Vaccination reduces risk of long Covid, even when people are infected, UK study indicates

‘People who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 appear to have a much lower likelihood of developing long Covid than unvaccinated people even when they contract the coronavirus, a study published Wednesday indicated. The research is among the earliest evidence that immunization substantially decreases the risk of long Covid even when a breakthrough infection occurs. Already, researchers had said that by preventing many infections entirely, vaccines would reduce the number of cases of long Covid, but it wasn’t clear what the risk would be for people who still got infected after vaccination.’

Read here (STAT, Sept 1, 2021)

Strain on NHS as tens of thousands of staff suffer long Covid

‘Intense pressures on the already overstretched NHS are being exacerbated by the tens of thousands of health staff who are sick with long Covid, doctors and hospital bosses say.

‘At least 122,000 NHS personnel have the condition, the Office for National Statistics disclosed in a detailed report that showed 1.1 million people in the UK were affected by the condition. That is more than any other occupational group and ahead of teachers, of whom 114,000 have it.’

Read here (The Guardian, Apr 3, 2021)

Long Covid affects most hospital patients, two UK studies find

‘Most patients treated in hospital for Covid-19 are still suffering a wide range of symptoms five months after discharge — and middle-aged women are even more likely to have long Covid than other groups — according to two UK studies released on Wednesday.

‘The larger study, led by the University of Leicester and called Phosp-Covid, analysed 1,077 people discharged from hospitals across the UK and found that only 29 per cent were fully recovered.

‘The remainder had an average of nine persistent symptoms each. These covered a wide range, including muscle pain and fatigue, breathlessness, pain, joint pain or swelling, weakness, short-term memory loss and “brain fog”.’

Read here (Financial Times, Mar 25, 2021)

How Taiwan triumphed over Covid as the UK faltered

‘Taiwan’s leaders, helped perhaps by having an epidemiologist as vice-president, perhaps by its experience of the outbreak of the Sars coronavirus in 2003, recognised the terrible threat posed by Covid-19, even as the earliest data trickled in. They decided the only way to protect their country, its people and economy, was to keep the virus out.

‘Britain, by contrast, made the catastrophic decision to treat the disease as akin to flu, aiming to limit its spread rather than stamp it out, said Jay Patel, a Covid-19 researcher at Edinburgh who studies comparative approaches to the pandemic worldwide. “Their playbook to begin with was different,” he said.’

Read here (Defend Democracy Press, Mar 21, 2021)

Covid: From boom to bust - Why lockdown hasn't led to more babies

‘For those who thought that lockdown would leave couples with little else to do than procreate, there was a surprise - not a baby boom but a baby bust. Research shows that the US is facing the biggest slump in births in a century and in parts of Europe the decline is even steeper. For those who study population the baby bust was not a revelation. "Having seen how bad the pandemic was I'm not surprised," says Philip N Cohen, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. "But it is still just shocking to see something like this happen in real time."

‘In June last year economists at the Brookings Institute in the United States estimated that US births would fall by 300,000 to half a million babies. At the same time a survey of fertility plans in Europe showed 50% of people in Germany and France who had planned to have a child in 2020 were going to postpone it. In Italy 37% said they had abandoned the idea altogether. A US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report indicates an 8% drop in births in the month of December.’

Read here (BBC, Mar 17, 2021)

Covid-19: EU warns UK over vaccine exports

‘Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, has said that if Covid vaccine supplies in Europe do not improve, the EU "will reflect whether exports to countries who have higher vaccination rates than us are still proportionate". Post-Brexit disagreements between the EU and the UK have been heightened by the diplomatic row over the export of the vaccines.

‘The European Council president, Charles Michel, claimed last week that the UK had imposed an "outright ban" on the export of vaccines and their components - there is no ban though, and his claim was dismissed by the government as "completely false". But Mrs von der Leyen says the EU is still waiting for exports from the UK, and it wants reciprocity.’

Read here (BBC, Mar 17, 2021)

The Nightingale alternative: Cast out fear in favour of love

‘According to Miss Nightingale: “True nursing ignores infection, except to prevent it. Cleanliness and fresh air from open windows, with unremitting attention to the patient, are the only defence a true nurse either asks or needs. Wise and humane management of the patient is the best safeguard against infection.”

‘Tell that to those who decided that old people already suffering from life-threatening complaints should be shut away for months on end, deprived of free movement in the open air and of the contact they crave with those they love!

‘And what would a woman who remarked, “How very little can be done under the spirit of fear!” have thought of the deliberate incitement of terror which has been the hallmark of public policy in the UK for the past eleven months?

‘What would her opinion have been of a government that splashes out apparently unlimited sums of public money on fear-inducing propaganda, with the aim of increasing “the perceived level of personal threat…using hard-hitting emotional messaging”?

‘A Nightingale approach to Covid, and to all infections, would allow us to cast out fear in favour of love, resolving the present conflict between concern for public health and the moral imperatives which should always take precedence over panicked speculation.

‘It would, however, be exceedingly inconvenient for those currently seizing the chance to impose their anti-human agendas on humanity, under cover of a pandemic.’

Read here (OffGuardian, Mar 7, 2021) 

100,000 deaths and a White Paper: What we need instead in Britain

‘We must refuse to engage on this paltry terrain. The pandemic, and the government’s abject failure to respond to it, should prompt a radical set of popular demands. Not since 1948 has there been such overwhelming public support for the NHS, or for the medical scientists and public health experts without whose knowledge and warnings even more lives would have been lost. In this context, and in recognition of how close we have come to an even greater disaster, we must reject this tinkering with the status quo.

‘Integration’ has served as a useful cover for Simon Stevens’s dismantling of the Lansley competition-based model, but it is a perverse misnomer for what the white paper proposes to embody in law. True integration is incompatible with a system of in-built conflicts of interest. Decisions about service provision need to be clearly accountable both to Parliament, and locally, to the public, neither of which is the case in what is proposed. Integration of healthcare with social care is indeed also needed, but is only possible if social care also becomes a public service. And neither this, nor adequate funding for the NHS, is ‘unaffordable’, especially while real interest rates are negative. What is unaffordable is to face the next pandemic as unprotected as we were for COVID-19.’

Read here (The Bullet, Mar 2, 2021)

What Europeans have learned from a year of pandemic

‘From the first case diagnosed a year ago at a hospital in northern Italy to the empty shops, restaurants and stadiums of Europe's cities, the lives of Europeans have been changed forever. Curbs on movement have forced every country and society to adapt its rules and rethink its culture. There have been hard truths and unexpected innovations in a year that changed Europe.

• Restrictions are tough for societies used to freedom
• Experts are essential, but mistakes have been made
• The EU wasn't set up for a pan-European health crisis
• Societies have responded in different ways
• A Europe without borders is fine in theory
• Hard truths about how we slaughter animals
• Europeans embraced lifestyle change in different ways

Read here (BBC, Feb 20, 2021)

Coronavirus (Covid-19) infection survey: Characteristics of people testing positive for Covid-19 in England, 22 February 2021

‘The UK government published a report on the infection risk associated with various occupations, based on data on COVID-19 cases in England from September 2020-January 2021. The analysis compared the likelihood of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 during the study period for 25 standardized occupation categories. The occupation-specific risk ranged from 2.1% to 4.8%, with an overall risk of 3.9%. None of the individual occupation groups had a statistically significant difference from the overall average; however, some of the occupations with the highest risk showed a significant increase over those with the lowest risk. 

‘Occupation groups at the upper end include professions such as teachers, law enforcement and prison staff, childcare and home care, and secretarial professions. Occupation categories with lower infection risk include professions such as farmers and gardeners; scientists, engineers, and researchers; legal, social work, and news media; and textiles and printing services.’ (Summary by John Hopkins Centre for Health Security)

Read here (Government of UK, Feb 21, 2021)

Three concessions from the West at G7: Britain, France and US

1. Boris Johnson pledges surplus to poorer countries at G7. Read here (BBC, Feb 20, 2021)
2. Macron proposes sending 4-5% of doses to poorer nations. Read here (BBC, Feb 19, 2021)
3. Biden pledges $4 billion for COVAX vaccinations program. Read here (DW, Feb 18, 2021)

Sensationalising, misrepresenting facts does disservice to people: Jeyakumar Devaraj

‘Yesterday morning, I came across an article titled “UK Government releases shocking report on Covid vaccine side effects” in one of the WhatsApp chat groups I am in. This article by dailyexpose.co.uk, dated 9 February 2021, states that 70,500 adverse reactions were reported in the 6.9 million people vaccinated in the UK between 8 December 2020 and 24 January 2021.

‘The article says five people went blind, 21 suffered strokes, 69 developed facial nerve weakness (Bell’s Palsy) and 107 died because of the Covid vaccine they received.

‘This is a terribly unscientific way of looking at the data. People get sick, suffer various maladies and die even when not vaccinated. So, we need to check whether the incidence of each of these adverse events is actually higher in the vaccinated cohort when compared to the baseline figures for that population. If it is, then it could be possible that the vaccine predisposes to these conditions, and we would have to look more closely.

‘Let’s take the deaths first. According to the UK Office for National Registration, in 2019 there were 1,079.4 deaths per 100,000 males and 798.9 deaths per 100,000 females – over the whole year.

‘The 107 deaths observed in the 6.9 million vaccinated individuals gives a mortality rate of 1.6 per 100,000 – over seven weeks. If we annualise it by multiplying 1.6 by 52 and dividing it by 7, we arrive at a figure of 11.5 per 100,000 – much lower than the UK Crude Death Rate (CDR) for 2019 (CDR = overall death rate without breaking it down into death rates for each age group). These figures indicate that it would be difficult to sustain an argument that the Covid vaccine increases the risk of dying in the UK population.’

Read here (Aliran, Feb 15, 2021)

US and UK in a spat with China over WHO probe on Covid-19

• White House cites 'deep concerns' about WHO Covid-19 report, demands early data from China (read here)
• UK says it shares US concerns over WHO COVID-19 mission to China (read here)
• China fires back at US allegations of lack of transparency over Covid-19 probe (read here)

All reports on Channel News Asia, Feb 14, 2021

Travelling during Covid: ‘I was nervous using a fake Covid-19 test certificate’

‘Coronavirus has changed the way we travel and many countries now demand proof of a negative Covid test before letting you in - with tests often costing hundreds of pounds. BBC reporter Joice Etutu has been speaking to two women who admit using and selling fake certificates...

‘Jessica* is also 24. She admits to selling fake Covid-19 certificates to people who wanted to travel abroad by advertising her services on social media. She says it was "easy money". "They just didn't want to pay £150 for a private test," she says. "We charged them £50. "Because it was so cheap people were asking so many questions, like 'how does it work?', 'when I get to the place are they gonna double check?', 'how did you do it?', 'am I gonna get in trouble?'"

‘Buying or even attempting to buy a forged certificate is a crime in the UK and using a forged certificate to travel is fraud by false representation. If you're caught selling fake certificates in the UK, you might face a prison sentence. Currently, it's the responsibility of airlines to check that passengers have a negative test result.’

Read here (BBC, Feb 9, 2021)

Is China to blame for Covid-19: Interview with The Lancet's editor Richard Horton

‘Whether it's Donald Trump, Tom Tugendhat or Paul Joseph Watson, various voices during this pandemic have blamed China for the mess we're in. How true is this? Editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical Journal, Richard Horton, argues that much of this stems from anti-Chinese racism and that we owe a debt of gratitude to the doctors, nurses and scientists of China.’

View here (Youtube, Novara Media, Feb 8, 2021)

Lancet editor says inequality and Covid-19 have converged to create a ‘syndemic’

‘In his new book "The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again," Dr. Richard Horton does more than trace the history of the COVID-19 pandemic and explain how we should listen to scientific experts in confronting this global scourge.

‘He does this, of course, but Horton is more ambitious than that. As editor-in-chief of "The Lancet" — one of the world's oldest, most famous and most prestigious medical journals — Horton has overseen the publication of countless articles on a variety of medical subjects. Hence, one can sense in his book a desire to apply the full breadth of his knowledge and experience to this problem. His conclusion is both fascinating and extremely relevant, even urgent.

‘As Horton explains, the COVID-19 pandemic was unnecessarily worsened by deeper social problems, from economic policies that left millions upon millions of people especially vulnerable to Western governments who made political assumptions about the virus that proved to be gravely mistaken. Speaking with Salon, Horton discussed everything from President Donald Trump's failure to address the pandemic (as well as President Joe Biden's early successes) to an intriguing thought experiment on what would have happened if the governments the world could have simply paid people to stay home.’

Read here (Salon, Feb 6, 2021)

Matt Hancock orders third review on link between vitamin D and Covid

‘A third review into the link between vitamin D and Covid has been ordered by the UK health secretary as more studies suggest that having low levels of the “sunshine hormone” raises the risk of death.

‘Matt Hancock has again asked the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), which sets NHS England clinical guidelines, and Public Health England (PHE) to “re-review” their prior appraisals, after the authorities began “encouraging” people to take vitamin D supplements rather than merely “advising” it.

‘Nice has twice said there was not sufficient causal evidence to support the use of vitamin D in high doses in hospitals to treat or prevent the respiratory illness. However, recent pilot and observational studies have suggested positive effects. A Queen Mary University of London study recently found that high-dose vitamin D supplementation significantly protects against respiratory illness.’

Read here (The Guardian, Feb 5, 2021)

Why has Britain failed on Covid? | Richard Horton, editor, The Lancet

‘A year after the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a pandemic, with Britain enduring more than a 100,000 deaths since, a number of major questions remain unanswered. Why was the response of the UK among the worst in the world? How is it possible that the death toll of countries in Europe and North America is so much higher than poorer countries in Asia such as Thailand and Vietnam? And when will things go ‘back to normal’? Discussing that, and more, is Richard Horton – editor of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet and author of ‘The Covid-19 catastrophe, what’s gone wrong and how to stop it happening again’.

View here (Novara Media, Feb 2, 2021)

Covid-19 infection rates fall as millions are vaccinated in Britain

‘Infection rates in the over-80s have fallen by 36 per cent this month. Other age groups have seen similar falls. The biggest drop was recorded in people in their 20s. Rates in that age group have halved. Prof Harnden said: “The data we have is still is very early because it only reflects approximately three or four weeks of the program and it’s mainly based on the Pfizer vaccine.”

Read here (News.com, Feb 1, 2021)

Oxford’s PRINCIPLE trial: Bringing ivermectin directly into the developed world in the battle against Covid-19

‘The University of Oxford soon kicks “the PRINCIPLE Trial” into a higher gear now, in what they consider a pathbreaking “high-quality trial” of Ivermectin, a generic drug already evidencing significant efficacy in over two dozen clinical trials around the world, according to some researchers. The UK government also backs this pivotal study via the Department of Health and Social Care. 

‘Searching for early-onset, home-based ambulatory treatments for COVID-19, the PRINCIPLE Trial seeks to meet a gap in research in the world’s richest nations to date. Nearly all of the taxpayer-financed research-based expenditures of governments in the US, UK and Europe, for example, have gone into vaccines, novel monoclonal antibodies, and novel therapeutics, with an emphasis on treating severely ill patients. 

‘Ivermectin, hailed as the “wonder drug” or “the People’s medicine” for COVID-19, gains growing attention worldwide made more widely available, frankly, partly due to TrialSite’s consistent chronicling of these trials around the world since the original University of Monash breakthrough.’

Read here (TrialSite News, Jan 23, 2021)