Postcards From The Hedge

"Excess deaths" are all over Contrariworld at the moment. Some want to use them to undermine vaccines, others (with overlap to the first group) to undermine lockdowns.  The Daily Telegraph has had the latter in a told-you-so frenzy with a truly awful headline (find the piece yourself!):  " Lockdown feared to be killing more people than Covid" The Twitter version appends 'effects' to 'lockdown', while the piece itself moves rapidly away from lockdown itself to issues related to the effects of the pandemic on healthcare. These would happen, probably more so, in the absence of mitigations, so attributing them to lockdowns is dubious. An inversion of reality, one might say.  The core evidence of a concern is a snippet of the graph of excess deaths - the deaths over and above those expected based upon an average of equivalent recent periods. In this period, the deaths directly attributed to Covid don't account for the whole of the excess. So what is ...

I wrote recently about the old-new topic of virus denial from a molecular biological perspective. My main thesis there was that the purported non-existence of viruses makes no sense in light of the fact that viruses contributed extensively to the subject of molecular biology. If they did not work in the way 'orthodoxy' would have it, infecting cells from all domains of life and having them copy their genomes and synthesise their proteins, then a great number of landmark experiments would be built on sand. The deep, serially-constructed understanding of molecular biology gained through those experiments would be an extraordinary coincidence, getting the right answers for completely the wrong reasons. Virus denial is a subset of germ theory denial, the strongest form of which would have it that there are no microbial pathogens at all - no viruses, no bacteriophages, no bacteria, no fungi or protists. Even adherents of that view might be forced to concede that the organisms exist...

According to Betteridge's Law of Headlines, any headline that ends with a question mark can be answered by the word "no". What, you want more? OK then... A paper  published in February 2022 caused a stir in the anti-vaccine community as it appeared to show a mechanism by which the RNA in certain vaccines might end up in the genomes of vaccinees, potentially even being passed to offspring. The fuss died down somewhat, but has been reamplified by molecular-biology- naïf  (but, I'm sure, great cardiologist) Dr Peter McCullough. Unfortunately, as ever, the scare is easily articulated, the refutation requires lengthy consideration of detailed mechanism.  "Vaccines can turn our cells into eternally spike-producing factories!!! And our babies!!!!".  Tl;dr: No they can't. Here's a basic schematic of the molecular biology of the situation: The normal information flow is from DNA sequence in the genome to RNA ('messenger' or mRNA) to amino acid sequenc...

Does this even need saying? That I should even feel moved to write this post, in this day and age, seems extraordinary. But an increasing number of people are latching onto the hoary old idea that there is no such thing as a virus - that virologists have been studying an artefact all this time; a product of the organism rather than an entity hijacking host biology in order to spread between hosts. Or, madder still, the whole field is a 130-year fraud, perpetuated by generations of scientists in order to ... ummm ... something something. Like many positions over the last few years, it is driven by Covid denialism taken to extremes - not only does SARS-CoV-2 not exist, none of them do . This seems a somewhat hyperbolic extension - scepticism over SARS-CoV-2 extended to dismissing the entire science of virology. This puts me in mind of the inhabitants of the planet Krikkit in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide upon observing the glories of the Universe for the first time above th...

I have discussed Geert vanden Bossche's debatable theories before. Briefly, he argues that mass vaccination in a pandemic 'selects' for mutants that escape the immunity conferred by the vaccine, and this threat is reason enough to just stop. He ignores selection for escape of what is loosely, but erroneously, termed 'natural immunity', and the enormous health and social costs attaching to the sledgehammering of this nut. Unfortunately for his theories, all variants so far have arisen in poorly vaccinated settings.  Now, Bret Weinstein - who claims to be an evolutionary biologist, yet - attempts, in his podcast and substack, 'On Driving SARS-CoV-2 Extinct', to rescue vanden Bossche from the dumpster and brush the banana skins from his shoulders.  Here's an excerpt - 'Rounding the earth' is the work of one Mathew Crawford: (I am aware that a properly-conducted review would include links to sources. In my defence, I can't bear to! Do your resea...

Since last I discussed Dr John Campbell, back in October , his subscriber count has gone well over 2 million. Unfortunately, due diligence seems to have continued its march in the opposite direction.  Dr Campbell is a nurse with a PhD in nursing education. He is undoubtedly expert in some areas; in others, he's just a bloke chuntering to the internet from his office - much like myself, with a far lesser reach! But his confident manner and background give disproportionate weight to his words among some.  The most recent video I watched by him - a rare occasion these days - details a Freedom of Information request to the Office for National Statistics (​FOI/2021/3240) for 'deaths from Covid-19 with no other underlying causes'. There are perfectly good debunking videos here ,  here and here , and textual arguments such as this ; I am simply adding my own tiny voice to the counterargument. Campbell's video has gone viral - shared by, among others, Piers Corbyn and Covid-s...