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.