Covid-19 News

Quote from Dr Richard

Sorry to ramble on. But you know Didier Raoult and Zelenko were right, I know they are rebels one a flamboyant character, the others very perceptive man of the Hasidic faith. My son is training to be a rabbi, has survived COVID, they have always been the most intelligent, perceptive race, kicked out of their homeland by Hadrian in ancient times. They originated anyway from the Arabic tribes and were the only ones to stand up and fight the Romans whilst Bedouin tribes shrugged their shoulders and made a deal. Anyway I digress, as I said before would you THHuxleynew be interested in with me supervising a new clinical trial? As I said this could be done in Cambridge or Oxford where they are starting one now. With all the elements of Anti Bat because I am sure their is synergy between each element of the combination, tabulating it is unnecessary, we know what to do. Then if Pharma want to make some dosh out of it, patent the thing and keep everyone happy so the money can be donated to the NHS or whatever?

I'm not qualified to supervise a trial. I mean, I could do a good impersonation (without qualifications), and have enough general knowledge to do it properly in theory, but with anything medical like that I'd not have the practical skillset - though maybe you do have it?

More though - I'm not sure you'd ever get permission for a trial with so many different components because this would increase the safety issues and decrease the scientific usefulness (if it worked - which of the components were actually doing this?).

I worship trees which engender in me spiritual feelings, and mean that I am politically disposed towards (mild) environmentalism: does that count as a religious comment?

THHuxleynew 'doesn't matter, all the components are tried and tested. Could be supervised over the internet. I just read the Sunday times, DC should be kicked out for bad behaviour, there ' no two ways about it. Maybe such a trial could be mentioned to Sir David?

Anyway the Science is done. Now it is a matter of its application, in a controlled clinical setting. No have some confidence, you are really good at the analysis to show exactly what needs to be done. Permission from who? The WHO? The medical research council? I used to have grant money from them, so I could submit a proposal, which if they give it the go ahead then it's up to the clinicians involved. Or maybe some other FRS at UCL could be persuaded to give it backing. I'll look into it. Or there's always the Wellcome Trust, it's hard to get things going, frustrating when you are retired, unfortunately.

Well its not been banned after all! My internet link is down to 1 mb/sec, so it just takes time to break through, again some soothing music, Lyonesse which I wrote for my wife. Just click on the black dove/future primitive profile view to have a listen if u like. Maybe give Ragnarok a miss my vocals are total crap, and its all a bit to heavy for Sunday. Hard work trying to prevent WW3.

Quote from Navid

On an average basis taking account the population the IFR is

0.000917714

Basically 0.1% --- LOWER THAN 0.2% from Stanford.

0.4% MORE FAKE NEWS FROM CDC! You can't average numbers you have to factor in the population in each bucket.

It is a bad flu. We knew that.

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Quote from Navid

I'd be willing to discuss this more with a person trained in the art. Given the high correlation with the vaccine schedule, and the rate which is at least 10x expected -- these comments don't begin to address the issue. If it really was enteroviruses, NPEV, then it would appear that it is more dangerous than polio and would not be affected by reduction in OPV.

Navid - we have two disagreements here. One is about the emerging threat of NPEV infection, AFM, and its relationship to Polio prevalence and Polio vaccination and (vaccination induced) OPV. This would need an extensive literature survey to understand, and would take some time. I'll leave the Comment I referenced above as a marker on the (partial and flawed) analysis in the paper you quoted, but note that if you want to debate this with a person trained in the art you will need to consider the entire NPEV and AFM/AFP literature 2006 - 2018, you might start with Acute Flaccid Myelitis: Something Old and Something New

The other disagreement is where you say the CDC Planning Scenario Table below is based on incompetent analysis, and you know better, that the headline figure should be < 0.1%, and that this represents true IFR in the US.

This is a much more easily resolvable difference.

lenr-forum.com/attachment/12501/

OK: your argument.

(1) You say the last column represents, or at least can be used to bound, COVID IFR. Wrong, it represents COVID symptomatic CFR as the Table you critique says.

To see the (large) difference, go to the definition on the same web page.

Symptomatic Case Fatality Ratio: The number of symptomatic individuals who die of the disease among all individuals experiencing symptoms from the infection. This parameter is not necessarily equivalent to the number of reported deaths per reported cases, because many cases and deaths are never confirmed to be COVID-19, and there is a lag in time between when people are infected and when they die. This parameter reflects the existing standard of care and may be affected by the introduction of new therapeutics.

Thus this does not include asymptomatic infections. These numbers are potentially higher than IFR (because of aymptomatics) but could also be lower (because IFR would be if the whole population caught the disease, these figures are based on the selected subset of the population who have caught it so far).

It is important to be precise and know what you are talking about. Nothing derived from these figures can tell you whole population CFR.

(2) You say that the last column is obtained by averaging the figures, whereas it should be obtained by averaging the figures weighted by population.

Now, if the CDC guys had averaged figures here they would be incompetent like you say. They have clearly not done this. Take the 2.5 column. Its average is 0.02/3 = 0.667% There is no way quantisation errors on the figures could turn that into the given 0.4%. So they did not do what you say, and jumping to this conclusion quickly is the type of lazy analysis that, although it can be done by people who are clever and careless, is incompetent.

In addition, these are symptomatic case fatality ratios. Therefore they must be combined weighting by the proportion of symptomatic cases. You cannot take these figures and population-fraction weight them to obtain IFR, because you do not know what is the relative case number in each. Pretty obviously this skews the raw population fractions towards those more likely to have symptoms (the elderly). This skew is in an opposite direction to the population fractions you use. We do not actually have to hand the raw data and can only say for now that your analysis is badly wrong, their analysis is not obviously wrong.

From their analysis, the preferred 2.5 column (scenario 5) gives effective IFR as 0.004/1.35 (35% assumed asymptomatic) = 0.3% (cf your 0.1%).

I say effective IFR because this is based on cases so far and NOT the entire population. As the page you critique makes clear - their concern is with medium-term planning, not COVID epidemiology.

The scenarios are intended to advance public health preparedness and planning. They are not predictions or estimates of the expected impact of COVID-19. The parameter values in each scenario will be updated and augmented over time, as we learn more about the epidemiology of COVID-19. Additional parameter values might be added in the future (e.g., population density, household transmission, and/or race and ethnicity).

Basically, they are trying to estimate hospital capacity needed.

0.3% is low, and very good news for the US. Compare that with the 0.7% or so from other places. andrea.s I put a marker in here that these figures (even though not directly applicable to IFR) are better than I'd expect in the US and I therefore think we should not be too quick to think we understand what real IFR would be if the whole population caught the virus. Maybe the US figures are lower because of shielding of those at higher risk - who will be less likely to catch it and therefore be less represented in the CFR statistics?

We may in the end see mortality differences between countries for given infection rate as primarily relating to how good or bad shielding is for those most at risk - and many factors affect this.

Quote from Mark U

India recently expelled the Gates Foundation, I surmise in part...

Nonsense. Never happened. May I suggest that you improve the quality of your news sources.

Edit: Just saw you later disavowed this claim. I imagine my suggestion is still valid though.

Quote from Navid

As for the real science, the article references the paperby Rachana Dhiman et al. "The last case of polio from India was reported in 2011. That year, the non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP) rate in India was 13.35/100,000, where the expected rate is 1⁻2/100,000...

In short, the best way to stop NPAFP is stop vaccine.

OK, so that paper gives the number of (so-called) 'non-polio' Indian paralysis cases from between 2000 to 2017 as 491,000.

Or 79 cases per day.

But - in 1990 when polio was endemic in India, the average rate of 'actual' polio paralysis was 500-1000 per day. At least, according to the guy who you referenced earlier: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3734678/

So despite a 84 to 96% reduction in paralysis cases, an argument is made that vaccines are bad? Seems very odd.

The real complaint is the the Non-Polio Acute Flacid Paralysis rate is 5 to 7 times higher in India than it is in the USA.

Although thats unsurprising, as India prefers to innoculate with OPV rather than IPV, mainly because the unit cost is five times cheaper, and because distributing it doesn't require the extra costs of needles and training 2 million people how to use them.

So who's to blame? The Indian goverment for cutting costs? Gates and the WHO for not donating enough? Is it just a fact of life that money buys better medical outcomes?

Anyway, besides all that, it seems a very strange to claim that a ~90% reduction in severe harm is some kind evidence against vaccines in general. As you appear to do.

Zeus46 - the antivax arguments here are very poor. But they do not need to be good for a target audience primed to see only one type causal relationship as likely: vaccine => something bad. Freud would have had a field day.

The issue with Polio vaccines is complicated because

OPV exists (at very low rate) and is a result of the vaccine. Vaccines are not completely harmless, but the harms of getting Polio are much greater until such time as the disease is eradicated.

AFP is mostly AFM - a different viral disease.

It is also possible (though very speculative) that the eradication of Polio has left an evolutionary niche into which new nasty virusses (like the AFM inducing NPEVs) can evolve. They are still at a very low level so we don't know much about them and cannot yet develop a vaccine!

Human health is a continual war. Antibiotics and vaccines win battles for us, but new challenges are unavoidable.

Could mark or navid please say: do you read Snopes to get basic sanity fact checking? Or do you dismiss Snopes fact checking as part of the Gates/CDC/medical establishment coverup? In any case, the Snopes facts are referenced.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch…-org-kicked-out-of-india/

Quote from THHuxleynew

the antivax arguments here are very poor.

For sure the link between the two is speculative. My point is that, even considering the link proven, the baby shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater.

Other fact checkers agree with Snopes. Mark, I'd guess you are not in principle against fact checking?

https://factcheck.afp.com/gate…ia-polio-vaccine-campaign

https://leadstories.com/hoax-a…-jAuZk1RT0uZcN1HPuBkp_YTM

https://www.politifact.com/fac…racy-about-bill-gates-an/

Quote from Zeus46

For sure the link between the two is speculative. My point is that, even considering the link proven, the baby shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater.

Sure, we would need to wait a long time before NPEV virusses cause as much disease as Polio did (or would, if not eradicated), if they ever would do that. It is like saying we should not have antibiotics just because 100 years later they have created antibiotic resistance.

Vaccination works, get on with it, what is there to lose. It's just a load of blah blah blah against it. If a family member contacted TB, measles, diphtheria, smallpox, or any of the major infective diseases, wouldn't you regret it. Or crippled for life with polio. Ok the flu jab is not 100% effective because HIN1 or other variations outwits the vaccine by mutation, and that looks like the problem with CO VID too. 40 at least mutations now. So the vaccine has to be raised to a component of the virus which does not mutate, so that is a matter of further research. Or maybe can work it out from the Gordon et a nature paper. If this turns out to be impossible the we are left with anti bat.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Sure, we would need to wait a long time before NPEV virusses cause as much disease as Polio did (or would, if not eradicated), if they ever would do that. It is like saying we should not have antibiotics just because 100 years later they have created antibiotic resistance.

Sorry but I'm still contemplating your Freudian analysis.

Is this why most anti-vaxxers I see on TV are cranky middle-aged women? Will kids develop vaccine envy? Is a thinner needle really better? And why do hypermuscular body-builder types prefer a dorsogluteal shot?

Rends

Interesting to see youngsters, particularly 5 to 14 years are actually down, allbeit on very low total figures.

So assuming a handful of Covid deaths in this group compensated by many less road accidents etc,

However 75,000 deaths of 65+ years is the true story, with over half of these (40,000 of total) of 85+ years.

Many of these attributable to the many goverments blind spot of care homes.

Apparently in the UK care homes for the elderly are now getting attention and resources.

The next blind spot is care homes for younger individuals with learning difficulties.

BBC Radio 4 program was saying how they call for an ambulance and get reply that patient is not old enought to be admissable under the new guidelines for care home patients.

Plus their carers are trying to get tests, but the nearest testing centre may be 30 miles or more and not all of them have cars or can drive, but they are advised not to take public transport!

Quote from Zeus46

Sorry but I'm still contemplating your Freudian analysis.

Is this why most anti-vaxxers I see on TV are cranky middle-aged women? Will kids develop vaccine envy? Is a thinner needle really better? And why do hypermuscular body-builder types prefer a dorsogluteal shot?

I guess one might, as a purely academic exercise, get milage out of looking at the differing unconscious motivations of male and female antivaxers?

These are excerpts from a TV series called Deadzone - Plague, which aired in July of 2003. Get your chloroquine!

Political bias

Since examining bias in content is not of itself political.

CNN and Fox are nearly opposite in terms of bias, and both score pretty badly, mixed, in terms of accuracy. Interesting that conspiracy theories seem to be mostly associated with Fox. Is there something political about conspiracies that makes those with right-leaning sympathies more likely to believe them than those with left-leaning sympathies?

Let's look at the research: Not obviously a left/right issue, but extreme left or right beliefs tend to favour conspiracy theory thinking. Maybe it is just a Fox thing. Or maybe this is related to the fact that Fox is closer to extreme Right than CNN is to extreme Left.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fox-news/

Overall, we rate Fox News strongly Right-Biased due to editorial positions and story selection that favors the right. We also rate them Mixed factually and borderline Questionable based on poor sourcing and the spreading of conspiracy theories that later must be retracted after being widely shared. Further, Fox News would be rated a Questionable source based on numerous failed fact checks by hosts and pundits, however straight news reporting is generally reliable, therefore we rate them Mixed for factual reporting.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/cnn/

Overall, we rate CNN left biased based on editorial positions that consistently favors the left, while straight news reporting falls left-center through bias by omission. We also rate them Mixed for factual reporting due to several failed fact checks by TV hosts. However, news reporting on the website tends to be be properly sourced with minimal failed fact checks