The UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance Reports have published vaccine effectiveness estimates since May 2021, but the estimates have slipped down and down with each passing month. How effective are the jabs really?
Omicron has no known evolutionary connection with the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and is milder than flu. Isn't it time to accept that it is a different virus and turn the page on the 'COVID-19 pandemic'.
Even on conservative assumptions, a '90% relative effectiveness' for a vaccine is just a 0.00027% absolute effectiveness for a young person. This was not properly explained, undermining informed consent.
by Paul Bird In assessing the impact of COVID-19 on the country, the most important statistic has been the number of deaths Covid has caused. That figure is relayed to us many times a day by the BBC and all other media. But does it really convey the impact reliably, or are we being misled? I believe it is misleading. Firstly, there is some difficulty in defining the number itself. There have been many attempts, with definitions including: primary cause on the certificate; contributory cause on the certificate; death for any reason within 28 days or 60 days of having tested positive. None is regarded as completely satisfactory. More misleading than that though is the question of interpreting the number. Does it tell us how much impact Covid is having on the UK population? How can you compare it with the impact of other diseases? Crucially, the figure says nothing about how much life the victims would have had left to live if they had not died from the disease. Quoting a number of deaths carries the implication that had the victims not succumbed to the disease then they would not have died. But we all have to die sometime. So a fatal Covid infection does not so much cause a death as bring it forward. Life is lost. In ...
Dr Rachel Nicoll has made a video about the shortcomings of the government's pandemic response and in particular just how unscientific its claims to be 'following the Science' were. Here, she summarises its contents.
Professor David Livermore has responded to Meta’s Oversight Board which has requested feedback on Facebook’s misinformation policy. He thinks the only items that should be flagged misinformation are egregious nonsense.
Read the open letter from doctors and professionals asking new PM Liz Truss to heed the worrying safety data and pause the Covid vaccine rollout to children.
Australia's drug regulator, the TGA, has admitted it has no idea how many of the adverse events reported to its database are actually caused by the Covid vaccines, despite assessing this being one of its key duties.
We turned society upside down for fear of excess deaths from Covid, but today we have substantially more excess deaths, and in younger people, and there is a complete silence, Andrew Bridgen tells the House of Commons.
Dr Clare Craig FRCPath The Covid Pimpernel: They seek it here, they seek it there, those testers seek it everywhere. Is it in Leicester, or in Torbay, that damned elusive RNA. On 7th September Public Health England announced a change to testing criteria. The change is designed to address the problem of false positives, people that test positive but do not in fact have COVID-19. The consequences of these false positives stretch far beyond the inconvenience to an individual who has to self-isolate unnecessarily. Counting false positives when a disease is not very prevalent can result in misleading, fear-mongering news articles and mistaken health policies. The impact of this change in testing criteria is yet to affect the case numbers being reported. The new criteria means some cases will need further assessment before being reported so those results will be delayed. Until Public Health England published this guidance, the working assumption was that false positive test results are irrelevant for testing carried out for COVID-19. This assumption is not true. However, in times of an epidemic, a few false positives does not make a material difference to the reported numbers of infected cases. When 30% of results are positive then 1% being false positive would be immaterial. When only 2% of your results are positive then 1% being false positive is important. ...
