The Henry Ford HCQ study is by no means decisive, but with death rates seemingly halved (sorta, maybe, kinda) — it does show how crazy it is to ban hydroxychloroquine. It also shows it’s low risk, and with all the conflicting studies out there, that there are a lot of ways to stuff things up.
With 10 million cases around the world it seems a bit incongruous that it’s taken so many months to get a trial this basic done with 2,000 patients. Speaking of slow research, the UK hydroxychloroquine trial that stopped has restarted again as of three days ago. This is a trial to see if HCQ can prevent coronavirus in 40,000 healthcare workers.
Perhaps half were saved?
Of those enrolled in the trial, 87% of the people who got hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) survived. This was a lot better than the survival rate of those with neither HCQ nor Azithromycin which was 74%. Possibly half of those who died in the latter group might have been saved had they got HCQ. But, the study was not randomized, so we really don’t know.
Consider that those who got both HCQ and Azithromycin had […]
I’ve been reading RT articles again and I just know that Andy West will disapprove! This particular one is written by
Peter Andrews, Irish science journalist and writer based in London. He has a background in the life sciences, and graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in genetics.
But not to worry Andy, I mention it only in passing because it put me on to the report itself, which is rather more interesting. Not that I particularly disagree with the headline:
Britain’s Leicester lockdown is an unjustifiable travesty, based on shoddy figures and a bungled report
The author says:
Even if they had got all their sums right, and there was an upsurge in cases that warranted action, the report makes clear that it is in the “under 19-year-old group”. That is, children. You know, those small humans who don’t get Covid-19, or if they do, are infinitesimally at risk of dying if they do? Just 0.05 percent of deaths from coronavirus have been of people aged under 19, and those under 40 represent only 0.7 percent. If the purpose of a lockdown is to save lives, whose lives do Public Health England think they are saving here?
I thought I would take a look at the actual report and see what it says myself. Firstly, it’s prepared by the so called Rapid Investigation Team, which I found wryly amusing, being so similar to the Rapid Response Team at World Weather Attribution and elsewhere, being a team of crack climate scientists dotted in university departments across the globe, who are on hand to respond to any extreme weather events and rapidly attribute them to climate change, thus generating alarm. In the case of the Rapid Investigation Team we have a group of crack government medics and epidemiological modellers on hand to investigate any ‘unexpected’ rise in Covid cases and attribute them (or not) to an unexpected and alarming rise in Covid cases.
The report begins:
In the last 14 days, 944 cases have been reported – 71 from Pillar 1 [hospital] testing and 873 from Pillar 2 [community].
The apparent sharp rise in cases have all come from community testing (government centres and home test kits), not clinical cases in hospitals, which are declining along with the rest of the country.
The bulk of the new positive cases are in the 18-65 age group though, not, as stated by RT, in the under 19s:
As it turns out, the positive cases are mainly coming from work places, food factories in particular, just like in Germany. So why the hell lock down the whole of Leicester because of some isolated ‘outbreaks’ in food factories? The incompetence of this government is staggering. The ‘outbreaks’ might not even be real and they are certainly not indicative of the ominous beginnings of a second bloody wave of Covid, as Sky News and other media liars would have you believe:
The histogram of pillar 1 and pillar 2 diagnoses appear to suggest that there is an ongoing outbreak of COVID-19 in Leicester with increasing numbers of cases being identified on subsequent days, most notably since early June 2020. However, the absolute change in numbers of clinically unwell cases cannot be readily distinguished from the numbers of new infections (symptomatic and asymptomatic) that might be expected to be seen due to the very significant changes in testing regimes that have occurred during the period mid-March to late June.
The rise in pillar 2 diagnose is probably linked, in part, to the availability of testing to the general public, and at least one component of the rise in new diagnoses is due to a steadily increasing proportion of infections (symptomatic and asymptomatic) being identified rather than a true increase in the number of new infections occurring.
There is an almost linear rise in the numbers of new cases being identified from the beginning of May until mid-June. However, this is not characteristic of unconstrained growth of an epidemic from an organism that is well characterised as having an R0≈3.
So, again, how does this justify locking down the poor people of Leicester?
However, just to illustrate how grossly incompetent the government are, the report then says:
The proportion of positive PCR tests (as a proportion of all test) is rising. This is suggestive of a genuine increase in numbers of new infections, not simply an artefact of increasing test rates.
This appears to be in direct contradiction to their previous statement that “at least one component of the rise in new diagnoses is due to a steadily increasing proportion of infections (symptomatic and asymptomatic) being identified rather than a true increase in the number of new infections occurring.”
One moment the data is probably not suggestive of a genuine increase in infections, the next moment it is! Bloody hell. If only the people of Leicster could know why their lives are being put on hold for at least another two weeks.
But then they say something very interesting:
This effect [proportion of positive PCR test rising] is most marked in the under 19-year-old group where the proportion of test positive cases fell to ≈5% (across all age groups) after the end of the initial epidemic peak, and has climbed back from mid-May to a current value of ≈15%. The proportion of positive tests in working age people has also risen to ≈15%
In the bulk of the test data (18-64) there has been an increase in the proportion of positive PCR tests to total number of tests to the new value of 15%. In children, it’s increased much faster from 5% to 15%.
The graph shows that it appears to have peaked at 15% and is now declining:
The herd immunity threshold for Covid-19 (allowing for T-cell mediated immunity via exposure to other coronaviruses) is variously estimated at 7-20%. Is it just coincidence that the proportion of positive PCR tests in Leicstershire (in children and adults) have reached 15% and do not appear to be going beyond that figure? Why Leicester though, and not the East Midlands (black on the graph above). Is this a very big clue:
Since the beginning of June there has been good provision of primary school access for children in Leicester, with 38% of the all age school capacity now being available (we believe that secondary access is currently still restricted to children of essential workers); and of this 94% of child-day place availability capacity is being utilised. We have been unable to provide any analytical link to correlate this observation with any real or apparent rise in new infections in the Leicester area. However, it would seem sensible to investigate this association to exclude any evidence of the recent rise in observed case numbers of being linked to a return of larger numbers of children to school.
Could it in fact be that in Leicester, where significant numbers of children have actually been attending school, infections in the community have risen quite rapidly to the herd immunity threshold as a result? Kids get the infection easily, then pass it onto parents and siblings etc.? Deaths and hospitalisations not rising, so no really detrimental consequences of the more widespread infection of children and adults below 65. Is Leicester being locked down because, ironically, it is now one of the few places in England which has actually reached the Covid-19 herd immunity threshold? That is a very unsettling thought to contemplate.
Scientists claim that a 5C warming will kill off 60% of the world’s fish. But such claims ignore major abrupt temperature excursions which occurred in the not too distant past.
Climate change will make world too hot for 60 per cent of fish species
Fish are at a far greater risk from climate change than previously thought, as researchers have shown that embryos and spawning adults are more susceptible to warming oceans.
In a worst-case scenario of 5°C of global warming, up to 60 per cent of fish species around the world would be unable to cope with temperatures in their geographical range by 2100, when different stages of their lives are taken into consideration. Even if humanity meets the Paris deal’s tough goal of holding warming to 1.5°C, it would be too hot for 10 per cent of fish.
Previously, we thought that just 5 per cent of fish species would struggle to cope with 5°C of global warming, but that was based on analysis of adult fish alone.
“We can say 1.5°C is not paradise, there will be changes. But we can limit those changes if we manage to stop climate change. Fish are so important for human nutrition, so this study makes a strong case for protecting our ecosystems and natural environments,” says Hans-Otto Pörtner at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, part of the team behind the research.
Thermal bottlenecks in the life cycle define climate vulnerability of fish
Flemming T. Dahlke1,*, Sylke Wohlrab1,2, Martin Butzin1, Hans-Otto Pörtner1,3,*
See all authors and affiliationsScience 03 Jul 2020: Vol. 369, Issue 6499, pp. 65-70 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz3658
Species’ vulnerability to climate change depends on the most temperature-sensitive life stages, but for major animal groups such as fish, life cycle bottlenecks are often not clearly defined. We used observational, experimental, and phylogenetic data to assess stage-specific thermal tolerance metrics for 694 marine and freshwater fish species from all climate zones. Our analysis shows that spawning adults and embryos consistently have narrower tolerance ranges than larvae and nonreproductive adults and are most vulnerable to climate warming. The sequence of stage-specific thermal tolerance corresponds with the oxygen-limitation hypothesis, suggesting a mechanistic link between ontogenetic changes in cardiorespiratory (aerobic) capacity and tolerance to temperature extremes. A logarithmic inverse correlation between the temperature dependence of physiological rates (development and oxygen consumption) and thermal tolerance range is proposed to reflect a fundamental, energetic trade-off in thermal adaptation. Scenario-based climate projections considering the most critical life stages (spawners and embryos) clearly identify the temperature requirements for reproduction as a critical bottleneck in the life cycle of fish. By 2100, depending on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenario followed, the percentages of species potentially affected by water temperatures exceeding their tolerance limit for reproduction range from ~10% (SSP 1–1.9) to ~60% (SSP 5–8.5). Efforts to meet ambitious climate targets (SSP 1–1.9) could therefore benefit many fish species and people who depend on healthy fish stocks.
The temperature excursion I was thinking of is the Younger Dryas, an abrupt return to ice age conditions just under 13,000 years ago, which lasted around 1200 years. The temperature shift was extreme (4-10C in Greenland), and occurred very rapidly, much faster than today’s mild global warming. The recovery was slower – but there were rapid periods of both warming and cooling.
Big freeze plunged Europe into ice age in months
… Carbon isotopes in each slice reveal how productive the lake was, while oxygen isotopes give a picture of temperature and rainfall. At the start of the ‘Big Freeze’ their new record shows that temperatures plummeted and lake productivity stopped over the course of just a few years. “It would be like taking Ireland today and moving it up to Svalbard, creating icy conditions in a very short period of time,” says Patterson, who presented the findings at the European Science Foundation BOREAS conference on humans in the Arctic, in Rovaniemi, Finland. …
A German weekly “Die Zeit” commentary criticizes the hostility directed at skeptical climatologists and epidemiologists.
“Where do we end up if a scientist’s degree of alarm becomes a litmus test for his scientific respectability?” Science activism represents “relapse into pre-enlightened thinking”.
Dogmatists refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope. Image cropped here.
The false prophets
Over the recent years, we’ve seen a number of alarmist climate scientists demanding we believe that they are the beholders of the truth, and so policymakers need to heed their advice without question.
Science hubris
That hubris has gotten so dreadful that journalist Thea Dorn has since felt compelled to pen a commentary appearing in the centre-left Die Zeit: “Don’t preach, do research instead!”
Rather than arrogantly declaring that the science is settled, scientists shine through by remaining doubtful, Dorn writes.
She warns of climate scientists having become “ideologists” in the climate debate, and that this is threatening to happen in epidemiology/virology as well.
Not acceptable to defame doubters
“There is a world of difference between an irrational dogmatist and a reasonable skeptic, Thea Dorn writes. “It is not acceptable to immediately defame anyone who expresses doubts about the reliability of epidemiological or climate models as a ‘climate’ or ‘corona denier’”.
In Germany there have been a number of renowned virologists who have recently come under fire for dissenting against the alarmist claims made by other virologists.
Dorn writes: “In contrast to religion, modern science owes its success to its openness to doubt, criticism and self-correction.”
Rahmstorf suggestion “absurd”
Thea Dorn particularly fires harsh criticism at Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf, alarmist scientist at the Potsdam Institute, for suggesting in an essay in Spiegel in 2019 that mankind somehow had control over the “earth system” but was losing that control, an assumption that Dorn called “absurd and highly questionable”.
Dorn slams Rahmstorf and Prof. Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber for mischaracterizing the earth’s complexity as a mere set a dominoes on the verge of toppling, and claiming they have the models to predict the future, and they and the alarmist virologists and immunologists should be heeded.
Be thankful for skeptics
On the role of skeptics, Dorn writes: “On the contrary: we can be thankful that – still? – there are enough scientists who reject the magic of the crystal ball and the delusion of total controllability.”
Science crusaders
Dorn also sharply criticizes the concept of the “activist scientist”, which Hans Joachim Schellnhuber calls himself. She comments: “It represents a relapse into pre-enlightened thinking. With a slogan like “Unite behind the Science!” one might swear crusaders to a holy mission.”
Dorn summarizes:
One of the most tragic acts that a democracy can commit is self-submission to the rigid rules of a clerical natural science for fear of submission to the power of nature.”
Iowa Climate Science Education 