#sunetra gupta

[covid-safer-hotties]

Column: With a conference on the pandemic, Stanford gives purveyors of misinformation and disinformation a platform - Published Aug 29, 2024

We’re living in an upside-down world, aren’t we?

It’s a world in which scientists whose research findings that COVID probably originated as a spillover from wildlife have been validated by dozens of scientific studies, but got them hauled before a Republican-dominated House committee to be brayed at by the likes of Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and accused of academic fraud.

Meanwhile, the purveyors of claims that COVID’s danger was overstated and could be met by exposing the maximum number of people to the deadly virus in quest of “herd immunity” have been offered a platform to air their widely debunked and refuted views at a forum sponsored by Stanford University.

This is awful, a full on anti-science agenda (and revisionist history), tone deaf to how this kind of rhetoric contributed to the deaths of thousands of Americans during the pandemic by convincing them to shun vaccines or minimize Covid. — Vaccine expert and pseudoscience debunker Peter Hotez

The event is a symposium on the topic “Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past,” scheduled to take place on campus Oct. 4.

No one can doubt that a sober examination of the policies of the recent past with an eye toward doing better in the next pandemic is warranted. This symposium is nothing like that.

Most of its participants have been associated with discredited approaches to the COVID pandemic, including minimizing its severity and calling for widespread infection to achieve herd immunity. Some have been sources of rank misinformation or disinformation. Advocates of scientifically validated policies are all but absent.

The event is shaping up as a major embarrassment for an institution that prides itself on its academic standards. It comes with Stanford’s official imprimatur; the opening remarks will be delivered by its freshly appointed president, Jonathan Levin, an economist who took office Aug. 1.

The problem with the symposium starts with its main organizer. He’s Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of health policy. Bhattacharya is one of the original signers of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a manifesto for herd immunity published in October 2020. The university didn’t respond to my question about Bhattacharya’s role. He didn’t respond to my request for comment.

The core of the declaration is what its drafters call “focused protection,” which means allowing “those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk” — chiefly seniors, who would be quarantined.

Focused protection, the promoters wrote, would allow society to achieve herd immunity and return to normalcy in three to six months.

The quest for herd immunity from COVID has several problems. One is that infection with one variant of this ever-evolving virus doesn’t necessarily confer immunity from other variants. Another problem is that COVID can be a devastating disease for victims of any age. Allowing anyone of any age to become infected can expose them to serious health problems.

Bhattacharya’s name doesn’t appear in the event announcement, but he has identified himself on X as its “main organizer.” Among the announced speakers is epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, another of the declaration’s original signers.

Several other speakers advocated fewer restrictions on schools and businesses while predicting that COVID would be manageably mild, like the flu — predictions that were consistently and catastrophically wrong.

The date of the symposium, by the way, is the anniversary of the signing of the Great Barrington Declaration. It’s also Rosh Hashana, one of the High Holy Days of the Jewish calendar. Stanford says the “overlap” with the holiday is regrettable, but it hasn’t offered to reschedule.

Stanford responded to my request for comment about the event by simply reproducing language from the event announcement.

“The conference was organized to highlight some of the many important topics that public health officials and policymakers will need to address in preparing for future pandemics,” the university said. “The speakers, including those already listed and others who will be added over the next several weeks, represent a wide range of views on this issue. We look forward to a civil, informed, and robust debate.”

That won’t do. Stanford’s argument that it’s merely providing a platform for “robust debate” among speakers with a “wide range of views” is belied by the roster of speakers, in which members of a discredited fringe of pandemic policy advocates are heavily overrepresented.

The event announcement has elicited skepticism and dismay among scientists seriously concerned about pandemic policy.

“Knowing who the speakers and panelists are,” wrote the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski, “I know that ‘assessing the past’ will likely consist of highly revisionist history ... claiming that public health interventions didn’t work.”

The description of some of the daylong symposium’s sessions should give one pause. The precis of a panel titled “Misinformation, Censorship, and Academic Freedom” states as fact that “governments censored information contrary to public health pronouncements in social media settings.” It asks rhetorically, “Does the suspension of free speech rights during a pandemic help keep the population better informed or does it permit the perpetuation of false ideas by governments?”

Yet who among these speakers lost their “free speech rights”? On the contrary, several, including Bhattacharya, rode their discredited claims to regular appearances on Fox News, op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and appointments to blue-ribbon government committees in red states.

A look at the speakers list should tell you where this event is heading. On a panel on “Evidence-Based Decision Making During a Pandemic” is Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden’s pandemic policy. Sweden has been held up by critics of school closings and lockdowns and advocates of herd immunity as a success story, the theme being that by keeping schools and restaurants open, the country beat the pandemic.

The truth is just the opposite. As I’ve reported, the Tegnell record is disastrous. Sweden’s laissez-faire approach sacrificed its seniors to the pandemic and used its schoolchildren as guinea pigs. Swedish researchers concluded in retrospect that its policies were “morally, ethically, and scientifically questionable.” The death toll rose so high that the government was eventually forced to tighten up the rules.

Sweden’s death rate from COVID was much worse than that of its Nordic neighbors Denmark, Norway and Finland, which all took a tougher approach. If Sweden’s death rate had only matched Norway’s, it would have suffered only about 4,400 COVID deaths, rather than its toll of 18,500.

Then there’s Scott Atlas, a radiologist and former professor at Stanford medical school, who is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution, the right-wing think tank housed on the Stanford campus. Atlas was recruited to join the Trump White House as a COVID advisor in July 2020 after having volunteered to Medicare Administrator Seema Verma that the government’s pandemic policies were “a massive overreaction” that was “inciting irrational fear” in Americans.

Atlas estimated that the coronavirus “would cause about 10,000 deaths,” which “would be unnoticed” in a normal flu season. By the end of 2020, as it happens, COVID deaths in the U.S. exceeded 350,000. As of today, the toll is more than 1.2 million.

At the White House, Atlas promoted scientifically dubious prescriptions for the pandemic. He pushed for reduced testing for COVID and dismissed masking as a countermeasure. Most damaging, he called for a herd immunity policy.

Atlas’ prescriptions disturbed his Stanford colleagues, about 110 of whom wrote an open letter in September 2020 alerting the public to “the falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” that Atlas was preaching.

“Encouraging herd immunity through unchecked community transmission is not a safe public health strategy,” they wrote. “In fact, this approach would do the opposite, causing a significant increase in preventable cases, suffering and deaths, especially among vulnerable populations, such as older individuals and essential workers.”

The Stanford administration also formally disavowed Atlas’ statements and prescriptions. “Dr. Atlas has expressed views that are inconsistent with the university’s approach in response to the pandemic,” the university said. “We support using masks, social distancing, and conducting surveillance and diagnostic testing.”

Yet now Atlas appears to be back in the university’s good graces, judging from his presence on the roster. Stanford didn’t respond to my questions about Atlas’ role, and he didn’t reply to my request for comment.

Allowing this symposium to proceed along the lines laid out in the announcement will be a black mark for Stanford in the scientific community.

“What’s happening at Stanford?” asked vaccine expert and disinformation debunker Peter Hotez on X. “This is awful, a full on anti-science agenda (and revisionist history), tone deaf to how this kind of rhetoric contributed to the deaths of thousands of Americans during the pandemic by convincing them to shun vaccines or minimize Covid.”

Stanford’s claim to be a neutral host of a scientific symposium falls short as a fair description of its duties as an academic institution.

No university claims to be open to the expression of any or all views, no matter how unorthodox or counterfactual; they make judgments about the propriety of viewpoints all the time; the level of discernment they practice is one way we judge them as serious educational establishments.

By that standard, Stanford deserves an “F.” On the evidence, neither the university nor its medical school, which is a sponsor of the symposium, exercised any judgment at all before greenlighting an embarrassing gala for the pandemic fringe.

[xtruss]

How Stanford Failed The Academic Freedom Test! For America’s New Clerisy, Scientific Debate Is A Danger To Be Suppressed

— By Jay Bhattacharya | January 11, 2023 | TabletMag.Com

Stanford ‘created an environment in which slander, threats, and abuse aimed at lockdown critics could flourish’. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

We live in an age when a high public health bureaucrat can, without irony, announce to the world that if you criticize him, you are not simply criticizing a man. You are criticizing “the science” itself. The irony in this idea of “science” as a set of sacred doctrines and beliefs is that the Age of Enlightenment, which gave us our modern definitions of scientific methodology, was a reaction against a religious clerisy that claimed for itself the sole ability to distinguish truth from untruth. The COVID-19 pandemic has apparently brought us full circle, with a public health clerisy having replaced the religious one as the singular source of unassailable truth.

The analogy goes further, unfortunately. The same priests of public health that have the authority to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy also cast out heretics, just like the medieval Catholic Church did. Top universities, like Stanford, where I have been both student and professor since 1986, are supposed to protect against such orthodoxies, creating a safe space for scientists to think and to test their ideas. Sadly, Stanford has failed in this crucial aspect of its mission, as I can attest from personal experience.

I should note here that my Stanford roots go way back. I earned two degrees in economics there in 1990. In the ’90s, I earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. in economics. I’ve been a fully tenured professor at Stanford’s world-renowned medical school for nearly 15 years, happily teaching and researching many topics, including infectious disease epidemiology and health policy. If you had asked me in March 2020 whether Stanford had an academic freedom problem in medicine or the sciences, I would have scoffed at the idea. Stanford’s motto (in German) is “the winds of freedom blow,” and I would have told you at the time that Stanford lives up to that motto. I was naive then, but not now.

Academic freedom matters most in the edge cases when a faculty member or student is pursuing an idea that others at the university find inconvenient or objectionable. If Stanford cannot protect academic freedom in these cases, it cannot protect academic freedom at all.

To justify this depressing claim, I would like to relate the story of my experience during the pandemic regarding a prominent policy proposal I co-authored called the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). I could relate many additional incidents that illustrate Stanford’s stunning failure to protect academic freedom, but this one suffices to make my point.

On Oct. 4, 2020, along with two other eminent epidemiologists, Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, I wrote the GBD. The declaration is a one-page document that proposed a very different way to manage the COVID-19 pandemic than had been used up to that date. The lockdown-focused strategy that much of the world followed mimicked the approach that Chinese authorities adopted in January 2020. The extended lockdowns—by which I mean public policies designed to keep people physically separate from one another to avoid spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus—were a sharp deviation from Western management of previous respiratory virus pandemics. The old pandemic plans prioritized minimizing disruption to normal social functioning, protecting vulnerable groups, and rapidly developing treatments and vaccines.

The same priests of public health that have the authority to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy also cast out heretics, just like the medieval Catholic Church did.

Even by October 2020, it was clear that the Chinese-inspired lockdowns had done tremendous harm to the physical and psychological well-being of vast populations, especially children, the poor, and the working class. Closed schools consigned a generation of children worldwide to live shorter, less healthy lives. In July 2020, the Centers for Disease Control released an estimate that 1 in 4 young adults in the United States had seriously considered suicide during the previous month. The U.N. estimated that an additional 130 million people would be thrown into dire food insecurity—starvation—by the economic dislocation caused by the lockdowns. The primary beneficiaries of the lockdown—if there were in fact any beneficiaries of these drastic anti-social measures—were among a narrow class of well-off people who could work from home via Zoom without risk of losing their jobs.

It was amply clear by October 2020 that the lockdown policy adopted by many Western governments, with the exception of a few holdouts like Sweden, had failed to stop the spread of COVID. It was in fact too late to adopt a policy goal of eradicating the virus. We did not have the technological means to achieve this goal, then or now. By the fall of 2020, it was abundantly clear that COVID-19 was here to stay and that many future waves would occur.

Governments had imposed lockdowns on the premise that there was nearly unanimous scientific consensus in support of them. Yet an extraordinary policy like a lockdown requires, or should require, an extraordinary scientific justification. Only near unanimity among scientists, backed by solid empirical data, suffices.

Like Gupta and Kulldorf, I knew that such unanimity did not exist. Many scientists worldwide had contacted us to tell us about their qualms with the lockdowns—their destructiveness and the poor evidence of their effectiveness. Many epidemiologists and health policy scholars favored an alternative approach, though many were scared to say so. It seemed clear to the three of us that as the next inevitable wave appeared, there was a risk that the lockdowns might return, and that scientific evidence against such steps would be ignored and smothered, at tremendous social cost.

We wrote the GBD to tell the public that there was no scientific unanimity about the lockdown. Instead, the GBD proposed a focused strategy to protect the elderly and other vulnerable populations. There is more than a thousandfold difference in mortality risk from COVID-19 infection between the old and the young, with healthy children at negligible risk of dying. The humane thing is to devote resources and ingenuity to protect the most vulnerable. The GBD and its accompanying FAQ provided many suggestions about how to do that and invited local public health communities, which know best the varied local living circumstances of the vulnerable, to devise local solutions. At the same time, the GBD advocated lifting lockdowns and opening schools to alleviate harms to children. We put the GBD on the internet, and invited other members of the public to sign it.

The GBD was published on Oct, 4, 2020. Almost immediately, tens of thousands of scientists, epidemiologists, and physicians signed the document, including many from top universities. Simultaneously, people started sending us translations of the GBD—ultimately into 40 languages—and to date, nearly a million people have signed from almost every country on Earth.

The plan received the attention of the American press, at first curious and fair, but soon thereafter hostile and tendentious. I started getting calls from reporters, including outlets like The New York Times and Washington Post, asking me why I wanted to “let the virus rip” through the population, even though that was the very opposite of what we were proposing, and questioning my credentials and motives.

It was at first quite perplexing to be the target of what turned out to be a well-organized, government-sponsored campaign of smears and suppression of scientific argument and evidence. I had taken no money for writing the declaration. Yet press outlets somehow turned Gupta, Kulldorf, and me into tools of a nefarious plot to destroy the world by spreading “disinformation” that would cause mass death. I started receiving death threats and racist hate mail.

About a year later, after historian Phil Magness made a FOIA request, I learned a part of the story of how the U.S. government-sponsored propaganda campaign against the GBD came into being. Four days after we wrote the GBD, Francis Collins, the geneticist and lab scientist who was then the head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, wrote an email to Anthony Fauci, the immunologist and lab scientist who headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases until the end of 2022. In the email, Collins called Martin, Sunetra, and me “fringe epidemiologists” and called for a devastating public takedown. The attacks on the three of us, aided by the cooperation of supposedly private social media platforms like Twitter, were launched shortly after Collins sent that email.

But this is not an article about the ethics of social media companies whose profits depend to a large extent on the friendliness of government regulators and whose employees may see themselves as partisan political activists. This is a critique of our best universities, which are supposed to be dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge—yet which turn out to be no different than government propagandists and private corporations in their self-seeking, amoral behavior.

Collins and Fauci sit atop tens of billions of dollars that the NIH uses to fund the work of nearly every biomedical scientist of note in the United States. Stanford University receives hundreds of millions of dollars of funding from the NIH, without which researchers would not have the resources to conduct many worthwhile experiments and studies. NIH funding also confers prestige and status within the scientific community. At Stanford, it is very difficult for a biomedical researcher in her department to earn tenure without landing a major NIH grant. The attack by Collins and Fauci sent a clear signal to other scientists that the GBD was a heretical document.

Among Stanford faculty, the reaction to GBD was mixed. Some members, including Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt, signed on enthusiastically. I received encouragement from many others throughout the university. Junior medical school faculty wrote telling me they secretly supported the GBD but were reticent to sign officially for fear of reprisal from their department heads and Stanford administrators. Others were hostile. One faculty member and former friend wrote that he was defriending me on Facebook, perhaps the mildest form of retaliation I received during the pandemic.

There is a distinction in philosophy between negative and positive rights. A negative right is a constraint placed on the authorities not to take action that would violate that right. For example, the First Amendment prohibits Congress from enacting a law limiting the free exercise of religion or speech. A positive right entails an obligation on authorities to actively promote some desirable state of the world, for instance, the right to protection in the face of dire threats to bodily harm.

The same distinction pertains to academic freedom at a university. Stanford did not fire me or break my tenure for writing the GBD. Therefore, it met the bare minimum standard of negative academic freedom. But Stanford failed to meet the higher standard of positive academic freedom, which would have required it to promote an environment where faculty members engage with each other respectfully despite fierce disagreement.

The most egregious violation of academic freedom was an implicit decision by the university to deplatform me. Though I have given dozens of talks in seminars at Stanford over the past decades, in December 2020, my department chair blocked an attempt to organize a seminar where I would publicly present the ideas of the GBD. Stanford’s former president, John Hennessey, tried to set up a discussion between me and others on COVID policy, but he was unable to, owing to the absence of support from the university.

I never received an invitation from the medical school to present a “Grand Rounds,” a high-profile presentation by a faculty member on a topic of importance to the entire medical school. Instead, Grand Rounds and other seminars and webinars at Stanford univocally promoted positions which it is now obvious were devastatingly wrong, but which no one on campus was allowed to debate or challenge. Around the world in 2020 and early 2021, the GBD was a central topic of discussion—but not officially at Stanford.

More than a year later, in early 2022, I asked the dean of the medical school, Lloyd Minor, why I and other prominent lockdown-skeptic members of the Stanford faculty never received an invitation to present. He told me that the experience of caring for COVID patients in March 2020 had scared some Stanford clinical faculty and that it was still too early for a dispassionate “academic” discussion on COVID policy. Had I been given the opportunity, I would have told my colleagues that the focused protection ideas contained in the GBD could have prevented many of those hospitalizations.

Stanford failed to create a work environment where these discussions could happen. And I was not the only one to suffer—Stanford deplatformed other lockdown-skeptic academics, including John Ioannidis, one of the world’s most highly cited scientists and the most prolific and influential Stanford faculty on peer-reviewed COVID-19 publications; Michael Levitt, a Nobel Prize winner who made fundamental original contributions to modeling; and Scott Atlas, a former chair of neuroradiology at Stanford, widely acknowledged health policy expert and a key adviser to former President Donald Trump on COVID policy.

Faculty at Stanford should rightly worry whether their professional work will lead to deplatforming, excommunication, and political targeting.

The university’s refusal to defend dissenting voices created an environment in which slander, threats, and abuse aimed at lockdown critics could flourish. In August 2020, when President Trump chose Dr. Atlas as a White House adviser on the pandemic, around 100 Stanford faculty members signed an open letter accusing Atlas of “falsehoods and misrepresentations,” without giving any specific examples. Instead, the faculty letter falsely implied that Atlas opposed handwashing. When Martin Kulldorff challenged the signatories to a debate on the topic, none accepted. Instead, the Stanford Faculty Senate voted to censure Atlas formally, though no one voting had his expertise in public health policy.

In August 2021, Melissa Bondy, the chair of epidemiology at Stanford, helped circulate a secret petition around the medical school asking the university president to censor me for accurate testimony that I had given to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at a publicly televised policy roundtable. I testified that no randomized trials yet demonstrate the efficacy of masks on children to contain COVID. Though the secret petition did not name me specifically, it quoted me and asked the university to suppress such speech by faculty members. This petition imposed unethical pressure on faculty members—especially junior faculty members worried about tenure votes—to sign on.

When I finally read a copy of the petition, it felt like a gut punch. Was I preaching heresy? To date, no one at any level of the university leadership has expressed their support for me voicing my ideas. My efforts to engender discussion were met with silence. My colleagues John Ioannidis and Michael Levitt both report similar treatment.

The undisguised aim of this petition was to expel dissenting Stanford faculty like me from public academic life, making a mockery of the idea of academic freedom at exactly the time when we needed it the most. Ironically, if Stanford had defended my right to speak, there would have been no need for such a petition, as there would have been no confusion about the fact that my opinions were my own and not that of my colleagues.

The faculty’s excommunication motion yielded dividends in its goal of suppressing speech. An anonymous group on campus organized a campaign to intimidate me in response to a tweet by DeSantis, which included a picture of me from the policy roundtable and an (accurate) quote: “By vaccinating the old, we have protected the vulnerable.” The group glued posters all over campus with a picture of my face, the tweet from DeSantis, and a graph of COVID cases in Florida, which at the time were high. (Florida’s age-adjusted COVID mortality throughout the pandemic is lower than the average American state and on a par with California’s.) The implication was that I was a thought-criminal whose work was somehow responsible for the inevitable spread of a highly infectious respiratory virus.

On a progressive-dominated campus, these posters were clearly an incitement to violence. The group placed them on kiosks all over campus, including near a campus coffee shop that I frequent. For a few days, I feared for my physical safety. I reported this harassment to Stanford, but the university minimized my concerns, referring me to a counselor who advised me to engage with a firm that would help reduce the personal information about me available online. At that point, I decided to return to campus despite the threat—after 36 years, Stanford remains my home. But those posters stayed up for months. While I refused to be intimated, I can certainly understand those who are bullied into silence—which is, after all, the point.

Academic freedom at Stanford is clearly dying. It cannot survive if the administration fails to create an environment where good-faith discussions can occur outside of a framework of ideological rigidity and the false certainties that ideologues—and governments—wish to impose on us. Stanford missed the opportunity to sponsor COVID policy forums and it deplatformed dissenting voices. Several prominent faculty exploited this environment, engaging in actions that directly violated basic academic norms.

A precedent has now been established. Faculty at Stanford should rightly worry whether their professional work will lead to deplatforming, excommunication, and political targeting. In this environment, professors and students alike would be wise to look over their shoulders at all times, in the knowledge that the university no longer has your back. And members of the public should understand that many of those urging them to “trust the science” on complicated matters of public concern are also those working to ensure that “the science” never turns up answers that they don’t like.

— Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University.

[satnpifi]

So why is there not more talk about this?

David Gorski is one of those Americans in what I think is called “the sceptic community”, that I know about, and have respected. More recently wikipedia referred to him when they claimed the Great Barrington Declaration was funded by crazy right wing, climate catastrophe denier Charles Koch.

The thing is, one, of course Sunetra Gupta, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff have always denied that. And btw at least Gupta says she’s left wing. Two, according to this article: Quacks in the ivory tower, the whole thing comes from a blogger who among other things is a “september 11 truthere”. Like dr David Groski et al. were so determined to prove the “other side” was evil, they didn’t care about the source of their “proof”.  I know, in the US and the UK, it is extremely polarised  - we’re that too, but not that extreme - something like that could happen. It’s not enough that they could be wrong (because they could be wrong) they must be painted as funded by a cartoonish evil anti-science lobbyist. At the same time the right wing in the US does the same thing. Except they call Fauci a “villian”, again it’s not enough to think he is wrong (because he might be wrong) he must be a villain.

The point is anyway, wikipedia isn’t any site. It’s Fooking Wikipedia, if they get something like that wrong, it’s a big deal. Should be talked about, I think.

[nihthraefn]

In October 2020 secluded in the Berkshires, three epidemiologists, Jayanta Bhattacharya (professor of medicine at Stanford), Martin Kulldorff (professor medicine at Harvard) and Sunetra Gupta (professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford) wrote and signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which outlined a different way of handling the pandemic, suggesting that the general population without comorbidities should continue their normal way of life and allow for the general population to build up herd immunity.   You can read about it and sign it here:      https://gbdeclaration.org

My pins, shirts and other items are available on Redbubble.  

[zmkccommonplace]

Jeremy Paxman: How do you think history will look back on this episode in the human story? Sunetra Gupta: As an extraordinary, panic-fuelled disaster where the affluent countries and the affluent sectors of the populations in those countries sought to protect themselves at the expense of the poor and at the expense of the younger generations and their futures.

BBC

[covid19diarylondon]

For the record - 01/11/2020

Last night, the UK government announced that England would go into a lockdown for a month from 5 November.  Let’s make one thing crystal clear -  the aim of the lockdown is not to eradicate the virus.  Its aim is to avoid hospitals buckling under the weight of Covid patients and it follows that fewer people will die.  This is exactly the same reasons given to us in March this year when we had our first lockdown.  In March, I could just forgive the government for being caught out (although arguably it should have been apparent to the government that they should have taken actions much sooner when they saw what was happening in our neighbouring countries).  Six months on, history repeats itself.  Let’s not excuse ourselves by saying that France, Spain and Germany are facing the same difficult situation and we are doing exactly what they are now doing.  Instead, can we look farther afield to places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea or New Zealand and see what they have done right?  Taiwan has not had a homegrown Covid 19 case for over 100 days continuously.  My friends in Seoul have been living a more or less normal life for months.  Hong Kong has never had a full lockdown.  I’m not for one minute suggesting that we should copy their models without scrutiny.  I also recognise that some policies used in those places will never be accepted by the people in the UK.  However, I do believe that lessons can be learned by studying how other places have got it right and why their infection and death rates are so much lower than ours.  

We have also seen how divided the scientists are. There is simply no hope that those scientists who made the Great Barrington Declaration will be able to convince the “Fauci” group or vice versa.  That said, apart from lockdown or no lockdown; herd immunity or no herd immunity, I believe that common grounds can be found to better control the virus from spreading. 

Specifically, in Hong Kong, if a person is tested positive, no matter how mild or serious his illness is, and regardless of his age, he will be sent to a hospital for treatment.  This achieves two purposes: 1) he is immediately taken out of circulation and he will not be able to spread the virus to the wider community; 2) common with all illnesses, it is easier and cheaper to treat people when the illness is not serious.   The patients will be released after they are tested negative twice consecutively.  Treating patients with bronchitis is easier than treating those with pneumonia; people with stage 1 cancer have a better chance of survival than people with stage 4 cancer.  It is the same for Covid 19 patients.  This is common sense.  Treating Covid 19 patients at their early stage of illness in isolated wards is far cheaper than treating them in the ICUs.  Those patients have a far better chance to survive if their illness is treated sooner.  Those medical staff treating patients with mild symptoms will have a lesser risk of being infected by the virus.  Now, what do we do in this country?  If you have symptoms, stay at home and self-isolate.  If you are tested positive, stay at home and self-isolate.  If you get well all by yourself, all is well.  Hospitals are not interested in you unless your condition becomes serious and can no longer cope.  To me, this is crazy.  It is also a false economy especially we have now learned so much about the virus and various effective ways to treat a Covid patient.  Everyone knows how expensive and precious an ICU bed is and how labour intensive it is to look after a patient in the ICU.   This is not my theory.  This is advocated by Dr Yuen Kwok-yung who graduated from the University of Hong Kong in 1981 and has the rare distinction of being a microbiologist, surgeon and physician.   He also had first-hand knowledge when SARS struck HK in 2003 and is one one the main advisors advising the HK government on fighting the pandemic right now.  You can find his Bloomberg interview here:  

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-17/treat-covid-19-early-to-save-patients-lives-sars-veteran-urges?srnd=markets-vp

Can the eminent scientists whom we see all day on the television please explain to me why Dr Yuen’s theory is wrong and why it cannot or should not be done in the UK?

I have great hesitation posting this because I don’t want to be trolled.  I don’t want to be labeled as Covidiots.  I am not.  I just believe that we cannot go in and out of lockdowns without becoming wiser.  I believe in sensible debates.   I am just a frustrated and concerned citizen and I don’t think I am alone.

[trendingjagat]

Indian-Origin Academic Leads Criticism Of UK’s Covid Lockdown Approach Sunetra Gupta is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford. London: A prominent Indian-origin Oxford University academic leads a group of over 30 academics who have expressed their doubts over the UK government's localised and national lockdown approach to tackling a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic.

[adribosch-fan]

Sunetra Gupta, epidemióloga de Oxford: “La cuarentena no es una respuesta solidaria porque hay muchísima gente que no puede sostener esa estrategia”

Sunetra Gupta, epidemióloga de Oxford: “La cuarentena no es una respuesta solidaria porque hay muchísima gente que no puede sostener esa estrategia”

Por Sofía BenavidesDarío Mizrahi

Sunetra Gupta, profesora de epidemiología teórica en la Universidad de Oxford

La destacada científica y novelista india lideró el equipo de investigación que desarrolló un modelo alternativo al famoso del Imperial College, planteando un escenario menos pesimista. Su preocupación por los efectos del confinamiento, sus diferencias con los libertarios y su crítica…

[shantinewshindi]

‘ज्यादातर लोगों को नहीं होगी कोरोना की दवा की जरूरत’: ऑक्सफोर्ड की प्रोफेसर ने बताया कब खत्म होगी महामारी दुनियाभर में कोरोना वायरस के बढ़ते मामलों के बीच ऑक्सफोर्ड यूनिवर्सिटी की प्रोफेसर ने दावा किया है कि कोरोना की दवा की जरूरत सभी लोगों को नहीं होगी। कोरोना वायरस के चलते अब तक एक करोड़ से अधिक लोग... Source link

[satnpifi]

I have the rule that I shouldn’t visit twitter more than three times a week. The site makes you a little strange in the brian. But it was via twitter I learned that while dr Tedros Adhanom think the world should do like China. Another big shot in WHO, Dr. David Nabarro, recommend what WHO has always recommended for pandemic: things like social distancing and hand washing.

But those aren't the two names I wanted to namedrop. What I wanted to write was this, isn't this what Sunetra Gupta has said the whole time? That lockdown is a luxury for the rich. Yeah, it’s easy to assume this is one reason she is one of the most famous critics of the lockdown in the west. She is a woman born in Kolkata (Kolkata I first speled “Calicut”, because I apparently think so little about India I at first didn’t realize that it’s two different Indian cities). She’s not just a professor in theoretical epidemiology at the University of Oxford, she might also have known something about poverty. That I'm post this doesn't mean I'm not afraid of the pandemic. I'm now we have winter infront of us. That could be bad. At the same time, media and now WHO, has cryed wolf before. Plus countries has turned it to politics. I don't know.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The herd immunity conspiracy

Thing about the "herd immunity" debate is, there isn't one. Herd immunity was discarded by WHO virologists and epidemiologists and their US/UK counterparts. So why are we still talking about it? Thank right-wing think-tanks, awash in corporate money. https://medium.com/@jmfeldman/the-herd-immunity-strategy-isnt-part-of-a-scientific-debate-about-covid-19-abddf6bc7c13 The Hoover Institute and the American Institute for Economic Research have coordinated with the Trump administration to promote this idea. Hoover's Scott Atlas is on Trump's covid task force and his idea of scientific debate is threatening to sue scientists. The majority of support for herd immunity comes from three scientists: Martin Kulldorff (Harvard Med), Sunetra Gupta (Oxford epidemiology) and theex-Hooverites Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford). These three convened the meeting that produced the "Great Barrington Declaration" arguing for herd immunity - a declaration whose signatories include many obvious fakes ("Dr Johnny Bananas"). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/09/herd-immunity-letter-signed-fake-experts-dr-johnny-bananas-covid And these three are cited by GOP governors and local pols for their refusal to implement lockdowns, mask orders and other evidence-based, life-saving measures. Like tobacco-cancer deniers of the fifties, they're selling doubt, and corporate-friendly politicians are buying. Herd immunity is bad science, but it's good for business. Tossing low-waged workers into a viral meat-grinder "keeps the economy going" - which is to say, it keeps billionaires' fortunes intact. Remember, if they need you to risk your life to make their fortunes, then you - not they - are the reason they have that fortune to begin with.

[wherelibertydwells]

Over six thousand scientists and doctors have signed a petition against coronavirus lockdown measures, urging that those not in the at risk category should be able to get on with their lives as normal, and that lockdown rules in both the US and UK are causing ‘irreparable damage’.

Those who have signed include professors from the world’s leading universities. Oxford University professor Dr Sunetra Gupta was one of the authors of the open letter that was sent with the petition, along with Harvard University’s Dr Martin Kulldorff and Stanford’s Dr Jay Bhattacharya.

It declares that social distancing and mask mandates are causing ‘damaging physical and mental health impacts.’

Great Barrington Declaration

[gorskon]

Gov. Ron DeSantis further embraces the Great Barrington Declaration by appointing Dr. Joseph Ladapo as Florida Surgeon General

Yesterday, @GovRonDeSantis appointed Dr. Joseph Ladapo, an apostle of the @gbdeclaration's eugenics lite "focused protection" approach to #COVID19, as Florida Surgeon General. This is a disaster for Florida and a triumph of "COVID contrarian" physicians.

I’ve written several times about the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), a statement released by three COVID-19-minimizing scientists, Dr. Sunetra Gupta (University of Oxford), Dr. Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University) and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University). Named after the Massachusetts town where the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER, the libertarian “free market” think tank…

[softrevolutionoflove]

Juridische tegenstrijdigheid mondmaskers

Een ministerieel besluit (dat de mondmaskerplicht invoert) staat hiërarchisch lager dan een wet (die het bedekken van het gezicht met kleding verbiedt). In de praktijk hebben agenten gelukkig gezond verstand en sanctioneren ze niet. Ze oordelen dan dat er sprake is van overmacht. Het is hier in België een slordigheid van de wetgever. Een rechter in België heeft alle boetes kwijtgescholden van de mensen die geen mondmasker hadden gedragen. De schade die is ontstaan door de coronamaatregelen dient te worden verhaald op die organisaties en personen die direct of indirect (mede)verantwoordelijk zijn voor deze maatregelen. Er is hier een probleem met de wet van 1 juni 2011 tot instelling van een verbod op het dragen van kleding die het gezicht volledig dan wel grotendeels verbergt.

Deze wet werd ingevoerd in het kader van het boerkaverbod, maar verbiedt ook het dragen van mondmaskers. De vraag daarbij is vooral of een mondmasker als “kleding” kan worden beschouwd. Vooral bij zelfgemaakte mondmaskers, zoals een sjaaltje of een stuk stof uit een oud shirt, is dat wel het geval. Medische mondmaskers, mogen we in feite niet gebruiken in België.

Ondanks de maatregelen stijgen en dalen de cijfers. De gewone griep is door de maatregelen verdwenen vanaf oktober, zegt Sciensano (het Belgisch instituut voor gezondheid) maar we hebben wel de grootste golf Covid ooit gehad. De conclusie is dat de maatregelen gewerkt hebben tegen besmettingen met de griep, maar niet tegen die met Covid. Precies wat Prof. Didier Raoult ook zegt. 

De regering en de virologen hebben zich geconcentreerd op maatregelen die de hele bevolking treffen. Daarmee hebben zij verkozen om zich niet te concentreren op de bescherming van de zwaksten. Er is in België een probleem door het dragen van mondmaskers. De geluksbeleving van veel mensen is weggevaagd!

Ik vraag om bescherming van de kwetsbare mensen in België, zoals mensen met longziekten. Intussen hierin gesteund door tientallen wetenschappelijke publicaties die tot dezelfde conclusie komen.

Het heeft geen zin de Belgische economie te onderdrukken en de vrijheden van de mensen af te nemen. Dat is een soort van nutteloze zelf-geseling. Het bijzonder gevolg van deze zelf-geseling is dat er dan ook nog eens een pak collaterale schade en doden zijn.

De maatregelen hebben alleen destructie tot gevolg gehad en meer doden dan als er geen mondmaskerplicht was geweest.

Boerka-wet

Sinds 2011 is het overal in België strafbaar om zich op publiek toegankelijke plaatsen te begeven met het gezicht geheel of gedeeltelijk bedekt of verborgen zodat mensen niet herkenbaar zijn. De drie voorziene uitzonderingsgronden (arbeidsreglementen, politieverordeningen naar aanleiding van feestactiviteiten, en 'andersluidende wetsbepalingen') lijken onvoldoende ruim om te verhinderen dat dit zogenaamde boerkaverbod op allerlei niet door de wetgever geviseerde situaties van toepassing is, zoals kerstmannen en sinterklazen, menselijke mascottes, dragers van stofmaskers en motorhelmen met ondoorzichtig vizier, straatkunstenaars, enz. Het dragen van medische mondmaskers valt niet onder een uitzonderingsgrond, maar met name tijdens de coronacrisis van 2020 bleek dat het verbod op dit punt niet werd afgedwongen door de ordediensten.

De wiskundige modellen van Neil Ferguson en andere epidemiologen zijn intussen in meerdere wetenschappelijke bijdragen naar de prullenmand verwezen. Toch blijven mensen deze methodes gebruiken en verdedigen, hoewel ze tezelfdertijd zelf zeggen dat er grote onzekerheden en reserves bij te maken zijn. De voorbije maanden zijn er tientallen studies verschenen van professoren met een wereldreputatie, die aantonen op basis van de reële cijfers, dat de maatregelen niet werken. Niet op basis van fictieve statistische modellen, maar op basis van de echte evolutie van Covid-19.

Professor John Ioannidis, Professor Dr. Knut Wittkowski, Professor Sunetra Gupta, Professor Dr. Klaus Püschel, Professor Dr. Michael Levitt, Professor Dr. Hendrick Streeck, Professor Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, Professor Dolores Cahill, Dr. Thomas Jefferson, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, Dr. Anders Tegnell, Dr. Bodo Schiffmann, Professor Dr. Peter C. Gøtzsche, Professor Dr. Pietro Vernazza, Professor Dr. Didier Raoult en vele andere wetenschappers bewezen dat jongeren minder vatbaar zijn voor covid-19.

Margot Cloet, CEO van Zorgnet-Icuro, zei het onlangs nog treffend op De Afspraak: we zijn proefkonijnen voor de maatregelen.

In het onderwijs zal er in verschillende snelheden worden versoepeld, blijkt uit de eerste beslissingen die genomen zijn in het Franstalig onderwijs. Gezien de epidemiologische situatie en de vaccinatiegraad is er een andere aanpak nodig, benadrukt minister Désir. Ik, Mirjam Schouten, BASc. uit Begijnendijk wil graag dat kinderen nog de mogelijkheid hebben om zich in vrijheid te ontplooien en een leven te leiden met hun eigen overtuigingen en meningen.

De verplichting tot het dragen van een mondmasker is anders voor leerlingen en leerkrachten in het Waalse Gewest dan in Brussel, waar er geen ruimte voor versoepelingen is. Dat bleek na overleg tussen de Franstalige minister van Onderwijs Caroline Désir en het onderwijsveld.

Het dragen van een mondmasker wordt flexibeler gemaakt in Waalse scholen, maar niet in Brusselse. Pedagoog Bert Smits (KU Leuven) stelt dat de lesoverdracht erdoor wordt bemoeilijkt, zeker voor zwakkeren. De Vlaamse Scholierenkoepel uitte dezelfde bezorgdheden. “Het is dan ook slecht voor de concentratie en communicatie als ze gedurende 7 à 8 lesuren per dag een mondmasker moeten dragen.” De mimiek van leerlingen en leraren gaat verloren door de mondmaskers.

Voor het basisonderwijs kijkt het Franstalig onderwijs naar de horeca. Voor personeel is een mondmasker verplicht in de binnenruimtes wanneer ze zich verplaatsen (als ze wandelen in de gang of even praten in de leraarskamer). Het mondmasker mag wel af als ze aan de les beginnen, als de vergadering start of als ze eten. Voor leerlingen is er geen mondmaskerplicht. In Brussel zijn er geen versoepelingen en blijft het mondmasker binnen verplicht voor alle aanwezige volwassenen - tijdens elk contact.

Ook voor het secundair onderwijs worden de regels van de horeca gevolgd. Wie zich verplaatst moet een mondmasker dragen (ook de scholieren), maar eens de les begonnen is, kan het mondmasker af. Dezelfde regel geldt voor lunchpauzes en vergaderingen. Opnieuw is er in Brussel geen ruimte voor versoepelingen. Leerlingen en leerkrachten moeten er ook tijdens de les hun mondmasker aanhouden.

Naast de discussie over mondmaskers is er in Franstalig België ook gediscussieerd over de ventilatie in schoolgebouwen en CO2-meters. De conclusie is dat er aanbevolen wordt om een risicoanalyse te vragen bij het comité voor preventie en bescherming op het werk of een andere dienst. Zij zullen de luchtkwaliteit meten en indien nodig strengere protocollen voorstellen.

De maatregelen die genomen zijn in Franstalig België, gelden tot eind september. Désir laat weten dat er voor de deadline opnieuw rond de tafel zal worden gezeten met de experts en het onderwijsveld. Vlaams minister van Onderwijs Ben Weyts (N-VA) heeft gesproken met zijn Franstalige en Duitstalige collega, het wordt tijd dat België 1 wordt en dat iedereen de drie landstalen gaat spreken.

Mondmaskers verplichten is een ingrijpende bedreiging voor het welzijn van onze jeugd.

Ondanks het voortschrijdend inzicht over de beperkte dreiging die van COVID uitgaat, én ondanks de ineffectiviteit én onzinnigheid van veel maatregelen, blijven de beperkingen onverminderd van kracht – en worden zelfs nog verder opgevoerd. Alles tegen beter weten in.

Zonder een deugdelijk wetenschappelijke grondslag.

Zonder deugdelijke rechtvaardiging of onderbouwing.

Zonder enig perspectief.

Het welzijn van kinderen en jongeren stond vorig schooljaar onder ernstige druk. Ze kampten met angst- en slaapproblemen, gedragsstoornissen en smetvrees. Ook nam isolatie en deprivatie bij de doelgroep toe en was er een gebrek aan fysiek contact waardoor hechtingsproblemen ontstonden.

In het lager onderwijs zijn het de leraren die verplicht zullen worden een mondmasker te dragen. In het secundair zouden alle leerlingen én alle leraren opnieuw mondmaskers moeten dragen.

Bronnen: de Belgische krant De Standaard en Internet.