It could be a coincidence, but Spain’s grid ran entirely on renewables for the first time on April 16th. Less than two weeks later, at lunchtime Monday Spain and Portugal and even parts of France suffered massive cascading blackouts. Thirteen gigawatts of electricity, about half the grid, suddenly disappeared at 12:30pm. Trains were halted, and people were stuck in dark subway tunnels. A tennis tournament was stopped, flights were cancelled and diverted, and prosaically, as an emblem of the Western World, Spain’s nuclear plants shut too, and are now running on diesel back up. Shops have been stripped, people are fighting over taxis, and landlines and ATMs are down, and even the mobile network failed in Madrid. The mayor of Madrid has urged the PM to declare an emergency and deploy soldiers.
Electricity has been restored to some areas, but the grid operator has said “it could take up to a week to fix”. Other reports say “six to ten hours”.
Panic buying has swept Spain and Portugal as nationwide blackouts paralysed both countries, shutting down transport networks and prompting people to clear supermarket shelves amid fears the chaos could last for days.
Huge queues formed outside shops and banks as residents and tourists desperately sought to stockpile essentials and take out cash as much cash as they could amid the uncertainty. Rows of cars were pictured lining up at petrol stations as people hoped to fill up their vehicles and fuel cans, with ex-pats detailing how they have tried to power generators to keep their homes going.
Airports have also been hit by the outages, with flights delayed and cancelled and holidaymakers in Portugal warned by the country’s flagship airline TAP Air not to travel for their flights until further notice. A British holidaymaker in Madrid described the situation in the city centre as ‘carnage’, telling MailOnline: ‘People are starting to panic. It’s going to get really bad if they don’t restore power quickly.’
It must be an attack of the “Rare Atmospheric Phenomenon”
There were rumors it was a cyber attack, or a fire in a transmission line. But Portugal is blaming Spain and says it was due to a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” which sounds like a polite way to say “a renewable energy failure”. After all, it’s hard to imagine a rare atmospheric phenomenon blacking out a nuclear plant.
The Portuguese prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said that the issue originated in Spain. Portugal’s REN said a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” had caused a severe imbalance in temperatures that led to the widespread shutdowns.
REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior or Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”
It appears the phenomenon occurred when it was a climate extreme of 23 degrees C in Madrid today. The Daily Mail has a fancy diagram explaining how extreme temperatures cause some regions to use more power than others for cooling. As energy “moves to hotter regions” they say, parts of the grid are “left with different voltages and frequencies”. This creates “‘anomolous oscillations in very high voltage power lines, leading to synchronization errors across the network”. I remain unconvinced that this is anything other than panicked post hoc hand-waving excuses.
It’s all kind of obvious when we look at network five minutes before the crisis. Some particular event may turn out to be the trigger, but a system that is 78% reliant on unreliables could probably be knocked over by a teddy bear, or perhaps a wayward cloud.
Before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little dispatchable spinning generation, and therefore no much inertia.
Solar PV/thermal + wind: ~78%
Nuclear: 11.5%
Co-generation: 5%
Gas-fired: ~3% (less than 1GW)
By Jo Nova New posts will appear underneath this one:
April 29th: The site is still under hostile attack. Since Easter Saturday waves of traffic from China, the US, Brazil and Europe have surged to overwhelm the servers. Daily, the load increases. At last count, traffic is running at six times normal. The attacker has control of around hundred thousand bots spread around the world. But they are attacking two randomly selected old pages. They are not even trying to hide that this is hostile.
DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. In effect, massive artificial traffic is trying to overwhelm the servers. Is it China?
If you can help, I’m asking for donations to upgrade the armor here
The Blob sets “The Science Trap” — and conservative politicians get caught every time
The Bureaucratic Blob Team brag about following “The Science” but the truth is, they fund only the questions they want answered, they sack the scientists who disagree, then they call everyone names who thinks differently. They’re not open to debate or ideas, they rule through ostracism and cancel culture — demanding people believe “The Science” — and mocking them as simpletons if they don’t — it’s like a cult or perhaps a kindergarten.
Conservative politicians leave themselves defenseless because for decades they keep funding the same Blob Science Institutions with the same Blob-incentives. When research groups are paid to find a crisis, they’ll keep hunting til they find one.
Last week in the debate, the Australian opposition leader, Peter Dutton said the dreaded line: “I’m not a scientist” and then had to say the next day “I believe in climate change” just to quell the uproar. It was the classic mindless science trap. It’s a hundred agencies paid to speak jargon versus one politician with no tech support.
Imagine if he had said the Coalition is going to fund the science research the Labor Party won’t?
None of our climate models can tell us whether next summer will be a BBQ scorcher or a wet blanket. The models are failing because they are missing nearly everything about The Sun. They treat our nearest star like it is a light globe, ignoring the solar magnetic field which is bigger than the solar system, the electric field, the sun spot cycles, and the way sun’s output of UV light changes. Our current best climate models all assume these effects are zero. They assume the solar wind which batters Earth at a million miles an hour has no effect at all. Isn’t it time we set up a dedicated agency to find out what role the sun has?
Don’t we owe it to the koalas, the children (and the taxpayer?)
What if the Sun is causing the warming and we’re spending hundreds of billions trying to reduce CO2 and it’s irrelevant?
Who did that due diligence before we spent half a trillion dollars trying to change the weather? Hands up? Anyone?
Why aren’t we investigating The Sun’s role in Climate Change? (Because we’re afraid it’s real?)
Big-Government politicians strangle science. They pour money in to find out “how bad man-made climate change is” but virtually nothing goes into asking how “good” our emission are, nor whether the Sun has the commanding role, and we’re irrelevant. Where is the institution dedicated to finding out how the Sun drives our climate? There isn’t one. There are a few researchers who trip over parts of the puzzle, but there is no independent dedicated agency that exists in order to find reasons that the Sun controls our weather.
Australia needs a dedicated Australian Space-Weather-Climate Institute to investigate the effect of the solar magnetic field, cosmic rays and the changes in solar UV on our climate. It needs to be separate from the other conglomerate behemoths of science, or it just becomes another part of The Blob.
We need competition in science, and a free market, not these centralized Soviet conglomerates of science like the CSIRO. Once an agency is trapped inside a big organisation, it can’t say something which makes the rest of the organization look silly. Nor could it publish results that showed the rest of the conglomerate group’s work was pointless. Likewise, Australia has an Australian Space Weather Forecasting Centre (ASWFC) but it’s a part of the Bureau of Meteorology. It won’t be competing with the BoM, or pointing out their flaws on the Channel Nine news.
We need a free market in science — we need that competition
The incentives for science are screwed. Right now scientists serve Big Government and work to get Bigger Government elected. They don’t serve the people.
In a better world the government would fund both science teams and they’d be criticizing each other in televised debates. The media would ask scientists hard actual questions and embarrass them when they were inconsistent hypocrites, or just chronically wrong. The voters could have informed consent…
In an even better world, the voters could vote for their tax dollars to go to particular areas of interest (like say when they fill out their tax return?). That way the scientists would want to serve the public, they’d want to be useful, and they’d be competing with other scientists so they’d speak out when they thought a climate model was useless.
In my favourite world, we’d pay hardly any tax, so we could all afford to donate to the research we liked the most…
Naturally, anything funded by the Government sooner or later becomes part of the Blob. That’s why we have to get the incentives right.
The Gods in the UK Parliament plan to spend £50 million in a quest to control sunlight, because obviously, the UK is too sunny
Also obviously, there is nothing more useful the United Kingdom could spend money on than pie-in-the-sky plans for weather-control. It’s not like people are struggling to heat their homes or put food on the table.
And it’s not like anything could go wrong, or plants use sunlight.
It’s not like the UK just installed 1.5 million solar panels on homes and is now paying money to reduce the sunlight falling on them.
In the end, this is just another Grow-The-Government-Blob job, but it’s also an escape plan. Wait for it. Twenty years from now, if the world is cooler due to solar activity or cosmic radiation, they’ll say the Geoengineering saved the world from global warming.
Scientists consider brightening clouds to reflect sunshine among ways to prevent runaway climate change
By Sarah Knapton, The Telegraph
Experiments to dim sunlight to fight global warming will be given the green light by the Government within weeks.
Outdoor field trials which could include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere, or brightening clouds to reflect sunshine, are being considered by scientists as a way to prevent runaway climate change.
But it’s all really safe and effective “by design” (unlike all those other experiments which were designed to be dangerous):
Prof Mark Symes, the programme director for Aria (Advanced Research and Invention Agency), said there would be “small controlled outdoor experiments on particular approaches”. “We will be announcing who we have given funding to in a few weeks and when we do so, we will be making clear when any outdoor experiments might be taking place,” he said.
“One of the missing pieces in this debate was physical data from the real world. Models can only tell us so much.
“Everything we do is going to be safe by design. We’re absolutely committed to responsible research, including responsible outdoor research.
Now they tell us? Suddenly (when a grant depends upon it) researchers remember that “Models can only tell us so much” and they need real data. Where were you Professor Symes for the last 30 years while national economies were being crushed on the alter of climate modeling.
Looks like the big plan to use pollution to fight “pollution”
The press release coyly talks about “aerosols” being injected into the sky, like it might be an giant air-misting device, or aromatherapy for the atmosphere. They don’t want to name the actual aerosol these experiments will dump in the sky — not in one sentence. Instead, they hint suggestively that sulfur dioxide comes off ships and makes clouds brighter from space, which is a nice way of saying that pollution from diesel makes clouds darker from Earth. See how this works? Bad-sulfur-dioxide needed regulation and created jobs (and the UN was very proud of itself for getting rid of SO2). Now good-sulfur-dioxide needs grants and creates even more jobs. SO2 just needs a makeover. So, gasp, it’s a common thing in jet exhaust. Did he just admit that we could all fly more and “save the planet”? The WEF won’t be happy about that.
Dr Sebastian Eastham, a senior lecturer in sustainable aviation at Imperial College London, said: “Every time you fly, sulphur, which is naturally present in jet fuel, is emitted into the lower most stratosphere causing a small cooling effect.
Experts are hopeful that if experiments prove a success, they could be scaled up and implemented within 10 years.
So they don’t specifically say they’ll be adding pollution to the sky that we’ve spent the last 100 years trying to get out of shipping. But it’s likely that’s exactly what they’re thinking of. Nearly all stratospheric aerosol injections use sulfur dioxide. Just last week, news came that the project called “Make Sunsets” in the US uses weather balloons to drop sulfur dioxide in the sky to “cool the world”.
The latest papers blame their success at getting SO2 out of shipping as the reason we got freakish warming that their models didn’t predict.
For the record, some crazy geoengineering schemes may involve chalk dust, titanium dioxide, and sea salt. Perhaps they’ll try them all?
And as the commenters on X are saying, I do not consent!
There has been a wicked price spike in cocoa beans which the usual suspects are blaming on “climate change” as if your air conditioner was ruining cocoa crops in West Africa. Instead African governments have fixed the price of cocoa for decades, forcing poor farmers to work for a pittance, and keeping the big profits for themselves. Not surprisingly, even though there is a wild price spike, farmers in Ghana are leaving the industry, smuggling crops out (because they get a better price). They didn’t plant new trees, they ran out of money for fertilizer, and didn’t try new varieties. Their children don’t want to farm cocoa, and the yields are falling on old sickly plantations.
So, surprise, socialist government controls wrecked the industry and they are now scrambling to put the pieces back together. Things are so desperate, the government of Ghana raised the price of cocoa by 58% last April and then raised the price of cocoa by another 45% last September, to try to reduce the smuggling. (The government was losing too much money). At one point last year it was estimated that a third of the national crop was lost to smugglers. A few months after this, the farmers were hoarding their beans in expectation the government would have to give them another price rise. Just chaos for everyone.
Meanwhile other socialists use these failures to tell us they have to fix the weather and we must give them lots of money to do it.
It’s always the way. Big Government creates a crisis and then beats us over the head with it, to demand more money and power. Greenies pretend to care about the poor, but they are happy to exploit the poor farmers of Ghana as fodder for press releases for their industrial “renewable” schemes, and banker friends.
Feel the pain of these farmers. Some of them have farmed for decades, yet they have nothing to show for it, saying “ It feels like we are working for other people’s benefit.”
Ghana has farmed cocoa for over 100 years. The country is the world’s second-largest producer, behind Côte d’Ivoire. The cocoa industry employs over a million people and contributes about $2 billion in foreign exchange annually. In recent times, prices of the commodity have increased exponentially, pushed by extreme climate events and supply chain crisis on fertilizers used by farmers.
Yet farmers like Anane and Holiata say they see little of this wealth. They point to the low prices set by the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), established in 1947. The board sets cocoa prices to regulate the industry and protect farmers from exploitation by European merchants, but farmers argue that these prices fail to reflect the crop’s true value on international markets.
The Cocobod traders were forward selling as much as 70% of the crop one year in advance. But when weather, disease, and a lack of fertilizer hit the crop, the bureaucrats couldn’t find the cocoa they’d already sold. They were caught short, forced to buy cocoa on the open market which sent the prices rocketing. (If only climate models worked, eh, they could have seen this coming?)
According to Oxfam, up to 90% of Ghanaian cocoa farmers do not earn a living income. Many of the 800,000 smallholder farmers who cultivate the crop survive on less than $2 a day, struggling to afford basic needs such as food, clothing, housing, and healthcare.
The cocoa industry is rife with human rights issues, like forced child labor, and slavery. When the environmentalists start to care about pain and suffering in the here and now, instead of theoretical storms in a hundred years time, we might think they give a damn about making the world a better place.
Apparently man-made climate change made it too wet, then too dry. Sure, we believe you…
The weather has been bad in Ghana in the last two years, first it was too wet which rotted the old sickly trees, and then it was too dry, but no climate model on Earth predicted both these extreme seasons correctly (the witchdoctors might as well use chicken entrails), and other countries nearby suffered bad weather too, yet they increased their crop yield. Nigeria’s cocoa exports saw a year-over-year increase of 15% in October 2024, and Cameroon’s cocoa crop is expected to rise 7% this year.
Price fixing, and regulation hurts the people it was supposed to protect
The Government of Ghana formed the price fixing board to try to protect farmers from volatile prices. Instead they trapped them in poverty and fed a bunch of bureaucrats that may destroy the local industry.
Under Ghanaian law, selling cocoa to anyone other than the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) through its licensed buying companies (LBCs) is a crime. The market is tightly regulated, with prices set annually by the government through the Producer Price Review Committee (PPRC).
If the government had offered a service but not forced it upon the farmers, the Cocobod bureaucrats would have had to stay competitive, or the farmers would have abandoned it to make their own deals. But there were no brakes or accountability on the government. In the end, the farmers did abandon it, but years too late, because it was against the law to smuggle the cocoa out of the country — so the farmers had to be desperate before they would take the risk.
It takes up to five years to grow new cocoa plants, so chocolate will be expensive until the free market solves itself, which it will, as long as the government gets out of the way.
Together the Ivory Coast and Ghana provide 60% of global cocoa, they have a nice little monopoly. But with these latest price spikes, many other countries are planting cocoa beans and soon there will be a lot more competition. The West African cartel have just wrecked their own competitive advantage.
We are still getting to the bottom of the problems on the site and working to overcome the issues. I’ll make an announcement soon. This is not just a software glitch. The site is being swamped with requests that started on Saturday. Thanks again for your patience.
Thanks to those who are sending donations to help upgrade the server.
Around 1,000AD, a little delicate moss (just like the one above), lived in a spot in Antarctica which is now locked in snow and ice all year round, and considered hyper arid and perennially frozen. No one expected to find nodding thread-moss (Pohlia Nutans) on Boulder Clay Glacier.
Researchers had to drill through 11 meters of ice to find it (or what’s left of it) and managed to date it to 1,050 years before present. This puts it smack in the centre of the Medieval Warm Period, when Vikings were marauding England, showing that this part of Antarctica was warmer 1000 years ago than it is today, even though humans have poured forth 1.8 trillion tons of greenhouse gases.
Pohlia nutans, needs liquid water and warmer summers. In order to grow, it has to find land that is ice free in summer has rain or melted water. Mosses can’t survive in this area now.
Spare a thought for the life of an Antarctic moss. They spend 9 or 10 months of the year buried in snow, hoping for a five or six weeks of warmth so they can grow a few millimeters. If they’re lucky they might catch some floating penguin poo dust for nutrients. If they’re not lucky the summers get cold for thousand years, and they’re buried in 11 meters of snow.
It sort of suggests this sort of climatic mayhem has happened before?
Fully 120 proxies show the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon. Yet the climate industry depends on it not being true. Everything that shows the world was warmer shows that our coal plants and cars are irrelevant. That nature does it all by herself, and that thousands of IPCC experts have been selectively skewing their stories to get bigger grants, or are just too scared to say what they really thought lest they be called a “climate denier”.
That, and the media ignoring hundreds of stories like these.
Apologies for the server troubles over Easter. We are working on it. (I would have left a note last night here but I was forbidden, like you.)
The problem seems to be so much traffic that the system was pushed beyond its limits over Easter. We will be increasing server power asap. I’ll keep you posted, but there may be more dropouts. Apologies for all the disruptions. I hope to be back to normal as soon as possible.
I’ll post more updates here. Thanks for your patience!
Apologies for the intermittent site outages today. I know not why. Still investigating….
UPDATE: These are extensive outages. It’s not just you. Hope to have this back to normal later tomorrow. Thanks for your patience and apologies for the disruption.
And so we arrive, a nation of people looking at TikTok as they cruise down the freeway
This week, our national energy policy is an Agony-Aunt letter — poor Alexa, 21, has been suffering from ‘climate anxiety’ since she was 15. Instead of asking her grandparents (who don’t rate a mention) she dreams of telling her grandkids that she did “everything she could”. Everything, that is, except for talking to her own grandparents, listening to climate skeptics, or seeking alternative views.
Instead of doing her homework, she gate-crashed the PMs promo event so she could be used as emotional bait in a battle between the deep-state-banker-blob and the workers. She probably thinks she’s on the side of the workers (though she’s also probably never met one).
Channel Nine reports on her mental health disorder in the middle of an election campaign, not to help her heal, but to exploit her to push for the climate policies, and political winners that Nine shareholders probably want. See their first line. It’s not “news”, it’s political advertising.
Young voters are forming a rallying cry for the federal government to address one of their greatest concerns: climate change.
Alexa Stuart, 21, has already spent years of her life anxious about the climate.
In other words, (twist-the-knife) — to solve her mental illness, we should turn our electrical network into a weather modification scheme at a cost of hundreds of billions, right? (Either that, or we could send her to a pub for fish and chips with a few climate skeptics. It’s so much cheaper.)
No country on Earth has made its own climate nicer with solar panels, or cricket burgers, and most of them are not even trying, but we should, they imply, because only horrible people would not be touched by her sad story. And after all, electricity runs on hope, faith and diversity, not on three phase power. If we follow the fantasy here — coal power causes heart palpitations.
Agony Aunt, (April Glover) digs deep for science, and finds psychological coleslaw instead:
One in 10 Australian adults is experiencing “significant eco-anxiety” like Stuart is, said the Black Dog Institute’s Chloe Watfern.
More than 80 per cent of 16 to 25-year-olds are worried about climate change, according to research published in The Lancet.
Watfern said this currently undiagnosed feeling can be akin to “the feeling of homesickness that you have when you’re home” or even pre-traumatic stress.
It can also be known as “ecological grief”, which is “a sense of mourning for ecosystems, biodiversity and species lost to environmental damage”.
So 10% of Australian adults have a mental illness that has three different names and is “currently undiagnosed”? It’s like pre-traumatic stress, she says, which is the trauma you get from events that haven’t happened, right? Just call it paranoid fantasies, OK?
If Alexa is stressed, it’s because she had a terrible education and grew up in a journalistic wasteland. Articles like this in Nine Media exploit vulnerable teenagers to scare money and votes out of nice people and feed that money to institutional banker funds. Speaking of which…
Channel Nine’s major shareholders are institutional banker funds:
What a surprise. As MarketScreener tells us, the major shareholders of Nine Entertainment are largely large index funds which invest in renewable energy and even if they don’t, they all prefer the kinds of governments that waste lots of money, write sloppy massive legislation full of loopholes, support glorious subsidy schemes, and pointless boom and bust cycles.
Major shareholders: Nine Entertainment Co. Holdings Limited
Name
Equities
%
Valuation
Birketu Pty Ltd.
238,260,442
15.02 %
223 M $
Macquarie Bank Ltd. (Private Banking)
145,524,938
9.177 %
136 M $
Perpetual Investment Management Ltd.
139,953,811
8.826 %
131 M $
Australian Retirement Trust Pty Ltd.
79,129,530
4.99 %
74 M $
FIL Investment Management (Singapore) Ltd.
72,527,964
4.574 %
68 M $
Macquarie Investment Management Global Ltd.
14,605,831
0.9211 %
14 M $
Investors Mutual Ltd.
10,325,056
0.6511 %
10 M $
BetaShares Capital Ltd.
9,092,133
0.5734 %
9 M $
State Street Global Advisors Trust Co.
8,939,320
0.5637 %
8 M $
Netwealth Investments Ltd.
8,383,182
0.5287 %
8 M $
Nine Entertainment pushes these cloying stories as a way to keep both sides of the Uniparty in line. They win either way. Even if the Big Green Labor Party doesn’t win, the Opposition candidates know what policies the media giants want, and are, for the most part, cowed into timid submission. Only Trump, who called them the Fake News Media, has used their terrible reporting against them, and outflanked them with social media. The people hate being lied to.
Any real opposition must turn the tables on the crooked media, in the politest possible way, and ask the questions that the fake journalists won’t ask. Say, do your shareholders benefit if you exaggerate climate change?
Mental illness is very serious. Should we treat it with national energy policy?
**Auroras being seen now in places like Adelaide Hills, Blue Mountains, Australind WA, Glenburnie, SA, Canberra, even Adelaide itself?**
Worth poking a head outside if you are near a dark spot. This is 12:20pm EST and may last a couple of hours. Moon is “unfortunate”, but the Glendale App is in a good zone predicting IMF is nice for five hours. People are excited in the SpaceWeatherLive forum. Nullschool suggests people may get lucky, even though auroras are fickle, changeable things.
“Follow the science” they say, right up until they destroy it
In August 2021, as the masses were being coerced and cajoled into vaccinations, the government announced a gigantic long term study with 10,000 Australians that would run for five years. They promised they would include the vaccinated and unvaccinated, and generate 100,000 samples, and 11 million datapoints. No stone would be left unturned to make sure the vaccines were safe and effective. “The Science” was being used to reassure the people.
Less than two years later the data must have looked terrible, because they suddenly stopped the study. They muttered something about archiving the data until more funding was available. (Sure, sure). Now, they want to quietly destroy the data and make sure no one can ever use it, or find out the secrets it hides with an FOI application. The cost of the entire project was $20 million, a pitifully small fraction of the $18 billion we spent on Australia’s Covid 19 treatment experiments, and it’s nothing compared to the human cost of suffering involved. Now, we’re trying to save a few dollars because the National Archives can’t afford to buy another 8 Tb hard drive from Officeworks or spend 0.1% of the Covid budget renting a cool room in a warehouse. Does anyone believe these excuses any more?
Tell the children, “Government ScienceTM” is nothing more than a tool of persuasion and marketing. It’s just a brand-name abused for profit and power.
A cynic might say those who set this study up did it purely for the purpose of “radiating confidence” in vaccines, and they never intended to finish it. But we know that if a miracle happened and the results had turned out well, they’d be running adverts, going on talkshows and sending a star recruit with a QoVax badge on a spaceflight with Katy Perry.
Destroying data is always a travesty. This experiment can never be redone:
Experts and participants have since been calling for the resurrection of the QoVAX project, but in a letter to study participants last month, Metro North Health confirmed that the study will be permanently shuttered, with all samples and data to be destroyed.
“Metro North Health has determined that, for a range of reasons including the many mutations of the COVID-19 virus and similar studies from Australia and worldwide, there is no longer a scientific and public health need to retain these biological samples for future study,” said the letter, sent 19 March 2025.
“Therefore, these samples will be appropriately sterilised and disposed of. All study data collected as part of the QoVAX-SET study will be archived for the specified time-period as required by law however, it will not be accessed or used for any future purpose.”
The excuse that the virus has mutated now and that there are “similar studies” elsewhere doesn’t wash. There is probably no other dataset like this one in the world, because for the first four or five months there was almost no Covid transmission in Queensland to complicate the analysis. If people got “long covid-like symptoms” we’d know it wasn’t from Covid. Elsewhere Pfizer and others “unblinded” the tests, making sure the unvaccinated got vaccinated, so there were no ethical concerns about them missing out. But that didn’t need to happen in Queensland.
Professor Davies called the decision, on which she was not consulted, “incredibly disappointing.”
“It’s a terrible example of research wastage and loss of a globally significant opportunity to realise benefits and generate knowledge through research based on the unique samples provided by the 10,000 Queenslanders who gave consent and participated,” Professor Davies, who heads up the Allergy Research Group at QUT, told Canberra Daily.
Indeed, QoVAX was unique in that it was one of the only real-world studies to have access to a ‘comparison set’ of participants who had been vaccinated, but had not been infected with the Covid virus, which only took off in Queensland after the state borders opened in December 2021.
Who knows what new assays or techniques we might come up with in the next ten years to reanalyze those samples (if they were not destroyed). The answers to questions like: “Who will benefit the most” from vaccines and who is at the greatest risk of side effects are probably hidden in that data. We might realize a certain gene puts some people at more risk of neuropathy, or clots, or allergic reaction after vaccination, but we won’t be able to confirm that if the data is incinerated.
As Rebecca Weiser explained two years ago, this data collection is extraordinary:
The QoVax team didn’t just collect the standard data. Participants provided information on environmental and social determinants of health and biospecimens of blood and saliva that have been used to derive genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic datasets that will shed light on how the novel vaccines impact the immune system.
The secure digitally integrated biobank has 120,000 biospecimens: serum, saliva and peripheral blood mononuclear cells, in three -80 degrees Celsius freezers and three liquid nitrogen dewars. The linked data repository has four million linked data points and more than 500 whole genomes.
In addition, the biobank has access to real-time electronic medical records. With 70 per cent of hospitals in Queensland storing medical records electronically, the study was intended to allow long-term digital surveillance of health outcomes related to Covid-19 vaccinations, and intersections between vaccine responses and Sars-CoV-2 infection.
14,000 Australians died of some mystery we can’t explain in 2022, and the side effects and deaths continue to this day. Likewise, all over the world.
The people who want the data destroyed are always the ones covering something up.
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