Flo Nightingale and the Ring Piece Chart

Florence Nightingale diagrams continue to do the rounds, both literally and figuratively. Variously also known as wedge diagrams (correct), coxcombs (misnomer, Nightingale’s coxcomb was the whole package), rose charts (by any other name, would still go round in circles), polar area charts (sometimes correct), and, in this parish, ring piece charts (for reasons that will become apparent), the general view seems to be that they are pretty and informative, and come with the added kudos of a shine from the Nightingale lamp. If they were good enough for dear Flo, then they are more than good enough for us. Dr No happens to think rather the opposite. They are always messy, often confusing, and, worst of all, frequently misleading.

The  

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I Tried It My Way

Matt Hancock reflects on his performance during the covid pandemic.

 And now, the end is near
 And so I face the final curtain
 My friend, I'll say it clear
 I'll state my case, of which I'm certain
 I've lived a life that's full
 I travelled each and every highway
 And more, much more than this, I tried it my way

 Regrets, I've had a few
 But then again, too few to mention
 I did what I had to do
 And saw it through without exemption
 I planned each charted course
 Each careful step along the byway
 And more, much more than this, I tried it my way

 Yes, there were times, I'm sure you knew
 When I bit off more than I could chew
 But through it all, when there was doubt
 I ate it up and spit it out
 I faced it all and I stood tall and tried it my way
 
I've loved, I've laughed and
  

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Pay Checking the Fact Checkers

Who pay checks the fact checkers? A intriguing post by a Bad Medicine reader led to information on facebot, of all places, suggesting that a vaccine manufacturer funds factcheck.org, facebot’s fact checker, so Dr No decided to follow the money, and dig deeper. What he found is interesting, in the faux-Chinese way. In the three months ending on 31st March 2021, factcheck.org received $53,501 from a health foundation that has over $2 billion invested in Johnson  

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Covid Apartheid

Let’s get the definitions out of the way. Unqualified, apartheid means the repugnant South African system of segregation by race. It comes “from Afrikaans, literally ‘separateness’, from Dutch apart ‘separate’ + -heid (equivalent of -hood)”: apart-hood. The word itself doesn’t make any reference to race, it just happened it arose in South Africa, and by its use there, unqualified, it came to mean racial apartheid. But the word — apartheid/apart-hood, or apartness, or separateness — can apply to any form of segregation. The phrase sexual apartheid makes perfect sense, segregation of the basis of sex. So to does the phrase  

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The Coronavirus and the Crocodile

An article published yesterday on off-Guardian, which coincidently makes welcome use of an earlier Dr No post on covid death certification, points out the menace of politicians and the MSM using cumulative covid deaths as a sort of fat crocodile, that only ever gets bigger, leaving so many to wonder who the crocodile will eat next. Like the gift that keeps on giving, it is the crocodile that keeps on growing. As the article says, cumulative covid deaths are about as useful as a cumulative unemployment counts, because neither tell you what is happening now. Yet there is another cumulative death count that paints a rather different  

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Going With the Flow Tests

The way the government’s coronavirus dashboard tells it, we can hardly move for covid lateral flow tests. Back of the envelope sums suggest there are now ‘only’ 600,000 plus daily LF tests, down from a peak of around a million daily tests in mid March. It’s a wonder we aren’t awash with grimy discarded test kits, jetsam from the ghost ship the New Normal. In Australia, where they take these things very seriously, the jetsam could have been far worse. A few months back, a zeroid (an endemic-covid denialist who believes instead in zero-covid, whatever it takes, and whatever it means) suggested that adding anal swabs for kids — zeroids believe kids and schools are hotbeds of  

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The Runaway Train of Project Fear

Forget Brexit, the real Project Fear kicked off in March last year, with SPI-B’s infamous “The perceived level of personal threat [from covid–19] needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging”. Printed in bold in the original report, the directive launched a thousand messages that sailed freely past their intended target, the complacent, and went on to cause immense collateral damage among the timorous. Rained on day after day by this lurid torrent of “hard-hitting  

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The Snakes and Ladders of Vaccine Numbers

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a pharmaceutical company in want of a profit will use relative risk. It will do this because presenting the results of clinical trials as relative risk reductions tends to make their new wonder drug appear dramatically effective. But relative risk reduction is only one way of presenting the data. We can also look at the absolute risk reduction, and a useful number derived from the absolute risk reduction, the number needed to treat. This tells us the number of people we need to treat to prevent one adverse outcome. As we shall see, absolute risk reductions and numbers needed to treat tend to dramatically lower the apparent, and so perceived, benefits of treatment.  

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Nothing to See Here

Has the novel vaccine for a novel coronavirus led to a novel case of hiding something bad in plain sight? We are constantly told by the authorities and mainstream media that the novel coronavirus vaccines are exceptionally effective and safe. Yet at the same time there is a constant drip feed, now running more like a torrent, of reports of numerous and sometimes serious side effects from the vaccines. Dan Astin-Gregory of the Pandemic Podcast recently received, but failed to publish, a “113 page report documenting the tragic accounts of people who had sadly died following the COVID-19 vaccination”. Mr Astin-Gregory’s heart  

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The Flea Is Airborne

The Covid Inquisition has had a rather hard time of it lately. As UK test positives, hospitalisations and deaths have plummeted, they have had in recent weeks to rely on scariants and foreign outbreaks in Brazil and India to maintain fear levels, but over the last few days a game changer has emerged: the virus is airborne. WHO have marginally up-rated their assessment of risk from aerosol transmission, triggering a raft of tweets from the Inquisition saying we told you so, but the real bombshell is a pre-print that puts some E notation numbers and extra computer generated colours on the Milk  

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