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Coronavirus


Bjornebye

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8 minutes ago, Tj hooker said:

Just watched that Panorama programme from last night dear god heads should roll for the almighty fuck up this shambolic government has inflicted on the NHS and the general public but no doubt the MSM will gloss over this no doubt .

It's odd though that this has come out from the most right wing BBC ever known  or are Panorama flying solo on this with a leftist leaning producer. 

I think we decided Panorama wasn’t to be trusted about 6 months ago. Pity really. 

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1 hour ago, SasaS said:

It is fairly easy to get all this information and extrapolate it.

Mate - this is where you are massively missing the point. A fair few of the population (read voters and probably about a third) will not do this, even if they could. Not just in the UK but throughout the world.

A good percentage cannot even spell extrapolate.

 

That is why the governments continue to run the false numbers.

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58 minutes ago, Tj hooker said:

Just watched that Panorama programme from last night dear god heads should roll for the almighty fuck up this shambolic government has inflicted on the NHS and the general public but no doubt the MSM will gloss over this no doubt .

It's odd though that this has come out from the most right wing BBC ever known  or are Panorama flying solo on this with a leftist leaning producer. 


Panorama have a completely separate editorial set up to BBC News or the rest of the BBC. 

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24 minutes ago, Captain Turdseye said:


That would mean we’re #1 pound for pound. God bless Boris Johnson. He’s at the wheel, man. He’s doing his thing. 

 

 

 

Do we know if Italy and Spain have added up all the numbers like this?  Belgium would still be fairly close.

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50 minutes ago, Rico1304 said:

I think we decided Panorama wasn’t to be trusted about 6 months ago. Pity really. 


I’d judge each programme on their merits.

 

There’s a massive staff working on all sorts of different topics with different makers/producers/directors. 

Interestingly there’s hardly been any reporting that John Ware, the panorama programme maker and Tory advisor is one of the financial backers trying to save the Jewish Chronicle. 

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22 minutes ago, Nelly-Torres said:

It looks like Prof. John Ashton has been making too much noise. 

 

Apparently, he's an antisemite too now. 


 

 

 

outstanding levels of hideous hypocrisy. Look at the comments as well 

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26 minutes ago, Nelly-Torres said:

It looks like Prof. John Ashton has been making too much noise. 

 

Apparently, he's an antisemite too now. 


 

 

 

outstanding levels of hideous hypocrisy. Look at the comments as well 

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On 28/04/2020 at 04:58, Section_31 said:

Love monkeys me 

 

New York Times.

 

In the worldwide race for a vaccine to stop the coronavirus, the laboratory sprinting fastest is at Oxford University.

Most other teams have had to start with small clinical trials of a few hundred participants to demonstrate safety. But scientists at the university’s Jenner Institute had a running start on a vaccine, having proved in previous trials that similar inoculations — including one last year against an earlier coronavirus — were harmless to humans.

That has enabled them to leap ahead and schedule tests of their new coronavirus vaccine involving more than 6,000 people by the end of next month, hoping to show not only that it is safe, but also that it works.

The Oxford scientists now say that with an emergency approval from regulators, the first few million doses of their vaccine could be available by September — at least several months ahead of any of the other announced efforts — if it proves to be effective.

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Now, they have received promising news suggesting that it might.

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana last month inoculated six rhesus macaque monkeys with single doses of the Oxford vaccine. The animals were then exposed to heavy quantities of the virus that is causing the pandemic — exposure that had consistently sickened other monkeys in the lab. But more than 28 days later all six were healthy, said Vincent Munster, the researcher who conducted the test.

“The rhesus macaque is pretty much the closest thing we have to humans,” Dr. Munster said, noting that scientists were still analyzing the result. He said he expected to share it with other scientists next week and then submit it to a peer-reviewed journal.

Immunity in monkeys is no guarantee that a vaccine will provide the same degree of protection for humans. A Chinese company that recently started a clinical trial with 144 participants, SinoVac, has also said that its vaccine was effective in rhesus macaques. But with dozens of efforts now underway to find a vaccine, the monkey results are the latest indication that Oxford’s accelerated venture is emerging as a bellwether.

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“It is a very, very fast clinical program,” said Emilio Emini, a director of the vaccine program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is providing financial support to many competing efforts.

ImageThe Jenner Institute is one of the largest academic centers dedicated to nonprofit vaccine research.
The Jenner Institute is one of the largest academic centers dedicated to nonprofit vaccine research.Credit...Mary Turner for The New York Times

Which potential vaccine will emerge from the scramble as the most successful is impossible to know until clinical trial data becomes available.

More than one vaccine would be needed in any case, Dr. Emini argued. Some may work more effectively than others in groups like children or older people, or at different costs and dosages. Having more than one variety of vaccine in production will also help avoid bottlenecks in manufacturing, he said.

But as the first to reach such a relatively large scale, the Oxford trial, even if it fails, will provide lessons about the nature of the coronavirus and about the immune system’s responses that can inform governments, donors, drug companies and other scientists hunting for a vaccine.

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“This big U.K. study,” Dr. Emini said, “is actually going to translate to learning a lot about some of the others as well.”

All of the others will face the same challenges, including obtaining millions of dollars in funding, persuading regulators to approve human tests, demonstrating a vaccine’s safety and — after all of that — proving its effectiveness in protecting people from the coronavirus.

Paradoxically, the growing success of efforts to contain the spread of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, may present yet another hurdle.

“We’re the only people in the country who want the number of new infections to stay up for another few weeks, so we can test our vaccine,” Prof. Adrian Hill, the Jenner Institute’s director and one of five researchers involved in the effort, said in an interview in a laboratory building emptied by Britain’s monthlong lockdown.

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Ethics rules, as a general principal, forbid seeking to infect human test participants with a serious disease. That means the only way to prove that a vaccine works is to inoculate people in a place where the virus spreading naturally around them.

If social distancing measures or other factors continue to slow the rate of new infections in Britain, he said, the trial might not be able to show that the vaccine makes a difference: Participants who received a placebo might not be infected any more frequently than those who have been given the vaccine. The scientists would have to try again elsewhere, a dilemma that every other vaccine effort will face as well.

ImageSocial distancing at Oxford last week.
Social distancing at Oxford last week.Credit...Mary Turner for The New York Times

The Jenner Institute’s coronavirus efforts grew out of Professor Hill’s so-far unsuccessful pursuit of a vaccine against a different scourge, malaria.

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He developed a fascination with malaria and other tropical diseases as a medical student in Dublin in the early 1980s, when he visited an uncle who was a priest working in a hospital during the civil war in what is now Zimbabwe.

“I came back wondering, ‘What do you see in these hospitals in England and Ireland?’” Professor Hill said. “They don’t have any of these diseases.”

The major drug companies typically see little profit in epidemics that afflict mainly developing countries or run their course before a vaccine can hit the market. So after training in tropical medicine and a doctorate in molecular genetics, Professor Hill, 61, helped build Oxford’s institute into one of the largest academic centers dedicated to nonprofit vaccine research, with its own pilot manufacturing facility capable of producing a batch of up to 1,000 doses.

The institute’s effort against the coronavirus uses a technology that centers on altering the genetic code of a familiar virus. A classic vaccine uses a weakened version of a virus to trigger an immune response. But in the technology that the institute is using, a different virus is modified first to neutralize its effects and then to make it mimic a targeted virus — in this case, the virus that causes Covid-19. Injected into the bloodstream, the harmless impostor can induce the immune system to fight and kill the targeted disease, providing protection.

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Professor Hill has worked with that technology for decades to try to tweak a respiratory virus found in chimpanzees in order to elicit a human immune response against malaria and other diseases. Over the last 20 years, the institute has conducted more than 70 clinical trials of potential vaccines against the parasite that causes malaria. None have yet yielded a successful inoculation.

In 2014, however, a vaccine based on the chimp virus that Professor Hill had tested was manufactured in a large enough scale to provide a million doses. That created a template for mass production of the coronavirus vaccine, should it prove effective.

A longtime colleague, Prof. Sarah Gilbert, 58, modified the same chimpanzee virus to make a vaccine against an earlier coronavirus, MERS. After a clinical trial in Britain demonstrated its safety, another test began in December in Saudi Arabia, where outbreaks of the deadly disease are still common.

When she heard in January that Chinese scientists had identified the genetic code of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, she thought she might have a chance to prove the speed and versatility of their approach.

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“We thought, ‘Well, should we have a go?’” she recalled. “‘It’ll be a little lab project and we’ll publish a paper.’”

It did not stay a “little lab project” for long.

ImageProfessor Sarah Gilbert, a vaccinologist at the institute, has also worked on developing a vaccine for MERS, an earlier coronavirus.
Professor Sarah Gilbert, a vaccinologist at the institute, has also worked on developing a vaccine for MERS, an earlier coronavirus.Credit...Mary Turner for The New York Times

As the pandemic exploded, grant money poured in. All other vaccines were soon put into the freezer so that the institute’s laboratory could focus full-time on Covid-19. Then the lockdown forced everyone not working on Covid-19 to stay home altogether.

“The whole world doesn’t usually stand up and say, ‘How can we help? Do you want some money?’” Professor Hill said.

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“Vaccines are good for pandemics,” he added, “and pandemics are good for vaccines.”

Other scientists involved in the project are working with a half dozen drug manufacturing companies across Europe and Asia to prepare to churn out billions of doses as quickly as possible if the vaccine is approved. None have been granted exclusive marketing rights, and one is the giant Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest supplier of vaccines.

Donors are currently spending tens of millions of dollars to start the manufacturing process at facilities in Britain and the Netherlands even before the vaccine is proven to work, said Sandy Douglas, 37, a doctor at Oxford overseeing vaccine production.

“There is no alternative,” he said.

But the team has not yet reached an agreement with a North American manufacturer, in part because the major pharmaceutical companies there typically demand exclusive worldwide rights before investing in a potential medicine.

“I personally don’t believe that in a time of pandemic there should be exclusive licenses,” Professor Hill said. “So we are asking a lot of them. Nobody is going to make a lot of money off this.”

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The Jenner Institute’s vaccine effort is not the only one showing promise. Two American companies, Moderna and Inovio, have started small clinical trials with technologies involving modified or otherwise manipulated genetic material. They are seeking both to demonstrate their safety and to learn more about dosing and other variables. Neither technology has ever produced a licensed drug or been manufactured at scale.

A Chinese company, CanSino, has also started clinical trials in China using a technology similar to the Oxford institute’s, using a strain of the same respiratory virus that is found in humans, not chimps. But demonstrating the effectiveness of a vaccine in China may be difficult because Covid-19 infections there have plummeted.

Armed with safety data from their human trials of similar vaccines for Ebola, MERS and malaria, though, the scientists at Oxford’s institute persuaded British regulators to allow unusually accelerated trials while the epidemic is still hot around them.

The institute last week began a Phase I clinical trial involving 1,100 people. Crucially, next month it will begin a combined Phase II and Phase III trial involving another 5,000. Unlike any other vaccine project now underway, that trial is designed to prove effectiveness as well as safety.

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The scientists would declare victory if as many as a dozen participants who are given a placebo become sick with Covid-19 compared with only one or two who receive the inoculation. “Then we have a party and tell the world,” Professor Hill said. Everyone who had received only the placebo would also be vaccinated immediately.

If too few participants are infected in Britain, the institute is planning other trials where the coronavirus may still be spreading, possibly in Africa or India.

“We’ll have to chase the epidemic,” Professor Hill said. “If it is still raging in certain states, it is not inconceivable we end up testing in the United States in November.”

Sounds like the beginning of a new planet of The apes. 

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16 hours ago, Spy Bee said:

It seems the reason that medical professionals are suffering so badly is viral load and a lack of PPE. I'm not suggesting that this is not a bad thing and we should all just crack on, I'm suggesting that you're painting a picture more bleak than the one we face. We have professionals from Oxford Uni suggesting that they are 80% confident of having a functioning vaccine by September, we have other human trials of different vaccines going on around the world, but you would rather focus on the fact that we haven't yet got a vaccine for a disease which no longer exists. I just think it's unduly negative.

 

NB. Elective surgery looks like being reintroduced here too.

Unduly negative? Get to fuck, there are people dying due to your government’s handling of the situation.

you shouldn’t be looking to relax fuck all as of yet.

people are confident a vaccine will be about in September? So anyone between now and then is fair game? Viral load - how does this come about, well Clive , mainly due to a rise in patient infection rates leading to a rise in hospitalisation rates - and what can we do to prevent this? Probably stay at fucking home and reduce the rate of infection.

people waiting on cancer treatments and other life threatening illnesses are still being seen, guess what they have a far better chance of making it through any treatment, with lower Covid hospitalisation rates, and reduced risk of adding Covid to any other issues they maybe suffering CF the fact so many under 70s patients have died with co-morbidities.

everyone wants this to be over, the only way through is to continue to be risk averse, because otherwise it will continue to propagate. Use the time to study the virus and come up with treatments, and measures around it.

relax early and all of those workers who have been “thanked” for keeping public services open are back in the firing line.

go and watch a few documentaries on the “Spanish flu” see how much damage the states caused then.

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4 hours ago, Rico1304 said:

I think we decided Panorama wasn’t to be trusted about 6 months ago. Pity really. 

Try not to be an odious bellend, there's a dear.

 

If I remember rightly, the complaints against the John Ware programme were that it was riddled with inaccuracies and false claims. Even the Tories and their supporters aren't claiming that about last night's programme, because... well, because it wasn't. 

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12 hours ago, Scott_M said:

I was talking to my Dad at the weekend and he was telling me how he thinks he's had the virus. Like most things he says, I just ignored it thinking he was talking shite, but there might be something to it.

 

He went on a cruise in November / December and the last few days were in Singapore. He flew back on 23/12 and said the flight was full of people coughing and spluttering etc. I'm sure all the people on the flight weren't just from Singapore or had friends only from Singapore etc. Our friend, who we go to all the games with, picked Dad & his girlfriend up from the airport.

 

Dad was fine over Xmas (he came to ours on Boxing Day before we went to Leicester and was fine at Sheffield Utd & Wolves). Day of the Everton FA Cup game, he started to feel shite & flu-y and travelled to the game with the lad who picked him up from the airport. Dad then felt shite for the next couple of weeks, didn't go to Spurs due to sickness, and only just about better to go to the Man Utd.

 

Dad's girlfriend was also really sick and flu-y over the same period.

 

At Spurs, the lad who picked him up from the airport & travelled with him to Everton, felt awful all day and said he had flu.

 

I've had a bit of a dry cough afterwards but nothing much and have genuinely been in good health. However, when it comes to virus's, I'm Bruce Willis in Unbreakable. My wife has had flu-y symptoms as well (aches and pains, fever, lack of taste).

 

I'd love to go and get tested so I knew what was what. It'd be nice to know if we'd all had it and have anti-bodies or whatever so I can get back to normality.

 

I'm also fully blaming my Dad for us not being able to celebrate our title win.

One of my missus' students was off ill in December. Took to his bed for a week, then cracked on over Chrimbo. Symptoms were identical to Covid-19. Doctors have called him in for antibody tests. 

 

This has been going on way longer than were told. Either your Da' and this student were isolated cases. Or, it's been spreading since before Christmas (three months earlier than we thought). Given the increased activity over the festive period it's possible a huge amount of people have had it. An yet things only got really bad in March? Certainly raises a lot of questions..

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16 hours ago, Spy Bee said:

The similarity between this thread and the FF is striking. When there is a bad result of bad news, there's fucking page after page written on it. When some positive news comes out there is barely a comment. 

 

I choose to have a positive outlook whenever I can. I think this is healthier and more constructive. Sorry if that makes people think I don't give a fuck about those suffering and dying, but that's just not true.

There is a difference between having a positive outlook, a cheery disposition and an attitude of let’s just bloody well get on with it we are British we are free.

there are plenty of people making the lives of others better right now.

im not walking around with a woe is me attitude, I am taking precautions, I’m being aware of my own and the safety of others.

Healthier and more constructive?? Really there are a good few people on this thread drinking the kool aid with the eager rush back to “normality”, you want to know infection rates? Check the epidemiologists not some fella on the internet.

positive news? When, where? The old boy getting around the garden - people loved it, but also pointed out that the Tory pricks and 19 years of austerity necessitated it. The old fella getting a cushion of his dead missus? Again generally well received. Dolphins in Venice - boss. Italians singing from balconies - again sound.

what other positive news has there been? It all seems positive one minute then negative the next, a bit like the coffee causes cancer, coffee cures cancer daily mail stories.

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