COVID-19 | Launch and Scale Speedometer

COVID-19 | Launch and Scale Speedometer

If face masks really stop Covid, then why are so many of us still catching it?

If face masks really stop Covid, then why are so many of us still catching it? If face masks really stop Covid, then why are so many of us still catching it? 

World Health Organisation is urging us to wear masks around Christmas table 

Surveys show three-quarters of Britons are wearing masks in mandatory areas Yet virus spreading at rate that requires Britons to be banned from mixing inside

UK reports new variant, VUI 202012/01

GISAID - UK reports new variant, termed VUI 202012/01: UK reports new variant, termed VUI 202012/01 (Variant Under Investigation, year 2020, month 12, variant 01). 

 

Threat Assessment Brief: Rapid increase of a SARS-CoV-2 variant with multiple spike protein mutations observed in the United Kingdom

Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence

Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence: The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The costs are legion. 

The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control. 

Perhaps this is a shocking revelation, given that universal social and economic controls are becoming the new orthodoxy. In a saner world, the burden of proof really should belong to the lockdowners, since it is they who overthrew 100 years of public-health wisdom and replaced it with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights. They never accepted that burden. They took it as axiomatic that a virus could be intimidated and frightened by credentials, edicts, speeches, and masked gendarmes. 

The pro-lockdown evidence is shockingly thin, and based largely on comparing real-world outcomes against dire computer-generated forecasts derived from empirically untested models, and then merely positing that stringencies and “nonpharmaceutical interventions” account for the difference between the fictionalized vs. the real outcome. The anti-lockdown studies, on the other hand, are evidence-based, robust, and thorough, grappling with the data we have (with all its flaws) and looking at the results in light of controls on the population. 

Much of the following list has been put together by data engineer Ivor Cummins, who has waged a year-long educational effort to upend intellectual support for lockdowns. AIER has added its own and the summaries. The upshot is that the virus is going to do as viruses do, same as always in the history of infectious disease. We have extremely limited control over them, and that which we do have is bound up with time and place. Fear, panic, and coercion are not ideal strategies for managing viruses. Intelligence and medical therapeutics fare much better.

European vaccine prices revealed in Belgian Twitter blunder

European vaccine prices revealed in Belgian Twitter blunder: government minister revealed the confidential prices of six different vaccines against Covid-19. 

This is the list of what the EU is paying:

• Oxford/AstraZeneca: €1.78

• Johnson & Johnson: $8.50

• Sanofi/GSK: €7.56.

• Pfizer/BioNTech: €12.

• CureVac: €10.

• Moderna: $18.

Every country in the world has an interest in mass vaccination against Covid and there is a big effort to put together a programme to ensure all countries can access enough to vaccinate the vulnerable. But drug and vaccine prices have always been very closely guarded commercial secrets.

Belgian secretary of state accidentally reveals EU vaccine prices: The information is protected by commercial confidentiality agreements.

Civil society groups, MEPs and health advocates have been calling for months for the Commission to reveal how much the EU is paying, arguing that deals involving taxpayer funds should have greater transparency.