Scientists Tried to Reinfect People With Covid – and Failed
By Will Jones
Scientists tried to reinfect people with Covid but found it impossible, even when they ramped up the dose 10,000-fold, according to the latest results from the Covid challenge trials. Nature has the details.
When Paul Zimmer-Harwood volunteered to be intentionally infected with SARS-CoV-2, he wasn’t sure what to expect. He was ready for a repeat of his first brush with COVID-19, through a naturally acquired infection that gave him influenza-like symptoms. But he hoped his immunity would help him feel well enough to use the indoor bicycle trainer that he had brought into quarantine.
It turned out that Zimmer-Harwood, a PhD student at University of Oxford, UK, had nothing to worry about. Neither he nor any of the 35 other people who participated in the ‘challenge’ trial actually got COVID-19.
The study’s results, published on May 1st in Lancet Microbe, raise questions about the usefulness of COVID-19 challenge trials for testing vaccines, drugs and other therapeutics. “If you can’t get people infected, then you can’t test those things,” says Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London. Viral strains used in challenge trials take many months to produce, making it impossible to match emerging circulating variants that can overcome high levels of existing immunity in populations.
Researchers use challenge trials to understand infections and quickly test vaccines and therapies. In March 2021, after months of ethical debate, UK researchers launched the world’s first COVID-19 challenge trial. The study identified a minuscule dose of the SARS-CoV-2 strain that circulated in the early days of the pandemic that could infect about half of the participants, who had not previously been infected with the virus (at that time, vaccines weren’t yet widely available). [Read the Daily Sceptic write-up of the study here.]
In parallel, a team led by Helen McShane, an infectious-disease researcher at Oxford, launched a second SARS-CoV-2 challenge study in people — including Zimmer-Harwood — who had recovered from naturally caught SARS-CoV-2 infections, caused by a range of variants. The trial later enrolled participants who had also been vaccinated.
The first participants got the same tiny dose of the ‘ancestral’ SARS-CoV-2 strain as did those in the first trial. When nobody developed a sustained infection, the researchers increased the dose by more and more in subsequent groups of participants, until they reached a level 10,000 times the initial dose. A few volunteers developed short-lived infections, but these quickly vanished.
Worth reading in full.
Despite this immunity to the old strains, nearly 40% of the participants reported an Omicron infection after being released from quarantine by December 2022 (and one even reported getting it twice).
The upshot? Natural immunity is extremely robust – even more robust than has previously been suggested – but new variants can appear that evade it with relative ease. We’d kind of figured that out, but it’s good to have it experimentally confirmed.
Lockdowns Were Unquestionably the Stupidest Government Intervention of Our Lifetimes
By Luke Johnson
The awful consequences which flowed from lockdowns are so deep and broad it is hard to know where to begin. I think they are the major cause of so many of our current problems.
At heart governments did the unthinkable. They deliberately broke the social contract on which society is founded. They imprisoned us for months on end – and all for nothing. Their draconian actions were unscientific, ineffective, irrational and wholly destructive. They completely undermined any belief that the powers that be act in a proportionate and considered manner: instead they panicked, and we lost our basic freedoms.
The rank stupidity of the authorities gave permission for ordinary citizens to do foolish and damaging things: to riot, to lose the work ethic, to drop out of school, to embrace hypochondria, to despair and even commit suicide.
All accepted norms were thrown out of the window. Instead of reassuring the public, the Government spent millions of pounds of our own money frightening us. Why bother with anything if the vast apparatus of the state behaves in such a demented way?
Lockdowns meant the economy was put into a sudden induced coma because of an exaggerated fear of disease. Unsurprisingly there were severe harms from such a drastic step. Terrible habits became ingrained. What could be more idiotic than paying people to sit at home and do nothing?
Civilisation is a more fragile construct than we like to believe. It depends on mutual trust and an expectation that the large majority of people are law abiding and have confidence in public bodies like Parliament, the civil service, the police, the education system, the national media, unions and public health experts. Institutions which have taken decades or even centuries to construct were exposed as hollow and led by cowards and sheep.
Most of the important things in life take time, balance and willpower. But lockdowns and public health monomania threw self-discipline and proportion on the bonfire.
Why care about any other disease except Covid? Why not just lock everyone up – even though it was crystal clear from February 2020 that Covid was largely only a serious risk to the elderly and frail? Who cares about education for millions of children? Why worry about squandering £400 billion of taxpayers’ money in Britain alone in less than two years, taking our national debt up to its highest level since World War Two?
Governments like those in Britain and America prostituted their nation’s creditworthiness to temporarily insulate the electorate from the sheer folly of lockdowns. But the bills are coming due – the absolute amount of Government debt keeps rising, and given much higher interest rates, the cost is becoming enormous.
I read an essay recently which described decivilisation – the decay of order, the advance of chaos, transience visible everywhere, and the absence of anything durable. This feels like the process we underwent during lockdowns. We are still picking up the pieces and attempting to deal with the aftermath.
The ruin imposed by lockdowns stretched from psychological abuse to educational impairments to economic devastation. It was social, cultural, career and institutional vandalism on an unprecedented scale.
The evil of inflation started in 2020 and accelerated in 2021 because of restrictions in production and supply bottlenecks – thanks to lockdowns. Millions of businesses were partly or wholly shut down, but demand for items did not necessarily diminish.
Indeed, in many cases demand rose – central banks inflamed conditions by lowering interest rates and printing money. People sat bored at home and bought goods online. After a brief hiatus, the value of assets like shares and property rose, with all the increased liquidity fueling prices. The rich got richer; the less well-off did not.
So of course the elite mostly thought lockdowns weren’t too bad after all. They sat snug, smug and safe in their nice homes, getting wealthier, while the ‘little people’ brought them things. Society became more divided – resentments grew.
By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, inflation was firmly entrenched. The rise in the price of energy simply turbo-charged this trend. Inflation exploded and the cost of living crisis took hold. Falling living standards have swept through communities like a third Horseman of the Apocalypse – the first being Covid, and the second (and most awful) being lockdowns.
Lockdowns bolstered the pathetic concept that safety is all that matters and boosted a growing tendency towards risk aversion. But that way lies a life of fear and stagnation, and a world without innovation, ambition or progress. Once a culture loses its collective confidence and belief in a better future, then decline becomes inevitable.
If society feels like it is spinning out of control, then you would be right to blame lockdowns. They were unquestionably the stupidest Government intervention of our lifetimes. Anyone who still claims they were ‘worth it’ is in denial.
Luke Johnson is a Director of Skeptics Ltd, the company that publishes the Daily Sceptic.
Chris Packham Packs on the Pseudoscience to Promote Climate Collapse “Terror”
By the final programme of his five-part Earth series, broadcast last year by the BBC, Chris Packham had perfected the art of taking imprecise proxy data from the geological record and comparing it to more accurate modern measurements to draw dubious conclusions about imminent climate collapse. One sudden spike in temperatures about 56 million years ago over “just a few thousand years” is said to be “incredible but sobering”. Scientists, he says, regard this as “analogous” to what is happening today. Some might, but a lot of others are more circumspect about relying on geological data that has a resolution of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and comparing it with today’s measurements.
Packham draws conclusions from events in the PETM, or Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a warming period that began sometime around 56.3 million to 55.9 million years ago. Briefly, it appears global temperatures shot up to around 25 or 26°C, compared with about 14.5°C today. In a published essay, science writer Andy May studied the evidence around the PETM and noted the proxy temperature measurements with lengthy resolutions “are not comparable to today’s monthly averages”.
But this lack of temporal precision does not stop Packham waxing lyrically about the PETM. “Violent storms ravaged the planet with flash floods and protracted drought,” he says. “What is scary is how it happened – each event triggering the next until it pushed the Earth past some serious tipping points,” he claims.
The ‘tipping point’ trope is the go-to climate-modelled message for today’s Armageddonists. Alas, there doesn’t appear to have been time in the programme to state what these ancient tipping points were, but in case the viewer doesn’t pick up on this current fashionable scare, Packham claims “and that is our nightmare”. Towards the end of the programme, he doubles down on his own claimed scientific precision and states: “Today, climate is changing faster than at any time in the last 66 million years.” This might what Packham understands ‘the science’ to say, but there is no way that anyone can know this, let alone prove it. He later told the Guardian that he hoped the “terror factor” generated by the series would “spur us to do something about the environment crisis”.
So what caused this spike in temperatures in the PETM? Since this is a propaganda film aimed at persuading the viewer that burning hydrocarbons and releasing ‘greenhouse’ gases like carbon dioxide into the air is potentially catastrophic, the answer Packham provides is simple. In this case methane, which he says started venting from deep within the Atlantic ocean. Again, the lack of precision around dates is a problem when it comes to attributing a rise in temperature over an imprecise period to a gas that has warming properties but stays in the atmosphere as briefly as 84 months. Marine geophysicist Professor Tim Minshull is less sure that methane release was the main cause of the global warming at this time. In a study published in 2016, he suggested methane release was slower and more modest than some researchers have hypothesised.
About 40 million years ago, ‘hothouse’ Earth, when alligators basked under palm trees in the Arctic, started to cool, a process that Packham attributes to falling levels of CO2. The rocks in newly-formed mountain ranges started to weather and react with the air to remove the gas from the atmosphere – or something. There are a number of problems with this hypothesis, not least the fact that CO2 levels had already been falling steadily for 150 million years from the end of the Jurassic, while temperatures remained as high as they had ever been in the geological record going back 600 million years. As the graph below shows, temperatures remained high, while CO2 levels began their long descent to the low, near denudation, levels seen today.
Meanwhile, scientists dispute the notion that rock weathering only acts as a carbon sink, suggesting that the process also releases amounts of CO2 to rival volcanoes. In a paper published last year, a group of Oxford University scientists led by Dr. Jesse Zondervan said their work on the carbon release had important implications for modelling climate scenarios. At the moment, the CO2 released from rock weathering is not included in the modelled work. Neither it seems are such inconvenient findings included in the Net Zero promotional work of Chris Packham.
The Earth presenter is a green activist and naturalist who holds the view that eight billion humans are wrecking the natural world in their attempts to sustain life on a difficult, dangerous planet. Some of his efforts to draw attention to the fragility of natural habitats are laudable. But as we have seen, he uses something called ‘the Science’ to promote the view that humans should stop industrial progress and return to a mythical natural state. The fact that the unexploited natural world could not sustain anything like eight billion souls is just one of the many reasons why his fantasies will never be adopted. His science starts with a pre-determined narrative, unlike the scientific process which draws conclusions after a ruthless examination of all the available evidence. Mainstream media such as the BBC have largely given up on the scientific process when it comes to climate change, and simply promote political messaging around the Net Zero project. In doing so, they ignore large swaths of scientific knowledge that are likely to trouble the ‘settled’ opinion. But then, this knowledge lacks the “terror factor” so beloved by Packham.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
U.S. Government Mandates Preferred Pronouns in All Workplaces
By Will Jones
The U.S. Government has mandated the use of preferred pronouns in every workplace in America in a clampdown on ‘discrimination’ against transgender people under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. John Murawski in UnHerd has more.
As of this week, failing to respect a queer person’s non-binary pronouns is the newest form of workplace discrimination recognised under the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act in the United States.
The new pronoun mandate for workers, employers and even customers was issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as part of the civil rights agency’s first move in a quarter-century to bring its workplace guidelines up to date with legal precedent and evolving social norms.
The 189-page document, which is technically legally non-binding but spells out the agency’s policies on investigating discrimination complaints, says that misgendering must be repeated and intentional, not a slip of the tongue, to rise to the level of workplace harassment. In its guidelines, the EEOC also decreed that it’s discriminatory for an employer to deny a transgender person access to a bathroom they feel best matches their gender identity, even if that invades the privacy of the other workers, or, in some cases, conflicts with another employee’s religious convictions.
The new standards were adopted on a 3-2 vote, along party lines, after the investigatory panel received some 37,000 public comments on the updates proposed last October.
With this dramatic decision, it’s no exaggeration to say that queer theory — the provocative academic idea that rejects the normativity of heterosexuality — is now firmly ensconced into U.S. law and American society, at least in the bluest and most urban areas with the most educated residents and top-paying jobs.
The EEOC’s decision is the consequence of decades of queer scholarship and legal manoeuvring to gain civil rights protection and social acceptance for behaviours once deemed as deviant but increasingly seen as liberated from archaic, repressive conventions. The agency said banning misgendering and bathroom restrictions for trans people “logically extends” from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock ruling that added sexual and gender identity as a protected category under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
Worth reading in full.
Depressing stuff. Hard to understand how in a supposedly federal system like America, the central Government can stipulate that every workplace in the country – and customers as well – must conform to confused people’s gender fantasies. But there you have it.
Personally, I blame Neil Gorsuch, the supposedly conservative originalist Justice who joined with the liberals in Bostock (he actually wrote the majority opinion) in arguing that constitutional protections for sex applied equally to gender identity. His facile logic? That it is impossible for an employer to make an adverse employment decision based on “transgender status” without thereby discriminating “because of sex”, since a man who suffers adverse treatment because he “identifies” as a woman is treated differently than he would be if he were a woman who “identifies” as a woman. Er, yes, Neil. But the point is he isn’t a woman. This point of mere biological fact was lost on such a lofty legal mind, unfortunately – and now a country of 350 million is living with the idiotic and tyrannical consequences.
Have Left-Wing Protesters Moved On From Climate Change?
By Will Jones
Climate protests are so last year, it appears, as the same crowd now preoccupies itself with Gaza demonstrations. Is the truth that Left-wing protests are just fads chasing the latest issue du jour? The Telegraph‘s Ross Clark thinks so.
It’s hard not to notice a distinct switch in the targets of Lefty protesters over the past few months. They seem to have lost interest in protesting about climate change and have switched to Palestine and asylum-seekers instead.
The shift can be dated to last November during a protest held in Amsterdam, when Greta Thunberg suddenly seemed to decide that the planet was no longer worthy of her complete attention. She told the crowd that there “can be no climate justice on occupied land”, before blathering on about Palestine. It didn’t please one of her fans, who stormed the stage and seized her microphone, but as ever with Greta she seemed to manage to set a trend.
In the months since we have seen fewer and fewer climate protests as progressive mobs find other things to work themselves up about instead. Never mind that we are supposedly heading for climate Armageddon if we don’t abandon all oil and gas more or less instantly, a more urgent injustice seems to be that asylum seekers are being taken out of three star hotels and housed on a barge instead – a barge which, by the way, seemed to be perfectly adequate in its previous incarnation as accommodation for oil workers (although I guess in the minds of climate activists they needed to be punished).
“Like most Left-wing causes,” Ross suggests, climate change was “just a passing fad”. “The same crowd seems to have evolved seamlessly from anti-globalisation to the Occupy movement, to climate change and now to Palestine.”
Don’t forget BLM!
“If you want to be on trend with your protesting, better opportunities now lie elsewhere,” Ross concludes
Worth reading in full.
News Round-Up
By Will Jones
- “Dire day for Tories as Labour wins in West Midlands and London” – Andy Street lost a knife-edge ballot to be Mayor of the West Midlands to Labour’s Richard Parker by 1,508 votes. Meanwhile, despite Ulez and being a general disaster, Sadiq Khan secured an historic third term, the Telegraph reports.
- “Scientists Backtrack, Admit Proposed Virus Experiments Could Have Been Done In China” –Testifying to Congress, EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak changed his tune and admitted he didn’t know whether the controversial DEFUSE experiments were conducted in China, according to ZeroHedge.
- “U.S. shared ‘gobsmacking’ Covid lab leak file with U.K.” – Evidence supporting the lab leak theory was presented to Dominic Raab, then the Foreign Secretary, in January 2021, but “was ignored”, reports the Telegraph.
- “Pharmaceutical giants knowingly sold HIV-infected treatment to NHS” – Pharmaceutical companies were aware they were selling a treatment infected with HIV to the NHS, the Telegraph reveals.
- “Campus radicals give us a horrible glimpse of the future” – “In those face-masked, neurotic features, we see a horrible glimpse of the future,” says Dan Hannan in the Washington Examiner. “A generation screen-addled, aggrieved, socially inept and, ultimately, lost.”
- “When Free Speech Turns Into Harassment” – Universities are navigating a minefield with Gaza protest, but there are right and wrong answers, says Cathy Young in Persuasion.
- “BBC Arabic forced to correct its output 80 times in five months of war” – The service made the equivalent of one revision every other day on average, including incorrect references to Jewish residents as ‘settlers’, the Telegraph reports.
- “The far-Left mob has seized control of Britain’s streets – and its borders” – Those who shout the loudest – from the most deranged Leftist standpoint – now have the whip hand to rule the rest of us, says the Telegraph‘s Zoe Strimpel.
- “Charity under review after imam compared Hamas attack to Jews escaping Nazi camps” – A charity which runs a Leeds mosque is being looked at by the Charity Commission after its imam compared the October 7th attack to Jews breaking out of Nazi concentration camps and criticised Jordan for intercepting Iranian missiles bound for Israel. The Telegraph has more.
- “The climate scaremongers: China leads the world over green power? Pull the other one!” – Lobbyists for Net Zero continue to gaslight the public into believing that China is leading the world in fighting climate change, says Paul Homewood in TCW.
- “Boris Johnson to co-chair ex-Tory MP’s Net Zero initiative” – The former Prime Minister has announced he will join ex-Net Zero tsar Chris Skidmore’s company, Better Earth, according to the Telegraph. Of course he will.
- “Household energy efficiency ratings ‘inaccurate and misleading’, report claims” – Which? is calling for an overhaul overhaul of the entire EPC system, reports the Telegraph.
- “North Sea oil drilling to continue for a decade after Net Zero deadline” – A raft of new licences extends operations for up to 20 years longer than expected, reports the Telegraph.
- “The outbreak of Chris Packham, Hugh Jackman and other Net Zero Celebrities…” – On Substack, Tom Ed looks at the celebrities climbing aboard the Net Zero bandwagon.
- “Labour plots new Net Zero crackdown on corporates” – Labour’s Ed Miliband is planning to legally oblige directors to publish their company’s carbon footprint, according to the Telegraph.
- “Offshore wind is gearing up to bulldoze the ocean” – The Biden Administration has recently produced a wave of plans and regulatory actions aimed at building a monstrous amount of destructive offshore wind, says David Wojick in WUWT.
- “A True Bipartisan Scandal” – How out of control is our surveillance state, asks Matt Taibbi in Racket News. “Read about a dubious investigation that swept up communications of some of the country’s most senior highest officials, and their families, in secret.”
- “Why unorthodox thinkers are embracing Christianity” – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson’s wife have all recently become Christians, and even Richard Dawkins is warming to the old faith. Jane Stannus looks at what’s going on in the Spectator.
- “Ireland’s blind hatred of Brexit has destroyed its borders. Starmer may do the same to ours” – Sadly, Ireland’s leaders seem to have determined that collaboration with the EU, whatever its cost, is always preferable to working with the U.K., says Dan Hannan in the Telegraph.
- “FSU Head Toby Young visited Scotland this week and almost got his collar felt by the Hate Monster!” Watch the short video he made while there about the draconian new law.
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