And testimony of contact tracer whistleblower shows ‘well-trained’ or ‘professional’ are not an accurate description…
Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Jenny Harries was asked during Sunday’s daily press briefing how members of the public could tell, if they received a call from someone claiming to be a coronavirus contact tracer, whether that person was genuine or a fraudster.
Harries claimed that:
It’s highly unlikely with all the confidentiality around the data systems that you will be contacted inappropriately… There has been a lot of input [sic] paid to this particular issue
but then told the member of the public asking the question that the public would be able to discern real from fraud because “it will be very obvious in the conversation that you have with them that they are genuine” because they will “obviously” sound like “professionally-trained individuals” and will have medical supervisors:
Of course, fraudsters manage to fleece people because they are completely unable to sound professional – or to pretend that they have a medical supervisor.
But even if such an idea were not nonsense, the genuine contact tracers say that they are not well trained and do not have access to supervisors:
One tracer, writing in the Guardian, said:
The training was very basic. We saw some slides about our role – the public health website we will use, and a script for what we had to say to people. We were told: do not go off-script, and if there was anything we could not answer, we should ask our supervisor.
…we were left unsupervised for hours. A message then appeared asking us to complete our online training – which was met with a chorus of “I did the training”. The day passed as we waited, re-attempted training, and wrote messages to supervisors and got no response.
To be clear, according to the Deputy CMO there is no number to call, no website to check credentials to ensure calls are from actual contact tracers. If there was, she would have mentioned it.
With a new pandemic wave building, the government’s ‘grand plan’ for contact tracing is a sham – rushed out unready to distract from the Dominic Cummings scandal. And that could not be more clearly demonstrated than by the fact that the supposedly-scientific way the public is supposed to tell they’re not being called by a fraudster is that the caller will sound good.
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