Just curious, anyone have a plan, or preps for global pandemic?

[BrianA]

Here's a study showing greatly reduced risk for heart attacks and strokes in vaccinated vs unvaccinated people, in the period of time 1 to 4 months post-covid infection. It's calculating an "Adjusted HR", but I'm not quite clear on what the adjustments are. But assuming it's correct, it's a massive difference, like 50% lower risk to be fully vaccinated.

 

Association Between Vaccination and Acute Myocardial Infarction and Ischemic Stroke After COVID-19 Infection

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2794753?utm_source=twitter

 

 

[Mike41]

23 hours ago, BrianA said:

Here's a study showing greatly reduced risk for heart attacks and strokes in vaccinated vs unvaccinated people, in the period of time 1 to 4 months post-covid infection. It's calculating an "Adjusted HR", but I'm not quite clear on what the adjustments are. But assuming it's correct, it's a massive difference, like 50% lower risk to be fully vaccinated.

 

Association Between Vaccination and Acute Myocardial Infarction and Ischemic Stroke After COVID-19 Infection

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2794753?utm_source=twitter

 

 

A friend of mine who was 64 and quite healthy died of a stroke after getting Covid. He was anti vaccine. He had been on a ventilator for two weeks

[mccoy]

Got the virus at last, probably omicron BA5, the dominant variant presently. Running nose for a couple of days, light fever at times, nothing which would impair usual activities. I had triple vaccination, the last one 6 months ago. The symptoms lasted about 3 days.

My son, who had triple vaccination and twice natural infection, exhibited just about the same symptoms.

My wife, who had triple vaccination exhibited more symptoms, among which partial loss of smell and taste.

[Sibiriak]

11 hours ago, mccoy said:

Got the virus at last...

Thanks for the info,  Mccoy.    How do you feel about  it overall?    Do you wish you had taken greater precautions,  or just accept it as unavoidable?

[mccoy]

Sibiriak, to tell the truth I was almost convinced that I was endowed of superimmunity hence that I would have shrugged the virus off without feeling it at all. My pride has been rightly punished!

No seriously, having been vaccinated, I chose not to take special precautions and I really felt that infection was inevitable, given the very high transmissibility of this strain. The results were perfectly coherent with the statistical expectations, no serious outcome for 90% of those with double or triple vaccination.

In my case, I felt I was 99.9% safe from serious consequences, given prior knowledge. At the end the symptoms turned out to be just a very small nuisance. 

 

 

 

[Todd Allen]

Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks The US Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs says he is “pretty convinced [COVID-19] came out of US lab biotechnology” and warns that there is dangerous virus research taking place without public oversight.

Edited August 10, 2022 by Todd Allen

[Sibiriak]

Thanks Todd.    I can't disagree with this:
 

Quote

 

We don’t know for sure, I should be absolutely clear. But there’s enough evidence that it should be looked into. And it’s not being investigated…

* * *

What I’m calling for is not the conclusion. I’m calling for the investigation.

 

 

[Matt]

On 8/9/2022 at 4:22 PM, mccoy said:

Sibiriak, to tell the truth I was almost convinced that I was endowed of superimmunity hence that I would have shrugged the virus off without feeling it at all. My pride has been rightly punished!

No seriously, having been vaccinated, I chose not to take special precautions and I really felt that infection was inevitable, given the very high transmissibility of this strain. The results were perfectly coherent with the statistical expectations, no serious outcome for 90% of those with double or triple vaccination.

In my case, I felt I was 99.9% safe from serious consequences, given prior knowledge. At the end the symptoms turned out to be just a very small nuisance. 

 

 

 

Hope you're all good now!

My nephew was staying over for a few days and he just tested positive for COVID a few days ago (while still staying here). Pretty mild for him and 1 day of feeling a bit ill (headache and stomach pains). It's very likely Ba.5. 

Interestingly, a day or two before he tested positive, I noticed odd sharp pains on the side of my head that lasted a few seconds at a time. I also had an uncomfortable night that night with sleeping - where my shoulder/upper arm and muscles around hip felt strained (as if I overworked in the gym). And I noticed a very subtle burning sensation in my nose for a few hours during the day but went away quickly. No fever, no cough, no sore throat or runny nose; or any other respiratory symptoms. I thought it was probably just pollen allergy that day.

I didn't put any of it together but the muscle pains were exactly what it was like when I had Omicron back in Feb. Except this was far, far milder and felt just a bit stiff with my muscles getting up in the morning. After an hour or so it was gone. But it did make sleeping uncomfortable so I woke up a few times to turn over in bed.

I did tell my brother I felt I was infected by something but never felt ill at all. I just felt off, like something was wrong. But he said to me (just before he went on holiday), yeah... I was ill with a virus or something a few days ago (I never knew... and he lives here).

I'm guessing I've been infected again with Omicron but had no idea. Having Omicron if Feb probably helped reduce symptoms a lot this time. 

Edited August 11, 2022 by Matt

[corybroo]

Ir anyone is still using a mask, here's a way to make a surgical mask more efficient.

Personally, I'm still wearing a mask in certain places where I feel the risk of exposure to many pathogens is high.

Simple rubber band fix improves surgical mask seal to N95 levels, study shows

 

A research team led by a Michigan Medicine surgeon worked with 40 health care workers to test standard surgical masks modified with two 8-inch rubber bands over the crown of the subject's head, bridge of the nose, around the cheeks and under the chin within the boundaries of the mask.

Thirty-one of the subjects, or 78%, had modified masks that passed a fit test with a score of greater than 100. The passing masks scored an average of 151, a significantly better fit than an unmodified surgical mask score of 3.8 but lower than a properly fitted N95 mask's score of 199. By the last day of investigation, all of the modified masks passed the N95 threshold, suggesting that greater experience with the banding improved fit and performance.

[Ron Put]

On 8/26/2022 at 12:46 AM, corybroo said:

Personally, I'm still wearing a mask in certain places where I feel the risk of exposure to many pathogens is high.

Of course, you are free to do so, except where security concerns may require you to take it off.

But neither you, nor "The Science" weaponized by the zealots, should ever again be allowed to force the rest of society to do as you do. Rubber bands or not.

I can only hope that at some point a major democracy will have the political will to do a thorough investigation and call those who were in power to answer for wrecking the economy and the lives of so many. If one does it, maybe more will. And we will be better for it.

Edited August 27, 2022 by Ron Put

[Ron Put]

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-global-march-of-folly/

 

The Global March of Folly

BY MARTIN KULLDORFF, JAYANTA BHATTACHARYA   APRIL 6, 2022   LAW, POLICY, PUBLIC HEALTH   7 MINUTE READ

 

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

 

Throughout the pandemic, the media have eagerly compared Covid statistics between different countries. But such comparisons are often deceptive.

 

Take, for example, the use of Covid case counts. These depend not only on the number of people infected but also on the amount of testing performed. While useful for evaluating whether cases are increasing or decreasing within a particular country, they are deceptive when comparing countries. If we truly wanted to know, it would be easy, through random seroprevalence surveys that measure the proportion of people with antibodies. But not all governments have been eager to conduct these surveys, while some scientists have even got into trouble for doing them.

Comparing Covid death tolls between countries, as many journalists have done, is equally problematic. A Covid death is defined differently in different countries, with varying testing thresholds and a different maximum number of days required between a positive test and death. Therefore, countries vary in the proportion of reported Covid deaths that, firstly, are genuinely due to Covid, secondly, have Covid as a contributing factor but not as the main cause, and, thirdly, that show whether an individual died with rather than from Covid. 

This confusion can lead to an over-reporting of Covid deaths. If we truly wanted to know, it would be easy. We could randomly select some reported deaths and evaluate their medical charts. Surprisingly few such studies have been performed.

Other countries have under-reported Covid mortality. For example, Nicaragua has reported very few Covid deaths. However, from reports that carpenters were working overtime to fulfill the burgeoning demand for wooden burial coffins in 2020, we certainly know that large numbers of people were dying from Covid there.

The media have also been tripped up by several significant variables. For example, the pandemic arrived and surged at different times in different countries, and even within countries – as you would expect from any pandemic. During the first wave in 2020, some countries were praised for their strict lockdowns and low Covid mortality, but subsequent waves hit some of them so badly that they now have among the highest mortality numbers in the world.

Covid is also seasonal. This means that it follows different seasonal patterns in different regions. This fact also tripped up journalists. In 2021, many journalists (often New York-based) blamed the seasonal summer wave in the southern United States on Covid policies. But when the subsequent winter wave arrived in the northern US, it was clear to all that it was a seasonal effect. 

Extreme Covid restrictions, such as those imposed by Australia, Hong Kong and New Zealand, certainly kept the virus at bay for a while. But that just postponed the inevitable. All countries have to work their way through the pandemic sooner or later.

Moreover, the focus on Covid cases, death counts and so on, ignores the collateral public-health damage from Covid restrictions. These have contributed to deaths from other diseases, and such deaths are just as tragic as Covid deaths. A basic public-health principle is that one should never focus on one single disease but consider public health as a whole. Even if the lockdowns reduced Covid mortality, for which there is scant evidence, one must also consider the harm that the lockdowns caused on other health conditions such as worsening cardiovascular-disease outcomes, missed cancer screening and treatment, lower childhood-vaccination rates, and deteriorating mental health.

Given all this, how should we compare countries’ handling of the pandemic? While not perfect, the best way is to compare excess mortality; that is, the observed total number of deaths during the pandemic minus the average number of deaths observed during the years before the pandemic. Since the pandemic is not yet over, we do not have the full picture yet. Nevertheless, a recent article in the Lancetpresents excess deaths for 2020-2021 for almost every country in the world. The map below shows the results:

Global distribution of estimated excess-mortality rate due to the Covid-19 pandemic, for the cumulative period, 2020-21

What can we learn from these data? How did three main pandemic strategies compare: (a) a do-nothing, let-it-rip approach; (b) focused protection of high-risk older people with only limited restrictions on others, and (c) general lockdowns and restrictions on all age groups? 

Belarus and Nicaragua did little to protect older people and they imposed very few Covid restrictions. They also report among the lowest Covid mortality numbers. From the excess-mortality data, it is clear that they did not escape the pandemic. Nicaragua had 274 excess deaths per 100,000 population, which is precisely the same as the regional average. Belarus had 483 excess deaths per 100,000, higher than the average for either Eastern Europe (345) or Central Europe (316). 

In Western Europe, the Scandinavian countries had the lightest Covid restrictions while they tried to protect their older high-risk population. Sweden was heavily criticised for this by the international media. The Guardian, for instance, reported in 2020 that life in Sweden felt ‘surreal’, with ‘couples stroll[ing] arm in arm in the spring sunshine’. Many journalists, politicians and scientists expected that the lighter Scandinavian touch would lead to disaster. That did not happen. Sweden has among the lowest reported Covid mortality numbers in Europe. Of the European countries with more than one million people, Denmark (94), Finland (81), Norway (7), and Sweden (91) are four of only six countries with excess mortality less than 100 per 100,000 inhabitants, the other two being Ireland (12) and Switzerland (93). 

What about the UK, with its more heavy-handed Covid restrictions? Compared to the Western European average of 140 excess deaths per 100,000, England had 126, Scotland 131, Wales 135, and Northern Ireland 132.

In the US, South Dakota imposed few Covid restrictions, while Florida tried to protect older people without too many restrictions on the general population. Did that result in the predicted disaster? No. Compared to the national average of 179 excess deaths per 100,000, Florida had 212 while South Dakota had 156. 

Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa report the lowest Covid mortality globally, with seven deaths per 100,000, but their excess mortality is 102 deaths per 100,000. Without age-stratified numbers, we do not know how much of this difference is due to the under-reporting of Covid deaths as opposed to the harsh lockdowns that caused malnutrition and starvation among the poor.

The countries with the highest excess mortality are Bolivia (735), Bulgaria (647), Eswatini (635), North Macedonia (583), Lesotho (563), and Peru (529), with no other countries topping 500 excess deaths per 100,000. According to the Oxford Stringency Index, Peru has endured some of the world’s harshest Covid restrictions while those in Bulgaria, Eswatini and Lesotho were closer to the average. Bolivia had very harsh restrictions in 2020, but not in 2021.

Though excess-mortality data should still be treated with caution, they do show that the few places that rejected draconian Covid restrictions did not see the catastrophic death counts that some had predicted.

The pandemic is not over, and with different seasonal patterns in different regions and different levels of population immunity, some countries have not yet seen the worst. For example, 40 per cent of all reported Covid deaths in Denmark occurred during the first 80 days of 2022. Denmark is not as extreme a case as Hong Kong, where 97 per cent of all reported Covid deaths have been in 2022.

The biggest weakness of excess-mortality statistics is that while they count Covid deaths, they do not fully capture the deaths, not to mention the collateral public-health damage, that come from Covid restrictions themselves. Missed cancer screenings and treatments do not lead to immediate deaths, but a woman who missed her cervical cancer screening may now die three or four years from now instead of living another 15 or 20 years. The mortality statistics do not reflect non-fatal collateral damage such as increasing mental-health problems or missed educational opportunities, either. Those harms need to be tallied and addressed in the years to come. 

Politicians argued that the draconian lockdowns were needed to protect lives. From the excess-mortality data, we now know they were not. Instead, they have contributed to the enormous collateral damage that we will have to live with for many years to come. It is tragic.

In her classic book, The March of Folly, historian Barbara Tuchman describes how nations sometimes pursue actions contrary to their interests. She starts with Troy and the Trojan horse and ends with the US and the Vietnam War. By ignoring basic, long-standing principles of public health during the pandemic, most nations marched down the path of folly together. The leaders of those nations will be fine, except for some early retirements. The devastation on children, the poor, the working class and the middle class, on the other hand, will take decades to repair.

Republished from Spiked-Online

Authors

• 
  Martin Kulldorff

  Martin Kulldorff, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is an epidemiologist and biostatistician. He is Professor of Medicine at Harvard University (on leave) and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on infectious disease outbreaks and the monitoring of vaccine and drug safety, for which he has developed the free SaTScan, TreeScan, and RSequential software. Co-Author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

  READ MORE  

• 
  Jayanta Bhattacharya

  Jay Bhattacharya, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a physician, epidemiologist and health economist. He is Professor at Stanford Medical School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Faculty Member at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute, and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Co-Author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

 

Edited August 27, 2022 by Ron Put

[Ron Put]

One has to wonder where the screaming headlines and ticke-tapes counting deaths have gone, and why The NYT, The WAPO and MSNBC are barely mentioning the current excess deaths numbers:
 

 

[Todd Allen]

2 hours ago, Ron Put said:

and why The NYT, The WAPO and MSNBC are barely mentioning the current excess deaths numbers:

I have seen a couple stories suggesting long covid may be causing excess deaths and the suggestion without supporting data that vaccination is the best protection.  But there are plenty of examples of highly vaccinated countries experiencing rising mortality.  I expect the next few waves of covid will shed light on who is most at risk.

[Ron Put]

On 8/29/2022 at 5:52 PM, Todd Allen said:

I have seen a couple stories suggesting long covid may be causing excess deaths

Anything to deflect from the elephant in the room, which is that the lockdowns and the scare tactics caused massive deferment of necessary healthcare. Remember the barely reported stories of ERs seeing dramatically lower rates of CV events  close to 50% of what was normally expected. Those who predicted the consequences we are seeing now were cancelled and censored.

Here is a glimpse of how it all happened in the UK:

 

The lockdown files: Rishi Sunak on what we weren’t told

 

When Britain was being locked down, the country was assured that all risks had been properly and robustly considered. Yes, schools would close and education

would suffer. Normal healthcare would take a hit and people would die as a result. But the government repeatedly said the experts had looked at all this. After all, it wasn’t as if they would lock us down without seriously weighing up the consequences, was it?

Those consequences are still making themselves known: exams madness, the NHS waiting list surge, thousands of unexplained ‘excess deaths’, judicial backlogs and economic chaos. Was all that expected, factored in, and thought by leaders to be a price worth paying? Right at the start of lockdown, ministers had already started to worry that the policy was being recklessly implemented without anyone thinking about the side-effects. Only a handful of key players at the very top made the decisions: among them Rishi Sunak, the chancellor. He has now decided to go public on what happened.

When we meet at the office he has rented for his leadership campaign, soon to enter its final week, he says at the outset that he’s not interested in pointing the finger at the fiercest proponents of lockdown. No one knew anything at the start, he says: lockdown was, by necessity, a gamble. Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, the chief medical officer and chief scientific adviser, would openly admit that lockdown could do more harm than good. As evidence started to roll in, a strange silence grew in government: dissenting voices were filtered out and a see-no-evil policy was applied.

Sunak’s story starts with the first Covid meeting, where ministers were shown an A3 poster from scientific advisers explaining the options. ‘I wish I’d kept it because it listed things that had no impact: banning live events and all that,’ he says. ‘It was saying: you should be careful not to do this stuff too early, because being able to sustain it is very hard in a modern society.’ So the scientific advice was, initially, to reject or at least delay lockdown.

This all changed when Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College published their famous ‘Report 9’, which argued that Covid casualties could hit 500,000 if no action was taken – but the figure could be below 20,000 if Britain locked down. That, of course, turned out to be a vast exaggeration of lockdown’s ability to curb Covid deaths. Imperial stressed it did ‘not consider the wider social and economic costs of suppression, which will be high’. But surely someone involved in making the policy would figure it out.

This was the crux: no one really did. A cost-benefit calculation – a basic requirement for pretty much every public health intervention – was never made. ‘I wasn’t allowed to talk about the trade-off,’ says Sunak. Ministers were briefed by No. 10 on how to handle questions about the side-effects of lockdown. ‘The script was not to ever acknowledge them. The script was: oh, there’s no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy.’

If frank discussion was being suppressed externally, Sunak thought it all the more important that it took place internally. But that was not his experience. ‘I felt like no one talked,’ he says. ‘We didn’t talk at all about missed [doctor’s] appointments, or the backlog building in the NHS in a massive way. That was never part of it.’ When he did try to raise concerns, he met a brick wall. ‘Those meetings were literally me around that table, just fighting. It was incredibly uncomfortable every single time.’ He recalls one meeting where he raised education. ‘I was very emotional about it. I was like: “Forget about the economy. Surely we can all agree that kids not being in school is a major nightmare” or something like that. There was a big silence afterwards. It was the first time someone had said it. I was so furious.’

One of Sunak’s big concerns was about the fear messaging, which his Treasury team worried could have long-lasting effects. ‘In every brief, we tried to say: let’s stop the “fear” narrative. It was always wrong from the beginning. I constantly said it was wrong.’ The posters showing Covid patients on ventilators, he said, were the worst. ‘It was wrong to scare people like that.’ The closest he came to defying this was in a September 2020 speech saying that it was time to learn to ‘live without fear’ – a direct response to the Cabinet Office’s messaging. ‘They were very upset about that.’

‘It was wrong to scare people like thatʼ: the posters that Sunak tried to stop
 

His Eat Out to Help Out campaign was designed to be an optimistic counter-narrative. ‘The survey data across Europe showed that our country was far and away the least likely to get back to normal. All the evidence was that everyone was too scared to go and do things again. We have a consumption-driven economy, so that would be very bad.’ As indeed it was. The UK ended up with the worst economic downturn in Europe.

Lockdown – closing schools and much of the economy while sending the police after people who sat on park benches – was the most draconian policy introduced in peacetime. No. 10 wanted to present it as ‘following the science’ rather than a political decision, and this had implications for the wiring of government decision-making. It meant elevating Sage, a sprawling group of scientific advisers, into a committee that had the power to decide whether the country would lock down or not. There was no socioeconomic equivalent to Sage; no forum where other questions would be asked.

So whoever wrote the minutes for the Sage meetings – condensing its discussions into guidance for government – would set the policy of the nation. No one, not even cabinet members, would know how these decisions were reached.

In the early days, Sunak had an advantage. ‘The Sage people didn’t realise for a very long time that there was a Treasury person on all sitting there, listening to their discussions.’

It meant he was alerted early to the fact that these all-important minutes of Sage meetings often edited out dissenting voices. His mole, he says, would tell him: ‘“Well, actually, it turns out that lots of people disagreed with that conclusion”, or “Here are the reasons that they were not sure about it.” So at least I would be able to go into these meetings better armed.’

But his victories were few and far between. One, he says, came in May 2020 when the first plans were being drawn to move out of lockdown in summer. ‘There’s some language in there that you will see because I fought for it,’ he says. ‘It talked about non-Covid health impact.’ Just a few sentences, he says, but he views the fact that lockdown side-effects were recognised at all at that point as a triumph.

He doesn’t name Matt Hancock, who presided over all of this as health secretary, or Liz Truss, who was silent throughout. As he said at the outset, he doesn’t want to name names but rather to speak plainly about what the public was not told – and the process that led to this. Typically, he said, ministers would be shown Sage analysis pointing to horrifying ‘scenarios’ that would come to pass if Britain did not impose or extend lockdown. But even he, as chancellor, could not find out how these all-important scenarios had been calculated.

‘I was like: “Summarise for me the key assumptions, on one page, with a bunch of sensitivities and rationale for each one”,’ Sunak says. ‘In the first year I could never get this’ The Treasury he says would have regarded this as a matter of basic competence. But for a year, UK government policy – and the fate of millions –was being decided by half-explained graphs cooked up by outside academics.

‘This is the problem,’ he says. ‘If you empower all these independent people, you’re screwed.’ Sir Gus O’Donnell, the former cabinet secretary, has suggested that Sage should have been asked to report to a higher committee, which would have considered the social and economic aspects of locking down. Sunak agrees. But having been anointed from the start, Sage retained its power until the rebellion that came last Christmas.

Then the Omicron variant started to rise last December, the dance began again. A Sage analysis claimed that without a fourth lockdown, Covid deaths could hit 6,000 a day. That was out by a factor of 20. But we only know this because, for once, the government rejected Sage’s advice. This time, Sunak was taking soundings of his own – including academics at Stanford University, where he went to business school, and his former colleagues in the world of finance who had started to do some Covid modelling.

Crucially, JP Morgan used South African data on Omicron to suggest that UK hospitals would not be overrun – contrary to Sage’s predictions.

‘I’m still on the JP Morgan research [email] list,’ he says. ‘It gives me a bit of a different perspective.’ In the case of Omicron, if that very different perspective was right, then every single one of the 12 Sage scenarios provided to ministers was a vast exaggeration and Britain would be locked down needlessly Yet the wheels were already in motion, says Sunak. ‘They had briefed already that there was going to be a press conference. The system just kind of geared up.’

 

He flew back early from a trip to California. By this time JP Morgan’s lockdown analysis was being emailed around among cabinet ministers like a samizdat paper, and they were ready to rebel. Sunak met Johnson. ‘I just told him it’s not right: we shouldn’t do this.’ He did not threaten to resign if there was another lockdown, ‘but I used the closest formulation of words that I could’ to imply that threat.

Sunak then rang around other ministers and compared notes.

Normally, cabinet members were not kept in the loop as Covid- related decisions were being made – Johnson’s No. 10 informed them after the event, rather than consulting them. Sunak says he urged the PM to pass the decision to cabinet so that his colleagues could give him political cover for rejecting the advice of Sage. ‘I remember telling him: have the cabinet meeting. You’ll see. Every-one will be completely behind you… You don’t have to worry. I will be standing next to you, as will every other member of the cabinet, bar probably Michael [Gove] and Saj [Javid].’ As it was to prove.

Is Sunak exaggerating his own role? For what it’s worth, his account squares with what I picked up from his critics in government: that the money-obsessed Sunak was on a one-man mission to torpedo lockdown. And perhaps the Prime Minister as well. ‘Everything I did was seen through the prism of: “You’re trying to be difficult, trying to be leader,”’ he says. He tried not to challenge the Prime Minister in public, or leave a paper trail. ‘I’d say a lot of stuff to him in private,’ he says. ‘There’s some written record of every- thing. In general, people leak it – and it causes problems.’

At any point, Sunak could have gone public – or even resigned. I ask him if he should have done. To quit in that way during a pandemic, he says, would have been irresponsible. And to go public, or let his misgivings become known, would have been seen as a direct attack on the PM.

At the time, No. 10’s strategy was to create the impression that lockdown was a scientifically created policy which only crackpots dared question. If word leaked that the chancellor had grave reservations, or that a basic cost-benefit analysis had never been applied, it would have been politically unhelpful for No. 10.

Only now can Sunak speak freely. He is opening up not just because he is running to be prime minister, he says, but because there are important lessons in all of this. Not who did what wrong, but how it came to pass that such important questions about lockdown’s profound knock-on effects – issues that will probably dominate politics for years to come – were never properly explored.

‘All this blaming civil servants – I hate it,’ he says, ‘We are elected to run the country, not to blame someone else. If the apparatus is not there, then we change it.’ When things go well, he says, ‘it comes from the person at the top being able to make decisions properly – and understanding how to make good decisions’.

Which is, of course, his ultimate point: ‘The leader matters. It matters who the person at the top is.’ It’s the reason he resigned, finally, and part of his pitch to be leader of the Conservative party. He says ministers need to be honest about the flip-side of any policy (including tax cuts), and that denial always makes things worse.

And the other lessons of lockdown? ‘We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did,’ he says. ‘And you have to acknowledge trade-offs from the beginning. If we’d done all of that, we could be in a very different place.’ How different? ‘We’d probably have made different decisions on things like schools, for example.’ Could a more frank discussion have helped Britain avoid lockdown entirely, as Sweden did? ‘I don’t know, but it could have been shorter. Different. Quicker.’

There’s one major factor he doesn’t raise: the opinion polls. Lockdowns were being imposed all over a terrified world in March 2020 and the Prime Minister was already being accused of having blood on his hands by failing to act earlier. Surely whoever was in No. 10 would have been forced to lock down by public opinion? But the public, Sunak says, was being scared witless, while being kept in the dark about lockdown’s -likely effects. ‘We helped shape that: with the fear messaging, empowering the scientists and not talking about the trade-offs.’

Those trade-offs are apparent. At first, no one asked what all those cancelled NHS appointments would mean. When the answer came, it was devastating: a waiting list that is projected to grow from six million now to nine million by 2024. Avoidable cancer deaths due to late diagnosis will run into the thousands. Then there’s the economic impact. ‘We are short of 300,000 to 400,000 [workers],’ he says. ‘That is a problem.’ Some 5.3 million are on out-of-work benefits, with

Even now, Sunak doesn’t argue that lockdown was a mistake – just that the many downsides in health, the economy and society in general could have been mitigated if they had been openly discussed. An official inquiry has begun, but Sunak says there are lessons to learn now. The emergence of another Covid variant (or another new pathogen) may lead to demands for another lockdown someday.

One of the questions will be how to protect democratic scrutiny in a future crisis – how to ensure that robust questioning and testing of policy continues, even when it is expedient for the government to suppress the debate.

To Sunak, this was the problem at the heart of the government’s Covid response: a lack of candour. There was a failure to raise difficult questions about where all this might lead – and a tendency to use fear messaging to stifle debate, instead of encouraging discussion. So in a sentence, how would he have handled the pandemic differently? ‘I would just have had a more grown-up conversation with the country.’

[BrianA]

Anyone supplementing folic acid, be aware it may lead to more severe covid:

 

High folic acid supplementation associated with higher rates of COVID-19 infections and mortality, study finds

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220831131158.htm

[Gordo]

China places millions into Covid lockdown again as economy continues to struggle

Hope this eventually leads to revolution and implosion of the CCP.  Pretty amazing that they are still sticking with this nonsense.

[BrianA]

Regarding the "nonsense", I wonder, has China had the same loss of longevity that was just in the news this week about the USA?

[mccoy]

3 hours ago, Gordo said:

Hope this eventually leads to revolution and implosion of the CCP.  Pretty amazing that they are still sticking with this nonsense.

I too am aghast that they are exhibiting such pervicacious inefficiency. 

[BrianA]

5 hours ago, BrianA said:

Regarding the "nonsense", I wonder, has China had the same loss of longevity that was just in the news this week about the USA?

 

Found this now:

 

China's life expectancy is now higher than that of the US

Covid is the main cause of shortened US life expectancy

The biggest driver in the drop in US life expectancy is covid, accounting for 50% of the decline, according to the CDC. Government figures show that as of Aug. 31, over 1.04 million deaths in the US have been attributed to covid.

 

https://qz.com/china-life-expectancy-exceeds-us-1849483265

[Todd Allen]

4 minutes ago, BrianA said:

Government figures show that as of Aug. 31, over 1.04 million deaths in the US have been attributed to covid

However that is using the government's ridiculous criteria defining a covid death as someone with a positive PCR test within a few weeks of death ignoring whether there was any covid symptoms or other potential causes of death.

[Ron Put]

7 hours ago, Todd Allen said:

However that is using the government's ridiculous criteria defining a covid death as someone with a positive PCR test within a few weeks of death ignoring whether there was any covid symptoms or other potential causes of death.

Fear is the most powerful tool in politics. It trumps everything else. When fear is instilled in a large part of the population, they will seek (and demand) protection in the form of a "do something" leader or state apparatus. No rational arguments can counter fear and if such arguments are painted as dangerous, those who advance them are burned at the public square. Demagog and populists have always used fear to maintain power and achieve their goals. The posters in the Sunak article above illustrate this well.

As to deaths, long-established medical practices were turned on their head, supported by rapidly politicised "Science" and criteria was was surreptitiously changed to serve political purposes, only to be changed again (quietly) when Biden came into office in the US. But the mythology will persist, and the heretics who challenge it will be ignored and "cancelled":

"Though excess-mortality data should still be treated with caution, they do show that the few places that rejected draconian Covid restrictions did not see the catastrophic death counts that some had predicted.

The pandemic is not over, and with different seasonal patterns in different regions and different levels of population immunity, some countries have not yet seen the worst. For example, 40 per cent of all reported Covid deaths in Denmark occurred during the first 80 days of 2022. Denmark is not as extreme a case as Hong Kong, where 97 per cent of all reported Covid deaths have been in 2022.

The biggest weakness of excess-mortality statistics is that while they count Covid deaths, they do not fully capture the deaths, not to mention the collateral public-health damage, that come from Covid restrictions themselves. Missed cancer screenings and treatments do not lead to immediate deaths, but a woman who missed her cervical cancer screening may now die three or four years from now instead of living another 15 or 20 years. The mortality statistics do not reflect non-fatal collateral damage such as increasing mental-health problems or missed educational opportunities, either. Those harms need to be tallied and addressed in the years to come. 

Politicians argued that the draconian lockdowns were needed to protect lives. From the excess-mortality data, we now know they were not. Instead, they have contributed to the enormous collateral damage that we will have to live with for many years to come. It is tragic."

[Gordo]

 70% of the U.S. population has had the virus, according to the latest CDC data. That’s up from 33.5% in December.

Haven't Had COVID Yet? Wanna Bet?

[mccoy]

On 9/2/2022 at 11:23 PM, Gordo said:

70% of the U.S. population has had the virus, according to the latest CDC data. That’s up from 33.5% in December.

My suspicion is that in Italy it's about the same percentage

[BrianA]

"Older people who were infected with COVID-19 show a substantially higher risk -- as much as 50% to 80% higher than a control group -- of developing Alzheimer's disease within a year, according to a study of more than 6 million patients 65 and older."

 

Risk factor for developing Alzheimer's disease increases by 50-80% in older adults who caught COVID-19

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220913140850.htm

[Gordo]

11 hours ago, BrianA said:

"Older people who were infected with COVID-19 show a substantially higher risk -- as much as 50% to 80% higher than a control group -- of developing Alzheimer's disease within a year, according to a study of more than 6 million patients 65 and older."

Just one anecdote, but my (over 70) mother in law seems to have accelerated "mental decline" after contracting covid earlier this year.  She had pretty severe symptoms when she got covid but recovered quickly after getting molnupiravir (Merck's covid anti-viral drug).  The symptoms of mental decline = memory problems, inability to follow google maps, getting lost, inability to think of even common words to describe things when talking (for example could not come up with the word "steering wheel").  But we noticed some cognitive impairment even before she got covid, so there is no real proof covid made things worse vs. just the natural progression.