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Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): Conspiracy Theories & Claims

Trevp666 said:
I believe it was Nytol.
Mum had been having weeks and weeks of only sleeping for (at best) a couple of hours, and often not at all. She asked me to get her some sleeping pills and I explained that I couldn't do that, she would have to ask the doctor, but in the meantime "let's try a herbal something" I said, thinking that it would most likely be ineffective but maybe the placebo effect might work.
So the instructions said to take two tablets about an hour before bedtime IIRC. She did so, and when I asked her the following day if they had worked she said that she followed the instructions, took two at about 10pm, started feeling a bit, 'yawny' half an hour later so took to her bed, then didn't wake up until about 930 in the morning when her morning cup of tea was brought in, and she was still really groggy then!
From then on she only took one tablet, and only once every few days.
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I know one herb that will help sleep, may raise an eyebrow though with your with mum, cannabis.
 
Jim said:
I know one herb that will help sleep, may raise an eyebrow though with your with mum, cannabis.
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Mum's not raising anything now - she carked it several weeks ago! But she did ask me some months ago if I could get any, lol.
 
Probably a coincidence, but it gives one pause.

Professor researching Covid-19 was killed in an apparent murder-suicide, officials say

A University of Pittsburgh professor on the verge of making "very significant findings" researching Covid-19, according to the university, was shot and killed in an apparent murder-suicide over the weekend, police said.

The research assistant professor, identified as Bing Liu, was found in his townhouse Saturday with gunshot wounds to the head, neck, torso and extremities, according to the Ross Police Department.

Investigators believe an unidentified second man, who was found dead in his car, shot and killed Liu in his home before returning to his car and taking his own life.

Police believe the men knew each other, but say there is "zero indication that there was targeting due to his (Liu) being Chinese," according to Detective Sgt. Brian Kohlhepp.

[...]

"Bing was on the verge of making very significant findings toward understanding the cellular mechanisms that underlie SARS-CoV-2 infection and the cellular basis of the following complications," his colleagues at the university's Department of Computational and Systems Biology said in a statement.

Full Article:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/06/us/university-of-pittsburgh-professor-killed/index.html
 
Trevp666 said:
Mum's not raising anything now - she carked it several weeks ago! But she did ask me some months ago if I could get any, lol.
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The only things that she's raising are the daisies that she's pushing up!
 
Roads today were very busy.
loads of people out walking and obviously not giving a shit about social distancing.
Dont know what to expect from Boris on Sunday but it appears that a lot of people think lockdown is over.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
The Guardian suspects a sinister media conspiracy was behind Prof Ferguson committing professional suicide.
Sure, there were articles in the press critical of Ferguson's research, but was it really the Telegraph, Sun or Mail that forced him to make a hypocritical **** of himself?

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...ts-media-government-adviser-social-distancing
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The poor old Guardian lost its collective mind some time ago. And their opinion on what is 'truth' overlooks the fact that in science the truth is constantly evolving. Furthermore , outside of chemistry and a couple of other hard sciences, you will find multiple opinions on what the truth actually is, even among equally qualified experts.

Ferguson's track record should have been at least questioned by all the media outlets when his huge numbers of deaths - IIRC 500,000 without lockdown, 250,000 WITH a lockdown - but no, they nearly all went into full on hysteria of the 'we are all going to die' type. Which in turn (and I think understandably) panicked the government.

Since it also transpires the Ferguson has refused to let his code be peer reviewed and that said code is 13 years old it seems to me that there should have been a much more critical reception of his estimates. It was in the public domain that his model had produced drastically incorrect forecasts in the past.
 
Cochise said:
The poor old Guardian lost its collective mind some time ago. And their opinion on what is 'truth' overlooks the fact that in science the truth is constantly evolving. Furthermore , outside of chemistry and a couple of other hard sciences, you will find multiple opinions on what the truth actually is, even among equally qualified experts.

Ferguson's track record should have been at least questioned by all the media outlets when his huge numbers of deaths - IIRC 500,000 without lockdown, 250,000 WITH a lockdown - but no, they nearly all went into full on hysteria of the 'we are all going to die' type. Which in turn (and I think understandably) panicked the government.

Since it also transpires the Ferguson has refused to let his code be peer reviewed and that said code is 13 years old it seems to me that there should have been a much more critical reception of his estimates. It was in the public domain that his model had produced drastically incorrect forecasts in the past.
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I have come to think of Ferguson as the Capita of epidemiology.

maximus otter
 
I made a couple of mistakes above. Let me correct them.

The code is not 13 years old. It's 15 years old.

The report did not forecast 500,000 deaths, it was 510,000

Imperial College have released a 'derivative' of the code. Not, you understand, the original code actually used to produce the report, but something that has been 'tidied up' by a team from Microsoft. .

There is an analysis of the 'derivative' here

https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/
The page was slow to load on my laptop, so here is a choice quote:

"Non-deterministic outputs. Due to bugs, the code can produce very different results given identical inputs. They routinely act as if this is unimportant.

This problem makes the code unusable for scientific purposes, given that a key part of the scientific method is the ability to replicate results. Without replication, the findings might not be real at all – as the field of psychology has been finding out to its cost. Even if their original code was released, it’s apparent that the same numbers as in Report 9 might not come out of it. "

Report 9 is the report with the 510,000 deaths that was used to spread hysteria among the populous by the media.

edit: - Microsoft? How the hell did they get involved?
 
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Cochise said:
- IIRC 500,000 without lockdown, 250,000 WITH a lockdown
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No, that's not correct. I copy my post from the conspiracy thread here:-

The actual facts- those figures are for a TWO YEAR period, not a two month period which is what we have had ( has it even been that long?). The 510,000 comes from doing nothing. The 250,000 figure comes from mitigations being taken, not full on suppression which is what we are trying at the moment. Most of the deaths that have been occurring have been from an infection that was contracted before the suppression started. When I multiply 17,000 by 12 to scale it up to two years I get 204,000. Looks pretty accurate to me.
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https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...cy-theories-claims.66849/page-35#post-1955963(Edit- that post was written on the 22nd April when deaths were only at 17,000)
 
Cochise said:
I made a couple of mistakes above. Let me correct them.

The code is not 13 years old. It's 15 years old.

The report did not forecast 500,000 deaths, it was 510,000

Imperial College have released a 'derivative' of the code. Not, you understand, the original code actually used to produce the report, but something that has been 'tidied up' by a team from Microsoft. .

There is an analysis of the 'derivative' here

https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/
The page was slow to load on my laptop, so here is a choice quote:

"Non-deterministic outputs. Due to bugs, the code can produce very different results given identical inputs. They routinely act as if this is unimportant.

This problem makes the code unusable for scientific purposes, given that a key part of the scientific method is the ability to replicate results. Without replication, the findings might not be real at all – as the field of psychology has been finding out to its cost. Even if their original code was released, it’s apparent that the same numbers as in Report 9 might not come out of it. "

Report 9 is the report with the 510,000 deaths that was used to spread hysteria among the populous by the media.

edit: - Microsoft? How the hell did they get involved?
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"...when [Ferguson's Imperial College study] assumptions were published others joined the dots. A Lund university academic warned that it meant 85,000 deaths for Sweden. An Uppsala team, feeding Imperial's parameters into its own study, agreed. The modelling envisaged Sweden paying a heavy price for its rejection of lockdown, with 40,000 Covid deaths by 1 May and almost 100,000 by June.

The latest figure for Sweden is 2,680 deaths, with daily deaths peaking a fortnight ago. The virus, it turns out, has been spreading at a fraction of the speed suggested. So Imperial College’s modelling – the same modelling used to inform the UK response – was wrong, by an order of magnitude."

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-tames-its-r-number-without-lockdown
maximus otter
 
A wild thought just occurred to me: Ferguson scans the horizon, and sees that his unbroken track record of wild overestimation of fatalities is about to cause his earning power as an epidemiologist to crater. How to escape from the spotlight, while retaining a shred of credibility?

Answer: A sex scandal!

Now he can tearfully limp off the world stage, out of the headlines with academic record not yet crushed, while a significant portion of the electorate - especially the men - winks and nods knowingly: "The Bonking Boffin, eh? Seen the picture of 'er? You would, wouldn't you? Phwoar!"

- All at the cost of a 10p phone call, and with a return to influence possible just as soon as the public's memory has faded.

maximus otter
 
maximus otter said:
"...when [Ferguson's Imperial College study] assumptions were published others joined the dots. A Lund university academic warned that it meant 85,000 deaths for Sweden. An Uppsala team, feeding Imperial's parameters into its own study, agreed. The modelling envisaged Sweden paying a heavy price for its rejection of lockdown, with 40,000 Covid deaths by 1 May and almost 100,000 by June.

The latest figure for Sweden is 2,680 deaths, with daily deaths peaking a fortnight ago. The virus, it turns out, has been spreading at a fraction of the speed suggested. So Imperial College’s modelling – the same modelling used to inform the UK response – was wrong, by an order of magnitude."
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Only stupid people would have joined those dots. There's no accounting for stupid people. Here is a quote from the paper that graph came from, explaining that graph. I am relieved that Swedish scientists are apparently able to read an academic paper. Phew.

The estimated reproduction number for Sweden is higher,not because the mortality trends are significantly different from any other country, but as an artefact of our model, which assumes a smaller reduction in Rt because no full lockdown has been ordered so far. Overall,we cannot yet conclude whether current interventions are sufficient to drive below 1 (posterior probability of being less than 1.0 is 44% on average across the countries). We are also unable to conclude whether interventions may be different between countries or over time.
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Futhermore:-
There remains a high level of uncertainty in these estimates. It is too early to detect substantial intervention impact in many countries at earlier stages of their epidemic (e.g. Germany, UK, Norway). Many interventions have occurred only recently, and their effects have not yet been fully observed due to the time lag between infection and death. This uncertainty will reduce as more data become available.
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At no point have they ever said their figures are exact. They are pointing out constantly that there is a high level of uncertainty. The reason there is a high level of uncertainty is because it is an unknown virus. We don't have all the facts because we don't have all the facts.

I find it odd that people blame the press for whipping up hysteria about figures, then the same people believe everything the press says when they hysterically misread the figures.
 
Is anyone else keeping an eye on Rishi Sunak's hair, or is it just me? It's been seven weeks since hairdressers and barbers were closed down and his barnet is looking very tidy. Compare to Boris's mop, for example, which was noticeably longer after he came out of hospital.
 
Cochise said:
"And 'injecting disinfectant' {not exactly meant to be taken literally} "

Exactly. I understood that, what he was saying is there something that could be injected that would act like a bleach. OK, his way of speaking is sometimes difficult to follow, but what I think he was visualising is could there be something that would just flush the virus out of the system rather than a vaccine. Because there may never be a vaccine.

I doubt the 'bleach' approach makes sense, because any thing you could inject that would kill the virus would have to be so strong that it would almost certainly have drastic side effects. I don't see why he shouldn't ask the question though.

I do get bored with the way the world tries so hard to make Trump look stupid, but half the time they only make themselves look stupid. I'm not saying he never says anything stupid. Sam Goldwyn said a fair number of stupid things but he made some flippin' good films.
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What apparently happened is that Trump was shown a visual aid of what happens with disinfectants on C-19. He saw this, and thought that if it could work on surfaces, why can't it work on people? How can a grown man reach such a stupid conclusion? Well, his university qualifications were bought not studied for, and the last time he handled a cleaning product was likely never in his entire pamperloined life.
 
This morning I woke up on the conspiracy side of the bed - The other side of the
bed says its all real and happening as 'they' say.

So here's the conspiracy:

Covid 19 'syndrome' is not basically caused by the Covid 19 Virus - It is corollary.

Here is why:

Heard a real interesting news story this morning - The Governor of New York just reported that most cases in NY are happening
among people who are staying home

And they said you should stay at home to avoid spreading it around - So why are most of the cases occurring among the people who stay home ???

I thought about it and remembered something from way back when - When the AIDS virus was the raging threat.

There was a writer and I think he was either a scientist or a doctor, who insisted, and showed some evidence, that AIDS was not caused by
the so called AIDS Virus -No, he insisted, and even wrote a book, showing that Aids was a syndrome - not a viral acquired disease even though
it showed up in many people who had the syndrome.

Now what you have to ask is Covid 19 actually causing the syndrome that is killing so many people ???

Or is Covid 19 just another common virus ??? -I read there are many viruses around and in the Human body that cause no symptoms - As is often the case with Covid19

This would explain why so many who have Covid 19 have no, or mild, symptoms - and only a relatively small percentage develop the
life threatening and sometimes lethal symptoms.

Is it time for the establishment medical hacks and scientists to admit
their blunder and admit they are wrong ???

- Maybe they should admit that medical error and mis-diagnosis is really responsible for most of the deaths ???

It is known that medical mistakes and errors in hospitals are a leading cause of
death - Is it time for us to open the World to the truth ???

Covid 19 is a mistaken or only slight cause of this pandemic.

This pandemic is mis-diagnosis and medical error gone global !!!
 
AlienView said:
There was a writer and I think he was either a scientist or a doctor, who insisted, and showed some evidence, that AIDS was not caused by
the so called AIDS Virus -No, he insisted, and even wrote a book, showing that Aids was a syndrome - not a viral acquired disease even though
it showed up in many people who had the syndrome.
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Pedantic point : HIV (Human immunodeficiency virus) is the virus. AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) is caused by HIV.

SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated and gene sequenced. If it hadn't been identified, there wouldn't be a test for it, there wouldn't be multiple groups working on a vaccine. And it's spread to nearly every country on the planet. Each of those countries has its own doctors, nurses, scientists. Millions of highly-educated personnel. Are you saying they're all concealing "the truth"?

Yes, there are countless viruses, amoebae, bacteria, fungi, archaea in the human body. Many don't have any effect. Many are well-known to the human immune system and kept in check. Some have a symbiotic relationship with us (e.g. gut bacteria).

Human cells make up only 43% of the body's total cell count.

Sometimes (ok, often) something new comes along and upsets the balance. In this case, causing a "cytokine storm" - where the immune system goes wild and attacks the body. Some people are more susceptible than others to this effect.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200505-cytokine-storms-when-the-body-attacks-itself
 
Min Bannister said:
No, that's not correct. I copy my post from the conspiracy thread here:-



https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...cy-theories-claims.66849/page-35#post-1955963(Edit- that post was written on the 22nd April when deaths were only at 17,000)
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I didn't say it was over two months. Someone might have. The point is that his program has deep technical flaws that mean the output is meaningless. They are understandable flaws that can occur in any program, which is why we have quality assurance and peer review in any properly run programming unit. His program produces different results if you run it on different hardware, for example.

There is nothing wrong with making mistakes, all programmers do. What is wrong is pretending you haven't made any. Or worse, as in this case, trying to explain the problems away by excuses, as evidently they have done if you read the link I gave.
 
Tribble said:
Sometimes (ok, often) something new comes along and upsets the balance. In this case, causing a "cytokine storm" - where the immune system goes wild and attacks the body. Some people are more susceptible than others to this effect.
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And that is one of the leading causes of death with Covid19 isn't it?

As was the opposite reaction where the immune system stopped functioning
with Aids - Immunodeficiency

In both cases a significant problem with the immune system

But if Aids was a virus and sole cause of the Aids epidemic how do you explain
that after 50 years there is still no vaccine for it? - They can now control it but
they still can't vaccinate against it - Why?

I'm getting to think that this is going to happen with Covid 19 as well.

Let me sum up my main points this way - Covid 19 is part of a bigger picture and
focusing on just one virus may prove futile.

For all we really know maybe things like climate change and air pollution
as well as other unknown elements may be involved.

Including the very act of doing the Covid 19 tests themselves {causing exposure by the person doing the test} - And placing too many people in hospitals'

Hospitals are known spreaders of secondary infection - A leading cause of death
is prolonged stays in hospitals.

If you end up in a hospital for any reasons - And they test you for Covid19 and you
test positive - What do you think they will put on the death certificate IF you
die? - Right, died of Covid 19 - BUT THAT MAY NOT BE TRUE!
 
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AlienView said:
So here's the conspiracy: Covid 19 'syndrome' is not basically caused by the Covid 19 Virus - It is corollary. Here is why: Heard a real interesting news story this morning - The Governor of New York just reported that most cases in NY are happening among people who are staying home. And they said you should stay at home to avoid spreading it around - So why are most of the cases occurring among the people who stay home ???
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You forget how many points of external contact people who are staying at home are still encountering in their daily life. For example, most people will need to go shopping and NYC is a hotbed of C-19, so they go to the supermarkets and even if they social distance, the infected person who wandered the isle before them has still left their virus behind. Then there are issues like mail and currency, which will get handled, but is the deliverer safe? The other thing is that the issue of airborne transmission hasn't been properly resolved, so we don't know how long c-19 will last in the air once somebody coughs. Not to mention issues like hand-rails, taps, etc. C-19 can apparently last up to 5 days on a cool surface like metal. Most people don't have the werewithall to set up their own decontamination center and airlock their apartments.
 
If you want the technical details about an HIV vaccine, here's a handy link. Summary : It's a right pain to do. Viruses are tricky sods that mutate. Some viruses have more variants out there. Hence there's no vaccine against the common cold or all strains of influenza while there are vaccines against TBE and Ebola.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV_vaccine#Difficulties_in_development
As for environmental factors - they'd have to be common to all affected countries. But the amount of air pollution, climate, effects of climate change, etc. are highly variable across the planet. If you can find a factor that can be proven to be responsible then go for it, but right now all the evidence points towards a natural, infectious virus.
 
Cochise said:
I didn't say it was over two months. Someone might have.
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No but you did say the projection was 250,000 deaths with a lockdown. That was incorrect.
Cochise said:
Or worse, as in this case, trying to explain the problems away by excuses, as evidently they have done if you read the link I gave.
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Since it is from Lockdown Sceptics I am not going to waste my time but I will repeat that Imperial made it very clear in the original paper that the figures were very rough and based on insufficient data. It was however, all they had to go on at the time. My very rough extrapolation of 210, 000 deaths over two years based on the deaths over two months seems to suggest that the figures were surprisingly accurate. The 250,000 was based on mitigation measures, not full lockdown. We had a partial period of mitigation before lockdown. The figure for full lockdown was 20,000 deaths. It is of course impossible to have full lockdown for two years so that was never going to happen.
 
Min Bannister said:
No but you did say the projection was 250,000 deaths with a lockdown. That was incorrect.

Since it is from Lockdown Sceptics I am not going to waste my time but I will repeat that Imperial made it very clear in the original paper that the figures were very rough and based on insufficient data. It was however, all they had to go on at the time. My very rough extrapolation of 210, 000 deaths over two years based on the deaths over two months seems to suggest that the figures were surprisingly accurate. The 250,000 was based on mitigation measures, not full lockdown. We had a partial period of mitigation before lockdown. The figure for full lockdown was 20,000 deaths. It is of course impossible to have full lockdown for two years so that was never going to happen.
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It's not the data that is the problem with Ferguson's program, it is that the program is broken in ways that make it useless. I have worked professionally as a statistician, I have been a C/C++ programmer since 1983, and I've led large development projects for databases (which are closely related to modelling programs). I understand exactly the criticisms the reviewer makes, and if someone was to give me a small chunk of Microsoft's budget I could assemble a team to put it right. (probably not in time to be any use, though, as reality will overtake it).

Ferguson is an amateur playing way out of his league - monolithic programs like his have been bad practice since the 70's. He won't let people peer review his actual code , what we are seeing is after MS had a go at cleaning it up. He doesn't comment his work - again a no-no in any professional shop. There should be at least a three-stage process in any change to code - it should be submitted by the author for desk checking, further reviewed by the code librarian for conformity to the project's coding standards, and once checked in submitted to QA to ensure the change has not broken other things that worked previously as well as fixing the actual problem being tackled.

I'm outraged by his lax methods, which is why I'm being so snarky about.the situation. If he was developing a game fine, nobody would die if the code was buggy. That's not what he is doing, is it? He's playing with everyone's lives.

He's not the only one to blame, because he has made errors in the past and no-one with sufficient clout to do anything about it seems to have investigated why.
 
AlchoPwn said:
What apparently happened is that Trump was shown a visual aid of what happens with disinfectants on C-19. He saw this, and thought that if it could work on surfaces, why can't it work on people? How can a grown man reach such a stupid conclusion? Well, his university qualifications were bought not studied for, and the last time he handled a cleaning product was likely never in his entire pamperloined life.
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Thank you for this succinct and accurate recap.
 
David Plankton said:
Is anyone else keeping an eye on Rishi Sunak's hair, or is it just me? It's been seven weeks since hairdressers and barbers were closed down and his barnet is looking very tidy. Compare to Boris's mop, for example, which was noticeably longer after he came out of hospital.
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"Compare to Boris's mop, for example, which was noticeably longer after he came out of hospital. "

Either that or his head shrank.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
"Compare to Boris's mop, for example, which was noticeably longer after he came out of hospital. "

Either that or his head shrank.
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Doesn't anybody realise.....Boris died in hospital and got replaced by a lookalike. That's why his hair is a bit different. And he sounds a bit different.
He's actually a bricklayer named Terry from Penge who was recruited as soon as Bojo went into St Thommo's hospital.
And Sunaks hair hasn't changed cos he's actually a Gargalflaxian who arrived with the fleet several weeks ago. He put's on the Human-like suit every day (you can sometimes see the join at the back) and that suit has real hair but it doesn't grow.
It's all true I tell ya......
 
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