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The paper has not been peer-reviewed, and its author, Andre Redert, is a computer scientist, not an epidemiologist (which is arguably a point in his favor).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