Category: Coronapanic

The news is packed with stories about the Canadian truck drivers protesting against a vaccine order (Wikipedia). Premier Blackface (Justin Trudeau) says that, while Canadians have some right to free speech, to assemble, and to protest against the government, the truck drivers are engaging in “hate speech” and therefore these rights do not apply.

Since the Canadian government has all of the guns, I’m assuming that #Science will prevail and the drivers will eventually be forced to accept vaccination or to leave the workforce (not as attractive a proposition as in the U.S. because the Canadian welfare system is far less generous and lifetime “means-tested” everything is tougher to obtain; Canadian family courts are a great option, however, for those who want spending power without engaging in wage labor (but the typical truck driver might not be a successful plaintiff)).

My question for today is why #Science requires that truck drivers be vaccinated. If they’re sitting or sleeping in their trucks 95 percent of the time, do they have enough contact with other humans to make their vaccination status of interest to anyone else? (let’s assume for the sake of this argument that COVID-19 vaccines substantially reduce infection risk from Omicron and whatever additional variants develop)

How many close contacts can a truck driver have if he/she/ze/they is working? (and, given the shortage of trucking that we’ve heard about, aren’t most truck drivers working at least full time?) Walking into a truck stop to use the restroom isn’t comparable to working all day in an office, store, or school with fellow employees and customers.

Why does Science require that the handful of heretics be dragged out of their cabs and stuck with a needle?

Related:

• countries ranked by vaccination rate (Canada is near the top)
• plague in Canada (the same Omicron spike as everywhere else, with deaths at the same rate as during two previous peaks)
• my 1993 trip to Ottawa (includes the below photo of the National Gallery of Canada, which “temporarily closed its doors to the public” for truckmageddon after being closed for more than a year for coronapanic)

“Boosted Americans 97 times less likely to die of virus than unvaccinated” (USA Today, 2/2/2022):

As the U.S. inches up to a 64% vaccination rate for the entire population, only 42% of those eligible for a booster have gotten the extra shot, and experts aren’t sure what will move the needle, so to speak.

Fully vaccinated Americans are 14 times less likely to die of COVID-19 than those who haven’t gotten the shots. Boosted Americans are 97 times less likely.

Those were the figures presented Wednesday by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on reports from 25 jurisdictions in the week ending Dec. 4. For every 100,000 people, 9.7 of those who were unvaccinated were killed by the coronavirus, compared to 0.7 of those fully vaccinated and 0.1 of the boosted.

Science (the CDC) tells us that the COVID-19 vaccination, in a full three-dose series, is the most effective pharmaceutical intervention ever developed. Although of course we believe Science and trust in the CDC, some questions are raised by this astonishing 97X risk reduction. At least over in Sweden, pre-vaccine SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t dangerous enough to justify terminating citizens’ right to gather, children’s right to attend school, etc. Nor was it dangerous enough to justify ordering people wear masks. We’re told that we a 97X reduction in risk is available and yet American schoolchildren, down to age 2, are ordered to wear masks and subject to various other restrictions. Vaccine papers are checked at restaurants (e.g., for those 5+ in Boston) to make sure that the unclean don’t mingle with the sacred. A range of restrictions are applied to discourage travel. But if the sacred have cut their risk by 97X, why are they worried about the 5% filthy untouchables (unvaccinated)? Is our tolerance for risk 97X lower than what prevails among Swedes? That is contradicted by the fact that Americans refuse to accept my proposed 35 mph speed limit, which would save more life-years than curing COVID-19.

We don’t order all road travel to cease because some people insist on riding statistically dangerous motorcycles. Why do we have COVID-19 orders in place when a 97X reduction in risk is as close as the nearest CVS? The people making the orders are Democrats and we are constantly informed that it is only Republicans who refuse to accept all three Sacraments of Fauci. Why do Democrats care if SARS-CoV-2 winnows out some of the Deplorables who could potentially vote a fossilized Donald Trump into a renewed dictatorship?

Another possibility is that the 97X risk reduction, while proven by Science, isn’t real. Here’s some data from Israel, famous for early adoption of vaccines and boosters:

Deaths tagged to COVID-19 are at an all-time high. This, despite the fact that those who aren’t boosted are excluded from public life. “Israel’s bet on early COVID booster shots pays off” (DW, 11/11/2021):

To enter the club, people must present their green pass, which includes an ID number and a QR code. “When somebody wants to go either to the pool or the gym, we check the green pass. Everybody has it on the phone these days. Sometimes it’s a little bit of an inconvenience, but people understand and cooperate,” said Levi.

In October, Israeli authorities canceled the green passes of those eligible for the third shot but who hadn’t received it yet. Those who don’t have a green pass can get a 24-hour pass by taking an antigen or “fast” test to enter facilities.

I’m wondering if the spectacular cited effectiveness of booster shots among Americans is partly due to the demographics of those who choose to get boosters. In Why rich white Americans believe in masks (October 22, 2020), an MIT professor:

It’s the usual causality problem with epidemiology. Upper middle class Northeasterners (like me) are adamant about mask wearing, and they rarely get sick. So it must be working.

(He added that a mistaken belief in mask efficacy would still be a positive because it would help assure a Biden/Harris victory. He bought his house, his cars, and his common stocks pre-2020, so the first year of the Biden Administration has been fine for him, financially.)

What would the “usual causality problem with epidemiology” look like in the booster world? What if the people who have the time, patience, and inclination to get boosters are rich white people who have the luxury of staying in their suburban bunkers 98 percent of the time? They weren’t likely to get COVID-19 in the first place and they’re not getting COVID-19 during their twice/week N95-masked excursions to the supermarket.

Note that this is not to suggest that the booster shot has no effect (see Maybe it is time for that booster shot? for why you might want to get one even if you think it has no effect!). But a post-boost 1/97th risk level seems tough to achieve by pharmaceutical means alone and without some help from Dr. Differential Demographics.

Related:

• “Unvaccinated vs. Boostered: What the COVID Death Toll From Israel Reveals” (Haaretz, 2/6/2022; remember in reading this that “partially vaccinated” in Israel means just the first two shots while “fully vaccinated” is three): “According to ministry figures, on January 31 the death rate per 100,000 people for the over 60s stood at 16.3 for unvaccinated individuals, as opposed to 0.9 for the fully vaccinated.” (1/18th the risk for boosted versus unvaccinated, not 1/97th!) Buried near the end, the demographic angle: “there is also a clear variation in death rates between groups with lower and higher socioeconomic status.”
• Why doesn’t the raging plague in Maskachusetts cause doubt among the true believers in Faucism? (1/3/2022; the Google shows that deaths in MA right now are at roughly the same level as the January 2021 “second wave” peak)

From state-sponsored media, “Africa may have reached the pandemic’s holy grail”:

So to fill in the true picture, Jambo and his collaborators turned to another potential source of information: a repository of blood samples that had been collected from Malawians month after month by the national blood bank. And they checked how many of those samples had antibodies for the coronavirus. Their finding: By the start of Malawi’s third COVID-19 wave with the delta variant last summer, as much as 80% of the population had already been infected with some strain of the coronavirus.

Similar studies have been done in other African countries, including Kenya, Madagascar and South Africa, adds Jambo. “And practically in every place they’ve done this, the results are exactly the same” — very high prevalence of infection detected well before the arrival of the omicron variant.

(note that the NPR article is free of the hate speech term “herd immunity”)

By summer of 2021, in other words, 80 percent of Malawians had been infected by SARS-CoV-2. Is that because they were Church of Sweden “experimenters” who failed to close schools, wear masks, and lock down citizens? No. Children lost a year of education. Residents were subject to lockdowns (example). People were ordered to wear masks (VOA).

The central tenet of the Church of Sweden is that, at least for a non-island non-Chinese country, lockdowns, mask orders, school closures, and other government actions have a minimal effect on a respiratory virus.

Is it fair to say that Malawi and other African nations that flexed their public health technocratic muscles have proved Anders Tegnell and colleagues correct?

Some Malawians who escaped the lockdowns… (source)

Related:

• “Child marriages skyrocket in Malawi as Covid-19 closes schools, figures show” (care)