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Wow – what an effort there is to change the culture right now!
Don’t go near other people…don’t go out much…if we let you go to the pub then don’t drink a third pint…don’t hug your grandchildren…don’t argue with family members if we let you see them at Christmas…don’t date anyone… And the latest is don’t send too many emails because they cause climate change.
That’s according to British officials, as reported in the Financial Times. “Thanks for polluting the planet: emails blamed for climate change” is the article’s headline. The details don’t really matter. It’s all about “Change your ways when we tell you to, and when we say jump don’t ask ‘how high?’ – just jump without thinking, because otherwise you’re a danger to public hygiene and the public good…and we mean it”.
The FT practically say as much: “Officials have been particularly taken by research suggesting that more than 64m unnecessary emails are sent by Britons every day, pumping thousands of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere owing to the power they consume.”
Yeah right. Got an idea about a behavioural change that can be decreed so as to condition people to being even more obedient than they are already? “Never hold the handle of a cup.” “Don’t give your dog any treats.” “Wipe your bum in the shower to save on toilet paper”? The stupider it sounds, the better – because that makes it easier to identify who’s got a tendency to LAUGH when they are ORDERED to do something. (This is very much like school.) Then send it to Britgov and they might run with it. “Do not disrespect order-givers, whatever orders they just gave you” is the message.
At least emails are better than tweets, Facebook posts, etc.
Basically people are being told “You thought it was your internet, did you? You thought the internet was a public service? Well think again, suckers!”
And hot on the heels of the “don’t argue or whatever it is you proles usually do with your smelly families over Christmas” “nudge” from an “expert” advising the government, whaddayaknow, here’s another learned professor. This one is saying that the ROADS should be closed, so that people can do more cycling and get more “exercise” during these difficult “Covid” times.
This time the c*** is called “Gabriel Scally”, he works at Bristol University, and yes he is a member of SAGE. Here is the man’s CV, if anyone wants to pick through it.
The rulers don’t like us moving around too far, do they?
N_, you repeatedly argue for official action to strengthen people’s immune systems, but when someone actually does you start arguing for private transport. And pointless e-mails; “key-boards good, touch-screens bad; key-boards good, touch-screens bad”? Should everyone be just like you?
N_
As usual you have a point, but sadly you take the wrong turn and make the wrong deductions, in my opinion. I agree with you about the mumble jumble that has become part of this ‘control’ of the virus, which is by trying to ‘control’ and micromanage all of our actions. I agree with you about the farcical nature of this advice. ‘Rule of 6’? Pubs closing at 10 PM? and so on it goes. I saw somewhere that the rule of 6 was invented by Boris (probably by the now disgraced Cummings) to try and forestall lockdown when that was suggested by SAGE. Also we now seem to be concentrating so much on ‘Christmas’, not as the pure Christian story or even the fairy tale Shepherds and mangers, but on the hyper commercial materialistic neoliberal Christmas, as what will make or break the spirit of this nation.
The story we are trying to evade here is really much simpler:
Proper effective lockdown means simply: social distancing, wearing face masks, avoid gatherings in small spaces, but even most important, test and trace and properly isolate contacts. But this is not palatable to the Pharisees and money grabbers. But when we find that 6 Tory MPS from the red wall went to no.10 and a had a bit of social closeness without the need of wearing masks, and even had the audacity to flaunt this, and when the PM then poses again as a joker-in chief, and when the same joker in chief then decides to rule like Caligula and insists that his horse must remain home secretary , oops… I meant senator despite advice to the contrary then one wonders about where we are heading. These are all diversions, the whole press should be calling for Johnson to go rather than concentrating on Corbyn, but there you are.SA, Dredd, what do you make of this?
Superantigenic character of an insert unique to SARS-CoV-2 spike supported by skewed TCR repertoire in patients with hyperinflammation
PNAS October 13, 2020 117 (41) 25254-25262
http://www.pnas.org/content/117/41/25254
– “The binding epitope on [the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein] harbors a sequence motif unique to SARS-CoV-2 (not present in other SARS-related coronaviruses), which is highly similar in both sequence and structure to the bacterial superantigen staphylococcal enterotoxin B”
Staphylococcal enterotoxin B – SEB – is pretty nasty. It’s produced by staphylococcus bacteria, of course, but was also developed as a bioweapon:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5086421/
– “Staphylococcal enterotoxin B (SEB) is the prototype of a non-egc-associated potent SAg. It is categorized as a category B select agent because it is the most potent staphylococcal enterotoxin, and much lower quantities are sufficient to produce a toxic effect than with synthetic chemicals. Furthermore, SEB is extremely stable and easily produced in large quantities. At low concentrations, SEB can cause multi-organ system failure and death. During the 1960s, when the United States had an offensive biological warfare program, SEB was studied as a biological weapon and stockpiled with various other bioweapons prior to its destruction in 1972 (4). Based on those investigations, the effective dose of SEB that would incapacitate 50% of the exposed population was estimated to be 0.0004 μg/kg of body weight, whereas the 50% lethal dose was estimated to be 0.02 μg/kg of body weight for humans exposed by the inhalation route”
Obviously viruses can’t make any proteins themselves, so in some cases, thankfully rare so far, SARS-CoV-2 is inducing hosts’ own cells to make SEB or something very similar to it. Do you know if harbouring something like this is common for viruses?
Clark
Thank you, very interesting. Viruses of course are packets of genetic material that then highjack the host cells to reproduce and to manufacture the various proteins that are coded for by the virus genome, so you are right they get the host to produce these proteins. As to superantigens, they are mostly associated with bacteria but some viruses also produce them such as rabies and EBV but the most studied is the Mouse Mammary Tumor Virus Superantigens.
What is also important to realise that the host response to these superantigens can also be variable due to genetic, environmental and other factors so that not everyone who is exposed to superantigens would react in the same way with a cytokine storm, or also weather the effects of such a storm. This is why the severity of the disease is different according to age, sex, ethnic background and comorbidities.The SEB superantigen specifically must be quite consistent in its effects or it wouldn’t have been produced as a bioweapon, and there wouldn’t be 50% of population incapacitation / death concentrations for it. I think it unlikely that the US stockpiled a bioweapon that killed predominantly the elderly. So presumably, either SARS-CoV-2 consistently causes production of something similar but not identical to SEB, or it only causes production of SEB in a minority of infections. It’d be very nasty should a mutation produce a strain that produced SEB more consistently.
Are there any other viruses that produce, specifically, SEB, or was SEB hitherto only a bacterial product? And did you notice this bit? –
– “What is even more interesting is that SARS-Cov-2 motif showed a palindromic behavior with respect to this superantigenic SEB sequence, in the sense that a broader stretch, from E661 to R685, could be aligned to the SAg peptide in the reverse direction as well (Fig. 3A, right). This brings to our attention the versatility and high propensity of the SARS-CoV-2 S TCRVβ-binding site residues to potentially elicit an SAg-like response.”
Maybe I’m being unduly suspicious, but does that happen often?
The British government’s media operation is currently describing how obedient and sufficiently grateful boys and girls will receive “freedom passes” that they can show to policemen, security guards, supermarket officials, etc., in order to be allowed to enter a cafe, walk down the street, or go into a shop the way they want to.
At the moment they are saying that
1) the condition for getting a “freedom pass” will be that you’ve been tested x times in y days for SARS-CoV2,
2) the main thing you’ll be allowed to do if you’ve got a “freedom pass” is keep your face uncovered.Both 1 and 2 are likely to change.
Condition 1 will become that you can prove from a piece of electronic equipment that you’ve been vaccinated – and obviously there will have to be a way to prove that you are the person whom the equipment says has been vaccinated.
Permitted Behaviour 2 will include many other things, such as
* being allowed to buy food at all
* being allowed to travel
* and perhaps soon, being allowed to leave your house.The term “freedom pass” sounds very mobile phony. You can see why the criminal thug Dido Harding from TalkTalk got appointed.
Other things that might come under 2 are:
* being allowed to receive medical treatment
* being allowed to get through the front door of a hospital, “GP’s” “surgery”, prison, or school (but once you’re dead they’ll probably allow you into a fast-throughput crematorium)
* being allowed to use a bank’s automatic teller machine
(Not sure about this one. It all depends on the lines along which the financial system cracks. Certainly “borrow borrow borrow” depends on “spend spend spend”. But many people are in such enormous debt and the crash is coming so soon that it might not matter so much to the moneylenders that they borrow a hugely gigantic amount in the next few months rather than only a gigantic amount.)(Remember – disobedient equals dirty! That’s how Daily Mail readers think!)
Certainly the fact that a fascist government is talking about “freedom passes” should make us very afraid.
“When the rulers talk of peace, war is already being prepared”.
N_
You talk regularly about symbolism, but seem to have no problems with the obvious symbol of this overplayed hysteria.
The mask(made of anything you like according to official advice, which does kind of give the game away).
Why do you go along with this unscientific, but very emotional approach?
This appears to be the best study of the insanity currently infecting people.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
Industry sponsored fact checkers(sic) have obviously been doing what they are paid to do(making fools of themselves?).
“A Danish study found the Covid-19 infection rate was lower among mask-wearers than non-mask wearers but not significantly so. However this is not proof that masks don’t have a significant effect, as the study didn’t look at whether mask-wearing protects others by stopping wearers from exhaling the virus.”
That last sentence gives their fraudulent game away. There is and never has been any real science that goes along with this and if, as they claim,they check facts, they’re rather inept in their chosen career.
You know the kind of idiot that would parrot the media led idiocy with things like “super spreader” without even realising the unscientific TV language they are engaging in.
How anyone can still think the devastating consequences placed on people are proportionate to the tiny risk involved is a staggering insight into the world of industry led propaganda.
Nothinguptop, you’ve never worked with microphones, right? ‘Cos if you had you’d know how essential a ‘pop shield’ is. Hold your hand in front of your face and say “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers”; feel all those little puffs of air hitting your hand? If you could see the air they’d look like smoke rings. Now try again with any old bit of fabric as a mask. That’s why you always put a pop shield on vocal mics, and that’s one reason that any old bit of fabric helps prevent other people being infected.
No reference to “MSM” at all, just a little experiment anyone can do for themselves. No “MSM” reference in all the citations from the scientific literature that Dredd gave you either; why have you ignored this evidence? Here they are again:
Howard et al (2020). Face Masks Against COVID-19: An Evidence Review. Preprints.
The use of masks to protect against respiratory infections: an umbrella review. Enfermedades Infecciosas y Microbiología Clínica.
Kähler & Hain (2020). Fundamental protective mechanisms of face masks against droplet infections. Journal of Aerosol Science.
Landi et al. (2020). Should face masks be worn to contain the spread of COVID-19 in the postlockdown phase? Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene.
Salter (2020). Reinventing Cloth Masks in the Face of Pandemics. Risk Analysis.
Lima et al. (2020). Cloth face masks to prevent Covid-19 and other respiratory infections. Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem.
And for anyone who wishes to read those reviews’ conclusions, they’re here.
Seeing as you’d been informed of the science (and I know you read it because you accused Dredd of being “part of the conspiracy” in reply), I have to assume that you’re actually trying to encourage the spread of infection and thereby increase the death rate. So why are you doing that?
– There are COVID-19 incidents in which a single person likely infected 80 percent or more of the people in the room in just a few hours. But, at other times, COVID-19 can be surprisingly much less contagious. Overdispersion and super-spreading of this virus are found in research across the globe. A growing number of studies estimate that a majority of infected people may not infect a single other person. A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. This finding is not rare: Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it.
So if “super-spreader” doesn’t sound “scientific” enough for you, you can refer to overdispersion instead. Links in the above passage lead to CDC, The Lancet, NCBI (2), PNAS, medrxiv, Nature (2), Welcome, and arxiv.
But of course, “they” are all “in on the scam”, right? Science is a conspiracy, right? But you’re not to be called a “conspiracy theorist”, because that’s just a “weaponised term” for the sheeple, right?
Wake up!
I am so sick of conspiracy theorists. The Internet gave us a wonderful new uncensorable channel bypassing the corporate media’s propaganda and gatekeeping, but conspiracy theorists have flooded it with shit.
Nothingontop (appropriate moniker) linked here:
The very first paragraph describes the objective of the trial:
– “Observational evidence suggests that mask wearing mitigates transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). It is uncertain if this observed association arises through protection of uninfected wearers (protective effect), via reduced transmission from infected mask wearers (source control), or both.”
So the paper accepts widespread pre-existing findings that mask use reduces cross-infection, and disproves Nothingontop’s earlier lie that using a mask increases infection risk for the wearer.
Nothingontop, do you encourage drunk driving, littering, and spitting in people’s faces too?
Nothing up top, like a website that remains nameless, likes bandying Around terms like fraudulent about all and sundry. That website recently published an article that was so full of fraud that claimed that all the rest of the world is committing the fraud and that website is the knight in Shining armour (pun intended) Come to save the world.
Could NUT be connected in any way to that website? I wonder.“Inconclusive results, missing data, variable adherence, patient-reported findings on home tests, no blinding, and no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others.“
This is taken from the paper that NUT quotes. I guess they too are fraudulent.SA, something odd seems to be happening; Nothinguptop posted links to three good articles, but promotes interpretations almost exactly opposite to what they show.
The Danish study accepts that masks reduce cross-infection rates but doesn’t find that a mask protects its wearer, therefore implying that masks work by source control. The Nature article shows that the Wuhan lockdown was highly effective, but confirms that infection doesn’t always cause symptoms, and found that 0.31% had been infected for a second time.
The Fullfact.org article’s byline is not very well worded, but the article itself correctly interprets the Danish findings. I therefore find myself suspicious of Professor Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson from the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, and the Spectator, for their misinterpretation.
Professor Carl Heneghan is the director of the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, and Tom Jefferson is a senior associate tutor. Both have very good affiliations, as does the CEBM itself, so I’m extremely surprised that they seem to have overlooked the possible benefits of source control.
Nothinguptop may have a point, in a perverse sort of way; the ‘symbolism’ of masks may itself be effective in reducing cross-infection. I find that seeing people wearing masks and having to remember to use one myself does act as an effective and constant reminder to be careful.
I have heard of a new study from France of people suffering long covid. Months after testing negative, their sense of taste and smell had not recovered. More invasive testing found live virus in the olfactory nerves of the majority.
Long covid is more common than covid death.
An article from a retired surgeon relating to the Danish study and Prof Heneghan’s response in an article in the Spectator.
Slugger O’Toole – To mask or not to mask?The article linked by ET explains it very well.
– “So why is Prof Heneghan conflating the two questions — whether masks protect the wearer, and whether masks prevent or reduce the spread of infection in the community — with the unvoiced implication of spread to others? That is a very political question, and the Spectator is a political magazine. You might wonder if the Spectator tends to the right-wing libertarian view, where government “edicts” are frowned upon as a breach of liberty. Making mask-wearing compulsory is such a breach, for example. You might even wonder if Prof Heneghan is looking for articles that support this view.
– It’s very clear, if you pay close attention to what the researchers described, and you understand how statistics “work”, you will come to entirely different conclusions to those described in Prof Heneghan’s article. But if you only read Prof Heneghan’s article you could come to the conclusions he does. This is another example of Fast and Slow Thinking in Politics (here) in action. Scientific papers by their very nature are turgid and indigestible; it takes effort to read them. Articles in the Spectator are for a general readership, where the readers do not stop to think or question things that seem so blatantly obvious. And so mischief and misunderstanding spreads.”
Nothingontop, I have come to the same conclusion as Factcheck.org. Do you claim that I too am being paid to lie? Do you claim that I am part of the conspiracy?
Another article about “super-spreaders” ie. clustering:
The Vulnerable Can Wait. Vaccinate the Super-Spreaders First:
Interesting article Clark. I am struck by the ingenuity of the maths/physics behind understanding networks but also by just how much we don’t know. Difficult decisions ahead for vaccine targeting.
– “I am struck […] also by just how much we don’t know.”
That’s why I’m advocating suppression of this virus. We can’t possibly know long term effects until a long term has elapsed. The pro-infection lobby may say “oh it only kills the elderly and frail; well, mostly”, but what if it’s rotting the nervous systems etc. of the fit in their prime? We could end up a country of permanently wheezing idiots, and what would that do to the sacred economy? There’s plenty of evidence of long term effects in many more cases than the deaths it causes, and you’d expect effects in the majority of tissue types because they all have the ACE2 receptors that SARS-CoV-2 exploits.
The (Tory) British government is introducing the population to the idea of being “given” “helpy freedom cards” if they consent to opening up their bodies to Big Pharma’s “scientific breakthrough” vaccine.
They are saying they’re not planning such a policy at the moment – oh perish the thought! – and at the same time they are telling their media to observe that “the government hasn’t ruled it out”. Those who think they’re good at understanding propaganda, please note the structure of this.
Meanwhile they are getting the (Labour) Welsh government to “promise” to introduce such “I’ve been vaccinated” cards in Wales. Unfortunately this is unlikely to end the same way as the poll tax, which was introduced in Scotland a year before it was imposed in the rest of Great Britain. Wales may be the testing ground for the policy.
Notice too the successful campaign to associate schools with “food for the poor” – just so long as the children eat it in the school buildings and don’t share any with their parents. If that is not preparation for widespread food shortages, I don’t know what is.
In that campaign, the rulers used a famous football player, so I’m told. Now they are talking about Boris Johnson acting as some kind of “Jesus Christ” figure and getting personally vaccinated live on television. (Shades of Mao Zedong swimming in the Yangtse river!)
It can’t be long before people get split off from their children rather as they got split off from care home-resident parents, and from undergraduate-age sons and daughters, and rather as “don’t hug your grandchildren” became the official national doctrine. The rulers are basically dividing us, snmashing us, and preparing to kill us on what in this country is an unprecedented scale. It was always clear that British fascism would smell like Thomas Malthus.
So…which out of the following two do we think will happen first?
1) Deaths by vaccine in Britain first exceed 1 million.
2) Vaccine refusers are banned from a wide range of activities, such as
* public transport (and probably altogether from travelling between different areas of the country)
* educational institutions (including schools – nothing like killing the children after they killed so many elderly people in care homes)
* supermarkets and wherever else the “obedient vaccinated” will be allowed to buy food on ration, at least so long as any food is for sale
* different kinds of access to bank accounts (the authorities won’t want us leper types touching money, right?)
* leaving their homes
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