2 Years In, Science Still Shows Masks Useless

I pointed out the large holes in the Bangladesh study nearly a year ago

Masks are back in San Diego, California, where the school board has just decreed that students must cover their faces or be barred from setting foot inside a classroom. Never mind that, per CDC statistics and Census Bureau population figures, more than 99.99 percent of children in California (where governor Gavin Newsom has regularly imposed mask mandates) and more than 99.99 percent of children in Florida (where Governor Ron DeSantis has let kids live mask-free) have not died of Covid—either because they haven’t gotten it, or because they’ve gotten it and survived it. Never mind that more than 99.99 percent of kids nationally have not died of Covid, either. And never mind that, again, based on CDC statistics, those over age 85 have had more than 2,000 times the chance of dying of Covid as those under age 18; that even those in their thirties have had 25 times the chance of dying of Covid as those under 18; and that, out of every 40 school-age kids (ages 5-17) who have died during the Covid era, only one of those deaths has involved Covid. Regardless, school officials have decided that everyone must mask up.

Nor are schools alone in returning to mask mandates. The military has been one of the most mask-happy of all institutions. Right on cue, the Navy announced that everyone, whether uniformed or not, must wear masks indoors on its bases in the San Diego area. Up the coast, Bay Area Rapid Transit has reimposed a mask mandate. Meantime, many colleges across the country have announced that they will be requiring masks this fall.

Such decrees ignore the facts that masks are physically uncomfortable, make it harder to breathe, and profoundly compromise human social interaction. But none of that matters to the mask zealots, who are convinced that benefits far outweigh any potential costs. So, where is the proof?

The nature of the public-health establishment’s embrace of masks is nicely captured in an article published last spring and currently posted on the website of the National Institutes of Health. The article, by Seán M. Muller, speaks of “the failure of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to provide supportive evidence” that masks work to reduce viral transmission—a matter I discussed at length last summer.

Muller deserves credit for being more honest than most mask advocates. He notes that the World Health Organization said in March 2020 that “there is no evidence” that masks work, and he adds that “it was the absence of significant positive effects from RCTs prior to the pandemic that informed the WHO’s initial [anti-mask] stance.” Yet Muller laments the reliance on RCTs as opposed to “mechanism-based reasoning.” This is a fancy term for applying one’s own reasoning faculties. Muller’s reasoning leads him to be convinced that masks must work. But that, of course, is why we have RCTs: to test people’s notions about what works and what doesn’t.

Muller recognizes that people “may transfer infectious material by touching their faces with unsanitized hands to place and remove a mask,” but this important realization doesn’t seem to affect his conclusions. Instead, he writes, “Mechanism-based reasoning provides a justification for the stance ultimately advocated by the WHO and adopted by many countries.” He admits that the “logic” entailed in such reasoning “relies only on a fairly simple germ theory of disease.” Yet—incredibly—he then asserts that such reasoning “places the burden of proof on those who would argue against recommending masks.” So, even if RCTs provide no evidence for the claim that masks work, even if they continually suggest, on the contrary, that masks don’t work, then health officials should still recommend masks—and probably mandate them—because the claim that they work seems logical to some.

This is fundamentally anti-scientific. Yet it effectively captures the thinking that has animated mask mandates for more than two years now. This kind of thinking continues even though (as John Tierney has detailed) the remarkable similarity in Covid results between mask-mandate and mask-free states, and between mask-mandate and mask-free countries, strongly suggests that masks don’t work—just as RCTs have indicated they don’t.

The lone, slender scientific reed onto which mask advocates can grasp, at least in terms of RCTs, is a recent study from Bangladesh. Released well over a year after the CDC and others had already embraced masks wholeheartedly, the study claimed to find statistically significant benefits from surgical masks. The first author listed on that study, Yale economics professor Jason Abaluck, weighed in publicly on the mask debate before the study ever went into the field. In the early days of Covid, he opined that both the federal government and state governments should give out free masks and perhaps levy fines on those who refused to wear them. Unfortunately for mask advocates, the very small differences that the study found, and the questionable methodology on which those findings were based, provide little more scientific support for mask-wearing than does mechanism-based reasoning.

The Bangladesh RCT found that 1,086 people in the study’s mask group, and 1,106 people in the study’s non-mask control group, got Covid. Amazingly, these numbers did not come from the study’s authors—even though they provide the answer to the main question the study was addressing. Rather, Ben Recht, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, computed these numbers from those that the authors did release, and Abaluck subsequently confirmed Recht’s calculation of a 20-person difference between the two groups.

This 20-person difference (out of more than 300,000 participants) meant that about 1 out of 132 people got Covid in the control group, versus 1 out of 147 in the mask group. That equates to 0.76 percent of people in the control group and 0.68 percent of people in the mask group catching Covid—a difference of 0.08 percentage points—which the study’s authors prefer to describe as a 9 percent reduction. Abaluck and company also describe their study as having provided “clear evidence” that surgical masks work—even though those masks’ alleged benefit registered as statistically significant only after the researchers “adjusted” the ratio of how many people got Covid in each group by providing “baseline controls,” which they do not transparently describe. (That adjustment, however—and its necessity for achieving statistical significance—is plainly indicated.)

This reported difference of 0.08 percentage points tested as statistically significant only because of the massive sample size that the authors claimed, which allowed tiny differences to test as significant rather than being attributable to random chance. It is not at all clear, however, that this study could really produce such precision.

Imagine if researchers randomly divided 340,000 individuals, regardless of where they lived, into a mask group (170,000 people) or a non-mask control group (the other 170,000). One would assume that this random division would result in the two groups being very similar. That’s part of the essence of an RCT—that if you randomly assign enough people to one group or another, the two groups will end up being essentially alike simply by chance. It would be a very different thing, however, to assign two whole cities of 170,000 people into two groups, with each member of a given city going into the same group. In that case, it wouldn’t be clear whether any potential differences in outcomes would be due to the intervention (in this case, masks) or to the differences between the cities (in rates of virus exposure, cultural norms, and so on).

The Bangladesh study’s approach falls somewhere between these two scenarios. Its researchers randomly assigned 300 villages to its mask group (in which it encouraged mask-wearing) and 300 villages with similar characteristics to its non-mask control group (in which it didn’t encourage mask-wearing). Every member of a given village was assigned to the same group. As a result, Recht writes, “Though the sample size looked enormous (340,000 individuals), the effective number of samples was only 600 because the treatment was applied to individual villages.”

However, the researchers didn’t analyze the findings at the level of villages. Instead, they did so as if they had randomly assigned 340,000 individuals to either the mask group or the control group. Recht writes that because “the individual outcomes are not independent” and “outcomes inside a village are correlated,” analyzing the study in this manner is “certainly wrong.” Put another way, when individuals are randomly assigned to one group or another in an RCT, one person’s outcome isn’t supposed to affect another’s—but this is hardly the case when analyzing the effects of a highly contagious virus among people living in the same village, all of whom were assigned to the same group. In layman’s terms, each roll of the dice should be independent and shouldn’t affect subsequent rolls. But in the Bangladesh study, each roll of the dice did affect subsequent rolls.

Recht cites a previous RCT on masks (which I discussed in my 2021 essay) that adjusted for such correlation—that is, adjusted for the fact that one person’s outcome could influence another’s. Even though that earlier RCT randomly assigned families rather than villages to a particular group, it still assumed correlation and adjusted for it. The Bangladesh study, which had far greater correlation, assumed none. Adjusting for correlation, Recht found that the Bangladesh study showed no statistically significant benefits from masks.

The danger in pretending to have randomly assigned 340,000 individuals is that huge sample sizes—which suggest great accuracy—allow small differences to test as statistically significant, since there is less likelihood that they merely reflect random events. This is fine if a test is really that accurate, but not if it’s inflating its sample size by a factor of more than 500 (600 versus 340,000)—or even by a factor of five. Such a scenario risks producing “statistically significant” results that are really just a product of random chance. This is exactly what seems to have happened in the Bangladesh study.

The mainstream press heralded this study as confirming that surgical masks work and suggesting that cloth masks (which, overall, didn’t show a statistically significant benefit) should perhaps be shelved. But the study’s actual findings were more interesting. It found no statistically significant evidence that masks work for people under the age of 40. For people in their forties, however, it found statistically significant evidence that cloth masks work but no corresponding evidence to support the use of surgical masks. For people in their fifties (or older), it found statistically significant evidence that surgical masks work, but no corresponding evidence to support the use of cloth masks. Further complicating matters, the researchers distributed both red cloth masks and purple ones. Recht, citing data from the study that the authors didn’t include in their write-up or tables, writes that, based on the study’s method of analysis, “cloth purple masks did nothing, but the red masks ‘work.’” He adds, “Indeed, red masks were more effective than surgical masks!” When a study starts producing findings like these, its results start to look like random noise.

Moreover, since there were just 20 fewer Covid cases in the mask group than in the non-mask control group, most of the difference between the 0.68 percent Covid rate in the former and the 0.76 percent rate in the latter was because of differences in the sizes of what were supposed to be two equally sized groups. The researchers omitted from their analysis thousands of people—disproportionately from the control group—whom they didn’t successfully contact. The University of Pittsburgh’s Maria Chikina, Carnegie Mellon’s Wesley Pegden, and Recht found that the study’s “unblinded staff”—who knew which participants were assigned to which group—“approached” those in the mask group at a “significantly” higher rate than those in the control group. Indeed, Chikina, Pegden, and Recht write that the “main significant difference” that led to an “imbalance” between the two groups was “the behavior of the study staff.”

Under the “intention-to-treat” principle, everyone who was originally randomly assigned to either group should have been included in the analysis, whether or not the staff had contacted them. Eric McCoy, an M.D. at the University of California, Irvine, explains that intention-to-treat analysis “preserves the benefits of randomization, which cannot be assumed when using other methods of analysis.” Recht, agreeing with McCoy, writes, “For the medical statistics experts, the intention to treat principle says that the individuals who are unreachable or who refuse to be surveyed must be counted in the study. Omitting them invalidates the study.” Yet that’s exactly what the authors of the Bangladesh study did. When Chikina, Pegden, and Recht analyzed the study’s finding using intention-to-treat analysis, they found no statistically significant difference between the number of people who got Covid in the mask group and the number who got it in the control group.

Thus, in order to show a statistically significant benefit from masks, the Bangladesh study both had to depart from intention-to-treat analysis and treat 340,000 people who were not randomly assigned to a group on an individual basis as if they had been. Doing just one or the other would have failed to produce a statistically significant result.

In addition, the study made no real secret that it was pro-mask, launching an all-out campaign to convince people in half of the villages to wear them. The researchers found that physical distancing was 21 percent greater in the mask villages than in the control villages, muddying efforts to distinguish between the effects of masks and distancing. The study also provided monetary incentives to some people, opening up the possibility that, given that participants and staff both knew what group people were in, some participants might have desired to give responses that pleased the researchers (and only those who reported Covid-like symptoms got tested for antibodies). Finally, the study didn’t test how many people had Covid antibodies beforehand, even though its principal findings about masks were based on how many people had Covid antibodies afterward. This is like determining whether a family bought butter during their most recent grocery trip by seeing if there’s butter in the refrigerator.

To sum up, the Bangladesh study’s findings show tiny differences in how many people got Covid in the mask and (non-mask) control groups, and these tiny differences register as statistically significant only because of myriad questionable methodological choices. The study’s researchers conducted their analysis as if they had randomly divided 340,000 individuals into either the mask group or the control group, when in fact they had just randomly divided 600 villages. They also deviated from intention-to-treat analysis, without which they would not have shown statistical significance even on the basis of this inflated sample size. They adjusted the ratio of Covid cases between the mask and control groups by adding baseline controls that were not well-explained—without which surgical masks would not have tested as providing statistically significant benefits. And they based their primary findings on whether people had acquired Covid antibodies by the end of the study, without having tested whether they had already acquired them before the start of the study.

Nevertheless, the CDC favorably references this study and calls it “well-designed.” And even before the effort had been peer-reviewed or published as an official study, Abaluck proclaimed, “I think this should basically end any scientific debate about whether masks can be effective.”

Keep in mind that there are no real grounds for cherry-picking results from the Bangladesh study. If the study persuades people that masks work, then it should also persuade them that those in their forties should wear cloth masks (red ones, not purple!) and then switch to surgical masks once they turn 50. All those statistically significant findings resulted from the same abandonment of intention-to-treat analysis and the same determination to analyze 340,000 people as if they had been randomly assigned to a group on an individual basis, when instead they had been lumped in with the rest of their village. To put it in layman’s terms: garbage in, garbage out.

More here:

https://www.city-journal.org/masks-still-dont-work

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

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Deborah Birx's Guide to Destroying America

Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator under President Donald Trump, was one of the "trifecta" of three leading public officials who successfully pushed COVID lockdowns in the United States. Virtually every page of Birx's new book, Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It's Too Late, reads like a how-to guide from the front lines of subverting a democratic superpower from within. It bears repeating, from the outset, that lockdowns were never part of any democratic country's pandemic preparedness plan prior to Xi Jinping's lockdown of Wuhan, China.

The lockdowns that Xi pioneered and Birx so zealously advocated for reportedly led to over 170,000 non-COVID excess deaths among young Americans while failing to meaningfully slow the spread of COVID anywhere they were tried. It would have been impossible for an enemy agent armed with anything less than nuclear weapons to have inflicted so much damage on America's economy, social fabric, and historical freedoms in such a short period of time.

Notably, though Birx's memoir has earned relatively few reviews from human readers on Amazon, it's earned rave reviews from Chinese state media, a feat not shared even by the far more popular pro-lockdown books of professional genuflectors to power like Lawrence Wright.

The glowing response from Chinese state media should come as no surprise. Nearly every sentence of Birx's book faithfully parrots the Chinese Communist Party's foreign and domestic propaganda, which helped facilitate Xi's weaponization of the COVID response to eliminate the independence of the CCP's private sector rivals.

Chapter 1 opens with what Birx claims was her first impression of the virus:

I can still see the words splashed across my computer screen in the early morning hours of January 3. Though we were barely into 2020, I was stuck in an old routine, waking well before dawn and scanning news headlines online. On the BBC's site, one caught my attention: "China Pneumonia Outbreak: Mystery Virus Probed in Wuhan."
Indeed, that BBC article, which was posted at approximately 9:00 a.m. EST on Jan. 3, 2020, was the first in a Western news organization to discuss the outbreak of a new virus in Wuhan. Apparently, Birx was scanning British news headlines just as it appeared. Birx then tells us where she got her philosophy of disease mitigation, recalling how she immediately believed Chinese citizens "knew what had worked" against SARS-1: masks and distancing:

Government officials and citizens across Asia knew both the pervasive fear and the personal response that had worked before to mitigate the loss of life and the economic damage wrought by SARS and MERS. They wore masks. They decreased the frequency and size of social gatherings. Crucially, based on their recent experience, the entire citizenry and local doctors were ringing alarm bells loudly and early. Lives were on the line-lots of them. They knew what had worked before, and they would do it again.
Birx spends several pages tut-tutting the CCP for its "cover-up" of the virus (which Chinese state media pointedly didn't mind), then tells us:

On January 3, the same day the BBC piece ran, the Chinese government officially notified the United States of the outbreak. Bob Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was contacted by his Chinese counterpart, George F. Gao.
Note that Jan. 3 was also the same day that heroic Chinese whistleblower Li Wenliang was reportedly admonished by Chinese authorities for sending a WeChat message about a "cover-up" of the outbreak. In other words, on the same day Li was "admonished," the head of China's CDC personally called U.S. CDC Director Robert Redfield to share the same information Li supposedly shared. Some cover-up.

From here, it gets worse. One page later, Birx tells us how traumatized she still is from having watched videos of Wuhan residents collapsing and falling dead in January 2020, and praises the "courageous doctor" who shared them online:

The video showed a hallway crowded with patients slumped in chairs. Some of the masked people leaned against the wall for support. The camera didn't pan so much as zigzag while the Chinese doctor maneuvered her smartphone up the narrow corridor. My eye was drawn to two bodies wrapped in sheets lying on the floor amid the cluster of patients and staff. The doctor's colleagues, their face shields and other personal protective equipment in place, barely glanced at the lens as she captured the scene. They looked past her, as if at a harrowing future they could all see and hoped to survive. I tried to increase the volume, but there was no sound. My mind seamlessly filled that void, inserting the sounds from my past, sounds from other wards, other places of great sorrow. I had been here before. I had witnessed scenes like this across the globe, in HIV ravaged communities-when hospitals were full of people dying of AIDS before we had treatment or before we ensured treatment to those who needed it. I had lived this, and it was etched permanently in my brain: the unimaginable, devastating loss of mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, brothers, sisters.

Staring at my computer screen, I was horrified by the images from Wuhan, the suffering they portrayed, but also because they confirmed what I'd suspected for the last three weeks: Not only was the Chinese government underreporting the real numbers of the infected and dying in Wuhan and elsewhere, but the situation was definitely far more dire than most people outside that city realized. Up until now, I'd been only reading or hearing about the virus. Now it had been made visible by a courageous doctor sharing this video online.
Birx's book was published in April 2022. The early videos she recounts as the source of her trauma were exposed as fake by the Associated Press and other outlets in February of 2020.

In the next paragraph, Birx tells us how she grew even more determined after seeing that the Chinese had built a hospital in 10 days to fight the virus:

Dotting it were various pieces of earth-moving equipment, enough of them in various shapes and sizes that I briefly wondered if the photograph was of a manufacturing plant where the newly assembled machines were on display. Quickly, I learned that the machines were in Wuhan and that they were handling the first phase of preparatory work for the construction of a one-thousand-bed hospital to be completed in just ten days' time . The Chinese may not have been giving accurate data about the numbers of cases and deaths, but the rapid spread of this disease could be counted in other ways-including in how many Chinese workers were being employed to build new facilities to relieve the pressure on the existing, and impressive, Wuhan health service centers. You build a thousand-bed hospital in ten days only if you are experiencing unrelenting community spread of a highly contagious virus that has eluded your containment measures and is now causing serious illness on a massive scale.
BuzzFeed had proved that images of rapid hospital construction in China were faked on Jan. 27, 2020.

To recap, Deborah Birx-the woman who did more than almost any other person in the United States to promote and prolong COVID lockdowns, and attempted, with the support of mainstream media outlets, to silence anyone who disagreed with her-tells us in 2022 that she'd been inspired in her work by images that were widely known to have been faked (as if the real images of old age homes in Italy and elsewhere weren't bad enough) before the lockdowns even started.

That's Chapter 1.

Birx then spends hundreds of pages recounting what appears to be political maneuvering to intentionally deceive as many Americans as possible into willingly locking down for as long as possible, without making it seem like a "lockdown":

At this point, I wasn't about to use the words lockdown or shutdown. If I had uttered either of those in early March, after being at the White House only one week, the political, nonmedical members of the task force would have dismissed me as too alarmist, too doom-and-gloom, too reliant on feelings and not facts. They would have campaigned to lock me down and shut me up.
Birx recalls using "flatten-the-curve guidance" to manipulate the "political, nonmedical members" of the government into consenting to lockdowns that were stricter than they realized:

On Monday and Tuesday, while sorting through the CDC data issues, we worked simultaneously to develop the flatten-the-curve guidance I hoped to present to the vice president at week's end. Getting buy-in on the simple mitigation measures every American could take was just the first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions. We had to make these palatable to the administration by avoiding the obvious appearance of a full Italian lockdown. At the same time, we needed the measures to be effective at slowing the spread, which meant matching as closely as possible what Italy had done-a tall order. We were playing a game of chess in which the success of each move was predicated on the one before it.
She also admits that her guidance regarding the maximum allowable size of social gatherings-10 people-was arbitrary, because her real goal was zero-no social contact of any kind, anywhere:

I had settled on ten knowing that even that was too many, but I figured that ten would at least be palatable for most Americans-high enough to allow for most gatherings of immediate family but not enough for large dinner parties and, critically, large weddings, birthday parties, and other mass social events. . Similarly, if I pushed for zero (which was actually what I wanted and what was required), this would have been interpreted as a "lockdown"-the perception we were all working so hard to avoid.
Birx then divulges her strategy of using federal advisories to give cover to state governors to impose mandates and restrictions:

The White House would "encourage," but the states could "recommend" or, if needed, "mandate." In short, we were handing governors and their public health officials a template, a state-level permission slip they could use to enact a specific response that was appropriate for the people under their jurisdiction. The fact that the guidelines would be coming from a Republican White House gave political cover to any Republican governors skeptical of federal overreach.
The White House advisor recalls with relish that her strategy led states to shut down one by one, destroying the livelihoods of millions of Americans and devastating the country's elementary and high school education systems without any public health benefit to show for it:

[T]he recommendations served as the basis for governors to mandate the flattening-the-curve shutdowns. The White House had handed down guidance, and the governors took that ball and ran with it . With the White House's "this is serious" message, governors now had "permission" to mount a proportionate response and, one by one, other states followed suit. California was first, doing so on March 18. New York followed on March 20. Illinois, which had declared its own state of emergency on March 9, issued shelter-in-place orders on March 21. Louisiana did so on the twenty-second. In relatively short order by the end of March and the first week of April, there were few holdouts. The circuit-breaking, flattening-the-curve shutdown had begun.
Cue the maniacal laughter.

In what may be her most damning remark about the entire U.S. response to COVID, Birx tells us that she'd always known "two weeks to slow the spread" was a lie and knew in advance that she wanted the timeframe extended, despite having no data to support why such a step was scientifically sensible:

No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn't have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude.
This is one of several quotes in which Birx refers to "our version" of a lockdown, though she never makes it clear what the original "version" of a lockdown was (read: China's). In fact, though Birx spends hundreds of pages boasting about her crusade for lockdowns across America, she never once explains why she wanted them or why she felt they were a good idea, other than the aforementioned brief asides about China's supposed success using social distancing to combat SARS-1.

Birx then says that she had a regular system for surreptitiously revising and hiding information from her bosses (whom she calls "gatekeepers") after they reviewed her guidance to the states, in order to keep lockdown measures in place for as long as possible against the wishes of the White House:

After the heavily edited documents were returned to me, I'd reinsert what they had objected to, but place it in those different locations. I'd also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the most salient-the points the administration objected to most-no longer fell at the start of the bullet points. I shared these strategies with the three members of the data team also writing these reports. Our Saturday and Sunday report-writing routine soon became: write, submit, revise, hide, resubmit.
Fortunately, this strategic sleight-of-hand worked. That they never seemed to catch this subterfuge left me to conclude that, either they read the finished reports too quickly or they neglected to do the word search that would have revealed the language to which they objected. In slipping these changes past the gatekeepers and continuing to inform the governors of the need for the big-three mitigations-masks, sentinel testing, and limits on indoor social gatherings-I felt confident I was giving the states permission to escalate public health mitigation with the fall and winter coming.
Birx's plans seem to be going quite well for her until she meets the book's leading antagonist: Scott Atlas, the former Stanford University neuroradiology professor serving as an adviser to the Task Force. To Birx's disgust, Atlas took a strong stand against school closures, treating children as unique vectors of disease, and other heresies.

More here:

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/deborah-birx-guide-destroying-america

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

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Education Is in a Shambles

The single most bizarre aspect of the pandemic policy response was the shutting of schools, public and private. One country never did that-Sweden-and the results were fabulous: zero deaths and zero educational losses. That this was the right choice should have been obvious from the beginning. COVID was never a serious threat to kids, mercifully.

In those fateful days, fully 55 million U.S. kids were suddenly sent home, and their parents' lives were massively disrupted to care for them and oversee their education. That happened for those lucky enough to be able to homeschool-a practice once nearly illegal and then suddenly mandatory-but for millions of kids, they simply slipped through the cracks, some losing as much as two years of education.

When the kids finally went back, they faced a coronaphobic environment with mandatory masking, plus a general message that they and their friends are disease vectors and they had better comply. They were hit with rolling lockdowns in the name of track-and-trace along with the pathological futility of somehow forever slowing the spread.

The result is a mental health crisis coupled with a dramatic decline in reading and math scores. We really are talking here about a lifetime trauma, far worse than a natural disaster. It was entirely man-made. It should raise fundamental doubts about the wisdom of our overlords.

So why did the shutdown happen?

So far as I can tell, such an egregious policy response has been baked into the modeling since 2006. The non-medically minded computer programmers who put together the whole idea of disease avoidance through "social distancing" developed an obsession with stopping schools, particularly ending school buses. In their view, kids are uncontrollable disease spreaders, so the only option is to put a stop to the whole enterprise.

An earlier modeling exercise for lockdowns written by Neil M. Ferguson of Imperial College London and published in Nature just assumed that school closures would reduce "attack rates" of a virus by 40 percent. This was echoed in 2006 by Robert Glass and his top two acolytes, Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, both of whom were pushing hard for school closures throughout February 2020 and somehow managed to get their way.

"Just watch kids with runny noses and coughing and sneezing and touching one another (especially the younger ones)," VA consultant Mecher wrote in March 2020 to public health officials all over the country. "You couldn't design a better system to spread disease. Schools and daycare centers are clearly amplifiers of disease transmission .. We can guarantee that if the US does not close schools now, they will eventually close all the schools and universities out of desperation." As for the downside, forget about it: "We don't need to exhaust ourselves searching for perfect solutions to address all these challenges associated with the 2nd and 3rd order consequences of school closure."

Strange how Dr. Mecher otherwise stayed out of the public eye for the duration of the pandemic.

In the big picture of things, the school shutdowns made absolutely no sense either epidemiologically or politically. The public school system in this country has for more than 100 years been considered the crown jewel of Progressive achievements. They began in this country in the 1880s at the state level as an effort to Americanize immigrant communities. They gradually became part of the normal function of government at all levels.

One might have supposed that the ruling class establishment would protect the schools above all else, not shut them down for fear of a virus that poses a near-zero risk to the kids. The flu pandemics of 1969 and 1958 did not cause this, and not even the polio scares of the 1940s were enough to force school closures. That it all happened in 2020 is a measure of just how bonkers the world became nearly overnight.

Now there is a real crisis at work in even finding teachers, many of whom have been massively demoralized not only from the closures but also the vaccine mandates. The Washington Post reports that "rural school districts in Texas are switching to four-day weeks this fall due to lack of staff. Florida is asking veterans with no teaching background to enter classrooms. Arizona is allowing college students to step in and instruct children. The teacher shortage in America has hit crisis levels - and school officials everywhere are scrambling to ensure that, as students return to classrooms, someone will be there to educate them."

This problem is coupled with the huge demographic upheaval of parents with young families fleeing the blue states for red ones, in search of a better place to raise the ones they love the most.

This might also be a tremendous opportunity for reform, dramatic reform. The education question should not actually be too difficult for any society that considers itself free. Parents want their kids to be educated and many institutions and people are thrilled to be part of the project. It might be heresy to say it, but consider that the entire industry would be better off without any government involvement at any level.

There is no reason why the entire sector should be treated like something uniquely requiring government intervention to make possible. We know now that government cannot be trusted in this realm. In fact, this trust may never return. Already public schooling was entering a crisis phase with curricula ever more detached from parents' wishes and kids treated inhumanely in an increasingly mechanized and bureaucratized system heavy with administrative expense.

The issue of homeschooling should at least be fully settled by now. Anyone who wishes to do so should be free to do so. But what about myriad hybrid schools that combine family, community, religious institutions, and civic associations? Most states have far too many regulations-including teacher certifications and curriculum requirements plus laws on compulsory attendance-that make the formation and development of more complex solutions too difficult.

If the Republicans are looking for solutions here, they should start with getting the federal government entirely out of the picture, starting with the immediate abolition of the Department of Education, which has done nothing to improve educational systems and much to inhibit innovative solutions at the local level.

It's also time to revisit the issue of so-called "child labor" laws (imposed only in 1938) that stop hybrid school/work solutions and end up conscripting kids into an inhumane environment for 12 years. It's pointless. Even now, kids on family farms (and also child actors!) are free to enjoy employment while also pursuing school studies. This right needs to be extended to everyone. It's preposterous that a 13-year old cannot legally serve a sandwich in a local shop and get paid to do so.

Beyond that, deregulation of the entire educational sector should be the main theme here. And the system of funding needs dramatic change too. Right now, it is tied to property taxes which in turn are linked to the system of school districts, which profoundly affects housing prices and ends up making most schools "public" in name only. A just system would link payments made to services provided, just as with private schools.

The system we have now is in the midst of an unsustainable crisis that is crying out for dramatic change. The incredible irony is that American educational institutions were massively disrupted and even wrecked by the very same crowd that built them in the first place. Even the New York Times is publishing writers who now say they never should have closed.

Indeed, but for all the catastrophic results, at least it has created a giant opportunity for massive reform that rejects the top-down, property-tax-funded, bureaucratically controlled model rooted in control, coercion, and compulsion, in favor of a system better suited to a free people. The way to prevent school lockdowns from ever happening again is to create a giant wall between government and education, and then let millions of flowers bloom.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/education-is-in-shambles_4645924.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

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Hidden side-effects of Covid

The third world is full of silent victims. Impoverished nations ruled by dictators, or those left to fend for themselves beneath the smoke of proxy wars, are often targeted by drug companies looking for a lawless testing environment.

Rarely, they get caught, and when it happens the story is usually printed in some sort of World magazine as a four-page human interest piece to momentarily entertain a Westerner on their way to work – flicked over and forgotten by the next train station.

Pfizer may have a shiny halo in the Covid era, but in the 90s eleven Nigerian children died during the trial of Trovan while others were rendered blind or brain damaged sparking a court case from the Nigerian government over ‘informed consent’. Informed consent is a topic the CDC, WHO, and NIH also struggled with when the notorious AZT trials began in Zimbabwe where 1,000 children contracted HIV/AIDS despite an effective treatment existing.

Carl Elliott, author of White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine said of similar controversies for small private trials in the West:

‘Many of these trials – especially Phase I clinical trials, which are early-stage studies done primarily to determine whether a drug is safe – exploit impoverished, vulnerable people, especially the mentally ill. Few people realise how little oversight the [US] federal government provides for the protection of subjects in privately sponsored studies.’

There’s a reason large drug trials aren’t done on the rich. In the third world – loose change is used as bait and the consequences for failure are limited to the mourning of a local family. Without global communication, victims cannot alert the world to their situation.

In 2020, the status quo flipped. Wealthy, highly educated Western nations found themselves as the testing ground for mRNA vaccines while the third world remained largely untouched. These trials were conducted without compensation, under duress, and often participation was mandated by governments either through coercive vaccine passport systems, direct fines, or by ‘locking citizens out of the vaccine economy’. This was called ‘an emergency rollout’ but in a strictly technical sense, it was a trial.

It doesn’t take an expert to correctly guess that there would be a range of terrible – and in some cases fatal – side effects from a new vaccine technology with 12.4 billion doses in two years.

Preparations were made by governments and pharmaceutical companies to protect themselves from the legal ramifications of angry citizens seeking a hell of a lot more than an apology and the odd human interest story. Early on in the rollout, it was this panicky level of preemptive legal work that worried the vaccine-hesitant. They were right to worry. While authorities repeated the mantra ‘safe and effective’ in the absence of long-term data, the statistical reality began to mount that Covid vaccines were returning the highest level of adverse effects seen in current use. 

The situation is likely worse than recorded, given how difficult some countries like Australia make it to record vaccine injuries. The safety profile of Covid vaccines do not compare to childhood vaccines, whose side effects look like a pebble next to Everest. Ordinarily, they would have been pulled off the shelf after the first death and sent back for further testing.

This situation is only a problem for governments and drug companies if the wider community is made aware. Hushing up the press or advising governments and their medical bureaucrats to walk the line of silence for ‘the greater good’ is not only possible – it was laid out in some of the leaked contracts. Nations like Argentina and Brazil were forced to go even further after being asked to back a pharmaceutical company’s legal protection with sovereign assets.

Social media is the weak link – the crack through which tales of adverse reactions leak.

It becomes difficult to keep chanting ‘safe and effective’ when hundreds – if not thousands – of stories make it onto social media detailing the horror that some people and their families have faced as a consequence of the vaccine trial. No matter how strong the contracts were between governments and pharmaceutical companies, there is a tipping point in public outrage where the desire for justice in the courts becomes unstoppable. Dare we call it, ‘social justice’. And it only takes one victory to set a precedent.

The natural reaction of those with something to lose (be it money or political power) is to immediately censor victims trying to share their stories. Australia is lagging a year behind the rest of the world thanks to a period in our history that will forever be known as ‘the hermit kingdom’, so we must look to the UK for a glimpse of our future.

While the BBC used public money to make a documentary attempting to shame the unvaccinated out of their decision, Mark Steyn of GB News gave those who were harmed by government vaccine directives the voice they were denied by Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

Aside from the injuries and deaths inflicted on otherwise healthy young people who had a near-zero risk from a Covid infection, the most striking part of the discussion was the behaviour of Silicon Valley, which routinely suspended and banned accounts belonging to victims.

The empty space created by their deletion sits as a scar on social media.

Many fully-vaccinated individuals in the media scoff or cheer at the censorship these people face, slurring them as ‘anti-vaxxers’ (despite the contradiction that it was their vaccination that harmed them). Others do not want to listen to first-hand evidence that a vaccine most people have taken might result in lifelong complications, especially if they have already given it to their children.

‘If you watch other TV stations, if you listen to other radio stations, if you go on social media, the people in this room with me tonight do not exist. In fact, as you can see they’re real, they’re flesh and blood, and they are your fellow citizens. They represent hundreds of thousands of other people in every corner of these islands [UK] and millions more around the globe. Yet if they post on Twitter, if they post on Facebook, they are labelled as misleading – as disinformation – and as fake news. These people are not in the least bit fake. They are victims of the Covid vaccine,’ said Mark Steyn.

It has escaped mainstream media’s notice that we live in an age where social media giants erase victims of the pharmaceutical industry and government edicts.

At what other point in modern history has it been acceptable for the personal recollections of victims to be deemed ‘misleading’ or ‘harmful’?

How can the likes of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram claim to be acting in the interest of ‘the greater good’ and ‘public health’ by hiding stories of adverse reactions, or the death of loved ones, from public view?

The truth is in the public interest, even if it is harmful to public health policy or the profits of Big Pharma. Informed consent requires an accurate assessment of risk. Would any publication turn a blind eye if Twitter deleted cancer sufferers complaining about Big Tobacco? What about if Facebook banned users who complained about mistreatment from police over concerns it would ‘erode trust in authority’?

If a new medical treatment is dangerous, even to a minority of healthy people, the public needs to know.

Silicon Valley does not only remove people who deviate from the ‘safe and effective’ narrative on vaccines. The community guidelines of some sites have expanded to cover ‘Climate Change’, gender, and sexuality in what appears to be an attempt to manipulate the direction of social ethics.

This is a system of political censorship more commonly seen in collectivist dictatorships. Perhaps this is the direction Western society is headed.

Surely, say the supporters of global gag orders, social media is a private entity. Unethical or not, it can do what it likes…

Although social media is perceived to be a public forum, that is not its legal status. However, those who claim that ‘private companies can do what they like’ are also incorrect. Setting aside the realty that all private companies are bound by various laws, Twitter, Facebook, and others are platforms. Platforms exist as a strange legal entity that arose in the early years of the internet where third parties began publishing content directly to the public via a company like Twitter.

These online sites look a bit like ‘publishers’ – who are legally responsible for every word set to print – but a publishing model is impossible to uphold in a live-post scenario where a billion people are chatting with each other. Instead, ‘platforms’ were given special legal exemption from liability toward their content. This protection came with a caveat. Because platforms are not publishers, they are not allowed to engage in editorial behaviour.

In other words, the community guidelines laid out by social media companies are being misused to censor political speech in direct violation of their legal structure.

The only ‘editorial’ behaviour platforms are permitted to engage in relates to the Good Samaritan Clause tagged onto Section 230 Immunity that essentially covers clear-cut cases of bullying, threats, intimidation, stalking, or otherwise illegal activity such as sex trafficking. It does not include scope for ‘hurt feelings’ or ‘the protection of Big Pharma from product failures’.

There is no need to tangle social media up in new legislation. The rules that were written to cover platforms were clear, simple, and sufficient. Instead, the problem sits in America’s political class who refuse to bring social media companies to court over abuses of power because they are using Silicon Valley censorship to advance their political careers, manipulate social trends, and protect their financial interests.

Where is the moral outrage from human rights lawyers about this cabal of elite entities working together to silence victims of billion-dollar corporations?

Worse, why are so many Australians occupying positions of privilege in the media happy to go along with the erasure of victims and the silencing of their suffering?

You can make the case that keeping the side effects of vaccines quiet will ‘serve the greater good’ by ensuring more people get vaccinated, but that ignores the ethical reality that human beings deserve to know the extent of true risk and make an informed decision for themselves. It is not up to strangers to judge what is ‘in the best interest’ for others.

Nor is it right to describe those who see excessive risk in Covid vaccines as ‘anti-vaxxers’. The percentage of people who reject the concept of vaccination (which is a valid position if we continue to support body autonomy) has not changed during the Covid years. What we are seeing instead is hesitation about a particular drug – a drug that has never been on the market before and was previously held back due to safety concerns that were estimated to take ‘a decade’ to resolve. Yet here they are, rolled out to the entire population of the world a year later.

Regardless of your opinion on Covid vaccination itself, deleting victims from the conversation is at best, immoral and at worst – criminal.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/empty-space-silicon-valleys-war-against-victims

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

<a href="https://edwatch.blogspot.com">http://edwatch.blogspot.com</a> (EDUCATION WATCH)

<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)

<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)

<a href="https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/">https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/</a> <b>(IMMIGRATION WATCH)</b>

<a href="https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/">https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/</a> (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

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‘Resist, Wake Up, Stop Obeying’: Holocaust Survivor Draws Parallels in Current Society to Nazi Germany

Vera Sharav was only 3 years old when her world collapsed. She and her family were chased out of Romania and herded into a concentration camp in Ukraine during World War II, where they were left to wait, and starve.

“The cloud of death was always there,” Sharav told The Epoch Times. Weekly, a list determined who would be sent where; whether it be a death or slave labor camp, she said.

While at the camp, she said her father died of typhus when she was 5, which had been widespread throughout the camps because of the cold and malnutrition.

After three years at the camp, she was rescued in 1944, she said. “My mother got wind that a few orphans would be transported out of the camp, so she lied and said I was an orphan to save my life, and that’s how I wound up leaving,” Sharav said.

This began what she called her odyssey as a child without parents, left to her own intuition and keen critical assessment of others’ intentions. “I had to assess who I could trust to take care of me,” she said.

While on a train to the Port of Constanta, Romania, where there were three boats awaiting to take groups of people to Palestine, she befriended a family. However, upon arrival, she found herself assigned a boat with other orphan children that would separate her from the family with whom she felt she could trust. So she rebelled.  “No matter what, I could not be convinced to get on that boat,” she said. “Miraculously, in the end, they gave in to me.”

Seasick, she fell asleep that night, only to wake up to find that the boat with the orphans had been torpedoed by who she said she found out decades later to have been the Russians.

Though she carried guilt for having survived, she was grateful she resisted because that resistance kept her alive, she said.

“I do not obey authority, and it saved my life.”

Weaponized Medicine

These memories returned in 2020 during the web of COVID-19 restrictions that spun out of control with the help of media propaganda, she said.

“So now, when people are obeying authority mindlessly, giving up their rights to make decisions about their own lives and what goes into their own bodies, I think back to that time,” she said.

Today, Sharav is a medical activist and founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a network of lay people and professionals who work to uphold humanitarian values and ethical standards established in the Hippocratic Oath, the Nuremberg Code, and the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights.

Both Sharav and Schara discussed with The Epoch Times what they saw as parallels between the National Socialist regime in Germany and the current medical directives being carried out in the United States through government funding.

Since the death of his 19-year-old daughter Grace in a hospital in 2021, after having been injected with a combination of drugs that he found out later was part of a federal hospital protocol, Schara called what was happening “genocide.” He has been crusading to tell his daughter’s story and network with others who have had a similar experience while bringing attention to the protocols that he believes amounted to the murder of his daughter, who had Down syndrome.

Under the Nazi regime, Sharav said, medicine was weaponized, as it has been today.

Though the Jews were the primary target, she said, the first medically murdered victims were disabled German infants and children under the age of 3. This later expanded the operation—titled T4 for the street address of the program’s central office in Berlin—to the disabled of all ages, including the mentally ill and senior citizens, Sharav said.

“The Nazis called them worthless eaters,” she said. “T4 was a concerted effort to be rid of what their propaganda called the ‘economic burden.’”

“Thirty-nine percent of that federal budget goes to those two groups right now, which is $2.2 trillion a year,” Schara said.

“The sooner solutions are enacted, the more flexible and gradual they can be,” the report states.

For Schara, the implication, while not overtly stated, suggests a call for eugenics that was supported by academic elites early in U.S. history, and later adopted by Nazi Germany.

Ten years after he took power, Adolph Hitler launched his genocide program that had been introduced in incremental steps with the help of propaganda portraying the regime as heroes, Sharav said.

“What happened to Grace, and what happened to many disabled and elderly in Western Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States in March and April of 2020 was medical murder,” Sharav said.

‘Built on a Lie’

Genocide isn’t new to the United States, Sharav said, as it was Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Oliver Wendell Holmes who voted in favor of the 8-1 majority opinion in the 1921 case Buck v. Bell, which upheld the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 and the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck, who was alleged to be mentally defective.

Holmes said it would be better to prevent the mentally disabled from being born than to allow them to “sap the strength of the state” or “let them starve for their imbecility.”

“The principle that sustains compulsory vaccinations is broad enough to cover cutting Fallopian tubes,” the justice wrote in his opinion. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Carrie Buck, however, was never actually mentally disabled, Sharav said.

“Arguments for eugenics are always built on a lie,” Sharav said. “But it’s an ideology that continues to poison public health policies.” And he blames this type of thinking for the medical decisions that ultimately contributed to Grace’s death.

‘The Banality of Evil’

As he continues to try to wrap his mind around what happened to his daughter, Schara says he gained some insight from the writings of Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt and her concept of the “banality of evil.” “It opened up a whole different view of the world for me,” Schara said.

Sharav’s experience made her familiar with the concept. The banality of evil is the normalization of mass murder by making it a bureaucratic routine that is handed down as orders through the chain of command to the person who pulls the switch, gives the injection, or turns on the gas, she said.

“No one called it murder,” Sharav said. “The Nazis were very adept at propaganda and language. The Jews were called ‘spreaders of disease,’ not unlike the epithets thrown at those who didn’t take the jab.”

Throughout 2021, the spread of COVID-19 was blamed on “the pandemic of the unvaccinated,” a phrase that was used by President Joe Biden and governors such as North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper. “The whole language of it is dehumanizing,” Sharav said.

‘A Slippery Slope’

Schara applies the concept to the fact that 67 percent of Down syndrome children are aborted in the United States, he said.

“Doctors encourage the mother to get an amnio (amniocentesis) test, and if the test shows Down syndrome or another disability that would complicate the parent’s life, he encourages an abortion,” Schara said.

What Sharav said she’s seen in an unholy union when medicine gets into bed with the government. “The Hippocratic Oath goes out the window,” she said.

The pledge to “do no harm” got replaced with allegiance to “the greater good,” Sharav said.

The question then remains, who has the authority to decide what’s best for the greater good, Sharav challenged.

What supports the greater good is having respect for the individual, Sharav said, and to pursue policies that advocate for the many over the individual is to open the door to medical practices that will cause harm.

“Look at what Big Pharma is doing now to children, aggressively pursuing them to be jabbed when they aren’t at risk at all from COVID-19,” she said.

It’s a slippery slope that—with the help of advanced technology—society is sliding down rapidly compared to the snail’s pace that it took for Hitler to implement his “Final Solution,” Schara said.

“We’re headed there exceptionally fast,” Schara said. “Today, the ‘Final Solution’ is the reduction of the entire human population under the ‘Sustainable Agenda’ of Agenda 2030.”

Unlike the physical camps that required ink tattoos for identification and guards to manage the prisoners, the new prisons are digital, Sharav said, managed remotely by surveillance through smartphones and cities. “With smart technology, you can manage billions all at once,” she said. “It’s chilling.”

It’s hard for many to fathom that an elite few would conspire to cause widespread harm, Sharav said.

“People will say, ‘They made a mistake; it was an accident.’ But no, the elite, just like the Nazis, have this arrogance in which they believe they are superior and therefore entitled to rule the rest of us because they think we are inferior,” Sharav said.

 Control vs. Faith

Schara said his concern is with an elite ruling class that is godless, believing only in what is measurable and controllable.

He emphasizes his faith in God as a powerful weapon to combat the dark agendas that have escalated beyond the comprehension of the average person, working 60 hours a week just to make ends meet.

“We should not fall trap to the false light that Satan will eventually ride in on to steal more souls. God’s true light protects those who believe,” he said.

“We the People” can reclaim sovereignty by learning to trust in intuition, experience, and the ability to assess lies from truth, Sharav said.

“Stop watching mainstream media,” Sharav said. “They’re all reading from the same script. They have bombarded people with fearmongering, which is exactly the same thing that the Nazis did. That’s how they controlled the population: through fear.”

For Sharav, the mission that has been laid at the feet of people throughout the world is the same as it was for her as a child: “Resist. Wake up. Stop obeying.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/resist-wake-up-stop-obeying-holocaust-survivor-draws-parallels-in-current-society-to-nazi-germany_4632304.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

<a href="https://edwatch.blogspot.com">http://edwatch.blogspot.com</a> (EDUCATION WATCH)

<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)

<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)

<a href="https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/">https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/</a> <b>(IMMIGRATION WATCH)</b>

<a href="https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/">https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/</a> (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

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Freedom of speech for the medical profession is under threat in Australia

No one wants to believe that they have been misled by people in positions of trust.

This is especially true when politicians, health bureaucrats, and regulatory bodies have forced compliance to medical mandates rather than leaving risk as a matter of personal choice. There is growing evidence from around the world that information has been withheld from public view and that doctors have been pressured out of questioning policy and data related to the pandemic.

In 1633, the authorities tried and condemned Galileo Galilei to house arrest, until his death in 1642, for publishing evidence that the planets revolved around the sun. They tried to silence open scientific debate. Ultimately, it didn’t work but did create a lot of suffering and misery for a few brave scientists in the meantime.

This kind of behaviour by powerful bodies is not confined to the past.

The newly formed Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS), operating as an alternative to the Australian Medical Association (AMA), is standing up for medical transparency, to protect our patients, and ensure open scientific debate.

Our AMPS members are refusing to be silent, even under threats to our registrations. We are fighting for law reform to provide our patients with evidence-based care rather than uncritical politically driven health practice.

Does the Australian public know that the government regulator, AHPRA, has warned health professionals, including doctors and nurses, not to publicly question government public health directives, including those related to Covid – effectively gagging them? This is done by threatening their registration.

Many have been disciplined or suspended for challenging the public health messaging even if they believed that they had scientific evidence to support their professional view.

The directive states:

‘Any promotion of anti-vaccination statements or health advice which contradicts the best available scientific evidence or seeks to actively undermine the national immunisation campaign (including via social media) is not supported by National Boards and may be in breach of the codes of conduct and subject to investigation and possible regulatory action.’

Brett Simmonds, Pharmacy Board Chair and co-chair of the Forum of NRAS Chairs, said of Covid vaccination programs:

‘National Boards support the vaccination program and encourage all registered health practitioners to get vaccinated unless medically contraindicated.

‘The codes of conduct for each of the registered health professions explain the public health obligations of registered health practitioners, including participating in efforts to promote the health of the community and meeting obligations on disease prevention.

‘There is no place for anti-vaccination messages in professional health practice, and any promotion of anti-vaccination claims including on social media, and advertising may be subject to regulatory action.

‘If you’re a registered health practitioner or student, the best thing to do is to read our joint statement. It explains the National Boards’ expectations of registered health practitioners about receiving, administering, and sharing information about Covid vaccination. It’s important you understand these expectations so that patients and communities are best protected against the novel coronavirus that causes Covid.’

AHPRA chief Martin Fletcher rejected the claim, saying:

‘In essence, AHPRA and National Boards expect health practitioners to use their professional judgment and the best available evidence in practice. This includes when providing information to the public about public health issues such as Covid and vaccination.

‘Any promotion of anti-vaccination statements or health advice that contradicts the best available scientific evidence or seeks to actively undermine the national immunisation campaign (including via social media) is not supported by National Boards.

‘It may be in breach of the codes of conduct and subject to investigation and possible regulatory action.’

It is a statement that appears to confirm, not deny, the complaints of medical professionals.

Never before have government bodies demanded compliance with domestic law that we believe breaches our codes and oaths to ‘first, do no harm’ and ‘I will not use my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat’.

Is it widely known among practitioners and the public that the government changed laws to give manufacturers 6 years to provide comprehensive clinical data on safety and efficacy for provisionally approved Covid treatments?

The comparative lack of vital long-term data (present for other vaccines and medical treatments) is lacking in Covid vaccines – making it difficult to justify statements such as proven safe and effective. ‘Assumed to the best of our knowledge’ would be more accurate.

This problem is highlighted by changing promises related to Covid vaccines, which began as ‘you won’t get sick and it will stop transmission’ but now manufacturers and medical bodies have had to admit, due to overwhelming physical evidence in patients, that Covid vaccines do not stop transmission and many people still get sick and die. These revelations call into question the validity of extraordinary measures placed on people for over two years.

In Australia, we have a serious problem. Government excesses of power created through emergency legislation have been allowed to violate our freedoms and liberties. They were justified by largely unscientific and refutable claims. Fear was wrongly employed by political leaders, who also took steps to keep health advice secret from the public by the re-classifying of National Cabinet after Freedom of Information requests were approved by the court.

Public Health Laws gave Chief Health Officers (CHO) unprecedented powers to do almost anything they thought was reasonable during a pandemic – which can be declared on opinion, not evidence – without having to justify their decisions. They are no better than the authorities in Galileo’s time.

Queensland Doctors are taking the Qld CHO to court to gain access to the scientific evidence used to justify mandates that contradict historical experience and scientific consensus. Public confidence should never be coerced through government-mandated compliance to political directives.

We believe our code of conduct requirements demand we exercise our right to political communication to respectfully debate scientific evidence, risk/benefit analysis of therapeutics, and provide informed consent. But to do so we risk losing everything.

If we are forbidden by the government to adhere to our codes and make our patients our primary concern, then this is the end of medicine and the death of science.

AMPS cannot allow such government intrusion to stand. We are fighting back against new laws recommended by the Queensland government that allow public naming and shaming of doctors under investigation.

‘New legislation introduced in Queensland, the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2022, will greatly enhance the government regulator’s powers for censoring doctors in Queensland,’ said Steven Andrews MP for Marani QLD.

Even the AMA described these new laws as ‘incoherent zealotry’. The cost for patient advocacy will be public humiliation and potentially career-ending reputational damage. With this unchecked power of AHPRA, fear-based compliance to public health directives will become the primary concern of practitioners.

AMPS has been calling for a Royal Commission into the government response to Covid, while advocating strongly for law reform needed now to allow practitioners to advocate for their patients as their primary concern. Click here for more information. We cannot stay silent while adherence to public health messaging becomes the new accepted standard of good medical practice. Our patients, not politicians, are who we serve, no matter the personal cost.

Galileo said, ‘Two truths cannot contradict one another.’ The pressure on medical professionals to hide their true opinions should be rescinded and doctors allowed to openly debate all Covid measures and be able to have all tools at their disposal to treat patients.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/the-end-of-medicine/

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Inflation Reduction Act? Drug-price controls make Dems’ bill the Lifespan Reduction Act

By Betsy McCaughey

Across the pond, Brits are demanding their next prime minister do something to reduce the United Kingdom’s notorious cancer death rates. But here in the United States, Democrats are doing the opposite.

They’re pushing for European-style price controls on drugs, which will slow cancer cures and lead to more deaths. Americans enjoy the highest cancer-survival rates in the world. But maybe not for long.

Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin call their legislation the Inflation Reduction Act. Don’t let the title fool you. The bill cripples the ability of drug companies to develop new cures. It should be called the Lifespan Reduction Act.

The bill empowers the federal government to impose price controls on top-selling brand-name drugs starting in 2026. Virtually all health experts agree these price controls will discourage innovation.

The only disagreement is how grave the impact will be. The Congressional Budget Office lowballs the number of new drugs that will never be developed and declines to predict the “effects of forgone innovation on public health.” But the Office of Health Economics, a think tank, foresees “significant losses in biopharmaceutical innovation and hence health for the U.S. and global populations over the coming decades.”

The Global Colon Cancer Association, which helps patients battling cancer, warned Tuesday that the bill will backfire, “leading to less of the medical innovation we need to finally defeat cancer.”

Amazing that Congress is ignoring these warnings. Democrats are bragging about reducing prescription-drug prices but not admitting you could be paying for that discount down the road with your life.

Democrats claim the government will “negotiate” with drug companies to reach a fair price. Untrue. The bill says government will dictate the price. Any company that refuses that price will get hit with a tax as high as 95% of revenue. That’s a gun to the head, not a negotiation. Democrats are playing word games with “negotiate,” just as with “recession.”

Medical investors look at the expected future revenue from a drug to decide how much to invest. Even non-American companies rely on selling in the US market for their profits. But the proposed price controls tell investors to put their money in some other industry, not medical innovation.

European drug developers led the world until price controls shut down innovation. Now drug development in Europe attracts only 3% of the investment capital available in the United States. It’s a warning.

Countries that promote drug development have better cancer survival rates, reports Columbia University economist Frank Lichtenberg, who compared rates in 36 countries.

The United States proves the point. Cancer death rates here have plunged in the last two decades. Research in the Journal of Medical Economics shows that from 2000 to 2016, more than 1.3 million patients were saved by new treatments for 15 different types of cancer.

Don’t expect that to continue under price controls. The University of Chicago’s Tomas Philipson and Troy Durie calculate that hundreds of potential cures will go undeveloped over the next decade, leading to a loss of life greater than what we’ve experienced from COVID. These are lives that would be saved if the current pace of innovation continued instead of being blocked by the Manchin-Schumer deal.

Is their price-control scheme even constitutional? The Congressional Research Service says forcing drug manufacturers to lower prices for all customers, not just government, might violate the “takings” clause of the Fifth Amendment. Certainly a 95% tax on revenues of companies that refuse could be considered “excessive” punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

Even so, Democrats are rushing to pass their 725-page bill, with its many varied provisions and cockeyed priorities. The bill pours hundreds of billions of public dollars into companies that install solar panels and build electric vehicles in the name of saving the planet.

But the same bill strips biotech and drug companies of the ability to attract billions in research and development funds and produce the next generation of cures. As if saving the planet is all-important and saving lives no longer matters.

https://nypost.com/2022/08/02/drug-price-controls-make-dems-bill-the-lifespan-reduction-act/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

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Scientists see COVID’s origin in Wuhan market

Since the emergence of COVID-19, a question has obsessed many: where did it come from?

That question – and the fact the virus was first detected in the city of Wuhan, home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology – has sparked geopolitical convulsions and a fracturing of faith in science, not to mention a thousand anonymous Twitter-sleuth accounts.

Meanwhile, a group of scientists has been working on their own parallel investigative effort. With a pair of articles published in Science last week (you can read them here and here), they say they are at the end of their search.

The virus almost-certainly jumped from wildlife into humans in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, the papers argue. The authors have even found the most likely section of the market. They have old photos of caged raccoon dogs – known carriers of COVID-19 – being sold there.

“The siren has definitely sounded on the lab leak theory,” says Professor Edward Holmes, a world-leading viral evolution expert based at the University of Sydney and co-author on both the papers. “In terms of what we can reasonably do, with the available science and the science we’ll get in the foreseeable future, I think we’re at the end of the road frankly. There’s not a lot more to mine.”

Professor Dominic Dwyer, director of public health pathology in NSW and a member of the World Health Organisation (WHO) team that travelled to Wuhan last year to investigate the origins of the virus, agrees.

“That’s what we thought originally back when we did the first report. This is yet another brick added to the wall of information around zoonotic infection.”

Twin strains

When COVID-19 first emerged in Wuhan, two distinct viral lineages were spotted, separated by two small changes in genetic code. They were detected a week apart in late December 2019.

The team behind the Science papers used computers to simulate the most likely sequence of events that would produce two viruses circulating at the same time.

They found it is exceedingly unlikely that a single virus would jump into humans and quickly split into two distinct variants.

Far more likely, was that the virus had been circulating in animals for long enough to split into multiple variants, two of which then jumped separately into humans. Multi-virus jumps have been seen when COVID-19 jumped from minks on Dutch farms to humans, and when SARS and MERS also jumped into humans.

If the COVID-19 virus originated in a lab, as some conspiracy theories suggest, you’d expect a single introduction into humans – rather than two distinct viral lineages. And both strains were found in samples taken from Huanan market. “That, I think, is pretty good evidence,” says Dwyer.

Lab-leak advocates argue that Huanan is a perfect super-spreader site. Maybe a scientist from the Wuhan Institute of Virology shopped there and spread the bug?

The Science papers show that 155 COVID cases in December 2019 were strongly clustered in the suburbs around the market – including cases with no known link to the market.

If the virus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, wouldn’t early cases cluster around there? Wouldn’t an infected scientist have passed on the virus while walking to work? “You wouldn’t expect to find the virus around a not-very-well-visited animal market in a different part of the city,” says Holmes.

And the papers show Huanan is hardly the perfect superspreader site that some suggest.

It turns out the market is a small and relatively obscure shopping spot. By reviewing social media check-in data, the team deduced that 70 other markets in Wuhan had more visitors than Huanan. Of 430 identified possible super-spreader sites in Wuhan, such as shopping malls, supermarkets and schools, the Huanan market was among the least visited.

“It’s like going to Coles in Bendigo on a wet Wednesday afternoon. It’s not a thriving mass of humanity,” says Holmes.

Further evidence: no COVID-19 has been detected among tens of thousands of blood donations made in Wuhan between September and December 2019, nor in thousands of samples taken from people hospitalised between October and December with influenza-like illnesses.

“What are the odds that two lineages escape from the lab and both make their way into the market and both cause superspreader events? It’s ridiculous. There is no way that can happen,” says Holmes.

We know now that COVID-19 moves easily among many species of animals, including raccoon dogs – but also badgers, hares, rats and foxes, all observed being sold live at the market in 2019.

Raccoon dogs were supplied to the market by a network of farms in western Hubei province, the Science papers note. Western Hubei is known for its extensive network of caves filled with Rhinolophus bats, which carry coronaviruses similar to the one that causes COVID-19.

“Raccoon dogs are a suspect,” says Holmes, but not the only one. “I think, strongly, there are a whole bunch of animals out there who have viruses like this that we have not sampled yet.”

Compare the theories

Theory one: Two closely related versions of a virus emerge at the same time in people who live near or work in a small market selling wildlife. The market sells animals known to both carry the virus and to be farmed near bats that carry similar viruses. We detect those viruses on cages in the market’s wildlife section.

We know from past experience viruses can jump from animals to humans at wildlife markets. And we don’t have any evidence of the virus spreading anywhere else in Wuhan before it was in the market.

Compare this to the lab-leak theory. No one has ever been able to prove COVID-19 – let alone a twin strain – was ever at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There’s no epidemiological evidence that the virus was spreading near the institute.

“There’s no emails. There’s no evidence in any of the science. There’s absolutely nothing,” says Holmes.

Lab-leak proponents have now turned to trying to find malfeasance in the articles’ peer review process, of all places. Holmes doubts the conspiracy theorists will ever be convinced. “Even if the Chinese do let us in the lab, people would say ‘aha, but they’re covering it up’,” he says.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/the-siren-has-sounded-scientists-pinpoint-covid-s-origin-20220802-p5b6gb.html

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Sun key to vitamin D as pills prove worthless

The biggest study in the world into vitamin D supplements has found the pills do not prevent bone fractures and are unlikely to provide the same benefits as obtaining the vitamin from the sun.

About one-third of Australians are vitamin D-deficient, and many have been advised by their doctor to supplement with vitamin D pills, the biggest-selling supplement in the country.

A US study published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests it would be far better to expose the skin to some sunlight every day instead.

The large study known as Vital, which involved 26,000 mid-life men and women, found vitamin D pills provide little benefit to most people. The headline finding was that vitamin D supplements do not prevent osteoporosis and were found not to prevent bone fractures even in people who already had bone thinning.

Vitamin D in the body plays a role in helping the gut absorb calcium, which strengthens bones.

Researchers on the study also found that vitamin D supplements did not provide the benefits of vitamin D obtained from sunlight, which include the prevention of cancer, prevention of heart disease, improvements in brain function and protection of the joints and eyes.

The NEJM published an editorial along with the study findings recommending people stop taking vitamin D supplements.

The author of the editorial was Steven Cummings, who is a research scientist at the California Pacific Medical Centre Research Institute.

“Providers should stop screening for 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels or recommending vitamin D supplements and people should stop taking vitamin D supplements in order to prevent major diseases or extend life,” Dr Cummings said.

“The trials show they have no benefit, even in people with vitamin D deficiency.

“With very few exceptions, such as those in nursing homes deprived from sun and ordinary diets, everyone gets enough vitamin D to maintain the functions and balance they need.”

You can also obtain vitamin D from foods including oily fish, eggs and red meat.

University of South Australia professor Elina Hypponen, who has extensively studied Vitamin D, said the US study did not include people who were truly vitamin D-deficient, and that such people would be likely still to obtain benefit from taking the ­supplements.

“If you can get vitamin D naturally and safely from the sun without risk of sunburn, then you don’t need to think about supplements,” Professor Hypponen said.

“But in situations where people are seriously vitamin D-deficient, then vitamin D supplements are sometimes necessary.”

The Vital study was funded by the US National Institutes of Health and began after an expert group examined the health effects of vitamin D supplements and found little evidence.

The Vital study reinforces a ­series of other research projects that have cast doubt on the efficacy of vitamin D supplements.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/science/sun-key-to-vitamin-d-as-pills-prove-worthless/news-story/35c21ef28a801455fa74d22995c59316

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

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Is red meat bad for you

Below is the abstract of a journal article that has been bruited about in the popular press. The journal article appeared yesterday. It is one of a long series of attempts to discredit meat eating.

And the present article is no more conclusive than any of its many predecessors. I have been blogging on the subject for many years so I know where the skeletons are. I used to teach research methods and statistics at a major university so I know what to look for

And the present article follows a familiar methodology. I am going to put it bluntly: When there is no overall connection between the variables you are studying, you do comparisons of extremes -- as in tertiles, quartiles or quintiles. You can sometimes "save" your research that way if the extremes differ.

The present article resorts to extreme quintiles so they really had to stretch it to produce a reportable finding. The important thing to know, however, is that such anayses throw away the majority of your data so really tell you nothing. But the resort to extremes does of itself imply that there was NO overall relationship in the data. It's a common analysis but totally discreditable scientifically

The real result of the research therefore is that eating red meat had NO EFFECT on anything

Dietary Meat, Trimethylamine N-Oxide-Related Metabolites, and Incident Cardiovascular Disease Among Older Adults: The Cardiovascular Health Study

Meng Wang et al.

Abstract

Background:
Effects of animal source foods (ASF) on atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) and underlying mechanisms remain controversial. We investigated prospective associations of different ASF with incident ASCVD and potential mediation by gut microbiota-generated trimethylamine N-oxide, its L-carnitine-derived intermediates γ-butyrobetaine and crotonobetaine, and traditional ASCVD risk pathways.

Methods:

Among 3931 participants from a community-based US cohort aged 65+ years, ASF intakes and trimethylamine N-oxide-related metabolites were measured serially over time. Incident ASCVD (myocardial infarction, fatal coronary heart disease, stroke, other atherosclerotic death) was adjudicated over 12.5 years median follow-up. Cox proportional hazards models with time-varying exposures and covariates examined ASF-ASCVD associations; and additive hazard models, mediation proportions by different risk pathways.

Results:

After multivariable-adjustment, higher intakes of unprocessed red meat, total meat, and total ASF associated with higher ASCVD risk, with hazard ratios (95% CI) per interquintile range of 1.15 (1.01–1.30), 1.22 (1.07–1.39), and 1.18 (1.03–1.34), respectively. Trimethylamine N-oxide-related metabolites together significantly mediated these associations, with mediation proportions (95% CI) of 10.6% (1.0–114.5), 7.8% (1.0–32.7), and 9.2% (2.2–44.5), respectively. Processed meat intake associated with a nonsignificant trend toward higher ASCVD (1.11 [0.98–1.25]); intakes of fish, poultry, and eggs were not significantly associated. Among other risk pathways, blood glucose, insulin, and C-reactive protein, but not blood pressure or blood cholesterol, each significantly mediated the total meat-ASCVD association.

Conclusions:

In this large, community-based cohort, higher meat intake associated with incident ASCVD, partly mediated by microbiota-derived metabolites of L-carnitine, abundant in red meat. These novel findings support biochemical links between dietary meat, gut microbiome pathways, and ASCVD.

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/ATVBAHA.121.316533

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Living with COVID: how treating masks like umbrellas could help us weather future pandemic threats

Thankfully, the UK now looks to be past the peak of both the recent heatwave and the latest COVID wave. But there will be more of both – and in future, we might think about how we protect ourselves from COVID in the same way we protect ourselves from the weather.

An umbrella is a useful analogy. If we look out the window or check the weather forecast and see rain, we would probably take an umbrella out with us. Similarly, if COVID cases are starting to rise or if a new wave is forecast, we might consider grabbing a face mask, for example.

But just as there’s no need to carry an umbrella with us when it’s sunny, we needn’t be expected to wear masks all the time. Of course, some people may choose to wear masks more consistently in certain settings, while others may forgo wearing them altogether. This is the nature of the current phase of the pandemic we’re in, a big part of which is based on personal choice and responsibility.

Thanks largely to the impact of vaccines, we no longer need the kind of rules-based approach to risk management we saw earlier in the pandemic. But the umbrella analogy can guide our behaviour and choices in a variety of areas of our response moving forward. Beyond masks, these include testing, ventilation and social distancing.

The idea is that we can pick up or step up precautions when we most need them (when COVID cases are on the rise), before relaxing them, if we want to, when infection rates and risk are lower.

What might this look like in practice?

Let’s say we start to see COVID cases rising again come autumn. This is a distinct possibility.

It then becomes even more important to take a test if we have any symptoms that might be COVID-related. This will help inform our decision of whether, and to what extent, to minimise contact with others.

Isolation is no longer a legal requirement, and I think this should remain the case. However, if possible, staying at home while we’re unwell is a sensible and considerate thing to do, particularly when COVID rates are high.

Distancing should also remain a choice. But during a wave of infections, people might wish to maintain more distance between themselves and others in shops, or may choose to avoid crowded venues.

Back on masks, when cases begin to rise, the risk of contracting and transmitting COVID also rises, so masks become a more useful and reasonable precaution. They can be particularly valuable in certain circumstances – for example, if someone is unwell but can’t isolate, when visiting people who are vulnerable, or in crowded indoor spaces.

Opening windows even a little can increase fresh air indoors and also help reduce the likelihood of transmitting the virus.

Finally, the number of people in the UK who have had a COVID booster vaccine is considerably lower than the number who received their first and second doses. We know immunity from vaccines wanes, and boosters restore vaccine effectiveness. So if we start to see rising cases, or looking ahead to future waves, it would make good sense for people who are behind on their vaccines to get up-to-date.

It’s been a year since England’s “freedom day”, when most legal COVID measures were removed. But the pandemic is far from over. Along with high numbers of daily infections, long COVID is very common, and the pressure on the NHS is still unsustainable.

In a recent article in the British Medical Journal, Professor Susan Michie and I reflected on some of the lessons we’ve learned over the past year.

Among these, the pandemic has shown us that behaviour is not purely down to an individual’s choice or motivation. People’s actions are also shaped by the opportunities and supports they’re given – or not given. For example, while some people might want to stay home if they have symptoms, they may not if neither their employer or the government provides financial support.

People should be encouraged and supported as much as possible to stay home when they’re sick, particularly when cases are high. Amidst a winter COVID wave, Australia has re-instated its pandemic leave disaster payments to enable those with COVID and without proper sick pay to stay home and not lose out financially.

Further, governments could ensure that free at-home tests are available during times when infections are likely to, or starting to, rise.

And it’s important that, to mitigate the impacts of future waves, vaccination coverage is as high as possible. Public health campaigns should target both the unvaccinated and partially vaccinated, as well as encouraging people (particularly the most vulnerable) to take up booster offers.

We also need more action to ensure adequate ventilation. In the US, billions of dollars are being made available for improving air quality in schools and other public buildings.

https://theconversation.com/living-with-covid-how-treating-masks-like-umbrellas-could-help-us-weather-future-pandemic-threats-187377

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

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