With almost 80% of its population having been vaccinated, Israel has scrapped the requirement for people to wear masks outdoors. The rule has been in place for the past year.
Is the Yellow Card vaccine reporting system fit for purpose? HART's Dr Ros Jones argues no, pointing to the 30-fold increase in vaccine linked deaths in the U.S in the past 3 months since Covid vaccination began.
We're publishing a short piece today by Sinéad Murphy in which she praises a new book called The Covid Consensus that asks why the lockdown policy has commanded such support from people on the left and right of politics.
Nicola Sturgeon has warned that restrictions on international travel should not be lifted too soon because of the "big risk" of importing Covid variants into the UK.
Glen Bishop has analysed a paper produced by one of the SAGE modelling teams and discovered an interesting fact: it tacitly endorsed the approach recommended in the Great Barrington Declaration.
by Glen Bishop In May last year, after the UK had been plunged into lockdown for the first time, the Warwick SAGE SPI-M team released a paper analysing the potential exit strategies and their projections for deaths under each scenario. Whether their projections were correct is debatable because of the vagueness of their assumptions, but more importantly the paper inadvertently highlights why lockdowns are farcical. Below is the graph projecting the pandemic course under different scenarios of lifting lockdown last year. The graph is poorly labelled and hard to follow, so bear with this explanation. It models five scenarios of releasing lockdown, where restrictions are eased on the May 7th by varying degrees, from no release to full release at intervals of 25% i.e., 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. With these levels of restrictions maintained until January 1st 2021, at which point, they are all released fully. The effect of this eventual release is shown in the ‘no controls’ side of the graph which is a continuation of the five same lines into 2021. As shown on the left-hand side representing 2020, the lines of 50%, 75% and 100% release of restrictions, projected an immediate resurgence in the virus with predictions of daily summer death tolls between 1000 and 4000 at their peaks. Clearly this did not happen ...
It is still "too early to say" whether the reopening of indoor hospitality can take place on May 17th because of the risk of Covid variants, according to the Environment Minister.
The first cases of blood clotting linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine occurred in January and February but the algorithms used by Britain’s medicines regulator did not pick them up, according to a new investigation.
A summary of all the most interesting stories that have appeared about the virus in the past 24 hours – not just in Britain, but around the world.
Academics who produce models predicting doom for places which don't lock down should be challenged to hindcast for states which stay open. If they can't get the past right, why should we trust them for the future?
