The UK’s healthcare regulator has expressed concern to the government that its multibillion-pound mass testing programme is “a stretch” of the authorised use of rapid tests, the Guardian has learned.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has approved the lateral flow devices to be used to find coronavirus cases but not to act as a “green light” for people who test negative to enjoy greater freedoms.
The regulator is concerned that people who test negative will be given false reassurance by their result and will let down their guard if they believe they are Covid-free.
There is very little data to show how well the Innova lateral flow devices detect the virus when used as a self-test by someone who has no symptoms. They are being used by millions of people a week in England under the government’s universal testing programme.
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Under-40s may be offered an alternative to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine after blood clot reports doubled, reports claim.
The chance of dying from a blood clot after having the jab is about one in one million – with 19 fatalities from around 20 million vaccinations. However, the total number of people in the UK who developed blood clots after getting one dose has gone from 79 to 168 in a fortnight, Medical Healthcare Products and Regulatory Agency (MHRA) data suggests.
The risk of being exposed to Covid-19 indoors is as great at 60 feet as it is at 6 feet — even when wearing a mask, according to a new study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers who challenge social distancing guidelines adopted across the world.
MIT professors Martin Z. Bazant, who teaches chemical engineering and applied mathematics, and John W.M. Bush, who teaches applied mathematics, developed a method of calculating exposure risk to Covid-19 in an indoor setting that factors in a variety of issues that could affect transmission, including the amount of time spent inside, air filtration and circulation, immunization, variant strains, mask use, and even respiratory activity such as breathing, eating, speaking or singing.
Following the publication of the 2011 preparedness paper, however, the number of ICU beds continued to fall. Then, five years later, government held an unusual and secretive event called Exercise Cygnus.
It involved all government departments, all local authorities, and the NHS, right across the UK. Its report has not been published for “national security reasons” and so as not to “frighten the public”. However, according to those with first-hand knowledge of the operation, Cygnus’ script contained a scenario of a patent lack of capacity in ICU beds and personal protective equipment.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/exercise-cygnus-uk-government-exercise-justifies-covid-19-lockdown
A mother has claimed her legs erupted into painful blood-filled blisters that ‘merged together’ after receiving AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine.
Sarah Beuckmann, from Glasgow, said she suffered flu-like symptoms after getting her first dose in mid-March — a very common side-effect. But the 34-year-old began to feel a tingling sensation in her legs just a week later and noticed a rash flaring up around her ankles.
President Joe Biden’s nomination of Eric Lander to be his top science adviser has been delayed in part because of a Democratic senator’s concerns about meetings Lander and his colleagues had with Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier who was charged with sex trafficking in 2019 before his apparent suicide.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/22/biden-top-scientist-met-jeffrey-epstein-confirmation-484159
Many of the vaccines developed to protect against COVID-19 are forms of messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines.
The Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines are forms of mRNA vaccine.
Unlike the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines, the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is not an mRNA vaccine.
Instead, the AstraZeneca vaccine is a viral vector vaccine made from a weakened form of a common cold virus from chimpanzees.
Robin Hauser, a pediatrician in Tampa, Florida, got COVID in February. What separates her from the vast majority of the tens of millions of other Americans who have come down with the virus is this: She got sick seven weeks after her second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/the-shock-and-reality-of-catching-covid-after-being-vaccinated
Closing playgrounds has helped to fuel “a pandemic of mental health problems” among children, a parliamentary committee has warned.
The All Party Parliamentary Group on a Fit and Healthy Childhood is calling for practical measures to help children recover from repeated lockdowns, which have left too many confined for long periods at home.
- Mass vaccination centre in Nice opened at 9am Saturday offering 4,000 AstraZeneca jabs to teachers, policemen and other at-risk staff aged over 55
- But it was forced to close by 1pm after just 58 people signed up for the jabs
- It is thought 3,000 teachers were eligible for the jabs but did not want to take it
- Local official said people ‘turned around’ after learning jab was AstraZeneca
Published 17 April 2019
Ukraine’s Azov movement is hostile to Russia, friendly to neo-Nazis, and inspired by France’s new right. It’s not running in Ukraine’s presidential elections because it plans to win power by playing a long game.
Johnson & Johnson privately reached out to Covid-19 vaccine rivals to ask them to join an effort to study the risks of blood clots and speak with one voice about safety, but Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc. declined.
Published 17 August 2011
Many scientists believe the remarkable properties of graphene could lead to the development of technology such as super-fast computers, flexible mobile phones and even transparent planes among other things. But will the nanomaterial live up to the hype?
…Why all the excitement? When graphite is broken down into graphene, the ultra-thin flakes take on unusual and exciting new properties. Three million of these sheets stacked on top of one another would stand just one millimetre high, and yet graphene is the strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than steel. It is also the most conductive. At the atomic level, it resembles a chicken wire lattice of carbon molecules that is so fine that not even a hydrogen molecule can pass through it.
Senior government officials have raised “urgent” concerns about the mass expansion of rapid coronavirus testing, estimating that as few as 2% to 10% of positive results may be accurate in places with low Covid rates, such as London.
…However, leaked emails seen by the Guardian show that senior officials are now considering scaling back the widespread testing of people without symptoms, due to a growing number of false positives.
…On 9 April, the day everyone in England was able to order twice-weekly lateral flow device (LFD) tests, Dyson wrote: “As of today, someone who gets a positive LFD result in (say) London has at best a 25% chance of it being a true positive, but if it is a self-reported test potentially as low as 10% (on an optimistic assumption about specificity) or as low as 2% (on a more pessimistic assumption).”
A study by Oxford University found the number of people who receive blood clots after getting vaccinated with a coronavirus vaccine are about the same for those who get Pfizer and Moderna vaccines as they are for the AstraZeneca vaccine that was produced with the university’s help. According to the study, 4 in 1 million people experience cerebral venous thrombosis after getting the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, versus 5 in 1 million people for the AstraZeneca vaccine. The risk of getting CVT is much higher for those who get COVID-19 — 39 in a million patients — than it is for those for get vaccinated. AstraZeneca’s vaccine use has been halted or limited in many countries on blood clot concerns.
- Luke Garrett, 20, died after suffering a seizure in Tarbolton, South Ayrshire
- Mr Garrett had muscular dystrophy and had been shielding for around a year
- But he died in the early hours of the morning the day after getting the jab
- Mother Tricia Garrett, 49, believes son would still be alive if he didn’t get the jab
- MHRA are investigating his death but there’s no evidence of jab causing seizures
There have been at least seven peer-reviewed studies which look at the question of lockdowns from a data point of view, and all of them come to the same basic conclusion: lockdowns do not have a statistically significant relationship with Covid cases or deaths. Here is a list of them with a key quote for ease of reference.
- “Comparing weekly mortality in 24 European countries, the findings in this paper suggest that more severe lockdown policies have not been associated with lower mortality. In other words, the lockdowns have not worked as intended.” “Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison” by Christian Bjørnskov. CESifo Economic Studies March 29th, 2021.
- “Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.” “Covid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of Adaptation” by Quentin De Larochelambert, Andy Marc, Juliana Antero, Eric Le Bourg, and Jean-François Toussaint. Frontiers in Public Health, November 19th, 2020.
- “Lockdowns do not reduce COVID-19 deaths.” “Government mandated lockdowns do not reduce Covid-19 deaths: implications for evaluating the stringent New Zealand response” by John Gibson. New Zealand Economic Papers, August 25th, 2020.
- “While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs.” “Assessing Mandatory Stay‐at‐Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID‐19” by Eran Bendavid, Christopher Oh, Jay Bhattacharya, John P.A. Ioannidis. European Journal of Clinical Investigation, January 5th, 2021.
- “Previous studies have claimed that shelter-in-place orders saved thousands of lives, but we reassess these analyses and show that they are not reliable. We find that shelter-in-place orders had no detectable health benefits, only modest effects on behaviour, and small but adverse effects on the economy.” “Evaluating the effects of shelter-in-place policies during the COVID-19 pandemic” by Christopher R. Berry, Anthony Fowler, Tamara Glazer, Samantha Handel-Meyer, and Alec MacMillen, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA, April 13th, 2021.
- “We were not able to explain the variation of deaths per million in different regions in the world by social isolation, herein analysed as differences in staying at home, compared to baseline. In the restrictive and global comparisons, only 3% and 1.6% of the comparisons were significantly different, respectively.” “Stay-at-home policy is a case of exception fallacy: an internet-based ecological study,” by R. F. Savaris, G. Pumi, J. Dalzochio & R. Kunst. Scientific Reports (Nature), March 5th, 2021.
- “Full lockdowns and wide-spread COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.” “A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes” by Rabail Chaudhry, George Dranitsaris, Talha Mubashir, Justyna Bartoszko, Sheila Riazi. EClinicalMedicine (The Lancet) 25 (2020) 100464, July 21st, 2020.
The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that 23 per cent of coronavirus deaths registered are now people who have died “with” the virus rather than “from” an infection.
This means that, while the person who died will have tested positive for Covid, that was not the primary cause of their death recorded on the death certificate.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/13/quarter-covid-deaths-not-caused-virus/
A presentation made to the National AEFI (adverse event following immunisation) Committee on March 31 recorded that there had been 180 deaths till that time and three-fourths of the deaths happened within three days of the shot.
In other serious adverse events too, the overwhelming majority took place in the three-day window. Even as AEFI deaths are reported daily, causality assessment by the National AEFI Committee appears to be lagging with information about just 10 deaths in the public domain.
Some 100 medical professionals have expressed opposition to vaccinating children with the coronavirus vaccine and separating between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
“We believe there is no room for vaccinating children at this time [due to] caution, modesty, the understanding that ‘haste is from the devil’; the recognition that we do not understand everything about the virus and the vaccine against it; and the first commandment of medicine: ‘First, do not harm,’” they said in a letter to the Health Ministry on Sunday.
…The authors of the letter said vaccinating children is not appropriate at this time because putting even a few children at risk of unknown side effects is not worth the protection it will afford them against a disease they say is not dangerous to children.