Dealing with a pandemic requires a clear aim, planning, intelligence and supreme flexibility to react to the unknown. However, ever since reports broke in the West of a newly-identified virus in Wuhan in January, this has not been the case in Britain. The result? We have suffered a very high death toll, and substantial social and economic damage has been inflicted on our society. It did not need to be this way. Our Covid-19 outcome could have been very different if certain mistakes were not made. Here we list some of the major decision-making blunders made over the last eight months.

1. Lack of a clear aim

In March, Health Secretary Matt Hancock set out 'to protect the NHS by building it up and flattening the curve. And to protect life by safeguarding those who are most vulnerable.' As it became increasingly clear that the NHS wasn't overwhelmed, however, the aim became muddied.

A grown-up debate between suppression and control of the spread of Covid-19 has not been played out. Hancock considers suppressing Covid is the only way until the cavalry (a vaccine) arrives.

South Korea has reported that 83 people have died after receiving flu shots, a week after Seoul said it would probe its mass vaccination program. The government continues to insist the deaths aren't linked to the jab.

The country's public health agency, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), announced on Saturday that 83 people in total have died after participating in a free vaccination initiative billed as a way to offset potential complications from Covid-19.

Most of the deaths involved the elderly, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported, citing figures provided by the KDCA. Of the total number of fatalities, 37 people were in their 70s, followed by 34 people aged 80 or older. Four deaths involved people in their 60s, while eight individuals who passed away were under 60.

Men of science have made abundant mistakes of every kind; their knowledge has improved only because of their gradual abandonment of ancient errors, poor approximations, and premature conclusions.

— George Sarton, founder, History of Science Society

The message that vaccines are safe and effective made perfect sense to my wife Lisa and me. Our beautiful boys would be fully vaccinated. I'd been vaccinated, and my wife had been vaccinated. It was the easiest decision two parents could make. You even get to kill two birds with one stone: protect your babies from infectious disease and contribute to herd immunity, and so protect others. What was the risk of something bad happening from a vaccine? The number thrown around — and still in wide use today — was "one in a million."

Losing faith in my pediatrician and ultimately the entire medical establishment triggered a massive case of cognitive dissonance for me, as it does for so many parents who trusted their pediatricians with their children's lives. Could my pediatrician be leading me astray? Could these vaccines really be harming my son? Are those crazy parents actually right? It's an alienating, disturbing, troubling path that many autism parents must walk. In many cases the parents of children with autism were the most compliant when it came to mainstream medical care — our children typically received every vaccine and medical intervention recommended to us by our trusted doctors. We're not "anti-vaxxers"; we're mostly "ex-vaxxers," the compliant parents who learned the hard way.

A lab experiment aimed at fixing defective DNA in human embryos shows what can go wrong with this type of gene editing and why leading scientists say it's too unsafe to try. In more than half of the cases, the editing caused unintended changes, such as loss of an entire chromosome or big chunks of it.

Columbia University researchers describe their work Thursday in the journal Cell. They used CRISPR-cas9, the same chemical tool that a Chinese scientist used on embryos in 2018 to help make the world's first gene-edited babies, which landed him in prison and drew international scorn.

The tool lets scientists cut DNA in a precise spot and has profound potential for good — it's already used to raise better crops and livestock, holds promise for treating diseases and earned its discoverers a Nobel Prize earlier this month.

But using it on embryos, sperm or eggs makes changes that can pass to future generations. Several international panels of scientists and ethicists have said it's too soon to know whether that can be done safely, and the new Columbia work shows the possible harm.

"If our results had been known two years ago, I doubt that anyone would have gone ahead" and tried it on embryos intended for pregnancy, said biologist Dieter Egli, who led the study.

The majority of new COVID-19 cases in Europe stem from a mutated strain of the coronavirus that has been traced back to Spain and was spread across the continent over the summer by tourists, scientists said in a report Thursday.

The variant most likely originated in farm workers in northeastern Spain, where it was first recorded in June, they said.

The team of scientists from the University of Basel, ETH Zürich in Basel, and SeqCOVID in Spain said a suspected "superspreader" event accounted for early proliferation of the virus, which was then spread abroad by tourists and other travelers.

Among the many serious symptoms of COVID-19, the strange neurological effects experienced by many patients count as perhaps the most mysterious.

A sudden loss of smell and taste was one of the first unusual symptoms reported by COVID-19 patients, but stroke, seizures, and swelling of the brain (called encephalitis) have all been described.

Some patients diagnosed with COVID-19 also experience confusion, delirium, dizziness, and have difficulty concentrating, according to case reports and reviews.

For several months, doctors have been relentlessly trying to understand this disease, and its many manifestations that seem to affect the brain in ways we can't fully explain.

Imagine millions of leafcutter ants on parade through a tropical forest. Driven by a craving mysterious to humans, they suddenly stream up a towering tree trunk. How do they know exactly which species of leaves to cut for their underground fungus garden? The ants do not eat the leaves; they eat the fungus. Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama and the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) in Denmark think that the choices the ants make about what to bring back to the nest may be driven by the nutritional needs of their fungus crop. They present new evidence in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution showing that fungi become more dependent on the ants to fulfill ever more specific nutritional needs as the partnerships develop. When the pilgrims landed in America, they learned from indigenous groups to plant corn with dead fish as fertilizer. Compare that system to a huge, industrial cornfield where liquid fertilizer is applied. The modern cornfield produces more corn, but it also requires industrial-scale use of specific nutrients.

"This is what we see as these ant farmers evolved," said Jonathan Shik, former post-doctoral fellow in staff scientist's Bill Wcislo's lab at STRI and now an assistant professor at UCPH. "Atta ants evolved huge agro-industrial farms. They have giant colonies with millions of workers. But they have miniscule brains and no detectable culture, so the big question is 'How do they know exactly what their crop needs?'"

To understand the goals of Operation Warp Speed we must understand Dr. Moncef Slaoui and his connections to Big Pharma and the Gates Foundation.

In mid-May, Donald Trump announced he was appointing Dr. Moncef Slaoui, a former executive with vaccine manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline, to lead Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership launched by the Trump administration to rapidly develop and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine. Dr. Slaoui was a Professor of Immunology at the University of Mons, Belgium. Slaoui earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Immunology from the University Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium and completed postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School and Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston.

Following his education, Slaoui joined the pharmaceutical industry, serving on the board of Directors of GlaxoSmithKline between 2006 through 2015. Slaoui served in several senior research & development (R&D) roles with GlaxoSmithKline during his time with the company, including Chairman of Global Vaccines.

More recently, Slaoui sits on the boards of several pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology organizations. In 2016, Slaoui was appointed to the Board of Directors of Moderna Therapeutics, a biotech company that is leading the way for messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics and vaccines. Moderna is also developing one of the COVID-19 vaccines which might be administered to the public.

When Slaoui was appointed to head Operation Warp Speed critics noted the conflicts of interest related to him leading the effort to develop a COVID-19 vaccine while holding stock in two of the leading vaccine manufacturers. Slaoui said he would sell his Moderna stock worth a reported $12 million and resign from the board of directors. However, in a recent interview Slaoui said he was keeping around $10 million of stock in his former company, GlaxoSmithKline, calling the shares his "retirement."

Last week, US president Donald Trump committed a kind of blasphemy by attacking Anthony Fauci, his pandemic consultant and practically the spokesperson for the White House regarding COVID-19, saying that:

"People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots. He's been here for 500 years. Fauci is a disaster. If I listened to him, we'd have 500,000 deaths."

A remarkable statement of historical dimension, since Trump is the first American head of state to cast doubt on Fauci, who has acted as the virus tsar for no less than six presidencies: Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama and Trump.

To make it clear, the logic behind Trump's attack is scientifically unfounded. He refers to a statement of Fauci he made some months ago, according to which people should "not wear face masks.". But even if all Americans had followed this advice, it would not have lead to a single extra death.

The simple reason is that the COVID-19 death rate data show unambiguously that a viral cause for the excess mortality seen in some countries, including the US, is virtually impossible — and that instead the massive experimental use of highly toxic drugs is the key factor in this context, as I recently outlined together with Claus Köhnlein MD, in an in-depth analysis for Real News Australia.

But on one point Trump hits the nail on the head: Fauci is simply a disaster, because he has been telling the world one lie after another for decades, while his presence actually feels almost as if he has been there for 500 years. And tragically, the mass media sell them to their audience of billions as a kind of gospel.

More than 80 percent of 200 patients hospitalized in Spain with COVID-19 had low levels of vitamin D, a new study found.

The study, which was published Tuesday in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, found that the majority of patients being treated for COVID-19 at a hospital in the northern city of Santander suffered from a deficiency of vitamin D.

Researchers at the University of Cantabria determined that just 82 percent of the 216 patients had inadequate levels — compared to around 47 percent of people in a control group who didn't have the virus.

The vitamin, which promotes healthy bones and supports immune system function, is produced by the body naturally when it's exposed to sunlight, though it can also be obtained from eating foods such as fatty fish, egg yolks, mushrooms and cheese.

Patients with deficiencies of the sunlight vitamin in the study were also more likely to have hypertension and heart disease, as well as experience longer hospital stays.