EvidenceNotFear
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[F]ewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of “problem” drugs and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed. Barriers to reporting include a lack of clinician awareness, uncertainty about when and what to report, as well as the burdens of reporting: reporting is not part of clinicians’ usual workflow, takes time, and is duplicative. Proactive, spontaneous, automated adverse event reporting imbedded within EHRs and other information systems has the potential to speed the identification of problems with new drugs and more careful quantification of the risks of older drugs.
Just as more provincial locations are turning high-street shop fronts into co-working spaces, big cities’ central business districts are going to have to become more residential. Another version of a 15-minute neighbourhood.
“We are seeing the death of an old central business district, but out of the ashes the creation of a new one,” urban studies theorist Richard Florida said in a virtual address to the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore. He believes there will be a 20 per cent reduction in the demand for central office space, opening up the possibility of a downtown that’s less about the daily grind and more about social interaction. Instead of having a city centre, where we work, and a spread of suburbs, where we sleep, these areas will merge, he says, becoming a collection of 15-minute neighbourhoods.
“Lockdowns,” the mass quarantine of both sick and healthy people, have never before been used for disease mitigation in the modern Western world. Previously, the strategy had been systematically ruled out by the pandemic plans of the World Health Organization (WHO) and by health experts of every developed nation. So how did we get here?
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/masked-ball-cowardice
Lisa Shaw, who worked for BBC Radio Newcastle, died at the age of 44 in May after developing headaches a week after getting her first dose of the vaccine.
…The coroner said: “Lisa died due to complications of an AstraZeneca Covid vaccination.”
http://archive.today/2021.08.27-025930/https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-58330796
The coercion of people to take these new on the market vaccines is something we’ve never seen before in our lifetimes in Britain. People have been bombarded with text messages and phone calls asking us to book a vaccine appointment. Anyone with a following who expresses the mildest of concerns about the vaccines and their promotion has been labelled an ‘anti-vaxxer’ or a ‘crank’ or ‘conspiracy theorist’. There’s been unedifying media witch-hunts against so-called ’anti-vaxxers’– with one columnist even suggesting that ‘refuseniks’ should have to wear a bell round their necks and a sandwich board declaring themselves ‘Unclean’.
Vaccines typically require years of research and testing before reaching the clinic, but in 2020, scientists embarked on a race to produce safe and effective coronavirus vaccines in record time. Researchers are currently testing 100 vaccines in clinical trials on humans, and 32 have reached the final stages of testing. More than 75 preclinical vaccines are under active investigation in animals.
This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1
The real-world study includes data on positive Covid PCR test results between May and July 2021 among more than a million people who had received two doses of Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccine.
Protection after two shots of Pfizer decreased from 88% at one month to 74% at five to six months.
For AstraZeneca, the fall was from 77% to 67% at four to five months.
http://archive.today/2021.08.25-105339/https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58322882
The CDC did not include its finding that “required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional” in the summary of its report.
Excess deaths have not been this high since the week ending Feb 19, when 2,182 extra deaths were registered – 18.8 per cent above the pre-2020 five-year average.
Although some of the increase in excess deaths can be explained by the recent rise in deaths involving Covid, most were not linked to the virus.
Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of applied statistics at The Open University, said: “These excess deaths can’t all be explained by deaths of people who had Covid-19. In the most recent week, for England and Wales there were 1,270 more deaths than the five-year average – that’s 14 per cent higher than that average.
…Deaths in private homes have been well above the 2015-19 average almost every week since April last year. Before Covid, around a quarter of deaths occurred at home but that has since risen to one third, according to research by the King’s Fund.
The majority of patients who contracted COVID-19 while in hospital did so from other patients rather than from healthcare workers, concludes a new study from researchers at the University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke’s Hospital.
The researchers analysed data from the first wave of the pandemic, between March and June 2020. While a great deal of effort is made to prevent the spread of viruses within hospital by keeping infected and non-infected individuals apart, this task is made more difficult during times when the number of infections is high. The high level of transmissibility of the virus and the potential for infected individuals to be asymptomatic both make this task particularly challenging.
Combined with other studies, these data indicate that vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals infected with the Delta variant might transmit infection. Importantly, we show that infectious SARS-CoV-2 is frequently found even in vaccinated persons when specimen Ct values are low.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v4.full
The arrival of the Delta strain in New Zealand has prompted the country’s Covid-19 response minister to question the efficacy of its ambitious elimination strategy – an approach that has been the backbone of the country’s pandemic response.
…“It does mean that all of our existing protections … start to look less adequate and less robust as a result of that we are looking very closely at what more we can do there. At some point we will have to start to be more open in the future.”
I reiterate our call: “slow down and get the science right—there is no legitimate reason to hurry to grant a license to a coronavirus vaccine.”
FDA should be demanding that the companies complete the two year follow-up, as originally planned (even without a placebo group, much can still be learned about safety). They should demand adequate, controlled studies using patient outcomes in the now substantial population of people who have recovered from covid. And regulators should bolster public trust by helping ensure that everyone can access the underlying data.
We write as concerned doctors, nurses, and other allied healthcare professionals with no vested interest in doing so. To the contrary, we face personal risk in relation to our employment for doing so and / or the risk of being personally “smeared” by those who inevitably will not like us speaking out.
Most blue surgical face masks used by many during the pandemic are not enough to avoid people from being infected with COVID-19, an alarming new study has found.
“We could be digging ourselves into a hole, for a very long time, where we think we can only keep Covid away by boosting every year,” Prof Eleanor Riley, an immunologist from the University of Edinburgh, told me.
Prof Adam Finn, a government vaccine adviser, said over-vaccinating people, when other parts of the world had none, was “a bit insane, it’s not just inequitable, it’s stupid”.
http://archive.today/2021.08.21-104255/https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58270098
A tight-knight case of characters has sought to destabilize the Syrian government by convincing Syrians, Western citizens, foreign states, and international bodies that the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army is a legitimate, “moderate” alternative, while flooding news across the globe with opposition propaganda.
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Recycling Is Garbage – The New York Times
Published June 30, 1996.
Believing that there was no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that recycling was their only option. Their intentions were good and their conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes makes sense — for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. And since there’s no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there’s no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren’t good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups — politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations — while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.