became not only widely embedded but placed on a pedestal such that they could no longer be questioned.

The book is called Expired for it encompasses all three meanings of that word. Firstly, covid and the response to it is a story about people taking their last breath. (I have decided not to capitalise covid just as we do not capitalise malaria, measles or flu. It does not deserve it). Certainly, there were deaths from the virus but there were also deaths from the disproportionate response to the virus, which itself arose partly from an overwhelming fear of death. Secondly, damaging mistakes were made because of people clinging onto untenable hypotheses past their shelf life and long after evidence had shown them to be misguided. Thirdly and fundamentally, this is a book about an airborne virus (SARS-CoV-2), the implications of its spread through expired air and the failure to acknowledge them.  

Debates about covid have been polarised. Nuance died. The belief, on both sides of the debate, that lives were at stake, has meant that passions were raised and extreme positions were adopted. Covid has created immense division even among friends and within families. I explore how it was that simple narratives have taken hold and how we came to be so divided. The most polarising debates, such as those around, for example, abortion, happen when both sides believe they are arguing to prevent the most harm. One side of the covid debate believed every intervention was saving lives, while the other focused on the harms caused by interventions, and so irreconcilable differences were inevitable. It is important to take a step back and realise that everyone involved shares the common objective of wanting to minimise harm. That should be our starting point. From that shared understanding we can look together at the evidence to determine the best way to minimise harm overall. It is important to do so now to ensure mistakes are not repeated  in the future. It will always be unhelpful to view others who disagree with us as agents of harm when they did not have that intent.

An understanding of Cloud-Covid-Land requires more than a rehashing of the scientific debate. First, it is important to understand the cultural, psychological and philosophical aspects to our own belief systems. Although everyone, especially scientists, like to think we dispassionately and logically weigh up the evidence before deciding what to believe, the reality is not so virtuous. Our prior beliefs determine what else we can believe. Even when there is conflicting evidence, rather than admit uncertainty, or adjust and replace our narratives, our default response is to pick a side. Changing our position means admitting mistakes (and perhaps gullibility) and most of us do not do that readily.

As well as this discussion of the scientific debate and how it evolved, I cover the factors that impact what we choose to believe, how we change our minds and what can influence those decisions. I have illustrated how beliefs can change with examples from my own changing opinions about covid. Fear played an important role in how our decisions were made and what we elected to believe at any one time. I present evidence for how that fear was generated as well as the impact it has had and was designed to have.

A scientist must be able to suspend their disbelief in order to rationally consider a hypothesis and judge it solely on the evidence available. Our ability to think rationally can be handicapped by our emotional responses and existing beliefs. When these are formed in an environment of fear and especially when they become part of our identity, our ability to challenge them rationally is strained. When authority figures constantly repeat false ‘truths’, myths are born.

Expired: Covid the untold story addresses twelve of these beliefs related to viral spread, extending to the lockdowns, asymptomatic infections, the efficacy of masks and more. Beliefs related to the spike protein covering the origin, treatments, vaccines and long covid will be covered in a second book, Spiked: A Shot in the Covid Dark. With each belief there is an area of conflict and evidence from both sides will be presented and critiqued. I will explore why people held differing assumptions based on the evidence available and the impact those beliefs had. Discussion around the issues raised is presented in chapters between the exploration of each belief.

From 2020, there was an inversion of ethical principles. The perceived needs of the elderly were prioritised over those of children. Governments enforced policies that were certain to result in harm with minimal opposition or even debate. Human Rights were disregarded. Laws were written that interfered with the minutiae of daily living, from the most intimate, like being able to say last goodbyes, to the most mundane, like sitting on a park bench. Huge amounts of money were spent on interventions that had no impact. A system of discrimination against a minority based on their health decisions was introduced and adopted across many nations. People responded in an unexpected manner: they outsourced their thinking to fact checkers, their morality to legal guidance and their bodily autonomy to the state. Leaving Cloud-Covid-Land means reinforcing ethical principles that have underpinned western societies for centuries and laying bare the damage that was done by overriding them.

The beliefs in Cloud-Covid-Land were sustained through the adoption of many attributes by which religions are maintained and there are references to these parallels throughout the book. We will meet the false prophets, high priests and puritans who drove the belief system uncovered in this book and go on to hear about blasphemers, witch-hunts and the worship of a saviour vaccine in Spiked but the themes and alignments to religions will be introduced here.

The book unavoidably presents a narrative of what happened. While every effort has been made to ensure its accuracy, it remains possible that it is imperfect. Over time more evidence may emerge that shows that the interpretation in this book was incorrect in places and new explanations will be constructed. I welcome that. That is how science progresses.

As a diagnostics expert my first concerns emerged around covid testing. I spoke out about them in September 2020. At the time I still believed many aspects of the official narrative. After that point I discovered other niche specialists had concerns around the handling of covid from their particular area of expertise and I started listening and investigating.

To fully understand covid requires an understanding of many disciplines including epidemiology, infectious diseases, virology, immunology, diagnostic testing, diagnosis of death and even physics. To understand all these aspects takes a large amount of work. Part of training in diagnostics is to be able to stop yourself from seeing what you expect to see and learn to observe dispassionately what the evidence says. Training also ensures that we remember that there is a real person behind every report and every number. After six months of working tirelessly, reading as widely as I could, I felt I started to understand what happened in spring 2020. Much more work was to follow to ensure I kept updated with subsequent developments.

I hope that this book summarises what I have learnt so far and provides a much more efficient way for others to understand what happened. I do not claim to cover all that has taken place but I trust the main issues regarding airborne long distance transmission and its implications have been addressed and that it may present a good, nuanced summary of what happened without it being a full chronological tale of when it all happened (see timeline at end of book). Rather than examining all the aspects of why events unfolded as they did, I focus instead on why some of the assumptions informing policy decisions proved in the end to be false.

Similarly, I have not attempted to include a roll call of all the people who played an important part in investigating or exposing the issues as that would be too long. I apologise for all those people who are not credited for their important work here. I have also not attempted to catalogue the conflicts of interest among officials and others responsible for bad decision making, which could in itself fill several books.

This book is not a self-help guide, rather it is a resource providing the evidence, explaining where it does not fit what has been the narrative presented by the authorities and mainstream media and proposing a clearer account that better fits the data we have. I don’t claim – even remotely – to provide here all the answers nor do I profess great literary talent, but I do hope I present insights that many people have not encountered, and I hope too that they are considered to be worth sharing.

There will be a few statistics but the number crunching work can be found elsewhere whereas this book summarises the findings from that work. Although Expired is a book about science it is told through stories. There will be plenty of metaphors and we will touch on giants, bank robberies and Great Danes. Along the way we will find loneliness, poverty, errors and death but there will also be bravery, solidarity and successes.

Let us begin with fundamental aspects of covid itself that are accepted truths and can mostly be agreed upon. There was spread of a virus called SARS-CoV-2, globally first noticed in 2019. The virus causes a disease - covid which, like SARS-1, caused an acute respiratory syndrome. It could also cause the life threatening overreactive immune response known as a cytokine storm and a propensity to clot in both small vessels and larger ones leading to life threatening complications such as blockage of the vessels supplying the lungs. People died because of this. I realise there are people who dispute the evidence that there was a viral induced illness and I will address these points in Belief Six: If you test positive you have covid.

From these foundations we can begin to explore aspects of the disease that are more complex, including the science behind how it spreads, the human immune response to it, what a positive test result really means and more. If you are prepared to accept that some of what you’ve been led to believe was inaccurate and ready to hear an evidence-based appraisal of covid and its consequences, then read on and prepare to rethink some of what you thought you knew.