Categories
Opinion

This is not a natural disaster, but a manmade one – The Spectator

For maintaining a precious sense of proportion, check out some other annual global fatalities: influenza, up to 650,000. Typhoid fever, up to 160,000. Cholera, up to 140,000. Malaria, 620,000 in 2017, almost all in Africa (so who cares, right?). In 2018, tuberculosis, developing treacherous antibiotic resistance, killed 1.5 million people. Why haven’t we closed down the whole world for TB?

What is destroying lives and livelihoods is not predominantly the illness. The UK economy is not in a tailspin because it can’t survive without the labor of the 32,000-plus fatalities, however much we may miss them as individuals. This is not a natural disaster but a manmade one.

https://spectator.us/natural-disaster-manmade-united-kingdom-costly/

Categories
Opinion

‘Independent Sage’ group is an oxymoron – Research Professional News

The idea that government advisers can separate science and politics is bogus, says Melanie Smallman

…having spent seven years in frontline science advice, I find the persistence of the idea that scientific advice can be separated from politics surprising.

…because it was impossible to describe the science without revealing the policy advice. The questions being asked and the particular science being used were all shaped by the direction that policy was taking—and vice versa.

At a time of a global pandemic, bringing more—and more diverse—expertise to bear on the issue has to be welcome. But the danger is that, in pursuing some ideal of scientific independence, political issues get disguised as technical matters. This risks handing decisions to scientific experts rather than elected politicians, hiding both decisions and politicians from public scrutiny.

https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-political-science-blog-2020-5-independent-sage-group-is-an-oxymoron/

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Opinion

The coronavirus crash could be even worse than we feared – The Spectator

Today’s figures for the first quarter of 2020 show Britain’s economy shrunk by two per cent, but that takes into account just a few days of lockdown (and suggests that the recession started some time before). The March figure is more like it: despite only formally being in lockdown for eight days in March, the UK economy contracted 5.8 per cent that month alone. As Capital Economics puts it ‘in just one month the economy has tumbled by as much as it did in the year and a half after the global financial crisis.’

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-coronavirus-crash-could-be-even-worse-than-we-feared

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Visitor Contributions

An Interactive Anti-Coronavirus Toolkit – Dr. Kevin P. Corbett

In the interest of public debate, we allow visitors to share opinions, experiences and research that may be of value to others. This is a visitor contribution from our Discussions page.

The views expressed are those of the individual posters themselves. Please read our Comments and contributions disclaimer.

Dr. Kevin P. Corbett


An Interactive Anti-Coronavirus Toolkit

Prologue

He had moved from thought to words, and now from words to actions.”

George Orwell, 1984

In this toolkit I draw on the predictive power of fiction together with various medical and other sources to both describe and illustrate how the Hysteria over the ‘novel Coronavirus’ is leading towards a form of physical and cultural death.

This Hysteria has bred mass delusion biasing medical diagnosis to more fully bolster and grossly inflate the evidence for the spurious disease category of ‘Covid-19’. This occurs through the medical generation of illness and death, caused by faulty clinical reasoning during medical examination and treatment [‘iatrogenesis’]. This process of iatrogenesis is assisted also by powerful social forces like Terror and Fear [‘sociogenesis’] .

All of these medical and social forces are being marshalled and fuelled in Great Britain and overseas by the confluence of Hysteria from the respective elected Governments, The World Health Organisation, the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) and other non-elected supranational agencies, which are all now fatally impacting on our national psyches and policy makers.

These unelected agencies include, the 24-7 cycling Mainstream Media (MSM), The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (who fund Imperial College London a British source of Lockdown modelling), Gilead, and other pharmaceutical interests.

All of the above respective commercial and academic interests stand to gain financially from any subsequent mandatory mass screening, testing, treatment and travel certification (‘passporting’).

The investigative journalists are right on it. Celia Farber cites the above confluence of vested interests, the “Gates-led Pandemic Reich”. Jon Rappoport calls them the “..actual conspiracy theorists—Gates, WHO, CDC—who invented the conspiracy..” ‘Covid-19’ and the government Lockdowns.

Read the full monograph. (Opens PDF from external site.)

Categories
Publications

Complexity of the Basic Reproduction Number (R0) – NCBI (2019)

Although R0 might appear to be a simple measure that can be used to determine infectious disease transmission dynamics and the threats that new outbreaks pose to the public health, the definition, calculation, and interpretation of R0 are anything but simple. R0 remains a valuable epidemiologic concept, but the expanded use of R0 in both the scientific literature and the popular press appears to have enabled some misunderstandings to propagate. R0 is an estimate of contagiousness that is a function of human behavior and biological characteristics of pathogens. R0 is not a measure of the severity of an infectious disease or the rapidity of a pathogen’s spread through a population. R0 values are nearly always estimated from mathematical models, and the estimated values are dependent on numerous decisions made in the modeling process. The contagiousness of different historic, emerging, and reemerging infectious agents cannot be fairly compared without recalculating R0 with the same modeling assumptions. Some of the R0 values commonly reported in the literature for past epidemics might not be valid for outbreaks of the same infectious disease today.

R0 can be misrepresented, misinterpreted, and misapplied in a variety of ways that distort the metric’s true meaning and value. Because of these various sources of confusion, R0 must be applied and discussed with caution in research and practice. This epidemiologic construct will only remain valuable and relevant when used and interpreted correctly.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6302597/

Categories
Opinion

Fear kills – Spiked

The media in this country have no shame. For two months they’ve been ramping up fear and hysteria over Covid-19. They predicted apocalypse. They reported the daily death tolls like gleeful grim reapers. 

And now, after all that, after pumping out 24-hour rolling doom for weeks on end, they have the gall to wonder why so many people have been too scared to visit a hospital during the pandemic. And why there has been a huge number of excess deaths from treatable ailments other than Covid-19. And why there was a policy of ‘Protecting the NHS’ at all costs from the coming viral calamity that involved sending even infected elderly people away from hospitals and back to care homes. ‘How could this happen?’, they cry.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/15/fear-kills/

Categories
Videos

UK Gov’t confirms Covid19 harmless to VAST MAJORITY of people – Off-Guardian

In this clip from the Downing Street Corona Briefing on May 11th, Chris Whitty – the UK’s Chief Medical Officer – says that, to most people, the coronavirus is entirely harmless.

Note: video and backup mirror can be found below.

  • Most people will never get it.
  • Most of the people who get it won’t ever experience symptoms.
  • Most of the people who experience symptoms won’t need medical care.
  • Most of the people who need medical care won’t be need emergency or critical care.
  • And even the tiny percentage of people who need who DO need critical care will survive, regardless of risk factors or medical history.
Categories
Opinion

How apocalyptic is now? – UnHerd

When you read diaries of people who lived through the revolution in Russia, you find them looking on in disbelief as the vast, centuries-old empire of the Romanovs melted into nothing in a matter of months. Few then accepted that the world they knew had gone forever. 

https://unherd.com/2020/05/are-we-living-through-an-apocalypse-now/
Categories
Opinion

It’s time to relax London’s lockdown and trust the capital to return to work – The Telegraph

As the world comes out of lockdown, the regional approach is being used everywhere. London is the safest place to try it here

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/15/time-relax-londons-lockdown-trust-capital-return-work/

Categories
News

Teaching unions are working against the interests of children, says Blunkett – The Times

Teaching unions are working against the interests of children in opposing plans to reopen schools, Lord Blunkett said today.

The former education secretary said that he was “deeply critical” of the approach of teaching unions towards attempts to open schools in England on June 1, for children in reception, year 1 and year 6.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/teaching-unions-are-working-against-the-interests-of-children-says-blunkett-mwrv5vws0

Categories
Opinion

The ‘official Covid story’ is one-sided to the point of deceit – The Telegraph

The biggest political ruse of our time has now spiralled so far out of control that it has become almost impossible to distinguish fact from deception. Every day we are besieged with such a selective and biased artillery of “scientific” assertions that it makes a mockery of expert insight.

Every day we are subjected to yet more bitesized epidemiology that gives an utterly false impression of risk. And every day we are bombarded with terrifying death figures so out of context that they are effectively meaningless.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/14/official-covid-story-biased-selective-point-deceit/

Categories
Videos

Debunking the Narrative (With Prof. Dolores Cahill)

Categories
Publications

DFTB COVID-19 EVIDENCE REVIEW – Don’t Forget the Bubbles (pediatrics blog)

Don’t Forget The Bubbles — a blog for medical professionals specializing in pediatrics — partnered with the UK Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health to track and review studies on COVID-19 in children, according to its website. Using research from 78 of those studies, it released a 45-page report on April 22 that extracts early findings on the epidemiology, transmission and symptoms of the coronavirus in children.

Conclusion:

The role of children in transmission is unclear, but it seems likely they do not play a significant role.

https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/COVID-data-top-10.pdf

Categories
Opinion

We can no longer ignore the excess deaths caused by lockdown – The Telegraph

But if we are going to be served up with the daily death toll from Covid-19, isn’t it about time we were also provided with the number of deaths caused daily by the national lockdown? If you are prepared to dig around a bit, it is already possible to work this out from officially released figures.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/13/can-no-longer-ignore-excess-deaths-caused-lockdown/

Categories
News

Dentists say lockdown measures are causing ‘unnecessary suffering’ – The Guardian

Some patients are struggling to eat and sleep despite trying multiple rounds of antibiotics, and for many others existing problems are getting more serious because of the lack of treatment caused by the closure of normal dental services.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/14/dentists-say-lockdown-dental-measures-cause-unnecessary-suffering-patients-agony-ppe-england

Categories
Opinion

The furlough scheme will soon become a national addiction – The Spectator

Trouble is, there will be many people who are better off sitting at home on 80 percent of their salary than going out to work to earn 100 percent of it – once travel costs, childcare, tax and so on are taken into account. For millions, there is little incentive ever to return to work. Moreover, because the government has been so generous this time around it has created an expectation that it will always bail out businesses in trouble in this way. In future recessions we will have demands for furlough schemes. Individual industries, too, will start demanding to be able to furlough employees when the going is tough. We are heading towards an idea which even Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell rejected: a universal basic income.

https://life.spectator.co.uk/articles/the-furlough-scheme-will-soon-become-a-national-addiction/
Categories
Opinion

Poverty won’t cure coronavirus… we MUST get back to work, writes hotel chain magnate SIR ROCCO FORTE – Daily Mail

The real and overwhelming tragedy is the devastation it is causing to previously profitable businesses, and even worse to the millions of working people previously in secure and productive jobs. This should be the Government’s overriding priority

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8317531/Poverty-wont-cure-corona-work-writes-hotel-chain-magnate-SIR-ROCCO-FORTE.html

Categories
Publications

“Staggering number” of extra deaths in community is not explained by covid-19 – BMJ

Only a third of the excess deaths seen in the community in England and Wales can be explained by covid-19, new data have shown.

Of those 30 000, only 10 000 have had covid-19 specified on the death certificate. While Spiegelhalter acknowledged that some of these “excess deaths” might be the result of underdiagnosis, “the huge number of unexplained extra deaths in homes and care homes is extraordinary. When we look back . . . this rise in non-covid extra deaths outside the hospital is something I hope will be given really severe attention.”

https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1931

Categories
Publications

Potential Implications of Testing an Experimental mRNA-Based Vaccine During an Emerging Infectious Disease Pandemic – The American Journal of Bioethics

Development of experimental vaccines to combat the COVID-19 pandemic has been rapidly progressing. In the United States, several Phase I clinical trial participants already received an injection of mRNA-1273, the experimental vaccine developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a biotechnology firm called Moderna (U.S. National Library of Medicine 2020). The chief medical officer at Moderna, Dr. Tal Zaks, lauded the speed with which his company has provided a potential COVID-19 vaccine: “I think we’ve set a new record here,” (Kelly 2020). However, the usual Food and Drug Administration (FDA) standard for proving safety and efficacy in animal models before moving onto testing in humans, has not been followed (Boodman 2020). Instead, safety and efficacy studies in animals will run concurrently with the Phase I clinical trial in humans. This article highlights the potential implications of this new manner of testing, while placing it in the context of the current pandemic.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15265161.2020.1763696

Categories
News

Police have no powers to enforce two-metre social distancing, says new official guidance – The Telegraph

Police have no powers to enforce two-metre social distancing in England, says new guidance for officers in England and Wales.

Officers should only enforce what is written in law which does not include the two metre rule, says the guidance issued on Wednesday by the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC).

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/13/police-have-no-powers-enforce-two-metre-social-distancing-says/