Friday, December 31, 2021

Day 700: Fact Checking

Fact checking these days is hard to distinguish from body checking; you slam into unwanted facts with all the force you can muster, hoping to bash them out of your way. An intrepid PlagueBlog reporter, working from home while infected with the dread disease, reports that Reuters has gotten into the fact checking game, trying to body slam the negative efficacy numbers buried in a Danish study of Omicron with a lot of dancing around the fact that there were negative efficacy numbers buried in a Danish study of Omicron:
Users online claimed that the table on page 6, particularly negative VE estimates against Omicron 91 to 150 days following second mRNA dose, was proof that vaccines were harming immune systems with other claims that unvaccinated people were less likely to get infected with the virus.
Negative efficacy literally means that unvaccinated people were less likely to get infected with the virus. While it's also literally true that the study did not conclude anyone's immune system was damaged by vaccination, the anti-vaxxers harping on the study never claimed it did. The fact check reads suspiciously like some sort of missive from a Communist press that toes the party line while leaking the truth out between the lines.

In any event, negative efficacy data is not limited to the backs of Danish preprints; el gato malo find some in Omicron data from Germany:
to calculate VE, we need to compare the vaccinated cohorts to the unvaccinated. that’s the control group. there are probably some pretty significant error bars here, but this outcome is STARK. the risk ratios for all vaccinated groups are far, far higher than control.

boosting does seem to lead to a 2/3 risk reduction vs just being double vaxxed but still leaves one at 4.7X the risk of the unvaccinated.
He goes into some detail about how the window of immortal time post-boosting makes these numbers look worse than they are (and the booster look better than it is). See the bad cat for details.

P.S. Brian Mowrey has a different take on what's going on with negative efficacy: the suppression of innate immunity.

P.P.S. Massachusetts cases were up 2% again today.

Thursday, December 30, 2021

Day 699: Excreting COVID

The long-awaited post-holiday numbers have appeared at the MWRA poop wastewater surveillance page. If you check the tiny print on the x-axis you'll see this chart is for the entire pandemic, and we've vastly exceeded last winter's pre-vaccine numbers.

You can hardly get tested for love or money here, between holiday pre-testing consuming the OTC test supplies, and holiday closures of the woefully unprepared official testing sites. So expect the true case numbers to remain confined to the poop for now.

Still, it could be worse. We could be like Puerto Rico.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up 2% today.

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Day 698: A World Lit Only By Gas

El gato malo recaps the pandemic by gaslight:
you accuse the other side of being nutters so that you need not give them a hearing. you see others do it, and give it a try, find it easy and successful, and adopt this new pose.

it not only sidesteps having to admit there might be another way to look at a situation, but it elevates you (at least in your own mind) to “high status member of the side of science and reason” despite the fact that you are, in actuality, the precise antithesis of such: you’re the closed minded bigot engaging in ad hominem presented as “settled science.”
Massachusetts cases were up 1.5% today.

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Day 697: Breaking Records Like Caitlyn Jenner in Women’s Sports

The US posted a one-day record total of 500,000 COVID cases, part of a world record total of 1,440,000 cases on Monday.

David Cole once again fails to leave the corona well enough alone, taking a bite out of the mainstream myth that Fauci didn't torture puppies:
Last summer, a conservative outfit called White Coat Waste (WCW) launched a campaign to expose various beagle-torturing “science” experiments funded all or in part by Fauci’s NIAID. WCW is, of course, a partisan org, but their info seemed solid. And that created a problem for Fauci, because animal torture plays very badly among leftists. The average leftist has no problem with duct-taping a mask to a toddler’s face or forcing an elderly man to die alone with no hand to hold because science. But abusing dogs? That’s an absolute no-go area for leftists (and, to be fair, for decent people of all stripes, even morally gray d-bags like me; I’m friends with everyone from commies to Nazis but I absolutely draw the line at animal abusers).
P.S. Massachusetts cases were up almost a percentage point today. That and the weekend were slightly down from Friday's peak, but Tuesdays tend towards lower case counts.

Monday, December 27, 2021

Day 696: Necronomicron

Good news out of South Africa, where case rates are falling and "the much more deadly Delta mutation has largely been replaced by Omicron, which – according to multiple studies – seems to be the mildest variant so far." South Africa wants compensation for the UK ruining its Christmas with baseless panicked travel bans in contravention of WHO recommendations, but seems unlikely to get it.

Also finally dead today is the pandemic of the unvaccinated, as the vaccines continue to be a far better cure for soccer than for COVID.

Sunday, December 26, 2021

Day 695: More Myocarditis

Vinay Prasad rips the FDA a new one in his latest post about a follow-up to the Nature Medicine paper about myocarditis:
  1. It is now clear for men <40, dose 2 and dose 3 of Pfizer have more myocarditis than sars-cov-2 infection, and this is true for dose 1 and dose 2 of Moderna.
  2. Pfizer boosters (Dose 3) have more myocarditis for men <40 than infection.
  3. Myocarditis post infection is more common as you get older, in contrast with myocarditis post vaccination, which is more common as you are younger (reverse gradients)
But the truth is STILL WORSE than these data.
  1. If the authors fixed the denominator for viral infection (i.e. used sero-prevalance), it would look even worse
  2. If the authors separate men 16-24 from 12-15 and 25-40, it would likely look worst in 16-24 age group.
But regardless, these findings already clearly dispel the true misinformation online: Yes, sorry to break it to you, vaccines can have risks of myocarditis EXCEEDING risks of myocarditis from infection.
On a lighter note, some Canadian humor:

Saturday, December 25, 2021

Day 694: A Second Plague Christmas

No news cycle is good news cycle, but fortunately for plague humor, the Off-Guardian never sleeps:

Friday, December 24, 2021

Day 693: Breaking Records Like a Man in Women’s Sports

Everybody who's still keeping track is announcing record-breaking COVID numbers. Besides our record highs in Massachusetts yesterday and the day before, Canada has exceeded 20,000 cases, with Ontario also breaking their record. The US hasn't maxed out yet, but New York and New Jersey are also on their second day of record breaking, and Ohio is on their third. Illinois broke records as well, and even Florida is thinking about it.

On the bright side, Israel may be backing off a second booster because Omicron is still looking mild. As long as it doesn't gremlin out at midnight tonight, we should be safe.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up one (and a twentieth) percent today, with almost 11,000 cases (some presumptive).

Thursday, December 23, 2021

Day 692: You Are The Experiment

More precisely, American 5–11 year olds are the trial run of Pfizer's COVID vaccine. The UK is waiting on our results before they will jab any healthy children. Specifically, they want more up-to-date infection rate and vaccine efficacy and safety data on this cohort; apparently Pfizer's underpowered trial failed to convince. Vinay Prasad has the details, along with harsh words for those American school systems mandating a dubious experimental vaccine for young children.

In other news, Spain and Canada also broke daily records yesterday, with over 60,000 and nearly 15,000 cases, respectively. (Reports of 50,000 Spanish cases are from Tuesday.) Also, the Supremes have scheduled a special session for January 7th to hear challenges to several federal vaccine mandates.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up almost a percentage point today, for an all-pandemic high of 9791 if our records are correct, and seem determined to hit 10,000 in a day soon—perhaps even tomorrow if the MDPH is working the pre-holiday.

Wednesday, December 22, 2021

Day 691: The Omicron and the Omega

Things are looking apocalyptic with heavily-vaccinated Britain posting an all-time daily high of 106,122 cases, Israel moving on to a fourth shot (because it worked so well the first three times), and Omicron sweeping the land.

But on the bright side, the army thinks it has cured all SARS, and the mainstream media are now admitting that cloth masks do nothing and it's pointless and dangerous to boost teens:
The last vote by FDA advisers, in September, rejected the proposal 16-2. FDA leaders revisited the proposal in November and simply bypassed the experts. So did the CDC, whose advisers had rejected boosters for people not at high risk. Two top FDA scientists, including the head of the agency’s vaccine efforts, quit around the time of the September vote over White House pressure to authorize boosters for all. They wrote in detail about their concerns.

A study by Oxford researchers, published last week in Nature Medicine, validated those concerns. It found young people suffered myocarditis, pericarditis and arrhythmias more frequently from vaccines than from Covid itself. And the long-term cardiac effects of boosters in young people are unknown.
Not to mention the unknown long-term side effects of COVID vaccines at any age...

Lastly but not leastly, after a long hiatus covering antifa and foot-shooting Republicans, David Cole takes another whack at the pandemic:
The “politician/scientist alliance” (typified by the Democrats and Fauci) has done much to encourage both extremes, exhorting the left to lionize lab-coaters (Fauci literally declaring, “I am science”), and taunting the right with a stubborn refusal to admit errors and uncertainties.

Also, the personal behavior of the alliance members has engendered bad-faith skepticism to a huge degree. The people who tell us we’re gonna die if we (and our children) are maskless have no problem constantly violating their own mask rules. In their personal behavior, they don’t act like there’s an emergency. Ordinary folks pick up on that.

Worse still, some in the alliance seem to be enjoying the pandemic a bit too much. When I see the wide toothy smile on the bony-ass Skeletor face of the New Zealand prime minister every time she announces new lockdowns and mandates, I think, “Jesus, that psychopath’s getting a kick out of this shit.”
Massachusetts cases were up five sixths of a percentage point today.

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Day 690: Winter Mask Advisory

Our governor warns that there's heavy mask weather ahead, or something like that. The locals are already complaining that the mask advisory is not a mandate, even though the most fascist maskist of us are already under city and town mask mandates.

In national news, the three-letter COVID agencies' witchhunt against the authors of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration has made the news, if Zerohedge counts as the news.

But the quote of the day comes from el gato malo of bad cattitude, in a long post about the harmless Omicron variant:
continuing to swerve around a chipmunk in the road as though it were some sort of phantasmagorical lovecraftian horror will accomplish nothing but needless damage.
P.S. Massachusetts cases were up almost two thirds of a percentage point today.

Monday, December 20, 2021

Day 689: Made in a Lab, Omicron Edition

Eugyppius and Igor Chudov (among others he cites in an update) independently conclude that Omicron was made in a lab through gain-of-function research, possibly for the purpose of vaccination.

On the COVID theater front, the City of Boston has announced a vaccination requirement for restaurants, theaters, and gyms starting in mid-January (with a series of later start dates for children). There is no booster requirement yet, nor any softening of the city's mask mandate. PlagueBlog recommends against congregating indoors exclusively with the vaccinated this way, as they appear to be more susceptible to Omicron than the unvaccinated.

Sunday, December 19, 2021

Day 688: Lockdowns Never Work Again

The Wall Street Journal reports that lockdowns never worked and were never going to work. They trace the unscientific temptation to lock down to Neil Ferguson's famously bad models, but lay the ultimate blame at the feet of politicians:
So why did public-health authorities abandon their opposition to lockdowns? Why did they rush to embrace the untested claims of flawed epidemiological modeling? One answer appears in the Johns Hopkins study from 2019: “Some NPIs, such as travel restrictions and quarantine, might be pursued for social or political purposes by political leaders, rather than pursued because of public health evidence.”
That's a bit circular, to echo their critique of self-validating models. Eugyppius gave a more concrete explanation a month ago: politicians are just as ignorant and afraid as the average man of these crazy times, yet they get to make the decisions:
In an interview I will never find again, someone asked Noam Chomsky about the failures surrounding the American debacle in Afghanistan. He responded that it was above all a reflection of the distorted and inaccurate intelligence assessments that pollute the thought of American foreign policy planners and military strategists. Random people on the internet, he said, had a better view of the situation from the start.

Exactly the same phenomenon plagues official responses to Corona. The problem with curated information isn’t just that it is slow, subject to inertia, and produced by insular out-of-touch functionaries. Because the information has political importance, there are incentives everywhere to manipulate and degrade its quality. Bureaucratic actors will lie about what is going on to curry favour, save face or evade blame. What is more, many advisers, analysts and modellers are only in the position of providing analysis in the first place, because we need more women in STEM, or because they tell the Faucis of the world what they want to hear, or because they have the right combination of sociopathy and narrow-mindedness necessary to ascend complex bureaucratic hierarchies.

Corona policies really are as stupid as they look. Politicians and bureaucrats have locked themselves into a sad parody of the film Contagion, and their increasingly unsustainable, erratic behaviour merely reflects their desperation.

Saturday, December 18, 2021

Day 687: The Little Variant That Couldn’t

The data on Omicron continues to be very reassuring, with negligible morbidity and mortality despite its communicability. For example, Alex Berenson reports on auspicious numbers from South Africa and Denmark.

Friday, December 17, 2021

Day 686: Nine Deaths per Atlanta

Here at PlagueBlog headquarters, we thought we'd be blogging more of your usual COVID chaos today, but instead we have the CDC unexpectedly backing down on Johnson & Johnson and a surprise Pfizer trial failure.

PlagueBlog doesn't take the claim of nine deaths from J&J seriously; estimates based on VAERS data put the COVID vaccine death toll somewhere above 9 deaths per half hour, with about one of those due to J&J and the other eight due to the mRNA-based vaccines. Steve Kirsch puts the estimate even higher, at 388,000 total deaths in the US, based in part on his old estimate of at least 150,000 and also on new data from "Wayne at VAERS Analysis" (whose own estimate is 407,831).

Sadly, Pfizer's trial issues may not lead to a welcome delay in unnecessarily jabbing the children:
[Pfizer] said on Friday that its study in children between the ages of 2 and 4 who were given two 3-microgram doses of the vaccine found it did not create the same immune response that a larger dose of the vaccine had in older children.

The 3-microgram dose did generate a similar immune response in children aged 6 to 24 months, the company said.

The company said it will now test a three-dose course in both age groups, as well as in older children. It had previously expected data from 2- to 4-year-olds this year, but said it did not expect the delay would meaningfully change plans to file for emergency use authorization in the second quarter of 2022.
P.S. Massachusetts cases were up seven tenths of a percentage point today.

Thursday, December 16, 2021

Day 685: National Nullification Day

It's the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, and in imitation of the spirit (if not the catchy sloganeering) of our ancestors, the Unity Project has declared it National Nullification Day. Though the call is for general COVID rebellion, the organization itself is particularly devoted to not jabbing schoolchildren.

Why rebel? Just for example, The Washington Post opines on the FDA and CDC progressing from ignoring their expert panels to failing to convene expert panels at all—most notably in extending boosters to 16- and 17-year-olds with no discussion of myocarditis, or anything else.

In local news, Omicron is speeding around Massachusetts faster than we can sequence it—which apparently isn't all that fast:
Researchers from Yale New Haven Hospital and the University of Washington this week posted data showing increasing numbers of samples with the genetic change.

But it takes seven to 10 days to complete the full genomic sequencing that would confirm the presence of Omicron. As a result, the official case counts probably represent a fraction of the current infections, Lemieux said.

“It is alarming to see how quickly this virus is spreading,” said Bronwyn MacInnis, director of pathogen genomic surveillance at the Broad Institute.
P.S. Massachusetts cases were up two-thirds of a percentage point today.

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

Day 684: Hurting the Children

Vinay Prasad posts an impassioned condemnation of all the damage done to children in the name of Science. He mentions the underpowered trial used to emergency-authorize Pfizer's vaccine for children 5–11 despite the dangers, but devotes more words to school closures and small cloth masks:
Some have claimed that our policies to children reflect “following the science.” They do not. There is no science to support primary school closure. No science supported prolonged (>1 year) closure for any age. No science supported outdoor cloth mask mandates for young kids, and no science supported deviating from the WHO guidance [on masks]. These policies meanwhile have devastating consequences for the well-being of children.
The one thing he gets wrong is that no organization stood up for the children; Children's Health Defense did.

P.S. Alex Berenson mocks Moderna for "pulling out of a major biotech industry conference in January because it’s afraid of Covid":
[A] company that has sold upwards of $15 billion in mRNA Covid vaccines this year won’t participate in a conference in San Francisco next month.

Apparently too many people will be going, or some such.

Now that’s confidence in your product!
P.S. Massachusetts cases were up three-fifths of a percentage point today.

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Day 683: Spikevax Forever

On the whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger front, a preprint out of Kaiser Permanente shows Moderna vaccination is still effective after 8 months:
Results: 927,004 recipients of 2 doses of mRNA-1273 were matched to 927,004 unvaccinated individuals. VE [vaccine effectiveness] (95% CI) was 82.8% (82.2-83.3%) against SARS-CoV-2 infection, 96.1% (95.5-96.6%) against COVID-19 hospitalization, and 97.2% (94.8-98.4%) against COVID-19 hospital death. VE against SARS-CoV-2 infection was similar by age, sex, and race/ethnicity, and was 86.5% (84.8-88.0%) during the Delta period. VE against SARS-CoV-2 infection decreased from 88.0% at 0-<2 months to 75.5% at 6-<8 months. Conclusions: These interim results provide continued evidence for protection of 2 doses of mRNA-1273 against SARS-CoV-2 infection over 8 months post-vaccination and during the Delta period, and against COVID-19 hospitalization and hospital death.
Although it would have been simple enough to also calculate all-cause mortality, sadly the authors did not approach that hot potato.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up less than half a percentage point today, but that's similar to last Tuesday. The weekend total was also similar to the previous weekend, so no signs of improvement yet.

Monday, December 13, 2021

Day 682: Myopericarditis in Ontario

There's an important preprint out of Ontario about local rates of "myocarditis/pericarditis" after vaccination, stratified by mRNA vaccine. H/T Vinay Prasad, who made a video about the results and their implications for vaccine policy. The conclusion:
Results: There were 19,740,741 doses of mRNA vaccines administered and 297 reports of myocarditis/pericarditis meeting our inclusion criteria. Among these, 69.7% occurred following the second dose of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine and 76.8% occurred in males. The median age of individuals with a reported event was 24 years. The highest reporting rate of myocarditis/pericarditis was observed in males aged 18-24 years following mRNA-1273 [Moderna] as the second dose; the rate in this age group was 5.1 (95% CI 1.9-15.5) times higher than the rate following BNT162b2 [Pfizer] as the second dose. Overall reporting rates were higher when the inter-dose interval was shorter (i.e., ≤30 days) for both vaccine products. Among individuals who received mRNA-1273 [Moderna] for the second dose, rates were higher for those who had a heterologous as opposed to homologous vaccine schedule.

Conclusions and Relevance: Our results suggest that vaccine product, inter-dose interval and vaccine schedule combinations may play a role in the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis, in addition to age and sex. Certain programmatic strategies could reduce the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis following mRNA vaccines.
Dr. Prasad goes into some detail about the various rates of myocarditis, some of which were quite high, and the "programmatic strategies" (avoiding Moderna and spacing shots more widely) for reducing this side-effect in young males. Nevertheless, PlagueBlog continues to recommend not injecting people who are at negligible risk of dying of COVID with vaccines that pose unprecedented risks of cardiac side effects.

Sunday, December 12, 2021

Day 681: Hackeado

Hackers have erased Brazil's vaccine database, derailing the government's vaccine passport plans for the time being, if not permanently.

Thursday, December 09, 2021

Day 678: Mouthwash

A Republican senator dared to mention the fact that mouthwash kills COVID, leading to the usual flurry of "fact check" hemming and hawing over facts the fact checkers don't know or don't like.

On the post-moderna front, Canada has quietly backed off of Moderna for teenaged boys, following in the footsteps of several European countries.

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

Wednesday, December 08, 2021

Day 677: Immortal Time

Immortal time has nothing to do with the FDA doubling down and asking a federal judge for 75 years to release Pfizer's COVID vaccine approval application under an FOIA request. Seriously.

Here at PlagueBlog headquarters, we find it hard to resist the temptation to pronounce it "immortal time" like some sci-fi concept, but it's really "immortal time": the time during which a subject in the treatment group cannot die from the disease being treated.

Immortal time is generally due to a delay in the treatment process that causes patients to count as untreated for some interval, during which they can die of the disease or other causes. This makes the treatment look more effective against the disease (or against the proxy of all-cause mortality) than it actually is. Depending on the length of immortal time and the fragility of the patient population, this can be a significant statistical issue.

While the initial Pfizer trial was too brief and front-loaded with healthy people to need immortal time correction, population statistics for COVID vaccine rollouts do need adjustments for the long window (at least 14 days) of vaccinated but unprotected time. Patients in this window frequently find themselves in the unvaccinated column—though who is in which column is its own vexing issue with COVID data. Since the old and infirm get priority for vaccination, they can artificially inflate efficacy of the vaccine, or even create efficacy where none actually exists.

Troubling though immortal time is, it is only one of many statistical gotchas in calculating vaccine efficacy. Several of these issues are explained in a recent blog post and paper by Norman Fenton and Martin Neil, with regards to ONS England data.
Correlating unvaccinated mortality with vaccine roll out we see curious patterns (dotted line the proportion of people getting first and second doses). Why are the unvaccinated dying after NOT getting the 1st dose? Why are the single dosed dying after NOT getting the 2nd dose?

Plenty of evidence that the vaccinated who die within 14 days of vaccination may be categorized as unvaccinated. Then someone who dies within 14 days of first dose is miscategorised as unvaccinated and a similar thing could occur post second dose.
This theory could be described as "safe but ineffective", as opposed to the more common "unsafe but effective" theories that attribute excess deaths (regardless of how they are categorized) to vaccine side-effects. However, the authors do find some excess deaths to account for, and postulate that vaccines are, in fact, increasing mortality—but through innate risks of vaccination rather than adverse effects per se:
However, in interpreting these results it is important to avoid an overly simplistic understanding of the processes at play before and after vaccination. On the one hand, after vaccination the vaccinee is reported to endure a weakened immune response, [19], [21], for a period of up to 28 days [20] and may be in danger of infection from Covid or some other infectious agent at any time during that period. On the other hand, infection prior to vaccination, where Covid remaining symptomless for a period of up to three days, might endanger the vaccinee after vaccination because vaccination is supposed to be prohibited for 3-4 weeks after contracting Covid.
P.S. Massachusetts cases are up three fifths of a percentage point again today. We're approaching 6000 daily cases and looking a lot like this time last December.

Tuesday, December 07, 2021

Day 676: Where in the World is Gavin Newsom Again?

Steve Kirsch remains hot on the trail of the elusive Gavin Newsom, who's apparently still been scarce since the wedding sighting. While the story has fallen off the news/debunking cycle, Steve Kirsch maintains that (after stem cell therapy in Mexico disguised as yet more family time) the governor is still AWOL:
He’s occasionally surfaced since his disappearance, but has never (AFAIK) been seen in public where he’s walking around, shaking hands, etc.
In other underappreciated weeks-old stories, eugyppius reiterates that testing in Israel proves the vaccines are doing nothing to stop transmission:
The more you control for different rates of testing, the harder it gets to find vaccine effectiveness against transmission, and the more you start stumbling over evidence of negative efficacy. This is why we find evidence of negative efficacy in the UK data but not (for example) in the German data. In the UK, unlike in Germany, the unvaccinated are not subject to constant testing rules. In Israel, all national airport arrivals are tested regardless of vaccination status. These numbers, widely discussed a few weeks ago, show far lower third-dose efficacy than claimed, and also indicate negative efficacy among the double vaccinated for the month of August. Because unvaccinated arrivals to Israel are quarantined and subject to additional testing, however, even these numbers are imperfect.

When you test everyone all the time regardless of vaccination status, a very different picture emerges.
P.S. Massachusetts cases were up almost half a percentage point today.

Monday, December 06, 2021

Day 675: Poo Pending

Elevated COVID results from MRWA wastewater testing means that the virus is on the rise in the greater Boston area:
“The wastewater is predictive, and when it’s going up like this, you expect a significant surge in cases,” said Todd Ellerin, director of infectious diseases at South Shore Health. “Then in the weeks to follow, you see an increase in hospitalizations and an increase in deaths.”

Infections and hospitalizations have been spiking in Massachusetts for weeks. The state Department of Public Health reported more than 5,000 daily cases on Thursday and Friday, which were the first days exceeding 5,000 infections since January.
Massachusetts cases were up about two fifths of a percentage point a day over the weekend and today.

Saturday, December 04, 2021

Friday, December 03, 2021

Day 672: Rumors of Our Demise…

Don't fall for the rumors of overflowing ICUs in Massachusetts. It's one university hospital with staffing issues in Worcester, hardly the medical center of the state. (I guess that's what happens when you fire a bunch of employees for not getting vaccinated.)

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up three fifths of a percentage point again today.

Thursday, December 02, 2021

Day 671: Pfizer Leaking

Mathew Crawford evaluates some Pfizer vaccine safety documentation released on the FDA's 55-year plan to respond to a FOIA lawsuit. He mistook it for a leak, but later provided a link to the released document.
Mortality Envelope Math

There appear to be 20,000 or so cases of SAEs in the report, and in the initial Pfizer trial, 0.7% of those injected suffered one or more SAEs. I suspect this percentage is low given the extremely healthy nature of the participants in the initial Pfizer trial (based on all-case mortality rates and cardiac events in both arms), but it will do for some basic envelope math.

20,000 is 0.7% of 2,850,000 [injected individuals], give or take, so I take that as the population reach of this particular report. The 1223 fatalities represents 430 deaths per million individuals injected, which falls very near numbers that I have computed several times over[.]
Also of interest today is the sequence for Omicron and its distance from the rest of the Greek alphabet of variants. Science Magazine reports:
Omicron clearly did not develop out of one of the earlier variants of concern, such as Alpha or Delta. Instead, it appears to have evolved in parallel—and in the dark. Omicron is so different from the millions of SARS-CoV-2 genomes that have been shared publicly that pinpointing its closest relative is difficult, says Emma Hodcroft, a virologist at the University of Bern. It likely diverged early from other strains, she says. “I would say it goes back to mid-2020.”

That raises the question of where Omicron’s predecessors lurked for more than a year. Scientists see essentially three possible explanations: The virus could have circulated and evolved in a population with little surveillance and sequencing. It could have gestated in a chronically infected COVID-19 patient. Or it might have evolved in a nonhuman species, from which it recently spilled back into people.
P.S. Massachusetts cases were up three fifths of a percentage point today.

Wednesday, December 01, 2021

Day 670: For Your Spikopathy

Breaking news: Omicron has entered the country.

Via Dr. Meryl Nass: the World Council for Health has some advice for treating exposure to the spike protein, regardless of source. A bit of their advice is generic (multivitamins, intermittent fasting) or downright silly (avoid GMOs). Frankinense is seasonal, at least, and nigella is tasty. (They provide dosages and other helpful information, such as that potatoes come from grocery stores.)

At the other end of their spectrum of recommended drugs, teas, and supplements, there has been some promising research into N-acetylcysteine (NAC) vs. COVID, which is still available as a supplement in the US if you look hard enough. It even made their top ten:
  • Vitamin D
  • Vitamin C
  • NAC (N-acetylcysteine)
  • Ivermectin
  • Nigella seed (a.k.a. black cumin, unfortunately not the only thing called black cumin)
  • Quercetin (a flavonol flavonoid)
  • Zinc
  • Magnesium
  • Curcumin (essentially turmeric)
  • Milk thistle extract
P.S. Massachusetts cases were up three fifths of a percentage point today.