The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in partnership with WHO and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, conducted Catastrophic Contagion, a pandemic tabletop exercise at the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Brussels, Belgium, on October 23, 2022.
The extraordinary group of participants consisted of 10 current and former Health Ministers and senior public health officials from Senegal, Rwanda, Nigeria, Angola, Liberia, Singapore, India, Germany, as well as Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The exercise simulated a series of WHO emergency health advisory board meetings addressing a fictional pandemic set in the near future. Participants grappled with how to respond to an epidemic located in one part of the world that then spread rapidly, becoming a pandemic with a higher fatality rate than COVID-19 and disproportionately affecting children and young people.
Participants were challenged to make urgent policy decisions with limited information in the face of uncertainty. Each problem and choice had serious health, economic, and social ramifications.
Johns Hopkins University
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Covid expert Professor Peter Collignon has shared a shocking graph showing why restrictions such as mask-wearing make little difference to case numbers.
The graphs compiled from Johns Hopkins University data compared the seven day rolling case average in Hong Kong and New Zealand.
Both jurisdictions were following a Covid-zero policy with heavy restrictions but have been struck by recent Omicron outbreaks.
The graphs show case numbers have shot up in both countries in the last month from zero to 3,000 new cases per every million people despite a strengthening of face mask and density mandates.
http://archive.today/2022.07.20-102157/https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10571833/Australian-doctor-shares-astonishing-graph-showing-masks-dont-work-against-Covid.html
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/
This systematic review and meta-analysis are designed to determine whether there is empirical evidence to support the belief that “lockdowns” reduce COVID-19 mortality. Lockdowns are defined as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI). NPIs are any government mandate that directly restrict peoples’ possibilities, such as policies that limit internal movement, close schools and businesses, and ban international travel. This study employed a systematic search and screening procedure in which 18,590 studies are identified that could potentially address the belief posed. After three levels of screening, 34 studies ultimately qualified. Of those 34 eligible studies, 24 qualified for inclusion in the meta-analysis. They were separated into three groups: lockdown stringency index studies, shelter-in-placeorder (SIPO) studies, and specific NPI studies. An analysis of each of these three groups support the conclusion that lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality. More specifically, stringency index studies find that lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average. SIPOs were also ineffective, only reducing COVID-19 mortality by 2.9% on average. Specific NPI studies also find no broad-based evidence of noticeable effects on COVID-19 mortality.
While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.
The original coronavirus lockdowns had ‘little to no’ effect on pandemic death tolls in the US, UK and Europe, a controversial report suggests.
Economists who carried out a meta-analysis found draconian restrictions imposed in spring 2020 — including stay-at-home orders, compulsory masks and social distancing — only reduced Covid mortality by 0.2 per cent.
They warned that lockdowns caused ‘enormous economic and social costs’ and concluded they were ‘ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument’ going forward.
In an exclusive and explosive one-hour interview with Veronika Kyrylenko of The New American, pioneering mRNA scientist Dr. Robert Malone explains the intensely corrupt workings of the government regulatory bodies that have mismanaged the pandemic, discusses the problems with the vaccine program and delves into potentially explosive and game-changing revelations about the shady origins of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China.
Britain recorded no new deaths within 28 days of a positive COVID-19 test on Tuesday.
The last time Britain recorded no deaths was in March 2020, before the country had entered its first lockdown. The figure on Tuesday relates to how many deaths have been reported and it comes after a national holiday on Monday – a factor which has in the past skewed the data.
…Britain’s overall death toll from the pandemic stands at 127,782 and is the fifth highest in the world, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-reports-no-new-covid-19-deaths-3165-new-infections-2021-06-01/
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.