Thomas Johnson - Medical Blog

South Africa's Covid-19 cases have reached 100 000 , doubling from 50 000 in 14 days. But the country is slowly going back to normal! In March, with the lockdown imposed and cases at 1 000, pandemic denialists (see right-wing local media, e.g. BizNews, Politicsweb, Daily Friend, DA and disparate commentators) postulated, with no evidence, SA was presenting more like mild Australia and New Zealand (and, why not, South Korea and Japan), and herd immunity is our saviour. That is, a lockdown is unnecessary, a nefarious ANC plot and there's nothing to worry about Others like "PANDenialists" aka PANDA, who are not medical experts, refuted credible epidemiological models. One retired SA government statistician called the pandemic a hoax. Emeritus Stanford biologist Mike Levitt (not medical doctor) called Australia a 'loser' for implementing a lockdown, and said the crisis is exaggerated. These opinions were headlined "MUST READ" (sic, BN), ie "mus...

Pliny the Elder, around 70BC, said doctors were able to get away with murder, citing Cato the Elder two hundred and fifty years earlier [1] . Later, Galen had complained Greek doctors fled to Roman cities to hide their incompetence. Pliny’s tirade was against Greek doctors who undermined Roman self-reliance. But he was right all the same. Doctors (and chemists) have the technical skill to kill without the cause of death being obvious, or they can be negligent without it raising questions. It’s sometimes the plot of detective stories. But in these, the doctor killer is always discovered. In reality, it’s very hard to prosecute doctors for malpractice or worse despite professional ethics and the law, in South Africa the Health Professions Act and National Health Act, being clear about the highest standards of professional and ethical conduct. Traditionally, doctors are reluctant to testify against colleagues even when the evidence of negligence is evident, although in a...

Last year Auditor-General Kimi Makwetu gave the Western Cape Health Department (WCHD) a clean audit . At best he was generous, at worse, mistaken, particularly regarding them allegedly meeting their performance objectives. In my opinion  he made a mistake  signing off on their 2018/2019 annual report containing their congratulatory self-assessment of all performance objectives when the facts say otherwise.  The AG is preparing for the 2019/2020 annual audit of state departments. This week I wrote asking him to review his decision. He confirmed receipt. This is an edited version of my letter. On November 21, 2019 I sent a report to the then head of health Dr Beth Engelbrecht (she was replaced by her deputy, Dr Keith Cloete from 1 April 2020), Premier Alan Winde and chair of the health committee of WC Legislature Wendy Philander my assessment as a patient of WCHD of its high-level financial position, cost efficiency and performance objectives in terms of ...

Who is PANDA (Pandemic – Data Analysis)? They came out of nowhere with their report “Lockdown is a humanitarian disaster to dwarf COVID-19 ” , which Business Day broke on April 5. Since then they’ve received a lot of media coverage questioning government’s epidemiological models that predict large numbers of coronavirus infections and deaths in South Africa. Little is known about them other than they’re a newly formed ad hoc advocacy group (also called a “consortium") of actuaries Nick Hudson and Peter Castleden and an unnamed medical doctor and economist. PANDA has no website or even a blog. But there are plenty of hits about them.  Credulous media, public, pandemic denialists and conspiracy theorists (BizNews chief among them) have unquestioningly taken their and generally business’ narrative the lockdown, at level 3 since June 1, is unnecessary and its economic consequences shall allegedly cause more deaths than the lockdown itself. Fund manager Allan Gray’s CEO ...