But that’s just the start. Murad Banaji, an Indian mathematician, reports that there were 476 funerals in Kanpur on one day — normally you’d expect about 100 — and yet only three reported deaths from Covid. John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has others: cities are cremating many, many times as many people as have apparently died from Covid (some of his data is taken from Banaji). The IHME model estimates that the number of people dead is about double the reported numbers; Burn-Murdoch thinks it could be much higher, as high as 10 times.
India has a relatively young population, and the risk of death from Covid is hugely affected by age, so the infection fatality rate – the risk of death for someone infected by the virus – was probably quite low, comparatively speaking: perhaps about 0.3%. (This Nature paper says that the IFR in Bangladesh is about that, and since the two countries have a similar age profile, I’m assuming it’s about correct for India.)
But that will all have changed now. The Indian healthcare system is overwhelmed; there isn’t any oxygen to keep patients alive. This news report suggests about 40% of ICU patients in India were dying back in September: if we imagine that all of the 0.3% of infected people who died went through ICU first (which isn’t true, but let’s imagine it), then that means about 0.75% of Indian people infected with Covid ended up in ICU (0.3 is 40% of 0.75).
But if you end up needing ICU in India now, you’ll almost certainly die: the things you’d have gone into ICU for — mechanical ventilation, oxygen, close medical attention — aren’t available. There just isn’t the capacity to treat you. The healthcare system has collapsed. ICU treatment was, in most cases, what was keeping the 60% who didn’t die alive. It’s a good bet that the IFR now is up much closer to 0.75%.
Let’s imagine, now, that we can get those 30 million vaccines into people’s arms as soon as possible. What good might they do 1?
First, to keep things simple, I’m going to assume that the social distancing measures stabilise the Indian outbreak at its current level of about 10 million new cases a day. There was a plausible estimate that about 30% of Indians – 300 million people! – had already had the disease in February, and about 10% have had a vaccine, so it’s reasonable to think that about 40% have some sort of immunity now. At some point that will start slowing down the outbreak significantly, but I’m going to ignore that, again to keep things simple.
Second, I’m going to assume that the vaccine prevents about 90% of deaths. It’s usually more than that, but there are new variants going around India, against which the Ox/AZ vaccine may be a bit less efficacious. Prof Rupert Beale, the head of the Cell Biology of Infection lab at the Crick Institute, thinks 90% is probably a reasonable guess, and Banaji thinks that vaccines are already having an effect.
And I’m going to assume that it takes about three weeks after the first dose for the vaccine to have a full effect.
So if you gave 30 million immunologically naive people the vaccine tomorrow, what would happen? Over the next three weeks, given that 1% of the population is being infected every day, about 20% of them will probably get infected, and 0.75% of them will die. That’s 45,000 deaths.
But after that, things will start to improve. Over the following two months, given our simplified numbers, about 13 million more of them would have caught Covid, and about 100,000 would have died. But, because they’re all vaccinated, all but 10,000 will, in fact, live.
So given these very plausible, or even conservative, estimates, the 30 million AstraZeneca vaccines sitting in an Ohio warehouse could save 90,000 lives in the next three months. Of course, it’s not plausible that they could be put in arms tomorrow – but, then, they also wouldn’t be distributed at random; they would, you’d hope, be given to the most vulnerable people, people with an expected infection fatality rate much higher than 0.75%. The Indian vaccination programme may well not be as well-targeted to at-risk groups as the JCVI-led UK programme, but if it were given entirely to, say, the over-65s, then it might save five times as many people. All of these are estimates, of course, but I think that it’s extremely reasonable to think that it’d be something like this.
And there’s something else to consider. As well as directly protecting people, it will break chains of infection; each infection prevented by vaccination will prevent some number of future cases. Working out even roughly how many would need proper scientific modelling, but as a sort of thought experiment, I checked and saw that the Indian vaccination programme is currently managing about two million doses a day. It was higher, before — about three million — so let’s go with that.
If we naively assume that the 30 million doses simply push the programme on by a proportionate amount, it would mean that the fight against the epidemic is accelerated by 10 days. Again, if I naively think “10 fewer days like today”, then that’s about 25,000 fewer deaths. That’s probably not a very sensible way to think about it — God only knows what the Indian epidemic will be doing in a month or two months’ time — but different models have the daily deaths peaking from 6,000 to 40,000 some time between now and the summer. I don’t think that ballpark figure is unrealistic.
Maybe I’ve got my maths wrong in all of this; maybe I’m wrong by an order of magnitude. Maybe they’ll only save about 10,000 lives. You could still save 10,000 lives for the cost of sending some vaccines you aren’t going to use to another country.
As I said above, there’s been some good news. The USA is going to release 60 million doses as they become available. But it’s not clear that they’re going to go to India – some, at least, are earmarked for Mexico and Canada – and, bafflingly, they have to undergo safety review. Every hour counts, but it will take weeks, at least, for the FDA to carry out this review; weeks in which thousands of Indian people die every day. India has already approved the Ox/AZ vaccine; it has its own experts, and they have assessed the risks and benefits, and they don’t need the FDA to check it for them. This maddening, patronising, counterproductive safety-first approach will cost thousands of lives. Simply get every dose you have on refrigerated aircraft right now and ship them to India as fast as you can.
And it’s not just the USA. Other countries have supplies of vaccines that could do good. Denmark, I think, has about 50,000 unused doses of Ox/AZ which it won’t use. I imagine that lots of other European countries have an oversupply. But the US millions are the overwhelming bulk of the issue.
When Aaronson wrote his blog post, the USA was standing, feet dry, by the pond, refusing to throw their life-belt to save thousands of drowning people. Now, at least, it looks as though they might throw it, after a suitable period of checking that it is adequately buoyant and is painted a regulation shade of orange. But the complete lack of urgency is probably going to cost thousands of lives. For pity’s sake, if you’re not going to use them, get them on a boat and send them somewhere that will.
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SubscribeBritain is 65 million and we had over a thousand deaths a day. Sometimes close to 2,000.
India is over 1300 million – so 20 times bigger population.
They’d have to have 30,000 plus deaths a day to match our worst period.
As usual, we are panicking and hysterical. This is not the plague (that killed 25-50% of Britain’s population), it’s not even the 1918 flu that killed 100m out of a world population of 2,500 million (1 in 25).
This is Covid 19, 3 million world wide deaths out of 8,000 million or more world population. So a 1 in 2,700 chance of death.
Why has every one become utter imbeciles and morons when it comes to measuring risk these days. People just see risk, they don’t put it into any proportion. They don’t do the simple maths. It’s the ultimate destination of the health and safety, risk free culture of the last 20 years.
In the UK the bed wetters who have backed lockdown have thrown away a year of life for 65 million for no reason what so ever. Lockdown didn’t reduce deaths as the death rates in Sweden, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea prove. (https://www.aier.org/article/the-failure-of-imperial-college-modeling-is-far-worse-than-we-knew/)
The death toll of 130,000 or so has an average age of death of 82, 30,000 plus dementia sufferers included, just so happened that during this period there were zero flu deaths, and the tally counts anyone who died within 28 days of a positive test and 95% of those who died had pre existing conditions. The genuine Covid 19 death toll in this country is probably much closer to 50,000, and that may even be an exaggeration.
Maybe we should measure the deaths of people who have had the vaccine within the last 28 days. With 2 shots per person and a daily UK death rate of 1500, you’d be able to count 84,000 deaths as vaccine deaths.
Back to basic maths and Covid 19 – 130,000 deaths from a population of 66m – it means a death rate in the UK of about 1 in 500. But if you don’t have pre existing conditions you can reduce that by a factor of 20, so it’s more like 1 in 10,000, and then you have to adjust that depending on how much younger than 82 you happen to be.
If you exclude the obese from the figures you will find healthy people under the age of 65 or even older, have almost zero risk.
Most people still don’t know anyone who has been seriously ill or died from Covid 19 – and if they do they’re usually very old, very frail and were sick anyway.
The great hysteria of 2020-2021 continues.
All very well, but the only sufferer I personally know who has died of COVID was exactly that: not obese, healthy, and under 65.
The outliers do not prove a point…. you have to go with the stats.
Worthy of a Bond villain.
Thanks, I am flattered
Bloefeldt perhaps?
Very few drunk drivers get killed while driving drunk. You have to go with the stats: let’s all drive drunk, whatever the bedwetters say.
Poor comparison….
Why?
But surely it’s their right to drive while drunk if they don’t believe statistics, even if they’re not the ones who get killed!
(/s)
No, it’s not their right to get other people killed.
Your mockery uses precisely the same argument that you’re opposing.
Which is that total ‘banning’ on the evidence of a little is wrong.
Your mockery is that total ‘doing’ on the evidence of a little is ludicrous.
You both make the same argument: ‘global’ or ‘universal’ ‘total’ responses to small local phenomena are invalid.
I’m not a logician but it seems clear to me.
Happens everywhere:
. Some kids fall off the high bar in playgrounds and hurt themselves badly.
. So bad all high bars in all playgrounds.
. So make all kids play on the high bar in playgrounds.
It’s all wild over-reaction isn’t it?
Your analogy is invalid. Here’s why. How many kids kill other kids in falling off the high bar while not injuring themselves?
This is about whom you put at risk by giving them the disease, even if it doesn’t kill you.
That’s what Richard, Kay and co want to do. They want to not be vaccinated and to return to normal life, because they reckon they personally will be fine.
Except that in doing that, they risk becoming carriers, who infect people who won’t be fine. They provide a locus for the disease to mutate into a form that vaccines don’t protect. And for all they know, they won’t be fine anyway, because they’re not virologist or epidemiologists, they’re just cranks on the internet and people are dying of this who weren’t supposed to.
“…who infect people who won’t be fine”…but the vast majority of those people who “won’t be fine” if they catch Covid will have all been vaccinated, and thus immune from the virus. Or, if they prefer not to get vaccinated, they understand the risk to themselves and deal with it, rather than expect others to make decisions about their own health, on their behalf.
So what’s your problem with young, healthy people choosing to not get vaccinated?
Most young, healthy people have never gotten flu shots, either. Why is submitting to vaccinations and all their attendant risks suddenly something the young and healthy owe to the older and most vulnerable?
We used to up until 1967, and killed about 7,000 a year ! Then Barbara Castle stopped all the fun!
That doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of us don’t know anyone who’s even had covid never mind died ‘of’ ‘with’ or ‘where covid was mentioned’. 99.8 percent have not died of covid.
Isn’t there a quote that says ‘anecdote is the enemy of truth’.
Sounds like an anecdote to me.
Except that it’s an anecdote that keeps repeating itself in every western country.
It’s in reply to an anecdotal account though. Jon Redman claimed to have known someone with no risk factors (to his knowledge) who (allegedly) died of COVID.
With the criteria used to classify a death as a “covid death”, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this person had fallen off a ladder, been in a motorcycle accident, or got blood poisoning from a cat bite.
In February the ONS thought 20% of Britons had been infected at some stage. Unless your circle of friends and family is very small it’s unlikely you don’t know someone who has had it.
I know of two people dying of it.
“With” or “of”? Ages? Medical conditions? Underlying conditions?
Yes Kay, because anyone with an “underlying condition” is, in your view, a non-person whose life is not worth preserving.
Nobody is saying that their lives are not worth preserving. But we have a right to be told the truth about the demographics of those dying from this virus. If it is NOT a virus that strikes down healthy and fit people in their prime of life, i.e.people of working age, or children or teens, it does not justify shutting down the world for over a year, trampling civil liberties, depriving people of health care, wrecking children’s education, destroying small businesses, and trashing the economy. It just doesn’t. Prevention efforts should have been targeted exclusively at the most vulnerable. They weren’t; quite the contrary. Actions of certain governments, eg. that of New York State and Michigan, in fact strongly suggested that they WANTED tens of thousands of elderly people to die.
100% of the people I actually know who’ve died of COVID were slim, healthy and under 65.
The claims that people like that are safe, and those who aren’t aren’t, is just something I’m expected to believe based on other people’s reported experience. A few weeks ago, however, COVID was reportedly no threat to the under-30s either and then India happened. A few weeks before that AZ was reportedly fine and now it’s not.
For all you, I or anybody else knows, the first round of deaths were just the weakest sufferers. The next round, given that immunity is ephemeral and the virus is mutating, appears to be reaching younger, supposedly stronger victims.
I am reminded strongly of that American Civil War general who was killed mid-sentence saying “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this ra—“…
100% of how many?
Get out of bed, stand straight, look life in the eye and live it. I am not willing to waste the rest of my life hiding away, even if whimpering spineless quivering fools like you are happy to avoid any risk for the rest of your lives.
Are you happy to refuse vaccination and thereby spread COVID to people it will kill, and / or incubate a variant of COVID that kills people who have been vaccinated? If so, shame on you. Really, shame on you.
If the vaccine works and you chose to have it, surely you are safe…. Unless you’re not sure the vaccine works.
I’ve explained this to you already. You are monstrously, malevolently selfish. You could not care less whom you infect.
You’re an absolute muppet, Richard.
You are a mindless sheep repeating the propaganda on mainstream media. 27,000 people die every day in India. 3000 kids die there every day from starvation. All while their government spends billions on military and space programs. All while their poorest don’t have access to basic sanitation and clean water.
Where was your faux outrage and concern for the people of India 2 years ago? Melt.
It was where my concern is now. I’m not talking about India. I’m talking about the threat to vaccinated people from those who choose to avoid vaccination because they figure they are not personally at risk, and who then spread it to people who are at risk.
I think your concern is entirely misplaced. For the vaccines not to work you would have to have far more significant mutations than are appearing now. In fact sequencing all these very minor variants only serves to further spread hysteria and fear.
As for your concerns if you’re worried. Simply do the following in addition to your vaccination. Make sure you take vitamin D and zinc, don’t stay for prolonged periods of time in crowded poorly ventilated spaces, get a big-ass HEPA air purifier for your office space (and/or home), and avoid speaking face-to-face with anybody for more than 20 min. If you do all of those things, the probability of you getting COVID are very small indeed.
In India, more than a thousand people per day die with TB (a totally preventable disease) with most having a younger and otherwise healthier profile than those with Covid-19. TB deaths do not make the front page because the West is not interested in deaths of Indian people per se – we are only concerned if they are dying from a disease that threatens the West.
Yes but TB hasn’t destroyed their healthcare system due to sheer caseload.
That’s the main difference – the collateral damage from this pandemic is an order of magnitude higher than TB ever was or will be.
Did you miss the bit where the Indian health care system literally collapsed under the case load? Ever heard of collateral damage? Thousands are going to die needlessly of other illnesses or injuries simply because they can’t get a hospital bed.
This virus is real and serious, I can’t believe this hasn’t got through by now.
God people on this site scare me sometimes.
“Collateral damage”? I don’t think you really want to go there.
The economic and social effects of these lockdowns have been – and continue to be – catastrophic.
Yes, because I’ve likely already been responsible for ‘killing’ someone in a chain of contagious viruses the myriad times I’ve had flu, cold, strep throat, gastro, etc. No one blamed anyone for passing on the flu virus that killed my father and I wouldn’t expect them to. That’s what viruses do, they spread, they harm some, and they kill others. And there are thousands of them out there and humans are carriers of them. We can continue to pretend that humans can control this perfectly or we can cut our losses and accept that sometime slim people under the age of 65 do die. Because, and I hate to break this to you, if it wasn’t COVID it was going to be something else…we all die eventually!
If he’s vaccinated with the same vaccine as other people, he’s just as likely to catch one of those dreaded “variants” the vaccine can’t fight, as he would be if he wasn’t vaccinated. And thus, spread it to other people whom the vaccine doesn’t protect.
Not sure if you have fully thought this through.
But I get it; it feels good to shame people who don’t feel obligated to submit to a swiftly-developed vaccine with a wide range of potential and possibly permanent side effects in order to “protect” others from some theoretical worst-case scenario.
Partially due to the lockdowns.
Without lockdowns, we’d have had (and maybe would have today) people dying in hospital car parks because the hospital is full of people, and hospitals running out of oxygen.
Only the vulnerable needed to isolate. The rest could have got in with their lives. We are so lucky we didn’t have your attitude when facing hitler in ww2.
You’re talking rubbish. We KNOW that the very most vulnerable people living in care homes were infected by their carers and doctors and nurses before there was a vaccine. It is not possible to isolate people entirely, because they need supplies, and they need assistance. This is in your scheme, to be provided by the people who are happily going about spreading the virus as they live their lives to use your phrase.
People caring for the vulnerable should have been more careful not to infect them, then. It’s not like they don’t have protocols in place, when there are viral outbreaks every flu season. They’re supposed to understand how viruses work, and spread. There are a lot of incompetent idiots working in the health care system, unfortunately.
DING DING DING. We have a WW2 reference.
I like Unherd’s output, I really do, but it’s commentariat is getting worse by the day..
Then stop reading it; nobody’s forcing you.
I’m alright as I am, thanks Kathy. If you re-read my comment, you’ll find that I quite enjoy Unherd’s content and thoughtful output.
My issue was with the general quality of the content BTL, which used to be much better.
As always, it is only a matter of time before Godwin’s Law strikes again…
Complete and utter garbage. You’re repeating the most basic bullshit and lies that have been fed during this event.
You present as a very stupid lady, I’m sorry to say.
Get that logic and reason out of here, Chris. It’s not welcome.
Instead we got a lot of empty hospitals, with staff having plenty of free time to make godawful TikTok dance videos (when they weren’t outside scolding lpckdown-breaking non-social distancing lockdown protesters, or cheering on lockdown-breaking non-social distancing BLM protesters a week later), while people suffered from all kinds of untreated ailments because beds had to be reserved for Covid patients, and old people died alone and in grief and despair because their loved ones weren’t allowed to be with them.
I had covid, I was one of the very first, picking it up at Mardi-Gras where the numbers became highest in USA. I then was sick as a really, really, bad flue, never felt in danger of my life though, then recovered in a couple weeks, then it hit back right again, this time had Long Covid 9 more weeks. Total Post Viral Chronic Fatigue. I do construction, am mid 60s, so very fit, and yet I had to lay around months I was so fatigued. (and if you do try to push through the fatigue and work it makes it worse, so rest is the cure). I have refused the mask entirely (I was way past incubation time before I ventured out) but for a couple times when bank guards blocked me from entering, everywhere else I am always the only one unmasked, but no one says anything to me as I am big and scruffy. (Except for the construction materials supply places, where well less than half mask, real men and women who do real work never masked.)
I am the most strident anti-Lockdown person out there. Lockdown did no good but has likely destroyed the West, the Central Bank bills are piling up and will have to be paid, and that is not possible without hyper-inflation unless controlled by equally bad problems, like devaluing the currency and raising interest rates to block it I believe. And that is a very bad thing indeed. (I am not a MMT Koolaid drinker).
The youth lost a year, and a year of education, and they are NEVER getting that back.
You do NOT burn down the house to get rid of the rats.
Ha ha ha ha – a real man – Cowboy Joe. I thought this kind of stuff was just in the old Westerns I used to watch in the 1950s when I was a kid, but this guy believes it and lives it.
LOL – still laughing.
I guess the cognitive dissonance of encountering someone who really suffered from Covid yet is still anti-lockdown has pushed you over the edge.
And we don’t know anyone who’s died or or suffered from the covid restrictions or measures either.
Though there’s almost certainly someone very close by.
In fact, if you want to be precise, there’s one very close by: yourself.
Every single one of us has suffered at the very least by the appropriation of our tax monies to splash out on these wild schemes: fumigating public places, ‘deep cleaning’ schools, public transport, putting people out of work and then paying them high ‘out of work’ monies… and on and on…
There’s much more.
Basically most of us just don’t know much of our fellows.
That’s why we rely so much on the media.
And government propaganda.
Both of which, we have learned since 9/11, are deeply corrupt and we’d be fools to trust in them.
So eventually, I hope, think, there’s going to arise a public paradigm by which we inform ourselves of the truth.
All these discussions in the comment sections of so many things are the faint beginnings of it I think.
In uK 127,500 are supposed to have died of SARS2 its nearer 5% 7,000 ..The rest had underlying illness diagnosed or not,Cancers, leukaemia,Asthma, etc..I dont recall 127,500 Autopsies or GPs sending any clinical evidence on deaths
Another idiot comes here with lies. The excess death data for the UK suggest that many more died than even the government says. Excess deaths can’t be faked, or misattributed.
“…many more died than even the government says”…so are you saying you can’t trust the government data to be accurate? And that there may be hundreds (thousands?) of deaths the government doesn’t know about? Where are all these dead people, buried in basements, or stored in freezers?
I don’t know anyone with cancer, therefore, cancer does not exist. It is a big government plot.
As you have no idea who “the vast majority of us” are, how can you tell who we know?
There’s always one, but the figures and stats show that to be very rare indeed.
Using your logic, we would have to ban crossing the road, stairs in houses and flying – just in case one of your healthy friends just happens to be one of the very very few that die after crossing a road, falling down the stairs or in an air accident.
Please use some sense.
Are you really saying that because Jon Redman knew someone who died from Covid and he was fit and healthy beforehand, to be taken as proof that locking down is the right thing to do.
Who mentioned locking down? I’m pointing out that your view of statistics weighs less than my direct experience, in the same way that I distrust all pit bull terriers even though most of them hardly ever kill anyone.
Isn’t this whole debate about locking down?
Didn’t the same ONS declare a few weeks back that the U.K. has overcounted Covid deaths by 23%, ie almost 30,000?
That number is almost certainly higher given the ridiculous policy of categorising deaths as Covid related simply due to dying within 28 days of an unreliable PCR test run at an absurdly / suspiciously high CT level.
Scandalously it appears that this zeal to attribute deaths to Covid does not seem to apply to recording of cause of death following vaccination. The government / NHS isn’t taking vaccine mortality very seriously and the latter’s Yellow Card system is riddled with inaccuracies and/or not being data-filled consistently.
None of which is being reported or covered by mainstream media – the same ones that didn’t report or attempted to trivialise or cynically rubbish the London demonstration on Saturday.
With all this irrational and irresponsible hysteria, our overcounting of cases and deaths might lead one to believe that making Britain look worse than it actually is/was has been intentional.
No.
See : Counting deaths involving coronavirus: a year in review Sarah Caul ONS January 12 2021
Bearing in mind that all the figures she quotes are still provisional because of the delay in coroner’s courts at the moment.
As for the 28 day thing you clearly are clueless as to how death certificates are completed in the UK and equally clueless about this illness. If you leave ICU having recovered from Covid you are at increased risk of keeling over for 90 days afterwards due to the effects of all the interventions that have been inflicted upon you.
As for the yellow card – anyone can fill in anything and claim it is vaccine related (see the “dental” section for some really bizarre and irrelevant “adverse reactions”). Unless you compare these reports with the average incidence of all those adverse events in the population, over a similar time period in a non vaccination setting you have no idea if there is anything untoward going on.
Incidentally at least one person died from a road traffic accident in the placebo group of the Pfizer trial. According to your reasoning this means that the Pfizer vaccine protects you from dying in a road traffic acident.
It’s your dogmatism that comes across as clueless. Maybe even credulous. Noted that you crank up the rudeness when confronted by assertions that don’t meet with your approval.
From David Oliver, Consultant in Geriatric and Acute Medicine in Manchester :
“Death Certificates contain causes 1a (cause directly leading to death) 1b and 1c (causes leading to 1a) and 2 (causes contributing to death but not directly related).
If Covid-19 is in our clinical assessment of the person we have assessed and treated the main cause of death, we will put it as cause 1a.
In other cases, someone might die from a complication of Covid-19 – for instance a pulmonary embolism (blood clot) or a bacterial pneumonia in which case that will be 1a with Covid as 1b or c.
In other cases, the person may have had Covid contributing to a death from another cause – perhaps by making the person weaker or more susceptible or starting a chain of events and may appear as 2.
There never was a formal requirement for a positive Covid-19 test to write Covid on a certificate if the clinical picture was clear and so yes, some patients, mostly earlier in the pandemic would have had Covid written down without yet testing positive.
… also “deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test” does NOT influence what we actually write on death certificates which by law we have to complete to the best of our knowledge and belief and which are scrutinised by a 2nd doctor.
En masse Falsification of certificates? no
the ONS data (rather than GOV own definition for counting) are not based on some arbitrary post test time period but on what we put on the certificate based on our clinical knowledge of that patient in their final illness. If we think Covid contributed to death it goes on.”
third party observing this interaction: yours is purely ad hominen.
Care to explain the ONS’s position on this – or are they clueless in your book?
What position ?
Probably nearer 95% see Epidemologists like Dr Karol Sikora, Professor Suntra gupta,who are less hysterical..
Didn’t the same ONS declare a few weeks back that the U.K. has overcounted Covid deaths by 23%, ie almost 30,000?
That number is almost certainly higher given the ridiculous policy of categorising deaths as Covid related simply due to dying within 28 days of an unreliable PCR test run at an absurdly / suspiciously high CT level.
Scandalously it appears that this zeal to attribute deaths to Covid does not seem to apply to recording of cause of death following vaccination. The government / NHS isn’t taking vaccine mortality very seriously and the latter’s Yellow Card system is riddled with inaccuracies and/or not being data-filled consistently.
None of which is being reported or covered by mainstream media – the same ones that didn’t report or attempted to trivialise or cynically rubbish the London demonstration on Saturday.
With all this irrational and irresponsible hysteria, our overcounting of cases and deaths might lead one to believe that making Britain look worse than it actually is/was has been intentional.
For me, it doesn’t mean anyone under 65 and healthy won’t die but it certainly is more of a long shot that they do. There no guarantees in life.
Until the advice changes. Remember when COVID was hardly any threat to the under 30s?
It isn’t a threat to healthy under 30s, nor healthy 65s.
Apart from all those Indian under-30s who are dying of it of course.
Maybe the point there is ‘it’. ‘It’ needs defining.
I think perhaps no one really know what they’re dying of.
There’s much that’s strange about the way this virus behaves around the world.
Indicating there are factors we are ignorant of.
Running around shouting ‘covid’ just distracts from looking for those factors.
How many, exactly? Do you know how many people under 30 in India regularly die of other causes, like malaria, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, etc?
or healthy 82 year olds until they become 82years 4 months,then the average age of death Catches up..If you are an obese prime minister ,more scared of Your live in Girlfriend & her £11,000 vases ..You are definately vulnerable/..
Well that sounds like empirical evidence then……did they die “of” or “with”?
He died of it. Very, very unpleasant and lingering way to die.
What very bad luck.
However what Richard E is saying is precisely what the late Bertrand Russell thought when he said “most people would rather die than think, and most do”
Well said sir….
But it would be much more without the lockdown.
And more without the vaccines, which the loonies oppose while touting Vitamin D or other nonsense/
Actually. You must read the article I linked too. It shows that those countries that didn’t lockdown were not the disasters that they were forecast to be by the same modelling techniques that have convinced you that the lockdown worked.
I call it Lockdown Logic. Basically zero logic in most cases, people too cowardly or lazy or thick to sit calmly and look at the figures and weigh the risks, of locking down and not locking down. Most of our imbecilic population followed the crowd and drank back the government propaganda of fear, and from that moment on their ego’s couldn’t even consider that they were fooled or were wrong.
(Mark Twain’s quote on it being easier to fool someone, than to convince a fool they have been fooled sums it up)
The idea that locking down does anymore than slow the spread and delays things a bit. Countries like Poland locked down early, and all they achieved was delaying their first wave. Very soon they will have one of the highest rates of death per capita.
The onus is on the countries that locked down to show that the positive impact of shutting down out weighs the economic, social and future health costs.
When the morons were out clapping the closure of the NHS, did it enter their heads for one second, what deaths would be coming down the road because the NHS basically stopped treating everything but Covid?
Well said!
Delaying getting Covid by locking down means you don’t get it at all, because you get vaccinated.
Delaying getting Covid means that hospitals aren’t swamped, don’t run out of oxygen and the death rate (deaths per 100 people catching the disease) don’t soar because even serious cases have to be denied ICU treatment.
Thats why almost all Governments have locked down to a lesser or greater extent…. and why, where extremist idiots like Bolsonaro undermine locking down policies, the disease gets out of control. As it did in Britain in September/October, when our own “let the dead pile up in their thousands” extremist idiot refused to take SAGE’s advice on a two week lockdown in mid-September, and the disease went from a rarity then to being out of control by the end of October, when he was forced to U-turn. That’s why tens of thousands died from the disease in October-February.
You do realize that both in the UK and US the hospitals and ICUs were never overloaded with COVID patients. Recall in NYC the makeshift hospital that was put up as well as the navy hospital ships – none were used in the end. Likewise recall Cuomo saying that the federal government wasn’t giving him enough ventilators, and again not only didn’t they use them but it turned out that the ventilators were doing more harm than good (at least as used initially last March/April/May).
Lockdowns are problematic because (a) they increase the probability of infection (almost all transmission has occurred indoors not outdoors); (b) they do not impact the area under the deaths/million curve, just prolong the agony; (c) they weaken the immune system including by reducing exposure to sunlight and hence a reduction in vit D levels; and (d) there is no guarantee the vaccines are as effective as claimed (the trials so far are limited) and that the vaccines are not devoid of either significant short-term sequelae or long term bad effects (which may take several years to develop).
The best strategy, therefore, is to vaccinate the most vulnerable (the over 65’s as well as some younger individuals with very significant and associated co-morbidities), while leaving the rest unvaccinated. Unfortunately that’s not happening and we can only hope that the number of fatal incidents post-vaccination is kept to a minimum. While these may be rare, when it affects somebody who was young and perfectly healthy it’s nothing short of a major tragedy. In this regard worth recalling the incidence of narcolepsy following the rushed swine flu vaccination in children which resulted in many unnecessary deaths.
Nor the £233 Million nightingales .
Include in your calculations the one year of life 65 million people lost due to lockdowns.
The 95% who died of pre existing conditions would have been saved if we just locked down the frail and those with pre existing conditions. They’re the ones who filled the hospitals and died.
The healthy and young never filled the hospitals and never threatened to do so. 80% of the population could have carried on life as usual, and it may have even saved lives. The healthy 80% would have caught it and become immune, they could have also provided the services to allow the vulnerable to stay at home. The healthy immune would have provided herd immunity to the frail.
The ones who filled the hospitals. Best source of information for this are the ICNARC reports :
ICNARC report on COVID-19 in critical care: England, Wales and Northern Ireland 5 February 2021″
Page 38 – 40 Patient demographics / characteristics (any advanced respiratory support) Admitted from Sep 1
Mean age 60.2, Median age 62, 67.8% male, 70.5% white, 89% able to live without assistance in daily activities. (So not exactly the usual UnHinged caricature of doddering crinkly in a care home and BAME)
Immunocompromised, Haematological malignancy and Renal are the top 3 serious comorbidites. However the admissions with very serious comorbidites only account for 9.7% of the total which means 90.3% admitted to these critical care beds did NOT have serious comorbidites – another UnHinged fallacy out the window.
and yes they have a separate section for fatties. 36.4% of admissions have a BMI 30 -<40, 10.6% =/>40 so definitely too much beer and crisps down the pub.
The vulnerable. Depends a bit on who you regard as being at risk.
“UK prevalence of underlying conditions which increase the risk of severe COVID-19 disease: a point prevalence study using electronic health records Walker August 2020” Calculated the population at risk of severe COVID-19 (aged ≥70 years, or with an underlying health condition) to be 18.5 million individuals in the UK, including a considerable proportion of school-aged and working-aged individuals.
OR one could look at social parameters :
OR one could go to the ONS :
Hi Elaine.
Do you think any such stats are potentially misleading, without the context of whether (1) the individuals in critical care actually caught the virus whilst in critical care or (2) whilst already (non-critical care) seriously ill in hospital and/or (3) what % of those testing positive were actually true positives AND suffering from covid-related effects?
Without accurate stats relating to the above (noting that for (3) we will never know), then all such figures are interesting, but not particularly informative.
Those questions don’t lead to any particular conclusion. For instance false negatives could outweigh false positives, there is no scientific way of determining the significance of covid in actually causing any particular death, those in critical care already may have immune systems unrepresentative of the population at large and hence be more susceptible etc.
All we really know, is that a lot more testing and reporting has been done for this disease, than for any preceding similar virus.
I’m personally minded to look at overall UK death stats, which look broadly similar to a situation in which the population is exposed to a fairly novel, very bad-flu-year-impact-like virus, in combination with the population being scared away from receiving normal-levels of life-saving treatments. In such a situation, I’d expect several tens of thousands of deaths from covid and several tens of thousands of deaths from the press-scaremongering and measures to tackle covid. It’s a bad year, but probably would have been similar to 1958 without the press and government reactions.
By the way, the increase in deaths/million in Oct-Feb had nothing to do with not locking down or locking down. Lockdowns have had zero effect, and usually they’ve been implemented after the curves are already on a downward path. The reason for the large increase and subsequent decrease in deaths/million over the Oct/Nov to April/May season is simple: it’s known as flu season or more generally respiratory tract infection season . That’s why the common cold is prevalent during the flu season and then falls to very low level in the late spring/summer/early autumn months.
Incidentally if you plot the deaths per million in the UK on a nightingale circular plot you immediately see the seasonality.
I do believe it goes further. Lockdown directly exacerbate covid illnesses and therefore deaths.
People forced to be in close contact for extended periods can’t help cross contaminating whereas before it well may have been avoided.
Same with masks. Recently seen claims that masks increase your own viral load and exacerbate your illness if you have one… prejudice your immune system if you don’t..
And as for slowing down the spread. Haven’t we seen graphs and charts enough demonstrating a total failure of lockdown measures to make any diference whatever in the trajectory of the disease between lockdown places and non lockdown?
exactly right on all counts
Vaccines…. vaccinate the vulnerable, those with pre – existing conditions who make up 96% of the dead so far and those over retirement age and you almost eliminate all deaths.
Vaccines are not necessary if you are fit and healthy – but it’s completely the choice of the individual if they have it or not.
I suspect in the long run the vaccines will not work, as yearly mutations feed through, and next year you will need another vaccine etc etc.
In my mind, once the vaccines have been offered to all there is no need at all for any form of lockdown – that’s if you were stupid enough to believe in lockdowns in the first place.
If you’ve had the vaccine and it works – you shouldn’t care who else has it – as you’re SAFE.
So let people choose.
I always support free choice and am quite happy if the bed wetters want to extend their own personal lockdowns for decades to come, wear masks 24 hours a day and stick to the rule of 6 into the 2030s and 2040s.
Well, you’re not safe. The more people haven’t had the vaccine, the more loci there are for new strains to evolve, and hence the greater the chance of a variant arising against which existing vaccines are ineffective.
If I were the only person vaccinated in a population of 1,000 I would not feel safe for long.
It is purely speculative that the variants are either more contagious or more virulent. Recall all the variants are >97% sequence identical. There is plenty for the immune system to target, especially from T cell immunity, outside the small regions of variation in the spike protein. This is even true of the current spike protein vaccines since many small peptides from all over the spike protein will be sitting on the cell surface ready to be targeted by T cells.
It is purely speculative that the variants are either more contagious or more virulent.
There’s mounting evidence some are indeed more contagious. It’s far from pure speculation.
There are published papers, yes. Full of speculation and fear mongering yes. Sure they’ve passed peer review (or at least some of them have) but when so many scientists just follow the herd that’s not surprising.
In the US there was a great brouhaha about the British variant, but judging from the UK, the British variant did not pose any problem and deaths and cases per million have fallen like a rock. Indeed, the current deaths per million figure is below the previous 5 year average in the UK.
Are you talking about Age Standardised Mortality Rates ?
According to the ONS :
“But the provisional age-standardised mortality rate in 2020 was 1043.5 deaths per 100,000 population around 8% higher than the five year average. This is the highest it has been in more than a decade (since 2008).”
All figures are provisional of course because of the 5 month delay in coroner’s courts at the moment
You’re a rather confused fellow, aren’t you. The Kent variant was far more infectious and went on to dominate in many countries. It killed tens of thousands here this last winter and only stopped doing so here because of a massively effective vaccination campaign which covered 95% of people in the most vulnerable categories. That variant spread like wildfire in India and then mutated into an even more infectious variant now known in common parlance as the Indian Variant.
More contagious, or more deadly?
Mutations of the virus genome are entirely random. Some will hinder reproduction of the virus, while others will enhance it. The crippled mutations will die out, and the more effective ones will reproduce and dominate. Thus we can be sure that in time, more infectious versions will appear when there is ever a large pool of infectious people anywhere in the world. Since our leaders are incredibly reluctant to isolate the country properly (witness the arrival recently of an infected Indian trade delegation who had the Indian variant for trade talks with the government) these variants are bound to arrive here and to spread.
You’ve just stated the vaccine doesn’t work.
In the old days if you had the vaccine you were safe and it didn’t matter what everyone else did. What you’re describing is a vaccine that doesn’t work.
“In the old days if you had the vaccine you were safe and it didn’t matter what everyone else did”
No you weren’t and yes it did. In order to achieve herd immunity and reduce transmission to insignificant levels (no community outbreaks) you have to reach a certain level of population immunity. This varies from pathogen to pathogen.
e.g. 93 – 95% for measles; 85% for diphtheria.
Measles is an RNA virus but has shown amazing evolutionary stability (many hypotheses regarding the reason for this) so no vaccine escape.
Right now we don’t really know whether Sars Cov 2 will be like measles or flu (always evolving and escaping). This is a moveable feast.
Not accurate. We know that SARS-CoV2 absolutely does not behave like the flu because its RNA replication mechanism is a lot more stable (i.e. much better proof-reading).
Yep – but not as stable as measles and we don’t have a good handle on which mutations (if any) will show vaccine escape.
Right now the virus has a couple of great petri dishes to play in – Brazil and India.
No I haven’t Richard. I’ve stated that if I’m the only one of a population of 1,000 who’s been vaccinated, then there are 999 people in whom a version of the virus can mutate. Any of these could be a variant that my vaccination does not defeat. So for vaccines to work, a lot of people have to have one; then there are both fewer places for a new strain to develop and a lower chance of transmission to me. If I’m the only vaccinated individual, I will not be immune for long.
At present, if not vaccinated, you are gifting COVID an opportunity to mutate into a strain that other people’s vaccinations don’t protect them from. It’s not all or only about you.
Lockdowns have taken a year of our lives, so we have every right not to comply.
What you are asserting about vaccination and mutation is just not true. There is plenty of speculation and fear mongering regarding this possibility, but no evidence for it whatsoever.
Painful line of reasoning sir. Recent peer reviewed publication, though small sample, shows natural immunization is more effective with the variants than these experimental medical treatments. We’ll have all the right answers in about five years or longer. Two extremes are common sense and natural immunity building versus experimental cell-changing technology not yet approved in one country. If I have to choose between freedom and safety I take freedom. Give me liberty or give me death. We all die, no lives are saved. Let’s enjoy our time. Peace out!
Most people are obviously going to get vaccinated, so you can rest easy.
Just accept that there are some people who are going to choose not to get vaccinated, and it’s their right. “My body, my choice”, and all that.
Your expressed philosophy rather selfishly asserts your right to allow yourself to become a vessel where the virus can mutate into a vaccine escaping version, AND you also would seem to think that the rest of us should tolerate you wandering about in our midst where YOUR rights mean you risk spreading it to us. Well….. Don’t be in the least surprised when we tell you you are not allowed out to mix with the rest of us in the world.
‘My body my choice’, is a mere slogan. It has no force whatsoever when your choice may harm me, or my family, or society at large. By all means refuse the vaccine (if you are stupid enough) but prepare for house arrest.
You are deliberately spreading disinformation. A deficiency of Vitamin D, triggers T-helper2 cells, which are pro-inflammatory, and thus creating the cytokine Storm, whilst a healthy immune system that has sufficient vitamin D triggers T-helper1 cells (non-inflammatory). You sir, are a danger to the public. What is your agenda?
He’s a socialist agent provocateur, best ignored, or even pitied.
He’s an example of what a commenter above stated, that it is easier to fool someone than it is to convince a fool that they have been fooled.
He’s taken the vaccine, and is now reading why it isn’t such a good bet (unless over 75-80). And as you can’t get the mRNA that is in the vaccine out of your body, he’s doubling down and shouting at everyone else that they’re gonna die if they don’t do what he did..
I’ve had the first injection, will be having the second, and the vaccine is divorcing CASES from DEATHS (because those who still get ill, don’t get seriously ill) as well as massively reducing cases in the first place because people have been vaccinated don’t catch the disease and are less likely to spread it.
What about those facts don’t you understand?
And how do you explain the plunge in cases and deaths in Britain, if it’s not due to vaccination?
Well, quite.
The man I know who died of COVID did so essentially following Richard E’s advice. He figured he wasn’t at personal risk, so he and his wife invited over his friend and his wife. The two latter, also following Richard’s advice, had been to a restaurant the night before. They all figured they’d be fine and they even took their masks off.
All four went down with COVID, three were seriously ill, and the fourth died five weeks after being infected.
The chances of being injured in a car accident when you’re drunk and not wearing your seatbelt are actually quite low in absolute terms, even if higher than if you’re sober and wearing one. Presumably, we should follow the stats here too, and drive drunk on the basis that we personally will probably be fine.
My friend died in a car accident last year. He didn’t think he was going to, and was just driving his car normally like he always does.
So, was the driver at fault.
Was the car at fault?
Should he not have made the decision to go by car?
Do we now say cars are unsafe and that if you drive one you are likely to be killed?
The chances of dying in a car accident in a given year are about 1 in 400. Being drunk at the wheel and causing the fatal accident makes almost no difference to these odds. Drunk at the wheel or sober, you are vanishingly unlikely to die in a car accident.
So we should follow the Richard E doctrine. It probably won’t happen to me, so it’s perfectly safe for me to drive drunk. Of course I may kill someone else, but so what; I may infect someone else with COVID and not die myself, but so what. It’s all about what suits me.
This reasoning is why people like Richard are not in charge of public health or safety decisions.
That figure you quote so assuredly is totally false. In fact you have exaggerated it by over a hundredfold. The number of raod traffic deaths in 2020 in the UK, a nation of 66 million people was 1580. That means that the chance of dying in a road accident is one in 47,000, not one in 400.
Your malignant dissembling idiocy is off the scale. You ought to be prevented from posting here since your falsehoods are a menace.
Do you have proof that any of your friend’s foolhardy behaviour (“They even took off their masks!” Oh, the horror!) was what actually caused him to get Covid?
Most people who got Covid in the past year had been stringently following all the rules, down to wearing their face diapers everywhere, even outdoors.
Nice bit of victim-blaming, anyway.
That’s actually not true as the cases and deaths in the UK were dropping like a rock before any significant vaccination took place. In case you haven’t quite got it yet, COVID-19 is seasonal just like influenza, spanning the months of October/November through April/May.
As for the comment that you can’t get the mRNA from the vaccine out of your body, that too isn’t correct because mRNA is unstable and degrades quickly. If it didn’t and you continued to produce spike protein for any serious length of time, you’d be in a very bad way.
COVID-19 is seasonal just like influenza, spanning the months of October/November through April/May.
One year is a bit little to be basing such a sweeping generalisation on. Let’s see what happens this June to September.
Just look at the curves. There have been 2 seasons. One was in March/May 2020 and the other was in the current flu season (Oct/Nov through April/May).
I admit the first season was a little difficult to figure out in the U.S. for reasons I’ll point out below, but it was absolutely obvious in most European countries including the UK (but obvious in Germany, Austria and Sweden, among others, for example).
The US was an interesting case in the first season as the epidemic started on the east and west coasts late in the flu season (Feb/March/April) and then slowly migrated inland. As a result some states, such as Utah, experienced rises later on the early and mid-summer. Others, such as North and South Dakota had absolutely nothing until the current season when it hit. No surprise as there isn’t that much travel into the Dakotas, and certainly a lot less from the two coasts to the Dakotas than to say Utah and Colorado.
The seasonality is exactly as expected fo any respiratory virus.
What does “seasonal” actually mean, practically speaking ?
Cases of flu and other viral respirartory illnesses have always tended to be much more common in the coldest months, because people spend far more time indoors.
I have said this many times. Epidemic curves will have their way. In our recent second wave in South Africa (with the wild, dreaded, mutant variant), there was no hard lockdown and no vaccines and still the curve plummeted down. Remember your first curve that went down? There were no vaccines. But oh, there was the lockdown…. there will always be a reason to terrify the population.
So why do you think the 2nd wave subsided. Did the virus get tired ? bored ? packed its bags and left for the coast ?
For exactly the same reason that the flu season starts up in Oct/Nov and winds down in April/May. Has to do with the virus sensitivity to cold, sunlight, etc.. as well as the time people spend outdoors which dramatically reduces transmission. Recall, 95% of all SARS-CoV2 transmission has occurred in poorly ventilated indoor spaces.
Aaaah yes ! so it’s people’s behaviour that drives transmission.
So how did people’s behaviour change in SA during the second wave ?
So if this virus is so temperature sensitive why has Manaus in Brazil been hit so hard ? – even last year when there was no P1 variant ?
People were out and about during the second wave. I told you there was no hard lockdown. All places of work were open except bars and taverns. The majority of people live cheek by jowl so don’t even social distance. It is extremely hard to communicate with you!
Maybe you didn’t read my post? I said it was the waxing and waning of the epidemic curve. During summer.
I agree. It should have just been allowed to run its course. That’s what viruses do. It was clear from the start of 2020 that it was nothing like the Spanish Flu or polio, anyway, not cutting a swath through the young and healthy population. Containment efforts should have been targeted to the populations at risk, i.e., keep it out of nursing and long term care homes. Instead we closed schools and businesses,imprisoned people in their homes, roped off playgrounds and forbade people to sit on park benches.
100 years from now people are going to look back to this time and say, “My god, what a bunch of f***ing idiots they were.”
My agenda is medical science. Trials on Vitamin D show little effect. I prefer scientific trials to fringe nonsense. Do you?
And what is the “medical science”. The unfortunate thing about large trials is that they are often designed to fail. And for very good reason because Pharma would be none to happy if simple and extremely cheap remedies like vitamin D, ivermectin, zinc, etc…. had a significant effect in reducing mortality and morbidity if given at the very onset of symptoms.
I suspect that you are none too qualified in actually assessing the primary literature or critically evaluating the various trials and their design. Rather, you give the appearance of just believing so-called experts, but refuse to listen to second opinions from experts with diverging views.
See Dr John Campbell’s recent interview of Dr Pierre Kory: the feeling is that parties with a vested interest (wink) are planning to ensure that the next study of Ivermectin shows inefficacy despite the over 20 RCT that show marked efficacy from prophylaxis through to critical care. The big global health organisation…. you know the one…. has already smeared the results of 2 meta analyses showing efficacy.
Pharma would be none to happy if simple and extremely cheap remedies
There may be an element of truth to that, but where was the outcry and pushback from Pharma over the use of dexamethasone? So far as I recall, there was none.
Dexamethasone is a little different and also not completely out there in terms of mechanism of action. Remember corticosteroid reduce inflammation (remember things like tennis elbow) and reduce inappropriate immune responses. The poor outcomes from COVID infection are not so much due to damage caused by the virus, but rather to an overactive, immune response. So corticosteroids are a natural thing to try in that regard. (As an example, that’s why steroids are combined with antibiotics in eye and ear drops).
The other reason dexamethasone wasn’t poopoo’d is because the study was done at Oxford.
Deliberate disinformation. You really should do better research before you post :
Cytokine Storm David C. Fajgenbaum NEJM December 2020
“Cytokine storm is an umbrella term encompassing several disorders of immune dysregulation characterized by constitutional symptoms, systemic inflammation, and multiorgan dysfunction that can lead to multiorgan failure if inadequately treated”
A comprehensive article on the various flavours of this condition and the many causes that can lead to it.
As for Vitamin D, I note :
Vitamin D3 inhibits the proliferation of T helper cells, downregulate CD4 + T cell cytokines and upregulate inhibitory markers Sheikh Hum Immunol June 2018
Which is the last thing you would want since you need CD4+ cells to ensure a good IgG and B memory cell response.
Do you have any medical qualification? If so you are a charlatan.
He is A Starmer supporter & Remainer ..going to be on the Wrong side of history or herstory for Wokes…Only Good this Pandemic will do it will make logical people more sceptical about Carbon being the agent of Climate ,when its The Sun,Volanoes,meteorites if large etc..Zero carbon is as stupid as Zero Coronavirus
You might want to read up on the ‘scientific’ studies of Vitamin D.
It’s been trialled. Doesn’t work. If it worked, Governments would implement it just as they have implemented Dexamethasone and a couple of other drugs found to work in trials.
(Sorry, that’s the real world. I realise that in the fringe echo chamber, it’s taken for granted that Governments are under the control of the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati, a three-headed green lizard, or whatever.)
Here is a good place to start your Vitamin D research.
https://www.grassrootshealth.net/
People should do their own research and not just believe what the government says. Take the Food Pyramid for example. Although it wasn’t the intent, now its considered a big contributor to obesity and diabetes.
Like this one ? :
Effect of a Single High Dose of Vitamin D3 on Hospital Length of Stay in Patients With Moderate to Severe COVID-19 A Randomized Clinical Trial JAMA Feb 2021
If you are referring to the Spanish study by Nogues this was removed from the preprint server after a series of damning critiques.
Nice review of all the crap studies so far by Gideon M-K; Health Nerd : What We Know About Vitamin D and Covid-19
I haven’t read the JAMA article but I will tell you this with 100% certainty. Administration of vitamin D after a patient is admitted is already way way too late. It’s just like tamiflu for influenza: to have any effect you have to take it at the very onset of symptoms, not once you’re in such a bad way that you have to be admitted to hospital.
Citation for this assertion please. Anecdotes do not = useable data.
How about a very good understanding of the practice of medicine, immunology and infectious diseases. As for tamiflu just google and you’ll see. Once hospitalized, tamiflu is not helpful to patients with influenza. Indeed, the major killer in influenza (and indeed for the Spanish flu of 1918) was not the virus but secondary pneumonia. The good doctor Fauci had a paper on this not too long ago (albeit before COVID-19).
We are not talking about flu. You asserted that in order for Vitamin D to be beneficial in cases of Covid, it needed to be given at the onset of symptoms – citation for this please.
Don’t have citations off hand but I’m sure you can google it. But if you understand how vitamin D works its obvious. It’s purpose is to prime your innate immune system. Doesn’t do much good once the horse is out of the barn.
“…it would be much more without the lockdown.”
No way of proving that. But places like Sweden, and states in the US like Florida, strongly suggest othewise.
And hidden right away by the Govt are the figures for deaths and adverse side effects from the vaccines. Go to Vaccine Analysis Profile on the Govt’s own website. Hard to find, as is the Yellow Card adverse event reporting system. I am not surprised they try and hide it away when Boris and his Big Pharma stooges claim the vaccine is “safe”. 627 deaths and hundreds of thousands of adverse reactions is not safe in the least. This is the Vaccine Analysis Profile for the AZ vax
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/979487/COVID-19_AstraZeneca_vaccine_analysis_print.pdf
What is so disturbing to me is how readily they call these experimental shots, ‘safe and effective’ all the while purposely ignoring the doctors and scientists saying they aren’t. Why didn’t big pharma create a drug to target only the sick and leave the healthy alone – oh wait, apparently there are therapeutics that are considered safe but all of a sudden they aren’t safe now! You don’t have to have a high IQ to see what the heck is going on. My only hope is that most people are not so swept with fear, that they will be able to make a rational choice, an informed choice. And, I too, believe in the right to choose. Thanks Richard for your intelligent comments.
“apparently there are therapeutics that are considered safe”
Which are?
Ivermectin for instance and there are others but no money in it for pharmaceutical companies. Admitting there are therapeutic drugs would also have prevented vaccines being approved for emergency use. Several companies say they will have a new most likely expensive pill ready possibly this year. Meanwhile this year there have been many needless hospitalisations and deaths that could have been prevented had early treatment been allowed.
Tens of thousands of people are using Ivermectin in South Africa with excellent results. It went black market when the government banned it (because of no endorsement from the who) and a court application has now overturned the ban.
Citation please. Anecdotes do not = useable data or even anything approaching reality.
I live here and experienced it throughout the second wave. I witnessed the movement of the drug and the communication and treatment between people on numerous platforms when it was banned. You are extremely difficult to communicate with. Google? Read? For the meta analysis go to Dr Tess Lawrie on the efficacy of Ivermectin.
So a few months ago the vaccines were safe and now they’re not.
At the moment only the old, obese and / or already ill are at risk. How about in a few months’ time? Or will that change like the safety of the vaccines has?
John, you’re wasting your time with these lunatics. They sucker you in to arguing then bombard you with left field fringe statistics that they share amongst themselves so that they can mock the ‘sheeple’. And by ‘sheeple’ I mean those people like you and me that aren’t so mind numbingly self obsessed that they recognise that while the UK’s response to the Pandemic (not ‘Plandemic’ or ‘Scamdemic’) has been flawed in many ways, the most helpful contribution that people like us can make is to simultaneously contort ourselves into removing our gaze from our navels, our heads from our arses and stop searching the internet for justifications for our own utter selfishness.
Any member of the public or health professional can submit suspected side effects through the Yellow Card scheme.
Intrigued by this I scrolled down to the section entitled “Dental”
Someone has claimed that teething and a diastema and malpositioned teeth as adverse events associated with a vaccination.
Since these tables don’t show average population rates for all these “adverse events” (age and sex adjusted) you can’t tell whether you are just looking at an average set of medical mishaps in the UK, during an average 4 month span January to April or something else.
Clearly some people believe that it is panic stations. Very sad.
The Yellow Card Scheme in the UK and the VAERS system in the US are very difficult to read. That’s the problem. It’s fortunate that the Norwegians picked up on clotting events with thombocytopenia (cerebral vascular thrombosis and disseminated intravascular coagulation) which are at least 50% fatal. Only then did some other European countries realize what was going on, including the Koch institute in Germany. The U.K., however, only came to the realization that the AZ vaccine had a problem when pulled kicking and screaming. No surprise, AZ is a U.K. product and the government were protecting a U.K. company.
It is also worth bearing in mind that the number of side effects from all the vaccines is well over an order of magnitude greater than that for the flu vaccine. Worth thinking about given how rushed and widely disseminated the vaccination program is.
What gets reported is any health event after vaccination. It doesn’t mean vaccination caused that health event. To determine that, the ‘natural’ incidence in an unvaccinated group of the same age (and other risk factors) would have to be subtracted. They haven’t been subtracted, in the numbers you are quoting.
That’s true but there is also a temporal factor. i.e. you have to look not just at the incidence of condition x in the general population, but the likelihood of developing condition x, y days or weeks from a given date certain. If a young, perfectly healthy individual is vaccinated on day 1, and a week later develops clotting with thrombocytopenia (something so rare that most doctors are unlikely to ever come across such events in their entire medical careers), it is very likely that the vaccine is the causative factor.
That Vaccine Analysis Profile lists ‘spontaneous reports’ of reactions to the vaccine, meaning anyone can report anything they think is due to the vaccine. For instance, eight fractures and dislocations have been thus reported. I find it doubtful these were in fact caused by the vaccine.
This plandemic has been an intelligence test for the masses. 85% have failed dismally.
As was to be expected. Thank you for that ‘juicy’ fact!
Ha,ha, at about 2000hrs my comment has been put in the sin bin, “Awaiting for approval “
What nonsense is this?
“The great hysteria of 2020-2021 continues”
otherwise known as “why are some people so stupid they don’t even share my views”?
Hear hear!
Chivers also says they only died from Covid, so no other possible causes.
Average UK age of Covid death within 28 days etc, 82. Average life expectancy India 69.
India Coronavirus Cases:16,263,695
Deaths:186,928
Recovered:13,648,159 (99%)
Closed cases (cases which had an outcome)13,835,087
186,928 (1%) Deaths
SURVIVAL RATE IS STILL 99%
The chances of anyone collating the deaths following a vaccine or genetic treatment is about zero.
And what about the fact there have been 86 studies, of which 50 peer reviewed, that all show positive results for Ivermectin, also a lot of studies have been done on other drugs, but still there is no home treatment. When you are positive you have to wait at home to find out if you will end up in the hospital or not.
Here is a link to all the studies, it’s also including HCQ, vitamine D and others.
https://c19early.com/
I completely agree. As Bertrand Russell put it so succinctly “Most people would rather die than think, and most do.
* A previous endorsement was allowed to stand for ten hours before being removed by the Censor! How mad is that ?
Oh – people over 65 don’t count. Let them die. They cost money anyway. It’s not as if they had been paying taxes for fifty years is it, and they all hate being alive, so why worry about them dying a few years earlier than they otherwise might have. They were only old – better dead than old, I always say.
Perhaps my statistics will be in need of correction but, every year in India, the following diseases are responsible for, approximately, the following number of deaths: 1,000,000 diabetes, 700,000 malnutrition, 340,000 diarrhoea, 220,000 tuberculosis and 115,000 from cholera.
As Bertrand Russell put it so eloquently “Most people would rather die than think, and most do”.
Totally agree. One small correction. India has 1.3 billion people. That really does put the daily deaths into perspective. Nearly 10 million die every year from TB, starvation and various bacterial infections.
I have read that there has been an Oxygen shortage in India for about a year, so this is not really due to higher demand now.
I am sad to say that Indians lack two critical ingredients needed to deal with such a catastrophe: self discipline and civic sense of duty. We were invited to a wedding in Delhi in Jan this year. We did not go. Looking at the video and pics of the wedding, we spotted two masks amongst a thousand guests. Social distancing, hand hygiene, masks, avoiding crowds are all essential to contain the spread. But just look at the religious, social and political gatherings to see how little the messages means to the population.
meanwhile rich families hoard oxygen cylinders. Doctors offer quack therapies at exorbitant rates: four friends of mine have had “plasma replacements” in Delhi as way of avoiding infection.Mildly asymptomatic people turn up at A & E departments, while drugs of dubious value are promoted by word of mouth on watts app groups. Everybody is a expert on what do, while no one has a clue.
People have to sometime take responsibility for their actions,or pay a price. It is appalling what is happening in India, but even if all the vaccination in the world turned up at India’s doorsteps, I doubt if it will used with the sense of discipline, prioritisation and civic sense that is needed.
I regret the pessimism, but I grew up in India and know it well enough.
Still I am proud that UK has already sent oxygen equipment and is sending more. Even while The Times is leading on what Boris Johnson said a while ago.
Well, I’ve got friends over there, and they’re saying there’s no pandemic, no mass deaths. As far as they can tell, they’re just like every other country. I think it’s propaganda by the UK media.
To what purpose?
To generate fear and peddle more vaccinations amongst young people and even children at low risk.
I have friends over there who have friends and family who are sick and dying. But so what? Anecdotes are meaningless in this context.
My friends who run a hospital in Kachhwa that has been turned into a Covid hospital ran out of oxygen. They have been raising money for an oxygen making machine.
Well, at the beginning of all this last spring, 13 May 2020, Telegraph, “Unicef warns lockdown could kill more than Covid-19 as model predicts 1.2million child deaths ‘Indiscriminate lockdowns’ are an ineffective way to control Covid and could contribute to a 45 per…”
The reduced economic activity from lockdown in the West would cause the above. The Africans growing flowers, coffee, the sweat shops making T-shirts, the tourists, lockdown killed more than it saved is very likely – and killed young to save old. The parents in the third world cannot feed the kids when the West stop buying the clothing and perishables – clothing price has collapse entirely, and so all those third world jobs…
Going out to the coffee house after buying a couple T-shirts was a life belt you Westerners could have thrown the third world children, but instead you sat home streaming Netflix trash.
The coffee market in 2019. By far the largest supplier is Brazil followed by Vietnam.
“In the UK, people drink 95 million cups of coffee per day … according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research. 65% is drunk at home, 25% at work or while studying, and the rest is consumed in shops, bars and restaurants … 80% of UK households prefer to buy instant coffee for in-home consumption, particularly those aged 65 and older …”
So, if you want the UK to support the coffee growers in Brazil and Vietnam you had better make sure you preserve as many 65 + punters as possible.
As for T shirts the UK’s top partner country for textile and clothing imports (counting by millions of dollars) is China.
Until all these hand wringers start producing checkable, statistics the cost of lockdowns stays in the realm of pure speculation.
Personally, I am waiting for the measles stats for Africa, for this year as a surrogate measure of damage done
60% of the coffee grown in the world is Arabica; most of what comes from Brazil and Vietnam is Robusta.
“Disturbing figures released by the International Labour Organization estimates that ‘250 million children, 61% in Asia, 32% in Africa, and 7% in Latin America’ are employed in sweatshops with women making up 85 to 90 percent of sweatshop workers.’”
so only 32% of children in sweat shops are African, but their mothers make a huge number., so OK.
“Kenya, for instance, is the world’s third-largest exporter of cut flowers, with its flower industry contributing around 1.06% to Kenya’s Gross Domestic Product-GDP.” this report from 2019, not so many flowers used in 2020, so who fed the kids?
So 35% of coffee is had at venues which locked down, and you think that nothing? Plus those would be the premium and ‘Fair Trade’ and more hands on beans.
Dont worry The Sweatshops make gucci handbags for harry styles & his mankini fans..
All the coffee serving venues in Italy have continued to serve throughout – takeaways.
How many fewer cut flowers exported from Kenya in 2020 ? Who do they export to ? Have they found new markets – New Zealand, Australia, S Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore ?
Until recently, going to a coffee house was takeaway only and T-shirt shopping not possible.
Suicides in UK due to Lockdowns has been hushed up..Rishi didn’t help 3million self employed ..so £2trillion debt hasn’t helped as many as hoped..
It does seem amazing how a science writer can continually get things so wrong. I seriously suggest Chivers look at the covid tracker covid.jerschow.com
A brief inspection shows the following: (a) while India’s cases per million and deaths per million are certainly rising from a very very low level, they are both still lower than in the US or Germany (where the number of deaths/million are falling like a rock). (b) until late March 2021, India was barely affected by COVID. Cases and Deaths per million were very low with only some very small bumps. Not surprisingly, they are now likely to get an outbreak comparable to that seen in the Western Countries. Not very surprising is it. Ultimately everybody is going to end up in the same boat with similar numbers of deaths per million give or take.
That doesn’t mean that India shouldn’t vaccinate. But recall, India has plenty of vaccine manufacturing capability already under license. Further, if the Indians do mass vaccinate, they would be wise to limit administration of the AZ and J&J (and likely the Pfizer and Moderna) vaccines to individuals older than 60. That way they will avoid risks associated with vaccinating the younger population where the probability of death upon infection with SARS-CoV2 is tiny.
I agree with the overblown sentiment in the article regarding the status of India’s situation compared to EU countries etc but this doesn’t take away from the thrust of the numbers and the moral question of what you do with medicine you’re not going to use.
Laura, that’s perfectly true. However, there’s a reason the AZ vaccine is going unused in Europe and hasn’t been approved in the US. The AZ vaccine (as well as the J&J one) is associated, however rarely, with thrombocytopenic clotting events, especially in women (but not exclusively) aged between around 20-50. such events, including disseminated intravascular coagulation and cerebral venous thrombosis are extremely difficult to treat and have a fatality of around 50%. While for sure rare, death from vaccination in individuals at miniscule risk of death upon infection, is problematic. And given the sheer numbers in India, and the fact that the average age of their population is likely a lot younger than in the US, could see a very significant number of those cases. Incidentally, if one looks at the VAERS database, it would appear that thrombocytopenic clotting events have also occurred with the mRNA vaccines, although, for whatever reason, the mRNA vaccines are being protected from bad publicity. This is unfortunate because it would be critical to know whether these conditions were attributable to the adenovirus vector or to the SARS-CoV2 spike protein.
In other words, if one is going to mass vaccinate, whether in India or in the West, it would be far smarter to restrict vaccinations to that segment of the population that is at significant risk of poor outcomes upon SARS-C0V2 infection; i.e. those over 60 and those younger who happen to have a significant number of severe co-morbidities.
In connection with the “blood clot” narrative, has nobody read the Taquet et al. paper at https://osf.io/a9jdq/ ?
OK, it’s only a preprint, but it has met a favourable reaction. Most statisticians, like myself, seem happy with the methodology. The relevant findings are at Fig.1 (p.13) and show that the chance of a CVT (aka CVST) event is much the same for mRNA vaccine (Pfizer/Moderna) as for AZ. On the other hand, a PVT event (different type of clot) seems much more likely for mRNA. A possible caveat is that the two groups of people, although large, are not exactly matched: the mRNA group is from the USA, AZ from the UK (and is much larger). So they might have a different composition in respect of age, co-morbidities etc. Table 1 demonstrates that PVT sufferers are much older than CVT, for example, and they are more obese, etc. Thus AZ’s better performance on PVT could be down to factors other than type of vaccine. Nevertheless, the overall message remains: mRNA vaccines DO produce blood clots, and apparently at a similar rate to AZ.
So this raises the question–why is AZ getting all the flak? Perhaps because Pfizer supplies are made within the EU?
Perhaps because AZ is British, while Pfizer and Moderna are US, and Moderna has very strong links to the NIH (and therefore the US government) – hence the mRNA vaccines are being protected against the same risks. I would not be surprised if the risks are the same for all vaccines based on the SARS-CoV2 spike protein, whether produced in the cell and exported (either from DNA to RNA to protein for the adenovirus-based vaccines; or from RNA to protein for the mRNA vaccines), or injected directly as spike protein (e.g. the Novovax vaccine). Further, it would behove all the companies to investigate this in detail rather than brush it under the table, and more specifically determine if there are simple approaches that can be used to prevent this (e.g. ensuring excellent hydration prior to being vaccinated, or simply taking prophylactic baby aspirin for several weeks prior).
From my perspective, even though the risks are tiny, they are still tragic when they occur in a population that was very likely at almost no risk of death following a COVID-19 infection.
I cannot have pfizer as I think its Albumin based,AZ grown on blood is safer for me….
One quibble Johann. Deaths per million cannot “fall like a rock”. They only go in one direction without resurrection. In the past month deaths per million in Germany have moved from 911 on March 26 to 983 on April 26. Based on 76,303 moving up to 82,344 on a base population of 83.9 million. But I do agree that vaccines which are destined for the bin should quickly be sent to India This can surely only be a good move.
Daily deaths per million is what I meant.
BBC News tonight featured an Indian pointing out that the Indian Government is only recording the Covid deaths which happen in hospitals. But his own organisation, which is cremating vastly more people than usual, takes the dead directly from their homes to cremation – unrecorded by the Govt. Thus the statistics for India are under-recording Covid deaths.
It was also stated that Modi’s Government is putting pressure on doctors to record deaths as not due to Covid, in order to reduce the embarrassment of the Government over the scale of deaths which are occurring on its watch. If true and widespread, this too will lead to under-reporting.
How does this person interviewed by the BBC know that all those people dying at home have died of Covid; is he doing an autopsy of all of them?
Also, why the hell would the Indian government be conspiring to UNDER report Covid deaths, if they desperately need foreign aid like oxygen tanks to deal with the crisis? Are we supposed to believe they would do this just out of “embarassment”? And what evidence was given in the report that the government was actually pressuring doctors to under-report?
Whatever; anything coming out of the BBC like the rest of the media I take with a brick-sized lump of salt.
In betting parlance his thesis is what would be called a Parlay, or Accumulator, or Multiplier. The problem is any link makes the chain true, or less true, and stacking guess upon guess is rarely useful.
Great article and I agree completely with the conclusion.
The article doesn’t, though, consider the political dimension of the US sending unused (and unloved) AZ vaccines to India. Biden ran as the anti-Trump; he is Mister Integrity and Mr. Science. He’s also Mr. Woke (or at least has to pretend to be). So there’s no way he’ll send millions of doses of AZ vaccine to the non-white continent of India without thoroughly testing and reviewing them and providing the Indian authorities with a full accounting of his findings and all potential risks (even if the Indians have already formed their own conclusion about the risk posed by the AZ vaccine).
There’s also the question of vaccine-resistant variants. A political nightmare scenario is if, in several months, a covid variant appears that is largely resistant to the vaccines except for the AZ vaccine. People will then stop worrying about the tiny risk of blood clots and clamor for booster doses of AZ vaccine. Biden does not want to have to admit he shipped the US stock of AZ vaccine to India in April. Perhaps this is a far-fetched scenario but canny politicians worry about this sort of ‘Black Swan’ event.
The article also doesn’t address the most interesting question about the terrible situation in India–why is this happening? (I realize that is not the subject of this particular article).
Why are we seeing true exponential growth in cases in India when we’ve never seen that in any other country? Growth has always been sigmoidal–rising fast then flattening. Is it simply because the Indians completely let down their guard and abandoned all social distancing measures?
Why are so many young people becoming very sick when everywhere else severe covid is primarily a disease of elderly people already in bad health? The latest Indian variant of covid appears to be somewhat more contagious but doesn’t appear to be inherently more dangerous.
There may be benign answers to these questions, but it’s also possible we’re seeing a troubling new aspect of this pandemic.
I agree. From wondering for months why India had seemingly escaped relatively lightly, I suggest what the profile of Indian infections is telling us is very bad news indeed for the rest of the world where vaccines will arrive over the next 18 months. I heard all the previous explanations about average age profiles etc and I can’t say I ever bought into them – there were too many counter examples, especially in Latin America, for this to have been the full explanation. In India I now know of several people in my *immediate* circle of relatives and acquaintances who have caught the virus (no deaths), one uncle in late seventies, taken one of the two doses of vaccine, *still* got it, but mild, and he is recovering. His son (my cousin) also has it, but recovering, all isolating. Contrast to the UK where I know only a couple of people from a much larger circle who caught the virus. In India you are in trouble if you are old and have not had at least one dose of the virus, because the hospitals are all full.
There seems to be an exponential order effect in play where the profile is *literally* similar to a nuclear chain reaction – you get a build-up of heat as volume incrases, until critical mass is reached, when you get a flashpoint, and we have seen this repeatedly, but localised to cities – NY early on, etc. The difference in India is, it’s nationwide. To me, this says multiple things – the US was probably very lucky indeed the vaccines arrived when they did, because the numbers there prior indicate it was probably well on the way to achieving that critical mass. My assumption throughout has been that the lockdowns will ultimately kill an order of magnitude more (through economic destitution) than the virus. But if you get this type of flashpoint, it looks like you would get similar numbers of dead – the difference is it happens immediately rather than spread out over several years. Another thing, it looks like the early profile difference of the virus in Europe (Germany etc) Vs the UK was all just noise – the *real* profile is what is happening in India, and it could well happen in Africa and even China unless the vaccines arrive quickly.
Pedantic point but the growth of COVID or any epidemic is always exponential – it’s the exponent that varies (the “R number”). R>1 and the disease is accelerating as it obviously is in India because, according to Modi, the country stopped taking precautions (and Modi encouraged them to stop).
Further pedantic point: the actual data (rather than the SIR model’s assumptions) for all the countries I’ve looked at (now in double figures) show that a power-law growth model fits better than an exponential. Nor is this news: Gerardo Chowell’s research group at Georgia State Uni have shown this to be the historical norm. Very few epidemics are really exponential.
Saying something is exponential but with an exponent that varies means it’s not exponential. If you vary the exponent you can make a curve wiggle around pretty much as you like.
“Growth has always been sigmoidal–rising fast then flattening.”
And maybe that’s exactly what’s happening in India, except they have’t yet reached the flattening stage?
India is the prime maker of the AZ vaccine. So really Biden does not need to check anything. India is capable of checking AZ itself.
I have been baffled that this point hasn’t been made more often. In fact because I haven’t heard anyone, on the msm, making it that I had begun to doubt myself that I’d even read it. But back during the EU – UK government astra zenica spat, certain writers pointed out that the Indian administration had also blocked the export of vaccine to the UK, without criticism from Brexitier types. It was during this debate that I thought that I’d read the statement about Indian’s pharmacological capacity.
Of an order for 10 million, 5 were delivered, but 5 stopped.
Perhaps ‘Brexitier’ types didn’t criticise because the Indian government didn’t try to do it in the irritating mealy-mouthed way Van der Leyen and others did.
Personally, my thoughts at the time were that the Modi government should have learned from and taken advantage of the AZ arrangement with Serum Institute and created more capacity for the vaccine in good time at other vaccine manufacturers.
It is also relevant that the EU has many more resources with which to deal with its problems than does India.
Agree with the above generally. Is canny politician not a tautological phrase?
Biden is too Senile too Worry …he thinks he’s ”Won” 1976 presidential election…
Tom,
This article is not exactly “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” is it?
You have forgotten to mention that India has 20 times the population of the UK.
Our “cases”, on a seven day rolling average, hit 60,000 in early January, equivalent to 1,200,000 per day for India. You use a figure of 300,000 for India, equivalent to 15,000 for the UK.
The cases numbers in the UK of 60,000 in early January dropped to 30,000 by the end of January.
Having been told that it takes about 3 weeks for the vaccine to take effect, the number of effective jabs by the end of January, in the UK would be around 2,000,000. – equivalent to 40,000,000 in India (which has jabbed 100,000,000).
So given the figure above the question is why are the cases rising in India now when more people have been vaccinated, whilst they fell in the UK when less people had been vaccinated?
So is Tom wrong to want India to have more vaccines, as more vaccinations causes more cases? So is Tom’s morality tale wrong – the “do gooder” not only ruined his clothes, but drowned the child, whilst attempting to rescue him?
I do not believe anybody knows the answer to the question as to why the numbers in different countries goes up and down so much. Is it lockdown, is it vaccines, is it the natural effect of the virus that waxes and wanes, is it that taking the vaccine produces a short term increase in cases, or does the natural effect of winter/summer cause the variations?
My guess is that they all contribute, but nobody knows how to untangle the different effects.
In the UK the first vaccinations were given on December 8.
The peak in case numbers was around January 8.
50% of 85+ years were vaccinated shortly after this date.
Looking at John Burn-Murdoch’s “Vaccine Effect” graphs, it then took a further month until there was a clear separation in rates of hospitalisation and deaths between this older cohort and the less crinkly.
So in the UK with a well organised vaxx infrastructure, a vaccination plan, no shortage of vaccines and probably most importantly of all, a decreasing degree of transmission from January 8, it took a full 2 months before there was a discernible vaccine effect.
India started vaccinating on January 16 – frontline workers first of all and then 60 + years and 45-60year olds with certain co-morbidities at the begining of March. Looking at the percentages of people who have received 1 dose, state by state, it all looks a bit haphazard. So, if India follows the same vaccine effect curve (unlikely because of the current exponential growth of transmission) it will be another month at least before you see any effect at all.
Big numbers of vaccines in arms at a time of exponential growth are irrelevant if they aren’t being targeted properly – those most likely to end up in hospital; in areas where transmission is high; around super spreader loci.
I think Tom’s point though is that true daily cases could be closer to 10m or even 20m: “… the number is probably more like 10 million. Since then, the IHME has updated its model suggesting that it could be double that, but let’s stick with the 10 million figure.”
Why, for some people, is it always the fault of the USA when somewhere like India is suffering? India manufactures covid vaccines by the millions, India decided not to prioritise a vaccine roll out, India carried on with mass gatherings, religious and sporting events. India is not backward or poor, they send rockets to the moon and beyond. India chooses to have poverty in its own backyard. The covid crisis in India is not the fault of the USA the EU or the UK. However please send them what they need.
India keeps electing socialist governments, so of course they’re going to remain poor. It’s a feature of socialism, not a bug.
Nobody ever said it’s the USA or UK’s fault. It’s completely India’s fault all the way. As an Indian, It’s the fault of both the Indian people and the Indian government. There were political rallies of thousands of people held right until the cases started increasing. The largest gathering in the world, Kumbh Mela was cancelled after 10 days, only because the one of the head of priests tested positive.
A lot of people know this, and in fact I’m happy to tell you that a significant amount of population even realizes the situation, and have been following the required population since Day 1. But the harsh reality is that because of those few thousand who can’t make rational decisions, millions of others are suffering because they’re carriers.
What’s been done cannot be undone. Even if it could be, not for a country with a population of 1.38 billion, who thinks religiously and politically before thinking logically.
Let’s be absolutely clear. India doesn’t have a covid problem. I have friends over there. It’s no different to any other country. The only problem is in the UK media.
India says manned space mission to cost $1.4 billion. The middle class in India live in gated communities and dislike the poor.
If you have stuff and live next to the masses of poor it becomes an issue.
The EU has millions of AZ vaccines that it won’t use. But I guess they might be needed as evidence in its court case against AZ.
I can already see the EU line of prosecution: “…but I submit, m’lud, AZ have destroyed all the evidence by actually using the vaccines on real European people for no profit, a most heinous crime, for which they most assuredly must be severely punished…”
Yes, when the Netherlands finally gets the 11m doses of AZ it is due but probably won’t use (due to having enough of the other vaccines), it might also consider playing the good samaritan and passing them on to India (or another country which needs them).
Here in Austria, it has been reported that 50% of vaccination appointments where AZ is on offer are being cancelled or the people simply aren’t turning up. I’m not sure whether those vaccines found their way into other people’s arms or whether they ended up in the trash.
Not turning up to your appointment says a lot about you as a person. Not only do you display an utter lack of concern for your fellow citizens (one of whom could have taken your place if notice of cancellation had been given) but also, indirectly, to people in other, less wealthy countries who would give their two front teeth to have a vaccine, any vaccine. It makes me livid.
Italy reauthorised AZ use. The vaccine programme keeps starting and stopping for lack of supply. I can’t say to the reasons but it’s probably not great to bracket all the EU countries together to make a comparison.
Aren’t EU countries such as the Netherlands, France, and Germany sitting on several million unused doses of the AZ vaccine, with little or no intention of using them? Meanwhile the EU sues AZ for not delivering enough doses fast enough to put into their fridges for some indefinite time…
Why is it only the EU and the US being criticised here?
Boris Johnson’s Britain has just ordered ANOTHER 100 million doses of a new vaccine. I believe that we now have 300-400 million doses on order for a population of 64 million, not all of whom will ever be vaccinated.
Anything to do with the EU and Biden’s US being unpopular with the Unherd crowd, while Boris’s Britain….. not so much?
Population by UN is 70million for Uk,stop quoting Evening standard estimate from 1987
can we please stop equating cases with deaths? Especially in a nation that skews young. With more than a billion people total, India’s numbers are going to be proportionately higher than most countries.’ At the same time, it’s a bit strange that only now is India experiencing an issue with Covid, more than a year after lockdowns in the West began. It’s also a bit strange how India’s own capacity for manufacturing vaccines is barely considered. In the West, we have people who’ve seen the vaccine and some of its side effects, and decide that covid is the more suitable risk.
Vanishingly few side effects.
And when these people bring covid on themselves (and possibly also infect others), they want a hospital bed which they then take away from others.
speaking of “vanishingly few,” those would be the ones who want or need hospital beds. Even Tom noticed the fatality rate of <1%.
Hardly “vanishingly few” when at one point we had 39,000 in hospital beds with Covid. Over the last year, there must be – what? – 200,000? – who have been in hospital with Covid.
It’s the side-effects which are vanishingly few (at least, when you subtract the number of people in an unvaccinated population who would have suffered the same event anyway).
They could always turf out smokers with lung cancer,, drinkers with sclerotic livers, and anyone else you sneer at.
Were you this this harsh and unforgiving with people who got AIDS?
Whilst I completely agree with the sentiment in the article that unused vaccines should not be hoarded, there are two questions I would like answered. India is allegedly experiencing a greatly increased death toll according to anecdotal reports of mass cremations. 1) Is the death toll actually more than normal at this time of year? 2) If yes, is the death toll due to the disease Covid 19?
Burning dead bodies out in the open, whilst an incredibly graphic image for Western nations that don’t use this method of disposing of the dead, doesn’t give any information as to the cause of death of each of those people, whatever the order magnitude they represent. It may be that the images and anecdotes absolutely reflect a spike in Covid 19 related deaths in certain regions and communities of a vastly complex and varied country. But to assume without evidence in play seems arbitrary at best and irresponsible at worst – particularly if it deflects from a different health crisis altogether.
It could just be, as the OP suggests, that a health system that is full of Covid 19 patients can’t attend to other death inducing maladies. This is what every nation has expressed as it’s primary fear before moving onto other questions of infection control. This is because the vast majority of people still, whatever the state of infection of Sars Cov2, die from something other than Covid 19.
I would appreciate a Fermi thought exercise that looked at how many people might die from unrelated conditions if a health service becomes overwhelmed, if possible, and also one that looks at the number of people that die in India every day, what they die of and what they are most likely to be dying of tomorrow.
If people are unable to breathe, and what Covid testing is going on is showing that cases are soaring, then that sounds like good evidence that people are dying from Covid rather than something else. The Indians are not idiots, very far from it, so there’s no reason to question claims that vast numbers of people are dying in an explosion of the disease.
As I posted above, there are reasons to believe the Indian death toll is being under-counted – the Indian Govt only counts people who die in hospital, not in the world outside (and the hospitals are so swamped that they aren’t admitting even the desperately ill) AND Modi’s Government is reportedly pressuring doctors to put down things other than Covid on death certificates, to conceal the number of deaths the Modi Government’s Covid strategy is allowing to happen.
Around 27000 people die a day in India, many with lower respiratory tract infections. Delhi which I’m led to believe is the main crisis area has particularly poor air quality. Further Covid numbers are suspect in all countries…
.
Do you know how many diseases can cause breathing difficultires or respiratory failure?
It’s in the financial interests of the vaccine manufacturers to protect those richer countries that can afford their products, while leaving the pandemic going elsewhere, thereby producing new strains of the virus that will require ‘tweaked’ booster shots and so on.
Tedros Ghebreyesus of the WHO recently said, “We face the very real possibility of affluent countries administering variant-blocking boosters to already vaccinated people when many countries will still be scrounging for enough vaccines to cover their most-at-risk groups. This is unacceptable. Analysts predict vaccines will generate huge revenues for manufacturers.” It may be unacceptable to Ghebreyesus, but it’s surely music to the ears of manufacturers with an eye on the bottom line.
What an apalling article.
The writer conjures up figures of daily infections from the IHME and yet calculates an IFR comparable to that of Bangladesh. The IFR is obvously much less. The math is simple even if you double the number of deaths, keeping in mind that the number of deaths are based on swirling rumours. The IFR should be less than 0.1% based upon the numbers presented in the article.That medical care is deficient is typical snobbery, which is best not dilated upon.
India is a massive country with a huge population, the number of (proportionate) deaths therefore are substantially fewer than that in the West.
Crucially this is a man made Pandemic or rather a Made in India Pandemic because of gross violation of basic common sense rules of distancing and masking in crowds. This angle is very important lest a casebe made that the variants in India are more “deadly.” This is not the case, notwithsatnding reorting by the MSM.
The government has goofed up big time, it is now scrambling to get its act together. I am not batting for the government, this must be made clear. Crowds in the hunderds of thousands have been permitted to gather for many weeks now, and the result is there for all to see.
Your readers will be pleasantly surpriseded to learn that the average Indian clinician is as astute as his Western counterpart if not more. Most antiviral drugs are made in India, also they are available and quite cheap (Ivermectin, budosenide, plasma, fluvoxamine, famotidine). Injection enoxaprin and fondaparinux are also easily availble as also every direct oral anticoagulant.
Dexamethasone ( oral/injectable) too is freely and cheaply avaiable. Oxygen supply is being rapidly ramped up.
Interestingly in many parts of the country the Kent variant is waeving through the public. A double mutant (E484Q and L452R) is also making an impact. There is a sense that these are more infective but there is no evidence whatsoever that they are more virulent.
The situation should be under control in the next 7-10 days regardless of predictions made by doomsayers. No marks for the government of course.
The efforts to contain the current surge are being made largely( if not only) by the medical community. I have faith in my colleagues, who are yet again under tremendous pressure and peril.
Budesonide is a corticosteroid, fluvoxamine a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and famotidine a a histamine blocker. While they may have roles in the treatment of COVID, is there any evidence they are antivirals?
I haven’t even read the article but I can tell you how to end the Covid nightmare anywhere. It’s : change the lifestyle, the waistline , the food , more exercise ,reduce your weight, take more vitamin D. Even in India people are Vitamin D deficient . It IS a respiratory virus !!! If your lungs are unhealthy, old or stressed, it’s going to cause breathing difficulties.
The answers are all usually not that complicated. We are often unwilling to recognise them & do something about them. This article is again about blaming someone else rather than accepting personal responsibility for your own inaction.
https://www.ndtv.com/indians-abroad/coronavirus-indian-origin-doctor-warns-indians-about-poor-diet-link-with-covid-19-deaths-2222425?amp=1&akamai-rum=off&__twitter_impression=true
Lockdown sceptics today has a good article on what’s really going on in India.
In short: no India doesn’t need vaccines at all.
Stop pushing the vaccine agenda
How delusional can you get?
Interesting piece. I missed a discussion of India’s existing vaccine programme. Surely they have vaccinated tens of millions, given that they are one of the biggest vaccine makers in the world. Indeed, India has already kept back the 5 million doses destined for Britain, and some millions destined for Morocco, and no doubt more, which will have been used by now, while their 2 vaccine factories are churning out large numbers every week. That moves me to ask what help India has requested. Maybe somebody on this thread knows.
According to Worldometer:
India is No 119 in world rankings of deaths per million of population. In India 27,000 die every day from all causes.
India has the second largest population in the world. China is No 1.
UK is No 13 in deaths per million.
How much Vaxx wasted in the EU ? report millions of AZ doses in Nethlands alone .
And we are still sending money to this criminal racket .
The death rate per million in india is 142.
The death rate per million for the world is 402.4.
For the UK, the death rate per million is 1,869.
What am I missing here?
“Per million” …..what? Total population, or people found to be infected?
Look, I already asked you once that if you don’t know what you’re talking about, then be quiet.
What do you think (I mean stop, just stop whatever you are doing and engage with the question) “Death Rate Per Million” may mean?
A waste of time doing this sort of calculation given the huge variation in how deaths are / are not reported and counted in different countries.
We might get a slightly better handle on what has gone on in a year or so once the final excess all cause mortality figures are in. I still won’t hold my breath for anything like accurate figures from India or other places for that matter.
See this paper for some intriguing insights :
Leveraging community mortality indicators to infer COVID-19 mortality and transmission dynamics in Damascus, Syria Watson April 2021
and
COVID-19 deaths detected in a systematic post-mortem surveillance study in Africa December 2020
As I have said many times about related issues the DFID (now the FCDO for all the difference that makes) should utilise the mandatory annual £12bn or whatever the figure is to purchase vaccines for those countries benefitting from involuntary UK taxpayer largesse.
What a good thing we do have a foreign aid budget, despite the hostility from some who would like to abolish it.
Last week I made a donation to a charity (Christian Mission to the Blind, if anyone is interested) to save people’s sight. Every £1 given is matched by £1 from the foreign aid budget, doubling the number of people whose sight can be saved. This runs until 20th May. It’s another worthwhile thing the foreign aid budget is doing.
https://www.cbmuk.org.uk/lightuplives/appeal/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=LULFBRF&utm_term=christian%20blind%20mission&utm_content=504103076298&gclid=CjwKCAjw7J6EBhBDEiwA5UUM2npSq_T4lUOwdnm8X8sfBpRLJbi4NCoSGeGJYj7Bf_LqpDghFdK1gRoCkJwQAvD_BwE
Yes CMB does great work!
It sounds as if oxygen and field hospitals would be more use than vaccines. Also doctors and nurses to help. Vaccines take time to work by which time this wave will probably have peaked.
The hospital in Kachhwa is raising funds for an oxygen making machine; I was so glad to hear that.
“Vaccines take time to work” if they really work at all. I am doubtful.
I seem to recall that in a previous exchange you wouldn’t even endorse the 1970s vaccination programme which eliminated smallpox.
So if it was up to the anti-vaxxers, we’d still have smallpox roaming the world, along with many other diseases which have not troubled those of us who have been vaccinated.
Ever since the news and video of the current situation in India started making headlines in the West it we’ve seen a corresponding increase in the “rich need to help the poor” narrative.
While there’s no doubt that the images are heart-wrenching, the implication that somehow the “rich” , who are now free of Covid must help others who are not, is simply false.
Nobody has beaten Covid. All that can be claimed is that some are doing better than others. From a Canadian perspective I can say that we are in yet another lockdown, our medical facilities are reaching their limit and we are scampering to get people vaccinated. We’ve had to “borrow” AZ doses from the US and are the only G7 country to dip into the AZ supply of COVAX that was meant for lower income countries. Part of our regular AZ supply was, until just recently, coming from India. We could send money to India but very little else.
The US, for a variety of reasons, is doing better than Canada and many other countries but they are not ‘home and dry’ either. Yes, you can argue that sending 60M unused doses of AZ to India is a ‘no brainer’ and back it up with charts, graphs and modeling projections but as much as I dislike Biden’s politics I don’t blame him for being cautious.
US vax rates are very good but new case counts per million, as of last week, were not that much less than India. It’s a little too soon for the US to declare the AZ stockpile “Not Needed”.
We’ve had to “borrow” AZ doses from the US
Do you mean the US has exported AZ vaccines to Canada, while, according to this article, similar exports to India are being held up while they undergo various checks?
Canada’s vaccine procurement has been such a mess it’s hard to follow.
In February – Canada said it would buy 20M doses of AZ from the US. They had previously announced that our AZ would come from India.
In March the US “lent” 4M doses of AZ to be split between Canada and Mexico. We are supposed to “re-supply” that back to the US at some point.
The most recent situation is that Canada has been getting AZ from Europe and India.
Now, for obvious reasons, Canada won’t be getting AZ sourced from India.
And of course, while all that’s been going on our government health “experts” have issued guidelines on the use of AZ
“yes,no,maybe,sometimes,never,always”
In March the US “lent” 4M doses of AZ
Yes, but did the US physically export those doses, or allow Canada to receive doses the US was entitled to but which hadn’t actually been delivered?
Yes – Canada received 1.5M doses of AZ at the end of March. Of course they were stored so the health officials could check them out.
For those that may not know. While the UK, Israel and the US were getting deals done last April and May, Canada decided to make a deal with CanSino – a Chinese company – which seems only natural seeing as that 1) The honest and reliable CCP have been holding two Canadians hostage for over two years and 2) progressive politicians abhor Big Pharma.
To absolutely no one’s surprise that deal collapsed at the end of August and left Canada scrambling to find vaccine. It’s the same sort of bureaucratic failure that sank the EU vaccine effort. So while the government brags that Canada has “secured” deals for 400M doses – over 10 times our pop of 37M – the actual delivery of vaccine has been a complete ‘start and stop’, ‘dribs and drabs’ clown show.
To add insult to injury, about two weeks ago the last blame-deflecting tool our politicians had – “we’re doing better than the US” was taken away.
The “cases per million” rate is now higher in Canada than the US. Our vaccination rate is somewhere south of 40th in the world.
I’m left puzzling as to why the US FDA feels the need for further safety reviews before releasing AZ vaccines to India. Any suggestions, anyone?
Suppose that the US does send all its unused AZ vaccines to India. What will global media headlines read if a couple of Indians die of a rare blood clot after receiving a vaccine? I bet there is chance that they would blame the US for sending untested vaccines to an unsuspecting country like India: “Evil US sends its rejects to India, worsting India’s pandemic fight”.
I do not understand why an intelligent journalist writes such an article about vaccines being the solution for Covid when the vaccines trial finishes end 2022 (yes 22). It will then still take many months before the data is properly analysed etc and everybody will have a different conclusion. For now, we have no idea whether the vaccine is the answer or not in, the short and/or long run. It certainly has a very effective placebo effect for now which is fine by me. Proof that I am right: look at the comments below they are all over the place. This is normal because everybody is right from their perspective …
The only thing that will mitigate covid is resilience of patients, resilience, resilience and nothing else. Unless the scientific community starts looking at already existing but ignored approaches to manage viral diseases and improve the resilience of individuals and populations, the confused discussion about and the struggle with covid will go on and on and on…
There are 3 big real life experiments running now in Israel, the UK and the US. Plenty of data available way before the end of 2022
The ethical analogy at the beginning of this article is worse than simple minded….The suit and the drowning child….Jesus Christ. And pushing the mRNA injections as an across-the-board ethical good is really … I’m really nearly hating this article. Please just submit this to the CNN Opinion column, and spare us.
I am puzzled by this article. My understanding was that India has one of the largest vaccine manufacturing capabilities in the world and already has licences to manufacture the AZ/Oxford vaccine already – in such quantities that it was exporting them? Am I missing something? Is not India capable of meeting its own vaccine needs.
The effectiveness of any vaccination program involves a great deal more than just brewing up the vaccine itself. Just off the top of my head – having a secure and timely supply chain for the aproximately 250 chemicals required to manufactue the AZ vaccine; identifying where in the country you will have the most effect with your vaccination program; infrastructure to distribute the vials to where you need them as rapidly as possible (have you ever travelled on an Indian train?); having enough syringes and needles in the right place at the right time; having enough trained bodies to admininster said vaccines….and I am not a Public Health professional.
Indeed. There was a BBC report that a lot of the bulk serum required for manufacture is held up in the US export system. Mind you the source is of course dubious.
If you were part of the Indian Government, being taken to work in your government automobile
walking to work, wearing an expensive suit and shoes, and you saw a fellow citizenchildtrying to breath in a 3rd world hospital beddrowning in a shallow pond, and you were easily able to reach them and save them — are you morally obliged to do so, even if it wouldruin your outfitmake your day just a bit more difficult? India is in fact a 3rd world country…and the evidence is highlighted in how it treats…or doesn’t treat…its citizenry.The problems of other nations is not the problem of the West….they are THEIR problems.
The better-off in India do not care about how many of the poor die, or in what conditions, unless and until the pestilence affecting the poor might threaten them. If that were not the case, India would have spent its money on hygiene and sewerage systems, instead of on nuclear weapons and a space programme.
Yes, Gandhi said what India needed most was flushing toilets. Instead they plead poor and spend billions on their military and space programmes. It is disgusting. India is a very rich country with a lot of poor, desperately poor people.
I am quite flummoxed by the non use of the cheap as chips parasitic drug Ivermectin which has proven to have both powerful anti viral and anti inflammatory abilities. Dr Tess Lawrie has conducted extensive research into trials done with this drug and found at best it had 86% efficacy in stopping Covid in its tracks. She sent all her research work to Matt Hancock who completely ignored her. Well there you go a minister that wants to spend Billions on expensive Pharma drugs. Dexamethasone they all drone on about is actually pretty poor regarding keeping people alive. There is without doubt a political reason why Ivermectin is not being used but had they swallowed their pride and carried out trials twelve months ago we would not have had so many deaths today
“Denmark, I think, has about 50,000 unused doses of Ox/AZ which it won’t use”. From what I’ve been reading, other EU countries are lining up to buy those.
Why always the profiteering (for the few), no liability experimental vaccines with God alone knows what long term side-effects they could cause due to pathogenic priming – as happened in all the animal trials? What about cheap Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine + Zinc and Vitamin D. India as a nation has dangerously low levels of Vitamin D: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6060930/
And could it be that the spike in Indian deaths relates directly to the roll-out of the vaccines: https://twitter.com/robinmonotti2/status/1386586001829769216/photo/1?
We have hundreds of deaths and over half a million side effects here in the UK with the AZ vax alone – but the Govt hides the Vaccine Analysis Profile away – as it does the adverse event Yellow Card reporting system. Why? The fact that Boris Johnson and the bought media says its “safe” should have millions of alarm bells ringing! . Here’s the AZ profile so far – but how many reports are missing because the Yellow Card system is hidden away? Is this what they mean by “Informed Consent?” https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/979487/COVID-19_AstraZeneca_vaccine_analysis_print.pdf
Hydroxychloroquine has been trialled. It doesn’t work.
Vitamin D has been trialled. It has little effect, though it’s good for your bones and in Britain we’re often deficient in it.
Sorry the facts don’t support fringe theories.
Glib ignorance, if I ever read it.
If you do not really know or understand what you are talking about, and it is clear that you don’t, then I would suggest keeping schtum.
And I guess the doctors and scientists, up to the Government’s Chief Medical Officer, don’t know what they are talking about either? And that’s why they are using treatments endorsed by trials, rather than trusting to nonsense which circulates on fringe websites?
I really have a lot of trouble dealing with this level of ignorant stupidity.
Oh please. You are reading the trials that were set up to fail. Go to ivmmeta.com to see some crystal clear data. Why are you so intent on trashing what works?
Everything that doesn’t support the agendas of big pharma and big government (and their agencies) is ‘fringe’.
I have been to this site and spent an entertaining 2 hours looking at their list of RCTs exploring early treatment and their Forest plots.
Although they say these 11 studies are all kosher RCTs in fact, having read them all, they aren’t e.g. 2 of them are unblinded, 4 of them are comparing ivermectin with other antiviral treatments with no placebo arm, 1 of them allowed random extra treatments to be added to their ivermectin arm … I could go on but I won’t.
In addition, the summaries of the results they give are laughably biased when you bother to compare their words with what the actual investigators wrote in their discussions.
Also they have a para at the end explaining why they have excluded some studies. One example they give is a study that recruited the treatment arm at one hospital and the placebo volunteers from another and yet one of their included studies did exactly this.
The Forest plots have some of the longest whiskers I have ever seen. This = very suspect study data as any good systematic reviewer will tell you.
Nice piece of almost useless firehosing.
They have a similar set up looking at Hydroxychloroquine.
No self respecting reader of papers should waste their time with either of these sites.
That doesn’t look terrible to me. Some 25,000,000 vaccinations between mid-February and 14 April resulted in 647 people being registered as fatalities and nearly 25 percent of the “blood issues” raised being hot flushes? That fatality rate is 0.00259 percent of vaccinated people. Roughly speaking. What would the figures look like in any random similar period without Covid and without vaccinations?
“but I’m going to ignore that, again to keep things simple”
That’s my pull quote for this article.
At the risk of appearing/being ignorant, for scale, this general death statistic is important: 8.4 million people die every year in India which comes to 22,500 per day
The EU 27 has over one million unused OxAZ doses as their Governments have scared people from accepting it. Absolutely “it’s not just the USA. Other countries have supplies of vaccines that could do good”
I just can’t believe that a science editor knows less than an average person like me in terms of the transmission rates during massive vaccination campaigns. Every single country internationally has had a huge spike in cases the first two weeks after starting vaccination. It is shedding. It is transmitting. Prior to the introduction of the vaccines, India was doing beautifully and had very
low incidence. Really, I don’t know if you ought to feel ashamed of yourself or resign.
not a mention of possible therapies. Like Dr Kory’s regimen: Ivermectin, Vit D and so on.
And not a mention of looking for the cause of this sudden upsurge.
Bit of a waste of time this whole article. He could have/should have simply said USA should give China it’s unused vaccines. But of course, that wouldn’t be an article.
Still quoting the models I see, even though we know that most of them are unmitigated nonsense that gives clairvoyants credibility.
You either have zero understanding of how disease transmission works or you are another shill pushing the pharma narrative. I suspect the latter. Here’s someone who actually understands the REAL data as opposed to the modeling and does an excellent and easy to understand job of explaining what is actually happening in India. Pay attention, you might learn something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg4aUqjH4N4
My layman’s approach to what is happening in India now: if you look at the relative numbers, same thing happened almost everywhere in the World. Not only in Europe and America, not only when right-wingers were governing, both in countries where lockdowns or restrictions were fancied, and where they were not. I read about Czechia or Germany dealing well with pandemic. Then, suddenly, there were articles about same countries going through a disaster, overburdened crematories and so on. It applies to Poland, UK, France, Sweden, you name it. The rest – without even one sudden surge – are the real outliers, mostly isolated islands or totalitarian states, where you cannot tell the difference between public health and political coercion, and their data does not always seem 100% right (yes, I mean China). It all makes sens, when you think of a fast spreading virus and wild forces of nature in general. The other thing is that the virus finally goes away by itself, at least temporarily, and Sweden is the best example. I hope and believe the vaccines work well, but how long can we wait in hiding until every nation is fully vaccinated?
The Biotech community did great work in creating, testing and putting into volume production safe and remarkably effective vaccines in less than 1 year. Within 3 months of this immense scientific and Private sector achievement the Politicians and the Public Sector agencies have managed to slow the rate of implementation to a snails pace and politicise human life. The only people in those areas to emerge with any praise are Astra Zeneca (non profit and a very practical workhorse vaccine) and should I say it ? The UK government.
Another hysterical article without researching the truth. Many more people die in India of starvation and TB. The Gates Foundation rolled out a disastrous vaccine programme a few years back that has added to the medical problems and many deaths.
In their rush to frighten the UK into taking a poisonous gene therapy, the establishment and their hacks are prepared to create another wave of Morgan Hysteria Syndrome.
Why have you never documented and commented on the sterilisation of thousands of injected Indian women or the TB crisis, or the poverty on the edge of towns and cities.
Some data:
(1) the UK decline rate in COVID-19 fatal infections has remained constant since 1 January 2021 as vaccine doses have increased from 2m to 20m: in other words, in a population cleared of the most susceptible by last year’s epidemic, vaccines appear to be having no observable effect on the normal seasonal decline in a now endemic winter respiratory infection. Any conclusions about the benefit vaccines might have in India are at best wildly speculative.
(2) We are projected to spend around £12bn on this vaccination program. Like millions, I haven’t received a penny in income, furlough, or unemployment benefit in 15 months, and savings intended for my pension are running out.
(3) The <5 yo mortality rate in India is 8 times the UK rate. Last year, they spent $20bn putting gadgets in space. Due to Western lockdown policies, those in poverty (the leading cause of death in India) have doubled in the last 12 months to 134 million. Deaths from untreated tuberculosis are spiralling.
How about: (i) stop being hysterical (ii) not spending £12bn on vaccines that are having no observable impact on infection decline rates (iii) restarting the economy so we can start buying things from India (iv) encouraging them to spend money on hospital facilities rather encouraging them to spend it on mobile phone satellites?
Presumably there is something wrong with this (deaths so far under 200,000) https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
“First: every day in India there are about 300,000 confirmed new cases; that number is growing every day. It does not seem to have ended its exponential growth, despite increasingly stringent social distancing measures.”
There has been a plateau in the increase in cases per day at 2.0% whereas in the previous week cases were rising at 1.3% a day at the start and finished at 1.8% a day. The week before that cases were rising at 1.0% a day at the start and finished at 1.2% a day.
Of course we should use those vaccines, but the numbers quoted here are weird and histrionic. What’s lacking is sufficient testing of his model from a variety of perspectives and using different approaches and assumptions. I guess even Tom has his off days.
Why do your articles provoke such a spate of utter nonsense below the line? It’s not really deserved, they are generally quite sensible. Maybe it’s the channel.
People below still spouting their old tropes about lockdown, kids’ education, false reporting of with or of Covid. Sweden, all hail Sweden with a city based population of 10 million. They have admitted mistakes and compare poorly with Norway and Denmark. On a death par with locked down London of similar population.
In England, if one stood in a court, accused of locking down unnecessarily, the jury would be in a majority in their favour and declare them innocent. Kids. If part of a normal year was missed, say by illness (non covid) then if they didn’t catch up they weren’t going far in life anyway. It’s not Covid’s fault their parents can’t help them.
False reporting. A cause for celebration. If “only” 50,000 died we should be claiming a success and justifying lockdown. If 130k is correct, Covid killed as many in UK in a year as WWII in 5.
Most companies and a huge number of citizens have managed to ride out the worst and are re emerging to go for a pint and book holidays.
If left to our own devices we’d have had repossessions, bankruptcies, very low morale and anxiety leading to worse mental health and social security misery. Doubt folk could afford to march and protest if they weren’t frightened for their future health. Much is written of the exposure to Covid in the NHS. Those with poor immunity would have been given a death sentence if they hadn’t kept away.
Doubting Thomases and EU fans. Your record’s stuck and your opinions are second hand received suppositions. If you can’t keep the nonsense to yourself, please stop repeating it over and over. It’s a bore and annoying.
Everything is worse in India because of the massively high levels of terrible poverty and the appalling levels of sanitation and hygiene. People still defecate in the streets, although for females it is usually the more deadly railways tracks.
So, the question is, some 15 months in from the official Time of Covid, why has India been ‘hit’ now? The situation has been exactly the same for more than a year and India was getting along okay. So, what changed?
Well, a vaccine and genetic treatment campaign began some weeks ago but we also need to know if Governments have clamped down on the previously effective use of Homeopathic and Ayurvedic medicine. Or, has the use of drugs like Ivermectin been stopped or diminished?
Or, are more people dying in hospital from respiratory diseases of all kinds because, in India, the patient is given food and care by relatives who may now be excluded because of Covid?
It makes no sense for India to be in strife now when it always had the conditions for a worst outcome. More vaccines and genetic treatments are not the answer because, India’s hospital system never copes and in fact does not treat the poor. It is always overwhelmed. And, if these treatments do have adverse outcomes and create high levels of serious and permanent auto-immune dysfunction as some medical experts have warned, India will truly be a disaster, way beyond any Covid problems.
If India can afford a “Space Programme” & Nuclear Weaponry, there must be a bit of cash left for a health service & the odd LOX plant to produce O2 for the people
Now they come begging !!
Exactly! The cheeky chaps, how dare they!
Good grief.Here we go again. Chivers, the mainstream ‘science writer’, biased blinkers on, also with a book out about numbers. Does it teach how to do relative numerical data comparisons?
And he also believes in some perverse way that vaccines will solve India’s covid problem. Maybe Chivers could go look at some graphs where heavy vaccine programmes have been rolled out. (Hint – look at steeply increasing shorter term death curvesthen compare the curves to past years and other non or hardly vaxxed countries – then another hint – it’s Spring!)
India – where is the IVERMECTIN? Where is the Vit D? Where is the megadose IV Vit C? Where is the Budesonide? Where is the HCQ/Zinc? Where is the …..? You know, all those very effective prophylactics and early treatments for covid which are also very cheap!! Ivermectin, IV Vit C, Calcifdeiol (Active D3) along with cheap anticoagulants even work in critical care situations. Where are/were the above in the UK – and the rest of the world come to that!
Parts of Mexico handed out an ‘early symptom covid kit’ – vast difference in deaths to other areas.
MSM is touting photos of a non covid incident from over a year ago in their frenzy to scare our population witless.
Pictures of funeral pyres – which are quite normal in India.
Pictures of a health service which is nothing like the standard of ours.
He’s also still banging on about ‘cases’ – all cause mortality is the only real figure that can be used – which is dodgy in itself in India. ‘Cases’ in the general population are irrelevant – easily distorted as we in the UK know.
A number of people have already pointed out that normally approx 26000 people die in India each day with a population approx 20 times more than the UK where approx 1600 plus die on average each day. Deaths in India are not even on the starting block relative to the UK, Europe and USA.
Another approach which could help to provide wider distribution of a vaccine in short supply would be to use the intradermal route. A smaller dose should be effective and this could well enable a seven-fold increase in distribution.
This technique has been shown (by me) to be effective for post-exposure rabies prophylaxis in Thailand. The technique is readily taught and was given WHO approval.
Urgent control of the present Covid-19 pandemic is required, before emergent mutant strains take hold. Other countries must be kept from the present tragedy in India.
It appears one can no longer comment after 24 hours? Pathetic!
Bring back DISQUS, it was a far better system, but presumably too expensive?
I’ve carefully read all the comments, and bar just a couple, there is no mention of the fact that repurposed, safe and effective medications exist. India was using Hydroxychloroquine with great success. Ivermectin is even more effective and is cheap, around 2-5 cents per pill, (unless you are in California or buying online, where it is exorbitantly expensive). Both are used in combination with other supporting medication. Since two major factories supplying the precursors for HCQ in Asia mysteriously blew up, one of them last Christmas, it may be that the supply is exhausted. The fact that these medications work is being concealed and contested wherever possible. The UK/NHS just came out against Ivermectin. So did the WHO recently, and now the FDA has changed its mind again. It shows clearly where their priorities lie.
I would like to suggest looking at this.https://covid19criticalcare.com/videos-and-press/the-whos-denial-of-ivermectin/
Slides from the trials can be seen there at http://www.ivmmeta.com with clearly positive results. 52 studies… Peru, Argentina, Chiapas, and in many other places, the evidence is there. Looking it up at random gives the impression that there is uncertainty about its effectiveness, and contradictory reports abound. Best taken with a pinch of salt….
India is another example of the link between know-nothing ignorance-is-a-macho-sign-of-authenticity right wing governments bringing disaster on their people by discouraging precautions against Covid.
Trump’s America
Johnson’s Britain
Bolsonaro’s Brazil
Now it’s Modi’s Hindu Nationalist India.
Plenty of evidence, for those who care to look.
Or is something else behind this “reset”, and governments (left, right, centrist) just doing what they’re told.
I’ve been saying for over a year now that this is and never has been a public health issue, it is a control and compliance issue.
You’ve hit the nail on the head Nigel. This has never been about a virus but the virus has been the catalyst in creating the control being sought.
Conspiracy theory nonsense, I’m afraid.
Hur hur hur hur
Stay off The Guardian and FT. You will soon be cured.
Don’t forget the BBC.
Say those who believe what they read on fringe websites full of fantasists.
The fact that one of the contributors to this discussion isn’t even willing to commit herself to admitting that we were right to eliminate smallpox in the 1970s by vaccination, because she is so opposed to vaccines, tells you all you need to know about the mindset of such individuals.
You need to brush upon your syntax! Your first sentence is appalling.
However you do have a point, although freedom of choice is always paramount.
Wasn’t the smallpox jab an actual vaccine?
Oh how I try….
Stay off the fringe websites, some of them compiled by agents of the Russian Government and others compiled by western loonies. You will soon be cured.
But seriously….. do you REALLY imagine that the doctors and scientists are all part of a sinister global conspiracy ?
Unfortunately many scientists and doctors, although by no means all, are subject to a herd mentality. Perhaps they should “unherd”. You have to remember that there are huge interests and egos at stake, and admitting one is wrong is very hard for the vast majority. It would behove all doctors and scientists to think critically and read everything they can on the subject, rather than just accepting the Fauci et al. status quo.
Not that so much, but in my experience the higher up the professional food chain you go the more likely you will see greater levels of conformity among your peers. A good example of this is when a simple employee, upon being made a manager, immediately becomes a corporate stooge. It gets worse the further up you go, particularly in human science fields like education or politics, which seem to attract types that believe that their ‘lessers’ should be managed – all for their own good will of course. Anyone who slips up or challenges their authority usually gets socially and/or professionally demoted and may risk losing a sizable income. For people from an affluent background who’ve never known poverty, that is a fate worse than death. Which is also the reason why the rich and powerful are rapidly turning our public institutions against us. They no longer serve the public good, but the good of the societal elite who will use said institutions (schools, hospitals, media) to bully and coerce the public into following the agenda laid out for them. This is why anyone who conforms to the current groupthink is socially endorsed, while anyone who challenges the agenda is labeled a right-wing conspiracy theorist.
Don’t take my word for it. Go and find out for yourself.
What in heavens name are you talking about given that the end result is more or less the same in most of the EU countries, including Germany where the deaths per million curve since November 2020 is virtually superimposable upon that of both the US and Sweden. It truly requires a very special type of ignorance and blinkered view to make comments such as yours, which are not at all helpful, and certainly do not lend to a rational approach for managing the pandemic.