Travel Covid test costs should be capped at £40, MPs have told the Government amid a growing Tory backlash against the charges.
OK, let’s cap the price of something in huge demand. That always works out well. The lampposts part of this is the following:
Senior Conservative MPs are calling
When even the Tories are this ignorant we need a new politics, no?
No
They should be free.
I objected to having to pay for masks as well.
If the govt forces one to do something ( and this is different to wearing seat belts) then it should pay for it. The “demand” only exists because scum politicians who should be up against the wall force it on the travelling public.
Bastards.
Apart from a hard core of dim cowardly pants-pissing middle class Marxist mugs who can afford the shite these fuckwit tests are not in demand other than by tyrannical edict of the fuck-scum British Tyranny Administration. Which is what Johnson and his fuckwit gang should better be known as.
Scrap the fucking tests altogether. But the plan is to help ruin airlines and air travel so no more mass flights for plebs anyway. Start refusing tests and flophouse hotel jail en masse. And sit down takeover the airports –or anything else we can think of to stop this shite. A few Bluelabour clapping seals getting cold feet isn’t going to stop the evil.
Otto
Nothing made anyone pay for a mask at any stage, if they felt strongly enough. At least, not in the UK – the various exemptions in the statutory instruments were perfectly clear.
If the money demanded for these tests was put towards executing MPs, then it might be worth it.
I have mo idea of the cost of bullets but 40mm manilla rope is about £13/metre.
PF
No again. If shops were coerced ( as my local one was) by police and council inpectors to enforce masks unless one could prove a medical exemption, then one-use masks should be issued at the store entrance. The cost should be met by the government and the revenue raised put towards Sheffield steel forgers for the manufacture of guillotine blades.
Otto +1.
As the government were quite happy to force businesses to close and pay the wages of the workers with our money, have thrown more of our money at our NHS than Labour could ever have dreamt of doing, have wasted colossal amounts of our money on Ventilators, crap PPE, Track and Trace, Nightingales etc. etc. etc., it seems fair for the government to pay EVERY cost that results as a consequence of the policies THEY imposed (obviously using our….. etc).
I don’t think being force to comply with bullshit imposed by the state counts as ‘huge demand’ . That’s a bit like saying Mao’s Little Red Book is the most popular book ever published. Yes, yes of course we could go to Skegness and yes, yes £150 or more is ‘what the market will bear’.
This is basically why libertarianism is stupid.
Other nations manage to have testing without rampant profiteering. In a shiny Dubai private hospital it cost me £30.
Otto
If shops were coerced … to enforce masks unless one could prove a medical exemption
If they did that (in the UK), they were acting illegally. In most cases where that happened, and the store was informed they were acting illegally, there was usually a sharp u-turn. Wrt some small shop owners, as in ignorant, sure – but it didn’t change the facts. As far as I was aware, no larger stores pursuing the “prove it” approach held that line once their CEO / head office had had that (and the potential liabilities) pointed out to them.
manufacture of guillotine blades
Agreed 🙂 Should be able to sell them to the French too, the way the idiot at the Élysée is carrying on…
Just sounds like another case of regulatory capture. Businesses making money because the government obliges the public to use their services. put them on the hanging list along with lawyers & tax accountants.
They don’t pay anything. It is either tax or borrowing =tax with interest. Or lately funny money printing. Which=inflation tax to come.
Scrap the entire silly circus esp the useless and damaging tests. Tests are the foundation of Johnson’s power-grabbing casedemic lies.
The government must know perfectly well that the covid protocols they have invented are utter BS. Dropping them will depend on the electoral calendar, not science or even The science.
BiS
regulatory capture
That’s how Robert Malone described the whole current train of events: “Regulatory capture by the pharmaceutical sector”. The thing that walked, talked and looked like a duck, but no one was allowed to call it a duck. He was trying to be diplomatic, as he’s probably largely understating it.
I’m increasingly of the view that we should be talking covid down, not up. Lift all restrictions. Yeah, there’s a bug going round, you probably won’t get it. If you do get it it probably won’t make you sick. If it does make you sick we have treatment. Get on with your life.
A commenter over at instapundit pointed out the government behaviour is a text book psy op. Wear a mask to remind you you are in danger. Prevent socializing so you feel alone and helpless. Reel out the inflated stats every day on the news to have you cowering in terror. Very plausible
I got our masks free, paid for by a Chinese educational philanthropist. Have I sold out to Red China?
@RLJ
“Yeah, there’s a bug going round, you probably won’t get it”
Anyone who thought eradication of Covid is possible has been a nut since the beginning. The important thing is pivoting the policy response into line for endemic Covid rather than pandemic Covid. There are plenty of measures that simply don’t make sense long-term, particularly once most people are vaccinated.
Part of that requires a shift in mindset though: “you probably won’t get it” only applies on a short time-scale, and you can reduce the chance of it happening within that timescale by eg avoiding crowded indoor settings. Aside from those relatively few epidemiologists who think we should be aiming for “zero Covid” by sticking to eternal lockdown-style restrictions, so that “you probably won’t get it” can continue to hold indefinitely, most of the eggheads have made their peace with endemicity meaning “ultimately almost everyone is going to get it, likely multiple times across their lifespan”.
In other words, there’s a bug going around forever and you probably will get it. If you’re a previously uninfected adult, your main choice (unless you intend to hide at home til Kingdom come) is whether your immune system’s meet-and-greet with the thing is going to be a vaccination or your first infection.
While the vaccination campaign is underway I can understand not wanting to downplay the consequences of infection or overplay how much progress we have made with treatment – there are an awful lot of people out there who would be expected to live another 5-10 years or more, albeit not in perfect health, whose chances if they catch Covid while unvaccinated are still pretty crappy despite the improvements in medical knowledge. No point pretending to them that it’s okay, we can cure this thing now, it’s “just a flu” so you don’t need a vaccine – frankly, for selfish reasons, I don’t want these people jamming up my hospital in case I need it for something else! (Even with vaccines there’d be some, perhaps enough that health care providers need to look at upgrading their capacity in the long term; without vaccines, there’s going to be far more.)
But ultimately you’re right that the policy response needs to move on for an endemic rather than pandemic environment. A largely vaccinated population does take most of the sting out of it, and a lot of the measures that will be in place for the long term are going to be pretty invisible to most people: changes to hospital design, potentially workplace ventilation regulations, ongoing viral genomic surveillance programmes etc. We’ll notice GPs inviting us for booster jabs and it wouldn’t surprise me if some cities outside Asia “turn Japanese” in terms of frequency of mask usage, particularly on public transport. Sociologists or economists decades hence might see underlying trends in online shopping and working from home that had a significant ramp-up in 2020-2021, but to the extent the virus permanently changes society in these kind of respects, it’s likely only been an acceleration of what would have happened anyway.
On the whole, the direction of travel should be towards the “old normal” and governments ought to be expediting that. However, I see no point – even as a pro-economic boost, panic reduction measure – in them lying to the populace that they’re “probably not going to get it”. Best just to level with them. You’re almost certainly going to get it, it’s highly infectious and for a (small though not trivial) minority of people it’s really pretty nasty, but if you want to dramatically slash your odds of a very bad outcome, or somewhat reduce the chances of you passing it to someone close to you who may be more vulnerable than you are, the vaccine is thataway.
Ivermectin is a bit of a canary in the coalmine for me.
In March this year, Professor Satoshi Ōmura – who won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine – published with others a paper in the respected Japanese Journal of Antibiotics (‘Global trends in clinical studies of ivermectin’) concluding that there’s a *one in four trillion chance* that ivermectin isn’t an extremely good treatment (and prophylactic) for COVID 19.
You would think – in the middle of what is (for whatever reason) the biggest story since WWII – that the newspapers which can’t wait to claim that rasberries will cure cancer, or coffee stops heart disease, might have been interested in that. TOP BOFFIN FINDS MIRACLE CURE, anyone?
Nothing.
In January this year, Dr Tess Laurie, whose company Evidence Based Medicine advises clients including the WHO, the NHS and the EMA on the evidence upon which to make prescribing decisions (she has 80+ papers to her name, and 1000+ citations), wrote to Matt Hancock – then her client! – advising him to ensure that ivermectin was used. He did not reply.
Not a story for any of the papers? HANCOCK IGNORES TOP ADVISER ON ‘MIRACLE CURE’?
In the US many doctors have been using it with good results. Dr Joseph Varon (AKA the Covid Hunter), who is head of critical care at a hospital in Houston, Texas. His hospital’s ICU mortality rate is a fraction of those in comparable hospitals. He uses ivermectin. He also cannot understand why in 120+ print and broadcast interviews that he has given, in which he has mentioned it, it never gets mentioned in the final article or broadcast.
Very strange indeed.
But then, ivermectin is out of patent. Billions upon billions of £/$ would be lost if a cheap alternative to vaccination was available. And they also would not be able to force vaccine passports on us.
Not to mention, the Bad Orange Man might have once said that looking at this ivermectin thing might be a good idea.
@ MBE,
Actually, the recent data from IHU infection Marseille which has treated and tested more patients in France in the last 18 months (>35000) shows clearly that vaccinated asymptomatic patients are as likely to carry the virus and pass it on as unvaccinated.
Their death rate is also 0.6 per 1000 people. Because they’ve been using hcq and azythromycin from the start as early treatment, as well as advising people to monitor their 02 levels if positive. The latter because of happy hypoxia which means that you feel fine when your o2 levels are low, and a few hours later you’re in ICU.
Also, it affects people over 70 and most (>90%) of those who died had underlying health conditions which meant that their life expectancy was less than a year.
We have a top infectious disease specialist and his medical team, head of the major (and only) hospital specialised in infectious diseases in Marseille, who has been vilified in France.
A ceaucescu style ending for johnson and his ilk is overdue.
Ecksy likes conspiracy theories, doesn’t he? Here’s one for him. One thing’s likely to come out of Corona going endemic is a reduction in longevity. And what’s the economic problem facing most developed economies? The pension time bomb. Want to put two & two together?
MyBurningEars,
You may be reading more into my comment than I intended. If propaganda is a given, then “keep calm and carry on” would be preferable to “OMG! We’re all going to die!” Honesty would be preferred to both, but fat chance of that.
@bis
Not convinced there’s going to be a big drop in longevity, at least in countries with good vaccine uptake, but it is one more nasty out there to avoid (and compared to the other relatively recently unleashed nasty, HIV, a far harder one to dodge). I would be surprised if the upcoming dent inflicted by endemic Covid isn’t overwhelmed by a few years of life expectancy rises. Their trend growth is slower than historically at the moment, but in the UK it still goes up about 6 weeks per year for males and 4 weeks/year for females – https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/bulletins/nationallifetablesunitedkingdom/2017to2019 – though it’s going to take a few years for the distortions of the pandemic period to wash their way through the figures. So I don’t think I’ll be able to see if I’m right on that until the middle of the decade!
@Monoi
The evidence from multiple studies that vaccines reduce transmission is pretty strong – not least because if vaccines reduce the probability of developing an infection within a given timeframe, as they seem to do, they must reduce the probability you will both get infected and then pass it on. The bad news is that the reduction in transmission doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as large as the reduction in mortality. Table 1 and the text above is worth a read: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccine-surveillance-report
@RLJ
At the heart of your comment was something too few people have grasped – as we move to the next phase of life with Covid, we need to shift to a new mindset, both politicians and plebs. And that’s got some pretty profound consequences. But if the bulk of epidemiologists are right, that we are all gonna get it, that’s got some big consequences too, so the mindset we need to manage our risks is a bit different to if catching it was either unlikely or avoidable.
Ivermectin as a viable treatment loooool. So much effort to try and prove it works and every positive preprint,article and study so far laden with holes and beyond weak including every single one cited in the comments here. Verging onto moronity to have faith in it at this point.
MBE
Agree entirely with the sentiment of endemic / back to normal but:
– Vaccine slashing odds > And various treatments could have achieved that too
– Prior immunity – as in “you’re likely to be exposed to it, very much like you are exposed to all sorts of stuff that you don’t get” rather than “you’re going to get it”? Most of those in one study sample exposed to SARs Cov 1 (18 years ago) were found to have T-cell immunity to SARs Cov 2. And there are 4 other common Corona Virus colds in that same context.
Interested
Absolutely, and which is why it stinks. None of the vaccines would have been authorised (temporarily licensed) for “Emergency Use” had there been recognised treatments (one of the pre-requisite conditions), hence “there can be no treatments”. Ie, as above, regulatory capture.
BiS
“reduction in longevity” Are you sure? The numbers here:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/monthlymortalityanalysisenglandandwales
suggest for the UK at least that all that really happened in 19/20 (July-June) and 20/21 was a catch up of a substantial dip/trough over the 18 months through to December 2019. Ie, dry tinder effect. I can’t upload graphs here but it looks pretty clear cut to me. Big monthly spikes and all that, but annually there wasn’t much to see. Calendar comparisons with 2015-19 rather conveniently included all of that major 18 month dip in the comparative base line, but then made no corresponding adjustment in 2020 for any likely reversal that would have been expected after such a dip.
If it’s now endemic, that’s not going to change much from where we are. I simply don’t buy one jot this view that very few people have had been exposed and there is going to be substantial further mortality as a result. I can’t see how the existing numbers support that.
dwayne
https://c19ivermectin.com/
BiS
“Reduction in longevity”
Although, if one is going to take the conspiracy route on this (reduced pensions etc), and look longer term, perhaps it might fit better from this angle……
Dr Charles Hoffe:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/wPViyCe7UKMv/
(~8 mins)
MBE,
Well, yes. If the vaccine only stops you getting sick and dying, but doesn’t stop you getting it or passing it on, then inevitably everyone will get it.
The interesting question would be, if you have been vaccinated, and you get covid, then get over it, can you now get it again? Because if the answer is yes, then natural immunity is better than vaccination, but if the answer is no, then the reason is natural immunity, and that means whether or not you have had covid is more important than whether you have been vaccinated. So the vaccine passport is a crock.
@dwayne
‘Ivermectin as a viable treatment loooool. So much effort to try and prove it works and every positive preprint,article and study so far laden with holes and beyond weak including every single one cited in the comments here. Verging onto moronity to have faith in it at this point.’
Welcome to the blog, dwayne.
Tell it to Professor Satoshi Ōmura, a ‘moron’ who won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine, and who published with three other professorial morons a paper in the respected/moronic Japanese Journal of Antibiotics (‘Global trends in clinical studies of ivermectin’) in which he concluded that there’s a *one in four trillion chance* that ivermectin isn’t an extremely good treatment (and prophylactic) for COVID 19.
I wonder why whenever IVM is mentioned on a blog somebody turns up who is previously unknown and who has a first name only. And they proceed to deny the effectiveness not of ivermectin but of the studies which have been published, knowing that the ‘no proper trial’ hurdle is difficult to jump if you do not have the backing of a drug company or a major academic institution whereas the first-line doctors who have been using it do not, cannot, employ random controlled trials because that means leaving half the patients untreated and thus at greater risk of bad outcomes (if it works).
I don’t think the appearance of those people after any mention of early treatment is a coincidence, I think it is an organised campaign. Organised by murderers.
@ rhoda Lapp
Absolutely organised. Has to be.
I have no idea whether ivermectin works or not. I do know that various very serious people with no obvious axe to grind say it is (you can’t corner the market in an out of patent drug, so really they can only lose their good names if found to be lying deliberately).
What I can’t understand is why the media are not interested. Take the doctor in Houston, Joseph Varon.
He is saying several things:
1) I am saving many more people in my ICU than comparable hospitals are.
2) I am saving them by a drug regime that majors on ivermectin.
3) I have given 120+ interviews to the print and broadcast media, because they can’t ignore my astonishing results, and they either do not ask me what my secret is (bizarre), or they ask, I tell them, and then they never mention it in the print or broadcast piece (sinister). 120+ times.
Obviously, Joseph Varon could be a fantasist but it would be a fairly simple job to prove that he is lying about his mortality stats (he isn’t, obviously), and if he isn’t lying about them it seems odd that he would lie about the means by which he is achieving them.
(There is an interview with him where he says all this on bitchute with a Fox news reporter who was fired because she refused to stop talking about ivermectin.)
So when the first 10 pages of every newspaper have been full of Covid stories from around the world for 18 months no British newspaper has been interested in talking to Dr Varon to find out exactly what it is that he is doing.
I find this so strange as to be inexplicable other than it being because they have been bribed or threatened not to talk about it.
While it is pretty clear that no one can make a fortune out of ivermectin, there are extremely powerful interests who could lose a fortune out of ivermectin.
The aggression and scale of the response every time you mention it on for instance a newspaper comments section suggests to me that they have invested in a team of sociopaths who are prepared to spend all their waking hours jumping on the subject.
I think they are frightened, and I think they are frightened for good reason: it is a very simple story, with very credible people behind it, and so obviously newsworthy to any sentient person that its suppression is in itself evidence of something sinister.
This guy is a Covid believer – he is fully into vaccination, believes in masking, essentially buys into the whole thing – but he has taken a very fair line on ivermectin including interviewing Tess Lawrie.
https://youtu.be/3j7am9kjMrk
https://youtu.be/D2ju5v4TAaQ
Rhoda/Interested
Peter McCullough as well in Texas (he gave evidence to a Texas Senate Committee and lots of other interviews) and, as you say, many others.
Media – Yes, they were effectively bought (bribed, call it what you want) throughout the key period. If you lose a lot of your advertising (because people are staying at home, not spending) and the Government offers to give you loads of ad money simply to pass on a simple message, you’re not doing yourself any favours (when pitching for that ad revenue) by having editorial pieces or awkward journalists contradicting that message. After all, VFM and all that, it diminishes the visual effect….
And all paid for by us, in order that our lives may be at increased risk. Murderers indeed. Well done Johnson. And he calls himself a Conservative. Dwayne, LOL you say?
I would point out for both MBE & PF that for conspiracy theories neither verified data nor evidence is required. It’s just needs to sound vaguely possible & you’re away.
The evidence for Ivermectin is weak and, unfortunately, some of the most important evidence in its favour was found to be seriously flawed – see https://grftr.news/why-was-a-major-study-on-ivermectin-for-covid-19-just-retracted/. Additionally, there’s no particular reason why we should expect it to work. However, it os being studied as part of the PRINCIPLE trial (https://www.principletrial.org/news/ivermectin-to-be-investigated-as-a-possible-treatment-for-covid-19-in-oxford2019s-principle-trial) so we’ll find out fairly soon.
Charles
That link I put above includes:
a) the one Interested volunteered above (for example), and also
b) the one you just referred to that you described as “some of the most important evidence”, and clearly shows that single one study as having been withdrawn.
It includes about 100 different studies in total (two thirds of them peer reviewed). That doesn’t look quite so weak to me? Perhaps have a look at that link (copied here):
https://c19ivermectin.com/
if you really are convinced it’s just nothing.
Charles. Just the first name? We conspiracy theorists regard that as a clue. However, as expected, the ‘not a proper trial’ hurdle. Experience of professionals counts for nothing, clinical trials taken as a gold standard when they definitely are not. Oh, and an Oxford trial for IVM. Will it be done by the same people who used a known dangerous dose in their HCQ trial without the zinc and only after hospital admission. You see, the point of the various early treatment protocols is that they be given early. Instead of waiting until it’s too late. Which is the only proffered alternative by the medical establishment, across the world. So, never mind the HCQ or IVM, or a dozen other claimed treatments, just answer me one question. When you have a positive PCR test, WHY IS THERE NO TREATMENT
Not in the U.K. but I was refused entry into a shop without a mask and when I pointed out I had a medical exemption and that this was discrimination the answer was they provided online services, curb side pickup and would even go and fetch the item I wanted while I waited outside if I paid cash so this all meant they weren’t discriminating and mean and could refuse me physical entry without a mask.
To be honest I just couldn’t be bothered and added it to places I don’t use anymore
@Charles
Contributors out of the blue who turn up on well-frequented blogs are short on argument but long on links.
Charles/Dwayne–Fuck off.
Interested is correct on all counts.
MBE–You are becoming NiV Jnr. That isn’t a compliament.
BiS–Your inability to join the dots is your undoing. What proof more do you require that the present powergrab is not a plan? The number of shithole countries now throwing their weight about with their people employing threat and violence–AUS/NZ/CANADA/LITHUIANIA/FRANCE/GERMANY–and most disgracefully of all Israel. Where their shitehouse leader wants 8 million vaxed Jewish fools to treat the 1 million with sense enough to stay away from the crap as early stage Nazi’s treated all Jews. Jewish refuseniks need to sew yellow stars on their clothes and see if their fellows will shut doors in their face.One would hope not.
Leaving out “build back better” and vast numbers of other signs.
Sorry BiS but long term perspective is that you are a self-deluding.
I will predict that Johnson will try to bring back LDs this winter and put on harsh thug measures Aussie style with ploddies and squaddies to try and get his vax pass 1st step to social credit tyranny off the ground. Present talk of tests going and continuing dropping of restrictions is just more gaslighting bullshit before he fires up the false test casedemic scam again to produce more deceitful infection/death figs and claims of NHS collapse on hand.
That is testable by events. I very much hope I am wrong. But I think this winter will be make or break for UK freedom. Johnson must be defeated.
To be fair to Charles, he’s been commenting here for at least a few months. Mostly to moan about Brexit IIRC.
@BniC, the shop was still discriminating on a disability. It doesn’t matter that they say they do many things to help the disabled, they are still discriminating. The actions they take to accommodate the disabled are only to be used when the cost of making adjustments is too high or physically impossible. So putting in a ramp in a listed building, or if the shop is too small for a wheelchair are things where the shop has to make accommodations. But where the disability can be accommodated without any real work, then they cannot refuse entry. The whole point of the law is to allow the disabled to live like normal people, not lepers.
If you hate the shop enough, try a disability claim in the small claims court. Kester Disability Rights can provide advice – https://disabilityrights.org.uk/
“To be fair to Charles, he’s been commenting here for at least a few months. Mostly to moan about Brexit IIRC.”
Given the political leanings of the sort of people who work for the government, one suspects he’s probably freelancing on the Brexit stuff on here. The covid related threads are his ‘work’.
@Charles
How do you explain eg Dr Joseph Varon? Is he lying about his mortality rates? If so, what’s your evidence for that? If not, is he lying about what he’s using (ivermectin) to achieve those rates? If so, what’s your theory as to why he would lie about that?
As for RCTs, while the evidence that you adduce as to why the evidence for ivermectin RCTs is ‘weak’ it itself, ironically, weak, it ignores the fact that RCTs are only one weapon in the armoury, and necessarily (certainly in a pandemic) one that arrives later.
In the real world, faced with a novel virus (or any condition) and no indicated treatments, doctors use their guile and experience to try whatever they have.
Ivermectin (which contra you has been understood for many years to have interesting anti viral properties) was one such.
It appears, from doctors with actual dying patients recovering in front of them, to be working.
I agree that a proper RCT carried out in a major western nation with proper standards would be a good idea.
What I am struggling with is why Hancock didn’t at least order one in January this year, when a thousand people a day were dying for want of an effective treatment, and Dr Tess Lawrie, who advises the WHO, the EMA and Matt Fucking Hancock, via the MHRA/NICE/NHS, as to the evidence for medicines, was shouting at him to start using it as a treatment?
10,000 patients get ivm, 10,000 get the other treatments, all nicely blinded, and away we go.
Can you hazard a guess as to why Hancock didn’t organise that?
Because the only answer I can come up with it Matt Hancock didn’t care if those people died because he had other plans.
I think he should be arrested and made to explain his ignoring of Tess Lawrie’s letter, personally. Maybe he has a good explanation. Or maybe he needs to do 40 years in the clink.
And if RCTs are so important, so vital, where was the RCT upon which the decision was made to reverse years of previous guidance and mandate mask-wearing?
Regarding BiS’s comments about “culling the elderly”.. 🙂
I don’t reckon that Covid is a very effective method. Even Before Vaccine the death rates of old fogies compared to their cohort size doesn’t exactly indicate mass geronticide. At 80+ years, the odds of kicking the bucket from Covid appeared to have been approximately 1 in 5000 for those free of co-morbidities (probably not many at that age!) going down to 1 in 165 for those with multiple severe co-morbidities. (NHS figures)
Have they gone? Just dumped their anti-treatment links and moved on?
Indeed, wasn’t the average age of death “with” covid higher than the average age of death overall?
@RK
‘Have they gone? Just dumped their anti-treatment links and moved on?’
It’s a game of whackamole.
Story in The Times yesterday in which the reporter writes that four healthy people in their thirties recently died of COVID19 in Scotland.
This is quite a big story, given that we are 18 months+ into this thing, and some some % of 30-39 yos will be immune from infection, and yet the people aren’t named – no grieving families paying tribute to their loved ones in the local paper, no Facebook warnings from parents, siblings, or spouses that this is not just a disease of the elderly.
I don’t know – maybe it’s true. But I find it hard to believe.
What’s worse is that the Times just takes this on trust from the government – its reporter has made no attempt whatsoever to establish the identities of the people concerned, so as to establish whether they actually *were* healthy (what is their BMI, for instance?), and whether they’ve been ‘vaccinated’. These are, you’d have thought, all basic journalistic enquiries, but apparently they are either questions they don’t want to ask, or questions they don’t know how to ask.
In my view it is the gang of supposed experts that don’t want this to end. If you ask who benefits and follow the money, experts feature at the top of the list. For example in Hong Kong, despite a longish period of no or minimal local infections there are daily reports of “experts” calling for increased restrictions – social distancing, mask wearing, travel controls – and all this with a total as of this morning 43 people in hospital.
The least publicity shy and main advisor to our so-called Chief Executive is a microbiologist who has in quick order become an epidemiologist, media star, architect, ventilation engineer, sewage disposal expert and resurrector of the historic miasma theory of disease.
My theory is that all supposed experts are academics generally operating way outside their sphere of competence and are desperate to hang on to their 15 minutes in the sun – plus of course the extra income that it entails. I doubt any anywhgere is the world are donating their services for the public good.
@PF Re link https://c19ivermectin.com/
That’s useless. A link leading to a maze of further websites, all containing low quality evidence with no proper analysis. For as long as it has existed, medicine has been plagued with qucks and fools who have promoted treatments which don’t work. If we decided what to use based on doctors reporting what worked for them, we’d still be bleeding people with leeches for almost every disease. A report that something works for some doctors is nothing more than a reason to study the treatment in more detail. That’s why we need trials which use randomisation and blinding.
@Interested – “How do I explain Dr Joseph Varon?”
There are very many sources of bias and confounding factors. It is easy to imagine that something is causing an improvement when it isn’t. Some typical ones are: treating sicker patients differently, counting outcomes differently, treatments differing in other ways. Since his treatment “majors on” ivermectin, it’s entirely possible the difference is something else.
“What I am struggling with is why Hancock didn’t at least order one…”
I think Dominic Cummings has revealed the reason for that: he’s “totally fucking hopeless”.
“And if RCTs are so important, so vital, where was the RCT upon which the decision was made to reverse years of previous guidance and mandate mask-wearing?”
I haven’t seen a good quality study in that area, and so do not think it is justified to mandate mask-wearing. It’s no more than educated guesswork to claim that it helps.