Category: Coronapanic

I was in the Tysons Corner, Virginia shopping mall last week. Masks are no longer required in Virginia. Governor Blackface (he’s sorry about his past racism, but not sorry enough to resign and let a Black person take the governor job?) rescinded his mask order in May (see “Virginia drops mask mandates, but not everyone is quick to give them up” )(NBC)).

Some folks wandering the mall were, nonetheless, wearing masks. This didn’t surprise me, but I was surprised by the fact that quite a few of those who were masked were wearing their masks under their noses. If you’re part of the Talented Tenth who believe in masks forever, wouldn’t you also be careful to wear a mask correctly? (i.e., make sure all of the aerosol virus goes out the sides!)

The photo below, taken July 13, 2021, shows the chin diaper and under-nose styles in front of a store owned by my favorite American growth company (#StocksForTheLongRun!).

Over in the U.K., 40 percent want masks forever… (I wonder how many support under-nose masks forever…)

Meanwhile, Facebook tells me (July 15) that even the smallest person can be a pandemic-ending hero by adding a frame to his/her/zir/their profile picture:

Despite this energetic effort, the propaganda ministers in Washington, D.C. are not satisfied. NYT:

President Biden’s surgeon general on Thursday used his first formal advisory to the United States to deliver a broadside against tech and social media companies, which he accused of not doing enough to stop the spread of dangerous health misinformation — especially about Covid-19.

The official, Dr. Vivek Murthy, declared health misinformation “an urgent threat to public health.”

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube said that they had taken steps to crack down on misleading health information, in line with their coronavirus misinformation policies. All three said they had introduced features to point people to authoritative health sources on their platforms.

YouTube said in a statement that it welcomed many takeaways of the surgeon general’s report. Twitter said it agreed with the surgeon general’s society-wide approach and welcomed his partnership. A person with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity said officials with the company met with the surgeon general’s office on Monday.

Related:

• A masked family walks into a crowded unmasked restaurant (if they were that concerned, why not eat at home or in the car?)

Americans who were at least moderately rich, e.g., incomes above $100,000 per year, prospered financially through a year of lockdown. They got paid the same or more. They didn’t have to spend money or time commuting. Their stock market and real estate holdings zoomed (so to speak) up. Since they couldn’t buy restaurant meals or travel, their earnings piled up. (See “During Covid-19, Most Americans Got Richer—Especially the Rich” (WSJ): “U.S. households gained $13.5 trillion in wealth in 2020. … More than 70% of the increase in household wealth went to the top 20% of income earners. About a third went to the top 1%.”)

Where have we previously seen someone who stays in one place for a year or more while surrounded by valuable items? Beowulf! At the end of the poem (more than 1,000 years old), our hero confronts a dragon whose lived experience for 300 years has been #StayHomeSaveLives while his/her/zir/their golden treasure appreciates. Mx. Dragon is almost as stuffed with cash as a Seattle divorce plaintiff, but never spends any of it.

Related:

• “Dragonomics: Smaug and Climate Change” (Richard Fahey, a grad student in English at University of Notre Dame): “I would suggest that Smaug may be productively read as a representation of climate change, in the sense that the dragon is a force of smoke and heat which destroys ecosystems and disrupts the environment in much deeper and more long-lasting ways. … At the center of our modern struggles with dragonomics, I would argue, the problem of avarice endures. It is greed, especially from the fossil fuel lobby and the major energy companies (many linked to nations themselves), which have stalled and prevented developments in renewable energies in order to reduce our carbon footprint. … Dragonomics is not simply about making money, it is about plundering it and more importantly hoarding it.”
• source of image above

George’s comment on Coronavirus kills the vaccinated in the UK, but not in the U.S., which quotes Mx. Fauci saying “If you look at the number of deaths, about 99.2 percent of them are unvaccinated.”:

Got to love the 99.2% number, specially the .2 added to 99.

By highlighting the absurd precision, I wonder if George has explained the root cause of the discrepancy between U.S. data and U.K. data, in which roughly half of the people dying from COVID-19 were previously blessed with the sacrament of two vaccine shots.

The U.K. is competent at keeping medical records. The U.S. is not. The U.K. has a central database to go with its National Health Service. With the exception of the VA hospitals, the U.S. has hundreds of $billions wasted on mutually incompatible databases, each one a silo for an individual hospital or hospital group.

Why couldn’t Saint Fauci find more than 0.8% vaccinated among the deceased? The better question is how he/she/ze/they was able to find even one vaccinated person given that there is no central database of the vaccinated, that to ask the “Are you vaccinated?” question violates HIPAA, and that hospitals have no incentive (and maybe no mechanism) to report the death of a vaccinated person.

Readers: What do you think? Unless an American dies with his/her/zir/their vaccine card stapled to his/her/zir/their forehead, how is anyone supposed to know whether he/she/ze/they was vaccinated?

Related:

• “EHR Use, High Administrative Burden Driving Healthcare Spending” (August 2018): “Since 2011, the federal government has spent $38 billion requiring doctors and hospitals to install electronic health records systems through the Meaningful Use program in Medicare and Medicaid,” noted Alexander. … Persistent problems with health data exchange and interoperability further diminish the value of EHR technology. Health data exchange and interoperability solutions are available to streamline health data exchange and eliminate the need for paper health records, but this additional technology costs money.
• Sweden may be recording COVID-19 deaths differently than other countries (the Swedes have one big database and use it to tag COVID-19 deaths within 30 days of a positive test; Norway relies on subjective evaluation by a physician and the physician taking the initiative to report)

“We’ve Come So Far With Vaccines, America. Now Keep Going.” (New York Times, July 3):

Seven months after the first shots were authorized for emergency use, 66 percent of adults — more than 100 million people — have received at least one dose. That’s not the 70 percent President Biden was aiming to reach by July 4, but it’s close, and it’s an impressive figure.

It is comforting to be reminded that Joe Biden was the president primarily responsible for the rapid development and purchasing of these vaccines. Uncle Joe takes care of us all!

But it’s too soon to declare total victory. The world is still locked in a desperate race between the coronavirus’s ability to evolve and society’s ability to vaccinate, and America’s lead in that race is precarious. The virus is evolving quickly and efficiently. Given enough time and enough susceptible hosts, it could still mutate its way around the human immune response and beyond the ability of existing vaccines to help. If that happens, the United States, and any other nations that have made such progress, will be forced backward.

If the vaccine evolves quickly and efficiently, what is the point of a vaccination project? If everyone in the U.S. were vaccinated tomorrow against all of the version of SARS-CoV-2 that exist in the U.S., wouldn’t a new variant arrive through the fully open southern border on Monday? From “Biden administration reverses Trump-era asylum policies” (Politico):

The Biden administration is reversing a series of Trump-era immigration rulings that narrowed asylum standards by denying protection to victims of domestic violence and those who said they were threatened by gangs in their home country.

In other words, anyone who can utter the words “my spouse hit me” or “a gang wants to kill me” is entitled to live in the U.S. for at least several years until a judge evaluates the truth of the statement (absent psychic powers, how is a judge supposed to figure this out?). Several years is certainly long enough to spread mutated SARS-CoV-2.

(The border is perhaps not “fully open” given that Kamala Harris tells migrants not to come to our party with some strong words.)

We don’t believe that if we gave 100 percent of humanity a flu shot we would eliminate influenza, right? Why do we believe that we can beat a “virus [that] is evolving quickly and efficiently” with our fairly sluggish vaccine system?

The scientists at Facebook told me, on April 30, that we can “end the pandemic” by adding a vaccine profile frame (Facebook previously granted FDA approval to vaccines):

What about Facebook today?

I would so love to meet the folks who believe the things that Facebook says aren’t true! Separately, one thing that is interesting about Facebook’s scientific information campaign is that it isn’t signed. Plainly Facebook has a deep bench of medical expertise, but who are the physicians and public health PhDs who authored the material that Facebook puts out? A typical newspaper article is signed by a journalist or two and approved by an editor whose name can be looked up. Quotes and opinions in the article will generally be attributed to a person whose professional background can be researched.

Circling back to the original topic… How is it possible to simultaneously believe that the virus is evolving rapidly and efficiently AND that vaccinations against a particular genotype (or set of genotypes) will prevent the virus from thriving?

Related:

• Nextstrain’s animated evolution
• Coronavirus kills the vaccinated in the UK, but not in the U.S.
• “CDC says roughly 4,100 people have been hospitalized or died with Covid breakthrough infections after vaccination” (CNBC, June 25)
• “The Domestic Violence Parallel Track” (a favorable de facto divorce, in which the plaintiff obtains house, kids, and cash flow, can be obtained in one day via a domestic violence claim)
• Au pair to green card (domestic violence allegations are the key to a fast track green card)

I had breakfast at Red’s Kitchen and Tavern in Peabody, Massachusetts today. Occupancy was at least 80 percent. None of the customers were masked (partly due to the fact that they were eating!). None of the cooks or servers were masked. The hostess was not masked. In walks a family of four, the parents perhaps 40 years old. Both parents and their middle school-aged children were wearing cloth/paper masks of the kind that #Science says provide almost no protection to the wearer (but, as demonstrated in Peru and the Czech Republic, when ordered for the general public and enforced by the police and military, can protect a whole population!). They kept their masks on until their food was served.

Our governor’s 69 emergency orders are no longer in effect so they didn’t have to wear masks by law/regulation/dictate. This is the North Shore, not Cambridge or Boston, so there was no apparent social pressure to wear a mask. There was no immediate social pressure to wear a mask from anyone else in the restaurant. Why would they wear a mask? #AbundanceOfCaution is the seemingly obvious answer. Except if that were the explanation, they would have simply stayed home and prepared groceries previously delivered by an army of Latinx essential workers. Why go into a crowded restaurant and rely on 3-cent paper surgical masks as PPE? Or, if slightly less cautious, wouldn’t they have gone to a drive-through and eaten in the COVID-19-free environment of their automobile? Or, if God had told them that they had to eat in that very restaurant that very morning, they could have worn N95 masks that would have had some chance of filtering out incoming Delta variant.

I don’t begrudge them their moderate level of coronapanic. One of the great things about Florida is that each resident is free to choose his/her/zir/their own level of coronapanic. I’m just wondering what moderately coronapanicked people are doing in a crowded restaurant in which nobody else is masked!

On a mostly unrelated note… here’s a $5 item from the Whole Paycheck in Bedford, MA:

I’m wondering why this is effective marketing. For the righteous who wish to purchase based on victimhood status, wouldn’t it work just as well to put a photo of the owners, maybe with traditionally female names attached and dressed as what we used to call “women”? The “Women Owned” legend risks, I would think, discouraging haters from buying. The Neanderthals who refuse to sort vendors by victimhood category may yet be happy to buy from “Judy and Kate” (just as they were happy to buy from Home Depot when Marvin Ellison was a top executive there and they’re happy to buy from Lowe’s now that Mr. Ellison is CEO, but they might not want to buy from Lowe’s if it put a big “Black-Managed” sign on the front).

[Disclaimer: I went into the Whole Paycheck to return an Amazon purchase (the Army of the Essential picked the wrong item off the shelf), not because I would ordinarily be pretentious enough to shop there. I did buy a watermelon on the way out, which turned out to be terrible. A replacement watermelon from Shaw’s (a regular supermarket for regular people) was vastly superior.]

U.S., July 5:

Anthony Fauci on Sunday said more than 99 percent of the people who died from COVID-19 in June were not vaccinated, calling the loss of life “avoidable and preventable.”

“If you look at the number of deaths, about 99.2 percent of them are unvaccinated. About 0.8 percent are vaccinated. No vaccine is perfect. But when you talk about the avoidability of hospitalization and death, Chuck, it’s really sad and tragic that most all of these are avoidable and preventable,” Fauci told host Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

(Mx. Fauci does not merit the “Dr.” title to join Dr. Jill Biden?)

Situation across the pond, July 2 (WSJ):

Data from Public Health England show that there were 117 deaths among 92,000 Delta cases logged through June 21. Fifty of those—46%—had received two shots of vaccine.

So… 46 percent of the deaths from the Delta variant (soon to be the only form of coronavirus that anyone has, at least until the “Delta Delta Delta” variant is available) are among the fully vaccinated in the U.K. The corresponding number in the U.S.? Around 1 percent.

You might say “Of course this makes sense. The U.K. has a higher vaccination rate than the U.S. If 100 percent of people in the U.K. were vaccinated, 100 percent of COVID-19 deaths would be among the vaccinated.” Yet the vaccination rates are not that different….

(Since we just celebrated July 4th, consider that if we hadn’t traitorously rebelled, we would still be part of the U.K. and would therefore be enjoying a far superior COVID-19 prevention strategy (more lockdowns (exceptions for the elite), more vaccines!). We would also have been spared four years of Donald Trump’s maladministration, racism, anti-LGBTQIA+ policies, etc.)

How do we explain the fact that the vaccines work so much better at preventing death in the U.S. compared to in the U.K.? These are more or less the same vaccines that are authorized for emergency use (not “approved”) here. The U.K. has our three plus Oxford/AstraZeneca (NHS).

Averros’s comment on The English decide to stay in their foxholes (COVID surge despite vaccination):

The main lesson of this quasi-pandemic is that public experts are, by and large, idiots and/or charlatans.

Any actual scientist given the facts as following: quickly mutating kind of viruses, vaccine tech producing very specific immune response and incapable of conferring sterilizing immunity, widespread community transmission will immediately figure out that mass immunization creates strong selective pressure on the virus thus rapidly creating new strains which not only avoid vaccines but also re-infect people who did get the cooties before.

With these givens the correct strategy is to vaccinate only those at risk of severe illness so as to protect them while minimizing generation of new strains.

But, no, the over-educated idiots and vaccine salesmen never think about anything further than immediate results of their actions. It’s like antibiotic overuse take 2 – only faster moving. The EYIs [Educated Yet Idiots] learned nothing from the previous bouts of medically-induced pathogen evolution.

My personal view for most of the past year has been that the best analogy to the typical Church of Shutdown state’s War on COVID-19 is the American side of the Vietnam War. Our best and brightest (e.g., Dr. Fauci, state governors flanked by their public health officials) present charts and statistics showing that, in any given month, the war against coronavirus is being won. The population is assured that just a little more sacrifice will yield massive dividends. Sometimes the Priests of Shutdown will draw on mathematical models from Whiz Kids. Month after month of winning battles leads to… a lost war (e.g., Maskachusetts having 3X the death rate of Florida, adjusted for population over 65, but the population still has faith in Robert S. McNamara (Governor Charlie Baker)).

But I wonder if averros has a better analogy. Circa 1950, the typical layperson thought that we were done with bacterial infection, despite the fact that #Science had already seen evolved resistance in action. See “Penicillin’s Discovery and Antibiotic Resistance: Lessons for the Future?” (Yale J. Biol Med):

2016 marks the 75th anniversary of the first systemic administration of penicillin in humans, and is therefore an occasion to reflect upon the extraordinary impact that penicillin has had on the lives of millions of people since. This perspective presents a historical account of the discovery of the wonder drug, describes the biological nature of penicillin, and considers lessons that can be learned from the golden era of antibiotic research, which took place between the 1940s and 1960s.

More than 150 antibiotics have been found since the discovery of penicillin, and for the majority of antibiotics available, resistance has emerged. Moreover, the recent rise of multi/pan-drug resistant strains has correlated with enhanced morbidity and mortality. Overall, ineffectiveness of the antibiotic treatments to “superbug” infections has resulted in persistence and spread of multi-resistant species [42] across the globe. This represents a serious worldwide threat to public health [41].

In early 1945, Fleming predicted that the high public demand of antibiotics would determine an “era of abuse”; this eventually became a reality [43-45]. No sooner had the miraculous effects of penicillin become apparent to the general public, then the antibiotic started to be overused. This triggered selective pressure for the emergence of penicillin-resistant strains, which over a few years spread across different countries. The discovery of each new generation of antibiotic quickly followed the same trend.

(How long it will be before American K-12ers are taught to celebrate the pioneering efforts of BIPOC American women in developing penicillin and the 1945 Nobel Prize won by Alexa Fleming, Ernestine Chain, and Heather Walter Florey?)

From the Journal of Popular Studies:

Related:

• People who don’t believe in evolution are idiots, but the coronavirus cannot evolve (January 3)
• Folks who vote for a larger Welfare State should also discourage the teaching of evolution?
• Stellar evolution in the #MeToo era
• “As the Delta variant of the coronavirus surges through the U.K., almost half of the country’s recent Covid-19 deaths are of people who have been vaccinated.” (WSJ)

One of the great things about medicine is that convincing conclusions are seldom reached. COVID-19, on the other hand, has been of such tremendous interest to humans worldwide that it doesn’t seem unreasonable to hope for answers.

We were told that vitamin D might protect us against coronavirus, e.g., in “Study suggests high vitamin D levels may protect against COVID-19, especially for Black people” (University of Chicago, March 19, 2021). But has the correlation/causation situation been worked out? People who are healthier and more robust will tend to spend more time outdoors and therefore have higher vitamin D levels. These same people will be harder for coronavirus to kill, but maybe it is because they are strong and healthy, which is why they were outdoors instead of inside watching TV, not because they happen to have high vitamin D levels.

Similarly, the debate over hydroxychloroquine does not seem to be settled. “Observational Study on 255 Mechanically Ventilated Covid Patients at the Beginning of the USA Pandemic” (medRxiv from Saint Barnabas Medical Center in New Jersey) was published on May 31, 2021 describing what happened to patients who were admitted prior to May 1, 2020 (i.e., it took more than a year to crunch the numbers). The paper certainly proves that ventilators are not very helpful. 78.8 percent of the ventilated patients died. Only 3.5 percent were “discharged to home without any cognitive or motor deficits and off oxygen therapy” (i.e., “walked out of the hospital”):

We found that when the cumulative doses of two drugs, HCQ and AZM, were above a certain level, patients had a survival rate 2.9 times the other patients. By using causal analysis and considering of weight-adjusted cumulative dose, we prove the combined therapy, 3 g HCQ and 1g AZM greatly increases survival in Covid patients on IMV and that HCQ cumulative dose 80 mg/kg works substantially better.

With so many people around the world supposedly afflicted with COVID-19 and so many $trillions of dollars being thrown at this medical problem, how is it possible that we don’t have the seemingly simplest questions answered?