Minister: Blood shortage will end in coming days, despite ‘foolish’ Orthodox boycott

 https://www.timesofisrael.com/minister-blood-shortage-to-end-in-coming-days-despite-foolish-orthodox-boycott/

Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday that the recent countrywide blood shortage would likely end in the coming days, adding that “foolish” calls by anti-LGBT religious groups not to donate — over Magen David Adom forms asking donors to identify “parent 1” and “parent 2” — were not the cause of the crisis.

Horowitz said at a Knesset Health Committee session that the “temporary” blood shortage was caused by the Omicron wave of the pandemic, as those infected are barred from donating for several months, adding “it’s not related to any other matter.”

He noted that such shortages are taking place around the world as well, and impacted Israel in previous waves of the pandemic too. “It’s the worst blood shortage in 40 years, according to the World Health Organization,” Horowitz said.

Cure for long COVID? Antihistamines shown to provide huge relief

 https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/321970

Prof. Pinto told Newswise that, “Most patients tell us that providers have not recommended anything that has helped. If patients wish to try OTC antihistamines, I urge them to do so under medical supervision. And because providers may not know about new potential treatments, I would encourage patients to be active in their care and consider taking research and case reports like ours to appointments with providers so they can help create a regimen that will work. The next steps for this research into antihistamine treatment are to conduct broad-based trials in order to evaluate efficacy and to develop dosage schedules for clinical practice guidelines.”

Dr. Brett Giroir on study on JHU study about COVID lockdowns

Johns Hopkins Study SLAMS Lockdowns As A DISASTER

Johns Hopkins study finds lockdowns reduced COVID-19 mortality by only 0.2%

John’s Hopkins Delivers a Lockdown Bombshell

Devastating Secondary Consequences Possible | Jordan Peterson on Johns Hopkins’ Lockdown Study

Johns Hopkins study reignites COVID lockdown debate

 https://www.foxnews.com/health/covid-lockdowns-johns-hopkins-study-debate

A recent controversial Johns Hopkins meta-analysis reignites a discussion about the adverse consequences of lockdowns after finding they had no significant mortality benefit during the first wave of the 2020 pandemic in the United States and Europe, according to a recent report.

Fox News guests use questionable lockdown study to launch misleading attacks on masks, vaccines

 https://www.salon.com/2022/02/03/fox-news-guests-use-study-to-launch-misleading-on-masks-vaccines/

Fox News segments on Wednesday repeatedly conflated a new study that questions the effectiveness of pandemic lockdowns with the controversies over vaccines and mask mandates, essentially to claim that all public health measures are ineffective. Yet many scientists across the globe have rushed to speak out against the paper, pointing out its flaws — something that Fox News did not address in its constant coverage of the study.

Did a Johns Hopkins Study 'Prove' Lockdowns Don't Work? What We Know So Far

 https://www.newsweek.com/did-johns-hopkins-study-prove-lockdowns-dont-work-what-we-know-so-far-1676724

"This is a highly political "push/opinion piece" masquerading as "sober analysis," Jeremy Kamil, associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport told Newsweek in an email. "One of the authors mentions affiliation with the Cato Institute, which as far as I know is a right-wing pro-business organization that is against governments doing anything at all about anything. The methods seem deceptive."

What to know about the study on lockdowns and COVID-19 deaths by economists

 https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/feb/07/what-know-about-study-lockdowns-and-covid-19-death/

Fox News and other outlets are touting a new study that looked at how early COVID-19 lockdowns impacted mortality of the disease. The stories come with bombshell headlines that say research conducted by Johns Hopkins University found that lockdowns barely reduced deaths.

A new paper by three economists affiliated with Johns Hopkins University found that COVID-19 lockdowns barely reduced deaths, but the paper has not been peer-reviewed and is considered a working paper. The university did not endorse the study.

Several experts have criticized the paper and point to issues such as the authors’ broad definition of lockdown, a limited focus on the first wave of the pandemic, a comparison of policies that look very different from country to country, and an exclusion of studies that look at the science of disease transmission.

Other research has found that lockdown measures have helped save millions of lives during the pandemic.

Now 'Prof Lockdown' slams shock study that found draconian curbs only reduced Covid deaths by 0.2%

 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10473937/Now-Prof-Lockdown-slams-shock-study-draconian-curbs-reduced-Covid-deaths-0-2.html

There are also questions about the methods used in the paper. Only 24 studies were included in the review and some were discarded for seemingly trivial reasons, which led to accusations the authors 'cherry-picked' studies.

But other experts said the review shows there is 'no evidence that lockdowns did any good and accused the British media of 'maintaining pandemic fear' by failing to cover the report.

Crucially, the researchers also left out studies which looked at early lockdowns in countries which managed to suppress Covid and record extremely low death rates during the pandemic through incredibly strict lockdowns and border controls — such as China, Australia and New Zealand.

Noting this limitation, the authors write: 'One objection to our conclusions may be that we do not look at the role of timing. If timing is very important, differences in timing may empirically overrule any differences in lockdowns.'

They add: 'Including these studies will greatly overestimate the effect of lockdowns, and, hence, we chose not to include studies focusing on timing of lockdowns in our review.'

Expert reaction to a preprint looking at the impact of lockdowns

 https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-a-preprint-looking-at-the-impact-of-lockdowns-as-posted-on-the-john-hopkins-krieger-school-of-arts-and-sciences-website/

“Smoking causes cancer, the earth is round, and ordering people to stay at home (the correct definition of lockdown) decreases disease transmission. None of this is controversial among scientists. A study purporting to prove the opposite is almost certain to be fundamentally flawed.

“In this case, a trio of economists have undertaken a meta-analysis of many previous studies. So far so good. But they systematically excluded from consideration any study based on the science of disease transmission, meaning that the only studies looked at in the analysis are studies using the methods of economics. These do not include key facts about disease transmission such as: later lockdowns are less effective than earlier lockdowns, because many people are already infected; lockdowns do not immediately save lives, because there’s a lag from infection to death, so to see the effect of lockdowns on Covid deaths we need to wait about two or three weeks. (This was all known in March 2020 – we discussed it in a paper released that month, and later published in Nature. Our paper is excluded from consideration in this meta-analysis.)

“It’s as if we wanted to know whether smoking causes cancer and so we asked a bunch of new smokers: did you have cancer the day before you started smoking? And what about the day after? If we did this, obviously we’d incorrectly conclude smoking is unrelated to cancer, but we’d be ignoring basic science. The science of diseases and their causes is complex, and it has a lot of surprises for us, but there are appropriate methods to study it, and inappropriate methods. This study intentionally excludes all studies rooted in epidemiology–the science of disease.”

The Evil Eye Remover

 https://www.aish.com/sp/so/The-Evil-Eye-Remover.html

Since this piece initially came out, people have been asking if the “curse” ever lifted. Well, my husband’s career ripened and prospered, my daughter’s condition improved dramatically, and around then I won close to $13,000 in fellowships and awards for that novel I was working on. In fact, “In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist” has just been released. Oh, and I became the owner of a washing machine.