Can anyone answer this?

[Moriarty]

"An influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears
against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in several,
simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and
illness. ... When a major change in either one or both of their surface
proteins occurs spontaneously, no one will have partial or full immunity
against infection because it is a completely new virus. If this new virus
also has the capacity to spread from person-to-person, then a pandemic
will occur."

This was the original wording from the WHO of what constitutes a Pandemic.

In 2009 the WHO removed :-
"with enormous numbers of deaths and illness."
From it's guidelines.

British Medical Journal report on H1N1 back in 2010.

Which allowed the WHO to declare a pandemic whenever it wished.
Governments around the world could say they were following the WHO guidance, hence removing liability.

Which also meant that Governments could enact a state of emergency (even though the UK never did as that still requires government oversight, they passed an act not a law) to pass laws without debate or the usual scrutiny.

Is any government going to pass up the opportunity to pass whatever it wants under those conditions

 

[TwoWhalesInAPool]

 

[Bad_Influence]

The queue at the local vax centre.

 

[TwoWhalesInAPool]

 

[Bad_Influence]

View attachment 4472

Still copy/pasting Tiddles? Go back to thedailymash, it’s your best work.

 

[SamBally]

These Covid obsessed stalkies just keep contradicting themselves. Over and over again.

The original 'thrust' of their argument was that the government was not accurately recording Covid deaths and so any figures announced were unreliable because there were or might be other underlying serious health issues at play and the age of the person, etc.

However, now they are posting what they claim are stats demonstating people are still dying of Covid after having the Covid jab.

It can't be both, can it. The method of recording deaths is either sh** or it isn't.

They do not know how to interpret and analyze data and quite frankly it is embarrassing that these so-called grown men are so damn ignorant.

 

[Bad_Influence]

These Covid obsessed stalkies just keep contradicting themselves. Over and over again.

The original 'thrust' of their argument was that the government was not accurately recording Covid deaths and so any figures announced were unreliable because there were or might be other underlying serious health issues at play and the age of the person, etc.

However, now they are posting what they claim are stats demonstating people are still dying of Covid after having the Covid jab.

It can't be both, can it. The method of recording deaths is either sh** or it isn't.

They do not know how to interpret and analyze data and quite frankly it is embarrassing that these so-called grown men are so damn ignorant.

There there Sam, I know you struggle at times. Take an Aspirin and lie down. You’ll be better after your morning nap.

 

[TwoWhalesInAPool]

 

[SamBally]

You'll have to translate it .

Why have you posted a link to an Italian doctor who got suspended for refusing to take the vaccine?


It is totally irrelevant. The Italian government introduced emergency Covid legislation in the health sector, requiring employees to get vaccinated, and was the first country in Europe to do so.

 

[TwoWhalesInAPool]

Long COVID: symptoms experienced during infection may predict lasting illness

Earlier in the pandemic, it appeared that the majority of people infected with the coronavirus experienced mild-to-moderate symptoms and generally recovered within two to three weeks, depending on the severity of their illness. However, as time has passed, it’s become clear that some people, regardless of the severity of their disease, continue to experience symptoms beyond the acute phase of infection. This has become known as “long COVID”.

Emerging evidence suggests that these patients experience a range of persistent symptoms and health complications. These may have a significant impact on their quality of life, physical and mental health, and ability to return to work.

But understanding long COVID is difficult. Its reported symptoms are highly varied, making it difficult to define. Many sufferers also weren’t hospitalised during the acute phase of their infection, and so weren’t tested for the coronavirus during the first wave of the pandemic. This makes it more difficult to understand what the potential causes of their long-lasting symptoms are, and also how these relate to symptoms that patients had during the early stages of infection.

We and other researchers from the Therapies for Long COVID (TLC) Study Group at the University of Birmingham therefore decided to try to build a clearer picture of what long COVID is and what influences it by pooling data from lots of separate studies. This gave us a view of the prevalence of reported symptoms, and better allowed us to see what the impacts and complications of long COVID are. Here’s what we discovered.

Symptoms of long COVID​

Our review showed just how varied long COVID is. Patients may experience symptoms related to any system in the body – including respiratory, neurological and gastroenterological symptoms. Our pooled data showed that the ten most commonly reported symptoms in long COVID are fatigue, shortness of breath, muscle pain, cough, headache, joint pain, chest pain, an altered sense of smell, diarrhoea and altered taste.

Other common symptoms include “brain fog” – when thinking is fuzzy and sluggish – memory loss, disordered sleep, heart palpitations and a sore throat. Rare but important outcomes include thoughts of self-harm and suicide and even seizures.

Most long COVID patients complain of symptoms experienced during their acute infection persisting beyond it, with the number of symptoms experienced tending to decline as patients move from acute to long COVID. Some, though, report developing new symptoms during their long COVID illness, while some also report symptoms reoccuring that had previously resolved themselves.

One of the studies we included in our review described two main symptom clusters of long COVID: those comprising exclusively of fatigue, headache and upper respiratory complaints; and those that are multi-system complaints, including ongoing fever and gastroenterological symptoms. This division encapsulates the difficulty of trying to pin long COVID down – it is a wide-ranging condition containing many types of complaints.

The mid-term and long-term effects and impacts of long COVID are yet to be fully understood. However, the evidence we reviewed suggests that people with long COVID may experience significant reductions in their quality of life, difficulties carrying out their daily activities or returning to full-time employment, as well as mental health issues.

One study reported that nearly a quarter of previously hospitalised COVID-19 patients suffered from anxiety or depression six months after the onset of their symptoms. People with long COVID often report being dismissed by healthcare professionals and receiving little or no support for the management of their condition – underlining the need for better treatments.

What increases the likelihood of long COVID?​

We found that a range of factors are associated with developing long COVID. For instance, one study reported that the presence of more than five symptoms of COVID-19 in the first week of infection was significantly associated with developing long COVID, irrespective of age or gender.

In addition, being older, female and hospitalised at symptom onset were found to be significantly associated with an increased risk of developing long COVID. However, several studies showed that for a significant number of patients, developing long COVID didn’t seem to be tied to the severity of their initial illness.

Experiencing certain symptoms during the acute phase of infection – such as initial breathlessness, chest pain or abnormal heart sounds – was also strongly associated with developing long-lasting symptoms. Having co-morbidities, particularly asthma, also raised the risk.

What the huge variability of long COVID suggests is that it actually comprises a number of different syndromes, potentially with different underlying causes. A better understanding of the underlying biological and immunological mechanisms of long COVID is therefore urgently needed if we’re to develop effective treatments for it.

The impacts that patients report – on their lives, work and mental health – make it clear that better ways of caring for people with long COVID patients are urgently needed. As well as evaluating symptoms and investigating the underlying mechanisms of long COVID, our TLC Study Group was set up to identify potential interventions for treating long COVID that could be evaluated in clinical trials. Armed with the knowledge from this research, this is what we’re aiming to work towards next.

link to article at The Conversation

27 July, 2021

authors:

1. Olalekan Lee Aiyegbusi Research Fellow, Institute of Applied Health Research, University of Birmingham
2. Shamil Haroon Academic Clinical Lecturer, Institute of Applied Health Research, University of Birmingham

 

[TwoWhalesInAPool]

Vaccinating teenagers is beneficial, even if their vulnerability to COVID-19 is low

The UK government has announced that all 16 to 17-year-olds will be offered a first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in the coming weeks. Many countries are already vaccinating children over 12, so this decision is not out of step with what is going on elsewhere. Despite this, the reaction in Britain is likely to be mixed.

If it was just a question of: “Does this vaccine work in this age group?”, then the answer is easy. The Pfizer vaccine’s phase 3 trial showed that it was safe and effective in people over 16.

But the question of whether it’s right to give the vaccine to 16 to 17-year-olds is more complicated. The benefits of vaccinating someone against COVID-19 generally fall as the people being vaccinated get younger, and all vaccines carry some risk, even if almost always very, very small. And you also need to take into account the wider impact that vaccinating young people will have on the rest of British society and the world.

Weighing up personal benefits​

It’s been well documented that for most young people, COVID-19 is a mild or asymptomatic infection. It can’t be argued that vaccination will significantly reduce severity of disease, hospitalisations or deaths among young people. But there are other benefits.

In a very small number of children, COVID-19 leads to a more serious condition called paediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome (PIMS), where inflammation appears throughout the body. PIMS tends to affect younger children, but cases have also been recorded in teens and young adults. By lowering the risk of infection, vaccination may prevent it.

There’s also the risk of long COVID, a much more common issue. Research suggests just under 2% of children who catch the coronavirus have symptoms that last for more than eight weeks. Long COVID is poorly understood and for some is a prolonged, debilitating illness. We currently have no treatment options for it and don’t know how long it lasts. It also isn’t limited to people who develop severe illness when infected – so using vaccines to prevent mild disease may reduce the number of long COVID cases.

We also know that the immune response following vaccination is significantly higher than following natural infection. Therefore, although a proportion of 16 to 17-year-olds will have already been exposed to COVID-19 and have some immunity, taking a vaccine will still offer the best protection.

These benefits need to be balanced against the risk of side-effects. For the Pfizer vaccine, these are thought to be similar across all age groups. Mild side-effects – including pain at the injection site and chills – are common, resolve quickly and are well tolerated. There are, however, concerns about more serious side-effects such as a severe allergic reaction (anaphylaxis) and inflammation of the heart (myocarditis or pericarditis).

But these are very rare – so much so that the UK government hasn’t been able to reliably estimate how frequently they occur. But because of this, and because the risk of severe illness stemming from COVID-19 in young people is so low, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation hasn’t stated outright that the benefits of vaccinating 16 to 17-year-olds clearly outweigh the risks – only that getting the balance between these benefits and risks is important.

Knock-on effects​

But the wider impact of vaccinating young people strengthens the case. Young people have already suffered significant disruption to their academic and social development, and suppressing the spread of the virus among them should mean that fewer have to isolate and miss school. It will also lessen any surge in cases when schools reopen after the summer holidays.

Lowering infections among children should also mean fewer parents and carers have to take time off work. Under the current guidance, if exposed to a positive case at home they still have to isolate, even if vaccinated.

Many young people will also have a close relative or contact who is clinically extremely vulnerable. It’s possible that such people will have responded less well to their COVID-19 vaccination and so will be choosing to continue to shield. Vaccinating their family and friends helps reduce the chance of them catching the virus.

This idea of vaccinating young people to prevent infection in others isn’t new. Giving the pneumococcal (pneumonia) vaccine to infants to prevent severe infection in early life has had a hugely beneficial effect in preventing community-acquired pneumonia in older adults. Vaccinating a further 1.4 million people in the UK population for COVID-19 is likely to further reduce transmission of the virus to those more vulnerable to severe disease.

We also know that random mutations occur when the coronavirus infects people and reproduces, and that the more of these mutations that occur, the more likely it is that viral variants will arise that can escape the effects of vaccines. Anything that reduces case numbers reduces this risk.

Do other countries need vaccines more?​

Despite all of the above, the ethics of offering vaccines to those unlikely to become very unwell will be debated, as rates of vaccination in many parts of the world are low. Many highly vulnerable people remain unprotected.

Recognising this, the World Health Organization has called for wealthier nations not to give fully vaccinated people booster doses until there has been a more equitable distribution of vaccines to the global population. A similar argument could be made against vaccinating younger people.

The challenge of balancing individuals’ and societies’ best interests in the context of a pandemic is challenging. We remain in an evolving situation and there is still so much we don’t know about the behaviour and threat of the COVID-19 virus. It’s likely that only history will be able to judge whether the UK vaccination strategy was the right one. But in the meantime, we may see vaccines being offered universally to younger age groups in the UK in due course.

link to article in The Conversation

Vaccinating teenagers is beneficial, even if their vulnerability to COVID-19 is low

Reducing transmission of the virus among younger people can help Britain reopen more quickly and reduce the risk of the virus infecting those most at risk.

theconversation.com

August 9, 2021

author:

Alex Richter
Professor and Honorary Consultant in Clinical Immunology, University of Birmingham

 

[SamBally]

Hardly irrelevant, as there are quite a few healthcare workers refusing to have the jabs, backed by lawyers.

That wasn't the argument. You stated the Italian government had NOT introduced legislation.


Secondly, the article itself states he is the ONLY doctor to refuse the vaccination.


437,213 healthcare professionals were registered to the Italian Order of physicians, surgeons, and orthodontists in 2018.

Don't you find it ODD only one is making a song and dance about it?


According to the article you posted.

 

[Bad_Influence]

Long COVID: symptoms experienced during infection may predict lasting illness

Earlier in the pandemic, it appeared that the majority of people infected with the coronavirus experienced mild-to-moderate symptoms and generally recovered within two to three weeks, depending on the severity of their illness. However, as time has passed, it’s become clear that some people, regardless of the severity of their disease, continue to experience symptoms beyond the acute phase of infection. This has become known as “long COVID”.

Emerging evidence suggests that these patients experience a range of persistent symptoms and health complications. These may have a significant impact on their quality of life, physical and mental health, and ability to return to work.

But understanding long COVID is difficult. Its reported symptoms are highly varied, making it difficult to define. Many sufferers also weren’t hospitalised during the acute phase of their infection, and so weren’t tested for the coronavirus during the first wave of the pandemic. This makes it more difficult to understand what the potential causes of their long-lasting symptoms are, and also how these relate to symptoms that patients had during the early stages of infection.

We and other researchers from the Therapies for Long COVID (TLC) Study Group at the University of Birmingham therefore decided to try to build a clearer picture of what long COVID is and what influences it by pooling data from lots of separate studies. This gave us a view of the prevalence of reported symptoms, and better allowed us to see what the impacts and complications of long COVID are. Here’s what we discovered.

Symptoms of long COVID​

Our review showed just how varied long COVID is. Patients may experience symptoms related to any system in the body – including respiratory, neurological and gastroenterological symptoms. Our pooled data showed that the ten most commonly reported symptoms in long COVID are fatigue, shortness of breath, muscle pain, cough, headache, joint pain, chest pain, an altered sense of smell, diarrhoea and altered taste.

Other common symptoms include “brain fog” – when thinking is fuzzy and sluggish – memory loss, disordered sleep, heart palpitations and a sore throat. Rare but important outcomes include thoughts of self-harm and suicide and even seizures.

Most long COVID patients complain of symptoms experienced during their acute infection persisting beyond it, with the number of symptoms experienced tending to decline as patients move from acute to long COVID. Some, though, report developing new symptoms during their long COVID illness, while some also report symptoms reoccuring that had previously resolved themselves.

One of the studies we included in our review described two main symptom clusters of long COVID: those comprising exclusively of fatigue, headache and upper respiratory complaints; and those that are multi-system complaints, including ongoing fever and gastroenterological symptoms. This division encapsulates the difficulty of trying to pin long COVID down – it is a wide-ranging condition containing many types of complaints.

The mid-term and long-term effects and impacts of long COVID are yet to be fully understood. However, the evidence we reviewed suggests that people with long COVID may experience significant reductions in their quality of life, difficulties carrying out their daily activities or returning to full-time employment, as well as mental health issues.

One study reported that nearly a quarter of previously hospitalised COVID-19 patients suffered from anxiety or depression six months after the onset of their symptoms. People with long COVID often report being dismissed by healthcare professionals and receiving little or no support for the management of their condition – underlining the need for better treatments.

What increases the likelihood of long COVID?​

We found that a range of factors are associated with developing long COVID. For instance, one study reported that the presence of more than five symptoms of COVID-19 in the first week of infection was significantly associated with developing long COVID, irrespective of age or gender.

In addition, being older, female and hospitalised at symptom onset were found to be significantly associated with an increased risk of developing long COVID. However, several studies showed that for a significant number of patients, developing long COVID didn’t seem to be tied to the severity of their initial illness.

Experiencing certain symptoms during the acute phase of infection – such as initial breathlessness, chest pain or abnormal heart sounds – was also strongly associated with developing long-lasting symptoms. Having co-morbidities, particularly asthma, also raised the risk.

What the huge variability of long COVID suggests is that it actually comprises a number of different syndromes, potentially with different underlying causes. A better understanding of the underlying biological and immunological mechanisms of long COVID is therefore urgently needed if we’re to develop effective treatments for it.

The impacts that patients report – on their lives, work and mental health – make it clear that better ways of caring for people with long COVID patients are urgently needed. As well as evaluating symptoms and investigating the underlying mechanisms of long COVID, our TLC Study Group was set up to identify potential interventions for treating long COVID that could be evaluated in clinical trials. Armed with the knowledge from this research, this is what we’re aiming to work towards next.

link to article at The Conversation

27 July, 2021

authors:

1. Olalekan Lee Aiyegbusi Research Fellow, Institute of Applied Health Research, University of Birmingham
2. Shamil Haroon Academic Clinical Lecturer, Institute of Applied Health Research, University of Birmingham

No idea what point you’re making with yet more copy/paste nonsense. Nobody said long covid wasn’t a thing. Sadly it seems to be caused as much by the vaccine as by covid itself.

 

[Bad_Influence]

Vaccinating teenagers is beneficial, even if their vulnerability to COVID-19 is low

The UK government has announced that all 16 to 17-year-olds will be offered a first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in the coming weeks. Many countries are already vaccinating children over 12, so this decision is not out of step with what is going on elsewhere. Despite this, the reaction in Britain is likely to be mixed.

If it was just a question of: “Does this vaccine work in this age group?”, then the answer is easy. The Pfizer vaccine’s phase 3 trial showed that it was safe and effective in people over 16.

But the question of whether it’s right to give the vaccine to 16 to 17-year-olds is more complicated. The benefits of vaccinating someone against COVID-19 generally fall as the people being vaccinated get younger, and all vaccines carry some risk, even if almost always very, very small. And you also need to take into account the wider impact that vaccinating young people will have on the rest of British society and the world.

Weighing up personal benefits​

It’s been well documented that for most young people, COVID-19 is a mild or asymptomatic infection. It can’t be argued that vaccination will significantly reduce severity of disease, hospitalisations or deaths among young people. But there are other benefits.

In a very small number of children, COVID-19 leads to a more serious condition called paediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome (PIMS), where inflammation appears throughout the body. PIMS tends to affect younger children, but cases have also been recorded in teens and young adults. By lowering the risk of infection, vaccination may prevent it.

There’s also the risk of long COVID, a much more common issue. Research suggests just under 2% of children who catch the coronavirus have symptoms that last for more than eight weeks. Long COVID is poorly understood and for some is a prolonged, debilitating illness. We currently have no treatment options for it and don’t know how long it lasts. It also isn’t limited to people who develop severe illness when infected – so using vaccines to prevent mild disease may reduce the number of long COVID cases.

We also know that the immune response following vaccination is significantly higher than following natural infection. Therefore, although a proportion of 16 to 17-year-olds will have already been exposed to COVID-19 and have some immunity, taking a vaccine will still offer the best protection.

These benefits need to be balanced against the risk of side-effects. For the Pfizer vaccine, these are thought to be similar across all age groups. Mild side-effects – including pain at the injection site and chills – are common, resolve quickly and are well tolerated. There are, however, concerns about more serious side-effects such as a severe allergic reaction (anaphylaxis) and inflammation of the heart (myocarditis or pericarditis).

But these are very rare – so much so that the UK government hasn’t been able to reliably estimate how frequently they occur. But because of this, and because the risk of severe illness stemming from COVID-19 in young people is so low, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation hasn’t stated outright that the benefits of vaccinating 16 to 17-year-olds clearly outweigh the risks – only that getting the balance between these benefits and risks is important.

Knock-on effects​

But the wider impact of vaccinating young people strengthens the case. Young people have already suffered significant disruption to their academic and social development, and suppressing the spread of the virus among them should mean that fewer have to isolate and miss school. It will also lessen any surge in cases when schools reopen after the summer holidays.

Lowering infections among children should also mean fewer parents and carers have to take time off work. Under the current guidance, if exposed to a positive case at home they still have to isolate, even if vaccinated.

Many young people will also have a close relative or contact who is clinically extremely vulnerable. It’s possible that such people will have responded less well to their COVID-19 vaccination and so will be choosing to continue to shield. Vaccinating their family and friends helps reduce the chance of them catching the virus.

This idea of vaccinating young people to prevent infection in others isn’t new. Giving the pneumococcal (pneumonia) vaccine to infants to prevent severe infection in early life has had a hugely beneficial effect in preventing community-acquired pneumonia in older adults. Vaccinating a further 1.4 million people in the UK population for COVID-19 is likely to further reduce transmission of the virus to those more vulnerable to severe disease.

We also know that random mutations occur when the coronavirus infects people and reproduces, and that the more of these mutations that occur, the more likely it is that viral variants will arise that can escape the effects of vaccines. Anything that reduces case numbers reduces this risk.

Do other countries need vaccines more?​

Despite all of the above, the ethics of offering vaccines to those unlikely to become very unwell will be debated, as rates of vaccination in many parts of the world are low. Many highly vulnerable people remain unprotected.

Recognising this, the World Health Organization has called for wealthier nations not to give fully vaccinated people booster doses until there has been a more equitable distribution of vaccines to the global population. A similar argument could be made against vaccinating younger people.

The challenge of balancing individuals’ and societies’ best interests in the context of a pandemic is challenging. We remain in an evolving situation and there is still so much we don’t know about the behaviour and threat of the COVID-19 virus. It’s likely that only history will be able to judge whether the UK vaccination strategy was the right one. But in the meantime, we may see vaccines being offered universally to younger age groups in the UK in due course.

link to article in The Conversation

Vaccinating teenagers is beneficial, even if their vulnerability to COVID-19 is low

Reducing transmission of the virus among younger people can help Britain reopen more quickly and reduce the risk of the virus infecting those most at risk.

theconversation.com

August 9, 2021

author:

Alex Richter
Professor and Honorary Consultant in Clinical Immunology, University of Birmingham

You do love your propaganda don’t you?

 

[Altair]

1) No need to capitalise words in your posts, in order to make them more relevant.

2) You need to read back to my post in which I answered to you, in which you asked me what I thought about Italy being the first country that approved said law - I actually said that just because said law had been approved, didn't mean it had been put into practice.
Theoretically it has been put into practice, but in reality it hasn't.
If it had been put into practice when approved, 100% of healthcare workers would have had the jabs by now - either that or struck off/been placed in an office - In reality this has not happened - There are still lots of healthcare workers working in the same places, doing the same jobs as they were doing previously, backed by lawyers and protests all over the country.

3) The doctor who was struck off is female, not male .
The male doctor is the one who answered her questions about the vaccines (on behalf of the goverment as he was working at one of the vaccination hubs).

The female doctor (who was subsequently suspended) got him to write them down, black on white, in order to have proof of what he told her.

She then refused to have the vaccine (advised by her lawyer), due to the fact that what Article 4 claims does not correspond to what is written by the pharmaceutical companies on the vaccine leaflet.

- Article 4 speaks of "free vaccination for the prevention of Sars-CoV-2 infection",

- The indications of the pharmaceutical companies, in the so-called leaflet, speak of prevention from the development of the Covid-19 disease.

2 entirely different things..

She was suspended for refusing to have a vaccine that the goverment issued as a vaccine that prevents Sars-Cov-2 infection, when in reality this is not what this vaccine does.

Pharmaceutical Companies claim that the vaccine does not prevent one from getting the virus, it merely prevents the development of said virus , as in, if you contract Covid, all this vaccine could do is lessen the effects of the virus.

Nowhere do the pharmaceutical companies claim that the vaccine will prevent you from contracting the virus - whereas the goverment speaks exactly of that .

Stated by the lawyer:

Formally, the vaccine does not guarantee those characteristics that are required by article 4, that is the prevention of contagion but only when the disease develops. And this is "an objective discrepancy between the text of the law and the product that is not directly functional to respond to the content of the obligation".


You rely far too much on data and so called 'official sources'.

Like many users here....You have way too much time on your hands.

 

[TwoWhalesInAPool]

 

[Altair]

Like many users here, you have no idea what you're talking about.

I have no idea....About anything...Happy now Omega?

 

[Altair]

I was merely replying to your assumptions, about me and my life.

I didn't CALL YOU OUT.....I assume Nothing about anyone. Observation is Key.

 

[Altair]

So you're actually checking how long my name appears to be online in this room and checking how many times a day I post?

No not likely.

 

[Altair]

You claimed that I have way too much hands on my time and that observation is key - The only way anyone can come to that conclusion is by controlling them.

You Do have way much time on your hands...That's my view of you....I have no intention to control you.