I want to take you on a journey – a journey into data. What you take from this is up to you – perhaps you’ll gain a healthy scepticism of statistical data presented by experts; perhaps you’ll gain an understanding of types of tricks that might be used to massage data to favour a particular outcome; or perhaps you’ll even decide that government experts are far more likely to be right than a random person on the internet. All that I ask is that you come on the journey with me.
The journey starts with a statement made by outgoing Mayor of the city of New York, Bill de Blasio:
We want everyone, right now, as quickly as possible, to get those boosters. And we’re going to make it even better for you with a new incentive and an incentive that is here just in time for the holidays. As of today, we’re announcing a $100 incentive for everyone who goes out and gets a booster here in New York City, between now and the end of the year.
The former Mayor seems to think that there’s no doubt that the vaccines, and the booster vaccine in particular, offer the way out of the Covid epidemic. Let’s see what the data say.
Taking the Data at Face Value
A quick exploration of data sources finds that New York city publishes a fairly decent collation of all of their Covid case data, and one document in particular contains data on cases and case rates by vaccination status – do the data on cases in the fully vaccinated versus the boosted support the Mayor’s faith in the booster?
That’s actually rather a surprise – even the NYC official data on case rates by vaccination status show that while the vaccine booster might have once offered some protection against infection with Covid, by late January the protection had been lost and in recent weeks case rates in those given the vaccine booster have been approximately double that of the fully vaccinated but not boosted. It isn’t clear why this is the case – perhaps it is the BA.2 variant of Omicron showing increased vaccine escape; perhaps it is the vaccine protection waning – all we know is that the boosted appear to be far more likely to get infected than the fully vaccinated.
These data suggest that de Blasio really should warn people that NYC official data suggest that in taking his $100 they’re going to be twice as likely to become infected, twice as likely to infect a vulnerable person and will be helping to make each Covid infectious wave far more serious.
But of course, I’m being naughty here – I’m guilty of omitting relevant data. How do the unvaccinated fare?
Ouch. Perhaps the former Mayor should have focused only on the unvaccinated for his $100 bribe – these data suggest that the sweet-spot is to be fully vaccinated.
But wait – my spidey-senses are tingling…
The Date of the Data Updates
A quick look at the data for the unvaccinated versus the vaccinated in the graph above shows signs of a simple statistical pitfall. For most of the data points there’s a general agreement in the trend between unvaccinated, fully vaccinated and boosted – they generally all go up together and all go down together, even if there are differences of scale. However, the most recent data points (far right) buck the trend, with the data for the vaccinated showing only a slight rise (below the trend), but the unvaccinated a significant jump upwards (above the trend). This reminds me of a study I was involved in many years ago, where the early data that came in supported the goals of the study, but as the rest of the data came in we discovered that the rest of the data didn’t – our early data was biased. Has the New York infection data suffered a similar fate?
Fortunately, the NYC data is hosted on ‘Github’, a platform that not only hosts the data but also gives information on each and every update to the data – thus we can explore how data are updated after their initial addition to the database. To explore this aspect of the data we can’t use the most recent data (as there’s been no opportunity to update them yet), but we can look for evidence of the effect in prior weeks’ data – I’m going to pick two weeks as examples, data for the week of March 12th and March 19th:
Let’s start with the data for March 19th (on the left, above). When the data for this week were originally published it was stated that there were approximately 3,200 cases in those vaccinated with two or more doses and 2,000 cases in the unvaccinated. However, in the following week’s publication the data for the week of the 19th had been updated, to approximately 3,800 cases in those vaccinated with two or more doses and 1,400 cases in the unvaccinated. A glance at the update two weeks after the original publication shows that the figures had found their level – after that first week’s update there is little change in the data. The data for the week of March 12th (on the right, above) confirms the effect – exactly the same pattern is seen.
It is worth pointing out explicitly two aspects of their updating the data in this way:
- The NYC authorities are almost certainly only reporting the most recent data in their headline statistics and in their releases to the press. Thus they will be exaggerating the case rate in the unvaccinated and understating the case rates in the vaccinated. Sure, the update might be reported somewhere, but who wants to go trawling around in the data-mud when all the headline data are so easily found?
- There is only a week’s delay between the original publication of the data and the first update but this is where the bulk of the correction occurs. The data have already been delayed by two weeks before publication, so waiting an additional week to allow the data to settle down to their final state would seem the obvious choice. Are they deliberately publishing the data early to mislead the public?
But wait – I can see that the data shown above is hiding another problem in plain sight…
The Unstated Assumption
If you look at the bar charts of our two example data update periods you should see that in their updates they don’t actually add many new cases – the main impact of the update is to transfer cases from the unvaccinated into the vaccinated. This raises obvious questions, such as what on earth is going on?
When working with data there are all sorts of assumptions, most of which will be stated somewhere. For example, in the datasets we’ve been working with they define a case of Covid not as ‘all cases’ (as you might expect) but only as ‘cases in those aged over five’. The reasons for this definition of ‘case’ in the data are reasonable enough, but the important point is that they’re stated explicitly in the accompanying documentation. However, there are also unstated assumptions, and these are potentially dangerous. In scientific studies it is very important that all efforts are made to turn these into stated assumptions, so that readers (and team members) know exactly what assumptions are being made. This is often why scientific documents are very dry and boring – all of the ‘obvious’ assumptions really need to be tied down, to remove any source of error arising from different interpretations.
In the case of the NYC data and updates, the data quite clearly show that there are few additional new cases brought into the data set after the initial data release; rather, the update mainly moves cases from the unvaccinated group to the vaccinated groups. This is presumably a result of linking each case to the city’s vaccination database.
It very much looks as though there is an unstated assumption – that the vaccination status of all individuals is ‘unvaccinated’ unless proven otherwise.
Beyond this, it is also likely that there is a deeper issue. Even after the vaccination database links have all been found there will almost certainly be some cases apportioned to the unvaccinated group where the individual concerned was actually vaccinated (i.e., it simply wasn’t possible to link his or her status to the vaccination database). The magnitude of this effect is completely unknown (as they don’t offer the data), but in the U.K. the ‘uncertain status’ cases made up about 5% of all cases and I’m sure New York City would be similar.
It goes without saying that cases where an individual became infected within 14 days of becoming fully vaccinated will almost certainly also be counted as unvaccinated.
There’s yet another complication with this new assumption about what constitutes ‘unvaccinated’ – the NYC data includes both cases and the case rate per 100,000, so we can calculate the numbers that they think are in the unvaccinated, fully vaccinated and boosted groups. If we do this and add them all together we get a number that is consistently about 7,000,000. This is far short of the approximately 7,800,000 that the city authorities claim live in the city and are aged over five. However, the city’s own data on the percentage partially vaccinated suggest that these number approximately 700,000-750,000 – suspiciously close to our shortfall. This suggests to me that the team counting the cases simply don’t speak with the team computing the case rates…
All this talk of unclear vaccination status highlights another problem with these data – just what has happened to the partially vaccinated?
The Unstated Assumption II
The particular data set we’re working with only reports cases and case rates in the unvaccinated, the ‘fully vaccinated’ and the boosted, but not the partially vaccinated. This in itself is fine, even if it would be better to have been given all the data.
A quick note on definitions – ‘fully vaccinated’ in the U.K. is easy to define, as it is those having taken two doses of vaccine (possibly after seven or 14 days). In the U.S. this means those that have completed their vaccine course, which means two doses for some vaccines, but only one dose for others. Thus in the USA there is a group called ‘partially vaccinated’ which is made up of those that have received only one dose of a vaccine that requires two doses to be fully vaccinated.
However, the data remain troublesome. The first publication of the data appears to have some cases declared as ‘unvaccinated’ which are then moved into the fully vaccinated or boosted groups. But surely there will also be among the cases of ‘unknown status’ (but counted as unvaccinated) some who are partially vaccinated. The result of this is that we should see the cases that become identified as being in the partially vaccinated being removed from the data set, as the data set does not include a category for partially vaccinated. This means the first week’s update should see a reduction in total cases. Instead, we see that the data actually show a slight rise. What is going on here?
What we really need is another set of data giving total case numbers – that way we can remove the total given in our original data set (unvaccinated, fully vaccinated and boosted) to get data for those that are only partially vaccinated. This is made complicated by the fact that the data we’ve been working with are only for those aged over five years of age; most of the available data sets available to us are for the whole population. Fortunately, the NYC data page does offer case rates by age. As we know that the population they’re working with is approximately 8,337,000 and that approximately 6.3% of the population of New York City is under five, we can calculate the total number of cases in the over five population from those data and compare with our data set to obtain infection numbers in the partially vaccinated.
Well, that’s another huge surprise. Even though our data set purports not to include cases in the partially vaccinated, there’s just nowhere else for them to be – our estimates of total cases are very nearly equal to another data set that does include cases in the partially vaccinated. A quick check with the NYC data on total vaccinations given suggests that around 750,000 people are partially vaccinated – thus cases in this group should be large enough to be obvious in the graph above.
And so we return to the definition of ‘unvaccinated’ in our data set. It very much looks like a case in the ‘unvaccinated’ is actually defined as: Any case where we can’t prove that the person was either fully vaccinated or boosted. Or perhaps: Cases in those that are unvaccinated, partially vaccinated and where we just don’t know their vaccination status
The denominator
That last definition of ‘unvaccinated’ brings us to another problem – exactly how many people are going to be in this group? The New York health authorities will have a fairly good idea of how many people in the city have been vaccinated, and we know that they assume that there are around 8,337,000 people in the city when doing their rates calculations – but how many people are actually in the city. The latest U.S. census estimates that there were approximately 8,804,000 people living in the city in 2020 – really we need to use this number when calculating the unvaccinated population in New York city (it will probably be higher than this now, but the 2020 census estimate will be close enough).
In terms of our calculation of case rates for NYC by vaccination status, our original data set’s estimates of case rates in the fully vaccinated and boosted is probably accurate enough (apart from the most recent week’s data), but case rates in the unvaccinated should really be called the ‘not fully vaccinated or boosted’ and the denominator should be the total population aged five and over that aren’t fully vaccinated or boosted.
The result
We’ve gone a long way on this journey – we’ve seen evidence in NYC’s official Covid data that suggests that:
- The most recent week’s data are unreliable, significantly overstating cases in the unvaccinated and understating cases in the vaccinated.
- Just one week after the original data release they update the data – this moves a substantial number of cases from the unvaccinated group to the vaccinated group.
- Cases are probably defined as ‘unvaccinated’ unless proven to be in the fully vaccinated or boosted.
- That means ‘unvaccinated’ includes the partially vaccinated.
- And it almost certainly also includes cases that can’t be linked to the vaccination database, whether this be because forms weren’t filled in correctly, people vaccinated out of state or people vaccinated without paperwork (such as the homeless or undocumented migrants).
- And it almost certainly includes people within 14 days of becoming fully vaccinated.
- Finally, for Covid purposes the city assumes its population is about 8,300,000, even though everyone else, including the U.S. census, thinks that the population is about 500,000 higher.
Let’s update our original graph of case rates by vaccination status with all the information we’ve gained along the way.
What a difference a little investigation makes – it isn’t that we’ve managed to add a small correction to their data, but that we’ve found evidence to support the actual rate in the ‘unvaccinated’ being substantially different to the official estimated case rate, even dipping below the case rate in the boosted in recent weeks. Note that we’ve not estimated the case rate in the unvaccinated, but in a strange group called ‘everyone not fully vaccinated or boosted’, which also includes every case where they couldn’t link the individual to their vaccination database – our estimate of case rates is almost certainly higher than would be found simply in the unvaccinated and partially vaccinated alone.
And so we can return to where we started our data-journey – Bill de Blasio’s generous offer to give $100 from the taxpayers of New York City to each person being boosted. You can take what you want from our travels, but perhaps you might agree with me that the data used by the city authorities to support their Covid strategy are nowhere near as robust as they believe, and that the $100 strategy is likely to make things worse.
I’ll finish with a question – how come any data analysis that shows the vaccines to be performing badly, making things worse or simply not necessary at all are ignored by the popular press, while no-one questions official data even when they’re full of holes?
Amanuensis is an ex-academic and senior Government scientist. He blogs at Bartram’s Folly.
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“..elderly and vulnerable people should be protected if they want it,..”
How? If masks don’t work, tests deliver wrong results, SD is just voodoo made up on the fly and staying inside and stopping socialising kills them too?
It was and will always be: let it rip and
stop trying to play God (with OPM, of course).
Indeed. One could also speculate that frightening the life out of the elderly (almost literally) did them a great deal of harm, keeping them separated from their loved ones (whether voluntarily while at home or by force by not allowing care home visits) caused great loneliness and despair, leading to physical decline. Leaving care homes shortstaffed by allowing those testing ‘positive’ to stay home for weeks on end and then losing staff when they refused to be part of the dangerous vaxx experiment must have led to deaths, as did jabbing people in poor healthy anyways, with the knowledge that people over 80 do not produce significant numbers of antibodies, meaning the whole vaxx campaign was pointless for the very elderly and probably only worsened their health (which may well have been the point, of course).
A friend in Spain was telling me how in the beginning he and his family had been terrified of infecting his gran, who was 90 when this started. How they had spent Christmas dinner with the younger people sitting by the open window of the kitchen, waving to granny across the room. As time went by and granny had reached 92 she told him to pack in the nonsense. She said, quite rightly, that she was 92, if her time had come, it had come and that she didn’t care to live longer if it meant she could not hug and kiss her loved ones (the Spanish are big on physical contact).
Frightening the old was despicable.
It really was. They had pretty much convinced people over 70 that if they got infected, they were almost definitely going to die. This despite the fact that early data from China showed that, even though the elderly were far and away those at greatest risk, the vast majority survived.
They also never made a distinction between elderly living at home and elderly living in care homes, where people are in essence sent to die and the average length of stay is between 6 to 18 months. That alone would have made an enormous difference to people’s state of mind.
Both my parents died in care homes, already suffering from advanced dementia with low quality of life. They both died of pneumonia I think, and possibly the triggering infection might have come from me or my kids or the staff – it seems to me the alternative, which would have been to stop visiting them, stop them mixing, and for them to be attended by staff wearing hazmat suits, would have been far far worse than their eventual fate.
I will never, ever forgive the government for the way my 94 year old father in law died. Deaf, and suffering from Altzheimers, he was imprisoned in a care home after a stay in hospital. He was kept in solitary confinement (he never had covid) and they lost his hearing aids, so he could not even lip read because all mouths were masked. We were not allowed to visit him. However, they allowed us to watch him crying via Zoom. He must have thought he was in hell, death was a release from such cruel conditions.
I will remain angry about it for the rest of my life, and I find it hard to be civil to anyone employed by the NHS as I still regard them as keen players in this theatre of horrors.
Totally agree
I would feel exactly the same in your position. It’s the 3 Cs for all of the medical/healthcare sector that has seriously boiled my p*ss throughout; Cowardice, complicity and cruelty. Nasty, nasty organization, the NHS. Unrecognisable from when I was employed with them, and the atrocities they committed ( whilst happily being hailed as heroes and martyrs ) against the vulnerable in their care is entirely unforgivable.
A truly gruesome story. They basically tortured him to death by systematic passive aggression. All in the name of compassion.
— words can’t really express what I’d like to be saying here —
“ However, they allowed us to watch him crying via Zoom.”
That is desperate poetry, with a real emotional punch, as indeed are many of your other words.
Possibly the only way that the majority of people will ever feel the outrage against the lockdowns, vaccine mandates etc. is to have their heartstrings pulled. Emotion beats reason hands down when it comes to changing peoples’ minds.
Can you imagine a music video using lines like that? And think of the visuals of some of the perpetrators…
How horrible my heart goes out to you. Makes you weep it really does. These people are just disgusting. As you say unforgivable absolutely unforgivable.
To borrow from JK Rowling, they missed Point Zero – There was no pandemic. FACT CHECK – TRUE.
And lest we forget, the corrupt WHO deliberately changed the definition of what a pandemic was just before the swine flu was declared as one, and muppet Mogwai even took a flipping vaccine for it, because I was very green and pro-vax back then, what with working in health care and all. But the swine flu did not result in massive numbers of deaths nor was it novel because some people evidently did have existing cross-immunity to it. The parallels with Covid are uncanny. But in that regard I think swine flu was a sort of ‘dummy run’ for the WHO and Big Pharma ( and all associates ) because what they learnt was that they needed a fraudulent test and one hell of a PsyOp to really make it impactful and work to their advantage, and boy did they succeed on a global scale! Pure chuffing manipulation and underhand shananigans from start to finish and look where we are now.
”Since 2003, the top of the WHO Pandemic Preparedness homepage has contained the following statement: “An influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in several simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.”6 However, on 4 May 2009, scarcely one month before the H1N1 pandemic was declared, the web page was altered in response to a query from a CNN reporter.7 The phrase “enormous numbers of deaths and illness” had been removed and the revised web page simply read as follows: “An influenza pandemic may occur when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity.” Months later, the Council of Europe would cite this alteration as evidence that WHO changed its definition of pandemic influenza to enable it to declare a pandemic without having to demonstrate the intensity of the disease caused by the H1N1 virus.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3127275/
Indeed. What I find so depressing is that as much as people are starting to wake up to the folly and evil, very few seem to me to have grasped what I believe to be the case – there was no pandemic, just a bad flu season that we should have just blustered through like every other bad flu season. The idea that covid was different or special is cemented in now, and I won’t live to see it let go of.
I saw a tweet the other day by that quack Hotez, pharma shill and vaxx pimp supreme. He was whining that the opening weeked of Barbie/Oppenheimer would result in moviegeddon, being huge (huge I tell you, huge, enormous) superspeader events – and we would never know, because no one was testing anymore.
Do these f-wits even read and understand their own words? A huge superspreader event we would never know about suggests there is nothing to know. If thousands of people start dropping dead in the next few weeks (bar having another round of boosters), we would definitely know. If no one is dropping dead and the hospitals aren’t filling up, then there is nothing to know. And that passes for a medical expert?
COVID was always the disease that’s extremely dangerous to everyone except those who actually got it. Nobody ever really questioned this patent insanity.
They still don’t. Most people I know are triple vaxxed, and they know I’m not. They ask me if I’ve had covid. I answer that I have no idea (never tested) but that I’ve had a few bouts of a flu like illness in the last couple of years and given that, if covid exists, most people must have had it at least once by now, so I expect I have had it once or twice. Not once has any of them expressed astonishment that I am still alive and in better health than they are, or asked me whether I was/is worried about covid. Some friends recently asked “oh, so how did you travel?”.
Well can you imagine if we’d had a PCR test for flu for the last 10 years, and mass testing for it was just routine and encouraged, the WHO would be declaring ”pandemics” as an annual event! We’d be dab hands at this lockdown and mask business by now, and our countries would have gone to sh*t economically, as well as health and social-wise, a long time ago as a result of these draconian and abusive measures. The success of the PsyOp ( and subsequent death jab uptake ) was always heavily dependent on the tests, the latter being the key to the governments’ totalitarian abuses of human rights, civil liberties and their crimes against humanity.
Indeed. Respiratory viruses of the type we’ve lived with since time immemorial will not go away, and we just need to accept that and keep on living with them – with the emphasis on living, as opposed to a living death. Even if all the lockdown lunacy “worked” to some degree, the suspension of normal life for billions for anything longer than 1 day per millenium is far too high a price to pay for any “lives saved”.
Yes, agreed. If anything there was a ‘pandemic’ of mass hysteria whereby everybody took leave of their senses and forgot what a flipping immune system was! I’m going to stick my neck out and say that there will never be any truly *novel* virus that could prove dangerous to people globally because everybody, depending on where you live, will always have immunity to something, and all you need is a functional immune system to not die from whatever lurgy you’re exposed to anyway. Oh and there’s the small point of governments/health authorities not depriving people of antibiotics and other known early treatment options that undoubtedly would have saved countless lives. It was all deaths resulting from iatrogenesis and democide.
This is evidenced by the fact that there are now more excess deaths in any country from 2021> than when we were exposed to their super-deadly, novel virus and had no miracle vaccine in 2020, and that those deaths ( and disabilities, inc heart damage ) are, worryingly, mostly taking place in people not even making it to the end of their natural life spans ( unlike the average age of death for somebody dying *from* Covid ), so people of working age and kids. You just cannot make this stuff up. A virus so deadly that people aren’t dying until they’re elderly and a vaccine so effective and safe you can still get Covid repeatedly and you won’t live long enough to draw your pension! Only in Clown World would such an absurdity make any sense.
It’s possible that a new plague might emerge that is dangerous enough to warrant drastic action, but unlikely we’d need to force people to take precautions, and equally unlikely any of them would do any good.
But that would likely only happen locally and never spread to be a global threat, just due to the fact a pathogen cannot usually be highly virulent and highly transmissible. Same goes for anything from a gain of function lab. It could cause havoc locally but a worldwide deadly pandemic is just the stuff of Hollywood movies in my opinion. The thing wouldn’t get very far if it killed its hosts so I anticipate in the future nothing worse than any flu we have already experienced. The WHO are trying their best to conjure things up though aren’t they? And they’ve had a few damp squibs, such as monkey pox and marburg recently, to name just two, though I did read about ‘shrew flu’ in China the other day. Molehills and mountains… And somebody might have to wake me up when this super-deadly haemorhagic fever thingy hits, with an IFR of 40, because I’ve got big expectations for that one. They’re really hyping it up! lol
Yes none of it seems very realistic.
Dr Mike Yeadon is firmly of the same opinion Mogs.
But that would likely only happen locally and never spread to be a global threat, just due to the fact a pathogen cannot usually be highly virulent and highly transmissible.
It absolutely can, at least in the right conditions. When the so-called black death wandered through Europe for the first time at the speed of the means of transportation back then, it would kill up to 80% of the people living in each settlement it reached within days.
I should have thought it obvious I’m referring to modern times, as in *the future*, where ‘The Black Death; Part 2’ is hardly likely to occur, what with medicines and sanitation being actual realities now.
The “Black Death” is one of those events that, when looked at more closely, is much more complicated than we have been taught. It also went on for decades (supposedly) in waves. It was pre-dated by strange weather patterns, rain and poor harvests meaning that the population would be weak and vulnerable to sickness. One person I spoke to about this thought that yellow (cadmium?) dyes from the East were responsible for poisoning people.
Finally it was such a long time ago that any evidence must be patchy. I think it is still unproven that the fleas were to blame.
Indeed – one theory I heard was that it was at least two different illnesses as historical records evidence completely different symptoms, one with Ebola-like haemorhagic symptoms, the other with more respiratory/pneumonic symptoms. Reflecting, as you say, preceding chronic health debilities.
I think you are referring to Dengue fever which is spread by mosquitos not person to person.
The first time someone gets dengue they feel pretty rotten stay at home and recover in a few days. The second time again can feel pretty awful and may need to be in hospital for repeated tests to make sure there platelet count doesn’t drop to low.
The third time quite often people are admitted to an icu for ntensive monitoring but can recover.
There isn’t a fourth time.
It really pisses me off the crap that is spoken in the west and the fearmongering about dengue. Yes it can be serious the third time but nowhere near the hype that is put out.
Indeed. I can remember some very bad ‘flu seasons. I think one was in the late 60s where so many people were sick everywhere became very quiet(empty shops, empty trains, etc), and my father (who never caught it) was, for some time, the only person in his office. Can’t remember any fuss being made.
Hong Kong flu, 1968, killed between 1 and 4 million, also flu in 1958 killed about the same. World population was much smaller then too.
And the NHS and the country at large weren’t shut down for Hong Kong Flu. Funnily enough there were no social media and 24hr rolling news back then either. Coincidence??
Indeed this was a key factor
I think a really important part – after two abortive attempts, 2004 and 2009 – was Don’t call it influenza. That’s too familiar to too many people for widespread panicking. It must be something verbally associated with a reportedly really bad illness many people still remember but something new and entirely different at the same time, to utilize mankind’s natural xenophobia. Eh voilà — Sars 2.0 aka Sars-CoV2 was born.
I think that is why Monkey Pox failed to make much impact. With such a silly name, it was not taken seriously.
…and the fact that it readily morphed into monepox, thus truly reflecting its origins!!!
15.Covid only exists in the mind.
Rebecca Harris: Shut up, you idiot.
Daily Skeptic: Yer, Shut up you idiot.
The testing point is missing a major argument. I remember at the beginning that some people were pointing out that a pcr test is so specific, it would pick up fragments of the virus, meaning not only that someone might not be infected, but also that it could be picking up fragments of an infection from months before. This was ignored or set aside as conspiracy (of course).
Little attention was paid to the announcement by CDC bimbo Walensky at the end of December 2021 that there was no need to test negative on a pcr test after being in isolation, as a person could test positive for up to 3 months after infection. In other words, they knew all along that a positive test for someone who was ‘asymptomatic’ (what we used to call ‘not sick’) was meaningless, yet countries threw billions of dollars, euros, pounds away on those garbage tests and forced people to be incarcerated on the basis of utter nonsense. This goes beyond whether or not the tests were accurate or not – outside of someone actually presenting as ill, they were utterly pointless.
People who are ill, by and large, tend to take to bed. Testing without symptoms = pointless. Testing while ill = equally pointless, they will have already infected people prior to symptoms and if already ill, how about going old-school and – gosh – treating them for their illness?
Testing, and getting a positive result without feeling ill = skivers charter!
And don’t forget the financial opportunity created for some organisations. They won’t be publishing the balance sheets for that lot. That said, it might have had a negative cash flow for some. E.g. the dentists surgery I go to had (earlier this year) an online symptom questionnaire specifically for Covid-19, with a list of about 10 items and a yes/no tick box for each one. It had a timeframe of about 4 weeks before. As it happened, I did have a fairly benign respiratory attack just before then; I think they would have cancelled my appointment if I’d selected “yes” for that lot – but it was outside the time limit so I said “no” to all of them. Nothing was mentioned on arrival. It all appeared normal there in early Spring.
One of the horrors of our time is that things don’t have to age well. They don’t even have to make sense from one moment to the next as long as the narrative has a hypnotic quality. Look at the mysterious disappearance of the Skripals and how completely that left the public consciousness. This is no consciousness at all it is a population captured by the images on the wall. Not surprising given that we are dealing with a hundred year old scientifically-crafted propaganda model that has had immense resources at its disposal, not just in terms of money but also darker insights gained in evil circumstances.All of the nastiness that went on in the post war era needs to be laid bare.
“Thankfully, there is now the investigative team at BBC Verify to rescue the truth from future pandemic propagandists!”
Yeah right!