Tag: covid-19

Half of CDC Coronavirus Test Kits Are Inaccurate, Study Finds

Coronavirus testing has been a hot-button issue since the beginning of the pandemic. First, there weren’t enough coronavirus tests to go around. Now, a new issue has emerged—just how accurate the tests people are getting actually are. According to a July 17 study published in the International Journal of Geriatrics and Rehabilitation, 50 percent of nucleic acid coronavirus tests distributed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provided inaccurate results.

The study’s lead author, Sin Hang Lee, MD, director of Milford Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory, found that the testing kits gave a 30 percent false-positive rate and a 20 percent false-negative rate.

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USE GLORY HOLES FOR SAFE SEX …Canadian CDC Approved!!!

The Canadian CDC breaks it down like this … if you’re gonna have sex during the pandemic, it’s a helluva lot safer to “use barriers, like walls (e.g., glory holes), that allow for sexual contact but prevent close face-to-face contact.”

New York City actually recommended walls back in June, but did not outright call them glory holes … sorry, NYC, Canada is holier than thou!

Folks on social media are having a field day tweeting creative ways to use walls and barriers, even suggesting things like “Plexiglas shields like in grocery stores except for glory holes,” holes in sheets, mail slots, doggy doors and donuts.

If glory holes sound a little too raunchy for you, don’t worry … doggy style seems to be kosher too. The BC CDC also recommends choosing sexual positions that limit face-to-face contact.

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Covid-19 Vaccines With ‘Minor Side Effects’ Could Still Be Pretty Bad

On Monday, vaccine researchers from Oxford University and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca announced results from a “Phase 1/2 trial,” suggesting their product might be able to generate immunity without causing serious harm. Similar, but smaller-scale results, were posted just last week for another candidate vaccine produced by the biotech firm Moderna, in collaboration with the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

As both these groups and others push ahead into the final phase of testing, it’s vital that the public has a clear and balanced understanding of this work—one that cuts through all the marketing and hype. But we’re not off to a good start. The evidence so far suggests that we’re getting blinkered by these groups’ PR, and so seduced by stories of their amazing speed that we’re losing track of everything else. In particular, neither the mainstream media nor the medical press has given much attention to the two vaccines’ potential downsides—in particular, their risk of nasty adverse effects, even if they’re not life-threatening. This sort of puffery doesn’t only help to build a false impression; it may also dry the tinder for the future spread of vaccine fear-mongering.

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GloboCap Über Alles

The parallels are overwhelming. The “state of emergency.” The propaganda. The mass hysteria. The mob mentality. The exaggeration of the actual threat. The police-state atmosphere. The suppression of dissent. The constant repetition of the new official narrative. The exhortative catchphrases and meaningless slogans. The confusion. The chaos. The existential fear. And so on. It is all so very familiar.

I’m referring to the simulated pandemic, of course, but also to the racialized civil unrest and identitarian polarization that GloboCap has fomented throughout the United States, and, to varying degrees, the rest of the empire. I’ve been covering the War on Populism and GloboCap’s “Trump-is-literally-Hitler” propaganda since 2016, so the civil unrest isn’t terribly surprising.

But, I confess, I did not see the fake plague coming.

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HOMELAND SECURITY WORRIES COVID-19 MASKS ARE BREAKING FACIAL RECOGNITION, LEAKED DOCUMENT SHOWS

WHILE DOCTORS AND politicians still struggle to convince Americans to take the barest of precautions against Covid-19 by wearing a mask, the Department of Homeland Security has an opposite concern, according to an “intelligence note” found among the BlueLeaks trove of law enforcement documents: Masks are breaking police facial recognition.

The rapid global spread and persistent threat of the coronavirus has presented an obvious roadblock to facial recognition’s similar global expansion. Suddenly everyone is covering their faces. Even in ideal conditions, facial recognition technologies often struggle with accuracy and have a particularly dismal track record when it comes to identifying faces that aren’t white or male. Some municipalities, startled by the civil liberties implications of inaccurate and opaque software in the hands of unaccountable and overly aggressive police, have begun banning facial recognition software outright. But the global pandemic may have inadvertently provided a privacy fix of its own — or for police, a brand new crisis.

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Are official figures overstating England’s Covid-19 death toll?

Matt Hancock has announced an urgent review into how Public Health England (PHE) counts Covid-19 deaths after discovering what appeared to be a serious issue in how rates are calculated.

Following the health secretary’s move on Friday, Yoon K Loke and Carl Heneghan, of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, wrote in a blogpost: “It seems that PHE regularly looks for people on the NHS database who have ever tested positive, and simply checks to see if they are still alive or not. PHE does not appear to consider how long ago the Covid test result was, nor whether the person has been successfully treated in hospital and discharged to the community.”

A Department of Health and Social Care source summed this up as: “You could have been tested positive in February, have no symptoms, then be hit by a bus in July and you’d be recorded as a Covid death.”

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