The Post-Partisan Emporium

Who Manages Unitaid? Context Behind the Lawrie-Hill conversation The Chloroquine Wars Part CIV Mathew Crawford " Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome. " -Charlie Munger Apologies for the substantial background behind this article up front. The payoff is large. Like  mega-Nicki Minaj large . Earlier this month,  an article  by  author  and medical and science correspondent  Neville Hodgkinson  circulated and created a buzz.  The article leads with brief discussions of the endemic fraud and corruption in the biomedical sciences , A leading UK cancer specialist told me years ago how he was blackmailed by the Imperial Cancer Research Fund into staying silent over a fraudulent study the fund had sponsored. Published in the Lancet, the study purported to show that patients treated holistically through the  Bristol Cancer Help Centre  did worse than those who had only orthodox treatment. It was junk science, aimed at discrediti...

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Flood-tide of Darkness James Howard Kunstler The frenzy around the Christmas holiday conceals deeper currents running through advanced techno-industrial societies like froth on the surface of a raging river that surges with dangerous, hidden flotsam. We’re informed that the next James Bond might be a transsexual. But, you see, it’s not just that Hollywood is running out of gimmicks for its floundering “franchises,” but rather that there has been no place for men these days in the struggle to prevent civilization from drowning. The lifeguards are cancelled. All that’s left in the commotion of the flood is the shrieking of women. Thus, the hysteria over Trumpism. America actually needed a rescue operation and, defective as he was personality-wise, Mr. Trump rose above the surge and called for exactly that, and was pulled under for the effrontery of saying so. It was a bad time to be a man standing out among men. The torrent is in charge now, not the people bobbing and flailing in it. Rid...

Is Vaccine Effectiveness Against Death Mostly a Statistical Illusion? One of the big challenges in analysing the data on Covid has been definitions. What is a Covid death, what is a Covid case or infection? What the data appears to say can change radically depending on the definitions adopted. This has been a particular issue with vaccination, as vaccination status is subject to a variety of conflicting definitions. In particular, when does someone count as vaccinated? Is it as soon as they have the needle in their arm, or do they remain ‘unvaccinated’ after that for a period of time, say seven, 14 or 21 days? For instance, the recent  ICNARC report  stated the number of ICU admissions by vaccination status. But it also clarified that ‘unvaccinated’ includes those who received a jab less than 14 days prior to testing positive. This means that some (an unknown number) who were counted as unvaccinated had in fact received a dose. This may be more than just a minor problem. For o...

WHITE GIRLS’ SACRIFICE By  Poppy Coburn GROOMING GANGS: A STATE WITHIN THE UK STATE In 2017, the BBC premiered a three-part mini-series entitled  Three Girls . The program was centred around the Rochdale grooming gangs, dramatising the abuse and subsequent court case from the perspective of three underage victims. Perhaps even more harrowing than the depiction of sexual violence was the institutional unwillingness of the police and the local council to grapple with the scale of the organised child abuse.  The drama was showered in accolades: the three young actresses portrayed the agony of the abused children with skill and sensitivity, and the decision to show on-screen sexually violent acts hammered home the horror of the Rochdale scandal. I found myself both horrified and relieved — horrified that such a miscarriage of justice had been allowed to happen, yet relieved that the national attention the incidents had received would prevent such repugnant crimes from happeni...

Original Antigenic Sin is a Real and Very Serious Reason to Stop Vaccinating Everyone Two papers discover that cross-reacting antibodies from common coronavirus infections can hinder effective antibody response to SARS-CoV-2. eugyppius In September,  a small study conducted by researchers at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam  looked at the antibody response of 20 severely ill Corona patients admitted to the ICU, comparing their cases to 12 mild infections and 6 negative controls. They found that the immune response of the severely ill, unlike that of the mild patients, was dominated by IgG antibodies against ordinary seasonal coronaviruses. In other words, the most severely ill patients had fewer naive B cells imprinting on SARS-CoV-2, and more memory B cells producing antibodies against the somewhat similar common coronaviruses these patients had recovered from in the past. As the authors note,  this is the phenomenon of Original Antigenic Sin . The immune systems ...