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Finally, some unexpectedly good news on community spread in Victoria:Untrackable new cases in Victoria are drying up. The incidence of community spread cases with an unknown source are every epidemiologists nightmare. So their absence is a marker of how well the restrictions work– and whether the “fire” is under control. It’s cheery news. Community spread is the number that matters most — more than daily infections. Known cases can be track-and-traced. Unknown cases mean whole clusters are spreading invisibly and restrictions need to be wider. Despite the depressing schedule planned in Victoria, if this reduction in unknown cases is sustained, then other options for pandemic management become possible. The NSW-style-management with intense tracking and tracing may suddenly become an option within weeks. (Though there may be a 50 case spike tomorrow just to prove me wrong.) Tracking and tracing works best at lower levels, and becomes overwhelming quickly as the number of clusters rise. With strong restrictions, the exponential rise in infections can become an exponential fall. Where before each person might infect three new people, now three people staying home are only infecting one (or something like that). Two lines get extinguished instead of amplified, as the virus runs out of fresh bodies to hijack. Victorians, no doubt, are fed up to the nth with lockdowns. At least a graph like this shows the end is in sight, and the isolates have achieved something. It augurs well.  Victoria, unknown cases of Covid-19, March to Sept 2020. Unknown cases in NSW are also graphed (in blue, above) for comparison (and below in more detail). The spread in the Victorian community was vastly larger than what NSW faced in March when many cases were from overseas. Don’t confuse this graph up for Daily New Cases, which are still coming in this week at 112, 79, 64, 59, 36…. New infections are still popping up, but mostly they are connected to known outbreaks, which are easier to manage (usually). The Victorian modeling of how long strict conditions need to run apparently doesn’t take this into account. So the harsh conditions are likely to end sooner than expected as long as people stay distant. The modelling did not attempt to estimate the number of community transmission “mystery cases” in the weeks ahead, nor did it model differing risks of transmission in industries like healthcare and meatworks. The makeup of cases each day is important in determining the risk of a resurgence. This is especially promising when we consider how well NSW is doing. For the last two months NSW has danced with the tiger and kept daily new mystery source cases under 5. Given that this was in winter, in a big city, this is good news too. This appears to be quite the success with tracking and tracing, and presumably with compliance.  NSW, unknown cases of Covid-19, June to September 2020. Currently there are a stream of random closures of schools or gyms and resturants. Sydneysiders can have gatherings of up to 20 people at one time. Funerals, with 100. Weddings with 150 people. Large sporting events are limited to 500. Stadiums are at 25% capacity. The problem is, of course, that NSW is running along a razor thin fence, one superspreader event away from bad news, and while they are moving a lot more than they were during the official lockdowns of April, it is still below normal levels. Let’s hope the numbers stay this low. At least in Australia, days are getting longer, and the sun and Vitamin D are rising. Data:
What does an apology even mean?
Dan Andrews asks so much, but gives so little. And it is a scandal that so many cheap, well known treatments and preventions are not being tested in large trials — Vitamin D, HCQ, Ivermectin, and all the other potential anti-virals like Interferon, Bromhexine, Melatonin, steroids, asthma drugs etc etc. Voters slam ‘unfair’ public sector pay riseAdam Creighton, The Australian Private sector wages in Victoria dropped by $1.9bn in the June quarter, while wages in the public sector increased by $88m, according to the IPA’s analysis… The poll, of just over 1000 Victorians, found only 7 per cent supported the 2 per cent pay rise that MPs and public servants received in July… In the last five years, the Victorian population grew 12% but the bill for public servants wages grew by 40%. Robert Gottliebsen wonders if “the state and its bureaucracy simply don’t have the skills to manage a crisis of this magnitude”. Look at the legal charges someone may face: The unwillingness of anyone to take responsibility is multiplied by the fact that, if there is an occupational health and safety conviction, the minister and senior bureaucrats in the department involved are in danger of being charged with industrial manslaughter which carries a maximum $16.5 million fine and 25 years in jail. Robert Gottleibsen lists the mistakes: There is Big-Government incompetence in every level 1. The well known hotel quarantine union and diversity hire failures. Emblematic of how inept it was: security staff got one hour of diversity training but no time in infection control. 2. People who tested positive were not notified quickly enough. What was the point of mass testing if the results were not used to stop infections spreading? This failure neutralized the success of mass testing 3. Not enough contact tracing. Test positivity in Victoria is ten times higher than NSW. Per infection, NSW is doing more testing. What to do with Victoria and the virus is a wicked problem and Sophie’s choice. More soon on the ugly complexities of melding the mess of virology, business and democratic wishes.
Extinction Rebellion blockade the Murdoch Press in the UK because climate reporting is supposed to be one-sided After thirty years of saturation media on climate change, XR realize there is absolutely nothing new they could say that hasn’t already been said 4,000 times. So they attack the newspapers that put forward a few opposing views among the wall-to-wall propaganda.This helps keep the compliant newspapers in line. So any self respecting editor ought be asking: If Extinction Rebellion aren’t blocking us, what are we doing wrong? Pity the poor newsagents and delivery boys and girls who lost money so XR could do grand-standing camping, blocking trucks and newspapers from getting out. Extinction Rebellion: Printworks protest ‘completely unacceptable’ says Boris Johnson More than 100 protesters used vehicles and bamboo lock-ons to block roads outside the printing works at Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, and Knowsley, near Liverpool. By Saturday morning, police said some 63 people had been arrested. The presses print the Rupert Murdoch-owned News UK’s titles including The Sun, The Times, The Sun on Sunday and The Sunday Times, as well as The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, and the London Evening Standard. If only they had evidence instead of bamboo sticks? @MartinDaubney #ExtinctionRebellion The police were there to protect the protestors right to damage other people?Hypocrisy is everywhere. Ian Austin of The Telegraph commented “on the Hertfordshire Police’s pathetic response. “
September 7th, 2020 | Tags: Censorship, Protests, UK | Category: Global Warming, Media-matters |  Print This Post | | By AwakenWithJP. Posted by David E. Yup. “When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” — George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings “Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.” — George Carlin … Be wary of junk data and junk conclusionsDeath data has become a political tool (stretched both up and down by vested interests). We’ve all heard of the motorcyclist who crashed into the Covid tally, and the payments for US docs. We know there’s junk data out there, but the suggestion we only count deaths “from” Covid, and not the deaths “with” Covid is unscientific in the extreme. Stick with me. We all want WuFlu to be nothing, but scientists and skeptics need to pick their targets carefully. Don’t lose sight of the real scandal and the real solutions. It’s a travesty that people are dying while cheap vitamins and antivirals are being ignored. Let’s fight for Vitamin D, HCQ, Ivermectin, and all the other potentials like Interferon, Bromhexine, Melatonin, steroids, asthma drugs etc etc. But let’s not get distracted by a hopeful fantasy that the true US “death tally” is only 6% of Covid deaths in the US. There’s an idea out there that only 9,680 people have died of Covid in the US, not 161,392 people. It’s because of this CDC quote: “For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death. “ Ask yourself: Does Diabetes protect you from Covid?Think it through. In this scenario, in order to be considered a real coronavirus death, the deceased not only have to have been tested, they can’t have any other contributing factor listed on the death certificate. Which means effectively that people with high blood pressure, cancer, heart disease, asthma, diabetes now cannot possibly die of Covid. (Won’t they be glad to hear that?) Nor can people who don’t get tested. And nor can obese people — unless they slim down first, then die. In a world where only 6% of the US Covid death tally are truly due to Covid, you can protect yourself from Covid by getting fat, not getting tested and getting diabetes. I don’t think so. Deaths are not simple one-cause eventsMost deaths are due to a bunch of bad factors overwhelming the system. The only pure deaths are things like bullets to the head (in homocide, not even in suicide which has its own collection of contributing factors). Death certificates reflect that, allowing doctors to list a lot of contributing factors (read ZdoggMD for a US doctors perspective). The 6% of certificates which didn’t list other factors may represent 10,000 totally healthy people cut down ahead of time, which is it’s own tragedy, surely. But, mundanely, it may also represent that some busy distracted doctors don’t always fill in the form properly. The question that matters is: How much longer would victims have lived if Covid hadn’t hit them?We will all die sometime. What matters is whether we are losing people who would have lived years longer. The average age of death in the US might be 78, but that means about half the population expects to live to be older than that. Some 78 year olds have a lot to contribute. Sometime in the next four years, the leader of the free world will be 78. The average 78 year old can still expect to live ten more years. So people with co-morbidites are at higher risk of dying of Covid, but someone with high blood pressure can survive years with the condition. Covid may trigger their early death, but if the US borders had been shut in time, that same person might have survived for another decade of holiday and family moments. Another decade of voting and adding a long-life perspective to younger generations. The real toll of Covid may be higher than the listed Covid deathsGet ready: Rather than being 6% of the official tally, there are credible arguments that the real tally is probably higher than the official tally, not lower. The US is not testing adequately, the test positivity is still above 5%, and for large periods it’s been as high as 15%. Australia’s test positivity has mostly been below 1%. We know there are many missed cases in the USA. Mortality counts are far higher than Covid deaths alone:Nationwide, 223,900 more people have died than usual from March 15 to Aug. 8, according to C.D.C. estimates, which adjust current death records to account for typical reporting lags. That number is 62,000 higher than the official count of coronavirus deaths for that period. Higher-than-normal death rates are now widespread across the country; only Alaska and Hawaii, states outside the contiguous United States, show numbers that look similar to recent years. — New York Times. So 60,000 extra people have died in the pandemic above and beyond the covid deaths listed on death certificates. Some of them were due to the pandemic, and not due to Covid. But equally, some of them were due to Covid in people that didn’t get tested. There were people who died from heart attacks and strokes who wouldn’t have died if they weren’t afraid to visit hospital during an epidemic. We know people died of cancer due to delays in treatments. We know people in homes died because their families couldn’t get in to see them and report neglect, or changes that only loved ones can spot. We know people died because of the way governments responded to the pandemic — but some of these people, or even more, would have died even if there were no lockdowns. If the virus ran free in the population, more high risk people would have been afraid to visit the local ER. For every motorcyclist who was listed as a Covid death — and shouldn’t have been — there might have been ten heart attacks or strokes in people who didn’t realize they had Covid. Ambulance officers reported turning up to homes to find people sitting up with blood oxygen saturation levels we thought were impossible — a classic sign of covid-19. We need to know excess deaths for the next ten yearsHas Covid lowered life expectancy in a measurable way? Anyone who claims to know the definitive answer at this stage is making stuff up. All death statistics now are subject to change. Three quarters of mild to moderate Covid cases showed signs of heart damage. How do we know if a heart attack victim who wasn’t tested for Covid had an infection that ultimately caused their death? We don’t. Only changes to excess deaths in coming years will reveal how many effective years Covid has stolen from people. We’ll never know on an individual basis, but only on a population-wide basis as we plot ongoing changes in deaths due to many conditions. Will there be a drop in stroke deaths next year because people at high risk of strokes died a year too soon? Has Covid fished out the high risk people from 100% or only from 20% of the population? After the pandemic has long gone, PhD’s will be made by studying graphs of excess mortality from various conditions in various towns. Will there by a dip in mortality figures “after the virus” — a classic sign that the virus took only a short time off the tally, or will the spike stand above the norms, marking deaths of people who died too young? Will there be fewer stroke victims in 2021 because they died in 2020, or will strokes continue at much the same rate? The Cause of Death is not singular or obviousDeath is a complex event with a chain of dependent variables, which all contribute to the outcome. The true cause of death is often impossible to know without a full autopsy, and sometimes even with one. To understand how complicated this is, read the 8 page coroner’s report on Patricia Dowd, possibly the first Covid death in the US. She was 57, with no known cardiac risk factors, but was overweight. To accurately figure out what caused her death took hours of work by someone with years of medical training, plus many blood tests, a long write up, and a cost of $3,000 to $5,000. Her cause of death is listed — somewhat ambiguously, and in desperate need of punctuation — as: “Acute Hemopericardium due to Rupture of Left Ventricle due to transmural myocardial ischemia (Infarction) with a minor component of myocarditis due to Covid-19 infection.” Feb 10th 2020 SARS-Cov2 RNA was detected in Dowd’s heart, trachea, lung, and intestine. She had no coronary atherosclerosis or thombosis. She complained of a “flu like illness” in the days leading up to her death. But, since she was foolish enough to have one comorbidity (excess weight and a BMI of 31, possibly by following the recommended low fat diet), she would later be described by some as “died with covid” not “died from covid”. So even though her heart was officially described as “rupturing”, which was broadcast in many sensational headlines, some people appear to be saying it is just a coincidence that she died at the same time as she had a Covid diagnosis. Seriously? Even car accidents can be caused by CovidIt sounds ridiculous. But it’s even possible that people who died of road trauma might not have if they weren’t infected. How many? Who knows. We’ll have to wait for those excess death studies, and even then we won’t know for sure. I make the point only to show how complicated the cause of death can be. Imagine someone with early stage Covid, untested and unaware that they were sick. Rapidly sinking into fatigue, they they make a stupid driving error that they wouldn’t have made if they weren’t infected. This sort of thing often happens, even just with the spring daylight savings transition. Study links daylight saving time to 28 fatal car accidents per year in the US The evidence shows about a six percent increase in the risk of fatal traffic accidents in the week after the time change each spring. In other words, more than 28 fatal accidents could be prevented yearly in the U.S. if the DST transition were abolished. The effect is especially pronounced in the morning hours and in locations further west within a time zone. Since it was first introduced, the spring transition to DST has been linked to a variety of problems, including increased risk of heart attack, workplace accidents, and suicides. There had been evidence suggesting an increased risk of car accidents, too. (Fritz et al, 2020)* The cause of a driving death is often a judgement mistake, and we know Covid infections cause cognitive deficits, loss of attention, dizziness, and fatigue. In other words, a true post mortem would take a PhD thesis length analysis of their past driving record, level of illness, type of mistake, sleep patterns, etc. etc. ad infinitum — and we probably still couldn’t say for sure whether they would be alive today if they hadn’t had Covid. What looks like, smells like and acts like a deadly pandemic?A wave of excess deaths is traveling around the world. The places with the highest peaks in excess deaths also happen to have the largest positive tests to coronavirus RNA. Coincidence? They also have the highest rates of healthcare worker morbidity and mortality. Twelve days after quarantine restrictions start or significantly increase in severity, the rate of new infections drops off to a lower rate of exponential growth. People change their behavior in reaction to this new threat as they learn more about it, which is constantly changing all our statistics. It’s highly dynamic situation. Covid is known to cause major blood clotting which damages organs. It has caused strokes, heart attacks, heart damage, low oxygen levels, and kidney damage, even in mild to moderate cases. There is still much we don’t know about it. Covid probably came out of a Chinese biowarfare lab. Is there something they know about it that we don’t yet? Is it significant that the Chinese put on the most strenuous quarantine measures to date, stricter than any other country? Or is that just another coincidence? Ominously, there are now four known cases of reinfection only months after the original infection. * * * It’s a hot contentious topic. Sorry if it’s not what some what to hear, but thanks greatly to those who stuck with this and read this far. Kudos to skeptics who maintain civility and accurate language even when they passionately disagree. Civil debate is what makes skeptics great. _______________ REFERENCESCurrent Biology, Fritz et al.: “A Chronobiological Evaluation of the Acute Effects of Daylight Saving Time on Traffic Accident Risk” www.cell.com/current-biology/f … 0960-9822(19)31678-1 , DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.12.045 * Fritz et al say that there were no lives saved in the fall, though this seems rather odd: “there were no effects of the fall-back transition to Standard Time (ST) on MVA risk“. September 4th, 2020 | Tags: Coronavirus, Mortality | Category: Microbiology, Mortality | Print This Post | | …
Don’t try this at home:Premature energy release can ruin your whole day. h/t Jim Simpson What happens when delusional people can’t convince the masses to agree with themFury as Extinction Rebellion founder say MPs and business owners ‘should have bullet put through their heads’The Sun, Sept 2, 2020 A BRITISH co-founder of Extinction Rebellion sparked fury after suggesting MPs and business owners “should have a bullet through their heads”. Ex-organic farmer Roger Hallam criticised the people “who run society” – saying they were “culpable” for the climate catastrophe. In a recording obtained by Guido, the 54-year-old was heard saying: “They [leaders] are exponentially more culpable for climate catastrophe. “1990 might as well give them six months in prison, now maybe you should put a bullet through their head – or rather someone probably will.” The real crime are the leaders and journalists who feed the delusions for their own profit and power. Creating things like pap declarations of “Climate Emergencies”. They are not just symbolism, they become the license for extreme responses. It’s a psychological and legal tool where people can both justify their own reckless behaviour to themselves, but also to justify dangerous acts of civil disobedience in a court. Not long back Roger Hallam was calling for Nuremberg style trials. The founder of Extinction Rebellion wants those responsible for climate change to face Nuremberg-style trials. Roger Hallam also called for a ‘World War Two mobilisation’ of society, with rationing and the confiscation of private property. Asked how those responsible for climate change should be dealt with, he told The Times: ‘The question will be who’s culpable, in the same way [as] with the Nazis. He added that ‘maybe [we] should put a bullet in the head’ as punishment. A bullet here, and a bullet there, and pretty soon we’ll be talking about a bloody revolution. Extinction Rebellion responded that this was old news, and they’re resolutely non-violent now. Roger Hallam supposedly said this a year ago and is not formally involved any more. But there is no denying that he and Gail Bradbrook co-founded Extinction Rebellion. They set up the movement after she was inspired by a hallucinogenic experience. Bradbrook happily admitted that she flew 11,000 air miles to Costa Rica for a holiday in 2016 where she took the drugs. She “tripped” in every sense of the word, and flew home to the UK to start a movement, separate from her family, end a marriage and “that was the right thing to do”. Hallam likes bullets and socialist governments: “If we’re going to have a possibility of living, we’re looking at mass socialistic organisation.” As Guido says: Socialism brought about by the barrel of a gun. History shows where this leads… h/t Colin I didn’t think cough syrups even worked against coughs, but one new paper suggests that bromhexine in common cough syrups reduces both Covid-19 rates of ICU and of mortality. The era of antivirals has come, not that Big Pharma want you to know that cheap out-of-patent drugs might help. But for years we were told that medical science didn’t have an answer to viruses. Bromhexine was patented in 1961 and is commonly found in OTC pharmacy cough syrups with names like Bisolvon, Robitussin, and Duro-Tuss (Wiki has a long list). Theoretically Bromhexine sabotages one of our molecules — with the snappy name of TMPRSS2 (which is shorter than saying Transmembrane protease S2). A protease is a fancy pair of molecular scissors, it chops or tweaks the viral spike and if that doesn’t happen, the virus can’t get into the cell (at least not through its favourite path). The nice thing about an antiviral acting against our molecules, rather than against the virus itself, is that it’s harder for the virus to mutate to get around it. That means it’s less likely the virus can develop resistance. The downside of targeting our own molecules is that it might fritz things up. Presumably this protease does something useful sometime. To that end, mice that don’t have this protein at all, seem to do OK. And then, there is fifty five years of drug store sales. How bad can cough syrup be?  Bromhexidine, mechanism of action, TMPRSS2, Spike activation. diagram. It is not at all certain that this drug would thwart the virus. Viruses can get into cells through another method called endocytosis. Possibly bromhexine might not make much difference. Luckily for us, a group in Iran were desperate enough to try it in a small, but reasonable trial, and the results are enticing. Basically, 39 people were picked at random out of 78 to try the bromhexine. In the half that missed out on Bromhexine, 11 went on to need ICU and 9 died. In the half who got the bromhexine, only 2 went into ICU and none died. We might feel a bit sorry for the nine in the first trial that didn’t get lucky. We won’t know how unlucky until someone has done a bigger trial. For the moment the p value of avoiding ICU was 0.007. And a p value of 0.027 for avoiding death. Where are the media?This paper was published on July 19th. In a world full of journalists, doctors and a million interested onlookers all connected at the speed of light, it’s curious that it hasn’t garnered attention. At this point I can’t find a single news story mentioning these results. There is one Swiss niche group which mentions it (at a dose of 50 – 100mg). And there is a $3,500 market report available from 2 days ago cryptically suggesting the “bromhexine market will grow a significant rate…”. Nearly every pharma company makes it. I’m curious to do this search now, because if the drug is useful, it will be near impossible to search in a few weeks and find “something that wasn’t there”. Not that I’m certain this drug is the answer, but years from now historians will be looking at how well the news got filtered. There are a few mentions months ago in medical niche outlets (March 2nd), clinical trials in China, and obviously some awareness that this drug might be useful. The wonder then, is that with all the billions being thrown at the virus, it was left up to an Iranian lab to pursue this possibility? “The efficacy of bromhexine in blocking cell entry of coronaviruses was established in 2017.”“ So we had a three year head start and yet, seven months into a global pandemic and almost no one has studied whether cough syrup might help? There are lessons in there for the ways we structure our research, and how useless our universities are. And it seems frivolous, but Iran’s death toll peaked the week after this study was published and has declined since then. (There is a swamp of factors: It could be bromhexine, or treatment changes, vitamin D levels, a younger age group, or it could be that Iran doesn’t test enough people, and the true number of infections has declined, even though the official daily new cases is steady on 2,000 a day.) But if word is spreading and Iranian drug stores are running out of cough syrup that would be interesting. Anyone know? Significant?Eyeballing table 1 of the paper there’s no obvious reason why the drug group would have done so much better. On average both groups waited about 7 to 8 days after symptoms showed up before going to hospital. Their blood oxygen was 88%. The treatment group may have been slightly less sick, with lower levels of lassitude, headache and tummy aches, was slightly younger (58 not 61) but had more diabetes. The treatment group was given 8mg, three times a day. Imagine if they had started treatment as soon as they felt sick? h/t thanks to TedM, who heard it from a Dutch doctor. UPDATE: As TedM notes, Iran may be using low dose HCQ as standard and Bromhexine may only be useful in combination with HCQ: In another publication from Iran on the trial is this comment: “Whether this promising result is because of bromhexine alone or combination of low dose HCQ [200 mg/d] and bromhexine is not clear at this point.” 200mg/d is half that in the Zelenko protocol. Both groups were on the 200mg/day HCQ, so it would appear that this dose of HCQ alone is too low to be effective. The article here: http://www.immunopathol.com/Files/Inpress/ipp-14214.pdf REFERENCEAnsarin et al, (2020) Effect of bromhexine on clinical outcomes and mortality in COVID-19 patients: A randomized clinical trial, BioImpacts, 10(4), 209-215 doi: 10.34172/bi.2020.27 http://bi.tbzmed.ac.ir/ September 2nd, 2020 | Tags: Antiviral, Coronavirus | Category: Evidence, Medicine, Microbiology | Print This Post | | .. President Xi will be delighted that so many industrial competitors are sabotaging their electrical grids with erratic, unreliable solar and wind power. Right now, The People’s Republic of China is the biggest platform in the world for the deployment of nuclear power technology. In twenty years, China has increased its fleet of nuclear power reactors from three to 48, with 11 more plants under construction. That means it will soon surpass France which has 57: By the end of the twentieth century, France’s mature nuclear energy industry operated over fifty nuclear power reactors to supply about 80 percent of the electricity consumed by its population of 60 million people.1 By contrast, when China connects its fiftieth nuclear power reactor to the grid, which is expected in a few years, China’s nuclear power plants will contribute only about 5 percent of the electricity demanded by its population of 1.4 billion.2 At the moment the USA has the largest nuclear generation in the world, with more than double the production of the nearest competitor — France. But China began stockpiling uranium in 2007, and in the last five year plan released in 2016 — China aimed to double nuclear power by the end of 2020. It looks like falling short this year — but by 2030 plans to outdo everyone including the USA. China poised to overtake US in nuclear power by 2030by Kotaro Fukaroka, Nikkei Asian Review. TOKYO — China is on track to surpass the U.S. as the world’s top producer of nuclear energy as early as 2030, reflecting hesitance to build new capacity in Japan and Western nations even as emerging economies move ahead. The trend reflects diverging approaches to nuclear power after the March 2011 Fukushima meltdowns in Japan. While the U.S., Europe and Japan grew risk averse in response to public fears, emerging nations have been keener. Indonesia and Philippines are among the countries dusting off old plans for reactors. And China and Russia have emerged as the main suppliers. Nuclear Belt and Road:China is competing with Russia to provide nuclear power in strategic deals, and already has agreements or MOU’s with Pakistan, Romania, Argentina, UK, Iran, Turkey, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Sudan, Armenia, and Kazakhstan. There are fingers in many pies. China would also have a dominant role in the nuclear industry. The bigger China’s nuclear power footprint grows, the more say China will have in global nuclear governance. If China in the coming decades becomes the leading nuclear power country, it will demand and obtain a commensurate role in members’ decisionmaking concerning multilateral technical rulemaking compacts and organizations, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). If China closes the nuclear fuel cycle, global governance mechanisms related to nuclear security and nonproliferation may be adjusted to reflect that accomplishment. David Archibald calculates that China is burning through its coal quickly, but obviously they are well prepared for the next step to nuclear. There are 451 nuclear plants on the planet. Australia has largest uranium reserves in the world but has no nuclear power plants. Given the inevitable rise of nuclear power one way or the other — perhaps we should dig up and burn our 300 years supply of coal while it is still worth digging up? If I were President Xi, I’d be donating to Greenpeace, funding The Greens, and sponsoring Greta to help hobble the competition.
September 1st, 2020 | Tags: China, Nuclear Energy | Category: Energy, Global Warming, Nuclear Power | Print This Post | | Ronald Reagan: “I’m sick and tired of the argument about whether some effort to enforce law and order is going to escalate anything at all…”
Nice civilization you have there. Shame if something happened to it.As Kamala says with a smile: “…they’re not going to stop, and nor should they”. Are the Democrats basically running on extortion: Vote for us so unhappy Democrat voters don’t tear the country apart? She’s talking about protestors (theoretically) but doesn’t seem to mention the rioters, and as the BLM say “silence is violence”. Things the ABC / BBC probably won’t mentionThe Democrats don’t seem to want to stop the mobs. Tucker Carlson explains… Keep reading → … The parasites take $1,300 per household each year in AustraliaAustralians could save $13 billion dollars a year if they weren’t forced to pay for pagan climate witchery. If the bill collector knocked at the door and demanded $1,300 dollars each year to try to stop storms and floods a century from now, there would be riots in the streets. Instead the money is buried in complexity and taken in slices through unlabeled bills and receipts throughout the year. We list the GST. Imagine if we listed “the Climate Tax”? Malcolm Roberts, a One Nation Senator has commissioned a study by Alan Moran to add up the cost. But why did he have to do that? Where was the Treasury, the Minister for Energy, the CSIRO, the ABC, the Labor Party, the State Premiers, and all our universities? All apparently, are out to lunch with the vested interests or running chicken, afraid of being called names. Alan Moran adds up the state and federal subsidies, including the renewable schemes (like the SRET) that charge every electricity user for other people’s solar panels. He also includes the costs to businesses from higher electricity charges — which are invariably passed on to consumers in their purchases. Those frozen peas at Coles have a hidden carbon tax. Labor likes to say “make the polluters pay”. But in the end, it’s always people who pay, no matter how the charge is hidden. But the Liberals are complicit too (with a few brave exceptions like Craig Kelly). What happened to the free market? Why are solar and wind “the way of the future” but twenty years later and people still need to be forced to buy them or they’d go out of business? Enough’s enough. Buried costs in the rise in electricity prices Electricity Cost, Australia. Alan Moran: The average wholesale price for the years 2008/09 – 2014/15 was $45.4 per MWh and more than doubled to over $92.5 per MWh in 2018/19. This increase is purely because of the effect of climate policies and renewables. The cost of coal is not a factor: the limitless supply of Victorian brown coal is not transportable and is priced at its mining cost plus the state tax, which is incorrectly called a royalty and was trebled in 2016, imposing a cost of $2-3 per MWh; black coal of the quality required for domestic generators is also abundant and its price is not markedly influenced by international trends  That’s a lot of money that Australians could spend on other things. Press Release:$13 billion hidden cost on households revealedA landmark economics report shows that climate policies and renewable subsidies cost Australian households around $13 billion per year, or $1300 per household. Senator Roberts commissioned economist Dr Alan Moran to use all existing government data to examine, for the first time, the true cost of climate policies. Senator Roberts said, “Australians will be shocked to know the additional cost of climate policies on our power bills is a staggering 39%, not 6.5% as the government claims. Using the government’s own data means that the report cannot be sensibly refuted.” Dr Moran’s report, The Hidden Cost of Renewables on Electricity Prices, takes an all-inclusive accounting approach, including hidden costs of higher energy prices passed on by business. Senator Roberts stated, “Governments have blatantly distorted and excluded key facts to keep Australians literally in the dark about inflated costs and future unreliability of our electricity. What is abundantly clear is the true cost of electricity would be $13 billion per year less, if cheap reliable coal production was not lumbered with policies that distort the market towards expensive and unreliable wind and solar. Artificially high energy prices savage our living standards and undermine our economic resilience and competitiveness, particularly during our COVID recovery.” Dr Moran found that the weather-dependent wind and solar currently cost the taxpayer $8 billion per year and continue to receive increasing subsidies after two decades. Senator Roberts added, “In terms of a true market economy renewables still remain unviable after 20 years and have become a parasitic malinvestment on our energy systems. These renewable subsidies distort low cost coal-based power generation and increases the wholesale price of electricity from $45.5 per MWh to $92.5 per MWh, at our cost.” Further scrutiny of the job creation in the renewables industry shows renewable subsidies causes a net loss of jobs in the economy, because every subsidised “green” job created, 2.2 jobs are lost elsewhere in the economy. Full report: The Hidden Cost of Climate Policies and Renewables Just some of the hidden costs: …  … Follow the money:Those who own the renewables investments make the profits from forced payments from unwilling customers.  Where do the Australian subsidies end up? Australian subsidies employ a lot of people in China, and some people in Australia. But for every Australian who gains a job, two lose theirs as companies move out of Australia to places that don’t pay hidden Climate Taxes. August 28th, 2020 | Tags: Carbon Tax, Moran (Alan), Roberts (Malcolm) | Category: Big-Government, Cost, Electricity, Free markets, Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | South Australia has built unreliable generators on one third of all homes in the state. They are expensive, encased in glass, and all fail at the same time, usually for breakfast, and definitely for dinner. They randomly fail when clouds roll in, but consistently fail all night long. When they do work, they all work together, producing an excess of energy when no one need an excess. In order to pretend that this surge is useful, a billion dollars of working infrastructure has to switch off, scale down, spin its wheels, and toss money out the window. A few weeks ago, the State Energy Minister of SA, Dan van Holst Pellekaan, warned that the state is only a few years away from reaching “net negative demand” which is a fancy-pants way of describing the moment that solar power makes more energy than the whole state can use. His reassuring comment was “The grid blowing up is not the right term, but it simply will not work.” With 250,000 unreliable generators in the state the midday excess is now so large it threatens to break things, drive up voltages, drive out reliable generators and generally muck up what was a finely tuned system honed over 50 years. There is already so much excess at lunchtime that the Energy Czars want to remotely switching off people’s solar panels at their most productive time, much to the outrage of hapless homeowners who thought they were buying something useful. Rooftop solar destabilising South Australia energy supply, says Dan van Holst Pellekaanby Perry Williams, The Australian, August 5, 2020 One third of the state’s households have rooftop solar systems installed but the strong uptake has created issues for the renewables-heavy grid, with solar at times generating so much surplus energy that demand falls near zero, destabilising the power system. Residents with solar now face the prospect of their rooftop panels being switched off remotely to ensure the grid stays stable and secure. “If the grid reaches net negative demand which under current operations is forecast in South Australia only a few years away, that’s not a political issue, that’s not a market issue, that’s not an environment issue. It’s actually a physics and engineering issue,” Mr van Holst Pellekaan told a Smart Energy Council forum on Wednesday. “The grid blowing up is not the right term, but it simply will not work.” South Australia has also accelerated a timeline for renewables to provide 100 per cent of its electricity needs with plans to hit the ambitious target by 2030. It didn’t have to be this wayThe entirely artificial rise of solar panels in South Australia:
No wonder South Australia is in so much troubleThe conservative party is in charge now in SA, but here’s the sensible party, telling us how practical they are, while they are trying to change the global weather with green electrons. “We are not philosophically or ideologically constrained in our governance in South Australia,” Mr van Holst Pellekaan told the forum of Australia’s state and territory energy ministers. “We are constrained by a firm conviction that we must move forward with regard to harnessing renewable energy and it must be in a practical way that works for everybody who participates in the market. We’re not locked into ideology. We’re locked into continuing down a path of making sure it’s a practical way to do it.” We’re not ideologues, my foot. It’s projection all the way down. Money, money,moneyIt’s an expensive game — global weather tweaking. The cost of managing the grid is rising fast. The costs of managing the power system soared to $310m in the first quarter of 2020, more than double the previous record set in 2008,consuming 8 per cent of all energy costs for the three month period compared with just 1-2 per cent historically, the Australian Energy Market Operator said. Are these $310 million dollar new costs being borne by the wind farms and solar panel owners? The solution to the destabilization-by-unreliable-generators, is to add more unreliable generators and on top of that — spent $1,500 million dollars on a giant interconnector emergency IV line to NSW. The report also highlights the benefits of a greater interconnected grid as levels of renewable energy increase. In South Australia’s case the proposed EnergyConnect project will dramatically reduce security challenges and allow South Australia and NSW to take advantage of their geographic diversity through their ability to share resources when it is to their economic advantage. This will drain unreliable energy out of South Australia at lunch time and windy days. That way, the surge can destroy the baseload economics of New South Wales as well. It also means South Australia can pretend to be 100% “renewable”, even though it won’t be able to do it without the billion dollar extension cord. August 28th, 2020 | Tags: SA (South Australia), Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | … When the hollering throng comes demanding strangers raise their fists, good people at dinner might agree, and take the path of least resistance. And if everyone did, it becomes another advertisement for a political terror group. “Look everyone supports us!”. But it only took one woman to refuse and the propaganda moment suddenly flipped. If you can’t see the video, you can watch it here.
Is this the point the BLM groupies back up at least on this approach? In comments under this tweet, there are many droll comparisons of Brown Shirts and RedGuards. But even BLM supporters know this went too far: @saletan Anyone who stages this kind of mob aggression is doing the Trump campaign’s work for free. @LAppiah This is just bizarre. I sincerely believe white people need to take a big step back and consult black leaders about what is and isn’t helpful… These comments win the internet today:@GreerMcVay said “I’m convinced these are right wing plants. I just don’t believe BLM advocates would do this.” @RidgePlaysGames: This was a psyop. No one on the left is doing something this stupid and baseless. Others take the mickey: @MichaelTanuvasa How many of these kids have Parents they wont say this shit, too? Honestly they should be looting and burning stuff. Not pulling stunts like this. If you are going to alienate ppl with no plan at least wreck some rich peoples money flow Funnily enough, apparently Lauren B. Victor, the women who wouldn’t accede, explained “It just didn’t feel right” though she could understand their anger. She revealed, “I’m very much with them. I’ve been marching for weeks and weeks.” So these are BLM supporters harrassing a BLM supporter. Civilizations need to discuss these moments, even if the ABC and BBC might not want to. Skeptics know that if people give in to bullies, the mob just asks for more. The new coercion-for-dinner event has gone viral on twitter, but word is only just spreading now into some mainstream news sources. Good people need to be prepared. Speaking of which, if you think the BBC is doing its own form of racism by banning the words to Rule Brittannia and The Land of Hope and Glory, you can sign the petition, and do your best to learn the words and sing these as often as possible. Teach the children. Britain abolished slavery in 1807. Let’s celebrate that.
The first case of a definitive reinfection was reported todayBefore we look at whether a cold gives us protection let’s point out we don’t know how well a SARS 2 infection gives us protection. A 33 year old man in Hong Kong was tested positive nearly five months after his first infection, and with a slightly different variant of the virus, so it’s very likely this was a second infection rather than a resurgence of the first. It hints that Covid may be a bit like the common cold, and our immunity may be partial and temporary which is not good news for the herd immunity idea and the vaccine plan, but it’s only one case. On the plus side, he had a three day fever, cough and sickness in March, but is asymptomatic this time, suggesting that maybe there is enough residual immunity to help him beat the second infection. There have been other reports of people getting reinfected but none of the previous cases had genetic testing of both infections to show they were different. But 13% of 4,000 doctors who were surveyed in May (even at that early stage) believed that at least one of their patients had been reinfected, so it is not that rare. UPDATE: Already today two other cases of reinfection have also turned up in Belgium and the Netherlands. More coming soon… Predictably, vaccine makers are rushing to say that these are not unexpected and probably don’t matter, but other researchers are more concerned. Vaccines are less likely to work for long if our immune systems can’t achieve it with a natural infection. How about Herd Immunity?Keep in mind we don’t know if the second-timer in Hong Kong was infectious this time. His immunity may have helped him feel better, (or it could be that his Vitamin D level was higher in summer) but he may still be able to infect others. This makes all the difference. If people can still reinfect vulnerable family members their immunity is not protecting the herd. Some people are hoping that Herd Immunity may be reached at 20% infected but an asymptomatic infection is not the same as immunity. Asymptomatic people shed just as much virus as symptomatic people. (Seungjae Lee et al) The whole point of herd immunity is the kind of immunity that stops the spread of the virus. After mild Covid-19 infections antibodies seem to fade fairly quickly, with a half life of 73 days. But could that protection be hiding in T cells, rather than antibodies? Our immune system — like the armed forcesT cells are the deep controllers of white blood cells, and in one of their many roles, they activate the B cells that make the antibodies. Normally we test for antibodies to see if people have immunity because that’s the cheapest way to tell if the whole army of immune cells knows what to look for. A fully fledged antibody response is a mature, armed-and-ready response. It is usually assumed that if we don’t have antibodies we don’t have protection.
 T-cells activate B-Cells, which make antibodies. | Image adapted from Mikael Häggström. A flurry of studies have dug deeper and are finding that it’s possible to have T-cells specific to virus without having any detectable antibodies to it. Antibodies are like small sentinels and look outs, sweeping our mucosal surfaces and blood for threats. They offer fast protection, ready to raise the alarm. T-cells, perhaps are the Colonels and Generals as well as the SAS. They can get activated within hours. Albeit, hours can matter with exponential invaders. Can common colds and T-cell memories give us protection? Maybe.One fifth of all our colds are coronaviruses. People are estimated to get a coronavirus cold on average every two to three years. Protective antibodies wane between colds, but cellular (T cell) immunity “could remain”. People appear to get less severe infections after the initial rounds. Sette and Crotty reviewed five studies on T-cells that showed that between 10 and 50% of people who have never been exposed to Coronavirus nonetheless carry T-cells that recognise parts of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. It’s possible that T-cell recognition is useful and gives us a head start, but the authors warn that it might be good, irrelevant or even a bad thing. If the antibodies are aimed at the wrong parts of the virus they may send the immune system out on a dead end path. That’s the ‘original antigenic sin’. Think of a distracted army aiming for the wrong target. It’s also possible that the antibodies themselves are a pest, clogging up the works, or worse — even helping the dang virus get inside immune cells themselves (known as ADE) thus making the infection worse. (It is known to happen in Dengue, Zika, Ebola and with some Coronaviruses). It is frequently assumed that pre-existing T cell memory against SARS-CoV-2 might be either beneficial or irrelevant. However, there is also the possibility that pre-existing immunity might actually be detrimental, through mechanisms such as ‘original antigenic sin’ (the propensity to elicit potentially inferior immune responses owing to pre-existing immune memory to a related pathogen), or through antibody-mediated disease enhancement. [ADE] While there is no direct evidence to support these outcomes, they must be considered. A detrimental effect linked to pre-existing immunity is eminently testable and would be revealed by the same COVID-19 cohort and vaccine studies proposed above. — Sette and Crotty. It is a war out there. We already knew around 45% of the population don’t seem to get any symptoms to Covid-19, so they are protected (from symptoms at least, though half show signs of lung damage). That may be because of their T-Cells, but it may not. Asymptomatic infections may occur because the initial viral load was low (masks help), or because they had a lower expression of ACE2, or higher Vitamin D levels, or high NK (Natural Killer cell) activity. It may be better cytokine production. And it may be something else entirely. T-cells are mostly targeting the side of the spike, not the active endStick with me. We can learn a lot from Braun et al. They looked at which parts of the virus the T cells were reacting to, which matters. As we already know survivors seem to have more antibodies against the spike – not against the nucleocapsid shell. Braun et al used 68 blood samples taken before the epidemic.They exposed their stored blood to the novel virus for 16 hours and found that 24 of the 68 samples proved to have T-cells that reacted in some way to the Coronavirus that they had never come across before. So 35% had some immune recognition. These are probably left over units from past battles with two of the common cold coronaviruses. We even know which two coronavirus common colds, namely 229E and OC43, are the top candidates because they have a few short amino acid sequences that are identical to sequences on the spikes on Covid viruses. To figure out what the Tcells were aiming at, the researchers split the spike into S1 and S2 zones. But most of the T cells were reacting to the S2 part, and only 6% of the total sample carried T-cells that recognised the S1 part — which is probably the most important part as it contains the RBD (Receptor Binding Domain) at the active end of the spike — that’s the zinger hot spot that sticks to our ACE2 receptors. This quiet line in Braun et al seemed important: ” Most COVID-19 patients with critical disease exhibited no reactivity to S-I “ Could it be that sickest patients were extra sick because they are not targeting the S1 area? Perhaps their immune systems were aiming at the wrong part of the spike? It’s not clear that T cells against the S2 area will help. This may be the antigenic sin Sette referred to, though Sette reviewed the Braun et al paper but did not comment on the S1 and S2 ratio. The Braun et al paper was hard work to decipher. This diagram from Meirson et al helped explain what was going on. (My explanation of what this means is below).  Figure 1. Structural comparison of SARS-CoV-2 S protein conformational states. (A) Surface diagram of SARS-CoV-2 homotrimeric structure in the unbound- closed and open conformations. (B) Structural illustration of S protein, including functional domains (NTD, N-terminal domain; RBD, receptor-binding domain; CTD2, C-terminal domain 2; CTD, C-terminal domain 3; and proteolytic cleavage sites (S1/S2, S2’). (C) S trimer with one RBD in the open conformation and (D) RBD-ACE2 complex shown as a cartoon. (E) Superposed structures depicting the conformational changes between the unbound-open (left) to the ACE2-bound state. (Meirson et al, 2020)
Deciphering the spike picture above: A/ Shows the spike in an open and closed form. The RBD means Receptor Binding Domain. That is the key spot that sticks to the ACE2 receptor. Obviously we don’t want that to happen. The “key” that clamps onto our cells is a way to open the door. B/ Shows the genetic map. One spike is made of three repeats of this code string. The RBD is on the first part of the coding string (which the researchers call S1). Looking at picture D, we see that the N terminal end starts near the virus membrane then reaches out along the spike to the important RBD. Then the string folds back on itself so that the C terminal ends up close to the starting point. The middle of the string sticks out on spike. C/ One of the spike sections hinges open. D/ The skeleton of the long string molecules, plus the ACE2 molecule the spike sticks too. Everything in biology is done in strings — that’s how they are read from the code. E/ Some pretty tricky engineering changes happen as the spike bites the ACE2 receptor. The spike proteins are quite different in the different coronaviruses, but there are a few common sections and some people have antibodies to parts on what is called the C-terminal. The question that matters — are these T-Cells that recognise this part of the spike useful in preventing a bad disease. Do they neutralize the virus, or just clog up our antibody tests? Here’s another image below, a bit like the one above. The skinny part of the spike is connected to the virus. The fat part is seeking out your ACE2 cells and wants to clamp on them. The two orange parts are probably the most important targets of antibodies.  N terminal, C Terminal, SARS CoV2, graphic, spike, Covid. Rahman et al
The big questionsCan T-cells protect us from a bad Covid infection? Are they the reason about 45% of people appear not to get any symptoms at all? But if these T cells are useful why do so many medical workers catch Covid? Why are the ranges of T cell responses here so wide? There is the puzzle that children suffer worse colds, yet get better protection from Covid, though have at least as much virus in their noses and throats. Will people with reinfections of Covid shed less virus than the first time?
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