This peer-reviewed paper has found that early treatment of vulnerable COVID patients leads to much lower death rates compared to those "associated with therapeutic nihilism.” rcm.imrpress.com/article/2020/2…
"The rates of death in our study indicate that early multidrug therapy is associated with > 90% reduction in mortality among the high risk compared to community rates of death associated with therapeutic nihilism in ambulatory patients who are subsequently hospitalized.”
It’s presumptuous for me to pronounce on health policy, of course. But the Cabinet have no qualms about doing so. And not only are they completely unqualified, they have repeatedly shown that they are useless.
It *looks* like a combination of safe, well known interventions can reduce hospitalisation and deaths when used early. What is the rationale for not applying this combination more widely?
The paper was published in Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine on December 30th. I urge all the journalists who hate follow me to go and read it for themselves and have a bit of a think.
There's now a widening gap between what some clinicians are doing and the official consensus. The doctors at the FLCCC @Covid19Critical are the most prominent group I know of who are arguing for early and aggressive intervention.
"I am not a crank!" I cry, as I am carted off to Twitter jail.
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Today the Times and the Mail have both run stories on #ivermectin based on "leaked slides" from a WHO researcher that found their way onto Youtube. One is paywalled, and the other is ... well, the Mail. thetimes.co.uk/article/iverme…
The UK media needs to up its game, and start looking at the peer-reviewed papers on which these slides were based, and start speaking with clinicians and researchers about what they mean. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9…
And the rest of us need to think about whether we are well served by this highly centralised and hierarchical system of knowledge production in both science and the media, in which most of us are reduced to the status of tweeting bystanders.
I enjoyed listening to this talk about how we might reinvigorate UK democracy. I was very particularly pleased to hear the presenter call for an opening up of scientific decision-making in a much more open process of democratic deliberation.
I have long been interested in how we give democratic bite and purchase on the conduct of public business. I am particularly interested in the use of political juries to oversee elites, and to develop knowledge that stands outside, and in some senses above ...
... the shared understandings and accommodations of those elites. The life sciences, like finance and many other aspects of public policy, are intensely vulnerable to capture by privileged insiders.
If you are looking at the Conservative party and wondering how they are able to commit the political equivalent of armed robbery year after year with no apparent loss of popularity *it's because the UK media are driving the getaway car.*
Sure, some of the people who should be trying to stop them, nominally left-wing politicians and intellectuals, are working for the same crime syndicates. But they can only pull off this trick because the media keep silent about what they are up to.
It's a big club, and not only are we not in it, we're going to keep being told that it doesn't exist by the people who are, until we create our own, democratic and cooperative media sector. If we can't describe our predicament, we cannot change it.
Philosophers hitherto have only pronounced 'rentier' in various ways. The point is to strip rent, interest and monopoly pricing out of the economy. This is why I warble on about media reform the whole time. Control of public speech is the cornerstone of rule ...
... Michael Gove and Boris Johnson both rose to their current eminence in the state via service to billionaires. The situation in the UK isn't hard to understand, once this is said out loud. And that's why a vast industry is dedicated to saying something, anything, else ...
Our liberation can only happen through a thorough-going reorganisation of the state, in the face of media that will insist that such a project is a distraction from the real concerns. I write up some of what that re-organisation looks like here - thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/…
In 2021 do we really want normal service to be resumed in the UK media? Normal service is going to divide us and rule us, centralise authority, and marginalise anyone who doesn't glorify the status quo. That's what normal service means. wordpress.com/stats/day/ther…
We'll go in to the new year with thousands of underemployed journalists and researchers, pools of unspent income, and an existing media regime that is very clearly not up to the job. No one is going to put these pieces together for us; no billionaires, no foundations.
Either we build a cooperative media regime, or we resign ourselves to permanent defeat. The first step to that is realising that no charismatic political leader or media celebrity will do this for us. It only going to be us. It's always only us.
Here's the former editor of the Sun asking on Saturday why so much of the British press supported Brexit: "serious questions have to be asked."
Is it such a mystery? On Thursday the same former editor of the Sun had already cracked the case.
It's been 10 years now since I took time out of my busy schedule to explain why media system based on public service values or market forces are bound to mislead the populations they pretend to serve. As a treat I set out the principles that would underpin an alternative.