Day 1246: The Erstwhile Preprint

You have to be quick in post-COVID clown world, not taking the week off for the holiday. We at PlagueBlog intended to blog the amazingly anti-vaxx preprint "A Systematic Review of Autopsy Findings in Deaths after COVID-19 Vaccination" on The Lancet's preprint server while it was still up. We expected it to last longer than 24 hours. It seems the world wasn't ready for an estimated 700,000 American vaxx deaths, while the excuses were near at hand. We'll quote them because who knows what they'll be tomorrow:

This preprint has been removed by Preprints with The Lancet because the study's conclusions are not supported by the study methodology. Preprints with The Lancet reserves the right to remove a paper that has been posted if we determine that it has violated our screening criteria.

They cite a FAQ that, of course, does not say they take papers down for methodological reasons (though they do for ethical and other reasons), just that they reject preprints for methodology—which they clearly did not (by posting it in the first place).

Note that this tissue of lies is inserted in place of the paper's abstract. The Wayback Machine is watching, so you can read that much there:

Abstract

Background: The rapid development and widespread deployment of COVID-19 vaccines, combined with a high number of adverse event reports, have led to concerns over possible mechanisms of injury including systemic lipid nanoparticle (LNP) and mRNA distribution, spike protein-associated tissue damage, thrombogenicity, immune system dysfunction, and carcinogenicity. The aim of this systematic review is to investigate possible causal links between COVID-19 vaccine administration and death using autopsies and post-mortem analysis.

Methods: We searched for all published autopsy and necropsy reports relating to COVID-19 vaccination up until May 18th, 2023. We initially identified 678 studies and, after screening for our inclusion criteria, included 44 papers that contained 325 autopsy cases and one necropsy case. Three physicians independently reviewed all deaths and determined whether COVID-19 vaccination was the direct cause or contributed significantly to death.

Findings: The most implicated organ system in COVID-19 vaccine-associated death was the cardiovascular system (53%), followed by the hematological system (17%), the respiratory system (8%), and multiple organ systems (7%). Three or more organ systems were affected in 21 cases. The mean time from vaccination to death was 14.3 days. Most deaths occurred within a week from last vaccine administration. A total of 240 deaths (73.9%) were independently adjudicated as directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.

Interpretation: The consistency seen among cases in this review with known COVID-19 vaccine adverse events, their mechanisms, and related excess death, coupled with autopsy confirmation and physician-led death adjudication, suggests there is a high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death in most cases. Further urgent investigation is required for the purpose of clarifying our findings.

Funding: None.

Declaration of Interest: Drs Alexander, Amerling, Hodkinson, Makis, McCullough, Risch, Trozzi are affiliated with and receive salary support and or hold equity positions in The Wellness Company, Boca Raton, FL which had no role in funding, analysis, or publication.

The Wayback Machine is not so good at capturing weirdly-linked PDFs, so if you're looking for the paper, the precient folks at The Daily Skeptic have it here, along with their own reporting.

Here is the preprint's extrapolation of 700,000 deaths, not from the autopsies and causes they listed, but from a rather mild VAERS underreporting factor:

Pantazatos estimated that VAERS deaths are underreported by a factor of 20. If we apply this underreporting factor to the May 5th, 2023, VAERS death report count of 35,324, the number of deaths in the United States alone becomes 706,480. If this extrapolated number of deaths were to be confirmed, the COVID-19 vaccines would represent the largest medical failure in human history.

Day 1224: Patients Zero

An independent news substack reports on three patients zero, doing gain-of-function research on SARSes at the Wuhan Institute of Virology:

Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus.

As such, not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019, but also that they were working with the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and inserting gain-of-function features unique to it.

When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”[.]

“Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli,” said Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and coauthor with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid19. Shi is known as “the bat woman of China,” and led the gain-of-function research at the WIV. “He was her star pupil. He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanized mice. If I had to guess who would be doing this risky virus research and most at risk of getting accidentally infected, it would be him.”

So not wet-market pangolin shoppers after all.

Day 1213: The New Anti-Vaxxers

The failure of the COVID vaccines has led to generalized grassroots anti-vaxxing. But lately the sorts of professionals who used to preface their doubts about the mRNA vaccines with apparently sincere statements that "I am not an anti-vaxxer but..." have been coming out as anti-vaxxers.

I don't know whether it's the recent revelations about massive production issues with AstraZeneca, the latest autism numbers, or previous enormities like the CDC adding an emergency use vaccine to the childhood schedule that's pushed these people out the Overton window into anti-vaxxing, but once they arrive they usually mention autism (rather than, say, SIDS).

Recently vocal anti-vaxxers include Steve Kirsch, Dr. Peter McCullough, and Aaron Siri.

Day 1193: Letters to Walensky

The bad cat has joined the epistolary madness, writing his own, properly capitalized missive to lame-duck CDC head Rochelle Walensky.

This series of unfounded claims and distortionary definitions seems both a poor and a deeply dangerous practice for Public Health.

If we are to have any hope of restoring faith in this field, we must ask and answer the pointed questions of “How did this happen?” and “At whose behest?”

Someone made these choices for some reason. Who and why would seem to be the bare minimum of post mortem here.

It is oft opined that a bad map is worse than no map at all and in this, I must wholeheartedly agree. The public health agencies in America have become the most calamitous of cartographers.

Jessica Rose also reports on Dr. Lapado's missive exchange with the dens of vipers writers of "word salad" at the FDA and CDC (which we linked in passing last time).

Day 1189: The State of Non-Emergency

About a year and a half after all semblance of an emergency ended (with the just the flu Omicron wave), the federal government has finally put a stake into the state of emergency that would not die. Federal largess for free COVID tests and vaccines has officially dried up. Like welfare bonuses, the Medicaid extension ended a bit earlier, but what happens when to those who no longer qualify for Medicaid varies by state.

Holdout states like Massachusetts are quickly dropping any remaining mask, testing, and vaccination mandates as well as ending local states of emergency. The major healthcare networks have been sending out emails about what they're dropping, as though they had a choice and could continue enforcing masking or other measures without the state to back them up. Regardless, none of them seem to have the appetite for it any longer.

It's difficult to say which intervention was the least effective, but the one people on the ground are still the most attached to seems to be masking. The government, on the other hand, continues to push dangerous and ineffective vaccines.

P.S. ...except in Florida.

Day 1188: The Vaccines Fail to Work, Bivalent Booster Edition

For the last day of the state of emergency, here's a preprint about the boosters failing to provide any protection against the most current incarnation of COVID they considered. They phrase this in terms of various Omicron variants, but there doesn't seem to be any reason to assume it's about the particular variant rather than the passage of time, as boosting is calculated with a week of immortal time.

Despite the immortal time fallacy, they found that more jabs led to more cases of COVID, and that natural immunity led to less COVID:

The risk of COVID-19 also varied by the number of COVID-19 vaccine doses previously received. The higher the number of vaccines previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19 (Figure 2).

[...]

The multivariable analysis also found that, the more recent the last prior COVID-19 episode was the lower the risk of COVID-19, and that the greater the number of vaccine doses previously received the higher the risk of COVID-19.

They cite some prior speculation (immune imprinting and IgG4 issues with which PlagueBlog readers are familiar) about the causes of the increase in COVID with more jabs, and even dare to suggest that more jabbing may not actually be helping.

Day 1181: VAERS Still Full of Dead Bodies

As of two weeks ago, VAERS was up to over 35,000 deaths from various COVID vaccines (over 17,000 of them in the US) out of about 45,000 total deaths reported since 1990. Steve Kirsch hasn't given up on VAERS-watching or convincing people to acknowledge the body count, though he himself refrains from the VAERS underreporting math in that post. (It adds up to about 700,000 COVID vaccine deaths in the US to date.)

He has other interesting arguments for VAERS veracity that I don't recall from my first run-in with his numbers a year and a half ago, back when the body count was half what it is now. I think the most impressive argument is the imbalance of male to female deaths. Men are the weaker sex when it comes to vaccine side-effects, but people allegedly making politically-motivated VAERS reports don't know that. They certainly don't know to report only the male childhood deaths and no female ones. Pediatric deaths that aren't from skateboarding into traffic or genetic diseases are already an anomaly that needs explanation beyond because VAERS. A sex imbalance is just adding insult to the injury of the CDC ignoring them.

Day 1168: CDC Director Lies to Congress About Masks

Maryanne Demasi reports on CDC Director Rochelle Walensky lying to Congress regarding what she knew when about COVID vaccine efficacy (the truth: nothing), and what the Cochrane review has retracted from its famously damning mask review (the truth: nothing).

To be fair, many innocent bystanders have gotten the impression that Cochrane backed down or apologized and thus masks might still work despite the utter lack of evidence, via nonsense promulgated by Zeynep Tufecki. (For less paywall, see Vinay Prasad's angry recap of Tufecki's confabulations.)

But the Director of the CDC isn't supposed to be just another sheep getting her COVID info from the opinion page of the New York Times. She should know better.

On a completely unrelated topic, RIP former pro football player Chris Smith, 31, who has died of suddenly. We'd like to report more details, but none have been released, not even the date of his death. We are forced to conclude it was particularly vaxxy-looking, such as keeling over of "commotio cordis" at his first XFL practice.

Day 1167: Casualties

I have long thought that if the excess mortality rate is out of control, then whatever is causing those deaths must be causing significant morbidity as well, not to mention affecting labor markets. Back in January, the Vigilant Fox reported some numbers from Ed Dowd:

The following table, provided by phinancetechnologies.com, provides a summary of different statistics regarding changes in disability that occurred from February 2021 through November 2022. We’re going to be focusing on the red section.

[table omitted]

The number it gives is an increase in disabilities of (1,460,000 + 1,677,000) 3,137,000 in people between the ages of 16-64.

“In Wall Street,” explained Edward Dowd, “we focus on signals and frequency and rate of change. That was a three-standard deviation year-over-year rate of growth change — shouldn’t have happened.”

He makes much of the new disabilities being concentrated among the employed (allegedly due to vaxx mandates), and, more obviously, causing our national staffing woes.

Day 1166: A Vaxx Like Any Other Vaxx

Aaron Siri, the man who sues the FDA so you don't have to, wrote an excellent essay against the anti-vaxx talking point that certain mRNA products that fail to prevent COVID infection or transmission "aren't vaccines." Apparently the essay was restricted to his paid Substack subscribers at one point, but in the intervening two months has gone fully public.

If you're not familiar with the other non-sterilizing vaccines on the market, this essay is both short and educational. One omission is why the pertussis vaccine is non-sterilizing, but it's much like the other inactivated virus vaccines: the virus (or bacteria in some cases) runs rampant in some more external part of the body (e.g., the mucus membranes or the digestive tract) but is prevented from getting into the bloodstream or spinal column where it could do the most harm.

If this sounds like a just-so story to obscure the poor performance of inactivated virus vaccines in first-world countries where the diseases aren't circulating anyway, well, further research on this topic is left to the reader. There's no particular evidence that the COVID vaccines are achieving even this half-arsed immunity, so (if the others are) the mRNA vaccines could still be not-a-vaxx by most people's standards.

Non-sterility is not his only argument, though the remaining points are less about the definition of a vaccine and more about standards of vaccine (or drug) safety that the mRNA products violate. That it's been a long, slippery slope with littered with other bad vaccines is a sort of argument for yes-a-vaxx, though not the one he makes.

It's all worth a read, but the most horrifying example is the hepatitis B vaccine, which appears under both the yes-vaxxes-use-new-technology point (recombinant DNA) and the yes-vaxxes-are-largely-untested point:

The clinical trials for Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines each enrolled at least 30,000 people, reviewed safety for at least six months, and had a placebo control group for at least two months on average.

In contrast, most childhood vaccines had only days or weeks of safety review; typically far, far less than 30,000 participants; and virtually never had a placebo control. As an example, let’s use the very first vaccine on the CDC’s childhood schedule – the hepatitis b vaccine given on the first day of life:

[vaccine schedule chart omitted]

The safety review in the clinical trial relied upon to license this vaccine is similar to that of many other vaccines on the childhood schedule. In a word: useless. Now let me earn the use of that adjective.

There are only two brands of hepatitis b vaccines that are given to babies on the first day of life, Recombivax HB and Engerix B. Here is a summary of the clinical trial relied upon to license Recombivax HB for babies and children directly from the official FDA documentation:

[screencap omitted]

So, 147 children were injected with 5 days of safety monitoring after injection. The clinical trial for Engerix B (see page 6), the other hepatitis b vaccine given to babies, only had 4 days of safety monitoring after vaccination.

This seems so unbelievable that, on behalf of Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), my firm sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the FDA demanding copies of the clinical trial reports submitted to the FDA to license Recombivax HB, and you can see for yourself it was indeed five days of safety monitoring after each shot given to babies and children! For Engerix B we requested that the FDA only produce clinical trial reports that reviewed safety for more than a week and after 3 ½ years, the FDA has still never been able to produce a single such study!

[...]

And if you are thinking, as I did, that maybe, just maybe, a clinical trial or some other large, robust safety assessment occurred after licensure (even though it would be condemned by the medical community as unethical – to withhold an “effective” vaccine from children in the control group), you would be wrong.

Note that hepatitis B is a sexually transmitted disease; there is no reason to vaccinate an infant unless the mother carried it. Studies have shown that immunity does not persist well into puberty as was hoped when the whole boondoggle of vaccinating day-old infants began. (PlagueBlog recommends against this vaccine in infancy, even if it is a vaxx like any other vaxx.)

P.S.: Alex Berenson reports that the vaxx became like any other vaxx in yet another way today when the FDA nixed the storied two-shot series along with booster samsara (the eternal cycle of boosters) in favor of one bivalent shot for all but the most defenseless among us. This remains an emergency authorization, with no final, allegedly vetted product in sight (as the monovalent vaccines are now deauthorized).

Day 1162: An Anti-Vaxxer for President

RFK Jr. isn't just an anti-vaxxer, he is the anti-vaxxer. He'll be kicking off his presidential campaign in Boston next week. One wonders if he'll come out of the gate gunning for the CDC, and how many Republican and independent voters he can grab on COVID issues.

Dr. McCullough also reports on a research letter on bad batches of Pfizer's COVID vaccine in Denmark. While it looks pretty damning, due to their methodology the report actually fails to control for bad administration technique, which (as a systemic problem rather than an occasional random jab to a vein) could be highly correlated with batch number.

Day 1133: Pandemic Iatrogenocide

The bad cat speculates that modern pandemics are iatrogenic; the cure is the disease. The nominal disease is mostly harmless in the face of modern medicine, and only panicking and adopting dangerously untested new drugs can lead to pandemic-scale mortality. (Note that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, whatever their effectiveness against COVID, are safe and well-tolerated old drugs.)

there has NEVER been a seriously dangerous global pandemic in the post antibiotic era. there have barely been any that even warranted notice and pretty much no one living can recollect a shred of the last one.

and the odds on bet appears to be that had we not swerved around covid as though it were a tyrannosaur in the road instead of a squirrel, covid would almost certainly not have been one either.

let’s unpack.

as was the case in the spanish flu, perhaps the last truly high excess death global pandemic to bedevil humanity, much of the damage was done by horrible reactions. and the parallels may be more poignant than people realize.

one of the enduring causes of fear during the 1918 flu was the way that it seemed to be killing otherwise young and healthy people (especially soldiers) in a matter of days. they would be a bit sick then suddenly die of massive organ failure and “wet hemorrhagic lungs.” the progression was incredibly fast, seemingly irreversible, and was stacking people who really ought to have been low risk in mortuaries like cordwood. this made risk, CFR, and IFR look horrifying and fear near universal.

if it could do this to a solider in his prime in a matter of days, every last one of us should be terrified.

[...] but respiratory diseases are different and tend to spread far more. fatality rates are low. claimed spanish flu CFR was always suspicious in this regard. and there may be a reason:

there is actually quite a lot of convincing evidence that many of the “young, healthy deaths” in spanish flu were iatrogenic.

[...] loosely put, iatrogenic death is when the doctor kills you. and there is a long and unpleasant history on that one from benjamin rush bleeding george washington to death to killing “witchy” cats to stop a plague carried by the fleas of the very rats they were eating to (and especially) new “wonder drugs” that are poorly understood but that rapidly go into widespread use.

and one of those drugs was aspirin.

aspirin had just come into widespread availability in 1918 (and bayer was rushing it to market for the pandemic). it was the new wowie-zowie drug and doctors (and especially militaries) all over the world fell in love with it. they prescribed it widely to those with spanish flu. in doses ranging from 8 to 31 grams per day. oopsie.

a typical aspirin today is 325mg and max dosing per day is ~4 grams.

a toxic dose is 200-300mg/kg of weight. that’s about 20g for a 180 pound person.

31g is “you’re going to die really, really fast and there is not a damn thing anyone can do to stop it once you take that dose.”

this is why incredible caution should be exercised around large departures from tested and true medical practice and new pharma modalities and products.

stop me if any of this starts to sound familiar.

So we'll stop him there, though he goes into some detail about a 2009 paper about Spanish flu iatrogenic aspirin, and how ventilators and nursing home policy were COVID's aspirin. Strangely (for him), he doesn't mention the vaccines.

Day 1103: Masks Still Don't Work

Everyone and their brother has reported on the latest meta-study showing masks don't work. Just for example, Vinay Prasad lights into the "religion" of masking in "The Cochrane Review on Masks is Damning":

Here is the big summary finding. With 276,000 participants in RCTs or cluster RCTs, masking does nothing. No reduction in influenza like or Covid like illness and no reduction in confirmed flu or COVID. That’s stone cold negative. See those effect sizes and confidence intervals.

[table omitted]

This is why Fauci said what he said initially on 60 [M]inutes. He wasn’t lying. The best evidence showed no benefit. That was before we saw a concerted campaign to promote cloth masking—a bizarre way to treat anxiety. People routinely wore cloth masks outside—something that was less 21st century and more 3rd century, akin to animal sacrifice, and dancing to make the rains come.

The section on N95 masks was also devastating.

He recommends reading the whole thing. Eugyppius talks about pro-maskers' reaction to the news:

Plainly, the conviction that mask mandates were necessary came first; The Science followed. All the while, though, the evidence didn’t go away. It was just suspended slightly out of view, diluted with weak excuses and deprived of influence over policy, until the ideological fervour dissipated and the plain truth could be spoken again. The lesson is that regime authorities, particularly when they enjoy the collaboration of the press and academia, can tell almost any lie, but keeping the truth out of view requires active effort, and sooner or later their myths come crashing down. The mask mythology was among the first to take shape, and it has been the first to fall.

In the coming months other pandemic fantasies will also begin [to] unravel.

Day 1102: vxCJD Paper Published

The mysterious disappearing vaxx-variant CJD preprint from last summer has finally been published, in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research (h/t the bad cat). The final paper is restricted to mainly the French cases from the preprint, including one who was still alive in August:

Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the formerly rare but universally fatal prion disease in humans, normally progresses over several decades before it leads to death. In the Appendix to this paper, we highlight the presence of a prion region in the spike protein of the original SARS-CoV-2, and in all the “vaccine” variants built from the Wuhan virus. The prion region in the spike of SARS-CoV-2 has a density of mutations eight times greater than that of the rest of the spike, and, yet, strangely that entire prion region disappears completely in the Omicron variant. In the main body of our text, we present 26 cases of Creuzfeldt-Jacob Disease, all diagnosed in 2021 with the first symptoms appearing within an average of 11.38 days after a Pfizer, Moderna, or AstraZeneca COVID-19 injection. Because the causal progression, the etiopathogenesis, of these atypical and new cases of human prion disease — cases of what is apparently a totally new form of rapidly developing Creuzfeldt-Jacob Disease — we focus on the chronology of the symptomatic development. We consider it from an anamnestic point of view — one in which we compare the typical development of pre-COVID cases of Creuzfeldt-Jacob Disease to the extremely accelerated development of similar symptoms in the 26 cases under examination. By such an approach, we hope to work out the etiopathogenesis critical to understanding this new and much more rapidly developing human prion disease. By recalling the sequential pathway of that the formerly subacute and slowly developing disease followed in the past, and by comparing it with this new, extremely acute, rapidly developing prion disease — one following closely after one or more of the COVID-19 injections — we believe it is correct to infer that the injections caused the disease in these 26 cases. If so, they have probably also caused a many other cases that have gone undiagnosed because of their rapid progression to death. By late 2021, 20 had died within 4.76 months of the offending injection. Of those, 8 died suddenly within 2.5 months confirming the rapid progression of this accelerated form of Creuzfeldt-Jacob Disease. By June 2022, 5 more patients had died, and at the time of this current writing, only 1 remains still alive.

One of the authors has also died. Note that the VAERS search mentioned in the paper (for CJD from COVID vaccines) originally produced 20 cases, 19 of whom were already deceased. In our previous vxCJD post the search produced 33 deaths, and as of last week is was up to 79 cases, 42 of whom are marked deceased, and two of which involved J&J rather than the mRNA vaccines.

If you're feeling brave, the bad cat goes into the prospective mechanisms behind vaxx-induced CJD. Keep in mind that vxCJD onset appears to be sudden, usually within 15 days of vaccination, rather than a delayed side-effect of the vaccines.

Day 1090: Not the Vaxx, and Yet, Still the Vaxx

Although it's harsh on Scott Adams week in the Covidsphere, we'll leave that work to the bad cat (representing the "fear is the mind killer" camp) and Mathew Crawford (representing the "controlled opposition" camp).

Instead we'll flash back to last year's news about IgG4: "Class switch towards non-inflammatory, spike-specific IgG4 antibodies after repeated SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination" in Science Immunology, followed in January by a similar result in Frontiers in Immunology: "mRNA vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 induce comparably low long-term IgG Fc galactosylation and sialylation levels but increasing long-term IgG4 responses compared to an adenovirus-based vaccine". (The first paper was preprinted in July, and the second submitted in August of last year.)

The bad cat and Alex Berenson go into some detail about the papers, but the short horror story is that the antibody response you get with repeated mRNA shots is akin to the one you get for allergens, and is not particularly useful against COVID qua infectious disease. This means that boosters not only make it more likely you'll catch COVID, but also make it more likely you'll die of COVID. So the vaxx is not necessarily killing people with the weird side-effects of an insufficiently-tested technology that has never succeeded before; it may just be killing them with...COVID.

PlagueBlog recommends avoiding drugs that have only been tested in a handful of mice, especially if said mice have only passed a vague and possibly harmful endpoint like "antibody levels".

Day 1067: The Other Football

While we at PlagueBlog Headquarters have been expecting the vaccine against soccer to eventually affect a major American sport live on camera, we watch little enough of it to have expected to witness the event ourselves. But we were watching today's Bills game when 24-year-old Damar Hamlin mysteriously collapsed on the field.

One would also have expected people to be a little more aware of the recent carnage on the soccer field and a little more prepared for SADS, but it's all shock and ad-libbing from the teams and reporters. As of press time the game is still suspended.

P.S. The Internet is grasping at a diagnosis of commotio cordis, but it's extremely rare, even rarer in adults, and also rarer in non-projectile sports like football.