Tip of the iceberg
Re: "ATK answer," (PostBag, Feb 23).
Khun Burin Kantabutra has always proposed many novel ideas in the Post. However, I beg to politely differ with his suggestion in "ATK answer" for a disease which is already basically everywhere in the kingdom.
In reality, due to previous limits on testing which all governments have faced, we really have only detected a moderate, if not very small percentage of the population which is Covid positive.
Having spent 25 years dealing with HIV/Aids as a volunteer nurse (granted, a disease with different transmission methodology), one of the lessons we learned in the Aids years was that for every positive result we got, we had to assume that there was at least one other positive result we often did not yet have.
As a rule of thumb, we often simply assumed that actual transmission rates were three to four times higher than we recorded, because testing then had limits, just as Covid testing today has.
Readers need to live with harsh reality that the more we can test, the more Covid-19 cases we will find. The number of cases might be far more that Thai public can probably even imagine. The dream of massive ATK testing is at this time neither workable, nor a solution and is blinded by a two-week incubation period.
Until we have a cure, the best we can do is simply manage cases based on severity, expand access to food and medicine for the poor and move on with life.
The mortality rate on Covid-19 is very low, and while anyone of us could be a victim, most of us are far more at risk when we get in a taxi or on a motorbike.
JASON A JELLISON
Not worth the risk
Re: "Most parents back jabs for kids," (BP, Feb 15).
On Dec 22, 2021, the UK's Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advised that children aged 5 to 11 years in a clinical risk group should be offered primary course vaccination with two 10 microgram (mcg) doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine.
On Feb 16, 2022, the UK announced the "JCVI has since reviewed evidence on the potential impact of extending Covid-19 vaccination to other children aged 5-11.
Consideration had been given to the health benefits of vaccination in this age group, the potential educational benefits (?), and the impact on NHS services of delivering a 2-dose vaccination programme to around 5 million young children".
By the JCVI's own admission, to prevent 0.13 ICU admissions, 1 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine must be administered to young children aged 5-11.
However a recent paper published by the JAMA entitled "Myocarditis Cases Reported After mRNA-Based Covid-19 Vaccination in the US From December 2020 to August 2021" indicates the number of children aged 5 to 11 who will go on to develop myocarditis due to the Covid-19 injections is up to 815 times greater than the number of children prevented from being admitted to ICU with Covid-19 by the vaccines.
Myocarditis in children is a serious disease with potentially life-long consequences.
Even Pfizer's CEO, Albert Bourla, has said the vaccines offer "little or no protection against the Omicron variant".
However, the JCVI wants to dose innocent children in advance of a potential future wave of an unknown Covid variant for which the vaccines are guaranteed to be far more dangerous than beneficial.
As Professor Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University has said, "public health policy and medicine are broken". I agree.
MICHAEL SETTER
