vaccines

We are all going to die (again)…

Brian O'Neill on November 29, 2021, 11:04 am

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Omicron is all over the media, much to the surprise of Angelique Coetzee the South African doctor who first discovered the new strain. South African Dr Angelique Coetzee first raised the alarm over the Omicron variant and says the rest of the world is over-reacting. "Patients I've seen had mild symptoms and recovered. None were admitted and no oxygen was needed. The hype makes no sense to at all."@JuliaHB1 pic.twitter.com/c14pbzveN6 — talkRADIO (@talkRADIO) November 29, 2021 Fear sells and the …

“Just didn’t get around to it”. The ethics of the unvaccinated…

Brian O'Neill on November 22, 2021, 7:15 pm

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Amid all the debate around lockdowns, vaccine passports, rising Covid figures etc it is important to remember that every death is a tragedy. In Friday’s Irish News there was the story about a 48-year-old father of 9 from Downpatrick who has died of Covid: THE family of a father-of-nine who died following a nine-week battle with Covid have told how his passing has left them “numb”. Ivor Wilcox (48), who lived in Downpatrick, died at the Ulster Hospital on Tuesday. …

Christians should support the right to life by get vaccinated…

Terry Maguire on July 30, 2021, 7:22 am

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Perhaps it’s me, but I just couldn’t see where Jim Wells was coming from in a recent Belfast Telegraph article on his views of Covid vaccines. Here’s Jim as reported in the Tele which might give some sense of why I was confused. “It is not an anti-vaccine issue it is an ethical issue. I have had a large number of Christians who have said to me: ‘Look we are not opposed to vaccines and are not into these conspiracy …

Diane Dodds holds the key to getting the population fully vaccinated…

Brian O'Neill on May 11, 2021, 7:33 am

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The Northern Ireland vaccine programme has been a stunning success. We have pretty much full vaccination in the over 60s and they have been doing a great job of going down the age groups. The issue is as you get younger you start to get more vaccine hesitancy. Young people generally think they are immortal, and when you have a disease that does not seem to affect them too badly you can understand why some might be tempted to not …

With an abundance of caution, Ireland shoots itself in the foot by deferred use of the AstraZeneca vaccine…

Terry Maguire on March 16, 2021, 11:00 am

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In the 1960s, US President Johnson was considering mandatory vaccination to eradicate a number of infectious diseases but was advised against it. The move would, he was told, cause 30,000 cancer deaths and 100,000 heart deaths. The President asked how the advisor knew this to which the adviser replied that this was the annual number of deaths from cancer and heart disease in the US but with mandatory vaccination, each one would be causally linked to a vaccine. This was …

New data showing “First Doses First” strategy is working may speed UK’s vaccination progress…

Mick Fealty on February 4, 2021, 10:15 am

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This comes via the marvellous John Naughton’s substack feed… It’s from Alex Tabbarok on Marginal Revolution… First, as I mentioned yesterday, we now have epidemiologists and vaccine researchers saying that for people previously infected with COVID a second dose is not necessary and may be “overkill.” Given how many people have had COVID, this increases the net benefit to First Doses First for everyone significantly. Second, an important new study verifies that for the AZ vaccine a longer delay for …

We need to be vigilant against the antivaxers…

Terry Maguire on January 22, 2021, 8:07 am

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Medical scientists are more positive than they have been for months. If the science is right – and we trust it is – twenty-one days after 95% of the most vulnerable have had their first covid-19 vaccine they should have 70% protection against the virus and then there should be a sharp fall in the numbers hospitalized and ending up in ICU. Mission accomplished in protecting the NHS and this should be happening mid-March. The Covid-19 virus will off course …

No, the COVID-19 Vaccine is not made from aborted babies…

Brian O'Neill on December 10, 2020, 12:47 pm

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You may have seen a story doing the rounds on social media about the new Covid-19 vaccine being made from the cells of aborted babies. Like most rumours on social media, it is just not true. A simple way to check if a story is true is to look it up on Snopes – the fact-checking site. From their entry on this rumour: A viral video published in late November 2020 re-energized a common anti-vaccine talking point, alleging that AstraZeneca’s …

Welcome to the Era of Vaccine Politics…

John Moriarty on November 28, 2020, 8:17 am

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If recent developments around COVID vaccination has reminded us of anything, surely it’s that nothing is easy. Proof of anything is hard to come by. Weighing up a 90%-effective vaccine against a 70%-effective one might seem straightforward, but that’s without knowing if those numbers remain stable as more evidence comes in, and if so, who are the 10 and 30% and when and why a vaccine can be ineffective in a given instance. Then you’re straight on to, well what …

Reasons to be cheerful – Africa declared free of wild polio after no cases in four years…

Brian O'Neill on August 26, 2020, 11:03 am

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I am in a glum mood today. The inability of our government to do the most basic tasks like sort out a water system or put in some bike lanes depresses me. Thankfully emotions are like the weather, and in a while, this gloom shall make way for the bright rays of emotional sunshine. Something that did lift my mood was the news that polio has been eradicated in Africa. From the Irish Times: Water-borne infection at one point paralysed …

Why wait for a Covid-19 vaccine; could we consider “natural vaccination”?

Terry Maguire on May 27, 2020, 7:00 am

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The race is on and the stakes high. A safe and effective vaccine in the near future is the best chance we are told of controlling a virus that brought so much death and economic destruction in the first half of 2020. A vaccine without side-effects administered to the whole population and giving total protection is what we seek but are unlikely to achieve. Things just don’t work this way, but that should not stop us trying. There is already …

The strange case of Ex-Dr Wakefield and the MMR vaccine…

Sharon Fennell on May 25, 2010, 10:25 am

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Andrew Wakefield is the ex-doctor, whose scant regard for scientific accuracy or ethics has led to him being struck off the medical register. Yesterday the General Medical Council (GMC) found him guilty of serious professional misconduct, having found him guilty last January of having “showed a callous disregard” for the suffering of children, saying also that he had “abused his position of trust.” Wakefield has caused untold harm to autistic people by leading those falsely describing the condition as vaccination …