What if Sydney could shorten the lockdown with cheap common drugs, but we didnt even try them?

How much does the Medical Swamp hate antivirals?

The news nobody wanted to hear (except perhaps Pharmaceutical giants): 29 new active cases in the NSW community.

Will NSW get desperate enough to try cheap drugs with low risks, mass production and promising results? It’s winter and the Delta variant is spreading. Contact tracing is rapidly being outpaced. The number of close contacts doubled overnight to 14,000.

What have they got to lose?

The Financial Review

NSW reported 44 new locally acquired COVID-19 cases, 29 of those were in the community while infectious and the number of close contacts has doubled from 7000 to 14,000 in the past 24 hours.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the lockdown was likely to be extended beyond Friday, July 16, unless there was a “dramatic turnaround” in coming days.

Antiviral hesitancy could be costing the state billions. What if an antiviral trial were offered to anyone who tested positive and their contacts, subject to medical advice (approved by their doctor)? It would be a great reason to go get tested. Got symptoms? — We may be able to help you and your family.

Some antivirals and vitamins like D3 appear […]

Thursday Open Thread

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Vaccines, not the magic bullet the advertisers claim

Israel is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, but having dropped restrictions, they are picking them up again only one month later as the Delta variant spreads.

In Tel Aviv, 75 students got infected at one party from a vaccinated person who had caught the virus from another vaccinated person. And though the UK data is better than the Israeli data, Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, has had both of her vaccine doses but still has to self isolate for two weeks due to a “near exposure”. How confident are the UK health experts? Not very. With the UK only weeks away from the so-called Freedom day, will double vaxed people have to self isolate for two weeks each time they are exposed?

This belies the key point about “getting vaxed for the nation”. If being vaccinated is about keeping you out of hospital, not so much about infecting your friends, then getting vaxed is more for self protection. The cost-benefit equation might look good for high risk people, but changes dramatically for healthy young people. We need to know how much vaccination slows transmission yet it’s barely a part of the national conversation.

A month […]

In Mexico deaths were 50% higher for 8 months, then they start Ivermectin…

For a whole year more people were dying in Mexico than normally died. There’s been one long bloodbath there and an untold story. Mexico may not have hit the “photogenic” headline stage that Brazil, Iran, and India did, but nonetheless, somewhat unnoticed, it’s been continuously bad. Mexico has the dubious honor of being one of the worst for testing, with positivity rates at the virtually the highest in the world, running at 35% and even reaching over 50% at times. Few countries have had higher rates (currently only Tunisia, Namibia, maybe Colombia are worse). The Case Fatality Rate has run at 12% for a year, only confirming that there weren’t enough tests to know the real scale of the infections. The excess deaths graph tells its own story. The wave of 2020 ran for a whole year with deaths running at 50 – 100% higher than in a normal year. Since the pandemic began some 350,000 excess deaths have been recorded. The death toll for Covid in Mexico may be 60% higher than the official Covid casualty count of 230,000. As winter made the situation even worse, things got desperate enough (finally!) for cheap treatments to be organized.

Ivermectin use […]

Freak weather, heat domes, cold snaps, all grist for the Global Witchdoctors

The Heat Dome was a freak local event

Once upon a time, scientists would say only 30 year trends counted. Now, all weather is climate except when it isn’t. Climate modelers know the heat over North East America was caused by your beef steak, but the cold over New Mexico was not even worth mentioning. (Nor apparently was the minus 81 in Antarctica a couple of weeks ago).

As Ryan Maue says: Overall the contiguous US is 1.4F below average.

…h/t Clarence.t WUWT

 

The Sun is already saying the Heat Dome “killed at least 500 people”. Strangely the February Texas freeze and blackouts may have killed 700 people, but five months later the media is still carefully waiting for confirmation before it puts that in a headline.

Blame the Pacific Ocean

Even NOAA says a Heat Dome is caused by La Nina and a local weather phenomenon:

This [heat dome] happens when strong, high-pressure atmospheric conditions combine with influences from La Niña, creating vast areas of sweltering heat that gets trapped under the high-pressure “dome.”

A team of scientists funded by the NOAA MAPP Program investigated what triggers heat domes and found the […]

Thursday Open Thread

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Corals bleached in 1862 by all the cars and coal plants that didn’t exist

Peter Ridd writes that a new paper uncovers rare lithographs of corals underwater in 1862.

One hundred and fifty year old pictures of corals are rare enough, but these ones had the unmistakable pure white cauliflower look that marks them as totally bleached. But in 1862 the first coal fired power plant was still twenty years away from starting work as a coral destroyer, and carbon dioxide levels were a perfect 286ppm.

This is the spot (below) in the Northern Red Sea just at the end of “The Little Ice Age”. Perhaps the seas were too alkaline then, and were yet to reach the perfect pH nirvana they must have struck the year before humans started scuba diving en masse.

Bleaching in 1862, twenty years before the worlds first coal fired power plant was built. Ransonnet 1862 | Tomas Cedhagen 2021

We can see why scuba diving was not popular in 1862.

The first underwater camera had a little man inside?

 

Somehow the great marine-psychics of the world know that corals didn’t bleach in the early 1960’s even though, or perhaps “because”, there was almost no one down there to see it.

From Peter Ridd:

[…]

Ten years ago China was worried about race based genetic bioweapons — Hello Biotech Cold War?

Image by AngMoKio

For anyone trained in genetics the news that China warned of the potential for race based genetic bioweapons in 2011 is just stating what any good SciFi writer has known for years. But the macabre detail may help wake up the rest of the world to the idea “What if”. What would a New Biotech Cold War look like, and does it look like this?

China was spelling out some toe-curling recipes: warning that new biotech could pump up the virulence of infectious agents; it could neutralize antibiotics and vaccines, or potentially make the “target” population more vulnerable by disabling specific genes. Theoretically, adversaries could add genetic material covertly. How about some involuntary “Gene Therapy”coming to an airconditioning system near you?

But hey, they were just speculating right?

Funnily enough, a guy called Miles Yu was working for Mike Pompeo, advising him on China, and he raised the existence of the Chinese submission with the US State Department last December. Pompeo ordered an investigation, but they couldn’t find a copy of China’s original submission at the time (it’s only a global UN convention, yeah?). But when Joe Biden was sworn in, the investigation was shut […]

Defund The Academics! CSIRO, Australian Unis had worked with Wuhan Lab too (and they forgot to mention it for 18 months?)

Well here’s a surprise. A year and a half later and now we find out that Australian labs were also helping China?

And tonight, 520 days after China shared the genetic sequence of SARS-2, Australian scientists are suddenly very concerned about how Australia might still be doing gain-of-function work with viruses? Minister Greg Hunt is asking for a “review” of gain-of-function research in Australia? Did he even know?

It’s amazing what the power of a good reporter can achieve. Hail Sharri Markson and The Australian.

For 500 long pandemic days some publicly funded scientists had millions of reasons apparently, not to talk about how the virus might have been a lab leak. These public servants may have been publicly scoffing at the idea the virus may have leaked from a lab, but they didn’t think to mention that they’d worked with bats, and gain-of-function viruses and even the Wuhan lab itself?

They were ethically bound to speak up. Did they say nothing, or did they talk to Morrison and Hunt in private? After which, given the government’s role, possibly none of them wanted to let that bat out of the bag?

Public trust in these institutions might be about to […]

Ivermectin may prevent 86% of Covid cases, and the UK will do a hobbled trial of it

The new super meta review of Ivermectin is out. It’s 27 pages of fine print detail and 144 references, and it’s very impressive.

Ivermectin…. by Fvasconcellos

Bryant et al soaked themselves in 24 studies involving 3,406 people and found that ivermectin use reduced deaths by a very nice 60% with “moderate certainty”. But ivermectin appears to be at its best when used to prevent infections in the first place. There was “low certainty” but with prophylactic use Covid infections were reduced by an average of 86% . But by the time patients were “in need of mechanical ventilation”, the data, while muddy, suggested ivermectin was not much help.

The bad thing about Ivermectin is that there are not many bad things. It’s too good, too cheap, too safe, and too far out of patent to be profitable.

Given the evidence of efficacy, safety, low cost, and current death rates, ivermectin is likely to have an impact on health and economic outcomes of the pandemic across many countries. Ivermectin is not a new and experimental drug with an unknown safety profile. It is a WHO “Essential Medicine” already used in several different indications, in colossal cumulative volumes.

[…]

Google funds virus research too, and with the same man who channeled money to Wuhan

Perhaps Google just wanted to help some medical researchers?

There’s nothing to suggest the Google charity funded the Wuhan Lab, or Covid, and Google says they didn’t. But the Google charity did send money to Peter Daszek and his charity which in hindsight doesn’t seem like a good place to put money. The EcoHealth Alliance is the one that Fauci helped fund, which did send money to Wuhan. And Daszek was the guy who joined the WHO team to “investigate” the origin and tried to quash the idea that it was a lab leak. He helped author a paper on Nature that said it was natural based in nothing much last February.

So it’s an odd fish for Google to have company with. Somehow there are millions of dollars of what appears to be careless money sloshing around in the system — and being divvied up for things that the careless funders might not have thought too much about. The Big Tech companies are acting like Dictators of medium sized nations but without the accountability…

These viral studies occurred in places like Japan, the US and Malaysia. One team worked on Henipavirus, which is also a bat borne virus. Another […]

Minus 81 Celsius last week in Antarctica

It was ten degrees below normal at Scott Base, in June, and usually July is the coldest month.

Pitch black, minus 81C and a howling wind.

Scott Base crew enduring near-record breaking Antarctica winter – 10C colder than usual

Spare a thought for the hardy crew who are wintering down in Antarctica, experiencing near-record breaking cold temperatures.

They’ve come very near to the coldest ever recorded temperature of -89.6C.

Cap Allon at Electroverse points out that some of that Global Warming has made it up to New South Wales where it had the coldest June day in 122 years two weeks ago.

A few weeks before that, Dunedin Airport New Zealand hit a record of minus 8.8C in May. It was the coldest day ever recorded there in any month since records started in 1963. One cold day doesn’t mean a lot climate wise, but if Antarctica was close to record warmth would most of the worlds media have barely said a word?

Remember the poles are warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.

ht Climate Depot and Electroverse

10 out of 10 based on 80 ratings […]

Using “Enviromentalism” and the UN as a trade weapon: China fires fake “Reef Scare” missile

Flynn Reef, Queensland, Photo by Wise Hok Wai Lum

Ever since Australia asked for an investigation into the source of Covid, China has been accidentally-on-purpose sticking pins into our trade deals. Pop went the wine, coal, beef, barley and lobster markets.

Now after concreting corals reefs in the South China Sea and plundering the Galapagos, China is suddenly concerned about the Great Barrier Reef. Overnight Chinese players in the UN have pushed it to the top of a list that had 82 more fragile ecosystems ahead of it. Pop, goes the tourism trade as the headlines ring out that UNESCO says the Reef is “in danger”.

At the moment, the only tourists that could possibly be frightened away are a few New Zealanders, because no one else can easily get around the two week quarantine. But when flights reboot, Australia just needs to send photos of the glorious corals to the world and “pop” goes the UN and China’s reputation.

It’s time the West dumped the UN — it’s just a play tool for Sino power

That would “pop” some of the CCP web of influence. What’s a Veto of a dead committee worth?

How many other environmental […]

Nothing shows how pathetic solar and battery power are like the pitiful celebrations

Strap yourself in: Solar Power and batteries made a whole town 100% renewable (for 80 minutes).

It’s an Australian first! Put out a press release. No seriously, they did:

Solar and battery microgrid takes WA town to 100% renewables in Australian first

Western Australia has again demonstrated its remote renewable energy generation chops, after successfully powering the Pilbara town of Onslow entirely on a combination of large and small-scale solar and battery storage for a total of 80 minutes.

Only 520,000 minutes short of a whole year.

“The milestone achievement was announced by WA energy minister Bill Johnston on Friday morning after being demonstrated by state government-owned regional utility Horizon Power, which established the solar and storage microgrid next to an existing gas plant.”

Onslow is a metropolis of 847 people sited in one of the sunniest zones in one of the sunniest countries in the world. With at least 3650 hours of sun a year, Onslow vies for a top ten position globally.

If solar power was going to make it anywhere, this would be it. But we all know what keeps the lights on in Onslow and it isn’t solar power.

The […]

Rumor: Top Chinese Secret Service man defected — says Covid was military bioweapon

It’s the sort of news that causes a Geopolitical realignment

There are now three Chinese defectors saying Covid19 was deliberately created by the Chinese Military. The third, Dong Jingwei, is possibly the highest ranking yet, and apparently talked to the DIA in mid February after flying into the US to visit his daughter.

The claims are that he has brought with him terabytes of data or “nearly 19 million documents”. It’s potentially dynamite — allegedly containing studies of Covid, forecasts of spread in the West, and names of Chinese spies in the US with details of payments.

If this is confirmed, and the Chinese Military did release a deadly bioweapon on the world, as Paula Bolyard says, “it ranks as one of the worst crimes against humanity the world has ever seen” — and the media, and some intelligence agencies, helped to cover it up.

The DIA kept the defector a secret from the CIA and FBI because they believed there were Chinese spies within them.

BREAKING: Defector Claiming Chinese Military Responsible for COVID-19 Identified as Top Counterintelligence Official

Paula Bolyard, PJ Media

According to RedState, the data includes:

Early pathogenic studies of the virus […]

People abandoning BBC propaganda for new UK Channel “GB News”

Signs of life in the UK outpost of Civilization

A new TV channel called “GB News” only opened on Sunday, to smashingly good ratings. GB News outdid the BBC and Sky on its first day as 164,000 people tuned in to see if they got real news for a change instead of repetitive inane cliches approved by some middle level bureaucratic arts graduate who was pushing their own political agenda to pump up their grifting salary and impress their friends. The BBC got 133,000 viewers and Sky 57,000.

BBC hit by mass boycott as viewers flock to Andrew Neil’s GB News and cancel TV licences

by Laura O’Callaghan, Express

AVID fans of GB News have hailed Britain’s newest TV channel and vowed to continue their boycott of the Beeb as they seek information from alternative sources.

Naturally, the collectivist bullies have gone after the advertisers, and while many spineless corporate CEOs have folded to cancel culture, at least one team is fighting back. Companies with weak CEOs include Kopparberg, Grolsch, Nivea, Open University, and Ikea.

Bravo to The Co-op which stood their ground

The Co-op announced that it would not remove its advertising.

China suddenly puts brakes on climate action, wind and solar subsidies

It’s almost like China’s climate action was just window dressing. It seems to be unraveling…

China’s National Carbon Trading Scheme was supposed to go into full operation later this month, but now it’s been cut back by two-thirds. Instead of burdening 6,000 companies it will only afflict 2,000. And only a week ago, the Chinese government suddenly axed solar and wind subsidies, with the cuts starting just six weeks from now. Oilprice calls it “a crushing blow for wind and solar”. In a devastating move, there are even demands that solar plants have to sell electricity at the same price as coal power. The cruelty!

China produces three quarters of all the world’s solar panels, having subsidized-the-heck out of the global industry, exploited slave labor and driven the US leaders out of production.

Judging by the Wall St Journal story — in the last two months the paradigm has shifted from Environmental control to Economic priority. Perhaps solar power wasn’t much use for building ballistic missile submarines?

How different things would be if solar was actually cheaper than coal…

No new solar power plant subsidies. Just like that? China to stop subsidies for new solar power stations, onshore wind projects […]

Bunions and broken bones: medieval shoes show price Homo Sapiens fashion victims willing to pay

Would you like bunions with that? | Photo: Mshirk

Believe it or not, Medieval shoes tell us something important about modern civilization. The hyper-gregarious Homo Sapiens might be able to walk on the moon, but ultimately a large proportion of the species just want to climb the social ladder. And the smarter, higher order sapiens might paradoxically be willing to pay the most stupid price.

In this case, being “progressive” in the 14th Century meant wearing pointy shoes that left 4 out of 10 people buried at the friary with bent and sometimes broken bones. Bunions make it harder to balance so they increase the risk of falls. The undeniable benefits of scoring social fashion points were apparently worth spending decades distorting foot bones. Before you dismiss this as a teenage girly thing, ponder that two thirds of the victims were men.

The social competition to have the pointiest shoes became so dangerous that in 1463 King Edward IV passed a law declaring toe-points had to be 2 inches or less within London.

Pointy shoes in a statue from 3,000 BC. | Camocon

The pointy shoe fashion bubble has struck all over the world: Japan, China, […]

Climate fears stop new gas plants in Europe, then cold hits and they go back to coal

God’s joke on governments that try to control the climate with their electricity grid:

Europe talks itself out of building gas plants in order to stop global warming, then after an extra cold winter, they also run out of gas, and now they have to go back to burning coal.

Spooked investors weren’t funding many gas plants now that the glorious renewable era was here and policy makers were all wearing their Hydrogen badges, and waving their carbon capture wands. In the last year all the geniuses of the European Investment Bank, the IEA, the European Commission were saying “gas is over” and it would be a stranded asset.

One month ago, Nina Chestney was predicting a gas supply crunch:

Gas faces existential crisis in climate wary Europe

May 14, 2021, , Reuters

Europe faces the prospect of higher electricity bills and a supply crunch, as utilities struggle to finance new gas-fired power plants unless they meet tougher emissions criteria imposed by banks pressured to stop financing fossil-fuel projects.

…Gas projects worth some 30 billion euros were cancelled, delayed or indefinitely postponed last year as they struggled to find funding.

The […]

China lied about the bats in the lab, and WHO helped cover it up

In 2017 there was an official Chinese Academy of Science video to showcase the new Wuhan “Level 4” lab. The video shows bats in a cage there and teams monitoring the lab in case there’s “an accident”.

The latest release of video footage tells us a few important things —

The Chinese Officials were lying when they said their were no live bats at the Wuhan Institute. The WHO was helping them lie. Peter Daszak, the President of the US group funneling NIH money to the lab, also lied and helped them to cover it up. In 2017 the Chinese Academy of Science admitted that ten years earlier, no one in China had known how to do this biosecurity research. The French (and presumably US collaborators) taught the Chinese how. They clashed all the way, and the Chinese threw the French out as soon as the lab was finished. French and US intelligence knew there was a high risk of bioweapons. But they didn’t tell the world, nor prepare for it. Instead they’ve done everything they can to cover it up. The Wuhan Institute of Virology viral databases went missing on Sept 12, 2019, before the virus started to spread. […]