Day 1058: No Child in the Manger

The bad cat has another monthly update on the precipitous drop in Swedish births, along with a recap of the potential causative factors behind the correlation between vaccinations nine months ago and historically low birth rates today, in those countries that report both stats in an accurate and timely manner:

but instead of the sort of all hands on deck attention one would expect from a health agency in the face of such a powerful and atypical signal on such an important matter, we’re getting absolutely nothing.

studies about what happens when you read rilke to nematodes are getting more funding and interest than this.

at a certain point, this utter lack of curiosity becomes an indictment of, if not complicity, at least of culpability in cover up.

what, after all, is public health supposed to be for if not this?

if this sort of mischief with the very basis of societal perpetuation is insufficient to rouse the alleged watchmen from their slumber, how is one not to ask some VERY pointed questions not only about whether they have any use at all, but perhaps just who and what they are guarding?

perhaps it is something other than our well being…

Day 1057: The Tripledemic that Wasn't

While the world (and especially Bloomberg) continues to speculate on how many Chinese will get COVID today (e.g., 37 million), Dr. Andrew Bostom reports on some more concrete numbers from the alleged tripledemic (h/t Dr. Meryl Nass):

Serious paediatric illness is best gauged by the actual number of children hospitalised, as opposed to ‘respiratory virus test positivity’. The latter is especially misleading because of the unique, ongoing phenomenon of continued mass COVID-19 testing for minimal symptoms. Curiously, almost two months later, I could find no local media follow-up coverage elucidating the feared paediatric ‘tripledemic’ by this most germane metric: a direct comparison of children hospitalised for COVID-19, influenza or RSV.

With the cooperation of Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH) spokesman Joseph Wendelken, and an academic paediatrician at Hasbro Children’s Hospital, I can now present those hospitalisation data, per the table below. Given time lags in compilation and transmission, the hospitalisation record only covers all of October, and November 2022.

[table omitted]

Despite the anguished media declarations, there was no Rhode Island paediatric ‘tripledemic’, at least through October and November. RSV, alone, accounted for around 90% (194 ÷ 222 = 87.4%) of so-called ‘tripledemic’ hospitalisations among Rhode Island children, and the rate of RSV hospitalisations (97 per month), was around seven-fold the rate of COVID-19 and influenza hospitalisations combined (14 per month). Moreover, the surrogate for RSV hospitalisations, a single International Classification of Diseases (ICD) RSV code (bronchiolitis, an inflammation of the smaller lung airways) omits RSV pneumonia and bronchitis coded hospitalisations. Certainly, omitting these ICD codes underestimates true paediatric RSV admissions.

I've seen other reports of flu peaking early this year, so it's interesting to see RSV swamping even flu. Both are on the decline already, and with COVID remaining harmless to children hopefully the tripledemic that wasn't will be behind us soon.

Day 1055: The Cleveland Negative Efficacy Study

China's new 100%-COVID policy continues to mystify both onlookers and Chinese. One thing that is not all that mysterious about the news is the prediction of three waves of COVID in China this winter, because it's not actually about COVID at all, but about three waves of movement and mixing connected to the Chinese New Year celebrations.

Back in the land of The Science™, one bit of news not to be missed is the Cleveland study of booster efficacy, which, as Eugyppius notes, had the unplanned result of showing that COVID cases increase with additional mRNA boosters:

Because Pfizer only tested the effectiveness of their BA.5 bivalent vaccine on a handful of mice, there has been understandable interest in working out whether the shiny new jabs actually do anything in return for inflicting an unknown number of injuries and undesirable side-effects on the Pfizer Pfaithful. Towards this end, a few scientists at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio have conducted a retrospective cohort study of Clinic employees who received the bivalent vaccine between September and December of this year. Most received the Pfizer cocktail, but 11% had the Moderna version.

Of 51,011 people ultimately included in the study, a mere 10,804 opted for bivalent vaccination. If anything shows that the stock of the vaccines is in freefall, it’s uptake this dismal at a major healthcare institution. The bivalently boosted were 30% less likely to be infected, in a study period where the vaccines and the circulating SARS-2 variants were for the most part perfectly aligned. In another blow to the logic of perpetual vaccination with subpar ineffective products, the authors note that their cohort had “too few severe illnesses for the study to be able to determine if the vaccine decreased severity of illness.” Because it’s severe outcomes and death, rather than infections, which matter, this is the same as saying the bivalent vaccines are totally pointless, especially in the younger cohort (mean age 42) studied here.

The real bombshell, though, is the authors’ accidental finding that risk of infection increases incrementally with each prior (non-bivalent) vaccine dose.

[...]

Their discussion of this point is more honest than you’d expect:

The association of increased risk of COVID-19 with higher numbers of prior vaccine doses in our study, was unexpected. A simplistic explanation might be that those who received more doses were more likely to be individuals at higher risk of COVID-19. A small proportion of individuals may have fit this description. However, the majority of subjects in this study were generally young individuals and all were eligible to have received at least 3 doses of vaccine by the study start date, and which they had every opportunity to do. … This is not the only study to find a possible association with more prior vaccine doses and higher risk of COVID-19. … We still have a lot to learn about protection from COVID-19 vaccination, and in addition to a vaccine’s effectiveness it is important to examine whether multiple vaccine doses given over time may not be having the beneficial effect that is generally assumed.

They also showed that prior COVID infection is effective in preventing COVID infections. (Fancy that!)

Day 1039: Not the Vaxx For Once

Eugyppius reports on raging respiratory infections in 1 out of 4 German children, especially RSV among the almost completely unvaccinated under-4 set, overwhelming hospitals. He attributes the problem to lockdowns:

This isn’t the vaccines (almost no children under 5 have been vaccinated), and it’s not just a coincidence or a bad year for RSV either. It’s a direct consequence of mass containment. While lockdowns didn’t do much about SARS-2, they appear to have reduced the incidence of other, slower-moving viruses considerably. Young women in particular have been underexposed to RSV for three years now, with the result that their breast milk confers far less passive immunity against common viruses than it did in the pre-pandemic era.

Of course a four-year-old would have been breastfed back in the Before Times, but presumably has not been exposed to enough viruses since then. For a vaxx-did-it theory, see, e.g., Igor Chudov on hematopoietic stem cells.

Day 1017: Yet Another Bad Mask Study

Of course, it's about masks. The NEJM paper is about an observational study of Boston schoolchildren, so it's been especially newsworthy here in Massachusetts. Vinay Prasad brought in Tracy Høeg to debunk the thing:

In the Boston study, the identified masking effect size against cases that is implausibly high. They say the dropping of the mask mandates corresponded with an additional 11,901 cases, which was 33.4% of ALL cases in the unmasked districts. Among the staff they found 40.4% of the cases to be attributable to the lifting of the mask mandates.

This is unrealistic considering most cases come from the community into the school AND we have a randomized study from Bangladesh failing to find any effect of either community or cloth masking in anyone under 50 (and that signal was modest, at around 11% decrease rate with surgical masks, which was uncertain, and no significant decrease with cloth masks). We also have a regression discontinuity design study from Spain which takes advantage of the fact that 5-year-olds don’t mask and 6 year old do and there was no significant discontinuity from age 5-6 as compared with other ages to suggest an effect of masking on case rates.

Additionally, the authors of the Boston study made the difficult-to-understand choice of “consider[ing] community rates of COVID-19 as part of the causal effect of school masking policies rather than a source of bias” in other words they saw community case rates to be a result of school masking policies/school case rates rather than community case rates to be the major source of school cases. A large body of research has suggested the opposite finding COVID-19 in schools is up to 10-20x more likely to come from outside of the school than from within. This includes a study from the UK where children <12 were not masked.

But they did plot the results of school COVID cases vs community covid cases and, as you can see here: [graph omitted] school case rates had a similar relationship to city/town case positivity rates in all districts, with all school case rates similar in relation to that of the community, which speaks against any large impact of school masking. Further, it is unclear why cases would be presumed to be coming from the school to the community with the school peak lagging the community peak in two of the districts or why any difference seen in the masked district would be presumed to be due to masks when the March 17 and the did not lift groups appear so similar in the difference between school (black) and community (orange) case rates. Looking overall at how much the mask district differs from the community compared with the unmasked districts, it’s clear the difference is modest---and of course may not be attributable to masks!

They both note the paper's strange focus on structural racism.

Day 1005: Amnestesia

The response to Emily Oster's recent plea in The Atlantic for a COVID-craziness amnesty went over surprisingly poorly. She got ratioed on Twitter for her forgive-and-forget stance, and all the usual suspects blogged their implacable opposition to letting anyone off the hook for criminal COVID insanity.

Mathew Crawford recaps some of the posts qua Apology Games (the lack of an apology being the first thing that comes up in criticism's of Oster's amnestesia), notably Eugyppius' salty take and Vinay Prasad's "narcissistic fence-sitting". Eugyppius was actually harsher than Crawford lets on:

Emily Oster may have said a few reasonable things in the depths of her pandemic moderation, but she can take her proposal for pandemic amnesty and shove it all the way up her ass. I’m never going to forget what these villains did to me and my friends. It is just hard to put into words how infuriating it is, to read this breezy triviliasation of the absolute hell we’ve been through, penned by some comfortable and clueless Ivy League mommyconomist who is ready to mouth support for basically any pandemic policy that doesn’t directly affect her or her family and then plead that the horrible behaviour and policies supported by her entire social milieu are just down to ignorance about the virus. We knew everything we needed to know about SARS-2 already in February 2020. The pandemicists and their supporters crossed many bright red lines in their eradicationist zeal and ruined untold millions of lives. That doesn’t all just go away now.

But of course the bad cat has the saltiest take:

it is precisely BECAUSE following vicious, evil orders is so easy in times of fear and that humans break and bow to authority with such ease that there must be sharp penalties, reputational and otherwise for so doing.

otherwise, you're just greasing the rails for next time.

it’s the low energy path of submission and freeing it from consequence serves only to render it a path more followed.

ignorance of the law is [no] excuse. neither is ignorance of ethics or epidemiology.

P.S. Not to be outdone, Eugyppius goes another round against Emily Oster and her fellow "Head Girls":

One of the reasons things like lockdowns and mass vaccination frenzies have become possible in the first place, is the uniformity of outlook and opinion among the governing elite. When everybody, from university professors to the minister president of Bavaria to municipal police administrators, believes that with enough social distancing we can eradicate SARS-2, and that the unvaccinated are responsible for prolonging the pandemic, the result is a powerful if erratic and ever-shifting social tyranny. Social media technologies have been particularly noxious for the consensus formation of the Head Girls, widening the range of issues on which they have functionally identical opinions and enforcing conformity more thoroughly than was ever before possible. And should one of their runaway preference cascades go off the rails and destroy society, they’ll rapidly reunite around the new consensus position, that nobody could’ve known any better and all the worst offenders—especially their friends and colleagues—acted in good faith with the knowledge that was available at the time.

P.P.S. Cartoonist Bob Moran also has something to say:

Day 1002: The Misinformers

On Monday, the Ethical Skeptic finally published Part 2 of his series on the CDC's death-reporting malfeasance. He elaborates on their missing and misclassified records---most notably, cancer deaths reclassified as COVID deaths to reduce the excess death rate from cancer below 9σ)---along with their callous disregard for the 20σ high in heart disease deaths since the inexplicable date of MMWR Week 14 2021.

To add insult to injury, he also find the CDC inventing fictional deaths among the unvaccinated to get the pro-vaccination results they wanted out of a sampling study, and their misuse of all-cause mortality figures. He concludes with a frightening number for excess non-COVID mortality:

In the end, it is this last chart depicted in Exhibit 6 which serves to confirm the claims made in Sections 1 through 4 of this article. The level of excess natural cause death which is not Covid itself, is around 13.3% to the excess of where it should be – even given a 1.1% baseline growth inside an aging demographic (see Exhibit 6, dark orange baseline ‘annual growth’).

Exhibit 6 – Excess Non-Covid Natural Cause Mortality as a metric, serves to filter out the distractions of Covid-19 as well as mortality from accidents, overdoses, and assault – all of which serve to cloud one’s ability to observe the entailed alarming signal. As of MMWR Week 40 2022, the US has experienced an additional 385,000 natural cause deaths above and beyond what we should have seen for this period of time. Couple this with 80,000 non-natural deaths during the same timeframe, and one finds an excess of 465,000 deaths which have occurred since MMWR Week 14 of 2021. A pandemic all unto itself.

---

Day 993: Frankencovid in the South End

The bad cat is incensed about the gain-of-COVID-function story:

“hey, what if we could make omicron even more immunity evading and as deadly as ebola?”

asked no sane person.

ever.

this is the biomedical equivalent of jumping up and down on a pogostick while holding the nuclear launch trigger. granted, this was just done in mice, but hey, that was good enough to approve a booster, right?

Eugyppius took it a little better:

To be clear: Just three years after Wuhan researchers decided it would be cool to insert a codon-optimised furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction of this interesting SARS-related bat virus they found, Boston researchers thought maybe it’d be fun to start mixing and matching different SARS-2 proteins to see if a new chimeric virus might be more exciting than boring old Omicron. The payoff is not any vaccine or treatment, but the mere knowledge that it is not just the spike protein that contributes to the pathogenicity of SARS-2. For extra fun, they did not conduct this research in space or at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, but in a BSL-3 facility at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories on Albany Street in the Boston South End.

He notes that while Alex Berenson thinks this is all a nothingburger, its flailing short-order cooks still pose a serious threat to humanity:

But, I’m just not much comforted by this. Beyond broader concerns with the entire enterprise of enhancing viruses in the lab for shits and giggles: The experimenters improved a slower-moving and more lethal wild-type strain by giving it the more infectious Omicron BA.1 spike. I think there are evolutionary reasons why such a combination is unlikely to arise naturally, and why this kind of research amounts to helping viruses achieve otherwise out-of-reach protein combinations for which our natural defences are ill-equipped.

He's also disturbed that the short-order cooks at BU seem to feel the need to lie about it to boot.

Day 985: The Cold Pandemic

Despise surprisingly low rates of toddler vaccination and adult boosting against COVID (under 5% each), the pandemic of the moment appears to be the common cold:

Sick kids are crowding emergency rooms in various parts of the country, and some pediatric hospitals say they are running out of beds. But this uptick in illness has largely been due to viruses other than the coronavirus, like RSV, enteroviruses and rhinovirus.

While respiratory infections typically surge in the winter months, experts say that this year the season has started much sooner, and that numbers are unusually high.

"Rates are as high as 25% of those [who have] tested positive for RSV. That is quite unusual for October, we would typically start to see higher rates in November, December and January," said Dr. Ibukun Kalu, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at Duke Children's Hospital in Durham, North Carolina.

[...]

For now, the issue is concentrated among younger patients. But Kalu said that with the colder months coming up, it could begin to impact more people.

"As we see more viral infections in kids, we will see a similar pattern in adults," she said.

Day 973: Deja Poo

Credit for today's title goes to the Boston Herald, reporting on the MWRA COVID spike:

The seven-day COVID wastewater average for the north-of-Boston region has jumped more than 100% within the last week, according to Wednesday’s update from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority tracker.

The daily average for the north-of-the-city area is now 1,016 copies per milliliter, a 104% spike from the average of 497 copies last Wednesday.

The seven-day COVID wastewater average for the south-of-Boston region has increased 56% within the last week. The average is now 993 copies, which is up from 637 copies last Wednesday.

Why a sudden spike when the weather hasn't changed much this month? Well, it is booster season, and the Daily Skeptic has picked up Alex Berenson's reporting on a paper in the Lancet showing immune suppression immediately after the shots, as well as the general negative efficacy of COVID vaccination:

The top two [figures from the paper's supplementary data] show that in the two weeks following the first jab individuals were three to four times more likely to test positive for Covid than their unvaccinated counterparts. This is further confirmation of the post-jab spike in infections that has often been noted and which there is evidence is a result of the vaccination temporarily reducing immunity.

The third figure shows that two weeks or more after the second jab – which during 2021 was regarded as ‘fully vaccinated’ – individuals were 44% more likely to be infected than their unvaccinated counterparts. This is negative vaccine effectiveness (where infections are higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated) of minus-44%. This negative effectiveness is in line with what was seen in the raw data from England at the time and also in studies from other countries, but contradicts the Government’s official estimates, which claimed effectiveness to be 60-85% against Delta infection. The new study indicates that the negative effectiveness was not just a result of confounding factors or a ‘catch-up’ effect, where the vaccinated have lower infection rates initially then higher infection rates as the effect of the vaccine wears off, as some have claimed.

Acknowledging the figures, the authors write: “Surprisingly, we observed a higher risk of test positivity after vaccination with one or two doses across all BMI groups, which is contrary to evidence reported by the U.K. ONS.” What they don’t mention is that it is fully in line with data from the UKHSA, nor that the ONS is known to overestimate infection rates in the unvaccinated because it underestimates the population – the ONS puts the unvaccinated adult population at 8% whereas the NIMS database puts it at 19% (and surveys higher still at 26%).

Or we could just blame it all on innocent schoolchildren, again.

Day 963: ADE in Vitro

The usual suspects have all picked up on the new report in Nature on antibody-depenent enhancement (ADE) from both COVID vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments. To the pro-vaxxer cries of "this is merely in vitro," Eugyppius adds a handy reminder that we may already have plenty of in vivo data:

Remember how everywhere mass vaccination occurs, we tend to see higher frequencies of infection? Remember how, in the deeply unadjusted and unreliable UKHSA vaccine efficacy statistics from the start of the year, the double-vaccinated appeared to experience higher rates of infection and death than the unvaccinated? Crazy conspiracy theorists might be forgiven for wondering if these are the effects of antibody-enhanced virus replication in the lungs of people more than six months out from their second jab.

Day 959: Excess Mortality: Italian Edition

While vaxx-driven excess mortality news has come out of Switzerland and Australia lately, today Eugyppius addresses a differently horrifying excess mortality story out of Northern Italy early in the pandemic:

Engler draws attention to the curious fact that early Italian excess mortality did not seem to spread from one Italian province to another – following virus infections outwards from an epicentre – but rather struck the affected regions all at once: [graph omitted]

What’s more, the excess deaths are clustered within the boundaries of the affected provinces, “meaning that which one of the 13 provinces a person lived in was a much better predictor of death than whether there was a high rate of deaths in neighbouring municipalities.” For Engler, this implicates provincial-level administrative decisions as to the rationing of care and provisions for the vulnerable, especially in the face of staffing shortages.

Day 947: See No Evil, Israeli Edition

Steve Kirsch reports on a budding Israeli scandal in which the Ministry of Health (MoH), not unlike our CDC, ignored its obligation to track vaccine side effects for an entire year. Next, they commissioned a study of the next six months of side effects, but then fudged the numbers for the public to greatly reduce the side effect profile:

The panel presented their findings to MoH personnel on or about Jun 6, 2022 in a Zoom call that was secretly recorded. They found that the COVID vaccines were much more dangerous to people than the world authorities admitted. They found serious adverse events that were never disclosed by Pfizer or any world government. These adverse events were also not found to be short term as the public was told.

They also determined causality, something no other world health authority has ever been willing to do (because other governments never looked at the data either). Causality was both obvious and easy to prove using the re-challenge data that was collected (you can’t do this using the US VAERS data, for example).

Day 946: Excess Mortality, German Edition

Via Eugyppius: a preprint linking German excess mortality to the temporal pattern of mass administration of spike-bases vaxes in the country:

In 2020, the observed number of deaths was close to the expected number with respect to the empirical standard deviation. By contrast, in 2021, the observed number of deaths was two empirical standard deviations above the expected number. The high excess mortality in 2021 was almost entirely due to an increase in deaths in the age groups between 15 and 79 and started to accumulate only from April 2021 onwards. A similar mortality pattern was observed for stillbirths with an increase of about 11 percent in the second quarter of the year 2021.

Something must have happened in April 2021 that led to a sudden and sustained increase in mortality in the age groups below 80 years, although no such effects on mortality had been observed during the COVID-19 pandemic so far.

Stillbirths are defined thus:

One problem with analyzing excess mortality at the level of stillbirths in Germany is that the definition of a ‘stillbirth’ has been changed at the end of 2018. Until then, a stillborn child was considered a stillbirth if a birth weight of at least 500 grams was reached. Since the end of 2018, a stillborn child is considered a stillbirth if at least 500 grams or the 24th week of pregnancy was reached, which led to a diagnostically related increase in stillbirths. This means that the figures on stillbirths are only validly comparable from 2019 onwards.

Day 934: Excess Mortality, CDC Edition

After months of agitating on Twitter, the Ethical Skeptic has finally posted to his blog about American excess mortality and the CDC's delinquent death data:

Finally, we end with the most important chart of all – the chart which indicates deaths which are not from accidents, suicide, addiction, assault, abuse, despair, disruption, nor Covid-19. The Excess Non-Covid Natural Cause Mortality chart which we began monitoring on May 29th 2021. What I called then, the ‘What the hell is this?’ chart. As one can see, we have lost 344,000 younger Americans to something besides Covid and non-natural death, during the period from 3 April 2021 to 6 August 2022. The current rate of mortality in this ICD categorization, is around 5,000 or more per week (the database shows a most recent five-week, weekly average of 7,887 deaths – subject to lag of course) – which exceeds most weeks of the Covid pandemic itself (save for the absolute peak periods).

By now, if all these mortality excesses were indeed a holdover from Covid-19 itself, they should have already begun to tail off. Unfortunately they are not only not tailing off, in many cases they are still increasing.

Accordingly, and without a shadow of a doubt, we have established that right now there exists a problem in terms of US citizen health and mortality. One which is differentiated from Covid-19 itself, and began in earnest MMWR Week 14 of 2021. Our next task, and what will be outlaid in Parts 2 and 3 of this article series, is to employ these and other observed arrival distributions to winnow out the causal mechanism(s) behind this concerning trend in US mortality.

Having made significant progress on the second and third article already, we very much look forward to publishing for the reader, our next article in the series, ‘Houston, We Know the Mechanisms (Part 2 of 3)’.

Day 919: Bad Lots Again

Followers of all things apparently or truly wrong with the COVID vaccines may recall some concern over bad lots. Back in the day the hot lots theory was a bit of a Swiss cheese, but due to Aaron Siri's tireless FOIA requests, the bad batch bunch now have an official lot list to compare to the mass of lot typos that is VAERS.

The result is some serious allegations against Pfizer, for a bad manufacturing process or just a bad product resulting in lots of deaths in early 2021, then secretly doing something to address the carnage.

Strangely, there's no particular comment about Moderna, despite similar indications of bad lots. The bad batchers don't seem to have updated their How Bad is My Batch? website with the cleaned up batch numbers yet, either. Perhaps they're still working on it.

Day 911: Even the President Rebounds

CNN reports that the President's COVID is back, due to the usual a rare Paxlovid rebound.

P.S. The Babylon Bee responds.

Day 910: Vaxxcess Mortality

The usual suspects have been reporting on excess mortality associated with the COVID vaccines. In the latest volley, Alex Berenson reports on a pre-print showing a correlation between vaccination rates and excess mortality rates in the Netherlands.

The finding in the new paper is particularly striking because the Netherlands has very high Covid vaccination levels nationally, so the differences between cities are relatively small. Almost every city had vaccination rates between 70 and 90 percent - mostly mRNA shots from Pfizer and Moderna, along with some DNA/AAV vaccines.

The paper found a “vaccination-correlated mortality rate” of about 5 percent of total mortality, meaning that 5 percent of deaths were skewed in patterns that reflected vaccination rates.

As the paper explains, the pattern does not prove that vaccinations actually caused those deaths, merely that the correlation exists. Still, since last summer, highly vaccinated countries have generally posted non-Covid death increases of 5 to 10 percent, the 5 percent figure is far from implausible.

A 5 percent increase in deaths may seem small, but by historical standards it is a huge annual change. It would translate into almost 175,000 extra deaths annually in the United States and more in Europe.

The paper has not been peer-reviewed, and its author, Andre Redert, is a computer scientist, not an epidemiologist (which is arguably a point in his favor).

He also tweets about mortality running 12% above normal in England.

Although the mainstream news has ignored the excess mortality story, the anti-anti-vaxxers have tried to make a case against it using US data. The ever-watchful bad cat dedebunked them, citing various methods not unlike those of the Dutch paper, most notably the Ethical Skeptic's, who also observes that the CDC is suspiciously far behind on publishing US mortality data.

Dr. Meryl Nass continues the life insurance saga with record claims/payouts for 2021.

Day 908: Prions Again

A French preprint came out in June documenting 26 out of over 50 sudden cases of Creutzfeld Jakob disease (CJD) after vaccination with COVID vaccines. The preprint has since been taken down, but you can get it from the Wayback Machine if you're interested.

The paper goes through the usual PLAAC analysis to detect a prion region in the older COVID spike protein used in the vaccines, and reassuringly documents that this region has disappeared from Omicron. It's perhaps more interesting for the 26 French case studies (out of over 50), along with another 16 cases from abroad. In a later edit they mention 19 CJD deaths recorded in VAERS through April, and link to a search that actually produces 33 CJD deaths out of VAERS when run on today's data. (If you're wondering whether health care workers have the time these days for differential diagnosis of CJD, there are more accurate, real-time tests now than the traditional "check the brain for holes on autopsy".)

Before you start worrying that you may already be a downer, the authors have more good news; the average time of onset in France was 11 days after vaccination, so you're probably in the clear as long as you avoid boosters. (Sadly there was no genetic analysis for the downer codon.)

CJD is a death sentence, and it took about five months for patients to die, though some died "sudden[ly]" after only 2.5 months. An addendum notes that they are all dead now; one unfortunate soul apparently lasted a year. The sudden onset and rapid death are enough to distinguish the cases from sporadic CJD (sCJD) or variant (mad cow) CJD (vCJD).

PlagueBlog pauses to suggest the abbreviation vxCJD.

Three of the French cases were associated with the AstraZeneca (non-mRNA) vaccine, though all the VAERS cases list mRNA vaccines. (This is not a result of high uptake of AstraZeneca, which is only about 5% of the doses given in France to date.) While COVID itself may have caused some rise in CJD cases pre-Omicron, PlagueBlog has found that case reports claiming so usually fail to note whether the patient had a spike-based vaccine about 11 days before onset of CJD symptoms, regardless of their COVID histories.

Note that this rash of vxCJD would not be the first vaccine disaster involving transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. A sheep vaccine caused a scrapie outbreak known as the 1935 Moredun Louping-ill Vaccine Disaster. Another contaminated vaccine caused a smaller scrapie outbreak in Italy in the 1990's.

Day 902: Even the President

President Biden, despite being double-vaxxed and double-boosted, has tested positive for COVID. According to news reports, he plans to take Paxlovid, the not particularly effective Pfizer antiviral best known for its rebound cases.

P.S. The Babylon Bee has the most unique coverage of this breaking story.

Day 895: No Evidence for Boosters

Vinay Prasad, among others, notes that the European CDC has rejected boosters for low-risk people because there's no evidence they would be of any benefit, while the Biden administration is making unscientific plans to push them on healthy Americans this fall.

Instead, the white house disregards these analyses and pushes this dose. The worry of course is that need to be seen as offering something for political rather than medical reasons. They need to limit cases right at the moment of the midterm elections.

The other concern is that clearly Pfizer has excess product, and this move will help them unload that supply. Are they merely working in Pfizer’s best interest? When the terms end for people like Marks-Walensky-Jha will they end up working for Pfizer? Serving on the board of directors?

The final concern is that they continue to play fast and loose with the FDA’s credibility. They are spending it like monopoly money. Unfortunately, the massive decline in public acceptance of other vaccines, which is in progress, will be, in part, attributable to their actions.

PlagueBlog notes that however tattered the FDA's credibility looks at the moment, it cannot compare to the shreds of the CDC's credibility.

Day 894: VAERS, What VAERS?

The management apologizes for our unintentional summer break here at PlagueBlog Headquarters. It was not due to ninja-COVID but to a mainframe breakdown; sadly the pandemic has in no way helped with the shortage of COBOL programmers and vacuum tubes.

We hope to report soon on case rates, the ongoing scourge of booster-driven OAS variants, jabbing defenseless infants with no scientific basis, and the vaccine-driven plunge in fertility in various countries that bother to publish their birth rates.

But the truly notable news of the past month came out of an FOIA request by Children's Health Defense, in which the CDC admits to never calculating their own standard adverse event statistic out of VAERS for the COVID vaccines. As usual, the bad cat said it best:

not only did they not perform the safety monitoring they were supposed to. at all. but they go on to claim that doing so is outside their purview and suggest asking the FDA instead. (who does not do this work, it’s supposed to be the CDC.)

this is just stunning.

what a complete and total fail and abrogation of duty and diligence.

either “most robust in US history” was a complete and total fabrication or wow have we been running around totally unprotected for decades. which one fills you with confidence?

[Some commentary and a screenshot of OpenVAERS data for the US omitted.]

quite literally any other vaccine in history would have been pulled off the market for 1/100th of this.

[...]

the agency whose specific purview and policy was to monitor this data just told you that everything was fine and their diligence the most robust in history while failing to do even the most rudimentary first pass work they were supposed to. they not only missed but misled about what is probably the single most severe safety signal in pharmaceutical history.

and then they said "not my job."

P.S. The state gave up the ghost on "daily" case reporting on July 8th, at which point cases were up a tenth of a percentage point.

Day 864: From Tragedy to Farce

The thirty-month-long Ays Rand novel that is the coronavirus pandemic leapt the shark recently, ascending from tragedy to farce via a thinly-veiled send-up of Pfizer on Dilbert. From the initial decision to become a big pharma company to Wally coming into his own to the most persuasive presentation pointy-haired boss has ever seen to eliminating the whistleblowers, it's two weeks of the most fun you can have combining epidemiology and cupidity in comic book form.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up an eighth of a percentage point on Friday.

Day 857: Buying Health

Mathew Crawford explains the illusion of vaccine efficacy caused by income disparities, a theory shared by the Ethical Skeptic (ES):

ES wins a grappling match by clean submission by showing that (still working at the U.S. county level) COVID deaths correlate to vaccination no more and no less after vaccination began as before. The pattern of results just…remains the same.

He does not touch on the possibility that the causal factor behind better health may not be the wealth itself but whatever caused the income and educational disparities in the first place.

Day 854: COVID Karate Kids

The bad cat deals the covidocracy a one-two punch with posts about the fakery that was martial arts before kickboxing—that is, the fakery that was epidemiology before bad cats on the Internet pooled their statistical chops, and the morass of confirmation bias that is public health even today.

From the former post (why public health "experts" never want to fight "the amateurs": what kung fu theater can teach us about public health):

from SAGE to the CDC, the UW to the NIH, it’s been complete and total woo-woo. their models did not just fail, they were so bad they were non-deterministic and could not even replicate their own results.

they rode in on big white woo-woo horses laden with credentials and made bold claims of their prowess and prescience. they legitimately had no idea they were not world champ top of the game stone cold epi-killahs. they had never been outside. it was 15 years of patty cake training to get ready for the gold medal round in olympic boxing.

total misses on swine flu and zika and dengue and “ebola comes to america” had been largely ignored.

they had no idea that they were, in reality, stunningly, embarrassingly bad at this.

and suddenly they were in the big leagues and got knocked out in the first round in front of everyone because they did not know any better than to jump in a ring for which they were unqualified. all their predictions were wrong, their recommendations false and ill advised. it was just jumping around and tossing out jargon and mathiness as though it implied knowing how to fight a disease.

and we watched this kung-fu theater die in real time.

And the latter post (we've reached the "we're not even going to pretend to prove this works, just do as you're told" stage of the pandemic: watch as the messaging shifts once more):

and that’s the stage of public health we are reaching, because they have lost the debate, been trounced on the data, and been caught lying and making up studies over and over but they are still sure they are experts (and there is no safe path down off the tiger onto which they have climbed in any event).

they are not going to change their minds nor in all likelihood can they without internal psychological crisis. imagine the psychic baggage of realizing that you just architected the most damaging and least effective public health response in human history while endlessly grandstanding about your knowledge and insight.

yowsa.

Yowsa, indeed.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a sixth of a percentage point today.

Day 853: Vaxx For Thee But Not For Me

The latest celebrity charged in a Spanish counterfeit vaccine passport scheme is also the most ironic: José María Fernández Sousa-Faro, president of one of the largest pharmceutical companies in Spain. According to Steve Kirsch and the EuroWeekly News, it was a sliding fee scale, so he paid a lot not to take his medicine.

Not surprisingly, some famous athletes also paid the big bucks not to have to take the cure for soccer COVID. What was surprising is that the counterfeiting ring was broken not by a direct investigation, but as a side-effect of the campaign against the "dark web":

What is interesting is that the police did not uncover the scam through a local investigation, but rather through efforts to curb extremism on the dark web.

Enter policeman A, his name has not been made public. According to the Guardia Civil he made contact with an extremist Islamic group who he arranged to meet in France, but told them that he personally could not travel as he had not been vaccinated.

He said: “I don’t have a COVID-19 passport; I am not vaccinated. Allah does not allow me to put anything impure in my body.”

They replied that they could get him a passport and even get him registered on the National Registry of Vaccination, He was introduced to two Madrid residents, Álex, a former thief with a history of sexual assault and known to have contact with criminals in Madrid and Irene, an attractive woman who had been convicted and then pardoned for drug trafficking many years ago.

The police followed the two and noticed that Irene met a young man twice a week, after hours. That young man turned out to be Mario, a nursing assistant in the Hospital of La Paz.

An investigation online found that Mario was an active militant and a Covid-19 denier, which made them suspicious. But on checking they found he could not be the source of the false certificates as he would not have access to the database.

So they went about pretending to be potential customers to gather the evidence they needed. What they found was another nurse was being given a share to issue the certificates, with the money being put into cryptocurrency accounts to try and hide it.

But they also did spend it drawing further attention to themselves, with the network growing and the number of customers increasing.

In the end, the police arrested 15 people involved in the selling and issuing of false certificates.

What makes this case even more bizarre is that Mario contracted Covid-19 and need to be vaccinated to be able to return to work, but he couldn’t do that as a denier. So that’s when he approached his would be accomplice, who helped him out. It was at that point, Mario realised that they could make money offering the false certificates.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a sixth of a percentage point today.

Day 849: The First Casualty of COVID is Duty

Vinay Prasad blogs at length about the pushback he got for taking the (actually) rational and scientific position on matters of COVID, rather than adopting pop-sci stupidity about masking children, closing schools, boosting the healthy, giving Moderna to anyone under 40, etc., etc.:

I'm trying not to use the word stupid to describe the people who hold the view that it helps. Instead, I will put it this way. I no longer respect any actual scientist who tells me that that it makes sense to make 2-year-olds wear a cloth mask in daycare except for the two hours they all nap together side by side. Anyone who believes that policy actually slows viral spread can be safely ignored.

But what can I do about bad policy? I thought about it, and slowly over the course of a year advanced a series of articles in places like Medpage today, and the Atlantic on this issue. I tweeted against the AAP when they said deranged things like there is no evidence that kids need to see faces.

This earned me great professional pushback, and headache. But you can't focus on that, you must focus on your duty. My duty, as a professor whose life is the arbitration of evidence, is to encourage people to use their rational, evidence-based medicine skills in pursuit of policy recommendations that benefit people. I can't be dissuaded if a bunch of people who aren’t thinking clearly decide to engage in mob Twitter.

Though the occasion of his post is obvious now, it goes unmentioned so we should note for posterity that armed guards hired to protect schoolchildren instead stood by at a school shooting in Texas this past week.

Massachusetts cases were up a fifth of a percentage point on Friday.

Interlude: The Orthopox That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Alex Berenson reports the impending sudden end to the monkeypox scare, as the news gets out that it's only affecting gay men, after gaining a foothold at a couple of gay raves in Europe:

The good news is that the public health authorities are now likely to pivot fast away from trying to scare people about monkeypox, for fear of stigmatizing gay men (by letting them know too much about what happens at these raves).

[...]

Added bonus: the same epidemiologists who wanted to lock you and your kids up for the last two years for Covid, a disease that poses approximately no risk to them, are now sure to let you know that MANDATES AND GOVERNMENT EFFORTS TO CHANGE BEHAVIOR NEVER WORK!

Day 843: Boosting Severity

The bad cat counts up adverse effects of boosters in VAERS and finds them even deadlier than the original shots:

the surge of boosters in the US began in September 2021.

this is precisely the same time the spike in deaths and hospitalizations per day per dose per day started.

so this is NOT an artifact of just dosing more, we’ve already controlled for that. the per dose incidence of death and hospitalization rose 4X immediately, seems to have plateaued for a minute, then found another step function spike in late january early feb and basically increased 5X from its already 5X elevated level. that is actual exponential growth in propensity for severe bad outcomes per dose.

such a thing is extremely unusual to see and would appear to be of such magnitude as to make a simple rise in reporting rates appear highly unlikely, especially as the overall reports figure does not mirror this pattern, retains linearity, and shows no major moves during this spike in more severe outcomes.

[...]

VAERS is supposed to function as a tripwire, a warning system. it’s the canary in the vaccine coal mine.

american public health officials appear to be literally treading on a carpet of dead songbirds so thick that feet have not touched floor in nearly two years.

In an afterthought he realizes what the second spike might be:

addendum (post publication) another possibility just occurred to me: this second surge in severe outcomes might be associated with 4th doses (second booster). i have no data on prevalence or timing there, but if this is the cause, then we’d have real cause for alarm as it would imply that each incremental boost looks 5X worse than before. purely speculative, but perhaps fertile ground for inquiry.

In other VAERS news, Children's Health Defense reports the illicit deletion of 10,000 severe adverse reactions to COVID vaccines from the database.

P.S. In other vaccine news, the FDA rubber-stamped another booster today, this time for five-year-olds, without any clinical trials for efficacy, and with minimal safety data. It did not reconvene the advisory panel because the advisory panel already said not to do that.

Here at PlagueBlog Headquarters, we follow the science, not political decisions made by the FDA against scientific advice.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a quarter of a percent on Friday.

Day 832: Scrapieing the Bottom of the Barrel

If you've heard the wild stories about experimental mRNA vaccines causing cancer and prion disease but brushed them off because the mechanism by which they might have such outrageous effects is unclear, the bad cat has some bad news for you:

a nasty ringer is the emergence of the GGGG quadruplex (made easier by adding more G’s) which can cause neurological disease and bind to prions.

this may actually be quite a lot worse in that it appears that you do not even need a full quadruplex for this to happen. duplexes will do if the protein can fold in such a way as to generate what is effectively a quadruplex binding site and thus based on THIS study, all of these sites can play this role: (i) d(TGGGGT), (ii) r(GGAGGAGGAGGA) and (iii) d(GGAGGAGGAGGA) can serve as a quad.

this appears to facilitate the transition of PrPc into its pathologic isoform.

that’s bad.

If you don't recognize PrPSc in the above, just keep in mind that now is not the time to take up cannibalism. And in the future, avoid new technologies that have gone down in flaming failure with horrific side-effects in every previous trial, but are allegedly working perfectly this time.

Speaking of the trials, Steve Kirsch, not content with breaking the news of all-cause mortality being up for the vaccinated in Britain by their own numbers, has also publicized evidence of what the internet cats call pfraud in the latest data dump: Pfizer fraud? Or just great execution? He waffles on whether what happened in Argentina was actual fraud, but of course there were yet more side effects that never made it onto the label:

Neither Augusto’s pericardial effusion, nor another volunteer’s penile vein thrombosis, appear to have found their way into the reported side effects of this trial.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a third of a percentage point today.

Day 829: Counterproductive Boosting

Eugyppius goes into the German and some Israeli data on the pointlessness (lit., stupidity) of spring boosting, and of boosting the young at any time. He also talks a bit about why he isn't blogging much at this low-COVID moment.

Here in New England we're having a high-COVID moment during everyone else's low-COVID moment. The bad cat has made a series of posting asking why:

• a funny thing happened on the way to herd immunity
• is new england covid hospitalization data being retroactively adjusted down?
• meanwhile, back in the northeast

From his latest (Saturday):

[the northeast] continues to be about the only CONUS cases hotspot going (apart from what seems to be some border crossing issues in TX)

and it’s flowing into the hospitals. but it’s, for the most part, only affecting the old. and the pattern looks the same pretty much everywhere (and may be understated in recent days as this series can take time to fully update)

[...]

this looks nothing at all like herd immunity. this looks like the other thing…

[...]

i keep hoping this is not going to be the awful set o[f] outcomes that seem emergent and i could, of course, still be wrong, but in the battle of biology vs ideology, biology remains undefeated and the intersection of leaky vaccines and antigenic fixation is a very high risk place and that risk rises over time.

no one seems to want to talk about this trend just now, but i think it bears serious watching.

something untoward is going on in the northeast and if it keeps getting bigger at this rate, it’s going to pop back up on the radar soon.

Day 826: 1001 Collapses

On the cure for soccer front, the Good Sciencing count has hit 1001 unusual collapses in and around sportsball, with 649 deaths. If you haven't checked them out in a while, they've added some spontaneous soccer death statistics from before the vaxx plague; it turns out that an average year doesn't quite equal January of a vaxx plague year.

The Washington Post reports on efforts to vaccinate more people in Infected Shenzhen. They explain the low vaccine uptake among China's elderly: unlike the West, China focused on those likely to spread the virus and not on reclusive retirees.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a quarter of a percent today.

Day 823: When Masks Kill

New in Medicine is the eponymous Foegen effect, a mechanism by which facemasks contribute to the COVID-19 case fatality rate, by Dr. Zacharias Fögen. (The things people put their own names on these days...)

A parallelization analysis based on county-level data showed that in Kansas, counties with mask mandate had significantly higher case fatality rates than counties without mask mandate, with a risk ratio of 1.85 (95% confidence interval [95% CI]: 1.51–2.10) for COVID-19-related deaths. Even after adjusting for the number of “protected persons,” that is, the number of persons who were not infected in the mask-mandated group compared to the no-mask group, the risk ratio remained significantly high at 1.52 (95% CI: 1.24–1.72). By analyzing the excess mortality in Kansas, this study determines that over 95% of this effect can solely be attributed to COVID-19.

These findings suggest that mask use might pose a yet unknown threat to the user instead of protecting them, making mask mandates a debatable epidemiologic intervention.

The cause of this trend is explained herein using the “Foegen effect” theory; that is, deep re-inhalation of hypercondensed droplets or pure virions caught in facemasks as droplets can worsen prognosis and might be linked to long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. While the “Foegen effect” is proven in vivo in an animal model, further research is needed to fully understand it.

The latest batch of Pfizer data came out yesterday, but so far no smoking guns have been spotted.

Massachusetts cases were up a sixth of a percentage point today.

Day 814: Negative Efficacy Numbers

PlagueBlog apologizes for taking a spring break during an exciting week that saw the end of federal transportation mask mandates as well as a damning preprint (hosted by The Lancet) RCT meta-study showing excess mortality caused by Pfizer's mRNA vaccine. (That is, it killed more people with side effects than it saved from COVID.) The bad cat has the details:

this rush to EUA not only allowed a seriously rigged drug trial methodology to be used (ignoring or misattributing the ill effects of immuno-suppression post dose 1 and for 7 days post dose 2, both know[n] and serious issues deliberately designed out of assessment despite the fact that all those getting the jabs would experience them) but also more or less ignored the overall mortality data despite the fact that it was not only available, but unfavorable.

certain felines were heard to describe it as “not so much as a vaccine study as an instagram selfie”

it appears these danish researchers are coming around to this viewpoint as well.

this was always available data. there were few deaths in the pfizer trial overall as the enrollees were generally young and healthy. 79% had zero comorbidities.

and they clearly played some games. they called a death in the vaxx arm “covid pneumonia” to avoid having a “covid death” and excluded it when calculating VE.

there was also a significant cardiovascular risk signal. this is why more people died overall in the active arm than in placebo. in the moderna trial, overall mortality was exactly equal in the 2 arms.

It is surprising that Moderna, which is known for having more side effects from its larger dose, actually broke even in the save-grandma/kill-grandson trade-off, but even more surprising is that Johnson & Johnson, the vaccine the regulators actually pinned a few deaths on and (occasionally) regulated, was the safest and most effective of the bunch.

This must be what the kids these days mean by "clown world".

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a seventh of a percentage point on Friday.

Day 802: Data Fraud, Simplified

Mathew Crawford posted a summary of the DMED/DoD vaccine data fraud situation early this morning:

The best way to understand the DMED saga is to forget what you've heard about it. Wipe your mind clean of the details and start over. The data results shared in January were likely incorrect, and the Department of Defense (DoD) comeback appears to be an ugly deception. This will be easier to understand after I explain what I believe did happen as clearly and as simply as possible.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a ninth of a percentage point today.

Day 800: No News is Censored News

This week was notable for the end of British COVID data transparency. Alex Berenson reported the hiding of embarrassingly disproportionate cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among the vaccinated.

But hiding the numbers won’t make the vaccines work better. It will just make people less likely to believe anything else public health authorities tell them about Covid and the vaccines - if that’s even possible at this point.

Their excuse for the sudden change was too silly to repeat here.

Speaking of silliness, Berenson also reports on the entertainingly failed criminal case of "US v. Bored-Rightwing-Potheads", otherwise known as the plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan.

Even by the standards of FBI-enriched “terrorism,” this was thin gruel.

Nonetheless the bluechecks bluechecked hard for this one. Right-wing militias were now taking aim at elected officials!

This was the media party line for the last 18 months, despite mounting embarrassments as the case moved ahead. Those included fact that the FBI fired the lead agent on it after he was arrested FOR BEATING HIS WIFE AFTER FORCING HER TO ATTEND A SWINGERS PARTY.

True story. Can’t make it up. Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity, Gangbangery, that’s the slogan, right?

I think that aptly summarizes the last 800 days. ("Can't make it up", not "Gangbangery", just to be clear.)

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a tenth of a percentage point on Friday.

Day 795: Delusional Rain Dance

Eugyppius rips into Chinese containment policies:

Let us rehearse some recent history:

Lockdowns and mass testing and contact tracing and masking are all Asian (primarily Chinese) policies, adopted en masse and with little forethought by western countries in Spring 2020. Our public health mandarins set aside their own planning and opted for Chinese mass containment instead, because they noticed the virus was not very deadly in Asia, and they assumed this was because whatever it was the Asians were doing was the thing to do. Mass containment is a worldwide delusional rain dance: Everyone hops about trying to coax water out of the heavens, copying whatever dance was current in the first place it started to rain.

Crucially, virology has a very primitive and inadequate understanding of how viruses actually circulate. Virological doctrine is that they ought to behave the same everywhere, but they don’t. [...]

There are many theories about why SARS-2 hit Asia so softly. Probably, the Asian-Pacific populations enjoyed some kind of prior immune protection, which would explain why the later, immune-resistant variant strains of SARS-2 have coincided with higher mortality in the East.

But the main point is this: Countries which did well early in the pandemic got another kind of virus, the Zero-Covid kind. They adopted an eradicationist orientation; they believed their containment measures had succeeded, and the officials who had championed these measures ascended to new heights of prestige. This is what happened in China and throughout Asia, and it is what happened in Australia and New Zealand.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a fourteenth of a percentage point today.

Day 793: Australia Still in Fascin’

Australia seems determined to maintain their position at the top of the Most Fascist COVID Response crowd, now by forbidding doctors from publishing research that contradicts "public health messaging". Alex Berenson has the story:

Doctors are now being told they could face discipline for saying anything that contradicts “public health messaging,” even if what they are saying is “evidence-based.”

They may even face investigations for “authoring papers” that health authorities do not like.

Here in the US, we just ignore the evidence; we don't ban it outright:

Johns Hopkins University medical professor Marty Makary, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, asked sarcastically whether "bypassing the typical voting process" of the VRBPAC was "following the science."

Instead, the agency plans to convene its outside experts to "discuss" the FDA's decision, which is like "a judge issuing a verdict and then having lawyers make their arguments," Makary wrote in a tweet thread.

"There is zero clinical data that a 4th dose reduces hospitalization risk," he said. "There isn't even any evidence that a 3rd dose reduces hospitalization risk in young people."

Here at PlagueBlog we follow the science by following the science, not by ignoring the science. And certainly not by stomping on the science in our jackboots...

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up nearly a tenth of a percentage point again on Friday.

Day 790: Two Shots are Better Than Four

Even the New York Times is pessimistic about a fourth shot (2nd booster) for anyone but the seriously ill or seriously old, but the Wall Street Journal one-ups them by dissing the first booster, too:

The FDA reportedly will authorize (but not recommend) the fourth shot for patients over 50. But if your immune system is healthy, three or even two doses of these mRNA vaccines should be sufficient.

Vaccine-induced protection against infection is short-lived and doesn’t get much of a boost from extra shots. Yet the initial two-dose regimen is enough to provide most patients excellent protection against severe disease—mediated by durable cellular responses, not the neutralizing antibodies that rise and wane quickly after vaccination.

Speaking of shots, the Chinese went gunning for Fido briefly, then allegedly backed off.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up almost a tenth of a percentage point today.

Day 789: Taylor Hawkins' Heart

While initial reports and later snide elisions attributed Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins' sudden death in Columbia to an overdose, the current word is that he was as toked as the average drummer, and instead died of "cardiovascular collapse", apparently caused by a massively swollen heart:

Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, who died Friday in Colombia, had a heart that weighed double the average for men his age [50], according to a new report.

Forensic experts during an examination found Hawkins’ heart weighed “at least 600 grams,” double the average of 300 to 350 grams (three-quarters of a pound), the Daily Mail reported Sunday.

While long-term drug use can cause swelling of the heart, the band is also rumored to have been fully vaxxed.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a twelfth of a percentage point today.

Day 786: DMED Fraud, Part 2

In a follow-up to his initial DMED fraud post, Mathew Crawford charts the allegedly "glitch[y]" data.

Day 785: No One Left to Resign at the FDA

Vinay Prasad is appropriately incensed at the White House for bypassing the pesky advisory committees and unilaterally declaring a 4th shot of ineffective mRNA COVID vaccines against an extinct COVID strain, plus a 5th shot if you're over 50. While he titled his blog post "The White House is now your doctor!" and he makes at least 8 great points, his most telling point was #7, that there's no one left to resign at the FDA. Another great quote:

They are skipping the ad-com [advisory committee] because they know many smart people will disagree with them, and consider their plan reckless, and lacking data. These people will give great quotes.

PlagueBlog eagerly awaits the great quotes to come.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a fourteenth of a percentage point again on Friday.

Day 783: The Daily Activities of a Two Year Old

The bad cat tears Moderna a new one over their "successful" COVID vaccine trial in ages 6 months to 6 years:

moderna has been far less forthcoming than even pfizer on adverse events (or if there have been more disclosures, i haven’t seen them) but we do have some. (per CDC)

grade 3 generally means “unable to undertake daily activities.”

grade 4 generally means “needs urgent medical care/hospitalization.”

[table of adverse effects by grade omitted]

this is a quite limited list, but it shows that we’re in the neighborhood of 20.5% of the vaxxed being unable to perform daily activities when we sum the 2 doses.

[table of "local" effects by grade omitted]

we pick up another ~11% grade 3 from local (though how that overlaps is unclear) so we can use a range of 20%-32% unable to undertake daily activities at some point in the vaccination regimen. about 0.1% were grade 4 and probably hospitalized/urgent care.

The cat also notes that no study participants were hospitalized for COVID itself, which poses vanishingly small risk to children at this age. The cure is literally worse than the disease.

The cure is also horrifyingly worse than the disease, when you consider what the daily activities of a two-year-old actually are. Here at PlagueBlog Headquarters we asked our underage intern about it, and she tossed some puzzle pieces onto the floor. In other words, it's not rocket science. It's not even submitting crappy statistics to the innumerates currently running the FDA about how it's a great outcome to injure children with a vaccine that does not even prevent the disease.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a fourteenth of a percentage point again today.

Day 782: Push Your Luck Games

Today's big news was that Moderna seems to have skipped right past the main myocarditis years to making a poor, leaky vaccine for the under-six set. PlagueBlog recommends against digging any deeper into the hole of government-guaranteed immunity from liability, especially where innocent children are involved. It didn't end well in Love Canal and it's unlikely to end well for the mRNA vaccines, either.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a fourteenth of a percentage point today.

Day 781: Covidese

We have a very young intern here at PlagueBlog Headquarters, in relation to whom arose the question of what were the most memorable words or phrases to come out of the COVID plague years. I prefer the bad cat's "Baysian datacrime," though what he's really talking about there is "immortal time," another vital concept to carry out of the pandemic (if there is ever an escape from the pandemic).

Today he outdoes himself with "they took the wheels off the trebuchet," the short summary of a long discussion of the apparent contradiction of so many employees burning out while working in their PJs:

your boss got more and more annoyed about calls being truncated to “go make lunch for the kids” or “because the rug cleaning guy is here” or “to see what the dog is freaking out about.” these are not things of the office. the office is, by design, meant to keep them out because they are distracting as hell and they break workflow and atomize it. they waste other people’s time. you probably did 100 of these things. perhaps you realized they were annoying to co-workers and employees, perhaps you didn’t. but, it started to create a new kind of license to demand accommodation and a sort of passive aggressive tit for tat of “well yes, i AM chopping onions because last week you were eat[ing] pizza!”

no one’s time is “their time” anymore. it’s all “our” time. this sets up a full blown tragedy of the commons. no one owns the resource of time, so no one takes care of it. everyone tries to overconsume and it gets grabby.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a twentieth of a percentage point today.

Day 780: MIT's Mask Anti-Mandate

Steve Kirsch blogs about MIT's new mask policy, which appears to prevent mini mask mandates from campus groups after the campus mandate and all relevant city mandates have been revoked. NBC has a bit more on the story. However, here at PlagueBlog Headquarters we heard about the policy changes from a campus group that is still trying to guilt attendees into wearing masks despite the anti-mandate.

One thing the news has missed is that, while the vaccination requirements remain draconian and myocarditis-inducing for MIT faculty, staff, and students, they have also been relaxed (to completely optional) for most visitors. This is easy to miss because different policy pages say different and opaque things about it, but the events policy page is clear that the TIM ticketing system is now optional and that vaccination is only recommended to attend events, while the general vaccination policy page restricts vaccine requirements to TIM ticket holders; vaccination of any sort is merely recommended for other visitors.

That you need prior experience with the Gemara to parse MIT's COVID policies is not particularly surprising, but it is surprising that a campus that was locked down for two years is now so open that visitors can not only breathe the air but walk about unvaccinated. None of the reports have really explained this change of heart, though if we were going to get a random outbreak of numeracy, MIT is certainly be the appropriate place for it.

Day 779: CDC Wrong Again

The Washington Examiner reports that the CDC has retracted 24% of all pediatric COVID deaths after it turned out they were reporting an unknown percentage of non-COVID deaths as COVID deaths this year. They also misreported an unknown, inflated percentage of adult deaths.

I checked out the usual suspects on this point, expecting to find far more horror than I did at the innumeracy at the CDC that didn't blink at reporting nearly 75 spurious pediatric deaths a week at the beginning of this year, when that number is 10% of all pediatric COVID deaths for the entire multi-year pandemic, and thus more than ten times what it should have been.

Day 773: Zero Shenzhen

The Guardian reports that China has locked down Shenzhen, a city of seventeen million near Hong Kong, in their latest attempt at Zero COVID:

No one can leave the city except in special circumstances and with a negative test result obtained within 24 hours prior to exit. Local communities and residences had established monitoring teams with a “warm-hearted service hotline”, it said.

The restrictions are due to stay in place until at least 20 March, adding Shenzhen to a number of other cities under various restrictions, including China’s most populous city Shanghai, and the northeastern city of Changchun in Jilin province. Of the 1,938 new cases confirmed on Sunday, more than 1,400 were in Jilin.

Day 770: Zero COVID, Anyone?

Somerville suddenly and unceremoniously dropped our mask mandate last Saturday, citing the mood at the CDC. This isn't as exciting as it sounds, because we're increasingly a city of condominiums largely served by shops in neighboring Cambridge. Their indoor mask mandate ends this coming Sunday.

The bats have come home to roost in China, where their Zero COVID policy is working about as well as it did for New Zealand:

On Friday, the authorities in Hong Kong said that the city’s hospital mortuaries had filled up so quickly amid a sharp Covid outbreak that body bags were being crammed into wards with patients who were still being treated for the virus.

“For some of the bodies, we have not been able to move them from the wards to the mortuary,” said Sara Ho, the chief manager of patient safety and risk management at Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority. “It may cause some concerns among patients.”

Massachusetts cases were up a twentieth of a percentage point yesterday. There were no body bag buildup concerns among our 290 hospitalized COVID patients.

Day 767: The Opposite of Working is Failing

The bad cat can caterwaul at times, but two of his recent posts have been calm explanations of the research showing variant-specific boosters are just as useless as the original boosters (with a side of original antigenic sin), and the looming apocalyptic dangers of original antigenic sin.

On the bright side, Massachusetts cases were up a mere thirtieth of a percentage point today. Mask mandates are falling across the commonwealth, and the poop level is so low that the MWRA had to redraw the graph to make it visible.

Day 761: Document Drop

The March batch of the FDA's Pfizer vaccine documentation has appeared at the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency website. Be sure to sort by Date Produced to see what's new.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a sixteenth of a percentage point today.

Day 760: The Poop Plummets Faster Than Vaccine Efficacy

The news of the day in Massachusetts is our plummeting COVID poop rates, kindly log graphed by redditor u/Delvin4519, of child mask mandate mapping fame.

Also of note is the exceptional ineffectiveness of Pfizer's vaccine in children. It's so bad even the New York Times reported it:

The numbers for protection from infection are more reliable [than claims about hospitalization]. Vaccine effectiveness against infection in the older children decreased to 51 percent from 66 percent. But in the younger children, it dropped sharply to just 12 percent from 68 percent.

We await the batch of FDA Pfizer documents that ought to have been released today. Perhaps they will appear in the customary spot momentarily. PlagueBlog recommmends not holding your breath, however.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a thirteenth of a percentage point today.

Day 759: Disrespect

The bad cat is in rate form today on the topic of "respect" for other people's useless masks:

if others are vulnerable then we need to provide real protection, not the illusion of safety.

a false football helmet is worse than none at all. you’ll behave as if you are protected when you are not. you’re going to get your head split open.

what would be the moral duty on a football field if you saw another player walk out onto the gridiron with a helmet made of old cereal boxes? would it not be to warn them that this was not going to protect their head?

Day 758: Public Malaise

Vinay Prasad lights into the corrupt institutions of public health and their role in abusing people, especially children, with masks, school closures, and other pandemic theater that left them less healthy than before—on the occasion of the NYC school system ending their WTF-inspiring outdoor mask mandate:

Let’s reflect on this for a moment. NYC school district has been requiring children wear masks OUTSIDE all this time. Years after we knew the virus almost never spreads outside. During recess when kids play, forced to wear a mask while exerting themselves. Wow!

Whoever made the policy is an idiot. No way around it. They are not fit for policymaking. They abused the power of government to coerce children (at incredibly low risk of bad outcomes) to wear a mask in a setting where the virus simply does not spread. In other words, they participated in something done in the name of public health, which actually made human beings worse off. Worse, they used coercive force to do it.

Post-COVID we need to seriously talk about setting restrictions. But not on people. We need to place restrictions on public health and things done in the name of public health. We cannot allow individuals who are poor at weighing risk and benefit and uncertainty to coerce human beings, disproportionately the young and powerless (waiters/ servers) to participate in interventions that have no data supporting them, for years on end.

Unfortunately for us, he can go on at some length about what idiot government functionaries and their ignorant fellow-travellers in the private sector have been up to without exhausting the subject.

Day 757: Metro Minor Mask Map

Reddit user Delvin4519 has put together a map of Greater Boston child abusers public school system mask mandates. Not surprisingly, it's worse the closer you get to Boston proper.

Here's a MSM story that takes the long COVID cake: The trucks have left Ottawa, but 'phantom honking' lingers for many downtown.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a twelfth of a percentage point yesterday.

Day 755: Another Day, Another Bad Mask Paper

Vinay Prasad debunks yet more sketchy mask statistics:

All this means is they think they are matching trajectories [between masked and no-mask counties], but the actual pandemic is almost surely doing different things. If I were to bet, it is more steep and brisk in no-mask mandate places. Then the mask mandate is implemented, and of course, covid-19 spread, which is non linear, may grow substantively over time, but that is going to happen disproportionately more in no-mandate counties as they started time zero with much brisker epidemic spread.

This is a damning limitation that thwarts the entire paper in my opinion. It cannot be saved by back calculations. Trust me, I wasted an afternoon in excel trying. Finally, this likely explains why the effect size seen here is too good to be true. Free surgical masks and strong advocacy had an 11% relative risk reduction in Bangladesh and cloth failed entirely. How can a mask mandate— mostly cloth masks let’s be honest— achieve a 20-35% reduction in cases? I suspect mismatching is the root reason why the effect is too good to be true.

And he's only warming up. He also discusses the fear factor, where people ineffectively mask (mandate) up and effectively social distance out of fear, but the masks get all the credit. Apparently there are even more statistical sins below the fold, but the PlagueBlog budget does not cover Substack subscriptions so our reporting ends here. Alex Berenson reports on an event entirely unrelated to COVID: Greta Thunberg invades the Ukraine.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a tenth of a percentage point today.

Day 754: The Billing Data

The bad cat reports on a treasure trove of vaccine side effect data: insurance billing in Germany.

this seems a sensible approach.

doctors [may] avoid filing vaccine adverse events reports with agencies. it’s extra work and they are under pressure not to. BUT they are going to bill for treatment. because doctors always bill for treatment.

The adverse event rate was many times that in the German version of VAERS, although the data is only for early 2021 so far. It may prove even worse later in the vaccine rollout. All-cause mortality also rose above average later in the rollout, despite the increasing immunity of the population to COVID.

P.S. Eugyppius also takes a look at the insurance data.

P.P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a sixteenth of a percentage point today, though on account of the holiday, this may be a displaced Tuesday lull and not fully representative of current case counts.

Day 748: Inconvenient Truths

Public Health Scotland has decided to stop publishing statistics by vaccination status because the mean anti-vaxxers keep pointing and laughing at them. Both eugyppius and Igor Chudov point and laugh even harder over it.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a sixth of a percentage point.

Day 746: The Bat Lady Again

You're going to have to read between a lot of lines to get any useful information out of Jane Qiu's latest Bat Lady puff piece in MIT Technology Review. Or, you can let the Internet de-Lysenko it for you:

Paul Thacker opens with a history of the CCP's fascist interference in local and Western media, including locking up anyone who reports seriously about what was once fondly nicknamed Wuhan Flu:

The reason we never learn anything about Shi Zhengli’s military research seems obvious: Jane Qiu understands that her role as science writer is to make happy talk about science, not to offend the Chinese government. When Qiu was called out for this on Twitter, she protested to the contrary, forcing reporter Keoni Everington of Taiwan News to call Qiu a liar for an “insult to our intelligence.”

Thacker covers the hair style puffery as well as most of the already-discredited arguments in defense of Shi Zhengli that appear in the story—Laos, the wet market, the missing database, etc.

Eugyppius also lays into this execrable propaganda piece, but focuses on a discredited argument that didn't even make Thacker's list, about the Yunnan cave:

As you might expect, nobody at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has any interest in disclosing new information, which leaves Qiu with little to report that we didn’t know already. Just a lot of the same old dissimulations, with the occasional update.

The most interesting of these surrounds the Mystery of the Mojiang Cave. The story goes that workers were cleaning up bat droppings in this abandoned copper mine in Yunnan province in the spring of 2012, when six of them fell ill with pneumonia. Shi’s lab tested blood samples to see if they’d contracted SARS or a SARS-related virus, and afterwards the Wuhan virologists developed a persistent interest in the Mojiang mine. Among the bat samples collected there, they claim to have found RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARS-2.

Note all of the bizarre coincidences you must live with, if you believe SARS-2 has natural origins: You have to imagine the virus just happened to enter humans via some zoonotic event in Wuhan, the only city on earth with a lab devoted to sampling and culturing SARS-related bat coronaviruses like SARS-2, where its closest known relative also just happened to be sitting in a freezer. And we haven’t even gotten to the furin cleavage site yet.

It is curious, then, that nobody can ever get the story straight, about what happened with those mine workers.

[Some lies omitted.]

In Qiu’s article we find the latest excuse: “Shi said her team did not find such antibodies, although she said some early tests did produce false positives that were corrected when the assays were fully validated.” So, the miners tested positive for SARS, before they tested negative for SARS. The only problem with this lie, is that it can’t explain why Shi and her team ever took an interest in the Mojiang mine in the first place:

It’s not unusual for respiratory illnesses to have an unknown cause, but even though Shi couldn’t figure out what had sickened the Mojiang miners, her instinct told her that something interesting might be going on. “What viruses were lurking in the cave?” she remembers wondering. Between 2012 and 2015, her team undertook more than half a dozen trips to the mine shaft, about 1,100 miles from Wuhan, and collected 1,322 bat samples.

Emphasis mine. Shi found nothing in the miners’ blood, but decided nevertheless that the distant cave where they got sick was the perfect place to spend three years sampling bats for SARS-related coronaviruses. Totally by coincidence, bats in the cave turned out to be full of SARS-related coronaviruses, including RaTG13.

While Eugyppius is more entertaining in general, Thacker does a better job at mocking the moral grandstanding of the Mother of Pandemics (nickname mine):

It’s Qiu’s collection of colorful facts—Shi Zhengli’s short wavy hair and beige sweater; her colleague’s neatly trimmed bangs and turquoise-colored T-shirt—and the studied lack of interest in critical evidence—Shi Zhengli’s military research for a fascist government—that should give readers pause for concern. Instead, we are treated to Shi Zhengli’s disapproval of us when her “girlish face suddenly dimmed” and she begins to berate those who question the Chinese government:

“I’ve now realized that the Western democracy is hypocritical, and that much of its media is driven by lies, prejudices, and politics.”

Shi paused and drew a sharp breath. Her body tensed, blood flushing her cheeks. The air swelled and seemed to grow hotter.

“They’ve lost the moral high ground as far as I’m concerned,” she said.

We Westerners really appreciate lectures about the moral high ground from someone whose personal body count is quickly approaching six million.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a tenth of a percentage point.