David Miles

Thanks for monitoring this. Been nice to have a break but time to start being careful again.

England is now experiencing a significant Covid wave, after 10 months of relative quiet The latest Covid situation in England and a look at where NHS services are as we head into winter

Lookks like covid's back with a vengeance. Oh well, it's been a nice year - almost - without too much of it. Time to get the FFP2 masks out and get vaccinated if at all possible.

Thanks to @chrischirp.bsky.social for keeping an eye on it.

christinapagel.substack.com/p/england-is...

Always a good plan. Preferably a respirator (FFP2 or N95 ) with loops that go round the back of the head instead of the ears.

"I remember when children were sent home from school with headlice. Now, they’re encouraged to attend school with a dangerous virus."

A child's 2nd infection is more likely to cause long covid than their 1st. The 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc don't bear thinking about.
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

I'd say it's even less logical than that. We'll do a lot to protect children from outdoor air pollution but indoors, anything goes. Buildings so damp the air is full of mould spores? No problem. Lock 'em in with airborne viruses? Bring it on.

Then we wonder why so many kids miss so much school.

It's almost as if outsourcing late-stage pharmaceutical development to the private sector doesn't lead to the best outcomes for public health.

I wonder if we'll ever learn.

Please don't take this seriously. The functional unit of a vaccine is the antigen. A child can handle up to a million at a time. Each bacterium living in the human gut has several thousand. No vaccination has more than 200.

This is a man who has never taken his own children to be vaccinated.

Been in the game for a while myself but I don't have the fortitude to listen to this sort of political drivel. Thank you for your perseverence.

I just read that literally and inevitably thought of Trump's best dead friend.

Thank you for putting yourself through this. You must have a strong stomach.

Trump's fortune is built on the life insurance payout his father got when his grandfather died in the 1918 influenza pandemic. If there was a halfway decent vaccine available, none of us would ever have heard of him.

No wonder he hates vaccines.

So glad someone said it. You can't prove an outcome is zero with a zero confidence interval. That doesn't mean that you can't prove something isn't true because the scientific method involves defining thresholds for '+ve' and '-ve' results.

Obviously over-simplifying for 240 characters here!

Do we need a reverse Turing test?

Now 'AI' can imitate humans, at least in very constrained situations, we need to know if someone's using a human actor to exaggerate their AI's capabilities.

I have a horrible feeling that inventing that test will only be the first of many layers of it.

The word 'most' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Most infectious diseases are fatal or life changing in less than half the people who catch them.

But then, Most people who play Russian roulette keep their brains. Doesn't make it a good idea.

Another issue is that infected mothers infect children at birth, establishing chronic infections that infect the child's children then cause cirrhosis and cancer in middle age. That wasn't well known in 1990.

Vaccinating at birth breaks the cycle.

Listening to RFK jr risks restarting it.

I suppose I should be happy that the emergency test actually worked this time but why did it need to come in the voice of Elon Musk's robot girlfriend?

And can anyone tell me whether the Welsh it lapsed into was as bad as I think it was? pretty sure that's not how to pronounce 'Cymraeg'!

“The only broadcast media at the time that was willing to talk about and get me on and report on it as a news story was GB News”.

That makes perfect sense – but not in the way he seems to think.

"I would like to see the data. Not enough to bother looking at the data which is available online but I would like to see it and until I do, I'm going to proudly announce how little I know as if ignorance is a virtue."

It's like watching the Muppets' Government by Fever Dream.

By 'not showing', does he mean sneakily hiding them among lots of scary words and numbers that he might need to read instead of serving them up on Fox News between KFC ads?

It's so frustrating that this sort of performative stupidity plays so well.

I'd also like to know how, if mercury compounds cause autism, there were so few autism diagnoses back when they were sold over the counter to treat teething pain.

But I probably shouldn't expect consistency from a man who can't be trusted with a dead whale or his children's babysitter.

Children offered chickenpox vaccine on NHS All young children in England and Wales will be offered a free chickenpox vaccine by the NHS from January 2026.

As recommended by the JCVI nearly two years ago and as the USA has been doing for about 30 years.

Better late than never.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Saw a copy of this in St Panras Station WH Smiths yesterday. A spectral chap called Richard kept tapping the subtitle and saying, "You mean the LATEST rise and fall of the House of York".

Then he demanded a horse.

He'll probably be happy to let Mullis have PCR. HIV and climate change deniers are very much in favour with him and his friends.

It really was a tragedy that Henry Erlich and Randall Saiki didn't get any credit for PCR.

Opinion | The Playbook Used to ‘Prove’ Vaccines Cause Autism Data can easily be manipulated to show causation that doesn’t exist.

If it smells like a quack, it quacks like a quack and it ducks like a quack when challenged, it's probably working for RFK Jr.

It's frustrating becauseimportant questions around autism going unanswered while these quacks pretend vaccines have anything to do with it.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure Franklin was no victim in how the DNA double helix was solved. An overlooked letter and an unpublished news article, both written in 1953, reveal that she was an equal player.

That was Watson's version. Wasn't true. It was shared with her full knowledge and comments and her paper was published back to back with Watson's and Crick's: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Watson thought it made him look good to pretend he stole it when he wrote his memoir. He's a wally.

I wonder what it's going to be. I'm on tenterhooks.

Seriously, though, the only question is whether he's going to wait for a scandal that needs a distraction before he drops his AI generated report wailing about vaccines.

If only he'd stuck to chainsaws and beached whales.

Could RFK Jr's move to pull mRNA vaccine funding be a huge miscalculation? The US is withdrawing $500m for vaccines for diseases like flu and Covid. Health correspondent James Gallagher asks if it's the right call.

The day the Beeb broke Betteridge's law of headlines.

Is a spade a spade? Is the pope a catholic? Is this a picture of a man who can't be trusted with a dead dolphin, his babysitter or decisions that will affect millions of people?

Same answer.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

That's a question that needs to be asked for every vaccine individually but with that caveat, immunocompromise is not usually a counter-indication for either mRNA or inactivated vaccines.

Inactivation actually works well for some vaccines, eg polio. Not so well for influenza or COVID-19

Many thanks. I hope you enjoy it.

I dread to think what he thinks 'safer, broader vaccine platforms' means.

Looks like the 'new tech' is inactivated influenza, which they've shown protects animals and is reasonably safe in people.

That was really, really exciting when Frank Macfarlane Burnet did it in the 1930s.

Not seeing why it's exciting enough to dicth 90 years of subsequent progress.