- Misinformation #1: Natural immunity offers little protection compared to vaccinated immunity
- Misinformation #2: Masks prevent Covid transmission
- Misinformation #3: School closures reduce Covid transmission
- Misinformation #5: Young people benefit from a vaccine booster
- Misinformation #6: Vaccine mandates increased vaccination rates
- Misinformation #7: Covid originating from the Wuhan Lab is a conspiracy theory
- Misinformation #8: It was important to get the 2nd vaccine dose 3 or 4 weeks after the 1st dose
- Misinformation #8: It was important to get the 2nd vaccine dose 3 or 4 weeks after the 1st dose
- Misinformation #9: Data on the bivalent vaccine is “crystal clear”
- Misinformation #10: One in five people get long Covid
Schools
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Some Covid restrictions were “idiocy” and lengthy school closures were an “unnecessary mistake”, Germany’s lockdown chief has admitted.
Karl Lauterbach, who became the face of the pro-lockdown movement, said some regulations went too far.
“Much of what we did was right but what was idiocy was the things like jogging with masks, or rules for outdoors. Those were excessive,” Mr Lauterbach said.
I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.
I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.
This study explores the effect of in-person schooling on youth suicide. We document three key findings. First, using data from the National Vital Statistics System from 1990-2019, we document the historical association between teen suicides and the school calendar. We show that suicides among 12-to-18-year-olds are highest during months of the school year and lowest during summer months (June through August) and also establish that areas with schools starting in early August experience increases in teen suicides in August, while areas with schools starting in September don’t see youth suicides rise until September. Second, we show that this seasonal pattern dramatically changed in 2020. Teen suicides plummeted in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began in the U.S. and remained low throughout the summer before rising in Fall 2020 when many K-12 schools returned to in-person instruction. Third, using county-level variation in school reopenings in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021—proxied by anonymized SafeGraph smartphone data on elementary and secondary school foot traffic—we find that returning from online to in-person schooling was associated with a 12-to-18 percent increase teen suicides. This result is robust to controls for seasonal effects and general lockdown effects (proxied by restaurant and bar foot traffic), and survives falsification tests using suicides among young adults ages 19-to-25. Auxiliary analyses using Google Trends queries and the Youth Risk Behavior Survey suggests that bullying victimization may be an important mechanism.
Download the PDF: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30795/w30795.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20221229164454/https://www.nber.org/papers/w30795
Pfizer’s CEO has been rapped by the UK’s pharmaceutical watchdog for making “misleading” statements about children’s vaccines, The Telegraph can disclose.
…A code of practice panel, convened by the PMCPA, found that Pfizer had breached the code in a number of different ways, including by misleading the public, making unsubstantiated claims, and by failing to present information in a factual and balanced way.
Presented as an independent voice for “unbiased” scientific advice, iSAGE provided a channel for media spinmeisters, spies and psy-op specialists to influence Britain’s pandemic policy without accountability. Leaked internal emails show members fretting over its unethical methods.
…It also brings the recommendations for unvaccinated people in line with people who are fully vaccinated – an acknowledgment of the high levels of population immunity in the U.S., due to vaccination, past COVID-19 infections or both. “Based on the latest … data, it’s around 95% of the population,” Massetti said, “And so it really makes the most sense to not differentiate,” since many people have some protection against severe disease.
Abstract
The present coronavirus crisis caused a major worldwide disruption which has not been experienced for decades. The lockdown-based crisis management was implemented by nearly all the countries, and studies confirming lockdown effectiveness can be found alongside the studies questioning it. In this work, we performed a narrative review of the works studying the above effectiveness, as well as the historic experience of previous pandemics and risk-benefit analysis based on the connection of health and wealth. Our aim was to learn lessons and analyze ways to improve the management of similar events in the future. The comparative analysis of different countries showed that the assumption of lockdowns’ effectiveness cannot be supported by evidence—neither regarding the present COVID-19 pandemic, nor regarding the 1918–1920 Spanish Flu and other less-severe pandemics in the past. The price tag of lockdowns in terms of public health is high: by using the known connection between health and wealth, we estimate that lockdowns may claim 20 times more life years than they save. It is suggested therefore that a thorough cost-benefit analysis should be performed before imposing any lockdown for either COVID-19 or any future pandemic.
Conclusions
While our understanding of viral transmission mechanisms leads to the assumption that lockdowns may be an effective pandemic management tool, this assumption cannot be supported by the evidence-based analysis of the present COVID-19 pandemic, as well as of the 1918–1920 H1N1 influenza type-A pandemic (the Spanish Flu) and numerous less-severe pandemics in the past. The price tag of lockdowns in terms of public health is high: we estimate that, even if somewhat effective in preventing death caused by infection, lockdowns may claim 20 times more life than they save. It is suggested therefore that a thorough cost-benefit analysis should be performed before imposing any lockdown in the future.
Only six healthy children with no underlying health conditions died as a direct result of catching Covid during a 12-month window, NHS analysis has revealed.
Four died from Covid, while two developed a Kawasaki-like inflammatory condition called Pims-TS, caused by the virus.
The data calls into question the wisdom of closing schools and forcing children to spend months at home when the health risk to under-18s is so small.
Children ‘have 99.995 per cent chance’ of surviving virus
YOUNGSTERS at a school are in mourning after two pupils died in one week, it has been confirmed today.
Harry Towers and Mohammed Habib passed away during October half-term and were both remembered in prayers during an online assembly on Tuesday. St John Fisher Catholic College in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, has ensured support is available for its grieving students and staff.
TRIBUTES have poured in for a 12-year-old girl who has died suddenly after suffering with a brain haemorrhage.
There is “no evidence” that school closures significantly reduced the spread of Covid, a study has found.
The research, published in the journal Nature Medicine, used data from Japan, where each municipality is responsible for the closure of schools in their areas.
…”Empirically, we find no evidence that school closures in Japan caused a significant reduction in the number of coronavirus cases,” they said.
“If opening schools leads to the spread of Covid-19, spikes of cases would occur in the control group; however, these were not observed. The implication is the same: school closures do not help reduce the spread of Covid-19 significantly.”
…Separate research, published earlier this year, found the UK had closed schools for longer than anywhere in Europe other than Italy over the past 18 months.
AN 11-YEAR-OLD girl has died after going into cardiac arrest at her school.
Pupils and staff are in mourning at Moat Community College in Highfields, Leicester, following the death, which was confirmed yesterday. The girl became ill there at around 11.30am last Tuesday and died a short time later, the school said.
Young children, as the world has known for months now, just aren’t prone to contract or transmit the coronavirus. Even the few who contract it are rarely symptomatic.
And masking is terrible for many of them: They’re still at a stage of growth where seeing faces and expressions is vital to developing cognitive and social skills. Children with certain disabilities, in particular, need to see teachers’ faces and lips to learn.
And the CDC’s own research indicates masks do nothing for kids: Its key study in December failed to show a statistically significant benefit to masking kids in school. And a former dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey Flier, noted recently, “We lack credible evidence for benefits of masking kids aged 2 to 5, despite what the American Academy of Pediatrics says.”
The ONS antibody studies suggest that nearly half of 16 and 17 year olds have been previously infected. We don’t know the equivalent figure for 12 to fives but it is likely to be similar. That means the vaccine effect relative to all unvaccinated (previously infected and not) will be drastically lower than the figure used in the modelling paper. In turn, even the 15 minutes of prevented lost schooling will be a significant overestimate.
The CDC did not include its finding that “required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional” in the summary of its report.
Schools are not spreading Covid, according to an official study that has boosted hopes that the return to class will not trigger an autumn surge in infections.
Pupils sent home in class bubbles were highly unlikely to pass on the virus to their parents even when they did pick up it from a fellow pupil, the research found.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/75136706-f171-11eb-8f01-2c678acbb979
Covid testing in schools is hugely disruptive and should be suspended, experts have said, as it emerged that up to 60 per cent of “positive” tests a week are coming back negative when checked.
Under plans to keep schools open, more than 50 million lateral flow tests have been carried out on youngsters, leading to thousands of pupils and their social bubbles being forced to self-isolate for 10 days.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/17/scrap-covid-tests-schools-says-oxford-vaccine-pioneer/
I had no choice but to speak out against lockdowns. As a public-health scientist with decades of experience working on infectious-disease outbreaks, I couldn’t stay silent. Not when basic principles of public health are thrown out of the window. Not when the working class is thrown under the bus. Not when lockdown opponents were thrown to the wolves. There was never a scientific consensus for lockdowns. That balloon had to be popped.
…Ultimately, lockdowns protected young low-risk professionals working from home – journalists, lawyers, scientists, and bankers – on the backs of children, the working class and the poor.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/04/why-i-spoke-out-against-lockdowns/
HART continues to be deeply concerned to hear various MPs and SAGE representatives calling for children to be vaccinated against COVID-19 despite the lack of long-term safety data. Disturbing language has been used by teaching unions implying that the use of ‘peer pressure’ could be harnessed to boost take up among school children, even though such coercion would be unethical, not to mention contrary to UK and International Laws and Declarations.