Day 973: Deja Poo

Credit for today's title goes to the Boston Herald, reporting on the MWRA COVID spike:

The seven-day COVID wastewater average for the north-of-Boston region has jumped more than 100% within the last week, according to Wednesday’s update from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority tracker.

The daily average for the north-of-the-city area is now 1,016 copies per milliliter, a 104% spike from the average of 497 copies last Wednesday.

The seven-day COVID wastewater average for the south-of-Boston region has increased 56% within the last week. The average is now 993 copies, which is up from 637 copies last Wednesday.

Why a sudden spike when the weather hasn't changed much this month? Well, it is booster season, and the Daily Skeptic has picked up Alex Berenson's reporting on a paper in the Lancet showing immune suppression immediately after the shots, as well as the general negative efficacy of COVID vaccination:

The top two [figures from the paper's supplementary data] show that in the two weeks following the first jab individuals were three to four times more likely to test positive for Covid than their unvaccinated counterparts. This is further confirmation of the post-jab spike in infections that has often been noted and which there is evidence is a result of the vaccination temporarily reducing immunity.

The third figure shows that two weeks or more after the second jab – which during 2021 was regarded as ‘fully vaccinated’ – individuals were 44% more likely to be infected than their unvaccinated counterparts. This is negative vaccine effectiveness (where infections are higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated) of minus-44%. This negative effectiveness is in line with what was seen in the raw data from England at the time and also in studies from other countries, but contradicts the Government’s official estimates, which claimed effectiveness to be 60-85% against Delta infection. The new study indicates that the negative effectiveness was not just a result of confounding factors or a ‘catch-up’ effect, where the vaccinated have lower infection rates initially then higher infection rates as the effect of the vaccine wears off, as some have claimed.

Acknowledging the figures, the authors write: “Surprisingly, we observed a higher risk of test positivity after vaccination with one or two doses across all BMI groups, which is contrary to evidence reported by the U.K. ONS.” What they don’t mention is that it is fully in line with data from the UKHSA, nor that the ONS is known to overestimate infection rates in the unvaccinated because it underestimates the population – the ONS puts the unvaccinated adult population at 8% whereas the NIMS database puts it at 19% (and surveys higher still at 26%).

Or we could just blame it all on innocent schoolchildren, again.

Day 963: ADE in Vitro

The usual suspects have all picked up on the new report in Nature on antibody-depenent enhancement (ADE) from both COVID vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments. To the pro-vaxxer cries of "this is merely in vitro," Eugyppius adds a handy reminder that we may already have plenty of in vivo data:

Remember how everywhere mass vaccination occurs, we tend to see higher frequencies of infection? Remember how, in the deeply unadjusted and unreliable UKHSA vaccine efficacy statistics from the start of the year, the double-vaccinated appeared to experience higher rates of infection and death than the unvaccinated? Crazy conspiracy theorists might be forgiven for wondering if these are the effects of antibody-enhanced virus replication in the lungs of people more than six months out from their second jab.

Day 959: Excess Mortality: Italian Edition

While vaxx-driven excess mortality news has come out of Switzerland and Australia lately, today Eugyppius addresses a differently horrifying excess mortality story out of Northern Italy early in the pandemic:

Engler draws attention to the curious fact that early Italian excess mortality did not seem to spread from one Italian province to another – following virus infections outwards from an epicentre – but rather struck the affected regions all at once: [graph omitted]

What’s more, the excess deaths are clustered within the boundaries of the affected provinces, “meaning that which one of the 13 provinces a person lived in was a much better predictor of death than whether there was a high rate of deaths in neighbouring municipalities.” For Engler, this implicates provincial-level administrative decisions as to the rationing of care and provisions for the vulnerable, especially in the face of staffing shortages.

Day 947: See No Evil, Israeli Edition

Steve Kirsch reports on a budding Israeli scandal in which the Ministry of Health (MoH), not unlike our CDC, ignored its obligation to track vaccine side effects for an entire year. Next, they commissioned a study of the next six months of side effects, but then fudged the numbers for the public to greatly reduce the side effect profile:

The panel presented their findings to MoH personnel on or about Jun 6, 2022 in a Zoom call that was secretly recorded. They found that the COVID vaccines were much more dangerous to people than the world authorities admitted. They found serious adverse events that were never disclosed by Pfizer or any world government. These adverse events were also not found to be short term as the public was told.

They also determined causality, something no other world health authority has ever been willing to do (because other governments never looked at the data either). Causality was both obvious and easy to prove using the re-challenge data that was collected (you can’t do this using the US VAERS data, for example).

Day 946: Excess Mortality, German Edition

Via Eugyppius: a preprint linking German excess mortality to the temporal pattern of mass administration of spike-bases vaxes in the country:

In 2020, the observed number of deaths was close to the expected number with respect to the empirical standard deviation. By contrast, in 2021, the observed number of deaths was two empirical standard deviations above the expected number. The high excess mortality in 2021 was almost entirely due to an increase in deaths in the age groups between 15 and 79 and started to accumulate only from April 2021 onwards. A similar mortality pattern was observed for stillbirths with an increase of about 11 percent in the second quarter of the year 2021.

Something must have happened in April 2021 that led to a sudden and sustained increase in mortality in the age groups below 80 years, although no such effects on mortality had been observed during the COVID-19 pandemic so far.

Stillbirths are defined thus:

One problem with analyzing excess mortality at the level of stillbirths in Germany is that the definition of a ‘stillbirth’ has been changed at the end of 2018. Until then, a stillborn child was considered a stillbirth if a birth weight of at least 500 grams was reached. Since the end of 2018, a stillborn child is considered a stillbirth if at least 500 grams or the 24th week of pregnancy was reached, which led to a diagnostically related increase in stillbirths. This means that the figures on stillbirths are only validly comparable from 2019 onwards.