PANDA eNews Vol. 8

Newsletter Archive
image

PANDA THREADS VOL. 8 | 6 JANUARY 2021

It's The New Year

It's January 2021, SARS-CoV-2 has (officially) been with us for over a year.
‘Happy New Year!’ is sounding hollow to many. We understand. We expect that 2021 will still have many tough battles against authoritarianism and the censorship of good explanations. Buckle up - it's going to be a wild ride, but we are up for it.


~ Nick Hudson and The PANDAs 


DavidBell_Thumb

The Betrayal of Sub-Saharan Africa

by Dr David Bell & Muhammad Usman 

The ‘Global Health Community’ that previously prioritised diseases such as HIV, TB and the big child killer, malaria, implicitly considers avoidable deaths due to interrupted healthcare an acceptable cost in the attempt to reduce transmission of SARS-COV-2.

Read the article
video_preview_aa0dcb23daa429ec6019c2c1f6a1c434.jpg

In conversation with a doctor who's seen this film before

Dr Wodarg is a German physician, health expert and activist.
 Words of wisdom from a man who has  journeyed to the inside of the whale. 

A_miscarriage_thumbnails

A miscarriage of diagnosis

by Dr Clare Craig

PCR testing for COVID-19 aims to detect individuals with a high likelihood of being infectious. However, false positive test results lead to false diagnoses, unnecessary measures and distort the overall picture of the pandemic.

The PCR test false positive results have more than one cause and productive conversations about them require the five categories discussed here to be distinguished from one another.

The operational false positive rate refers to the rate of error across the whole process. This will vary from day to day so the rate should be measured as a tendency to a mean, not taken as the minimum. Each laboratory will have its own operational false positive rate and this can change over time.

Read the article

Prof Jay Bhattacharya is a member of PANDA's Scientific Advisory Board and holds a position as Professor of Medicine and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He also directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.

Facts - not fear - will stop the pandemic

by Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD and Christos A. Makridis, PhD

The media relish negative news. “If it bleeds it leads” still holds, and perhaps it’s never been truer than in the COVID-19 era. Every day the news highlights the spread of the virus and tells the sad stories of some of its victims.

And yet, much of the media does not pay sufficient attention to the good news regarding improved treatments and survival of patients with the coronavirus. In contrast with the international media, the American press has been unrelentingly negative in its COVID coverage, even when there is good news to tell. That negativity is part of what fuels a culture of fear that affects local, state and federal politicians and the decisions they make.

Read this story on The Hill

Channel Surfing

Every so often, we are captured by the lived experiences of the people from across the world who interact on our channels. This is one of those (from YouTube).

I am from the Soviet Union and have lived in Canada for 24 years. I find that almost all the Russians whom I have met here feel very similar about the present situation. We had lived through years and decades of propaganda, especially everywhere in the media, the deficit of basic necessities,  restrictions, things you could not say or do, things being banned and so on.  However, we never felt the hatred or pressure from other people for thinking differently, except by the state or by the propaganda.  In Stalin’s time, it was common to snitch on one another, even on one’s friends or family members. Millions of people were arrested, their lives destroyed. But in my childhood and younger years we were happy and content, even though some things were scant. We all had a community where people supported one another.  We came to Canada to look for freedom, for opportunities, for individual rights, for better future for our children. Did our hopes come true? Well,  before the year 2020, my whole family did very well. But now, many people are starting to doubt or even regret their decision to immigrate here. In fact, at the time I was leaving Russia, the country had just begun to open and expanded the trade and connections with the world. We had begun to hope that life would be better (Unfortunately, with the newer version of state-oligarch capitalism, almost all those hopes soon disappeared :-( ).
We, the immigrants, came to Canada for freedom. But now it feels like we are losing it. We have already lived through propaganda and manipulation. We are extremely sensitive to that.  We can’t stand lies. Are we coming back to the worst things we have escaped? Was it all worth leaving your family and your community behind to end up in the same system, but worse, because nobody will care for you?

Missed any of our videos? Click here to catch up.

PANDA_Telegram

PANDA’s stance on Open Science often conflicts with the narrative of mainstream media. We sometimes have posts censored or throttled by the major social media platforms, including posts written by leading scientists.

In the event that we are banned or shadow-banned, we will be moving to alternative platforms to share our articles, posts, threads, news and reports, including Telegram.

t.me/pandata19

OPEN SCIENCE. HUMAN AGENCY.

© Copyright, , Pandemics - Data & Analytics • Cape Town, South Africa
This email has been sent to you, because you are a customer or subscriber of Pandemics - Data & Analytics.
Unsubscribe

logo_footer2

Sent via

SendPulse