Category: Coronaplague

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?

“Why Young Adults Are Among the Biggest Barriers to Mass Immunity” (New York Times, today) shows that, despite scientific leadership in the White House, America is not safe from science deniers. From the folks who say that they’re the smartest people in the U.S.:

Many young adults are foregoing Covid vaccines for a complex mix of reasons. Health officials are racing to find ways to change their minds.

But the straightforward sales pitch for older people — a vaccine could very possibly save your life — does not always work on healthy 20-somethings who know they are less likely to face the severest outcomes of Covid.

Many young adults are relatively healthy, and they often have work, school and young children to worry about. Getting vaccinated does not always register as a top priority, experts and young adults said.

My comment:

“healthy 20-somethings who know they are less likely to face the severest outcomes of Covid”

“Less likely”?

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html

shows that the risk of death to an 18-29-year-old is 1/610th the risk faced by an elderly American (85+)

A slender 20-year-old is more likely to be killed in a car accident driving to/from the vaccine clinic than he/she/ze/they would be likely to be killed by COVID-19 if he/she/ze/they did not get vaccinated. If we’re confused regarding why such a person does not want to spend the time and effort to get vaccinated maybe we should question our own intelligence, not the intelligence of the young person.

I guess what is most interesting about this is that the technocrats who are now in charge of the economy and society couldn’t have figured this out 6-12 months ago and come up with a plan, e.g., to pay healthy young people for undergoing a procedure that has no benefit to them. It was already apparent then that COVID-19 was a killer of the elderly (median age of a COVID-19-tagged death here in Maskachusetts: 82). And it was certainly known as of December 2020 that the vaccines wouldn’t be FDA-approved, but only authorized for emergency use. It was entirely predictable that the side effects of the vaccines, e.g., a few days of flu-like symptoms and worse, would be rationally perceived as outweighing the benefits to slender healthy young people.

From Jun 25, St. Petersburg, Florida, part of a crowd of 10,000+ packing into the bars and clubs of Central Avenue just after 11:00 pm:

(I got out my handy bullhorn and told the young people to cease their covidiocy and disperse. I tried to get a chant going where I would say “Stay Home” and they would respond by shouting “Save Lives”, but was unsuccessful.)

We spent $trillions purportedly fighting COVID-19. We said that testing was critical to this fight. There is empty retail space all over the U.S. (thanks partly to closures ordered by governors!). Why didn’t we ever get COVID testing that was actually convenient, fast, and simple?

Plainly it can be done. Here’s a storefront COVID-19 testing center near Times Square (June 12 photo):

Why weren’t there storefronts like this all over the U.S., starting around April 2020, the fees paid via the government money printing press?

Related:

• Why aren’t vaccines available at highway rest stops? (still true here in Maskachusetts; infinite budget for highway signs urging people to go to a web site and begin scheduling a vaccination, but no budget for a roadside stop-in vaccine clinic)

Our anonymous hero behind Medical School 2020 is working in a hospital now. Part of his residency training has included shifts in the intensive care unit. There he has gained some insight into why American ICUs became clogged during COVID-19 peaks.

“Hospitals wouldn’t let relatives come in to see the patients,” he said. “A patient with no long-term chance of survival can’t be unplugged with relatives approving ‘goals of care.’ But people are reluctant to approve unplugging a loved one if they aren’t able to see the patient and understand the patient’s situation.” In other words, without relatives coming into the ICU, the docs and nurses had no “goals of care” and therefore kept patients on ventilators for weeks after they would ordinarily have been unplugged.