When our American cousins cry “Live Free or Die” and take to the streets to protest overweening state authority during lockdown, whether they know it or not, they are honouring the tradition of English liberty.
Many clinical research studies, even in the major general medical journals, do not satisfy the identifiable features that make them useful. These features include:
- problem base;
- context placement;
- information gain;
- pragmatism;
- patient centeredness;
- value for money;
- feasibility;
- transparency.
Most clinical research findings false. Further, most of the true findings do not result in huge human benefit. Reform and improvement in the clinical research are overdue.
See also: Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals by Richard Smith at the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine
Quoted summary points
Blue-sky research cannot be easily judged on the basis of practical impact, but clinical research is different and should be useful. It should make a difference for health and disease outcomes or should be undertaken with that as a realistic prospect.
Many of the features that make clinical research useful can be identified, including those relating to problem base, context placement, information gain, pragmatism, patient centeredness, value for money, feasibility, and transparency.
Many studies, even in the major general medical journals, do not satisfy these features, and very few studies satisfy most or all of them. Most clinical research therefore fails to be useful not because of its findings but because of its design.
The forces driving the production and dissemination of nonuseful clinical research are largely identifiable and modifiable.
Reform is needed. Altering our approach could easily produce more clinical research that is useful, at the same or even at a massively reduced cost.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002049
Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.
Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.
Fact 2: Protecting older, at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding.
Fact 3: Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem.
Fact 4: People are dying because other medical care is not getting done due to hypothetical projections.
Fact 5: We have a clearly defined population at risk who can be protected with targeted measures.
The coronavirus crisis has clearly demonstrated the value of good journalism. Yet the response of too much of the media has also shown how bad journalism can help to make a terrible situation even worse.
Self-important media outlets have crossed over from ‘speaking truth to power’ to assuming that they should have the power to tell governments what to do.
The overwhelming pressure of this shrill Something Must Be Done journalism quickly helped to push the UK government into changing tack and imposing a general lockdown, with far-reaching consequences for society.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/23/how-the-media-made-the-crisis-even-worse/
But as I have said repeatedly, I see no evidence for the necessity of lockdown, for two reasons. Firstly because the case fatality rate of Covid-19 does not warrant it (the evidence points to between 0.1%-0.5%, and a recent study from Stanford University suggests it may be between 0.12% and 0.2%). And secondly, because I have seen no evidence to suggest that a lockdown strategy makes any real difference in reducing cases and deaths.
The eurozone economy suffered the steepest falls in business activity and employment ever recorded during April as a result of measures taken to contain the COVID-19 outbreak, according to provisional PMI® survey data. The month as saw unprecedented damage to the eurozone economy from lockdown measures coupled with slumping global demand and shortages of both staff and inputs.
BBC: Coronavirus: Deaths at 20-year high but peak may be over
Summary:
- “A third [of deaths in the week up to 10 April] were linked to coronavirus, but deaths from other causes also increased, suggesting the lockdown may be having an indirect impact on health.”
- “On Tuesday [21 April] 823 new deaths were announced, but most of these happened in the previous days and weeks. Some even date back to March.”
- “But the ONS also said deaths from other causes rose too.”
- “The number of deaths from flu and pneumonia…is three times higher than the total number of coronavirus deaths this year.”
Carl Heneghan, director of the centre for evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, said that the impact of the lockdown was “going to outweigh the damaging effect of coronavirus”.
Project completed: October 2017
The Center’s SPARS Pandemic exercise narrative comprises a futuristic scenario that illustrates communication dilemmas concerning medical countermeasures (MCMs) that could plausibly emerge in the not-so-distant future. Its purpose is to prompt users, both individually and in discussion with others, to imagine the dynamic and oftentimes conflicted circumstances in which communication around emergency MCM development, distribution, and uptake takes place. While engaged with a rigorous simulated health emergency, scenario readers have the opportunity to mentally “rehearse” responses while also weighing the implications of their actions. At the same time, readers have a chance to consider what potential measures implemented in today’s environment might avert comparable communication dilemmas or classes of dilemmas in the future.
- COVID-19 is very infectious but causes no symptoms in most people.
- New York disaster is due to use of ventilators.
- 80% of pregnant women were COVID-19 positive but not a single baby died due to COVID-19.
- Do what we always do: isolate the frail and sick but don’t isolate the young and healthy.
- Getting herd immunity is how we’ve solved the problem in the past.
- Social distancing is destroying millions of lives and killing 100 people for every one it saves.
Visit Professor Joel Hay’s site at: https://joelhay.com/
A group of 101 Iranian doctors has penned a letter addressed to the leaders of Afghanistan, Georgia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Pakistan to take ‘immediate action’ to destroy “all of the US biological laboratories” in their countries amid fears that the coronavirus pandemic may have been spread deliberately as a form of biological warfare, Press TV has reported, citing the letter.
http://archive.today/2021.10.23-110640/https://sputniknews.com/20200319/iranian-doctors-urge-neighbours-to-liquidate-any-us-biological-labs-amid-coronavirus-fears-1078623300.html
Categories
Don’t gag NHS workers – Spiked
NHS staff have been warned against speaking out on ‘political’ issues in relation to coronavirus, including the widespread shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE).
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/22/dont-gag-nhs-workers/
United Nations warned the coronavirus could trigger famines around the world
Worldwide freeze on commerce has sent shock waves through financial markets
World Food Programme director warned millions could be forced into starvation
Those suffering acute hunger predicted to nearly double to 265 million this year
Coronavirus tests given to thousands of NHS staff so they could return to work have been found to be flawed and should no longer be relied on, a leaked document reveals.
Overall, however, the fact that good-sized regions from Utah to Sweden to much of East Asia have avoided harsh lockdowns without being overrun by Covid-19 is notable….And empirical analyses of national and regional response strategies…do not necessarily find that costly lockdowns work better against the virus than social distancing.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/22/there-is-no-empirical-evidence-for-these-lockdowns/
This article is from 28 March 2018:
There are many things policymakers can do to fight fake news and propaganda. New legislation for websites could require transparency about sponsored content and who is financing them, and the amount of money for sponsored content could be capped. They could attempt to clearly define illegal hate speech.
But they must be careful to avoid creating incentives for mass removals — and ensure they don’t find themselves mimicking the behavior of authoritarian countries.
https://www.politico.eu/article/opinion-big-tech-censorship-google-transparency/
Mexican health officials are investigating after two babies died and 29 children were hospitalized from suspected adverse reactions to shots from the country’s national vaccination program.
Six of the children hospitalized in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas remain in serious condition, the Mexican Social Security Institute said on Sunday.
The illnesses were reported after 52 children from the rural mining community of La Pimienta were given vaccines Friday for tuberculosis, rotavirus and Hepatitis B, the institute said. Later that night, 31 of the children “presented adverse reactions presumably associated with the application of these vaccines,” officials said. Two of the children later died.
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/10/health/mexico-vaccine-deaths/index.html
In 2016, WHO1 recommended that the dengue vaccine CYD-TDV (Dengvaxia; Pasteur, Lyon, France), the first dengue vaccine, licensed for use in adults and children aged 9 years or older, be considered for use in highly endemic regions where at least 70% of 9-year-old children had previously been infected with dengue. The Philippines was the first country to introduce Dengvaxia on a large scale in selected highly endemic regions, targeting about 1 million children aged 9–10 years. In November, 2017, an excess risk of hospitalisation for dengue and severe dengue in vaccinees who had not had a previous dengue infection at the time of vaccination was reported,2 on the basis of retrospective analyses3 of data from the Dengvaxia phase 3 trials, using a novel non-structural protein 1 (NS1) based antibody assay. Following a reanalysis of these data,3 the Philippine Dengvaxia programme was suspended. However, by the time the programme had been suspended, more than 830 000 children had received at least one of the three recommended Dengvaxia doses. The news about the safety concerns in dengue-naive vaccinees led to major public outcry, with loss in vaccine confidence that extended to routine childhood vaccines.4
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)32525-5/fulltext