The CDC has said there is a "plausible causal association" between the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine and blood clotting after finding more U.S. cases of the condition among people who received the vaccine.
We're publishing an original piece tonight by Dr Sinéad Murphy, an Associate Researcher in Philosophy at Newcastle University, about why it is the public have put up so little resistance to lockdowns.
We've taken a look at the new modelling from Imperial, Warwick and LSHTM that led to headlines earlier this week saying SAGE was no longer predicting an apocalyptic 'third wave'. Unfortunately, it's not all good news.
The vaccine rollout is set to extend to those below the age of 40 from Thursday, with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines being offered as alternatives to that made by AstraZeneca "where possible".
by Glen Bishop The latest release of papers from SAGE, modelling the relaxation of restrictions, tells us more about the psychology and authoritarian tendencies of the power drunk cabal of scientists in SAGE than they do about the future trajectory of the pandemic. The overly pessimistic assumptions remain in the papers, such as Imperial's assumption that two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have only an 80% efficacy against death from coronavirus. Numerous studies have found the protection to be 90% or even 95%. This assumption alone, even if all else were perfect, could be causing a two to four-fold over estimation in deaths of those vaccinated. Despite this, the central modelling predictions from the three teams for deaths between now and June 2022 (under the current roadmap) are as follows: 7,500 (Warwick), 9,000 (Imperial) and 11,200 (LSHTM). As data savvy readers will know, these are far below the cumulative deaths in a bad flu season – for instance, the flu season of 2017-2018 cost 22,087 lives, according to PHE. A rational group of scientists would advise that risks are now within the normal accepted range and thus the end of restrictions is nigh and normal life will return. Unsurprisingly, that is not what these three modelling teams have done. Their models have failed to deliver the pessimism and danger craved ...
The Prime Minister has told MPs that coronavirus variants pose a potential lethal danger and a new surge in autumn is highly likely. Is the supposedly 'irreversible' lifting of lockdown under threat?
In an article promoting global government, the Telegraph's Global Health Security correspondents have made the bizarre claim that public health lockdowns have no trade off with the economy. Misinformation, anyone?
New research suggests that health and social care workers who feel greater pressure from their employers to receive Covid vaccination are more likely to decline it.
The Government says it "can't rule out" the return of tiered lockdown restrictions to deal with "local Covid outbreaks". 99% of the English population lived under the toughest tiers when such a system was last imposed.
MIT researchers analysed a large sample of pandemic-related tweets, and used ethnographic methods to study "anti-mask" Facebook groups. They found that sceptics place a premium on data literacy and scientific rigour.
