International News Covid-19 .....

[Yellow There!]

Did you listen to the radio5 live piece?

Nope.

God I wish all exchanges on this forum were as simple as that...

 

[QR]

Nope.

It explains why you are talking the same drival the illimformed MPs were.

Give it a go. You Will learn something. I promise.

 

[Leysboy]

I’ve been watching the cricket series in India, they’ve allowed fans into the stadium in Chennai.

Now bearing in mind they have a serious problem over there, these fans have been allowed in, there is no social distancing, and a massive amount of fans inside the stadium are not wearing masks.

I either think this is a massive hoax, Or we are acting like sheep, and following what we are told.

Unless of course they’ve all been vaccinated already, but I doubt that very much. Crazy!

 

[Paul Cannell]

What has that theory got to do with Occam’s razor?

Occam’s razor says that it arose in nature. That is hands down the most parsimonious explanation.

I'm not so sure. It doesn't explain how the virus changed from the original bat virus(1) or how a bat flew into the centre of a big city and started an infection in a food market (2).

1. And late in the month, a professor at National Taiwan University, Fang Chi-tai, gave a lecture on the coronavirus in which he described the anomalous R-R-A-R furin cleavage site. The virus was “unlikely to have four amino acids added all at once,” Fang said — natural mutations were smaller and more haphazard, he argued. “From an academic point of view, it is indeed possible that the amino acids were added to COVID-19 in the lab by humans.”
2. No bats were sold in the market.

I'm not claiming to understand the biology btw, I'm quoting from something called the New York Intelligencer. It's a long read. The way I summarise it is:

In summary:
1. governments and other agencies have developed biological weapons since before WWII - see widely available evidence on Pingfan, on Fort Detrick. Some of the skills are interlinked with commercial research on viruses. This is a murky area.

2. Commercial research on viruses has become big business since the 'emergence' of diseases like Ebola, SARS and MERs and a network of laboratories co-operate internationally. In order to collaborate with other scientists laboratories have to be incredibly secure and are iirc peer-certified. The only such lab in China is Wuhan Institute of Virology,

3. Evidently (I think) there is a need to make candidate viruses more human-friendly, able to infect humans that is, to help testing antidotes or vaccines. (I don't quite understand why this is but). In 2006 a scientist named Baric got a patent for "for their invisible method of fabricating a full-length infectious clone". The clone in the patent was a clone of the entire deadly human SARS virus, the one that had emerged from Chinese bats, via civets, in 2002.

4. Baric and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the two top experts on the genetic interplay between bat and human coronaviruses, began collaborating in 2015.

5. In 2012 in Mojiang, in southern China six men set to work shoveling bat guano were sickened by a severe lung disease, three of them fatally. Carers and family were not affected. Shi Zhengli’s team took the samples back to Wuhan and analyzed whatever fragments of bat virus she could find. In some cases, when she found a sequence that seemed particularly significant, she experimented with it in order to understand how it might potentially infect humans. Some of her work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and some of it by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Department of Defense via Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.

6. At the end of 2019, an outbreak of a new virus in Wuhan was investigated by Shi Zhengli. Shi determined that the new virus was related to SARS but even more closely related to a bat disease that her own team had found on a virus-hunting trip: the now-famous RaTG13. Shi was surprised that the outbreak was local, she said: “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” The bat hiding places that she’d been visiting were, after all, as far away as Orlando, Florida, is from New York City. She checked her notes and was reassured that the virus wasn't from the lab. Instead of a full analysis the Wuhan Institute of Virology closed down its databases of viral genomes, and the Chinese Ministry of Education sent out a directive: “Any paper that traces the origin of the virus must be strictly and tightly managed.”

7. Because of a. the significant money to be made from the sort of activities above and b. general government reluctance to publicise these dangerous activities the authorities closed ranks. End of story, blame nature.

My opinion is that something went wrong in Wuhan and the virus escaped accidentally, no conspiracy just good old human error and the unswerving punctuality of chance. it's pretty clear the Wuhan government made a major effort to pretend there was no problem for a few weeks before locking down Wuhan (with 16 hours notice, enabling 300,000 people to get out) - source video documentary on Al Jazeera

 

[MalaysiaYellow]

I’ve been watching the cricket series in India, they’ve allowed fans into the stadium in Chennai.

Now bearing in mind they have a serious problem over there, these fans have been allowed in, there is no social distancing, and a massive amount of fans inside the stadium are not wearing masks.

I either think this is a massive hoax, Or we are acting like sheep, and following what we are told.

Unless of course they’ve all been vaccinated already, but I doubt that very much. Crazy!

Sometime ago, India "gave up". Due to its people, economy, infrastructure, etc nearly all restrictions were lifted and the population were on their own. Also reports are that over a 1/3 of people don't even turn up for their vaccinations.

 

[Pete Burrett]

Sometime ago, India "gave up". Due to its people, economy, infrastructure, etc nearly all restrictions were lifted and the population were on their own. Also reports are that over a 1/3 of people don't even turn up for their vaccinations.

A much more likely explanation as to why a crowd was allowed in than the pandemic being 'a hoax'. Worrying that anyone could still actually think that might be the case, or that people outside India are just sheepishly following rules that don't make sense.

 

[QR]

If only our Government pedalled fact and not fiction.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1360871714054365192

 

[QR]

I either think this is a massive hoax, Or we are acting like sheep, and following what we are told.

Hoax?! Jesus wept.

That isn't an either or statement by the way.

So it's probably one of the most stupid things ever posted on this forum.

 

[chuckbert]

I'm not so sure. It doesn't explain how the virus changed from the original bat virus(1) or how a bat flew into the centre of a big city and started an infection in a food market (2).

1. And late in the month, a professor at National Taiwan University, Fang Chi-tai, gave a lecture on the coronavirus in which he described the anomalous R-R-A-R furin cleavage site. The virus was “unlikely to have four amino acids added all at once,” Fang said — natural mutations were smaller and more haphazard, he argued. “From an academic point of view, it is indeed possible that the amino acids were added to COVID-19 in the lab by humans.”
2. No bats were sold in the market.

I'm not claiming to understand the biology btw, I'm quoting from something called the New York Intelligencer. It's a long read. The way I summarise it is:

In summary:
1. governments and other agencies have developed biological weapons since before WWII - see widely available evidence on Pingfan, on Fort Detrick. Some of the skills are interlinked with commercial research on viruses. This is a murky area.

2. Commercial research on viruses has become big business since the 'emergence' of diseases like Ebola, SARS and MERs and a network of laboratories co-operate internationally. In order to collaborate with other scientists laboratories have to be incredibly secure and are iirc peer-certified. The only such lab in China is Wuhan Institute of Virology,

3. Evidently (I think) there is a need to make candidate viruses more human-friendly, able to infect humans that is, to help testing antidotes or vaccines. (I don't quite understand why this is but). In 2006 a scientist named Baric got a patent for "for their invisible method of fabricating a full-length infectious clone". The clone in the patent was a clone of the entire deadly human SARS virus, the one that had emerged from Chinese bats, via civets, in 2002.

4. Baric and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the two top experts on the genetic interplay between bat and human coronaviruses, began collaborating in 2015.

5. In 2012 in Mojiang, in southern China six men set to work shoveling bat guano were sickened by a severe lung disease, three of them fatally. Carers and family were not affected. Shi Zhengli’s team took the samples back to Wuhan and analyzed whatever fragments of bat virus she could find. In some cases, when she found a sequence that seemed particularly significant, she experimented with it in order to understand how it might potentially infect humans. Some of her work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and some of it by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Department of Defense via Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.

6. At the end of 2019, an outbreak of a new virus in Wuhan was investigated by Shi Zhengli. Shi determined that the new virus was related to SARS but even more closely related to a bat disease that her own team had found on a virus-hunting trip: the now-famous RaTG13. Shi was surprised that the outbreak was local, she said: “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” The bat hiding places that she’d been visiting were, after all, as far away as Orlando, Florida, is from New York City. She checked her notes and was reassured that the virus wasn't from the lab. Instead of a full analysis the Wuhan Institute of Virology closed down its databases of viral genomes, and the Chinese Ministry of Education sent out a directive: “Any paper that traces the origin of the virus must be strictly and tightly managed.”

7. Because of a. the significant money to be made from the sort of activities above and b. general government reluctance to publicise these dangerous activities the authorities closed ranks. End of story, blame nature.

My opinion is that something went wrong in Wuhan and the virus escaped accidentally, no conspiracy just good old human error and the unswerving punctuality of chance. it's pretty clear the Wuhan government made a major effort to pretend there was no problem for a few weeks before locking down Wuhan (with 16 hours notice, enabling 300,000 people to get out) - source video documentary on Al Jazeera

Thanks for this PC, I’ll have a good read. The only comment I have thus far is the issue of RRAR FCS. This kind of thing is closest to my expertise and I’d say the Prof’s observation has some presumptions. Yes you might expect only one or maybe two consecutive acids change identity (due to spontaneous changes in bases in the RNA genome of the virus), but insertion of longer sequences is possible through recombination. For that to happen you would expect to find sources of the additional sequence (coding for the modified FCS) in the same virus, or in other viruses that the same bat may have had at the same time as the coronavirus. There are apparently such sequences but I haven’t found a peer-reviewed paper discussing it.

I still contend that the mixing of biological material in species-jumping viruses and associated natural selection of virulence is a much more likely source of a nasty virus than human experts doing it synthetically. We really aren’t as good at that kind of thing as you might assume. That’s not to say it’s proof that virologists didn’t do it, just that it’s far from straightforward. When people are trying to design new proteins with useful functions there is usually more success using evolution-selection approaches than smart synthesis approaches.

 

[Paul Cannell]

Fair enough, boy. I also have some anecdotal stuff from a farmer I work with on some rewilding malarkey who clearly has expertise in the field, being associated closely with testing. His opinion seems to be that there's such a vast amount of covid cells out there that anything can happen, as a total layman and his donkey, I don't pry much......

I tried to keep an open mind and my brains fell out

 

[Essexyellows]

Saturday numbers.....
71473 people in Leicestershire have tested positive - up from 71,176 (increase 297).
32296 (increase of 119) were within the Leicester City Council area.
39177 (increase of 178) cases were reported in the County.

UHL reported 25 death's.
The death's occurred on the following days; 2nd January (1), 20th January (1), 21st January (1), 26th January (1), 29th January (3), 31st January (2), 5th February (1), 7th February (2), 8th February (1), 9th February (2), 10th February (3), 11th February (6) and 12th February (1).
Total UHL death's stands at 1214.

Maybe of interest....
Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland vaccinations reported 11th February.
1st dose 2nd dose
16-69 73,162 9.8% 1,872 0.3%
70-74 35,718 67.0% 81 0.2%
75-79 35,298 96.4% 765 2.1%
80+ 48,524 91.9% 3,634 6.9%
Total 192,702 6,352
Total cumulative 199,054

 

[chuckbert]

This editorial in the BMJ isn’t very complimentary about the UK (and US, Brazil, India, Mexico) covid responses.
“Social murder”!

Covid-19: Social murder, they wrote—elected, unaccountable, and unrepentant

After two million deaths, we must have redress for mishandling the pandemic Murder is an emotive word. In law, it requires premeditation. Death must be deemed to be unlawful. How could “murder” apply to failures of a pandemic response? Perhaps it can’t, and never will, but it is worth...

www.bmj.com

 

[Essexyellows]

This editorial in the BMJ isn’t very complimentary about the UK (and US, Brazil, India, Mexico) covid responses.
“Social murder”!

Covid-19: Social murder, they wrote—elected, unaccountable, and unrepentant

After two million deaths, we must have redress for mishandling the pandemic Murder is an emotive word. In law, it requires premeditation. Death must be deemed to be unlawful. How could “murder” apply to failures of a pandemic response? Perhaps it can’t, and never will, but it is worth...

www.bmj.com

What load of emotive pish.
Nobody is solely responsible irrespective of their job.
Imagine if, way back when, we had pulled up the drawbridge and locked out UK citizens and any imports/exports.
Those pesky migrants in boats....... blast them out of the water shall we?
UK citizens left to their demise abroad.
Nothing in - nothing out....... eat spuds.

We would have been in Mad Max territory and "it" was already here.

 

[SteMerritt]

Imagine if, way back when, we had pulled up the drawbridge and locked out UK citizens and any imports/exports.
Those pesky migrants in boats....... blast them out of the water shall we?
UK citizens left to their demise abroad.
Nothing in - nothing out....... eat spuds.

What a load of emotive pish...

 

[Essexyellows]

What a load of emotive pish...

You got it.... well done.

Anyone who thinks politicians can be held accountable for their actions only needs to look at the Donald.

 

[Sarge]

You got it.... well done.

Anyone who thinks politicians can be held accountable for their actions only needs to look at the Donald.

On the subject of which ... a low rent, UK version of impeachment is ongoing ... probably with a similar end result ?

Cummings in court as Good Law Project begins judicial review of Government Covid contracts

GLP say a focus group and support services contract was given to Public First because the PM’s then senior aide wanted the company to have it.

www.thelondoneconomic.com

 

[Essexyellows]

On the subject of which ... a low rent, UK version of impeachment is ongoing ... probably with a similar end result ?

Cummings in court as Good Law Project begins judicial review of Government Covid contracts

GLP say a focus group and support services contract was given to Public First because the PM’s then senior aide wanted the company to have it.

www.thelondoneconomic.com

Ah yes ....... lots of lawyers getting rich off the back of "doing what`s right"....... good job they weren`t around in WWII we would have got the bill to rebuild Dresden.

 

[Marked Ox]

Ah yes ....... lots of lawyers getting rich off the back of "doing what`s right"....... good job they weren`t around in WWII we would have got the bill to rebuild Dresden.

In this case they are right. There may be nothing wrong with all of those contracts, but scrutiny should happen and the Govt haven't exactly being rushing to get the info out for that scrutiny to happen.

 

[QR]

Ah yes ....... lots of lawyers getting rich off the back of "doing what`s right"....... good job they weren`t around in WWII we would have got the bill to rebuild Dresden.

Secrecy and poor transpancy from the government spending billions of our money and it's the fault of the lawyers for challenging it. Er..... Whataboutism Alert (again)

 

[Concretebob]

Secrecy and poor transpancy from the government spending billions of our money and it's the fault of the lawyers for challenging it. Er..... Whataboutism Alert (again)

Straight from the EY book of whataboutism. Classic.