I spent last week at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Copenhagen. ECCMID is the main international conference on infection. American meetings that were once pre-eminent have fragmented, becoming parochial; Asian rivals have failed to gain traction. Copenhagen was ECCMID’s comeback: 2020 was cancelled; 2021 was online and 2022 was a ghost. This time was ahead of 2019: 15,000 attendees; lecture halls overflowing and the biggest trade show I’ve seen in 40 years of international meetings.
I went with curiosity. Denmark ended all Covid restrictions a year ago, but the conference blurb promised anti-Covid measures. Delegates – mostly laboratory scientists and infection specialists – would be “offered” N95 masks. As luck would have it, I went with an incipient RTI (respiratory tract infection, i.e., a cold). This progressed inexorably into a hacking cough and a blocked nose.
Much was encouraging. Only 1 or 2% of my fellow infection specialists wore masks, and I saw only one in a contraption combining goggles, shield and mask. No one appeared perturbed by my symptoms, nor suggested I leave, wear a mask or do a test. A noted physician amiably diagnosed, “It’ll be Covid”, but sat beside me nonetheless. It was quite like the old days. Of course, it’s possible that only the blasé attended in person whilst the fearful attended online. It’s also possible that some folks avoided me so effectively that I was unaware of being shunned. But, even if both caveats are true, it’s beyond dispute that most professionals are now relaxed about Covid.
All that’s positive, for any reasonable person has to accept that the virus isn’t going anywhere. Virology textbooks must be rewritten to say that we have five ‘common cold’ coronaviruses not four, with SARS-CoV-2 the commonest.
Other developments left me less sanguine.
I’ve mentioned that huge trade show, at least double the area of the last pre-pandemic ECCMID in 2019. Many unfamiliar companies had PCR machines to sell. Friends from established companies told me that molecular diagnostics had ‘come of age’. Manufacturers have grown rich, I think.
Whether all this testing does any good is quite another matter. A sponsored-session speaker proudly described how she’d run a mobile virus testing service for New York Schools. I asked what it had achieved, given that New York had endured 18 months of school closures. Sweden, sans testing, had kept schools open throughout, without catastrophe, I pointed out. “What’s more, it now has the lowest excess mortality in Europe,” I added.
“I’m not the Governor of New York,” she responded defensively. “He’s the one who shut the schools.” This was followed by the point that her service could also detect influenza, identifying children who ‘should’ be given Tamiflu. Given the questionable risk-benefit profile of Tamiflu in healthy children, I found this underwhelming.
Back to the trade show. It was surprising to see AstraZeneca still promoting its adenovirus vector vaccine, which has been abandoned everywhere in Europe. Merck’s ‘Antiviral Corner’ was another curiosity, not mentioning molnupiravir (which has slumping sales) – let alone ivermectin (no surprise) – and stressing monoclonals. These have fared poorly against mutants, mostly being withdrawn or restricted.
Pfizer and Moderna’s trade stands were large and, as expected, promoted their vaccines (Moderna has nothing else to promote). Both also had sponsored sessions that were too packed to enter. I did squeeze into another session where Moderna’s folks presented developmental non-Covid vaccines, also based on mRNA technology, and asked what was being done to monitor for myocarditis. I added, conversationally, to explain my question, that is it was unclear to me whether the hazard with the Covid mRNA vaccines related to the spike protein (as I actually suspect) or to the lipid carrier nanoparticles.
This pulled one of Moderna’s senior staff to the podium, telling me that “We have a cardiology panel to review all adverse events”. Interestingly, there was no effort to assert that myocarditis wasn’t a concern. No one followed up on my question, nor on others I asked in the same vein. No one challenged – nor concurred – when, asking about an adenovirus vector anti-Ebola product, I suggested that the corresponding Covid products were “mediocre and briefly effective, at best.” (I should add that the anti-Ebola prototype gave a robust immunoglobulin response and is directed against a high-lethality bloodborne virus; it might have merit.)
Aside from my own questions I didn’t hear myocarditis mentioned at all. Rather, a lady from the WHO asserted that Covid vaccines had saved 1,004,927 lives in Europe. Lordy, such precision! As question time was truncated, I just shouted “Confidence intervals?” “They’ll be in the paper,” she responded. Which sounded like “Very wide”.
And now let me spell out what did deeply trouble me. That, after three years dominated by the pandemic, ECCMID – the world’s premier infection meeting worldwide – lacked sessions for professionals to debate four central questions:
- First: where did the virus come from? And what are the implication for laboratory work that seeks, or may lead to, ‘gain of function’.
- Second: did NPIs work? I believe that the answer is, “Not very much; they just selected for more transmissible variants”, but others, including friends from Singapore, have a different view. There was no session on masks, and precious few posters or free papers, despite Cochrane and despite their centrality to the response.
- Third: vaccination. Even if you believe vaccines did some good in the old and vulnerable – as I and most professionals do – their coercive deployment in low-risk populations, especially children, looks ever more dubious. They fail to prevent viral circulation and occasionally harm or kill people too young to be at any real risk from Covid. And, believing vaccines did initial good doesn’t mean that they should be given time and again. Repeated boosting is supported by scant data and is challenged by Cleveland Clinic findings indicating that infection becomes more likely in those who’d had multiple boosters. I asked a UKHSA speaker (and erstwhile colleague) on this last point after she’d presented on the SIREN study, also following Covid infections in healthcare workers over time. She claimed ignorance of the Cleveland data and hasn’t acknowledged a copy that I forwarded.
- Fourth: what is the responsibility of infectious disease professionals when advising governments, if their advice has massive consequences for civil society? Should these professionals simultaneously advise government and run media campaigns advocating particular courses of action?
Everyone I spoke with has a view on these topics. Many, like me, think that much evil was done, though they’re less willing to say it openly. Others support the pandemic response.
ECCMID has hosted many debates in the past – I’ve argued that we should choose antibiotic treatments by identifying the pathogen’s mechanisms of resistance whilst my opponent argued we should just measure what antibiotic concentration stops it from growing. And ECCMID isn’t averse to ethical controversies. There was an excellent session on the ethics of futile antibiotic use – meaning when the patient is dying of an underlying disease. At best one delays the Grim Reaper by a few low-quality weeks, condemning the patient to a slower and more painful death. At worst one does that and drives antibiotic resistance, hazarding future patients.
If we professionals can debate these topic, surely we can and must also dissect anti-viral responses – many likely also futile – that turned the world upside down and whose collateral harm will be with us for years to come. The WHO’s threatened Pandemic Treaty – which hazards the supra-national embedment of bad responses – makes this debate even more vital.
Oh, and that cough? The test I finally ran in Norwich came up negative. So, if you caught Covid in Copenhagen last week, it wasn’t me.
Dr. David Livermore is a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.
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If you look at the relationship between the government and the governed a particular way you can argue that the government ‘farms’ the ordinary people for their taxes. Part of farming includes the ordinary people generating another generation of tax payers.
Perhaps ordinary people realise that they have been ‘farmed enough’ and don’t care enough to raise a new set of tax payers?
Possibly. Taxes are a necessary evil – the problem IMO is that the state keeps growing and wanting more and more, and people seem to accept that the state should “fix all our problems” (LOL).
A colleague of mine frequently makes the assertion…
“The problem with this country is that people don’t pay enough taxes.”
He is recently retired. Highly qaualified microbiologist. A firm believer that the PCR test is one of the most accurate tests ever produced. I make a point of rubbishing this comment of course.
Surprisingly, when it comes to parting with cash he’s always at the back of the queue or AWOL.
God help us!
I’m reminded of this:
“It was the blunt but ingenious billionaire Kerry Packer who memorably explained to a stunned Parliamentary committee exactly how the tax system works.
The late business tycoon said: “I am not evading tax in any way, shape or form. Now of course I am minimising my tax and if anybody in this country doesn’t minimise their tax, they want their heads read because as a government I can tell you you’re not spending it that well that we should be donating extra.””
Thanks for the Kerry Packer reminder.
I must say that my opinion on taxation has somersaulted. I firmly believe that it is now our duty as citizens to avoid paying tax at any and every opportunity.
And as for charity donations…nothing more than secondary taxation for the gullible.
I have made a similar journey.
Packer makes some good comments here: Two minutes with a brilliant billionaire: politics, legislation and tax
This is also hilarious: Trump: I Understand the Tax Code Better Than Anybody
Well, at least nothing really desperate is in store for us! They didn’t even contemplate to end state-sponsoring of childlessness so that people can have “sex lives” as substitute for anything else which might have provided some meaning to their non-sex lives.
Do you mean free contraception? I’ve never really thought about it, but I think you have a point.
At some point they will want to wipe the slate of debt clean with a Reset and CBDCs. They will use it as an answer to leaving the next generation in debt.
Once the Kommissars lead us to the potato fields of Absolute Zero, procreation will be just about the only pleasure left in life.
Throw in the ministrations of the Department of Energy, Food and Health Insecurity to re-create the infant mortality of past centuries, and no further incentivisation needed to go forth and address Babygeddon until further notice, other than a crack corps of UKHSA matrons to knock on doors with powers to confiscate illicit contraceptives.
https://www.ukfires.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Absolute-Zero-online.pdf
“crack corps of UKHSA matrons to knock on doors with powers to confiscate illicit contraceptives.”. Wow, yes, like the firemen in Fahrenheit 451, the role turned on its head
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-denis-rancourt-there-was-no-pandemic-it-was-the-state-that-killed-granny/5876206
Further confirmation. I know we on here don’t need this but still…
As Jordan Peterson put it: any society that does not value motherhood is committing suicide. And of course the current social-economic conditions force women to be employees and taxpayers first and foremost.
But, presumably, at some point the technologically developed countries will collapse together with industrial manufacturing and then contraception will no longer be available. At that point women will start having babies again.
Plus the orthodox religious communities have more babies anyway so they will outbreed the “progressive” societies.
Nobody’s forcing women to do any such thing. We work out of free will, because it’s considered ‘normal’ in this day and age. You know, because we’re made up of unique individuals, as opposed to one hive mind, controlled by our XX sex chromosomes common denominator?Besides, if we were being “forced” to go out to work, explain how there’s so many people of both sexes collecting dole/disability benefits. So not a lot of ‘forcing’ taking place there, is there? Why’d you think they’re shipping in so many immigrants? One of the reasons is because they’re prepared to go out and perform the low-skilled jobs natives are unwilling to get off their arses ( and benefits ) and do. This is especially true of those from Eastern Europe, in my experience. They’re not afraid of hard work.
Sorry to break it to you but if there was no contraception available the other issues would still exist. Such as cost of living, child care etc, so there’s a good chance women would just avoid having sex. Unless you’d want to take that specific choice and basic right to consent/bodily autonomy away from us as well? You know, like a certain demographic whose attitude to females is stuck in the dark ages, who we spend a lot of time complaining about on here?
“This is especially true of those from Eastern Europe, in my experience. They’re not afraid of hard work.”
Thank you. I’m one of them.
In my many years of experience it’s those people, often Poles, who are over-qualified for a position, due to what their profession was back home, but they’re not afraid to role up their sleeves and get cracking with more menial jobs. They’re grafters. Whereas it’s the non-EU migrants who we’re more likely to see living on state handouts years after arriving in the country.
But we know Muslims outbreed natives, partly due to their culture, because procreation is a duty, with little in the way of choice, but partly because of the extent of government support they’re given.
A FOI request I’d personally be interested in getting data on is how many non-EU migrants, who have, say, 2+ kids, are living on benefits, and how that compares to the native population. It’s my theory that these particular migrants wouldn’t be having so many kids if they had to support them themselves. This would also include family reunification. Family should only be allowed into the country to join the ( usually ) man if he has an established income and the means of supporting a large ( usually, again ) brood. Because otherwise the whole demographic shifts due to a topsy-turvy way of dealing with this issue. The governments are incentivizing the wrong people to have larger families, hence the gradual ‘replacement’ occurs, which we know all about by now. It’s natives that need incentivized, not just third world economic migrants. Nearly said “third world scroungers”, there…
Sorry to break it to you but if there was no contraception available the other issues would still exist. Such as cost of living, child care etc, so there’s a good chance women would just avoid having sex.
Yep. Just as they did during thousands of years before this US invention for the benefit of mankind was made. The contraceptive pill was actually never invented because mankind died out five thousand years earlier because all women were so exceptionally keen to get exploited for other people’s economic benefit that they just wouldn’t have sex.
If you honestly don’t understand that working for money is a necessity for most people and not some kind of exciting hobby they’ve taken up because it’s just better than sex (!!1) which your statement seems to suggest, I pity your total cluelessness about the real world. Try talking to some shop or bar staff to find out if they really work because to them, it’s better than sex, and not perhaps rather grudgingly because they need the money.
Sheesh.
What are you droning on about? Where have I stated that going out and earning a living ISN’T a necessity for people? I haven’t got a clue what you’re on about!
Maybe re-read my post and try cobbling together a response which borders on making sense next time. Just a suggestion…
This article accurately describes how the great replacement has been implemented over many decades. We are reaching the final stage of a very long game.
According to Emile Durkheim, the “cult of the individual” is a new religion that Western society has adopted since the decline of Christianity. Durkheim believed that this religion is based on the idea that the rational individual is sacred. It’s a complex society that’s united by modern science and individual democratic rights.
The cult of the individual is an anathema to the concept of raising a family. To bring up children generally requires that you put yourself second and your children first, this goes against the modern way of living and thinking. When you hear about the way the state and the ‘authorities’ are dictating on so many issues including trans-gender, who would want to be a parent and be hectored and dictated to in that way? The so called education system seems to have become a propaganda machine that dictates and indoctrinates. Who would want to be a parent and have to contend with the plethora of climate change and gender dogma coming back from the schools?
It is a dark World we have created and it will not go well but in the end the human spirit is indomitable and new life and new times will come, albeit it will be a painful process to get there.
I agree, even though I didn’t know about this book.
The problem with the cult of the individual is that eventually the ego finds itself so unbearable, it rather kills the host than carries on.
I think maybe that’s what Matthew 16:25 means.
“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”
Guys – what happened to my comment?
One of the things that I thought might wake people up to the covid scam would be the dire consequences on pregnant women who took the jabs. I haven’t looked at the stats but I hear anecdotal reports that still births and miscarriages are significantly on the rise.
One leftfield suggestion as to why we are having fewer children is – car seats!! In a normal car how many car seats can you get in the back? Two. Unless you can afford one of this more seats but then those cars are no longer on sale as SUVs take over. Have more that two children and you have a space problem unless you wait to have a third until the first pair are past child seat age – whatever that is.