Tag: Corona

COVID-19’s ‘Patients Zero’ May Have Been Wuhan Lab Scientists, Report Finds

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The report—authored by independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Gutentag, and published on Substack—names Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu as “three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2” in fall 2019. Not only did these three scientists work at the WIV, but they worked specifically on gain-of-function research; Hu in particular was considered a “star pupil” of Shi Zhengli, dubbed the “bat woman” for her work studying coronaviruses in bats.”

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“The report’s authors spoke with multiple sources inside the U.S. government who provided the information. These sources, whose names were withheld to protect their anonymity, said there is little doubt that the laboratory is where the pandemic started.”

How Covid made it nearly impossible to pass new vaccine rules

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The HPV vaccine has been around for almost two decades and could spare thousands of people from developing cervical and oral cancer — so mandating it for schoolchildren once seemed an easy call for Democrats in deep-blue California.
But a bill to do just that has been watered down beyond recognition in one of the most liberal states in the U.S., a victim of a homegrown anti-vaccine movement that has become more organized and more successful since the pandemic.”

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“Across the country, blue-state policymakers have nearly given up trying to create new vaccine policy and are now simply trying to hold the line on a decade’s worth of public health gains. Attempts to add required vaccines for school kids this year sputtered in Wisconsin, California and Massachusetts, a stunning reversal after a successful push to tighten exemptions for mandated childhood vaccines.”

The COVID-19 Pandemic Permanently Damaged Property Rights

Posted on by Lone Candle

“if the government deprives owners of their supposed state constitutional right to a fair return on their investment, fewer people will go into the business and even fewer will upgrade their properties. That helps no one.
The result is obvious: fewer available rentals and fewer rentals in tip-top condition. Investing in rental property has always been a prime means for middle-class people to build wealth. My grandfather was an immigrant paperhanger (remember wallpaper?) who invested in Philadelphia row houses decades ago. Now, I talk to many people who won’t dare buy a rental house out of the legitimate fear that the government can suspend rent payments at will.”

The Covid mask wars have left us unprepared for the next pandemic

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Jason Abaluck is a Yale behavioral economist and the co-author of a study of masking interventions in Bangladesh that provided the single largest randomized controlled trial we have that looks at the effects of encouraging people to wear masks during the Covid pandemic. His research found a significant reduction in Covid cases in the villages that encouraged masking.
When I talked with him this week, he emphasized that his finding — even if it’s eventually supported by further research — is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to figuring out masks.

“There’s a couple distinct questions that are getting conflated here,” he told me. Here are some of them:

“If you wear a mask while there’s a pandemic, are you less likely to get sick?”

“If you wear a mask while you have a respiratory illness, are you less likely to infect other people?”

“If you make people less likely to get sick during a pandemic, does that have lasting benefits to them, or does it just delay an infection without significantly changing their long-term health outcomes? Does it reduce transmission enough to change the overall dynamics of the pandemic?”

“If you tell people to wear masks, will they actually wear masks correctly and reliably?”

“If you mandate that people wear masks, will they actually wear masks correctly and reliably?”

“What are the costs, to the median person and to a person who is unusually affected by wearing masks, of wearing masks?””

Facebook Says Noting the CDC’s Scientific Misrepresentations ‘Could Mislead People’

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Laboratory experiments provide good reason to believe that masks, especially N95s, can reduce the risk that someone will be infected or infect other people. But those experiments are conducted in idealized conditions that may not resemble the real world, where people often choose low-quality cloth masks and do not necessarily wear masks properly or consistently.

Observational studies, which look at infection rates among voluntary mask wearers or people subject to mask mandates, can provide additional evidence that general mask wearing reduces infection. But such studies do not fully account for confounding variables.
If people who voluntarily wear masks or live in jurisdictions that require them to do so differ from the comparison groups in ways that independently affect disease transmission, the estimates derived from observational studies will be misleading. Those studies can also be subject to other pitfalls, such as skewed sampling and recall bias, that make it difficult to reach firm conclusions.

Despite those uncertainties, the CDC touted an observational study that supposedly proved “wearing a mask lowered the odds of testing positive” by as much as 83 percent. It said even cloth masks reduced infection risk by 56 percent, although that result was not statistically significant and the study’s basic design, combined with grave methodological weaknesses, made it impossible to draw causal inferences.”

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“If wearing a mask had the dramatic impact that the CDC claimed, you would expect to see some evidence of that in RCTs. Yet the Cochrane review found essentially no relationship between mask wearing and disease rates, whether measured by reported symptoms or by laboratory tests. Nor did it confirm the expectation that N95s would prove superior to surgical masks in the field. The existing RCT evidence, the authors said, “demonstrates no differences in clinical effectiveness.””

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“Does the Cochrane review prove that masks are worthless in protecting people from COVID-19? No. But it does show that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) misled the public about the strength of the evidence supporting mask mandates”