Covid-19 response

Bruce Stephens said:
I don't wish to give him the ad revenue. He (Campbell, that is) seems pretty clearly dishonest by this point. He doesn't deserve my attention. I'm not sure whether he's gone full anti vaccine yet (still just anti mRNA as far as I know) but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.
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Campbell isn't the one presenting the information on this occasion.
 
The Royal Society publication dated 21 Oct 2020 - Covid Vaccine Deployment - Behaviour, ethics, misinformation and policy strategies. pg 3

"The public needs to be empowered to spot and report misinformation, with more accountability for media companies to remove harmful information and legal consequences for individuals or groups that spread misinformation".

Section 6.2 simply puts across the message that anything that counters the vaccine rollout is misinformation and should be removed and shut down. Doesn't matter how accurate or true the information, if it went against the rollout, it was removed.

In the Telegraph today (It wasn't just the BBC either, it was widespread and relentless:

The BBC was allowed to “misrepresent” the risk posed by Covid to most people to boost public support for lockdown, Government adviser Professor Mark Woolhouse has told the U.K. Covid Inquiry.

Professor Mark Woolhouse, an eminent epidemiologist and Government adviser, lambasted the corporation for having “repeatedly reported rare deaths or illnesses among healthy adults as if they were the norm”.

He said this created the “misleading impression” among BBC News viewers at the start of the pandemic that “we are all at risk” and “the virus does not discriminate”.

In reality, he said it was known at the time that the risk of dying from Covid was 10,000 times higher in the over-75s than the under-15s.

But Prof. Woolhouse told the Covid Inquiry the BBC did not correct its reporting, saying: “I suspect this misinformation was allowed to stand throughout 2020 because it provided a justification for locking down the entire population.”

He said further evidence of this was provided by a briefing dated March 22nd 2020 by a sub-group of the U.K. Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) that focused on the public’s behaviour.

This stated that “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group… the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging”.

Prof. Woolhouse said the “misperception” created by the BBC’s coverage that everyone was at risk was a “barrier to targeting interventions at the vulnerable minority who truly were at high risk from Covid”.

In his written submission to the inquiry about the impact north of the Border, he said: “I fear that Scottish Government’s pandemic response was compromised as a result.”

He also concluded that lockdown had been “least effective at protecting the most vulnerable precisely because of their need to have contacts with health care and social care workers — self-isolation was not an option.” The expert added: “This should have been recognised from the outset.”
www.telegraph.co.uk

BBC ‘misrepresented’ Covid risk to boost lockdown support, inquiry told

Epidemiologist Prof Mark Woolhouse criticised corporation for reporting rare deaths among healthy adults as the norm during pandemic
www.telegraph.co.uk www.telegraph.co.uk
 

Attachments

Nearly £10 billion written off value of P.P.E

Accounts published by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) also show the Government has no idea exactly how much PPE it has stored.

“Nearly all” of the PPE held in warehouses or containers is set for disposal.

DHSC said some of the PPE it had “was not usable by the department because it was defective or not suitable for use within the health and social care sector”.

“Other PPE was not defective, but the department will not be able to use it before its expiry date,” it added.

Government estimates it would cost £70m to take a full stock-take of the PPE that is currently held.

Because of the change of market conditions and the state of the equipment, material the Government spent £13.6bn on is now worth £3.7bn – a decrease of 73%.

news.sky.com

Nearly £10bn written off value of PPE bought during COVID pandemic

Labour's shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said "Rishi Sunak threw away taxpayers' money as if it were confetti" when chancellor, but the government insisted the decision to try to secure PPE for frontline health and care workers "was right".
news.sky.com news.sky.com
 
Amity Island said:
Because of the change of market conditions and the state of the equipment, material the Government spent £13.6bn on is now worth £3.7bn – a decrease of 73%.
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Some people (with close ties to some in Westminster) were able to make a great deal of money out of this scandal.
 
Burner phones and deleted (evidence) watsap messages between ministers.

The Scottish Daily Express can reveal that Nicola Sturgeon and Jeane Freeman purchased cheap mobile phones and prepaid top-up cards during the early months of the Covid pandemic.

The discovery – buried in the records of MSPs allowances – raises further questions about how the two key SNP ministers were communicating with each other during the once-in-a-century health emergency. Neither had a government issued mobile phone during their time in office.

www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk

Nicola Sturgeon and Jeane Freeman bought 'burner' phones in 2020 Covid lockdown

Exclusive: Both the two key figures at the top of the SNP's response to the pandemic bought cheap prepaid mobile phones and top-up cards in March 2020, despite having access to official communication devices
www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk

And at the covid inquiry yesterday:

At the root of her appearance in Edinburgh today is the allegation – explicitly confirmed, though excused, by Sturgeon this morning – that in 2021, when she gave an undertaking to the media to hand over all her WhatsApp messages to a future public inquiry, she already knew that (she had deleted the (evidence) messages) they had been deleted. Sturgeon justified this deliberate act of misleading the public, the media and bereaved families with an unapologetic apology and a baffling word salad.

www.telegraph.co.uk

Sturgeon breaks down in tears and admits to deleting WhatsApps: key moments from Covid Inquiry

Former first minister is accused by grieving families of 'crocodile tears' after her appearance in Edinburgh
www.telegraph.co.uk www.telegraph.co.uk
 
Interview yesterday with Florida's Surgeon General about d.n.a and lipid nano particles.

 
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Bruce Stephens said:
If you're going for crazy interviews
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No idea what you mean. Are you saying we can no longer rely on information and opinion given by official appointed leaders? If not, then where do we look for trustworthy and reliable information? We've already established that official studies and the like are often un-reliable, riddled with fraud, misinformation, bias and falsified results etc.
 
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Amity Island said:
Are you saying we can no longer rely on information and opinion given by official appointed leaders?
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Just him specifically. I'd also be skeptical of anything arising from an interview with Tucker Carlson. Anyone regarded as too far gone for Fox News isn't likely to attract useful sources.
 
Bruce Stephens said:
Just him specifically.
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I actually think much of what he said was very similar to how I felt about the pandemic response from the very beginning. It really did feel like a test of discernment. There were those who believed everything they were told and others like myself who felt deep down there was way more to this than meets the eye. It all felt really off from the outset.

After following this debacle for past 3 years, i've come to the conclusion that it was largely a confected response, be it scotch eggs, pcr test or definiton of a case. Not saying people weren't getting sick, just that everything was twisted or presented in the most un-believable way.

I think we are still waiting to find out what it was all (really) about.
 
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Amity Island said:
I actually think much of what he said was very similar to how I felt about the pandemic response from the very beginning. It really did feel like a test of discernment. There were those who believed everything they were told and others like myself who felt deep down there was way more to this than meets the eye. It all felt really off from the outset.
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I think that's a completely natural feeling.

We're pattern seeking animals, after all, and this is/was obviously a major event. It feels like it deserves a matching explanation.

People felt something not that different in the 1980s with HIV/AIDS. This was a disease that seemed to (very disproportionately) kill promiscuous, gay, drug users. So some Christians believed it was a punishment from God, some (Christian or not) believed HIV wasn't relevant (or, in some cases, didn't exist at all) and AIDS was caused by drug use and/or "unnatural sex", and (more famously) as effective drugs became available, some argued that AIDS was really being caused by AZT and other drugs. It was also a virus that changed society generally (every sexual encounter was potentially one that could give you this fatal virus), and so encouraged condom use (surely a good thing for obvious reasons). And people (with some justification) argued that governments were spreading fear unnecessarily: while a sexual encounter could infect you with a fatal virus, sexual encounters with men (and especially men who have sex with men) were much riskier than encounters with men who didn't do that (and women who didn't have sex with men who have sex with men).

Some of the conspiracies were made a bit less plausible given that in some parts of the world heterosexual men and women were more affected.

I don't recall conspiracies arguing that HIV was deliberately created, but I wouldn't be shocked if they existed.

The conspiracies continue, of course. Peter Duesberg (who was surely part of what influenced South Africa's disastrous response) still believes he was right. RFK Jr apparently believes (or argues) that vaccine research is responsible for HIV, the Spanish Flu, Lyme disease, and RSV. (Though I think he also argues that "the gay lifestyle" is partly responsible for HIV/AIDS too.)

While I'm sure there were real conspiracies (grifters are going to grift) in the HIV/AIDS era, I just don't think there were big ones behind it. Similarly with SARS-CoV-2. Lots of conspiracies (including in the Conservative Party), but they're all relatively little things (people selling supplements and other treatments that they claim will be effective (often claiming that the vaccines are ineffective or harmful), people offering PPE for inflated prices to governments).

Overall I think it's roughly what it seems to be: an accident of a virus crossing over from bats (via some unknown intermediaries), and governments and health systems trying to cope, and sometimes trying to use the emergency to push their own agendas. And none of it's very pretty. Apart from the vaccines, which were developed very quickly and are amazingly effective (and unusually safe). And those seem to be the things that some people want to argue with.
 
Bruce Stephens said:
I think that's a completely natural feeling.

We're pattern seeking animals, after all, and this is/was obviously a major event. It feels like it deserves a matching explanation.

People felt something not that different in the 1980s with HIV/AIDS. This was a disease that seemed to (very disproportionately) kill promiscuous, gay, drug users. So some Christians believed it was a punishment from God, some (Christian or not) believed HIV wasn't relevant (or, in some cases, didn't exist at all) and AIDS was caused by drug use and/or "unnatural sex", and (more famously) as effective drugs became available, some argued that AIDS was really being caused by AZT and other drugs. It was also a virus that changed society generally (every sexual encounter was potentially one that could give you this fatal virus), and so encouraged condom use (surely a good thing for obvious reasons). And people (with some justification) argued that governments were spreading fear unnecessarily: while a sexual encounter could infect you with a fatal virus, sexual encounters with men (and especially men who have sex with men) were much riskier than encounters with men who didn't do that (and women who didn't have sex with men who have sex with men).

Some of the conspiracies were made a bit less plausible given that in some parts of the world heterosexual men and women were more affected.

I don't recall conspiracies arguing that HIV was deliberately created, but I wouldn't be shocked if they existed.

The conspiracies continue, of course. Peter Duesberg (who was surely part of what influenced South Africa's disastrous response) still believes he was right. RFK Jr apparently believes (or argues) that vaccine research is responsible for HIV, the Spanish Flu, Lyme disease, and RSV. (Though I think he also argues that "the gay lifestyle" is partly responsible for HIV/AIDS too.)

While I'm sure there were real conspiracies (grifters are going to grift) in the HIV/AIDS era, I just don't think there were big ones behind it. Similarly with SARS-CoV-2. Lots of conspiracies (including in the Conservative Party), but they're all relatively little things (people selling supplements and other treatments that they claim will be effective (often claiming that the vaccines are ineffective or harmful), people offering PPE for inflated prices to governments).

Overall I think it's roughly what it seems to be: an accident of a virus crossing over from bats (via some unknown intermediaries), and governments and health systems trying to cope, and sometimes trying to use the emergency to push their own agendas. And none of it's very pretty. Apart from the vaccines, which were developed very quickly and are amazingly effective (and unusually safe). And those seem to be the things that some people want to argue with.
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My point is mainly about the pandemic and the multitude of responses effectively being a (our / each of us) test of discernment.

Much of it was so ludicrous, so unbelievable and unnecessary I'd of assumed the vast majority would have made better judgements. Contrary to discernment, the opposite happened.

Instead of everything (locking down, closing off hospitals to everyone but covid patients, shutting schools, bankrupting businesses and the economy etc etc), we could have instead had one simple rule, if you are sick (with covid symptoms), stay at home.

Instead, people happily followed the stupid rules. I was expecting at some point to see the nation say come on, they taking us all for fools now, let's get on with our lives.
 
Amity Island said:
Instead of everything (locking down, closing off hospitals to everyone but covid patients, shutting schools, bankrupting businesses and the economy etc etc), we could have instead had one simple rule, if you are sick (with covid symptoms), stay at home.
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As you know, our government (and likely some others) really didn't want to do that (they feared damaging the economy, and most certainly didn't want to compensate people who had to stay at home and couldn't work). They also (especially as evidence accumulated) doubted that it would be sufficient. The fear wasn't so much deaths as it was capacity for treatment. By the time they decided they really had to do something it was too late for moderate action.

But never mind, next pandemic we're going to act more like Sweden, according to the head of the UKHSA. (I'm not sure that's conditional on the particular properties of the infectious agent, and I'm sure it doesn't include a Swedish level of wellfare state or anything.)
 
Bruce Stephens said:
As you know, our government (and likely some others) really didn't want to do that (they feared damaging the economy, and most certainly didn't want to compensate people who had to stay at home and couldn't work). They also (especially as evidence accumulated) doubted that it would be sufficient. The fear wasn't so much deaths as it was capacity for treatment. By the time they decided they really had to do something it was too late for moderate action.

But never mind, next pandemic we're going to act more like Sweden, according to the head of the UKHSA. (I'm not sure that's conditional on the particular properties of the infectious agent, and I'm sure it doesn't include a Swedish level of wellfare state or anything.)
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We don't know what the government didn't want to do. We know some used burner phones, deleted messages or didn't hand them over to the enquiry.
 
Amity Island said:
We don't know what the government didn't want to do.
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In some cases we do, by their actions. There were repeated calls to improve the situation with statutory sick pay, and (eventually) they made a small improvement (now reversed). People claiming in work benefits (if I remember correctly) asked to isolate were (eventually) offered some money, but only once they'd got a positive test (so if they had symptoms they were supposed to isolate but wouldn't necessarily receive any compensation).
 
Bruce Stephens said:
In some cases we do, by their actions.
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True.

We know they didn't want us to manage our own life risks.

Didn't want us to decide if we said goodbye to or to meet loved ones who were already in their later days of life.

Didn't target the therapeutic at only those in their 50's and over.

Didn't want us to make our own free (free of psychological manipulation) choice on who wanted to take the therapeutic.

That the JCVI priority list for the new vaccine was never met. They made it abundantly clear long before the roll out that it should be the elderly in care homes that are first to receive the new therapeutic, Due to the push for mrna instead of a traditional vaccine, cold storage prevented those most at risk from having it. Instead it went to William Shakespeare in hospital.
 
Mandates unlawful, held judge in ruling.

And yet this week, they are still mandating healthcare staff and police and sacking those that don't feel they would benefit from or want the jab.

 
The Chief Health Officer of Queensland, Australia, said it was wrong to imply there was something unique about symptoms suffered by people following a bout of coronavirus. Instead, sufferers are simply experiencing the normal effects of recovering from a virus, which can include fatigue, brain fog and shortness of breath – known as post-viral syndrome.

The comments follow new research by Queensland’s public health department, which studied more than 5,000 people suffering Covid-like symptoms between May and June 2022.

Analysis found no evidence that COVID-19 positive adults were more likely to have symptoms a year after their diagnosis when compared to symptomatic adults who were negative for COVID-19.

www.telegraph.co.uk

There is no such thing as long Covid, say health officials

Doctors in Queensland say the condition is no different to any post-viral syndrome
www.telegraph.co.uk www.telegraph.co.uk
 
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