Public Health Scotland Director lies to the UK Covid Inquiry

Earlier today, Freedom Podcast published a video exposing lies that Professor Jim McMenamin, Director at Public Health Scotland, had told the UK Covid-19 Inquiry. 

He has also written to the Inquiry to point out these lies, providing the evidence from Public Health Scotland itself to prove that the evidence McMenamin gave was not factually correct.

Professor Jim McMenamin is a Consultant Epidemiologist and Head of Infections Service and Strategic Incident Director at Public Health Scotland. He is a member of the UK New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threat Advisory Group (NERVTAG). In 2025, he was appointed as an Honorary Professor at the University of Glasgow within the School of Health and Wellbeing.

On 29 May, McMenamin gave testimony at the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.  He said:  “One thing that often does get missed is … the Scottish population [throughout 2020 were] compliant … it was entirely due to their self-isolation and the adherence that they had to the Test and Protect programme that it bought us time to develop, deploy and demonstrate beyond doubt, what we then went on to see, the effectiveness of the vaccines that were available to reduce mortality and bring us back out of that restrictive set of things that we implemented for societal response.”

As Freedom Podcast proves in the video below, this is not true.

Data from Public Health Scotland shows that Scotland had no excess deaths before lockdown, but suffered over 28,000 excess deaths after lockdown, with a 10% increase in deaths compared to the pre-pandemic average, Freedom Podcast explained.

Additionally, the majority of covid deaths in Scotland occurred after the vaccine rollout, with most deaths being among the vaccinated, which contradicts McMenamin’s claim about vaccine efficacy.

Freedom Podcast has taken things a step further and written a letter to the Covid Inquiry, which he published on his Substack page and is almost identical to what he said in the video below. We have noted differences between the video and his letter in square brackets in the transcript that follows.

Transcript [Letter to the UK Covid Inquiry: Misleading the Public]

[Dear Inquiry,]

I watched Professor Jim McMenamin give evidence on behalf of Public Health Scotland to the inquiry on 29 May 2025. I note that he made several claims within his evidence that are not factually correct and I believe he has used statistical interpretation to mislead the inquiry.

First of all, McMenamin makes the claim that the public health interventions (including the covid-19 vaccines) reduced the number of deaths from covid-19 in Scotland. Even using Public Health Scotland’s own data, that claim is not accurate.

Scotland had suffered NO excess deaths in early 2020 when covid-19 was said to be circulating unchecked. By the time of the National Lockdown on 23 March 2020, Scotland had actually recorded NEGATIVE levels of excess death (seen below in yellow in the chart). The spike in excess deaths only started AFTER the lockdown was implemented, with death rates in care homes doubling during April 2020 (whilst under lockdown restrictions).

Since lockdown, Scotland has suffered over 28,000 excess deaths. This represents a 10% increase on the pre-pandemic average.

[Clip of Prof. McMenamin testifying at the Covid Inquiry.]

Prof. McMenamin makes the claim that the covid-19 vaccines reduced the number of covid deaths in Scotland. From Public Health Scotland’s own data, we know that Scotland had reported 5,000 “covid” deaths before the vaccine rollout, yet we suffered a further 10,000 “covid” deaths after the vaccine rollout.

The majority of those 10,000 deaths were among the vaccinated. Public Health Scotland confirmed this at the time in their weekly reports titled ‘Covid-19 & Winter Statistics Report’. This report would cease publication in February 2022 after it became clear that +90% of covid-19 deaths being reported were actually amongst the vaccinated, making McMenamin’s claim about the vaccine efficacy a false statement.

This data is confirmed by Public Health Scotland themselves and the National Records of Scotland.

National covid testing would also stop in Spring 2022, and then, obviously, the number of ‘cases’ being reported seemed to fall. But was just a result of the testing having been stopped? The number of excess deaths being recorded in Scotland continued to rise through 2022 and 2023. Something else was killing Scots in excess after the pandemic had been declared over – the inquiry should be investigating the root cause of these excess deaths.

Professor McMenamin also made the misleading statement that there was no correlation between the discharging of 5,000 patients from Scottish Hospitals into Scottish care homes and the subsequent spike in excess deaths in our care homes. No amount of statistical trickery can hide the facts shown in the table below.

During the 10 weeks of the National Lockdown, there were 2,478 excess deaths in our care homes. An 84.3% increase over 10 weeks. Then, after lockdown ended, care home deaths returned to normal levels – actually went below average over summer 2020 (as you see in the green bars below).

There is clearly a causal link here between the implication of lockdown and treatment protocols (including hospital discharges), and the spike in all-cause excess mortality seen in our care homes during the lockdowns from March 2020 to the end of May 2020, where deaths almost doubled in our care homes.

During the cross-examination of Professor McMenamim, the inquiry counsel raised concerns with the findings of Public Health Scotland’s report on discharges from NHS Scotland care homes to hospitals between 1 March 2020 and 31 May 2020. The report confirms that in that time period, there were 5,198 discharges (4,804 individuals) from hospitals into care homes.

A subsequent Freedom of Information response from Public Health Scotland confirmed that of those 4,804 patients discharged, 1,159 of them died in the care home they were discharged into that summer (between 1 March 2020 – 30 June 2020).

If those patients were deemed fit enough to be discharged, why did so many of them die? 675 died within 30 days of discharge. Public Health Scotland acts as a Scottish Government agency; their own report claimed there was no correlation in the spike in deaths with the hospitals’ discharge. This is Public Health Scotland marking their own homework here and misleading the public and the inquiry with a false claim that there was no statistical correlation between hospital discharge and an increase in deaths in care homes.

[In his letter to the Inquiry, Freedom Podcast asked: “Can I ask the inquiry to review the data provided here – all sourced directly from official Public Health Scotland or National Records of Scotland data – and ask Professor Jim McMenamin to correct the record.”]

Scotland – and the rest of the UK – continues to suffer elevated levels of mortality post-pandemic. Why?

Why, after a pandemic, when the UK lost 250,000 of our most vulnerable members of the population, do we continue to see elevated levels of death – and most worryingly, elevated death rates amongst our younger age groups?

The Office for National Statistics and National Records of Scotland became so concerned with the elevated levels of excess death that in February 2024, they CHANGED the methodology for calculating and reporting excess deaths. The previous 5-year-average method – based on actual death figures in the previous five years – was replaced by a statistical model of “Expected Deaths.”

This new methodology raised the mortality baseline by over 10% and in doing so, now hides the elevated mortality levels. Death rates should have fallen after the pandemic, instead, they have remained elevated above the pre-pandemic average. No amount of obfuscation or statistical tricks can hide that fact.

Thanks for watching, please share. [We cannot allow the truth to be buried.]

[In his letter, Freedom Podcast added: “Please also see the video post of Prof Jim McMenamin’s evidence on the Biology Phenom Substack, which inspired me to write this article and write to the Inquiry: Biology Phenom Substack.]

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While previously it was a hobby culminating in writing articles for Wikipedia (until things made a drastic and undeniable turn in 2020) and a few books for private consumption, since March 2020 I have become a full-time researcher and writer in reaction to the global takeover that came into full view with the introduction of covid-19. For most of my life, I have tried to raise awareness that a small group of people planned to take over the world for their own benefit. There was no way I was going to sit back quietly and simply let them do it once they made their final move.