Perspective from a 2018 New York study that tested a bunch of healthy adults for common respiratory viruses. Over 6% tested positive.
eugyppius | May 2, 2022
The ever-sharp Zacki on Twitter points to this intriguing 2018 study out of New York. The authors administered PCR tests to 2,685 people at a tourist attraction in New York City, between the months of January and July. Over 6% tested positive for one of seven common human respiratory viruses. In the winter, human coronaviruses were the most common; in the summer, rhinoviruses took the lead. By design, the study targeted healthy populations, and so we must imagine that it substantially understates the true rate of virus infection.
The authors don’t find a significant difference in the overall prevalence of positivity between winter and summer. In their small sample, it’s only the mix of viruses that changes. This is another piece of evidence in favour of my crazy theory, that a great part – perhaps a majority – of spring and summer allergies are in fact persistent low-grade rhinovirus infections.
Other studies, particularly on rhinovirus, find even larger incidences of infection. There is this paper, which looks at rhinovirus in infants and finds that 20% of their sample are asymptomatic positives; or this case-control study of all ages, which finds rhinovirus in 17% of their asymptomatic controls.
For perspective: At the height of the alpha wave in the United Kingdom, only about 0.3% of the population was testing positive for SARS-2 every day. School antigen testing in Germany, which is done multiple times a week and finds nearly every detectable infection in school-age children, found Delta 7-day incidences of around 1%, and Omicron 7-day incidences peaking in February at near 4% in specific age cohorts (see the the graph on p. 5). The allegedly hypercontagious SARS-2 looks like it was doing substantially worse, in other words, than garden-variety human coronaviruses in the same month in the New York study.
Respiratory viruses are extremely pervasive; they’re everywhere and this is totally normal. What isn’t pervasive, is virus testing. We’ve only ever tested widely for a single virus. So much of Corona mythology depends upon presenting data in isolation from what we know about the behaviour of all the other pathogens we’ve lived with for centuries. Our governments have spent two years hyperventilating about incidences of infection that turn out to be minuscule, or at worst normal, when compared to the other pathogens that infect us. This should also make you very, very sceptical of uncontrolled studies cataloguing alleged Long-Covid symptoms. If we tested this widely for rhinovirus, imagine all the totally unrelated symptoms we’d find in our vast pool of positive results.
By Will Jones | The Daily Sceptic | April 29, 2022
The Pandemic Response and Recovery All-Party Parliamentary Group met this week to hear about visiting restrictions still being imposed by many care homes and NHS Trusts. Co-chaired by Rt Hon Esther McVey MP and Graham Stringer MP, the Group listened to evidence about the devastating effects visiting restrictions in hospitals have on patients and their loved ones. MPs also heard how visiting restrictions in care homes, along with the continued use of rolling lockdowns and over interpretation of testing guidelines, is leading to isolation, neglect and abuse of the residents.
Leandra Ashton, who co-founded The People’s Care Watchdog, Dr. Ammar Waraich, a medical registrar in the West Midlands, Carol Munt, experienced Patient Partner and Advocate and Dr. Ali Haggett, community mental health and wellbeing specialist, told MPs of the obstacles still in place when trying to visit a loved one and the shocking impact on vulnerable hospital patients, care home residents and their families.
All the speakers voiced serious concerns that obstacles are still in place in some healthcare settings. Politicians heard harrowing accounts of the harmful effects of isolation and loss of social contact on physical and mental health, safeguarding problems with medication, dehydration, hygiene and lack of basic care and the failures to uphold existing legislation to protect those who lack capacity.
Leandra Ashton’s mother was arrested in November 2020 for taking her grandmother out of her care home a day before the second lockdown. Two years on, many residents are still being isolated from their loved ones. She told MPs:
When I took the video of my mum being arrested taking my nan out of her care home, I did not think it would go viral. So many families got in touch and it led to us setting up the People’s Care Watchdog. We were struck by how much legislation is in place, such as Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, Deprivation of Liberty and the Mental Capacity Act, to protect those in care homes. These laws are simply not being upheld and instead guidelines are being over-interpreted and the legislation even used to keep people in care homes and hospitals as if they were prisons. The public bodies that are supposed to uphold the protective legislation are not doing so.
There are still obstacles in place when trying to visit a loved one in a care home and the impact has been and continues to be devastating. The safeguarding issues I am seeing and hearing about are atrocious. Residents left for hours in dirty, wet incontinence pads leading to dangerous pressure ulcers. Malnutrition. Dehydration. End of life medication given to patients without their or their family’s consent. Psychological trauma, post-traumatic stress and suicides have resulted because of this. Multiple systems are failing, including Local Authorities and the CQC. It is a complex situation that needs a bold approach by both empowering families and galvanising Government action to hold public bodies to account and stop private equity firms placing profit over people.
Listening to the evidence, Esther McVey said:
I am troubled by the evidence presented by our speakers, particularly the safeguarding issues and neglect that care home residents are suffering as a result. In hospitals, we have heard about patients losing hope and refusing treatment without the encouragement of family. We know patients have much better treatment outcomes when they have support from relatives and friends around them.
Most of the infection control measures that restricted visiting in healthcare settings have been removed, most recently NHS Trusts were told healthcare workers, patients and visitors no longer need to distance in hospitals, so I fail to see why and how these visiting restrictions are still in place in any healthcare setting. I shall be writing to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to ask that he makes it absolutely clear that all patients and residents must be able to see visitors.
Highlighting how visitation is an important and necessary part of healthcare, Carol Munt said:
In the same way that we would not stop prescribed medication and treatments, we should not have stopped visits. Why were decisions taken without any consideration for the need of patients and their families to connect? Why do we still have such variation in compassionate care across the country? There is no uniformity among care homes apart from the need to be profitable for their owners. Some care homes made a superhuman effort to arrange visiting, as did the Bristol Nightingale Hospital. There was good practice in some places so there should be good practice everywhere. We should expect more of these endemic situations and we must be prepared for them.
I could not comprehend how any Minister for Health and Social Care could allow this to happen and not make the effort to get his department to look at ways that visiting could be facilitated. I heard and continue to hear the most callous reports of relatives dying alone with no visitors. The same goes for hospital patients. Ultimately, I think we need legislation to ensure that visiting rights are enshrined and protected.
Medical Registrar Dr. Ammar Waraich reported that many hospitals are still preventing visits due to the potential risk of Covid spread:
The policy is cruel, inhumane and unnecessary. Seeing loved ones can be immensely therapeutic and give struggling patients the will to survive. It is deeply traumatic for families to lose loved ones suddenly or see them go through difficult treatment without being there in person. Video calls are not a good enough replacement and we do not have the staff, the time or resources to facilitate calls for all our patients.
Most infection control measures have been lifted as the level of risk is no longer there. Hospitals can no longer function as detention centres and an inpatient stay should not become a sentence. The policy was one of the major mistakes of lockdown. Visiting sick relatives in hospital is, and must remain, a fundamental right, not to be given up.
Co-chair Graham Stringer said:
I find it extraordinary that no visiting is allowed in some healthcare settings, even to this day. It is cruel that family members are being denied access to sick and vulnerable loved ones, often not getting regular updates, living in anxiety about what their relatives may be going through, but knowing they are going through frightening and difficult treatment, often at the end of their lives, without being able to be with them in person.
“At the height of the pandemic it was understandable that there were precautions but there is no longer a basis to that argument. All the restrictions have been lifted and NHS Trusts across England have now been told to ‘return to pre-pandemic physical distancing in all areas’. The government must take action to resolve this situation.
Speaking about her experience working in the community throughout the pandemic, Dr. Ali Haggett said:
I have spent the last eighteen months with the support group Unlock Care Homes, uncovering the plight of many thousands of families who are still denied regular, meaningful contact with care home residents and hospital patients. Even before Covid, we knew that isolating people, particularly older people, has a serious impact on physical and psychological health. We have continued to isolate adults in care and in some hospitals almost continuously for two years. The effects have been felt particularly badly by those with dementia. Many residents no longer recognise their families and have been denied the most basic of human needs.
My concern is that this situation is concealing neglect and abuse on a significant scale. One of my community members sadly died and the hospital has admitted liability partly because he was completely blind and couldn’t reach his food or drink. Had his wife been allowed to visit, this wouldn’t have happened. Families I work with report numerous issues still affecting them, not just visiting restrictions. Rolling lockdowns, over-interpretation of testing, PPE requirements resulting in poor communication and fear, lack of ancillary services such as podiatry or physiotherapy leading to huge health problems, residents asked to isolate when one person tests positive, sometimes for 10 days or more and the one significant visitor recommendation being ignored or rejected. Families must be able to visit openly and check the wellbeing of residents.
Stop Press: MPs and Peers including Esther McVey, Lord Frost, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Sir Graham Brady, Emma Lewell-Buck, Graham Stringer and Sammy Wilson have written to the Telegraph to say they are “deeply concerned” that visiting is still forbidden in many institutions where “over-interpretation of testing guidelines is leading to isolation, neglect and abuse of vulnerable residents”. They point out that Article 8 of the Human Rights Act and the Mental Capacity Act “could and should have protected against this situation arising” but this legislation is being “wilfully misinterpreted as an excuse” to keep people isolated in care homes and hospitals “as if they were prisons”.
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | April 30, 2022
A newly published, peer-reviewed study in Cureus looked to see if there was a correlation between mask compliance and COVID-19 outcomes in Europe. The study was undertaken at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil.
The authors noted that previous trials about mask effectiveness had produced mixed results and those that concluded that masks were associated with a reduction in transmission and cases were conducted out of season.
“The World Health Organization (WHO) as well as other public institutions…strongly recommend the use of masks as a tool to curb COVID-19 transmission. These mandates and recommendations took place despite the fact that most randomised controlled trials carried out before and during the COVID-19 pandemic concluded that the role of masks in preventing respiratory viral transmission was small, null, or inconclusive. Conversely, ecological studies, performed during the first months of the pandemic, comparing countries, states, and provinces before and after the implementation of mask mandates almost unanimously concluded that masks reduced COVID-19 propagation.
However, mask mandates were normally implemented after the peak of COVID-19 cases in the first wave, which might have given the impression that the drop in the number of cases was caused by the increment in mask usage. For instance, the peak of cases in Germany’s first wave occurred in the first week of April 2020, while masks became mandatory in all of Germany’s federal states between the 20th and 29th of April, at a time when the propagation of COVID-19 was already declining.
Furthermore, the mask mandate was still in place in the subsequent autumn-winter wave of 2020-2021, but it did not help preventing the outburst of cases and deaths in Germany that was several-fold more severe than in the first wave.”
Due to the different levels of masking in Europe (5% – 95% compliance), it gave the authors the opportunity to test masking during a strong COVID-19 wave.
“Data were collected from the following Eastern and Western European countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Republic of Moldova, Ukraine, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Northern Ireland. The inclusion criterion was a population size higher than one million people.”
Analysis was undertaken to verify if masking correlated with COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. The data looked at were between October 2020 and March 2021, in the 35 European countries listed above, during which all the countries went through a peak COVID-19 infection wave.
The average proportion of masking was 60.9% with Eastern Europe being slightly higher than Western Europe. However, compliance was much more homogeneous in the East than the West.
Importantly, results showed a weak positive correlation for mask compliance versus morbidity (cases) and mortality (deaths).
Each dot in the diagrams above represent a different country. As you can see, as mask compliance goes up, so do cases/million and deaths/million.
Please note, the positive correlation for mask usage and cases was not statistically significant. However, the correlation for masks and deaths WAS statistically significant.
The correlation was even higher in the West compared to Eastern countries. It is suggested that this could be because larger countries are located in the West. However, even when the largest countries were removed, the correlations hardly changed.
Various other analyses were performed, e.g. using smaller and larger countries but no tests resulted in negative correlations.
The authors conclude by saying that “while no cause-effect conclusions could be inferred from this observational analysis, the lack of negative correlations between mask usage and COVID-19 cases and deaths suggest that the widespread use of masks at a time when an effective intervention was most needed, i.e., during the strong 2020-2021 autumn-winter peak, was not able to reduce COVID-19 transmission. Moreover, the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.”
Science is finally catching up with the science that disappeared two years ago. Whilst this study is not conclusive, it is quite damning and will be interesting to see what masking mandates or recommendations are brought back, next winter, after this.
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | April 29, 2022
The writer is in New Zealand
THE business magazine Forbes has published a story with the arresting headline: ‘Unvaccinated People Increase Risk Of Covid Infection Among Vaccinated, Study Finds.’
The work to which it refers is not in the normal sense a study but is actually a modelling exercise published by the journal of the Canadian Medical Association. Did the Forbes staff writer read the paper very well? I am quite sure not. At the end of paragraph one of the Method section of the original paper, it describes its model, saying: ‘A vaccine that is 80 per cent efficacious would result in 80 per cent of vaccinated people becoming immune, with the remaining 20 per cent being susceptible to infection. We did not model waning immunity.’
Now I am sure you know that the mRNA vaccines do not stop infection and also wane in effectiveness. In other words mRNA vaccination does not confer immunity and its effectiveness does not remain constant as the paper assumes. So what use is this paper and to what do its conclusions apply? Apparently not to the mRNA Covid vaccines.
Lo and behold, one of the paper’s authors, David Fisman, declares competing interests: ‘He has served on advisory boards related to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines for Seqirus, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Sanofi-Pasteur Vaccines.’
Another author, Ashleigh Tuite, was ‘employed by the Public Health Agency of Canada when the research was conducted’ (aka the domain of Justin Trudeau).
So why publish this story which on the face of it has little relevance to the real-world data of the current pandemic? Forbes magazine is 51 per cent owned by a Hong Kong-based company, Integrated Whale Investments, about which little is known. The Washington Post has suggested that Forbes’s editorial policy has been influenced as a result, but by whom no one really knows.
At this point in the pandemic, it has become clear that boosted individuals are becoming more vulnerable to Omicron than the unvaccinated. So I can only suggest that it might be advantageous for some scientists and politicians to blame the unvaccinated for everything in order to cover up their own mistaken ideas. Or perhaps there are commercial interests anxious to sell more arguably useless vaccines for billions of dollars. You decide.
If the government and their compliant media friends are our one source of truth, as has happened in New Zealand (by decree), then you have no option except to blame the unvaccinated whatever happens.
The actual situation is that the unvaccinated are currently less likely to be hospitalised than the boosted. Thank you to Grant Dixon for compiling and graphing NZ Ministry of Health data, below.
This morning my mask-exempt friend entered a haberdashery shop, whereupon two other potential customers turned and fled. Yesterday she was turned away from a fabric store. I am sure many of you have had similar experiences. The fact of the matter is that almost the whole of the New Zealand population has become subject to fear-based government-sponsored groupthink.
Are we all being conditioned to vote for Jacinda Ardern in next year’s election based on the carefully constructed myth that she is keeping us all safe? We should be keeping our feet on the ground. We should recognise that public relations experts and propaganda promoters are at work full-time, but they are working out of touch with reality.
Meanwhile our whole economy is becoming ever more dysfunctional. As people are too afraid to associate with one another in public, the whole basis of commercial activity is being undermined.
The two large supermarket chains are laughing all the way to the bank. As small businesses are forced to close and their monopoly grows, supermarket prices and profits are entering the stratosphere. Smart individuals are now ordering their vegetables and groceries direct from Australia (as far away from us as Moscow is from London) because they are so much cheaper.
The government is clueless to control this rampant price inflation, along with most things including the pandemic. The public is hoodwinked, queueing fully masked and fully vaccinated to pay through the nose for everyday items without a squeak of dissent.
The ten-year-old son of a friend asked his mother the other day: ‘Which do you think our society is more like – Brave New World or 1984?’ I doubt if either Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could ever have imagined anything so incomprehensibly doublethinking as 2022 New Zealand.
This is the state we have reached through our government’s careful rationing of information and saturation conditioning.
Time we reopened the floodgates of free speech and social media – hold your horses, we might endanger our one source of truth.
By Angus Dalgleish | TCW Defending Freedom | April 30, 2022
THE recent announcement from the General Medical Council that doctors face being struck off for spreading fake news on vaccines and lockdowns is somewhat frightening given the recent experience of Dr Sam White, a GP in Hampshire. It has a chilling Orwellian overtone to it.
It seems to imply that fake news is anything not approved by the Government and any of its agencies such as Public Health England and the NHS plus the mainstream media, who have been bribed throughout the pandemic with lucrative advertising contracts.
It assumes that ideas and speculation from discredited sources such as Neil Ferguson and Sage were correct and accepted by the senior medical officers such as Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, with all other inputs ignored or treated with contempt. Many of us suggested that as Covid was an airborne virus which affected mainly the old and those with other medical conditions it should be treated as such. This was based on knowledge accrued from years of treating such unknown upper respiratory tract infections (URTIs) which involves correcting the hideously low levels of vitamin D3 in the population and treating symptoms with regular gargling of aspirin and mouthwash and intranasal sprays. In short, vitamin D3 and topical anti-inflammatory medicines abort colds and flu when given early and frequently.
Why was this not made official policy? I observed severe Covid symptoms melt with such a regimen in many friends and colleagues.
Secondly, why were doctors not allowed to give dexamethasone, which is known to be life-saving in cases of lung inflammation? No, we had to wait for a trial to tell us it worked. A colleague calculated that 4,000 to 5,000 patients died unnecessarily through this decision, which the Chief Medical Officer has to own.
Also why did they stamp on any original idea such as ivermectin, which was dismissed as ‘worm treatment for horses’ when it clearly has some benefit in some Covid cases?
What I am driving at here is that common sense can be classified as fake news by the ever-increasingly power-crazed authorities. The greatest example of this ill-informed madness was the decision to enforce lockdowns not once but twice. It has been calculated that lockdown probably averted 200 Covid deaths but the advisers took no account of the effects on other conditions by denying screening and early treatment of cancer, heart attacks, strokes, not to mention the infliction of severe mental health problems and chronic stress (I personally know of four suicides, two of them medical colleagues). This is before we get on to the big picture – the destruction of young lives, education and the economy.
For what? Sweden refused to follow the lockdown route and not a single child lost a day’s education.
Our experts who felt entitled to tell us what to do and conspired to denigrate those of us with an alternative take such as Professor Sunetra Gupta, myself and other Great Barrington declarants. They cruelly derided Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell for refusing to back lockdown, with 2,000 of his own condemning him.
It has now been accepted by all bar the CCP in China that lockdown was an absolute and avoidable disaster. Yet those of us who were right would be persecuted and prosecuted and struck off by this new emanation from the GMC. Dr Sam White also thought that masks were a waste of time, something every one of the government advisers has agreed with at some time, but they were insisted upon by the Department of Fear, Intimidation and Control of the Population.
Next comes the ‘vaccine’ project. In spite of our warning that a good vaccine needs a powerful T-cell adjuvant, and that the 80 per cent of the spike which mimicked human sequences and was likely to induce side-effects should be omitted, we were dismissed as not important or eminent enough to heed. The vaccines that the establishment backed were experimental medicines designed to reduce morbidity and death in the older population and of course to save the NHS.
So why were they imposed on the whole population without testing to see if they were needed? Even the BCG vaccine was given only to non-tuberculin reactors after a test.
My colleagues started to see serious reactions especially in those below 55 years, which have now been accepted to be real, such as blood clots, strokes, heart inflammation and death. Our original report highlighted the sequence in the spike similar to a neurological protein and severe neurological damage has now been officially recognised. For pointing this out early we were accused of being anti-vaxxers. No, we were not! We were just trying to save people from serious side-effects from a disease with an 0.085 per cent fatality rate.
Presumably the GMC would now strike off anyone, such as Sam White, trying to do the best for their patients. No, they should be looking at the real culprits for this mayhem and whether they had the skills and experience to make these decisions (they did not).
Bizarrely, in this brave new world they were given knighthoods.
Institutional science follows politics; it will always endorse central regime policies
eugyppius | April 30, 2022
During the pandemic, Germany closed schools on a wider scale and for a longer duration than most other places in the civilised world. I was recently reminded of how our government came to embrace these extreme policies. The story is very revealing:
It began with the strange decision of state media to elevate Christian Drosten at Berlin Charité to national prominence, by granting him the Coronavirus Update podcast on 26 February 2020. The WHO had just endorsed lockdowns two days before, and various countries were acquiring new Corona tsars – random virus wizards who would become the face of containment policy to panicking domestic audiences. Every day, Drosten’s banal podcast interviews were reported breathlessly across the German media, as if they meant anything.
It’s important to remember that Drosten is a virologist. He’s not a statistician, and for what it’s worth, he’s not a public health expert either. He studies how very small proteins work and how they interact with human cells. Nevertheless, Drosten had (or claimed to have) a wide range of opinions on matters outside of his field, including the question of whether closing schools would slow down SARS-2.
At first, Drosten said that he didn’t think this would accomplish very much. Like everyone else of his ilk, he had an early history of saying basically correct and sensible things before he went crazy. On 11 March 2020, he went home and read this paper on Nonpharmaceutical Interventions Implemented by US Cities During the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic. It wasn’t his field; his assessment of its analysis is worth no more than mine or yours. But after reading it, he decided that actually closing schools would be a great idea, especially when used in combination with other interventions, such as banning mass gatherings. This was wind in the sails of hystericists like Markus Söder, minister president of Bavaria. And so we closed our schools, and our kids endured months of social isolation and mental anguish, because Drosten read a thing and had a brilliant idea.
But, that’s only the official story. It may be vastly worse than that. I really doubt, for example, that Drosten’s ridiculous podcast was a spontaneous programming idea by Norddeutscher Rundfunk. I suspect, instead, that there’s a reason lockdowns and Corona tsars went together in those early days. Primary was the political or bureaucratic decision to do all this crazy stuff, in the absence of any evidence aside from some dodgy numbers out of Wuhan. Thus the genius smart guys who run our institutions had to find celebrity virus astrologers, who could become the public face of novel policies and provide a simulacrum of science for the politicians to pretend they were following. It’s even odds, whether Drosten really did change his mind because of a paper he read one night; or whether it was rather the political or bureaucratic faction behind Drosten that changed their minds and gave him a paper or two to read.
Science isn’t some objective reasonable force outside of politics. Scientists spend most of their careers chasing government grant funding, and fighting for appointments and promotions in government-funded university systems. Science follows politics, and nobody knows this as much as the disingenuous politicians who claim that their policies are subordinate to scientific findings.
By Will Jones | The Daily Sceptic | April 29, 2022
Emergency calls for cardiac arrest and acute coronary syndrome in young people in Israel were significantly associated with the vaccine rollout, both first and second doses, spiking 25% higher than in earlier years, but not with COVID-19 prevalence, a study in the Nature journal Scientific Reports has found.
Using data from the Israel National Emergency Medical Services (EMS) from 2019 to 2021, the study looked at the volume of cardiac arrest and acute coronary syndrome EMS calls in the 16-39 year-old population. It found an increase of over 25% in both call types during January-May 2021, compared with 2019-2020, but no significant increase in calls correlating with COVID-19 infection rates.
The main finding of this study concerns with increases of over 25% in both the number of CA [cardiac arrest] calls and ACS [acute coronary syndrome] calls of people in the 16-39 age group during the COVID-19 vaccination rollout in Israel (January-May, 2021), compared with the same period of time in prior years (2019 and 2020). Moreover, there is a robust and statistically significant association between the weekly CA and ACS call counts, and the rates of first and second vaccine doses administered to this age group. At the same time there is no observed statistically significant association between COVID-19 infection rates and the CA and ACS call counts. This result is aligned with previous findings which show increases in overall CA incidence were not always associated with higher COVID-19 infections rates at a population level, as well as the stability of hospitalisation rates related to myocardial infarction throughout the initial COVID-19 wave compared to pre-pandemic baselines in Israel. These results also are mirrored by a report of increased emergency department visits with cardiovascular complaints during the vaccination rollout in Germany as well as increased EMS calls for cardiac incidents in Scotland.
While several studies have found severe myocarditis to be a rare adverse effect of the vaccines, the study authors note that myocarditis is often missed, and in fact has been found to be likely responsible for 12-20% of unexpected deaths in adults under 40 in normal times.
Myocarditis is a particularly insidious disease with multiple reported manifestations. There is vast literature that highlights asymptomatic cases of myocarditis, which are often underdiagnosed, as well as cases in which myocarditis can possibly be misdiagnosed as acute coronary syndrome (ACS). Moreover, several comprehensive studies demonstrate that myocarditis is a major cause of sudden, unexpected deaths in adults less than 40 years of age, and assess that it is responsible for 12-20% of these deaths. Thus, it is a plausible concern that increased rates of myocarditis among young people could lead to an increase in other severe cardiovascular adverse events, such as cardiac arrest (CA) and ACS. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this might not be only a theoretical concern.
The results, shown visually in the following graphs, are unmistakable, with clear corresponding spikes in vaccination numbers and emergency calls.
The study does not look at death rates in the age group, but data elsewhere show a clear spike in deaths during the period.
Surely it’s well past time these experimental vaccines (in Israel’s case, Pfizer), rushed to market in record time, are withdrawn for younger people.
By Meryl Nass, MD | April 30, 2022
Remdesivir is an IV drug. Therefore, for the past 2 years it was almost exclusively used in hospitalized patients, not outpatients.
Royalties go to Gilead, but a portion go the the NIAID, Tony Fauci’s agency and to the US Army, which assisted with its development.
Remdesivir received an early EUA (May 1, 2020) and then a very early license (October 22, 2020) despite a paucity of evidence that it actually was helpful in the hospital setting. A variety of problems can arise secondary its use, including liver inflammation, renal insufficiency and renal failure. Here is a list of articles revealing its kidney toxicity:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33340409/
WHO recommended against the drug on November 20, 2020.
Few if any other countries used it for COVID apart from the US. A large European trial in adults found no benefit. The investigators felt 3 deaths were due to remdesivir (0.7% of subjects who received it.)
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00485-0/fulltext
However, on April 22, 2022 the WHO recommended the drug for a new use: early outpatient therapy in patients at high risk of a poor COVID outcome:
https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/who-recommends-against-the-use-of-remdesivir-in-covid-19-patients
Monoclonal antibodies are only effective at the beginning of illness, as they fight the virus. After about ten days, there is no more live virus and then a later phase of the disease occurs, due to an overactive immune response. Antiviral drugs do not work during the second stage, but immune modulators do. Steroids and ivermectin are effective therapies at this stage.
Outpatient infusion centers were set up to provide monoclonal antibodies to patients at the start of COVID to those who were at high risk of a bad outcome. But now the centers are shuttered as none of them work against current COVID variants. Outpatient infusions will now be available for remdesivir, which is an antiviral drug, as a replacement.
So a new way to use remdesivir has been developed: early, when it might actually work. WHO says it does. Was WHO bought off or will it actually have a positive impact? Who knows yet?
The vast majority of COVID patients are not hospitalized until they are in the second stage of illness, which is when remdesivir, HCQ and other antivirals are not very effective, since there is no more live virus. (HCQ has some immunomodulatory actions which may explain its mild benefit at this late stage.)
The US government, which has made a series of ineffective and harmful recommendations regarding the response to COVID, has just added another harmful recommendation to the list.
The FDA just licensed Remdesivir for children as young as one month old. Both hospitalized children and outpatients may receive it. The drug might work in outpatients, but the vast majority of children have a very low risk of dying from COVID. If 7 deaths per thousand result from the drug, as the European investigators thought in the study of adults cited above, it is possible it will harm or kill more children than it saves.
Shouldn’t the FDA have waited longer to see what early outpatient treatment did for older ages? Very little has been published on children and remdesivir. FDA said very little about the approval.
When we look at the press release issued by Gilead, we learn the approval was based on an open label, single arm trial in 53 children, 3 of whom died (6% of these children died). 72% had an adverse event, and 21% had a serious adverse event.
https://investors.gilead.com/news-releases/news-release-details/vekluryr-remdesivir-first-and-only-approved-treatment-pediatric
I heard that some nurses refer to the drug as “Run, death is near.”
Based on the paucity of information FDA released with its Remdesivir approval, it appears that FDA knows very little about the drug’s benefit in children, and our children will be the guinea pigs. If we let them.
By Noah Carl | The Daily Sceptic | April 27, 2022
When it comes to the lab leak theory of Covid origins, there’s a lot of inconsistency between what scientists have announced in public and what they’ve revealed in private.
First, there was Professor Kristian Andersen, an American virologist. Writing to Anthony Fauci on 1st February 2020, he said of the virus that “some of the features (potentially) look engineered”, adding that he and several colleagues “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”.
Mere weeks later, Andersen co-authored a paper stating, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.
Next, there was Professor Jeremy Farrar, head of the UK’s Wellcome Trust. He wrote in his book Spike that he initially believed there was a 50% chance the virus had leaked from a lab, and that other scientists to whom he’d spoke had put the percentage even higher.
Yet Farrar signed the infamous Lancet letter, which referred to claims that “COVID-19 does not have a natural origin” as “conspiracy theories”.
A new freedom of information request, made by the group U.S. Right to Know, has revealed that another author of the Lancet letter gave credence to the lab leak in a private email. Professor Charles Calisher, an American epidemiologist, said he did not see how “anyone could definitively state that the virus could not possibly have come from that lab”.
Interestingly, Calisher’s email was sent one month after the Lancet letter’s publication, which means he either changed his mind or was not expressing his true beliefs when he co-signed the letter.
According to a March 2021 article in the MIT Technology Review, Calisher said the “conspiracy-theory phrase” was “over the top”. However, the article doesn’t make clear whether Calisher believed this at the time he co-signed the letter, or whether he subsequently came to believe it.
In any case, calling the lab leak a “conspiracy theory” is a pretty strong statement. So if Calisher did change his mind about it, he could have let the public know – for example, by removing his name from the letter, or clarifying his position in some other public forum.
What’s more, in September of 2021, Calisher told The Telegraph that “the letter never intended to suggest that Covid might not have a natural origin, rather that there was insufficient data.” But this doesn’t make sense.
If the letter’s purposes was merely to suggest “there was insufficient data”, it wouldn’t have used the phrase “conspiracy theory”, or else it would have dismissed both the natural origin and the lab leak as “conspiracy theories”. For example, it might have said, ‘We stand together to strongly condemn unfounded speculation about the origin of COVID-19’.
There’s much about the official narrative on the lab leak that doesn’t add up. The public has a right to know why so many scientists made blatantly unscientific claims that contradict their private correspondence.
By Will Jones | The Daily Sceptic | April 27, 2022
Doctors who criticise vaccines or lockdown policies on social media could face being struck off if regulators rule they are guilty of spreading ‘fake news’, according to new guidance from the GMC. The Telegraph has the story.
The core guidance for medics has been updated for the first time in almost a decade to cover media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The rules on use of social media include a duty to be “honest” and “not to mislead”, as well as to avoid abuse or bullying.
The draft regulations from the General Medical Council (GMC) – which the watchdog describes as a 21st-century version of the Hippocratic Oath – also say doctors must speak out if they encounter “toxic” workplace cultures that threaten patient safety. And they say medics must take action if they encounter workplace bullying, harassment or discrimination.
The watchdog regulates doctors, who can face a range of sanctions – including being struck off the medical register – if they are found to have failed in their duties.
Charlie Massey, the Chief Executive of the GMC, said… the fundamental principles of the guidance remained the same, but had been updated to reflect the modern world.
“We’ve had feedback that doctors want more clarity on using social media. We are already clear that doctors must be honest and trustworthy in their communications, and are now emphasising that this applies to all forms of communication. The principles remain the same whether the communication is written, spoken or via social media,” he said.
The use of social media by medics has become an increasingly vexed issue during the pandemic, the report adds.
In December a judge ruled that the GMC’s interim orders tribunal had made an “error of law” when it ordered a GP accused of spreading misinformation to stop discussing Covid on social media.
Dr. Samuel White, who was a partner at a practice in Hampshire, raised concerns about vaccines and claimed “masks do nothing” in a video posted last June.
The GMC’s Interim Orders Tribunal imposed restrictions on Dr. White’s registration as a result. But the High Court said this decision was “wrong” under human rights law.
He had claimed “lies” around the NHS and Government approach to the pandemic were “so vast” that he could no longer “stomach or tolerate” them.
In August, the tribunal concluded Dr. White’s way of sharing his views “may have a real impact on patient safety”. It found Dr. White allegedly shared information to a “wide and possibly uninformed audience” and did not give an opportunity for “a holistic consideration of COVID-19, its implications and possible treatments”.
But the GP’s barrister, Francis Hoar, argued the restrictions imposed on his client’s registration were a “severe imposition” on his freedom of expression.
The draft guidance says doctors can be held accountable for promoting misleading information or stepping outside areas of their expertise. They are told to “be honest and trustworthy … make clear the limits of your knowledge… [and to] make reasonable checks to make sure any information you give is not misleading.
“This applies to all forms of written, spoken and digital communication,” the draft guidance states. And doctors are warned that online rows and trolling could jeopardise their professional futures.
It is of course outrageous that medics should be at risk of losing their career for questioning on Twitter the Government line on its draconian public health interventions. If there’s one thing we were lacking during the pandemic it was not an excess of conformity amongst doctors. The right of medics to ‘informed dissent’ should be strengthened, as per the High Court ruling in favour of Dr. White, not weakened.
On the other hand, there are plenty of Government advisers I can think of who could do with being penalised for “stepping outside areas of their expertise”. Somehow I doubt anything similar will ever be applied to them, however.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The GMC guidance is still the subject of a public consultation – and anyone can contribute. Click here to begin the process.
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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