If he is in China he can’t get Google, YouTube, Facebook and thousands of other sites. Perhaps this site is just too insignificant for the Chinese censors to bother with. ChinaSaint is very wise to be incredibly supportive of the Chinese Government, his hosts, though. Who knows where he might end up if he were critical?
Agree that's what I was hinting at. I met a Chinese girl in London last year who was telling me that they are not allowed to have Facebook and have their own state-run equivalent. she said many of the young still go under the wall to get FB. I don't find the risk worth it tbh. FB is crap.
It’s good for pictures of OAPs looking glumly at supermarket shelves and the scientific opinions of plumbers.
His quote of "It is totally refuted as being man-made by China." is so reassuring. About as reassuring as that ambassador comments that the Uighurs pictures are fake and that they are all happy?
It’s widely acknowledged as not being man-made. Beth (I think) posted the clever stuff behind it to back that up some time ago. You can say China did this or didn’t do that. Once you stray into suggesting the Chinese government intentionally inflicted this on the world you’re into dodgy alt-right skinny teenagers on 4chan territory. None of which, again, excuses the gross incompetence and corruption of our Brexit Meanz Brexit government which is what it’s really intended to do.
I better not say any more about China or I may get a virus. I can imagine thousands of them around monitors say "Ellers In Berkshire has criticised the People Republic of China. Send out a virus.
With all due respect, I read the post from Beth and of course, I respect her knowledge as that's her job however even she would say that there are other areas in all of this that her and others may find strange. remember it wasn't that long ago that people were assassinating others with weird stuff that wasn't picked up at first by certain scientific organisations. For all, we know the Chinese may have created something we can't understand yet. Agree all a bit far fetched, but we don't actually know. I'm sure you do though?
If you want to know the government’s vaccine strategy just read the Sunday Times. Kate Bingham, head of the Vaccine Taskforce, wife of Tory minister and life sciences venture capitalist, has helpfully shared the approach, down to specifics about which vaccines the government could be investing in. But she’s not shared this with the British public, or even MPs. She revealed all in an international online webinar for women in private equity ($200 a head fee). The actual vaccines we (the taxpayer) could be paying for are classified as ‘official sensitive’ but it’s nice for others to get a head start in strengthening their portfolios. FOR ****’S SAKE. How much ****ing rope do we have to give these people? Apparently all 50 year olds and above will be vaccinated by next Easter, even though they don’t know which vaccine(s) work yet.
I have now performed my civic duty I have listened to the very long Yeadon interview. He is obviously very earnest not a nutter. He is not a mad conspiracy theorest. I think there are a number of things wrong with what he says, but there are also so many things we hear from the media that are wrong too. I think there is a lot right in what he says too Time will tell if he is right...or wrong ... So here are the problems He says 30% of country has had Covid19 in the first wave, 30% have a natural immunity (to other Coronovirus I assume). The rest are vunerable but not enough to fuel a pandemic. ...but those people are your granny, your friends mother (in my case), your ill child. They may still die He says there is no excess deaths, now. He is wrong they are now rising, (I checked figures and there are excess deaths for last 3 weeks). But an increase in excess deaths must come from somewhere (these are often people who were going to die in the nearish future)...so there will be a dip and there was during the summer, when we had less than normal death but they are now rising. He says these are due to non-respiratory deaths caused by restricted access to NHS. He maybe right on that. But Covid also causes non-respiratory deaths...due to thickening of the blood, so you get stroke and heart disease. So he cannot really say that. I am sure that over the next 4 weeks we will have rising death rates, and more and more will be identifiable as "Covid". But he is so right there will be a lot caused by ill people not using the NHS, late Cancer detection. Heart problems not diagnosed etc...and suicides. He says that the false positives in the PCR test are fuelling this response to the second wave. Now he has a real point here. When you are testing 20-30 million people and you have a false positive rate of 1%, then you will get 30,000 false positives. This is a disasterous result in a disease in which nearly half people are assymptomatic. In scientific research, you retest the sample and then you go back and get a second sample (near immediately) and retest. Because the trace and track system is not run by scientists but by managers and company people like Harding, this is not done. The Trace and Track system will not release their specificity/ sensitivity results to SAGE...they just give out the manufactures sensitivity/specificity figures, which were obviously run under laboratory conditions. That is a disgrace Alternative SAGE have been asking for a different testing regime from the start He assures you that you are immune if you have had it before....now this is partially wrong. We get the common cold 2 or 3 times a year, that is caused by a coronoavirus. There are only 6 human coronovirus, so we get multiple infections through our life time. Covid 19 is a new virus though. We keep getting common cold time and time again. However what he should have said is you probably have partial immunity and so you still get a respiratory disease and can pass it on (especially dangerous if you pass it onto your granny, who has been isolated and gets the "full blown...I have never seen this before" attack ) He is right the presence of antibodies is not the be all and end all. I have said this myself here. T cells are the important ones, and memory B cells. In the vaccine trial this is tested. We will know this soon. I am pretty confident that the vaccine will give us partial immunity and so they will reduce a Covid19 infection down to a dose of the common cold He mentioned the fact that the vaccine trials are not been run effectively, but he meantioned himself why. We cannot test vaccinate people and then give them Covid . That is against human rights. So we vaccinate peopl (like my daughter and now son-in-law) and just allow them to live their lives. They are/will be closely monitored for years to come. So that comment is not fair. He says he does not trust the BBC as they portray false information. They are given the information from the Government, from Valance and Witty and from the Trace and Track system. If they did not give out that information they would be attacked by all sides, but there are beginning to get "freedom of information" requests through, which is highhlights the U turn in March when we went from herd immunity to lockdown in the first U-turn. So I think he is wrong in saying the pandemic is over, it is still here. It will be there every winter until vaccine/herd immunity/herd partial immunity takes over. Should we shut the coutry down again...now you are talking politics/not science But I question I would ask him (and he wouldnt answer because he doesn't know...fairly) WHY And WHY would the Tories do this, and ruin the monetary basis of this country. I really fear that the government has become increasingly reactive and not at all proactive. I may be beginning to believe, we will soon be dying of lack of leadership and not Covid. You are probably going to ask me what I would do if I was PM QPRBeth. I think I would ask the old and vulnerable to self isolate over the winter, (and that would be a personal decision). I would put in place a lot of social services to look after these people, there would be no stigma if you chose to isolate. I would let everybody else get on with their lives. If you showed symptoms, then you isolated and got a series of verified tests. All your contacts were then told and they were monitored correctly. Masks should be worn appropriately. There would be a lot more to think about...the gist is I am not sure this lockdown is going to help the country very much...and is unfair on the east and soth west of England
'Mass coronavirus vaccination' plan for Scotland in 6-weeks time, leaked email claims NHS Scotland has already secured fridges to store the vaccine in readiness for its anticipated delivery before Christmas. A "mass vaccination" programme is being planned for Scotland in mid-December, according to a leaked email. A memo has been uncovered by the Sunday Mail that relates to the roll out of an anticipated nationwide Covid-19 inoculation schedule in just six weeks time. The document explains it's "the most important public health goal in our lifetimes". It's also understood the Scottish NHS has already awarded a contract for supply of refrigeration equipment to store the vaccine when it becomes available. The email sent by NHS Lothian director David Small to Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) members in different local authority areas, outlines the scale of the operation required. It explains: "Timescales are uncertain, but we are working to an assumption that a vaccine will be available from mid-December 2020. "This will be a mass vaccination programme to achieve the most important public health goal in our lifetimes."
Thanks for putting the time in. Long COVID? The false positives in the PCR test seem to me to be very irritating but irrelevant when compared to the hard data - COVID hospital admissions and COVID related deaths, and we know which direction they are heading, and alarmingly rapidly. There is a legitimate and necessary debate to be had about measures to try and control the virus (which we can’t guarantee will work) and their impact on mental health, other non covid physical health, the economy and education. Dr Yeadon’s opinions don’t seem to me to be contributing much to that debate, which is about principles and priorities, not science, testing accuracy or the definition of pandemic. This debate should have been had much more clearly and publically throughout the year. Every policy decision should have come with an easily digested risk benefit analysis (this saves xx lives and will cost x% of GDP/xx jobs/xx cancer deaths) and a rationale as to why it’s worth it*. Instead we get meaningless and misleading graphs presented poorly. I’m afraid isolating the old and vulnerable is no longer enough to stop the hospitals being flooded. That’s why we have another lockdown, which is ideologically the last thing free market Tories want. The answer to the WHY question is only difficult if you think we are being deliberately misled. The answer is fear, indeed terror, of the consequences of inactivity. The shame is that we can’t even guarantee that the proposed actions will work, even temporarily (which is actually the best we can hope for). * I posted earlier that if you applied the same cost effectiveness measures that NICE does for new medicines, we wouldn’t be taking any anti COVID measures. Personally I think this says more about the NICE methodology than anything else but I admit to extreme bias and personal interest in this.
Can confirm not606 is not banned in china ellers from the few times i have been. Facebook is deffo blocked though as is google
Thanks Beth, I think you confirmed a lot of what I took from his interview. It was the WHY thing that struck me most, and, as you say, he couldn't answer of course
The problem in the trace and Track system is not irrelevant Stan and it is really Yeadons only solid point imho. It is run by the incompetent and for various reasons it gives us false results The test is not fit for purpose and untrustworthy The tracking system doesnt work and is untrustworthy The scanning in to places just is not correct. I am extremely unimpressed by Valance and Whitty. Sally Davies would not have allowed this to happen. But we will see numbers in hospitals rise drastically for the next 3 weeks I am sure. But I stick with my point, we are suffering now from lack of leadership
Perhaps irrelevant is too strong a word, and no argument from me that test and trace has been a disaster, laughable if it wasn’t so important. And yes, leadership both political and scientific has been pretty absent. They all seem out of their depth. Sadly it’s not confined to the UK. This whole event has done public confidence in science no good whatsoever in my view, and Whitty and Vallance have contributed hugely to this. Their performance yesterday was shameful. At the start I was willing to trust them completely, now I greet their appearance with derision. Now I will upset a few here.......the ultimate saviours in all this will be hard nosed commercial companies, and they will make money out of it - whether through vaccines, antibody treatments, anti viral treatments or other things. These treatments will mean we can co exist with the virus while living normal(ish) lives. All of the public health measures short of complete isolation are of only limited impact.
I know you won't know the answer to this Beth, but I wonder whether the proposed vaccine(s) will prevent or supress Long Covid?
