UK Surgeon: ‘Very Few’ Doctors Willing to Speak Out Against Prevailing Opinion on COVID-19

Consultant Surgeon Dr. Tony Hinton (L), a spokesman for the Health Advisory and Recovery Team, poses for a photo with Lee Hall, host of NTD's "British Thought Leaders" programme. (NTD)

Some health professionals in the UK felt they had to self-censor during the COVID-19 pandemic to protect their jobs, a veteran consultant surgeon has said.

In an interview with NTD’s British Thought Leaders (BTL) programme, Dr. Tony Hinton, an independent consultant ENT surgeon who has spent 30 years working in the National Health Service (NHS), said that while he began to question the effectiveness of lockdowns and the COVID-19 vaccines “very, very early on,” the group that was “hardest to engage with” was other doctors.

“Very few of us are willing to speak out because—particularly if you have an NHS job—basically your job’s on the line if you speak out, and you'll get called in to speak to the medical director and told you’ve got to stop, and may be suspended,” he said.

Hinton is one of the spokespersons for the Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART)—a group of experts who are sceptical about the UK government’s policies and guidance relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The surgeon told the BTL programme that he was once challenged by someone who stated he was “against the international consensus on science,” to which Hinton replied that the person had likely only heard “one side of the story”—because “the people who are of the other opinion have been shut down almost completely until very, very recently.”

Repeated Lockdowns

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the first national lockdown in England in late March 2020. Although not convinced it was the right way to go, Hinton said he didn’t have any criticisms for the initial lockdown given the difficult choice ministers were facing.

“If politicians panic and they overdo things and they’re too cautious, well, they’re not going to get the blame for that. If they don’t do enough and it’s a disaster, they‘ll absolutely get the blame. So they’ll never take that risk,” Hinton said.

“But it was obvious from that point, that from then on, no further lockdown was necessary, and no further repeated lockdowns were necessary because the cases had just come down by themselves,” he contended.

Hinton said international data indicated “no positive correlation between harder, longer lockdowns and less COVID,” noting that lockdowns also caused harms such as to education and in terms of cancer diagnosis and treatment delays.

He also noted that the average age of deaths with COVID-19 was similar to the average age of deaths from other causes.

According to Office for National Statistics data for England and Wales, by March of this year, the median age of those people whose deaths involved COVID-19 was 82—the same as the median age of death from all causes in 2020.

Unclear If mRNA Vaccines Would ‘Switch Off’

Hinton said he and his son, an orthopedic surgeon who had had COVID-19, decided to get the vaccines in early 2021—before realising the vaccines’ effectiveness in preventing transmission is limited and short-lived.

“As doctors, we were being told it was our duty to take the vaccine because it was going to protect our vulnerable patients from catching COVID from us. Because if we took the vaccine, we couldn’t catch it, we couldn’t pass it on. We now know both those things are untrue,” he said.

He disputed authorities’ claim that no step had been skipped in the vaccines’ authorisation processes, saying it was “concerning” the way they were fast-tracked.

The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency previously said it was able to expedite the approval process by reviewing data as it came instead of waiting for all data to become available.

Hinton said he’s most concerned about the mRNA vaccines. These are encoded with a spike protein that is linked to both long COVID and adverse vaccine effects.

“[With] a normal vaccine, you’re injecting a known amount of some dead virus or something, and you know what the reaction to that will be. Here, you’re injecting a known amount of the mRNA, but two people could make completely different amounts of Spike protein from that.”

He equated that to giving some patients normal doses of paracetamol to treat a headache, while giving other patients 100 times the normal dose.

Hinton, who took two doses of the Pfizer vaccine in January and March 2021, said he’s still taking regular blood tests to monitor his spike protein antibodies, which can be obtained from COVID-19 infections or from the vaccines.

The results have been concerning, Hinton said. “I’m still making large amounts of Spike protein ... Will I forever? And will that cause a problem? I don’t know.”