Contrary to claims since January that the Kent coronavirus variant is “up to 100%” more deadly, a new study from Public Health England has confirmed – as a Lockdown Sceptics‘ analysis showed three weeks ago – that it is no more deadly than the original virus. The study continues to claim it increases the risk of hospitalisation by 30%, but this too seems unlikely to be more than a statistical artefact. As the Swiss Doctor notes, it is based on poor evidence, and “the influence of age, comorbidities and seasonal effects is much larger”.
Lockdown Sceptics noted on Saturday that while the British variant is becoming dominant in many countries, that dominance is often, as in the UK and Denmark, accompanied by infections, hospitalisations and deaths plummeting not surging. President Macron is locking down France again for a month (including closing schools), blaming the surge on the British variant. But is this correct? Here’s the graph plotting the progress of the Kent variant across the channel.
Here’s what the positivity rate does at the same time.
Notice how it declines from the end of January to mid February, despite the British variant by that point being in the driving seat (some of the drop around Christmas may be due to a temporary change in testing practice). It then goes up again from late Feb, but the increase is steady – the sharp rise in raw case numbers in the past three weeks is driven mainly by an increase in testing.
This isn’t to say that the new variants do not bring new challenges. The Swiss Doctor observes that a number of the variants (though not the British one) have shown evidence of partial immune evasion, at least in terms of antibodies.
Nevertheless, some of the new coronavirus variants – most notably the ‘South African’ variant – are beginning to show partial immune evasion, as was to be expected. Some monoclonal antibodies already fail to neutralise some of the new variants, and most vaccines achieve lower neutralisation, too. Pharmaceutical companies will respond to this by creating new therapeutic antibody combinations and by updating their coronavirus vaccines (a multi-billion dollar business).
In fact, by March 2021, the novel coronavirus has managed to escape two out of three major antibody classes. If a new strain manages to escape all three major antibody classes, this “would be a worrying development, and should be monitored closely”. (Greaney et al.) This is one more reason why progress in early and prophylactic treatment is so very important.
To be sure, antibody immune evasion doesn’t necessarily mean complete immune evasion, as the immune system has additional means to fight off infections, including the famed T cells.
The Swiss Doctor’s latest is worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Disinformation is dogma.
Diversity is Unity
I have never fallen for the climate scam even when I knew little of the science to me the story just didn’t add up. Now the fear-mongering is laughable.
Global boiling!
Last week I attended a talk by an eminent astronomer on the origins of life, both pro- and eucariotic, on this planet. His theme was the probabilities of finding signs of it elsewhere in the Universe, using the James Webb telescope. After a detailed presentation, he advised us that the world will indeed inevitably warm up as our ageing Sun becomes hotter. So it seems that eventually the predicted boiling of Earths oceans will indeed occur, as so Sagely (sic) predicted by United Nations Chief, António Guterres.
Only one small thing he (Guterres, that is) got wrong. He warned us that “the era of global boiling has arrived”. Well – not quite yet, it seems. Our guest Lecturer paused for a moment in his talk, then noted as an aside, “I estimate that the oceans will boil away – in approximately one thousand million years time.”
A slight temporal error seems to have crept in to the Guterrean prediction, it seems. Such temporal indeterminacy seems to have become a cornerstone of political utterances of late. Events seem to have a habit of ignoring their proper place and time, or at least, those defined by our scientifically illiterate Autocracy and its sycophantic Minions. That next Parliamentary restructuring predicted to be in just under five years time, for instance – just another slip of the mind, perhaps? It may seem like a billion years, but people seem to have become quite impatient of late. Time to set your watches going?
The used car salesman knows more about cars than me, but I don’t always buy one from him. I use my own judgement. Just as I don’t fall for the sales techniques of government funded data adjusters and mainstream media.
According to Git erres (global boiling, global drowning) we’re all going to drown in boiling water!
They are spouting out the mantra, though! I recently watched some footage on Al Jazeera about the floods in various central Europe countries, and even they used the term – wait for it – “climate change”. Nasty weather events, though, even if they are natural ones that happen independently of our input (which is probably true, most of the time).
Don’t forget El Nino and Hunga Tonga, MASSIVE amounts of water thrown into the upper atmosphere from totally natural events
Interestingly, all reports I have read clearly mention that these are the worst since the mid 1990s. Therefore, something similar has happened in living memory so is clearly not “excessive” nor “unprecedented”.
I do remember hearing about the devastating floods in Prague I think this was about 2006 – no mention of global warming/climate change(insert any crappy term you like) then.
Climate scare stories sell newspapers bring in academic grants, and “keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety)” by way of taxation and control. What’s not to like? (Except for the massive global wealth transfer from West to East, from poor to rich, and massively increased heating and transport costs.)
Try a little experiment—-The next time you are in the company of friends or family and the subject of climate change comes up, tell them that none of the climate projections about Polar Bears etc have come true and that there is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event, and I guarantee you that everyone in the room will look at you as if you are from Mars. —-That is the Power of Propaganda. IT WORKS
A number of people I know of my generation (in their 70s) think this whole climate change business is over-blown if not to say a total scam. After 70+ years on this good Earth we have seen the scorching Summer of 1959 the Arctic winter of 1962/63, we have been back to the seaside haunts of our childhood and seen that the tide goes up and down much the same as it did 70 years ago. And we conclude that as Joni Mitchell sang back in the days of our youth;
Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like, when you’re older, must appease him
And promises of someday make his dreams
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
What is more we do not like Electric Cars and will not buy them. Maybe all this crabby old climate scepticism is one reason this Government seems determined to chastise the pensioners
I still believe the climate scam goes back to the Club of Rome meeting 1972.
Indeed, when it was identified as a perfect storm to whip up. Reinforced on several occasions, including ‘The First Global Revolution’ publ. 1991 (available on @rch1ve. com) by The Council of the Club of Rome cabal.
These quotes from Club Members in the said issue:
1) “No generation has ever liked its prophets, least of all those who point out the consequences of bad judgment and lack of foresight.
The Club of Rome can take pride in the fact that it has been unpopular for the last twenty years. I hope it will continue for many years to come to spell out the unpalatable facts and to unsettle the conscience of the smug and the apathetic.”
2) “We’ve always thought of climate as an act of God It requires an enormous shift in the way we think of the world and our place in it to understand that we have already moved into an era in which we are actually responsible for managing climatic parameters.
Finally, after years of mistakes, we are coming to recognize that continued economic prosperity is tied to ecological stewardship. There is responsible profit to be made in caring for the planet.”
Philip: a member of a family not renowned for its brains.
Robert Redford: a member of a trade renowned for (in fact based upon) its fakery.
You don’t need to “believe” stuff that is true. Global Government has always been to the forefront of the Liberal Progressive Mind—–But in modern times The Club of Rome is a good place to start where we had that famous uttering, “In searching for the new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.”—–But since then ofcourse the UN and WEF have taken that ball and ran with it so that this ideology has filtered down through all western governments with wealth redistribution on their minds, and all developing nations holding out their hands for that wealth —-Eco Socialist Scam
It was global cooling they were frothing about then . Ice age iminent. The cause? Why man of course . Particulates in the atmosphere blocking the sun
Yet another reason for the liars to get rid of the crumblies ASAP.
Willis Eschenbach wrote a post about “the drowning coral atoll islands” nearly 15 years ago. It’s a straightforward and shortish “read” – and has stood the test of time far better than any of the dross the Catastrophists have claimed.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/floating-islands/
Good read. Thanks for that.
I did a degree in Geology and it’s pretty clear from that that a mere 200 yrs of climate “data” is just a nonsense way to view the worlds climate.
It isn’t just 200 years of climate data. —-It is 200 years of sparse climate data. 200 years of unreliable temperature data, where we never had thermometers all over the planet. They were mostly in prosperous western countries, very few in the third world, none at the poles and none in the oceans that is 70% of the globe. From all of this clutter we are expected to believe that “scientists” know what year was warmer than some other year by sometimes only hundredths of a degree when the thermometers were never designed for such accuracy and the area around where they sit has changed considerably over time so that at one time the thermometer might have been in a field but is now surrounded by concrete buildings and tarmac.
Climate Scare Stories Always False
There is a climate scare story that is real which no one talks about and it is infinitely more scary than a wee bit of warming – global cooling. We also have a magnetic pole shift going on which is weakening the Earth’s protective shield. The uber rich ‘elites’ like Musk and Bezos know this and that it why they are digging bunkers to hide in.
The president is guilty of misinformation .( Or is it disinformation ?) It is a brazen lie anyway