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placnx
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Posts posted by placnx
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On 4/11/2021 at 9:52 PM, onebir said:
Some points in the WSJ article seem valid nonetheless.
With a moment's reflection it should be obvious that vaccine passports are incompatible with the original rationale for lockdowns: 'flattening the curve' to prevent health services being overloaded simply isn't necessary if a substantial chunk of the vulnerable population has been vaccinated and won't be doing that overloading (regardless of whether herd immunity has been achieved).
What's changed?
I forgot to mention that the authors (Kulldorff, Bhattacharya) are using the currently popular subject of vaccine passports, which animates the libertarian crowd, to revive their anti-shutdown campaign from last September. WSJ is happy to oblige.
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On 4/11/2021 at 9:52 PM, onebir said:
Some points in the WSJ article seem valid nonetheless.
With a moment's reflection it should be obvious that vaccine passports are incompatible with the original rationale for lockdowns: 'flattening the curve' to prevent health services being overloaded simply isn't necessary if a substantial chunk of the vulnerable population has been vaccinated and won't be doing that overloading (regardless of whether herd immunity has been achieved).
What's changed?
The original impetus for vaccine passports was to allow international airline travel without spreading Covid. The passport concept then was suggested as good for restaurants, events, etc, to reduce social distancing normally required since some restaurants only able to serve indoors are uneconomic otherwise.
For international travel and public health monitoring, vaccine passports are not ideal. A digital & physical WHO card would make more sense.
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On 4/11/2021 at 6:51 PM, gargamon said:
There have been studies where false info has been put into wikipedia. It does not take long before the false information is removed. Yes, anyone can edit it, but anyone can also fix it when false data is added.
Further, most info in wikipedia has references to the originating source, so you are free to check the actual source for validity.
Concerning the source of the 1918 flu pandemic, this Kansas source was an authentic outbreak and reported in 1923. It seems that Wikipedia is not up to speed on this one. Any volunteers to update it with this from 2014:
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1 hour ago, Anant72 said:
Knowing that the Sinovac vaccine is, by the Chinese health authorities' own admission, 50-54% effective only, why is Thailand planning to use it anyway? Because it is cheaper? Because it wants to please its overlord? If the level of effectiveness is so low, how can people expect to eradicate the virus?
when are we going to be able to choose a vaccine we can trust like Pfizer or J &J?There is a problem getting much vaccine from anywhere because global production capacity is insufficient. This article predicts that it will take 4.6 years to vaccinate the world at the present rate:
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6 hours ago, connda said:
You can't make revenue selling vaccines if natural immunity is allowed though person-to-person transmission. This is the model that has been working since the dawn of the evolution of higher life forms up until 2020 when we're informed by a subset of scientists that natural herd immunity is no longer attainable and can only be reached by mass vaccinations. Just like that. Counter opinions are not allowed.
There is a huge profit motive to push that narrative as well as to discredit and censor all other scientists and epidemiologists who hold alternate views such as those scientists and epidemiologists who signed the Great Barrington Declaration. Scientists such as Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations. You have esteemed and highly qualified scientists who hold opposing opinions regarding the nature of SARS-Cov-2 and the handling of the outbreak who are literally called disinformation agents by main-stream media as well as by scientists and government officials aligned with or working for pharmaceutical companies. When scientists working for Big Pharma reject opposing scientific views and modeling based on their funding, there is significant potential for conflict of interest.
When science stops evaluating itself and brands alternate "expert" opinion as heretical, it stops being science and becomes something akin to religion.
Bottom line: there should be a open dialogue between qualified and expert peers within the scientific community, but that dialogue is no longer allowed and in many cases censored. That's dangerous for science as a whole.You might read this to understand the trend to ideological medicine:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/herd-immunity-bhattacharya-atlas-barrington
Achieving herd immunity by infection depends a lot on the virus. In this case, its infectiousness, its ability to silently spread, its velocity of mutation into variants that can reinfect, its mortality, make the case for herd immunity by infection moot. People such as Kulldorff who keep reviving this proposition are in my opinion unethical. It adds to arguments of Republican governors of Texas and Florida who seek to roll back Covid mitigation. We need up to 80% of population including children to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. This will protect others who cannot be vaccinated.
As for Thailand, I'm a proponent of getting the US government to increase vaccine production to distribute to low and middle-income countries. This has been proposed in an ambitious program:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/opinion/world-covid-vaccines.html
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19 hours ago, gargamon said:
I believe the Spanish Flu started in Kentucky, USA. It was erroneously named "Spanish" because Spain was the only country that was actually reporting the deaths accurately. All the other countries were lying about the numbers. Sound familiar??
Are you joking?
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19 hours ago, DavisH said:
FYI Australia has ordered 125million doses for its paltry population of 25M; 30M doses for NZ for a 5M population. And the US over 1.2billion doses. This is just utter, disgusting greed, while much of the world goes without. This is NOT the way to control a pandemic.
The US is distributing some excess already, and will also allot through COVAX. The way to deal with this problem is to increase production capacity for the advanced vaccines.
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20 hours ago, DavisH said:
Ddid you see the worldometers Myanmar numbers since the coup? They recorded just 14 cases today. It's highly likely these numbers are being suppressed or testing is not being done. Numbers there could be rampant now and noone would know.
Thailand has no hope of herd immunity, even if everyone is imminused because there will always be those crossing the border and reintroducing the virus, and vaccines aren't 100% effective.
At least the mRNA vaccines so far show efficacity against the variants, much better than immunity after infection.
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20 hours ago, sezze said:
100% true . You can only blame China to keep it under the radar when they noticed and lying about the real numbers , not the origin . Virus are everywhere , and they mutate and jump species all the time . Once a while a mutation and species jump is working "good" and if the situation is right ( meaning high R ratio , in a high density population ) then it jumps off . Has done it before and will happen more and more ( we with more and more people on this planet , and travel faster and more then ever ) .
China is probably the origin , but even that isn't 100% sure . The bats which this coronavirus originated from is living in many places in Asia , including Thailand ( infact they found precursors of Covid19 strain in Thailand in samples from a few y ago ) .
If the precursor came from Thailand, it only improved when it sat around in China. Certainly there's no evidence of a virulent Corona until cases arrived from China last year.
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21 hours ago, dbrenn said:
What's the point of blaming any country for Covid? This kind of thing can start anywhere - there were even reports that the Spanish Flu first crossed over to humans from pigs in the US, travelling with troops to Europe. Diseases can originate anywhere, and are accidental, so who really cares?
There are probabilities, and zoonitic diseases arise more commonly in China and West Africa. The Spanish Flu was a misnomer. Here's an excellent analysis:
We should all care where a virus originated. It may not be the last from that source.
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21 hours ago, ozimoron said:
What purpose does it serve to blame any country for a virus which originates there? As I understand it, the coronavirus likely jumped from bats to another animal and then to humans. That animal hasn't yet been identified.
Just one of the theories. Also available: direct from bats, direct from lab.
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2 hours ago, RichardColeman said:
Be fair, we in the UK built or converted two ruddy great Nightingale hospitals at a cost of £220 million to the taxpayer for the surge that we never appeared to use. Least Thailand's cost is just soldier labour moving beds.
The Brazil variants haven't overrun the UK yet. Good to have Nightingales just in case.
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19 minutes ago, Peter Denis said:
Seems to me that scientists are a bit more reluctant to sign the John Snow Memorandum. It currently has 6.900 signatures instead of the 3.000 you mention...
Below the status of signatures for the Great Barrington Declaration.
You should read the John Snow Memorandum: https://www.johnsnowmemo.com/
In the following quote, "herd immunity approach" is the Great Barrington approach:
"The arrival of a second wave and the realisation of the challenges ahead has led to renewed interest in a so-called herd immunity approach, which suggests allowing a large uncontrolled outbreak in the low-risk population while protecting the vulnerable. Proponents suggest this would lead to the development of infection-acquired population immunity in the low-risk population, which will eventually protect the vulnerable. This is a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.
Any pandemic management strategy relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed. Uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity(3) and mortality across the whole population. In addition to the human cost, this would impact the workforce as a whole and overwhelm the ability of healthcare systems to provide acute and routine care."-
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4 minutes ago, robblok said:
Yes it can.... but that is just part of life just like the Brits did not purposely made the virus more potent. As long as its not man made or escaped from a lab its just part of life. But that is my opinion others might see it differently.
I meant that the situation in China is naturally conducive to flu virus, maybe others, more so than UK, for example. The way ordinary Chinese farmers do things would have change a lot to change this fact of life.
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8 hours ago, Peter Denis said:
It seems that Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya are of a different opinion re vaccine passports.
FYI > Mr. Kulldorff is a biostatistician and epidemiologist, and professor at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Bhattacharya is a physician and economist, and professor at Stanford Medical School.
Attached a link to the April 6 article they published in the Wall Street Journal > https://www.wsj.com/articles/vaccine-passports-prolong-lockdowns-11617726629
For those that cannot access the full article, I added the PDF version.
Vaccine Passports Prolong Lockdowns - WSJ _ April 2021.pdf 889.06 kB · 0 downloads
Kulldorff and Bhattacharya are two of three who wrote the infamous Great Barrington Declaration which was denounced in the Lancet:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32153-X/fulltext
This latter became the John Snow Declaration and was subsequently subscribed by around 3000 scientists. Had the advice of Great Barrington been followed, so many more could have died. Just look at Brazil these days.
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23 hours ago, robblok said:
Yes but like the mutation its not something you can influence it just happens. So blaming is useless. Its not as if the Chinese wanted this to happen just like the UK did not plan on breeding a more infectious type. These things happen.
Now if the virus in China came from a lab or was man made, then its a different story.
After SARS in 2003, the wet markets were supposed to be closed. Maybe that worked for six months. In spite of efforts for total control, accidents and epidemics cannot be abolished.
The raising of various species together where they can contact/ingest droppings of wild birds has been happening for long years in China, and so have epidemics and pandemics.
As for the lab leak theory and gain-of-function research, we will only know of something incriminating if someone inside spills the beans.
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8 hours ago, BritManToo said:
What I was implying is that main stream scientists are more concerned with keeping their job and their status and the respect of their peers than actually taking a chance and discovering something new or possibly controversial.
That may be true sometimes. Conflict of interest is a huge problem here, mainly scientists and institutions who are afraid of losing access in China. This especially affects the lab leak question and whether there should be additional investigation in China of the origin of SARS-2. The Australian experience shows that whole countries can put their China trade at risk for asking too many questions.
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23 hours ago, sandyf said:
You are wrong, the proportion of covid cases in China to the population is inconsistent with a pandemic, less than 100K out of nearly 1.5 billion. Infection was very localised in China with nearly 75% of cases in just one province.
Unless of course you can prove otherwise.
You don't know much about statistics in China, it seems. Numbers are subject to manipulation to feed the narrative. People who reported what was happening have been disappeared except for the doctor who got Covid himself and passed away.
Perhaps you don't remember that some 5mn people left the province around Wuhan at Chinese New Year in 2020 before the government could lock down. So they were all free of Covid? Judging from hospital scenes, people packed in corridors, that doesn't make sense.
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17 hours ago, WHansen said:
An extract from the above article 09/03/2021
"Thai virologist Dr Yong Poovorawan has stepped in to explain why private companies are not yet allowed to import Covid-19 vaccine to Thailand.
On March 8, the Chulalongkorn University professor responded via Facebook to people inquiring why private companies and hospitals could not procure their own vaccine.
He explained that the Thai and other governments around the world had registered Covid-19 vaccines for emergency use. This meant responsibility for any side effects from inoculation lay with the government, not the vaccine producers.
Therefore, Covid-19 vaccine can only be imported under the government’s contract.
Currently, vaccine producers will not negotiate with private purchasers who have no government authorisation.
However, Dr Yong said private companies will be permitted to export shots once Covid-19 vaccines are fully registered, with responsibility for any side effects passed to the producers."
Maybe the vaccine producers are reluctant to be held responsible for serious side effects and this is slowing down the process ?
Pfizer may asking for full approval from US FDA in the first half of this year:
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7 hours ago, robblok said:
Because if you can't blame one country you can't blame the other. You cant say because of unsanitary practices in the UK the virus mutated. But at the same hand they like to do that with China.
Talk about double standards.
Well in fact zoonotic viruses have quite a history of originating in China, due to the particular animal husbandry practices there. Not so in the UK.
Whether the variant arose in the UK or came across the English Channel a/k/a la Manche is not as significant. These mutations occur in humans, not animals.
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15 hours ago, bangon04 said:
but we cannot call it the Chinese virus... because that would be unfair to our benevolent cousins
Want to call it the "Calais Virus"?
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18 hours ago, rabas said:
There are no records of the B117 strain in Myanmar from world databases. There are now 15 records of the B117 strain in Thailand, 9 were from positive cases found in ASQ. The other 6 are from the recent bar outbreaks in BKK.
It's unlikely to be from Myanmar.
In another thread, entry from Cambodia was suggested. It's difficult to know in the best of times what Covid is doing in Burma. Are these databases only reporting what governments report to them?
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19 hours ago, Nanaplaza666 said:
Covid is the new flu , the flu has magically disapeared . Experts say there is no more flu , how ????
Incidence of flu is reduced because people are wearing masks!
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8 hours ago, Russell17au said:
FACTCHECK: I never claimed that any of the companies that are listed by Reuters (A news media organisation) which failed to list Ecohealth Alliance Inc as the company that has been contracted by the American Institue of Health to investigate the link with the bats for the SARS and MERS viruses since 2014 and it is a joint operation that was set up between the Obama administration through the National Institute of Health and China in 2014. If you want the facts then here is the National Institute of Health projects site which is the American Government official site and not a media outlet.
The disturbing part of the Ecohealth/WIV collaboration is the technology transfer concerning gain of function research described in this article:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
Netizens pose question: How did UK variant get into Thailand despite emergency decree?
in Thailand News Headlines
Posted
Hydroxychloroquine was debunked in clinical trials a while ago.