Thread: Corona Virus

Originally Posted by superquag

And now, a comment from a source with more 'Gravitas' than my 'umble self...

Chief Science Officer for Pfizer Says "Second Wave" Faked on False-Positive COVID Tests, "Pandemic is Over" | HubPages

As always, follow the links before taking up a final position.

- Just a snippet of the above:-

"In 1957, a pandemic hit, the H2N2 Asian Flu with a .7% Infection Fatality Rate, which killed as many people per capita in the US as the COVID has claimed now. There was never a single mention of it in the news at the time, never mind the extraordinary upheaval that we see now. In 1968 the Hong Kong Flu hit the US (.5% IFR,) taking 100,000 people when the US had a markedly lower population. Not single alarm was raised, not a single store closed nor even a network news story. The following summer the largest gathering in US history took place, Woodstock.

Mass hysteria is never accidental, but benefits someone. The only question left to answer is, whom?"

My favourite type of conspiracy theory .... the unspoken one. What exactly are you asserting?

First, he used to be the Pfizer CSO but isn't now (in fact it doesn't say what he currently does) so the heading is incorrect and misleading.

You also didn't state that the ex-scientist's article was from this website:

How Likely is a Second wave? – Lockdown Sceptics

"Lockdown sceptics" - I would guess that they're not neutral on these issues?

The following is the basis for their assertion that PCR tests are all false-positives:

The PCR test for the virus is good enough to confirm infection in someone with symptoms. “Is it flu or is it COVID-19?” is a question easily answered. What it is very poor at, however, is what is being asked of it now, namely estimating the percentage of people who are currently infectious in the community. We do not know exactly what the false positive rate is, but it is widely believed to be greater than the actual, remaining prevalence of the virus (Heneghan, 2020), which is around 1:2000, or 0.05%. (ONS prevalence survey Aug 14th 2020). The result of continuing to use this test alone on a massive widescale screening program is inevitably to generate a high proportion of false positives. The problem of using any assay to conduct surveillance on a low prevalence virus with a PCR test has been widely discussed (Heneghan, 2020). Under present parameters, even accepting an unlikely 0.1% False Positive rate and a prevalence of 0.1%, more than half of the positives are likely to be false, potentially all of them. It is the opinion of the authors that the false positive rate is higher and the prevalence lower than this. Consequently, it is impossible for the positives to be much other than false.

I may not be a medical epidemiologist, but that reads more like Monty Python than science. According to them there are more false positives than actual infections. I actually searched some of their references and was unable to find anyone asserting that PCR tests were all false, only that they reacted the same way to both live and dead virus.

FYI, I posted some time ago that theories that there would be a "second wave" were based on what happened with the Spanish Flu, where it mutated and came back more lethal - there's no indication that's what happening now.

It is hard to be certain about the situation with testing overseas, but it is certain that the PCR testing done in Australia is not producing a lot of false positives - the proportion of positive tests in well under 1% (which means very few either real or false positives!). If overseas countries are using the same testing procedure, and there is considerable evidence they mostly are, you need to explain why they are getting so many more false positives.

There is no mystery about why there has been a second wave in many places - ease restrictions while there is still a lot of community transmission and it takes off. And some places, such as the USA, the first wave has never ended because they have never really tried to end it.

Look at New York, where the virus is making a comeback, with a positive rate up to 5% in some areas, and the government is going to fine people who refuse to wear masks.
Or look at the UK where the test and trace system has failed and Johnson is being forced to lock down parts of the country again.
Or parts of Europe such as France, Germany and Spain.

It's amazing how many people are determined to deny reality because it is inconvenient.
This pandemic has not even peaked yet. A vaccine is at least a year away. Magical thinking won't make it go away.

Originally Posted by DiscoMick

Look at New York, where the virus is making a comeback, with a positive rate up to 5% in some areas, and the government is going to fine people who refuse to wear masks.
Or look at the UK where the test and trace system has failed and Johnson is being forced to lock down parts of the country again.
Or parts of Europe such as France, Germany and Spain.

It's amazing how many people are determined to deny reality because it is inconvenient.
This pandemic has not even peaked yet. A vaccine is at least a year away. Magical thinking won't make it go away.

It would be interesting to know the impact of the cooling season forcing more people to congregate indoors on the increasing virus rates in the northern hemisphere.


Regards,
Tote

Originally Posted by Arapiles

FYI, I posted some time ago that theories that there would be a "second wave" were based on what happened with the Spanish Flu, where it mutated and came back more lethal - there's no indication that's what happening now.

An article from the Financial Review.

After a relatively mild first wave, the 1918 flu returned with renewed force.

Pandemics of respiratory disease tend to come in waves, and the 1918 flu pandemic is often given as an example. After a relatively mild first wave, in the northern hemisphere spring of that year, the illness gradually receded before returning with renewed force from the latter part of August (the date depended on where you were in the world). This was the far more deadly second wave, which accounted for most of the estimated 50 million deaths in that pandemic. There was a third wave, in the early months of 1919, that was intermediate in severity between the other two.
Based on their scrutiny of the genetic sequences of the strains of the flu virus that caused the first and second waves of the 1918 pandemic, scientists including Jeffery Taubenberger of the US National Institutes of Health concluded a few years ago that the virus mutated between those two waves. During the first wave, they believe, the pandemic strain lacked the ability to spread easily, and it therefore emerged in a limited way through a background of milder but more contagious seasonal flu around the tail end of 1917. The mutation the following summer rendered it highly transmissible, allowing it to explode in August – by which time there was no more seasonal flu to dilute it.

Could this scenario be repeated with Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19? Coronaviruses behave differently from flu, and from what scientists know about them, it seems unlikely. “The coronaviruses are not prone to mutation which perhaps is their weak spot,” says virologist John Oxford of Queen Mary, University of London.
Annelies Wilder-Smith, an expert in emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, agrees. So far Sars-CoV-2 has proved relatively stable, she says, and if it were to mutate, “We would hope that it would mutate to be less virulent.”
Unfortunately, that doesn’t rule out a resurgence. Unlike in China, lockdowns in other countries are being lifted before the disease has been eradicated, mainly because of fears about the economic consequences of keeping them in place. That means the virus is still circulating in their populations, and from what we can tell they are still far from achieving herd immunity (probably around 60 or 70 per cent of a population needs to be immune to protect it as a whole).

Coping with the constant threat of re-emergence is going to have to be the posture of humanity in the foreseeable future.
— David Nabarro, a public health expert at Imperial College London and the WHO’s special envoy on COVID-19

With no vaccine likely to be widely available for a year at the earliest, the risk of further outbreaks is therefore high. David Nabarro, a public health expert at Imperial College London and the WHO’s special envoy on COVID-19, says he doesn’t think in terms of waves, so much as ever-present danger. “Coping with the constant threat of re-emergence is going to have to be the posture of humanity in the foreseeable future,” he says.
How bad could a resurgence be? Wilder-Smith is relatively optimistic. “Yes there will be a second wave, and a third and a fourth and a fifth,” she says, “but hopefully they will be smaller each time, as we learn to suppress them.” But there are bleaker scenarios. Writing in the journal Science on April 14, a group of mathematical modellers – led by Christine Tedijanto and Stephen Kissler of the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston – highlighted “the potentially catastrophic burden on the healthcare system that is predicted if distancing is poorly effective and/or not sustained for long enough”.

With the caveat that a model is only as good as the data that feed it – and data on COVID-19 are still patchy – they estimated that the risk of a resurgence could persist until 2025, and that social distancing measures might need to be employed intermittently until 2022.

Originally Posted by DiscoMick

Look at New York, where the virus is making a comeback, with a positive rate up to 5% in some areas, and the government is going to fine people who refuse to wear masks.
Or look at the UK where the test and trace system has failed and Johnson is being forced to lock down parts of the country again.
Or parts of Europe such as France, Germany and Spain.

It's amazing how many people are determined to deny reality because it is inconvenient.
This pandemic has not even peaked yet. A vaccine is at least a year away. Magical thinking won't make it go away.

Nail on the head right there, DM.

All this talk of a 'Second Wave' is hyperbole. What is happening is that there are fluctuations in the infection numbers, in part due to the efficacy of implemented control measures, the standard of documentation, available medical treatment and human stupidity, to name a few!

Originally Posted by Arapiles

My favourite type of conspiracy theory .... the unspoken one. What exactly are you asserting?

A 'Pandemic" of Official reaction.
Not only but also, * Unprecedented Opportunity to curtail people's 'rights' and impose top-down government control over citizens. For example,

WA now has powers to FORCIBLY vaccinate.

Or am I reading too much into it? Sections 184 to 186 (Document Pages 120 onwards .)

https://www.legislation.wa.gov.au/legislation/prod/filestore.nsf/FileURL/mrdoc_43155.pdf/$FILE/Public%20Health%20Act%202016%20-%20%5B00-k0-00%5D.pdf?OpenElement

- Bet no one here voted for that !!!

(Source/link for the above. Australian police can kidnap people for medical reasons and remove anything "including underwear” to forcefully administer vaccines )


* The over-use of the word 'unprecedented' is..... Unprecedented.

Giddy up. A bit of underwear removal for a.shot in the arse cheek.

Cheers