The Daily Blog Open Mic – Tuesday – 15th September 2020

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Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.

Moderation rules are more lenient for this section, but try and play nicely.

EDITORS NOTE: – By the way, here’s a list of shit that will get your comment dumped. Sexist language, homophobic language, racist language, anti-muslim hate, transphobic language, Chemtrails, 9/11 truthers, climate deniers, anti-fluoride fanatics, anti-vaxxer lunatics and ANYONE that links to fucking infowar.

5 COMMENTS

  1. RNZ trying to beat the govt with a stick over a fucking rugby game. WTF. After 6 months of cancelled international sport around the world including the olympics, RNZ decides to investigate whether the govt has ‘dropped the ball’ and whether New Zealanders can cope with an election on the same day as a footy match. If this is the main complaint from MSM, New Zealand must be doing far better than we thought.

    • Yes six foot four so Stuff investigates the baddies of the media now so good on them as ‘Radio NZ’ is so right wing to listen to for us on the left so how come a public radio network is sated strongly to National??????

      Read this;

      https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2018763930/the-goodies-and-baddies-of-the-1pm-covid-presser
      RNZ
      MEDIA
      5:00 am today
      The goodies and baddies of the 1pm covid presser
      From The Detail, 5:00 am today
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      Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield talk to media during a Covid-19 coronavirus briefing on 6 May, 2020. Photo: Pool / NZME
      The daily reality TV show that is the 1pm Beehive news conference has turned the spotlight on the journalists covering it, with critics calling them hectoring and aggressive.
      But Stuff political journalist Thomas Coughlan tells The Detail’s Sharon Brettkelly we live in a free-thinking democracy and we need to hold our politicians to account.
      “There are questions that politicians don’t like to be asked, let alone being forced to answer – that’s probably where the shoutiness comes from,” he says.
      The routine has been the same nearly every day for 25 weeks; at 1pm the Prime Minister – or another politician – steps up to the platform with, usually, the Director General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield.
      “It’s this very dark, poorly lit room in the bottom of the Beehive,” Coughlan says.
      “I actually find it quite a tiring place to be, the atmosphere is so draining it has this soporific quality to it.”
      But as soon as the microphones are “hot” and live streaming begins the atmosphere changes.
      Coughlan describes to The Detail the moment the journalists arrive in the theatrette and set up their microphones, the sounds of the hand sanitiser machine that herald the arrival of Ardern and Bloomfield, and what happens when the Prime Minister says she’s “happy to take questions”.
      And it is those questions and the behaviour of the journalists asking them that are under fire.
      Documentary maker Robyn Paterson says the press gallery journalists risk undermining their own validity with their aggressive, relentlessly repetitive questions. In her recent opinion piece on Newsroom.co.nz she asks if their approach threatens to “derail the nation’s co-operation at a time when it is most needed”.
      “I think it’s that fine line isn’t it, between what is scrutiny and then flips into ‘gotcha’ or what some would call harassment,” she says.
      From Coughlan’s perspective the criticism came from nowhere, and the questioning is no different to any other press conference with the Prime Minister or other politicians – except it goes out live to the public.
      From the first Covid press conference, he says, “what was going on was obviously extraordinary and unprecedented. The way that the questions were being asked and the way that the gallery was conducting itself was really quite normal.
      “In those 1pm press conferences there really is no material difference from a post-Cabinet press conference or a stand up with the opposition; it doesn’t feel any different.
      “The criticism seemed to come from nowhere because this really is the way it’s always been and actually no one has had an issue with it in the past because I don’t think anyone’s been watching.”
      He says people are “choosing not to understand” the repetitive questioning.
      “Politicians won’t voluntarily surrender the whole truth. As a journalist you have to repetitively question and when a question is repeated it is refined each time … in such a way that it becomes a closed ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question.”
      Coughlan says transcripts from the press conference show that a lot of the questions are not answered and repeat questioning is a way of forcing the politician into giving an actual answer.
      But Paterson says journalists need to be mindful of the public needs.
      “I really feel that at times that hasn’t been taken into account. What do the public need? What we are facing at the moment is a particularly tricky disaster because it’s a long term disaster and it’s ongoing … and a public health response requires widespread and continued public buy-in.”

      • Maybe this new lab produced “antibody” COVID 19 virus fighter now offers us some hope; lat’s hope the test shows positive results.

        https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/uk-begins-trials-of-new-antibody-treatment-for-covid-19-2295375
        UK Begins Trials Of New Antibody Treatment For COVID-19
        As part of the government-backed Randomised Evaluation of COVid-19 thERapY (RECOVERY) Trials, monoclonal antibodies, or potent laboratory-made antibodies, will be given to about 2,000 patients in the coming weeks to see if they are effective against coronavirus.
        WorldPress Trust IndiaUpdated: September 15, 2020 1:02 am IST
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        UK has begun human trials of a new antibody treatment for patients hospitalised with COVID-19.

        London:
        The UK on Monday began human trials of a new antibody treatment for patients hospitalised with COVID-19.
        As part of the government-backed Randomised Evaluation of COVid-19 thERapY (RECOVERY) Trials, monoclonal antibodies, or potent laboratory-made antibodies, will be given to about 2,000 patients in the coming weeks to see if they are effective against coronavirus.
        The Phase 3 open-label trial in patients hospitalised with COVID-19 will compare the effects of adding REGN-COV2 to the usual standard-of-care versus standard-of-care on its own.
        “REGN-COV2 was specifically designed by Regeneron scientists to target the virus that causes COVID-19. RECOVERY will be the fourth late-stage randomised clinical trial evaluating REGN-COV2 and will add to our knowledge about how this novel antibody cocktail may help hospitalised patients in need,” said George D Yancopoulos, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Regeneron, the biotech firm collaborating on the project.
        “The world urgently needs new medicines to combat COVID-19, and well-designed trials to evaluate new treatment options will quickly help us learn which are most effective,” he said.
        Peter Horby, Professor of Emerging Infectious Diseases and Global Health at the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Medicine, is the chief investigator of the trial.
        He said the study is aimed at determining whether REGN-COV2 is safe and effective in the context of a large-scale randomised clinical trial.
        “We have already discovered that one treatment, dexamethasone, benefits COVID-19 patients, but the death rate remains too high so we must keep searching for others. The RECOVERY trial was specifically designed so that when promising investigational drugs such as REGN-COV2 became available they can be tested quickly,” he said.
        REGN-COV2 is the first specifically designed COVID-19 therapy being evaluated by RECOVERY.
        Experts said that it was selected due to its emerging safety profile in humans, pre-clinical data showing it could protect against viral escape mutations, and prevention and treatment studies in non-human primates showing it reduced the amount of virus and associated damage in the lungs.
        Professor Fiona Watt, Executive Chair of the UK’s Medical Research Council, highlighted that the RECOVERY trial has previously found the “most clinically effective” treatment for COVID-19 so far in dexamethasone.
        “The same UK-wide trial will now test a new treatment designed specifically to combat the virus that causes the disease. Monoclonal, or targeted, antibodies are already used to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases.
        “The new trial will tell us whether antibodies that attack the virus can be an effective treatment for COVID-19,” she said.
        Martin Landray, Professor of Medicine & Epidemiology, Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, said there are good reasons to be excited about the trials as it would provide a robust assessment of the effect the lab-manufactured monoclonal antibody combination treatment has on hospitalised patients.
        “Up to now, we have largely been studying whether existing drugs can be re-purposed to tackle this new disease, but we now have the opportunity to rigorously assess the impact of a drug specifically designed to target this coronavirus,” he said.
        REGN-COV2 is currently being studied in two Phase 2/3 clinical trials for the treatment of COVID-19 and in a Phase 3 trial for the prevention of COVID-19 in household contacts of infected individuals.

  2. Funny old Whurl eh? So many people see the “plummeting” of CONSUMER confidence as a bad thing.
    Filling their garages up with a load of kaka, and buying into unsustainable bullshit treats and trinkets is still apparently high on their agendas.

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