Most of Australia is living with freedom, not the virus. “Living with the virus” means long lockdowns in NSW. Who wants that?
The Australian Federal government wants to “open up the nation” when we reach 70 or 80% vaccinated, like it’s The Sign of Bethlehem, or something, but the No-Covid States are rebelling and it’s no wonder. Being free of Chinese Bioweapons means being free to dance, sing, work and send the kids to school — and the voters rather like that. No virus means no lockdown. The States with zero covid know that if they let the virus in even at 80% “vaxed” they’ll have less freedom. They might get to fly to London but they’ll have to give up Big Weddings, Parties, and possibly Grandpa too.
The key value is and always was hospital beds. The hospitalization rates mean even at the magical 80% double-vaccinated mark hospitals will be overwhelmed, forcing states to flatten the curve for months and stand in the street banging tin pots at 9pm each night to say thanks to strung out health workers. We don’t need modeling to know this, it happened already in places like the UK, Spain and Italy. It only took a few percent of the population to get infected and hospitals were overwhelmed.
It’s just maths. There are 12,000 active cases in Sydney now — so a mere 0.15% of the NSW population is infected, but hospitals are already running out of beds. Cancer surgery is being rescheduled.
Photo by Hakan Nural on Unsplash
These first generation vaccines are not remotely good enough. Even most of the pro-vax modelers admit we have to vaccinate more 90% of the whole population (really 95%, they say) and in that scenario, there are still thousands of deaths and ongoing restrictions. If the vaccines stopped transmission it might be different. But the leaky sort only halve it (see Table 3 below). Even the 100% vaccinated cruise ship still spread the virus.
If States-with-Freedom open borders to States-with-lockdowns, the lockdowns will spread, not the freedom.
Before we open up we need a better plan than purist vaccination.
The solution is profoundly right wing: it’s hard borders, state rights, free speech and free choice — the right to pick the treatment we want with our doctor. But bizarrely, at the moment, the conservative party in Australia has become the best friend of Big Pharma and Big Bureaucrats while The Labor Premiers are fighting for hard borders and state rights.
Relying on first generation vaxes without antivirals is a train-wreck.
It’s almost like Scott Morrison and Gladys Berejiklian like lockdowns. Judge them by the outcomes, not their words. How many billions of dollars lost, deaths, and broken businesses will it take for them to investigate the bargain vitamin and out-of-patent drugs that have saved thousands in the third world? Instead, they’re trying to sell us on a scheme that might have been written by Big Pharma itself.
Morrison must be frazzled, calling West Australians and Queenslanders “cave dwellers,” because they have not ram-vaccinated as many people as disaster-land-NSW. With insults and a totally Sydney-centric perspective, he may have just handed the next national election to Labor. Were the Liberals hoping to win any seats in WA? Did the Liberals learn nothing from their humiliating WA state election loss?
There is a battle of models going on as well, as various Governments in Australia try to figure out what to do next. All of these models start from the one-eyed Vaccines-Will-Save-Us-Kemosabe! point of view. But it’s eye opening to follow the calculations which mostly show that infecting the nation at 70 or 80% vaxed is reckless. The only model that doesn’t is the Doherty institute’s, and it’s a fantasy model. But that’s the one Scott Morrison is betting the house on. All the models assume there is no other treatment and no one does anything to raise Vitamin D or Zn levels. So all the models are flawed, but we can still learn something from them.
The Grafton ANU modelling concludes that the toll from playing games with novel viruses could be quite high:
“And assuming 80 per cent vaccination coverage for only those over 16, as per the National Plan, there could be approximately 25,000 fatalities and some 270,000 cases of long COVID.
Buried quietly is modelling from The Burnet Institute, which suggests that fully 45% of these deaths will be among the vaccinated population. There are three million Australians older than 70. Even if we vaccinate 95% of them, and even if the Pfizer vaccine protects 96% of that group, there are still potentially a lot of dead bodies in that age group in the wake of the virus. (And the AZ vaccine only stops 92% of deaths.)
No one wants to copy the pain that the people of NSW are going through. Who can blame the smaller states? We almost suspect that what Berejiklian and Morrison are most afraid of is that clean states will show how wrong and incompetent the NSW approach is.
What if the ACT, Victoria, or New Zealand get back to zero? Won’t that make the “gold standard” state look like chumps.
Image: Scientific Animations
The Doherty team models a different virus in an imaginary world
In a fantasy simulation the Doherty group pretend we start with only 30 cases, which is about 900 cases lower than NSW already has. They assume we can manage to track and trace them, which has already failed in NSW (test results are slow, and tracers are not even phoning infected people for a couple of days!). The Doherty model pretends that children don’t spread the virus much, and only runs the simulation for the first six months. It’s like they set out to show the nation can open at 70-80%, and made up the assumptions to achieve that.
In the fine print the Doherty group also assumes the Ro (rate of spread) is reduced from an awesome 6.3 down to 3.6. That means they also assume many ongoing restrictions are in place to halve the rate of spread. Presumably that means Australia can kiss goodbye to football finals, concerts, festivals, big weddings and funerals, and “live with” ongoing masks and lots of distancing. This is a Big-Pharma version of freedom, where we live with death and the last 20-30% of the population are put under major pressure to get vaxed or to hide from public life. How much fun can you have? Booster shots, baby! Big Pharma know that if the nation opens up at 80% the headlines will be full of stories of loss and deaths and reasons to push the last 20% towards an injection.
The Grafton modelling estimates hospitalization and deaths
Here’s a table we rarely see. There are a lot of caveats –see below.
CHR – Case Hospitalization rate. IFR – Infection fatality rate.
Deaths may be higher because…
They don’t include deaths related to long covid, or an “overshoot of herd immunity” which I think means a surge that overwhelms hospitals where death rates rapidly rise. They don’t include deaths due to non-Covid causes, such as suicides, undiagnosed cancers, or people avoiding hospitals because they are afraid of catching Covid.
These estimates only consider immediate acute Covid deaths. But in the first wave of the UK epidemic, people who survived and left hospital were subsequently four times as likely to be readmitted to hospital and eight times as likely to die than a matched control group. [14] In other words, deaths can lag illness by a long time.
The next mutation escapes the current vaccines.
Deaths may be lower if…
Australians have higher levels of Vitamin D, maybe lower levels of comorbidities or high risk genes, or they might get scripts to use antivirals. These are not even mentioned in the paper.
The death rate due to Delta is lower than estimated here. The death rates are estimated from Canadian data which estimates that Delta is 2.3 times as deadly as the original Wuflu [11]. The hospitalization rate is likely be to be twice as much as the Alpha strain, which was already 1.5 times higher than the original, based on English and Scottish data [8] [9]). The hospitalization rate for Delta is thus three times higher than the original Wuhan Flu. It’s bad. The Delta variant pumps up the viral load faster, so it swamps immune systems faster and spreads more easily. That explains the higher hospitalization rate, and it’s hard to believe it won’t also increase the death rate — but it may not increase it by the same ratio. The deaths are more about vascular clotting and an overactive immune system, which doctors might be still able to treat.
Vaccines assumed to stop half of transmission:
Though if the Israel data applies to all cohorts, after 6 months, VE of infection is 0.16 and presumably OR (Transmission) must be less too.
The ChADOx means Astrazenica, and Comrinaty means Pfizer vax.
Professor Quentin Grafton from The Australian National University, Dr Zoë Hyde from the University of Western Australia and Professor Tom Kompas from the University of Melbourne examined the Australian Government’s National Plan to reduce restrictions once enough adults are vaccinated.
Under the National Plan, once more than 80 per cent of adults receive two doses of COVID-19 vaccines, equivalent to approximately 65 per cent of the total population, the nation will “manage COVID-19 consistent with public health management of other infectious diseases”.
Professor Grafton said the new modelling showed “we simply can’t afford to do that, both in terms of lives and long-term illness from COVID”.
“We found substantial morbidity and mortality is likely to occur if the Australian Government sticks to the National Plan,” he said.
“Our modelling shows if 70 per cent of Australians over 16 years of age are fully vaccinated, with a 95 per cent vaccination level for those aged 60 years and over, there could eventually be some 6.9 million symptomatic COVID-19 cases, 154,000 hospitalisations, and 29,000 fatalities.
“And assuming 80 per cent vaccination coverage for only those over 16, as per the National Plan, there could be approximately 25,000 fatalities and some 270,000 cases of long COVID.
“In contrast, and if children are also fully vaccinated, national fatalities for all age groups would be reduced to 19,000 with 80 per cent adult vaccination coverage. This would fall to 10,000 at a 90 per cent adult vaccination coverage.
“Children also directly benefit from vaccination. If we could achieve 75 cent vaccination coverage among children and adolescents, we could prevent 12,000 hospitalisations in these age groups.”
Grafton conclusions are to Triple vax the over 60s and vax all the kids?
The Grafton team are essentially saying we need to vaccinate at least 90% of all Australians including children to consider opening with a lower death rate. They assume that 95% of the over 60s are vaccinated, and even consider doing this with two doses of AZ plus the Pfizer booster shot to maximize protection. But even with all that vaccination, the death rates are still too high unless children are vaccinated too. Even under this scenario, with “only” 70% of Australians vaccinated and the over 60’s “triple vaxed,” they estimate there will still be nearly 30,000 deaths and nearly 300,000 with long Covid.
Nearly half of the deaths will be in the vaccinated.
Readers may well disagree with the conclusions, but the modeling and assumptions and references are all there to discuss. (See the links below).
Nearly 7 million Australians will get symptomatic infection — which still means some significant productivity hit to workers and students, even if “it’s like the Flu”. We can bear that, but do we have to?
Locally acquired cases in each Australian state for the last seven days.*
Is it worth it?
All these deaths, the sickness, and the experimental vaccines is to allow us visit friends overseas, and let in tourists to help our tourism industry. It also means Qantas can make more money, and we can accept mass immigration that most Australian don’t want (and which pushes down blue collar wages, and pushes up house prices). It also means we can take in Chinese paying students to universities. “Yay”.
Obviously the West has totally failed to stop the Chinese Bioweapon. It is now a given that we’ll all get it or one of its descendants eventually. But there is a huge difference between getting this mutation now — without any respectable approved treatments and with 30,000 deaths — and getting a different mutation a year from now — with a suite of antivirals and / or the second generation of vaccines (which might be so much safer). Monoclonal antibodies may make travel possible without a vaccine. So may a combination of antivirals, like the way we treat AIDS. The next mutation may get nicer like Spanish Flu did, or it might not.
What they are trying to do is distract Australians from the real debate, which is about borders and antivirals.
The modelling from Professor Grafton, Dr Hyde and Professor Kompas is available online as a pre-print publication. Read an analysis article by the three researchers about their findings and proposed four-step national COVID-19 response at Policy Forum.
PS: Before commenters say it, this modelling is not “like climate change”. That doesn’t make it right, but it’s 20 pages not 2000, it’s all published, the assumptions are spelled out and it isn’t trying to predict waves of infections on a regional basis using a bottom up grid system with error bars wider than the trends. Nor is it trying to predict mutations and death rates 100 years in the future.
The point is not the exact number of deaths, but that using purely vaccines and ignoring all the other solutions is a bad strategy.
SA is the pioneer wind state and the first to experience the rapid increase in power prices that hastened the demise of the local car industry. They literally blew up the last of their coal-fired power stations although they still have gas which is just as well because during wind droughts they live on gas and coal power from Victoria.
RE enthusiasts laud SA as an RE powerhouse, the wonder of the world and the shape of things to come across Australia. That is true but not in the way that they mean. Look at the situation in SA in the recent week from August 12 to Wed 18.
The chart below shows the amount of wind power generated in South Australia hour by hour through August to date. The dotted line across the chart at 219MW is close to 10% of the installed capacity of 2,100MW and it marks the upper level of supply that I regard as a “wind drought”.
From the 12th to the 18th the supply was mostly under the line and consequently they were importing power every day of that week at breakfast and dinnertime. They were importing at lunchtime on weekdays as well during that period and this is unusual due to the amount of solar they have.
South Australia may be a net exporter over 12 months but that it practically beside the point because they depend on imports whenever they are in drought. When other states, led by Victoria, get rid of more coal power they will not have spare power during wind droughts to prop up SA.
That is just about the end of the RE story until there is feasible and affordable grid-scale storage because there is no way to deny the reality of wind droughts. They are clearly visible in the AEMO records and Tony from Oz has been monitoring the situation for years. It is about time for more people to pay attention. See here for the introduction to his comprehensive wind generation series.
Mike O’Ceirin has an interactive site based on those records and this link takes you to a list of periods when the whole of the NEM was in drought (under 10% of installed capacity) during 2020. On 18 occasions the duration of the drought was ten hours or more and in June the drought on the 5th and 6th lasted for 33 hours. Other droughts in June lasted for 18, 16, 14 and 9 hours.
For more instructions on wind watching check out the addendum to this post from the Energy Realists of Australia. But remember that wind watching can be time-consuming and habit forming so please watch responsibly. A Windwatchers Anonymous group has been established to support people who recognize a need for help with wind-watching dependence.
Pay attention to the low points instead of the high points!
RE boosters are excited by the high points of RE supply, but think about a flood protection levee or wall. You need to check the low parts where the water will penetrate and you you will not be impressed to see the high parts getting twice as high while there are still gaps in the wall. Windless nights are the gaps in the RE wall and there is no point in wasting more resources in RE capacity until the storage issue is resolved.
THURSDAY MORNING UPDATE – LOW WIND AT BREAKFAST TIME
Access the widget in real time here. Western Australia is not connected to the eastern states that are all connected to form the NEM the National Energy Market.
Across the NEM at 8am the windmills are delivering 16% of capacity and 5% of the power in the grid. Queensland and Tasmania are the bookends of the system and the other three states are all in deficit. The lakes in Tasmania (the battery of the nation) are being drained so the ungrateful South Australians (croweaters) can have hot coffee on the way to work.
Urge your friends and relations to check this display at breakfast and dinnertime to see how much or how little green is visible on the bars to signal how much more wind capacity is required to dispense with the black, brown and red bits. Think about moving to Tasmania or getting a home generator!
Google and Youtube are to some extent the Police of our National Conversations. Somehow they are allowed to invest privately and simultaneously put people in jail according to rules they made up themselves. What could possibly go wrong?
Consider the ownership of vaccine makers. Alphabet owns YouTube and Google. Alphabet owns 12 per cent of Vaccitech, which created the AstraZeneca vaccine. YouTube bans videos mentioning ivermectin as a COVID treatment. Aren’t these conflicts of interest? If ivermectin was approved for COVID, what would happen to big pharma’s hundreds of billions of dollars in profits? These profits are a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to big pharma.
New business model? What if one hot drug created a market for other drugs:
Consider the vaccine maker Pfizer’s profits. It’s second quarter 2021 revenue was $19 billion, up 89 per cent. In three months, it made $4 billion profit. The European Medicines Agency discovered a definite link between Pfizer’s vaccine causing myocarditis. In September 2020, our TGA approved Pfizer’s Vyndamax drug to treat myocarditis. Our health department confirmed the AstraZeneca vaccine’s links with blood clots. Pfizer’s Eliquis drug treats blood clotting. Last quarter its sales were up 13 per cent. So are those blood clots rare? Really? In 2019 Pfizer’s Zavicefta drug was approved to ICU patients on ventilators. Is Pfizer making profits making people sick and more profit treating the sickness it caused?
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is a tech giant with a $1.4 trillion market cap, making it the 5th most valuable company by market cap in the world.
What if public policy was controlled by people who are afraid of being put in the naughty corner by Google and Youtube?
Malcolm Roberts and Craig Kelly are fighting the good fight in Australia in Parliament. In the next election they are going to need all the help they can get.
h/t David B and a few others (I’m trying to find their names).
PS: From Jo. Rafe Champion has been posting at the lost Catallaxy site for years so I offered him a home to try to fill the vacuum on Australian blogs for discussion on energy issues.
The dilemma Australia faces is that if we keep stuffing subsidized unreliable energy into the system we will force stable fuels out, and be carbon free, but we will also be free of 50Hz cycles, 24 hour power, aluminium plants, and manufacturing jobs. Policy-dreamers are using magical words like “battery” and “pumped hydro” as if Australia is a scaled up Mechano Truck run on Monopoly-money and we can expect reliable rain for the first time in 2 billion years.
by Steve Hunter
The Energy Security Board, chaired by Kerry Schott, has at last delivered a report to the Federal Government with proposals for market reforms to resolve a looming crisis in the national power supply or at least the NEM, the National Energy Market that covers the south-eastern states, excluding WA. The crisis is twofold – increasing grid instability and the threat of supply if coal plants are forced out of business prematurely. Both of those issues arise from the rapid escalation of intermittent inputs of wind and solar power because Australia has the gold medal for the rate of increase in installed RE capacity.
Kerry Schott, the chair of the ESB, has signalled that the ‘simple’ plan to move towards net zero emissions is to get in as much renewable energy and hydro as we can and back it up with pumped hydro and batteries.
The fundamental problem is the gap in RE supply on windless nights when the supply is zero. No amount of installed capacity is helpful in the absence of wind and sun, in the way that a chain is only as strong as the weakest link and a flood protection wall is only as good as the lowest point regardless of the high parts or the average height.
How much can we expect from pumped hydro and batteries?
The Snowy 2.0 project will probably cost north of $10 Billion and it will take years to complete. It is expected to deliver as much power as a big coal power station like Bayswater for about six months. So to replicate Bayswater we need a second Snowy 2.0 but where can that be located? And even then, the two Snowys (and associated wind farms) only replace 2GW out of some 20GW of coal capacity that we have at present.
Moving on to batteries. Some people in the industry will tell you they are not supposed to deal with wind droughts, they just deliver instantaneous inputs of power to stabilize the grid in the face of fluctuations of wind and solar input. But still there is talk about putting batteries at Liddell and Yallourn to cover the gap when they close. The problem is the difference in scale between the power that you can get from the battery (after it is charged) compared with the power delivered by the coal plant. The pathetic scale of big batteries is explained here.
Many of the problems in the green energy transition are covered in the briefing papers from the Energy Realists and you can see them all here.
Even CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times have stopped defending him.
These are the same teams that hid the Hunter-Biden Laptop from hell, the “10% for the Big Guy” scandal and that the FBI had possession for a whole year and did nothing.
ABC (America) News said: ” when you listen to the President, he is saying things that simply do not comport with the reality.”
In the last week Joe Biden’s own Defense Secretary, and the Pentagon Spokesman both flatly contradicted him in the media. Tucker Carlson says that’s something that never ever happens.
The Afghanistan debacle was so complete, it’s like it was planned. Could someone merely incompetent achieve a perfect fail?
The New York Times has turned against Joe Biden on Afghanistan. For the last two days, it has covered for him. With only brief, passing mentions, the Times has suppressed the issue of American citizens trapped in Afghanistan.
Today, that is all changed. Not only is the issue of getting Americans out mentioned, the headline article in the print edition is: “Despair in Kabul Undercuts Biden on Rescue Effort: President Goes on Defensive as Criticism of U.S. Evacuation Grows Louder.”
It’s clear if you watch closely that things are changing very fast in Washington. The people around Biden are moving away from him, in ways that are not subtle.
Why is this happening now? Was it always the plan? Did the party that hates white guys finally realize it was being led by one? Again, we don’t know the answer. But the signs are everywhere, and they’re strikingly obvious.
Some of Biden’s most senior appointees are contradicting him in public. If you cover politics, it’s shocking to see that. This is a violation of the first and most ruthlessly enforced rule in any White House: Don’t diminish the boss.
But suddenly they’re doing just that, and they’re doing it openly. Just hours after Joe Biden assured us that things were fine in Afghanistan, for example, Lloyd Austin, his defense secretary, described the situation there as a disaster. And then Austin repeated it, for emphasis. Others are doing the same thing. Biden this afternoon told us that American citizens are having no trouble getting to the airport in Kabul … But just an hour later, the Pentagon spokesman told us that’s not true. Actually, Americans are being beaten in Kabul …
Afghanistan is hardly Biden’s first disaster. As of tonight, our southern border has collapsed, the murder rate is spiking in our cities, the Covid vaccines do not work, inflation’s out of control, and the country’s entire population of school children hasn’t been educated in more than a year. All of that’s been going on. None of that seemed to bother CNN in the slightest. In fact, they reserved their energy to attack anyone who noticed those trends. But now, suddenly their anchors are weeping on the air because Americans are trapped in Afghanistan. They don’t notice the 70,000 who die every year from drug overdoses. But this has sent them into a self-righteous rage. Call us cynical, but we don’t buy it. Something else is going on here.
The legacy media move as a herd. Once a shift comes at the top, the rest will follow. Who will fight for him?The man who got 80 million votes (theoretically) may become one of the shortest serving Presidents in history.
Apparently the Taliban were not waiting for a US President to gift them with helicopters and guns and then run away. What they really needed was climate change:
Rural Afghanistan has been rocked by climate change. The past three decades have brought floods and drought that have destroyed crops and left people hungry. And the Taliban — likely without knowing climate change was the cause — has taken advantage of that pain.
According to the CBS News article, titled “How climate change helped strengthen the Taliban,” “Rural Afghanistan has been rocked by climate change. The past three decades have brought floods and drought that have destroyed crops and left people hungry. And the Taliban — likely without knowing climate change was the cause — has taken advantage of that pain.”
Wake up to the new reality that Solar Panels can stop the Taliban. When you see the crying children in Kabul, feel guilty because you eat meat, drive cars, and heat the world! Then go make yourself a Fairtrade Organic cup of Cocoa and know that you’re helping.
According to CBS News, the farmers were destitute, abandoning their children to extremist influences. They didn’t have enough food to eat or enough water to put on their crops, so they turned to farming poppy seeds for opium. Not that they’ve ever done that before…
Thanks to James Taylor of Hearthland for finding a graph of just how much crop yields have fallen lately.
Crop yields Afghanistan.
Clearly Climate Change causes better crops…
Or maybe climate change is irrelevant, and well, “follow the money”.
Logan explained that the Taliban’s main base is not Afghanistan but Pakistan … She said the U.S. helps fund a good portion if not all of the Pakistani defense budget in terms of military and intelligence services, like the ISI.
“For example, you could stop the money. You could stop the remittances of Pakistanis living in the United States. You could put on sanctions. You could have visas [withdrawn], you know,” Logan said of one potential action the U.S. government could take quickly to counteract the catastrophe in Kabul.
The three Taliban “Shura,” or councils, she added, are all in Pakistan – the Quetta, Peshawar and Miramshah. The Shura all benefit from the “warm embrace of the ISI”, she added.
“The United States has known this from day one.”
This disaster appears to be exactly what the US Swamp wants — they could stop it, yet they don’t.
Carnival Vista | Photo by antonio from Trieste, Italy
by J.D.Rucker:
…according to The Liberty Daily, every staff member and every guest on the ship was vaccinated.
“Somewhere near Cozumel in the Caribbean Sea, there’s a cruise ship that had zero unvaccinated people aboard but that still suffered an outbreak of Covid-19,” the report said. “This goes against the narrative that the reason for ‘breakthrough cases’ is due to too many unvaccinated people mingling with those who have taken the experimental injections.” It continued, “The Carnival Vista, which departed from Galveston, Texas, on July 31, has issued strict face mask protocols and ordered infected people aboard into isolation.
Shipping lines would probably do better by giving passengers free Vitamin D and prescribing anti-virals.
The tale of the contagious cruise ship also implies that States demanding all visitors must be vaccinated might not be achieving much at all. If vaccinated travellers are not quarantined in similar arrangements to the unvaccinated, it’s just a matter of days before they bring in Covid.
According to ANI, now, vaccine certificates or negative COVID-19 tests are also required to enter synagogues, mosques, or churches where there are more than 50 people. The capacity of shops, malls, and industrial parks is also limited to one person per seven square meters. It is worth noting that more than 78 percent of Israel’s approximately nine million people received two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine.
Israel was one of the first nations to load up the vaccines, but the latest figures were suggesting that protection from infection was rapidly waning. People vaccinated in January still had protection from severe disease six months later (mostly) but only 16% protection against being infected. So infections are rapidly rising, and even though hospitalization and death is a lot lower, the hospitals are still struggling. So the new push policy is to get that third shot of Pfizer now:
Israeli PM Naftali Bennett released an audio message urging seniors to get the booster dose on Sunday. In the recorded message, the leader warned that in the next two to three weeks anyone who is over the age of 60 and has not yet received their third vaccine is six times more likely to become seriously ill from the coronavirus, compared to those who are five days past their third shot.
Stepping right into the fray here with the hazmat suit on. Some very bright people are missing the point of locking down with only one known case.
Imagine a virus is like a house fire. When the flames start, we don’t say, “it’s just a curtain, it’s only 1% of the house.”
On Tuesday, New Zealand found one sole Covid case and locked down the entire nation immediately at, like, Defcon level 4. Which sounds bonkers, understandably, to someone living in a place that’s had 38 million cases. But the brilliant Glen Greenwald, bless him, just got this one wrong. “They seem demented (and) oblivious to the costs of sustained isolation” he said, at a point when NZ had sustained all of 13 hours of isolation its first national lockdown for a year.
In similar form, the excellent Nigel Farage, declared Jacinda Ardern had lost her marbles. In response to the foreign critics like these, defiant New Zealanders flocked to the #NZhellhole hashtag and let rip with thousands of scenic photos of ski slopes and beaches mocking what a tough life it was in the NZHellhole prison.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that the death rate in New Zealand of the whole Covid pandemic so far has been just 5 per million — which is 7 times smaller than the Australian death rate and 380 times less than the US and UK.
Think of a bioweapon outbreak like a spark on dry grass.
Exponential growth changes everything. Once there is an uncontrolled flame, the best time to put it out is straight away.
Furthermore — If the strategy is going to be a lockdown of any sort sooner or later — because the hospitals will break at some stage — then every day that passes makes the eventual lockdown longer and more horrible. We can have lighter lockdowns or shorter lockdowns, but not both.
A graph with no data, no units and no numbers because it’s pretty obvious.
So we’re all watching New Zealand in another round of Epidemiology-Games. It is the Delta variant, and they’ve now figured out it came from Sydney making it a clean sweep of infection spreading Delta from NSW to every state and nation in Australasia.
This is still democracy in action.Most New Zealanders probably figure it’s better than Gladys’ plan:
Tess McClure, The Guardian
…a disastrous outbreak of the Delta variant in Sydney has helped galvanise New Zealand’s “team of 5 million” – and across the country, the government’s tough strategy on Covid-19 has enjoyed widespread popular support.
New Zealanders have consistently supported even the toughest anti-Covid measures. About 80% rated the government’s Covid-19 response as overall good, according to polling commissioned by the Spinoff in February, and 59% rated the response as “excellent”.
New Zealand’s strict border controls have allowed citizens to live relatively normal, unimpeded lives for most of the past year – complete with packed restaurants, music festivals, and uninterrupted schooling. The country has surpassed the US and UK on measures including unemployment, quality of life, freedom of movement, and debt to GDP ratios. It has also suffered a relatively tiny number of deaths, hospitalisations, or serious illness and disability from Covid-19.
“We have spent very little time under restrictions compared to other countries,” says Wiles. “And we know that the stricter those restrictions are, if you use them well – we’ve lived those benefits. We’ve been living in this incredible bubble.”
A healthy economy starts with healthy people.
But here is a surprise…
To reduce Covid, New Zealand suspends vaccinations
Instead of going into overdrive to put people in long queues to get vaccinated, the New Zealand vaccination program has been suspended entirely. Presumably it will start soon with drive-by vaccines or some format that reduces the risk of spreading Covid.
Vaccines are slow medicines for a fast virus which increase the spread of the virus now, in order to prevent infections in a couple of months time.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced Covid vaccinations will be suspended for 48 hours due to a nationwide lockdown. “We want to ensure vaccinations can still take place in a safe environment… we will be providing a further update in the next 24 hours,” Ardern said this evening.
She said officials would be considering whether drive-through vaccinations were the best option and what other precautions could be put in place to ensure it was safe. Director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield echoed Ardern’s comments, saying we wanted to minimise movement as much as possible.
This is what a health department does if it is serious about stopping the spread rather than just being a promotions machine for Big Pharma, not mentioning any names Gladys Berejiklian.
Best wishes to our NZ friends in the hope that restrictions will end as soon and successfully as possible. And best wishes to anyone in lockdown restrictions anywhere.
This may seem like an esoteric discussion to people in places where elimination seems impossible, but in the Bioweapons Cold War Era, we still need to get this right. There are 1600 more bat viruses in the freezer at Wuhan.
Thirty years later and the main two arguments of the IPCC are the Hockeystick and Ignorance Graph.
Essentially, the Chosen Expert Modelers look at the recent warming and say “‘we’re certain it’s CO2 because we can’t think of anything else”. Or more specifically, “we know it’s CO2, because our broken models don’t work without it”. Their models don’t work with it either but no one really cares.
These are the same models that don’t include any solar magnetic effect, solar wind factors or solar spectral changes. If the Sun was driving the climate, their models will never figure that out.
That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Figure 1b of thousands in IP6.
This is the classic fallacy known for a few hundred years as Argument from Ignorance. The more ignorant the climate researchers are, the worse CO2 looks.
In the 6th dimension of Intergovernmental Climate Propaganda, which arrived last week, the long discredited Hockeystick is not just a sidenote, it’s the very first graph the IPCC uses in their Summary for Powerful people (the ones who make policy).
As per usual, hundreds of years of warmth has been retro-extinguished. Thousands of proxies around the world all deviated from the real temperature and non-randomly in the same direction. It’s a conspiracy I tell you! Luckily the IPCC has found scientists who can correct these simultaneous errors of proxiness which mostly they do by just tossing out the results they don’t like. They ignore whole series they don’t like, delete the years that don’t work for them, and flip that data upside down if they need to. And if that’s not enough they use trees that grow larger rings when CO2 is higher.
And when they are not deleteing data, they’re using the wrong trees. No one is even pretending anymore. They’ve done it all before and no one went to jail or even lost a job.
As Steve MacIntyre tells it the PAGES2017 data set winnowed down the thousands of proxies to their 692 favorite ones. In PAGES2019, instead of getting more data, they got less, and now there are only 257 proxies.
You might think they were the 257 longest or best proxies, but about 25% of the ones that made it through are short coral studies which often have steep rises in the last 50 years, but no information at all for the two thousand years before that, that mattered.
Figure 1, IPCC 6AR. page 8 PDF
Steve McIntyre slices and dices the Zombie Hockeystick.
Although climate scientists keep telling that defects in their “hockey stick” proxy reconstructions don’t matter – that it doesn’t matter whether they use data upside down, that it doesn’t matter if they cherry pick individual series depending on whether they go up in the 20th century, that it doesn’t matter if they discard series that don’t go the “right” way (“hide the decline”), that it doesn’t matter if they used contaminated data or stripbark bristlecones, that such errors don’t matter because the hockey stick itself doesn’t matter – the IPCC remains addicted to hockey sticks: lo and behold, Figure 1a of its newly minted Summary for Policy-makers contains what else – a hockey stick diagram. If you thought Michael Mann’s hockey stick was bad, imagine a woke hockey stick by woke climate scientists. As the climate scientists say, it’s even worse that we thought.
To give the average punter an idea of just how industrial-grade the cherry picking is, McIntyre picks a random assortment of proxy histories the IPCC filtered out in order to discover the modern Hockeystick marked in Red.
The Black graphs disappeared, the blue graphs lived on, and the red line is the politically correct history of the temperature on Earth.
Random selection of proxies that didn’t show unprecedented global warming in PAGES 2017. The IPPC interpretation in Red.
Curiously, Cape Ghir (bottom right) off Morocco actually has a hockeystick, but its one of unprecedented cooling. It’s an alkenone proxy, which McIntyre describes as being good for estimating ocean temperatures, and used so often they have boilerplate formulas to convert the values into temperatures. However this is clearly wrong, the IPCC heroes know the temperatures were rising (how could it be any other way?) so they flip the graph to “discover” the warming. Up is down, black is white, you know the drill, Winston. They’ve done it before.
And a quarter of the cherries that were picked were the brief coral studies which tell us nothing about the Medieval Warm Period:
Coral Temperature Proxies
Hiding the decline
Since about 1960 tree rings and other proxies “diverge” from thermometers probably because tree rings are often not good thermometers, and sometimes thermometers are not good thermometers either — especially when they are put near exhaust vents from air conditioning units.
MacIntrye:
They took “hide the decline” to extremes that had never been contemplated by prior practitioners of this dark art. Rather than hiding the decline in the final product, they did so for individual trees: as explained in the underlying article, they excluded the “divergent portions” of individual trees that had temerity to have decreasing growth in recent years. Even Briffa would never have contemplated such woke radical measures.
Say hello to Divergence-free regional chronology?
“…rather than excluding divergent series altogether,
we exclude only the divergent portions of these series.“
If you don’t like your data, you can delete your data.
See the bump around World War II in the top graph? It’s gone…
…
The warming around WWII was “divergent” from climate models and government grants. It was deleted.
The 2021 Zombie Hockeystick also includes that famous tree that responds to increasing CO2 levels by growing larger rings.
Five different PAGES2019 series use stripbark bristlecones…
By confusing cause with effect the stripbark pines are the ultimate tool to find warming at exactly the same time as CO2 rises.
Read it all: https://climateaudit.org/2021/08/11/the-ipcc-ar6-hockeystick/
Eight weeks ago, Australians weren’t that interested in the vaccines to an exotic foreign disease. Back then, only 7% of the population were fully vaccinated, and now, viola, it’s 21% of the nation (which is a quarter of all adults).
By letting the virus leak in to a Limo Driver, who could have been protected with a $50 Hazmat suit, and then being too slow to act, the Premier of New South Wales has lit a fire under the rush to vaccination, not just in NSW but indirectly across the rest of Australia, since nearly every state has now been infected with a Covid strain that has a post-mark from Sydney. By trying to do a minimalist response, she ensured maximal type of lockdown.
She’s now saying the Delta virus can’t be eliminated, even though most other states have done that, and everyone knows it.
Big Pharma must be delighted. The CCP too.
Australia and New Zealand were in a bubble of freedom and safety that was, unfortunately, antithetical to the advertising pitch and hit jingle — “Vaccines are the only way out”. Despite being 93% vaccine-free (or more) the two nations had one fiftieth the deaths-per-capita of the UK and USA, and less economic damage too, showing that hard borders beats vaccination for viral control. It stood as an example of a better way to deal with the average bioweapon. Any nations that locked out the disease could open their borders to each other, and their economy, and they didn’t need Big Pharma.
Australia and New Zealand had the luxury of watching the results of the epidemiological experiments and mass-mutation-games around the world. But that’s all at risk now, and the only solution (apparently) is mass vaccination.
It’s a national emergency, lets use the slowest medicine we can find?
Given that this slow medicine takes five to ten weeks to work, it remains unexplained why anyone would pick it to beat a surging epidemic with a doubling time of four days. Especially when there are other medicines that work in hours and are insanely cheap. The cost of a single day of lockdown in Sydney would cover free national doses of the drug that shall-not-be-named plus probably enough Vitamin D, Zinc, B6 and B12 to give 25 million people a lifetime supply and deworm all the cattle in Australia too. It’s almost as if the government is spending other people’s money?
I’m not suggesting that Big Pharma are running the NSW Department of Health. I’m just saying that if they were, all the Department decisions would look uncannily the same.
They must be very happy that Gladys is in charge of nearly the whole nation’s strategy.
If you would rather live without mandatory vaccination or at least be able to wait for more data, a longer safety record, or other choices, the Sydney outbreak is making it much harder.
The lockdown might have ended already if close contacts were given antivirals and Vitamin D.
There are almost no brave people left in academia, or sport, or the land of celebrity. When one of their own faces the axe for some random transgression of an invisible rule book on political niceties, their colleagues abandon them.
In academia, they’re supposed to be the intellectual cream of the crop –the individual giants who fought their way to the top. But it’s like we’ve selected for wary herding people instead. And perhaps that’s the point. When universities were turned into schools and businesses, and quirky philanthropist funding became predictable Big-Government largess, the mavericks and rebels didn’t fit and one by one were expelled, sacked — or just pushed sideways til they fell out. What’s left in the wasteland of academia, apparently, are the mid-wit networking climbers. The middling Ordinaires rose into positions above their due and became afraid of losing the sweeter deal than they deserved. If they were the top dogs in their field, and if that mattered, they could speak their mind, get sacked, and still be offered a new position at a competing institution. But second rung players don’t have that option. They won’t put their head above the parapet and say up is not down, and 3 is not 2.
Clearly universities don’t want to employ giants. They can’t control them.
This teacher, years ago, worked on something that an anonymous accuser suddenly declared was demeaning to Asians. The teacher’s years of service and excellent record counted for nothing. A petition was gathered among students, who were possibly also too afraid to look like closet racists by not signing it. Why would students show the integrity and bravery their teachers lacked? And thus a mob was born. The terms “homophobia” and “body shaming” was added somewhere along the line. There was no investigation in any meaningful manner. She was cancelled.
Mac Donald puts it this way: “Vaughn’s colleagues, cowering from the mob, let her twist in the wind. Almost none came to her defense.” … None of her active colleagues in 2020 protested, and the administration didn’t bother to investigate the charges.
How is it that the faculty said nothing and that administrators acted so precipitously to satisfy the angry kids?
It’s not just academics, it’s sports leaders and CEO’s who rush to appease too:
[It’s the].. college president who rushes to apologize for imaginary crimes, the CEOs who pour money into the coffers of Black Lives Matter leaders who despise the very system that the business heads otherwise uphold, the famous actor who turns his own (putatively) insensitive remark into a public drama of penitence . . . fear has turned them into timorous tacticians. Where is the confidence that naturally follows from accomplishment?
They’re nervous, very nervous—and they’re willing to violate the norms of their own workplaces and fields and personal ethics when the pressure comes, or at least to retire in fear as others commit those violations. One wonders if there is something about the ladder of achievement in 21st century America that robs individuals of integrity the higher they go.
“…like a form of cultural suicide has taken hold”
A society whose leaders are so easily cowed is heading toward a dark fate. To watch our prestigious academic chiefs bow down to a pack of irate 20-year-olds is to feel the American spirit drain away. To observe an eminence in the world of sports lose all his mojo and beg forgiveness for a lapse most of us chalk up to the ordinary sins of ordinary people is to suspect that an ethos of cultural suicide has taken hold.
The highly credentialed members of our society boast of their worldliness and tolerance and enlightenment, but there is now more freedom of speech and diversity of thought in an automotive repair shop than there is in the faculty lounge. Never has there been more insecurity among the smart set, never more caution in the boardroom.
Merit used to bring rewards:
Achievement hasn’t made them more comfortable, and it hasn’t brought them more freedom.
They know they’re weak, and that’s hard for a superior person to accept. Despising Donald Trump and his fans made them feel better. Trump is out, but they still have January 6, and people who resist the vaccine, and who push the audits…
We can all see where this is headed but it ain’t over yet.
Politically correct shackles are just words, so they can be defeated by words.
Support those on the front line of the cultural war, the politicians who take the hard road, the journalists who do a good job. The Peter Ridds of the world. Even a friendly message helps. Just say thanks. Share the messages you like, and the jokes. Spread the word. Subscribe, follow and link to the leaders you admire.
Thanks from me to those who take the time to name and shame the biased journalists and silent academics. If those cultural cowards fear student-mobs, they will fear organized grown-ups even more. Group-thinkers, after all, need to think they are on the same side as The Group. Never underestimate how much it will get to them if they find out thousands of polite steadfast adults disagree.
And every waking minute, mock political correctness in all its forms and never apologize for the great nations that we inherited, that defeated slavery, and gave women and men freedom and peace like no other civilization on Earth.
It’s a culture war, so fight with cultural tools. There is a reason the politerati warriors hate national flags. Use them.
This is what students were protesting against ion 1960 in San Diego
They want us to trust them, but if they won’t investigate cheap options, they don’t appear to have our interests at heart. Who do they serve?
Even if a long-used safe cheap drug reduced infections or deaths by 10% the cost-benefits of using it are obvious for everyone (except the companies that sell expensive competing products). The studies we have suggest one antiviral (and there are many others) could reduce infections by 86% and deaths by 50% or more. The antiviral successes against Covid in India, Mexico and Peru are there for all to see. If antivirals were being used in Sydney perhaps they could have halved the Ro (or more), slowed the spread, saved lives and businesses and shortened the lockdown?
Which brings us to the awkward questions that almost no one seems to be even asking: Why aren’t cheap low risk drugs already well tested ten times over? Why aren’t the TGA and Health Ministry urgently working to fix obvious clinical vitamin deficiencies like D3? Where is the ABC and our publicly funded institutions and our academics? Isn’t the point of publicly funded universities so they can do the research that corporates won’t do?
They want us to trust them, but if they won’t investigate cheap options, it doesn’t exactly sell themselves as groups that have our interests at heart. Vaccine hesitancy might be a lot less if people still trusted our institutions and knew they were considering all the options, not just the ones that happen to suit pharmaceutical stockholders. Just saying….?
Millions of Australians are extremely concerned about the federal government’s push to force hastily approved and poorly tested novel vaccines on the population, when adequate long term safety data is unavailable. It is also is of great concern that many notable doctors and medical researchers reporting successful treatment using cheap, safe generic anti viral drugs appear to be ignored by the government and TGA, due to these generic drugs being of little commercial value and not sponsored by pharmaceutical companies for approval by the TGA
We therefore ask the House to formally request that the TGA assess the use of Ivermectine and Hydroxycloriquine, in the recommended dosages and combination with complimentary drugs, based on the peer reviewed studies and data, and the recommendation of notable Australian medical researchers such as Proffesor Thomas Borody and Professor Robert Clancy. We ask that the house requests this of the TGA in the absence of sponsorship by a pharmaceutical corporation, seeing as both of these drugs are generic and of little commercial value to an individual company, and due to the conflict of interest many of these companies have with competing patented vaccines of far higher commercial interest. We believe that if this is performed thoroughly and transparently it will restore public faith in the federal government, and also provide confidence to the public that all options for treatment are being honestly explored.
Even CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times have stopped defending him.
Australia and New Zealand were in a bubble of freedom and safety that was, unfortunately, antithetical to the advertising pitch and hit jingle — “Vaccines are the only way out”. Despite being 93% vaccine-free (or more) the two nations had one fiftieth the deaths-per-capita of the UK and USA, and less economic damage too, showing that hard borders beats vaccination for viral control. It stood as an example of a better way to deal with the average bioweapon. Any nations that locked out the disease could open their borders to each other, and their economy, and they didn’t need Big Pharma.
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