|
|
 Google searches in Australia for “ivermectin”. Word about Ivermectin is spreading in Australia, so much so that our Chief Medical Officer, Paul Kelly, and “news” outlets felt the need to fire shots across the bow. As predicted the drug was labeled as a horse dewormer used by fringe people and crazies. If the drug didn’t threaten sinecures and profits, it could have been called a Nobel Prize winning Wonder Drug used by 200 million people.
In an extraordinary turn, the Chief Medical Officer staked his reputation on something that is obviously flat out wrong and easily shown to be so. In another remarkable move, the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia advised pharmacists to refuse legal prescriptions if the patient didn’t answer in a politically correct manner. (Who needs doctors?)
Here’s the Chief Medical Officer of Australia, who has apparently not read many papers on Ivermectin:
There’s no evidence to support the use of ivermectin to treat Covid-19. Don’t look for magic cures online, and don’t rely on what’s being peddled on the internet, because none of them work.”
Australia’s chief medical officer, Prof Paul Kelly, pleaded with the public not to take unproven medicine like ivermectin to treat Covid-19.
“The reality is, there are many trials that have been done into ivermectin, not a single one of them have shown to be effective,” he said.
–– The Guardian, but also the ABC national news
There is not a single trial, there are 63 trials involving more than 26,000 people, often medical workers, that show that ivermectin may help prevent infection in around five out of six people if used prophylactically. If used as an early treatment it may help 60% of people or more.
Paul Kelly wants us to trust him with our lives but he has not taken the time to read even one study on Ivermectin?
And none of the journalists at the press conference today have apparently read one either.
h/t to Lance, ColA, Nezysquared, John Droz, Jim Simpson, Helen D, Clarence.t, Destroyer69, RobB, Christine K. Popeye26, David A, Konrad, Old Ozzie and the FLCCC.
Ivermectin is so safe it’s been handed out en masse by illiterate non-medical staff in remote Africa:
Ivermectin has continually proved to be astonishingly safe for human use. Indeed, it is such a safe drug, with minimal side effects, that it can be administered by non-medical staff and even illiterate individuals in remote rural communities, provided that they have had some very basic, appropriate training. This fact has helped contribute to the unsurpassed beneficial impact that the drug has had on human health and welfare around the globe, especially with regard to the campaign to fight Onchocerciasis.
— Crump and Omura, 2011, . doi: 10.2183/pjab.87.13
Like all drugs, ivermectin has side effects, risks and conflicts with other medications, so seek medical advice. But given the low cost and safety, all of us should be able to go to our doctor and talk about it. Surely the lockdowns would end sooner, and people could travel more, lives would be saved, fewer mutants would arise, and more ICU beds could be kept free. The only thing that goes badly are Big Pharma profits.
Doctors have the right to prescribe this “off label” — Health Minister Greg Hunt said so. But the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia is even suggesting that pharmacists do not supply a legal prescription?
h/t to Brenda Spence
Chemists Come Between Doctor and Patient
Phillip M. Altman Quadrant Magazine
… the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia [PSA], …has decided your local neighbourhood chemists can trump prescribing doctors if they suspect the drug is being used for other than its primary designated purpose, the treatment of roundworm parasites.
PSA recommends that pharmacists do not supply ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19. Should pharmacists be unable to establish intended use of an ivermectin prescription, supply should be declined.
— Pharmaceutical Society of Australia alert to members
Altman has written to the PSA:
The directive by the PSA instructs pharmacists not to supply ivermectin on prescription if they deem the prescription has been written for the management of COVID-19. This is disturbing in that the PSA has taken upon itself, for the first time of which I am aware, to interfere with the sacred doctor-patient relationship by denying a medication, considered necessary by a doctor and legally prescribed, for a potentially serious infection.
The PSA has clearly overreached the boundary of the profession and should immediately withdraw this advice.
Phillip Altman BPharm(Hons), MSc, PhD
Clinical Trial and Regulatory Affairs Consultant
Read it all at Quadrant, and if you are a member of the PSA, send them an email.
There might be some interesting legal cases arising from relatives of any injured party who was refused a legal script…
—————–BACKGROUNDER ON IVERMECTIN————————-
The wonder drug that disappeared
Keep reading →
9.3 out of 10 based on 110 ratings
Ever wonder where the NeverTrumper Conservatives came from?
 In 2018 someone caught a top dog at Google bragging that they had donated money to conservative think tanks and magazines to get them to go easy on Google and not criticise their anti-Trump and anti-conservative bias. Emerald Robinson heard the rumors, and waited while the Wall Street Journal sat on the story. “The tape sounded like a smoking gun” she said, but nothing happened.
Finally, after she got confirmation from an insider, she broke the story on Twitter, hoping the WSJ would get into gear. Instead she was attacked by the National Review editor, who she hadn’t named, but who must have been feeling guilty because he did the full flame-throwing mockery non denial response. Later Breitbart and Wired ran stories, but a whole lot of others didn’t.
So this is partly a story of the complete sell-out of National Review, but it’s also a tale of all the other media that didn’t shine a light on it. Readership sank, the NeverTrumpers were shifted sideways to non-positions on a non-magazine, but the NationalReview board took a bad situation and made it worse. Read Emerald Robinson’s withering conclusion:
How The National Review Sold Its Soul to Google
Emerald Robinson
Did the editors of the National Review learn anything from this debacle? Of course not. The feckless Rich Lowry recently handed the magazine over to the world’s only living Evan McMullin voter Ramesh Ponnuru — who was absolutely nobody’s choice to steer the magazine back to popularity. (If anything, Ramesh Ponnuru represents an even greater slide into snide effeminacy than Lowry, and few thought that was possible.) Defeat seems to be the brand for these boys. In any culture war, Rich Lowry and the gang have always been the first to stand athwart history, crying: “We surrender first!” They’ve been so weak and defeatist during the Trump years that a year’s subscription to the magazine could be marketed as an estrogen supplement.
Meanwhile the funding of the magazine now relies even more heavily on Big Tech money: the back page of the June 1, 2021 issue was a full-page Facebook ad. Inside the same issue, in case you missed the point, there was a two-page ad from Google. The National Review didn’t bother trying to win back its old subscribers by becoming more conservative. Instead, it flipped them a giant middle finger. This final insult might lead us to think the unthinkable about the soy boys who sank Buckley’s flagship. The same feeble metrosexuals who attacked the Covington Catholic boys, and printed pro-Jeffrey Epstein articles, and tried to discredit Carter Page, and pushed the Russia Hoax might not actually be conservatives after all. Their role does not seem to be halting the Left. Their role seems to be: pretending to be conservative in order to persuade actual conservatives to lose gracefully to the Left.
Conservatives must finally recognize something that’s very depressing and very important: the conservative intellectual movement in America didn’t just fail. It aided and abetted the Left for money. The Left bought off the Right’s leading conservative intellectuals. And its think tanks. And its “flagship” magazines. This is not hyperbole or conjecture. I’ve got the receipts. Until conservatives understand the depth and breadth of that betrayal, they won’t have any chance of rebuilding that movement out of the ashes any time soon.
9.7 out of 10 based on 90 ratings
8.4 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
Dr Marion Gruber and Dr Phillip Krause were not just at the FDA, they had been there for 30 years and were heading up the teams that decided last week to approve Pfizer for 16 year olds last week.
Noah Weiland and Sharon LaFraniere, New York Times
Gruber and Krause were upset about the Biden administration’s recent announcement that adults should get a coronavirus booster vaccination eight months after they received their second shot, according to people familiar with their thinking.
Neither believed there was enough data to justify offering booster shots yet, the people said, and both viewed the announcement, amplified by President Joe Biden, as pressure on the FDA to quickly authorize them.
They are worried about that Israeli data showing people vaccinated in January only had 16% protection left in July.
White House officials have stressed that the plan for Americans to start receiving boosters next month was uniformly endorsed by the most senior federal health officials, including Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting FDA commissioner. They have described the need to develop a booster plan as urgent in light of growing evidence that the vaccines lose potency over time — a trend that they fear suggests the vaccines’ protection against severe disease and hospitalization will also soon weaken.
Remember this graph of the Israeli data — the one that shocked the markets in July?
 Vaccine efficacy Israel. The January cohort (blue) may have included the highest risk people, so perhaps some immune responses won’t fold as fast in other groups. But even in the success at preventing hospitalization lies bad news. The vaccines (mostly Pfizer) were still useful at preventing hospitalization 82% of the time — but that means nearly one out of five of the highest risk people aren’t protected, even though they are double vaccinated. This might be workable if the vaccines stopped transmission, but they’re only 50% effective in stopping the virus spreading.
So it’s not surprising the Biden Administration wants to start the booster shots in just three weeks, but the FDA hasn’t done the safety checks yet. It’s an IPCC-climate-science type quandary where the outcome is known before the investigation:
…FDA regulators are in the position of trying to determine whether booster shots are safe and effective after the White House — and their own agency head, Woodcock — already endorsed administering them.
“This process has been the reverse of what we would normally expect in vaccine policy,” with the administration announcing plans based on a certain outcome before regulators can complete their review, said Jason L. Schwartz, an associate professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health.
Meanwhile in Israel the third booster dose is now so normalized (after all of three weeks) that the old two-dose-passports might get tossed in the bin. That ticket to freedom is now just a five or six month pass. Three-Vax can lock out the Two-Vax.
Yahoo News has the New York Times article.
9.8 out of 10 based on 60 ratings
Tony Thomas has been reading academic papers so you don’t have to. Dr Blanche Verlie at the Uni of Sydney
explores “the affective geographies of eco-anxiety” and seems to help create victims to study at the same time. A good business model maybe, but at the expense of mental health.
The more young people suffer, the more useful they are as political activists:
Tony Thomas, Quadrant
 Dr Blanche Verlie,Uni Sydney Verlie correctly concedes that “climate anxiety can intersect with and contribute to clinically diagnosable mental illness” born of “hopelessness, disillusionment or apathy”. But she explains helpfully (if I might paraphrase) that the more kids suffer the better chance they’ll become green activists. In her own words,
climate anxiety is not an illness or disorder, but an appropriate and even valuable source of discomfort that can provide an important lens to help people re-evaluate what is important to them and find meaningful ways to inhabit the world. Education’s remit for cultivating critical thinking and empowerment thus makes it an exciting realm for supporting young people to contribute to what Verlie (2019a) [she is speaking of herself in the third person] terms ‘bearing worlds’: engaging with the pain that the status quo offers in order to transform it.”
She surveyed “educators” and found them feeding the fear:
Verlie found (surprise!) that kids felt overwhelmed, hopeless, anxious, angry, sad and frustrated. Their teachers, having blighted the kids’ joi de vivre with climate doom, then set about “encouraging students to engage with their emotions, validating those emotions, supporting students to navigate and respond to those emotions, and empowering them to take climate action.”
And what a fear it is. This week’s news is just how disabling climate anxiety can be:
Tony Thomas, Quadrant
Dr Verlie provides dramatic quotes from her undergrad students [at RMIT].
 Photo by Zhivko Minkov ♦ I’ve been crying myself to sleep a lot lately. And crying at random times too. It’s not as though I watch a video about climate change, and I cry during it. I mean sometimes that happens. It’s more like, something little happens, like my toast burns, and I have an existential breakdown because I think it’s a metaphor for how the world is burning because we aren’t paying attention.
♦ I found myself dry retching in the shower for over an hour one evening. The contractions of my stomach muscles, sense of my throat exploding, and my whole body convulsing, felt like I was trying to spew up some kind of demon, a wretchedness, a loneliness and desperation, a sense of loss for all that could have been but probably won’t, for that which is but will no longer be.
♦ I feel bitter towards individuals and systems and fail to understand why people are not being charged for climate crimes.
♦ The future, for me, is dark, cloudy, a black hole of uncertainty. I don’t know how it will play out.
♦ I was thinking of the dark, foreboding nature of climate change, its creeping horror masked by invisibility in the here-and-now of hyperconsumptive capitalism. Sometimes I see climate change as a chasm opening up before me, and I stand on a precipice overlooking the deep ravine, teetering on the edge.
At least students don’t feel alone as long as they live in Monoversity World:
♦ I’m so glad I changed into this class – it’s more of a climate change therapy group than a university subject.[3]
Imagine the mental health gains if students were taught critical reasoning instead?
As far as academia goes it’s in the national interest to shut them all down. Turn off the tap. Cut public funding to any institution that doesn’t uphold free speech and teach why Argument from Authority and Ad Hominem reasoning are fallacies in the first term of the first year of every subject.
Tony Thomas’s just-published “Foot Soldier in the Culture Wars” ($29.95) is available from author at [email protected] or publisher Connor Court.
Photo by Zhivko Minkov on Unsplash
9.7 out of 10 based on 61 ratings
…
8.9 out of 10 based on 8 ratings
The global nuclear industry has put in fifteen applications to display exhibits at the up-and-coming UN Climate COP26 event in Glasgow. But all fifteen have been rejected in preference for exhibits from industries that appear to solve climate problems but have little effect on actual emissions.
Nuclear power poses an existential threat to the Climate Porn and Fear Industry, potentially causing mass job losses by providing thousands of years of reliable electricity as well as grid scale spinning inertia, FCAS, and reserve capacity too.
President Xi could not be contacted, but has in the past encouraged the rest of the world to keep trying to cut emissions in the most expensive way possible.
 … Imagine what the world would look like if the UNFCCC wanted to solve the climate crisis? (And if there was one?)
hat tip GWPF
The Sunday Telegraph
Up to 15 applications from nuclear-related bodies are understood to have been rejected by Mr Sharma’s COP26 Unit in the Cabinet Office.
They included an application involving the World Nuclear Association, which represents the global nuclear industry, to put on an exhibition featuring a life-size model of a nuclear reactor.
The trade body will still send delegates to attend events in the blue zone, after their applications were approved by the UN. But in an open letter to Mr Sharma, Sama Bilbao y León, director of the World Nuclear Association, said: “We are deeply concerned about the news that every application on nuclear energy for the Green Zone at the upcoming COP26 conference has been rejected.
read more at the GWPF
Photo by Nicolas HIPPERT on Unsplash
9.6 out of 10 based on 78 ratings
…
9.4 out of 10 based on 10 ratings
The FDA has launched a marketing program to rebrand the Wonder Drug from Japan as just a horse paste and thus bury the 3.8 billion doses given to very non-horsey humans, many of whom were in Subsaharan Africa. On another day this would be a hideously racist. When do 200 million Africans count for nothing?
The FDA may hope to save people from self-medication accidents, but will regret telling a half-truth-soup and burning up more of what’s left in their trust-bucket. After all, they want the public to trust them with their lives, but it only takes one eye opening conversation to undo years of propaganda. If the FDA are not mentioning that something like 200 million humans use Ivermectin each and every year — what else are they hiding? That it won a Nobel Prize and costs $1 a day?
The FDA and the Guardian and co, are training readers to mock anyone who even asks about Ivermectin. It’s the old Argumentum By Derision again. The tool of bullies, not scientists.
Martin Pengelly at The Guardian got the message the FDA was sending:
Ahead of full US authorisation of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine, the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had a simple message for Americans contemplating using ivermectin, a medicine used to deworm livestock, instead of getting a Covid shot.
“You are not a horse,” it said. “You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”
Indeed, Lordy! No cool person will take cow medicine ever again. But say, don’t vets use penicillin ..?
The reasoning that animal-medicine can’t be a human-medicine doesn’t wash: a lot of drugs for farm animals are drugs for humans too. Like Aspirin. Valium. Prednisone. Propofol. Tramadol. Dexamethazone. doxycycline Amoxicillin. Benazepril. etc etc etc.
 …. The FDA is going Double or Nothing — not to save American lives, but to save their own reputation. Word is getting out that Ivermectin seems to help a lot of people, and how would it look if the US FDA was not as advanced as India, Peru and Mexico?
The FDA’s job is to carefully evaluate the scientific data on a drug to be sure that it is both safe and effective for a particular use, and then to decide whether or not to approve it. Using any treatment for COVID-19 that’s not approved or authorized by the FDA, unless part of a clinical trial, can cause serious harm.
Given their job is to evaluate scientific data, the FDA doesn’t give any of the sort of reasons we’d expect it might do. They don’t say ivermectin is ineffective, doesn’t work, or that it binds to the wrong part of the virus, stops antibody production, or doesn’t reach the tissues it needs too, or anything like that.
They can’t say that, because apparently they haven’t looked:
“The FDA has not reviewed data to support use of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients to treat or to prevent COVID-19; however, some initial research is underway.”
How good do we feel about that? 644,000 Americans have died so far, but the FDA hasn’t found the time in the worst pandemic of the last 100 years to even organise the research?
- If it’s that cheap and low risk, why has it taken the FDA 16 months to start reviewing it?
- Aren’t preapproved drugs the fastest and cheapest to test because they’ve already passed most of the safety checks and are in full production? If so, what program does the FDA have for screening pre-approved drugs to repurpose them. If the FDA doesn’t do this, who should, and why hasn’t the FDA called for that?
The Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance of Doctors feels the FDA is being misleading.
They agree that people should talk to their doctor and not take medicines designed for animals — but point out that there are 40 medical trials world wide that show it is safe and effective, and 10-20% of all drugs in the US are prescribed “off label”.
“Due to its extensive record of safe use, medical professionals can feel confident about
prescribing Ivermectin,” said Dr. Pierre Kory, president and chief medical officer of the FLCCC. “In the 40 years since it was first approved for use, more than 3.8 billion people have been treated
For more information about the FLCCC Alliance, the I-Mask+ Prophylaxis & Early Outpatient Treatment Protocol for COVID-19 and the MATH+ Hospital Treatment Protocol for COVID-19, please visit www.flccc.net with an average of only 160 adverse events reported per year. This is a better safety record than several vitamins.”
The FDA won’t quote their critics, but their critics are not afraid of what the FDA says (even if it is boring). Here they are:
Here’s What You Need to Know about Ivermectin
-
-
- FDA has not approved ivermectin for use in treating or preventing COVID-19 in humans. Ivermectin tablets are approved at very specific doses for some parasitic worms, and there are topical (on the skin) formulations for head lice and skin conditions like rosacea. Ivermectin is not an anti-viral (a drug for treating viruses).
- Taking large doses of this drug is dangerous and can cause serious harm.
- If you have a prescription for ivermectin for an FDA-approved use, get it from a legitimate source and take it exactly as prescribed.
- Never use medications intended for animals on yourself. Ivermectin preparations for animals are very different from those approved for humans.
Medicine delayed is medicine denied. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Australian doctors can prescribe Ivermectin off label. Talk to your Doc. Show them the One Page Summary of Critical Trials on Ivermectin and the IMASK protocol.
…
REFERENCES
Andy Crump and Satoshi Omura (2011) Ivermectin, ‘Wonder drug’ from Japan: the human use perspective ,Proc Jpn Acad Ser B Phys Biol Sci. Feb 10; 87(2): 13–28. doi: 10.2183/pjab.87.1
9.8 out of 10 based on 86 ratings
Because there is so much to discuss…
9.4 out of 10 based on 23 ratings
GB News has only been running for 10 weeks in the UK but it has already been targeted by a campaign to boycott the advertisers.
However the boycott was twice as likely to get people to tune in.
This is how it works. Once the Virtue Signallers have overdone the bullying and the crowd knows it — the bullying itself works like a signpost.. By definition, the forbidden material will always be the most interesting. The politically incorrect shows are the most entertaining.
GB News joy as campaign to boycott advertisers has actually BOOSTED channel
Express.co.uk
While those wishing to boycott GB News may take brands removing their adverts as a win – a recent survey found it may have actually given the channel a boost.
A poll of 1,000 people conducted by CT Group, commissioned by GB News, gave the statement “consumer goods brands should not adopt overt political views”.
Of those polled, 57 percent agreed that brands shouldn’t take on “overt political beliefs”. And only 15 percent disagreed with the statement. When those surveyed were asked if an advertiser boycott made people more likely to tune into the news network, 29 percent confirmed it would.
People are refusing to pay the BBC license too.
Express.co.uk
The Minister for Media and Data has reported a “decline in willingness to pay the licence fee” of the BBC. Mr Whittingdale continued: “The second is in the longer term the decline in willingness to pay the BBC’s licence fee. “So I think this debate about how we sustain public service broadcasting is only just beginning.”
 This is both good and bad. It’s good that the BBC is feeling the squeeze, but ultimately it’s bad that the price signals are knocking on the door, and no one is listening. People wouldn’t be tuning out if the BBC was not such a humorless preaching bore.
In a normal world, the BBC ought to care that people are leaving and want to give them what they want to get them back. Instead the BBC will no doubt beg the government for more money while it beats them over the head for not being leftist enough, and the government will give it cash. In the process the Deep State gatekeepers will become more entrenched.
Meanwhile: In Australia, people might want to know about this petition calling for an ombudsman for the ABC. I’d rather sell it myself, but it’s good to see any kind of protest.
9.8 out of 10 based on 97 ratings
7.9 out of 10 based on 19 ratings
In Australia, the subsidy bandaids are piling up.
 … We subsidized weather-controlling generators in the hope that our electrical infrastructure could not only provide electricity but would also stop storms, floods and The Taliban. However the weather-controlling-generators were also weather-dependent, and it was costing quite a lot to add storage, stability, transmission lines and synchronous condensors. Who knew changing global weather would cost so much?
Once upon a time Australia had a full complete electricity grid that was cheap and efficient. Then we added inefficient things to it until we had two whole grids, one that changed the weather (in theory) and a spare one that filled in for all the other grids failures. For some reason it was not cheaper to run two whole grids rather than just one.
The subsidies were needed to drive out the cheapest player (coal power), but having succeeded, we then needed different subsidies to keep the coal power in.
What a tangled web we weave when first we lie to ourselves.
Geoff Chambers, The Australian
Special payments will be needed to keep ageing coal-fired and gas power stations in business to avoid future spikes in electricity prices, under a national plan to shore up the energy grid.
A new capacity mechanism recommended by the Energy Security Board will put incentives in place to stop the early closure of power plants and create long-term signals for investment in dispatchable generation.
NSW is nearly running out of electricity every 4 days.
The Australian understands the Australian Energy Market Operator has issued a record number of warnings about a lack of supply in NSW this year, at a rate of almost one every four days. The notices are issued when AEMO considers there is not enough capacity available in the system.
Once upon a time Australians got “capacity” for free, now we have to pay for it.
We didn’t need an Energy Security Board either.
9.8 out of 10 based on 108 ratings
8.3 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
 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.
From the ANU Grafton modelling press release:
Even 80% vaxed is not enough for Australia to live free
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.
Keep reading →
7.5 out of 10 based on 79 ratings
This work is supported by the Energy Realists of Australia. See the site for more information on Casualties on the Road to Net Zero.
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!
9.9 out of 10 based on 59 ratings
Proof reader accidentally published before the final draft. Finished copy coming soon.
10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
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).
9.8 out of 10 based on 92 ratings
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.
9.7 out of 10 based on 61 ratings
…
7.9 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments