Mike Yeadon: "I’ve had a read through of that paper in the clinical trial of the AZ vaccine in South Africa.
Remember, the narrative is “it doesn’t work against the SA variant”.
I do not believe they’ve established this in any way.
Immediate reaction is that no conclusions can possibly be drawn from this because it’s massively underpowered!
Check out the confidence intervals crossing zero. Vaccine efficacy 95% CI are -76.8 to +54.8%.
I had a friend in clinical development who used to say “I absolutely hate pilot studies. They’re always underpowered. Everyone assumes the result will be directionally correct. It’s just not true. If the error bars are a big multiple of the variance in the endpoint you’d trying to measure, it’s just noise, garbage”.
Here, the uncertainty looks ten times bigger than the variance you’d hope for in a properly powered study.
If this is all the evidence there is, then I’ll stick with multilocus immunity, and that tiny changes in the virus do NOT lead to “immune escape”. It’s propaganda. Sadly, I know of genuine physicians who aren’t immunologists who’ve bought the narrative. When those on our side of the debate agree with this unlikely story, we’re lost.
Also, note in the tail end of the results. The vast majority of well over 80 epitopes identified against which T-cell responses formed were unaffected by mutations. Just as we’d expect.

So what have we really got? Unreliable PCR tests to “confirm” that subjects with vague & non specific symptoms, which they claim are suggestive of Covid19, actually have the virus. But the symptoms could be those of any respiratory virus.
The antibody / virus neutralisation assays, purporting to evaluate whether immune serum “works” against the mutants, are artificial & highly contrived. Furthermore they lacked internal controls.

This has all the smell of a rather poorly designed & underpowered study which had a purpose. It’s not good science. Pretty good politics, though!

But if you’re told we must close the borders to prevent vaccine- and naturally-acquired immunity being bypassed by mutants, please know that it’s BS.

Cheers,
Mike
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.10.21251247v1.full.pdf

"And this is just part of the web of money and influence surrounding Edmunds and other key players in the modelling game including a very high-profile person named Neil Ferguson (more on Ferguson below)."
https://thewallwillfall.org/2021/02/13/the-pandemic-modelling-cabal-have-a-serious-conflict-of-interest-rosemary-frei-msc/

The Guardian's "Global Development is supported by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation"
https://dumptheguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/11/its-as-if-theres-no-covid-nepal-defies-pandemic-amid-a-broken-economy

ONE WEEK LEFT TO VIEW:
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THE BOOK OF VISION (plus Q&A) https://t.co/TUDvoqGvCC
"An ancient, patient, fallible medicine that relies even before technology on the body’s intrinsic ability to react to illness..connected to the life of people & places, woods & waters, dreams & nightmares"
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San Francisco IndieFest 2021
https://watch.eventive.org/sfindiefest2021/play/5fd3f9c73ee6300037fba02f

A new study, involving over 25,000 school-aged children, shows that masks are harming schoolchildren physically, psychologically, and behaviorally, revealing 24 distinct health issues associated with wearing masks.
https://montanadailygazette.com/2021/01/25/new-study-finds-masks-hurt-schoolchildren-physically-psychologically-and-behaviorally/

January 11th, 2020: Where the PCR test assays come from: the internet. No checks, no controls. But is this early article telling us a lot more? Read this carefully: "News about the sequence came from Edward Holmes, a virologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney, who tweeted the first notice about the availability of what he referred to as an “initial” sequence of the virus early this morning. Holmes is a member of a consortium led by Yong-Zhen Zhang of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center & School of Public Health that posted the sequence on an open-access site, virological.org. The consortium said it had also deposited the sequence in GenBank..
Ralph Baric, a coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina..After downloading the sequence last night, his lab immediately began to try to reverse-engineer a live virus from the sequence.. “If you want to have a strong public health response, you have to do this quickly,” says Baric, who leads one of the few labs in the world that can re-create coronaviruses just from their sequences. (Bureaucratic hurdles would make it difficult for China to ship the actual virus quickly to other countries, he says.)
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/chinese-researchers-reveal-draft-genome-virus-implicated-wuhan-pneumonia-outbreak

40% of first wave Covid cases caught in hospitals:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/12/40-per-cent-first-wave-covid-cases-could-have-caught-hospitals/

Mike Yeadon adds context to the vaccination question:
"For context to consideration of risks, I think it relevant to examine risks from flu & whether vaccination makes sense.
For both flu & covid19, risks of death rise steeply with age & underlying illness.
The line is steeper with covid19 than with flu. The effect of this is as age falls, the risks from covid falls faster than the risks from flu.
I think this is a reasonable position: those who aren’t at sufficient risk from flu to seek vaccination should not seek covid19 vaccination, because the risk for them from covid19 is lower than from flu. Yet they didn’t think of the flu risk was sufficiently great to warrant reducing it via vaccination.
I hope these ramblings are of interest, even if you disagree with them, which you’re wholly entitled to!
Best wishes, Mike"

Karl Popper's Falsification Principle: how to divide science from non-science. Science: For a theory to be considered scientific it must be able to be tested (for medicine this means with evidence) and conceivably proven false. "The science" is only what could be proven false.

For Popper, science should always attempt to disprove a theory, rather than attempt to continually support theoretical hypotheses (eg that epidemiological modelling based on limited data & possibly flawed assumptions is a reflection of reality despite evidence to the contrary).

Scientific progress happens through proving theories wrong or partially wrong. The moment something is declared outside the boundaries of being able to be proved wrong (eg lockdowns, face masks & vaccines) then it is no longer science but a faith based set of unmovable beliefs.

The true scientist will always seek to find out how a PCR test can't possibly diagnose a disease, why cloth masks increase infections rather than decrease them, why lockdowns kill rather than save lives, why vaccines which skipped years of human trials can cause many deaths, etc

Because that is the only way in which scientific progress can be made: testing theories until the theories, or part of them, can be proved wrong and a new or modified theory is required to explain that aspect of reality, which in turn can be tested and improved. That is science.

Having an a priori position on vaccinations is an entirely faith based anti-scientific position. Anybody who declares themselves pro or anti-vaxx as a matter of principle is not endorsing science, but faith, in both cases. Vaccines can fail or succeed: testing does require years.

Anybody who calls a mRNA genetic editing intervention a vaccination is also not endorsing science, but marketing for human gene editing. Science always requires precision on all levels, including terminology.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1358547889400795139.html

"Meta-analysis of 54 studies with 77,758 participants found chance an infected person will infect one or more people at home is 18% if symptomatic & CLOSE TO 0% if asymptomatic [0.7% incl. PCR false + & attribution errors]
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2774102

Steve Baker: Ministers must never again be free to impose crippling restrictions without proper scrutiny

A new Public Health Act would prevent ministers imposing job-destroying restrictions without warning or scrutiny

Just like Coronavirus itself, lockdowns and restrictions cause immense damage. Food insecurity has more than doubled since the start of the pandemic, half of us have put on weight, one in three people are drinking more, children’s educational prospects have been damaged, perhaps irrevocably, and many of the limited company directors, freelancers and the self-employed who were excluded from Government support have suffered untold harm. ...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/14/ministers-must-never-free-impose-crippling-restrictions-without/

"We, as professionals from around the UK, have grave concerns regarding Government policies put in place in response to Covid-19. In particular, these policies adversely affect core principles on which our democracy depends.
We ask, as a matter of urgency, that the Government and all opposition MPs take appropriate actions to restore the UK to a true democracy, as a minimum:
(i) The Rule of Law & Separation of Powers.
Parliamentary Debate. Reinstate the lawful role of Parliament to represent its constituents as elected representatives of the people by ensuring that the Corona Virus Act 2020 is repealed or, as a minimum, receives a monthly review by Parliament.
(ii) Fundamental Human Rights and individual autonomy.

Freedom to protest. Ensure a proportionate policing approach for pro-rights movements and critics of Government policy. Decriminalise protests and prevent police violence.

Freedom of speech. Reverse instructions of censorship to the broadcast media and online platforms to allow for an independent media to report on this topic, free from Government interference.

Autonomy of decisions. Prevent tactics of coercion or discrimination by public or private entities that seek to disproportionately, unlawfully or unnecessarily impose upon the personal freedoms of UK citizens.

(iii) Openness and accountability in decisions, conflicts and the data.

Conflicts of Interest. Reconsider the sphere of influence of those members of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) that have a material conflict of interest in the Covid-19 solutions being proposed.

Conflicts of Interest. Ensure a proper procurement process is followed for all contract negotiation and issuing by Government departments.

Openness and Accountability. Complete proper informed risk assessments for all decisions being made to assess the proportionality and necessity of the measures and the impending harms likely to occur. Provide all risk assessments to Parliament in a timely manner for decisions to be made.

Democracy is not ‘optional’. The Government must now make a firm commitment to democracy and confirm that these powers will never again be used without proper legal authority, process or regular ratification by Parliament.
This Declaration is signed the following individuals:
https://democracydeclaration.com/

Face Mask Discrimination Letter
https://democracydeclaration.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Face_masks_discrimination_template_letter-1.pdf

Testing in Schools Open Letter to MPs
https://democracydeclaration.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Testing-in-Schools-Open-Letter-to-MPs.pdf

The PCR test at 35 cycle thresholds or over does not detect a Covid19 case. It detects inactive SARSCoV2 (if not any SARS or coronavirus) viral fragments, up to two months old. If there are symptoms, they could simply be symptoms of any influenza, common cold, rhinovirus, or any other respiratory disease. The same goes for deaths counted within say 28 days of a positive PCR test at over 35 cycle thresholds. SAGE minutes in comments below indicate live viral load which is high enough for transmission is only found at 24 cycle thresholds or under.

Steve Baker: "👀An outline of a new Public Health Act ⤵️

Thank you Lord Sumption for your assistance 👏 "