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We finally reached a turning point with Omicron that suggests we have it’s measure. We couldn’t know if the South African experience would translate to the overweight, indoor and diabetic parts of the world given 60% in South Africa had already had Covid — plus it was summer, and that part of the world is more familiar with certain anti-virals which must not be named. But the news from the UK is about as good as we could have hoped. And Hallalujah, restrictions are being wound back in the UK. Hurrah! It’s three doses of Covid cheer as UK cases continue to plunge, Plan B curbs may soon be liftedDailyMail, UK  Modeling Omicron UK Daily Mail
And on hospitalizations The hospitalization curve in the UK has just (maybe) started to decline, and if there are no surprises, then Omicron is roughly kinda 10% as severe as Delta was.  Modelling Hospitalizations in the UK. Omicron
I know some will feel that this is no news at all and we could see this coming for weeks. But bear in mind that in South Africa, the country far ahead of us all, the deaths have only just plateaued the last three days (we hope). The peak of infections in South Africa was December 17th. So that’s a full month’s lag from cases to deaths.  Deaths may have only just hit the peak in South Africa. Graph OWID.
And right now, deaths are rising around the world, with the exception of Germany:  Source. OWID There are plenty of ways this could have turned out differently. Even now, we don’t know the after effects or “sequelae” — like the long Covid tally, or how long natural immunity will last, or whether there is some inflammatory, or autoimmune side effect. A lot of people are turning up in hospital for other things, and being diagnosed with Covid. Most likely Omicron is ripping through the population faster and more asymptomatically than anyone thought, but what if there are other symptoms taking people to hospital that we don’t associate with Covid? We’d hope the docs have figured that out, but it would be nice to see someone in the media even ask the question. We are not at the end of the Omicron track yet. And as long as we suppress safe cheap drugs and keep injecting 90% of the population with a leaky ineffective vaccine, the next variant-of-concern is in production right now. Welcome to a world where El Salvador leads the way in medical care As early as July 2020 El Salvador was trialling kits to treat Covid that included Ivermectin. Cases were starting to rise, so on August 9, 2020 the President Nayib Bukele made a national announcement that treatment kits and tests were available. Anyone with symptoms could call up the helpline and a box would be delivered to their home. The treatment kits included ivermectin, azithromycin, zinc, Vitamin D, Panadol, and an antihistamine. By January 2021 cases were on the rise again and so Ivermectin was made available over the counter without a prescription for anyone to buy at pharmacies. Meanwhile the vaccine rollout began in February 2021. But by April 9 only 2.8% of the population was vaccinated. The rate of delivery increased from there. By January 2022, El Salvador became possibly the first country in the world to tell people to “get fit” to beat Covid. Imagine suggesting that? Lucky El Salvador didn’t wait for the random controlled trials to develop a treatment kit. Wow.
 The first Covid peak was the day after the President announced home deliveries of treatment kits. The second peak was day after the news was announced that Ivermectin would be available without a prescription. Here’s El Salvador compared to the rich nations of the world: On a cases per million basis, the “big” surges in El Salvador were … tiny. Especially when compared to the West.  Per capita cases of Covid. El Salvador managed the pandemic better than nearly anywhere. The kits were described by one doctor as like a take away food delivery. Here’s a lady delivering some, as seen on a WHO video which praises El Salvador . It mentions masses of treatment kits (at 2:30) but does not list a single ingredient. Just like magic, getting a cardboard box will save you?  Vans were sent to homes of infected people to deliver treatment kits. (WHO Video) By February 2021 El Salvador had delivered 200,000 treatment kits. But at this stage people were also buying itself for themselves from the local pharmacy too.  200,000 kits were delivered to homes by Feb 2021 | WHO Video El Salvador kits for treating Covid TrialsiteNews listed the ingredients: Called the “Outpatient Treatment for COVID-19, the protocol includes the following: Medicines Dose / Duration
So who is this President of El Salvador and how did he get the idea to use anti-virals?It seems that back in May 2020 he was already onto the potential of other drugs. Salvadoran leader says he takes drug touted by Trump for coronavirusSAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said on Tuesday he takes hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug that U.S. President Donald Trump has promoted as a way to ward off the novel coronavirus, though experts have warned about its safety. Bukele told reporters that El Salvador was not promoting it anymore as a treatment, following the recommendation of the World Health Organization, though patients would still be able to take it as a preventative measure if they wished. “I use it as a prophylaxis, President Trump uses it as a prophylaxis, most of the world’s leaders use it as a prophylaxis,” Bukele said. On a cumulative basis El Salvador has done exceptionally wellOnly New Zealand has lower cases:  Few have done better than El Salvador. | Source: OWID It’s fair to ask if El Salvador has done enough testing, but the test positivity rate varied from 3% – 15% which is on par with many countries. And in terms of total death rates per million from Covid — El Salvador at 587 per million was worse than New Zealand (10) and Australia(95) but lower than Canada (820), the UK (2,200), and the US (2,500).
How many of us would have predicted two years ago that we’d have more freedom and more competent medical treatment in El Salvador than we could get at home? Send these figures around the world. People need to know. * * * All studies on ivermectin are here. There are 20 known mechanisms of action: It’s so safe doctors fed it to primary school children to treat lice in Canberra. It has been used to virtually eliminate Covid in Japan,Uttar Pradesh, and in Indonesia where it cut Covid by 98% at the same time cases in Australia grew 500% with Lock-n-Vax. There are also success stories from Peru,Brazil, and Mexico. Keep reading → January 18th, 2022 | Tags: Coronavirus, Ivermectin, Vaccine | Category: Health |  Print This Post | | Scott Manley has done an excellent summary video of the Tongan volcano, much of the science and history of it as well as the effects thousands of miles away. The area around the volcano had completely reformed in the last ten years. He has collected some great footage together. It’s interesting watching air pressure waves travel across Japan and the USA. Ken Stewart found the compression- decompression wave hit the east coast of Australia at about 5:16 Qld time and took 3 hours and 24 minutes roughly to get to Shark Bay, an average speed of about 1,160 kph. The decompression was about half an hour after the first peak and can be seen (still) in weather station pressure data. Eruptions of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai are roughly 900 years apart and this one was on schedule. Thanks to Greg A The CliffMass weather blog noted that the pressure wave hit Seattle at 4:30AM local time, so the air pressure spike took 8.5 hours to cross the Pacific at about 664miles per hour. h/t WattsUp Sending best wishes for the poor people of Tonga. Planes are on the way to help, slightly complicated because Tonga is still Covid free, and people there are not too keen on dealing with that at the same time as the recovery. Will Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai make a difference to global temperatures or will just it provide a convenient excuse for cooling that may be on the way in 2022 anyhow? January 18th, 2022 | Tags: Pacific Islands, Volcano | Category: Geology, Global Warming, Meteorology, Oceans | Print This Post | |
by Jo Nova Who would have guessed that giant protected monopolies would devolve into wallowing workplaces where sad-sack un-productive workers accumulate? “Hazard Harrington” writes from the inside of Big Tech about the terminal decline, the dark moods, despondency and lack of productivity. When the most exulted culture at work are the most victimized, the miserable workers share their misery and nobody gets anything done. Wokeness is that dead end where everyone can blame everyone else, and no one, apart from white men, can be sacked. So the people who can’t compete collect in a kind of Sargasso sea of civilization. h/t Bill in AZ UPDATE: Hazard Harrington’s account is now gone. Archive copy @HazardHarringto from Inside Big Tech … COVID/WFH [Working From Home] has totally broken people. They are fundamentally weak, often with no social support outside of work. They’re the people with no children, no spouse. Only a dog or cat for emotional support. There’s constant talk, even now, about how hard things are for everyone. Often meetings start with going around the room to ask “How is everyone feeling?” Literally everyone else went on sad rants about their lives. “I’m so MAD a white supremacist shot 3 black men in Kenosha!” It’s bad to feel good: It’s toxic. When it got to me, I said “Good.” and then a (((lady engineer))) literally proposed that we should not be allowed to answer the question positively. I shit you not. I think it hurt her that I wasn’t as miserable as her. She made some argument about “vulnerability”. These people not only want you weak, they want you to expose your vulnerabilities to them so they can exploit them. They may not intend this explicitly, but whatever twisted ideology they worship ends with this result.
So back to morale. Everyone is demoralized. This may surprise you, since Big Tech is extremely well paid and has been able to WFH throughout the past 2 years. They’ve been given extra days off, extra stipends, bonuses, etc. They never had to fear being laid off.
Thus The Big Tech empires have become Soviet style microcosms — because they are protected by Big-Government and able to swallow up competition in a predatory easy way, they lost the hard edge of competition and gained the luxury of supporting and fostering every cultural soft whimsy, debilitating ideology, and self-defeating dark habit. The Great Resignation is real. Many employees are leaving for better jobs. Remote work has (so far) resulted in more job opportunities for those working in Big Tech, especially outside of Silicon Valley. And so we backfill those positions, or hire new people, all remote. We now have employees who have nearly 2 years of tenure who have never met another employee in person, and lives alone in some city away from where the office was. The churn in good workers leaves the last decent employees training everyone new. They can’t get anything done, but the new employees, probably remote, don’t get enough support to thrive either. We’re running on the code written in years past. No major new product initatives are being launched. Bosses have become left-wing therapists We know Big Tech management will sack people with conservative or outspoken male views, or who just says “toughen up sunshine” because they are not paying enough deference to the Wokish totems. So it follows that the vacuum of realism was filled with red carpet support for anyone as long as they’re “sufficiently left” or a minority. They “can agitate, complain, do no work, and continue employment.” That in turn became the self-reinforcing spiral. The sensible left cajoled each other into becoming militant progressives and there was no one there to put the brakes on. Management has become “understanding” to the extreme. Anyone who has had a bad sleep can be excused for the day. “Bring your whole self to work” was the Big Tech mantra. Tell people about your cool hobbies, share your politics (if you’re far left only), share your sex life. This plus the feeling of distance an online-only presence creates has made people braver in speaking their thoughts. You used to have to have the balls to knock on the CEOs office door, or schedule a meeting. Now you can fire off a nasty Slack message straight to her. People will openly write threads and comments throughout Slack bad-mouthing the higher ups at the company. And they do nothing. Productivity is essentially zero, or less: We had a woman who worked for us who was just awful at her job. Could not understand instructions at all. Could not do the job. Barely spoke English. She wasn’t just not productive, she actually dragged the team down. I worked with my Director to finally get her fired after… …failing her Performance Improvement Program (PIP). HR told us they can’t fire her because she’s Asian and female and in California, that it’s just simply too hard. This was over 5 years ago. And I’m not productive either. I’m constantly bombarded with anti-white, anti-male, woke propaganda. We’ve even had explicit discussions of assigning less work to URMs (under-represented minorities), because “life is really hard for them right now.” This suggestion was from a lesbian white woman with cats. As productive as one person can be, you can’t add value when constantly thwarted. I worry about this apathy spreading to companies that matter. Ones that write software for utilities. The Great Monopolies have become socialist corporations like the USSR, eaten from within, but running on momentum.
Big Tech leads the way, but the commenters below this extraordinary thread find similar themes in their own workplaces, in academia and “much of American society in general”. America needs a mass emigration from Big Tech to Free Tech, and Big Tech is working towards that, banning their own most popular commentators. The more they ban the better. But here’s thing, Hazard Harrington is writing about the flaws of Big Tech from his Twitter account. He’s gone from 0 to 17,000 followers in just two months. If you visit @HazardHarringto — tell him to make his exit plan now to take his readership with him. We all need an escape plan. Dark Hall Photo by Foundry UPDATE: Judges decision is final. Djokovic to be deported. He faces a three year ban potentially. “An embarassing farce”. No one looks good in the Novak Djokovic Deportation saga, but ponder what it says about the vaccines. We’re deporting the best tennis player in the world — not because of the germs he might spread, but to because of the ideas he might spread. “It’s in the public interest” says the Immigration Minister While some are cheering One Rule for All, ponder that we’re punishing someone because of what other people might do? Djokovic is a political prisoner:Immigration minister Alex Hawke didn’t dispute Djokovic’s claim of a medical exemption… [he] said allowing the player to stay could sway some Australians against getting vaccinated. “Mr. Djokovic’s presence in Australia may pose a health risk to the Australian community in that his presence in Australia may foster antivaccination sentiment,” Hawke said in a document detailing his decision. “His presence in Australia, given his well-known stance on vaccination, creates a risk of strengthening the antivaccination sentiment of a minority of the Australian community,” Hawke said in the cancellation notice. It’s a free speech battle. And yet Djokovic didn’t come here to make a political point. He wasn’t brandishing his state of unvaccination. He has steadfastly refused to discuss his medical choices. If Australia can’t guarantee players in a Grand Slam will be free of political interference we don’t deserve to host one. Two other players with medical exemptions arrived in Australia and were moving around freely, but turned around and left after Djokovic was detained. It’s all so sordid. Renata Voracova was deported after being ordered to strip in a six-hour interrogation. Others like Frenchman Jeremy Chardy chose not to even come after having an adverse reaction to his first dose and deciding not to have the second. If the border rule about vaccination was about health and not politics, it would have allowed people to use alternatives like testing, or quarantine, or effective antivirals. It’s become a farce — a global advertising campaign that says “Don’t visit Australia”. Tourism Australia must be cringing. It’s not “one law for all” when it’s selectively enforcedSome say deporting Djokovic is a victory for “one rule for all”. But only the unvaxxed will be given a legal visa, allowed to fly in, detained, and post hoc have all their details scrutinized by teams of lawyers and be turned into a media circus and a “lesson” for the public. How many vaccinated tennis players got things wrong on their forms? Who knows? Apparently no one verified the details of Novak’s forms before he was given a visa, so presumably no one checked any other ones either. Will the Australian government go through all the vaccinated players applications now and arrest them on court if any got things wrong? The unvaccinated are being punished and singled out. Why did they issue him a visa in the first place? What sacrifice exactly are we protecting? Prime Minister Scott Morrison: “Australians have made many sacrifices during this pandemic, and they rightly expect the result of those sacrifices to be protected,” he said Friday evening. Because we are certainly not protecting the hard border any more. Australia has had 1.5 million cases of Covid (that we know of) in the last four weeks. All of whom ultimately caught it in a chain from double-vaccinated travellers. Perhaps Scott Morrison is afraid that people who had been forced into getting a vaccine they really didn’t want would realize they were bullied into it, and should have had a choice too? As Alexandra Marshall @ellymelly says: #Scomo had Alex Hawke throw #Novak out of the country for ‘inciting’ antivaxx sentiment. How can you be deported for ‘inciting’ sentiment against a health order that ISN’T mandatory? In the latest news a judge (or three) will decide Sunday if Djokovic can stay. Seen on Twitter from @TennisSerbia  … The donations don’t excuse people breaking the rules, but in the PR game of Australia versus Novak, Australia looks embarrassing. Novak wants to play tennis. We are not being good sports. After the government lost in court, they waited days til 5:50pm Friday night to announce they were revoking his visa for a competition that starts Monday. Presumably they figured they had a weak case and didn’t want him to have more time to appeal. Australians justifiably hate the hypocrisy of the rich and famous getting exemptions, so this has lit a fire among fed-up Australians. But the real target of that anger should be spread a lot wider. If the rules really mattered, the government would have investigated all the visa applicants before they gave them visas. If it was about health then we can hardly block the unvaccinated when the vaccinated have the same viral loads. If we were trying to stop Covid on planes we’d ask people to take ivermectin. Keep reading → January 16th, 2022 | Tags: Free Speech, Vaccine | Category: Australia, Big-Government, Free Speech, Global Warming | Print This Post | | Global leaders must be sweatingData from Public Health Scotland (PHS) is showing that not only are the “double jabbed” more likely to catch Omicron than the unvaxxinated — but they are more likely to be hospitalized as well. And that’s on a per capita basis and after controlling for age. The triple jabbed are less likely to end up in hospital than both other groups, but for how long? Wow. Covid Scotland: Case rates lowest in unvaccinated as double-jabbed elderly drive rise in hospital admissionsBy Helen McArdle, Herald Scotland DOUBLE-JABBED Scots are now more likely to be admitted to hospital with Covid than the unvaccinated amid an increase in elderly people falling ill due to waning immunity. It comes amid “weird” data showing that case rates have been lower in unvaccinated individuals than the single, double, or even triple-jabbed since Omicron became the dominant variant in Scotland. Right now the double-jabbed are catching Covid twice as often as the unvaxxed in Scotland. Even the triple jabbed are slightly more likely to catch Covid than the unvaccinated.
Preliminary data for last week – which is age-standardised to adjust for the fact that younger people are more likely than older adults to be unvaccinated – shows a Covid case rate of 11 per 1000 in the unvaccinated group compared to 15 per 1000 for those who had received a booster or third dose, and 25 per 1000 for the double-vaccinated cohort. Well that breaks the narrative: Who exactly is putting who at risk? The people spreading Covid at the moment are more likely to be vaccinated than unvaccinated. Yet they are not the ones being banned from cinemas, bars and clubs. The Double Jabbed are even more likely to end up in hospitalThere goes the last main argument for mandatory vaccines. The hospital beds are not being filled by the selfish unvaccinated. In the week ending January 7, the hospitalisation rate was also twice as high in the double-jabbed compared to the unvaccinated – 130 admissions per 100,000 versus 59 per 100,000 – but fell to just 15 per 100,000 in the triple-jabbed.  … No wonder world leaders are telling the double jabbed to “get boosted” The triple vaxxed are for the moment, thankfully, less likely to die (of Covid anyway) All the death rates for Omicron are in the order of 1 in 20,000 which is a blessing. But given that death can take 4 – 8 weeks, it’s perhaps a little too soon to fix these ratios in stone for the Omicron wave that is still steaming: In the final week of December, the death rate was 7.06 per 100,000 among the double-jabbed compared to 4.79 per 100,000 in the unvaccinated, and 0.21 per 100,000 in the triple-vaccinated. The vaxxed and unvaxxed groups are obviously not the same to start with. Even when age is controlled the vaccinated may be working in riskier jobs, more likely to take Covid tests, and are a higher risk group. The unvaccinated may be healthier to start with, and also more likely to have natural immunity. What about natural immunity?Helen McArdle of the Herald Scotland (paywalled) tries to investigate why the data is so odd, but despite all the expert waffle, natural immunity is left til the end and only called “past infections”. If many people in the “unvaccinated” category are actually “immunised with the real deal” then the truly unvaccinated might not score so well if the people with natural immunity are taken out and put into their own grouping. I’m sure the experts know this, so it’s a little surprising they haven’t rushed out and done that? Why is natural immunity so hushed up? What if natural immunity without a vaccine worked better in young healthy people than the quasi unnatural mixed immunity? The data would look like this too. The people getting in trouble now appear to be the ones who were due for a booster, but haven’t got it. So they were the first to be double jabbed and were higher income older high risk people. Their double-vaccine is long past it’s best-by-date. These are the people filling hospital beds, but no one is suggesting they should pay a health fee, lose their jobs, or be banned from flying. Who’s caught more Covid, – the twenty-somethingsOver the whole pandemic the group who’s caught Covid the most in Scotland are the 20 – 24 year olds. Seen below in cumulative data with 100,000 cases per 100,000 population.  Source: Public Health Scotland. In other news, even the boss of Pfizer says that two doses are not working against Omicron.  …. What this means according to Alex Berenson Keep reading →  Author BernbaumJG Our immune systems are a fully functioning type of AI, or rather BI — biological intelligence. After millions of years of evolution, the system is tuned for efficiency with feedback loops “up the kazoo”. We’re provoking a complicated system we don’t understand. It’s quite possible, if we keep provoking it with something “non threatening”, rather than getting more excited, the immune system may get bored. It could also get tired, desensitized, or exhausted. Robert Malone warned months ago that we need to test each round of vaccines and we can’t assume our bodies will respond the same way. Whatever it is, the European Medicines Agency wants to put the brakes on the booster program: Frequent Boosters Spur Warning on Immune ResponseBy: Bloomberg | Repeat booster doses every four months could eventually weaken the immune response and tire out people, according to the European Medicines Agency. European Union regulators warned that frequent Covid-19 booster shots could adversely affect the immune response and may not be feasible. Repeat booster doses every four months could eventually weaken the immune response and tire out people, according to the European Medicines Agency. Instead, countries should leave more time between booster programs and tie them to the onset of the cold season in each hemisphere, following the blueprint set out by influenza vaccination strategies, the agency said. The head of vaccine strategy at the EMA said that we can’t repeat boosters constantly: “We should be careful in not overloading the immune system with repeated immunizations” — Marco Cavaleri, the EMA head of biological health threats and vaccines strategy He also said effectively that we don’t even know exactly how many antibodies people need to get protection. We can’t define the threshhold of protection. Some people with quite high levels of neutralizing antibody still got infected while people with low levels of neutralizing antibody that did not get sick in the trials. This is a bit of a major problem I would think. Isn’t the usual test to see if someone has “protection” just a blood test looking for antibodies? If that doesn’t work, something is very wrong with the mental model we have for how vaccines operate? Is it some other antibodies that really offer protection, ones they are not testing for? h/t Beowulf Why does “seven years” suddenly matter? “The past 7 years have been the hottest on record “by a clear margin,” scientists say” Since when do we do climate analysis on seven year periods? — Since climate scientists get rewarded for scaring taxpayers and “seven” is this years lucky number. 2021 wasn’t THE hottest year so they have to come up with somethingIn climate “science” there are always a thousand combinations and permutations of climate records to pick from, so it’s a snap to find one that sings. If it wasn’t the hottest year in 2021, it might have been the hottest global summer, warmest winter, driest spring, or stormiest “on record”. And if temperatures stop rising, the hottest year record stretches elastically into the hottest 2-years, 3-years and 5 years-on-record. Scientifically, the climate interval that matters most is whatever it has to be to stretch out and sing “Bingo” — “The Met Bureau needs more money.” Naturally all Climate Bingo games are boosted by inexplicable adjustments, badly placed thermometers, shrinking thermometer screens, and the process of constantly rewriting history. If the incinerators near thermometers don’t do it, the homogenization will. They might be Australian tricks, but most Met Bureaus are the same. Remember the shocking heat of 1998 — the UAH satellites still do, but all the other temperature sets have erased it.  …. It also helps that most of history has been wiped outThe collective amnesia at Met Bureaus doesn’t just include days like the hottest day ever recorded in Australia in modern equipment (which was 51.7C in Bourke in 1909). They also erase the longest hottest summer at Marble Bar too. The Met Bureaus also forget the Medieval warm period, the Romans, Minoans, and the whole damn Holocene. They forget the Eemian, Aveley, Holstein and Hoxnian interglacials and most of the last half billion years of records, almost all of which were hotter than the hottest parts of the Holocene, which was hotter than 2021. The last 500 years has been the coldest of the last 5,000Two can play Climate Bingo. In the history of human civilization we’ve never lived through six centuries that were colder than the last six. Maybe that’s more important than a 7 year hot record in the “blip” at the end?  It’s been cooling for 6,000 years. The blip of modern warming is higher than the graph shows (which ends in 1855). Things might be the same temperature now as a thousand year ago. But all the records we set today are nothing in the big scheme… UPDATE: See how serious the global warming has been in Greenland since that ice core ended in 1855, the total rise since then is 2C, which has almost entirely occurred by 1880. The effect of CO2 since 1880 has been almost nothing in Greenland. Read all the posts on the Bureau of Met
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