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It's worth noting that the RCN is a trade union (and in my professional opinion (ex NHS nurse) a poor one - but that's another thread), not a medical body. They do not make decisions based on medical evidence any more than the RMT (transport) union does. Which is not to say their points may or may not be valid in regards to workers rights, only that they are not a medical authority.3 points
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Here's some latest numbers on hesitancy distribution, within the NHS, in the BMJ:2 points
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R0 of the SARS COV 2 Omicron variant: 10 Risk of thromboembolism as a result of COVID infection: one in 5 Risk of thromboembolism as a result of AZ vaccine: one in 50,000 Uninformed/undereducated is one possibility. Phenomenally bad at math is another. To be blunt you're wrong and so are "they". Like not in a philosophical, "lesser evil. two sides of the coin" way - but more of a "mathematically defined to a near incalculable degree of probability" way. Vaccinating a human population for COVID19 will result in fewer deaths and loss of QALYs than not vaccinating the population, unequivocally.2 points
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The unvaccinated healthcare workers are a small group. Disproportionately smaller than the average population. Moreover, as already mentioned, the level of training on that matter is inversely proportionate to vaccine hesitancy (i.e. MD < Nurses < paramedics < support staff). And I note that you are now moving away from the scary "new" mRNA vaccine and now it is adenovirus-base vaccines. As it is, the risk is still orders of magnitude lower than getting blood clots following a SARS-CoV-2 infection. And hey, if you are in a high risk group, you have other vaccines to choose from. But that is of course not the point, is it? It is about not wanting a vaccine and trying to find excuses for it. Geez, I wonder why did not squash the pandemic yet.2 points
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Quick question; is "anti-quantum" a concept in mainstream physics? I got curious since it was mentioned in another (now closed) thread and I can't remember seeing it in my brief studies of the topic and I'm unable to find references to "anti-quantum" in physics. My guess is that the term was invented as part of a non-mainstream speculation, hopefully someone could confirm or link to some material. Side note: I'm aware of "anti-quantum" in the context of computer science and cryptography. The term refers to "quantum-proof", "quantum-safe" or "quantum-resistant"; algorithms that are thought to be secure against a cryptanalytic attack by a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor's algorithm.1 point
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AFAIK, that is the case. In any event, it appears to be basically undefined. In physics, if it is not quantum it is continuum.1 point
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The only thing that looks "cohesive" to me on this thread are the cohesive attempts by members of the forums to have you explain --with a default-minimum maths, if possible-- how you can see a force in Schrödinger's equation; and what's more, how you can see any interactions that show up as "cohesive." The DeBroglie-Bohm model does not display cohesiveness either, BTW. The wave acts on the particle by means of the quantum potential in an equation that's formally a Hamilton-Jacobi formulation of dynamics; while the particle does not act on the wave. The wave goes its own way. That's the main reason why Einstein didn't like the model, BTW.1 point
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Several people have done so. You claim current theory says a photon spreads and out and "disappears". But current theory does not say it disappears. So your "cohesive force" seems to address a non-existent problem. But in case I have misunderstood, I've asked you about this, and you have failed to respond. The dispersion of wave packets is not a problem, so far as I am aware, but in any case you have denied that dispersion of wave packets is what you have in mind. So if it is not that, I ask again: what problem in physics are you addressing with this idea? If it addresses no problem, it can be dismissed as a scientific hypothesis, by Ockham's Razor.1 point
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Oh my!! Definitely. I'm glad to find out I am not the only one. When I drive on US highways I am constantly reminded of the question of meaning because of the road sign that says "lane ends merge left." I cannot decide if this means that the lane I am in is ending and I am instructed to merge to the left, or if it simply means that the two lanes are merging in a leftward direction. This bothers me! More significantly, I once had a job of helping my boss prepare for quarterly meetings with a very volatile leader. I would spend days struggling to 'spin' the presentation in a way that would assure that the volatile leader would receive the meaning we wished to convey.1 point
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OK, so the vast majority of mRNA vaccine components (i.e. lipids, PBS and sucrose) have been in use in various medications for decades. The only active component that could be considered novel is a strand of mRNA that encodes the SARS COV 2 S protein. Do you know what else mRNA is in? EVERY ORGANISMAL CELL ON THE PLANET. Every time you eat, breathe and drink you ingest mRNA. Your gut microbiome produces billions of strands of foreign mRNA inside your body every day, which can and do cross the gut epithelium into the bloodstream. Also, the mRNA from the vaccines is cleared from the body in around 72 hours, the spike proteins encoded by them in 21 days. So, given how ubiquitously and frequently your cells encounter foreign mRNA molecules, and that no component of the vaccine actually persists in the body long term, by what mechanism would the mRNA cause an adverse reaction years after the fact? I mean, no one knows if you sprout wings out your butt 30 years after drinking Monster Energy, but there's not really a mechanism that would lend itself to that being a realistic concern.1 point
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I had a salient point in mind when I mentioned the uncertainty of location and it had nothing to do with Heisenberg. I failed to explain my view in a way that anyone could follow but I find it relevant to the topic so I will try to explain it now with the following example. Suppose you mail two letters at the same time. One contains a payment addressed to the utility company and the other contains a note addressed to a friend. If the utility company receives your personal note and your friend receives the utility payment, you know you made a mistake and sent the wrong item to the wrong address because the laws physics do not conspire to swap the contents of your letters while in transit. But suppose the laws of QM can conspire to swap the identity of the contents, then you can never be certain which item went where and that is the uncertainty of location I had in mind. If quantum superposition is a reality, then the latter scenario is possible with the resulting uncertainty of locations. Entangled particles can not physically swap places prior to their observation but they can swap identities which is the observational equivalent. Quantum teleportation is an example where an operator on one end of an entangled pair can alter the outcome on the other end with the resulting uncertainty. How do you reconcile this view with Schroedinger’s "superposition" where entangled particles are in a mixed quantum state until observed?1 point
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WARNING: Off-topic rant about to begin. Feel free to ignore. <start rant> It is all just so stupid that I think people fight against mandates not because of something they believe in, but because they enjoy being angry about something. I laugh every time I see a video of someone on a plane who sits in their assigned seat, makes sure their tray table is secured & their seats are in the upright and locked position, has their approved-size carry-on luggage properly secured in the overhead or under the seat in front of them, turns their cell phone to airplane mode, opens their window shade, fastens their seatbelt, then throws a hissy fit because they are asked to wear a piece of cloth over their nose and mouth. Clearly it is not personal freedom they are fighting for, but the right to berate flight attendants who didn't make up the rules in the first place. Same thing with vaccine mandates. People who don't want a business owner to be able to require they meet safety standards insist business owners should be able to deny serving people who are gay. Vaccines make your balls shrink, they cause more deaths than COVID, they don't work, they were developed too quickly, they are an unproven technology, they'll cause your workforce to quit, they'll result in Armageddon! Are people who fight against vaccine mandates also fighting against training mandates, hand washing mandates, speed limits in the hospital parking lot, uniforms, complete documentation, and the literally thousands of mandates from government that cover hospital operations? These people exhaust me. <end rant>1 point
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Circular would be nearer the mark. There's very little evidence of any Biblical characters or events for disinterested* historians to research. Ditto for archaeologists. The archaeology of the Levant has been subject to political control since it became a genuine discipline which has added to the problem of independent verification of people and events described in the NT. *Disinterested means impartial, objective.1 point
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It's already been pointed out that QM (Schrödinger's equation) deals with energy and not forces - we deal with interactions. One of the issues here is that it's not clear whether the wave packet being referenced is a wave function, or the deBroglie wave. Some statements imply one, and some imply the other. They are not the same thing. How can a wave function feel a force? How does a deBroglie wave have an internal force? One of these, at least, must be addressed.1 point
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Just to correct myself. There are cases in which you can say an electron changes its spin, of course. But not for spin-entangled states. For example, you put an ion in an ion trap and subject it to a magnetic field. The ion will flip its spin. The devilish property of a maximally-entangled state is that you cannot say its spin has any particular value whatsoever. Yes, it's very much like that; they're initial correlations. The tricky part is that correlations are quantum. All hell breaks loose when correlations are quantum and you want to think about the gloves as actually possessing all these properties at a given time. Quantum mechanics embeds a different (non-classical) kind of logic when you express it in terms of properties you can measure. 'Quantum gloves' need to be able to occupy states that are neither right-handed, nor left-handed (superpositions); neither black nor white, etc. And we need to be able to measure several properties of the gloves. If we want to have properly quantum gloves and display all the 'trickery' of quantum entanglement, we would need: 1) Several measurable properties. Take three observables, say: handedness (H), colour (C), and material (M). 2) Measurements of any one of these properties (observables) completely mess up measurements of the other; and you can't measure (H,C), or (C,M), (H,M), at the same time. (Incompatible observables.) 3) (For simplicity) the observables have a discrete dichotomic spectrum (possible values when measured): H {left-handed, right-handed} C {black, white} M {natural, synthetic} 4) When the gloves are in a definite state of handedness, the H-incompatible properties C and M are maximally scrambled, or 'blurry': Equally likely to be black or white; equally likely to be natural or synthetic. The gloves simply don't have those C, M properties when H is well defined! If they had, it's not difficult to prove that, for many series of repeated experiments on a given glove: Probability(left-handed & white)+P(black & synthetic) greater or equal than Probability(left-handed & synthetic) This is called Bell's inequality, and it's just a consequence of the properties H, C, and M actually having a value. Quantum probabilities violate this inequality for certain choices of observables. But wait a minute. Didn't we say that properties H (handedness) and C (colour) are incompatible? How can I even make sense of Probability(left-handed & white)? I'm not supposed to be able to measure handedness and colour at the same time! (for the same glove). Yes, but the whole basis of this combined-probability setup is based on the assumption that when I measure, eg, H for one glove and the result is 'left-handed', I know with certainty that, were an experiment to be performed at the other glove's location, it would produce the result 'right-handed' with total certainty. And sure enough, it does, when I do so. So I'm counting 'left-handed' outputs for the other glove as 'right-handed' outputs for this glove. This is very important to keep in mind. So the gloves would have to be kinda schizoid. But the whole thing is local. In order to see that, let's go back to a pair of electrons. We take electrons from separate parts of the world, completely uncorrelated. We bring them together and have them interact. They reach a maximally entangled state called the singlet. This only happens because they've been proximal and interacting (local!!!). Now (and not before) they display perfect anti-correlation. If I perform my experiment on them when they're still next to each other, they display all the craziness that I've just described. Now the state decays (splits apart). I perform the same sequence of measurements. The perfect anti-correlation is still there. It hasn't changed. So it didn't come from me doing anything on one of the electrons and the other 'sensing' what I did. It came from the initial interaction that produced the anti-correlations. Murray Gell-Mann was very frustrated that people, decades after Bell, Clauser, Shimony, and all that saga, still called this 'non-locality'. Just as an indirect evidence of how much confusion this term 'non-local' has caused in physics, here's a quotation: (taken from a scientific forum.) Ooooooo-kay.1 point
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There's a few non-mutually exclusive hypotheses regarding the evolutionary origins of viruses. The "virus-first" hypothesis posits that virus evolution occurred on parallel with cellular life. If that were the case then yes, virus origins, or at least some virus origins may well be separate from cellular life. Also note, many viruses are not terrestrial. If all humans are descended from Adam and Eve, how come a French woman has never given birth to a Singaporean? If you're related to your cousins, how come one of them has never given birth to your child? Common ancestry doesn't infer that organisms will spontaneously change into fundamentally different organisms. In fact if a bacterium woke up one day and discovered it had divided into a bacteria and an elephant, it would completely contradict contemporary evolutionary theory. I often wonder what would happen if fundamentalists ever gained the self awareness to realize how counterproductive and hypocritical being petulant and condescending on the internet is.-1 points
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Are they uninformed? I question that. I think these healthcare workers are actually hyperaware of the data surrounding the vaccine (AZ in particular, since we're focusing on the UK). While the majority of the general public doesn't focus on the small chance they will be fatally impacted by a thrombotic event, these employees would likely be quite cognizant that there's a real chance such consequences could impact them directly. As I mentioned previously, the fact that these events happen and are viewed as acceptable collateral damage, with no effort to improve the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, can't be too encouraging. They're weighing this risk against the possibility of being seriously impacted by Covid, and determining the vaccine isn't worth it. Patricia Marquis, from RCN England made that same point (see my post above). Now, you can call these workers "uninformed" if you want to. It's reassuring to wield self righteous anger at a chosen out-group that you can collectively ostracize. But the fact is in a free society with free access to information, these workers have a choice to interpret the data and risk as they see fit, and act accordingly. Which brings us to the question of the effect on the NHS as a system, and whether the mandate is actually worth it from a systems perspective. Many in the NHS feel the harm done to the patients would be measurably greater with these impending staff shortages than if employees are allowed to work unvaccinated. Just how far is this crusade to forcibly vaccinate everyone prepared to go and at what immediate cost? Do the ends really justify the means? I don't think they do, and neither do many others.-1 points
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Another interesting article. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/18/health-department-warning-over-vaccine-mandate-for-nhs-england-staff Excerpt: Ministers have been issued with a stark warning over mandatory Covid vaccines for NHS workers in England, with a leaked document saying growing evidence on the Omicron variant casts doubts over the new law’s “rationality” and “proportionality”. On Tuesday the Royal College of Nursing said the leaked memo should prompt ministers to call a halt to the imposition of compulsory jabs, which it called “reckless”. “The government should now instigate a major rethink”, said Patricia Marquis, the RCN’s England director. “Mandation is not the answer and sacking valued nursing staff during a workforce crisis is reckless.” “The low VE [vaccine effectiveness] against infection (and consequently effect on transmission) plus the lower risk posed by Omicron brings into question both the rationality of the VCOD2 policy and its proportionality and makes the case for vaccination requirement weaker than when [ministers] decided on the policy. “The evidence base on which MPs voted on VCOD2 has now changed and we may see more objections from MPs, increased media interest and higher likelihood of judicial review.” “Now we’ve learned more about both vaccine efficacy against Omicron transmission and its severity, it looks increasingly foolish. “Ministers would be wise to rethink the policy and avoid putting even more pressure on our NHS by sacking tens of thousands of health and social care workers in the next few weeks. When you know something won’t work, it’s right to change course.” Hospital bosses have voiced rising concerns that they may have to close entire units and send patients elsewhere for treatment because the enforced dismissal of unvaccinated staff means they cannot run safely. There is particular concern about maternity units as hospitals are already 2,500 midwives short. Matthew Trainer, the chief executive of Barking, Havering and Redbridge NHS trust in London, said last week that the loss of unvaccinated midwives, coupled with the fact that it already had a 10% vacancy rate among those specialists, “would put us in quite a serious position”. Recent data on deaths caused by Covid -19 (in the UK) from the Office of National Statistics calls this into question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UHvwWWcjYw&t=57s-1 points
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I have already admitted that introduction of cohesive force is not compatible with the framework of traditional quantum theories. This fact does not mean introduction of cohesive force is false. Rather, it means that traditional quantum theories are only approximately true. Can't he understand this simple logic? I am tired of discussing with persons without intellectual honesty. Considering their difficult conditions, however, I cannot but feel sympathy. So, I would like to say goodbye. Thanks a lot. I wish all of you good luck.-2 points