Category: Coronaplague

Today is the three-year anniversary of the Boston public schools closing. From boston.gov:

Mayor Martin J. Walsh and Boston Public Schools Superintendent Brenda Cassellius today announced the district-wide closure of all Boston Public Schools for students, effective on Tuesday, March 17. At this time, schools are expected to reopen on Monday, April 27, following April vacation.

(The schools fully reopened, with a forced masking and vaccine coercion, about 1.5 years later.)

What were the smart people thinking on the same day? From John Ioannidis, Stanford Medical School, and author of “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”… “A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data”:

A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.

How was that guestimate of 0.05%? Roughly 7 million people have died from COVID-19 (WHO) out of a total human infestation of formerly lovely Planet Earth of 8 billion. If we assume that everyone has been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 by now, that’s a population-wide fatality rate of 0.0875%. How did Professor Ioannidis do in predicting the mostly peaceful protests of summer 2020, the inflation of 2021-2023, increased alcoholism and opioid addiction, and the good citizens of Martha’s Vineyard turning their backs on hapless migrants?

One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health. Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric.

What were the stupid people thinking on March 17, 2020? Let’s check this blog for three same-day stories:

• Will the human race be more susceptible to obsessive compulsive disorder going forward? (if hand-washing and mask-wearing worked to stave off coronadeath, we would breed a subspecies of OCD humans)
• Coronavirus is a national emergency, but let’s not do anything drastic “on Friday, March 13, the Boston Public Schools decided to close for six weeks… but not start the closure until the following Tuesday (today, March 17). If the problem is serious enough to require a six-week closure, why open the schools on a single Monday after everyone has had a chance to pick up the virus somewhere over the weekend (if anyone needed to come the school to retrieve an item, that could have been done over a period of days, without gathering everyone together in close quarters for 6+ hours).”
• More from the British on coronavirus “The only thing that would potentially save us from these shutdowns is a vaccine, say the authors. But other sources are saying that a vaccine probably won’t work, right? The virus evolves so fast that last month’s vaccine won’t help with next month’s infection.”

Related:

• The Honest Man of American Medical Research weighs in on coronaplague (my March 23, 2020 post about Ioannidis)

[Oh yes, Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! It is ironic that Irish-influenced Boston shut down schools on the day honoring someone who was famous for teaching.]

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Continuing to explore a topic raised in February (Did vaccines or any other intervention slow down COVID?)…

Cochrane has shown that the correlation between forced masking and coronaplague is minimal (i.e., general public masking does not reduce the spread of a respiratory virus, just as Science, including the WHO, said for 100 years prior to June 2020). We’ve had a good natural experiment on COVID-19 vaccines in that countries vary dramatically in their vaccination rate. Where is the study that shows, from these data, that population-wide COVID-19 vaccination, as aggressively promoted by the CDC (down to age 6 months!), reduces COVID-tagged death rate?

The New York Times offers a map and table of countries and their “fully vaccinated” rate. We can see that Chile is 93% fully vaccinated and Spain is virtuously at 87%. Compare to just 34% in Ukraine and 30% in Nigeria.

The correct approach to an analysis would almost certainly include adjusting by share of population over whatever we can agree is the COVID-vulnerable age (CDC says 6 months; European public health officials say 50 (age of vaccine eligibility); previous attempts have used 65; median age of a COVID death is about 80). But what if we do a rough cut by looking at the raw (not age-adjusted) COVID-tagged death rates?

Country	Vaccination Rate	Covid-tagged deaths/million
Chile	93%	3,080
Spain	87%	2,301
Switzerland	70%	1,603
Turkey	64%	1,175
Ukraine	34%	2,565
Nigeria	30%	15(!)

Is it obvious from the above that #VaccinesSave?

(We could also look at excess deaths by country during three years of coronapanic. Vaccinated Chile is at 18%; Spain at 11%; packed-with-filthy-unvaccinated-disgusting-people Switzerland at 8% (no data for Turkey, Ukraine, and Nigeria).)

Why does this matter? Let’s look at a post-Cochrane tweet from a person who might be described as a moderate believer in public health interventions. With her MD and MPH, certainly, she cannot just throw in the towel on the idea that humans, at least with sufficient credentials, can be masters of their own destiny. In light of the Cochrane review, she says that we will master our destiny with vaccines and Paxlovid:

HIGH POPULATION IMMUNITY & Omicron being less severe. Cochrane review yesterday showed masks don't work well for population control. Now have to
1) Figure out who needs boosters (suggest older/vulnerable like WHO says) every year
2) Get Paxlovid on formularies for those who need https://t.co/4XCeZWYge8

— Monica Gandhi MD, MPH (@MonicaGandhi9) February 2, 2023

But if the Followers of Science fooled themselves for 3 years on masks, why can’t the Followers of Science also be wrong about the effectiveness of vaccines and Paxlovid? Is it worth looking at age-adjusted country-to-country comparisons to make sure that we aren’t wasting a lot of time, energy, and money that could be better spent on, e.g., fighting obesity (first step under Philip’s dictatorship: no more Buy 2 Get 3 candy sales at CVS!)?

Fighting COVID with ineffective tools is not cost-free because humans have limited time, energy, and money. Closing schools, for example, will ultimately cost more lives than SARS-CoV-2 infection because people with less education live statistically shorter lives. Dollars printed to pay people to sit at home for 2 years are dollars that can’t be used to pay people to lose weight (imagine what you could do for public health if you gave Americans $600/week on condition that they lose 1 lb. per week! (maybe people would game the system by bulking up in the week prior to the first weigh-in?)).

(Speaking of Paxlovid, my friends in California seem to be Pfizer’s best customers. They said that they would never get COVID because (a) they had 4 or 5 Pfizer shots, (b) they mostly stayed home for 2+ years, and (c) they wore their N95 masks on the rare occasions when they left home. Then they got COVID (once or twice) and, despite being reasonably young (60ish) and not obese or chronically sick, they would guzzle Paxlovid within hours of an at-home test yielding the sacred magenta line. (How did they get it so fast when the rest of us have to wait 2 months to see a primary care doc? Telehealth!))

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It’s been three weeks since the publication of “Do physical measures such as hand-washing or wearing masks stop or slow down the spread of respiratory viruses?” (Cochrane):

We identified 78 relevant studies. They took place in low-, middle-, and high-income countries worldwide: in hospitals, schools, homes, offices, childcare centres, and communities during non-epidemic influenza periods, the global H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009, epidemic influenza seasons up to 2016, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identified five ongoing, unpublished studies; two of them evaluate masks in COVID-19.

Compared with wearing no mask in the community studies only, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/COVID-like illness (9 studies; 276,917 people); and probably makes little or no difference in how many people have flu/COVID confirmed by a laboratory test (6 studies; 13,919 people).

Compared with wearing medical or surgical masks, wearing N95/P2 respirators probably makes little to no difference in how many people have confirmed flu (5 studies; 8407 people); and may make little to no difference in how many people catch a flu-like illness (5 studies; 8407 people), or respiratory illness (3 studies; 7799 people).

In other words, we’re back to Science v2019: the only way to avoid infection is to stay home, not to go into a theme park during Christmas vacation wearing a cloth mask (Faucism), a surgical mask, or an N95 mask (True Science).

The masked faithful who’ve continued with their rituals after the Covidcrats rescinded their orders requiring masks (illegal in Florida!) say that they’re Following the Science. So we might expect a dramatic change to the slope of the de-masking curve now that this utterly reliable organization has come down with its verdict.

What have you seen out there in the wild? It’s tough for me to observe any changes here in Florida due to the small sample size (a handful of old/sick-looking people are sometimes observed in masks). I have queried mask believers in Massachusetts and California and they say that they are not going to change their behavior in response to the Cochrane article. Part of their justification is that they believe themselves to be vastly superior to the average person, including the health care workers in some of the studies underneath the Cochrane analysis, in competence, diligence, and consistency. Masks will fail for the incompetent rabble, but not for them.

Some excerpts from a Maskachusetts mask-believer:

Stupid people will do stupid things. Incompetent people will muddy the signals for otherwise potentially beneficial countermeasures. And your governor is still a douchebag, even if it is true that the Black History AP course [sic; the correct title is “AP African American STUDIES” (not “history”)] was politically motivated. Also, plain water and hand rubbing was shown by the CDC to be effective in getting virus particles off your hands.

(Hatred of Ron DeSantis is “Carthago delenda est!” for Democrats? I never mentioned Ron D when asking him how the Cochrane study would affect his behavior.)

From my Boston/DCA flight in January:

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Here’s a chronology of humans fighting SARS-CoV-2:

Let’s ignore for the moment that “excess deaths” might be a better measure because doubts have been raised about whether COVID-tagging of deaths has been done correctly in various states and countries. We’ll go with the statistic that we have on the “search for the keys under the lamppost” theory of #Science.

Especially for the U.S., the slope of the curve is remarkably constant. Why is that surprising? We had the miracle of lockdowns. Then we had the miracle of mask orders. Then we had the miracle of mRNA vaccines. If these miracles worked, but then the deaths resumed after the virus mutated, shouldn’t we see a more dramatic variation in slope?

Perhaps it is in Europe that we can see some effects. Humans did something in June 2020 that flattened the European curve until late October when hockey stick growth started again. But what did humans do in June 2020? The various coronapanic orders had actually been relaxed by that point. Once again in June 2021 there is a leveling of the European curve. Maybe that shows the efficacy of COVID vaccines? It seems unlikely. As in the U.S., the Europeans injected the old/vulnerable much earlier in 2021.

Related:

• U.S. should approve a saline injection as a Covid-19 vaccine? (June 2020; the above chart suggests that my proposal was adopted!)
• Where is the population-wide evidence that COVID vaccines reduce COVID-tagged death rates? (look at country v. country)

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It has been two years since victory-through-vaccination was declared in Israel. Let’s check in and see how the county “did” as the Covidians say (the implication being that preserving lives from SARS-CoV-2 is the only goal of a human or a government and therefore the proper way to measure the overall success of a society is by a single excess deaths number).

Israel was a Covidian Dream State second only to China. Israel closed schools and businesses, made it illegal for people to gather and socialize, forced the peasants to wear masks, forced people to get vaccinated by excluding them from jobs, public places, etc. if they #Resisted. Israel did not suffer from the malgovernance of Donald Trump, who told Americans to inject bleach and steal their dogs’ ivermectin heartworm pills. Israel obtained the Sacrament of Fauci from Pfizer sooner than any other country. Given the proven effectiveness of mRNA vaccines, if any country could have escaped the ravages of COVID it should have been Israel.

What was the result? A dramatically worse outcome than in no-mask, no-lockdown, later-to-the-vaccination-party Sweden (Our World in Data):

Sweden suffered from 5% excess deaths over three years of coronapanic while Israel suffered 9%. What could be worse than that? Well… what if we adjust for demographics? We are informed by the CDC that COVID primarily kills infants and toddlers, which is why it is critical to ensure that year-old babies get their bivalent booster as a 4th shot. If we ignore CDC guidance and use Maskachusetts and international data that COVID kills at a median age of about 80, we would have expected Israel to suffer much less than Sweden from COVID. Israel’s median age, says the Google, is 30.5 versus 41.1 in Sweden.

Sweden is tough to beat, you say, because Anders Tegnell, MD, PhD was so smart? At least Israel beat the U.S., right? The above map shows that the U.S. suffered a 14% rate of excess deaths. However… the median age in the U.S. is 38.1.

If we adjust for age, therefore, it is quite possible that Israel, despite meeting all of the conditions of a Covidian Dream State, actually “did worse” than the packed-with-Deplorables United States!

Related:

• “Lessons from Israel in how to beat Covid” (Times of London, February 7, 2021)
• “Israeli data suggest mass vaccinations led to drop in severe Covid cases, CDC study finds” (CNBC, February 26, 2021)
• “Israel imposing third national COVID-19 lockdown” (Reuters, December 24, 2020 (Merry Christmas from the Covidcrats?))

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Last week, from the CDC:

If your last #COVID19 vaccine dose was before September 2022 (October 2022 for kids 6 months – 11 years), you need an updated vaccine to help protect against Omicron.

To learn more and find free vaccines near you, go to https://t.co/2akIUZ14Rd#WeCanDoThis pic.twitter.com/7q0ruyH6Px

— CDC (@CDCgov) January 18, 2023

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:

I’m pro vaccines in general, but there’s a point where the cure/vaccine is potentially worse, if administered to the whole population, than the disease

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 16, 2023

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:

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I hope and trust that everyone has cleaned up from their Kwanzaa celebrations and recovered from any toaster-induced head injuries. Now that you all have some free time, I’d like to ask that you paint and mail a portrait of me so that I can cover all of the walls in our house with portraits of its most distinguished resident.

Inspiration for this project comes from America’s top doctor via the New York Times:

The walls in Dr. Anthony S. Fauci’s home office are adorned with portraits of him, drawn and painted by some of his many fans. The most striking one is by the singer Joan Baez. The two of them, he said, “have become pretty good friends over the years.”

Dr. Fauci seemed a little uncomfortable with people knowing about the pictures. He said that previously, when they were captured on camera, the “far right” attacked him as an “egomaniac.” If someone goes to the trouble of sending him a portrait of himself, he said, he would “feel like I’m disrespecting them” if he discarded it.

I know that none of you are sufficiently poisoned by far-right ideology and QAnon (whatever that is) to call me an egomaniac as a result of this decoration plan. I would also appreciate it if you would name your next dog after me, as this Maskachusetts resident has named his/her/zir/their Goldendoodle “Fauci”. A friend uses a Fi collar and sent me this screen shot related to another user’s dog from his app:

(At 20 lbs., this animal is not at high risk from COVID! Mindy the Crippler is a little heavier, but Science says that there is no point in trying to slim down to avoid a virus that targets the obese. If we take her to a lockdown state we can start calling her “Faucina”.)

I would like at least some of the portraits to reflect my commitment to #StoppingTheSpread. So the scene could include me getting a 7th booster shot at the local CVS, me swabbing my nose for a rapid Covid test before entering a crowded theme park, me putting an N95 mask and face shield on our golden retriever (Mindy the Crippler).

DALL-E can perhaps provide some inspiration.

“computer programmer with golden retriever”:

Just being Asian = “computer programmer”?

“computer programmer getting covid vaccine shot” = thoughtcrime

“golden retriever wearing N95 mask” shows some confusion regarding Faucism:

“computer programmer in his office surrounded by self-portraits”

“Lisp programmer”

Circling back to Anthony Fauci, my inspiration, “Fauci Leaves a Broken Agency for His Successor” (by a Hopkins Med School prof in Newsweek):

In a study of NIH funding published in The BMJ, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I found that in the first year of the pandemic, it took the NIH an average of five months to give money to researchers after they were awarded a COVID grant. This should be unacceptable during a health emergency.

Consider the question of how COVID spread—was it airborne or spread on surfaces? (Remember all those people wiping down their groceries?) It lingered as an open question without good research for months, as Fauci spent hundreds of hours on television opining on the matter. Finally, on August 17, 2021—a year and a half after COVID lockdowns began—Dr. Fauci’s agency released results of a study showing the disease was airborne. Thanks for that. The announcement on the NIAID website, titled “NIH Hamster Study Evaluates Airborne and Fomite Transmission of SARS-CoV-2” came 18 months too late.

Imagine if, in February 2020, Dr. Fauci had marshaled his $6 billion budget, vast laboratory facilities, and teams of experts to conduct a definitive lab experiment to establish that COVID was airborne. On this question and many others throughout the pandemic, our problem was not that the science changed—it’s that it wasn’t done.

What science was done by Science?

the NIH spent more than twice as much on aging research as it did on COVID research in the first year of the pandemic, according to my team’s analysis. I’m all for aging research, but not when a novel virus is killing thousands of Americans per day.

the NIH spent more than twice as much on aging research as it did on COVID research in the first year of the pandemic, according to my team’s analysis. I’m all for aging research, but not when a novel virus is killing thousands of Americans per day.

Because the NIH moved at glacial speed, most of our COVID knowledge came from overseas. The critical discovery that steroids reduce COVID mortality by one-third came only after European researchers did a randomized trial that Fauci’s agency should have commissioned quickly. Similarly, a conclusive study showing that Vitamin D reduces COVID mortality, published last month, arrived two years too late.

Time to hit Costco for the Vitamin D!

The official government job description for Dr. Fauci’s role states that the director must “respond rapidly to emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases.” Dr. Fauci didn’t do that during the coronavirus pandemic. In order for the U.S. to respond better to the next pandemic, we will need our nation’s infectious diseases research agency, and its top doctor, to act with a sense of urgency.

The NIH’s disheveled COVID response is a window into a bureaucracy that has underperformed for decades. With obvious biases and blind spots, our nation’s top research institution has long hindered research progress in important topics, from food as medicine to the role of general body inflammation in disease. The “H” in “NIH” stands for health, and health means much more than laboratory medicine. That means it should fund proper studies on environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just chemotherapies to treat it. The NIH’s legacy system of having the oldest scientists in the room determine what research is worthy of investigation crowds out the study of fresh new ideas.

The last point is one made by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Evolution did not supplant preceding dogma because Darwin was persuasive to established scientists. Evolution prevailed as the dominant paradigm after the established scientists retired and/or died.

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