Eleftheros

Move Forward suspects foul play in controversy over iTV’s legal status Even saying that in public is probably enough to have the entire party banned, along with all its MPs.

"Starting to"? When did it ever stop?

*Anutin reveals increase in COVID-19 cases, but not severe: urges public to remain calm* The best way to get the public to remain calm would be to stop issuing pointless bulletins every time the number of Covid-19 cases rises. Idiot.

This inquiry is pretty much guaranteed not to be a fact-finding exercise – but a political one. It will most likely rebrand lockdown as a noble cause, led astray by a few faulty people. They, not the system, will be blamed. In that way, it can buttress the moral case for future restrictions and the overriding power of an unelected civil service. It won't be a way to genuinely clear the air, but a classic case of power absolving itself.

I didn't say the scientific modelling was nonsense. I went out of my way to commend the authors for making such a detailed study. As I recall, I said something like "The Lancet guys did extremely detailed work." I'll go further than that; I think they probably did the best possible work that they could in impossible circumstances. We don't even have a consensus on what constitutes a "Covid death" around the world. The UK used the metric "anyone who died within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test"; other countries were more rational. We don't have a consensus on what constitutes "being vaccinated". Is it one dose? Two? Three? How long after vaccination is someone still regarded as "unvaccinated"? The authors of the study were forced to "assume" (their word, not mine) 14 separate factors which would affect their calculations. Again, I'm sure they did their best, but it's an impossible task. There is simply no way to come up with a definitive number in such chaotic circumstances. Which is why I said before, and say again, that declaring "vaccines saved 14.4 million lives" is an absurd and unscientific claim.

Hysterical playground name-calling is always a bad substitute for reasoned argument.

How true that is. There are still people who believe everything that governments, health bureaucrats and Big Pharma tell them, despite evidence to the contrary from a solid 3 years of hypocrisy, stupidity, false statements, and drooling nonsense emanating from governments and their tame health bureaucrats. Even throwing a dart at a board would have been a better way to decide policy than the policy that was generally enacted. As the 19th century UK prime minister William Lamb wisely observed: "What all the wise men promised, has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass."

The dinosaurs-that-be would rather gargle battery acid than allow Pita to become PM. Whether he is technically in breach of some badly written law is irrelevant; the interpretation is everything and the dinosaurs are firmly in charge of that process. Thailand is now stuck between the future (Pita) and the past (Army, Crown, Electoral Commission, and Constitutional Court) and my guess is that the 'past' has too much to lose to allow this guy near the levers of power. I expect that they will try to shove him in jail, because in their eyes, that makes the process look more legitimate. The question remains: What will happen on the streets if it plays out like this?

That may be true, but it still doesn't alter the fact that declaring "vaccines saved 14.4 million lives" is an absurd and unscientific claim. Any number can only best guess from a computer model based on a set of assumptions and estimates. Change the assumptions and you change the number. The Lancet guys did extremely detailed work, but the reality of computer modelling is that the error bars on any estimate are usually so wide as to make the answer meaningless - except for political purposes. That was precisely the case of Imperial College's computer model of Covid deaths - wildly inaccurate, but politically useful. Hundreds more examples of this kind of thing can be found in the climate change literature.

Good find. It exactly proves my point that any estimate of "lives saved" is an entirely speculative exercise in mathematical modelling. If you want to "prove" that the vaccines saved lives, you first have to assume that the vaccines saved lives, as the article explicitly states. "Vaccination was assumed to confer protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection and the development of severe disease requiring hospital admission." Of course, once you have simply assumed that the vaccine works, then it is not too difficult to "prove" that it saved a lot of lives. The exact number you come up with depends on how you tweak the parameters in your computer model. It's a mathematically pointless exercise, but I suppose it serves a purpose. It probably provides some cover to governments and Big Pharma by "proving" how well they handled this outbreak.

It's a truly terrible road. They've been building massive overhead flyovers in that area for what seems like decades, but there are all sorts of detours, chicanes, and bumpy ruined sections of the original road. Not difficult for anyone to make a mistake and cause an accident. The locals have been complaining about it for years with the usual lack of success.

".. as long as it takes" As long as what takes, exactly? Have any of these dim bulbs figured out an exit strategy? Biden has no answer to that, and Rasheed Sanuk has no idea, either. These people are toddlers playing with fire, given that the threat of nuclear war is still in play.

Someone who is "pro-virus" is actively anti-human, given that viruses kill humans in large numbers every year. Such people, it seems, can almost exclusively be found in the ranks of the climate change zealots who believe that humans are, in the words of environmentalist David Attenborough, "a plague on the Earth". To produce an estimate of "lives saved by vaccination", you first have to assume what degree of protection against a "Covid death" was given to each individual by a vaccination, and then multiply that by the population, a highly speculative piece of mathematics. These estimates serve a single purpose: to pacify the gullible into believing they did the "right thing".

No promotion in 544 years, eh? Career has stalled, it seems....

I remember the Great Tourist Diarrhoea Outbreak in Saigon/HCMC, when the locals first realized that tourists would pay real money for water in bottles .....

Dengue is a truly nasty disease, attacking both young and old, and with a significant mortality rate. Even dengue pales in comparison with Japanese encephalitis, another mosquito-borne disease, which has a 25% mortality rate in symptomatic cases, and many more will have lifelong disability. Fortunately there is a very effective, long-established and safe vaccine, which I guess is routinely given to Thai children.

Well, the Khmer Rouge banned them. With extreme prejudice.

It was not "if", it was not "an official" and it was not "a harmless mistake". It definitely occurred, it was the US Government and their leading health authorities, and it was a false supposition which was used as a firm basis for a raft of extremely damaging and discriminatory policy decisions. For example, there is no logical reason for any sort of vaccine mandate unless you are holding as a fact that the vaccines are 100% effective. Because if you don't have that 100% certainty, you cannot logically separate the population into a pristine vaccinated cohort and an infectious unvaccinated cohort.

No, I am talking about repeated public statements made by leading health and political figures in the US to the effect that if you got a Covid-19 vaccine, you were 100% safe from getting the virus and transmitting it. No more, no less.

It's called 'deliberately making false statements'. And that's being generous. If you believe that government apparatchiks are justified in stating falsehoods for the supposed 'greater good' of society, then you are on the same side as some extremely nasty and well-known people in the recent history of the world.

Excuse me, they weren't just "a handful of people". They were the leaders of the country and thus the people who decided subsequent policy based on those false claims.

You know as well as I do that the people who made policy in the US, that is the leading health bureaucrats and the politicians whom they advised, said it publicly loud and often, and based policy on that. To deny that is truly to try to defend the indefensible.

Clearly a Thai with an unusually educated and erudite grasp of his own language.

"Sit down, put your feet up, take your time, no need to hurry, stay as long as you like." That is now regarded as 'offensive'?

Yes, but health authorities should have known - must have known - that any claims of absolute 100% protection against infection and transmission for a rapidly evolving respiratory virus had to be incorrect. Yet that did not stop them flooding the airwaves with statements to that effect, and then using those statements as a basis for subsequent public policy. That is why I characterize them as incompetent, malicious, or both.