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News

Hospitals Retreat From Early Covid Treatment and Return to Basics – WSJ

Around one-third of hospital deaths during the initial COVID-19 peak were due to inappropriate treatment.

“We were intubating sick patients very early. Not for the patients’ benefit, but in order to control the epidemic & to save other patients,” Dr. Iwashyna said “That felt awful.”

…As a safety precaution, doctors and hospitals limited the access of health-care workers to coronavirus patients on ventilators, giving them fewer opportunities to check on them. That meant patients required more powerful sedatives to keep them from pulling out throat tubes.

…Overall, survival for Covid-19 patients increased 28% from April to September at HCA hospitals.

…Before the pandemic, between about 30% to more than 40% of ventilator patients died, according to research. Numbers were sharply higher in Wuhan, China. As the pandemic grew, hospitals in the U.S. reported death rates in some cases of about 50% for ventilated Covid-19 patients.

http://archive.today/2021.05.27-080636/https://www.wsj.com/articles/hospitals-retreat-from-early-covid-treatment-and-return-to-basics-11608491436

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Publications

Effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19: A Tale of Three Models – medRxiv

Results While model 1 found that lockdown was the most effective measure in the original 11 countries, model 2 showed that lockdown had little or no benefit as it was typically introduced at a point when the time-varying reproductive number was already very low. Model 3 found that the simple banning of public events was beneficial, while lockdown had no consistent impact. Based on Bayesian metrics, model 2 was better supported by the data than either model 1 or model 3 for both time horizons.

Conclusions Inferences on effects of NPIs are non-robust and highly sensitive to model specification. Claimed benefits of lockdown appear grossly exaggerated.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.22.20160341v3

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Publications

Covid-19: The lost lessons of Tamiflu – BMJ

While the truth about Tamiflu emerged only after years of exhaustive work by the Cochrane review group and investigative journalists, the machinations behind remdesivir’s rapid climb were evident at an early stage. On 29 April, the same day as a trial was published showing no significant effect of remdesivir among patients in hospital, remdesivir’s manufacturer rushed out interim findings of a more favourable trial by press release and with full White House honours. The much vaunted but minimal benefits shown in severely ill people were used to justify FDA approvals and worldwide purchase. Now a much larger trial has found little or no benefit in hospital patients, and a BMJ Rapid Recommendation, produced in collaboration with the World Health Organization and Magic App, has come down against use of remdesivir in patients with covid-19 of any severity.

…Science by press release, on the basis of interim or ad hoc analyses, and without access to the data, also afflicts our knowledge about the covid-19 candidate vaccines. Patients and the public deserve better than this. So do health professionals. Pandemic or no pandemic, decisions must be based on scrutiny of the full data from trials that are independent of drug and vaccine manufacturers.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201205164516/https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4701

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Publications

UK Economic and fiscal outlook – UK Office for Budget Responsibility

The coronavirus pandemic has delivered the largest peacetime shock to the global economy on record. It has required the imposition of severe restrictions on economic and social life; driven unprecedented falls in national income; fuelled rises in public deficits and debt surpassed only in wartime; and created considerable uncertainty about the future.

…GDP is set to fall by 11 per cent this year – the largest drop in annual output since the Great Frost of 1709.

https://obr.uk/docs/ExecSumm_November_2020.pdf

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Publications

Predictive performance of international COVID-19 mortality forecasting models – medRxiv

The Imperial model had larger errors, about 5-fold higher than other models by six weeks. This appears to be largely driven by the aforementioned tendency to overestimate mortality. At twelve weeks, MAPE values were lowest for the IHME-MS-SEIR (23.7%) model, while the Imperial model had the most elevated MAPE (98.8%). Predictive performance between models was generally similar for median absolute errors (MAEs) 

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.13.20151233v5.full

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Publications

Covid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of Adaptation – Frontiers in Public Health

Results: Higher Covid death rates are observed in the [25/65°] latitude and in the [−35/−125°] longitude ranges. The national criteria most associated with death rate are life expectancy and its slowdown, public health context (metabolic and non-communicable diseases (NCD) burden vs. infectious diseases prevalence), economy (growth national product, financial support), and environment (temperature, ultra-violet index). Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.

Conclusion: Countries that already experienced a stagnation or regression of life expectancy, with high income and NCD rates, had the highest price to pay. This burden was not alleviated by more stringent public decisions. Inherent factors have predetermined the Covid-19 mortality: understanding them may improve prevention strategies by increasing population resilience through better physical fitness and immunity.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339/full

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Opinion

Have we got it all wrong when it comes to Covid? – The Irish Examiner

There is a case to be made that we as a country have been led by a conversation about the virus which has been unbalanced and disproportionate, writes Daniel McConnell

https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-40081700.html

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Opinion Publications

Covid-19: politicisation, “corruption,” and suppression of science – BMJ

Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling.

Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling.

Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling.

The UK’s pandemic response provides at least four examples of suppression of science or scientists. First, the membership, research, and deliberations of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) were initially secret until a press leak forced transparency.2 The leak revealed inappropriate involvement of government advisers in SAGE, while exposing under-representation from public health, clinical care, women, and ethnic minorities. Indeed, the government was also recently ordered to release a 2016 report on deficiencies in pandemic preparedness, Operation Cygnus, following a verdict from the Information Commissioner’s Office.

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4425

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Opinion Publications

When good science is suppressed by the medical-political complex, people die – BMJ

The UK’s pandemic response relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines. Government appointees are able to ignore or cherry pick science—another form of misuse—and indulge in anti-competitive practices that favour their own products and those of friends and associates.

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4425

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News

Government urged to focus on surge in unexplained non-Covid deaths at home – The Telegraph

Experts fear people still unable to access medical care even though there are now relatively few coronavirus cases in hospitals

Twice as many people are now dying at home from unexplained causes rather than Covid-19, with experts calling for an urgent investigation into what is causing the excess deaths.

The ONS figures show that deaths in hospitals continue to be much lower than usual, suggesting that many of the home deaths are people who would ordinarily have received hospital care.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/28/deaths-home-causes-coronavirus-increase-ons-figures-reveal/

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Videos

Oxford epidemiologists: suppression strategy is not viable – UnHerd

2:55 – Masks
• Tom Jefferson: “Aside from people who are exposed on the frontlines, there is no evidence that masks make any difference, but what’s even more extraordinary is the uncertainty: we don’t know if these things make any difference…. We should have done randomised control trials in February, March and April but not anymore because viral circulation is low and we will need huge number of enrolees to show whether there was any difference”.
• Carl Heneghan: “By all means people can wear masks but they can’t say it’s an evidence-based decision… there is a real separation between an evidence-based decision and the opaque term that ‘we are being led by the science’, which isn’t the evidence”.

9:26 – Pandemic life cycle
• CH: “One of the keys of the infection is to look at who’s been infected, which shows a crucial difference when comparing the pandemic theory to seasonal theory. In a pandemic you’d expect to see young people disproportionately affected, but in the UK we’ve only had six child deaths, which is far less than we’d normally see in a pandemic. The high number of deaths with over-75s fits with the seasonal theory”.

14:00 – Covid seasonality
• CH: “The stability of the virus is far less when the temperature goes up but humidity seems to be particularly important. The lower the humidity, the more stable the virus is in the atmosphere and on surfaces… It’s now winter in the southern hemisphere, which is why places like Australia are suddenly having outbreaks.”

20:37 – Lockdown
• CH: “Many people said that we should have locked down earlier, but 50% of care homes developed outbreaks during the lockdown period so there are issues within the transmission of this virus that are not clear… Lockdown is a blunt tool and there needs to be intelligent conversations about what mitigation strategies can keep society functioning while we keep the most vulnerable shielded”.

25:20 – Nightingale hospitals
• CH: “They are the wrong structure. What you need is fever hospitals which were here until around the 1980s or 90s. They were on single floors and had isolation within isolation. Theere were no lift shafts and staff were trained, which meant that everyone was protected from each other… It looks like at leats 20% of people got the infection while they were in hospital”

27:30 – Suppression strategy
• CH: “The benefits of the current strategy are outweighed by the harms…When it comes to suppression, only the virus will have a determination in that. If you follow the New Zealand policy of suppressing it to zero and locking down the country forever, then you’re going to have a problem… This virus is so out there now, I cannot see a strategy that makes suppression the viable option. The strategy right now should be how we learn to live with this virus”

32:45 – Response to the virus
• TJ: “I am a survivor of four pandemics and for the other three, I didn’t even realise they were going on. People died but nothing changed and none of the fabric of society was eroded like this response… Do I see steps being taken at a European level about learning from our mistakes and changing policies? The answer is no…

39:30 – Politics of the virus
• CH: “We as individuals are part of the problem because sensationalism drives people to click and read the information. So it’s a big circle because we’ve created the problem — if we put the worst case scenario out there, we will go and have a look. If you want a solution, you’ve got to get people to stop clicking on this sensationalist stuff”.

43:30 – IFR
• CH: “We will be down about where we were with the swine flu: around 0.1-0.3% which is much lower than what we think because at the moment we are seeing the case fatality”.
• TJ: “If you look at the whole narrative, it was distorted from the very beginning by the obsession with influenza which was just one or two agents and nothing else existed. We’re no different now”.

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News

Belarus president unwilling to accept additional terms to get foreign loans – BelTA

According to the president, the World Bank has showed interest in Belarus’ coronavirus response practices. “It is ready to fund us ten times more than it offered initially as a token of commendation for our efficient fight against this virus. The World Bank has even asked the Healthcare Ministry to share the experience. Meanwhile, the IMF continues to demand from us quarantine measures, isolation, a curfew. This is nonsense. We will not dance to anyone’s tune,” said the president.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200707005229/https://eng.belta.by/president/view/belarus-president-unwilling-to-accept-additional-terms-to-get-foreign-loans-131164-2020/

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News

How Many More Will Die From Fear of the Coronavirus? – New York Times

Cleveland Clinic CEO and Mayo Clinic President say the response to COVID-19 could be as big a disaster as the virus itself.

“The true cost of this epidemic will not be measured in dollars; it will be measured in human lives and human suffering. In the case of cancer alone, our calculations show we can expect a quarter of a million additional preventable deaths annually if normal care does not resume,” they wrote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/opinion/coronavirus-hospitals-deaths.html

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Videos

Professor Dolores Cahill on The James Delingpole Channel

Note: The video has been removed from Vimeo but has been archived on BitChute (see embedded below highlights).

James talks with Professor Dolores Cahill, a world renowned immunologist who has advised the Irish government and the EU.

  • We should end the lockdown. Quarantining healthy people was a huge mistake, should never have been done and should never happen again.
  • All the available information tells us there’s no longer any basis for the lockdowns. The economic harm and resulting health effects could be five times higher than those caused by the virus. The adverse health implications of poverty is well-known and has lots of supporting data.
  • The immunology community knew in January and February that there was nothing very special about COVID-19.
  • There are lots of clinical trials showing the usefulness of vitamins C, D and Zinc for preventing symptoms of corona-type viruses.
  • It is also very well established that hydroxychloroquine, which is a very safe drug, can be used as a treatment.
  • There was no need to ramp up the hospital care system because there were established methods for prevention and treatment.
  • It was known that the virus would circulate the world in a month. Professor Cahill was surprised at the lockdown because the ‘virus was gone.’ There is clearly enough data for this.
  • COVID-19 (also known as SARS-CoV-2) is about 80% the same as SARS-CoV-1 in 2003. These types of viruses last about 6 weeks in each location before naturally ‘dying off’ as people become exposed and then developing immunity.
  • 80 out of 100 people would have developed antibodies within 10-11 days and become immune for life without experiencing symptoms.
  • Although COVID-19 is a novel virus, it can be ‘recognized’ by the immune system of anyone who had already been exposed to SARS-CoV-1. This is because of COVID-19’s 80% similarity to the earlier 2003 virus.
  • With these types of viruses, you will be negative for the PCR test (which tests for the presence of the virus) after recovery but you will test positive for the antibodies.
  • You don’t need the lockdown if you boost your immune system. in fact, the lockdown made matters worse by depressing people’s immune system. Sunshine, interacting with people, shaking hands–all these help to boost your immune system.
  • Elderly people should be taking vitamin C, D and Zinc to protect their immune systems. People with underlying conditions, or those who develop symptoms, should contact their doctor to consider prescribing off-label hydroxychloroquine.
  • Symptoms: flu-like for the first five days. If it gets worse and you develop a cough, that’s when you need to ring your doctor for treatment. Treatment includes hydroxychloroquine for 3-5 days, with Zinc and AZT antibiotic. This is an established protocol that has been used in many clinical trials in 2020.
  • There was some reason to be scared of COVID-19 during the very early stages (around January) because because we didn’t know anything about it. However, the media and WHO was fearmongering when they used Wuhan as an example of what would happen everywhere.
  • From February onward, the immunology community recognized that COVID-19 is the same as a normal virus in most parts of the world. There was something different about Wuhan, Bergamo and New York but t here was no reason to lockdown the rest of the world.
  • Vaccines have their place and can be safe. However, studies show that animal and human subjects that were given a type of influenza vaccine later reacted badly when they encountered a coronavirus ‘in the wild’. The reaction caused a cytokine storm that either killed the subject or made the subject very ill. The reaction between different types of vaccinated and wild viruses is called viral interference.
  • People in Wuhan and Bergamo were given a certain type of influenza vaccine. It became apparent around April-May that the high death rates in both cities could be due to viral interference from the administered influenza vaccine.
  • It has not been possible to make a safe and effective vaccine for the SARS-CoV-1 in 2003. If we have not been able to make a vaccine for this coronavirus, we should not expect a safe vaccine for COVID-19 any time soon. A vaccine developed for COVID-19 would be a complete experiment on those who take it.
  • Vaccines containing alluminium, Thimerodal or mercury are intrinsically unsafe.
  • The global death rate for COVID-19 is around the same as a bad influenza. Outside of Wuhan, Bergamo and New York, the death rate appears to be less than the normal flu.
  • Current data shows that the real death rate for COVID-19 is 20 or 30 times less than the initial estimates from the WHO. We now know the death rate is about one in a thousand for the vulnerable and one in five thousand for the healthy. In the under 70s age range, this is lower than the average flu.
  • It was well-known in February that there was no need for the lockdowns.
  • There have been no cases of transmission from children.
  • If we were to end the lockdown, we would need 10 days to prepare. This is because people have not been out and exposed to sunlight. Preparation include taking vitamins C, D and Zinc; getting fresh air; avoiding stress; and making sure doctors have hydroxychloroquine.
  • It is almost as if the current advice is geared to making sure people get sick in order to support more lockdowns.
  • There will be no second spike if people take the above precautions to strengthen their immune system.
  • A recent study shows that people who continued working were healthy. Engaging with other keeps you healthy by strengthening the immune system.
  • There hasn’t been an open debate in any country about the harm versus benefits of the lockdown. This may be a big reason for why the lockdowns are continuing.
  • Dr. Rashid A. Buttar and Dr. Judy Mikovits are trying to open the debate about prevention and treatments but their voices are being censored.
  • The use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment has been politicized.
  • Evidence is being cherry-picked in order reach a predetermined goal: a money-making vaccine. The existing prevention and treatment methods don’t make money for big-pharma.
  • Masks and social distancing is appropriate for something like ebola but not for coronaviruses.
  • We will build up herd immunity within about two weeks.
  • We know how COVID-19 is transmitted because it belongs to the family of coronaviruses. It is not transmitted through the air. This has been proven because groups of people in encloses spaces (for example, plane-loads of fruit-pickers) did not all come down with the sickness.
  • The two meter rule is unnecessary.
  • There was enough information from many sources for the government and their advisors to know that all these measures are wrong. There should be legal implications for those who advocate continued lockdown. Hundreds of unnecessary deaths should be grounds for a legal tribunal.
  • There is a high risk of a death spike after lockdown due to other causes, such as cancers, that will attributed to COVID-19. This will be used to support more lockdowns.
  • The politicians, broadcasters, newspaper editors, ministers for health–everyone complicit in censoring and withholding information from the public about the true nature of COVID-19 needs to be held personally liable for the deaths caused.

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Videos

The epidemic is on its way out – Professor Sunetra Gupta, UnHerd

We spoke to Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford and head of the team that released a study in March which speculated that as much as 50% of the population may already have been infected and the true Infection Fatality Rate could be as low as 0.1%.

In her first major interview since the Oxford study was published, she goes further by arguing that Covid-19 has already passed through the population and is now on its way out. She said:

On antibodies:
• Many of the antibody tests are “extremely unreliable”
• They do not indicate the true level of exposure or level of immunity • “Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet what we’ve observed is almost a uniform pattern of behaviour”
• “Much of the driving force was due to the build-up of immunity”

On IFR:

• “Infection Fatality Rate is less than 1 in 1000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000.”
• That would be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%

On lockdown policy:
• Referring to the Imperial model: “Should we act on a possible worst case scenario, given the costs of lockdown? It seems to me that given that the costs of lockdown are mounting that case is becoming more and more fragile”
• Recommends “a more rapid exit from lockdown based more on certain heuristics, like who is dying and what is happening to the death rates”

On the UK Government response:
• “We might have done better by doing nothing at all, or at least by doing something different, which would have been to pay attention to protecting the vulnerable”

On the R rate:
• It is “principally dependent on how many people are immune” and we don’t have that information.
• Deaths are the only reliable measure.

On New York:
• “When you have pockets of vulnerable people it might rip through those pockets in a way that it wouldn’t if the vulnerable people were more scattered within the general population.”

On social distancing:
• “Remaining in a state of lockdown is extremely dangerous”
• “We used to live in a state approximating lockdown 100 years ago, and that was what created the conditions for the Spanish Flu to come in and kill 50m people.”

On next steps:
• “It is very dangerous to talk about lockdown without recognising the enormous costs that it has on other vulnerable sectors in the population”
• It is a “strong possibility” that if we return to full normal tomorrow — pubs, nightclubs, festivals — we would be fine.

On the politics of Covid:
• “There is a sort of libertarian argument for the release of lockdown, and I think it is unfortunate that those of us who feel we should think differently about lockdown”
• “The truth is that lockdown is a luxury, and it’s a luxury that the middle classes are enjoying and higher income countries are enjoying at the expense of the poor, the vulnerable and less developed countries.”

Categories
Opinion

Poverty won’t cure coronavirus… we MUST get back to work, writes hotel chain magnate SIR ROCCO FORTE – Daily Mail

The real and overwhelming tragedy is the devastation it is causing to previously profitable businesses, and even worse to the millions of working people previously in secure and productive jobs. This should be the Government’s overriding priority

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8317531/Poverty-wont-cure-corona-work-writes-hotel-chain-magnate-SIR-ROCCO-FORTE.html

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News

Coronavirus: Chancellor Rishi Sunak warns of ‘significant recession’ – BBC

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52641807

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Opinion

Face Masks Pose Serious Risks To The Healthy – Russell Blaylock MD

As for the scientific support for the use of face mask, a recent careful examination of the literature, in which 17 of the best studies were analyzed, concluded that, “ None of the studies established a conclusive relationship between mask/respirator use and protection against influenza infection.”1

When a person is infected with a respiratory virus, they will expel some of the virus with each breath. If they are wearing a mask, especially an N95 mask or other tightly fitting mask, they will be constantly rebreathing the viruses, raising the concentration of the virus in the lungs and the nasal passages. We know that people who have the worst reactions to the coronavirus have the highest concentrations of the virus early on. And this leads to the deadly cytokine storm in a selected number.

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Opinion

Opposing lockdown is NOT “profits before people” – Off-Guardian

Ever since the UK entered “lockdown”, those pushing for it to end have been labelled “callous” or “selfish” or accused of putting profits before people. Meanwhile millions are unemployed and a global famine is on the horizon. The lockdown will kill more people than the virus, and needs to be ended.

In what is perhaps the greatest example of gaslighting in human history, we have “champions of the working class” arguing for mass unemployment, the shutting down of small businesses and the self-employed, and draconian police powers.

https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/12/opposing-lockdown-is-not-profits-before-people/

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News

More people dying at home during Covid-19 pandemic – UK analysis – The Guardian

About 8,000 more people have died in their own homes since the start of the coronavirus pandemic than in normal times, a Guardian analysis has found, as concerns grow over the number avoiding going to hospital.

Of that total, 80% died of conditions unrelated to Covid-19, according to their death certificates. Doctors’ leaders have warned that fears and deprioritisation of non-coronavirus patients are taking a deadly toll.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/08/more-people-dying-at-home-during-covid-19-pandemic-uk-analysis