Blue sky has replaced x and twiter

Heā€™s no problem bullying a woman whoā€™s clearly vulnerable.

McConkey wouldnā€™t want to know who John Ioannidis is because he has become the primary hate figure of not just the Zero Covid movement, but also the supporters of forever lockdown, the zero Covid in all but name. In terms of politics, thatā€™s pretty much all of the nutcase left, most of the leaders and a lot of the followers are champagne socialists (wankers in other words). Their basic motto is you poor people over there need to fucking stay locked down as long as this thing lasts, so we and our very special parents and grandparents are safe. That may seem a bit harsh, but the reality is that itā€™s the parents and grandparents of the poor and low income that are in the main dying, and lockdown doesnā€™t protect them in the slightest, they donā€™t live in leafy suburbs or mansions on the hill where they can safely isolate, work from home, and order their groceries and cooked meals online. They work in the low income ā€œessentialā€ jobs where thereā€™s a higher risk of exposure to Covid, they have to go to crowded grocery stores to shop where 99% of masks worn are fuck all use, and go on public transport, etc.

But lockdown is for their own good they say, we are saving them from themselves, as they sip their Moet and nibble on their artisan hummus and seven grain crackers. The same cunts with their BLM signs on their half acre front lawns, who would absolutely shit themselves if a black person walked through their neighborhood. Defund the police they say, but they donā€™t really mean that, as they demand the police show up if a dog shat on their immaculate lawn. Wankers all.

Ioannidis is by no means infallible, and he has made some dubious conclusions on limited data, but on a global basis he is more right than wrong. His work was done off antibody studies so there may be sampling issues, and it dates from summer of last year so out of date. The global median IFR for Covid may now be roughly 0.5% but the range is enormous, from less than 0.1% to at least 1.5%. Thereā€™s a very broad range of Covid mortality across regions, and it isnā€™t easily explained. Low death rates in Africa and most of Asia, demographics and diet, reporting issues, life expectancy, sunlight, lockdowns, no lockdowns, who the fuck knows.

What we do know is that in wealthy western countries reporting is fairly good and the statistics are consistent. Deaths range from 100 - 300/100k population and the IFR calculated at 2 times CFR is 1.0% (Europe is 1.1%, the US 0.9%). That seems intuitively right to me, a higher than median IFR in wealthy countries where people have a long life expectancy and a lot are obese.

Where it all goes tits up is when itā€™s politicized. The US has the highest death rate in the world (it doesnā€™t, Europe is higher), itā€™s those people that wonā€™t wear masks (itā€™s not, the virus donā€™t care about your fancy scarf), people opposing lockdowns are murderers, people for lockdowns are murderers, etc. Itā€™s all bullshit. Itā€™s a nasty old disease and you donā€™t want to get it, and should do everything you can to avoid getting it and endangering others, but on the flipside you also canā€™t expect other people to bear the burden. I do think itā€™s unfair what we are doing to young people, they should be out enjoying themselves, working on a career, riding, the things young people have always done. And of course the reality is a lot of them are, which makes a mockery of governments who fucked up the early response and are now trying to be seen to take stern action, like Boris the clown taking credit for lockdowns, or your silly person with the pointed head that views me as a dangerous threat even though Iā€™m now fully vaccinated.

Was that long enough for you cunts? Itā€™s now a simple choice. Vaccinate the old and vulnerable and whoever else wants it and OIUTF, or concede to the nutters and stay locked down for the next decade until all threats of possible variants are gone.

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7 grain crackers, where can I get them?

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I thought it was funny the way CB shut your man down.
Lad from Wetherspoons; John Ionnidas
CB; Iā€™ve never heard of him, Sam have you ever heard of him?
Sam; No
CB; You canā€™t be quoting people weā€™ve never heard of.

One of the things the pandemic has shone a light on is the amount of absolute looney tunes earning a living in medical faculties around the world. Your man Ionnidas, Delores Cahill, Sam, Tomas Ryan, Ferguson, Gerry Killeen. Iā€™d say the list is endless.

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academics in general are a special breedā€¦

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Ioannidis predicted 10,000 deaths tops in the US based on no restrictions. To say heā€™s ā€œby no means infallibleā€ is extremely kind. It would be akin to saying that people who believe in flat earth theory have ā€œunconventionalā€ or ā€œmaverickā€ opinions.

And as for your assertion of ā€œmore right than wrongā€, Iā€™d say that somebody who predicted 10,000 deaths in the US based on a no restriction environment has got it so spectacularly wrong that they have pretty much lost the right to be taken seriously on anything ever again.

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Welcome back Sid.

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Are you any relation to Tom?

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Thatā€™d be a long list.

Iā€™m assuming the same logic would hold for the likes of Neil Ferguson and San McKonkey and co who predicted many multiples of the actual death toll too?

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Ioannidis did not predict 10,000 deaths, in March 2020 he gave an effective range of 1K to 1.6 million for the US and urged caution making decisions on what was known at the time.

This is the problem with debates on the INTERNET. A lie was spread to further an agenda, you prove it was bullshit, but the person who wrote it continues on as if it never happened. A return of the well clamped rating is badly needed.

Itā€™s the problem of being blinded by ideology, on both sides. We had a congresswoman here call for the police to be abolished and no more incarceration this week. Which means of course that Officer Chauvin could not be sentenced, and all psychopaths and serial killers set free. Mad stuff altogether, yet people get away with it.

Ferguson has become a sort of boogie man for the crackpots for seemingly no reason at all, I suppose they need somebody to lash out irrationally at. There are a lot of lies about Ferguson and what he ā€œpredictedā€. His model came up with around 510k deaths for the UK and 2.2 million deaths in the US in a situation where there were no government interventions and no behaviour modifications among the population, ie. an absolute worst case scenario where the entirety of the population behaved as if there were no pandemic. The UK has had 127k Covid deaths within a 28 day cut off, in reality their real amount of Covid deaths is much higher, probably more than 150k, while the US has had 578k deaths so far. Thatā€™s with wide scale government intervention to restrict movement and severe behaviour modification among the populations.

That seems pretty reasonable to me and broadly correct - as it was obvious that it wasnā€™t going to be a case of no government intervention and no behaviour modification among the population, thatā€™s not how human nature works in the face of a pandemic like this.

Iā€™ve no vested interest in defending Ferguson, I just think itā€™s funny how somebody who put forward what seems to me to be a fairly reasonable model of what could happen has become such a figure of hate for the deniers. This hatred makes no sense.

As regards McConkey, sure he comes across a bit of a doomsayer, but Iā€™d take somebody who spells out the worst case scenario any day over a chancer like Ioannidis who demanded that the US government be totally cavalier with the lives of many millions of people.

The worst McConkey can be accused of is of being too dystopian, but he definitely canā€™t be accused of not taking the pandemic seriously. The dividing line about who is worth listening to and who isnā€™t is who took the pandemic seriously and who didnā€™t. Ioannidis didnā€™t. McConkey did, he warned accordingly, and if his worst case scenarios didnā€™t or donā€™t come to pass and his warnings help to prevent worst case scenarios, well, thatā€™s a significant gain for society over the alternative, isnā€™t it? Why? Because lives have been saved that would otherwise have been lost. Again, the hatred for McConkey makes no sense. Itā€™s like having hatred for somebody who warns somebody staggering out of a pub drunk not to drink drive home.

The genuinely dangerous people throughout this pandemic have been the idiots who constantly played it down, because playing it down played with peopleā€™s lives, and many people lost their lives because of people in the public eye who constantly played it down. Funnily enough Stanford, not least its ā€œHoover Institutionā€ pushing out far right propaganda dressed up as science, has been a haven for these know nothings. Ioannidis, Michael Levitt, Scott Atlas, Richard Epstein, all constantly told the public to underestimate the pandemic. Their words had as much value as Toby Youngā€™s, their words cost lives, and they should all hang their heads in shame.

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Quote:

If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population ā€” a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis ā€” and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.

No. You can take a pandemic seriously and not upend everything else in the world because of it at the same time.

Yes, but read the whole article, rather than quote mining. His pessimistic case later in the article is 40 million dead. The thrust of his article, which is in keeping with what a good scientist should do, is that decisions should not be made on unreliable data. It was written on March 17th, 2020. He also proposed extensive antibody testing, which would have been a wonderful help if it had been pursued.

But he wasnā€™t setting government policy. Fauci was, and he was (at the time) telling people to go on cruises.

Know nothings :joy: Where did you get your PhD yourself?

Ferguson took the pandemic so seriously he ignored the rules that he insisted others should follow. You donā€™t think that had an influence on how seriously the general public took government advice? How many lives did that cost I wonder, if he can break the rules why canā€™t I? Or Gavin Newsome in California telling the public not to eat at restaurants, and then breaking his own rules, or Nancy Pelosi going to a hair salon that was legally closed, etc. Great role models. Plenty other examples across the political spectrum.

Regarding Ireland, if the HSE and NPHET were interested in saving lives they would have made care homes secure and worked on infectious disease control in Irish hospitals. That would have saved approx 50% of the deaths right there. But they were too busy dreaming up restrictions like 5km and stopping people going to the park.

Only a far left nutter would label the Hoover Institution far right. Youā€™re not doing a good job of camouflage Sid.

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Neil Ferguson is a total hypocrite and smug, slimy, arrogant nomark late onset hipster cunt of the very highest order. The kind of man whoā€™s natural level is vice president sales of a small brand of generic paracetamol (now with added caffeine)

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Ffs are the FBI going to get called again

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