But now imagine that a new variant arrived which was more transmissible, by the same margin. Each person infects five people, on average. Suddenly the first one infects five, those five infect 25, those 25 infect 125. By the time you reach the 10th generation, it’s almost 10 million new cases, and about 12 million in total. Even if it still only had an IFR of 4%, it would kill about 480,000 people – nine times as many as the original.
So even if Omicron is less deadly, if it’s very good at spreading through the population, it could quickly overwhelm the health service just through sheer weight of numbers.
The question, then, is: is it more transmissible? There was much excitement over the weekend, when the case numbers appeared to be slowing there — after zooming up to 19,000 a day, they dropped back to 17,000, and people started to wonder whether it had peaked. But then the South African health service released a new tranche of data on Sunday, with another 37,000 cases — the apparent slowdown appears to have been a reporting backlog.
Even taking that into account, Omicron isn’t doing quite the mad upwards dash that it was in late November. But it’s still escalating, in a presumably fairly immune population. And it seems to be spreading even faster in the UK: Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, told the Science Media Centre that “In South Africa the latest R estimate is about 2.2. For the UK the estimate is 3.7 which is doubling every 2 to 3 days.” The UK HSA technical report suggests (p19) that it spreads around twice as easily as Delta in the UK population. If that’s true, it would easily overwhelm any gains from reduced virulence, even if they’re real.
So what does it all mean? Over the weekend, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine released a model of how Omicron might spread. It included scenarios with different assumptions about how good the new variant is at evading immunity, and about how good the boosters are at building that immunity back up. It also assumed that we’d keep the Plan B advice in place (masks in some public spaces, people working from home if they can, some vaccine-status checking) and that the NHS would administer about 500,000 new booster jabs a day.
The most likely scenario is that the variant is pretty good at evading immunity, but that boosters work pretty well. Under that scenario, the LSHTM model’s projections look fairly bleak: a peak of about 6,000 hospital admissions a day, compared to about 4,000 a day at the January 2021 peak. And they think between about 40,000 and 50,000 people would die of Covid between 1 December and 30 April.
They say in the model that they have assumed Omicron is no less deadly than Delta, given prior immunity. They might be wrong about that, but as I’ve shown, we can’t be sure. It’s certainly very possible that we’ll be looking at another wave of deaths comparable to the first or second one.
Will Johnson’s booster boosterism make much of a difference? I doubt it. It takes at least a week for boosters to have a significant effect on your immunity, and for some people more like two. Even if we started vaccinating a million people a day from tomorrow, the impact of that wouldn’t be felt until around Christmas. We’re not going to start vaccinating a million people tomorrow: we’ve been averaging 400,000 a day recently, fewer than the LSHTM model assumes, and the NHS thinks that we’ll still be boosting well into January and February and we’ll only have offered everyone a jab by the new year. Hopefully it’ll ramp up quickly, but if we’re relying on boosters, then most of the January caseload will be baked in already.
And here’s the really worrying thing. Sajid Javid, the health secretary, told MPs last night that 200,000 people have been infected by Omicron yesterday alone. This was such a huge claim that people assumed he’d got mixed up: perhaps he meant 200,000 people are infected? Or have been? But apparently not. There were about 50,000 cases reported in the UK on 10 December. The ONS infection survey suggests that we only detect 40% of them: that is, there were really 125,000. On the 10th, 19% of cases were Omicron. That is about 25,000 cases. But cases detected on the 10th were probably infected on the 7th, six days ago. And if it’s doubling every two days, then that 25,000 has had time to become 200,000.
For reference, that’s about the number of daily cases that we had in early January 2021, the peak of the second wave, by which time we’d already been in full lockdown for a month. We are not in lockdown now, and several more doublings are probably already locked in. If Javid is correct, then Omicron had better be much less deadly, or there could be real trouble ahead. We’ll know if he’s right in about three days.
So should we be talking about restrictions?
The restrictions we put in place for the first and second waves were intended to avoid something far worse. The 16 March 2020 paper by Imperial College London predicted 500,000 deaths if no measures were taken. That was what sent us into lockdown. The actual death toll of 40,000 or so in the first wave was a fraction of what it could have been.
But we are nowhere near where we were early last year. We’re now talking about something that is on the level of a very bad flu season. Full-on March 2020 lockdown is probably an overreaction.
But the LSHTM model thinks that we could prevent about two-thirds of those deaths and hospitalisations by going to full lockdown,1 and about one-third by introducing, right now, some less strict measures, equivalent to Stage 2 of the “roadmap out of lockdown” from spring: the biggest part of that was probably that only two households or six individuals could meet indoors.
It is a non-trivial intervention that could slow the course of Omicron; it might buy some time for the sped-up booster programme; and it would mean we wouldn’t have to cross our fingers and hope that Omicron is less deadly than Delta. Obviously politicians will be reluctant to ruin another Christmas. But relying on boosters alone is a big risk, especially since no one but Johnson seems to think we can hit the target.
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SubscribeThis same organisation just discovered this week that it is institutionally racist. https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/aboutus/organisation/governance/equity-diversity-and-inclusion/racial-equality/independent-review
“This independent review found evidence of racism and inequalities which point to deeper, more structural problems within LSHTM that have negatively impacted the experiences of those (people of colour) within our organisation.”
they are a compromised and corrupted organisation, it is more important for them to say fashionable dogma rather than what is actually true.
So either the report is true, in which case why would I trust a bunch of racists?
or its untrue in which case why would I trust an organisation so spineless it will say whatever it takes to placate a minority of activists?
Either way, I wouldn’t trust the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to find their own arse if they used both hands and a map, never mind their modelling of a virus.
So, a bunch of racists is incapable of producing a useful Omicron model?
Before I answer , Rodney, are you really sure you want to commit yourself to a position of defending the scientific reliability of racists?
but yes, a bunch of racists modelling a variant originating from Africa, would give me cause for concern about whether their modelling is undermined by their racism. And I’m going to take them entirely at their word, they have loudly and proudly announced in their report that they are a racist organisation.
Sorry Rodney that was unfair to you, reading between the lines your question is maybe: we all know LSHTM isn’t actually racist, they are just appeasing their loud activist diversity and inclusion officer types to get themselves out of the firing line of a race row and the bad publicity that would bring, as that’s a separate issue to how they conduct their modelling, perhaps their modelling is unaffected?.
But I’m not willing to play that game any more, they are outing themselves as either an organisation that bows to activist pressure, in which case what pressures are they bowing to when making their modelling assumptions or they are what they say they are, a racist organisation.
It was a genuine question because I didn’t immediately see how one followed the other. And it gave you an opportunity to explain further
Well if they are racist then we can’t know for sure that they are selecting the best people in various positions!
Ah, but, meritocracy is white-nationlism, so we are told.
It could well be that LSHTM is entirely meritocratic with only the best people in their respected positions ensuring the best possible research. Their admission of institutional racism may well be a tacit acknowledgement of their competence.
Touche!
Lack of critical thinking and demonstrating their willingness to follow the herd onto a bandwagon du jour undermines confidence in their ability to carry out unbiased scientific analysis in a highly politicised environment. Simples innit?
It appears the Omnicron variant resulted in less deaths than Delta on a mostly unvaccinated African population, so what the hell is going on in this country? We are 80% + vaccinated so why are we in “Plan B” at all? do these vaccines work or not? if not why is the plan more booster vaccines? if they do then why is there a panic?
You’re making the mistake of looking for logic and rationale in all of this. But so many careers (and egos) are invested in the covid charade now that it’s developed a momentum all of its own. What passes for “policy” is becoming ever more absurd. The point is to keep the show on the road. And never waste a crisis even if it’s a phoney one!
Your comment would be equally correct if you replaced “Covid” with “climate”, for the same reasons.
I completely agree with you with regards to the absurdity of covid policies. Here in Ontario Canada, one PHO for the town of Kingston just announced this: “Dr. Piotr Oglaza is also placing new restrictions on restaurants – they must be closed to indoor dining between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., not sell or serve alcohol after 9 p.m., ensure all patrons are seated when served, seat no more than four people at a table, and not allow dancing, singing or live music.” Because serving alcohol at 8:50pm doesn’t increase infectivity of this virus, but at 9:05pm, it goes completely crazy and zooms around the restaurant, specifically seeking out those with a glass of wine? It’s so beyond absurd that I don’t even know what to think anymore. The people in power have no common sense, or can’t read, or don’t understand anything that’s happened over the past 22 months?
i particularly like the “not allow dancing, singing or live music” rule, who knew Covid19 was such a curmudgeonly virus
The people in power are deluded, drunk on power, stupid or whatever else you may like to call them. But we can all vote. A smart politician now, if they had the balls, would stand up & say: “If you vote for my party we’re going to stop all this covid nonsense, provide focussed protection for the elderly & vulnerable, and let the rest of the population get on with their lives.”
To those of us with a modicum of common sense, we think such dictates are absurd. There’s a similar rule where I live that says in a restaurant you must put your mask on if you get out of your seat to go to the toilet, or on the way in our out of the venue, but you can take it off while seated.
But in the world of the risk averse public official this micro management makes perfect sense because that’s how they live.
A friend told me yesterday that he was having a quiet mid afternoon beer after work & the premises got a Covid compliance check.
All present had to show their vaccine cert & the owner had to show he’d checked them.
How many were present?
The barman, my friend & his dog.
But hey that official now has ticked the box that he’s checked compliance at these premises. Will his boss notice that it was mid afternoon when a breach is highly unlikely? Definitely not.
Might they have been better employed checking a large night club full of drunk dancing teenagers possibly spreading Covid like the plague. Definitely.
But then that would have been risky & we can’t put the staff at risk now can we.
That’s why, in reality the whole edifice is so obviously stark naked to anyone who cares to look.
I am continually reminded of the film ‘wag the dog’.
George, I thought Tom explained the differences between South Africa and the UK very clearly, and you can’t really fault his logic. For one thing a much younger population and a much greater degree of natural immunity. (Of course to get to the high levels of natural immunity you need to go through a lot of infections, illness and deaths).
As to vaccine effectiveness ‘working’ isn’t a binary ‘it works / it does not’ attribute; it is a matter of degree.
What I find exasperating however, is that he does not mention the fact that Sweden has never had a full lockdown or many legal restrictions, which in my view is a much better route to go down, taking account of individual circumstances and, yes, their own level of risk acceptance.
However that doesn’t mean that people didn’t change their behaviour a great deal. They will do this whatever the government says in this country if it starts to look bad.
I have just checked at the SA stats out of curiosity: SA’s population is similar to the UK’s, but their death toll is only about half, despite no vaccines.
I hasten to add that SA is as big as Portugal, Spain and France, so lower density and their population is much younger, but still…
South Africa’s population is still concentrated in cities… and township populations are more dense than UK cities. Yes, the country is much larger, but many areas are not populated.
I wish people would remember that density isn’t the size of a country divided by the population. People make this mistake regularly with Sweden and certain US states, as though everyone is spread out equally and not concentrated in a handful of densely packed cities with just a few people living out in the sticks.
You missed the point he made re ‘natural’ immunity gained from catchng Covid and so develop the same immunity they would have had they been vaccinated.. herd immunity!
I think this is spot on, and Sweden remains an interesting case.
I feel that other governments could have encouraged behavioural changes and trusted their peoples. That might have avoided some of the harm caused.
However, different peoples would respond in different ways, and, in the UK, our population may may not have trusted our government
Yet we get told frequently by The Science that vaccinations are better than natural immunity. Even the WHO changed their definition of herd immunity 3 times recently.
As I understand it, if one is exposed to a low viral load and develop mild symptoms one will develop a weak natural immunity. I may be mistaken however.
I don’t know about that… maybe one of our resident doctors can weigh in.
Andrew, just another thing – what is omitted is that the UK has a very high percentage of obese and overweight people and that has to contribute to the high death rate in the UK.
According to the evidence reported from Israel, immunity conferred by infection and recovery is more robust and longer lasting than vaccines. By orders of magnitude. This was supported by Professor Robert Malone, the first scientist to recognise the drug potential of mRNA technology.
I agree with you.
You don’t have to go through lots of deaths to create natural herd immunity. Just use available (but for some reason) illegal treatments that worked before vaccines arrived.
Indeed, we have Uttar Pradesh and Japan as real time real life examples. Two thirds of people in hospital in South-Africa were there for other reasons, and happened to test positive without showing any symptoms. Only a couple of hunderd of the usual suspects are in ICU. A storm in a tea cup, but oh so useful to keep the masses frightened. Germany goes completely bonkers with booster within a month. Makes one wondering what the situation would be if the Morgenthau plan had been carried out. And before anyone says that this is a horrendous remark, how should we qualify withholding medical treatment from millions of people and ruining others peoples’ lifes, so that a few can get rich? Is there a name for that?
…but for some (financial) reason…!
You mean big pharma aren’t doing this for free? Next you’ll be suggesting they’re ramping up the fear in order to maximise profits Surely not. The pharma companies are good and ethical organisations who have never lied about trial results, bribed doctors, or pushed medicines that are knowingly killing people. They’d never do these things. If you can trust anyone it is big pharma execs. They’re honest and upstanding and definitely not in this for themselves. Next you’ll be saying politicians don’t have integrity
Chivers seems to be saying that natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity: according to the article, South Africa’s previous waves of Covid probably infected more of their population, giving them a potential advantage against Omicron as compared to our vaccinated population.
I would need to reread it, but I thought he mentioned that relying on natural immunity would cause large numbers of deaths – which, I seem to remember, they had.
Once you have been through that though, my understanding is that natural immunity lasts longer
Chivers is right on that score. Pity that the grifters and grafters, swindlers and liars are still forcing vaccines on those with natural immunity.
A mostly unvaccinated African population who have mostly acquired natural immunity by having, and surviving, three previous waves.
If we all catch omicron some of us will die, but many more will be immune to the next strain. Mutation never stops; evolution never ceases; we will all catch it eventually.
The question is; do we keep pedalling to try and outrun it, or just let it overtake us? In the course of history mankind was overtaken by many plagues, often deadlier than this one. It’s no consolation if you’re the one who succumbs.
When Covid has run its course (if it ever does) and things have returned to a new normal, the myriad inquiries into the handling of the disease (the ones that aren’t covered up) will reveal the worldwide response to be a combination of wilful mismanagement and a complete fiasco, as well as being a front-runner for the Biggest Shambles of the 21st Century.
Yes, is this enough though?.. I demand a Global trial for the Global mafia. And this time We must reach the bone.. We must unearth who is behind the puppets parading on screens.. I do not know about you guys but I am creating MY Normal and I hope everyone to realize the enormous opportunity that We create the Normal we dream of and belongs to us..
That death was reported as with Omicron. Not from it. The person might have been in hospital because of a stroke or somesuch.
We do not need a repeat of these lies to frighten the population. I note the vaccination status was not given, which almost always means they were vaccinated.
Definitely not sunstroke judging by my garden. But I am afraid the 19 million target was set in absurdity as an excuse to lock us down anyway when it is missed.
Only skimmed the article as it seems to be the usual Chivers rabbit-hole statistics that amount to not very much.
Dr Coetzee has said that one South African has commented that covid has become a “UK psychosis”. Seems about right.
And there is no question that Johnson has manufactured an “emergency” in order to try and save his own political arse. This is about the lowest he has yet sunk. What an utterly disgraceful man he is
I have been feeling that it’s the converse – the so-called party scandal was a convenient squirrel to distract from the government’s CoV response.
Possibly but why would he then try and cover it up?
They’ve spent so long covering up cover ups, they no longer know what they’re covering up in the first place.
“Sajid Javid, the health secretary, told MPs last night that 200,000 people have been infected by Omicron yesterday alone.”
The labs must have been pretty busy analysing samples that day, even with the extrapolation to 200,000.
Sometimes we need to step back and sense check statements from all sides. This is when we miss journalists challenging politicians to justify their claims
HARTgroup does a lot of sense/fact checking on the numerous over blown claims the government / advisors come up with. They have repeatedly shown them to be spouting nonsense. Never a surprise. What I can’t understand is why people haven’t long since stopped listening to any of them
And no mention of the fact that the largest proportion of those hospitalised in South Africa are there for other reasons and tested positive for Covid while in hospital – all people in hospital in SA are routinely tested for Covid.
Also there is the assumption that lockdowns actually work against an airborne virus.
‘And we should also remember that while deadliness — virulence — is important, it’s not as important as transmissibility.’
Tom, this is the most laughable sentence I have heard regarding covid. If nobody dies then there is no issue.
Then came a whole heap of imagining. You imagine the IFR will be 4%. That is an outrageous figure which is almost certainly to be higher that that for even the over 80 cohort.
He explained his reasoning. A small increase in transmissibility causes a much bigger increase in cases because it’s exponential. The percentage of those who die tends to be fixed.
Transmissibility is always more important, because virulence is never going to be zero
He made the point badly and you misunderstood it.. it’s simply that if you say, quadruple the transmission rate and get (only) half the fatality RATE you still end up with twice as many deaths. If the fatality rate is tiny (?) then yes, the transmission rate is almost irrelevant.. let us hope that turns out to be the case: but we’re some way from knowing that. In the meantime the precautionary principle must apply or else, by the time we find that out, it will be too late!
The daily cases are doubling every 2-3 days, like 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048,4096,8192,16384 in 4-6 weeks. The small fatality rate is roughly fixed.
If deaths are only 0.1%, then 16 people die per day after 4-6 weeks (16384/1000), but deaths keep increasing 32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048 per day over the next 2-3 weeks, continuing upwards until we run out of people to infect.
Either we batten down the hatches, or let it become endemic. I still don’t know which is the best choice if it’s “mild”
That assumes that cases keep doubling each day, which is highly unlikely even in a society with no restrictions. We saw similar predictions based on similar statistics in previous waves that turned out to be very wide of the mark. SAGE’s modelling and estimates are always far too pessimistic, and we need to take what they say with a large pinch of salt.
”less deadly than the other variants” – where is the evidence that they are more deadly than flu? Covid deaths are based on positive tests and not illness. Why is it impossible for the media, health professionals and politicians to see the nonsense and harm they are generating?
Mass psychosis seems to account for much of the behaviour we’ve been witnessing. Carl Jung’s rather depressing take is outlined at: https://odysee.com/@academyofideas/is-a-mass-psychosis-the-greatest-threat
You are right, the plan won’t work, but not because the target will be missed, but because there will always be a new letter of the alphabet to enjoy. What will we do when the next variant arrives and we have run out of boosters? Or do we just keep mixing and matching?
Now you are advocating for restrictions, which means that we will have them in place for ever.
The naivety of some people makes me laugh: the BBC was interviewing some folks queueing for the booster and they where saying how that was a no brainer as it represented the only way to live a normal life. Ah, it is good to be young and inexperienced! (Pity that those being interviewed where in their late 40s, at least).
What do pro-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers have in common?
Neither will ever be fully vaccinated…
That is SO good!
Found elsewhere on th’Internet but definitely worth pinching!
Excellent!..
If I were Greek I would feel peed off that my alphabet will forever more be linked to this lunacy.
It’s a no brainer for an individual because it could save your life.
But you could be right. How can vaccination not be causing new variants with increasing immunity to the vaccines?
And I now understand that new variants of this particular virus are as likely to be more virulent as less virulent, partly because they are transmissible before symptoms appear.
Is it now time to let it rip? A lot of people would die, but thinking long term, it may cause less harm
I’m guessing you’re a fit, healthy, young person.. the argument weakens as you move away for those 3 contributory factors!
Reasonably fit, healthy (at least physically), 65 but 3 jabs.
I’ve been against the idea of not taking steps to combat the virus, but at some point we will have to live with it. Are we maybe reaching that point
Personally, as a risk management specialist, I believe the only solution is to isolate vulnerable people from the virus into fully sealed ‘holiday’ villages not vice versa which is demonstrably impossible. BOTH the isolated and the fit, healthy non-vulnerable can then lead normal lives but only provided the isolated ‘holiday’ villages are 100% sealed. Not rocket science: far less drastic.
I’m 72, fit, health but with hopeless immunity to the common cold (another Coronavirus) so I’m assuming I’m vulnerable. I’m having a great time in my isolated but sadly not sealed, holiday village!
He’s another one on the payroll with a mindset of keeping the whole shit show going.
The “what happens if the variant is more transmissible” analysis is laughable.
Lets assume first the simplest case, variant arrives and the population is 100% immune-naive and susceptible. The variant will spread until 100% of the population has been infected. For a given IFR rate, the number of deaths will be the same. If it is 4% then 4% of the population will die.
In all cases, fraction of people who are infected plotted against time will approximate to a sigma curve [1], the cumulative fraction who have been infected will be the integral of that curve (can’t recall the name, it rises asymptotically from zero, is maximally steep at 50%, and then asymptotically approaches 100%).
The only issue with transmissibility is how long time-wise this takes. The more transmissible, the faster it will happen. In that case, the peak in the absolute numbers infected at any given time will be higher the more transmissible is the variant. Depending on the numbers, health care may be compromised and effectively increase the IFR.
Of course, there are all sorts of things that have an affect on top of this, notably prior partial immunity from earlier variants.
Also, if an effective vaccine can be developed fast enough that it is deliverable before a significant number of people have been infected (which might of might not depend on measured designed to slow the spread), then that could reduce the numbers of deaths.
However, if Omicron is as infectious as it appears to be; if the vaccines are, how shall I put it, as useless as they appear to be; and NPI are also as ineffective as they appear to be: then Omicron is going to beat anything we can do about it. It will, shall we say, rip through the population.
[1] In practice is tends to be a Gompertz curve, which is like a sigma curve but is skewed such that the rise is quicker than the fall time-wise.
You answered your own question but gave it too little weight (ie time factor): overloading ICUs will mean inadequate medical care which ITSELF will result in far more deaths than otherwise..
Also, it understates the value of vaccines insofar the weight of scientific literature produces clear and convincing evidence that prior vaccination significantly reduces (for OMICRON, about 70% with Pfizer, preliminarily), the likelihood an infected vaccinated person will have a serious case of COVID-19. The vaccines are very useful at the individual and population size level, even if their usefulness in terms of reducing transmission rates has been significantly blunted by Delta, and now, OMICRON.
I’m always wary about modelling with exponentials. They are extremely sensitive to the growth rate, and often short term fast exponential growth gets tempered over time – particularly if you only have a short, statistically noisy, period to estimate from.
The red-flag in the LSHTM paper linked to above, is then the projection of 20,900,000 Covid cases for the coming six months, between Dec21 and May22, for their mildest scenario – ‘Low immunity escape, high booster efficiency’ (fig2b). Yet by comparison, to date we’ve had around 10,900,000 cases in two years.
So that’s a projected eight-fold increase in rate despite the fact that we’re mostly vaccinated which should mean the growth rate should be comparatively low compared to Covid in an unvaccinated population. Their high immune escape, low booster is 50% of the population catching Omicron in six months. Personally, I think this needs a sense check. If true it would represent a serious failure of the vaccination policy.
Secondly, from Tom’s piece above, an IFR rate at ‘4%’ seems unrealistically high (written for journalistic effect?). On weekly trends the UK had 325,000 cases (‘preceding 7 days’ to allow for lag) and 831 deaths. An IFR of 0.26%. Some countries are higher (eg US or Germany), but the last half year has had low case fatality rates across most European countries. If Omicron is milder, the IFR would be even lower.
As Tom said, when wiggling just two numbers can have a massive impact on forecasts, you have to be really robust about what those two numbers really are and do robust triangulation against real observed evidence to check they make sense.
The average of .26% worldwide for all age groups is the most widely used one that I have seen.
And that’s the IFR of CONFIRMED cases. How many cases go unregistered? Let’s say they register 50% – a very, very generous figure for the worldwide population. Then the actual rate of deaths per infection is 0.13%.
Now, if we look at the population without serious life threatening co-morbidities the death rate per infection is probably a tenth of that figure – i.e. 0.013%
And the entire world has sunk into a deep mass psychosis over this. WTF.
I thought confirmed cases were CFR?
I think that if we’d watched a typical Hollywood epic five years ago depicting world leaders gripped by fear, losing their marbles and dragging their populations down with them then we’d probably conclude ”what a load of cr*p!”.
Not many of us would trust any data issued by an institution branded “London School” of anything. All hopelessly compromised now.
Anyway, as Tom himself says “it’s hard to know what to make of the data”. Welcome back to March 2020, and the narrative that we could have saved thousands of lives by locking down a couple of weeks earlier. Personally I still think that’s utter bull, but to the credit of these propagandists it has stuck and I am certain has driven the decision to ramp up restrictions and further divide the population on vaccines.
The target is hopelessly unrealistic, but that’s not the point anymore – it’s all about HMG saying we tried, and ultimately the finger of blame will point somewhere between HMG, NHS, who will blame lack of resources, and those resistant to further vaccination. A full range of scapegoats there, what’s not to like?
What started as 3 weeks to flatten the curve is now a political blame game and point-scoring exercise. I never see want to see another Mayor or First Minister on my TV screen for the rest of my life. Wastrels, grifters and con-merchants all of them. As for the BBC, they clearly want to grind the morale of the country into the dirt. I doubt China and Russia have stopped laughing at us in the past 18 months.
I hope the unvarnished, unpleasant truth about all this is eventually written by historians who don’t slavishly believe that Boris is personally responsible for everything from the issue of PPE to Lateral Flow Kits (as Tom says on his Twitter feed, impossible to get in some parts of the country). Or are in the pay of Big Pharma.
We may learn something useful about viral control, the actual preparedness of a National Health service to meet all the Health challenges of the 21st century and the importance of citizens to make informed choices, not just on vaccines, but also their overall lifestyle. The latter was a given when the NHS was originally created, to serve a much smaller population.
The boosters will be based on the original strain’s spike protein. What we are witnessing is evolved vaccine evasion. Boosters are, at best, pointless, and may even be counterproductive because their strength and specificity may actually inhibit the natural immune response to the new strain.
The rapid evolution of vaccine evasion was entirely predictable with a policy of universal vaccination.
Quit the daft policy of universal vaccination and reserve the (soon to be developed, I hope) updated vaccines for the truly vulnerable.
The mammoth in the room.
There is the possibility of a universal vaccine coming along
I’m not sure any of that paragraph is right, all the reporting iv seen from Africa is that Omnicron is less dangerous to people with poor immunity. The start of the article says as much when it mentions Africa 25% vaccination rate. And the second bit is just ass backwards, deadliness is far more important than transmissibility, how could it be otherwise?
The reason that transmissibility is more important is because transmission causes cases to rise exponentially, whereas deadliness is a fixed percent. So, something that is twice as transmissible but half as deadly doesn’t cancel itself out in terms of deaths. In fact, in the this example there would be ~ 5 x more deaths for the more transmissible/less deadly strain after just 5 rounds of infection.
Thanks Simon, i take your point, i think the problem in the article is Chivers’ attempt to word this in a pithy way, it reads like a tweetable line. I would say deadliness isn’t exactly fixed it’ll be a related to co morbidities but i take your meaning.
Transmission rate x 4 + fatality rate x 0.5 = double the deaths!
Wrong you are assuming that everyone is susceptible to the virus
When we first were told we would need two jabs to freedom, I decided that if there were a call for additional vaccines, then it is probably a stunt of some sort and had nothing to do with COVID. Sure enough, out came the booster programme, seemingly on the same day as jab two.
This is deeply suspicious as this government manages only through deceit and deception. There is nothing honest nor honourable about their actions. This shows us how they regard us. Merely as tools for their enrichment and advancement.
….. ugh, Tom, have you still not learned your lesson about covid… ? i.e.: difference between cases and positive tests, the fact that the vaccines are not vaccines but a new type of medicine (they may or may not be good medicines, we shall find out in 10-20 years), the real risk of covid (cases not positive tests), the enormous difficulties with using models to predict disease behaviour (far too many variables), the high likely-hood that all the anti covid measures (possibly including vaccines-see adverse side effect reports) may well be worse than covid, the sliding into a non-democratic world order based on using the covid fear factor, there is not just covid in the world: health (and health data) is far more complex than just covid…
Is big pharma your paymaster? You are rabbiting around with figures taken out of context which is a typical ploy of the big pharma rep (I have been receiving their visits fore 30 years)
I am probably wasting my finger tips…
This talk is interesting: it is publicity from the Indian Gov for ayurvedic medicine: you have to look beyond that part and look for the central message https://www.facebook.com/CanadaIndiaFoundation/videos/1161213934285366/
And if you really want to have an idea of the bits of ‘science’ we should start questioning check this: https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement
….. there are a few interesting comments on subjects related to science in medicine…
I reckon that we will still be where we are today in a year’s time.
Yep
Very very likely..there is no sense that there will come an end point to this pantomime…
They want to stop omicron so they can sell us the vaccines before omicron ends the pandemic with acquired immunity.
Ha!
So it turns out by your reasoning that countries with a low vaccination rate have superior immunity and the failure of Imperial College’s forecasts to come anywhere near reality is proof that masks and lockdowns work?
Are we not victims of the McNamara Fallacy?:
(1) Measure that which can be measured.
(2) Ignore that which cannot be measured.
(3) Assume the measured dimensions encompass control variables.
(4) Assume purported control variables are just that (control variables), not variables that are endogenous — that is, determined within a (possibly) complex dynamic system.
(5) Assiduously endeavor to tweak endogenous variables, which amounts to running in circles chasing one’s tale.
(6) Ignore data indicating failure of step 5. Wash-rinse-repeat ad infinitum.
I had not heard of that fallacy but it sounds like something all the quasi-sciences employ. Then, of course, don’t mention the fact that there is actually no physical evidence of SARS-CoV-2. Its existence is based on flimsy circumstantial evidence backed up by rigorous confirmation-biasing algorithms. Something is going on, but there is as much evidence that it is a virus as it is stardust.
For the last 20 months we’ve been repeatedly told (incorrectly) that natural immunity is not real or somehow inferior, and the only way to achieve proper immunity is through vaccination.
Now a situation occurs where a variant passes through a population with low vaccination and high levels of natural infection, without doing much damage. The argument is now switched to say well natural infection is better than vaccination. Our immunity is somehow possibly inferior to South Africa because we achieved our immunity via the vaccine, and they via natural infection.
(Even though we have had very high levels of covid AND a huge vaccination programme)
It can’t go both ways, the natural immunity deniers have dug themselves into a hole this time.
Will the last man alive please switch off the ventilator.
A problem with over-monitoring is that, if you go looking for problems, you find them. That then creates demand to do something about them when, in fact, doing nothing might be the best option.
So, let’s stop fetishizing fatalities attributed to flavours of COVID. We don’t fetishize all other fatalities.
“Let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen.” (Susan Sontag)
Well, I have a medical /public health background and decided to get vaccinated and I have had the booster.
But I am weary, I have not heard one prediction in two years that is worth a grain of salt really. Personally, I think any further lockdown will be an utter and pointless disaster – on so many fronts… but only one front seems to matter to Boris the Blob.. and at this late hour I cannot even bring myself to explain further . I diagnose That I have the Covid equivalent of Shell Shock/ Combat Fatigue or maybe just plain bored. I am going to get on with my life, look after and enjoy my extended family as best as I can….
I see so many wretchedly scared and fearful souls out there now, masked up ( even when driving their car), cancelling meals out etc etc that it makes me weep for what the “powers that be” have done to them, us ,me..
“Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.”― Thucydides,
“Wait for that wisest of all counselors, Time.”- Pericles.
The CDC says do not do the vax if infected – so that makes this million a day boostering, along with millions a day getting omicron a bit challenging….
So, Chivers, what is the problem with covid AND a vax at the same time? I tried to get into the VAERS to see anything – but it is not user friendly
“As of November 17, 2021, VAERS has received 1,822 reportsof myocarditis or pericarditis among people ages 12-29 years who received COVID-19 vaccines.”
“See the link for the chart source here.. As of November 26, 2021, the number of deaths reported to VAERS in connection with the Covid vaccines was 19,532. It is both astonishing and revealing that in the last 11 months there were more reportsof vaccine deaths related to Covid shots than to all other vaccines combined during the previous three decades.”
“As of July 19, 2021 there were 419,513 adverse event reports associated with Covid-19 vaccination in the U.S., with a total of 1,814,326 symptoms reported. That’s according to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database. Report an adverse event after vaccination online here.”
I do not know who these sites are – a search under “vaers report amount of covid problems” pulled up legions of this sort of stuff (VAERS is the CDC reporting of vaccine adverse reactions – it is reported professionally and not just made up numbers.)
You do know that adverse event reporting systems report everything that happens without checking whether it could be caused by the vaccination, right? Including traffic accidents and toothache? And sore arms? For the myocarditis fair enough – though you would need to check how many unvaccinated people in those age groups get it, for comparison. But for deaths and total events, the big numbers probably come because 1) there is immense media attention, so people are much more likely to report; 2) this is a quite rare case of vaccinating the entire population, including middle aged and old people. Unlike children, those have a much higher risk of something going wrong in a random two-week period. Did anyone do a comparison with deaths following flu vaccination (that is also given to old people)?
You should know that (a) every single study prior has shown that adverse effects are way under-reported in VAERS; (b) it’s a huge hassle to deposit a report in VAERS so most people just don’t bother (even smart ones who are perfectly capable of navigating the system; (c) deaths following flu vaccine (other than the swine flu one which was withdrawn when only 35 deaths were reported) is at least 2 orders of magnitude lower; (d) it is well established from several studies that the incidence of myocarditis following vaccination in the young is orders of magnitude higher than what is expected. You need to stop arguing and really investigate the facts for yourself rather than just walk around with blinders spewing the party line.
No argument on myocarditis. That is a real problem.
On deaths, neither your rough estimates nor mine really matter. If the vaccine really is causing a lot of deaths that would not otherwise have happened (deaths from vaccination as opposed to deaths with vaccination) it will be extremely easy to make a proper, statistically sound, study that proves it. And there is no shortage of qualified antivaxxers who would love to make that study. When I see the study I shall consider it – as will all the worlds’ health authorities. Until then, I shall assume that the data are not there, and that all the talk about deaths from vaccination is, at best, an honest misunderstanding.
“it will be extremely easy to make a proper, statistically sound, study that proves it.”
If a medical professional works to reveal any vax problems they are set on by the pro vax agenda – and may have their carrier destroyed. Check out the youtube of the Houston doctor – and many others who dared to look under the rock the bad side effects are hidden under.
Why don’t you watch Bret Weinstein interview Dr Peter McCullough to hear what happens to negative studies…. Data is there.
Galeti Tavas is claiming that there are about 20000 ‘vaccine deaths’ over the past 11 months, and that this is way higher than anything for any other vaccine. If he is really saying that COVID vaccines have caused 20000 premature deaths in the US alone, and that is what the words mean, the ball is in his court. The database is public. If there is anything to take seriously in his words, it would be easy to prove. So, I am waiting for Tavas, Strauss, or one of their friends to come up with their proof, or admit they do not have the data to back their claims. .
‘What happens to negative studies’ is a different and rather less urgent question, AFAIAC. One thing at a time. Anyway, I really dislike to get important and controversial information from video interviews. It is too hard to check for problems, hidden assumptions, and emotional tricks, so I would likely discount what they said anyway. At most I would follow a video if I really trusted the author – and I do not really trust Bret Weinstein or anyone else on the anti-vaccination team.
Sorry for being so obtuse, but (strange as it may seem considering how much I write 😉 ) I have to limit the time I spend on this, and I do not think listening to Peter McCullough would feel very productive to me..
I gave you the opportunity and you did not take it…. what a cop out Rasmus. Back to CNN then?
A certain Jim Peden gave me this link: https://ivmmeta.com/,on ivermenctin. It looks somewhat serious, and I feel duty bound to check it out, at least briefly, and compare with those who argue against it. That is written, scientific data, and might change my mind depending on what I find. That is for the weekend, when I have time.
Meanwhile I googled Prof. McCullough, and found this. McCullough has clearly been promoting the 20000 deaths figure, so he is relevant. The tone of my link is horribly partisan (pro-vax), so I would likely distrust it if I were you. I might not trust all of it myself. But it made the obvious point that I had been making already – that if you want to show that vaccines have killed 20000 people, it is not enough to count the deaths ‘with‘ the vaccine. You need to check how many of those who would be expected to die anyway, and then count the excess deaths. And/or you need to show a plausible mechanism that could have made the vaccine cause them. My link says McCullough has not done that. This is enough for me. If McCullough is serious, it should be very easy for him to do a professional calculation and show how COVID vaccination caused 20000 excess deaths, and what the causes of death were. In written text, with references. Until he does this, he is not worth spending my time.
McCullough’s credentials, by the way, are not to be poo-pooed given that he is one of the most highly cited and highest impact (measured by h index, where h is the number of papers cited h or more times) physician-scientists in the US. And incidentally, let me say once again, perhaps just carefully go through the UKHSA weekly reports: right now the all-cause mortality in the 10-59 yr old vaccinated group is double that in the unvaccinated. That’s hard data. Of course there may be confounding factors, but nevertheless it is very worrisome.
And by the way, why don’t you tell us when the last time you heard of somebody you know experiencing a severe averse effect from the polio, MMR, and DPT (with the new Pertussis) vaccines. How many people do you know personally who’ve experienced any sort of adverse effect other than a minimally sore arm from flu shot (which incidentally only has about 50% efficacy if that).
AS for mechanism that too has been established: the spike protein is not inert – it is toxic. Of course there is a balance between LD50 and ED50, but who knows what the variation in the amount of spike protein produced actually is: probably well over an order of magnitude. And guess what, the adverse effects correlate inversely with age, in contrast to COVID which correlates with increasing age. Why would that be: because the translational machinery of the young is far more efficient than that of the elderly so no doubt they produce a good deal more spike protein.
Why should Dr. McCullough waste his valuable time compiling information to convince the likes of you, especially as that information is publicly available to anyone who can be bothered to look?
7 Dec 2021 VAERS
No. adverse reactions 818,044
Deaths = 17,128
Perm.disabled = 26,199
https://vaersanalysis.info/2021/10/22/vaers-summary-for-covid-19-vaccines-through-10-15-2021/
You read statistics like the devil reads the bible, i.e. without any understanding. In terms you might understand: Those numbers are ‘with’ vaccination, not ‘from’ vaccination. Data bases like VAERS deliberately keep in everything but the kitchen sink, because they are intended as raw input for people who will analyse them in detail. With the huge number of vaccinations, lots of deaths and adverse events will happen shortly after vaccination, from pure chance. Car accidents, broken arms, heart attacks, you name it. The result that matters is if the number of blood clots / myocarditis cases / deaths is higher than you would expect by chance, and whether any differences might be caused by vaccination. This calculation should not be difficult for anyone in the profession, and lots of people will have tried and found nothing of interest. If McCullough wants to convince anybody, let him do the necessary work. If he just want to fire up fellow believers, no one else has a reason to listen.
In Europe the EMA database has indicated 30,000 deaths. What they will say, as they have said in the US is that they haven’t yet investigated these and the link to the vaccine hasn’t been fully established. But that’s a cop out and cover up. An interesting factoid out of UKHSA if one actually looks at their published data (which you can download): the all-cause mortality (so not just COVID but everything) in the 10-59 yr old group is currently double in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. Why, who knows but don’t you think it bears investigating rather than to remain in complete denial.
Of course the side effects of the vaccination bear investigating. Indeed, they are being investigated all the time, by people who know what they are doing. That is how the information about blood clots and myorarditis came out. When those same people look at the data and give a properly validated number for excess deaths I will believe it. I would be very surprised if the final result matched your anecdotes.
“the all-cause mortality (so not just COVID but everything) in the 10-59 yr old group is currently double in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated…worth investigating”
It has been investigated – at length, notably in Jeffrey Morris’s blog “UK Data: Impact of vaccines on deaths. Part 2: Fully vaccinated (both doses) Updated: Nov 27”
https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-about-real-world-impact-of-vaccines-on-all-cause-deaths
Ultra briefly :
“Since both risk of death and vaccination rate vary strongly across age groups, failure to stratify by age under these circumstances can produce extremely distorted and misleading results as a result of Simpson’s paradox, as previously shown in Israeli data.”
Also from the ONS Excel spreadsheet “For the 10-59 age group, the vaccinated population will on average be older than the unvaccinated population due to age-based prioritisation in the vaccine roll-out. As mortality rates are higher for older people, this will increase the mortality rates for the vaccinated population compared to the unvaccinated population”
Intrigued by this pairing I went to have a look.
This first thing I noticed was that even though Dr McCullough was referencing various studies, none of the citations appeared in the show notes – makes life tedious for the interested viewer if they want to follow up and actually READ these papers.
Dr. M made a couple of pretty big assertions. One of them was “80% of children in the US have already had Covid”. According to the AAP, as of 12.09.2021, 7196901 children have had Covid (out of a total child poulation of 75266842). Allowing for an additional 20% of asymptomatic infections (this figure supported by a study in the UK and another in S Korea) this still only brings the total to 8636281 – nowhere near 80% of the child population, more like 11%
Another big assertion : “You can only get Covid once”. Reinfection rates, albeit very low, have been documented by ONS, the SIREN study, a rapid review in the BMJ, a study in Kentucky … on and on.
There are no protocols for treating Covid at any of the big hospitals : Well there were guidelines produced early on by NIH, IDSA and the CDC. Whether individual clinicians bothered to read these was up to them, I guess. Personally I wouldn’t go anywhere near a clinician who didn’t have a copy of the current guidelines in one pocket and a dog eared copy of Sackett and Strauss in the other.
11,000 cases of myocarditis in VAERS : No there aren’t. There are 2,337 reports of myocarditis in VAERS for all vaccines from 1990 to Nov. 11, 2021 acording to Reuters. Of those, 1,969 myocarditis or pericarditis reports concerned people aged 30 and younger who received COVID-19 vaccines.
He then mumbled something about the drug cocktail he took to treat his own bout of Covid and how he got better in 4 – 6 days. Well personally, I took paracetamol, tea and chocolate and that worked fine for me too.
I think the drug cocktail he was propounding was the one in this speculative paper ? “Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection”
https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(20)30673-2/fulltext
He references the 2 thoroughly discredited Marseilles papers in the Azithromycin section so I was disinclined to swallow any of his other suggestions.
I await with interest the result of the Elsevier case.
Your take on McCullough is interesting given your own credentials: fewer than 1000 citations for your published work versus more than 100,000 for his. My personal take is that McCullough is a world-renowned authority in cardiology, a first rate doctor who actually thinks rather than follows some set protocol, and a first rate physician-scientist. There are those who criticize and those who actually do. And incidentally, the Marseille papers have not been discredited except by those who wish to discredit anything to do with early COVID treatment to prevent hospitalization. That effort to discredit anything other than vaccines and new (and of course very expensive) drugs is really a tragedy of epic proportions.
As for the number of cases of myocarditis in VAERS I wouldn’t trust Reuters with a barge poll. The incidence post-vaccination reported in a large study out of Israel is 1 in 5000; a similar very recently published study out of Hong Kong has an incidence of about 1 in 2000. That’s not a nothing especially given that the age group of relevance is at minimal risk of any untoward consequences of a COVID infection.
For someone who seems to think the elites are conspiring to fool us, you are surprisingly impressed by individual credentials. Regrettably, even some Nobel prize winners have been known to spout nonsense. Me I put trust in collective scientific opinion (the wisdom of crowds – it is easier to fool a few people than a large group). After that, I look at the arguments from both sides, and check which make sense. E G-L clearly knows enough to understand the literature, takes the trouble to check, and gives precise references so others can find out if she is telling the truth. Which puts her ahead of McCullough.
Speaking of which – VAERS is public. Why not do some of that research you say I should do and find from the source exactly how many cases are reported? You would win the argument hands down. I tried a search for COVID vaccine and myocarditis, just on the VAERS web site, and was told there was 2119 events reported. Sounds like Reuters is more reliable than McCullough. If you need to add in more terms and get a higher number, you would need to explain why, and what you are doing, so that other people can check your numbers. Again, not hard to do for a world authority in cardiology – if his numbers are actually correct.
And now please don’t start talking about underreporting. McCullough apparently said there was 11000+ cases of myocarditis in VAERS. This is not true. If he is doing a different calculation entirely, he needs to tell us what and how.
You should try this very comprehensive review of the Gautret studies and then see what you think :
“Reply to Gautret et al: hydroxychloroquine sulfate and azithromycin for COVID-19: what is the evidence and what are the risks?” Julian DMachiels
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924857920302260
The NEJM published 3 terrific studies out of Israel in September, October and December all looking at vaccine safety. The largest study (Safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Setting Noam Barda, September 2021
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110475)
said : “The vaccine was associated with an excess risk of myocarditis (1 to 5 events per 100,000 persons)”. They gave confidence intervals as one is supposed to do, to give an idea of the uncertainty around the point estimate.
They also stated : “To place these risks in context, we also examined data on more than 240,000 infected persons to estimate the effects of a documented SARS-CoV-2 infection on the incidence of the same adverse events …. but it was estimated to result in a substantial excess risk of myocarditis (11.0 events per 100,000 persons). SARS-CoV-2 infection was also estimated to substantially increase the risk of several adverse events for which vaccination was not found to increase the risk …” which they then list. This infected group, incidentally is NOT directly comparable with the vaccinated cohort.
The Hong Kong study is behind a pay wall.
Is there a signal blinking for myocarditis and mRNA vaccines ? You betcha, but as always it is more nuanced than the average click bait headline would have you believe.
As you are probably aware the Israeli government did a deal with Pfizer in 2020 – guaranteed supplies of vaccine for unlimited access to vaccine data.
Many thanks for doing all this work – and telling us. Please continue.
You’re very naive. Everything that says anything negative towards the vaccine is censored. But at least, after much fuss, you have seen the light over the issue of myocarditis. Now do the relevant literature and web research over blood clotting with thombocytopenia, Guillain-Barre syndrome, Bell’s palsy and any number of other neurological inflammatory conditions. You will find exactly the same thing. The fact of the matter is very simple: if this weren’t COVID and much of the world’sd public health authorities and governments hadn’t collectively lost their wits about them, all the vaccines would have been taken off the market a long time ago. But the authorities are just doubling down on stupid and what’s worse unethical conduct when it comes to really pushing vaccination in children who are at minimal risk of untoward outcomes if infected with COVID.
Well, of course! If COVID was not such a dangerous disease, we would be much less tolerant of vaccine side effects. But then, the official world death toll from COVID as of December 15th is 5.3 million. The Economists’ estimate is 11-21 million. That justifies a fair few side effects.
Dr McCullough went through this in detail in his interview with Bet Weinstein – the fact of underreporting. Didn’t he also mention that people have been contacted by VAERs to verify their information. I stand to be corrected.
“You do know that adverse event reporting systems report everything that happens without checking whether it could be caused by the vaccination, right?”
This is 100% not what I have been told.
The reporting is exceedingly arduous with every last detail from vax batch number, date, location, and then very specific data fallowing. 75% of them are submitted by doctors and other professionals on behalf of injured vax takers as the professionals were so concerned. It is a long report, and also says many times that misreporting on this is a Crime, and carried penalties.
It is not some casual thing and is thought to only get 20% cases reported as it is so complex to use. Under reporting – NOT over reporting is the problem with VAERS.
I saw one example (Europe) where a death from a car accident had been registered on an ‘adverse events’ database. Which is actually quite correct, as I understand it. I do not doubt that the reporting is thorough and arduous. But AFAIK no one is being asked ‘how do you know this was caused by vaccination’? This is actually how those databases are supposed to work. They are intended to catch everything that happens, whatever the cause might be, because they are there to flag up unknown and unexpected side effects, so you need to have everything in there. ‘Hypothesis generation’ as someone put it. The work of deciding whether the numbers are suspicious, and whether the adverse effects could actually be caused by the vaccine needs to be done afterwards. An until you have done that, the numbers are useless. Those calculations are complex because you need to understand whether any effects are likely to have come about by chance or not. But for a huge effect like 20000 deaths it should not be hard for a professional to do a first analysis and give us some validated evidence. ‘How many died, what did they die from, how many deaths would you have expected without the vaccination’, I mean how hard can it be? And I have yet to see anything like that.
“For the myocarditis fair enough – though you would need to check how many unvaccinated people in those age groups get it, for comparison.”
We need SO much data to be clearly and comparatively communicated to the public, every day, that we are not getting.
As to myocarditis, there are two things that appear to be true that I’ve heard: 1) this condition is extremely extremely rare in young healthy people. The rates reported to VAERS constitute a huge increase. 2) The media is consistently down-playing the general severity of the condition. This message is unforgiveable because prior to now, doctors would never have said, “Oh, Jeremy only has a MILD case of myocarditis.” It’s not a “mild” condition.
Given that, the key question is: What is the incidence of myocarditis in young people who have COVID vs. the incidence of those young people who get myocarditis as a result of the vaccine? That’s what I would need to know as a parent. It’s not even as simple an equation as (for example) “X number of kids who get vaccinated will develop myocarditis, but X+N number of kids who get COVID will develop myocarditis so it’s less risk to be vaccinated.” That’s because whatever risk is tied to the vaccine is a certainty once you get vaccinated, but the risk associated with COVID isn’t a certainty because your child may not even get COVID to begin with. It’s also hard to gather good statistics because the number of kids vaccinated is a known number, whereas the number of kids we know (and therefore can study/compare) who have gotten COVID is uncertain. However many kids we know have gotten COVID, the number who actually contract the disease is higher.
This question of risk of vaccine for younger people and especially kids vs. risks associated with them contracting COVID is a bottom-line issue that we need to have on-going RELIABLE data on, and of course an on-going public discussion about.
Very well put and spot on.
That is indeed the right way of looking at it. Personally I am content to trust the people who recommend vaccinations, who will have done exactly this kind of accounting. Until I get some reliable evidence to the contrary, of course. The problem is that RELIABLE data are harder to come by than you would think, and there are any number of people all through the public debates who are eager to misinterpret what we get and muddy the waters. As they say, a lie can run halfway around the world before truth has time to get its boots on. But yes, it does make sense to do what checking you have data (and time) for.
Incidence of myocarditis in young people who have Covid.
Well one could start here at MMWR : “Association Between COVID-19 and Myocarditis Using Hospital-Based Administrative Data — United States, March 2020–January 2021” with a cohort size of 36,005,294.
And from this study “Shedding the Light on Post-Vaccine Myocarditis and Pericarditis in COVID-19 and Non-COVID-19 Vaccine Recipients ”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34696294/
one should perhaps take note of the following :
“In the United States, the frequency of myocarditis is difficult to ascertain as many cases are subclinical. In community-based populations, the prevalence and outcomes of myocarditis are unknown as epidemiologic studies suggest that the majority of Coxsackie B virus infections, an important cause of myocarditis are subclinical, thus following a benign course.”
and from the US Military study : Myocarditis Following Immunization With mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines in Members of the US Military June 2021
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2781601
there is the comment in the discussion : “Notably, nearly 1% of highly fit athletes with mild COVID-19 infection have evidence of myocarditis on cMRI.” (they reference 2 studies for this comment)
Oh Julie, what a pity. You’ve had a relapse just as you were getting up to speed with some meaningful comments. You could have commented on Galeti’s input to the article on the anglo-french fishing dispute and wondered at his life experience which is 5x most others’. We’re just making up for the weekend’s drought of C-topics. What’s the alternative in our attempts at retaining sanity ? The DT, DM, Guardian? Of course we’re not achieving a lot but it’s a bit more comforting than delving into the toxic and childish comments in the MSM.
Time for you to get into the queue for your booster ‘Julie’. Hurry along.
were all just isolated Winston Smith’s here, when we gather to comment were sense checking ourselves against others to make sure we still know that 2+2 = 4
Of course. We’re hardly going to change anybody’s mind. Do politicians read this stuff?
Is that what I wrote or intended? At least you didn’t address me as ”sweetie” and at least I didn’t downtick you but you’re still languishing at the bottom of the pile according to most voted. I’m sure you’re capable of much more.
‘Julie’ doesn’t really have a cogent point of view – his fun is to troll. I’m thinking a male teenager.
I think.. one another thing that is coming down fast –apart from political parties, science and medicine- is data and statistics…
2 years now and..??.. the more data, numbers and statistics the less relevant corona And the statistics become to each one of us, to our lives and health… As an individual and citizen I have no clue where those statistics and graphs come from.. what are the criteria, how are being collecting, from whom and what purposes… and, and.. Do I distrust those behind the numbers and percentages? Absolutely….
2 years now, and I have seen no change to my surroundings, friends etc..(although the media, day and night spreading audio-visual violence to convince everyone otherwise)… But That is exactly the data Not being collected because the corona-narrative will have no chance..!
2 years now and the only use of data and percentages, is quasi-scientific and quasi-facts tool for spreading fear and panic.. And indeed for some out there, are scheming behind our backs hoping that a big social, economic, mental, behavioral shift will happen…
2 years now, and all those super-smart scientists and experts although they openly claim, they have no clue where this virus came from, what is exactly and why is here.. that there is no secure medicine and therapy.. etc.. at the same time with super-fast speed they know how to make those vaccines/genetic treatment.. they know everything about every new variant.. they decide lock-downs etc etc.. Mostly, they claim they know the future.. that is at the core of their statistics and percentages.
How come and they appear confident and know what to do with something they know very little of what it is?…
PANIC STATIONS!
I have searched in vain for modelling or commentary thereon that even mentions that an ever increasing range of antiviral treatments are now available in our hospitals. A couple now reported as awaiting final approval look like being extremely effective in reducing death and serious illness rates, especially when given immediately after testing positive. Too many people seem to bent on covering themselves by highlighting worst case scenarios rather than factoring in latest data as is vital in such a fast-moving situation.
One of the antivirals you may have in mind is Molnupiravir. However, concerns have been raised both in the US and UK by individual doctors about its mutagenic effects. The article is sadly paywalled but here’s an extract –
https://trialsitenews.com/uk-scientists-emphasize-concern-about-mercks-molnupiravir/
Although Merck’s antiviral targeting COVID-19 called molnupiravir has been authorized by Britain’s regulatory authority(MHRA), that doesn’t mean the novel drug doesn’t pose danger to some potential COVID-19 patients. The use of the drug needs to be closely monitored due to concerns associated with the potential to spur dangerous mutations, report scientists. TrialSite reported recently on the UK nationwide PANORAMIC study involving participants aged 50 and above who would be classified as at-risk: those subjects must have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 under five days. Several scientists went on the record expressing their concern about use of the drug while the producer, Merck, argues the calls are unfounded.
TrialSite reported on the substantially degraded results of the study showing only a 30% rate of cutting hospitalization and death rates, based on adjusted statistics. Many scientists now raise the concern that the drug could become a genesis of new variants in weakened immune systems.
Thank you for this. I actually had in mind Pfizer’s new drug Paxlovid, extremely successful in blind trials , and Fluvoxamine, an SSRI already widely used to treat depression and very cheap. Good article on the CapX website a few days ago about its efficacy for Covid.
Some people, most of them already very old, are sadly going to die of a cold virus this winter. Get over it.
I’m glad a lot of people in the comments pointed out what utter bollocks this article is from the statistics side alone. Mr Chivers argues in his own apocalyptic, fear porn-driven PMC interests, excluding every relevant political analysis. He precisely represents the technocratic-authoritarian mindset that I thought UnHerd was struggling against. I think I’ll have to unsubscribe. Shame.
“Even if it still only had an IFR of 4%”
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/207273/covid-19-deaths-infection-fatality-ratio-about/
According to the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team for previous variants. “In high income countries, the estimated overall infection fatality ratio (IFR) is 1.15%” so why assume an IFR of 4% in the senario outlined? Imperial is not known for taking the low estimates on anything based on their previous panic mongering.
What about the HART article that concludes that only between 10% and 20% of the population are susceptible to any one variant of COVID?All the models seem to assume that everyone is vulnerable to every variant
I watched a great interview yesterday between Steve Kirsch and an eloquent woman from the Childrens Defence Fund covering vaccine Emergency Use Agreement (EUA) legalities which made it crystal clear why govt’s are behaving in these irrational ways – the final piece of the jigsaw for me!
She used an illustration of 4 legs on a stool which LEGALLY ALLOW the EUA status of vaccines to stand up, something which crucially gives full indemnity to the manufacturers which is a vital requirement for them. They are…
The final point was the most chilling, explaining their determination to vaccinate small kids when medicine tells us they barely get ill, rarely pass it on and have unknown long term downsides from an experimental genetic therapy.
BECAUSE…in the USA vaccines included on the regular childhood vaccine roster give automatic immunity to the manufacturer.
Once they get Covid19 into children, a small further step is routine childhood immunisation, liability is gone, income is secured and we will definately see the Pandemic evaporate. It has been a pharma goal for decades to get a corona virus vaccine accepted as part of regular public health planning – (and yes, I have watched their Pharma conference clips discussing it)
An amazing interview with much more besides the above. A Mafia protection racket is what it reminds me of…create a problem, get paid to solve it.
https://rumble.com/vqqb06-alix-mayer-explains-why-the-drug-companies-are-targeting-kids.html
There are new nuances to investigate 🙂
Thanks for being this government’s propoganda machine, it has helped my decision to cancel my subscription. Any fear I’ve had through this global crisis has turned toward the possibility that we really are all under the influence of Lizard people. Goodbye
No words
And still no mention from our governments about the probable enormous benefits of checking and optimizing Vitamin D levels, using OTC nasopharyngeal hygiene, and/or early treatment per any one of the FLCCC, Chetty, or AAPS protocols (and there are others) – interventions proven to work extremely well by physicians actually treating tens of thousands of infected patients since March 2020. Biggest effect of pandemic on me: development of utter contempt for anything spouted about it by our governments, health authorities, and mainstream media.
It would seem to me to be questionable that “more people have already had the virus ” in South Africa What evidence is there for this? As Covid 19 and its variants had been circulating for a year before the vaccination programme was started, I would suggest that as many people in the UK have also had the virus or have T cells (built up over many years) which latch on and destroy the virus.
We are given too many outlandish statistics about this coronavirus in order to get us to comply with government policy. You have shown that such statistics from “experts” have no foundation in fact because it depends on what information is put into their modelling.
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Who actually cares?
The world is being destroyed – pensions and savings destroyed by the response money printing and QE caused inflation, small business lost by the Million, 1.2 third world children dieing of the poverty from reduced economic activity, all the Western, and many developing world, have had their education destroyed…. and on and on – people locked in concentration camps in AU, Aa, Austria, freedom lost – it is the greatest disaster since WWII – and entirely self inflicted, it is nothing to do with health – all about money and power.
I meant about the cooff or whatever it is called
This is a genuine question: if two doses of the vaccine provide almost no protection against Omicron and the booster provides significant protection, and if the plan is to boost the vast majority of the population within the next 3 weeks or so, why is no-one suggesting that we go into full or nearly full lockdown for 3-4 weeks to allow time for the booster doses to be given? This wouldn’t be the same as the open-ended lockdowns that we had previously; it would be for a short time only. Is it because we’re coming up to Christmas? Is it politically unpalatable given recent revelations about No. 10’s breaches of the earlier lockdowns?
That would mean that we will be in lockdown EVERY SINGLE WINTER.
Said that, my money is on much more stringent restrictions in January, i.e. plan C (blasted alphabets!)
That WILL mean that we will be in lockdown EVERY SINGLE WINTER.
Full lockdown might not be warranted at this point. But yes, I am convinced that the reasons for not tightening restrictions further (banning parties, for instance) are purely political.
I think Andrea has raised a point to think about, and it goes along with your thoughts about the politics. What would the result be of completely opening up (the opposite of what Alex said)?
A lot of people would die, but possibly not as many as with delta (jury still out on mildness). We would need to compare this with the harm caused by severe restrictions, maybe repeated next winter.
Would we then have a (milder?) variant that we could live with? Would an endemic, highly transmissible, variant reduce the likelihood of if a more dangerous variant?
“A lot of people would die, but possibly not as many as with delta”
Actually, more would directly die this winter due to increased transmissibility, but I am thinking long term
What a hair-brained idea! First, it ought to be clear to anyone paying attention that none of the vaccines provide any significant “protection” at all for whatever strain of covid you wish to name. If they did, vaccinated folks wouldn’t have been told to mask up & social distance; not to mention continue contracting and transmitting the virus, often at higher rates than the unvaccinated.
Second, we’ve been led up the garden path so often these last 22 months that I’ll wager most of the population don’t buy the “Omnicron” tale, let alone the idea that this dreaded variant can be “beaten” by a booster silver bullet! I for one refuse to participate in any more lockdowns, curfews, masking mandates or other restrictions on my liberty.
“if two doses of the vaccine provide almost no protection against Omicron and the booster provides significant protection”
If 2 doses are ineffective, what on earth makes you think that the booster, which is the same concoction, would do better? Is it because that’s what you’ve been told?
Here’s a genuine answer: because “full lockdowns” are known from cross-jurisdictional data and experience to kill and harm innocent children and adults alike. That alone should be sufficient knowledge to take such a cruel, barbaric and in fact murderous policy off the table for good. They also happen to be almost completely ineffective at containing the spread of an already endemic virus.