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.

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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.