Day 730: A Sudden Reversal

The Telegraph reports that, in a sudden reversal, the UK is about to end vaccine mandates for National Health Service and "social care" workers, citing possible shortages of 80,000 workers.

In local news, our two year COVIDversary is coming up. Details to follow...

Day 729: Truckers

As the Canadian vaccine mandate trucker protest approaches both Ottowa and comical counterproductivity, the Aussies are also getting in on the action.

In local news, WBUR notes our falling sewage levels but says to remain worried, especially abuot Omicron, The Sequel.

Day 728: Weathervane Says It’s Gonna Snow Tonight

Vinay Prasad takes a scathing look at the harms caused by COVID "weathervane" commentators:

What is a weathervane? You will recognize them— they are frequently on TV news giving updates on the pandemic. These are people in biomedicine, who may even have fancy titles and lofty ranks, and they are good at averaging what people think, and offering that point of view. Their method is simple: read the mainstream news outlets, closely follow academic twitter, and average the opinion of people they see. Of course, they are averaging the last few days, so they are always a lagging indicator of sentiment among the media and elites.

Weathervanes often have similar characteristics. First, they self identify as ‘science communicators’ and less often as ‘scientists.’ Some have published papers, but these are often un-original and plodding. Rarely, in their scientific work have they held a position or stance against others in their own field or discipline. Almost never has their work taken place on a controversial issue, in the midst of a scientific debate.

P.S. Massachusetts case numbers were up only half a percentage point today.

Day 727: The Misinformers

Some of our favorite substacks made it into The Guardian's hit piece on the alleged COVID misinformation industry. Rather than linking unreliable sources like the U.K. legacy media, we refer our readers to eugyppius' overview of the misinformation misinformation campaign.

P.S. Eugyppius launched a counter-strike against the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Massachusetts cases were slightly up, at three fifths of a percentage point.

Day 726: Above the Law

It's a big day for thinking oneself above the law. The FDA has decided that, because it hired reviewers who can't read, it won't be meeting the court-ordered FOIA deadline for the next 55,000 pages of Pfizer vaccine data.

A school system in Riverside, NY is refusing to abide by the state supreme court order overturning mask requirements in schools. For their part, angry post-COVID parents refused to take back their unmasked children yesterday.

A similar standoff took place in Virginia:

Fairfax County Public Schools made a show of defying Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s order that schools respect parental rights on masking on Tuesday, with an assistant principal standing in front of the school to suspend students without masks, and a public relations staffer who said the media was not allowed to watch the conflict between state and local governments play out.

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

Day 725: The Omicron Hypothesis

It sounds like an episode of Star Trek, but it's a substack post series by Mathew Crawford, currently at three parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. He actually covers seven hypotheses about the origins of the Omicron variant, as well as the reasons one might be spouting wild theories about such a mild and unassuming "variant". If you've missed any omicrankiness, from the patents to the lab leaks to the variant's variant, it's in there, along with the author's even wilder conspiracy theory.

Massachusetts cases were up five ninths of a percentage point for the Tuesday lull.

Day 724: Something is rotten in Denmark

The opening line of Alex Berenson's latest post makes a better title than his title (AN URGENT WARNING). Most of his rot is in Israel, where vaccination continue to counterproduce the most Omicron cases, including one percent of the population of the country on Saturday. He advises a precipitous halt to all vaccination because, to paraphrase, WTF?

His earlier post, Moderna stock is falling faster than Covid vaccine effectiveness, is the real title winner for the day, especially when you throw in the opening zings:

I’m joking, kids! Nothing is falling faster than Covid vaccine effectiveness.

And unlike vaccine effectiveness, Moderna stock has a zero lower bound.

Massachusetts cases were up only about two-thirds of a percentage point a day over the weekend and today.

Day 723: Are the Numbers Really Up?

It's a shame "casedemic" was coined in the medieval times of the COVID pandemic, because that bon mot would fit today's omicrommon cold statistics better than ever before.

Vinay Prasad's guest blogger, Dr. Sebastián González, goes into detail about the problems and cost of "overdiagnosis and overtesting", that is, medicalizing every old fragment of viral DNA in evidently healthy people. Some of the issues are quite meta:

Consider the UK, which is now planning for the absence of up to 25% of workers from their workplaces due to covid19 cases. Overtesting could per se, overwhelm the health care system (particularly during covid19 surges) if healthcare workers (HCW) are isolated without need, reducing the HCW force, leading to worsening outcomes and increasing mortality due to hospitals and ICUs constraints. People will die when the people who should be taking care of them are needlessly isolated at home and the quality of care lowers.

Overtesting has ballooned to an extent in which testing capacity becomes overwhelmed. Paradoxically, the healthcare system can be jeopardized by the increasing demand of testing by those seeking covid19 tests.

Given how little over-the-counter rapid COVID testing from various companies wuth friends at the FDA resembles the early days of highly-rationed, broken tests direct from the CDC, is it any wonder our current numbers look higher? Whether they really are higher is one of those questions we may never get a straight answer to.

Day 722: The Legacy of Tamiflu

In a scathing editorial, the BMJ lights into COVID vaccine manufacturers for their lack of transparency, recalling "the Tamiflu saga" of twelve years ago:

The BMJ supports vaccination policies based on sound evidence. As the global vaccine rollout continues, it cannot be justifiable or in the best interests of patients and the public that we are left to just trust “in the system,” with the distant hope that the underlying data may become available for independent scrutiny at some point in the future. The same applies to treatments for covid-19. Transparency is the key to building trust and an important route to answering people’s legitimate questions about the efficacy and safety of vaccines and treatments and the clinical and public health policies established for their use.

Twelve years ago we called for the immediate release of raw data from clinical trials. We reiterate that call now. Data must be available when trial results are announced, published, or used to justify regulatory decisions. There is no place for wholesale exemptions from good practice during a pandemic. The public has paid for covid-19 vaccines through vast public funding of research, and it is the public that takes on the balance of benefits and harms that accompany vaccination. The public, therefore, has a right and entitlement to those data, as well as to the interrogation of those data by experts.

Day 721 Retrospective: With COVID

On Friday the truth came out about Massachusetts COVID stats: only half the patients usually reported as hospitalized for COVID are actually sick from the disease. The numbers are still a bit wonky, though:

To identify patients admitted for COVID-19, the Baker administration is using the drug dexamethasone as a proxy. The powerful steroid, used to quell the inflammatory storm in severely ill COVID patients, is also commonly used to treat other conditions, such as septic shock or swelling in the brain.

On the Godwin's Law front, the pet owners of Hong Kong appear to be hiding their hamsters from the genocidal government, perhaps under the floorboards.

Massachusetts cases were up just over a percentage point.

Day 720: The Tiniest Victims

The news of the day was looking to be our poo again, but China has decided to cull a bunch of hamsters because eek, tailless rat COVID, of course:

Officials said on Tuesday that it was not clear that the virus had been transmitted to humans from imported hamsters. But they called on residents to surrender hamsters imported since Dec. 22 to be tested and euthanized to prevent any further spread.

“They’re excreting the virus, and the virus can infect other animals, other hamsters and also human beings,” said Thomas Sit, assistant director of Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation department. “We don’t want to cull all the animals, but we have to protect public health and animal health. We have no choice — we have to make a firm decision.”

Massachusetts cases were up about one and a twelfth percent again today. The MDPH is still putting the data in a random spot instead of the archive.

Day 719: The Curious Case of the Barking Nazis

Yesterday the sequel came out to David Cole's column The Curious Case of the Barking Nazis, but it turned out to be much more politics than COVIDics. Let us instead travel back in time a week to when Dr. Robert Malone's appearance on Joe Rogan was still news and Nazis were still barking mad:

So you invite a Covid “mRNA scientist” on your show and the segment that goes viral involves not science but history.

How the hell does that happen?

Last week, when Joe Rogan hosted social media exile Dr. Robert Malone, the phrase that rightists came away repeating like Pollys wanting crackers was “mass formation psychosis” (MFP).

The term went so viral the AP fact-checked it (yes, the AP fact-checks theories now. Please do CRT [critical race theory] next).

Malone invoked MFP to explain public manipulability during the pandemic. MFP, he said, “comes from European intellectual inquiry into what the heck happened in Germany in the ’20s and ’30s” when “a very intelligent, highly educated population went barking mad” because people had “free-floating anxiety and a sense that things don’t make sense” and “their attention was focused by a leader on one small point, just like hypnosis.” Thus “they literally became hypnotized and could be led anywhere,” so they attacked “the other [Jews]” because Hitler told them to.

Hitler laser-focused a hypnotized, anxiety-ridden people on the Jews, and a highly educated population went “barking mad.”

Except that’s just not how it went down. Malone was repeating a bad Facebook meme (“Ever wondered how the Germans blindly followed a madman and killed six million Jews? Now you know! Please like & share”).

David Cole is a Holocaust historian, so he goes on at length about how it really went down, and concludes:

So what’s my point, beyond trying to appeal to the dog demographic by saying “bark” a hundred times (to all my new canine readers, Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy? You are! You are!)? When you rely on stale clichés like “Hitler hyp-mo-tized the Germans who went mad and killed the Jews,” you miss out on understanding the actual mechanics of how these things happen. You rob yourself of the ability to comprehend.

That's promising, but he gets back onto today's left-right politics instead of today's COVID-driven madness. PlagueBlog questions whether it was really one wrong point of history that stuck from the Joe Rogan show. If so, then it stuck because we are a crazed mob now, regardless of when exactly the pre-war Germans went barking mad. But I think Cole got this impression from overactive censors. Even if you can manage to censor five hundred thousand (alleged) vaccine deaths, there's no stopping Godwin's Law.

As of press time, the MPDH had not published today's numbers to the archive, though we did find it elsewhere afterwards.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up about one and a twelfth percent.

Day 718: More COVID Humor

The Babylon Bee comes through again with a new, improved COVID test, and the bad cat provides one meme above the fold:

Day 717: Genes for COVID

A Polish study has found more in a lengthening line of genetic predispositions toward more severe COVID. In Google translation:

[Marcin Moniuszko and Mirosław Kwaśniewski] have identified a genetic variant that more than doubles the risk of severe disease and death from COVID-19. It is estimated that even 14% of Poles have it, although in the overall European population it occurs with a frequency of about 9%. According to the authors of the discovery, it could help in the early identification of those most at risk.

You may also have heard about the recent Neanderthal DNA result, or a previous study out of Sweden. There's also a genome browser.

The MDPH seems to be taking the holiday off.

Day 716: Intracranial Infections

Steve Kirsch reports rumors of increased intracranial infections and asks whether it's caused by masks, vaccines, or PCR swabs. (Mere chance is never an option.) The comments are pretty divided, though some commenters are going with "all of the above".

Day 715: Don't Stop Believing

A little pandemic humor from Jon Rappoport for the weekend: “Help me. I stopped believing in the virus.”

When did you stop believing in the virus?

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment. I was watching a cooking show a few weeks ago. The host was making a shrimp dish. I fell asleep and had a dream. Dock workers were throwing cases of vaccine vials into the ocean. When I woke up, I felt lighter. My daughter called from college. She said she was taking a leave from her studies and coming home. Her thesis advisor had just been fired for writing an article defending the 1st Amendment. I miss my daughter. I was glad she was coming back.

And then you stopped believing?

I think it was around that time.

Did something traumatic happen to you?

No. I lost my cat for a few hours, but I found her in the living room closet.

Any marital problems?

No. But I haven’t told my husband I stopped believing.

Why not?

He wears a mask when he goes out in the backyard to work in the garden.

I see. So I would call what you’re experiencing a spontaneous suspension of belief.

Is it serious?

It could lead to irrational actions. We don’t have a mental disorder label for it yet, but I have seen it in a few patients. It’s a regression into childhood, basically. A person abandons responsibility.

It goes on like that.

Day 714: Prisoner’s Dilemma

The bad cat has some interesting speculation about bad vaccines as a prisoner's dilemma:

this [prisoner's dilemma thought experiment] is obviously a gross oversimplification and the reality of secondary attack rates etc, but it raises a potentially REALLY interesting question:

is omicron really this much more contagious or is it vaccines MAKING it this much more contagious?

i have not yet looked at this, but it seems a promising avenue to explore perhaps by comparing the testing adjusted rates of omi growth in some high vaxx vs low vaxx places of similar demographics.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up only one percent today.

Day 713: The Supremes Split the Difference

Today the Supreme Court effectively struck down OSHA's novel vaccine mandate but upheld CMS's novel vaccine mandate.

On the topic of whether you should be taking novel vaccines, Alex Berenson digs up some very interesting data from Alberta (bottom of the page), substantiating negative efficacy in the first fourteen "immortal" days after vaccination.

P.S. The local poop is definitely in freefall.

P.P.S. Somerville is trying to come late to the vax mandate party.

Massachusetts cases were up one and five-ninths of a percentage point today, which is down from yesterday but not plummeting like the poop.

P.P.P.S. Alex Berenson reports the Alberta government has already censored their own data, but you can find the smoking gun in the Wayback Machine if you missed it.

Day 712: Immortal Time Datacrime

The bad cat explains the immortal time fallacy using saline (and calls it datacrime). But the transient immune depression from the jab make the numbers even worse:

those who get a booster are, for at least 14 days, MUCH more likely to get sick. this is high hit probability fire to run across. the risk, in the middle of an omicron surge, is very high to begin with. this is not a time you want to be immuno-suppressed.

and if they do get sick, likely because they got the booster, they are not counted as a booster illness. they get counted as a “double vaxxed.”

[...]

clearly, boosted is the highest risk group in our example.

but it will read as the lowest.

[...]

this definitional deception has literally taken a product that increased risk by 47% and made it look like 58% VE. note that this is UP from the 48% it reported as saline. yup, swapping in a product that does actual harm will, under these measurement modalities, read as HIGHER vaccine efficacy than saline. this calculation mistakes harm for benefit.

Note that while these infection numbers don't dispel claims that the vaccines reduce severity, bad cat has his paws on some numbers that do imply it's original antigenic sin all the way down.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up one and seven-ninths of a percent today, which was more than the Tuesday lull but less than last week's highs.

Day 711: When 500,000 Americans Died and Nobody Noticed

A Redditor dredged this 2012 Vioxx story out of the wayback machine (the live page is paywalled). Once again, it stars crazed madman Ron Unz, doing the math that nobody else bothered to. In this case he extrapolates 500,000 deaths from Vioxx out of the excess mortality for the years it was on the market:

Senior FDA officials apologised for their lack of effective oversight and promised to do better in the future. The Vioxx scandal began to sink into the vast marsh of semi-forgotten international pharmaceutical scandals.

Then in 2005, as he now remembers it, Ron Unz "was reading my morning newspapers, as I always do, and noticed tiny items about an unprecedented drop in the American death rate. Hmm I said, I wonder if that might have anything to do with all those other stories about that deadly drug recently taken off the market and all the resulting lawsuits."

The year after Vioxx was pulled from the market, the New York Times and other media outlets were running minor news items, usually down-column, noting that American death rates had undergone a striking and completely unexpected decline. These were what Unz, a dedicated news browser, was reading.

Typical was the headline on a short article that ran in the 19 April 2005 edition of USA Today: 'USA Records Largest Drop in Annual Deaths in at Least 60 Years.' During that one year, American deaths fell by 50,000 despite the growth in both the size and the age of the nation's population. Government health experts were quoted as being greatly "surprised" and "scratching [their] heads" over this strange anomaly, which was led by a sharp drop in fatal heart attacks.

[...] Unz went back to those 2005 stories. Quick scrutiny of the most recent 15 years worth of national mortality data provided on the US Government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website offered Unz some useful clues.

"We find the largest rise in American mortality rates occurred in 1999, the year Vioxx was introduced, while the largest drop occurred in 2004, the year it was withdrawn," says Unz. "Vioxx was almost entirely marketed to the elderly, and these substantial changes in the national death-rate were completely concentrated within the 65-plus population.

"The FDA studies had proven that use of Vioxx led to deaths from cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes, and these were exactly the factors driving the changes in national mortality rates."

The impact of these shifts, Unz points out, was not small. After a decade of remaining roughly constant, the overall American death rate began a substantial decline in 2004, soon falling by approximately five per cent, despite the continued ageing of the population. This drop corresponds to roughly 100,000 fewer deaths per year. The age-adjusted decline in death rates was considerably greater.

"Patterns of cause and effect cannot easily be proven," Unz continues. "But if we hypothesise a direct connection between the recall of a class of very popular drugs proven to cause fatal heart attacks and other deadly illnesses with an immediate drop in the national rate of fatal heart attacks and other deadly illnesses, then the statistical implications are quite serious."

Unz makes the point that the users of Vioxx were almost all elderly, and it was not possible to determine whether a particular victim's heart attack had been caused by Vioxx or other factors. But he concludes: "Perhaps 500,000 or more premature American deaths may have resulted from Vioxx [the author's italics], a figure substantially larger than the 3,468 deaths of named individuals acknowledged by Merck during the settlement of its lawsuit. And almost no one among our political or media elites seems to know or care about this possibility."

The Reddit thread also implicates Pfizer's related withdrawn drug, Bextra, which, while deadly enough, doesn't seem to have been quite the silent overlooked killer that Vioxx was.

The moral of this story is don't be so sure that you'd necessarily notice hundreds of thousands of excess deaths due to heart complications of a wonder drug that the drug company knew about all along.

In local news, an intrepid PlagueBlog reporter notes that the COVID sewage numbers are no longer shooting straight up.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up about 1.5% for the Tuesday lull.

Day 710: Djokovic Released From Concentration Camp

After spending the weekend in an Aussie Impfung Macht Frei camp, unsuspecting tennis player Novak Djokovic is free on visa. He may even get to play tennis, though seeing the police tear-gas his fans and other rubberneckers today, along with the looming threat of yet another jackbooted functionary re-revoking his visa, can't have inspired much confidence in the reigning Aussie Open champion.

Massachusetts cases were up approximately one and two-thirds percent daily over the weekend and today. The promised new hospitalization numbers are on their way into the MDPH, but won't be out until Thursday, or possibly a week from Thursday, due to the reporting schedule.

Day 709: Missives from the Ministry of Truth

The bad cat agrees with PlagueBlog about the truthiness of the fact checkers:

we, the experts, have asked a couple people hand-picked to tell us what we wanted to hear and decided that there is no such thing as the thing we dislike and are now playing a semantic game around a chosen name and descriptor to deny as a matter of lexicography the existence of the underlying mechanism that it describes.

a 24 year old media studies major from vassar who could not get a more impressive job than “anonymous truth minister at a failing masthead” said so.

so, the matter is settled.

Coming tomorrow from the MDPH: real hospitalization numbers.

Day 708: Concentration Camp Fail

Australia exceeded 100,000 cases in a day for the first time yesterday, despite the best efforts of fascism (though due in part to a reporting backlog).

In unrelated news, it seems you can no longer tweet "Impfung Macht Frei" in Germany.

Day 707: The Latest Numbers

The Omicron numbers are still through the roof, even without counting a zillion mild, untested cases. But the more interesting undercount is of vaccine side effects. The European passive surveillance system, EudraVigilance, hit the following total on New Year's Day:

• Total reactions for the mRNA vaccine Tozinameran (code BNT162b2, Comirnaty) from BioNTech/Pfizer: 16,471 deaths and 1,546,829 injuries
• Total reactions for the mRNA vaccine mRNA-1273 (CX-024414) from Moderna: 10,170 deaths and 465,080 injuries
• Total reactions for the COVID-19 vaccine JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S) from Johnson & Johnson: 2,245 deaths and 114,229 injuries
• Total reactions for the vaccine AZD1222/VAXZEVRIA (CHADOX1 NCOV-19) from Oxford/AstraZeneca: 7,371 deaths and 1,117,914 injuries

The numbers were compiled by Health Impact News, where they are broken down further by symptoms and also displayed in a handy table.

VAERS Analysis shows 21,000 deaths, a million injuries, and 110,000 hospitalizations through December 24th due to COVID vaccines. Eugyppius continues to track negative vaccine efficacy in Britain.

Real Science continues to track the soccer vaccines sudden athlete collapses (412) and deaths (242). In a similar vein, Australia appears to have lured Novak Djokovic and other tennis players into the country with promises of vaccine exemptions only to toss them into their concentration camps.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up two and a third percent today.

Day 706: The Rubber Stamp, the Xerox Machine, and Babies

The CDC gets out the rubber stamp to approve boosters for twelve-year-olds at 5 months, although such young children are still at no statistical risk for non-mild COVID. Surprisingly, someone on the advisory committee voted against; look for a replacement committee member soon.

On the bright side, the FDA lost its baseless case to ignore a legitimate FOIA request for Pfizer's vaccine license application, and has been ordered to release 55,000 pages a month rather than their requested 500. This reduces the amount of time to Xerox the whole thing from 75 years to about 9 months.

The ongoing unmitigated disaster that is COVID vaccination has dredged up more than just an old AIDS controversy and ineffective flu vaccines. Yet another thing that the CDC denies is the role of childhood immunizations in SIDS and other sudden "unexplained" infant deaths. In fact, applying either math or history to the situation makes it apparent that SIDS is largely due to the vaccination schedule rather than historical staples like blankets, pillows, and stuffed animals, or sleeping position. This has been known for quite some time, and continues to be borne out in VAERS and elsewhere:

Prior to the introduction of organized vaccination programs, "crib death" was so rare that it was not mentioned in infant mortality statistics. In the United States, national immunization campaigns were expanded in the 1960s when several new vaccines were introduced and promoted. For the first time in history, most U.S. infants were required to receive several doses of DPT (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus), polio, and measles vaccines. (The measles vaccine was administered at 9 months of age from 1963 to 1965). Mumps and rubella vaccines were also introduced in the 1960s. By 1969, an alarming epidemic of sudden unexplained infant deaths impelled researchers to create a new medical term—sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). By 1972, SIDS had become the leading cause of post-neonatal mortality (infant deaths occurring between 28 days and 1 year of life) in the United States. In 1973, the National Center for Health Statistics, operated by the CDC, created a new cause-of-death category to document deaths due to SIDS.

You may have heard that the "Back to Sleep" campaign reduced SIDS, but what it actually did was coincide, for reasons that are not entirely clear, with changes in the coding of infant deaths:

From 1999 through 2001, the number of U.S. deaths attributed to "suffocation in bed" and "unknown causes" increased significantly. Although the post-neonatal SIDS rate continued to decline, there was no significant change in the total post-neonatal mortality rate. According to Malloy and MacDorman, "If death-certifier preference has shifted such that previously classified SIDS deaths are now classified as 'suffocation,' the inclusion of these suffocation deaths and unknown or unspecified deaths with SIDS deaths then accounts for about 90 percent of the decline in the SIDS rate observed between 1999 and 2001 and results in a non-significant decline in SIDS."

The trend toward reclassifying sudden infant deaths under alternate ICD codes is an ongoing concern. From 1999 through 2015, the U.S. SIDS rate declined 35.8% while infant deaths due to accidental suffocation increased 183.8%. According to Lambert et al., "There is evidence of a continuing diagnostic shift between SUID subtypes," but "there has been little change in overall SUID rates since 1999."

This makes it even more disturbing that the FDA, killer of babies, has forced Owlet to turn their SIDS-interrupting Owlet Smart Sock baby pulse-ox into a glorified sleep monitor.

Massachusetts cases were up two and a quarter percent today.

Day 705: Omicancellations

Rio has cancelled Carnivale. Sundance has gone virtual, again. Chicago has cancelled classes because the teachers refused to come in.

Flight cancellations continue, and have even increased post-holiday.

In local news, Arisia has been cancelled ten days out. Massachusetts cases were up over 30,000 today, or almost 2.6%.

Day 704: Rewriting the Past

The title doesn't refer to the ongoing parade of pro-crazies pedalling deperately backwards, but to what Ron Unz calls the revival of the Duesberg Hypothesis, the most respectable of the many theories of how HIV fails to cause AIDS. RFK Jr. covers it in unexpected detail in his recent book about Fauci, Torturer of Beagles, perhaps because early, poisonous AIDS drugs did more to kill (potential) patients, and faster, than HIV did. The analogy to Pfizer's vaccine against soccer COVID would have been hard to pass up.

Massachusetts cases were up 1.6% today. While that's down from late last week, it's likely just the Tuesday doldrums. Check back tomorrow for more record-breaking.

Day 703: 12σ Deaths in Indiana

The man of the new year, Dr. Robert Malone, commenting on some extreme non-COVID life insurance claim numbers in Indiana in 2021, asks What if the largest experiment on human beings in history is a failure?

It's clear from the frequent partial bans of the various vaccines and their negative efficacy that it's been a failure. A better question would be, "What if the largest experiment on human beings in history is an unprecedented, unmitigated disaster?"

Mathew Crawford puts the 12σ number onto the 40% increase in deaths of working age Hoosiers:

Davidson [head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica] described a 10% increase in mortality as a 3-sigma (standard deviation) event, so that makes 40% a 12-sigma event. That's statistics talk for how far from ordinary unusual events are. For clarification, a three-sigma event should happen around once every 300 or so years and a six-sigma event should happen once every 300,000 or so years. We're talking about the proportion of the area under a normal curve that is shaded in proportion to the total area. We would really need to zoom in on it quite a bit to detect with the naked eye.

A 12-sigma event is where geeky statisticians who have seen enough tables to know the round-numbers by heart have to look up the capacity of their software package to see if it's well enough powered to perform the calculation. Whatever it is, it's far more likely that an asteroid collides with Indiana tomorrow, ejecting 400 basketball-sized fragments as it falls that each make a perfect swoosh through the nets in every cornfield basketball hoop in the Hoosier state two seconds before destroying all of human civilization (really, I computed that in my head).

Steve Kirsch searches desperately sarcastically for the elusive cause of so many unexpected deaths, and notes that the press is ignoring the story.

Jessica Rose summed it up better than we can:

So what does this tell us? It tells us that we are potentially in a huge steaming pile of shit.

The solution is absolutely not jabbing the children even more, like the FDA arbitrarily decided to do today.

P.S. We're still waiting to see whether the MDPH is open for business today.

Day 702: Ontario Omicron Original Antigenic Sin

Negative efficacy data continues to drop out of those few places that are on top of data collection in this new Omicron Year. One of those places is Ontario:

it shows something incredibly interesting. it shows vaccines working to stop cases until mid december and then suddenly inverting. this is presumably due to omicron.

vaccination just fell to a -33% VE for cases and this looks to be worsening rapidly, likely because of a rise in omicron prevalence.

this is consistent with not just vaccine escape, but vaccine driven acceleration.

the vaccinated are getting covid at higher rates than the unvaxxed and that rate looks to be increasing rapidly as omi gains viral share.

many are denying this and calling it a simpson’s paradox (SP) where each subgroup is actually showing strong VE but where the way they aggregate causes the net figure to invert and imply an erroneous relationship that does not actually pertain. such things have been common in covid data.

i think this claim is incorrect.

firstly, if this is an SP, then why did that not manifest before? why did the relationship for case reduction invert so suddenly? it was certainly not a massive, sudden change in who was vaccinated.

Day 701: Omicron Severity

Omicron seems mild enough here at PlagueBlog Headquarters, but a preprint out of Manchester, England portends hospitalization numbers proportional to those from Delta:

Using data from the Virology laboratory at the Manchester Medical Microbiology Partnership (MMMP, a partnership between UKHSA and the Manchester Foundation Trust), we have extracted a real-time feed of Omicron samples from hospitals across Greater Manchester, an area of the United Kingdom with a population size of approximately three million individuals. Omicron hospital samples are growing exponentially across Greater Manchester (doubling time 2.7 days (95% CI: 2.1, 3.7)). The proportion of Omicron in hospital samples follows a similar trajectory to the SGTF [S-gene target failure, an Omicron trait] proportion in cases, but with a two-day offset. This is consistent with the delay from testing positive to hospital admission, implying a similar proportion of Omicron cases are converting to hospital admissions as for Delta cases. Comparing the Greater Manchester data to national hospitalisation data, similar tends are observed. Therefore, there is no signal of a substantial reduction in hospital admission risk with Omicron, and Omicron epidemics are likely to place a substantial burden on public health infrastructure.

While this wasn't the pattern from South Africa, vaccination rates were low there while they are high in Britain. Considering the negative efficacy of the vaccines and the media's inflated idea of the severity of "average" COVID cases, it seems entirely possible that Omicron could end up just as much of a problem as any previous variant of COVID ever was—which is to say, flu-like. Bad flu seasons have overwhelmed JIT healthcare systems in the past.

So it's not necessarily the mildness of Omicron that's led to the backpedalling of COVID craziness you may have observed lately; its pervasiveness alone is enough to blow all the bad statistics of the pandemic out of the water. Once anybody can do the math of vaccine and mask (in)efficacy on their fingers, the cat is outta the bag.

Interlude: A Chemical Hunger

A Chemical Hunger, an interesting series on the author's unique theory of obesity, ended in November. It began in July with a dramatic restatement of the mystery of obesity:

The study of obesity is the study of mysteries.

The first mystery is the obesity epidemic itself. It’s hard for a modern person to appreciate just how thin we all were for most of human history. A century ago, the average man in the US weighed around 155 lbs. Today, he weighs about 195 lbs. About 1% of the population was obese back then. Now it’s about 36%.

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Another thing that many people are not aware of is just how abrupt this change was. Between 1890 and 1976, people got a little heavier. The average BMI went from about 23 to about 26. This corresponds with rates of obesity going from about 3% to about 10%. The rate of obesity in most developed countries was steady at around 10% until 1980, when it suddenly began to rise.

Today the rate of obesity in Italy, France, and Sweden is around 20%. In 1975, there was no country in the world that had an obesity rate higher than 15%.

This wasn’t a steady, gentle trend as food got better, or diets got worse. People had access to plenty of delicious, high-calorie foods back in 1965. Doritos were invented in 1966, Twinkies in 1930, Oreos in 1912, and Coca-Cola all the way back in 1886. So what changed in 1980?

Common wisdom today tells us that we get heavier as we get older. But historically, this wasn’t true. In the past, most people got slightly leaner as they got older.

And that's just the start of the mystery episode.

Spoilers: Later, the author (or authors; the about page is quite vague) decide pollution must be the answer. Even later, the suspect pollutant is revealed to be lithium.