the very extensive published literature on the SARs CoV 1 / MERS vaccines published over the last almost 20 years.

You speak in riddles jmc. I think there was no vaccine campaign for sar1/mers. And I understand that no field-ready SARS vaccine was ever completed. Since several SARs CoV 2 vaccines have been completed and released with data on safety and efficacy, hence there can be only very little practical experience to compare, with the Pfizer BioNtech, moderna and Oxford vaccines.

The ZOE app? A classic example of very low quality data.

You may be right, on that. But I have my doubts about the PCR procedure as well. So we're a bit stuck, PCR churns out huge numbers of false positives, I would be interested to know what data you think is high enough quality. Do you think the ONS are close 645,800 in England? It matches the zoe app well. If s, ar the cdc ifr of 0.23%, it might mean thousands of deaths per day. Am I being pessimistic?

If you dont have accurate testing, any attempt to predict an IFR is going to fail dismally.

Does PCR produce false positives? Yes
What percentage? We have no idea. Could be anything from 0.1% to 10%. We simply dont know.

On top of that we know IFR varies hugely with age groups so you cant apply a blanket all age group IFR to calculate deaths. It'll vary hugely with demographics of a country and area.

In other news:
There is a LOT of literature for MERS/SARs vaccines.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6688523/
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30160-2/fulltext
https://jbiomedsci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12929-020-00695-2

and so on. Hundreds of citations.

Ultimately funding dried up as the disease levels and threat died up.

There are plenty of diseases we COULD develop a vaccine for if it was economically or socially beneficial.

the very extensive published literature on the SARs CoV 1 / MERS vaccines published over the last almost 20 years.

You speak in riddles jmc. I think there was no vaccine campaign for sar1/mers. And I understand that no field-ready SARS vaccine was ever completed. Since several SARs CoV 2 vaccines have been completed and released with data on safety and efficacy, hence there can be only very little practical experience to compare, with the Pfizer BioNtech, moderna and Oxford vaccines.

The ZOE app? A classic example of very low quality data.

You may be right, on that. But I have my doubts about the PCR procedure as well. So we're a bit stuck, PCR churns out huge numbers of false positives, I would be interested to know what data you think is high enough quality. Do you think the ONS are close 645,800 in England? It matches the zoe app well. If s, ar the cdc ifr of 0.23%, it might mean thousands of deaths per day. Am I being pessimistic?

There were at least clinical trial for at least 3 or 4 different SAR1/MERS vaccines candidates over the years. All had reached Phase III trials. I posted a subject survey paper on the subject here a while ago.

I found a very good summary paper from 2012 that went into great detail on the why and the wherefore for the various SARs 1 / MERS vaccines and the reasons for their individual failures which I posted elsewhere back in March. I'll see if I can dig it up again. It was this paper than disabused me of any illusions that any effective human corona-virus vaccines were either going to be developed quickly or were going to have any impact on this particular pandemic. This was even before the exceptionally skewed age morality mortality curve became apparent. SARSs CoV 2 just does not kill people under 70 at the same rate as in other historical pandemics. So the effectiveness of any potential vaccines on final mortality rates would be seriously attenuated.

The problem with data is that during the pandemic it is very heterogeneous and often very low quality. its quite educational to read the papers that attempted to calculate the probably excess deaths for previous pandemics and the steps required to clean up and normalize the data sets and produce meaningful results. Often the attempts at data clean up introduced new corruptions. The classic example being the bio-informatics guys trying to do the data analysis might not be familiar with the different diagnostic criteria used in a clinical setting and then how that data is consolidated by the national statistics agencies who use quite different criteria. So the first pass I do when looking at these papers is quite simply how clued in are the researcher for potential pitfalls like that. And you then read the paper accordingly.

And when you have the whole process politicized then that add a whole order of magnitude of obfuscation to the data. So its just like most subjects like this. You familiarize yourself with the area, get a feeling for what data "sounds right" and what does nt. And go from there. Saying that I have found some countries data very informative and other totally useless. And use the good data to extrapolate some sense onto the low quality data.

For me the data from Norway and Norwegian researchers has been my benchmark country since the beginning of March. I know how the place works.. They have a very efficient national health agency and some very good university researchers. They have been very transparent with all models used for policy decisions and with publishing detailed real-time data. And there has been little or no overt politicization of the subject in national politics . For example the national broadcaster, NHK, has not engaged in the scurrilous, sensationalist and very partisan reporting on the subject like the BBC. Its things like that, making it apolitical, which make a big difference to the quality of the data.

All public data in the UK is very much political. As it is in the US. So should be treated as such.

I have discovered a group called the Covid 19 Actuaries Response Group

https://www.covid-arg.com/

This is important because the primary interest of actuaries is to measure risk and uncertainty, mostly with respect to balance sheets and asset value, to predict (for example) pension fund sustainability. This matters because actuaries intentionally avoid getting involved with the morality of various policy measures, they will do what SAGE should be doing, using objective evidence based science to characterise the effects of the covid-19 pandemic. Hence their work will be a hard nosed economic evaluation, without emotional involvement.

Anyway, heartless as it seems, that's how it is.The group periodically releases bulletins to summarise their work. They have recently released a bulletin Analysing variations in the response to the second wave through nonpharmaceutical interventions, i.e. checking if lockdowns work.

https://www.covid-arg.com/post/second-wave-non-pharmaceutical-intervention-responses

The use the same method as me, observing significant features in the data and manually fitting them to policy changes. I am pleased that this bulletin broadly confirms my own findings that lockdowns above T1 "work" by slowing cases. The actuaries conclude : Tier 3 measures were effective in reversing the growth, and the national lockdown has resulted in a further decrease in rates.

This effect was clear in the Welsh "firebreak", a short but strict lockdown, but the add with the rate accelerating in recent days, suggesting a return to previous levels of growth, confirming what we know, lockdowns delay growth, but growth returns once lockdown ends.

Here is the first paragraph of their Conclusions.

The more stringent restrictions, whether it be lockdown in England, the firebreak in Wales or the longer Circuit Breaker in Northern Ireland have all been similarly effective in bringing down both cases and admissions at a reasonably rapid rate. Prior to the national lockdown in England, it is clear that regional tier restrictions had varying degrees of effectiveness; Tier 1 failed to stem the growth, Tier 3 appeared to be effective at initiating a modest decline, and in the middle, Tier 2 was broadly neutral.

You're still doing the "lets not think ahead more than 2 weeks" fallacy.

You're still refusing to accept that all the models predict large suppression results in nothing more than a large spike and R about 4 weeks after release which means you need to do it again, and again and again with it getting slightly worse each time.

SAGE SPI-M modelled this. Imperial modelled this in report 9.
Most epidemiology text books state this.
Lancet review of lockdown v1 data showed this was indeed what happened.

So lockdowns "work" if you stop looking a few weeks after it ends. In reality they create a bigger problem and guarantee the need to keep doing it and ultimately cost more lives.

This is the main reason lockdown was not and is not recommended as a means of dealing with a pandemic and never had been - because mid to long term that make a situation worse.