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Category: COVID19

04/09/2021

Please Sign the Petition to stop the COVID Lockdown Ending Prematurely

4 September 2021

The Governments, Federal and NSW State, seem hell bent on ending the COVID lockdown.

Morrison stuffed up the vaccine and Gladys stuffed up the lock-down.

Now Morrison is talking about ‘Freedom’ and ‘One Australia’ showing that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Gladys is talking about the need for more deaths as if it is an inevitable consequence of the Delta strain and that nothing can be done to mitigate the situation . She is talking about bed numbers and trying to conjure ICU nurses out of thin air. The fact that the State public hospital system is always at full capacity with beds in corridors in ED is well known to any health professional who has any dealings with the system and is about to bite us big time.

So what should be done? The lockdown can only buy time to improve the vaccine rollout, but this is still very much worth doing. Figures from NSW that I posted last week suggested that vaccination reduced the chance of being in ICU by about 97%. Vaccinated people can still get and transmit COVID as it seems that the antibodies are not in secretions, so it is not until the virus invades that the body starts to fight it. But as the disease is milder, vaccinated people will cough less, spread the virus for less time and be less sick themselves.

NSW has given about 7.2 million doses to a population of 8.2 million people. For everyone in NSW to have 2 doses it would take about 16 million doses. If we assume that about 4% of people are anti-vaxxers and want to take their chances, and 16% are children under 12 for whom the vaccines are not approved, then 80% of the total population should be vaccinated, which will take about 13 million doses. At the current rate of a million doses a week, that should take about 6 weeks from now.

The government already has a huge debt and will avoid a lot of future costs by prevention rather than ‘cure’. A support package for those who cannot work is naturally needed also. There was a full page ad in the SMH last week with a number of businesses urging the Government to stick to the opening up timetable of the Doherty Report. Given that the Doherty Report recommendations were based on a far lower number of cases and it was assumed that what cases there were could be traced and were not Delta variants, the report needs to be reconsidered. Perhaps because it is from a reputable research organisation and that it is a long read it has not been seriously challenged, The Government has used it to try to justify the early opening.

One of the disappointing things in my life has been the revelation that some people really do not care a fig about anyone as long as they are personally OK. I was initially shocked to find that the Tobacco industry really did not care how many people died as long as they could make money. I found that the asbestos industry was the same, and then that most businesses skimp on safety on the principle that ‘we take the money, you take the risk’ There has also been the worrying trend, which I still link to Harvard management theory in the 1980s that managers can manage anything, and just need to buy any expertise that they do not have. Often that do not even know what they do not know, so they neglect to ask, do not know who or what to ask, or find the advice inconvenient. And sometimes they put ads in the paper.

We also cannot assume that those in Government know or care or that their primary concern will be for the welfare of their constituents. Presumably their unlikely re-election is what they are focused on.

So please sign the petition to stop the early opening- it currently all we can do.

29/08/2021

Irresponsible COVID Policies will Destroy the Federal and NSW Liberals

29 August 2021

Ok. I am making a prediction. The totally irresponsible Liberal COVID policies will destroy both the Morrison government and the NSW Liberals.

Why? The strategy of unlocking with only 70% of over 16 adults vaccinated is totally irresponsible. It is true that less children will get a bad infection and die, but some will- perhaps 1 in 100,000. But if a few million children go back to school, that is still a significant number. The unvaccinated children will also get infected and go home to their families and infect them. Every parent who has had kids start at day-care knows how many more colds they got that year.

As far as the adults are concerned, if there are still 30% of them unvaccinated, that is a huge number to make an epidemic. The hospitals always manage with very slim margins of capacity. How many beds are in corridors and how many trolleys in ED normally? Quite a few. Now they are stopping non-urgent surgery, but these cases are not trivial, and cancer patients may well die of their delays.

But they key point is that the hospital system will be overwhelmed by cases and that those cases would not be necessary if the government held its nerve and continued the lockdown until all those who wanted the vaccine had it- upwards of 95% perhaps. If NSW is vaccinating a million people a week and has 8 million people needing 2 doses each, that is 16 weeks, less the fact that almost half the adult doses has been given. 12 weeks might be a realistic estimate, better if the vaccine can be hurried further. As far as the children are concerned, I recall in the 1950s when polio vaccine came- we were simply lined up in the school corridor at lunch time and everyone was done.

The cost of vaccination compared to the cost of hospitalisations does not bear thinking about. It is also probably that the cost of the hospitalisations and time lost will exceed the cost of a decent home support system- but Morrison will not even consider this, still talking about tax cuts before the election, as the national debt balloons to record levels. Do the rich really need this?

Morrison also wants to force states that have almost no COVID to open up. Qld and WA, having isolated themselves, controlled COVID and given themselves quite a remarkably normal quality of life do not want to be forced to open to NSW and Victoria, where COVID is frankly out of control. Morrison needs Qld seats to get re-elected. If he forces Qld to open and the pandemic spreads there as it will, his chances of re-election is nil.

Gladys Berejeklian is now talking about vaccinations, trying to distract attention from the number of cases and is systematically getting us used to the idea that since we now can never get to zero cases, we have to open up, and might as well do it now as later. This is not true, if now we are not vaccinated, and later we will be. She is blamed for the Delta virus escape as she did not mandate vaccination for limo drivers who ferried people from the airport to the quarantine hotels and then was slow to lock down Bondi when the infection escaped in June. So now to say it is all inevitable and unlock with what amounts to a very low vaccination rate is likely to lead to very big epidemic, the health system being overwhelmed, a lot of unnecessary deaths and yes, Gladys losing the election.

And Gladys does not like Morrison either, so she had better throw him under a bus before he does it to her.

29/08/2021

COVID Vaccine Works!

29 August 2021

An anti-vaxxer who keeps posting on my Facebook page also keeps demanding proof that the vaccine does more harm than good. I told her to do her own research as it is really too obvious.

I looked at the figures for NSW today and they made the point very clearly. There are 126 people in ICU of whom 13 have had one dose of vaccine and 1 has had 2 doses. The percentage of NSW people over 16yo unvaccinated are 37.3%, one vaccination jab 29% and two vaccinations 33.8%.

If vaccine did not work, the percentage of people in ICU would be the same in all 3 groups. This would mean unvaccinated would be 47 (37.2% of 126), one vaccine jab 37 (29% of 126) and two vaccine jabs 43 (33.8% of 126). But the numbers are: unvaccinated 113, one jab 12, two jabs 1.

So those with 2 jabs have only I person in ICU instead of 43, and those with one jab have 12 instead of 37. So the chance of being in ICU has been reduced by 42/43 (97.7%) with 2 jabs, and 25/37 (67.6%) with one jab. This is just a one day sample (yesterday in NSW), but the results are very significant. The data is from NSW Health via Juliette O’Brien’s website.

And the chance of dying due to vaccine is about 1 in a million.

www.covid19data.com.au/hospitalisations-icu

20/08/2021

Attitudes to Anti-Vaxxers- a parallel with smokers?

20 August 2021

I spent over 20 years of my life with my principal task to fight the tobacco industry. I saw how harmful smoking was in my patients, and tried to tell them. But smoking was common, allowed everywhere and, after food, the most advertised product in the country. Shops were so covered with ads that when you drove into a town, you looked for the cigarette ads to find the food shop. It was normalised. One of my patients, whose leg I had just amputated said, ‘All the doctors say that smoking is harmful, but if it was the government would do something about it’.

There were almost no smoke-free restaurants anywhere, because the non-smokers had been trained to put up with it, and restaurateurs were worried that smokers might leave them. They knew that the non-smokers had no choice. The tobacco industry told the pub owners that smokers drank more and gambled more, so they had better not offend them, so the Australian Hotels Association were the major lobby, with the Registered Clubs and Restaurant Association tagging along. The tobacco industry disputed the science long after it was proved to any reasonable analysis, and smokers clung onto this. The tobacco industry PR followed what was called the ‘tightrope policy’. They did not know if smoking was harmful because they were not doctors, so they were not responsible for selling a lethal product, but because everyone had heard it was harmful, smokers were taking their own risks.

Smokers therefore said, encouraged by the Industry that it was their ‘right to smoke’, and then they denied that it harmed everyone else. So instead of the tobacco industry having to prove that passive smoking was harmless, the medical profession then had to prove it was harmful and then get legislation implemented, a process that took about another 45 years at about 43 deaths a day in Australia. Since non-smokers also got heart attacks etc, the Industry argued that they could not blame them on the second hand smoke.

Now we have the ‘right not to be vaccinated’ and the ‘right not to be excluded because we are unvaccinated’. Instead of spreading second hand smoke, unvaccinated people are spreading COVID virus. And they are saying that vaccinated people also spread the virus and can also catch it. Perhaps. But vaccinated people spread less virus, and the right not to be exposed to a virus trumps the right to spread it.

China unashamedly goes for the greatest good for the greatest number and puts little store on individual rights. Our tradition of Greek thought is all about the individual reaching his or her full potential, even if this means we tend to overlook the exploitation of others. This is becoming increasingly relevant as unregulated markets, like a Monopoly game, move money upwards and increase inequality.

I saw a meme yesterday that the CDC (Centre for Disease Control) does not mandate masks. This was in the context of the conclusion that ‘neither should we’. No doubt CDC does not need to mandate masks (assuming that the meme was correct)- the people who work there will have the vaccine ASAP.

The answer in civil rights terms if that anti-vaxxers have the right to be unvaccinated as consenting adults in private, but they do not have the right to go into public spaces where they may spread the virus. That is the individual rights answer and also the greatest good for the greatest number. We had a tobacco epidemic for 100 years, when it should have lasted 50 years if there had been science-based policy. This must not happen with this epidemic. We must have a lockdown until probably 90% of the whole population is vaccinated. We should vaccinate people who want it as fast as we can. Then we should have vaccine passports so we can open up again. Florida in the US is showing us what happens when silly policies are followed.

10/07/2021

Is There a Role for the Military in Vaccination?

10 July 2021

I felt that something was wrong when a Soldier started advising me about vaccinations.

Here is a good summary from Crikey of what seems to be happening.

www.crikey.com.au/2021/07/07/administration-with-authority-how-putting-the-vaccine-rollout-in-military-hands-is-corrosive-for-the-country/?utm_campaign=Weekender&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wkndr=RFdETTg0am9ucG5qc2dpcVpTeTU2QT09&success=krsmvj

09/07/2021

COVID19 Vaccines Reduce Transmission

9 July 2021

www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/mounting-evidence-suggests-covid-vaccines-do-reduc?fbclid=IwAR0HwSRf56I6awyVZfsN1O-CbCjeOHJWZk9PwxbgJE_L2V9TwRJPxalSLu8

27/06/2021

NSW Govt tries to Blame Limousine Driver for New Sydney COVID Outbreak

26 June 2021

The pathetic efforts of Gladys Berejeklian to blame the limousine driver for the latest COVID outbreak, which has now caused a city-wide lockdown and an increasing number of cases needs to be judged on its demerits. Obviously there should have been regulations that anyone on the front line had to be vaccinated, and surely driving a limo from the airport to the quarantine hotel is ‘front line’.

She said that she ‘could not control the subcontractor of the subcontractor.’ Actually, she could have. Now she has the regulation that she should have had months ago- front line staff have to be vaccinated.

Of course, the reason for the spread of the virus from the Melbourne quarantine hotels months ago was the fact that the support staff had many jobs, because they were not permanent and had shifts everywhere. The same problem occurred with transmission in Victorian Nursing homes- casual shifts. Now it is Sydney drivers.

The farmers are moaning that they will not be able to pick the fruit without the visas for backpackers, foreign students and Pacific Islanders. Skilled migrants? I do not think so. It is about sub award wages and poor conditions. If Australia is a rich country we need also to remember our roots as the country of a ‘fair go’. If top wage are high by world standards, so they should be at the bottom. If wages were high enough Aussies would pick the fruit, and cleaners and limousine drivers would have regular jobs and award wages.

But here was the NSW Government trying to blame the limo driver for the outbreak. But today’s Sun Herald has the Police Commissioner saying that the driver had committed no crime. Neither has the NSW Government- they are just incompetent, but no one seems to blame them.

www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-17/nsw-quarantine-worker-may-have-breached-health-order/100223120

28/04/2021

Clotting Risk from Vaccines and COVID19 Infection

28 April 2021

A new Oxford Study compares the incidence of Cerebral Venous Thrombosis with the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccine and the risk if you get COVID19. The risk from the A-Z vaccine is 5 per million, the Pfizer and Moderna 4 per million and the risk if you catch COVID19 is 39 per million. The sample size is large with over half a million cases in each group, so the reliability of the research is quite good.While there is no COVID19 about, it is obviously safer to have no vaccine and no risk, but the COVID19 situation could change at any time. The Business Council and other non-medical political groups are calling for a more open society and for the case chasers to try to keep a certain level of infections once the gates are opened. i.e. We get the money- someone else fix the problems. Presumably they will try to stop further lockdowns, particularly as the percentage of the population who have been vaccinated increases.The bottom line is that the A-Z vaccine is almost as safe as the Pfizer one, and it is a good idea to be vaccinated ASAP in case the situation changes for the worse. I had the A-Z almost 2 weeks ago and only noted a slight headache, and tiredness on the evening of the vaccine, and a bit of local tenderness at the injection site the next day. I will have the second shot in 10 weeks.

www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-04-15-risk-rare-blood-clotting-higher-covid-19-vaccines-0?fbclid=IwAR2TIjtz8C7ku_M1OXcELaa2BfrC4hBTwBSoD_svCfdhwWQORr6K4sx4BOI

13/04/2021

Politicisation of Vaccine Rollout has caused the Problems

13 April 2021

Scott Morrison’s objective was to have a low risk strategy. He got the States to handle the COVID19 crisis, while he merely took the credit for its success. Then he wanted to have a successful vaccination programme, and go quickly to an election. He announced a lot of vaccine deals, waving a chequebook with our money to put us high in the world’s vaccine queue. (Tough luck poorer countries with much more cases).

But the deals were soft, the Qld vaccine had problems with false positives for the HIV/Aids test, and it seems the Astra-Zeneca vaccine is not quite as effective as the others, and had a few side effects. So his loudly-touted intervention has just made him look ineffective.

The problems in the health system with the overlapping Federal/State responsibilities and cost-shifting, and the starving of Medicare with subsidies to the private system have all been swept under the carpet in the crisis. But the government’s new dynamic, which is to ignore good advice and treat everything as a political problem, with Morrison giving advice on every subject from weather forecasts, to fires to vaccines is part of the replacement of knowledge by politics, which is a problem in many areas.

Here is an analysis of this fiasco by Steven Duckett, one of Australia’s leading health economists.

https://theconversation.com/4-ways-australias-covid-vaccine-rollout-has-been-bungled-158225

09/04/2021

Vaccines and Probabilities

April 9 2021

Many years ago as I tried to tell sceptical people that smoking killed people, the research was all about the probability of smokers getting diseases more often than non-smokers. People would often reply, ‘Lies, damn lies and statistics’ as if this was some sort of frightfully clever response that neutralised any sensible discussion.

Statistics have been used by researchers for years and are the basis of the experimental method to get towards scientific truth. Things are rarely ‘proved’ in science, they are just rendered more and more likely, so that the probability of their not being true becomes infinitesimally small.

Where there are number of variables the statistics become ever more complicated and the proofs more arguable. Some of us get a bit lost as the complexity rises, and try to retreat to ‘common sense’, with is another way of saying what is most probable based on facts we are already sure of.

The Astra-Zeneca vaccine has been pushed in Australia, and there is a world shortage of vaccines, despite Prime Minister Morrison running around with an open chequebook for a long time and boasting that we were at the front of the queue for was it 4 different ones ‘in development’?

The loss of the Uni of Qld. vaccine because it gave a false positive in the HIV/Aids test was a bad blow, given that it was ‘ours’ and the vaccine against cervical cancer had been so successful.

As more and more countries expressed reservations about the A-Z vaccine, it was becoming harder and harder to stick to the line that they were panicking and there was nothing in the stories about blood clotting in dangerous body locations.

Now A-Z is not recommended for the under 50 age group, which is most of the country. Presumably this means that because under-50s are less likely to die of COVID19 even if they get it, the risk of dying from a clot becomes more significant. Obviously in Australia, if we can keep COVID isolated forever, we will not need a vaccine at all unless we want to venture overseas. So we are looking at the probability of the virus escaping, and the probability of other vaccines being available as well as the chance of dying at whatever age we are with whatever existing medical problems we may have, versus the chance of having a bad reaction to the vaccine.

I want to get vaccinated so I can go on an overseas holiday at last, but the A-Z vaccine may be less effective against new and dastardly strains, and if I take that risk will I be stuck in a hotel in Mongolia unable to fly home because the government has changed its policy on my vaccination status or the absolute numbers who can be quarantined?

It is very hard to answer all these questions for anyone, and when older patients who have clotting problems ask for advice, it is very hard to give them an answer. Doctors will have to spend a lot of time on this. Our practice is not vaccinating at all, the red tape scared us off, despite the fact that we had bought a new vaccine frig and have been vaccinating people for 40 years. Call me a coward if you will. But for myself, I do have an appointment to have the A-Z vaccine next week.

Here is the SMH article:

AstraZeneca blood clot cases force major vaccine shake-up; Pfizer now preferred for under-50s

By Rachel Clun

April 9, 2021

Pfizer is now the preferred vaccine for people aged under 50 and the timing of Australia’s rollout is in doubt after medical experts expressed concerns about rare blood clots potentially linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine – the mainstay of the country’s existing COVID-19 strategy.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Thursday night the government will review Australia’s vaccine portfolio and accept medical advice that will preference the Pfizer vaccine over AstraZeneca’s in adults aged less than 50 years old who have not already received a first dose of AstraZeneca, putting plans to vaccinate the entire population by October in doubt.

Australia’s decision follows changes by European medical regulators after a review of data confirmed a rare blood clotting condition seen in a small number of patients was linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Mr Morrison said the new advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation was not a prohibition on the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in people aged under 50.

“This is not a directive. This is not an instruction,” he said, noting they were taking “an abundance of caution” with the new advice. He said the impact of this decision on the timeline of the rollout was uncertain.

“Tomorrow, and over the weekend, there will be a recalibration of how the program will need to be adjusted to take into account decisions the government’s taken tonight to accept those recommendations from ATAGI,” he said on Thursday evening.

Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly said the rare but serious blood clot disorder was discussed in the meeting, taking into account what was decided overseas and looking at what that would look like in Australia.

“This is a rare event,” he said. “But it is serious and can cause an up to 25 per cent death rate when it occurs.”

For those over 50, Health Department secretary Professor Brendan Murphy said AstraZeneca was strongly recommended.

“It is a vaccine that is very, very effective,” he said.

ATAGI spent hours on Thursday considering the medical evidence. It then issued new advice on the AstraZeneca vaccine, which it provided to the government just after 7pm.

The medical experts made three recommendations, including that AstraZeneca was preferred in adults over 50, after a lengthy meeting. They also recommended adults under the age of 50 should only be given AstraZeneca where the benefits clearly outweighed the risks. Third, it recommended that adults under 50 who had already received their first doses without experiencing serious side effects could safely be given their second dose.

Professor Kelly stressed the data on the rare clotting side effect, venous thromboembolism, was still only preliminary.

Britain’s vaccine advisory committee says adults under 30 should be offered an alternative to AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine when possible, due to a very rare side effect of blood clots in the brain.

“There are very few cases of this extremely rare event that have happened anywhere in the world, but the ones we’ve seen, there’s definitely a tendency for the younger people [to develop it],” he said.

The UK regulator has decided to offer an alternative vaccine for those aged under 30.

Australia has purchased 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and has been relying on the AstraZeneca vaccine as the workhorse of the rollout. The country is expecting its first deliveries of the Novavax vaccine, pending regulatory approval, some time in the fourth quarter of the year.

Late on Thursday, Australian pharma giant CSL said “it remains committed to meeting its contracted arrangements with the Australian government and AstraZeneca for locally produced AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines.”

AstraZeneca Australia added that it respected the decision outlined by the government.

“Regulatory agencies have reaffirmed the vaccine offers a high-level of protection against all severities of COVID-19 and that these benefits continue to far outweigh the risks.” a spokeswoman for the company said.

Earlier, the Prime Minister said the risk of severe side effects with the AstraZeneca vaccine is much lower than with common drugs including paracetamol and the oral contraceptive pill.

Mr Morrison said it was important to know the risk of developing venous thromboembolism was much lower following the AstraZeneca vaccine than the risk of death from COVID-19.

“Let’s note that in the UK, the advice is that some 6000 people’s lives have already been saved by this very vaccine. So we need to consider the positive benefits,” he said.

From UK data, the risk of venous thromboembolism following the vaccine was about one to five per million people.

“To put that in some sort of perspective, the combined oral contraceptive pill, that can include adverse side effects of venous thromboembolism – that’s seven to 10 per 10,000,” Mr Morrison said.

The advice has been shared with the expert medical panel, the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, which comprises all state and territory chief health officers and led by federal Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly.

The matter will also be discussed in national cabinet on Friday and in meetings with state and territory health ministers, who were due to meet on Thursday night to discuss the revised advice and its implementation.

On Wednesday 75,880 doses of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines were administered across the country, Scott Morrison said, taking the national total to 996,214 doses administered so far during the rollout.

The states and territories have administered 509,802 doses. Through the federal government, 486,343 doses have been administered, including more than 125,260 through aged care.