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Millions of Britons could need Covid boosters every six months for the foreseeable future, a health boss hinted today.
Dr Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), suggested the most vulnerable ‘relevant groups’ in society will still need regular top-up jabs.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10660967/Health-chief-hints-relevant-groups-continue-Covid-boosters-six-months.html
Over the past two years, we have seen pensioners penalised for drinking cups of tea a bit too close to each other in their gardens, women fined for going for a walk in a reservoir slightly too far away from their homes, and we’ve seen more than 300 people charged by the police for being ‘potentially infectious’. Children were unable to visit their grandparents at care homes to share their last moments together. Families were separated from spending festive and religious periods together. I could go on. While the Government used the Public Health Act 1984 to implement many of the lockdown restrictions, the Coronavirus Act gave the Government similar extreme authoritarian powers.
From the very beginning of the pandemic, a public health emergency has been used to push through laws that bite at the very liberties we are so proud of here in the UK. I consistently warned against the risk to our civil liberties arising from the reams of guidance and regulations issued by the Government over the past two years and the powers in the Coronavirus Act.
The boy – aged between 11 and 12 – fell ill just after 1pm today at lunchtime
Police and ambulance rushed to Shoeburyness High School to try and save him
Tonight Essex Police confirmed it was investigating and death was ‘unexplained’
Speaking this week on The Mail on Sunday’s Medical Minefield podcast, Prof Woolhouse said: ‘I think that lockdown will be viewed by history as a monumental mistake on a global scale, for a number of reasons.
‘The obvious one is the immense harm the lockdown, more than any other measure, did in terms of the economy, mental health and on the wellbeing of society.
…[A study published in Science in February 2021] also found something intriguing: lockdowns could, in a worst-case scenario, actually increase transmission of the virus by up to five per cent.
…As Dr Ali puts it: ‘Some people say lockdowns were beneficial, others that they were really terrible.‘The reality actually is much closer to the idea that it didn’t make much difference either way.’
For those who made painful sacrifices, that won’t be an easy truth to swallow.
An 18-year-old died two weeks after having her Covid vaccination when a blood clot caused a ‘thunder clap’ headache. Kasey Turner was admitted to hospital two weeks after having the AstraZeneca vaccine.
An inquest this week heard her severe and sudden headache was the result of a thrombosis in her sinus cavity. Kasey was admitted to Barnsley Hospital’s A&E department on the morning of September 23, 2021 with the “worst headache” that she had ever experienced. Partly because of a low platelet count in her blood doctors ruled out a brain hemorrhage.
Risk calculus is a funny thing. According to a new poll, the Canadians most cautious about the risk of catching Covid-19 are also the most likely to support open war between Russia and the United States.
It wasn’t a big sample, but the results were stark. Ekos Politics polled a random sample of around 1000 Canadians, and stratified the results by vaccination status. This revealed that whereas 56% of unvaccinated Canadians oppose the idea of NATO imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, an even greater number of the triple-vaccinated — 59% — support doing so.
Serco has won a £212m ($278m) contract for disease testing and contract tracing from the UK Health Security Agency, the organisations set up to replace the controversial NHS Test & Trace and doomed Public Health England.
In a contract initially set to last two years, the tech and public sector outsourcing provider will be expected to support services in the country including positive case tracing, contact tracing, isolation follow-up, test enquiries, and test bookings.
So what should we expect from the sanctions? Western pundits and commentators have little doubt: the sanctions will hamstring the Russian economy, sow discontent among the Russian people and elites alike, and possibly even cause the downfall of the Putin regime. At the very least, we’re told, they will hinder Russia’s war efforts. But history suggests otherwise: see Iraq, or more recently Iran. Far more likely is that this turns out to be the latest Western strategic miscalculation in a long list of strategic blunders, of which the United States’ inglorious withdrawal from Afghanistan is just the most recent example.
After all, Russia has been preparing for this moment for quite some time. Following the first wave of Western sanctions, in 2014, and partly in retaliation against them, Putin embarked on what analysts have dubbed a “Fortress Russia” strategy, building up the country’s international reserves and diversifying them away from US dollars and British pounds, reducing its foreign exposure, boosting its economic cooperation with China, and pursuing import substitution strategies in several industries, including food, medicine and technology, in an effort to insulate Russia as much as possible from external shocks.
UK health and statistics authorities allegedly used 14 inconsistent ways to define fatalities.
Many who died early in the pandemic were never actually tested for the virus while others may have died from something else entirely, according to experts.
…The Oxford study, from 800 freedom of information requests, found some deaths were attributed to Covid just because a care home provider said so and coronavirus was rife.
The report stated: “At the beginning of the pandemic, Public Health England linked data on positive cases to the NHS central register of patients who died.
“This definition meant that a patient who tested positive would be counted as a Covid death even if they were run over by a bus several months later.”
Catherine Austin Fitts speaks with Karel van Wolferen Dutch journalist, writer and professor, about the war in Ukraine and how it ties into the economic reset.
Did official figures overestimate Britain’s grim Covid death toll?
It’s a question that has been asked persistently by medics and members of the public alike almost since the start of the pandemic.
…Last week, in the first of a series of special reports probing the science that has underpinned our pandemic response, The Mail on Sunday set about tackling the ongoing concerns that tests used to diagnose Covid were picking up people who were not actually infected.
The conclusion of some scientists was, yes, they did. And there were those who maintained that despite shortcomings, PCR swabs – used by millions – were accurate enough.
The shocking moments that were experienced when escaping the horror of the war were described by ethnic Greeks originally from Sartana on the outskirts of Mariupol in Eastern Ukraine.
The refugees from Sartana have been in hosting facilities of the Municipality of Zografou in Athens for a week now and their children have already started school.
In speaking about their escape from Mariupol through a corridor, one refugee speaking in Greek with a distinguishable Ukrainian accent said to OPEN TV: “I remember when leaving Mariupol, Ukrainian soldiers stopped us and threatened us.”
“Russian soldiers in tanks were trying to calm us down after all of that,” she added.
A detailed analysis of where almost £5bn of Covid business funding went is not possible due to gaps in data, a spending watchdog has found.
The Scottish government provided £4.4bn in grants and business rates relief between the start of the pandemic and October last year.
A further £375m was announced following the emergence of Omicron last winter.
The government said the speed and scale of the roll out helped to safeguard thousands of job and businesses.
But Audit Scotland was unable to determine where all the money ended up.
…Scottish Conservative finance spokeswoman Liz Smith acknowledged the speed with which the money had to be released but said the report highlighted a “shocking lack of data” meant “enormous sums of public money were paid out” but “we don’t properly know where it went”.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220317095443/https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-60770729
Ending the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 may not be realistic because the electric vehicle charging network isn’t close to being ready, a government advisory report has warned.
Sir John Armitt, head of the National Infrastructure Commission, said there was a “real risk” to the deadline because of the slow progress of installing new electric chargers.
Drivers will not switch away from fossil fuel cars quickly enough if they are not confident of being able to charge electric vehicles, the commission warned in a report published on Wednesday.
The electric vehicle charging network is “significantly behind where it needs to be” and without more chargers drivers “will not have the confidence to make the switch to electric vehicles”, the report warns.
It has been one of the most enduring Covid conspiracy theories: that the ‘gold standard’ PCR tests used to diagnose the virus were picking up people who weren’t actually infected.
…But could they have been right all along?
It has been one of the most enduring Covid conspiracy theories: that the ‘gold standard’ PCR tests used to diagnose the virus were picking up people who weren’t actually infected.
Some even suggested the swabs, which have been carried out more than 200 million times in the UK alone, may mistake common colds and flu for corona.
If either, or both, were true, it would mean many of these cases should never have been counted in the daily tally – that the ominous and all-too-familiar figure, which was used to inform decisions on lockdowns and other pandemic measures, was an over-count.
And many of those who were ‘pinged’ and forced to isolate as a contact of someone who tested positive – causing a huge strain on the economy – did so unnecessarily.
Such statements, it must be said, have been roundly dismissed by top experts. And those scientists willing to give credence such concerns have been shouted down on social media, accused of being ‘Covid-deniers’, and even sidelined by colleagues.
But could they have been right all along?
THE PFIZER-BIONTECH vaccine, which relies on technology known as messenger RNA, has been instrumental in the war on Covid. But there are important questions about its side effects. Particularly since a new report has outlined 42,086 case reports, detailing lesser-known adverse events after inoculation with the jab.
The NHS spent billions on Covid tests, but is there any truth behind the claims that the ‘gold standard’ PCRs who too sensitive, and ended up diagnosing cases who were never infectious? Were the pandemic infection figures deliberately ‘sexed up’ to scare people in complying with lockdown rules? And was it really worth spending £37billion plus on testing? The Medical Minefield team investigate with science journalist Jo Macfarlane, public health consultant Dr Allyson Pollock and Dr Al Richards, Associate Professor of Pharmacy at the University of Reading.
http://archive.today/2022.06.21-103256/https://www.mailplus.co.uk/radio/medical-minefield/162080/were-millions-diagnosed-with-covid-when-they-didnt-really-have-it
Britain’s Covid pandemic death rate is much better than previously thought compared with the rest of the world, a Lancet study has shown.
Research by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in the US calculated the excess death rates for 191 countries and territories and found that the UK is now roughly in the middle at 102.
Previously, countries have been judged by death rates alone, which would place Britain at 168 – the 24th worst in the world. Critics of the Government’s pandemic response have often cited this figure as justification for calling for tougher Covid restrictions.
But Britain was found to have an excess death rate of 126.8 per 100,000, very close to France – which had 124.4 per 100,000 – and Germany, with 120.5 per 100,000.
Sweden, which did not lock down, was found to have one of the best excess death rates in Europe, with 91.2 per 100,000. Only Finland, Luxembourg and Iceland fared better.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220310190243/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/03/10/uk-covid-death-rate-compared-rest-world-isnot-bad-feared/
Thailand’s National Health Security Office (NHSO) has so far paid 1.509 billion baht ($45.65 million) as compensation to 12,714 people who developed side-effects after they received Covid-19 vaccines.
The NHSO on March 9 reported that from May 19, 2021 to March 8 this year, a total of 15,933 people had filed complaints of negative reactions to Covid-19 vaccines.
The NHSO said 2,328 complaints were rejected after it ruled that the side-effects were not related to the vaccinations.
Of the rejected cases, 875 complainants are appealing against the earlier decision of the NHSO.
It added that 891 cases were pending consideration.