The Flu (Health)

[Mick Harper]

The Indian situation reminds me of two things I advocated at the start of the pandemic. As in wartime situations, general medical facilities are not what is needed. Specialised units should have been made available for no other purpose than treating Covid patients. It is absurd tying up hospital Special Care Units, kitted out at the cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds with every bit of kit under the sun, when they are going to be used to treat one condition essentially requiring one bit of kit, ventilators. Nor would such facilities need expensively-trained and scarce Special Care doctors and nurses.

In the Indian context, people are dying because of a 'shortage of hospital staff who can operate oxygen cylinders', and a 'shortage of doctors who can operate ventilators'. WTF. Specialised facilities would also ensure that oxygen would only be used when really necessary. It is obvious from the film footage that this has become a slightly hysterical must-have for all Covid sufferers. Many of whom are dying because all the oxygen is being used up by Covid patients who are not.

[Mick Harper]

A fascinating example of the principle outlined above has just been reported on Al-Jazeera. You will recall that people all over India have been dying because the hospitals can't get enough oxygen. The India army has just announced it intends to set up five hundred plants next to hospitals all over India. Each plant can manufacture a thousand litres of oxygen every minute. No shit, General Sherlock.

[Boreades]

India is a curious example.

They were doing fine, treating people with Ivermectin as a prophylaxis treatment, Which costs pennies a dose for generic products, compared to many pounds for a patent pharma product.

Then WHO says "no! no!", and some Indian states stopped using it, and the cases soared.

Then some states got brave and started using it again.

[Mick Harper]

Coupla points. Given the state of Indian medicine generally I doubt that Ivermectin was given/not given in such a systematic way as to produce this causal curve. Which in any case is better explained by the Indian government suddenly launching mass political rallies and mass religious ceremonies on a Covid-prepared population. Though having said that, the current quite swift decline does not seem to correlate very well with any great efforts at lockdown procedures.

But the Indian generic vs Big Pharma has a case to answer as far as my own personal experience goes. Twenty years ago (was it?) the first ever effective migraine treatment, sumatriptan, came on the market. Only available on prescription. Then available cheaply as an Indian generic, then not available for love or money, then available expensively by Big Pharma brand over the counter in Britain, now available kinda medium-priced from some British internet pharmacies. It is a very mysterious process.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Wile E. Coyote]

If you look at the COVID deaths we know about and where they occurred (it's probably a meaningless exercise, but still), it appears that the spreading is occurring mainly in confined buildings, eg nursing homes, hospitals, meat factories, offices etc. There is very little evidence to suggest people getting ill at outdoor events. This is what makes Lockdown so bizarre, you are forcing people into the very areas where they are most likely to be infected, i.e. indoors.

If you are going to a political rally, eg a Black Lives Matter protest or an Indian Political rally, you would expect similar outcomes, but the commentators find that only one rally has spread COVID........

[Mick Harper]

[Wile E. Coyote]

Dominic Cummings is just arguing with hindsight, on the basis of the existing paradigm created by Xi and endorsed post facto by WHO and a band of other "useful idiots".


Wiley's post facto suggestion for saving lives is that the vaccine should have been given to fatties first. Anthea Turner worked it out and deserves the credit.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Anthea's genius was to spot that healthy people were not dying, so you needed to prioritise those close to end of life and....... leading the most unhealthy lifestyles.

SAGE was almost there, but their political correctness will have cost 1000s of fat persons/smokers' lives.

[Mick Harper]

Anthea and I share an unfortunate condition. Being too pretty to have our intellects taken seriously.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Wiley is incredibly geek chic. However, I refuse to use this to my advantage. No, I must be loved because of my intellect alone.

[Wile E. Coyote]

The World Health Organization (WHO) was founded in 1948 with the noble goal of ensuring the attainment of the highest possible level of health by all people. Wiley can't disagree it's been a force for good. Until recently.

Yesterday they welcomed Syria to their executive board. This is a regime that has recently bombed and gassed folks.

What is going on. WHO are WHO?

During the previous SARS outbreak the then Director General of WHO, Gro Harlem Brundtland, was highly critical of the Chinese government, she encouraged a ban of travellers from the epicentre of the outbreak, but was fiercely critical of the Chinese for their treatment of arresting whistleblowers.


Fast forward to the start of COVID, and things have changed. The Director General Tedros has been an outspoken advocate for the Chinese government’s (effectively XI's) COVID-19 response. Tedros commended China for “setting a new standard for outbreak control” and has praised the country’s top leadership for its “openness to sharing information” with the WHO. This time WHO came out against a travel ban from China and was silent about the arrest and imprisonment of whistleblowers. It's basically a 180 degree turnaround.

Despite the new policy of Chinese openness we are still no closer to knowing whether COVID started with a lab leak or a spill-over event. Still, adding fuel to the debate is the revelation that scientists from the Wuhan lab published articles that described manipulating coronaviruses (so called “gain of function” experiments)

There is a very good balanced article on lab leak/spillover.

Who opened Pandora's box ?

https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/origins-of-covid-19-who-opened-pandoras-box-at-wuhan-people-or-nature/

[Mick Harper]

The simplest, though not necessarily the truest, explanation for WHO's recent mood swing is that the Americans pulled out their funding and China stepped up theirs. The WHO's bureaucracy, knowing which side of their pay cheques were buttered, shifted from being pro-American to being pro-Chinese.

More generally the 'Syria situation' (remember Saudi Arabia being given an executive position on the UN Human Rights commission?) is because the 'international' world of 2021 is so different from the world of 1948. Not just the UN, but all world bodies (remember 'Fifa?). Then, it could be taken for granted that everyone was an English gentleman except the Russians and the rules and the institutions were structured accordingly. Now even English gentlemen are not necessarily to be relied on.

It is all because of my old bugbear, democracy. Once everyone's got an equal vote you discover the truth about the human condition. We are not, generally speaking, very nice people and should not therefore, generally speaking, be put in charge.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

All of this might be true if the world operated to the WHO drumbeat. I have seen no evidence that they are regarded by anybody as other than a minorly useful/minorly vexatious talking shop. As for the Chinese, I would say the best they can hope for from all this is a sigh of relief they dodged a very large bullet.

I am not saying we are out of the woods, I am saying you are in the wrong woods.