18 hours ago, Happy Blue said:

These scientific experts are saying something different?   

 

France advises against Moderna for under-30s over rare heart risk

French health authorities advised against use of the Moderna COVID jab for people under 30 late yesterday, after a nation-wide study confirmed a risk of cardiac inflammation associated with mRNA vaccines.

The study from Epi-Phare, an independent medicines safety research group that works closely with the French government, confirmed previous findings

It looked at all people in France aged 12 to 50 who were hospitalized for myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) or pericarditis (inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart) between May 15 and August 31 of this year.

Results showed that vaccines from both Pfizer and Moderna increase the risk of these illnesses within seven days of vaccination.

The risk, is higher in men under 30 years old and particularly after a second dose of the Moderna vaccine, which the study found

You know people in car accidents wearing seatbelts get big imprints on their chest and bruising from the belt, and can even get cracked ribs.

5 hours ago, Gunnersauraus said:

@Harry the scientific method is still the best we have. And its supposed to be in a way that should mean that bias wont affect it. Sure scientists get things wrong. And no scientist would say that just because there is a consensus that something is true it definitely is. However you can be fairly certain that if there is a huge scientific consensus on something. Eg that people should vaccinate or that humans are causing climate change. That there is alot  more reasons than not that it is true with our current knowledge. Thats not to say it is definitely true. But certainly it's very unlikely that someone who isnt a scientist is going to be able to make a good argument that it isnt. In fact it quite often shows as I've never heard an argument from an anti vaxer or climate change denier that hasn't already been debunked. In fact a lot of their arguments are embarrassing and can be beaten with common sense 

I'm fully onboard with the science of vaccination and climate change and generally everything else. However I can also spot BS within science.

I've seen science manipulated for political purposes during the pandemic. For example in Australia there's an organisation called OzSage who are based on the UK independent Sage. This is comprised of epidemiologists, economists and other specialties and has been characterised by dishonesty, with ideology coming first and data/science second. They produce modelling designed to generate hysteria to apply political pressure towards extending lockdowns and  continued border closures. None of their work would get published in a journal but it gets published in the newspapers to keep hysteria high.

Everyone should think critically when presented with information.

1 hour ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

I think it's a bizarre statement because science isn't a person  - science is a body of knowledge that is built from testing predictions about the world and then observing and learning from those predictions.

I don't think any scientist would claim that "science knows everything" because the very premise of science being a body of knowledge that grows as you continue to test hypotheses indicates that: 1.) scientists don't know everything; 2.) scientists not knowing everything drives science forward and keeps hypotheses coming, gets them tested, and observations are then reported. The body of knowledge grows constantly.

We should trust science because it's made up of centuries of work from experts throughout time and is based on real world tested hypotheses and observable findings from those tests. Does that mean it's perfect? No, absolutely not... and we know that scientific findings can change over time. But it seems weird that with all science has done for modern medicine... and the modern world in general... we sometimes pick and choose what we want to believe from the scientific experts.

We trust virologists when they present solutions to other viral infections. Why not COVID?

I fully support your defence of science, but whilst we're on the subject of its flaws, some criticisms I have of science and expertise:

1. The biggest flaw of science is the way it gets written up by the media. Dramatizing it, exaggerating the level of certainty of uncertainty. "May cause" gets presented as "probably does cause". And then secondary reporting on the report by cable news and agenda driven outlets amplifies the inaccuracies.

2. Experts in a particular field can be biased towards the importance of their field in a complex multi variate situation such as a pandemic. 

3. Universities, and the pressure they're under to churn out research results in some shite getting published because jobs are on the line.

4. Similar to 3, the body of knowledge is affected by confirmation bias. For example climate change becomes a point of investigation of every facet of life (E.g global bird population). Numerous papers with a hypothesis that is "climate change may explain change in this particular system". I think this does result in some incorrect conclusions at times. Correlation is not causation. For example the conclusion may be that a certain observed change is caused (or may be caused) by climate change however in fact it may just be correlated, and the actual cause may just be increasing global population (which itself causes climate change). Most likely the published science will be properly inconclusive but the media reporting will go a step further than the paper itself.

5. Its absolutely possible to follow the science but still make incorrect (or at the very least questionable) decisions.

I think those are fair criticisms. However science is far more right than wrong, and a bigger problem is the exploitation of the uncertainty by bad actors (on both sides), such as the type that make dodgy YouTube clips that anti vaxxers latch on to or that exaggerate things to keep the Greenies at maximum passion.

23 hours ago, nudge said:

Yeah, it doesn't change the fact that the majority of deaths in the last three weeks were not unvaccinated in certain countries though. 

Are the raw numbers completely pointless though? They might be pointless in evaluating the effectiveness of the vaccine as they do give out a wrong impression, but they are important if we talk about overloading hospitals and healthcare system in general - the main reason of new restrictions and lockdowns in European countries at the moment. The fact that breakthrough cases are rising significantly (and more than expected previously) and more and more fully vaccinated land in hospitals and ICU is very concerning, and signals that current vaccines alone will not be enough to end the pandemic. Yet instead of talking about that, the politicians are playing the blame game and creating a narrative where the unvaccinated alone are solely responsible for the spread and clogging hospitals which is clearly not the whole truth, is it?

Sorry I don't mean to downplay that death post Vax is still an issue, but it was always going to be, and any suggestion otherwise was media misrepresentation.

But in terms of raw numbers, the Vaccinated are still a huge block of the population, (with a skew towards the older bracket,) who have reduced their contribution towards the healthcare overload situation as much as possible. 

Waning immunity is an issue but I think the bigger one is that northern winter is coming. And that is sure to drive a wave..

Booster jabs are needed, kids can soon be vaccinated to drive higher immunity in the total population (although their contribution to hospitalisation is low) but I think if Europe starts going back to lockdowns this winter is hard to see this pandemic ever ending.

16 hours ago, Gunnersauraus said:

So a singer from a band that does cover songs decided to get a fan up on stage and piss on him 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/sophia-urista-brass-against-fan-b1957226.html%3famp

@MUFC decided to tag you. Cant think why this would make me think of you

Genuinely shocked by the video of this but it was Twitter comedy gold.

https://twitter.com/guillotexeneize/status/1459031284756406280?t=P5mNJJL8DSVFfrALpGyJHA&s=19

10 hours ago, nudge said:

If you're talking raw numbers (and not rates per 100.000), then it's not necessarily true for every country anymore.

In the UK, over 70% of Covid deaths in the last three weeks were fully vaccinated. 

 

In Germany, it was around 40%, a huge increase compared to previous months, and appears to be rising.

 

In Ireland, it's about 50% since April.

I know but raw rates are pointless when 90% of the population, and even higher in the worst affected age groups are vaccinated

Really hoping Europe hold its nerve and does NOT do lockdowns again over winter. 

The deaths are majority unvaccinated, which is almost exclusively by choice. 

Not sure how this thread ever got made about just two streaming services when there's an out of control number of different competing options...

You could drop $10 on each of those to get basically everything available which is utterly shite.

We use Disney plus and get amazing value from that with the kids. We pay for Netflix and Stan but don't watch it much. I'm contemplating moving back to just pay per view, or purchasing the season of a show on the iTunes store as it would probably cost less and result in me actually feeling more excited about having something to watch

On 02/10/2021 at 20:43, nudge said:

 

Sure, but do you think the government will immediately refurbish everyone's house because a bunch of people glued themselves to the motorway?... If not, then the only thing their protests achieve is disruption, additional emissions, and alienation of public support.

Also it gives a sense of fulfillment in the protestors. 

On 14/09/2021 at 00:43, Inverted said:

I also think that American conservatives believe that if it comes down to it, the military is going to be on their side.

They don't need to be able to overthrow the military, because they hope that if the USA made too much progress too quickly, the military, or parts of the military, would intervene in their favour and establish a military dictatorship.

Probably, that's why they're so eager that the US military maintains a size and a state of readiness that makes it invincible to any threat, internal or external. Even a rogue fraction of it would be enough to subdue the entire country.

There's a pretty uncomfortable marriage between conservative elites and the Trump coalition of voters.

I don't think those groups want the same things. Trump voters seem to just want "death" to democrats and to upend the status quo.

Elites just want to deregulate and enable corporate pillaging. They don't want civil war and want to keep the status quo. 

One thing Australia can offer is insight of how quickly the virus spreads from a single case. There's so little COVID out there that we trace the fuck out of it, and

Below is a map of the current Melbourne outbreak. We'd had zero cases for a couple weeks, then had a pair of covid positive removalists come to pack up an apartment in Melbourne.

They had the delta strain, and have COVID to 4 people in other apartments in the complex on the same floor. One of those guys went to the footy and gave it to 6 people in the bay of the stadium he was sitting in, 1 of those 6 went to the rugby the day after and it took off from there.

We found the removalists cases on day 1 ( 3 days after they'd done the job), 10 new cases on day 2 and announced a lockdown with another 12 cases on day 3. That was all that was known about at the time we locked down, and yet in every case in yellow on the chart below was already positive by that point, just had not been found and contained.

Today was the 7th day we've been locked down and announced 26 new cases, but 24 of them had been in quarantine for 100% of their infectious periods, so no risk to have spread it further... Current plan is to reopen in 4 days time provided all detected cases were in quarantine for their entire infectious periods.

That's 3 lockdowns this year for Melbourne, which have been 5 days, 14 days and (fingers crossed) 11 respectively.

On 13/07/2021 at 23:56, Harry said:

Yep Australia is pandemonium at the moment (winter) although I'm out of lockdown and my son has only done 2 weeks of homeschool this year. Sydney are in lockdown now and have taken a less risk averse approach, being reluctant to lock down, so now rather than a 10 day lockdown it looks to be 6+ weeks... The threat of imminent COVID spread might finally get us back around to letting people have the AZ vaccine which our medical association had turned their noses up at...

I'm back in lockdown.

On 10/07/2021 at 03:41, Dr. Gonzo said:

I think the reality is, the biggest "new normal" in our "post-COVID" world is that there isn't going to be a "post-COVID" world. You look at Singapore, a country that's been an absolute leader in it's COVID response and managing the virus... and they're talking about COVID as something that we'll just have to live with forever. It'll go from being a pandemic to an endemic, like chickenpox, there will probably just always be a baseline level of COVID going around in any given country (and what that baseline is will probably depend on country to country).

So I don't really think we'll ever return to a true "pre-COVID normal" tbh. Too many governments of massive countries around the world really botched the intial response to the virus for that to really ever be a possibility.

At the same time, I do think countries that have high vaccination rates do need to start dropping restrictions and start letting people have as close to a reasonable return to normalcy as possible. My dad's a small business owner that did his best to adapt to COVID, but dealing with the economic impact of the pandemic + issues with importing and costs of ingredients going up have been a nightmare for him. That's probably the case for many businesses, big and small, all across the UK. And that's the livelihood of millions of people across the country - and internationally as well. The economic cost has been very high and I don't think it's sustainable for much longer unless we want to run all small businesses out of operation and leave everything to by the country/world's richest people.

Aside from the economic cost, the emotional and societal cost has been huge. Suicides and arrests for domestic violence have gone way up in a lot of countries as people and families have lived in isolation - in some places for well over a year. Alcoholism is probably skyhigh worldwide too (I haven't looked at the numbers for that though, I'm just making a guess).

I'd never heard that myth taken seriously by anyone, tbh. I'm surprised it ever got legs. Kids had COVID pretty early on in Wuhan, so it was easily disprovable. They may have had milder cases than their parents/grandparents, but they could get it and spread it just like anyone else.

There's no doubt COVID is serious and that people are right to be worried about new variants. We'll likely be having to need boosters to our current vaccines and be dealing with various COVID outbreaks for the rest of our lives tbh.

But I do think countries where a lot of people are vaccinated are right in easing restrictions. Does that mean I don't think goverments should be inflexible and never put restrictions higher ever again? Absolutely not - I think it depends on a case by case basis. But I don't think people and businesses can wait much longer to know there's a light at the end of the tunnel or that we can anticipate things ever being the same as they were before the pandemic.

COVID's permanently changed the world and it's highly likely we need to learn how to function as a society with the very high likelihood that there will be baseline levels of COVID even in societies that had an excellent vaccine rollout and/or good early controls for COVID.

But I still think places like Peru, Brazil, India, Iran, etc... where we're seeing more and more waves of the virus, they probably need to be kept on extreme lockdowns until the spread is contained better and vaccines are more easily available. And for places like Australia, where they've been very cautious but the vaccine rollout has been slow... they've got to expedite getting jabs into arms. Otherwise @Harry's never going to experience life outside of lockdown again.

Yep Australia is pandemonium at the moment (winter) although I'm out of lockdown and my son has only done 2 weeks of homeschool this year. Sydney are in lockdown now and have taken a less risk averse approach, being reluctant to lock down, so now rather than a 10 day lockdown it looks to be 6+ weeks... The threat of imminent COVID spread might finally get us back around to letting people have the AZ vaccine which our medical association had turned their noses up at...

But for now, we continue on our logic circuit...

People wanted Britney freed, but the universe thought they said Bill.

On 11/06/2021 at 05:30, Dr. Gonzo said:

Is the vaccine situation in Australia getting any better?

The turnaround between how things were here before the vaccination rollout to how it’s been with the vaccine being open to all adults here has been staggering.

Normalcy seems much closer here than it did in January or February & the biggest impediment to the states getting back to normal even quicker is the huge number of vaccine skeptics.

Not hugely  improved. 20% of people have their first shot. But only essential workers and over 40s are eligible and that isn’t likely to change before the end of winter. So it’s a second winter of clenching and hoping we can keep COVID under control for another flue season.

issue was our government had AZ as the vax that was going to be doing the bulk of the work, but then the Australian medical association recommended it only for use on over 50s. So we are using that on them, and only have enough Pfizer for 40-50 yo at this point, with more to come by Christmas.

We live in such different places...

In Australia one COVID positive person drove 2000km from Victoria to Queensland over 5 days stopping in 8 different cities.

That is front page news, and there are now 10 million people shitting themselves that there will be other infections in those locations from their travels....

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-10/covid-exposure-sites-nsw-qld-cases-victoria-sunshine-coast/100204044?utm_source=abc_news_web&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_web

5 hours ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

Yeah but centrists like Manchin and Sinema don’t come off looking much better. They look owned by the same businesses and rich people as the GOP.

Yeah agreed. It's not just an overblown liberal freakout, there really is a fight for democracy. Trump might be too inept to pull it off but a more clever person who recognises that the GOP base have the strongest ideological resonance towards rebellion against democrats and rejection of expertise can harness that to much more dangerous effect. And when you consider that the majority of GOP politicians for years have worked for the big money corporations and found democracy inconvenient and something to be worked around, you see the peril that is there. 

Every forner Republican president except Trump is more politically aligned with Biden democrats than the current GOP, and the centre right college educated types have recognised that. For now the lunatics are running the asylum, and many of the politicians who are still there are just holding on for the ride.

So many of the GOP members were bad faith actors long before this latest wave of Trump. Shills appointed by big business backers to occupy a senate position in a red state.

 Im sympathetic to her current situation, and of giving her 'time to get into the right space, or changing things around as a one-off. Thats all fine. But I have some concerns that she seems to be alluding to more than this.  It seems like she's done a bit of a mic drop in the back end of that message, and has now left it to the media to fight the issue on her behalf.

I may be wrong about that, but I think to some degree, if you do a difficult job, and get paid a great deal of money to do it, and are the envy of 'so many in the world, you have a responsibility to round out the job description as best you can. For sure, journalists and staff be respectful of her more introverted nature, and try to minimise the extent to which you put her on the spot, and keep the questions to a minimum, but she's there to inspire kids, and I think its better to do that with a positive message through what she communicates in an interview than in a message of hey I dont do interviews because it makes me uncomfortable, and thats bad for my mental health"".

I'm not insensitive to her social anxiety. I take mental health seriously, have had my own brushes with it, and am already readying myself to be a parent in a world with a very high prevalence of youth mental health issues. But in that world I am also concerned about a continuing trend towards hypersensitivity, which is something that gets reinforced with situations such as this, and I think has a negative psychological impact on the individuals involved and the broader collective when we start catering to each individuals particular concern, and sends a message of mental health is a weakness and excuse to have rules changed. There is some truth there, but its also very important that we continue to push people outside their comfort zone at times, and that we teach our kids that there are some aspects of our lives that are a bit shit but we still have to get on in and do them anyway.

Moana

Gosh that movie makes me happy. 

10/10

Interesting tactic from Ohio on driving uptake of vaccination. Will surely get some sceptics out to the vaccination centres.

14 hours ago, UNIQUE said:

does nobody care or worry about why governments lie about the stats. governments always lie to make things seem better than they are. they like to tell you stuff that makes them look good. when they lie and it makes them look bad then you need to worry. 

They aren't lying mate. What you claim as lies is mostly cherry picked examples or imperfections in the systems dressed up with a motive of conspiracy. In actual fact any tallied data at a national level on any issue or cause is imperfect as fuck. 

I would have more respect for an argument that took all the government data as fact but then argued still we should not lock down, and yes should let a fuck ton of people die, and yes it will cull the aging population, and leave a significant portion of people with lifelong physical impacts but it's better than bankrupting the government and racking up debt your children will be paying off until they retire. That you fundamentally believe more in an "only the strong survive" mentality than a "leave no man behind" one. 

On 04/05/2021 at 19:40, Devil-Dick Willie said:

Well done mate. 

I think it would be weird to date an identical twin, that's for sure. Like, you'd just sound so fake saying "nah, I'm not even slightly attracted to your sister".

5 minutes ago, Toinho said:

How’s everyone going? 10 weeks in here. Zombie mode activated a while ago. 

In my experience the fog started to ease around 12 weeks and get really better around 6 months.

I'm sure your kids are blowing your away even now but it will ramp up fast mate.