But that’s just the start. Murad Banaji, an Indian mathematician, reports that there were 476 funerals in Kanpur on one day — normally you’d expect about 100 — and yet only three reported deaths from Covid. John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has others: cities are cremating many, many times as many people as have apparently died from Covid (some of his data is taken from Banaji). The IHME model estimates that the number of people dead is about double the reported numbers; Burn-Murdoch thinks it could be much higher, as high as 10 times.
India has a relatively young population, and the risk of death from Covid is hugely affected by age, so the infection fatality rate – the risk of death for someone infected by the virus – was probably quite low, comparatively speaking: perhaps about 0.3%. (This Nature paper says that the IFR in Bangladesh is about that, and since the two countries have a similar age profile, I’m assuming it’s about correct for India.)
But that will all have changed now. The Indian healthcare system is overwhelmed; there isn’t any oxygen to keep patients alive. This news report suggests about 40% of ICU patients in India were dying back in September: if we imagine that all of the 0.3% of infected people who died went through ICU first (which isn’t true, but let’s imagine it), then that means about 0.75% of Indian people infected with Covid ended up in ICU (0.3 is 40% of 0.75).
But if you end up needing ICU in India now, you’ll almost certainly die: the things you’d have gone into ICU for — mechanical ventilation, oxygen, close medical attention — aren’t available. There just isn’t the capacity to treat you. The healthcare system has collapsed. ICU treatment was, in most cases, what was keeping the 60% who didn’t die alive. It’s a good bet that the IFR now is up much closer to 0.75%.
Let’s imagine, now, that we can get those 30 million vaccines into people’s arms as soon as possible. What good might they do 1?
First, to keep things simple, I’m going to assume that the social distancing measures stabilise the Indian outbreak at its current level of about 10 million new cases a day. There was a plausible estimate that about 30% of Indians – 300 million people! – had already had the disease in February, and about 10% have had a vaccine, so it’s reasonable to think that about 40% have some sort of immunity now. At some point that will start slowing down the outbreak significantly, but I’m going to ignore that, again to keep things simple.
Second, I’m going to assume that the vaccine prevents about 90% of deaths. It’s usually more than that, but there are new variants going around India, against which the Ox/AZ vaccine may be a bit less efficacious. Prof Rupert Beale, the head of the Cell Biology of Infection lab at the Crick Institute, thinks 90% is probably a reasonable guess, and Banaji thinks that vaccines are already having an effect.
And I’m going to assume that it takes about three weeks after the first dose for the vaccine to have a full effect.
So if you gave 30 million immunologically naive people the vaccine tomorrow, what would happen? Over the next three weeks, given that 1% of the population is being infected every day, about 20% of them will probably get infected, and 0.75% of them will die. That’s 45,000 deaths.
But after that, things will start to improve. Over the following two months, given our simplified numbers, about 13 million more of them would have caught Covid, and about 100,000 would have died. But, because they’re all vaccinated, all but 10,000 will, in fact, live.
So given these very plausible, or even conservative, estimates, the 30 million AstraZeneca vaccines sitting in an Ohio warehouse could save 90,000 lives in the next three months. Of course, it’s not plausible that they could be put in arms tomorrow – but, then, they also wouldn’t be distributed at random; they would, you’d hope, be given to the most vulnerable people, people with an expected infection fatality rate much higher than 0.75%. The Indian vaccination programme may well not be as well-targeted to at-risk groups as the JCVI-led UK programme, but if it were given entirely to, say, the over-65s, then it might save five times as many people. All of these are estimates, of course, but I think that it’s extremely reasonable to think that it’d be something like this.
And there’s something else to consider. As well as directly protecting people, it will break chains of infection; each infection prevented by vaccination will prevent some number of future cases. Working out even roughly how many would need proper scientific modelling, but as a sort of thought experiment, I checked and saw that the Indian vaccination programme is currently managing about two million doses a day. It was higher, before — about three million — so let’s go with that.
If we naively assume that the 30 million doses simply push the programme on by a proportionate amount, it would mean that the fight against the epidemic is accelerated by 10 days. Again, if I naively think “10 fewer days like today”, then that’s about 25,000 fewer deaths. That’s probably not a very sensible way to think about it — God only knows what the Indian epidemic will be doing in a month or two months’ time — but different models have the daily deaths peaking from 6,000 to 40,000 some time between now and the summer. I don’t think that ballpark figure is unrealistic.
Maybe I’ve got my maths wrong in all of this; maybe I’m wrong by an order of magnitude. Maybe they’ll only save about 10,000 lives. You could still save 10,000 lives for the cost of sending some vaccines you aren’t going to use to another country.
As I said above, there’s been some good news. The USA is going to release 60 million doses as they become available. But it’s not clear that they’re going to go to India – some, at least, are earmarked for Mexico and Canada – and, bafflingly, they have to undergo safety review. Every hour counts, but it will take weeks, at least, for the FDA to carry out this review; weeks in which thousands of Indian people die every day. India has already approved the Ox/AZ vaccine; it has its own experts, and they have assessed the risks and benefits, and they don’t need the FDA to check it for them. This maddening, patronising, counterproductive safety-first approach will cost thousands of lives. Simply get every dose you have on refrigerated aircraft right now and ship them to India as fast as you can.
And it’s not just the USA. Other countries have supplies of vaccines that could do good. Denmark, I think, has about 50,000 unused doses of Ox/AZ which it won’t use. I imagine that lots of other European countries have an oversupply. But the US millions are the overwhelming bulk of the issue.
When Aaronson wrote his blog post, the USA was standing, feet dry, by the pond, refusing to throw their life-belt to save thousands of drowning people. Now, at least, it looks as though they might throw it, after a suitable period of checking that it is adequately buoyant and is painted a regulation shade of orange. But the complete lack of urgency is probably going to cost thousands of lives. For pity’s sake, if you’re not going to use them, get them on a boat and send them somewhere that will.
Main Edition
US
FR
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeBritain is 65 million and we had over a thousand deaths a day. Sometimes close to 2,000.
India is over 1300 million – so 20 times bigger population.
They’d have to have 30,000 plus deaths a day to match our worst period.
As usual, we are panicking and hysterical. This is not the plague (that killed 25-50% of Britain’s population), it’s not even the 1918 flu that killed 100m out of a world population of 2,500 million (1 in 25).
This is Covid 19, 3 million world wide deaths out of 8,000 million or more world population. So a 1 in 2,700 chance of death.
Why has every one become utter imbeciles and morons when it comes to measuring risk these days. People just see risk, they don’t put it into any proportion. They don’t do the simple maths. It’s the ultimate destination of the health and safety, risk free culture of the last 20 years.
In the UK the bed wetters who have backed lockdown have thrown away a year of life for 65 million for no reason what so ever. Lockdown didn’t reduce deaths as the death rates in Sweden, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea prove. (https://www.aier.org/article/the-failure-of-imperial-college-modeling-is-far-worse-than-we-knew/)
The death toll of 130,000 or so has an average age of death of 82, 30,000 plus dementia sufferers included, just so happened that during this period there were zero flu deaths, and the tally counts anyone who died within 28 days of a positive test and 95% of those who died had pre existing conditions. The genuine Covid 19 death toll in this country is probably much closer to 50,000, and that may even be an exaggeration.
Maybe we should measure the deaths of people who have had the vaccine within the last 28 days. With 2 shots per person and a daily UK death rate of 1500, you’d be able to count 84,000 deaths as vaccine deaths.
Back to basic maths and Covid 19 – 130,000 deaths from a population of 66m – it means a death rate in the UK of about 1 in 500. But if you don’t have pre existing conditions you can reduce that by a factor of 20, so it’s more like 1 in 10,000, and then you have to adjust that depending on how much younger than 82 you happen to be.
If you exclude the obese from the figures you will find healthy people under the age of 65 or even older, have almost zero risk.
Most people still don’t know anyone who has been seriously ill or died from Covid 19 – and if they do they’re usually very old, very frail and were sick anyway.
The great hysteria of 2020-2021 continues.
All very well, but the only sufferer I personally know who has died of COVID was exactly that: not obese, healthy, and under 65.
The outliers do not prove a point…. you have to go with the stats.
Worthy of a Bond villain.
Thanks, I am flattered
Bloefeldt perhaps?
Very few drunk drivers get killed while driving drunk. You have to go with the stats: let’s all drive drunk, whatever the bedwetters say.
Poor comparison….
Why?
But surely it’s their right to drive while drunk if they don’t believe statistics, even if they’re not the ones who get killed!
(/s)
No, it’s not their right to get other people killed.
Your mockery uses precisely the same argument that you’re opposing.
Which is that total ‘banning’ on the evidence of a little is wrong.
Your mockery is that total ‘doing’ on the evidence of a little is ludicrous.
You both make the same argument: ‘global’ or ‘universal’ ‘total’ responses to small local phenomena are invalid.
I’m not a logician but it seems clear to me.
Happens everywhere:
. Some kids fall off the high bar in playgrounds and hurt themselves badly.
. So bad all high bars in all playgrounds.
. So make all kids play on the high bar in playgrounds.
It’s all wild over-reaction isn’t it?
Your analogy is invalid. Here’s why. How many kids kill other kids in falling off the high bar while not injuring themselves?
This is about whom you put at risk by giving them the disease, even if it doesn’t kill you.
That’s what Richard, Kay and co want to do. They want to not be vaccinated and to return to normal life, because they reckon they personally will be fine.
Except that in doing that, they risk becoming carriers, who infect people who won’t be fine. They provide a locus for the disease to mutate into a form that vaccines don’t protect. And for all they know, they won’t be fine anyway, because they’re not virologist or epidemiologists, they’re just cranks on the internet and people are dying of this who weren’t supposed to.
“…who infect people who won’t be fine”…but the vast majority of those people who “won’t be fine” if they catch Covid will have all been vaccinated, and thus immune from the virus. Or, if they prefer not to get vaccinated, they understand the risk to themselves and deal with it, rather than expect others to make decisions about their own health, on their behalf.
So what’s your problem with young, healthy people choosing to not get vaccinated?
Most young, healthy people have never gotten flu shots, either. Why is submitting to vaccinations and all their attendant risks suddenly something the young and healthy owe to the older and most vulnerable?
We used to up until 1967, and killed about 7,000 a year ! Then Barbara Castle stopped all the fun!
That doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of us don’t know anyone who’s even had covid never mind died ‘of’ ‘with’ or ‘where covid was mentioned’. 99.8 percent have not died of covid.
Isn’t there a quote that says ‘anecdote is the enemy of truth’.
Sounds like an anecdote to me.
Except that it’s an anecdote that keeps repeating itself in every western country.
It’s in reply to an anecdotal account though. Jon Redman claimed to have known someone with no risk factors (to his knowledge) who (allegedly) died of COVID.
With the criteria used to classify a death as a “covid death”, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this person had fallen off a ladder, been in a motorcycle accident, or got blood poisoning from a cat bite.
In February the ONS thought 20% of Britons had been infected at some stage. Unless your circle of friends and family is very small it’s unlikely you don’t know someone who has had it.
I know of two people dying of it.
“With” or “of”? Ages? Medical conditions? Underlying conditions?
Yes Kay, because anyone with an “underlying condition” is, in your view, a non-person whose life is not worth preserving.
Nobody is saying that their lives are not worth preserving. But we have a right to be told the truth about the demographics of those dying from this virus. If it is NOT a virus that strikes down healthy and fit people in their prime of life, i.e.people of working age, or children or teens, it does not justify shutting down the world for over a year, trampling civil liberties, depriving people of health care, wrecking children’s education, destroying small businesses, and trashing the economy. It just doesn’t. Prevention efforts should have been targeted exclusively at the most vulnerable. They weren’t; quite the contrary. Actions of certain governments, eg. that of New York State and Michigan, in fact strongly suggested that they WANTED tens of thousands of elderly people to die.
100% of the people I actually know who’ve died of COVID were slim, healthy and under 65.
The claims that people like that are safe, and those who aren’t aren’t, is just something I’m expected to believe based on other people’s reported experience. A few weeks ago, however, COVID was reportedly no threat to the under-30s either and then India happened. A few weeks before that AZ was reportedly fine and now it’s not.
For all you, I or anybody else knows, the first round of deaths were just the weakest sufferers. The next round, given that immunity is ephemeral and the virus is mutating, appears to be reaching younger, supposedly stronger victims.
I am reminded strongly of that American Civil War general who was killed mid-sentence saying “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this ra—“…
100% of how many?
Get out of bed, stand straight, look life in the eye and live it. I am not willing to waste the rest of my life hiding away, even if whimpering spineless quivering fools like you are happy to avoid any risk for the rest of your lives.
Are you happy to refuse vaccination and thereby spread COVID to people it will kill, and / or incubate a variant of COVID that kills people who have been vaccinated? If so, shame on you. Really, shame on you.
If the vaccine works and you chose to have it, surely you are safe…. Unless you’re not sure the vaccine works.
I’ve explained this to you already. You are monstrously, malevolently selfish. You could not care less whom you infect.
You’re an absolute muppet, Richard.
You are a mindless sheep repeating the propaganda on mainstream media. 27,000 people die every day in India. 3000 kids die there every day from starvation. All while their government spends billions on military and space programs. All while their poorest don’t have access to basic sanitation and clean water.
Where was your faux outrage and concern for the people of India 2 years ago? Melt.
It was where my concern is now. I’m not talking about India. I’m talking about the threat to vaccinated people from those who choose to avoid vaccination because they figure they are not personally at risk, and who then spread it to people who are at risk.
I think your concern is entirely misplaced. For the vaccines not to work you would have to have far more significant mutations than are appearing now. In fact sequencing all these very minor variants only serves to further spread hysteria and fear.
As for your concerns if you’re worried. Simply do the following in addition to your vaccination. Make sure you take vitamin D and zinc, don’t stay for prolonged periods of time in crowded poorly ventilated spaces, get a big-ass HEPA air purifier for your office space (and/or home), and avoid speaking face-to-face with anybody for more than 20 min. If you do all of those things, the probability of you getting COVID are very small indeed.
In India, more than a thousand people per day die with TB (a totally preventable disease) with most having a younger and otherwise healthier profile than those with Covid-19. TB deaths do not make the front page because the West is not interested in deaths of Indian people per se – we are only concerned if they are dying from a disease that threatens the West.
Yes but TB hasn’t destroyed their healthcare system due to sheer caseload.
That’s the main difference – the collateral damage from this pandemic is an order of magnitude higher than TB ever was or will be.
Did you miss the bit where the Indian health care system literally collapsed under the case load? Ever heard of collateral damage? Thousands are going to die needlessly of other illnesses or injuries simply because they can’t get a hospital bed.
This virus is real and serious, I can’t believe this hasn’t got through by now.
God people on this site scare me sometimes.
“Collateral damage”? I don’t think you really want to go there.
The economic and social effects of these lockdowns have been – and continue to be – catastrophic.
Yes, because I’ve likely already been responsible for ‘killing’ someone in a chain of contagious viruses the myriad times I’ve had flu, cold, strep throat, gastro, etc. No one blamed anyone for passing on the flu virus that killed my father and I wouldn’t expect them to. That’s what viruses do, they spread, they harm some, and they kill others. And there are thousands of them out there and humans are carriers of them. We can continue to pretend that humans can control this perfectly or we can cut our losses and accept that sometime slim people under the age of 65 do die. Because, and I hate to break this to you, if it wasn’t COVID it was going to be something else…we all die eventually!
If he’s vaccinated with the same vaccine as other people, he’s just as likely to catch one of those dreaded “variants” the vaccine can’t fight, as he would be if he wasn’t vaccinated. And thus, spread it to other people whom the vaccine doesn’t protect.
Not sure if you have fully thought this through.
But I get it; it feels good to shame people who don’t feel obligated to submit to a swiftly-developed vaccine with a wide range of potential and possibly permanent side effects in order to “protect” others from some theoretical worst-case scenario.
Partially due to the lockdowns.
Without lockdowns, we’d have had (and maybe would have today) people dying in hospital car parks because the hospital is full of people, and hospitals running out of oxygen.
Only the vulnerable needed to isolate. The rest could have got in with their lives. We are so lucky we didn’t have your attitude when facing hitler in ww2.
You’re talking rubbish. We KNOW that the very most vulnerable people living in care homes were infected by their carers and doctors and nurses before there was a vaccine. It is not possible to isolate people entirely, because they need supplies, and they need assistance. This is in your scheme, to be provided by the people who are happily going about spreading the virus as they live their lives to use your phrase.
People caring for the vulnerable should have been more careful not to infect them, then. It’s not like they don’t have protocols in place, when there are viral outbreaks every flu season. They’re supposed to understand how viruses work, and spread. There are a lot of incompetent idiots working in the health care system, unfortunately.
DING DING DING. We have a WW2 reference.
I like Unherd’s output, I really do, but it’s commentariat is getting worse by the day..
Then stop reading it; nobody’s forcing you.
I’m alright as I am, thanks Kathy. If you re-read my comment, you’ll find that I quite enjoy Unherd’s content and thoughtful output.
My issue was with the general quality of the content BTL, which used to be much better.
As always, it is only a matter of time before Godwin’s Law strikes again…
Complete and utter garbage. You’re repeating the most basic bullshit and lies that have been fed during this event.
You present as a very stupid lady, I’m sorry to say.
Get that logic and reason out of here, Chris. It’s not welcome.
Instead we got a lot of empty hospitals, with staff having plenty of free time to make godawful TikTok dance videos (when they weren’t outside scolding lpckdown-breaking non-social distancing lockdown protesters, or cheering on lockdown-breaking non-social distancing BLM protesters a week later), while people suffered from all kinds of untreated ailments because beds had to be reserved for Covid patients, and old people died alone and in grief and despair because their loved ones weren’t allowed to be with them.
I had covid, I was one of the very first, picking it up at Mardi-Gras where the numbers became highest in USA. I then was sick as a really, really, bad flue, never felt in danger of my life though, then recovered in a couple weeks, then it hit back right again, this time had Long Covid 9 more weeks. Total Post Viral Chronic Fatigue. I do construction, am mid 60s, so very fit, and yet I had to lay around months I was so fatigued. (and if you do try to push through the fatigue and work it makes it worse, so rest is the cure). I have refused the mask entirely (I was way past incubation time before I ventured out) but for a couple times when bank guards blocked me from entering, everywhere else I am always the only one unmasked, but no one says anything to me as I am big and scruffy. (Except for the construction materials supply places, where well less than half mask, real men and women who do real work never masked.)
I am the most strident anti-Lockdown person out there. Lockdown did no good but has likely destroyed the West, the Central Bank bills are piling up and will have to be paid, and that is not possible without hyper-inflation unless controlled by equally bad problems, like devaluing the currency and raising interest rates to block it I believe. And that is a very bad thing indeed. (I am not a MMT Koolaid drinker).
The youth lost a year, and a year of education, and they are NEVER getting that back.
You do NOT burn down the house to get rid of the rats.
Ha ha ha ha – a real man – Cowboy Joe. I thought this kind of stuff was just in the old Westerns I used to watch in the 1950s when I was a kid, but this guy believes it and lives it.
LOL – still laughing.
I guess the cognitive dissonance of encountering someone who really suffered from Covid yet is still anti-lockdown has pushed you over the edge.
And we don’t know anyone who’s died or or suffered from the covid restrictions or measures either.
Though there’s almost certainly someone very close by.
In fact, if you want to be precise, there’s one very close by: yourself.
Every single one of us has suffered at the very least by the appropriation of our tax monies to splash out on these wild schemes: fumigating public places, ‘deep cleaning’ schools, public transport, putting people out of work and then paying them high ‘out of work’ monies… and on and on…
There’s much more.
Basically most of us just don’t know much of our fellows.
That’s why we rely so much on the media.
And government propaganda.
Both of which, we have learned since 9/11, are deeply corrupt and we’d be fools to trust in them.
So eventually, I hope, think, there’s going to arise a public paradigm by which we inform ourselves of the truth.
All these discussions in the comment sections of so many things are the faint beginnings of it I think.
In uK 127,500 are supposed to have died of SARS2 its nearer 5% 7,000 ..The rest had underlying illness diagnosed or not,Cancers, leukaemia,Asthma, etc..I dont recall 127,500 Autopsies or GPs sending any clinical evidence on deaths
Another idiot comes here with lies. The excess death data for the UK suggest that many more died than even the government says. Excess deaths can’t be faked, or misattributed.
“…many more died than even the government says”…so are you saying you can’t trust the government data to be accurate? And that there may be hundreds (thousands?) of deaths the government doesn’t know about? Where are all these dead people, buried in basements, or stored in freezers?
I don’t know anyone with cancer, therefore, cancer does not exist. It is a big government plot.
As you have no idea who “the vast majority of us” are, how can you tell who we know?
There’s always one, but the figures and stats show that to be very rare indeed.
Using your logic, we would have to ban crossing the road, stairs in houses and flying – just in case one of your healthy friends just happens to be one of the very very few that die after crossing a road, falling down the stairs or in an air accident.
Please use some sense.
Are you really saying that because Jon Redman knew someone who died from Covid and he was fit and healthy beforehand, to be taken as proof that locking down is the right thing to do.
Who mentioned locking down? I’m pointing out that your view of statistics weighs less than my direct experience, in the same way that I distrust all pit bull terriers even though most of them hardly ever kill anyone.
Isn’t this whole debate about locking down?
Didn’t the same ONS declare a few weeks back that the U.K. has overcounted Covid deaths by 23%, ie almost 30,000?
That number is almost certainly higher given the ridiculous policy of categorising deaths as Covid related simply due to dying within 28 days of an unreliable PCR test run at an absurdly / suspiciously high CT level.
Scandalously it appears that this zeal to attribute deaths to Covid does not seem to apply to recording of cause of death following vaccination. The government / NHS isn’t taking vaccine mortality very seriously and the latter’s Yellow Card system is riddled with inaccuracies and/or not being data-filled consistently.
None of which is being reported or covered by mainstream media – the same ones that didn’t report or attempted to trivialise or cynically rubbish the London demonstration on Saturday.
With all this irrational and irresponsible hysteria, our overcounting of cases and deaths might lead one to believe that making Britain look worse than it actually is/was has been intentional.
No.
See : Counting deaths involving coronavirus: a year in review Sarah Caul ONS January 12 2021
Bearing in mind that all the figures she quotes are still provisional because of the delay in coroner’s courts at the moment.
As for the 28 day thing you clearly are clueless as to how death certificates are completed in the UK and equally clueless about this illness. If you leave ICU having recovered from Covid you are at increased risk of keeling over for 90 days afterwards due to the effects of all the interventions that have been inflicted upon you.
As for the yellow card – anyone can fill in anything and claim it is vaccine related (see the “dental” section for some really bizarre and irrelevant “adverse reactions”). Unless you compare these reports with the average incidence of all those adverse events in the population, over a similar time period in a non vaccination setting you have no idea if there is anything untoward going on.
Incidentally at least one person died from a road traffic accident in the placebo group of the Pfizer trial. According to your reasoning this means that the Pfizer vaccine protects you from dying in a road traffic acident.
It’s your dogmatism that comes across as clueless. Maybe even credulous. Noted that you crank up the rudeness when confronted by assertions that don’t meet with your approval.
From David Oliver, Consultant in Geriatric and Acute Medicine in Manchester :
“Death Certificates contain causes 1a (cause directly leading to death) 1b and 1c (causes leading to 1a) and 2 (causes contributing to death but not directly related).
If Covid-19 is in our clinical assessment of the person we have assessed and treated the main cause of death, we will put it as cause 1a.
In other cases, someone might die from a complication of Covid-19 – for instance a pulmonary embolism (blood clot) or a bacterial pneumonia in which case that will be 1a with Covid as 1b or c.
In other cases, the person may have had Covid contributing to a death from another cause – perhaps by making the person weaker or more susceptible or starting a chain of events and may appear as 2.
There never was a formal requirement for a positive Covid-19 test to write Covid on a certificate if the clinical picture was clear and so yes, some patients, mostly earlier in the pandemic would have had Covid written down without yet testing positive.
… also “deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test” does NOT influence what we actually write on death certificates which by law we have to complete to the best of our knowledge and belief and which are scrutinised by a 2nd doctor.
En masse Falsification of certificates? no
the ONS data (rather than GOV own definition for counting) are not based on some arbitrary post test time period but on what we put on the certificate based on our clinical knowledge of that patient in their final illness. If we think Covid contributed to death it goes on.”
third party observing this interaction: yours is purely ad hominen.
Care to explain the ONS’s position on this – or are they clueless in your book?
What position ?
Probably nearer 95% see Epidemologists like Dr Karol Sikora, Professor Suntra gupta,who are less hysterical..
Didn’t the same ONS declare a few weeks back that the U.K. has overcounted Covid deaths by 23%, ie almost 30,000?
That number is almost certainly higher given the ridiculous policy of categorising deaths as Covid related simply due to dying within 28 days of an unreliable PCR test run at an absurdly / suspiciously high CT level.
Scandalously it appears that this zeal to attribute deaths to Covid does not seem to apply to recording of cause of death following vaccination. The government / NHS isn’t taking vaccine mortality very seriously and the latter’s Yellow Card system is riddled with inaccuracies and/or not being data-filled consistently.
None of which is being reported or covered by mainstream media – the same ones that didn’t report or attempted to trivialise or cynically rubbish the London demonstration on Saturday.
With all this irrational and irresponsible hysteria, our overcounting of cases and deaths might lead one to believe that making Britain look worse than it actually is/was has been intentional.
For me, it doesn’t mean anyone under 65 and healthy won’t die but it certainly is more of a long shot that they do. There no guarantees in life.
Until the advice changes. Remember when COVID was hardly any threat to the under 30s?
It isn’t a threat to healthy under 30s, nor healthy 65s.
Apart from all those Indian under-30s who are dying of it of course.
Maybe the point there is ‘it’. ‘It’ needs defining.
I think perhaps no one really know what they’re dying of.
There’s much that’s strange about the way this virus behaves around the world.
Indicating there are factors we are ignorant of.
Running around shouting ‘covid’ just distracts from looking for those factors.
How many, exactly? Do you know how many people under 30 in India regularly die of other causes, like malaria, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, etc?
or healthy 82 year olds until they become 82years 4 months,then the average age of death Catches up..If you are an obese prime minister ,more scared of Your live in Girlfriend & her £11,000 vases ..You are definately vulnerable/..
Well that sounds like empirical evidence then……did they die “of” or “with”?
He died of it. Very, very unpleasant and lingering way to die.
What very bad luck.
However what Richard E is saying is precisely what the late Bertrand Russell thought when he said “most people would rather die than think, and most do”
Well said sir….
But it would be much more without the lockdown.
And more without the vaccines, which the loonies oppose while touting Vitamin D or other nonsense/
Actually. You must read the article I linked too. It shows that those countries that didn’t lockdown were not the disasters that they were forecast to be by the same modelling techniques that have convinced you that the lockdown worked.
I call it Lockdown Logic. Basically zero logic in most cases, people too cowardly or lazy or thick to sit calmly and look at the figures and weigh the risks, of locking down and not locking down. Most of our imbecilic population followed the crowd and drank back the government propaganda of fear, and from that moment on their ego’s couldn’t even consider that they were fooled or were wrong.
(Mark Twain’s quote on it being easier to fool someone, than to convince a fool they have been fooled sums it up)
The idea that locking down does anymore than slow the spread and delays things a bit. Countries like Poland locked down early, and all they achieved was delaying their first wave. Very soon they will have one of the highest rates of death per capita.
The onus is on the countries that locked down to show that the positive impact of shutting down out weighs the economic, social and future health costs.
When the morons were out clapping the closure of the NHS, did it enter their heads for one second, what deaths would be coming down the road because the NHS basically stopped treating everything but Covid?
Well said!
Delaying getting Covid by locking down means you don’t get it at all, because you get vaccinated.
Delaying getting Covid means that hospitals aren’t swamped, don’t run out of oxygen and the death rate (deaths per 100 people catching the disease) don’t soar because even serious cases have to be denied ICU treatment.
Thats why almost all Governments have locked down to a lesser or greater extent…. and why, where extremist idiots like Bolsonaro undermine locking down policies, the disease gets out of control. As it did in Britain in September/October, when our own “let the dead pile up in their thousands” extremist idiot refused to take SAGE’s advice on a two week lockdown in mid-September, and the disease went from a rarity then to being out of control by the end of October, when he was forced to U-turn. That’s why tens of thousands died from the disease in October-February.
You do realize that both in the UK and US the hospitals and ICUs were never overloaded with COVID patients. Recall in NYC the makeshift hospital that was put up as well as the navy hospital ships – none were used in the end. Likewise recall Cuomo saying that the federal government wasn’t giving him enough ventilators, and again not only didn’t they use them but it turned out that the ventilators were doing more harm than good (at least as used initially last March/April/May).
Lockdowns are problematic because (a) they increase the probability of infection (almost all transmission has occurred indoors not outdoors); (b) they do not impact the area under the deaths/million curve, just prolong the agony; (c) they weaken the immune system including by reducing exposure to sunlight and hence a reduction in vit D levels; and (d) there is no guarantee the vaccines are as effective as claimed (the trials so far are limited) and that the vaccines are not devoid of either significant short-term sequelae or long term bad effects (which may take several years to develop).
The best strategy, therefore, is to vaccinate the most vulnerable (the over 65’s as well as some younger individuals with very significant and associated co-morbidities), while leaving the rest unvaccinated. Unfortunately that’s not happening and we can only hope that the number of fatal incidents post-vaccination is kept to a minimum. While these may be rare, when it affects somebody who was young and perfectly healthy it’s nothing short of a major tragedy. In this regard worth recalling the incidence of narcolepsy following the rushed swine flu vaccination in children which resulted in many unnecessary deaths.
Nor the £233 Million nightingales .
Include in your calculations the one year of life 65 million people lost due to lockdowns.
The 95% who died of pre existing conditions would have been saved if we just locked down the frail and those with pre existing conditions. They’re the ones who filled the hospitals and died.
The healthy and young never filled the hospitals and never threatened to do so. 80% of the population could have carried on life as usual, and it may have even saved lives. The healthy 80% would have caught it and become immune, they could have also provided the services to allow the vulnerable to stay at home. The healthy immune would have provided herd immunity to the frail.
The ones who filled the hospitals. Best source of information for this are the ICNARC reports :
ICNARC report on COVID-19 in critical care: England, Wales and Northern Ireland 5 February 2021″
Page 38 – 40 Patient demographics / characteristics (any advanced respiratory support) Admitted from Sep 1
Mean age 60.2, Median age 62, 67.8% male, 70.5% white, 89% able to live without assistance in daily activities. (So not exactly the usual UnHinged caricature of doddering crinkly in a care home and BAME)
Immunocompromised, Haematological malignancy and Renal are the top 3 serious comorbidites. However the admissions with very serious comorbidites only account for 9.7% of the total which means 90.3% admitted to these critical care beds did NOT have serious comorbidites – another UnHinged fallacy out the window.
and yes they have a separate section for fatties. 36.4% of admissions have a BMI 30 -<40, 10.6% =/>40 so definitely too much beer and crisps down the pub.
The vulnerable. Depends a bit on who you regard as being at risk.
“UK prevalence of underlying conditions which increase the risk of severe COVID-19 disease: a point prevalence study using electronic health records Walker August 2020” Calculated the population at risk of severe COVID-19 (aged ≥70 years, or with an underlying health condition) to be 18.5 million individuals in the UK, including a considerable proportion of school-aged and working-aged individuals.
OR one could look at social parameters :
OR one could go to the ONS :
Hi Elaine.
Do you think any such stats are potentially misleading, without the context of whether (1) the individuals in critical care actually caught the virus whilst in critical care or (2) whilst already (non-critical care) seriously ill in hospital and/or (3) what % of those testing positive were actually true positives AND suffering from covid-related effects?
Without accurate stats relating to the above (noting that for (3) we will never know), then all such figures are interesting, but not particularly informative.
Those questions don’t lead to any particular conclusion. For instance false negatives could outweigh false positives, there is no scientific way of determining the significance of covid in actually causing any particular death, those in critical care already may have immune systems unrepresentative of the population at large and hence be more susceptible etc.
All we really know, is that a lot more testing and reporting has been done for this disease, than for any preceding similar virus.
I’m personally minded to look at overall UK death stats, which look broadly similar to a situation in which the population is exposed to a fairly novel, very bad-flu-year-impact-like virus, in combination with the population being scared away from receiving normal-levels of life-saving treatments. In such a situation, I’d expect several tens of thousands of deaths from covid and several tens of thousands of deaths from the press-scaremongering and measures to tackle covid. It’s a bad year, but probably would have been similar to 1958 without the press and government reactions.
By the way, the increase in deaths/million in Oct-Feb had nothing to do with not locking down or locking down. Lockdowns have had zero effect, and usually they’ve been implemented after the curves are already on a downward path. The reason for the large increase and subsequent decrease in deaths/million over the Oct/Nov to April/May season is simple: it’s known as flu season or more generally respiratory tract infection season . That’s why the common cold is prevalent during the flu season and then falls to very low level in the late spring/summer/early autumn months.
Incidentally if you plot the deaths per million in the UK on a nightingale circular plot you immediately see the seasonality.
I do believe it goes further. Lockdown directly exacerbate covid illnesses and therefore deaths.
People forced to be in close contact for extended periods can’t help cross contaminating whereas before it well may have been avoided.
Same with masks. Recently seen claims that masks increase your own viral load and exacerbate your illness if you have one… prejudice your immune system if you don’t..
And as for slowing down the spread. Haven’t we seen graphs and charts enough demonstrating a total failure of lockdown measures to make any diference whatever in the trajectory of the disease between lockdown places and non lockdown?
exactly right on all counts
Vaccines…. vaccinate the vulnerable, those with pre – existing conditions who make up 96% of the dead so far and those over retirement age and you almost eliminate all deaths.
Vaccines are not necessary if you are fit and healthy – but it’s completely the choice of the individual if they have it or not.
I suspect in the long run the vaccines will not work, as yearly mutations feed through, and next year you will need another vaccine etc etc.
In my mind, once the vaccines have been offered to all there is no need at all for any form of lockdown – that’s if you were stupid enough to believe in lockdowns in the first place.
If you’ve had the vaccine and it works – you shouldn’t care who else has it – as you’re SAFE.
So let people choose.
I always support free choice and am quite happy if the bed wetters want to extend their own personal lockdowns for decades to come, wear masks 24 hours a day and stick to the rule of 6 into the 2030s and 2040s.
Well, you’re not safe. The more people haven’t had the vaccine, the more loci there are for new strains to evolve, and hence the greater the chance of a variant arising against which existing vaccines are ineffective.
If I were the only person vaccinated in a population of 1,000 I would not feel safe for long.
It is purely speculative that the variants are either more contagious or more virulent. Recall all the variants are >97% sequence identical. There is plenty for the immune system to target, especially from T cell immunity, outside the small regions of variation in the spike protein. This is even true of the current spike protein vaccines since many small peptides from all over the spike protein will be sitting on the cell surface ready to be targeted by T cells.
It is purely speculative that the variants are either more contagious or more virulent.
There’s mounting evidence some are indeed more contagious. It’s far from pure speculation.
There are published papers, yes. Full of speculation and fear mongering yes. Sure they’ve passed peer review (or at least some of them have) but when so many scientists just follow the herd that’s not surprising.
In the US there was a great brouhaha about the British variant, but judging from the UK, the British variant did not pose any problem and deaths and cases per million have fallen like a rock. Indeed, the current deaths per million figure is below the previous 5 year average in the UK.
Are you talking about Age Standardised Mortality Rates ?
According to the ONS :
“But the provisional age-standardised mortality rate in 2020 was 1043.5 deaths per 100,000 population around 8% higher than the five year average. This is the highest it has been in more than a decade (since 2008).”
All figures are provisional of course because of the 5 month delay in coroner’s courts at the moment
You’re a rather confused fellow, aren’t you. The Kent variant was far more infectious and went on to dominate in many countries. It killed tens of thousands here this last winter and only stopped doing so here because of a massively effective vaccination campaign which covered 95% of people in the most vulnerable categories. That variant spread like wildfire in India and then mutated into an even more infectious variant now known in common parlance as the Indian Variant.
More contagious, or more deadly?
Mutations of the virus genome are entirely random. Some will hinder reproduction of the virus, while others will enhance it. The crippled mutations will die out, and the more effective ones will reproduce and dominate. Thus we can be sure that in time, more infectious versions will appear when there is ever a large pool of infectious people anywhere in the world. Since our leaders are incredibly reluctant to isolate the country properly (witness the arrival recently of an infected Indian trade delegation who had the Indian variant for trade talks with the government) these variants are bound to arrive here and to spread.
You’ve just stated the vaccine doesn’t work.
In the old days if you had the vaccine you were safe and it didn’t matter what everyone else did. What you’re describing is a vaccine that doesn’t work.
“In the old days if you had the vaccine you were safe and it didn’t matter what everyone else did”
No you weren’t and yes it did. In order to achieve herd immunity and reduce transmission to insignificant levels (no community outbreaks) you have to reach a certain level of population immunity. This varies from pathogen to pathogen.
e.g. 93 – 95% for measles; 85% for diphtheria.
Measles is an RNA virus but has shown amazing evolutionary stability (many hypotheses regarding the reason for this) so no vaccine escape.
Right now we don’t really know whether Sars Cov 2 will be like measles or flu (always evolving and escaping). This is a moveable feast.
Not accurate. We know that SARS-CoV2 absolutely does not behave like the flu because its RNA replication mechanism is a lot more stable (i.e. much better proof-reading).
Yep – but not as stable as measles and we don’t have a good handle on which mutations (if any) will show vaccine escape.
Right now the virus has a couple of great petri dishes to play in – Brazil and India.
No I haven’t Richard. I’ve stated that if I’m the only one of a population of 1,000 who’s been vaccinated, then there are 999 people in whom a version of the virus can mutate. Any of these could be a variant that my vaccination does not defeat. So for vaccines to work, a lot of people have to have one; then there are both fewer places for a new strain to develop and a lower chance of transmission to me. If I’m the only vaccinated individual, I will not be immune for long.
At present, if not vaccinated, you are gifting COVID an opportunity to mutate into a strain that other people’s vaccinations don’t protect them from. It’s not all or only about you.
Lockdowns have taken a year of our lives, so we have every right not to comply.
What you are asserting about vaccination and mutation is just not true. There is plenty of speculation and fear mongering regarding this possibility, but no evidence for it whatsoever.
Painful line of reasoning sir. Recent peer reviewed publication, though small sample, shows natural immunization is more effective with the variants than these experimental medical treatments. We’ll have all the right answers in about five years or longer. Two extremes are common sense and natural immunity building versus experimental cell-changing technology not yet approved in one country. If I have to choose between freedom and safety I take freedom. Give me liberty or give me death. We all die, no lives are saved. Let’s enjoy our time. Peace out!
Most people are obviously going to get vaccinated, so you can rest easy.
Just accept that there are some people who are going to choose not to get vaccinated, and it’s their right. “My body, my choice”, and all that.
Your expressed philosophy rather selfishly asserts your right to allow yourself to become a vessel where the virus can mutate into a vaccine escaping version, AND you also would seem to think that the rest of us should tolerate you wandering about in our midst where YOUR rights mean you risk spreading it to us. Well….. Don’t be in the least surprised when we tell you you are not allowed out to mix with the rest of us in the world.
‘My body my choice’, is a mere slogan. It has no force whatsoever when your choice may harm me, or my family, or society at large. By all means refuse the vaccine (if you are stupid enough) but prepare for house arrest.
You are deliberately spreading disinformation. A deficiency of Vitamin D, triggers T-helper2 cells, which are pro-inflammatory, and thus creating the cytokine Storm, whilst a healthy immune system that has sufficient vitamin D triggers T-helper1 cells (non-inflammatory). You sir, are a danger to the public. What is your agenda?
He’s a socialist agent provocateur, best ignored, or even pitied.
He’s an example of what a commenter above stated, that it is easier to fool someone than it is to convince a fool that they have been fooled.
He’s taken the vaccine, and is now reading why it isn’t such a good bet (unless over 75-80). And as you can’t get the mRNA that is in the vaccine out of your body, he’s doubling down and shouting at everyone else that they’re gonna die if they don’t do what he did..
I’ve had the first injection, will be having the second, and the vaccine is divorcing CASES from DEATHS (because those who still get ill, don’t get seriously ill) as well as massively reducing cases in the first place because people have been vaccinated don’t catch the disease and are less likely to spread it.
What about those facts don’t you understand?
And how do you explain the plunge in cases and deaths in Britain, if it’s not due to vaccination?
Well, quite.
The man I know who died of COVID did so essentially following Richard E’s advice. He figured he wasn’t at personal risk, so he and his wife invited over his friend and his wife. The two latter, also following Richard’s advice, had been to a restaurant the night before. They all figured they’d be fine and they even took their masks off.
All four went down with COVID, three were seriously ill, and the fourth died five weeks after being infected.
The chances of being injured in a car accident when you’re drunk and not wearing your seatbelt are actually quite low in absolute terms, even if higher than if you’re sober and wearing one. Presumably, we should follow the stats here too, and drive drunk on the basis that we personally will probably be fine.
My friend died in a car accident last year. He didn’t think he was going to, and was just driving his car normally like he always does.
So, was the driver at fault.
Was the car at fault?
Should he not have made the decision to go by car?
Do we now say cars are unsafe and that if you drive one you are likely to be killed?
The chances of dying in a car accident in a given year are about 1 in 400. Being drunk at the wheel and causing the fatal accident makes almost no difference to these odds. Drunk at the wheel or sober, you are vanishingly unlikely to die in a car accident.
So we should follow the Richard E doctrine. It probably won’t happen to me, so it’s perfectly safe for me to drive drunk. Of course I may kill someone else, but so what; I may infect someone else with COVID and not die myself, but so what. It’s all about what suits me.
This reasoning is why people like Richard are not in charge of public health or safety decisions.
That figure you quote so assuredly is totally false. In fact you have exaggerated it by over a hundredfold. The number of raod traffic deaths in 2020 in the UK, a nation of 66 million people was 1580. That means that the chance of dying in a road accident is one in 47,000, not one in 400.
Your malignant dissembling idiocy is off the scale. You ought to be prevented from posting here since your falsehoods are a menace.
Do you have proof that any of your friend’s foolhardy behaviour (“They even took off their masks!” Oh, the horror!) was what actually caused him to get Covid?
Most people who got Covid in the past year had been stringently following all the rules, down to wearing their face diapers everywhere, even outdoors.
Nice bit of victim-blaming, anyway.
That’s actually not true as the cases and deaths in the UK were dropping like a rock before any significant vaccination took place. In case you haven’t quite got it yet, COVID-19 is seasonal just like influenza, spanning the months of October/November through April/May.
As for the comment that you can’t get the mRNA from the vaccine out of your body, that too isn’t correct because mRNA is unstable and degrades quickly. If it didn’t and you continued to produce spike protein for any serious length of time, you’d be in a very bad way.
COVID-19 is seasonal just like influenza, spanning the months of October/November through April/May.
One year is a bit little to be basing such a sweeping generalisation on. Let’s see what happens this June to September.
Just look at the curves. There have been 2 seasons. One was in March/May 2020 and the other was in the current flu season (Oct/Nov through April/May).
I admit the first season was a little difficult to figure out in the U.S. for reasons I’ll point out below, but it was absolutely obvious in most European countries including the UK (but obvious in Germany, Austria and Sweden, among others, for example).
The US was an interesting case in the first season as the epidemic started on the east and west coasts late in the flu season (Feb/March/April) and then slowly migrated inland. As a result some states, such as Utah, experienced rises later on the early and mid-summer. Others, such as North and South Dakota had absolutely nothing until the current season when it hit. No surprise as there isn’t that much travel into the Dakotas, and certainly a lot less from the two coasts to the Dakotas than to say Utah and Colorado.
The seasonality is exactly as expected fo any respiratory virus.
What does “seasonal” actually mean, practically speaking ?
Cases of flu and other viral respirartory illnesses have always tended to be much more common in the coldest months, because people spend far more time indoors.
I have said this many times. Epidemic curves will have their way. In our recent second wave in South Africa (with the wild, dreaded, mutant variant), there was no hard lockdown and no vaccines and still the curve plummeted down. Remember your first curve that went down? There were no vaccines. But oh, there was the lockdown…. there will always be a reason to terrify the population.
So why do you think the 2nd wave subsided. Did the virus get tired ? bored ? packed its bags and left for the coast ?
For exactly the same reason that the flu season starts up in Oct/Nov and winds down in April/May. Has to do with the virus sensitivity to cold, sunlight, etc.. as well as the time people spend outdoors which dramatically reduces transmission. Recall, 95% of all SARS-CoV2 transmission has occurred in poorly ventilated indoor spaces.
Aaaah yes ! so it’s people’s behaviour that drives transmission.
So how did people’s behaviour change in SA during the second wave ?
So if this virus is so temperature sensitive why has Manaus in Brazil been hit so hard ? – even last year when there was no P1 variant ?
People were out and about during the second wave. I told you there was no hard lockdown. All places of work were open except bars and taverns. The majority of people live cheek by jowl so don’t even social distance. It is extremely hard to communicate with you!
Maybe you didn’t read my post? I said it was the waxing and waning of the epidemic curve. During summer.
I agree. It should have just been allowed to run its course. That’s what viruses do. It was clear from the start of 2020 that it was nothing like the Spanish Flu or polio, anyway, not cutting a swath through the young and healthy population. Containment efforts should have been targeted to the populations at risk, i.e., keep it out of nursing and long term care homes. Instead we closed schools and businesses,imprisoned people in their homes, roped off playgrounds and forbade people to sit on park benches.
100 years from now people are going to look back to this time and say, “My god, what a bunch of f***ing idiots they were.”
My agenda is medical science. Trials on Vitamin D show little effect. I prefer scientific trials to fringe nonsense. Do you?
And what is the “medical science”. The unfortunate thing about large trials is that they are often designed to fail. And for very good reason because Pharma would be none to happy if simple and extremely cheap remedies like vitamin D, ivermectin, zinc, etc…. had a significant effect in reducing mortality and morbidity if given at the very onset of symptoms.
I suspect that you are none too qualified in actually assessing the primary literature or critically evaluating the various trials and their design. Rather, you give the appearance of just believing so-called experts, but refuse to listen to second opinions from experts with diverging views.
See Dr John Campbell’s recent interview of Dr Pierre Kory: the feeling is that parties with a vested interest (wink) are planning to ensure that the next study of Ivermectin shows inefficacy despite the over 20 RCT that show marked efficacy from prophylaxis through to critical care. The big global health organisation…. you know the one…. has already smeared the results of 2 meta analyses showing efficacy.
Pharma would be none to happy if simple and extremely cheap remedies
There may be an element of truth to that, but where was the outcry and pushback from Pharma over the use of dexamethasone? So far as I recall, there was none.
Dexamethasone is a little different and also not completely out there in terms of mechanism of action. Remember corticosteroid reduce inflammation (remember things like tennis elbow) and reduce inappropriate immune responses. The poor outcomes from COVID infection are not so much due to damage caused by the virus, but rather to an overactive, immune response. So corticosteroids are a natural thing to try in that regard. (As an example, that’s why steroids are combined with antibiotics in eye and ear drops).
The other reason dexamethasone wasn’t poopoo’d is because the study was done at Oxford.
Deliberate disinformation. You really should do better research before you post :
Cytokine Storm David C. Fajgenbaum NEJM December 2020
“Cytokine storm is an umbrella term encompassing several disorders of immune dysregulation characterized by constitutional symptoms, systemic inflammation, and multiorgan dysfunction that can lead to multiorgan failure if inadequately treated”
A comprehensive article on the various flavours of this condition and the many causes that can lead to it.
As for Vitamin D, I note :
Vitamin D3 inhibits the proliferation of T helper cells, downregulate CD4 + T cell cytokines and upregulate inhibitory markers Sheikh Hum Immunol June 2018
Which is the last thing you would want since you need CD4+ cells to ensure a good IgG and B memory cell response.
Do you have any medical qualification? If so you are a charlatan.
He is A Starmer supporter & Remainer ..going to be on the Wrong side of history or herstory for Wokes…Only Good this Pandemic will do it will make logical people more sceptical about Carbon being the agent of Climate ,when its The Sun,Volanoes,meteorites if large etc..Zero carbon is as stupid as Zero Coronavirus
You might want to read up on the ‘scientific’ studies of Vitamin D.
It’s been trialled. Doesn’t work. If it worked, Governments would implement it just as they have implemented Dexamethasone and a couple of other drugs found to work in trials.
(Sorry, that’s the real world. I realise that in the fringe echo chamber, it’s taken for granted that Governments are under the control of the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati, a three-headed green lizard, or whatever.)
Here is a good place to start your Vitamin D research.
https://www.grassrootshealth.net/
People should do their own research and not just believe what the government says. Take the Food Pyramid for example. Although it wasn’t the intent, now its considered a big contributor to obesity and diabetes.
Like this one ? :
Effect of a Single High Dose of Vitamin D3 on Hospital Length of Stay in Patients With Moderate to Severe COVID-19 A Randomized Clinical Trial JAMA Feb 2021
If you are referring to the Spanish study by Nogues this was removed from the preprint server after a series of damning critiques.
Nice review of all the crap studies so far by Gideon M-K; Health Nerd : What We Know About Vitamin D and Covid-19
I haven’t read the JAMA article but I will tell you this with 100% certainty. Administration of vitamin D after a patient is admitted is already way way too late. It’s just like tamiflu for influenza: to have any effect you have to take it at the very onset of symptoms, not once you’re in such a bad way that you have to be admitted to hospital.
Citation for this assertion please. Anecdotes do not = useable data.
How about a very good understanding of the practice of medicine, immunology and infectious diseases. As for tamiflu just google and you’ll see. Once hospitalized, tamiflu is not helpful to patients with influenza. Indeed, the major killer in influenza (and indeed for the Spanish flu of 1918) was not the virus but secondary pneumonia. The good doctor Fauci had a paper on this not too long ago (albeit before COVID-19).
We are not talking about flu. You asserted that in order for Vitamin D to be beneficial in cases of Covid, it needed to be given at the onset of symptoms – citation for this please.
Don’t have citations off hand but I’m sure you can google it. But if you understand how vitamin D works its obvious. It’s purpose is to prime your innate immune system. Doesn’t do much good once the horse is out of the barn.
“…it would be much more without the lockdown.”
No way of proving that. But places like Sweden, and states in the US like Florida, strongly suggest othewise.
And hidden right away by the Govt are the figures for deaths and adverse side effects from the vaccines. Go to Vaccine Analysis Profile on the Govt’s own website. Hard to find, as is the Yellow Card adverse event reporting system. I am not surprised they try and hide it away when Boris and his Big Pharma stooges claim the vaccine is “safe”. 627 deaths and hundreds of thousands of adverse reactions is not safe in the least. This is the Vaccine Analysis Profile for the AZ vax
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/979487/COVID-19_AstraZeneca_vaccine_analysis_print.pdf
What is so disturbing to me is how readily they call these experimental shots, ‘safe and effective’ all the while purposely ignoring the doctors and scientists saying they aren’t. Why didn’t big pharma create a drug to target only the sick and leave the healthy alone – oh wait, apparently there are therapeutics that are considered safe but all of a sudden they aren’t safe now! You don’t have to have a high IQ to see what the heck is going on. My only hope is that most people are not so swept with fear, that they will be able to make a rational choice, an informed choice. And, I too, believe in the right to choose. Thanks Richard for your intelligent comments.
“apparently there are therapeutics that are considered safe”
Which are?
Ivermectin for instance and there are others but no money in it for pharmaceutical companies. Admitting there are therapeutic drugs would also have prevented vaccines being approved for emergency use. Several companies say they will have a new most likely expensive pill ready possibly this year. Meanwhile this year there have been many needless hospitalisations and deaths that could have been prevented had early treatment been allowed.
Tens of thousands of people are using Ivermectin in South Africa with excellent results. It went black market when the government banned it (because of no endorsement from the who) and a court application has now overturned the ban.
Citation please. Anecdotes do not = useable data or even anything approaching reality.
I live here and experienced it throughout the second wave. I witnessed the movement of the drug and the communication and treatment between people on numerous platforms when it was banned. You are extremely difficult to communicate with. Google? Read? For the meta analysis go to Dr Tess Lawrie on the efficacy of Ivermectin.
So a few months ago the vaccines were safe and now they’re not.
At the moment only the old, obese and / or already ill are at risk. How about in a few months’ time? Or will that change like the safety of the vaccines has?
John, you’re wasting your time with these lunatics. They sucker you in to arguing then bombard you with left field fringe statistics that they share amongst themselves so that they can mock the ‘sheeple’. And by ‘sheeple’ I mean those people like you and me that aren’t so mind numbingly self obsessed that they recognise that while the UK’s response to the Pandemic (not ‘Plandemic’ or ‘Scamdemic’) has been flawed in many ways, the most helpful contribution that people like us can make is to simultaneously contort ourselves into removing our gaze from our navels, our heads from our arses and stop searching the internet for justifications for our own utter selfishness.
Any member of the public or health professional can submit suspected side effects through the Yellow Card scheme.
Intrigued by this I scrolled down to the section entitled “Dental”
Someone has claimed that teething and a diastema and malpositioned teeth as adverse events associated with a vaccination.
Since these tables don’t show average population rates for all these “adverse events” (age and sex adjusted) you can’t tell whether you are just looking at an average set of medical mishaps in the UK, during an average 4 month span January to April or something else.
Clearly some people believe that it is panic stations. Very sad.
The Yellow Card Scheme in the UK and the VAERS system in the US are very difficult to read. That’s the problem. It’s fortunate that the Norwegians picked up on clotting events with thombocytopenia (cerebral vascular thrombosis and disseminated intravascular coagulation) which are at least 50% fatal. Only then did some other European countries realize what was going on, including the Koch institute in Germany. The U.K., however, only came to the realization that the AZ vaccine had a problem when pulled kicking and screaming. No surprise, AZ is a U.K. product and the government were protecting a U.K. company.
It is also worth bearing in mind that the number of side effects from all the vaccines is well over an order of magnitude greater than that for the flu vaccine. Worth thinking about given how rushed and widely disseminated the vaccination program is.
What gets reported is any health event after vaccination. It doesn’t mean vaccination caused that health event. To determine that, the ‘natural’ incidence in an unvaccinated group of the same age (and other risk factors) would have to be subtracted. They haven’t been subtracted, in the numbers you are quoting.
That’s true but there is also a temporal factor. i.e. you have to look not just at the incidence of condition x in the general population, but the likelihood of developing condition x, y days or weeks from a given date certain. If a young, perfectly healthy individual is vaccinated on day 1, and a week later develops clotting with thrombocytopenia (something so rare that most doctors are unlikely to ever come across such events in their entire medical careers), it is very likely that the vaccine is the causative factor.
That Vaccine Analysis Profile lists ‘spontaneous reports’ of reactions to the vaccine, meaning anyone can report anything they think is due to the vaccine. For instance, eight fractures and dislocations have been thus reported. I find it doubtful these were in fact caused by the vaccine.
This plandemic has been an intelligence test for the masses. 85% have failed dismally.
As was to be expected. Thank you for that ‘juicy’ fact!
Ha,ha, at about 2000hrs my comment has been put in the sin bin, “Awaiting for approval “
What nonsense is this?
“The great hysteria of 2020-2021 continues”
otherwise known as “why are some people so stupid they don’t even share my views”?
Hear hear!
Chivers also says they only died from Covid, so no other possible causes.
Average UK age of Covid death within 28 days etc, 82. Average life expectancy India 69.
India Coronavirus Cases:16,263,695
Deaths:186,928
Recovered:13,648,159 (99%)
Closed cases (cases which had an outcome)13,835,087
186,928 (1%) Deaths
SURVIVAL RATE IS STILL 99%
The chances of anyone collating the deaths following a vaccine or genetic treatment is about zero.
And what about the fact there have been 86 studies, of which 50 peer reviewed, that all show positive results for Ivermectin, also a lot of studies have been done on other drugs, but still there is no home treatment. When you are positive you have to wait at home to find out if you will end up in the hospital or not.
Here is a link to all the studies, it’s also including HCQ, vitamine D and others.
https://c19early.com/
I completely agree. As Bertrand Russell put it so succinctly “Most people would rather die than think, and most do.
* A previous endorsement was allowed to stand for ten hours before being removed by the Censor! How mad is that ?
Oh – people over 65 don’t count. Let them die. They cost money anyway. It’s not as if they had been paying taxes for fifty years is it, and they all hate being alive, so why worry about them dying a few years earlier than they otherwise might have. They were only old – better dead than old, I always say.
Perhaps my statistics will be in need of correction but, every year in India, the following diseases are responsible for, approximately, the following number of deaths: 1,000,000 diabetes, 700,000 malnutrition, 340,000 diarrhoea, 220,000 tuberculosis and 115,000 from cholera.
As Bertrand Russell put it so eloquently “Most people would rather die than think, and most do”.
Totally agree. One small correction. India has 1.3 billion people. That really does put the daily deaths into perspective. Nearly 10 million die every year from TB, starvation and various bacterial infections.
I have read that there has been an Oxygen shortage in India for about a year, so this is not really due to higher demand now.
I am sad to say that Indians lack two critical ingredients needed to deal with such a catastrophe: self discipline and civic sense of duty. We were invited to a wedding in Delhi in Jan this year. We did not go. Looking at the video and pics of the wedding, we spotted two masks amongst a thousand guests. Social distancing, hand hygiene, masks, avoiding crowds are all essential to contain the spread. But just look at the religious, social and political gatherings to see how little the messages means to the population.
meanwhile rich families hoard oxygen cylinders. Doctors offer quack therapies at exorbitant rates: four friends of mine have had “plasma replacements” in Delhi as way of avoiding infection.Mildly asymptomatic people turn up at A & E departments, while drugs of dubious value are promoted by word of mouth on watts app groups. Everybody is a expert on what do, while no one has a clue.
People have to sometime take responsibility for their actions,or pay a price. It is appalling what is happening in India, but even if all the vaccination in the world turned up at India’s doorsteps, I doubt if it will used with the sense of discipline, prioritisation and civic sense that is needed.
I regret the pessimism, but I grew up in India and know it well enough.
Still I am proud that UK has already sent oxygen equipment and is sending more. Even while The Times is leading on what Boris Johnson said a while ago.
Well, I’ve got friends over there, and they’re saying there’s no pandemic, no mass deaths. As far as they can tell, they’re just like every other country. I think it’s propaganda by the UK media.
To what purpose?
To generate fear and peddle more vaccinations amongst young people and even children at low risk.
I have friends over there who have friends and family who are sick and dying. But so what? Anecdotes are meaningless in this context.
My friends who run a hospital in Kachhwa that has been turned into a Covid hospital ran out of oxygen. They have been raising money for an oxygen making machine.
Well, at the beginning of all this last spring, 13 May 2020, Telegraph, “Unicef warns lockdown could kill more than Covid-19 as model predicts 1.2million child deaths ‘Indiscriminate lockdowns’ are an ineffective way to control Covid and could contribute to a 45 per…”
The reduced economic activity from lockdown in the West would cause the above. The Africans growing flowers, coffee, the sweat shops making T-shirts, the tourists, lockdown killed more than it saved is very likely – and killed young to save old. The parents in the third world cannot feed the kids when the West stop buying the clothing and perishables – clothing price has collapse entirely, and so all those third world jobs…
Going out to the coffee house after buying a couple T-shirts was a life belt you Westerners could have thrown the third world children, but instead you sat home streaming Netflix trash.
The coffee market in 2019. By far the largest supplier is Brazil followed by Vietnam.
“In the UK, people drink 95 million cups of coffee per day … according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research. 65% is drunk at home, 25% at work or while studying, and the rest is consumed in shops, bars and restaurants … 80% of UK households prefer to buy instant coffee for in-home consumption, particularly those aged 65 and older …”
So, if you want the UK to support the coffee growers in Brazil and Vietnam you had better make sure you preserve as many 65 + punters as possible.
As for T shirts the UK’s top partner country for textile and clothing imports (counting by millions of dollars) is China.
Until all these hand wringers start producing checkable, statistics the cost of lockdowns stays in the realm of pure speculation.
Personally, I am waiting for the measles stats for Africa, for this year as a surrogate measure of damage done
60% of the coffee grown in the world is Arabica; most of what comes from Brazil and Vietnam is Robusta.
“Disturbing figures released by the International Labour Organization estimates that ‘250 million children, 61% in Asia, 32% in Africa, and 7% in Latin America’ are employed in sweatshops with women making up 85 to 90 percent of sweatshop workers.’”
so only 32% of children in sweat shops are African, but their mothers make a huge number., so OK.
“Kenya, for instance, is the world’s third-largest exporter of cut flowers, with its flower industry contributing around 1.06% to Kenya’s Gross Domestic Product-GDP.” this report from 2019, not so many flowers used in 2020, so who fed the kids?
So 35% of coffee is had at venues which locked down, and you think that nothing? Plus those would be the premium and ‘Fair Trade’ and more hands on beans.
Dont worry The Sweatshops make gucci handbags for harry styles & his mankini fans..
All the coffee serving venues in Italy have continued to serve throughout – takeaways.
How many fewer cut flowers exported from Kenya in 2020 ? Who do they export to ? Have they found new markets – New Zealand, Australia, S Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore ?
Until recently, going to a coffee house was takeaway only and T-shirt shopping not possible.
Suicides in UK due to Lockdowns has been hushed up..Rishi didn’t help 3million self employed ..so £2trillion debt hasn’t helped as many as hoped..
It does seem amazing how a science writer can continually get things so wrong. I seriously suggest Chivers look at the covid tracker covid.jerschow.com
A brief inspection shows the following: (a) while India’s cases per million and deaths per million are certainly rising from a very very low level, they are both still lower than in the US or Germany (where the number of deaths/million are falling like a rock). (b) until late March 2021, India was barely affected by COVID. Cases and Deaths per million were very low with only some very small bumps. Not surprisingly, they are now likely to get an outbreak comparable to that seen in the Western Countries. Not very surprising is it. Ultimately everybody is going to end up in the same boat with similar numbers of deaths per million give or take.
That doesn’t mean that India shouldn’t vaccinate. But recall, India has plenty of vaccine manufacturing capability already under license. Further, if the Indians do mass vaccinate, they would be wise to limit administration of the AZ and J&J (and likely the Pfizer and Moderna) vaccines to individuals older than 60. That way they will avoid risks associated with vaccinating the younger population where the probability of death upon infection with SARS-CoV2 is tiny.
I agree with the overblown sentiment in the article regarding the status of India’s situation compared to EU countries etc but this doesn’t take away from the thrust of the numbers and the moral question of what you do with medicine you’re not going to use.
Laura, that’s perfectly true. However, there’s a reason the AZ vaccine is going unused in Europe and hasn’t been approved in the US. The AZ vaccine (as well as the J&J one) is associated, however rarely, with thrombocytopenic clotting events, especially in women (but not exclusively) aged between around 20-50. such events, including disseminated intravascular coagulation and cerebral venous thrombosis are extremely difficult to treat and have a fatality of around 50%. While for sure rare, death from vaccination in individuals at miniscule risk of death upon infection, is problematic. And given the sheer numbers in India, and the fact that the average age of their population is likely a lot younger than in the US, could see a very significant number of those cases. Incidentally, if one looks at the VAERS database, it would appear that thrombocytopenic clotting events have also occurred with the mRNA vaccines, although, for whatever reason, the mRNA vaccines are being protected from bad publicity. This is unfortunate because it would be critical to know whether these conditions were attributable to the adenovirus vector or to the SARS-CoV2 spike protein.
In other words, if one is going to mass vaccinate, whether in India or in the West, it would be far smarter to restrict vaccinations to that segment of the population that is at significant risk of poor outcomes upon SARS-C0V2 infection; i.e. those over 60 and those younger who happen to have a significant number of severe co-morbidities.
In connection with the “blood clot” narrative, has nobody read the Taquet et al. paper at https://osf.io/a9jdq/ ?
OK, it’s only a preprint, but it has met a favourable reaction. Most statisticians, like myself, seem happy with the methodology. The relevant findings are at Fig.1 (p.13) and show that the chance of a CVT (aka CVST) event is much the same for mRNA vaccine (Pfizer/Moderna) as for AZ. On the other hand, a PVT event (different type of clot) seems much more likely for mRNA. A possible caveat is that the two groups of people, although large, are not exactly matched: the mRNA group is from the USA, AZ from the UK (and is much larger). So they might have a different composition in respect of age, co-morbidities etc. Table 1 demonstrates that PVT sufferers are much older than CVT, for example, and they are more obese, etc. Thus AZ’s better performance on PVT could be down to factors other than type of vaccine. Nevertheless, the overall message remains: mRNA vaccines DO produce blood clots, and apparently at a similar rate to AZ.
So this raises the question–why is AZ getting all the flak? Perhaps because Pfizer supplies are made within the EU?
Perhaps because AZ is British, while Pfizer and Moderna are US, and Moderna has very strong links to the NIH (and therefore the US government) – hence the mRNA vaccines are being protected against the same risks. I would not be surprised if the risks are the same for all vaccines based on the SARS-CoV2 spike protein, whether produced in the cell and exported (either from DNA to RNA to protein for the adenovirus-based vaccines; or from RNA to protein for the mRNA vaccines), or injected directly as spike protein (e.g. the Novovax vaccine). Further, it would behove all the companies to investigate this in detail rather than brush it under the table, and more specifically determine if there are simple approaches that can be used to prevent this (e.g. ensuring excellent hydration prior to being vaccinated, or simply taking prophylactic baby aspirin for several weeks prior).
From my perspective, even though the risks are tiny, they are still tragic when they occur in a population that was very likely at almost no risk of death following a COVID-19 infection.
I cannot have pfizer as I think its Albumin based,AZ grown on blood is safer for me….
One quibble Johann. Deaths per million cannot “fall like a rock”. They only go in one direction without resurrection. In the past month deaths per million in Germany have moved from 911 on March 26 to 983 on April 26. Based on 76,303 moving up to 82,344 on a base population of 83.9 million. But I do agree that vaccines which are destined for the bin should quickly be sent to India This can surely only be a good move.
Daily deaths per million is what I meant.
BBC News tonight featured an Indian pointing out that the Indian Government is only recording the Covid deaths which happen in hospitals. But his own organisation, which is cremating vastly more people than usual, takes the dead directly from their homes to cremation – unrecorded by the Govt. Thus the statistics for India are under-recording Covid deaths.
It was also stated that Modi’s Government is putting pressure on doctors to record deaths as not due to Covid, in order to reduce the embarrassment of the Government over the scale of deaths which are occurring on its watch. If true and widespread, this too will lead to under-reporting.
How does this person interviewed by the BBC know that all those people dying at home have died of Covid; is he doing an autopsy of all of them?
Also, why the hell would the Indian government be conspiring to UNDER report Covid deaths, if they desperately need foreign aid like oxygen tanks to deal with the crisis? Are we supposed to believe they would do this just out of “embarassment”? And what evidence was given in the report that the government was actually pressuring doctors to under-report?
Whatever; anything coming out of the BBC like the rest of the media I take with a brick-sized lump of salt.
In betting parlance his thesis is what would be called a Parlay, or Accumulator, or Multiplier. The problem is any link makes the chain true, or less true, and stacking guess upon guess is rarely useful.
Great article and I agree completely with the conclusion.
The article doesn’t, though, consider the political dimension of the US sending unused (and unloved) AZ vaccines to India. Biden ran as the anti-Trump; he is Mister Integrity and Mr. Science. He’s also Mr. Woke (or at least has to pretend to be). So there’s no way he’ll send millions of doses of AZ vaccine to the non-white continent of India without thoroughly testing and reviewing them and providing the Indian authorities with a full accounting of his findings and all potential risks (even if the Indians have already formed their own conclusion about the risk posed by the AZ vaccine).
There’s also the question of vaccine-resistant variants. A political nightmare scenario is if, in several months, a covid variant appears that is largely resistant to the vaccines except for the AZ vaccine. People will then stop worrying about the tiny risk of blood clots and clamor for bo