Covid reflection from the UK

This is going to get a bit lively for a Sunday!

Well I sorry you both feel that way, but as Mr Malhotraā€™s father died he has a point he must pursue.

Maybe but the spread despite jabbing on a mass scale doesnt seem to fit the hypothesis.
Again will we get a proper vaccine whilst the cash cow of psuedo jab exists?

If I can ask you to listen and view on John Cambellā€™s latest posting which features actual UK stats on excess mortality and also from Europe with the final and quite shocking information from the Gov meeting on how perfectly not at risk children are subjected to a potential risk to health via the jab. First do no harm.

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No Iā€™ve got better things to do
His father was 73 and had heart issues

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Not necessarily a measure of anything though, is it?

The bottleneck in the UK tends not to be acute beds, but intermediate care, rehab or care home beds and acute hospitals are terrible places full of ill people just waiting to infect each other with all sorts of nasties - so minimising time spent in hospital is (up to a point) a good thing. In turn that reduces the number of acute beds that you need.

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It is a measure of the motive behind differing covid policies in UK and France.

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Itā€™s what it says - a measure of bed capacity. You seem to be implying that having a lot more capacity leads automatically to longer than necessary stays in hospital - but thatā€™s not a logical argument.

I think that @Corona has a good point in that there is no incentive for large pharmaceutical companies to develop a fully preventative vaccine. This could in large part be due to the economic system within which they operate, which requires company boards to take decisions which are in the best interests of the shareholders. Developing a product that everyone wants, and which has to be renewed every 6 months or so, is a real profit spinner, and is thus in the best interests of the shareholders.

I acknowledge, and agree with, @JaneJones point that there are indeed educational and psychological consequences from the pandemic, as well as those of an economic or political nature.
In the face of a highly contagious new disease, for which the best treatments had yet to be determined, it was highly likely that an already overstretched NHS would simply be totally swamped. Therefore, closing places of public assembly such as schools, cinemas, theatres, and sports venues was indeed a logical step to take. It was accepted at a fairly early stage that children were less likely to develop serious disease, but the risk in relation to schools was that the children would cross-contaminate each other, and then take the disease home to parents or grandparents.
As for the particularly medically vunerable, I think it is pretty clear that the logical way to protect them, and thus keep further potential load away from the NHS, is to encourage them to stay away from other people.

However, I do believe that the real objective in all of this was to protect the NHS.
Now I donā€™t mean protecting NHS staff, but rather protecting the institution of the NHS, and all that it stands for in the eyes of the electorate.
Letā€™s face it; Any government that is in power when the NHS collapses under the load placed upon it, is going to be wiped out at the next general election.
So at the end of the day it is all about protecting the party of government at the polling booth.
The people donā€™t matter, but their votes most certainly do.

Interesting, now excess deaths are being debated at higher levelsā€¦

The link is supposed to be that minimising inpatient stays improves outcomes allowing the service to shed (the now unnecessary) beds.

So having lots beds might lead to having longer stays because there is less pressure to discharge. Longer stays cause their own problems and even longer stays might result.

Of course the idea only works up to a point - that being when you have too few beds, too few places to which to discharge patients and are running the service at too high an occupancy to absorb temporary increases in demand - in other words welcome to the NHS.

This sounds a little like the older conspiracy theory that ā€˜Big Pharmaā€™ know how to cure cancer but wonā€™t release it because they make too much money from conventional therapies.

Honestly, the first pharma company that invents a cure for cancer will just print money. Ditto generating a sterilising vaccine for covid that 100% wipes out all trace of infection and transmission.

The people that run big pharma companies are in the age/health group thatā€™s at risk of death or long-term effects from Covid, so making a poor vaccine increases their likelihood of dying from the disease, just like many of them are likely to develop cancer at some stage. I know some individuals from the groups that worked to develop vaccines, and let me tell you that no-one wanted to make anything but the most effective vaccine they could produce. There were lots of start-ups also working on this, and making what Corona calls a ā€˜realā€™ vaccine would guarantee their future wealth as their business would be acquired for hundreds of millions of pounds/dollars. There has never been a time in my lifetime when so many organisations had so much funding to find a ā€˜cureā€™ - not even during the AIDS pandemic.

The way things are going at the moment, most people have a decent level of resistance, the disease itself is appearing to become less harmful with each new variant, and the vaccinations & boosters are likely to be discontinued unless thereā€™s a fresh wave of a really harmful new variant. All the vaccine-producing kit is going to be sat idle until something else comes along. We are already seeing a lot more interest in making diagnostic assays for new infectious diseases from the companies that turned their business over to making LFDs for Covid.

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I donā€™t think that it is a conspiracy theory, but more the outcome of the framework, and indeed the laws, which govern the decision making process of company boards.
Anyway, (and as something of an aside), any theory that suggests that Big Pharma know how to cure cancer falls at the first fence, which is that cancer is a generic term that covers many completely different afflictions. There are over 90 different types of Lymphoma alone, and each requires different treatment. There will simply never be one single cure that works for all cancers.

When researchers started looking for ways to deal with Covid, they had no idea what they were going to come up with. No doubt they hoped to find a total cure, or perhaps a definitive protection, but as we all know, what they found was a means of reducing the chance of contracting the disease for some people, and reducing the severity of the disease in a lot of people.

Now put yourself in the position of the board of directors, who have a legal duty to maximise profits for investors, and who can be sued if they fail to discharge that duty correctly.
Remember also, that these people have been brought up in a system where the almighty dollar is king, and where often good business and good morality are strangers to one another.

So you now have a product that is in high demand, has the potential for many repeat sales indefinitely, and the investors are happy.
This, against a background where your research people have already told you that the current product is the best that they can do.
So is it good business practice to throw further millions into more research that all the evidence indicates will be fruitless ? Of course not. Much better to increase shareholders dividends, make them happy, and have them approve a substantial board members pay increase in return for having done such a wonderful job.

Itā€™s not a conspiracy theory, but the logical application of the way that the capitalist system works within the framework of laws that govern it.
No system is perfect, and every system has itā€™s limitations, and capitalism does not incentivise the search for either a drug to totally prevent Covid, or a drug to quickly cure it, as from the viewpoint of pure and unbridled capitalism, to do so would be to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

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I would also like to that in no way does that diminish the excellent work done by AM and his colleagues do for us all. As Robert said its simply a business model. Pfizer buy up other comanies work rather than spend their own on the development. In Kent the local tory mp spent many millions altering the road network to suit Pfizers requirements and then Pfizer announced they were closing the R&D and a lot more of the estate leaving 1000ā€™s out of work a very red faced and fuming mp. Its just a business model and an American way of doing business and the current jab has, just as any product has a life cycle only when sales fall will they at the top take any action. Same with cholesterol meds, sales plateau so they convince the WHO to lower the bar (level) and sales pick up, even trying to convince the WHO to add statins into our food! All with very poor science to back up the claims.

Re conspiracy theories, I was drawing a parallel, rather than suggesting this actually was one, though I could well imagine that in 5 years time it had grown legs and become full-blown. In a previous job, I was actually approached by the manager of the innovation centre I worked in, asking if the ā€˜cure for cancerā€™ thing was true (she was fairly convinced it was).

There are indeed many cancer forms, and no pan-cancer magic bullet will ever exist. :slightly_frowning_face: :+1:

As for business practices, I abhor the model that produced the addictive opioid wave in the US, finding the stories I was hearing unbelievable, so unethical was the practice of some drug companies. But in this case, Iā€™m reasonably sure that no injectable vaccine is going to produce sterilising immunity for this virus - the route of infection into the body prevents an injectable vaccine from working well. Shareholder dividends are always a problem, and managing a business in a way that thereā€™s a long-term plan rather than squeezing the max profit out every minute is always better. Ethics play into that too, making a company seen to be more desirable than one thatā€™s just cut-throat in practice.

I know the Sandwich site a little, having bought pre-owned kit from there after they shut. At least the place is being used again now, so the investment in infrastructure hasnā€™t gone to waste completely.

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Never say never, as they say

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Iā€™ll wait and see. :wink: It would be wonderful to be proved wrong.

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Treating with autophagy may show some promise too. Interesting, I read an article on how tumour cells could turn that provess off.

@Robert there was triage everywhere I think. As youā€™ve said, the early vaccines stopped that having to become much greater and more visible.

The UK Treasury has been receiving hugely increased amounts of Inheritance Tax for the past 2 years and itā€™s continuing. I believe government pension payments are notably down from what was expected too. I suspect a few defined benefit pension schemes canā€™t believe their luck on this point but will keep very, very quiet.

More worryingly Dr. John Campbell has recently passed on the official excess mortality figures that are reported now worldwide across all age groups. They indicate an across-the-board rate of 15% higher deaths everywhere, than would have been previously expected. The causes are probably mixed but cardiovascular causes in particular have spiked.

One of my gigs was for the Chairman/owner of a pharma. He employed a press officer to keep the familyā€™s name out of the press, not in. I got to see the strategy papers and key people were kind enough to chat. The strategy was explicitly (this was written down) never to cure anything, only to develop treatments for conditions, ideally chronic that couldnā€™t be cured, as the patient would have to ā€˜keep taking the tabletsā€™. Additionally, specifically stated, there was the worry that a if a cure to anything major like AIDS or the common cold was developed, it would be immediately appropriated by governments thus not returning the cost of its development [ahemā€¦of course, not just the cost] to pharma.

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Bastards. Utter bastards. :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

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Exactly this happened with the discovery of Helicobacter Pylori, and itā€™s role in stomach ulcers. The Aussie scientists who did the work had huge problems getting their work recognised, mainly due to a concerted misinformation campaign by the pharmaceutical industry, who had a vested interest in, and made huge amounts of money from drugs to treat the symptoms of stomach ulcers. For them, the cure proposed by the scientists would wipe out a large ongoing profit.
The scientists did eventually have their work validated, and also won the Nobel Prize.

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Not pharmaceuticals but the same happens in the swimming pool world if anything damages chemicals sales.