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Scientists urge people to get boosted as omicron reduces levels of Covid-fighting antibodies 30-fold.
By Sarah Knapton 13th December 2021. Find Article Here:-
New research from Oxford University shows double-vaccinated at far greater risk of infection from omicron.
Visitors queue for Covid-19 vaccinations at a walk-in vaccine centre at Romford.
Omicron reduces the levels of coronavirus-fighting antibodies 30 fold, leaving the double-vaccinated at far greater risk of catching the virus, scientists have warned, as they urged people to get booster.
A new study by Oxford University looked at blood samples taken from people who had two doses of either AstraZeneca or Pfizer and measured the level of antibodies they had which were capable of neutralising the new variant.
They found a substantial fall in the number of antibodies able to fight off omicron compared to Delta in people who had their second dose two to nine weeks earlier.
The drop was greater for people who had two doses of the AstraZeneca jab with 21 out of 22 people studied having no neutralising activity detectable at all above the cut-off threshold – although some activity was still seen below the threshold.
However the researchers said that other parts of the immune system may still be protective, and argued that there was no evidence that the new variant increased the risk of severe disease or death, or stopped vaccines being effective against more serious illness.
Prof Matthew Snape, Professor in Paediatrics and Vaccinology at the University of Oxford, said: “Ultimately it’s one piece of the picture and we still haven’t pinned down the threshold of protection, and what is enough to prevent infection, or severe disease, or hospitalisation and death.
“It might be that a 30 fold decrease takes it down but you’re actually still protected against severe disease and hospitalisation.
“Importantly, we have not yet assessed the impact of a “third dose” booster, which we know significantly increases antibody concentrations, and it is likely that this will lead to improved potency against the Omicron variant.”
Hopes for T-cell immunity against omicron
Last week, the first study into T-cell immunity against omicron by Johns Hopkins University found that the memory cells hold up well against the variant, suggesting that vaccines will still work against severe disease.
T-cells offer a broader and longer-lasting protection than antibodies and even if they do not prevent an infection, can stop the disease becoming serious.
However researchers said the new figures did show the importance of being boosted.
Teresa Lambe, Professor & Jenner Investigator, the Jenner Institute, at the University of Oxford, said: “The more this virus spreads, the more people will catch it, the more likely we are to see individuals who will become very ill. So getting a booster and getting it in your arm as soon as possible is one of the best ways to protect going forward.”
However Prof Lambe added: “I haven’t lost hope, and I’m still very hopeful that our vaccines will protect us against severe disease and hospitalisation.
“There is encouraging data coming from other parts of the globe, suggesting this may be the case.
“We obviously have the T-cell response that is not reported on in this paper and we have non-neutralising antibodies, which can also confer a degree of protection against severe disease.
“We have seen across all variants of concerns, so far, good protection against severe disease and hospitalisation by the regimes that have been used within the UK.
Data published last week from the UK Health and Security Agency (UKHSA) found that vaccine effectiveness dropped to around 40 per cent for Pfizer against omicron after two doses. There was insufficient evidence to give a figure for AstraZeneca.
Booster jabs were found to offer up to 75 per cent protection from mild infection with the new variant, which is down by 20 per cent from that given by a third dose against the delta variant.
Your Man Back in the Public Gallery: Assange Extradition, US Appeal Result
By Craig Murray 13th December 2021. Find Article Here:-
On Thursday afternoon I was in Edinburgh High Court to get back my passport, which had been confiscated during my own court proceedings avowedly to stop me going to Spain to testify in the trial of David Morales of UC Global. He stands accused by whistleblowers in his own company of spying on Julian Assange, his lawyers and other associates (including myself), on behalf of the CIA, and in engaging with them on plans to kidnap or assassinate Assange.
Having got my passport, I was wandering down the Canongate to buy a new sporran. I fear that I only wear my kilt on occasions where I end up not at all sober, and invariably spend the next morning wondering what on earth happened to my tie, left hose, mobile phone etc. The loss of a sporran is a particularly expensive experience. While explaining to the maker that my sporran needs a long chain to accommodate my finely matured figure, my phone rang and I was asked whether I could get to the High Court in London by 9.45am, as the judgement in the United States’ appeal in Julian’s extradition case was imminent. Waverley Station being a short walk down a steep close from the sporran maker, and with the agreement of Nadira and the rest of my long suffering family, I was off to England.
The Royal Courts of Justice have nothing of the grimness of the Old Bailey, or of Woolwich Crown Court inside Belmarsh Prison. They are Victorian Gothic at its least inspired and most gingerbread house cheesy, as though Mad King Ludwig was working on a straitened budget. Once inside there is no visible security of any kind, and the courtrooms are laid out in aged oak benches like the smaller lecture rooms of an old university.
A lovely man named Derek had been at the front of the queue for me since 5am, but his kindness turned out to be unnecessary. For the first time at any Assange hearing, nobody asked me for identification papers or fired inappropriate questions about why I was at a public hearing. At the reception desk I asked where the Assange judgement would be given, and was told Court No.1, but that there was no point in attending because copies of the judgement would simply be handed out.
I walked with my friend, Assange activist Deepa, to Court No.1 shortly after 9.30, and there was nobody else there except one reporter from Reuters. Over the next half hour about twenty other people turned up, mostly journalists but including a few European activists. There was no sign of Julian and no sign of either legal team. Julian’s fiancee Stella Moris arrived just before ten, and we were allowed in to the courtroom. The clerk of court told us there would be no lawyers present so we could sit anywhere we wished. Reporters and activists jumbled in the first two rows immediately below the judge’s bench. I sat alongside Stella in the fourth row, and shortly before the judge appeared, Gareth Peirce (Julian’s solicitor) arrived and simply took a seat also in the fourth row. The well of the court was perhaps a third full, and the public gallery above was completely empty.
It is important to explain that Stella did not know the judgement at this stage. We had spoken briefly before going in and we were not hopeful, but she sat there awaiting the decision on whether Julian might be home for Christmas, or potentially in jail for many more years, with enormous composure and self-control. I had spoken with her the night before on the telephone and knew she was in serious emotional distress. But here in public, she did not betray it at all.
Lord Justice Holroyde entered and read out a brief summary of the judgement. Lord Chief Justice Burnett, the other member of the two man panel, apparently had better things to do. It was evident after a few seconds that the insufferably smug Holroyde was going to find in favour of the United States Government.
Julian was not present, neither in person nor by videolink. That judgement should be given on a prisoner in the presence neither of himself nor of his counsel seems to me a quite extraordinary proceeding. The entire event felt wrong. I was aware that Julian was unwell, and that he had been very unwell at the hearing in October on which this was a judgement. Mary Kostakidis has constructed an edit of those tweets from her reporting on that day which referenced Julian’s state of health. What we did not know was that he was actually suffering a stroke.
(In her retweeting the original relevant tweets, they have all ended up dated 12 December, but these are in fact Mary’s tweets from the courtroom in October).
What I can tell you from personal experience is that the appalling standard of healthcare is the single worst thing about prison, and the callous disregard of prisoners’ lives an ingrained feature of the system, about which I shall write more in due course.
So Holroyde briefly announced to the world the capitulation to the United States. His argument was simple and short. The High Court accepted that Baraitser had rightly judged the expert evidence on Assange’s health, so the diagnoses of serious depression and autism stand. However she had erred in not seeking diplomatic assurances from the United States that he would be kept in conditions that would not trigger suicide. Holroyde’s argument rested entirely on the Diplomatic Note received from the US government containing these assurances. They constituted, he stated, a “solemn assurance from one state to another”, as though that were a thing of unimpeachable surety.
Holroyde did not address the point that these were assurances from the very state whose war crimes and multiple breaches of international law Assange had exposed, resulting in this very extradition in the first place.
He did not address the fact that the United States has a record of breaking exactly these kind of assurances on prisoner conditions, and there is substantial European Court of Human Rights case law on the subject. In fact the legal force of diplomatic assurances has been the subject of a massive opus of recent jurisprudence that Holroyde simply ignored.
He did not address the fact that the very assurances in this Diplomatic Note were shot through with conditionalities.
He did not address the fact that repeated US court decisions stated that US domestic authorities were not bound by any diplomatic assurances given to foreign governments (which incidentally is precisely the same argument, accepted by Baraitser, that UK courts are not bound by the UK/US extradition treaty bar on political extradition).
He did not address the fact that the majority of the charges against Assange in the extradition request were now exposed as based on perjured evidence from a convicted paedophile and fraudster in the pay of the CIA, which some might see as reflecting poorly on the US authorities’ bona fides.
He did not address the fact that the government whose assurances as to treatment he viewed as unquestionable, had been plotting to kidnap or assassinate the subject of the extradition.
Holroyde whisked away in a flurry of dusty robes and horsehair wiggery. Gareth Peirce had advance knowledge of the result, but had been barred from telling anybody. She had been informed lawyers were not to attend court, but had come along to offer moral support, and simply sat with the public. Edward Fitzgerald QC, Julian’s counsel, was simultaneously giving the decision to Julian in the jail.
My admiration for Gareth is undisguised. In my view she is the greatest UK lawyer of post-war history, a notion I know she would find laughable. I also know she will be a bit cross about my writing about her, as she detests the limelight. If you don’t know of her, do a little research just now. I have been extremely fortunate in life to know many great people, but Gareth is the one of whose regard I am proudest. Anyway, Gareth was really cross about the judgement.
The effect of the judgement is that the case is now returned to Judge Baraitser with the instruction to reverse her decision and order Assange’s extradition. In doing so she passes the papers up to the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, with whom the final decision on all extraditions lies. Julian has until 23 December to submit an appeal against this High Court decision to the Supreme Court, something he is minded to do.
Now read this very carefully. The United States Government’s appeal to the High Court was only on those points on which Baraitser had ruled against extradition – Assange’s mental health and the effect upon it of extradition and US prisoner conditions. Assange’s appeal now to the Supreme Court will also be restricted to those subjects. The points on which Baraitser originally ruled in favour of the United States, including Assange’s First Amendment protections and the right of freedom of speech, the bar on political extradition and the inapplicability of espionage charges to journalism – will only be heard later, if he loses at the Supreme Court on what is still the US appeal.
If the Supreme Court decides for the US on the basis of diplomatic assurances, and the case returns to Baraitser to exercise the extradition warrant, at that time we finally have the cross appeal on all the issues this case is really about. If the High Court then accepts the cross-appeal as arguable (and Holroyde stated specifically that Assange’s wider points of appeal “would be heard at a later stage in proceedings”), then Patel’s trigger itching hand will be stayed while we restart the appeals process, quite possibly back to Holroyde and Burnett.
This benefits the Machiavellian state in two ways. For up to another year the legal argument will continue to be about Julian’s mental health, where the self-disparagement required by his defence suits the state political narrative. Nobody inside court is currently permitted to be talking about freedom of speech or the exposure of US war crimes, and that of course feeds in to the MSM reporting.
The state also is happy that this convoluted Supreme Court and then cross-appeal process will last for years not months, even before we look at the European Court of Human Rights, and all that time Julian Assange is stuck in high security in Belmarsh jail, treated as a terrorist, and his mental and physical health are visibly deteriorating in a way that is simply horrible. It is not hyperbole to state we may well be watching his slow murder by the state. It certainly appears now probable that he will never fully regain his health. The Julian who went into captivity is not the same man we would get back if ever released.
My worry is that I have no confidence that there is any hope of fairness in the judicial process. I most certainly would not wish anybody’s destiny in the hands of the supercilious Holroyde. There seems no alternative but to batter on through the endless Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, but I fear we are but dignifying a cruel charade. Political will, rather than judicial sense, appears the more likely route to a breakthrough. But I look at Johnson, Biden and Morrison and I see no more conscience, principle or probity than I do on the judicial bench.
There does appear to be a recognition in the mainstream media that aspects of the prosecution are a real threat to journalism even in the muted way that the mainstream media pursue the profession. Persuading the fourth estate to use their influence on key politicians, backed by popular mobilisation including online, appears to be the most hopeful tactic at the moment. But it is a hard and bitter slog.
On leaving the High Court, Stella and I both gave impromptu speeches to the waiting crowd and media. The BBC carried this live until I mentioned US war crimes, when they hurriedly cut it off. These below are the full speeches, and the video should start at the right point. We had come straight from consulting with Gareth after hearing the judgement, so remember what I have told you and consider how extraordinarily well Stella coped and spoke here. How can we not continue to fight?
Also have a look at this article below, Find Article Here:-
Julian Assange Has Stroke In British Prison: Court OK’s Extradition To United States.
By Kylie Thomas December 11th, 2021.
Julian Assange had a stroke in Belmarsh Prison in the United Kingdom, and his fiancée, Stella Moris, suggested it was triggered by the stress generated by his ongoing time in jail.
Assange, the 50-year-old WikiLeaks founder, is being held at the maximum-security jail in London. During the trial, the High Court ruled that Assange can be extradited to the United States to be tried for espionage. He was unwell and the prison still forced him to go to the prison video room, even after the judge excused him during the hearing.
This ruling had overturned a previous ruling by a lower court, saying Assange could not be extradited to the United States due to his mental health.
WikiLeaks said that doctors confirmed Assange’s stroke.
BREAKING: Doctors confirm Julian Assange suffered a stroke on the morning of his latest hearing
Amnesty called this weeks ruling reversing a decision to refuse extradition a “travesty of Justice” #FreeAssangeNOW https://t.co/xRi7di719U— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 11, 2021
The mini-stroke has left Assange with a drooping right eyelid, memory problems, and signs of neurological damage. A ‘transient ischaemic attack’ – “mini stroke” caused by a temporary disruption in the blood supply to part of the brain – can be a warning sign of a full stroke. Assange has since had an MRI scan and is now taking anti-stroke medication.
Moris told TheDailyMail, “Julian is struggling and I fear this mini-stroke could be the precursor to a more major attack.”
“It compounds our fears about his ability to survive the longer this long legal battle goes on. It urgently needs to be resolved,” Moris added.
“Look at animals trapped in cages in a zoo. It cuts their life short. That’s what’s happening to Julian. The never-ending court cases are extremely stressful mentally.”
According to his legal team, Assange intends to to appeal the decision to the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court.
Julian Assange had released documents in WikiLeaks labeled “Vault 7” such as the US Army manual for Guantanamo prison camp, a video of U.S. Apache helicopter killing civilians in Iraq, Iraq and Afghanistan war documents, State Department cables (which has also been called “Cablegate”), and nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails in 2016.
This has apparently lead to increasingly elaborate CIA plans to abduct or assassinate Julian Assange that were apparently discussed “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration and were confirmed by multiple officials, one being a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries,” the former senior counterintelligence official told Yahoo News.
This article has been updated to reflect that Julian Assange had the stroke on October 27, 2021.
‘This Christmas my family and I will do as we please’ Neil Oliver on Government parties during Covid.
Posted on 11th December 2021. Find 10min Video Here:-
Global over-population is the real issue.
Here is a piece written for the UK Daily Telegraph, by Boris Johnson on 25th October 2007. This is by a man who has fathered 7 children, that are known of to date.
Find Article Here:-
It is a tragic measure of how far the world has changed — and the infinite capacity of modern man for taking offence — that there are no two subjects that can get you more swiftly into political trouble than motherhood and apple pie.
The last time I tentatively suggested that there was something to be said in favour of apple pie, I caused a frenzy of hatred in the healthy-eating lobby. It reached such a pitch that journalists were actually pelting me with pies, and demanding a retraction, and an apology, and a formal denunciation of the role of apple pie in causing obesity.
As for motherhood — the fertility of the human race — we are getting to the point where you simply can’t discuss it, and we are thereby refusing to say anything sensible about the biggest single challenge facing the Earth; and no, whatever it may now be conventional to say, that single biggest challenge is not global warming. That is a secondary challenge. The primary challenge facing our species is the reproduction of our species itself.
Depending on how fast you read, the population of the planet is growing with every word that skitters beneath your eyeball. There are more than 211,000 people being added every day, and a population the size of Germany every year.
As someone who has now been travelling around the world for decades, I see this change, and I feel it. You can smell it in the traffic jams of the Middle East. You can see it as you fly over Africa at night, and you see mile after mile of fires burning red in the dark, as the scrub is removed to make way for human beings.
You can see it in the satellite pictures of nocturnal Europe, with the whole place lit up like a fairground. You can see it in the crazy dentition of the Shanghai skyline, where new skyscrapers are going up round the clock.
You can see it as you fly over Mexico City, a vast checkerboard of smog-bound, low-rise dwellings stretching from one horizon to the other; and when you look down on what we are doing to the planet, you have a horrifying vision of habitations multiplying and replicating like bacilli in a Petri dish.
The world’s population is now 6.7 billion, roughly double what it was when I was born. If I live to be in my mid-eighties, then it will have trebled in my lifetime.
The UN last year revised its forecasts upwards, predicting that there will be 9.2 billion people by 2050, and I simply cannot understand why no one discusses this impending calamity, and why no world statesmen have the guts to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves.
How the hell can we witter on about tackling global warming, and reducing consumption, when we are continuing to add so relentlessly to the number of consumers? The answer is politics, and political cowardice.
There was a time, in the 1960s and 1970s, when people such as my father, Stanley, were becoming interested in demography, and the UN would hold giant conferences on the subject, and it was perfectly respectable to talk about saving the planet by reducing the growth in the number of human beings.
But over the years, the argument changed, and certain words became taboo, and certain concepts became forbidden, and we have reached the stage where the very discussion of overall human fertility — global motherhood — has become more or less banned.
We seem to have given up on population control, and all sorts of explanations are offered for the surrender. Some say Indira Gandhi gave it all a bad name, by her demented plan to sterilise Indian men with the lure of a transistor radio.
Some attribute our complacency to the Green Revolution, which seemed to prove Malthus wrong. It became the received wisdom that the world’s population could rise to umpteen billions, as mankind learnt to make several ears of corn grow where one had grown before.
And then, in recent years, the idea of global population control has been more or less stifled by a pincer movement from the Right and the Left. American Right-wingers disapprove of anything that sounds like birth control, and so George W. Bush withholds the tiny contribution America makes to the UN Fund for Population Activities, regardless of the impact on the health of women in developing countries.
As for the Left, they dislike suggestions of population control because they seem to smack of colonialism and imperialism and telling the Third World what to do; and so we have reached the absurd position in which humanity bleats about the destruction of the environment, and yet there is not a peep in any communiqué from any summit of the EU, G8 or UN about the population growth that is causing that destruction.
The debate is surely now unavoidable. Look at food prices, driven ever higher by population growth in India and China. Look at the insatiable Chinese desire for meat, which has pushed the cost of feed so high that Vladimir Putin has been obliged to institute price controls in the doomed fashion of Diocletian or Edward Heath.
Even in Britain, chicken farmers are finding that the cost of chickenfeed is no longer exactly chickenfeed, and, though the food crisis may once again be solved by the wit of man, the damage to the environment may be irreversible.
It is time we had a grown-up discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this country and on this planet. Do we want the south-east of Britain, already the most densely populated major country in Europe, to resemble a giant suburbia?
This is not, repeat not, an argument about immigration per se, since in a sense it does not matter where people come from, and with their skill and their industry, immigrants add hugely to the economy.
This is a straightforward question of population, and the eventual size of the human race.
All the evidence shows that we can help reduce population growth, and world poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and access to birth control. Isn’t it time politicians stopped being so timid, and started talking about the real number one issue?
Boris Johnson was MP for Henley, when he wrote this. He became UK Prime Minister on 24th July 2019.
The Lie of Masks – Unmasking Covid19.
By Keep Britain Free 19th June 2020. Find 50sec Video Here:-
Masks do nothing except show your obedience. They are muzzles. Don’t let them muzzle you. This short video show various Government ‘U’ turns regarding Face Masks.
http://www.keepbritainfree.com
Was building the NHS Nightingale hospitals worth the money?
By Siva Anandaciva 5th May 2021 Find Article Here:-
Florence Nightingale received seven unexpected tributes in the 200th-anniversary year of her birth. In late March 2020, as concerns grew that Covid-19 would overwhelm the NHS’s critical care capacity, emergency NHS ‘Nightingale’ hospitals sprung up from Exeter to Sunderland with the aim of supporting the NHS to cope with surging number of people with Covid-19.
England was not alone in pursuing this approach, with countries from Argentina to China also rapidly creating facilities to treat large numbers of patients. And although the quest for more NHS capacity in England involved block-booking capacity in private sector hospitals; adapting existing NHS hospitals to care for more critically ill patients; and developing primary care ‘hot hubs’, long-Covid clinics and (for a brief moment) NHS Seacole centres, it was the Nightingales that often captured national attention and featured prominently in early media reports of the NHS’s response to the pandemic.
The seven Nightingales had different purposes – with some mainly set up as critical care facilities and others designed to deliver step-down care for recovering patients (Figure 1). But the hospitals shared at least one common goal (listed on one of the hospitals own websites): ‘Bring hope’.
And in the early days, the Nightingales did just that. Over March and April 2020, the consortia (including NHS, military and private sector experience) that built the Nightingales were rightly praised for rapidly converting conference and concert venues into places that could safely store and deliver oxygen to patients, support infection control and deliver complex critical care. Behind the scenes, a host of activity ensured the wider infrastructure that hospitals need would also be in place – from financing, to clinical governance processes, to ensuring there would be food and drink available to staff.
But over summer 2020, one issue came to define the narrative around the Nightingales – quite simply, they were not seeing many patients (Figure 2). And now, one year after they were built, many of the facilities are either being decommissioned or repurposed as mass vaccination centres or diagnostic centres.
Inevitably then, there have been disagreements over whether the Nightingales – which were created at the cost of more than £530 million – should be seen as white elephants that could never have been used, or as the ‘ultimate insurance policy that were thankfully not needed’.
The ‘five whys’ can be a simple but powerful way of getting to the root of an issue. But two whys may suffice in this case: were the Nightingales a waste of money? Why? Because they didn’t see many patients. Why? Because there weren’t enough staff to run them?
The largest Nightingale hospitals were reported to have 4,000 planned beds and would need 16,000 staff at full capacity (a higher staff complement than any hospital in England barring Barts Health NHS Trust and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust). For an NHS that entered the pandemic with 100,000 vacancies this would always have been an eyebrow-raising ask – as there were few supernumerary staff who could move to support the Nightingales without their local hospitals falling over.
And although, in extremis, the Nightingale staffing ratios could have been changed to allow a smaller group of staff to care for more patients, delivering sub-optimal care on a mass scale like this would have been a very different proposition to the narrative of an ‘ultimate insurance policy’ that we (thankfully) didn’t need.
An investigation by the National Audit Office (NAO) would be the clearest way to cut through these competing narratives and determine if (a) the Nightingales weren’t needed – because other measures both to contain the spread of Covis-19 and to maximise the use of existing NHS facilities were effective; or (b) the Nightingales were needed but couldn’t be used because of a lack of available staff. An NAO study could also usefully highlight other factors that might explain why the Nightingales didn’t see more patients – including the locations chosen for the hospitals; difficulties in transporting unstable critically ill patients; and the growing understanding that patients with Covid-19 would require multi-organ support and a wider range of hospital services than a Nightingale hospital could offer.
There were undeniably some positives from the Nightingale experience. Staff who worked in these locations speak of less hierarchical working styles and rapid learning and improvement systems (including the use of bedside learning co-ordinators) that they want to take into their home organisations. And the courage of staff who volunteered for these facilities should not be forgotten. But the Nightingales experience also unfortunately highlights the folly of having a chronically under-staffed health service. A properly staffed NHS, which didn’t enter the pandemic in a staffing crisis and with fewer hospital beds than comparable countries, might have been able to make more use of the Nightingales.
But, in the end, the country has been left with relatively unused emergency facilities, hugely overworked existing facilities that were full of patients with Covid-19, and rising waits for routine care. The Nightingales have shown that in an emergency you can build ventilators, you can adapt buildings and you can manufacture personal protective equipment – but unfortunately, there is no magic NHS staffing tree to shake.
Just a Little Prick- a short video about Vaccines.
By Chubby Rain. 10th December 2021. Find 3min 30sec Video Here:-
The Truth is Where? 