Dirk comments

Hayashi and Stoltenberg agreed it is important for like-minded nations to continue imposing economic sanctions on Moscow while supporting Ukraine, according to the ministry

That's why Japan now as the only G7 country started to buy Russian oil over the imposed oil price cap...

Everyday I still see people not double masking, and not social distancing in morning rush hour train. Does no one care?

I went from double masking to single masking a few weeks ago, but with these numbers it's back to double.

An academic report has shown that around 60 percent of children who developed moderate or severe symptoms due to infections since July were under the age of 5, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.

Translate: in the population of around 20.000.000 people under 18, there were found 5 with moderate symptoms, of which 3 were under the age of 5.

Finally, influenza is returning. How can I distinguish what I have without using a test?

Rumor goes that with the 4th one you're 120% protected against risks.

Looking forward to the booster and later omicron update shots, followed by the rest of the Greek alphabet.

I suggest they change variant naming to Kanji, so they don't run out of characters so soon.

Last year this time, goto travel campaign, no jab.

Now, SOE in most prefectures, half the population jabbed.

Works great!

52 critically ill in Tokyo currently, and there are only 650 hospitals. This is going to be a disaster!

The numbers are going down for no reason.

They go down, because the peak of respiratory diseases is usually around end week 4/5

Forgot children, and long term safety

The vaccine has been properly tested and tried, it is not rushed.

Can you show me the study that shows safety for:

Elderly people

Pregnant women

People with Auto-immune deficiencies

People that have been previously infected with Sars-cov-2

Nobody has ever implied that, the real argument is that vaccination is a much safer and effective way to achieve herd immunity than letting people die unnecessarily even if we had access to a safe and effective health intervention.

Is there any safe vaccin available then?

I opt for politicians and people working in/for pharmaceutical companies. Only they can save us.

I opt to give it to all the politicians that so kindly spend billions of public dollars to acquire them.

What a nonsense question; viruses aren't alive to start with, let alone can they be dormant.

health care system already creaking under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic.

Yesterday in Tokyo 37 hospitalisations related to Covid, which has approximately 650 hospitals.

That's a huge strain if on average every hospital has 1 patient in 2 weeks....

There are WHO guidelines how to determine corona deaths. For example if you have a car accident and you die within 2 days and you test positive for the virus you don't count, but if you die after 3 days or later you do count.

A vaccine for next year requires absolutely no rushing, it can be tested for efficacy and safety the same as every other vaccine already available.

Especially long term effects will be well-known...

Which is your choice, but if one one hand you have something that has been carefully tested for safety, and in the other a disease that sometimes ends up very badly, that is related with yet another health problem almost every week, and that can be easily transmitted to other people close to you that may be even more vulnerable, it should be quite clear on which side is more likely for bad things to happen.

So you rather expose an enormous healthy population, of which 98% doesn't develop symptoms or only lightly, to something that has been developed and "carefully tested for safety" for less than a year, than to just protect the vulnerable people themselves.

As a fun exercise look up Narcolepsy and Pandemrix, the "safe" vaccine that was used in Europe for the Mexican flu.