Eleftheros

Wouldn't that be an improvement on his current condition?

Thai TV just reported that a definite deal had been struck for all games to be shown free. FIFA reduced the price to 1.1 billion and the money was found somewhere. Perhaps each side waved skeletons from each other's closets and decided that a deal was in everyone's interests.

Undoubtedly that is the right interpretation. I think that the Scottish government is trying to win the Mengele Award for Best Medical Practices.

I wonder if they used those words "removed" and "disinfected" deliberately. They were euphemisms which were very popular in Europe in the 1940s ("Welcome to Auschwitz. Hope you had a nice train ride. Now, if you'll just go into that large chamber over there, we'll make sure you are 'disinfected'.").

Truth, facts, evidence and reality are irrelevant in the Covid era. Don't you know that? You must follow the official narrative, even if you think it is absurd. Haven't you been watching the BBC, CNN or MSNBC and other mainstream news outlets? They always tell the truth.

Of course. You must always do what the government tells you at all times, without question. Remember that the people in power are morally and intellectually superior to all the peasants, nobler and wiser people, and the only way to make a better society is to allow them to decide exactly what you are allowed to think, do, own and spend. It's all for The Greater Good.

Somebody who doesn't agree with every single governmental measure that was introduced and then enforced in the name of "controlling" the Covid virus outbreak.

Thailand seems to be reluctant to get to grips with this virus, even though new ways of managing it are coming through and being passed into law. In Scotland, for example, they have a new law called the Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Act 2022, which states clearly that "The Scottish Ministers may make arrangements for the vaccination or immunisation of persons against any disease." Other legal restrictions and requirements include that, at the discretion of the Scottish government, citizens: (a) submit to medical examination, (b) be removed to a hospital or other suitable establishment, (c) be detained in a hospital or other suitable establishment, (d) be kept in quarantine (within the meaning of section 51(4)), (e) be disinfected or decontaminated, (f) wear protective clothing, (g) provide information or answer questions about the person's health or other circumstances, (h) have the person's health monitored and the results reported, (i) attend training or advice sessions on how to reduce the risk of infecting or contaminating others, (j) be subject to restrictions as to where the person may go or with whom the person has contact, (k) abstain from working or trading. That should make the Scottish people feel more secure in their lives, once they have been decontaminated and detained in a suitable establishment. Perhaps Thailand would like to try this approach.

That is utterly false. Stop making stuff up just because it makes you feel morally superior. I am saying that the data show that excess deaths in the UK are up by about 15% since April, very few of which are due to Covid infections. I would think that any government would be concerned enough to inquire into the reasons for its citizens dying off, but so far they can't be bothered. It is left to organizations such as the British Heart Foundation to come up with a partial answer, which is that the ruinous lockdowns prevented people having their cardiac health checked. But that's not the whole picture. The phenomenon needs further investigating.

It is simply a mathematical reality that if you are calculating : A/B * C and you don't know any of the factors A, B, or C with any degree of accuracy, then you cannot expect to get an accurate answer.

You must see that the "number of people saved by vaccines" is a meaningless number. The way they estimate this is as follows: First, estimate the "mortality rate", which means estimating the number of Covid deaths (a dubious figure) divided by the number of infections (a completely unknown and unknowable figure). Do that both for the vaccinated and unvaccinated cohorts (more uncertainty) and then calculate the difference in mortality rate and multiply that by the population size. So it starts with a dodgy number divided by an unknowable number, multiplied by another poorly measured number to arrive at a total. It's the best they can do, but it should not be taken as an accurate representation of reality.

I'm not about to start playing Credibility Bingo on competing views of how many lives vaccines might have "saved". For a start, nobody accurately knows how many people died from Covid, given that every country used a different metric to decide what was and was not a Covid death, and even to decide if someone was vaccinated. Some jurisdictions considered people unvaccinated for 2 weeks after receiving a first dose, others regard you as unvaccinated if you are not "up to date" with the constantly increasing booster total required. A pointless exercise.

"Evidence-based facts"? Come on. The Gavi one is just another of those "mathematical model" studies which were largely responsible for starting the whole train wreck (see Imperial College, Ferguson, Neil, failed predictions of). Undoubtedly, the timely appearance of Omicron helped, but it is not the case that its appearance was simultaneous with governments stopping restrictions. New Zealand, for example, moved to "red alert" when Omicron arrived there, and even last week, the NSW government went into panic mode when a cruise ship with Omicron-infected patients was sighted on the horizon - Hazmat suits, quarantines, the whole panoply. Meanwhile, the UK had to open up months before Omicron made it there. The decisions made were politically-driven by a belated realization of the enormous damage being done by lockdowns.

Whether your opinion reflects "reality" or not does not disguise the fact that lockdowns were an unprecedentedly damaging blunder on economic, health, social and legal grounds. It may have been the worst health policy ever enacted in history. I don't agree with the idea that trying to extend the lives of (mainly) the sick and elderly is worth ruining a country for decades to come, the burden of which will fall on the young and future generations.

I don't think it was the change in the virus but the change in economic conditions. After two years of stupidly and blindly following a damaging lockdown regime, governments (not least Thailand's) saw what ruinous consequences it was producing, and were forced back into a retreat into something closer to reality and common sense.

"Regurgitate" is a very appropriate verb. It wasn't so much "vaccines and lockdowns/restrictions" - remember that the vaccines were heavily spruiked as being the magic bullet to get us beyond the lockdowns. That in turn became another convenient excuse for demonizing a section of society, with the absurd slogan "a pandemic of the unvaccinated".

We were talking about lockdowns, not vaccines. But by all means place me on ignore.

I would estimate that the damage caused by lockdowns - medical, psychological, social, and financial - far outweighs any saving of lives that may have happened, and that those negative effects will be felt for decades to come in a very painful way by future generations.

I think this is almost certainly part of the cause of the excess deaths. But this has not jumped massively "since the pandemic began". It has jumped massively since government measures to "control" the pandemic began. It's an important distinction.

It's only weird if you think that the mainstream media is in the business of journalism, of holding power to account. In fact, it is nowadays in the business of publicizing Government propaganda, and keeping silent when it sees something that threatens the preferred narrative.

Most people you call "anti-vaxxers" are nothing of the sort. They will happily take vaccines if there is a serious threat to their health and a well-tried and tested, effective vaccine which will conquer the illness. Most people I know who have decided not to take Covid vaccines have as their broad reasoning "not this disease, not these vaccines, not these health authorities". In other words, they have done their risk/benefit analysis and decided to do without the vaccines, a decision that is looking better every day.

I think a better formulation of that advice is "Do the risk/benefit analysis for yourself."

I find it hard to take the CDC seriously as a reality-based scientific enterprise, as its Covid protection advice now refers to "pregnant and recently pregnant people", seemingly unable to use the word "woman". They were certainly over-confident in the ability of the vaccines to prevent infection and transmission of Covid, and it is a toss-up at this point whether they are serving the cause of scientific truth, or the government narrative.

Let's be generous and assume that the virus had caused a secondary bacterial lung infection which the antibiotics were able to deal with. This is known to be a complication of both flu and Covid.

Equally pertinent is that governments round the world seem to have no interest in investigating these matters. It seems that they either don't care, or are scared of what they might find. In the UK (with a similar population to Thailand) over 30,000 extra citizens have simply dropped dead since April this year - that is, the excess deaths are mainly occurring outside hospital (rather than sick people gradually passing away in hospital). Only a small proportion of these are Covid deaths. In the Canadian province of Alberta in 2021, the leading cause of death was "ill-defined and unknown causes", not great diagnostics for a developed nation's healthcare system. This may be happening in Thailand, too, but I shouldn't think they even have the figures to hand, let alone any reason why it's happening.