Group break isolation: On the failure of the deregulated health care system: Systematic labor transfer to Germany, Episode 1, Munich 2022. For the past 25 years, there has been a massive transfer of highly qualified professionals to Germany very particularly from the poorest countries in the EU and Europe; since 2012, also increasingly from civil war countries such as Syria. According to the German Medical Association (Bundesärztekammer, BÄK), a total of 402,119 physicians were working in Germany at the end of 2019, the majority of them (207,000) in the hospital sector. The number of working physicians with a foreign passport […]
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238 posts
Phillipp Osten: Pockengift. Geschichten aus der Berliner Impfbibliothek, in: Kursbuch 206 (June 2021), p. 20-46. From the journal’s editorial: “Vaccination is hope. Vaccination is almost eschatologically charged. Will it bring us the end of the pandemic? We hope so, but admittedly we don’t know. The virus eludes us through mutation, the vaccine through ordering and production problems, and the organization of vaccination could have begun more efficiently.
Paul D. Thacker: Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial, in: BMJ 375 (November 2, 2021) n2635, online in: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n2635. In the fall of 2020, chairmann and chief executive Albert Bourla stated in an open letter that accurately predicting an approval date for a Pfizer vaccine in the U.S. would be difficult. He reminded the audience that they were “operating at the speed of science”. Researchers who participated in Pfizer’s vaccine trials complained that the picked up speed might be detrimental to data integrity and patient safety.
Arch G. Mainous III, Benjamin J. Rooks, Velyn Wu, Frank A. Orlando: COVID-19 Post-acute Sequelae Among Adults: 12 Month Mortality Risk, in: Frontiers in Medicine (December 12, 2021), online in: https://doi.org/10.3389/fmed.2021.778434. Background: There are concerns regarding post-acute sequelae of COVID-19, but it is unclear whether COVID-19 poses a significant downstream mortality risk. The objective was to determine the relationship between COVID-19 infection and 12-month mortality after recovery from the initial episode of COVID-19 in adult patients.
Michael Worobey: Dissecting the early COVID-19 cases in Wuhan, in: Science volume 372 (December 3, 2021) issue 6572, p. 1202-1204. In his article, author Michael Worobey traces the origins of coronapandmia.
Benjamin F. Maier, Marc Wiedermann, Angelique Burdinski, Pascal Klamser, Mirjam A. Jenny, Cornelia Betsch,Dirk Brockmann: Germany’s current COVID-19 crisis is mainly driven by the unvaccinated, in: medRxiv (26.11.2021), online in: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.11.24.21266831. Vaccines are the most powerful pharmaceutical tool to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. While the majority (about 65%) of the German population were fully vaccinated, incidence started growing exponentially in October 2021 with about 41% of recorded new cases aged twelve or above being symptomatic breakthrough infections, presumably also contributing to the dynamics.
A contribution by break isolation, Munich The debate about the positions of the #zerocovid campaign shows that the left has lost many positions and assumptions that were previously considered to be common, and that the understanding about them must be conducted anew.
Paul Simon: “Die Seeleute haben am miesten gelitten”. Interview mit Sergio Bologna [“The seafarers have suffered the worst”. Interview with Sergio Bologna], in: Jungle World 47 (25.11.2021). An interview with logistics expert and historian Sergio Bologna on the problems in container shipping. The problems in container shipping triggered by the Covid 19 pandemic shine a spotlight on the disastrous working conditions in logistics. But there is no end in sight for global supply chains. Link to the article on the homepage of Jungle World
Sara Reardon: Kubas Impfstoffe halten offenbar, was sie versprechen (Cuba’s vaccines apparently deliver what they promise), in: Spektrum.de (25.11.2021). In her article, the author describes the efficacy of Cuban vaccines: Soberana has a high efficacy of 92.4 percent in clinical trials. She also says the Abdala vaccine is similarly good.
Paolo Piacentini: Il Dopoguerra Post-Pandemico: I Problemi Del Prossimo Futuro Ed I Moniti Del Lontano Passato,in: ASTRIL – Associazione Studi e Ricerche Interdisciplinari sul Lavoro, Working Paper 56 (2021), ISSN 2280-6229. The prospects for the present-day ‘post-pandemic’ era are metaphorically confronted with the ‘post-war’ experience of one century ago, in the years after WWI.
Karl Heinz Roth: Im Bann des ‚Großen Lockdown‘: Giorgio Agamben‘s Endzeitvisionen (Under the Spell of the ‘Great Lockdown’: Giorgio Agamben’s Visions of the End Time), Bremen 2021. During the first pandemic year, there was considerable turbulence in the field of political philosophy. In particular, the opinions of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben caused a stir.[1] At the beginning of the first wave of the pandemic, he declared, referring to an expert opinion of the Italian National Research Council, that Covid-19 was an ‘invented epidemic’, since the actual events did not differ in any way from the seasonal influenza that had […]
Translation of: Sergio Bologna: Credenze popolari e fake news, 2021. Back to the Middle Ages. That’s how someone defines today’s age, which is populated by beliefs that used to be called “popular beliefs,” spread via social networks and the many “wisdom sources” with which gurus and prophets of various origins earn their bread. That Covid-19 is a flu no different from the flu waves that have been occurring every year for decades is just a typical “popular belief” of today.
Ilya R. Fischhoff, Adrian A. Castellanos, João P.G.L.M. Rodrigues, Arvind Varsani, Barbara A. Han: Predicting the zoonotic capacity of mammals to transmit SARS-CoV-2, in: bioRxiv (June 29, 2021), online in: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.18.431844. Back and forth transmission of SARS-CoV-2 between humans and animals may lead to wild reservoirs of virus that can endanger efforts toward long-term control of COVID-19 in people, and protecting vulnerable animal populations that are particularly susceptible to lethal disease. Predicting high risk host species is key to targeting field surveillance and lab experiments that validate host zoonotic potential.
Guillaume Chapelle: The medium-term impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions.The case of the 1918 Influenza in U.S. cities, in: LIEPP Working Paper 112 (October 2020). This paper uses a difference-in-differences (DID) framework to estimate the impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) used to fight the 1918 influenza pandemic and control the resultant mortality in 43 U.S. cities.
Jonathan Ashworth, Charles A. E. Goodhart: The great Covid cash surge – digitalisation hasn’t dented cash’s safe haven role, in: CEPR (Centre for Economic Policy Research) discussion papers No. 16618 (October 2021).
Bruno Canard, Étienne Decroly: Wuhan, ein neues Hiroshima? First published in Manière de voir No. 179 (October / November 2021), translation: Bernd Schrader. The authors are research directors of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Laboratory of Architecture and Function of Biological Macromolecules, University of Aix-Marseille. The exact origin of the Covid-19 pandemic remains unknown, no solid evidence allows to validate the hypotheses. Many scientists demand an independent investigation, freed from the resistance of the Chinese authorities. Because the negligence observed in Wuhan raises questions about the genetic manipulations carried out in this laboratory, as in those of […]
Arjun Puranik, Patrick J. Lenehan, Eli Silvert, Michiel J.M. Niesen, Juan Corchado-Garcia, John C. O’Horo, Abinash Virk, Melanie D. Swift, John Halamka, Andrew D. Badley, A.J. Venkatakrishnan, Venky Soundararajan: Comparison of two highly-effective mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 during periods of Alpha and Delta variant prevalence, in: medRxiv (August 21, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.06.21261707. Although clinical trials and real-world studies have affirmed the effectiveness and safety of the FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines, reports of breakthrough infections and persistent emergence of new variants highlight the need to vigilantly monitor the effectiveness of these vaccines.
Koen B. Pouwels, Emma Pritchard, Philippa C. Matthews, Nicole Stoesser, David W. Eyre, Karina-Doris Vihta, Thomas House, Jodie Hay, John I. Bell, John N. Newton, Jeremy Farrar, Derrick Crook, Duncan Cook, Emma Rourke, Ruth Studley, Tim Peto, Ian Diamond, A. Sarah Walker and the COVID-19 Infection Survey Team: Impact of Delta on viral burden and vaccine effectiveness against new SARS-CoV-2 infections in the UK , in: medRxiv (August 24, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.18.21262237. The effectiveness of BNT162b2, ChAdOx1, and mRNA-1273 vaccines against new SARS-CoV-2 infections requires continuous re-evaluation, given the increasingly dominant Delta variant. The authors investigated the effectiveness of the vaccines in […]
Adam Tooze: Has Covid ended the neoliberal era?, in: The Guardian Online (September 2, 2021), online in: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/02/covid-and-the-crisis-of-neoliberalism. According to Adam Tooze, the year 2020 revealed the risks and weaknesses of the market-oriented global system as never before. For him, it gave the impression that a turning point had been reached. Link to the article on the website of The Guardian newspaper
Gregori Galofré–Vilà, María Gómez–León, David Stuckler: A Lesson from History? The 1918 Influenza pandemic and the rise of Italian Fascism: A cross–city quantitative and historical text qualitative analysis, in: Working Paper Documentos de Trabajo No. 2102 (19.7.2021). Objectives: Evidence linking past experiences of worsening health and support for radical political views has generated concerns about the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The influenza pandemic that began in 1918 had a devastating impact on mortality. The authors test the hypothesis that deaths from the 1918 influenza pandemic contributed to the rise of fascism in Italy.