(03-02-2023, 12:23 PM)BIAD Wrote:

Quote:Nicky Campbell, the BBC Radio 5 Live broadcaster, wrote: “It’s the Tory-supporting Telegraph with the leaks reported by every
other broadcast organisation. Should these leaks of Hancock’s WhatsApp messages not be discussed? Are they not news?
The inquiry could take 10 years – that’s the argument of the Tory-supporting Telegraph.”

Quote:Matt Hancock: Eight government WhatsApp Covid messages revealed

'WhatsApp messages sent by Matt Hancock when he was health secretary during the pandemic have been
revealed. The messages, including conversations with ministers and officials, provide an insight into the inner
workings of government at the height of the pandemic.

Here are a few of the private texts published in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

1. 'What a bunch of absolute arses'
After congratulating the then education secretary Sir Gavin Williamson on delaying A-level exams for a few weeks
- a shorter period than some teaching unions called for - Mr Hancock had some choice words. On 1 October 2020,
Mr Hancock messaged Sir Gavin: "Cracking announcement today. What a bunch of absolute arses the teaching
unions are."

Sir Gavin replied: "I know they really really do just hate work." In response, Mr Hancock returned two laughing out
loud and a bullseye emoji.

2. 'I WANT TO HIT MY TARGET'
Mr Hancock texted his old boss George Osborne, ex-chancellor and then-Evening Standard editor, on 28 April 2020
to "call in a favour" asking for a favourable front page, as he tried to reach his own deadline to reach 100,000 daily
Covid tests.

Mr Osborne replied: "Yes - of course - all you need to do tomorrow is give some exclusive words to the Standard
and I'll tell the team to splash it." After replying with a quote, Hancock later writes in capital letters: "I WANT TO
HIT MY TARGET!" The editor answered bluntly: "I gathered."

In another interaction, on 9 November 2020 Mr Hancock asked for an explanation about Mr Osborne calling for
Boris Johnson to make testing his number one priority and insisted: "OK but mass testing is going very well."
"No-one thinks testing is going well, Matt," Mr Osborne replied.

3. 'They want an excuse to avoid having to teach'
Sir Gavin, messaging Mr Hancock, on 10 May 2020 ahead of schools reopening, asked for the health secretary's
help in getting personal protective equipment (PPE) for schools "as a last resort so they can't use it as a reason
not to open".

The education secretary texted: "All of them will [open] but some will just want to say they can't so they have an
excuse to avoid having to teach, what joys!!!"

4. 'Dying from Covid is as big as your risk of falling down stairs'
Boris Johnson had misgivings about the government's shielding advice in discussions with the chief medical officer
Prof Sir Chris Whitty. In August 2020 the then-prime minister suggested that if renewed lockdown restrictions were
needed over-65s be offered a choice on shielding.

Mr Johnson, addressing Sir Chris in a WhatsApp group on 9 August, said: "If you are over 65 your risk of dying from
Covid is probably as big as your risk of falling down stairs. And we don't stop older people from using stairs. What
do you think?" Sir Chris conceded that he "would think twice before shielding unless it threatened the NHS". Chief
scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance replied: "We haven't found shielding easy or very effective first time round."

Only a few days previously, shielding had ended for more than two million clinically vulnerable people in England,
Scotland and Wales. Since March 2020 they had been advised to stay at home to avoid contracting Covid.
Shielding later returned.

5. Testing is working 'for MOST'
Helen Whately, who was social care minister at the time, travelled 50 miles to a Covid test centre so a relative could
be tested in September 2020, according to the Telegraph. There were restricted numbers of home testing kits and the
public had to book a slot at a testing centre, where they could swab themselves and it would be sent to a laboratory.

Speaking of the experience on 19 September, she messaged Mr Hancock: "So my mystery shopping shows the system
is definitely working, at least for some." Mr Hancock enthusiastically replied "for MOST!", despite UK labs struggling to
keep up with demand and people being asked to travel hundreds of miles to get tested.

6. 'Williamson needs a haircut'
Mr Hancock clashed with Sir Gavin over whether to close schools ahead of their return January 2021. In private WhatsApp
messages with a special adviser, he said he had to take "rear guard action" to ensure schools did not open, while the
then-education secretary was battling to keep children in school.

During a meeting on Zoom on 28 December 2020 to decide on the fate of students, Mr Hancock and his special adviser
Emma Dean appeared to send each other messages commenting on the call, according to the Telegraph.
Ms Dean said: He's [Sir Gavin] freaking out. You can tell he isn't being wholly rational."
Mr Hancock got his way as schools closed days later amid a national lockdown.

In an earlier exchange in September the pair took aim at Sir Gavin following the education secretary being forced to
abandon A-level and GCSE students being given grades by algorithm. Replying to Ms Dean's suggestion Gavin looked
awful and questioning if the education secretary was OK, Mr Hancock said: "He needs a haircut and a holiday
somewhere other than Scarborough!"

7. 'Drinks cold in the fridge'
During the May 2020 drive to hit the 100,000 tests per day target, trucks full were bought from Amazon.
Mr Hancock was worried the government could look "flaky" if it was accused of using them to pad the stats.
But there was jubilation when the target was hit - not least from Gina Coladangelo, the aide with whom Mr Hancock
had an affair.

She messaged: "Drinks cold in fridge at [Department for Health]. Feel free to open them before we are back [beer emoji]".
But problems continued. Mr Johnson admitted in June he was "going quietly crackers" over capacity, asking "what is
wrong with us as a country that we can't fix this?". In September, Mr Hancock was advised to avoid an interview with
Andrew Neil "because he could go hard on testing".

8. 'Eh'
One set of messages shows Boris Johnson getting in a muddle over statistics.
He flagged a Financial Times article stating the global case fatality rate had fallen below 0.04. Mr Johnson wanted to
know why the British death rate appeared to be much higher at 4%.

Chief scientific officer Sir Patrick, chief medical officer Sir Chris, aide Dominic Cummings, Cabinet Secretary Simon
Case and Mr Hancock all chipped in. When Mr Vallance eventually pointed out the FT figure is a probability, not a
percentage, the PM replied "Eh" followed by another message reading simply "?".

He offers "five marks" to whoever can explain the difference and asks them to "show working" - before Mr Cummings
assures him it is a "common confusion". In the same exchange, Mr Johnson says he "knows what I would prefer" if
he was 80 and given a choice between exposure to Covid-19 and "destroying the economy"...'

Quote:'...Matt Hancock suggested to an aide that they "frighten the pants off everyone" about Covid, messages
published by the Sunday Telegraph show. It appears the former health secretary discussed when to reveal
the existence of the Kent variant of Covid to ensure people complied with lockdown rules.

In another exchange, the head of the Civil Service, Simon Case, suggested the "fear/guilt factor" was vital
to the government's messaging...'

(03-06-2023, 02:27 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: ...

This Hancock character needs to be dragged out to the gallows. 

Quote:The world has wicked problems.

Quote:Covid global health emergency is over, WHO says

'The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared that Covid-19 no longer represents a "global health emergency".
The statement represents a major step towards ending the pandemic and comes three years after it first declared its
highest level of alert over the virus.


Diversity following the rules.

Officials said the virus' death rate had dropped from a peak of more than 100,000 people per week in January 2021
to just over 3,500 on 24 April. The head of the WHO said at least seven million people died in the pandemic.

'Great hope'
But Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the true figure was "likely" closer to 20 million deaths - nearly three
times the official estimate - and he warned that the virus remained a significant threat. "Yesterday, the Emergency
Committee met for the 15th time and recommended to me that I declare an end to the public health emergency of
international concern. I've accepted that advice.

It is therefore with great hope that I declare Covid-19 over as a global health emergency," Dr Tedros said.
He added that the decision had been considered carefully for some time and made on the basis of careful analysis
of data. But he warned the removal of the highest level of alert did not mean the danger was over and said the
emergency status could be reinstated if the situation changed.

"The worst thing any country can do now is to use this news as a reason to let down its guard, to dismantle the
systems it has built, or to send the message to its people that Covid-19 is nothing to worry about," he said.

The World Health Organization first declared Covid-19 to be a public health emergency of international concern
(PHEIC) in January 2020. This signalled the need for coordinated global action to protect people from the new virus.
It will now be up to individual countries to continue to manage Covid in the way they think best.

Vaccines were one of the major turning points in the pandemic. According to the WHO, 13 billion doses have been
given, allowing many people to be protected from serious illness and death. But in many countries vaccines have
not reached most of those in need.

More than 765 million confirmed Covid infections have been recorded worldwide.
The US and UK, like many other countries, have already talked about "living with the virus" and wound down many
of the tests and social mixing rules. Dr Mike Ryan, from the WHO's health emergencies programme, said the
emergency may have ended, but the threat is still there.

"We fully expect that this virus will continue to transmit and this is the history of pandemics," he said.
"It took decades for the final throes of the pandemic virus of 1918 to disappear.
"In most cases, pandemics truly end when the next pandemic begins."...'

Quote:NIH announces Long-sought universal flu vaccine: mRNA-based candidate enters clinical trial (5/16/2023)

The phase I trial will test safety and efficacy in a small number of people.

An mRNA-based flu vaccine designed to offer long-lasting protection against a broad range of influenza viruses is now in a phase I clinical trial, the National Institutes of Health announced this week.

The trial brings the remarkable success of the mRNA vaccine platform to the long-standing efforts to develop a universal flu vaccine. Currently, health systems around the globe battle the seasonal scourge with shots that have to be reformulated each year to match circulating strains. This reformulation happens months before typical transmission, providing manufacturers time to produce doses at scale but also giving the strain in circulation chances to shift unexpectedly. If the year's shot is a poor match for the strains that circulate in a given season, efficacy against infection can be abysmal. Still, even when the shot is well-matched, people will need another shot next year.

"A universal influenza vaccine would be a major public health achievement and could eliminate the need for both annual development of seasonal influenza vaccines, as well as the need for patients to get a flu shot each year," Hugh Auchincloss, acting director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a news release. "Moreover, some strains of influenza virus have significant pandemic potential. A universal flu vaccine could serve as an important line of defense against the spread of a future flu pandemic."

A successful design has been elusive. Flu vaccines often generate immune responses to fast-evolving bits of proteins on the outside of flu virus particles, hemagglutinin (Ha or H) and neuraminidase (Na or N). These proteins are responsible for helping the virus break into and out of human cells, respectively, during an infection. Both proteins look a little like lollipops stuck to the outside of the virus particle, with their tops evolving and being prime targets for potent antibodies against the virus.

For the universal vaccine design, NIH researchers have targeted not the tops of these proteins but a portion of the Ha protein's stem—a highly conserved part of the protein that doesn't evolve as quickly. Human antibodies that target this conserved region will likely target Ha proteins from a range of different flu strains in the same class. And, because this section doesn't evolve as quickly, the vaccine could induce long-term immunity. With this design, the mRNA-based vaccine will include a snippet of genetic code in the form of mRNA that gives human cells the blueprints for this conserved stem region. From there, the immune system can learn to target it.

There's already data to suggest this target could work. Before NIH researchers used an mRNA-based design, they developed a similar HA-stem targeting vaccine that appeared safe and effective in a phase I trial. The vaccine uses stabilized protein fragments of the Ha stem stuck to a nanoparticle. Last month, NIH researchers published results showing that this nanoparticle vaccine induced cross-reacting neutralizing antibodies against influenza viruses in the same virus group (H1). And those neutralizing antibodies stuck around for more than a year after vaccination. The vaccine candidate has advanced to a second trial. The researchers are hopeful that having multiple platforms in the works will increase their chances of getting a successful vaccine.

For now, the mRNA-based vaccine is starting with a small trial of just 50 people recruited through partners at Duke University. Three groups of 10 volunteers will get different vaccine doses to find the optimal dose. Once that's found, 10 more will be vaccinated, and their responses will be compared to a 10-person control group that will be given a standard annual flu vaccine.


Beth Mole is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.

Quote:Video emerges of Tory staff partying during Covid

'A video has emerged showing some Conservative Party workers drinking and dancing at a Christmas party
during the Covid pandemic. In the video, published by the Mirror, one person is heard saying it is OK to film
"as long as we don't stream that we're, like, bending the rules".



The paper says the video sheds new light on a gathering that police had previously looked into.
The Conservatives said disciplinary action had already been taken. The video, taken at the Conservative party's
headquarters in Westminster, dates from December 2020 when London was in Tier 2 restrictions.
This meant people were banned from socialising indoors, except with members of their household or a support
bubble.

People in London who did want to socialise at that stage of the pandemic had to do so in a garden or at a pub
with outdoor seating - but such gatherings were limited to groups of six people. Police investigated the event
last year and no fines were issued. Shaun Bailey, who was given a peerage in Boris Johnson's resignation
honours list this week, was running for London mayor in December 2020, and members of his campaign team
attended this gathering inside the Tory party's HQ.

The event has been reported before, but only still photographs were published by the Daily Mirror. Although
Mr Bailey was photographed surrounded by party workers in those images, he is not seen in this newly-obtained
video. In November 2022, Scotland Yard said it was taking no action against Mr Bailey nor other people who
attended the gathering.

The Conservative Party said four people seconded to Mr Bailey's campaign were disciplined.
In the 45-second video on the Mirror website, people can be seen drinking and standing in groups, while a man
and a woman can be seen holding hands and dancing.


Mocking at Christmas, a game for all the family and friends.

Labour's Angela Rayner said the attendees had "openly mocked" the rules of Covid pandemic.
"The Tories think it's one rule for them and one rule for everyone else," added the deputy leader.
Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper Tory MPs and ministers should be "sick to their stomachs" seeing
this new footage. "While families grieved and NHS staff worked on the front line, Conservative Campaign
Headquarters partied."

The Metropolitan Police have not yet responded to the new video footage...'

Quote:They Suffered Myocarditis After COVID-19 Vaccination. Years Later, Some Still Haven't Recovered.
(Illustration by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock)
By Zachary Stieber, Lia Onely
|
Sep 20, 2023
Updated:
Sep 21, 2023
Under pressure from the military and his mother, Jacob Cohen was feeling increasingly cornered.
Mr. Cohen did not want to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. He knew the shots had not been available for long. He was worried about their safety.
While Mr. Cohen initially resisted receiving a shot, he faced restrictions such as being forced to remain on base while vaccinated soldiers left. He was also pressured by military commanders, who scheduled a vaccination appointment for him and contacted his mother as part of a multipronged campaign.
"They told me, 'Come on. It's your mother. She's crying. She's worried. What wouldn't you do for her?'" Mr. Cohen, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym because of concern about repercussions for going public, told The Epoch Times.
"I didn't want to take the vaccine. I didn't believe in it," he said. But he wanted to appease his mother. "I would do anything for her."
Mr. Cohen received his first shot, manufactured by Pfizer, on Sept. 22, 2021. He was 21.
Two weeks later, he was awakened by a sharp pain at 3 a.m.
"I felt like my heart was trying to get out of my chest," Mr. Cohen said.
The soldier has felt pain before. "I never felt something like this," he said.
Mr. Cohen went with a friend to the hospital, where he was placed in quarantine because he wasn't fully vaccinated. Thirty minutes ticked by.
"I felt like it was the first time in my life I actually started seeing flashbacks of things that I did in my life—I felt like I was truly dying," Mr. Cohen said.

U.S. Army soldiers prepare Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines at the Miami Dade College North Campus in North Miami on March 9, 2021. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Doctors finally came in and ran tests. They diagnosed Mr. Cohen with perimyocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle and the tissue around the heart.
They said Mr. Cohen was lucky. If he had come just a little later, he would have needed open heart surgery.
He spent three days in the hospital, taking medication and pills. When he was discharged, he was told not to engage in any physical activity for at least six months. He also needed to report for regular checkups and take a pill every day.
Six months after leaving the hospital, Mr. Cohen's cardiac MRI showed concerning results. His heart still hadn't recovered.
Doctors gave him more pills.
"They told me maybe I will need them for the rest of my life," Mr. Cohen said.
The military marked him as unable to serve for the rest of his life, and released him.
To this day, he suffers.
"I've been feeling, I'm not sure if it's trauma or something, but it feels sometimes like a sting there, a short sharp pain," Mr. Cohen said.

He's also unable to do all he used to do before.
"I was training. I was playing soccer. I did a lot of physical things, which now I can't afford ... to do anymore," Mr. Cohen said.
'Continued Pain'
Dr. Adam Hirschfeld was among the first people to receive a COVID-19 vaccine in the United States
The orthopedic surgeon was motivated by a desire to prevent his patients from becoming sick.
"I didn't want to put any of my patients at risk," Dr. Hirschfeld told The Epoch Times.
He received a Moderna primary series, composed of two doses, in January 2021. He was 36.
Three days after the second shot, Dr. Hirschfeld felt discomfort in his chest and numbness in his left arm.
A cardiac MRI confirmed evidence of heart inflammation. Dr. Hirschfeld was prescribed medicine and discharged two days later.
Dr. Hirschfeld has since undergone about a dozen electrocardiograms, another half a dozen echocardiograms, and a follow-up cardiac MRI.
"I went from being completely healthy—no issues, no medications—to seeing 10 different doctors in the blink of an eye," Dr. Hirschfeld said.
The follow-up MRI, conducted about 18 months after the vaccinations, showed normal cardiac function.

But Dr. Hirschfeld still experiences pain.
"I have continued chest pain on the right side, and then I have neuropathic type pains in my neck and shoulder areas," he told The Epoch Times. "I have it when I wake up, and it's there when I go to sleep."
The suffering affects the doctor physically and mentally.
"Having chest pain every day for two and a half years is very disconcerting," he said.
Pfizer and Moderna didn't respond to requests for comment.
Shots Cleared; Cases Appear
Mr. Cohen lives in Israel. Dr. Hirschfeld lives in the United States.
The first myocarditis cases after COVID-19 vaccination were reported in those countries in January 2021. Only a few weeks had elapsed since authorities cleared and recommended the shots for large portions of the population, including many young, healthy people.

A man receives the first dose of a Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in Meitar, Israel, on March 9, 2021. (Amir Levy/Getty Images)

At first, authorities hid reports of myocarditis from the public. Israel first acknowledged there was a likely link between the shots and the inflammation. The United States finally followed in June 2021, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said there was a "likely association."
Even after the association was made public, officials and many experts claimed that the myocarditis cases were mild. Most patients were hospitalized, authorities acknowledged, but they said patients could expect to recover without treatment and with rest.
The myocarditis is "rare but mild," Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC's director at the time, said on "Good Morning America" on June 24, 2021.
Dr. Walensky said the cases were "self-limited," or didn't require treatment to resolve.
Then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky speaks to reporters at a COVID-19 mass vaccination site at Hynes Convention Center in Boston on March 30, 2021. (Erin Clark-Pool/Getty Images)
Dr. Jeremy Faust, editor-in-chief of MedPage Today and a teacher at Harvard Medical School, on Twitter two days later described the cases as "self-limited troponinemia," or elevated troponin levels that would resolve on their own. Troponin is a protein in the heart that's a marker of heart injury.
Those claims were already wrong at the time, based on case reports alone.
A previously healthy 24-year-old man in Massachusetts, for example, experienced chest pain so serious that he went to an emergency department, doctors reported on May 18, 2021. He was eventually discharged with a prescription for a beta-blocker and anti-inflammatory drugs and told not to engage in strenuous activity for three months.
Another early case involved a previously healthy 16-year-old boy in California who experienced "stabbing chest pain" and went to the emergency department for help. He described the pain as 6 to 8 on a scale of 1 to 10. The symptoms prompted doctors to admit him to intensive care. He spent six days in the hospital before being discharged.
Like many early case reports, no follow-up data were reported, making it impossible to say that the cases had fully resolved.
"Unless you've experienced it individually, you can't tell somebody that their case was mild," Dr. Hirschfeld said. "If you have elevated troponin, that's your cardiac muscle breaking down.
"That's something that's permanent. And so to tell me that my cardiac muscle breaking down is mild is pretty insulting."

Signs of persistent symptoms appeared in the literature before long. U.S. military researchers, for instance, stated on June 29, 2021, that seven of 23 patients continued to have chest discomfort weeks or even months later. Dire outcomes were known even earlier. Two deaths were reported to U.S. authorities in February 2021, while another two were reported in Israel in the spring. Both of the Israelis who died were previously young and healthy.
Professional Biker Affected
Kyle Warner was a professional mountain bike racer when he received his first COVID-19 vaccine in May 2021. He completed a primary series the following month.
Mr. Warner, who lives in the western United States, teaches older people and wanted to protect them from COVID-19. The CDC and others promoted the idea that the vaccines curbed or even prevented transmission based on observational data.
"The sentiment was these are safe and effective. If you get them, you don't need to wear a mask anymore, and you can't transmit COVID or catch COVID," Mr. Warner told The Epoch Times. "I spend quite a bit of time around older people and help them learn.
"I wasn't necessarily afraid of COVID myself. Not that I did respect it, but I wasn't worried it was going to kill me," he added. "But I was worried about getting someone else sick, especially when I'm with our older clients."

Quote:The B/Yamagata detection results from FluNet are important but caution is currently needed in their interpretation as the sporadic B/Yamagata detections could be vaccine-derived. They could be linked to the presence of live-attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV) preparations in the environment or RNA from traditional inactivated vaccines if they were administered in the same room where specimens are also collected from patients [16,17].

Indeed, a number of B/Yamagata detections in Scotland and the United States during the 2021/22 season were confirmed as being linked to LAIV [18,19]. Another important point is that if the B/Yamagata lineage does become extinct, there is the potential of a later re-introduction of this influenza virus lineage (as has happened in the past, e.g. the re-emergence of influenza A(H1N1) in 1977) and this lineage could still pose a risk in the coming years [1].

...
Conclusion

Influenza B/Yamagata is being closely monitored by WHO GISRS NICs and the WHO Collaborating Centres for influenza. We think it would be advisable to also establish a dedicated multi-disciplinary working group (virologists, immunologists, epidemiologists, modellers, policymakers, experts from GISRS and industry), under the auspices of the WHO, that publishes and communicates criteria to define the moment when B/Yamagata is declared extinct (e.g. 24 months of no new wild-type cases), the data that should be collected (e.g. epidemiological data to define wild-type cases) and the consequences of this declaration (e.g. vaccine composition).

(10-01-2023, 12:26 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: Conclusion

Influenza B/Yamagata is being closely monitored by WHO GISRS NICs and the WHO Collaborating Centres for influenza. We think it would be advisable to also establish a dedicated multi-disciplinary working group (virologists, immunologists, epidemiologists, modellers, policymakers, experts from GISRS and industry), under the auspices of the WHO, that publishes and communicates criteria to define the moment when B/Yamagata is declared extinct (e.g. 24 months of no new wild-type cases), the data that should be collected (e.g. epidemiological data to define wild-type cases) and the consequences of this declaration (e.g. vaccine composition).

Has influenza B/Yamagata become extinct and what implications might this have for quadrivalent influenza vaccines?

(10-24-2023, 10:46 AM)BIAD Wrote: A Member of Parliament finally got his chance to discuss something that the media have avoided.
Listen to it.