Centre For Local Research into Public Space (CELOS)
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From former Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr.Richard Schabas: articles like these are "part of the dialectic of scientific debate."
And at all times, scientific debate is a good idea.
July 3, 2022
SSRN (formerly the journal of the Social Science Research Network): Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA vaccination in randomized trials
"The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for 45 COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials (2.3 46 and 6.4 per 10,000 participants, respectively)...The excess risk of serious adverse events found in our study points to the need for 49 formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious 50 COVID-19 outcomes such as hospitalization or death."
May 10, 2022
The Wall Street Journal Long Covid
''Common long Covid symptoms can include cognitive issues, a racing heartbeat when you change position and extreme fatigue, particularly after physical or mental exertion. ...New symptoms can occur and old ones can come back. Recovery isn’t linear....“People need to be aware of the roller-coaster effect which you can have with this disease,” says Kristin Englund, an infectious-disease physician at Cleveland Clinic who started the long Covid clinic there last year.''
Jan.22, 2022
The Globe and Mail Vaccines are a Tool, Not a Silver Bullet
"We put our faith in the vaccines, while other approaches – such as drugs for early treatment, or a role for our natural immunity, or lowering our personal risk factors, for instance – got comparatively less attention. Key individuals predicted – half promised, really – we’d be done with COVID, at least in the West, by the summer of 2021. In February, 2021, Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, said the vaccine was still offering strong protection at the six-month mark and “indicators right now … are telling us that there is a protection against the transmission of the disease.” That April, Dr. Ugur Sahin, the CEO of BioNTech (which developed the vaccine for Pfizer), told reporters, “Europe will reach herd immunity in July, latest by August.” It wasn’t a tough sell. Who would not want it to be true?"
Jan.27, 2022
Healthy Debate Let evidence be our guide: Misinformation most insidious when it comes from health-care professionals
by Concerned researchers and experts from CoVaRR-Net
Eradication of SARS-CoV-2 was not the primary goal of COVID-19 vaccination campaigns and never has been. Rather, the goal from the start has been to limit morbidity and mortality caused by COVID-19 – an entirely reasonable end goal, which vaccines have achieved as indicated by an ever-growing body of evidence, including three independent large-scale studies showing more than 80 per cent effectiveness of three doses of COVID-19 vaccine against hospitalization and death due to Omicron – an impressive feat given that current vaccines were modelled against the ancestral virus rather than Omicron. read more
Dec.22, 2021
The Wall Street Journal: The Dangerous Push to Give Boosters to Teens
The U.S. government is pushing Covid-19 vaccine boosters for 16- and 17-year-olds without supporting clinical data. A large Israeli population study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this month, found that the risk of Covid death in people under 30 with two vaccine shots was zero.
Booster mandates for healthy young people, which some colleges are imposing, will cause medical harm for the sake of transient reductions in mild and asymptomatic infections. In a study of 438,511 males 16 to 24, 56 developed myocarditis after their second Pfizer dose (or 1 in 7,830, at least seven times the usual rate). True, most cases were mild, but in the broader group of 136 people (including older and female patients) who developed myocarditis after the vaccine, seven had a “complicated course,” and one 22-year-old died. read more
Nov.25, 2021
Bruce Hindmarsh, UBC (Regent College) Till we Have Faces
From the introduction:
"The following is my very personal attempt to understand COVID-19 and the unprecedented public policy response in Canada and Western nations. The issues involved are complex, fast changing, and touch on questions of science (in multiple fields), ethics and politics, and, ultimately, philosophy and theology.....I turned to analyse the COVID-19 crisis in more detail in part because of a crisis of authority. Whereas there is much that we all normally take on authority, deferring to expertise, this way of operating is disrupted when leading authorities disagree. It became apparent to me in the spring of 2021 that doctors and medical scientists of highest repute disagreed about many reported “facts” about the coronavirus, including the messaging of public health authorities."
Nov.20, 2021
The Spectator
Excerpt:The scientists discussed collecting viruses from bats in eight countries including Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos between 2016 and 2019. But to avoid the complication of signing up local subcontractors to their grants in those countries, they promised to send the samples to a laboratory they already funded. And where was this lab? Wuhan.
Some of the emails talk about sending data, not samples; but some talk repeatedly about sending actual samples. ‘All samples collected would be tested at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,’ reads one from 2016. Another in 2018 even talks of sending bats themselves. The emails make it clear that Wuhan scientists would sometimes be working in the field alongside their US colleagues.
Oct.27, 2021
Aug.15, 2021
David Pugliese has done some interesting work on the role of the Canadian army (Ottawa Citizen).
Excerpt:
Last year, this newspaper reported that a team assigned to a Canadian military intelligence unit monitored and collected information from people’s social media accounts in Ontario, claiming such data-mining was needed to help troops working in long-term care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the military’s Canadian Joint Operations Command planned a propaganda campaign aimed at heading off civil disobedience by the public during the pandemic. The plan called for using similar propaganda tactics as those employed against the Afghan population during the war in Afghanistan.
August 8, 2021
British Medical Journal Transparency in covid vaccine research
June 30,2021
The Globe and Mail Canadian COVID-19 death toll far exceeds official reports, according to analysis By Alex Cyr
June 28,2021
The Wall Street Journal: A Covid Commission that Americans can Trust
June 23, 2021
Bernard L'Hermite "How did we get here?"
June 15, 2021
The Spectator: The difficulties of following the science.
Report from the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M):‘The scale of this resurgence is highly uncertain, and it could be either considerably smaller or larger than previous waves’ and ‘R is estimated to be 40-80 per cent higher for Delta [Indian] than for Alpha [Kent], although a figure higher or lower than this cannot be ruled out’.
June 10, 2021
The American Journal of Public Health (AJPH)"Of Mice and Schoolchildren: A Conceptual History of Herd Immunity." David Robertson Read more
May 26, 2021
The Washington Post: an overview by four doctors of the current research about covid and children, urging a return to normalcy: read more.
Received May 14, 2021
A letter in Science: Investigate the origins of Covid19
May 5, 2021
Nicholas Wade, The Origin of Covid 19: Did people or nature open the Pandora's box at Wuhan?
Received April 28, 2021
BBC: No sign of infection after test concert in Spain, researchers say.... read more
Received April 10, 2021
From the Centre for Disease Control (CDC): Science Brief: "SARS-CoV-2 and Surface (Fomite) Transmission for Indoor Community Environments"
Excerpt: "....the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection via the fomite transmission route is low, and generally less than 1 in 10,000, which means that each contact with a contaminated surface has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing an infection."
Received April 2, 2021
COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink
Ari R. Joffe1, Division of Critical Care Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, Stollery Children's Hospital, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
Received March 15, 2021
Medical researcher Rosemary Frei "The curious case of Geert Vanden Bossche."
Received March 10, 2021
Statistics Canada report: "Provisional death counts and excess mortality, January to December 2020."
"In the early months of the pandemic, the weekly number of excess deaths and deaths caused by COVID-19 were closely aligned and mostly affected older populations, suggesting that COVID-19 itself was driving excess mortality in Canada. However, more recently, the number of excess deaths has been higher than the number of deaths due to COVID-19, and these deaths are affecting younger populations, suggesting that other factors, including possible indirect impacts of the pandemic, are now at play."
Received March 9, 2021
The dance was one in a series of experiments conducted by Fieldlab, an initiative set up by the government and the entertainment industry.
People won tickets to attend the dance. 100,000 people entered to win. Everyone had to have a negative COVID-19 test ahead of the dance, and all will be tested five days after.
All 1,300 people at the event were split into five groups with different rules. Some had to wear face masks, while others were encouraged to shout and cheer as much as possible. Everyone was equipped with sensors to monitor how much contact they had with others.
Received Feb.20, 2021
Oxford University website: Our World in Data re Covid19 mortality
February 17, 2021
The Lancet Clarifying the evidence on SARS-CoV-2 antigen rapid tests in public health responses to COVID-19 Most people infected with SARS-CoV-2 are contagious for 4–8 days.7 Specimens are generally not found to contain culture-positive (potentially contagious) virus beyond day 9 after the onset of symptoms, with most transmission occurring before day. This timing fits with the observed patterns of virus transmission (usually 2 days before to 5 days after symptom onset), which led public health agencies to recommend a 10-day isolation period. The short window of transmissibility contrasts with a median 22–33 days of PCR positivity (longer with severe infections and somewhat shorter among asymptomatic individuals). This suggests that 50–75% of the time an individual is PCR positive, they are likely to be post-infectious.
Received Feb.5, 2021
A National Post article about recent research of the incidence of covid19 (including deaths) in India, well after the lockdown has ended. read more
Received Feb.3, 2021
British report on the transmission of B.1.1.7 in England. Excerpt from the Swedish sender: "- While evidence has accumulated that the B.1.1.7 lineage are associated with significant changes in virus phenotype, assessing the extent to which these changes lead to meaningful differences in transmission between humans is challenging and cannot be evaluated experimentally.”
Received Jan.25, 2021
Ari Joffe, Paediatric critical care physician, Edmonton Alberta
COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink: I explain why I changed my mind about supporting lockdowns.
Abstract and access to pdf of full article in Preprints.org.
Received Jan.21, 2021
Report from the Ontario Patient Ombudsman: "Honouring the voices and experiences of Long-Term Care Home residents, caregivers and staff during the first wave of COVID-19 in Ontario."
Excerpt: "Recommendation #2: A change in approach to visitation Patient Ombudsman recommends that the government and health sector organizations not restrict visitors entirely during any second waves of COVID-19, but rather permit a limited number of essential caregivers to visit patients or residents along with implementing infection control measures. Visits by essential caregivers can be permitted safely. A number of organizations have developed reports addressing issues related to visitation and providing recommendations on permitting essential caregivers. Any restrictions on visitation should be limited, targeted based on evidence, proportional to the risk a visitor poses...."
Jan.17, 2021
Evidence Brief from the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute:
Excerpt: "Highlights the growing body of evidence that demonstrates improvements in patient safety, patient experience, patient outcomes and patient care with presence of essential care partners across a range of institutional care settings....Reports on the transmission of COVID-19 within facilities during this time of pandemic."
Jan.15, 2021
Open letter from MPP Roman Baber to Ontario premier Doug Ford, with 20 footnotes.
Excerpt: "Premier, we should stop scaring children.This generation of kids will grow up with an anxiety disorder and will be afraid of normal life. Kids need to be kids again, back in school with their friends. They should not believe that coming close to another child may result in someone’s death. It’s false and unwarranted."
Followed on the same day by a rebuttal from the Hon. Christine Elliot, Minister of Health, reproduced here. She says:
Excerpt: "Mr. Barber should apologize to each and every one of the families [ed: 5,289 when the letter was written] for minimizing their loss."
Followed by more references (including from the Ministry of Health) from MPP Baber here.
Jan.6, 2021
ASSESSING MANDATORY STAY-AT-HOME AND BUSINESS CLOSURE EFFECTS ON THE SPREAD OF COVID-19
European Journal of Clinical Investigation
Eran Bendavid, Christopher Oh, Jay Bhattacharya, John P.A. Ioannidis,
Stanford University
Excerpt: "The most restrictive non‐pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for controlling the spread of COVID‐19 are mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closures. Given the consequences of these policies, it is important to assess their effects. We evaluate the effects on epidemic case growth of more restrictive NPIs (mrNPIs), above and beyond those of less restrictive NPIs (lrNPIs)." read more
Jan.4, 2021
Lockdown Effects on Sars-CoV-2 Transmission – The evidence from Northern Jutland From MedRxiv (Yale/BMJ) Kasper Planeta Kepp, Christian Bjornskov
Excerpt: “[T]he most time- and space-focused empirical dataset available with sufficient statistical power, adequate and homogeneous control group, nearly complete testing, and with the smallest possible confounder pollution imaginable in a real setting.”
Dec.29, 2020
Youtube interview with Prof.Sucharit Bhakti (Thai/German microbiologist). Here is a critical wikipedia post about his work. Here is a 1985 article on PubMed, with Bhakti as one of the authors, warning about possible unwanted side-effects of the H1N1 vaccine.
Nov.26, 2020
From the Centre for Law and Policy Research (India): https://clpr.org.in/blog/legibility-and-obscurity-in-the-age-of-big-data-i/
Linking to a study of AI and Ebola, published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6175342/
Oct.14, 2020
A Medic's case against another lockdown
Dr.Matt Strauss, Assistant professor of Medicine, Queen's University
Excerpt: "Luckily, we no longer have to talk about mathematical models. We now have seven months of real-world data to look at....In medical science, we rely on epidemiologists to take all the available data from all the countries and perform statistical analyses to correct for as many different variables as possible.
This has now been done for lockdowns. In August, the Lancet published an analysis of data from 50 countries."
April 18, 2020
Dr.Matt Strauss: Courage is crucial in the fight against coronavirus
Excerpt: "As a critical care physician, I can say from both clinical experience and from scientific literature, courage in illness matters. It matters for survival.....The mind-body connection definitely exists, it’s called the spinal cord (as well as the hormones secreted by the hypothalamus.)....Even if you have not contracted Covid-19 yet, you can start fighting now. Start jogging. If you can’t jog, start walking. Feel the sun on your face. Breathe the wind. Tell your family you love them; they’ll probably tell you the same."
March 29, 2020
Wesley Pegden A call to honesty in pandemic modelling
March 29, 2020
Rosemary Frei "Where’s the Evidence Supporting the Drastic Measures Against COVID-19?"