She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Health Feedback

Computing Forever interview with Dolores Cahill contains numerous inaccuracies about COVID-19 and vaccines

I have very little patience with gross of anti-vaxxers as most are poorly informed, lack arguments and really oppose any measure from government. See a continuation of anti-government protests such as the yellow jackets and the incredible Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The harm is done by a few scientists of name who support a political platform.

Unfortunately with virus infections, one needs just a small number of persons to cause an outbreak. Many statisticians were mistaken making the assumption the SARS CoV-2 would behave similar to the flu virus. "Science" was used to claim herd immunity could be attained by letting her rip. The politicians of conservative pedigree and libertarian economics were grateful to offer a few vulnerable on the altar of corporate profits.

Paying the Price of Herd Immunity Policy

-- o -- o -- o -- o -- o --

Mathematics of life and death: How disease models shape national shutdowns and other pandemic policies

RIVM scientist Jacco Wallinga is also on the Oxford team of Neil Ferguson simulating and predicting the spread of coronavirus. Both advocated government policy of herd-immunity ... both erred.

And the messaging of leading politicians has been erratic and non-consequential.

Laissez-faire Handling Outbreak by PM Boris Johnson

Furthermore the anti-vaxxers are violent, damage property, issue death threats and set fire to vaccination centra.

Belgian manhunt for armed soldier who threatened virologist

Additional reading ...

The Many Enterprises of Dolores Cahill

'Sapere aude'

Older people would rather die than let Covid-19 harm US economy - Texas official | The Guardian - March 24, 2020 |

Today clearly eyed, the Texas official redubbed the China virus as the Black virus.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick pins COVID surge on unvaccinated Blacks

Free to choose except when you belong to the black community?

As coronavirus rages again in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott resists statewide action, hamstrings local leaders | Texas Tribune - Aug. 6, 2021

This is the other side of the coin ... letting the Covid-19 virus and variants rage.

Governor DeSantis of Florida making more headlines as he aspires a presidential run.

'Sapere aude'

archived Mar 14th, 2020

Look at that LAMBDA-wut curve under the DELTA curve! ooo boy howdy.
archived Wed Jul 28th, 2021

An overwhelming 72%-28% of those surveyed by USA TODAY and Ipsos called mask mandates "a matter of health and safety," not an infringement on personal liberty. By 61%-39%, they endorsed requiring vaccinations except for those with a medical or religious exemption.

That view isn't universal, though. Nearly 1 in 5 said they hadn't gotten a COVID-19 shot yet and don't plan to anytime soon - underscoring the complicated terrain ahead as the number of cases diagnosed and deaths recorded rise, especially in communities with low vaccination rates.

"I think the mandates and requirements are against our rights as being U.S. citizens," said Carlie Wright, 30, the stay-at-home mother of two sons from Logan, Utah, who has declined to get a vaccine or wear a mask. "We shouldn't have government to control our lives and tell us what they can and can't do."

And when the 5-11 year old group is approved, presumably later this fall, there will be few remaining excuses for not making vaccination mandatory.

Many states already have the dreaded "vaccine passport" infrastructure in place, but are not advertising it as such. For example, Colorado has its "myColorado" smart phone app, which initially was advertised as an easy way to maintain a digital copy of your driving and fishing licenses. Within the past few weeks they have quietly added a connection to the state vaccination database.

Jesse Jackson ... was vaccinated against the virus and received his first dose in January[of WHICH vaccine?] during a publicized event
[...]
Despite having been diagnosed for Parkinson's disease, Jackson has remained active, and has advocated for COVID-19 vaccines for Black people, who lag behind white people in the United States' Pfizer, Moderna vaccination drive.

Valentine, 61, announced on Facebook on July 11 he had COVID-19 and predicted he would survive. Days later, Valentine's relatives said he was very sick, and he wanted listeners to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Nashville radio host Phil Valentine dies at 61 after battling COVID-19 | The Tennessean |

Anti-vaccine US radio host Phil Valentine dies of COVID-19

Valentine had been a skeptic of coronavirus vaccines. But after he tested positive for COVID-19, and prior to his hospitalization, he told his listeners to consider, "If I get this COVID thing, do I have a chance of dying from it?" If so, he advised them to get vaccinated. He said he chose not to get vaccinated because he thought he probably wouldn't die.

After Valentine was moved into a critical care unit, his brother Mark said the talk radio host regretted that "he wasn't a more vocal advocate of the vaccination."

"I know if he were able to tell you this, he would tell you, 'Go get vaccinated. Quit worrying about the politics. Quit worrying about all the conspiracy theories," Mark Valentine told The Tennessean on July 25.

Full approval for Pfizer Covid vaccine could come from FDA on Monday, report says | CNBC |

White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci told the Associated Press on Aug. 8 that he hoped vaccines would start receiving full approval "within the month of August," adding that full approval would lead more companies and schools to mandate vaccines.

U.S. companies have tightened vaccine rules for employees as Covid cases have spiked across the country in recent weeks, and some cited full a provable from the FDA as part of the decision-making process.

Full approval could also help persuade people who are hesitant about getting vaccinated until the FDA fully signs off on the shot.

Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine

'Sapere aude'

Vaccination against Covid-19 is in Sweden not recommended for kids under 16 in general. For kids from 12 years and up, it is recommended on case by case basis with kids that has pre-existing conditions that would agrevate an infection.

Personally I would be hesitant to vaccinate my 12 year old, considering a) how little can be known at this point about long term effects in growing bodies and b) the lower risk of severe cases in children and c) the non-sterilising nature of the vaccines making the epidemological benefits unclear.

Of course, in part it might be because ten years ago we had a vaccine that gave some kids narcolepsy:

In 2010, The Swedish Medical Products Agency (MPA) and The Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) received reports from Swedish and Finnish health care professionals regarding narcolepsy as suspected adverse reaction following Pandemrix flu vaccination. The reports concern children aged 12-16 years where symptoms compatible with narcolepsy, diagnosed after thorough medical investigation, have occurred one to two months after vaccination.

THL concluded in February 2011 that there is a clear connection between the Pandemrix vaccination campaign of 2009 and 2010 and narcolepsy epidemic in Finland: there was a nine times higher probability to get narcolepsy with vaccination than without it.[120][121]

At the end of March 2011, an MPA press release stated: "Results from a Swedish registry based cohort study indicate a 4-fold increased risk of narcolepsy in children and adolescents below the age of 20 vaccinated with Pandemrix, compared to children of the same age that were not vaccinated."[122] The same study found no increased risk in adults who were vaccinated with Pandemrix.

The vaccinations probably weren't necessary according to the Council of Europe: Council of Europe condemns "unjustified scare" over swine flu.

The Council of Europe has heavily criticised the World Health Organization, national governments, and EU agencies for their handling of the swine flu pandemic.

The parliamentary assembly of the council--the international organisation that protects human rights and the rule of law in Europe--published a draft of a report that reviewed how the H1N1 pandemic was handled.

National governments, WHO, and EU agencies had all been guilty of actions that led to a "waste of large sums of public money, and unjustified scares and fears about the health risks faced by the European public," says the report.

The conclusion came in the parliamentary assembly's social, health and family affairs committee report published on 4 June.

The report was prepared by Paul Flynn, socialist member of the assembly and Labour MP for Newport West and approved by the committee ahead of a plenary debate at the end of this month. It says there was overwhelming evidence that the seriousness of the pandemic was vastly over-rated by WHO

I think there is a difference in trusting science and trusting the (hopefully) science based recommendations that comes from institutional bodies. To make sure institutional bodies interprets the science correctly (or as correct as the science at that point allows) they need to be held accountable and called out when they are wrong (for example the airborne transmission of Covid-19). Without holding them accountable when they are wrong, you can't build widespread public trust. And if trust comes down to tribalism and politics and social media censorship then public health interventions becomes very hard and not very efficient.

Of course this is hard when you have actors that benefits from stirring up panics, and a social media landscape that not only feeds the trolls but makes it easy to monetise stirring up panics.

The fiasco of the 1976 'swine flu affair'

But what was meant to be a ceremonial opening and positive public relations effort would turn sour. That week, the papers had begun reporting troubling news from vaccine clinics in Pittsburgh: three apparently unexplained deaths due to heart attacks.

"I remember that day. I remember it vividly," recalls Imperato. "I saw those headlines on the subway. And I said, 'Good God. All hell is breaking loose here.'"

The headlines would get worse. Two days later, the New York Post tabloid wrote of "The Scene at the Pennsylvania Death Clinic", featuring emotional but almost certainly embellished tales: "One of the old people, 75-year old Julia Bucci, had winced at the hypodermic needle in her arm, had taken a few feeble steps, then dropped dead on the floor of the health station. Right in front of their eyes.".

Much of the research on the anti-vaxx movement has focused on political disengagement, the fraying bond of trust between many states and their citizens. In the popular imagination, the prototypical western anti-vaxxer is a sort of fringe lunatic, a village idiot, perhaps even a political extremist. But the vaccine sceptics of professional sport remind us that radicalisation and myth cut across boundaries of privilege and socioeconomics.

Anti-vaxxer Djokovic, a privileged person and no more worthy to be quoted than my neighbour in The Hague.

Enter Djokovic's wife, Jelena, who at the beginning of April spread the viral video of medical professional Dr Thomas Cowan and his debunked theory linking 5G technology to the coronavirus outbreak. The video now carries a "false information" badge of shame on her Instagram. Instead of being one of the many to share a false video innocently, she doubled down.

Building mental strength ...

Djokovic remembered, in particular, the days when his family would shelter from Nato's bombing raids in his grandfather's Belgrade basement.

Less than a month into a Covid-19 vaccine booster drive, Israel is seeing signs of an impact on the country's high infection and severe illness rates fuelled by the fast-spreading Delta variant, officials and scientists have said.

Delta hit Israel in June, just as the country began to reap the benefits of one of the world's fastest vaccine rollouts.

With an open economy and most curbs scrapped, Israel went from single-digit daily infections and zero deaths to about 7,500 daily cases last week, 600 people hospitalised in serious condition and more than 150 people dying in that week alone.

On July 30th, it began administering a third dose of the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine to people aged over 60, the first country to do so. On Thursday it expanded eligibility to 40 year olds and up, whose second dose was given at least 5 months prior, saying the age may drop further.

In the past 10 days, the pandemic has abated among the first age group, more than a million of whom have received a third vaccine dose, according to Israeli health ministry data and scientists interviewed by Reuters.

The rate of disease spread among vaccinated people aged 60 and over - known as the reproduction rate - began falling steadily around August 13th and has dipped below 1, indicating that each infected person is transmitting the virus to fewer than one other person. A reproduction rate of less than 1 means an outbreak is subsiding.

Northern Ireland has the highest rate of Covid-19 infection in the UK, at 579.5 per 100,000 people.

It is the highest infection rate in the North since January 8th.

Fermanagh & Omagh has the highest rate of any local authority in the UK, with a total of 1,003.9 cases per 100,000 people recorded in the seven days to August 18th.

Nine further deaths of patients who had tested positive for Covid-19 were reported in Northern Ireland on Monday, along with another 1,320 confirmed cases of the virus.

On Monday morning there were 352 Covid-positive patients in hospital, of whom 43 were in intensive care.

Unfortunately this high rate of infection has also been spilling in to border areas of the Republic, and particularly into Donegal which has a much longer border with N. Ireland than it has with the rest of the Republic.

Index of Frank's Diaries

A man suffering severe Covid-19 symptoms who left Letterkenny Hospital after being encouraged to do so by a number of anti-vaxxer campaigners has been readmitted to the hospital and is in a serious condition.

The Donegal man was the subject of a viral video earlier in the week during which a group of people insisted that he be released from hospital, despite medical staff stating this would worsen his condition.

In the video, one activist said he was "rescuing" the man, and falsely claimed that treatment in the hospital would "kill" the patient.

One staff member told the man that leaving the hospital would risk "endangering" his life. "It's a very difficult disease that you have, and I'm not lying to you, you could die, but this could be your best chance in the hospital," the staff member told the patient.

"It's better that he die in the house than he dies here," the activist responded.

The patient, who appears to be struggling to breathe in the footage, agrees to leave the hospital and return home. He later appeared in a video posted to social media on Wednesday saying that he felt much better and accused the hospital of mistreating him.

Early on Thursday morning the man reported severe breathing difficulties and an ambulance was called. He was returned to Letterkenny Hospital where he remains in an "extremely serious condition", a well-placed source said. It is understood he has been placed on a ventilator.