Witty is on about £210.000 and Valance is on £185,000, and as you say they are there as public servants to tell it straight, and they are doing a sterling job.

If either were to make something up and use the government platform to generate that something towards feeding their own greedy ends in front of half the population on TV then it would be easily picked up by fellow scientists....

So NOT true, and is NOT happening......

A bit like global warming then? Are you saying that's not as serious as the scientists are telling us?

Without wishing to sound over zealous, if you believe that the current pandemic Is driven by a handful of evil people who are profiting from conning us you really do need your bumps felt.
Are the 150,000 deaths not real? Was the 120k increase in deaths in 2020 over the prior 10 year average a collusion between a few naughty civil servants in the births deaths and marriages depts?
Covid is real and even if vaccines only offer 50% better immunisation then only selfish conspiracy theorists wouldn't take them because they read some rubbish on the internet.

What absolute rubbish.

How do they have an agenda when everything they say or do is scrutinised and peer reviewed?

You’ve been watching too much YouTube

And herein lies the disaster of the culture wars. Politicised, activist led academia has led to a collapse in trust in information undermining faith in the medical sciences when we need it most. When you come from the first generation after the (near) eradication of TB to hear younger work colleagues say they're not taking the vaccine because they 'don't know what's in it' is really quite saddening.

Those very same people are more than happy to pump their bodies full of narcotics, alcohol and junk food, despite not know what is in all that either

Just been talking to my cousin this morning who's wife has had covid /tested positive about a week or so ago, (my wife also tested positive NY eve and she has an underlying lung condition but luckily being fully jabbed she's been ok).
His wife has been pretty bad with it, and he's working with a 30 Yr old who won't have any jabs be d you don't know what's in them, who smokes 20 a day and dri ks ever day.
Astonishing

I have friends who are exactly the same!

You seem to have mistaken me for a conspiracy theorist? I'm not a covid denier, I'm tripple jabbed, wear a mask and fully believe it's happening. But the whole thing from day one has been overhyped in the extreme. In reality, the deaths are mainly from the very vulnerable in society, the people who would have died anyway, but of the next thing they caught or the next fall they had. Every life lost has it's own tragedy attached to it of course and there have unquestionably been some outliers who have died from it way before their time.

But those who fall hook, line and sinker for the doomsday predictions from the scientific community are just on the other end of the same spectrum as the conspiracy theorists. There are still people gleefully filling twitter with 'wait and see' messages, hoping for the 6,000 daily deaths the idiots forecast to come true so they can say 'told you so'. Omicron appears less deadly than flu, if that remains the dominant variant the drama and obsession the country has with covid has to end. Testing, isolation, stat collection, all of it. The NHS staff crisis is the latest dramatised subject. NHS staff who are off with a positive test will be back in work in a week and highly unlikely to be off again. There might be a very short term issue, but it's one they'll cope with. The media have been parasitic and toxic throughout with their fear sells sensationalism. There are people who are genuinely terrified of being outside their house and by being around people. My Mum knows people from her WI group that barely left the house since early 2020 as they believe they'll likely die if they do. It's just not healthy all round.

I'll stand by my point that the epidemiologists and scientists will want to maintain the importance of covid over the next two years however. They are earning vast sums from consultancy, media work and their research funding will be through the roof. They will continue to maintain the medias focus on it for as long as they can and keep the gravy train going.

For clarity, not a conspiracy theorist. Get your jabs and boosters people and wear a mask. But try not to be scared of covid.

What happens for that week though? Say you normally have 3 staff on a ward and that becomes 1 due to positive tests even for a single day. How does that 1 person look after 9 (say) patients on their own?