Ministers are to reconsider vitamin D as a potential weapon against Covid-19 after Matt Hancock wrongly claimed that government scientists had run unsuccessful tests.
The health secretary told the Commons last week that he had ordered a trial that showed vitamin D did not “appear to have any impact”. Officials now admit that no trials took place.
New evidence from Spain suggests that vitamin D, which some scientists believe helps to prevent a fatal overreaction to the virus, could save lives.
EvidenceNotFear
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The senior Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East is also a part-time officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare unit, Middle East Eye has established.
Gordon MacMillan, who joined the social media company’s UK office six years ago, has for several years also served with the 77th Brigade, a unit formed in 2015 to develop “non-lethal” ways of waging war.
The 77th Brigade uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, as well as podcasts, data analysis and audience research to conduct what the head of the UK military, General Nick Carter, describes as “information warfare”.
http://archive.today/2021.02.28-085538/https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-executive-also-part-time-officer-uk-army-psychological-warfare-unit
- 75,000 people could die from non-Covid causes as a result of lockdown to devastating official figures in a 188-page document from SAGE.
- 16,000 people died as a result of the chaos in hospitals and care homes in March and April alone.
- A further 26,000 will die within a year if people continue to stay away from A&E.
- An additional 31,900 could die over the next five years as a result of missed cancer diagnoses, cancelled operations and the health impacts of a recession.
- Official COVID-19 death toll on 29 September 2020 is 41,936.
Covid-19 patients are currently occupying fewer than 2 per cent of all hospital beds in England, official data suggests.
The most NHS recent snapshot — released three weeks ago — shows just 478 out of 110,000 beds in use were by Covid-19 patients on September 3.
…Even at the peak of the crisis in Britain, only a quarter of all beds were occupied by virus patients. On April 7, 26.5 per cent of the 67,206 people in England’s hospitals were being treated for coronavirus — the highest proportion on record.
The vitamin D endocrine system have a variety of actions on cells and tissues involved in COVID-19 progression.
Early calcifediol (25-hydroxyvitamin D) treatment to hospitalized COVID-19 patients significantly reduced intensive care unit admissions-Calcifediol seems to be able to reduce severity of the COVID-19.
Calcifediol seems to be able to reduce severity of the disease.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076020302764
The committee also heard that under the World Health Organization case definition, if a patient has a heart attack and is also found to have Covid-19, the case will be recorded as a Covid-19 death.
- Chief Executive Paul Reid said the cost of testing this year is estimated at €450 million and the estimate for next year is €700m.
- He said that, to date, the highest level of weekly testing has been 90,000 tests.
- 4,328 children and teachers have been tested and the positivity rate in school cases has been 1.9%.
- Out of 27 deaths in September 2020, 20 of these cases, the patients had an underlying illness.
- The median age of those who died was 79.
- Humans have lived with infectious diseases for at least 15,000 years.
- Until the early 2000s when we started to vaccinate for flu, we accepted that outbreaks would kill 20,000 to 50,000 people every winter without much comment.
- Self-isolation is not appropriate if you do not share the living conditions of the elites who make the rules – and that the risk does not seem proportionate to the benefits for ordinary people.
- Face covering, as practised, is irrelevant in most circumstances. The whole country should not be driven by the exceptional circumstances of rush hour in major cities. If most people are currently wearing face coverings, acknowledge that this is because they want to avoid trouble rather than to achieve protection.
- We will never eradicate the threat from coronaviruses because they are so widespread among animal populations.
We have had plenty of anecdotes about people failing to be diagnosed with serious diseases during lockdown. This is thanks to either to hospitals cancelling appointments, GP surgeries stopping face-to-face meetings or people picking up the message that they should protect the NHS by trying not to use it.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/quantifying-the-cost-of-lockdown
Professor Russell Viner, from University College London, demanded schools should instead remain fully open in the face of a second wave and cease their ‘flip-flopping’ between closures and openings which are ‘harming’ the education of youngsters.
He was speaking after his recently published study revealed those under 20 are 44 per cent less likely to be infected with the virus than adults.
…’We need to be thinking: “Are we testing too many children?” because of our understandable but probably unscientific and misplaced concerns about children being infected in schools.’
A USA TODAY analysis shows the state’s positive case count among kids ages 5 to 17 declined through late September after a peak in July. Among the counties seeing surges in overall cases, it’s college-age adults – not schoolchildren – driving the trend, the analysis found.
Local lockdowns are not working to suppress the increase in coronavirus cases, analysis shows, with just one town managing to break free of restrictions, and most seeing instances continuing to rise.
Care home chiefs fear deadly mistakes made at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic risk being repeated as councils offer them extra cash to take Covid-positive hospital patients.
…Now, despite a Government pledge to place a ‘protective ring’ around vulnerable residents, care homes in Cumbria are being offered £1,500 – double the local weekly fee – to take Covid-positive patients from hospital.
…Tony Carling, a care home operator in Cumbria, has decided not to take Covid-positive patients, but fears it could be a costly move. He said: ‘The majority of our clients are funded by local authorities, so it’s very difficult to turn down. You are under extreme financial pressure as to whether you get further business from that authority if you don’t support their needs.’
A curated list of mask facts and medical publications.
COVID-19 is as politically-charged as it is infectious. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the WHO, the CDC and NIH’s Dr. Anthony Fauci discouraged wearing masks as not useful for non-health care workers. Now they recommend wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are hard to do (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies). The recommendation was published without a single scientific paper or other information provided to support that cloth masks actually provide any respiratory protection. Let’s look at the data.
- Surgical masks are loose fitting. They are designed to protect the patient from the doctors’ respiratory droplets. There wearer is not protected from others’ airborne particles.
- People do not wear masks properly. Many people have the mask under the nose. The wearer does not have glasses on and the eyes are a portal of entry. If the virus lands on the conjunctiva, tears will wash it into the nasopharynx.
- Most studies cannot separate out hand hygiene.
- The designer masks and scarves offer minimal protection. They give a false sense of security to both the wearer and those around the wearer.
**Not to mention they add a perverse lightheartedness to the situation. - If you are walking alone, no need for a mask. Avoid other folks; use common sense.
- Remember: children under 2 years should not wear masks because of accidental suffocation and difficulty breathing in some.
- Even if a universal mask mandate were imposed, several studies noted that folks do not use the mask properly and over-report their wearing. Additionally, how would the mandate be enforced??
- The positive studies are models that assume universality and full compliance.
- If wearing a mask makes people go out and get Vitamin D – go for it. In the 1918 flu pandemic people who went outside did better. Early reports are showing people with COVID-19 with low Vitamin D do worse than those with normal levels. Perhaps that is why shut-ins do so poorly.
This is an archive of a series of Tweets by Dr. Mike Yeadon on 26 September 2020. It has been formatted for readability but otherwise kept intact.
Yesterday, two strikingly similar events tells us the oppressive police state closes in. My sister is visiting her daughter in Lincoln and loves looking after her granddaughter. Daughter and husband go out for a drink as a couple (they’re fit and well, late-20s). No pub would let them in because they don’t have the NHS Proximity App. They just don’t want to be tracked, thanks very much.
Meanwhile, earlier on the same day, a family friend and daughter tried to go for a pizza in Zizzis in a small town near Guildford. Again, they were told unless you stand outside and download this App, we’re not serving you. They went somewhere else on principle.
It is simply not necessary to be doing anything about COVID-19 and definitely not this App. How many readers know that summer flu typically kills 200 people every day in July? That was five times the number of COVID-19 deaths, even though the reporting biases the cause to COVID-19. For example, if a person died of pneumonia and had a COVID-19 positive in the last 28 days, it’s coded COVID-19. Vallance/Whitty sombrely warned us of “the potential for 200 COVID-19 deaths per day” sometime in October, if we didn’t accept Draconian measures.
I’m much more knowledgeable about immunology than is SAGE. I was shocked yesterday to review the membership and as of the whole of the spring phase of the pandemic, they had NOT ONE immunologist. It’s no wonder they don’t realise that we are close it and in places over the threshold for “community immunity”.
We know this by:
- the shape of the daily deaths versus time plots;
- the fact that covid19 deaths essentially ceased during the late summer;
- the ‘Secondary Ripple’ is happening at around four to five times slower pace than the March ‘afterburners on full’ climb when we were at the maximum susceptibility;
- as predicted, the deaths per million population is far smaller now in the most infected, dense conurbations than in the centres of recent outbreaks.
It is simply not necessary to do anything, let alone this East German tech surveillance and interferences with civil society that we’re accepting, it seems, with hardly a murmur. ‘Lockdown’ (as abbreviation for state interventions) will not save a single life. At best, these deaths will be displaced into the winter.
Those dying “with or of” covid19 continue to be, as previously, in the old, frail and already unwell. Over 50% of recent covid19 deaths were in the over-80s and 95% were in the over-60s. As before, most had at least two life limiting, chronic disease such as dementia (the largest category), diabetes, obstructed lung disease, kidney failure etc. It is beyond question that in almost all cases, the next viral infection will see them into the next world. So they cannot be “saved”. So it is WHOLLY IRRATIONAL that Govt has chosen to place large tracts of the country under “measures”. It’s worse than that.
I’m complete certain that the best thing to have happened would have been NOT to do testing in any locations where young people gather (I’d abandon all community testing), let this years intake at secondary school, 6th form colleges and Universities do what healthy, enthusiastic young people do, which would add another few percent to community immunity by middle of October and in all likelihood, that would abort even the current ‘Secondary Ripple’
The ignorance that is demonstrated daily by SAGE and by ministers will, I am certain, lead to MORE COVID-19 deaths than if we do nothing. They’re trying mightily and wholly inappropriately to prevent the normal and unquestionably beneficial process whereby young people build their acquired immunity which these fools fail to understand is what protects the vulnerable.
Next, in the vain and uninformed attempt to prevent happening something of unequivocal good in our communities, government is amplifying dangerous conditions in the country. It is estimated that spring lockdown killed 20 thousand people approx through poorer access to healthcare. Even SAGE’s own estimates of additional fatalities arising directly and indirectly from their “measures” currently sit at 75,000. So far, 42,000 have died “with or of” COVID-19.
Meanwhile, these chaotic and damaging “measures” have completely wrecked our economy and I’m concerned that we’re already beyond repair of some of it. We’ll experience a bleaker future rather directly as a result. Aside from the cold economics, family businesses have been as destroyed as if Govt had fire-bombed their premises, bringing bleak futures and retirements to millions.
I’m normally quite hardy and I am aware I’m suffering from almost disabling levels of anxiety. And we’ve stood by while civil society is dismembered, week by week, severing relationships which, for many people than they’d rather not be alive and living in U.K. if the trade-off is this living near-death.
I’m doing what I can in providing science based testimony. I can’t demonstrate or organise it. It’s not what I’ve ever done, either. So, some of you reading this absolutely need to organise, raise petitions, lobby your MP, write to the PM, etc. Persuade others that far from expert guidance coming from the SAGE and others at the top, they’re ignorant (or malevolent) and are engaged in acts so destructive to the nation in all its pieces that I am of the belief that, if it isn’t stopped and imminently, the U.K. we knew and loved will be deleted.
It’s not for me to work out motives. But it’s enough to know that Ferguson, Whitty and Vallance each stand to become very wealthy if they succeed in torturing us through the winter, by which time lots of you will be desperate for a poorly tested vaccine which most of you do not need.
Finally, the “coronavirus emergency” – which has long been over, by the way – has resulted in what are essentially extraordinary War Powers “in order that they can act fast when needed”. I don’t think they need do any such thing. But these Powers are ALREADY being used to insert into our lives and against our wills, invasive surveillance software. Absent these War Powers, this could not have been done without parliamentary approval.
The original text can be found on Twitter.
The cycle of absurdity is now firmly established. We conceal ourselves; COVID-19 bides its time until we decide to come out again, infections rise, we go back into hiding. It’s a miserable, pointless spiral and possibly the most depressing thing about it is the institutional lack of intelligence it reveals. How much longer must this national version of Jeux Sans Frontières continue before Boris Johnson points to the elephant in the room – a great, lumbering fact of life that increasing numbers of us have been aware of for months.
Archived mirror:
…it is recommended that improving vitamin D status in the general population and in particular hospitalized patients has a potential benefit in reducing the severity of morbidities and mortality associated with acquiring COVID-19.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0239799
- Patients with sufficient levels of vitamin D are less likely to experience complications and die from COVID-19
- It has also been found to reduce infection rates.
- Vitamin D sufficiency was linked with a significantly decreased level of inflammatory markets, and higher blood levels of immune cells, in new research from Boston University’s school of medicine.
- In patients older than 40, those who had sufficient levels of vitamin D were more than 51% less likely to die than patients who were deficient.
- Sufficient vitamin D can reduce the risk of catching the coronavirus by 54%, the vitamin can also help against other viruses affecting the upper respiratory tract.
Have we all gone mad, and become so afraid of the virus that we’ve lost the ability to read, to think and to question? You could argue that the fear of Covid-19 has become so all-consuming that it has become even more of a killer than the virus itself.
- The national debt: £36 billion borrowed last month [August] alone.
- The national debt: Our overall figure of more than £2 trillion is the biggest ever recorded, and will take at least two generations to pay off. Redundancy looms for millions.
- Of the 52,514 virus deaths registered by the Office for National Statistics, 89 per cent have been over-65s.
- More than 22,000 over-85s have died, as well as some 17,000 aged between 75 and 84.
- Only 314 people under the age of 40 have died of the disease since March.
- NHS England figures show that more than 95 per cent of patients who die from coronavirus in hospital have an underlying health condition, such as diabetes, heart disease or obesity.
- New report estimates that there will be a total of 74,000 deaths over the next five years due to the long-term financial and health impact of the pandemic.
- Oncologists warn of an extra 30,000 deaths from cancers currently going undiagnosed.
- Dr John Lee: COVID-19 is currently killing fewer than 40 of the 1,600 people who die every day in the UK.
- There were 2,000 extra deaths from strokes and heart attacks this summer.
COVID-19 is not a pandemic. It is a syndemic. The syndemic nature of the threat we face means that a more nuanced approach is needed if we are to protect the health of our communities.
A syndemic is not merely a comorbidity. Syndemics are characterised by biological and social interactions between conditions and states, interactions that increase a person’s susceptibility to harm or worsen their health outcomes. In the case of COVID-19, attacking NCDs will be a prerequisite for successful containment.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32000-6/fulltext
My 30 years of working in academic environments, as both a scientist and a clinical academic, tell me this: a scientist’s career objective is to big up his subject, which increases his personal likelihood of gaining grants, influence and promotion. Scientists focus on narrow topics, often almost to the exclusion of everything else. Perspective is rarely a strong point. The more their subject is in the public eye, preferably centre stage, the better it is from a career point of view. Any crisis is, I’m afraid, a career opportunity for some. Unbiased, agenda-free, selfless public service is not, I believe, a key feature of academic life, nor is there any real reason to expect it to be.
The management of the Covid ‘crisis’ – a crisis substantially caused by the very management itself – has all the hallmarks of government being advised by a group of experts in the limelight, in thrall to groupthink, and with far too cosy a consensus to do effective science.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/09/25/the-making-of-britains-covid-catastrophe/