Official stats show Wales has UK's worst death rate - not England

Decisions by Scotland and Wales to rely on tougher Covid restrictions throughout the pandemic may not have been 'worth it', scientists said today.

Nicola Sturgeon is still yet to commit to a date for ending work from home guidance, despite England dumping the advice last week, while Mark Drakeford is refusing to lift the highly-controversial 'rule of six' for another four days. Both nations resorted to tougher Covid curbs than England early out in the pandemic, and kept people living under economically-cripping curbs for longer.

But experts told MailOnline they could not see a 'huge amount of difference' in the cumulative death rates between England and the rest of the UK.

Many lockdown sceptics have recently been sharing statistics from the ONS showing that just 17,371 people died of Covid in England and Wales up to the end of September 2021 where COVID-19 was the only cause of death recorded on the death certificate. This compares to 148,536 official Covid deaths in the same period (also for England and Wales, as are the estimates below) where COVID-19 was mentioned as a cause of death somewhere on the death certificate. Separately, the Government dashboard reported 126,384 deaths recorded as occurring within 28 days of a positive Covid test in the same period, while the ONS reported 117,247 excess deaths.

Moving forward people will need regular boosters to be "up to date", & they won't be using the term "fully vaccinated" anymore.
Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Center for Disease Control, told the media on Friday that the CDC is intending to "pivot the language" regarding the Covid19 vaccines.
Speaking to the press briefing, Dr Walenksy had a very obvious message she really wanted to hammer home :

And what we really are working to do is pivot the language to make sure that everybody is as up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines as they personally could be, should be, based on when they got their last vaccine. So, importantly, right now, we're pivoting our language. We really want to make sure people are up to date. That means if you recently got your second dose, you're not eligible for a booster, you're up to date. If you are eligible for a booster and you haven't gotten it, you're not up to date and you need to get your booster in order to be up to date.

(You can watch the full briefing here.)

It's pretty clear that "say "up to date", not "fully vaccinated", was underlined in the memo. As was "pivot the language", but what does it actually mean?

Compulsively testing and quarantining healthy athletes is even stupider.

It's the last week of the 2022 European Men's Handball Championship, held this year in Slovakia and Hungary, and the players just can't stop testing positive for Corona. Iceland, where handball attracts enormous interest, had eleven players sidelined after positive tests last week. Their star goalie, Björgvin Páll Gústavsson, emerged from isolation to play against Croatia yesterday, only to test positive again this morning. It's back to quarantine for him, as he waits for a PCR confirmation. Nobody is actually too sick to play, but the alternative - spreading Omicron to a bunch of other athletes who will get it one way or another anyway - is unthinkable.

Mass containment is a set of policies that require people to act crazy all the time. Omicron is everywhere; locking up a few athletes isn't going to slow it down. To that comes the fact that these handball players are all totally healthy; their risk of severe outcome is so low, it's essentially unquantifiable. And on top of it all, all these precautions plainly do nothing. Everyone is testing positive anyway.

A 31-year-old father has been removed from the heart transplant list at a Boston hospital because he is refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine, his family said.

DJ Ferguson's family say he was first on the list to receive the transplant at Brigham and Women's Hospital — but he is no longer eligible because of his vaccination status, CBS Boston reported.

His father, David Ferguson, said his son — who is fighting for his life in the hospital and is in desperate need of the transplant — doesn't believe in the COVID-19 vaccine.

In revoking Novak Djokovic's visa for refusing the COVID vaccine after fully recovering from the virus just last month, Australia has abandoned the science of immunology.

Australia has a renowned and glorious history in immunological science. In fact, I would go as far as to say that if there is an immunological "city on the hill," it was Australia.

From the storied Walter and Eliza Hall Institute to the Garvan Institute, to prominent Australian Nobel laureates and founding fathers of immunological science (Sir Macfarlane Burnett, Jacques F.P. Miller and Peter Doherty) to contemporary leaders of immunological science (Jonathan Sprent, Christopher Goodnow and Jason Cyster), Australia has been known as the mecca of immunological thinking and science.

The results are in from the world's largest study of ivermectin for COVID-19.

Researchers in Brazil found that regular use of ivermectin as a prophylactic agent was associated with significantly reduced COVID-19 infection, hospitalization and mortality rates.

The study was conducted in Itajaí, a port city in the state of Santa Catarina, between July and December 2020. Study authors include FLCCC physicians Dr. Flavio Cadegiani and Dr. Pierre Kory. Lead author Dr. Lucy Kerr was approached by the mayor of Itajaí, after the city began to experience a severe outbreak of COVID.

The entire population of Itajaí was invited to participate in the program, which involved a medical visit to compile baseline, personal, demographic, and medical information. In the absence of contraindications, ivermectin was offered as a preventative treatment, to be taken for two consecutive days every 15 days at a dose of 0.2 mg/kg/day.

In this interview, return guest Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT who has been at MIT for over five decades, discusses her latest paper, "Innate Immune Suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccinations. The Role of G-quadruplexes, Exosomes and MicroRNAs," co-written with Dr. Peter McCullough, along with two other authors, Dr. Greg Nigh and Dr. Anthony Kyriakopoulos.

Previously, Nigh and Seneff co-wrote an entire paper detailing the differences between the spike protein and the COVID jab spike protein. In a non-peer-reviewed research paper just this week published on the pre-print service authorea, they and their other co-authors delve deeply into the mechanisms of the COVID shots, showing how they absolutely, in no way, shape or form, are safe or effective. The shots actually suppress your innate immune system.

"I think McCullough is fantastic and I'm so happy to have him collaborate with me," Seneff says. "I really hope we will be able to find a journal that is willing to publish it. We may have to seek some kind of alternative media to get it published.

It's really incredible the amount of censorship that's going on right now. I'm in a state of shock all the time. I just keep thinking it's not going to get any worse, and it's truly going to get better, and it just seems to keep on getting worse and worse.

I don't know where the end is. It's very discouraging ... Pharma has so much money behind [them] and they've got it all set up to make sure that nothing gets past them ...

We're hoping to put it up as a preprint, but ... remarkably, they can reject it at the level of preprint as well. We're working on that angle, but it's not easy. When you're writing something this radical, they really fight hard to keep it off the web."

On January 16, 2022, the pre-print service Authorea published this paper on its web site, assigning it a DOI, thus making it official.

The most comprehensive estimate of the global impact of antimicrobial resistance thus far is published in The Lancet today. It reveals that more than 1.2 million people (and potentially millions more) around the world died in 2019 as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections - placing it among the leading causes of death.

Antimicrobial resistance has emerged as one of the most pressing public health issues of the 21^st century that threatens the effective treatment and prevention of an ever-increasing range of infectious agents no longer susceptible to the drugs we have used to treat them.

This problem is especially relevant for bacteria; over several decades, bacterial pathogens that cause common and severe infections have developed resistance to basically every new antibiotic released to the market. Faced with this reality, the need for action to halt a developing global crisis in health care became very evident.

The Omicron surge in America, which has accelerated at an incredible rate, appears to be peaking, according to analysis by J.P. Morgan.

In a report published on Tuesday, the investment banking company notes that the U.S. peak has not come any later than in the U.K., despite the lower vaccination rate.

The Omicron wave in the U.S. also looks to be peaking, despite a significantly worse vaccination profile. The overall level of fully vaccinated individuals in the US, at 62% of the total population, is lower than in the U.K., where 70% of the total population have been fully vaccinated, but the difference is not huge. More striking is the difference in the share of the population who have received a booster shot, 24% of the total population in the U.S. compared with 54% in the U.K. Given the importance of boosters in lifting protection, after the protection from the primary doses fades over time, it might have been expected that the Omicron infection upswing would last longer in the U.S. than in the U.K.. But this does not seem to be the case. It looks like the effective reproduction number in the U.S. returned to 1.0 on January 16th, only 31 days after the Omicron variant first pushed it above 1.0 in mid-December