As I do you and yours.
Edit: Sorry @artfoley for that comment about you last year. It was a fucking horrible, hateful, despicable comment and I genuinely regret making it.
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So why does McConkey say he never heard of him ?
Well it could be that he hasnāt heard of Ioannidis, or it could be ego and acting the bollox, or third, and probably most likely, it could be that McConkey has heard of Ioannidis but hasnāt been following what he has to say to the extent where he could comment on it. I suppose as regards the third option it would be a form of acting the bollox if he didnāt just say that.
He said he never heard of him. Half of TFK can give you a run down on Ioannidis but Sam McConkey never heard of him. Heās lying
McConkey doesnāt have an INTERNET forum reputation to desperately maintain though. Whereas on the internet itās not enough for people like me or you to say they havenāt heard of somebody. The rule is: they have to immediately do a furious Google search and within half an hour be an expert on a person they previously hadnāt heard of.
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**Fair play, you rarely see that here, mores the pity
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Ioannidis (and his students) did the first antibody study in the US, and did the first large scale meta analysis of global antibody studies, calculated the first reasonable IFR and broke it down somewhat by age group. It would have been enormously helpful if antibody studies were done on a widespread basis.
The politicizing of science has been a disaster, we are literally back in the 17th century.
An absolute nonsense, said with no evidence to back it up.
It is like whipping yourself on the last mile of a marathon. Itās proponents are the deluded and thick, totally disconnected from the bigger picture.
My recollection is that there were quite a few country level antibody studies done in Europe last summer and they usually came in somewhere in the 7-10% range, canāt remember the exact figures but Iām sure it was in that ballpark. Spain and Sweden definitely did them.
Sunetra Gupta did an estimate in March 2020 where she said she believed around half of the UK population already had antibodies. That quickly proved to be way out and unfortunately that miscalculation has informed her rhetoric since, and also had knock on implications for the realms of politics and how we should approach the question of restrictions or lack of them. Thatās what I mean about ego leading people in academia to dig in to wrong assumptions and take on a quasi-political position rather than a properly scientific one.
Science is science, and often science will contradict other science, and some āscienceā is deeply flawed or junk science. The question of restrictions or lack of them is political. It has to be informed by science, but as useful as science is, real world events have given us the most information and set out a few iron basic principles. The virus spreads through human proximity. If you let it spread it will spread widely and rapaciously and society cannot function with this happening. If you crush infection rates, unless you have a comprehensive plan to keep them crushed, they will spring up again and have you back to square one or worse. We in Ireland believed, or at least it was our strategy, that we could tinker here and there with regulations and somehow keep infection rates at some sort of equilibrium. That was wrong, we couldnāt.
The question of restrictions or lack of them has to be informed by an end goal. What is it you want to achieve with your strategy? Is what you want to achieve achievable? Whether something is achievable or not will to a large part be determined by how you move at key moments. Those key moments for Ireland were late February/early March, 2020, and late June/early July. In this country we never really set out a proper goal or had anything beyond blind hope that what we were doing might somehow work, and our movements were defined by the wrong kind of cautiousness, caution about trying not to disturb what we knew as normal life as much as possible rather than caution about the virus. And so weāre left with the worst of all worlds, and we have what you have on the Covid thread with people shouting furiously at each other, a microcosm of social media comment at large.
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Whatās nonsense about it? If you have a pipe slowly flooding your bathroom, and youāre able to remove the floodwater at a greater rate than the water leaks from the pipe, thatās good, but you still have a problem with the leaky pipe.
We had four cases last July 1st, but we still allowed foreign travel, and foreign travel was the leaky pipe, left unattended to. Meanwhile we still canāt travel outside of our counties.
Foreign travel or travel over the border? Thereās no point in having the hotel quarantine if thereās free movement in the border counties
Irrelevant. We had an open border with Northern Ireland., who allowed quarantine free travel to the likes of Spain.
Are you one of those lunatics who thinks we can have a āborder bufferā?
Why not? Just because something may not be perfect doesnāt mean itās not worth doing. Surely the P1 variant is a concern? If itās a concern, shouldnāt we be doing something about it?