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SA: “Well done for revealing the source of Node’s knowledge. The Agora blog is a gem of pseudoscientific gobbledegook.”
What is the Agora Blog? I’ve never heard of it till now and I’m not aware of ever referencing it. You’ve associated me with it in a very negative way. If you don’t have a reason for doing so, the honourable course would be to retract this false association.
For the record, my only substantial quote today was from the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Blog (“Comment and opinion from The BMJ’s international community of readers, authors, and editors”). You didn’t respond other than to attack me personally.
– “So, to be clear, we just sent 3 million children into primary school FOR ONE DAY, so they could all mix around the virus, and *then* go into lockdown? That’s what’s actually just happened, right? My brain isn’t making this up?”
Laura McInerney, 8:18 pm · 4 Jan 2021
@miss_mcinerneyNode – “For the record, my only substantial quote today was from the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Blog (“Comment and opinion from The BMJ’s international community of readers, authors, and editors”)”
I don’t believe you. I do not believe that is where you got:
– The absolute risk reduction is much more meaningful:
– (0.88-0.044)% = ~0.84%
I think you got that from Iain Davis via Off-Guardian. Possibly someone posted it to the BMJ blog, but if so I expect you found a link to it from one of your favourite conspiracy theory sites; after all, why would you be reading an “official story” site like the BMJ?You could prevent this sort of contention by linking your sources.
Hospitals now getting overwhelmed in “no lockdown” Sweden. Hospital reception rooms and canteens are being converted for covid care.
Maybe Node is referring to this, which is indeed linked to in Iain Davis’s piece in OffGuardian.
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4347/rr-4
Had you wished to counter his argument you could perhaps have presented an alternative perspective, as put forward by another bmj contributor here:
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4347/rr-8
But I realise that ‘Quack, quack quack, “I am so great, you are so dumb”; the great conspiracy theorist puts the stupid sheeple in his rightful place!’ is probably more in keeping with the ‘fruitful scientific discussion’ engaged in on this thread.
Node, the stuff you post is irrelevant, a distraction. Unbelievably wrong-headed decisions have been and continue to be made by European and US governments, decisions that are killing hundreds of thousands of people, and are likely to promote even worse variants of the virus. But the stuff you post contains nothing remotely relevant, nor even realistic.
If there were any value in the arguments you promote, they would be being discussed by hundreds of virologists, immunologists and epidemiologists. Many such scientists have Twitter or Facebook streams etc; I link to such sources frequently, and each one has links to others. None of them are discussing the stuff you think is so important. But they’re all either “in on the scam” or stupid sheeple, right? And the Great Wise Node would lead us to salvation if only we weren’t so brainwashed by the MSM, right?
Look, if we saw any value in OffGuardian, Swiss Propaganda Research or UK Column we could go read their dozen soundbites over and over again for ourselves. But they’ve been proven so hopelessly wrong that they’re irrelevant, so why bother parroting their bunk?
Steph, it isn’t an “alternative perspective”, it’s deliberate deception disguised as science, just like Yeadon’s stuff, and it should be called out as such. Calling it an “alternative perspective” is like calling armed robbery “alternative employment”. But thanks for finding the link.
Steph, my quote of Node, “(0.88-0.044)% = ~0.84%”, does not appear in Allan S. Cunningham’s letter at BMJ, so your comment is consistent with Node getting that from Iain Davis at OffGuardian, rather than the BMJ as Node claimed.
As hospitals overload, as people suffer die by the droves, as we enter another lockdown that could have been avoided, and has been avoided by more sensible governments, I am sick to the back teeth of the arrogance and dishonesty of conspiracy theorists. Node should recognise that he’s out of his depth and do everyone a favour by either raising his game, or STFU.
I have repeatedly described the template of conspiracy theory; I do not use the term merely to dismiss politically inconvenient truths. It is a recognisable phenomena wit specific recognisable features, and indeed, learning to recognise it would protect politically inconvenient truths, for when an establishment apologist dismissed a truth as “conspiracy theory”, we could reply “no, that’s not a conspiracy theory, because this is what actual conspiracy theory looks like…”. Learning to recognise conspiracy theory would also protect the public, by unmasking scumbags like Yeadon.
Yes, Steph and ET,
If you look again at my post of January 4, 2021 at 18:20, you’ll see I linked to Peter Doshi’s piece at the end of the quote.@Clark
With respect Clark, I think there are important aspects to the vaccine trials that require scrutiny. They have shown they can reduce covid-19 cases but not that they can prevent hospital admissions, severe disease, deaths, infection or even transmission of the virus. You have often pointed to Goldacre’s “Bad Pharma” for a good insight into how Big Pharma massage statistics to sex up their presentations. Absolute risk reduction is an important metric by which to judge some clinical trials data and in this case we are talking about smallish numbers of end points in large numbers in each arm. 119 people need to be vaccinated to prevent one new covid 19 case. (from ARR 0.84%. number needed to treat is it’s inverse). Nor have they shown how long any effect may last for although I realise the time factor is a constraint.“Hospital admissions and deaths from covid-19 are simply too uncommon in the population being studied for an effective vaccine to demonstrate statistically significant differences in a trial of 30 000 people. The same is true of its ability to save lives or prevent transmission: the trials are not designed to find out.”
Tal Zaks, chief medical officer at Moderna, told The BMJ that the company’s trial lacks adequate statistical power to assess those outcomes. “The trial is precluded from judging [hospital admissions], based on what is a reasonable size and duration to serve the public good here,” he said.
On the other hand, I feel that everyone is trying to find the magic bullet to kill this virus off. Ireland’s case rates have gone from approx 300 a day mid December to over 6100 today. It is shocking and will inevitably translate into deaths and overwhelmed hospitals.
As I said, I’ll still have either vaccine when it is offered to me but the trial data such as is available publicly merits scrutiny. I agree with Doshi, all trial data on all vaccines (and indeed every trial ever) should be made publicly available.ET, I entirely agree with your 00:26 comment. Big pharma and the captured regulators could serve us better, and would inspire trust instead of conspiracy theory, if they were in the habit of full transparency. But such a system is incompatible with and not even possible in a system dominated by capitalism; any fully transparent company would be out-competed and then subsumed by a more deceptive rival, and any political party favouring the public would be defeated, either at the polls due to the capitalist media eg. Corbyn’s Labour, or by financial domination eg. Greece.
Node, I’m sorry, I see now that you did link to Doshi’s article, but only in your second comment on that subject. But your first quote came from OffGuardian, didn’t it? And by your second, with the link, it was too late, because you’ve long since pissed me off by approaching this from the perspective of conspiracy theory.
Node, no solution to covid-19 has been acceptable to you, and you have repeatedly promoted false arguments that it is trivial. That means that you side with death and suffering, and until you change that I will oppose you, no matter what username you post under.
ET, 00:34 – “everyone is trying to find the magic bullet to kill this virus off.”
And that’s the problem; magic bullets don’t exist. But we don’t need them. All we need is sufficient discipline. Preferably self discipline, which can be inspired by good leadership, but sadly a minority would still need discipline to be enforced. We’re a year into this, but we could have ended it in five weeks, and still could do at any time; we just need to choose to. What are our intelligence and free will worth? It’s only a virus, it has none of either.
Magic bullet was a poor choice of phrase. Workable soluton would better fit.
A workable solution exists in choosing to temporarily change our behaviour.
Pause all unnecessary meeting. Compartmentalise into zones, restrict travel between them and grade them red, amber and green. Move activity outdoors where possible, and where not possible, ventilate as much as we can stand. Reorganise into closed community groups, and make larger groups of groups. Use group testing, eg. waste water testing. Use temporally segregated closed teams for essential activity. Take some windows out in each bus and train carriage. Etc, etc; I shouldn’t be the only one promoting ideas like this.
It’s doable. Some countries have eradicated it already. Scotland’s restrictions drove two strains extinct. Done right, it would take under two months, but half measures have already cost us a year. Let’s stamp the damn thing out before more mutations make it even worse.
And for everyone’s sake, let’s put an end to this pretence that it doesn’t exist, or that it doesn’t matter and we should just let it overrun us.
If we did this, we’d also have a defence strategy against future pandemics, in answer to a question Steph asked a couple of weeks ago. And even if we couldn’t outright win, we’d gain time to develop and properly test vaccines.
Oh, and let’s properly regulate virus research, have proper lab inspections, and move the most dangerous research to remote locations, with proper worker quarantine. The first SARS arose naturally once, and escaped from labs at least three times:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
Its seems there is agreement, even among the official conspiracy theorists, that coronavirus-19 came from China, but disagreement whether it came from a meat market or from a Deep State part funded bio-lab in Wuhan.
As soon as the concerted MSM coverage began it was clear this was the latest assault on Trump, hoping to ruin his re-election chances by wrecking the economy and using the virus to ban political gatherings and allow election irregularities to be introduced under cover of an emergency. I mean in UK you have the farce of a poorly attended mother of parliaments due to a virus!
Trump had to be removed as a successful populist leader against Globalism, but he’s fighting back, whereas Corbyn was easily pushed aside, and the Globalist Project is now called the Great Reset. This isn’t about serving humanity, albeit there are useful idiots, and hired help, who think so, its about entrenching the power of the existing ruling class and is an alliance between the western bankers, the Chinese communists and the Vatican. I.e. using a virus to impose, in a day, a police state with all protests banned, except violent Deep State backed hate-groups like BLM and Antifa, used to attack patriotic opinion.
The problem is despite their best events in inflicting health and economic harm, following the communist dictum the end justifies the means, with corrupt democrat and republican politicians well rewarded for just following orders, Trump’s still standing and has heroically exposed the election irregularities to millions of Americans, despite the BBC/MSM censorship.
And therefore instead of the virus-crisis ending in November, a new mutant, no details provided, has allegedly emerged requiring even greater restrictions to stop its spread, despite the restrictions not stopping the spread of the first deadly virus. In other words the latest national lockdown that makes no medical sense, but has been announced to try and double down on the virus-terrorism to stop Trump, as Congress meets to vote on the Presidency.
January 4, 2021 at 22:55#64308REPLY
node“What is the Agora Blog? I’ve never heard of it till now and I’m not aware of ever referencing it. You’ve associated me with it in a very negative way. If you don’t have a reason for doing so, the honourable course would be to retract this false association.”
Yes Node, I acknowledge my error, it was not the Agora Blog by Ian Davis, and for this I sincerely apologise and eat humble pie. However I will amend this to say that the source of the original argument you put forward in your post of January 4, 2021 at 17:10#64276 was actually partly from the article by Ian Davis in OffGuardian
So let us see why I and Clark have reached this conclusions:
Your post:
“By the way, your 95% effective claim is based on a calculation that gives relative risk reduction:
100(1 – (0.044/0.88)) = ~95%.
The absolute risk reduction is much more meaningful:
(0.88-0.044)% = ~0.84%”OffGuardian Ian Davis:
Using Pfizer’s figures, the relative risk reduction is 100(1 – (0.044/0.88)). Which is 95%. Voila!
Almost a cut and paste I would say. Would you agree?
That would have been fine if you had then linked the source of this calculation, but as Clark pointed out, it appears from your post that you have independently arrived at these figures.Another quote further down from Ian Davis:
However, this was based upon relative risk reduction. That is the declared percentage difference between the vaccinated group’s 8/18310 chance (0.044%) of developing COVID 19 against a 162/18319 (0.88%) chance of COVID 19 symptoms without the vaccine. As this larger group of 43,000 people have yet to be trialled, there is no basis for this claimed outcome. But it is what it is, and we can use these reported figures here.
This sounds fantastic and is a much better marketing strategy than reporting the absolute risk reduction. The absolute risk of developing COVID 19 symptoms without the vaccine is supposedly 0.88% and with the vaccine 0.044%. In absolute terms, the effectiveness of the vaccine is (0.88-0.044)%.“For the record, my only substantial quote today was from the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Blog (“Comment and opinion from The BMJ’s international community of readers, authors, and editors”). You didn’t respond other than to attack me personally.”
You then later did quote the article by Peter Doshi in the BMJ.
I did not attack you personally, I just merely mentioned the confusion created between your two different posts.The problem here is that I do tend to agree with you to a very small extent, and with Peter Doshi and also with what ET has said. Yes we must be cautious about the vaccine, and yes the data is not mature, how can it be if vaccines have only been developed 6 months ago, of course we do not have long term safety data and so on, but given the gravity of the situation there is a real urgency in breaking this cycle. If you have other suggestions, bolstered by reliable quotes, that naturally acquired herd immunity is the way forward, then let us have this discussion.
Therein is the problem Node. If we can solve our differences by rational discussion then we need to agree as to what our beliefs are and how we can respect each other. But this is impossible if we jump from one subject to another. If you start with the view point that the virus is no worse than the ‘flu, and that the PCR is meaningless, then of course we cannot take you seriously when you then jump onto why the vaccine is not effective and so on. At some point we may just agree to disagree.
Dave
“And therefore instead of the virus-crisis ending in November, a new mutant, no details provided, has allegedly emerged requiring even greater restrictions to stop its spread,”One thing about the pandemic, right now when England enters “very big lockdown” whereas most of Scotland only goes into “big lockdown”, is as follows.
SNP types will be wondering whether the holding of the Scottish general election on 6 May can be put into question, with the reason being seen as English people “ignoring Scotland”, or – better still – English people spreading germs. Of course to the hypocritical Hun middle classes in Scotland, this will be couched as English people being incompetent at management – insufficiently Calvinist with the cashboxes maybe. To the majority of the population, though, it will be sold as “They come up here, they think they’ve got a right, and they haven’t washed their hands”.
Imagine if bubonic plague had arrived and spread out from Notting Hill in 1960. Good news for the Mosleyites or bad?
I just hope a leading SNP type is caught on camera saying what they really think, namely that the pandemic could be wonderful for their xenophobic cause.
Another way of looking at this is that the fascism that has reigned in Britain isn’t particularly “imperialist”…and so when fascism is in the air, it’s not only in the air in the “Junker” group in the Union’s capital city.
Lordy! Lordy! …. I made a pretty uncontroversial post backing up my statement to Dredd that the new vaccines were “poorly tested”, which everybody here seems to agree with, yet it has provoked a barrage of insults, smears and false claims.
I make no apologies for sourcing Off-Guardian. It is an excellent site (eg see today’s story about so-called Russian hacking which backs up several of Craig’s claims). However I get my information from many other sources too, and I don’t feel the need to provide a link for every fact I post here. In general, when I summarise someone’s point, I don’t; when I post a substantial quote, I do.
I didn’t post your 2nd quote from Ian Davis so I don’t know why you think it’s relevant. By the way, I notice you haven’t refuted anything he said, just complained about where he said it
Finally you lay down some rules for “rational discussion” which I’m to abide by if you are to take me seriously. Ha ha, what arrogance! Maybe I’ll take you seriously when you realise calling someone names (covid denier, trivialiser, conspiracy theorist, deluded, etc) has no part in rational discussion.
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