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.

Day 745: Reading Between the Lines

The bad cat explains how to read between the Lysenkoist lines to the Darwinist truth of today's scientific papers. His example involves the possible negative efficacy of vaccines after six months, but it's the pattern that disturbs:

in the age of the internet, this sets up a bizarre and deeply frustrating conflict: those who can and do really read studies are constantly having to pick them apart and explain to the “google and spam” crowd who just selectively confirm their biases and skim the lead paragraph of a study why the study they just cited does not, in fact, say what they are claiming it does.

and, of course, trying to convince someone that the authors deliberately misstated the facts in the summary is like trying to teach a new trick to the very oldest of dogs. they are just not having it.

Day 742: The FDA Backs Off

The FDA, after egging Pfizer on in their premature submission of an ineffective COVID vaccine for toddlers, has now punted the advisory board meeting until Pfizer has tested their third dose. It's unclear why they backtracked so suddenly; the least likely explanation is the one they gave about always following the science:

Since the early days of the pandemic, we have always followed the science in this ever-changing situation. Given the recent omicron surge and the notable increase in hospitalizations in the youngest children to their highest levels during the pandemic so far, we felt it was our responsibility as a public health agency to act with urgency and consider all available options, including requesting that the company provide us with initial data on two doses from its ongoing study. The goal was to understand if two doses would provide sufficient protection to move forward with authorizing the use of the vaccine in this age group. Our approach has always been to conduct a regulatory review that’s responsive to the urgent public health needs created by the pandemic, while adhering to our rigorous standards for safety and effectiveness. Being able to begin evaluating initial data has been useful in our review of these vaccines, but at this time, we believe additional information regarding the ongoing evaluation of a third dose should be considered.

Vinay Prasad is strangely disappointed in this good news:

Now, facing the prospect of a negative advisory vote, the FDA walks back the meeting itself.

What are they thinking? We have far more at stake than just this vaccine— we have the fate of all vaccines on the line. What will the American people think about this vaccine with these flip flops? If a vaccine is ultimately approved at these ages, a huge chunk of Americans may never trust it. Worse, many may stop trusting all the vaccines we have had to protect from childhood illnesses for many years. Already some states are floating regulations to remove all vaccine mandates. That would not be good. Finally, trust in the FDA may crater entirely as it appears the White House is controlling the day to day decisions of the agency.

If a kids vaccine is someday approved, what will the uptake be? We currently have ~20% uptake in 5 to 11, this vaccine is poised to do even poorer given all this drama.

We agree that flip-flopping is bad, but what's the alternative at this point? Surely not crapshots in arms?

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

Day 741: Tell the FDA Off

Steve Kirsch recommends telling the FDA off during the comment period for their insane consideration of Pfizer's ineffective and unsafe vaccine for children under 5, for whom the trials showed it was particularly ineffective. (Fortunately it's also completely unnecessary at that age.) Instructions for commenting are at the link.

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

Day 740: The Sudden Reversal

The New York Times stuck a nose in the air and felt an unmasked breeze. More specifically, they catalogued an encouraging number of retractions and expirations of pointless mask mandates. Even the crazies at The Atlantic want to end the madness already, even if they have to back down on every media lie of the pandemic to do so.

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

Day 739: Hot Lots

Mathew Crawford goes into detail about how baseless (yet still possible) the theory of bad lots of COVID vaccines is.

Certain lots can, mathematically, have more adverse events reported against them without being in any way different than others, because they were distributed in settings where reporting to VAERS is more likely. He mentions long term care facilities and red states; the political likeliness of adverse event reporting can be misinterpreted as a conspiracy where Big Pharma is trying to kill conservatives.

Hot lots are just the lots put into hot patients. He accumulates some evidence that earlier lots are associated with more side-effects, but they also went into the elderly, who suffer more side-effects, at higher rates.

Aspiration (the practice of injecting the vaccine properly) can also be associated with lot, when the same lot got into hands with similar training. While PlagueBlog is fond of aspiration theories, this is the first place we've seen it suggested that anyone aspirated anywhere in the US during the pandemic of the vaccination. If he or the hot lot sites have some European data, then this is a valid consideration.

Taking just these considerations (and perhaps those I haven't thought of) into account, I can easily imagine data that appears to suggest "hot lots", but ultimately represents other issues of varying concern. While this certainly does not fully dismiss the HLH, our simplest and primary reasons to be skeptical of the HLH could potentially explain all of the observed effects. However, we should thank all of the investigators looking into this problem, both because the HLH may yet turn out to be true, but perhaps more importantly because that investigation may help shed light on other serious issues.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his numeracy, Mathew Crawford is a conspiracy theorist, so he can't just leave it at that. He adds a fourth point that lot sizes vary, and says (boldface omitted):

At this point I'd like to offer a middleground hypothesis. It could very well be that a large part of the noisy AE batch distribution is due to points 1-4 that I made earlier. It could also be that there are a small number of toxic batches within all of that which resulted in additional harms.

Day 738: Falling Apart

Eugyppius has a long reader report on "containment collapse" experiences around the globe, including Canada:

On Thursday night, Ottawa was still relatively quiet, although there were a lot of Canadian flags flying from pickups and SUVs. Regular folks who got in their cars, pickups, SUVs, and vans beat the convoy to Ottawa on Thursday night and early Friday morning.

Around 10 AM on Friday, January 28, the HONKING began. Day 1 of The HOONKENING. People in pickups, cars, SUVs, vans were starting to pile into town, and they began jamming up roads in the downtown core, most importantly Wellington St, the street the Parliament buildings sit on. As far as I can ascertain, the first big trucks arrived from the Southwestern Ontario leg a couple of hours later. They, too, piled up on Wellington St and other roads in the downtown core and held their horns down.

Seemingly, entire hotels in Downtown Ottawa were booked out by protestors. I walked the streets of downtown with a group of friends on Friday night. Despite the temperature hovering somewhere around -27℃, the city was one giant block party. Folks were screaming at the top of their lungs for "FREEEEEEEEDOM!!!!" firecrackers and fireworks popped off intermittently, HOONKING was incessant. One woman was running around with her shirt off, wearing body paint that said "My Body, My Choice," while a burly gent wielded dual Canadian flags wearing nothing but his underwear and some steel-toes.

People actually had fun in this country for the first time in two years.

Day 737: The Defense Medical Epidemiology Database

We missed the DMED whistleblower news, but Daniel Horowitz covered it all in an op-ed at the Blaze earlier this week. He ripped into the military's lame excuses for the circa 300%–2000% increases in a bunch of apparently vaccine-related diagnoses appearing in the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database in 2021:

This is in addition to the original data Renz revealed to Sen. Johnson showing a tenfold increase in diagnoses for neurological issues, a 300% increase in miscarriage diagnoses, and a total cancer diagnosis increase of about 300%.

One would think this data would be the biggest national news story for the ensuing week, but the revelation was met with radio silence. Then, late Monday night, PolitiFact finally drops its obligatory “fact-check” and posts the first and only response from a defense official. Shockingly, they validate the data, but suggest without cause that somehow the 2016-2020 data in the system was all a glitch and that they will get to the bottom of it.

[Quote omitted]

What’s next? Are they going to tell us the VAERS data from 1990 through 2020 was just a glitch, in order to accommodate the new 2021 sky-high baseline?

This statement, taken at face value, is the equivalent of a political and national security nuclear bomb that requires immediate follow-up questions just to make sense of it, yet PolitiFact takes this absurdity at face value and goes on to rule the articles on the DMED data “false.”

Putting aside the feasibility of such a statement for a moment, the implication of this assertion would be that the entire military health surveillance system was 100% broken on every diagnosis code for five straight years. This is the expensive database whose purpose is described by the military as “granting military health officials unprecedented access to epidemiologic data on active component service members and tailored queries that respond in a timely and efficient manner.” That in itself is a huge national security issue, and Thomas Renz and his military whistleblowers deserve a medal for “discovering” it.

It goes on like that for quite a while.

Day 736: The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Mask Study

While the public's patience for the endless flow of bad mask papers seems to be waning, Vinay Prasad remains alert and ready to tear into the recent nadir of mask studies:

Ultimately, the CDC & NIH failed us. The agencies should have run a half dozen masking cluster RCTs under different conditions, and for different ages. We were starving, and we needed this loaf of bread. Instead, the CDC published flawed study after flawed study. It didn’t even give us crumbs; it gave us a fistful of sand. Starving, we swallowed each grain, and begged for more. Medical leaders told us to fill our bowl before it runs out. Science lies on its deathbed.

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

Day 733: Groundhog Day Again Again

This is where I say, "the groundhog saw its shadow, which means we'll be having six more months of COVID." But the real quote of the day comes from eugyppius on Omicron:

Your immune system isn’t going to invest heavily in fighting minor threats, and in this it much wiser than our governments and public health establishments.

I heard this one on the news this morning and had the same reaction as Alex Berenson: Just another healthy 49-year-old having a stroke...

In totally unrelated news, the COVID vaccines continue to make progress towards eliminating the scourge of soccer in our lifetimes.

Day 732: Year 3, Day 1

Year 3 of COVID in has produced the strange spectacle of the FDA begging Pfizer to apply for emergency vaccine use in children under 5 despite its being ineffective in that group. (They gave up on it actually being an emergency several age brackets ago.)

Massachusetts cases were up less than a fifth of a percentage point today.