Day 814: Negative Efficacy Numbers

PlagueBlog apologizes for taking a spring break during an exciting week that saw the end of federal transportation mask mandates as well as a damning preprint (hosted by The Lancet) RCT meta-study showing excess mortality caused by Pfizer's mRNA vaccine. (That is, it killed more people with side effects than it saved from COVID.) The bad cat has the details:

this rush to EUA not only allowed a seriously rigged drug trial methodology to be used (ignoring or misattributing the ill effects of immuno-suppression post dose 1 and for 7 days post dose 2, both know[n] and serious issues deliberately designed out of assessment despite the fact that all those getting the jabs would experience them) but also more or less ignored the overall mortality data despite the fact that it was not only available, but unfavorable.

certain felines were heard to describe it as “not so much as a vaccine study as an instagram selfie”

it appears these danish researchers are coming around to this viewpoint as well.

this was always available data. there were few deaths in the pfizer trial overall as the enrollees were generally young and healthy. 79% had zero comorbidities.

and they clearly played some games. they called a death in the vaxx arm “covid pneumonia” to avoid having a “covid death” and excluded it when calculating VE.

there was also a significant cardiovascular risk signal. this is why more people died overall in the active arm than in placebo. in the moderna trial, overall mortality was exactly equal in the 2 arms.

It is surprising that Moderna, which is known for having more side effects from its larger dose, actually broke even in the save-grandma/kill-grandson trade-off, but even more surprising is that Johnson & Johnson, the vaccine the regulators actually pinned a few deaths on and (occasionally) regulated, was the safest and most effective of the bunch.

This must be what the kids these days mean by "clown world".

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a seventh of a percentage point on Friday.

Day 802: Data Fraud, Simplified

Mathew Crawford posted a summary of the DMED/DoD vaccine data fraud situation early this morning:

The best way to understand the DMED saga is to forget what you've heard about it. Wipe your mind clean of the details and start over. The data results shared in January were likely incorrect, and the Department of Defense (DoD) comeback appears to be an ugly deception. This will be easier to understand after I explain what I believe did happen as clearly and as simply as possible.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a ninth of a percentage point today.

Day 800: No News is Censored News

This week was notable for the end of British COVID data transparency. Alex Berenson reported the hiding of embarrassingly disproportionate cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among the vaccinated.

But hiding the numbers won’t make the vaccines work better. It will just make people less likely to believe anything else public health authorities tell them about Covid and the vaccines - if that’s even possible at this point.

Their excuse for the sudden change was too silly to repeat here.

Speaking of silliness, Berenson also reports on the entertainingly failed criminal case of "US v. Bored-Rightwing-Potheads", otherwise known as the plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan.

Even by the standards of FBI-enriched “terrorism,” this was thin gruel.

Nonetheless the bluechecks bluechecked hard for this one. Right-wing militias were now taking aim at elected officials!

This was the media party line for the last 18 months, despite mounting embarrassments as the case moved ahead. Those included fact that the FBI fired the lead agent on it after he was arrested FOR BEATING HIS WIFE AFTER FORCING HER TO ATTEND A SWINGERS PARTY.

True story. Can’t make it up. Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity, Gangbangery, that’s the slogan, right?

I think that aptly summarizes the last 800 days. ("Can't make it up", not "Gangbangery", just to be clear.)

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a tenth of a percentage point on Friday.

Day 795: Delusional Rain Dance

Eugyppius rips into Chinese containment policies:

Let us rehearse some recent history:

Lockdowns and mass testing and contact tracing and masking are all Asian (primarily Chinese) policies, adopted en masse and with little forethought by western countries in Spring 2020. Our public health mandarins set aside their own planning and opted for Chinese mass containment instead, because they noticed the virus was not very deadly in Asia, and they assumed this was because whatever it was the Asians were doing was the thing to do. Mass containment is a worldwide delusional rain dance: Everyone hops about trying to coax water out of the heavens, copying whatever dance was current in the first place it started to rain.

Crucially, virology has a very primitive and inadequate understanding of how viruses actually circulate. Virological doctrine is that they ought to behave the same everywhere, but they don’t. [...]

There are many theories about why SARS-2 hit Asia so softly. Probably, the Asian-Pacific populations enjoyed some kind of prior immune protection, which would explain why the later, immune-resistant variant strains of SARS-2 have coincided with higher mortality in the East.

But the main point is this: Countries which did well early in the pandemic got another kind of virus, the Zero-Covid kind. They adopted an eradicationist orientation; they believed their containment measures had succeeded, and the officials who had championed these measures ascended to new heights of prestige. This is what happened in China and throughout Asia, and it is what happened in Australia and New Zealand.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a fourteenth of a percentage point today.

Day 793: Australia Still in Fascin’

Australia seems determined to maintain their position at the top of the Most Fascist COVID Response crowd, now by forbidding doctors from publishing research that contradicts "public health messaging". Alex Berenson has the story:

Doctors are now being told they could face discipline for saying anything that contradicts “public health messaging,” even if what they are saying is “evidence-based.”

They may even face investigations for “authoring papers” that health authorities do not like.

Here in the US, we just ignore the evidence; we don't ban it outright:

Johns Hopkins University medical professor Marty Makary, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, asked sarcastically whether "bypassing the typical voting process" of the VRBPAC was "following the science."

Instead, the agency plans to convene its outside experts to "discuss" the FDA's decision, which is like "a judge issuing a verdict and then having lawyers make their arguments," Makary wrote in a tweet thread.

"There is zero clinical data that a 4th dose reduces hospitalization risk," he said. "There isn't even any evidence that a 3rd dose reduces hospitalization risk in young people."

Here at PlagueBlog we follow the science by following the science, not by ignoring the science. And certainly not by stomping on the science in our jackboots...

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up nearly a tenth of a percentage point again on Friday.