73 thoughts on “June Bank Holiday Papers

    1. ce

      Yes, but they protect us from psycho-gulls… and also Richard Madeley…silver linings…

  1. f_lawless

    “UK in race to stop variant spread of long Covid”
    “Experts warn of long Covid risk in unvaccinated younger people”

    Official Covid narrative in the UK descending into a desperate farce. Can’t mention hospitalisations or deaths any more because there’s been nothing much to speak of for some time now. Time to dust off long Covid again

  2. f_lawless

    I’m trying my comment again without the link. Article seems to be black listed in some way.
    Website is “ConservatÍve Woman co uk”
    Title: “CovÍd jab approved for 12-15 age group – but regulator won’t take responsÍbility”

    Quote:

    IT WAS announced yesterday that the MedÍcines Healthcare and products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has approved the PfÍzer vaccÍne for British 12-15-year-olds. This decisÍon comes in the same week that 93 Israeli doctors wrote to their government begging them not to use CovÍd-I9 vaccÍnes on children..

    The doctors said: ‘We believe that not even a handful of children should be endangered through mass vaccÍnatÍion against a disease not dangerous to them . . .

    ‘Furthermore, it cannot be ruled out that the vaccÍne will have long-term adverse effects that have not yet been discovered at this time, including on growth, reproductive system or fertÍlity . . .

    ‘The increasingly prevalent opinion within the scientific community is that the vaccÍne cannot lead to herd immunity, therefore there is currently no “altruistic” justification for vaccÍnating children to protect at-risk populations.’
    ___________
    Meanwhile a couple of days ago Boris Johnson declared

    ” VaccÍnating the world by the end of next year would be the single greatest feat in medical history..
    I’m calling on my fellow G7 leaders to join us to end to this terrible pandemic”

    He really does mean every man, woman and child. There are clearly other political agendas in motion here separate to public health. What other way to describe it but deeply sinister?

    1. Unreal

      Sinister or just money grabbing business as usual f?
      My feeling is that political types should have no role at all in making public health decisions

    2. Nigel

      If you take as a starting point that vaccinating people to protect them from a disease is a fundamentally nefarious activity, then, yes, Johnson’s statement must seem sinister. If you instead view the vaccination of people against a disease as a good thing, then Johnsons’s statement is insincere, untrustworthy, probably a lie, and just his usual posturing.

      1. Micko

        Do you not think that a third option could be that he means what he says and is genuinely sincere about vaccinations.

        No?

      1. Broadbag

        Glass jaw! The shop keeper defending himself, his store and staff but watch our ‘justice’ system kick into gear and turn the scumbag into a victim.

    1. goldenbrown

      perfect, beautifully done

      1x scuuuumbag properly dealt with and reputation in shreds, hopefully he learned his lesson well and the sheer embarrassment alone causes him to stay away from Jervis St and maybe reassess his future

      and next time I’m in town I’m going into that place to congratulate the owner and show him my support

    1. The Dude

      Absolutely disgraceful how law and order have been let go in Dublin city centre, with another 8 arrested last night amid disturbances.

      Yet it is also deeply troubling to see that some uniformed police officers are no longer wearing ID tags.

      Where is the accountability? Why has the city been let get so uncivilised and unwelcoming?

      Meanwhile the blame game has begun between the city council and central government for the chaos, with the council now saying its warnings ‘went unheeded’.

      Who is in charge? the Environment Minister, the DCC CEO, city councillors? Nobody seems accountable.

      In a properly run city, such chaotic scenes would not be happening – and are not occurring elsewhere.

      Odd how every super market has a traffic light system to manage crowds, yet this was never considered for public streets and spaces. If only the authorities could have had a year to prepare.

      I ask again, is there a capital city in the EU that is worse governed?

          1. GiggidyGoo

            You need to understand what’s written, and the. apply it to the situation. Given your take on it, anyone leaving a supermarket with alcohol in a trolley can be subject to what happened there. In the video above, I saw people carrying a plastic bag with cans of beer. On their way home probably as they didn’t seem like troublemakers. Your law states –
            “the relevant person is acting in that place, or the relevant person and some or all of the accompanying persons are acting in that place, in a manner that—

            (i) gives rise to a reasonable apprehension for the safety of persons or the safety of property or for the maintenance of the public peace, or

            (ii) is causing, or gives rise to a reasonable apprehension is likely to cause, annoyance and nuisance”

            None of the above were portrayed by the citizens in the video. On the other hand, the Gardai fulfilled the definition in the law.

            I note you didn’t quote the Litter Pollution Act 1997. In that act you’ll find, specifically,
            “3.—(1) No person shall deposit any substance or object so as to create litter in a public place or in any place that is visible to any extent from a public place.

            Now, the Garda deposited a substance (beer) and objects (cans) in a place (busy street) that is visible from a public place.

        1. Rob_G

          I suppose no-one is surprised that Giggidy gets his news from far-right, conspiracy-minded message boards

          1. GiggidyGoo

            Ah, Rob_G. Are you saying the video is a fake? Funnily enough, I take my news from a wide variety of sites, left, right, far left, far right, centre, far centre, near centre, bloated centre etc. Maybe you should try something similar? Or is The Journal the height of what you can take in?

          2. Rob_G

            Maybe you should check out StormFront while you are at it, just in case there are any interesting perspectives there that you have missed

          3. GiggidyGoo

            Wow – great comeback. How long did it take to think that one up? And what’s StormFront.

            So, is the video fake? Or is it just that you haven’t anything much to say?

        1. Unreal

          It’s good to see Giggidy back, wasn’t sure about that Giggigy fella to be honest …

  3. SOQ

    VAERS COVID Vaccine Data (Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, USA)- 294,801 Reports- Through May 28 2021

    5,165 Deaths
    17,619 Hosptitalizations
    39,121 Urgent Care
    51,133 Office Visits
    1,342 Anaphylaxis
    1,565 Bell’s Palsy
    5,317 Life Threatening
    1,892 Heart Attacks
    756 Myocarditis/Pericarditis
    1,392 Thrombocytopenia/Low Platelet
    571 Miscarriages
    13,574 Severe Allergic Reaction
    3,994 Disabled

    Source: https://www.openvaers.com/covid-data

    Is there a similar summary site for European data anywhere?

        1. SOQ

          Thanks yeah- that is not very clear at all, not even an export facility. openvaers.com appears to be a separate site which rolls the hard figures up into decent categories. There is questions around how data is reported to VAERS but no details on how it is collated for the European one.

          This issue of weird menstrual cycles keeps getting more reports on social media but I am not sure if anyone is collating them. It’s technically not a vaccine injury as these are women whom have been around vaccinated, rather than had it themselves.

          I find it quite ironic that in certain quarters it is being dismissed as being not being real, in other words a conspiracy- so who is wearing the tinfoil hat now?

          1. SOQ

            I see reports of 12,184 dead and 1,196,190 Injuries from the European Medicines Agency- that can’t be right surely?

          2. alickdouglas

            Welcome to the extraordinarily frustrating world of drug pharmacovigilance.

            1) I think the EMA reports are simply a centralisation of the reports submitted to the sponsor companies; so if you received Pfizer in Europe and reported an AE, in theory you or your HC provider should have reported that AE into the Pfizer system. VAERS is likely to give a similar pattern of events, although via a different capture system.

            2) I’m not sure how the data is processed before it gets put into the EMA report; presumably there’s standardization of some kind, the reaction lists are categorical. I should have paid more attention when I filled in my own vaccine AE, I don’t remember it being categorical, I thought it was freetext.

            3) You need to have a close look at the quality of the data; there’s huge reporting bias. The Janssen AE reports are nearly all from NL, and the Pfizer ones almost all from Italy. It might be that these vaccines were most used in those countries, but I suspect there are more complex factors at play such as certain companies having a higher profile and people being therefore more likely to report symptoms.

            4) Regarding your points on number of deaths/injuries. I don’t know where you got that data, but if it’s from the EMA system there isn’t a 1:1 relationship. For example, I just did a quick filter to show ‘serious’ events, and one of the people who died has 13 associated fatal AEs.

            These are all issues that make these pharmacovigilance tools extremely frustrating to use. Database interrogation needs carefully designed questions and lots of QA/QC. They are principally useful for looking at trends. For example, it would be interesting to run an analysis of rate of event x in Pfizer vs. Moderna, AZ vs Janssen and mRNA vs. Adeno.

          3. alickdouglas

            The breakdown on that page is given by SOC (system organ class), which is the raw high level categorisation. Seems pretty clear then that they are referring to the number of incidents reported into the system rather than the number of individuals for whom symptoms have been reported. This means the reporting has been done by someone who doesn’t have a clue about how these databases are constructed or what type of valid interpretations can be gathered from the data. Would make a nice MSc thesis for someone to dig into the database, but a lot of work needed to clean up the biases before any kind of valid trends might be spotted.

          4. alickdouglas

            Is what the best I can do?

            The person who authored the article you linked to doesn’t have the first notion how to do an analysis. That’s totally obvious from the manner in which raw data is presented in the article. All the article does is present totals of events per different classifications, it means nothing at all without a denominator or a value to compare it with. It took me no more than 2 minutes scrutinising the data to spot that 14 reports of fatality in the database are accounted for by the death of one individual. This is a clear indicator that the data cannot be interpreted at face value and that the denominator is unlikely to be obvious. It does not mean that the dataset is garbage, it means that it needs to be treated with a great deal of planning and reflection, not adding up totals in columns.

            For your info the best I could do would be to actually do an analysis myself, but I’m not motivated to do so, I have better things to spend my summer on. An epidemiology student would do it much cheaper than me.

          5. SOQ

            Sorry- bad and distracted wording-

            Is counting injuries rather than injured going to make a huge difference when it comes to fatalities?- it is a sum total after all, or at least should be. I am not sure how they extracted that data because after a report is ran, the export features in https://www.adrreports.eu/en/ do not work. The only search criteria is serious or non-serious- there is not even an option for deaths.

            Absolutely brutal stuff because Oracle BI is quite a flexible tool. It is so bad one has to wonder if it has not been left deliberately obtuse. It should not be up to volunteers to interpret such data because if it was properly categorised before publication, there would be no massaging of figures- in either direction.

          6. alickdouglas

            No worries : D

            Fatalities and pregancy are interesting classes of event, because they are the most inarguably empirical (both are binary yes/no). They are therefore useful for testing data reliability. However, they aren’t really *that* useful for public health. If a medical product caused any significant amount of death or pregnancy, you would expect to see it in a trial of 40 000 recipients. So deaths for me from a data perspective are canaries in the coalmine for judging how useful the database is going to be, how much work will need to be done to ‘repair’ it and how much analysis it will need.

            The problem with deaths in databases is that there are a wide range of causes of death. Furthermore, deaths tend to be comparatively over-reported into PV databases. They are therefore a less useful indicator for spotting trends.

            In short, I’m not a big believer of these PV databases as tools, either for signal detection (or the converse, ‘demonstrating safety’). I think they are most useful as a propaganda tool. A better method is through hypothesis-driven PV. I strongly suspect that this is one of the reasons why the EU system spotted the thromboembolic events way before the UK system did (Public Health England favor a stats/data fishing methodology for signal detection that somewhat excludes expert opinion, some EU countries such as Germany prefer opinion/hypothesis driven PV: I have no hard evidence, but it does seem that chatter between physicians in EU led to scrutiny for thromboembolic events)

  4. Slightly Bemused

    And they leave out the important news. Now that pubs are reopening, does everyone remember the skill of opening a packet of crisps or peanuts to share? Remember to peel back the front of the packet. If peeling the back, it gets caught in the centre at the seal.

    Happy munching, and enjoy, those of you who do get out for a pint or glass

    1. alickdouglas

      Share? Share? Like having someone else’s i n f e c t e d hand dipping into the packet??????

      May as well ask them to cough in your pint while they are at it

      ; D

        1. Slightly Bemused

          Let me guess, if it was a feed of chips, you would be angling for the tomato chip, the one holding back the ketchup from the rest and as a result absorbing that lovely red vinageryness?

          1. Slightly Bemused

            If we ever do get to have that chat and a pint, I will be keeping my eye on you…

  5. Johnny

    Heathers prior experience was with a small time,mickey mouse very local,credit union after a stretch at scandal ridden Ulster Bank,where she failed make the C suite.

    Since these halcyon days as a junior employee at her local credit union she has played her ‘outsider’ status into this,who says education matters or experience huh,just look at Heathers ever expanding portfolio,what a journey for a senior orange order members daughter.

    Minister for Social Protection,
    Minister for Rural & Community Development
    Minister for Justice.

    Can only image the pride among her fellow workers at Cootehill Credit Union.

      1. Johnny

        I care and so do lots people what her scumbag grandfather did,FG has a death grip on justice it’s bizarre,unprecedented to cling raw power over such an important state function,wtf they hiding ?

        -March 2016, Humphreys approved a decision to demolish the buildings 13-19 on Moore Street as she deemed them to not be of “historical importance”.
        The buildings were where the first bullets of the 1916 Easter rising were fired….

        1. Janet, dreams of an alternate universe

          ah I thought you just had a problem with her religion, that’s how you phrased it in you comment on the previous thread.

          1. Papi

            He’ll see a stripey cat or a butterfly in a minute and forget the whole thing. Not to worry.

          2. Johnny

            your not even irish ‘daddy’ wtf is your point,do you even have one,shur who cares about Moore St…

          3. Janet, dreams of an alternate universe

            I’m not Irish ?
            sorry I don’t know what you are trying to say here

          4. Papi

            I think he’s trying to say it to me, because as we all know, Johnny is the only Irish person in the world. He just can’t say it very well, the poor lamb.

          5. Papi

            So, credit union, FG, grrrrrr, justice, grrr, Moore Street, Easter rising, Irish language, grrrrrr.

            Is that about it now there, wee man?
            Crystal clear as usual. Oh look, a rainbow!

          1. Papi

            Johnny was there, maaan, you weren’t, your not even Irish.

            *You’re. Can’t even do it in jest.

    1. Kate

      She waffled last week on the inexplicable delay on producing scoping enquiry into death of Shane o Farrell by Judge Houghton. She disgracefully and shamefully laid blame on Shane’s family – in fact the report was finished last year and it’s taken 2 years. Lucia o Farrell will put manners on them yet !!

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