Day 849: The First Casualty of COVID is Duty

Vinay Prasad blogs at length about the pushback he got for taking the (actually) rational and scientific position on matters of COVID, rather than adopting pop-sci stupidity about masking children, closing schools, boosting the healthy, giving Moderna to anyone under 40, etc., etc.:

I'm trying not to use the word stupid to describe the people who hold the view that it helps. Instead, I will put it this way. I no longer respect any actual scientist who tells me that that it makes sense to make 2-year-olds wear a cloth mask in daycare except for the two hours they all nap together side by side. Anyone who believes that policy actually slows viral spread can be safely ignored.

But what can I do about bad policy? I thought about it, and slowly over the course of a year advanced a series of articles in places like Medpage today, and the Atlantic on this issue. I tweeted against the AAP when they said deranged things like there is no evidence that kids need to see faces.

This earned me great professional pushback, and headache. But you can't focus on that, you must focus on your duty. My duty, as a professor whose life is the arbitration of evidence, is to encourage people to use their rational, evidence-based medicine skills in pursuit of policy recommendations that benefit people. I can't be dissuaded if a bunch of people who aren’t thinking clearly decide to engage in mob Twitter.

Though the occasion of his post is obvious now, it goes unmentioned so we should note for posterity that armed guards hired to protect schoolchildren instead stood by at a school shooting in Texas this past week.

Massachusetts cases were up a fifth of a percentage point on Friday.

Interlude: The Orthopox That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Alex Berenson reports the impending sudden end to the monkeypox scare, as the news gets out that it's only affecting gay men, after gaining a foothold at a couple of gay raves in Europe:

The good news is that the public health authorities are now likely to pivot fast away from trying to scare people about monkeypox, for fear of stigmatizing gay men (by letting them know too much about what happens at these raves).

[...]

Added bonus: the same epidemiologists who wanted to lock you and your kids up for the last two years for Covid, a disease that poses approximately no risk to them, are now sure to let you know that MANDATES AND GOVERNMENT EFFORTS TO CHANGE BEHAVIOR NEVER WORK!

Day 843: Boosting Severity

The bad cat counts up adverse effects of boosters in VAERS and finds them even deadlier than the original shots:

the surge of boosters in the US began in September 2021.

this is precisely the same time the spike in deaths and hospitalizations per day per dose per day started.

so this is NOT an artifact of just dosing more, we’ve already controlled for that. the per dose incidence of death and hospitalization rose 4X immediately, seems to have plateaued for a minute, then found another step function spike in late january early feb and basically increased 5X from its already 5X elevated level. that is actual exponential growth in propensity for severe bad outcomes per dose.

such a thing is extremely unusual to see and would appear to be of such magnitude as to make a simple rise in reporting rates appear highly unlikely, especially as the overall reports figure does not mirror this pattern, retains linearity, and shows no major moves during this spike in more severe outcomes.

[...]

VAERS is supposed to function as a tripwire, a warning system. it’s the canary in the vaccine coal mine.

american public health officials appear to be literally treading on a carpet of dead songbirds so thick that feet have not touched floor in nearly two years.

In an afterthought he realizes what the second spike might be:

addendum (post publication) another possibility just occurred to me: this second surge in severe outcomes might be associated with 4th doses (second booster). i have no data on prevalence or timing there, but if this is the cause, then we’d have real cause for alarm as it would imply that each incremental boost looks 5X worse than before. purely speculative, but perhaps fertile ground for inquiry.

In other VAERS news, Children's Health Defense reports the illicit deletion of 10,000 severe adverse reactions to COVID vaccines from the database.

P.S. In other vaccine news, the FDA rubber-stamped another booster today, this time for five-year-olds, without any clinical trials for efficacy, and with minimal safety data. It did not reconvene the advisory panel because the advisory panel already said not to do that.

Here at PlagueBlog Headquarters, we follow the science, not political decisions made by the FDA against scientific advice.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a quarter of a percent on Friday.

Day 832: Scrapieing the Bottom of the Barrel

If you've heard the wild stories about experimental mRNA vaccines causing cancer and prion disease but brushed them off because the mechanism by which they might have such outrageous effects is unclear, the bad cat has some bad news for you:

a nasty ringer is the emergence of the GGGG quadruplex (made easier by adding more G’s) which can cause neurological disease and bind to prions.

this may actually be quite a lot worse in that it appears that you do not even need a full quadruplex for this to happen. duplexes will do if the protein can fold in such a way as to generate what is effectively a quadruplex binding site and thus based on THIS study, all of these sites can play this role: (i) d(TGGGGT), (ii) r(GGAGGAGGAGGA) and (iii) d(GGAGGAGGAGGA) can serve as a quad.

this appears to facilitate the transition of PrPc into its pathologic isoform.

that’s bad.

If you don't recognize PrPSc in the above, just keep in mind that now is not the time to take up cannibalism. And in the future, avoid new technologies that have gone down in flaming failure with horrific side-effects in every previous trial, but are allegedly working perfectly this time.

Speaking of the trials, Steve Kirsch, not content with breaking the news of all-cause mortality being up for the vaccinated in Britain by their own numbers, has also publicized evidence of what the internet cats call pfraud in the latest data dump: Pfizer fraud? Or just great execution? He waffles on whether what happened in Argentina was actual fraud, but of course there were yet more side effects that never made it onto the label:

Neither Augusto’s pericardial effusion, nor another volunteer’s penile vein thrombosis, appear to have found their way into the reported side effects of this trial.

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

Day 829: Counterproductive Boosting

Eugyppius goes into the German and some Israeli data on the pointlessness (lit., stupidity) of spring boosting, and of boosting the young at any time. He also talks a bit about why he isn't blogging much at this low-COVID moment.

Here in New England we're having a high-COVID moment during everyone else's low-COVID moment. The bad cat has made a series of posting asking why:

• a funny thing happened on the way to herd immunity
• is new england covid hospitalization data being retroactively adjusted down?
• meanwhile, back in the northeast

From his latest (Saturday):

[the northeast] continues to be about the only CONUS cases hotspot going (apart from what seems to be some border crossing issues in TX)

and it’s flowing into the hospitals. but it’s, for the most part, only affecting the old. and the pattern looks the same pretty much everywhere (and may be understated in recent days as this series can take time to fully update)

[...]

this looks nothing at all like herd immunity. this looks like the other thing…

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i keep hoping this is not going to be the awful set o[f] outcomes that seem emergent and i could, of course, still be wrong, but in the battle of biology vs ideology, biology remains undefeated and the intersection of leaky vaccines and antigenic fixation is a very high risk place and that risk rises over time.

no one seems to want to talk about this trend just now, but i think it bears serious watching.

something untoward is going on in the northeast and if it keeps getting bigger at this rate, it’s going to pop back up on the radar soon.

Day 826: 1001 Collapses

On the cure for soccer front, the Good Sciencing count has hit 1001 unusual collapses in and around sportsball, with 649 deaths. If you haven't checked them out in a while, they've added some spontaneous soccer death statistics from before the vaxx plague; it turns out that an average year doesn't quite equal January of a vaxx plague year.

The Washington Post reports on efforts to vaccinate more people in Infected Shenzhen. They explain the low vaccine uptake among China's elderly: unlike the West, China focused on those likely to spread the virus and not on reclusive retirees.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a quarter of a percent today.

Day 823: When Masks Kill

New in Medicine is the eponymous Foegen effect, a mechanism by which facemasks contribute to the COVID-19 case fatality rate, by Dr. Zacharias Fögen. (The things people put their own names on these days...)

A parallelization analysis based on county-level data showed that in Kansas, counties with mask mandate had significantly higher case fatality rates than counties without mask mandate, with a risk ratio of 1.85 (95% confidence interval [95% CI]: 1.51–2.10) for COVID-19-related deaths. Even after adjusting for the number of “protected persons,” that is, the number of persons who were not infected in the mask-mandated group compared to the no-mask group, the risk ratio remained significantly high at 1.52 (95% CI: 1.24–1.72). By analyzing the excess mortality in Kansas, this study determines that over 95% of this effect can solely be attributed to COVID-19.

These findings suggest that mask use might pose a yet unknown threat to the user instead of protecting them, making mask mandates a debatable epidemiologic intervention.

The cause of this trend is explained herein using the “Foegen effect” theory; that is, deep re-inhalation of hypercondensed droplets or pure virions caught in facemasks as droplets can worsen prognosis and might be linked to long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. While the “Foegen effect” is proven in vivo in an animal model, further research is needed to fully understand it.

The latest batch of Pfizer data came out yesterday, but so far no smoking guns have been spotted.

Massachusetts cases were up a sixth of a percentage point today.