Phenell Podcast 01

This is Phenell Podcast 01, Boxing Day 2021

A Mobile Phone Pandemic?

Omicron looks like it will be pretty ubiquitous pretty soon.

And they are testing like mad in the UK.

Which means that many people who go into hospital for everything from an ingrowing toenail to having their wisdom teeth fixed will have tested positive in the previous 28 days.

Which means they will each be counted in the official statistics a Covid case.

Meanwhile, many people will have used their mobile phones. And they will sometimes need to go to hospital, just like usual. Having used their mobile phone in the previous 28 days.

Which means that announcing a mobile phone pandemic will make just about as much sense as maintaining that there is still a Covid pandemic.

The people who have been done like a kipper

I do wonder whether, to at least some extent, public support for the further Covid measures announced in the UK this week has been driven by resentment.

Surely some of the people who, in good faith, submitted to the vaccine unnecessarily (I have in mind the people who were never at any real risk of dying from Covid) must now be realising that they have been done like a kipper.  They have seen the latest round of Covid measures in the UK introduced in response to a variant which – according to all the available evidence so far presents no material risk at all.  They have seen the Prime Minister announced those measures which suggests – as a matter of timing – that the primary motive for them was to distract attention from the Prime Minister’s current political difficulties. Those difficulties arising from very strong evidence that 10 Downing Street was busy having parties this time last year, when such parties were banned for the rest of the population. Ordinary people have been prosecuted for not obeying them whilst the government has been just laughing at them.

It is consistent with human nature for people who have submitted to the vaccine to feel consciously or unconsciously resentful of those people who resisted the pressure to get vaccinated.  Clearly, some of the people who got vaccinated thought that they were doing “the right thing”. Equally clearly, there are others who never wanted to get vaccinated, but were coerced into it. Either way, they might feel: why should the unvaccinated not now feel the pain?

The Turning of the Tide for Covid Hysteria?

It is too early to be sure, but it does rather seem that the tide has finally turned on Covid hysteria. This is not to say that it is going to disappear overnight. The tide takes a while to come in, and a while to retreat.  This post is not the place to run through all the evidence that Covid hysteria – all of the lockdowns, the travel restrictions, the masks, the abandonment of the Nuremberg code to coerce inoculations and the shutting down – has caused far more damage than it has prevented. Rather to identify pointers that this particularly nasty silly season is at long last showing signs of subsiding.

I have said before, and will probably say again, that government measures have not been driven by “the science”.[1] Rather, they have been driven by public opinion; the population at large around most of the Western world has been scared witless by tales of Covid 19, as if it were the Black Death. This is not deny that Covid 19 has been a nasty little bug.  It plainly has been (albeit that it is not up at the extreme end of nastiness as far as bugs go). Accordingly, there has been a double bump for politicians:

• To follow the well-founded well-established previous protocols (minimise disruption to everyday life) would have exposed governments to a deafening bray from the blob;
• Beggaring previous expectations, imposing restrictions has proved to be surprisingly popular with the voters.

Further, as has been noted many times, it is much easier to scare the public that it is to reassure them.

Anyway, scarces come, and eventually they go. What makes me think that this one is now headed, however reluctantly, for the door?

• The big factor is the arrival on the scene of the Omicron variant.[2] A good source of information on this is Dr John Campbell, who publishes daily talks on YouTube.  He notes that of the 336 confirmed cases of Omicron in the UK (that is the latest data, will be a day or so out of date now) not a single one of them has led to a hospital admission.  And what of the people who are in hospital with omicron? Dr Campbell looked at the evidence of that from South Africa earlier in the week. He refers to the evidence from the South African medical research Council which has examined the 166 cases of patients with Covid 19 (almost certainly Omicron variant). A couple of things stand out. The first is that over three quarters of them were not admitted for anything to do with Covid at all. They may not have even known that they had Covid, but the standard practice at the Steve Biko Hospital in Pretoria is to test everybody. The second parallel point is that nobody is dying of the Omicron variant.[3] this evidence is consistent with what is becoming out of Oslo; of the 120 people who have tested positive for Covid having attended a particular restaurant on 26 November, none have become seriously ill.[4]
• This good news is compounded by the evidence that Omicron appears to outcompete other variants. In other words, the particularly nasty variants of the bug are rapidly being replaced by a variant that rather looks as though it is is no worse than the common cold.
• Just as a nasty bug is best displaced by a less nasty bug, so so a silly scare most likely be displaced by scarce about something else. And there is now substantial evidence that lockdowns have caused more harm than good.[5] The mainstream media has not been particularly interested in academic studies about the efficacy of Covid measures, but is starting to take interest in people dying of cancer, or committing suicide, by reason of the Covid restrictions.
• My daughter Annabel wrote an article this week for the Telegraph in London headed The true cost of the travel red list – and why it’s pointless anyway.  What is remarkable about the piece is not so much its content (Annabel has made similar points before) but rather that the comments posted by readers are pretty much universally in agreement. A few months ago, there would have been a mix of comments from both sides of the argument.
• Likewise, more and more evidence has been coming in that the inoculations (I hesitate to call them vaccines, because they are not really vaccines at all) are a good deal less effective than had been hoped. For example, evidence from the federal prison in the United States suggests that it is really not useful at all against the Delta variant.[6]
• Similarly, in Sweden Dr Sebastian Rushworth has been noting that natural immunity seems to work much better than the inoculations.[8]

Assuming that I am right, and that the tide is turning, is the hysteria going to go meekly? I rather doubt it. Those of us who read history will have been struck how regimes for whom the writing is clearly on the wall tend to behave even more violently and irrationally than ever. The closing months of the Second World War in Germany are striking case in point is the Germans sent their children into war as they stepped up their efforts to exterminate the Jews and steal Europe’s artwork. Likewise, I think we will see nations commit more and more egregious offences contrary to the Nuremberg code[7] (which forbids coercing people into medical procedures they do not want) as the drug companies collect the last few tens of billions of dollars to be earned from the inoculations.

The EU and Pfizer

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[1] Apart from anything else, as lawyers who deal with technical cases well know, as do those who study the machinery of government, it is all too easy to find expert evidence to support pretty much any case one wishes to run. The leading epidemiologists in the world have criticised Western governments response Covid 19, but their voices have been ignored by pretty much all governments.

[2] Cynics note that omicron is an anagram of moronic. But that is not why the name was chosen; it is simply a Greek letter (they skipped over Nu and Xi – the latter to avoid offence to Chinese leader, it seems).  The reason, I suspect, omicron is not particularly well known as a Greek letter is that it does not have a symbol that is different from our alphabet. Letters like alpha, beta, delta, lamda, theta, et cetera, are useful in science because they have useful connotations. Lamba( λ) for example is well recognised as representing a wavelength. Omicron is just boring old “o”. And so not very useful.

[3] SAMRC report:

A key question regarding the new Omicron outbreak is whether disease severity is similar, milder or more severe than with the other variants, given the large number of Omicron mutations.

The best indicator of disease severity is measured by the in-hospital death rate. There were 10 deaths in the SBAH/TDH cohort in the past two weeks, making up 6.6% of the 166 admissions. Four deaths were in adults aged 26 – 36 and five (5) deaths were in adults over 60. One death was in a child in whom the cause of deaths was unrelated to COVID. There were no COVID related deaths among 34 admissions in the paediatric COVID wards over the last two weeks. This compares favorably to the proportion of deaths at the complex over the past 18 months which was 17%.

[4] The Telegraph reports:

The omicron outbreak at an Oslo Christmas party seen as “the biggest in the world outside South Africa” is so far only causing mild disease, with Norway’s state epidemiologist expressing hope that it might mark the beginning of the end of the pandemic. 

As many as 120 people who attended the Louise Restaurant and Bar on the night of Nov 26 tested positive for Covid. Around half of those have screened positive for omicron, with 13 proven to have the variant in sequencing.

“They have symptoms like fever, cough, headache, muscle pain,  fatigue, but for now none of them have become severely ill and none of them have been treated in hospital,” Tine Ravlo, an Oslo infectious diseases doctor, told The Telegraph.

[5] Thus for example in the Canadian paper The SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic in High Income Countries Such as Canada: A Better Way Forward Without Lockdowns it is noted that

Several reports find that lockdowns, even if they were to be highly effective, can be predicted to cause at least 5–10-times more harm to population wellbeing and deaths in the long-term than they prevent (46, 53, 77–79). Harms include economic recession, unemployment, loneliness, poverty and food insecurity, deterioration of mental health with increased suicides and substance use, increased intimate partner violence and child abuse, lost education and future potential in children, delayed/disrupted health care for serious conditions, and increased societal inequality (79, 80). Framing a recession as being “the economy vs. lives” is a dangerous false dichotomy; as governments can spend less on the social determinants of health, including healthcare, education, roads, sanitation, housing, nutrition, vaccines, safety, social security nets, clean energy, etc., statistical lives will be lost in the years to come (77–79). Importantly, the negative effect of a drop in GDP on population wellbeing and lifespan consistently occur over the long-term, even though not detectable during the short-term due to temporary increased government spending (11, 81–83). Unemployment and loneliness are two of the strongest risk factors for shortened lifespan and chronic diseases (84).

Cost-benefit analyses of each alternative set of possible response measures should be performed, using a common metric that allows making commensurable comparisons among all outcomes, such as the WELLBY or QALY metric (77, 79, 83, 85–87). When done, these analyses have consistently found lockdowns to have higher costs than benefits (Table 5) (46, 53, 77–79, 88–93). Of note, these cost-benefit analyses have made assumptions in favor of lockdowns (i.e., marked reductions in COVID-19 fatalities), and very conservative against lockdowns (e.g., not including the predictable effects of loneliness and unemployment on lifespan and chronic disease, of societal disruption on world food insecurity and poverty rates, of interrupted health care on conditions other than COVID-19; and using the highest estimates of the value of QALY or WELLBY) (11, 77, 84, 92). Therefore, despite the difficulties inherent in complex cost-benefit analyses, the results strongly suggest that lockdowns do not have a favorable cost-benefit balance.

[6] In the paper Transmission potential of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant in a federal prison, July—August 2021 the results are summarised thus:

Results A total of 978 specimens were provided by 95 participants, of whom 78 (82%) were fully vaccinated and 17 (18%) were not fully vaccinated. No significant differences were detected in duration of RT-PCR positivity among fully vaccinated participants (median: 13 days) versus those not fully vaccinated (median: 13 days; p=0.50), or in duration of culture positivity (medians: 5 days and 5 days; p=0.29). Among fully vaccinated participants, overall duration of culture positivity was shorter among Moderna vaccine recipients versus Pfizer (p=0.048) or Janssen (p=0.003) vaccine recipients.

Conclusions As this field continues to develop, clinicians and public health practitioners should consider vaccinated persons who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 to be no less infectious than unvaccinated persons. These findings are critically important, especially in congregate settings where viral transmission can lead to large outbreaks.

[7] By way of reminder:

The Nuremberg Code (1947)

Permissible Medical Experiments

The great weight of the evidence before us to effect that certain types of medical experiments on human beings, when kept within reasonably well-defined bounds, conform to the ethics of the medical profession generally. The protagonists of the practice of human experimentation justify their views on the basis that such experiments yield results for the good of society that are unprocurable by other methods or means of study. All agree, however, that certain basic principles must be observed in order to satisfy moral, ethical and legal concepts:

1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.
   
   The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs, or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.
2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results justify the performance of the experiment.
4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability or death.
8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him, that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.

[8] Covid: the surprising fourth wave

So, Israel gets hit by a fourth wave, as do many other places. Why are the places discussed at the beginning of this article, Sweden, Lombardy, and New York, not currently experiencing fourth waves?

As I see it, there are two possibilities. The first is that these places have developed so much natural immunity, thanks to the fact that they’ve experienced a couple of extra months of heavy spread of covid-19 during the spring of 2020, that covid is now over and done with in those places and no more big waves are coming. Israel has high rates of vaccination, but at the beginning of autumn 2021 it had experienced fewer months of pandemic spread, and thereby had a lower proportion of the population that had developed natural immunity from prior infection. It’s been pretty well established by now that the immunity conferred by infection is far more durable than the immunity conferred by vaccination, so that is a reasonable hypothesis, now that we know the immunity generated by the vaccines is so fleeting…

So, the first possible explanation I mentioned for why some places are not experiencing a fourth wave is that those places now have sufficient natural population immunity, which is protecting them. The second option is that these places are currently enjoying temporary protection, afforded by the fact that they vaccinated their populations later than places like Israel. If that is the case, then they will head in to fourth waves in another month or two.

Numero Ooni for Pizza

One of my better puchases his year has been an Ooni pizza oven.

Pizza never really works in a conventional oven. Not hot enough. This badger, fueled by a gas bottle, gets much hotter. The result is pretty much identical to what one gets out of a big wood fired pizza oven.

Furthermore, good service from the Pizza Oven Store.

Photo Shoo

My darling has told me it is time for better photos on my practice website. She is clearly right, and got snapping.

I liked this one…

… but not suitable.

Legal Here, but not There

It may not be wholly infallible, but a reasonably robust way of assessing the severity of a criminal charge is to ask whether the conduct complained of would be criminal if it occurred somewhere else. Clearly, the most serious offences – murder, theft, robbery, rape (in the traditionally accepted sense of forcible sex contrary to the wishes of the other party) et cetera are offences everywhere.

The offences of which Ghislaine Maxwell is charged are not, in this test, particularly serious.  Jeffrey Epstein had sexual encounters with teenage girls. Different countries, and different States in the United States, set different age benchmarks, below which such sexual encounters are criminal.  Ghislaine Maxwell has been accused of assisting him, although it appears that he obtained fulsome assistance from some of the women – then teenagers and, some would say, cadet prostitutes – who are now giving evidence, presumably in the hope of a cash payout.

All this is the more unsatisfactory since whatever happened was so long ago, such that the likelihood of witnessing remembering things which did not in fact happen is acute.  At least one of them seems to have difficulty in remembering where her alleged sexual encounter took place; was it somewhere where it was illegal or not?

Notwithstanding, Ghislaine Maxwell is in real trouble. The judge has been against in every ruling so far. The mob is baying for a scapegoat, having been denied the opportunity to prosecute Jeffrey Epstein himself. Ghislaine Maxwell might well spend the rest of her life in jail.

We do not know if Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide, or was murdered. It is something of a mystery quite how he managed to accumulate such a vast fortune, especially since he was apparently so busy with the girls, and indeed socialising generally.  The trial might well throw up evidence of all sorts of people who were rather more involved with Jeffrey Epstein than they would like now to acknowledge. There might well be evidence of cameras planted throughout Jeffrey Epstein’s homes. Did Jeffrey Epstein use footage from these cameras to blackmail the wealthy? That would provide an explanation as to why he ended up dead.