Genetic match discovered in Covid’s unique furin cleavage site on spike protein
Matched genetic sequence patented by Moderna for cancer research purposes
Researchers say one in 3trillion chance Covid developed the code naturally
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Two weeks ago the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published data about the effectiveness of boosters against COVID-19
The CDC failed to publish a tranche of their data, however – omitting the impact on those aged 18-49, who are least likely to benefit from boosters
The CDC are also being criticized for failing to publish their information about child hospitalization rates and comorbidities
A spokeswoman for the CDC said they were concerned that the data would be misinterpreted, pointing out that it was incomplete and not verified
Critics said that it was always better to publish the information rather than withhold, and allow scientists to analyze and explain what they could
Remaining restrictions on travel could be reviewed before Easter but some laws introduced during the pandemic will be made permanent, according to the Government’s plan for living with coronavirus.
The legal requirement to isolate is to be scrapped within days as the Prime Minister vowed to remove “all remaining domestic restrictions in law”.
The Government’s Living with Covid plan sets out its intention for other legal provisions to remain indefinitely, while others will be reviewed at a later date.
“We knew from February [2020], never mind March, that the lockdown would not solve the problem. It would simply delay it,” Woolhouse says, a note of enduring disbelief in his voice. And yet in government, “there was no attention paid to that rather obvious drawback of the strategy”.
Instead, lockdowns – which “only made sense in the context of eradication” – became the tool of choice to control Covid. The die was cast in China, which instituted ultra-strict measures and, unforgivably in Woolhouse’s book, was praised by the World Health Organisation for its “bold approach”. “The WHO,” he suggests, “got the biggest calls completely wrong in 2020. The early global response to the pandemic was woefully inadequate.”
The UK’s largest private provider of children’s care homes sent more than £2 million to its founders’ offshore company in the Caribbean while accepting huge sums in government Covid support.
Caretech Holdings PLC has posted soaring profits in the past two years despite having care homes for the most vulnerable in society that are among the worst-rated in the country.
“If you want to see the anti-human nature of the western green left in one shot, that is it right there,” Mr Morrow said.
“They’re saying human activity is the cause of disaster – so they’re saying human activity, reproduction, having children – this is a cause of disaster.”
[Ms. Spit] is part of a very small, little-discussed community of pandemic victims: those who have suffered—or had family or loved ones suffer—from rare but serious vaccine side effects recognized by doctors, regulators and researchers. They say they feel lost in wider Covid-19 statistics, which have shown vaccines to be extremely safe and effective for most of the population.
Faced with the gravest health crisis in memory, governments deployed newly developed vaccines in record time. Many countries indemnified pharmaceutical companies that made the shots, with some governments promising to consider compensation for suspected Covid-19 vaccine-related injuries.
Now governments, including the U.S. and U.K., are trying to live up to that pledge. They are in the very early stages of applying existing vaccine-injury programs to hundreds of claims of injury alleged from Covid-19 shots.
…The U.K.’s National Health Service has received more than 720 claims requesting Covid-19 vaccine-related compensation. The country’s vaccine-injury compensation program entails a one-size-fits-all cash payment of £120,000, equivalent to around $163,000. The volume of Covid-related claims has grown by about 20 a week, toward a projected 1,500 to 1,800 new claims this year, according to U.K. government projections.
http://archive.today/2022.02.22-001537/https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-vaccines-were-deadly-in-rare-cases-governments-are-now-weighing-compensation-11645266603
More than 240,000 calls to NHS 24 went unanswered from September to January in figures described as “astonishing” by opposition parties.
At a time when patients were urged to call the helpline before turning up to A&E, an average of almost 50,000 calls per month to the NHS 111 number failed to be connected.
The highest number of abandoned calls occurred in September 2021 when 68,119 were left unanswered, according to data obtained by the Scottish Conservatives.
Over the festive period, in December, on more than 46,000 occasions callers were unable to speak to anyone.
The Conservatives said that “shockingly” on January 3, very nearly half of all calls (49.7%) were abandoned, accounting for more than 7,000 abandoned calls on that day alone.
Government’s Cobra emergency committee to meet
The government’s emergency response committee Cobra will meet this afternoon to discuss the response to Storm Eunice, No 10 has confirmed.
The Home Office minister Damian Hinds said the military was being readied to help if required. He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain:
Cobra have been convened about making sure the readiness is in place for this storm. Obviously it comes right on the back of Storm Dudley.
“We have had to learn a lot of lessons from previous events like Storm Arwen and others.
“There are troops as you know at readiness if needed, if military assistance is called for, the Environment Agency are of course on the ground, the network operators themselves are also in readiness.”
The wearing of face masks by doctors contributed to the death of a patient in an NHS hospital because they exacerbated communication problems, a coroner has said.
The personal protective equipment “aggravated” a “failure in verbal communication” between two physicians treating an epileptic patient.
John Skinner was admitted to Watford General hospital suffering from seizures in May 2020, during the first Covid wave.
He was given phenytoin, an anti-epileptic drug, by a junior doctor who did not know the correct dose to be administered and asked for help from a more senior colleague who told him to use a 15 mg/kg dose measurement. This was misheard as 50 kg/mg.
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Trudeau’s totalitarian turn – The Spectator
On announcing the ‘state of emergency’, (state of emergency piled upon pre-existing state of emergency), Trudeau’s government immediately declared that banks are allowed to freeze personal and business accounts on the mere suspicion of involvement with the protest, without obtaining a court order. They cannot be sued for such actions. Police, intelligence agencies and banks are authorised to share ‘relevant information’. Banks are now required to report financial relationships of persons involved in the protests to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Photos of meeting in Kyiv last year – which UK personnel thought was private – were posted by Ukraine’s National Guard (NGU)
UK MoD tells Declassified it has no plans to train NGU and that British commander was misquoted
But UK military is engaging with NGU and aware of “the peculiarities of [its] combat operations”
Apparent member of another far-right Ukrainian group was trained at Sandhurst in 2020
Details and photos of the meeting in the capital, Kyiv, were posted in Ukrainian on the website of Ukraine’s National Guard (NGU) last year.
Declassified understands the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) believed the September 2021 meeting to be private and should not have been publicised. There is no mention of the meeting in any UK records that are publicly available.
Three British commanders of Operation Orbital – the UK military’s training mission in Ukraine – are pictured, alongside three NGU officers. They sit around a table taking notes.
The World Health Organization amplified false Chinese statements about COVID-19 initially, while it dragging its feet on declaring an international emergency. Pandemic experts here clung to flu epidemic plans too, ignoring observable COVID-19 successes in East Asia and so ruling out any similar possibility of test-and-trace containment in the UK from the off.
Most public health experts then pivoted to being extremely pro-lockdown, but stuck rigidly to this even as the context, and so the costs and benefits of restrictions, changed with the vaccines and omicron.
Epidemiologists proved especially stubborn. Their modelling usually ignored the role of voluntary behavioural change entirely, so erred on the side of assuming catastrophic public health outcomes absent government mandates and restrictions. Hence, Freedom Day was dubbed “criminal” by scientists, while the government’s scientific advisers called for more restrictions last Christmas. Both proved wrong in retrospect.
Anti-lockdown scientists were viewed as having ‘fringe’ ideas because those calling for draconian restrictions had more followers on social media, a study has shown.
Professor John Ioannidis, of Stanford University, an expert in data science and the reliability of research, studied the expertise of authors who signed the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) compared with signatories of the John Snow Memorandum.
…In an article published in BMJ Open Research, he found that both letters were authored by very influential experts, but that the John Snow Memorandum authors had a far greater reach on social media, which made it appear that their view had more support.
…Prof Ioannidis concluded: “Both the Great Barrington Declaration and John Snow Memorandum include many stellar scientists, but JSM has far more powerful social media presence and this may have shaped the impression that it is the dominant narrative.
In the two years since, ministers have been racing to rectify this. The spread of Covid spurred the Government to funnel more than £200m of taxpayer cash into a new Vaccine Manufacturing & Innovation Centre (VMIC), with hopes of bringing forward the opening date to summer 2021 and delivering millions of doses to get the population jabbed.
Although the money went in, jabs have yet to come out. More than six months after it was slated to open, VMIC’s doors are still closed. Its role in beating Covid has been non-existent.
Now, the mega-vaccine plant is up for sale – a step insiders say was unavoidable. “Without a buyer, VMIC would fail or it wouldn’t open,” one Westminster source says.
The European Medicines Agency’s safety committee said on Friday it was reviewing reports of heavy menstrual bleeding and absence of menstruation from women who had received COVID vaccines from Pfizer (PFE.N)/BioNTech (22UAy.DE)and Moderna (MRNA.O).
The assessment was in view of reports of menstrual disorders after receiving either of the two vaccines, both based on messenger RNA technology, and it was not yet clear whether there was a causal link, the agency said.
It is more than a rebuke to Medley and the modellers though. This pandemic began, for many, with an announcement from Imperial College, whose study predicted 500,000 deaths if we did nothing. We locked down and never tested the prediction.
This time, in the face of what the public saw as dire predictions, we didn’t lock down and the apocalypse never came. The unspoken — and sometimes spoken — implication is clear: are we all fools?
Smart meters will reportedly undergo a massive change and automatically send suppliers updates every 30 minutes on customers’ power use starting from May, the Telegraph has revealed. In May, energy regulator Ofgem will be given the green light to change the way smart meters work, possibly paving the way for “time of use” tariffs.
This could see customers charged different rates for energy throughout the day depending on demand, industry experts have claimed.
Such a system could see households pay more to use electricity at peak times, however, energy bosses have insisted the move will be optional for customers and even stated it will save money.
AstraZeneca recorded a big jump in revenue on Thursday as it begins to take a profit from its coronavirus vaccine for the first time.
The company recorded full-year revenues of $37.4 billion, an increase of 38% from the year before at constant exchange rates. Part of the boost came from $4 billion in sales of its COVID-19 vaccine, developed with the University of Oxford.
Despite rising revenue, AstraZeneca reported a pre-tax loss of $265 million due to costs from its purchase of U.S. drug company Alexion Pharmaceuticals and new drug research.
The Anglo-Swedish drugmaker said in November it would begin to take a “modest” profit from the COVID-19 shot, which it had been providing “at cost” — around $2 to $3 —following an agreement with Oxford. Other COVID-19 vaccine producers, such as Pfizer and Moderna, have been booking hefty profits on their shots all along.
In the three months to September, the company said revenue jumped by about 50%, to a record $9.9 billion. The increase was due to sales of more than $1 billion in COVID-19 vaccines and the inclusion for the first time of some $1.3 billion worth of revenue from its rare disease business unit following the recent acquisition of Alexion.
The South African GP who first raised the alarm about Omicron says she was pressured by governments “not to publicly state that it was a mild illness”.
Dr Angelique Coetzee told Germany’s Die Welt newspaper this week that European governments asked her to portray the new strain as just as serious as previous Covid-19 variants, including Delta.
“I was told not to publicly state that it was a mild illness,” she said. “I have been asked to refrain from making such statements and to say that it is a serious illness. I declined.”
Asked what she meant, Coetzee said “based on the clinical picture there are no indications that we are dealing with a very serious disease”.
http://archive.today/2022.02.12-083002/https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/covid-19-omicron-south-african-gp-who-raised-alarm-about-omicron-says-she-was-pressured-not-to-call-it-mild/XJ5H7I6E2LKVM5S655ET5HLIWI/