Mutations of SARS2 are roaming. Currently there are 19 million active (known) cases of Covid. Due to copying errors, mistakes are accumulating in the genes of the virus. It’s a relentless process of trial and selection. A trillion monkeys on keyboards blindly working its way around vaccines, and immune systems. To beat this, we need to understand it.
Below is a map of known variants created from the samples which have had full sequences done. This is the remarkable “Nextstrain“ — an opensource tool. I have labelled a few clusters by their “country names”, (though we’re not supposed to do that. Let’s all say “WuFlu”.)
The family tree of SARS-Cov-2 starts at the bottom left corner with two samples from Wuhan around Christmas 2019. This is called the 19A clade, which appears to have almost died out now, though there are still remnants left of this original virus in corners like Iran and PNG. Otherwise, the Wuhan 19A virus has been superseded by its children.
The branches and time marches to the right.
The code for one full virus is 29,000 bases long and as best as I can tell, all the dots on the branches have been sequenced in full. At the Nextstrain page you can mouseover and click on every point to find out which lab and town the sample came from, and which mutations it has.
Be aware the “tree” above is heavily shaped by the nations doing the most testing and sequencing. Australian labs pop up often, sampling the cases flying into airport quarantine. But India has done very little sequencing and Mexico even less. Some African nations have virtually none. So there will be thousands of invisible branches and strains that we can’t see above, because no one has tested them.
The only reasons the Indian and Brazillian variants are not branching as much as the UK variant is because those variants haven’t yet dominated countries which do a lot of sequencing. That not-so-fortunately is about to change as smart wealthy countries have, daftly, let these variants in.
The UK variant has spread far
These graphs below on the Nextstrain Covariants by country page show the predominance of each variant. The UK variant is marked as an orangish brown. It was first noticed in October last year, but within a few months was responsible for nearly every infection in the UK. Similarly, throughout the European lands the takeover is almost complete.
The US is a different cauldron. There, the pink zone is successfully competing with it in the USA graph is the Californian “484K” variant. But starting to spread are both the #P1 Brazillian variant and the Indian ones.
But the strains that will dominate in just a few months time may be invisible now.
It’s an arms race
The graphs below show that the newer faster-spreading variants usually wipe out the older slower ones. Partly this is because a new strain brings a new wave, and as infections rise (not shown in these graphs) the proportion of older strains is squeezed out. But in the end the faster-spreading arrivals breach the previous norms for quarantine, restrictions, and hospital care. After new cases rise rapidly and set off alarms, governments and citizens inevitably raise their own level of response. The new stricter restrictions, by default, then wipe out the old slower variants. Obviously, some combination of restrictions, masks, isolation and lockdowns work — starving the old variants out of existence by depriving them of new bodies, but at great expense. The cheapest restrictions, of course, start at the border. (Just stop the flights!) A hard border means almost no need to lockdown. It also means no new mutants arise within that country.
The UK variant has taken over nearly everywhere in Europe. The grey background were the unknown variants.
It’s barely visible above — but seeping into the latest UK data (top left graph above) is a tiny barely visible, green wedge. This is the ominous strain from India. In India, the new double mutants are growing rapidly, but despite the catastrophe unfolding, they’re still only half of all the samples.
Most of the variants in India are “grey”. Not known.
Indian new variants of covid (green).
The Indian variant has arrived in South Korea. See how fast it is growing.
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To appreciate how much data is held in this system, here’s the information for one “dot” in the orange section growing from the “UK Variant” branch. A 41 year old man was diagnosed in Raipur India, 3 to 7 days ago. His sample was sequenced with a full list of mutations. (To see this, mouseover a dot, then click inside the black small data box to see the larger more detailed one. Or not. It’s a nerdy thing. But you will be able to appreciate just how far and fast these versions are travelling.) You can, if the urge takes you, trace the branches and see how often the strains are leaping borders. Even if you are a data nerd, and not a Covid one, the Nextstrain system is impressive. The data can also be sliced by country, by region, by strain and by mutation. Scroll down — agog. Click particular strains in the legend to clear the clutter out.
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Things we know
The virus exists. PCR is useful. The virus has been sequenced in full many times. Symptoms and transmissibility are linked to different variants. Never before has the world had live data like this. Yet we still need more. There is almost no data from so many countries that matter.
The variants are coming — as long as people are getting infected somewhere, this virus is adapting. New variants may well throw a spanner in the works of vaccine programs, and natural immunity. Herd immunity to a virus that no longer exists may not be useful, and in some cases can be a disadvantage. Eliminating the virus stops the mutations arising. Vaccination will slow the development of new mutations locally, but once they arise it will select for viruses that escape the vaccination.
PCR looks, smells and acts like a useful test. The PCR test is used to sequence viruses (and to do legal, forensic, medical and paleo-fossil studies). Like any tool, it can be overdone, abused, or faked. But the tree at the top of the page was made with a continuous branching structure and with data from hundreds of independent labs on five continents. That suggests, Occams razor style, that despite the masses of money and vested interests doing their best to skew results, that the bulk of these PCR tests and mapping would be hard to fake.
Restrictions are eliminating strains: That less infectious strains are universally wiped out shows that restrictions (as expensive, ugly, and unpopular as they are) do work. If the higher restrictions were used, without the presence of the newer strains, obviously that would eliminate all versions of Covid. (See Australia, NZ etc). As the virus gets more infective and transmissible, restrictions would need to be harder and faster.
Eventually a nicer strain of Covid will probably arise, one which doesn’t overwhelm hospitals. It may however become a nastier strain on the path to being kinder. Spanish flu did that and took three years.
We need antivirals: The arms race means there will be an ongoing competition between our immune systems, vaccines, anti-virals and new strains. “Herd immunity” is likely only a temporary illusion. Antivirals that act on our enzymes or entry portals are more likely to work against multiple strains because our biochemical machinery isn’t changing like the virus is, and it’s much harder for the virus to find a new port of entry into our cells, or a new path to hijack. If we used antivirals as well as vaccines, we’d prevent more mutations and eliminate clusters faster.
This is why it is still a rank scandal of the highest order that our public medical research dollars have not focused first on antivirals and our public health responses failed to do the most useful, cheapest restriction of all — just closing borders. Anthony Fauci should have been fired a year ago.
The UN WHO is responsible for every case outside China which could have been stopped. It was obvious to anyone with microbiological training on Twitter by February 2020 that the borders should have been sealed.
The WHO should be defunded immediately. It serves the CCP but fails the world.
The Indian strain looks bad, it’s hard to tell how bad, the data is awful (as in, poor testing, inadequate sequencing, high positivity. What’s the actual mortality rate? Who-the-heck knows. ). The governments dilemma is the competing duty of care to people at home versus abroad. One case getting into the community could cost millions to resolve. But we owe it to citizens to find a way to get them home. I’d like to see us offer them tents near military air bases (or something!) and give them at least one path to return? It’s not five star, but it might still be better than a small apartment in Delhi. Those with better options will just wait. The desperate will be grateful to get home anyway they can.
See: Nextstrain and Nextstrain Covariants by country
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Yes you are.
We still live in a free country.
It’s only the febrile woke who hold that aberrant view.
How can anything be analyzed if the language required to do so is a no-go zone?
–[Indeed Sam. I just added “Let’s all say Wuflu” to hone that point. Well said. – Jo ]
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In an alternate dimension Australia chose not to eliminate the virus but to seek the mythical natural herd immunity.
Just like Sweden that other Australia managed to kill 1395 per million (18,458 people) until the Australian variant known as the Roo-Flu began to kill mainly teenage girls and marsupials. It all ended when a local nova came up with the bright idea to flash multiple times. This destroyed all that planet’s solar panels and eradicated the virus via gamma ray irradiation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3lwL0qF-mg
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Antivirals … of course . Wuflu does not need vaccine as we have TREATMENTS
Read Dr. Vladimir Zelenko cure for this and all other virus / bacteria you might catch
https://noqreport.com/2021/04/30/hcq-proponent-dr-vladimir-zelenko-to-receive-nobel-prize/
Vit D C zinc panadol green tea extract fluids for all well people
HCQ etc and antivirals and steroids for the weak and old
IN FACT THE ABOVE WILL CURE ALL FLUS AND COLDS
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Paul, Zelenko is remarkable, and it is crazy that we don’t test that protocol, but be aware that 70% of the worlds HCQ is made in India. If it were able to stop the spread and the deaths you’d think we’d see it there. Are they using it? Can anyone find out the latest treatment protocol in India?
Antivirals could be major benefit and prevent many deaths (a scandal, a scandal) but they need to be started early, and nothing is a guaranteed cure.
Beware of sweeping binary statements in a global pandemic.
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“70% of the worlds HCQ is made in India.”
Interesting since I believe that the strains of Malaria common in India became immune to HCQ years ago.
Regarding D3, Zinc, etc. I’ve made sure that I’m not deficient in any immune system related nutrient and when I caught Covid on a cross country flight packed with spring breakers, it was no worse than a mild flu. Within a week after the first symptom appeared, they were mostly gone and I was back on the slopes. It also convinced me that the masks in common use are completely useless as everyone on that plane was required to wear masks except for the 5-10 minutes it took to eat the pretzels they provided as a snack.
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The stretchy knitted fabric masks are completely useless … you can hold them up and see light through the holes. No one makes filters out of knitted material … pick any filter you like: industrial dust mask, swimming pool cartridge filter, engine air filter, or N95 PPE mask, they are all made the same way which is with layers of randomly packed microfibers. Only the density of fibers and thickness changes.
A proper surgical mask is already three layers, and there is no direct path for the air from one side to the other. Forcing the air to take a zig-zag path through the filter is the reason that it drops off the particles in the material.
There’s also a time limit on all of these masks … as tested extensively by the manufacturers they are no longer effective when worn for many hours because the particles gradually build up and work their way through. In any case, there’s no such thing as a 100% mask … best you can get is N95 which still allows 5% through, and that’s under ideal conditions. Surgical mask is only picking up about 50%.
With all that being said, there’s plenty of clinical evidence that the severity of a COVID case depends greatly on how big of an initial dose you got, and whether you got one brief dose, or multiple doses over a period of time. Microclots in the lungs are highly non-linear. You can easily operate on 90% lung capacity and hardly feel any different … lungs have significant redundancy. Getting infected at a low level, and then resting up and getting over it is probably the best thing that could have happened.
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In March 2020, Roy Spencer, Ph.D. had an article on his website about HQC that really needed a follow-up. I asked several times — but it never happened.
Spencer picked the 40 nations with the highest rates of malaria. In those nations it was likely that many people took small doses of HQC regularly to prevent malaria.
Mr. Spencer found the COVID infection rate extremely low in those 40 nations.
That does not prove HQC was preventing COVID, but the results were interesting.
At the time I speculated that they were generally warm nations, with people spending more time outdoors in March, and getting more Vitamin D from the sun.
That doesn’t prove anything either.
It almost seemed like developed nations didn’t want to cure COVID — those ventilators seemed to be counterproductive.
The world leaders seemed so excited to be able to tell everyone what to do, and control their lives — leftists ALWAYS love to do that … for over 100 years !
Just one person’s opinion.
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Beware of sweeping binary statements in a global pandemic !! You say
Obviously, some combination of restrictions, masks, isolation and lockdowns work !! You say
Based on??
The published evidence shows that places that didnt restrict have had better outcomes than places that zealously restricted.
The death rate in Uruguay (low restriction) is less than Peru (high restriction), Idaho (low restriction) less than Wyoming (High restriction), Sweden less than UK or belgium, Florida less than Louisiana. Etc Etc https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/narrative-lockdowns-and-masks-fails-yet-again
Its one thing to close borders and lock the virus out, but the evidence refutes the notion that blanket non-targeted internal lockdowns have achieved anything but harm. Masks have not been shown to achieve anything.
There’s a lot more to learn about this pathogen and how we should treat it. Panic restrictions were tried and the evidence shows they failed. Time to listen to the ‘Great Barrington’ virologists rather than the witch-doctors.
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I find the study underlying this to be bizarre and not credible. I can attest to the relative strictness of restrictions here and Wyoming was not a high restriction state relative to most around it. Our cases rate was only modestly high, but we used so many PCR tests, and no one is able to even tell me what cycle number they used, that many may have been false positives (and likely were so on the basis of lack of symptoms and lack of infectiveness).
Note also that the point of the report appears entirely to make states run by Republicans look bad, thus is the reason for using data only after August which makes New York look better than the Dakotas. Since we dumped the mask mandate, which had been on dec to feb, our cases have declined to 1 per 10,000 per day and as of last week when last I checked, haven’t had a death for six or seven weeks statewide (4 months were I live).
It is true that our public health officials over-reacted and have kept the schools k-16 under absurd and strict orders for no apparent reason, and our governor is a fence sitter, but even in this covid hysterical university town there have been few restrictions.
Odd also that I was just informed today by the state department of health that my private health information was impermissibly disclosed to Github and subsequently by Github. I wouldn’t put much credibility in that study; it had an agenda.
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The Indian government did distribute over 100 million tablets of HCL during 2020. Their officially recommended clinical treatments included: supplementary Oxygen; low dose anticoagulants (e.g. enoxaparin); corticosteroids; Hydroxycholorquine, Remdesivir (where available).
Towards the end of 2020 they were distributing the “Ziverdo Kit”: Zinc, Doxycycline & Ivermectin. These were also popular for private purchase outside government distribution channels because of the low price … roughly 3 USD.
Be specific about what statistical results in India you would expect if this was a success, and what you would consider a failure. What would it have to look like in order for India to claim their treatments worked?
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But was the HCL distributed with zinc. Was it just a one time distribution.
Also the India variant requires a doubling of standard Ivermectin dose to be effective.
John Campbell Piere Kory Ivermectin
https://youtu.be/19DPijOoVKE
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Tel. Thanks.
You say, “Be specific about what statistical results in India you would expect..”
An excellent question. Data should specify region/state. Note policy differs across the various states. I would need this to be noted and shown in the data along with the outcome measures.
As well – What I would like see is further discussion on the politics, that is, the negotiations between the Indian government and Pfizer, and what Pfizer did after.
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The American CDC does give that level of resolution, and New York City has separate statistics.
However, I couldn’t find anything so detailed from India … there’s a language barrier, many of their sites are not in English.
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They are now using Ivermectin, or have been doing so up till recently. It is not a vaccine, and its protective affect seems to wear off over a month or so. Do not know if they still have any left.
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i dont know but DR Roy Spencer noted early 2020 that there was a great correlation with malaria prone countries and a lack of covid. i would add that HCQ would need to be readily available over the counter without a script
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its claimed for Zelenko …. no deaths
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a thought IF IF HCQ was over the counter in the USA ( it isnt because there was no demand to do so because USA has virtually had no malaria problem due to use of DDT ) We would have no hysteria of the use of this wonder drug
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The competition between the children of Wu Flu has started. Each with a rich population base to create even more virulent strains. Brazil vs Pakistan vs India vs Nigeria. The warmth of the summer in the Northern hemisphere will help slow the viruses and there will be many. One strain specific innoculation will be nowhere near enough, but a start in slowing the spread. In time these competing viruses will be up against a benign strain against which no one defends. That will be when herd immunity starts.
For us in Australia, the idea that China is waging economic war because we were brave enough to ask about the origins of Wu Flu is an obvious admission that the CCP is responsible. I doubt the escape of the virus was intentional, but the action in sending millions of infected Chinese overseas in the following months was murderous. As was the simultaneous declaration of the WHO, the group tasked with preventing pandemics, that the virus was not infective, person to person.
The only puzzle in the spread and mutation of this virus is that infection stopped in China and never started in North Korea. And if you believe that, you probably believe in man made Global Warming too.
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This NH summer in Europe will be relatively cool and wet.
‘I doubt the escape of the virus was intentional … ‘
A Wuhan Lab malcontent may have purposely released Covid at the fish market. There is also a bizarre possibility that a high ranking whistleblower did the deed, the generals were manufacturing a first strike weapon.
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I don’t understand this idea that the virus stops spreading in summer. If you look at U.S. data from last year a summer peak began on or about May 1, 2020 and rose to a peak around July 20. It declined thereafter, but began another wave on Sept 1 with the opening of colleges and universities around the country.
There is so much variably that people can see exactly what they wish to see.
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Hi Kevin, I think this winter peak applies to high latitude populations. It gets muddled in nations like the US that are so long North to South. The seasonal triggering of respiratory viruses is very different between New York and Florida and the “cases” graph for the entire US is a very unhelpful average. As factors like UV, Vitamin D status, and which season drives people indoors, changes North to South, so will the seasonal triggering of their pools of respiratory viruses.
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Winter peaks happen in influenza in temperate and polar zones. In the tropics there is not a neat season.
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Analogies to influenza go only so far — I mean look at the difference between COVID and Flu with regard to young people. If people sitting inside with air conditioning were the cause of the summer COVID peak (notice how the argument has already morphed from why there is no summer peak to explaining why the observed one doesn’t count) then why did Wyoming have a summer peak timed almost exactly like the USA as a whole? It is not hot enough in summer to bother with air conditioning here. Now you can claim it was imported from nearby states or tourism, but my point is there is no hard evidence for much of anything, exceptions to practically everything, and lots of speculation. What we are missing is reliable data — case data is a mess, so is death data. Hospitalizations data would be interesting.
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Kevin, I suspect the wave in Florida in summer was partly due to people living indoors with air conditioners. Both dry air and humidity help the virus, and so does cool air. The best conditions to kill the virus are high temps and 50 – 60% humidity. (Apparently)
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Medical treatments are partly driving the variants:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dispatch-14-covid-crystal-ball
Although, the woman who runs my local diner has a PhD in Biomedical Engineering (she quit that field after becoming totally disgusted with Western Medicine) says that a virus will adapt to its environment. Thus, if the virus was sequenced in every single person who has been actually sick with it, probably a new variant would be seen for every REAL case.
It’s the reason why flu vaccines work so poorly: They are manufactured in eggs and the virus adapts to the egg. So, no matter what virus they choose to put into the vaccine, it will be a different virus when they get done with it. You can look this up. It’s well known.
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By the time flights are stopped, the cat is already out of the bag.
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Very true in the case of nations like the UK and US and EU that let everything in until they decide to try to stop one bad variant. All the EU nations and the US tried to stop the UK variant, too late, and they all failed.
In the Australian-NZ scheme the border quarantine against all nations with any community spread works to stop the unknown nasty ones.
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You would think that … but in Sydney the Ruby Princess dropped a shipload of infected people right in the heart of the highest density part of the city and they spread out going home via taxi, bus, train, etc.
By the way … the Ruby Princess came in from New Zealand, and had made a number of earlier trips back and forth between Australia and NZ, so those infections must at some stage have been in New Zealand as well. Strangely enough the cat did not get out of the bag and there was no explosion of cases in Sydney at the time, nor anywhere in New Zealand either. You would have expected a sudden spike like New York, New Jersey, London … but it didn’t happen.
They didn’t introduce quarantine and border closures until after that Ruby Princess incident. Go figure huh?
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JB.
Agreed, the virus can mutate even within one person. And they are now wondering if the virus can stick around for longer (as in — be one of the unknown reasons for Long Covid. )
Re Eggs, Yes and No. The endless challenge with any vaccine is to produce something safe that the body reacts to as if it were dangerous. Natural influenza produces a lifelong antibody response. Vaccines do a small shadow of that which needs a yearly booster (if you are hoping to get protection that way).
Most coronaviruses don’t even produce a lifelong reaction. We catch the exact same colds over and over. They are very different to influenza.
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What you seem to be describing here in the quote is ‘suboptimal antibody response’, a response that might be further impeded when the innate immune system of a vaccinated person is out-competed by suboptimaly primed adaptive immune system which can can enhance escape variants of the virus. In the case that you are describing in the quote, it is the innate immune system that is the first responder in asymptomatic cases as far as i can see unless i am mistaken. The adaptive immune system comes along later in the battle. The danger is that especially in children, who have a stronger innate immune system, a vaccine jab could prime their immune system system in such a way that the innate immune system is outcompeted and is thus made redundant somewhat. If this is slowly becoming clearer, it would tend to suggest that priming the adaptive immune system in favour of the the innate immune system (first responded) might come at considerable cost.
This, if i have studied more or less correctly is incredibly important. Of course i am not a vaccinologist, or immunologist. What i seem to be finding out unless i am again mistaken here is that the reason we “catch the exact same colds over and over is because our innate immune system is coping perfectly well without having to enlist the help of the adaptive immune system for this task. Further editing and study might iron out some bugs in my comment, but here it is in raw form.
“The potential danger of suboptimal antibody responses in COVID-19”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-0321-6?fbclid=IwAR2OHhAhzFzJpqZOEI_ifMLBpihW-beWYoGQ0L4XJ5cDQRpleOQ5kQ9lH28
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Not quite the way I would say it. But the Nature paper is a useful one (thank you). I was thinking of the risk of “Original Antigenic Sin” rather than Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) (which the paper talks about). But they are both real risks.
If people form a good antibody response to a virus that has mutated too much it can work against them. It’s as if the army was primed with the wrong weapons and hunting for the wrong enemy. We can put in a big investment and gear up making antibodies that don’t work so well. This happens in both vaccines and naturally — EG our first influenza may prime us to fight a form of influenza that no longer circulates. EG H3N2 in 1968.
When an antibody scores a partial hit it unleashes a huge amplification from our immune system which gets very excited — like a wartime response, but the danger is that if this is not a good antibody – one that stops the virus rather than just slowing it down — the ineffective wartime response can slow down the testing and production of a better antibody.
This is my concern with current vaccines, and another reason to use antivirals second (close borders first!). The virus mutation rate will speed up as more people are infected for the first time, but will eventually slow and settle, and then a vaccine will have more chance of success in the long term. Though there are plenty of diseases we still don’t have vaccines to even 60 years later. EG RSV. The first vaccines were disastrous, and we still haven’t got a good one.
The innate immune system is quite different and independent from the adaptive one, though they do interact. The innate system is always there but when faced with a totally new virus, the adaptive one takes days and weeks to get going and may need a couple of months to optimize and filter out and evolve the best antibodies. Children are especially good with the innate generic system, but as we get older we rely more on antibodies. But children can and do make antibodies to particular influenza strains that last at least 50 years so they are still “pretty good at it”. They just don’t have a big library of antibodies to draw on.
The point about children and Covid is of course, the cost benefits are vastly different than for adults. Though there is still the risk of Long Covid even in children and it is debilitating. Speaking of which — where is that data? Apparently kids with long covid can’t even get doctors to pay attention at the moment. So much we don’t know.
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Worth noting-
Yes, the condition “Long Covid” is real.
It has been treated with success with vaccines, and with ivermectin.
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“Most coronaviruses don’t even produce a lifelong reaction. We catch the exact same colds over and over. They are very different to influenza.”
If you know a reference for this statement, better show it. To my knowledge it has never been determined whether the subsequent “cold” was the same. There are 2 groups of human corona viruses causing common cold, and stored immune sera are at least partially reactive against strains circulating 20-40 years later. It is probable that the reason coronavirus colds are primarily a disease of the very young (and the immune compromisedd) is that sequential infection with different serotypes builds a generalized resistance. Note that the minority of “colds” are corona virus – rhinoviruses cause most of them.
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1009453
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Correct – the common cold is just a collection of symptoms.
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Fran. I’ll do a post on it. I have been looking it up. It was the same cold and in the same people and a long study. There are many viruses that cause colds, but I was hunting for information on specific coronavirus colds and our immune response to them. There may be 200 forms of rhinovirus and adeno etc but there aren’t that many coronaviruses.
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This pandemic has been managed for maximum fear, maximum stress, and maximum pollution. And thus, for maximum illness.
One of the most important things I read, early on in the pandemic, is just below. It was amongst the comments, following an article:
“During the heights of the aids hysteria I worked as a breathing therapist and realized that people who made an hiv antibody test and it was hiv positive they had often pneumonia a month after made the test. The main problem is the fear created by having a deadly virus. This fear affects the breathing, especially the breathing musculature. Watching the breathing results often in breathlessness… and then they try to breath deeper. At the end this creates a high static energy level and permanent contracted breathing muscles and the impossibility to open the lungs easily. It’s a devils circle!”
I spent some time recently, searching around online for some backup for the story above.
And then I brought it up at a gathering of friends one morning, when the talk turned to a book on breathe and breathing. I relayed the story above and remarked that it was pretty counter-intuitive.
A friend across the table instantly piped up, saying that, “No, it’s not.” Essentially, he said: “When I broke my ribs, that was the main concern—that I would end up with pneumonia. When you break your ribs, it hurts to breathe, you don’t breathe properly, and you’re prone to lung infections.”
A positive result to an antibody test doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with illness and neither does a positive result on a PCR test—the test on which this whole entire pandemic narrative has been built. The PCR test cannot detect either active virus or active infection. There are a whole range of problems with the PCR test, which I won’t get into here.
But, according to the story above, a positive result to an antibody test—which could’ve been a false-positive, or could’ve meant that the person had met the ‘enemy’ and their immune system had dealt with it quite handily—instilled fear in people. And that state of fear often led quickly to a lung infection!
Think about that for half a minute. And then think about the MSM ‘reporting’ you’ve likely been listening to, watching, or reading.
How many people have been scared sick over the last 15 months? I’ve seen this paper in a psychology magazine liken it to “Voodoo Death”:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.589884/full
How Do Nocebo Phenomena Provide a Theoretical Framework for the COVID-19 Pandemic?
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JB, ultimately 14% of people who tested positive in Victoria with a PCR ended up in hospital, and 3% died. That’s predictive power no other test or psych poll will give. (Odds have improved since then in most modern countries).Getting a positive result also meant that someone was a risk to people around them. Track and tracing showed that too. People who got positive tests also may have relatives who got positive tests after theirs and some of them could get very sick.
Start from virology, not psychology. Some of your points are good, and fair, but the answer to the actual harm and deadliness comes from medical observations.
Absolutely, people have used this relentlessly for political purposes. But just because some selfish gravy troughers are using this for their advantage does not prove anything about the virus.
Keep the politics out of the science. (Even though so many can’t).
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Jo, it sounds like your entire article (and worldview) are based on a Pasteurian concept of health and disease. You should probably look up Bechamp’s alternate view, which matches reality much better, but of course doesn’t generate as much profit for doctors and pharmaceutical companies, so it’s somewhat unpopular among those groups. In Bechamp’s world, your health has essentially nothing to do with the viruses and bacteria you are exposed to, since your immune system is specifically evolved to take care of all of them, and there is no way to avoid them while living a normal well-adjusted happy life. Instead health is a consequence of your constitution, diet, lifestyle, mental attitude, etc. Healthy people do not need to worry about colds, flu, or Covid – because those potential pathogens (nature’s way of culling the weak) don’t stand a chance against a robust immune system. Unhealthy people, on the other hand, should probably focus on becoming healthy before worrying about individual viruses.
Being diagnosed “positive” with a “deadly disease” does cause disease (dis-ease). Modern voodoo is no different than ancient voodoo. Fear is the mind-killer, and when the mind is dead, the body will follow. What does that make the fear-mongers (the corrupt politicians and media)?
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What’s one of the first things that happens when a person gets sick? They lose their appetite. Why? Because ketosis is good. It’s an evolved response. People who ate less (during an acute illness) simply out-survived those that ate more.
I’ll just throw it out there that intermittent fasting is probably the single best preventative medicine.
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The starved rat outlives its sated colleagues. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851235/ Could be a sadhu floating around who hasn’t eaten for a thousand years innit?
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Roman, A ewe with pregnancy toxaemia is not in a good condition and will die from ketosis alone. Ketosis is real, and ketosis kills if the appetite cannot be regained. And loss of appetite can come from toxicity (ie that is what happens in ketosis). I take your point there may be some adaptive advantage in losing apetite, but it might just be a side effect. In the long human history too little food has more often been a problem than too much.
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Stick around Steve, Before you accuse anyone of the heinous Pasteurian crime, you might want to read a bit wider… I was one of the first to write about Vitamin D and of Zinc, C, B6, and of cheap antivirals like HCQ, Ivermectin, Bromhexine, Budesonide, interferon. I’ve been explaining the Big Pharma profit mechanism for the whole pandemic.
Plus the importance of exercise … two weeks ago. Did you miss it?
Being fit and healthy is very important, but even marathon runners at 29 have been brought down by this virus. Even some children. Why not use all the tools we have?
PS: Modern psychology IS the Voodoo I was suggesting we avoid.
@Roman. Indeed, fasting is very useful. eg Remarkable boost for immune systems after fasting
See https://joannenova.com.au/2014/06/remarkable-boost-for-immune-systems-after-fasting/
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I know you wrote about the vitamins, exercise, and cheap effective medications, Jo… I read all those posts. That’s great, and definitely keep it up. But when you say “all the tools”, for some reason you include several that are indeed based on an incorrect Pasteurized view of disease, and therefore demonstrably cause more harm than good. By that I mean things like lockdowns, PCR tests, masks, border closures, social distancing, fear-mongering, etc. None of these can make people healthier, because health is not just (or indeed at all) about avoiding germs. So you should decry them as much as possible if you know more about health and disease than Pasteur apparently did.
Since your top post here is about fear-mongering related to “new virus variants”, it looks like you are engaging in some of that voodoo yourself. That’s not helpful, and you should take your own advice and avoid it 🙂
[Steve I will leave this comment here for the host to see when she logs on.]AD
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Steve, if you think the scientific method is the wrong approach, by all means, go for it. But this is the wrong blog to come for a chat about Voodoo.
Reporting on the data is what it is. You can label anything “fear mongering” or “voodoo” but that doesn’t change the real world. And it doesn’t predict anything useful either.
If you want to convince me that the PCR test, masks, borders, etc is “100% harmful” you’ll need accurate language, disciplined reasons, and to engage with the points I posted that show they can help. Restrictions obviously, self evidently, stop the virus (read the post). See the strains decline in every single country as a new faster strain arrives. Why is that happening? See also the evidence from every Australian state and NZ..
There is a kind of religion out there that suggests that our naturally immunity is always strong enough, and sunlight and salad will defeat anything, but history is full of dead bodies.
Life is more complicated. Lockdowns can be both good and bad, just like a hammer can be a great tool and a deadly weapon. Short lockdowns, done early = better health in the long run. Long lockdowns are horrible, and you and I both think they are a bad strategy. Once those borders are open a long repeat wave of lockdowns is highly likely (as I predicted). My heart goes out to UK friends. It could have been avoided by shutting the borders last Feb.
You’re on the right track with healthy aims, perhaps open up to other possibilities?
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Well, Jo, you are mostly doing pretty well as a truth-seeker, which is why this is such a great blog, but you do seem to have a blind spot. You have called out the lies the governments and mainstream media have been telling you (in some cases for decades) about global warming, the glories of Marxism and socialism, US election integrity, etc. etc. But when it comes to anything medical, you assume they are telling the truth. Why would they? Does a leopard change its spots?
Here are a few points you may wish to consider that vary from the official narrative:
1) Death rates last year were exactly normal (what pandemic?) That’s as hard as hard data gets, and it doesn’t agree with your panic. (I specifically checked the English-speaking Western countries, but would be surprised if any of the other countries were any different)
2) Better save some of your UK sympathy for the Amish and Mennonites, who don’t have the “benefit” of all our modern technology. Let’s check in on them, shall we? Wait just a minute, what do I see? What are they doing, how can this be? Without masks, social distancing, lockdowns or fear, Just living their lives, herd immunity’s here! (the mainstream response to this one is hilarious)
3) People are starting to get sick of all the fear porn, and are reclaiming their liberty, kicking masks out of schools (along with CRT), and even having mask-burning parties. They’re not dying in droves any more than the above-mentioned healthy-living country folk, or anyone else for that matter.
Sure, you can indeed successfully predict continued lockdowns. But that prediction is more consistent with a political panic-demic than an actual medical pandemic. Can you think of a prediction that would distinguish those two separate interpretations of reality?
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Steve, thanks for that comment.
The CV19 “data” that is treated as something pure and pristine, holy even, has been a big concern for me.
A recent comment outlines some of it;
“Thanks Lucky.
The basic “data” on which all estimates of the prevalence of CV19 and its seriousness have been based, is indeed “basic”.
Data recovered from various countries has been treated as equivalent and reliable for combination.
In fact the basic health profiles of various countries have been vastly different and this prevents CV19 “data” from those countries being amalgamated into an honest uniform, valid picture.
Even within the USA when you have city of New York compared with rural areas you are comparing chalk and cheese.
New York, with its crowding and sewage problems, cannot be realistically compared with rural areas.
Internationally when we compare Australia, with its excellent vaccination profile, with the troubled region of Italy with its fluctuating Chinese workers and undocumented stay behinds, we are again comparing chalk and cheese.
As Steve pointed out yesterday, basic health plays a big part in deciding who suffers most.
Data is only as good and useful as the methods used to produce it.”
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For the causal reader who has not seen this “debate” before wiki has a good distillation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_denialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_B%C3%A9champ
apologies to the blog owner for using the d word
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It is very interesting to go back to that post Jo. As a small baby I was nearly starved as my mother was very ill. She was living in the deep countryside with no one to help until a friend turned up and saved my life with a trip to town to buy the needed baby milk. I think some health problems can be blamed on that, many years later!
Dr Michael Mosley has some methods of fasting diets to help to reset insulin status.
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The second one, that is, from June 2014. The first one is recent, also very interesting.
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Jo, couldn’t agree more.There’s been so many basic principles of science broken during the COVID pandemic. I can add the total ignorance of treating complex diseases with a “multidisciplinary approach”. I can add “treat early” to reduce a build up of viral infection that cant be controlled later. These are basic principles that are used in one of my area of speciality – agricultural crop disease. I know those same principles are also used for many medical disease conditions eg cancer. Why have our medical “advisors”/public health officials been so focused on only 1 treatment – vaccines? If you ignore Vitamin D, Zinc, vitamin C etc I can count 11 possible early ( and later) anti- virals which all look like they could play a role in treating COVID. Some of the better known ones like Ivermectin and HCQ have safety profiles that are equivalent or better than most of the pharmaceuticals available on the market today.
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Marathon runners put their bodies under too much stress. There is difference between being fit and being healthy.
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Stick around Steve
In support of Jo on this one-
Modern medicine has shown itself to be subject to the usual pressures, -money, fame, career, the cocktail circuit- but no more than other disciplines. The public have given medics too much hero worship, time for realism.
Voodoo is to be avoided, put most of psychology in this definition.
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Steve, apart from the put down of Pasteur, I found the rest very thought provoking.
Maybe we have become complacent about our own personal responsibility to look after ourselves and live wisely.
Undoubtedly CV19 can be a horrible affliction but the early high death rates in parts of Italy and New York nursing homes caused me to question the validity of so called “data”.
Early CV19 deaths in Australia were of people aged between 70 and 90.
Then someone brought up the young European guy who died of it in China; it was later reported that he was a serious Alcoholic. But No No! the alcohol didn’t weaken his system.
I remain deeply disappointed at the handling of this problem and feel distrustful of the people who are elected to lead us.
Victoriastan, New York Cuomo, the Chinese enclave in Italy that has connections with Wuhan and so on.
Australia’s biggest problem is unbridled affluence: yesterday in the shopping centre I saw a number of large people but the stunning thing was to see a bloke with a perfectly round midriff, the diameter of which was in the order of 90 cm. Another person was seen at about 90 from side to side and 60 cm from front to back.
These people are victims of modern society and I wonder how they might deal with the CV19 if it visited them.
All data is not data if background details vary from one batch to the next.
KK
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Steve is raw food lady
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/i-reject-your-reality/
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Here in Perth, we had someone who was in quarantine for two weeks and tested negative at every test. When released he went to Collie where he was tested again and it came back ‘weak positive’ . Mark McGowan said it may have been leftovers from having Wuflu in the past. The mayor of Collie said ‘don’t panic’ and then promptly put herself into 14 day lockdown. Consequently tracing and testing is now going on in Collie. This is never going to end, the fear is going to crush peoples lives.
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Chris- (or anyone)
curious, what is “Weak positive”
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It means a positive of low intensity. PCR amplifies viral DNA (actually from RNA to DNA). The amount amplified is quantified by flouresence and other methods. Lots of DNA a strong signal, not much is a weak signal.
Ideally the signal strength is informative about the amount of virus in the patient although other factors can affect the correlation.
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Too many people believe only Pasteur or Bechamp is right. People can be infected by germs, but the terrain is more important by far.
‘The Differences Between the Germ Theory, the Terrain Theory and the Germ Terrain Duality Theory’
https://juniperpublishers.com/jojnhc/pdf/JOJNHC.MS.ID.555631.pdf
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Well said Greggg. I am not claiming that germs don’t exist, or that they can’t cause problems. But like you said, the terrain is more important, and trying to avoid the germs is a fool’s errand. Everyone is going to die, and some of us will end up dying of infectious diseases no matter what we do. Sad but true. So the only sensible strategy I can think of is to stay as healthy as possible, and make the most of the time we have here. That means get out, enjoy life, make a living, touch people to make you and them feel better, take your mask off so you can smile and make emotional contact, and go ahead and take vacations somewhere else if you can afford to. If you are sick, by all means stay home and rest and try not to cough on anyone. But pretending that we can “stop” a new flu pandemic is literally insane… do the same thing over and over, etc…. and it doesn’t matter whether it was a natural or manmade one.
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Greg, I agree that it is not useful to have a polar view. Pasteur and Béchamp are but 2 faces of the same dice.
My personal theory is that DNA acts like a microscopic multi-frequency antenna in the centre of the cell and it’s signature micro-field is what engenders molecules to assemble in accordance with the source DNA. I have partially demonstrated that I can do RF destruction of DNA by selecting it’s signature frequency and doing a sort of resonant destruction but it is slow-going and makes zero income. This face of the dice of health sees very few published works and I have too many pressing real-world matters to attend to.
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this is a load of bollocks.
Take the ribosomes out of your cells and see how quickly you die.
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Hi Steve, I agree that there is a lot you can do to boost your immune system, but I also think that there are some pathogens that some individuals–even very healthy people with a strong immune system–will struggle to fight off, resulting in severe illness or death. Sometimes this happens at a population level, such as in America, Australia and the Pacific Islands, when whole populations of healthy natives were suddenly exposed to new pathogens from explorers and colonist. In the early colonial period these native peoples died in their thousands from new infectious diseases contracted from Europeans; diseases that they had very poor immuninity to–in spite of their healthy diet, good levels of fitness and, presumably, their immune systems that were very strong but only worked against the pathogens they were normally exposed to. SARS-CoV-2 is new–it almost certainly was made in the gain of function experiments in the Wuhan Lab–and it’s new enough to mean that there was always going to be some illness and death as world populations go through the process of developing an immune response to it.
[Well said. – Jo]
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Entirely true Rob. But do you think that shutting down the entire world’s economy (and social life) can “fix” this problem? Or are all these misguided and useless half-measures just making things worse? Perhaps we should focus on staying healthy (sunlight, diet, exercise) and then make sure that cheap effective medications are widely available for those whose immune systems cannot cope by themselves? No matter what we do, some people are going to die of infectious diseases, and all of us are going to die of something sooner or later. What kind of life do we want to be living in the meantime?
Remember, the only way to prevent everyone from dying of infectious diseases is for absolutely everyone to live in a plastic bubble for their entire lives. That seems… unlikely. As they say, a ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for. The ocean is dangerous. Get out there and take your chances! It just might be worth it…
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Data, for what it’s worth;
https://joannenova.com.au/2021/05/thursday-open-thread-49-2/#comment-2425981
All data is not equal.
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I have to disagree with you to an extent. We used PCR tests in this state to an extent of probably half the state’s residents. I may have been the only person who actually read the packaging and saw it stated “For research puposes only not for diagnostic puposes”, which got me to research the false results rates.
Yet, use them for diagnoses is just what we did. Once we started mass testing of people without symptoms we got quite an epidemic going. It was an odd epidemic. I knew very few people who had a positive test who developed anything more than the weakest of symptoms, loss of taste or headache mainly, which are easy to suggest. Many with no symptoms at all. Lots of positive cases never infected others even though they lived with roommates or family. In asking how many cycles were being used to return test results no one from the state department of health, to the testing laboratory, to the “health” czars at the university could or would tell me.
When local prevalence of a disease is low, a laboratory test with known false positives can present a problem identifying many false results. The interpretation of these tests is a matter of conditional probability. One needs independent information to make a reasonable interpretation.
I get excited about this topic because I think it led to a lot of misunderstanding and unnecessary panic and absurd rules around here.
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When will the COVID-21 come out?
October? November?
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I had a chuckle when I heard that the cat got out in WA. I had a double take when the security guard who had it was in a household of twelve people. Then our Victorian reporter added that he had also been to his local mosque. That sounds familiar for many Victorians.
The one lesson that Victoria learnt the hard way was allowing the virus into the moslem community with their large families and extended family gatherings.
One criteria for acceptance as a security guard should be that they have limited family and social contact. Maybe not a wokeful requirement but it is protection both ways; for the individual, his family and social contacts as well as the entire community.
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Need to be more careful with the m-word!!
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Oh gosh, our open borders in the US might actually become a problem for us?
Who knew.
Given all the issues that our woke leaders have found trivial compared to the “human right” to
open borders, administering COVID protocols to these poor folks, much less closing the border,
is unthinkable. Generally, some our worst COVID outbreaks correlate with concentrations of undocumented….
for those not familiar with the US wondering about spots like Oregon look at a map of where we require
concentrations of labor intensive seasonal farm work. Our public health is, in many states, manageable for the majority,
but in a nation of 330 million (and some number of uncounted) there are niche populations that clearly live outside the system.
It will be a major social problem if we begin to perceive these groups as a threat beyond their socio-economic status, which we have
generally decided is mostly our fault thus we try to create ways to bring them into our mainstream. Polemics on the right notwithstanding, it can be easily observed that if you are in America, and conform to our traditions in your life….work hard, educate your kids, shop, smile….even those who rail against “illegal immigration” will tacitly accept your presence. The presence of 20-40 million such in this country, a majority of whom are productive parts of the economy, testifies to this.
If you build it, they will come.
A general perception that a deadly variant that reignited COVID came in over the southern border, if that were to happen, would be an event on the order of Pearl Harbor in terms of our cultural perceptions. That’s scarier than the virus.
Watch our statehouses; the governors will see problems on the ground well before Washington is aware of them.
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Sadly the problem (one of one hundred) is that the Governors won’t know a problem variant is over the border until it is already sending too many to hospital. At this point closing the borders won’t help (except to stop newer variants).
If they wait for the data to close the border, it’s too late.
The States should be closing borders already. But that appears to be impossible in the US. If this were Ebola, I suspect they’d find a way.
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Tis said men go mad in mobs and return to sanity one by one..some never .
The effect of 14 months of Dread Covid Doom are starting to show.
When a hunter stampedes and harasses a herd into full terror,the weak start falling dead in their tracks..
Are we at full stampede yet?
For I doubt we can dismiss the effect of the fear porn,state propaganda and official panic.
Tell people they are sick,often enough and they will believe you.
And the annual flus are interesting in how you may or may not be effected by them.
For myself I have noticed I do not get the flu,when I am too busy to tolerate it.
When I have the leisure to suffer it,only then does it strike.
So even though I work with the general public,I seldom get flu..
Naturally vitamin D C and Zinc seem to help as well.
This being the International Year of Lying..The Dread Covid is what done it.
We are all going to die..
Join your government covid cult now.
For only the bureaus can save you..
Of course these are the same people with a decades long record of failure,deceit and destruction…Proven as unable to stop such things as invasive plants and animals,smuggled drugs and other contraband..But have faith..the Dread Covid Virus they will stop..
If only we have faith..As they arrest Christians for praying to their God..
If we only surrender our wealth, our freedoms and our right to make choices..to our benevolent minions,only then can they save us..
Sound familiar?
Government has become a cult.
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Pardon-
Being busy or at leisure will not determine getting flu or not. Nor will lying of others to you or you to yourself affect getting flu.
I do not have your faith or faith in government.
Poetry will not save you from death or dictatorship.
Other comments I like.
00
When you fart, and it stinks, isn’t the virus still in the fog of smell?
Brings into question of being charged for endangering others around with your deadly gas bomb.
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JJ Dog
I think I just killed a whole lift full of people – they looked pretty bad as I got out (relieved)!
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Going by that analogy reused masks would be like tainted underwear getting worse by the hour or day.
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Please not at breakfast.
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There is good research and comment in this thread, thank you.
Antivirals. Note that Pfizer are introducing one for Wuhu.
Politics and science. Inseparable.
Who gets the grants? Whose research is denigrated? Where do the production contracts go? What results are squelched by social media as contrary to guidelines? What researchers are de-platformed? What ideas will never get mention on mass media?
pcr. A brilliant test for the applications that it suits such as described above by Jo. For diagnosis of disease in individuals it is fraudulent. In only one jurisdiction, (to my knowledge) Florida, is the Ct for each test published. Ct can be regarded as gain, amplification. pcr results normally come out as yes or no. Of course they correlate, the Ct is manipulable.
The name for this is- ‘Hans the talking horse’.
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Thanks Lucky. Indeed, Politics and the industry-of-science are inseparable, so let’s talk about Science itself instead. What’s true and what isn’t. Better to keep politics out of that hunt, eh?
And US states should all be transparent with the methods. The PCR test can be abused (like any test). But the map above comes from all over the world. It would take some enormous conspiracy to get every lab in Ghana, Rome, Suriname, Johannesburg, Bangladesh and Tokyo to report fabrications. It’s hard to fake results that fit in a branched tree.
As I said, the PCR Test is predictive in individuals regarding hospitalization, chance of illness, death, and chance of infecting others. It leaves a wake.
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Perhaps but in the case of CAGW that’s how it’s been working.
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PeterS, different topic, and no branched tree of interlocking evidence in CAGW. All they have is a monotonic rise in two variables (temp and CO2) over the period from 1980-1999. The CAGW theory is shot full of holes. So many turning points don’t fit. All of history before 1980 doesn’t fit.
The theory that PCR tests predict something useful most of the time has been tested over and over. It can be misused, but faking ALL the data from PCR would be a vast conspiracy.
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Hi Jo, I did think the main concern with the PCR test was that it was being used as a screening tool for large numbers of asymptomatic people at times when there wasn’t much virus about and then these results were often used to justify UK-style lockdowns–in anticipation of the hospitals being overwhelmed. Under these circumstances various suitably qualified people have been suggesting that the false positive rate could be something like 90% of the total positive test results returned. As you have said, the test will be more useful when only applied to people with symptoms–to sort out which of them have got COVID. Another valid use of the PCR tests appear to be the test positivity rate, which appears to give a useful plot of the shape of the case curve which corrects for the number of tests. Having said that I suppose the people being tested in this scenario would need to be selected using a consistent set of criteria e.g., either all with no symptoms, or all with symptoms.
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I have never said this. ever.
.
Imagine Victoria didn’t test asymptomatic people enough in say — the first week of June 2020. Imagine an asymptomatic case spread the disease in Victoria willy nilly. Imagine that 8 weeks later they had 700 cases a day and needed a three month lockdown.
That’s why we test for asymptomatic cases.
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No. They did not need a lockdown.
What they needed was to put the chief med officer, MadDan and some police chiefs up against a wall (Swedish meaning of course).
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‘It’s hard to fake results that fit in a branched tree‘
Or, in the case of the PCR test you are only testing for specific strains. What test films were sent to these labs? I have previously linked to where the test was for the 1918 Pandemic Influenza and not the seasonal A & B stains. This may explain the absence of flu reporting since week 11 in 2020.
The information on this tree really needs to have details of what was tested for and how many repetitions were used to achieve the positive result. If a virus can mutate due to replication errors than I believe it would be reasonable to expect errors occur within the process in the PCR solution. 2 strands can produce 4.3 billion similar copies at 32 replications. Many Labs were a ‘goto’ choice for our Health bureaucracies as they were reporting %100 positives.
As a general summary on this post: the common cold mutates – hence we do not have a cure for the common cold, yet!
And, this may be a good thing as exposure to these molecules may be the key to herd immunity to the more dangerous pathogens.
My advice, hug, kiss and care for those around you when you are dealing with a bug where greater than %99 of those tested positive are asymptomatic.
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It is hard to understand why, despite calling PCR the ‘Gold Standard’ testing method, the Ct is not specified. The skeptic in me suggests that those who are trying (and succeeding) in driving the people of the world into a panic, like the fact that whenever the panic appears to be waning, by increasing the Ct, and the testing rate, they can create a new ‘wave’. With a high enough Ct, you could probably find the virus in a bottle of hand sanitizer.
The assertion that one of our larger pharmaceutical companies has managed to create a concoction with 95% ‘efficacy’ (whatever that means) to battle a poorly understood new virus, in less than 12 months, sounds too good to be true. Their own
In the climate debate generally, there were many of us who suggested ‘follow the money’, as a means of understanding the state of play. Perhaps this approach may also help to understand the current alphabet soup of truths, half-truths and outright lies through which we are currently wading.
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It has been 1 1/2 years since this was released on an unsuspecting world with the assistance of Tedros Adhonem, the first non medical head of WHO and appointee of President Xi of China. At the very least he should be on trial for crimes against humanity. It’s one thing for the UN to push the false story of Global Warming to upset the distribution of world wealth, quite another to deliberately cause the deaths of millions.
A world without international travel, cruise ships, busy airports as a world of hard borders may persist for many years as the virus varieties dominate in each country as with the varieties of malaria, different drugs for different regions. But this is highly transmissable from human to human, so until a universal solution is found, those long dreamed vacations to exotic places will be impossible. And stopover places like Dubai built on the concept of mass tourist world travel may wither.
Until there is mass defacto innoculation through a common benign strain or a breakthrough in anti virals, international travel may be stopped for a decade. And then there will be different dominant strains in regions. This is especially worrying as the virus is also likely to mutate to a much more deadly strain, as happened in the second wave after 1918. At least this virus has also and finally been stopped in Australia although the strident warnings about a boom if flu is obviously wrong. With the borders closed, this is not possible.
The Chinese government has not thought this through. Belt and Road and much trade will collapse with hard borders. The story of the virus entering on a frozen chook or prawn, let alone a live visitor will become a real fear. And war would devastate countries because of the risk of infection, something I believed ended WW1 in the trenches with H1N1, Spanish flu. Germany could not have lost and so quickly.
Luxurious, fast and unlimited International travel without even innoculation cards will not resume for years and not just for tourists. Chinese exports will be much harder to negotiate and the mass export of Chinese tourists and students around the world has stopped. Even Australian steel is booming as buyers are forced to buy at home, which is helping our companies. And our universities grown fat on free money will shrink to service a much smaller static domestic population. Maybe standards will go up and the fake courses disappear? We can hope. Rich regional universities servicing tiny local populations like James Cook may have to stop spending millions of public money punishing staff like Dr. Ridd. It will hit the power of the ultra rich Vice Chancellors currently on more than $1Million a year.
And Australia which previously registered over 10 million overseas trips by Australians each year will have to get very used to holidaying at home or in a South Pacific bubble. Possibly for a decade. Still, that’s upwards of $60Billion which gets to build Australia and develop our own tourist facilities and regions and attractions. We may have to buy Ayers Rock back.
It will be a very different world. And those resorts in China which specialise in tiny copies of the Eiffel Tower will be as close as many Chinese tourists come to visiting Paris or Venice or London.
One real hardship will be on reunions of Australian families dispersed around the globe by a world of unlimited rapid travel. Reunions will be near impossible and that will be very hard for some. The only path home will be through long isolated quarantine and not in mid city hotels as per our local would be tyrant and dictator, Commissar Daniel Andrews with his unlimited power of arrest outside the judicial system, an attempt which nearly succeeded except for two Green votes in the Upper House. He had a plan with this virus and while he crippled the ANZAC march, 78,000 people were allowed to attend a football game. The Australian army is not welcome in Victoriastan.
The Australian cricketers stuck in India may only come home through quarantine and families split by travel and jobs will remain split for a long time. Possibly our remote territories will become significant quarantine stations, as with Christmas island.
I can see the US borders being slammed shut in the near future as the implications of unfettered mass migration are finally learned and Republicans retake Congress in 18 months while geriatric Joe sits on his throne. Who is actually running the Presidency is yet to be clear, which would give China pause. Things are just not going to plan with this virus.
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Good synopsis. The “grand plan” is pretty obvious. A NWO once the world’s economy collapses making the Great Depression of the 1930s look like a walk in the park. How we get there is a different and more complex story.
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The Great Reset is coming faster from the loss of free speech and fair elections. The economy is already screwed through hidden inflation, and artificially managed low interest rates.
We must keep our eyes on the right targets. Don’t waste time on masks and lockdowns, protest about borders and antivirals and cancel culture and voter ID.
PResident Xi thanks conservatives who protest masks and lockdowns instead of bigger threats and things that can reduce the lockdowns and disease in the first place.
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Jo
Surely there is nothing bigger than ‘lockdowns’ or don’t you view them as in reality House arrests? That is surely the biggest and most frightening attack on civil liberty I have seen in my lifetime. Made even more scary that people have been so terrified by Govt propaganda that they want more of it
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What matters more, that I am asked to stay home unless exercising for an hour a day or shopping or working, OR that I am locked out of the public arena, unable to speak my thoughts for fear of being jailed?
One is a brief inconvenience and something I would do voluntarily anyway to avoid catching a Chinese bioweapon with long term potential health consequences.
The other is like the USSR.
That I could become a prisoner in my own head, unable to speak for fear of the gulag? That friends and family might have to cancel me or suffer consequences too.
That is 1,000,000 times worse. Obviously.
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In the spirit of a free speech, data. So few deaths, most elderly, in nursing homes, in Victoria and last year.
There is more reason to fear our loss of Liberty and the enabling of a surveillance state. We know from history this ends badly.
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Broadie, you think if we just let Covid run, mutate, overwhelm the hospitals, leave 10% with long Covid, and some still unable to work a year later, that will stop the surveillance state? And remember the death rate is only low if everyone gets a hospital bed. Once they run out of beds and oxygen bottles (India) and anaesthetic (Brazil) the mortality rate is so much higher. How does that make people free?
And the next mutation on the way will have what mortality rate? No one knows.
The surveillance state was on the way regardless of Covid. Your mobile phone number is an ID card, tracker (and for some folk, a camera and microphone at home too).
There are people in the US right now who said “All lives matter” who have lost their career and their friends, and are probably on a watch list right now for “domestic terrorism”.
We lucky sods with closed borders though, suffer a tiny loss of freedom compared to friends in the US and UK. We are free to go maskless, go to large parties, football statiums 95% of the year, and free from a nasty illness which may leave scarring in kidneys, heart and brain, some cognitive loss.
If you worry about freedom — fight for fair elections, hard borders, and access to antivirals.
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Absolutely, Jo.
Fair elections.
Hard borders.
Antivirals.
And I might add another.
Free speech. Remove 18c.
30
Thank-you for your considered reply Jo. I left this thread open for my wife to read and I was told in no uncertain terms that “Jo is Right”.
I however have to stay focused on the information that I can rationalize to have some basis in fact or to find support from some source I feel I can trust. Your site is very important to this process. I understand the risks you are taking are extreme, though I remember David? and yourself have lead the followers of your blog in the direction of a safe investment strategy. Coal not Renewables!
And Lest we forget Professor Peter Ridd et al.
Yesterday, I was told by a District Court Judge that we are being well governed by those who fear ‘Climate Change’ and ‘Covid’, for the first time I shut my mouth. Not from fear of the man’s power but out of respect for his family.
We are in a war between:
(1) those who understand history and know that in the imperfect and evolutionary world we live in that individuals generally make the better decisions in the interest of those round them and their environment,
And,
(2) Those who believe they are the one who can make the correct decision if only they have enough power.
At this point in history I believe the second is in ascendancy and has successfully claimed power at every level. Unfortunately due to an inherent flaw (run out of other peoples money)have to initiate ‘The Great Reset’.
The ‘Great Reset’ appears to be an admission by the Progressive Socialists that Marx was correct and you need to go full ‘Stasi’.
The race is on between (1)’We the People’ who are busy defending the US constitution and retaking their School Boards, Precincts, States, Courts etc at great risk and sacrifice bot with a smile and (2)the Fascists with their useful idiots, memebots and paid thugs.
In the meantime, I just have to stay focused on the things I can control. There still remains my three unanswered questions on this ‘Pandemic’:
(1)Why is the University of Washington Virology departments Covid running at ~%5 percent of those tested for Pulmonary infection?
(2)What happened to the seasonal flu in week 11 of 2020?
(3)Why if there are so few deaths listed as Covid in places like China, Vietnam, Cambodia etc aren’t our Chief Medical Officers flying there to see the piles of dead or find out if there is a cure?
40
Thank you Broadie.
Collectivism / Communism always has to resort to force ultimately, because it doesn’t work and people won’t comply voluntarily.
Regarding three questions.
1. I’d need to see the study.
2. The seasonal flu was predictably wiped out in 2020 by a few weeks of lockdown. It is less infectious and with a shorter incubation, so all covid restrictions will stop it spreading even faster than they stop covid.
3. China wouldn’t let us in transparently anyhow, and for all those other nations their success can probably be explained on the phone and we probably already know those answers. Why won’t the media discuss it more? Vietnam did a majorly aggressive track and trace up to three layers of contacts deep. As for Cambodia? Who knows. They probably don’t have good statistics themselves. With a younger fitter population, perhaps the disease hasn’t left a wake bar what would should up on MRIs and Xrays that they can’t afford and haven’t done.
10
Virology Department from what was the initial ‘hotspot’
No it was wiped out across the world at about the same time, lockdown or no lockdown. John Cullen (#iamjohncullen and a guest on Crowdsourcethetruth)has claimed a Nobel Prize for discovering this. He asks, “Who picked up the phone?” (Cullen claims to be an Oracle data base employee who was responsible for the back-end of the data presentation used by the reporting agencies.)
Cullen as I understand it has identified the use of rT PCR as the gold standard to be responsible and believed seasonal flu was excluded from the detectable sequences. He has also identified that the CDC data actually records a large number of deaths from pnuemonia and influenza without Covid.
Look at the Mortality data from the recording sites, there isn’t any sign of a pandemic affecting mortality.
What we do know is the actual deaths are going to increase as those born in the 40s and 50s (%42 increase in birth rate) reach their product life cycle age.
That is correct, the disease hasn’t left a wake bar. There isn’t any evidence of excess deaths you would expect from a pandemic other than the instruction to put any suspicion of Covid19 on a death certificate. A privilege only previously reserved for tobacco. The lock downs however are leaving a trail of destruction and implanting a surveillance system that we know from history will bring a reign of terror from a Totalitarian Tyrant.
[Nearly every nation that has reliable influenza statistics did some kind of lockdown within a month or two. It really is predictable that influenza with a lower Ro was significantly reduced. As far as excess deaths go, we either have to believe that thousands of frontline doctors are liars or deluded, and that the bodies piling up in morges / icerinks / crematoriums are not real, or the excess deaths is real, Covid is real. – Jo]
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Looking at the ‘Cat’ that came out of the bag.
Questions asked of the data.
Plus great music and excellent visuals. I love the ‘bedtime stories’, they are excellent!
00
Defining a person with NO symptoms as a flu “case”, based solely on a test (PCR), known to have many false positives, has never before been done in medical history.
[Not true. It took a 5 second search to find that PCR is used to find asymptomatic cases in other diseases – J]
It would be more logical to assume people with no flu symptoms are not sick — they do not have the flu, and are NOT a risk to others.
[We know through tracing that they do infect others. – Jo]
Rather than speculating on COVID, I’d like to consider the 1918 / 1919 flu epidemic that killed millions of people (not 50 million — that is a myth). One of the deaths was my then young grandmother, when my mother was age 2 –that changed her life,
Recall that the 1918 / 1919 flu had two huge death spikes, and then seemed to disappear.
[It had three spikes, not two. The first was the kindest. The worst was the second. – Jo]
With NO vaccines to prevent it,
With NO medicines to cure it.
I assume it mutated into a milder flu.
[ It subsided after infecting an estimated 500 million people, and went on to cause a century of H1N1 variants thereafter including other pandemics though never as bad.– Jo]
So it is possible COVID would fade away, after two death spikes, even without any vaccine or cure. It is not necessary to always assume the worst for COVID.
Flu strains mutate. That’s why a typical conventional flu vaccine is only 40 to 60 percent effective. Anything is possible, but it’s hard to believe an mRNA medication will be 95% effective, for even one year.
When I heard about COVID in March 2020, I boosted my Vitamin D intake from 5,000 to 10,000 IU a day. Due to a serious allergic reaction to a vaccine when I was a child, at doctor’s orders I have not had another vaccine in over 60 years. Not even for smallpox. But I never discourage others from joining the mRNA medical experiment. I do remind them adverse side effects are about ten times more than a conventional flu vaccine.
COVID is a strange disease. My 70 something friend got COVID in 2020 and only lost his sense of smell for a while. My 50 something niece got a COVID vaccine recently, and became so sick that she couldn’t go to work or the next three days. The censorship of adverse flu shot reactions is suspicious.
There has been far more useful COVID information here, than in the leftist media (almost everywhere else) combined.
[Forgive me from writing inline, but it’s easier to reply quickly rather than take up real estate quoting and responding below. Please Richard, do more research and less speculation. Better to ask a good question. – Jo]
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Richard
‘My 50 something niece got a COVID vaccine recently, and became so sick that she couldn’t go to work or the next three days. The censorship of adverse flu shot reactions is suspicious.’
Censorship? How would that be achieved in a free society?
Here in the UK there have been many tens of millions of vaccinations. There is a very active press at national and local media, a very active social media, a very active network of people who know many other people who talk about things happening in their lives or that of friends and relatives..
Our area has had a very high level of shots, first and second.
There is a common adverse reaction of sore arms, others say they have felt a bit under the weather for a day or two. I think we would have heard if there had been mass censorship hiding serious problems on a large scale
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Tony B.
When I first read your words
“Censorship? How would that be achieved in a free society?”, I thought that was satire. But maybe you believe that.
Since you are here at this website, you must realize that the best feature of this website, besides Ms. Nova scolding me, is information about climate change, the US election and COVID that is NOT found in many other places.
Certainly not found in the leftist-biased press, which is at least 95% of all media sources here in the US.
The adverse reactions to any vaccines are rarely reported — actual numbers reported are estimated to be 1% to 10% of all adverse reactions.
I don’t care about sore arms.
The serious adverse reactions, including deaths, reported for the new COVID medications so far, are about 10 times higher per injected patient, than ordinary influenza vaccines.
That is a fact.
I didn’t mention in my earlier comment that my brother in law was also sick — no energy to do anything for three days, right after his vaccine — both my bother in law and niece stayed home for three days after their shots, until they felt better, and never reported their side effects to any doctors.
Between December 14, 2020 and April 23, 2021, there were an unusually high 3,544 deaths reported to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System [VAERS], along with 12,619 serious injuries.
There are 20 to 30 deaths reported every year to VAERS related to the flu shot. That’s with 195 million receiving flu shots.
Compare that to the COVID shot, which resulted in 2,602 reported deaths with the first 77 million vaccinations.
It will take many months to investigate the death reports, but the number of reported deaths is unprecedented.
That’s a highest ratio of reported deaths to vaccinations for any vaccine in U.S. history, and yet no major media outlet seems interested.
The US adverse effects database is not set up for the average person to get a brief summary:
https://vaers.hhs.gov/
Here in the US, Facebook, Twitter and Google bragged about how they used forms of censorship to help Biden win the election. The Hunter Biden laptop story was buried. Time magazine wrote an article about this subject, proud that this helped defeat Trump !
No censorship?
You must be kidding?
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““Censorship? How would that be achieved in a free society?”, I thought that was satire. But maybe you believe that.
Since you are here at this website, you must realize that the best feature of this website, besides Ms. Nova scolding me, is information about climate change, the US election and COVID that is NOT found in many other places.”
Richard, I am not talking about elections I am talking about a disease within the community whereby people would be one of those affected or it would be one of their family, relatives or friends. Deaths are currently below average here and fortunately places of burial are relatively quiet, hospitals are quiet, even doctors are willing to talk to you.
There is no sign whatsoever of any excess of anything except such things as sore arms or people under the weather for a day or two. There is very littler else to talk about and if after effects were many and serious it is difficult to see where the evidence is.
02
tony b
I was talking about adverse reaction to COVID medications. Nothing else. And I don’t care about sore arms or people being tired for a day. That’s common for flu vaccines.
The number of reported severe adverse reactions to COVID medications, including deaths, per injection, here in the United States, is unprecedented.
This subject was discussed last night, after my comment, on the Tucker Carlson show on Fox News at 8pm EST, using the same government database that I used.
Among many other facts Tucker reported was that the number of adverse reactions reported from the COVID medications was so large, it exceeded all adverse reactions reported, for all vaccinations, over a 15 year period, which I believe he said was 1997 to 2012.
It was just by chance that I later found out my niece was very sick for three days after her vaccine, and my brother in law was exhausted for three days, and could barely get out of bed.
I only found out those facts by asking them directly if they had side effects.
They did not volunteer the information to me for over a month, or go to doctors, or get their reactions added to any adverse reaction database.
Tucker Carlson also mentioned that a swine flu vaccine was halted after only a small number of deaths were reported (he may have said 25) — so once again it seems the new COVID vaccines are being regulated differently than flu vaccines in the past.[snip off topic]
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Richard, here is a link that simplifies searching the VAERS data given by your link.
https://www.openvaers.com/covid-data
I will note that I am most concerned about vaccination of youth. Fortunately, their rate of serious illness and death is very low. Adverse vaccination reactions are also very low in the age group (0-17 years), but I find that at this point, death from the disease and death from vaccination occur at a rate on the order of 10 per million.
Unfortunately, each vaccination represents an opportunity for an adverse effect, which is clearly a disadvantage for 2 dose vaccines.
For older age groups, vaccination adverse effects occur less frequently. As many have pointed out, long term effects cannot be known at this time. That is a major reason why vaccination of youth should be done more cautiously. Sadly, in the U.S. at least, it appears likely that some youth will have survived the disease only to die needlessly from vaccination. Again, this likely will be a small number. Of the ~22,000,000 youth in this age group, perhaps 500 to 700 may die from the vaccine if all are vaccinated.
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Richard, (again I’m late to this discussion – but better late than never); you say:
But then you tell us :
That was on Tucker Carlson’s show.
I watched it. I heard it. I read the transcript. It was not censored.
It’s here:
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/tucker-carlson-shatters-media-silence-why-are-thousands-of-people-dying-from-covid-vaccine/
Vid and written transcript.
Where’s the censorship?
00
Regarding the Spanish Flu of 1918 / 1919.
There were several attempts at flu vaccines back then, although failures in the vaccine industry strangely don’t seem to make the headlines as much as success. They concluded at the time that influenza was caused by bacteria and they did come up with a vaccine based on that starting point … which was rather ineffective.
https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/blog/vaccine-development-spanish-flu
There were also many doctors at the time prescribing Aspirin to cure the flu … since Aspirin was the fix everything wonder drug popular in its day.
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Jo Nova:
Please do more careful reading of my comments before criticizing correct statements. You seem to enjoy “correcting” me, but it would be useful for you to be correct first ! I don’t appreciate being criticized in public, for correct statements, with no chance to defend myself.
[And I don’t enjoy wasting time correcting people who make declarative statements about things they haven’t done a 2 second search OK? – Jo]
“flu”
I said a “case” of flu was not diagnosed solely with a test, and no symptoms, prior to 2020.
That is a fact.
[Still timewasting. So do a two second search on asymptomatic cases of influenza instead. Whatever. See https://jcm.asm.org/content/57/1/e00716-18 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11136770/ and https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/64/6/736/2733100 etc etc etc etc etc x 100 . It was a silly claim, easily proved wrong. If your point is that PCR isn’t or can’t be used to show an asymptomatic infection. Then it’s wrong. A fact. If you mean that people didn’t come home from the Doctor with certificates saying they had an asymptomatic infection, who cares? -Jo]
Your criticism can not change a fact.
.
.
PCR test:
I said rather than trusting a PCR test for COVID for a patient with no symptoms
(done with an excessive 30 to 40 cycle threshold (Ct) values typically in the US),
it would be more logical to assume a patient with no symptoms was not sick.
[So you argue that asymptomatic people are “not sick”. “Congrats”. We agree! – Jo]
While that assumption might miss a few COVID infections, the PCR tests here with a Ct of 30 to 40 caused too many false positives.
[Define your terms. What does “too many” mean. How was that bad? If we don’t know who the superspreaders are, doesn’t it matter? And if we don’t know who is a true asymptomatic case and who is a presymptomatic case, then we have to treat them all the same. And then there is that reference showing asymptomatic people infect others 1/3.8 as often as symptomatic people. You had no reply. It’s not an honest conversation if I provide detailed answers and you just repeat your mistake again. – Jo]
Proof of the danger of people with positive PCR tests, and NO flu symptoms, spreading COVID, is not conclusive as you seem to think. Nothing about COVID is conclusive.
[ Yet you make 100% conclusive statements so often? Glad to see you are coming around to my POV. 🙂 When you get more time, perhaps read my past replies and come up with arguments against them instead of just saying “it’s not conclusive” with nothing else. – Jo]
.
.
Two huge 1918 / 1919 flu death spikes:
There WERE two huge global death spikes
(#2 and #3) and two mild death spikes (#1 and #4).
I was correct.
You said three spikes, and you were wrong, unless you are referring to a specific nation, rather than the whole world.
[ Whole world. CDC ref. Here’s the graph. Count the spikes. Your apology is accepted. Just stop digging. OK? It’s a semantic timewaster.
Since there were no more huge death spikes after those two, people at the time considered the disease to have disappeared. If you want to argue about my words “seemed to disappear”, a subjective view of the Spanish Flu, I’ll give you that one.
But I won’t back down on the others.
[ Please post more carefully in shorter, more accurate comments. Don’t dilute threads with unresearched declarations. Thanks. – Jo]
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Ms. Nova:
My last comment here — you can celebrate tonight.
In Fall 2020 my doctor, in practice for 50 years, was complaining to me about reporting COVID infections from a PCR test when the patient had no symptoms at all.
He felt the test was inaccurate.
A second doctor confirmed that opinion.
I researched how COVID “cases” were reported and said in my comment that in the past flu “cases” were not defined simply by a test with no symptoms.
You attacked me like a junkyard dog, claiming PCR tests were used for other diseases with no symptoms. Then you insulted me. My comment had nothing to do with other diseases, just COVID versus other flu strains in the past. I was correct. You so called “fact check” was a red herring logical fallacy And you were rude.
I wrote there were two huge death spiked back in 1918 1919 because that was a fact. You attacked by claiming three spikes. There WERE two huge death spikes. The number of spikes was not important to my main point — the 1918 1919 virus must have mutated into a milder strain. But you attacked the minor detail anyway.
I couldn’t find my source article, so I looked at Wikipedia, and this is what they had:
“The Spanish flu, also known as the 1918 influenza pandemic, was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. Lasting from February 1918 to April 1920, it infected 500 million people – about a third of the world’s population at the time – in four successive waves.”
You may trust the CDC — I don’t
You may not trust Wikipedia — I often don’t, but on this subject I do.
You were using a devious form of censorship — the “fact check” based on false facts, or misinterpreting what I said. Just like the New York Times and Washington Post often do.
You print what I had to say — seeming to promote free speech — and then disrupt free speech by character attacking in bold blue ink to discredit me.
I have never seen you do this with anyone else over several years. And you just did it again.
I was surprised you published my reply, but you ruined it with more misinterpretation of what I wrote, and incorrect ‘fact checking’.
As I result, this will be my last comment on this website, and I will delete it from my list of 50 websites that I check every day.
You are a conservative who is intolerant of dissent. Long comments I write that agree with you get published in full, and get lots of thumbs up. For example, my comment (#3) to the article “Court Rules Germany Needs … ” got 41 thumbs up and zero thumbs down.
… but my comments that disagree sometimes never show up at all. That’s an acceptable form of censorship — it’s your website.
But misinterpretation of comments, inaccurate fact checking, and uncalled for personal insults, loudly inserted in bold blue type within my comment, are unnecessary, excessive censorship.
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My apologies for being so blunt. I hoped you would write more carefully.
The blue reply style is an old one from the early climate wars on this blog. It’s quicker when I am doing so many replies.
I wish you good luck. Thanks for your comments on climate change where you’ve made some valuable points.
You’re welcome back if you choose to. – Jo
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Jo, Interestingly Anthony Fauci researched the “Spanish Flu ‘ and wrote a paper on it. Many autopsies were carried out and from the autopsies it was found that a significant number of deaths were caused by bacterial infections in the lungs , not the virus. When Fauci said masks were not necessary on March 8th he knew from from his own research that masks were potentially lethal. However just three days later on March 11th he testified before congress that covid 19 -” would be ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu.” That was the day America was masked up and locked down.
The question that is ignored – is what happened in three days to change his mind?
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Chris, when Fauci said masks were not necessary they were facing a crisis where they were running out of masks in hospitals. He lied to the public so they didn’t run out and buy all the spare masks up.
Doctors and nurses were discussing the ethics at the time of whether they had to turn up to hospitals which could not provide basic PPE. Doctors don’t want to work without masks.
Fauci is culpable. He should have made sure the USA had enough masks, good supply lines, and even pre-prepared the public to have a few in case of a pandemic. His preparation — his pandemic plan was a failure.
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I wonder what you-all think of Australian citizens being banned from returning from India. Surely that’s a violation of their rights.
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Based on the belief that we are in a state of emergency (questionable, but that’s the official position right now) and if you accept the genuine requirement that Australians in Australia must accept severe lifestyle restrictions, including business closures, being unable to travel to see relatives, weddings and funerals effectively banned, and even with police beating up old ladies for sitting on park benches … if you accept all that then imposing some border controls is pretty darn small in the scheme of things.
All of this is supposedly temporary, and hey it was only going to be two weeks to flatten the curve … yes I’m going to keep reminding people about that no matter how annoying it might be.
Now we might get to the question of equal treatment. Back in 2020 Europe was a lot worse than India is right now, and Australians were allowed to get back from Europe, although only via long stays in quarantine. It seems odd to arbitrarily change the rules and treat India differently, but the government response has been consistently inconsistent right through this, and I guess we still have a legal system, anyone can try to claim the “Rights” … whatever that still means I’m not sure. Can’t see why those people in India have more or less claim than any other Australian.
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All sensible and the solution is as you hinted pretty obvious. Quarantine and test all Australian citizens upon arrival. Expensive but so what? We’ve already spent far more than we can afford so a little extra is not even going to make a difference. In a word war situation we would do the same but instead of testing for viruses we would be testing for spies. Perhaps we should do that too.
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There will be periodic outbreaks and we must be on our guard, as in wartime.
‘NSW Health said traces of the virus have also been found in the Marrickville Sewage Network that covers a number of inner-west suburbs.’ (SMH)
I’m warming to the idea of concentration camps in the Simpson desert.
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Tel, Re Europe versus India, I suspect the new rapid spread of the Indian variant is much worse than the European ones. It keeps escaping even our one year tested quarantine. Two leaks in WA in a month? And so many people on flights getting infected apparently as they fly.
I suspect the Indian variant is more aerosol spread, and that the government has realized that normal hotel quarantine won’t work.
As I said, I want to offer those people something — tents in the hot dry pilbara is harsh, but better than nothing at all. I think it could be built fast and made secure enough to stop the spread. I fear however that we can’t stop people catching a highly infectious aerosol on planes without goggles and respirators. But I don’t know if it is that bad. Data…. we need that data.
31
Army Engineers could knock up three star accommodation in fairly isolated places, attached to an airstrip. People would be segregated, depending on where they came from and then settled into separate villages. Giving it the appearance of a refugee camp, free of charge.
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I thought camps in the desert should have been done from the start.
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Statistics!
You can search “EuroMoMo” which is short for European Mortality Monitoring and it gives charts of deaths per week, broken down in various ways. Using the “All Deaths” category and looking at the spike in March 2020 we can see the following:
* Last week of 2019 for reference — 77555 deaths per week total.
* 14th week of 2020 and peak of COIVD — 109549 deaths per week total.
Presuming the difference is caused by COVID, that makes a peak of 31994 COVID deaths per week at the height of the first wave in Europe.
OK, India stats are here … https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/india
Presuming they count correctly, the larger and sharper second wave in India makes around 4000 deaths per day peak, which would be 28000 deaths per week. That’s fairly comparable to Europe. However there’s always other factors involved: Europe on the whole has an older population than India, while India has a larger total population than Europe.
We could look at how fast the spike came up, that would be approx five weeks from base to peak in both second-wave India and first-wave Europe … not a whole lot different. I’m presuming that India has peaked, although we don’t know that for sure.
All things considered, what’s happening now in India is remarkably close to what happened March and April 2020 in Europe. It’s easy to understand why Europe got hit hard and fast, given the element of surprise, when they had no idea what was going on … the strange question is why India is getting hit a year late after bringing it under control relatively easily in 2020.
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This is what concerns me Tel. The deaths in the EU were due to docs not understanding the way to treat Covid and using Flu techniques. They were also caused by super low Vitamin D levels in late winter Europe and an old population.
The wave in India is partly due to hospitals being overwhelmed. While Indians may not be so short of Vitamin D they are probably suffering other major deficiencies due ot poverty and a low meat diet — Eg Zinc, B12. Both of which are commonly found in meat and both of which appear to be very important in Covid.
But it may also be due to the new variants being more deadly. So the questions are:
1. Is this mutant more deadly in countries with better healthcare?
2. Can we slow the spread with the same techniques, or is this one more aerosol borne, which makes it so much harder to stop.
3. Is this still a cluster spreading disease.? If only 20% were superspreaders before, but 30% are superspreaders with the new variant, that alone will cause a big increase in R0.
4. Will current vaccines offer as much protection?
Thanks to London, Greece, South Korea and parts of the US for offering themselves as test cases to find out these answers. We appreciate your sacrifice. And we hope you get lucky, and all the answers above mean this will not be a disaster in the West.
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The inconvenience of the few outweighs the safety of the many.
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“Surely that’s a violation of their rights.”
This whole 14 days to flatten the curve has been a violation of all our rights. Then there is the cricketers, they are coming home, because they have more rights then us plebs.
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Rod
Being a Brit I do think that it is a violation of rights that your cricketers (and others) can’t return to Oz. Albeit with watertight quarantine arrangements. However I see the vote on your post was 6 to 3 and wondered on what grounds half the respondees did NOT think it was a violation of rights?
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I initially had the impression that ban was for the foreseeable future. It then became – or was originally – for just two weeks while the Commonwealth gov. reviewed for a better remedy. I was against the rights of Australians to return home being blocked, especially when they were otherwise trapped in a country with limited ability to vaccinate or treat COVID-19. That is where the argument was to be had. If it was just for two weeks, to prepare for their return, then, no argument. Their rights were subjugated to the fact that governments were using inadequate facilities for quarantining and they were, and still are, blind to the fact they were actually responsible for spreading the virus to many so closseted, or into the community itself via staff.
It’s interesting that the idea of using made-for-holidays hotels was ever considered as reasonable for quarantining. It seems there are cost savings to governments using ready made, underutilised,
uneducated in infectious disease overseeing staff, cross-infection guaranteeing structures. What happened to the infectious disease experts that it seems something other than healthcare had them supporting these arrangements? They all have the history of Legionnaire’s disease as a template for how viruses have spread through airconditioning as recent history!
Strangely, governments have stuck with this system and continue to do so. Cerebral fallout seems to inflict so many people who enter politics. They can’t seem to learn from the obvious. Maybe that’s why they fall into so many ludicrous, financially devastating contracts like building submarines over 40 years when by any definition they’ll at least be obsolete, or climate change where their imperial nature believes they determine science, and the climate, and force everyone to follow them into the pits for destroyed Western national economies.
It would seem at least, and at last, the Federal government has realised it has to utilise constructed-for-purpose buildings – and hoopefully everything else that goes with that – to quarantine in the future. The States are still clinging to their hotels, so the Commonwealth, hopefully having seen the light and the essential need for change, will make full use of the two weeks to start getting other fit-for-use facilities in isolated places prepared to take returning Australians from hell holes they are stuck in so they get properly quarantined and looked after if infected. As for the States and their hotel experience histories, to which they seem blind, who here would like to get off a plane and be plonked into one of those hotels, especially when so many incoming seem to be infected. You might as well sleep in the same room.
10
Leg.Disease ain’t viral, I know, but the history of airconditioning holds.
00
The legionnaires disease is from the cooling towers in buildings aspirating the vector into the environment. It infects people outside the building generally and inside if the mist gets drawn into an air intake.
10
Sorry. By “them” in “used to destroy them” I meant bacteria, cancer cells, etc. The three people listed supposedly used the resonance method to cure cancer in particular. As your post suggests that the covid sitation may be getting bad, I posted this as another angle on how to potentially treat what may be otherwise a runaway bad situation. Though alternative (though well founded) thinking is generally what your site is about, it’s fair of you to see my post as a ‘tad’ tangental. Feel free to discard if you like. No worries.
00
Politicians set policy and border restrictions, not the World Health Organisation or Anthony Fauci. Advisors can only recommend. Blame Trump, Bolsanaro, Modi et. al. and their respective governments.
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Incomplete. Governments use the advice of “specialists” to base their decisions to apply border restrictions. If anyone is to blame, it’s the so called specialists first then the politicians for falling for their nonsense. We need to remember that by and large politicians are pretty dumb so they will jump on board any advice that sounds good even if it’s wrong. The CAGW saga is a classic example.
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Hard borders are best, Australian’s politicians and medical specialists have been exemplary. Simon is correct, many world leaders behaved poorly under fire.
27
Governments rarely use or misuse the advice and data supplied by specialists and base their decisions to apply border restrictions on ideology and expediency. And then blame the experts for the deaths.
30
Its complex, states have control over medical matters, but Australia under Morrison performed well in organising a national approach.
I support Albo’s proposal for regional quarantine hubs in every State and Territory, this pandemic may take a few years to quell.
01
This piece from Nicholas Wade, who covered science for the New York Times for 30 years, is a must read – it lays out in terrific detail the overwhelming evidence that sarscov2 is the product of a Chinese lab accident:
“Three people working at BSL3 lab at the institute fell sick within a week of each other with severe symptoms that required hospitalisation.
This was “the first known cluster” that we’re aware of, of victims of what we believe to be covid-19.”
Origins of Covid – Following the clues
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038
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To the point,in conflict with passport?
https://www.rebelnews.com/aussies_threatened_with_jail_if_they_return_home_because_of_coronavirus?utm_campaign=ay_indiaban_5_4_21&utm_medium=email&utm_source=therebel
00
Perhaps a new kind of vaccine? Create antibodies against a non mutating Corona virus surface antigen?
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/18/e2025622118
00
The strains of COVID-19 in Australia CAN’T kill healthy people under 60. Probably can’t kill most healthy people under 80, and only a few more older than that by which time it DOESN’T MATTER because old people are supposed to die of something like COVID, or influenza, or community acquired pneumonia, or UTI, or AMI, or…… ESPECIALLY if they’re bed bound and demented!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! JC!…..
COVID-19 CAN’T BE ERADICATED by active measures. To try is foolish, economic suicide akin to spending $1.5 trillion to stop any degree of natural warming.
Anti-viral medication is the long term answer because viruses aren’t going anywhere and we have very little to use at present.
The govt MUST remove the ban on HCQ it is patently IMMORAL. Ivermectin, zinc, azithromycin should be freely available for people to try at their own risk. Just like the vaccines are. NO DIFFERENCE.
This “pandemic” is being milked for all it’s worth by every amoral company and individual on the planet, and that includes Pfizer et al, govt and politicians, globalists. God.
As for India, of the approx 28000 deaths so far this year, only 2% are allegedly due to COVID-19. I say allegedly because ALL of the data from ALL over the world conflates dying with and dying from (I know all about morbidity/ mortality and death reporting). And India isn’t even top of the list. Mass hysteria and fear. Keeps people compliant. “Oooohh, you might die… best do as we say”.
What a farce.
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Thank you for that remarkable piece of sanity: chock full of logical observations and conclusions.
Thanks again.
KK
10
I only wish he’d used some bold and underlining. I found it a bit flat.
10
If, as is asserted, it is all the UN WHO’s fault, where does that leave the USA, who stopped contributing, and claimed that it was no big deal (Trump Feb 2020).
And since the cat (or virus) is out of the bag, should the response now be to take every step to make the antivirals, distribute them and immunise everyone as quickly has possible?
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That’s the plan; to vaccinate everyone; with lots of different vaccines. Whether we reach that draconian point only time will tell. I for one refuse to be vaccinated with several if not dozens of vaccines. I will wait for a long time before I even contemplate taking one let alone many. In any case I smell a rat, and it’s not dead yet – just huge and spreading it’s “outputs” everywhere.
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🙂 🙂
12
Sorry Keith, no idea how I did that
10
Free riders. – a bit of hypocrisy for your 3?
16
Living out in the regions I won’t be taking the vaccine.
41
Nor I. Thats my advantage of not being a city sewer rat and I’ll take it thanks.
20
JO
“The PCR test is useful” you say. And yes it is, when used at the correct no of cycles.
Its clear that this has not been the case in nearly all countries and for nearly all the time that the virus has been circulating. Excessive cycles has been the norm and the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the test results are highly questionable and almost certainly contain large nos of false positives particularly when done in countries with large nos who have been infected and recovered. When the WHO came out early this year and recommended a lower no of cycles we had the number of infections (to call them cases is completely incorrect) fall hugely.
We have been conned and lied to. We continue to be lied to regarding covid and have our govt and others basically do not follow the latest research. If they did the masks would have been gone long ago, HCQ + zinc and Ivermectin would be in widespread use and lockdowns would never have been implemented. And we have brand new treatments being pushed when they have not gone through the full testing protocol, and we have reputable scientists raising serious concerns about potential severe long term issues.
Your claim that “restrictions work” is fanciful in the extreme if we look at lockdowns and their catastrophic impacts – their death toll will exceed covid by a large margin. A recent study by authors from Duke University, Harvard and Johns Hopkins calculated that over the next 20 years the US would have 1.3 million more deaths BECAUSE OF the idiotic lockdown measures introduced by many US states. Compare that to the covid count, once we remove the excessive counting, and we have many times more people dying or going to die due to lockdowns.
The issue here is not covid, its the idiotic and anti science based responses of many world govts. Here in Australia we have spent more per capita than any others, and are yet to actually face covid. Where is the plan? When will we open up? What will happen when people start dying here of covid in even small numbers – will we be rational or will the hysteria take over and we lockdown and further restrict? Or will we acknowledge that we have to move forward and that the path of eradication and endless restriction is a fools errand? I would be betting on hysteria unfortunately…
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Prophet of Boom.
Yes, we’ve been lied to about antivirals. We are sold non stop one sided propaganda about vaccines, which may be useful, but are riskier and more expensive than the antivirals which should be our primary approach. And we were lied to about borders last Feb, and inexplicably people who love freedom didn’t complain or even mention “the borders”. The biggest, cheapest, best method of stopping bioweapons was tossed out the window. The Conservatives were easily distracted.
On the restrictions being “fanciful”. No. Not so. The evidence is all over the graphs in the post. It’s also in the excess deaths graphs. Excess deaths peak with the virus, not with the lockdowns. And the data on lockdown deaths is not there yet and may never be there. It’s speculation. Perhaps. Perhaps not.
If lockdowns will cause more deaths than Covid, the solution is “Close The Borders” — not to increase Covid deaths.
10
“should the response now be to take every step to make the antivirals, distribute them and immunise everyone as quickly has possible?”
Trump was ridiculed in Sept 2020 for saying a vaccine will be ready before end of year with Operating Warp Speed, rolled out Nov 2020 but doubted on its safety/performance, had 100 million doses to give but was again restricted by Democrat politicians, Governors and interests, Feb 2021 Biden claims no vaccination programs existed when taking office, March 2021 Biden takes full credit for the vaccination program the Trump administration developed and began delivering in 2020
If that clown had managed to do the same even I would give him credit for it, but you no cause orange man bad.
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Reply to #18.
00
The USA is not the world, and until the world reaches herd immunity, everyone, and in particular the free riders, is at risk
06
The “free riders don’t care”
Have you had your poison?
40
SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes the disease COVID-19 in some but not all people who are infected by this virus.
So-called COVID-19 “vaccines” can reduce the number of people who show signs of COVID-19 but do not prevent you being infected by the virus or from transmitting the virus to others.
The original SARS-CoV-2 virus was very age-dependent as to those infected who then developed the symptoms of COVID-19.
More information is required on how the new variants of SARS-CoV-2 alter the age-dependent profile of developing the symptoms of COVID-19.
All vaccines have a risk-benefit trade-off and it is unethical to expose healthy people to new experimental vaccines when they have a very low risk of developing the symptoms of COVID-19.
To date, young healthy people are more at risk of the seasonal flu than COVID-19.
It is likely than some people apart from their age may also have a generic predisposition to developing COVID-19 once infected – more research is required on this.
The response to the pandemic is being driven more by politics than by medical prudence – this should concern everyone.
More people are now dying in Australia from experimental COVID-19 “vaccines’ than from COVID-19 itself.
That is being ignored by the Main Stream Media and the political class.
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More people are now dying in Australia from experimental COVID-19 “vaccines’ than from COVID-19 itself.
Exactly. Good point. But suddenly these deaths and complications are just a small statistic. Imagine taking it and dying knowing no one really cares.
40
Just two points to make; Firstly, it is pretty well documented, and affirmed by the guy who actually designed the PCR test, that the PCR test is not a diagnostic tool, was never designed as such, and should not be used for the purpose because it is too non-specific. It’s a bit like trying to decipher a person’s race or sex with a tool that is designed only to reveal that the subject is human and not animal. In which case all the data revealed in the “tree” diagram is very suspect. In fact, any data revealed by the PCR test relating to Wuflu is suspect, with it at times giving up to 90% false positives.
Secondly, it’s a strange irony that all those variants are nominated as having a race or region as their name, but where is the China variant? It is simply referred to as Covid 19 because it’s racist to ascribe it being of Chinese origin and it might offend the CCP and its people.
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I have jumped on this so many times it is not funny. Here is what I wrote last time. I was grumpy.
also everything else you wrote is unscientific garbage.
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That is your standard, attack the messenger.
Exactly the same standard of character assignation that is applied to climate scientists that go against the UN WMO, governments as is applied to Medical professionals who go against the UN Who, Governments.
Same people in white jackets created a $Trillion climate industry have now created the $Trillion COVID industry, do not believe the former, do not believe the latter.
Lies damned lies and experts.
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Assassination, not assignation
10
Sorry but Rick used Mullis as an expert so I am free to critque his assertion and I pointed out that he actually isn’t and never was. Mullis came up with a concept and that was it. He didn’t even think of using thermophiles for his polymerase. He had no expertise in the area in which Rick is using him as an authority.
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Your doing that a lot lately, you are better than that. I am the one that you originally replied to with that quote.
Its a wiki link, so there is that, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis
“It is important to note that detecting viral material by PCR does not indicate that the virus is fully intact and infectious, i.e. able to cause infection in other people. The isolation of infectious virus from positive individuals requires virus culture methods. These methods can only be conducted in laboratories with specialist containment facilities and are time consuming and complex.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-pcr-idUSKBN24420X
Are all these Labs actually culturing this so called virus, India is getting 500,000 positives a day, so I be guessing no.
Positive results do not rule out bacterial infection or co-infection with other viruses. The agent detected may not be the definite cause of disease. Laboratories within the United States and its territories are required to report all results to the appropriate public health authorities.
This test has not been FDA cleared or approved; the test has been authorized by FDA under an Emergency Use 5
Authorization (EUA) for use in laboratories designated by Quest Diagnostics that are also certified under CLIA, and meet
the requirements to perform high complexity tests.
https://www.fda.gov/media/136231/download
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Wasn’t Mullis talking about HIV diagnosis? It’s a retrovirus, not a coronvirus.
10
The thing about Mullis is that you can get a quote about anything.
00
Yes, he was… Another scam industry that’s been flying for decades…his words.
20
My point is that detecting retroviruses is an entirely different thing to detecting normal RNA viruses. Retroviruses embed themselves in our own DNA. So it’s misleading to quote Mullins on an entirely different class of viruses. Why won’t the medical researchers get into this conversation and correct these issues?
It’s like the West is stuck in two different conversations and both halves need to listen to the other…
00
Why doesn’t this virus disappear like the ones before it – bird flu, swine flu, etc ?
Genuine question, not political.
10
The big difference is that Covid is a designer virus and it broke out in a heavily populated area.
21
Those were both influenza-
this is one factor https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2014/the-reason-for-the-season-why-flu-strikes-in-winter/
another is transmissibility. Bird flu is an avian form of influenza and the virus, so far,does not pass from human to human well/at all
00
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/comparing-covid-19-with-previous-pandemics#Severe-acute-respiratory-syndrome
As the person above says, transmissibility. Seems SARS was the most similar to this one and it was stopped by tracing people infected. We were hopeless at this and we let it out of the bag , WHO telling us not to stop flights from China. Too late.
Clearly travel is the big spreader.
11
SARS was very deadly, weakly transmissible and only infectious when disease was apparent. With no cases with low or no symptoms, SARS could not spread once sick people were isolated.
20
SARS was not spread asymptomatically. That was a big difference.
11
I think I wrote the same, “only infectious when disease was apparent”?
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Yes. GeeAye. I was agreeing with you. Thanks for adding an informed perspective to the discussion.
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Sorry for jumping on you. I was getting grumpy for some reason.
10
My goodness some of you people go on and on.
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And on.
00
Covid comments
https://redpowerphotos.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/monthly_2021_05/image.png.21e71a671a610ad83c16bc34c8f99560.png
00
I’ve just jumped in here, so I might have missed it being mentioned, but The Weekend Australian 24/4, had an large article on an Australian antiviral nasal spray, that was being taken up, in Europe? Four sprays a day were supposed to stop covid getting a bridge head. Worked very well.
50
Australia use 35-45 cycles according to the Government
A PCR reaction amplifies a highly specific target region of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Each amplification
reaction is known as a cycle, and usually 35-45 cycles are undertaken. The Ct value of a reaction is the
cycle number when the fluorescence of a PCR product can be detected above the background signal
(Figure 1). Whilst extending the number of cycles beyond 40 may increase the sensitivity of the assay, it
may also increase the risk of false positivity due to non-specific amplification. This may be identified by
assessing the Ct value (usually high), shape of the amplification curve and/or performing a melt curve
analysis.
https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2020/07/phln-guidance-on-nucleic-acid-test-result-interpretation-for-sars-cov-2.pdf
https://www.sabhlokcity.com/2020/11/pcr-testing-how-many-cycles-are-used-in-australia/
Dr Fauchi himself has stated that over 35 cycles is useless as virtually everyone will be positive to something.
10.2% of all cause mortality in India is respiratory illness
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-leading-causes-of-death-in-india.html
Population The current population of India is 1,391,382,919 as of Wednesday, May 5, 2021, based on Worldometer elaboration of the latest United Nations data. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/india-population/
Average life expectancy is 70 years for females, 68 for males.
Contrary to all assumptions that deaths in the State would have gone up in 2020 due to the impact of COVID-19, the absolute number of deaths went down by 11.1% in comparison with 2019.https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/all-cause-mortality-drops-during-pandemic-year/article33721469.ece
April 22, 2021 at 4:09 am
“My comments about corruption in US labs relate to claims that some use 40 cycles to find a positive test. I have not pursued that, as I assume many other people are. If they do 40 cycles +, I assume it is corruption. It could be incompetence.”
JoNova
“Testing, especially PCR testing, is the basis for the entire house of cards of Covid restrictions that are wreaking havoc worldwide. From testing comes case numbers. From case numbers come the ‘R number,’ the rate at which a carrier infects others. From the ‘dreaded’ R number comes the lockdowns and the restrictions, such as England’s new and baffling tiered restrictions that come into force next week.
The daily barrage of statistics is familiar to us all by this point, but as time goes on the evidence that something may be deeply amiss with the whole foundation of our reaction to this pandemic – the testing regime – continues to mount.”
A recent study done by Stanford University, that masks are not beneficial but dangerous.
https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0306987720333028?token=A3E7D8CD2B51A6CA0BE5F181C6E5E12FD0152B54F1305C81C9F0C89781B9B8E028260E437776CD9826B21CDF259CEBAF&originRegion=us-east-1&originCreation=20210411061921
More fear porn, time to ramp it up as cold season approaches.
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Your final reference has a note that the paper has been retracted. The reasons for the retraction read exactly like the problems with the very pro-mask Liu et al in the Lancet from last June, which people have suggested be retracted, but which is still being used to promote the effectiveness of masks. The editors of science direct make the statement that proper masks, worn in proper manner are an effective preventative, but they don’t cite any evidence.
If masks were anywhere near as effective as people claim, then we should have some very clear observations and evidence to point to — like an epidemic wave in progress that came to halt with a mask mandate. As Carl Heneghan at the CEBM has said, after a half dozen or more RCT’s showing no measureable or significant effectiveness, one should begin to suspect there really isn’t any.
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The study was good when I saved it to my notes, retracted or 404 is the normal now if it goes against the woke.
14 days to flatten the curve, nearly there.
10
that’s a lot of stuff. Do you know what RT means? It can mean reverse transcriptase (ie making DNA off an RNA template) but it also means real time.
A real time PCR can detect the PCR product when it starts to amplify -here is a handy link
https://www.fda.gov/media/136151/download
I have a QS7 if you are interested. Anyway… the bit you might want to look at is “DEVICEDESCRIPTION AND TEST PRINCIPLE”. This is very important “Fluorescence intensity is monitored at each PCR cycle”
In other words you can see at which cycle the targeted amplicon is first detected. Labs that use 40+ cycles will know which cycle the positive was detected at.
20
I watched a video of a lab processing 70’000 samples a day in the UK, the contamination was massive from the multi pipette sampler, they were literally dripping as they passed over previous tubes. The lab supervisor stated 70% were contaminated, but they had to punch out 70,000 a day.
Its all about the money for them with no limit on the cost to us.
Yes I know both terms of RT.
Thanks for the link, think I have read it, but will look at it when I get back.
30
Yeah… I’m sure that video was legit with the 49000 false positives in a day.
10
Yep I have no idea if the Vid was legit, it was one of those hidden camera numbers, but elaborate to set up the equipment for a bogus film, then again the dancing nurses were all in empty hospitals so I guess anything can be faked.
I don’t find 49,000 false positives hard to believe at all considering the BS we are being subject to and 500,000 cases a day in India, its all cases cases cases.
Bulk Gas ship off QLD 11 of the 12 crew tested positive, one negative, none had symptoms.
One washed ashore (so must of been 13) in Vanuatu and tested positive. Yep all seems legit and beyond question.
Keep forgetting the PCR states +test plus symptoms = positive result
Negative results do not preclude SARS-CoV-2 infection and should not be used as the sole
basis for patient management decisions. Negative results must be combined with clinical
observations, patient history, and epidemiological information. (Should the positive results also require clinical symptoms or is it a one way street?)
Positive results do not rule out bacterial infection or co-infection with
other viruses. The agent detected may not be the definite cause of disease.
30
what you’ve defined there is a pandemic? Maybe someone should declare it?
01
Case equals positive PCR, your own link states “Positive results do not rule out bacterial infection or co-infection with
other viruses. The agent detected may not be the definite cause of disease.”
So what does rule out all others and leave the COV as the culprit, or does that not matter in science anymore.
30
So what does rule out all others and leave the COV as the culprit
Path labs run all sorts of tests on sick people – swabs and bloods. You’ll find that any such co-infection will receive a clinical response. But you know this and don’t need me to tell you. I hope.
01
What you speak of is not done. In Aus none have symptoms, they are not sick, they need a test to tell them their ill.
What other test would you run on a person who has no symptoms of any illness, your not making sense!
20
This makes no sense MP… unless you are implying that the PCR results are not specific to covid. Since they are then I don’t understand.
00
That bottom 5 lines is from your link
00
and? Par for the course with any disease .
If you detect the presence of one thing it does not exclude the possibility of others. It is up to the clinicians to monitor the patient and respond according to what they observe. If their illness develops in an unexpected way they adjust their therapy. On the other hand if they have a positive covid virus result they can immediately put in place therapies that mitigate advancement of the disease.
I’m wondering if you’ve missed the point of testing?
00
I may of missed the point you have missed the target.
What therapies are offered to people with positive tests, yet no symptoms? How are they ill if they have no symptoms?
Therapies that have been proved to work are banned, why is this?
What therapies mitigate advancement, Oxygen?
10
they are rightly isolated and monitored. You must know this? They are a case of infection even if they have no symptoms.
The therapeutic and clinical response to the disease is vastly better now than when the disease first hit. You know this too right?
Stop baiting.
01
What is this better response of which you speak, I see no different approach.
00
MP… ask a critical care doctor and find out. The proof is with the outcomes.
00
You made the claim, isn’t the burden of proof on you. I honestly see no different approach and as nobody has symptoms how are outcomes better or worse?
00
Nah… I’ll leave your insult to the medical profession where it is.
00
Insult?
10
What is a QS7?
00
It is an RT PCR machine made by ABI/thermo. And it is not mine really but I know how to use it.
10
This is Reiner Fuellmich the lawyer working on a law suit that will challenge the Drosten Corman protocol that the WHO set-out as the standard for it’s signatories countries for testing.
https://rumble.com/vcdckn-planet-lockdown-atty-reiner-fuellmich-interview.html
The real pandemic is the PCR test.
The next real problem is dangerous vaccines being pushed on an unsuspecting public which we don’t know what the long term outcome will be.
Here’s Dr Michael Yeadon, former Pfizer chief scientist’s opinion.
https://rumble.com/vg4inv-michael-yeadon-full-interview-planet-lockdown.html
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Except that the WHO test that you’ve mentioned was reported at the very start of the pandemic and is not followed anywhere. It will be a moot litigation.
Try this link instead for WHO guidelines https://www.who.int/news/item/14-01-2021-who-publishes-latest-manual-on-biosafety-in-laboratories
and here is a kit I can have delivered to the lab tomorrow that is related to the ones that are used around the world and quite different from Drosten Corman.
https://www.thermofisher.com/au/en/home/clinical/public-health/coronavirus-sars-cov-2-research-solutions/sars-cov-2-detection.html
Are you a bot? Why would you spread falsehoods?
03
Yes, the WHO has changed its position on many things about PCR testing, the definition of a pandemic, the virulence of this virus, etc etc…
But the damage has been done. The media, governments and most government scientists are promoting these tests for determining infectious disease. Playing up the fear and locking down our economies and forcing medical treatments against the will of many people.
However, there are many medical scientists and pathologists who dispute this and several courts have already issued judgements, after studying the literature and hearing from expert witnesses that they are not capable of being useful in this regard.
Many more scientists are wanting to come forward to dispute the use of PCR for this as well as the lock-downs as well as mask wearing and the covid vaccines but they are fearful of professional repercussions.
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you misrepresented what I wrote. Very early in the pandemic they brought a method to attention. There was no mandate and no direction given. The PCR test that is being litigated is not used. Full stop. There is nothing to litigate.
And nothing else that you wrote is supported and I suspect it is just baseless assertion.
02
Do I really need to post links to the German and Portuguese court cases… You can find them if you look. The same goes for the doctors and scientists…
30
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t1b01H0Jd4hsMU7V1vy70yr8s3jlBedr/view?fbclid=IwAR0L_Iu6wwIVfFlZpykLhDHroS12MHZqO533Uizzc-5ZfUUmALOOjY58he4
10
That WHO link is lab biosafety from January 2021 not PCR.
00
Here is the latest video from Dr Michael Yeadon, an ex-Pfizer scientist and VP, who says the variants represent very small deviations from the original virus (around 0.3%) and the body’s immune system would have no problem in identifying the variants.
https://vladtepesblog.com/2021/05/05/new-interview-with-former-pfizer-vp-dr-michael-yeadon/
40
Yeadon — sigh — is not worth watching. He spends ten minutes telling us how qualified he is (irrelevant ad hom arguments) but I’m happy to forgive him for being a pharamacol / biochem guy right up until he repeatedly speaks nonsense, declaring as a fact inanities which anyone who’s done Microbiology 201 knows are false.
Things like “we never quarantine the healthy” “we never used lockdowns and masks”, “masks never slow transmission”, “no symptoms means no spread”. He’s never studied the Black Plague, nor Spanish Flu, Rabies, or probably any other pandemic. He hasn’t read the papers on Covid. History is full of examples showing how wrong he is. They used lockdowns, border closures and masks in 1918. See my post on American Samoa. Read up on the Black Plague in England in 1665 where they locked people in homes and painted red crosses on the door. Where people like the King in Oxford sat out the whole year sealed away from the disease. Where a whole town called Eyam sealed the disease in, selflessly trying to stop their infections spreading to the outside world.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/The-Great-Plague/
The man is apparently a B grade researcher in a semi-related field who hasn’t done his research, doesn’t offer any evidence, just repeats assertions and fallacies like going on and on with his own Bio. There must be 100,000 people out there just as qualified, who disagree. Who cares. He speaks filler and binary falsehoods. He knows enough jargon to take advantage of scientifically trained people who have not studied microbiology.
Life’s too short. Please, find better sources of information. A lot of people have watched and mentioned YEadon.
*+*
33
He has a point though (I’m assuming this as I wont watch it) but it is just a truism – that most sequence changes cause no change to viral action and most of the rest cause a minor change.
% difference in sequence is not a way to gauge whether a virus has mutated into a form that is deadlier or more transmissable.
21
That is not what Dr Michael Yeadon was saying.
His (Micheal Yeadon’s) point was that a few point mutations should not cause the body’s immune response to be significantly reduced from a previous state of immunity. I assume he meant immunity gained from natural infection.
Which is what Mark Allinson said in his comment.
40
If he said that he is incorrect.
00
It seemed reasonable to me. Why is he incorrect?
00
You’re wrong, Jo. The two main research field tests for the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ found no incidence of human to human transmission. Nil.
https://odysee.com/@drsambailey:c/secrets-of-influenza-%F0%9F%98%B7:1
20
Seriously? I bet the secret files are stored on a server in Frankfurt.
03
With the climate change? (I guess there has been so little of it there should be plenty of room)
00
Jo, I didn’t think Michael Yeadon (MY) was preening his credential feathers at all. I took it that he was just informing his audience, who may not know him, of his experience. I believe you’re above credential envy but you accused him of ad hom and proceeded to do just that!
BTW professor Sucharit Bhakdi is on record agreeing with MY as their views are very similar.
40
My frustration with Yeadon is that he uses a lot of time without giving any good arguments and reasons.
And my reply about the thousands who are as qualified as him is only to demonstrate how pointless ad hom arguments are. They prove nothing.
If I’ve missed his evidence, please let me know…
21
This is something that is not spoken about. https://youtu.be/fZshpYUwNRY The actual number of deaths in America due solely to Covid.
10
How to ignore 94% of Covid deaths?
Answered: https://joannenova.com.au/2020/09/how-to-ignore-94-of-covid-deaths/
23
Did not watch Youtube from Chris because it was 15 minutes.
Chris’s comment may have been a bit confusing but the point is clear. Have Covid Deaths been exaggerated to whip up fear and hysteria.
There is a lot of confusion about how Covid Deaths are recorded. Unfortunatley I cannot give any information on that most important issue.
What is clear is that the medical information (as recorded on the death certificate) may not be reflected in the statistics. The deaths are codified by the department of Birth, Deaths and Marriages and also the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
The crucial thing is what we are told!
Is a Covid Death the the proximate cause of death or do they include all the underlying conditions. That has never been made clear.
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/causes-death-australia-doctor-certified-deaths-summary-tables/latest-release
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Do most people die from COVID anyway? I think the majority die from the an overreactive cytokine response aka. cytokine storm. Jo had highlighted that aspect as well – months ago. (maybe even a year ago)Had been well known before COVID from peoples reactions to flu and previous SARS infection. There is an aspect of re-inventing the wheel with the whole COVID pandemic thingy. I find it very annoying.
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Good memory Ross.
But if Covid causes the cytokine storm, that is still a covid death isn’t it?
If Covid causes a heart attack because of increased clotting and the heart attack wouldn’t have happened at that point without Covid, then isn’t it also a Covid death?
If Covid allows a secondary infection to occur that would not have occurred, then the victim is still a Covid fatality? Does that make sense?
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Great link, you may like.
https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/
Mass Vaccination in a Pandemic – Benefits versus Risks: Interview with Geert Vanden Bossche
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJZxiNxYLpc
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6252794642001#sp=show-clips
Tucker: How many Americans have died after taking COVID vaccines?
@4:10
“After the First four months of covid vaccinations, more deaths have been recored than from all other vaccines administered in the united states for the last 15 years”
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https://video.foxnews.com/v/6252794642001#sp=show-clips
Tucker Carlson Videos ok?: How many Americans have died after taking COVID vaccines?
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Well may we say, “Keep politics out of science”. However, “politics” INCLUDING among the the puppeteers in the Lamestream Media, seems to be a science (and engineering) wasteland. This is basically because acknowledging realities, especially when personally / politically “distasteful”, tends to harsh the warm feelings of the professionally “concerned” and disrupt their “narrative”.
My brother put it more bluntly:
“The most dangerous organism on the planet is a ‘concerned’ citizen”.
I’ll leave it at that. (I ran out of parentheses.)
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The big argument I’m having with people is the “it only kills 1 percent of people so who cares”. I have trouble arguing against it convincingly.
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As I understand the SARS-CoV-2 replication process after it has initally infected a supporting host it is just like any other repetitious activity. It is hit and miss and it seems highly likely copy mistakes are made in every host during the billions of repetitions. These are ‘variants’ and they mostly perish immediately (e.g. the invaded cell cannot support the change made). Very occasionally a variant becomes more efficient at replication than the original for whatever reason. A host carrying that variant may infect another (or several others) and if it is more infectious then it may become dominant but it depends on how healthy and healthily immune people are since our defence systems, including herd immunity, are wise to viral trickery.
Is the UK over SARS-CoV-2 what with our vaccination programme and widespread reported infection count? That is a question that will only be answered if and when we get back to normal, but one thing is becoming apparent in the latest science on the subject which shows lockdowns really do not work. The viral waves appear to be natural occurences regardless of what measures we take to prevent infection aside from common sense but you won’t read about it on MSM which is still stoking up fear. Meanwhile our NHS is getting useful time to recover from a whole year of missing non-Covid-19 illnesses.
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“Great Video”
Opposing Views: COVID | Dr. Mercola and Dr. Kamil – Mikhaila Peterson Podcast #77
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9Rpz7WGIwQ
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World’s Most-Vaccinated Nation Activates Curbs as Cases Rise
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-04/world-s-most-vaccinated-nation-reintroduces-curbs-as-cases-surge
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CRITICAL INFO about COVID vaccines:
Did you know that the Absolute Risk Reduction (ARR) offered by the Pfizer vaccine is only 0.7% and Moderna’s ARR is 1.1%? See this new paper https://t.co/8NkgznZCxs?amp=1
Tucker Carlson asks very pertinent questions about adverse reactions to vaccines …
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6252794642001#sp=show-clips
(thanks to Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. (https://twitter.com/NikolovScience))
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Thank-you mods for taking this out of moderation.
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Great video, thanks for the link.
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https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/investigations-as-grandmother-80-develops-severe-bruising-on-her-body-after-first-astrazeneca-jab/news-story/b6d14a08924cf39d438c9ffe52964010
Investigations as grandmother, 80, develops severe bruising on her body after first AstraZeneca jab
Maureen DeBoick, 80, from Western Australia, was flown to the Fiona Stanley Hospital in Perth two weeks ago after the troubling symptoms developed.
https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/leaked-chinese-document-reveals-a-sinister-plan-to-unleash-coronaviruses/news-story/53674e8108ad5a655e07e990daa85465
Leaked Chinese document reveals a sinister plan to ‘unleash’ coronaviruses
A leaked 2015 government paper has revealed a discussion by top Chinese scientists who said a virus could be “unleashed in way never seen before”.
https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/health-safety/six-vaccinated-travellers-test-positive-to-covid19-in-hotel-quarantine/news-story/b9914aab7b3935ab273a326466bc7f85
Six vaccinated travellers test positive to COVID-19 in hotel quarantine
NSW Health has revealed six overseas travellers who reported being fully vaccinated have tested positive to COVID-19 in hotel quarantine.
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COVID 19 variants are more common than I’ve had hot dinners. This is Darwinian evolution in reality. The virus will ALWAYS be creating new variants in order to defeat the vaccines. The REAL worry is that one of these (future) variants will be totally resistant to ANY vaccine. Then, we’ve got a real problem…..
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Can vaccinated people still spread the coronavirus?
February 27, 2021
1. Does vaccination completely prevent infection?
The short answer is no. You can still get infected after you’ve been vaccinated.
Many people think vaccines work like a shield, blocking a virus from infecting cells altogether. But in most cases, a person who gets vaccinated is protected from disease, not necessarily infection.
https://theconversation.com/can-vaccinated-people-still-spread-the-coronavirus-155095
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