We regret to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that we are currently in a public health emergency of international concern. At least three of the conditions are currently met by…rhinovirus and parainfluenza virus. So get ready for another round of lockdowns. But perhaps not.
But these two factions are very well-capitalized. Pharma can bankroll private and public media outlets in perpetuity. And taxpayers will continue to subsidize public TV and radio. And NPR and PBS pledge drive pitch-people will repeatedly tell gullible prospective donors how important it is to support “independent” media that keeps them well-misinformed.
The draft of the IHR amendments and an accompanying draft Pandemic Agreement are both still under negotiation a month short of the intended vote at the World Health Assembly (WHA) in late May. Together, they reflect a sea change in international public health over the past two decades. They aim to further centralize control of public health policy within the WHO.
During the Covid pandemic, the U.S. government spent billions of dollars on nearly 400 products intended to protect, diagnose, and treat hundreds of millions of people – all with the label “EUA” or “Emergency Use Authorization.” But what does EUA actually mean?
As each industry becomes centralized and consolidated under the few, consumer choice simultaneously disappears. As choice disappears, so does the ability of the individual to meet their specific and unique needs.
Stories abound of people who were subjected to remdesivir and ventilation, without proper informed consent, sometimes even against their will. Other accounts tell of judges having to issue orders for patients to be allowed to try IVM and HCQ in hospital, despite the safety profile and lack of contraindications with other drugs – meaning, it couldn’t hurt to try and it might help.
All public health interventions have costs and benefits, and normally these are carefully weighed based on evidence from previous interventions, supplemented by expert opinion where such evidence is limited. Such careful appraisal is particularly important where the negative effects of interventions include human rights restrictions and long-term consequences through impoverishment.
The WHO and Pandemic Response – Should Evidence Matter? Continue Reading
The inference from the lengthy paper is the opposite of what many would have thought: the greater the mitigation efforts in US nursing homes, the higher the death toll during the pandemic. Those efforts not only largely failed to reduce Covid mortality, but they also added non-Covid deaths. The more they tried to mitigate, the worse the outcome was.
Both reports are detailed and provide useful information about the pandemic in Norway. The commission is critical of certain aspects of the handling of the pandemic but believes that the management overall was good.
I set out to understand why people were behaving in a way that would’ve been seen as unhinged just weeks before. I could see everyone becoming germophobes, and I wondered if that behavior, once ingrained in the population, would ever go away. Could I reason people out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into? Probably not, but there were other people I admired trying, and I couldn’t just stand idle. So I decided to write a book, an idea that became Fear of a Microbial Planet.
Clearly, most people are done with Covid and have stopped paying heed to the advice from public health authorities. This of course contains its own long-term dangers. Are Labor and the Greens not interested in knowing the vaccine truth and restoring public trust in the integrity of our public institutions, including Health and Parliament?
Australian Senate to Investigate Excess Mortality Continue Reading
Like everyone, I have been following the news from the Far East since the beginning of the year. Although infectious diseases were not my subject matter research, epidemiologists are trained to think critically, to question what many accept at face value. The picture that emerged was far from clear. A few observations did not fit well with the apocalyptic predictions.
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