Last week, from the CDC:
My comment:
You’re expecting parents of year-old babies who had three shots of Pfizer in the summer of 2022 to take the kids in for additional shots this month? Are you living in an alternate universe of compliance? Please show us a picture of a 1-year-old getting his/her/zir/their 4th shot!
Where are the Super Karens whose existence is assumed by the CDC? The American Academy of Pediatrics tries to keep track of this. Even with more than half of Americans voting for politicians promising lockdowns, school closures, mask orders, and vaccine papers checks, only 11 percent of children 6 months-4 years have been injected:
There is no state in which a majority of young children have received even a single dose of the life-saving vaccine:
The true believers are in D.C. (40%) if we are to believe statistics gathered by a government that can’t run basic services. Vermont’s 33% number looks suspiciously like a guess. The Maskachusetts 25% seems believable, as does the 4% in “walk it off” Florida. California leads in hypocrisy as usual. They want vaccine papers checked and vote for muscular action against SARS-CoV-2, but won’t inject their own kids.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk is taking some heat for saying that mass vaccination might be counterproductive:
Can Musk be right? The best thinker at Stanford Medical School, John Ioannidis, looked at this about 1.5 years ago. “Benefit of COVID-19 vaccination accounting for potential risk compensation” (Nature magazine). Short summary: If the vaccine is less effective than people imagine it is, infections/deaths from COVID will increase as a result of mass vaccination because people change their behavior in response to the false perception of protection. Based on my observations of the righteous, Dr. Ioannidis has been proven correct. Folks who express terror about getting COVID, Medium COVID, or Long COVID are nonetheless out and about on optional trips, e.g., packed airline travel to a theme park.
In case the original tweet is memory-holed:
Even Columbia and Harvard say the new boosters don’t work any better than MRNA-Classic:
https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/bivalent-booster-worth-it
“The booster’s efficacy in people had not been studied before the booster was approved by the FDA, though animal studies have found it generates better protection against widely circulating omicron variants. Statements in the past weeks from vaccine manufacturers maintain that the bivalent booster is better than the original booster at increasing antibodies.But an unpublished study conducted by David Ho, MD, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, suggests that the new bivalent booster generates the same level of antibodies against omicron variants as the original booster. Harvard researchers have reported similar results.”
Regards of his own results, Dr Ho maintains the orthodoxy by saying you should get the Nth booster anyway.
Dr. Ho also plugs Paxlovid so that everyone can be like the CDC director! (Injected 5 or 6 times; infected 7 or 8 times; Paxlovid every week or two?)
Even CNN now says that the bivalent booster is worse (https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/11/health/moderna-bivalent-transparency/index.html):
It found that 1.9% of the study participants who received the original booster became infected. Among those who got the updated bivalent vaccine – the one that scientists hoped would work better – a higher percentage, 3.2%, became infected. Both versions of the shot were found to be safe.
I used to disagree with you about this stuff but you’re right. No idea how the CDC thinks they have credibility left. It’s sad that they squandered it.
My thinking has evolved too! I myself dressed up like an Ebola doctor in March 2020 for a trip to Costco. It took me until the end of that month to realize that the Swedish MD/PhDs probably had it right, but it was almost impossible not to be swept up in the initial hysteria, especially in the Boston area. And I succumbed later in 2020 to vaccine enthusiasm, not initially questioning the plausibility of humans having become smarter than viruses. I think it was December 2020 before I began asking the obvious vaccine questions, e.g., https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/12/27/if-covid-19-vaccines-werent-tested-on-likely-covid-19-victims-how-do-we-know-that-they-will-reduce-covid-19-deaths/ (Living in Maskachusetts at the time, the natural prejudice is to imagine that pharma can triumph.)
I still remember wearing a mask outdoors all the time and people being shamed for going to the beach without a mask.
By the way the study you link in that post just finished it’s 25 month run in December. Looks like no results yet but would be interesting to see what they show on Moderna preventing infections long term.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427
Another interesting angle is obsession with Covid and Covid vaccines specifically: there are other viruses that raged through population this winter.
My family is reasonably fit and is full of vitamins.
I got something on the business trip, got over it with some cough, tested negative for covid, still felt weakness for weeks. Then right before vacation to the holy land of Florida we all got flu (positive flu test/negative covid test), we got over it really easily, but still wasn’t nice at all.
Bunch of friends/coworkers had non-covid infections in November/December too, some out for weeks, and still we are mostly concerned about covid.
> infections/deaths from COVID will increase …
> because people change their behavior
There are two reasons for doubting this. One is the fear among the devout Coronafaithful and their strict observance of mask and needle rituals. It can be observed at any time here. They get vaccinated (repeatedly), they mask up, they get covid (repeatedly).
The other reason is the evidence that the mRNA vaccines actually reduce immunity to covid and possibly other diseases.