Day 1058: No Child in the Manger

The bad cat has another monthly update on the precipitous drop in Swedish births, along with a recap of the potential causative factors behind the correlation between vaccinations nine months ago and historically low birth rates today, in those countries that report both stats in an accurate and timely manner:

but instead of the sort of all hands on deck attention one would expect from a health agency in the face of such a powerful and atypical signal on such an important matter, we’re getting absolutely nothing.

studies about what happens when you read rilke to nematodes are getting more funding and interest than this.

at a certain point, this utter lack of curiosity becomes an indictment of, if not complicity, at least of culpability in cover up.

what, after all, is public health supposed to be for if not this?

if this sort of mischief with the very basis of societal perpetuation is insufficient to rouse the alleged watchmen from their slumber, how is one not to ask some VERY pointed questions not only about whether they have any use at all, but perhaps just who and what they are guarding?

perhaps it is something other than our well being…

Day 1057: The Tripledemic that Wasn't

While the world (and especially Bloomberg) continues to speculate on how many Chinese will get COVID today (e.g., 37 million), Dr. Andrew Bostom reports on some more concrete numbers from the alleged tripledemic (h/t Dr. Meryl Nass):

Serious paediatric illness is best gauged by the actual number of children hospitalised, as opposed to ‘respiratory virus test positivity’. The latter is especially misleading because of the unique, ongoing phenomenon of continued mass COVID-19 testing for minimal symptoms. Curiously, almost two months later, I could find no local media follow-up coverage elucidating the feared paediatric ‘tripledemic’ by this most germane metric: a direct comparison of children hospitalised for COVID-19, influenza or RSV.

With the cooperation of Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH) spokesman Joseph Wendelken, and an academic paediatrician at Hasbro Children’s Hospital, I can now present those hospitalisation data, per the table below. Given time lags in compilation and transmission, the hospitalisation record only covers all of October, and November 2022.

[table omitted]

Despite the anguished media declarations, there was no Rhode Island paediatric ‘tripledemic’, at least through October and November. RSV, alone, accounted for around 90% (194 ÷ 222 = 87.4%) of so-called ‘tripledemic’ hospitalisations among Rhode Island children, and the rate of RSV hospitalisations (97 per month), was around seven-fold the rate of COVID-19 and influenza hospitalisations combined (14 per month). Moreover, the surrogate for RSV hospitalisations, a single International Classification of Diseases (ICD) RSV code (bronchiolitis, an inflammation of the smaller lung airways) omits RSV pneumonia and bronchitis coded hospitalisations. Certainly, omitting these ICD codes underestimates true paediatric RSV admissions.

I've seen other reports of flu peaking early this year, so it's interesting to see RSV swamping even flu. Both are on the decline already, and with COVID remaining harmless to children hopefully the tripledemic that wasn't will be behind us soon.

Day 1055: The Cleveland Negative Efficacy Study

China's new 100%-COVID policy continues to mystify both onlookers and Chinese. One thing that is not all that mysterious about the news is the prediction of three waves of COVID in China this winter, because it's not actually about COVID at all, but about three waves of movement and mixing connected to the Chinese New Year celebrations.

Back in the land of The Science™, one bit of news not to be missed is the Cleveland study of booster efficacy, which, as Eugyppius notes, had the unplanned result of showing that COVID cases increase with additional mRNA boosters:

Because Pfizer only tested the effectiveness of their BA.5 bivalent vaccine on a handful of mice, there has been understandable interest in working out whether the shiny new jabs actually do anything in return for inflicting an unknown number of injuries and undesirable side-effects on the Pfizer Pfaithful. Towards this end, a few scientists at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio have conducted a retrospective cohort study of Clinic employees who received the bivalent vaccine between September and December of this year. Most received the Pfizer cocktail, but 11% had the Moderna version.

Of 51,011 people ultimately included in the study, a mere 10,804 opted for bivalent vaccination. If anything shows that the stock of the vaccines is in freefall, it’s uptake this dismal at a major healthcare institution. The bivalently boosted were 30% less likely to be infected, in a study period where the vaccines and the circulating SARS-2 variants were for the most part perfectly aligned. In another blow to the logic of perpetual vaccination with subpar ineffective products, the authors note that their cohort had “too few severe illnesses for the study to be able to determine if the vaccine decreased severity of illness.” Because it’s severe outcomes and death, rather than infections, which matter, this is the same as saying the bivalent vaccines are totally pointless, especially in the younger cohort (mean age 42) studied here.

The real bombshell, though, is the authors’ accidental finding that risk of infection increases incrementally with each prior (non-bivalent) vaccine dose.

[...]

Their discussion of this point is more honest than you’d expect:

The association of increased risk of COVID-19 with higher numbers of prior vaccine doses in our study, was unexpected. A simplistic explanation might be that those who received more doses were more likely to be individuals at higher risk of COVID-19. A small proportion of individuals may have fit this description. However, the majority of subjects in this study were generally young individuals and all were eligible to have received at least 3 doses of vaccine by the study start date, and which they had every opportunity to do. … This is not the only study to find a possible association with more prior vaccine doses and higher risk of COVID-19. … We still have a lot to learn about protection from COVID-19 vaccination, and in addition to a vaccine’s effectiveness it is important to examine whether multiple vaccine doses given over time may not be having the beneficial effect that is generally assumed.

They also showed that prior COVID infection is effective in preventing COVID infections. (Fancy that!)

Day 1039: Not the Vaxx For Once

Eugyppius reports on raging respiratory infections in 1 out of 4 German children, especially RSV among the almost completely unvaccinated under-4 set, overwhelming hospitals. He attributes the problem to lockdowns:

This isn’t the vaccines (almost no children under 5 have been vaccinated), and it’s not just a coincidence or a bad year for RSV either. It’s a direct consequence of mass containment. While lockdowns didn’t do much about SARS-2, they appear to have reduced the incidence of other, slower-moving viruses considerably. Young women in particular have been underexposed to RSV for three years now, with the result that their breast milk confers far less passive immunity against common viruses than it did in the pre-pandemic era.

Of course a four-year-old would have been breastfed back in the Before Times, but presumably has not been exposed to enough viruses since then. For a vaxx-did-it theory, see, e.g., Igor Chudov on hematopoietic stem cells.